Really Dead, Page 21

  “Yeah, well, not scripted scripted, if you know what I mean.” I didn’t know what she meant. “But it’s sort of scripted. Esther says Judy’s a real pain. I mean she’s nice enough, but she’s always messing up, saying the wrong things.”

  The awkward silence between us returned and we both looked around at the scenery. We were halfway between Soursop and Virgin Gorda so our visual options were limited — there was an island in front of us, an island behind us, and a whole lot of water everywhere else.

  “So, you and Rob, huh.” What Pam had said didn’t really qualify as a question, so I didn’t quantify it with an answer. “He likes you. A lot. I can tell.” She said it without any hint of jealousy. “He’s one of the good ones, you know? You two should hook up.”

  Maybe it was a generational thing? Was she offering to share? “I thought you and Rob were, you know…”

  “Shut up!” She slapped me on the arm. “You thought I was doing Rob? Are you serious? He’s nice and everything, but he’s older than my dad!”

  “My mistake.” Or was it? Maybe Pam just didn’t want anyone to know about her relationship with Rob — and she did have a relationship with him, I’d seen that with my own two eyes.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s awesome.” She shimmied, turning her whole body to face me, reminding me of a little girl getting ready to share her deepest darkest secret with her BFF. “Don’t tell anybody, okay?” Oh, God. She was going to share a secret. I really didn’t want to hear the juicy details about whatever was going on between her and Rob. “So, like, the thing is …”

  It turned out that my eyes had seen clearly, but my brain had blurred the facts into the wrong image. Pam wasn’t doing Rob. She’d been doing Adam, the aerial cameraman. She hadn’t wanted to “freak him out” (her words) when she thought she might be pregnant, so she’d turned to Rob, the closest thing to a dad she had on location. The package that Rob handed her by the pool had been a pregnancy test that he’d picked up for her when he was in St. Thomas, shooting Chris’ drunken arrival. Pam’s kiss that night had been one of gratitude, not lust. And the big smile and hug she’d given him when he’d come to her room so early in the morning? They’d been fuelled by relief, not lust.

  “See what a sweetheart he is?”

  “I do now.” And I felt pretty dumb for jumping to the wrong conclusion so quickly based solely on visual images that I’d misunderstood.

  “So? Will you hook up with him?”

  “I don’t know about that.” All I did know was that I wanted to change the topic of conversation. Thankfully, the geography did it for me. We’d slowed down and were driving past the breakwater into the Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbour.

  The damn door to the laundry room at James’ villa was locked. None of the keys Mandy had left for me would open it.

  “Great. Just bloody great!” With my luck Albert’s bag would be locked too.

  I leaned in close to the door and tried to get my head at an angle that would allow me to see between the wooden slats of the shutter on the inside of the window. No matter how I contorted all I could see was the slats. Now what?

  I had two hours to kill before I had to be at the airport to meet Albert. I spent the first hour pacing, without a gecko audience. A bird’s nest hung over a small wrought-iron bench behind the pool. A pair of tiny yellow-bellied black birds, who were barely larger than hummingbirds, darted in and out of the nest as they brought food to their babies, amusing me just long enough for me to be able to identify them.

  Another hour to go.

  I felt useless. I wasn’t getting anywhere — even though I’d probably covered a couple of miles with all the pacing I’d done that day. I had to do something useful. Using my fingers, I tried to count out my best guesstimate of the time difference between Virgin Gorda and Sydney. Sixteen hours? Maybe seventeen? James was probably talking to Aunt Patti a lot so he wouldn’t notice the call on his phone bill.

  Aunt Patti answered on the fourth ring. I’d woken her up.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she asked before knowing who was calling. (She’d inherited the Butler worrying gene.)

  “Hi Aunt Patti, it’s Ria.”

  “Is Blake all right? Has something happened?”

  I spent the next few minutes reassuring her that Dad was fine and apologizing for calculating the time difference wrong. Aunt Patti needed those minutes to wake up enough to consciously join the conversation.

  I told her how nice the hotel was and asked who she thought should win the competition.

  “They both came with excellent recommendations. They’re equal in experience, but I think Judy’s got a slight edge. She’s worked at a more varied selection of international properties. Ted, on the other hand, is better at dealing with the guests. He’s more polished, smoother, you know what I mean?”

  She hadn’t said anything about Ted being a spy. Did she not know? Maybe he was spying on her? Maybe she was doing something shady with the books, ripping Dad off … at the rate my brain was working I’d be hiring Oliver Stone to make a movie about all the conspiracies my mind was theorizing about. “Could I look at their applications?”

  “I’d love you to! Nothing against James, but I don’t put one hundred percent faith in his assessment. He’s looking at their entertainment value, while I’m more interested in their management value. You should know that the votes from the department heads at the BVI site are unanimous — they all prefer working with Judy over Ted and that carries more weight than James’ vote, in my opinion. Jean Philippe, our head chef, even threatened to quit when Ted tried to put a padlock on one of the refrigerators. James’ partner has commandeered it for his own use and he wanted to keep his food separate from everyone else’s. It’s Jean Philippe’s kitchen! It took a lot of talking and a pay raise to convince him to put up with the creative types for a few more weeks. I can understand why Ted’s doing all he can to impress the producers of the show, but he seems to have forgotten that he’ll have to work with the department heads at the hotel if he gets the job. I’ll be very interested to hear what you think. I’ll email their applications to you just as soon as I get to the office.”

  “That’d be great.” But what if Ted really was a spy? Would he be able to see what was coming and going in my email account if I logged on at the hotel? My Internet knowledge was limited enough to worry me. A new conspiracy line started to wriggle through my head … if he could access my account, had he seen that I’d sent Glenn a copy of his CSIS card? “Actually, could you send the information to a friend of mine? My email program’s been messing up a lot lately.”

  “No worries. What’s his address?”

  I gave her Glenn’s personal email address as I watched an Air Sunshine plane coming in from the west. “Aunt Patti, I have to go meet a friend at the airport. I just saw his flight coming in.” As if Albert and I would ever be friends!

  There was no sign of the television crew and there wasn’t a private jet on the tarmac when I got to the airport. They must have finished shooting Chris’ supposed arrival.

  “Where’s James?” Albert said the minute he stepped out of the airport building. He was carrying the same metallic silver briefcase he’d left Soursop with. He clutched it close to his chest, with the Toronto morning paper on top of it. Glenn’s paper. The nightclub shooting that happened just before I left for Machu Picchu was still making news; the cover picture was of the three men who had been arrested.

  “Over on Soursop. He asked me to pick you up.” If the damn case was locked I planned to break it open by running over it with the Jeep.

  Albert raised one eyebrow. “Why didn’t he send Mandy?”

  “She’s in the scene they’re shooting tonight, so she’s getting her makeup and wardrobe done.” I turned around and opened the driver’s door. “Come on, Albert. I’m James’ sister. He trusts me completely.”

  I heard, and ignored, his grunt of agreement as he begrudgingly got into the passenger seat beside me and clutched
his briefcase in his lap for the ride to the marina. It wasn’t until we were both standing on the dock beside the boat that he finally released his grip on it and let me take it. He kept his newspaper, though.

  Like James, I sat in the car waiting to see the boat pull out. I wanted to make sure that Albert really left.

  When I got back to the villa I ran down the stairs, two at a time. My hands were shaking as I opened the non-locking briefcase. It was full of plastic DVD cases. The brittle plastic cover almost snapped in my hands when I split the first case open. The DVD popped out and then I saw what had been hidden beneath it.

  For the third time Glenn’s call went to the voice mailbox for Ria’s room. Where the hell was she? He’d been trying to reach her for hours, ever since he’d got back home from the editing suite. The message she’d left for him was a doozy — Ted Robarts was a CSIS spy and someone had been spying on her?

  He’d given up on calling her cellphone. Those calls went straight through to voicemail; her phone was either off or not working.

  For his fourth phone call he didn’t ask for her room — he asked the person who answered the phone to find out where Ria was, only to learn that she was “off island” and wasn’t expected back until after sunset. Didn’t they have clocks down there? He wanted a time, something specific. Their messed up communications, on so many levels, were driving him crazy. It took two cigarettes, one right after the other, to calm him down enough to be able to sit at his desk.

  There was an email from Ria, with attachments, but she sure didn’t waste any words in her message — there weren’t any.

  Glenn double clicked on the attachment. “What the fuck?” Ted Robarts’ serious face was looking back at him from the scan of a CSIS ID badge. But the name on the badge didn’t match the picture. Jake Purcell? Ted Robarts was definitely tweaking Glenn’s curiosity. The receptionist at the editing place had called him Phil. Ria knew him as Ted. CSIS knew him as Jake. Glenn zoomed in on the badge and carefully looked up close at every inch of it. It looked real enough, but anyone with a laminator and Photoshop could put together something like it. But why would they? His printer didn’t sound very healthy as it turned the visual image on his screen into a solid, physical object. He picked up the printed sheet and stared at it. How was he going to check this out?

  He clicked on Send/Receive one more time and was surprised to see what had to be a big file coming in. He had high-speed service, but it still took almost a minute for the email to load. It was from Ria’s aunt, the president of Butler Hotels. He opened it and read Ms. Whitecross’s cheery note, explaining that Ria had asked her to send the attached information. He double-clicked on the first attachment.

  It was Judy Ingram’s application package for the show. Her resume was impressive. She had a bachelor of commerce degree and an MBA. Glenn recognized the names of a lot of the hotels she’d worked at — mainly because he read Ria’s travel articles religiously and she’d written reviews on most of them. Could Ria and Judy have possibly met before? The video that Judy had sent with her application looked so homemade and amateur that it was almost painful to watch. The focus was off, the lighting was terrible, and the open collar of her crisply starched shirt kept scratching against the small microphone that was pinned to her blazer. Despite the technical weaknesses of the video Judy herself came across as confident and competent.

  The second attachment was Ted’s application package. He, too, had an impressive resume. Like Judy he had a bachelor of commerce degree, only his wasn’t a general degree it was specifically a B. Comm. — hospitality and tourism management. Unlike Judy, Ted hadn’t gone on to earn an MBA. Glenn didn’t recognize as many of the hotels on Ted’s resume as he had on Judy’s, but the technical quality of his video blew Judy’s out of the water. Ted’s performance, if you could call it that, was much smoother than Judy’s. He smiled, he looked right into the lens of the camera, his shoulders were relaxed, and his body moved naturally with his dialogue.

  Glenn felt a familiar quick pulse of adrenalin shoot through him. He wasn’t stumbling around, trying to figure out what to do next. He knew what to do. With Judy and Ted’s pictures both frozen on a split-screen on his monitor, he put their now-printed resumes on the desk in front of him, picked up the phone, and started to call each and every one of the references they had listed. All of the people he spoke to believed him when he identified himself and the newspaper he worked for and then claimed to be looking for background information for a story he was putting together on Check-Out Time.

  Judy’s references sang her praises and said they hoped she was going to win the job at The Butler BVI. From what they said, and from the career progression he’d seen on her resume, it seemed like the most logical and deserved next step-up on her career path.

  Ted’s references were just as enthusiastic about him. Glenn was getting nowhere, learning nothing. With a heavy sigh he dialed the number for Ted’s last reference — the Crystal Hotel in downtown Toronto. He’d driven by it many times, but had never been in it. All he knew was that it was rated five-star and always packed full of movie stars during the Toronto International Film Festival. The human resources manager wasn’t available, but the assistant manager was more than willing to answer Glenn’s questions. Everyone at the hotel had enjoyed working with Ted; it was because of Ted and the changes he implemented that their hotel had been bumped up from a mere four-star rating. They’d all been sorry to lose him to the hotel in Dubai.

  Dubai?

  Glenn double-checked Ted’s resume. There was no mention of a hotel in Dubai. “Which hotel was that?” he asked. It was a place he’d never heard of but, according to the assistant manager of human resources, getting the job of managing one of the few six-star hotels in the world was a real professional coup. Ted was so well thought of in the industry that he’d been poached for the job — he hadn’t even applied for it.

  “That’s why we were so surprised to get a call from the production company about Ted’s application for the reality show. He must not have liked living in Dubai. Maybe his wife had a problem adjusting to being a female in a Muslim country?”

  Ted was married? Again, Glenn read through his application. There was no mention of a wife.

  He quickly ended the call and then started clicking with gusto, finding the website for the Dubai hotel easily. Two clicks away from their homepage he found the general manager’s welcoming letter. It said all the right things — and was signed Ted Robarts, General Manager.

  Maybe the page hadn’t been updated since Ted left to go to the BVI? Possible, but unlikely. Ted, or Jake, or Phil, had been on Soursop for over two months. A high-end hotel like the one in Dubai wouldn’t wait that long to update their website.

  A few more clicks — Glenn learned that Dubai was nine hours ahead of Toronto. The general manager of the hotel would be gone for the day. He didn’t want to leave a voicemail and started typing up an email.

  The open DVD cases were spread out in a circle around me on the floor of the great room. Each one held the exact same thing — a disc and, under each disc, one one-hundred dollar bill, one fifty-dollar bill, one ten-dollar bill, and one five-dollar bill. One hundred and sixty-five dollars per case, times sixty cases. Albert had brought James $9,900.00 in Canadian bills. Was that how James paid his employees? That didn’t make sense. The salaries of so many employees must have added up to almost ten times that much. Even if the money did have something do to with the production, why the big secret? I slowly closed all the cases and put them back in the briefcase, while trying to think of an explanation for Albert’s cash deliveries. By the time I clicked the briefcase shut I was no closer to understanding what I’d found.

  And there was still the locked room under the outside stairway of the building across the pool patio. There had to be a way to open it.

  I rummaged through all the drawers in the kitchen, but didn’t find any keys. What I did find, however, was a collection of metal skewers. In almost every spy movie I’d
ever seen someone picked open a lock with a long skinny object at least once. It was worth a try.

  The baby birds were hungrily squawking for their parents to bring them more food when I walked by their nest. I knelt down in front of the door and tried to stick a skewer into the lock. It was too thick. I tried a slightly thinner one. It went in and I started to fiddle. Nothing happened. I tried an even thinner one. It went into the lock more easily and I was able to really move it around. I put more force into my fiddling.

  “Want me to give it a try?”

  I dropped the skewer when I heard Chris’ voice and watched it roll under the door before turning my head around to face him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was bored.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be shooting your arrival?” With difficulty I stood up. My knees were mad at me for kneeling on such a hard surface.

  “We’ve done the airport stuff. Now we’re just waiting on the light. We won’t start shooting the helicopter bit for another hour and a half. Everybody’s at the Bath and Turtle. They’d heard that Jimmy Buffett wrote “Cheeseburger in Paradise” about the burgers there, but I’m trying to amend my carnivorous habits. I just had a salad.” His shiner was shining through his makeup. He’d need another touch-up before shooting the helicopter scene.

  “I know of four other places in the Caribbean that make the same claim about Buffett’s song.”

  “There’s a shocker — false advertising.” He feigned a shocked look, but the bruised skin around his left eye didn’t open as wide as the skin around his right eye. “I wonder which one’s real?”

  “You’d have to ask Jimmy Buffett that.”

  “Okay. I’ll tell Mike to get his number for me. Anyway, I left to check out some of the cars in the parking lot, they really know how to pimp their rides here, and there was this one Beetle, bright red, extra big shiny spinners for rims, big yellow flames detailed on the sides, and slammed really low to the ground — awesome, awesome car. I started talking to the guy who owns it. He’s a singer. His name’s Elvis.”