The Killer Touch

Four

Joss managed to produce excellent wine for the dinner, and pigeons braised over the charcoals. She also arranged that Burt set opposite Mrs. Keener, with Rolf opposite Joss. Burt could see her visibly melting under the man’s attention, hypnotically reaching for her glass when Keener filled it.

Burt devoted his attention to Mrs. Keener, and in the process grew increasingly puzzled. She seemed miserably ill at ease in a dress too small for her. Its décolletage might have been breathtaking had her cleavage not been so grotesquely distorted. Burt half-expected to hear a pop like a champagne cork coming out of a bottle, and to see Mrs. Keener shoot up to the roof. She kept squirming in her chair, plucking at her waist, and plunging a hand inside her dress to make certain adjustments when she thought Burt wasn’t watching. Though she ate only one pigeon, she seldom raised her eyes from her plate. When she did, Burt saw the sparkle of moisture inside her lids. He felt a rising excitement; watery eyes, loss of appetite, itching, all were signs of drug withdrawal. But if she really were an addict, that blew his whole theory to hell. Then he remembered something which restored it; he had delivered fourteen caps to her, and there would have been no reason for her to be deprived.

When he tried to engage her in conversation, she answered in monosyllables without looking up. Each time she spoke, Rolf would pause in his talk with Joss, stiffen, and relax only when she finished. Finally Burt asked:

“Where did you work, Mrs. Keener, before you were married?”

Nobody moved, but Burt could feel the air stretch taut like a balloon about to burst. Rolf pushed back his plate and asked with a half-smile:

“Tell me something, Burt. How does it feel to arrest a man?”

Joss looked annoyed at this abrupt diversion of Rolf’s attention. No doubt, to her it was normal dinner conversation, everybody friendly and on a first-name basis.

“That depends, Rolf. Thieves, embezzlers, forgers, I just feel relieved. Here’s another man put out of the way before he gets dangerous, one more man stopped short of murder.”

“Murder? You think all crime leads to murder?”

Burt put his knife on his plate and weighed his words carefully. “Put it this way, Rolf. Murder is insanity. Crime of any kind is a small dose of the same thing.”

“Oh, I don’t agree. The profit motive—”

“—is an excuse they give themselves. Show me a financially successful crook, and I’ll show you a man who could have made just as much money in, say, the used-car business. Why did he turn to crime? Social protest. The hell with everybody, he says, I won’t play their stinking game. So he commits a crime and gets away with it. Why don’t they catch me? he wonders. He commits another, then another, getting bolder and bolder until he’s finally caught and tossed in the pen. Then he’s relieved as hell. See, he says to himself, I was right. Everybody’s out to get me.”

Rolf was smiling. “And if he isn’t caught, I suppose he finally commits murder.”

Burt shrugged. “That’s the biggest social protest of all.”

“Yes.” Rolf pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Interesting to meet a philosophical cop. How do you feel when you get a murderer?”

“I feel good, Rolf. Damn good. I feel I’m saving a life, maybe several. Because they don’t generally stop at one. It’s like getting an olive out of a bottle, the first one’s the hardest. After that it becomes a simple and final solution to everything. Even the simplest irritation, a waitress spills a drink on your lap and your first thought is, kill her.”

“Burt,” said Joss. “That’s insane.”

“That’s my point. A sane man might, under very pressing circumstances, commit one murder. But he wouldn’t stay sane long. Murder’s too big a load to carry. Even your Nazi friends, Rolf, had to keep telling themselves they were just following orders.”

“And when a cop kills?” asked Rolf softly.

Burt felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what kind of fiction does a cop provide himself with when he kills—”

Joss cut in quickly. “Rolf, I want to show you something.”

Rolf ignored her. He leaned-forward and fixed his eyes on Burt. “I know what they tell themselves. They say it was an unavoidable accident. I aimed for his legs but somebody jostled my gun. I fired over his head but he jumped up and caught the bullet. He was trying to kill me and I had to stop him.” He leaned back, looking pleased with himself. “I have a theory about cops, Burt. They know, when they go into the racket, that eventually they’re going to find themselves in a position to kill legally—”

Joss rose. “Rolf, come over here a minute.”

“Let me finish,” said Rolf with sudden peevishness. “You see what I’m getting at, Burt?”

Burt felt sticky perspiration beneath his clothes. At the beginning of Rolf’s soliloquy he had thought, Well, so Rolf’s hobby is cop-baiting. He’d been over this route before and, rather than anger, had felt only a faint boredom. But now the man was dealing with the subconscious motives of a policeman who kills, and these were the precise questions Burt had been asking himself.

“Rolf, joining the police doesn’t get you a license for killing—”

“How many cops have burned for it?”

“Rolf, I want to talk to you,” said Joss.

Rolf sighed and stood up. “My theory is that cops are instinctive killers who’ve found a socially accepted way of going about it. Think it over.”

Burt watched Rolf and Joss walk over to the edge and pretend to be looking through the telescope. Joss would no doubt tell him about the boy, and Burt would have preferred that she mind her own business. But of course Joss would say it was her business to see that no misunderstandings arose between guests.

Well, unfinished business, Mrs. Rolf Keener. “Could I borrow your comb?” he asked.

She looked up in surprise. “Sure.”

She delved into her little handbag and came up with a sequinned comb. She wiped it with a napkin and gave it to him. He saw with dismay that it was clean of hair. Scratch one effort...

He combed his hair and gave it back. “The temperature has cooled since last night,” he said casually.

And just as casually she replied, “I threw you the ball and you dropped it. You want to pick it up again?”

He had only to stir the ashes.

“I just wanted to say, if you need help with anything, tell me before he gets back.”

He’d been thinking about the letters, but she pointed a finger at the untouched pigeon on his plate. “You can. Slip that under the table to me, quick.”

There are times when a man gets involved in a scene so bizarre that he must freeze his intellect, numb his mental process, before he can act. It was in this way that Burt passed her the pigeon and sat listening to the hidden crackle of tiny bones and the juicy sound of her mastication. She ate with her head lowered, devouring the entire pigeon in the time it took to rip off the meat and convey it to her mouth. Burt sat with a growing conviction that he was the only sane person at the table. Finished, she touched a napkin to her mouth with such incongruous delicacy that he burst out laughing.

She frowned toward Rolf, then leaned confidentially across the table. “Don’t tell Rolf. He’s trying to enforce my diet.”

A bright light flashed in his brain. “Oh, you’ve put on weight recently?”

“You think I’m getting fat?”

“I see nothing wrong with your shape, if your clothes only fit—”

“Oh, that’s part of it, don’t you see? He’s got this idea that people go through life trying to balance out their various urges. I’ve got an urge to eat, but I’ve also got this urge to wear nice things. He decided that the urge to dress well was strongest. So he went out and bought me a raft of lovely clothes for our trip, only they’re two sizes too small. He figures I’ll diet in order to be able to wear them; meanwhile I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown because I’m afraid something’s going to burst out any minute.”

Burt managed a faint smile. The whole ridiculous story fitted Rolf’s weird logic. Unfortunately, one of the main props in his theory was that the clothes weren’t really hers...

Joss and Rolf returned, and Joss said she’d see if the boys were ready to play music. Burt-excused himself and followed her out to the kitchen.

“Joss, I wonder if you’d take your eyes off Rolf long enough to listen to Mrs. Keener. I want to know if her voice sounds... different than when she first came.”

She looked at Burt with unfocused eyes. “I couldn’t tell from the grunts she’s given so far.”

Burt frowned. “Yeah, that’s funny. After you left she talked up a storm.”

“Don’t forget her husband left, too.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, come now. Does a woman camp out where her old man can see? No, baby. She sits quiet and sedate and something like a stick until he gets out of earshot. Then she turns it on.” Joss smiled loosely and patted his cheek. “That chick’s got her net out for you, Burtie. Don’t get tangled up in it.”

Burt realized that Joss was half-drunk and a bad security risk, but he needed help.

“Listen, when we go back out there, I want you to get everybody to sign the guestbook. I’m particularly interested in Mrs. Keener.”

She raised her brows. “What’s on your mind?”

“Just a sneaky way to see her handwriting.” He patted her shoulder. “Go on, play it natural. I’ll explain when the party’s over.”

Back at the table, Joss carried it off... almost. She brought up the subject of a previous guest, forgot his name, then got the guest book, a massive bookkeeping ledger, to refresh her memory. She discovered that none of those present had signed the book. Burt signed first, then Rolf Keener, who asked Joss with a faint smile, “Is it okay if I sign for both of us?”

Joss shot Burt a brief glance, then said quickly, “Oh, no. Everybody sign.”

Rolf, still smiling, pushed the heavy book in front of the woman. “Here, Mrs. Rolf Keener. Sergeant March would like your autograph.”

Burt met the cold blue eyes and regretted his maneuver with the book. He’d revealed more than he could ever learn, and it gave him no surprise to look across the table and see the woman print in block capitals: MRS. ROLF KEENER.

The boys began playing a bouncy local mixture of calypso, cha-cha-cha, and Latin American rock-and-roll. They’d donned white shirts for the occasion, and Boris managed to look dignified even with a nose-flute in one flaring nostril. Coco sat on the floor with his legs hooked around a pair of bongo drums. His hands, pink-scarred by fish-bites, fluttered like black wings on the taut drum-skin. Godfrey’s face hung vacuous over a guitar almost as large as himself.

Rolf pulled Joss up to dance on the wooden floor; he acted like someone playing a hilarious game — and winning it. Burt hesitated to trust his leg, but when Joss and Rolf began their third twist, he asked Mrs. Keener to dance.

“If I pop out of my dress,” she said, getting up, “will you look the other way?”

“We’ll have to wait and see,” said Burt.

Burt found to his surprise that he enjoyed dancing with her. She moved with a boneless, sinuous grace which never brought her into contact with him, but nevertheless made him totally aware of her body. He glanced down at her muscular calves, saw that her feet were shod in flat-heeled, ballet-style slippers.

“Did you used to be a professional dancer?”

She dimpled in a way she must have practiced. “You say the nicest things.”

Burt thought: She’s certainly no junkie. She’s a healthy female animal with beautiful coordination, a gargantuan appetite, and none of the addict’s sexual apathy. He could feel her physical warmth surrounding him like a blanket. On their third dance he spoke softly in her ear: “On the slope behind your cabin, there’s a concrete water catchment with a tile-roofed cistern at the lower end. Have you seen it?”

“Yes.” She whirled away once and came back into his arms. “In an hour?”

So simple, he thought, like meeting her for coffee. “That’s fine.”

She came against him for an instant as though sealing the bargain with a sample. Burt found himself looking over her head into the icy blue eyes of Rolf. There was no jealousy there, only a crinkle of mild amusement.

But then, he asked himself, why should Rolf be jealous? For he had just learned, with a certainty that dispelled all doubt, that the woman in his arms was not Tracy Keener.

The woman pleaded a headache fifteen minutes later and the pair left despite Joss’s protest that parties didn’t end this way in the islands. Joss decided to stay and finish the wine and Burt stayed with her.

“Joss, what’s the best way to get to this island without the authorities knowing?”

“In the hold of a ship, I guess.”

Burt thought of Mrs. Keener’s tight clothing, he’d returned to the theory that they’d belonged to a smaller woman. She couldn’t have carried much luggage as a stowaway.

“Is there a quicker way?”

“Flying in at Grenada.”

“She’d go through immigration.”

“Not our immigration. We come under St. Vincent, the southern islands come under Grenada. People cross all the time and nobody knows unless they get in trouble.”

“Then Rolf could have picked her up in the launch from Grenada. Of course.”

“Who, Mrs. Keener?”

“She isn’t Mrs. Keener.”

Joss’s mouth dropped open. “You mean he sent his girl friend down here—”

“I mean that the woman who came on O’Ryan’s schooner is not the woman we had dinner with tonight. There’s been a switch, and it happened sometime between last night and the night before.”

She stared at him a moment, then shook her head. “I’ve had too much to drink, Burt. I can’t figure it.”

“Okay. I searched the purse while I was on the schooner. Her driver’s license said she was five-feet-four, and weighed a hundred and five pounds. Now this woman was nearer one-twenty, wouldn’t you say?”

“At least, but women change their weight.”

“But not their height, Joss. While we were dancing I noticed that she was wearing low heels. The top of her head came to the tip of my nose. I’m six feet and a quarter inch tall. My nose is approximately five inches below the top of my head. That would put her height at about five-seven.”

“But why? To change wives—”

“Divorce is a lot less trouble. It’s bigger than that, and I’ve got a feeling there’s a lot of money involved, knowing Rolf.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get more information — maybe. I’ve got a date with her out by the cistern.”

Joss looked alarmed. “Burt, it’s probably a trap.”

“I know. I don’t aim to throw myself at her feet without looking around. Rolf has a gun, you know.”

“Burt, don’t risk it. Look, let me talk to Rolf, I’ll tell him I’m sick, get him to take me to St. Vincent, go to the police—”

“And tell them what?”

“Why... that there’s a woman here—”

“And our proof?”

“My word—”

“Have you told anybody about seeing your husband on the beach wearing hip boots?”

“What does that—?” She closed her mouth, reddening. “Oh, I see what you mean. They’d think I was raving. Okay, you go.”

“Suppose Rolf does have a big deal on; he’d see that I never got to St. Vincent.”

Joss laughed nervously. “Oh, hell, this thing has sobered me up quicker than a gallon of black coffee. Who do you suppose the woman is?”

“It’s not important, is it? I’m wondering what happened to the real Mrs. Keener.”