Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  “Probably,” Marcia said in a flat voice. She was rubbing a line of blusher along her cheekbone. “We can wait for them with that guy from Norway. He’s really friendly.”

  The brunette dropped her hair and watched Marcia rub color into her face in the mirror. “You put on makeup weird,” she said with the air of having reached a great insight. Jane, who was now brushing her hair, cast a curious glance at Marcia’s reflection.

  “People usually make a special face when they put on makeup,” explained the brunette. “Like opening their eyes big and kind of smiling a little, maybe. Checking out how it would look when you were talking to people.”

  Marcia was just rubbing that old blusher on there like someone slamming paint on a fence. Jane gave her another look while she took out her own lipstick, realizing the squeaky brunette was right. There was such a thing as a putting-on-makeup expression, and Marcia didn’t have one.

  Jane touched up her own face, keeping half an eye on the two women. While the brunette looked about twenty-two, it was hard to tell how old Marcia, the blonde, was. There was a solemnness about her that made her sleazy outfit look even more grotesque.

  Marcia went over to the sink and scrubbed her hands like an obsessive compulsive. “I smell like dead fish,” she said. She sounded angry.

  Back in the Fountain Room, Jane noticed that the mood of the gathering had changed. The rowdier element in the corner seemed to have cleared out. The place was now full of knots of gloomy, dark-suited men, not mixing and looking far from festive.

  Still, why should she care if the party was dying just as it had begun? Her job in the lobby lounge was to sell drinks by keeping the customers in their chairs. Here, all she had to do was sing. She’d get paid whether or not this grim little party ever took off.

  But what should she sing to these dismal-looking men? “Gloomy Sunday,” the infamous Hungarian suicide song, might be just the ticket. She certainly wasn’t going to do anything bouncy. The only dignified way to deal with a dead crowd was to reflect their mood and pretend everything was just fine. She decided “Autumn Leaves” might be a good choice. As soon as she played her request for that nice man from Shetland.

  After her next set, she stepped off the dais and Magnus Anderson came up and thanked her. “Lovely,” he said. “Do you know anything else by Patsy Cline?”

  Before she could answer, he glanced over Jane’s shoulder, clicked his tongue and snapped, “Here’s that annoyin’ lass, come to torment me.”

  The woman who came up to them was about thirty, with pale skin, light brown hair and large greenish eyes like peeled grapes. She wore silver drop earrings in the shape of fish, and a big fish pin fastened the matronly-looking scarf that she had draped over a stiff, boxy brown suit. Way too much shoulder pad, thought Jane. It made her look artificially squared off, as if she were a fish out of water, soft and squishy, wearing a not entirely successful human disguise.

  “Hi, Magnus,” she said in a grating but perky voice. “Remember me? Carla Elroy from Seafood Now magazine?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said without enthusiasm.

  Carla looked over at Jane with just a flicker of curiosity and turned back to Anderson, who was scowling. “So how did the salmon meeting go?” she demanded. “They wouldn’t let me in.”

  He shrugged noncommittally.

  “Listen,” she said, “there’s rumors.”

  “Oh?” Anderson narrowed his eyes a little.

  “That’s right. Something funny’s going on in farmed salmon. All over the world. Strange rumors about pigmentation problems. Did you guys talk about that?” She gave him a little smirk of triumph.

  Jane watched Anderson’s own pigmentation change from pale to florid. He blinked hard a few times and looked furious, but in his soft, feathery voice, he just said, “I don’t know a thing about it.” Then he nodded to Jane and walked away.

  Carla turned to Jane. “Are you a member of the Women’s Seafood Network?” she said eagerly, apparently unaware that she had driven Magnus Anderson away in a choler. Jane expected this woman to give her the secret handshake of this organization. A dead-fish handshake, no doubt.

  “I’m here to sing. I’m afraid I’m not in the fish business.” Actually, she was glad she wasn’t in the fish business, but it seemed tactless to say so.

  Carla’s green eyes grew even bulgier and her expression more earnest. “It’s a fascinating industry. Really global and dynamic. But there aren’t a lot of women in it. That’s why we have the Women’s Seafood Network. So we can help each other deal with these old boys.” She wrinkled up her nose. “A lot of these guys are totally macho.”

  Jane reflected that while overbearing jerks were undoubtedly the downside, there were plenty of single women who would be only too glad to find themselves in an industry full of men. She checked Carla’s ring finger—naked—and stopped herself from congratulating Carla on the great odds she should be enjoying. Maybe she wasn’t interested in men.

  “So do you eat a lot of fish?” she said to Carla. “It’s supposed to be very good for you.”

  “Full of Omega-3. It fights cholesterol,” Carla said solemnly. “The only problem is, I want to know all about it first. Where it was caught, how it was processed, how it’s been handled. It all starts with proper on-board bleeding techniques.” She was getting quite animated now.

  Jane felt slightly queasy and was relieved to see that Gary was waving to her. She was afraid Carla would move on to evisceration any moment now. “I’m so glad you enjoy your work,” she said. “Now I’m going to have to do mine.”

  From the dais at the end of the room, Gary played in his own moody, introspective way, and Jane sang and watched the party fizzle. Throughout the next hour she observed Carla buzz at the knots of suited men, trotting over to them in her sensible pumps, turning her white face up to them eagerly, occasionally whipping out a notebook and standing there, pencil poised. Everyone seemed to make short work of deflecting her.

  Jane doubted that with her gauche interview technique she’d ever advance beyond Seafood Now magazine. It was so simple, really. All she needed to have done was look sympathetic instead of delighted when confronting Anderson with the suggestion there was some problem with salmon. Jane would have got the whole story out of him in five minutes by making it clear she was on his side.

  Carla finally left the room. She looked satisfied despite having been universally rejected. Perhaps she thought she was being fended off because she was a woman trying to penetrate the old boy network. She was wrong. Jane could tell from Carla’s assertive, overeager mingling technique, not unlike a dive-bombing insect at a barbecue, that the rejection was personal rather than gender based.

  Jane sang “Somebody Loves Me” and began to think about her love life, mulling over in her mind how she could dump Jack Lawson, a singing rancher she’d met in the eastern part of the state last summer and with whom she had been carrying on a long-distance romance for some time. He was expecting to meet her after work tonight. Maybe she’d sleep with him just once more—for old times’ sake and because she knew realistically she wouldn’t be able to resist his physical charms anyway. Then she’d dump him. Nicely, of course.

  These basically recreational affairs, no matter how they were dressed up, worked only to a point. Jane was determined to end it while it was still fun. She’d never expected the thing to go on as long as it had.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of another woman. Maybe the Women’s Seafood Network took turns sending in its members in shifts to make sure the old boys weren’t conspiring against them, and this amiable-looking tubby blonde was here to replace Carla.

  The new arrival wore a bright blue crepe dress draped artfully over firm and ample flesh. She had the good legs that often went with a big torso, especially on women who drank a lot, and she strode confidently around the room on a pair of very expensive Italian shoes with high heels that showed off those legs.

  Unlike the tired tartan tarts Jane h
ad observed earlier, and who now seemed to be gone, this woman was used to dressing for success, and the muscles in her calves had adapted.

  She seemed more welcome than poor Carla. Jane watched her purposefully knocking back what looked like a gin and tonic and beaming and bubbling around the room, shaking hands and exchanging air kisses like a politician. At one point she even thwacked the elegant Chilean on his elegant back in a hearty, one-of-the-boys manner. He blinked his Bambi-like eyes and smiled nervously.

  She exchanged some words with the men around him, and when Jane stopped singing in one of her dramatic pauses, she heard the woman’s deep laugh and voice. She was English. “We’ll jolly soon set things right,” she said in the booming, assured tones of the captain of a girls’ hockey team.

  She left soon after, and Jane started to think about Jack again, then decided it was all too boring, just as boring as this gig.

  Maybe she should move to Prague. Jane had been to Prague in the bad old days and had felt a Mitteleuropisch Ernst Lubitsch charm under the oppressive surface. She’d heard they liked American jazz singers, and it was cheap and lively right now, full of expatriates. The Left Bank for the nineties and all that. Of course, all those buzzy people were probably a lot younger than she was—young and eager and looking for a buzz instead of creating one.

  The hours crept by. The partygoers drifted in and out. At one point, Magnus Anderson left with a group of men and gave her a friendly wave. Jane kept on singing, although her repertoire was getting thin and her voice was tired. She reminded herself that the extra five hundred would come in handy. She was in the middle of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and wondering if Budapest had a shot at being the next Prague, when Carla Elroy of Seafood Now magazine reappeared in the banquet room.

  This time she was harder to ignore. She was wearing pajamas with tropical fish all over them, and she was screaming. She rushed to the front of the room and said, “My God, my God!”

  The cuff on the sleeve of her pajama top was dark red and wet, and there was another paler red stain on her outer thigh, probably where the cuff had touched it. It looked very much like fresh blood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jane stopped singing. Gary stopped playing. What little conversation there had been ceased. The men in dark suits all stepped back in the nervous, embarrassed way men do when faced with a woman displaying strong emotion.

  Jane stared at the wet pajama sleeve. It was blood all right. There was nothing else it could be. Jane let her mike fall. It made a thud and a crackle as it hit the floor. She stepped toward Carla and found herself putting an arm on her shoulder. “Are you all right?” she heard herself say.

  Carla let out a sob and reached for Jane, looking up at her with those bulging eyes now shiny with tears. Her sleeve made a red streak across Jane’s beige dress. “In my room,” she said. “It’s horrible. We have to help her. What shall we do?”

  Jane pushed up the pajama sleeve and looked at the woman’s soft white arm, turning it over just to make sure Carla hadn’t hurt herself. Or been hurt. The skin was intact, smooth and white with a fine down of pale hairs, but looking heart-breakingly fragile somehow, so pale, with the tracing of blue veins at the elbow. The blood hadn’t come from Carla, who submitted passively to the examination, then burst into tears and buried her face in her hands.

  “Carla, tell me your room number.” Jane made her voice firm. A very specific request often calmed down hysterical people. She kept her hand on Carla’s shoulder and felt it shuddering with sobs through the thin cotton. Carla looked up from her hands and whispered, “Two ten.”

  Jane turned to Gary, now standing up. “Send security to two ten.” He nodded and rushed away, and Jane turned back to Carla. “What happened? Is someone in trouble?”

  Carla was still trembling. “I’m scared. I don’t want to go in there.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Jane. “But maybe you could show me the way.” Somebody had to get up to the room to see if someone was in trouble. It might take Gary a while to scare up security, and Jane didn’t think Carla should be left here in her pajamas with no one to take care of her but these gloomy suits. Carla, who had tried to act tough before, now seemed helpless.

  “I’m going up there now,” Jane said in a kindergarten teacher voice. “Will you show me the way?”

  “I’m not going in that room,” Carla said, snuffling.

  “Okay. You can wait in the hall. You don’t want to stay here, do you?”

  Carla looked around at all the curious faces. They all looked interested and puzzled, but none of them looked particularly sympathetic. “I’ll come with you,” she said.

  In the elevator, Jane knew the poor thing was pulling herself together when she put a hand to her cheek and said, “Oh, my God, all those guys saw me in my pajamas.”

  “Thank God they’re such chic pajamas,” Jane said in a kindly way. Actually she felt they didn’t really do a lot for Carla. Their tropical gaiety was a little overwhelming and made her look, by contrast, even more like a codfish.

  The elevator doors opened, and they walked down the narrow corridor, lit at intervals with metal wall sconces that left blotches of yellow light on the textured wall paper. Behind one of the blank white doors, they heard music and laughing. It sounded as if a dorm party were in progress.

  In front of room 210, Carla stopped. The door was slightly ajar. “In there,” said Carla. “In the bathroom.”

  Jane knew she should wait for security. But what if someone were hurt? She could call 911 from the room and get help right away. She left the door wide open and went inside.

  It was a large suite, filled with puffy-looking sofas and glass coffee tables. A laptop computer sat on one of the tables. The floor-to-ceiling turquoise curtains were drawn. On one side of the room was a bar, littered with dirty glasses and an overflowing ashtray. Through a doorway she saw a pair of double beds with turquoise-and-rose spreads. There were a few other closed doors.

  Jane knew which door led to the bathroom because she heard a loud fan coming from behind it. She held her breath, pulled open the door and jumped back about a foot.

  She half expected someone to rush out at her, but instead there was just the sound of the fan and another sound: the sound of dripping liquid. She stepped inside the doorway. The drip came from the sink faucet. She could see a drop of water clinging to the tap, fattening, then falling, and producing another rhythmic blip.

  The bathtub’s white plastic shower curtain was drawn all the way across. At the bottom, though, one end of the curtain was bunched up, and Jane saw a smear of blood. At her feet, she noticed that the terry bath mat, with its raised letters reading “Meade,” was speckled with a fine spray of blood. She took a deep breath and lifted the other end of the shower curtain away from the tub.

  There was no doubt in Jane’s mind that the young woman in the tub was dead. The limbs were arranged so unnaturally, the elbows jutting akimbo, the knees wedged against the sides, in a position that would have been uncomfortable if this woman could feel anything. It looked as if she had been pushed into the tub and hastily abandoned, something messy to be cleaned up later.

  And the face. Jane could bear only to glance at it. The jaw was in some kind of spasm, and the eyes showed white all the way around. They were small, milky blue eyes with pale lashes.

  She looked to be in her late twenties. She had dark blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. Slightly darker roots were showing around the hairline. She wore faded jeans, a plain gray sweatshirt and a pair of slightly dirty Reeboks. One of them was hooked over the edge of the tub. The front of her sweatshirt was soaked with blood. It looked very dark, not red at all. There were flecks of blood on the white tiles behind her and still more on the small bottle of hotel shampoo and the tiny piece of pink soap that sat primly in the ceramic soap dish.

  Jane backed out of the bathroom, feeling dizzy and slightly nauseated. Behind her, from the room, she heard a footstep and a man clearing his throat.


  She turned, feeling physical fear for a second before she realized that the man who stood there staring at her was a young guy from the hotel security staff. She’d met him the week before when he’d bounced a few drunks out of the Fountain Room.

  She heard herself say, “There’s a dead woman in the tub,” in a voice that shocked her because it sounded so calm.

  The security man hustled into the bathroom as she was leaving, and they managed to collide in the doorway. He shoved past her and ripped back the curtain, the rings making a ratchety sound as they slid along the pole. He stood there for a second, his hand on the shower curtain, then drew in his breath, let the curtain fall back, turned to Jane and said, “Fuck.”

  “Yeah,” said Jane.

  He’d know what to do. If he didn’t, he should. She wasn’t going to try to calm him down. Back in the hall, Carla stood there all by herself, while a few of the men Jane had seen at the reception, apparently drawn here by curiosity, stood a few paces away, staring into the room.

  Jane touched Carla’s shoulder. “The security guy is there now. It’s going to be all right.”

  Carla nodded. “I was pretty scared,” she said. “I’m better now.”

  “Good. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Carla. “I know she’s not part of the Women’s Seafood Network.”

  Jane tried to imagine the contorted face alive, relaxed, safe. It was hard to do. It was as if the woman in the tub had always been a corpse.

  The security man came out of the room. He looked pale and slightly angry, as if he resented someone messing with the space for which he was responsible. “The cops are coming,” he said. “They’ve asked you two to wait. I can put you in two fourteen across the hall.” He glared at the collection of name-badged rubberneckers. “There’s nothing to see,” he said with a trace of contempt. “Please don’t block the hall.”

  They began to drift away, and he led Jane and Carla to another room and let them in with a passkey. “I don’t know if the maid has had time to make up the room,” he said apologetically, in some hotel management reflex way that was ludicrous considering the circumstances. But trivial thoughts often appeared in the midst of horrors. Jane had found herself focusing on the soap and shampoo spattered with blood next to the dead girl. She remembered it was Caswell-Massey shampoo and was surprised that the Meade would have something so nice.