Darker Than Amber (19 page)

It took a long long time to flesh it all out. She became resigned to it, to the extent she did not try to drag her feet when I requested she list the fourteen. Nine was the best she could do, and she wasn't sure of two of their names. She estimated the total take of just herself and Terry at close to four hundred thousand dollars. It was after two o'clock when she said in a tired whine, "Honey, my hand is going to drop right off, honest. It's all full of cramps."
"Take a rest while I read it over."
There were fifteen pages in her unformed backhand, all the lines sloping up toward the right side of the sheets. It would give any investigator more than enough. There was little point in pulling any more details out of her. Her head sagged slowly, jerked upright. She was emotionally and physically exhausted.
"Okay, Del. Just a little bit to wind it up. Ready? New paragraph. I am not going to tell Ans about this letter. I am going to leave him a note... saying I have killed myself. Period. I will pin it to my pillow... after he passes out tomorrow night. Period. I am sorry about what. we did to those men. Period. I am glad I have written. this letter. Period. May God have mercy... on my soul. Period. Sign it, Del."
I was looking down over her shoulder as she wrote her name Adele Whitney. She hesitated. "When I was booked a few times, like in Chicago, it was my right name."
"Put that down too."
"Jane Adele Strusslund," she wrote. She dropped the pen, making a spray of ink on the paper under her signature. She stood, turning as she stood, to come up in the circle of my arms. She yawned deeply, shuddered, rested her forehead against my chin.
"Do I get a gold star, teacher?"
"Solid gold, Jane."
Her head jerked back. "Please don't call me that."
"Okay."
She yawned again. "I'm pooped something awful, darling. Would you like to undress me, maybe?"
"We'd better both rest up. Tomorrow could be rough."
Her glance was coldly inquisitive. "The times I've been turned down you could count on one hand, friend. You gay or something?"
I slowly folded the bulky confession, stuffed it into an envelope. The Monica D. made a larger pitching motion, moving us both off balance, both taking a sideways step to catch ourselves, like the beginning of an improvised dance. The compartmentation creaked, and I knew we were well into New Providence Channel, where we would take the sweep of the weather.
"Tomorrow I'll get you stashed in a safe place in Lauderdale. It will be four or five days before I can wind up a few things hanging fire. There'll be all the time in the world to get acquainted then, Del."
"Sure thing," she said flattered and picked up the purse and flight bag and went into the head and banged the door shut.
When the door opened again, I had turned the stateroom lights off. I had arranged slacks, shirt and shoes in a handy pile on the floor half under my bed, on the side away from the other bed, with the thick envelope, folded once, in the hip pocket of the slacks, and my stateroom key in a side pocket. I was in my bed in underwear shorts. Through the il of lashes I saw her stand braced in the open doorway. her heavy hair was combed long like Alice's. She wore the thing she called a jama shift. It fit loosely, blocked very little the light behind her, had lace at the hem, throat, short sleeves, and stopped about four inches above her knees. Costume for a drowning.
The light clicked off. Darkness loudened the noises of the Monica D., the buckety-swash of her rolling corkscrewing motion, the almost subsonic grumble of the marine drive downstairs, and the little phased chitters and whines that came and went as bulkhead portions picked up sympathetic sonances.
A weight came onto the bottom corner of my bed, tightening the blanket across my feet. A hand found my knee, stayed there.
In a sing-song plaint, in that teeny little-girl voice sweet carnival candy, and while her plump little fingers massaged my blanketed knee, she said, "It's like you're leaving me out. It's like you're making all the rest of it lies and tricks, not wanting to make out with me. Words don't ever mean much. How am I supposed to feel? Jesus, Travis! Am I such a terrible pig you couldn't stand touching me? They were going to kill me. I don't feel safe at all. Please, honey, hold me. Make love to me. So than I'll really and truly belong to you and it will all come out fine for us. Please!"
The thing that astounded and disheartened me was to find a very real yen to take a hack at this spooky little punchboard. There had been a lot more to Vangie in both looks and substance, but she hadn't tingled a single nerve. I wanted to grab at this one. Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to guarantee complete degradation. I wanted to pull her down and roll into that hot practiced trap which had clenched the life out of fourteen men. And there was the big shiny rationalization. It's the way to make her trust you, fella. Go right ahead, lull the broad. It'll take about nine minutes out of your life. You're a big boy. A broad is a broad is a broad, and who'll know the difference? You will, McGee. For a long long time.
But she had to have some gesture. She had to have some assurance. So I sat up, hitched toward her, put my arms around her, tucked her face into my neck. "Everything's going to work out fine, kiddy."
Her sigh was deep and shuddering. She had shucked herself out of that jama thing, and her skin felt whisper-soft, super-heated. She clung hard and said, "Hurry, dear. Gee, I'm so ready I'm practically there already."
"No, honey. Let's wait and make it in style. I have a thing about the right time and the right place, and waiting just makes it a better blast. Why do we have to rush anything? Once we're off this nervous boat and tucked away safe, we'll spend days in bed."
"We can have that too."
I knew the quickest way to cool me off. That fat little mouth made me squeamish. So I kissed it hard enough and long enough to creak her neck, mash the lips against her teeth, bend her rib cage.
She was puffing like a little furnace when I let her loose, hoisted her off my bed, turned her and welted that behind with a pistol-crack slap.
"Hey! Ow!"
"Back to your own sack, kiddy."
She made grumbling sounds, but once she was in her own bed she giggled. "Anyways, I got proof you're not lavender, dearie."
"Try to get some sleep."
I guessed that the exhaustion of fear would catch up with her. I gave her what I hoped was enough time, then got up and dressed swiftly and silently. I leaned over her and heard slow deep buzzing snores, bee sounds that came up from the deepest part of the pool of sleep. I locked the door behind me when I left.
Meyer, squinting as he opened his door for me, looked like a sideshow bear in his awning-stripe pajamas in green, black and orange. He yawned and sighed, sat where the light was best and read Del's confession. There was no more yawning and sighing. He gave it his total attention, as if he had forgotten I was there. When he finished it, he refolded it, took it over and put it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket in the locker.
As he turned, he frowned beyond me, saying, "It is too absurd a simplification, Travis, to try to relate her actions to moralistic terms. Wickedness. Heartlessness."
"For God's sake, Meyer!"
"We can find a more appropriate answer in a book written by a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. It's called, I believe, The I and the Not-I. It is an extension and interpretation of one facet of Jungian theory."
"At this time in the morning?"
"She develops the concept that a frightening number of people in the world are unaware of the actual living reality the human beings around them. It is the complete absence of empathy in action. They believe themselves to be real, of course, yet they merely lack the imagination to see that other persons are also real in the same way and on the same terms. Thus, even though they go through the obligatory social forms and personal relationships, all people are objects rather than people. If all other people are objects, then there can be no psychic trauma involved in treating them as objects. That pair disposed of fourteen objects, not fourteen brothers. Their uneasiness comes not from any pity, not from any concern for the dead objects, but merely from their awareness that society frowns upon such actions."
"Meyer, please!"
"In a sense one can envy them because, unlike you and me, Travis, they cannot identify, they cannot project. We can, and so we do a lot of bleeding. We bled for a woman as wretched as Miss Bellemer. You keep remembering the look of the back of Griff's neck. This pair drifts through life without the inconvenience of such uncomfortable baggage. Interesting, isn't it, to relate this concept to conscience and to individual goals?"
"Are you through?"
"Vocalization always helps me develop such relationships."
"Meyer, how did it go?"
"Oh! My little visit. I slid in there like a veritable wraith. After a few moments I began to realize I could have marched through leading a LIFE and drum corps. At that point my heart stopped banging into my larynx and slid back down where it belongs. I selected a more effective place for our voodoo doll. The sink stopper seemed tight. I left her under water in the sink, and fortunately it is a very deep sink. She has some buoyancy. The porous stone has absorbed enough water to hold her down. She sways with the motion of the ship. An eerie effect. Drunks often have to make a bathroom journey in the small hours. I left the bathroom light on for the fellow. When you are beginning to emerge into hangover, the world is slightly hallucinatory. It might take him quite some time to identify the real and the unreal."
"Remind me not to wake you up at this time of day. You are so ornate you give me a headache. I call your attention to where the Powell Daniels money is at the moment."
"Around Terry's middle. So?"
"If we don't want him making a successful run for it, I better take the wings off his heels."
He glanced at his watch. "It's after four. The depressant effects are diminishing. He's had perhaps seven hours. I don't think the risk is justified, Travis. He's an exceptionally brawny brute. Why don't you just leave well enough alone?"
"I'm going to give it a try."
Shrewd eyes studied me. "I find the compulsion odd. Your normal cheer has soured. Could it be possible the little pig required the bargain be sealed, in her manner?"
"Get off my back, Meyer."
"And so the daring-do is a penance, a reaffirmation of the real identity of the McGee, a symbolic scrubbing of the soiled escutcheon."
"Do you really think I cut myself a slice of that?"
"Dear boy, if I thought so, I wouldn't be making such a dull joke about it."
"Then be advised I came damned close."
His eyes went round. "Actually?"
"Seems I'm less fastidious than I thought. So maybe there is a little flavor of escutcheon scrubbing in the air after all."
"The wish is not the deed, except to apologists. You didn't follow through. And, if you had, after all she is young, pneumatic, lubricious, and no doubt highly competent. Also, any parent will tell you that if you dress a child in his best and send him out to play, he will find the deepest, sloppiest mud puddle in town and stomp around in it, perfectly aware of the whomping he'll get when he goes home. There is sometimes a hypnotic deliciousness about dirt."
I grinned at him. "I need you around more often, sire. Okay. All straight on the rest of your duties?"
"Completely. And be very careful with that fellow."
I climbed the aft ladderways to the lounge deck and stood at the fantail rail. We were quartering into a northwest wind. The ship grunted and chugged its way across a black and lumpy sea, leaving in the churned wake a faint green-white of phosphorescence.
I debated going after the mild authoritative weight of the Bodyguard. But I didn't want to risk awakening her. And didn't want to admit to myself there was any chance I couldn't handle a sleeping drunk no matter how many layers of muscle he wore.
I closed the door of Stateroom Fourteen without a sound, and stood for a long time, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the slight glow in the room which came from the yellow crack of light shining out from under the door of the head.
At last I could see the shapes emerge, the silent length of him in the far bed, the vague bulks of the furniture, even the oblong of the note pinned to the pillow of the empty bed. I moved to the porthole and worked the curtains aside so that a nearby deck light increased the inner illumination. From there I could look down upon him, and hear the slow rasp of his breathing. He was on his left side, tilting toward the prone position, hands wedged under his pillow, right leg bent, the knee bracing him.
I moved around behind him. The covers were halfway to his waist. I reached across him with my right hand, and with both hands I carefully picked up the coverings and turned them slowly down until when I doubled them back, the folded edge was below his waist. He slept in a pajama top. I nipped the loose edge of it and folded it upward. Around the lean fitness of Mr. Body's waist was the dark band of the money belt, perhaps four inches wide. It was too dark to see how it fastened. It looked as if it could be one of those types made of GI fabric which have two straps and two buckles in front, one above the other.
With infinite care I ran my fingertips around him, lightly brushing the fabric of the belt. In the front, right in the middle of him, I felt the little metal edges of the buckles, the strap tongues. His belly lifted and fell with his breathing, and closing my eyes so as to focus my whole perception on touch, I made certain that I knew just how they were fastened. One at a time I worked each strap out of the leather loop. The next step was more difficult, the problem of pulling the straps through the first metal part of the buckles. There was a slight loosening at the bottom of each exhalation. I pulled gently each time he exhaled, and gained perhaps a quarter inch each time. It took a half dozen exhalations to release each strap. His sweat and breath smelled rich with booze. Then, all that held the belt were the little metal prongs through the strap holes. I pulled on the strap of the bottom one first. Each time he exhaled, I risked a slightly increased pressure. Then, in my fingertips, I felt the little pop as the buckle was freed. I knew how I would work it. Get the other one open, then gently lay the belt open so that it was held by the weight of him. After that, stealth would be the greater risk. I would merely get a good grip on it, snatch it violently out from under him and be out the door before he could paw the cobwebs out of his eyes, taking the off chance of not meeting a member of the ship's company in the corridor.