Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

  “Well now, that’s better, Steve.”

  “And now for the favor. How long do you figure you’ll be sitting in the lounge with Mrs. Carrington?”

  “I really don’t know,” he said soberly.

  “She may need you with her. She looks pretty sick.”

  “I’ll stay with her, of course.”

  “Can you tell me for how long?”

  Jacob Quirk reached into his vest and produced an ancient timepiece. He examined it diligently. Every movement, every small gesture was studied. Somebody must have told Jacob to relax at all times. Somebody must have slowed him up, a long time ago. He adjusted his glasses, as though the numbers on the watch dial were too small to read.

  “It’s getting quite late,” he said. “I usually am in bed by this time back home. But I must say I’m enjoying Mrs. Carrington’s company. An intelligent woman. And she is quite familiar with—”

  “Can you stand her company for a while?”

  “Can I?” he asked himself, surprising himself with the question. “I suppose I can.”

  “I need our stateroom,” I explained.

  “Need it?”

  “For a long stretch.” I winked.

  “How interesting,” said Jacob L. Quirk. “At this hour?”

  “Maybe I’d better draw you a diagram,” I said. This boy was really fruit for the kindergarten. Or was he playing me for the laughs? The face of Jacob L. Quirk was as blank as a Boy Scout’s in a bordello. He was about fifty years old and had the kisser of a flabby bulldog, complete with folds and wrinkles. But his eyes were telling me that I didn’t make sense.

  “A diagram?” he asked curiously.

  “Look, Jake. I’m inviting a woman into our cabin, see? I’m going to play games with her. It might even wind up in a wrestling match. She wants me to explain the birds and bees to her. We were discussing the subject on the other side of the bar. I was telling her my personal theories about the art. I was explaining some of the lesser Hindu tricks. And she wants me to demonstrate. It takes time. It needs solitude. The way I see it, my lady friend wouldn’t relish the idea of having a third party in the stateroom when I show her all the holds I know. Do you get it now? Or shall I break it down into four-letter words?”

  Jacob listened to me soberly, hearing me out all the way down the line. His furrowed brow told me that he would work the thing out in his brain sooner or later. He continued to stare at me in a friendly way, a fatherly way. He sucked at his lower lip and shook his head.

  “Well, now,” he meditated. “Well, of course, of course.”

  “Two hours,” I said. “Better synchronize our watches.”

  “What? Oh? By all means.” He chuckled. “Two hours then.”

  “And thanks for your cooperation, Jacob.”

  “Nothing at all,” he said, as though it was nothing at all. “Simply leave the light on in the cabin when you are—ah—ready to leave. I’ll be strolling on the promenade deck and will look at our window from time to time. I’ll venture inside only when our light is on. How is that? Is that what you want? Well, fine. Fine.”

  CHAPTER 2

  I circled the room slowly, threading my way around the wall on the way back to Jane. The little dramas at the tables had shot into second gear, some of them on their way to a resolution. The businessmen were now pawing the matrons, making coy passes while slobbering their drinks and singing off-key barroom ballads, semi-bawdy in the lyrics and weird in the harmony department. One of the old dolls gazed at the world through slitted eyes, her cheeks high with genuine color, the prelude to an upchuck or a quick search for thrills in her ardent Babbitt’s cabin. The officers at the bar still tipped their glasses, joined by several babes of indeterminate ages, who giggled and gasped at the quick flow of badinage. The mother and daughter combine had split up, finally. The mother sat beyond the bar, in the lounge, chatting gaily with a character who might have hopped out of a Wodehouse novel, an old jerk with a walrus mustache and a sleepy smile. The daughter had abandoned her tatting and now stood out beyond the lobby, sniffing the salty air and cocking her head at the conversation piece at her side, a youngish traveler who sucked and blew at a large pipe.

  I was crossing the bar when somebody tapped my elbow.

  It was Strom. He blinked at me apologetically. “Beg your pardon, mister. Are you Conacher?”

  “In the flesh.”

  “A good guess,” he said, more to himself than me. “I thought I remembered your face. Aren’t you the private investigator who did so well on the Mary Ray case, not too long ago?”

  “In person. But I didn’t know you studied the police reports, Strom.”

  “Ah. You know my name?”

  “I know your face. You, too, have a well-publicized puss, my friend. Much more famous than poor little me.”

  “A compliment.” Strom smiled. He had a peculiar tic on the right side of his nose, the nostril. He breathed more out of one side, as though he might be sniffing a bad smell. In the quick move of his nostril, he resembled a small and snorting horse. But it was all over, always before his next line. “Mr. Garel thought he recognized you, Conacher. He wants me to invite you over to his table for a drink.”

  I turned my head to look back at Garel. He was smiling at me, nodding, as cordial as a cat about to dine on a few birds.

  “Tell Mr. Garel I’m busy now, Strom. I’ll take a raincheck on his drink.”

  “I couldn’t do that.” The smile still creased his nondescript pan. The nostril flared. He was tightening now, tensing with a new emotion, something I had never seen before. “You wouldn’t want me to disappoint Mr. Garel?”

  “I don’t mind. Mr. Garel can wait.”

  “Ah? But Mr. Garel isn’t in the habit of waiting.”

  “Mr. Garel should learn new habits.”

  “Not on this trip, Conacher.”

  He was almost exactly my size, a few inches taller maybe, but the same in the beam and underpinnings. In the tight little moment he had created, a strange sense of danger pricked at my scalp. Out of the past, out of the record of this man’s mayhem, the awful color of his temper rose up and made my gut burn. He was as mild as a schoolteacher talking to a recalcitrant pupil. He neither fretted nor fumed. Yet his skinny hand had not lifted itself from my sleeve and I could feel the steel grip of his bony fingers through my jacket; holding my arm with a stony purpose. And through it all, he was smiling at me still. He was telling me with his gentle manner that I was reserving a prize spot for myself on his black list. He was warning me to toe the line and be a good boy. It was the hidden threat of his underplayed histrionics that steamed me and warmed my collar.

  I slapped his arm away.

  “Behave, Strom,” I said quietly. “And tell Mr. Garel he’ll see me later—when I’m in the mood.”

  “You are a cute little crud,” Strom said, still smiling. “You are very cute, indeed, Conacher.”

  “Stuff it,” I said, and walked away from him.

  I could see him behind me, in the mirror of the bar, the simpering grin still plastered on his lean jaw, his arm upraised in the position it had held before I slapped it. Then he lifted it and used it to light a cigarette. He turned abruptly and marched back to his master’s table. Garel shrugged and stared my way, but that was all I saw of him. I rounded the bar and returned to Jane.

  “Slowpoke,” she said.

  “Arrangements,” I told her. “My little roommate must still believe in the birds and the bees.”

  “Was he the one at the bar?”

  “He was not. The one at the bar we can live without.”

  “He looked familiar.”

  “He was familiar,” I said. “You’ve probably seen his wrinkled kisser in the papers, on page one, maybe ten years ago. His name is Strom and he’s a gunsel for the great Garel, who is also a passenger on this tub. What a
list of fellow travelers! With Garel on board, this boat should be headed for an old-fashioned piracy cruise. I wonder what he wants down in Puerto Rico.”

  Jane turned to level her eyes at him. She shivered and went a few degrees off her course when she saw him. “Garel?” she whispered. “Wasn’t he tied up with the dope traffic at one time?”

  “You know your headlines, Jane.” I patted her hand and maneuvered my body so that it blocked her view of him. “Forget about the heel, baby. He’s not in our league. I’ll keep him away from you all the way down.”

  I was bending over her and she smiled her thanks at me. She blew me an invisible kiss and reached up for my hand and dragged me down alongside her. The wind had whipped up a bounce and roll in the sea, more extreme than an hour ago, so that the glasses slid and slipped on the tabletop. The waiters had set up the rim to prevent breakage. But there was no rim on the cushioned seat against which we rocked. Jane bumped and ground her hip into me. Every once in a while somebody would drop a glass and the tinkling crash set off a howl of laughter from the assembled drunks and lushes around and about us.

  “One more?” I asked her. “One more Aquavit?”

  “Just one,” Jane whispered. She took a small nip at my ear when she gave me her drunken confidence. “You fix everything with your cabin mate, Stevie?”

  “Fixed.”

  “Practical little man,” she cooed. “I love a man with a mind. You’ll be a big success in the shoe business.”

  I got her the final drink and she dawdled over it. She was talking loose and free now, all the ice gone out of her, all the snobbishness and upper-class frigidity lost under the spell of the paralyzing drink. Was she putting on an act? The sight of her alongside me sent shivers of anticipation goosing up and down my shanks. She would be a handsome handful in bed. Too easy? Out of character? She was violating my picture of her. She was giving the lie to the things I knew about her.

  You can’t make book on any woman. Out of my past experience with the weaker sex, I had my own private code of rules and regulations neatly filed in the hidden corners of my brain, but subject to change at a minute’s notice. A man works at his trade and meets the clients and builds his judgments out of his experience with them. And in my trade, women were an important branch of study. I had worked with them and against them and among them and alongside them. I had fought them and bought them and sought them. I had sought them because seeking was my forte, as the frogs put it. A skip-trace expert learns to be diligent and patient while on the trail of the purposely missing person. A skip-tracer is a beagle who sniffs and strains to make the locate on a particularly elusive subject. Most of my business took place across the desk in my mouse-nest office on Forty-Fifth Street in New York City. I hunted deadbeats and phonies for a wide variety of clients, from department stores to credit houses. My reputation was better than good for a long time, but it hit the higher-rate bracket when I was lucky enough to track down a little louse named Mark Trupp, a character who had grabbed himself a satchelful of loot and kept the police scratching their noggins for over a year. I made the locate on Mark Trupp after an involved routine with an assortment of mad people. And most of them were women, dolls of all types who had been favored by the wily Trupp on his erratic jaunt through three countries and almost a quarter of a million bucks belonging to his boss. After that, the big cases broke my way. I was called in on all sorts of stuff, but in every job, it was the broads who loused me up.

  The way Jane Yorke was lousing me up right now.

  I grabbed her elbow and edged her carefully out of the bar. She was as steady on her gams as an eel out of water, slipping and sliding with the bouncing of the boat as we made our way out to the promenade deck. She hugged me tight, using me as a crutch. She pivoted me and pulled me to the rail, using her hip to guide me and then rubbing me to a standstill to watch the water slap and splash against the hull. The salt air bit and stung. It was doing me good, sobering me and steadying me. But Jane was lost to reality, her eyes closed as I piloted her up forward and through the door that led to my cabin.

  Inside, she leaned into me and paralyzed me with her first burst of affection. She kissed me, holding me to the wall so that the action of the boat froze us there. She fell against me and moved away, using her terrific body as a weapon. In the darkness, the scene blossomed into a nightmare. She kissed with skill and purpose. She stung her tongue into me and melted her mouth into mine. There was the bittersweet taste of the Aquavit on her lips. It was an effort to break away.

  “We’ll lacerate ourselves this way,” I said.

  Jane said nothing, letting me ease her away from the wall. The sharp ends of her nails bit into me as she clutched my arm and tensed her body against the zany motion of the boat. Across the stateroom and into the berth was a distance of six feet or so. But it took a long time to make it. It took stumbling and righting ourselves over and over again, each effort slowed by the urgency of her passion. She was hell-bent for a good time, and when we finally made the bed, she lay against me, her hand still in mine, her body soft and willing alongside me, so close that I could feel the beat of her heart against my chest.

  Then she was sobbing, gently.

  “Changed your mind?” I asked.

  “Don’t move, Steve,” she said. “Don’t say anything.”

  “Ask me something easy, baby.”

  “Please, please,” she begged. “Not yet.”

  “What are we waiting for? A fanfare?”

  “You’re laughing at me, Steve.”

  “The situation is loaded with laughs,” I commented. “Can I help it if I have a sense of humor? What do you want me to do now? Start to knit a doily?”

  “I want to talk to you,” she sobbed. She wasn’t kidding. She wasn’t acting. She was crying, real tears, because I could feel them against my fingers when I touched her face. Not hysterics. Nothing out of control, but a steady sobbing, a wrenching, sad sighing. So that I felt myself beginning to feel sorry for her. And this was no time for sympathy. This was a moment for finishing the little business at hand. I tightened and pulled away from her, straining to let her go. I was angry, but not overloaded with it. It was a combination of anger and frustration, like putting a bet on a wrong nag at Roosevelt Raceway. Only she wasn’t the wrong nag. And I would have laid ten to one that she was the sort of nag who would never let a rider down.

  So I said, “Why eat your heart out? We didn’t sign a contract.”

  “You’re going to hate me.”

  “What’s bothering you?”

  “I want to talk to you, Steve.”

  “Talk? At a time like this?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “Not with me, you aren’t.”

  Her hand tightened on my arm and she clawed her anxiety at me. She wasn’t fooling. “I came here for two reasons, Steve. For two reasons, do you hear me? One of the reasons was that I had to talk to you. I know who you are. I know you’re not in the shoe business. You’re a private detective and you’re on your way down to San Juan to try to locate Nancy Scott. You were retained by Nancy’s father for the job. He told you that I was the only one who might be in communication with his daughter. He suggested that I might be going down to San Juan to meet Nancy. And that’s why you’re on this boat—to follow me. You see, I’m pretty clever myself.”

  “You’re out of this world,” I admitted. “How did you know I was going down with you?”

  “I have my own confederates,” she said quietly. “I’m one of Nancy’s oldest friends. I know all the servants in her father’s house.”

  “I don’t get it. What’s the deal? I mean now, right now? What’s the gimmick with me?”

  “I had to talk to you, Steve.”

  “Talk?” I laughed. “We could have talked up in the bar.”

  “Intimately,” she said. “Maybe I thought somebody in the bar might be listening.”


  “Somebody? Who?”

  She didn’t say. She was back alongside me again, rubbing herself into me. She had stopped the histrionics and seemed calm and quiet and under control. But she couldn’t do much with her flaming torso, her trembling hands and her heaving breasts. She still wanted to complete her little game with me, all the way through to the end.

  “Will you talk to me?” she asked.

  “Why not?”

  “Put your hand back where it was.”

  “My pleasure. Are we talking now?”

  “Not now, Steve. Later.”

  She was stabbing me silly now, using her long nails to claw into my shoulders. She was melting into me, the ripe, full hardness of her breasts bursting against me, her mouth an unexplored mine of delight. The Aquavit had faded and in its place I smelled only the heady odor of her personal perfume. She was something out of a book of sin, an impossible piece. I had been warned that Jane was a psycho. A sexual siren, a round-heel, a nympho. In the close-up, she proved herself a challenge that I would long remember.

  “Now,” she begged. “Now, Steve.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Jane lay back against the pillow, her body unwound, her arms under her head, her hair loose against her shoulders. The thin light from the promenade deck outside glowed on her figure, making her a misted siren, a gray shape because of the tan that covered her body, a shade darker than the white sheet beneath her. Outside, the wind whistled across the deck, skimming through the promenade and whirling in a high falsetto around to the port side of the boat. The sea had calmed, but the boat rolled enough to keep me close to her, back and forth, gently. We smoked, and the small bright dots of our cigarettes brightened and faded in the gloom. I began to wonder what time it was. I began to wonder how soon my cabin mate would be wandering out there on deck, to check on me.

  “You wanted to talk,” I said.

  “In a little while,” Jane said. “Do you mind? I like it this way, Steve.”