A Man of Affairs (16 page)

“How much?”

“We’ll each sign over some of our holdings. They can be predated so as to give you a long-term capital gains. You should clear between twenty and thirty thousand. And you must understand that, in effect, that money is coming out of our pockets.”

“Nice big bribe,” I said.

“Let’s stay clear of the ugly words. Well all be more comfortable,” Cam said. “We’ll all go to New York tomorrow. Just Fletcher and Amparo and the staff will be left here. You do not say a word of what happened to anyone. I’ll help you liquidate what we sign over to you. Then you can be on your way.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“You stay on the island until I’m damn ready to let you leave, any of you,” Bowman said, his face ugly.

“That would be a pretty good trick, too.”

“Not as difficult as you might think.”

I stood up. “And not as easy as you might think.”

“Are you going to be difficult?” Cam asked plaintively.

“Sure am,” I said. “I don’t want any piece of this thing. If you boys are caught in a bind, it’s because you had your necks out, and that’s too bad. But you’re both sharp, and Amparo is a good secretary, so you shouldn’t be hurt beyond repair. I think that my people at Harrison should know about this just as soon as possible. And I’m going to let them know just as soon as I possibly can.”

I expected them to try to block me at the door. But they let me go. Bowman gave me a cold and savage smile as I looked back at them. He lifted his glass. “Good luck,” he said.

And it was forty minutes before I learned about the hole card, the ace that had made them so calm. Forty minutes, before I guessed why Amparo had left while I was in the bathroom.

There wasn’t much light left in the west when I got back to the dark veranda where I had left Bridget. She was tense and slightly indignant. “What took you so
long?”

And I told her. It shocked her terribly—not only Mike’s death, but their plans to save themselves.

“I thought Bowman was a nasty piece of work,” she said, “but I sort of liked Cam and Amparo. But they’re just like Bowman, aren’t they?”

“In their own way. The words may be different, but it’s the same tune. So we’ve got to get off the island.”

“How?” she asked.

“Why, by boat, I guess.”

“Indeed?” she said sweetly. I looked down at the dock. The
Try Again
was gone. The three skiffs were still tied up.

“I saw Romeo down there about ten minutes ago,” she said. “He fiddled around for a while and I couldn’t see what he was doing, and then he took off like a bat.”

So we went down to the dock. Nobody seemed to notice us, or care. The outboard motors were on the rack in the dock house. We batted at the mosquitoes that whined around us. The housings were off the sides of the motors. I knew without further investigation that some essential parts were gone, and those parts would be on the
Try Again.

My Bridget had asked a helluva good question.

How?

She whispered, “How are you at swimming?”

“Not that good.”

“I was making a joke. Why are we whispering?”

“I don’t know. Let’s get away from the bugs.”

We went back up to the house at a half run.

“What’s the point?” Bridget asked.

“I won’t play their game, so they won’t let us off the island. None of us. So it doesn’t matter if you and I and Guy and Elda and Bonny and Bundy do know he’s dead. They’ll have a way of getting Cam off. So they keep us right here until Cam gets the three of them healthy up in New York. Then what do we do? Sue? I have a hunch they’ll come out of it with enough money to buy their way out of any jam that might arise because of this.”

A few moments later, in a dreamy voice, Bridget said, “I never in my life have seen a house party go more completely to hell.”

ELEVEN

DINNER ON SATURDAY NIGHT was a strange occasion. For the first time since my arrival, the food was indifferently prepared and carelessly served. Amparo, Bowman and Cam did not put in an appearance. Quite obviously the staff was badly rattled. There were just the six of us. Booty served us at a table in the lounge. She banged the dishes down in a great hurry, and didn’t hear you when you spoke to her. Her eyes were enormous. Dinner was quite late—late enough so that Bonny Carson got well loaded beforehand—and when it was finally served, the main course was tepid.

I had told them about the sudden death of Mike Dean.

I had expected Guy Brainerd to be utterly crushed. But in a most curious way it seemed to hearten him. His big jaw become more firm. “In effect, Glidden, it solves a problem for me. Elda and I talked it over this afternoon. Even though the annual fee he has been paying Brainerd Associates is handsome, there comes a time when a man must weigh profit against… his personal pride in himself and his work. I had about made up my mind to cancel the Dean contract.”

“And I told Guy,” Elda said, “that a man of his standing should not have to endure rudeness.”

Bridget made an almost inaudible and entirely disrespectful sound. Elda Garry stared at her furiously. “After all Guy has done for you, you should be ashamed of yourself, Miss Hallowell.”

“But think of what I did for both of you!” Bridget said and winked broadly at her. The lady editor turned red in the face and stabbed her fork into a piece of the overdone and cooling roast.

Bonny frowned into space and said in her deeply husky and blurred voice, “Figure he’s going to walk in any minute. Never thought they could kill Mike. He was all man. Mean as a damn snake, but all man. You gotta give him that.”

“I give him nothing, nothing at all,” Bundy said shrilly.

Bonny turned her head slowly and looked at Bundy with a certain almost regal dignity. “You know, sometimes, Bundy, you’re a nasty little jerk.”

“So okay! But what did he ever do for us?”

“He was a great guy.” She crossed herself quickly and then began to cry and, a few moments later, left the table, stumbling over the sill as she went out onto the veranda.

Bundy stood up and patted his mouth with his napkin. “You got to excuse her,” he said. “It’s just temperament. You know, she’s sentimental like. All great artists are that way. You gotta know how to handle them.”

He trotted after her.

“That dreary little type is almost touching,” Elda said. “He seems so terribly devoted.”

“Oh, he’s terribly devoted,” Bridget said, smiling at Elda. “Bonny’s last two agents dropped her because they couldn’t see any future in handling her. So now she’s with poor little Bundy and she’s the only client he’s got who ever made more than two hundred a week, and he’s got one chance of making a dollar out of her, so he’s extremely touching and devoted. I think it’s so charming the way you can sentimentalize everything, honey.”

Elda dropped all her Manhattan mannerisms and bawled, in pure Iowa, “Get off my back!”

Guy said heavily, “I hardly think this is the proper time for quarreling, ladies. Remember, we’re all in the same boat. To put it bluntly, if Mr. Glidden is correct, we’re being held here against our will by unscrupulous, and if I may use an old-fashioned word, wicked people. And we will be here for several more days, it would seem. I have important matters in New York that I should attend to. I think we should give our attention to seeing if we can think of some way out of our… dilemma.”

“If you want to do any planning,” I said, “don’t do it aloud either here or in any of the bedrooms. The whole joint is wired, and apparently Bowman is the one who has been doing the most listening.”

I saw Elda and Guy give each other a look in which horror and shame were commingled. His bald head turned as dark and moist as a pickled beet. And she turned so pale she looked greenish. She swallowed with an effort.

“Are you absolutely positive?” Guy asked me.

“Almost completely certain.”

He banged his fork down. “Had I known that Mike Dean would lend himself to any such…”

“Chicanery?” Bridget said helpfully.

“Chicanery, I would never have accepted a public relations contract. There is one thing I have always said. I must be able to believe in the man, the idea or the product that I am…”

“Standing behind of?” Bridget suggested.

He gave her an annoyed glance. “Yes. Yes, of course. I do not care to deceive the public. But, obviously, Mike Dean was deceiving me. I valued him as a friend. I was not aware of his…”

“Multifarious deceptions?” Bridget said in a honeyed voice.

Guy jumped up, glared down at her, and walked away.

“Why do you insist on being so unpleasant to him?” Elda asked.

Bridget muffled a yawn. “Oh, I donno, kid. Maybe it’s because I recently found out he’s the most incurable stuffed shirt in all the wide world.”

“He’s a wonderful and charming man!” Elda said hotly.

“Defend him, kiddo. Stand up for him. I just can’t…”

And every light went out. Elda gasped. Bridget found my hand and squeezed and said, hollowly, “And she knew that there in the darkness, perhaps inches from her dainty ankle, the dread mamba lay coiled to strike.”

“Stop it! Please!” Elda said. “Oh, Guy! Guy!”

“Coming, darling,” he said, and I heard him blunder into a chair and curse under his breath. He felt of my shoulder and said he was sorry and worked his way around the table.

Booty came into the room carrying two candles. “Generator broke,” she said, and put one candle on the table and went away with the other, her shadow vast and wavery.

It was a half hour before the lights came on again. By then it was after ten. A wind had arisen, again out of the northeast. When Guy and Elda said good night, Bridget and I went down onto the dock. Out at the end it was clear of mosquitoes.

“To think I thought I was in love with a type like Guy,” she said.

“Instead of a type like me.”

“Don’t get fatuous, Glidden. Get practical. Get us off the island. Get us off now. I’ve got a crazy idea. I’ve got the idea somebody is going to kill somebody. I don’t want it to be you.”

“We can untie a skiff and paddle with our hands and, hell, Grand Bahama is only thirty something miles over that-a-way some place.”

“One of those skiffs has oarlocks, Sam.”

“The hell you say! Which one?”

“The smallest. But there aren’t any oars.”

I climbed down into the smallest to check, and found out she was right. I went back to her. Something was niggling at the back of my mind. A pair of green oars. But where? I told her to stay right there. I went into the dock house. My lighter flame flickered. The oars stood in a corner. I left them there.

I went back to her. “Oars,” I said. “But it’s thirty miles!”

“More than thirty miles, and the wind will be some help if it holds in that direction, and you are a great big boy now, and besides, I can spell you. So go get…”

I clapped my hand lightly over her mouth, and turned her head so that she too could see the figure standing quietly in the faint moonlight at the end of the dock.

So we talked maybe too gaily of other things until it went away. Whoever it was, mosquitoes didn’t seem to bother it.

“We can figure on three miles an hour and be conservative,” I said.

“Call it eleven hours, then,” she said.

“And take into account getting lost and getting swamped and getting blisters and so on and so on.”

“But, brother, wouldn’t it scare hell out of them!”

“Are you trying to shame me into it?”

“You’re going to try it, Sam, aren’t you? I know you are. I can tell from your voice.”

“Okay, okay. Shall we go pack?”

She hugged my arm. “I’m a silly and temperamental and emotional woman. And I want to leave right now. I don’t want to go near that house.”

It was a crazy gesture, but she had an infectious and persuasive way about her. And there was something too real about her fear.

With utmost caution I got the oars and made certain they fitted the oarlocks. She got into the stern. I untied the line. The oarlocks squeaked and I dipped the pins in the water and they stopped. I took long, strong strokes, and tried to be as silent as I could be. There were two lights on in the house. She was silhouetted against them. The house dwindled, but with an uncomfortable slowness.

We left the bay and turned southwest toward the point. She kept turning and looking back. After a time we could no longer see any lights, but we still whispered.

After I had rounded the point and the wind was behind us, I rested on the oars while I checked the constellations in the night sky and, using the island as a reference point, I set a clumsy course to follow.

“Want me to row now?” she whispered.

“We can use a normal tone of voice now, Murph.”

“Stick with Bridget, huh? Do I row?”

“When I get tired. Off we go. It’s about eleven.” I made the oars bend and made water gurgle against the bow. The oar handles overlapped in an annoying way, and every once in a while I would bang my knuckles. After a time I found a comfortable rhythm. Bridget sang about bell bottom trousers, her voice a clear and true contralto in the night. She knew all the words. Then we made up some more words. We were enormously gay. It was a lark.

Until the moon went under; soon after the stars were gone, and the wind freshened, and the first wave broke over the stern and she had to begin to bail with her cupped hands because there wasn’t anything else. Then it was not at all gay. We were tiny people in a tiny boat on a turbulent and immeasurable sea, under the dark vault of an alien and endless night. What had been partially a lark became a damn fool venture, serious and deadly.

We had to talk loudly to hear each other over the sound of the wind and the cresting water.

“Are you staying ahead of it?” I asked her.

“I… I think so. I can’t see very well. And I keep getting slivers.”

By looking astern I could see the white froth of a breaking wave in barely enough time, each time, to avoid the worst of it by giving a hard pull at the oars.

“What did you say?” I asked her.

“I said I keep wondering what I’m doing here.”

A good question. What the hell were we doing out in a fourteen-foot flat-bottomed skiff in the middle of the night with no idea of direction? I was thoroughly scared, with good reason. I hoped she wouldn’t crack up. I suspected she wouldn’t.