A Job to Kill For

by Janice Kaplan

  “Only on life,” he said.

  I rubbed thumb and forefinger against my nose. “I noticed you rubbing your nose when I first arrived, and you’ve been sniffling since I got here,” I said.

  “Allergies,” he said. “Nothing more exciting than that. Do you think I’d be hanging out here if I had enough cash for cocaine?”

  “What would you do instead?”

  “Go clubbing with Britney Spears,” he said snidely.

  “Or club Britney Spears, which might be a better idea,” I said.

  He laughed and I decided to believe him. Maybe I was deceiving myself because I wanted to see if the e-mail messages gave a glimpse into Cassie’s mind. Either way, I put on the helmet, and Billy reached over to help me adjust the strap.

  “You okay riding in that skirt?” he asked.

  I swished the prettily pleated silk Escada, which had plenty of swirls to settle around me without hiking up. Fortunately, I’d given up wearing pencil skirts long ago. No use pretending you were still a thin line Pentel when you’d moved to Uni-ball extra-wide.

  Billy patted the seat and I climbed on. He put on his own helmet, settled in front of me, and revved the engine.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  He turned around and flashed a devilish grin. I grinned back, my excitement rising. My face flushed and my whole body throbbed with anticipation. No wonder good girls like Cassie fell for bad boys like Billy Mann. Dancing on the edge of danger—whether with men, motorcycles, or sex—made you feel alive.

  “What do I do?” I asked.

  “Hold on to me,” he said, facing front again and grabbing the handlebars.

  We took off down the road, and I felt a surge of adrenaline. Not the scary I’d better fight that tiger sensation, but the Wow, I could soar forever feeling. Wind in the face, hair blowing, world rushing by in a blur of color wasn’t a bad way to get from here to…

  Here to where?

  Maybe I hadn’t acted quite as responsibly as I thought.

  I peeked sideways around my helmet and strained to get my bearings. Late afternoon and the sun glimmered to my left, so we were heading north. Good for me. But after that, my internal GPS gave up the ghost. Pressed up against the leather-clad back of a man I’d just met, I couldn’t see very much, and I didn’t dare let go for a better view.

  Billy made a quick left onto a highway, and in just a couple of miles took an exit. I thought I caught a sign for Lincoln Boulevard, but now the pumping adrenaline had turned me into a heart-pounding, ears-buzzing, hands-trembling mess. I had to calm down.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to relax. When I opened them again, a boat basin came into view, the very blue water broken by long piers packed with vessels for sailing, motoring, and showing off newly minted money. Surrounding all of it, high-rise condominiums stood like glass-and-steel lighthouses, beacons of success for the smaller dinghies passing through.

  I sighed. Admiralty Way in Marina del Rey. Not exactly South Central LA. The only gang warfare here involved faux gangplanks. Billy drew the bike to a stop and jumped off. He held out a hand and I climbed down, more tentatively. My legs felt stiff from the tension of straddling the seat, and I took a few bowlegged steps.

  “Walking like that is the sign of a good ride,” Billy said with a wink.

  “My first time on a bike,” I admitted.

  Billy cupped his hand at my chin. “Do it a lot, and it gets better and better.”

  He turned around, and I expected Billy to head inland, toward one of the less-opulent apartment buildings. Instead, he began striding toward the water. At a gate marked BOAT OWNERS ONLY, he waved me forward.

  “Boat owner?” I asked. “Sunfish or six-masted schooner?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We walked down the pier, where boats ranged from twenty-four-foot day-sailers to motor cruisers four times that size. The boats all had names gracefully painted on the stern, but the tradition of christening a ship after a beautiful woman seemed to have given way to showing off. A huge sailboat, clearly the toy of a Hollywood producer, boasted Big Opening Weekend, and another with shiny wooden detailing that must have cost a small fortune declared Ain’t I Smart.

  “I like this one. The Lucky Duck,” I said reading the name off a smaller sailboat halfway down the dock. “At least someone can count his blessings.”

  “The owner’s a nice guy,” Billy said. A moment later he swung onto a boat prosaically christened DreamRide, which didn’t tell me much.

  “Is this yours?” I asked, struck by the contrast between the grimy store where we’d just been and the clean, well-ordered boat.

  “Nah, I just pick a different one to sail every night,” Billy said. Then, seeing my shocked look, he laughed. “Of course it’s mine. Help me rig and we’ll get out of here.”

  I hadn’t been sailing since age twelve, when I spent two weeks at a sleep-over camp on the shores of Lake Pashakee. Back then, we had a one-hour period for sailing and usually spent forty-five minutes of it trying to rig the boat. Since one of the older girls at camp had told me that Pashakee was Native American for “People drown in this lake all the time,” I didn’t mind staying close to shore.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, trying to remember the difference between starboard and leeward.

  “Grab this mainsheet,” Billy said, handing me a thick rope. I figured I’d be pulling it to raise the sail, but instead he pushed a button and the sail began rising on its own.

  “Neat,” I said, smiling. Apparently boats had changed since my camp days.

  With the sail raised, Billy tied down the rope he’d handed me, then hit some more buttons to start the engine humming. Within five minutes, we’d pulled out of the slip and cruised slowly into open water. If sailing had been this easy for Christopher Columbus, he’d have zipped to the Orient and never discovered America.

  Billy’s boat had a full-size steering wheel and the oceangoing version of cruise control. He set some dials that put us on a straight line to a distant point, and the wheel moved gently all by itself. With the steering under control, Billy disappeared underneath for a moment and came back with two frosty glasses.

  “Beer,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind. It’s all I have.”

  I took the glass, and Billy sat down next to me. I had about a million questions I wanted to ask him, including how he managed to afford a getup like this. But I had more urgent business.

  “So these e-mails from Cassie,” I said, getting right to the point. “I take it you keep them on the boat?”

  “Yup,” he said. “We’ll get to them.”

  “Obviously, you two stayed in touch even after she got married.”

  “Roger traveled a lot,” Billy said, briefly checking the horizon and glancing again at his directional settings. “Cassie needed a friend. Now that she was so rich, she didn’t trust a lot of the people who suddenly wanted to hang out with her.”

  “But you two had been hanging out for years.”

  Billy got up and leaned against the railing. “Old friends are the best friends. You give each other whatever you each need.”

  I suddenly got it. “Cassie gave you the boat, is that it? And you’d take her out whenever she wanted to get away?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s say she did. That’d make it pretty obvious that I didn’t kill her, don’t you think? I mean, you don’t knock off the goose that lays the golden egg.”

  I thought about it for a moment. His logic made sense. But something didn’t add up. Billy said he’d been waiting for the cops to come since Cassie died.

  “Why would you be a suspect in her murder?” I asked.

  Billy slowly rolled up his shirt sleeve and pointed to a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his left bicep. He flexed the muscle a couple of times, and the tattoo seemed to jump out and stare down at the dragon that wound its way up his right arm.

  “Tattooed biker dude with piercings, two drug arrests, and a bad ’tude,” said Billy. “Pin it on
me and everybody’s happy.”

  “Sure that’s not drug-induced paranoia?” I asked.

  “I told you I’m not high,” he said irritably. The appealing gloss of charm had evaporated, and his soft, warm eyes now looked hard and angry.

  “Did Roger know you and Cassie still saw each other?”

  “Probably. When you’re a billionaire, you know everything. Or you think you do.”

  I leaned back. “I’m sorry, Billy, you’ve got me confused. If Roger had been knocked off, I’d have you on my suspects list. On the other hand, I don’t see what you get out of having Cassie dead, except maybe ownership of a very nice boat—but you had that anyway.”

  Billy looked relieved. “Yeah, maybe I’m overreacting.” He walked across the deck and took a pair of binoculars from under a seat. “You can usually see some dolphins and porpoises in the water. Occasionally a whale. Take a look, and I’ll go get the stuff we were talking about.”

  I took the binoculars and leaned over the railing while Billy went back underneath. The setting sun loomed large on the horizon. Grant had once explained to me why the orange ball that warms our planet seems so much bigger at the end of the day—something about the angle of refraction of light. Or maybe it’s that at the end of the day everything looms larger: Small problems burn in importance and terror lurks in the darkening shadows.

  Suddenly, the boat jerked, the bow lurching sharply to the left, and the sails began swinging wildly across the deck.

  “Get down!” Billy called from underneath.

  Before I could budge, the heavy boom smacked into the back of my shoulder.

  “Oww!” I screamed, clamping a hand on the sore spot and ducking—but not far enough. The boom teetered back and forth and, gathering additional force in the wind, slammed terrifyingly into the back of my head.

  “Help!” I yelled. My head reeling from the pain of the blow, I tottered forward and lost my footing. I tumbled over the railing, plunging through the air and…

  Splat.

  I landed in the water with such incredible force that it felt like I’d smacked into cement. Then the inexplicably hard surface gave way and I began sinking into the cold, dark ocean. Icy water pierced my clothes and covered my face. I hadn’t had time to close my mouth as I fell, and now I choked on a mouthful of brine, coughing madly as the salt water penetrated down to my lungs. I kicked hard to get to the surface, but being completely disoriented, I instead forced myself down deeper. My eyes burned, and holding my breath was out of the question, because all the air had been forced out of me on impact.

  Was this how people drowned? I’d been swimming all my life, but that hardly mattered. Now the water had turned into an enemy, fighting my efforts to escape from its cold clutches. I clawed at the water, desperate to surface but getting nowhere. Something slimy brushed by my face, and I slapped at it in panic. A jellyfish? Used condom? Slippery side of an electric eel?

  I flailed my arms, as out of control as Ashley used to be when she threw tantrums as a toddler. Back then, I’d hug her arms tightly to her sides to help her calm down.

  Something I could try now.

  I crossed my arms in front of my chest and made myself stop kicking. I hoped to pop to the surface like a cork, but instead I hovered in the water. An image flashed in my head of the batches of brownies Jimmy and I made early every Saturday morning. Happy to be with him, I’d stopped counting calories and gained five pounds. If I sunk to the bottom and drowned now, the coroner could call it death by chocolate.

  Wait a minute. Didn’t fat float? Instead of dying from not dieting, I could be saved by Betty Crocker.

  Sure enough, as my body became slightly more relaxed, I began to bob toward the surface. At least I assumed it was the surface, because I saw little glimmers of light. I turned upward, and in a moment my face broke through to air.

  I coughed and spluttered for oxygen.

  “Help!” I called into the gathering darkness.

  I started kicking again, but this time to keep myself above water. The flowing Escada skirt, now a sodden mess, pulled heavily against my legs. No time for modesty. I put my shaking fingers to the waistband, found the zipper, and tugged. In a moment, the wet fabric slipped off and floated away. My shoes had fallen off long ago, and now I could swim freely.

  But where to go? The current moved faster than I expected, and small waves splashed over my chilled skin. I could see the outline of Billy’s boat, moving steadily away from me in the gentle evening breeze. I looked around frantically, but no other boat came into view. Where was the Coast Guard at a time like this? Or even a cruise ship. If I had to eat seafood buffets and play shuffleboard to be saved, I’d do it.

  “Woman overboard!” I shouted.

  Maybe I could flash an SOS. Though come to think of it, I’d heard that Morse code had been dropped on the high seas. Not that I knew it in the first place.

  “Bill-eeeee!” I yelled. My voice was muffled by the waves but unexpectedly, the boat turned and began to head back toward me.

  Now a new panic set in. Had Billy deliberately knocked the boom in my direction to send me into the water? If so, I didn’t want to get anywhere near him. As the boat approached, I turned and started to swim fast in the opposite direction. Then I stopped. Not a wise decision. Did I really want to spend the night swimming desperately toward a shore I couldn’t see?

  “Lacy, La-cee,” called a voice from the boat that was overtaking me now.

  “I’m here,” I shouted back to Billy.

  He hadn’t lowered the sails, but the grinding roar of the motor came closer. Then I heard a splash as a life preserver landed twenty yards away. I started swimming toward it, but Billy reeled it back in.

  “Another try!” he called, and I saw him on the edge of the boat, hurling the ring again. This time, it plopped down ten feet in front of me.

  “Nice throw,” I said lunging for the round orange ring.

  “Grab it and hang on,” he directed.

  I did exactly that, and in a minute I was riding the waves, being pulled gently back to the boat.

  And back toward the spinning blades of the motor.

  “Turn that off!” I screamed, over the roaring noise.

  Billy must have complied, because a sudden stillness came over the water. Relief flooded through me as I passed inches from the motor, now mercifully stopped. Billy hung a metal staircase on the stern of the boat and drew me close enough to reach it. Anxiously, I put one foot on the cold metal and hefted myself up. When I got to the second step, Billy reached down, put his arms around my waist and lifted me into the boat.

  “Are you okay?” he asked as I sat down shivering on the bottom of the boat.

  I nodded dumbly.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  He reached down to the deck and came up with a dirty green towel that he bundled around my shoulders.

  “You’re shaking. You’ve got to get out of those wet clothes.”

  “I’m out of most of them,” I said. I wrapped my arms around my bare, goosebump-covered legs and rubbed them to warm up. My hands quickly turned black and oily. I shuddered, not wanting to think about what had been with me in the drink.

  “Jeez, what a weird accident,” he said. “Good thing you can swim. I probably should have made you put on a life vest before we went out, but I didn’t think of it.”

  “Do you even have them?” I asked, looking around the boat for the requisite orange jackets.

  “Of course. It’s the law.”

  I nodded, trying to convince myself that Billy Mann cared about following laws.

  “You’re right, I’d like to get into something dry,” I said, unable to stop trembling. “Do you have anything I can borrow?”

  Billy eyed me carefully. “Probably,” he said. “Let’s look.”

  He helped me stand up again, and with an arm steadying me at the elbow he led me belowdeck, past a tiny galley kitchen and a bathroom with a re
al shower—and into a full-size sleeping cabin. A big bed filled most of the area, tucked into the V-shaped front of the boat and expanding back. Pale peach sheets and a chenille blanket lay tangled over the mattress, though there’d been some effort to straighten up—the pillows were piled neatly, and a folded duvet rested along the edge. A small chest had been built into the opposite wall. One of the drawers stood partly open, and a hairbrush and travel-size tube of toothpaste rested on the bureau top. That they hadn’t fallen suggested it had been a calmer ride belowdeck than above.

  Billy reached to the far side of the bed and pulled up a bright yellow dress clumped into a ball. He shook it out. “You can wear this,” he said, handing it to me. “In fact, you can have it.”

  I’d had my share of surprises today. I’d ridden a motorcycle, risked drowning, and ripped off my clothes in front of a man I barely knew. But nothing quite prepared me to see a vintage Nina Ricci couture cocktail dress with a wrapped bodice and delicate hand-sewn beading. It had to be worth thousands of dollars. I’d expect to see it on the red carpet at the Golden Globes, but not balled up under a bed.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked, holding the gown up to my shoulders. Whoever wore the dress before had been taller and thinner than me—and probably tanner, too. “Are you sneaking into Renee Zellweger’s closet? Making deals with Reese Witherspoon’s stylist?”

  He shrugged. “Someone left it here.” Then, changing the subject rapidly, he said, “At least it’s something to wear home. Get you out of the wet clothes.” He tugged at the half-open bureau drawer and produced a cashmere wrap in the same shade of yellow. “This goes with it. A little warmer. Get dressed and I’ll come back.”

  He left again, and I slowly peeled off my wet shirt and lace La Mystere cleavage-enhancing bra. The padded push-up cups had absorbed the ocean water like sponges, thrusting my chest up toward my chin. When I unhooked the now-heavy bra, my breasts sagged but my spirit soared. I pondered the matching panties for a moment, and then stepped casually out of them. It felt strange, but I’d read about all the celebrities going commando—i.e., wearing only a bikini wax under their clothes—so I could give it a try. Though frankly, the expression seemed odd. “Going commando” had a vaguely military sound, as if army corporals defending America’s freedom tossed their Calvins before aiming their guns.