She slid her glasses down to the tip of her nose. 'Do you have some pressing business or something?'
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I do.'
'No wonder I'm so insecure. I practically ask you to marry me and you tell me to lie down. Alone.'
He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She was weaving and wobbling again. He waved to a white- jacketed steward.
'Would you walk with Miss Richards to her cabin?' Tobin said, pressing a five-dollar bill into the steward's hand.
'I really need to talk to you,' Susan said but by then the steward had taken her arm. He seemed very good and very practiced at this sort of thing. Within moments they had disappeared around the curve of the deck.
Tobin went back to the Farrises' cabin.
38
'He wasn't blackmailing you, was he?'
'I don't have to answer any of your stupid goddamned questions,' Jere Farris said.
'He wasn't blackmailing you-but you were paying him to be on the show. Probably a certain percentage.'
Alicia Farris had opened the cabin curtains. The sunlight was rich and yellow and you could see clearly the red nub in the carpeting and where there was a stain of some sort on the sheet and the last wisp of steam on the bathroom mirror from the shower being run hot and long.
Jere wore a blue button-down shirt and jeans. His blue eyes needed some Visine. He wore no shoes or socks. He had a fierce red bunion on the big toe of his left foot. He smoked one of his wife's long white cigarettes. In the yellow sunlight the smoke was silver blue. He said, 'I'm getting sick of you, Tobin. In case I haven't told you that already, I mean.'
'That's what 'payday' meant. Every time you got a check, you had to pay him part of it.'
'That's bullshit,' Farris said.
Alicia, sitting on the edge of the bed near where the sheet was stained, said quietly, 'Why don't we just tell him, Jere?'
'Why don't you just keep out of it, bitch?'
She leaned over and with a great deal of expertise slapped him once very hard across the mouth. You could see tears in his eyes and a pinpoint of blood on his lower lip. 'I'll put up with your stupid little girlfriends, Jere, but I won't put up with anything else.'
Tobin pulled his eyes away. He did not want to be in this room at this moment. There was a slow and sad and long-standing anger here-an anger about to become rage-one of the worst kind, one borne of humiliation and debasement. There was nothing uglier to see. Nothing.
Alicia turned to Tobin and said, 'It was very simple. He had all the power, Ken Norris did. He could go to the syndication company and get any one of us fired at any time. He knew it and we knew it. So we had to pay him ten percent of our salaries to stay on the show.' She exhaled silver blue smoke of her own. 'Face it, Tobin, without that show none of us would have any career at all. It was worth the ten percent.'
Tobin said, 'Iris Graves knew that. That had to be the story she was working on. And Sanderson the private detective knew that too. I can understand why one of you would kill them and Ken Norris. But why Kevin Anderson?'
'Because he was sick of the sham,' Farris said, slamming his fist on the table. 'He was going to talk to the press as soon as he got back.'
'So everybody in your group knew this?'
Alicia nodded.
'And apparently,' Tobin said, 'added Kevin to the list.'
'I didn't kill anybody, if that's what you're thinking.' His petulance was getting irritating again.
'I think,' Alicia said with a kind of defiant dignity, 'that Tobin suspects it's me.' She smiled at her husband. It was a pleasant smile to see. 'After all, dear, I'm the only one with any balls in the family.'
'She didn't kill anybody, either,' Farris said.
'One of your group did,' Tobin said, 'in order to prevent the story from coming out.'
'It would have made us laughingstocks,' Alicia said, her voice quiet again. 'It's bad enough to be has-beens but to have to pay kickbacks on TV-you can imagine what the press would have done to us.'
Tobin was about to speak when a noise, almost vulgar on the fresh ocean air and on such a sunny day and on such blue water, violated the peace of the cruise ship.
There was no mistaking what it was, the noise.
It was the sound of a gun being fired.
'My God,' Alicia said.
But Tobin was already out the door.
39
Six doors away, Todd Ames, looking as if he were preparing for a GQ photo shoot-white button-down shirt, apricot colored ascot, white linen pants, steel gray hair in perfect shape-leaned to the side of Susan Richards's door. He appeared to be in clinical shock.
As Tobin reached him, he saw that. 45 dangled from Ames's left hand. Tobin recognized the weapon as Ames's own. Ames did not seem aware that he held the gun.
Tobin glanced at him, then pushed inside.
The curtains were still drawn. The room stank of bourbon. The bed was a mess. There was the scent of sleep and sweat and vomit. With the door closed, Tobin felt as if he had stepped down into a deep hole that had sealed itself behind him.
She sat curled in a chair. She was naked. There was for the moment nothing erotic about her. Indeed her nakedness was terrifying because it was obviously symbolic of her mental state.
She turned her beautiful aging face to look up at Tobin. She said, 'You know the funny thing?'
'No,' he said, 'no, I don't know the funny thing.'
'Prison isn't what scares me.'
'What scares you, Susan?'
'The photographers.'
'Why do they scare you?'
He wished it were light in here. He wished it did not smell so womb-warm. He wished her eyes did not look so unfocused.
'The way they used to follow Marilyn Monroe around. You remember?'
'Yes.'
'They'd get right up to her and she'd start to cry and you could see the panic in her eyes. That's what scares me.'
'You killed them, then?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
She laughed. 'Tobin, it was the only career I had. Once it came out that I'd had to pay to be on it-'
'God,' he said, and sank down onto the ottoman. He leaned back a bit toward the bureau where he could
