A more interesting itinerary would be a plus, too. Cruising the Baltic, cruising the South Pacific—there were some genuinely exotic routes available to cruise ships, going places he’d like to see.
Places he’d like to take Jenny. She was sure to love life aboard ship, and there were plenty of activities for kids if he and Julia wanted some private time.
Plenty to think about. And he’d much rather keep his mind busy with that sort of thing than with their final hours aboard the Carefree Nights. Which didn’t promise to be all that carefree.
Thirty
The fish on the dinner menu that last night was marlin, lightly grilled and served with a brown butter sauce. The two women ordered it, as did Roy. Keller asked for the filet mignon, medium rare.
“Well, that’s a switch,” Roy said. “This must be the first time I’ve seen you have anything but fish. I was beginning to wonder if you shouldn’t be the one collecting fish stamps.”
When you ordered fish, the waiter took away your ordinary table knife and gave you an oddly shaped fish knife. No one ever seemed to use it, and Keller figured any piece of fish he couldn’t cut with the side of his fork was one he didn’t much want to eat.
When you ordered steak, they brought you a steak knife.
At one thirty, Keller scanned the Sun Deck. All was quiet, and he couldn’t see anyone around. At dinner they’d requested that all bags be placed out in the corridor by three a.m., so that crew members could collect them prior to departure, and the occupants of all four Sun Deck cabins had already complied.
Keller positioned himself in front of the door to stateroom 501. Several pieces of luggage were on the deck to his right. There was music playing within the cabin, barely audible through the heavy door, and the DO NOT DISTURB sign was suspended from the knob.
He had the key in his pocket, the one Julia had picked up for him, but he left it there and knocked. Carina opened it at once, wearing a pale yellow nightgown to which he supposed the word diaphanous might apply. He got a whiff of her perfume and a sense of her body heat as she reached to embrace him, then stopped herself when she realized that wasn’t in the script anymore.
Instead she made do with stating the obvious: “You’re here.”
He was, and so was Carmody, stretched out on the bed on his back, naked to the world but for a pair of boxer shorts and an arresting amount of body hair. The man’s mouth was hanging open and he was breathing slowly and heavily through it. The music Keller had heard through the door was still low in volume. Soft jazz, and Keller recognized the song but couldn’t put a name to it.
“I put the powder in his nightcap,” she said. “He drank it.”
No kidding, Keller thought.
“He wanted to fuck me,” she said, “but he passed out instead. You know where I can get some more of that powder?”
Keller had obtained it by crushing two capsules, collecting the powder in a folded-up slip of paper. As arranged, he’d met Carina that afternoon and passed it to her, along with instructions for its use. If he’d given it to her earlier she might have rushed things, and he hadn’t wanted that.
“Out like a light,” she said. “Look at him, hairy like an ape. You know what I almost did?”
“What?”
“Put a pillow over his face. I thought, what if he wakes up? But he wouldn’t wake up. He’s dead to the world, and a few minutes with a pillow over his face and he’d stay that way forever. Save you the trouble, huh?”
Satin Doll, Duke Ellington and his orchestra. That’s what was playing.
He said, “It’s good you restrained yourself.”
“Why? I would have paid you all the same. You’re the one gave me the magic powder.”
“You want it to look like death by natural causes.”
“So? He stops breathing, his heart stops beating, he’s dead. What’s more natural than that?”
“He’d have these pinpoint hemorrhages in his eyeballs.”
“So his eyes bleed, what do I care? What’s it gonna hurt him if he’s dead?”
“They’d see the hemorrhages,” he said patiently, “and they’d know immediately that he’d been smothered.”
“Oh, fuck,” she said. “Like CSI?”
“Something like that. And who do you think they just might suspect of smothering him?”
“Fuck. Good I didn’t do it.”
“I’d say.”
“So,” she said. “How you gonna make it look natural?”
He moved quickly to the side of the bed, drew the steak knife from his pocket, and sank it between two of Michael Carmody’s ribs and into his heart. The body shook with a brief tremor, the hands raised up an inch or so from the bed, and then all was still.
“Holy fuck!”
“Well,” Keller said.
“You just killed him. Just like that.”
“You’re a rich widow. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“But you stabbed him! The knife’s right there sticking out of him!”
“Good point,” Keller said, and removed the knife. There was hardly any blood on it.
“But won’t they see the wound? How’s that gonna look like natural causes?”
“Now, that’s a good question,” he said, and reached for her.
Thirty-One
The ship docked in Port Everglades before breakfast, and at nine o’clock passengers were allowed to disembark. Keller collected their bags in the cruise terminal, and a cab had them at the airport three hours before their flight home.
They found a place to have coffee, and Julia said, “You didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, but I’ll ask now. It’s done, isn’t it?”
“It’s done.”
“I want to hear, but I don’t want to hear now. Okay?”
“Sure.”
“I miss Jenny. I miss her like crazy. I’ve been sort of holding that off to one side, how much I miss her, but now we’re on dry land and we’ll be home in a couple of hours and it’s okay to let myself feel it. I miss her something fierce.”
“So do I.”
“They were nice, weren’t they? Roy and Myrt.”
“Very.”
“And there was a lot to him besides the stamps. That opened the door, but he’s an interesting person in other respects, don’t you think?”
“Definitely.”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing them again. I wonder if we ever will.”
“We have their email.”
“And they have ours, but did you see all the people exchanging email addresses last night? How many of them do you think will ever get in touch?”
“We could make a point of it,” he said. “Maybe go on a cruise with them again sometime.”
“With Jenny, though.”
“Absolutely.”
“And with no—”
“Work connected to it. Again, absolutely.”
“That might be fun. Okay, I think I’ll read the paper now. There won’t be anything in the paper, will there? No, of course there won’t, it’s far too soon. Honey? We’ll talk later.”
“Okay.”
“When I’m ready.”
“Right.”
Keller always liked the New Orleans airport, not least of all because it was named for Louis Armstrong. He didn’t know who O’Hare was, but doubted he ever amounted to much as a horn player. Neither did JFK or LaGuardia. Orange County had named an airport after John Wayne, and that was pretty good, and there was Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, but Keller figured New Orleans had them all topped.
They drove straight from the airport to the Wallings house. Donny wasn’t home from work yet, but Claudia and the kids were there, and something unwound in Keller the second he saw his daughter, something he hadn’t even known was coiled tight. He picked her up and nodded happily as she told him a million things, some of which he could even understand.
Claudia poured coffee and put out a plate of cookies, and Julia unzipped her bag and played Lady Bountiful, passing out present
s for everybody. Claudia got a blouse, which she professed to love, and for Donny Julia’d picked out a Hawaiian-style sport shirt with a desert island motif.
“I don’t know if he’ll ever wear it,” she said.
Claudia said, “Are you kidding? He’ll love it, and you know it’s something he’d never pick out and buy for himself. The hard part’ll be getting that man to take it off.”
The kids got what they got, and seemed content. And, as soon as they decently could, they packed up Jenny and headed for home.
He’d found a spare moment to call Dot from the Fort Lauderdale airport, reporting success in an ambiguous sentence or two, ringing off after she’d expressed congratulations. Now he busied himself with the week’s worth of mail. There was a new list from one of his favorite dealers, ten pages of Portugal and Colonies, and while it was hardly a priority, he’d been a week away from his stamps and couldn’t resist.
He was circling an 1899 set of four Lourenço Marques overprints when Julia came into the room. He looked up and saw her face.
“I found the story online,” she said.
“And?”
“It was simple and straightforward. An American couple, Mr. and Mrs. Michael Carmody, were found in their cabin, the victims of a double homicide. He’d been stabbed once, she’d been stabbed multiple times. The cabin was ransacked, and the apparent motive was robbery. The killer left behind an extra key card for the cabin, and one seems to have gone missing from the desk.”
Keller nodded. That was the connection they were supposed to make.
“The murder weapon was also left behind. It was a steak knife, suggesting that a member of the kitchen or dining room staff might have been responsible.”
“I can see how they might think that.”
“Yes.” She was sitting down now. Her hands were loosely clasped on the table in front of her, and she was looking down at them. “I knew you had to do it that way. Not the knife, I didn’t even think about how, but I knew you were going to kill them both.”
“I didn’t really have much choice.”
“No.”
“The minute she walked in on me in their cabin, it was pretty much settled. When I met her out on deck in the middle of the night—”
“Two a.m., wasn’t it?”
“Something like that. When she said what she wanted, I thought about doing her right then and there. Put her down fast and fling her overboard.”
“And take care of him later?”
“If I could figure out a way. What I decided was the best thing to do was wait until the last night.”
“And do them both.”
“Yes.”
She thought about this. “If you did what she thought you were going to do, made his death look like a heart attack—could you have done that?”
“I could have tried. But a good medical examiner wouldn’t be fooled. And the guy was going to be a star witness, and his two bodyguards had gone down the first day out of port.”
“One of them died.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It was in the article. And the other one’s still in the hospital in Nassau. Just a coincidence, as far as the early story is concerned, just a sign that this was a hard-luck cruise, because they don’t know there’s a connection between those two men and the Carmodys.”
“They will.”
“If he died and she didn’t, they’d question her.”
“Right.”
“And she’d fall apart.”
“Within a couple of hours, would be my guess.”
“Even if it passed for a heart attack—but it wouldn’t, would it?”
“If it was a genuine bona fide heart attack,” he said, “and she’s the just-married younger wife, who’s pretty much of a semipro hooker, they’d still grill her six ways and backwards.”
“Yes, of course they would. And she’d give you up in a New York minute, so there’s no question, you had to do them both. Multiple stab wounds?”
“The first one killed her,” he said. “The others were for show.”
“So at least it was fast. For whatever that’s worth.” She looked up. “Oh, what am I going on about? She was trash to the bone, she was trying to get her husband killed, so why should her dying bother me? ’Cause she was a woman? Like that makes a difference? Please.”
He didn’t say anything.
“They were both horrible people, and the two bodyguards were a pair of thugs, and what do I care about any of them? You know what it is?”
“You were there.”
“That’s exactly right. I was there. If I stayed home and you flew off somewhere and came back and told me the story, I wouldn’t be able to wait to get you in bed. Now all I am is slightly sick to my stomach. And I wasn’t just there, darling. I was a participant. I got you the card key.”
“That’s true.”
“Doesn’t that make me an accessory? Of course it does. I don’t mean legally, I don’t care about that. I mean the way I feel. Is there something I can do? So I don’t feel like this?”
“Take a shower.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
She went off to do so, and he returned to his price list, but had trouble staying focused. He was still sitting there when she came back wearing a robe with her hair wrapped up in a white towel.
She said, “I couldn’t see what good a shower would do, but I have to say I feel a little better. Isn’t there something you do afterward to get over it?”
He’d performed the exercise the previous evening, before he fell asleep, and he talked her through it now: picturing the victim, concentrating hard on the image, and then turning it over to the Photoshop of the mind: shrinking it, fading it, pushing it off into the distance, until it was an undefined gray dot that ultimately vanished altogether.
“It’s hard to do,” she said.
“It gets easier with practice.”
“I suppose it must. I’ll work with it. And I may take more showers than usual over the next week or so. But I don’t want to have to do this again.”
“No.”
“I’m not sorry I was there. This is something you do, and I’m fine that you do it, and I even like it a lot more than I don’t. And I should know what it’s like, what it feels like. I didn’t, and now I do.”
“But once is enough.”
“Once is plenty. Oh, a price list. ‘Portugal and Colonies.’ Are you finding stamps that you need?”
“A few.”
“That’s good,” she said. “What and where is Lourenço Marques?”
“It’s part of Mozambique.”
“Well, I know where that is. And they have their own stamps?”
“Not since 1920.”
“I guess nothing lasts forever. You know what I’m going to do now? Besides making the mental picture shrink and turn gray? I’m going to email Myrt Huysendahl to make sure we don’t lose touch. Do you think Jenny would like a small-ship cruise of the Turkish Riviera?”
“You know, I’ll bet that’s what she was saying earlier.”
“Must have been. I think you and I would like it, and Roy could see where his stamps come from. I’m going to be fine, you know.”
“I know,” he said.
KELLER’S SIDELINE
Thirty-Two
I’ll tell you what’s annoying,” Dot said. “I was in Denver myself this past weekend.”
“What’s the matter with Denver?”
“Nothing,” she said, “aside from the fact that I had a perfectly nice room for two nights at the Brown Palace, and I didn’t get to sleep in it.”
“Insomnia?”
“I never have insomnia, Keller. Nothing keeps me awake. That’s one of the benefits of leading a blameless life. I slept fine, but not in my room. And don’t ask.”
“I won’t.”
“I had a dirty weekend. Flew up to Denver and slept with a strange man.”
“Oh.”
“That
’s it? ‘Oh?’ That’s all you’ve got to say on the subject?”
“You said not to ask.”
“It’s an expression, Keller. If I really didn’t want you to ask I wouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”
“Oh.”
“You’re just insisting on hearing it all, aren’t you? All right. I met this man on JDate. You know what that is?”
“I’ve heard of it,” he said. “It’s an online dating site. But isn’t it for Jewish people?”
“So?”
“I never knew you were Jewish.”
“Look at it this way, Keller,” she said. “I’m a lot closer to being Jewish than Stuart Lichtblau is to being sixty-two.”
“Oh.”
“He’s a widower,” she said, “and I gather he was sixty-one when his wife died, but that must have been fifteen years ago. He spent a few months mourning her and a few more searching for a replacement, and then he discovered he liked being single, and ever since he’s been spending his golden years screwing his brains out.”
He couldn’t say Oh again, but what else was there to say? He asked her if she’d had a good time.
“Yes,” she said, “and no. He’s retired, he had a chain of record stores that he sold back when people still bought records, and he’s got this town house in a gated community in Aurora. His bed’s the size of a tennis court, and I bet he spends more on Viagra than you spend on stamps. I have to say he taught me some new tricks, though I can’t say my life’s fuller for having learned them. And I had good food to eat and pricey wine to drink, and he treated me like a lady, and you know what? I couldn’t wait to go home.”
He thought about it. Then he said, “What’s annoying?”
“Annoying?”
“You said what’s annoying is you were in Denver this past weekend, but…”
“Right, right. I could have done it while I was there. Except of course for the fact that it’s your line of work, not mine. But, you know, call it irony. I made a trip to Denver, and now you have to make a trip to Denver. Assuming you feel like taking the job.”