Color Him Dead (3 page)

“You aren’t cool with the help. You overplay the autocratic scene, as if you’re afraid they’ll treat you as an equal.”

Carefully she lay her fork on the table. “In a way you’re right, Drew. I grew up on a sandhill farm in the Nebraska panhandle. My dad was a retired railroader trying to raise five kids on a pension check. When I was fourteen he gave up, shoved a shotgun barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I left home the same day. Two years later I married Nils. He’s worth a million dollars and he gives me everything I want. This lake—” she waved her arm—“is mine. I can do what I want with it.”

“Is it in your name?”

In the few seconds before her eyes dropped, the play of emotion across her face was as revealing as a suddenly illuminated screen. Here was a girl who had married wealth expecting to find the end of her troubles, only to discover that the nagging feeling of insecurity didn’t go away. Now the answer had been dropped into her lap; the money wasn’t really hers.

She looked down and twirled her glass silently for a minute. She spoke without looking up, her voice uncharacteristically low and hesitant. “May I make a suggestion?”

“You’ve been making them all day. Shoot.”

“Let’s go over to Honeymoon Beach with the picnic basket. Get some boy-girl scenes.”

She asked in a way that made it impossible for Drew to say no, even though warning bells jangled in his mind. Honeymoon Beach was a quarter-mile across the lake, tucked under a twenty-foot cliff. They’d hauled in white sand and put up a little shack which would hold a refreshment stand and bathroom. Drew put on swim trunks, set the self-timer on his camera, and got some shots of Edith and himself sitting on the blanket. Then opening the lunch basket. Then strolling down the beach hand in hand. (Her palm was a hard pad of flesh, but smooth as chamois. Her skin had a clean fresh-water smell, her breath held a touch of her after-dinner wine. Every cell in his body was tense with awareness that they were alone on this tiny beach, that the hotel was a quarter-mile across the water, and that she had been strangely quiet and pliant since lunch.

The sun grew low, sending a pale yellow light across the water. “I can’t shoot anything in this light.”

“How terrible.” She dropped to the blanket and rolled over on her back. Her eyes looked sleepy; inside the green bathing suit, her breasts were twin cones pointing at the red sky; her legs were slightly open, and the sun gleamed gold on a few hairs high on her thighs. “I had the bartender fill our jug with martinis,” she said.

He sat beside her, lifted out the jug, and filled the plastic cup. “We’ll have to drink out of the same cup.”

“My lips are pure. But you drink first.”

He took a drink and felt the warmth spread within him. He gave her the cup and she half-raised to drink; he put his hand under her head and spread his fingers. The nape of her neck was warm and covered with soft down. He took the cup and set it aside, then bent to kiss her. He felt her hands on his back; her lips were soft; her breath tasted of martini, but the clean fresh smell was still there. He felt her muscular tongue dart between his lips, and he knew he’d find no resistance. He slid his hand up her leg and found the hard, elastic cloth of her swimsuit. He tried to get his fingers under it, but she caught his wrist. Her lips moved against his: “You’re married.”

“So are you,” he grunted.

“With me it doesn’t make any difference. Can you say that?”

Still her strong fingers held him away from the ultimate discovery. He drew away and saw a half-smile on her face. He saw that he’d read her mood correctly, but he hadn’t read far enough. First she wanted him to renounce his wife, just as she’d tried earlier to make him admit that she was more lovely, more shapely than Marianne. Edith was a girl hungry for reassurance, and he wasn’t that eager for what she offered.

He sat up with his back to her. “No, I can’t say that it makes no difference that I’m married. I doubt if you can, either." “But I
can,
Drew. Listen, when I first got married I used to lie there and wait for him to come to bed. Five nights out of six he’d just poke his head through the door and say goodnight. Lord! I’d parade around with my clothes off, and he’d just smile wistfully and say, ‘You’re very lovely, Edith. I hope you’re happy.’ If I hinted that I wasn’t, why the next day there’d be a bracelet or a ring or a new coat. It got so bad I’d break out in a heat rash if I stood close to a man in an elevator. Finally I’d had it; one night after he’d gone to sleep I sneaked out and caught a taxi. I was nervous, nervous as hell. The driver was a young Italian, and I guess he’d seen women like me before. He made it easy—”

“You like to talk about it, Edith?” he asked softly.

She was silent a moment, and he heard the gurgle of the martini jug. A moment later he felt her hands on his shoulders, pressing him down as she pushed herself to her feet. “I’m going to change.”

He turned to watch her walk toward the little bath house. It looked raw and savage without paint. Her steps gradually slowed, until at the door she stopped and turned. “If you decide to come, bring the blanket.”

As she closed the door, he felt his thought process smothered in a wild surge of excitement. Here was the offer, no strings attached. Just come, man, bring yourself, no need to renounce Carey, nothing. Hadn’t she told that story about the cab driver to show that there’d be no complications, no unpleasant aftermath? There would be a brief contact, nothing more; two people wanted something they couldn’t get alone, so they pooled their resources in a temporary alliance until the end had been achieved, then went their separate ways and no hard feelings….

He had gotten up and walked stiffly to the bath house. As he turned the knob and pushed open the door, he’d felt only a slight stab of premonition, a feeling that he was stepping off into deep, deep water….

Now they were lowering the casket. For a moment the eyes were off Drew, watching the descent of that ridiculously ornate box, with their minds plunged into thoughts of their own mortality.

It was time….

He gambled that Cornell and Fellini would not shoot into the crowd. He plunged into the thickest of the mass, smashed through, and was running free, down the hill toward the line of cars. The first shot ripped the air over his head with a sound like tearing tissue paper. The second slug made a starburst in the windshield of a parked car. He gambled that they wouldn’t shoot accurately downhill, and he won that gamble too. The guns barked above him like angry dogs as he ran behind the cars in a low gorilla’s crouch. A slug burned the paint off a fender in front of him, then made a long, disappointed whine out over the valley. They had his range now; he prayed that his third gamble would pay off. He knew he’d won when he found a car with the leather key case dangling from the dash, lovely as a diamond pendant. Still crouching, he opened the door, turned the key, pressed the dashboard starter, and jumped in as the engine roared. He squealed out, crouching low over the wheel. As he looked up at the mirror, he saw Fellini and Cornell ranged on top of the hill like rookie cops at target practice.
That’s it boys, hold the guns the way the book says, straight from the shoulder with the body turned sideways, and never mind the part that says you can’t hit a bull’s ass with a scoop at twenty yards, let alone fifty …

Now a hundred … two hundred….

Here was the narrow one-way bridge, the bottleneck. Halfway across, Drew twisted the wheel and rammed the hood beneath one railing. He felt the rear bumper strike the other side. He threw the keys in the river and ran on. Now there was only the marshal, old Cash Macklehaney, leaving the intersection in a stiff-legged old man’s run. Drew shouted “Get him! Get him!” as he ran past, and the old man stopped and peered with bewildered, nearsighted eyes to see what Drew was chasing. Drew had jumped in the old man’s car and was roaring off when he heard the dull boom of a .44 Colt. He didn’t worry because he was a moving, going-away target, and old Mac’s gun hadn’t cleared leather in twenty years—

The slug punched a hole in the door just behind the hinge, flattening as it did so and losing a good half of its muzzle velocity. It lost a little more passing through the car’s upholstery, but it still had enough foot-pounds of kinetic energy to blast an impact crater in the flesh above his left ankle, to break the two bones of his left leg, then glance off and smash a nerve and gouge out a vein before dropping to the rubber floor mat. The pain hit his leg like a block of ice dropped from a great height.
Goddam,
he told himself,
this cools it for you, lad.
But the car had an automatic shift, and so he thought: Screw the left leg, just grit your goddam teeth and keep that right foot on the floorboard, keep your eyes on that nude hood ornament, and keep those chromium tits pointed west. Keep your mind on that little cabin in the high pine forest. Don’t think about the pain that rakes your leg like fishhooks pulled upward, forget the blood that fills your shoe. You got a clear road ahead and nobody behind, and if you don’t make it now, you don’t deserve to live….

The jagged cinder of St. Patricia thrust up from a lonely sea, fifty miles from the touristed comfort of the Lesser Antilles. A string of semi-dormant volcanoes split the island like the spiked back of a prehistoric monster. Boiling thunderheads formed above them and marched down to the western sea, trailing streamers of rain into splintered ravines. On the steaming leeward slope, the frogs grew as big as capons, bamboo formed impenetrable thickets, and the night-hunting
fer-de-lance
ruled the bush beyond the glow of kerosene lamps. On the windward slope, trade winds swept through hexagon cactus and screwpine, combing and parting the shoulder-high citronella grass. To the north the island dwindled to a hundred rocky, wave-lashed fragments; to the south it joined the sea in a marsh inhabited by reptiles and foot-long centipedes.

St. Patricia was a garden closed to visitors. The only flat-lands large enough for a landing field belonged to a planter named Barrington. The only harbor deep enough for cruise ships was also Barrington’s. He liked privacy, and the island’s 40,000 inhabitants had to share it.

A diesel coaster circled the island twice a week; six ancient trucks rattled over forty miles of pitted asphalt laid by U.S. Army engineers in 1943; two jitney-cabs careened about the capital, their original colors bleached and rusted to a mottled brown.

Still, visitors came. Junketing students wheedled deck passage on cargo schooners which carried off the booty of the rich volcanic soil: bananas, nutmeg, copra, cocoa and rum. Hardy yachtsmen arrived after sailing fifty miles against the tradewinds. Now and then a chartered floatplane deposited determined sightseers in the shallow harbor of the capital.

These visitors found a social pyramid as ancient as Egypt. At its bottom were 30,000 blacks, descended from a mixture of African slaves and native Caribs. At the same social level, but not part of it, were two hundred poor whites whose ancestors had been exiled from England in the eighteenth century. These lived in xenophobic poverty in a crumbling village called Hope. The island’s middle class of shopkeepers and small farmers consisted of 5,000 Bengalese Indians descended from indentured laborers who’d been paid off in land. At the peak of the pyramid perched twenty-seven planters of English descent, of whom Barrington was by far the richest. They ruled the island through some 3,000 mixed-blooded managers, foremen, overseers, clerks and bookkeepers. The most powerful of these was Marcel Eudoxie, called Doxie in the island’s French patois. An octoroon of French descent, he was manager of Barrington Estates….

Doxie sat in the wooden shed of the Customs and Immigration office and tapped his swagger-stick on the toe of a black riding boot. His crossed legs were sheathed in white riding pants, and one brown arm rested on the back of his chair. His red face and bulging eyes made him appear on the verge of a violent rage, but his voice rolled out in a controlled lilt which mocked the man behind the desk:

“A white man can’t disappear on this island, George. He isn’t staying at a hotel. He couldn’t have spent the last three weeks in the bush. Where is he?”

The black man leaned back with a creak of his leather crossbelt. He wore black shorts, a short-sleeved white jacket, and knee-length white socks.

“He has a week left on his visa. He’ll turn up then.”

Smiling vaguely, Doxie aimed his swagger-stick at the corporal. “I want to know now.”

The corporal agitated a palm-leaf fan and glanced out the window. A greasy odor of drying copra drifted in from the wharf outside. A street vendor chanted that his mangoes were
très-sweet,
fresh off the tree. The corporal sighed: “I can’t go out looking—”

“All right.” Doxie allowed impatience to edge his voice. “Let’s see the book.”

“You need authorization—”

“Barrington.”

“He’s in Europe.”

“He’ll be back this week.”

“The
madame—?
”

“Miss Edith arrives tomorrow, if you’re concerned.” Doxie rapped his stick on the desk. “The book, George.”

The corporal placed a black bookkeeping ledger in front of Doxie. The entry was a barren statement of a man’s existence, no more:

Doxie frowned; it was unusual for a single man to come to St. Patricia for recreation. Single men usually went to Barbados or Trinidad. Though the man might be wholly legitimate, Doxie knew he couldn’t risk it. Barrington was a boss who tolerated no looseness, no mysteries, no unclassified strangers. And since his marriage to Edith, he’d been particularly nervous about visitors from the States.

“You met his plane,” said Doxie. “What did he look like?”

“Big,” said the corporal, squinting up at the corrugated roof. “Over six feet, about two hundred pounds. Short black hair, short black beard. Fresh sunburn, so he couldn’t have been long in the islands. He had a lame leg, used an aluminum crutch strapped to his arm. He used it awkwardly, and the leg seemed to hurt him. It must have been a recent injury. He traveled light. Binoculars, one bag for his clothes, pencils and sketchpad. He was an artist.”