I glanced at her. She was wearing dark glasses now, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but I had that feeling I’d had the other times that she was hanging onto every word with rapt attention. Sam handed me the other rod. I threw the reel on free spool and thumbed it lightly while he ran the line up the outrigger. For the time I forgot her, watching my own bait with the old eager anticipation while we trolled quietly. The sun was hot. Flying fish skittered out of the blue side of a swell. A tanker in ballast went past to seaward, rocking us in its wake. Water boiled under my bait, and there was a slight click as the line snapped off the outrigger.
“Mackerel,” Holt said laconically.
I lowered the rod tip till the slack was gone, and then raised it, setting the hook. It was a small one, not over three pounds. “Good marlin bait,” Sam said, as he grasped the leader and dropped it in the box. I glanced at Mrs. Forsyth. She was lighting a cigarette. The fish appeared to bore her. Well, it wasn’t much of a fish.
An hour went by. I landed a barracuda of about fifteen pounds, and then a bonito that came in badly slashed by barracuda. She had no action at all, but she didn’t appear to mind. She seemed to be lost in thought. We went on trolling. I watched my bait.
“Bird,” Sam said behind us.
“I see him,” Holt replied. The beat of the engine picked up, and we swung in a sharp turn.
Mrs. Forsyth glanced round at me. “We aren’t going to chase birds, are we?”
“Man-o”-war,” I said. “A frigate bird.” I stood up and looked forward, and spotted him. He was about a half-mile ahead, off the starboard bow. She stuck her rod in the holder on the rail and came over to look too.
“When you see one hovering like that,” I told her, “he’s usually following a fish—”
“Why?” she asked.
“Table scraps,” I explained. “When the fish locates a school of bait and starts to feed, he drives them to the surface. That gives the bird a chance at ’em.”
She nodded. “I see.”
Captain Holt was starting forward. “Probably dolphin,” he said. “I see some dunnage.”
“How about taking it on the port side?” I asked.
“Sure.”
”Get set,” I told Mrs. Forsyth. She sat down in the chair and I fitted the rod into the gimbal for her. “There’s a big plank up ahead, and we’re going to pass it on your side. If he hits, lower your rod and reel in till the slack’s gone, and then strike once by raising the tip—”
“How do they know it’s a dolphin?” she asked, watching me with that intent expression on her face.
“They don’t actually,” I said. “It’s just an educated guess. Dolphin like to he under anything floating on the surface.”
We came abeam of the plank, and then it began to drop astern. I stood up to watch. Her bait fluttered past it, started to draw away.
“Here he comes!” Holt said tersely.
It was one of those moments that’d still give you a thrill if you fished for a hundred years. I saw the blue bolt of flame under the surface, and then he came clear, quartering and behind the bait, a bull of eighteen or twenty pounds flashing green and gold and blue in the sunlight, and took the bait going down. Her line snapped off the outrigger. I hoped he wouldn’t take mine too. Sometimes they will—take both baits in one blinding strike so fast you think you’ve hooked two separate dolphin all at the same instant.
He didn’t. He took only hers, set the hook himself when she forgot to hit him, leaped, made one fast, slashing run, leaped three more times, and was gone. She reeled in. Sam looked at the leader. “Kink,” he said.
“What did I do wrong?” she asked, casually taking cigarettes from the breast pocket of her blouse.
“Nothing,” I said.
“But he got away.”
I was beginning to get it now, though it made no sense at all. The whole thing had bored her profoundly and she didn’t mind in the slightest that she’d lost the fish, but she wanted me to explain why.
I explained. “When he was jumping, he threw a kink in the leader. Wire’ll always break if it kinks. It happens to everybody.”
“Oh,” she said thoughtfully.
She wasn’t interested in fishing, and never had been. She was listening to my voice.
There was no possible explanation for it, but I knew I was right. I watched her closely the rest of the day, checking it, and found that whenever I was talking, no matter what the subject, she listened in that same way. She said nothing about herself except that she was the private secretary to a businessman in a small town named Thomaston in central Louisiana. It might even be true, I thought, in spite of the expensive watch. She could have presents like that any time she wanted them. There was no longer any doubt that fishing bored her. She raised a sail, and lost it, with no more interest than she’d shown in the dolphin. I hooked up with a six-foot sail, and landed it; it wasn’t badly hurt and there was little blood, so we released it. That was it for the day, except for two or three small dolphin and another bonito. We were back at the dock at four forty-five.
We paid Holt, and I drove her car back to the motel. Outside No. 17, she held out her hand and smiled. “It’s been wonderful. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Would you like to go out again tomorrow?” I asked.
“I’d rather not take that much sun again so soon.”
“How about dinner tonight?”
I got the same cool, polite brush. “Really, I couldn’t. But thank you just the same.”
I went back to my own room. After I’d showered and changed into gray flannel slacks and a light sports shirt, I sat down in front of the air-conditioner with a cigarette and went back over the whole thing from the time I’d noticed she was eavesdropping. She’d looked me over and dropped me. Why? And what had she really wanted? An adventure, an interlude, a break? Whatever it was, I’d failed to measure up somewhere. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all. The phone rang.
“I’m just stirring some Martinis,” she said warmly. “Why don’t you come over, Mr. Hamilton, and have one with me to celebrate your sailfish?”
You never know, I thought; maybe that’s why they’re so fascinating. “Love to,” I said. I dropped the phone back in the cradle and was out the door in two strides.
I knocked on No. 17, and stepped inside. She’d changed into a pleated black skirt and white blouse, and was very smart and very, very attractive from the sling pumps to the sleek dark head. There was a bucket of ice on the glass top of the dresser, and she was stirring Martinis in a pitcher.
She turned and smiled. “Do sit down, Mr. Forbes.”
Two
The way she said it told me there was no point in trying to bluff. I stepped inside and closed the door. Her room was exactly the same as mine, furnished with a brown carpet and curtains, twin beds with yellow spreads, a dresser, and a glass-covered desk at the right of the door. The telephone was located on the desk, and beside it— almost under my hand—were two sheets of motel stationery covered with the slashes and pot-hooks of shorthand. Two names were spelled out in the message; one of them was Murray, and the other Forbes.
I glanced up at her. “You just got this?”
She nodded coolly, and poured the Martinis. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“But you knew who I was all the time? You practically told me there in the bar.”
She smiled. “I couldn’t resist it; you were so insufferably smug. And I wanted to see how you’d react.”
“Are you from the police?”
“Of course not,” she said. She handed me the Martini, and picked up her own. “Here’s to your sailfish. Or should we drink to Mr. Murray’s durability, or the high cost of extradition?”
“What about Murray?” I demanded.
“Haven’t you heard?”
“How could I? I was afraid to call anybody on the Coast. And there was no mention of it in the papers I could get.”
“Then you were still afraid you’d killed him?”
/> I took a sip of the drink; I needed it. “No. I assumed he was tougher than that. But felonious assault is pretty damn serious itself. What do you know about it?”
“Would you hand me those notes, please?”
I took them off the desk and passed them to her, so completely at sea now I didn’t feel anything at all. She walked around between the beds and sat down on the farther one with a leg doubled under her and the pleated skirt spread carefully over her knees. Taking a sip of the Martini, she said, “Hmmm,” as she studied the shorthand. Then she put her drink down on the night table and groped for a cigarette. I held the lighter for her. She smiled, and nodded to the armchair near the end of the bed. “Please sit down.”
“What about Murray?” I said impatiently.
“Broken jaw,” she said, consulting her notes. “Mild concussion. Something or other to the something sinus— ethmoid, I think. Scalp lacerations. Various minor injuries. A hundred and fifty dollars’ damages to his camera and possibly two hundred to the furnishings of a motel room. He’s recovering satisfactorily, and the woman’s husband appears to have used a little influence to smooth it over and keep it hushed up. You might go to jail for any one of half a dozen misdemeanors if they could get their hands on you, but there’s no felony charge. Nothing they would extradite you for.”
I sighed with relief.
“You apparently don’t care much for private detectives.”
“I can contain my enthusiasm for them,” I said. “Snoopy bastards. I had to have that film, anyway; and since I didn’t know how to get into a Speed Graphic, I opened it on his head.”
“You were lucky it was no worse.”
I lit a cigarette. “Would you mind telling me who you are, and just what this is all about?”
“I’ve already told you who I am,” she replied, taking a sip of her drink. “Mrs. Marian Forsyth.”
“And you’re a private secretary to some businessman in Louisiana,” I said. “Don’t give me that.”
“I am,” she said. “Or was, rather. However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”
“Except for a minor point,” I said. “I wasn’t the racetrack tout; I was the man behind him. I made him. It was a public-relations deal. But never mind that. How’d you find out all this?”
She smiled. “You’ll love this. From a private detective.”
“But for God’s sake why? And where was it I saw you before?”
“Miami Beach,” she said. “Six days ago.”
“Oh. Then you were staying—”
She nodded. “At that same Byzantine confection you were. The Golden Horn.”
The Golden Horn was one of those chi-chi motels in the north end of Miami Beach that really aren’t motels at all except that you can park your own car if you want. I didn’t have a car, of course; I’d stayed out there merely because they were less expensive than the big places. I thought of it now, trying to remember when I’d seen her.
“It was by the pool,” she said. “You were trying to pick up some girl from—Richmond, I believe.”
I frowned. “I remember the girl, all right. Silver blonde with a seven-word vocabulary. Priceless, hilarious, hysterical—I can’t remember the other four. But I don’t know why I’m so vague about seeing you. As attractive—”
“Competition, perhaps,” she said. “The pool side is not my terrain. Nor the beach. I’m too thin.”
“You’re entitled to your own opinions,” I said. “Don’t try to brain-wash me. I still say I’d have noticed you. I could spot the line of that head a hundred yards—”
“I had my hair up, and I was wearing a swimming cap,” she said crisply. “Now, if we’re through discussing my visibility, or lack of it, would you care to know what I was doing?”
“That one I’ve already figured out. You were listening.”
She gave me an approving glance. “Right.”
“But why? What was it about my voice? If you’re a talent scout for Decca, I can’t sing a note.”
For the moment, let’s just say your voice has a certain unique quality that interests me. And it might make you a great deal of money.”
“How?” I asked.
I can’t tell you right now; maybe I won’t at all. I don’t know. But at any rate you know now why I started investigating you—especially after I began to suspect your name wasn’t really George Hamilton.”
“What tipped you off about that?” I asked. “I thought I was pretty careful.”
“Pure chance,” she replied. “It just happened there was a man named Forbes registered there at the same time—”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. I remember now. And he was paged, there by the pool. But, dammit, I wouldn’t have believed it was that obvious.”
“It wasn’t,” she replied. “On the contrary, you recovered beautifully. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking right at you. Naturally it made me wonder, since I’d just heard you tell the girl your name was Hamilton. I don’t remember whether that was before or after you told her your father was Chairman of the Board of Inland Steel.”
“It was a waste of breath,” I said. “She was a girl who liked to strike closer to the source. She collected the board chairmen themselves. But what did you do then?”
She finished her drink and started to get up. “Let me,” I said, and refilled the glasses with what was left in the pitcher. I sat down again. “Go on.”
“I went up to my room,” she said. “It was on the second floor, overlooking the patio and the pool, and I could watch you from the window. I called the desk and asked them to page Mr. Hamilton.”
“Oh. I remember that call. So you were the mixed-up type from Eastern Airlines that kept insisting she’d found the luggage I hadn’t even lost?”
She nodded coolly. “That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. I had to find out if you really were registered under that name, or just lying to the girl on the grounds that you should always lie to girls. And I wanted to hear your voice over the telephone—”
“And that was the same deal last night?” I interrupted. “I mean, when you asked all those questions about fishing, over the phone?”
“Of course.” She gestured impatiently with a slim hand. “But to get back—primarily, I wanted to watch you while you were being paged.”
“I see.” This girl was clever. “And I flunked?”
“You flunked. The boy called you three times from the other end of the pool before you remembered who you were.”
“Well, there was an awful lot of blonde extruded from that bathing suit—”
“I allowed for a certain amount of preoccupation. But your subconscious should have been on duty, anyway. It was fairly obvious you hadn’t been Mr. Hamilton for very long.”
I nodded. “So then you put the private snoops on me? You know, sometimes I get the impression I’m a kind of backlog for the whole damned industry.”
“Well, perhaps if you behaved yourself—”
“If you’re referring to this last deal,” I said, “the woman told me she was separated from her husband. What was I supposed t
o do, get an affidavit? But never mind that. How did the snoops find out where to dig? After I rocked that one up with his camera, I was running scared, believe me; he didn’t seem to be the healthiest. I think I used three different names from Las Vegas to Los Angeles International to Chicago to Miami, and I registered from San Antonio, Texas.”
It was quite simple,” she said. “I got your correct name and your Los Angeles address off an old credit card.”
“What?”
”When you try to change your identity, you should clean out your wallet.”
“I don’t leave my wallet lying around—”
“No. But you don’t take it in swimming with you, either.”
I was beginning to feel like an absolute chump. This girl had picked me to pieces as if I’d been an oaf at a county fair.
“Listen,” I said, almost angrily, “I know I’m not that stupid. When I was in the pool or on the beach, it was in my room. And the room was locked.”
“I know,” she said. “But you have a bad habit of not turning the key in at the desk. And the next afternoon you went swimming off the beach. Remember? I merely took the key from the pocket of your wrap and went up to the room.”
I shook my head. “You’ve got a really cold nerve. Don’t you know that’s a serious offense, whether you took anything or not?”
“There was really no risk,” she said. “Your room overlooked the beach, so I could see you out there. And the whole thing didn’t take five minutes.”
“You don’t let anything stop you, do you? So then what?”
“That was when I called the detective agency. They put their Los Angeles office on it, and when you checked out of the Golden Horn they told me where you were staying down here. I came down. I wanted to keep in contact, and perhaps meet you, but not commit myself until I received the report from California and learned a little about you. When we came in a while ago, I called Miami. They’d heard from the West Coast at last, and they gave me the report over the phone. Parts of it were quite interesting, so I called you to come over.”
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