“Hey! What are you …”
“Write it. You can tear it up if you want to, if you don’t understand why it has to be done. You can tear it up, and then you can get out of this stateroom.”
She hunched over the paper like a schoolgirl and wrote. I dictated. “I have decided to take my own life by jumping into the sea before this ship gets to Florida. I am going to give this letter to someone to mail to you.”
“Just a little slower, please.”
“I would rather kill myself … than wait and have them … kill me the way they did Evangeline Bellemer. Period. I think that everybody connected with this should pay for their crimes. Period. That is why I … am making a full confession … at this time. I will tell you where … you can find them all … and what we have been doing … for the last two years.”
I waited. She finished the final words and turned and stared at me. “You sure do want a hell of a lot of insurance.”
“Use your head, woman. Insurance for you too. They’ll break Ans Terry down in five minutes and he’ll verify you jumped overboard. The cops will pick up everybody who was in on it, and there’ll be nobody left to come after you if they ever did get any clue. Nobody will be looking for you, nobody from either side.”
“I … I guess you’re right. But I just hate to put it down on paper. Couldn’t we do it later? You could trust me to write it all out after we’re safe, dear.”
“When you’ve written the whole thing out and signed it and I have it in my hand, addressed and stamped and sealed, then we’ll talk about how much I trust you, Del.”
“Jesus, you’re hard, aren’t you?”
“And free as a bird, and planning to stay that way. If you don’t like it, go take your chances with Terry and Griff.”
She spun back and snatched the pen up. “All right, all right, damn you! What next?”
“Miss Bellemer was living at … 8000 Cove Lane, Apartment Seven B, Quendon Beach … under the name of Tami Western. Period. What’s Griff’s name?”
“Walter Griffin.”
“Walter Griffin lives at the same address in Apartment Seven C. He very probably arranged to have her killed by being struck by a car, when ordered to do so by … what’s Mack’s name?”
“Webster Macklin.”
At Meyer’s three solid knocks upon the stateroom door she jumped violently. I’d worked out a code with Meyer, based on several of the plausible things you can call out when somebody knocks.
“Yes?” I called. That let him know our guess was right and she had simplified things by leaving Fourteen unlocked and it was safe to leave Ans his little keepsake.
“Sorry. Wrong room,” he rumbled.
I kept her going. She balked now and again, such as when I demanded she put down the specifics of the most recent murder. He had been a fifty-four-year-old divorced chemist from Youngstown, Ohio, taking a vacation alone, and they had come aboard on separate tickets at separate times as Mr. and Mrs. A. B. Terry, and he had twenty-six thousand dollars in cash in a money belt, the proceeds of the sale of some bonds and the cash value of his insurance policies. Ans Terry was now wearing the money belt, and Mr. Powell Daniels was sticking out of the silted bottom somewhere west-southwest of Miami, wearing under his resort clothes an entirely different sort of belt, one of those designed for scuba diving, with every compartment snapped shut on its wafer of lead.
She explained it to me. “I’d tell him to just wander around until he was sure our luggage had been brought in. We had to come aboard separate on this one on account of crew people knowing me. He came to the cabin and I gave him a celebration drink. It would really knock them out, that stuff. Then I’d let Ans in. You could count on four or five hours before you could slap them half awake. We know where the best place is on this boat, from before. It’s on the promenade deck about thirty feet forward from where the deck stops. It stops at the doors to the dining room. I guess it is about the middle of the ship. Right there there’s no place above you where people can look over. There isn’t any rail there or side deck on the lounge deck, and up on the sun deck there’s a lifeboat in the way. It’s the same on either side of the ship. You do it about three in the morning. They aren’t really awake. But they sort of walk, if you hold them on both sides. We sing and ask him if he’s feeling better if there’s people. I go and stand at the nearest stairway, and if nobody is coming, I click my tongue, and Ans picks them up like you pick up a sleepy kid, and leans out over the rail and drops them.”
I dictated it back to her. Meyer had figured out the visitors’ pass system perfectly.
I was curious about how so many apparently intelligent men could be gulled so readily.
“Oh, you can always tell the ones worth a try, and out of those, the ones you can get to take a real interest in you. The marrieds you brush off. Also the ones who know their way around too good. You work to get the name and home address and local address, and if they have to leave right off, that’s no good. Sometimes you can go ten days without finding one worth turning in the name so Mack can get him checked out. And then a lot of times from what he found out he’d say no. Like if the guy was too important and had too much money, it would be no just as quick as if he had no chance of raising the minimum twenty thousand. When you get a go-ahead, then you keep right on with the tease, letting him get close sometimes. We all worked it just the same. You cry a lot. You say you shouldn’t see him at all, that it’s too dangerous. You make him meet you at hideaway places at weird times. Then you confess your ex is a mental case and he’s going to kill you. You tell the guy your ex has found out about him, and you make him move to another place under another name. Then you start putting out, and you butter him up by going kind of crazy and telling him it’s never been like that before. After they start getting it, they’ll believe any damn fool thing you tell them, and do any fool thing you ask. So you fake an attempt on your life, and you say the only way to get away is tickets under a fake name on a cruise ship and bring lots of money, because you have an old friend in Kingston or St. Thomas or somewhere the ship is going who has a remote cottage somewhere and she can fix it so the two of you can stay there under some other name indefinitely. By then, because of the way he worked the postcard bit, any relatives he has and some friends and business partners have been getting cards from him from Spokane or Toledo or Albuquerque or some place like that, and that’s where they start hunting when they don’t hear anything else ever. We always worked it the same exact way, but DeeDee would handle a guy different than Tami or me, and I would use a different approach than Tami. The thing is, as soon as he thinks he’s going to get to spend sack time with you on a cruise ship, he hasn’t got eyes for anything else. And making him believe you don’t dare be with him in public makes it a lot safer. I’d always bring one suitcase full of Ans’s things aboard with my stuff. How quick you could get him tuned up all the way kind of depended. One ran out on me the day before sailing. They gave me a terrible ride about that, DeeDee and Tami did. I think, all things considered, DeeDee could do the best and fastest job of nailing them down, but if in the beginning you let them think you’re going to be easy to get, you spoil it. Lonely men over forty-five, they all, every one of them, have this fantastic thing about young women, and that’s what you work on.”
It took a long long time to flesh it all out. She became resigned to it, to the extent she did not try to drag her feet when I requested she list the fourteen. Nine was the best she could do, and she wasn’t sure of two of their names. She estimated the total take of just her and Terry at close to four hundred thousand dollars.
It was after two o’clock when she said in a tired whine, “Honey, my hand is going to drop right off, honest. It’s all full of cramps.”
“Take a rest while I read it over.”
There were fifteen pages in her unformed backhand, all the lines sloping up toward the right side of the sheets. It would give any investigator more than enough. There was little point in prying any more details out
of her. Her head sagged slowly, jerked upright. She was emotionally and physically exhausted.
“Okay, Del. Just a little bit to wind it up. Ready? New paragraph. I am not going to tell Ans about this letter. I am going to leave him a note … saying I have killed myself. Period. I will pin it to my pillow … after he passes out … tomorrow night. Period. I am sorry about what … we did to those men. Period. I am glad I have written … this letter. Period. May God have mercy … on my soul. Period. Sign it, Del.”
I was looking down over her shoulder as she wrote her name Adele Whitney. She hesitated. “When I was booked a few times, like in Chicago, it was my right name.”
“Put that down too.”
“Jane Adele Stusslund,” she wrote. She dropped the pen, making a spray of ink on the paper under her signature. She stood, turning as she stood, to come up in the circle of my arms. She yawned deeply, shuddered, rested her forehead against my chin.
“Do I get a gold star, teacher?”
“Solid gold, Jane.”
Her head jerked back. “Please don’t call me that.”
“Okay.”
She yawned again. “I’m pooped something awful, darling. Would you like to undress me, maybe?”
“We’d better both rest up. Tomorrow could be rough.”
Her glance was coldly inquisitive. “The times I’ve been turned down you could count on one hand, friend. You gay or something?”
I slowly folded the bulky confession, stuffed it into an envelope. The Monica D. made a larger pitching motion, moving us both off balance, both taking a sideways step to catch ourselves, like the beginning of an improvised dance. The compartmentation creaked, and I knew we were well into New Providence Channel where we would take the sweep of the weather.
“Tomorrow I’ll get you stashed in a safe place in Lauderdale. It will be four or five days before I can wind up a few things hanging fire. There’ll be all the time in the world to get acquainted then, Del.”
She narrowed those large brilliant eyes, cocked her head to the side. “Sure thing,” she said flatly, and picked up the purse and flight bag and went into the head and banged the door shut.
When the door opened again, I had turned the stateroom lights off. I had arranged slacks, shirt and shoes in a handy pile on the floor half under my bed, on the side away from the other bed, with the thick envelope, folded once, in the hip pocket of the slacks, and my stateroom key in a side pocket. I was in my bed in underwear shorts. Through the veil of lashes I saw her stand braced in the open doorway. The heavy hair was combed long like Alice’s. She wore the thing she called a jama shift. It fit loosely, blocked very little of the light behind her, had lace at the hem, throat, short sleeves, and stopped about four inches above her knees. Costume for a drowning.
The light clicked off. Darkness loudened the noises of the Monica D., the buckety-swash of her rolling corkscrewing motion, the almost subsonic grumble of the marine drive downstairs, and the little phased chitters and whines that came and went as bulkhead portions picked up sympathetic resonances.
A weight came onto the bottom corner of my bed, tightening the blanket across my feet. A hand found my knee, rested there.
In a sing-song plaint, in that teeny little-girl voice sweet as carnival candy, and while her plump little fingers massaged my blanketed knee, she said, “It’s like you’re leaving me out. It’s like you’re making all the rest of it lies and tricks, not wanting to make out with me. Words don’t ever mean much. How am I supposed to feel? Jesus, Travis! Am I such a terrible pig you couldn’t stand touching me? They were going to kill me. I don’t feel safe at all. Please, honey, hold me. Make love to me. So then I’ll really and truly belong to you and it will all come out fine for us. Please!”
The thing that astounded and disheartened me was to find a very real yen to take a hack at this spooky little punchboard. There had been a lot more to Vangie in both looks and substance, but she hadn’t tingled a single nerve. I wanted to grab at this one. Maybe everybody at some time or another feels the strong attraction of something rotten-sweet enough to guarantee complete degradation. I wanted to pull her down and roll into that hot practiced trap which had clenched the life out of fourteen men. And there was the big shiny rationalization. It’s the way to make her trust you, fella. Go right ahead, lull the broad. It’ll take about nine minutes out of your life. You’re a big boy. A broad is a broad is a broad, and who’ll know the difference?
You will, McGee. For a long long time.
But she had to have some gesture. She had to have some assurance. So I sat up, hitched toward her, put my arms around her, tucked her face into my neck. “Everything’s going to work out fine, kiddy.”
Her sigh was deep and shuddering. She had shucked herself out of that jama thing, and her skin felt whisper-soft, super-heated. She clung hard and said, “Hurry, dear. Gee, I’m so ready I’m practically there already.”
“No, honey. Let’s wait and make it in style. I have a thing about the right time and the right place, and waiting just makes it a better blast. Why do we have to rush anything? Once we’re off this nervous boat and tucked away safe, we’ll spend days in bed.”
“We can have that too.”
I knew the quickest way to cool me off. That fat little mouth made me squeamish. So I kissed it hard enough and long enough to creak her neck, mash the lips against her teeth, bend her rib cage. She was puffing like a little furnace when I let her loose, hoisted her off my bed, turned her and welted that behind with a pistol-crack slap.
“Hey! Ow!”
“Back to your own sack, kiddy.”
She made grumbling sounds, but once she was in her own bed she giggled. “Anyways, I got proof you’re not lavender, dearie.”
“Try to get some sleep.”
I guessed that the exhaustion of fear would catch up with her. I gave her what I hoped was enough time, then got up and dressed swiftly and silently. I leaned over her and heard slow deep buzzing snores, bee sounds that came up from the deepest part of the pool of sleep. I locked the door behind me when I left.
Meyer, squinting as he opened his door for me, looked like a sideshow bear in his awning-stripe pajamas in green, black and orange. He yawned and sighed, sat where the light was best and read Del’s confession. There was no more yawning and sighing. He gave it his total attention, as if he had forgotten I was there. When he finished it, he refolded it, took it over and put it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket in the locker.
As he turned, he frowned beyond me, saying, “It is too absurd a simplification, Travis, to try to relate her actions to moralistic terms. Wickedness. Heartlessness.”
“For God’s sake, Meyer!”
“We can find a more appropriate answer in a book written by a woman whose name escapes me at the moment. It is called, I believe, The I and the Not-I. It is an extension and interpretation of one facet of Jungian theory.”
“At this time in the morning?”
“She develops the concept that a frightening number of people in the world are unaware of the actual living reality of the human beings around them. It is the complete absence of empathy in action. They believe themselves to be real, of course, yet they merely lack the imagination to see that other persons are also real in the same way and on the same terms. Thus, even though they go through the obligatory social forms and personal relationships, all other people are objects rather than people. If all other people are objects, then there can be no psychic trauma involved in treating them as objects. That pair disposed of fourteen objects, not fourteen brothers. Their uneasiness comes not from any pity, not from any concern for the dead objects, but merely from their awareness that society frowns upon such actions.”
“Meyer, please!”
“In a sense one can envy them because, unlike you and I, Travis, they cannot identify, they cannot project. We can, and so we do a lot of bleeding. We bled for a woman as wretched as Miss Bellemer. You keep remembering the look of the back of Griff’s neck. This
pair drifts through life without the inconvenience of such uncomfortable baggage. Interesting, isn’t it, to relate this concept to conscience and to individual goals?”
“Are you through?”
“Vocalization always helps me develop such relationships.”
“Meyer, how did it go?”
“Oh! My little visit. I slid in there like a veritable wraith. After a few moments I began to realize I could have marched through leading a fife and drum corps. At that point my heart stopped banging into my larynx and slid back down where it belongs. I selected a more effective place for our voodoo doll. The sink stopper seemed tight. I left her underwater in the sink, and fortunately it is a very deep sink. She has some buoyancy. The porous stone has absorbed enough water to hold her down. She sways with the motion of the ship. An eerie effect. Drunks often have to make a bathroom journey in the small hours. I left the bathroom light on for the fellow. When you are beginning to emerge into hangover, the world is slightly hallucinatory. It might take him quite some time to identify the real and the unreal.”
“Remind me not to wake you up at this time of day. You are so ornate you give me a headache. I call your attention to where the Powell Daniels money is at the moment.”
“Around Terry’s middle. So?”
“If we don’t want him making a successful run for it, I better take the wings off his heels.”
He glanced at his watch. “It’s after four. The depressant effects are diminishing. He’s had perhaps seven hours. I don’t think the risk is justified, Travis. He’s an exceptionally brawny brute. Why don’t you just leave well enough alone?”
“I’m going to give it a try.”
Shrewd eyes studied me. “I find the compulsion odd. Your normal cheer has soured. Could it be possible the little pig required the bargain be sealed, in her manner?”
“Get off my back, Meyer.”
“And so the derring-do is a penance, a reaffirmation of the real identity of the McGee, a symbolic scrubbing of the soiled escutcheon.”
“Do you really think I cut myself a slice of that?”
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