Darker Than Amber (4 page)

"I am often guilty of vulgarity. Forgive me. Have we a nice mild onion I can chop into my six scrambling eggs?"
We were on second coffees when we heard her running the water in the head. Soon she appeared in the doorway, looking down at us in the booth adjoining the stainless-steel galley, wearing the black pants and the white shirt with its trimmings of lace.
"Good morning to Meyer and McGee," she said. "If there is really no other woman aboard, one of you is a perfect jewel, washing out the dainty underthings."
"Always at your service, Miss Doe," Meyer said. He got up. "Sit here, my dear. Opposite the McGee. Boat owners get waited on hand and foot. I'm chef as well as laundress. And your turn will come. Coffee black and hot first?"
"Please." She slid rather stiffly into the booth, grimaced as she lowered herself. "How do you feel?" I asked her.
"As if somebody had tried to break my back."
As he placed the coffee in front of her, Meyer said, "Thank me for that too. I stretched you out across a boat seat and I could feel your ribs give every time I pushed the air out of your lungs. But I was reasonably careful not to break any."
The morning light was brilliant against her face as she sat opposite me. Her dark hair was brushed to a gloss, hung free, two dark curved parentheses which framed the lovely oval of her face, swung forward as she dipped her head and lifted the cup to her lips. She had made up her mouth carefully with the lipstick from the convenience kit. The pale down on her face, just below the darker hair of the temples, grew quite long. There was one faint horizontal wrinkle across the middle of her forehead, twice arched to match the curve of her brows. And a slightly deeper horizontal line across her slender throat. A few pores were visible in the ivoried dusk of her skin where it was taut across the high solidity of oriental cheekbones, but there was no other mark or flaw upon her, except the cheekbone scar shaped like a star.
In that light the color of her eyes surprised me. Light shrunk the pupils small. The irises were not as dark as I had imagined. They were a strange yellow-brown, a curious shade, just a little darker than amber, and there were small green flecks near the pupils. Her upper lids had that fullness of the Asiatic strain, and near-death had smudged the flesh under her eyes. She looked across at me and accepted the appraisal with the same professional disinterest with which the model looks into the camera lens while they are taking light readings.
"And otherwise?" I asked.
She lifted her shoulders slightly, let them fall. "I slept fine. You men will have to fill in some blanks. Where are we?"
"Tied up at Thompson's Marina at Marathon."
"And last night, after I corked off, did you dear boys go honking and blustering over to the beer joints to make the big brag about what you rescued from the briny?"
Her voice was mild, but there was a curl to her lips.
Meyer smiled down at her. "I don't know how McGee reacts to that, my dear, but personally I find the inference offensive. How would you like how many eggs?"
"Uh... two. Easy over."
"With a little slab of sauteed fish? And a quarter of one of Homestead's better cantaloupes?"
"Yes.... Yes, please. Mr. Meyer?"
"Just Meyer."
"Okay. Meyer, I'm sorry I said that. It's just that I'm a little spooked."
"Forgiven," Meyer said. "We bluster, dear. We bluster all to hell and gone. But honk? Never!" Meyer served her, poured us both more coffee, then came and wedged in beside me with his own cup.
"I don't know how you saved me," she said. Meyer explained it all, how we happened to be there, what we saw and heard, and who had done what. As he explained, she ate with a delicately avid voracity, a mannerly greed, glancing up at Meyer and at me from time to time.
"McGee stayed down just long enough to make my blood run cold," Meyer said. "I know it was better than two minutes."
She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly in a speculation I could not read. I said, "I knew you were alive when I got to you. So that was the only good chance I had to bring you up alive, to get you loose that first time."
"And you heard the car leave?"
"Before you touched bottom," I said.
Her plate was empty. She put her fork down with a little clink sound. "Then we three, right here, are the only people who know I'm alive. Right?"
"Right," said Meyer. "Our plans before you... uh, excuse me, dropped in... were to leave sometime this morning and head for Miami. Want to come along?"
She shrugged. "Why not?"
"My dear," Meyer said, "it would seem as if someone took a violent dislike to you last night."
"Is that a question?"
"Only if you want to give an answer. We are not going to pry. So you don't have to make up any answers. Tell us what you feel like telling us, or nothing at all."
"He... one of them-there were two-he didn't like it. He wished there was some way to get around it, so it wouldn't have to happen. But he knew and I knew we were way past any place where there was any chance of turning back. I was scared sick. Not of dying. When you take a chance and lose, that's the chance you take. What he didn't like most was being told not to make it easier. I-Ie didn't think that was right. And that's what had me so scared, going out the hard way. Being down in the water and no chance to do anything, and holding my breath down in the dark on the bottom as long as I could. I whispered to him, begging him to put me out first. He knows how. I thought he would. He could have done it so Ma... so the other one wouldn't even have heard. But then they stopped and as he swung me over, that wire hurting me terrible, and let me go, I knew he wasn't going to."
She stopped and gave us both a look of savage satisfaction. "I was taking a breath to scream my lungs out but then I knew that if I didn't make a sound, the other guy would think Terry had hit me on the throat before dumping me, and he'd have to report it, and they might give him a hard time. I sure owed him a hard time, so I didn't let myself make a squeak and it... I guess it took my mind off everything a little bit, and at least I ended up down there with a big hunk of air in my lungs instead of all screamed out. Funny, it could have made the difference."
"And probably did," Meyer said. "And it was why I thought someone was disposing of a dead body, the way you came down without a sound. A good thing Travis got down there quickly."
"Boy, if they ever find out somebody got me in time!"
I saw her shiver. It was a clue to her being more rattled than she would let herself show us. Her voice was at odds with her pale and dusky elegance. It was a rich, controlled contralto, but she switched back and fort" from the vulgarity of an artificial elegance of expression to a forthright crudeness. I could not tell whether it was spirit or stupidity that made her feel pleased with her own cleverness in giving Terry a hard time as she was, as far as she knew, being murdered.
She raised her eyebrows in surprise and said, "You know, I haven't even said thanks! Okay, thanks, guys. McGee, I say it took guts to go down there after me, and it was a nice thing to do for anybody. I don't remember much. Just all black and terrible, and then somebody pulling my hair and touching me, maybe a fish going to eat me. Then being in all that fish smell, and somebody pushing at me, and heaving up that water all over. So here I am. And thanks."
"You are most welcome," Meyer said. "And here you are, with a second life to lead. Everything since last night is pure profit. So what are you going to do with your new life?"
"I don't know! I haven't had to think of things like that. I've always been told what to do, and brother, I better do it. I don't want to have to think about what I should do." She bit her lip and looked at each of us in turn, head slightly tilted. "You boys look like you've got something going for you. I mean, this boat and all, and you have a lot of cool. It's not a fishing trip and back to the old lady and the office. If you've got something going, maybe there's some kind of way I could fit into things."
It was touching in an inverted way. The family had moved away, leaving the housecat to scratch at a new screen door.
"I'm an economist, just as I told you, my dear, and McGee here is in the salvage business, on contract."
"It's more interesting than I thought," she said wistfully. "Maybe no matter what I work out, it is going to get back to those people I'm walking around, and they'll try again. They can't miss twice."
"If you're looking for advice," Miss Jane Doe we can't guide you any without knowing the problem Miss Doe."
"Vangie," she said. "I owe you at least my right name, huh? Short for Evangeline. The whole name will kill you, honest. Evangeline Bridget Tanaka Bellemer. Bellemer is sort of French meaning beautiful sea. That's a gas! Actually what I got dropped into-the beautiful sea. I guess I have to settle down and think things out somehow. When do we get to Miami? After lunch?"
It amused me. "Maybe by five or six tomorrow evening."
She looked relieved. "I wish it was next month, or next year. Anyway, there's more time than I thought, and that's a help."
"Ask for advice if you think you need it," Meyer said. "And you look well enough to accept a temporary appointment as dishwasher."
She stared at him. "Are you kidding!"
"On this vessel," I said, "everybody works."
"I'm not so big on housework," she said with a trace of sullenness mixed with acceptance of her fate.
After I'd settled the bill for dockage and fuel, Meyer handled the lines and I ran the Flush out of there, sitting up at the topside controls forward of the sun deck. When we were out into the channel Meyer went below. In a little while she came up and asked permission to sit in the co-pilot seat. She had found a white shirt of mine and put it on over the borrowed blouse. She had found a hat left aboard by a guest, a straw thing with cute sayings on it and a floppy brim a good yard in diameter. She had found some sunglasses. She had a tall highball in hand, almost as lethally dark as iced coffee.
"Okay I made myself a knock?" she asked. "Want I should go get you one too?"
"Later on, maybe. Won't you be too warm?"
"It's not so bad now, with the wind. What the sun does to me, I break out. Like little boils. So I have to watch it. You know, Meyer is pretty fussy, isn't he? I washed the damn dishes. He said I left grease on, I should wash them again. I said once was all I bargained for, so he's down there washing them all over. Gee, I can see how come it takes so long to Miami. This thing is really slow."
"But cozy."
"What it's like, Travis, is a real great apartment pad, the hi fi and furniture and all. You could fill it with swingers and really blast away."
She was quiet for a long time. She was not exactly killing her drink. Tiny sips were widely spaced. I was aware of her examining me from time to time, long glances behind the dark lenses.
"Look, in this salvage business, I suppose it's like other kinds of things, there's a contract you want to get and a lot of people want to get it too because there's good money in it. In business you do better if you have some kind of an edge, right? Maybe what would be a help to you, I was thinking, some way to soften up those guys, so they want to have you do the work. What you could do, maybe, is put the price a little higher, to cover whatever it would cost to make them feel friendly."
"Sorry, honey. It doesn't work that way."
More silence. We passed a bar where about forty pelicans stood in single file in about an inch of water. I pointed it out to her and she said, "Yeah. Birds."
Most people are as blind as Vangie. Eyesight is what you use to get around without running into things. But they find no real value in what they see.
Her drink went down, a little bit at a time. Suddenly she started questioning me about my houseboat. I really owned it? could I take it any distance? could I get it over to New Orleans, or maybe Galveston? Did I get to use it often, or was I too busy with my salvage business? Costs something to run such a nice boat, huh? Don't lots of people charter their boats to get some of their bait back? A boat like this, did you ever think there could be a way to turn it into a real gold mine? Like sort of little weekend excursions, with everything done real tasty.
I finally realized what she had in mind. She couldn't risk staying in the Miami area. But if I could cruise to other waters, she'd help me get set up in the excursion business. She'd line up three or four fun kids, hire a cook and a maid, stock up with steaks and champagne and offer weekend excursions for the tired businessman at a thousand dollars a head. "Out of just three passengers, you could net better than a grand, McGee, believe me.
"Until somebody drops us both off a bridge, Vangie?"
"Come on! I was messed up in something a lot rougher than that. I should have known when I was well off, back when I was just a plain ordinary hustler. So I had to go and let myself get talked into this... this other kind of work. Most of the time I didn't let it bother me. But once in a while, one of the johns would be different. Sweet, sort of. And then I'd think he should get a better deal than what he was going to get. It seemed too raw. And so... hell, I had a couple of drinks and got soft and hinted what was going to happen to him. I could have ruined the whole setup for everybody. But they got to him before he could get to the law, and that was that. But I was finished. They didn't dare use me anymore, and couldn't trust me not to fink on them if they cut me out of the action, so the only thing they could do was take me off the books for good. I knew that. I guess I blew it because I think my nerves had been going bad. You work a setup like that long enough and you begin to dream about those guys and what happened to them all. And you begin to imagine people are following you. If I hadn't tried to tip that one off, it would have been the next one or the one after that. Look, you don't buy the cruise boat idea, huh?"
"No thanks. Vangie, what kind of a setup were you in?"
"If you don't know, you stay healthy. What I ought to do is blow the whistle on the whole group. But it would be a terrible thing to do to the other two gals who got pressured into it just like I did. I think they'll crack sooner or later too. Anyway, the law could get so excited about it maybe I couldn't make any kind of a deal anyway. When somebody lifts the lid off the pail of worms, it's going to get very very warm for everybody, and you can believe it. What I keep thinking, I haven't been a blonde since I was seventeen, and quit when my hair started cracking and splitting. There's some money I can pick up if I can get to it, if they haven't staked it out. I could get a nose job too, maybe, or something around the eyes they do to change you. And I heard if you make the right contacts, you can get set up pretty good in Australia lately. The bad thing is how... everybody's getting nervous."