Murder Packs a Suitcase

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Going up?” Frieda asked crossly, stabbing the Open Door button with resignation. That nap was clearly something she needed.

  “On second thought, I think I’ll get some coffee,” Mallory lied. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  When Mallory reached the Bali Ballroom, she saw that the double doors were closed tight. She turned one of the knobs halfheartedly, expecting to find the door locked. Instead, it opened.

  Inside, the lights were off. Even though she didn’t dare switch them on, there was enough light from the hall that after waiting a few seconds for her eyes to adjust, she could see fairly well.

  The Bali Ballroom seemed as lifeless as Phil’s body had been as it floated in the pool. Bubbling water no longer cascaded down the waterfall, and the potted flowers that had been lush only the day before now drooped pathetically. Yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the entire display.

  She was about to step forward to get a closer look when she heard voices in the hall.

  “Could the timing have been any worse?” Desmond moaned. “I’m coming up for review in another two weeks. Two weeks! Do you have any idea how a murder looks on a résumé?”

  “As if a murder is something that can be scheduled,” Courtney shot back angrily. “Penciled into someone’s Filofax like…like ‘Make a dentist appointment for a cleaning’!”

  Desmond Farnaby and Courtney Conover. Mallory stepped closer to the doorway, hugging the wall so she couldn’t be spotted from the corridor.

  “That’s so typical, Des,” Courtney added. “It’s all about you.”

  “Des”? Mallory thought, startled. What happened to “Mr. Farnaby”?

  “I just know my history with Phil is going to come out,” Desmond continued. “That man never seems to stop causing trouble for me. Even now, when he’s dead.”

  My sentiments exactly, Mallory reflected, remembering that she’d had the exact same thought not long before. She took a few steps closer to the doorway, hoping to hear more before they walked away.

  “But that was ages ago,” Courtney insisted. “Besides, there’s no way the police would ever link his murder with what’s basically ancient history.”

  Courtney and Desmond were talking to each other with a sense of familiarity that Mallory hadn’t picked up on before. She hadn’t realized there was history between them.

  Desmond also seemed to have a history with the murder victim. That suddenly made him a lot more interesting.

  Mallory remained in her hiding spot, expecting the two of them to pass by. Instead, Desmond said, “We can talk about this later, Courtney. Right now, I have a hotel to run. And that includes getting the ballroom back into shape.”

  He strode into the ballroom and snapped on the lights.

  “Mallory!” he cried, looking startled. “What are you doing here?”

  “I, uh…”

  “The police were very clear about keeping everyone away from the crime scene,” he scolded. “I could get in trouble.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Look at this place!” he exclaimed, putting his hands on his hips as he surveyed the ballroom. He already seemed to have forgotten all about her transgression. “That horrid yellow tape is plastered everywhere. I don’t know why it’s still up, when the cops have already spent ages collecting evidence. They made me turn off the waterfall, and I’m supposed to keep the door closed. I can practically hear the mildew growing! Do you have any idea how much it hurts to see my beautiful hotel in this state? And I’m not even going to mention what it’s doing to our guests’ morale!”

  Mallory supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised that his take on the situation was the same as it had been the day before, when he’d instantly morphed into Mr. Clean.

  “You wouldn’t believe how many guests have already checked out,” he lamented. “Or how many cancellations we’ve had. With CNN carrying the story, even our international clients are steering clear of the Polynesian Princess. Thank you, Ted Turner, for helping bad news spread faster than ever!”

  “You can’t blame people for being upset about a murder,” she commented, irritated by his self-centered attitude. “Even people who didn’t know Phil.”

  “Right,” he sniffed. “The people who did know him aren’t upset at all.”

  Desmond’s openness about his feelings concerning the murder victim emboldened her. “I heard there was some bad blood between you and Phil.”

  She expected him to be happy he’d found someone who would listen to him vent. Instead, a look of shock crossed his face.

  “How did you know about that?”

  Mallory did some fast thinking. “I believe one of the other journalists mentioned it.”

  “Not that it’s a secret or anything,” he added hastily. “A lot of people in the tourism business know that Phil and I were in business together.”

  It’s news to me, she thought. “The hotel business?”

  Desmond shook his head. “About twenty years ago, Phil and I tried to cash in on the incredible tourism boom that was sweeping over central Florida. We opened a fabulous tourist attraction: a haunted house called Crypt Castle.”

  Frankly, Mallory couldn’t picture Desmond getting involved in something so whimsical. Somehow, it didn’t fit with the crisply ironed shirts and the bow ties. She couldn’t imagine Phil in the haunted house business, either.

  Still, she supposed business was business. If something looked like a good investment, there would be no reason for anyone not to pursue it.

  “It was fabulous,” he continued proudly. “The special effects were enough to scare the pants off anybody. Screeching ghouls, trapdoors that opened unexpectedly, rattling chains…It was state of the art in the haunted house industry.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It failed.” Sighing, he added, “It turns out that being an entrepreneur may look easy, but it’s not. There are too many factors that go into making a business a success. Most of them impossible to control.”

  Mallory hoped he’d list a few, but he’d drawn his mouth into a thin straight line. She almost got the feeling he was being careful not to say something he might regret.

  “I guess the tourism industry is a pretty small world,” she observed casually. “I understand that Phil’s ex-wife tried her hand at entrepreneurship, too.”

  “On a considerably smaller scale,” Desmond noted huffily. “Opening an ice-cream stand is hardly the same thing as operating a major attraction. Patrice’s venture was small-time. Crypt Castle, on the other hand, was something special. It was tremendous, for one thing. It sprawled over more than ten acres, including outbuildings that housed little extras, like the Dungeon of Death and the Ghosts ’n’ Ghouls Gift Shop. Families could spend an entire day there. We had a refreshment stand, a playground with a giant skull kids could crawl through, and two huge parking lots.

  “And the main building, the haunted house, was fabulous. We had room after room with all kinds of creepy special effects, not to mention live actors and a terrific sound system. We had a wall that breathed, a heartbeat that throbbed beneath the bed in the master bedroom, cobwebs that changed shape and turned into ghouls….”

  “It does sound amazing,” Mallory commented. “I’m surprised it didn’t make it.”

  Desmond shrugged. “Like I said, there are a million things that can go wrong. In the end, I decided to go into something more reliable, like the hotel business. Of course, there are a million things that can go wrong there, too, and they usually do. But at least it’s not your head on the chopping block all the time. Even more important, there’s definitely something to be said for getting a weekly paycheck.”

  “There certainly is,” she agreed.

  So Phil once had business interests here in the Orlando area, she thought, mentally filing away what Desmond had told her about the defunct haunted house. That, she decided, is a part of the murder victim’s past that warrants further investigation.
>
  “What about Patrice?” she asked. “What happened to her business?”

  “Frankly, I don’t remember. She might have sold it to somebody else who wanted to swirl ice cream into cones all day. Or maybe a developer bought it, knocked it down, and crammed a hundred condos on the land.”

  “Where is she these days? Still in Orlando?” Realizing she didn’t want to sound as if she was giving him the third degree, she added, “I wonder what kind of job somebody gets after giving up on the ice-cream business.”

  “Oh, she’s long gone,” Desmond replied. “She got out of here a couple of years after the divorce. She went up to Chicago, I think. Of course, that was ages ago. Lord knows where she is now.”

  Too bad, Mallory thought. Picking her brain might have been helpful.

  Suddenly Desmond sighed. “I should really get back to work,” he said, glancing around the ballroom as if the mere sight of it was almost too distressing to bear. “I just wanted to check and see if the cops had taken down this horrid crime-scene tape yet. I can’t wait to turn this jewel of a ballroom back into an active part of the hotel. I’ve got a twenty-fifth-anniversary party scheduled for Saturday night and a Sweet Sixteen on Sunday. Keep your fingers crossed that they won’t end up canceling, too, just like everybody else.”

  As she headed back to her room, Mallory pondered what Desmond had told her. He certainly made no bones about his dislike for Phil Diamond. Still, he seemed so matter-of-fact about their failed business venture, it was hard to believe that seeking revenge had ever been on his agenda.

  Yet there was no reason for him to have been completely honest with her concerning either his past interactions with Phil Diamond or his current feelings about the man. And she had seen him destroy evidence with her own eyes. While his actions could have simply been the result of his fastidiousness, it was equally possible he’d been trying to cover something up.

  She knew that if she wanted to get her name off Detective Martinez’s list of suspects, she would have to do whatever she could to find out. In the meantime, however, the gnawing in the pit of her stomach reminded her that she was about to face something that was almost as traumatic as finding Phil Diamond’s body floating at the base of the Gitgit Waterfall: her first date in more than twenty years.

  9

  “I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.”

  —Bill Bryson

  Ten minutes later, Mallory stood in front of her hotel room closet, taking deep breaths in a fruitless attempt to calm herself.

  Why on earth did I ever agree to let Wade come with me tonight? she thought. None of the clothes she’d brought seemed appropriate. The pink linen blouse that had looked perfectly fine at home suddenly struck her as boring. Her silky black shirt not only seemed too bare, she suddenly remembered that it was a little tight around the arms.

  It occurred to her that her main problem was that she had no idea about the proper dress code for an evening of yo-ho-ho’ing with a shipload of pirates.

  Or maybe it wasn’t the pirates’ opinion that she was concerned about.

  With a defeated sigh, she reached for her dependable beige linen go-everywhere dress, reminding herself that its primary virtue was that it could be dressed up or down with the right jewelry. She had just slipped it on and was studying her upper arms in the mirror, agonizing over whether they were too plump to be seen in public, when her cell phone trilled.

  Great, she thought, making a mad dash for her purse. Somehow Wade got hold of my cell phone number and he’s calling to cancel. He finally realized he has absolutely no interest in spending an entire evening with a boring, middle-aged woman who hasn’t been called upon to hold up her end of a serious adult conversation in months. Especially a serious adult conversation with a member of the opposite sex.

  So she was surprised that her home number was flashing on the screen.

  “Jordan?” she answered breathlessly, afraid that something was wrong. “Amanda? Is everything okay?”

  “Of course,” her daughter returned calmly. “Everything is fine, Mother. It’s you I’m worried about. Are you all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right,” Mallory replied.

  She remembered that it was her life, and not her children’s, that was suddenly in turmoil. Yet she hoped her daughter had been so tuned in to her own personal crisis that she hadn’t bothered to tune in to any news media.

  Trying to sound casual, she added, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because you’re in a brand-new place, doing a brand-new job,” Amanda replied matter-of-factly. “Because you don’t know a soul down in Florida. Because you’re staying at a hotel all by yourself, sleeping alone in a strange bed. Because this is practically the first time you’ve left Rivington since Daddy died.”

  Even though she was greatly relieved that her daughter clearly didn’t know a thing about Phil Diamond’s murder, Amanda’s list of Five Good Reasons to Feel Anxious still gave Mallory pause. Each one was completely true. Yet out of all of them, the only one that made her stop and think was the last.

  And the sole reason was that her daughter had called her at the exact moment she’d been agonizing over what to wear on something that sounded an awful lot like a date. For the first time since before her wedding day, she’d been getting ready to spend an entire evening with a man who wasn’t either her husband, a co-worker, or a dentist about to perform a particularly long procedure on her. And trying to come up with ways to look good while doing it.

  “I’m fine,” Mallory assured her daughter. “Orlando is like a big playground. You couldn’t get into trouble if you tried.”

  “How about the other journalists on the trip?” Amanda asked. “Are you getting along with them?”

  “All the writers are very nice.” Except for the one who’s very dead, she thought. But since Amanda obviously hadn’t heard about it, she certainly wasn’t going to be the one to give her one more thing to worry about. At least not unless she found out about it in the news, like her editor had. “And we’re in very good hands,” she continued. “A lovely young woman from the Florida Tourism Board has been taking good care of us. So has the general manager of the hotel.”

  “That’s a relief,” Amanda replied. “I’ve been so worried about you being down there all alone.”

  “How about you?” Mallory asked, a bit irritated by her daughter’s concern over her ability to function on her own. “Any new developments?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. Today I had a long conversation with Mr. James. Do you remember him? He was my favorite history teacher in high school. We had a long talk about my future. I really wanted his input, since he’s someone who knows me well.”

  “What was his advice?”

  “To follow in Daddy’s footsteps. Mr. James feels I have the verbal skills and the mental agility required to be an excellent lawyer.”

  “Then you’ve made your decision—and you’re ready to go back to school?” Mallory asked hopefully.

  “Not yet. Tomorrow I’m going to see if I can track down my Girl Scout leader. I seem to remember that one year I sold more cookies than anyone in our troop’s history.”

  Which clearly puts you in the running to be the next Bill Gates, Mallory thought.

  Aloud, she said, “How is Jordan doing?”

  Amanda sighed. “What does it take to get that boy off the couch?”

  “Remind him that tomorrow is recycling day,” she suggested. “Dragging the pail out to the street is about the only exercise he gets these days.”

  “I will. But tell me more about this press trip,” Amanda urged. “Do all the writers do everything together, like on one of those European tours that covers eight countries in fifteen days?”

  “Actually, we’re all interested in seeing different things,” Mallory explained, still peering at her arms in the mirror. “But Courtney—she’s the woman from the tourist boar
d—came with me to the Titanic museum. And one of the other writers who specializes in travel for senior citizens tagged along when I went to a reptile preserve called Gatorland.”

  “I’m so glad you’re making new friends!” Amanda sounded like the proud mother of a kindergartner. “What about meals? Please don’t tell me you’re eating alone tonight.”

  “Actually,” Mallory replied, doing her best to sound nonchalant, “I’m going to a dinner show with a…a new friend.”

  “A friend?” Amanda sounded suspicious. Or at least confused. “What do you mean? Is this someone you met in Florida?”

  “It’s one of the other journalists.”

  “How nice! What magazine does she write for?”

  “It’s not a she.”

  After a long silence, Amanda croaked, “You have a date?”

  “It’s not exactly a date,” Mallory insisted. “Like I said, I’m simply having dinner with one of the other writers on the trip. We’re just friends.”

  The silence at the other end of the line seemed to last an eternity. Mallory was beginning to wonder if the capricious technology behind cell phones had failed.

  But then Amanda said, “Mother, I think that’s wonderful. That you’re spending time with a man, I mean.”

  The girl was full of surprises. “You do?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s important for you to make all kinds of new friends—including male friends. Platonic relationships with members of the opposite sex can play a very important role in building a person’s self-esteem.”

  Mallory was contemplating whether or not to say that she wasn’t so sure Wade belonged in the platonic category when Amanda instructed, “Now, I want you to do your best to have a good time tonight. And remember: You’re a very interesting person with a lot of worthwhile things to say. You can do this. There’s absolutely no reason to be nervous.”

  Just hearing the word nervous sent Mallory into a tizzy. She was suddenly back to obsessing over the presentability of her arms, her collection of inappropriate outfits, a platonic relationship versus the almost unimaginable alternative…. By the time she hung up, she was completely convinced she’d made a mistake in agreeing to have dinner with Wade, even if scores of pirates would be serving as her chaperones.