Death in Paradise (10 page)

Having Andre around helps. He keeps me more balanced. I eat meals. I get exercise. I can't work all the time. Much of it, but not all. But today he wasn't here. There was no one to massage the knots out of my shoulders or to remind me to breathe or to tell me that the rest of the conference organizers hadn't died and left me in charge. I'm compulsive. I'm obsessive. I'm a worrier. Where was that guy when I needed him?

They're always writing articles telling us professional women that we need to learn to manage our stress. We're supposed to find the time in our days for an hour of brisk exercise plus a wonderfully balanced, nutritious diet, plus all those calming cups of herb tea and aromatherapy, plus quality time with friends and family, etc. It was the etc. that always got to me. I figured the people who wrote the articles worked about two hours a day and had perfectly painted toenails. I managed stress by moving faster and being more aggressive.

As I was going downstairs, a rhyme popped into my head:

 

As I was going up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there,

He wasn't there again today,

I wish, I wish, he'd go away.

 

I wished they'd all go away. I was tired. I wanted to lie down in my fancy linen sundress and take a nap, like Rory. Thinking about Rory meant thinking about Martina, and thinking about Martina led me to thinking about her husband, Jeff. I'd met Jeff Pullman a few times, at board functions and once or twice at other conferences, and I could never understand what had drawn them together. Jeff was one of those men who never seem to lose their boyish good looks. In his fifties, he could have been twenty years younger, and his disposition was as pleasing and appealing as his looks. I knew he had to be more than a fresh-faced all-American boy. He was a tremendously successful lobbyist. But he seemed totally honest and genuine.

He was fun to talk to. He had an enormous repertoire of funny stories. He had instant recall of his last conversation with anyone, regardless of how much time had passed. He was always up-to-date on current issues in education, all the inside the beltway gossip, and lots of other gossip as well. His eyes twinkled. He had a great smile. And he seemed to want everyone to have a good time. He was never grouchy or short with anyone. He gave the appearance of caring about people. A perfect paragon. I would never be attracted to someone without a few snags and edges—I like my
men
nice and complicated, moody and passionate and filled with obsessive enthusiasms—but I could see where he was an attractive package. What I couldn't figure out was why he'd been attracted to Martina unless opposites truly do attract.

A former assistant of Martina's named Olivia D'Angelo had put it very well when she'd said, "Martina wakes up in the morning with one idea in her head—herself—and spends the rest of the day trying to make everyone else share her idea." Once when I was telling Andre about Martina, he'd asked me why we put up with her if she was so impossible. My first answer was because we didn't have any choice. She was there, she was a fixture, she was just a difficult person we had to deal with.

It was also true that we had our own selfish motives. The rest of us on the board were interested in promoting the ideas, and exploring the issues, surrounding single-sex education. For Martina, single-sex education was inextricably linked with herself. As far as she was concerned, she was the patron saint of single-sex education in the United States. So I suppose that just as she used us, we used her. Lately, as her behavior got more erratic and her ego more insatiable, a rumbling movement in the troops had begun to discuss her ouster. But we'd been thinking about a board vote, not an assassination. And until now, we'd been too busy with our other lives to take any action.

But that brought me back to my questions. Why had a nice guy like Jeff ended up with a woman who was such a user? What had his ulterior motive been? Or was I just being overanalytical. Why couldn't it simply have been love? If what Shannon had said at lunch today was true, he had left his wife for Martina. What were—had been—her plusses? She was attractive. Smart in the same Washington insiders way that he was. She was rich. Well educated. Could be charming. Was eminently presentable. Maybe that was all. Maybe the first Mrs. Jeff had been a stolid little homebody next to whom Martina had seemed like the perfect mate for a lobbyist.

I pushed opened the door to the twelfth floor and headed for my room. Enough of idle speculation. Anyone would think that I was a gossip. I had work to do. Calls to make. Arrangements. Oh, joy! What I'd said to Andre seemed too true. I might as well have been in the Yukon in February for all the difference it made being in Hawaii. Maybe I'd skip the luau and go into town. Get a burger and walk the streets. Feel like I was on vacation. Except that I was one of the board members. I was here as a worker bee, a professional glad-hander. Besides, the people who were here were interesting. I was just feeling a need for some solitude.

I got to be all by myself for the forty-five minutes that it took me to track down the person responsible for the luau, a woman named Leilani Leland. Positively alliterative. Lovely and alliterative or not, it took seven phone calls to find her and telephone tag is one of my least favorite games. When I finally did get connected and explained why I was calling, she told me I didn't have to worry about a thing, everything was fine, all the arrangements taken care of. All in a voice designed to soothe the savage breast.

Once upon a time, I used to hang up at that point, reassured, like young Rory, that all was right with the world. Experience has taught me a lesson, so I said, "Let's just go over a few of the details, shall we?"

"Everything's fine, Ms. Kojak."

She couldn't get my name right and I was supposed to trust her with my conference? "I'm sure it is, but it won't hurt to check." She murmured a reluctant assent. "All right, now, you've reserved a private outside space for us on the beach side of the hotel, yes?"

"Yes. Certainly. We always use the same spot."

"Good. Now, let's check numbers. Last night, through some oversight, we had twenty-five guests left without tables at dinner. We can't have that happen again, can we?"

"I can assure you, tonight everything will be fine," she said. In her voice was the certainty that in her department, at least, things went right.

I went right on with my checking. The more cheerful the reassurance is, the more wary I get. "We have one hundred fifty conference attendees, plus one hundred guests, spouses, mostly, and thirty-five children. I make that two hundred eighty-five. Is that the number you have?" There was silence except for the rustling of papers, a sigh, some more rustling. Another sigh. With each rustle and sigh, my anxiety level rose. "Excuse me," I said. "Are you still there? Is something wrong?"

Another silence. Then she said, "According to the papers I have here, your group confirmed for two hundred people. That's the number we've given the kitchen."

Oh, great. Last night they'd forgotten twenty-five people.

Tonight it was eighty-five. Tomorrow they'd probably clean out our rooms and put our luggage in the street. I said, "No."

"Excuse me?"

"I said, no, not two hundred. It's two hundred eighty-five. And we did confirm, to you, in writing. I have a copy of a letter here, from the hotel...." Rory might be irritating, but I blessed her for being so organized that not only had she confirmed the two hundred eighty-five number in writing, she'd scanned their reply letter right into her file, so I had a copy of it as well. Sometimes I hated technology. There were days when I longed to move to a cabin in the woods and grow beans, like Thoreau, but at times like this I thought technology was simply grand. "It's confirming two hundred eighty-five people for a luau this evening, signed on behalf of the hotel catering service by a Mr. Charles Thorsen."

There was another long silence. Actually, it wasn't quite a silence. What I heard, faintly but distinctly, was my sweet telephone contact saying "Oh, shit," followed by the sound of breaking crockery. Then she raised her voice, and I heard that quite clearly. "Can someone find that moron, Charlie, and send him in here. Pronto." Then she was back on the line, her voice simmering with honey. "It won't be a problem, Ms. Kojak. I assure you. Your two hundred eighty-five people will be well fed. Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"No. Thank you." I disconnected without even correcting her about my name. I didn't have the heart to ask whether there would be enough tables and chairs as well as food. I figured she'd take care of that while she was running around for the rest of the afternoon slaughtering coconuts, skinning pineapples, and husking chickens.

It was board policy for each of us to monitor one of the seminars, to be sure that what we said we were offering was what people got. I opened my appointment book to check on which one I was assigned to. Miraculous. I had the afternoon off. But before the devil could find work for my idle hands to do, there was a knock on the door.

When I opened it, the entire doorway was filled with brilliant color. Jonetta Williamson. Our missing board member. Person of color. Woman of size. She would have shamed a peacock. She was magnificent. "I just got in," she said. "I met Shannon in the lobby, pale and staggering after her bout with some feisty cop. She could barely speak. You want to fill me in?"

I stepped aside and let her sweep past. She settled herself in a chair. "Sorry I couldn't get here sooner. We had a missing student. Thirteen. Tiny little bird of a thing. I was dying of fear, imagining some wretched child fancier had snatched her. She disappeared between home and school, you see. Come to find out, she'd run away with her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, and there she is, nothin' more than a baby. They can't start prosecuting those guys for statutory rape soon enough for me. I'd like to string a few of 'em up by their balls right outside the schoolhouse door."

She fanned herself with her hand. "Don't they even have air-conditioning in this place? I am roasting."

"Oh, sure. I'll turn it on. I was on the phone the last hour, so I guess I didn't notice."

"Honey, you are always on the phone, it seems to me. You've got to start takin' it easy and let someone else do the work. You're never going to get your own school to run until you prove you can delegate."

"Truth is, Netta, I don't want a school to run."

She shook her head knowingly. "We'll just wait and see. Time you get around to wanting to marry and have some babies, it's gonna be mighty complicated trying to raise your kids when you spend half your life on an airplane and the other half on the phone. Babies cry on airplanes and as soon as you get on the phone, they go flush your purse down the toilet."

Unlike the rest of the board, who ran nice upper-middle-class establishments in nice upper-middle-class towns, Jonetta was out there on the line saving lives. Single-handedly she had secured funding and a building to start a school for poor black girls. As she put it, "All of you sigh and worry about a girl with good grades and her college money already in the bank gettin' left behind in physics because the boys are more aggressive and outspoken. I'm worrying about the girls with twenty-seven-year-old crack-addicted mothers who are likely to get pregnant and drop out of school, or join a gang and drop out of school, or just drift away because they've got no idea that school can do anything for them. I'm worryin' about the girls who may otherwise be dead or at a dead end if I don't help."

I thought a lot of what we did was important. Not only because we did it in private schools, but because the ideas were getting out and getting used and making a difference in lots of girls' lives. It was exciting to me to teach teachers new ways to help girls feel comfortable with technology, whether it was building bicycles or programming computers, and it was fulfilling to know that because of what we were doing, many girls would have greater success at science and math. But Jonetta was the person I wanted to be when I grew up. Jonetta had a calling, a mission, and the courage and drive to see it through. I could argue with a caterer and win. Jonetta could argue with the mayor of New York.

The air-conditioning made an instant difference. Jonetta leaned back in her chair and smiled. "Well, good to see that something works. You got anything to eat?"

I passed her the room-service menu. "I'll call down and have them send up some sandwiches. What sounds good to you?"

"The shrimp and avocado salad. And the turkey club. Some fries would be nice, and I think after all the way I've come, that you'd better get me some of that banana cream pie, too." I picked up the phone and ordered everything. I also asked them to send up a pitcher of lemonade and some Maui potato chips. They actually taste just like Cape Cod chips to me, but maybe I'm being a regional chauvinist. I didn't care what they were called, they were good and I was craving salt.

That done, we got down to business. "So, Thea," she said, "you found her?" I nodded. "How did that happen?"

I told her about Rory banging on the door, and about the pre-meeting meeting being missed. "She was in a state and I knew she wouldn't let it alone until I did something, so I went up to Martina's room and banged on the door. When she didn't answer, we got security to let us in. And there she was."

"Can you tell me about it, or was it too awful?"

I hesitated, Nihilani's flat, cold voice in my ear, commanding me not to tell anyone about the crime scene. But Jonetta hadn't even been here, and anyway, I felt, at this point, desperate for someone I could talk to, and I'd always felt close to Jonetta. "I'm not supposed to talk about it. The cops... you know... they told me not to."

Jonetta rolled her eyes. "Thea, you know I didn't have anything to do with it. I wasn't even on Maui at the time." When I still hesitated, she said, "Must be some scary cops, to shut you up. Well, okay, what if I cross my heart and hope to die and swear I'll never, ever tell a soul?" I couldn't help but meet her smile. "And anyway," she added, "sometimes, when you've had a terrible experience, it helps to talk about it."