Big Kiss-Off (13 page)

Janice continued to study his face in the mirror. “You’re very angry with me, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“Put yourself in my position.”

“I’m trying to.”

Finished with her hair, Janice stood up and caught the hem of her dress with both hands. “Angry enough to shoot me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Isn’t that why you brought the gun?”

Cade breathed hard as Janice pulled her dress over her head and hung it neatly on a hanger. All she was wearing under the dress was a short white petticoat and her hose. He’d forgotten how truly lovely she was. Janice meant, obviously, to go all the way to back her claim that she still loved him, that she’d thought he was dead, that all she had really done was to look out for herself.

Janice came back to the bed, stripped off the pastel silk spread and folded it neatly. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, she rolled down one of her hose, her blonde hair falling over her face, as Cade had dreamed a thousand times of seeing it fall.

“I can’t say I blame you,” she said. “From your point of view, it was a nasty, despicable thing for me to do. But any mistakes I’ve made have been of the head and not of the heart. So I’m an avaricious little bitch, I can’t help it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes and hooked her thumbs in the elastic waistband of the petticoat. “I’ve seen too many wives of dead and ‘missing’ officers running billing machines or clerking in dime stores. And I wasn’t having any.”

The petticoat followed her hose to the floor and she sat looking up at Cade with her gray-green eyes slitted and sullen, reminding him somewhat of Mimi.

“Well — ?” Janice asked, quietly. “Well — ?”

The night heat fondled Cade’s body with little, black, moist fingers. He lay looking at the ceiling that he couldn’t see, acutely conscious of Janice’s breathing. He’d never felt so emotionally or physically depleted.

This was the dream he’d dreamed?

He moved slightly and Janice moved with him, as if even in her sleep she was reluctant to lose contact. Whatever else she was not, Janice definitely was a good actress. For some reason of her own, she wanted him to think she was still in love with him. She’d done her best to further the illusion. Just the same, her best hadn’t been enough. Cade felt shamed and put upon and soiled — as if he’d been had. What Janice had given him held little value for her. She’d given the same to Tocko and Moran. Cade was certain of that now. Janice had been too eager to please him. There was something in the back of her greedy little mind, something for which she still needed him.

Cade eased his way to the edge of the bed and the spring, giving under his weight, made the bed sway like a boat. Over the shrilling of the cicadas and the booming of the frogs, he could hear Mimi’s small, militant voice.

“Thees woman no love you. All the time you thought you were happy, she was just sleeping weeth the silver maple leaves on your shoulders.”

Cade wondered what Mimi was thinking now. He felt a twinge of remorse. Still, all he had done was what she had asked him to do. She’d been determined to get to Moran. He hoped she was satisfied.

The air in the room was stifling him. Carefully, so as not to awaken Janice, Cade eased out of bed and dressed. Perhaps it would be cooler on the pier. Perhaps he could think more clearly. Janice’s talk of a swank resort was a lot of foolishness. There weren’t enough rooms in the lodge to make it pay. The pier had cost more than she could hope to take in in five seasons. Then there was the single-stack cutter. She and Moran were up to something, something that tied in with Janice’s hectic affair with Tocko, with his being warned out of Bay Parish by Joe Laval, with Laval being murdered.

As he felt his way down the dim stairs to the lobby, Cade wondered if it were possible that Moran had shot Laval. He’d heard a light plane in Bay Parish. Moran was a flyer.

The silence in the lobby was complete. Cade turned too sharply at the foot of the stairs and the gun bulging his pocket slammed against the newel post. The silence magnified the sound. Cade stood holding his breath, looking down the hall at the door of the room into which Moran and Mimi had disappeared and realized he was jealous. After what he’d just been through with Janice!

Men, Cade decided, were complex creatures, almost as complex as women. He reached for the hook of the front screen door and found it already unhooked. Someone else had been unable to sleep. Moran? Mimi? The youth he’d seen behind the desk?

Cade waded the loose sand to the pier. The air sweeping over the dark bay was cooler and cleaner there. There was a faint slap of waves on the beach and farther out, a suggestion of whitecaps. Cade turned his attention from the water to the cutter made fast to the T-shaped pier. A white “S” enclosed in a white circle was painted on the stack. The insignia was vaguely familiar. Cade tried to place it and couldn’t. One thing, however, was certain. The cutter was built for speed. It was not a contractor’s boat.

He turned and looked back at the lodge. Only the lobby was lighted. There were no lights in any of the other rooms. Cade tried to put Mimi out of his mind. So Moran was a bastard. So, according to Miss Spence, he had at least three other wives. What happened to Mimi wasn’t any of his affair. She’d stowed away in La Guaira to join Moran. She’d swum the river in the dark. She’d kept herself pure for the guy. Cade hoped she was happy.

He started to turn back to the pier and stopped as a faint light, feeling its way out past a drawn shade, showed in one of the cottages. So a cottage was occupied, and not by a tired businessman and his amorous secretary.

Cade raised his eyes to the tall web of steel behind the cottage. It was the first time he’d noticed the tower. It was substantial, solid. It looked like a professional two-way affair, perhaps a ship-to-shore sending outfit. Either that or a powerful ham set.

In a luxury fishing lodge?

Cade felt the butt of the gun in his pocket, as he walked out on the pier. The small cruisers he’d noticed were old work tubs with peeling paint. Sandwiched between them were several new skiffs, one a fourteen-foot job, powered with a new fifteen horsepower Sea Horse with two cruise-a-day tanks. Janice was getting money from somewhere, more, a lot more, than she could have possibly gotten from the sale of the old house.

Sweat started on his face again and trickled down his sides. He wished now he’d stayed in New Orleans. He hadn’t accomplished a thing by coming to the Bay. His intended showdown with Janice had turned out to be just a show — an amorous interlude that had been all play-acting and had left him disgusted with both himself and her. He still didn’t know a thing more than he’d known when he first heard Janice had been in Bay Parish and had sold his properties.

He stooped to feel the tautness of one of the lines mooring the
Sea Bird
and the sweat dribbling down his sides turned cold. There was someone behind the next piling. Cade drew his gun from his pocket and looked around the piling. Mimi was sitting on the far side, swinging her bare feet over the planking.

She looked up at him with wet eyes, “’Allo.”

In the light from the bulb on the pier head, Cade could see that her face was stained with tears and that the bodice of her dress had been torn and pinned together.

He returned the gun to his pocket, lighted a cigarette and squatted down beside her. “Smoke?”

Mimi took the offered cigarette. “Thank you.”

Cade had a fair idea of what had happened. He wished he could think of something to say to comfort her. It wasn’t nice to see a dream dissolve. He knew.

Mimi sucked at the cigarette in silence. Then, wiping her wet cheeks with the back of one hand, she announced, “Is all right now. I weel not cry any more.”

“It didn’t go so good, huh?”

Mimi shook her head. “No. I ’ave been ver’
bobo
, like you say, a leetle fool.”

“In what way?”

“Jeem has no affection for me.”

“No?”

“No.” Mimi’s small chin jutted. “All he did was use me in Caracas. I was ver’ pleasant way for him to spend a week. I am not even his wife.”

“He admitted it?”

Mimi shook her head. “No.” She put her free hand on her left breast. “It is a feeling I have here. I could tell when we were alone.” Her breathing grew labored. “He has no love for me. All I am to him is a woman. All he wanted was encore. And when I wouldn’t he hit me with his fist and knocked me down on the bed.”

The bitterness in his voice surprised Cade. “Why didn’t you use your knife?”

Mimi’s bitterness matched his own. “Because he took it away from me.” She studied her bare feet. “But my knife and my shoes were all he did get.” She began to cry without sound. “It is funny, no, how you can want someone so badly and then not be in love at all? That is why my dress is torn. And now I do not know what to do.”

“How about going back to Caracas?”

“No. My family would not receive me.”

Cade sighed. “I tried to tell you. Miss Spence, that’s the postmistress in Bay Parish, said the return addresses of at least three other girls writing him read — Mrs. James Moran.”

“Now you tell me thees.”

“Would you have believed me if I had told you before?”

Mimi thought a moment. “No.” She continued to cry without sound.

“Where is Moran now?”

“I don’t know. He called me bad names and tried to stop me but I ran from the room an’ out here.”

Cade looked back at the lodge. Janice’s window was lighted. She was awake and knew he was gone. It could be Moran was with her, comparing notes.

What wind there had been had died. The bay no longer lapped at the beach. The whitecaps were gone. Cade began to sweat again. His throat contracted. The roof of his mouth was dry. He felt as if he were sitting on a cork waiting for all hell to pop.

“Rest and quiet, that’s an order, Colonel”
the medic in Tokyo had told him.
“When you get back to the States buy a boat, take it easy. Crawl into the bunk with your wife and a jug of rum and don’t get out of the sack for two months.”

So he’d bought a boat. He’d drunk a few bottles of rum. He’d even been to bed with his wife; that is, his former wife. All that was missing was the rest and quiet, with a murder charge and Mimi added. The situation had all the qualities of a nightmare. Cade was almost afraid to open his mouth for fear the mounting hysteria inside him would rush out.

The squatting position cramped his legs. Cade stood up and lighted a second cigarette. Mimi stood beside him. “But what are you doing here?”

Cade told her. “I’m in the same boat you are, baby. Janice is still sleeping with my maple leaves. I still have something she wants.”

“What?”

“I don’t know, but she doesn’t care any more for me than Moran does for you.”

Mimi’s Latin temper got the best of her tears. She shoved out her little jaw. “Then why did they bother to lie? Why did they not just tell us to go away?”

“I don’t know,” Cade said.

His feeling of attempting to climb a sheer glass wall returned. He felt unutterably tired. Nothing made sense. Nothing had made sense since his return to Bay Parish. He watched the black water lap at the hull of the
Sea
Bird
, thinking that if his tanks were filled instead of empty, a partial solution of his problem would be to feel his way back up the series of inland watercourses to New Orleans and turn the whole matter over to the law. It was too big for him.

He turned his attention to the skiff with the attached outboard motor. The small port of Grand Isle was only a few miles away. He and Mimi could easily make it in the skiff but running away wouldn’t solve anything. Besides, he had no reason to run. He hadn’t killed Laval. All he’d done was come home.

Mimi followed his eyes and sniffed. “I ’ad outboard like that in Caracas harbor. At La Guaira.”

Cade knew a moment of irritation. He had enough problems of his own without worrying about Mimi. He wished she were back in Caracas. Or did he? He’d never known any girl he’d liked so much in so short a time. Mimi was everything Janice wasn’t.

He lifted his eyes from the skiff to the sky as he heard a familiar drone. There was only one sound like it. He waited for the lights on the landing strip to come on. They didn’t. Instead, all the lights in the lodge winked out and the door of the radio shack opened briefly to spill an indeterminate number of men into the night. Then all was dark again.

Mimi tried to locate the sound. “Is plane.”

Cade continued to study the clouds. “A helicopter,” he corrected her. “And from the sound, a big one.” He slipped the gun from his pocket. “You wait here.”

“No,” Mimi said determinedly. “No. Wherever you go, I am going.”

There was the pad of bare feet on the deck of the cutter. The crew men, roused from their sleep, wearing only their shorts, leaned on the aft rail, studying the night sky, as if they were watching a show.

Cade looked from the yawning men to the dark lodge, then walked back down the pier to the stretch of pumped-in beach. From the sound of the revolving planes, the ’copter was having trouble locating the strip.

Drop a flare, you fool
, Cade thought.

Then the depth of the nightmare increased. From somewhere back of the lodge a voice that could only be Tocko’s called, “Okay. Show your lights, boys, so Charlie can come in.”

Closer at hand, Moran’s voice answered profanely, “I’ll shoot the first bastard who does. I might have known you’d try to foul up the deal by pulling something like this?”

A flashlight beam stabbed the sky, followed by a shot.

“I warned you,” Moran said.

Cade walked around the unlighted lodge with Mimi panting beside him. Its huge planes revolving slowly, the helicopter was hovering over the landing strip now. Then a second and a third and a forth flashlight beam pierced the sky and the pilot set it down. As he did, a dozen shots thudded into the metal and from the far side of the strip Tocko called:

“Find Moran, Squid.”

The Squid’s thin voice answered, “I’ll find him.”