Killed in Paradise Page 9

  “Well,” Jan said brightly as I closed the door behind “Chiun,” “have you found him, yet?”

  “No,” Kenni said gloomily. “We’ve just lost him worse.”

  “Kenni,” I said, “it was just a theory. Theories are like tissues—you use them up and throw them away until you don’t need any more.”

  “What do we do now, then?” She was asking that a lot today.

  “Well, you two are supposed to grill suspects in the Bogie’s mystery.” The ship gave another lurch. “I am going to go ask for some Dramamine for myself.”

  Jan laughed at me. “It takes a little while to work, but it’s worth it. You may want to sleep it out.”

  I did in fact sleep for a little while, right after I took the seasickness pills. Lying down, I think, helped as much as the medicine did. It was a strange thing, but the same motions that were so nauseating when I was trying to stand up were actually pleasant when I lay on my back. The secret was to inhale as the ship went up, and exhale as the ship went down. It made a nice rhythm. When I began to miss Kenni, I knew I was getting better.

  I have this strange time sense—I always know within ten minutes or so what time it is, even if you wake me up in pitch blackness in the middle of the night. However on this trip, something had happened to me that had never happened before. We slipped over from the Eastern Time Zone to the Atlantic Time Zone, which is one hour ahead of New York. Since no part of the United States, but only parts of rural maritime Canada, Caribbean islands, and the east coast of Brazil are on Atlantic time, I had no practice adjusting for it, and was therefore an hour behind myself.

  Right now, for instance. Spot (who doesn’t give a damn what the clock says) decided it was time for me to fill his bowl again, and woke me up. I figured it was about a quarter after two, which suited me fine. Lunch (which I was in no shape to grab) would be about over, and I could ambush Watson Burkehart by the door of the dining room, where he would be standing, smiling at those passengers he had not yet offended.

  I checked my watch, though, and saw three-sixteen, and now I didn’t know where to find him. I sighed. The only thing to do was go looking. I arranged a meal for Spot, who tucked into it as if eating with the floor jumping under you like a teeter-totter was a gourmet experience, and got to it.

  It wasn’t hard to find him. The cleanup crew in the dining room told me he’d be in his cabin in the crew quarters. I wasn’t supposed to go into the crew quarters—sailors having somewhat unfortunate reputations, this particular cruise line had draconian nonfraternization rules concerning passengers of either sex. However, I waved the letter with the purser’s signature on it giving me the run of the ship to look for Schaeffer, and the doors were opened.

  All except the door to Burkehart’s cabin. The crew did not travel in the luxury the passengers did. I would not go so far as to say the hallway I was standing in was grubby, but it certainly wasn’t homey. It reminded me of the heating and air-conditioning plants in the basement of the Network.

  I knocked again on Burkehart’s door. Hatch. With the frills gone, I could understand now why they were called hatches. “I know you’re in there, Burkehart.”

  “Go away,” he said. “I don’t have to talk to you. You aren’t even supposed to be here.”

  I decided it was impractical to try to get him to read the purser’s note through the iron of the hatch. Instead, I said, “I wasn’t supposed to be in the kitchen, either.” A Norwegian in blue work clothes carrying a wrench the size of my right arm walked by and grinned as I said it.

  “The galley, I mean. I wasn’t supposed to be there, either. I just showed up and stopped Clem from cutting you up into tubesteaks.”

  “Clem was drunk. Clem is always drunk.”

  “Drunk goes away. Scars are forever. Look. I’ve got something to say to you. I’m going to say it, standing out here yelling where everybody can hear it, or in your cabin like civilized human beings, if you can manage it. It’s up to you. You will notice that no one has tried to make me go away.”

  I think it was the insult that got the hatch opened as much as anything. Whatever it was, Burkehart opened up, scowled at me, and made me scuttle sideways past him into a room about one-quarter the size of my cabin, decorated in Early Pipe and pinups. I sat on a wooden chair. Burkehart took the edge of the bed.

  He was a different man out of a tuxedo. Dressed as he was now, in slacks and a sleeveless undershirt, he looked skinny and furtive and scared. He looked exactly like the kind of guy you’d expect to steal kitchen utensils from his employer.

  “So,” I said conversationally. “Where’s Schaeffer?”

  He showed me his beautiful teeth in what was supposed to be a defiant grin. I didn’t buy it. The truly defiant do not play nervously with their chest hairs while they try to put the message across. As it was, he wasn’t even good at making it clear what the message was. Was he trying to make me believe he knew but wasn’t going to tell me, or was it simply that he was pretending to take pleasure in the idea that I didn’t know?

  I put the question to Burkehart. “Which is it?”

  He had about seventeen chest hairs, all coiled tightly against him like springs from the inside of ballpoint pens. Without looking, he would stretch them out, then release them, and let them coil up again. It was fascinating to watch.

  So was his face. He was putting so much effort into the grin the corners of his mouth were trembling with muscle strain. He finally spoke to me, more, I think, to give his mouth something to do than to convey information. In any case, he certainly avoided conveying any information.

  “It will take a better man than you to find him,” he said.

  “Why?” I said. “Did you kill him and dump him over the side or something?”

  That killed what was left of his smile. “Get out,” he said.

  “To go back to yelling through the door? Just when things are getting interesting?”

  “You are persecuting me,” he said. “Just because I wouldn’t let the old lady smoke.”

  “For not letting the old lady smoke you get no tip. I’m collecting the debt you owe me.”

  “What do I owe you?”

  “You owe me for keeping Clem from scooping off your chest with a broken bottle. I think I mentioned that already. What would you do with your hands without your chest hairs to play with?”

  Burkehart pulled his hand away from his chest, looked at it like it was something he’d dug up at the beach, then tucked it under his thigh to keep it out of mischief.

  “Clem is a drunk. He makes threats.”

  “You looked like you believed him. Or do you always wet your pants at nine-thirty in the morning?”

  “I did not wet my pants!”

  “You were close. What did you do with the knives?” I don’t know why I asked that. Instinct, I guess. When people start getting indignant at accusations that are patently untrue (I knew he hadn’t wet his pants. They were white pants.), it’s frequently a good idea to follow up with one that you think is true.

  “I didn’t take the knives. Stop plaguing me about the knives!”

  “Don’t get so excited, my dear Watson.”

  “You are going to make me lose my job.” He was morose now. Everybody always picked on poor Watson.

  “You’re not too good at it, anyway,” I told him. “You lack warmth. Where’s Schaeffer?”

  “I have an old grandmother to support. And children. They’ll starve if I lose my job.”

  “Stop, you’re breaking my heart. You’ll need money, right? To tide you over while you look for another job. To open a little cutlery shop, maybe.”

  I knew from Burkehart’s eyes that if he had stolen the knives, he sure didn’t have them now. If he had, he would have cut my heart out with one of them, or maybe several.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Five thousand dollars American.”

  Now I grinned. “Dream on,” I told him. “I couldn’t give you that if you took travelers’ ch
ecks.”

  “You can get it. You work for a rich American company. You can get the money.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “We get to the Island tomorrow.”

  “We will get there soon after sundown. They wait till daylight to enter the harbor to make a show for the tourists. We’ll be close to shore. You could swim it.”

  “Well, guess what? I’m not going to swim past Customs, Immigration, and the Coast Guard in the dark to get you money. I haven’t even said I’m giving you money at all. What am I supposed to get for it?”

  “You’ll get your money’s worth,” he promised. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  And that was as far as he’d go. He wouldn’t even give me any idea of what “everything” entailed. Ordinarily under those circumstances, I’d tell him to get stuffed. Instead, I told him I’d think about it.

  It was a mistake, as I found out very soon, but it wasn’t a stupid mistake. I had reasons. Burkehart was scared, and I wanted him scared. He undoubtedly suspected that if he told me what he knew, I could use the information to neutralize whoever or whatever he was afraid of, but he was such a thoroughgoing sleazeball he wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to squeeze a few bucks out of somebody even for the sake of his own peace of mind. If he’d grown up in Manhattan instead of St. David’s Island, he could have gone into the New York Real Estate Market and named buildings after himself.

  I wanted Burkehart scared, but I wanted him to have hope. I didn’t think Schaeffer was going to swim ashore, either. We wouldn’t be in the dock until eleven o’clock tomorrow morning. I’d get to Burkehart before then and see how tender stewing in his own juice had made him. One thing he didn’t know was that I wasn’t going to hand out any five Gs of the Network’s money to him or anybody like him. If the information was good, I might come across with a tenth of that.

  If I had read him right, he would have taken that and been glad to get it. I never did find out.

  I reported developments to Kenni and Jan, then didn’t catch up with them again until dinner. Having had my seasickness relieved, I was incredibly hungry. I took the lamb in ginger sauce with new potatoes and green beans.

  The conversation was about the mystery game. I asked Mrs. Furst how she enjoyed being grilled.

  “It was quite interesting. I’m supposed to be an heiress, you know, and I have the most wonderful motive—I’m tempted to ask Billy and Karen if I can use it for one of my own books—but no one asked me about it.”

  “What did they ask you about?”

  “About you, and how you liked the food.”

  “And how he gets along with the chef,” Judy Ryerson added. “I didn’t know whether to come out of character to explain that wasn’t part of the mystery, or just claim ignorance. My character doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “I was sitting next to Bob Madison,” Mike Ryerson said. “A lot of people asked him if he’d had plastic surgery.” He grinned ruefully and went back to his duck.

  Nobody rose to the bait. Lee H. Schaeffer had disappeared from our ken, and it was tacitly agreed that for tonight at least, he’d disappear from our conversation.

  We talked about the Island, instead. I contributed the Network’s interest in all this, but Jan and Kenni carried the ball. Kenni, because in addition to looking up the histories of exiled Mafia figures, she had also turned up all the stats on the Island. And Jan, because as a stewardess, she’d been there before.

  We found out from Kenni that St. David’s Island was about the same area as Manhattan, but had less coastline because it was round. Like Bermuda, it had originally been colonized by the survivors of a slave-ship wreck, and the races were so thoroughly mixed for so many generations, nobody gave a damn about it anymore.

  “She’s right,” Jan said. “Of course, it may change if the tourism really takes off, but when I was there before, everyone was natural and friendly. Also, something to look for, you’ve never seen so many black people with bright blue eyes in your life.”

  “I’ve never seen any,” Neil Furst said. “Until Grandma brought me to New York, I don’t think I ever saw any black people at all.”

  Jan didn’t know what to do with that; she was rescued by the arrival of dessert and coffee. Kenni went on. “There’s fresh water on the island, but it has a lot of sulphur in it, so they use ground water for industry—”

  Mike wanted to know what industry.

  “There are significant guano deposits on the eastern end of the island. Tourists tend to stay away from there.”

  “You’d think so,” Mike said.

  Kenni drank some coffee, looked at it, made a face, drank more. I already knew she was a coffee addict, having seen her at breakfast.

  “The population is about thirty-five thousand, so there’s plenty of room for everybody. They trap rainwater for drinking—something else they have in common with Bermuda.”

  “There’s practically no crime on the island,” Jan said.

  “Oh?” I said. “I’d heard it was a major dope-smuggling center at one time. I heard there’s a lot of Mafia money in numbered bank accounts.”

  Jan gave me a blank look. “Oh,” she said at last. “Of course. I meant, you know, crime. The kind a tourist has to worry about. Mugging. Purse snatching. Things like that. The Islanders don’t even rob each other.”

  “The leading cause of death—” Kenni said. She put down her empty cup. “The leading cause of death is motorbike accidents.”

  “That’s true,” Jan said. “They drive those things like maniacs, so be careful crossing streets. Kenni, honey, are you all right?”

  I had been about to ask the same question. Because she definitely didn’t look all right. She was wobbly and bilious, but I didn’t think she was seasick. Seasickness creeps up on you, a little at a time; it doesn’t hit in the middle of a sentence.

  Kenni wobbled a bit, and opened her mouth, but not to answer the question. Instead, the coffee made a return appearance, followed by dinner, and she slumped to the floor, splashing her hands in the mess as she went by.

  “Sick bay,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s on this deck, just the other side of the slot machines.”

  I scooped Kenni up and ran. As I went by, I heard murmurs and the sound of notebooks flipping open. I heard one voice say, “Don’t tell me he’s got nothing to do with the solution.”

  I wanted to stop and kick him a few times, but I was in a hurry.

  12

  “And you slump into the Valley of Fatigue...”

  —Welch’s Grape Juice commercial

  “SHE’LL BE ALL RIGHT,” Dr. Sato assured me. He was undoubtedly the handsomest man on the ship. Apparently, he was the best dresser, too, since I had bounced in on him in the middle of a private meal in his quarters off the sick bay, and found him sitting there in his dress whites, just daring ginger sauce to mess him up. He saw me, left the meal in midbite, told me to put Kenni (who was woozy, but not unconscious) on the examining table, and threw me out.

  Fair enough, I thought. He’s the expert. I turned to go.

  “Oh, Mr. Cobb,” he said. I wasn’t surprised he knew who I was. He probably had a notebook with my food preferences in it, too.

  “Yes?”

  He pointed to a white knob on the wall. “Turn that halfway to the right on your way out, will you?”

  I walked to it, wondering what medical marvel I would be assisting in. Then I turned the knob and heard Frank Sinatra music.

  He smiled a beautiful smile at me. “Patients find it very soothing, and I am a great, great fan of his.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good.”

  “She’ll be all right, Mr. Cobb,” he said. “This happens frequently.” With his trace of Japanese accent, he sounded even more competent than he would have otherwise. A few cars, a few transistors, and those people have brainwashed an entire nation into thinking they can do anything. In this case, I hoped it was true.

  “Okay,” I said, “it happens frequently. W
hat is it that has happened?”

  “With the patient’s permission, I will tell you when I have treated her.” He smiled, bowed, and retreated. In the process, he somehow managed to get the door to the waiting room closed with me on the other side.

  I sat down and looked at a week’s worth of the ship’s newspaper. I dwelled especially on Tuesday’s. “Giants 35, Eagles 3.” That was all it said. Not a single detail. I had had to wait two days for it, and I still didn’t know anything. The next time I have anything to do with a Network contest, the prize will be a satellite dish.

  I was thinking all this foolish stuff because my brain kept leading me around to a conclusion I didn’t like: someone had poisoned Kenni.

  And it could have been anyone. With all the comings and goings and table-hopping those mystery mavens went through, any one of a dozen people, not counting waiters and kitchen help, could have slipped her something.

  The coffee narrowed it down a little, but not much. I had fallen in, as I frequently do, with a table full of those people who like to sit on an uncomfortable chair in a restaurant with high heels or ties on, shmoozing about things and nursing coffee or (in the case of Althea Nell Furst) cigarettes until I want to apply for a grant from the Hemorrhoid Foundation.

  It didn’t matter, then, that Kenni’s coffee had tasted funny, since the coffee had been there as long as the whole meal before it had.

  And as long, I was beginning to think, as this examination was going to take. Despite my semifamous time sense, I was astonished when I looked at my watch and saw that only a little over twenty minutes had gone by. I waited another half hour, looked at my watch, and saw that a total of twenty-five minutes had now gone by. It was a Japanese watch, so there couldn’t be anything wrong with it.

  I laughed at that, then sat there calling myself an asshole, laughing while a woman I was, if not in love, at least in fond with, was being examined by an Oriental Sinatra freak after having been poisoned.

  I was expanding on the theme of my assholiness (how did I let myself get into this in the first place, why did I ever get into macho games with Schaeffer, where the hell was Schaeffer, etc.) when the door opened and the doctor emerged, wafted in by a few bars of “The Summer Wind.”