Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  Inside room 214, the bed was unmade and there were crumpled pieces of paper in a circle around the wastebasket where someone had tried to sink them. Next to the television was a collection of empty liquor miniatures and toothbrush glasses flanking a plastic ice bucket full of water.

  “Will you girls be okay?” the security man said, wrinkling his forehead as he surveyed the trashed room. “I gotta go get a hold of my boss.” Carla didn’t even bristle at the appellation “girls,” she just sat down in a big chair.

  “Go do what you have to do,” Jane said firmly. As soon as he left she pulled up the sheets on the bed and smoothed the bedspread over it. The room now looked less repulsive. She investigated the tiny empties and ascertained that a bourbon drinker had stayed here. And he or she had left the key in the minibar. She knelt and pawed through the collection. “How does a drink sound?” she said to Carla. “It might be a good idea. The ice has all melted, though.”

  “Is there any vodka?” Carla said plaintively.

  Jane made her a vodka Collins and poured herself a double cognac. They prepared to wait for the police. Carla took a deep breath and a sip of her drink. She seemed still shaky but much more calm. “Will this go on someone else’s bill?” she said, staring at the glass.

  “Who cares?” said Jane. She sat on the end of the bed. “This is an emergency.”

  Carla gave her a loopy smile. “Thanks for taking care of me. I really was pretty blown away.”

  “Of course you were,” said Jane.

  “I hit the tail end of the North Pacific Factory Trawler cocktail party after the salmon reception,” said Carla. “Those guys party on later than most people. Then I went upstairs. I spell-checked my report on the show and added a few lines about the last events I’d covered, and then I put on my pajamas. I was just going into the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I found her. She was there the whole time I was spell-checking. It’s horrible.”

  Carla had backed out of the bathroom and decided to pick up the phone and call for help, but then she had wondered if anyone was still lurking in the suite. That’s when she’d left the room and gone down one flight of stairs to the salmon exporters reception.

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just went to the first place where I could find people I knew. I guess I panicked.” Carla sounded apologetic. “You’re so calm.”

  “I expected I’d find a body. You were surprised by one,” said Jane. “It’s not the same thing at all.”

  How long would this take, anyway? Jane remembered Jack Lawson was coming by. Suddenly the choice between dumping him and having wild, abandoned sex with him (or somehow combining both) seemed less important than it had earlier. He would have let himself in with his key by now. She supposed she should call him.

  From right outside the door she heard an irritated male voice say, “Let’s get those witnesses separated. I don’t want them reinforcing each other’s wonky stories.” Then there was a businesslike rap on the door, and a thirtyish man in a blazer and polyester slacks came in.

  “I’m Detective Olson,” he said, looking serious but friendly and not at all as if he thought they were a bunch of hysterics concocting wonky stories. “I understand you ladies found the body in room two ten.”

  “She did, actually,” said Jane, pointing to Carla. “And she came downstairs for help, and I went up with her to check it out.”

  “Okay,” he said, pointing to Carla. “I’ll talk to you first. Will you come with me, please?” Carla rose obediently. To Jane he said, “If you don’t mind waiting, I’ll talk to you next, okay?”

  They left the room, and Jane called home. Jack answered. “Where the hell are you?” he said in a nice but puzzled way.

  “I’m still down at the Meade, and I’m going to be even later. There’s been a murder at the hotel. The police are going to question me, and I have to stick around.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “And I thought you played those nice, quiet rooms. Shall I come down there?”

  “No, no,” she said. “Just make yourself comfortable. I’ll get home when I can.”

  “Well, what happened? A bar fight or something?” Jack was a country-western singer who’d played more than his share of wild honky-tonks.

  Jane felt suddenly tired, too tired to tell him all about it. “I was singing and someone came in screaming that they found a body. I went upstairs with her and checked it out. There was a young woman dead in the tub. There was a lot of blood.”

  “Maybe she killed herself,” said Jack.

  “I didn’t see any weapons lying around,” said Jane. “Anyway, the police are here now. It’s all under control.”

  “Are you holding up okay?” he said. “It must have been a shock. I’m glad I’ll be here when you come back. You shouldn’t be alone after something like this.”

  “You are very sweet,” she said, touched.

  “So are you.” His voice softened. “You pretend you’re not, but you are.”

  After she said good-bye and hung up, she wondered if that were true. Jack apparently wanted to believe it, but his remark had seemed both patronizing and presumptuous. After all, he was younger and much more naive than she was.

  Jane would have liked to be sweet, and maybe she had been once, when she was very young and her husband, Bernardo, had taken care of her. It had been easy to be sweet then. Now it was probably too late. Now she could be kind in a brusque, superficially maternal way, taking care of Carla, for instance, without actually liking her very much.

  A little while later a uniformed officer came in and escorted her down the hall to another anonymous hotel room. This one had been made up. Detective Olson asked her a few questions at a table at the end of the room while a battery of other people came in and out, barked into the phone, stood around chatting and managed to create an air of organized chaos.

  Olson ignored all this activity and asked simple, clear, direct questions, waiting patiently for a simple answer. It was easy to fall into his polite, impersonal rhythm of questioning. He established that Jane worked at the hotel, wanted to know about Carla’s demeanor, asked her if she had ever been in the suite before.

  “Carla’s room?” she said.

  “Apparently it was a hospitality suite run by her magazine,” he said. Jane had wondered how Carla rated such a luxurious room. “Were you there earlier for a party or anything?”

  “No. I just went in once. When Carla told me there was someone in trouble.” She felt compelled to apologize for having possibly contaminated a crime scene. “I thought I’d better go up there in case someone needed help before security got there.”

  “Sometimes it’s better just to call the police,” he said gently. “But I understand you were trying to help. Still, there could have been someone in there.”

  Jane nodded, and he asked her what she had handled in room 210. She tried to reconstruct her movements, and he made a few jottings in a notebook, then took her name and address and thanked her for her cooperation.

  Jane found herself disappointed. She wanted to ask him a lot of questions. Was there a weapon around anywhere? How had the woman died? How long had she lain there? She would have to wait and read about it in the paper, she supposed. But she did blurt out, “Do you know who she is?”

  “Not yet,” he said, rising to indicate the interview was over.

  As he walked her to the door, the uniformed officer came into the room with Trygve, the Norwegian fish bureaucrat she’d seen much earlier in the Fountain Room, the one who’d requested “Just One of Those Things.” His two-dollar tip seemed like something that had happened a week before.

  Jane was startled to see him in a homey plaid bathrobe. He looked vexed. He had one hand jammed angrily in his robe pocket, and the other hand held a passport. He looked reasonably sober, but flushed. “I hope this won’t take long,” he said. “I have a very early flight tomorrow, and an important meeting with the Norwegian cabinet.” The policeman didn’t look particularly impressed.

  Jane t
urned once and looked back at him. He seemed fairly self-possessed considering the circumstances, but she caught one odd detail that indicated he was disconcerted or maybe still slightly swacked. He was wearing only one slipper, a childish-looking thing of some bristly fur. His big white naked foot made him look pathetic and vulnerable somehow. She wondered if they’d woken him up, but that wet hair seemed to indicate he’d just come out of the shower.

  At home, Jane discovered Jack sound asleep in her bed. He lay on his stomach, his head turned toward the wall and half buried in his pillow. His gorgeous, tapering back emerged from the sheet, and one hand stretched out across her pillow. His clothes lay neatly folded on a chair, and his very expensive felt Stetson was sitting on the foot of the bed.

  Didn’t he know it was unlucky to leave a hat on the bed? Jane hated herself for being superstitious, but she plucked it away and put it on top of his clothes, then undressed herself and slid under his warm, heavy arm. She put one hand on his back and tucked her knees into his side. Maybe he would wake up and maybe he wouldn’t. Jane wasn’t sure what she wanted and soon fell asleep herself, thinking that maybe they would make love as soon as they woke up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Instead they had a fight.

  It started when Jack uttered his first words of the day. “Why didn’t you wake me up last night? I wanted to make you feel better. I wanted to take care of you. I thought you needed me, but you don’t.” He had propped himself up on one elbow and was glaring at her.

  “Well, it’s a good thing I don’t,” she said sleepily, “because you’re never here. You just shuttle in once in a while from L.A., and then you go back down to the studio and party with your buddies or do a gig at some state fair.”

  “Is that what you think? I thought you understood. This recording thing is very important to me. I invited you to come down there.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack, I don’t want to sit around on a folding chair in a cold studio like some groupie. I’m too old for that.”

  She hadn’t meant to be so blunt. He’d caught her unawares by starting in while she was still half asleep.

  “You know what your problem is,” he said solemnly.

  She sighed and put the pillow over her face. “Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me. What is my problem?”

  “Inability to commit,” he said.

  She tore the pillow off her face. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jack. That’s supposed to be my line. There’s one of those why-he- won’t-commit articles in every women’s magazine in the beauty parlor.”

  She realized she was on dangerous ground now. Telling a guy he was behaving like a woman, was, in her experience, never a good idea.

  She barreled on, trying to change the subject a little. “Maybe I should remind you that what you liked so much about me was that I wasn’t possessive. That we could just have a great time. That I didn’t want to snare you or change you. It seems unfair to attack me for what you considered to be one of my better points.”

  He fell back down on his back, bouncing the bed. “That was pretty good strategy,” he said.

  “It wasn’t strategy,” she said. “I’m way beyond that kind of thing. You may not believe it, but it’s true. Come on, Jack, let’s not fight. You’re leaving for the airport in just a couple of hours. Don’t go away mad.” She stroked his hair. “Besides, I had a perfectly horrible time last night. I’m too tired to fight.”

  “You poor thing,” he said, kissing her forehead. “I’m sorry I got bent out of shape.” She relaxed a little, but then, instead of comforting her in some carnal way that she felt would unkink both of them, he managed to start in on himself again. “But you have to understand, it’s hard on my ego that you don’t seem to need me to be there for you. It’s not that I want a codependent relationship or anything. . . .”

  When Jane had first met Jack Lawson, he’d seemed straightforward and uncomplicated, a nice all-American hunk with a great baritone voice who could ride a horse, was a terrific dancer, and was unashamed of his endearingly greedy level of physical passion. Where had he come up with these mushy clichés—“inability to commit,” “be there for you,” “codependent”?

  She ran a hand along his shoulder. “Jack, I know this recording thing is very exciting, but do you think you’re spending too much time in L.A.?” He was clearly a victim of cultural contamination.

  “You mean you think I should make more time and space for our relationship?”

  “Oh, never mind,” she said in a tactical retreat. (She might not operate strategically, but she still used tactics.) She could see it now. He’d stop writing his appealingly sordid drinking and cheating songs and start composing New Age odes to dolphins before too long. By which time Jane planned to be out of the picture. He was sweet, though, looking at her now rather blearily with boyish, tousled hair.

  “Darling,” she said, “I’m very tense. I wish you would do something to relax me. Something not too verbal.”

  Fortunately Jack’s personality hadn’t changed at its deeper core. He swung immediately into action. Pushing her shoulders down onto the pillow, he climbed on top of her, twisted her hair in his hands and started in delicately on her earlobe with the tip of his tongue while sliding one smooth knee up the inside of her thigh in his usual decisive manner.

  A few hours later she stood on her porch in her bathrobe, waving good-bye to him as a taxi took him to the airport. Maybe I’ll dump him later, she thought. But for now, I won’t worry about it. He was scheduled to be gone for three weeks. By then maybe everything would take care of itself in some mysterious way. Maybe he would dump her. He had to be surrounded by gorgeous women in L.A. On the whole, Jane would have preferred to dump him before he dumped her, but Jack was so sweet that she wanted to make sure she didn’t hurt him. She sighed and reminded herself to drop by the seafood show on her way to work and pick up some of that smoked salmon from that nice Shetland man.

  When she got inside the convention center, Jane was confronted with rows and rows of booths, each fronted by a flounce of shiny blue fabric. In the booths were salespeople offering samples of cooked fish, men in suits, women in bright dresses, all smiling and friendly, all wearing plastic badges.

  There were glass cases full of mounds of ice with shiny-looking dead fish lying on their sides and neat overlapping rows of fillets and steaks, garnished with lemons and limes.

  In the Hawaiian area (things seemed to be arranged on roughly geographical lines), Miss Hawaii in traditional muumuu with sash and rhinestone tiara posed for pictures with conventioneers, and there were big tropical fish trimmed with waxy pink and white and scarlet flowers. Jane stopped to admire a huge round orange fish with white polka dots.

  Some of the booths featured videos showing clean blue waters, fishing vessels pounding through foamy waves, smiling women in white smocks and caps cleaning and slicing fish in spotless factories.

  As she walked the aisles in search of Magnus Anderson’s stand, jostled by lots of conventioneers carrying plastic bags bulging with brochures, Jane was offered toothpicks impaling shrimp, breaded fish in the shape of stars and half moons and squares of white fish in various sauces—Cajun, teriyaki, dill. Also available were glossy brochures, price lists, logo-laden oven mitts and pot holders, pens, luggage tags, key chains and fridge magnets.

  The New Zealanders, whom Jane had never thought of as particularly fishy, were out in full force with a section of their own, blowups of photos of pristine fjords and artful displays of emerald-green mussels and bright white fillets of orange roughy.

  The Chileans seemed to be serving some final little meals of salmon and Chilean wines to a few select customers. Their stand was staffed by elegant gentlemen in beautiful suits.

  There were lots of Canadians in a section plastered with red maple leaves. A man from Newfoundland was demonstrating a machine that removed cod tongues—and various Quebecois accents floated through the air. A sign said that lobster races would be held at the New Brunswick stand hourly.
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  The Norwegians had a nest of booths all to themselves. Everybody there seemed incredibly tall. A blue-eyed chef, draped with medals and even taller with his toque, was demonstrating a cod dish, and a gray-haired man with fierce eyebrows was feeding some salmon into a huge stainless-steel slicing machine.

  She made her way past a Scottish piper and a brace of men in kilts and trews, a gaggle of pale-complected New Englanders in sweaters and L. L. Bean gear, and various aerobicized young women in black Spandex, handing out large shrimp in a stand full of garish fake marble columns. They looked a lot slicker than the two babes in Highland fling outfits she’d seen last night.

  A certain amount of packing up was going on, with people bent over cardboard boxes and running around with wrapping tape, scraping off grills and taking down signs.

  Finally she found stand seventeen, where Magnus Anderson was leaning over his refrigerated case, pointing to a map for the benefit of an American customer who looked clearly puzzled. “It’s right here, at the sixtieth parallel,” Magnus was explaining patiently. Jane imagined every pitch began with that basic geography lesson.

  She stood a little to one side as he went on about the fact that nowhere in God’s creation was there a better place to farm salmon than in Shetland.

  Behind him she watched a pretty dark-haired girl and a florid middle-aged man stacking up piles of brochures and stowing them in a big box. They spoke to each other in a language that sounded vaguely like English, but which Jane slowly realized was completely incomprehensible to her.

  She must have looked startled, because when Magnus’s prospect, stuffing more brochures into his plastic bag, left, Magnus turned to her and said, “They’re spickin Shetland.”