Ed Gorman - Several Deaths Later

"Not speaking?"

"Oh, hi," Tobin said.

"Did you finally get some sleep?"

"Finally. And you?"

She smiled. "Finally." Susan Richards was even better looking in the daylight wearing a one-piece white bathing suit, such suits invariably reminding him of Julie Adams in The Creature From the Black Lagoon, a seventh-grade spectacle so astonishing that he began to understand that the most exalted feeling on the planet, right next to godliness, was horniness. She wore sunglasses so black he could not even glimpse the shape of her eyes behind them. She smiled. "But my wrinkles were still there, this morning."

"Wrinkles?"

"Around my eyes and mouth. My agent wants me to pay a little visit to my friendly neighborhood plastic surgeon because I got turned down for a role two months ago. Because of my age."

"You're beautiful, Susan, and you know it."

She dismissed his compliment with a graceful hand. "Twenty-two lines in a Raquel Welch mini-series. I was supposed to be her younger sister. But the casting director said I was too old." She laughed but there was a chilly sadness in her voice. "Oh, he didn't say it quite that way, of course. I think he said, 'Raquel and you are too much alike. It might confuse the audience.' " She paused then. "We had a meeting."

"Who had a meeting?"

"The regulars on 'Celebrity Circle.'"

"Oh?"

"Yes, and Todd said that you think one of us is the killer. Is that right?"

He shrugged. "I don't know who else it could be."

Her beautiful mouth became ironic. "Does that include me?"

"Well…"

"You're cute when you're trying to be evasive." She put out a hand to be helped up. He thought of holding this same hand last night. The darkness seemed impossible now that yellow day burned the deck.

As she stood up, she grabbed a black leather Gucci casual bag and a tiny framed black-and-white photograph of a little girl. He was about to ask her about the girl when Jere Farris strolled by and said, "Coming to the costume party tonight?" and then went on without waiting for an answer.

"Well," Susan Richards said, "are you?"

"I suppose."

"You sound delighted."

"It's the idea of dressing up in funny clothes, I guess.

I've never been able to figure out why adults like to do that."

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, and he thought of last night again, now so idyllic in memory, and she laughed like wind chimes and said, "Who said we're adults, Tobin?"

"Sanderson was a private detective."

"From an agency?"

"Agency?"

"Yes," Tobin said, "a detective agency. Like Pinker-ton's."

The captain shook his head. "Not from the looks of this brochure. I'd say he was strictly free-lance and not exactly running an empire, either."

He handed Tobin a two-color trifold brochure. The paper was rough to the touch and you could see where the ink had smudged in the printing. The outer panel said, CONFIDENTIAL INVESTIGATIONS OUR SPECIALTY.

"Pretty much what you'd expect," Captain Hackett said as Tobin opened up the flap and looked inside.

There were several photographs of Everett Sanderson, all of them taken when he was much younger. In one photo he wore navy whites; in another, a dark police uniform; in a third (and the most recent) he appeared as he had aboard this cruise ship, a chunky, sixtyish man in a conservative western suit with a white Stetson, string tie, and bulldoglike jowls. The copy beneath these photos referred to the fact that Everett Sanderson had served first his country, then his city, and now, on a for-hire basis, he was serving the public.

"Simpson, Kentucky," Captain Hackett said.

They sat in his office. Sunlight streamed through their whiskey glasses, giving the liquid a golden gleam, as the ceiling fan chopped briskly at stale air. The captain explained that the Coast Guard would be sending investigators within thirty-six hours.

"That mean anything to you?" Tobin said.

"No. I was hoping it meant something to you."

Tobin smiled. "Afraid not. But there is something that would mean something to me."

"What's that?"

"What you and the doctor checked Cindy McBain for the other morning."

"I guess you're on our side now."

"Is that an answer?"

The captain sighed. "We found blood." The captain paused. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"We weren't quite sure you could keep a secret." He frowned. "I'm sorry, Tobin."

"Tell me about the blood."

"There was plenty of it. He'd been stabbed."

"A second blood type on the rug. We think that the killer must have cut him or herself while stabbing Ken Norris. So we were checking Miss McBain's hands and arms for any cut marks."

"You didn't find any."

"Correct." He hesitated. Cleared his throat softly. "But we did find somebody with exactly the sort of cut marks we would have expected."

"You did?"

"Yes. Miss Graves."

"The dead woman?"

"Right. And, in her belongings, we also found a notebook-a sort of journal, actually. She wrote about going into Miss McBain's room-after following Ken Norris all night. But she didn't cut herself on the knife. She cut herself on a piece of a lamp that had been knocked over and shattered. That's what she said in her journal and that squares with what we found at the scene." Now it was his turn to smile. "She was also the mysterious figure in the trenchcoat and snap-brim hat your friend McBain kept going on about."

"Why the hell was she following Norris?"

"Story, presumably." He leaned leftward, opened a drawer, and withdrew the small brown leather notebook Alicia Farris and Iris Graves had been struggling over the day of Iris's death. "She has a lot of rambling notes in here. I spent most of last night sipping sherry and looking through them. Care to take the notebook and see what you can come up with?"

"Sure."

The captain said, "They're hiding something."

"Who?"

"The 'Celebrity Circle' bunch. You'll see that very clearly when you start reading the notebook there. Something binds them together-but I'm not sure what."

"You heard about Cassie McDowell slapping Todd Ames last night?"

"Yes."

"Whatever binds them together seems to be coming apart."

"That's my impression too." He glanced out the porthole. "Some days I wish I would have been a Greyhound driver." He poured some brandy from his cut-glass snifter. "My daughter from Oak Park was supposed to bring her children on this cruise. Thank Christ one of my granddaughters came down with the measles." He turned back to Tobin. "I don't have any idea what Sanderson was doing on this trip but I suspect he was working with her."

"With Iris Graves?"

"Isn't it likely?"

Tobin considered. Then, "She worked for Snoop. It's a publication that probably hires dozens of private investigators. I suppose they could have been working on a story together."

"I keep thinking back to when they were all in the party room-when I told them about Norris's death."

"Their reaction, you mean?"

"They reminded me of wartime. I was in Korea. I got that way-about death, I mean." He glanced out the porthole again. A tattered golden cloud dragged by. "The first death I ever saw-well, it was a corporal and of course I couldn't let the other fellows see me cry. But that night in my tent…" His jaw locked as he returned his gaze to Tobin. "I guess I can understand servicemen getting that callous about death-but why would celebrities?"

Tobin sighed. "To be fair to them, they're fighting their own war; against age and the loss of their looks, against constant competition, and against just sheer luck. There are so many people who want to make it in Hollywood. An environment like that doesn't exactly spawn wonderful people."