This book is dedicated to:
Hudson’s Bay Scotch
Kent Cigarettes
and
Yuban Coffee
without which it might never have been written.
Chapter One
Behind me on the yacht, gayety swirled like audible confetti. I leaned on the rail up near the bow, smoking a cigarette and finishing another bourbon-and-water, as music from the small combo drifted past me, muted and velvety.
By leaning over the rail and looking back toward the stern, I could see the tall yellow-haired gal in the blood-colored strapless swinging her chummy hips in a shocking rumba. It looked almost as if she were waving to me. Dancing like that, I thought, she’d use up several partners a night. I also thought about going back there again and letting her use me up, but I stayed where I was, waiting for something to happen.
This was the Srinagar, 160 feet of honest-to-goodness, diesel-powered, ocean-going yacht, freshly painted a gleaming white, anchored in Newport Harbor, Southern California. And while my stamping grounds are Southern California—specifically Los Angeles and Hollywood, an hour’s drive away, where the office of Sheldon Scott, Investigations, is located—my stamping grounds do not usually include yachts.
In fact, I don’t even look much like a man accustomed to leaning casually on yacht rails. I look more like a guy who sells hot dogs—and even tonight, in a well-tailored white tux, maroon bow tie and scarlet cummerbund, I might easily have been mistaken for one of the crew mingling briefly with real people.
The agency above-mentioned is mine. I’m Shell Scott, six foot two, loaded with 206 pounds of mostly muscle, and right at the moment half loaded with bourbon. And, at the moment, waiting for my client to put in an appearance. I’d been hired, and even my fee had been settled, but who my client was I didn’t yet know. Our only contact so far had been by phone, and all I knew about her was that she was frightened, was named Elaine Emerson, and had a throbbingly beautiful voice.
Of course, sometimes voices can fool you, but I’m a confirmed optimist and thus my hopes were even higher than I was. Elaine Emerson had asked me to describe myself, and I’d gotten only about half through what I considered the vital points when she’d stopped me, saying she thought she would have little difficulty in finding me, either on the Srinagar or in the L. A. Coliseum.
Besides the fact that I’m fairly big, my hair is about an inch long, sticks up into the air as if trying to escape all at once from my head, and is, though I’m only a young, healthy and—I like to think—virile thirty, white. My eyebrows are white, too, and slant sharply up and then down as if somebody had pounded on them and broken them. They have been pounded on, in fact, but not broken; that is just the way they grew, as if springing savagely at my hairline. I didn’t even get to tell Miss Elaine Emerson about my very slightly broken nose, gray eyes, the thin slice shot from my left ear, the fine scar over my left eyebrow. I barely got started. But she’d said she would find me. So far, she hadn’t.
I sucked in the last drag from my cigarette and nipped the butt into black water below. It arced through the air and winked out. Near it, something white swirled in the water. Unless my eyes were still unfocusing from the waving hips back aft, and I’d merely imagined that whiteness. But I thought I’d noticed it before. There wasn’t any further sign of it, though, so I turned toward the dancers again.
From here I could see only the outer slice of the small square of deck being used for the dance floor, but it was perhaps the most interesting slice. The combo was playing Siboney with liquid abandon, and those same hips were frantically attacking the air and anything else within range, which seemed virtually everything else. The red dress stood out like a flame in the light from hanging lanterns. Then she sort of catapulted herself out of sight, and it was as though the engines had stopped. A couple came into view, pressed close together in their modern version of a Polynesian mating dance, and then they too disappeared from that slice of deck. I started walking down the narrow alleyway toward the dance floor.
On my right, beyond the dark waters of the bay dotted with small craft, some anchored and some under way from one end of the harbor toward the other, the lights on the Balboa peninsula glittered like jewels. Not more than a hundred yards from me was a small sandy beach, a few feet beyond it the color and movement of the Balboa Fun Zone. Occasionally the sound of a merry-go-round there mingled raucously with the combo’s more delicate harmonies, and lights from the Ferris wheel spun slowly over the amusement booths below it.
As I passed the dance area, the music stopped. I walked to the portable bar farther back on the stern and asked the uniformed bartender for another bourbon highball. I got it, went back near the dancers and leaned against the rail, looking them over. The combo swung into Manhattan, and half a dozen couples started dancing.
The gal in the red dress was sitting in a deck chair sipping from a Martini glass, her yellow hair somewhat tousled. A few minutes ago, before going up forward, I’d stood where I was now for several minutes, and we had practically become acquainted through glances. But at the moment she was talking to a heavy-set guy with a cigar waggling in the corner of his mouth, and I couldn’t get a glance in. A short distance behind her, leaning against a metal beam which supported an overhead canopy, stood another tall girl. This one was dark-haired, wearing a white dress, and I recognized her, too, from my last inspection tour. This one I would recognize any time, any place, from now on.
The yellow-haired tomato was very attractive, smooth and shapely, almost too top-heavy and almost too vital and bubbling. But the tall dark lovely turned that “almost” into too much. Simply because she was in the same group with them, she made the blonde and all the rest of the women here appear to be less than they really were, as if she somehow dimmed their luster by the superabundance of her own.
But it wasn’t a fiery, blazing luster—rather it was the beautiful coolness of fire imprisoned in thin ice, a controlled and graceful manner and movement, the soft shock of her deep dark eyes. She hadn’t danced with anyone during the minutes I’d watched her; she had been alone most of the time. And whenever my eyes had caught her dark ones, she had looked away. Leaning back against that metal beam, the white dress hugged her fine full body in clean sweeping lines. Her hair was dark, but refulgent, a thick chestnut-colored mass behind her oval face. She was slim enough, but with almost reckless curves, lush deep breasts bursting with life, sharply incurving waist above smoothly arching hips.
She turned slightly and saw me looking at her. For a long moment she stared at me, then straightened up; I thought she was going to walk toward me. But she looked away, reached into a bag she was holding and took out a cigarette, lit it. She didn’t look at me again.
This was a kind of goofy situation. The gal I’d talked to on the phone had emphasized the fact that it was imperative nobody know she was hiring a detective. That was the main reason for describing myself to her. She had said that she would locate me on the yacht and then approach me when I was alone so that we’d be unobserved by others. That was why I’d twice ogled the dancers, and wandered around a bit, and been sort of skulking in dark corners.
I was about to go off and skulk some more when I noticed the yellow-haired tomato in the red dress walking across the dance floor toward me. She caught my eye and smiled, and I grinned back at her in the most encouraging manner I could muster, which is pretty encouraging. This red-clad lovely was not only good to look upon, and shaped sensationally, but she could dance.
She stopped alongside me, rested one hand on the rail and fluttered big green eyes at me.
“You’ve been watching me, haven’t you?” she said.
“Sure. I’m no fool.”
She smiled. “I saw you here a while ago, but you didn’t dance with anybody. Don’t you dance?”
“Not quite as much as you. But I enjoy dancing. All sorts of dancing. And I’ll try practically anything.”
“Good. I do all sorts, too.”
“Yeah. All at once.” I grinned at her, hoping she wouldn’t mind. She didn’t.
“You’re fun already,” she said. “I’ll bet we’d have swell fun together.”
“I’ll bet we would,” I agreed. “We are. And we haven’t even started dancing yet.”
“We will, though. You just bet we will. What’s your name?”
“Sh —” I cut it off. There were surely some people aboard who had by now recognized my chops, but an even greater number of the citizens in Southern California know my name; and, until I was sure who my client was, and what she wanted me to do, it was perhaps discreet just to be a guy named Scott.
“Scott,” I said.
“I’ll call you Scotty.”
“Fine. What do I call you?”
“Arline.”
For a moment I thought she’d said Elaine, and I let out a small whoop.
“What did you say?” she asked me.
“Nothing. I just let out a small whoop. Did you say Elaine?”
“No. Arline. Arline, like in … well, like Arline.”
“Have we chatted before? Recently? About anything?”
“No.” She shook her head, yellow hair shimmering. “I’d have remembered.” She still had the Martini glass, now empty, in her hand. She held it up and said, “Would you get me another Martini, Scotty?”
“Right away. Or I could get you shots of gin, vermouth, and an olive, and just let you mix them in you. During a rumba, say?”
“I’d rather have the bartender do them. They’re wonderful—practically choke you. I think he uses gin, vermouth, and fallout. Why don’t you have one with me?”
“Ah … I’ll stick to bourbon, Arline. Back in a minute.”
While I waited for the drinks I looked around a little more. I was beginning to feel marvelously buoyant, possibly buoyed up a little extra by the bourbon already in me. And I decided that if my client didn’t show up for a while I wouldn’t worry about it but would simply enjoy myself—rushing up on the darkened bow every ten minutes or so, and then back to where the life was.
A cute and curvy little blonde was on one of the bar stools, sipping a tall drink with fruit on top of it, and keeping time to the combo on the bar’s edge. There were a number of juicy gals aboard, and she was one of the juicy ones.
“Hi,” the little one said. “Who’re you?”
“I’m … Scotty.”
“Hi, Scotty. I’m Jo. And I’m woozy!”
That answer made me feel happy and sad at the same time. This one was Jo. Well, you can’t have everything. I picked up my freshly prepared drinks, said, “See you later, Jo,” and walked away as she called sweetly after me, “That’s a promise!”
Arline thanked me for the drink, sipped about a third of her Martini and shook her head rapidly back and forth. “Wow. That’s it, all right. Now I’m radioactive.” She blinked the big green eyes at me, smiling. “Isn’t this fun?”
“Sure is.”
“I mean, the yacht and all.”
“Yeah. It’s great. Everybody should have a yacht.”
She frowned slightly, sipped again at the Martini, and said slowly, thinking hard, “But … that’s—that’s socialistic, isn’t it?”
I grinned. “Not quite, my sweet. Under socialism, the government gives everybody an oar. But there are no yachts.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” she said. “Why don’t we dance?”
“Why don’t we?”
We did. We put our drinks down on the teakwood deck, stepped onto the highly polished section before the combo and danced. But it was much more than just a dance. It was like doing a fox trot and getting your pants pressed at the same time. It was a sort of anatomy lesson in four-four time, a promise for three steps and madness on the fourth, it was—well, it was too much.
Halfway through Imagination, I stopped, sort of quivering. “I need a drink.”
“But we haven’t finished the dance.”
“Maybe you haven’t, baby, but I’ve finished.”
“Oh, come on, Scotty. Just another minute.”
“Another minute would do it, all right. No. Thank you, but no.” I spoke firmly. If you can speak firmly while breathing through your mouth. “I really do need that drink.”
While she argued with me, Imagination ended and the boys in the group took a short break. Arline and I finished our drinks, then she said, “You’re fun, Scotty. But I want to dance. I’m just crazy about dancing.”
“I’d guessed it.”
“So I’m going to find somebody with—with stamina. With stick-to-it-iveness.”
“Maybe if it hadn’t been a fox trot…” I began weakly. Then I changed my tune and defended myself, “I’ve got stamina. The thing is, I’ve got too much stamina. I’ve got so much…” I paused. “Incidentally, exactly what do you mean by stick-to-it-iveness? And stamina, for that matter?”
“Oh, Scotty. Here we are arguing. Already.”
“Arguing? Who’s—”
“Oh, there’s Zimmy,” she cried.
“Zimmy? Who’s—”
“’Bye, Scotty. We’ll get together later maybe. I’ve got to dance a Shiffle with Zimmy.”
“Shiffle? What’s—”
But she was gone. Maybe it was just as well. The conversation had become pretty disconnected. I stood there, feeling as if somebody had given me a hot transfusion and then taken it back. So I looked around, sort of sneering loftily at everybody, then walked toward the bow, having another healthy glug of my bourbon. If those glugs were really healthy, by now I would have been in perfect condition—I’d had no dinner, and I’d been pouring this healthy bourbon down quite rapidly since my arrival. And a dinner of bourbon is practically no dinner at all. Time to start taking it easy, no doubt. So I finished the last swallow, put my glass at the edge of the alleyway, and went on to the spot up forward where I’d been earlier.
No client had put in an appearance, after two or three minutes, so I lit a cigarette and looked out over the bay to the lights of the Balboa Fun Zone. The Ferris wheel was circling slowly, suspended carriages rocking to and fro as the wheel stopped for another pair of passengers. Above it the stars, distant suns sharp in the clear sky, seemed mere dim reflections of the lights below. Somewhere over on the starboard side of the yacht a gal was singing off-key, but pleasantly, happily off-key.
Then, below decks, somebody in one of the staterooms on this side switched on a light. The glow poured out of the portholes and onto the water below. And, for the second or third time tonight, I saw that swirl of white.
It looked almost like somebody swimming around down there. I shook my head. That didn’t make good sense. Maybe it was a porpoise. An albino porpoise. Yeah—that made sense. I was squinting, leaning forward, and now my eyes not only focused but the vision got very clear indeed.
That was no porpoise. Or if it was, it had a beautiful bare fanny. Suddenly I didn’t feel so crushed about being abandoned by Arline. Maybe the best party wasn’t on this here yacht after all; maybe it was down there with the fish.
I shook my head again. This kind of thinking won’t do at all, I thought. I must be drunk. I must be losing my mind. That can’t be a porpoise. Porpoises simply don’t have fannies like that.
And, by golly, that’s what it wasn’t.
As she straightened out, the contours of a shapely little gal became clearly visible just under the water’s surface. She stroked toward the Srinagar. And I got a good look at it.
That’s what it was, all right. I was convinced.
It was a bare fanny.
Chapter Two
That’s what it was, for sure. I knew. I may not know much about porpoises, but I know a little about bare fannies. It’s hard to fool me with those.
I have seen them before. In fact, when I was Health Director of the Fairview Nudist Camp, I saw more bare fannies than you would think a man could stand. Some beautiful, some only moderately pleasing, and some that should have been filed under “Miscellaneous.” For a while there I’d thought I might never want to look at one again.
But that feeling passed. And how it passed. The truth is, it just whetted my appetite. And down there was what looked like a veritable banquet. Even after Fairview, this was more than just a—well, a bottom. It was the tops in bottoms, a vision of water-kissed dandiness, sheer poetry, a fanny sonnet; all by itself, it was enough.
She had swung clear up to the side of the yacht by now, and she stopped, keeping almost motionless by dog-paddling. She raised one arm and waved.
I waved back.
Then a deliciously merry feminine voice called softly, “Hey, up there.”
“Yeah! Yeah!” I called down to her. “Hello! What’s…” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
She called up, “Please help me.”
“Okay. I’ll be right in. Don’t panic.”
“No! Stay there,” she yelped. “I want to get back up.”
“Back up? Up here? With … me?”
“Yes, up there. Somebody took away my ladder—never mind. I’ll tell you when I get up there.” I was still leaning over the rail, so the light which poured onto the water from the portholes below was also shining up on me. She went on, “I saw your cigarette, but I couldn’t see you until the light came on just now. I decided to take a chance on you.”
“You’re taking a chance, all right.”
She laughed. “Don’t tell anybody I’m in here.”
“Don’t you worry!”
“I’d be embarrassed. Will you get my bikini for me? Better do that first.”
“Bikini?”
“My bathing suit. It’s a red and white striped bikini back at the far end of the boat—where all the people are. But way farther back, clear at the end, on the deck behind some kind of storage box.”
“I can find it.” Explanations, I decided, could wait; now was a time for action.
“I can’t come back aboard like this,” she said. “So run and get it and give it to me, will you?”
“Trust me. I’ll do it,” I said. “Hold tight. Don’t go anywhere … don’t ask anybody else!”
I heard her laugh again, but I was racing toward the stern. Alongside the dancing people I slowed down, walked on past the bar. I didn’t have any trouble finding the bikini. The red and white striped wisps of cloth were in deep shadow behind some kind of chest affixed to the deck on my right, close to the edge. I picked the two small pieces up, wadded them in one hand and started back to the bow.
And now, at a time when I was in no mood for delays of any kind, there was a delay. In fact, two delays. And at least one of them was trouble.
It all happened in about a minute. As I turned and headed forward again, I saw the lovely dark-haired gal in the white dress, whom I’d earlier been admiring, step from the edge of the dance floor and walk up the darkened alleyway down which I’d just rapidly traveled. The whiteness of her dress was visible in the darkness as she walked twenty feet or so along the corridor and stopped.
It seemed more than a coincidence; there was, I thought, a chance she was waiting there for me. At any other moment I would have been overjoyed by that possibility, but at this moment I merely felt a slight queasiness come over me. Maybe, though, she was just getting some fresher air, watching the lights. I didn’t get to ask her.
As I passed the dance floor and reached the alleyway a man behind me said, “Hey, you.”
I didn’t know if he meant me or not, so I kept on going. He said sharply, “You. Scott.”
I was out of sight of the dancers, a few feet into the corridor’s relative dimness, and I stopped and turned around. Walking toward me was a tall, thin, hawk-faced guy. I’d never seen him before. But he knew my name; and it came out of his mouth as if he didn’t like it.
“Yeah, you,” he said, walking up to me. “You are Shell Scott, aren’t you?”
“So?”
“So what the hell are you doing aboard?”
His voice was nasty. In fact, most things about this egg impressed me as nasty, unpleasant. He was about an inch taller than I, but very thin, and his face was sucked in at the sides of his mouth, his hairline high on his forehead, the nose hooked and sharp over a thin black mustache. Some women might have thought him sort of sinisterly handsome, but to me he looked emaciated, unhealthy. Hawk-faced, but as if the hawk were moulting.
I said quietly, “I could think quite a while without thinking of any reason why I should tell you.”
“A smart guy,” he sneered. “I heard you was a smart one, a tough boy.” He was asking for it. He went on, “There’s no room on the Srinagar for no private eye, no peeper. Especially not you, Scott.”
“Well, maybe I can make room.” I took a deep breath, still managing to keep my voice calm and quiet, “So good-by.”
“Yeah, good-by all right. You’re leaving, jerk.” He frowned at me, straight black brows drawing down over his eyes. “But first you’re gonna tell me what brought you here tonight, of all nights.”
“What’s so special about tonight?”
He chewed on his lip. “Never mind. You want to go now, quiet like, in the launch? Or all of a sudden, over the side?”
“You don’t look much like the skipper of this tub. Or the guy throwing the party. Or a guy who can toss me over the side, for that matter. So maybe I’d better wait until somebody else tells me to blow.”
I was guessing. For all I knew he might have been the yacht’s owner; but my guess was apparently right and he was just a punk throwing his weight around. Why, I didn’t know.
He swore softly and said, “Let’s say I’m a friend of a friend. And I’m telling you, beat it.”
I was tired of this egg. Guys like this one I get tired of very fast. I started to squeeze my hand into a fist, and felt the cloth in my hand. I’d forgotten the bikini, and automatically I glanced down at it. So did the hawk-faced guy.
“What in the hell—” he said explosively and grabbed at the cloth. The red and white wisps were jerked from my fingers, and he glared at them, then said, “Why, you bastard! That’s Bunny’s bikini. What the hell you doing with Bunny’s bikini?”
He didn’t know it, but that was the last time he was going to swear at me. I said softly, “Friend, watch your language. Or I’ll wash out your mouth with your teeth. And who’s Bunny?”
He didn’t answer. He just pivoted suddenly and swung at me. Not with an awkward right. It wasn’t a right, and it wasn’t awkward. It was a sharp left hook launched hard and fast at my face with his body pivoting gracefully behind it.
I didn’t quite get out of the way of his fist. I did manage to jerk my head back enough so the blow bounced off the point of my chin. But then I had him.
I have been hit with just about everything except a Ford’s rear axle, and in the process I’ve developed a number of automatic reflexes. That, added to years as a United States Marine, with the Marines’ emphasis on manual self-defense, with more judo and several ideas of my own thrown in for good measure, made the rest of this practically automatic.
As his left fist bounced jarringly off my chin I brought up both arms fast, right hand closing around his elbow and left arm slapping the inside of his forearm. I turned left with him, pushing on his elbow and following the force of his blow, and his wrist slid neatly into the crook of my left elbow. With his wrist caught there, I slapped my left hand over the right one as he swung off balance, kept pulling down on his elbow with both hands now as I leaned into him. And I really leaned into him. I heard the bone pop. It hadn’t broken—not yet it hadn’t—but the elbow bones and tendons, bending the wrong way, were audibly protesting. And so was he.
It wasn’t a loud sound. The noise was a pained grunt growing into a choking gasp. I kept the pressure on, even increased it a little as I bent forward. He was turned clear around, facing almost in the same direction I was, his knees bending. He gasped some more, went down on one knee. His right hand was still free, but he couldn’t swing it toward me without breaking the other arm that I was playing with. Or getting it broken.
But he didn’t wilt, or quit, or ask me to stop. He just swore at me filthily, spittle rolling over his lower lip.
I said softly, “Friend, in about five seconds I can break a couple arms and a couple legs for you, and then you wouldn’t have any left. So shut that kisser and take it easy.” I leaned into him a little more and his head snapped back, mouth stretching wide. The mouth was wide, but nothing was coming out of it.
I held him that way long enough so he wouldn’t forget it, then let go and straightened up. For a moment he kept his arm in the air where I’d left it, then slowly he pulled it toward his chest, grabbed it with his right hand. Breathing gustily through his mouth he got to his feet and stood facing me, staring at me.
“Okay, Scott,” he said finally. “Okay.” He swallowed. “Remember, you asked for it, Scott.” He sighed shudderingly, as if pain and hate and anger were all mixed into the sound, then added, “And you’ll get it.”
Chapter Three
The hawk-faced guy wheeled and walked away, holding his arm close to him. I watched him go, wondering what that had been about, then bent forward and picked up the two pieces of cloth that had so infuriated him. He’d dropped them about halfway through the elbow-bending bit. I straightened up and started to turn when there was a sound behind me.
I swung around suddenly, stopped when I saw the white dress. I’d completely forgotten the girl who’d come up here ahead of me. She must have been only a few feet away all the time.
She said, “How do you do, Mr. Scott. I’m Elaine Emerson.”
It was the throbbingly beautiful voice I’d heard on the phone. But now, undistorted, issuing softly from her lips, it was a caress, like whispers in front of glowing fireplaces, the softly slurred laziness of a woman’s words between kisses, a voice for after midnight, and cocktails, and soft music.
“Believe it or not,” I said, “I’ve been hoping you were. Hello.”
“Hello.”
“But my hopes were fading,” I said. “When you didn’t show up earlier, I figured you were merely the owner of the Srinagar, or something equally depressing.”
She smiled. Even before she’d smiled, though, her softly modeled mouth had turned up at the corners, as if the smooth red lips were always ready to smile. There was enough light so that, standing this close to her, I could see her face clearly, the parted lips and prominent cheekbones, and the dark eyes. Especially the eyes. They were big and shadowed, deep and dark, almost like the eyes of some women of India, glowing and lustrous as if softly lighted from within. I thought again of fire in ice, but when I was this close to her, the ice seemed very, very thin.
I said, “Anyway, I’m glad you’re my client instead. Or are you now?”
“Yes, of course. At least I still hope you can help me find out what’s wrong.” She paused. “That man—the one you just … discouraged. He knows who you are, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah, but so do a lot of other people. That doesn’t mean he can connect us. And I hope he’s discouraged.”
“He should be. That was quite expert, Mr. Scott.”
“Shell.”
“Shell, then. It was somewhat unnerving, but under the circumstances I’m glad I—saw you in action.” She smiled. “You do inspire a feeling of confidence.”
I beamed. This gal was really charming. Not only beautiful, but really a remarkable female.
She said, “I noticed you earlier, of course. It would be almost impossible not to notice you, Shell.”
I beamed some more. But then I wondered, Is that good?
She went on, “A man kept hanging around and I was afraid he might follow me. When he left I took a chance on meeting you. And then that—that awful man.” She looked up at me. “Why was he so anxious for you to leave?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe you could tell me.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t any idea who he is.”
“Miss Emerson—”
“Elaine.”
“Elaine, it would help if you gave me an idea of what the trouble is. What I’m supposed to do.”
“I’m terribly worried about Craig—Craig Belden. He’s my brother.”
That puzzled me. Brothers and sisters usually have the same last name—unless the woman is married. I said, “Is it Miss Emerson or Mrs. Emerson?”
“Miss. Oh, Craig’s really my half brother, much older than I. We have the same mother, but our mother divorced his father several years before she remarried and I was born. Clear?”
“Clear enough. And reassuring.”
She smiled again, then sobered. “Anyway, we’re quite close now, and something’s terribly wrong. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I do know he’s afraid someone is going to kill him.”
I let that hang in the air for a moment, then asked her, “How do you know?”
“He told me. Oh, he didn’t say it in so many words. He said if he got killed—you know. But he is afraid, and his nerves are in awful shape. He’s going to pieces more every day.”
“Who does he think wants to kill him? And why?”
“I don’t know. I—” She stopped speaking, suddenly turned toward the rail and looked out over the water. Then I heard the steps of somebody on the deck. A couple had left the dance floor and were standing at the start of the alleyway, leaning against the metal bulkhead, doing something. I didn’t know what they were doing, but the girl was giggling.
Elaine said softly, “We can’t talk here. I just wanted to have a word with you and identify myself.” She paused. “It’s about twenty to twelve now. At midnight Mr. Goss has arranged for entertainment at the dance area. A Hawaiian group from the Islands. So everybody will be there—that would be the best time for us to meet and talk. All right?”
“Sure. Who’s Mr. Goss?”
“He’s your host—he owns the Srinagar. And he’s one of the men Craig has been associated with.”
“As friends? Or—”
She interrupted, “Oh, nothing like that. I understand they’re good friends. I should go back now. At midnight I’ll be in Cabin Seven. That’s below this deck and on the starboard side. Meet me there then, will you?”
“I’ll be there.”
“I can’t really tell you a lot more, Shell, but at least we won’t be interrupted in the cabin.” She turned and started to walk past, then stopped in front of me, close to me, and looked up at my face, light glowing dimly on the smooth cheeks and in her large eyes.
Then her lips curved in an odd smile, and she said, “By the way. What were you doing with Bunny’s bikini?”
“Huh?” All of a sudden it was as if icy seas were washing over me. I was drowning in a cold ocean of confusion. “Bunny? Bikini?” In my mind’s bloodshot eye I could see her going down for the third time. Without me. Cursing me.
“Oh … that,” I said, as if it were nothing.
And there Elaine left it, the odd smile still on her lips. “See you at midnight.”
She went in one direction and I watched her, graceful, hip-swaying walk—and then I was going in the other direction. When I reached that forward spot and leaned over the rail, the light which previously had been shining from the portholes was out, and for a horrible moment I couldn’t see a thing down there except black water.
“Hello,” I yelled. “You there? Speak to me. Hello?”
“What took you so long?” It was the same voice, and without salty bubbles in it. “I thought you were never coming.”
“Well, I’m back. Here I am. I—”
Then I could see her, dimly. She was swimming from farther to my right, almost from the point of the bow. She stopped below and said, “I forgive you.”
“That’s good. I’m glad you didn’t … drown or anything.”
“Did you find my bikini?”
“Yeah, here it—”
“This is so silly. After you raced away I tried to call you, but I guess you didn’t hear me. You can’t hand the bikini to me, and if you threw it I’d probably miss it and it would sink. And then I’d be in an awful fix.”
“We’d both be in an awful fix.”
“So you’ll have to roll over a ladder.”
“Ladder?”
“Yes, one of those rope things with wooden steps across it. There was one back aft when I jumped in earlier, but it isn’t there now—I swam back and looked. There’s the landing where the launch unloads passengers, but it comes up right by the dance floor. I knew I couldn’t climb up there, could I?”
“I wouldn’t advise it. Especially not the way they’re dancing.”
“So roll over a ladder. Is there one near you?”
“Just a minute.” I ran back and forth along the rail, stooped over, looking. I was looking everywhere at once, but there wasn’t any ladder. There wasn’t even any rope.
I went back to my place on the rail. “We’re in a hell of a fix,” I called down. “No ladder. I’ll have to leave you and find one.”
“All right. But hurry.”
“I’ll go like the wind. You won’t … sink or anything?”
She laughed that merry laugh again. “I could swim for hours. I can hang on the anchor chain again if I want to.”
Anchor chain. That would be near the point of the bow. “That’s where you came from, huh?”
“Yes. And when I was back aft, I sat on the screw for a while.”
“You … what?”
“Sat on the screw. The propeller. You know, the thing that goes around and makes the ship go.”
“Yeah.” Probably I could have figured that out for myself, I thought. It occurred to me that this little gal and I were almost old friends by now; I certainly felt friendly. We’d carried on practically enough conversation for a whole evening, but I still didn’t know what she looked like. I knew what part of her looked like, but that’s not a whole woman, no matter how you look at it.
“Say,” I said, “are you Bunny?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“I got waylaid by a guy who recognized your bikini.”
“Oh, that must have been Joe. José Navarro. He’s my partner.”
I said suspiciously, “What kind of partner?”
“In the act. We do an act together.”
“He swims?”
“No, we do a dance—I’ll tell you when I get up there.”
I squinted at my watch. Eleven-forty-five p.m. I had fifteen minutes left. Only fifteen minutes. That wasn’t nearly enough time for all I’d planned to do. “I’m off!” I yelled, and then, for the second time tonight, I was racing toward the stern.
Not yet had it occurred to me that this was a kind of madness, that nights shouldn’t be like this, that there was an unreal quality about all these activities. Later it would occur to me; but right now nothing mattered but that ladder.
I found the bartender. “Where’s a ladder? A ladder?”
He eyed me coldly. “Now how in hell would I know where is a ladder, Mac?” He turned back to a drink he was stirring, then stopped and slowly bent his head around to look at me again. “Ladder?”
But I was gone. I went all around the rail of the Srinagar, but there was no ladder. I knew the kind of thing Bunny had meant, the rope-and-wood affairs which can be placed, rolled up into a ball on deck and then shoved over the side when needed. But none were in sight, and I didn’t want to ask too many people. This was the kind of operation where you don’t need a crowd, all throwing over ladders.
Just aft of amidships, steps led down to the enclosed deck beneath. I went below and searched around for a minute or two without success, then realized there had to be some kind of storeroom here, in which items usually up on deck might have been temporarily put out of the way. So I walked along the dimly lighted alleyway until I came to a door different from the usual staterooms. It looked like a storeroom. It wasn’t.
I tried the door and it opened. I started to step inside, then noted that the room’s interior was lighted—and occupied. Occupied by four men, in fact, all suddenly frozen into motionlessness by my sudden appearance. Four frozen men, with four frozen faces. And one of them was the hawk face of the guy I’d bent around up on deck. Nobody had to tell me I wasn’t welcome.
In that moment a lot of the zip went out of me. The happy sort of exhilaration during which I’d been charging pell-mell about drained from me slowly, and by the time one of the men spoke I was not only calmed down, but nearly sober. Those looks weren’t just unfriendly. They were murderous. And that is not merely a figure of speech—murder looked out at me from at least two pairs of eyes.
One pair belonged to the man I’d had the tussle with. Joe Navarro, Bunny had called him. He must have come straight here after our beef. And that would have interested me greatly if I’d had time to think about it. But I barely had time to look the other men over quickly.
Navarro was the only one standing. The three others were sitting around a low rectangular table, in thickly upholstered chairs. Closest to me was the guy in the middle. His back had been toward the door, and he’d jerked around in his chair. He was a short, pale-faced man with thinning, sandy-colored hair, blue eyes, and a wide pointed chin.
The other two were seated at my left and right, at opposite ends of the table. The one on my left slowly rose to his feet, placing his hands—long thin hands with long thin fingers—on the table top, and looked steadily at me. He was about six feet tall, thin, with regular, almost aristocratic features, and a thin sharp nose like the blade of a knife. White hair covered his head in tight rippling waves. His black dinner jacket looked expensive, as if the material had been made by the ounce and bought by the pound, very well tailored and smoothly fitting. His black patent leather shoes looked as if they’d been manufactured within the hour. In fact, the man had a kind of shiny, new look all over. His face was tanned and smooth, barely lined, but he must have been over fifty, maybe close to sixty years old. He stared calmly at me, features almost without expression, but his dark eyes seemed to burn with the fires of hell, as though from behind them he could see me being turned by the devil on a spit and greatly enjoyed the sight. That was the other pair of eyes with murder in them.