Feast of Murder(64)

This, Gregor thought, was going to be even more difficult than he had feared.





Three


1


LIKE MANY OTHER WOMEN in her position, Sheila Baird had very little patience with sex. She knew how to use it, because she had to know how to use it. It was important in the care and feeding of important husbands, although not so important as the way she appeared to other important husbands in public or the prestige of the charity balls she got them invited to. Sheila could moan and groan and shudder and shake with the best of them. She wasn’t above buying upscale how-to manuals and proposing forays into the sexually absurd. She had had love made to her while she was hanging by her knees from a gymnast’s bar and while she was tied to the wall of a Pullman compartment on a train. It was one of the things she liked best about her marriage that Jon had no interest in that sort of thing and confined his sexual attentions to the ordinary and to bed. No matter how he confined them, however, he did display them. He had made love to her three times a week like clockwork from the day they were married. Then he had gone into jail and not made love to her at all. Now he was out, and Sheila thought she had every right to expect him to do something. Sheila was unshakably convinced that all that talk about female orgasm was bunk. Females didn’t have orgasms, and that was a good thing for them, too. Males had orgasms, though, and for them that was a kind of addiction. There was always something wrong when the addiction seemed to have been cured. Sheila had been worried about it ever since Jon got out of jail. She had expected him to come back and leap on her. Instead, he had come back, walked into his study, and shut and locked the door. For hours after that, she had heard him tapping away at his computer terminal and talking on the phone. For all the weeks since, he had done practically nothing else. Sheila was beginning to get nervous, and not because she felt sexually deprived.

Husbands who weren’t sleeping with trophy wives were on the way to divorcing trophy wives. That was the ticket. Husbands who were on the way to divorcing trophy wives had to be subjected to—shock treatment.

Sheila was a naturally curious woman, about some things, but under ordinary circumstances she would never have stayed in the mess hall to listen to Gregor Demarkian ask questions when Jon had gone back to their cabin. Tonight, she had wanted to think. She had let Jon go and sat with all the others, busy making plans while Mr. Demarkian was busy belaboring the obvious. Sheila had heard all about how Gregor Demarkian was supposed to be a great detective, but now that she’d met him she didn’t believe it. Great detectives were either men like Sherlock Holmes—meaning the sort of men who not only knew everything, but made a point of displaying the fact—or fighter types like Starsky and Hutch. They weren’t big fuzzy ethnic lumps like Gregor Demarkian, and they didn’t ask silly questions about who had the salad dressing first. Sheila had sat through it all with her mind more than half on something else—meaning Jon—and then, when it was over, she’d said good night to everyone and been the first out of the room.

She went down the passage carefully, leaning to the left to keep her hair out of the candle flames, and let herself into the cabin she shared with Jon. The outer room was empty, but the door to the inner room was open and a wash of light was coming through the door. The light was strong, which meant that Jon was using a great many candles, or that he’d found the flashlight she’d hidden away in the bottom of her make-up case. Sheila thought about going in just as she was, thought better of it, and opened the lid of the boxy looking thing Jon insisted on calling her “locker.” The locker was full of lingerie. She took out a pair of green silk panties, a green silk nightgown, and a green robe so sheer it could have been a form of light and put them on.

“Are you coming to bed?” Jon called to her from the next room.

“Mmm,” Sheila said. If there had been a little teasing in his tone, she would have been heartened, but there hadn’t been. She found a mirror and a comb, combed out her hair, and wished she had the wall of mirrors she had in her dressing room back home. It was impossible to tell what you really looked like as long as you were on this boat.

“What was the gossip rodeo like?” Jon called out again. “Did Demarkian ask a lot of questions about the length of Charlie’s big right toenail?”

Sheila went to the door that led to the inner room. Jon was lying in bed, surrounded by candles in holders, bent over a stack of computer papers. Business, business, business.

“He didn’t ask about toenails at all,” Sheila told him. “He asked a lot about the salad dressing and who had passed it. He asked a lot about the seating arrangements. He wanted to know who was where.”