Darker Than Amber

by John D. MacDonald

  In the brochures, of course, there were the beautiful people dancing gracefully and romantically by moonlight and the light of Japanese lanterns on the tropic deck of a brand new ship, and the same lovely people smiling in the warm sunlight, their golden limbs in relaxed and effective composition around the blue dance of the huge shipboard swimming pool.

  It isn’t like that. These little ships are lumpy with endless coats of topside paint, and the ship’s staff is overworked, and the schedules are rigidly set, with brassy announcements coming over the speaker systems, sending the whole herd moving in one direction or another.

  It isn’t like they thought. But it isn’t like anything else they ever knew either. Perhaps, in some wistful and tender sense, these are the beautiful people, and because this is the dream fulfilled, they hold onto it tightly, making small translations from reality. And down there, in the cramped inconveniences of the little cabins, in the slightly oily wind of the ship’s air-conditioning, in the muted grumble of the ship’s engines, the little vibrational shudders as she crosses the tropic ocean, sunburned flesh is coupled in a passion more like that of years ago, and in the breakfast morning they smile into each other’s eyes, a secret recognition.

  But this was the tag end of the season, and a mixed bag. Scampering flocks of small children. A sprinkling of heavy men in their middle years, accompanying, with a certain air of apprehension, their young doughy blondes toward the Bay Street shops. A contingent of scrubbed-looking high-school kids chaperoned by a nervous-acting couple who looked like a male and female Woodrow Wilson, and an unchaperoned pack of kids of college age, the girls like a bright fluttering flock of tropic birds, the boys languid under the terrible burden of improvised sophistication, and thirty or forty couples of the “mother” classification.

  The tour caravan left. The others dispersed into Bay Street. The machine came to life. It could readily chew up the entire passenger lists of four deluxe cruise ships simultaneously, each one better than twice the size of the little Monica D. The saloons turned the music on. The straw market women began their sales patter, waving the merchandise, and making crude comment on the Jamaican hats a lot of cruise people were wearing. These people were a tiny morsel for the machine, a hundred and fifty or so, but with proper pressure, calibration, alignment of the rollers and levers and sluice gates, it might churn eight thousand dollars out of this motley group, and there was little else to do on a Monday afternoon in June anyway.

  The mystique of the operation is that a true blue consumer will buy something she does not need and cannot afford when she discovers that the same item at home would cost her thirty dollars more.

  Our targets were not in the pack, and just as I was about to say we’d better go aboard, she started slowly down the gangplank. Unmistakably she. Theatrically she, making her exit after the rabble had been cleared from her path.

  White cotton twill pants, fitting her slenderness with an almost improbable snugness. They came to just above her bare ankles, with a slight flare, an instep notch. The wide waistband was snugged around her slender waist, and above it was six supple bare inches of midriff, and above that a little half-sleeve truncated blouse, fine red and white stripes, so dense with stiff ruffles she looked like a Christmas display of ribbon candy. Atop the interwoven and intricate coiffure of cream-blonde hair was perched at a perfect straightness a wide-brimmed, white bullfighter hat of straw in a fine weave, with white ball fringe dangling all the way around the rim. She carried a red purse shaped like a lunch bucket. Her sandals had half-heels, white straps, thick cork soles. The very wide flat rims of her sunglasses had a red and white checkerboard pattern.

  She came slowly down the incline of the gangplank, the slope creating, with the thick soles of the sandals, considerably more hip motion than she could have achieved on a level surface. Every crew member who could get to a rail on the starboard side stopped all work and watched the descent. The only discernible flaw in her figure was that her thighs, as revealed by the tightness of the pants, were too long and too heavy to be in proportion to the rest of her. She was slightly tanned, just enough to set off the smoothness between waistband and blouse. I could sense the concerted inaudible sigh as she reached the level of the cement dock. She walked with a sense of complete awareness of being watched, looking straight ahead, undeviatingly. It was a triumph of merchandising, a perfect gem of functional display techniques, as specific as the cutaway working models of engines at auto shows. She turned and looked back up at the deck. A big man appeared and came down toward her. He had a long, limber stride, a small waist and hips under white stretch Levis, and great wads of muscle bulging the navy blue knit sports shirt. His pale forearms had almost the exaggerated meatiness of Popeye the Sailor, and he held himself and moved in a way that betrayed those curious anxieties of the Mr. America syndrome. He had a face far older than the body, long, eroded and sallow, with brows and lashes of such pallor it had an expressionless look. There was something just wrong enough about his pale curly locks to make me quite certain it was a hairpiece. A long slim cigar was clamped at an uptilted angle in the corner of his mouth. The girl had continued walking, and when he caught up with her, they stopped and talked. She tilted her head back so she could look up at him from under the hat brim. Seeing them together I realized he was big enough to look me in the eye.

  She took a list from her purse. He looked at it with her. He shrugged, tapped ash from the cigar, walked with her toward Bay Street.

  I got my bag from the hotel and went aboard first, presented my ticket, was properly greeted.

  “I saw that couple come off several minutes ago, and they looked familiar. Both of them in white pants.”

  “Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Terry. Yes, of course. They have traveled with us before. You know them?”

  “The name doesn’t sound right. I guess I’m mistaken.”

  “You will have a chance to see them more closely, perhaps. You are almost neighbors. They are also on the port side, also in an outside cabin on the lounge deck. Number fourteen, several rooms forward of yours, sir.”

  There was no one at the steward’s station and no sign of a maid. I located the key rack, opened the glass door and took the key to six from its hook. The cabin was bright and pleasant. I checked the location of fourteen and went, as planned, to the ship’s lounge. The ceiling, of white peg-board, wasn’t high enough for me. It would be all too easy to tear my scalp on one of the little round sprinkler heads which protruded from it. There were groupings of overstuffed chairs and sofas, upholstered in blue, yellow, rose and purple, surrounding round black tables with raised chrome edges. The floor was of black composition. I picked a group with yellow upholstery, and had a waiter bring me a Pauli Girl beer. From time to time a passenger would hurry through, all haste, frowns and concentration, camera clanking.

  Meyer appeared, sat down with a heavy sigh. “I am entombed down there, in a ghastly flickering glow of tiny light bulbs.” He pointed aft. “I have our mail drop. The first stairway through that door, halfway down, at the curve, a fire hose in a case. The top is recessed a little. So, the top right corner of it, the right as you face it.”

  “Very good.”

  “And it has struck me that we might make use of the PA system. I have heard them paging people.”

  “Also very good, depending. I’m off. She had a list. So it’s an odds-on chance they split up. Go play with your doll.”

  At almost two-thirty I spotted her, alone, just going into the Nassau Shop, carrying one dressbox-size package. I followed her in. She put the sunglasses in her purse. She strolled slowly back through the store and stopped at a circular rack containing Daks skirts. I was loafing about eight feet away when the clerk approached her.

  When she spoke I learned she had a child voice, a little thin dear girlie voice. “This one, in the green, this is just linen, isn’t it? No other fabric to keep it from wrinkling?”

  “Pure linen, miss.”

  “So you put it on and an hour later i
t looks like you’d slept in it. No thanks.”

  “A beautiful wool, perhaps, miss? In this soft gray?”

  “I guess not. Thanks anyhow.”

  I circled and came upon her at the end of a counter, face to face, glance to glance in the instant of passing, sensed behind her eyes the little click of appraisal and dismissal, as if back in there was mounted one of the tired old cameras used by defeated photographers on the littered boardwalks of unfashionable resorts.

  Hers was a pointy little face under the bulk of hat and weight of hair. The fur of her eyebrows angled up in a habitual query that no longer asked any questions. It was a small mouth, with the pulp of the unpainted lips so bulgingly, ripely plump she had the look of getting ready to whistle. Sharp little nose and sharp little chin, and an angled flatness in her cheeks. The feature that unified all the rest of it was the eyes, very very large, widely set, brilliantly and startlingly green. She was all erotic innocence and innocent eroticism, moving by me, knowing I would turn to stare, that I would see the arrogance, the slow laziness, the luxurious challenge of the lazy scissors of the long weight of white thighs and the soft flexing perkiness of the little rump. She made me think of a Barbie Doll.

  I did not know what to try or how to try it. I could not appraise how much nerve she had or how much intelligence. Nor how completely Terry owned her. If, by luck, I rested the edge of the wedge at exactly the right point, tapped with proper impact, the crystalline structure might cleave. More probably any attempt would glance off, arouse suspicion, send her trotting to wherever Ans Terry awaited her, with a description of me. But if she could be convinced, very quickly, that she was marked for execution also.… I had to stake the whole thing on how much she knew about what had happened to Tami. Then I found one possible way I could do it, with a fair chance of its working.

  She had gone to a counter where, under glass, elegant little Swiss watches were displayed. The clerk helping her went off to get something out of stock. I moved quickly to stand beside her and said in a low voice, “If you’re Del Whitney, I have to talk to you. I’ve got a message from Tami.”

  “You’ve got me confused with somebody. Sorry.”

  “Tami gave me the message before they killed her, and she told me how I could find you.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to stare up at me from under the flat brim of the hat. I turned my head slightly, looked at her, saw her absolute rigidity, eyes made even larger by shock. The clerk was returning. “K-k-killed!” she whispered. I had that same feeling you get in a hand of stud poker when you’ve hung in there with sevens back to back, seen the third one go elsewhere, debate hanging in there with those two kings staring at you across the table, then meet the raise and see the case seven hit you, and know then just how you are going to play it.

  “Is this what you had in mind, miss?” the clerk asked.

  “What? No. No, thank you.” She moved away from the counter and, ten feet away, stopped and stared at me again. I could sense that she was beginning to suspect she had been tricked and had responded clumsily.

  “I don’t think it would be smart for Terry to see us together.” I took out my wallet, felt in the compartment behind the cards, pulled out the folded clipping of the report of the fingerprint identification. “If you didn’t happen to know her by this name, Del, it won’t mean much.”

  She unfolded it. Suddenly her hands began an uncontrollable trembling. The dressbox slipped from under her arm and fell to the carpeting. “Oh God! Oh dear Jesus God!” Her voice had a whistly sound.

  I picked up her package. “Pull yourself together! You’ll bitch us both up. If you want to stay alive, settle down, damn it. Where’s Terry?”

  “Wuh-wuh-waiting for me at that Blackbeard thing.”

  “We better get you a drink.”

  I took her to the Carlton. Her walk was strange, rigid, made stilt-like by shock. I took her to a dim back corner of the paneled bar lounge, empty at that hour. I got her a double Scotch over ice. She gulped it down and then began to cry, fumbling a tissue out of her red purse. She cried almost silently, hunched, shuddering and miserable. At last she mopped her eyes, blew her nose, straightened with a slight shudder.

  “I just don’t understand. Who are you? What’s happening?”

  “They tried to kill her. They missed. She came to me. I’m just an old friend she could trust, that’s all. I live in Lauderdale. She couldn’t take the risk of trying to contact you and DeeDee, so she made me promise to try. DeeDee has disappeared. If you want a good guess, they’ve knocked her in the head and planted her out in the boondocks someplace.”

  “My God! What are you trying to do to me!”

  “Lower your voice! I’m trying to give you Tami’s message. She was going to make a run for it. You can see she didn’t get into the clear. She tried to sneak back to pick up the money she had stashed away, and probably ran into Griff, whoever he is. She was afraid of running into him. She said to tell you to run. She said that all of a sudden they found out the law was getting too close, and they decided to close out the operation. And because you three hustlers are the way they’d tie the others into it, and because it is a murder ring situation, they made a policy decision to kill the three of you. And it looks as if you’re the only one left, Del.”

  “But they … wouldn’t!”

  “Read the clipping. Kiddy, they hit her so hard with that murder car it splashed her up against the second story of a stone building.” When I saw the sickness, I followed it up by taking her wrist and saying, “It smashed one whole side of her head flat, all the way to her nose. And from the waist down she was just a sack of busted meat.”

  She gagged, swallowed and said, “But I’d find out about it when …”

  “When you get back? Who’ll give you a chance to read last week’s newspapers? They’ll turn you off before you can unpack, lay low a few months, then recruit new girls.”

  “I’ve got to tell Ans! We’ve got to get away from here!”

  I bore down on her slender wrist until pain changed the shape of her mouth. “Smarten up fast, or I can’t help you, kiddy. That Monday night before you sailed, dear old Ans wired a cement block to Tami’s ankles and heaved her off a highway bridge below Marathon. It was after midnight. Mack drove the car. She was conscious. What they didn’t know, there were fishermen under the bridge. They got her up in time. She came to me in Lauderdale. Here I am taking this lousy risk of getting mixed up in this stinking thing, and you come on stupid. They thought she’d be dead. They talked in front of her. Griff and Ans made a sentimental deal. Ans was to drown Tami, and in return Ans turns you over to Griff. Tami said please warn you without Ans knowing. I owed her the favor. She was shook. She’d been sunk into twenty feet of black water with her ankles wired. So I flew over here and I’m booked back on the Monica D. I didn’t know I’d locate you ashore, from Tami’s description. Maybe even with a warning you don’t stand a chance. But I made the try. Stay stupid and you’re soon dead, because you’ve been in a business where that’s the only way they retire you, sweetie.”

  It glazed her. She stared wide-eyed into the middle distance, the fat little mouth agape, exposing the gleamings of even little white teeth.

  “He’s been acting so funny,” she whispered. “Jumpy. Cross all the time. And there wasn’t any other cruise he drank so much. And mean to me this trip. Nasty mean. He gave me such a thumping! The thing that started it, I asked him when we could quit. First it was going to be just three or four. Then it got up to ten. And this was number fourteen and I said to him that no matter how smooth it went, if you kept it up and kept it up, you were pushing your luck. I said I was getting sick of having such a strain all the time, and how much better everything was when there was just the two of us in the little apartment in Coral Gables, and I worked the conventions over on the Beach. That was no real reason for the thumping he gave me. He’s had lots better reasons. I’ve been with him seven years. This is big money, but … when I can’
t sleep, sometimes I keep thinking about those poor guys. I just can’t believe Ans would … let them do that to me.”

  “No, of course not. He is a very sentimental guy. He wants to keep you alive and well, so the cops can pick you up and let a whole swarm of people make identifications, so they can bring you to trial for murder first and let you make a deal with the law and help them nail everybody else. Use your head, kiddy. They know DeeDee would make a deal. Vangie would make a deal. Why should they trust the third hooker to keep her mouth shut?”

  She bit down on her thumb knuckle. “Tuesday morning it was, he didn’t get back to the place until way after three. Then he sat out there drinking, and he wouldn’t come to bed. You know … I guess it would really bother him to have to do that to Tami. I guess it was hard on him.”

  “And Griff is going to cry real tears when he tucks you into some swamp.”

  She shuddered. “Please stop doing that, huh? I have to think. God, I don’t know what to do. You can guess how much bread Ans lets me have. I don’t have a hundred dollars in the world. I’ve never been on my own at all. I’ve been with Ans since I was sixteen. I was third runner-up for Miss Oceanside Beach and he was third runner-up for Mr. Body. He was twentyseven. We teamed up like to help each other, and we went a billion miles in that old car I bet, just barely making out on the contests, a whole year of it, and then he got so sick there in Chicago, and I was working waitress and telling my troubles to a girlfriend, how he was in a charity ward, and the medicines so expensive, and my feet hurting all the time from those damn tile floors, and then my waitress girlfriend took me on that double date, and the guy put fifty bucks into my purse, under the table.”