John D MacDonald Page 4

  She gave me a bright and completely artificial smile and said, "Let’s."

  We walked out a door and by a large airy dining room with yellow tablecloths and headed for the swimming pool.

  "Your Mister Bowman is quite a production. Has Dean got many more at home like him?"

  "He’s not my Mister Bowman and I wouldn’t know."

  "Don’t snap at me, Louise."

  "I’m sorry. I guess I just feel . . . sort of cross. Anyway, I think he’s very nice."

  "Do you know anything about him?"

  "He said he’d been with Mike Dean for quite a long time."

  "He’s a very plausible guy."

  "Sam, will you look at that poor little mouse on the high board? She waited too long."

  There was an awkward girl in that gangly hinter-land between childhood and adolescence on the high board. She wore a brown swim suit. She stood pigeon-toed, holding her nose, her left hand outstretched for balance. She was looking down at the water and she was frozen there. Her friends were yelling at her to jump. After a painful eternity, she turned and scampered back to the safety of the platform. A small boy jeered at her and ran out on the board and off the end and made running movements all the way down. The girl clung to the iron railing, shaking her head. I looked at Louise. She was looking up at the girl, her lips slightly parted, an odd expression on her face.

  "That’s me," she said softly.

  "What?"

  She turned quickly and the mood was lost. "I . . . don’t know what I meant. I didn’t mean anything." So the muted and competent Louise Dodge felt somehow that she was on a high place and afraid to jump. Maybe she. felt she had waited too long. And I wondered if, also, she felt she were in some area of transition, some awkward area between two kinds of existences.

  We walked to the far end of the big pool.

  "Look," I said.

  The girl had gone out to the end of the board again. Her friends were counting aloud, chanting a count. Shrill voices saying, Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten--GO!"

  She wavered and could not. She started to turn and lost her balance. She waved her arms wildly and screamed and fell, and grabbed her nose when she was half way down. We watched her swim to the side, race up the ladders, run out to the end of the board and go off almost without hesitation. "After the first time, it’s easy," I said.

  "That’s what they say," Louise said.

  Somehow we had started talking on two levels. It made me feel clumsy with her, and yet curiously excited. I could not deny the strength of the attraction I felt toward her. I could not look at her without thinking how it would be to touch her, But it was something I was going to have to sublimate. I knew that. And this funny sort of talk made it more difficult to thrust desire out of my mind. I did not want to think of desire, because then I thought of Warren Dodge, and my mind would make ugly, sick little pictures of the two of them together, of his grossness defiling her lucently ivory body. Somebody had written the wrong story book about Louise and Sam. We didn’t meet when we should have met. When we were both ready to meet. A time like that goes by and you can’t get it back. You can howl or you can whine, but you can’t go back to any of those forks in your own road and try the other turn instead of the one you took.

  Anyway, this wasn’t the girl with the braid and the blue dress. This was a woman and she was twenty-seven, and you could look at, her eyes and the shape of her mouth and make a fair guess as to how often and how badly she had been hurt.

  When we saw the others down on the dock we headed &at way. The boat was called the _Try Again_, and it was a twenty-six-foot sports fisherman with out-riggers, twin screws, two swivel fishing chairs bolted to the deck, a broad beam and an oversized cockpit. The crew was a knotted charcoal-colored little man in khakis named Romeo. When we were aboard, some boys on the dock tossed our lines aboard. Romeo eased it out and then opened it up and it really got up and went. There was a northeast wind and enough of a chop so that the _Try Again_ spanked white spray out fifteen yards on each side of the bow, but it ran steady and dry.

  Bowman, braced easily against the movement of the boat, gave us all more of the travelogue, speaking above the sound of the gutty engines.

  "This is one of the great fishing areas of the world," he said. "You have the flats for dolphin, albacore, king, tarpon, barracuda, amberjack, Spanish mackerel and SO on. Then, down toward Bimini, which isn’t much of a run from here in the _Try Again_, you get marlin, tuna, sail, mako, the big stuff. Mike doesn’t get as much time to fish as he’d like to have. He’s a real bug on it. The day before yesterday he got an eighty-seven-pound barracuda on thirty-pound test line. Ugly devil."

  I couldn’t resist it. "I thought you were in New York the day before yesterday, Mr. Bowman."

  It didn’t cause a ripple. "Please call me Fletcher, Sam. I got down yesterday. Amparo showed me a picture of it she took with one of those Polaroid cameras. That’s Amparo Blakely. She’s Mike’s indispensable girl Friday. Last year Mike brought a four-hundred- and-thirty-pound marlin to gaff on sixty-pound test line. The fight lasted over three hours."

  Tommy had been listening avidly. He moved in on Bowman with what sounded like highly technical questions. Bowman seemed to give informed answers. It gave me the uneasy feeling that there would be damn few subjects that could come up that Bowman wouldn’t have the inside pitch on, and couldn’t discuss with mellow confidence and self-effacing charm. He had a white scar in one thick black eyebrow and I wondered who had had the pleasure of putting it there. The sun was hot and the three male tourists, Tommy first, shed jackets and ties and rolled up shirt sleeves. The air seemed to be reviving Warren. He asked Bowman if there was a drink aboard. Bowman was apologetic and dreadfully sorry that there was not. But we would be at Dubloon Cay in half an hour now. It was just thirty miles northeast of Grand Bahama.

  I found myself looking at Louise. She was standing by the rail, holding onto one vertical support for the Navy top. The wind snapped her glossy black hair against her cheek and molded her dress tightly against her high breasts and against her thighs. I just looked at her and when I turned and looked at Bowman he was still talking to Tommy, but he was looking over Tommy’s shoulder at me. He held my glance for a quarter beat and then looked away, but I had the feeling he had gotten the message.

  THREE

  BOWMAN POINTED OUT DUBLOON CAY and it didn’t look as though there was anything on it. It was low and about three miles long. Then we went around a point and we could see the small tidy bay, the long T-shaped dock, a wide expanse of lawn that sloped up to a long low building of weathered wood, with many porches and verandas. As we came closer I could see a pool to the left of the house, with umbrellas and people lying around in the sun, and a tiny figure of somebody in a white coat carrying a tray of drinks. To the right of the main house, back in the pines, were several smaller structures. There was a cruiser about forty-five feet long moored to the dock, as well as several skiffs with outboard motors. A hundred yards to the left of the dock, along the semicircle of sand beach, a small float plane was pulled up against the sand and moored with long lines tied to palms. There was a low sea wall between the lawn and the sand beach. The layout looked like a small and efficient hotel, fashionable and comfortable. God knows Mike Dean could afford it.

  Romeo reversed the engines at the last possible moment and Bowman fended the boat off the dock until Romeo had the fenders in place and the lines secured. Two Bahamian boys in white jackets trotted down and got the luggage onto the dock. We each identified our own luggage, and Bowman told the boys what rooms we were to be put in, and told us that the best thing to do would be follow the boys and unpack and change into something comfortable and join the party out by the pool. He said it was a little too late for sun clothing as the bugs would be out in another hour to drive us all indoors.

  We were all in the right wing of the building. The McGanns were beside me and the Dodges beyond them. My room was clean and rather bare and very
small. A room for sleeping only. There was a small tiled bath. One door opened onto the corridor and the other door onto the long front veranda with its view of the bay and the open sea beyond, and twin islands in the distance. I unpacked, changed to gray slacks and a dark blue sports shirt, and walked out onto the veranda at about five-thirty. The sun was getting lower, but there was still a lot of heat in it. I had no intention of heading for the pool by myself.

  Fifty feet along the screened veranda a screen door hissed. I looked up from lighting my cigarette and saw a blond girl come in, walking from sunlight into shade. She wore a knit shirt in a narrow red and white stripe, red shorts that were very short indeed. She was a round-faced leggedy blonde, toffee-tan, barefoot, humming a something song, swinging her legs in the song’s rhythm, carrying a half drink in her hand. She saw me and lifted the drink as though in a toast and said, "Hello now," and turned into a room two doors from mine. She left me with memories of legs and smile, and a sense of the whole island being brought into better focus. I sat in a deep canvas chair and put my legs on a low round wooden table, and in a few minutes Tommy and Puss came out. We decided to wait for the others and it was not a long wait, and then we went on out to the pool where everybody was, and where the drinks were.

  I had seen plenty of pictures of Michael Davis Dean, and I had heard a lot of talk about him. I knew what he would look like. A big head with heavy features of that spuriously noble design that makes you think of togas and Cicero. A shock of prematurely white hair, unkempt in the contrived way of a second-rate poet. Nobody seemed to know very much about his past. His father had been well off. Mike had never gone to college. He got his first national publicity back in 1934 when he was thirty. In the big receivership tangle over the Geiss Roller Bearing empire, it was Mike who popped up out of no place, holding aces back to back. He had never married. I had heard a lot of words about him. Crafty, unscrupulous, power-mad, egomaniac. And also, charming, able, generous, genius.

  I was not braced for Mike in the flesh. He had a deep tan and he wore a straw coolie hat and an ankle-length pink sarong, professionally knotted at the waist and thoroughly rump-sprung. He was shorter than he had looked in his pictures; he stood about five-nine. There were hard shifting slabs of muscle in his back and shoulders and chest, and the sarong was knotted around a slightly protruding belly that looked hard as a rock. His eyes were a very pale gray-blue, and his chest hair was heavy and white. He had something of a Hawaiian look about him. He radiated intense energy, and a conspicuous charm. It was almost impossible to imagine him in any group he would not dominate merely on the basis of an animal magnetism. I sensed that this was a man who would commit himself one hundred and ten percent to anything he decided to do. I sensed that it would be a sorry situation to be standing in his way.

  Fletcher Bowman introduced us. Mike was, bewilderingly, a jolly and muscular elder brother to Puss, a courtly uncle to Louise, a drinking partner to Warren Dodge, a fellow sportsman to Tommy, all in the space of a minute and a half. When he released my hand he grinned shrewdly up at me and thumped me lightly in the ribs with a slow fist big as a burl of mahogany, and said in a voice the others could not hear, "We’ll make some talk when we get a chance, Big Sam."

  And the hell of it was that it made me feel flattered and honored to be given this special attention, even though I knew it was only a part of his tactics. "I’m the uninvited guest," I said.

  "Self-invited. And the only reason for that is because I didn’t think there was a chance you’d come. You fit right into this picture the way we want to set it up, Sam. Folks, you’ll need a drink before we make the rounds. No, Fletcher, I’ll take them around."

  He motioned and one of the white-coated men came over and took our drink order. Mike was drinking steaming coffee from a pewter mug with a glass bottom. A small boy with a white jacket and great dignity came over to us and offered a tray of hors d’oeuvres.

  Mike rapped him on the top of the crinkly skull and the boy grinned with quick pleasure and worship. "This is Skylark," he said. "Romeo and Ruby’s youngest. Romeo and Ruby stay here on the island the year round and keep things in shape. When I move in with a crowd, they beef up the staff with their relatives and stock up on food and liquor."

  Our drinks came and Mike took us on a circuit of the pool. I knew it would take quite a little while before I could fit names to the faces. But there was one that was easy. Bonny Carson. I had expected to find at least one person from the entertainment world there, but I would not have guessed it would be Bonny. She hit her peak in the late forties and early fifties when she starred in several hit musicals. Outside of infrequent guest spots on television, she had dropped out of sight. But the big-eyed clown face was unmistakable. She had strong gifts of comedy, and a brass voice with which she could lift the roof off the house when she belted out a song. But on a Wednesday evening, the tenth of May, on Dubloon Cay, she was solemnly and somewhat sullenly drunk, and she was showing her thirty-five-plus years. There was a little man hovering around her, name of Bundy. He had a sharp pale nervous face, more than his quota of nervous mannerisms: ear tugging, head scratching, lip pulling. His smile went off and on like a timed electric sign. In shorts he looked somewhat like the pictures you have seen of self-conscious chickens defeathered by a tornado. He had a fiercely protective attitude toward Bonny Carson.

  There was another woman who stood out, Amparo Blakely, Mike Dean’s indispensable secretary. She would have been noticed anywhere. She was big. She was nearly six feet tall, and she was big-boned and she was close to forty; but none of those attributes detracted from her look of being a completely feminine and forceful and desirable woman. I had seen her in photographs featuring Mike Dean. In those pictures she had usually been a few steps behind him. I had not realized how big she was, but I had a clear memory of her striking face. I knew that Amparo was a not unusual Spanish name and I had wondered if she was partly Spanish. But now, seeing her in the flesh, I suspected that she was half Mexican Indian. Though her eyes were pale, her face, tanned to a red-bronze, had that Aztecan look of humid passions hidden behind the Indio mask.

  I had heard the many legends of Mike Dean’s Amparo Blakely. It was said that she had become independently wealthy by riding along with Mike on his deals. She had been with him a long time. And now, with ease and assurance, she was acting as his hostess. I had heard it hinted that their relationship was more than professional. As I looked at her, at the mature, magnificent and superb body in a white and aqua dress, I did not see how any platonic relationship between Mike and this total woman would be possible. They both had a look of being more alive than the rest of us.

  Her hair was dark when she was in the shade, but the sun brought out coppery glints in it. She wore crude gold earrings in a barbaric design. And as she moved among the guests she had that inimitable look of being utterly at home in her world and within herself.

  I looked around and I knew there were one hell of a lot more people on the island than I had expected, and I knew I should get them all sorted out as quickly as possible. I wanted to know who was working for and with Mike Dean, directly and indirectly. You can tell a lot about a man by the attitude of the people who work for him. Fletcher Bowman was a younger, more suave, less forceful edition of Mike Dean. But he was so obscured behind all his masks of mannerisms I could not detect his actual attitude toward his boss man.

  I wanted information and so I looked around and detected what I thought might be the most pleasant way of acquiring it. The blond cutie I had seen on the veranda was back at the pool, and she had changed to a blue blouse and a white skirt. She sat on a couch built like a trampoline, a yellow canvas cover spring-fastened to a tubular bronze frame. She had a new drink and she was humming her little song and half-smiling into the middle distance and tapping a slender foot in a tall blue shoe as she sat facing a dull fireball of a sun that was sliding down into a sea that had turned to oiled slate.

  I stood over her and said, "On the first go-round I g
ot it that you’re called Murphy, but I didn’t get the rest of it. And I’m lousy on names and so I need maybe a briefing on you and the rest of the throng."

  She came back out of her middle distance and focused on me, warm and friendly as a pup.

  "In my file folder it says here that you’re the biggest thing on the island and your name is Sam Something."

  "Glidden."

  "Have it your way. And I am a shade drunk from drinking and you may sit down and be briefed." She patted the yellow canvas beside her and I sat down.

  "About this Murphy," she said, "I am Bridget Hallowell and I used to be called Bridey until that damn book came out and then it became Murphy. I am starting an international movement to get it back to Bridget where it belongs."

  "Bridget it will be. And on the briefing, start with you."

  "After I get you lined away. First I want the measurements. Men shouldn’t be so big. I do not mind being made to feel dainty and fragile, but not this dainty and fragile."

  It is something I have had to get used to. "Six feet four and a quarter, Bridget. Two hundred and eighteen pounds. And I will be thirty-one on the twenty-fourth of next July. I am vice-president of the Harrison Corporation.*