Several Deaths Later

by Ed Gorman

  Kevin Anderson, macho guy that he was, had not brought a light along. Presumably this was because of his X-ray vision.

  He went without pause to the bed and the material. He was, of course, neither as gentle nor as neat as Farris and Cassie had been. He made a quick mess of things, in fact, scattering items all over the bed. He reminded Tobin of a dog rooting for something buried.

  The less he found that interested him, the more furious Anderson's search became.

  Until the next set of footsteps came along.

  Where Farris and Cassie had gotten scared, Anderson got angry.

  He stood in the center of the cabin looking big and fit but vaguely silly in his fake leopard skin loincloth, making a large club from his fist.

  Obviously he was simply going to deck whoever came through the door.

  But, not wanting the next person to be scared off- he'd learned nothing so far but the person now trying the doorknob might just be the one-Tobin once again eased open the closet door and went, "Pssst!"

  Anderson spun around as if somebody had struck him in the back of the head with a rock.

  "Get in here!" Tobin whispered.

  As the cabin door was starting to open, Anderson apparently got caught up in the moment and complied without any hassle.

  Cassie moved down one inside the closet and Anderson took her place. Now there were Tobin, Anderson, Cassie, and Farris. Everything smelled cramped and sweaty. Only Cassie's perfume kept the closet from reeking like a locker room.

  A beautiful hooker came in next. She'd brought one of those dinky pencil flashlights doctors use when they make you say "Ahhhh."

  Tobin got a vicious elbow in the rib from Anderson. Cassie, who'd had more than her share to drink, had tottered into Anderson and so Tobin wound up getting the elbow. He wanted to curse and very loudly but he knew better. In here all he could say was, "Ssshhh!"

  All of them leaned up to the louvers so they could watch as Susan Richards sorted through the debris Kevin Anderson had strewn all over the bed.

  The problem was, Tobin realized, you couldn't see whose stuff-Sanderson's or Iris's-she was going through because now it was all mixed up together.

  Something caught her attention, though, because she leaned way over and started to examine it.

  Tobin couldn't be sure if she picked it up and took it because about the time she would have been doing so, the cabin door opened up and there stood somebody else with a flashlight.

  Todd Ames must have crept along the corridor on tiptoes because none of them had heard him at all.

  Now Ames and Susan stood a few feet apart in the gloom, shining their lights on each other.

  "Susan, what are you doing here?"

  "I could ask the same question, Todd."

  "I'm sick of this bullshit!" Anderson said and ripped open the closet door.

  Susan screamed.

  Ames threw on the lights and held up a.45 he'd concealed in his thick sueded Robin Hood belt.

  Susan, seeing everybody come out of the closet, said, "What were you all doing in there?"

  "Watching you," Tobin said. He nodded to Ames. "You'd better either use that or put it away."

  Ames touched one side of his perfect gray hair and said, "Seems as if I should be the one giving the orders."

  Anderson moved so quickly even Tobin was forced to admit he was impressed.

  Anderson slapped Ames across the face and then simply took the gun from him.

  Anderson said, "Now, Tobin, you little bastard, I want you to tell me what's going on here."

  30

  11:45 P.M.

  "So why don't we just get it over with?" Tobin said, once they'd all found various places to sit.

  "Get what over with?" Cassie McDowell asked, reverting to TV. She was the naive schoolteacher of "McKinley High, USA." Her Bo Peep garb had never seemed more appropriate.

  "Gosh, I can't imagine," Tobin said. Then, "What the hell do you think I'm talking about? I told Jere and you that I had the personal effects of Iris Graves and Everett Sanderson in my room-and then each of you proceeded to break in. What the hell were you looking for?"

  Kevin Anderson and Todd Ames had helped themselves to the quart of Wild Turkey Tobin had sitting on his bureau. They guzzled it without ice from transparent plastic glasses.

  Ames said, "We don't have to answer a damn thing."

  Susan Richards, lighting a cigarette, said, "I came here because I heard there was a party."

  "Right," Tobin said, "so you jimmied the lock with a credit card and came in."

  Tobin, as always when he was angry, paced. Being small and compact, he gave the impression of great energy as he did so. With his Burglar mask still on, he looked both greatly earnest and greatly comic.

  He paused at Kevin Anderson and said, "I'm surprised you'd be afraid of him."

  "Afraid of who?"

  "Of Ken Norris."

  Anderson's masculinity had been challenged. "Who said I was afraid of him?"

  "If you hadn't been then you wouldn't have resorted to killing him."

  Anderson set down his drink. He made his biceps bulky and his hands into fists. "You accuse me of killing him again, I'll punch your face in."

  "Jesus, Kevin," Cassie said, "what we don't need is more violence."

  Tobin turned to Jere Farris. "Why don't you share that notebook with us?"

  "What notebook?" But he was flushing.

  Tobin held out his hand.

  Farris shook his head miserably-maybe he wouldn't have looked so miserable if he'd taken off his Stetson- and reached inside his leather vest. "Here."

  Tobin tapped the notebook dramatically, the way a prosecuting attorney who'd trained at Warner Brothers would have.

  "In this notebook," he said and thumped it again, rather enjoying himself now. "In this notebook is evidence that will convict one of you of Ken Norris's death-and the deaths of Iris Graves and Everett Sanderson."

  "If you've got the evidence," said Todd Ames, smiling with capped teeth at Cassie, "then why don't you make a formal accusation?"

  "Because as yet I haven't broken the code."

  "Code?" Ames said.

  "She wrote in her own shorthand. Not even her boss at Snoop can translate it."

  He felt a genuine sense of relief pass through the five people packed into his tiny cabin.

  He took to pacing again. He took to notebook-thumping again. He said, "You know what I think?"

  Kevin Anderson said, "I don't know what you think but I also don't give a damn what you think."

  "I think," said Tobin, undeterred, "that one of you killed him and that the rest of you are protecting that person." He thumped again. "But here's the trick. I also suspect that you're not sure which of you did it. You"-and he pointed to Cassie-"you may think it's Kevin and Kevin may think it's Todd and Todd may think-"

  Todd Ames said, "You don't have a damn thing on any of us. You've got some queer notebook with some scrawlings in it, and that's all."

  Jere Farris said, "And we've still got the show."

  Tobin saw it then. Mention of the show made each of them smile. He saw how "Celebrity Circle" bound them up tight as blood. He said, "And that's why you're afraid that one of you is a killer. Because if that's the case, the show may well die. And your livelihoods will be all over." He turned to Farris. "What did you say about directing local TV news?"

  Kevin Anderson threw back the last of the Wild Turkey and said, "I don't know about anybody else, but I'm leaving."

  "Me too," Cassie said.

  "One of you is a killer," Tobin said.

  "You wave that goddamn notebook at us one more time," Anderson said, "and I'll put it someplace you won't like at all."

  His anger served as a rallying point for the rest of them. Soon Tarzan was joined by a cowboy, a hooker, Robin Hood, and Florence Nightingale at the door.

  "We're going back to the party," Jere Farris said, "and have a damn good time. You coming, Tobin?"

  With that, th
ey all laughed and left, slamming the door with undue finality.

  The first thing Tobin did was go to the bathroom again.

  Then he came out and lit up a cigarillo and took to pacing once more. His plan hadn't worked. He hadn't learned a damn thing.

  Or so he thought until he began looking carefully at the jumble of personal effects on the bed.

  Something was missing. He wasn't sure what. He just had the impression that not all the stuff Captain Hackett had given him was there now.

  It took him ten minutes of sifting and ten minutes of trying to remember everything that Hackett had handed over before he realized what was gone.

  Sanderson's newspaper clippings about the fire and the Indiana beauty contest. What bearing did they have on "Celebrity Circle"? And whose identity would they have exposed? Strange. Damn strange.

  31

  FRIDAY: 12 :53 A.M.

  "Say, would you dance with me so my husband could take a picture of us?"

  The woman, bigger than Tobin-which was not, after all, an especially impressive feat-had grabbed him just inside the restaurant where he'd gone in search of Cindy.

  The woman was dressed as the Wicked Witch of the West and her husband as Teddy Roosevelt. The husband, drunk, tried aiming a Polaroid at Tobin. Everything here was, if anything, crazier than when Tobin had left. Two fat men did something like a polka with each other while their wives laughed so hard they pounded each other on the shoulder. The two fat men were up on a table. A waiter, in a snit, and probably a well-deserved snit, took a drunk's drink and poured it into a flower bowl, apparently telling the man he'd been cut off. The dance floor was darker now; only a feeble dawnlike hue of pink from a baby spotlight offered any illumination, and some of the scenes on the dance floor were reasonably pornographic, the frivolity of earlier hours having given way to pure-and understandable-lust.

  "I've danced with everybody on 'Celebrity Circle,' " the woman said. "And Henry's taken my picture with every one. You're the last."

  "Goody," Tobin said, letting her pull him onto the floor and into his arms as the trio played "The Impossible Dream" as a samba. "Smile," Henry said.

  "I always liked you better than your partner on that review show," the woman said. "He was too snotty. He didn't like Robert Redford."

  "Neither do I," Tobin said.

  The woman, fiftyish, giggled. "Yes, but you're cute."

  He supposed there was logic there somewhere.

  As they danced, and Henry continued to punch out the Polaroids, Tobin glanced round the dance floor for sight of Cindy. But nothing. He saw all the others on the "Celebrity Circle" dais-and they all glowered at him whenever he made eye contact-except Cindy and Kevin Anderson.

  My God, what if…

  "It's such a great show," the Wicked Witch said. "Beg pardon?"

  "The show. 'Celebrity Circle.' It's great."

  "Oh. Thanks. But I'm only doing this cruise and then I'm gone."

  "Everybody looks like they're having so much fun." She giggled her annoying giggle again. The song was interminable. "I'd pay to be on that panel. I really would."

  "Yes," Tobin said, on autopilot now, and only half-listening to her.

  He was fearing the worst. That Kevin had sweet-talked Cindy…

  The song, at last, ended and the woman said, rather threateningly really, "Did you get some good ones, Henry?"

  "I got some wonderful ones, honey." He said "shome" and he said "wunnerful" and saying so nearly fell over, from the booze, backwards.

  "Thanks," Tobin said, extricating himself from her grasp. "I really enjoyed it."

  And then he was off to the dais, pressing himself through dancers and sweet-talkers and boosters and sots, and at last he reached the dais and felt the laserlike collective glare of the "Celebrity Circle" group searing through him.

  "Looks like Cindy dumped you again, Tobin," Jere Farris said.

  "She wanted somebody who could get it up in less than a half-hour," said America's favorite school teacher, Cassie McDowell.

  Only Susan Richards had the grace to look embarrassed at Cassie's drunken ugliness.

  He turned back to the end of the table where Joanna Howard sat talking to a busboy who was obviously about her speed-neither one appeared to know how to put the moves on anybody.

  He went up to her. "Have you seen Cindy?"

  She glanced up and then frowned. "She… left."

  Tobin cleared his throat. "Kevin?"

  She paused. She tried to spare his feelings. "I really didn't see."

  Which of course meant Yes.

  The bastard had come back here after the confrontation in Tobin's cabin and taken Cindy away. But why, after the way he'd treated her last night, would she go?

  Then he smiled to himself.

  She'd go because women like Cindy seemed to derive perverse pleasure from men who treated them badly. Tobin had never understood this, and didn't care to, really.

  When his gaze fell on Joanna again, he saw that she was watching her lover, Jere Farris, in the arms of his wife on the dance floor.

  Tobin said, "You can do better than him, Joanna. You really can."

  She smiled with her soft forlorn eyes and said, "Weren't you the one asking about Cindy a few seconds ago?"

  "Good point," he said, and went back to his cabin.

  32

  1:10 A.M.

  Tobin, back in his cabin, calculated the time and decided to hell with it. He had to find out why somebody took the newspaper clippings relating to Everett Sanderson's presence on the cruise ship and left everything else.

  He took one of Sanderson's brochures, looked at the phone number and town name and zip code rubber-stamped on the back of it, and then picked up the phone.

  He first tried the number of the agency itself and got a ghostly answering machine, one of those recordings that sound as if they'd been made by a poltergeist. It said the agency was closed and would be open at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, if tomorrow was a weekday. Then, fortunately, it left another number to call in case of emergency.

  Tobin certainly considered this an emergency. On the fourteenth ring a woman with a cigarette cough answered the phone. Tobin said, "Hello?"

  The woman kept coughing and finally said, "Who the hell is this anyway?"

  The detective agency wasn't nearly as friendly as it had promised to be in the brochure.

  33

  1:17 A.M.

  It was while she was slathering her rather nice twenty-eight-year-old body with a bar of very soapy soap that Cindy thought she heard some kind of bump or thump in the cabin outside of Kevin Anderson's bathroom.

  She stood very still, aware suddenly of just how naked naked really was, and held her breath the way she had when she'd been a little girl and played boogeyman with her brother and her brother was three steps away from finding her hiding under the bed-held her breath and strained her hearing so hard she got a slight headache.

  But there was just the warm water beating on her body, beading on her body, and the pleasant exhaustion that came at the end of a long day.

  Then she decided she was being paranoid. Maybe Kevin had just opened and shut a drawer with undue power. He liked doing stuff like that-flinging back doors and jerking up chairs from the floor and twisting them around to sit on. It was because he did things like that, or so she supposed, that she'd finally accepted his apologies for last night ("I've just been sort of uptight, babe," was the way he'd said it, not ever using the exact word sorry exactly but she knew that for a guy like him-he had, after all, had his own network series and there was the promise of another-that for a guy like him even those words had been difficult to say) and so, at the last, Tobin gone, she'd said, yes, all right, she'd go back to his cabin with him, both of them knowing of course what that meant.

  Kevin had wanted to take her two steps inside the cabin door. The nun's outfit had really fired up most of the men. But inside its heavy black folds she'd run with sweat and insisted on taking a quick shower, during whic
h time she'd started composing a letter to Aberdeen about how weird this trip was becoming, with a TV star practically begging her for her company.

  A door slammed.

  She couldn't be sure of it.

  It might have been any number of other things- somebody drunk falling against the wall in the corridor, Kevin sliding back the closet door with his usual enthusiasm-but somehow she thought not.

  Somehow she thought a door had slammed.

  Tired of all her apprehension, she turned off the shower, slid back the door, and grabbed a big white fluffy towel.

  She dried off quickly, took a smaller towel to use as a turban for her hair, and then left the slippery tiles and steamy air of the bathroom.

  She found Kevin immediately and began screaming almost as immediately.

  34

  1:23 A.M.

  "That little squirt on TV?" the woman said.

  "That's me."

  "What the hell you doin' callin' here at three in the morning?" Her voice had gotten much friendlier since he'd explained who he was. Fortunately, or so she confided, she'd always preferred him to Richard Dunphy.

  "You know that a man named Everett Sanderson was murdered."

  A mournful pause. Sigh. "Yep."

  "He was your husband?"

  "Nope. Brother-in-law. His wife died twenty years ago or so and he never remarried. Ever since he lived upstairs in our youngster's room. Him and Merle, that's my husband, they ran the agency together."

  "That's what I'm calling about."

  "The agency?"

  "About what Everett was doing on the cruise." Another pause. "You'd be wantin' to talk to Merle about that."

  "Could you hand the phone over to him?"

  "Can't."

  "Asleep?"

  "Gone."

  "Where?"