A Deadly Shade of Gold (5 page)

"I wouldn't know. I think he has some cousins somewhere."

A man appeared at the window on Branks's side. Branks turned the tape machine off.

"All clear, Ken. We got more prints than anybody needs, most of them smudged."

"How about that end cabin?"

"A farmer from South Carolina and a half wit kid. They didn't see anything or hear anything. No other cabins occupied."

"How about the owner?"

"He should be here any minute. He lives way the hell and gone out."

"Runs the gas station?"

"Yes."

"Check him on anybody coming to see Taggart. How about Taggart's gear?"

"I'd give you about twenty-eight cents for everything he owns, Ken."

"Have Sandy tag it and take it in and store it, and arrange to have that heap driven in to the pound."

The man went away. Ken Branks stretched and yawned. "He had a little over twenty left out of the forty, Mr. McGee. These things have a pattern. The way I see it, Taggart went out to do some cruising on your money. So he hit a few bars, and got somebody agitated, and that somebody followed him on back here and went in after him with a knife. In the dark, probably.

Taggart did pretty good. The place is pretty well busted up. From the wounds, the guy was hacking at him, and got him a dozen times on the hands and face and arms before he finally got him one in the throat. So somebody left here bandaged up and spattered all to hell with blood.

It won't be hard, I don't think. Leg work. Hitting all the likely saloons and finding where the trouble was, and who was in it. We'll pretty Taggart up for a picture we can use to show around here and there. Don't expect to see your name in the paper. Or Miss Gardino's. It won't get big coverage. The season is on, you know. Can't upset the sun-loving merrymakers." We got out of the car.

He shook his head and said, "Some poor son of a bitch is out there tonight burying his clothes, throwing the knife off a bridge, trying to scrub the blood off his car seat, and it won't do him a damn bit of good. By God, nobody can get away with making a pass at his girl. She can drive up to Raiford once a month and pay him a nice visit. You can take off, Mr. McGee. If I remember something I should ask you, I'll be in touch."

As I drove away, my neck and shoulders felt stiff with tension. I was under no illusions about Mr.

Branks. I remembered how he had maneuvered me into the light to give me a thorough inspection. And I pretended not to see the flashlight beam as somebody had checked my car over while he was talking to me.

Branks would check me out with care and precision, and Nora too, and when his estimate of the
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situation did not pay off, he would go over us again.

A single lamp was lighted in Nora's living room. I saw Shaja, still in her blue robe, get up from the chair and come to unlock the door. I followed her into the living room. "How is she doing?"

"She fell to sleep, not so long ago." I noticed that she had brushed her hair, put on her makeup.

"Such a wicked think," she said. "My hoosband, yes. One could expect, from a prison sickness.

Some kind. Her Sam, no. Please to sit. You drink somesink, maybe?"

"If you've got a beer."

"Amstel? From Curacao?"

"Fine."

She went to the kitchen and brought back one for each of us, in very tall tapered glasses, on a small pewter tray.

"About him returning, she was so excite. So 'appy. It breaks my heart in two."

"Shaja? Is that the way you say it?"

"For friends, just Shaj. It comes from a girl in an old story in my land. For children. A princess turnink to ice slowly."

"Shaj, I had to tell the police she went there with me."

"Of course!"

"The way I told it, I made Sam a lot less important to her. I'll tell you exactly what I told them, and you remember it and tell her as soon as she wakes up. A man named Branks will come to see her. She should tell him exactly the same thing. It shouldn't be hard, because most of it is the truth."

She agreed. I repeated what I had said to Branks. She gave little nods of understanding.

When I had finished she frowned and said, "Excuse. But what is wrong to tellink this man she was in love with her Sam, all the three years he was gone? Is no crime."

"There is a reason for it. You see, there is something else too."

I saw a little flicker of comprehension in her eyes, product of a mind nicely geared to intrigue.

"Somesink she does not know yet?"

"That's right."

"But you will tell her?"

"When she feels better."

She was thoughtful for long moments. She looked over at me. "You do not see her often, but
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you are a good friend, no?"

"I hope so."

"I am her friend too. She is good to me for a long time now. I can do all the work of the shop, completely. Those girls obey. What you will tell her, maybe it takes her mind from the work. But you should know, it will be no harm to anything."

"You're a nice person, Shaj."

She smiled, perhaps blushed slightly. "Thank you."

I leaned back into heavier shadow and sipped the beer. The light came down over her shoulder, backlighting the odd pale hair, shining on the curve of her broad cheek. This one had the same thing Nora had, such a total awareness of herself as a woman, such a directed pride in being a desirable woman, that every small fastidiousness was almost ritualistic, from stone clean scalp to glossy pedicure, all so scented and cared for that, as is the case with the more celebrated beauties, the grooming itself forms a small barrier against boldness, against unwelcome intrusion.

Around us was the night silence ticking toward three in the morning. In a nearby bed slept the drugged woman, unaware for a little time of the depth of her wound. In that silence, which seemed more difficult to break with every passing moment, I felt the slow increments of awareness. That sort of awareness is an atavistic thing, a man-woman thing on a wordless level, and when it occurs in just that way, you know that she, in the cat-foot depths of the female heart, is just as aware of it as you are.

She lifted the glass to her lips, and I saw the silken strength of the pale throat work as she swallowed.

"What made the princess turn to ice?" My voice sounded too loud.

She stared across at me. At last she said, "Breakink a sacred vow."

"Was she forgiven?"

"Not at all. Her heart turns to ice. Her tears turns to ice. And where she is, on a high mountain, it then begins to snow, and forever, even in summertimes, the mountain there is white."

"It seems like a sad name to give a little girl."

"It is not my name."

"No?"

"My name is Janna."

"Where did you get Shaja then?"

"My hoosband call me that as a love name, because to him, in the beginning, I was of ice. But then not."

"Why do you call yourself that now?"

She came to her feet with a slow lithe grace. "Perhaps for rememberink at all times such a sacred vow. A vow to a man who throws at tanks little bottles of fire. Perhaps you should go and sleep a little, and come back here at almost nine when I must leave, because if she is not awaken then, she can sleep more and you can be here to tell her all those thinks, no?"

I agreed. No princess could have dismissed a peasant with a more gracious hauteur. She walked me to the door, turning on the hallway light.

"What was his work, Janna?"

"Please. You must not say that name for me. Not ever."

"What did he do for a living, Shaja?"

She shrugged. "A teacher of history. A man not quite as tall as me. A mild man, getting bald on his head in the middle. Just one year married. It was necessary, what he did. But then all of the world turned its back on our land. As you know. That is the shame of the world. Not his shame.

Not mine. I came out because I was no use there. Not to help him there." She put her hand out.

"Goodnight," she said. "Thank you."

It was the abrupt continental handshake, accompanied by a small bow, an immediate release of the clasp. As I walked to my car I looked back and saw her still standing there in the open door silhouetted against the hallway lights, hips canted in the way a model stands. We both knew of the hidden smoldering awareness. But there would be no breakink of vows, not with that one. It made her that much more valuable. Dobrak, the history teacher, bald on his head in the middle, mild slayer of tanks, had his hand on her loyal heart at all times. And she would wait out her years for him, unused and prideful.

As I drove back to Bahia Mar I wanted to hold fast to all the small speculations about her, the forlorn erotic fancies, because I knew that as she slipped out of my mind, Sam Taggart would take her place.

And he did, before I was home. I found a slot and then I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked across to the public beach. I walked slowly where the outgoing tide had left the sand damp and hard. The sea and the night sky can make death a small thing. Waves can wash away the most stubborn stains, and the stars do not care one way or the other.

It was a cheap and dirty little death, a dingy way to die. When dawn came, there would be a hundred thousand more souls alive in the world than on the previous day, three quarters of a million more every week. This is the virus theory of mankind. The pretentious virus, never knowing that it is a disease.

Imagine the great ship from a far galaxy which inspects a thousand green planets and then comes to ours and, from on high, looks down at all the scabs, the buzzings, the electronic jabberings, the poisoned air and water, the fetid night glow. A little cave-dwelling virus mutated, slew the things which balanced the ecology, and turned the fair planet sick. An overnight disease, racing and explosive compared with geological time. I think they would be concerned. They would be glad to have caught it in time. By the time of their next inspection, a hundred thousand years
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hence, this scabrous growth might have infected this whole region of an unimportant galaxy.

They would push the button. Too bad. This happens every once in a while. Make a note to re-seed it the next time around, after it has cooled down.

Lofty McGee, shoulders hunched against the cold of the small hours, trying to diminish the impact of the death of a friend.

But Sam was still there, in a ghastly dying sprawl on the floor of my mind. He wasn't going to make the PTA. They had closed his account. I squatted on my heels and picked up a handful of the damp sand and clenched it until my shoulder muscles creaked and my wrist ached like an infected tooth.

This time they had taken one of mine. One of the displaced ones. A fellow refugee from a plastic structured culture, uninsured, unadjusted, unconvinced.

So I had to have a little word or two with the account closers.

That was what I had been trying not to admit to myself.

It wasn't dramatics. It wasn't a juvenile taste for vengeance. It was just a cold, searching, speculative curiosity.

What makes you people think it's that easy? That was the question I wanted to ask them. I would ask the question even though I already had the answer. It isn't.

Five

AT FIFTEEN-MINUTE intervals I went into the bedroom to look at Nora Gardino. In the darkened room, she was a curled girl-shape under a fuzzy green blanket, a black tousle of hair, a single closed eye, a very deep slow soft sound of breathing.

At ten-thirty I heard a sound in there. I went in. She stood by the dressing table, belting a navy blue robe. I startled her. She stared at me, shaped my name with silent lips, then came on the run for holding and hugging, shuddering and snorting against me, her breath sour.

"It was a dirty dream," she whispered, and made a gagging sound. "Just a dirty wretched dream."

I stroked her back and said, "He never came back. That's all."

She pushed herself away. "You think you can make it that easy?"

"Not really"

"Don't try then," she said, and ran into the bath room and slammed the door. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself some more coffee. I went back to the magazine article I was reading.

A southern pusgut who fancied himself a liberal was patting the coons on their burry heads by asking them to live up to the responsibilities of conditional oquality, the implication being that his white brethren were so doing. I would have liked to have sent that jolly racist crawling across bad terrain with a couple of skilled Negro infantrymen giving him covering fire. I decided that I wouldn't want to marry his daughter, and threw the magazine aside just as Nora came into the
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kitchen, taking small steps. I got the orange juice from the refrigerator and handed it to her.

She sat at the table and took several small sips and said, "I'm pretty flippy today Trav. Don't listen too hard to anything I say."

"Shaj took off at quarter to nine. She said the shop is under control."

"Bless her. And you too, my friend."

She had not put on makeup. Her face had a new dry papery texture, as though it would crackle to the touch.

I told her about Branks. I gave her the same detailed report I'd given Shaj.

"Can you handle it?" I asked.

"I guess so. You mean, on the level that he was nothing more than a friend who'd been away.

Yes. I can manage. But why?"

"Maybe I don't want him to know that we have a very intense personal interest in finding out who...."

"Who killed him. Don't hunt for easier words. Use the brutal ones. Let them sting. Why shouldn't he know we have that personal interest, Trav?"

"Because we don't want him interfering with any looking we may want to do. If it is personal. If it is intense, we want a part of it, don't we?"

She put the empty juice glass down.

"Do you know something about it?"

"I think so."

"Did you tell that man?"

"No.

I cannot describe the look on her face then, a hunting look, a merciless look, a look of dreadful anticipation. It reminded me that the worst thing the Indians could do to their enemy prisoners was turn them over to the women. "I want to keep it very very personal," she whispered.