by Ed Gorman
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.
Or that Tobin wasn't going to be his patient, anyway.
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.
"Helpless. The opposite of me. I'm his surrogate mother." The rancor of the deserted mate coarsened her voice. "And I was from the beginning."
"How did you meet?"
She smiled and he saw a flash of the girl in her and rather liked the sight of that girl. "I was a continuity person. Or script girl, as they were called in those days. This was down in Falsworth, Georgia, don't you know." She gave him the benefit of a parody southern accent. Tobin wondered why white northern straight people could never quote blacks, southerners, or homosexuals without resorting to dialects and stereotypes. "It was a low-budget movie and Jere was the director. This was when he was right out of film school at USC, his dues-paying period. He'd tried to get some kind of work with Roger Corman-that's when Brian DePalma and Jack Nicholson and Martin Scorsese were working with Corman-but it just never worked out. So he got offered this kind of second unit job with this very low-budget horror movie being shot in Georgia and he took it. On the way down there, the director died of a heart attack so the production company-the people who had hired me-promoted Jere to director. That's where we all met, as a matter of fact-Todd Ames, Ken Norris, Kevin Anderson."
"You've known each other that long? Since…?"
"Since 1968." She laughed. It was a warm feminine laugh and he wanted to kiss her on the forehead. "God, you should have heard us then, Tobin. We were so pretentious. The movie we made…" The laugh again. Now he heard the melancholy in it. "Really terrible. 'Ingmar Bergman meets The Monsters,' Variety said. And they were being kind."
"And you've been with Jere ever since?"
"Oh, yes. I took out adoption papers shortly after." She stubbed out one cigarette and immediately lit another. "Am I sounding bitchy?"
"Within tolerable
limits."
"He's a child."
"Why don't you leave him?"
"I love him. Isn't that the shits?"
"It happens."
"I'm so sensible. Look at these hands." She put her large hands across the table, next to the little electric "kerosene" lamp (probably just the sort real gold miners had used) for his inspection. "Big hands, aren't they?"
"But nicely shaped."
"'Purposeful hands.' That's a line from Steinbeck. I've always liked that. It seemed to describe me exactly." She exhaled. The smoke was a beautiful electric blue in the shadowy bar. They seemed out of time and place here-as if they'd been trapped in some time warp. He did not mind the feeling at all. He thought about ordering a drink but chose not to, knowing he'd only be potzed by dinner.
"Anyway," she said, "I've had to be purposeful for both of us. When he couldn't get work in pictures, I convinced him to go into television. That's how we wound up with 'Celebrity Circle.' We saw Ken and Kevin and Todd all lose their series and so then we heard about this game show packager and we went to them and-well, 'Celebrity Circle' was born. It's been our bread and butter for eight years. And as you can see, it's fed some of us pretty well."
She seemed to want a compliment and he was happy to give her one. "You're a good-looking woman and you know it."
"Do you want to have an affair?"
He laughed. "If we do have an affair, will you tell me why you were wrestling with Iris Graves outside my room the other day?"
"Oh, that, Tobin." She tried to sound dismissive but she couldn't. Not quite. "She's been a pest the past few months. Just trying to dig up some gossip on our show for that rag she works for."
"What was the notebook?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I really don't. I'd just had an argument with Jere in our cabin about dear little Joanna Howard and I was walking down the corridor toward the swimming pool and I saw her in a deck chair taking notes and… Well, I'd had a few drinks, to be honest, and I just got irrational. I wanted to take her notebook and rip it up. Suddenly the notebook became very symbolic of everything she did and everything that filthy newspaper stands for. Believe me, Tobin, I don't wish Snoop on my worst enemy. So anyway, I grabbed the notebook from her and started running down the corridor and she came after it. She grabbed me and we started fighting and that's when you came out." She blew out some more blue smoke. There was just the darkness and the frail light of the fake kerosene lamps and the smell of afternoon indulgence and liquor. "Hardly what my mother would call ladylike behavior." Then she paused. "But if you're asking me am I sorry she was murdered, of course I am." She looked at him boldly. Her wooden earrings clattered. "And I didn't have anything to do with it. Nothing."
