I walked back to the car. I had to think out the normal automatic motions of walking, lift of the foot, bend of the knee, swing and placement of the foot, and the alternate procedure with the other leg.



I backed the car away from behind the billboard, got stuck for a heart-stopping moment, rocked it free and came out to find nothing on the road except two big trucks, both receding in opposite directions.



I unlocked my mirrored room and walked into it, realizing I had absolutely no memory of the drive back. I looked out my windows and knew it was full morning, and I knew that when Griff had eaten yesterday's three meals, he hadn't any idea they would be the last three. I wondered if the girl with the sun-sleepy whine of voice was nested in her sleep in Seven C, her body resting from Griff's use of her, dent of his head in the neighbor pillow.



The records say that forty thousand men disappear every year in this country. A great many of them stay lost. People don't look very hard.



I could guess what the others would think. Griff had been teamed with Vangie-Tami. The execution could have made him uneasy. If he came across her money and left, he would be difficult to find. I put the chain on the room door. I locked myself in the bathroom, put her money on the countertop, and with the little kit from the side pocket of my suitcase, I cleaned out the short barrel of the Bodyguard, replaced the missing round, shoved it back into the clip against the spring pressure.



I removed the rubber bands, sorted the money by denomination and counted it twice. Her guess had been optimistic. Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty. Taking mostly fifties, I put the eight hundred and sixty into my wallet. I banded the rest of it into one solid brick, wrapped it in a dirty shirt and stuffed it into the glove compartment and locked it.



I took a long, long shower. I stretched out on the bed.



So go home, McGee. Why not? It's just another salvage operation, only this time you get to keep it all. The wench is dead. And these are rough folks. Right now the sun would be burning down on your open eyes, waiting there for somebody taking a short cut to the beach to come across the car and then the suicide. Scratch one Vangie and one Griff. They cancel out. So go home. There's enough in the kitty now to take you to a year from Christmas, and a very lush year at that. Sure. And spend the whole year wondering at what moment they were knocking off what new pigeon, now that they'd cleaned up the operation by disposing of the one weak link.



Monica Day. Who the hell was she? And why did she sound familiar? Bit parts? Ans Terry. Ansel. Ansel. Known as one big powerful son of a bitch who could kill people with his hands.



So, very probably, could Griff.



And so had I. And it didn't feel any better than doing it with a gun. In fact, it felt a little worse.



At a little past noon I was back aboard The Busted Flush. I leave the airconditioner set to cycle when the inside temperature gets past ninety. I put the thermostat back down to seventy, then went through into the forward bilge with my brick of money. My safe is an aluminum box. A child could open it with a church key. But the child who could find it would frighten me.



Forward, on the port side, below the water-line, I have a section of fake hull. Drill a hole and the sea would come spurting through, and keep coming, because there is an open sea cock that keeps it filled with about sixty gallons. There is a little lever which closed the sea cock. The lever is carefully concealed. I close the sea cock. I press an area of the hull just so. Then I can get a blade under the other end and pry it open. It swings on concealed bronze hinges. Thirty gallons or so rush down into the bilge and the pump starts automatically. I reach into the gap and down between the double hull section, and pull the box free of the brackets that hold it. I shake the water from it. It has a good rubber gasket, a clamp fastening with good leverage. I open it, put the brick of currency inside, push it back down against its buoyancy, back into the brackets. I swing the heavy curve of wood back into place. I open the sea cock. I hear the faint garglings as it fills again, up even with the outside water-line. The fake hull in that area is always slightly damp. One small artistic leak that trickles about a meaningless cup of seawater a day.



I have a second safe, a barrel job, hidden quite carefully. I keep a few good things in it. Not too much. Enough to keep disappointment from being too acute. A man who finds something does not keep on looking.



And so, on that Friday, I went right from Bahia Mar to Port Everglades to check on Monica Day. More properly, the Monica D. D for DeLorio Shipping Lines. Day as in the Italian pronunciation of the letter D. The home base of the company is in Naples. From November through June they operate two small single-stack, single-class cruise ships out of Port Everglades. On the drive down I had remembered why the name was familiar. The sister ship was the Veronica D.



When I went over the bridge I saw three vessels moored there. One was the Veronica D. No particular activity around her. I drove into the port area and parked the rental car by the big customs shed. There were a few people around and a mild and aimless air of activity. Cases of provisions were being taken off a truck and put on a conveyor belt that ran up to an open cargo hatch in the side of the hull where the hands were grabbing the cases and stowing them. A man stood with a clipboard, checking the items aboard. I found a gate ajar in the wire fence and walked with an air of purpose to the forward gangplank. An officer in white was at the top of it, just stepping aboard. I went on up. There was a smart young seaman on the side deck, and he watched me walk up the incline and stood at attention, blocking the way.



"Sir, is not permitted coming aboard now. Is later."



"I want to talk to the purser."



"Is ver' busy now, sir, for the sailing. Five o'clock sailing. Much work."



I found a five-dollar bill for him, shoved it into his tunic pocket. "Why don't I stand right here and you run and find him and tell him it's important?"



After a little hesitation, he hurried off. He was back in a very short time with a man who looked like a fifteenth-century bishop. He had a regal manner, a spotlessly crisp white shirt.



"May I be of some help, sir?"



I led him a dozen steps forward, out of earshot of the gangplank guard. "A question of identification, if you wouldn't mind."



I showed him two of the wallet-sized pictures of Vangie. "Do I know her? Oh, yes, of course. It is Mrs. Griffin. Mrs. Walter Griffin. She has sailed with us... five times, perhaps six. Over two seasons."



"Can you describe her husband?"



"Oh, yes, of course. A large man, brown, very strong-looking. A large jaw, small mouth."



"Have they acted unusual in any way?"



"I would say no, not really. Always the best accommodations, an outside room on the Lounge Deck. Quiet people. Stay to themselves. A table for two they must have. They do not join in the fun, you know? The poor woman, she cannot take the sunshine, so I wonder why she does go on cruises. He would spend much time in the sun. They are generous with tipping. Is there trouble? Perhaps she is the wife of some other person. Believe me, I could not make any statement about such a thing. We cannot get involved in a thing of that kind. It is not our affair."



"I am not going to ask for a statement."



"There is nothing more I could tell you. I hope I have helped you. Oh, one thing. They have always taken our shorter cruises."



"Where is the Monica D. now?"



"On her last Caribbean cruise of this season. We have had our last. Tonight we sail for Italy, perform Mediterranean cruises, and return in late November. The Monica D. will join us in the Mediterranean." He took out a thick black wallet, leafed through some cards, handed me one. "This, sir, is the cruise schedule of both vessels this season. Could you now excuse me, please?"



I stood in the shade of the customs shed and found, on the card, the final cruise of the season of the Monica D. It was a seven-day cruise. She had left Port Everglades last Tuesday at ten o'clock in the evening. She had arrived this same Friday at Kingston, Jamaica, at seven in the morning, and would leave at five in the evening today. Tomorrow she would arrive at Port-all-Prince at one in the afternoon and leave at nine in the evening. On Monday she would arrive at Nassau at one in the afternoon and leave at five o'clock--just four hours later. And dock right back here at eight in the morning next Tuesday.



With Ans Terry and Del aboard. Nice quiet people, who'd keep to themselves and occupy an outside room on the Lounge Deck and tip generously.



I decided it would be very interesting to fly over to Nassau late Sunday or early Monday and ride back on the Monica D. At this time of year they would have available space.



Ans and Del might be a little bored. I might liven up the last leg of the journey. But there was one problem to solve, and if the Veronica D. was sailing at five, a little close observation might give me a valuable clue. And it was a situation where I might well use Meyer's disciplined brain.



I found The Hairy One just returning from the beach with two sandy moppets in tow, ages about four and five. He explained that it was a small favor for the mother, a chance for her to go to the hospital to visit the father, who had managed to set up an A-frame to hoist a marine diesel engine up where he could work on it, and then had lowered it onto his right foot.



"It is saddening," he said, "to learn how the young are being deprived of their cultural heritage. This pair had never even heard of Little Red Ridinggoose and the Three Bare Facts."



"He's all mixed up," the little girl explained solemnly. "He found a penny in my ear," the little boy proclaimed. He sacked them out in the bunks aboard the John Maynard Keynes for the obligatory nap, and I heard him explain solemnly that he wouldn't tell on them if they didn't take their naps, but to keep them from being a bad liar, they had to look like people taking naps, so they had to close their eyes, breathe deeply, and make no sound at all for a little while. And as long as they were doing nothing but pretending to take naps, they could be thinking him up a better ending for Little Red Riddinggoose. She deserved better than to be sent off to Yale.



We sat on the cockpit deck under the shade of an awning he had rigged. The sea breeze moved by. We kept our voices down.



I was aware of his careful and intense and questioning stare. He said at last, "You have the look of having felt a stale cold breath on the back of the neck, Travis. The jocular detachment, that look of the bemused spectator has been compromised."



"It got very iffy. It got very close in all respects. Somebody who gives you just one small poor chance is very good indeed, and the him or me rationalization is never totally satisfactory. By dawn's early light I buried him on a beach, in soft sand, using a hunk of driftwood, and it keeps bothering me that I buried him face down. It makes no difference to him. But I keep remembering the look of the back of his neck. The one called Griff. And I am not ready to talk about it. Not for a while. Some night, Meyer, in the right mood, I'll tell you." "Tell me just one thing now. Will anybody come looking for you?"



"No. He thought it was going to be the other way around. So he made certain nobody would be looking for him. He set it up very nicely. Only the names were changed. And nobody else in the group knows of me or has seen me."



"And there is still the interesting lure of the money,



"I brought that back."



"So that's the end of it?" The smile on that massive and ugly face was all too knowing.



"That's what I tried to talk myself into."



"But then it would keep going on, wouldn't it?"



"And the shape of it is just about what we guessed, Meyer. I keep picking up more details. And, as a reasonable guess, I think they've murdered between thirty and forty men in the past two years. And it would have been going on before that, before Vangie was recruited."



"I knew the figures would be high."



He surprised me. "How could you know that?"



"We estimated the total take. If any single venture netted a really large amount, there would be people tracking down every tiny clue. Whores in hot pursuit of money in six figures would be tireless, and able to pay well for expert assistance. But ten or fifteen or twenty thousand... there would be less furor, and a much longer list of potential victims. Of course you have one curious problem. You're not so naive as to appoint yourself an angel of vengeance, burying them in the soft sand, face down, one at a time."



"I have to crack one open. So wide open it will stay open, and then I have to hand it over to a cop bright enough to see what he's got, and I have to do it in such a way that I can melt back into the woodwork. I have two candidates. And a little thought or two for each of them. But let me use you on the one problem that baffles me.



"Only one?"



"Only one at a time, Meyer."



At twenty minutes to five we arrived at dockside in all the confusions of sailing. They were obviously going to have a fairly full ship for the transatlantic run. The literature I had picked up at a travel agency on the way over said the capacity was three hundred plus. Passengers were boarding. They had three gangplanks out. Crew only. Passengers only. Visitors only. We went up the visitors' gangplank. The gate onto the deck was narrow. We were each given a rather dogeared blue card. One crew member gave us our cards and as he did so, he chanted the new head count in Italian, and the crew member standing behind him marked it on a clipboard. We did not go below. We performed little experiments. We tried to leave by the passenger gangplank and were politely turned back. Meyer asked if he could leave the ship for a few minutes and keep his blue card and return. Ah, no, sir. It is so easy, just geeve it now, we geeve it back, eh?



The time grew near. The ship's group of six musicians stood on one of the lower weather decks, playing sentimental Italian songs of sorrow and parting. People threw paper streamers. People ashore behind the wire waved and waved and waved. There was a call for visitors to leave. And another. And a final call. And we watched the jam as they surrendered their blue cards, putting them into the outstretched hand of the crew member. He would count them in batches, sing out the count, drop them into a slot in a wooden box as his companion kept score. Meyer went ashore. I leaned on the rail a dozen feet from the gangplank. The two crewmen conferred. The dock crew was beginning to cast off the first lines. One crew member hurried off.



Over the increased tempo of the music the bull horn blared, "Please. Your attenzione! One guest is steel aboard the sheep. Please, that guest weel go ashore immediately."



So I surrendered my blue card and went ashore, and the crew member was slightly disapproving of me. They pulled the gangplank away as Soon as I stepped off it. I found Meyer behind the wire, grinning. He pulled me away from the people and said, very simple, once you figure it out. It makes you wonder what took you so long."



"If you try to make me guess, old buddy... "Two visitors go aboard. He takes both cards. He waits for the maximum traffic density of the people leaving, those times when the card collector accumulates a stack and counts them during the next lull. They count cards, not heads. So the two cards, aligned to look like one, get popped into his outstretched hand. All cards issued are accounted for. If somebody visiting happens to lose his card while aboard, if it blows over or something, no sweat. He just says he lost it. They let him off, take his off the count. The system leaves everything tidy. But they sail with one extra. If they had to sail without getting the correct count, there'd be a determined search for a stowaway. They sail with an extra passenger they know nothing about, and in transit, the arithmetic is adjusted back to the proper number. The accomplice cannot come aboard as a passenger, of course. It would distress them to run a short count. It would imply somebody fell overboard."



We turned and watched the Veronica D. moving away from the dock. "I could have slipped him both cards," Meyer said, "and you would still be aboard."



That night, up on the sun deck aboard the Flush, I told him all of it. All except the Griff part. And I told him the things I thought I might try. And he came up with a few impressive refinements.



Saturday morning, after I had rather unwillingly agreed to a more direct participation on his part, I made the ticket arrangements for us. A flight early Monday morning from Miami to Nassau on Bahamas Airways. And two tickets back to Port Everglades from Nassau on the Monica D., Stateroom Number 6 for me, an outside room on the Lounge Deck. And, for Meyer, the most remote thing I could find, according to the chart of the ship, an inside room on B Deck. There were only ten staterooms on B Deck, and those were clustered in the stern section. He got Number 21, a cubicle with a bed and pullman upper, a shower and a toilet.



We then went to see an old friend of mine named Jake Karlo. No one knows his age. He is about the size of a full-grown cricket. His standard gait is a jog trot. He has kept up with the changing times. When I first knew him he had a tiny office in a ratty old building in one of the oldest parts of downtown Miami. He booked third-class talent into fourth-class saloons-beefy strippers, loud young unfunny comedians and loud old unfunny comedians, off-key sopranos for weddings, and off-key baritones for funerals, musicians who would take years to make it, and musicians who had made it too long ago, butterfingered jugglers, trained dogs and shabby chorus lines. But he could make you believe each act was the greatest.



Now he has an office layout of such size, elegance and persuasion it is sometimes called Goodson-Todman South. He owns substantial percentages of several successful clubs, a piece of a theater chain, a big interest in a television production company, and a hundred percent of both an equipment rental firm and a big commercial color lab. With the steady growth of the Miami area as a moving-picture and television center, Jake has maneuvered himself into a position where he can supply all the necessary production equipment, furnish all necessary technicians, build and rent sets, supply people for bit parts and for use as extras, costume them, and process the film for final editing.



Several years ago several con artists moved in on him, set him up beautifully, bled off his working capital, then moved in closer to bail him out in return for control. Somebody recommended me. I had to get Jake to imitate total defeat, and when their guard dropped and they began congratulating each other, we worked our own con game on them. Jake has not forgotten.



He came running across his half acre of carpeting. I introduced him to Meyer. Jake leaned back on his heels and stared up at me, like a man admiring a tall building. "Mr. Meyer," he said, "how this monster saved my life, believe me! Thieves from the Coast in black neckties, they knew everything. They knew how to peel poor old Jake Karlo like a banana. So what problems could they have with a type like this McGee? Such a big rugged honest one, like they would cast him in westerns, and actors those people eat for breakfast. When they left, maybe it was by Greyhound bus. All we let them keep was the cufflinks and the black neckties, heh? This McGee, he never comes to see an old man just for friendship. Always some favor. What is it now? Jake Karlo's right arm? All you do is ask, it's yours."



"Meyer," I said, "you will never believe it, but this active young man has twenty-one grandchildren."



"Twenty-three. Keep track, at least. But not one with the name. Every one we had was a girl yet. Six of them. Who gets the name? My brother's boy. Such a genius! Seven jobs I try him in. Even emptying wastebaskets, he could find some way to cost me a thousand dollars an hour. Come on. Sit, gentlemen. I told them out there, no calls, no interruptions."



I told him what I wanted, and he spread out the four photographs of Vangie, the five by sevens. He sat behind his giant desk and looked at them with pursed lips.



"You look," he said, "you say lovely. Oval face, delicacy, some oriental blood. Absolutely great eyes. Then more and more you keep seeing animal. Like a warning there. Watch out. How about the size, the build?"



"About five seven. Hundred and twenty to twenty-five. But the kind of body that looks riper than the weight. Physical condition of a dancer."



He nodded. "Sure. One kid I've got, she's five foot and doesn't go a hundred pounds. Not really so much upstairs or downstairs, but what gives it that look, the waist is practically nothing. You've got with her a fourteen-inch difference from waist to hips, nineteen to thirty-three. She's doing a fishbowl at the Shoreliner, and the bar business, it's making everybody rich, just when the smart money figured the fishbowl bit was dead forever."



Seeing the puzzlement on Meyer's face, I said, "A nude girl dances very slowly, making sort of swimming motions, in a little brightly lighted room directly under the bar. Mirrors reflect the image of her, only about four inches tall, into fishbowls full of water spaced along the bar. It's an effective illusion. Jake, have you got anybody who might fit the bill?"



"How close does she have to work? What'll the lighting be?"



"Daylight, but a long way off. Say a hundred feet."



"So the face is important, but what has got to be right is posture, the way she moves, the way she walks." He pressed the lever on his intercom and said, "Liz, bring me in the specialty book, the one the cover is green on.



In a few moments the secretary came in and put a thick album bound in green leather in front of her diminutive boss. He flipped the pages rapidly. The photographs were eight-by-ten glossies, in clear acetate sleeves, with the pertinent information about each one on the facing page.



He stopped at one, studied it, held Vangie's picture beside it, looked from one to the other and said, "Just right." He spun the book around and we stared at it and saw a smiling, clear-faced, brown-eyed Nordic blonde.



"Is this a rib?" I asked him.



He stood up, leaned across the desk, pointed the features out one by one, with an air of great patience. "Shape of the face. High cheekbones. Same type mouth. Same type eyes once Kretoffski gets through with her. How many wigs we own? Maybe two thousand? So relax. Read the stats."



Miss Merrimay Lane. Twenty-three, Five seven. One twenty-three. Specialty dancer: Interpretive, comedy, acrobatic, tap, chorus, exotic.



"A dancer is best," Jake said. "Body control. This chick was working on the Beach, then they closed out for the season May fifteen. Let's hope she stayed put." He gave his secretary the phone number.



After a few minutes, at the sound of a little musical bong, Jake lifted the phone and in a slower and deeper voice said, "Merrimay, sweetheart! Would you be free for a little daytime one-shot?" He listened, winked at me, and said, "Darling girl, don't you know by now that Uncle Jake will squeeze the client for the final peso? No, dear. Not dancing. No audition required. So wrap something around it, precious girl, and put it in a cab and hustle it on down here to my office. Twenty minutes? You are such a delight, I mean it, dear." He hung up and spoke into the box, telling his secretary to get Kretoffski to report to him in thirty minutes.



He looked at me and said, "Boychick, an arm you can have. A leg you can have. But one of my people getting hurt? That's out."



"Did you have to say that, Jake?"



"For the record only."



"She starts work in Lauderdale at eight o'clock Tuesday morning. But I want to take her up there for a briefing tomorrow. There's an off chance she might have to go with me up to Broward Beach sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. But that will be it. How does five hundred sound, plus expenses?"



"In January, February, it isn't such great arithmetic. In June it is a lover's kiss."



Merrimay Lane was announced and made an extravagant entrance. She came sweeping in wearing an orange strapless sunback dress, white gloves, purse and shoes, gigantic false lashes, a cloud of spicy perfume, a funny little hat in orange-colored straw balanced atop blonde tresses. She covered space with the effortless ease of the dancer, made glad cries at Jake, kissed his cheek, whirled and looked with pert expectancy at us.



"The giant there, darling girl, that is Mr. Travis McGee, a very personal dear friend who I would trust with all six of my lovely daughters; if you start thinking anything is strange about what he wants done, you shouldn't worry. And his associate, Mr. Meyer. What I can say is this beautiful young girl is one of the hardest reliable workers you want to meet, strictly pro, and no temper tantrums, and she learns routines like lightning. And what it is he wants you to do, sweetheart, I think afterward you keep your mouth shut. I have people waiting to see me on the next floor down, so the talking you can do here. Feel free. Take your time. When Kretoffski comes, Liz will send him right in.



"Maybe if she could hold him until we cover the part he doesn't have to know?"



"On the way out, I will tell her that."



When the door shut, Merrimay said, "Well, it certainly sounds terribly mysterious."



I handed her one of the pictures of Vangie. "You have to be mistaken for this girl, at a distance, a good distance, in daylight."



She studied it, turned her head this way and that. "Hmm. If my mother had married a Chinese, or a half Chinese. My size?"



"Very close."



"I suppose the big question is why."



I had delayed making up my mind until that moment, but I had respect for the intelligence I saw in her eyes. "Some people tried to kill her. It was a very good try. They thought they had. She had a miraculous escape. So when she showed up again, it had to be a very nasty shock. They made absolutely certain the next time. So if one of them should see her again... we might make some good use of the reaction."



She stared at me, swallowed visibly, put her fingertips to her throat. "Couldn't it turn out to be a nasty shock to me, too?"



"There'll be no way for him to get near you. That is absolutely guaranteed. You'll understand when we show you the physical layout. And if at that point, you want to say no, you'll still get the five hundred."



She looked at the picture again. "She's very interesting looking. But it is sort of a cheap pose, actually. Do you know how she held herself, how she walked, all that?"



"Mr. Meyer and I spent two days with her."



"She was about twenty-five?"



"Twenty-six."



"What did she do?"



"She'd been a prostitute for twelve years."



Merrimay's brown eyes widened. "My word, that's quite an early start, isn't it?"



"For a time she was a five-hundred-dollar call girl in New York."



She looked incredulous. "They make that much?"



"A few of them."



She shrugged. "Okay, then. It's a deal, provided I can back out if there's something I don't want to do. But I don't want to know any more about this until Si Kretoffski gets me fixed up."



"The sun poisoned her," I said. "She was quite pale."



"I can see that. It's no problem. What about clothes?"



"I think," Meyer said, "what she was wearing the first time they tried."



He looked at me and I nodded. "Miss Lane, it was an oyster white wraparound skirt in that OrIon fleece material, and a sleeveless blouse, raw silk, natural, with sort of a Chinese collar effect in front, and cut halfway down the back, a circular cut."



She frowned. "Wardrobe might have it. How much time is there?"



"It will happen early Tuesday morning."



"Oh, then if they don't have it, I can find something close enough. You'll pay expenses?"



"Of course."



By quarter of five that Saturday afternoon, we were ready to demonstrate the final result to Jake Karlo. Merrimay wanted time to freshen her makeup, so we went to Jake's office. Meyer said, "Mr. Karlo, you have some fantastic talents available to you. And that girl may be better than you know. I am exhausted. She bled us of every shred of information. Every habitual gesture we could remember. She even worked on the voice, saying that she knew she wouldn't need it, but it would make her feel more like the other girl. Travis, she deserves a bonus."



"Approved."



She tapped on the door and came in. The clothing was almost exact, and the shoes she had picked to go with it were what I could imagine Vangie picking. Kretoffski had worked a miracle on her eyes. Only the color was wrong, too deep and soft a brown.



It was Vangie's walk, that tautly controlled sway, swing and tilt of hip, toeing in slightly. It was Vangie's pallor, and her way of looking at you, head lowered, a look of brooding challenge. She tilted her head to thumb back a wing of the dark hair, and, pitching her voice deeper, came very close to achieving that same richness.



She stood, hipshot, in front of the desk. "They said you boys wanted me in here. I'm Vangie, it's short for Evangeline. Bellemer. honest to God, it's getting to be a real drag hanging around here the whole damn day long, I mean I'm like used to more action."



She turned away, did a vague slow dance step, turned and dropped into a chair and scowled at us. "Trav, honey, the very least you could do is break out some good bourbon for Vangie, I mean it's coming up that time of day, isn't it?" She ran her tonguetip along her underlip. I'd seen Vangie do that, just as slowly, forty times.



It wasn't quite right, of course. She wasn't Vangie, but she was so close, so heartbreaking close it chilled the nape of my neck. I hadn't realized how much all that hard work had accomplished.



Jake tore a sheet of paper off his desk pad, folded it once and held it up. "Sweetheart, I have written a word on this piece of paper. It is a word of great meaning. It is a word I have respected all my life. I am a fool. This word was in front of me and I couldn't read it. Monday it will be added to your file, lovely girl. Later in the week we will take new pictures of you." He trotted over to her. "I give you this piece of paper. Jake Karlo never writes anything foolish about something so great and wonderful and beautiful."



She opened the piece of paper. She stared up at him with Vangie's mocking smile. "Actress! Where have you been, honey? Don't they let you out? Listen, you want to turn a five-hundred-dollar trick and have the john ask for you the next time he hits town, you got to be an actress. Right?"



Jake, beaming, turned and held his arms wide. "See? See?"



"Jake, darling," she said. "Please don't. You'll make me cry, and it will spoil the eyes. And... all day I've been getting closer and closer to tears. For Vangie, I guess. There but for the grace of God, or something. The poor, sad, simple bitch. Jake, you make me very happy. Damn, damn, damn. I'm going to cry." She got up and ran out of the room.



"We can use her a lot closer than I'd have thought possible," I said.



"Not too close," Jake said. "Not close to trouble." He thumped the desk top with his little fist. "A man gets so busy he doesn't look good at his own people. A sweet child like that, all of a sudden a hundred-and-ten-percent floozy. And she photographs like a dream. If she doesn't freeze up, if she doesn't choke when the lights go on, I can merchandise that dear little package. Discipline she's got. What I got to do is set up a test, something where say she's dancing, she comes running off stage, big applause. She's happy. The guy is waiting there. He tells her something that breaks her heart. She gives it a very slow take. She can't believe it. Then say she thinks it's a joke and tries to laugh. Extreme close-up. Say she's just made it. Real big. And the tests have come back. Leukemia." He hit the desk again. "A take like that, in ten minutes I can sell her to Max on a seven-year deal, script approval, good options. I make her twenty-one years old. Merrimay Lane. It sounds good. Already you can hear it's got star quality."



Though he said good-by to us, and walked us to the elevators, I had the feeling we were getting not more than ten percent of his attention.



On the fast ride down I said to Meyer, "Was she that good?"



"Believe me, boychick, the broad was colossal." At ten-thirty on that hot bright breezy Monday morning, the black taxi brought us in from the airport, down Nassau Street and east on Bay Street, to let us off at Rawson Square. I knew from the look of Bay Street that no cruise ships were in. In the hot months when there are no cruise ships tied up at Prince George Wharf or anchored out in the harbor beyond the lighthouse, Bay Street slows to a walk. The pretty little shopgirls stroll and chatter. Drivers doze in their cabs. Traffic is sparse and stately. The fat dark women yawn and gossip in the straw markets as they weave the tourist goods.



It is the rest period for that big machine which is Bay Street. The components of the machine are the heavily stocked shops with luxury items from all over the world. Solomon's Mines, Trade Winds, John Bull, Cellars Wineshop, the Island Shop, the English China House, Kelly's, Lightbourns, M'Lords, Mademoiselle, The Nassau Shop, the Perfume Box, Robertson and Symonette, Sue Nan's, Vanity Fair.



A quiet time, when the locals even shop in thoughtful and leisurely relaxation, and when the long bars in Dirty Dick's, the Junkanoo and Blackbeard's Tavern are empty.



We walked past the straw market and the rental boats out to the wharf area, carrying our minimal luggage.



"I never really believed you'd never take me on a cruise, dear," Meyer said.



"How did you get so lucky?"



I found an official-looking mustachioed fellow who told me that the Monica D. would tie up at the wharf about one o'clock, and a Dutch boat was due in the evening. We checked the bags at the Prince George Hotel, and then we went shopping for some little remembrance for Ans Terry and his lady. Meyer was dubious about our being able to find anything of sufficient symbolic impact. I said we'd look around, buy what we found and then, after meeting the gentleman, decide whether or not it was reasonable to expect a useful reaction. The more off balance he was by tomorrow morning, the more deadly would be the effect of seeing Vangie.



It was Meyer who spotted the display of dolls in a case in Solomon's Mines, beckoned me over and pointed one out. Dolls of all nations. And the Japanese one bore a faint resemblance to Vangie. She was about five inches tall, beautifully made. The clerk took it out of the case for us. Black hair was glued in place, and the kimono was sewed on. We bought it. At Kelly's Hardware we bought a spool of fine wire, a piece of soft sculptor's stone, a file and a carving knife.



We repaired to the pleasantly dark bar at the Carlton House on East Street. When the bartender had fixed us each one of their superb planter's punches and moved away, Meyer said, "I am extremely nervous, Trav. This is a long way from economic theory. I'm certain I'm going to make some terrible blunder."



I realized he could not function in a vacuum and play it by ear as we went along. People need an identity, a place to stand. I said, "McGee and Meyer are both from Fort Lauderdale. They came over separately. Meyer had some talks with people on the Nassau Development Board about the economic consequences of a change in the corporate tax structure or some damn thing, at your usual per them and expenses. McGee came over with a batch of people joining a big party going on at Paradise Beach and now that the party is running out of charge, he's heading home. We ran into each other on Bay Street. We're casual acquaintances. We're going back on the same ship, but you bore me. I'm more interested in lining up some dainty lollipop. Maybe I can get some mileage out of you by sticking your thumb in Ans Terry's buttonhole while I cut his lollipop out of the pack. Or maybe it might work the other way. The legendary Meyer charm might work well on the lollipop, while I trick Ans into going down to your squalid accommodations where I can thump his head and lace him to your bunk. Anyway, we establish a message center and get to work giving them the eerie feeling there is something gone wrong in the world, a warp in reality, some cogs slipping in their skulls. They're ice-cold, Meyer. Heartless and murderous. But any savage animal gets bad nerves when confronted with the inexplicable. We just give them a Halloween party, with a few goblins to think about."



"That particular smile, McGee. I am very glad you have no good reason to come looking for one Meyer. Okay, I feel better. Skoal!"



We stood in the dusty shade and watched them, with casual skill, latch the Monica D. to the wharf. She was dressed up to come in, flapping with as many pennants and flags and banners as three new gas stations on opening day. Deck crew in whites, and the packed, expectant, gaudy, gabbling pack of passengers crowding the starboard side of B Deck where the gangplank would be affixed. This was the last romantic port of call, and I could well imagine that their cruise director had made some dampening comments about shopping on Bay Street. This is standard procedure. The cruise directors hawk the marvels of the wares at those ports where they have set up a kickback from the shops. At St. Thomas and Kingston the cruise directors give glowing recommendations about specific shops. But they can't pry any kickbacks out of Bay Street because it is too well, too solidly established, too world-renowned to give a hoot. The big machine chews up the people, but it gives fair value.



Four hours ashore at the mercy of the machine. Five big taxis were waiting, an indication that there were a few who had signed up for a tour of the island.



The chain was dropped, and as the harried staff checked them off, the folk came hurrying down the gangplank. In the lead was an overstrength platoon of the same beefy arid resolute women you see bursting into department stores on sale days the instant the doors are unlocked. Great hams bulged the lurid shorts.



"Attention please, attention please. Passengers taking the tour will please board the limousines off to your left as you debark. Thank you."



The ship's last cruise of the season, a short one, at the lowest rates. Yet it was at only a little more than half capacity, they had told me. During the height of the season, in the first three months of any year, when these small cruise ships that ply the Caribbean are at capacity, a good two-thirds of the passenger list is made up of what a friend of mine who worked aboard one for a season called the "mother" trade. To explain what he meant, he would give you a big expansive smile and say, "I always promised Mother that some day I'd take her on a cruise. Well, sir, with the kids married off and the store sold, I said to her, I said, 'Mother, you better start packing, because we're a-going on that cruise.'"



So they fill up the little ships, eat the spiced and stylized cruise food, get seasick, sunburned. They take afternoon dance lessons in the Neapolitan Ballroom, play organized deck games, splash about in the small pool on the sundeck, play bridge, get a little tiddly and giggly, dress up for dinner and appraise the dresses of the other women, get totally confused about which port is which, take fragmentary language lessons, vigorously applaud the meager talents of the ship's floor show, take all the tours, write and mail scores of postcards, compete for prizes in the costume ball, spend a dutiful amount of time each day at sea in the rental deck chair.



In the brochures, of course, there were the beautiful people dancing gracefully and romantically by moonlight and the light of Japanese lanterns on the tropic deck of a brand-new ship, and the same lovely people smiling in the warm sunlight, their golden limbs in relaxed and effective composition around the huge shipboard swimming pool.



It isn't like that. These little ships arc lumpy with endless coats of topside paint, and the ship's staff is overworked, and the schedules are rigidly set, with brassy announcements coming over the speaker systems, sending the whole herd moving in one direction or another.



It isn't like they thought. But it isn't like anything else they ever knew either. Perhaps, in some wistful and tender sense, these are the beautiful people, and because this is the dream fulfilled, they hold onto it tightly, making small translations from reality. And down there, in the cramped inconveniences of the little cabins, in the slightly oily wind of the ship's air-conditioning, in the muted grumble of the ship's engines, the little vibrational shudders as she crosses the tropic ocean, sunburned flesh is coupled in a passion more like that of years ago, and in the breakfast morning they smile into each other's eyes, a secret recognition.



But this was the tag end of the season, and a mixed bag. Scampering flocks of small children. A sprinkling of heavy men in their middle years, accompanying, with a certain air of apprehension, their young doughy blondes toward the Bay Street shops. A contingent of scrubbed-looking highschool kids chaperoned by a nervous-acting couple who looked like a male and female Woodrow Wilson, and an unchaperoned pack of kids of college age, the girls like a bright fluttering flock of tropic birds, the boys languid under the terrible burden of improvised sophistication, and thirty or forty couples of the "mother" classification. The tour caravan left. The others dispersed into Bay Street. The machine came to life. It could readily chew up the entire passenger lists of four deluxe cruise ships simultaneously, each one better than twice the size of the little Monica D. The saloons turned the music on. The strawmarket women began their sales patter, waving the merchandise, and making crude comments about the Jamaican hats a lot of cruise people were wearing. These people were a tiny morsel for the machine, a hundred and fifty or so, but with proper pressure, calibration, alignment of the rollers and levers and sluice gates, it might churn eight thousand dollars out of this motley group, and there was little else to do on a Monday afternoon in June anyway. The mystique of the operation is that a true-blue consumer will buy something she does not need and cannot afford when she discovers that the same item at home would cost her thirty dollars more.



Our targets were not in the pack, and just as I was about to say we'd better go aboard, she started slowly down the gangplank. Unmistakably she. Theatrically she, making her exit after the rabble had been cleared from her path.



White cotton twill pants, fitting her slenderness with an almost improbable snugness. They came to just above her bare ankles, with a slight flare, an instep notch. The wide waistband was snugged around her slender waist, and above it was six supple bare inches of midriff, and above that a little half-sleeve truncated blouse, fine red and white stripes, so dense with stiff ruffles she looked like a Christmas display of ribbon candy. Atop the interwoven and intricate coiffure of cream-blonde hair was perched at a perfect straightness a wide-brimmed, white bullfighter hat of straw in a fine weave, with white ball fringe dangling all the way around the rim. She carried a red purse shaped like a lunch bucket. Her sandals had half-heels, white straps, thick cork soles. The very wide flat rims of her sunglasses had a red and white checkerboard pattern.



She came slowly down the incline of the gangplank, the slope creating, with the thick soles of the sandals, considerably more hip motion than she could have achieved on a level surface. Every crew member who could get to a rail on the starboard side stopped all work and watched the descent. The only discernible flaw in her figure was that her thighs, as revealed by the tightness of the pants, were too long and too heavy to be in proportion to the rest of her. She was slightly tanned, just enough to set off the smoothness between waistband and blouse. I could sense the concerted inaudible sigh as she reached the level of the cement dock. She walked with a sense of complete awareness of being watched, looking straight ahead, undeviatingly. It was a triumph of merchandising, a perfect gem of functional display techniques, as specific as the cutaway working models of engines at auto shows.



She turned and looked back up at the deck. A big man appeared and came down toward her. He had a long, limber stride, a small waist and hips under white stretch Levis, and great wads of muscle bulging the navy blue knit sports shirt. His pale forearms had almost the exaggerated meatiness of Popeye the Sailor, nd he held himself and moved in a way that betrayed those curious anxieties. He had a face far older than the body, long, eroded and sallow, with rows and lashes of such pallor it had an expressionless look. There was something just wrong enough about his pale curly locks to make me quite certain it was a hairpiece. A long slim cigar was clamped at an uptilted angle in the corner of his mouth. The girl had continued walking, and when he caught up with her, they stopped and talked. She tilted her head back so she could look up at him from under the hat brim. Seeing them together I realized he was big enough to look me in the eye.



She took a list from her purse. He looked at it with her. He shrugged, tapped ash from the cigar, walked with her toward Bay Street.



I got my bag from the hotel and went aboard first, presented my ticket, was properly greeted.



"I saw that couple come off several minutes ago, and they looked familiar. Both of them in white pants."



"Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Terry. Yes, of course. They have traveled with us before. You know them?"



"The name doesn't sound right. I guess I'm mistaken."



"You will have a chance to see them more closely, perhaps. You are almost neighbors. They are also on the port side, also in an outside cabin on the Lounge Deck. Number Fourteen, several rooms forward of yours, sir."



There was no one at the steward's station and no sign of a maid. I located the key rack, opened the glass door and took the key to Six from its hook. The cabin was bright and pleasant. I checked the location of Fourteen and went, as planned, to the ship's lounge. The ceiling, of white pegboard, wasn't high enough for me. It would be all too easy to tear my scalp on one of the little round sprinkler heads which protruded from it. There were groupings of overstuffed chairs and sofas, upholstered in blue, yellow, rose and purple, surrounding round black tables with raised chrome edges. The floor was of black composition. I picked a group with yellow upholstery, and had a waiter bring me a Pauli Girl beer. From time to time a passenger would hurry through, all haste, frowns and concentration, camera clanking.



Meyer appeared, sat down with a heavy sigh. "I am entombed down there, in a ghastly flickering glow of tiny light bulbs." He pointed aft. "I have our mail drop. The first stairway through that door, halfway down, at the curve, a fire hose in a case. The top is recessed a little. So, the top right corner of it, the right as you face it."



"Very good."



"And it has struck me that we might make use of the PA system. I have heard them paging people."



"Also very good, depending. I'm off. She had a list. So it's an odds-on chance they split up. Go play with your doll."



At almost two-thirty I spotted her, alone, just going into the Nassau Shop, carrying one dressbox-size package. I followed her in. She put the sunglasses in her purse. She strolled slowly back through the store and stopped at a circular rack containing Daks skirts. I was loafing about eight feet away when the clerk approached her.



When she spoke I learned she had a child voice, a little thin dear girlie voice. "This one, in the green, this is just linen, isn't it? No other fabric to keep it from wrinkling?"



"Pure linen, miss."



"So you put it on and an hour later it looks like you'd slept in it. No thanks."



"A beautiful wool, perhaps, miss? In this soft gray?"



"I guess not. Thanks anyhow."



I circled and came upon her at the end of a counter, face to face, glance to glance in the instant of passing, sensed behind her eyes the little click of appraisal and dismissal, as if back in there was mounted one of the tired old cameras used by defeated photographers on the littered boardwalks of unfashionable resorts.



Hers was a pointy little face under the bulk of hat and weight of hair. The fur of her eyebrows angled up in a habitual query that no longer asked any questions. It was a small mouth, with the pulp of the unpainted lips so bulgingly, ripely plump she had the look of getting ready to whistle. Sharp little nose and sharp little chin, and an angled flatness in her cheeks. The feature that unified all the rest of it was the eyes, very very large, widely set, brilliantly and startlingly green. She was all erotic innocence and innocent eroticism, moving by me, knowing I would turn to stare, that I would see the arrogance, the slow laziness, the luxurious challenge of the lazy scissors of the long weight of white thighs and the soft flexing perkiness of the little rump. She made me think of a Barbie Doll.



I did not know what to try or how to try it. I could not appraise how much nerve she had or how much intelligence. Nor how completely Terry owned her. If, by luck, I rested the edge of the wedge at exactly the right point, tapped with proper impact, the crystalline structure might cleaver. More probably any attempt would glance off, arouse suspicion, send her trotting to wherever Ans Terry awaited her, with a description of me. But if she could be convinced, very quickly, that she was marked for execution also.... I had to stake the whole thing on how much she knew about what had happened to Tami. Then I found one possible way I could do it, with a fair chance of its working.



She had gone to a counter where, under glass, elegant little Swiss watches were displayed. The clerk helping her went off to get something out of stock. I moved quickly to stand beside her and said in a low voice, "If you're Del Whitney, I have to talk to you. I've got a message from Tami."



"You've got me confused with somebody. Sorry."



"Tami gave me the message before they killed her, and she told me how I could find you."



Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to stare up at me from under the flat brim of the hat. I turned my head slightly, looked at her, saw her absolute rigidity, eyes made even larger by shock. The clerk was returning. "K-k-killed!" she whispered.



I had that same feeling you get in a hand of stud poker when you've hung in there with sevens back to back, seen the third one go elsewhere, debate hanging in there with those two kings staring at you across the table, then meet the raise and see the case seven hit you, and know then just how you are going to play it.



"Is this what you had in mind, miss?" the clerk asked. "What? No. No, thank you." She moved away from the counter and, ten feet away, stopped and stared at me again. I could sense that she was beginning to suspect she had been tricked and had responded clumsily.



"I don't think it would be smart for Terry to see us together." I took out my wallet, felt in the compartment behind the cards, pulled out the folded clipping of the report of the fingerprint identification. "If you didn't happen to know her by this name, Del, it won't mean much."



She unfolded it. Suddenly her hands began an uncontrollable trembling. The dressbox slipped from under her arm and fell to the carpeting. "Oh, God! Oh, dear Jesus God!" Her voice had a whistly sound.



I picked up her package. "Pull yourself together! You'll bitch us both up. If you want to stay alive, settle down, damn it. Where's Terry?"



"Wuh-wuh-waiting for me at that Blackbeard thing."



"We better get you a drink."



I took her to the Carlton. Her walk was strange, rigid, made stilt-like by shock. I took her to a dim back corner of the paneled bar lounge, empty at that hour. I got her a double Scotch over ice. She gulped it down and then began to cry, fumbling tissue out of her red purse. She cried almost silently, hunched, shuddering and miserable. At last she mopped her eyes, blew her nose, straightened with a slight shudder.



"I just don't understand. Who are you? What's happening?"



"They tried to kill her. They missed. She came to me. I'm just an old friend she could trust, that's all. I live in Lauderdale. She couldn't take the risk of trying to contact you and DeeDee, so she made me promise to try. DeeDee has disappeared. If you want a good guess, they've knocked her in the head and planted her out in the boondocks someplace."



"My God! What are you trying to do to me!"



"Lower your voice! I'm trying to give you Tamie's message. She was going to make a run for it. You can see she didn't get into the clear. She tried to sneak back to pick up the money she had stashed away, and probably ran into Griff, whoever he is. She was afraid of running into him. She said to tell you to run. She said that all of a sudden they found out the law was getting too close, and they decided to close out the operation. And because you three hustlers are the way they'd tie the others into it, and because it is a murdering situation, they made a policy decision to kill the three of you. And it looks as if you're the only one left, Del."



"But they... wouldn't!"



"Read the clipping. Kiddy, they hit her so hard with that murder car it splashed her up against the second story of a stone building." When I saw the sickness, I followed it up by taking her wrist and saying, "It smashed one whole side of her head flat, all the way to her nose. And from the waist down she was just a sack of busted meat."



She gagged, swallowed and said, "But I'd find out about it when.. "When you get back? Who'll give you a chance to read last week's newspapers? They'll turn you off before you can unpack, lay low a few months, then recruit new girls."



"I've got to tell Ans! We've got to get away from here!"



I bore down on her slender wrist until pain changed the shape of her mouth. "Smarten up fast, or I can't help you, kiddy. That Monday night before you sailed, dear old Ans wired a cement block to Tami's ankles and heaved her off a highway bridge below Marathon. It was after midnight. Mack drove the car. She was conscious. What they didn't know, there were fishermen under the bridge. They got her up in time. She came to me in Lauderdale. Here I am taking this lousy risk of getting mixed up in this stinking thing, and you come on stupid. They thought she'd be dead. They talked in front of her. Griff and Ans made a sentimental deal. Ans was to drown Tami, and in return Ans turns you over to Griff. Tami said please warn you without Ans knowing. I owed her the favor. She was shook. She'd been sunk into twenty feet of black water with her ankles wired. So I flew over here and I'm booked back on the Monica D. I didn't know I'd locate you ashore, from Tami's description. Maybe even with a warning you don't stand a chance. But I made the try. Stay stupid and you're soon dead, because you've been in a business where that's the only way they retire you, sweetie."



It glazed her. She stared wide-eyed into the middle distance, the fat little mouth agape, exposing the gleamings of even little white teeth.



"He's been acting so funny," she whispered. "Jumpy. Cross all the time. And there wasn't any other cruise he drank so much. And mean to me this trip. Nasty mean. He gave me such a thumping! The thing that started it, I asked him when we could quit. First it was going to be just three or four. Then it got up to ten. And this was number fourteen and I said to him that no matter how smooth it went, if you kept it up and kept it up, you were pushing your luck. I said I was getting sick of having such a strain all the time, and how much better everything was when there was just the two of us in the little apartment in Coral Gables, and I worked the conventions over on the Beach. That was no real reason for the thumping he gave me. He's had lots better reasons. I've been with him seven years. This is big money, but... when I can't sleep, sometimes I keep thinking about those poor guys. I just can't believe Ans would. let them do that to me. "No, of course not. He is a very sentimental guy. He wants to keep you alive and well, so the cops can pick you up and let a whole swarm of people make identifications, so they can bring you to trial for murder first and let you make a deal with the law and help them nail everybody else. Use your head, kiddy. They know DeeDee would make a deal. Vangie would make a deal. Why should they trust the third hooker to keep her mouth shut?"



She bit down on her thumb knuckle. "Tuesday morning it was, he didn't get back to the place until way after three. Then he sat out there drinking, and he wouldn't come to bed. You know... I guess it would really bother him to have to do that to Tami. I guess it was hard on him."



"And Griff is going to cry big tears when he tucks you into some swamp.



She shuddered. "Please stop doing that, huh? I have to think. God, I don't know what to do. You can guess how much bread Ans lets me have. I don't have a hundred dollars in the world. I've never been on my own at all. I've been with Ans since I was sixteen. I was third runner-up for Miss Oceanside Beach and he was third runner-up for Mr. Body. He was twenty-seven. We teamed up like to help each other, and we went a billion miles in that old car, I bet, just barely making out on the contests, a whole year of it, and then he got so sick there in Chicago, and I was working waitress and telling my troubles to a girlfriend, how he was in a charity ward, and the medicines so expensive, and my feet hurting all the time from those damn tile floors, and then my waitress girlfriend took me on that double date, and the guy put fifty bucks into my purse, under the table."



She shook her head slowly, frowning. "When he found out for sure about the hustling, it racked him up. He cried and cried. When he got better we tried to make it the square way, him pumping gas, but he got an allergy and his hands swelled so bad he couldn't work, and I went back to hustling, and it didn't bother him so much, and finally it didn't bother him at all."



She frowned at me and said, "He's weak, kind of. He's scared. He could do that to Tami from being scared. It must be killing him inside to think I've got to be killed too. That's why he's so mean and jumpy and drinking and"



All The tiny childish voice trailed off. In the quiet of the empty lounge she sat with head lowered, hat brim concealing her face. Her hand, resting inert next to the ashtray, was small, plump, with short fingers and a thick palm, the nails nibbled so close to the quick her fingertips looked deformed. She wore a narrow gold wedding ring set with small diamond chips, and a little gold wristwatch shaped like a heart, the strap fashioned of thin black fabric cords. It had shifted from its customary position and I could see where the light tan of the wrist surrounded the pattern of a heart in the white untanned skin. The wrist of a woman and the small tidy forearm always seem to me to have some tender and touching quality, a vulnerable articulation unchanged from the time she was ten or twelve, perhaps the only part of her that her flowering leaves unchanged.



The shaded light was on the paneled wall above us, the glow of it yellow-orange. She turned her head toward me, looked up from under the white straw brim, green eyes in shadow.



"He knows I didn't want to get into this. But what he had done, you see, he had listened to too much about it, and they told him that we knew so much it wouldn't be healthy not to get into it. I guess it isn't so healthy now. Not for anybody. I bet he knows what he can expect too. It could be making him drink so much. He's always been too proud of his body to drink so much. If they're closing the store, how long will Ans and Frankie Loyal last?"



"She didn't mention Frankie."



"He works with DeeDee. Worked with DeeDee. He's more like Ans, sort of. Jittery, kind of nervous about the whole deal. Griff is different. He's closer to Mack and Nogs. Griff is more like helping run the thing, and he worked with Mack and Nogs before, and I think he gets cut in on all three teams too. There's one thing about Griff, he isn't nervous about a thing. A person to him is a bug, and if it is where your foot comes down, that's the way it crumbles. At least, if he gets me, he will make it just as easy for me as he can. I know that. He's always liked me. He's hinted a couple of times we could change the teams around."



"What kind of a name is Nogs?"



"I don't know his real first name. It's some kind of a joke about eggnogs and a Christmas party years and years ago. Nogs Berga is his whole name. I heard Mack say Nogs has a lot of things going for him, a lot of things straight things, like monkey jungles and 'gator farms and frontier towns, and Mack runs our operation for him, getting the credit reports on the guys we line up, and saying what boat to get the tickets on, and fixing it so the postcards get mailed from faraway places from those guys so it won't be a lot of guys disappearing from around this area, which could make a lot of heat after a while. What am I going to do? What do you think I should do?"



"Can you handle yourself so Ans won't suspect you now?"



She gave me a quick glance, with an ugly twist to her fatty little mouth. "There's been plenty I haven't wanted him to suspect, friend."



"But if he does and thumps it out of you, it could put me in the bag, Del."



She shrugged. "I'd tell him I was in a place where a radio was on Miami news, and I heard about Tami and DeeDee and figured it out from the funny way he's acting. Anyway, if you don't want to, why take the boat? You found me. You did the favor. I don't even know your name. Fly back."



"The name is Travis McGee, and I am in Stateroom Six on the Lounge Deck, and I can give you one idea of what you could do. Will he drink enough to pass out?"



"That's the way it's been going this trip, and he's getting a good start while we're talking."



"Leave him a note. Say you heard the Miami news and figured it out. So you've decided to go over the rail. That would cover you in case Griff has orders to meet the ship and take over right away."



"So then what?"



"So then I give a good piece of money to the room steward, and he'll know a way to fix it so you don't have to disembark with the others. We'll give him a reason he can appreciate. Like a husband waiting outside the customs shed with a gun. Ans Terry isn't going to show anybody that note, not with what you say in it. There'll be a short count on the passengers getting off. Short by two, you and me. But the steward can use a piece of his piece of money to keep anybody from getting agitated. Ans will take your stuff off through customs, and I have an acquaintance on board who'll take my gear off. Then when the whole turmoil is over and everybody gone, we walk off."



She took her hat off and laid it aside, patted her hair, stared into her new drink with narrowed eyes, and drummed her plump fingers.



"Sure. He'll show them the note. I didn't get off. So they'll believe it. They'll believe I took a jump. It gives me a chance to run."



"I can give you a start. A couple of hundred bucks." With eyes still narrow she said, "Why?"



"Favor to Vangie. I promise a favor, I like to go all the way with it."



"She never said anything about knowing anybody named McGee in Lauderdale."



I got the inscribed photograph from the wallet. She studied it. "Like that, huh? Where'd she know you from?"



"Way back."



She handed the photograph back. "What do you do for bread?"



"I call it salesmanship. But sometimes the mark doesn't mind letting his friends and family know how stupid he was, and then they call it extortion or conspiracy to defraud."



"You got a nice tricky way of figuring things out. I guess you'd make out pretty good in con work, looking more like you race boats or build roads or used to play ball or something. Is there any reason you have to stay in Lauderdale?"



"Why?"



"Maybe you could think up something that would use me for bait. God knows I've had enough practice putting on an act for those guys."



"Fourteen acts."



She lifted her shoulders slightly. "I wouldn't want that kind of an ending, not ever again."



"Let me put it this way, Del. I keep things clean. If you try a rough line of work, you take too big a fall if it goes sour. Almost every con operation is a partnership thing. Sure, I could use you. It might be a good time to move along. It would be a good time of year to go up and work the Jersey shore. But what if these people down here found out somehow you got away? Somebody would come after you. I might be crossing a street with you when they run you down Why should I take a chance like that? And the law isn't going to believe you took the jump. If they are unraveling it, you could be near the top of their list, and there is a large fall for helping a murderer escape."



"I never killed anybody! I couldn't!"



"You just lured them into the situation, so Ans could do it. Fourteen times. They wouldn't electrocute you. Not a pretty young woman. They almost never do. But they'd hang consecutive sentences on you so that the way you'd finally leave would be out the back gate in a box. And I could get five or ten for harboring a fugitive. Kiddy, I'm walking around free as a bird because I don't take bad risks."



She turned completely to face me, fastened her short fingers around my wrist and went to work on me with those green eyes. It was not an unwavering stare. She moved it around, up and down and across, pausing at my eyes each time. She put an old fuzzy edge on the clear silver of her voice.



"Since I was sixteen I've been sizing guys up. The way I am, dear, I got to belong to somebody. Ans was weak, and that was why it wasn't ever the greatest. McGee, you threw all this at me fast. I know you're strong. And I know we react good to each other. There's that feeling you can't miss. So the only choice I've got, dear, is you. I've got to trust you. I've got to let you take charge and get me out of this mess. That's the way things are between us, and maybe it comes out better luck than we could guess. What I can be, when I have somebody, is absolutely level all the way. I'll help you any way you want help, and food, clothes and a roof is all I'll need. And I swear to God that if anybody finds me, I'll convince them you didn't know a thing about anything. I can be a help. I can do the college-girl bit or the housewife bit or the model bit, or be a young widow or whatever. And the day you say go, I'll go. No strings, no tears. So take a chance, huh?"



But I couldn't get fourteen men out of my mind, men who'd been snookered by the business with the eyes, the dear little voice, men who'd sucked at that plump little mouth, been enclosed between the long warm clasp of those thighs, men who'd marveled at the luck that had brought them in their middle years the heats and devotions of such a spectacular young girl, and had gone cruising with her and hadn't lived past the first night aboard, to have their reservation taken over by an aging Mr. Body.



"Maybe," I said. "I'll think about it. Maybe I can come up with an idea which will give me some insurance. It's after four now. When can you shake loose from him?"



She forgot the question for a moment. She shook her head. "It's so spooky, thinking about it. My God, him handing me over to Griff just like I've been handing those marks over to him. Everything you say fits, dear. We gals should have been able to figure it out. If it ever started to go sour, we three would be the first to go. You know, I'm going to miss those kids. We had a lot of laughs."



"What time?"



"Oh, figuring his track record this trip I'd say he'll fold before eleven o'clock. Maybe even before ten."



"Stateroom Six," I said. I rapped my knuckles on the table. Two quick knocks, a pause, two quick ones again. "Knock like that."



It was interesting to me in a clinical way that in the distance from our table to the street door she managed to sway a tautly fabricked hip against me three separate and insistent times, though she'd had no trouble with sway or balance on the way in. With an instant practicality, she'd changed masters. Now it was merely a case of firmly cementing the new relationship in the only way she knew how.



Back aboard at four-thirty, I checked our mail drop and the slip said, "At home."



I went aft and found my way down to his cabin. He opened the door to my knock. "Welcome to steerage," he said. He pointed to the dressing table. I saw the doll. I went over and picked it up. He had carved a rather good cement block. It dangled on the silvery wire an inch below the ankles.



The doll was naked. Any other doll would have been bare, or unclad. But the Japanese artisan who had made this one, even knowing it would be sewed and glued into a kimono, had given a total and humorless attention to detail, making of it a statue rather than a doll. Even the navel was a typically Asiatic little stub, with incised curlicue.



"Couldn't do a damn thing with the hair," he explained.



"I had to cut it all off, soak it in hot water, get it straight, glue it back on--I went ashore for the glue--and shape it with my nail scissors."



"It's a beautiful job, Meyer. Absolutely beautiful."



"After I gave her more eyebrows with a little black ink, it turned into a better resemblance."



"It's going to give our boy one hell of a turn."



"How did you make out?"



He sat on the bunk. I straddled the straight metal chair that faced the dressing table. He was a splendid listener with expressions of great wonderment, surprise, awe, concern, appreciation-and little gasps and grunts and murmurs in all the right places. "So I stood under the portico and watched her stilt along to Bay Street, knowing she was giving it a little extra something, adding one extra little circular fillip that made everything else work that much harder to keep up. The resplendent officer atop his little box under his umbrella blew the birds out of the trees with his whistle, and stopped every vehicle in the downtown area to let her cross East Street, and a chap in a sun helmet ran full into an old lady with her arms full of packages. He was looking back over his shoulder at the time."



"My God, Travis, what a fantastic gamble!"



"Just the first contact. That was the gamble. From then on I played it the way she was calling it. I had to sense how much she'd swallow and just what things would give it a ring of truth. When it wasn't working just right, I'd move the walnut shells around again. She's what the Limey locals would call a nasty little bit of work. Nastier than our Vangie. She kids herself more than Vangie did. She's perfectly willing to believe Terry'll dump her because she could be talked into dumping him. With a little persuasion, she would have set up a double on this trip. Let Terry drop their pigeon over the side, then hand Terry to Griff on a platter for the same treatment."



"This business of keeping her aboard, and finding a way to take her away with you. I fell off at one of those curves."



"The instructions I'm going to give you right now will give you enough clue so you can climb back on."



He listened with a total attention, and when I was through, he repeated the whole sequence flawlessly. He was a joy to work with.



"But can you make her do it?" he asked.



"The choice is going to look just fine to her."



We saw her at dinner. A gala night. She came in late, sat alone at a table for two. She wore a dark blue sleeveless bodice in some glittering metallic thread, a lighter blue cummerbund, a white ankle-length skirt that draped handsomely to her walk. I saw her searching for me after she had ordered. We were fifty feet away. Her gaze swept across me, stopped, came back. She held the glance for a moment, and without expression, gave a single almost imperceptible nod. A little later I looked over and saw a thick-bodied tourist leaning on her table, bending over, talking to her. The dining room lights made a gleaming pattern on his sweaty bald head. She paid not the slightest attention to him. He was swaying slightly, in drunken persuasion. Finally she looked up at him as if suddenly noticing him. She motioned him closer. She put her hand on the nape of his neck, pulled him down, whispered into his ear. She whispered for perhaps ten seconds. He sprang back from her. She watched him calmly. He backed into a waiter, then he turned and went back to his table. He passed quite close to us. His color looked bad, his mouth hung open. His eyes had that glassiness of someone who had been given a quick little glimpse of hell and turned into a believer.



He sat and pushed the food around his plate and then went out.



When next I looked over, she was gone. She rapped on the inner door at precisely ten-thirty. She came in very quickly, dropped a little blue airlines bag and a big white purse onto my bed, then snugged herself into my arms, her arms locked around my waist, tightly. She was shivering, and I guessed it was half faked, half real. She kept herself pulled very firmly against me, and she whispered, "Darling, darling, darling. I'm safe now."



I gently unwound her and stepped away. "You shouldn't have packed anything."



"But I know that. I didn't! Don't be cross with your Delly. I am yours now, dear. What I did was make some lightning purchases, inexpensive stuff, just the essentials, dear, and that little bag to hold what I couldn't get into this purse. It's new too. He knows all my clothes. He's like that. He's going to find everything there, my purse and identification things and my money, what I had left. All he'll be able to find missing is my yellow checked jama shift, and he would have noticed that was laid out to sleep in. It's in the blue bag, dear. He'll see I didn't even take the darling dress I bought out of the store wrappings, and he'll know I was upset. I even left my dear little heart watch on the night stand. I made the bed look as if I tried to sleep. I left the note pinned to the pillow. I wrote it like you said, dear, about hearing on the radio about DeeDee and Tami and realizing why he was acting so strange. You have to lock the door with the key, so I had to leave it unlocked. So I folded the note and pinned it that way and wrote his name in big letters. And I said that I just couldn't live with my conscience any more, after what we'd done. Oh, he'll have no doubt! So here I am, all for you, without a dime, and just this outfit that I wouldn't be caught dead in, usually. I bought it so I wouldn't look like me at all. See? Short little green walking skirt, and this kind of dumb Fauntlery blouse and flats and little-girl stockings. Let me show you the full effect."



She hurried to her new purse and took out a comb and seated herself in front of the mirror. She unpinned her hair, let it fall long, and, biting her lip, combed the pale thick weight of it. She fashioned it into a high ponytail, fixing it so most of the weight of it fell forward across the front of her right shoulder. With pink lipstick she widened her mouth. She put on a new pair of sunglasses, dainty frames and a pixie tilt, then stood up and faced me, smiling for inspection.



"This is the way I walk off this Eyetalian sheep."



"The walk will give you away."



She trudged over to the door and back, toeing out, slouching, swinging her arms too freely. "Will it?"



"Okay. You're eighteen. A backward eighteen."



She took the glasses off, planted herself, looked up at me with her head cocked. "You've decided yes. I can tell."



"On one condition."



"Anything!"



I put the sheaf of ship's stationery and my pen on the glass of the dressing table. "Sit here and write what I tell you to write."



When she had seated herself and picked up the pen, I told her to date it yesterday. "To the Police Department, Broward Beach, Florida. Dear sirs..



"Hey! What are you"



"Write it. You can tear it up if you want to, if you don't understand why it has to be done. You can tear it up, and then you can get out of this stateroom."



She hunched over the paper like a schoolgirl and wrote.



I dictated. "I have decided to take my own life by jumping into the sea before this ship gets to Florida. I am going to give this letter to someone to mail to you."



"Just a little slower, please."



"I would rather kill myself... than wait and have them kill me the way they did Evangeline Bellemer. Period. I think that everybody connected with this should pay for their crimes. Period. That is why I... am making a full confession... at this time. I will tell you where... you can find them all... and what we have been doing.. for the last two years."



I waited. She finished the final words and turned and stared at me. "You sure do want a hell of a lot of insurance."



"Use your head, woman. Insurance for you too. They'll break Ans Terry down in five minutes and he'll verify you jumped overboard. The cops will pick up everybody who was in on it, and there'll be nobody left to come after you if they ever did get any clue. Nobody will be looking for you, nobody from either side."



"I... I guess you're right. But I just hate to put it down on paper. Couldn't we do it later? You could trust me to write it all out after we're safe, dear."



"When you've written the whole thing out and signed it and I have it in my hand, addressed and stamped and sealed, then we'll talk about how much I trust you, Del."



"Jesus, you're hard, aren't you?"



"And free as a bird, and planning to stay that way. If you don't like it, go take your chances with Terry and Griff."



She spun back and snatched the pen up. "All right, all right, damn you! What next?"



"Miss Bellemer was living at... Eight Thousand Cove Lane, Apartment Seven B, Quendon Beach... under the name of Tami Western. Period. What's Griff's name?"



"Walter Griffin."



"Walter Griffin lives at the same address in Apartment Seven C. He very probably arranged to have her killed by being struck by a car, when ordered to do so by... what's Mack's name?"



"Webster Macklin."



At Meyer's three solid knocks upon the stateroom door she jumped violently. I'd worked out a code with Meyer, based on several of the plausible things you can call out when somebody knocks.



"Yes?" I called. That let him know our guess was right and she had simplified things by leaving Fourteen unlocked and it was safe to leave Ans his little keepsake.



"Sorry. Wrong room," he rumbled.



I kept her going. She balked now and again, such as when I demanded she put down the specifics of the most recent murder. He had been a fifty-four year old divorced chemist from Youngstown, Ohio, taking a vacation alone, and they had come aboard on separate tickets at separate times as Mr. and Mrs. A. B. Terry, and he had twenty-six thousand dollars in cash in a money belt, the proceeds of the sale of some bonds and the cash value of his insurance policies. Ans Terry was now wearing the money belt, and Mr. Powell Daniels was sticking out of the silted bottom somewhere west-southwest of Miami, wearing under his resort clothes an entirely different sort of belt, one of those designed for scuba diving, with every compartment snapped shut on its wafer of lead.



She explained it to me. "I'd tell him to just wander around until he was sure our luggage had been brought in. We had to come aboard separate on this one on account of crew people knowing me. He came to the cabin and I gave him a celebration drink. It would really knock them out, that stuff. Then I'd let Ans in. You could count on four or five hours before you could slap them half awake. We know where the best place is on this boat, from before. It's on the Promenade Deck about thirty feet forward from where the deck stops. It stops at the doors to the dining room. I guess it is about the middle of the ship. Right there there's no place above you where people can look over. There isn't any rail there or side deck on the Lounge I deck, and up on the Sun Deck there's a lifeboat in the way. It's the same on either side of the ship. You do it about three in the morning. They aren't really awake. But they sort of walk, if you hold them on both sides. We sing and ask him if he's feeling better if there's people. I go and stand at the nearest stairway and if nobody is coming, I click my tongue, and Ans picks them up like you pick up a sleepy kid, and leans out over the rail and drops them."



I dictated it back to her. Meyer had figured out the visitors' pass system perfectly.



I was curious about how so many apparently intelligent men could be gulled so readily.



"Oh, you mean always tell the ones worth a try, and out of those, the ones you can get to take a real interest in you. The marrieds you brush off. Also the ones who know their way around too good. You work to get the name and home address and local address, and if they have to leave right off, that's no good. Sometimes you can go ten days without finding one worth turning in the name so Mack can get him checked out. And then a lot of times from what he found out he'd say no. Like if the guy was too important and had too much money, it would be no just as quick as if he had no chance of raising the minimum twenty thousand. When you get a go-ahead, then you keep right on with the tease, letting him get close sometimes. We all worked it just the same. You cry a lot. You say you shouldn't see him at all, that it's too dangerous. You make him meet you at hideaway places at weird times. Then you confess your ex is a mental case and he's going to kill you. You tell the guy your ex has found out about him, and you make him move to another place under another name. Then you start putting out, and you butter him up by going kind of crazy and telling him it's never been like that before. After they start getting it, they'll believe any damn fool thing you tell them, and do any fool thing you ask. So you fake an attempt on your life, and you say the only way to get away is tickets under a fake name on a cruise ship and bring lots of money, because you have an old friend in Kingston or St. Thomas or somewhere the ship is going who has a remote cottage somewhere and she can fix it so the two of you can stay there under some other name indefinitely. By then, because of the way he worked the postcard bit, any relatives he has and some friends and business partners have been getting cards from him from Spokane or Toledo or Albuquerque or some place like that, and that's where they start hunting when they don't hear anything else ever. We always worked it the same exact way, but DeeDee would handle a guy different than Tami or me, and I would use a different approach than Tami. The thing is, as sOon as he thinks he's going to get to spend sack time with you on a cruise ship, he hasn't got eyes for anything else. And making him believe you don't dare be with him in public makes it a lot safer. I'd always bring one suitcase full of Ans's things aboard with my stuff. How quick you could get him tuned up all the way kind of depended. One ran out on me the day before sailing. They gave me a terrible ride about that, DeeDee and Tami did. I think, all things considered, DeeDee could do the best and fastest job of nailing them down, but if in the beginning you let them think you're going to be easy to get, you spoil it. Lonely men over forty-five, they all, every one of them, have this fantastic thing about young women, and that's what you work on."



It took a long long time to flesh it all out. She became resigned to it, to the extent she did not try to drag her feet when I requested she list the fourteen. Nine was the best she could do, and she wasn't sure of two of their names. She estimated the total take of just herself and Terry at close to four hundred thousand dollars. It was after two o'clock when she said in a tired whine, "Honey, my hand is going to drop right off, honest. It's all full of cramps."



"Take a rest while I read it over."



There were fifteen pages in her unformed backhand, all the lines sloping up toward the right side of the sheets. It would give any investigator more than enough. There was little point in pulling any more details out of her. Her head sagged slowly, jerked upright. She was emotionally and physically exhausted.



"Okay, Del. Just a little bit to wind it up. Ready? New paragraph. I am not going to tell Ans about this letter. I am going to leave him a note... saying I have killed myself. Period. I will pin it to my pillow... after he passes out tomorrow night. Period. I am sorry about what. we did to those men. Period. I am glad I have written. this letter. Period. May God have mercy... on my soul. Period. Sign it, Del."



I was looking down over her shoulder as she wrote her name Adele Whitney. She hesitated. "When I was booked a few times, like in Chicago, it was my right name."



"Put that down too."



"Jane Adele Strusslund," she wrote. She dropped the pen, making a spray of ink on the paper under her signature. She stood, turning as she stood, to come up in the circle of my arms. She yawned deeply, shuddered, rested her forehead against my chin.



"Do I get a gold star, teacher?"



"Solid gold, Jane."



Her head jerked back. "Please don't call me that."



"Okay."



She yawned again. "I'm pooped something awful, darling. Would you like to undress me, maybe?"



"We'd better both rest up. Tomorrow could be rough."



Her glance was coldly inquisitive. "The times I've been turned down you could count on one hand, friend. You gay or something?"



I slowly folded the bulky confession, stuffed it into an envelope. The Monica D. made a larger pitching motion, moving us both off balance, both taking a sideways step to catch ourselves, like the beginning of an improvised dance. The compartmentation creaked, and I knew we were well into New Providence Channel, where we would take the sweep of the weather.



"Tomorrow I'll get you stashed in a safe place in Lauderdale. It will be four or five days before I can wind up a few things hanging fire. There'll be all the time in the world to get acquainted then, Del."



"Sure thing," she said flattered and picked up the purse and flight bag and went into the head and banged the door shut.



When the door opened again, I had turned the stateroom lights off. I had arranged slacks, shirt and shoes in a handy pile on the floor half under my bed, on the side away from the other bed, with the thick envelope, folded once, in the hip pocket of the slacks, and my stateroom key in a side pocket. I was in my bed in underwear shorts. Through the il of lashes I saw her stand braced in the open doorway. her heavy hair was combed long like Alice's. She wore the thing she called a jama shift. It fit loosely, blocked very little the light behind her, had lace at the hem, throat, short sleeves, and stopped about four inches above her knees. Costume for a drowning.



The light clicked off. Darkness loudened the noises of the Monica D., the buckety-swash of her rolling corkscrewing motion, the almost subsonic grumble of the marine drive downstairs, and the little phased chitters and whines that came and went as bulkhead portions picked up sympathetic sonances.



A weight came onto the bottom corner of my bed, tightening the blanket across my feet. A hand found my knee, stayed there.



In a sing-song plaint, in that teeny little-girl voice sweet carnival candy, and while her plump little fingers massaged my blanketed knee, she said, "It's like you're leaving me out. It's like you're making all the rest of it lies and tricks, not wanting to make out with me. Words don't ever mean much. How am I supposed to feel? Jesus, Travis! Am I such a terrible pig you couldn't stand touching me? They were going to kill me. I don't feel safe at all. Please, honey, hold me. Make love to me. So than I'll really and truly belong to you and it will all come out fine for us. Please!"



The thing that astounded and disheartened me was to find a very real yen to take a hack at this spooky little punchboard. There had been a lot more to Vangie in both looks and substance, but she hadn't tingled a single nerve. I wanted to grab at this one. Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to guarantee complete degradation. I wanted to pull her down and roll into that hot practiced trap which had clenched the life out of fourteen men. And there was the big shiny rationalization. It's the way to make her trust you, fella. Go right ahead, lull the broad. It'll take about nine minutes out of your life. You're a big boy. A broad is a broad is a broad, and who'll know the difference? You will, McGee. For a long long time.



But she had to have some gesture. She had to have some assurance. So I sat up, hitched toward her, put my arms around her, tucked her face into my neck. "Everything's going to work out fine, kiddy."



Her sigh was deep and shuddering. She had shucked herself out of that jama thing, and her skin felt whisper-soft, super-heated. She clung hard and said, "Hurry, dear. Gee, I'm so ready I'm practically there already."



"No, honey. Let's wait and make it in style. I have a thing about the right time and the right place, and waiting just makes it a better blast. Why do we have to rush anything? Once we're off this nervous boat and tucked away safe, we'll spend days in bed."



"We can have that too."



I knew the quickest way to cool me off. That fat little mouth made me squeamish. So I kissed it hard enough and long enough to creak her neck, mash the lips against her teeth, bend her rib cage.



She was puffing like a little furnace when I let her loose, hoisted her off my bed, turned her and welted that behind with a pistol-crack slap.



"Hey! Ow!"



"Back to your own sack, kiddy."



She made grumbling sounds, but once she was in her own bed she giggled. "Anyways, I got proof you're not lavender, dearie."



"Try to get some sleep."



I guessed that the exhaustion of fear would catch up with her. I gave her what I hoped was enough time, then got up and dressed swiftly and silently. I leaned over her and heard slow deep buzzing snores, bee sounds that came up from the deepest part of the pool of sleep. I locked the door behind me when I left.



Meyer, squinting as he opened his door for me, looked like a sideshow bear in his awning-stripe pajamas in green, black and orange. He yawned and sighed, sat where the light was best and read Del's confession. There was no more yawning and sighing. He gave it his total attention, as if he had forgotten I was there. When he finished it, he refolded it, took it over and put it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket in the locker.



As he turned, he frowned beyond me, saying, "It is too absurd a simplification, Travis, to try to relate her actions to moralistic terms. Wickedness. Heartlessness."



"For God's sake, Meyer!"



"We can find a more appropriate answer in a book written by a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. It's called, I believe, The I and the Not-I. It is an extension and interpretation of one facet of Jungian theory."



"At this time in the morning?"



"She develops the concept that a frightening number of people in the world are unaware of the actual living reality the human beings around them. It is the complete absence of empathy in action. They believe themselves to be real, of course, yet they merely lack the imagination to see that other persons are also real in the same way and on the same terms. Thus, even though they go through the obligatory social forms and personal relationships, all people are objects rather than people. If all other people are objects, then there can be no psychic trauma involved in treating them as objects. That pair disposed of fourteen objects, not fourteen brothers. Their uneasiness comes not from any pity, not from any concern for the dead objects, but merely from their awareness that society frowns upon such actions."



"Meyer, please!"



"In a sense one can envy them because, unlike you and me, Travis, they cannot identify, they cannot project. We can, and so we do a lot of bleeding. We bled for a woman as wretched as Miss Bellemer. You keep remembering the look of the back of Griff's neck. This pair drifts through life without the inconvenience of such uncomfortable baggage. Interesting, isn't it, to relate this concept to conscience and to individual goals?"



"Are you through?"



"Vocalization always helps me develop such relationships."



"Meyer, how did it go?"



"Oh! My little visit. I slid in there like a veritable wraith. After a few moments I began to realize I could have marched through leading a LIFE and drum corps. At that point my heart stopped banging into my larynx and slid back down where it belongs. I selected a more effective place for our voodoo doll. The sink stopper seemed tight. I left her under water in the sink, and fortunately it is a very deep sink. She has some buoyancy. The porous stone has absorbed enough water to hold her down. She sways with the motion of the ship. An eerie effect. Drunks often have to make a bathroom journey in the small hours. I left the bathroom light on for the fellow. When you are beginning to emerge into hangover, the world is slightly hallucinatory. It might take him quite some time to identify the real and the unreal."



"Remind me not to wake you up at this time of day. You are so ornate you give me a headache. I call your attention to where the Powell Daniels money is at the moment."



"Around Terry's middle. So?"



"If we don't want him making a successful run for it, I better take the wings off his heels."



He glanced at his watch. "It's after four. The depressant effects are diminishing. He's had perhaps seven hours. I don't think the risk is justified, Travis. He's an exceptionally brawny brute. Why don't you just leave well enough alone?"



"I'm going to give it a try."



Shrewd eyes studied me. "I find the compulsion odd. Your normal cheer has soured. Could it be possible the little pig required the bargain be sealed, in her manner?"



"Get off my back, Meyer."



"And so the daring-do is a penance, a reaffirmation of the real identity of the McGee, a symbolic scrubbing of the soiled escutcheon."



"Do you really think I cut myself a slice of that?"



"Dear boy, if I thought so, I wouldn't be making such a dull joke about it."



"Then be advised I came damned close."



His eyes went round. "Actually?"



"Seems I'm less fastidious than I thought. So maybe there is a little flavor of escutcheon scrubbing in the air after all."



"The wish is not the deed, except to apologists. You didn't follow through. And, if you had, after all she is young, pneumatic, lubricious, and no doubt highly competent. Also, any parent will tell you that if you dress a child in his best and send him out to play, he will find the deepest, sloppiest mud puddle in town and stomp around in it, perfectly aware of the whomping he'll get when he goes home. There is sometimes a hypnotic deliciousness about dirt."



I grinned at him. "I need you around more often, sire. Okay. All straight on the rest of your duties?"



"Completely. And be very careful with that fellow."



I climbed the aft ladderways to the lounge deck and stood at the fantail rail. We were quartering into a northwest wind. The ship grunted and chugged its way across a black and lumpy sea, leaving in the churned wake a faint green-white of phosphorescence.



I debated going after the mild authoritative weight of the Bodyguard. But I didn't want to risk awakening her. And didn't want to admit to myself there was any chance I couldn't handle a sleeping drunk no matter how many layers of muscle he wore.



I closed the door of Stateroom Fourteen without a sound, and stood for a long time, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the slight glow in the room which came from the yellow crack of light shining out from under the door of the head.



At last I could see the shapes emerge, the silent length of him in the far bed, the vague bulks of the furniture, even the oblong of the note pinned to the pillow of the empty bed. I moved to the porthole and worked the curtains aside so that a nearby deck light increased the inner illumination. From there I could look down upon him, and hear the slow rasp of his breathing. He was on his left side, tilting toward the prone position, hands wedged under his pillow, right leg bent, the knee bracing him.



I moved around behind him. The covers were halfway to his waist. I reached across him with my right hand, and with both hands I carefully picked up the coverings and turned them slowly down until when I doubled them back, the folded edge was below his waist. He slept in a pajama top. I nipped the loose edge of it and folded it upward. Around the lean fitness of Mr. Body's waist was the dark band of the money belt, perhaps four inches wide. It was too dark to see how it fastened. It looked as if it could be one of those types made of GI fabric which have two straps and two buckles in front, one above the other.



With infinite care I ran my fingertips around him, lightly brushing the fabric of the belt. In the front, right in the middle of him, I felt the little metal edges of the buckles, the strap tongues. His belly lifted and fell with his breathing, and closing my eyes so as to focus my whole perception on touch, I made certain that I knew just how they were fastened. One at a time I worked each strap out of the leather loop. The next step was more difficult, the problem of pulling the straps through the first metal part of the buckles. There was a slight loosening at the bottom of each exhalation. I pulled gently each time he exhaled, and gained perhaps a quarter inch each time. It took a half dozen exhalations to release each strap. His sweat and breath smelled rich with booze. Then, all that held the belt were the little metal prongs through the strap holes. I pulled on the strap of the bottom one first. Each time he exhaled, I risked a slightly increased pressure. Then, in my fingertips, I felt the little pop as the buckle was freed. I knew how I would work it. Get the other one open, then gently lay the belt open so that it was held by the weight of him. After that, stealth would be the greater risk. I would merely get a good grip on it, snatch it violently out from under him and be out the door before he could paw the cobwebs out of his eyes, taking the off chance of not meeting a member of the ship's company in the corridor.



Perhaps I was thinking more of the final steps than the final buckle. Or I had to tug harder at it. He grunted, rolled toward me, brought a hand down quickly, so quickly his fingertips brushed the back of my hand before I could get it away.



I heard his hand patting at the buckles. He sat up quickly. "Bitch!" he said. "You damn bitch! What the hell are you doing?"



As I saw him lean to reach toward the light switch, I clenched my hands together, chopped down hard at the exposed side of his throat. But in the darkness I hit too far back, and my fists rebounded off the great rubbery bulk of the trapezius muscle, and he disconcerted me with the speed with which he came lunging off the bed, shoulder slamming into my chest, big arms clamping and locking around me as he drove me back onto her empty bed. I felt my whole rib cage bending, and he had the sense to keep his face tucked against me so I couldn't get at his eyes. He grunted with effort and I felt blackness moving in behind my eyes. I chopped at the nape of his neck with my fist, but I couldn't get enough force into the awkward blows. I found an ear, wadded it small, and tried twisting it off, but the pain merely increased his power. Then, knowing there was only one chance left, I got my thumb under the corner of his jaw, fingers clamped for leverage around the back of the bull neck, and with waining strength, dug that thumb in as deeply as I could. He wheezed, and the pressure slackened enough for me to fill my lungs, pushing the darkness back. Suddenly he released me, yanked his hand back and tried a clubbing punch to the face, misjudged the distance, hit me squarely in the throat. The pain galvanized me into a leaping spasm that carried us both off the bed and down onto the floor between the beds. My throat felt full of broken gravel. He was underneath. I picked his head up by the ears and banged it down as hard as I could, twice. Then he wormed to the side, rocked up onto his shoulders, clamped me diagonally across the chest with bare legs as hard as marble, and if he'd had one more half second to bear down, that would have ended it. But I made a frantic grab at his crotch. He gave a whistling scream, flopped and floundered away, got hold of my fingers, loosened my grip, pulled himself loose, scrambled up before I could and, as I was coming up, kicked me solidly and squarely on the point of the chin with the hard front pad of his right foot.



I spilled over onto my back, perfectly conscious, but absolutely unable to move a finger or even blink my eyes or move my tongue to the other side of my mouth.



I lay there thinking with a great coldness that the most probable finish of our little rumble would be for him to lift a bare foot high, and stamp it down onto my throat. And the rail was the other side of the other door, just ten feet across the dark weather deck. "To him, you are just an object," Meyer said in a lecturer's tone.



My dead head rolled from side to side as the ship rolled. When it rolled toward him, I could see him. He sat on the edge of his bed, head between his knees, making soft crooning noises.



He got up and with a painful deliberation, he edged by me, doubled over, and went to the door of the head and opened it. I moved a finger, a whole hand. I bent my right knee. I pushed myself over onto my face, got my hands against the floor, lifted the full eighty tons of myself up onto hands and knees, reached and caught the footboard of her bed, climbed up onto my macaroni legs. I turned and looked into the head. He stood, bent over, in front of the sink. He cuddled himself with one hand, and in the other he held the dripping doll, the cinderblock swinging. His mouth kept opening and closing, but I could not hear a sound. Life was running back into my muscles, like Popeye after the great hunk of canned spinach drops down his throat. He seemed frozen there, unaware of me, unaware of anything. I went to the doorway. The jaw shelf was turned just right, at the height of the middle of my chest, and three feet away. I took a hand towel from the rack, wrapped my right fist tightly, screwed my heels into the floor and started it with a pivot of hips and back, the fist moving ten inches to the impact point, and following through a good long yard, my knuckles almost brushing the floor.



He moved a half step to the side, fell so loosely his forehead bounced when it hit the tile. I found the money belt half under her bed. The second strap had torn loose.



When I was ready to leave, I took a final look around. I had put him back into his bed, in the position I had found him. The breathing sounded the same. The single strap held the money belt safely and snugly around my middle, under my shirt. I had both parts of the doll in my hand. When the dark head had broken off, it had rolled into a corner, but when I was hunting for it, the movement of the ship brought it rolling back out to meet me. I had let the water out of the sink.



And he would not know what parts of it were real. After the early honking and bell-ringing, shouts in the corridors, hasty rappings on the stateroom door, announcements to get all baggage into the corridors as quickly as possible, I dressed quickly. She had not moved a muscle, lay in a spill of cream hair, fatty little lips agape, eyes smudged with weariness.



According to his little placard, the room steward was named Arturo Taliapeloleoni.



I moved him back into a corner of his little office. "Scusi," I said. "I wish to ask you to help me with something of the greatest importance, per favore."



The blow in the throat had given my voice an unmistakably conspiratorial quality. It made him look apprehensive. "Ah?" he said.



"I am in numero sei. Here is a token of importance." He accepted it too casually, thinking it a ten. Then he saw the second zero and the color went out of his face, surged back pinkly. "If it is anything I can do, signore." The bill had flicked out of sight.



"I bought passage alone. But now there is a lady in my stateroom. She is from other quarters aboard. It is of the greatest importance that she and I be permitted to remain aboard until mid-morning."



"That would be impossible, truly!"



"Many things can be arranged. Indeed, they must be arranged. Or it is possible that as she walks out of the customs building her husband might shoot her right there, in front of your passengers. He is a violent man. Others could be hurt. It would not be good for the company."



Even his lips were pale. "It would be very bad. But there is the question of the luggage inspection, no?"



"Her luggage will be taken off by someone. Mine will be taken off by someone else, a friend. It will go through customs and be taken away."



"But if two passengers are missing?"



"The one who counts them could be told of the necessity for this arrangement."



I dipped my fingertips into my shirt pocket and extracted the other two bills, a fifty and a twenty. I gave him the fifty. "This could purchase some small cooperation in the counting?"



"It is possible."



I gave him the twenty. And this, of course, is for yourself and the room maid."



"The cleaning and the fumigation starts. From stateroom to stateroom



"Does not a man of your position have a sign he can place upon both doors of numero sei, that it is to be skipped until certain other work is accomplished? After all, you do not sail for the homeland until Friday, I understand."



"It is very difficult, but..



"How many chances in one lifetime does a man have to save the life of a beautiful woman?"



He straightened, lifted his chin. "It will be done!"



"You have great understanding."



When I went back to the room, she had still not stirred.



I selected the essentials she would need. Her white bag would hold them readily. I put the yellow and white checked pajama shift in the flight bag, squashed the bag flat enough to go into my bag, and, locking the door behind me again, toted it down to Meyer's hovel.



"Have you got a cold?" he asked.



I dropped the bag in the corridor outside the door. His was there. Both were tagged. "They'd both end up on the end table at customs inspection. I pulled the door shut, pulled my shirt loose, unstrapped the money belt.



He put it on, and I helped him fasten it with the aid of two pieces of cord to bridge the six or seven inch gap between the ends of the straps and the buckles.



"Just in case," I said, "anything goes wrong about getting off this bucket. in case somebody thinks it's a smuggler's cute trick."



He adjusted his shirt, patted his belly. "This is a damned poor way for an economist to handle money."



"Just while we're standing here, sure, it could have been earning twenty-two cents. Your next step is to act like a hostile lady in a supermarket."



"If I am not the first off, McGee, I shall be no further back than third place."



"I flipped your art work over the side. Sorry."



"And the fellow with it?"



"No. He'll wonder how much of it he dreamed. He never saw my face. But he'll know it wasn't Del who roughed him. He got his look at the doll. It put him into shock. I deepened it a little and tucked him into the beddybye. The steward is bribed. The pig buzzes like a bee, and we are a pair of unmitigated, revolving, reprehensible sons of bitches."



"Revolving?"



"No matter from which direction the object is viewed."



I opened the door. "Best of luck."



When I got back, notices were taped to both of the state room doors, in an ornate Italian script. I went in and pushed the inside lock. Her bed was empty, the bathroom door half open, water running.



I tapped on the door. "Darling?"



"It's all fixed."



"Come in, dear."



I went in. The two small bulbs made a dingy light in the small bathroom. She was sitting in the deep narrow little tub, using the shower head off the bracket, taking a sit-down shower. Her hair, gathered together and pinned at the nape of her neck, spilled down her back. Her face was scrubbed clean, a line of suds drying along her jaw. She smiled up at me, a softness in the huge green eyes.



"Morning, lover," she said.



"Did you hear me say that I"



"Sure. I knew you'd fix it."



She soaped the washcloth, handed it to me and said, "Do my back, huh?" She reached and got her hair and piled it up on her head, held it there and leaned forward, resting her forehead against her round wet knees.



"There's women aboard, honest to Betsy, they're a yard at least across the can, and I just barely fit into this crazy tub. I bet they're always having to bring a gang of little wops into these cans and yank them loose. Gee, I kept hearing all the noise going on and dropping right back off to sleep. Done, darling? Thanks. Look, take this shower thing and rinse the suds off my back. Then dry me so I can let go of my hair. Honest, my hair is so thick and heavy, if it gets wet it doesn't dry for hours."



When I had finished the requests, she shook her hair back, rinsed the washcloth, wrung it out, soaped it again and held it out to me, saying, "You did so good on the back, you get to wash the front too."



"No time for games, kiddy. Hurry it up."



"Are you cross? Did you catch a cold? Your voice is Hoarse. you sit there and talk to me?"



"I'm not cross, but I am nervous. If my arrangements don't work, I'd rather had you dressed and on your feet if some ship's officers or customs people come hammering at the door."



"All right, dear," she said, unexpectedly humble and obedient.



It was quarter to eight, and I went out, spotted the channel buoy and estimated we'd be tied up in thirty minutes. I came across Arturo Taliapeloleoni, gave him a breakfast order and let him make another bill disappear. He brought it ten minutes later. I hustled her into the bathroom and took the tray from him at the door while he tried to peer around me without seeming to do so. With a conspirator's grimace, he left.



She squeaked with delight at the breakfast tray, especially at the carafe of brandy I'd ordered for the coffee. After she sat down and had taken the first sip of the iced juice, she tilted her head to the side and said, "Hey, we're slowing down now."



"Coming in past the breakwater now."



"When will we get off, darling?"



"Eleven, I guess. I want to get up there in a few minutes and make sure Terry gets off without creating any disturbance."



"He'll creep off like a rabbit, believe me. Why worry about him?"



"Also, I want to see if there are any cops waiting for the two of you. If this thing is coming apart, they might have more than you know. I can watch and see if anybody takes him when he gets off. That might change the whole picture."



She stopped chewing and through a wad of sweet roll said, "How will it change if?"



"If they ask the ship's officers about you, the room steward is going to put two and two together and immediately turn chicken."



She began chewing again, slowly. "Hell, they couldn't get that close to it so soon. No." She winked at me. "But they'll sure get close fast when they get the confession. Hey, what'd you do with it?"



"Printed the address on it, put the stamps on it, and gave it to my friend to mail when he gets ashore."



"Honey, I think we should have mailed it. What if he gets curious? I'd be curious about a letter addressed to the cops."



"I make the decisions. And what do you do?"



"I... I do what you say. Okay, darling. That's the way it will be. That's the way I want it, too. You're the boss man."



I gulped the second half of my cup of coffee, warned her about not answering any knock, relocked the door from the outside. I went down to the promenade deck.



They were easing the starboard up to the big wharf. There were about a hundred people in their bright clothing and sun-brown skin standing behind the chest-high hurricane fencing in the morning sunshine, awaiting the passengers and crew of the last cruise of the season of the Monica D. They were waving. I could hear the yelps of greeting. Cars glittered in the parking area. The deck crew heaved the big hawsers, and the shore hands dropped the loops over the big iron bollards. The deck winches groaned and took the slack and slowly snubbed the length and weight of her against the wharf. Her deep rumbling of the main engines stopped, leaving the thinner sound of her generators supplying the shoreside ship's services. Two gangplanks were swung up and latched, and as the ship's captain and two of his officers went down the gangplank in spotless whites, carrying small handbags and briefcases, the PA system aboard blared that all debarking passengers should gather on the promenade deck at the amidships gangplank prepared to leave the ship as soon as all the luggage was off.



I moved aft to a place where 1 could see the ship's end of the passenger gangplank, and I saw Meyer there, belly firm against the rail, first in line. He did not see me. He looked very resolute. The cargo hatch in the lower hull had been opened, and the gravity roller conveyor set in place. Baggage was coming down and the porters were filling the first big hand truck. They would roll it into the shed and begin filling the next one, while in the customs shed other porters would hustle it, according to alphabetical name of the passenger on the tag, to the proper customs section. One out of every three pieces coming off seemed to be one of the straw liquor baskets. The passengers were lined up, clutching customs declarations and proof of vaccination, the ones wedged near the rail peering over and trying to identify their own pieces of luggage. The shoreside PA system began to wham out a series of marches, the speakers so overloaded much of it was just an overlapping resonant blur. A few favored passengers were paged and directed to go forward to the other gangplank. They were the ones with a little political leverage. They had to walk down the wide wharf corridor between the wire fence and the side of the ship, past their fellow passengers whose impatience to get off was further stimulated by this demonstration of privilege. The one-class ship in the last minutes of the cruise had become a two-class ship, and the favored dozen walked a little stiffly under the pleasant burden of importance, chatting together with excess animation. In the shed they would get a head start on the inspection.



Suddenly I saw Meyer among them. His name had not been called. He walked like the king of all the bears, looking up at the ship, searching me out. Spotting me, he made a single airy little gesture, a prince of the blood flipping a florin to the humble peasant. And if he ran into any special curiosity inside the doors of the shed, I could guess exactly how he would handle it, with cold professional gaze, great pomposity, excluding any possibility that Herr Doktor Professor Meyer could be given anything but the most privileged treatment.



I then saw him searching among the visitors behind the wire, as I was, to spot Merrimay Lane, our imitation Vangie. I believe he saw her just as I did, standing in too dense a clot of people, and he veered over to her, moved her along. They walked on either side of the wire fence until she had reached an open space. He paused and said a few more words to her, then hastened to catch up with the rest of the privileged ones, matching his quick stride to the blare of Stars and Stripes Forever.



I had not been able to spot Ans Terry, and I began to have worrisome visions of him in his bed exactly as I had left him, the blood ball in his brain slowly suppressing the automata of lungs and heart. His head had pounced pretty well. And even with the towel, I had knuckles sufficiently puffed to create four temporary dimples. The brain jelly bounces around inside the shell and the skull, sometimes tears readily. Lesser damage can leave the customer comatose for seven hours, seven weeks or seven years.



As my concern grew, I finally went hurrying back up to the Lounge Deck. Fourteen was wide open, and two maids were in there stripping the beds, chirping at each other in the cheery fluidities of Italian. It was a noticeably happy crew. The last cargo of sunburn had been trucked around the islands, the last sheaf of tips safety-pinned to the underpants, and Friday they'd be homeward bound with, at the end of the voyage, two weeks with the family while the Monica D. was freshened up in one of the company docks at Naples in preparation for the first July cruise to Mediterranean ports.



Down again, I went to the rail, leaned out and looked upward and about twenty feet forward of where I stood, inns Terry leaning on the starboard rail of the Sun Deck.



There were other people up there too, couples spaced at wide intervals along the rail. these were the relaxed ones, who saw no point in jamming themselves into the throng on the lower deck. the herd began to thunder off, they would drift on down and saunter off. They are the same people who keep their seats in airplanes while the sheep-like clog the aisle waiting for the doors to be opened. When the aisle is clear, they get up, gather their possessions, and quite often manage to get their luggage first and catch the first cab.



I went on up. I took a position about ten feet aft of Terry. His long sallow grooved face looked empty. His body was unnaturally motionless. I could see a little purple knot on his forehead, half of a grape. Trying to imagine what was going on in his mind, I had a sudden vivid memory of going to a small zoo when I was a kid, and being fascinated by the ceaseless, purposeless pacing of a polar bear. He went back and forth across the front of his cage. Six strides each way, shifting weight and direction exactly the same way for the return trip. That could be very much like what Ans Terry's brain was doing. He could not know Vangie had escaped her watery grave. Only he and Macklin knew where she'd been dropped and how she had been weighted. But there had been the reality of the drowned doll in his hand, looking like Vangie. Now Del had written a farewell note that made little sense and had gone over the side. And some body had come in in darkness and taken the money. His mind would be pacing back and forth, six strides, always the same, trying to find some relationship between these things.



He was not looking down. He was staring straight out, at nothing. I looked down and saw Merrimay in that open place along the fence. She stood with one hand holding the pipe that ran along the top of the chest-high fence. Her head was tilted back and she was looking up at me. I turned a little away from Ans Terry, and pointed my shielded right hand at him, three poking gestures. She nodded. She was wearing dark glasses.



A march ended. Into the electronic scratchiness between bands she yelled up at us. "Ans! Hey, Ans!"



His body tightened and he stared down. The next march started. I saw him find her and stare at her. She waved, pulled the glasses off, stood in Vangie's exaggeratedly hipshot way, and stared right up at him with Vangie's wide mocking grin.



He stared down at her, leaning forward further, his big hard yellowish hands clamping the rail. His mouth hung open. I looked down at her. She kissed the palm of her hand, blew the kiss upward. He made a sound half gag and half cough, and when I looked back toward him, I saw a shine of spittle on his chin, a wet strand swinging.



Suddenly he whirled and sprinted for the stairway. A couple was just turning away from the rail, middle-aged, quite smartly dressed. Terry did not change stride or direction. He dropped his shoulder slightly and plunged through the six-inch space between them. The man was whirled and slammed into the rail, and caught the rail and kept from falling. The small woman plunged off at an angle, arms flailing for balance, legs running to try to catch up, but she leaned further and further forward, and I was running as fast as I could to try to catch her. It was all slow motion. She pitched headlong into a stack of folded deck chairs, twisting the precision of the stack, tumbled loosely onto her back, rolling slack, the blood welling quickly through the multiple lacerations. I got a glimpse of her as I veered to follow Terry, and me I heard her husband yelling in a cracked bellow of terror, anger and outrage, "Help! Help!" Martial music blared and bothered his appeal.



As I reached the deck below I saw Ans just disappearing down the next gangway to the Deck. Behind him a fat man sat on the deck, bawling indignations. And as I tried to go around him, with an unexpected agility he extended a foot and hooked my ankle. I slapped both hands smartly on the deck, tucked my shoulder under and rolled, came up onto my feet, took three jolting backward steps and sat down solidly, facing the fat man. The two of us got up like mirror images of each other. "Stop all the goddamn running!" he yelled. "Busted a whole pocketful of cigars."



"I was trying to stop him from running."



"One of you is more than enough, buddy. Take your time. Everybody will get to get off. There's too much running."



I heard a hoarse excitement of shouts, went quickly to the rail, and stared down and saw Ans Terry coming down the gravity conveyor, sitting up, riding backward, clubbing with his fist at the burly deck hand who had hold of one ankle. The punishment knocked the man loose, and Terry grabbed the low stationary side rail which kept the luggage from falling off, swung his legs over, hung, dropped lightly to the concrete wharf, spun and headed directly toward the place where Merrimay stood behind the wire.



The Bodyguard chunked solidly into the meat of my hand, and I used my left forearm and the rail as a brace and squatted to aim at him, too aware of the decreasing accuracy of the short barrel at such an increasing distance, remembering it would throw high at the downward angle, and if I aimed at the small of his back I should hit the target area of the big back and, with my luck, knock him down. The blind violent beast-like urgency to get to the dead Vangie could have only one interpretation, a necessity to finish it again, regardless of consequence. But an agile and wiry porter came from the side and sprang onto that broad back, locking his arms around Terry's throat. He staggered under the additional weight, kept going more slowly. A dock guard trotted in to intercept him, and whaled him mightily across the belly with his billy club, an approach that reduces ninety-nine out of a hundred men to the immediate level of ferocity of an Easter bunny. But he was whamming a triple layer of muscles trained to the hardness of interwoven cordovan. Terry grasped the club, stopped, planted his heels, made a swinging motion like a hammer throw. The guard had the thong around his wrist. Somebody had shut off the music. I heard the brisk snap of bone as the guard went rolling across the cement. While stopped, Terry evidently decided to remove the minor annoyance on his back. He broke the hold on his throat, took the man's wrists, bent abruptly forward, a deep strong bow, a yanking leverage of the arms which sent the little brave one through the air to sprong into the wire mesh fifteen feet away and rebound. All the people had backed away from the fence. Merrimay, to my absolute and total astonishment, stood her ground, the knowing smile in place.



As I started to aim, the burly chap who'd been knocked loose on the conveyor and had ridden it all the way down got to Terry, clapped a hand on a bull shoulder, spun him and hit him with great enthusiasm, squarely in the mouth.



The people aboard and ashore were strangely silent. I could hear some little kids crying. Men were converging on the action with varying degrees of haste and caution. Terry hooked the burly optimist in the middle, doubling him into slow-motion collapse. A guard bounced a billy club off the sculptured blond curls. Two baggage handlers hit him high and low. Two hands from the ship were competing to hit him in the face. And then the cautious ones came diving in. Some went staggering back, rubber-legged One went down and started making unsuccessful efforts to get up. Terry was erect for a moment more, and somebody had snatched off the hairpiece. His skull glistened, and I heard the tock when the club rapped it. He melted down from view, and turmoil ended. They began getting off him, moving back, fingering their faces and looking at their hands for blood. A dock guard bent over Terry, gathered the limp arms behind him, clicked handcuffs on him. Overhead, on the Sun Deck, the same cracked voice was yelling, "Get a doctor! Quick! Get a doctor!"



The fat man stood beside me. He was looking down at the snubbed.38 still in my hand. I shoved it down into the holster until it clicked in place. The fat man said, "I don't know anything about anything, and I got terrible eyesight." He moved away from me, walking briskly.



Everybody aboard and ashore had suddenly become noisy, telling each other what they had seen. And, of course, everybody had seen something quite different. The last of the casualties were up on their feet, some of them leaning on friends. Terry began rolling from side to side, and they plucked him up and stood him on his feet, trickles of blood coming from fresh welts on the hairless skull. He went along, docile, one holding each arm. After about ten steps he suddenly began leaping, writhing and kicking, and began a terrible, spine-chilling, open-jawed howling. "Haaooo Haaooo Haoooo." It stilled the crowd sounds.



He tore loose from one man. The other was hanging on and being spun around. A third trotted up, timed the spinning, and clopped him on the skull again. Terry went down to his knees. They yanked him up and led him away to some structure beyond the customs shed. He stumbled along, head bowed and wobbling from side to side. The crowd noise had started up again. A dock guard walked to the blond hairpiece, bent over it, stared curiously at it. He reached to pick it up, pulled his hand back, wiped the hand on his thigh. It gave the crowd the release of laughter, semi-hysterical. The guard took the billy club and scooped it up, holding it at arm's length, balanced atop the club. He acknowledged laughter and applause with a little bow toward the ship, then toward the fence, and marched off just as, with the timing only accident can achieve, the PA system began the Colonel Bogie March.



I looked at Merrimay. She looked up at me, slipped the glasses back on, made a little shrug of query, palms extended. I made a circle of thumb and forefinger, and she nodded and turned and began walking to the place where it had been agreed Meyer would meet her as soon as he had cleared through customs.



The last of the baggage was being trundled in. The chain was dropped and the herd started down the gangplank in their cruise hats and salt-water burn. I went quickly back to Stateroom Six. It was nine o'clock.



She looked up as I came in, all the questions written on her face.



"No sweat," I said. "He got off okay. No reception committee."



"That's what I figured. Sweetheart, what was all the roaring going on out there?"



"Somebody got off drunk. A drunk dropping parcels, picking up two and dropping three more, that's real comedy."



The big pot had kept the coffee reasonably hot. Arturo had provided a generous little flagon of brandy, and she had lowered the level of it an inch or so. I had the inner trembles from thinking of how narrowly Terry had missed getting his hands on Merrimay, so I laced mine generously.



From time to time we heard loud happy Italian passing by in the corridor and on deck. The cleanup squads. She had wiped her mouth clean of the pinkness.



She turned my wrist and looked at my watch. "I'm lost without my little heart watch. I keep looking at my empty wrist all the time. It kept wonderful time. I got it at a discount place. Ninety bucks. It retails for a hundred and seventy-five." She leaned and stroked my arm, widened her big green eyes at me. "Gee, what a break you're getting, huh? Just me in these dumpy clothes, and not even a penny in my purse for luck. Poor McGee. And I've got whole racks and drawers full of the most darling clothes, and anyway forty pairs of shoes--that's my vice, buying shoes--and more perfume than a store, and I can't go near it. I suppose Ans'll sell it. Or go try to recruit a girl my size. Oh, I forgot for a minute. You said they'll probably knock him off too, and Frankie Loyal." She closed her eyes, shook her head, tapped her temple with a stubby forefinger. "I must be losing my mind! When the cops get that letter, nobody is going to have time to do anything. It's weird, you know, thinking I'll be the only one that got away. Just on account of you're so terribly smart, T... T.... Darling, would you forgive me? It's kind of insulting. I know, but you told me your front name and I know it starts with a T but I can't seem to remember it."



"Travis. Trav."



"Okay, I'll never forget again. Travis like travel. Because we're going to travel, baby. Far and wide. Do you know how good for you I'm going to be? You don't even know the half t. What kind of a place do you hide me out in in Lauderdale? Cute, maybe? I don't really care if it's a shack or a car or something. You know something, honey? I feel like kid when summer vacation starts. I got to have a new me. But you have to like it or I won't use it. I was thinking of one. I want to see if you like it What I was thinking, first name should have like the same sound I'm used to. You know, so I'll answer. So I thought Nel. There aren't many Nels around, and it is kinda quaint. Then for a last name I thought of the store names along Bay Street because we met there. And how about one of those with a hyphen in the middle? That hyphen stuff has always churned me up. So tell me if you like this. Miss Nel Cole-Thompson."



"Just great," I said. I divided the last of the coffee. She wanted just a touch of brandy and I took the rest.



She came around behind me, and dug her fingers into the muscles near the nape of my neck. "Trav, dear, you're just all knotted up. It's all this tension that's making you seem so cross. Let your head hang loose. Breathe deep and let's see."



She struggled diligently, digging and prodding and rubbing.



"No use," she said finally. She came around me, slid onto my lap, arm around my neck. She kissed my ear, huffed a little blast of warm breath into it. "What we're going to do, we got plenty of time. Del... I mean Nel is going to relax you her way. All you do, is you just lie down and close your eyes tight."



"Too much chance of Arturo not being able to make his arrangements stick."



She shrugged, sighed, got up. "Okay. But when we get where we're going, sweetheart, we're going to have us what they call acres of afternoon, and you can believe it. You're going to get so relaxed you won't know or care who you are any more. Me too."



She paced for a little while, looked at my watch again, then curled up on the bed, propped on the pillows, and prattled on and on about her childhood in Austin, Minnesota.



As I listened, I could not help relating her to the theory Meyer had propounded in the small hours. She could blithely accept the abrupt disappearance of Ans Terry from her life forever after seven years of his ownership because she was the "I" and Ans was the "Not-I," hence merely an object, and when any object lost its utility to the "I," it could be discarded without a backward glance. Of late he had lost his utility as a pleasure object, and I had moved in to fill the void. The fourteen victims were forgotten the moment she felt assured she could escape punishment. Her tears for Vangie had also been without concession to the tradition of mourning a friend, because Tamie too had been an object, something that had hung on a wall of one of the rooms of her life, and were life to take her back into that room, she would miss Vangie the way one might miss a mirror that had always hung in a certain spot. If one became associated with an object that could inflict pain when displeased, one merely took the precaution of pleasing the object.



Probably she thought she was treating me in a very special way by telling me the details of her childhood, girlhood, life with Ans Terry. The things she remembered were empty and trivial. The shallowness of her mind gave her a Curious flavor of innocence.



She had taken no part in the direction of her life. She had let life happen to her, and her pleasure was in her clothes, in her figure, in pleasing and being admired by men, in enjoying sex, in changing her hairdo.



She was twenty-three. Any pattern of life she had drifted into would have left her essentially the same, with the same interests and the same emptinesses.



At last I told her it was time we were leaving. She pinked her mouth again, put the dark glasses on, snapped her purse shut and said, "Boy, I was really getting fed-up with these cruises."



I left her there and took a look and found the dockside cafe. I went back and got her and took her down the gangplank.



A gate in the wire fence had been left ajar. We went through and she stood in the shade of the customs shed while I phoned for a taxi. We had a five-minute wait.



When we walked through the sunlight to the open door of the cab, she gave me an assured little smile and a hearty swinging thud with a healthy hip.



The driver, following my directions, drove out of the port area onto Route One and turned left. After four blocks, I said, "Driver, I've got some phone calls to make. Would you please pull into that shopping center ahead on your right and park as close as you can to the drugstore."



He found a slot at the very end of the herringbone pattern, the closest parking area to the drugstore. The cab was airconditioned.



I patted her on the leg and said, "Just hold still a while, honey. There are some things I have to take care of, a few little arrangements to make. For us. Shouldn't be more than five minutes or so."



"Okay, honey," she said.



I reached, tapped the driver on the shoulder, put a five in his hand. "In case you get restless," I said.



"In the rain, five o'clock traffic, a fare has to make the airport in four minutes, I get restless, buddy. Otherwise, never."



I whispered in Del's ear. try to be inconspicuous. Just in case."



"Anything you say, that I do."



They had expanded the shopping center by opening an entire new area behind it, on the side street. Some of the shops had merely doubled their area and taken another store front on the new side. The drugstore was one. Meyer and Merrimay were in the last booth in the row opposite the counter. She was back to blonde, the wig stowed away, the transparent film peeled from the flesh beside her eyes so that their contour was back to normal. Her mouth was redrawn to her own taste. And somewhere she had changed to a short-sleeved red and white striped blouse, a split red skirt. They both looked and acted very edgy.



"How close could he park?" Meyer asked. "Smack dab in front."



"Good!"



She stood up, showed us the dime in her outstretched hand. "It had better be the same girlish voice as before, don't you think?"



"Yes indeed," Meyer said. She hurried off toward the booths. "There is a very dandy girl. She thought of a good way to get the confession to them. She kept her Vangie suit on, and her Vangie hair, and she stopped a kid a half block from the station and gave him a buck to hustle it to the homicide people."



"When did she phone back?"



"Ten-thirty. She got right through to the top brass. They admitted right off it was a very interesting document, and a copy had already been rushed up to Broward Beach. Then she asked them if they'd like to lay their hands on the girl who wrote it. She'd changed her mind about killing herself. She was trying to get out of the area. She said she could hear them drooling. They tried to stall her, keep her on the line. She told them to have a prowl car waiting six blocks north of here, in the Howard Johnson parking lot, and hung up." Merrimay came back to the booth and said, "We better take off, don't you think?"



We walked into the new area. She had her car, a little white Corvair hardtop. She handed me the keys. Meyer clambered into the back seat.



As I backed out of the parking slot, I said, "Morbid curiosity, anyone?"



"Might as well see the end of it," Meyer said. I circled the block, drifted into the lot on the other side, went up an aisle two parked rows away, turned into an empty slot. Through the tilted back window of the cab we could see her pale head.



The patrol car came in with a deft swiftness, stopped with a small yelp of tires directly behind the cab, blocking it there. The blinker light was revolving, bright even in sunlight. A pair in pale blue piled out with guns in hand. Shoppers stopped and gawked.



The cab door popped open and Del sprang out and took off between the parked cars, running diagonally away from us. The short green skirt did not impede her, and she ran well on those long legs. Yelling at her to stop, the police ran after her. One followed her between the cars. The other sprinted down the aisle to circle her and cut her off.



For a time our vision of the chase was obscured, and then we could see them catch her in an open space. She tried to flail them with the white purse and one snatched it away. She kicked at them, but one got behind her and grabbed her around the middle, pinning her arms, and lifted her off her feet. The other one snapped a cuff onto her right wrist, snapped the other onto his own left wrist. Then she stood docile, head lowered.



A crowd was gathering. The cop tugged at her and she came along with him, through the circle of people. She did not look up. The cab driver was standing with his hands on his hips.



Another patrol car had arrived. I had not seen it appear. Other cops were talking to him and I saw him shrug and point at the drugstore. Two of them marched n with him, hoping no doubt to nail me in a phone booth. They were slipping her into the rear seat of the first patrol car.



I said an exceptionally ugly word with an exceptionally ugly emphasis, and backed out and drove to the highway, and turned north, toward the broad boulevard which would take us over to Bahia Mar.



After a block of silence I said to Merrimay in the bucket seat beside me, "Excuse the language."



"I think we may have said it simultaneously, Travis. "All three of us," Meyer said.



"Merrimay," I asked, "how come you just stood there when Terry was coming at you?"



"I guess the cameras were rolling, and when you have all those extras in one scene, you don't want to run into a lot of retakes. I guess it just wasn't real to me, somehow. I was Vangie, and he had tried to kill me, and the instant he got over that fence, I was going to rip most of his face off with my fingernails." She shifted and recrossed her legs. "I guess he was... out of his mind."



"Beyond his mind," I said. "He was over into an area where his mind couldn't work any more."



"Then... my impersonation did what you wanted."



"Beyond my wildest dreams, Miss Merrimay. All I wanted to do was get him so rattled he'd make mistakes. I didn't hope for such a convenient arrest. They've got him now, and they ought to get a very interesting reaction when they let him read what the girl wrote. Meanwhile, I offer a steadying drink aboard the Flush."



"I'd like that," she said. "I hope my next acting job gets that big a reaction." Once we were settled aboard in the lounge, the airconditioners laboring to bring it back down to a lower setting, drinks in hand, our gear transferred from Merrimay Lane's car to our respective boats, Meyer said, "Something puzzles me, nought, nought, six and seven-eighths. That poisonous little chippy is going to keep mentioning your name at every opportunity. You are not entirely unknown to the local gustapo. And how do you expect to stay out of it?"



"Out of what? Nobody saw her in my stateroom. Do you think anybody on that boat will admit they can be bribed to let people stay aboard until customs has folded its tent and gone home? Miss Merrimay Lane, a client of a dear friend, met us both when customs had cleared us. We came back here. Who was the dark-haired girl who left off the confession and made the phone calls? I wouldn't have any idea. Oh, how did the blonde get my name? Hell, boys, I struck up an acquaintance yesterday afternoon on Bay Street and talked her into a friendly drink. Wouldn't you? We traded names. Mrs. Del Terry. But I didn't continue the acquaintance aboard ship, not after I got a good look at the shoulders on that guy. Boys, believe me, I never heard of any Tami Western in my life, or any Vangie. What I think, she's trying to smoke screen the issue. Maybe I look a little like the guy who met her at the boat and took off with her, and she's covering for him by giving you my name. Con man! Are you out of your mind?"



Merrimay put her empty glass down and stood up. "Dears, don't say it hasn't been interesting. But I have an afternoon date in Miami with some sweaty old leotards. I love your lovely money, and I love your generous little ways. And it's good for the glands to get terrified once in a while. But most of all I love the luck. I love the way you showed up and got Uncle Jake to take a better look at me. And if I have to tell lies for you, I'll have the widest most innocent brown eyes you ever did see."



She patted Meyer and kissed him on the forehead. I walked her out onto the stern deck, to the little gangplank that crosses over to the pier.



She put her hand lightly on my shoulder and studied me with intent brown eyes. "And you, McGee. If my luck starts running bad, do you keep a fresh supply?"



"At all times."



She tilted her mouth up against mine, quite briefly, her lips soft and leaving an impression of coolness. "I might be by for some someday."



I watched her walk briskly toward her car, the red skirt swinging against good legs. She did not glance back.



Meyer surrendered the belt. I put the twenty-six thousand in my watery vault. Later, in the news stories, I found the information I wanted, the address of Powell Daniels' divorced wife and their twin fifteen-year-old sons. I wrapped up the money. I used a ruler to print the name and address. No handwriting expert in the world can make any identification of block letters, all caps, printed with a ruler. I sent it parcel post, special handling, from Miami's main post office.



And by then, of course, they had them all. Terry, Loyal, Berga, Macklin, the Barntree woman and the Strusslund woman, and they were searching the continent from Hudson Bay to Acapulco for Walter Griffin. Macklin said Griff shoved Vangie into the speeding path of the stolen car, and that she was so terrified she was only semiconscious. Macklin had been driving the car. Nogs had given the order. Drowners, Incorporated, was the name some reporter stuck on them. Despite all the frantic efforts of the tourist industry in the Broward Beach area to get it handled with the same emphasis as a parking ticket, the whole thing, as you will remember, was page one, prime-time shrillness for day after day, with much editorializing about greed, callousness and the decay of moral standards.



Before the grand jury returned the indictments in record time, I was summoned up to the women's wing of the Broward Beach jail for a confrontation with the Strussland woman. Though they'd had her only ten days, her discreet tan had faded to paste, and all the life had gone out of the hair of cream, so that it hung in dulled strands. She wore a baa gray cotton dress without a belt and paper shoes. There were deep violet smudges under her eyes.



The sweet little kiddy-ice was unchanged. "Why did you do that to me! Why?"



"Do what? Buy you a drink in Nassau?"



We had a large interested audience. "Honey, please! You tricked me into writing the confession. My God, tell them how it was, darling! You made promises! You were going to take me to Jersey."



"Wish I could help out, girlie. But I don't know what your angle is. It doesn't make any sense. I don't have a twin brother, and the last time I ever saw you, until right now, was in the ship's dining room. I don't see how it can do you any good trying to bring me into this. Either you did what you wrote down or you didn't."



"So it's going to be like that, you bastard?"



"It's going to be what happened, that's all."



First she made a pretty fair attempt to get her thumbs into my eyes, but the matrons caught her and held her in restraint. As they took her out, that fatty little mouth opened into a round horror-hole. In a candy.sweet chant she said words and phrases that seemed to fume and smoke in the jail air, to give off a tangible aroma of rot. She ejected that last few over her shoulder as they dragged her out, and when the sound had faded, some very professional officers of the law took out handkerchiefs and mopped their faces.



On the Fourth of July I got Meyer to take ten thousand of what I had found in Vangie's kitchen ceiling. At first he would have no part of it, but then after frowning into space for half a minute, he suddenly agreed.



The next day he showed me a copy of something he had pecked out on his typewriter, titled Meyer Manifesto. It was a stately mass of whereas, wherefore, and be it resolved, nd after I had sifted out the meat of it, I discovered that he was putting the ten thousand into a four and a half percent interest account, and that each year he would draw out four hundred fifty dollars and use it to finance the Meyer Festival on July Fourth and such subsequent days as the Festival might continue unabated. Invitations would be issued to convivial and compatible persons, both of the permanent group and the transient group, and it would be held upon a beach area to be designated each year, the only stipulation being that it would be a deserted beach accessible only by boat. The theme of the Festival would be Booze, Broads, Beer, Bonhomie, Bach, Blues and Rhythm, Bombast, Blarney and Behavioral Psychology.



I guess he saw that I had to fake my pleasurable approval. Things were getting flat and wistfully sour.



The smart money had it all figured out about the Drowners. The best odds were that the State would hold a cook-in for Terry and Loyal, and that Jane Adele Strusslund and Delilah Delberta Barntree would get life, as would Macklin. And Emil "Nogs" Berga would get twenty to life.



Somehow, I couldn't haul myself back up out of the sours. I kept slipping further in. When that happens to you, there is no continuity of self-awareness, no frequent appraisals... just a little flash of uncomfortable illumination from time to time, and you turn it off quickly because you don't like the bright light.



I would see my hand pouring a Cup of Plymouth over ice, and I'd take a sup of it, spilling a little, and in wiping my chin feel that it had been a little too long between shaves.



And then one morning I went beach walking at three o'clock and looked up just in time to see one hell of a shooting star. It really whipped across there, fast, hot and bright. I admired it. An old chunk of iron, after noodling around out there for half a billion years, had come in hot and fast at eight miles a second, and had gladdened the mind of a dreary pygmy on a starlit beach.



Suddenly I felt disgusted with myself. What the hell was the use of taking my retirement in segments whenever I could afford one if I was going to slop around and groan and finger the sad textures of my immortal soul? As opposed to the psychotic, the neurotic knows two and two make four, but he can't stand it. I admired the patience of my friends for putting up with me the last few weeks. Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.



Why be gloomy because the woman supply had run bad for a time? If there was any truth in averages, it had to start getting good. I thought it certainly wasn't going to improve if I kept spooking around like a wounded violinist. The world was good, and it had been one hell of a shooting star.



At ten o'clock that same morning, while entertaining myself with as many choruses as I could remember of the lass who had her head tucked underneath her arm, and putting n a little topside paint at the same time, I glanced down at the dock and saw Meyer staring up at me in vast astonishment.



"It isn't always exactly on key," I said, "but it's real loud."



"It is that. Yes indeed."



"Clamber aboard for a brew."



We drank them under the topside awning. Meyer said, "With a few more years of practice, boy, you could work up to real manic depression. I never know when you're going to come bounding out of the slump. Or hy."



"Decided I was spoiling my retirement all to hell."



"You weren't doing mine any good."



"Meyer, let us round up a boatload of amiable clowns, jolly doxies, and old drinking friends and go bonk-chonkie bonk-cbonkie up the Inland Waterway in this lush tub, visit old haunts, scare the sea birds, invent parlor games and outrage the shoredwellers. And, above all, regain our health, our clean young American good looks."



"McGee, the last time I came back I went to bed for a week."



"Let's try for ten days."



I heard the distant ringing of my phone and decided finally to answer it.



A small forlorn voice I did not recognize said, "Travis?"



"Yes, dear."



"About that luck. How's the supply?"



The voice had been so dispirited and uncharacteristic I had not identified it until then. "Merrimay, unless I get rid of some, the supply is going to sink the boat. What's wrong?"



"Oh, I had to talk big. You know. And Uncle Jake got me a test. And I blew it. I came on like country ham. Old Rubber face herself. Actress! Ha! I don't want to face any of the gang I run with, and get patted on the head and told I'm still a great dancer. Travis, if maybe you could make up a sort of CARE package. Sonic of that luck, and a thick steak and red wine.... Maybe you're all sewed up?"



"And bring it to you at five-thirty?"



"Or five. I might not be any bundle of cheer, though." She sighed. "Got a pencil handy? Write down the address."



When I climbed back to the sundeck Meyer said, "I've made a tentative mental list of the passengers for this epic voyage. Let me check them out with you."



"Sure, Meyer."



After about six names he leaned and snapped his fingers in front of my face. "I get the curious feeling you aren't listening."



"They're great names. Great: Meyer. Who were they again?"



"Pierce, Fenner, Smitli, Kidder, Beane and Goodbody," he said disgustedly and went home.



I think I sat right there for a long time. Just smiling.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR



John D. MacDonald was graduated from Syracuse University and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Dorothy, had one son and several grandchildren. Mr. MacDonald died in December 1986.



Other Books by John D. MacDonald


All These Condemned


April Evil


Area Of Suspicion


Ballroom Of The Skies


The Beach Girls


The Brass Cupcake


A Bullet For Cinderella


Clemmie


The Crossroads


Deadly Welcome


Death Trap


The Deceivers


The Drowner


The Empty Trap


The End Of The Night


The Executioners


A Flash Of Green


The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything


Judge Me Not


A Man Of Affairs


Murder In The Wind


The Neon Jungle


On The Run


One Monday We Killed Them All


The Only Girl In The Game


Please Write For Details


The Price Of Murder


Slam The Big Door


Soft Touch


Where Is Janice Gantry?


Wine Of The Dreamers



And in the Travis Mcgee Series


01 The Deep Blue Good-By


02 Nightmare In Pink


03 A Purple Place For Dying


04 The Quick Red Fox


05 A Deadly Shade Of Gold


06 Bright Orange For The Shroud


07 Darker Than Amber


08 One Fearful Yellow Eye


09 Pale Gray For Guilt


10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper



The End


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