Darker Than Amber (7 page)

There is a strong hint of some persons in a position of authority over these three operating units of one man and one woman each. For the time being, we shall assume there are two, hot headed males, and that one of them was the driver of the car that took Miss Bellemer to the place where she was supposedly drowned.
A check of the cab company owning the vehicle in which Miss Bellemer left this area proved that she asked to be driven to Broward Beach. This matches the labels in the garments she was wearing when rescued from the water. One may assume that she and the man called Griff have been living in the same quarters or adjoining quarters in the Broward Beach area. She left with the hope of enlisting an unnamed bartender, very possibly also of that area, in recovering some $32,000, which she had saved out of her cut of the operation during the past two years. It is possible she intended to trick the bartender into luring Griff away from their quarters long enough for her to retrieve the money she had hidden away and make her escape undetected.
Observations and assumptions of possible pertinence:
1. Miss Bellemer exhibited certain histrionic talents which could presumably be useful in a confidence game. 2. A series of multiple murders can be successful only if the victims have neither friends nor family anxious to conduct an intensive search. 3. This area is a place where lonely and well-to-do men in their middle years come to begin a new life. 4. In casual conversation with Meyer, Miss Bellemer displayed an intensive knowledge of the shopping conditions in the various islands of the Caribbean, from Curacao to Grand Bahama, which might well have been acquired through frequent cruises, then abruptly changed the subject. 5. Disposal of bodies at sea would constitute no problem provided the passenger in question was not known to be missing, but this would seem a curious and difficult situation to arrange. 6. Callous as it may seem, it is not difficult to imagine several people of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer carrying out murder after murder, provided some way had been found to reduce the risk. 7. The operation is continuing and is sufficiently profitable to warrant the swift and merciless execution of anyone who might possibly endanger it. 8. As an estimate of the size of the operation, assuming Miss Bellemer's savings were fifty per cent of her percentage, and that she received twenty-five per cent of the take on each individual operation, we can extrapolate somewhere around $400,000 gross for the three couples during the two-year period. It is more likely she saved but twenty-five per cent, which would indicate a probable total gross of three quarters of a million dollars.
"Meyer," I said, "you have a curious mind."
"And," he said comfortably, "some excellent pictures of the bitch."
"And you forgot that she started to call the driver of that convertible something. Ma.... As in the beginning of Mack, Manny, Manuel and so forth."
"Forgot that. Another thing I meant to put in. She said she and Griff had to lie low when they got back from an operation. Makes the cruise more of a likely idea."
"And another item. A guess. They'll have to recruit and train a new girl to work with Griff."
We had gotten right up to the point of asking the question. It was almost a tangible thing, something that lay puddled on the cockpit deck between our chairs, streaming and stinking in the warm night. I had been saving my tobacco ration, my single evening pipe. I tugged the pouch out of the side pocket of my slacks, unzipped the pipe compartment, took out the Charatan sent me long ago by a lovely and grateful client with superb taste. The shape is Bell Dublin. It is a straight grain of Coronation quality. Before sending it to me from London she had some small silver numbers inlaid in the heavy part of the bit. 724. The twenty-fourth night of a memorable July, a little code which, if her husband Sir Thomas could interpret it, would bring him in search of McGee, complete with horsewhip and incipient apoplexy.
I packed it carefully with carrinmore Flake. Whenever, in the rotation of my small assortment, I work my way around to the Charatan, though it is an excellent pipe to smoke, I feel somewhat pretentious and effete. I can never completely overcome my middle-class reservations sufficiently to take a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pipe for granted.
I keep kitchen matches and cleaners in the pipe compartment of the pouch. I lit it. The pulsing flame illuminated my face.
An angular girl-shape walking along the dock stopped and said, "Hey, Trav. Hey, Meyer."
"How you, Sandy?"
"Oh, just fine. Didn't know you got back."
"Tied up about dark. What's new?"
"Babs made it. Twins like the doe said it would be. Twin boys. Day before yesterday. And Barney was out on a half-day charter last week, Thursday I think, fifteen miles southeast, and a waterspout ran right over him, over the transom and off over the bow and swung around and nearly got him again. Didn't hurt anybody. Tore the outriggers off, turned his aerial into a pretzel, lifted up all the loose gear and took away. You got to hear him tell about it; honest to God, it's the funniest thing I ever heard. I'm looking for Lew. You seen him?"
"No, we haven't."
"I was just checking to see if maybe he was having a drink with the Tiger. You see him, please tell him I'm home and that doctor phoned from Orlando and wants to start that three-day charter tomorrow noon, a party of three."
She walked away into the night. We heard discordances music, night laughter, and somebody firing his fifty-six shooter on television. Meyer went below and returned with 2 cold brews, sat down with a heavy sigh and said, "What it is, of course, is a question of involvement."
"Keep talking. I know how I'm going to vote."
"I wrote that all out to organize it in my mind. She's not aware of how much she told us. Maybe it's enough, maybe not. That's more in your line. You'd know the next step. I don't. That is, if anybody takes that step. Question. Should a reasonable man, knowing what we know, and guessing what we have guessed, involve himself? Going down after the girl into that water was a clear-cut problem, and your response was instinctive. What we are talking about, I suppose, is the lives of a bunch of men we've never seen, men walking around. Thirty people watch a girl get knifed. A man lies dying of a coronary on a New York sidewalk, with the pedestrian traffic parting to move around him, like a stream moving around a boulder."
"And," I said, "you have this button and if you push it you get ten grand and ten thousand Chinamen die. And if a man is dumb enough to get himself mousetrapped"
"And if a tree falls in the desert and there is nobody to hear it, does it actually make any sound?"
"Meyer, I've changed my mind. I was going to vote no. I am not going to vote yes. I am just going to think about that no until this time tomorrow. I have nice green stuff in my lockbox, enough so it will be next Christmas before I have to think of beginning to look around for somebody who needs somebody to handle a little problem. But."
"Yes indeed. But."
"Aren't you the one who says that's a dangerous word?"
He ignored the question.
"Our Vangie, case-hardened though she is, got herself involved in something that dismayed her, and her revulsion built until she finally tried to pull down the whole structure. The impulse that made her do it was essentially suicidal. Consider her totally antisocial attitude prior to the past two years, Travis. To her mind, the world was corrupt and indifferent. As a child whore she knew the only imperative was to survive. She probably took some kind of hard pride in thinking herself capable of anything. She tried to tell herself that murder for profit was fine, if you could get away with it. But, over two years, actually being a part of such a thing eroded her false image of herself. And there, my friend, I think we have the reason for all the talk. Woman in search of herself. Trying to explain herself to herself-in front of witnesses. She had been a stoic about being dropped off the bridge because she had a guilt that required punishment. And even while she kept saying she wouldn't tell us anything about the past two years, the little bits kept coming into her monologues. Names. Terry, Griff, DeeDee. Hints and allusions. It was a two-day confessional, Travis. And
I got up quickly. I forgot the lack of headroom aboard the John Maynard Keynes. I whammed my head into the overhead solidly enough to tip the world on edge and flood my eyes with tears. Meyer stared at me in astonishment.
When I could speak I said, "Leave us not have so much effing celebration about the bitch. Okay?"
"What's wrong with you these two days, Travis?"
"Wrong? How?"
"Sit down. You can't straighten up in here anyway. You haven't been the life of the party boat, boy. Rigid, tense, remote."
I sat, fingered the knot on the top of my head. "I ran a ten-day clinical service."
"It wasn't that, because you were peaking very nicely when I came down to fish. Now suddenly this explosion of irritation."
"I got tired of talking about the bitch."
I was glowering at him. Suddenly the Meyer smile began and widened. You can't stay irritated with Meyer. He nodded and chuckled.
"I should have figured it out sooner," he said. "Tell me, O wise man."
"A dedicated archaeologist, at enormous risk to himself, descends into a cavern and comes up with a lovely figurine. He is an expert. He cherishes the form of ancient art. This one is rare and beautiful. His romantic heart bubbles over. Then he turns it over and looks at the base and there is the curious inscription: 'Made in Scranton, Pennsylvania." So it has no value. Cheap goods. But it is so damnably lovely the poor archaeologist sits and looks at it and broods over what might have been."
"Very funny."
"And a little sad, boy. You like women as people. You do not think of them as objects placed here by a benign providence for your use and pleasure, so in that sense you are not a womanizer. But you cherish the meaningful romantic charade. Friend, you have been sulking. You have had your nose flattened against the candy-store window, even though you knew all the candy in there was made of putty, and if you broke in and gobbled, it would make you deathly ill. Perhaps, five years ago, you would have made the ghastly mistake of trying to transform the bitch with the power of love, because she is decorative, spirited, shrewd in her fashion. You are wise enough to know she is ease-hardened beyond redemption, but it has still made you wistful and sulky and depressed."
I pondered the diagnosis. Then I threw my head back and laughed at myself. Valiant knight trapped on a merry-goround, scowling and trying for the brass ring with the tip of the rusty lance, knowing that if he got it, all he'd get would be another ride to noplace.
"Welcome back," Meyer said. "What's the program?"
"Wait and see if she comes back for help. If she does, we play it by ear, with the idea of conning her into giving us the whole package and letting us line up a lawyer who can drive a good bargain with the law so she takes the smallest beating possible. If she doesn't come back, then we go find the rest of the pieces ourselves and bust the operation wide open and let the law pick up the stragglers."
"We?"
"You're involved, Meyer. I can use that orderly Brain."
"All my effing celebration?"
"To balance the McGee habit of bulling my way in and breaking the dishes. And if we come out of it with a little meat, we share."
At five o'clock the following evening, I waited on a bench in the hallway of the Broward Beach police station for ten minutes until a Detective-Sergeant Kibber, a middle-aged man with a tenant-farmer face, wearing brown slacks and a shiny blue sports shirt hanging outside the slacks, came and sat down beside me and asked me my name, address and occupation. I showed him my Florida driver's license. In the blank for occupation is typed Salvage Consultant.
"Who do you think she is, Mr. McGee?"
"It's just a hunch. I had a date in Lauderdale last night with a girl named Marie Bowen. A first date. She didn't show. And... well, hell, Sergeant, I can't remember the last time anybody stood me up. I was going to meet her at a bar. She never showed up."
"Know her address?"
"I expected to find out what it was last night. We'd been in the same party one other time, and I remember her saying she had friends up here, or a family or something. So when the description of the hit-and-run, and how it was a girl maybe her age and hair color, came over the radio, and it said you didn't have an identification, I thought I could.. find out for sure."
"We still haven't made her, but we got the car about noon. Somebody stuck it in an empty lot, residential area. It was clouted off a shopping-center lot sometime before eleven last night. The guy who owned it was in the movies there with his wife. This year's Olds. It figures to be kids. We're getting more of that than we should. It was wiped clean. The stupidest kid knows enough for that. When they clout a car it's a pack of them, and one will open up. A thing like this, a kid can't handle it too long."
He turned to an empty page in his pocket notebook, wrote, tore it out, handed it to rue. "You take this over to City Memorial, give it to the fellow there that's on duty in the morgue. Six blocks west from here. If it's this Marie Bowen, you phone me from there, otherwise, thanks for the effort. And if it is or it isn't, it still won't be any fun taking a look."
I looked at the note on the way out. It gave me a strange jolt. "Give bearer a look at the Jane Doe. Kibber."
The Gray Lady at the visitor's desk directed me to the right corridor. The down stairway was at the end. Basements are a rarity in Florida. It was all linoleum and battleship gray. A colorless young man sat at a steel table under a hanging lamp reading a tattered Playboy. He took the note, crumpled it and dropped it into a wastebasket, got up and led me to a heavy door, pushed it open, turned on the inside lights. It was a small chilly room with lots of pipes and duets suspended from the ceiling. They had a filing system I had never seen before. They were modular installations, looking like heavy office filing equipment. The doors were gray steel, about six and a half feet long, horizontal, and eighteen inches or so high. Each storage case was four bodies high. They had three of them. I saw that a small ruby light glowed on the edge of the case next to an off-on toggle switch on five of the drawers, the two middle ones in two of the four-high units, and one of the middle ones in the third. They were the ones at the handiest height.