Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  “A stove?”

  “No, no. The thing the hot water goes through.” Impatiently he grabbed a fountain pen and drew a squiggle.

  “A radiator?” said Jane.

  “Yes.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I am telling you, that isn’t the sort of thing that excites me,” he said indignantly, adding with a sort of Scandinavian frankness: “Making love is fine without a lot of silly dramatic nonsense.”

  Jane tried and failed to repress a picture of Knutsen in the throes of passion—a good old-fashioned hydraulic lover like Sven in that video.

  His story, whatever the truth of it, was rolling right out now. Jane decided a little nonjudgmental sympathy was in order to keep it coming.

  “How upsetting,” she said. “These conventions can get wild, of course, but for someone to manacle you to a radiator!”

  "It was terrible!" he said indignantly. Jane almost imagined him writing an irate letter to the Seattle Times or the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

  “What happened after that?” she asked, wondering if she’d get a blow-by-blow description of any drunken attempts to fight his way through Marcia’s fishnet tights with one hand tied to the radiator.

  “I passed out,” he said, as if this were the most reasonable thing to do. “I had a lot to drink. Usually I just drink beer, but I had been drinking whiskey. In the bar and before, in that little refrigerator in the room.”

  Suddenly he put a hand to his head. “God, I can’t believe I’m telling you this. If my wife knew . . . if my colleagues . . .” He bristled a little. Clearly this was what he feared the most. Ridicule from his colleagues.

  “I won’t discuss this with anyone,” Jane promised. “And I won’t tell the family your name. They may not want to know how strange Marcia was. These details will remain between us. What happened when you came around again?”

  He gazed out the window at the clear water of the harbor. It had begun to snow. “I was horrified. I looked over at my hand. Then I realized the stupid girl had attached me to a sort of control.”

  “A knob?”

  “Yes, a big knob. So I just unscrewed the knob with my free hand. It was easy.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “There was no one in the house. I was going to call a taxi, but I didn’t know the address, so I walked outside and far away I saw that space needle thing. I began to walk downtown, and soon enough I saw a taxi and whistled for it, and it stopped and took me back to the hotel. They had left me my wallet, thank goodness.”

  “They?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just before I passed out, I heard her talking to someone else.”

  “A man or a woman?”

  “A man. He was in the next room. It was then I thought I might be killed, but I was spared. I passed out while they were talking.”

  “Why do you think this happened to you?” she said.

  “The girl was crazy. Some kind of a sexual lunatic,” he said, as if he had to fend them off every day. “A nymphomaniac.”

  “And who do you think the man was?” said Jane.

  “Who knows?” he said. “An accomplice. Or maybe another sexual victim?” He shrugged. He seemed to have pulled himself together. “I was no good to her. I was passed out.” He pulled himself up in his chair and said with dignity: “Anybody who had drunk as much as I had would be in the same state.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Jane, who could think of absolutely no situation on earth when questioning male virility would be productive.

  Despite his initial reluctance, Knutsen now seemed eager to share his ordeal. “Back at the hotel I had a horrible time getting the handcuffs off. It was humiliating. I tried with a pocket knife and a corkscrew. Then the police came and wanted to know something about a dead girl in the next room. They said there had been an accident. A shooting.”

  Knutsen threw up his hands. “I decided then and there to get out of America and come right home. I arranged for an earlier flight.”

  “So when the police came, you kept your hand in your pocket to hide the handcuffs,” she said. “How did you get it off, finally?”

  Remarkably, Knutsen seemed to have forgotten that she had blackmailed him into telling her all this. Now he was leaning across the desk with wide eyes.

  “I had to ask the concierge to send up a locksmith. It was terrible. This young man came up and took it off. I told him it was all just a silly joke. He said he’d come across this before.”

  Jane could imagine the locksmith leering at another bungled bondage stunt. “And what did the police ask you?” she said.

  “If I had heard a shot. Which I had not. And they wanted to know about the door that led from my room to the suite. The hospitality suite of your magazine. That’s all they asked me.”

  “The connecting door?” she said.

  “Earlier there had been a cocktail party there, and I had arranged to have the door open,” he said. “The editor . . .”

  “Norman Carver?” said Jane.

  “That’s right. He said he could use the extra space. The party kind of spread out. And I had some friends in, too, so it worked out. We got our drinks from his bar.” He frowned. “The mini-bar is so expensive. Almost as bad as buying a drink in Norway.”

  “So the door was open?”

  “I wasn’t sure, and I told them so. You see, I wasn’t too interested. Because I didn’t realize until later that the girl who’d been shot was the same girl who tied me to the radiator.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  “A friend told me. After I came back to Norway.”

  “And the police didn’t want to detain you?”

  “I showed them my diplomatic passport,” said Knutsen, “and told them I needed to go home.”

  “And the police didn’t know you’d been out with her?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “But when I came back I got a phone call from the police in Seattle. They asked me about it.”

  “And what did you tell them?” said Jane.

  “I told them the truth,” he said. “That I left with her, went to her house, passed out and came back to the hotel alone.”

  “You left out the detail about the handcuff, though, right?” Jane couldn’t imagine him volunteering that little touch.

  “They didn’t ask about that,” Knutsen said with dignity. “They wanted to know what she was wearing and if I’d seen her change clothes. They said they would be in touch. Naturally, I am hoping to avoid any more unpleasantness. I would like to forget all about this business.”

  “Naturally,” said Jane. “What a horrible experience.

  “The police didn’t ask to test your hands for powder burns,” she said. If they had, they would, of course, have found the handcuff there. Then she remembered he seemed to have come straight from the shower. A test would have been inconclusive.

  “No, nothing like that, thank God.”

  “And you lost your slipper,” she said.

  “I looked all over for that damned thing,” he said, looking just as puzzled as he had over Marcia St. Francis’s odd behavior. “I never did find it.”

  By the time Jane left his office, she couldn’t quite see how or why Trygve Knutsen would have killed Marcia St. Francis. If she had been wearing the same outfit, there might have been some sort of trail. But clearly Marcia had gone somewhere else, changed, come back to the hotel and ended up in the Seafood Now suite.

  Knutsen seemed to be genuinely bemused by the strange events that had taken place in Seattle that night. If he’d been making up a story, the one he’d come up with was unnecessarily bizarre.

  Jane was confused, too. What was Marcia up to, luring him to a house, chaining him to a radiator, then changing into a remarkably unseductive outfit and returning to the hotel? Jane felt that she was seeing only a small part of the picture. The missing bit was what motivated Marcia. Jane found it hard to believe that she was a predatory sex fiend.

  As for
Trygve Knutsen, he seemed quite straightforward, amazingly forthcoming and actually rather amiable once she had him going. Then she reminded herself that she had met a couple of killers before. They had seemed nice enough, too. That was exactly what she had found most frightening about them.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “There’s no need for you to come back with me in the cab,” Jane said firmly to Solveig. They were standing under the falling snow on the curb outside the Fisheries Directorate.

  Resentful because she had been bullied into attending that night’s salmon market reception, Jane was beginning to take a perverse pleasure in thwarting whatever further plans of Solveig’s she could. What she wanted to say was, “I’ve had it up to here with you and your damn fish, so back off.” Instead she tried to look pleasant but firm.

  “All right,” said Solveig. “But I will see you later at the hotel.” She lifted her powerful jaw and narrowed her pale eyes. “In the meantime, I am arranging your dinner hour.”

  Jane had a ghastly flash of a whale blubber dinner with a stubborn Solveig watching to make sure she cleaned her plate.

  Just then the taxi pulled up, and Jane darted toward it, risking another fall on the slippery pavement. “We’ll talk later,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Keep the taxi receipt,” said Solveig, coming after her. “We shall be reimbursing you.”

  Feeling like a hunted animal, Jane got into the cab, slammed the door and waved and smiled at Solveig through the window while repeating, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” through clenched teeth.

  There’s no reason for that woman to get to me so, she thought when she got back to her hotel room. She was only doing her job. Still, Jane toyed with the idea of pleading appendicitis or something to get out of the evening’s event. It seemed more exhausting to think up an excuse than not to go, but the triumph of foiling Solveig might make the effort well worthwhile.

  Jane hadn’t had lunch, so she poked around in the minibar and came up with a chocolate bar and some cheese. She took off her shoes, lay down on the bed and made a half-hearted attempt to eat her snacks.

  Finally she gave up and set the food on the bedside table. Her head on the pillow, staring at the cheese and chocolate nestling unappealingly in their wrappers, she thought about Trygve Knutsen.

  A name badge could bring out the animal in a lot of people, she knew. Could he have been so drunk he’d killed Marcia with her own gun, enraged because she’d handcuffed him to a radiator? And then blacked out?

  Jane drifted off to a jet-lagged traveler’s afternoon nap. Tomorrow she’d be on her way home, and maybe she could find out more about Marcia. And maybe Jack Lawson would be in town. Jane realized she hadn’t thought about him once on this trip.

  When she woke, it was to the shrill ring and flashing red light of the bedside phone. It took her a second to realize where she was, a disorienting feeling that often came upon her when she woke after sleeping during the day.

  Solveig was on the line. “Why aren’t you down here at the reception?” she demanded.

  Jane didn’t feel up to a story about a burst appendix or even a migraine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep. I’ll be right down.”

  Groggily she went through her suitcase and found a dark dress to wear. She had the impression this affair was a big deal, perhaps because it was billed as “a reception.” At least there would be something to eat. Probably salmon. Jane had always been fond of seafood, but after this trip she found herself craving red meat. She could hardly wait to get back to Dick’s Drive-In on Broadway, where she would order a couple of deluxe hamburgers and a mess of Dick’s homemade fries.

  She made her way to the room where the reception was being held. It was dimly lit and full of men in suits standing around, glasses in hand. The lighting was dim because a tall, stout woman with curly blond hair and a pink tweed suit was standing on a podium, showing slides of pie charts. Jane recognized her as the backslapping Englishwoman in blue who had worked the room back at the Meade Hotel. This presumably was Amanda Braithwaite.

  “As you see,” she said in a middle-class English accent, “even this modest increase in per capita consumption, a modest goal and surely well within our reach, will, in markets the size of Europe and North America, enable us to move many more tons of product.”

  Her eyes becoming accustomed to the light, Jane tuned out the woman’s bossy voice and looked around the room. There was a large buffet, with lots of salmon—some of it smoked, some of it in puff pastry, some of it poached and dusted with dill. Jane’s fantasy meal switched from Dick’s deluxe hamburgers to rare roast beef sliced thin, maybe a French dip with some nice meaty, garlicky juice.

  Amanda Braithwaite clicked a control in her hand—the other hand held a pointer—and a carousel lurched to the next slide. A happy, upscale family beamed down at a plate of rosy salmon. “Like all successful creative concepts, ours is simple. We’ve got to let people know salmon is accessible. Research shows people like it, but consumer attitudes are still lagging behind. Consumers don’t realize that the development of farmed salmon means our product is available all year round.” She tapped at the screen with the pointer and said accusingly, “It’s an absolutely appalling situation and the result of years of promotional neglect on the part of the industry.”

  Jane glanced around the room. The men in suits were looking vaguely guilty, as if their dentist had just scolded them for not flossing properly.

  “A quite appalling situation,” Amanda Braithwaite repeated, clicking her tongue, frowning at them all. She let this sink in before she hit the advance button to reveal a slide with all kinds of boxes and arrows. “Here’s the way the funding will be deployed,” she said, her persona shifting slightly—from the pull-up-your-socks schoolmistress to an army officer briefing the troops before the assault on Normandy.

  Looking around, Jane recognized some faces. Several of these people had been at that other reception back in the Meade Hotel, brooding in corners while she had serenaded them with “Autumn Leaves.”

  Thank goodness it was dark in here. When the lights went on, maybe she could fade away. She was about at the end of her rope, worrying about the fact that these guys had first seen her as a lounge singer and now she was supposed to be a fish journalist.

  Knutsen was there, too—having changed from his cozy cardigan to a dull suit. To her horror, she saw he was talking to Gunther Kessler. What the hell was he doing here? Wasn’t he in refrigeration? Jane had learned enough about the fish business by now to wonder just what the glum Swiss was doing at a marketing conference. And to ask herself why he had been looking at salmon pens in Shetland with Magnus.

  The sooner she got out of the fish business, the better. Gunther Kessler was an unpleasant reminder of how incredibly unslick she could be.

  When she turned away from him, hoping to avoid his eye, she found herself staring at the tall, good-looking Norwegian she’d fingered as her squeeze at the airport. It seemed that every time she turned around, she was brought face-to-face with another rip in her frayed and shredded cover story. To make matters worse, the Viking god was staring right at her. She was relieved to hear an American voice at her elbow.

  “Well, it’s Jane da Silva from Seafood Now.”

  It took her a moment to recognize one of the Alaskan Putnam brothers—she wasn’t sure whether it was Don or Bob. He looked a lot better here than he had at Chinook’s. For one thing, his burly frame was now encased in a good-looking suit instead of a T-shirt.

  “How are you?” she whispered, offering him her hand as Amanda barked on about a salmon recipe program with which she intended to reach every household in the northern hemisphere.

  “Are you involved in this salmon marketing thing?” Jane asked. “I thought salmon farming was a hanging offense in Alaska.”

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” he said amiably, leaning over to whisper in her ear. “The fact is, I’m trying to get some of our guys interested in work
ing with the farmed guys and promote salmon across the board. I’m here as a friendly observer.”

  On the podium, Amanda Braithwaite cleared her throat elaborately and glared at him. “The recipes will be developed with high nutritional standards,” she said sternly, “with both American and European weights and measures.”

  “They already handed out a lot of printed stuff with this whole presentation,” he whispered to Jane, as if by way of explanation for his lack of interest.

  They both stood there, chastised, and listened to details of the chef’s competition, the print campaign in women’s publications, the point-of-purchase display for supermarkets, the PR campaign to tell the world how safe and hygienic farmed salmon was and, if the Alaskans “came on board,” the liaison program with “the wild sector.” Jane found the last phrase rather evocative, conjuring up the image of a bunch of crazed, fur-clad Alaskans busting up a bar in Kodiak.

  When the presentation came to a merciful close and the lights went up, Putnam asked her to dinner. “I know a terrific place here in Bergen along the waterfront,” he said. She’d placed him now. Clearly he was the brother who hadn’t spouted Bible phrases, but she still wasn’t sure if his name was Don or Bob.

  Remembering that Solveig had threatened dinner plans, Jane decided to accept. That would settle the Valkyrie’s hash nicely, and whichever Putnam brother he was, he actually seemed quite pleasant.

  “That sounds great,” she said, but at that moment Solveig hustled up, handed her a huge press kit and announced that she had arranged for Jane to have an exclusive dinner interview with Amanda Braithwaite, who was already bustling over, a splotch of pink bouclé wool among the dark suits.

  “I understand completely,” said Putnam, backing off graciously. Jane decided he wasn’t the sleazeball she’d first thought. It was partly his appearance that had given her that impression. The beard and the barrel chest had made him look tough, and the Chinookie T-shirt was definitely a fashion mistake. But in these surroundings he seemed a lot more couth. Maybe he was one of those chameleon types—Jane felt that she herself was one—who unconsciously took on some of the coloration of their environment.