Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, “I could ask you to forget that scene on the rock.”

  “Well …” she gave a little shrug. “You scared hell out of me with your dark frown and your little gun. But I’m quite skilled at forgetting, as you’ve no doubt heard. But I’d like to know something; if you didn’t kill her husband, who did?”

  He looked down, thinking, scratching the sand between his feet with a stick. Why not tell her? You’re trying to restore her memory; she’s got to have something to work with. Yeah, but what if I trip some delayed-action memory key and it all comes back in the middle of the night? I wouldn’t know until the men in blue broke down my door. Well, you’ve got to take the risk. Stay with her during the day, watch the house at night….

  Edith broke into his thoughts. “She killed him, didn’t she?”

  Drew looked at her sharply. “How’d you know?”

  She gave a twisted, bitter smile. “Because I understand why a woman would do that.” She sobered. “Look, if you don’t trust me, nothing I say will change your mind. But I assure you I don’t confide in my husband.”

  He scratched in the sand a moment longer, then nodded his head slowly. “You’re right. She did it. We had an apartment together, as Mr. and Mrs. Gaylord. We used to go there in the afternoons when we were supposed to be working on publicity. Her husband followed her once. He pushed open the door and found her … well, she never wore clothes around the apartment. He had a gun: I don’t know whether he’d have used it or not, but he didn’t look exactly sane. I knocked it out of his hand and got him down on the floor. He was pretty well pacified when she stuck the gun over my shoulder and shot him between the eyes.”

  Edith gasped. “Deliberately? I mean was she cool about it?”

  Drew nodded. “She knew what she was doing; I think she let her husband follow her just so something like that would happen. She’d married the old man for his money, and he didn’t show any signs of fading away. He was also beginning to tighten up the purse strings. She was an impatient girl; she lived like someone on the lip of a volcano and she didn’t like to wait for anything.” He took a drag on his cigarette. He found that he could talk calmly as long as he used only the surface of his mind. “They tried us together. It was the juiciest love-nest murder in a decade, and the newspapers had a ball. I’d made several nude sketches of her—one in particular of her sitting on the bathroom stool with her chin in her hands. They published it, blacked out in the proper places to avoid obscenity charges. I’d also written poems, lurid anatomical odes which I told her to destroy after reading. She’d kept them in the apartment, and they found their way into the papers riddled with blanks where the naughty words had been deleted. The case had just about been milked of news value by the fourth day, when my wife had her kid. Back it jumped to page one. I was the villain, cheating on my wife while she lay on her bed of pain. Somehow the girl came out as the pawn of my evil genius. In court she put on a terrific show, telling the true story as though she’d been scared into lying, then finally blurting that I was the one who’d really fired the shot. It convinced the jury. They let her go and found me guilty of first-degree murder. I drew a death sentence.”

  “Death,” Edith gasped again. “Oh, but they didn’t execute you.”

  “No, my old man got a new lawyer to appeal the verdict. When it developed that both the girl and her lawyer had skipped the country two weeks after the trial, the appellate court smelled a rat. They couldn’t grant a new trial without new evidence, but my sentence was cut to life imprisonment.”

  She looked at him. “You aren’t there now.”

  “I escaped.” He smiled and pressed his cigarette into the sand. “Now you know. You can go to the police and tell them.”

  “No. I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  She looked out over the sea, her eyes moist. “I felt we had something in common the first time I saw you. Now I know what it is. We’ve both been locked up. We can both be locked up again. We’re living on borrowed time. I won’t steal yours, if you don’t steal mine.” She looked back at him. “I hope Seright isn’t your real name.”

  “No.”

  “Because my husband has … a remarkable talent for getting people under his thumb. If you have anything to hide—” She broke off suddenly and looked up the slope to his right. “Oh, damn him. He couldn’t leave me alone a single afternoon.”

  Drew followed the direction of her eyes and saw the tall grass move. There had been no wind. “Did you see who it was?”

  “That servile black mouse, Charles.” She stood up. “I’d better go in. By midnight Ian will know everything.”

  “Everything? How many minutes we skied, how far down the beach we walked, how far apart we sat. What else? He couldn’t hear us talking.”

  She sat on her heels a yard away. “If I get friendly with anyone, he sends them away. I never know where they go, they just … disappear.”

  “Okay, tomorrow you start being unfriendly. Call me Seright, in that supercilious tone you used on the rock. Treat me like you treated Doxie. Okay?”

  She frowned and lit a new cigarette. “I guess. I don’t know. He’s too smart for me. Too cruel … too—oh God, I hate him!”

  “Yet you married him. Why?”

  She hesitated, then leaned back against the tree. “I met him on Barbados when I was touring the islands with my aunt. We danced at one of the hotels, and he invited me to cruise down to Tobago on his yacht—with my aunt chaperoning, of course. So … there was a tropical moon, and Ian looked like a dashing aristocrat in his yachting cap. He asked me to marry him, and I accepted.”

  He sat up and stared at her. He had followed her trail through the islands from man to man. He had stood on the terrace of a breezy villa in Barbados and talked to the rum brewer who had kept her in a private cottage on the beach until Ian came along with a better deal.

  “You remember this?” he asked.

  She dropped her eyes. “Well … no. Ian told me.”

  “Your aunt verified it?”

  “She died a month after I was married.”

  “According to Ian.”

  She was silent a moment, then she spoke in a tense voice. “What are you suggesting?”

  Drew wasn’t sure he was doing it right, but he wanted to make her doubt the past her husband had contrived; he wanted to wipe away the false and make room for the truth.

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” he said gently. “It’s the only story you’ve got, so you’re stuck with it.”

  She sat up straight. “It’s true!”

  “It’s logical,” said Drew. “Better than if he’d said you floated ashore in a woven basket and he took you into his home and raised you as his daughter—”

  “You want to see my marriage license?”

  “What would it prove?”

  “It would prove that Edith Nila Nelson married Ian Barrington before a magistrate in Portsmouth, Tobago. And don’t say forgery, because the signatures are all there, mine and Ian’s and the old magistrate’s in a shaky hand, with a different pen….”

  Drew thought how easily Edith Nila Nelson could have been changed from Edith Nisstensson One erasure, a few changes. And then came an even colder thought: If Ian knew Edith’s previous name, he could trace her back to where a certain Drew Simmons fitted into the picture—

  He saw Edith walking away, her bare feet sending up little spurts of sand. “Hey! Come back here.”

  She stopped. “You don’t want to see the license?”

  “I was kidding. I believe you.”

  She came back, and he read the relief in her eyes. Those pitiful documents were her only tangible link to her past, and she believed in them with the fervor of a fanatic.

  “I have to go in anyway,” she said. “Would you … take me skiing tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll see you at ten,” she said, and turned away.

  He watched until she disappeared beneath
the manchineel, then he climbed up to the shack. The rats had gotten the impression he’d abandoned the shack for all time; at least fifty of the gray-furred rodents were romping through the rooms. He routed them with a tigolete and carried his belongings down from the fort. He swept up the rat-turds and kicked out a trio of soldier crabs that had invaded the house through the open door; he mashed a seven-inch centipede and shooed a pair of amorous chameleons off his bed. He took his gun apart, polished it with an oily piece of flannel, and returned it to its niche in the wall. He ate—bully beef and ship’s crackers—and walked out onto the point of land which stretched toward Petty-lay. He sat back against a guava tree and sipped rum until dusk fell. If he drank enough he might sleep….

  “ ‘Sieur,” said a voice behind him. “You wish to put wind in the lamp?”

  He whirled to see Leta standing in her old gray dress, holding the Coleman lantern. He realized with a mild surprise that he was glad to see her.

  “How the hell did you get here?”

  “Chaka, he brought me in the back. Nobody saw.”

  He reached for his crutch, but she jumped forward and held it for him. He read a wariness in her eyes.

  “Why did you come back?” he asked, walking back toward the shack.

  “I think of you alone, nobody to carry water and make you coffee in the morning. I think how the fishermen cheat you when you buy fish and how you do not know to cook on the charcoal….” She paused. “You wish me not to stay?”

  He walked into the shack and set the lantern on the table, pumped up the air tank, filled the little cup with methylated spirits, and lit it.

  “Where would you sleep?”

  “I have fixed a bed of grass in the room between yours and the big room.”

  He looked at her in the faint glow of the spirit flame. Only the whites of her eyes showed clearly; the rest of her blended with shadow. She would be in the way at times, but her presence would lull Ian’s suspicions, and she would help keep his own mind off Edith.

  “I’d like you to stay,” he said. “But won’t you be afraid at night?”

  “Ah no, you keep me safe.”

  “You didn’t used to think so.”

  “That was before you bash Doxie.”

  He frowned at her. “Who told you that?”

  “Everyone knows, everyone talks how my white mister knock down the redman with he crutch. Steel band made a song, tonight they play in the street and sing how Doxie coming for to throw you off and you shut his eyes for him. And how the master goes off and leaves you to rule his island. So now I have no fear, I know that no man can rule you.”

  He was embarrassed by the mist of hero-worship he saw in her eyes. He felt that he could handle a fer-de-lance with his bare hands and she would gaze on benevolently, sure that her white mister knew what he was doing.

  He turned up the lantern and hung it on the hook above the table. “Fix us a couple of drinks.”

  She wore a faint white beginning of a smile as she turned and walked to the closet. He thought: She didn’t ask why I’m here; she doesn’t care. She knows only that rum is warm in the belly and after it comes love.

  Sitting across from her he thought: She’s a simple savage, like Edith ten years ago. The thought brought a sudden, ruttish mood. He reached under the table and pinched her thigh. “Finish your drink.”

  He rose and turned out the lantern, then went into the bedroom. He kicked off his shorts, lit a cigarette, and lay down. The thick stubby bedposts made him feel as though he lay on the belly of a dead elephant. He heard Leta in the next room, making her private, feminine preparations for love. She treated his bedroom as a private preserve, coming in only to clean, serve coffee, and make love.

  She walked in and stood by the bed holding the kerosene lamp. The yellow light lent a golden sheen to her naked body, highlighting the underside of her breasts and the faint bulge of her belly, casting a furry shadow down her thighs.

  “You wish the light?” she asked.

  He frowned, then he remembered that Edith’s light had stayed on during Ian’s visit. Of course, Ian wanted light, and Leta had learned from him.

  “No. Get in bed.”

  Poof! And then her warm body was beside him, pressing insistently. He put his face in the hollow of her neck and inhaled slowly. She smelled different from Edith; Leta’s was a heavy smell, not at all unpleasant. It hit his nerve endings like a thick soft blanket. If smells could be keyed to music, hers would have been a deep throbbing bass note, slightly muffled; Edith’s was higher, sharper….

  “Dudu …” Leta’s breathing was loud; she seized him with her hand and began a quick, impatient massage. Her leg slid across his and the hinge of her thighs opened up. A velvetly warmth moved against his hip. The magic of her West Indian pelvis allowed a boneless, sinuous movement. A warm, wet mouth searched desperately.

  “Dudu, make love …”

  There could be no delay once you’d set the machine in motion. She was Edith all over again. He stretched out his arm and laid his cigarette on the ashtray. She was still moving when he turned back to her; he seized her hips and dug his thumbs deep into the flesh of her stomach, but he couldn’t stop her movement. He accepted the rhythm and fit himself into the mechanism, feeling the circling arms and the legs which locked together in the small of his back like a tight steel clamp. He struggled to hold back while she fought to steal it all, charging forth to seize her trophy, then retreating, then charging forth again and again, each thrust more savage until it was over and there was nothing left of her. As he rose, her arms slid from his neck like two lengths of rope. They flopped on the sheet and lay lifeless on each side of her body, palms up and fingers half-closed.

  He rolled to the edge of the bed, picked up his burning cigarette, and used it to light another. He hopped to the window and felt the cool night breeze on his sweat-damp body. The moon, not yet risen, had sent a faint sheen ahead of it into the eastern sky. The mountains formed a jagged black pattern against it, like the jawbone of a wolf with several teeth broken.

  He looked at the big house through its screen of foliage. A white panel of light stretched out across the beach, rooted in Edith’s bedroom. Perhaps she was reading in bed, lying naked beneath the sheet. He pictured himself walking into her room, jerking off the sheet, lifting the gun, and—

  I could kill her now, he thought. I could forget about restoring her memory and resurrecting that old, dead Drew Simmons; I could just kill her and start again.

  But he’d give it more time. He was glad Leta had come; she absorbed the urge which Edith awakened. The craving was gone … no, just pushed into the back of his mind. He sensed its presence and knew it would come rushing back to fill the hollowed-out cavity of passion …

  NINE

  Drew picked up a fragment of coral and gave it an underhanded toss over her balcony. He heard it tic against her window and then clatter on the tile floor. A minute later she appeared at the wrought iron railing tugging at the belt of her blue dressing gown. She squinted against the rising sun.

  “Seright. You’re about three hours early.”

  Her voice sounded sullen and truculent. She had always awakened with a defensive rancor at the world.

  “Yes,” agreed Drew. “How about breakfast?”

  A breeze whipped the gown away from her legs, revealing pink pajama shorts bloused around her thighs. She drew it together at her knees and frowned irritably.

  “I always eat alone here on the balcony.”

  “How do you know, always?”

  Her jaw set, and for a moment he thought she would turn him down. Then she shrugged, “Tell Meline to fix another serving. I’m going to shower.”

  The angular cook pinched her gray lips together when Drew said he would breakfast with the madame. He knew that the news would reach Ian and probably put the man on his guard. But it couldn’t be helped; he had awakened to feel the crushing pressure of time, an awareness that yesterday had been a blank and that only five days r
emained. His only chance was to be constantly at her side, dragging her past before her.

  He stepped through the upstairs door and heard the susurration of a shower from behind a mahogany door at the north end of the building. The rest of the upper floor formed a single vast room with three sets of French doors opening onto an encircling balcony. Functional groupings of furniture divided the room roughly into three sections: On the east stood a complex of sofa, overstuffed chair, marble coffee table and mahogany bookcase. On the west, a sewing machine dominated a long table littered with scraps of material, tissue patterns, and half-finished articles of clothing. He pondered this un-Edithlike hobby corner for a moment, then walked over to inspect the sleeping section. Besides the double bed, between a nightstand and a wardrobe, stood a six-foot tall, three-panel mirror. It was almost a twin of the one which had taken up a third of the living room in their apartment. But he saw that this one had been made in England; the other had come from Cedar Rapids and Rochester, via her husband’s store.

  Making a mental note to ask where she’d acquired her taste for mirrors, he regarded his multiple image with a faint distaste. His faded denim shirt ended at the elbow in a raveled fringe; his abbreviated dungarees hung limp and whitened from the sun and the sea. His crutch was a pale aluminum finger extending from his wrist to the floor; the spiral of tape around his leg was turning gray. Patches of black stubble grew on his jaws and chin where he had been unable to shave over his cuts. His cropped hair formed tufted clumps on his skull. Leta, you’ll never make it as a barber….

  The hiss of the shower ended; a moment later he heard the muffled tinkle of bottles. He glanced in the mirror and saw her back through the four-inch gap in the door. She sat at a dressing table touching up her copper hair with deft upward strokes of her fingers. He watched her slide the gown off her shoulder and begin applying deodorant to her armpit.

  “That’ll just wash off when you ski,” he said.

  She stiffened, then drew the gown back over her shoulder. “Will you please close the door?”