Darker Than Amber (16 page)

Four hours ashore at the mercy of the machine. Five big taxis were waiting, an indication that there were a few who had signed up for a tour of the island.
The chain was dropped, and as the harried staff checked them off, the folk came hurrying down the gangplank. In the lead was an overstrength platoon of the same beefy arid resolute women you see bursting into department stores on sale days the instant the doors are unlocked. Great hams bulged the lurid shorts.
"Attention please, attention please. Passengers taking the tour will please board the limousines off to your left as you debark. Thank you."
The ship's last cruise of the season, a short one, at the lowest rates. Yet it was at only a little more than half capacity, they had told me. During the height of the season, in the first three months of any year, when these small cruise ships that ply the Caribbean are at capacity, a good two-thirds of the passenger list is made up of what a friend of mine who worked aboard one for a season called the "mother" trade. To explain what he meant, he would give you a big expansive smile and say, "I always promised Mother that some day I'd take her on a cruise. Well, sir, with the kids married off and the store sold, I said to her, I said, 'Mother, you better start packing, because we're a-going on that cruise.'"
So they fill up the little ships, eat the spiced and stylized cruise food, get seasick, sunburned. They take afternoon dance lessons in the Neapolitan Ballroom, play organized deck games, splash about in the small pool on the sundeck, play bridge, get a little tiddly and giggly, dress up for dinner and appraise the dresses of the other women, get totally confused about which port is which, take fragmentary language lessons, vigorously applaud the meager talents of the ship's floor show, take all the tours, write and mail scores of postcards, compete for prizes in the costume ball, spend a dutiful amount of time each day at sea in the rental deck chair.
In the brochures, of course, there were the beautiful people dancing gracefully and romantically by moonlight and the light of Japanese lanterns on the tropic deck of a brand-new ship, and the same lovely people smiling in the warm sunlight, their golden limbs in relaxed and effective composition around the huge shipboard swimming pool.
It isn't like that. These little ships arc lumpy with endless coats of topside paint, and the ship's staff is overworked, and the schedules are rigidly set, with brassy announcements coming over the speaker systems, sending the whole herd moving in one direction or another.
It isn't like they thought. But it isn't like anything else they ever knew either. Perhaps, in some wistful and tender sense, these are the beautiful people, and because this is the dream fulfilled, they hold onto it tightly, making small translations from reality. And down there, in the cramped inconveniences of the little cabins, in the slightly oily wind of the ship's air-conditioning, in the muted grumble of the ship's engines, the little vibrational shudders as she crosses the tropic ocean, sunburned flesh is coupled in a passion more like that of years ago, and in the breakfast morning they smile into each other's eyes, a secret recognition.
But this was the tag end of the season, and a mixed bag. Scampering flocks of small children. A sprinkling of heavy men in their middle years, accompanying, with a certain air of apprehension, their young doughy blondes toward the Bay Street shops. A contingent of scrubbed-looking highschool kids chaperoned by a nervous-acting couple who looked like a male and female Woodrow Wilson, and an unchaperoned pack of kids of college age, the girls like a bright fluttering flock of tropic birds, the boys languid under the terrible burden of improvised sophistication, and thirty or forty couples of the "mother" classification. The tour caravan left. The others dispersed into Bay Street. The machine came to life. It could readily chew up the entire passenger lists of four deluxe cruise ships simultaneously, each one better than twice the size of the little Monica D. The saloons turned the music on. The strawmarket women began their sales patter, waving the merchandise, and making crude comments about the Jamaican hats a lot of cruise people were wearing. These people were a tiny morsel for the machine, a hundred and fifty or so, but with proper pressure, calibration, alignment of the rollers and levers and sluice gates, it might churn eight thousand dollars out of this motley group, and there was little else to do on a Monday afternoon in June anyway. The mystique of the operation is that a true-blue consumer will buy something she does not need and cannot afford when she discovers that the same item at home would cost her thirty dollars more.
Our targets were not in the pack, and just as I was about to say we'd better go aboard, she started slowly down the gangplank. Unmistakably she. Theatrically she, making her exit after the rabble had been cleared from her path.
White cotton twill pants, fitting her slenderness with an almost improbable snugness. They came to just above her bare ankles, with a slight flare, an instep notch. The wide waistband was snugged around her slender waist, and above it was six supple bare inches of midriff, and above that a little half-sleeve truncated blouse, fine red and white stripes, so dense with stiff ruffles she looked like a Christmas display of ribbon candy. Atop the interwoven and intricate coiffure of cream-blonde hair was perched at a perfect straightness a wide-brimmed, white bullfighter hat of straw in a fine weave, with white ball fringe dangling all the way around the rim. She carried a red purse shaped like a lunch bucket. Her sandals had half-heels, white straps, thick cork soles. The very wide flat rims of her sunglasses had a red and white checkerboard pattern.
She came slowly down the incline of the gangplank, the slope creating, with the thick soles of the sandals, considerably more hip motion than she could have achieved on a level surface. Every crew member who could get to a rail on the starboard side stopped all work and watched the descent. The only discernible flaw in her figure was that her thighs, as revealed by the tightness of the pants, were too long and too heavy to be in proportion to the rest of her. She was slightly tanned, just enough to set off the smoothness between waistband and blouse. I could sense the concerted inaudible sigh as she reached the level of the cement dock. She walked with a sense of complete awareness of being watched, looking straight ahead, undeviatingly. It was a triumph of merchandising, a perfect gem of functional display techniques, as specific as the cutaway working models of engines at auto shows.
She turned and looked back up at the deck. A big man appeared and came down toward her. He had a long, limber stride, a small waist and hips under white stretch Levis, and great wads of muscle bulging the navy blue knit sports shirt. His pale forearms had almost the exaggerated meatiness of Popeye the Sailor, nd he held himself and moved in a way that betrayed those curious anxieties. He had a face far older than the body, long, eroded and sallow, with rows and lashes of such pallor it had an expressionless look. There was something just wrong enough about his pale curly locks to make me quite certain it was a hairpiece. A long slim cigar was clamped at an uptilted angle in the corner of his mouth. The girl had continued walking, and when he caught up with her, they stopped and talked. She tilted her head back so she could look up at him from under the hat brim. Seeing them together I realized he was big enough to look me in the eye.
She took a list from her purse. He looked at it with her. He shrugged, tapped ash from the cigar, walked with her toward Bay Street.
I got my bag from the hotel and went aboard first, presented my ticket, was properly greeted.
"I saw that couple come off several minutes ago, and they looked familiar. Both of them in white pants."
"Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Terry. Yes, of course. They have traveled with us before. You know them?"
"The name doesn't sound right. I guess I'm mistaken."
"You will have a chance to see them more closely, perhaps. You are almost neighbors. They are also on the port side, also in an outside cabin on the Lounge Deck. Number Fourteen, several rooms forward of yours, sir."
There was no one at the steward's station and no sign of a maid. I located the key rack, opened the glass door and took the key to Six from its hook. The cabin was bright and pleasant. I checked the location of Fourteen and went, as planned, to the ship's lounge. The ceiling, of white pegboard, wasn't high enough for me. It would be all too easy to tear my scalp on one of the little round sprinkler heads which protruded from it. There were groupings of overstuffed chairs and sofas, upholstered in blue, yellow, rose and purple, surrounding round black tables with raised chrome edges. The floor was of black composition. I picked a group with yellow upholstery, and had a waiter bring me a Pauli Girl beer. From time to time a passenger would hurry through, all haste, frowns and concentration, camera clanking.
Meyer appeared, sat down with a heavy sigh. "I am entombed down there, in a ghastly flickering glow of tiny light bulbs." He pointed aft. "I have our mail drop. The first stairway through that door, halfway down, at the curve, a fire hose in a case. The top is recessed a little. So, the top right corner of it, the right as you face it."
"Very good."
"And it has struck me that we might make use of the PA system. I have heard them paging people."
"Also very good, depending. I'm off. She had a list. So it's an odds-on chance they split up. Go play with your doll."
At almost two-thirty I spotted her, alone, just going into the Nassau Shop, carrying one dressbox-size package. I followed her in. She put the sunglasses in her purse. She strolled slowly back through the store and stopped at a circular rack containing Daks skirts. I was loafing about eight feet away when the clerk approached her.
When she spoke I learned she had a child voice, a little thin dear girlie voice. "This one, in the green, this is just linen, isn't it? No other fabric to keep it from wrinkling?"
"Pure linen, miss."
"So you put it on and an hour later it looks like you'd slept in it. No thanks."
"A beautiful wool, perhaps, miss? In this soft gray?"
"I guess not. Thanks anyhow."
I circled and came upon her at the end of a counter, face to face, glance to glance in the instant of passing, sensed behind her eyes the little click of appraisal and dismissal, as if back in there was mounted one of the tired old cameras used by defeated photographers on the littered boardwalks of unfashionable resorts.
Hers was a pointy little face under the bulk of hat and weight of hair. The fur of her eyebrows angled up in a habitual query that no longer asked any questions. It was a small mouth, with the pulp of the unpainted lips so bulgingly, ripely plump she had the look of getting ready to whistle. Sharp little nose and sharp little chin, and an angled flatness in her cheeks. The feature that unified all the rest of it was the eyes, very very large, widely set, brilliantly and startlingly green. She was all erotic innocence and innocent eroticism, moving by me, knowing I would turn to stare, that I would see the arrogance, the slow laziness, the luxurious challenge of the lazy scissors of the long weight of white thighs and the soft flexing perkiness of the little rump. She made me think of a Barbie Doll.
I did not know what to try or how to try it. I could not appraise how much nerve she had or how much intelligence. Nor how completely Terry owned her. If, by luck, I rested the edge of the wedge at exactly the right point, tapped with proper impact, the crystalline structure might cleaver. More probably any attempt would glance off, arouse suspicion, send her trotting to wherever Ans Terry awaited her, with a description of me. But if she could be convinced, very quickly, that she was marked for execution also.... I had to stake the whole thing on how much she knew about what had happened to Tami. Then I found one possible way I could do it, with a fair chance of its working.
She had gone to a counter where, under glass, elegant little Swiss watches were displayed. The clerk helping her went off to get something out of stock. I moved quickly to stand beside her and said in a low voice, "If you're Del Whitney, I have to talk to you. I've got a message from Tami."
"You've got me confused with somebody. Sorry."
"Tami gave me the message before they killed her, and she told me how I could find you."
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to stare up at me from under the flat brim of the hat. I turned my head slightly, looked at her, saw her absolute rigidity, eyes made even larger by shock. The clerk was returning. "K-k-killed!" she whispered.
I had that same feeling you get in a hand of stud poker when you've hung in there with sevens back to back, seen the third one go elsewhere, debate hanging in there with those two kings staring at you across the table, then meet the raise and see the case seven hit you, and know then just how you are going to play it.
"Is this what you had in mind, miss?" the clerk asked. "What? No. No, thank you." She moved away from the counter and, ten feet away, stopped and stared at me again. I could sense that she was beginning to suspect she had been tricked and had responded clumsily.
"I don't think it would be smart for Terry to see us together." I took out my wallet, felt in the compartment behind the cards, pulled out the folded clipping of the report of the fingerprint identification. "If you didn't happen to know her by this name, Del, it won't mean much."
She unfolded it. Suddenly her hands began an uncontrollable trembling. The dressbox slipped from under her arm and fell to the carpeting. "Oh, God! Oh, dear Jesus God!" Her voice had a whistly sound.
I picked up her package. "Pull yourself together! You'll bitch us both up. If you want to stay alive, settle down, damn it. Where's Terry?"
"Wuh-wuh-waiting for me at that Blackbeard thing."
"We better get you a drink."
I took her to the Carlton. Her walk was strange, rigid, made stilt-like by shock. I took her to a dim back corner of the paneled bar lounge, empty at that hour. I got her a double Scotch over ice. She gulped it down and then began to cry, fumbling tissue out of her red purse. She cried almost silently, hunched, shuddering and miserable. At last she mopped her eyes, blew her nose, straightened with a slight shudder.
"I just don't understand. Who are you? What's happening?"
"They tried to kill her. They missed. She came to me. I'm just an old friend she could trust, that's all. I live in Lauderdale. She couldn't take the risk of trying to contact you and DeeDee, so she made me promise to try. DeeDee has disappeared. If you want a good guess, they've knocked her in the head and planted her out in the boondocks someplace."