"You've known each other that long? Since…?"
"Since 1968." She laughed. It was a warm feminine laugh and he wanted to kiss her on the forehead. "God, you should have heard us then, Tobin. We were so pretentious. The movie we made…" The laugh again. Now he heard the melancholy in it. "Really terrible. 'Ingmar Bergman meets The Monsters,' Variety said. And they were being kind."
"And you've been with Jere ever since?"
"Oh, yes. I took out adoption papers shortly after." She stubbed out one cigarette and immediately lit another. "Am I sounding bitchy?"
"Within tolerable limits."
"He's a child."
"Why don't you leave him?"
"I love him. Isn't that the shits?"
"It happens."
"I'm so sensible. Look at these hands." She put her large hands across the table, next to the little electric "kerosene" lamp (probably just the sort real gold miners had used) for his inspection. "Big hands, aren't they?"
"But nicely shaped."
"'Purposeful hands.' That's a line from Steinbeck. I've always liked that. It seemed to describe me exactly." She exhaled. The smoke was a beautiful electric blue in the shadowy bar. They seemed out of time and place here-as if they'd been trapped in some time warp. He did not mind the feeling at all. He thought about ordering a drink but chose not to, knowing he'd only be potzed by dinner.
"Anyway," she said, "I've had to be purposeful for both of us. When he couldn't get work in pictures, I convinced him to go into television. That's how we wound up with 'Celebrity Circle.' We saw Ken and Kevin and Todd all lose their series and so then we heard about this game show packager and we went to them and-well, 'Celebrity Circle' was born. It's been our bread and butter for eight years. And as you can see, it's fed some of us pretty well."
She seemed to want a compliment and he was happy to give her one. "You're a good-looking woman and you know it."
"Do you want to have an affair?"
He laughed. "If we do have an affair, will you tell me why you were wrestling with Iris Graves outside my room the other day?"
"Oh, that, Tobin." She tried to sound dismissive but she couldn't. Not quite. "She's been a pest the past few months. Just trying to dig up some gossip on our show for that rag she works for."
"What was the notebook?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I really don't. I'd just had an argument with Jere in our cabin about dear little Joanna Howard and I was walking down the corridor toward the swimming pool and I saw her in a deck chair taking notes and… Well, I'd had a few drinks, to be honest, and I just got irrational. I wanted to take her notebook and rip it up. Suddenly the notebook became very symbolic of everything she did and everything that filthy newspaper stands for. Believe me, Tobin, I don't wish Snoop on my worst enemy. So anyway, I grabbed the notebook from her and started running down the corridor and she came after it. She grabbed me and we started fighting and that's when you came out." She blew out some more blue smoke. There was just the darkness and the frail light of the fake kerosene lamps and the smell of afternoon indulgence and liquor. "Hardly what my mother would call ladylike behavior." Then she paused. "But if you're asking me am I sorry she was murdered, of course I am." She looked at him boldly. Her wooden earrings clattered. "And I didn't have anything to do with it. Nothing."
"Have you thought any more about Ken Norris and why anybody would want to kill him?"
"I've thought about it but I don't know why."
Someday there would be a machine more reliable than a polygraph and you could just hook people up to it and it would tell you if the person was lying to you or not. Until then you had to depend on your own instincts and they could be pretty damned unreliable. He stared at her and again felt a little fillip of middle-aged desire and then wondered if she were lying and had no idea at all.
"Do you think they're connected-Ken's death and the other two?" she asked.
"Probably," Tobin said.
"Did they find out who the man was?"
"Somebody named Sanderson." Which reminded him that he wanted to go to the captain's office and find out what Hackett had learned about Sanderson. He eased his chair back.
"You're leaving?"
"Afraid I have to," Tobin said.
"Dance with me tonight?"
"Tonight?"
"The costume party."
"Oh. That's right."
"You don't have a costume?"
"I'll probably just wear a raincoat and go as a flasher."
"Will you flash me?"
"I don't think you need an affair right now, Alicia," he said. "I think you need to decide if Jere's worth all the trouble or not."
"He's actually quite a good lover."
"I'm happy to hear that."
"And a very attentive mate when he wants to be."
"Another good quality."
"But he needs a mother and I'm tired of playing the role." She watched Tobin as he stood up and then she said, "I'm not very brave, am I, Tobin?"
"That's the hell of it."
"What?"
"None of us are."
21
Several times-and at perhaps too great a length-Tobin had made the argument in print and on television alike that Rudolph Mate's D.O.A., with Edmond O'Brien, and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me, Deadly were two of the greatest film noirs ever made. He believed this so much that he took them with him whenever he traveled, and dipped into them for fifteen or twenty minutes, the way others dipped into swimming pools for similar amounts of time. Their perfection exhilarated him-the grim and mournful O'Brien; the psychotic but fascinating Ralph Meeker; and the black-and-white photography that showed roots in German expressionism but that became, in these instances, inexorably American-the urban streets at night, the millions of twisted tales played out on them.
He was watching Edmond O'Brien down the fatal glass of poison when the phone rang in his cabin. He swore and punched Freeze on the VCR remote control.
"Hello."
"I want to say this in a friendly way." The voice, sleek, theatrical, modulated, belonged to the sort of man who would spend a good deal of time catching his reflection in mirrors and windows.
"Say what in a friendly way?"
"I know you're doing a little snooping about."
"What gives you that impression?"
"I had a bite with Alicia Farris."
It was nice to be able to trust people, Tobin thought. He'd had the impression, while talking to Alicia, that they were friendly if not exactly friends. But apparently Alicia had reported right back to Todd Ames.
"I see."
"We should stick together, Tobin; the 'Celebrity Circle' people, I mean."
"I didn't know that we weren't."
"You're going around asking questions."
"You make that sound like some sort of betrayal."
Todd Ames's voice got very tight. "In a way, I consider it a betrayal." He paused. "There's the show to consider."
"Ah. The show."
"You're not very good with sarcasm."
"I guess I'm just sort of old-fashioned."