Darker Than Amber (8 page)

He took hold of the handle on one of the doors, lifted it and slid it back into a slot above the body compartment. He pulled the shelf which held the body outward. It rolled easily on its bearings. It clicked to a stop at the limit of its transit, and a bright built-in lighting system came on automatically. All the light was focused on the cotton sheet covering the body. I felt against my face a stir of air colder than that in the small room.
He reached and took the sheet and slowly turned it down. He turned it all the way down to her waist, and moved just a little bit to the side.
I imagine they had left the eye open to aid identification. The other side of her head and the other side of her face could be identified as probably being of human origin. From the waist down it was not a woman-shape under the sheet, just a lumpiness like a bed carelessly made up to resemble someone sleeping there, and the shoulder on the bad side of her was pushed in in a curious and sickening way.
I looked at that eye. An eye which has dried has an oddly dusty look. Like a cheap glass eye in a stuffed owl. It was the color I knew it would be. Darker than amber. With green flecks near the pupil.
I looked at the young man. He was standing there, staring at her breasts which he had so unnecessarily uncovered, his underlip hanging away from his teeth.
"You!"
He gave a little start "Uh... can you give us an I.D.?"
"Sorry, no.
He covered her up. As he started the drawer back in, the lights went off. He pulled the door out and swung it down and clicked it in place. As we headed back out I said, "Why don't you go get yourself a live one?"
"Huh?" He turned the room light out, pulled the door shut. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "Sure, buddy, if I could find one of those. Even that messed up you can tell it was built like it wouldn't never quit. About the only thing didn't get mashed was the tits, but you can tell it had everything to go with them. A stack, buddy." He sat down, winked, picked up his Playboy and said, "See you around."
It had happened a few minutes after midnight on a downtown street. The proprietor of the corner magazine store was a real expert, the kind who raises his voice to let everybody within fifty feet enjoy the analysis.
"Nighttime, friend, this street is dead, everything closed, but you know this town, it's a real fast north-south street, hardly any lights, and all stop streets coming in. I opened up real early, and this morning before I opened up, friend, I went and took me a good look and figured it out. Now those kids were going like hell, no getting around that. So right in the middle of this block that woman, more than likely a little drunk, she comes tottering right out in front of them. At that speed, the kid driving didn't have a prayer of stopping. So what is the logical thing for him to do? What would you or I do, friend? What we would do is swerve toward the curb and cut around behind her. Right? So she sees those headlights coming like hell, and instead of keeping going, and she would have been okay if she had, she spins around and tries to get back where she came from. Pow! So he was going full speed, and where he caught her was about two feet from the curb, caught her with the right side of the front of that stolen car. There were still some little bits of glass sprinkled around there at the point of impact, and the places where the cops put sand or something on the blood. I paced it off, and that poor woman went thirty feet through the air, and they hosed it clean later, but this morning you could see where she hit the front of the Exchange Building just below a second-story window, and she bounced off of the stone front, a glancing blow like, and she landed dead in the middle of the sidewalk another fifteen feet further on, so all told it was forty-five feet from where she got hit to where she came to rest, and friend, you can bet your bottom dollar that poor woman didn't feel a thing. Once you figure it out logical, you can see why there aren't any skid marks at all, and anybody in that car feeling the thud of how hard she got hit, they'd know there was no point in trying to find out how bad she was hurt. One time five or six years ago I was night-driving over across the state, heading west about ten miles this side of Arcadia on State Road Seventy, straight as a string, no traffic, going about seventy, and a doe came running out of no place and I hit her dead square on, must have knocked her twenty feet into the air. Took out my headlights, smashed the grill and the radiator and buckled the hood up. I fought that car in the dark and got it stopped without rolling it, way off next to a range fence maybe fifty feet off the road, lucky to be alive. I tell you, that's a real sickening sound, that thud when you hit a living thing. But neither my doe or that woman knew what hit them."
I could imagine Vangie had known what was going to hit her. I could guess she might have even ridden in the car they killed her with. And she had stood there in the shadows, waiting for it to go around several blocks after they let her out, her and the man who stood behind her, big hands clamped on her elbows. Two or three blocks perhaps, to get up the speed to make it absolutely certain, then she'd see the headlights coming fast, maybe with some blinking to make identification certain, and then she'd feel the grasp tighten, and she would try to brace her feet, but the brutal shove would send her floundering out, while the man who held her dodged swiftly back to avoid being spattered, then walked swiftly to the corner, walked another half block, got into his own car and drove sedately away. I wondered if this time Vangie had broken, if she had begged and blubbered and wet her pants and had to be held upright to be shoved out into the path of the juggernaut.
I had the strange conviction somebody was going to tell me all about it some day. Unwillingly.
So here we go again, noble brave name Key-Hoc-Tee? Wasn't the world maybe just a little bit better off minus one slut? Did it grab you that much, boy, to have that seasoned meat offered to you on a platter? Did it squinch your sentimental Irish heart to see the lassie roll her lonely hips in the solitary dance? How can you know the whole thing wasn't all lies, that she didn't try to cross up her fellow assassins and grab all the loot for herself and that's why she got dropped off a bridge? How do you know the whole scheme, whatever it is, isn't something she cooked up all by herself?
Maybe, for me, the only true knowing of her was down there in the black press of the outgoing tide, my fingers wrapped in her hair, feeling the frail questioning grasp of the girl-hands on my wrist, then feeling the girl-shapes of her as I pulled myself down her body to the wired ankles. All right. So that was it, the awareness of the life down there, going out of her quickly, the desperation and the stubborn wire and the haste. It was a difficult thing to do. You feel good to do a thing like that. And then when they take what you saved and see how high they can splash it against a stone building, you get annoyed.
Okay, hero. Tip the cops. It's their job.
But there is thirty-two thousand floating around somewhere. It needs a new home. And you've invested two hundred already.
It was quarter to ten that night before Meyer rang my bell and came aboard. He handed me a big manila envelope and said, "It took a goodly amount of sweet talk. Homer's wife expected to be taken to the movies. The last thing she wanted was some old camera club churn to show up with a problem. As a photographer, Homer is curiously limited. He takes macro-photographs of wild flowers of the southeast. He has thousands. But he has a very sure touch in that darkroom."
I pulled the pictures out. There was the big one, and I looked at that first. It was black and white, on semigloss paper without borders, a vertical shot, about eleven by fourteen, a closeup so extreme her features were larger than life size. It caught just the area from above her eyebrows to just below her chin, in quarter profile half turned toward the lens. You could not, of course, tell that she was dancing. She was looking down, the wing of dark hair nearest the lens swinging forward, covering part of her cheek. Her eyes were half closed. It had a luminous loveliness, the way the light lay across her face, the delicacy of it, a slight softness of focus, a look of dreaming. The angle somehow emphasized the oriental look of her. I looked at it a long time.
"This is a dandy, Meyer."
"Better than I could have hoped. That is about thirty percent of the frame. Sooner or later that one will win me a small piece of change. You might enjoy the title I've decided to give it. 'The Island Bride.'"
I thought of what a stone wall and a cement sidewalk had done to most of that face and put it aside and looked at the others. There were four enlargements, all five by seven, glossy, in sharp focus. They were the four shots he had taken when she had begun posing.
"Those seemed best for your purposes, Trav."
"They are. And the ones that will fit in my wallet?"
"In the glassine envelope there. Exactly the same four as the five-by-sevens."
"Got them. Good."
"Trav, don't you think I could be some kind of help in this
"Maybe later. If I find more to go on. I'm going to find a place up there to hole up. When I'm ready for you, I'll call you."
"I Don't... get careless."
"Nobody could get a good look at her and get careless."
I saw that it was a few minutes past ten. I reached and switched the little Jap television to the unaffiliated channel that gives local news at that hour. A youth with many tricks with the eyebrows barked world affairs at us. He's the one that pronounces it Veet Nee-yarn.
Soon he got around to our girl. "Earlier this evening the Broward Beach police made a positive identification of the mystery woman in last night's hit-and-run fatality. Word came back that her fingerprints are definitely those of Miss Evangeline Bellemer, age twenty-six or twenty-seven. The last address on file for her was a Jacksonville address. They do not know yet if she was living in this area. She had a record of several arrests for soliciting, public prostitution, indecent exposure, extortion and attempted extortion. Police are conducting an intensive hunt for the driver of the stolen car, and expect to make an arrest very soon, according to informed sources."
I clicked the fellow off. "From what she said," Meyer said, "I thought she was given better protection than that."
"Check it out and you'll find some convictions, but I doubt you'll find any time served. It's the standard deal, Meyer. The cops who are on the take have to bring a few of them in now and then, when they're sure of who'll be on the bench. The gals take turns, plead guilty, pay the fine and draw a suspended sentence. The law looks good, and from the viewpoint of the people operating the vice business, a girl who has a record is easier to keep in line."
"Sometimes, McGee, you make me feel naive."
"Stay as sweet as you are. Time for one game?"
"If you promise if you get white not to open with that infuriating queen's gambit." South of the city of Broward Beach, along A1A, is where the action is. The junk motels, bristling with neon, squat on the littered sand, spaced along the beach areas, interspersed with package stores, cocktail lounges, juice stands, auction parlors, laundromats, hair stylists, pizza drive-ins, discount houses, shell factories, real-estate offices, tackle stores, sundries stores, little twenty-four-hour supermarkets, bowling alleys and faith healers. The sprawl continues down through the continuous satellite communities of Silvermoor, Quendon Beach, Faraway and Calypso Bay.
I had left my venerable Rolls Royce tethered in her stall.
It was no occasion for anything as conspicuous as the electric blue of old Miss Agnes, who, during her darkest hour, had been converted by some maniac into a pickup truck. I cruised in my inconspicuous rental Ford and decided upon a motel called the Bimini Plaza. I did not know if it was in Silvermoor or Quendon Beach, nor could I think of any reason why I should care. It merely looked a little richer than the others, and had, according to its sign, three pools, three bars and inimitable food. It also had a bad ease of vacancy, a June problem that usually mends itself in July. I took their best, a large room at the ocean end of one of the three parallel wings. I had a salt-crusted picture window facing seaward, and a cleaner one facing the pool area in the inner court. I had two double beds, two weights of traverse draperies, a glassed shower stall, a large tub, a bidet, an icecube maker, polar air-conditioning, remote controls for the color television set, and an ankle-deep lavender rug. For nine bucks, single.
The place was abundantly mirrored. There was a long one over the multi-level countertop which extended the length of the bedroom wall opposite the double beds, and one set into each of the sliding doors of the clothes closet, and one set into each side of the bathroom door. The bathroom wall above its counter top was all mirror, as was a smaller wall area in the bedroom, in the alcove where the dressing table stood.
In resort architecture this technique, which might be Early Hefner, or Bunny Quatorze, is supposed to attract the wingers and swingers, the ones who beef up the bar gross, and who presumably have the disease of Narcissus to such an extent they get half their boots out of watching themselves. The flaw is the concept that all the transient trade will be pretty people. Absolutely no business of the kind where the total combined weight they could well afford to lose would add up to about the total weight of one of the little lollipops the mirrorhangers had in mind.
As I walked back and forth, stowing the necessaries I had brought along, I kept seeing unexpected reflections of myself out of the corner of my eye, a brown slab of meat piled higher than is customary, the stride a loose-jointed shamble -knuckly scarified McGee-san, hoping that all dragons which need slaying will be the size of cocker spaniels, with their teeth and claws worn down from chawing bolder knights, their fiery halitosis fresh out of flints and fluid. In the silence of the room, in the manufactured coolness, mirrors populated the space with too many McGees, and I tried to dredge up a buried memory, and finally brought it into the light. Six days and six nights in a suite in Las Vegas as abundantly mirrored as this one, with that overly emotional heiress who had made the ghastly mistake of not only marrying a Seattle cop but giving him a power of attorney. The power of attorney was due to expire in six days, and he had laid out a very substantial sum to have her killed before the six days were up.