Big Kiss-Off (7 page)

“I’m not taking you to New Orleans.”

Mimi’s voice continued small. “That is for you to say.”

Cade made certain the cruiser wasn’t rubbing on the pier and that the mooring lines were fast, before opening the door of the aft cabin. At first, his eyes still blinded by the sun, he thought he’d walked into a trap, that the man on his bunk was drunk and waiting for him. He tugged his pistol hastily from his pocket.

Then Cade realized that the Cajun was dead. Laval’s shirt front was stained with blood. He lay with one limp arm trailing to the deck plates. In death the gaunt Cajun sheriff looked even more like a weasel than he had in life. Cade felt the flesh of his face. It was still warm. He hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes.

Cade caught at the rim of an open port to steady himself. Joe Laval was dead on his boat and he had threatened to kill him. In Sal’s, the night before, in front of two dozen witnesses, during his fight with the Squid, he had panted:

“You bastards. If I had a gun I’d kill you both.”

Behind him, her view of the cabin blocked by Cade’s back, Mimi asked, “What is the matter? What are you looking at?”

The smell of the blood still dripping to the deck plates sickened Cade. He had smelled too much blood, lost too much of it himself. Backing out of the cabin, he closed the companionway door and leaned against it, breathing through his mouth. Perspiration beaded on his face. He felt like he wanted to be sick and couldn’t.

Mimi tugged the tail of her borrowed shirt out of the waist of her borrowed pants and used it to wipe Cade’s face. “What is it? Tell me. What is the matter, Cade?”

It was the first time Mimi had used his name, Cade liked the sound of it in her mouth. He tried twice before he could speak. “There’s a dead man in the cabin.”

“Who?”

“The local sheriff. A man by the name of Laval.”

“You are certain he is dead?”

“I’m certain.”

“How dead?”

“Shot. I think through the heart.”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“But why should anyone kill him on your boat?”

He was afraid he knew the answer to Mimi’s question. Tocko had always hated him, ever since they had been boys and he had refused to allow Tocko to push him around. Now, after pirating Janice, and after stripping him of property that had been in the Cain family for one hundred years, Tocko had reason to fear Cade, fear him enough to plant a dead man on his boat. A murder conviction would be much more permanent than a warning to leave town.

He had threatened Joe Laval. Now Joe was dead and his only alibi for the approximate time of the killing was that he had been walking with a pretty girl, a girl who was in the country illegally, a girl who had spent the previous night aboard his boat.

It was the sort of thing only a Tocko Kalavitch could dream up. On the other hand, Joe had been Tocko’s right-hand man. Tocko would be hard put to find anyone else who would do the dirty jobs Joe had done.

“But why?” Mimi demanded.

“Put your shirt back in your pants,” Cade told her.

He glanced up, then down, the levee. It dozed in the mid-morning sun. The only sounds were the jangling of a ship’s bell in mid-river, the surge of the river itself and the buzz of a single-motored plane rising from the small airport on the far side of the town. The storm-pitted glass in the windows of the old house acted like so many reflectors, blinding him. The only moving object he could see were two distant men just starting up the weed-grown road that led to the business district.

Cade took his glass from its bracket over the wheel and trained it on the two men. The man in the white suit was Tocko. The face of the other man was unfamiliar but he was in the uniform of the Immigration Service. They could only be coming to one place.

Cade returned the glass to its bracket and looked at Mimi. Moran had been in Tocko’s employ. Men like Moran liked to boast of their conquests. Undoubtedly, Tocko knew all the details concerning Moran’s romance in Caracas — and wanted her himself. Tocko wanted every pretty girl he saw. The big Slavonian collected screams in the night as some men collected stamps.

Cold anger replaced Cade’s queasiness. Tocko might or might not be able to pin Laval’s death on him. A jury would decide that. But Tocko could have him held for trial, leaving Mimi unprotected.

Cade’s agile mind raced on. Mimi was in the country illegally. After the “discovery” of Laval’s body, Tocko’s smart move would be to persuade the immigration officials to parole the girl in his custody as a material witness. Tocko was a power on the river. He was a man of property and substance. He knew whom to see. It was a fifty-fifty gamble that the immigration officials would listen to him, especially if Tocko were willing to post bond for Mimi. And Tocko would be willing. That kind of a scream from Mimi would be worth any amount of bond.

Even thinking of the girl that way excited Cade. After all, he’d been hungry for two years.

Mimi blushed at the look in his eyes and tucked more of her borrowed shirt into her already well-filled white pants. “Please, Cade,” she reproved him gently. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Cade spoke without conscious volition. “Just thinking how nice it would be.”

He started the port, then the starboard motor of the cruiser. There was no strain on the aft lines. The forward line gave him more trouble. He was drenched with sweat by the time he fought it over the rusted iron and returned to the wheel of the cruiser.

Tocko and the immigration man were running now, shouting something unintelligible over the throb of the motors. Cade made a derogatory gesture and gunned the
Sea Bird
out of the slip too fast, its powerful twin screws spitting a messy wake of mangled hyacinth bulbs and churned mud.

He had to have time to think, time to get rid of Laval’s body.

Her bare feet spread on the deck to maintain a precarious balance, Mimi looked from the muddy wake to the shouting men on the pier. Then holding on to the back of the wheel chair with one hand to steady herself against the slap of the river, she put the thumb of her free hand to her nose and wiggled her fingers experimentally. “What does that mean in English?”

Cade fed more gas to the boat as he swung the wheel hard, up river. “That we’re going to New Orleans.”

Mimi was silent a moment. Then she said, quietly, “Thank you. You are, how we say,
muy buen caballero
. It would be nice with you, too.”

Cade sucked in his breath sharply as he glanced at the dark-haired girl. She was the damnedest one hundred pounds of mixed naivète and poise he had ever seen stuffed into one feminine body. Her statement was just that, a statement, not an invitation.

To keep from making a fool of himself, Cade forced his eyes to scan the gas gauge. The tanks were still a quarter full. If he hadn’t forgotten the channel, if he didn’t hit a submerged object, if the immigration man didn’t telephone on up the river for a Coast Guard boat to stop him, at the knots they were logging they should raise the lower harbor by early afternoon.

The more Cade thought about going to New Orleans the better he liked the idea. He wanted to meet Mimi’s “husband.” He wanted to talk to Janice. Perhaps one, or both, could explain why he was being pushed around.

In a sheltered cove a few miles above Buras, Cade cut his motors long enough to drag Laval’s body out of the cabin. If a Coast Guard boat should stop him, he didn’t want the dead man aboard. After two years in Pyongyang, he had all he could stomach of prisons and prison camps.

In this instance he had played it smart. This way he might be suspected of killing Laval but no one could prove anything.

Cade considered weighting the body but could find nothing aboard the cruiser he could spare. It had taken every penny he’d had to buy the boat and outfit it as meagerly as he had. In the back of his mind he supposed he’d reasoned that if he ran too short of cash he could always put a small mortgage on the old home place. Now the old house was gone. Tocko had bought it at his price, with Janice thrown in for lagniappe.

Mimi eyed the dead man with feminine distaste. “You knew him?”

Cade touched his swollen nose and the adhesive tape under his eye. “Very well. He gave me these last night. At least, he had his deputy do it.”

“Why?”

“He didn’t say. He did order me to be out of town by noon.”

“I see,” Mimi said with quick comprehension. “This is why you wouldn’t go.”

Cade heaved the body up on the transom of the boat. “Let’s say one of the reasons.” It was hot and still in the cove. Cade was panting just from the effort of lifting the body. He still had a long road to travel before all of his strength returned. He glanced at his watch as he rested. It was eleven o’clock. Joe had made his deadline stand up, after all. Not that it mattered to Joe. The gaunt Cajun was through taking orders from Tocko, through with throwing his weight around, finished with doing Tocko’s dirty work. Cade squeegeed the sweat from his face with the side of his hand before Mimi could use the tail of her shirt. Now that he’d had time to think, Tocko sacrificing Joe Laval just to get rid of him didn’t make good sense. Joe had been invaluable to Tocko.

Cade leaned against the side of the cruiser. But then, nothing made sense, nothing made sense since, lousy and dirty and half-starved, he’d called on his last ounce of strength to stagger across the line under his own power at Panmunjom.

“Rest and quiet, that’s an order,”
one of the big-shot medics in Tokyo had told him.
“I see you come from the Delta country, Colonel. 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 except to eat.”

Mimi watched him warily, wetting her naturally red lips with the pink tip of her tongue. “What are you thinking?”

“You might be surprised,” Cade said, wryly. “Then again, you might not.”

He heaved Laval’s body over the edge. The splash sounded unnaturally loud in the hush of the cove. The body bobbed several times like a swimmer treading water, then was caught in an eddy and floated off down river.

Cade dropped a bucket overside and sloshed the transom and the cockpit with water. It was a minor matter to make the cockpit shipshape again. The cabin was another affair. The mattress on which Laval had been killed was sodden with clotted blood. Blood had dripped down onto the deck plates and seeped in between the cracks. Cade scrubbed the deck as best he could but there was nothing he could do with the mattress except throw it overside. When he’d finished, his trousers and shirt were sodden with sweat. Cade thought of going for a swim and thought better of the idea. The sight of Mimi in a pair of his shorts and a makeshift halter would only add to his problem. The girl liked him. She trusted him. He wasn’t completely a heel, he hoped.

His sour mood stayed with him, as he started his motors again and continued up river. He hadn’t been smart in running. He had acted on impulse, instead of reasoning the thing out. If the law couldn’t prove he’d killed Laval, now that he’d disposed of Joe’s body, he couldn’t prove that he hadn’t killed him. What evidence there was, was in the river. If he was suspect, and he would be, his sudden flight, the missing mattress and the blood that had seeped into the cracks would all be against him. Any half-smart lawyer, using his threat to kill Joe and the three pieces of evidence as a foundation, could build a good case against him.

Cade’s resentment against Mimi grew. If it hadn’t been for Mimi, if he hadn’t tried to save her from Tocko, he wouldn’t have run. So Laval had been shot on his boat? He hadn’t shot him.

Mimi sensed his mood. “Have I done something, Cade?”

His name didn’t sound so good in her mouth. “No. Nothing,” Cade said, shortly. “Just leave me alone.”

He sat watching the shore line fall behind the speeding cruiser, swinging wide now and then to give an outbound steamer plenty of seaway, occasionally passing a banana boat or a smartly painted tanker laboring up stream against the current.

It was two o’clock when he wove his way through the ships riding at anchor in the lower harbor and a few minutes later when he cut his motors and nosed into the private slip of a ship chandler he and his family had done business with for years, not far from the Charbonnet Street Wharf.

Mimi eyed the gear-cluttered pier with distaste. “Why are we stopping here?”

Cade told her, curtly, “To get some money. What did you think I was going to do, run the
Sea Bird
right up Royal Street and help you out in front of the hotel in that outfit?”

Mimi’s eyes narrowed slightly, “I’m sorry, I am a lot of bother to you.”

“Yes, you are,” Cade admitted.

He made fast to the pier, then getting his papers from his strong box in the locker under his bunk, he strode down the pier to the office. The chandler was glad to see him. After a quick glance at the
Sea Bird
and its registry papers, he was glad to lend Cade a thousand dollars on the boat — at ten percent.

Cade made the arrangements to leave the cruiser where it was for the time being and returned for Mimi. She refused his offered hand and scrambled up on the pier herself. “I can manage. I don’t want to be any more bother to you than I can help.”

“That’s fine with me,” Cade said.

He told himself he would be glad to get rid of the girl. He would outfit her as best he could. He’d take her to the Royal Crescent Hotel and turn her over to Moran. From there on in, she could make out on her own, while he had a showdown with Janice.

It was almost four o’clock by the time he’d bought Mimi a dress and some hose and shoes and underthings, to replace the wisps in which she had swum ashore. The dress was white, of a waffle weave material, with a square neck cut to show the top rounds of her breasts. It looked well on her but Cade decided he’d like her better in the borrowed white pants and shirt which Mimi insisted the slightly shocked clerk put into a bag for her.

Back on crowded Barrone Street, Mimi stood so close that Cade could feel her slim body trembling. His sour mood deepened. He’d picked the girl out of the river. He’d fed her and clothed her. He’d saved her from Tocko Kalavitch. He was risking a murder rap for her. And was she grateful? No. She was so eager to get to the stud to whom she’s given her virginity that she was a-tremble with anticipation.