Darker Than Amber

John D McDonald - Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber

Dedication

For Bonie and Bill

CHAPTER 1

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

They came to a yelping stop overhead, out of sight, dumped her over the bridge rail and took off.

It was a hot Monday night in June. With moon. It was past midnight and just past the tide change. A billion bugs were vectoring in on us as the wind began to die.

It seemed to be a very final way of busting up a romance. I was sitting there under the bridge in a skiff with my friend Meyer. We were under the end of the bridge nearest the town of Marathon, and it is the first highway bridge beyond Marathon on your way to Key West-if you are idiot enough to want to go to Key West.

My bachelor houseboat, The Busted Flush, was tied up at Thompson's Marina in Marathon. It had been there since Saturday afternoon. After I got in I phoned Meyer in Bahia Mar in Lauderdale, where he lives aboard his cabin cruiser. I'd been gone a little longer than I'd planned, and I had one small errand for him to do, and one small apology for him to make for me. I said that in return, if he wanted to come on down to Marathon by bus, I could put him into a good snook hole at the right time of year, tide and moon, and then he could come on back to Bahia Mar with me aboard the Flush, and we'd get in late Wednesday afternoon, probably--not that it mattered.

Meyer is the best of company, because he knows when talk is better than silence, and he tries to do more than his share of all the less interesting chores.

Until I asked him to join me, and heard him say yes, I had thought I wanted to be completely alone for a few days.

I'd just finished spending ten days aboard the Flush with an old friend named Virginia, known as Vidge. She had come rocketing down from Atlanta, in wretched shape emotionally, trying to find out who she used to be before three years of a sour marriage had turned her into somebody she didn't even like anymore. In the old days she'd never been skyrockets-just a quiet, pretty, decent gal with a nice oblique sense of fun and games, and the manifest destiny of being a good wife.

After three years of Charlie, she was gaunted, shrill, shaky, and couldn't tell you what time it was without her eyes filling with tears. So I took her cruising. You have to let them talk it out. She felt enormous guilt at not being able to make the marriage work. But the more she talked, the more I realized she hadn't had a chance. She was too passive, too permissive, too subdued for an emotional fascist like Charlie. He had leaned too hard. He had eroded her confidence in herself, in everything she thought she was able to do, from meeting people to cooking dinner to driving a car. Finally he had gone to work on her sexual capacities. Were the sexes reversed, you could call it emasculation. People like Charlie work toward total and perpetual domination. They feed on the mate. And Vidge didn't even realize that running away from him had been a form of self-preservation, a way of trying to hang fast to the last crumbs of identity and pride.

At first she talked endlessly, but she couldn't get all the way down to it. She kept saying what a great guy he was and how she had failed him in everything. The third evening, at anchor in a quiet corner of Florida Bay, I managed to get enough of Dr. Travis McGee's truth serum into her. Clean, pure Plymouth gin. By arguing with her, contradicting her, I edged her ever closer to the truth. And in the final half hour, before she passed out, she broke through the barrier and described how much she truly hated that destructive, domineering son of a bitch Charlie. It was very graphic, and she had no idea I was taping it. When she passed out I toted her to the guest stateroom and tucked her in. She slept a little better than around the clock, and was subdued and rueful the next day. That evening she started handing me the Charlie-myth again, and what a failure she was. I played her tape for her. She had hysterics which settled down into a good long hard cry. And after that she was famished enough to eat twenty ounces of rare steak. She slept the clock around again, and woke up feeling that maybe it would be pointless to give the marriage another big try.

Vidge and I had a private history of a small affair way back. It would have been better if we had both wanted the same things out of life. But we had kidded ourselves and each other for a time--before reality set in.

The attempt to relive that pleasant nostalgia was a clumsy failure. Charlie had so thoroughly insulted her womanhood she was far too nervous and anxious to be reached. She was certain she had become frigid. I attempted another of Dr. McGee's famous nostrums. I roused her early, and I gave her a full day of swimming, fishing, beachcombing, skindiving and maintenance and housekeeping chores aboard the Flush. I gave her a day that would have reminded any marine of boot camp. That night, with the waxing moon at the half, and a good breeze keeping the mosquitoes away from the sun deck, she was too sodden with exhaustion to think of being nervous or anxious or apprehensive when I moved over onto her sun mattress and gently shucked her out of her shorts. She made small purring sounds, half contentment and half sleepy objection. When the sudden awareness that it was working for her brought her wide awake she was too far along to choke herself off with all those anxieties Charlie had built, and when it was done she was happy enough and confident enough to keep chuckling now and again until her breath deepened into sleep.

I lugged her dead weight down to my master stateroom, where, many hours later, in the orange-gold light of the morning sun coming through the curtained portholes, she proved to herself it hadn't been a fluke.

When I put her ashore in Flamingo, she looked two years younger. Her tan was good. She had started to fill out again. Her hands were steady and her voice had lost the edge of shrillness. She smiled to herself quite often. I had gotten her sister on the ship-to-shore through the Miami Marine Operator, and the sister had driven down to Flamingo to pick her up there. I managed to get the sister aside and tell her that if Vidge weakened and went back to Charlie, he might well destroy her completely. The sister, in a calm, dry, unexcited tone, said that if Vidge showed the slightest hint of going back to that monster, she, personally, would giftwrap Vidge and send her back to me in Lauderdale, prepaid. I guess she noticed my alarm at that prospect.

Sure, there had been some pleasure in the missionary work, but dealing at close range with a batch of acquired neuroses can make your ears ring for weeks. She was a good enough memory to set up a gentle nostalgia, but not so great that I would have gone looking for her. Most of all, I think that my nerves were frayed by having to edit everything I said to the lady for the ten days. I was trying to build back some morale and independence, and the wrong comment at the wrong time would have send Vidge tumbling back down.

You can be at ease only with those people to whom you can say any damn fool thing that comes into your head, knowing they will respond in kind, and knowing that any misunderstandings will be thrashed out right now, rather than buried deep and given a chance to fester.

Vidge, like so many other mild nice people, was a natural-born victim. Life had treated her so agreeably during her first twenty years she'd never had to plant her feet and swing at anything just to maintain her identity. She was loving and giving. And she would have made a delightful permanent package for some guy able to appreciate it. Lots of Vidges never have to find out they're victims. They land with the right people. But when one of them has the bad luck to mate with a Charlie, she gets gobbled up. You see them in the later years, those vague, translucent, silent women who stand over at the edge of life, with the nervous smile that comes and goes, and the infrequent and apologetic cough. Charlie is the squat florid one with the loud laugh and the bright neckties and the scatological jokes and the incipient coronary accident.

Chugging away from Flamingo at low cruise after dropping my passenger, I had the dreary feeling Charlie was going to snare her again and extract double penalties for the little attempt to escape. I was getting oil pressure fluctuation on the starboard diesel and had a friend in Marathon who would take a look at it without trying to find some plausible 1' way to pick my pocket, so I aimed her in that direction.

My pockets were reasonably hefty. Enough to give me a chance to enjoy another installment of my sporadic retirement. By the end of the year I'd have to dig up a new prospect, somebody so anxious to recover what was legally his that he'd give me half its value for getting it back, half being decidedly better than nothing.

The repair was a minor job, one I could have done myself if I'd been able to diagnose it. I heard the word on the snook hole, remembered the way Meyer would talk a good one up to the side of the boat, and that was how we happened to be under the bridge in a rented skiff Monday midnight, casting the active surface plugs into a splendid snook hole, with the skiff tied to one of the bridge pilings. In the current boil of the incoming tide they had been feeding nicely. I'd had good results with a Wounded Spook with a lot of spinning clattering hardware on it to fuss up the water and irritate them. We'd hooked into at least ten good ones, lost seven amid the pilings, boated three in the eight to twelve-pound range. But we were down to that just-one-more cast.

After midnight on a Monday in June, traffic is exceedingly sparse. The concrete bridge span was about twenty feet above the water. We were in the shadows under the bridge. I heard a car coming; it seemed to be slowing down. There was a sudden screech of brakes overhead. And, moments later, the girl came down. She came down through the orange glow of bridge lights and the white pallor of moonlight. Feet first. Pale skirt fluttered upward baring the long legs. Just one glimpse of that, and she chunked into the water five feet off the bow of the skiff, splashing us, disappearing. Motor roared, tires squealed, car rocketed off.

It was a forty-foot drop for her. Twenty feet of air, twenty feet of depth. I would have expected her to bob up but for one thing. She hit my line. The surface plug was a few feet beyond where she hit. And she took it right on down to the bottom, and there the plug stopped taking out line against the drag.

I had 10-pound mono on that reel. I pulled at it, and it held firm. I tossed my wallet into the bottom of the skiff, shoved my rod at Meyer and asked him to keep the line tight. I yanked my boat shoes off, went over the side, took a deep breath and let half of it out, and pulled myself down the monofilament, hand over hand, sliding my hands along it, grasping it between thumbs and fingerpads. Soon, in the blackness, I reached and touched the hair afloat, dug my fingers into it, got a good hold to try to lift her. Two hands, with that extraordinary gentleness of the last margin of consciousness, closed softly around my wrist. I pulled my way down her body, down to the ankles to find why I couldn't lift her off the bottom. I felt the double ridges of wire biting into the slenderness, leading down and through one of the three oval holes in a hefty cement block. I felt swiftly for the place where itßwas fastened, felt the hard twist of wire close to the block. I knew that if I had to go up for more air and come back... no girl. And my lungs were beginning to try to pump the air in, so that I had to use an effort of will to keep my throat closed against the blind effort. It had been done with pliers. Heavy wire. I knew which way it had to twist. It tore the pads of my thumb and fingers. I hooked fingers into the pocket of my shirt, ripped it off, wrapped it around the wicked ends of the wire, then untwisted as hard as I could. The world was getting a little dreamy. Just slightly vague. But the wire began to unwrap, and the free ends made it easier by giving me more leverage. I wanted to stretch out, yawn, sing some old sad songs, and float on out to sea in the delicious softness of the tide. The wires were free. I yanked them through the hole in the cement block. I kicked hard against the bottom and came slowly up, smiling perhaps, nodding a little, loosely hugging the hips of the drowning girl. I was thrust rudely out of sleepy-bye into the ugliness of coughing and spewing and retching in the fractured moonlight, then trying to hold her so her face was out of the water. That was when I saw Meyer, standing in the skiff, outlined against the lights, carefully playing us two big blundering fish and trying to work us toward the boat. Soon I could help. He knelt and got hold of the girl and worked her aboard over the flat stern, and as I hung on, waiting for strength to climb aboard, I saw him tumble her roughly face down over one of the seats, stand straddling her, reach his hands under her, and pull up slowly, then let her drop and shift his hands and push downward against her back just above the waist.

My feet were beginning to trail outward in the increasing strength of the outgoing tide. Had she been dropped five minutes later I wouldn't have been able to get down to her against that tide run.

I wormed up over the transom, sat there gasping. "While you were down there," Meyer said, his voice distorted by effort, "I went over to town and had a couple of beers."

"She was alive when I got there, buddy. She grabbed my wrist. So I had to unwire her from her anchor on the first trip."

"Some tenderhearted guy," Meyer said, "didn't have the heart to tell her they were all through. Easier to kill them than hurt their feelings."

"Is that the best way to do that?"

"Shut up. It's my way. And I think it's working." I fumbled in the tray of the tackle box and found my small flashlight. I'd recently put new batteries in it. Her soaked skirt was bunched, covering her from mid-thigh upward. Quite a pity, I thought, to discard such a long and lovely pair of legs. I rested the flashlight where it shone upon her ankles and hunched down with the fish pliers and nipped the wire. Freed of that stricture the legs moved a little apart, bare feet both turned inward. Bent over in that position, I saw a glitter under the edge of the bunched skirt, reached and lifted it slightly and saw my Wounded Spook against the back of her left thigh, the rear set of gang hooks set deeply. I clipped the leader off it right at the front eyelet, and just as I did so she gave a shallow, hacking cough and spewed water into the bilge, then gagged and moaned.

"Any more criticisms?" Meyer asked. "What ever happened to mouth-to-mouth?"

"It sets up emotional entanglements, McGee." After more coughing, she made it clear she wanted no more punishment. Meyer, deft as a bear, rolled her over, scooped her up, placed her in the bow, fanny on the floorboards, shoulders and back against the angle of the gunnels. I put my light on her face. Dark hair was pasted down over one eye. She lifted a slow hand, thumbed the hair back over her ear, squinted, turned her face away from the light, saying, "Please."

I turned the light away, totally astonished to find that it was a face which lived up to the legs, maybe more so. Even in the sick daze of waking up from what could have been that last long sleep, it was delicately Eurasian, sloe-eyed, oval, lovely.

As he moved to reach the lines to free them, Meyer said, "Damned handy, Travis. As soon as you run out, they drop you another one. Stop panting and start the motor, eh?"

Back at Thompson's, I ran the skiff up alongside the starboard stern of The Busted Flush. She was tied up with the port side against the pier. While Meyer held it there, I scrambled aboard. He lifted her to her feet, and I reached over the rail, got her, swung her aboard, tried to put her on her feet and had to hold her to keep her from falling. Meyer went chugging off in the skiff to leave it over at the small boat dock where it belonged.

I took her down into the lounge and on through, past the galley to the master stateroom. She stood braced, holding tightly to the back of a chair while I turned the lights on and pulled the pier-side draperies shut. Her head was bowed. She looked up at me and started to say something, but the chattering of her teeth made it unintelligible. I took my heaviest robe from the hanging locker and tossed it onto the big bed, then got her a big towel from the locker in the head and threw it in onto the bed and said, "Get out of that wet stuff and dry yourself good."

I went to the liquor locker, found the Metaxa brandy and poured a good three inches into a small highball glass. I carried it to the stateroom and knocked, and in her chattery voice she told me to come in. She was belting the robe. Her clothing was in a sodden little pile on the floor. I handed her the glass. It chittered against her teeth. She took it down in three tosses, shuddered, then sat on the edge of the bed, hugging herself.

Meyer appeared in the doorway. "Chills? Hmm. Shock. Reaction. Miss, if you have the energy, a hot shower or, better yet, a hot tub. And then another drink. Okay?"

She gave a tense little bob of her head, and Meyer scooped up the wet clothing. In moments I heard the roar of the water into the huge elegant sybaritic tub the original owner had installed to please the tastes of his Brazilian mistress, before I won the vessel from him-sans mistress-in a Palm Beach poker session.

"S-s-s-something... in my... l-l-l-leg," she said. I got the needlenose pliers, the good wire cutters, and Dr. Meyer to assist me. We had her lie prone on the giant bed, custom-built-in equipment on the boat when I had won her, and Meyer folded the robe back, untangling it from the barbs on the other set of gang hooks on the belly of the speckled plug. I swung the big bed lamp over to bear upon the operating area.

There are too many trite words for legs like that. Ivory. Grecian marble. I was considerably more accustomed to brown legs. These had a dusky pallor. But pallor did not mean softness.

The chills were in cycles. When a chill tightened her up, the long muscles of calf and thigh, dancer's muscles, swelled-changing the elegant curvatures of those legs in repose. The backs of the thighs and the calves had a fine-grained, flawless, matte finish, and the area of the backs of her knees were shinier, faint blue veining visible under the skin.

We had to adjust our operating technique to the chills, but the brandy was beginning to work, diminishing the violence of them. First, with Meyer steadying the triple shank of the imbedded gang hook, holding it with the needlenose pliers, I nipped through it with the wire cutters, tossed the body of the plug aside. Of the gang hook, two hooks were sunk into her beyond the barb. With Meyer still holding the shank, I clipped the free hook off.

"This is the part that will hurt, dear," Meyer said. "Go ahead," she said.

There is only one way to remove a fish hook. You have to push it the rest of the way through, bring the point back out through the skin.

Meyer changed the grip and angle of the pliers, waited for a small chill to end, then made a slow steady twist of his wrist. The two barbed points made two little tents in the skin as they came up from underneath, pushed against the essential toughness, no matter how delicate it may seem, of human hide, then simultaneously pierced through. She made no sound or motion. Wondering if she had fainted, I moved to look at her face. She lay with her eyes open, totally relaxed.

I carefully clipped the barbs off. Bright dark droplets of blood stood out against fairness. I plucked the barbs from the smooth surface of hide, and Meyer, holding the same grip on the pliers, rotated his wrist the other way and brought the barbless curves of metal back out through the channel where they had first dug in. Dab of iodine then, on each of the four small holes, and one round ouchless waterproof patch, size of a half dollar.

"A great honor, Doctor," I said, "to assist you in the technique which bears your name."

Unfolding the back of the robe down over her legs he said, gutturally, "You may have the object of removed to keep always, Kildare."

"Clowns," the girl murmured. "My God." Meyer hastened out, turned off the bath water. "Your bath awaits, milady. In several minutes I will knock, enter with averted stare, hold the second drink in your direction. The water is very hot. Force yourself into it. What do we call you?"

She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been. "Jane Doe will do just fine," she said.

"Your comedy team is Meyer and McGee," he said. "I am Meyer, known as Meyer. The pretty one is McGee, known as Travis, and this is his simple little unassuming houseboat, Jane Doe."

"Delighted," she said, barely moving her lips, and stood up and brushed by us and went into the bath and closed the door.

I went into the guest stateroom which Meyer was occupying. There is a big drawer under the bed. An ironic type had once named it the broad bin, and unfortunately I have been unable to think of anything else to call it. I found girl's pajamas, roomy flannelette in blue and white stripes. I found some black Dacron sailcloth slacks in size twelve, and a white pleated Dacron shirt with long sleeves and with an edge of Dacron lace on the collar and cuffs. I found a pair of tennis shoes that looked about the right size. And I took out one of those little packages, seal unbroken, the better hotels provide for female guests whose luggage has been taken to some highly unlikely place by their friendly airline. The essential toiletries, with a stylized picture of either a blonde or a brunette imprinted on the flexible plastic.

I put them in on the big bed of the boat's owner, debated making the bed up fresh, remembered that the linen had had but one night's use by McGee, and she was not exactly in a condition to be overly fastidious. As I came out of the master stateroom, Meyer came out of the bath after delivering the drink.

"Come take a look," he said. I followed him to the galley.

He had drawn a small washtub of fresh water, put her clothing in it to rinse the salt out of the fabric. Mother Meyer.

"What we have, Doctor Watson," he said, "is a raw silk sleeveless blouse in natural color, and an OrIon fleece wraparound skirt, both items with the label of something called, God help us all, The Doll House, in Broward Beach. And we have these lacy little blue briefs, and the matching bra, about a B-cup size 34 I would judge, excellent quality and unlabeled, possibly from a custom house. No shoes. And, as you may have noticed, no jewelry, no wristwatch. But pierced ears, indentation of a ring on the ring finger of the right hand, and though she's no sun bunny, a stripe of pallor on the left wrist where the wristwatch was worn." I followed him into the lounge. "Age, Mr. Holmes?"

"Some oriental blood. Complicates the problem. I'll say twenty-six, but give me two years either way."

"How about the long decorative fingernails, Mr. Holmes? Too long for useful work, no? And broken practically down to the quick on the third and fourth fingers of the right hand, possibly from a struggle."

"Very good, Doctor Watson, my dear fellow. Is there not one other thing worth consideration?"

"Uh... the scar on the right cheekbone?"

"Meaningless in itself. Come, man!" I looked blank. He said, "I shall give you a little help, Doctor. Imagine how some other young woman might react to the same set of circumstances."

I thought of Vidge. She wouldn't have endured so placidly the pain of removing the fish hooks. She would have been bleating and hooing and thrashing, and she would have been demanding doctors and policemen. When I said Jane Doe's acceptance of our help seemed significant, he beamed at me and said that her muscle tone, the rich trimness of her figure, her acceptance of the situation all seemed to point to some aspect of the entertainment world, probably one of the more sleazy segments of it, a so-called exotic dancer, a hinterland belly dancer, a bunny at one of the more permissive key clubs, a singer on one of the little cut-rate cruise ships. All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.

We heard a door open, the gargling sound of the tub water running out, the sound of the stateroom door closing. In a few minutes we went as a committee of two, rapped on her door, and heard her call to us to come in. She lay in the middle of the giant bed under the coverings in the striped pajamas, her head, turbaned in a maroon towel, resting on two pillows. Her color had improved. We stood at the foot of the bed. "Much better, eh?" Meyer said.

"I got a little buzz from that big knock of brandy. On account of I guess nothing to eat since breakfast maybe."

"No trouble to fix you something, Jane Doe," I said. She frowned. "I don't know about solid food. I got a feeling maybe I wouldn't hang onto it so long. Maybe some warm milk and a coupla aspirin, Mr.... I forgot your name."

"Travis McGee. The hairy one is Meyer. How about a big warm eggnog with no stick, vanilla, nutmeg on top?"

She looked wistful. "Gee, when I was a little kid. sometimes... that would be nice, honest." She glanced toward the chair where the clothing was. "There's a girl on board?"

Sometimes when you think you can be casual, it doesn't work at all. You think something is healed, but then when you least expect it you learn all over again that some things never heal. My voice gave me away when I said, "The girl who owned those clothes is dead."

The normal automatic response would have been to say something about being sorry, but she said, "Then they ought to fit fine. In that big crazy blue tub I was wondering if I was dead, and if you dream things more real-like when you're dead. I guess when I wake up tomorrow I'll know for sure."

"In the morning," Meyer said, "when you feel better, you can tell the whole thing to the police."

Again I was aware of that utter emptiness behind those dark eyes, and of something else back there, a cold and bitter humor, the kind of humor which can make a joke when the hangman adjusts the noose.

"What's to tell?" she said. "I tried to kill myself and it didn't work."

I said, "You tucked that cement block under your arm and hopped over the bridge rail."

"It wasn't easy. You forgot all about the eggnog maybe?" In an absolutely casual and offhand way, Meyer said something that seemed to be all L's and vowel sounds.

She said, "No I... " She stopped, stared at him with narrow eyes and lips sucked bloodless. "Damn sneaky," she said.

Meyer smiled happily. "Jane Doe from Main Street, Honolulu. Forgive me. I heard just that faintest breath of Island accent in your voice. And you do have that very unique loveliness of the Hawaiian mix, my dear."

"Yah. I'm a dream walking." I have never heard a woman speak of herself with quite that much bitterness.

Meyer turned to me. "Macronesian strains, and add Irish and French and some Japanese and what all, stir for a few generations in a tropical climate and the results can refute the foes of mongrelization." He beamed at the girl. "I'm an economist, my dear. I did a survey of the Islands a few years before statehood, a tax-structure prediction."

You can watch the Meyer Magic at work and not know how it's done. He has the size and pelt of the average Adirondack black bear. He can walk a beach, go into any bar, cross any playground, and acquire people the way blue serge picks up lint, and the new friends believe they have known him forever. Perhaps it is because he actually listens, and actually cares, and can make you feel as if his day would have been worthless, an absolute nothing, had he not had the miraculous good fortune of meeting you. He asks you the questions you want to be asked, so you can let go with the answers that take the tensions out of your inner gears and springs. It is not an artifice. He could have been one of the great con artists of all time. Or one of the great psychiatrists. Or the founder of a new religion. Meyerism.

Once upon a time when Lauderdale was the place where the college mob came in force, I came across Meyer sitting on the beach. He had a half circle of at least forty kids sitting, facing him. Their faces were alive with delight. Every few minutes there was a big yelp of their laughter. And they were the cold kids, the ones who look at and through all adults exactly the way adults stare at motel art without seeing it. And Meyer was, miraculously, part of that group. When I drifted closer, forty pairs of eyes froze me, and Meyer turned and winked, and I moved along. A kid was playing slow chords on a guitar. Between chords, Meyer would recite. Later I asked him what in the world he'd been doing. He said they were a wonderful bunch of kids. A lovely sense of the absurd. He had been inventing a parody of Ginsberg, entitled "Snarl," making it up as he went along, and he had also made up a monologue of a Barnyard girl trying to instill the concept of social significance into the mind of the white slaver who was flying her to Iraq, and he titled that one "The Two Dollar Misunderstanding." Then he had assigned parts to them and brought them into the act, setting the scene up as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor at a White House garden party in honor of culture.

And once I had seen a very reserved matron type, after talking earnestly in a corner with Meyer for three minutes, and without a drink in her, suddenly fall against his barrel chest and sob like a heartbroken child. He would not tell me just what it was that had broken her. His code forbids such revelations, and possibly that is one of his secrets too.

His comfortable little cabin cruiser, named the John Maynard Keynes, is tied up a seventy-foot walk from Slip F-18. In the sunset dusk he holds court, with wildly assorted people cluttering the cockpit deck, perching on the rails, sitting on the edge of the dock, legs swinging. And there are always the young popsies, sixteen to twenty, eyes soft with a special worship, content to be near him, the same way those of sterner breed clutter the hotel suites and the pits of the Grand Prix race drivers. Were he sensuously unscrupulous he could keep his bunk forever stocked with the exceptional tendernesses of the very young. But, instead, on an average of three times a year he takes unto himself one of that breed which he calls, with warmth rather than irony, the iron maidens. These are stern, mature, aggressive, handsome women who have made their mark in the world, and perhaps forfeited much in the process. Accomplished artists, concert musicians, heads of fashion houses and other competitive businesses, administrators, editors, women in government. He treats them fondly, but as though they are enchantingly foolish young girls, and goes off with his iron maiden of the moment for a few weeks, and when he brings them back, their mouths are soft, and their voices have lost that edge of command, and their eyes are filled with that unmistakable look of devotion. When I seemed curious, he suggested I read what Mark Twain had written about choosing a mistress. He said he had discovered just one other factor Twain had overlooked. He said that the woman who achieves a position of power and command is usually so intelligent that she catches on quite quickly when it is explained to her that she has a secret yearning to be hapless and foolish for a little while, to switch off the machinery of domination, to be cherished not only as a woman, but also in the same way she was once cherished when she was a little girl, before she became locked into those motivations that drove her upward so mercilessly. "They want a ribbon in their hair," he explained, "and someone who does not want to make any use of what they've achieved, and someone who would never go around waving their scalp on the end of a spear after they've gone back to the wars, or even look them up at the embassy or in the executive suite someday."

Now he reached and patted Jane Doe's ankle under the sheet and coverlet. "My dear, you are going to have the best sleep you've had in months. Just stay awake long enough for one of Travis famous eggnogs.

Her smile was almost shy. "Okay."

When I took the eggnog in, she was almost gone, but she stirred, braced herself on an elbow, drank it a few swallows at a time until it was almost gone, looked sleepy-eyed at me and said, "I could be down there dead. And maybe this is the way it would be."

"We're real."

She finished it, handed me the tall glass. "You are. But I don't know about Meyer."

I turned off the light. At the door I said good night, but she was already gone. I had heard Meyer come out of the head. He was in the guest stateroom, sitting in lurid pajama bottoms on the side of the bed, digging at the deep, glossy black pelt on his chest.

"She dropped off?" he asked.

"Like tumbling into a well."

"I think you should dispossess me, captain. I can sleep in the lounge."

"And complain about it for all time? No thanks."

"That was the reaction I hoped for. Look at the time! Ten past two. I've earned my keep. While you were eggnogging the lass, I went onto the dock, swiftly and deftly filleted the brave snooks, wrapped fillets separately in foil and put them on the second shelf, larger refrigerator, behind the steaks."

"Forgot them completely. Thanks."

I "I nearly forgot them, Travis. The lass has a tendency to attract complete attention. Aside from what a delectable morsel she appears to be, what's your reaction to her?"

I leaned against a built-in stack of drawers, arms folded. "Wariness, I guess. Like they say about stalking a panther, you're never sure of who's after who. A hell of a lot of control there, Meyer. I think it looked like a very professional job of trying to kill her. No husband discarding the tiresome wife. So somebody had to have a very good reason for scuttling merchandise of that quality. She must have given them enough reason. And they didn't make it easy for her. No rap on the skull before they chunked her over. I can guess she's really shook, but she's not going to let herself show it in any way. Or yell cop. She's a hard one, Meyer. I get the impression of... gambler's nerves. She took a chance and lost. She accepted the loss and knew what it would mean. Then got a break she had no right to expect. I detect the smell of money. And she was playing in a rough league."

Meyer sighed. "I think we'll get some answers from her, if she thinks there's any way she can use us. Partial answers probably. I noticed one thing. Any girl that attractive almost always has dozens of little automatic tricks, a way of looking at a man, speaking to him, holding herself. Not so much flirtatiousness as awareness of the weapons she's always owned, and how to use them at all times. I've been trying to think of the categories I've run into where they can turn the whole arsenal on and off at will. Good trained nurses, dedicated actresses, ballet dancers... and whores. And we won't know why those two men dropped her off that bridge unless she decides it is in her best interests to tell us."

"Two men?"

"At least two, and probably in a convertible. From the time the car braked to a stop until she hit the water, there wasn't time to work her out of a sedan with that block wired to her ankles, and I doubt they'd have her strapped to a fender like a dead doe. And also there was no sound of a car door at any time. The car started up so quickly, whoever dropped her wouldn't have had time to get back behind the wheel. Besides, the motor was being revved the whole time it was stopped. So I see a nervous man at the wheel and a powerful man in the back seat with her. Powerful and agile. He jumped out over the door, scooped her up -a hundred and twenty pounds of girl plus cement block -swung her up and over the parapet and let her drop feet first, vaulted back into the car as the other man started it up. I'd also guess they were parked a distance from the bridge, lights out, well over on the shoulder, waiting to be certain nothing was coming from either direction. As she knew what was going to happen, it must have been a horrid wait for her. But I would wager she didn't whine or beg."

I shook my head admiringly. "Ever wonder if you're in the wrong line of work, Professor?"

"I'm in the logic business, McGee. I deduce possibilities and probabilities from what I can observe. My God, man, compared to the mists and smokes of economic theory and practice, the world of actual events seems almost oversimplified. A corporate financial statement is the most nonspecific thing there is. If a man can't read the lines between the lines between the lines, he might as well stuff his money into a hollow tree."

In that villain's face the eyes are an intense blue, bracketed by the wrinkles of weather and smiling, small eyes peering from either side of the potato nose. "Don't overrate my talents, boy. You function superbly in areas where I'd be helpless as a child. I couldn't have gone down after her, or made myself stay down when I learned it was the only way to save her."

"McGee, all meat and reflexes."

"And illusion. One of the last of the romantics, trying to make himself believe he's the cynical beach bum who has it made. You permit yourself the luxury of making moral judgments, Travis, in a world that tells us man's will is the product of background and environment. You think you're opportunistic and flexible as all hell, but they'd have to kill you before they could bend you. That kind of rigidity is both strength and weakness."

"Aren't you swinging a little wild tonight, Prof?"

He stuck a fist against a huge and shuddering yawn. "I guess so. A funny hunch that Miss Jane Doe is very bad news. And I've seen how you take on problems. You get deeply involved. You bleed a little. Indignation makes you take nutty risks. All that splendid ironic detachment goes all to hell when you detect a dragon off in the bushes somewhere. I wouldn't want you to get the same professional kind of attention she got. I'd miss you. Where would I find another pigeon who gets clobbered by the queen's gambit? Or knows how to lead Meyer to the fat snook. Good night, pigeon."

After I had made my nest on the big yellow couch in the lounge and put the lights out, I forgave Meyer for prodding me with his parlor psychology. He'd depicted me as a little too much of a gullible ass. Sometimes, sure, I'd identified a little too closely with a customer, and when you couldn't help them, it could leave a lasting bruise. But I have been there and back time after time, and had my ticket punched. No matter how much I despised the fat cats who devise legal ways of stealing, I had learned not to give them any odds-on chances of puncturing the brown hide of McGee. It had happened enough times to teach me that in spite of the miracles of modern medicine, hospitals are places where they hurt you, and that when you hurt enough the cold sweat rolls off you and the world goes black. I knew I had some parts nobody could replace if they got smashed, and once deep in the wormy comfort of the grave there would be no chance to identify with the gullible ones, or any chance to nip in and snatch the meat out of the jaws of the fat cats.

The dead-eyed cookie was not likely to elicit any warmth and sympathy from the McGee, or send him off in any galloping charge to recover the magic grail. Besides, I had enough bread for months of joyful leisure, for cruising, beachcombing, getting happily plotzed with good friends, disporting with the trim little jolly sandy-rumped beach kittens, slaying gutsy denizens of the deep blue, and slipping the needle into every phony who happened into my path. When it came time to embark on the next profitable crusade, it would be for the sake of someone considerably more helpless than our Eurasian Jane Doe.

But those certainly were fantastic legs. I started mousing around the galley early, certain both boat guests were asleep. It startled me when Meyer came aboard. He came onto the stern deck and knocked softly on the lounge door. I went and opened it for him.

"Lock yourself out? Why?"

"For the same reason I got up and buttoned the whole boat up after you'd sacked out last night. I started wondering if anybody could have stayed on the bridge to make sure she stayed down. Not likely. But it's not a bit of trouble to lock up."

"Where have you been, Meyer?"

"A morning stroll. The view from the bridge. About two miles there and two miles back. That adds up to a six-egg breakfast. I wanted to confirm some guesses."

"Such as?"

"It sounded to me as if they took off in the direction of Miami. The tire marks check out. They swerved over onto the wrong side of the bridge to jettison their sweet cargo. Skid marks. And then more skid marks where they scratched off and swerved back into their own lane. They stopped fairly near this end of the bridge, and it has enough center rise so they couldn't see the road behind them while stopped. But from the top of the rise you have a good straight shot for about four miles south. And, from where they dumped her over, you can see a good mile straight ahead. With their lights out, nobody coming from the direction of Marathon would notice them on the wrong side of the bridge. But they had to know it would be clear enough. So I walked further and, about two hundred yards south of the bridge, the shoulder is so wide you can park there and see around the bridge. Tires had mashed the grass down."

He took an object from his shirt pocket, a very generous cigar butt, better than three inches long, wrapped in a tissue. He held it on the palm of a big paw, prodded it with a thick hairy finger. "We had a good rain about eight last night, remember? This hasn't been out in the rain. Looks like a very good leaf. From where I found it, right at the edge of the brush, the passenger threw it out. I don't think you could throw a cigar that far from a car on the highway proper. And this isn't the kind you throw away. The wet grass put it out. You don't throw it away unless you've lit it to settle your nerves, and then somebody says let's go, and you have a girl to dump over a bridge railing in the next minute. Then you throw away a good cigar. Nice teeth marks, Travis. Big choppers. They'll stay nice and clear even after this has dried out all the way. So would you humor an aging economist and tuck it away in a good safe place? One of us might meet the fellow again."

He rewrapped it carefully and I accepted it. "Anything else, Inspector?"

"Ah, yes. As an ignorant tourist I queried a surly old fellow about water depths. Except in the main channel under the center of the bridge, most of the rest of the area averages about three feet at low tide. One exception, the hole where we were fishing, where the outgoing tide sets up a good swirl. Fifty feet in diameter, twenty and thirty feet deep. The highway people worry about it undercutting some of the bridge piers eventually. Over the main channel the bridge walls are considerably higher, too high to conveniently hoist a girl over. So either the man with the cigar, or the fellow racing the engine, or perhaps a third man if there was one, knows the waters hereabouts. In fact, dear heart, there might be other cement blocks down there, with empty loops of wire. When the crabs and the other scavengers have picked them clean, the ligaments would rot and the bones separate at the joints. The slender bones of the leg would slip out of the loops as soon as the feet were gone, and it would not make much difference by then, I imagine. We may have discovered the southeastern repository for surplus bawds. The fatal ka-slosh on many a dark night, my boy. And the slow empty dance of the tethered bawds in the final caress of the current deep and black, the wild hair drifting, and the aimless sway of their emptied arms, and the slow oceanic tilting of their sea-cool hips in the

"Meyer! At eight in the morning?"

"Extreme hunger gives me poetic delirium. Travis, good lad, you look unwell."

"I was, for a moment. You see, Meyer, I was down there. And it was black. And when I wound my fist in her hair to try to lift her, and found I couldn't, she was just enough alive to reach up and put both hands on my wrist, as gently as a sick child. If she hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been able to stay down long enough to get her loose. Yes, Meyer, it was deep and black. And not very nice."

"I am often guilty of vulgarity. Forgive me. Have we a nice mild onion I can chop into my six scrambling eggs?"

We were on second coffees when we heard her running the water in the head. Soon she appeared in the doorway, looking down at us in the booth adjoining the stainless-steel galley, wearing the black pants and the white shirt with its trimmings of lace.

"Good morning to Meyer and McGee," she said. "If there is really no other woman aboard, one of you is a perfect jewel, washing out the dainty underthings."

"Always at your service, Miss Doe," Meyer said. He got up. "Sit here, my dear. Opposite the McGee. Boat owners get waited on hand and foot. I'm chef as well as laundress. And your turn will come. Coffee black and hot first?"

"Please." She slid rather stiffly into the booth, grimaced as she lowered herself. "How do you feel?" I asked her.

"As if somebody had tried to break my back."

As he placed the coffee in front of her, Meyer said, "Thank me for that too. I stretched you out across a boat seat and I could feel your ribs give every time I pushed the air out of your lungs. But I was reasonably careful not to break any."

The morning light was brilliant against her face as she sat opposite me. Her dark hair was brushed to a gloss, hung free, two dark curved parentheses which framed the lovely oval of her face, swung forward as she dipped her head and lifted the cup to her lips. She had made up her mouth carefully with the lipstick from the convenience kit. The pale down on her face, just below the darker hair of the temples, grew quite long. There was one faint horizontal wrinkle across the middle of her forehead, twice arched to match the curve of her brows. And a slightly deeper horizontal line across her slender throat. A few pores were visible in the ivoried dusk of her skin where it was taut across the high solidity of oriental cheekbones, but there was no other mark or flaw upon her, except the cheekbone scar shaped like a star.

In that light the color of her eyes surprised me. Light shrunk the pupils small. The irises were not as dark as I had imagined. They were a strange yellow-brown, a curious shade, just a little darker than amber, and there were small green flecks near the pupils. Her upper lids had that fullness of the Asiatic strain, and near-death had smudged the flesh under her eyes. She looked across at me and accepted the appraisal with the same professional disinterest with which the model looks into the camera lens while they are taking light readings.

"And otherwise?" I asked.

She lifted her shoulders slightly, let them fall. "I slept fine. You men will have to fill in some blanks. Where are we?"

"Tied up at Thompson's Marina at Marathon."

"And last night, after I corked off, did you dear boys go honking and blustering over to the beer joints to make the big brag about what you rescued from the briny?"

Her voice was mild, but there was a curl to her lips.

Meyer smiled down at her. "I don't know how McGee reacts to that, my dear, but personally I find the inference offensive. How would you like how many eggs?"

"Uh... two. Easy over."

"With a little slab of sauteed fish? And a quarter of one of Homestead's better cantaloupes?"

"Yes.... Yes, please. Mr. Meyer?"

"Just Meyer."

"Okay. Meyer, I'm sorry I said that. It's just that I'm a little spooked."

"Forgiven," Meyer said. "We bluster, dear. We bluster all to hell and gone. But honk? Never!" Meyer served her, poured us both more coffee, then came and wedged in beside me with his own cup.

"I don't know how you saved me," she said. Meyer explained it all, how we happened to be there, what we saw and heard, and who had done what. As he explained, she ate with a delicately avid voracity, a mannerly greed, glancing up at Meyer and at me from time to time.

"McGee stayed down just long enough to make my blood run cold," Meyer said. "I know it was better than two minutes."

She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly in a speculation I could not read. I said, "I knew you were alive when I got to you. So that was the only good chance I had to bring you up alive, to get you loose that first time."

"And you heard the car leave?"

"Before you touched bottom," I said.

Her plate was empty. She put her fork down with a little clink sound. "Then we three, right here, are the only people who know I'm alive. Right?"

"Right," said Meyer. "Our plans before you... uh, excuse me, dropped in... were to leave sometime this morning and head for Miami. Want to come along?"

She shrugged. "Why not?"

"My dear," Meyer said, "it would seem as if someone took a violent dislike to you last night."

"Is that a question?"

"Only if you want to give an answer. We are not going to pry. So you don't have to make up any answers. Tell us what you feel like telling us, or nothing at all."

"He... one of them-there were two-he didn't like it. He wished there was some way to get around it, so it wouldn't have to happen. But he knew and I knew we were way past any place where there was any chance of turning back. I was scared sick. Not of dying. When you take a chance and lose, that's the chance you take. What he didn't like most was being told not to make it easier. I-Ie didn't think that was right. And that's what had me so scared, going out the hard way. Being down in the water and no chance to do anything, and holding my breath down in the dark on the bottom as long as I could. I whispered to him, begging him to put me out first. He knows how. I thought he would. He could have done it so Ma... so the other one wouldn't even have heard. But then they stopped and as he swung me over, that wire hurting me terrible, and let me go, I knew he wasn't going to."

She stopped and gave us both a look of savage satisfaction. "I was taking a breath to scream my lungs out but then I knew that if I didn't make a sound, the other guy would think Terry had hit me on the throat before dumping me, and he'd have to report it, and they might give him a hard time. I sure owed him a hard time, so I didn't let myself make a squeak and it... I guess it took my mind off everything a little bit, and at least I ended up down there with a big hunk of air in my lungs instead of all screamed out. Funny, it could have made the difference."

"And probably did," Meyer said. "And it was why I thought someone was disposing of a dead body, the way you came down without a sound. A good thing Travis got down there quickly."

"Boy, if they ever find out somebody got me in time!"

I saw her shiver. It was a clue to her being more rattled than she would let herself show us. Her voice was at odds with her pale and dusky elegance. It was a rich, controlled contralto, but she switched back and fort" from the vulgarity of an artificial elegance of expression to a forthright crudeness. I could not tell whether it was spirit or stupidity that made her feel pleased with her own cleverness in giving Terry a hard time as she was, as far as she knew, being murdered.

She raised her eyebrows in surprise and said, "You know, I haven't even said thanks! Okay, thanks, guys. McGee, I say it took guts to go down there after me, and it was a nice thing to do for anybody. I don't remember much. Just all black and terrible, and then somebody pulling my hair and touching me, maybe a fish going to eat me. Then being in all that fish smell, and somebody pushing at me, and heaving up that water all over. So here I am. And thanks."

"You are most welcome," Meyer said. "And here you are, with a second life to lead. Everything since last night is pure profit. So what are you going to do with your new life?"

"I don't know! I haven't had to think of things like that. I've always been told what to do, and brother, I better do it. I don't want to have to think about what I should do." She bit her lip and looked at each of us in turn, head slightly tilted. "You boys look like you've got something going for you. I mean, this boat and all, and you have a lot of cool. It's not a fishing trip and back to the old lady and the office. If you've got something going, maybe there's some kind of way I could fit into things."

It was touching in an inverted way. The family had moved away, leaving the housecat to scratch at a new screen door.

"I'm an economist, just as I told you, my dear, and McGee here is in the salvage business, on contract."

"It's more interesting than I thought," she said wistfully. "Maybe no matter what I work out, it is going to get back to those people I'm walking around, and they'll try again. They can't miss twice."

"If you're looking for advice," Miss Jane Doe we can't guide you any without knowing the problem Miss Doe."

"Vangie," she said. "I owe you at least my right name, huh? Short for Evangeline. The whole name will kill you, honest. Evangeline Bridget Tanaka Bellemer. Bellemer is sort of French meaning beautiful sea. That's a gas! Actually what I got dropped into-the beautiful sea. I guess I have to settle down and think things out somehow. When do we get to Miami? After lunch?"

It amused me. "Maybe by five or six tomorrow evening."

She looked relieved. "I wish it was next month, or next year. Anyway, there's more time than I thought, and that's a help."

"Ask for advice if you think you need it," Meyer said. "And you look well enough to accept a temporary appointment as dishwasher."

She stared at him. "Are you kidding!"

"On this vessel," I said, "everybody works."

"I'm not so big on housework," she said with a trace of sullenness mixed with acceptance of her fate.

After I'd settled the bill for dockage and fuel, Meyer handled the lines and I ran the Flush out of there, sitting up at the topside controls forward of the sun deck. When we were out into the channel Meyer went below. In a little while she came up and asked permission to sit in the co-pilot seat. She had found a white shirt of mine and put it on over the borrowed blouse. She had found a hat left aboard by a guest, a straw thing with cute sayings on it and a floppy brim a good yard in diameter. She had found some sunglasses. She had a tall highball in hand, almost as lethally dark as iced coffee.

"Okay I made myself a knock?" she asked. "Want I should go get you one too?"

"Later on, maybe. Won't you be too warm?"

"It's not so bad now, with the wind. What the sun does to me, I break out. Like little boils. So I have to watch it. You know, Meyer is pretty fussy, isn't he? I washed the damn dishes. He said I left grease on, I should wash them again. I said once was all I bargained for, so he's down there washing them all over. Gee, I can see how come it takes so long to Miami. This thing is really slow."

"But cozy."

"What it's like, Travis, is a real great apartment pad, the hi fi and furniture and all. You could fill it with swingers and really blast away."

She was quiet for a long time. She was not exactly killing her drink. Tiny sips were widely spaced. I was aware of her examining me from time to time, long glances behind the dark lenses.

"Look, in this salvage business, I suppose it's like other kinds of things, there's a contract you want to get and a lot of people want to get it too because there's good money in it. In business you do better if you have some kind of an edge, right? Maybe what would be a help to you, I was thinking, some way to soften up those guys, so they want to have you do the work. What you could do, maybe, is put the price a little higher, to cover whatever it would cost to make them feel friendly."

"Sorry, honey. It doesn't work that way."

More silence. We passed a bar where about forty pelicans stood in single file in about an inch of water. I pointed it out to her and she said, "Yeah. Birds."

Most people are as blind as Vangie. Eyesight is what you use to get around without running into things. But they find no real value in what they see.

Her drink went down, a little bit at a time. Suddenly she started questioning me about my houseboat. I really owned it? could I take it any distance? could I get it over to New Orleans, or maybe Galveston? Did I get to use it often, or was I too busy with my salvage business? Costs something to run such a nice boat, huh? Don't lots of people charter their boats to get some of their bait back? A boat like this, did you ever think there could be a way to turn it into a real gold mine? Like sort of little weekend excursions, with everything done real tasty.

I finally realized what she had in mind. She couldn't risk staying in the Miami area. But if I could cruise to other waters, she'd help me get set up in the excursion business. She'd line up three or four fun kids, hire a cook and a maid, stock up with steaks and champagne and offer weekend excursions for the tired businessman at a thousand dollars a head. "Out of just three passengers, you could net better than a grand, McGee, believe me.

"Until somebody drops us both off a bridge, Vangie?"

"Come on! I was messed up in something a lot rougher than that. I should have known when I was well off, back when I was just a plain ordinary hustler. So I had to go and let myself get talked into this... this other kind of work. Most of the time I didn't let it bother me. But once in a while, one of the johns would be different. Sweet, sort of. And then I'd think he should get a better deal than what he was going to get. It seemed too raw. And so... hell, I had a couple of drinks and got soft and hinted what was going to happen to him. I could have ruined the whole setup for everybody. But they got to him before he could get to the law, and that was that. But I was finished. They didn't dare use me anymore, and couldn't trust me not to fink on them if they cut me out of the action, so the only thing they could do was take me off the books for good. I knew that. I guess I blew it because I think my nerves had been going bad. You work a setup like that long enough and you begin to dream about those guys and what happened to them all. And you begin to imagine people are following you. If I hadn't tried to tip that one off, it would have been the next one or the one after that. Look, you don't buy the cruise boat idea, huh?"

"No thanks. Vangie, what kind of a setup were you in?"

"If you don't know, you stay healthy. What I ought to do is blow the whistle on the whole group. But it would be a terrible thing to do to the other two gals who got pressured into it just like I did. I think they'll crack sooner or later too. Anyway, the law could get so excited about it maybe I couldn't make any kind of a deal anyway. When somebody lifts the lid off the pail of worms, it's going to get very very warm for everybody, and you can believe it. What I keep thinking, I haven't been a blonde since I was seventeen, and quit when my hair started cracking and splitting. There's some money I can pick up if I can get to it, if they haven't staked it out. I could get a nose job too, maybe, or something around the eyes they do to change you. And I heard if you make the right contacts, you can get set up pretty good in Australia lately. The bad thing is how... everybody's getting nervous."

"Why?"

"Because it's been going on so long. You get the feeling the odds are going bad. Because they're nervous, if they grab me again, they'll take it out on me for scaring them by getting away. They'll make me beg to be back down in that water wired to a rock."

Meyer appeared to hand me my eleven o'clock bottle of chilled Tuborg. She turned toward him and said, "You sore or anything?"

"Should I be?"

"Maybe you should. But it's kind of a thing with me, Meyer. I was in a Home for a while, and I had to do every kind of scut work there was and I swore I wouldn't ever again, even if I had to use food money for maid service."

He moved around her and against the rail. We talked. He asked gentle questions: she finished her drink at last and went below and came back with another just as tall and just as dark. I suspected that her nervousness about her future had been making her increasingly talkative with me. And the beginning of the second drink unfastened her tongue a little more. She began to try, quite obviously, to shock Meyer out of his placid and friendly acceptance of her, and in doing so gave us enough clues and false clues so we could fit together a coherent and plausible history.

Her brothers had been blown up while playing on a Hawaiian beach, had dug up something that went off. After the war her mother had brought the six-year-old Vangie to the States. Her mother had come to track down the Navy officer who had promised to divorce his wife and marry Vangie's mother. The officer brushed her off. Her mother found waitress work, acquired a brutal boyfriend. By the time Vangie was ten she was unmanageable in school. When they threatened to send her to an institution for delinquent children she called their bluff by becoming so shamelessly delinquent they had to send her away. After she had been in the institution two years, a truck crushed her mother to death against the back wall of the restaurant where she worked. At thirteen, looking almost eighteen, she seduced the resident director of the institution and blackmailed him into taking her off all menial work and giving her special food and privileges. Over a year later somebody reported the situation to the state attorney general's office, and the director, to save his own neck, smuggled her out and turned her over to a vice ring working the Virginia Beach area. They beat all rebellion out of her. She was transferred to other stations on the national circuit, and by the time she was twenty-four she was working for a call circuit in Jacksonville and making the top dollar in the area. Two years ago she had been recruited into the dangerous game she would not describe.

Certainly the breaks had gone against her. Circumstance had turned her into an emotional basket case. You could bleed a little for the Hawaiian child who couldn't comprehend what had happened to the big brother who had carried her around on his shoulders.

The Busted Flush droned roughly east by northeast up the channel in the midday glare. I'd pulled my T-shirt off and I was slumped back in the big topside pilot seat, squinting to pick up the familiar markers, steering by means of bare toes braced against a top spoke of the wheel. Swathed against the sun, shadowed by the huge hat, Miss Vangie talked on and on in that creamy contralto, Meyer braced nearby, beaming and nodding, a devoted audience. She lunged back and forth through time, with side trips into obvious fantasy and self-delusion, her mode of speech changing from imitation duchess elegance to clinical crudity. All the basic patterns emerged, the way a design will appear after the etcher has made his ten thousand tiny engravings on the copper plate. Perhaps some social psychologist would have given his chance of an honorary degree to have the whole recital on tape.

It was interesting at the beginning I guess any normal person has curiosity about the inner structure of organized prostitution, the dangers to avoid, the payoffs, the mechanics of solicitation, the ways of extracting extra bounty when they get hold of a live one. But after a time it was repetitious and dull. Too much detail about the furnishings of darling apartments, about the accumulation of darling wardrobes. The life of a sandhog tunneling under a river can be fascinating until you have to listen to a play-by-play of every shovel load of muck. And so when Meyer went below to fix lunch, and she decided she was maybe getting too much sun through reflection off the water and followed him down, the silence was welcome.

In the silence I wanted to sort her out. Her twelve years on the track had coarsened her beyond any hope of salvage. Though I know it is the utmost folly to sentimentalize or romanticize a whore, I could respect a certain toughness of spirit Vangie possessed. She had not howled as she fell to her death. She had not flinched or murmured as we cut the hooks out of her leg. And she had bounced back from the edge of death by violence with remarkable buoyancy. The talking jag seemed the only symptom of how shaken she had been. I could think of few women I had known who could have taken such terror in stride.

I realized I felt proud of her. This reaction was so irrational it startled me. I tracked it down to its obvious source. It was the inevitable sense of ownership. I remember talking all night long to a damned fine surgeon. At one time during the night he spoke of the ones he had hauled back through those big gates when he had no right to expect it could be done. "They become your people," he said. "Your kids. You want the good things for them because they get it on time you gave them. You want them to use life well. When they crap around, wasting what you gave them, you feel forlorn. When they use it well, you feel great. Maybe because it's some kind of a ledger account, and they have to make up for what those others would have done, those ones you lost for no damn good reason."

I knew that the risk I'd taken had been for the sake of putting another hooker back on the tiles. So I had to believe she had enough essential spirit and toughness to be able to make it some other way, and would.

At three-thirty, after Vangie had sacked out, the wind changed, moving in our direction, making it so hot at the topside controls I had Meyer take the wheel while I strung a tarp for shade. Then we sat and talked about our passenger, agreeing that the talking jag was reaction hysteria.

"Also," Meyer said, "she has to level with us. She can't help adding trimmings, but it is essentially true. Maybe she didn't want to tell a pair of civilians about her career. Maybe she wanted to pretend to be something else. But if she'd pretended to be something else, how would that work when we get to Miami? Say she was going back to the model agency? Back to the husband and kiddies? Back to the old secretarial desk? By leveling she's asking for help and advice. How does she get out of the range of the people who'll take another try at her?"

"But without leveling all the way. I had told him about that part of the conversation he hadn't been there to catch.

"Travis, she keeps walking around it, getting a little closer every time. I think she wants to tell us. I think she wants to get it off her chest. Whatever she's been doing for the past two years, it makes her feel guilty. But she has a real dilemma. If she tells us enough so we can tip off the authorities, her girlfriends will suffer right along with the men in the group. Even so, if we stay receptive, I think she'll get around to it, just in the forlorn hope we'll be able to tell her what to do."

"Got any guesses about what she's been doing?" I asked.

Impatiently he said, "You listened to her, just as I did. Blackmail doesn't upset her. Nor does conspiracy, nor theft, nor extortion, nor addiction, nor mayhem. Let's say there aren't too many choices left."

"At least it upset her."

"Yes indeed. After two years, it began to make her edgy."

Tarpon Bay seemed a reasonable halfway point, and after I had moved well off east of the channel, set the big hook in good bottom and killed the engines, she came stretching and yawning up into the sunset light to say that it looked as if we were in a lake, and why were we stopping, was it busted?

I explained that we didn't want to overtax the captain by running all night, so parking was standard operating procedure.

As it was very still and very hot, I got the big auxiliary generator going, and we buttoned up the boat and put the air-conditioning on high. The fading day put an orange-gold light through the starboard windows of the lounge. I briefed her on the music machinery, and after she couldn't find anything she liked among my tapes or records, I put the FM tuner into the circuit and she prowled the band from end to end until she settled for a Hollywood station whanging away at what Meyer terms beetle-bug mating chants. She boosted the bass and put the gain slightly below torture level. My big amplifier fed the rackety-bang into the big wall-mounted Bose stereo speakers, giving us all the resonances and overtones from twenty cycles all the way up to peaks no human ear can detect.

I had let her dig into the broad bin. She had left it open, of course, with a strew of discards on the floor nearby, just as she left any empty glass at the place where she finished it, hung the clothes she took off on the floor, left the bourbon bottle uncapped on the galley countertop, cluttered the head with toiletries, lipsticked the towels, left dark hairs in the basin. Though indifferent to all the spoor she left behind her, she spent all the time she was not talking, eating or sleeping in tidying herself. She put in a fantastic amount of mirror time, and was delighted to find a little kit in the broad bin which gave her the chance to work with great concentration on fingernails and toenails, filing the broken fingernails carefully.

In the most unlikely event she was ever aboard for a longer cruise, I knew I would have to ration the showers she took. She would strain the capacity of even the oversize fresh-water tanks aboard the Flush.

Digging through the broad bin she had come up with short brown shorts in a stretch fabric and a sleeveless orange blouse which she did not button, but had overlapped before tucking it into the shorts so that it fitted her torso very trimly. Barefoot, she danced alone on the lounge carpeting, half of a dark drink in her hand. The dance was mildly derivative of the frog-fish-watusi, moving to a new place, facing in a new direction from time to time.

Meyer and I had dropped the desk panel and we sat on either side of it, playing one of those games of chess where, by cautious pawn play by both of us, the center squares had become intricately clogged as the pressure of the major pieces built up, and each move took lengthy analysis. While he pondered, I watched Vangie. She gave no impression of being on display. Her face was without expression, eyes partially closed. She rolled and twisted her body to the twang-ka-thump music, but in a controlled and moderate way.

I could not tell if she was lost in the music or lost in thought. Nearly everyone over nineteen who tries the modern dances of the young looks so vulgar as to be almost obscene. And I would have expected Evangeline to be no exception. But when she bowed her head, the wings of dark hair swung forward, and in the rhythmic turning of her upper body from side to side, in the roll and swing and cadence of her hips, she achieved that curious quality of innocence the young ones project, wherein body movements that are essentially sexual become merely symbolic sexual references, mild and somehow remote.

I knew she had no awareness of our watching her from time to time. I tried to identify the factors that enabled her to project that special flavor. The brief shorts enhanced the length and grace and elegance of her legs. The way she had overlapped the blouse made it loose across the bosom, blurring her contours. Part of the effect was due to the restraint of her movements. But in large measure it had to be the shape of her in waist, flanks, hips, thighs, buttocks. There was a look of fullness and ripeness, but all of it trimmed by the interwoven musculature under that thin subcutaneous fat layer that makes the softness of woman. There was no loose wobbling, no saddlebag pads of flesh above the hips, no softness of waist, no jounce of inner thigh or sag of belly. There was a tilt of that flatness just below the last knuckles of the spine, that flat place where there are two dimples in healthy flesh, and below that the buttocks swelled into a solid roundness, without droop or flaccidity. Then it was the tightness of the flesh of youth that must give these dances their curiously somber quality, a brooding, inward look to those earthy movements. When the flesh is taut, the dance becomes strangely ceremonial. It is a rite that celebrates the future, and it was eerie to see how accurately it could be imitated by a woman who had left any chance of love so far in the past.

When it was my move, I saw that Meyer had not, as I had expected, begun the disruption of the balance of power in the center squares. He had moved a bishop, bringing more force to bear. As I began to study it, he went away and came back bearing what he calls his tourist disguise, a huge black camera gadget bag. He put it down, bent over it and pawed around and selected a Nikon body and a medium telephoto lens.

He turned the palm of his hand to catch the same light that was on her face, and took a meter reading from his palm. He set speed and aperture, went down onto one knee, focusing with the lens aimed upward toward her. The clack of the reflex mechanism was muffled by the music. He moved to a new angle, caught her again and again, unaware, until she turned in her solitary ritual and saw him and stopped and said, "Oh, come on!"

"Strictly amateur," he called to her over the din of music. "Dead fish, broken sea shells, old stone walls, lovely faces."

"But here's what you want, Meyer, for God's sake," she said. She shook her dark hair back, turned at an angle to him, wet her lips, arched her back, then stood hipshot, head lowered, eyes hooded, lips apart, staring into the lens with stylized lustful invitation.

She struck three such poses and Meyer recorded them dutifully, but I knew he had no interest in that kind of record. When he thanked her and put the camera away, she went over and turned the volume down and said, "I posed for a lot of art model stuff, you probably saw it in girlie magazines, except I haven't done any the last two years. I've got such a good body, the way it photographs, I got pretty good money, but let me tell you it's harder work than you'd think. It worked out pretty good as something to keep some money coming in when we got the word to knock off for a couple of weeks, and another thing, when you tell the fuzz you're a model, and you've got the glossies and the magazines to prove it, they better believe it."

Meyer had returned to the chess game. She left the music turned down, went and built herself a new drink and came back and stared at the board as I made a pawn-takes-pawn move that would force a recapture and open up the middle squares.

"Maybe," she said, "instead of that dumb game you boys could stake me twenty for a start and we could play threeway gin. Quarter of a cent? You'd get my marker for the twenty and I never faulted on a marker in my life, you can believe it."

"Maybe later," Meyer said.

"Excuse me all to hell," Vangie said, turned up the music and went back to her dance, pausing to take her tiny sip of the drink from time to time.

That night I was back in an old dream, asleep on the yellow couch in the lounge, the air-conditioning off, the Flush unbuttoned, a faint coolness of night breeze moving through the screening of the open hatches forward and along the length of her and out the stern ports and doorway.

I always remember after awakening that I have dreamed the same dream many times, but in sleep it is always new. Back in that tumbledown shed on the hillside at night, in the stink of the leg wound that has gone bad, rifle braced on a broken crate, trying to push the illusions of the high fever out of my mind so that I wouldn't get the crazies and imagine they were coming up the slope toward me through the patterns of moonlight, and fire at hallucinations and thus give them the chance to find me and finish it, then wait there and also kill the girl when she came in the morning with the medicines. Then something touched my shoulder and I knew they had sneaked around behind me.

I went in an instant from the dream to the reality of the touch in the darkness of the lounge, made a hard spasmed leap from that prone position that took me over the back of the couch, with, in the moment of takeoff, my right hand snatching the little airweight Bodyguard, hammerless .38 special. I rolled noisily to the wall, and where shadows were deepest, moved swiftly and silently to the light switch near the desk. I could see a shadow moving away from the couch. Squinting in advance to void the dazzle of the lights, I came up into a crouch and hit the switch.

Vangie had been backing away. She stared at me, mouth sagging, eyes squinched against the sudden glare, and stopped there looking at me and at the deadly muzzle of the little short-barreled handgun. I let the nerves and muscles go loose, slipped the weapon temporarily into the desk drawer.

"Salvage business!" she said in a thin enraged tone. "Salvage? For chris sake!"

I yawned. "I didn't mean to startle you. You startled me. There are some people around who don't appreciate me at all."

She was naked, her hair tousled by sleep. She moved back toward the couch, shaking her head. Her nipple areas were exceptionally large, dark, almost a plum red, making the breasts themselves look smaller than they were. Weaving of flat muscles over the curve of hip. Deep and powerful slope of the belly down to a pubic thatch like a patch of gunmetal-colored smoke through which gleamed the pale plump weight of the pudenda framed between the round and solid pallor of the thighs.

She sat on the couch and said, "Geez, my knees are like water. Touch you to wake you up and you blow up like a rocket or something."

I leaned against the desk. "Did you have something on your mind?"

With the automatic exasperation of the person who has been startled she said, "What does it look like I had on my mind anyway? Maybe I came mousing in here in the dark so you could teach me chess, hah?"

She sighed and leaned back slightly, relaxing, sprawled and straddled, putting one hand behind her neck, elbow akimbo. Her body had too specific a look. It seemed too earthily illustrative of function, in the way that some of the larger flower blossoms have such a fleshy look of process one cannot see them from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.

I reached to the nearby chair, picked up my T-shirt and tossed it to her. She caught it and looked at me and said, "You're giving me some kind of a message?" She shrugged. "Well, it wasn't what anybody'd call a great start, buddy." She pulled it on over her head, hitched herself up to snug it under her seat. It came to mid-thigh. She patted her tumbled hair and crossed elegant legs. "What I had in mind, McGee, I couldn't get back to sleep once I woke up, and I had this lousy little impulse, maybe a way of saying hello, or saying thanks. Or a way to make it easier to get back to sleep. What you should know, I wasn't going to peddle it."

I sat astride the desk chair, forearm along the top of the back, chin on my forearm. "I didn't think you were."

She scowled. "But it could get confusing, because I am going to try to hit you for a loan. And you maybe wouldn't understand it would be a loan, really and truly. Two hundred bucks?"

"Okay."

She gave me a little of the expression she had used when posing for Meyer and deepened her voice. "So there's two good reasons to say thanks, Trav."

"Saying it is enough, Vangie."

She studied me. "Listen, I know that there are a lot of guys who get chilled off if they know a girl's been a hooker. But I wasn't going to try to pay you back with some kind of faked-up trick, Trav, honest. I'd want to make out for real, and that's something I've never peddled except sometimes by accident practically. Maybe it wouldn't be the greatest blast in the world, but you won't forget it in a hurry, and you can believe it."

"Vangie, stop putting me on the spot, will you? You're all girl, and I'm not a prude, and I appreciate the gesture, but you are not in my debt and.

"And thanks but no thanks? Sure." She yawned. "No hard feelings, Trav. I guess all these things, they depend on what you're used to. For some little spook working behind a big desk the last twenty years, he'd think I was coming on with the greatest thing since the wheel, but I guess a man who looks like you and has a boat like this can score just about whenever and wherever he gets the wants." She got up, winked at me, sauntered over to the table and lighted a cigarette, shook the match out. "We're still friends, Mister. Maybe... I don't know... better friends this way. Funny to have a man friend. Men are either trade or they're in for a cut of the gross. You and Meyer. Funny, crazy bastards. I get the feeling... oh; skip it."

"What feeling?"

She came closer, stood in front of my chair. "It's silly. A feeling that you two like me. I was in that big bed thinking bout that. You know all the garbage about me I told you. and you're still nice." Abruptly her amber eyes filled with tears. Her mouth twisted and she turned and walked away, keeping her back to me.

In a harsh half-whisper she said, "What I've been mixed up in, it's a lot better all around if you weren't parked under that bridge. And if they find me again, maybe that isn't such a bad thing either. Awake in there I was thinking there's no way you can stop being what you are. There's no way to hide from what you know. And having anybody like me makes it tougher. Before I came creeping in here in the dark, I was getting screwy ideas, like paying off the world by going to work at a leper place if they still have them anymore these days. Miracle drugs, they probably got them all over and it's too late."

I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder and turned her around. She kept her eyes downcast. "We like you even if you don't do dishes, Vangie. And we'd like to help you if we knew more about it."

For a little while I thought she would talk. She sighed and turned away. "Oh, hell, Travis, it isn't so much finking out as keeping you guys from knowing how lousy I really am."

She braced up and assayed a crooked smile and said, "A year from now I'll have forgotten the whole thing. I've had good practice forgetting stuff. Say, you think I ought to pay a little call on Meyer?"

"I think it would work out just about the same way."

"So do I. Anyway, I think I can sleep now." With a swift and sisterly kiss on my cheek, she left the lounge. I turned the light out and settled down again, the weapon back under the pillow where it belonged. I'd felt no slightest itch of desire for her, and knew why. It had been a white lie. I was a prude, in my own fashion. I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped tightly upon her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.

I could not want her on any terms. But I could like her. And wish her well.

The next day, after beginning it with considerable good cheer, Vangie became more subdued and restless as we chugged north up the length of Biscayne Bay.

When she came up in mid afternoon to sit beside me at the topside controls, I asked her if she had decided what she'd do.

"Get off this thing after dark, Trav. God, just one clown has to see me and happen to mention to the wrong party that he saw Vangie. Then they start looking. I don't know if I could sit still for it again. I think I used up any guts I had, and if they get me, I'd scream myself crazy. The smart thing to do is use the two hundred for a long bus ride, and go back to blonde, then work waitress or something until I find the right contacts so I can go back on the track. That's what I should do."

"But?"

"So there's something fishy about this salvage business, Trav. About you and this boat, and about that gun bit last night. And when you hauled me out of the ocean, you had no idea of calling the cops, and you kept your mouth shut. I don't know what you are. I know you're not cheap muscle. You could be legit, even. But you know your way around, and you seem cool and smart and foxy."

Meyer appeared and said, "Private discussion?"

"No, honey. Stick around. I'm about to proposition your buddy here. In my whole life I never saved a dime. In the last two years I've stashed maybe thirty-two thousand in cash. It's what you could call dirty money maybe, but nobody can say I didn't earn every dime of it, and it's a very little bit of a cut of the whole take. I hid it in a pretty good place. I'll tell you this much. I was partnered with a fellow named Griff. He's as tough and quick and solid as you want to find. Right now he believes I'm gone for keeps. He knows I've been squirreling it away, but he doesn't know where or how much. I know for sure that by now he's probably cleaned out my place, my clothes and furs and jewelry and luggage and color TV and my darling little car, and he'll be cashing that stuff in as fast as he can. And I think he'll have just about torn my apartment to bits trying to find the money. But it's in a good place, really, and if my luck is any good, he hasn't found it. With that money I could really make a run for it, with a lot better chance of staying in the clear. But if Griff hasn't found it, he'll be keeping an eye on my place for somebody to come after it, because how could he know I hadn't told somebody? Anyway, I think I can get a guy to help me just enough so I can get in and out, a bartender I think I can trust, a fellow who's had the hots for me real bad for a long time. Anyway, at least I ought to be able to get close enough to find out if it's too risky for me to try."

"Then what?" I asked.

"Then I come back and hide on this boat and I tell you where it is and you go get it for me, Trav. And you keep a piece of it."

"You wondered if I was legitimate. To this extent, Vangie, that I couldn't go liberate money that belongs to somebody else and turn it over to you."

"Somebody else!" She pulled the dark glasses off and looked directly into my eyes. That dark amber was as merciless as the eyes of the big predator cats, and as empty, and as hungry. "Dead ones, Charlie," she said. "You want to rent an accountant and divide it up and go stuffing it into the graves? You want to worry yourself, think about all the dead ones to come. Me leaving isn't going to stop a thing. They break in another girl. Listen, it's a tiny piece of the whole deal, and it's mine!"

I glanced at Meyer and saw that it had shaken him as much or more than it had shaken me.

"Ten thousand for you," she said. "How about it?"

"The standard fee is half. If I recover it, which means if I even try. That's something we'll talk over when you come back."

"If I have to come back. If I can't get in and out with it alone. Half is one hell of a cut, McGee."

"And half of nothing is still nothing at all."

"My dear," Meyer said, "if things should go wrong for you, wouldn't you feel better if you had written it all out and put it in a sealed envelope and left it in my care?"

She reached and touched his cheek. "You are the nicest, Meyer. So nice you'd have to blow the whole bit, and it would mess up my girlfriends and keep the law looking for me forever. If I get my hands on that money, I want to stay dead, thank you."

"Knowing that your... friends are still murdering for profit?"

"People are dying all over the place for all kinds of reasons, Meyer, and if I'm out of this one, it couldn't bother me less."

Well after dark, wearing the black slacks, white blouse, dark glasses, and white kerchief around her hair, and carrying my two hundred in the pocket of the slacks, she went down the stern gangplank, gave me a quick wave and walked off into the night. Meyer had moved back aboard his own boat. I drifted after Vangie and memorized the plate of the cab she got into, went back and wrote it down, buttoned up the Flush, picked up Meyer and went off to eat Chinese. When we got back, we went below and he hunched over his little portable typewriter and composed a summary as follows:

For the past two years Miss Bellemer, a hardened prostitute twenty-six years of age, has been operating in this area with a group of accomplices in some manner more profitable and more dangerous than common prostitution. Three women were involved. It can be assumed the other two are of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer. She called one of them DeeDee Bea, spelling uncertain. There was a strong impression that the operating unit for each venture was a team of two, one woman and one man. For a time she worked with a man named Frankie. More recently her partner has been one Griff. No names of other associates are available as yet.

Logic tells us that the operation was some variation of a confidence game, its success dependent on the allure of the women in the ring. Miss Bellemer admitted in an indirect fashion she had felt sorry for one of the victims, had in fact warned him, even though she knew she was placing herself in grave danger thereby. Apparently, despite her warning, the victim was disposed of. Because Miss Bellemer was sentenced to death by her associates for this lapse, we can assume that the victims of their operations have been disposed of through murder.

There is a strong hint of some persons in a position of authority over these three operating units of one man and one woman each. For the time being, we shall assume there are two, hot headed males, and that one of them was the driver of the car that took Miss Bellemer to the place where she was supposedly drowned.

A check of the cab company owning the vehicle in which Miss Bellemer left this area proved that she asked to be driven to Broward Beach. This matches the labels in the garments she was wearing when rescued from the water. One may assume that she and the man called Griff have been living in the same quarters or adjoining quarters in the Broward Beach area. She left with the hope of enlisting an unnamed bartender, very possibly also of that area, in recovering some $32,000, which she had saved out of her cut of the operation during the past two years. It is possible she intended to trick the bartender into luring Griff away from their quarters long enough for her to retrieve the money she had hidden away and make her escape undetected.

Observations and assumptions of possible pertinence:

1. Miss Bellemer exhibited certain histrionic talents which could presumably be useful in a confidence game. 2. A series of multiple murders can be successful only if the victims have neither friends nor family anxious to conduct an intensive search. 3. This area is a place where lonely and well-to-do men in their middle years come to begin a new life. 4. In casual conversation with Meyer, Miss Bellemer displayed an intensive knowledge of the shopping conditions in the various islands of the Caribbean, from Curacao to Grand Bahama, which might well have been acquired through frequent cruises, then abruptly changed the subject. 5. Disposal of bodies at sea would constitute no problem provided the passenger in question was not known to be missing, but this would seem a curious and difficult situation to arrange. 6. Callous as it may seem, it is not difficult to imagine several people of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer carrying out murder after murder, provided some way had been found to reduce the risk. 7. The operation is continuing and is sufficiently profitable to warrant the swift and merciless execution of anyone who might possibly endanger it. 8. As an estimate of the size of the operation, assuming Miss Bellemer's savings were fifty per cent of her percentage, and that she received twenty-five per cent of the take on each individual operation, we can extrapolate somewhere around $400,000 gross for the three couples during the two-year period. It is more likely she saved but twenty-five per cent, which would indicate a probable total gross of three quarters of a million dollars.

"Meyer," I said, "you have a curious mind."

"And," he said comfortably, "some excellent pictures of the bitch."

"And you forgot that she started to call the driver of that convertible something. Ma.... As in the beginning of Mack, Manny, Manuel and so forth."

"Forgot that. Another thing I meant to put in. She said she and Griff had to lie low when they got back from an operation. Makes the cruise more of a likely idea."

"And another item. A guess. They'll have to recruit and train a new girl to work with Griff."

We had gotten right up to the point of asking the question. It was almost a tangible thing, something that lay puddled on the cockpit deck between our chairs, streaming and stinking in the warm night. I had been saving my tobacco ration, my single evening pipe. I tugged the pouch out of the side pocket of my slacks, unzipped the pipe compartment, took out the Charatan sent me long ago by a lovely and grateful client with superb taste. The shape is Bell Dublin. It is a straight grain of Coronation quality. Before sending it to me from London she had some small silver numbers inlaid in the heavy part of the bit. 724. The twenty-fourth night of a memorable July, a little code which, if her husband Sir Thomas could interpret it, would bring him in search of McGee, complete with horsewhip and incipient apoplexy.

I packed it carefully with carrinmore Flake. Whenever, in the rotation of my small assortment, I work my way around to the Charatan, though it is an excellent pipe to smoke, I feel somewhat pretentious and effete. I can never completely overcome my middle-class reservations sufficiently to take a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pipe for granted.

I keep kitchen matches and cleaners in the pipe compartment of the pouch. I lit it. The pulsing flame illuminated my face.

An angular girl-shape walking along the dock stopped and said, "Hey, Trav. Hey, Meyer."

"How you, Sandy?"

"Oh, just fine. Didn't know you got back."

"Tied up about dark. What's new?"

"Babs made it. Twins like the doe said it would be. Twin boys. Day before yesterday. And Barney was out on a half-day charter last week, Thursday I think, fifteen miles southeast, and a waterspout ran right over him, over the transom and off over the bow and swung around and nearly got him again. Didn't hurt anybody. Tore the outriggers off, turned his aerial into a pretzel, lifted up all the loose gear and took away. You got to hear him tell about it; honest to God, it's the funniest thing I ever heard. I'm looking for Lew. You seen him?"

"No, we haven't."

"I was just checking to see if maybe he was having a drink with the Tiger. You see him, please tell him I'm home and that doctor phoned from Orlando and wants to start that three-day charter tomorrow noon, a party of three."

She walked away into the night. We heard discordances music, night laughter, and somebody firing his fifty-six shooter on television. Meyer went below and returned with 2 cold brews, sat down with a heavy sigh and said, "What it is, of course, is a question of involvement."

"Keep talking. I know how I'm going to vote."

"I wrote that all out to organize it in my mind. She's not aware of how much she told us. Maybe it's enough, maybe not. That's more in your line. You'd know the next step. I don't. That is, if anybody takes that step. Question. Should a reasonable man, knowing what we know, and guessing what we have guessed, involve himself? Going down after the girl into that water was a clear-cut problem, and your response was instinctive. What we are talking about, I suppose, is the lives of a bunch of men we've never seen, men walking around. Thirty people watch a girl get knifed. A man lies dying of a coronary on a New York sidewalk, with the pedestrian traffic parting to move around him, like a stream moving around a boulder."

"And," I said, "you have this button and if you push it you get ten grand and ten thousand Chinamen die. And if a man is dumb enough to get himself mousetrapped"

"And if a tree falls in the desert and there is nobody to hear it, does it actually make any sound?"

"Meyer, I've changed my mind. I was going to vote no. I am not going to vote yes. I am just going to think about that no until this time tomorrow. I have nice green stuff in my lockbox, enough so it will be next Christmas before I have to think of beginning to look around for somebody who needs somebody to handle a little problem. But."

"Yes indeed. But."

"Aren't you the one who says that's a dangerous word?"

He ignored the question.

"Our Vangie, case-hardened though she is, got herself involved in something that dismayed her, and her revulsion built until she finally tried to pull down the whole structure. The impulse that made her do it was essentially suicidal. Consider her totally antisocial attitude prior to the past two years, Travis. To her mind, the world was corrupt and indifferent. As a child whore she knew the only imperative was to survive. She probably took some kind of hard pride in thinking herself capable of anything. She tried to tell herself that murder for profit was fine, if you could get away with it. But, over two years, actually being a part of such a thing eroded her false image of herself. And there, my friend, I think we have the reason for all the talk. Woman in search of herself. Trying to explain herself to herself-in front of witnesses. She had been a stoic about being dropped off the bridge because she had a guilt that required punishment. And even while she kept saying she wouldn't tell us anything about the past two years, the little bits kept coming into her monologues. Names. Terry, Griff, DeeDee. Hints and allusions. It was a two-day confessional, Travis. And

I got up quickly. I forgot the lack of headroom aboard the John Maynard Keynes. I whammed my head into the overhead solidly enough to tip the world on edge and flood my eyes with tears. Meyer stared at me in astonishment.

When I could speak I said, "Leave us not have so much effing celebration about the bitch. Okay?"

"What's wrong with you these two days, Travis?"

"Wrong? How?"

"Sit down. You can't straighten up in here anyway. You haven't been the life of the party boat, boy. Rigid, tense, remote."

I sat, fingered the knot on the top of my head. "I ran a ten-day clinical service."

"It wasn't that, because you were peaking very nicely when I came down to fish. Now suddenly this explosion of irritation."

"I got tired of talking about the bitch."

I was glowering at him. Suddenly the Meyer smile began and widened. You can't stay irritated with Meyer. He nodded and chuckled.

"I should have figured it out sooner," he said. "Tell me, O wise man."

"A dedicated archaeologist, at enormous risk to himself, descends into a cavern and comes up with a lovely figurine. He is an expert. He cherishes the form of ancient art. This one is rare and beautiful. His romantic heart bubbles over. Then he turns it over and looks at the base and there is the curious inscription: 'Made in Scranton, Pennsylvania." So it has no value. Cheap goods. But it is so damnably lovely the poor archaeologist sits and looks at it and broods over what might have been."

"Very funny."

"And a little sad, boy. You like women as people. You do not think of them as objects placed here by a benign providence for your use and pleasure, so in that sense you are not a womanizer. But you cherish the meaningful romantic charade. Friend, you have been sulking. You have had your nose flattened against the candy-store window, even though you knew all the candy in there was made of putty, and if you broke in and gobbled, it would make you deathly ill. Perhaps, five years ago, you would have made the ghastly mistake of trying to transform the bitch with the power of love, because she is decorative, spirited, shrewd in her fashion. You are wise enough to know she is ease-hardened beyond redemption, but it has still made you wistful and sulky and depressed."

I pondered the diagnosis. Then I threw my head back and laughed at myself. Valiant knight trapped on a merry-goround, scowling and trying for the brass ring with the tip of the rusty lance, knowing that if he got it, all he'd get would be another ride to noplace.

"Welcome back," Meyer said. "What's the program?"

"Wait and see if she comes back for help. If she does, we play it by ear, with the idea of conning her into giving us the whole package and letting us line up a lawyer who can drive a good bargain with the law so she takes the smallest beating possible. If she doesn't come back, then we go find the rest of the pieces ourselves and bust the operation wide open and let the law pick up the stragglers."

"We?"

"You're involved, Meyer. I can use that orderly Brain."

"All my effing celebration?"

"To balance the McGee habit of bulling my way in and breaking the dishes. And if we come out of it with a little meat, we share."

At five o'clock the following evening, I waited on a bench in the hallway of the Broward Beach police station for ten minutes until a Detective-Sergeant Kibber, a middle-aged man with a tenant-farmer face, wearing brown slacks and a shiny blue sports shirt hanging outside the slacks, came and sat down beside me and asked me my name, address and occupation. I showed him my Florida driver's license. In the blank for occupation is typed Salvage Consultant.

"Who do you think she is, Mr. McGee?"

"It's just a hunch. I had a date in Lauderdale last night with a girl named Marie Bowen. A first date. She didn't show. And... well, hell, Sergeant, I can't remember the last time anybody stood me up. I was going to meet her at a bar. She never showed up."

"Know her address?"

"I expected to find out what it was last night. We'd been in the same party one other time, and I remember her saying she had friends up here, or a family or something. So when the description of the hit-and-run, and how it was a girl maybe her age and hair color, came over the radio, and it said you didn't have an identification, I thought I could.. find out for sure."

"We still haven't made her, but we got the car about noon. Somebody stuck it in an empty lot, residential area. It was clouted off a shopping-center lot sometime before eleven last night. The guy who owned it was in the movies there with his wife. This year's Olds. It figures to be kids. We're getting more of that than we should. It was wiped clean. The stupidest kid knows enough for that. When they clout a car it's a pack of them, and one will open up. A thing like this, a kid can't handle it too long."

He turned to an empty page in his pocket notebook, wrote, tore it out, handed it to rue. "You take this over to City Memorial, give it to the fellow there that's on duty in the morgue. Six blocks west from here. If it's this Marie Bowen, you phone me from there, otherwise, thanks for the effort. And if it is or it isn't, it still won't be any fun taking a look."

I looked at the note on the way out. It gave me a strange jolt. "Give bearer a look at the Jane Doe. Kibber."

The Gray Lady at the visitor's desk directed me to the right corridor. The down stairway was at the end. Basements are a rarity in Florida. It was all linoleum and battleship gray. A colorless young man sat at a steel table under a hanging lamp reading a tattered Playboy. He took the note, crumpled it and dropped it into a wastebasket, got up and led me to a heavy door, pushed it open, turned on the inside lights. It was a small chilly room with lots of pipes and duets suspended from the ceiling. They had a filing system I had never seen before. They were modular installations, looking like heavy office filing equipment. The doors were gray steel, about six and a half feet long, horizontal, and eighteen inches or so high. Each storage case was four bodies high. They had three of them. I saw that a small ruby light glowed on the edge of the case next to an off-on toggle switch on five of the drawers, the two middle ones in two of the four-high units, and one of the middle ones in the third. They were the ones at the handiest height.

He took hold of the handle on one of the doors, lifted it and slid it back into a slot above the body compartment. He pulled the shelf which held the body outward. It rolled easily on its bearings. It clicked to a stop at the limit of its transit, and a bright built-in lighting system came on automatically. All the light was focused on the cotton sheet covering the body. I felt against my face a stir of air colder than that in the small room.

He reached and took the sheet and slowly turned it down. He turned it all the way down to her waist, and moved just a little bit to the side.

I imagine they had left the eye open to aid identification. The other side of her head and the other side of her face could be identified as probably being of human origin. From the waist down it was not a woman-shape under the sheet, just a lumpiness like a bed carelessly made up to resemble someone sleeping there, and the shoulder on the bad side of her was pushed in in a curious and sickening way.

I looked at that eye. An eye which has dried has an oddly dusty look. Like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl. It was the color I knew it would be. Darker than amber. With green flecks near the pupil.

I looked at the young man. He was standing there, staring at her breasts which he had so unnecessarily uncovered, his underlip hanging away from his teeth.

"You!"

He gave a little start "Uh... can you give us an I.D.?"

"Sorry, no.

He covered her up. As he started the drawer back in, the lights went off. He pulled the door out and swung it down and clicked it in place. As we headed back out I said, "Why don't you go get yourself a live one?"

"Huh?" He turned the room light out, pulled the door shut. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sure, buddy, if I could find one of those. Even that messed up you can tell it was built like it wouldn't never quit. About the only thing didn't get mashed was the tits, but you can tell it had everything to go with them. A stack, buddy." He sat down, winked, picked up his Playboy and said, "See you around."

It had happened a few minutes after midnight on a downtown street. The proprietor of the corner magazine store was a real expert, the kind who raises his voice to let everybody within fifty feet enjoy the analysis.

"Nighttime, friend, this street is dead, everything closed, but you know this town, it's a real fast north-south street, hardly any lights, and all stop streets coming in. I opened up real early, and this morning before I opened up, friend, I went and took me a good look and figured it out. Now those kids were going like hell, no getting around that. So right in the middle of this block that woman, more than likely a little drunk, she comes tottering right out in front of them. At that speed, the kid driving didn't have a prayer of stopping. So what is the logical thing for him to do? What would you or I do, friend? What we would do is swerve toward the curb and cut around behind her. Right? So she sees those headlights coming like hell, and instead of keeping going, and she would have been okay if she had, she spins around and tries to get back where she came from. Pow! So he was going full speed, and where he caught her was about two feet from the curb, caught her with the right side of the front of that stolen car. There were still some little bits of glass sprinkled around there at the point of impact, and the places where the cops put sand or something on the blood. I paced it off, and that poor woman went thirty feet through the air, and they hosed it clean later, but this morning you could see where she hit the front of the Exchange Building just below a second-story window, and she bounced off of the stone front, a glancing blow like, and she landed dead in the middle of the sidewalk another fifteen feet further on, so all told it was forty-five feet from where she got hit to where she came to rest, and friend, you can bet your bottom dollar that poor woman didn't feel a thing. Once you figure it out logical, you can see why there aren't any skid marks at all, and anybody in that car feeling the thud of how hard she got hit, they'd know there was no point in trying to find out how bad she was hurt. One time five or six years ago I was night-driving over across the state, heading west about ten miles this side of Arcadia on State Road Seventy, straight as a string, no traffic, going about seventy, and a doe came running out of no place and I hit her dead square on, must have knocked her twenty feet into the air. Took out my headlights, smashed the grill and the radiator and buckled the hood up. I fought that car in the dark and got it stopped without rolling it, way off next to a range fence maybe fifty feet off the road, lucky to be alive. I tell you, that's a real sickening sound, that thud when you hit a living thing. But neither my doe or that woman knew what hit them."

I could imagine Vangie had known what was going to hit her. I could guess she might have even ridden in the car they killed her with. And she had stood there in the shadows, waiting for it to go around several blocks after they let her out, her and the man who stood behind her, big hands clamped on her elbows. Two or three blocks perhaps, to get up the speed to make it absolutely certain, then she'd see the headlights coming fast, maybe with some blinking to make identification certain, and then she'd feel the grasp tighten, and she would try to brace her feet, but the brutal shove would send her floundering out, while the man who held her dodged swiftly back to avoid being spattered, then walked swiftly to the corner, walked another half block, got into his own car and drove sedately away. I wondered if this time Vangie had broken, if she had begged and blubbered and wet her pants and had to be held upright to be shoved out into the path of the juggernaut.

I had the strange conviction somebody was going to tell me all about it some day. Unwillingly.

So here we go again, noble brave name Key-Hoc-Tee? Wasn't the world maybe just a little bit better off minus one slut? Did it grab you that much, boy, to have that seasoned meat offered to you on a platter? Did it squinch your sentimental Irish heart to see the lassie roll her lonely hips in the solitary dance? How can you know the whole thing wasn't all lies, that she didn't try to cross up her fellow assassins and grab all the loot for herself and that's why she got dropped off a bridge? How do you know the whole scheme, whatever it is, isn't something she cooked up all by herself?

Maybe, for me, the only true knowing of her was down there in the black press of the outgoing tide, my fingers wrapped in her hair, feeling the frail questioning grasp of the girl-hands on my wrist, then feeling the girl-shapes of her as I pulled myself down her body to the wired ankles. All right. So that was it, the awareness of the life down there, going out of her quickly, the desperation and the stubborn wire and the haste. It was a difficult thing to do. You feel good to do a thing like that. And then when they take what you saved and see how high they can splash it against a stone building, you get annoyed.

Okay, hero. Tip the cops. It's their job.

But there is thirty-two thousand floating around somewhere. It needs a new home. And you've invested two hundred already.

It was quarter to ten that night before Meyer rang my bell and came aboard. He handed me a big manila envelope and said, "It took a goodly amount of sweet talk. Homer's wife expected to be taken to the movies. The last thing she wanted was some old camera club churn to show up with a problem. As a photographer, Homer is curiously limited. He takes macro-photographs of wild flowers of the southeast. He has thousands. But he has a very sure touch in that darkroom."

I pulled the pictures out. There was the big one, and I looked at that first. It was black and white, on semigloss paper without borders, a vertical shot, about eleven by fourteen, a closeup so extreme her features were larger than life size. It caught just the area from above her eyebrows to just below her chin, in quarter profile half turned toward the lens. You could not, of course, tell that she was dancing. She was looking down, the wing of dark hair nearest the lens swinging forward, covering part of her cheek. Her eyes were half closed. It had a luminous loveliness, the way the light lay across her face, the delicacy of it, a slight softness of focus, a look of dreaming. The angle somehow emphasized the oriental look of her. I looked at it a long time.

"This is a dandy, Meyer."

"Better than I could have hoped. That is about thirty percent of the frame. Sooner or later that one will win me a small piece of change. You might enjoy the title I've decided to give it. 'The Island Bride.'"

I thought of what a stone wall and a cement sidewalk had done to most of that face and put it aside and looked at the others. There were four enlargements, all five by seven, glossy, in sharp focus. They were the four shots he had taken when she had begun posing.

"Those seemed best for your purposes, Trav."

"They are. And the ones that will fit in my wallet?"

"In the glassine envelope there. Exactly the same four as the five-by-sevens."

"Got them. Good."

"Trav, don't you think I could be some kind of help in this

"Maybe later. If I find more to go on. I'm going to find a place up there to hole up. When I'm ready for you, I'll call you."

"I Don't... get careless."

"Nobody could get a good look at her and get careless."

I saw that it was a few minutes past ten. I reached and switched the little Jap television to the unaffiliated channel that gives local news at that hour. A youth with many tricks with the eyebrows barked world affairs at us. He's the one that pronounces it Veet Nee-yarn.

Soon he got around to our girl. "Earlier this evening the Broward Beach police made a positive identification of the mystery woman in last night's hit-and-run fatality. Word came back that her fingerprints are definitely those of Miss Evangeline Bellemer, age twenty-six or twenty-seven. The last address on file for her was a Jacksonville address. They do not know yet if she was living in this area. She had a record of several arrests for soliciting, public prostitution, indecent exposure, extortion and attempted extortion. Police are conducting an intensive hunt for the driver of the stolen car, and expect to make an arrest very soon, according to informed sources."

I clicked the fellow off. "From what she said," Meyer said, "I thought she was given better protection than that."

"Check it out and you'll find some convictions, but I doubt you'll find any time served. It's the standard deal, Meyer. The cops who are on the take have to bring a few of them in now and then, when they're sure of who'll be on the bench. The gals take turns, plead guilty, pay the fine and draw a suspended sentence. The law looks good, and from the viewpoint of the people operating the vice business, a girl who has a record is easier to keep in line."

"Sometimes, McGee, you make me feel naive."

"Stay as sweet as you are. Time for one game?"

"If you promise if you get white not to open with that infuriating queen's gambit." South of the city of Broward Beach, along A1A, is where the action is. The junk motels, bristling with neon, squat on the littered sand, spaced along the beach areas, interspersed with package stores, cocktail lounges, juice stands, auction parlors, laundromats, hair stylists, pizza drive-ins, discount houses, shell factories, real-estate offices, tackle stores, sundries stores, little twenty-four-hour supermarkets, bowling alleys and faith healers. The sprawl continues down through the continuous satellite communities of Silvermoor, Quendon Beach, Faraway and Calypso Bay.

I had left my venerable Rolls Royce tethered in her stall.

It was no occasion for anything as conspicuous as the electric blue of old Miss Agnes, who, during her darkest hour, had been converted by some maniac into a pickup truck. I cruised in my inconspicuous rental Ford and decided upon a motel called the Bimini Plaza. I did not know if it was in Silvermoor or Quendon Beach, nor could I think of any reason why I should care. It merely looked a little richer than the others, and had, according to its sign, three pools, three bars and inimitable food. It also had a bad ease of vacancy, a June problem that usually mends itself in July. I took their best, a large room at the ocean end of one of the three parallel wings. I had a salt-crusted picture window facing seaward, and a cleaner one facing the pool area in the inner court. I had two double beds, two weights of traverse draperies, a glassed shower stall, a large tub, a bidet, an icecube maker, polar air-conditioning, remote controls for the color television set, and an ankle-deep lavender rug. For nine bucks, single.

The place was abundantly mirrored. There was a long one over the multi-level countertop which extended the length of the bedroom wall opposite the double beds, and one set into each of the sliding doors of the clothes closet, and one set into each side of the bathroom door. The bathroom wall above its counter top was all mirror, as was a smaller wall area in the bedroom, in the alcove where the dressing table stood.

In resort architecture this technique, which might be Early Hefner, or Bunny Quatorze, is supposed to attract the wingers and swingers, the ones who beef up the bar gross, and who presumably have the disease of Narcissus to such an extent they get half their boots out of watching themselves. The flaw is the concept that all the transient trade will be pretty people. Absolutely no business of the kind where the total combined weight they could well afford to lose would add up to about the total weight of one of the little lollipops the mirrorhangers had in mind.

As I walked back and forth, stowing the necessaries I had brought along, I kept seeing unexpected reflections of myself out of the corner of my eye, a brown slab of meat piled higher than is customary, the stride a loose-jointed shamble -knuckly scarified McGee-san, hoping that all dragons which need slaying will be the size of cocker spaniels, with their teeth and claws worn down from chawing bolder knights, their fiery halitosis fresh out of flints and fluid. In the silence of the room, in the manufactured coolness, mirrors populated the space with too many McGees, and I tried to dredge up a buried memory, and finally brought it into the light. Six days and six nights in a suite in Las Vegas as abundantly mirrored as this one, with that overly emotional heiress who had made the ghastly mistake of not only marrying a Seattle cop but giving him a power of attorney. The power of attorney was due to expire in six days, and he had laid out a very substantial sum to have her killed before the six days were up.

When we first holed up there, we had been almost right for each other, both in and out of bed. But the mirrors and the enforced togetherness kept pushing us further and further apart. She thought that all her tragic and humorless tantrums were a sign of emotional depths beyond my ability to comprehend. My gallows humor offended her. She felt any humor, any light touch, any mild clowning was an offensive indication of the trivial mind. Toward the end, the mirrors somehow turned us into a lonely crowd, a platoon of tragic CLArabelles and a squad of smirking McGees, crossing and crisscrossing the multiple mirrored images of each other like a flock of strangers roaming around a bus station. After the bounty on her pretty head ran out, and she paid me off, it was an indication of how enforced intimacy can cool things off to have her, at the airport, give me the same finishing-school handshake and remote glance and fleeting smile she would give an acquaintance whose name she could not quite remember.

I registered my appreciation of Vangie's playmates by deciding to carry the airweight Bodyguard at all times. It goes into the side pocket of the pants, the right-hand pocket. The spring-pop holster is fastened into the pocket. It was made to my order by a talented Cuban. Slide the open hand into the pocket, press just so, and the gun jumps solidly into the hand. It makes no bulge. There is nothing to catch on the fabric. Florida has handgun rules as curious as anywhere else. I own one acre of scrub land in one of the pork-chop counties in north central Florida. Taxes come to $4.11 a year. The obliging sheriff renews my permit every three years. In Florida you can keep a gun iIi your ear, your home or on your boat with no permit. You can carry it on your person or your own land with no permit. In certain areas you can carry it anywhere if it is openly and prominently displayed. But they do not like it tucked out of sight.

I can never tote it around, aware of the meager weight of it against my right thigh, without feeling a little twinge of theatrical jackassery. Carrying a gun, especially a very utilitarian one, has the bully-boy flavor of the ersatz male, the fellow with such a hollow sense of inadequacy he has to holster his sexual ego with a more specific symbol of gonadal prowess. Except for those whose job it is to kill folks, having to use a gun is the end product of stupid procedure. It is a handy way of correcting mistakes, so the only time to carry it is when you head into an area where a lack of information compounds the possibility of the inadvertent mistake.

I put the five-by-seven shots of Vangie under the patterned paper lining the shallow desk drawer. The wallet-sized shots were in the wallet. I had used the sample of her handwriting from her score-keeping chore during a three-way gin game, and had written across the most blatantly invitational of the four poses-"All my love from your Vangie." Green ink. Childlike backhand. Circle instead of a dot over the i in Vangie.

Time to begin. I looked out my side windows at the pool. Five little kids splashing around in the roped-off shallows. I could not hear their shouts. I could not hear the shrillness of one of the red-brown young mothers who stood on the pool apron, shiny with sun oil, bulging her semi-bikini, her face twisted to ugliness as she yelled threats at the kids. The other young mother was supine on a sun pad.

The strange fragments of reality make patterns in your head sometimes. They form a collage that is static for a few moments, giving you the feeling that you are on the edge of some perception that might make all the rest of it a little more meaningful. The elements of this design were Vangie's dry amber eye, the yelping children at play, the barely perceptible weight of the gun, the slack underlip of the morgue attendant, and the adornment of the thickening body of the young vacationing matron in such a brief snugness of fabric that there would almost inevitably be another towhead added to her brood.

Very probably all perceptions are secondhand. The titled lady who had gifted me with the very ex pensive pipe had gifted me with something else also. When she insisted I read the poetry of W. H. Auden, I thought she was out of her mind. When I finally humored her, I found that it was not anything like what I had expected. And now this composite scene brought up from memory one of Auden's irreverent perceptions:

As the poets have mournfully sung, Death takes the innocent young, The rolling-in-money, The screamingly-funny, And those who are very well hung.

I found The Doll House on Sea Crescent Circle in Broward Beach. It was in a rich row of expensive shops. I parked on the circle and walked into the shop. It was cool, hushed, shadowy, smelling of fabrics and scents. Prism spots highlighted the display areas. As I walked in I broke the beam of an electric eye. A bell bonged somewhere. A girl came walking out of the shadows at the rear of the place, through the patterns of light.

She was dark, slender and pretty, and the front of her dark blue maternity smock was unmistakably bulged.

It was not yet noon. "Good morning, sir. May I help you?"

I knew that her quick glance had appraised the clothes I had selected to give the specific impression I sought to convey casual and confident money, the kind that arrives on its own ketch or motor sailer. Boat shoes, khaki slacks, a dark green silk sports shirt, a very small edge of pale yellow ascot showing at the throat, a white denim jacket with wooden buttons, over the arm. I am considerably more plausible as a construction worker or a linebacker, but I have, over the years, developed the talent shared by bit-part actors and con men of giving a reasonable imitation of whoever is supposed to be wearing the garments. What I was wearing required amiable evasions, social pleasantries, and the air of being able to buy that part of town if a group of devoted people in the background recommended it.

I smiled into her eyes and said, "Nice. Very nice. The Doll House complete with doll."

The twinkle took precedence over the attentive politeness. "In the seventh month, that's good for the morale."

"Should you be working? Or are you the owner?"

"I'm hired help. The owner is Miss Gates. And it's good for me to keep working, thank you. This one is the sixth."

"And the little note of pride is well earned. I figured you for a child bride."

"I'll treasure that too. You're improving my day. Are you looking for a gift?"

"No. As a matter of fact I've got a fairly strange problem. And maybe I'm wasting my time, but I have a little extra time."

"You're not alone."

"I've got the problem because I have a terrible memory for names. I tied up down at the city pier over a year ago. I had a friend who lived here then. He's moved away. He rounded up a batch of people and we had drinks aboard, and it turned into a long loud evening. There was one girl in the group I thought I'd like to see again some day. She had a date that night. But... you know how it goes, she found a chance to let me know she'd be happy to have me give her a ring next time through. She gave me a picture of herself. Some kind of publicity shot, I guess. I threw it into a drawer aboard the boat. This morning it took me about a half hour to locate it. Her name is gone completely. I tried to think of some kind of a clue, and all I could remember was overhearing her talk to my date about her favorite place to buy clothes in Broward Beach. The Doll House. So I thought I'd take the outside chance. Maybe you people know her name."

I took out the small picture, one without inscription, and handed it to her, and followed her slowly as she took it over under one of the spotlights. She examined it, gave me a quick glance which could have been a disappointed reappraisal, and said, "She's not a charge customer. But she does come in quite often. Andra... Miss Gates always takes care of her."

"How do I find Miss Gates?"

"She's back in the office, sir. If you will wait a few moments I will get you the information."

The chill was obvious. She had withdrawn and slammed the gates. I stood and stared into the glossy photograph of a girl's face of a plastic mannequin. She stood on a round pedestal that lifted her almost up to eye level with me. She held her arms and hands in a position which looked as if somebody had just snatched her banjo away, and she hadn't had time to react. She wore a brief little shift in a coarse blue weave with a huge brass zipper from throat to hem, a little brass padlock fastening the zipper at the neckline, and, pinned to the bosom, a little spring-tension reel key. the padlock key snugged up against it. An overhead spot shone on her straight, thick, cream-colored Dynel hair.

"Sweetie," I said to her, "your message gets through. May one day a plastic chap unreel your little key and tousle your plastic locks."

I felt fairly confident of the degree of risk I was taking.

Vangie had spoken of her darling little ear, of having a place to live. And if she had a record, and if it was a dangerous and conspiratorial game she was playing, it had to be under a different name. Otherwise the police would have had the local address very quickly.

Little Mother came silently back across the carpeting, handed me the picture and an unlined file card. I had heard a distant clicking of a typewriter. On the card was written Miss Tami Western, 8000 Cove Lane Apartment 7B, Quendon Beach.

"Sorry to take so long, sir. As Miss Western pays cash, Miss Gates had to look through the delivery file. Some things which had to be altered were delivered. It would be three miles or so south of the city line."

"Thank you very much."

"We're glad we could be of service, sir."

I started toward the door and turned back. "None of my business, but there I was improving your day, and all of a sudden I'm Typhoid Mary. Would it help anything if I bought something?"

"I would be happy to wait on you, sir."

"Come out, come out, wherever you are, and tell me, please, why that picture turned you off?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you"

She stopped abruptly, made a wry face. "Maybe you're not having me on after all, Mr. "McGee. Travis McGee."

"Mrs. Wooster. You give the impression of being able to find your way around, Mr. McGee. And if you'd never seen her in your life, that picture should give you some kind of a message. But you spent an evening with her. I don't want to say anything more. I don't want to knock a steady customer."

"I was under the spell of black velvets. From two o'clock on. Half and half, stout and champagne. They came aboard at six. If you've ever tried that magic potion.. She laughed. "Sure have. Everything gets such a lovely glow."

"That's why her name is gone too. And what she does. Some kind of an entertainer, I think. I mean that's the way the picture looks."

"Mr. McGee, you are backing me into a corner. I don't want to make any moral judgments. She has a lovely face and a lovely body. And we can guarantee she's well-dressed. But do one little thing. Take a look at that picture again, and let's just say she doesn't sing and she doesn't dance, and she isn't an actress, nor does she entertain with Aloha and other requests on her musical saw. And let's say she distributes quite a few of those pictures."

I looked at it again. "Mrs. Wooster, you may have saved me from a very awkward little situation."

She lowered her voice. "If there was a chance of my being wrong, one small chance, I would have kept my mouth shut, believe me. But about five months ago she was here one afternoon with a little redheaded girlfriend, and it had been a long and liquid lunch. The girlfriend was DeeDee or BeeBee or something. They were both back in the fitting room, and there was a good customer there too, and the customer said something that apparently annoyed the redhead. I would guess that... the redhead actually has a better background than Miss Western. But, to shock the other woman, the redhead, who'd been sitting waiting for Miss Western to get her suit fitted, she jumped up and... like a circus barker or something, she pretended to be auctioning off the merchandise, patting Miss Western and turning her around and displaying her charms and... saying it would cost for this and for that... a kind of obscenity I never heard before. Miss Western was helpless with laughter. The other customer fled in tears. And... they weren't kidding. It was as if, all of a sudden, they had both changed into something we never saw around here before. They were both hooting with laughter when they left. And when Miss Western came in the next time, Miss Gates asked her not to bring her friend back again ever. She took it all right. You just don't look as if... that is the sort of girl you'd want to look up. Or, excuse me, have to look up."

"Now you're making my day. But what sent the woman out in tears? Bad language?"

"The redhead was making some ugly comparisons. Andra confronted her and apologized and said the redhead would never be permitted inside the shop again. But she never has come back."

"I guess this makes you the only friend I have left in town,' I told her.

She sighed. "You know, it's a shame. I have a perfectly great gal in mind. So she's visiting your sister in Chicago. If I were you... I mean trying to think like a guy, spending just a few days here, you probably belong to something that has some kind of reciprocal deal with the Yacht Club. They've got a pool and tennis courts and so on, and it's relaxed and friendly. What I wouldn't do is go pub-crawling down Sand Alley. That's the strip down at the beaches. It is sort of what they call a little bit wide open. Let's just say there's a lot of different kinds of Tami Westerns, and people have gotten served some pretty strange drinks."

Off to the right of A1A as you head south are the random, unzoned living areas. Barren trailer parks making a huge hot aluminum glitter in the sunshine. Other trailer parks with shade and space and waterfront. Tract houses in clusters that vaguely resemble a game of Monopoly. Improbable groups of high-rise apartments. Curiously architectured conglomerations of condominium apartments.

I found Cove Lane a mile south of the Bimini Plaza, turning off AlA between a shopping plaza and a self-service car wash. Two blocks west it changed from business to residential. Number 8000 took up half of the south block, and was far more attractive than I had any reason to expect. They were garden apartments, single story, in gray weathered cypress trimmed white. Ten numbered units, each containing four apartments A, B, C and D--but so laid out, like the spokes of a wheel, with plantings, high basketweave fencing, access drives of white crushed shell, that each have a look of restful pleasure and the look of being near the sea.

A small sign advised me to inquire at Howard Realty, three blocks east, for rental information. There were little hooks on the sign, on which HR hung a gray and white sign saying Apartment for Rent.

At Howard Realty, a sallow, spidery young woman with very thick glasses, a bright yellow blouse and bright pink shorts was minding the store.

"Eight Thousand," she said, "is as nice as anything you can find up or down this whole beach. It shows what a real smart architect can do. But before we waste any time, or..."

"McGee."

"The minimum lease period is three months. We've got five empties right now, which you can believe me when I say that's unusual. And the summer rates right now on the cheapest are ninety-five a month without utilities, and that goes up to a hundred and thirty-five on the cheapest from November first to May first. Still curious?"

"So far."

"No kids and no pets. There'd be two of you?"

"Just me."

She took me over to an attractive wall panel, about eight feet long and three feet wide, in effect a map of Eight Thousand Cove Lane, with the road, drives, fenced patios shown. Pieces of plywood had been cut to the shapes of the ten structures and affixed to the panel and painted white. Keys hung from hooks in the plywood, under the number for each apartment. Five red tags were hung with five of the forty keys.

"In each unit, is a studio apartment with Bahama beds. C is the small one-bedroom, like this one. B is the larger one-bedroom. A is the two-bedroom job. Heat pumps, wall ovens, tubs and showers, wall-to-wall carpeting, fiberglass draperies, private patios with redwood lawn furniture, completely furnished. We have, let me see, one A, two B's and two D's. So I'm wasting my time if I quote a C rate. The D's are ninety-five until November first, and the B's are a hundred and sixty two fifty. Two twenty during the season. Being alone you wouldn't want that A, I guess. Two months in advance."

"How about maid service?"

"That's something you'd have to arrange yourself. We'd help you as much as we can, of course."

"I'd like to go take a look at one of the B units."

"If... you could come back about four o'clock. I'll be all alone here until"

"I'm not planning to steal the lamps or the silver or the TV set," I said, taking my wallet out.

"I know that, Mr. McGee. It's just that"

I gave her four fifty-dollar bills. "Why don't you just hang onto this for a little while, and if it's as good as it sounds, I'll be back and give you the rest of the two months in advance. Okay?"

Eyes distorted to hugeness by the heavy lenses inspected me, and she nodded and said, "Here. Hang onto the money yourself. I think the B's in the odd-numbered units are more attractive somehow than in the even ones. Two B and Five B. Here's the key to Five, Mr. McGee." She lifted it off the hook and handed it to me. "Hurry back," she said, smiling.

I bent over the model again and said, "Is this the same layout?"

"Yes. Just like this." I stared, trying to think of something to ask, demanding that the fates send me a phone call. After a few moments, just when I would have had to turn and go, they relented and sent me a mailman. He trudged in and said, "Registered letter, Bitsy."

As she went over to sign for it, I straightened up, plucked the Seven B key off the board and hung the Five B key in its place and, as I passed them on my way to the door I said, "Thanks. Be back in a little while."

I turned into the shell drive. I parked by the fence gate to Seven B. I knew that any slightest furtiveness could be dangerous, and so I walked to the front door, put the key in the lock, opened the door, and decided it would be more natural to leave it a few inches ajar. I knew from the intensity of the heat in the small foyer that it was empty. It was indeed a most attractive place. And hot. Within minutes sweat was trickling into my eyes. It took not more than three or four minutes to make certain it had been picked clean. No furs, no jewelry except costume jewelry. Plenty of underthings and resort wear and some cocktail dresses. Dressing table and bathroom countertop and medicine cabinet stocked with enough stuff to start a drugstore with a cosmetics department. No luggage at all on the high shelf in the closet. But about forty pairs of shoes. No sign of any personal papers or records or photographs. Big high-fidelity combination with a stereo record player and a bin stuffed full of Vangie's kind of music. It was very neat and clean, the bed made fresh, turned down, clean towels on the towel bars. But there was the beginning of a little film of dust on the wooden surfaces.

From the kitchen window I could see that the carport was empty. I found specific evidence in the living room. I tilted an upholstered chair over and looked at the underside of it. The material covering the springs and webbing had been removed and stapled back on. The staples were shiny. And they rust quickly in the summer humidity.

Two choices: Griff had located the bundle she had squirreled away, or he had satisfied himself it wasn't in the apartment. Or, a third choice, somebody had made her very very anxious to explain exactly where she had hidden it. A woman named Bellemer had died, quite badly. Another woman named Tami Western had gone on a trip. Car and luggage gone. When the rent ran out, the management would pack the rest of her stuff and store it, and when the storage charges were up to the estimated value, it would be sold off for the storage. No new problem when a girl's money stops. They pack the good stuff and leave.

Another few minutes and I would look as if I'd been standing in a shower with my clothes on. Just as I reached the foyer the door was pushed open. He was a broad one. Thirty, maybe. Orange swim trunks the size of a jock strap. Legs like a fullback. Flyboy sun glasses. White towel hanging around his neck. Black curly hair on top of a broad hard-looking head, and no evident hair anywhere else except some pale fuzz against deep tan from the knees down. "There was too much belly, but it was such a deep brown he was managing a precarious hold on the beach-boy image. He had a shovel jaw and a curiously prim little mouth.

"What the hell is going on?"

"That's a good question, friend. You'd think the way this operation looks they'd be smart enough to try to rent one of these until they got the last tenant's crud out of it. Let me out of this sweat box, please."

He backed away and I pulled the door shut, tried it to be certain it had locked.

"You lost me someplace on this rental play, buds. There is a chick has it and she's on a trip."

I frowned at the key, showed it to him. "Seven B. The girl in the Howard office gave it to me. First, I tried to open Five B with it. I thought that was what she said. Then I looked at the tag and tried this one."

"So it's just the key that's wrong. I saw the car. The door is open. So somebody could be cleaning it to the walls. They get some action like that around here."

A sun-drowsy girl-voice drifted over the wall from the adjoining court. "Who you talkin' to, Griff? Whozat, baby?"

"Just a guy looking, buds. They screwed up and give him the key to Tami's place, I told him she's away only. Mack showed yet?"

"No, and he din even call. How about that?"

"Well," I said, "thanks for straightening me out. Would you... recommend it as a place to live?"

When he shrugged those shoulders he was hoisting considerable poundage of meat. "Depends on what the play is. You got it private. Nobody bothers anybody. No kids mousing around. You got the big beach a quarter mile south, and even slow like now there's action if you want to check it out. For a guy single, you can't whip it."

"You work around here?"

"See you here and there, buds," he said and trudged toward the gate to the next patio where the girl-voice had come from. He wiped his face on the towel and went in and pulled the gate shut without a backward glance. I drove back to the office.

"They're really nice, aren't they?" said Bitsy. "Furnished just a little more completely than I expected," I said and held the key up so she could read the tag.

"But... but... oli, my God, did you walk in on somebody? Who's in that one?: She ran a thumbnail down a cardex list. "Miss Western. But I told you Five B!"

"That's where I went. The key wouldn't open the door. I looked at the tag and saw it was for Seven B, so I thought you made a mistake about which place was empty. Don't worry. She wasn't there. A fellow named Griff, who seems to live in Seven C, saw my car and the open door and he straightened me out."

"She does go away quite often on trips." She spoke over her shoulder as she headed to the wall panel. She took the key from the Seven B hook and said, "This is the one I meant to give you. Darn it! It must be that maybe when Fred was sweeping up he knocked them off with the broom handle or something and put them back wrong." She stood there checking the other tags. "I guess the rest are okay. Do you want to look at Five B now?"

"I guess not. It's the same layout as Miss Western's?"

"The color scheme will be different, of course. "Has she lived there long?"

She looked at the card again. "Almost two years."

"Well, she certainly keeps it clean and tidy."

"You were asking about maid service. I see here that she has a maid who comes in. We have to keep a record, so we'll know who's been given permission to go into the units. Are you interested, Mr. McGee?"

"Very much. There's just one other place I wanted to check, mostly because I promised I would, but I think I'll settle for Five B."

"Then you ought to grab it now. This time of year they don't stay empty long."

"How long would fifty hold it, not returnable?"

"Let's say... since this is Thursday, until Saturday noon? Then if you take it, it applies to the rent. You would owe... an additional two eighty-four seventy five, with the tax, and forty dollars deposit for the utilities. We handle getting them hooked up in your name. But you take care of the phone yourself."

"Can you give me the maid's name?"

"Of course. Here. I'll write the name and address on the back of your receipt."

"Fine."

"She's a colored girl. She works for some of our other people too." I started the car and put the air-conditioning on high, both vents aimed at my face, before I drove away, I had the name of the maid. Mrs. Noreen Walker, 7930 Fifth Street, Arlentown. 881-6810. I tucked the slip in my pocket, and from a drugstore in the corner shopping plaza I dialed the number.

Noreen, she be back along six o'clock from the bus, she workin' today."

So I used my afternoon time in sorting out the bars and cocktail lounges. You can make a guess from the way they are on the outside, from the names they put on them, but can't be certain. You have to go in. You don't have to k. Certainly not in the ones you can check off at first glance. You just go look up an imaginary name in their book and walk back out. I had no interest in the ones, the ones with the neighborhood flavor and neighborhood trade, cute signs about credit, bartender bejolly uncle, general conversations including everyone in the bar, and generally a couple of massive women named or Sade or Pearl bulging over the edges of their bar drinking draft beer and honking their social-hour drinks.

five-thirty I had found four probables. They were all two miles of Cove Lane. They all had certain things in common. Carefully muted g, spotless glassware, premium brands in the bottle uniform jackets on the bartenders, carpeting, no television cocktail piano, dim and intimate banquette rooms flavor of profitable professional operation. And they had another factor I was looking for. You feel it in the back neck. A sense of being appraised, added up. Plymouth over ice. At The Ember Room, the shot was slightly stingy, and high. At The Annex the fee was a dollar. The gin was poured free hand into a squat thick-based tumbler, a knock better than two ounces, I estimated. The cheese spread in a brown pot was sharp and good. Couples sat in shadowy corners, heads close together, and they were served by cocktail waitresses in white leotards and high heeled white sandals. Two stools away two florid men in business suits were arguing intensely about one of the provisions of a Swiss corporate setup. A slender girl with a very deep tan and a cap of curls white as snow, and an evening gown with only a double thickness of gray netting over breasts as brown as her arms, noodled a little golden piano on a raised dais, under a small rose-colored spot in a corner beyond the bar, making mouths to match the music. The bartender at my end had the happy face of a young well-fed weasel. I left him a dollar bonus for the single drink to keep my image green.

The bar was attached to one of the glossier motels. I went through into the motel and made some casual conversation with a desk man with a faint smell of authority about him. I got around to my key questions, I learned that the management operated the dining room and the room-service liquor, but 'The Annex ', was on consignment.

Suspicion confirmed. The Annex would have a few sidelines going for it. The casual customer gets a heavy knock, good service in elegant surroundings! The aim would be to make just the costs on that business. The profit would come out of the live ones live, fat and unwary. Must keep careful watch, sort them out, steer them into whatever matches their vulnerability. Broads or beach boys, dice or cards, all staged elsewhere. It was nicely named. This was The Annex. The action was in other rooms, other places.

The shuffle is available everywhere, from Vegas to Chicago, to Cleveland. Sometimes it's a little smoother than in other places. Electronic technology has improved the efficiency.

I had to find out if Noreen Walker could fill in any blanks. Arlentown was the dusky suburb of Broward Beach, west of the city. The Street improved as I neared her block. The little frame rental cottages were more recently painted, the fences in repair, the yards free of old auto parts.

I parked in front of her place in the evening slant of sunshine, aware of eyes watching me from up and down the block. I got out and stood at the white gate, knowing there would be no need to push it open and walk to the porch. A heavy woman, very dark of skin, wearing a cotton print, plodded out onto the porch and said, "You about the phone again?"

"I want to talk to Noreen."

"She lives here. She my middle daughter. What about?"

"About some work out at the beach."

"Sure then," she said. "Just come home. Changing her clothes." She went back in.

I went back to the car and sat behind the wheel, leaned and swung the passenger door open. Through the open door, in a few moments, I saw her come down the porch steps, push the gate open, come to the car, her head tilted in inquiry. She wore blue sandals, bermuda shorts, a pale blue knit sleeveless blouse with a turtleneck collar. She was a tall slender young woman, very long-legged and short-waisted. She was lighter than her mother, her skin the tone of an old penny. She had a slanted saucy Negroid face, the broad nostrils and heavy lips. Her eyes were set very wide, and were a pronounced almond shape, and very pretty. Her breasts poked sharply against the knit fabric.

"Askin' fo' me, mister?"

"I phoned earlier and somebody told me you'd be home round six."

"Wantin' maid work done at the beach?" She was bending, peering in at me, manifestly suspicious.

"Would you please get into the car and sit for a minute, Mrs. Walker?"

"No need, mister. I ain't got me no free day at all. Maybe could get you somebody, you say who to phone up." I took the keys out of the ignition and tossed them onto the seat, toward her. I said, "Mrs. Walker, you can hold the car keys in your hand and leave that door open."

"I Don't want no maid work?"

"No."

"What is it you wantin'?"

I had the folded fifty-dollar bill in my shirt pocket, and took it out and reached and stuck one corner of it under the car keys. She moved away and I suddenly realized she was going to the rear of the car to glance at the plates. She came back, looked in at me. "What you 'spect to buy?"

"Some conversation."

"You tryin' set me up someways, somebody con you rong. Could be some other gal. I never mess with no white stud, never been in law trouble. I'm a hard-working widow woman, and I got two baby boys in the house there, so best thing you be on your way.

I got out Vangie's picture, held it where she could see it. "That there's Miz Western. I wuk for her a long time, here at that Cove Lane."

"You used to work for her. She's dead."

For the first time she looked directly into my eyes. Her mouth firmed up, and I saw a shrewd light of intelligence behind her eyes.

"Fuzz doan throw big money to nigger women, 'less it's got a mark on it, you come back a-raidin', find it and take me into town sayin' it's stole, and get me sayin' things to frame up who you think done it."

"I'm not the law. I just want to know what you know about Tami Western. It might help me get a line on who did it. I want to know her habits. And the longer we keep talking, the more all your neighbors are going to wonder what's happening."

"Big friend of Miz Western maybe?" She had a bland and vacuous expression.

"She was a cheap, sloppy, greedy slut. Where can we talk?"

"Where you from, Mister?"

"Fort Lauderdale."

"Down there any chance you know any Sam B. K. Dickey?"

"I worked with him once. A mutual friend was in trouble."

"Likely he knowin' your name?"

"Travis McGee."

"Please, you wait a piece, mister."

It was a ten-minute wait. Some children came to stand and stare warily at me from a safe distance.

She came back out and leaned in the door as before. Her smile looked tired. "Just to be certain, Mr. McGee, I asked Mr. Sam to describe you. He was quite picturesque about it. But it fits. And he said I can trust you a hundred percent, which is something Mr. Sam would not say too often about our own people. It saved us a lot of time to have you know him. I hope you do understand that the standard disguise is... pretty imperative. If you could come back to this area at nine o'clock, I think that would be best. Four blocks straight you'll come to a traffic light. There's a drugstore on the far corner. Park just beyond the drugstore and blink your lights a couple of times."

When I returned to that corner it was five after nine. She opened the car door quickly and got in.

"Just drive around?" I asked.

"No. Go straight ahead and I'll tell you where to turn. It's a place we can talk." It was a narrow driveway, a small back yard surrounded by a high thick hedge of punk trees. There was a small screened porch, lights on, comfortably furnished. I followed her to the porch. She had changed to a dark green jumper dress, worn with a white long-sleeved shirt, with a big loose white bow at the throat.

As I followed her onto the porch and we sat in two comfortable chairs on either side of a small lamp table, she said, "Friends of mine." She took a cigarette from her purse, lighted it. "Very conspiratorial, I know. But we're getting very used to that these days, huh, McGee. Mr. Sam said I could trust you. I'm one of the regional directors of CORE. I'm a University of Michigan graduate. I taught school before I got married. He died of cancer two years ago and I came back here. Working as a maid gives me more freedom of action, less chance of being under continual observation. Eventually I'm what you might call a militant optimist. I believe that the people of good will of both races are going to get it all worked out. Now you can stop wondering about me and my little act and tell me what you want to know. You gave an accurate picture of Tami Western. If she didn't travel so often, I would have dropped her from my list. That woman could turn that apartment into a crawling slum in about twenty minutes flat. About all I can say for her is that she was generous. Extra money, clothes she was tired of, presents men gave her she had no use for. But in a strange way, she made me feel... crawly. No one could live in Arlentown without being pretty much aware of the facts of life. But whenever we were there alone when I was doing the housework, the times when she wasn't sleeping or fixing her face or taking one of her half-hour showers, she was always trying to convince me how much better off I'd be selling myself to white men. She said she could give me all the pointers I'd need, and introduce me to the right people, and I could clear three or four hundred a week with no trouble at all. I just had to keep telling her no God-fearing Baptist church lady could do like that without going to hell for sure. It really shocked me to hear you say she's dead."

"Murdered. How long did you work for her?"

"I think... fifteen months. Yes."

"And she went on trips how often?"

"On cruises. Cruise ships to the Caribbean. Anywhere from five days to fifteen days. She'd tell me when she was leaving and when she'd be back, so I could clean it after she left and show up again the day after she was due back. She'd leave from Port Everglades. And she'd bring back some little present for me, usually. Those ships, you know, go winter and summer, all year. I'd say she went off, oh, a dozen times while I worked for her."

"Was there any predictable pattern?"

"Sort of, I guess. When she'd get back she'd stay at the apartment there, not going out at all. Sleep until noon, play those records, watch the TV, and do those exercises of hers. One thing about that woman, Mr. McGee, she kept herself fit. She'd lie down on the floor and hook her feet under the edge of the couch and lace her fingers behind her neck and do situps, dozens of them, just as slowly as she could. Sometimes she'd try on everything she owned and leave it all stacked around for me to put away again. And there were two girlfriends she had. Sometimes when she was staying home neither of them would come around. Other times it would be one or the other, and a few times they'd both come by. They'd fool with each other's hair, fixing it in different ways. And they'd play gin rummy, gambling. You never heard such language."

"Do you know the names of the girlfriends?"

"DeeDee was one of them. Small and redheaded and a little bit heavy. Let me think, now. For fun sometimes they'd use her full name, to tease her. It was... Delilah Delberta Barntree. Usually it was DeeDee or DeeDee Bea. She seemed more educated than the other two, but she had the dirtiest mouth. And she was the same age as Miss Western, in her middle to late twenties, I think. The third girl was younger, early twenties, and very slender. She's a natural blonde, with very thick and heavy hair, that creamy kind, and she wears it usually in some way that leaves her little face sort of peering out from under all that weight, a pretty little face with sharp features and black eyebrows and black lashes. Not naturally that way, just to make more of a contrast. I don't know her last name. They called her Del."

"What kind of a car did Tami Western own?"

"A red Mustang convertible with a white top."

"How long would she stay in the apartment after her cruises?"

"A week or so. Ten days. Then she would start going out. Usually then she did a lot of shopping. She'd be out a lot in the evenings. And then she'd start not coming home at all at night, three or four nights a week, and when she was home and I was there, sometimes there would be phone calls and she'd lie on her bed and make love talk into the phone, and wink at me and make a face if I walked by. Once she was crying and begging into the phone to somebody, but it didn't mean a thing. The wink and the face were the same. Then after a while she'd start packing to go on a cruise."

"Did men come to the apartment?"

"No. She had a thing about that. She said it was her place and out of bounds and it was going to stay out of bounds."

"The man in Seven C knew her. Griff."

"Yes. I know. A big man with a mean look. I don't know what the relationship was. He'd call up and she'd go next door for a little while."

"What if you had to make a guess at the relationship?"

She frowned. She pressed a slim brown finger to the corner of her mouth. When she stepped out of her housemaid role she had that slightly forced elegance of the educated Negro woman, that continuing understated challenge to you to accept her on her terms or, by not doing so, betray the prejudice she expected you to have. I cannot blame them for a quality of humorlessness. They carry the dead weight of all their deprived people, and though they know intellectually that the field hand mentality is a product of environment, they have an aesthetic reserve, which they will not admit to themselves, about the demanding of racial equality for those with whom, except for the Struggle, they would not willingly associate. They say Now, knowing that only fifteen percent of Negro America is responsible enough to handle the realities of Now, and that, in the hard-core South, perhaps seventy percent of the whites are willing to accept the obligations of Now. But they are on the move with nowhere to go but up, with the minority percentage of the ignorant South running into the majority percentage of ignorant Negro America, in blood, heartbreak, shame and confusion. I hoped that this penny-colored dedicated pussycat wouldn't stick her head under the wrong billy club, or get taken too often to the back room for interrogation. If, even on the word of one of their shrewdest lawyers, Sam Dickey, she was willing to trust a white man, it meant she had a vulnerable streak of softness in her, which could guarantee martyrdom sooner or later.

My intolerance is strictly McGee-type. If there were people around colored green or bright blue, I would have a continual primitive awareness of the difference between us, way down on that watchful animal level which is a caveman heritage. But I would cherish the ones who came through as solid folk, and avoid the slobs and fools and bores as diligently as I avoid white slobs and fools and bores.

"If I have to make a guess," she said, "from what I overheard, those three were lining up men who'd take them on trips. They were whores who kept it from looking like ordinary whoring, and they'd clip the men for all the traffic would bear. So I guess they'd have to have some kind of protection, some muscle they could call on if the customer got ugly about it. It had to be something like that, with that man Griff scaring them off. And maybe he even helped find the customers in the first place somehow."

"When they were talking together, did the names of other men come up?"

"The other two kidded Del about some man. Somebody named Terry. They'd kid her in a very rough way, and she'd get angry." She shook her head. "No other names I can remember."

"Do you know if she kept much cash on hand?"

"I know she paid cash for everything, even the rent. But that's all I know about that. Oh, wait a minute. One time, months ago, I finished up and it was time for her to pay me the twelve dollars. She just had some ones in her purse and she told me to wait. She took her purse into the little kitchen and closed the swinging door. She was in there a long time. Five minutes, maybe. Then she came out with the ten-dollar bill for me. I don't think she worried about me being honest, not after the time I took a pretty pleated blouse of hers home with me to wash and iron for her. It was Italian, hand-made, and she'd bought it in Nassau. The minute I got it wet, I saw the shadow through the little pocket, and there were four hundred-dollar bills in there, folded into thirds and fastened with a paper clip. I dried the money out and took it back to her the next time, and she thought it was the funniest thing in the world. I told her we good church-going Baptist ladies, we don't hold none with stealin'. She made me take twenty dollars for bringing it back."

"Did she tell you this time she was leaving?"

"No. I had to go there last Monday, expecting her to be in bed when I unlocked the door and went in. But she'd packed up and left. I looked around and saw she'd taken all her best things and all her luggage, so I knew it would be a long trip. It was a mess there, believe me, things thrown all over, empty glasses, drawers all open. It looked as if she had to leave all of a sudden. So I straightened it all up, made the bed fresh, and decided she'd get in touch with me when she got back."

"Just one last thing, Mrs. Walker. Would you know where she usually went when she went out in the evening?"

"Good places along the beach, I'd say. Before she gave up smoking, that's what the book matches would say. The Ember Room, and Ramon's and The Annex. Places like that. And when the other women were there, sometimes they'd talk about places like that, who they saw there, things like that."

"I certainly appreciate your help, more than I can say."

"I want to ask questions about what happened to her, and I have the feeling you don't want me to."

"I'll make a deal with you. When this is over, one day I'll look you up and tell you how and why it happened, because by then there couldn't be any danger to you in knowing."

She nodded. "And I haven't talked to you at all."

"Right."

We went out toward my car. She stopped and said, "I'll walk home from here, Mr. McGee."

"No trouble to drop you off, Noreen. They've kind of lighted the neighborhood street lights."

She turned so that the porch lights shone on her face. Suddenly she grinned in a mischievous way, giving me a glimpse of the wry humor she kept so carefully hidden. She backed away a full step, crouched slightly, and with a little snap of her right wrist, a slender four-inch blade appeared. She held it with an ominous competence, palm upward, knife hilt butted into the heel of her hand, thumb holding it against the bunched fingers.

"Mess wid me, you studs, you no use to no gal henceforth. Back off outen my way.

"I'm suitably impressed."

She straightened, sighed, thumbed the blade shut, slipped the knife into the jumper pocket. She looked up at the stars, no expression on her face. "We housemaids have to keep in character. This is the ghetto. The laws don't work the way they work outside. We're the happy smiling darkies with a great natural sense of rhythm. You can't hurt us by hitting us on the head. We'd still be nice and quiet except the Communists started getting us all fussed up." She looked at me and I saw bitterness on her face. "In this state, my friend, a nigger convicted of killing a nigger gets an average three years. A nigger who rapes a nigger is seldom even tried, unless the girl happens to be twelve years old or less. Santa Claus and Jesus are white men, Mr. McGee, and the little girls' dolls and the little boys' toy soldiers have white faces. My boys are two and a half and four. What am I doing to their lives if I let them grow up here? We want out. In the end, it's that simple. We want out, where the law is, where you prosper or you fail according to your own merits as a person. Is that so damned much? I don't want white friends. I don't want to socialize. You know how white people look to me? The way albinos look to you. I hope never to find myself in a white man's bed. I don't want to integrate. I just don't want to feel segregated. We're after our share of the power structure of this civilization, here. McGee, because when we get it, a crime will merit the same punishment whether the victim is black or white, and hoods will get the same share of municipal services, based on zoning, not color. And a good man will be thought a credit to the human race. Sorry. End of lecture. The housemaid has spoken."

"When I next see Sam, I'll tell him that his Noreen Walker is quite a gal. And thanks again."

When I got turned around and headed out of the driveway, I saw her way down the dark street, saw just the swing of the arms in the long sleeves of the white blouse under the jumper dress.

A very talented old-time con man once coached me very carefully in the fine art of appearing to be very very drunk. At midnight, after having changed to an executive-on-a-convention suit, I reappeared, stoned to the eyebrows, at the bar of The Annex. I walked with the controlled care of a man walking a twelve-inch beam forty stories above Park Avenue. I eased myself onto a bar stool in stately slow motion. As I stared straight ahead into the bottle racks, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the contented weasel approaching to wipe the spotless bar top.

"Good evening, sir," he said with that small emphasis which was in tribute to the dollar tip way back during the cocktail hour. "Plymouth over ice?"

I swung my stare toward him, without haste, focused ten feet behind him, and then on him. I spoke with deliberation, spacing each word to give it an unmistakable clarity. "I have been in here before. You have a very good memory, my man. Plymouth will do nicely. Very nicely indeed. Yes. Thank you so much. Very nice place you have here."

"Thank you, sir."

When he had put the drink down, he hovered. I stared straight ahead until he began to turn away, and then said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

"Sir?"

"What is your name, my good fellow?"

"Albert, sir."

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Words of one of the poets, Albert. I made a great deal of money this month. A vulgar quantity."

"Congratulations, sir."

"Thank you, Albert. You have understanding. It is a rare virtue. My tax attorneys have arranged that I keep a maximum amount of that sum. My associates are eaten by envy. My dear wife will smile upon me. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Albert. In one of those tomorrows, I shall pry loose another plum from the tree of life. But will it be meaningful? What is the symbolic value?"

"Well, money is money. I mean you can't buy happiness, sir, but it sure takes the sting out of being unhappy."

"Unhappy. I knew you had understanding. And bored, Albert. The days become the same." I turned on the stool and looked around at the lounge area. The brown-breasted piano player had changed to a blue gown with a V down to the navel, and evidently with some concealed device which kept it anchored just unboard of the nipple areas. When I swung back I swayed slightly, closed my eyes, opened them again, lifted my drink and looked at the cocktail napkin. "Yes. Of course. The Annex. I have been in a great many places this evening, Albert. I have talked with many many many people. Few of them had understanding. They cannot comprehend the tragic trauma of our times. Someone suggested I return here. I have forgotten who. Perhaps I was misled. A rather large fellow, as I remember. The evening blurs. That is what happens to evenings. They all blur, merge, become meaningless. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Albert, I know you have understanding. You have proven that. But do you have tolerance for the mistakes of others?"

"The way I see it, anybody can make a mistake, sir. Right?"

"You are also a philosopher. My mistake would be tactical, Albert. The large chap at an unremembered place implied get that word, Albert... implied that here I might find an ear, a little pussycat ear into which I could tell my tale of sadness, my need of cheer. Man is a lonely animal, Albert. And every place is a lonely place. If I have asked for some service the house does not, could not, would not provide, I am truly sorry for having offended you. I beg your pardon most humbly, my dear fellow."

He set to work increasing the gleam of an already polished glass. "Well, sir, let me say this. You won't find a nicer place on the beach. Now suppose, just suppose some girl comes in here. Now understand, I don't mean any hooker. I mean an upper-grade girl, and she's restless, and maybe something has happened, boyfriend trouble, and she's hurting a little. You understand? So she's at my bar and she has one over the limit and maybe her judgment isn't too good and some bum starts moving in on her. What do I do? When I say bum, I mean maybe he's got a two-hundred-dollar suit, a bill-clip full of money, he's still a bum in my book. What I do, I chill the bum off her, and when I get a chance, I see that she gets to be with the kind of man anybody can see is a real gentleman-like yourself, sir. That way nobody gets hurt. Nobody has any regrets. Anytime you get two nice people together, it makes you feel good."

"Albert, you continue to amaze me."

"Freshen that drink up, sir?"

"Splendid idea. But to go back to the topic again, it would mean I would have to be on hand at precisely the right moment. And so our discussion is purely academic."

"Sir, in one way it is and in another way it isn't. It's really kind of a weird coincidence you came in here tonight again and we got into this kind of a talk. It's like fate or some thing. It so happens there is this girl works cocktail waitress here. She's really a great kid. Just great. And the trouble she's been having..

I held up my hand to stop him. I closed my eyes, swayed slightly, holding on to the padded rail.

"You okay, sir?"

"I do not mean to spurn your suggestion, dear chap. I wished one moment to recollect a few names the large fellow mentioned. Doubtless they are dear friends of his and, if I have the right place, well-known here. A Miss Tami Western, a Miss Barntree, or a Miss... the name escapes me. Del something. Slender."

Albert scuttled back into his weasel hole and slammed his little doors. He wanted some time to reappraise the situation, and so he excused himself and went down the bar and served the few other customers in his section.

When he came back he said, "None of those ladies has been in here tonight." There was finality in his tone.

"Albert, we seem to be losing our rapport. Have I done something wrong?"

"Wrong? Wrong? A customer asks about another customer, so I say whether they been in or not. Okay?"

My hand was on the bar, palm up. I pulled my thumb back enough to expose the corner number on the folded twenty.

"A fellow as deft, as kindly, as helpful as you, Albert, would know how to get in touch."

Strangely, he hesitated, and then the twenty disappeared so quickly I half expected to see a little puff of smoke. He gave a cautious glance down the bar, then leaned over it toward me. His personality suffered an abrupt change. "Friend, what you just bought for the twenty, maybe you won't like. But you are getting your money's worth. Advice, you bought. I don't know if you come in here with a case of the cutes, or if somebody steered you to a busted mouth for laughs. Either way it would be the same. There's muscle don't want you poking in that direction, not those broads, not Western and Barntree and Whitney. All I know about that operation, they got no room for what you got in mind. I'm doing you a favor. Forget it. For half a bill I set you up with a good clean hardworking kid. You want to get something you couldn't forget so quick, hang around until two o'clock, for two bills you get the piano player, if after she looks you over she says okay, which she probably would because she isn't booked and what she won't take is fat or old, some kind of a thing about that, and either kid it would be for the night. But you come in here and give me the names you give me, friend, it has to turn me off, You following me?"

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

"Oh for chrissake!"

"In the vernacular, dear boy, my earlier acquaintance was having me on?"

"He was sending you to play in the traffic."

"This muscle you mentioned, is it that dangerous?"

"You better believe it. Those broads can put on the cool pretty good, but if somebody doesn't take a hint, then they get a real good hint, like a kneecap gets kicked loose out in the parking lot."

"But with no style, dear boy. Punks, no doubt." He shook his head sadly. "You don't want to believe me, sir. This is no game. Take my word. I don't tell anybody about what you asked, I'm doing you a favor."

I manufactured a shudder and some difficulty in focusing on Albert. I put a five-dollar bill on the bar. "Suddenly, dear friend, I find myself in dire need of an empty bed rather than diversion. I have foundered on the rocks. Plymouth rocks. I trust we may pursue these matters when I have a less overwhelming sense of unreality."

With an egg-sucking grin Albert said, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, sir?"

"Exactly. We have each made a new friend, and so the evening is not a total waste." I walked my twelve-inch beam on out the door.

Back in my hall of mirrors, spread-eagled and supine on one of my two double beds under the cave-breath of the air-conditioning, I fit together the pieces I had, and I thought of them in three colors-green for the facts, yellow for the reasonable guesses, red for the ones I had to reach for.

It puzzled me that to be totally stoned and heavily solvent did not make me attractive bait. Perhaps they could handle only so much bait at a time. If they hadn't replaced VangieTami, the other two might be diligently busy at the moment. They might both be off on cruise ships. They might be lying low until they were certain their previous ventures had not created unwelcome heat and attention. Or they could be setting up new pigeons-provided the execution of Tami had not made the group decide to suspend operations until they were certain she had not left them a little posthumous gift of trouble.

One Mack had driven the car that had stopped on the bridge over our fishing hole. One Terry had dumped her over. And her reappearance when the bartender she spoke of had evidently betrayed her trust must have come as a sickening shock to those boys. I knew there was little logic in my absolute confidence that Vangie had not identified me as the rescuer, no matter what they might have done to her. She would have to give them a plausible story of rescue. Some fishermen under the bridge. And, having her return to get her money would be an indication she had not exposed the operation. Had they broken her to the point of making her tell the hiding place? I knew why I doubted it. In free fall to what she believed was her death, she had stifled the instinctive scream just to give Terry an awkward time. Knowing that the second attempt would kill her for sure, knowing that she couldn't buy a thing with the money she had squirreled away, it seemed consistent with some inner toughness of fiber for her to deny them the money.

I was dubious about the next step. The possibility of tracing Vangie's bartender friend seemed remote. The aging shovel-jawed beach boy, Griff, would get very edgy if he should come across me again. Vangie's five minutes in that kitchen intrigued me. It was a small kitchen. It wouldn't take long to find out if the money was still there, or if Griff's thorough search had found it.

Getting into Seven B the second time would be more difficult. I could be certain of one thing. I was not dealing with a group of early risers. Sliding glass doors on aluminum tracks opened from the apartment living room onto the fenced patio area. They yield as if they were made to be opened with a tire iron.

It was five after two. I picked up the phone and left a call for quarter to five. This time I had closed the outer gate. The inner latch on the sliding doors tore slowly under leverage, made a little clinking sound as it parted. In the dark apartment, I pulled the kitchen door shut behind me, clapped shut the aluminum venetian blinds, turned the lights on and went to work. The time it had taken Vangie to get the money meant a fairly intricate hiding place, something which had to be taken apart and replaced. Stove negative. Refrigerator negative. Wall oven negative. Dishwasher negative. Some of the nuts that fastened housings on were cross-threaded, indicating somebody had been there first, but there was no way of knowing if any of the places had turned up the jackpot. I stopped and leaned against the counter by the sink. I checked the disposal unit. Removing that housing would be no five-minute job, and it didn't look as if there could be any space available inside it anyway.

There was a kick stool beside the sink, the kind that rolls on concealed casters that retract when you step on it so that it stands firm. It was to give access to some of the cabinet shelves built too high to reach easily. No clue in any of them.

I looked at the ceiling fixtures. The one over the sink was a double circle of fluorescent tubing, the kind where the base fastens against the ceiling by means of a knurled center screw. I moved the kick stool over in front of the sink and turned off the lights, opened the blinds. The day was brightening rapidly and soon there would be the first horizontal rays of orange sunlight coming in from the Atlantic. Without any particular optimism, I undid the knurled screw. The base came down and hung by the wiring, a foot below the acoustic tile of the kitchen ceiling. The wires hung from the countersunk junction box. The base was round, perhaps sixteen inches in diameter. A crude rectangular hole had been cut into the tile beside the junction box. I reached up into the hole and over to the side, away from the junction box. The first packet I brought down was two inches thick, fastened with two red rubber bands. There was a fifty exposed on one side of it, a twenty on the other. The second packet was thinner, with a hundred on one side, a ten on the other. The third was the thickest of all, with twenties on either side. The last one was medium, exposing a ten and a fifty. I shoved them inside my shirt and rebuttoned it. I fitted the base back over the threaded fixture spindle, replaced the knurled screw, got down and rolled the kick stool away. Vangie had made a shrewd selection. The hiding place was obvious and unlikely.

With a satisfying weight and bulk inside my shirt and with tire iron in hand, I went out the way I had come in.

Just as I touched the gate latch, I heard a single crunch of a step on the brown pebbles behind me, and as I tried to spin, hard metal hit me briskly and solidly over the right ear. It wasn't meant to knock me down. It was perfectly gauged to do exactly what it did. With the echoes of the first red and white explosion going off in my head, I staggered back against the gate. The tire iron clanked onto the pebbles. That kind of blow on the skull creates a wave of nausea in the back of the throat, clogging and receding, coming back in diminishing force several times as vision clears.

In the increasing light I saw that Shovel Jaw looked better in his flyboy sun glasses. His eyes were small, inflamed, perhaps by his days on the beach, and his lashes were stubby, sparse and pale. They had the look you see in elephant eyes, a dulled and tricky savagery. He stood at a professional distance and held one of the most reliable and deadly of handguns aimed casually at my chest, dead center, a heavy Luger. I could see how neatly he had taken me. He had been tucked behind the plantings just to the right of the gate, perfectly content to wait there, knowing it was the only way out.

He hooked a toe under the tire iron, flipped it far to the side. "You keep getting the wrong key, buds."

"You keep pretty good track of this place."

"I run the wire from a little Jap intercom through the wall, set it on dictate at full volume, the other half of it next to my bed. I get a week off one of those little nine-volt batteries. You came through loud and clear. I was expecting somebody. Not you. Somebody I know better. Turn real slow. All the way around. That's nice. Hands flat against the gate. Keep them there. Walk your feet back toward me. A little more. Little more. Fine."

Even then he was careful. Long reach. Quick little taps with the fingertips. Fortunately he tapped the money bulge before he made any further investigation of the slight bulk in the right-hand pocket of my slacks. And it is such an unlikely weapon carried in such an improbable place, it will even get past most hasty police searches.

"Now keep yourself braced just like that with your left arm, and reach down and unbutton the shirt and shake that stuff out of there, buds."

The four packets fell. He tapped the shirt again at the waistline to be certain. Then he had me shuffle several feet to the side, maintaining the same helpless posture. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him squat, gather up the packets, the gun now in his left hand. They went into the front of his shirt.

He straightened up. "Where the hell was it?"

"In the ceiling, up underneath the big light fixture over the sink."

"Fifty hours I spent in there. So the bitch told you."

"Or maybe I'm not as stupid as you are, Griff."

"I don't make that kind of mistake, like letting you get me sore. I take it very calm, buds. I don't care who you are. I don't have to know who you are, or who told you what. All I have to do is keep my mind on this play until it's over. What you do now is open the gate very slowly, and you open it wide. And you walk slowly down the drive the way you came, with me behind you. And then you go around your car and you get in on the passenger side, and very slowly you ease yourself over behind the wheel. Let's go. There's a busted door, a tire iron. I try to fire a warning shot and it gets you in the spine. It's no sweat to me to testify, buds. Remember that. I'm clean as Girl Scouts m the area."

Never get cute with the competent ones. Amateurs with guns in their hands are dangerous, but there is almost always a delay before they can bring themselves to actually fire at a human being. The competent ones are not hesitant.

When I was behind the wheel, he closed the door, hitched close to it, rested the Luger barrel on his left thigh, aimed at my middle, his thick finger on the trigger. "Get your keys, buds, and start it up. Keep it at thirty-five. Go out to the highway and turn south."

I was one docile fellow. I wanted no lead tearing through the irreplaceable parts of wondrous, inimitable, precious me.

"How far?" I asked.

"Keep going."

After a mile or so I said, "Did they make Terry do it the second time too?"

"He was away. Shut up."

"You could be making a mistake, Griff."

"So when I find out, I'll cry a little."

The beach clutter thinned out. He told me to slow down. He had me pull over onto the right shoulder until the road was clear of the meager morning traffic. Then, at his direction, I drove diagonally across the highway, up a rutted sandy track and pulled around behind a huge billboard advertising that ocean-front piece, eleven hundred feet of Atlantic Beach, four hundred feet deep from highway to tide line, for sale or lease.

The orange-red rising sun was lifting out of the sea, the gap between it and the steel blue horizon widening. He made no mistakes getting me out of the car. We walked across sandy hummocks, past tall clumps of sea oats. We came to a swale between brown dunes which seemed to satisfy him.

"What you do now, buds, very slow, is you lie down right there flat on your back."

"Now wait a minute!"

"When you goof a play, the cost comes high. You should know a thing like that. The little ball drops in the wrong hole. Stretch out, boy. They find the Luger in your hand. After I put one in the side of your head, I even let you fire one out to sea in case some clown takes a paraffin test. There's no history on the Luger, and I put no prints on the car. The surf noise like that, who hears two shots? Nobody sees us here. We're out of sight. I was sleeping in swim trunks. So I roll the loot in my clothes and walk all the way back down the beach. Maybe I find a pretty shell. Who knows? Just stretch out nice, buds."

"Can I have a cigarette?"

"Don't use them."

"I got my own. How about it?"

"Stop stalling and... okay, light one. It'll look like you thought it all over and decided to take the jump."

I slapped my shirt pocket, reached into the right hand pocket of my slacks. The spring release jacked the little Bodyguard into my hand, and I fired once, falling to the right, rolling hard, every nerve arched tight waiting for the slug. I ended up in a prone position, braced on my elbows, left hand clamping the gun wrist to steady it. He was down. I saw his right hand on a slope of sand, the fingers opening and closing. The Luger stood upright in the soft sand a foot from his hand, barrel sunk straight down. I walked to him on my knees, holding the gun on him. I circled him, picked up his weapon, tossed it a dozen feet behind me. The upper right side of his chest had a spreading red stain sopping the thin yellow fabric of the sports shirt. He coughed weakly and blood ran from the corner of his mouth down into the coarse sand.

The reddened eyes looked vaguely at me. "Tricky bastard," he said in a half whisper. "Should have known you were taking it too easy. My play would have been to check you out better. Christ, everything feels as if it was going all loose inside me."

Where's Terry?"

"Screw you, buds."

"You aren't hit as bad as you think, Griff. The sooner you answer, the sooner I go get an ambulance."

He turned his head, coughed a heavier gout of blood into the sand. He closed his eyes. "Ans Terry. Him and the Whitney bitch. Monica Day."

Abruptly he opened his eyes very wide, threw his head back and stared at the sky. His body arched twice, thudding down against the sand, and he kicked his heels against the sand, then slowly softened and dwindled into stillness. The slug had evidently severed one of the big arteries in the right lung. It hadn't taken long. I stood up slowly, slid the Bodyguard back into the spring catch. I looked around. I could hear traffic sounds merged with the wash of the surf. It numbs, always, even when you keep asking yourself what other choice you had. Somebody watched him pull himself up by the crib bars and stand cooing and drooling, and thought him a damned fine baby. Far down the beach I saw an early-morning family moving slowly my way. Two large shapes, two tiny shapes covering more ground. I reached down, yanked the yellow shirt out of the waistband, recovered the four packets, buttoned them back inside my shirt. I thought of wrapping his hand around the Luger and putting a second slug into the same hole. But who shoots himself high in the right side of the chest?

I saw a piece of weird board in the sea grass, a splintered piece of one-by-1 a little over two feet long. I squatted near the deepest part of the swale and, working as hard and as fast as I could, using it as a crude shovel, I made him a hole as long and as wide as he was, and almost as deep as he was thick. I checked his pockets, found nothing, took another look at the beach and saw how much progress the family had made. I tugged the body down parallel with the trench, then rolled him one half turn to drop face down into it. Next I slid my board under the Luger and dropped it beside his ear and used the board to shove it down into the sand. Like a nightmare bulldozer I crawled around the area, shoving the board with two hands like a bulldozer blade, covering him over, borrowing from all sides of the swale to fill the pocket a good two feet deep above his thick dead brown neck, and at one point heard myself making a small foolish whimpering sound, shut my teeth hard and cut it off. I stood up again, sweaty and weak. The family was heading back from whence they came, back probably to a motel breakfast.

The sand was too dry to take any identifiable imprint. A footstep left a shallow pocket of sliding sand. I scraped the coughed blood under. There was no sign of him. The wind might uncover him in a day. Or cover him ten feet deeper.