by Jane Heller
Pat made kissing noises into the phone, then spoke to her other three sons, making kissing noises to them too. Finally, Lucy came on the line. She received a stirring rendition of “Happy Birthday” and the kissing noises.
“Ten years old,” Pat mused to her daughter. “That’s right, you’re almost a teenager now. Yes, Aunt Jackie and Aunt Elaine are right here in the room with me, and they send their love. I will. Now tell me, sweetheart. What’s your father planning for your special day today? Lucy? What is it, sweetheart? Why are you crying?”
Pause.
“What do you mean he’s not there?” Pat went on, looking upset. “He left the apartment early this morning? To ride on an airplane? Then who’s staying with you and the boys? Mrs. Who?”
“Uh-oh. Sounds like Dr. Bill flew off on another medical mission,” I whispered to Jackie. “You’d think he could have waited until after Lucy’s birthday.”
“Why should this day be different from all the others?” she said. “According to Pat, this kind of stuff went on throughout the marriage.”
“So he didn’t leave a number or say where he was going?” Pat was asking Lucy. “Well, I’m sure he just forgot to, dear. And when he comes back, you’ll have a real birthday celebration together, okay?” She had her game face on, but she was devastated, we could tell. She had convinced herself that Bill had changed, that he was no longer putting his career before his kids, that he wanted his family back. And now he’d gone off and left the children in the hands of a housekeeper, probably so he could participate in some conference on irritable bowel syndrome.
I went to Pat and asked her if I could talk to Lucy, just for a minute. She handed me the phone.
“Hi, cutie,” I said. “It’s Aunt Elaine. Happy birthday.”
I told Lucy about the special present I had bought her in Old San Juan, which seemed to cheer her up, and she told me she wanted to come and stay at my apartment the next time she was in New York. I said of course she could stay at my apartment, as long as she didn’t bring along her brothers and their raging hormones. She didn’t understand my remark but thought it was funny, and by the time I handed the phone back to Pat, she was laughing.
As she and her mother were saying goodbye, I began to wonder about Bill Kovecky, about what had made him leave town in such a big hurry. I’d never met him, so I didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of him, but I couldn’t help asking myself: What kind of man flies off on a business trip the day of his only daughter’s birthday? What kind of man agrees to take care of his five children while their mother is away and then goes away himself?
I’ll tell you what kind: the kind that isn’t to be trusted. I didn’t know who wrote that nursery rhyme that was left under Jackie’s door, and I didn’t know why he wrote it. All I knew at that moment was that it was possible—just possible—that Bill Kovecky had taken a flight out of New York so he could jet down to the Bahamas and rendezvous with the writer of the note…to oversee Pat’s murder personally.
21
The minute I got back to my stateroom I called Simon.
“What’d you find out?” I asked breathlessly when he answered.
“Not a whole lot,” he said. “Lenny does own a business on Long Island called Lubin’s Lube Jobs. Skip is an art director at V,Y&D. Henry sells cars at Peterson Chevrolet in Altoona. And Albert is listed in both the Manhattan and Ridgefield, Connecticut, phone directories.”
“Damn.”
“The only moderately curious thing that came out of all my calls was that when I dialed Albert’s two numbers, I got recordings saying they’d been disconnected and that no further information was available.”
“Who disconnects their phones when they’re only going away for a week?”
“I had the same thought. Maybe Albert isn’t planning on coming back. Maybe once he does the hit, he’s taking his money and moving to Mexico or something.”
“But why would a person like Albert Mullins have to kill people for a living?” I asked. “He’s already got two residences and enough money to travel the globe in search of Snowy Egrets.”
“Maybe Albert’s two residences are the spoils of past hits,” Simon suggested. “Or there’s another possibility: He’s not the hit man.”
“Or there’s a third possibility: He is the hit man but he isn’t in it for the money.”
“You think he murders other men’s ex-wives just for kicks? Because he has a grudge against women?”
“God knows. There are enough misogynists around. Actually, I was thinking that the hit the hit man’s supposed to pull off on this ship might be his first; that he could be sort of a fledgling hit man; and that he’s only doing the job because he was forced into it.”
“When did you come up with all this?”
“When I started to mull over the phone call I overheard between the two men that night. If memory serves, the ex-husband seemed to be pressuring the guy on the ship. I got the distinct impression that the hit man was having second thoughts and had only placed the call to his ‘employer’ to back out. It was almost as if Bill or Peter or Eric—whichever of them is behind this—had something on the guy that was making him feel obligated to go through with the job.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this before.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, Slim. You didn’t.”
“Sorry. Is the information important?”
“It could be.”
I gave Simon a report on my morning with Pat and Jackie, in particular on Bill’s rather sudden departure from New York. “I’m betting that Bill and Albert are in this together,” I said. “Albert leaves town as if he’s never coming back. Then Bill leaves town without telling anyone where he’s going. What’s more, Albert becomes Pat’s devoted servant from the first minute we step onto the ship. Is his attentiveness toward her the real thing or is he all over her like a cheap suit because he’s simply following orders? From Bill?”
Simon sighed. “I don’t know. There’s no way to know.”
“You’re not giving up, are you, Simon?”
“Of course not. As a matter of fact, I spoke to Captain Solberg about this whole mess.”
“You what?”
“I know you already talked to him, but that was before you got the nursery rhyme.”
“What did he say?”
“You mean after he offered me discount coupons at several jewelry stores in Nassau?”
“No. Not that again.”
“He was so unresponsive and I was so frustrated that I ended up blurting out my real name and the fact that I was on assignment to cover the ship for the magazine.”
“Oh, Simon. You said that traveling under an alias is how you get a true picture of the places you write about.”
“I’ve already gotten a true picture of the Princess Charming, believe me. What I need now is for Captain Solberg to investigate the threats that have been made against a woman on his ship. I thought that by telling the guy I was doing a story for Away from It All, I might get a rise out of him.”
“Did you?”
“Not in the way I’d hoped.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“He asked if I’d brought along a photographer from the magazine and if he or she would mind shooting him from his left side, his good side.”
“Great. Another Barbra Streisand. Is that all he said?”
“No. He told me the same thing he told you: He’ll only investigate a murder after a murder has been committed.”
“Jerk.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Not you. Captain Solberg.”
“Oh.”
“Listen, Simon. I suggested to Pat and Jackie that we spend the day together—just the three of us. I think it’s important that we stick close, given the situation.”
“I understand. But I’ll miss you today.”
“I’ll miss you too.” I made kissing noises into the phone, the way Pat did.
“We’ll see each other at dinne
r though,” said Simon.
“And maybe after dinner, once Jackie and Pat are back in their staterooms with their doors locked, you and I can repair to my room and try one more time to solve this puzzle.”
“I had the same idea.”
“Simon, I really want to thank you for helping me,” I told him. “It’s such a comfort to have someone to share all this with.”
“I haven’t helped you at all,” he said. “Not yet anyway.”
“Oh, yes you have,” I assured him. “You believed me. That means a lot.”
“I’m glad. Now I’d like to make a suggestion, Slim.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“I think I ought to spend the night with you tonight. In your stateroom. As a precaution.”
I didn’t answer.
“Are you there?” he asked.
“Yes. I’m just processing what you said.”
“I want to protect you, Elaine. I won’t sleep at all knowing you’re alone in that room with a murderer running around.”
“That’s very sweet of you, Simon. It’s just that the last time we planned to spend the night together, in your stateroom, it didn’t go very well. I’m still having flashbacks.”
He laughed. “Look, I’ll sleep in the chair or something. We won’t even touch each other, if you don’t want to. But I really would feel better if I could watch out for you, that’s all.”
I was extremely touched by his desire to watch out for me. The only person who had ever watched out for me was me.
I pictured Simon on the phone in his stateroom, so earnest, so considerate. My being in jeopardy was probably forcing him to relive the whole Jillian nightmare.
“Of course you can sleep in my room,” I said, not exactly making the sacrifice of the century. “You don’t snore, do you?”
“Only when I fall into a very deep sleep,” he said. “But don’t worry: I don’t expect to.”
Pat was still riled up about Bill’s leaving the children with a housekeeper, but she agreed to spend the day with Jackie and me as planned. Our first stop was Her Majesty’s New Age, the ship’s women-only health spa. Jackie was having the dead cells on her face exfoliated. Pat went for the bath in freeze-dried seawater and seaweed. And I booked a forty-minute session with the reflexologist. Reflexology, for the uninitiated, is a form of foot massage in which varying degrees of pressure are applied to specific parts of the feet to alleviate imbalances, weaknesses, or blockages in the body. I didn’t believe in reflexology any more than I believed in bathing in seaweed, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
I was wrong. My reflexologist, a serious Slavic woman named Nadia, began with my left foot.
“Ouch!” I said after she’d ground her finger into the middle of my big toe.
“For da pineal gland,” she informed me. “Must do to clear da head and sinuses.”
“My head and sinuses are perfectly clear,” I said. “How about going a little easier on me, okay?”
This time she pressed deeply into the heel of my left foot. Again, I cried out in pain.
“For da sciatic nerve,” she explained. “Also fixes da hemorrhoids.”
“That’s very interesting, Nadia, but I don’t have hemorrhoids, thank God.”
She ignored me and began kneading the center of the sole of my left foot. Instead of torturing me though, it tickled something wicked.
“Hey,” I giggled, yanking my foot away from her. “What part of the body were you unblocking that time?”
“Da heart,” she said, grabbing hold of the foot, determined to continue. “I can feel dere’s a little blockage but I can cure—if you be quiet and let me do.”
I let her do.
My session with Nadia ended just as Jackie and Pat were wrapping up their spa adventures.
“Now what?” I asked them. “A little skeet shooting?”
“My ankle’s still sore,” said Pat, who’d been hobbling around pretty well with the aid of her cane. “I wouldn’t mind doing something more sedentary.”
“Same here,” said Jackie. I kept forgetting this was her first full day out of the hospital. I wanted to keep her safe from the hit man, but I didn’t want to tire her out.
“Something more sedentary,” I mused, scanning the schedule of the day’s activities. “What about the Perfume Seminar?”
They liked that idea. So off we went to the Perky Princess boutique, where folding chairs had temporarily replaced racks of clothing and were arranged in a little circle. We sat down. Within a few minutes, a heavily made-up woman named Veronica joined our group, introduced herself as the ship’s onboard perfume expert, and began to pass vials of different fragrances around the circle. She spoke, we sniffed. The experience, while not wildly entertaining, was pleasant enough—especially when Veronica got to the vial of vanilla. She explained that, although vanilla wasn’t perfume, per se, it was considered by French women to be the fragrance of choice. It certainly smelled better than those infuriating inserts that perfume manufacturers stick into upscale magazines.
Smelling the vanilla made the three of us hungry, so our next stop was the Wine and Cheese Appreciation Hour. There, we sampled wines and cheeses from all over the world—at least the ones we could reach. The event drew so many passengers looking to scarf down some free food and booze that we could barely get near the table where the food and booze were.
Over the course of the day, we also attended an Art Auction (one of Ginger Smith Baldwin’s oil paintings was being sold, and Kenneth and Gayle Cone, who were gaining a reputation around the ship as quite the big spenders, were the highest bidders); an ice carving demonstration (we were shown how to chip the ice into the shapes of various farm animals); and the ship’s version of that all-time TV favorite “The Dating Game.” (The contestants, most of them elderly women, were asked what most appeals to them in a man. They said, “A Living Will.”)
As we went from activity to activity, Pat pocketing souvenir after souvenir, I kept marveling at the fact that we never once ran into Albert, Lenny, Henry, or Skip, even though the ship was at sea the entire day and there was nothing for them to do except make the rounds of the activities, just as we were doing. Of course, Albert could have been in the ship’s movie theater, where they were showing Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller The Birds. Lenny could have been holed up in any one of the ship’s nine cocktail lounges. Henry could have been holed up in his stateroom with Ingrid, or vice versa. And Skip could have closeted himself away in the library with yet another Deepak Chopra tome.
At four-thirty, Jackie had her checkup with Dr. Johansson, so Pat and I accompanied her to the hospital. Remarkably, when she signed in with Nurse Wimple, she was not made to wait among the fifty or so other patients but ushered right into one of the examining rooms.
“I think Dr. Johansson really likes Jackie,” I told Pat as we sat together in the waiting room. “He certainly seems to be giving her preferential treatment.”
Pat was deeply involved in a recipe in Redbook—something involving bread crumbs and canned cream of mushroom soup—and didn’t respond. But, I suddenly thought, if Dr. Johansson has a female patient he likes and plays favorites with, maybe Dr. Kovecky does too. Maybe Billy boy has a lady friend. Maybe that’s why he hired a hit man to kill Pat.
Jackie came out of the examining room looking flushed and excited.
“Per says I’m doing fine,” she said. “He doesn’t want me staying up late tonight but he still wants to take me to lunch in Nassau tomorrow and show me around.”
“At least you’ll be safe,” I said without thinking.
“Safe?” she asked.
“I meant, in case you have a relapse.”
It was British Night in the Palace Dining Room and Ismet was recommending the steak and kidney pie.
“Listen, Ishmael, you can leave the kidneys off my plate and just bring me the steak, okay?” said Rick. “And make it medium rare, huh?”
The rest of us ordered the beef Wellington.
“El
aine! You aren’t worried you’ll get Mad Cow Disease?” Jackie stuck it to me.
“Mad Cow Disease is the least of my problems right now,” I said.
She looked puzzled but went on with her conversation with Kenneth Cone, who had sat down next to her after arriving a few minutes after his wife did.
Simon and I were sitting next to each other too. It was still such a thrill every time I saw him again. In spite of the thorny problem that was hanging over our heads, I felt so lucky that he was in my life—for however long my life lasted.
“How are you enjoying the cruise?” I asked Dorothy, who was seated on Simon’s other side.
“It’s been wonderful.” She smiled, her eyes twinkling. “Like a second honeymoon.”
“What did she say, Dorothy?” Lloyd asked.
“She wanted to know if we were having a good time on the cruise,” said Dorothy.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her we’ve been fucking like newlyweds.”
All conversation at the table came to a temporary halt.
“Did I say something out of line?” Dorothy asked, playing innocent. She was a devil, that Dorothy.
“Your language is a little saltier than Kenneth and I are accustomed to,” Gayle sniffed.
“What did she say, Dorothy?” asked Lloyd.
“She said that she and her husband don’t have sex,” was Dorothy’s response.
“Good grief. The old witch has sex on the brain,” Gayle muttered. “If she still has a brain at her age.” Obviously, Dorothy had struck a nerve.
“I hate to break it to you, dear,” Dorothy said to Gayle, “but you’re going to be eighty-six too someday, God willing. All that money you flaunt can’t change that.”
“I guess the white gloves are off now,” I whispered to Simon, who was amazed by the exchange that had erupted. Jackie was trying to keep a straight face. Pat was trying not to faint. And Rick and Brianna began arguing with each other arid were, therefore, oblivious to all of it.
“Oh, so it’s my money you’re envious of, Mrs. Thayer,” Gayle said coolly, her tiny, surgically enhanced nostrils flaring. “I thought it was my manners you coveted.”
