"The water people, of course. Who else did you think I was talking about?"
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO HARRY HEALEY?
IN a world where moon shots are possible, where black can be white, where we are all at the mercy of computers from IBM, you don't drop dead with surprise anymore just because a strange and beautiful woman, already looking like a creature from another planet, starts to talk about water people. What the hell, we've had all kinds of weird people in the comic strips long before the invasion of television. Haven't we given serious attention to frogmen, moonmen and spacemen? Not to mention Superman, Batman and Robin.
I'm an ABC type of thinker. One thing at a time. I took a long look at green-eyed, fantastic Serena Savage.
"Where is Harry Healey?"
"I don't know."
"Where did you get the manuscript from?"
She didn't bite her lip. She wasn't the type. She kept her cool at all times, it seemed, no matter what madness she was mixed up in. Her green eyes glittered over my face.
"I suppose I should begin at the beginning. Though it won't make sense even that way—it is a very strange, very weird story."
"I think maybe you better had. Don't think I'm not impressed with your water people—but save them for later. I'm confused enough to give up smoking."
She didn't smile. That capacity she did seem to have lost, somewhere between here and Skeleton Key. There were ghosts in her lovely face.
"You did read the manuscript, Mr. Noon?"
"Yes. About sixty-two pages worth. Is that all there is?"
She nodded. "Where is it now?"
"A lovable character named Dandy who introduced himself as Jesus Killy took it away from me at gunpoint about an hour ago."
I quickly filled her in on the gunshot party in the hall and the odd and unhappy Arvis who didn't seem to be the sort of girl to invite along on heists. Mention of both her and the poor little corpse in the foyer of my building made Serena Savage's eyebrows rise. They were catzy things, those eyebrows. Silken, unplucked and golden blond. Something like Ingrid Bergman's Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. I was feeling more and more like Robert Jordan every second. A nice way to feel about a woman.
"Oh," she murmured.
"Oh?" I said. "Is that all? What does it mean—oh?"
"Arvis is Harry Healey's daughter. The rough man would have to be Dandy Jaxon—with an x, not c k s. That was the way he always introduced himself. The little man was Jesus Killy, as you guessed. He and Dandy were partners in the beginning. I imagine they fell out when they realized just how much of a fortune was involved in Harry Healey's manuscript."
"Mind if I sit down?" I gestured toward one of the long, low dark lounges complete with bolsters and fluffy cushions. The bricked over fireplace was behind me. From the lounge, I could face the front door and her. The Chinese housecoat, limned by the glow of the nearby lamp, was pleasantly transparent in places. Serena Savage's long healthy legs gleamed like shapely stanchions. She sat down across from me in a butterfly chair of reddish hues. Coupled with her own golden-girl coloring and feminine architecture she would have beautified anything this side of Heffner's rabbit warren. I could see she was studying me, too. Maybe comparing me to something she might have seen in a movie or read in a book. I don't really know. At the initial meeting of our lives, all I wanted her to tell me was a straight story with a reasonable amount of truth and belief in it. Water people—for Christ's sake!
"I'm going to call you Serena," I said, "and you may call me Ed. The time has come for some facts. Real facts. I could ask a lot of loaded questions and maybe we could piece a story together. But what the hell. The weather outside is frightful, we've locked the door and I'm in no hurry to prowl the wintry streets of this crooked city. So suppose you tell me a bedtime story—the whole, original ball of wax. From the day you walked onto that pier with Artie Sothern. Okay? Healey's story loses sight of you after The Naked Lady comes back with a dead Artie on board. Until this morning when I read that story, I could have been reading a whopper. A real sea fable. Except for the fact that Healey's attempt at authorship was sent along to me by a man who hasn't time to read things just for the hell of it. Understood? Dandy Jaxon showing up with Arvis and then killing the real Jesus Killy has just brought the thing home to me a bit more. People don't kill things or people just because some author has a fanciful imagination. So I'm prepared to believe anything you tell me. Almost anything. Including water people. So let's have it, Serena. All the way from Act One. I promise not to interrupt. I'm all ears."
She uncrossed her legs and took a long filter-tip cigarette from a lucite box of the things on the small mosaic-tiled coffee stand by her chair. I didn't move. She was gathering her wits, collecting her thoughts, and even the small act of me lighting her weed might have broken the chain of recollection. I think she understood that, too, and appreciated it. Her small smile was tight and controlled. When she finally wafted a cloud of blue smoke from her impeccable nostrils, I was reminded of the fourth space missile that had left Cape Kennedy that morning, straining for the orbit that would race it around the moon.
"All right," she said in a low, unhurried voice that would have made me think of bedrooms and exultant sex except for the single fact that I knew what she was about to talk about. "Perhaps your way is better. I'll start from the beginning. It was in May—last May when I was in Melona meeting Artie Sothern in that bar. If you haven't guessed already, Ed, I'm a showgirl. They tell me I have the equipment for it—although I had other ideas. I'm originally from Branford, outside of New Haven. That's Connecticut, of course. I'm a graduate of Boston University. I majored in dramatic arts. I wanted to be an actress. Hepburn—Katherine and not Audrey. That's the plan I had made for myself. New York was not the answer, as I found out—like so many other girls do. Oh, I made the rounds, got some jobs—including a commercial for face cream that netted me about twenty thousand dollars in sixty-seven—and as is usual I spent half my time chasing men out of my bedroom. Or running from theirs. Don't get me wrong. I'm no prude—I laugh at virginal females, really—but I did want to do my own choosing and I did want to win the starring role in a play, in any play, because I was the actress for the job. Silly, isn't it? Well, to make a long story a little shorter, I took a daring gamble and signed up for a road company capsule version of Long-Legged Lilly which was going to play Florida before starting on a forty-eight state tour. I thought. When I got down here, or I should say there, I found out the company manager wanted me as an understudy to the aging Hollywood female who was going to play the lead. Meanwhile, he thought he could make me be the understudy for his wife back in New York. In the bedroom department, of course. Men . . ." She shivered involuntarily and the thin ghostly smile lit up her face. "I cleared out—I was almost flat broke thanks to my busting my contract—and I met Artie Sothern in that bar. I liked him. Oh, I knew what he wanted. But he was so damn clean-cut and wholesome about it, I didn't mind. There are men like that. He didn't sneak and crawl or get oily. He made no bones about the fact that he thought I'd be a terrific lay—his exact words, Ed. So I was kind of down in the mouth and needing company—and I tagged along. Which is why I went down to the pier with him to go for a cruise on that pretty old boat of theirs. The Naked Lady. Harry Healey loved that boat. I saw it in his eyes the moment Artie said he'd like to take me along for those sponges. Funny man, Harry Healey. Tall, very, very strong looking, but when he talked to Artie—even though there couldn't have been more than, say, three years difference in their ages—you could tell he felt about Artie the way a man does about a son. For the record, at the time, I did notice that Harry Healey looked a little under the weather. Oh, not the way a man does if he has been drinking. Just kind of drawn, strung-tight, if you know what I mean, He looked—well—beat is the word."
"Go on," I said, not wanting to disturb her flow of narrative, merely wishing to prod her along. "So you went with Artie Sothern for a joyride on the high seas. To Skeleton Key."
He
r green eyes smoldered. That's the only word. For a long moment, fear and anxiety washed in them. Swirling and flickering like beacons in the storm. But she got hold of herself.
"You read the manuscript, Ed. That part about where Harry ran into those—mermaids—those swimming women. Well, it was like that with us, too. We were anchored offshore, at Skeleton Key, about two hundred yards out, when we saw the swimming women. Artie thought it was a gag—or that some movie company was doing a film out there. He got a big boot out of the whole thing until . . ."
"Don't stop now," I begged.
She drew her breath in sharply. The Chinese housecoat heaved as her well-made chest reacted. Something deep inside of her had come alive.
"They climbed on board in back of us—while some of them swam in the water—and before we could fight back—they had tumbled Artie over the side. I couldn't lift a finger to help him. Before I could realize that we were being hijacked, literally, someone chloroformed me and I was unconscious before I ever knew that Artie had been drowned by those women in the water right before my very eyes! I didn't actually realize even that until I read Harry Healey's manuscript and the description of what happened to Artie when The Naked Lady got back to Key Alma."
I didn't say a word. I only stared at her. She caught my meaning and her chin tilted up at me. The green eyes called me three kinds of an idiot.
"You'll have to hear the rest of the story before you pass any judgments, Ed. I told you. I was a stranded showgirl who walked into a mess as old as Christmas with her eyes wide open. I didn't think such things could be in the twentieth century. I still don't."
"I don't need convincing, Serena. In an age where we have the Berlin Wall and schoolboys tying up principals and smashing university property, I can believe almost anything. What's the rest of it? The important part that Harry couldn't write about because he didn't know it or never got to put it down on paper. Your part."
She got hold of her anger and stared at the tip of her cigarette. Lazy, indescribable tendrils of smoke, like the ectoplasmic tricks in a Topper movie, rose to the ceiling of the apartment.
"I woke up, hours later, in a cave someplace. Yes, a cave. Like a grotto or a subterranean cavern. But it wasn't dank or damp. Or mossy, like you'd think. They had electric lighting, air-conditioning, central heating—everything. It was as comfortable as could be. It was literally an underground complex. Talk about those Man From U.N.C.L.E. shows—or anything science-fiction! It was incredible. I wasn't harmed or in bad shape in any way. Just a mild buzz from the chloroform and a feeling I was having a nice dream. Or a nightmare. It was hard to tell which."
"I'm still listening," I reminded her.
"I know, I know—but I can't help wondering if you'll think I've lost my mind or am making this up. This place—I don't know where it is—is somewhere under the sea off Skeleton Key. Maybe you reach it underwater, maybe you can't. I don't really know. All I can tell you is that somewhere down there is a crowd of people who are living under the sea. And robbing the people who live above the water—to keep themselves going. Scientists of some kind or maybe people who belonged to the Third Reich and went down deep to keep from being caught. . . . Oh, it's crazy, I tell you. Not even Harry Healey knew how crazy it was——"
"Hold on. Don't skip. You're jumping the gun. Don't theorize for me. You haven't told me what happened when you woke up, who you met—or how you finally got away. I take it they didn't buy you a plane ticket to New York and say it's-been-swell-meeting-you-Serena-Savage. There has to be more. Take it slow, now, and don't worry about offending my sensibilities. All things are possible in an impossible world, didn't you know that? An old shoemaker on Delancey Street told me that once when I learned that his mistress was a young heiress worth a fortune who fell in love with him and couldn't buy him off. She was twenty-one and he was sixty-seven, but for her, he had the stick that did the trick. See what I mean?"
Her green eyes refused to laugh at that.
"You're a crude psychologist, Mr. Noon. But you're right. I am leaving out the important parts—all right, I was coming to it." She inhaled once again and the exhalation was once again delightful to see. "I'll tell you. When I woke up, I was wearing silks of the most expensive texture. . . . The room I was in was like a harem. With ottomans and plush pillows and Chinese tapestries and Japanese lanterns. With incense. And then a woman came to see me. A tall, radiantly stunning woman. A brunette. She might have stepped out of a painting. Her name was Madame Roti. R-O-T-I. She told me that I had been kidnapped because I was beautiful and they needed me. When I asked needed for what, she told me that her people—that's all she would call them—lived under the water with all the comforts of home and that in time I would no longer yearn for civilization. I would have everything. Luxury, comfort and the necessities, but the requirements were that I should join them as an integral unit of the whole and all I would be asked to do was to swim on the open seas for appointed intervals and that was all. Now I was sure I was dreaming, and when I asked about Artie Sothern and what had happened, she smiled a funny smile—like a cat does when he sits by himself sometimes—and she said—I'll never forget that: Remember Circe and Ulysses? Well, my dear, you have lured the sailors onto the rocks that destroyed them. . . ."
"Ouch," I said. "You're right. Nobody would believe this. But don't take my word for it. What happened then?"
Serena Savage had let her cigarette acquire a long ash. She tapped it methodically into an ash tray.
"Madame Roti left me, asking me to think it over. I felt like I was mad. Not knowing what really had happened. Wondering whether or not it wasn't all some kind of elaborate production staged for my benefit. After all, I am an actress. Make-believe is my life. I expected a man in boots and beret to step out of a niche in the wall somewhere to shout: 'Cut. Print it!" You know what I mean? What I felt? It was a positively weird sensation."
"But no man in boots or beret did step out from the wall, did he?"
"No," she said soberly. "And I fell asleep, mixed-up, confused, feeling drugged. And I don't know how many hours later I was wakened out of a deep sleep by about four other girls. All beautiful, wearing sarongs like Lamour. All long-haired blondes with beautiful faces and bodies. They wouldn't tell me a thing. They were like automatons. All zombies moving like a team. Oh, and I was blindfolded, too. I didn't know what was happening. What to expect. I had seen no men, either. I do remember a feeling like going up in an elevator. And then the next thing I knew was I could feel the water and the outside air. It was like coming up out of a mine shaft or a tunnel. It was then that I found myself suddenly swimming in the water. I took the blindfold off—my hands were free—and there I was, swimming in the water off Skeleton Key just like the day before. I saw The Naked Lady and Harry Healey and it came to me all in a flash that the same thing was going to happen that had happened the day before—or only hours ago, I really didn't know, I had lost all sense of time. . . . It struck me that someone had thought of a unique way to attract the attention of seamen in a lonely Godforsaken spot for the sole purpose of hijacking boats and yachts and pleasure craft just for the spoils. I was confused. I wasn't sure, of course. I only knew it was some filthy kind of racket and I didn't want any part of it. Did I tell you that I was scared, too? More scared than I had ever been in my life?"
"You've got guts though. Huge heaping doses of same. The mere fact that you didn't go out of your everloving mind is amazing. Now, what happens?"
Her shudder was that of the child's lost in the grip of a Boris Karloff horror movie.
"You read Harry Healey's story—they tricked him same way they did Artie. Distracting him while one girl slipped on deck behind him. Once they had him in the water, he was helpless. They dragged him down until he blacked out. And then they left him for dead and swam off. Toward wherever or whatever there was that takes them back to that . . . secret hiding place of theirs under the water."
"Wait a minute. Didn't you see them? Where were you while all this was
going on——?"
"Let me finish, Ed. I told you—I didn't know what was going on—I only knew I wanted no part of it. I slipped away while they were all busy with Harry Healey. I'm a fine swimmer—one of the things I do really well. I swam underwater about a hundred yards, away from all the commotion, out to sea, and then popped up for a lungful of air before submerging again. By the time I was quite a ways off, they had finished with Harry. And they had disappeared. As if the ocean had swallowed them up. So I backpedaled and reached The Naked Lady from the side that couldn't be seen from shore. I think they had given me up for dead as they obviously had given up Harry. Anyway, I was dead exhausted when I got on deck. I had just enough strength to crawl under a stretch of canvas on board, toward the stern deck, and collapse altogether. I slept like a dead woman. I never even saw Harry Healey come back on board, nor did he ever know I was there. When he got back to Key Alma and left the boat to go see Doc Ponto in Melona, I was still sleeping it off. More dead than alive. When you have to swim for your life, it just about knocks every muscle and nerve out of your system. I was as limp as a dead fish. When I came to, it was already late afternoon. Harry Healey was gone and even the live-bait shack was dark. It was then that the whole terrible nightmare came back to me. I couldn't believe what I had seen or heard or what had happened to me. I felt the way Harry Healey had in his story when he met me and thought my voice had sounded funny. But that was because he wasn't feeling well and had wax in his ears like the doctor had told him. I didn't know what to do. Who would believe me? The local law in Melona was like something out of a small-town movie. A hick sheriff and a couple of deputies. Also, I was broke. Flat broke and all I was wearing was the sarong. So I stole into the bait shack to see if I could find some loose change or bills or something to wear at least. I wanted out—I tell you. Anything to get back to New York and away from a nightmare. I never thought of talking to Harry Healey when he got back from Melona. I expected him to bite my head off. I had somehow caused Artie Sothern's death and in spite of what had happened to Harry himself, he'd never believe I was innocent. Like I told you—I was sure he was cracking up, anyway. Too much sun, too much water—too much everything."
Death Dives Deep Page 5