Darker Than Amber

by John D. MacDonald

  Probably she thought she was treating me in a very special way by telling me the details of her childhood, girlhood, life with Ans Terry. The things she remembered were empty and trivial. The shallowness of her mind gave her a spurious flavor of innocence.

  She had taken no part in the direction of her life. She had let life happen to her, and her pleasure was in her clothes, in her figure, in pleasing and being admired by men, in enjoying sex, in changing her hairdo.

  She was twenty-three. Any pattern of life she had drifted into would have left her essentially the same, with the same interests and the same emptinesses.

  At last I told her it was time we were leaving. She pinked her mouth again, put the dark glasses on, snapped her purse shut and said, “Boy, I was really getting fed with these cruises.”

  I left her there and took a look and found the dockside empty. I went back and got her and took her down the gangplank. A gate in the wire fence had been left ajar. We went through and she stood in the shade of the customs shed while I phoned for a taxi. We had a five-minute wait.

  When we walked through the sunlight to the open door of the cab, she gave me an assured little smile and a hearty swinging thud with a healthy hip.

  Fourteen

  The driver, following my directions, drove out of the port area onto Route One and turned left. After four blocks, I said, “Driver, I’ve got some phone calls to make. Would you please pull into that shopping center ahead on your right and park as close as you can to the drugstore.”

  He found a slot at the very end of the herringbone pattern, the closest parking area to the drugstore. The cab was air-conditioned.

  I patted her on the leg and said, “Just hold still a while, honey. There are some things I have to take care of, a few little arrangements to make. For us. Shouldn’t be more than five minutes or so.”

  “Okay, honey,” she said.

  I reached, tapped the driver on the shoulder, put a five in his hand. “In case you get restless,” I said.

  “In the rain, five o’clock traffic, a fare has to make the airport in four minutes, I get restless, buddy. Otherwise, never.”

  I whispered in Del’s ear. “Try to be inconspicuous. Just in case.”

  “Anything you say, that I do.”

  They had expanded the shopping center by opening an entire new area behind it, on the side street. Some of the shops had merely doubled their area and taken another store front on the new side. The drugstore was one. Meyer and Merrimay were in the last booth in the row opposite the counter. She was back to blonde, the wig stowed away, the transparent film peeled from the flesh beside her eyes so that their contour was back to normal. Her mouth was redrawn to her own taste. And somewhere she had changed to a short-sleeved red and white striped blouse, a split red skirt. They both looked and acted very edgy.

  “How close could he park?” Meyer asked.

  “Smack dab in front.”

  “Good!”

  She stood up, showed us the dime in her outstretched hand. “It had better be the same girlish voice as before, don’t you think?”

  “Yes indeed,” Meyer said. She hurried off toward the booths. “There is a very dandy girl. She thought of a good way to get the confession to them. She kept her Vangie suit on, and her Vangie hair, and she stopped a kid a half block from the station and gave him a buck to hustle it to the homicide people.”

  “When did she phone back?”

  “Ten-thirty. She got right through to the top brass. They admitted right off it was a very interesting document, and a copy had already been rushed up to Broward Beach. Then she asked them if they’d like to lay their hands on the girl who wrote it. She’d changed her mind about killing herself. She was trying to get out of the area. She said she could hear them drooling. They tried to stall her, keep her on the line. She told them to have a prowl car waiting six blocks north of here, in the Howard Johnson parking lot, and hung up.”

  Merrimay came back to the booth and said, “We better take off, don’t you think?”

  We walked into the new area. She had her car, a little white Corvair hardtop. She handed me the keys. Meyer clambered into the back seat.

  As I backed out of the parking slot, I said, “Morbid curiosity, anyone?”

  “Might as well see the end of it,” Meyer said.

  I circled the block, drifted into the lot on the other side, went up an aisle two parked rows away, turned into an empty slot. Through the tilted back window of the cab we could see her pale head.

  The patrol car came in with a deft swiftness, stopped with a small yelp of tires directly behind the cab, blocking it there. The blinker light was revolving, bright even in sunlight. A pair in pale blue piled out with guns in hand. Shoppers stopped and gawked.

  The cab door popped open and Del sprang out and took off between the parked cars, running diagonally away from us. The short green skirt did not impede her, and she ran well on those long legs. Yelling at her to stop, the police ran after her. One followed her between the cars. The other sprinted down the aisle to circle her and cut her off. For a time our vision of the chase was obscured, and then we could see them catch her in an open space. She tried to flail them with the white purse and one snatched it away. She kicked at them but one got behind her and grabbed her around the middle, pinning her arms, and lifted her off her feet. The other one snapped a cuff onto her right wrist, snapped the other onto his own left wrist. Then she stood docile, head lowered. A crowd was gathering. The cop tugged at her and she came along with him, through the circle of people. She did not look up. The cab driver was standing with his hands on his hips. Another patrol car had arrived. I had not seen it appear. Other cops were talking to him and I saw him shrug and point at the drugstore. Two of them marched in with him, hoping no doubt to nail me in a phone booth.

  They were slipping her into the rear seat of the first patrol car. I said an exceptionally ugly word with an exceptionally ugly emphasis, and backed out and drove to the highway, and turned north, toward the broad boulevard which would take us over to Bahia Mar.

  After a block of silence I said to Merrimay in the bucket seat beside me, “Excuse the language.”

  “I think we may have said it simultaneously, Travis.”

  “All three of us,” Meyer said.

  “Merrimay,” I asked, “how come you just stood there when Terry was coming at you?”

  “I guess the cameras were rolling, and when you have all those extras in one scene, you don’t want to run into a lot of retakes. I guess it just wasn’t real to me, somehow. I was Vangie, and he had tried to kill me, and the instant he got over that fence, I was going to rip most of his face off with my fingernails.” She shifted and recrossed her legs. “I guess he was … out of his mind.”

  “Beyond his mind,” I said. “He was over into an area where his mind couldn’t work any more.”

  “Then … my impersonation did what you wanted.”

  “Beyond my wildest dreams, Miss Merrimay. All I wanted to do was get him so rattled he’d make mistakes. I didn’t hope for such a convenient arrest. They’ve got him now, and they ought to get a very interesting reaction when they let him read what the girl wrote. Meanwhile, I offer a steadying drink aboard the Flush.”

  “I’d like that,” she said. “I hope my next acting job gets that big a reaction.”

  Once we were settled aboard in the lounge, the air-conditioners laboring to bring it back down to a lower setting, drinks in hand, our gear transferred from Merrimay Lane’s car to our respective boats, Meyer said, “Something puzzles me, nought, nought, six and seven-eighths. That poisonous little chippy is going to keep mentioning your name at every opportunity. You are not entirely unknown to the local gestapo. And how do you expect to stay out of it?”

  “Out of what? Nobody saw her in my stateroom. Do you think anybody on that boat will admit they can be bribed to let people stay aboard until customs has folded its tent and gone home? Miss Merrimay Lane, a client of a dear friend, met us bot
h when customs had cleared us. We came back here. Who was the darkhaired girl who left off the confession and made the phone calls? I wouldn’t have any idea. Oh, how did the blonde get my name? Hell, boys, I struck up an acquaintance yesterday afternoon on Bay Street and talked her into a friendly drink. Wouldn’t you? We traded names. Mrs. Del Terry. But I didn’t continue the acquaintance aboard ship, not after I got a good look at the shoulders on that guy. Boys, believe me, I never heard of any Tami Western in my life, or any Vangie. What I think, she’s trying to smokescreen the issue. Maybe I look a little like the guy who met her at the boat and took off with her, and she’s covering for him by giving you my name. Con man! Are you out of your mind?”

  Merrimay put her empty glass down and stood up. “Dears, don’t say it hasn’t been interesting. But I have an afternoon date in Miami with some sweaty old leotards. I love your lovely money, and I love your generous little bonus. And it’s good for the glands to get terrified once in a while. But most of all I love the luck. I love the way you showed up and got Uncle Jake to take a better look at me. And if I have to tell lies for you, I’ll have the widest most innocent brown eyes you ever did see.” She patted Meyer and kissed him on the forehead. I walked her out onto the stern deck, to the little gangplank that crosses over to the pier.

  She put her hand lightly on my shoulder and studied me with intent brown eyes. “And you, McGee. If my luck starts to run bad, do you keep a fresh supply?”

  “At all times.”

  She tilted her mouth up against mine, quite briefly, her lips soft and leaving an impression of coolness. “I might be by for some someday.”

  I watched her walk briskly toward her car, the red skirt swinging against good legs. She did not glance back.

  • • •

  Meyer surrendered the belt. I put the twenty-six thousand in my watery vault. Later, in the news stories, I found the information I wanted, the address of Powell Daniels’ divorced wife and their twin fifteen-year-old sons. I wrapped up the money. I used a ruler to print the name and address. No handwriting expert in the world can make any identification of block letters, all caps, printed with a ruler. I sent it parcel post, special handling, from Miami’s main post office.

  And by then, of course, they had them all. Terry, Loyal, Berga, Macklin, the Barntree woman and the Stusslund woman, and they were searching the continent from Hudson Bay to Acapulco for Walter Griffin. Macklin said Griff shoved Vangie into the speeding path of the stolen car, and that she was so terrified she was only semiconscious. Macklin had been driving the car. Nogs had given the order.

  Drowners, Incorporated, was the name some reporter stuck on them. Despite all the frantic efforts of the tourist industry in the Broward Beach area to get it handled with the same emphasis as a parking ticket, the whole thing, as you will remember, was page one, prime time shrillness for day after day, with much editorializing about greed, callousness and the decay of moral standards.

  Before the grand jury returned the indictments in record time, I was summoned up to the women’s wing of the Broward Beach jail for a confrontation with the Stusslund woman. Though they’d had her only ten days, her discreet tan had faded to paste, and all the life had gone out of the hair of cream, so that it hung in dulled strands. She wore a baggy gray cotton dress without a belt and paper shower shoes. There were deep violet smudges under her eyes.

  The sweet little kiddy-voice was unchanged. “Why did you do that to me! Why?”

  “Do what? Buy you a drink in Nassau?”

  We had a large interested audience. “Honey, please! You tricked me into writing the confession. Tell them! My God, tell them how it was, darling! You made promises! You were going to take me to Jersey.”

  “Wish I could help out, girlie. But I don’t know what your angle is. It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have a twin brother, and the last time I ever saw you, until right now, was in the ship’s dining room. I don’t see how it can do you any good trying to bring me into this. Either you did what you wrote down or you didn’t.”

  “So it’s going to be like that, you bastard?”

  “It’s going to be what happened, that’s all.”

  First she made a pretty fair attempt to get her thumbnails into my eyes, but the matrons caught her and held her in restraint. As they took her out, that fatty little mouth opened into a round horror-hole. In a candy-sweet chant she said words and phrases that seemed to fume and smoke in the jail air, to give off a tangible aroma of rot. She ejected the last few over her shoulder as they dragged her out, and when the sound had faded, some very professional officers of the law took out handkerchiefs and mopped their faces.

  On the Fourth of July I got Meyer to take ten thousand of what I had found in Vangie’s kitchen ceiling. At first he would have no part of it, but then after frowning into space for half a minute, he suddenly agreed.

  The next day he showed me a copy of something he had pecked out on his typewriter, titled Meyer Manifesto. It was a stately mass of whereas, wherefore, and be it resolved, and after I had sifted out the meat of it, I discovered that he was putting the ten thousand into a four and a half per cent interest account, and that each year he would draw out four hundred fifty dollars and use it to finance the Meyer Festival on July Fourth and such subsequent days as the Festival might continue unabated. Invitations would be issued to convivial and compatible persons, both of the permanent group and the transient group, and it would be held upon a beach area to be designated each year, the only stipulation being that it would be a deserted beach accessible only by boat. The theme of the Festival would be Booze, Broads, Beer, Bonhomie, Bach, Blues and Rhythm, Bombast, Blarney and Behavioral Psychology.

  I guess he saw that I had to fake my pleasurable approval. Things were getting flat and wistfully sour.

  The smart money had it all figured out about the Drowners. The best odds were that the State would hold a cook-in for Terry and Loyal, and that Jane Adele Stusslund and Delilah Delberta Barntree would get life, as would Macklin. And Emil “Nogs” Berga would get twenty to life.

  Somehow, I couldn’t haul myself back up out of the sours. I kept slipping further in. When that happens to you, there is no continuity of self-awareness, no frequent appraisals … just a little flash of uncomfortable illumination from time to time, and you turn it off quickly because you don’t like the bright light.

  I would see my hand pouring a C-cup of Plymouth over ice, and I’d take a sip of it, spilling a little, and in wiping my chin feel that it had been a little too long between shaves.

  And then one morning I went beach-walking at three o’clock and looked up just in time to see one hell of a shooting star. It really whipped across there, fast, hot and bright. I admired it. An old chunk of iron, after noodling around out there for half a billion years, had come in hot and fast at eight miles a second, and had gladdened the mind of a dreary pygmy on a starlit beach.

  Suddenly I felt disgusted with myself. What the hell was the use of taking my retirement in segments whenever I could afford one if I was going to slop around and groan and finger the sad textures of my immortal soul? As opposed to the psychotic, the neurotic knows two and two make four, but he can’t stand it. I admired the patience of my friends for putting up with me the last few weeks. Vidge had soured me a little, and Vangie had dropped off the bridge and accelerated the process, and then I had really put the lid on it by trapping that dumb empty punchboard into a life sentence.

  Why be gloomy because the woman supply had run bad for a time? If there was any truth in averages, it had to start getting good. But it certainly wasn’t going to improve if I kept spooking around like a wounded violinist. The world was good, and it had been one hell of a shooting star.

  At ten o’clock that same morning, while entertaining myself with as many choruses as I could remember of the lass who had her ’ead tooked underneath ’er arm, and putting on a little topside paint at the same time, I glanced down at the dock and saw Meyer staring up at me in vast astonishm
ent.

  “It isn’t always exactly on key,” I said, “but it’s real loud.”

  “It is that. Yes indeed.”

  “Clamber aboard for a brew.”

  We drank them under the topside awning.

  Meyer said, “With a few more years of practice, boy, you could work up to real manic depression. I never know when you’re going to come bounding out of the slump. Or why.”

  “Decided I was spoiling my retirement all to hell.”

  “You weren’t doing mine any good.”

  “Meyer, let us round up a boatload of amiable clowns, jolly doxies, and old drinking friends and go bonk-chonkie bonk-chonkie up the Inland Waterway in this lush tub, visit old haunts, scare the sea birds, invent parlor games and outrage the shoredwellers. And, incidentally, regain our health, our clean young American good looks.”

  “McGee, the last time I came back I went to bed for a week.”

  “Let’s try for ten days.”

  I heard the distant ringing of my phone, cursed it, decided finally to answer it.

  A small forlorn voice I did not recognize said, “Travis?”