Murder Packs a Suitcase

by Cynthia Baxter

  “Would you like a drink?” Mallory suggested.

  “I usually just have water in restaurants,” Annabelle replied. “It’s an easy way of keeping the cost down. Not only in terms of the drink itself, but also the tax and tip.”

  Oh, dear, Mallory thought. The budget thing, even at a time like this.

  Annabelle let out another loud sniffle. “But maybe I’ll splurge this one time and treat myself to a Diet Coke.”

  “I was thinking of something a little stronger,” Mallory said. “Something that might make you feel better.” She scanned the menu. “How about a Race-A-Rita?”

  “You mean alcohol?” Annabelle seemed shocked. “I don’t usually drink at lunch. Not when restaurants charge such exorbitant amounts for—wow! Will you look at these prices?”

  “It’s on me,” Mallory insisted, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “In fact, I’ll join you.”

  She scanned the menu, struggling to make sense of the unusual combinations of alcohol, fruit juices, and even some ingredients that had no place in alcoholic beverages, such as ice cream, bananas, and chocolate syrup.

  “How about an Oil Slick?” she finally proposed. It was just beer with a fancy name, but she figured that was less likely to get Annabelle loopy than one of the restaurant’s more creative concoctions. It also happened to be one of the cheapest drinks on the menu, which meant her tightwad of a dining companion wouldn’t have such a hard time allowing herself to indulge.

  “I guess I’ll have one of those Race-A-Ritas,” Annabelle finally decided.

  “Let’s order some food, too,” Mallory suggested. The last thing she wanted was to end up with a luncheon companion who was slumped on the table, sobbing into her glass over her lost love.

  Fortunately, their waiter came by almost immediately.

  “A Race-A-Rita for my friend, and I’ll try a Barney’s Purple Passion.” Mallory hoped Annabelle wouldn’t notice that the drink she’d ordered for herself had no alcohol mixed in with the raspberries and ice cream.

  “Would you like those in a fuel can?” the waiter asked matter-of-factly, glancing up from his pad.

  Mallory blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “You can get your drinks in a fuel can with the Race Rock logo,” he explained, pointing to the fine print on the menu. “Or for an extra charge, you can get it in a twenty-two-ounce logo collector pub glass.”

  “I think we’ll both stick with a regular glass,” Mallory told him. “And we’d like some appetizers. How about an order of the Chicken Dragsters and some Nitro Wings…easy on the High Octane Nitro Sauce?”

  Mallory had come to this bizarre place with the goal of calming Annabelle down—and perhaps even finding out more about the man who had not only been murdered but also had some mysterious connection to her dead husband. Yet now that she was here, she couldn’t stop the newly uncovered writer’s voice in her head from narrating the experience.

  Race Rock offers travelers a chance to feast on foods with a race-track theme—or at least race-track-themed names—in a truly unique environment. Where else can a vacationer dine on Nitro Wings dipped in a High Octane sauce while watching racing footage on a tremendous screen, enjoying the rrr-rrr sound that’s unique to this popular pastime?

  “Sorry about all this,” Annabelle suddenly said, gesturing at the clump of damp tissues wadded up in one hand. “I don’t usually get so emotional about things.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Mallory insisted, her thoughts returning to the assignment at hand. “Not when you had such a close relationship with Phil.”

  All of a sudden, instead of seeing an irritating travel writer who was obsessed with pinching pennies, Mallory saw Annabelle as a woman in pain. True, it was difficult to imagine any woman falling in love with an oaf like Phil, but there was probably no greater mystery on earth than the reason one person was attracted to another. Couples had their own secret life, one that no one else was privy to. Even attempting to comprehend it was usually a waste of time.

  Fortunately, the waiter brought their drinks quickly. He seemed to have had some experience with tourists who were at the end of their rope and had become desperate for alcoholic beverages served in tall curvy glasses that resembled hurricane lamps—even if it was still way before noon.

  As she stirred her purple foamy drink, Mallory commented, “I have to admit, I had no idea you and Phil were…a couple.”

  She hoped she’d used the correct term. She braced herself for a confession of unrequited love. Or worse yet, a heartbreaking report that Annabelle and Phil’s relationship had consisted of nothing more than a series of one-night stands in travel destinations all around the globe, everywhere from Albuquerque to Zanzibar, which Annabelle had interpreted as love and Phil had seen as one of the perks of travel writing, along with free shampoo and gift baskets.

  So Mallory was relieved that Annabelle nodded. She opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, but instead leaned over and took a long, slow sip of her bright-orange Race-A-Rita. In fact, by the time she came up for air, a full third of the gigantic hurricane lamp was empty except for a thin film of foam around the glass.

  “It started about five years ago,” she began. “I’d just gotten into writing travel articles. I think I was on my third or fourth press trip—”

  “What did you do before you got into travel writing?” Mallory asked. She couldn’t resist learning everything she could about Annabelle Gatch’s history while her guard was down and her blood alcohol level was climbing.

  “I was a technical writer. I wrote pamphlets on how to program your VCR or change the message on your answering machine.”

  No wonder no one can figure out how to do those things, Mallory thought.

  “Anyway, I was in the BVI—”

  She blinked. “I’m sorry, the what?”

  “The BVI,” Annabelle repeated. “The British Virgin Islands.”

  “Got it.”

  Annabelle took another impressively long sip of her drink, wiping out another third. Mallory glanced around the restaurant, hoping their waiter would materialize so she could order Annabelle another before she started making embarrassing slurping sounds.

  “There were five journalists on that trip,” Annabelle continued, “along with the usual escort. This one happened to be from the PR firm that represented the BVI’s Tourism Board.”

  A faraway look had come into her eyes and her voice sounded uncharacteristically dreamy. Whether that was due to her trip down memory lane or the fact that she’d just downed enough alcohol to incapacitate a sailor, Mallory couldn’t say. Still, she pushed the plate of chicken wings closer to Annabelle, hoping she’d take the hint and add a little solid food to all the tequila sloshing around in her stomach.

  “I barely noticed him at first,” Annabelle continued. “In fact,” she added with a smile, “believe it or not, I actually thought he was kind of obnoxious.”

  Imagine that, Mallory thought wryly.

  “At least, until the third night,” Annabelle went on. “That was Calypso Night. The hotel we were staying at, the Tortoise Island Resort, had set up a table right on the beach for just the six of us. All around us were tiki torches that were stuck into the sand. We had a whole team of waiters, who brought us one course after another. I can’t tell you how beautiful it was. Or how romantic. Sitting on the beach under a sky filled with stars and a big, bright moon…”

  Mallory could picture the entire scene. In fact, she could practically hear the waves pounding on the shore and experience the grittiness of a grain of sand that had found its way into her appetizer.

  “Anyway, somehow I ended up sitting next to Phil, even though I’d kind of been avoiding him up until then,” Annabelle went on. “And for the first time, we talked. I mean, we really talked. Not only about the past, but also about our hopes and dreams for the future. And before long, we both realized there was a real connection between us. That we were meant to be together. It was almost as if we were soul mates.”
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br />   Somehow, Mallory was having a difficult time picturing boorish Phil as anyone’s soul mate. Unless, of course, he thought that playing that role would result in a payoff—namely, one that took advantage of the fact that hotels changed the sheets every day. Yet given Annabelle’s sincerity, she had no choice but to concede that there was at least a possibility that the man had had another side to him.

  “That was probably the most amazing night of my life,” Annabelle said wistfully. “After dinner, all the other writers went off to their rooms. But Phil and I walked along the beach, holding hands.” She sighed. “It was incredibly romantic. It was also the beginning of something wonderful. That same night, Phil and I made love for the very first time. It happened on the terrace outside his room, overlooking the Caribbean Sea.”

  I hope that terrace wasn’t also overlooking the kitchen, Mallory thought. Or else that’s a night the hired help is still talking about, too.

  “We made love three times,” Annabelle told her.

  Too much information! Mallory thought, wincing.

  Annabelle didn’t seem to notice. “Phil and I connected in a way I’d never connected with anyone else before,” she continued in the same dreamy voice. “Neither of us slept a wink that night. We were too busy getting to know each other. For me, it was as if I’d been in a deep sleep and I’d just woken up for the first time in my life.

  “But we knew our relationship would never work in the real world,” Annabelle continued, her voice hardening. “Not when I had my life in Baltimore and he had his far away in Los Angeles.”

  Just like Wade and me, Mallory thought. She quickly reprimanded herself for being as silly and starry-eyed as Annabelle.

  “So we decided that we’d simply do our best to go on the same press trips,” Annabelle concluded. “And that’s what we’ve done ever since. We always pretended we didn’t know each other well because we didn’t want to embarrass anyone else on the trip. But for us, each travel junket was another secret rendezvous. Phil and I have made love in Barbados, Madrid, Namibia, New Dehli, Boston, the Canary Islands, and Fallbrook.”

  “Fallbrook?”

  “Fallbrook, California. The avocado capital of the world.”

  Pretty convenient, Mallory thought cynically, especially for a man like Phil. Not only was he accumulating frequent flyer miles, at the same time he was racking up another type of benefit that also began with the letter F.

  Annabelle leaned forward and slurped up the rest of her drink. Instead of making her even more intoxicated, however, for some unfathomable reason, reaching the bottom of a hurricane glass the size of a tornado seemed to sober her up.

  “But ever since Sunday, I’ve been in a panic.” For the first time since they’d sat down, she sounded like her old crusty self. “I can’t help worrying about what will happen if the police find out.”

  “You mean you didn’t tell Detective Martinez about it?” Mallory asked, startled.

  Annabelle snorted. “Why would I? The fact that Phil and I were intimate is bound to make me a suspect.” She narrowed her eyes. “And of course I didn’t kill him. Why would I? I was in love with him, for heaven’s sake! I’m the last person in the world who would have wanted him dead!”

  “Of course,” Mallory agreed.

  Yet she was thinking the exact opposite. Annabelle’s admission that she and Phil had been enjoying a lot more than free HBO in their hotel rooms hardly absolved her of guilt. In fact, as far as Mallory was concerned, it shot her way to the top of the suspect list.

  As Annabelle had admitted herself, the police almost always began a murder investigation by focusing on the murder victim’s significant other. And Mallory saw no reason why she shouldn’t do the same.

  12

  “Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.”

  —Anne Sophie Swetchine

  Mallory was still pondering the unlikely pairing of Phil Diamond and Annabelle Gatch later that day as she drove to Kissimmee, a town just south of Orlando on the map.

  The more I learn about the other travel writers, she marveled, the more amazed I am. It turns out you really can’t judge a book by its cover.

  At the moment, however, she had other things to concentrate on besides the intrigues of her fellow travelers and how they might relate to Phil’s murder. On the agenda were two stores that she sensed would turn out to do a pretty good job of capturing the old Florida.

  She pulled up in front of Orange World, a gift shop and produce store on Highway 192. When she’d stumbled across it while doing research on the web, she’d known immediately that it would be perfect for her article. For one thing, it had opened in 1973, meaning its roots were in the golden days of Florida tourism. Yet probably even more important was the fact that the building was designed to look like the piece of fruit that had inspired its name—at least its top half. The bright-orange, dome-shaped structure epitomized kitsch—especially Florida kitsch.

  How wonderful that this building survived, she thought as she snapped a few photos.

  Outside were bins filled with brilliantly colored oranges, grapefruits, and even tangelos. Mallory had never dreamed that so many different varieties of citrus fruits existed. Unable to resist a little shopping, she grabbed a plastic basket and picked out a bag of oranges. Each one was perfect, making them look as if someone had painted them with a coat of orange enamel.

  Inside the shop, she found the usual tourist paraphernalia, the T-shirts and baseball caps and pens that were available pretty much everywhere. She was much more interested in the grocery section, which was stocked with local specialties produced by Florida-based companies. Mallory filled a basket for Amanda with several flavors of coconut patties and jellied citrus fruit squares that were made right in Orlando. For Jordan, she chose a chocolate alligator called a ChocoGator, which was packed in a box with so-called Gummie Gators. Personally, she found both types of candy creepy, but that was exactly why she thought her son would get a kick out of them. After a long debate, she tossed a jar of guava jelly into her basket, figuring she’d give it to Trevor.

  Her second stop was a store that was farther along the same road. Shell World, which had opened a few years after Orange World, occupied a whopping twelve thousand square feet. Before going inside, she took photos of the Volkswagen covered in seashells and the golf cart with the same motif, both parked outside. For no apparent reason, a statue of a pirate guarded the door. Mallory looked for a treasure chest—one filled with seashells, of course—but there was none.

  Inside, Shell World was all that its name promised. Aisle after aisle was jampacked with merchandise that was a tribute to the seashell. Seashell wind chimes, seashell night-lights, seashell necklaces, seashell tissue boxes, seashell boxes, seashell wreathes, even a curtain made of shells, which could be purchased with or without a palm tree design created by different colored shells.

  The store’s inventory also extended to any and every other item that was even vaguely related to the sea: plastic lobsters, mermaid snow globes, rubber sharks. There were also aisles containing nothing but seashells in their natural state, in case shoppers became so inspired they wanted to go home and cover various parts of their homes or possessions with shells.

  Mallory wandered through the Seashell Museum, which featured exhibits of different types of starfish, sand dollars, and other unusual sea creatures. “Reticulated cowrie helmet,” she wrote in her notebook. “Video on deep-sea diving.”

  While at first she’d been horrified by the store’s seashell-themed wares, as she snaked through the aisles on her way out, she kept stumbling across items that caught her fancy. A seashell night-light for the bathroom, shell earrings for Amanda, one of the rubber sharks for Jordan, even though she had no idea what he’d use it for. She also bought a few shell-covered boxes, soap dishes, and necklaces for purposes that had yet to be determined.

  I’d better get out of here before I buy enough shells to cover my Subaru back home, s
he thought.

  As she came out of Shell World, blinking in the bright sunlight, she glanced around, wondering if Highway 192 had any other treasures left over from the old Florida days. Her heart began to beat faster when she spotted a building right across the street that she hadn’t noticed when she’d arrived.

  It was shaped like a giant ice-cream cone.

  Patrice, she thought. Phil Diamond’s ex-wife.

  She knew that Patrice was no longer in the ice-cream business. But she couldn’t resist checking this place out on the off chance that the person who worked there might know something about her.

  Mallory hurried into her PT Cruiser, got back on the road, and made the first U-turn she could. As she pulled into the parking lot, she saw that the ice-cream shop’s window was cut out of the “cone” and giant swirls of what was supposed to be soft-serve vanilla ice cream formed the roof.

  Mallory was afraid the stand would be manned by a sixteen-year-old whose idea of ancient history was Bill Clinton’s presidency. Instead, a woman who was at least Mallory’s age stood at the counter, hunched over a magazine. She was wearing an orange halter top made of fabric that looked wet and slippery, and a pair of denim shorts that were daringly short. Her hair, dyed an unnatural shade of red that still managed to look flattering, was piled up on her head and held in place with half a dozen silver barrettes.

  “What can I get you, hon?” the woman asked. She barely glanced up from an article that, according to the headline, promised “amazing weight loss secrets” that enabled someone to lose ten pounds in one week while eating chocolate cake.

  “I’ll have a vanilla cone,” Mallory replied without even bothering to check the short menu posted along the back wall.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much what everybody has,” the woman replied with a knowing smile. “Power of suggestion, you know? Small or large?”

  “Uh, small.”

  “Ever hear of subliminal messages?” the woman asked as she stood at the gleaming silver soft-serve machine, expertly filling a normal-size cone with a tower of ice cream. “It’s a technique people in advertising use all the time. See, they sneak secret messages into the ads you see on TV. In magazines, too. Like in a vodka ad, the swirls in the ice cubes spell out ‘Buy Stoli Now!’ That’s how they brainwash you. Anyway, I swear that’s what this giant ice-cream cone over my head does. It makes people order vanilla.”