by Marc Behm
‘He’s got it comin’ to him!’ the other yelled.
‘Break it up!’ the cop shouted as he raced past them. The Eye walked on. A half-hour later he was out of Roseville on the open road. A Ford convertible filled with hooting youngsters zoomed by. One of them threw a bottle at him. He passed a horse grazing like a silver ghost in a moonlit pasture.
No … Joanna didn’t know he existed. Not really. No. She was suspicious of everybody and he was just another goblin in her mind. So there were two possibilities: (1) She wanted to disappear again and had hired Kinski to ambush anyone who might be after her. Which meant that she was probably already on the run. (2) She was curious to find out once and for all whether or not she was actually being followed. Which meant that she would stay around awhile to see what Kinski dragged up; which meant that she was in danger now, if the local fuzz found out she was Kinski’s client; which meant that she would have to be warned.
He found the Rabbit parked where he’d left it on the shoulder of the road. He climbed behind the wheel and drove to Sacramento.
The MG was in the parking lot behind the hotel. He went to a bar and phoned her room.
‘Miss Ellen Tegan?’
‘Yes.’
Her voice jolted him. ‘H-hello.’
‘Hello …’
‘This is Lieutenant McElligott, State Police. We’re investigating the slaying of a Pancho Kinski, and we found your name in his office files …’
‘Oh, yes. I hired him a couple of days ago to – to find a – something I lost. Slaying, you say?’
‘Could you come to my office sometime tomorrow, Miss Tegan? It’s just a formality. Make a statement.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Thank you. Good night.’
‘Good night, Lieutenant.’
Ten minutes later she checked out of the hotel. She drove to Oakland at a steady eighty miles per hour.
She spent the rest of the night in a motel, registered as Miss Valerie Anderson. In the morning she sold the MG at a used car lot in Alameda. The Eye got rid of the Rabbit there, too.
She took a taxi to the airport and flew to Boise, Idaho.
She spent two months in Sun Valley. Her new name was Ella Dory.
Mornings and afternoons the Eye, bundled in a fur anorak and scarf, sat shivering on the hotel terrace with his binoculars, watching her ski; nights, he would go to The Igloo, one of the resort taverns, and watch her dance. She became friendly with only one man. And their meeting almost cost the Eye an attack of apoplexy.
As he was coming into The Igloo one evening, she suddenly appeared in front of him, emerging from the tap room.
‘I wish you’d stop following me,’ she said. ‘Really.’
He stood there, petrified.
But she was looking past him at someone standing in the entrance. He turned, saw a slim, dark, smiling man in his fifties, wearing a sheepskin jacket.
‘I’m not following you,’ he laughed. ‘We just always seem to be going in the same direction at the same time.’
The Eye ran outside and gulped down lungfuls of air. He felt as if he’d just tobogganed down the side of Borah Peak.
His name was Jerome Vight. He was an attorney from Little Rock, Arkansas. A bachelor. After that they and several other couples formed a casual skiing and cocktail clique, Joanna completely indifferent to the whole arrangement, and Vight (the Eye watching every phase of his beguilement) becoming more and more captivated by her unconcern. By the end of the first month he was hooked.
Cora Earl was another matter altogether. She was a fashion designer from New York, thirty-two years old, twice divorced, thoroughly misanthropic. She arrived at the hotel one afternoon with a safari of bellboys carrying fifteen pieces of luggage. She saw Joanna sitting in the lounge, marched over to her, and said exactly the right thing.
‘I’ll bet you a thousand bucks that you’ve been seduced by at least one of these scurvy ski-bum bastards since you’ve been here.’
Joanna looked at her coolly and held out her hand. ‘Give me the thousand,’ she replied.
Cora opened her purse, took out two five hundreds. ‘I’m in one seventeen C,’ she said. ‘Whenever you get horny, come up and sleep with me.’
A week later Joanna accepted the offer.
The Eye, watching them dance together in The Igloo, was secretly pleased. She needed someone to restore her self-confidence and to mend her body. No man on earth was capable of the job but Cora was perfect – just as Dr. Martine Darras had been, years ago. Both women were the same opiate of appeasement, the same dream of passion in the night, the same goddess smiling in the tempest, reaching out with a soothing hand to heal a sacred hurt.
He followed them back to the hotel. On the seventeenth corridor he climbed out a window and inched his way along a slippery ledge to the terrace of 117C. He stood in the snow at the window of the suite, watching them.
Joanna was hanging her mink coat over the back of a chair. Then she sat down and pulled off her boots. Cora walked across the room, waving her arms angrily.
‘… I taught her everything she knows about designing clothes, the bitch! In fact, all that LA stuff last year was my idea originally. The harem trousers and the handkerchief bit and jump suits and chamois bathing suits and all that. I called her up last week and said, “Darling, bravo!” and she said, “Go fuck yourself!” How do you like that!’ She laughed. ‘But wait’ll she sees my new collection! It’ll make her rags look like the latest thing from Bulgaria! The little toad!’
She was wearing a deerskin skirt and a see-through chiffon blouson. A cylinder hung on a chain around her neck. Joanna took it in her hand. ‘What’s this?’ she asked. Cora opened it and pulled out a toothbrush. ‘It’s for wherever you happen to be,’ she said, ‘afterwards.’ She peeled everything off and walked naked to the window. Joanna pulled off her sweater and ski suit. She got up, came behind her, leaned against her back. They were standing in the steamy pane just in front of the Eye. Cora touched the glass with her nipples. ‘What’s with you and Jerry Vight?’ she whispered.
‘He’s a Taurus,’ Joanna said.
Cora reached behind her, put her hands on her hips and pulled her closer. ‘You ought to grab him. He doesn’t know what to do with all his fucking money. But don’t put out until he’s ready to marry you. I like you on my back.’ She closed her eyes. ‘You feel menacing. A friend of mine got sodomized by a cop in Central Park. Said it was heaven! I never tried it. It’s supposed to blow all sorts of fuses. Physically, he’s repugnant – Jerry, I mean. A weasel. Probably got a cock on him like an obelisk. But he’s so fucking rich! He once flew around the world with a girl he picked up in New Orleans. They went to Madrid, Athens, Nairobi, Sydney, Tokyo. Just like that! But I digress!’ She turned and took her in her arms. ‘Let me look at you.’ She kissed her shoulder. ‘“To have, to hold,”’ she crooned, ‘“for just one brief hour of ecstasy …’”
‘My father went to Nairobi,’ Joanna said. ‘He was an anthropologist. He wrote a book, The Beginning of Time.’
‘“And then to let you go again,”’ Cora sang. Her hands moved between them.
‘He went to Mozambique.’ Joanna lifted her crooked finger to her mouth, bit it. ‘And sailed up the Crocodile River in a schooner all the way to … I don’t know where. He never came back. He was looking for the lost tribe of the Limpopo People. The Limpopos were a race of gods who built golden cities all over Africa, aeons ago. They probably never existed … but he was certain they were still there, somewhere beyond the rain forests and the plains, living in golden temples, waiting for him. Maybe he found them. Maybe he’s there now.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Cora pulled her down to the floor and wrapped her in her legs.
The Eye climbed over the railing, slid back along the ledge to the corridor window. He went to his room and did a crossword puzzle.
Joanna met Jerry Vight in the coffee shop the next morning. Naturally, he was peeved.
&
nbsp; ‘Let me give you a word of fatherly advice, Ella,’ he snapped.
‘“Be thy intents wicked or charitable?”’ she asked him gravely. ‘“Thou com’st in such a questionable shape that I will speak to thee.’”
He scowled. ‘What?’
‘Hamlet,’ she smiled. ‘What’s on your mind, pal?’
‘Well, listen …’ He lowered his voice. ‘I know this girl-to-girl business is quite the thing these days, and I don’t want to sound like an out-of-date fogey, but …’ He took her by the hand. ‘Cora is a whore. A genuine honest-to-God creep, Ella. She’s selfish, cruel, egomaniacal, and completely heartless. When she’s through with you she’ll just kick you out and slam the door.’
Joanna laughed. ‘You make her sound like a man.’
‘She’s worse than a man,’ he said. ‘She’s neuter.’
The Eye, sitting at a nearby table, watched Joanna’s face. Her wanness had vanished overnight. She was wearing her killer’s mask again. He felt cold fists of stage fright grip his vitals.
She struck on New Year’s Eve.
As soon as the sun went down, he climbed out the corridor window to the terrace of 117C. He’d been doing this every night for the last three weeks and was now familiar with every slippery foot of the ledge and the cornice.
It was snowing.
He stood in the white darkness, staring through the window. She was alone, lying on the floor, nude. Her back was covered with nail scratches and bruises. She sat up, held out her arms. They were wrapped from wrists to shoulders in shimmering garlands of bracelets. A string of pearls was tied around her waist. One of Cora’s fifteen pieces of luggage was open before her. It was a small blue leather case filled with jewelry. She took a diamond ring and slipped it on her little toe. She turned and smiled. He could see her liquid green eyes all the way across the room, shining with pleasure as she pinned a small ruby on her ear. She was almost looking at him, and it was as if his presence were the cause of her delight.
He raised his hand, waved at her timidly.
She rolled over on her spine like a cat and scratched her back on the rug. Then she jumped up, took her watch from the chimney, checked the time. She put all the jewels back in the case, closed and locked the lid.
She went into the bedroom. She reappeared, dragging Cora’s naked, rigid body by the feet. She pulled it across the room, opened the window. The Eye climbed up on the ledge and hid in a black angle of the wall. Joanna lifted the corpse and pitched it over the railing. It dropped down seven stories into the cul-de-sac alleyway behind the hotel and sank into nine feet of snow. She went back into the room and closed the window.
Fifteen minutes later the Eye was down in the lobby, checking out. At nine o’clock she emerged from the elevator, followed by a bellboy carrying her luggage. She was holding the blue leather jewel case under her arm, wrapped in her mink. She paid her bill, then sent the boy off looking for Vight. She sat down in the lounge and lit a Gitane.
There was a party in the bar. An orchestra was playing beer hall polkas. Guests in paper hats were reeling in and out of all the passages, throwing streamers and blowing whistles.
Jerry came across the lounge, his dinner jacket sprinkled with confetti.
‘What is it, Ella?’
‘You were right.’ She held a handkerchief to her eyes, sniffed and whimpered. ‘She gave me my walking papers. It was awful. I feel so shitty. You should have heard her. You were right. She’s a monster.’
‘Well …’ He didn’t know what to say. ‘The hell with her.’
She got up. ‘So long, Jerry.’
‘What do you mean so long?’
‘I’m leaving.’ She went out into the lobby.
He followed her. ‘Ella! Wait a second … Ella! … Please – listen to me! You can’t – Ella! …’
He checked out, too.
They were married that night in Boise. They flew to Honolulu the next morning.
12
The eye sat on the beach behind the gutted hull of a rowboat, watching them through his binoculars. He was on the point of a W between two coves. The Cariddi was anchored in the inlet to the left, a quarter of a mile offshore. Jerry was squatting on the forward deck, wearing a straw hat and drinking a can of orange juice.
They’d been coming out here every afternoon for the last three days, looking for the American destroyer that was supposed to be down there somewhere on the bottom of Kaneoke Bay.
Joanna surfaced, climbed up the ladder. She was naked to the waist, wearing a pair of jeans cut off at the thigh. She pushed the mask onto the top of her head, sat down on the bow. ‘Christ! The water’s like oil. What’s the temperature?’
‘Ninety-seven.’
Their voices carried across the cove with amphitheatre clearness. The Eye could even hear the hum of the radio in the cabin.
‘It’s twenty below in Boston. And it’s snowing in New Orleans.’
‘Turn off the goddamned radio,’ she said.
‘I want to hear the news.’
‘What for?’
‘My! You look fetching!’ He tried to crawl between her knees. She laughed, kicked him away.
The laugh was false – almost hysterical. Jerry couldn’t interpret it, but the Eye, who knew her much better than he did, was perfectly aware of what it meant. She was in mortal danger, so tautly drawn that she was giddy with tension. Every hour brought her closer to disaster. Five whole days had passed, and Cora’s body hadn’t been found yet. But perhaps at this very moment they were shoveling it out of the snow, and this evening the hunt for Ella Dory would begin. She wouldn’t be too difficult to locate. Her spoor led directly from Idaho to Oahu – directly to this blue cove in the warm sea. And instead of fleeing, she was forced to linger here in the sun, playing vacation games and parrying the amorous gropings of a man she loathed.
‘There’s no destroyer.’ Jerry threw the can overboard.
‘There’s something down there.’
‘Where?’
‘Just behind all those fucking weeds. A great big hump covered with sand.’
‘No kidding!’
‘As big as a house.’
This morning, while Jerry was having breakfast, she’d gone out and bought a pair of handcuffs in a toy shop near the hotel. The Eye had watched.
Jerry tossed his straw hat onto the roof of the cabin. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He donned his mask and flaps and jumped off the deck. Joanna sat there a moment, staring at the beach. Then she got up and pulled off her jeans, opened her bag, took out the handcuffs, unlocked their prongs. And over the side she went.
Flies devoured the Eye. He slapped his arms and neck, the blows echoing like rifle shots up and down the beach. The stink of salt and warm rot almost suffocated him. A spiked fin floated into the cove. He watched it dully, measuring it. It looked like a long golf bag drifting in the current He jumped up. Shit! It was a motherfucking shark! It circled the Cariddi, swam into the surf, thrashed atop a breaker. Jesus! It was gigantic! It twisted, dived. Joanna came up the ladder, her buttocks twinkling in the sun. The Eye crawled behind the rowboat, lifted his binoculars. She jumped over the cabin, unhooked the anchor chain from the aft cleat, dropped it overboard. The shark surfaced, bumped against the stern, dived again. Joanna went to the helm, started the engine. The Cariddi groaned and turned toward the open sea.
The Eye sat there a moment, watching it round the right headland of the W. Then he looked at the water. The cove was a mire of blue and green. Jerry was still down there, handcuffed to the anchor.
With the shark.
The Eye had already checked out and was sitting in the lobby doing a crossword puzzle when she arrived. She was wearing sandals and a sleeveless turquoise beach tunic. Her emerald eyes, overflowing in her sun-blackened face, were almost unbearably exotic. She looked about eighteen years old.
The waiting was over. She was on the run now, cool and smooth.
‘Mr. Vight has gone to Lahaina,’ she told the clerk. ‘He’ll
be back on Friday or Saturday.’
‘Yes, Mrs. Vight.’
‘Get me a reservation on a flight to San Francisco this afternoon.’
‘Are you leaving us?’
‘Just for a week. My mother is ill.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that!’
‘Nothing serious. She sprained her wrist playing tennis or something.’
The Eye found a copy of yesterday’s Los Angeles Herald-Examiner on the plane. Cora Earl’s picture was on page one, under the headline SUSPICIOUS FALL IN SUN VALLEY! Inquest to Decide Cause of Celebrated Designer’s Death.
That night she stayed at the Mark Hopkins and kept her Mrs. Ella Vight alias until she’d cashed all of Jerry’s traveler’s checks. Then, wearing a red wig and changing her identity, she sold Cora’s jewels to a fence in San Mateo for another heavy bundle. She put nearly sixty thousand dollars in a safe–deposit box in a bank in Oakland the next day before leaving for the airport.
The Eye tried to get a seat on the same flight to Mexico City, but there were no vacancies. He tried two other airlines. All the Thursday planes were booked; the standby lists were filled. The catastrophe was so unexpected that he didn’t even have time to panic. Her flight was announced, she walked into the boarding ramp, stopped, glanced once over her shoulder and was gone. By the time he realized he’d probably never see her again, she was airborne.
Shit. From Mexico she could vanish in any direction – South America, the Caribbean, Europe – no, she couldn’t! She couldn’t get a passport. So it wasn’t total finality. She’d be only twelve hours ahead of him. And she’d probably stay overnight, at least – right? Maybe a day or two. Plenty of time. He made a reservation for the earliest Friday morning flight. Besides, there was still the safe-deposit box in Oakland. He could stake out the bank. She’d go back there sooner or later – in a month, six months, a year. His heart sank. A year? Shit.
He took a taxi back to the Mark Hopkins. He’d go to a movie, have dinner, get to bed early. His radar whined. In the lobby two men were standing at the desk, talking to the clerk. They were both young, long-haired, fit, wearing natty overcoats with fur collars. Feds!