Ed Gorman - Several Deaths Later

Captain Hackett said, "I'll be outside, Tobin. You help her get dressed and then bring her out. All right?"

Tobin did the only thing he could do. He nodded.

"Forget the part where you think she's crazy."

"Forget it? Why?"

"Because if she's crazy, then people feel sorry for her and if they feel sorry for her, then it's just another story about some pathetic has-been TV star. But if she willfully and coldly set out to do in all these people-ape shit is the word I'm looking for here, Tobin."

"That's two words."

"Whatever. Ape shit is what our readers will do. AGING PRIME TIME QUEEN KILLS TO KEEP HER SHAME SECRET. It needs some work but it's a good peg. You earned your dough, pally."

"Thanks."

"Hey, you get seven grand and you sound miserable."

"I am miserable. I happened to like Susan. And what's this seven grand stuff?"

"Expenses."

"What expenses?"

"I told you already. Phone calls and stuff."

"What's 'stuff?'"

"Jesus, all right. We should be celebrating and we're haggling. Seventy-five hundred then."

"First you said ten, then you said eight, and now you're saying seventy-five hundred."

"Just get some good pictures, OK?"

The editor of Snoop, who probably not only watched "Celebrity Handyman" but liked it, hung up.

Tobin went into one of the ship's eight bars.

There was a kind of ritual involved in getting drunk to forget. First of all, you wanted to reach the first level of drunkenness very quickly so you drank drinks with gin in them. In this case, Tobin used martinis. Then you wanted to sit by yourself with a window to stare through, which was easy enough to do on a cruise ship. Then you wanted to be left entirely alone with only a jukebox for company. This tiny dark bar, festooned with nautical symbols, had a jukebox that ran to Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. You couldn't ask for more than that.

It didn't always work as you intended it to, of course. There was a certain kind of drunkenness that was just bloody wonderful, when you reached the exact point where sadness and despair meshed-there was an almost overwhelming and perverse sweetness to it.

Unfortunately, Tobin must have gone right past it without noticing it because, almost as if he'd been in a car accident, he looked up and saw a gigantic bartender in white shirt and white ducks and white apron leaning in and hauling him out of the booth.

"You've had enough for this afternoon, Mr. Tobin," the bartender said.

Enough? How long had he been drinking. Enough?

He couldn't possibly have had more than fourteen or fifteen martinis. So what if he did kind of trip and fall on his last journey to the jukebox ("Strangers in the Night" just kept sounding better and better). He tripped; was that a capital offense or what? "Come on now, Mr. Tobin. Come on now."

You wake up and you can't remember anything. Nothing at all. You need to pee and you're afraid you need to barf and then you're afraid because you can't remember anything.

He reconstructed, or tried to: Susan Richards had attempted suicide but had failed and had then confessed to Todd Ames that she'd killed the four people. Then Tobin, sad because it was Susan, had gone to get drunk. "Scoobey-doobey-doo" kept playing in his head. That and Kent cigarettes. He definitely (well, sort of definitely) recalled buying a package of Kent cigarettes and smoking them. One by one till they were all gone.

He lay there then and pressed the remote control on his nightstand. He might as well be viewing while he was preparing himself for the enormous task of emptying his bladder and taking a shower.

No easy thing to move your leg and put your foot on the floor and then get up and go into the bathroom.

And then for no reason he thought of his daughter (the way fragments of memory assault you during a hangover) and how her hair had looked so red in the sunlight at her cap-and-gown graduation and how he'd hugged her and…

The movie was Death Wish 9 in which Charles Bronson, now an octogenarian, is dedicated to keeping safe the lives of his fellow prisoners in an old folks' home.

They'd managed to get sex into the film by having the extremely sexy day nurse wear a see-through uniform.

Finally, he couldn't take it any longer-not the movie, his bladder.

He forced his leg off the bed and then his other leg and then he went and had himself a shower.

When he came out he opened a beer left over from last night's frolic and was just having his first sip when the phone rang.

It was an operator and she wanted to know if he was the Mr. Tobin who had called the residence of a Mr. Sanderson and Tobin said he was and then she said go ahead please.

"Mr. Tobin, this is Everett Sanderson's brother. You were supposed to call me this afternoon." He sounded angry.

"Damn, I completely forgot. I'm sorry."

"You called last night and was asking the missus some questions about my cousin who died in that trailer fire."

"Yes, I was, Mr. Sanderson."

"I'd like to know why."

"I wanted to know why your brother was on the cruise ship."

"Did they find out who killed him yet?"

"Yes."

There was a long pause. Then a noise that might have been a sob. "There ain't nothin' bad enough that can happen to that man."

"It's a she."

"A woman?"

"Yes."

"Bullshit. No woman could kill Everett."

Given the circumstances, Tobin decided to overlook the ridiculous remark.

"What the hell did she have to do with Everett?"

"He knew about Ken Norris skimming the money from the 'Celebrity Circle' cast. She didn't want that known."

"I don't know what you're talkin' about."

"Your brother was working with a woman named Iris Graves from a newsstand paper called Snoop."

"Snoop. Everett read it all the time but he sure as hell didn't work for it."

"You're sure?"

"My brother went on that boat to talk to Mandy Nichols."

"Who?"

"Mandy Nichols. She was married to a cousin of ours." Then he mentioned the name of the man in the newspaper clipping-the one who'd been burned to death in the trailer fire.

Tobin leaned back against the headboard. "Why would he be trailing Mandy Nichols here?"

"Because she killed our cousin-and damn near killed their little girl right along with him."

Tobin explained about the newspaper clipping he'd discovered along with Everett's personal effects. "Why didn't it mention a little girl?"

"They didn't find her till next day. She'd crawled away from the fire, then collapsed out in the woods. They'd assumed at first that Mandy had taken her along." He cursed. '"Course Mandy with her fancy notions didn't plan to take nobody along. My cousin was the kind of man who woulda tracked her down and she knew it. So she tried to kill both of 'em-her husband and her daughter."

"And Everett's been tracking her all these years?"

"Yes. Till about a year ago when we found her."

"Mandy?"

"Right."

"Where was she?"

"Hollywood. That was always her thing. To live in Hollywood. Couldn't sing, couldn't dance, couldn't really even act much based on what I saw in her high school plays. But she did have a good face and a good body. I gotta give her that."

"So Everett confronted her?"

"He tried. She had him arrested several times. He tried to tell the police what had happened-how she'd hooked up with these so-called actors who were down here on location and the three of them helped her douse the trailer with gasoline and then set it up."

"You're sure it was the actors?"

"Positive. It had rained three or four hours after the fire and the sheriff found four sets of tracks in the morning-three male ones and then Mandy's."