Ed Gorman - Several Deaths Later

She smiled with her soft forlorn eyes and said, "Weren't you the one asking about Cindy a few seconds ago?"

"Good point," he said, and went back to his cabin.

Tobin, back in his cabin, calculated the time and decided to hell with it. He had to find out why somebody took the newspaper clippings relating to Everett Sanderson's presence on the cruise ship and left everything else.

He took one of Sanderson's brochures, looked at the phone number and town name and zip code rubber-stamped on the back of it, and then picked up the phone.

He first tried the number of the agency itself and got a ghostly answering machine, one of those recordings that sound as if they'd been made by a poltergeist. It said the agency was closed and would be open at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, if tomorrow was a weekday. Then, fortunately, it left another number to call in case of emergency.

Tobin certainly considered this an emergency. On the fourteenth ring a woman with a cigarette cough answered the phone. Tobin said, "Hello?"

The woman kept coughing and finally said, "Who the hell is this anyway?"

The detective agency wasn't nearly as friendly as it had promised to be in the brochure.

It was while she was slathering her rather nice twenty-eight-year-old body with a bar of very soapy soap that Cindy thought she heard some kind of bump or thump in the cabin outside of Kevin Anderson's bathroom.

She stood very still, aware suddenly of just how naked naked really was, and held her breath the way she had when she'd been a little girl and played boogeyman with her brother and her brother was three steps away from finding her hiding under the bed-held her breath and strained her hearing so hard she got a slight headache.

But there was just the warm water beating on her body, beading on her body, and the pleasant exhaustion that came at the end of a long day.

Then she decided she was being paranoid. Maybe Kevin had just opened and shut a drawer with undue power. He liked doing stuff like that-flinging back doors and jerking up chairs from the floor and twisting them around to sit on. It was because he did things like that, or so she supposed, that she'd finally accepted his apologies for last night ("I've just been sort of uptight, babe," was the way he'd said it, not ever using the exact word sorry exactly but she knew that for a guy like him-he had, after all, had his own network series and there was the promise of another-that for a guy like him even those words had been difficult to say) and so, at the last, Tobin gone, she'd said, yes, all right, she'd go back to his cabin with him, both of them knowing of course what that meant.

Kevin had wanted to take her two steps inside the cabin door. The nun's outfit had really fired up most of the men. But inside its heavy black folds she'd run with sweat and insisted on taking a quick shower, during which time she'd started composing a letter to Aberdeen about how weird this trip was becoming, with a TV star practically begging her for her company.

A door slammed.

She couldn't be sure of it.

It might have been any number of other things- somebody drunk falling against the wall in the corridor, Kevin sliding back the closet door with his usual enthusiasm-but somehow she thought not.

Somehow she thought a door had slammed.

Tired of all her apprehension, she turned off the shower, slid back the door, and grabbed a big white fluffy towel.

She dried off quickly, took a smaller towel to use as a turban for her hair, and then left the slippery tiles and steamy air of the bathroom.

She found Kevin immediately and began screaming almost as immediately.

"That little squirt on TV?" the woman said.

"That's me."

"What the hell you doin' callin' here at three in the morning?" Her voice had gotten much friendlier since he'd explained who he was. Fortunately, or so she confided, she'd always preferred him to Richard Dunphy.

"You know that a man named Everett Sanderson was murdered."

A mournful pause. Sigh. "Yep."

"He was your husband?"

"Nope. Brother-in-law. His wife died twenty years ago or so and he never remarried. Ever since he lived upstairs in our youngster's room. Him and Merle, that's my husband, they ran the agency together."

"That's what I'm calling about."

"The agency?"

"About what Everett was doing on the cruise." Another pause. "You'd be wantin' to talk to Merle about that."

"Could you hand the phone over to him?"

"Can't."

"Asleep?"

"Gone."

"Where?"

Pause. "I really shouldn't be talkin' to you. Merle hates it when I talk to people about his business."

"When will he be back, Mrs. Sanderson?"

"Tomorrow morning sometime." Beat. "He's doin' a divorce case. One of those stakeout jobs. He'll be real tired. He'll want a big breakfast-three eggs and some sausages and some wheatcakes and some toast with peanut butter and jelly-then he'll want to roll right into bed."

"What would be a good time to call him?"

"Maybe two, three in the afternoon. Our time."

"All right." Then he thought of the newspaper clipping. "By the way, did your husband or Everett ever mention a man who died in a trailer fire named William Kelly?"

"How'd you find out about him?" She sounded suspicious.

"They have mentioned him then?"

"Of course they mentioned him. He was kin. A first cousin."

"What?"

"Sure. Hell, I was to his baptism. He was a good boy and then-"

"Then what?"

"Now I'm gettin' into agency business and that's where Merle can get mighty mad. You just call back like I told you to."

"But-"

"You just call back." And then she hung up.

He had just decided to light up a cigarillo when a heavy hand fell many times on his cabin door.

He was up off the bed, frightened and puzzled, in seconds.

Captain Hackett stood in the door. You could tell he'd been drunk and had then gotten sober abruptly.

He looked old and he looked miserable. "It's happened again."

"What's happened?"

"A killing."

"Who?"

"Kevin Anderson."

"My God."

"Come on," the captain said, "and hurry.”

They had put him out in the corridor and they had put a white sheet over him and into the white sheet had soaked the red blood, his blood of course, that had come from the repeated shots in the chest.

He was tall enough that the sheet only reached to just below his knees. You got a good look at very hairy legs and soles with athlete's foot.

The costume party, which had still been going on even though the more sensible or more lustful had long since fled it, had brought out moth-to-flame onlookers. They stood now in their silly getups-Snow White and Teddy Roosevelt and Superman-watching as somber men in white jackets went in and out of the room. Occasionally Captain Hackett came out and asked them to please, please go back to the party and have a good time, that there had been another misfortune (he was a word man, was the captain) but there was nothing for them to fear. A few complained, a few more threatened, but they were too drunk and filled with the festivities to do anything but wobble back from where they'd come, along the deck of the cruise ship, the stars brilliant and timeless, the moon full and pagan. The band had never stopped playing and the air was filled with the playful, erotic strains of Cole Porter's "Love For Sale."

"You were taking a shower?"

"Tobin, please, don't I get a lawyer or something?"

Tobin went over and hunched down next to her. They were in Kevin Anderson's cabin. You could smell blood and other terrible things. You could see where, in falling over backwards from the force of the shots, Kevin Anderson had smashed a lamp and cracked a mirror. There was a sinister aspect to the room now. The lights seemed very bright. The carpet was splotchy red. Now Tobin sensed what detectives must feel when they come on a murder scene. There was something pornographic about it all.