Death in Paradise (31 page)

Her overwhelming concern for my welfare was touching. And this was Jolene, the most human. The one I saw as a leader. Get up close and personal with Mr. Death and all she wants to know is who will introduce the dinner speaker. "I can't," I said. "I'm... I just can't. Look, the introduction that Billy and I drafted is on my laptop, which is on the desk in my room. Get someone to let you in... you can use the printer that's right there to print it. It's filed under DinSpch. Have Zannah do the intro."

"Great," she said. "Great. I'll do that right now. Have you heard how Rory is?"

"Not really. They just said she'd be okay."

"I'd better go find that speech," she said. She hung up without ever learning how I was.

All the care and attention I got was from Ed and Marie, who were practically strangers. Nothing from my colleagues and so-called friends. It just confirmed what I already knew—that in business your friends aren't really your friends. I had no reason to be surprised. What did surprise me was my reaction. I'm supposed to be tough and cynical, well defended, and here I was longing to be cared for. Clearly I hadn't been eating my Wheaties. I needed more mental gymnastics to toughen up my mind and spirit. Next I'd be wishing Andre were here to protect me from the bad guys, when I believed in taking care of myself.

I rested. Marie came back with a nurse, got me unhooked from my bottles and tubes, and helped me dress. Then, equipped with my wallet and my health insurance card, I signed my life away in return for a discharge with sheets of instructions about what to watch out for. And I was free. But before I left, I wanted to see Rory.

Eddie and Marie were reluctant. They didn't think it was a good idea. But I insisted. I needed to know how she was. Maybe my visit was prompted, in part, by knowing how it felt to have no one asking about me. She was irritating and irresponsible, but she was also obviously disturbed enough by what had happened to have done herself serious harm. Having judged herself so harshly, she didn't need any more judgment from me.

They wheeled me to the door and I pushed myself into her room and up to her bed. Her eyes were closed and she was as pale as the sheets. Her arms were wrapped in bandages. Tubes dripped various fluids into her veins. "Rory?" I said.

Her eyes fluttered open. "Thea!" She looked like she'd run if she could.

"I came to see how you were."

"Wish I was dead," she said. "I tried to be." She closed her eyes.

"Why did you do it, Rory? No one was blaming you."

"You don't know anything," she said. "They will. You'll see."

"But why? Why would anyone blame you?"

"I'll never tell. Not you. Not cops." She trailed off and closed her eyes, a look of pain on her face. "They were here, you know."

She gave a faint, ironic laugh. "Did you know that suicide was a crime? We're so damned powerless! Even our lives aren't our own. Oh, God! I've been so stupid. I never thought this would happen. Never expected... I was a fool, you know. So naive."

I touched her arm. "Talk to me, Rory," I said. "Tell me what happened. I know you didn't kill her...."

She twitched away from my hand. "Go away. Just go away and leave me alone. I don't want to talk about it. Besides, you know too much already."

What was she talking about? What did she know? What was she hiding? And what on earth did she think I knew? "You're wrong," I said. "I don't know anything. This is the craziest, most paranoid group on the planet. What is it that I'm supposed to know, Rory?"

"Don't try and play dumb with me. I know what a clever, manipulative bitch you are, remember?" She sighed and turned her head away. "I don't know," she said. "Do I need a lawyer or the coroner? I don't know. It's too confusing right now. I never thought... this..." She sighed again. "My laptop. Who has it? Jolene? Jonetta? I know the cops don't." There must have been something in my face, because she said, "It's you, isn't it? Ms. Finger-in-every-pie, right?"

"I have it."

"With you?"

"Back in my room. What's on it, Rory?"

She sat up suddenly. "Nothing. There's nothing on it. My own private stuff. I just don't want anyone looking at my stuff. You know how it is. My personal life is none of their business. None of your business. Don't let anyone look at it, okay?"

Actually, her personal life had become their business—them being the Maui police—when she'd attempted suicide. A corollary to Andre's rule. You try to take a life, any life, even your own, and you lose your privacy. But this wasn't the time to tell her that. We'd had a murder and she knew something about it. That's what I wanted to talk about. A complex person, Rory. Bad at doing her job and bad at letting someone else do her job, like Martina. She was bad at lying and bad at telling the truth. Pinning her down was like trying to catch fog. I could imagine how much she must have frustrated Nihilani and Bernstein.

Yet I was exactly as bad as they were. I knew just how she felt, which they probably did not, and yet I wouldn't leave her alone either. "If you're involved in this, you're a lot better off if you work with the police than if you go ahead and protect Martina's killer, and that comes out." I waited. No response. "You know something, don't you, Rory? What do you know?"

She opened her eyes and looked at me. It was a look of sheer hatred. "Why... did you... have to come and not... Suzanne?" She was too tired to talk much more. I knew how that felt, too. I was barely holding up my end of this nearly monosyllabic conversation.

"Suzanne got sick."

"And pigs can fly." She closed her eyes again. I was glad to be free of that fierce glare. "I'll never tell," she whispered. "Never. I can be trusted. I made some mistakes. Yeah. But I can be trusted. I can. I'm not like Martina."

"Did you help her killer?" I asked again.

Rory opened her eyes. Earlier she had looked like a warrior princess. Now she looked like an evil witch, as though Martina's evil mantle had fallen on her. "Everything I know stays with me. Dies with me, if necessary. I'm not some maudlin, slobbering drunk, like Martina. They can trust me. I'm reliable."

Her self-centered drama, combined with her hostility, got to me, and my resolve not to be judgmental dissolved.
Oh, please spare me,
I thought. I'd intervened for her on Friday when Martina was drunk and abusive. Gone with her to rouse Martina and discovered a body on Saturday. Kept her from jumping off a balcony and summoned help for her today and of course all she could think of was herself, and even then, not with any eye toward helping herself by digging out of this mess. The kid needed counseling. She needed to understand that she wasn't the center of the universe and that all of us, whether at the center of the universe or not, must at some point take responsibility for our own actions.

"Oh, grow up, Rory," I said. "That's exactly what you were last night—a slobbering drunk. Martina's death is a terrible thing, but life goes on. Your life is going on. You need to start thinking about how you want the rest of it to be. About taking charge. All this dramatic living and dying stuff. It's so juvenile." I was being monumentally unsympathetic to the plight of this poor, unhappy girl. Any second now, a cadre of caring therapists was going to burst through to door and start beating me with Prozac bottles.

The dark eyes blazed. "You'll be so sorry you said that! You don't understand anything. You don't know anything. What's going on. What people really think. What I really think. Maybe I have good reasons to be upset; maybe I really did want to kill myself. Maybe if you hadn't come to Hawaii, everything would have been fine. But no. You had to come along and stick your nose into everything; well, I don't want you nosing around me. Those two Neanderthal cops were bad enough. You don't even have a right to be here."

With difficulty, because what I wanted to do was spank her, had both of us not been too weak, I returned to the original purpose of my visit. "I just came to see if you were all right... as a board member...."

"Oh, screw the fucking board," she said. "Of course I'm not all right. But I will be. They'll take care of me. Now get out of my room or I'll call a nurse and have you thrown out."

I wheeled myself slowly out of the room. At the door I hesitated, as a thought occurred to me. "Rory," I said. "If you had anything to do with the people who killed Martina, don't assume you can trust them. They've already killed once...." I was going to suggest she think of her own safety, perhaps even suggest a cop outside her room, but she cut me off.

"Shut up," she said. "Shut up and go away. Whatever it is you have to say, I don't want to hear it." As I wheeled away, I wondered if Bernstein and Nihilani had gotten anything more out of her than I had. From their behavior toward me, I thought not. Rory was a real puzzle. What had she done that was so terrible? That had driven her to suicide and to these fantastic protestations? Had she actually helped kill Martina? Was she the killer? It was possible, I supposed. But if Rory was the killer, why had someone tried to kill me? Did she have an accomplice? She had said "they," at some point, hadn't she? Thinking about all this hurt my brain. I let the Pryzinskis wheel me to their car.

But partway there, I began to focus on something else Rory said—that I knew too much. I wondered what it was that she thought I knew, what possible basis she could have for accusing me of sticking my nose into things. All I'd ever done, with respect to her, was routine conference business, except for rescuing her from Martina's drunken abuse. I knew she was very protective of Martina, but interfering with some masochistic role didn't logically connect with the things she'd just said. The threats and dark hints. So what was it? Something even I didn't recognize? Or was the girl simply crazy.

Her behavior was so upsetting I wished I could evict her from my mind. But I have a terrible character flaw. I am the self-appointed rescuer of those who can't help themselves. And unlikeable as Rory was, she couldn't take care of herself. I worried that she might try and harm herself again. Wondered what the hospital was doing about that. When I got back to the hotel, I'd ask the midnight twins to keep an eye on things. Maybe call the hospital as well.

I shook my weary head. This whole business made no sense. Of course, to me, murder had never made any sense, yet it happened. For once, maybe Rory was right. Maybe it was time to take my nose back to the hotel and tuck it into a nice, safe bed. Right after I ordered up a delicious batch of tea and toast, took a hot bath, and tried to reassemble my brain. And then something else occurred to me, popping into the thought window like a message in a magic eight ball. Once I had my brain back, I was going to take a look at Rory's computer. No longer just to download files. Now I was wondering what she didn't want me to see. Whether there were clues there to all the nonsense she'd been babbling. Maybe in the process, I'd be able to figure something out.

 

 

 

Chapter 22

 

Marie insisted I sit in front on the ride back to the hotel. It made me feel guilty but I was glad not to have to ride with my knees in my ears. It was a peaceful ride. Dr. Pryzinski asked if there was anything I wanted to know, medically, about what had happened. I asked a few questions. He gave simple, thoughtful answers. It made me wonder why a man who was so good with patients, which is sort of what I was by adoption, had chosen pathology, so I asked him.

"Revenge," he said.

"Revenge?"

He nodded. "Back when I was in high school I had a friend. She was a girl but she was a friend, not a love interest, named Shirley. Shirley was just a little bit of a thing, kind of like our Marietta, and very shy, but she was smart. Back then, it wasn't very easy for a girl to be smart... I guess, being in the business you're in, I don't have to tell you about that. Shirley put a lot of effort into not being smart, but sometimes she couldn't help herself. Anyway, Shirley wanted to go to college. No one in her family had ever gone to college and they didn't understand why it was important to her."

He chuckled. "You're going to be very sorry you asked. I never make a long story short."

"He's telling you the truth," Marie piped in. "When Eddie starts to tell a story, you have to be prepared to sit back and listen."

"I'm prepared." I was interested, and it sure beat my own thoughts.

"Shirley had a boyfriend. Guy named Joey. Did I tell you that Shirley was pretty? Well, she was. Little bitty blond thing with the biggest, bluest eyes. Anyway, Joey wanted to marry Shirley as soon as she graduated, while Shirley, she wanted to wait until she finished college. They used to fight about it a lot. She'd tell me about it and cry on my shoulder when we did homework together. I never would have gotten through math without Shirley. She had an instinct for math and a real knack for teaching. What a loss to the world that was... but, I get ahead of myself."

He cleared his throat. "Joey didn't like it that Shirley and I studied together. He came by my house one night and told me to keep away from her. He said that Shirley belonged to him. I hadn't met Marie yet, nor had a daughter, and I wasn't educated about feminist ideals back then, but it seemed quite clear to me that Shirley ought to be able to study with anyone she wanted to study with. I told him that. I also told him that Shirley and I were only friends and I was no threat to their relationship. But the next time I called Shirley and asked for some help, she wouldn't talk to me."