Chocolate Chocolate Moons Page 16

“So are nine hundred and ninety-eight other passengers,” Trenton says, sitting on the side of the bed checking his toes.

  “Craig’s and Sandy’s cabins are on the upper deck. Rocket’s cabin is on our deck but on the opposite side. There’s also a D. Point and B. Point traveling together. Could it be Decibel Point and Breezy Point? “

  Trenton rubs a lubricant into his feet. “Could be.”

  “I’ll palm Molly and see what she wants to do about dinner.”

  “I’m exhausted, Jersey,” I say when she calls. “I’m going to order something from room service. Their take out menu is encyclopedic. By the way, is your shower as small as mine?”

  “I didn’t think it was small. I have plenty of room. As a matter of fact, Trenton and I can both fit inside. See you in the morning.”

  Jersey goes into the dining alcove and reads the menu aloud. “How about sliced sturgeon with saffron, lemon, and fennel, or lobster-and-rock-shrimp ravioli with a white-wine-and-pesto sauce or grilled boned Cornish hen in a blood-orange rum sauce, or leg of lamb studded with black garlic with fresh asparagus? Tonight’s special is osso bucco.”

  “Not interested,” Trenton says.

  “There’s Venusian veal with celery-root puree, porterhouse steak with sautéed Uranium mushrooms in a champagne sauce, and grilled halibut surrounded by miniature baked potatoes stuffed with créme frâiche and red caviar.”

  “Too boring.”

  “Their featured dessert is a seven-layer cannoli cheesecake with espresso sorbet followed by dark chocolate truffles and candied fruits. They also have grapefruit and pomegranate sorbet served with thin lacy green-tea butter cookies. Anything tempt you, Trenton?”

  “No, not really. What else have they got?”

  “A plate of shredded iceberg lettuce, a package of Freedom Plan dried pecans with butterscotch supplements on the side, and Cassini Huygens cocktails.”

  “Now that sounds delicious. Order that. Makes me feel like we’re on a vacation.”

  The next morning, the first thing everyone sees is that their holo screens are blinking a message. Trenton pushes “Play.” A voice says, “Welcome, travelers!”

  “This must be important,” Trenton says, “because we can understand the words and I don’t have to translate it from Garble.”

  “Also,” Jersey says, “you can read the words on the bottom of the screen as they are spoken.”

  “A minor technicality.”

  The voice repeats, “Welcome, travelers! Before midnight the transport will pass through one of the relatively empty regions in the asteroid belt known as the Kirkwood Gap. And because Jupiter is so large and has so much gravity, it sometimes accelerates objects floating in this gap into orbits different from the one the ship’s computer predicts. We do not anticipate being hit. But you should know that the green cubes that line every hall and are in every room closet contain protective suits good for three days of life support. Each stateroom has its own power source and two weeks’ worth of supplies. At the first sign of trouble, your room seals and becomes a lifeboat. You can call our toll-free number just in case. Thank you, and good luck.”

  “Just in case of what?” Jersey opens a closet and finds several protective suits. “Let’s leave this door open.”

  I catch up with Jersey and Trenton at night. They’re in their room finishing leftovers from last night’s meal. No one can stretch lettuce like Trenton and Jersey.

  “Why anyone eats chips and dips when they can crunch on fresh lettuce is a mystery to me,” Trenton says. “Want a bite?”

  “No thanks. How about going out for a drink?”

  We stroll through a series of malls looking for a cocktail lounge. Jersey and I walk slowly looking in shop windows.

  Trenton grabs our hands and yanks us away. “You can shop later,” he says, spotting a dark, noisy bar called the Purple Tree Lounge.

  32

  CRAIG CASHEW BOARDS the Mars–Titan transport and finds his room. He unpacks, kicks off his shoes, lies down on his bed, and waits for Decibel and Breezy, who share a two room-suite on the deck below.

  Breezy dons a brown wig, takes a skin-color-change pill, inserts hazel contact lenses, sprites herself with Menthe perfume, and slips into a tight low–cut, red dress. She and Decibel take an elevator to the floor above, find Craig’s room, and press a buzzer.

  Breezy stands in the doorway and looks at Craig. She puts one hand on her hip and twirls around. “If Rocket doesn’t pay any attention to me in this, there is something wrong with him.”

  Craig gives a low whistle.

  “We need to review our plans,” Decibel says, entering and plopping down in the middle of the sofa. “Breezy is going to find Rocket, who will most likely be at Hogwarts Health Foods and…um…um…”

  “The word you are looking for, Dad, is seduce,” Breezy says.

  Decibel looks at Breezy. “But only to lure Rocket back to his room so we can talk to him. We don’t want to hurt him. We only want to make him think that we might. We’ll wait near his room, and when Breezy and he show up we’ll invite ourselves inside.”

  Breezy goes to Hogwarts Health Foods on Shopping Deck 6 and waits. After an hour of pretending to read labels, Rocket appears, wearing an open orange shirt and black trousers. His hair is damp and slicked behind his ears like he’s coming from a shower. He glances at Breezy and walks past her, his eyes focused on the herbal-tea section. Breezy follows him. She slides herself between Rocket and the teas.

  “Ooh, rose hips, my favorite,” she sighs, patting her hips. “That one has a warning about extra valerian. Nothing like living dangerously. Do you take yours straight or…” She lowers her voice. “…do you add a little St. John’s wort?” She turns and bends, reaching for the St. John’s wort and pushing her tight ass against him. She rises and turns making sure Rocket sees her bat her eyelashes. Then she slowly slides her hand up and down over the bottle and licks her lips.

  “Actually, I love it with bladder wrack and a touch of yerba maté,” Rocket says, now torn between Breezy and the new line of yerba maté.

  Breezy sees his eyes shift away and cries in a breathy voice, “Yerba maté! Yerba maté! Why didn’t I think of that? I love yerba maté. You seem to know so much about health food. I would love to be shown your etchings of health foods.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a pair of licorice handcuffs and dangles them in front of him. “You never know who you’ll meet on transports, so I always carry my own licorice handcuffs. They’re 100 percent organic!”

  “Do you like supplements?” asks Rocket. “I can get every kind wholesale.”

  “Supplements is my middle name. I was raised on supplements. I live on supplements. Life without supplements is a life not worth living.” Breezy runs her hand over her breasts. “How do you think I keep my figure?” She picks up a bottle of uterine tonic and strokes it. Her tongue circles her lips. “What a sexy-looking bottle. Ooh! Ooh! There’s a bottle of kava kava. Do you think I should buy the uterine tonic or the kava kava?” She puts one on each breast. “I need help making up my mind.”

  “Personally, I would buy the kombucha so we could do the babushka,” Rocket says, finally turning from his passion for health foods to a passion for Breezy. Breezy, who substituted yesterday’s Menthe perfume for today’s good sprinkling of Brewer’s Yeast, leans close to Rocket.

  Rocket recognizes the smell and swoons over its distinctive vitamin B aroma, an aroma that resembles school-cafeteria Parmesan cheese that kids call “vomit cheese.”

  Rocket puts his arm around Breezy and gives her a little squeeze. “I know a great little place called the Purple Tree Lounge. Meet me there at nine. We can celebrate our love of health foods with a Buffered Paregoric Sour or a Newman’s Own Omega-3 Fish Fins.”

  Trenton pushes the door to the Purple Tree Lounge, a pickpocket kind of place: dark, crowded, noisy. “Good thing I’m wearing my high beams,” Jersey says blinking her eyes and tilting her head.

  I grab Trenton’s other
arm tightly. “Think we’ll get a table?”

  We push through the crowd. Trenton bumps into to a woman whose dress is held by one thin strap. She holds her pinky up and away from the rest of her fingers, which are curled around the tall stem of a glass, to balance it, and I see a small rose tattoo on the pinky. “Excuse me,” he says.

  “Watch where you’re goin’, junk man, you almost made me spill my drink.”

  “I would have bought you another if that happened. Sorry.”

  The woman turns abruptly and walks in the direction of the bar on the other side of the room. We see her take a seat next to a man in a bright cerulean-blue-striped jacket with his back to us. It crosses my mind that it might be Rocket.

  We look for a table, but the only one available is one near them. We grab it. The woman sees us out of the corner of her eye and swivels away on her stool. We pick at some nuts and wave frantically at the waiter, who finally sees us and brings us our drinks.

  “Listen, they’re playing ‘Moon Rover’ with Becky and Lois,” I say. We raise our glasses and clink to the twins.

  The woman Trenton bumped into takes the arm of the man next to her and whispers in his ear. He shifts. They see his profile, but it is dark, so nothing registers. But when he gets up and helps his drinking companion push toward the door, we can clearly see that it’s Rocket.

  “He must be traveling to his apartment on Titan,” Trenton says. “I wonder who the woman is.”

  Jersey adjusts a lens to get a sharper view. “She’s hard to see, but I think she looks like the one we saw on the Culinary’s security holo with Pluto Pastrami, but her skin and hair’s different. Wasn’t her name Breezy, or Tweezy?”

  “You mean Breezy Point, Decibel Point’s daughter,” Trenton says. “D. Point and B. Point were listed on the transport’s guest list. Decibel may be headed to that new drug company on Titan that scientists are talking about. I can imagine how tempting it must be to work off-planet in a new lab with state–of-the-art equipment free of Mars’s rules and regulations.”

  Jersey takes several deep breaths. “Trenton, I’m not going. Don’t even think about it.”

  We finish another round of drinks and leave the lounge. Trenton wants to find a store that sells butterscotch supplements, which is easy to do, because every place seems to sell them. Then Jersey and I pop into Planet Dior while Trenton, who like most men, android or otherwise, dislikes shopping—especially with two women—and goes back to his room.

  The store is having a special sale on items with polka dots. Jersey finds a pink-and-green blouse marked down ten times.

  “What’s the problem, Jersey? You love those colors, and the price is great.”

  “Do you think anyone will notice that the right sleeve has fifteen polka dots and the left sixteen?”

  I sigh. Shopping with Jersey isn’t fun.

  Breezy and Rocket leave the Purple Tree and sway together, doing a Mango Tango down the corridor toward Rocket’s room. Then Rocket puts a hand in his pocket and takes out some echinacea, fenugreek, and devil’s claw-yucca and pops them in his mouth.

  “You take too much of that stuff,” says Breezy, trying to walk as gracefully as she can on her black platform heels, which is not easy considering she drank a Paregoric Sour, a Fish-Oil Collins, and two double Zombies with extra flaxseed oil. “Are you sure it’s all safe? This transport carries a lot of unregulated products.”

  “No problem, sweetheart. You’re talking to a professional.”

  As they near Rocket’s room, Rocket slows. “I think I’m feeling a delayed reaction from some calli tea I drank earlier.” He sways, but Breezy steadies him.

  “Are you sure it was the tea? You’ve combined a lot of pills.”

  Rocket doesn’t answer and stumbles on toward his room, breathing hard and sweating. He puts his palm to the door. It jolts open. When he and Breezy go inside, he bends and reaches for his throat. The room circles around him.

  Decibel and Craig, who have been waiting in the hall for Breezy to return with Rocket, rush to Rocket just as he collapses and convulses on the floor.

  “Oh my God!” Breezy screams.

  Craig and Decibel lean over him. Decibel puts a finger to Rocket’s neck. “No pulse. He’s dead!”

  “Dead? How can he be dead? He was just alive,” Breezy says.

  “It works that way sometimes,” Decibel sighs. He opens a bag and takes out a small vacuum that he brought in case he needed to sweep Rocket’s room clean of evidence.

  Craig’s voice shakes. “Do you have to do that?” he asks. “He keeled over without any one of us touching him.”

  Decibel warns, “But we were here. I touched his neck to find a pulse. The police will find our biometrics.”

  When Rocket doesn’t respond to the transport’s attendance check, his room is opened and he is found dead on the floor of his cabin. The ship’s security team does a sweep with a tracer spectrum light. No prints or DNA are found, not even those belonging to Rocket meaning someone swept the room clean.

  Sandy Andreas sits in his cabin on a clear French Provincial–inspired Lucite chair. The cabin has a large picture window and dark blue carpet dotted with stars. The sheets and towels are monogrammed with his initials so he can take them with him when he leaves, instead of having to steal them. He wears a crisp white shirt and chinos and only one gold chain around his neck rather than the usual four.

  He is having a good morning reading the Robber-Barron’s Report that says the Marsdaq hit a five-year high. Market analysts remain bullish on tech and drug spending, and several new products that Sandy’s labs manufacture are being deregulated. He is savoring a walnut brioche with apricot marmalade and mocha java coffee when one of the ship’s security guards calls. He motions to an assistant to let him in.

  “Please sit,” Sandy says without enthusiasm to the security officer. He lifts a finger and points to the sofa. “What’s this about?”

  “Just routine, Mr. Andreas. We’re questioning everyone on board as to where they were and what they were doing last night. Can you tell us your destination and the purpose of your trip?”

  “I’m going to Titan to advise Craig Cashew, CEO of the Culinary Institute who is also on board, about the gardens and farms at Titan Culinary. Then I’ll take another transport going all the way to Pluto’s moon Charon to explore places where I can build all-robotic research stations.”

  “Your doorway recorded that you left your room last night for several hours. Can you tell us where you went?”

  “Can’t sleep. I have insomnia. Took a walk.”

  “Anything else?”

  Sandy’s face tightens like a clenched fist. “Are you accusing me of something? Because that’s all I’m going to say without a lawyer.”

  33

  ONE DAY AFTER I get back from Titan, I sit in Jersey and Trenton’s living room. The room has a dozen screens built into a wall. The opposite wall has a holograph of the brain that emerges and floats in three dimensions. It looks like a glowing map of the universe. It is one of the few truly beautiful things they own.

  “What’s that buttery smell? I thought you never ate butter.”

  “It’s the new butterscotch supplements we bought on the trip. Try one.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it food, but this isn’t bad,” I say savoring the taste. “Promise you won’t tell the twins that I ate this, or they’ll step up their pace monitoring what I eat.”

  “Lamont called us,” Jersey says changing the subject. “Isn’t it amazing that Rocket Packarod died when we were on the transport?”

  “I had heard he was a health food nut,” I say. “Maybe those of us who love chocolate are in better shape than those who love broccoli.”

  Jersey rolls her eyes.

  “I’m not happy with the forensic report about Rocket’s death,” Trenton says. “I’ve asked Lamont to send me samples from Rocket’s cabin. Remember that woman at the bar on the transport who bumped into me, the one with the rose tattoo on h
er pinky? I think I remember seeing such a tattoo on Breezy’s pinky. But I’m not sure. Let’s view the Candy Universe holo again, where the man had his arm raised standing next to a girl.”

  I sit on the one comfortable upholstered chair reserved for guests and look at the photos on the table next to it. There is one of Jersey as a child and two of Trenton before his accident. I love those photos, because clearly Trenton was once fat.

  Trenton keys the middle screen. We wait a moment, then the holo of the Candy Universe plays.

  “Stop,” Jersey says getting up and pointing to the woman. “Enlarge the hand.” She peers at the image. “See, her pinky has a rose tattoo. No question. It’s Breezy. I knew it the minute she called Trenton a junk man.”

  I take another supplement. “Right before the Mars Malt party, I was walking in the garden area. I saw Craig Cashew talking on his palm. I overheard him say, ‘Tell your cousin Pluto that I have what he or his girlfriend dropped.’ I think Craig must have been talking to Sandy’s wife, Solaria, about her cousin Pluto. If Craig found some piece of evidence that links Breezy and Pluto to the poisoning at the Candy Universe and he didn’t give it to the police, he’s withholding evidence. And withholding evidence is a crime.” I take another supplement. “I wonder what he could want from Pluto and Breezy. Could Craig be connected to the poisoning of the Chocolate Moons?”

  Jersey removes the supplements before I can reach again. “I can’t see a motive. Craig Cashew made the Culinary what it is today.”

  The next day, as Jersey is cleaning, she puts a lava lamp on her side of the bed and an identical one on Trenton’s side. She stands back and watches the symmetrical swirling patterns. Then she programs a micrometer to make sure they stay coordinated. She fears waking up in the middle of the night and screaming if she sees one lamp bubble up and the other bubble down. Then she puts her shoes in alphabetical order inside her closet.

  “How could there be no prints or DNA in Rocket’s room?” she asks Trenton.

  “Not hard if you can make a scanner-vac. Parts can be packed in separate bags and assembled later. It’s not a complicated gadget, and it’s small.”