Tourists Are for Trapping

by Marian Babson

  Hotel rooms are notoriously poor at providing reading material. Once you have read the menu—down to the fine print that lets you know that room service has shut off long before you want it, so it’s all academic, anyway—and the notices that disclaim all responsibility for valuables unless deposited in the hotel safe, you’ve had it. Nor was this the sort of hotel to shelter a Gideon Bible. Here, it would be a Gutenberg or nothing. Since the cost of providing a Gutenberg Bible for every room was prohibitive, it was nothing.

  Listlessly, I picked up the exercise book. Once I’d removed the two empty and well-licked half slices of bread, it didn’t show much indication of Pandora’s lunch. I brushed away a couple of crumbs and opened the book idly. “The Trials and Travails of Tour 79”— the trials and travails of Perkins & Tate was more like it.

  At least, they’d started out having a good time. I was glad to see that there was nothing but praise for Larkin’s Luxury Tours and all the arrangements that had been made for Tour 79. I flipped casually through the notebook, dipping in here and there.

  I found the shopping sequence in Amsterdam that Paula had been so worried about. It seemed pretty innocuous to me—a clear case of the guilty fleeing when there was no pursuit. I was interested to notice that some play was made about Carrie’s comments on the occasion, however. She seemed to be showing signs of a sharpening temper—perhaps she was just a poor traveler. If she had been, it would be the sort of thing Tris Tablor wouldn’t want to admit to himself, since he’d induced her to sign on for the trip.

  And then, the last item. A scrawl, the handwriting barely recognisable as by the same hand as that which had gone before: Why, Carrie, why?

  After that, nothing. Either Tris Tablor had been too broken up to write any more in his journal, or else that was the point at which Paula had managed to “borrow” it.

  I closed the notebook and sat staring at it, wondering just what it was about it that had unsettled me so. There was something teasing at the corner of my mind, but I couldn’t quite catch the thought.

  Then the tap sounded at the door. A perfunctory warning rap immediately before the door opened. It was just as well no one was doing anything they oughtn’t—as a warning, it was a washout.

  Neil Larkin came into the room, followed by Professor Tablor. It was a toss-up which of them looked worse. Tablor, by a short head, I decided. But then, he was older, had been under a longer-continuing strain, and was ill to begin with.

  Instinctively, I struggled to my feet and measured the distance to my briefcase. If Tris Tablor showed any signs of collapsing, I could make it with another standing broad jump. At the moment, however, he seemed to be holding up.

  “How is everything?” Neil asked.

  “Kate’s asleep,” I told him. “You might as well let her rest as long as she can. She had a hard day yesterday. You could do with some rest yourself.”

  “Couldn’t I just!” He shuddered, then remembered his responsibilities to his clients and turned to the professor.

  “Why don’t you go back and try for some sleep?” Neil suggested. “The police won’t be along for a while yet. They can talk to you last. That ought to let you get some rest.”

  “Rest…,” Tris Tablor said dazedly. “Yes … rest.” He really was looking terrible.

  “It was her, then?” I asked.

  Neil nodded. “Pulled out of the Thames. She’d been in several days. Since she first disappeared, they think.”

  “Another … suicide?”

  “Probably.” He looked at me warily. “That will be for the police to decide, won’t it? They’ll be along later; they’ll give everyone a chance to have breakfast first.” He grimaced. “We’re getting kid-glove treatment—they’re probably hoping they can handle this without anyone’s screaming for the American Embassy.”

  “I can see that it would complicate matters,” I said. Delay them, too, but there was no use in pointing that out. Neil knew it as well as I did.

  But Professor Tablor was worrying both of us. He stood there, shaking his head slightly, like a punch-drunk fighter. “It goes on,” he said vaguely. “It keeps going on. One thing leads to another. Isn’t there ever an end?”

  “Come on, Professor.” Neil took his arm firmly. “Rest. There’s nothing more you can do.”

  I walked to the door with them. As they were leaving, I held out the exercise book to Tris Tablor. He took it, staring at it for a moment as though he didn’t recognise it. Then he raised his head and looked at me questioningly.

  “It just … turned up,” I said. “The way things do. It got mixed up with someone else’s luggage. The way things do.”

  As an explanation, it was so feeble it was helpless, but he accepted it. Nodding his head, as though he understood all about the way these mysterious things can happen, he tucked it under his arm with the small package he was carrying.

  Neil was tugging at him, but he remained in the doorway a moment longer, staring at me. “It can’t keep going on,” he said intensely. “It’s got to end sometime. It’s got to.”

  “It will.” I tried to be encouraging. “Soon.”

  “Soon.” He nodded, catching at the word as though it were a promise. “Soon.” Neil was pulling at his arm again, and this time, he responded. The door closed behind them.

  Penny and Gerry were both half-dozing now, Penny still clutching her precious chunk of plaster like a child with a toy on Christmas night. Except that a diamond was a lot more valuable than any toy.

  Valuable. My mind refused to rest and sent me pacing the room. Different people had different values. I wondered what Donna’s values would be, in future years. She was just about old enough to repudiate Paula and everything Paula held sacred. Whatever she turned to, it wouldn’t be diamonds.

  Outside, the day had arrived. Charladies waited in bus queues, homeward bound after a night of cleaning office blocks. Overeager desk workers walked briskly toward their offices and another day’s labours.

  Perhaps I had dozed off, too, asleep on my feet. Suddenly, without any awareness on my part of the passage of time, it was a lot later than I thought it could be. That was what came of not having anything to concentrate your attention on. Of having nothing to read.

  For a brief moment, I regretted returning Tris Tablor’s notebook to him so promptly. I could have kept it awhile longer, he wouldn’t have minded, he had written it for others to read. True, it hadn’t made such scintillating reading, but he was a professor of physics, not literature.

  Physics. Suddenly, it came flooding back to me. He had said Carrie’s protégé had believed he had evolved a new theory—one that Tris Tablor had torn to pieces. Yet later, Tablor had announced that he was publishing an exciting new theory in the autumn—eighteen months after Carrie’s protégé had “committed suicide.”

  But Carrie had been the boy’s mentor and friend. She would most probably have seen his physics thesis—he would have shown it to her—perhaps asked her criticism on the writing—she was an English professor. She would recognise it if she read it again. And if the same thesis was appearing soon under Tablor’s name, she would inevitably see it, recognise it, question it …

  But Carrie had providentially “committed suicide” in Switzerland. It was Tris Tablor who had told me that about the woman’s death. Insisted on it. Another suicide.

  Then Angela Hunt, who had been Carrie’s roommate on the tour, to whom she might have confided something, speculated about something—who just might have known something about those pills she was or wasn’t taking—had died here in London. And Tablor had claimed that he had put her into the taxi to catch the train. He had been the last to see her alive. The police were sure to follow up on that.

  “It keeps happening,” Tris Tablor had just been saying. As he had said earlier, “Sometimes people commit suicide by forcing other people to kill them. ” As neat a piece of rationalization as I had ever encountered—it was too bad I hadn’t recognised it for what it was at the time. When he had looke
d at his betraying, murderous hands as though he had never seen them before. As though they had an independent life of their own that he was powerless to control.

  Also, his expression that night in the pub had been so peculiar as to be frightening. He must have heard Winnie and Billie Mae confiding in me—he’d been close enough to overhear. He had covered it by diverting my attention to Pandora, but he must have been facing a crisis then. Facing just how long it could go on, how far it could go. He was fundamentally a quiet, basically conscientious scholar who had been pushed beyond his limits, succumbed to temptation, and then had had to kill to cover up. But he couldn’t keep on killing—too many people were involved. He wasn’t the stuff mass murderers are made of.

  And he had said, tonight, “It’s got to end … soon.” The shape of that package under his arm reminded me of something else he had said earlier as well: “For her to sit there and eat that cheese fondue was as much an act of suicide as it would be for me to eat my way through …”

  I gave a shout that brought Gerry to his feet, snatched up my briefcase, and rushed for the door. I couldn’t wait for the lift—I took the stairs two at a time.

  I banged on Tablor’s door, but there was no answer. I had hardly expected any, but I went on trying.

  “What’s the matter?” Gerry came up behind me, ashen. “What’s got into you?”

  I began kicking the door, but a chambermaid hurried up with a master key before I could do any damage. She inserted the key into the lock, turned it, and swung the door open, looking at me as though she thought I had lost my senses, but was afraid I hadn’t. Word about the guests and their problems circulates quickly behind the scenes. I started forward slowly.

  “Aaraayow!” With a wail of distress, Pandora dropped to the floor from my shoulder and crouched there.

  “Come on.” I stooped and tried to pick her up. Still wailing faintly, she dug her claws into the carpet and refused to be budged. Quivering, wailing, she refused to cross that threshold. I knew then, if I hadn’t known before.

  I straightened up and walked slowly into Professor Tablor’s room. The others grouped together in the doorway behind me, as though afraid of what they might discover if they followed me. But there was nothing dramatic to be seen.

  There was only a trail of empty candy wrappers across the carpet, leading to the huddled, motionless form on the bed.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Perkins & Tate Mysteries

  Chapter 1

  Simple things amuse simple minds. I was deriving quite a bit of amusement from the early edition of the evening paper. I had just made a note of the rapidly rising actress on page seven, who had been photographed against the background of her antique silver collection, holding the prize piece of carved jade from her treasury of objets d’art, and captioned by a melancholy quote saying how much she was going to miss her little mews cottage and her treasures during the next three months when she would be filming in Spain. I underscored her name and made a notation to get in touch with her after the burglary when she would be looking for another—and brighter—public relations person.

  “Stop that!” I shouted as a bandit-masked whirlwind sprang from an ambush of late-afternoon shadows and hurled herself at my Biro. Capturing it successfully, she tumbled over and over across the desk, kicking at it with her hind legs and uttering loud yowls of defiance.

  You had to laugh at the little clown. A fact she constantly used against me. “Behave yourself.” I tried to recapture the Biro, but she rolled away from me with it, growling as though she really meant it. Only the rakish tilt of her ears betrayed her playfulness.

  “Come on, give it back.” I feinted for it again, and her tail lashed menacingly her slanted blue eyes glittering. She was having a lovely time.

  “Be a good cat,” I said. I had dropped the paper by now and she had my full attention. Which was what she’d wanted all along.

  Suddenly, she abandoned the game. The Biro dropped from her mouth and rolled across the desk unnoticed. She was taut and alert, blue eyes staring at the door. I followed her look, seeing nothing but the closed door. After a moment, though, I heard it, too.

  Someone was taking the stairs two at a time. Someone gained the tiny hallway and pounded on the door, but didn’t wait for any social niceties like being invited to enter. He burst through the door, slamming it behind him and leaning against it, looking around wildly, gasping for breath. His eyes were bulging, his face purple, but he was just recognizable—the white coat helped.

  I gazed at him in mild amazement. True, I was three or four months overdue for my semiannual checkup, but you don’t really expect your dentist to get emotional over a fact like that. Particularly as Gerry and I were practically the only National Health patients he had on his eminent and star-studded roster of Famous Mouths I Have Looked Into.

  “You’ve got to help me,” he choked. “You’ve got to help me, now. Quickly!”

  It was a good line, and probably one he had picked up from patients ringing in the middle of the night with throbbing abcesses. But it seemed to be slightly misdirected.

  “Are you sure you have the right place?” That was as near as I dared get to asking him if he knew where he was. “This is Perkins and Tate—”

  “Public Relations, Limited,” he finished for me. “Of course, it’s the right place. Public relations—that’s what I need right now. God! How I need public relations!”

  It was a statement to warm the cockles of many a heart at the Institute of Public Relations, but it simply made my blood run cold. I mean, public relations isn’t usually something you need immediately, like a fix, or a stiff drink. If you do, it means the horse has bolted, the barn has burned to the ground, the ground has caved into a previously unsuspected mineshaft, and somebody is handing you a rusty hasp and demanding that you put it all back the way it was.

  Pandora glared at him, twitching her nose, then abruptly dived under the desk, hissing. She had recently had the last of her booster shots, and men in white jackets smelling, however faintly, of antiseptic were at the top of her Hate Parade.

  He ignored her; I doubt that he even noticed her. He was still staring wildly in my general direction, waiting for me to wave the magic wand and make everything all right again.

  “Why don’t you sit down, and we’ll talk this over,” I suggested.

  “Sit down? We haven’t time! We’ve got to get into action now, you fool! Don’t you understand? She’s dead. Morgana Fane! She died under the anaesthetic in my dental chair. My God! Morgana Fane!”

  I instantly needed a stiff drink myself. Morgana Fane—the Model of the Moment—of this decade. About to be the Bride of the Year. That mesmeric face, which had decorated a thousand magazine covers, launched a thousand styles, and—it was rumoured in the peephole press— shipwrecked a few dozen marriages, now stilled forever. It was the end of an Era.

  Fortunately, the company was fairly solvent at the moment, and there was a bottle of Scotch in the kitchen cupboard. Going for it, I asked, “What did the police say about it?”

  “I haven’t called them!” He was affronted. “Not yet. That’s why I came to you. I want a press representative with me before I do.”

  Oh, fine. At the rate he was going, a solicitor would be more help when the police arrived. They were not going to take kindly to playing second fiddle to a public relations man. Although I appreciated the good dentist’s problem. A society/show business practice, of the kind he had built up, depends on word-of-mouth recommendations and confidence. Lots of confidence. He could go out of style as fast as an old-fashioned abortionist if the death of a famous patient wasn’t handled properly. Faster. And Morgana Fane —I found myself echoing the dentist—my God!

  “Didn’t she respond at all to the kiss of life?” I turned just in time to catch the shifty look that flashed across his face. He hadn’t bothered to try. He’d been too worried about his own skin. He’d flown for a press representative—probably leaving her still there in
the chair. That would look great in the headlines.

  I took the drink I had poured for him and put it back in the cupboard beside the bottle—Gerry could drink it later. We were going to have enough problems without our dentist facing the music with liquor on his breath. It would be all the press needed—and I didn’t think the police would react too favourably to it, either.

  “There was no point in trying,” he defended hastily, having evidently caught the look that flashed across my face just before I turned away. “Any fool could tell that she was gone.”

  There was a steady hissing sound emanating from beneath the desk. I just looked at him, my face as blank as I could possibly make it. I felt like joining Pandora under the desk for a hissing session, but it was a luxury I was denied.

  This expensive dentist had not carried Perkins & Tate (Public Relations) Ltd. on his National Health books just because he could not resist our winsome faces. It was one of those tacit understandings, and Gerry and I had dutifully seen to it that his name was planted in a few columns and the discreet mention was inserted wherever possible. Very discreet—the dental profession being as twitchy as the medical on the subject of publicity. It had worked quite well and to our mutual satisfaction for several years. This time, however, the piper was really presenting the bill—and with a vengeance.

  “She’s still there,” I said flatly. Just checking, I didn’t expect any contradiction.

  I didn’t get one. “Right where she expired,” he said. His face twitched with indignation. “In my dental chair!” He made it sound as though the only decent thing she could have done was to crawl into an anonymous gutter to die.

  “What about your nurse?”