Business mob-style, I gathered. Which explained why he wanted to hole up in his suite with a warm gun, and why he hadn’t disembarked with the others. A common criminal.
I could live with that.
David ghosted back into view behind me and dropped a hand on my shoulder. I twisted to look at him.
“Boyfriend,” he said. “Up in the bedroom. He had this.” David deposited another gun in my lap, a match for the semiautomatic we’d confiscated from Cole. “Do you want to take a look?”
“Why, is he naked?”
It’s hard to get a complete double take from a Djinn, but I managed. “I didn’t notice,” he said. Which was, no doubt, a crushing blow to Mr. Cole. I was sad for him. “What do you think? Pass?”
“Pass,” I said. “Whatever problems he has aren’t any concern of ours. Mr. Cole, we’re done here. I’ll be taking your guns with me, though. If you have intruder problems, David will be happy to come to your rescue.” I batted my eyelashes again. David didn’t look pleased with being volunteered. “Thanks.”
“Thanks for what?” Cole asked, mystified. I walked over to the bar and retrieved the second pistol from the ice bucket. Nicely cooled down.
“Not shooting me, too,” I said. “That would have been awkward.”
“No,” David said. “That would have been fatal for Mr. Cole.”
I gathered that Mr. Cole was a man of few boundaries, but he recognized that one, and he nodded. “It won’t happen again. Sorry. Eh—what’s your name?”
“I’m David Prince. Her name is Joanne Baldwin,” David said. “But you can call her Mrs. Prince.”
I got a shiver out of that. A nice one.
We left Cole on the couch, still grappling with the utter destruction of his worldview.
All in all, not a bad first interrogation. Then again, my standards are pretty low. If I survive it, it can’t be that bad.
Chapter Five
After Mr. Cole, the others seemed meek as kittens. Spiteful, furious, spitting, hissing kittens with needle-sharp claws and biting teeth. Each cabin seemed to come with its own particularly darling set of divalicious problems. Take Holly Addams, the model. . . . She had two employees, one of whom was solely occupied in making her disgusting-looking smoothies whenever she got hungry. They must have been made out of cardboard and water, because she had less body fat on her than your average piece of dry bone. She also had a trunk full of illegal and controlled substances, which explained why she hadn’t left the ship when ordered. Her employees were just hapless and cowed. I tried not to traumatize them any more than I had to.
Three bankers in a row, two male and one female, all of whom had refused to leave out of lapdog-like devotion to star clients. These were rich people in their own right, but they’d gotten that way by single-minded dedication to that art of brownnosing, and they weren’t about to stop the habit of a lifetime now. No connection to Bad Bob that I could find for them, their assistants, or (in the case of one of them) his mistress, who was ensconced in the downstairs bedroom.
And then we ran into Cynthia Clark.
“The Cynthia Clark?” I asked Aldonza, who was still hustling clean towels around the hallway. She nodded. “Isn’t she making a movie?”
“She was,” Aldonza said. “But she quit. I don’t know why. Now she’s here.”
Cynthia Clark was an old-school star—glamorous, beautiful, icy cool. If Grace Kelly had ever had a rival, or Audrey Hepburn had ever worried about being upstaged, she was the source of their anxiety. Her 1960sera films were classics. So were her ’70s efforts. By the ’80s she’d transitioned from starlet roles to tough matrons, and still did it better than anyone else.
Then she’d had a well-publicized marital disaster, some alcoholism, some rehab, and a whole lot of plastic surgery. Now she looked frozen at the age of fifty, although the twenty-year-old ice was beginning to crack under the strain.
She occupied cabin thirty-two, along with a European maid and a personal trainer, who I suspected doubled as another kind of workout partner.
I knew the minute we entered the cabin that something was off. David did, too. No bullets flying, no obvious signs of danger, but there was something very wrong with the feeling of the whole place. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
Maybe Miss Clark had been in the middle of a knockdown, drag-out fight with her assistant. That would have explained the feeling of tension and anger that saturated the air.
Miss Clark was seated, like Mr. Cole, on the grand sofa, but she was wearing a pair of pencil-legged white pants, very ’60s nautical, paired with a blue-and-white-striped knit shirt. Her eyes were the same blue as shallow Caribbean waters, and if her hair was dyed that lustrous shade of blond, I couldn’t tell. Even with the makeovers, she had seriously fierce DNA at work.
I felt as if I should genuflect before taking a seat in the side chair that she offered with a gracious nod. David remained standing, but he didn’t resort to the in timidation stance this time around. More of a tranquil stand-at-ease type of thing.
Clark’s trainer and maid busied themselves in another part of the room. I barely registered them as background noise, because La Clark simply drew every bit of attention to herself just by sitting there.
“Thank you for seeing us, Miss Clark,” I said. “My name is—”
“Joanne Baldwin, yes, I know,” she said. She had a contralto voice, and she used it the way a master musician uses a violin, conveying all shades of meaning in one brilliant stroke. “You represent these Wardens I’ve been hearing so much about. And your companion?”
“David Prince,” he said.
“You’re one of the . . . Djinn?” She tried the taste of the word, and I could tell she liked it. When he nodded, Clark’s eyes drifted half closed, and she sat back against the cushions, studying him. “Extraordinary. I thought there were no surprises left in the world, but here you are. Like something straight out of a fairy tale. The old kind, of course. The frightening ones.”
She offered us coffee, tea, drinks. Neither of us felt thirsty, but I accepted a delicate little teacup steaming with French Roast, just to make this more of a social call. Being able to say I had coffee with Cynthia Clark didn’t factor into that decision at all. Well, not much.
Clark blew on the surface of her own brew and studied us both with X-ray eyes that had reportedly once made Steve McQueen swoon. “How can I help you?” she asked.
“Just a few questions, and then, I promise, we’ll certainly be out of your way,” I said. “First, can you tell me why you didn’t leave the ship before departure, as you were asked to do?”
“Well, you’re direct,” she murmured. “How very refreshing. It’s all a bit embarrassing, I suppose, and it’s going to make me seem like a horrible tyrant. I was terribly tired, and I left strict instructions not to be disturbed for any reason prior to departure. I’m afraid my employees might have taken those instructions a bit too literally. When I finally rose for breakfast, I was informed of the evacuation order, but it was too late for us to make our arrangements and leave.”
There was something odd about Clark’s aura. It seemed very calm, swirling with neutral blues and soft golds, but it also felt artificial. “What kind of arrangements? I’d think you’d want to get out as quickly as possible.”
“I really can’t go into details,” she said. “But it was entirely accidental that we ended up staying here, on the ship. We won’t be any trouble to you. I’m quite content to stay in the cabin.” She gave me a cool smile. “It’s so difficult to find privacy these days out in the real world.”
I wondered, because a curl of hot magenta drifted over her aura. Resentment, maybe. She wasn’t the It Girl anymore when it came to the paparazzi, and she knew it. It probably took a great deal of effort to get herself photographed at all, except in retirement magazines talking about how she was “still young at sixty-five.”