Sailing to Capri (8 page)

“Mrs. Wainwright’s finished for the night,” I told Montana, who was still standing by the door watching me. It was unnerving, as though he was looking out for any false move I might make. Well, darn it, the only move I was going to make was to clear the last of the dishes from the dining room table and then I was off to bed.

When I told him this, Montana immediately said he would help. He stacked plates efficiently, holding the silverware down with his thumb so it wouldn’t fall.

“You’re pretty good at table clearing,” I said.

“When I was a kid I was a busboy at a diner in Galveston.”

“Maybe you should have stuck to it,” I said nastily.

He made no comment, simply followed me into the kitchen
with the dishes. I ran water into the sink, squeezed in some Palmolive, swished the dishes around, rinsed them off, set them on the wooden drainer. He didn’t offer to dry them, which for some reason irked me. I took paper towels and ostentatiously dried the glasses, polishing them slowly to a gleam. I put them in the glass-fronted cupboard next to the dozens of others. I turned to face my silent, watchful guest.

“Time for bed,” I said, walking past him into the corridor that led from the kitchen to the front hall.

“Wait!”

It wasn’t a request, it was a command. I spun around. “Wait for what? So you can expound on your stupid theory that Bob was murdered? Well, I’m sorry but I don’t want to hear it.” He was standing next to me by now, but I turned angrily away.

He grabbed my shoulder this time. “Please, Daisy Keane, wait a minute. It’s not for me, it’s for Bob. He gave me something for you. Please, sit here while I go get it.”

He pulled out a chair, sat me in it, then walked down the corridor to the front hall. I waited, sullenly. He was soon back, holding a bulky manila envelope which he handed to me.

“Do you know what’s in here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Bob simply asked me to hold on to it. I was to give it to you ‘should the need arise.’ And I’m quoting his exact words.”

He pulled out the chair opposite and sat, elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of him, looking at me. I caught sight of the strange turquoise-studded bracelet again and wondered in passing why such an obviously tough honcho would wear such a thing.

I turned the manila envelope over and over. For some reason I didn’t want to open it. I didn’t want to know whatever it was Bob had to tell me from beyond the grave, I just wanted things to be the way they had always been. Why, oh
why,
couldn’t I simply turn back the clock and start all over again? By not getting the flu, not staying home in bed, not allowing Bob to drive alone? Then I remembered what Montana had said: that if I had, I would be dead too.

I clutched the envelope to my chest. Whatever it contained was personal, from Bob to me. It had nothing to do with this man; he was only the messenger. The weariness I had felt earlier returned, draining me. “I can’t deal with this now,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’m off to bed.”

“I think that’s sensible. It’s been a long emotional day.”

Remembering that after all Montana was my guest, I told him to help himself to anything he wanted. I said there was bourbon and bottled water in his room and leftovers in the refrigerator if he got hungry. He’d find cookies in the biscuit tin on the shelf over there, tea—

“Thank you,” he stopped me. “I’ll be fine.”

I paused awkwardly at the door. “Well then, I hope you’ll be comfortable in the Red Room.”

“I will,” he promised.

The flight of stairs had never seemed longer as I hurried
back to the sanctuary of my room. I heard Rats’s claws pattering on the wooden floor behind me. I also heard Montana’s footsteps on the stairs, then muffled by the old Chinese silk runner as he walked to his room at the opposite side of the house. I waited till I heard his door close then quickly closed my own. For the first time ever, I locked it.

I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I felt safer away from sinister Harry Montana’s dark all-seeing gaze, forever looking for secrets or for answers to questions I hadn’t known existed and anyhow didn’t want to know about.

The lamps were lit and their gilded shades cast a pleasing glow. The bed was turned down, the pillows plumped, the extra blanket folded across the bottom because Brenda, who took care of these things, knew about my notoriously cold feet. I put the large manila envelope on the bed then went into the bathroom and washed my face. I went and sat at my pretty little dressing table and rubbed cream into my skin then slowly brushed my long hair, staring at my miserable reflection, at my swollen eyelids and my tight mouth, putting off the moment when I would have to open that envelope. I knew that if Bob could see me now, he would tell me straight out I looked like hell. “Get yourself together,” I could hear him barking at me. “Tomorrow, go to the beauty parlor, the spa, wherever it is you lasses go to get yerselves fixed up. Just don’t walk around looking long-faced at me.”

Baring my teeth, I practiced a smile in the mirror. I looked like a plain, tired woman. I snapped off the little silver-sconce lamps, slipped off my shoes, got out of my clothes and hung them carefully in the closet. I put on a nightie: white cotton
lawn down to the ankles and buttoned to the neck with long sleeves. I put on my comfy old pink bathrobe and girly oversized fluffy pink slippers, then I went and lay on the bed.

Rats, who’d been waiting patiently, jumped up and came to sit on my feet. He was heavy and I was desperately uncomfortable but I wasn’t about to move him. I needed him as much as he needed me.

I lay propped against the pillows, eyes closed, reviewing the day. It seemed ages since we had stood in the biting wind as Bob was finally laid to rest. I could hear the little jeweled clock Bob had given me on my birthday ticking softly. This was a house of many clocks; Bob loved them. The dog made snuffly sleepy noises and the wind pushed the snow softly against the curtained windows.

I could put it off no longer. I sat up, took the envelope and ripped it open. Inside I found three more envelopes. The largest one said, “Do Not Open.” The other two were letter size. One said, “To be opened at the appropriate moment. You will know when.” The other, “Open now.”

I opened it carefully and unfolded the sheets of lined yellow paper torn from a legal pad.

“Daisy, love,”
Bob’s letter began,

I hope you may never need to read this because it will mean that I am dead. But if you do, then I know I am in good hands. In the years since I picked you up at that party you have come to mean more to me than almost any other woman. I say
almost,
because though I never discussed it, there was a woman I cared deeply about many years ago, long before I knew you.

Remember I told you that night we met, that I’d been there too, at the bottom of the emotional heap? Well it was Rosalia Alonzo Ybarra I was referring to. Remember I said I’d asked myself if I would like to be young again, ambitious again, in love again? Well it was Rosalia I was thinking about.

When I was with Rosalia I was all those things: young, broke and in love. I was twenty, she was eighteen. She put up with the poverty and there was no doubt she loved me and I loved her, but she couldn’t take the other part of me: my burning ambition, the need to win at all cost. She left me because of it. All she wanted was a normal family life with a husband who came home nights and a lot of children. I’m telling you the truth now—and this is the first time I have ever really talked about her. I never saw her again and I’ve never gotten over her. I sacrificed her to a part of my life that seemed more important at the time. It was only as the years passed that I realized how selfish I’d been.

So you see, lass, when I saw you alone and afraid that night at the party, something in me from the past reached out to you. It was as though by saving you I could make amends, maybe even find a kind of happiness through you. And I did, my sweet Daisy girl (your mother, God rest her soul, should have been shot for giving you that name. You’re much more of an Eleanor or an Isabel, a Juliet even, because you are a true romantic, even though you try to hide it from yourself). But that’s beside the point and anyhow,
lass
suits you just fine. And by the way, even without even seeing you I know you need to get your hair done, it’ll be straggling all over the place like always. Go get a hairdo, a massage, a facial, and bloody well cheer up! No use moping around now it’s all over.

I suppose I was never a good man in the best sense of the word and anyone who called me a son of a bitch probably had good reason. But I
tried and I cared, and in time the money meant less to me. It became merely a reflex action, making more and more. But when it gets down to it, “enough” is all a man needs.

If the worst happens to me—other than dying in my own bed of natural causes with a glass of good Bordeaux and you by my side—-you can be sure I was
murdered.

My heart skipped a beat. It was here in Bob’s own handwriting. Swallowing back the shocked tears I read on.

I’m imagining you reading this and realize it will come as a shock, but a man like me doesn’t get to my age—sixty-four, in case you’ve forgotten—without making an enemy or two. And no doubt some of them would like to see me under the earth instead of basking on top of it in the sunny South of France with my latest—and most lovable—redhead. Namely—-you. But for some time I’ve had the uneasy feeling that someone from the past was out to get me. At first I thought it was just a joke, some crazy with a bee in his bonnet about a wealthy public figure. Now, though, I’m not so sure. But who? you might ask. I have no idea, and anyhow, I hope it’s all a figment of my overactive imagination, though Lord knows I’ve probably offended enough people (and that’s putting it mildly) and I’ve beaten enough of them out of a business deal or in a game of high-stakes finance to fill a good-size downtown Manhattan bar, where at six p.m. no doubt they will all cheerfully drink to my demise.

I have given Harry Montana a list of possible suspects I’ve “offended,” though I can’t be certain it’s actually any one of them. After all there are plenty of other loose cannons out there in the world of high finance,
both male and female. Anyhow, Montana knows the score and how all of this came about, and no doubt he’ll fill you in.

On this list are six people I tried to help in my lifetime, though I daresay none of them would admit it, or even believe that was my motive. Could one of them be my killer? (I say “killer” because if you’re reading this then obviously I am already dead.) Again, who knows, though I’m personally of the opinion that there’s more to each of them than their current lives show.

Here’s something else to think about, Daisy: It’s my belief that if you take folks out of their normal habitat and put them in a strange place with other strangers, they become different people, or rather they show themselves for the people they
really
are. And now I’ve come up with the perfect idea to test out that theory.

My feeling is if I have been killed for my money then at least let’s have some fun out of it. So now I’m going to play a game, and I’m setting it up for you.

Remember those old movies where all the suspects are gathered together in the big country house? Somehow there’s always a thunderstorm with the lights flickering on and off and a sinister old butler; there’s creaking floorboards and poisoned wine and knives gleaming, and faces at the window and shadowy figures glimpsed in darkened hallways. Well, it’s going to be a bit like that, only instead of a gloomy country house, Daisy lass, it’s going to take place on a high-class yacht, namely the famous
Blue Boat,
and at the Villa Belkiss.

I’m sending you and all six of the suspects on a Mediterranean cruise. Tell them it’ll be a kind of wake, a “celebration of my life” as the pompous funeral people insist on calling it, though personally I rather enjoyed celebrating my life when I was alive to enjoy it. This is not the
real reason I’m inviting them though. I involved myself in these people’s lives. Now I want them to acknowledge the truth about themselves, to reveal their deepest emotions to each other, and also to you, Daisy. I want you to find out their reason for living and how what I did affected their lives. Maybe then they will come to terms finally with who they are. And if they do, maybe they would have surprised me, and maybe they’ll get a second chance.

It’s an interesting thought, and a perfect way to find out the truth before they finally get to hear my will read and discover if there’s anything in it for them.

How can I get my suspects on board? you might ask. Money, of course. It’s always the bait rats are eager to snap up. Again, Montana will have all the details.

So you see, I’m looking to you and to Montana to solve my murder. Montana will also guarantee you will never be in any danger. And trust me, Daisy, that wherever you are … and wherever I am … I will be always there, keeping an eye on you.