Big Kiss-Off (3 page)

“Yes, I know that,” Cade said. “I saw you. You live here in Bay Parish?”

She shook her wet head. “No.”

The word had a faintly foreign sound to it.

“You’re off a boat then?”

The girl bobbed her head.

“A ship? A steamer? The one that just dropped anchor an hour or so ago?”

“Yes,” the girl said distinctly.

Cade realized that standing in the open doorway of the lighted cabin as he was, he was a perfect target for anyone on the levee. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

The girl clutched the towel closer to her. The well-cared for fingers of one hand caught at her throat in apprehension. Cade leaned against the door. “Why swim off? And having swum off, why pick my boat?”

The girl’s hand left her throat, as she gestured in the general direction of the music still coming from Sal’s place.

“You thought I would be in the
cantina?
”

“Yes.”

Cade realized her teeth were chattering and that the portions of creamy flesh he could see were covered with cold pimples. He looked for something warm and all he could see was his uniform tunic. He picked it from the bunk and handed it to the girl. “Put this on.”

She touched one of the silver maple leaves and some of her fright seemed to leave her. “Officer? You are officer?” she asked earnestly. Her intonation was definitely foreign.

“Ex,” Cade said curtly.

The girl turned her back and the towel dropped to her bare feet, as she struggled into the coat. When she turned again, it was all Cade could do to keep from sweeping her into his arms. He’d never seen anything cuter. She’d done something to her wet hair. His top pockets had never been better filled. The skirt of the coat came halfway down the girl’s thighs. She looked like an animated pin-up picture by Varga.

She tried to smile.
“Gracias!”

“Colombian?” Cade asked her.

“Venezuelan,” she corrected.

To keep from making a fool of himself and possibly getting his face slapped, Cade took the bottle of rum from the locker and handed it to the girl. “Here. Take a drink of this. Then maybe you can stop shivering long enough to make sense.”

The girl drank without pleasure and returned the bottle.
“Gracias.”

Cade sat on the littered bunk, holding the bottle in his hand. “All right. Let’s have it. You swam ashore and picked my boat to warm up in and grab some food and maybe a few clothes, because you thought I was in the cantina. Now you go on from there. Why didn’t you come ashore in one of the ship’s boats or in the pilot tender?”

The girl spoke distinctly, choosing her words with care. “Because they do not know I am on the ship. Because I am — ” she stopped, puzzled. “How you say when you not pay the passage?”

“A stowaway?”

“Sí.”

“You stowed away, where? In what port?”

“The port of La Guaira. I am from Caracas.”

Cade was incredulous. “And none of the crew spotted you between there and here?”

The girl shook her head. “No.” She had the charm of making everything she said sound dramatic. “For six days I am in a lifeboat, over-covered with canvas. I bribe a steward for food.” She looked at the open can of beans. “Is not nice to be ’ungry. I am ’ungry now.”

“I’ll string along with that,” Cade said. He took himself a drink of rum. “Okay. We’re up to Caracas. Why did you stow away?”

The girl moved his clean clothes aside and sat on the bunk opposite him. “Because I do not have the money or the passport and I want to come to the States. I
have
to come to the United States. And when I get here, I know they will not let me in. So when the boat stopped out in the river, I slide down a rope in the dark and swim to the shore.” She added earnestly, “It was a long way an’ I was ver’ afraid.”

Cade brought himself another drink. He wished the girl would button the top button of his tunic or stop leaning forward when she talked. Wet and muddy and frightened as she was, she was one of the most attractive girls he had ever seen. That included Janice. Just looking at her excited him. He put the cork back in the rum bottle. “What’s your name?”

“Mimi,” she said, gravely, “Mimi Trujillo Esterpar Moran.”

It was snug in the cabin with the door closed. The rum lay warm in Cade’s empty stomach. He was pleased by his own sagacity. “That Moran sounds like it might be Irish.”

Mimi smiled. “It is.”

Cade got up and opened the cabin door. The fog was heavy now and blotted out the levee. The juke box in Sal’s was still playing
Jambalaya
. As far as he could tell, there was no one watching on the pier. It could be he’d gotten his wind up over nothing. Warning him off the river and making sure he left were two entirely different things. Not even Joe Laval or Tocko could explain cut mooring lines or a dead man. Especially when the dead man was a local boy and former Army officer.

Behind him, Mimi’s voice sounded worried. “Someone saw me swim ashore? Someone is looking for me?”

“No,” Cade said.

He closed the door and leaned against it, staring at the girl on his bunk. She didn’t look like any waterfront tramp he’d ever met. She looked like a nice kid from a good family. More, she had guts to do what she’d done. So he hadn’t been with a woman in two years. He was damned if he’d force himself on her just because she had fallen into his lap. If anything should eventuate it would have to start with her, after he’d heard the rest of her story.

“I am so ’ungry,” Mimi said.

Cade pumped up the pressure stove in the galley and lighted all three burners. He examined the meager ship’s stores he’d purchased before putting out of Corpus Christi and decided on cream of mushroom soup, canned corned-beef hash and coffee. He put the cans on the small work table and found Mimi fingering the silver leaf on her shoulder.

“Colonel,” she smiled at him.

“Ex,” Cade reminded her.

She touched his wings. “And flyer.”

Cade picked a clean shirt and a pair of new white duck pants from the litter of clothes on the bunk and laid them on her lap. “Put these on,” he said gruffly. He opened the door of the forecabin and lighted a small lantern. “In here.”

Mimi stood up dutifully.

Cade looked at a smear of levee mud on one small cheek. “You’d better wash that mud off. I’ll get you a bucket of water while you peel.”

Mimi was worried, “Peel?”

“While you take off your clothes,” Cade explained. He picked up a bucket attached to a length of quarter-inch nylon line.

Mimi was relieved. “Oh,” she smiled, “for wash.”

Out in the open cockpit, Cade lowered the bucket overside. The dog on the far bank of the river was still howling. As he hauled up the filled bucket, there was a clanging of ship’s bells in the channel and the steamer he’d seen drop anchor earlier, the ship Mimi must have come from, began to move up river through the fog.

The door of the forecabin was closed. He rapped on it and Mimi opened the door a crack and reached out with a bare arm and shoulder for the bucket, smiling, “
Gracias
. Thank you ver’ much.”

Cade was relieved when she’d closed the door. He made coffee, then added water to the canned soup and put it and the hash to warm. The rum in the bottle was gone. He sucked the last few drops and pushed the empty bottle out the open port over the sink.

The things that could happen to a man.

He set the small table, debated a moment and broke out a bottle of port and two glasses. A small glass of wine never hurt anyone — unless the Squid worked him over afterwards. Even under the thin layer of rum, Cade could taste the orange wine he’d drunk in Sal’s.

Damn the Squid. Cade felt the butt of the gun in his waistband. The Squid wanted to have a good time. The Squid didn’t want him to leave. He’d do what he could to please the Squid. The next time they tangled, he’d be prepared. He’d kiss him all over his pointed head with the barrel of the .38.

The watched soup finally came to a boil. Cade turned off the burner and rapped on the forecabin door. “Okay. Come and get it.”

Mimi opened the door, still smiling. She looked even more fetching than before. She’d braided her wet hair and coiled it around her head. The top two buttons of her borrowed shirt were open and she had discarded the wisp of wet lace. The white pants were tight to the point of bursting around her rounded hips. “Okay, I know,” she said, “but what is this, come and get it?”

Cade forced himself to look away from her. “Just what it sounds like. Sit down. Soup’s on the table.”

He looked back, as she touched the adhesive tape on his cheek and nose with feather light fingertips. “Someone has hurt you. You have been in the fight.”

Cade wished she hadn’t touched him. “Yeah. Something like that.” He sat across from her. “Okay. You said you were hungry. Eat.”

The table was narrow. The benches were close together, so that their knees brushed as they ate. The cabin was small and intimate. What might happen tomorrow was a hundred years away. Cade poured two glasses of wine. It was nice sitting across the table from a pretty girl again.

He raised his glass to the girl across the table. “To strangers that met in the night.”

She touched his glass with hers.
“Saludos!”

He drank his wine. She sipped at hers and spooned her soup away from her, eating rapidly but daintily. She wasn’t a tramp. Hungry as she was, her table manners were perfection.

Finished with her soup, she smiled. “You are being ver’ kind and ver’ gallant.”

Cade tried to eat and couldn’t. It wasn’t food he wanted. He wanted love and companionship and someone warm and soft in his arms. He’d lived with men so long, bitter and angry men, in an alien land. “What could I do?” he asked. “Throw you off the boat? Put you back on the levee in nothing but a pair of sheer scanties and a bra?”

Mimi met his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

A long moment of silence followed, relieved only by the creak of the mooring ropes and the faint swish of the water in the bilge. A new feeling, a feeling of strain, filled the cabin. Cade refilled the girl’s glass. She liked him. He was affecting her just as she was affecting him. Under her calm exterior, she was as excited by the night and their mutual closeness as he was. He could tell by the beat of the pulse in her throat, the way she looked at him from time to time.

“All right. Let’s go on with the story,” he said. “You had no money and no passport.”

“No.”

“But you wanted to come to the States. You
had
to come to the States?”

“Sí.”

“Why?”

Mimi ran the tip of a pink tongue across her full lips.

“Why?” Cade repeated. “Let’s have it. Being as pretty as you are, you could have been, well, let’s say you could have had a bad six days between here and La Guaira, if one or more of the crew had happened to discover you and failed to report you to the captain. Or you might have been drowned swimming ashore. Or I might have been a heel. I still might be, for all you know.”

Although the hips of the white pants fit snugly, the legs were loose. Mimi thrust out her right leg and pulled up the leg of the borrowed pants to disclose a small but efficient looking knife strapped high on the inside of her cream-colored thigh.

“So you have a knife,” Cade said. “Why have you taken the chances you have?”

“To find Captain Moran.”

The name meant nothing to Cade. “What’s this Moran to you?”

Mimi’s Latin accent was more pronounced this time. “My ’usband. We were married in Caracas almost a year ago.” Her voice barely audible, she continued, “When my family find out, they were ver’, how you say,
irritado
!” She found the word she wanted. “Angry. We are ver’ ol’ family. They did not like I should marry foreigner.” Her lower lip thrust out in a sullen pout. “I am not so pleased myself.”

“Why?”

“He was supposed to send for me, but he did not. That is why I stow away, to come to him.”

Realizing the leg of her pants was still pulled high on her thigh, Mimi blushed and rolled down the leg.

Cade returned his eyes to her face. Of course. She had told him her name — Mimi Trujillo Esterpar Moran, and he had kidded her about the Moran sounding Irish. For some reason the thought of any other man having had Mimi made him furious. He asked, “How long were you together?”

Mimi said, “One week. Just the week he was in Caracas.”

“He hasn’t been back since? That is, to Caracas?”

Mimi continued to pout. “No.”

“He was Army?”

Mimi’s smile was small. “A flyer. Just like you. He was on what you call mission.” She accented the
on
in mission.

It was an effort for Cade to talk. “Where in the States is he stationed?”

The black-haired girl shook her head. “That I do not know. I ’ave not heard from him since he left Caracas. But I ’ave written many letters, here. To the adress he gave me — Captain James Moran, Bay Parish, Louisiana, in care of one Tocko Kalavitch. That is why I stowed away in the boat that I did.” She seemed to be trying to convince herself. “And in the morning I will find him.”

“Yeah. Sure. Maybe.” Cade said.

If there were a Moran in Bay Parish, the man was new since his time. He didn’t know any Morans on the river. There were Morgans and Monroes and Moores and Mooneys. There was even a Serbian family that had changed its name to Morton, but he didn’t know any Morans. Cade felt deflated, let down. He poured more wine in his glass, wishing it were rum, wishing he had a case of rum. It would seem that the wrong people always got together.

The things that could happen to a man.

First, Janice.

Then the Squid.

Now this.

“More wine?” he asked Mimi.

“No, thank you,” she said, primly.

He looked at her. And now the thought he had been keeping buried within him struggled to the surface. After all, why shouldn’t he just dump her in the river? Probably her whole outlandish story was a he. Probably she was just a plant, an emissary of Tocko and Company, intending some trick to do him damage once her disarming presence had lowered his guard. Cade lighted a cigarette. Well, he’d play along with her a while. He didn’t want to believe the worst of her. But he’d keep his guard high.