Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER TEN

ALLISON MET ME at the Port Washington station in another Caddy, a convertible this time, powder blue with cream-colored leather fixings. Sleek.

Allison was sleeker. I caught my breath and for one long happy moment forgot about Bert, forgot about Sheila who I was trying to do a favor, forgot about Karen and what Mrs. McGarity guessed, even forgot about three years in the Army and how Allison ticked incorrectly. She was tanned to a kissable crisp. She wore red-gold hair in an upsweep and green eyes like emeralds against the tawny skin of her face. She’d supported her breasts and made an attempt at covering them with a halter of criss-crossed straps of white. Since the smooth skin of her chest and the dark, shadowy cleavage between her breasts and the rippling flatness of her belly below the criss-cross halter and above the trim white shorts was all of one coppery hue I had to assume she did her sunning in this halter or in no halter at all. Her thighs were broadened against the cream-colored leather of the Caddy’s front seat, with tiny blonde hairs on them catching the sunlight and gleaming with it.

“It’s good to see you, Gideon,” she said.

“It’s going to be a hot day.”

“We’re prepared for it at the Bluff. That’s our home, the Bluff. Trust Gregory to make a joke of his blindness so other people will laugh with him but not at him. We live on a cliff overlooking the sound and Gregory calls our house Blind Man’s Bluff. But let’s not talk about Gregory.”

“Let’s not.” Either the fog hadn’t reached out as far as Port Washington or it had already gathered in its last wraith-like tendrils and departed for the day. The polished powder blue of the Caddy reflected bright morning sunlight like a mirror.

Allison gunned the Caddy away from the station and waved at a few people in Port Washington’s sleepy streets. We climbed a hill and Allison watched me while I watched the scenery. We made a right turn at the top of the hill and headed east along the edge of the Sound on a two-lane blacktop road.

Allison removed her right hand from the steering wheel and took my hand and placed it down on her thigh. I lifted it up and began to feel foolish and let it rest there again. Her flesh was warm with the sun and rippled with hidden muscle every time she took her foot off the gas pedal to apply the brake on the curving road.

“I missed you, Gideon. You didn’t write, not once.”

“What the hell,” I said. “You got married.”

“That has nothing to do with it. I’ll tell you right now so you make no mistakes: if ever I had to choose between Gregory and you, I’d take Gregory, but that doesn’t mean we can’t…”

“Chrissake,” I said. “We’ve seen each other only once in three years.” I’d begun raising my voice. Allison always did that to me, made me feel confused and angry with myself. She knew it and it made her smile and lick the moisture from the hardly-seen blond fuzz on her upper lip.

“I just want you to understand, that’s all. Gregory tells me my collection of jewelry is worth a quarter of a million dollars. I’ve got everything I want, Gideon. Almost everything. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. Not anything.”

“You already told me that.”

“I said almost everything. I’m going to be perfectly frank with you and if you get nasty about it that won’t matter because Gregory won’t believe you if you decide to tell him.”

“You ought to know me better than that.”

“I do, but just in case. You… think I’m not normal, Gideon. Maybe I’m not, but I’m me and I like to live for what I feel. Some people feel things and try to hide them or suppress them, but they’re stupid. They’re only going to live once and every day they don’t do what they want to do is one day less of life without living. Does that sound logical to you?”

“Sure.”

“Then, I live the way I want. If I’m not normal I don’t care. I make no comparisons. I… Gideon, I missed you.”

“You said that, too. I’m sorry if I sound like a wet blanket, Allison, but we can’t just take up where we left off three years ago.”

She ignored that. She said, “I miss a man’s eyes. You couldn’t dream what it was like. A man can caress you with his eyes, a man can make your limbs turn to water with his eyes. Remember the way you used to look at me, Gideon?”

“Me and everyone else. Stop making it personal, Allison.”

“Why do you make me… admit things? I never liked a man as much as I liked you, Gideon.”

“Fine,” I said. My hand on Allison’s tawny thigh had begun to sweat.

“I simply wasn’t made for one man. I don’t think any woman really is content with one man all her life, whether she admits it or not. But what Gregory represents is more important than anything else.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. She had this quirk, and she assumed it was part of all women, overt or otherwise. It had chased me into the Army and played hob with my male ego now. But the as-Allison-goes-so-goes-the-world attitude made me smile wryly. She probably thought all happily married women were hypocrites.

“Here we are,” said Allison.

You could tell it stood for millions. A fieldstone wall bordered the black-top road for several hundred yards, dipping away from the road and down a grassy hill toward the beach the blue waters of the Sound. A massive grillwork gate with, of all things, cupids perched atop it, stood ajar. We rolled through and the Caddy must have disconnected an electric eye circuit, for the gates swung ponderously shut behind us. Our tires churned a wake of dust and pebbles as we drove along a winding gravel path to Blind Man’s Bluff.

It stood on the edge of a cliff, all right. The house, a rambling many-winged structure of fieldstone and wrought-iron framed bay windows, nestled in a grove of shaggy, great-boughed oaks dappling the blue-green lawn with patchwork sunlight.

“You see what I mean?” Allison demanded. “I wouldn’t give that up for anything, but I’m beginning to think I can’ have my cake and eat it too. Here comes Gregory.”

Gregory Tolliver had heard the car approach and now walked out across the lawn toward us. In his right hand he carried a tall, frosted glass. His left hand held Shamus’ harness, the boxer growling and snuffling when he saw us.

“Did you find Mr. Frey, my dear?”

“Yes.”

“He certainly picked a fine day to join us out in the country, then. I hope you brought along swimming apparel, Mr. Frey.”

“Nope,” I said. “I can always go wading.”

“Then perhaps mine will fit.”

“Gideon is bigger than you, dear,” Allison said. Tolliver was a sturdily-built man in tennis shorts, with a thin, muscular body far better preserved than his gaunt face.

“Allison will work something out, I am sure, Mr. Frey.”

I was in for a memorable day and started to realize it when Allison worked something out. She worked herself out of the criss-crossed halter. She draped the white strips of cloth over the seat of the Caddy and looked at me and raised a finger to her lips for silence. Right then as far as I was concerned she could have her cake and eat it, at least for today. And I was right: Allison sunbathed, at least from the waist up, in exactly nothing. Tawny flesh and pink-brown of her nipples were almost the same color.

Allison smiled at Tolliver and said something about Tom Collins for all of us. I stared at her and while my tongue wasn’t exactly hanging out my eyes must have said they liked what they saw and there was her husband, standing there and not seeing. Damn.

Tolliver disappeared inside to get some drinks, but Shamus looked back at us and growled. I thought that dog was going to cause trouble. Shamus, a snooper all right.

We walked around behind the house where the trees were fewer and the sun stronger. Allison led me by the hand right up to the edge of the cliff and perched herself there precariously, dangling her feet over. A sturdy metal fence marred the view but you could still see the beach directly below and the pier which jutted out into the blue waters of Long Island Sound for about fifty yards and the large blue and white cabin cruiser moored at the pier’s end.

“The fence is for Gregory,” Allison explained. “If he wanders back here he won’t fall off. The electric eye which shut the gate as we went through is also Gregory’s idea.”

Leaving her tanned legs dangling out of sight, Allison stretched out, her bare back on the carpet-cropped grass, her arms lifted over her head. She squirmed herself into the sun’s direct rays and smiled with childlike contentment. She purred. Muscle rippled faintly where the flesh of her breasts jutted out from the smooth line formed by throat and chest.

I did some purring too, but I said, “Gregory will be out here in a minute.”

“So what? He’s blind, remember? It’s a hot day, Gideon. The least you can do is remove your shirt.”

There she went again, making me feel foolish. Men lolled around on beaches from here to Lower Slobovia with their shirts off. I slipped the blue and rust Basque shirt over my head and dropped it on the grass.

Then Tolliver came from the rear of the house. I still couldn’t grow accustomed to his blindness. I saw Allison, lying beside me and wearing nothing but a good suntan from the waist up and tossed her my shirt. She brushed it away and laughed and called, “Here we are, Gregory.” I Tolliver’s steps carried him to us unerringly. He wasn’t even led by Shamus although Shamus followed behind him, then growled, then leaped forward and snapped his ugly jaws over my Basque shirt and trotted it over to Tolliver. “Hey!” I said. “Don’t rip that.” Tolliver fingered the shirt, then held it out for me. “Warm?” he said. “Hot.”

“It’s a pity you didn’t bring bathing apparel. Now, if Allison were broad-minded enough…” Tolliver smiled. “I’m joking, of course.”

Could a man be so completely naive about the woman he married? I started thinking that maybe, just maybe, Allison didn’t have many guests. If I had been the first it might explain Tolliver’s attitude. It seemed a reasonable gambit to shove the conversation in Funland’s direction, so I said, “Do you have many guests out here at the Bluff?”

Tolliver set a tray down on the ground and Allison hopped, bouncing delightfully, to her feet and returned to my side with two Tom Collins. “Gregory doesn’t have many friends,” she told me blandly.

“You see, Mr. Frey, I prefer the company of younger people. As a general rule, we entertain Allison’s friends more than we do mine. I would rather be surrounded by talk of swimming and sunbathing than rheumatism and the gout.”

I lit a cigarette and flipped the match over the edge of the cliff. “Frankly, I sometimes still wonder how a man in your position ever got started with an amusement palace.”

“Allison regards it as a hobby,” Tolliver answered at once. “We visit Tolliver’s Funland several times during the season and… I don’t know if I should tell you this. You’ll pledge secrecy?”

“Boy Scout oath,” I said, and laughed.

“Well, we visit incognito. The concession people rent their places from my agent in Brooklyn. When we visit Tolliver’s we’re just two more customers, a blind man and his wife. Oh, they know there is a Gregory Tolliver, but they don’t know I’m their man. Your associates are a pleasant group, Mr. Frey.”

“Most of them,” I said. “I think one of them killed Bert Archer.”

“Yes, poor Archer,” Tolliver mused. “A terrible tragedy. Have the police uncovered anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“They decided it was murder at the inquest,” Allison reminded us.

“Their investigation isn’t breaking any speed records,” I said then sucked in my breath as Allison rolled over on her stomach, propping herself on her elbows, her breasts hanging like ripe, succulent fruit.

“You can hardly expect the police to advertise,” Allison pointed out.

“Mr. Tolliver,” I asked, trying my luck with a new subject again, “Does your agent in Brooklyn maintain a constant check on the activities at Funland?”

“No, not that I know of. Why should he?”

“I was just wondering. Then if some criminal activity were going on there, you wouldn’t know about it?”

“Probably I wouldn’t. This is all hypothetical, of course. There isn’t something you want to tell me?”

I considered. I closed my eyes and stopped looking at Allison and thought of Karen. “Hell, no,” I said easily. “I was only wondering.”

“Enough morbid talk for one day!” Allison cried, skipping to her feet. The way she bounced….

“What I had in mind,” Allison called over her shoulder as she headed for a long flight of stone steps carved in the face of the cliff and descending steeply to the beach and jetty below, “was a spin in the Allison I… I’m sorry, Gideon, it embarrasses me, but the boat was named for me, you see.

Coming?”

“Coming,” said Tolliver. With Shamus leading him he walked to where the steps began, then thumped Shamus’ rump and the dog trotted off in the direction of the cool shade near Blind Man’s Bluff. A wrought-iron railing guided Tolliver down the steps and by the time we reached the bottom Allison had already leaped aboard the cabin, cruiser which bore her name in large block letters on its prow. Presently the motor began to throb with a rich, steady humming and the boat bobbed up and down.

“She’s forty feet long and can do better than thirty knots,” Tolliver explained as we climbed aboard from the pier. Tolliver walked with sure, familiar steps toward the wheel and Allison backed out of his way before he could brush against her. “I pilot this ship, Mr. Frey,” he said. “So you and Allison can entertain yourselves back in the cabin or on the sundeck.” Lord, he was throwing us together.

“Come on,” said Allison, taking my hand. “I’ll get you some beer.”

The boat eased forward with a smooth surge of power as Allison led me back to the galley. Outside, we’d churned up a frothy white wake in the Sound. We were picking up speed.

“How does he know which way to steer?” I asked.

“I’m his eyes aboard the Allison I. All I have to do is warn him if any craft approaches. He knows the Sound. Besides, the neighbors know who’s piloting and keep clear of the Allison I. Now will you please stop standing way over there by the stove and come here?”

“That can wait. Your husband’s on this boat.”

“My God, Gideon. Don’t tell me you got wounded in the wrong place in Korea.”

“That’s nasty.”

“Damn you, Gideon. Either you come here or I’m going to scream and tell Gregory you… you attacked me.”

I laughed and then stopped. Allison had begun to scream without the slightest expression on her face.

“All right,” I hissed. “All right.”

“What’s the trouble?” Tolliver called from above. “What’s wrong down there?”

Allison came into my arms with enough force to thrust me back against the small electric stove. She ground herself against me and began to tremble. She called back, huskily, “Turn to starboard, dear, that’s all.”

The cruiser swung about sharply, hurling us across the cabin until Allison’s back struck the bulkhead. She let herself slide to the floor and didn’t leave go of me.

“Gideon,” she whispered. “Gideon, Gideon.” Her lips pouted, hot and avid, against my neck, my shoulders, my chest. I dug nails into my palms and said no over and over inside my head because I’d start the mad whirl with her all over again, but there was Allison clinging to me hot and wet in the warm, still air of the cabin and I sighed and clung back and every few minutes Allison would yell “starboard” or “port” or “steady as she goes” and I could hear Tolliver whistling a cheery sea ballad about a pirate ship whose hair hung down in ring-e-lets.

“I’ll turn on the air-conditioning,” Allison said, slipping away easily. “It will be cooler here later.” Damn her, she did just that. Then she went on deck and I called myself a jackass for each of Heinz’ fifty-seven varieties and said to myself it wouldn’t happen again. But I had a feeling all Allison had to do was crook her pinky.

I smoked a cigarette before following Allison. When I reached the sundeck she had found herself a white terrycloth robe with the word “hers” embroidered on it in maroon script. The white tennis shorts were on the deck beside her, but she’d wrapped herself from chin to knees in the robe and lay there with the sweat glistening on her face. “Relax, Gideon,” she told me. “Lie down.” I stretched alongside her and watched her make a production of ignoring me. Once or twice she called directions to Tolliver, and then the cruiser left the Port Washington Channel behind it and cut out into the wide blue expanse of the Sound and soon there was nothing but the water and the sky and Allison in her damned terrycloth robe.

Then Allison not in her terrycloth robe. She stood up and stretched her arms toward the smoky-hot blue sky. She’d draped the robe about her without using its sleeves and it fell away in a crumpled heap, like a large bathtowel. She stood there, poised on tiptoe and stretching up to bring down the sky around her, then pirouetted slowly toward the water and executed a graceful swan dive which could have got her a job at the Flushing Meadow Aquashow.

“Swimming?” Tolliver called. His blindness-keened ears had picked up and interpreted the sound of the faint splash. “Just Allison,” I said, and watched her surface. She shook her head and treaded water rhythmically with a bicycling motion as Tolliver cut the motor and turned the cruiser back toward her at my directions.

Allison bobbed up and down in the water so that one moment the red-gold hair upswept about her face was only visible and the next wet-sleeked shoulders and chest flashed into view. “It’s delightful, Gideon. Won’t you come in?”

I remembered swimming a few days back with Karen and the way she’d lost the halter of her two-piece bathing suit and what followed. I remembered a lot of fancy resolutions about women in general and Allison in particular. I remembered why I’d come out here to Blind Man’s Bluff and how my questions had gone not only unanswered but most of them unasked. And then Allison crooked her pinky.

Well, she smiled at me and kicked hard in her bicycle tread, clearing the water almost down to her waist, before she surface-dived and disappeared. “Nuts to you, Gideon Frey,”

I mumbled.

“What say?” Tolliver wanted to know, using the guide rail to walk back along the side of the cabin toward the sundeck.

“Nothing,” I said, dropping my trousers near Allison’s terrycloth robe and trying out a jacknife dive as Allison surfaced again. She had me coming and going. She knew I’d always loved the water. And other things.

I broke surface a yard from Allison and blinked the water from my eyes. She was treading water and smiling at me and drove her feet up against my chest, kicking off and back-stroking away from the cruiser. I followed her with a butterfly and we swam a wide circle around the cruiser. I didn’t do a very good job, what with watching Allison’s long legs and arms churn water in gorgeous precision, kicking up foam and spray about her nakedness and turning every now and then to look at Tolliver on the deck of his cruiser, because it seemed uncanny, him standing there and gazing out over the waters while his wife swam naked with a man. in his jockey shorts.

Tolliver had lowered a rope ladder over the side by the time we returned. Allison said, “you first,” and I didn’t feel her weight on the bottom rung of the ladder until I’d placed one foot on the cruiser deck. Tolliver came at me with the terrycloth robe, but I shook my head and then remembered he was blind and said, “It’s me. Allison’s on her way.” Then I called back over my shoulder, “Gregory has your robe for you, Allison.”

Allison climbed aboard dripping wet and shining. She turned her back to Tolliver and let him drape the robe across her shoulders, then skipped away toward the cabin and began rubbing herself dry.

A few minutes later, Allison donned her white tennis shorts again and another halter, also white, but not criss-crossed. She placed a ham sandwich in one of my hands and a glass of beer in the other. “There’s more of everything in the galley, Gideon.”

The cool water had quickened my appetite. Allison was back in the galley in nothing flat, making more sandwiches and uncapping more beer. I called “left” to Tolliver and then added “port” in nautical parlance as a motor launch rocketed by to starboard. Then I had myself another sandwich, a thicker one, and more beer. My appetite had been whetted by the Sound not only for food but for other things. I draped my hand across Allison’s bare shoulder as she sat down and smiled at me without doing any coaxing at all. I looked at Tolliver and felt like a heel, but only mildly. He’d done the marrying. If he were a license-carrying cuckold and wore a thin wedding band to prove it but no horns you could see, that was his worry.

“The sun is hot,” said Allison. “Too hot,” I agreed.

We headed for the cabin which slept eight, a double tier of three-quarter bunks on either side of a narrow companion-way done in red leather. A bas-relief of a bosomy nude hung on one wall and Allison said. “He’s got to see it, you know. His fingers.”

“His fingers,” I said, looking at her. Off came the second halter. Allison unzipped the shorts and stepped out of them as they fell to her ankles. She didn’t come to me. She didn’t want to, not yet. She stood there, neither demurely nor obscenely but in exactly the sort of posture she might have employed had she been fully clothed and showing off a new dress. Her eyes were big and very white and very green as she finally swayed toward me and met me with arms held stiffly at her sides, first contacting my lips with hers, warm and wet, then leaning forward against my chest, then the flat belly cool against me and the loins and the smooth line of thighs and never using her arms but swaying against me and leaning until we fell back on one of the three-quarter bunks without a sound except the gentle yielding creak of the red leather.

Far away I heard frantic shouting and the quick angry splintering of wood. Something shoved me forward and Allison on top of me and there was more shouting, some strange voices and Tolliver’s too. Allison leaped to her feet and secured the halter on her breasts. She climbed into the shorts and zipped them on the run. A moment later she had thrust my gray trousers within the cabin and I put them on and went out on deck.

Allison stood at the rope ladder, completely composed. The bow of a small motor launch was just slipping below the churning white water while Allison helped a middle-aged woman soaking wet and shaking all over, aboard ship. A man stood nearby, hands on hips, face florid, lips trembling so much he couldn’t talk.

“I’m terribly sorry,” Tolliver said. “We’ll pay for your boat.”

“We… might… have been… killed. Why couldn’t… you look… where you were… going?”

“It’s my fault,” Allison told the man quietly. “My husband is blind and I usually direct him. I was making some sandwiches you see.”

“A blind man oughtn’t to pilot….”

“That’s quite enough,” Tolliver said coolly. “We will pay for your boat. If there has been an injury, you may contact my lawyers. Now if you will tell us where we can drop you?”

“Glen Cove Landing,” the man said, still fuming. “I think I’m going to report this.”

“You can do anything you please, sir. But on my cruiser you’ll keep a civil tongue. Allison, see if you can get them something to eat.”

Allison’s eyes sparked hatred at the middle-aged couple. She looked at me and her eyes could talk better than any words. Later, they said.