“I didn’t make any public statement.” He went over to the phone. He looked at his watch. “I want to see if I can get Grumby at home by now.”
“Better let me place the call for you. Knowing where you are would be worth money to the girl on the switchboard.”
He looked up the number. Charla placed the call. When she had Grumby on the line, she handed the phone to Kirby.
“Interesting press conference you held, Mr. Grumby.”
“Ah, Winter! You must understand that we have to protect ourselves.”
“Then you’ll understand my statement when I make it.”
“I don’t think I follow.”
“All I can say is that I was an underling. Uncle Omar certainly didn’t leave me anything. All I can say is that O.K. Devices was some sort of tricky corporate thing I never quite understood. It never made sense to me, using all that money to buy property and securities abroad and then putting the deeds and certificates and a lot of cash into Swiss banks in your name and the names of your associates. But I did it because I was paid to do it. And I can tell them that Miss Farnham is baffled too, because she burned the records at your request.”
There was a long silence. In a rather rusty voice, Grumby asked, “What is the purpose of all this, Mr. Winter?”
“I am going to try to avoid making any statement at all.”
“A statement like that—fictitious one might destroy us all.”
“In the absence of any documentation, it could get sticky for everybody. I’m just suggesting that you don’t try to get any cuter.”
“We may have seriously underestimated you, Mr. Winter.”
“You can’t retract the statement. But you can avoid making any more. I have all the trouble I need right now.” He hung up.
Charla looked at him approvingly. “You can be quite a serpent.”
“At heart I’m a ninny.”
“It’s an effective disguise. Omar did look like such a sweet, baffled old man. We should have assumed you’d take after him.”
The phone rang and she answered it. “Who? Oh, yes, of course. What is that? Oh, no, my dear. My brother and I hardly know the young man. Seen with him? You must be mistaken. Not that I would mind, you understand. It’s really quite exciting being in the same hotel, actually. Even the same floor, I understand. He must be a very interesting chap. All that money. My word! I’m sorry my brother and I have to leave this evening. It would be amusing to stay here and watch the fun. No, of course not. You’re very welcome.”
She hung up. “A bright girl, that one. Playing percentages, bribing the help, I imagine. Possibly the bellhops who carried you upstairs last night. I tried to stay well out of it, but those boys are quite observant. Well, darling, you might as well bring your suitcases in here and we’ll leave it up to Joseph to plan a good way to get you out of here tonight and onto the Glorianna. She’ll be refueled by now. And it’s just what you need, you know. The dramatic, mysterious disappearance.”
“That’s all I need.”
“We’ll do our bargaining at sea, Kirby.”
“Will we?”
“Dear boy, give me credit for some intelligence. If you weren’t interested in making a deal, you wouldn’t be hanging about, would you?”
“I guess not. I—uh—think I’ll shower and change.”
“Take your time, dear. We won’t be out of this for hours and hours. Want your back scrubbed?”
“No thanks.”
“Don’t look so severe. Any other little service you can think of?”
“Not right now. I’ll let you know.”
“I’m sure you will, you lovely serpent.”
When he was back in his room with the door bolted, he went and listened at the corridor door. He could hear a murmur of voices in the hall, and some laughter. He walked back and forth, biting his lip, smacking his fist into his palm. He remembered her words, “a place where screaming wouldn’t matter.” It made him feel sweaty and chilled.
At seven-thirty he stood on the exposed landing with the green eye looking out of the porthole in the bright door at him, shadowed by the dusk.
“It’s me,” he said in a squeaky, muffled, breathless voice. “Me!”
Betsy opened the door and let him in. “Dear Lord,” she said softly. “Anybody follow you here? No, I guess they wouldn’t.”
He undid the jacket and belt of the hotel uniform and took the hotel pillow out. He pulled the wads of tissue out of his cheeks. He collapsed into a chair and said, “They sent up a fat one.”
“A fat what?”
“A fat waiter. I called from the honeymooner’s room.”
“From the whose room?”
“I haven’t hit anybody since I was thirteen years old. He put the tray down and turned around and—Pow. I left a fifty-dollar bill in his hand. Then I walked right through all of them.”
“All of who?”
“Why would they have uniforms this color? Salmon and emerald?”
“Kirby, I heard all about you on television, on the six o’clock news, and I could guess that the thundering herd is after you, but really, you’d better start at the beginning. Unless you start somewhere near the beginning, I am going to all of a sudden start screaming.”
“She said something about screaming, and it was very nasty.”
“Kirby!”
“All right. All right.” And he told her. There was, for once, no need for in-process editing. She listened carefully, thoughtfully.
“So she finally showed her teeth, did she?”
“My God, the last place I ever want to be is on that yacht. And it’s a damn strain to talk to somebody and not really know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you are a sweet lamb and I think you did very well. But where are we? Now she thinks you know what it is she’s after. But you have no idea what it is?”
“Absolutely none.”
“But now she knows she’s either got to be awfully damn cute to get it away from you, or awfully rough, or pay your full price, or come in as a partner. What does it sound like, whatever it is?”
“All I can think of, I swear, is some sort of an invention.”
She nodded gravely. “That’s where I’ve been going too. Years and years ago, he did try to invent things. And suddenly he became rich and powerful. He got an edge, a gimmick, something that works. I think that Charla and Joseph reasoned it all out by inference. Maybe they don’t even know exactly what it is. But they could guess it could be written in his personal papers.”
“And they think I know exactly what it is.”
“Maybe it would be awfully useful right about now if you could lay your hands on it, Kirby.”
He closed his eyes. “You know, I’m just about whipped. Everybody in the world thinks I’ve got twenty-seven million dollars squirreled away and they all want it. Just six people know I gave it all away. You, me, Wilma, Wintermore, Charla and Joseph. And I gave Charla the idea I’d kept some. But they want something else, and I don’t know what it is, and you don’t, and you seem to think they don’t either.”
“Leaves Wilma, doesn’t it?”
He opened his eyes. “Could she know?”
“Maybe she could know without knowing she knows. Maybe she could have it without knowing she has it.”
“Guess I better phone her.”
He phoned Wilma. A man answered. He had a precise, high-pitched voice. “Who wishes to speak to her, please?”
He hesitated. Betsy was listening too. She nodded. “Kirby Winter.”
“You wouldn’t mind proving you’re Mr. Winter?”
“How do you expect me to—”
“Just a moment, please. I must get the questions she wrote down. You can prove you are Mr. Winter by answering them correctly.” He was gone for twenty seconds. “Are you there? Good. First, please give me the name of the man you were dealing with at the time of your uncle’s death.”
“Uh—Manuel Hernandez y Gomez.”
�
�And the name of the man in Rangoon in December?”
“Oh. Dr. Na Dan Boala.”
“Thank you, Mr. Winter. I suggested this precaution to my sister. She was in such a state of horrible emotional shock, she wasn’t thinking with—her customary precision. I am Roger Farnham. She hoped you might call. Now, thank God, I shall be able to leave also. The harassment is sickening, as I guess you must have learned by this time. I must say, it is a grim reward for my sister’s years of loyal faithful service to your uncle.”
“I didn’t have anything to—”
“I realize that, of course. And there is much about this I can’t pretend to understand, sir. Wilma will tell me very little. But I do know, of course, she is—uh—incapable of hanky-panky.”
“Yes. Of course.”
“I’ll doubtless be followed when I leave here, but I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing I won’t be leading them to Wilma. Do you know that the reporters actually badgered her into hysterics?”
“That’s too bad.”
“It took considerable guile to get her hidden safely away.”
“I can imagine.”
“And it would be a shame if you led the world to her hiding place.”
“I’ll certainly try not to.”
“She’s too delicate for this sort of thing. I’m leaving it up to you to do the right thing, and find some way out of this for her. Someone should be sued for the filthy hints they put in that interview.”
“I don’t think they’ll be doing any more hinting.”
“The damage is done, apparently. At any rate, sir, I have a home, a family and a profession to return to. Please tell her I cannot be expected to damage my own life in some vain attempt to assist her.”
“Where is she?”
“You will be careful about contacting her? She does want to see you.”
“I’ll be very careful, Mr. Farnham.”
“I smuggled her to the house of one of my associates, Mr. Winter. He is on a sabbatical leave in France, and he left the key with me. Unfortunately the phone is disconnected. Have you a pencil? Two-ten Sunset Way, Hallandale. It has considerable privacy due to the plantings Professor Wellerly arranged with that in mind. A small pink house. She has food and water, and she should be quite safe there, from the rabble and the curiosity seekers. But she is upset, naturally. Give a long ring then a short and then a long, and she will know it is either you or me, sir. She will open the door to no one else. And I believe I am right in saying we are both depending on you to do something to clear up this unfortunate situation.”
“Thank you.”
“Not at all, sir. It’s my duty to my sister. Good evening.”
“Well now!” Betsy said as he hung up. “How cozy you’ll be! In your wittle pink housey.”
“So how do I get there?”
“I can’t say that I really care how you get to Hallandale, friend.”
“In this uniform?”
“Bernie Sabbith is almost your size, and there is a whole closet loaded with stuff. Be his guest.”
“She wouldn’t think of letting me stay in that house with her.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I mean it. She’s a very—she’s sort of an odd girl. Uh—very proper.”
“Even under emergency conditions like this?”
“I wouldn’t want to risk it. Really, it would be a terrible risk for me to leave here. Any cab driver might recognize me.”
“Well, my friend, you can’t stay here. I’m a very odd girl too.”
“Is it or is it not important to you to help me?”
“Indeed it is, but there are some kinds of help—”
“I was thinking, Betsy, I could write a note to her telling her to trust you. You know, she really doesn’t think much of my judgment. Then you could go out there and stay there with her tonight and talk the whole thing out and maybe you and she can figure out what it is that Charla is after. I can reduce the risks by staying here alone. Then you can come back tomorrow and if you’ve learned anything we’ll know what to do, and if you haven’t, then we can try to figure out the next step.”
At first Betsy was reluctant, but at last she agreed the idea had some merit. She made drinks while he wrote the note. Then, having laid in some stores during the day, she cooked ham and eggs in the tiny kitchen corner. Just before she left, a little before nine, she showed him where the television set was. She crawled on her hands and knees to the intricate headboard of the enormous bed, flipped the switch that moved a ceiling panel aside exposing the picture tube built into the ceiling. The other controls were next to the switch.
“If Charla locates the place, ask her to watch TV with you, Kirby.”
“If I can arrange my life properly, I’ll never see that woman again.”
“What’s the matter. Scared of her?”
“Totally.”
Betsy gave him a wan smile. “Frankly, so am I.”
Seven
AFTER CHECKING AGAIN to be certain the door was locked, and after a lengthy hunt for the final elusive light switch, Kirby Winter crawled to the middle of the giant bed. There was a troublesome fragrance of Betsy about the pillow. It was a warm night, with a murmurous traffic sound, a ripped-silk sound of far off jets, the adenoidal honk of boat traffic. The ten-o’clock news had displayed other pictures of him, still shots, grinning like an insurance salesman. And there was one picture of Wilma Farnham, looking severe. The newscast made them sound like the master criminals of the century. Informed sources believed that Winter and the Farnham woman had already fled the country. They had both made mysterious disappearances under the very noses of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. One could see them chummed up on Air France, snickering, tickling, getting bagged on champagne, heading for that stashed fortune and a simple life of servants, castles, jewels, furs and tireless lechery.
He wondered about Betsy and Wilma. By now they would be deep in all their long talking, and he blushed to think of Wilma, distrait, uttering all her shy girlish confidences. “And all the time he really was terrified of women. You should have seen him run from me in absolute horror.”
He was physically exhausted, but he could not slow his mind down. He knew he would not sleep, but suddenly he was down in the jungly world of nightmare. Wilma, giggling, opened zipper compartments in long cool pale thighs to show him how solidly stuffed they were with thousand-dollar bills. Charla had little gold scissors, and she smirked and cooed as she cut the ears from little pink rabbits which screamed every time. She was bare and golden, oiled and steaming, and when she turned he saw the vulgar placement of the little tatoo which read “Ninny.” He walked into the scene in the little gold telescope and found Uncle Omar there, off to one side, chuckling. Uncle Omar thrust a deck of cards toward him and told him to take any card, but when he took the card it was warm and heavy and moving, and suddenly he was back in an old car in a heavy rain of long ago, and he found the dream blending into a reality of some warm, solid, busy, rubbery creature burrowing against him, snuffling and giggling and snorting, raking him with small claws. In a few moments of night fright, he tried to dislodge it, thrust it away from him, but the very act of clutching at it, the agile roundnesses under his hands, turned fright into a sweet aggression, his mind—standing aside—awed, wringing its hands, finding no way to intercede.
In a vague and troubled way, as he became aware of the helpless inevitability of it, he felt all the responsibilities of literary allusion, of equating it with fireworks, ocean surf, earthquakes or planetary phenomena. At the same time he was remotely, fretfully concerned with identity, wondering if it were Charla, Betsy, Wilma—but soon realizing that particular problem was, as of the moment, entirely academic. He just did not have time to give a damn.
So it transpired without benefit of analogy, or time to create one, aside from the hurried thought it was rather like some sort of absurd, stylized conflict, like a sword fight to music where you duck in time and in relation to the imposed necessi
ties of tempo. As the fight was both won and lost, in a white blindness, he sensed, from a long way off, her vast tensions, some spaced yippings, then a buttery melting of the creature quelled.
And then there was a head beside him, wedged into his neck, tickling him, and a breath making long slow hot whooshings against his throat, and a hand that came up to idly roam his indifferent cheek.
“Hoooo—boy!” she whispered. “Hooooo, Bernie! Oh, you the doll of all times. The livin’ most.”
“Um,” he said, pleased that his heart had decided not to hammer its way out of his chest.
“Suh-prize, suh-prize, huh, sweetie? Nice suh-prize?”
“Um.”
“Couldn’t make the damn key work for hell. Figured on you changed the lock, and I would truly kill you dead, you’d done that to Bonny Lee one time. Then it worked and I come a-mousing in, felt the bed, looking for two pair of feet. I find two pair, Bernie-boy, there be the gawddamnedest fracas around here you heard ever.”
“Uh.”
“You doan talk much to a gal missed you so bad, honey. Don’t you get the idea now I could be hustling you for any piece of that TV crud, on account of you just use them sick-looking broads you brang down here like always. I come here because you’re just the most there is anywhere, and I love you something terrible, and it was real wild and nice, hey now?”
“Um.”
She ran her fingertips across his upper lip. “Hey! You gone and shaved it off! Now what in the world you look like, I wonder.”
She scrambled away from him. She fumbled with the headboard control panel for a few seconds and then a bright overhead spot blinded him. He shut his eyes tightly, opened them a little bit and squinted at the girl.
She was kneeling, staring down at him, a deeply browned leggy girl. Her brown eyes were huge and round. Her mouth was shaped into a round shocked circle. She had big round brown breasts with a startling white stripe across them. She had a flat tummy, smooth muscles of a swimmer, and under a tight tangled cap of white curls, a lovely, delicate, angelic face, bronzed and innocent.
“Who you, you tow-head son of a bitch!” she yelled. “What kinda smart-ass trick you pulling anyways? I’m gonna rip the face right offen you!” Her fingers curled dangerously.
The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything Page 9