Travis McGee 13 - A Tan And Sandy Silence

“He won’t be back, Mary. Are you going to miss him, particularly? You going to be lonesome?”

“That would depend, wouldn’t it?”

“Is there any of his stuff in there?”

“Not much. A few things.”

“Anything worth his coming back after?”

“I wouldn’t think so. No.”

“Now you can invite me in again.”

Her color was back. “You take a hell of a lot for granted.”

I put a knuckle under her chin and tilted her face up and looked at it inch by inch, a long and interested search. “If you want, girl, I can throw you back, like an undersized mackerel. The world is full of Carl Bregos. It’s up to you.”

She twisted her chin free. “I guess I wouldn’t want to be thrown back, Gav. I guess it wouldn’t fit my image. Was there really a Lois Jefferson?”

“If you think there was.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then there never was such a girl.”

“Poor Carl. Do you always get what you want?”

“I usually get what I think I want.”

She tilted her shoulders one way, her hips the other. Her look was challenge. “And sometimes you find out you didn’t really want it after all. Me, too. Win a little, lose a little, huh?”

“If you wanted Brego, you’d still have him. I wouldn’t have gotten to say more than two words to you.”

“Like I was saying when we were so rudely interrupted, you want to come into my house? It’s hot out here when the wind quits.”

So we went in, and I wondered why I could find no trace of a Canadian accent. She had to be Lisa Dissat.

Eleven

THOUGH THE plantings were different, the patio furniture of a different style and arrangement, the pool and the cold water shower head were placed just as in my rented garden. I went to the shower and turned it on and sluiced off the sand that had caked thickly on my sweaty back and on my left side where I had rolled to get up quickly. The woman stood and watched me and then took a big, striped beach towel from a stone bench and brought it to me as I stepped out of the spray and turned the shower off.

As I dried myself, I realized how sexually aware of her I had become. Physical readiness. All her honey-brown curves and cushions were there, appropriate, ready for more.

It is such an old old thing, the pattern of male conflict that wins the female. It is deep in the blood and the secretions, a gut knowledge. We are mammals still caught up in all the midbrain mechanisms of survival. The bison female stood long ago and watched the males thud their brute heads together, tear up the sod with their hooves, watched the loser lope heavily away, and then she waited patiently to be mounted by the victor. The stronger the male, the stronger the calves, and the better protected the calves would be during the long months of helplessness. The victorious male, turning from battle to the prize of battle, would be physiologically ready to mate her and have no question about her readiness.

I knew the musky readiness of the woman. She told me in the way she stood, in the way she looked at me, in the shape of her placid mouth. Maybe ten percent of what we can say to each other is with words, and words can conceal as easily as they can reveal. The rest of it is body language, our cants, tilts, postures, textures.

And who can prove there is not an actual telepathic signal being transmitted? Tiny electrical discharges occur in the living mind in great and complex profusion. Strong emotion, tautly focused, may send out an impulse so strong it can be read. Hate, fear, anger, joy, lust… these all seem contagious beyond all objective reason. I knew she was so swollen, so moist, so ready, that if I trotted her into the shadowy coolness of the apartment and into her bed, there would be no time or need for foreplay, that she would cling and grind and gasp and within a minute begin to go into a climax.

The violence had caught us up in the first act of the fleshy ceremony, and I wanted to take that quick, primitive jump so badly I felt hollowed out by the ache of it. Bed was her country. That was where, after the first great surge, she would take command. I would become what she was accustomed to and lose any chance of keeping her off balance. I shook myself like a big tired Labrador after a long swim, balled the damp towel, and flipped it at her face. She moved in her slow sensuous dream, getting her hand partway up before it hit her squarely in the face. It fluttered to the floor. “Hey!” she said, frowning. “What’s that for?”

“Pick it up!”

“Sure,” she said. She picked the towel up. “What are you sore about? Why are you getting ugly and spoiling the fun?”

“He was supposed to hammer me to bloody ruin out there. That was supposed to be the fun. Thanks a lot.”

She came toward me. “Darling, you’ve got it all wrong. I was getting bored with him! I was so glad you came along.”

“Sure, Mary. Only I know the Bregos of this world. They don’t start anything they don’t think they can win. Their cheap women chouse them into it because they like the blood. You set me up by reacting to me. If you’d cooled it, there’d have been no fight. He was going to smash me around and that was going to turn you on for him, so you’d hustle him into your sack for a quick hump. A little midday entertainment. No thanks.”

She leaned forward from the waist, face contorting, voice turning to a squalling fishwife. “Goddamn you! You moved in on us with all that crap about me looking like somebody else. You thought I was worth the chance of getting your ass whipped. Don’t slam the gate on the way out, you son of a-” Her lips started to say the obvious word, but I had fitted my big right hand to her slender throat, just firmly enough to cut off her wind, not firmly enough to crush any of the tender bones and cartilage. The ball of my thumb reached to the big artery in the side of her throat under the jaw hinge, and my first and middle finger reached to the artery on the left side of her throat.

Her eyes went wide, and she dropped the towel and put her nails into the back of my hand and my wrist. I pinched the arteries gently, drastically reducing the flow of blood to the brain. It gave her a gray-out to the edge of fainting. Her eyes went out of focus, and her mouth sagged. When I let up, she tried to kick me, so I pinched again. Her arms fell slack to her sides. When I released the pressure, adjusting my hand enough so that she could breathe, she raised her hands and then hung them upon my wrist.

I smiled at her, pulling her a half-step closer and said, “If you get loud and say nasty things, dear, if you get on my nerves, I can hold you like this, and I can take this free hand and make a big fist like this, and I can give you one little pop right here that will give you a nose three inches wide and a quarter inch high.”

“Please,” she said in a rusty little voice.

“You can get a job as a clown. Or you can see if you can find a surgeon willing to try to rebuild it.”

“Please,” she said again.

I let go of her and said, “Pick up the towel, love.”

She coughed and bent and picked it up and backed away. I turned away from her and went to the cottage apartment and pulled the door open and went in. I went to the kitchen alcove and checked the bottle supply. I heard her slide the glass door shut again.

I fixed some Booth’s with Rose’s lime juice and a dash of bitters, humming softly but audibly. I took my glass over to the couch and sat and smiled at her and said, “Did I ever tell you I read minds?”

“You must be some kind of a crazy person.” It was not said as an insult. It was said softly, wonderingly.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “Many messages are coming through. Ah, yes. You are wondering if you can get the hotel management to throw a net over me and get me out of here. No, dear. I think they would believe me instead of you. If they make life difficult, I could go down to the harbor and find your friend Brego and bounce him up and down until he agrees to write out a personal history of your touching romance and sign it. Then I could go find your husband and peddle it to him. It would cut the heart out of any alimony payments.”

“I just want you to-”

“Where and when did you meet Brego?”

“On the beach. Over a week ago. My neck hurts.”

“Of course it hurts a little! How could I do that without giving you a sore neck? Let me see. What else is in your mind? You’re wondering if I’m going to lay you and if I’ll be nicer to you afterward. The answer to both questions, dear, is: time will tell.”

She went over to the kitchen bar. Ice clinked into a glass. She came back with a drink and sat on a hassock five feet away from me. Her eyes looked better. Her confidence was coming back. She squared her shoulders, tugged the bikini top and bottom into better adjustment, tilted her head, and risked a meager smile. “I guess all that lunch talk about land investments was a lot of crap, huh?”

“What makes you think so? It’s what I do.”

“You don’t act like it’s what you do. Like the way you were with Carl and with me, Gavin. I mean… well, it’s like you enjoyed hurting.”

“Well… let’s suppose there’s a man with a good idea where a new interstate is going or a new jetport, and suppose we teamed up, and you had some nice long weekends with him, and he clued you about where to buy the raw land. Mary I just couldn’t stand having you get tricky with me about something like that. I wouldn’t want to worry about you selling that information to somebody else. I’d have to have you so trained for the work that if I just stare at you for ten seconds, you start to have the cold sweats and the gags: Hurting is purely business. I guess I enjoy anything that helps make money.”

She thought that over, sipping, frowning. “But it’s not as if I was going to work with you, Mr. Lee.”

“Time will tell.”

“You keep saying that. Well, I’m not going to work with you or for you. For that kind of work you’re talking about, what you want is some kind of a hooker, it seems to me.”

“Does it seem like that to you? Really? I wouldn’t say that. You’re built for the work. You have just enough cheap invitation in the way you look and the way you handle yourself to keep a man from wasting a lot of time on unnecessary preliminaries.”

“Now wait one goddamn minute-”

“Are you still with Brego? No. Then shut up.”

“I’m sorry. Don’t get sore.”

“Fifty bucks makes you a hooker. For five hundred you’re a call girl. Five thousand makes you a courtesan.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind. But when we move the decimal point one more place, your end of the arrangement is fifty thousand. That makes you a career woman.”

The pointed tongue moved slowly across the underlip. She swallowed and said, “I’ve got my own thing going, thanks.”

“Alimony is a cheap hustle.”

“It all depends.*

‘On how much he’s got? On the evidence? On the law? It has to be a cheap hustle, because when there’s enough money involved, there’s more profit from going in some other direction.“

I had wanted to test just how deep the hardness went. Her eyes changed. She slopped some of her drink onto her bare knees, wiped it off with her hand. “That’s crazy talk.”

“Not for careful people who’ve got the right contacts.”

“For me, no thanks. I just wouldn’t have the nerve, Gav.”

I got up and moved around, carrying my drink. I did not know where to take it from there. I could guess that she had been ordered to keep to herself in Grenada but had finally gotten so bored she had become reckless and picked up Brego. Now the Brego game had mushroomed into something a lot less comfortable for her. If she could live quietly at the inn for the length of time she was supposed to, she could get away with it. She wasn’t too much shorter than Mary or too much younger. Dark hair. All American women look alike to the help.

I hadn’t wanted to let myself think about Mary. From the physical description the housekeeper had given Jeannie Dolan, this woman was the Canadian, Lisa Dissat. If she was here, Mary was dead. I had the beginnings of an idea. I went back to the conversations at lunch. Neither the first name of her supposed husband nor her Stateside residence had come up.

After mental rehearsal and rewrite I sat once again and looked placidly at her and said, “The way you spell that last name is bee-are-oh-el-el?”

“Yes.”

“Kind of unusual. It rings a bell someplace. Mary Broll. Mary Broll. It’s been bothering me ever since I met you in the bar.”

“Why bother with it? Want me to fresh up your drink?”

“Got it!”

“Got what?”

“Where’d you register from? One buck will get you five it’s the Fort Lauderdale area. Sure! We had a syndicate set up a couple of years back and we wanted a builder in the Lauderdale area who could put up a hotel and marina complex in a hurry. Heavy-set fellow name of Broll. Big. Not old. Frank? Wally? Jerry?… Harry! Damn right. Harry Broll.”

“Maybe there’s more Brolls than you know, Gav.”

“Bring me your purse, honey.”

“What?”

“Go get your purse. Your pocketbook. Your handbag. Bring it to dear old Gavin Lee so he can look at your ID, dear.”

She gave me a broad, bright smile, and her teeth chattered for a moment before she got herself under control. “Okay. My secret is out. You are speaking of the man I used to love.”

“How long have you been married to him?”

“Nearly four years.”

“Any kids? No? Lucky. Kids seem to get the rough end of the stick. Bring me the purse, honey.”

“Why should I? I told you, didn’t I?”

“Honey, if we stop getting along, we’re going to have to hurt your neck a little until we get squared away.”

“Please. It makes me sick to my, stom-”

“Get the purse!”

She brought it to me. I found the billfold. I examined the identification. I looked at the signature on the driver’s license. I knew my Mary had signed it, and I knew, looking at it, that she was dead.

“Honey, go over to that desk and take a piece of paper and sign your name on it. Mary D. Broll. And bring it back here to me.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I am the fellow who sat across the table from Mary D. Broll at Le Dome of the Four Seasons in Lauderdale two years ago last month. There were about ten of us at that dinner. Harry was making the big gesture, trying to sucker us into letting him build for us. I spent the evening trying to make his wife. She wouldn’t give me a clue. I always have a better memory for the ones who get away. Here’s her signature right here. Go over there and forge it for me, honey.”

“Who are you?” she demanded, close to tears.

I gave her a broad, egg-sucking smile. “Me? I am the fellow who all of a sudden owns himself a whole woman, right from dandruff to bunions and everything in between. Broads like you don’t play games like this unless there’s money in it. And now it’s our money, dear. I am the fellow who is going to get it all out of you, and I am going to beat on you until you convince me there’s nothing left to tell. Me? Hell, baby, I am your. new partner.”

“Please. Please. I can’t tell you-”

“The little lady in this corner is getting one chance and one chance only, to go over to the desk and sign her real, true, legal name to a piece of paper and bring it back to the gentleman. And if it turns out that it is not her real true name, it is going to be one of those long afternoons. We’re going to have to stuff a towel in the little lady’s mouth so the screaming won’t spoil anybody’s vacation.”

She walked to the desk, her back very straight. She wrote on a piece of paper and brought it back and handed it to me and began to weep. She covered her face and ran for the bedroom. Damned few women look well from a rear elevation, running away from you in a bikini. She was not one of them. She had written her name neatly. It was a schoolgirl neatness. Lisa Dissat.

I slowly crumpled the sheet of hotel paper. I felt tired. I got up and walked back to the bedroom where she lay upon the unchanged sheets she and Brego had stained, sweated, and rumpled. She was on her side, knees hiked up, clenched fists tucked under her chin. She made sucking sounds, whining sounds. Fetal agony.

In the better interrogations there is always a good guy and a bad guy. I had been the bad guy. Time to change roles. I went into the bathroom and took a hand towel and soaked it in cold water. I wrung it out, took it to the bed, sat on the side of the bed, and cupped my hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward me. She resisted and made protest sounds, then let herself roll onto her back.

I hitched closer and gently swabbed her face and forehead. Her eyes went wide with astonishment The last thing she had expected was gentleness. She snuffled. Her face looked touchingly young. Tears had washed away the challenge and the hardness.

“Have you got anything with you to prove your name is Lisa Dissat?”

“N-no.”

“And you’re pretending to be Mary Broll?”

“Yes. But I-”

“Does Broll know you’re impersonating his wife?”

“Yes.”

“Were you having an affair with him?”

“Yes.”

‘Where’s the real Mary Broll?“

“… I don’t know.”

“Lisa?”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do! I didn’t!”

“Lisa!”

“I couldn’t have changed anything.”

“Just say she’s dead, Lisa. Go ahead.”

“I didn’t know he-”

“Lisa! Say it!”

“She’s dead. Okay. She’s dead.”

“Harry killed her?”

She looked startled. “Oh, no!”

“Who killed her?”

“Please, Gavin. If he ever knew I told anybody-”

“You’re in a real box, dear. You can worry about what’s going to happen in the future, or you can worry about what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes.”

“I don’t even know if he really meant to.”

“What’s his name?”

“… Paul. Paul Dissat He is… my first cousin. We worked for the same man. In Quebec. Mr. Dennis Waterbury. Paul got me the job there. I’m a secretary. I was a secretary. Paul is an accountant. He is… very trusted. I think he might be crazy. Really crazy. Maybe he really planned to kill Harry’s wife. I don’t know. I don’t even know if he knows.”

“How much money is involved?”

“An awful lot. Really, an awful lot of money.”

“Stop crying.”

“I want to talk about it, and I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been scared for so long! I want you to make me tell you all of it, but I’m afraid to tell you.”

Twelve

IT was a very long afternoon for both of us. But longer for Lisa Dissat, because from time to time she tried to get cute. But the more she tried it, the more conditioned she became, and the more quickly she would correct herself.

At last I was able to bring the complex, wandering, fragments of the story into reasonably sharp focus.

Paul Dissat had hungered for a long time to share in some of the large profits Dennis Waterbury made on his varied operations and investments in resort lands, oil and gas drilling programs, new urban office structures, tanker leasing, and so on. Paul Dissat was well paid. There were staff bonuses when things went well. Paul Dissat was shrewd enough to realize that without investment capital he had no chance of participating in the profits and that if he used his skills to tinker with the records of the various corporations and their shifting, changing bank balances, sooner or later an audit would catch him.

He was single, she said, and did not look like anybody’s idea of an accountant. Bachelor apartment, sports car. She said he was a superb skier, proficient at downhill racing and slalom. She said that three years ago, when she was twenty-three, she had run up bills she was unable to pay. She was afraid of losing her job. She had phoned Paul. She had not seen him in several years. He had taken her to dinner and back to his apartment and made love to her. He had paid her overdue accounts and arranged for her to be employed by Waterbury. After they had been intimate many times, he had told her of his plan to share in some of the fat profits from Waterbury’s operations. He would arrange the necessary leverage through her. He said he would let her know when the right opportunity came along.

He arranged for her to seduce the particularly unattractive minor partner in one of the Waterbury developments and to pretend infatuation. Paul prompted her during the affair, telling her what her lines should be. Eventually, in order to safely end the affair without Lisa going to his wife, the man deposited a substantial amount of cash in her savings account. Paul told her that the cash was the proceeds from the stock in a Waterbury enterprise that the man had sold to get the money to buy her off. Paul had taken all of the cash except a thousand dollars.

They had done it once again prior to her affair with Harry Broll and made a little more than the first time. Paul explained to her that a man who has suddenly made a substantial profit tends to be generous with a mistress who is becoming too demanding and possessive.

I wanted to know why she kept so little of the take and let her first cousin have all the rest She said it was because she was in love with him. At first.

“The third one was Harry,” she said. “I went to the hotel and took dictation. Just like the first two men. Ten minutes after I looked at him in a certain way and told him how real brilliant he was, I was helping him take off my bra, because his hands were shaking so bad. Then after Harry went back to the States, Paul made me quit my job and follow him. I didn’t want to. He said this could be the big one, worth a big risk. So… I did what he said. Harry got jumpy when I phoned him last November from Miami. He was glad, but he was nervous, too. I told him I had followed him because I was so in love with him I couldn’t live without him, and I was putting my future in his hands.”

Harry had set her up in the apartment in the Casa de Playa. At about that time Paul Dissat had been transferred to the administrative offices of SeaGate, Inc. in West Palm Beach, just as he had planned and expected. SeaGate was a large, complex situation with very complicated financing and special tax problems. Paul had been involved in it from the beginning.

“I called Paul once, but he got very angry. He told me to keep on following orders. The orders were to make myself just as agreeable as I possibly could, to make Harry as happy as possible, to really work on the sex part of it and do anything and everything to give him so much pleasure he’d never be able to get along without me. That wasn’t easy, because Harry worked hard and he didn’t keep in shape and didn’t have much energy left for bed. But after I learned what turned him on the most, it got better for both of us. I had to pretend to be passionately in love with him. You know, it wasn’t such a bad life. Go shopping, go out on the beach, get your hair done, watch your weight, do your nails, take naps. Not a bad life. Then a few days before Christmas, Paul wanted to know when Harry would be with me, definitely. I said I could make sure he’d come in the middle of the day on the twenty-third and spend an hour and a half with me. He told me not to be surprised if Mrs. Broll showed up. I couldn’t understand what Paul was trying to do. He told me to shut up and do what I was told. She came barging in as Harry was leaving. Better looking than I’d thought from what Harry had told me about her. She called me some things, and I called her some things, and she went away crying.”

Harry Broll had then become very upset. He had told Lisa Dissat that he needed her, that he wanted to get a divorce from Mary and marry her, but he couldn’t do that yet. He had to make up with Mary, humble himself, promise never to see Lisa again. He said he had to do that because without her financial backing he was going to miss out on his great opportunity at SeaGate. He said he had to move her out of the apartment and be very careful about seeing her. He said it might last until May, but then he could leave Mary and marry her.

On the night of January fourth, shortly before midnight, Harry came to Lisa’s motel, where he had moved her after taking her out of the apartment. He was drunk. He said that he and Mary had a terrible fight, and she was leaving him. As soon as Harry had passed out, Lisa phoned Paul to report, as required, any new development. Paul drove over to the motel, left his rented car there, borrowed Harry’s car and house keys, and told Lisa to undress the unconscious Harry and keep him quiet for as long as she could manage.

“He wouldn’t tell me what he was going to do. He acted all… keyed up, excited, on top of the world. He came back at daylight. He seemed very tired and very relaxed. He helped me get Harry up. Harry was confused. He knew Paul, of course, because of SeaGate and knew he was my cousin. But that was the first he realized that Paul knew about Harry and me. Paul pretended to be very upset about the affair, I guess to keep Harry off-balance. The three of us went back in Harry’s car to Harry’s house on Blue Heron Lane. Paul kept telling Harry he was in trouble. Paul made me wait in the living room. He took Harry into the bedroom. Harry made a terrible sound. A kind of bellowing groan. I heard heavy footsteps running, and then I heard Harry throwing up. When Paul brought him back into the living room, all cleaned up, Harry was like a sleepwalker. Paul kept saying it was an accident, and Harry kept saying anything like that just couldn’t be an accident, and Paul kept telling him that everything could be worked out for the best if Harry would just pull himself together. Paul had me make coffee, a lot of it.”

Mary had, of course, been interrogated by Paul Dissat and murdered by Paul Dissat when he finally had everything he needed-the air reservations and tickets from the travel agency, the hotel reservation, the complete details of her arrangement with her trust officer, the fact that only one friend knew where she was going and why: Holly Dressner at 27 Blue Heron Lane, a few doors away. And he had the ninety-two hundred dollars in cash she had drawn from the income account of TA 5331. Mary was half packed for the trip. She had bought resort clothes. At Paul’s order Lisa finished the packing, hunting through Mary’s belongings for what she thought she would need.

“It was weird with her on the bed all covered up. I tried some of the stuff on in her dressing room. She was a little hippier than I am. I mean some of the things were a size ten when I’d be better off in an eight. Harry was like a very sick person. He couldn’t seem to get himself out of it. Tears kept rolling down his face. Once he just sort of hung on me. He grabbed me and put so much weight on me he nearly rode me right down on to the floor. He was asking me something, mumbling about how could Paul do that, how could he. They had a terrible argument later on. I couldn’t hear most of it. It was about what to do with her body. Harry said he couldn’t stand having her buried on the place. There was something about the seawall and a transit mix truck. Paul told Harry she was going to be buried right on the property, then Harry would not go back on any promises, ever.”

She was given her orders, and Paul made her repeat them until there was no chance of her forgetting them. Drive to Miami International. Find accommodations for the night of the fifth and sixth. Stay in the room. Use Mary’s ticket on the seventh. Use Mary’s driver’s license as proof of birthplace when needed. Use her immunization certificate if needed. Use her hairstyle. Wear big dark sun glasses. Travel in her new clothes. Go to Grenada. Register as Mary Broll. Live quietly. Keep to yourself. Send some postcards to Holly Dressner. Pick the kind which do not require a message. Sign with a little drawing of a smiling face.

“I did try to keep to myself. But, God, I’ve been here a long long time, Gav. I really have.”

“What do you do next? What are Paul’s orders?”

“On Monday, next Monday, I’m supposed to send a cable. Paul dictated it to me.”

I made her get it. It was to Woodrow Willow at Southern National in Miami.

PROCEED WITH LOAN

AS ARRANGED EARLY JANUARY

HAVE ADVISED HARRY

BY PHONE.

HOME SOON.

MARY BROLL.

Harry’s part in it would be to phone Woodrow Willow that same day, Monday, April twenty-sixth, and tell him that Mary had reached him by overseas phone call from Grenada to tell him she had cabled Willow to go ahead, tell him not to worry, tell him she would be home soon. He would inform Willow that Mary had given him the name of the travel agency she had used and had told him that her neighbor, Mrs. Dressner, had known all along where she was.

Very nice. If Willow felt like double-checking after he got the cable, he could call the travel agency and call Mrs. Dressner.

“Can’t they check back on an overseas call?” I asked.

“Sure. That’s why I call him at his office next Sunday afternoon. I’ve got the number. He’ll have a secretary there. It will be person-to-person. Mrs. Broll calling Mr. Broll. That’s for afterward, in case they do a lot of checking.”

“Checking what?”

“I’m reserved to leave here on Monday, the third of May. Paul just didn’t have time to work everything out before I left. But the way he wants it to happen, Mary Broll will have some kind of accident. He’s going to get a message to me telling me what to do. I just… leave everything of hers and arrive back home as myself somehow. Maybe a towel and a beach bag left on the beach; and nothing missing but a swim suit and a cap.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“The way I understand it, Gav, Harry invested seven hundred thousand in SeaGate. The letter of agreement said that on or before April thirtieth, he has to pay in another three hundred thousand to make one million dollars. There is a block of stock escrowed for him and a note escrowed, saying SeaGate owes him seven hundred thousand plus interest. It is an… indivisible block. He takes it all and wipes out the money SeaGate owes him and pays three hundred more. If he doesn’t, he just gets his seven hundred back with interest, and the hundred thousand shares go to increase the number of shares the corporation is selling to the public and to reduce the number the stockholders will offer. There is no way in the world Harry can get that money except from the bank on a loan on Mary’s trust. He can’t get an extension, and he can’t cut down the number of shares he’ll take. And he is borrowed to the hilt everywhere else.”

“So he had to keep Mary alive for about four months after she died?”

She shivered. “Or lose a big profit, a million and a half.”

“How much to your cousin?”

“He said a million. He didn’t say that in front of Harry. I think he could get it all out of Harry.” She frowned. “The thing about Paul, he stopped giving a damn what he does. It doesn’t matter to him any more. It scares me. Once when I was little, a deaf boy took me to the movies, and he laughed when nobody else was laughing. Paul is like that now, sort of.

“And I suppose Harry has been making a big fuss, storming around, shaking up Mary’s friends, demanding they tell him where they’re hiding her.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess it would make him look better later on, if people could testify to that. I don’t know how he is. I keep wondering how he’ll sound on the phone.”

Her voice dragged. Her face looked puffy with fatigue. Her eyes were irritated because of the many times the tears had come. There wasn’t much left of the day. She said, “Can we go for a walk on the beach? Would that be okay, Gavin?”

She got up and got a gaudy print dashaki and pulled it over her head, pushed her hair back into semiorder, put her big glasses on. “Gee, I feel emptied out, as if it’s out of my hands somehow. I should be scared, but I’m too beaten down to be scared. You’re in charge, Gav. You’ve taken over. I don’t know where we’re going, but you’re running the ship.”

It was so nicely done I had my mouth all set for the bait and the hook. Poor little victim of a sordid conspiracy, clinging to the first man who’d give her the benefit of the doubt.

Sweet little immature face and a busy, nimble little butt and all the conscience and mercy of a leopard shark. Let me be your little pal, mister. Nobody else has ever understood me but you. She had slipped up on one little detail, but it was a bad slip.

She let me see how she must have looked trying on Mary’s new resort clothes while Mary lay dead. Probably Lisa turned this way and that, looking in the mirror, smoothing her rear with the backs of her hands, wishing the damned dead woman had bought the cute clothes one size smaller. She tried on clothes while the men argued in the next room. “Look at it this way, Broll. You had a look at her an hour and a half ago. They’ll want to know why you waited so long before reporting it. What do you tell them?” While Lisa hummed and bit her lip and frowned at herself and wondered if the colors were right for her.

Thirteen

WE WALKED Up the beach in the orange and gold light of tropic sunset. The tide was moving out and the packed sand was damp and firm under our tread, a coarse, yellow-brown sand. The sun was behind us setting into the sea just out beyond Long Point. Far ahead, beyond the rocks that marked the end of Grand Anse beach and beyond St. George’s harbor, was the toy-town look of the town at evening, spilled up the green slopes, small formal shapes with windows looking toward the sea.

We walked past the Grand Anse Hotel, the Grenada Beach Hotel, the Holiday Inn. Cars had come down to the public areas to park under the sea grapes and the almond trees. People swam in the relative cool of twilight, and people walked the long broad promenade of packed sand. Sloops and ketches and multihull sailboats were anchored off the two-mile crescent of beach. A fast boat was pulling a limber black girl on water skis between the anchored sailboats. Behind us was the blinding dazzle of the sun’s path on the quiet sea, and our shadows ahead of us were long in a slanting pattern against the damp sand.

“You were going to talk, I thought?”

“I am. I am.” She moved closer, linked her arm through mine, hugged it against her body, and looked up at me. “I have to, I guess. Do you know how things can happen to your life that… don’t fit it somehow? Then everything else isn’t real. When you forget, then everything around you is real again, but what happened doesn’t seem as if it could have ever happened. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Not yet, girl. Not yet.”

“I guess in my own way I was as numb as Harry was. It seems like ten years ago, practically.”

“Didn’t you think it was pretty damned stupid for Paul to kill Mary Broll? Didn’t you tell him it was stupid?”

She had to wait until we had passed a group of people strolling at a slower pace than ours. She indicated a stubby cement pier at the far border of the Holiday Inn property. It projected only to the surf line and seemed to have no purpose other than as some sort of groyne to retain the sand. We went up the slope of beach, stepped up onto it, and walked out to sit near the end, our backs to the sunset.

She laced her fingers in mine, tugged at my hand, and rested it palm upward against the smooth, round brown of mid-thigh. She frowned toward the town.

“I’ve thought about it and thought about it, Gavin. I guess it got to be pretty obvious to Paul that an affair with me wasn’t going to be enough leverage on Harry. Harry and his wife weren’t getting along so great anyway. There wasn’t anything real important to expose, you might say. So why did he tip off Mary Broll so she’d catch me and Harry together? Why did he make sure she would catch us? Why did he tell me to yell at Mrs. Broll and make a big scene out of it? Motive, right?”

The point was well taken. Mary would certainly confide her problem to someone. The scene at the apartment had attracted so much attention that even Jeannie Dolan heard about it later. Of late, Harry had been blustering around, threatening people, trying to locate his dead wife.

If the police were tipped, dug for Mary, and found her, even the most inept state’s attorney could put together a case R Lee Bailey couldn’t successfully defend.

“So, Lisa, you think Paul had decided to kill her when he made the phone call to her. Does that make sense? He didn’t know then she’d decided to go away. He didn’t know then what she’d arrange about the loan. She could have left without any warning at all. He’d have to be some kind of warlock, reading the future.”

“I know. I think about it until my head starts to hurt, and then I give up.”

“Did you think he’d ever kill anybody?”

“You don’t go around wondering whether people you know can kill other people, do you? I knew he was mean. I knew how nasty he could get. I knew there was something kinky about him, the way he got something special out of sleeping with me and then making me sleep with those older guys. It was something to do with him never getting married, I think. We look alike, like brother and sister. His eyes are the same as mine, the same dark dark brown and long black lashes and-see?-the left one set straight, and the right one slanty. His mouth is like mine, a lot of natural red to the lips, and the mouth small, and the lower lip heavy and curling out from the upper lip. We both look younger than we are, but that’s always been true of the whole family. Aside from that there isn’t the least thing feminine about him. Even my eyes and mouth don’t look girlish on Paul, somehow. Except when he’s asleep. That’s strange, isn’t it? I’d watch him sleeping, and then his eyes and lips would look the most like mine and make me feel strange. He is big! He’s almost as tall as you are and as big,through the chest. But he moves a lot quicker. I guess I mean his normal way of moving is quicker. Nobody is quicker than you were with Carl. Jesus! You looked kind of dumb and sleepy, as if you couldn’t believe he was really going to beat on you. Then you were something else.”

“I want to know more about Paul. How old is he?”

“He’ll be coming up onto thirty-seven, I think in July. Yes. Other companies have tried to hire him away from Mr. Waterbury. So I guess he’s a good accountant. He stays in great shape all year. He does competition slalom in the winter and tennis in the summer. His legs are tremendously powerful, like fantastic springs.”

“An exercise nut?”

“With weights and springs and pulleys and things. And a sun lamp that travels by itself from one end of you to the other and turns itself off. He’s really happy about those legs. One funny thing, he’s as dark as I am, and he has to shave twice a day when he goes out in the evening, but on his body, except for those places where everybody has hair, he hasn’t any. His legs have a really great shape, and there isn’t any hair on them or his chest or his arms. The muscles are long and smooth, not bunchy. When he tenses them, his legs are like marble.”

“You called him kinky.”

She frowned and thought for a little while. I saw the point of her tongue slowly moisten the curve of underlip. “No. That isn’t the right word. The whole sex scene isn’t a big thing with him. I mean it’s there, all right. It was something we would do. You know, when he couldn’t unwind and get to sleep, he’d phone me to come over to his place down in the city. We were five blocks apart He makes me feel… I don’t know… like one of his damn exercise machines, something with a motor and weights and springs, so that afterward he could put it in his exercise log. Ten minutes on the rowing machine. Eight minutes on the Lisa machine.”

“I can’t really get the picture of you two.”

“What’s so difficult, honey?”

“You move to Quebec and change jobs because he tells you to. You come over whenever he phones you. He tells you to seduce Mr. X and then Mr. Y and tells you how to extort money from them, and he takes most of it. He tells you to seduce Harry, quit your job, and follow Harry to Florida, and he tells you to come here and pretend to be Mary. You are awfully goddamn docile, Lisa.”

“I know. I know. Yes. It’s funny about him. He’s just so absolutely positive you’re going to do what he tells you to do, it’s a lot easier to do it than try to say you won’t.”

“Did you ever try to say you wouldn’t do something he asked you to do?”

“God, yes! In the very beginning, before he even got the job for me. I was at his place, and he asked me to get him something from across the room. I was sitting at the table, and I said something like ‘You’re not a cripple, are you?’ He got up and went behind me and hit me on top of the head with his fist. I blacked out and fell off the chair and cut my chin. It did something funny to my neck pinched a nerve or something, and I was in bed for three days with it, practically in agony. He was a darling. He waited on me hand and foot. He was so sweet and considerate. I guess… it’s easier to do what he says, because you have the feeling that neither of you knows what he’ll do if you say no. At work he’s another person.”

“How do you feel about the way you’re crossing him?”

“It keeps making me feel as if I’m going to throw up.” She looked up at me with a piquant tilt of her dark head. “It’s funny,” she said. “I never saw you before today. Then you scared me so. You really did. Now you’re so nice and understanding. I can really talk to you. About everything.”

Her fingers were laced in mine, and she pressed down on my hand, holding the back of my hand against the round, tan thigh, slowly swinging her dangling leg as she did so. I felt the smooth working of the thigh muscles against the back of my hand. It was a sensuous and persuasive feeling. She was a pretty piece, making her constant offer of herself in any way that she could.

“Why trust me?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I’m trying to. I guess I can’t go it alone, no matter what it is. I appreciate you didn’t mark me up any. I mean I hate to get belted in the face where it shows. It cuts a person’s mouth inside, and there’s a big puffy bruise and maybe a mouse comes under a person’s eye. It’s a bad thing to do to a girl. She goes around ashamed.”

“Paul belted you?”

“Sometimes.”

“But you trust him?”

“He’s a blood relative. Maybe I shouldn’t trust him at all. He’s strange. He really is. It doesn’t show. You have to know him.”

“I keep thinking of how boxed in you are.”

“How do you mean?”

“Suppose after you go back, Harry is picked up for killing his wife. They have her body. It’s certainly no big problem finding the girlfriend and proving you were there. With that starting point, Lisa, how long before the state attorney’s investigators learn about the impersonation? Would you want to explain on the stand why you took her money, her tickets, her reservations, her clothes, and her car?”

There was a sudden sallowness. “Come on now. Don’t, honey! Jesus! I don’t like jokes like that. We’re in this together, aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

“What do you want of me? What more do you want that I’m not ready and eager and willing to give, dear?”

“Do you think Cousin Paul is going to give you a short count on the money again?”

“If he gets the chance.”

I pulled my hand away from her. “Now what would keep him from having the chance? Me?”

“Darling, please don’t try to confuse me.”

“How am I confusing you?”

“Well… you said you own me now, and you said there had to be money in it. So I guess you’ll go after the money. I guess you’d have to have my help.”

“Doing what?”

“That would be up to you, dear.”

“To figure out how you can help me get rich?”

“That’s the name of your game, I thought.”

“Maybe Paul’s game is over.”

“How do you mean?”

“Harry Broll is not a complete idiot. Why couldn’t he have gone quietly to the police and managed to sell them the truth? So they lay back and wait for you to return and for Paul to make his move, and scoop you both up.”

“Damn! I forgot to tell you about the letter I wrote Paul. He was right there when I wrote it. He found Mary Broll’s personal stationery for me to use. He told me what to write. I had to do it over because he said it was too neat the first time. I dated it January fifth. It said that Paul had been right and I never should have gotten involved with Harry. It said Harry had done something terrible while drunk and had gotten me to his house afterward to help him but I couldn’t. I said I was frightened and I was going away and to wait until I got in touch with him. He held it in front of Harry and made him read it. Then he had me seal it in an envelope and put a stamp on it and address it to Paul’s place in West Palm Beach. Paul put it in his pocket to mail as soon as he could.”

The sun was gone. The world was darkening. The sky was a dying furnace, and the sea was slate. We walked back the way we had come but more slowly.

“Gavin?”

“Shut up, Lisa. Please.”

The beach was almost empty. The outdoor torches had been lighted at the Spice Island Inn. Birds were settling noisily to bed, arguing about the best places. Canned music was coming over allweather speakers, a steel band playing carnival calypso.

When we reached her gate, she said, “Now can I say something? Like, please come in?”

“I want to sit out in the breeze, thanks. Over there.”

“Join you?”

“Sure.”

“Bring you a drink, maybe?”

“Thanks. Same as before.”

I sat deep in a chaise, legs up, trying to work it out in every possible combination and permutation. With Mary Broll dead, Woodrow Willow was supposed to slam the lid on that trust account. Harry was probably the beneficiary under her will, possibly a coexecutor along with the bank. But had she died in early January, even in a traffic accident, the chances of processing the estate quickly enough for Harry to get his, three hundred thousand before April thirtieth were very damned remote. She had to die later on.

So what if Meyer and I had not had all those vague feelings of uneasiness? What if we had accepted my phone call as being proof enough that she was alive and well and living in Grenada? Then it would have worked like a railroad watch. The timely loan. The news of pending reconciliation. Enough supporting information for Willow to consider the cable legitimate authorization. Then the ironic tragedy. Estranged wife on the point of returning home to her contrite husband, missing in mysterious drowning incident. Search is on for body. However…

“Here you go,” she said. I thanked her for the drink She had brought one for herself. She sat on the side of the chaise, facing me. I moved my legs over to make room. The stars were beginning to come out I could see that she had brushed her hair, freshened her mouth. The bright, block print dashaki had deep side slits, and she adjusted herself and it, either by accident or design, so that the side slit showed the outside of a bare thigh and hip as high as the waist, a smoothness of flesh in the dying day that was not interrupted by the narrow encirclement of bikini I had seen there before.

“You certainly do an awful lot of thinking,” she said.

“And here I am, dear, alive and well.”

“But you have been terribly terribly hurt a few times, Gav.”

“The times when I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

“Do I keep you from thinking clearly? I’d sure like a chance to try. Would you mind if I ask you politely to please make love to me?”

“What are we celebrating?”

“You’re such a bastard! Gavin darling, I feel very very insecure about a lot of things. I’ve been alone a long time. Now I want somebody to hold me tight and make love to me and tell me I’m delicious. For morale, I guess. Why do you even make me ask? It doesn’t have to be any big thing, you know. It doesn’t have to take up a hell of a lot of your time. Hitch over just a little bit, darling, and let me…”

The way she started to manage it to lie down beside me and hike her dashaki up and tug my swim trunks down and simultaneously hook one brown leg over me-certainly wasn’t going to take up a great deal of anybody’s time, the way she was going at it.

I pushed her erect and pulled the trunks back up. “Very flattering. Very generous. But no thanks.”

She laughed harshly and picked her drink up off the sand near her feet. “Well, comparing you to Carl, I can say this. You’ve got a different kind of attitude. If I hadn’t uncovered proof, I’d be wondering about you.”

“I’m busy pretending I’m Paul, wondering how he has it all worked out.”

“Different strokes for different folks.”

“I hang back and make sure Harry Broll follows orders. I check with him about the Sunday afternoon phone call from you. On Tuesday morning, the twenty-seventh, I will get in touch with Mr. Willow, in my capacity as an employee of SeaGate, to verify that Mr. Broll will indeed have the funds to pick up his escrowed block of SeaGate shares. I am assured. The money comes through. And I am very very busy right through, the thirtieth and through the weekend, because that is the end of the fiscal year for SeaGate. Right?”

“I guess so, dear.”

“Then I have to do something about Cousin Lisa. She’s expecting a message from me. I’ll have to deliver it in person.”

“To tell me what to do next?”

“Old Harry is twitchy about his dead wife. And Lisa is twitchy about Harry’s dead wife. Harry and Lisa could testify against me if they ever join forces. Lisa is wearing the dead woman’s rings. I just have to arrange a nice quick safe way to meet her in the islands and blow her face off and blow her dental work to paste. Then there’s no mystery about a body. I can settle down and separate good old Harry from every cent of his gain and every cent he has left over when that’s gone. When Harry is empty, it will be time to lay him to rest, too. By accident. Just in case.”

I reached an idle hand and patted her on the shoulder. She remained quiveringly still, then was suddenly up and away, to come to rest five feet from the chaise, staring at me.

“Nol No, Gavin. He’s my first cousin. No.”

“He couldn’t do that?”

“Absolutely not. Not ever. Not any way.”

“Then why are you so upset?”

“Anybody would be upset, hearing something so horrible.”

“You know you are supposed to fake Mary Broll’s death. There’s less chance of a hitch if somebody plays the part of the body. You’ve been Mary Broll since January. Why switch now?”

“Don’t be such a bastard!”

“It’s the way I have to read him from everything you’ve told me. A quirky guy but very logical. A good improviser. If one logical plan doesn’t develop the way he wants it to, he thinks up an alternative just as good or better. And… Lisa dear, just what the hell good are you to him? The end of usefulness. He knows there’s a chance you’ll make new friends who’ll hear about how you died and get very upset about it and might run into you in an air terminal somewhere a year from now. All you are is a big risk, and an unnecessary risk.”

“Shut up!”

“Think about it.”

“I am thinking about it.”

“It wouldn’t be my style, but I have to admire it in a way. It ties up the loose ends. No way out for Harry. Or you.”

She found her drink had been kicked over. “Ready for another?”

“Not yet, thanks.”

“Want to come in?”

“I’ll stay here awhile.”

“Be back soon, dear.”

Fourteen

TOUGH LISA DISSAT was not gone for more than ten minutes, it was full night when she came back a velvet beach under a brilliance of stars. There were lights behind us from the Spice Island Inn cottages. The lights made a slanting yellow glow against the sand.

She sat beside me again. She had changed to tailored white shorts, a dark blouse with a Chinese collar and long sleeves. She smelled of perfume… and Off. The white fabric was snug on the round hip that pressed warm against the side of my knee.

“Took off your instant rape suit, eh?”

She pulled her shoulders up slightly, and her drink made the sounds of ice as she sipped. “I guess you made me lose interest.”

“Are you a believer now?”

“Up to a point. I can’t see any percentage in taking dumb risks. You are the loose end Paul doesn’t know about. I guess I can be the bait in the trap. But we have to be awfully awfully careful. He’s very sensitive to… what people are thinking. We can’t give him any chance at all.”

“How do you mean that?”

“If it’s like you say, if that’s what he’s going to try to do, then he’ll have it all worked out so there won’t be any risk in it, hardly any at all. So if he really wants to kill me, we have to kill him instead, darling.”

“Your very own first cousin?”

“Don’t be a stinker, please. What other choice is there?”

“Then what?”

“Then we have to get me back into the States in some safe way. I guess there’s no reason why I couldn’t go back in as Mary Broll, come to think of it. What harm would it do?”

“None, if you don’t try to keep on being Mrs. Broll.”

“If he isn’t thinking about killing me like you say, then we’ll have to play it by ear.”

“All goes well, and you and I are back in the States. Then?”

“We just go and see Harry. That’s all. I’ll tell him that unless he gives us lots and lots of money, he’s going to have lots and lots of trouble. And you can beat him up if he tries to bluff us.”

“How much money?”

“I don’t think we should make him really desperate or anything. I think we should leave him with enough so he’ll think he came out of it pretty well. I think we could ask for half a million dollars.”

“Each?”

“No, dear. He has to pay taxes on the whole thing, you know. I think with the holding period before the sale to the public, it will be long term. Yes, I know it will. He should get his money next December. Hmmm. His taxes will be a half million. That leaves him two million, and I know he owes four hundred thousand and he will have to pay back the three hundred thousand. So out of his million and three, we’ll take five hundred thousand, darling, and he’ll have eight hundred thousand left. It would be neater if we took six hundred and fifty and left him six hundred and fifty, don’t you think?”

“A lot neater. And you want half?”

“What I want and what you’ll let me have aren’t the same, are they?”

“They could be with cooperation all the way.”

“Moving money like that around without leaving traces that people can find later is very hard. Do you know anything about that kind of problem? I’d think you would.”

“If Harry Broll will hold still for the bite, yes.”

“There’s no problem, Gav honey. None.”

“.Leaving only Paul.”

She finished her drink, bunted me with her hip. “Scrooch over some, honey: Make room. No funny stuff this time, I promise.”

She turned, lay back, and fitted her head to my shoulder, swinging her legs aboard.

After a while she said, “Want to order dinner in my place or yours, dear?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“I’m not hungry, either. Gee, look at all the damned stars. Like when I was a little kid, the night sky looked glittery like this.”

“Where was that?”

“Way up in French Canada on the St. Lawrence, north of Riviere du Loup. A little town called Trois Pistoles. Ten thousand saints, ten thousand churches all over that country. Convent school, uniforms, vespers, acts of contrition, the whole scene. I ran away when I was fifteen. With my best friend, Diane Barbet. We got across the border and into the States. Things got kind of messy for us. You survive or you don’t, I guess. I don’t know what happened to Diane. I think about her sometimes. A guy in Detroit helped me really go to work on my hick Canuck accent. Movies, television, radio, and using a tape recorder. I think in English now, except if something startles the hell out of me or scares me. I get scared in French. Another man sent me to business school. To learn to be an executive secretary. That was in Cincinnati. He was a real old guy. He picked me up. I was hitchhiking. He took me home. He lived alone-his wife had been dead two years. He wanted me to stay there with him and pretend I was his grand-niece so the neighbors wouldn’t turn him in. I wanted somebody to send me to school so I could be a secretary, so it worked out okay. He bought me pretty clothes. I was eighteen by then. He bought me a little car, even. He was retired. He cooked and kept the house clean and did the laundry and made the bed. He even ironed my things that needed it, and he rinsed out stuff. I was really pretty rotten to old Harv. He was forty years older than me. That is a lot of years. When he got on my nerves, I wouldn’t let him touch me. I cut off the supply. He didn’t really want me too often or give me much trouble. I finished school and got my certificate. and got a job. The way I was living, I could put it all in the bank, and I did. I came home one evening, and he was on the floor in the utility room. His whole left side had gone dead. His eye drooped and spit ran out of the left side of his mouth, and he couldn’t speak. He just made terrible noises when he tried. I packed all my things into the trunk of my car, and then I called the hospital. I parked in the next block and walked back to make sure they found him and put him in the ambulance. I went to a motel. I finished out the week after I gave notice. I got my money out of the bank. I left and went down to Mobile and sold the car there. You can sell cars easy in Alabama. Then I flew home to Canada and got a good job in Montreal. I kept missing old Harv. I still miss him, I guess. It was a pretty good way to live, you know? I wasn’t very nice to him. If I had it to do over, I’d be a lot nicer. I’d never hold out on him the way I did. It never cost me a thing to make him feel good.

“Anyway, I had a wonderful life in Montreal. There was a great bunch of kids there. And then I fell really really in love. When my guy took off with a girlfriend of mine, I did what I always do when I hurt. Buy, buy, buy. Shoes, clothes, wigs. I like money. I guess I spend it to hurt myself. You know? I knew I was in real trouble unless somebody bailed me out. So I went up to Quebec and saw Cousin Paul. I think I could have gone the rest of my life without the kind of help he gave me. Hey, look!”

“Shooting star.”

“I know. But such a big, bright, slow one, huh? It lasted forever.”

“Did you make a wish?”

“Was I supposed to? Would it work?”

“The way to make a wish come true is to wish for something you’re going to get anyway.”

“Is it okay to wish a little late?”

“Go ahead. It wasn’t my shooting star.”

“Okay. I wished.” My arm was around her. She turned in a twisting motion that slipped her breast into my hand. Under the thin fabric of the blouse she wore no bra, and in seconds I felt the nipple growing and hardening. “Does that give you a clue, friend? Something I’m going to get anyway?”

I sat up, raising her with me, slid my hands onto her waist, picked her up, and dropped her onto the sand beside the chaise.

“Ow! That made me bite my tongue, you son of a bitch!”

“Just be a good girl and stop trying to hook me on the product. It’s there anytime I want it. Stop pushing it.”

She stood up. “Don’t be too damned sure it’s going to be served up on a damn tray when you decide to ask for it, Gav. And I wasn’t trying to hook you on anything. I just think it’s friendly and nice to get laid. It isn’t a big thing, is it? And it got me going, what I was talking about.”

“Old Harv, for God’s sake?”

“No, you dummy! The money. Big gobs of money, just thinking about it makes me feel all hollow and crawly inside, and I guess it’s so much like the feeling you get when you know you’re going to get laid, it works the same way.”

“Go take a cold shower.”

“You’re terribly nice to me. You’re oceans of fun. I’m going to walk up and down the beach and think about blizzards and icicles and catheters and having my teeth drilled. That takes me off the edge fast.”

“I should think it would.”

So she went walking out there, clearly visible, scuffing barefoot through the foamy water that came running up the wet slope after the thud of each slow, small wave. A girl walking slowly, slow tilting swing of hips, legs shapely and dark below the white glow of the shorts.

She had deftly pushed a lot of my buttons. She had worked on proximity, touch, forthright invitation. She had talked in areas that accentuated sexual awareness. She smelled good, felt good, kept her voice furry and intimate. I knew she wasn’t being made wanton and reckless by my fabulous magnetism. We were moving toward an association, possibly profitable. For maximum leverage within that association of two,` she wanted to put that weapon to work which had profited her in the past, probably in every relationship except the one with her cousin.

I was another version of good old Harv, whom we last saw on the floor with spit running out of his mouth. She’d pushed Harv’s buttons and got her secretarial training and a car and a lot of clothes. Her libido certainly wasn’t out of control. It was just a useful thing for her to do, a nice little inexpensive favor for her to grant; and if it clouded the recipient’s judgment, eventual profit from the relationship might improve.

Were I a great ape, a giant anthropoid, munching stalks torn from the jungle, and able to lead her to forgotten treasure, Lisa would take her best shot at making everything friendlier and nicer. As she said about Harv, it wouldn’t cost a thing to make that big monkey feel good.

But knowing how and why the buttons are pushed doesn’t diminish the physiological after effects of the button pushing. The tumescence is noticeable. The palm of the hand retains the shape of the breast the precise size, warmth, and rate of erection. The eyes watch the slow walk, creating an increase in the heartbeat and rate of respiration and blood pressure and surface body temperature, as the conditioned mind anticipates the simple progression of events of calling to her, bringing her close, shucking her out of the shorts, pulling her astride, and settling her properly for that sweet, grinding task that would end so quickly the first time.

The buttons tripped certain relays. I had to go back into the mind, into central control, and reset those relays, compensate for the overload, switch the current back to those channels designed for it.

I went searching through the past for the right memory, the one which would most easily turn growing desire to indifference.

I thought a memory of Miss Mary Dillon long ago aboard the Busted Flush would do it. There were more than a few, but they would not come through vividly enough to achieve turnoff.

Lisa made it so damned easy, so completely available, there was no importance to it. And with no importance to an act, why did it matter whether or not it happened? Why did McGee need some cachet of importance in this world of wall-to-wall flesh in the weekend living room where the swingers courteously, diligently, skillfully, considerately hump one another to the big acid beat of the hi-fi installation, good from 20 to 20,000 cycles per second?

Is McGee still impaled upon some kind of weird Puritan dilemma, writhing and thrashing around, wrestling with an outdated, old-time, inhibiting and artificial sense of sin, guilt, and damnation? Is that why he couldn’t accept the lifetime gift Lady Jillian offers? Is that why he has this sickly, sentimental idea that there has to be a productive and meaningful relationship first, or sex degrades? So bang the doxy, because easing the ball-pressure is reason enough.

Who needs magic and mystery? Well, maybe it is magic and mystery that an Antarctic penguin will hunt all over hell and gone to find the right pebble to carry in his beak and lay between the funny feet of his intended, hoping for her favor. Maybe sex is a simple bodily function, akin to chewing, sneezing and defecation. But bald eagles fly as high as they possibly can, up into the thinnest air, making the elegant flight patterns of intended mating all the way up, then cleave to each other and fall, fall, fall, mating as they fall fluttering, plummeting down toward the great rock mountains.

The way it is supposed to work nowadays, if you want to copulate with the lady, you politely suggest it to her, and you are not offended if she says no, and you are mannerly, considerate, and satisfying if she says yes.

But the Tibetan bar-headed goose and her gander have a very strange ceremony they perform after they have mated. They rise high in the water, wings spread wide, beaks aimed straight up at the sky time and time again, making great bugle sounds of honking. The behaviorists think it is unprofessional to use subjective terms about animal patterns. So they don’t call this ceremony joy. They don’t know what to call it. These geese live for up to fifty years, and they mate for life. They celebrate the mating this same way year after year. If one dies, the other never mates again.

So penguins, eagles, geese, wolves, and many other creatures of land and sea and air are stuck with all this obsolete magic and mystery because they can’t read and they can’t listen to lectures. All they have is instinct. Man feels alienated from all feeling, so he sets up encounter groups to sensitize each member to human interrelationships. But the basic group of two, of male and female, is being desensitized as fast as we can manage it…

“What the hell is there about me that turns you off?” Lisa demanded. She had walked up the slope to stand by the chaise, blotting out a Lisa-shaped abundance of stars as she looked down at me with a faint angle of pale yellow light laying across her cheekbone and lips.

“I was wondering what you’d do if I picked up a pebble in my beak and put it between your feet.”

“I’ve heard of a lot of ways guys get kinky, but that is-”

“Why do you want reassurance from me? Take my word for it. You are a fantastic piece of ass. Ask practically anybody.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t checked it.”

She stood there for a few seconds in silence. Then she said, “If you ever do want some, friend, you’re going to have to take it away from me, because that’s the only damned way in this world you’re ever going to get any.”

“Goodnight, Lisa.”

She walked away from the shoreline, a silhouette moving toward the yellow lights.

Fifteen

THURSDAY I was up early. Awakening in a new place makes the day of arrival seem unreal. There had been no Carl Brego, no Lisa Dissat trying to be Mary Broll, no Lisa Dissat striding angrily away from me in the hot, buggy night. I went to my cottage after she left, swam in my minipool, two strokes per lap, changed, and went to the open dining room. The food was good, the service indifferent. There were some beautiful people there. A fashion photography team. Some yacht people. Some twosome guests had tried to get as far as possible from wherever they didn’t care to be seen together. Some guests were ritualistic sun worshipers who had been there for many many weeks, using the intense tropic sun to add each day’s tiny increment of pigmentation at the cost of blinding, suffocating, dazed hours and quarts of whatever oil they happened to believe in. Johnson’s or coconut or ol ive. They were working toward that heady goal of becoming a living legend in Bronxville or Scranton or Des Moines.

“Tan? You think that’s a tan? So you didn’t see Barbie and Ken when they got back from Grenada that time. Dark? I swear to Christ, in a dark room all you could see were white teeth. And Barbie’s diamonds.”

I took a cab into town, memorizing landmarks all the way. I negotiated the rental of an Austin Moke. A Moke is a shrunken jeep with a very attractive expression, if you look at the front of it and think of the headlights as eyes. It looks staunch, jaunty, and friendly. It is a simplified piece of machinery. Stick shift which, like the wheel on the right, you work with the left hand. The horn, a single-note, piercing beeeeep, is operated by pressing in on the turn indicator with the right hand. A quick whack with the heel of the hand is the approved method. Four speeds forward, small, air-cooled engine, pedals so tiny that if you try to operate one with your bare feet, it hurts like hell. Canvas top nobody ever folds down in the hot season, and all they have in Grenada are two hot seasons, one wet and one dry.

With the tourist season almost over, there were a lot of them in stock. I picked one with a lot of tread, and the rental man and I walked around it and tested lights, horn, directional signals, windshield wiper (singular). He wanted his total rental in advance, which is standard for the area. While we dickered, I practiced getting in and out of the damned thing. I’d learned in Grand Cayman and Jamaica that with the length of my legs there is only one possible way. Stand beside vehicle on right side. Bend over at waist. Reach across body and grasp steering wheel with right hand, while simultaneously lifting left leg, inserting it into vehicle so that foot comes to rest on the floor well beyond pedal area. Swoop your behind onto the seat and pick up right leg and lift over high broad sill (which contains gas tank). In driving position both knees are bent sharply, spread wide apart. Steering wheel fits between knees, and lower part of legs must angle in to assure foot contact with pedals. Adjust to inevitability of frequently giving oneself a painful rap on the left leg while shifting.

We arrived at a mutually agreeable fee of five Yankee-ten Biwi-dollars a day for a one week rental or any period of less than a week. I buy the gas. I will phone him when I leave and tell him to pick it up at the Spice Island Inn. I promise not to leave it at the airport. I tell him I would not drive it over that road to the airport for a hundred dollars a mile. Can I drive safely on the left side of the road? I suggest that perhaps no one in Grenada can drive safely on any side of the road. But yes, I have so driven on other islands of this British persuasion.

We accomplish the red tape, he gives me a free map of St. George’s and environs. I note that, as expected, there is at least one half-pint of gas in the five-gallon gas tank. I edge carefully into the tourney and immediately am nearly bowled over and over by a small pale bus with a name across the front of it. The name is: I AM NOTHING.

After I have bought petrol and felt my way back into the center of town, avoiding too intimate a contact with a large gaudy city bus called LET IT BE NIE, I park my Moke and wait until I am certain my legs will work. (“You will enjoy browsing in St. George’s along the narrow, quaint streets.”)

I changed another wad of Yankee dollars into Biwi at the Bank of Canada, picking that one from among all the shiny banks downtown, from Chase to Barclay’s to the Bank of Nova Scotia, because there was a faint aroma of irony in the choice: The girl standing behind the money-changing counter was very dark, very thin, and totally antagonistic-so much so, there was no chance of ever making any kind of human contact with her unless you were her identical anthracite color.

I asked some questions and was directed to a big busy supermarket called EVERYBODY’S FOR EVERYTHING.

As long as I had kitchen facilities and I could make my own ice cubes, it seemed useful to set up shop. Gin, rum, fruit juices from Trinidad, mixes, and a couple of large substantial drink glasses. I am a fussy old party about glassware. Nothing takes the pleasure out of drinking like the tiny dim glasses supplied by hotels and motels. I always buy heavy glasses, always leave them behind. Tiny glasses turn drinking from a pleasure rite to a quasialcoholic twitch.

The final purchase was on impulse at a shop I saw on the Carenage on the way home. A great big planter’s hat of straw with a batik band. Put a man in a rental Moke with advertising painted on the side of it and put a funny hat on him, and he is a tourist. All tourists look alike. Regardless of age, sex, or the number of extra lenses for their cameras, they all look alike.

I found my way back out to Grand Anse to hotel row, and I found an overland way to get the Moke close to my cottage. I carried my box of stuff in. From the moment I had awakened until the moment I finished putting the stuff away and sat down, I had not let myself think about Mary, Lisa or the mechanics of impersonation.

It is a useful device. If you keep things in the front of your mind, you worry at them like a hound chomping a dead rabbit. Throw problems in the back cupboard and keep them there as long as you can. The act of stirring around seems to shuffle the elements of a problem into a new order, and when you take it out again, there are new ways to handle it.

I tossed my sweat-soaked shirt aside. The air conditioning felt good on my back and shoulders. Okay. Mary is dead. I want Paul Dissat. I want him very badly. The money is the bait, and Lisa is the bait in another sense. I want very badly to convince Paul and Lisa and Harry Broll that, if given a choice, they would elect retroactive birth control. I want them so eager to be out of it they’d dig their own graves with a bent spoon and their fingernails.

Secondly, as a professional, as a salvage consultant in areas of considerable difficulty, I want to come out of this with a little salvage for myself. If I walk away without a dime, with only expenses I can’t reasonably afford, then I lose all respect for myself as a con artist. I would have kicked the hell out of their little wagon just to avenge one hell of a woman, Mary Dillon. Pure emotionalism is bush league.

So? So I do not advise Mr. Willow not to make the loan on Mary’s securities. They go to Harry eventually anyway. That is, if Harry happens to be still around. The money has to be loaned to Harry, and Harry has to pick up his block of stock in time and get himself in position to make a great deal of money when the public issue comes out. But that is a long long time for me to wait for my money. I shall use the leverage to extract a reasonable chunk from Paul, maybe from Harry, maybe from both, before I set them to work with those bent spoons.

It may be enough to have Harry and Lisa dig their graves deep with the sides and ends properly squared off and stand in them without the slightest morsel of hope left. Then I walk away and leave them standing there. But Paul is something else.

Program: Lisa must perform exactly as instructed, make her phone call to Harry, and send the cable to Mr. Willow at the bank. I want her to be desperately anxious to tell me all the details of any contact by Paul Dissat. Then I will prepare to greet him. Here. There. Somewhere.

I pulled on my salty swim trunks and put on my big tourist hat and went looking for the lady. She was not in cottage 50. I trudged around, squinting into the hot glare, and found her on a sun cot at the top of the slope that led down to the beach proper. She was facedown. The bikini was yellow today. The top was undone, and she had rolled the fabric of the bottom so that it was about as big around as a yellow lead pencil where it cut across the tanned cheeks on her behind. She was glossy with oil. Her towel was on the sand. I sat on it. Her face was turned away.

“You wanna buy nice coconut, Miss lady? Peanuts? Nice spices?”

She slowly turned her heat-stricken, slackmouthed face toward me. “I don’t want any-” She shaded her eyes, squinted. “Oh. It’s you.”

“Me. Absolutely correct. Me, himself.”

“Who needs you?”

She lay with her face turned toward me, eyes closed.

“You need me,” I told her.

“Not any more. Thanks a lot. But not any more.”

“I don’t mean that kind of need, honey. I’m talking about financial need. Commercial necessities.”

“Thanks loads. I think I’d better take my chances with Paul.”

“That should be a lot of laughs for both of you. I wrote an interesting letter last night.”

She forgot her top wasn’t latched. She sat up fast. “What kind of a letter? Who to?”

“What’s the local policy about the tits on tourists?”

She picked up the top and put it on. “I know what your policy is, friend. You ignore them. What kind of a letter?”

“Double envelope. A sealed letter along inside the sealed letter. If he doesn’t hear from me on or before May tenth, he opens the second letter.”

“Then what?”

“He takes action.”

“What action?*

“Oh, he just gets in touch with the right people at the SEC and says that it looks as if one Mr. Harry Broll bought himself into SeaGate, Inc. with a final three hundred thou fraudulently obtained and that this fact might not be uncovered by the accounting firm preparing the material for the red herring and they should check with a Mr. Willow regarding evidence as to whether or not Mrs. Broll was alive at the time he released funds at her earlier request. My friend is an attorney. He knows all the steps in the new registration folk dance. Delicate, these new issues. They can die of a head cold.”

“Oh God! Why’d you think you couldn’t trust me?”

“Who said anything about that?”

“Isn’t that why you did it?”

“Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. What if we miss? Suppose your dear cousin nails us both, lays us to rest in a ceremonial boat, lights the pyre and sends us out to sea. The last few moments would be a lot more enjoyable knowing Cousin Paul would never make a profit on the deal.”

She swallowed hard and looked unhappy. “Don’t talk about things like that.”

I knew that behind her sun squint her brain was ticking away, weighing and measuring advantages. I reached under the sun cot and retrieved her big sunglasses from the magazine on which they lay and handed them to her.

“Thanks, dear,” she said, putting them on. “Sure. I see what you mean. And if he catches us sort of off base, it could maybe be handy to tell him about your lawyer friend.”

“Yes. I think so. If he gives me a chance.”

“Can’t you see why I thought you did it on account of me?”

I thought it over. “Well, I suppose I can in a way. If you did decide he represents a better chance, you could tip him off about me and he could… tidy up the situation.”

She turned over and put her feet down on the sand near my legs. Her hairline was sweaty. Trickles of sweat ran down her throat, and a little rivulet ran between her breasts and down across her belly to soak into the narrow yellow bikini. Her knees were apart, and the cot was so short-legged that her knees were on the same level as her breasts. Her eyes were even with the top of my head.

She leaned toward me, forearms on her knees, and said in a cooing voice, “You know, you act so weird about me, about us, that I’m afraid I’m going to keep on misinterpreting the things you say. We’re going to keep on having misunderstandings. I waited a long time last night for you to come over to my place to say you were sorry.”

I looked at her. Bright sunshine is as cruelly specific as lab lights and microscopes. There was a small double chin, caused by the angle of her head. There was a scar on her upper lip near the nostril. Her hands and feet were small, square and sturdy, nails carefully tended. Her posture made a narrow tan roll of fat across her trim belly. Her slender waist made a rich line that flowed in a double curve, concave, convex, into the ripe tan hip and thigh. She sat with her plump parts pouched into the yellow fabric, heavy and vital. Stray pubic hairs, longer than the others, curled over the top of the bikini and escaped at the sides of the crotch, hairs the color of dull copper.

Sweat, muscles, flesh, hair, closeness. So close the tightness of the yellow pouch revealed the cleavage of labia. This was the magic and mystery of a locker room, steam room, massage table, or of a coeducational volleyball game in a nudist colony. This was jockstrap sex, unadorned.

“Lisa, I guess we have to say things so carefully we won’t have misunderstandings.”

“Maybe I got the wrong impression yesterday. You wouldn’t be queer, darling?”

“No more than any other true-blue American lad.”

“Some kind of trouble? You can tell Lisa. Prostate, maybe? Or some kind of irritation?”

“I’m in glowing health.”

“Honey, are you so strung out on some great broad that you just don’t want to make it with another girl? I could understand that. I’ve been through that.”

“Nobody I’ve met lately has gotten to me.”

Her mouth firmed, and her throat turned darker. “Am I some kind of pig woman it would turn your stomach to-”

“Whoa! It’s just a little rule of mine. Save the dessert until last.”

Her mouth softened into a sudden smile. “Dessert? Darling, I am also homemade soup, meat and potatoes, hot rolls and butter, and your choice of beverages. I am mostly meat and potatoes.”

“There’s another reason for waiting, Lisa.”

“Like?”

She was ready again, I decided. Like training a mule. A good, solid blow between the eyes, and I should have her total attention.

“It’s kind of a sad story, dear.”

“I love sad stories. I love to cry and cry.”

“Well, once upon a time there was this lovely, delicate little blond lady, and she and I were partners in a complicated little business deal. We took our plans and problems to bed, and talked them over during rest periods. I freaked over that little lady. She loved to make love. Then our business deal went sour. it fell apart. That was too damned bad because it was a nice piece of money for both of us. Well, one day a month later we romped all day together, happy as children, and that night I took her out in a boat, a nice runabout, out into the Atlantic. It was calm and beautiful, and I made her sit on the side rail, and I aimed a Colt.45 with the muzzle an inch from her pretty brow and blew the top of her head off. I wired the spare anchor to her waist and let her go in a half-mile of water, and the moon was so bright that night I could see her for a long way as she went down. Now you can cry.”

Her mouth sagged open. She put a hand to her throat and in a husky whisper said, “Jesus H. Christ!”

“That idiot girl thought that by sleeping with me she was buying insurance, in case I ever found out she had gone behind my back and made her own deal for half again as much as she would have made as my partner. She was so convinced of it, she was starting to smile when I pulled the trigger. You’re not crying.”

“Jesus H. Christ!”

“You said that before, Lisa. After that I decided it’s bad policy. I made the punishment fit the crime, but I hated myself. You know? I used to think of that little blonde a lot. It used to depress me. It seemed like a waste, all those goodies sinking to the bottom of the sea.”

“What are you?”

“Me? I’m your partner, Lisa. And we trust each other, don’t we? Nobody is going to try to be cute. But… just in case… let’s save all the goodies until after we’ve made the money score?”

“T-that suits me, Gavin,” she said. She clapped her thighs together so smartly they made a damp slapping sound. “L-later. I… I got to go for a minute. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll probably be swimming.”

She went off toward her place, walking slightly knock-kneed, head bowed and shoulders hunched. An imaginary letter and an imaginary blond partner. I could imagine that dear imaginary girl sinking down down through the black water, hair outspread, getting smaller and smaller and more and more indistinct until she was gone out of my imaginary life forever. Poor kid. Gavin Lee was a mean son of a bitch. It made me almost want to cry. Now the Lisa-McGee contest could be declared no contest. The lady wasn’t going to come out for the third round. She was cowed. She was going to do as she was told. She was going to have as much sex drive from here on as a harem guard. And at the first ward from her cousin she was going to come on the run to tell me all about it.

That evening she was so prim it was as if she had never left the convent school. We walked on the beach and got back to the cottages just after dark. We went to her place. She unlocked the gate. We went in, and she screamed as the two dark shapes jumped me. It got very interesting. They both knew a lot more about it than Carl Brego had. If they had been ready and willing to kill, they had me. But they weren’t. And that gave me a better chance than I thought I was going to get.

I took punishment and gave it back. Whistling grunts of effort. Slap and thud of blows. Scuff of feet. I took one on the shoulder, off balance, and fell and rolled hard and came up near a yellow light bulb. A half-familiar voice said, “Hold it! I said hold it, Attie! I know this joker.”

The voice was suddenly very familiar. “Rupe, you dreary bastard, what are you trying to do?”

“A favor for a friend. Lady, if you can get some Kleenex and some rubbing alcohol or some gin, I’d be obliged. And turn on some lights around here.”

I told Lisa it was all right. She turned on the garden lights and the inside lights. She had some alcohol and a big roll of paper towels. All three of us were breathing hard. We were all marked, one way and another.

I said, “Mary, this is an old friend of mine. Rupert Darby, a sailing man. Rupe, Mary Broll.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mary. And this here, Mary, is Artie Calivan. Artie is mate on the Dulcinea, and I’m hired captain. And this big rawboned bastard it’s so hard to get a clean shot at, Artie, is an old friend of mine from way back. Trav McGee.”

“McGee?” Lisa said blankly.

“It’s a kind of joke name, honey,” I said. “It comes from an old limerick. Trav rhymes with Gav for Gavin. And McGee rhymes with Lee.”

If it had just hung there, I couldn’t have brought it off. But Rupe came in very smoothly. “I’d like to recite you the limerick, Miz Mary, but it’s just too dirty to repeat in front of a lady. I use that old name on Gav when I’m trying to get his goat. I think I’ve got one tooth here that isn’t going to grow back tight again, dammit.”

I looked at his mate. “You brought along a big one.”

“Seems he was needed. I needed two like him.”

“You were doing fine with just one of him. But why?”

“Oh, that damn Brego. What did you think? He whined all day about how us hired captains ought to help each other out, and he said this big fellow, quick and mean as a sneak, had filched his piec-excuse me, Miz Broll, his lady friend. So finally I said to Artie here, let’s take the dinghy and run over there to the inn and bounce this tourist around some. Had no idea it was you, Tr-Gav. None at all. Sorry. But not too sorry. First time I haven’t been half asleep in two weeks.”

I dabbed at a long scratch on my jaw and moved over to Lisa and put my arm around her waist. “Honey, have you got any message you want these fine men to deliver to Mr. Brego?”

“Rupe? Artie? Would you tell him that Mrs. Broll suggests he stop by again and try his luck with Mr. Lee?”

Rupe laughed. “Sure.”

“Would you mind taking some of his things back to him?”

“Not at all.”

“Let me go gather them up. It won’t take a second.”

Rupe sent the young man down to keep an eye on the dinghy. Rupe and I sat in a shadowy corner of the garden.

“What happened to the Marianne?” I asked him.

“Two bad seasons, and the bank finally grabbed her. I don’t really mind a hell of a lot. I work for good people. Good wages.”

“Thanks for the nice job of covering.”

“That? Hell, that’s what a good hired captain starts with or learns real fast. When somebody clues you, don’t stand around saying ‘Huh?’ Run with the ball. No point in asking you what’s going on. I certainly know something is going on, and that broad in there must be part of it. She looks good enough, but there’s better on the island. Any time you have to scruff up a clown like Brego to grab yourself that kind of ass-”

“Like you said. There’s more than meets the eye.”

“By God, Trav, you know something? That was fun off and on.”

“Glad you enjoyed it. How’s Sally?”

“Fine, last I heard. She went back to her folks. She married a widower fellow with four kids. Our three plus his four makes a lot of family.”

“Sorry to hear about that, Rupe. I really am.”

“It hurt some. But I hate the land and everything on it. I hate a tree, and I hate a mountain. The only death worth dying is by drowning. With the licenses I’ve got I’ll stay on the water all the rest of my time. When our oldest girl drowned, that did it for Sally. That finished her; up, down, and sideways. No more oceans. Next time I write the kids I’ll put in a note to her saying I saw you. She always liked you, Trav.”

Lisa came out with a brown paper bag and gave it to Rupe. “This won’t be too much trouble?”

“Not one bit, Miz Mary.”

“Thank you so much. Excuse me, but is that mate of yours a mute?”

“Artie just doesn’t have very much to say.”

We both walked Rupert down to the dinghy. He stowed the bag aboard, and they picked the little boat up and walked it out past the gentle surf, scrambled in, and started the little outboard and headed back toward the yacht basin.

“Imagine that Carl sending them to beat you up!”

“They gave it a good try.”

“Did they hurt you, darling?”

“Hardly at all. A month in bed and I’ll feel like new.”

“I mean really.”

“Honey, the adrenaline is still flowing. So the pain is suppressed. Tomorrow morning when I try to get out of bed I’ll know how much damage they did.”

“Rupe has really enormous hands, doesn’t he?”

“And very hard, too.”

“And that gigantic boy is really handsome. Did you notice?”

“I wasn’t thinking in those terms. Want to eat in the dining room?”

“Let’s order it sent to my place. It’s so much nicer, really. We can fix our own drinks and be comfortable. I won’t make any passes, Gavin. None at all.”

She kept her word. Long after we had dined, when the nightcap was down to the dregs, she came over to me and bent and peered at my face, teeth set into the softness of her under lip.

“You are going to have one great big mouse right on that cheekbone, friend.”

“I can feel it.”

She straightened up. “I can’t read you, McGee.”

“McGee? Who he?”

“Like the limerick. Tell me the limerick huh?”

“Tell the truth, I can’t remember it.”

“Was it real dirty?”

“Not very, as I remember. But insulting.”

“Funny, you knowing him. I would have thought he would have told Carl you were an old friend. Carl would have told him your name, Gavin Lee, and described you and all.”

“Lee is a common name.”

“Gavin Lee sure the hell isn’t. And how many people are your size anyway?”

“Lisa honey, what are you trying to develop here?”

“I don’t know. Is there anything you ought to tell me that you haven’t?”

“Can’t think of a thing.”

“What are we going to do after we get rich, dear?”

“Live rich.”

“Like this place?”

“And Las Brisas at Acapulco. And Cala de Volpe on Sardinia. The Reina Cristina in Algeciras.”

“In where?”

“Spain, near Gibraltar.”

She sat on the couch a couple of feet from me, eyes hooded, mouth pursed. “Will we travel well together when we’re rich?”

“Get along?”

“Do you think we will?”

“We’ll have to try it.”

“Are you terribly dog-in-the-manger about things?”

“Like what?”

“If we had something going for us and I happened to see somebody like Artie Calivan. As long as I didn’t overdo.”

“Get the guests?”

She shrugged. “When they come in pairs, dear. And both exciting.”

“I don’t like to set policy. Take each situation on its merits. Okay?” I put my glass down and stood up. Winced. Flexed my leg. It was going to stiffen up very nicely during the night. She walked me out to the garden gate. I kissed her on the forehead and told her to dream about being rich. She said she had dreamed about that ever since she could remember.

Sixteen

I CAME bounding awake in the middle of the night from a dream so horrible I couldn’t remember any part of it. I was drenched with icy sweat and trembling badly.

The dream made me recall lying to Lisa about sending a letter. A letter would be a comfort. I couldn’t wait until morning. Leonard Sibelius, Esq., attorney at law.

The sealed letter inside was about the same, but the cover letter for the sealed letter varied. I asked him to read the sealed letter if he did not hear from me by the last day of May and then give it to some colleague wise in the ways of the SEC and the NASD.

After the lights were out again and the letter tucked away, I thought of how ironic it would be if Harry Broll ended up being defended by Lennie Sibelius on a charge of murder, first. Lennie would get him off. He would extract every dime Harry had ever made and put a lock on every dime Harry might make in the future, but he would get him off. I felt myself drifting off and wondered what the hell there had been in that nightmare that had so thoroughly chilled my blood.

I was up early again on Friday and made another exciting run into town. I stopped at the main post office and sent the letter to Lennie by air, special delivery, registered mail. I drove through the oneway tunnel that leads from the Carenage area under Hospital Hill to the Esplanade and the main part of downtown. The Queen Elizabeth II was in, and it was her last visit of the season. She had spewed about two thousand passengers into the town and onto the beaches. The ones in town were milling around, arguing with each other about the currency and looking for the. nonexistent duty-free shops and being constantly importuned to hire a nice taxi and see the sights. The big single-stack ship was anchored out with fast launches running back and forth like big white water beetles.

I ambled around and admired one out of every forty-three tourist ladies as being worth looking at and did some minor shopping of my own, then tested my skill and reflexes by driving back to the Spice Island Inn.

It was on that twenty-second day of April that I risked two lives instead of merely my own and drove Lisa out toward the Lance aux Epines area and had lunch at the Red Crab-burly sandwiches on long rolls, icy Tuborg beer, green salad-eaten outdoors at a white metal. table by a green lawn in the shade of a graceful and gracious tree. After lunch we went exploring. We stopped and looked at the sailboats moored in Prickly Bay. I drove past large, lovely houses, and we got out of the Moke at Prickly Point and walked down the rocky slope and looked over the edge at the blue sea lifting and smashing at the rocks, working away on caves and stone sculpture, biting stubbornly and forever at the land. A curiously ugly species of black crab, big as teacups, foraged the dry sheer stone just above the reach of wave and tide, scrabbling in swift hundreds when we moved too near.

I studied my map and found, on the way back a turn that led to a stretch of divided highway, probably the only bit of it on the little island. Weeds grew up through cracks. It was the grand entrance to the site of what had been the Grenada Expo of several years ago. I had heard that few visitors came. Many of the Expo buildings were never completed. The ones which had been finished lay under the midafternoon hum of sun’s heat, warping plywood shedding thin scabs of bright holiday paint. Some faded, unraveling remnants of festive banners moved in a small sea breeze. We saw a VIP lounge where the doorsill brush grew as high as the unused and corroded doorknobs. Steel rods sprouted from cement foundation slabs where buildings had never stood. We found a huge and elegant motel, totally empty, completely closed, yet with the lawns and gardens still maintained by the owners or the government.

I drove down crooked little dirt roads, creaking and swaying at two miles an hour over log-sized bumps and down into old rain gullies you could hide bodies in. She clung and laughed, and we made it down an angled slope to a pretty and private little stretch of beach where the almond trees and the coconuts and the sea grapes grew closer than usual to the high tide mark because of the offshore protection of some small islands.

I parked in the shade. We walked on the beach and found one of the heavy local skiffs pulled well up between the trees, with red and blue and green paint peeling off the old weathered wood. She hiked a haunch onto the gunwale, near the handwhittled tholepin, braced herself there with one knee locked, the other leg a-swing. The breeze moved the leaves overhead, changing the patterns of sun and shade on her face and hair, on her yellow-and-white-checkered sun top, her skimpy little yellow skirt. The big lenses of her sunglasses reflected the seascape behind me. She sucked at her cigarette, looked solemn, then tilted her head, and smiled at me.

“I’m trying to figure out why it should be so much fun, just sort of churning around in the heat of the day,” she said.

“Glad you’re enjoying it.”

“I guess it’s because it’s like a date. Like being a kid again in Trois Pistoles and going out on a date. It’s a feeling I haven’t had in a long long time. It’s sort of sweet, somehow. Do you know what I mean, Gav?”

“Not exactly.”

“Ever since I left when I was fifteen, I’ve been with guys I’ve either just been in bed with or am just about to get into bed with or both. And if it was a guy I’d already had or one I was going to have, if we were alone in a funny, private place like this, we’d be knocking off a stand-up piece right here. I was thinking I don’t want you to try anything, because it would take away that feeling of being on a date. There’s something funny and scary about it, like being a virgin again. Or maybe it’s you that’s scary to me, about that girl sinking in the ocean. I dreamed about her. Jesus! You really did that? Really?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

She slid off the gunwale and snapped her cigarette into the surf line. She bent and picked up a coconut in the husk and threw it with a shotput motion. She was wiry, and she got surprising distance with it.

“So this is just a little bit of time when nothing happens and we just wait, Gavin.”

“For your cousin. After you make the phone call and send the cable.”

I leaned on the boat. Some palm fronds had been tossed into it. I lifted them and saw the battered metal fuel tank for the missing outboard motor, and I saw a spade with a short handle, sawed off where it had broken and decided it was a clumsy, improvised paddle. Clumsy but better than none at all. With all that weight and freeboard she would be a bitch to try to paddle against wind or tide.

“Head back?” I asked.

“Can we keep on being tourists, dear? Let’s look at that map again.”

We went back to the Moke, studied the map and decided to try the road out to Point Saline and look at the lighthouse. It was a road so wretched that by the time we were halfway I had decided only a jeeplike vehicle such as a Moke could make it. Then around the next hairpin corner I was shouldered into the shrubbery by three taxis coming back from the lighthouse, whamming and leaping over the ruts and broken paving, chock-full of tourists off the QE2.

My gratis map had little paragraphs on the back of it about local wonders, so just short of the lighthouse hill we stopped and dutifully got out to walk for a moment on the white sand beach of the Caribbean, then crossed the road and went down a path for about fifty yards to walk on the black sand beach of the Atlantic. Then I roared the Moke up the twenty-degree slope to the lighthouse.

The attendant was there, obviously eager to be a guide, obviously eager for bread. We climbed the several flights to the glass enclosed top. The treads were very narrow, the steps very steep. Lisa was directly ahead of me, and I was staring at the backs of her knees as we climbed.

It was a view so breathtakingly, impossibly fabulous that it became meaningless. It was like being inserted into a living postcard. It does no good to stand and gawk at something like that. The mind goes blank as soon as you see it. Tourists take pictures and take them home and find out they have postcards. If they put Helen in front of the view, they have a postcard with Helen in it. The only way a person could accommodate himself to a place like that would be to live there until he ceased to see it and then slowly and at his own pace rediscover it for himself. When I found out what the attendant had to do to keep that fifty-mile light operating, I was happy to place some Biwi in his hand.

Lisa was quiet on the way back. When we were nearly back to the deserted Expo site, I glanced over at her and saw the tear running down her quiet cheek, coming out from under the sunglasses. I pulled over in a shady spot and said, “Hey!”

“Oh God, I don’t know, I don’t know. Leave me alone.”

“Sure.”

Glasses off. Dab eyes, snuffle, sigh, blow nose. Fix mouth. Put glasses back on. Light cigarette. Sigh again, huffing smoke plume at windshield.

“Everything is supposed to be so great,” she said. “Everything is some kind of a trick. Every time. Some kind of flaky trick, no matter what it is. Fifty-mile lighthouse! Good God! What the hell is a Fresnel lens?”

“A Frenchman invented it long ago. It focuses light into a beam.”

“Nothing is ever what you expect. That’s what got to me, Gav. A fifty-mile lighthouse and all there is up there is a mantle like off a Coleman lantern and not a hell of a lot bigger, and that poor scrawny black son of a bitch that has to get up every two hours all night long and run up there and pull on some goddamn weights like a big grandfather clock so his fucking light keeps turning around for another two hours. Fresnel! They fake everything in the world.”

“What kind of a big deal did They promise you, Lisa?”

She pulled the glasses off and looked at me with reptilian venom and coldness. “They told me, friend, to sing in the choir, love Jesus, do unto others, pray to God, live a Christian life, and then live in heaven in eternal bliss forevermore. They forgot to explain that the choirmaster would give me free private voice lessons when I was fourteen and by the third lesson he’d have his finger up me. They didn’t tell me that if I didn’t report him, I’d lose out on all that eternal bliss. They didn’t tell me that I wouldn’t want to report him, because then he wouldn’t have a chance to do it again. They didn’t explain about it being the temptation of the flesh and how finally you get to the place where you either make a true confession or you run away. They were running their big lighthouse and making it look wonderful, shining its light all over the world to save souls. But it was just a gas mantle and weights and chains and a weird lens. The real thing they teach you without even knowing it is: do unto others before they do it unto you.”

“My my my,” I said in a gentle wonder, and the tears came again. She got them under control at last.

“Will you laugh at me if I tell you what I really want to do with the money Gav?”

“I don’t think I will.”

“I want to join an order. I want to give the money to the order. I want to take a vow of silence. I want to kneel on stone floors and pray until my knees bleed and I faint. I don’t ever want to be screwed again the rest of my life or be even touched by any man. I want to be a bride of Christ. Now laugh yourself sick.”

“I don’t hear anybody laughing.”

“You think I’d go over the wall in a week, don’t you?”

“Do you?”

“If I can find the guts to start, I’ll never leave. Never. You’re doing all this to me by making me feel the way I did a long long time ago. A lot of men ago. A lot of beds ago.”

“I don’t think people stick with projects they start because they think they should start them. That’s image making. People stick to their truest, deepest gratifications, whether it’s running banks, building temples out of beer-cans, stuffing dead birds, or telling dirty jokes. Somewhere early you get marked.”

“I got it early. Stations of the Cross. Easter. Christ is risen. At about twelve I felt so marvelously pure. Jesus loved me, that I know.”

“So you fight it all your life or go back to it. Either way, it is a deep involvement.”

She found her glasses on the floor, picked them up and said wearily, “You know so goddamn much, don’t you? You know something? You’ve got a big mouth. A great big mouth. Let’s get back on the beach where I belong.”

Seventeen

THAT RANDOM afternoon had turned Lisa Dissat off in a way she either couldn’t explain or didn’t care to explain. It amounted to the same thing. We became like neighbors in a new suburb, nodded and smiling when we met walking to or from the main hotel building or up and down the two-mile beach or back and forth from sun cot to cottage.

I saw some of the cruise ship men, crew and passengers, take their try at her now and then when she walked the long wide beach alone. I saw male guests at our hotel and the other beach hotels make their approach, each one no doubt selecting the overworked line he thought might be most productive. They would fall in step with her, last about a half dozen steps before turning away. I followed her a couple of times and kept count. Prettier young women in bikinis just as revealing walked the beach unaccosted. It was difficult to identify those characteristics which made her such a frequent target. It was something about the tilt and position of her head, in relation to the shape in which she held her mouth while walking. It was challenge, somehow. A contempt and an arrogance. Try me, you bastard. Try your luck and see how good you are. Do you think you’re man enough to cope, you bastard? There was both invitation and rejection in the roll of her hip. To describe everything that happened to tilt, curve, and musculature in one complete stride from start to finish and into the next stride would have taken a seventeen syllable word. Provocative, daring, and ineradicably cheap. That was what Rupe had seen so quickly, wondering why I risked even a bruised knuckle to take ass like that away from Carl Brego. It was what I had seen when she sat with Brego for a drink and lunch.

It was a compulsive cheapness. I could not believe that it was deliberate in the sense of being something she had thought out. It had to be something she could not ‘help doing, yet did not do out of some physical warp or out of any flaw in intelligence or awareness.

She had been uncommonly determined to give herself to me. It had been too early an effort. She wanted to be used, not loved. She wanted to be quickly tumbled and plundered. It was what she expected and what she wanted, and it was that need which exuded the musky, murky challenge.

I have a need to try to put people together out of the pieces they show me. The McGee Construct-A-Lady Kit. For those on a budget we suggest our cheaper, simpler Build-A-Broad Kit.

Once you Build-A-Broad, it pleases you more than it did before you took it apart and examined the components.

She had ripened young. They had drilled virtue into her so mercilessly that when she was seduced she believed herself corrupt and evil. Purity could not be regained. So she ran away and had spent a dozen years corrupting because she believed herself corrupt, debauching because she had been debauched, defiling because she was the virgin defiled.

When you cannot like yourself or any part of yourself in mind or body, then you cannot love anyone else at all. If you spend the rest of your life on bleeding knees, maybe Jesus will have the compassion to love you a little bit. She had been destroyed twelve years ago. It was taking her a little while to stop breathing.

I kept in close touch with her. She heard nothing. I killed time restlessly. So Saturday I got a clear connection and talked to Meyer. I told him to check out Paul Dissat in the SeaGate offices in West Palm. I had to spell the name in my own special kind of alphabet before he was sure of it. Detroit Indiana sugar sugar Alabama teacup.

“Dissat? Paul Dissat?”

“Yes. And be damned careful of him. Please. He bites.”

“Is Mary there? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine.”

After all, what else could I say? Time to talk later.

Later on Saturday I drove until I finally found the way to Yacht Services. I parked the Moke and went out on the long dock and found the Dulcinea. She was a custom motor sailer, broad of beam with sturdy, graceless lines. Rupe Darby and Artie kept her sparkling, and she looked competent

Artie had gone over to the Carenage in the dinghy to do some shopping. Rupe asked me aboard and showed me the belowdecks spaces, the brute diesels, all the electronics. He was fretting about the delivery of some highly necessary engine item. It was supposed to come in by air. They couldn’t leave without it, and he didn’t want to be late meeting his owners at Dominica. He hoped to be out by Wednesday.

I asked about Carl Brego, and he told me that Brego’s rich lady had arrived with friends, and they had left early that morning for two weeks sailing the Grenadines.

A sunbrown and brawny woman in blue denim shorts and a dirty white T-shirt came along the dock and waved and smiled. She had a collie ruff of coppery gold hair, a handsome weathered face. Rupe invited her to come aboard and have some coffee with us. She did, and we sat in the shade of the tarp rigged forward. She was Captain Mickey Laneer, owner and operator of the Hell’s Belle, a big businesslike charter schooner I could see from where we sat Mickey had a man’s handshake and a state of Maine accent.

“Trav, Mickey here has the best damned charter business in the islands, bar none.”

“Sure do,” she said, and they both chuckled and chuckled.

“Could be out on charter all the time,” Rupe said.

“But that would take all the fun out of it, too much of the same thing,” Mickey said.

“She charges high, and she picks and chooses and doesn’t have to advertise. Word of mouth,” Rupe said, and they kept chuckling.

“Five hundred bucks a day US, and I don’t take the Belle out for less than five days, and I won’t carry less than three or more than five passengers. Price stays the same.”

“That’s pretty high,” I said.

“I keep telling her she ought to raise the rate again.”

“Would you two mind telling me why you keep laughing?”

Mickey shoved her hair back, grinning. “Rupe and I just enjoy life, Mr. McGee.”

“She does a good trade with business meetings. Three or four or five busy, successful executives, usually fellows in their thirties or early forties, they come down to relax, get some fishing in, get a tan, do a little dickering and planning. You know.”

“Why is everybody laughing but me?” I asked.

“She takes male passengers only Trav.”

I finally caught up. “I get it. Your crew is all female, Captain?”

“And,” said Rupe, “all nimble and quick and beautiful and strong as little bulls. They range from golden blond-a gal who has a masters in languages from the University of Dublin-to the color of coffee with hardly a dab of cream. Eight of them.”

“Seven, Rupe. Darn it. I had to dump Barbie. She was hustling a guest for extra the last time out. I’ve warned them and warned them. After I provision the Belle-the best booze and best food in the Windwards-I cut it down the middle, half for me and the boat, half for the gals. So on a five-day run, they make better than three hundred, Biwi. Everyone from golden Louise all the way to Hester, whose father is a bank official in Jamaica.”

“You need eight crew to work that thing, Mick?”

“I know. I know. We’re going out Monday for ten days. Four fellows from a television network. Nice guys. It’ll be their third cruise. Old friends. That means my gals will be topless before we clear Grand Mal Bay.”

“And bottomless before you get opposite Dragon Bay and Happy Hill.”

“Could be, dear. Louise flew up to Barbados today. She says she has a cute chum who loves sailing. It’s a way for a certain kind of girl to combine her favorite hobbies and make a nice living. I don’t take hard-case types. I like polite, happy girls from nice backgrounds. Then we have a happy ship.”

She got up and said, “A pleasure to meet any of Rupe’s old friends, Travis. Hope you’ll sail with us sometime. Rupe has.”

“Mickey invited four of us captains to a free five-day cruise last year.”

“I had a cancellation,” Mickey said, “and we were all wondering what to give the other captains for a Christmas present. Well, nice to meet you.”

After she was on the dock, she turned and waved and said, “Tell him our motto, Rupe.”

He chuckled. She walked lithely away. He said, “Mickey likes you. In her line of work she gets to tell the men from the boys in a hurry.”

“What’s the motto?”

“Oh. It’s on her letterhead. ‘Make a lot of lovely new chums every voyage.’ ”

“Enjoy the cruise?”

“Oh, hell yes. By God, it is different. There’s rules, and Mickey, enforces them. None of her gals get slopped. Any and all balling is done in the privacy of your own bunk in your own stateroom, curtains drawn. No pairing off with any special gal, even for a whole day. If a gal is wearing pants, long or short, it means hands off. Otherwise, grab whatever is passing by whenever you feel like it. The gals don’t make the approach. The things you remember are like standing aft with a big rum punch in a fresh wind with Mickey at the wheel really sailing that thing, putting on all the sail it’ll take, and those eight great bareass gals scampering around, hauling on those lines, trimming sail. And like being anchored in a cove in the moonlight, the evening meal done, and those gals singing harmony so sweet it would break your heart right in two. Great food and great drinks and good fishing. Everybody laughs a lot aboard the Belle. Between all they got to do, those gals put in a day full of work for a day’s pay. I can’t understand that damned stupid Barbie. Why’d she want to try some private hustling? Her old man must own half the state of South Carolina. Barbie’s been a sailboat bum all her life. And she gets this chance to make a good living doing the two things in this world she does best and enjoys most, sailing and screwing, and she blows the whole deal. It’s hard to understand. Anyway, we were out five days, and it was like being gone a month, I swear. It’s… it’s something different If you ever see the Belle coming in here or leaving, you wouldn’t figure it out. Those gals look like some kind of Olympic people training for a race. Nimble and slender and tough and… fresh faced. Scrubbed. You know?”

On Sunday Lisa agreed without much argument to arrange her call so that I could hear both ends of the conversation. She placed it from the cottage. We had to wait a long time before the desk called back and said they had her party on the line. I sat close beside her, and she turned the phone slightly so we could both hear, my right ear and her left.

It was Harry’s nervous, lying voice. “Mary, honey? Is that you, Mary darling?”

“Yes, dear. Can you hear me?”

“Talk loud. You sound a million miles away, honey. Where are you? I’ve about gone out of my head with worry.”

I hoped he sounded more convincing to his secretary than he did to me. Lisa followed her prepared script, telling Harry to let Holly Dressner know she was all right and that she had phoned. She said she was afraid he’d find the travel agency she’d used. The Seven Seas. Down in Hallandale. Mrs. DeAngela had been very nice and helpful.

“Are you going to come home? To stay?”

“I think so, Harry. I think that’s best, really.”

“So do I. When, honey? When will you be home?”

“I’ve got reservations out of here May third. But don’t try to meet me. I don’t know when I’ll get in. And I’ll have my car. By the way, you don’t have to worry about the money. Not any more. I’m going to cable Mr. Willow tomorrow to activate the loan and put the money in your account, dear.”

“I’ve been getting pretty nervous.”

“I can imagine. I guess I wanted you to sweat a little.”

And on and on and finally it was over, and she hung up. She gave me a strange look and then wiped beads of sweat from her upper lip and throat.

“It spooked me.”

“I know.”

“If I’d been Mary, I certainly wouldn’t arrange a loan for that son of a bitch. I don’t see much point in that phone call, really. There’s enough without that.”

“His secretary will make a good witness. Mary Broll is alive and well and in Grenada. She’ll be home May third. She can say she was there when Mrs. Broll called her husband. Probably Harry will have his secretary get Mrs. Dressner on the phone and make sure his secretary hears him give her Mary’s message.”

“I don’t have to send her any more cards. If I was supposed to, Paul would have told me. He thinks everything out.

“It’s a good way to be, if you like to kill people.”

“It’s weird. You know? I’ve thought and thought about what you said, Gav. The smart thing for him to do would be kill me. Get word for me to meet him on the way back. Some other island. Arrange something. But I just can’t believe he would. We’re from the same town. We’re family. I keep having this dream about him. He’s standing watching me sleep, and,I sneak my eyes open and find out he isn’t really looking at me. He’s looking the other way, and he has a mask just like his face that he wears on the back of his head. He’s pretending to watch me, but he’s looking at something else I can’t see. When the dream wakes me up, I’m cold all over.”

“We won’t have long to wait, Lisa. After you send the cable to Willow tomorrow, you’re no use to him.”

“Stay close to me, huh?”

I reassured her. I wouldn’t let the bad man get her.

She’d be safe.

Sure.

Eighteen

I WAS UP VERY early on Monday morning when the sun was still behind the green mountains. I swam. The tide was low and getting lower, still running out I went back to take my shower before dressing for breakfast.

By then, of course, he had talked with Lisa long enough to discover I was one of his priorities. He had immobilized her and come after me. Usually I am pretty good at surprises. Some sense I cannot describe gives me a few microseconds of lead time, and when I get that kind of warning, the reaction time seems to be at its best. Perhaps it is hearing or the sense of smell at subliminal levels.

I don’t know where he hid. There were good places in the garden. He could have crouched behind the bar in the service area or behind some of the bigger pieces of furniture in the living room. He worked it out well. He saw me go swimming, and he nipped over the wall unobserved. I’d locked the gate but not the sliding door. He could assume I would come inside to take my shower, and I would have no reason to close the bathroom door. Standard procedure is to reach in and turn the handles until you get the roaring water to the right temperature, and then you step in. It is a moment of helplessness, and there is a useful curtain of sound.

I remember that when I got the water temperature the way I wanted it, I straightened to strip the swim trunks off. The whole back of my head blew up, and I went spinning and fluttering down through torrents of white, blinding light.

I know what he probably used. I made things easy for him. I had picked up the piece of driftwood in the surf a few days before. It was iron hard, less than a yard long, a stick an inch and a half in diameter with a sea-polished clump of root structure at the end of it the size of a large clenched fist.

Because he did not give a particular damn whether he killed me or not, he waited for the water roar, then came prowling into the bathroom with the club cocked, poising like a laborer to sledge a stake into hard ground.

The brain is a tender, gray jelly wrapped in membrane, threaded and fed with miles of blood tubes down to the diameter of thread. The gray jelly is a few billion cells which build up and discharge very small amounts of electric impulses. The whole wet, complex ball is encased in this bone, covered with a rubbery layer of scalp and a hair thatch which performs some small shock-absorbing service. Like the rest of the body, the brain is designed to include its own spare parts system. Brain cells are always dying at a rate dependent on how you live but are never replaced. There are supposed to be enough to last you. If a stroke should kill all the cells in the right hemisphere involved with communication-hearing and speaking, reading and writing-there is a fair chance of dormant cells in the left hemisphere being awakened and trained and plugged into the other parts of the system. Researchers can run a very thin electrode into an animal brain and hit a pleasure center and offer a chimp two levers-push one, and he gets a little electrical charge that makes him feel intense pleasure; push the other, and he gets a banana. The chimp will happily starve to death, pushing the pleasure lever. They can make a rabbit dangerously savage, a cat afraid of mice. They can put electrodes against your skull and trace pictures of your brain waves. If you have nice big steep alpha waves, you learn quickly and well. People who smoke a lot have stunted alpha waves. People who live in an area with a high index of air pollution-New York, Los Angeles, Birmingham-have rotten little alpha waves that are so tiny they are hard to find. No one knows yet why this is so. It may be a big fat waste of everybody’s money, time, and energy sending kids to school in Los Angeles, Chicago, and lately, Phoenix.

Anyway, if you take a club to all this miraculous gray tapioca with a good full swing and bash the back of the skull a little to the right of center where a right-hander is likely to hit it, it is not going to function at all for a while, and then it is going to function in some partial manner for a varying period of time, which could be for as long as it lives. If you have any blood leaking in there and building pressure between the bone and the jelly, then it is not going to live very long at all.

Even if there is a perfect, unlikely, one-hundred-percent recovery, it is going to take a long time to gather up the scattered pieces of memory of the time just prior to the blow and the time just subsequent to the recovery of partial consciousness. The memories will never be complete and perfect. Drop one of those big Seeburg jukes off the back of a pickup truck, and you are not going to get any music at all, and even if it can be fixed, the stereo might not ever work too well.

Forget the crap about the television series hard guy who gets slugged and shoved out of a fast moving car, wakes up in the ambulance, and immediately deduces that the kidnapper was a left-handed albino because Little Milly left her pill bottle on the second piling from the end of the pier. If hard case happens to wake up in the ambulance, he is going to be busy trying to remember his own name and wondering why he has double vision and what that loud noise is and why he keeps throwing up.

Assembling the bits of memory into some kind of proper order is a good trick, too.

Here’s one fragment. On my left side, curled up in a cramped, tilting, bouncing place where things dug into me. Very hot. Some fabric pasted to me with sweat. Head in a small place full of blue light. Something abrasive under my left cheek. Arms immovable, hands dead. Motor grinding. A woman making a keening sound somewhere near, a thin long gassy cry, over and over, not in fear, in pain, in sorrow-but as if she were practicing, trying to imitate something, like a broken valve in a steam plant. Blackout.

Another: being jounced and joggled, hanging head down, bent over something hard digging into my belly. Thighs clasped. By an arm? One brute son of a bitch to carry me that way in a walk, but this one was jogging! Begin shallow coughing that announces imminent vomit. Immediately dropped heavily into sand. Gag, choke, and drift back into the gray void.

There were others, more vague. Some were real, and some were dreams. The brain was trying to sort out the world and it took bits of input and built dreams. On patrol, clenching myself motionless against stony ground while the flare floated down, swinging a little, moving over to burn out against the shoulder of the hill that closed off the end of the valley they were using. A brilliantly vivid fragment of old nightmare of Junior Allen surfacing behind the cruiser, tough jowls wedged into the gap of the Danforth anchor.

Then along came a more detailed one that continued so long the brain was able to go to work on it, sorting out evidences of reality, comparing them to evidences of fantasy. I awoke slowly. I was sitting on sand, leaning back against something that felt like the trunk of a tree. My arms were fastened around behind me, painfully cramped. I tried to move them and could not. I tried to move my hands, wiggle my fingers, and I could feel nothing.

I stared down at familiar swim trunks and down the brown length of, my very own legs with the curled hair sun-bleached to pure white against the brown hide. A quarter-inch in diameter nylon cord had been tied to both ankles. It had been pulled so tight it bit into the skin. My feet were puffed. There was a two-foot length of cord from ankle to ankle. My legs spraddled. A sea grape tree grew up out of the sand in the middle of the triangle formed by my spread legs and the ankle-to-ankle cord.

It took time to work it out. It was unlikely I had been there so long the tree had happened to grow there. Do trees grow slowly? Yes. Very slowly. Okay, could I have been fitted over the tree somehow? Long, careful thought. No. Too big. The ankles had been tied after they had been placed on either side of the tree. By me? No, the cord was too tight. My feet were. swollen and blood dark. By somebody else then. Untie the cord? Not with arms I couldn’t move and hands I couldn’t feel. Remove tree? No way. I was supposed to stay there. No choice about it. I turned my head to the left, slowly, slowly. I was in shade. Out there the sand blazed under a high sun. Blue waves, small ones, moved in toward the sand and lifted, crested white, slapped and ran up the sandslant and back into the next wave. I turned my head the other way as slowly and looked to my right

A man was sitting there. He was sitting on a small, inflatable blue raft I had seen afloat in Lisa’s pool. He had a weathered brown basket made of strips of woven palm frond, and he was pressing it back into shape and working new green strips of frond into it. He sat cross-legged, intent on his task. He had a trim cap of dark curls. He had dark eyes and long lashes. He had a plump red mouth. He wore white boxer shorts. He wore a gold cross on a chain around his neck. He wore a wristwatch with a stainless steel band and a complicated dial. That was all.

As he tugged and pulled at the stubborn fronds, a lot of useful-looking muscles bulged and writhed and slid around under the smooth skin of arms and shoulders. He rose effortlessly to a standing position and turned the basket this way and that. It was crude. Conical. Half-bushel size. His legs were slender, but the long muscles looked springy and powerful.

A name tugged at the edge of my mind until finally I could fit my sour mouth around it. An articulated croak. “Paul.”

He looked at me. There is a way you look at people, and there is a way you look at objects. There is a difference in the way you look at objects. You do not look at your morning coffee cup, at a runover toad in your driveway, or at a flat tire the same way you look at people. This was the way a man might look at a flat tire that he was going to have to attend to in a little while. Not like the owner of the car but like a service station attendant. Damage appraisal, estimate of time required.

I managed another word. “Untie.” I was becoming a chatterbox. He looked back down at his basket repair job. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t talk to me. Then gray mists came rolling in from some swamp in the back of my head, and the world faded away…

I was being shaken awake. I was going to be late for school. I was picked up and placed on my feet. I squinted into a dazzling world and saw Paul looking at me. I was leaning back against a palm bole, weak and dizzy. I looked down and saw the familiar length of cord from ankle to ankle. Where could my sea grape tree have gone? I could not imagine. Paul pulled me away from the tree and turned me to face the sea. He walked me carefully, holding onto my upper arm with both hands, helping me with my balance. I had to take short steps. There was very little feeling in my feet. He guided me at an angle down the beach, the trees at my left, the sea at my right. We were out in the hot glare, away from the shade of the trees. He stopped me and said, “Sit.” He helped me ease down onto the seadamp brown sand, facing the basket I had seen him repairing. It was upside down on the sand, like a crude clown’s hat. A wave slid up the sand and took a light lick at the edge of the basket and at my right foot.

With the slow grace that accompanies ceremony, Paul reached and plucked the basket away. It was a magic trick. Lisa’s severed head was balanced upright on the sand, facing the sea. Magicians can fool you with things like that. He stood easily in front of her and extended his right foot and put his bare sandy toes against her left temple and slowly and gently turned the head so that it faced me. As he did so he spoke a rapid, guttural, unmusical French.

Lisa rolled mad and empty eyes toward me, eyes that looked through me at something on the other edge of the world beyond me and creaked her jaw wide and made a thin, gassy, aspirated scream, gagged for air, and screamed again.

He squatted, turned her head back, slid his palm under the chin to uptilt her face, spoke down at her, the French rapid but gentler, almost tender, chiding her.

A wave slid up and under him, and the edge of foam slapped the lower half of her face. She gagged and coughed. He stroked her dark, soaked hair back from her forehead with a tender and affectionate gesture, patted her cheek said something else to her which ended with one word I understood. Adieu.

He moved toward me, and as he did so, I saw a bigger wave coming. She seemed to see it, too. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her mouth shut. It slapped against my hip. It washed completely over her head and reached six feet behind her and paused, then came sluicing back leaving two small divergent ridges in the sand from the nape of her neck toward the sea, shaped like the wake of a boat: The sea had combed her hair forward, left it pasted down over her face.

He lifted me easily onto my feet, turned me to face up the slope of sand, urging me on. By dint of great mental effort I put three words together. “She can’t see.” Meaning, if she can’t see, she can’t see the wave coming the neat time.

“Never mind,” he said. His English was good, but there was a trace of the French-Canadian accent which Lisa had eliminated entirely. As we walked up the beach, I saw the old boat and remembered the day with Lisa. So she had guided Paul to this secluded spot. I saw the spade with the short handle stuck into the dry sand near the trees. Easy to dig a hole big enough for Lisa. With her knees against her chest, her ankles tied to her wrists, it wouldn’t take much of a hole at all. I saw the Moke beyond the trees, on that rough little sand road, parked almost where I had parked it on that day of the lighthouse.

He helped me through the thick, dry sand and eased me down in the shade with my back against a rough tree trunk. “Dig her out?” I said. I was getting pretty good with three-word sentences.

He sat on his heels, began picking up handfuls of dry sand and letting it trickle out of the bottom of his fist. “It’s too late. Not that it would make any difference. I shouldn’t have used the basket. She hated the basket. She begged me not to use the basket. But I had to be sure she told every last thing. But something broke in her head. After she lost all her English. Something gave way. I thought seeing you might put her back together. I guess it was the basket. I’ll be more careful with you.”

I looked out at Lisa. I saw the biggest wave yet of the incoming tide. It did not curl and smash down at the packed sand until it reached her; then it bounced high off that dark roundness sparkling in the sun, the way a wave will bounce off a small boulder along the shore.

It was hard to believe it was Lisa. From the back only the dark hair showed. Her head looked like some large nut covered with a dark growth that had fallen from a tropical tree and rolled down, coming to rest in the incoming tide.

“If she holds her breath at the right time, she could last a long time, perhaps,” he said. “But she is dead. Just as you are dead.”

“And… Mary?”

There was a slight Gallic shrug. “That was bad luck. I went to her to try to convince her to leave Harry for good. Why should a woman like that have been loyal to a man like that? I wanted her to run, because without her, Harry would have to find three hundred thousand somewhere else. I have that much. I was going to squeeze Harry for half his stock. Waterbury should have let me buy in. Then nothing would have ever happened.”

“Bad luck?”

“She tried to run. The house was dark. I caught her, and we fell badly. Very badly. It was an ugly situation. She knew who I was. I couldn’t call an ambulance, could I? She knew how bad it was. I had to find out a lot from her while she could still talk. She was stubborn. I had to… amplify the pain to make her speak.” He frowned. “I thought it would sicken me to do that. But it was a strange pleasure in a little while. As if we were lovers. So that is bad luck too, I suppose, to learn that about oneself. Gratification is expensive and very dangerous, eh?”

He stood up, clapped his hands to remove the loose sand. “And it was the same pleasure with Lisa, and we will discover if it is the same with a man, too. I should not care to dig a hole big enough for you, Mr. McGee.”

“McGee?”

“I am very good about details. Harry described you well enough. Mary is dead. Lisa is dead. McGee is dead. But we must find out who you sent the letter to and what it said. We shall improvise, eh? There is a tire pump and a jack in the tool compartment of that ugly little vehicle. Something will come to mind. There will be enough time to proceed slowly and carefully.”

He walked up toward the car, a hundred feet away. The equation was very simple. No unknowns. I could spend the afternoon on this hideaway beach as Paul Dissat whiled away the lazy hours with a question-and-answer game with the penalty for wrong answers and right answers precisely the same. Improvised agony.

Or I could try to stand up. That was the first step. If I couldn’t, there wasn’t any point in wondering about step two. If I could stand up, then I had to see if I could walk down the beach and into the sea. I had to hurry, but with short steps well within the range of my constraining nylon cord, and I had to keep my balance. The third part of it was getting into the water at just the right place. I had seen the place when I had been out there near Lisa’s head in the hot sun.

There is no such thing as an undertow: Not anywhere in the world. All you ever find is a rip. Tb have a rip, you have to have a partial barrier parallel to the beach. It can be a sandbar or a reef. The barrier has to be underwater. There has to be a hole or channel through it. A great volume of water comes in on wind and waves and tide over the barrier, rushing toward the beach with waves marching right along behind each other, hurrying in. Then that big volume of water has to get out to make room for the water coming in. So it goes flowing out through the hole or channel. A big volume and a narrow deep hole makes one hell of an outgoing current It is sort of fan-shaped, wide at the beach end, narrowing toward the gap in the barrier, and going faster and stronger as it gets narrower…

You can read a rip on a sandy beach from the way it boils up the sand in a limited area and makes a foam line out toward the gap. If you get caught in one, you swim parallel to the beach until you are out of it, then turn toward the beach. Fight it and you can panic and drown, because they usually go faster than any man can swim.

I got up, scraping some hide off my back on the palm trunk. I went down the beach slope, stamping my feet wide for balance. The beach and the sea kept tilting, misting, merging, flowing. In nightmare slowness I passed the round, black, hairy thing, saw it vividly for just a moment. A wave had come in and covered it entirely. The top of it was a few inches under momentarily motionless water, at rest when a wave had come all the way in and gathered itself to run back out. Her black hair was fanned out, and in that instant of sharpened, memorable vision I saw the spume of sand drifting out of her open mouth, like a strange cartoon balloon, a message without sound. A sandy, tan farewell.

Paul was shouting above the wave noises. I was off balance, leaning forward. A wave slapped my chest and straightened me up. I took a deep breath and lunged forward. I counted on the exceptional buoyancy of the water, the high salinity of the dry season. I had to know if I was in the rip. I managed to roll and float and look back at the beach and saw him and the trees and the raft and the Moke moving into the distance at six or eight miles an hour. It was a good rip, and I hoped it was a long gap in a barrier reef, that the reef was well offshore, and that it would move me out into a current that would take me away from there. Any direction at all. Out to sea and drown while laughing at how Lennie Sibelius was going to nail Paul Dissat, nail him and sweat him and find out how it happened. All of it.

The swell had built nicely, and it was going to play hell on him, trying to find me bobbing around in all that blue and white sparkle. If the hands are dead, it is less burdensome to drown, but you try not to drown if you can help it. I could arch my back and float high, my ears full of the drum sounds of the sea, a wave slapping me in the face now and then. Lift my head, pick a direction, and go kicking along. When all the luck has gone bad, do what you can.

Nineteen

IT WAS a good rip that carried me way out and put me into a sea current that seemed to be taking me due north at a hell of a pace, increasing speed the further out I got. The water was warm, and the sky was squinty bright, and I was gently lifted and dropped in the swell. It had been a good way to live, and given a choice of dying, it was as good as any that came to mind. I wanted to stay aware of the act of dying as long as I could. I wanted to touch it and taste it and feel it. When it is the last sensation left, there is a hunger to use all of it up, just to see what it is like at the very end, if it is peace or panic.

I kicked my bound legs slowly and easily. When I lifted up, I could no longer pick out the beach area where Lisa had died. I looked to the southwest and saw the checkerboard pattern of the town of St. George’s to the northeast growing more easterly as I floated farther. Finally, I began to see more and more of Grand Anse beach as I drifted further out from shore, and it came into view beyond Long Point. When all of the beach was visible, I estimated that I was two miles from land. I saw the bright sails moving back and forth in the bay when a wave lifted me high. I could not guess how long I had been floating because I kept fading into a semidazed condition very much like sleep. The sun was so high I guess it was past noon.

There was a change in the direction of the current. I believed it had begun to carry me northwesterly, but I was too far from any reference points to be sure. I was opposite the town by then, and as near as I could estimate, I was just as far from the town as I was from Point Saline. When I could no longer see much of the town, see only the green mounded hills, I knew I was at least three miles offshore, possibly four.

I came out of a daze and saw a tall ship bearing down on me about a mile away. There was just enough angle so I could make her out as a threemasted schooner, and she had all the canvas on her, all the fore and aft sails flying, tilting her on a long reach.

I knew it could be reality or fantasy, and the - smart money would bet on fantasy. I guessed she had come out of St. George’s, and from my estimate of the wind, if she was headed north to the Grenadines, she would stay on that course until she was far enough out to come about and put her on the opposite tack for a single long run that would clear all of Grenada and head her for Carriacou.

I felt remote, as if working out a problem that had nothing to do with me. My arms had no feel ing. I moved up and down on big, slow, blue swells.

The crests were not breaking. I kept kicking myself back to an angle where I could watch her, see the boil of white water at her bows. My chance of being seen was one in ten thousand, even if she passed by me fifty yards away.

But then I had an idea. I suppressed it because it was going to involve a lot of effort and any effort did not really seem worthwhile. There would be fishermen aboard, people who always scanned the sea even when there is no hope of stopping for a chance at whatever quarry they see. The big fish smash the water, whack it to foam, send the spray flying. Go to work. Make a fuss. Give them something to spot. Hard to do. Double up and snap. Get the bound legs up and whack them down. Get into a spin, writhing and turning the body, kicking. Duck under and come out and kick as high as you can. Dizziness then. Sickness. Vision going. A sound of sails slatting, lines creaking, a thin cry. Sound of an outboard nearby. Hands grasping, lifting me. Fall onto hardness, onto oil stink, fish smell, and vomit up quarts and quarts of sea water…

Then came that burlesque of fantasy, an ironic parody of the seafarer’s paradise. I was on a low, broad hatch cover, and I could feel the motion of a ship under me. I squinted up into brightness to see, clustered close around me-all their lovely faces somber, all their girl voices murmuring of concern-the sirens of all the legends, seawind stirring their tresses, their lovely skin in shades from antique ivory to oiled walnut. They were close around me, a multitude of them, prodding and massaging calves; ankles, and puffy feet forearms, wrists, and swollen hands.

One lifted my dead left hand, and I stared at it with remote interest. It was a dark purple rubber glove, overinflated, with deep dimples where the knuckles had been.

Suddenly I screamed. It astonished me. I am not the screaming type. There was a pain in my right hand equivalent to having all the fingernails yanked off simultaneously. Pain shoved me far enough into sudden darkness so that the raw scream seemed far away and I could think of it as an angry white bird, clawing and flapping its way out of my open throat.

I came out of blackness in time to get myself braced for the next pain. It was again in the right hand, and as it faded, I got a big one in the left hand, which caught me off-balance and so I roared. The enchantresses moved back a little, looking down at me in worried speculation. They were all in little sleeveless blouses in bright colors, no two alike, all in little white shorts.

Captain Mickey Laneer came into view and perched a haunch on the hatch cover beside my hip. She wore a khaki shirt and a baseball cap. “What the hell have you been trying to do to yourself, McGee?”

“Hello, Mick. Lost an argument.”

“Somebody throw you overboard?”

“Ran away, got into a rip, floated out from shore.”

She stared at me. “From shore? Jesus! You could be a little bit hard to kill. Gals, this is an old and good friend of our old and dear friend, Rupert Darby, captain of the Dulcinea. Say hello to Travis McGee.” They said hello in smiling musical chorus. “McGee, clockwise around you, starting with Julia in the yellow shirt, meet Teddie, Louise, Hester, Janey, Joyce, Margot, and Valerie. Teddie, get to the helm on the double and tell Mr. Woodleigh he’s falling off to port, for chrissake, and bring him back on. Janey, Mr. McGee needs a big mug of black coffee with four ounces of Fernandez rum in it. Margot, you help me get Mr. McGee onto his feet, and we’ll put him in my cabin while we run back in.”

I started to say something to her, then had to clamp down on the pains. Very savage pain but not as bad as the first ones.

“Speak to you privately, Mickey?”

“Move back, gals.”

“Somebody is going to make very damned sure I drowned. It could revise their plans if I didn’t. They’ll keep a watch on the hospital. They could get to me there, I think. It’s a bad risk.”

“McGee, I like you. But I can’t get involved in anything. The government pretends I don’t exist. They like the money I bring in. The black power types talk about me forcing blacks into prostitution. Bullshit! Hester is the only almost pure black, and there are three less than half. Every girl has freedom of choice, believe me. Any publicity of any kind, any infraction, they hit me with a heavy fine. Enough to hurt without driving me out of business. Don’t kill the goose. But don’t let her get fat. You need hospital attention for the head and the hands. So I’m going to come about and have a nice run back and turn you over to Rupe to put you in the hospital. I’ve got four good, regular customers aboard who’ve paid their money for a ten-day cruise. Sorry.”

I started to fade out and couldn’t have pulled my self back in time if a sudden pain hadn’t hit my right foot, as if an electric icicle were being shoved through it.

“Mick. I’m… sorry, too. Rupe heading up to Dominica Wednesday. Take me up to Grenadines, set up a meet, transfer me. Reach him on radio?”

“Yes but, dammit-!”

“Take me back, and I blow your tired businessman cruises right out of the water, captain. Sorry as hell. You probably fulfill a pressing need. No pun. Official complaint to your lady governor, if I have to. And the premier. And the Miami Herald.”

“McGee, I like you less and less. You are a bastard!”

“Only when I have to be.”

“But, damn you, you could die on me!”

“Sort of a risk for both of us.”

“Valerie? VAL! Get it on over here, girl. This big ugly son of a bitch going to die on me? She was a nurse, McGee.”

Valerie was of that distinctive and very special mix you see in Honduras. Mayan, Chinese, and Spanish. She looked at my hands and she had me roll onto my belly while she checked the back of my head. Her touch was firm enough to hurt but gentle enough to let you know the hurt was necessary.

They helped me onto my back again, and she bent close and thumbed my eyelids up and looked gravely into one eye and then the other, back and forth, several times.

“Well?” Mickey said impatiently.

“Eet wass a terrible blow on the head. I don’t know. The pupils are just the same size. Probably no fracture because the skull is solid and thick right there. Concussion. Could be bleeding in the brain, captain.”

“How do we tell? What do we do?”

“One girl has to be with him every minute, and what she has to do all the time she is with him is count his pulse for one full minute and write it down. Count his respiration for one full minute. Write it down. Over and over. One hour is the most a girl can do that and be accurate. Half hour is better.

“So we set up half-hour shifts.”

“Then she must write down a column of figures. Suppose it is like… 71, 70, 72, 69, 71, 70, 69. FYne. Then it is 70, 69, 67, 68, 66, 67, 65… right then the girl on duty finds me and finds you, and we get a seaplane alongside to take him to a hospital. They’ll have to open his skull and see if the clot is shallow enough so they can take it out and keep him alive.”

“My hands?” I asked.

“They’ll hurt like hell,” Valerie said. “Like living hell. But you’ll be fine. No nerve damage. No dead tissue. Good circulation, so that even something that tight couldn’t cut it all off.”

The pain hit again as I was fading, but it just held me on the edge, and when it stopped, I went the rest of the way on down. Blurred memories of being carried, of choking on hot, pungent coffee, of hearing the hiss of water along the side of the hull. Then memories of it being night time, feeling that slow swing and turn of an anchored vessel, hearing faint music from topside, of moving in and out of sleep and seeing girls, sometimes the same one, sometimes a different one, solemnly and intently taking my pulse, lips moving, writing on a pad, then staring back and forth from my chest to a watch, counting respirations, writing it down. A Coleman lantern was hung from the overhead with an improvised shade which left the bunk in relative shadow and filled the rest of the small cabin in harsh brightness.

I awoke to a gray morning light in the cabin. The lantern was out. A slender, dark-haired girl sat taking my pulse. She had a narrow, pretty face, sallow skin. Her forehead and the end of her nose were sunburned.

“Where are we?”

“I’m counting.”

“Sorry. Tell me when you’re through.”

“You made me get mixed up.”

I let her count, write it down. “We’re at anchor in a cove by some pretty little islands north of Grenada. They’re called the Sisters. Now I have to count your breathing.”

“Who are you?”

“Joyce. I’m new. Hush, please.”

“From Barbados, eh?”

It startled her. “How’d you know that?”

“I can even remember the words. You are Louise’s ‘cute little chum.’ She flew up and talked to you,about the job.”

She blushed. “Yes. Let me count, please.”

“Dear girl, do your counting, and then I have to get up and use the head.”

She wouldn’t let me without going and bringing Valerie back to check me over and give permission. I felt shaky and frail. When I came back from the nearby head, clutching at everything handy, Valerie was sitting on the bunk looking at the notebook tabulations, and Joyce was standing near her. They got out of my way, and I sighed as I got in and lay back.

“Now we can take you off the continuous count, I think,” Valerie said. “Do you feel dizzy? Do your ears hum?”

“No.”

“I think we’ll take a count every fifteen minutes. Joyce, your hour will be up in… ten minutes. Stay another hour, okay? I’ll have Margot take over from you at seven thirty, and you can go help with breakfast then.”

“You’re a good nurse,” I told Valerie. “Isn’t there a shortage of nurses around the islands?”

She was so still for a moment her pretty face looked like a temple carving. Her Indian blood was more apparent. “Oh, yes. A shortage of nurses. And damn lots of patients. And not so many reasons for keeping them living, I think. The children die. The old ones come back over and over, trying to die.”

She spun and left quickly. I tried to smile at Joyce. Maybe I managed it convincingly enough. I think she smiled back as her face tilted and blurred and faded into gray-black. I had to say something to assure Joyce and myself I was not going sour on them.

“What did you do in Barbados, dear?” My voice seemed to come from the bottom of a brass barrel.

“Does it matter?” she said from the far end of a hundred yard corridor.

“I’m interested. I’m curious. That’s all.”

She began to emerge out of the humming mists and the metallic distances. I saw her face again, shifting as if underwater, then firming up. “Are you all right?” she asked, frowning. I felt her fingertips moving on my wrists, seeking the pulse.

“I’m fine.”

“You looked different. Your eyes were funny. I work in a boutique in Bridgetown. My husband worked at the desk in a couple of the good hotels. We could live on what we made if we were careful. Maybe he got tired of being careful. He left over a year ago, and I have no idea where he is. What else do you want to know? I’m English and Portuguese mostly with a bit of colored. I make about two hundred and seventy-five to three hundred, Biwi, a month in the season and a lot less when the tourists are gone. I can’t quite live on it. I’ve sold the things Charles and I owned, like the music system we got on hire-purchase and was all paid for, and I let them come and take the things which weren’t paid for. The last thing I let go, the last thing worth selling, was my little sailboat my father built for me before he died when I was twelve.” Her words were coming faster and faster, and she had stopped searching for the pulse. Her thin fingers were wrapped around my lacerated wrist. “It was the only thing I could use to get away, to be someone else, and I took it out in a gale before I let it go, telling it to drown me, but it would not…”

“Hey, now,” I said.

Her eyes had filled. “I mean there is no end to it, Mr. McGee. I’ve been a decent woman. I have no family at all. A fat political gentleman wants to give me a cottage in a development he owns. There has been one girl every two years, I understand. He is quite old. They each end up with a cottage and some sort of small pension. I imagine a long street of them with the years marked on little signs in the little yards, with all of us sitting on our little porches…”

“Joyce, honey. There, honey.”

Kind words started the flood. She put her forehead down into the bend of my elbow, and the stifled sobs wracked her thin body. I stroked her hair and made soothing sounds. I identified my own feeling of guilt. I had not really wanted to know about her life and her problems. I had been talking in an effort to keep the brassy mists from sucking me under. But the words had opened her up, and it had come spilling out.

She pushed herself away, stood with her back to me, blew her nose. “Why should you give a damn?” she said in a choked voice. “Why should anybody?”

“Is this cruise what your friend Louise described?”

She turned, snuffled, sat wearily in the chair. “Oh, yes. Louise didn’t lie. She called a spade a spade. It’s a ten-day trial, you might say. I will do deck duty, scut work, help with the food, drinks, laundry, scrubbing, and all that. But I don’t have to be… available unless I decide to be and tell Captain Laneer first. The men really seem quite nice. I can keep my clothes on, thank God. Louise said it took her three days to get used to pottering about the decks and below decks entirely starko. I think it would take me forever, and even then I couldn’t adjust. The girls are so much nicer than I imagined. But an entirely naked woman is not really erotic, do you think? Of course, in a cold wind or offshore insects or one’s time of the month or coming into port, clothes are definitely required.” She had a brooding look frowning down at her knuckles. “It’s rather difficult for one to imagine being quite ready for it. I mean if one has taken a bucket of scraps aft after cleaning fish, it is so abrupt to be suddenly tweaked, then taken by the hand, and led below.” She roused herself and looked slightly startled. She had been voicing her internal monologue. “I go on, no?” She forced a wan smile. “At any rate, once the ten days are ended, I shall either go back to the boutique to stay or go back to quit my job and pack. I shall fret about it later, not now. Valerie told me that it would be good for you to get as much sleep as you can now. Can you sleep, dear?”

I could. I slept and slept and slept. The dull ache in hands and feet and head did not inhibit it. In too many of the sleep periods Lisa was way down below the velvet black, waiting for me on the bright beach, the severed head propped on the delicate bones of the jaw, smiling at me.

It was another morning, and Mickey Laneer brought me a stone mug of coffee, nudged me awake, and put the coffee in my hand after I had hitched up, knuckled grainy eyes.

“You are some kind of a sleeper,” she said.

“A long swim with your hands and feet tied will do it every time. We moved again, didn’t we? Where are we, and what day is it?”

“Anchored in the lee of Frigate Island at eight o’clock on the morning of Thursday, April twenty-ninth.”

“Thursday! But couldn’t you get in touch with-”

“He’ll be off to the west of here about opposite us at fourteen hundred. We’ll make a radio check on him an hour beforehand. No sweat. We’ll run out and intercept and put you aboard Dulcinea.”

“I’ve been a lot of trouble to you and your crew, Mick.”

Her smile was sour. “Better this kind than the kind you were going to lay on me if I ran you back in.

“Hard feelings, captain?”

She grinned, punched me on the side of the thigh. “My four passengers haven’t made any complaints. Maybe because I run the only game in town. The gals have loved playing nurse. By doing it your way-with you having the grace not to die on me-I’ve kept my friendship with Rupe. And I put a high value on it. No, McGee. Except for having to give up my own cabin, no hard feelings. How do you feel anyway? Strong?”

I checked and tested. “Better than I should.”

“You look good. If you feel strong enough, I can send you down a little sample of our recreation program here aboard the Hell’s Belle. Courtesy of the management. Name your favorite nurse, man.”

“Joyce?”

The taut smile was gone. “Now you really are a smartass, you know that? I know damned well you know that girl’s arrangement aboard, because she told me about talking to you.”

“I thought maybe she’d made her decision.”

“And you were curious? I wouldn’t want you aboard long. You’d make too much mischief. Nobody puts any kind of pressure on that kid. She works it out for herself. She makes her own decisions.”

“What will she decide?”

Mickey Laneer stood up, looking weary and cynical. “She’ll decide that every other choice she has is worse. I’ll send your breakfast.”

Teddie brought my breakfast. She was the big, creamy, Minnesota Swede who had learned her sailing on Lake Superior. She was the one who giggled. Her hair was sea-weathered to a harsh spill of pure white hemp. From the bulge of bland forehead down to the clench of prehensile toes, she was tanned to the shade of macaroons. She giggled as she presented the tray with the menu she had devised. Two giant rum sours. A stack of toast. A platter of flying fish, perfectly sauteed and browned, crisp and sweet. A big enameled coffee pot and two of the stone mugs. She latched the door, giggling, and we had breakfast. She took the tray over to the table and came back, giggling. In the moist hollow of her throat, from earlobe to collarbone and across the socket in front, around to the other earlobe, she smelled exactly like fresh cinnamon and Pears’ Soap.

The rendezvous was made about fifteen minutes past two, an estimated seven miles due west of Frigate Island. I convinced Mickey that there was no need to use the tender to transfer me. It was a freshening breeze, the sea running sparkling high. I said that though I didn’t want to test my skull by diving, I could certainly swim a little. Rupe put the Dulcinea dead in the water, rocking in the trough, and hung the boarding ladder over. Mickey at the helm took the Belle across the Dulcinea’s stern, laying her over so that as I sat on the lee rail and swung my legs around to the outboard side, my feet were but inches from the water.

I dropped and swam the fifty or sixty feet to the Dulcinea, bringing from the Belle no more than I had brought aboard-the swim trunks, leaving behind somewhere in the sea the scraps of nylon cord they had cut out of my flesh.

There was no hand extended to help me when I clambered aboard the Duicinea. Rupe and Artie stood staring at the Belle, jaws slack, leathery paws dangling. Mickey saw no need to change the uniform regulations for an old friend like Rupe. Mickey showed off by taking the Belle fifty yards past us, coming about smartly, working hell out of her girls, and then coming back aslant, waving as she angled across our bows on a northeast course not over forty feet away. The girls shouted, grinned, laughed, and waved.

“Fool woman,” Rupe said. “All sailor, that fool woman. Artie. Artie? ARTIE!”

“Huh? Me?”

“Bring in that boarding ladder and stow it right this time.”

“Boarding ladder?”

“ARTIE!”

“Oh. Sure. Yessir, Rupe. Right away.”

Rupe put the diesels back in gear, opened them up to full cruise, checked the chart and gave Artie the compass course, and left him at the wheel. We went below.

“Now what the hell is this all about, Trav?”

“It’ll take some time.”

“Time is what we’ve got the most of.”

Twenty

RUPE LOANED me the money to get home, and Artie loaned me the clothes, a set of fresh khakis that fit better than I would have guessed from looking at him. I had to buy straw sandals at Kingstown on St. Vincent. Customs and immigration clearance was at San Juan, and I had an interesting time there. People are supposed to have papers and luggage, a wallet and a toothbrush.

They wanted to take my citizenship away from me. I told them it was a little misfortune at sea. I told them we could make some collect phone calls. When I said a magic name they could call collect, they came to attention. They almost smiled. That was on Sunday, the second day of May. I pulled the home number, unlisted, out of the damaged recesses of memory and got his wife, then got him. He talked to the boss immigration fellow, and when they were through, the boss immigration type felt a compulsion to pump my hand and call me sir and ask me if there was any little thing he could do, anything at all.

Before my flight left, I tried Meyer again; and this time he was aboard his boat, and when he heard and recognized my voice, he said in a shaky voice, “Thank God. Thank God.” I told him what I needed and what to do and not to be so sentimental, anyway

It was a bright, clear day to fly across the Bahamas and the incredible tones and shades of the Bahama flats. I wanted to think but not very much. I wasn’t very sure about being able to think things through. I wanted to depend on Meyer. The weather across my internal landscape wasn’t very good. Patches of gray, like drifting clouds, obscured things I wanted to see. And sometimes in a waking state I would have the same feeling, the same jolt as when you awaken from sleep. For a little while I would not know where I was or where the plane would land.

I got off that flight and walked through the lower level and out to vehicle pickup, and there was Meyer, bless him, standing beside a dark blue rental Ford as ordered. A very anonymous car. I told him he had better do the driving, as I was not entirely sure of the circuitry in my head. He drove. I talked. We selected a ma-and-pa motel on the way into Lauderdale on Route 1, and he got me a room in the back with an air conditioner that sounded like an air hammer breaking up paving. I finished the story in the room.

I unpacked the stuff Meyer had brought from the Flush, using that spare key I gave him, which he keeps hidden aboard the Keynes. He had packed some Plymouth, which seemed a kindly gesture. He went and got ice from the machine, and we drank from sleasy disposable glasses that looked as though they were about five room guests overdue for disposal.

I sat on the bed, sipping the clean, cool taste of juniper. Meyer paced and paced. He would stop in front of me to ask questions. “I’m not clear on one point. You did write the whole thing to Lennie Sibelius, telling him to get moving, open the inner envelope if you hadn’t checked in by the end of May?”

“I did. But I told Lisa the tenth of May. I wrote to Lennie later. And I did not tell her who I wrote to, of course.”

“She believed you?”

“She very definitely bought it. And she told Cousin Paul everything he wanted to know. Assumption: he believed her the way she believed me. But by the time he found out about the letter, he’d gone too far with both of us to start making deals. His next step was to make me talk to him. And he could have. I’m stubborn, Meyer. Need I mention it? The pain threshold is high, as measured on the dolorimeter. But I could have gotten so anxious to talk I would have fallen all over myself. He scares me. What was your reading on him?”

“Humble beginnings. Very bright, very reliable. Full scholarship to McGill. Went back to his village to work for the man who helped him. Worked for that man about three years, and then one of Waterbury’s companies acquired the benefactor’s business in a merger situation. Waterbury was impressed by Paul Dissat and took him into the Quebec headquarters. Dissat is thirty-six, single, conservative, devout Catholic. He doesn’t drink or smoke. He’s apparently managed his own savings very shrewdly. Handsome. Very fit. Superb skier and superior tennis player.”

He paced and I sipped, and the air conditioner kept up its whangbangroaring, leaking condensation down the blue concrete-block wall.

He stopped in front of me, using his lectern mannerisms. “He functions very well in a highly pragmatic profession. He is perfectly aware of cause and effect. He can weigh the degree of risk he is willing to take. He will assume that the man who gets your letter will be competent. Can his whole plan stand determined investigation? No. Even without a link as weak as Harry Broll enough could be learned to bring it before a grand jury. What would this sort of scandal do to the SeaGate stock offering? It would come out that a fraud had been committed to get funds from a bank to pay for a preoffering block of stock. Waterbury could not afford to proceed. Both Jensen, Baker, and Fairmont, Noyes would recommend the applications be withdrawn. This would all happen, if your letter exists, with or without Paul Dissat on stage. See where I’m going?”

“I think so.”

“With no public issue to raise money through the sale of stock, SeaGate comes to a shuddering halt. Harry’s indivisible block becomes worthless. I can think of a Dissat-like solution.”

“Grab the three hundred thousand from Harry?”

“Yes. But don’t burn the bridges. Not all the way. Kill Harry because he is the last useful witness left alive. Then take a leave of absence on an emergency basis, somewhere out of touch. Lay back and listen. If there is no letter at all, if it was a bluff, then come back after the deadline and pick up the project again.”

I toasted him. “To you, Meyer. If he has left already, I get the letter back from Sibelius, and we wait for him to reappear. If he’s still here and working closer to the deadline of the tenth and if he hasn’t gotten around to Harry, we pluck Harry away from him and take Harry to a private place and have a long chat about Mary and Lisa.”

“If he has left, or is preparing to leave, and wants a door ajar so that he can get back just in case, then he’ll have given Waterbury some sort of cover story I imagine.”

“Can we arrange a secret meeting with Waterbury?”

“Travis?”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“If we can’t find Harry Broil anywhere and if Paul Dissat is still around and if Harry never did buy that block in SeaGate, even if Mary’s body is dug up and identified, there’s no way you can get Paul indicted. You probably can’t even get him fired.”

“He’s got pretty legs.”

“I don’t want you to do some damned idiot thing.”

“Long black eyelashes, Meyer. Red lips.”

“Travis!”

“Maybe I want to dance with him. Maybe I want to whisper in his ear. But I don’t want to have him come to me. You see, he’s a careful man. He knows I’ll come back if I didn’t drown. That’s why I told you to be careful about being seen going aboard the Flush. Am I overreacting?”

“No. You are not overreacting.”

“Don’t let him get to you, Meyer, when he starts looking for that letter.”

“I’ve never seen you like this.”

“He scrambled my brains. We should get away. I know a great cruise we could take.”

“A cruise! A cruise?”

“It’s different. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Do that. There’s been no report of Mary Broll’s death from Grenada. It’s taking a long time.”

“A guest is charged for the cottage whether she uses it or not and charged for the food whether she uses it or not. And in the absence of a body it is the kind of island where, if a lady gets invited aboard a yacht for cocktails or up into the hills to an estate for cocktails, a lady could decide to spend a week being entertained. It is, shall we say, an impulsive place. A carefree isle.”

“I phoned Mr. Willow last Wednesday. He got the cable from Mrs. Broll on Monday, and he talked with Harry Broll on Monday. On Tuesday morning he activated the loan papers and deposited the funds in Broll’s personal account. I thought you’d like to know. That’s when I started trying to get you on the phone. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. It was… pleasant to hear your voice.”

“Paul sent the cable in her name. No problem. I should have realized how easily he could do that.” I looked at Meyer’s watch after first staring at my empty wrist for the thousandth time. “Five o’clock on Sunday afternoon. About the only thing we can do is try to find Harry.”

“How?”

“There is a name in the back of this scrambled skull. All the file cards are spilled on the floor. Let me crawl around back there for a minute.”

I retrieved the red-brown hair, pale green eyes, the vital and expressive face, the lean, quick-moving body. I let her walk around and smile, and then I knew her. “Jeannie Dolan of 8553 Ocean Boulevard.” I hitched along the bed and got her number from information and called her.

“Who?” she asked in a sleepy voice.

“McGee. The guy with the blue Rolls pickup.”

“Hey! It’s you! I’d about decided I hadn’t made any kind of dent on you at all. And that doesn’t help a girl’s pride. Where are you? Ask me out and then sweat out about three minutes of girlish reluctance and then come and get me, huh?”

“I am going to do exactly that later on, but right now I can’t do any stirring around.”

“Oh! Are you sick?”

“Not too sick to take you out, Jeannie. But I am trying to give the impression of being out of town. For good reasons.”

“Okay. I’m not even talking to you. I will go around saying, ‘Whatever happened to good old whosis?’ ”

“You are one nice lady.”

“Rrrrright!”

“For reasons I may tell you some day, right now I want to know how goes the course of true love and romance and convenience. Betsy and Harry.”

“It isn’t exactly a script Ali McGraw is going to want to star in. Right now Betsy is teed pretty good. He was real jumpy and mean last week, and Wednesday morning early, like five, he got a phone call. It woke her up, but she fell asleep, and then he’s shaking her awake. It’s just getting to be daylight, and he’s dressed, and he’s packed a suitcase. He tells her he’s going away on business. By the time the front door slams, she has asked him where he’s going and when he’ll be back about three times-no answer. I told her I think she has been handed the personally engraved, natural bristle brush and maybe she should move back down here onto four with me. She’s been calling his office and getting brushed off there, too. She drove out there a couple of times, but there was no sign of his car. Maybe he is away on business. But it showed no consideration, the way he left.”

“Sold any condominiums?”

“Not to that friend of yours. She never showed up. If she really exists.”

“You are very suspicious of people.”

“If you’d ever met my husband, you’d know why. He could walk into a phone booth and leave by a side door.”

“I’m a sneaky type too, Jeannie.”

“That’s nice. It’s what I’m used to.”

“I’ll be calling you soon.”

“You do that, hon. Bye.”

Meyer and I talked, establishing the new parameters. But. it was like the game of guessing which. fist contains the chess pawn. Harry had enough animal caution to know that if things went wrong for Paul Dissat, it was runaway time for Harry. So if it was Paul who phoned him, maybe Harry had started to run. Conversely Paul would know Harry was shrewd enough to know when to run, and so if Paul gave Harry cause to run, he would make certain Harry wouldn’t be able to.

“The money will be the clue,” Meyer said. “The first thing in the morning, as soon as the bank is open. I don’t think it was paid over to SeaGate. And I don’t think it’s still in the bank.”

“How do you manage that?”

Meyer smiled an unexpectedly unkindly smile. “By almost giving Woodrow Willow a coronary. He deserves a jolt. One should not be able to con a trust officer out of any assets held in trust.”

“I’m coming along.”

“Do you think you-”

“In the disguise you’re going to go out and buy me at Happy Sam’s Giant Superstore Open Always Practically.”

“And on the way back here I buy pizza and beer to go?”

The lobby of the Southern National Bank and Trust Company takes up half of the ground floor of their new building on Biscayne. It is like three football fields: People at the far end are midgets, scurrying around in the cathedral lighting. The carpeting is soft and thick, dividing the lobby into function areas through the use of colors. Coral, lime, turquoise. The bank colors are pale blue and gold. The girls wear little blue and gold bank jackets with the initials SNB on the pocket, curled into a fanciful logo, the same logo that’s stitched into the carpet, mosaiced into the walls, embossed on the stationery, and watermarked into the checks. The male employees and officers up to ambassadorial rank wear pale blue and gold blazers. Everybody has been trained to smile at all times. The whole place looks like a huge, walk-in dental advertisement. There is probably also a bank song.

Meyer dropped me a block away, and while he found a parking space, I strolled back to the bank and went in. I wore a Hawaiian shirt, a straw ranch hat with a red band, a drugstore camera around my neck, sunglasses with big pale orange lenses. A guard moved in from the side and asked if he could help me. I said I was meeting the little woman here because she had to cash a traveler’s check, probably to buy some more of those damn silly hotpants, and where would she go to cash traveler’s checks. He aimed me across a hundred yards of carpeting, under a forty-foot ceiling. Nobody else looked at me. Tourists are invisible, except to the man trying to sell them something. Otherwise, they are as alike as all the trees in the park. Only a botanist knows there is any difference between trees. Or an applegrower.

I kept moving, because if I stood still, one of the guards would come over and ask me if he could help me. I did not know how long it would take. Meyer said he would come in from the north side corridor after going up to the trust department and coming back down with Mr. Willow. Also, I kept moving because I wanted to make certain that by no ten-thousand-to-one-chance was Cousin Paul doing a little banking business this hot, windy Monday morning. Sometimes his face would be completely gone from memory, and that would frighten me. Then it would pop back like a slide coming into automatic focus.

At long last I saw Meyer coming toward me, striding right along, and I guessed that was Mr. Woodrow Willow a half step to the rear. I watched Meyer. He was going to rub his nose if he wanted me to join the act. He looked through me and did not see me at all. Woodrow Willow was not what I expected. This was a young man, tall, fresh-faced, snub-nosed, round-headed with the same mouth old Walt used to draw on his chipmunks. I sauntered after them, and caught up when they talked to a man who had,his own big blond desk in a solitary, private thirty-by-thirty area of coral carpet right out in the midst of everything. The man used a phone. Soon a rangy woman came over walking like one of those heel-and-toe competitors, elbows pointed outward. She listened. She picked up the phone. A far younger girl came, carrying a ledger card. She jogged. Every part of her jogged.

After she left, Meyer shook hands with the man at the desk, and Meyer, Willow, and the rangy woman walked all the way across to a line of teller’s stations on the far side of the bank. The rangy woman spoke to a slender girl with brown hair. Then she spoke to a man patrolling behind the cages. The slender girl closed her window and came around and out onto the bank floor. Meyer turned toward me and rubbed his nose. The rangy woman was leaving.

I walked up, and Meyer said, “Mr. Willow, this is my associate, Mr. McGee. McGee, may I present Miss Kathy Marcus.”

“Who is this person?” Willow said in a voice of despair. “Good God, I had no idea you were going to bring in-”

“A place where we can talk?” Meyer said. “Just to have Kathy tell us in her own words before we get into anything else. Then we won’t be taking up so much of her time.”

“Take a lot,” she said. “I’ve got a three-dollar short that’s driving me up the wall.”

“We’d better use one of the small conference rooms upstairs,” Willow said.

Upstairs was 1910 banking, as opposed to 1984 version in the lobby. Oak paneling, green rugs, leather libraries. The computers were hidden offstage. Park your Mercer under the elm trees and come in and talk about buying a block of Postal Telegraph.

There were six chairs around the table in the small conference room. There were two framed prints of clipper ships and a seventeen-pound glass ashtray on the polished walnut. As soon as the door was shut, I shed the ranch hat, shades, and camera.

“Enjoying your stay?” Kathy asked me with a quick wink.

“Little gal, when I come across those Everglades in that big old air-conditioned Greyhound bus, I said to the little woman, I said, Mother, we shoulda-”

Kathy guffawed, stopping me. Willow rang the big glass ashtray with his pipe in authoritarian tempo, silencing everybody. “Please! This is a very serious matter. If I have your attention, Miss Marcus, we would like to find out to what extent you are involved-”

“Whoa, friend,” she said sharply, no laughter in her voice or her level stare.

“Now you will listen to me, Miss Marcus! I was saying-”

She got up and went to the door and smiled and said, “When you go home to the wife and kiddies tonight, Woodie, tell her that nice Miss Marcus quit the bank and went right down the street to another bank. Some loyalty, huh?”

“Come back and-”

“Woodie dear, the banks are so hard up for anybody who is worth a damn, it’s pathetic. They’ve been hiring people here if they’re ambulatory and feel warm to the touch. And I am one very damned good teller, and I have been here four years, and I am not now, nor have I ever been, involved in anything hanky or panky.”

“Please, come back and-”

“Woodie dear, you just can’t have it both ways. You can’t call me Kathy and fun around with me when we’re alone in an elevator and give me a friendly little grab in the ass and a chummy little arm pressure on the tit and then expect me to sit meek and mild in front of these gentlemen and take some kind of accusatory shit from you. No thanks. I’ll tell them downstairs who ran me out of this bank.”

“Kathy,” he said.

With her hand on the knob she looked at him with narrowed eyes and said, “That’s a start at least. Say the rest of it.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply-”

“Do you want me to come back and sit down, Woodie?”

“Please. I would appreciate it very much.”

She came slowly back to the chair, sat, and smiled and said, “If these men had been strangers, Woodie, I would have let you go on being a jackass, and I would have cooked you later. But I’m among friends. Friends who rescued an eerie blonde from the oldest floating houseparty in the world.”

“I remember already,” Meyer said.

I looked at her more closely. “Delmonica Pennypacker?”

“Just a little name I made up for my vacation. Anyway, as I understand it, Woodie, you want a play-by-play account of cashing the check for Mr. Harry Broll.”

Woodrow Willow was coming out of shock. He cleared his throat and told how a Mr. Winkler, a vice president of the bank, had received a telephone request last Wednesday at closing time from Harry Broll, stating that he would be in at about eleven on Thursday to cash a check for three hundred thousand on his personal account. He wanted to make certain the bank would have cash available in hundred-dollar bills. This is not an unusual request in an area where large real estate deals are made.

Kathy took over and said, “The way our system works, everything has to go through teller records, or we’re out of balance. The cashier is Herman Falck, and I suppose Mr. Winkler told Herm to have the cash on hand. Herm told me he would run it through my balance, and he said Mr. Broll would probably bring in a dispatch case for the money. That amount would fit with no trouble. We run a minimum cash balance in the drawer at all times to make the place less appealing to the knockover boys. We signal the vault for more cash or to come make a pickup when we get too fat. They come zipping in a little electric money cart.

“So at ten after eleven Herm brings these two men over to me. I put out my closed sign so that a line won’t build behind them. He takes the dispatch case from the man with Mr. Broll and hands it around to me. Mr. Broll gives me the check, and Herm initials it. Then Herm goes back and brings the cash cart behind the cage. It’s just a matter of packing the sixty wrapped stacks of hundreds into the case. A black plastic case, imitation lizard. I counted them out as I packed them. Five, ten, fifteen, on up to three hundred. The case was below eye-level looking from the floor of the bank. I snapped the snaps and slid it up onto the counter, and the other man took it, and they walked away.”

“Had you ever seen Mr. Broll before?” I asked.

°I think so. He looked sort of familiar. Maybe I waited on him. The name seems familiar.“

“How did he act?”

“Well, I guess he’s really a pretty sick man. I don’t think he could have managed without the other man helping him.”

“In what way did he seem to you to be sick?”

“Well, he was very sweaty. His complexion was gray, and his face was wet. He kind of wheezed. Like asthma sometimes. He didn’t have much to say. Usually, men joke about lots of money when they put it in or take it out. They joke with me because I’m all girl, I guess. His friend had to kind of support him walking to my window, I noticed. Mr. Broll walked slowly, a little bent over and taking small steps. His friend was very nice to him: Considerate.”

“What did his friend look like?”

“Younger. Dark curly hair. Tall. Middle thirties, I’d guess. A very nice voice. Some kind of accent. Marvelous clothes. Conservative mod. But he was too pretty for my taste. Husky pretty. Great eyelashes. He called Mr. Broll ‘Harry,’ but Mr. Broll didn’t call him anything. Let me help you, Harry. Here, let me take that, Harry. Come on, there’s no hurry, Harry. Take your time, old man. It took them a long time to walk to the main doors. The fellow helped Mr. Broll and carried the dispatch case. I watched them. They didn’t go right out. I guess Mr. Broll felt faint, because they stopped and sat down in that lounge area left of the main doors. It made me uneasy. You like to see three hundred thousand get to where it has to go and get locked up again. They sat side by side on the couch. I could see the fellow leaning toward Mr. Broll and talking quietly and confidentially. I saw Mr. Broll put his hand over his eyes. The other man pulled it away and took his handkerchief and wiped Mr. Broll’s face, wiping the sweat away, I guess.” She frowned. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but the whole scene had a funny flavor. It seemed faggoty to me, like a wife with a sick husband… No. The other way around. A youngish husband with kind of a fat, sick old wife he doesn’t really love but feels sort of affection and gratitude and… a sense of duty to, if I don’t sound flippy.”

“Not flippy at all.”

“I was busy, and when I looked again, they were gone. I would guess it was about twenty minutes before noon when they left the bank together.”

Willow said, “Would you say Mr. Broll was drunk or drugged?”

She thought it over. “No. He kept his eyes sort of squinted up. He knew what he was doing. He just seemed… fragile. As if he was in terrible pain. As if he had the world’s worst bellyache and was wondering if he was going to pass out with it. And… he smelled sort of sour. He was wrinkled, and he had beard stubble. I wondered if he’d been traveling all night or he’d slept in his clothes. I suppose it could have been the world’s worst hangover.”

“Thank you, Miss Marcus,” Willow said. “Uh… Kathy.”

“That means take off, huh?”

“With our thanks, Kathy,” Meyer said. “You are a bright girl and a good observer. And if it ever becomes possible to tell you anything about this whole matter, we will.”

“Thank you,” Kathy said. She paused at the door and said, “McGee, do you still have that wild floating pad?”

“The Busted Flush. Slip F-18.”

“I’ll come visit. If you haven’t gotten married up.”

“Come visit, Kathy. Bring your swim pants.”

“I’ll bring a bowl of Greek salad. I make one hell of a Greek salad.”

When the door shut, Willow said, “Good help is so terribly hard to find and hard to keep that one has to… uh… put up with a degree of impertinence that… uh…”

“Like she said, Woodie,” I told him, “it’s a lot easier to get respect from the pretty ones if you don’t keep grabbing them by the ass in the elevator. Right, Meyer?”

“Absolutely right. An executive can’t have it both ways.”

“Keep the pretty ones at a distance,” I said. “Grab the dog-faced ones by the ass. Then you have a happy bank.”

“A contented bank,” Meyer said.

“Goddammit,” Willow yelled. “Tell me what this is all about!”

Meyer said, “I’ll ask you the same question I asked you before, Woodrow. Could you swear that you were absolutely, positively certain that Mary Broll was alive when you processed that loan?”

“The answer is still the same. But why are you asking the question?”

“I’ll ask you another. What was Harry Broll going to use the money for?”

“To buy the SeaGate stock to pay the balance due of three hundred thousand. Don’t look at me like that. It’s legal, you know. It is illegal to borrow money to buy listed securities.”

“He’d lose a great opportunity if he didn’t buy the block of stock?”

“Oh, yes! Really great.”

“Would he have to have cash to buy that stock, Woodrow?”

“Of course not! A certified check would-”

“Do you think he bought it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you think of any way of finding out?”

“Don’t go away.”

We were left alone. Meyer sighed. I told him he was pushing Woodie around beautifully. All he did was sigh again. When Meyer gets the silents, he isn’t very good company.

Twenty-one

AS MEYER drove conservatively back toward Lauderdale in fast traffic, he said, “We can summarize what we know, if you think it will help.”

“You do it, and I’ll tell you if it helps.”

“We do not care whether Harry Broll was running from Dissat or hurrying to meet him. Immaterial. Dissat had him from some unknown hour early Wednesday morning until they walked into the bank Thursday at ten after eleven. By three o’clock Wednesday afternoon Harry Broll was forced to make the phone call to Mr. Winkler about the large cash withdrawal. Dissat had to then sustain Broll on that depressed level where he could make his appearance at the bank without creating suspicion, yet would have no interest in appealing for help. Total emotional and physical defeat. A person reduced to Harry Broll’s condition is beyond feeling terror. Only despair. The only part left would be the details of disposal, or if he’d already planned how to do it, to go ahead with it. If it required darkness, he would have to have a place to take Broll to wait for night, or better yet, a place to immobilize him safely so Dissat could put in an appearance elsewhere. If we are building the structure of limitation, the parameters of time and space, we need to know if Dissat appeared at the West Palm office on Wednesday, and if he did, the time spent there.”

“And where he is right now,” I said. “When I wonder where he is right now, I wonder if he’s crouched on the floor behind us. That’s what he does to me, Meyer. Sorry. He was so pleased with himself, so damned delighted when he reached out with his bare toes and turned her head so she looked at me with those empty, crazy eyes. It was a funny kind of innocent pleasure, as if he had no idea there was anything really wrong about it. He was like a little kid who’d built a kite that would fly, and he wanted me to tell him how great it was. He tried to talk tough. Movie tough. But it was like something that had to be said. An obligatory part of the ceremony. After that we were going to share something, he and I. Some special personal important relationship. Dammit, I can’t say it so that you can understand how it was.”

“He fits the pattern of a certain kind of damaged personality I have read about, Travis. He could be called the activated sociopath sadist. Bright, healthy, energetic, competent. Excellent in areas requiring ritual. Mathematics, accounting, engineering. Quite cold inside. Tricky. Unable to concede the humanity of people around them because, having no basis of comparison, they think all of us have their same dry and barren soul. They are loners. They can charm when they choose. Sexually stunted, inhibited, often impotent. When Mary tried to escape from him and he caught her and they fell badly and injured her seriously, that activated him. Now he knows what he wants. He wants inventive episodes like the one with Lisa. The money will be meaningful only in how many such episodes it will buy. He isn’t aware of evil. Only of being caught. You have to think of him as a bored child who suddenly discovers that it is wonderful fun to go to the pet store and buy a mouse and bring it home and do things to it until it is dead. Life is no longer boring. It is full of rich and wonderful excitement. The mouse shares the experience, so he feels fond of the mouse for as long as it lasts. You could say that the child loves the mouse to the extent he can feel love.”