He was quick. He caught my hand in exactly the way I didn"t want him to catch it, and watched my mouth as he ground my knuckle bones.
"Glad you like it," he said. "Welcome aboard." He took his keys out and unlocked the hatchway to the cabins. He pulled Dee to her feet slapped her bare rump and said, "Little sweetheart, you go bring up some decent gla.s.ses and the vodka."
Little sweetheart snickered and arched and went below dutifully. Junior Allen sat where she had been, and patted Corry"s bare knee and said, "What"s your line of work, Trav?"
"Whatever I happen to find. A little charter boat work in season. Take boats north and south for the winter folks. Fry cook. Half-a.s.s marine mechanic. You name it."
After little sweetheart brought his bottle and the gla.s.ses, he fixed himself a drink. He beamed at me.
"These kids tell you about the trip? I"m going to take four of "em over and show them the islands. h.e.l.l, I"ve. got the boat, the time and the money. It"s the least I can do."
Had I not known the history, I would have readily bought the image he was projecting. Fatuous, expansive idiot, hooked by the tired flesh of little sweetheart, taking her and three of her friends on the romantic tropic tour.
"Pa.s.senger list still open?" I asked, smiling back.
That changed his eyes but not his grin. "If Pete and I sleep in the two bunks forward, that leaves the main cabin for the gals. I can sleep six, but they got to be very good close friends." He roared with laughter. "Sorry we can"t sign you on, buddy."
"I get to be the fifth wheel," Corry said bitterly.
"How so, girl?"
She stared coldly at him. "What"s so complicated, Dads. You and Dee, Pete and Patty. And good old Corry. h.e.l.l, sign him on. I"ll need somebody to talk to. Maybe you"ll need somebody to run your boat."
"I never need any help with a boat," he said, smiling. "Or anything else, little sweetheart."
"I"m Corry. She"s little sweetheart, Dads." He patted her knee again and beamed at her. "You"ll have fun. Don"t you worry about it a minute."
"Always b.i.t.c.hing about something," Dee said. "Always."
Pete and Patty came aboard. And within minutes I knew what Junior Allen was after. At first glance Patty was unattractive, an impression derived from the gawkiness and the gla.s.ses. They kidded her coa.r.s.ely about getting sick, and she responded by clowning. The clowning was her defense. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were high and immature and sharp against the fabric of her blouse. Her legs were long and pale and lovely. There was a colt grace about her, a loveliness of gray eyes behind the heavy lenses, a ripe warm sensitivity of mouth.
She was Lois, years ago, and in a different social strata. She was wasted on the lout dullness of sideburned Pete. She was fresh and fragile and vulnerable. She was the obvious victim, and once he had the quartet where they could not escape him, it would require no great effort to turn the other three into accomplices. They were coa.r.s.ened already. They would help Junior Allen teach their funny clown-girl the facts of life, help him take her down into a nightmare where, finally, her clowning would do her no good at all.
We drank. His young pals called him Dads and patronized him. He grinned and grinned. Deeleen teased him. Corry kidded him. Pete ignored him. Junior Allen grinned and grinned and grinned. But some instinct made him wary of me. I would look toward him and see those little blue eyes studying me over that wide smile. He was a big old tom watching benignly as the mice cavorted. He didn"t want another cat at the party. There wasn"t enough for two.
But I did find out what I wanted to know. Pete said, in answer to a question by Patty, that they would leave as soon as Junior Allen had some work done on the boat. They would move their gear aboard and go down to Miami where the work was to be done, and cross over to Bimini from there. The cruise would last a week or ten days. Dads was paying all expenses. Dads was a live one. Patty would tell her people she was visiting a friend, a girl who lived in Jacksonville. Dads said they"d probably be leaving Tuesday or Wednesday. Don"t bring along a lot of stuff. We"ll be roughing it, kids.
We ate Barney"s fish sandwiches. We switched to beer. In the late afternoon the group split up. Pete took Patty home. Dads and Dee stayed aboard. I went up to the apartment with Corry. They were dingy rooms, small, high-ceilinged, too many layers of paint on the walls, the rugs dusty, the cheap furniture stained and scarred, the utilities primitive. She had spent the last hour back in the sun. She was dazed with sun and beer. She opened us two fresh beers and then went off to take a shower. She gave me a book to look at. It was a thick portfolio of eight-by-ten glamor shots of her, girlie shots, nude and semi-nude studies, with tricky lighting effects.
She had been a couple of years younger, I suspected, when they had been taken. Some were quite attractive, some were remarkably tasteless, and the balance were perfectly standard-the tawny back-lighted bulge of b.r.e.a.s.t.s and b.u.t.tocks, and the standardized glowing wet-mouthed smile of enticement. She said the photographer friend had sold quite a lot of them to magazines. I could believe her.
The figure was standard adequate and so was the photographic technique. After I had finished the book and long after the shower had stopped, I heard her calling me in a small voice. I went to the bedroom. She had pulled the yellow shades down, making a dim golden light in the shabby room. She lay naked on the bed with a black towel across her loins. "h.e.l.lo there, darling," she said. She wore the same smile as in the photographs, but drowsier.
"h.e.l.lo yourself."
Wrestler"s jaw, sleepy green eyes, huge smooth brown thighs. She yawned and said, "Less have a li"l love and a li"l nap, sweetie."
"Let me borrow a shower first."
"Sure. Sure, you go "head. But hurry it up. I"m in such a wonnerful mood, lover."
I went into the bathroom. It was a mora.s.s of stale towels and sour swim suits, fetid and perfume-sweet, soapy and damp. It astonished me not to find moss on the walls, mushrooms in the corners, ferns behind the john. The stream of water was feeble and tepid. I made the shower last a long long time. I used the least damp towel I could find. I opened the bathroom door with great care, and as I had hoped and expected, she was making a regular little snare-drum snore, saying "Paah" with each exhalation.
I dressed stealthily, tiptoed to the bed, removed the black towel and tossed it into the bathroom. I put my empty beer can on the floor next to hers. In the living room I found a post card and a pencil stub. I wrote, "Corry, sweet: Even when you"re half asleep, you"re marvelous. I"ll be in touch, honey." I put it on the bed on the far side of her and tiptoed out, grinning like an idiot. Or like Dads.
But the grin had the feel of a suture. These are the little losers in the bunny derby, but they lose on a different route than the Mariannes, or the ones you see in the supermarket on the nights when they double the green stamps, coming in junk cars, plodding the bright aisles, snarling at their cross sleepy kids. Deeleen and Corry save wistfulness for thoughts of the key clubs. They could be the centerfold in anybody"s s.e.x book. You have to stay with the kicks. Age twenty and age twenty-one. The cats always show up. The phone always rings. Friends have friends. It isn"t like anything was going to wear out, man. It isn"t like they were going to stop having conventions.
And you get a little tired or a little smashed or a little bored, so you throw a big fast busy fake and it is over in nothing at all. And learn the ways to work them for the little gifts here and there. Like maybe a cruise. Or the rent. Or a couple beach outfits by Cole. Friendship gifts. Not like you were really working at it. The ones work at it, there is always some character taking the money, and there can be police trouble and all that. You work waitress once in a while. The rest of it is dates, really. One date at a time. And some laughs, and if you"re short, he can loan you. And other numbers to call when there"s a whole bunch of guys.
This is the queasy shadowland, and they don"t even work hard at that because they have never learned to work at anything. They turn sloppy, and when the youngness is gone, there isn"t much left. Just the dead eyes and the small meaty skills and the feeling their luck went bad sometime, when they weren"t watching. Fifteen to twenty-five is the span, and they age quickly and badly. These are the bunnies who never find a burrow.
I got back to Lois in the hot blue dusk and she was extraordinarily docile. She wore a little navy blue dress with a starched white collar, and she had her dark hair flattened to severity. She gave the impression she was dedicating her life to sobriety and good works.
I forgave her all indiscretions, and her dark eyes glowed.
After dinner I told her about the cruise. I told her what I planned to do. We went over the plans, amending them, tightening them here and there. We did not talk of the end of it, even though the end was implicit in the things that had to happen before the end.
She kissed me a good night with quick cool lips, a dark glance that swiveled demurely away.
In my bed I thought of the brutal leathery hands of Junior Allen. Behind the agreeable grin he was as uncompromising as a hammer. Beast in his grin-mask. A clever, twisted thing, hunting for that perversion of innocence, the horrification of gentleness which would feed his own emptiness.
And I began thinking of that gentleness nearby. I computed the distance with care. Twenty-one feet, perhaps, from bed corner to bed corner. Would it not be good for her spirit, her morale, to be desired? Left alone, would she become dubious of her own time of a gentle aggression? And would not her fastidious litheness take away the heavy taste of the fleshy girls in the Citrus Inn? McGee, the Perfidious. Rationalizer. Womanizer. Gonadal argumentation. Go to sleep.
Was she on her left side? Her right We? Was she wakeful too? Were her eyes open in the same darkness, listening to the same whispery drone of the air conditioning? Was she wondering why I did not desire her?
Go to sleep, McGee, for G.o.d"s sake. You want a permanent dependent?
I sat up. My heart was b.u.mping and my breath was shallow. I went in there moving as silently as a drift of smoke. She would be sleeping. I would turn right around and glide away from there.
I moved close to the bed, barely making out the dark spill of the pillowed hair, holding my breath to try to hear the cadence of her breathing. She made a small throaty sound of total contentment, of a perfect gladness, and reached and found my wrist and drew me to her. Ripping the sheet and blanket aside, presenting herself so totally, guiding us with such an artful ease, that as I lay with her we were joined, her readiness and her long exultant shudder a confession of what her night thoughts had been.
After a few moments she stilled us, so sweetly enclasped, saying, as she turned us, "Wait, darling. Please. The way we talked tonight. I could not really look at you. You couldn"t really look at me. Because we couldn"t say anything about the end of it. And that"s a shadow. You know it is."
"There isn"t any other choice."
"You know there is. I can charge him with rape. It"s true enough, you know. I can testify. They can put him away."
"It won"t look very good for you. Stayng with him."
"Look good to whom? I care about my opinion of myself and your opinion of me. No one eIse. He terrorized me. I"m articulate. I can make anyone see how it was. And I can talk to Cathy and she will identify him as the man who beat her. Between the two of us, darling, we can make certain he"ll be put away for a long time. Get the first part of it done, and before he can retaliate, we"ll go to the police, Cathy and I."
"I don"t think that"s the way to..."
"I want it that way. Promise."
"But... "
She had her fingers laced at the nape of my neck. She gave me a hearty tug. "Promise!"
"You have me at a disadvantage."
"Ah, I have you at an advantage, McGee. Promise!"
"... All right."
She pulled strongly. She rocked her wide mouth against my shoulder in a dainty, exacting, continuing, irresistible demand. And at last murmurously curled herself into sleep, the small love words falling away into heavy slumber. Once she was gone I had a little time to think of the promise. I looked at it coldly. It was a tactical stupidity. Junior Allen, once he was trapped, would spoil everything he could reach. He would try to make deals. And he would have the knowledge of Sergeant David Berry"s fortune to bargain with, stolen, restolen, and stolen once again... if all went well for me.
Yet I knew I would keep the promise. Try to salvage something. She moaned in her sleep. Her long legs twitched. She was running from an old horror. I stroked her hair and kissed her eyes and she came half awake and sighed and settled back again.
If it all went wrong, would anyone ever be able to comfort Patty Devlan?
Doce
THE SMALL insured package from Harry arrived Monday morning. When I got back from the post office, Lois, excited and nervous, told me that Howard Wicker had called collect and left the message that the Play Pen was set up for a ten o"clock appointment Tuesday morning for installation of the new generator.
"It"s moving so quickly," she said, wide-eyed. I opened the package and took out the imitation gem. It was deep blue, big as a songbird"s egg, with a bright and perfect star. I did a stupid thing. I bent and rolled it across the floor toward her, when it rolled crookedly. Had it heen a snake she could not have leapt back inore violently, ashen and trembling, putting her hand to her throat, looking sick.
"Just like that," she whispered.
"Pick it up."
She hesitated a long moment, then reached and picked it up. Her color was coming back. She studied it and looked at me. "This really isn"t real?"
"Not unless my friend made a horrible mistake."
"It"s beautiful."
"Cornflower blue. Long ago they were thought to be love charms. It wouldn"t fool an expert."
"Will it fool Junior Allen?"
"For just long enough, I think."
"My G.o.d, Trav, be careful!"
I took it away from her and wrapped it in some of the tissue from the small box and put it into my pocket.
She wore blue sailcloth shorts I had not seen before, a blouse with a narrow blue and white horizontal stripe. We had a connubial flavor this morning, but awkward. I had stayed the night with her, and when the early snarl of the fishermen leaving had awakened me, I had made love to her again. Without words. Afterward, she had rolled onto her stomach and wept and could not say why and could not be soothed. She had showered first, and when I came out she was busy fixing breakfast, her mouth small, her face prim, her eyes evasive.
"What are you going to do?" I asked her.
"Just some lawyer things, about the sale of the house. It won"t take long."
"Make it last. Keep busy. Keep your mind off this."
I offered her Miss Agnes, but she decided she would rather take a cab. She changed to a skirt and left. There is a cab stand up by the charter boat docks.
I looked at a chart and estimated that Junior Allen would cast off at about seven to be at Robinson-Rand by ten. With happy cruise pa.s.sengers. Suddenly the careful plan seemed full of basic flaws. How could I be so certain he kept the loot aboard the Play Pen?
Logically, that was the best place for it. He vas good with his hands. He"d had all the time n the world to prepare a hiding place. A forty-foot cruiser is a complex piece of equipment. It would take days to make a careful search of every inch of it. I"d had a good opportunity to study the layout, and saw no good reason why my short cut wouldn"t work. If the random factors didn"t get too random. If they didn"t get out of control. He"d had more luck than he deserved.
And I had done my homework on him. Know the man, know the terrain, know the values. Nothing had been wasted and, I hoped, nothing overlooked.
There is as much danger in overestimating as in underestimating the quality of the opposition.
A. A. Allen, Junior, came through as a crafty, impulsive and lucky man. He had gone after the sergeant"s fortune with guile and patience, but now that he had begun to have the use of it, he was recklessly impatient to find his own rather perverse gratifications.
Sanity is not an absolute term. Probably, in the five years of imprisonment, what had originally been merely a strong s.e.xual drive had been perverted into a search for victims. He had indulged himself with erotic fantasies of gentle women, force, terror, corruption. Until, finally, the restolen fortune became merely a means to that end, to come out and live the fantasies.
Cathy was a victim. And then Lois Atkinson. And Patty Devlan was next. As if each satisfaction required that the next victim be more vulnerable, more open to terror. Taste is quickly jaded. Make a projection of his trend and his needs, and it might well end up with the jumprope set, and then become murderous because smaller mouths would not stay closed.
Good old Dads. Would honey like a nice boat ride on the nice man"s boat? Would sweetie like a nice ten-day nightmare?
The five of them aboard would, catalyzed by a total isolation and the brute heat of the islands in August, and by the closeness of flesh in a confined s.p.a.ce, by the liquor, by the meaty and casual permissiveness of the girls from the Citrus Inn, finally embark on those permutations and interrelations which would fit Junior Allen"s fantasies. Good old Dads would gradually take charge, and all the fragile alarms of Miss Patty would find no response in the sundulled and drink-dulled paganism of Corry and Deeleen and Pete, find among them no protective conspiracy to save her from that inevitable result of Junior Allen"s sly maneuvering, that obligatory scene for her when good old Dads would, smiling, and with grotesque ham-handed imitation of tenderness, gather her squeaking and whimpering and pleading into the seaman"s bunk for that thickened and driving instruction, that hammering indoctrination which would thrust her quickly along the road of not giving a d.a.m.n, not for Pete, not for herself, not for any of the abandoned and gentle dreams. Poor frantic little clowngirl, hiding the loveliness behind the heavy lenses, the shrill guffaw, the exaggerated gawkiness. Have some nice candy, sweetheart, and go with the nice man in his nice car, and wave good-by to all your friends.
I had made a note of the phone number in the Citrus Inn apartment, and I phoned.
Deeleen answered. "Who? Oh sure. Hi. You want Corry? Well, she isn"t here. You want her, what you do is call that b.i.t.c.h after I"ve gone."
"What"s the matter?"
"I"ve had it with her, boy. Believe me, I"ve had it. You should have hung around. It was a big evening. She got drunk and she got nasty. I"m telling you, we"re splitting up."
"Is the cruise off?"
"h.e.l.l no! We"re leaving from here six-thirty tomorrow morning, and go some place to get some work done on the boat and leave from there and go to Bimini at night. In the moonlight. Like I told her, the only thing I want is come back and find her moved out. She says I should move out. Where does she get that? I found this place, didn"t I? Who needs her? She likes to spoil everything for everybody. The thing was she snuck off with Pete. He"s a nice kid, but what"s the point? She knew he"s been trying to make out with Patty for months, G.o.d knows why, but that"s their business, isn"t it. She had to know it would b.i.t.c.h up the cruise and all. It was a mess around here last night, Patty crying her eyes out. So she busted up the trip sort of, but she didn"t spoil it. That"s what we decided last night after she came back to the boat with Pete, both of them stoned, and there was a big fight and they took off. Just Dads and Patty and me. And the h.e.l.l with Corry and Pete. I don"t know where they are, and n.o.body cares. The cruise"ll get Patty"s mind off him. The thing is, there"d have been no harm done if Pete gets from her what Patty won"t give him yet, but she has to come back smashed and bragging about it in front of Patty."
"How did it all start, Dee?"
"I don"t know. We were all just kidding around, rough kidding maybe, and Corry got sore at something Dads said, and then Pete got sore at something Patty said to Corry, and then Corry went away, and a little while later Pete slipped away"
My admiration for Junior Allen was reluctant. He had simplified things for himself. They could not know that they had been maneuvered, any more than Cathy had known in the beginning. So he could set off with his little putty-haired pig, and with the wan victim of the lover"s quarrel and the betrayal.
"I was going to stop around a little later on, Dee, and have a bon voyage drink with you people."
"There"s n.o.body here now but me, Trav. Dads is off picking up supplies. Patty went home. She"s coming back tonight and stay here at the apartment so we can get off at six-thirty like Dads wants. My stuff is aboard already, so I"ll probably sleep aboard tonight. Maybe Patty too, if she wants. What you could do, you could come around tonight because four would be better"n three for a bon voyage drink?"
"You don"t think Corry will be back?"
"Man, I know she won"t be back. She and Pete took off together, and they"re shacked someplace. She"s out of the picture, Trav. You know, I wisht Patty was more of a doll, and then maybe you"d like to come along, because now there"s room. What you do, when you come around, you take a good look at her. It could turn out three"s a crowd and she"ll need comforting the way she feels now. She"s really got a nice complexion. And she says things you would laugh yourself sick when she"s feeling good."
"That would be up to Dads."
"You can come around and if you like the idea, then we can ask him, but it wouldn"t be fair not telling you you don"t make out with Patty. She"s got a thing about it, scared or something. I don"t know. Maybe it would be different, off on a cruise. The way I figure it, if you want to go, honey I can make Dads do about anything I want. Come right down to it, this cruise was my idea in the first place."