Murder on the QE2 (15 page)

He looked as though he wasn’t sure whether to accept my explanation. But then he said, “I don’t read a lot of murder mysteries, Mrs. Fletcher, so I’m not familiar with the way a mystery writer’s mind works. I suppose if you were writing a book about this, you’d have Scotland Yard fly to the ship and take over the investigation.”

“Yes,” I said brightly, “that’s exactly right. If I were writing a book about this, that is precisely what I would write.”

“All I can ask is that you not repeat this fictional scenario to anyone else. It’s misleading, if you know what I mean.”

“I certainly do, Mr. Prall. Sorry to have caused you any problem.”

I went to my cabin and returned George Sutherland’s call. He was out of the office and wouldn’t be back for hours.

I checked my watch and saw that there was only a half hour until Elaine Ananthous’s lecture in the Grand Lounge. I decided to put off returning the other calls until later. But as I was about to leave, the phone rang.

“Jessica?”

“Yes.”

“James Brady.”

“Yes, Jim. How are you?”

“Great. What’s this about Scotland Yard flying to the ship to investigate Tralaine’s murder?”

“Sounds like the overly active imagination of a mystery writer.”

“Any mystery writer I’d know?”

“Can I talk to you later, Jim? I have to return some calls, and I’m due at a lecture.”

“Sure. Want to be a guest on my satellite feed at noon?”

“Goodness, no. But if I get a chance, I’ll pop up and watch. Where are you broadcasting from?”

“The Helicopter Deck. Nice break in the weather.”

“Lovely day, although they say it might change. Noon on the Helicopter Deck, you say? I’ll be there.”

The crowd for Elaine Ananthous’s lecture was sparse. I spotted Mary Ward sitting alone at a table and joined her. “Breakfast in your room this morning?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s such an indulgence.”

I laughed and said, “There’s an old saying, Mary. ‘Living well is the best revenge.’ ”

She looked at me with wide eyes. “But I don’t have anyone I seek revenge against.”

“Just a saying, that’s all,” I said as Priscilla Warren came to the microphone to introduce Elaine. Before she did, she said, “As you know if you’ve read your program this morning, the famed television chef Carlo Di Giovanni will be giving a cooking demonstration right here this afternoon following Act Two of the murder mystery play. He’s been gracious enough to offer to cook a gourmet meal for one special passenger. We’ve pulled a cabin number from the hat, so to speak, to come up with the winner. And she is—Mrs. Mary Alice Ward.” There was a smattering of applause.

“Mary, that’s wonderful,” I said.

“This must be my lucky year,” she said. “Winning this crossing, and now a gourmet meal by a famous chef.”

“Just as long as you like garlic.”

“I think I can get used to it.”

A table set up next to the microphone contained a variety of plants. Elaine tentatively approached the mike, eyes darting left and right, her facial tic visible even from where we sat.

Her lecture was, to be kind, painful. She spoke so softly she could barely be heard. Worse, she seemed perpetually confused. The small audience soon became smaller as people wandered away. By the time she was finished and asked if anyone had questions, no more than two dozen people remained, including me and Mary Ward.

She came to our table and sat heavily for such a small woman. “I just knew it was going to be awful,” she said, wringing her hands. “My God, it was excruciating being up there.” She sat up straighter and took in the large lounge. “Look. Everyone left. They hated it. It’s bound to get back to Sam Teller. He’ll use it as an excuse to fire me.”

“I thought it was very interesting,” Mary Ward said. “Very interesting, indeed.”

I said, “Elaine, stop worrying so much about Sam Teller. I’m sure he won’t have any idea that the audience was not as big as you would have liked it to be. And Mary is right. It
was
interesting.”

“But I was so nervous. I’m supposed to be a television star. Did I look like a television star up there?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said.

But she wouldn’t be dissuaded from her grim post-mortem of her performance. “It’s all because of that rotten man, Di Giovanni. He deliberately upset me this morning because he wanted me to fall on my face. I hate him. I really and truly hate him.”

She took in the lounge again. “Wasn’t Troy here?”

“Troy Radcliff?” I said. “No, I didn’t see him.”

“He promised he’d be here. He’s such a good man, you know. He really is quite fond of my show. I know he’ll go to bat for me with Teller if he tries to get rid of me. I hope he isn’t sick. He’s getting on in years.”

“Yes, I noticed” I said. “But we should all be in such wonderful physical condition at his age.”

“I’ll go call his cabin,” she said, standing and straightening her shapeless gray dress.

Because we both looked up at her, our vision also took in the shopping promenade one deck above.

“Look,” Mary Ward said, “that’s the actress, Lila Sims.”

Elaine looked up, too. “Sam Teller’s bimbo wife,” she said, lip curled, her voice a snarl.

“Who is that with her?” Mary asked.

“That’s ... that
was
Ms. Tralaine’s personal trainer, Mr. Silvestrie,” I said.

“He’s trying to get his own show on the network,” Elaine Ananthous said. “Physical fitness. I’m sure he’d like to get rid of me, too, and use my half hour for his own stupid program.”

Passengers on the promenade also recognized Lila Sims. One asked for her autograph. She was not a big star, but had made a name for herself appearing in B movies in which she played sexy young female characters, her on-screen wardrobe consisting primarily of bikini swimsuits. The passenger asking for the autograph was young, a teenager. As he held up pad and pen, Silvestrie pushed him aside, took Sims by the arm, and hurried her away.

“Hardly the way to please your fans,” I said, disgusted with that sort of behavior from a public person.

“He’s probably just trying to protect her, considering what happened to the other actress on the ship,” Mary Ward offered. She seemed always to see the good in people, to find a reasonable explanation for bad behavior.

Ananthous left us to call Troy Radcliff’s cabin, and Mary Ward and I departed the Grand Lounge in the opposite direction.

“I took a walk on the Boat Deck this morning,” I said. “I missed your company.”

“And I missed my early morning exercise,” she said. “I’ll be sure to make up for it tomorrow.”

“Good. I’ll join you. In case we don’t see each other for the rest of the day, shall we make it seven tomorrow? On the Boat Deck?”

“Yes,” she said. “I look forward to it.”

I whiled away the hour before James Brady’s satellite feed by sitting in a deck chair where a young deck steward wrapped me in a thick red blanket and brought me a steaming cup of bouillon. Frank and I had done this every day during our crossing twenty years ago, and the forty-five minutes represented the first true moment of peace and tranquility I’d experienced since boarding.

Soak up every blessed minute of it, Jess, I told myself. You may not have many more moments like it

James Brady’s satellite feed represented an impressive exclusive for his network. With the sun shining and a stiff breeze causing his yellow necktie to flap, he stood in front of a huge camera and assorted supporting electronic gear supplied by the ship’s communications department, and told of Marla Tralaine’s murder, stressing that the cause of death had not been released by shipboard medical personnel. He mentioned the names of others traveling with her—her personal manager, Peter Kunz, her hairdresser, Candy Malone, and her personal trainer, Tony Silvestrie—and also reported that the founder and chairman of the Teller Cable Network, Sam Teller, and his actress wife, Lila Sims, were aboard. Before ending his report, he glanced over at me, then faced the camera again, and said, “And America’s most famous mystery writer, Jessica Fletcher, is here with us, perhaps poised to solve this murder before we reach Southampton. This is James Brady reporting from the North Atlantic on the beautiful
QE2,
which unfortunately is also the scene of controversial actress Marla Tralaine’s murder.”

“How was it?” he asked.

“Sounded good to me. You’re the only television commentator with the story. As they say, timing is everything.”

He laughed. “Have you learned anything new this morning?”

“No.”

“Anything new about Scotland Yard flying to the ship in a couple of days?”

“No,” I said. I would have been happy to share the information with him because not only had he been a friend for years, but his reputation as a journalist was pristine. But I couldn’t betray the confidence George Sutherland had placed in me, so I added nothing.

Because my next lecture wasn’t scheduled until the following day, the afternoon promised to be a more tranquil one than yesterday. I would, of course, attend Act Two of the play, and was determined to again enjoy the tea dance. TV chef Carlo Di Giovanni was to give his lecture and cooking demonstration at five, with Mary Ward as his special dinner guest.

I wasn’t hungry after my sizable breakfast and would have preferred eating lunch at the last possible minute. But that would mean missing the beginning of Act Two. I opted to skip the Queens Grill, going instead to The Pavilion, at the stern of the ship just off the One Deck swimming pool, where meals are served cafeteria-style, including light fare. A lot of other passengers evidently were in the same mood, because the lines were long. But they moved quickly, and I eventually found a table for my grilled chicken Caesar salad and cup of tea.

Although a few passengers stopped by to say hello, only one asked anything about my insert in that day’s program. He wanted to know whether there was any truth to the rumor that Marla Tralaine’s body was to be buried at sea. I said I hadn’t heard anything about that, adding that 1 doubted it since her death was not from natural causes, and a full investigation would have to be launched once we got to England.

What rumor would be next? That she’d risen from the dead and was seeking revenge on her killer? I wouldn’t have been surprised.

The Grand Lounge was standing room only when I arrived at two, and dozens of onlookers leaned on the railing of the shopping promenade above. I was, of course, delighted that the play I’d written had attracted so many interested passengers. But I also wondered whether the news of Marla Tralaine’s murder, now public knowledge because of the insert I’d written, had attracted the curious who would not have been there otherwise.

Director Rip Nestor bounced out to the microphone, welcomed everyone to Act Two of the shipboard murder mystery, and briefly brought the audience up to speed on what had occurred the previous day. I glanced around in search of my fellow lecturers. The only one I saw was Judge Dan Solon, sitting with people he’d been with at the craps table last night.

Nestor completed his recap. He then said, “The New York Police Department has sent one of its top investigators to the scene in an attempt to unravel the murder of Millard Wainscott. The man is a legend in criminal investigation. Please welcome Detective Billy Bravo.”

Jerry Lackman, the actor playing Detective Bravo, swaggered onto the stage. He wore a holster beneath his left arm in which a snub-nosed revolver was nestled. A portable radio hung from his belt, and he carried a pad and pen. I watched with interest as he took the lines I’d written and used them only as a blueprint for his ad-lib presentation to the audience. He did the same while questioning the other actors and actresses playing the parts of employees at the TV studio. Because I had seen the two videos of other shows produced by Malibu Mysteries, I’d deliberately created situations in which Detective Bravo could use the names and a few facts about certain passengers in the audience, and drew them into the plot as potential suspects. He was brilliant in the way he handled the audience. I was very impressed.

I thought back to Mary Ward’s comment that he sounded to her as though he came from California, not New York; I had to agree with her. Lackman did not have an accent that even hinted of native New Yorker. Did that matter? I wondered. Was there some meaning I should assign to it in terms of Marla Tralaine’s death? If there was, I couldn’t come up with it at the moment.

But then I also thought of Lackman’s telling me he’d learned of the murder through “official channels.” And, why had he been visiting Sam Teller in the cable network owner’s penthouse suite?

I didn’t linger on these questions because I became caught up in the stage action. I’ve always thought that writing a play must be the most rewarding of all literary efforts because you get to see what you’ve written played back in an immediate setting. Great playwrights must gain a tremendous psychic satisfaction from seeing their efforts performed night after night, with skilled actors and actresses interpreting the characters they’d created. Of course, the play being performed on the
QE2
would hardly rank as great theater. But I was satisfied.

As Act Two neared its conclusion, I anxiously waited for the second murder to occur. It wouldn’t surprise, me, of course. But I hoped it would shock the audience.

It happened with such suddenness that even I was taken by surprise. A young woman suddenly stepped from behind a screen, a knife in her hand. She took a few steps toward the character, John Craig, the TV studio’s floor director played by the handsome black actor, John Johnson.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Johnson asked.

“To do this,” she responded, raising the knife high above her head and plunging it into his chest, the blade on the specially constructed stage prop disappeared into the handle, making it appear that it had entered deep into his body.