Feast of Murder(92)

“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” Calvin said, his face working himself up into a monumental pout. “I don’t think you’re even beginning to take this seriously. You haven’t been the same since you came back from jail.”

“No?”

“It changed you,” Calvin said piously.

Jon Baird sighed. “I don’t see why it should have,” he said. “It was my idea to go in the first place. This is my cabin along here, Calvin, and I want to get into something warm.”

Calvin blinked, offended, but Jon ignored him. He just forced his way into his own cabin and shut the door. Then he looked around and wondered where Sheila had gone and if she intended to come back.

He also wondered how Sheila had done the night before, with Tony on the agenda, but he didn’t think it would ever be polite to ask either one of them. If that had been the kind of thing fathers and sons confided in each other, Jon would have told Tony not to bother.





3


Tony Baird didn’t need to confide anything to anyone. Sex had never been important to him. It was more like the giant roller coaster at Palisades Park: fun to do but not really necessary to life. Secrecy wasn’t important to him, either. He was firmly embedded in that generation that had shifted the focus from what it was they did to what it was they got caught doing. Since he knew that there was nothing terrible that could happen to him because of what he was about to do, he wasn’t worried about doing it. It didn’t even bother him that he had a fairly good idea, now, why it had to be done. He had learned it first at prep school and had it hammered home to him in college. There were no absolute standards of morality, no objective norms of behavior, no real way to tell an unchanging “right” from an unchanging “wrong.” Everything was relative and connected inexorably to gender, race, and class. Since he’d hit the jackpot on all three, he had every right on earth to do what he had to do to get where he was going. One of the reasons he liked his father was that his father wasn’t old-fashioned at all. His father had figured out all this stuff long before the professor who taught Tony had ever been born.

Charlie Shay’s body was lying on its side under a pile of blankets. It would have been much better for everybody if he could have gotten to it the night before, but Demarkian had been asleep in the other bunk. There had to be something wrong with a man who preferred sleeping with a corpse to sleeping in the same cabin with Bennis Hannaford.

Tony got the weights he’d been carrying out of his pockets. They were lead weight sinkers for buoys, left in the hold after a less determinedly Puritan voyage God only knew how many years ago. He put the sinkers into Charlie Shay’s pockets and the cuffs of his pants and his shoes. There were fewer of them than Tony wished there were, but he thought there were enough. Bodies sank, after all. They didn’t float to the surface until they were puffed full of gas and rot. It would take weeks before Charlie got like that. Tony turned Charlie on his back, considered picking him up just the way he was, and decided against it. He didn’t really want to touch any more dead skin than he had to. He wasn’t sure he could carry Charlie around loose like that without making the sinkers fall out to the floor.

Down at the end of the passage where the makeshift showers were, there was a storage bin full of canvas and lines. Tony left Charlie where he was, went down there, and got a little of both. The passage was empty. The whole deck was empty, as far as Tony could tell. The crew must be occupied above, trying to get them moving in this awful calm. Tony didn’t care about the calm. If it hadn’t come up naturally, they would have had to devise something else to take its place.

He got the canvas and the line back to the cabin, went in and laid it on the floor. Then, after a little deliberation, he unfolded the canvas until it made a kind of rug on the wood deck and rolled Charlie off the bunk onto it. Charlie’s body landed with a thud that was much too soft and squishy for Tony’s taste. He swallowed his discomfort and wrapped Charlie firmly up in canvas, the way hospitals wrap babies and patrons in Chinese restaurants wrap moo shu pork.

When the wrapping was done, Tony took a long length of line and tied the package together. He had to wind the line around a half dozen times and was still left with something that looked like a kindergarten child had done it, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was that he get the body up on the main deck without losing any of the sinkers or brushing against the skin of that face. All that mattered was that he get this over with and get it over with quickly.

He threw Charlie Shay over his shoulder like a sack of sand and made his way out into the passage. It was a tight fit but not an impossible one, and the passage was still empty. He went to the staircase and climbed to the deck above. The passage there was empty, too, and so was the final staircase up. If he had been able to do this last night he wouldn’t have been so tense. The rest of them would all have been asleep and he wouldn’t have had to rehearse in his head what he would say when someone came up and found him in the middle of this.