Gulf Coast Girl

Five

Calling from the watchman’s shack would be quicker, but I didn’t want the audience. I slowed going through the gate, and the graveyard watchman lifted a hand and nodded. I noted bitterly that old Chris had gone home at last.

I turned right off the dark street, away from the water-front. There was an arterial and a shopping center about ten blocks over. The drugstore was closed, but I saw a neon cocktail glass beyond it and a sign that said Elbow Room. I parked and pushed through a door into refrigerated dimness and smoke and a muted ground swell of “Easy to Love.” The phone booth was at the rear, beyond the jukebox.

I closed the door and fished for a dime. The little fan whirred. I wondered uneasily how long it had actually been since she’d called. Twenty minutes? Thirty?

It was ringing. It went on.

Then it clicked. “Hello,” she said. “Mrs. Wayne speaking.”

She sounded all right. I breathed easier.

“Manning,” I said.

“Oh. Bill! I was just hoping you would call—” There was a contralto delight in it that was like the brush of finger tips. Then I remembered what she’d told me: be careful what you say. She was merely cueing me. There still might be something wrong.

“When am I going to see you again?” I asked.

“Do you really want to?”

“You know I do,” I said. “How about right now?”

“We-e-ll—”

“Can I come out?”

“Heavens, not here,” she said, coyly chiding. “Bill, after all—”

After all, we have to be discreet. There was a strained, uncomfortable feeling in this talking to her as if we were lovers, and I wondered what she thought of having to do it.

“Where can I pick you up?” I asked.

“How about meeting me at that same cocktail lounge? In about fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll be waiting for you,” I said.

I was sitting in the car in front of it when she pulled up in the Cadillac and found a place to park. If she was being followed I didn’t want to go inside where they might get a look at my marked-up face. I eased alongside. She saw me, and slipped out on the street side and got in. It had taken only seconds.

I shot ahead, watching the mirror. There were cars behind us, but there was no way to tell. There are always cars behind you. I was conscious of the gleam of the blond head beside me, and a faint fragrance of perfume.

“Are you all right?” I asked quickly.

“Yes,” she said. “But they searched the house again, while I was gone.”

I turned and headed for the beach, wondering about that. Why would they search the house? And how would she know they had, if she’d been gone? If they were looking for a man they’d hardly have to pull out the dresser drawers and slice open the upholstery, the way they did in movies. Then I began to get it.

We passed a street light. She looked at my face and gasped. “Bill! What happened?”

“That’s what I’ve got to tell you,” I said. I swung the corner and headed west on the beach boulevard. It was beginning to darken now, at one a.m., as the crowds thinned and some of the concessions closed up shop.

The pug stared at me with his unseeing eyes, just waiting for the buoyancy nothing on earth could stop. Tell her? What kind of fool would tell anybody?

But how else was I going to explain what I had to do? I had to trust her. We had to trust each other. And the insane part of it was that I did. I considered that, puzzled. I’d known her less than 24 hours, she had never told me one word about herself, and yet I would have trusted her with anything. Maybe they shouldn’t let me out alone.

I watched the mirror. There were still too many cars to tell. I picked up speed, checking them.

“Bill,” she said urgently, “tell me. What is it?”

“That thug, the one who was beating you. He looked me up at the pier, to work me over for slugging him. There was a fight, and an accident. I knocked him off onto the barge—”

“He isn’t—”

“Yes,” I said.

She didn’t say anything. I glanced around at her, and her head was bowed as she looked down at her hands. Then she raised it, and her eyes were bitter with regret.

“It’s all my fault,” she whispered. “I got you mixed up in it—”

“Stop that,” I said. “It was nobody’s fault, except his. He just couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

I told her the whole story. We came down off the sea wall onto the hard-packed tracks going west along the beach. There was no moon, and it was very dark. I could hear the surf off to the left. There were three cars behind us. One of them stopped; I kept watching the other two.

“I’ll never forgive myself,” she said. “But, Bill, won’t they be able to see it was just an accident?”

“Not now,” I said. “It’s probably never an accident if you’re fighting, and it’s too late for that, anyway. But for God’s sake quit blaming yourself. You didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s about as sensible as blaming General Motors for it because he drove out there in an Oldsmobile.”

“What are we going to do?”

I checked the mirror again. The two cars were falling back as I picked up speed. “I’m still trying to get it straight in my mind,” I said. “Legally, I’m guilty. Morally, I don’t feel guilty at all; I don’t think I’m any more responsible than if he’d been killed in an unavoidable traffic accident. And I don’t intend to go to prison or get myself killed by Barclay’s gang for something I couldn’t help—”

“Of course not,” she said simply.

“All right. Listen,” I said. I told her what I was going to do. “There’s only one catch to it,” I finished. “You’ll have to give me the money for that boat with no guarantee you’ll ever hear from me again. The word of a man you’ve known for one day isn’t much of a receipt.”

“It’s good enough for me,” she said quietly. “If I hadn’t trusted you I would never have opened the subject in the first place. How much shall I make the check?”

“Fifteen thousand,” I said. “The boat is going to be at least ten, and there’s a lot of stuff to buy. When we get aboard I’ll give you an itemized statement and return what’s left.”

“All right,” she said.

I looked back. The lights of the other two cars were far behind us. They disappeared momentarily behind some dunes. I slowed abruptly and swung away from the beach, coming to a stop some fifty yards from the roadway. We were in the edge of the dunes with the low silhouette of a line of salt cedars before us, well out of range of passing headlights. I snapped off my own lights before we had even stopped rolling.

It occurred to me suddenly that I’d done a very foolish thing in coming out here at all. We should have stayed downtown on a lighted street. If they were following her, all they’d seen was a quick transfer from her own car to one they didn’t recognize. I might even be Macaulay for all they knew.

She started to light a cigarette. “Not yet,” I said. One of the cars went by, and then the other. Their red taillights began to recede down the beach.

When they were gone, I said, “All right,” and lit her cigarette. She took the checkbook out of her bag and held it open on her thigh. I snapped the lighter again so she could see.

“Pick a name,” I said. “How about Burton? Harold E. Burton.”

She wrote out the check. I held it until it dried, and put it in my wallet. “Now. What’s your address?”

“One-oh-six Fontaine Drive.”

“All right,” I said, talking fast. “I should be back here early the third day. This is Tuesday now, so that’ll be Thursday morning. The minute the purchase of the boat goes through and I’m aboard I’ll mail you an anniversary greeting in a plain envelope, just one of those dime-store cards. I don’t see how they could get at your mail, but there’s no use taking chances. Other than that I won’t get in touch with you. I’ll be down there at the boat yard all the time. It’s in another part of the city, and I won’t come into town at all. I’ve only been around Sanport for about six months, but still there are a few people I know and I might bump into one of them. I’ll already have everything bought and with me except the stores, and I’ll order them through a ship chandler’s runner—”

“But,” she interrupted, “how are we going to arrange getting him aboard?”

“I’m coming to that,” I said. “After you get the card, you can get in touch with me, from a pay phone. It’s Michaelson’s Boat Yard; the name of the sloop is Ballerina—”

“That’s a pretty name,” she said.

“It’s a pretty boat,” I replied. “I’m just hoping I can get her. She was still for sale last night. But if something happens and she’s already sold by the time I get back, I’ll make that card a birth announcement instead of an anniversary greeting, and give you the name of the one I actually do buy. There are several down there. All straight?”

“Yes,” she said. She turned a little on the seat and I could see the blur of her face and pale gleam of the blond head. “I like the whole plan, and I like the way your mind works.” She paused for a moment, and then added quietly, “You’ll never know how glad I am I ran into you. I don’t feel so helpless now. Or alone.”

I was conscious of the same thing, but probably in a different way than she’d meant it. There was something wonderful about being with her. For a moment the whole mess was gone from my mind. The sea wind blew past the car, and behind us in the night I could hear the surf.

“You were good on the phone, too,” she said. “Thanks for understanding.”

In other words, keep your distance, Buster. It was stage money, so don’t try to buy anything with it. I wondered why she thought she had to warn me. We both knew it was only an act, didn’t we?

Maybe I was always too aware of her, and she could sense it. I lashed out deliberately at the spell, shattering it. “All right. Now,” I said curtly. “That still leaves the problem of getting him aboard. I’ll have to work on that. He’s there in the house, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “How did you know?”

“Guessing, mostly. You said they’d searched it while you were gone. They wouldn’t have had to tear it up much, looking for a grown man. So maybe he told you they had.”

“You’re very alert. He heard them and told me.”

“Why is he hiding there? And how?”

She leaned forward a little with her elbow on the back of the seat, and took another puff on the cigarette. “I’ve been wanting to get to this. Here’s the whole story, briefly.

“About three weeks ago my husband saw one of them on the street and knew they’d caught up with us again. But for some time he’d been working on this plan for getting to Central America and losing them completely, for the last time. It was about completed. I won’t go into it in much detail except to say it involved a man who’d been a close friend of my husband’s in college. He lives in Central America, in Honduras to be exact, and is very wealthy. He owns a number of large plantations, and has considerable political influence. He’s also a rather passionate flying fan. He’s always buying planes in the States and having them flown down to him, and my husband was to take this one to him. It would get him out of the country without any trail they could follow, you see? He’d merely take off without filing a flight plan, and disappear. Of course, landing down there would be illegal, but as I say, this friend of his had quite a bit of political power.

“The only trouble, however, was that he had to go alone. It was a light plane and its cruising radius with the maximum amount of fuel was still a little short, so he’d added an extra tank. That meant I had to come later, making sure I wasn’t followed. We had that arranged, however. I was to do it over the Memorial Day week-end, and it involved about five different zigzagging commercial flights with the reservations made considerably ahead of time. On a long holiday like that they’d be sold out, you see? If they were trying to follow me they might catch a no-show at one or even two of the airports, but not all of them. There was more to it than that, too, but I won’t bother you with it.

“But he had engine trouble, and the plane crashed off the coast of Yucatan. My husband got off in a rubber boat, and was picked up by some snapper fishermen. And they brought him, of all places, right back into Sanport. Fortunately the boat docked at night and he managed to slip off and get out to the house without being seen. It was just two days before I was supposed to leave.

“But now they’ve found out where we live, and they have the place surrounded. Barclay rented the house right across the street, and they watch me all the time. They’re waiting for me to lead them to him—”

“And they don’t know he’s inside?”

“I don’t think so. You see, they searched it the first time while he was actually gone. It was disguised as a burglary, but it was pretty transparent.”

“But didn’t you say they’d searched it again today? Yesterday, I mean?”

She nodded. “He’s in a sealed-off portion of the attic, and the only way into it is through the ceiling of a second-floor closet. He has to stay up there nearly all the time. All the time when I’m out of the house. I think they’re pretty sure he’s gone, but they know if they keep watching me I’ll lead them to him sooner or later. I hadn’t realized until what happened up at the lake that they might try beating me up. That scares me, because frankly I don’t know how much of it I could take.”

I thought of it, feeling the cold stirrings of anger and an increasing awareness of just how much more there was to this girl than her looks. She was cast out of the pure metal. No whining, no heroics—she simply said she didn’t know how much of it she could take and went right on with what she had to do. The next time that pug looked at me, I’d look back.

She went on. “And as to what’s in the plane, it’s money. About eighty thousand dollars, to be exact. All he has left. He can’t take much more, Bill. That plane crash did something to him—the crash, that is—and then being brought right back in the middle of them after he thought he had gotten away. And losing the money on top of it, so he couldn’t even run any more.”

“But you just wrote a check for fifteen thousand—”

“I know. Naturally, he had to leave me some so I could follow him. And I sold my jewelry, and borrowed what I could on the car.”

I began to catch on then. There’d been this $700 trap gun and three fathoms of Cadillac and all the rest, so I’d been hit rather a glancing blow by the fact that she was going to trust me out of town with $15,000 of her money. If I turned out to be a crook and ran off with it, it was such a bore to have to go down to the bank and tell them to transfer another bushel or two into the checking account. It wasn’t exactly like that. She was merely handing me the last chance they’d ever have. This girl was a plunger. If she said she trusted you she trusted you all over.

“Well, wait,” I said. “I can probably find a cheaper boat—”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to sea in a cheap boat. And we’ll recover the money from the plane, anyway.”

“All right. But, listen. My God, do you realize the jam you’ll be in if something happens to me?”

“That was the general idea, Bill, when I said I wanted time to make up my mind about you. Remember?”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “Do you mind if I get a little personal?”

“Why, no. What is it?”

I tried to say it lightly. “I’ve been feeling sorry for Macaulay because he was up against a rough proposition alone. I’d like to amend that, for the record. I don’t know of anybody who’s less alone.”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and I wondered if I’d gotten it off as lightly as I intended. After all, this was an awkward situation for her, and she’d already shown me the road signs once.

It was almost too fast for me then. She slid toward me on the seat, murmuring, “Bill . . . Bill!” her face lifted to mine and her arms slipped up around my neck, and then I was overboard in a sea of Shannon Macaulay. My arms tightened around her and I was kissing her, assaulted by faint fragrance and the touch of her and the way she could overrun and flood all the last corners of consciousness, and all the time my mind was trying to regain that half second of lag and tell me it was an act and that the reason she was saying my name over and over was to keep me from having my head blown off.

It wasn’t thought. You couldn’t hold her in your arms and think, so it had to be instinct that told me what it was. She’d been looking beyond me, and must have seen him silhouetted against the sky. The surf and the pounding of blood in my ears drowned out any possibility of my hearing him, but he’d probably be standing at the window now, right at the back of my neck, and if she hadn’t already got across the fact it was somebody named Bill she was kissing, and not Macaulay, she’d have blood all over her before she could say it again.

A voice said, “All right, Jack. Break it up and turn round.”

I was so tight and the tension broke so suddenly I was conscious of an almost hysterical impulse to giggle over the idea. I knew now he’d heard her say Bill, all right, because he called me Jack.

Instead, that is, of just shooting me without bothering to say anything.

I turned. A light burst in my face, and another voice I would know anywhere remarked with urbane weariness, “I say, you people are oversexed, aren’t you?”

Two thoughts caught up with me at once. The first was that they hadn’t heard us and didn’t suspect anything. Her reaction time had been so fast they’d caught us kissing, just what you’d have expected of two people in a parked car along the beach. That was good.

But it was the second one that pulled the ground from under me. They had that light in my face. They’d be blind if they didn’t see the marks that pug had left on it.

I had never been more right. “Hmmmm,” Barclay said softly, somewhere in the darkness. “So that’s where he went.”

I didn’t say anything. I could feel the hair prickle along the back of my neck.

“Came to see you, didn’t he?”

“Who?” I asked, just stalling for time. I had to think of something. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t be dense, if you don’t mind. Chap you hit, up at the lake.”

If I denied it they wouldn’t believe me, anyway, and when he didn’t show up they’d go out there and ask the watchmen. They’d know then I’d done something to him. There was a better way: talk like a loud-mouthed fool, and admit it. It didn’t have much chance, but at least it had more than the other.

“If that’s who you mean,” I said. “He did. I guess you haven’t seen his face. And that’s not all. If you don’t keep him out of my hair he’s going to be bent worse than that the next time you get him back.”

“Where is he now?”

“How would I know?” I said. “Was he supposed to tell me his plans?”

It was creepy. I was scared and in a bad spot, trying to talk like Mike Hammer, and to nobody. There was just that light glaring in my face and a whole universe of blackness around it.

“Well, it isn’t important,” he said. “But there’s another matter. We’re about to suggest that you leave town, Manning, and do it immediately. These sylvan assignations of yours and Mrs. Macaulay’s are becoming something of a nuisance; this is twice we’ve been led on a fool’s errand just to find you rutting about the landscape. Get out of the car.”

I didn’t want to, but I got out. I heard her shaky indrawn breath as I closed the door. “No. No. No—”

It was a good, cold-blooded, professional job. Nobody said anything. Nobody became excited. I never did even know for sure how many there were besides Barclay. I swung at the first dark shape I saw, because I had to do something; the blackjack sliced down across the muscles of my upper arm and it became a dangling, inert sausage stuffed with pain. They pulled both arms behind me and bent me back and slugged me in the stomach. At first I tightened the abdominal muscles in time to the cadenced beat of it, slug, swing, slug, but after a while I lost even the power to do that. Somewhere far off I could hear her crying out and opening the car door, but then somebody pushed her and she fell.

When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared in my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.