Out on the Rim

Chapter Twenty

It was 10:33 that night when Georgia Blue arrived by taxi at the Manila Hotel. She slowly entered the vast lobby, sweeping it with practiced eyes as she crossed to the elevators, her right hand down inside the leather bag that hung from her shoulder.

She rode an elevator alone up to the fourth floor. From there she took the stairs to the fifth floor, slipped past the dozing floor porter and hurried down the corridor to suite 542 where she knocked softly. Booth Stallings opened the door a few seconds later.

“I think I’m in a little trouble,” she said in a voice not much louder than a whisper.

Stallings poked his head out and looked up and down the corridor. “Come in,” he said, opening the door wide enough for her to enter. He then closed the door, shot its dead bolt and fastened the chain. Turning, he found Georgia Blue in the center of the suite’s sitting room, her posture awkward, her expression uncertain. Stallings thought she almost looked as if she were missing something, maybe a key part of her body — a foot, or even an arm — until he realized it was her tremendous poise that had vanished. She’s lost it somewhere, he decided. Or somebody took it away from her.

“Sit down,” he said.

For a moment she seemed not to have understood him. Then she smiled, as if it were the kindest invitation ever offered. The smile vanished as she turned to make her choice of where to sit. It was obviously a difficult choice and possibly the most important of her life. Finally, she decided on a green armchair, which she sank into, keeping her right hand deep in the leather shoulder bag.

“Drink?” Stallings said as he moved to the room refrigerator. She shook her head. Stallings took out a can of beer, carried it back to the couch, sat down, popped open the can and said, “What kind of trouble?”

“I need a place to stay tonight,” Georgia Blue said.

“Here, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Wu and Durant are looking for you.”

“Oh?”

“Otherguy, too.”

“Fuck Otherguy.”

Stallings drank some of his beer. “Tell me about it,” he said and leaned back, resting the beer can on the left arm of the couch. He draped his own right arm over the couch’s back, hoping it was the most nonthreatening posture he could assume. It then occurred to him that a smile might help keep her right hand down inside the shoulder bag. So he smiled.

“Why’re they looking for me?” she said.

“They didn’t say and I didn’t think they much wanted me to ask.”

“May I stay here tonight?” she said.

“What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow’s next year. The future. Tonight’s right now and that’s all I can handle.” She paused and added, almost as an afterthought, “We can do some sex if you’d like.”

“Sounds interesting,” Stallings said and gave her another smile.

“No it doesn’t,” she said, bringing her right hand out of the bag. In it was the Walther semiautomatic. “Is this what’s bothering you?”

He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a turn-on.”

She put the pistol back into the shoulder bag and then placed the bag on the floor beside her chair. “Better?”

“Much.”

Another silence began to build. Stallings let it. The silence collapsed before reaching 30 seconds when Georgia Blue said, “Shit.”

“Go on,” Stallings said.

“It happened between the time we got back from the war memorial and had lunch at the Peninsula. That’s when he called.”

Another silence threatened but Stallings warded it off with: “He being?”

“Harry Crites.”

“Ah.”

“From Washington.”

“I see,” Stallings said. “Must’ve been about midnight yesterday back there, if it was around noon today here. Give or take an hour.”

“We didn’t talk about the time. Or the weather.”

Stallings gave her what he hoped was an encouraging nod. When that failed to produce a response, he said, “What did you talk about?”

“We have a code,” she said. “A kind of silly verbal code. He used it to tell me to call a number exactly ten minutes after he hung up. I was to call for instructions.”

“Local number?”

“A pay phone. It’s always a pay phone.”

“Did you call it?”

“I’m supposed to be working for him, right?”

“Right.”

“So I called it.”

She waited, as if expecting Stallings to prod her along with yet another question. He obliged with, “Who answered?”

“A man.”

“Recognize his voice?”

“He had an accent.”

“Filipino?”

“I’m not sure. He may have been faking it. Probably not. But I don’t know who he was.”

“He gave you the instructions though?”

“Yes. He told me to—”

“The guy on the pay phone?”

She nodded. “He told me to call Boy Howdy, identify myself, and say I wanted to rent that giant bouncer of his to throw a fright into somebody called Emily Cariaga. I was to offer Boy Howdy two thousand U.S. Then the pay phone man gave me her address in Forbes Park and told me what he wanted the bouncer to warn her about. Then—” She suddenly stopped talking and for a moment Stallings thought she might have been struck dumb.

“Go on,” he said.

“She was flying out late this afternoon. She was going to Spain.” Again there was that sudden silence with its air of absolute finality. Stallings felt his irritation growing and decided to vent some of it.

“Goddamnit, Georgia!”

She blinked twice, as if mildly surprised by his tone. “This bouncer,” she said. “This monster man who works for Boy Howdy was to warn her she’d better not tell anyone about what she’d learned. No one. Ever. The monster man was to be — extremely firm, the pay phone man said.”

“I don’t guess he told you what she wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

“No.”

“So you called Howdy then?”

She nodded. “He wanted his money first. I said he could pick it up at the desk downstairs. I left it there for him. In an envelope. And then I went to the Peninsula and we all had lunch.”

“So we did,” Stallings said, finished his beer, crushed the can, rose and headed for the small refrigerator. As he passed Georgia Blue’s chair he scooped up her shoulder bag. She turned to look up at him.

“I knew you were going to do that,” she said.

Instead of replying, Stallings looked inside the bag.

“I could’ve stopped you,” she said.

Stallings took the Walther out, examined it briefly, and stuck it down into his right hip pocket. He dropped the bag back to the floor. “When’d you find out she’d been killed?” he said.

“Late this afternoon. It was on Radio Veritas, I think. I went downstairs to a pay phone and called the police to make sure it was the same Emily Cariaga.”

“Then what’d you do?”

“I went out. I went to the Shoe Mart and Rustan’s in Makati near the Peninsula. But I didn’t buy anything. Then I went to a couple of bookstores. After that, to the Inter-Continental. They have a cafe there with Jeepneys. I mean with booths that look like Jeepneys. I had a drink. Maybe two. I may have eaten something. I know I’m not hungry.”

“And then straight back here?” Stallings said.

She nodded.

“You don’t know who she was, do you?”

“No.”

“Durant got a phone call after you left this afternoon,” Stallings said. “It was from Emily Cariaga. She and Durant were — well, pretty good friends, I guess. It was Durant who found her.”

Georgia Blue grew still. Nothing moved. Stallings didn’t think she even breathed. There was nothing else for him to say so he waited for her reaction. She finally exhaled the breath she had been holding, drew in another one and used it to say, “I see.” There was another long silence until she said, “You’d better call Durant.”

“What for?”

“Tell him I’m here.”

“What’s he going to do tonight that he can’t do tomorrow?”

She looked at him with an expression that was both puzzled and confused. And then she asked a question to which she obviously knew the answer although it still seemed to surprise her. “You’re... you’re damned decent, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes,” Booth Stallings said. “Once in a while.”

When Georgia Blue first entered Stallings’ suite she had been wearing a brown silk blouse, a tan skirt that looked something like chino but was probably silk gabardine, the brown and white spectators, and the leather shoulder bag containing the Walther PPK. When she entered his bedroom at 1:16 A.M., she was wearing only the brown silk blouse.

Stallings was propped up in bed, reading a book. It was actually a bound set of galleys that a publisher had sent the foundation. While packing for his trip, Stallings had found it on the bedside table in his apartment across from the Washington zoo.

The book was composed of essays by 19 notables of varying rank but identical bent. Each essay set forth the writer’s thoughts, often muddled, on terrorism, which none of them could define without waffling. But if they couldn’t agree on what terrorism was, they were unanimous about what should be done to its practitioners. Stallings had found the book to be yet another tiresome disquisition of the “Zap the Fuckers” school. In Washington, it had put him to sleep four nights running, so he had packed the galleys instead of the Seconal.

When Georgia Blue came into the bedroom, wearing only the brown silk shirt, Stallings dropped the bound galleys to the floor, locked his hands behind his head, and stared at her. He remembered when — upon seeing her for the first time in the Madison — he had decided she was one of the three most striking women he had ever seen. He now narrowed the field to two and even considered eliminating the remaining contestant who was an Italian actress pushing 50.

“That couch in there too short or are you too tall?” he said, feeling his mouth going into something that he hoped was more smile than leer.

“Both,” she said and started unbuttoning the blouse. She undid the buttons methodically, looking down at them as she might have if undressing alone. When all the buttons were undone she removed the blouse, folded it neatly, as though for packing, and placed it carefully on a chair.

She turned back then, neither provocative nor coy, serving up the full course. Stallings devoured it with his eyes, wondering how it would taste on the tongue.

“That does stir the blood,” he said.

“Good,” Georgia Blue said as she slipped into bed beside him.

Kissing her, Stallings decided, was like kissing your first older woman — the one with all the wicked experience. He then decided not to decide anything else and simply go along with whatever happened, except that what happened was far from simple. Instead, it was intricate, a trifle wild, totally sensual and innovative even to Stallings who thought, until now, that he long ago had crossed his last sexual frontier. At one point he experienced a miser’s glow when he realized that this night in this bed in suite 542 of the Manila Hotel would turn into his main account at the Bank of Fantasy — and that he could draw on it without limit for as long as he lived.

It was over in half an hour, give or take five minutes. They lay, staring at the ceiling, her head on his shoulder, Stallings wishing for the first time in years that he still smoked. Chesterfields. Unfiltered. The Destroyers with their “They Satisfy” promise. Or was that Old Gold? He had almost decided to ask Georgia Blue, even if she weren’t old enough to remember, when she said, “That fucking Durant.”

“Seems like a nice enough fella.”

“Not when you think he might kill you.”

“Because of the Cariaga woman?”

“He could,” she said. “I don’t know if he will. But he could.”

“He won’t kill you,” Stallings said. “Not until he gets his money anyhow.”

She turned her head to find him still staring at the ceiling. “But what if he never gets his money?” she said. “What if I’ve blown the whole deal?”

“In that case,” Stallings said, still staring at the ceiling, “it won’t be just that fucking Durant you have to worry about.”

At 8:17 the next morning the venetian blinds went up with a clatter that ended in a small bang. Sunlight streamed in on Stallings and Georgia Blue who lay in the bed, both naked to their waists, which was where the sheet ended. She bolted upright. Stallings opened his eyes to find Otherguy Overby standing at the window, looking out at the bay.

“Nice day,” Overby said, not turning. “Except they say it’s going to be a little hot later on.”

He turned then, looking first at Stallings, then at Georgia Blue who made no effort to pull up the sheet. “Wu and Durant are in there,” Overby said, nodding toward the sitting room. “They think we need to talk.”

“They order coffee?” Stallings said.

“No, but I did,” Overby said, turned and left the room.