Everyone's Dead But Us

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  He said, “What do you want?” He might have been barking at recalcitrant linemen.

  I said, “There’s been murder, death, and destruction. You seem to have missed it all.”

  “Is this a fucking joke? Get that fucking light out of my face.”

  I swung it aside. Slightly behind him and to the left was a slender young man who looked to be about a breath over the age of eighteen.

  I said, “It is not a joke.”

  “Who died?”

  “Henry Tudor, the owner of the island, along with a number of members of the staff.” I swung the light behind me. It didn’t reach to the Port Atrium. I waited for a flash of lightning. I said, “See. The Port Atrium is gone.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Have you guys been out at all tonight?” I asked.

  “No. We’ve been…busy.”

  Good to know the winning Super Bowl quarterback was getting his quota of sex. “How about your friend?” I asked.

  “He’s been with me.”

  “Can I ask him?” I inquired.

  “You can ask.”

  I did. I got a confused look.

  “He doesn’t speak much English,” Klimpton said.

  Scott said, “You’re listed as Blake Marsala. What’s with the closet crap? This is an exclusive gay resort dedicated to discretion.”

  “I’m not…I…Do you need us for something?”

  “We’re trying to get everybody on the island to get together in Apritzi House. That way with a killer on the loose we can all protect each other.”

  Klimpton said, “Or it could make it easier for the killer to murder everyone with one fell swoop.”

  “Your choice,” I said. Obviously, safety in numbers was not the cliché of the day here.

  “We’ll stay here.” He closed the door.

  While on the porch before we dived back into the rain, Scott said, “He’s sort of got a point. If everybody’s in one spot, one bomb and we’re all gone.”

  “Yeah, but if we get everybody who’s accounted for in one spot, we’ll be able to watch each other.”

  “Unless there’s somebody unaccounted for, which is possible.”

  “Do we keep doing this or not?” I asked.

  “I think it’s better if we know who’s where. We can’t make them take precautions. We have no mechanism for arresting them or keeping them in one place. Some knowledge is better than no knowledge. I guess.”

  “What’s with Klimpton’s closeted crap?” I asked. “A closet? On this island? Is there a point?”

  “He’s frightened. The young man is probably bought and paid for.”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “wasn’t that Mylon Drak, the Czech porn star standing behind our star quarterback? Not that I’d know anything about porn stars.”

  “I wouldn’t know either. I think it was. Don’t they sell his dildos in all kinds of trashy gay magazines? Not that I know anything about dildos in trashy gay magazines.”

  “Is that the one that’s supposedly twelve inches? Not that I would ever notice such ads either.”

  “Hard to tell.”

  “This is no time for ghastly puns.”

  “What better time?”

  The storm raged about us. With the mad pounding of the storm, the dawn didn’t seem too eager to show up this day. Perhaps the darkness was beginning to get a little grayer. Still, the flashlight helped barely enough. I could see his wound had continued to bleed. I said, “You’re bleeding through your bandage again.” He lowered his head. I pushed back the hood of his slicker and examined his scalp.

  He said, “I’ve been feeling a little dizzy.”

  “Do you need to lie down?” He looked pale. The cloth I had applied was nearly soaked through. I lifted it gently off his wound. In the light I could see the angry gash. It did not look pretty.

  Scott said, “I’m fine. I hope. I’m not going to leave you running around this island by yourself. Not with a killer on the loose.”

  I took off my shirt and tied it around his head. He looked pretty absurd. I hope it helped. I put my jacket back on and the slicker over it. We dashed through the whirling maelstrom to the next house.

  We hurried along a low wall, which in normal times, had regularly spaced safety lights that I always associated with California and Hawaii. We passed a number of villas that were supposedly unoccupied. We entered them anyway. After careful inspections we found nothing. The lack of dead bodies was comforting in a sick way. The next occupied mansion was the villa of Louis Deplonte, the son of the pretender to the French throne. It was a quarter of a mile past our quarterback’s residence and sat at the bottom of a tremendously long stairway. This guest house was set mostly into the side of a low hill. The road split here. Half followed the parapet and hugged the coast. About another hundred feet along the main way, that side path turned and led to the castle. It was the only inland way over the rocky escarpment to the castle. The other half turned inland after passing directly in front of the main doors of this villa. At the split in the path, it had dipped to within twenty feet of the sea. Plumes of spray from the violent surf added to the drenching rain. We hurried forward.

  We heard no sounds from inside and saw no light. By now they could have had candles lit. Deplonte had been at the end of the pier when we arrived to give our news about finding Tudor. He and Virl Morgan, his guard, had not been seen after the Port Atrium’s destruction or at the fire at the castle, nor had their bodies been found in the rubble. Repeated pounding elicited no response. I used the master plastic door opener. The first room was a foyer. Four rooms led off it. One was a bedroom with the bed linens mussed, but unoccupied. Both bathrooms were empty. We listened at the door to the next room. We heard faint sounds from within.

  Scott and I looked at each other. “We need to check,” I said. I opened the door cautiously. There was vague light from dying embers in a fireplace grate. Certainly not enough to illuminate who was in the room. I swung the flashlight in a slow arc. About halfway around the room, it starkly lit up Virl Morgan with taut butt pistoning above the spread legs of his employer. Deplonte was chained hand and foot to a sling. Our view from the side showed his penetrated butt a few inches off the seat.

  Both men turned to us and gasped in astonishment. I flicked out the light.

  “Who the fuck is there?” called Virl’s masculine voice.

  We eased back out and waited. A few moments later Morgan swung open the door. He wore a pair of jeans that clung without a belt to his slender hips. His massive, hirsute chest had a healthy pink glow. He had a gun in his hand. “What the fuck are you doing in here?”

  Tudor had died from a gunshot. I had no way of knowing whether the caliber of the gun that had been used in the killing matched the caliber of this one. Or, even if it was the same kind of gun, whether it was in fact the same gun. Certainly, I had neither the equipment nor the expertise to find out if it was the murder weapon. All that presumed I could wrestle it away from him to do any such checking.

  I prepared myself to leap at Morgan if he raised the gun in the slightest. I said, “I saw your boss in the Atrium about ten minutes before it collapsed. The castle tower has been blown to bits. I found Henry Tudor’s body with a bullet hole in the head.”

  His royally screwed boss, now dressed in white silk briefs, joined us. With aristocratic snippety, he said, “Who’s disturbing us?”

  Morgan repeated my story to the son of the pretender. He scratched his silk clad nuts as he listened to the story.

  When Morgan finished, I said, “A number of the employees were killed in the collapse of the Atrium. We can’t get any help from off the island because of the storm. We have people injured, at least one very seriously. We’ve got a killer loose on the island who is most likely also an expert in explosives.”

  Morgan nodded. “Not likely to be two different people.”

  “You’ve got a gun,” Scott pointed out.

  Morgan looked at it. “Yeah?”

&nb
sp; “Do you know who else has a gun on the island?” Scott asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Are we going to be inconvenienced?” Deplonte asked.

  I said, “Depends if you considered being murdered an inconvenience or not.” I wondered if his remark was the result of years of aristocratic indifference, the shallow comment of someone who was little more than an excessively immature frat boy—if that wasn’t a redundancy, or if he was simply a moronic twit. Or perhaps all three.

  Morgan said, “You’re investigating?” I explained the current division of duties. Morgan said, “I’ll go with you to check the villas. We’ve got to know exactly who is here, who’s missing. You guys would have to be suspects as well. Maybe even more so because, as you claim, Tudor’s body was in your room and the castle tower is what got blown up.”

  I said, “So far everybody on the island, including you two, could be suspects as well. We saw you running on the path. Don’t you usually wait to do that until after your charge is asleep?”

  “We’re both awake,” was his answer, which didn’t address the question.

  I said, “It could have been you who planted the dead body in our room.”

  He nodded. “Plenty of suspicion to go around.”

  I said, “I’d rather it just be Scott and I who checked the villas.”

  Morgan said, “I have an obligation to my charge to ensure his safety. Part of keeping him safe is finding out what the hell happened and being sure that it is not a danger to him.” He turned to his employer. “We need to get dressed. We need to go with these two gentleman. We need to help.”

  “Are we really going out in the storm?” Deplonte asked. He whined more annoyingly than a loser on a reality television show.

  “If we have to,” Morgan said.

  “I’d rather wait here,” Deplonte said.

  “You need to be where I can see you. Until we find out who is doing all this, I need you to stay with me. We can’t help by hiding out in the villa. We’ve got to be proactive.”

  Deplonte said, “Henry is really dead?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He was always so efficient,” Deplonte said.

  There’s something I’m not sure I’d want engraved on my tombstone.

  We waited while they threw on some more clothes. The farthest occupied villa along this part of the path was Henry Tudor’s. Past his place all the others were vacant and then the path meandered far inland to eventually meet up with the main road a quarter of the way around the island. Tudor’s villa was the largest on the island. The castle might have had more square footage but this was far more modern. The four of us followed the beam from the flashlight. As we neared the villa, we saw that it was completely dark. I shone the light over as much of the exterior as I could. We saw torrents of water cascading from the downspouts.

  I used my entry card. We entered a massive foyer. Foot-thick Greek columns stood in the four corners of the room. I think they might have come from some real temple of antiquity.

  I said, “According to the list I was given, he had a lover.”

  Deplonte said, “Yes, Derek Harris. He is a real nice guy. Very sweet. Besides his Olympic successes, he’s made a couple of movies. He was very closeted. He came here a lot in the past few years.”

  “He didn’t live here year round?” I asked.

  Deplonte said, “Why would he? Not that many do, actually. There are so many places to be and see and explore. Derek had money of his own, but not enough to afford this place, of course. Few do.”

  I caught a sidelong look at us. I’m not big on interpreting body language. I think it’s bullshit, this nonsense when someone says, ‘by the look on your face I can tell that ten years ago on the last Saturday in October you had cornflakes for breakfast.’ But if I was willing to go out on a limb, I’d say this look meant that we weren’t quite worthy of being on the island either. I’d never noticed any difference in the employees’ treatment of other guests and ourselves. I suppose they were paid to conceal any disdain.

  Scott said, “How long had they been lovers?”

  “I’ve been coming here since I was eighteen, ten years ago. He was here then, before the Olympics.”

  “They must have become lovers when he was in his teens.”

  “Late teens is what Wayne Craveté told me. They met at his first national championship meet.” Tudor hung out at national teenage gymnastic meets?

  The four of us stayed in one another’s presence. We started our search in the living room. The furniture was all plush black leather. One wall had twenty-by-twenty-foot large modern canvases with random splashes of paint or haphazard geometric designs. Another wall seemed to have nothing but cubist art, perhaps some original Picassos. I shone the light toward the third wall. It took me several heart-stopping seconds to realize the man with the raised ax was one of a string of sculptures. I felt more than a trifle foolish for flinching. The fourth wall was mostly window overlooking the sea and fronted by an eighteen-foot bar.

  We found a large-caliber gun sitting on the Louis Quatorze bench in the center of the room. I sniffed it. It sure smelled like it had been fired recently.

  “He had a gun?” I asked.

  “I guess,” Morgan said.

  Scott said, “Somebody could have planted it there.”

  I said, “We’d have to find out who knew about the gun, who had access to this room and wherever he kept it.”

  Morgan turned on us, “You really think you two are going to get cooperation from anyone, answers to probing questions? Have you any idea of who you’re dealing with?”

  I said, “Some very spoiled rich people.”

  Morgan sighed. “The cliché is true. The rich are different and these are among the very richest. You should both understand that. What I’m sure you can’t understand is the steps we would take to protect that which needs protecting.”

  “Who gets to decide what that is?” I asked.

  Morgan said, “Your righteous dismissal of class distinction doesn’t. You don’t. This isn’t America. You have no standing.”

  I said, “At this moment, nobody’s got a lot of standing, including you.”

  Morgan’s chuckle sounded colder than January in the Yukon. “We are not created equal. Not hardly. Not on this island. We are as equal as our money allows us to be.”

  I said, “My class distinctions may not count, but your class superiority doesn’t count for shit either. Nobody on this island has enough money to stop this storm. Nobody has enough money to get an official police force here. Cash can’t communicate with the outside world. You might be able to burn people’s money to keep us a little warm in front of a fire, except everybody probably uses credit cards. I suspect they don’t provide a lot of warmth. We could be equally dead if we don’t find out who the killer is and who set off the explosion.”

  Deplonte said, “Why are we wasting time debating? Are we done in here yet?”

  “We are wasting time,” I said, “because people’s lives could hang in the balance. Aren’t you afraid that there’s a killer on the loose? He’s done one hell of a lot of destruction to the island already. Maybe there are other bombs planted. More people could die.”

  “That’s why I have Morgan,” Deplonte said. “For protection. I don’t need you.”

  Scott, who has infinitely more patience than I, said, “Perhaps before this is over, we will all need each other.”

  Morgan said, “You two can stay with us and look with us or you can go.”

  I said, “I’ve got the only flashlight.” An impasse of stark practicality. Dawn was breaking but it was adding shadows to the gloom rather than dispelling darkness. Morgan hesitated. Deplonte, his not-quite-majesty began chewing on his right thumbnail. After several moments, Morgan capitulated. He wasn’t a fool. I guess we could have arm wrestled for the thing. By himself Morgan would have been a formidable opponent. His sort-of-royal majesty probably would not have been a lot of help in any serious battle.
I suspected alone, I had a decent chance against Morgan’s strength; with Scott on my side, we’d have a damn good chance. I also began to suspect that Morgan wasn’t simply some overmuscled and convenient stud bunny. He knew there was danger. Part of protecting his charge would be to go along for now.

  We continued to examine the villa. Everything was clean, neat, and in its place. The living room took up the entire front section of the first floor that faced the sea. The villa was about half a mile inland but built on what I suspected was one of the highest points on a reasonably flat plain. The island was flat the way I thought of Iowa as being flat. If you took Interstate 55 south from Chicago to St. Louis, that was flat, barely a mole hill in sight. If you took Interstate 80 west of Des Moines, you got gently rolling countryside, no real hills, certainly no mountains, and by most definitions flat, but it was more varied than the Illinois prairie.

  The view was tremendous. The bar had numerous exotic liqueurs and top-shelf brand hard liquor. The bathrooms were pristine solid marble. No tile on these floors or walls. The fixtures were gold plated. A device that remotely resembled a microwave oven sat on the edge of the bathtub.

  “What’s this?” I asked, highlighting it with my flashlight.

  Deplonte said, “A towel warmer.” Adding enough “how could you be so stupid not to know that?” to his tone that I’d have cheerfully shoved the appliance up his recently penetrated butt—sideways.

  Tudor’s laptop computer sat on a desk in the study. This room was lined with books and was the only one with skylights. The rain poured unrelentingly. I opened the computer top. It didn’t even beep or peep or make a protest. It was very dead. Even were it designed to do so, we weren’t going to be able to send wireless messages with it.

  I asked Morgan, “Do you know if anybody had a wireless one?”

  “Not that I know of.” I told him about Sherebury’s not being able to connect to the Internet.

  Morgan said, “Tough luck.”

  I said, “We need to look through these things to see if there is anything that would give a clue to the murderer.”