Ed Gorman - Several Deaths Later

"So you sneaked back to their room. How'd you get in?"

"Credit card."

"Really?"

"One of the crew showed me how to do it."

"Nice crew."

"But it wasn't there."

"The letter?"

"No."

"And that's why you were tossing the room?"

"You mean opening drawers and stuff?"

"Right."

"I just went crazy. Started throwing stuff around and… I really got scared. If she ever saw a letter like that she'd-she'd have proof then, not just suspicions."

"So you didn't find the letter?"

"No."

He said, "Two more people were murdered tonight."

He wasn't sure why, but he was very interested in her reaction. "Who?"

He told her. "Did you know or speak with either of them ever?"

"No." Then she seemed to understand his motive. "You think I had something to do with it, Mr. Tobin?"

He laughed and touched her shoulder again. "No, I don't, Joanna." He glanced at his watch. He'd left Cindy alone now for nearly half an hour. He said, "Did you put the room back in order?"

"Yes. I was very careful."

"Then all you can do is wait."

"What if she came back for something and found it on the floor?"

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. "There are all sorts of possibilities and every one of them will make you crazy if you think of it too long. So why not go have a drink somewhere and wait till you hear from Jere? That's really about all you can do now."

This time she touched him. "You're really nice, Mr. Tobin. I'd heard a lot of stories about you, but." She stopped herself. "Well, you know, everybody tells stories about everybody."

"I know," Tobin said. "'Yosemite Sam.'"

She giggled. "Coming from you, it sounds funny."

Suddenly all Tobin wanted was to go back and find

Cindy. To hell with murders. To hell with this young woman's love affair.

"I'll walk you back to your cabin," Tobin said.

"See," she said, "you really are nice.”

He took her to her cabin and said good-night and said to try and get some sleep and then he went back to the deck where the bodies had been found.

The passengers were gone, and so were the corpses, and so were the captain and the stewards in white uniforms.

And so was Cindy.

He checked his own cabin and then he checked her cabin and then he tried a few of the lounges where, of course, the murders were the number one topic. In one of the lounges he saw a crew member and described Cindy to him and asked if he'd seen her and the guy said, "Oh, the babe from Kansas City? God, isn't she all right?" He shrugged. "She was in here a while ago but she left."

"Alone?"

"Huh-uh. With everybody's least favorite TV cop."

"You're kidding? Kevin Anderson?"

"Right." He grinned. "Why would she take him when she could have had me without hardly begging at all?”

He didn't find her. He checked out her cabin several times and he checked out the various lounges but he didn't find her and he recalled once a high school girlfriend who'd made him unbelievably jealous, and how in his battered Ford he used to drive around and around her house, knowing she was out on a date with someone else, there being a kind of solace in the mere motion of driving around and around her house, there having been no solace in anything else during those terrible nights, knowing she was irretrievably gone from him. He hated being jealous, the way it demeaned him, but he never seemed able to escape its clutches long. He had been known to get jealous during the first ten minutes of a blind date when, at a party, his date had seen an old boyfriend and merely nodded, proving to Tobin (as he had admitted to Dr. Spengler during six useless months on the couch) that he was probably at least 37.8 percent crazy after all.

He went back to his cabin and stripped and lay down and took his emergency cigarette from his dinner jacket and, of course, being months old, it was hard and stale but Tobin tried not to notice that as he sat on the edge of his bed in his underwear inhaling the thing, thinking of Cindy in the arms of Kevin Anderson and wishing that he were not five-five and not so complicated and that Cindy and he could fall madly in love for the remaining three days of the cruise. It was testament to his frame of mind that he only rarely thought about the bodies he'd seen earlier on the deck, or about the dead Ken Norris.

And then, cigarette half-smoked and already starting to feel guilty about his indulgence ("Now isn't that a stupid reaction to something like Cindy dumping you-smoking? Exactly who did it help? You? Anybody? No."), a knock like a rock fell on the door and of course he thought: Cindy. She's spent enough time with the TV playboy and is sorry and now at last we're going to make love and spend three fleshy, blissful days together.

But it wasn't Cindy at the door. Not at all.

It was Captain Hackett.

"Small caliber bullets, close range."

"Dr. Devane used to be a coroner," Captain Hackett explained. "He's now a full-time physician aboard the ship."

"I see," Tobin said.

"Upstate New York," the doctor said. "Where I was a coroner, I mean." He seemed to think his former address had some bearing here. He was the same brown-haired man Tobin had seen on deck earlier. He wore a blue suit and a white button-down shirt and a red tie. He looked like a politician. He had the teeth for it, anyway, and that odd, cold distance Tobin had always sensed in politicians.

They were in Captain Hackett's office, sitting at a round table covered with rolled-up nautical maps. A decanter of brandy and three glasses were on the table. A facsimile of a Chesterfield lamp was pulled down near their heads for illumination. In the portholes the night was velvet black. None of the men could be said to be quite sober.

"Do you know who they were?" Tobin said.

"The woman's name was Iris Graves." The captain poured each of them more brandy as he spoke.

"Know anything about her?"

"I've been through her belongings. She seemed to be a reporter."

"Really?"

"Yes. And you won't believe for what paper." The captain laughed. "Snoop."

"That thing in the supermarket?" the doctor said. "Exactly."

"The hell of it is," Tobin said, "they sometimes get things right. Or half right." Then he thought back to her wrestling match with Alicia Farris. The notebook they'd been fighting over became very large in Tobin's mind. "How about the man?"

"Sanderson. Everett Sanderson."

"Occupation?"

"Not sure."

"You went through his things?"

"Yes. But except for a few letters addressed to him, there was no other form of identification," the captain said. "Plus he bought his ticket under the name of Kelly."

"Why would he do that?" the doctor said. He sounded irritated at the mere thought of dishonest people.

"That's what we're going to find out," the captain said. "Or presumably, anyway."

Tobin said, "I'm waiting for the good part, Captain."

"The good part?'"

"Yes, when you tell me why you invited me to your cabin."

Captain Hackett leaned forward beneath the Chesterfield light and folded his hands. Tobin recalled the man's panic earlier in the evening-the first indication that he was perhaps not as composed as he hoped to appear. "I need a spy, Mr. Tobin."

"A spy."

"We've got three and a half days before we reach port. That means for three days I need to keep several hundred passengers calm. I need to find out what's going on."

"I don't understand what I can do."

"You're in a unique position. You're one of them but you're not one of them."

"One of whom?"

"The 'Celebrity Circle' crowd. You're part of the show but you're not intimate with any of them. I've noticed that you don't take your meals with them and that you don't go to their parties and that you don't hang out with them much."