Darker Than Amber (6 page)

Meyer had returned to the chess game. She left the music turned down, went and built herself a new drink and came back and stared at the board as I made a pawn-takes-pawn move that would force a recapture and open up the middle squares.
"Maybe," she said, "instead of that dumb game you boys could stake me twenty for a start and we could play threeway gin. Quarter of a cent? You'd get my marker for the twenty and I never faulted on a marker in my life, you can believe it."
"Maybe later," Meyer said.
"Excuse me all to hell," Vangie said, turned up the music and went back to her dance, pausing to take her tiny sip of the drink from time to time.
That night I was back in an old dream, asleep on the yellow couch in the lounge, the air-conditioning off, the Flush unbuttoned, a faint coolness of night breeze moving through the screening of the open hatches forward and along the length of her and out the stern ports and doorway.
I always remember after awakening that I have dreamed the same dream many times, but in sleep it is always new. Back in that tumbledown shed on the hillside at night, in the stink of the leg wound that has gone bad, rifle braced on a broken crate, trying to push the illusions of the high fever out of my mind so that I wouldn't get the crazies and imagine they were coming up the slope toward me through the patterns of moonlight, and fire at hallucinations and thus give them the chance to find me and finish it, then wait there and also kill the girl when she came in the morning with the medicines. Then something touched my shoulder and I knew they had sneaked around behind me.
I went in an instant from the dream to the reality of the touch in the darkness of the lounge, made a hard spasmed leap from that prone position that took me over the back of the couch, with, in the moment of takeoff, my right hand snatching the little airweight Bodyguard, hammerless .38 special. I rolled noisily to the wall, and where shadows were deepest, moved swiftly and silently to the light switch near the desk. I could see a shadow moving away from the couch. Squinting in advance to void the dazzle of the lights, I came up into a crouch and hit the switch.
Vangie had been backing away. She stared at me, mouth sagging, eyes squinched against the sudden glare, and stopped there looking at me and at the deadly muzzle of the little short-barreled handgun. I let the nerves and muscles go loose, slipped the weapon temporarily into the desk drawer.
"Salvage business!" she said in a thin enraged tone. "Salvage? For chris sake!"
I yawned. "I didn't mean to startle you. You startled me. There are some people around who don't appreciate me at all."
She was naked, her hair tousled by sleep. She moved back toward the couch, shaking her head. Her nipple areas were exceptionally large, dark, almost a plum red, making the breasts themselves look smaller than they were. Weaving of flat muscles over the curve of hip. Deep and powerful slope of the belly down to a pubic thatch like a patch of gunmetal-colored smoke through which gleamed the pale plump weight of the pudenda framed between the round and solid pallor of the thighs.
She sat on the couch and said, "Geez, my knees are like water. Touch you to wake you up and you blow up like a rocket or something."
I leaned against the desk. "Did you have something on your mind?"
With the automatic exasperation of the person who has been startled she said, "What does it look like I had on my mind anyway? Maybe I came mousing in here in the dark so you could teach me chess, hah?"
She sighed and leaned back slightly, relaxing, sprawled and straddled, putting one hand behind her neck, elbow akimbo. Her body had too specific a look. It seemed too earthily illustrative of function, in the way that some of the larger flower blossoms have such a fleshy look of process one cannot see them from a purely aesthetic viewpoint.
I reached to the nearby chair, picked up my T-shirt and tossed it to her. She caught it and looked at me and said, "You're giving me some kind of a message?" She shrugged. "Well, it wasn't what anybody'd call a great start, buddy." She pulled it on over her head, hitched herself up to snug it under her seat. It came to mid-thigh. She patted her tumbled hair and crossed elegant legs. "What I had in mind, McGee, I couldn't get back to sleep once I woke up, and I had this lousy little impulse, maybe a way of saying hello, or saying thanks. Or a way to make it easier to get back to sleep. What you should know, I wasn't going to peddle it."
I sat astride the desk chair, forearm along the top of the back, chin on my forearm. "I didn't think you were."
She scowled. "But it could get confusing, because I am going to try to hit you for a loan. And you maybe wouldn't understand it would be a loan, really and truly. Two hundred bucks?"
"Okay."
She gave me a little of the expression she had used when posing for Meyer and deepened her voice. "So there's two good reasons to say thanks, Trav."
"Saying it is enough, Vangie."
She studied me. "Listen, I know that there are a lot of guys who get chilled off if they know a girl's been a hooker. But I wasn't going to try to pay you back with some kind of faked-up trick, Trav, honest. I'd want to make out for real, and that's something I've never peddled except sometimes by accident practically. Maybe it wouldn't be the greatest blast in the world, but you won't forget it in a hurry, and you can believe it."
"Vangie, stop putting me on the spot, will you? You're all girl, and I'm not a prude, and I appreciate the gesture, but you are not in my debt and.
"And thanks but no thanks? Sure." She yawned. "No hard feelings, Trav. I guess all these things, they depend on what you're used to. For some little spook working behind a big desk the last twenty years, he'd think I was coming on with the greatest thing since the wheel, but I guess a man who looks like you and has a boat like this can score just about whenever and wherever he gets the wants." She got up, winked at me, sauntered over to the table and lighted a cigarette, shook the match out. "We're still friends, Mister. Maybe... I don't know... better friends this way. Funny to have a man friend. Men are either trade or they're in for a cut of the gross. You and Meyer. Funny, crazy bastards. I get the feeling... oh; skip it."
"What feeling?"
She came closer, stood in front of my chair. "It's silly. A feeling that you two like me. I was in that big bed thinking bout that. You know all the garbage about me I told you. and you're still nice." Abruptly her amber eyes filled with tears. Her mouth twisted and she turned and walked away, keeping her back to me.
In a harsh half-whisper she said, "What I've been mixed up in, it's a lot better all around if you weren't parked under that bridge. And if they find me again, maybe that isn't such a bad thing either. Awake in there I was thinking there's no way you can stop being what you are. There's no way to hide from what you know. And having anybody like me makes it tougher. Before I came creeping in here in the dark, I was getting screwy ideas, like paying off the world by going to work at a leper place if they still have them anymore these days. Miracle drugs, they probably got them all over and it's too late."
I went to her and put my hand on her shoulder and turned her around. She kept her eyes downcast. "We like you even if you don't do dishes, Vangie. And we'd like to help you if we knew more about it."
For a little while I thought she would talk. She sighed and turned away. "Oh, hell, Travis, it isn't so much finking out as keeping you guys from knowing how lousy I really am."
She braced up and assayed a crooked smile and said, "A year from now I'll have forgotten the whole thing. I've had good practice forgetting stuff. Say, you think I ought to pay a little call on Meyer?"
"I think it would work out just about the same way."
"So do I. Anyway, I think I can sleep now." With a swift and sisterly kiss on my cheek, she left the lounge. I turned the light out and settled down again, the weapon back under the pillow where it belonged. I'd felt no slightest itch of desire for her, and knew why. It had been a white lie. I was a prude, in my own fashion. I had been emotionally involved a few times with women with enough of a record of promiscuity to make me vaguely uneasy. It is difficult to put much value on something the lady has distributed all too generously. I have the feeling there is some mysterious quota, which varies with each woman. And whether she gives herself or sells herself, once she reaches her own number, once X pairs of hungry hands have been clamped tightly upon her rounded undersides, she suffers a sea change wherein her juices alter from honey to acid, her eyes change to glass, her heart becomes a stone, and her mouth a windy cave from whence, with each moisturous gasping, comes a tiny stink of death.
I could not want her on any terms. But I could like her. And wish her well.
The next day, after beginning it with considerable good cheer, Vangie became more subdued and restless as we chugged north up the length of Biscayne Bay.
When she came up in mid afternoon to sit beside me at the topside controls, I asked her if she had decided what she'd do.
"Get off this thing after dark, Trav. God, just one clown has to see me and happen to mention to the wrong party that he saw Vangie. Then they start looking. I don't know if I could sit still for it again. I think I used up any guts I had, and if they get me, I'd scream myself crazy. The smart thing to do is use the two hundred for a long bus ride, and go back to blonde, then work waitress or something until I find the right contacts so I can go back on the track. That's what I should do."
"But?"
"So there's something fishy about this salvage business, Trav. About you and this boat, and about that gun bit last night. And when you hauled me out of the ocean, you had no idea of calling the cops, and you kept your mouth shut. I don't know what you are. I know you're not cheap muscle. You could be legit, even. But you know your way around, and you seem cool and smart and foxy."
Meyer appeared and said, "Private discussion?"
"No, honey. Stick around. I'm about to proposition your buddy here. In my whole life I never saved a dime. In the last two years I've stashed maybe thirty-two thousand in cash. It's what you could call dirty money maybe, but nobody can say I didn't earn every dime of it, and it's a very little bit of a cut of the whole take. I hid it in a pretty good place. I'll tell you this much. I was partnered with a fellow named Griff. He's as tough and quick and solid as you want to find. Right now he believes I'm gone for keeps. He knows I've been squirreling it away, but he doesn't know where or how much. I know for sure that by now he's probably cleaned out my place, my clothes and furs and jewelry and luggage and color TV and my darling little car, and he'll be cashing that stuff in as fast as he can. And I think he'll have just about torn my apartment to bits trying to find the money. But it's in a good place, really, and if my luck is any good, he hasn't found it. With that money I could really make a run for it, with a lot better chance of staying in the clear. But if Griff hasn't found it, he'll be keeping an eye on my place for somebody to come after it, because how could he know I hadn't told somebody? Anyway, I think I can get a guy to help me just enough so I can get in and out, a bartender I think I can trust, a fellow who's had the hots for me real bad for a long time. Anyway, at least I ought to be able to get close enough to find out if it's too risky for me to try."
"Then what?" I asked.
"Then I come back and hide on this boat and I tell you where it is and you go get it for me, Trav. And you keep a piece of it."
"You wondered if I was legitimate. To this extent, Vangie, that I couldn't go liberate money that belongs to somebody else and turn it over to you."
"Somebody else!" She pulled the dark glasses off and looked directly into my eyes. That dark amber was as merciless as the eyes of the big predator cats, and as empty, and as hungry. "Dead ones, Charlie," she said. "You want to rent an accountant and divide it up and go stuffing it into the graves? You want to worry yourself, think about all the dead ones to come. Me leaving isn't going to stop a thing. They break in another girl. Listen, it's a tiny piece of the whole deal, and it's mine!"
I glanced at Meyer and saw that it had shaken him as much or more than it had shaken me.
"Ten thousand for you," she said. "How about it?"
"The standard fee is half. If I recover it, which means if I even try. That's something we'll talk over when you come back."
"If I have to come back. If I can't get in and out with it alone. Half is one hell of a cut, McGee."
"And half of nothing is still nothing at all."
"My dear," Meyer said, "if things should go wrong for you, wouldn't you feel better if you had written it all out and put it in a sealed envelope and left it in my care?"
She reached and touched his cheek. "You are the nicest, Meyer. So nice you'd have to blow the whole bit, and it would mess up my girlfriends and keep the law looking for me forever. If I get my hands on that money, I want to stay dead, thank you."
"Knowing that your... friends are still murdering for profit?"
"People are dying all over the place for all kinds of reasons, Meyer, and if I'm out of this one, it couldn't bother me less."
Well after dark, wearing the black slacks, white blouse, dark glasses, and white kerchief around her hair, and carrying my two hundred in the pocket of the slacks, she went down the stern gangplank, gave me a quick wave and walked off into the night. Meyer had moved back aboard his own boat. I drifted after Vangie and memorized the plate of the cab she got into, went back and wrote it down, buttoned up the Flush, picked up Meyer and went off to eat Chinese. When we got back, we went below and he hunched over his little portable typewriter and composed a summary as follows:
For the past two years Miss Bellemer, a hardened prostitute twenty-six years of age, has been operating in this area with a group of accomplices in some manner more profitable and more dangerous than common prostitution. Three women were involved. It can be assumed the other two are of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer. She called one of them DeeDee Bea, spelling uncertain. There was a strong impression that the operating unit for each venture was a team of two, one woman and one man. For a time she worked with a man named Frankie. More recently her partner has been one Griff. No names of other associates are available as yet.
Logic tells us that the operation was some variation of a confidence game, its success dependent on the allure of the women in the ring. Miss Bellemer admitted in an indirect fashion she had felt sorry for one of the victims, had in fact warned him, even though she knew she was placing herself in grave danger thereby. Apparently, despite her warning, the victim was disposed of. Because Miss Bellemer was sentenced to death by her associates for this lapse, we can assume that the victims of their operations have been disposed of through murder.