Murder Packs a Suitcase (16 page)

11

“It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.”

—Woody Allen

A
fter her late-night ordeal at the police station, Mallory expected to fall into a deep sleep the moment she collapsed into bed. Instead, she spent the rest of the night wrestling with the sheets as she desperately tried to make sense of what Detective Martinez had shown her.

Why had Phil Diamond been collecting newspaper articles about David? What did it mean? Was Phil a deranged stalker…or had there been some connection between him and her husband that she hadn't known about? The more she struggled to make sense of it all, the more dead ends she hit.

Mallory was actually relieved when the glowing red numbers on the digital clock beside her bed read 7:00. She stumbled into the shower, making the water as hot as she dared in the hopes that the steam would clear her head. When that didn't work, she headed downstairs to the Tiki Tiki Tearoom.

“Coffee,” she instructed the waitress even before she'd sat down. “Please.”

She'd just taken the first few swallows and was feeling the caffeine start to kick in when she heard someone croak, “Rough night?”

Glancing up, she saw Annabelle Gatch hovering next to the table. Even though it was early, Annabelle's clothes were rumpled, and a good portion of her black hair had already escaped from the plastic clip that held the rest of it in a crooked bun.

“It looks like you and I are the only early birds this morning,” Annabelle chirped.

Mallory didn't remember her being quite this cheerful before. Or maybe she was finding her fellow journalist particularly irritating this morning because even with the caffeine boost, her head still felt as if it was swathed in bubble wrap.

She decided to pretend she was up at this hour for a good reason instead of because her high level of anxiety made sleep impossible. “I thought I'd get an early start.”

Annabelle plopped down in the chair across from her and grabbed a menu. “Where are you headed today?”

“The Ripley's museum.” She couldn't bring herself to call it by its real name, the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Orlando Odditorium. “It opens at nine.”

“Maybe I'll go with you. I've been meaning to check it out for my readers to see if it's worth what they charge. You don't mind, do you?”

“Not at all,” Mallory replied.

She was lying, of course. Her first thought had been,
How on earth can I get out of this?
Even under the best of circumstances, spending an entire morning with a professional penny pincher wasn't exactly appealing. Given the way she was feeling today, she didn't know how she'd manage to remain civil.

But she quickly realized that an outing like this might provide her with an opportunity to find out more about Phil. The world of travel writing was turning out to be much smaller than she ever would have thought. Since Annabelle seemed fairly seasoned, it was possible she had some information about the murder victim that could prove useful.

“Why don't we meet in the lobby just before nine?” Mallory suggested after they'd finished breakfast.

“Fine,” Annabelle agreed. “That'll give me enough time to get in touch with Courtney. I'm not going unless I get a voucher. And you'll drive, right?”

“Of course.” Skinflint Hint #483, Mallory thought wryly: Whenever you go somewhere by car, make sure someone else drives so you don't have to pay for gas.

The Odditorium was close by, less than half a mile away on International Drive. The attraction was housed in a large white building with a red tile roof that gave it a Spanish look. Yet the attractive architecture was secondary to the fact that the entire structure had deliberately been built on a slant, to make it look as if it was sinking into the ground.

Predictably, Annabelle gasped when she saw the cost of the tickets. “Wow! I'm going to have to pay close attention to see if the admission price is worth it for my readers.”

Why should today be different from any other day? Mallory thought cynically.

Aloud, she said, “If you don't mind, I need to stop in the ladies' room. I'll just be a minute.”

“No problem. I'll wait here.” Glancing at the large metal horse positioned right outside the rest rooms, Annabelle commented, “Look at that. It says that Lucky, a life-size model of a prize-winning racehorse, was made from over four hundred pounds of iron horseshoes. I don't think that's particularly hard to believe, do you? Even though it says
BELIEVE IT OR NOT!”

How did I allow myself to get roped into this? Mallory thought, wondering how she was ever going to survive an entire morning of listening to Annabelle complain. It would have been hard enough under normal circumstances, but given the fog that still engulfed her brain, even the simplest tasks seemed more difficult than usual. She decided to try focusing on the museum and the fact that this morning's outing gave her an opportunity to pump Annabelle for information about Phil.

Ever since the cops had found those newspaper clippings in the victim's hotel room, the stakes had gotten higher than ever. Not only had their appearance brought David into the scenario, they had also fueled Detective Martinez's suspicions that she had played a part in Phil Diamond's death.

The fact that Annabelle seemed to have met Phil before they got here meant that she might be a good source of information about the man. And given the comments she'd made about him at the group's introductory lunch—especially her crack about how anyone who'd ever spent any time with him at all knew what a jerk he could be—she seemed to know him pretty well.

Mallory was surprised to find that even the ladies' room was part of the museum. The oddities on display directly related to the bathroom theme—fortunately, with some semblance of taste. The poster on the door, for example, claimed that in 1994, in Vilnius, Lithuania, thirty tons of old money was recycled into bathroom tissue. The blown-up cartoon illustrating this mind-boggling feat included toilet paper dotted with dollar signs.

But they probably don't use the dollar sign in Lithuania, Mallory thought. Then she hoped she wasn't becoming as contrary as Annabelle.

Right inside the museum was the desk that had actually belonged to Robert Ripley, the man behind the Believe It or Not! phenomenon. Sitting at it—or at least giving the appearance of sitting at it—was a hologram of an actor portraying the famous cartoonist.

“Clever, huh?” Mallory commented, taking out her notebook and jotting down a couple of sentences.

“Sure,” Annabelle grumbled. “Especially since it means they don't have to pay a
real
actor.”

The exhibits continued with more displays about the creator of the popular series. Mallory copied down all the pertinent facts: that Robert Ripley created over 56,500 of the cartoons for his newspaper column in the
New York Globe,
that he worked from 6
A.M.
to noon every day for thirty years, that he visited 198 countries looking for oddities.

A black-and-white video showed a funeral that took place in China in 1932, as well as actual footage of some of the tribes Ripley visited. Next came glass cases containing some of his finds, including a horrifying mask that was supposedly made of human skin and a shrunken head from the Jivaro Indians of Ecuador. Unfortunately, the shrunken head was wearing a long straight black wig that made it look like an American Girl doll.

Most of the displays, however, were simply blown-up reproductions of Ripley's cartoons. And the next room was filled with optical illusions, fun house mirrors, and a hologram of a huge jewel that visitors were invited to steal.

“So far, this is pretty cheesy,” Annabelle grumbled. “Given what they charge, there's no way I can recommend this place to my readers.” She scribbled some notes in a small spiral notebook she'd whipped out of her purse. Mallory couldn't help noticing a big orange sticker on the front that said,
CHEAP-O CHUCK'S,
19
CENTS.

“Frankly, tourists can find this kind of thing in other places, for less money,” Annabelle went on in the same disgruntled tone. “As far as I'm concerned, this place should be called the Rip-Off Believe It or Not Museum.”

Mallory was less inclined to be critical, especially since she thought the hokey displays were kind of fun.

“I think children would enjoy it,” she commented, annoyed by Annabelle's negative attitude, which was turning out to be even more pervasive than her miserliness. “A lot of adults, too. This place brings me back to my family's trips to Florida when I was a kid. In fact, I'm kind of glad that an attraction that relies so strongly on people's imaginations still exists.”

She felt vindicated when the displays in the next room turned out to be an improvement over what they'd seen so far: artifacts Ripley had brought back from his travels, like blowpipes from Borneo from the 1930s and a Maori canoe paddle.

Not far beyond, however, she and Annabelle came across some truly grotesque items, the kind of thing that only prepubescent boys were likely to get a kick out of. In fact, Mallory could hardly bring herself to look at the Siamese piglets that had been born stuck together or the alligator whose head was impaled with a pitchfork.

“This stuff is gross!” Annabelle announced. “I mean, can I really advise my budget-conscious readers to pay good money to see a two-headed calf? Or look at this so-called Fiji mermaid. It says right on the display that it's a fake, nothing more than a monkey and a fish sewn together.”

“The Fiji mermaid is actually famous,” Mallory commented. “P. T. Barnum had one in his American Museum in New York during the 1860s. It really brought in the crowds.”

“In that case, he was right about a sucker being born every minute,” Annabelle replied tartly. “And I want to make sure my readers aren't among them.”

The statue of Robert Earl Hughes, who weighed 1,069 pounds and died at age twenty-one, didn't do much to change their minds. Neither did the model of Thomas Wedders, a circus sideshow entertainer who had a nose seven and a half inches long.

Mallory and Annabelle agreed to skip the exhibit that highlighted the methods of torture employed by various cultures. It wasn't until they wandered a bit farther that they came across the types of exhibits Mallory had been expecting, items that were unusual, entertaining, and truly worthy of the claim “believe it or not!” In the center of the room was a 1907 Silver Ghost Rolls-Royce constructed from more than one million wooden match-sticks. Hanging on the walls were a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
made out of bread and a portrait of Lincoln made from Lincoln pennies.

“Now, this is something I can write about,” Annabelle announced.

“Definitely old Florida,” Mallory agreed.

They wandered over to a rickshaw from China that was made entirely from jade. According to the sign in front of it, it weighed almost a ton. Since it was designed to be carried by small men, Mallory wondered if chiropractic treatments had been invented in China, just like spaghetti, paper, and gunpowder.

“Speaking of Florida,” Mallory said casually, realizing she was running out of time to pump Annabelle for information, “did you know that Phil Diamond was originally from Florida?”

“I think I heard something about that,” Annabelle replied vaguely, staring at the gigantic jade wheel with more intensity than it deserved.

“I understand the police still haven't identified the killer,” Mallory added, making another attempt to draw Annabelle into a conversation about the murder victim.

“Not yet. Hey, look at this bedpan collection!” She stopped in front of dozens of bedpans attractively arranged in a geometric pattern on a high white wall. “It says here that Stella Downing of Fort Hunter, New York, spent sixty-six years collecting them. Where would somebody store all these bedpans? Maybe in an out-house?”

Mallory obviously wasn't making much progress with her investigation. She tried to think of another way of gracefully turning the conversation to Phil as she and Annabelle studied a vampire killing kit from the mid-1800s. Neatly packaged inside the box were vials that according to their labels contained “flour of garlic” and “herbe-gris.” The kit also included a cross and a silver stake big enough to drive through the heart of the vampire in question.

But she just couldn't focus. Maybe it was because of her sleepless night—or maybe it was because she was simply too distracted by the huge portrait of Vincent van Gogh made from postcards of his paintings or the chunk of the Berlin Wall.

And then she and Annabelle walked through one more doorway…and stumbled onto a display of frightening-looking spears. It was impossible not to notice how closely they resembled the one that had been used in Phil Diamond's murder.