by Ed Gorman
Suddenly all Tobin wanted was to go back and find
Cindy. To hell with murders. To hell with this young woman's love affair.
"I'll walk you back to your cabin," Tobin said.
"See," she said, "you really are nice.”
***
He took her to her cabin and said good-night and said to try and get some sleep and then he went back to the deck where the bodies had been found.
The passengers were gone, and so were the corpses, and so were the captain and the stewards in white uniforms.
And so was Cindy.
He checked his own cabin and then he checked her cabin and then he tried a few of the lounges where, of course, the murders were the number one topic. In one of the lounges he saw a crew member and described Cindy to him and asked if he'd seen her and the guy said, "Oh, the babe from Kansas City? God, isn't she all right?" He shrugged. "She was in here a while ago but she left."
"Alone?"
"Huh-uh. With everybody's least favorite TV cop."
"You're kidding? Kevin Anderson?"
"Right." He grinned. "Why would she take him when she could have had me without hardly begging at all?”
18
3:14 A.M.
He didn't find her. He checked out her cabin several times and he checked out the various lounges but he didn't find her and he recalled once a high school girlfriend who'd made him unbelievably jealous, and how in his battered Ford he used to drive around and around her house, knowing she was out on a date with someone else, there being a kind of solace in the mere motion of driving around and around her house, there having been no solace in anything else during those terrible nights, knowing she was irretrievably gone from him. He hated being jealous, the way it demeaned him, but he never seemed able to escape its clutches long. He had been known to get jealous during the first ten minutes of a blind date when, at a party, his date had seen an old boyfriend and merely nodded, proving to Tobin (as he had admitted to Dr. Spengler during six useless months on the couch) that he was probably at least 37.8 percent crazy after all.
He went back to his cabin and stripped and lay down and took his emergency cigarette from his dinner jacket and, of course, being months old, it was hard and stale but Tobin tried not to notice that as he sat on the edge of his bed in his underwear inhaling the thing, thinking of Cindy in the arms of Kevin Anderson and wishing that he were not five-five and not so complicated and that Cindy and he could fall madly in love for the remaining three days of the cruise. It was testament to his frame of mind that he only rarely thought about the bodies he'd seen earlier on the deck, or about the dead Ken Norris.
And then, cigarette half-smoked and already starting to feel guilty about his indulgence ("Now isn't that a stupid reaction to something like Cindy dumping you-smoking? Exactly who did it help? You? Anybody? No."), a knock like a rock fell on the door and of course he thought: Cindy. She's spent enough time with the TV playboy and is sorry and now at last we're going to make love and spend three fleshy, blissful days together.
But it wasn't Cindy at the door. Not at all.
It was Captain Hackett.
19
4:34 A.M.
"Small caliber bullets, close range."
"Dr. Devane used to be a coroner," Captain Hackett explained. "He's now a full-time physician aboard the ship."
"I see," Tobin said.
"Upstate New York," the doctor said. "Where I was a coroner, I mean." He seemed to think his former address had some bearing here. He was the same brown-haired man Tobin had seen on deck earlier. He wore a blue suit and a white button-down shirt and a red tie. He looked like a politician. He had the teeth for it, anyway, and that odd, cold distance Tobin had always sensed in politicians.
They were in Captain Hackett's office, sitting at a round table covered with rolled-up nautical maps. A decanter of brandy and three glasses were on the table. A facsimile of a Chesterfield lamp was pulled down near their heads for illumination. In the portholes the night was velvet black. None of the men could be said to be quite sober.
"Do you know who they were?" Tobin said.
"The woman's name was Iris Graves." The captain poured each of them more brandy as he spoke.
"Know anything about her?"
"I've been through her belongings. She seemed to be a reporter."
"Really?"
"Yes. And you won't believe for what paper." The captain laughed. "Snoop."
"That thing in the supermarket?" the doctor said. "Exactly."
"The hell of it is," Tobin said, "they sometimes get things right. Or half right." Then he thought back to her wrestling match with Alicia Farris. The notebook they'd been fighting over became very large in Tobin's mind. "How about the man?"
"Sanderson. Everett Sanderson."
"Occupation?"
"Not sure."
"You went through his things?"
"Yes. But except for a few letters addressed to him, there was no other form of identification," the captain said. "Plus he bought his ticket under the name of Kelly."
"Why would he do that?" the doctor said. He sounded irritated at the mere thought of dishonest people.
"That's what we're going to find out," the captain said. "Or presumably, anyway."
Tobin said, "I'm waiting for the good part, Captain."
"The good part?'"
"Yes, when you tell me why you invited me to your cabin."
Captain Hackett leaned forward beneath the Chesterfield light and folded his hands. Tobin recalled the man's panic earlier in the evening-the first indication that he was perhaps not as composed as he hoped to appear. "I need a spy, Mr. Tobin."
"A spy."
"We've got three and a half days before we reach port. That means for three days I need to keep several hundred passengers calm. I need to find out what's going on."
"I don't understand what I can do."
"You're in a unique position. You're one of them but you're not one of them."
"One of whom?"
"The 'Celebrity Circle' crowd. You're part of the show but you're not intimate with any of them. I've noticed that you don't take your meals with them and that you don't go to their parties and that you don't hang out with them much."
Tobin shrugged. "I'm a guest 'celebrity.' They're a very tight-knit little group."
Without reservation, the captain said, "One of them is a killer."
"That's a pretty heavy accusation."
"I have no doubt it's true. Especially since I found out that the Graves woman was a reporter." He paused again and glanced at the doctor. "Naturally, we've got security forces of our own aboard the vessel, Mr. Tobin, but as I said, you're in a unique position to find some things out."
"Right now I'm very interested in Sanderson."
"So am I. I've already put in a call to our home office. We should know a great deal more about him within eight hours or so."
"The biggest problem you're going to have, Robert," the doctor said, "is keeping everybody calm." He made a face at Tobin and Tobin realized just how drunk the man was. "Including me." The doctor laughed, but he was only half-joking. "I sure as hell don't like walking around a cruise ship where a killer's loose. Do you, Mr. Tobin?"
"So how about it?" the captain said.
"I'll help you any way I can," Tobin said. "I mean, if I find anything out, I'll let you know."
"I'd appreciate it if you'd go out of your way to find things out."
"All right."
"And report them back to me."
"Of course."
"Because one more murder and…" The captain shook his head. "The cruise industry can be very profitable, Mr. Tobin. It can also become very unprofitable once you start getting a certain reputation."
The drunken doctor said, "I think you can understand our position."
What he actually said was, "I shink y'can un-nershand our poshishion."
Tobin was just glad the good doctor wasn't performing surgery this evening.
***
Tobin went through the special hell of insomnia. Why is it, he wondered, when you can't sleep you don't have sexual fantasies about gorgeous women but instead concentrate on all the terrible things you've done with your life? Your failures. Your excesses. Your petty vanities.
Sick of flowered shirts, he put on a plain white button-down job, a pair of Lee jeans, and his blue canvas slip-on deck shoes, and went out to the railing to watch the rolling water and the way the moonlight burnished its black and eternal beauty.
Now the human sounds were gone and there was just the steady thrum of the powerful engines and the caw of occasional birds lost in the midnight clouds.
"Seems that we have the same problem."
He was embarrassed by the way he started at the unexpected sound of another voice.
She lay a soft hand on his elbow and said, "Gosh, I didn't mean to frighten you."
He relaxed, smiled. "Just lost in my thoughts, I guess."
"Pleasant thoughts, I hope," Susan Richards said. She wore a white robe that gave her already delicate beauty an almost spectral cast. He thought, being a movie critic, of the painting of Laura in Preminger's great film, and then he realized, in his heart rather than his groin, that ever since meeting her a few days ago he'd had a somewhat active crush on Susan.
She joined him, leaning on her elbows at the railing. She smelled wonderfully of skin lotion and perfume.
He laughed. "I wish they were pleasant, Susan. I'm afraid at this time of night, all I can think of is what a jerk I've been with people I've loved."
She was in profile, perfect profile, but still he could see how his words affected her. A slight jolt of the body, as if she'd been struck. The shadow of melancholy falling across the eye and mouth. "We all have those regrets, Tobin." She turned to him gently. Were there soft tears in her eyes? "And you never get rid of them, no matter how many people you surround yourself with, or how much noise you create."
"I see you know what I'm talking about."
"Of course."
They turned their attention back to the silvery water, to the endless night. At such moments the mere notion of daylight seemed impossible. It would always be night, and a world of whispers and shadows, and guilt.
He felt, wanting her, feckless as an eighth-grader.
He let his elbow touch her elbow just the tiniest bit and she startled him completely by taking his hand.
"Do you like holding hands?"
"I love holding hands," he said.
"Good, then let's hold hands and watch the water and not talk, all right?"
His heart, his groin, and perhaps his entire soul seemed to be logjammed in his throat. He gulped and said with a cracking eighth-grade voice, "Fine."
While he didn't talk, he did watch her, the beauty that was so easy to see yet so remote in some way he could not understand but only sense. Her hand was silken and beneath the tender flesh he felt the delicate bones and small tendons of her fingers. God, he was so dizzy, it really was like eighth grade, words and the proper moves lost to him.
She spoke first. "Wouldn't it be nice to take a lifeboat and row to an island somewhere, one of those islands Gauguin liked to paint, and just live there peacefully the rest of your life?" Tears were still evident in her voice, and a subtle hint of desperation.
He was thinking of her, of going to that island with her, and for a moment his self-loathing was gone and he saw them in some ridiculous but fetching movie as island mates, tummies pleasantly filled with the fish he'd speared earlier that afternoon in waters blue as Aqua Velva, and making love on a bed of gigantic green palm fronds near a crystal waterfall.
"I'd leave in a minute," he said. Then he brought her to him and started to kiss her, trying to make his move gentle and tender, rather than threatening or overtly sexual.
But she crossed her slender arms in front of her so he could not get close enough to kiss her. "I don't mean to be a tease," she said.
"It's all right. I shouldn't have done that."
"Well, for what it's worth, a part of me wanted you to do that."
He let her go. "I think I'd rather wait till all of you wants me to do that."
She took his hand again and held it to her face and for some reason, he thought of a small beautiful child hugging her brown fuzzy teddy bear.
Her eyes were closed in unfathomable yearning and she said, her voice slight and nearly lost in the sudden caw of ocean birds again, "I think I can sleep now. I think I can now."
She left.
It was both abrupt and graceful, her departure, and he was struck again with the word spectral, because she was so much the lovely ghost as her white robe faded, faded down the gloom of the deck until she was one completely with the darkness, not even the slap of her slippers or the scent of her perfume left as tangible evidence of her existence.
He stayed there, as if just banished from Eden, not knowing what to do with himself or the quick doom of his feelings for Susan Richards.
Finally he went back to his cabin and fell into uneasy sleep.
20
10:43 A.M.
In the morning three episodes of "Celebrity Circle" were shot and of the three only the middle one had any sort of spontaneity. Even when the Applause sign ignited there was only a faint slapping together of hands-too many people thinking about the curious couple found dead on the fourth deck. During the second episode, however, a certain bitchy brilliance overtook Cassie McDowell (so much for her "McKinley High, USA" image) and she proceeded to cut sharp and close at the bone of fame, ragging the somewhat pompous Todd Ames about his new hosting job and even skewing some of the "civilian" guests. ("God, is that your real laugh or do you get an extra piece of luggage for cackling that way?") Jere Farris was up on a small tier with the crew. He paced and wrung his hands and then flung helpless looks down at Joanna Howard, who flung them right back up like faded roses at a departing lover. Tobin got to see all this because the civilians who stood to win everything from washers to cars rarely called on him, Tobin being a terrible player. He always panicked and blanked and as Todd was wishing them adieu they always glowered at him, vague threats in their gaze, as if they held him accountable for the fact that their children would never again have enough to eat. So the morning bloody went.
"I don't suppose you'd tell me what was in that notebook you and Iris Graves were wrestling over yesterday, would you?"
"Oh, God, you really are playing detective, aren't you?"
As he seated himself at Alicia Farris's table in one of the smaller lounges, Tobin had of course expected not only resistance but resentment from Alicia. He hadn't expected her wry, even amused glance.
"Nice place, isn't it?" She smiled. "Makes you want to go get a pan and look for some gold."
The motif here was the gold rush, and all the expected cliches of interior decoration had been brought to bear-blowups of forlorn gold mining camps, waitresses got up to resemble saloon hostesses, wagon wheels mounted on the wall, and drinks served in tin pans with fool's gold written on the side. Fortunately, it was pretty dark, so nobody could see Tobin blush. Stuff like this really embarrassed him.
"It's wonderful," he said.
"Now do you want me to tell you what you're wondering?"
"What am I wondering?"
"You're wondering why an otherwise respectable woman such as myself would be sitting alone in a kitschy little lounge having a drink at three in the afternoon."
"Actually, I wasn't wondering that at all."
"Well, in case you hadn't heard, my husband is having an affair."
"I'm sorry." He said it as if she'd just told him her biopsy had been horrible. In a way, he thought, it was sort of the same thing. He had to pretend innocence, of course. If he seemed knowing, she would feel paranoid-as if he were somehow part of a vast conspiracy from which she'd been kept. You got that way when your mate's infidelities became public.
"
Oh, he's done it before, Tobin. It's nothing new."
"Still, it can't be much fun."
"You sound as if you know what I'm going through."
"I've been on both ends of that particular gun."
"Well put," she said. Then, "I wish I had. Been on both sides, I mean. To get back at him, I once tried to sleep with a parking lot attendant. He was very beautiful, very brown-he might have been part Negro- and we got so far as his shabby little apartment and I felt ashamed and excited at the same time and then his girlfriend came in. She was very brown-and very angry. She slapped him and then she slapped me and I realized what a silly suburban white woman I was after all and I just ran and ran. One of my heels came off but I kept running down the street anyway, limping, and finally a cop stopped me and asked if I was all right and I said no I wasn't all right, and then I began crying and it was really terrible, right there in the sunlight-it was very hot and very bright-just sobbing and all these fascinated street people gathering around to watch me come undone, and this cop just held me as if he were my father, and just let me cry and it was so decent of him that I just cried all the more and…"
She took a bitter drag of her cigarette. This afternoon she wore a tan blouse and white slacks. She also wore large wooden hoop earrings. Her makeup was flawless. She was still overweight but oddly her weight gave her a real poise and dignity. "He always goes to the same sort."
"Jere?"
"Ummmm."
"What sort is that?"
"You're not having a drink?" she asked, as a waiter dressed up as an old sourdough approached. Tobin, seeing his costume, wanted, most uncivilly, to punch him out. "Diet 7-Up," Tobin said, not looking at the poor kid, who was probably working his way through college. He noticed the way fortyish and overweight Alicia touched the very tip of her tongue to the center of her red upper lip. There was a certain Victorian eroticism about it and he fell for a painful moment to remembering that Cindy McBain had spent the night with Kevin Anderson. "What sort?" he said finally.
