Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  Stacy was by now completely ignoring the shoppers who drifted by, and none of them were sufficiently bold to break up her conversation in search of a sample.

  Jane opened her eyes wide, leaned forward and took on the dramatic, confiding manner of a woman Stacy’s age. “You know what? I saw her body. The woman who found it went crazy and rushed over to where I was, and I went back and saw her.”

  Stacy was clearly thrilled. “Omigod, no way!” she said.

  “It was awful,” said Jane.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Stacy said.

  “Listen,” said Jane, “would you mind if we talked about it? It really shook me up. I feel like if I knew more about her, about what happened that evening, it would be less freaky.”

  “No problem,” said Stacy. “Do you live around here? I’ll be off at nine.”

  “Great,” said Jane, “I’ll be back then. Maybe we can have a coffee or something.”

  “I’m really glad you came in,” Stacy said. “It would help me a lot to talk about it, too.”

  Their morbid curiosity having been recast as co-therapy and thereby made respectable, the two women promised to meet at nine right outside the store.

  Jane had an hour to kill, so she went to Tower Books at the bottom of Queen Anne Hill and headed for the travel section to read about Norway. The end papers of one fat book about all of Scandinavia showed a map of the region. She looked for some of the names that had appeared on her itinerary.

  Everywhere she was going seemed to be along the west coast. A little town called Tromsø and an archipelago called the Lofoten Islands were both above the Arctic Circle. Trondheim was farther south, at the end of a long fjord. Bergen, she noted, was on the same parallel as the Shetland Islands.

  She already had a vague impression of the place, borne out by the guidebooks she skimmed standing there in the aisle. Clean as a whistle. Lots of gorgeous scenery. Land of the midnight sun (except at this time of year it would be land of the midday gloom, she supposed). Plenty of fish to eat. No tipping. Everyone spoke English. A good place to buy furs and modern jewelry, with enamel work a specialty.

  That eliminated shopping. Jane was hardly in the market for furs or jewelry, her fashion forays being presently limited to the Nordstrom rack, where all the markdowns went. Not to mention the bargain jeans, T-shirt and slinky dress emporium she favored in lean times, home of the perpetual ten-dollar sale, which she thought of affectionately as the “teen tart store.”

  The guidebooks were full of stunning photographs of fjords, charming little towns and mountain meadows. All the pictures had obviously been taken in the height of summer. Jane had a bleak vision of herself shivering in hotel rooms and browsing among dusty carved trolls in chilly souvenir shops. While snow was undeniably beautiful, she hated being cold.

  She read a capsule description of the Norwegian character. “While traditionally considered cool and reserved, Norwegians often come alive at night, and love a party,” it said. That sounded like Knutsen all right. And farther along: “A remarkably law-abiding people, Norwegians enjoy living in a country with one of the world’s lowest crime rates. Violent crime is practically unknown.”

  She sighed. Here she was, barreling off to a cold place with a reputation for dull cooking, no shopping in sight, her days filled with watching fish being headed and gutted. And the guidebook was telling her the chances of her finding a demented killer there were minimal.

  At nine Jane found Stacy outside the store, standing in front of a huge display of bright yellow daffodils, shivering a little in her floral dress and light raincoat and looking a little sad in contrast with the garish flowers.

  Jane suggested a coffee across the street, and Stacy stood on tiptoe to check out the place before agreeing. Once inside, she made a point of sitting so she could look out the window over at the entrance to Thriftway. Jane wondered for a second why she seemed so distracted, then realized that, of course, Stacy was living in a state of perpetual hopefulness and had her eye out for the missing-in-action boyfriend.

  When they were settled with their coffees, however, Stacy got back on track. Jane rewarded her with a description of the body. Just the bare details, the position of the limbs, the paleness of the skin, the clothes she was wearing.

  “You’re kidding!” said Stacy. “She’d changed?”

  “That’s right.” Jane sipped her coffee. “I wonder when she did that?”

  “She was wearing that stupid Scotch outfit when she left with that guy. His name was Trigger or something.”

  “Did she have a lot to drink?”

  Stacy shook her head. “That was the weird part. She drank Perrier and lime. I can’t see going off with that guy unless you were pretty shit-faced, no offense.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t know. She was kind of snuggling up against him, like rubbing his leg and stuff, and he slobbered something in her ear and she was all like giggly. It was like she was drinking, you know. She held on to her glass like it was really booze, and acted sort of out of it.”

  “He didn’t notice she wasn’t actually drinking?”

  “Are you kidding? He was so far gone he was totally clueless.”

  “Maybe they went up to his room,” said Jane. But where had she changed into that plain sweatshirt and jeans?

  “I think they went in her car,” Stacy said now. “Because she dangled her car keys in front of him before they left. They must have gone in her car.” Her gaze drifted over Jane’s shoulder.

  “What was she like?” Jane tried to catch Stacy’s eye. “What kind of a person was she?”

  “Really strange,” said Stacy, who politely met Jane’s gaze once more. “We talked about modeling, because that’s what my career goal is. Like a lot of girls who work for the agency. I told her I was going to try and be a spokesmodel on Great American Star Search.”

  Jane looked blank.

  “You know,” prompted Stacy. “It’s on TV. With Ed McMahon. You can win a lot of money. You have to do an evening gown thing, and then you announce the next acts and stuff.”

  Jane got a vision of poor Stacy squeaking into the camera in a beaded gown.

  “Anyway,” Stacy went on, “she didn’t know anything about modeling. Like how you have to have head shots and stuff. I couldn’t figure out what she was doing there. She sure hated fish.”

  “Did she seem really interested in this guy, this”—Jane remembered not to use his actual name—“this Trigger guy?”

  “Yeah, in a totally sleazy way. It was really weird. Because when we left her house her boyfriend gave her a big kiss, like they were really in love. He gazed into her eyes and gave her this serious look, and she gave him this sweet little smile. I thought they were totally in love. It was so sweet. They stood there for a minute like she was going off on a trip or something.”

  Stacy sighed, presumably at the thought of separated lovers, and her desperate eyes flitted back across the street.

  Jane tried to imagine Curtis Jeffers in a passionate embrace, and failed. “And she was wearing that plaid outfit?”

  “That’s right. I guess she couldn’t have taken that drunk guy home, because her boyfriend was probably there. I wonder where they went and where she changed? I don’t get it. Because someone saw Trigger or whatever his name is back in the hotel hours later. Without her. So maybe she ditched him.”

  “Who saw him later? Did you?”

  “No, this guy in the bar. Magnum something. He had a weird accent.”

  “What kind of an accent?”

  “Like Uncle Scrooge on those Duck Tales cartoons,” said Stacy. “My little sister watches that.”

  “You mean like from Scotland?”

  “Yeah,” said Stacy. “That’s it.”

  “Magnus Anderson?”

  “I think that’s the guy. He came up to me and the catfish guy. It was quite a while later because we ended up having dinner at Benihana’s of Tokyo.” Stacy looked momentarily smug, as if she’
d pulled a fast one on her boyfriend. “Anyway, this catfish guy was waiting for me to get into a cab, and this Magnum guy comes up and he’s talking and he says something about poor old Trigger. Like someone just saw him in the hotel looking all wrecked up. This Magnum guy said something about him getting into some kinky stuff. He seemed to think it was funny.”

  “Kinky stuff?”

  “That’s right. The catfish guy was joking around with him, and he said something about how Trigger came back with his kinky gear. That was it. Kinky gear. Then I got in the cab and went home.”

  She sipped her coffee and seemed to grow impatient. “I didn’t think much about it until the cops got in touch with me and asked me all about this stuff. Then it really hit me. Someone killed her.”

  “What did the police ask you?”

  “What she was like and when I saw her last and if I thought she was a hooker. I said no, she seemed weird, though. And they asked if I noticed anything strange about the evening. I told them what I could remember, but I was really shook up.”

  “Did they ask you about this Trigger guy?”

  “I told them they left the table together, and they wanted to know if I knew for sure they went in her car. I said she held up the keys. They were all cold and didn’t give me any idea what they were thinking. I was crying because I was scared, thinking it could have been me.”

  “Of course you were upset,” said Jane. “What a strange thing. I mean, it’s hard to get an idea of what Marcia was thinking that night.”

  “It was,” said Stacy. “Really strange. And the part that really weirded me out was when she opened her purse and took out the car keys and I happened to glance in there. I told the police about that.” Just then Stacy half rose in her chair, and her face lit up.

  “Omigod,” she said rapturously. “I gotta go. There’s my boyfriend.” She managed a birdlike, “Thanks for the coffee,” as she scraped her chair away from the table.

  “What did you see in her purse?” said Jane.

  “A gun,” Stacy said. “She was running around town carrying a gun.”

  Through the rain-spattered window, Jane watched Stacy on the sidewalk. She jumped up and down and waved her arms, her raincoat flapping crazily as she yelled, “Steve!” across the street.

  Steve was tall and thin with a neat haircut, and he wore jeans and a baseball jacket. He jammed his hands in the pockets of the jacket and strolled toward Stacy across the Thriftway parking lot.

  Jane watched them embrace and stroll off together arm in arm down the wet sidewalk. Her face was turned toward him, and he bent down and kissed her.

  She finished her coffee and remembered from the map she’d seen earlier just how close the Shetland Isles were to Norway. Maybe she’d make a quick stop there on her way. She thought she had Magnus Anderson’s card at home. It would be easier to ask him in person just what it was he’d thought Trygve Knutsen had been up to that night.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jane woke up in her narrow bed in the hotel in Tromsø. The down comforter was all twisted, and her arms and legs were sticking out. She had probably thrashed around in her sleep, trying to cool off. Despite her worst fears, the hotel was overheated, not cold at all.

  She went to the window overlooking the harbor and opened it a crack. A satisfying slice of clean, cold air blasted into the room. Her watch said four-thirty. Jet-lagged and still half asleep, she wondered whether it was A.M. or P.M. It didn’t matter, really. And of course it was impossible to tell by looking outside. At this time of year, this far north, the sun could manage only a low, lazy circle near the horizon.

  The view of the harbor from Jane’s window looked like a photographic negative. Steep mountains covered with white snow stood out, luminous and pearly, against the dark sky and the black, flat water of the harbor. There were small, twinkly lights on in the big trawlers moored below and in the little houses on the steep slopes of the mountains across the water.

  There wasn’t much activity out there—although a few cars were moving across a sweeping concrete bridge off to her left. But then it was Sunday, and the woman who’d met her at the airport after her trek from Seattle to Copenhagen to Oslo and then up here had told her everything was closed and made arrangements to pick her up for dinner later. Jane wondered if she’d slept through their dinner appointment.

  Maybe she could get CNN on TV, and some cheerful American voices would tell her what Greenwich mean time it was. Norway was one time zone away from Britain, so that would be easy to compute.

  A wind had come up, and the window frame started to rattle. She closed the window and then, for good measure, the heavy curtains. The view was beautiful but somehow unsettling.

  She had a brief struggle finding the power button on the television in the corner of the room but finally got the screen to jump to life. Little electronic letters on a white screen read “Welcome Mrs. la Silver” along with an invitation to learn about the hotel’s automated checkout system.

  Impatiently she picked up the remote control. After a few tries with various arrows pointing in different directions, she found a subtitled American detective show, a soccer game, a French music video and a group of dour-looking men in sweaters involved in some panel discussion in Norwegian or Swedish, she couldn’t tell which.

  The next time she hit the arrow, she got a view of two very pale people slamming laboriously to a sexual climax in one of those white laminated beds sold in America in Scandinavian furniture stores. A pudding-faced blonde blinked a lot as she gave forth clearly bogus cries of bliss. Her silent partner kept at her in a steady, workmanlike way. Jane felt rather sorry for him because of the expression of worried concentration on his face. The camera pulled back to reveal his white buttocks bobbing cartoonishly between her splayed knees and the soles of four dirty bare feet. Apparently the studio floor hadn’t been swept for years. Nobody’s toes were curled up with delight, either.

  “Ja, Ja,” said the woman with what seemed to Jane just a trace of impatience, just as a big notice jumped onto the screen with directions in Norwegian and English for ordering the rest of the film and putting it on the room bill.

  She hit what she thought was the button to go on to the next channel but instead got another black rectangle covering the middle of the image. This one read “Thank You Mrs. la Silver. This movie charge will appear on your room bill.”

  Panic set in as she had visions of this document being scrutinized by smirking bookkeepers at the Norwegian seafood agency sponsoring her trip. Beneath the notice (Jane felt her misspelled name was simply adding insult to injury) the blonde gave a yowl not unlike that of a Siamese cat, and a responding guttural grunt became audible, presumably from the man. Jane jabbed randomly at the remote control. Maybe the fish people would send a sharp note to Norm Carver, saying they wouldn’t pay for Inga and Sven Go All the Way, or whatever it was she was watching.

  The black notice disappeared suddenly. Sven was now on his back, crossing his ankles neatly and reaching for a pack of Marlboros, with the quietly satisfied look of a man who had just stacked a cord of wood or cleaned out the gutters. Inga was simpering and pouring her big soft breasts into a turquoise lace brassiere.

  Jane managed to find the power button and turned off the whole thing, then picked up the phone and called reception.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said. “I didn’t understand the remote control, and I didn’t mean to order the movie. I was trying to get rid of it.”

  The softly accented male voice put her on hold a moment, then came back on the line. “It is all right,” he said. “You should be getting the erotic film now. Is there a problem with the picture?”

  “But I don’t want it,” she said. “And I don’t want it on my bill, either.”

  “If you watch it for five minutes,” said the voice with a polite but slightly impatient air, as if he’d been through all this before, “you have to decide whether or not to order it.”

  “I am not interested in seeing
any movie, erotic or other wise,” she said firmly. “I made a mistake, and I want it off my bill.” She took a deep breath. “As far as I’m concerned, you can take the whole television out of my room if it’s going to behave with a mind of its own.”

  She was tempted to tell him that Sven and Inga’s exertions were about as erotic as an aerobics session but realized he’d think she was complaining about the movie’s inability to arouse her.

  “Oh,” he said, “you mean you want to cancel?”

  “Yes,” she said, beginning to feel resigned to the Kafkaesque nature of the encounter yet unable to resist adding: “And I never wanted the film to begin with.” She took a deep breath and added, “Perhaps you could tell me if it’s morning or afternoon.”

  “It is sixteen thirty-three,” he said as if speaking to a lunatic.

  “Thank you. And how do I call room service?” A light meal would cheer her up, and maybe a pot of coffee.

  “There is no room service,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”

  She found a Coke and a chocolate bar in the mini-bar. Next on the agenda, she knew, was dinner with the fresh-faced woman from the fish agency who had met her at the airport. Ragnhild somebody. She checked her itinerary.

  Dinner with Ragnhild tonight, followed by a visit to a codpacking plant in the morning. Jane sighed. Why hadn’t some suave Chilean been a suspect for her to track down? South of the equator it was summer.

  An hour or so later Jane stood in the frigid gloom outside the hotel. Apparently Norwegians didn’t bother with snow removal. This was the case in Seattle, too, where it snowed once or twice a year and everybody just stayed home until it melted. Here, the streets were covered with a sheet of packed, shiny ice. The street was empty. Across from her hotel were some charming wooden houses, painted pretty colors: yellow, a soft green and an orangy red. They looked like the steep-gabled wooden houses in Seattle.