Several Deaths Later

smell the sweet perfume and even sweeter sachet. He liked the female smells and for the first time he became aware of the sexuality of her naked body. He felt ashamed that lust had as always triumphed over compassion.

'What was the gunshot? You trying to kill yourself?'

She laughed and for a moment sounded genuinely delighted. 'What, and ruin my makeup? No, I was just trying to get attention, Tobin.' She pointed with an elegant hand to a hole in the wall. 'I just fired the gun because I thought it would sound good. I had to do something.' Then her face grew sad again, like a small girl hearing terrible news, and she said, 'You didn't want me to be the killer, did you?'

'No.'

'That's very nice of you.'

He raised his head again and stared at her. 'When the captain comes, don't say anything.'

'What?'

'Don't say anything until you've got a lawyer.'

'It doesn't matter, Tobin. It really doesn't.'

'It matters to me.'

'I appreciate that.'

Tobin said, 'Why kill Sanderson too? Iris Graves had discovered what was going on-Ken Norris demanding a part of your salary-but why Sanderson?'

'Because he was helping the reporter and even if he hadn't wanted to, he would have exposed me.'

'They worked together?'

'Yes.'

He was about to ask her more but the door creaked open and Captain Hackett put his head inside.

'I just had a conversation with Todd Ames, Miss Richards,' Captain Hackett said. 'He told me what you tried to do and what you confessed to. Are those things true?'

'Remember what I said about a lawyer,' Tobin said. 'Yes, Captain,' Susan Richards said. 'They are true.'

'God,' Tobin said. 'God.'

She'd been right, Susan had. He would not have been unhappy to learn that the killer was Jere Farris or Todd Ames or Cassie McDowell or even Alicia Farris. But he genuinely liked Susan Richards. Genuinely.

Captain Hackett said, 'I'll be outside, Tobin. You help her get dressed and then bring her out. All right?'

Tobin did the only thing he could do. He nodded.

40

11:14 A.M.

'Forget the part where you think she's crazy.'

'Forget it? Why?'

'Because if she's crazy, then people feel sorry for her and if they feel sorry for her, then it's just another story about some pathetic has-been TV star. But if she willfully and coldly set out to do in all these people-ape shit is the word I'm looking for here, Tobin.'

'That's two words.'

'Whatever. Ape shit is what our readers will do. AGING PRIME TIME QUEEN KILLS TO KEEP HER SHAME SECRET. It needs some work but it's a good peg. You earned your dough, pally.'

'Thanks.'

'Hey, you get seven grand and you sound miserable.'

'I am miserable. I happened to like Susan. And what's this seven grand stuff?'

'Expenses.'

'What expenses?'

'I told you already. Phone calls and stuff.'

'What's 'stuff?''

'Jesus, all right. We should be celebrating and we're haggling. Seventy-five hundred then.'

'First you said ten, then you said eight, and now you're saying seventy-five hundred.'

'Just get some good pictures, OK?'

The editor of Snoop, who probably not only watched 'Celebrity Handyman' but liked it, hung up.

Tobin went into one of the ship's eight bars.

41

2:04 P.M.

There was a kind of ritual involved in getting drunk to forget. First of all, you wanted to reach the first level of drunkenness very quickly so you drank drinks with gin in them. In this case, Tobin used martinis. Then you wanted to sit by yourself with a window to stare through, which was easy enough to do on a cruise ship. Then you wanted to be left entirely alone with only a jukebox for company. This tiny dark bar, festooned with nautical symbols, had a jukebox that ran to Sinatra and Nat King Cole and Johnny Mathis. You couldn't ask for more than that.

It didn't always work as you intended it to, of course. There was a certain kind of drunkenness that was just bloody wonderful, when you reached the exact point where sadness and despair meshed-there was an almost overwhelming and perverse sweetness to it.

Unfortunately, Tobin must have gone right past it without noticing it because, almost as if he'd been in a car accident, he looked up and saw a gigantic bartender in white shirt and white ducks and white apron leaning in and hauling him out of the booth.

'You've had enough for this afternoon, Mr. Tobin,' the bartender said.

Enough? How long had he been drinking. Enough?

He couldn't possibly have had more than fourteen or fifteen martinis. So what if he did kind of trip and fall on his last journey to the jukebox ('Strangers in the Night' just kept sounding better and better). He tripped; was that a capital offense or what? 'Come on now, Mr. Tobin. Come on now.'

42

6:17 P.M.

You wake up and you can't remember anything. Nothing at all. You need to pee and you're afraid you need to barf and then you're afraid because you can't remember anything.

He reconstructed, or tried to: Susan Richards had attempted suicide but had failed and had then confessed to Todd Ames that she'd killed the four people. Then Tobin, sad because it was Susan, had gone to get drunk. 'Scoobey-doobey-doo' kept playing in his head. That and Kent cigarettes. He definitely (well, sort of definitely) recalled buying a package of Kent cigarettes and smoking them. One by one till they were all gone.

He lay there then and pressed the remote control on his nightstand. He might as well be viewing while he was preparing himself for the enormous task of emptying his bladder and taking a shower.

No easy thing to move your leg and put your foot on the floor and then get up and go into the bathroom.

And then for no reason he thought of his daughter (the way fragments of memory assault you during a hangover) and how her hair had looked so red in the sunlight at her cap-and-gown graduation and how he'd hugged