Killed on the Rocks

by William L. DeAndrea

  “It’s scary, Rox,” I said.

  “Not as scary as the thought of blowing it all without giving it a try.”

  Not only was she rich and pretty, she was smart, too. I had the feeling there were going to be some interesting times ahead. I told her so.

  “Great,” she said. “Now move over and let me on the bed.”

  I took her in my arms and we kissed. After a few seconds, I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Roxanne wanted to know.

  I grabbed a handful of yellow fuzz. “This,” I said. “It’s like making love to Winnie the Pooh.”

  She bit my nose. “Big detective. Can’t even figure out how a zipper works.”

  I puzzled it out. I pulled the long zipper down slowly and carefully. After all, there was a treasure inside.

  15

  Come, let us reason together.

  —Lyndon B. Johnson, televised speech

  ABOUT 2:00 A.M. I SAID, “We’d better stop giggling and get some sleep.”

  Roxanne giggled. “We’ve got the rest of our lives to sleep,” she said.

  “And a long time after that, too.”

  She looked at me. Her eyes were big and bright in the dim lamplight. “You’re morbid, Cobb,” she said. “How could I love anybody as morbid as you are?”

  “Beats me,” I said. “Second thoughts already? You have your way with me—”

  “Actually, I had a couple of ways with you.”

  “—and now you want to toss me aside, just because I’m morbid.”

  “Never,” she said. “Be as morbid as you want. We can sleep in coffins for all I care.”

  “Do they make double coffins?”

  “I’m rich, I’ll get one custom-made.”

  “Swell. Any color velvet lining you like. Now let’s get some sleep, okay?”

  “Can’t,” she declared. “I’m hungry.”

  I yawned. “I think Spot’s got some food left. Maybe he’ll share.”

  “I’m serious, Cobb.” She pushed me in the ribs.

  “I’m serious, too. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night, and I had a busy day. And I’d better be just as busy tomorrow.”

  “What more could you do?”

  I yawned again. “I’ll think of something. Can’t let the killer be busier than you are.”

  Roxanne winced. I hadn’t meant to say that; hadn’t meant to bring the killer in bed with us.

  “Come down to the kitchen with me, Cobb. Dost gave us icebox-raiding privileges that first night, and I’ve never used mine.”

  “This is only the second night, Rox.”

  “I know, I know. Come on, I’ll make you a cup of hot chocolate, you can relax. We’ll bring Spot down, so we won’t even be breaking your three-at-a-time rule.”

  “All right,” I said. “God, two hours into the relationship, and I’m henpecked already.”

  “Get used to it,” Roxanne said brightly. “It’s good for you.”

  Roxanne climbed back into her teddy-bear suit, and I got into my sweats, and we took off for the kitchen.

  The light switches in the hallway had little night-lights in them, enough to find our way to the kitchen by. The kitchen itself was pitch black—the round window in the swinging door might as well have been onyx. “Now,” I said to Roxanne, “if I remember correctly, the light switch is to the right side of the door.” I pushed inside and groped for the switch—this one wasn’t lighted. As soon as I flicked it, a voice said, “Freeze!”

  I blinked against the sudden light. Roxanne gave a little scream, Spot snarled. I blinked again, and found myself staring into the muzzles of a double-barreled shotgun, and the very angry, very frightened face of Barry Dost.

  “Don’t move, killer,” Barry said.

  “Anything you say.”

  “That’s right, anything I say.” Barry had rye bread, lettuce, tomatoes, mayonnaise, and some of tonight’s leftover roast beef on the table in front of him. Big deduction—we’d surprised him in the act of making a sandwich.

  “Cole slaw is good on that, too,” I said.

  “What?”

  “On a roast-beef sandwich. Cole slaw instead of the lettuce and mayonnaise. Agnes makes a good cole slaw. There might be some left.”

  “Shut up. What’s the girl doing here?”

  “My name’s Roxanne,” Roxanne said. “Hi, Barry.”

  “Don’t ‘Hi’ me. What are you doing with this—this—”

  He couldn’t think of anything bad enough to call me. After a few more thises, Roxanne came to his rescue.

  “The same as you,” she said. “I got a little hungry, and I asked Matt to come down with me while I raided the icebox.”

  He narrowed his eyes at her. “You may lose your appetite after I blow his guts all over the kitchen.”

  I got a mental picture of that, and I’ll admit, it did a hell of a job on my appetite.

  “May I put my hands down?”

  “No. Who knows what you could be hiding in that sweat suit?”

  I knew I should have worn the shorts. “Then, may I ask you a question?”

  “Make it fast.”

  “Why are you so sure I killed your father?”

  “I heard the two of you together. I heard him talking to you.”

  “What did we say?”

  Barry looked sullen. “I couldn’t make out all the words.”

  “What did I say?”

  “I couldn’t make out anything you said. You were whispering or mumbling or something.”

  The shotgun made a big difference. If it weren’t for the shotgun, I would have laughed or shaken my head or both. I was learning, though, that no matter how silly he’s being, a man with a shotgun commands respect.

  “Then how did you know it was me with him?” I asked respectfully.

  “What are you trying to pull?” Barry demanded.

  It’s very hard to be persuasive with your hands up, but I did my best. “I’m not trying to pull anything. We’ve got a serious misunderstanding going on here, and I want to work it out.”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “I’m not trying to trick you. If it made any difference, I’d give you my solemn word of honor that I was not with your father last night.”

  “Ha!”

  “Exactly. If you think I’m a killer, then my word doesn’t mean much. I’m trying to see if there’s something logical that would convince you I’m telling the truth.” I was also trying to get him to lower that shotgun before I shit my pants, but it wasn’t a good idea to tell him that.

  Barry laughed and shook his head at me. You can do that when you’re the one with the shotgun. “You can’t logic your way out of this one, Cobb. My father called you by name!”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said.

  Barry didn’t hear the disgust in my voice. “Is that supposed to be a prayer?” he sneered. He took a tighter grip on the shotgun.

  I could feel little tributaries of sweat merging to form a cold river down my back. “Barry,” I said as calmly as I could, “has it occurred to you that your father might have been talking about me?”

  “About you?”

  “Why not? He’d offered me a job, already.” A touchy subject, but this had to make so much sense, even a paranoid like Barry Dost would understand it. “He’d offered me a job, and he was also probably trying to figure out what the Network had in mind sending me here.”

  “He already knew,” Barry said. His hands were looser on the gun. “He knew everything about you Network people.”

  “All right, he knew. Then he could have been filling someone in. Or giving him—”

  “Or her,” Barry said portentously. I was beginning to get the feeling I’d get out of this alive.

  I nodded enthusiastically. “Or her. Giving whoever it was his impressions of the talks, now that he’d met all of us Network people face-to-face.”

  Barry frowned. “Talking about you,” he said.

  “A person’s
name comes up when you talk about him more than when you’re talking to him,” I said.

  “Sure,” Roxanne chipped in. “You should have heard how many times your name came up today.”

  “Sure.” His voice was bitter. “Everybody trying to say I killed my father.” The shotgun came up a little. If I lived, I was going to have to give Roxanne a swift kick in the ass.

  “Nonono,” I said. “Just wondering why you weren’t there to tell your own story.”

  “I wanted to think.”

  “Think now,” I told him. “I had no reason to kill your father or even hurt him. You may know something that can help pin the murder on the real killer. Come and talk to the others.”

  He was thinking it over. He didn’t like it much, but apparently life as the castle ghost had lost its appeal for him.

  “It’s too late to wake the others,” he said. “Let’s make some sandwiches.” He turned away and leaned the shotgun up against the sink. It wasn’t the greatest gun safety I’d ever heard of—in fact, it stank—but I wasn’t going to worry about it. Now that he’d put the gun down, I controlled the situation, thanks to Spot. The Samoyed could make a meal of the guy before he ever got anywhere close to the weapon.

  Roxanne and I sat down at the table. Roxanne grabbed a knife and started cutting a tomato into neat, round slices.

  “Tell you why I decided to trust you,” Barry said.

  “Pass the bread,” Roxanne said.

  “I’d like to know.”

  “It was her. Roxanne. She was being so afraid for you, and so brave. And she isn’t the type of woman who’d let a man fool her.”

  “Just once,” Roxanne said. “And I used that one up long ago. Meat, please?”

  It seemed to me his logic in trusting me was as faulty as it had been in suspecting me. Maybe Bats’s prediction had already come through, and Barry had already gone off the deep end.

  “Who could—” I was distracted for a second by Roxanne. If the size of her hunger reflected the intensity of her love, I was one lucky man. She’d built a sandwich the size of a manhole cover; she took a bite out of it that would have made a shark’s mother tell it it was bolting its food. She saw me looking at her, and shrugged. At least I wasn’t going to have to teach her not to talk with her mouth full.

  I turned back to Barry. “Who do you think your father might have been talking to about me?”

  “I don’t know.” He thought for a second, then said it again. “It wouldn’t be Norman or his wife. If it was Uncle Jack or Aranda, why would they deny it?”

  “Nobody likes to be the last known person to see the victim alive, because people have this irritating tendency to assume you’re the murderer.”

  “The way I did with you.”

  “Exactly. So if it wasn’t me, and it wasn’t Jack or Aranda, who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry said again. He sounded irritable. “The lawyers didn’t show up because of the snow, those two and me are the only people he might have been talking to confidentially in the middle of the night.”

  “I think you’re being a little naive, Barry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your father was famous for playing all the angles. Doesn’t he have somebody inside the Network?”

  “What? Oh. Sure he does. Did. Of course he did.”

  “Who? Could it have been somebody here for the negotiations?”

  “Oh, my God, it could.” Barry clapped a hand to his head as if to hold the top of his skull in place. “Cobb, you’re right, I never should have run away. If we’d had a chance to talk about this earlier ...”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Anybody want a soda?” Roxanne asked.

  “Coke,” I said. What the hell, I thought. I wasn’t going to get any sleep, anyway. Barry asked for one, too.

  “Somebody from the Network’s been tipping off my father, and gets cold feet, who knows why? And decided he has to kill him.”

  “Yeah. The big question,” I said, “is who?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Dad never told me things like that. And I’ve been busy with all this PR stuff, working on the image, you know, I wouldn’t have had time to ask even if I thought he would tell me.”

  “That,” I said, “is a shame.”

  “It sure is. You’ll have to ask Jack, or even Aranda. She’s taken a big interest in these proceedings for some reason.”

  “She says it’s because she used to be in show business,” I told him.

  Barry snorted. “Yeah, right. I think she was looking for dirt on the old man because her time was about up, and she was looking for a way around that prenuptial agreement.”

  “What do you mean, her time was about up?”

  “Little things. Dad stopped lighting her cigarettes. He stopped saying ‘Your ma and I,’ when Aranda wanted me to do something. He was just—pulling away. After all, I’ve seen it twice before. I know the signs.”

  That seemed very interesting, but the more I thought about it, the less it seemed to mean. As a possible motive for murder, it stank. Killing Dost certainly wouldn’t help her get around any prenuptial agreement.

  Now Barry put on his aggressive face. “You know,” he said sternly, “I’ve got a question or two for you, Cobb.”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you have a candidate for Network spy?”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do.”

  “Who is it?”

  I never had to explain why I wasn’t going to tell him, because at that moment a woman’s scream split the house in two.

  16

  It’s time once again to take you ... one step beyond!

  —John Newland, “Alcoa Presents” (ABC)

  BARRY’S EYES WENT IMMEDIATELY to the sink, where the shotgun was leaning. He was still looking at it as he began to get out of his chair.

  I grabbed his wrist. “Leave the gun,” I said.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “The hallway’s going to be crowded up there. Leave the gun. It can cause more problems than it can solve.”

  He looked longingly at it.

  “We’re wasting time,” I said.

  Barry tore his eyes away. “Aaaaagh! All right, then, let’s go”

  “Right. Wait here, Rox,” I said.

  She said something around a mouthful of sandwich that was probably “Fat chance,” or one of its ruder equivalents. She sure didn’t wait there. It was all I could do to get through the swinging door before her.

  When I got to the top of the first flight of stairs, the screams told me more. They were the screams of Aranda Dost, they were coming from above and down the end of the hall. And they were calling my name.

  “Matt! Matt Cobb! Get up here! Get up here right away!”

  Roxanne said, “If that’s the way women call you in the middle of the night, I’m glad I got my claim in first.”

  I saved my breath for climbing.

  As I ran down the end of the hall, Jack Bromhead stuck his face out of his room. “Dammit, Cobb, what is it?”

  “Don’t know,” I said, and kept running.

  Behind me, I heard Bromhead cursing his ankle and saying he’d be along in a minute, as soon as he found something. Fine with me. If I was about to go face-to-face with a killer (with my newfound, thickheaded love dogging my footsteps), I wanted all the help I could get. Short of Barry Dost with a shotgun behind me, that is.

  Now there was a new scare—the screaming stopped. I had to remember where Aranda’s room was. She couldn’t bear staying in her old one, she’d said. Right—directly above Jack’s, one flight up. Next door to Barry’s. It was one of the bare-bones, not-yet-decorated rooms we’d searched this morning.

  Up the stairs at the end of the hall, a short way down the corridor, and there it was.

  The first thing I saw was Ralph, looking like a cologne ad in his uncle’s pajama bottoms and hairy chest, standing in the open door of the room. He was lit by something from wit
hin the room that flickered like blue firelight. I knew that kind of light. I spent a large portion of my life bathed in it. It was the light of a TV set.

  I was getting good and sick of running up and down those stairs. It took my last breath to say Ralph’s name.

  “Cobb!” he said. “Get in here.”

  “Wh—Wha—”

  “I don’t know what it is. You just see for yourself.”

  I shrugged, and stepped through the door. Aranda Dost sat up on her bed, dressed in a sheer black thing that had ridden up her legs and down her bosom because she was making tight fists in the material. Her eyes were wide, and her mouth was open. She was breathing, “No. No. No.” Her gaze was fixed on the TV screen.

  I couldn’t blame her. The face on the screen was that of G. B. Dost, the late business tycoon.

  Dost was standing in front of a plain black background. He wore a gray business suit, a white shirt, and a red tie. He was talking.

  “What’s taking you so long?” the TV said. “Barry, are you there? Why’d you want to put an old man through this?”

  It’s a tape, I thought. Then I remembered. This room hadn’t been fixed up. I walked to the TV set. The phantom Dost kept expressing his impatience.

  Aranda finally deigned to notice me. “Where are your wiseass remarks now, Mr. Cobb?” she spat. “You wanted a sign? How’s this for a sign? Oh, Gabriel, it’s all right, Darling. We’ll get you safely across, and we’ll find out what happened to you—”

  I tuned her out and looked at the back of the TV set. I looked at the input jack—nothing. I looked at the antenna terminals—nothing. I followed the power cord to the outlet of the wall. I pulled the plug.

  The screen went dark—the room went black. Well, he couldn’t bring electricity from beyond the grave, at least.

  “For God’s sake, Cobb, what are you doing?” Haskell Freed’s voice. I looked at the doorway. The whole gang was there, jockeying for position and asking each other what was going on.

  I put the plug back in. Gabby Dost flickered across the darkness again.

  “Dammit, Barry, it’s hotter than hell in here.”