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 sautéed 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. He 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 up 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 forth 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?”
The question seemed to alarm her. “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 squarer 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,” Meyer said, “we can’t give 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! That’s 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 copilot 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 aesthetic 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.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s been going on so long. You get the feeling the odds are going bad. Because they’re nervous, if they grab me again, they’ll take it out on me for scaring them by getting away. They’ll make me beg to be back down in that water wired to a rock.”
Meyer appeared to hand me my eleven o’clock bottle of chilled Tuborg. She turned toward him and said, “You sore or anything?”
“Should I be?”
“Maybe you should. But it’s kind of a thing with me, Meyer. I was in a Home for a while, and I had to do every kind of scut work there was and I swore I wouldn’t ever again, even if I had to use food money for maid service.”
He moved around her and leaned against the rail. We talked. He asked gentle questions. She finished her drink at last and went below and came back with another just as tall and just as dark. I suspected that her nervousness about her future had been making her increasingly talkative with me. And the beginning of the second drink unfastened her tongue a little more. She began to try, quite obviously, to shock Meyer out of his placid and friendly acceptance of her, and in doing so gave us enough clues and false clues so we could fit together a coherent and plausible history. Her brothers had been blown up while playing on a Hawaiian beach, had dug up something that went off. After the war her mother had brought the six-year-old Vangie to the States. Her mother had come to track down the Navy officer who had promised to divorce his wife and marry Vangie’s mother. The officer brushed her off. Her mother found waitress work, acquired a brutal boyfriend. By the time Vangie was ten she was unmanageable in school. When they threatened to send her to an institution for delinquent children she called their bluff by becoming so shamelessly delinquent they had to send her away. After she had been in the institution two years, a truck crushed her mother to death against the back wall of the restaurant where she worked. At thirteen, looking almost eighteen, she seduced the resident director of the institution and blackmailed him into taking her off all menial work and giving her special food and privileges. Over a year later somebody reported the situation to the state attorney general’s office, and the director, to save his own neck, smuggled her out and turned her over to a vice ring working the Virginia Beach are
a. They beat all rebellion out of her. She was transferred to other stations on the national circuit, and by the time she was twenty-four she was working for a call circuit in Jacksonville and making the top dollar in the area. Two years ago she had been recruited into the dangerous game she would not describe.
Certainly the breaks had gone against her. Circumstance had turned her into an emotional basket case. You could bleed a little for the Hawaiian child who couldn’t comprehend what had happened to the big brother who had carried her around on his shoulders.
The Busted Flush droned roughly east by northeast up the channel in the midday glare. I’d pulled my T-shirt off and I was slumped back in the big topside pilot seat, squinting to pick up the familiar markers, steering by means of bare toes braced against a top spoke of the wheel. Swathed against the sun, shadowed by the huge hat, Miss Vangie talked on and on in that creamy contralto, Meyer braced nearby, beaming and nodding, a devoted audience.
She lunged back and forth through time, with side trips into obvious fantasy and self-delusion, her mode of speech changing from imitation duchess elegance to clinical crudity. All the basic patterns emerged, the way a design will appear after the etcher has made his ten thousand tiny gravings on the copper plate. Perhaps some social psychologist would have given his chance of an honorary degree to have the whole rambling recital on tape. It was interesting in the beginning. I guess any normal person has curiosity about the inner structure of organized prostitution, the dangers to avoid, the payoffs, the mechanics of solicitation, the ways of extracting extra bounty when they get hold of a live one.
But after a time it was repetitious and dull. Too much detail about the furnishings of darling apartments, about the accumulation of darling wardrobes. The life of a sand-hog tunneling under a river can be fascinating until you have to listen to a play-by-play of every shovel load of muck. And so when Meyer went below to fix lunch, and she decided she was maybe getting too much sun through reflection off the water and followed him down, the silence was welcome.
Darker Than Amber Page 4