Gulf Coast Girl (2 page)

I gathered it must be a private gun club her husband belonged to, but she didn’t say. We dropped on down the hill into swampy country where big oaks festooned with Spanish moss met above the road. I could see old mudholes here and there through the timber, the silt cracking into geometric patterns and curling as it dried. It was quiet and a little gloomy, the way you imagined a tropical jungle would be.

We went on for about a mile and then the road ended abruptly. She stopped. “Here we are,” she said.

It was a beautiful place, and almost ringingly silent the minute the car stopped. The houseboat was moored to a pier in the shade of big moss-draped trees at the water’s edge, and beyond it I could see the flat surface of the lake burning like a mirror in the sun. There was no whisper of breeze. I got out and closed the door, and the sound was almost startling in the hush.

She unlocked the trunk and I took my gear out. “I have a key to the houseboat,” she said. “You can change in there.”

It was a lot larger than I had expected, and looked as if it must have four or five rooms. It was moored broadside to the pier which ran along parallel to and just off the bank under the overhanging limbs of the trees. A narrow gangplank ran from the bank out to the pier, and another shorter one onto the deck of the scow.

She led the way, disturbingly out of place in this wilderness with her smooth blond head and smart grooming, the slim spikes of her heels tapping against the planks. I noticed the pier ran on around the end of the scow at right angles and out into the lake.

“I’ll take the gear on out there,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at it.”

She came with me. We rounded the corner of the houseboat and I could see the whole arm of the lake. This section of the pier ran out into it about thirty feet, with two skiffs tied up at the end. They were about half full of water, and there were no oars in them. I put down the aqualung and mask and looked around.

The lake was about a hundred yards wide, glassy and shining in the sun between its walls of trees, and some two hundred yards ahead it turned around a point.

“The duckblind is just around that point, on the left,” she said.

I looked at it appraisingly. “And he doesn’t have any idea at all where the gun fell out?”

She shook her head. “No. It could have been anywhere between here and the point.”

It still sounded odd, but I merely shrugged. “All right. I might as well get started.”

She started to turn, and then froze. She was listening to something. Then I heard it, very faintly, over the immense hush all around. It was a car, somewhere a long way off. Her face grew very still and I could see the color go out of it. The sound of the car faded away; I couldn’t tell whether it had stopped somewhere or gone on.

We were standing very close together on the end of the pier. Our eyes met. “What’s the gag?” I asked roughly.

“Gag?”

“You’ve been looking for a car, or listening for one, ever since you picked me up. Is somebody following you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “I hope not.”

“Your husband?”

Her face jerked up toward mine and I could see the ruffling of an Irish temper in the eyes. “My husband? And why would my husband be following me, Mr. Manning?”

I was a mile off base, and realized it. “I’m sorry,” I said. It had been a stupid thing to say, and I wondered what there was about her that made me so uncomfortable and ready to jump down her throat at the slightest excuse. She wasn’t bothering me, was she? The hell she wasn’t bothering me.

She smiled, a little shakily, and I knew she was still scared. “It’s all right,” she said. “You really didn’t mean it, anyway. You’re very nice, you know.”

“Maybe we’d better get started looking for that shotgun,” I said.

“Would it help if I went, too, in one of the boats?” she asked. “I’d like to watch. And I thought perhaps, if you had something to guide you—”

I looked around. It would help, all right. The water was fairly clear and the visibility should be pretty good with the sun directly overhead, but still I’d have to come to the surface every few yards to get my bearings.

“Sure,” I said. “But you can’t go out in a skiff the way you’re dressed. I can bail one out, but it’d still be dirty and wet.”

“I think I’ve got an old swimsuit in the houseboat. I could change into that.”

“All right,” I said. We went back around to the gangplank and walked aboard. She unlocked the door. It led into a big living-room which was well-furnished and even had a fireplace. There was a rug on the floor, a sofa, some overstuffed chairs, a bookcase, and two or three framed pictures along the walls. The windows were closed and curtained. It was in the center of the deckhouse structure, and two doors led off into other rooms at each end. The air was dead and still, and smelled faintly of dust.

She nodded to one of the doors at the right end of the living-room. “You can change in there. I’ll see if I can find my swim-suit.”

I went in. It was a bedroom. There was a double bed in it, and a dresser, and the floor was carpeted from wall to wall. So this was roughing it in a duck camp in the wilds. I took off my clothes and got into the swimming trunks. It was hot, and I was shiny with sweat. I wondered if she had found her suit, and then wished irritably I could quit thinking of her.

I took a cigarette out of the shirt and lit it before I went out in the living-room again. The doors at the other end were closed, but I could hear her moving around in one of the rooms. It sounded as if she was changing clothes. I located a pair of oars and went down to the end of the pier.

Hauling one of the skiffs up alongside, I began bailing with an old can. There was no shade here, and the sun beat down on my head. In a moment I heard the whispered padding of bare feet behind me and turned around.

She could make your breath catch in your throat. The bathing suit was black, and she didn’t have a vestige of a tan; the clear, smooth blondness of her hit you almost physically. A few inches shorter with the same build and the same legs and she would have been downright voluptuous; as it was there was something regal about her. I looked down and went on bailing.

I fitted the oarlocks and held the boat while she got in and sat down amidships. Setting the aqualung and mask in the stern, I shoved off.

“Pull out about twenty yards,” I directed. The water was only about five feet deep around the pier and I could see the bottom from the surface. The gun was nowhere around there.

“All right,” I said in a moment. “Hold it right there while I go over. Row very slowly toward the point, just as if you were going to the blind, but don’t get too far ahead of me. You’ll be able to tell where I am by the bubbles coming up. I’ll have to cover fifty or seventy-five feet on each side, because it was dark and he could have wandered that much off the course.”

She nodded, and watched with intense interest while I slipped the straps of the outfit over my shoulders and put on the mask. I bit on the mouthpiece and slid over the stern. The water was only about ten feet deep and the visibility was good. I went down and brushed bottom. It was soft, and my hand raised a cloud of silt.

That was the only thing I was afraid of. In all that time the gun might have sunk completely out of sight in the mud. But still it should leave a track, an outline, where it disappeared, as there were no currents to disturb the bottom and erase it. I looked up and could see the boat directly above me on the ground-glass screen of the surface. The oars dipped once, scattering bubbles. I swam to the right, just above the mud and not disturbing it, made a wide swing, and came back to cover the other side. Here and there an old log lay on the bottom. I searched carefully around them.

She moved the boat slowly ahead. Time went by. I saw an empty bottle, two or three beer cans, and an underwater snag festooned with bass lures. Now and then bass and perch would stare at me goggle-eyed and slide away.

We couldn’t have been over seventy-five yards off the pier when I found the gun. If I’d been looking ahead instead of staring so intently at the bottom I’d have seen it even sooner. It was slanting into the mud, barrel down, at about a 60-degree angle with the stock up in plain sight. I pulled it out and kicked to the surface. I was some twenty feet from the boat. She saw me and rowed over.

I caught the gunwale and lifted the shotgun out of the water so she could see it. Her eyes went wide, and then she smiled. “That was fast, wasn’t it?” she said.

I set it in the bottom of the boat, stripped off the diving gear, and heaved that in, too. “Nothing to it,” I said. “It was sticking up in plain sight.”

She watched me quietly as I pulled myself in over the stern and sat down. I picked up the gun. It was a beauty, all right, a trap model with ventilated sighting ramp and a lot of engraving. I broke it and held it over the side, swishing it back and forth to get the mud out of the barrel and from under the ramp. Then I held it up and looked at it. She was still watching me.

“It’s a pretty gun, isn’t it?” she said self-consciously.

I stared at it again, and then back at her, feeling the silence lengthen out. It was the stock that gave it away, the stock and she herself. She was a lousy actress.

The barrel could conceivably have stayed free of rust for a long time, stuck in the mud like that where there was little or no oxygen, but the wood was something else. It should have been waterlogged. It wasn’t. Water still stood up on it in drops, the way it does on a freshly waxed car. It hadn’t been in the water 24 hours.

I thought of that other set of car tracks, and wondered how bored and how cheap you could get.

She pulled us back to the pier. I made the skiff fast and followed her silently back to the car, carrying the diving gear and the gun. The trunk was still open. I put the stuff in, slammed the lid, and gave her the key.

Why not,
I thought savagely. When had I become such a priss? I couldn’t understand myself at all. If this was good clean fun in her crowd, what did I have to kick about? Maybe the commercial approach made the whole thing a little greasy, like an old deck of cards, and maybe she could have been a little less cynical about waving that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but still it was nothing to blow your top about, was it? I didn’t have to tear her head off.

I didn’t know. All I was sure of was that I was sick of the whole lousy thing and of her most of all. Maybe it was just the sheer magnificence of her, paradoxically, that made it seem even junkier than it was. She didn’t have any right to look like that and work the other side of the street at the same time.

“You’re awfully quiet,” she said, the gray eyes faintly puzzled.

This was the goddess again. She was cute.

“Am I?” I asked.

We walked back to the pier and went into the living-room of the houseboat. She stopped in front of the fireplace and stood facing me a little awkwardly, as if I still puzzled her.

She smiled tentatively. “You really found it quickly, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. I was standing right in front of her. Our eyes met. “If you’d gone farther up the lake before you threw it in it might have taken a little longer.”

She gasped.

The storm warnings were going up the halyards, but I was too angry to see them. Angry at myself, I think. I went right ahead and reeled my neck out another foot.

“Things must be pretty tough when a woman with your looks has to go this far into left field—”

It rocked me, and my eyes stung; a solid hundred and fifty pounds of flaming, outraged girl was leaning on the other end of the arm. I turned around, leaving her standing there, and walked into the bedroom before she decided to pull my head off and hand it to me. She was big enough and angry enough.

I was shaking. I choked with anger, and I choked thinking of her, and at the same time I told myself contemptuously I was acting like the heroine in a silent movie and that I ought to lean against the closed door with my hand on my chest. Why didn’t I call a cop, or faint?

I stripped off the wet swimming trunks and slammed them on the bed and began furiously dressing. I was buttoning the shirt when it finally occurred to me to ask myself the same question I’d implied to her. Why? Even if she did like her extra-marital affairs rough, ready, and casual, she didn’t have to chase them this far. With the equipment she had—even with that wedding ring showing—all she had to do was stumble. But what other explanation was there? She’d deliberately thrown the gun in the lake. I gave up.

I was reaching for a cigarette when I suddenly heard footsteps outside on the pier. I held still and listened. They couldn’t be hers. She was barefoot. Or even if she’d already changed and put her shoes on, this wasn’t the clicking of a woman’s high heels. It was a man. Or men, I thought. It sounded as if there were two of them. They came aboard and into the living-room, the scraping of their shoes loud and distinct in the hush. I stiffened, hardly breathing now.

Detectives? Wayne himself? Suddenly I remembered the way she’d doubled all over town getting out on the highway and how she’d kept watching the rearview mirror. I cursed her bitterly and silently. This was wonderful. This was all I lacked—getting myself shot, or named correspondent in a divorce suit. And for nothing, except having my face slapped around under my ear.

I looked swiftly around the room. There was no way out. The window was too small. I eased across the carpet until I was against the door, listening.

“Well, it’s the scenic Mrs. Macaulay,” a man’s voice said. “You don’t mind if we look around, do you?”

Mrs. Macaulay? But that was what he’d said.

“What do you want, now?” Her voice was little more than a whisper, and it was scared.

“The usual,” the man replied easily. “Tiresome, aren’t we?”

“Can’t you ever understand that I don’t know where he is?” she said passionately. “He’s gone. He left me. I don’t know where he went. I haven’t heard from him—”

“A bit tiresome yourself, if you don’t mind my saying so. We’ve heard the routine. But to get back to the present moment—we found your making two trips out here in twenty-four hours rather intriguing, and thought we’d look into it. Might even take up nature study ourselves. Now, where’s Macaulay? Is he up here?”

“He’s not up here, and I don’t know where he is—”

Her voice cut off with a gasp, and then I heard the explosive impact itself. It came again. And then again. She apparently tried to hold on, but she began to break after the third one and the sob which was wrung from her wasn’t a cry of pain but of utter hopelessness. I gave it up then, too, and came out.

There were two of them. The one to my left lounged on the arm of an overstuffed chair, lighting a cigarette as I charged into the room. I saw him only out of the corners of my eyes because it was the other one I was after. He was turned the other way. He had her backed up against one end of the sofa and off balance with a knee pressed into her thighs while he held her left wrist and the front of her bathing suit with one hand and hit her with the other. He wasn’t as tall as she was, but he was big across the shoulders. It was utterly methodical, efficient, and sickening.

I caught the arm just as he drew it back again. He dropped her. She fell across the sofa. He was blazingly fast, and even taken by surprise that way he was falling into a crouch and bringing his left up as he stepped back. But I was already swinging, and it was too sudden and unexpected for even a pug to get covered in time. He was still moving back and off balance when it landed, and he kept going. He bounced off the arm of another overstuffed chair, and rolled. He brought up against a three-legged wall table near the door. It fell over on him.

I started for him again, but something made me jerk my eyes around to the other one. Maybe it was just a flicker of movement. It couldn’t have been any more than that, but now instead of a cigarette lighter in his hand there was a gun.

He gestured casually with the muzzle of it for me to move back and stay there. I moved. There was something about him.

He smiled. “Damned dramatic,” he said, almost approvingly. “Hell’s own shakes of an entrance.” Then he looked boredly at the gun in his hand and dropped it back in the right-hand pocket of his jacket.

I was ten feet from him. And I remembered how fast it had appeared in his hand before. He was safe enough, and knew it. I watched him, still feeling the hot proddings of anger but beginning to get control of myself now. I’d come out without even stopping to think because I couldn’t take any more of the noises coming from in here, and now I didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d walked into, except that it looked dangerous. I couldn’t place them. They weren’t police. And they obviously weren’t private detectives hired by her husband, because it was her husband they were looking for. Somebody named Macaulay, and she’d told me her name was Wayne. It was a total blank.

The one I’d hit was getting up. Pug was written all over him, in the way he hitched up his trousers with his wrists and the heels of his thumbs, shook his head to clear it, and began advancing catlike on the balls of his feet with his hands out. He was a good six inches shorter than I was, but he had cocky shoulders and big arms, and I could see the bright, eager malice with which he sized me up. He was a tough little man who was going to cut a bigger one down to size.

“Drop it,” the lounging one said.

“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh, and urgent.

The other shook his head almost indifferently. He was long and loose-limbed and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. It was impossible to tab him. He might have been an intercollegiate miler or a minor poet, until you ran into that cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had that indefinable something about him which enables you to tell the master craftsman from the apprentice in any trade, whether you know anything about it or not. There was something British about his speech.

“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some more?”

I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch for very long without losing your head, and with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.

Tweed Jacket’s amused gaze flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, under the circumstances, unless the rules have changed. Might go through the rooms, though, and have a dekko at the ash trays. You know his brand of cigarettes.”

The pug went out, managing to bump against me and push me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was mutual.

There was silence in the room except for Shannon Wayne’s stirring on the sofa. She sat up. The whole side of her face was inflamed and her eyes were wet with involuntary tears. The bathing suit was one of the old ones with shoulder straps and one of them was torn loose so the front of it slanted downward across a satiny breast. She fumbled at the strap, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. The button was gone. She held it together and went on enduring.

Tweed Jacket apparently found us tiresome in the extreme. He crushed out his cigarette, whistling a fragment of the “Barcarolle” from
The Tales of Hoffman
. The pug came out of the last room.

“Water haul,” he said, spreading his hands.

Tweed Jacket’s eyebrows raised. “Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”

“Right.” Tweed Jacket unfolded himself languidly and stood up.

The pug looked at me, his hazel eyes bright with wickedness. “How about Big Boy? We better ask him, hadn’t we?”

“Rather unnecessary. I’d suggest you stick to business, old boy.”

There was no longer any doubt as to who was boss, but the pug wanted me so badly he tried once more. “This is a quiet place to ask, and he might know Macaulay.”

Tweed Jacket waved him toward the door. “Quite unlikely,” he said. His eyes flicked over the girl’s figure again with that same cool amusement. “I’d say his interest in Macaulay was vicarious, to say the least.
Vive le sport.”
They went out.

In the dead silence I could hear their footsteps retreating along the pier, and in a moment the car started. I breathed deeply. I was pulled tight and soaked with sweat. Tweed Jacket’s urbane manner covered a very professional sort of deadliness, and it could easily have gone the other way. Only the profit motive was lacking. He simply didn’t believe Macaulay was here.

I turned. She was still holding the front of the bathing suit. “Thank you,” she said, without any emotion whatever, and looked away from me. “I’m sorry you had to become involved. As soon as I can change, I’ll drive you back to town.”

I walked over in front of her, so mixed up now I didn’t know anything. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I wonder if you’d tell me what this is all about? And why you threw that gun in the lake?”

She looked through the place I’d have been standing if I had existed. “Really,” she said coldly, “I thought you had that all figured out.”

She was about as beautiful when she was angry as at any time. I tried to filter that out of my mind and look at her objectively. It wasn’t easy.

What had changed the picture? Nothing had really happened to prove I was wrong about it, but I was suddenly very ashamed of myself. It was odd, especially when I still didn’t know why she’d done it, or why she had told me her name was Wayne while they’d called her Macaulay. All I was sure of was that I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I’d like to apologize, if it’s worth anything.”

Her face brightened a little. Then she smiled. With the eyes still full of tears that way, it could catch hold of you right down in the throat.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s my fault, anyway. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid as not to realize that was the way it would look. What else could you think?”

I was uncomfortable. “I’d like to forget it,” I said, “if you could. But what in the name of God did you do it for?”

She hesitated. “I’d hoped I would have more time to make up my mind before I told you. If I told you at all. But you were too observant.”

“Make up your mind about what?”

Her eyes met mine simply. “About you.”

“Why?” I asked.

She stood up. It was obvious she was under a strain. “Would you—excuse me a minute? I’d like to change, and maybe if I had a chance to think—”

“Sure,” I said. She went out. I sat down and lit a cigarette. There was no use trying to guess what it was all about, or what she really wanted. I thought of the two men who had just left. There was something deep and probably quite dangerous going on under the surface here, but I couldn’t see what I had to do with it.

I switched back to her, and as usual I couldn’t get my thoughts sorted out. I was conscious of being happy about something, and in a moment I realized it was simply knowing I’d been wrong about the whole thing. That made no sense at all, of course.
Maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist,
I thought sourly.

She came out in a few minutes, dressed and looking as smooth as ever. She had put on fresh make-up, and the ugly redness was gone from the side of her face. She touched it gently.

“I want to thank you again,” she said. “I don’t know how much more of it I could have taken.”