Skinny Dip - Страница 2

As for the splash, Chaz would have preferred to hear it; a soft punctuation to the marriage and the crime. Then again, it was a long way down to the water.

He allowed himself a brief glance, but saw only whitecaps and foam in the roiling reflection of the ship's lights. The Sun Duchess kept moving, which was a relief. No Klaxons sounded.

Chaz picked up the key and hurried to the stateroom, bolting the door behind him. After hanging up his blazer, he opened another bottle of wine, poured some into two glasses and drank half of each.

Joey's suitcase lay open for re-packing, and Chaz moved it from the bed to the floor. He splayed his own travel bag and went foraging for an antacid. Beneath a stack of neatly folded boxers-Joey was a champion packer, he had to admit-Chaz came upon a box wrapped in tartan-style gift paper with green ribbon.

Inside the box was a gorgeous set of leather golf-club covers that were embossed with his initials, C.R.P. There was also a card: "Happy 2nd Anniversary! Love always, Joey."

Admiring the silken calfskin sheaths, Chaz felt a knot of remorse in his gut. It passed momentarily, like acid reflux.

His wife had class, no doubt about it. If only she hadn't been so damn… observant.

In exactly six hours he would report her missing.

Chaz stripped to his underwear and lobbed his clothes in a corner. Packed inside his carry-on was a paperback edition of Madame Bovary, which he opened randomly and placed for effect on the nightstand by Joey's side of the bed.

Then Charles Regis Perrone set his alarm clock, laid his head on the pillow and went to sleep.

The Gulf Stream carried Joey northward at almost four knots. She knew she'd have to swim harder if she didn't want to end up bloated and rotting on some sandbar in North Carolina.

But, Lord, she was tired.

Had to be the wine. Chaz knew she wasn't much of a drinker, and obviously he'd planned it all in advance. Probably hoped that the fall from the ship would break her legs or knock her unconscious, and if it didn't, so what? She'd be miles from land in a pitching black ocean, and scared shitless. Nobody would find her even if they went looking, and she'd drown from exhaustion before daylight.

That's what Chaz probably figured.

He hadn't forgotten about her glory days at UCLA, either, Joey realized. He knew she would start swimming, if she somehow survived the fall. In fact, he was counting on her to swim; betting that his stubborn and prideful wife would wear herself out when she should have tucked into a floating position and conserved her strength until sunrise. At least then she'd have a speck of a chance to be seen by a passing ship.

Sometimes I wonder about myself, Joey thought.

Once a tanker passed so close that it blocked out the moon. The ship's silhouette was squat and dark and squared at both ends, like a high-rise condo tipped on its side. Joey had hollered and waved, but there was no chance of being heard above the clatter of the engines. The tanker pushed by, a russet wall of noise and fumes, and Joey resumed swimming.

Soon her legs started going numb, a spidery tingle that began in her toes and crept upward. Muscle cramps wouldn't have surprised her, but the slow deadening did. She found herself laboring to keep her face above the waves, and eventually she sensed that she'd stopped kicking altogether. Toward the end she switched to the breaststroke, her legs trailing like pale broken cables.

We've only been married two years, she was thinking. What did I do to deserve this?

To take her mind off dying, Joey composed a mental list of the things that Chaz didn't like about her:

1. She tended to overcook fowl, particularly chicken, due to a lifelong fear of salmonella.

2. The facial moisturizing cream that she applied at night smelled vaguely like insecticide.

3. Sometimes she dozed off during hockey games, even the play-offs.

4. She refused to go down on him while he was driving on Interstate 95, the Sunshine State Parkway or any surface road where the posted speed limit exceeded fifty miles per hour.

5. She could whip him at tennis whenever she felt like it.

6. She occasionally "misplaced" his favorite George Thorogood CDs.

7. She declined to entertain the possibility of inviting his hairstylist over for a threesome.

8. She belonged to a weekly book group.

9. She had more money than he did.

10. She brushed with baking soda instead of toothpaste…

Come on, Joey thought.

A guy doesn't suddenly decide to murder his wife just because she serves a chewy Cornish hen.

Maybe it's another woman, Joey thought. But then why not just ask me for a divorce?

She didn't have the energy to sort it all out. She'd married a worthless horndog and now he'd heaved her overboard on their anniversary cruise and very soon she would drown and be devoured by sharks. Out here you had the big boys: blacktips, lemons, hammerheads, tigers, makos and bulls…

Please, God, don't let them eat me, Joey thought, until after I've died.

The same warm tingle was starting in her fingertips and soon, she knew, both arms would be as spent and useless as her legs. Her lips had gone raw from the salt, her tongue was swollen like a kielbasa and her eyelids were puffy and crusted. Still, the lights of Florida beckoned like Stardust whenever she reached the top of a wave.

So Joey struggled on, believing she still had a slender chance of survival. If she made it across the Gulf Stream, she'd finally be able to rest; ball up and float until the sun came up.

She had momentarily forgotten about the sharks, when something heavy and rough-skinned butted against her left breast. Thrashing and grunting, she beat at the thing with both fists until the last of her strength was gone.

Cavitating into unconsciousness, she was subjected to a flash vision of Chaz in their stateroom aboard the Sun Duchess, screwing a blond croupier before heading aft for one final bucket of balls.

Prick, Joey thought.

Then the screen in her head went blank.

Two

At heart Chaz Perrone was irrefutably a cheat and a maggot, but he had always shunned violence as dutifully as a Quaker elder. Nobody who knew him, including his few friends, would have imagined him capable of homicide. Chaz himself was somewhat amazed that he'd gone through with it.

When the alarm clock went off, he awoke with the notion that he'd imagined the whole scene. Then he rolled over and saw that Joey's side of the bed was empty. Through the porthole he spied the jetties that marked the entrance of Port Everglades, and he knew he wasn't dreaming. He had definitely killed his wife.

Chaz was dazzled by his own composure. He reached for the phone, made the call he'd been practicing and prepared himself for what was to come. He gargled lightly but otherwise made no attempt at personal grooming, dishevelment being expected of a frantic husband.

Soon after the Sun Duchess docked, the interviews commenced. First to arrive was the ship's solicitous security chief, then a pair of baby-faced Coast Guard officers and finally a dyspeptic Broward County Sheriff's detective. Meanwhile, the Sun Duchess was being combed from bow to stern, presumably to rule out the embarrassing possibility that Mrs. Perrone was shacking up with another passenger or, worse, a crew member.

"Exactly what time did your wife leave the stateroom?" the detective asked.

"Three-thirty in the morning," Chaz said.

The specificity of the lie was important to ensure that the rescue operation would focus on the wrong swatch of ocean. The ship's loca-

tion at 3:30 a.m. would have been approximately seventy miles north of the spot where he'd tumbled his wife overboard.

"And you say she was going to 'scope out' the moon?" the detective asked.

"That's what she told me." Chaz had been rubbing his eyes to keep them red and bleary, as befitting a hungover, anxiety-stricken spouse. "I must've nodded off. When I woke up, the sun was rising and the ship was pulling into port and Joey still wasn't back. That's when I phoned for help."

The detective, a pale and icy Scandinavian type, jotted a single sentence in his notebook. He pointed at the two wineglasses next to the bed. "She didn't finish hers."

"No." Chaz sighed heavily.

"Or take it with her. Wonder why."

"We'd already had a whole bottle at dinner."

"Yes, but still," the detective said, "you're going out to look at the moon, most women would bring their wine. Some might even bring their husbands."

Chaz cautiously measured his response. He hadn't expected to get his balls busted so early in the game.

"Joey asked me to meet her on the Commodore Deck and I told her I'd bring our wineglasses," Chaz said. "But I fell asleep instead- okay, make that passed out. We'd had quite a lot to drink, actually."

"More than one bottle, then."

"Oh yeah."

"Would you say your wife was intoxicated?"

Chaz shrugged gloomily.

"Did you two have an argument last night?" the detective asked.

"Absolutely not." It was the only true piece of Chaz's story.

"Then why didn't you go outside together?"

"Because I was sittin' on the can, okay? Taking care of some personal business." Chaz tried to make himself blush. "The seviche they fed us last night, let me just say, tasted like something the cat yakked up. So I told Joey, 'Go ahead without me, I'll be along in a few minutes.' "

"Bringing the wineglasses with you."

"That's right. But instead I must've laid down and passed out," Chaz said. "So, yeah, it's basically all my fault."