His hand went down under the table and gently carressed the silken soft, fleshy inside of her thigh. Then his fingers clamped tightly into the smooth plumpness; kneading it almost savagely.
CHAPTER ONE
Sprawled on the powdered-sugar whiteness and softness of the Gulf beach sand, soaking up the warm winter sun, he tried not to think about the letter he'd received from his wife this morning. He wasn't doing too well at it. It was a strange thing but whenever he heard from Norma, he suddenly acquired a conscience and this he didn't like. It knocked him off beat.
"Isn't it wonderful, Si?" the blonde, next to him, said. "I just love it; I mean, it's so wonderful."
"What is?" he asked without looking at her. It hurt him to look at her when she talked-there was such a breach between the way she should have talked, with her looks, and the way she actually did.
"Oh, everything," she said. Her voice was flat; such a nothing voice that went so perfectly with the boring fatuities she was always mouthing. "The nice, pure white sand," she said. "And the glorious sun and the pretty green waters of the Gulf and the lovely, lovely breeze. It's all so glorious, Si. I just love this life, don't you?"
"No," he said. "I don't. It stinks. The sun, the Gulf, the sand and the breeze. They all stink. Gloriously. In fact all Florida stinks. So does the wide world and all the people in it, for that matter. Present company not excepted."
He opened his eyes then, to see if he'd got to her a little; hurt her a little.
She was half leaning over him, with that long, silk-soft yellow hair billowing away from one side of her piquantly pretty face. She looked either puzzled or dismayed; Si Walker couldn't tell which. It was difficult to read Mimi's thoughts, when and if any, through her facial expressions. But then she laughed.
"What's funny?" he demanded.
Mimi twisted a finger into the tangled, sun-bleached hair on his chest. "Oh, you!" she said. "Always kiddin' around!"
God, why didn't she shut up?
"What makes you like that, Si, honey?" she said. "Why are you always sayin' things like that, trying to hurt peoples' feelin's and all? Golly, I should think you'd be the best-natured person in the world, you're so good lookin' and have a big, beautiful car and a swanky motel and all. You're real lucky. You ought to be happy all the time, instead of grouchy and moody."
He sat up, then. He turned to her and said: "You know all about it, don't you? Mimi-Girl Philosopher. Do you know what you can do with your philosophy?"
Deadpan, she said: "No, honey. What?"
"Oh, Christ," he said.
She ran the tips of her fingers over his shoulder and down the sun-stained flesh of his powerful biceps. His skin prickled pleasantly at the warm, sensual touch.
"I don't care," she said. "Be an old grouch. I love you, anyhow. Golly, darling, you've got such a beautiful body!" She shivered, ecstatically, then bent her head and playfully nipped his shoulder with her small, white teeth. "Mmmmmmmmmmmm! I could eat you."
"It could be arranged," he told her.
"Oh, you!" she said and giggled.
He couldn't take that, today; the giggling. He reached out and put a hand over her mouth. She didn't try to take it away. Instead, she opened her mouth and roguishly tickled his palm with the hot tip of her tongue. And her gray eyes held his gaze, unblinkingly. She watched his eyes move over her, then, lingering on the rhythmic rise and fall of the soft, creamy rounds that overflowed the top of her two piece swim suit. Then his gaze swept down over the gentle swell of her belly, the delicate mounding of her Mount Of Venus, plainly delineated under the tight lastex bottom of her swim suit, the long, tapering, full-fleshed curving of her firmly plump young legs, with the intriguingly dainty, faintly visible trace of golden down on the tops of her thighs.
As his eyes returned to hers, he said, almost gently, now: "There, that's better. This is the way they ought to make your model. No mouth." He moved his hand away from her lips.
"Then how could you kiss me, honey?" she asked right away.
"Don't talk again for the rest of the afternoon and I'll show you, later," he said.
She cocked her head like a dog that doesn't fully understand but her eyes darkened and she tongue-tipped her full, sulky lips, moistening them.
His hand moved on to her belly, stroked it, caressingly. He watched her eyes close, her moistened lips part.
"You are beautiful, though," he whispered. "So God damned animal-beautiful."
His hand slid up and covered the bulging fullness under the bathing suit top; his fingers dug luxuriously into the resilient mound, massaging it, lovingly. He felt the center of it rise eagerly, try to push through the cloth into his caressing palm.
"Oh, Si! SiT Mimi murmured. "Oh, darling!"
Then, abruptly, her eyes opened. "Honey, honey, you'd better stop," she said. She rolled away from him, over onto her stomach. "There are other people on the beach."
"You think I care?" he said. He reached over and placed his hand on the bare, warm, curving hollow of her back. "For two cents I'd really give 'em something to gawk at."
His hand slid down, forced its way under the waist of the lastex swimming shorts, moved over the plump half-moons of her buttocks. "For a lousy two cents," he told her, "I'd rip that suit off of you, right here on the beach and-"
With a shocked gasp, she twisted away from him, displacing his hand. She sat up, stared at him wide-eyed. "Si, are you crazy?"
He grinned at her. "Yeah," he said. "Over you."
Then, with almost the same breath, in the same caressing tone, he said: "Mimi, how much dough you got with you?"
For a moment she was too surprised to answer. Then she shrugged. "Mmmm, I don't know, exactly. Why, sweetie?"
"I could use a few bucks."
She frowned. "Again?"
His voice went harsh. "Look. Either you give it to me or you don't. But no lectures. If you're broke, say so. Hell, I can go to Jack, who owns the Beach Club, here, if I have to."
She pouted and reached for her purse on the blanket beside her. "All right," she said, unenthusiastically. "But, I'm not made of money, you know. I'm only a poor working girl on vacation. You still owe me ten from yesterday, Si."
"I know. I know. Just give me twenty and I won't bother you again. I told you, before, I had to put every cent of cash I had into those two new units on the motel. Until my bank loan comes through, Thursday, I'm a little flat, that's all. What is it, a criminal offense?"
He heard a change purse snap inside her big beach bag. "Twenty's a lot. What do you need twenty for, hon?"
That's a good question, he thought. What do I need it for? I've still got half the fifty I bummed from Elena, my beautiful, my beloved, my drunken boss lady. So, why, Si, boy?. ... Because it's so easy? Because you get a bang out of conning them? Because, hell, they got to pay for your beautiful manly company, don't they?
"Why, it's this way," he said, aloud. "I need it to take another broad out tonight. One a little more beautiful and not quite as boring as you. A better lay, too. A helluva better one. That answer your question?"
He knew as soon as he said that, he'd gone too far. He listened to the change purse snap shut again and then the clack of the beach bag handle. She thrust the bag aside and sat there, her chin high, her lower hp trembling, pale with anger as she stared straight ahead toward the Gulf.
He gave a snorting laugh. "You sore?" When she didn't answer, he said: "You're going to be even sorer. Literally."
He tugged the tight tops of her swim pants away from the flat brown smoothness of her belly. With his other hand he picked up a handful of sand and dropped it down inside the pulled-away trunks.
She turned and stared at him in big-eyed shock for a moment. Then her face began to crumple and the tears came.
He got to his feet and walked away from her, back toward the Beach Club.
This being a week day, there were mostly women on the beach. Some of them had children with them. They were all ages. They all watched Si swing across the sand and their heads all turned so their eyes could follow him. Although he was used to this, he still got a kick out of it. He knew how he looked. He'd seen himself in the full length mirror in his room, enough. Like the cover on a physical culture magazine, even to the extreme brevity of the white trunks that contrasted so nicely with his mahogany tan and so formidably advertised his masculinity. He always got a kick out of the way the eyes of the women were always drawn to that part of him, in quick, surreptitious glances; even the most snobbish looking women.
He always hated to leave the beach, to put clothes on. When you had a good product, he figured, it was foolish not to display it. The women did, didn't they? Especially when it was your livelihood. And this splendid physique he'd spent so much time and effort developing and keeping, was really his stock in trade. The full time job he was supposed to work at, at Elena's motel, was only an avocation. Hell, nobody could live on that sixty bucks a week.
He walked across the parking lot to get the pack of cigarettes he'd left in Elena's canary colored Cad convertible. As he turned from the car, a Lincoln Continental purred to a halt beside him. With her clever makeup and expensive hairdo, the driver looked like a nicely preserved forty. But Si tabbed her for probably ten years older. One like Elena was enough, so he stared at the woman coldly. She didn't seem to notice. Her eyes were too busy moving over his magnificent body.
"Pardon me." She had a husky, insinuating voice and Si saw now that her eyes were a little bloodshot. "Would you care for a drink? I hate to be so forward but I'm dying for one and I don't like to drink alone. It's bad luck. Y'know?"
He looked at her hard. He said, curtly: "Sorry, mother. You're just not my type."
He turned and walked away.
A moment later, she screamed after him: "You bastard. You egotistical bastard, you go to hell, you hear? Who needs you, anyhow?"
Si grinned and walked on toward the Club.
Inside, Mimi was now sitting at a corner table, toying with a bottle of beer. Her face lighted like a reef beacon when he came in. His eyes swept past her, though, and he went straight to the bar. A stocky, shiny-bald barman started mixing a double Martini right away. Without preamble, he said:
"She's been calling every ten minutes, Si. I dunno what to tell her. She keeps calling me a liar and says she dam' well knows you're here. What do you want me to do?"
Si Walker frowned. He made a production out of it. He knew that it made him look more fiercely handsome for the several women in the place who were looking at him. He said, quietly:
"Damn her, why can't she leave me alone?"
"Ha!" the barman said. "This kind of trouble I should have." He watched Si gulp the Martini and flick the empty glass with a fingertip, for a refill.
The barman made the drink and eased the pad of tabs along the bar. "You want to sign for those?" he said without enthusiasm.
Si knew that his bill here was getting high but not bad enough for them to shut him off-yet. He was too decorative to be shunted away to some other beach joint, competition being what it was. Sometimes he wondered why they didn't put his name up in fights: Extra Added Attraction-Simon Walker.
He turned and looked toward Mimi's corner. She smiled at him. "No," he told the barman. "Make out the chit and I'll pay for it when I leave." He picked up the second Martini and walked over to Mimi.
When he sat down, she reached across the table and took his hand and surreptitiously pressed a folded twenty dollar bill into it. "Thursday, though, honey." She sounded just a little frightened.
God, he told himself, you'd think it was a fortune. Why do I mess around with this penny ante stuff? Why don't I wise-up and really turn pro and hit for Miami or Palm Beach where they'll squeeze a G or at least a C note into my sweaty little palm?
He knew why, but he didn't like to dwell on it.
Because he was chicken, really, was why. Anything really bigtime unnerved him badly. He didn't know exactly why this was so but he knew it was the reason he stuck to this stupid Middle-Class West coast resort town and the stenogs and nurses and school teachers on winter vacation-and drunken, fighting-the-forties motel owners for the steady source.
Or maybe there was just a latent streak of pseudo-respectability still in him that prevented him from turning into a full time, Grade A, solid gold-plated heel. The same factor that kept him from completely forgetting about Norma, his wife, and their boy, Tommy; made him think, sometimes, about going back to them, facing the music, trying to change and start all over again.
Damn Norma for that letter he got this morning!
Another part of himself hated feeling this way; it was a weakness and any form of weakness was for the birds, for the chickens and that way boredom and poverty lay.
"You hear me, Si?" Mimi's voice broke into his thoughts. She sounded worried. "You'll have to pay me back, Thursday."
"I know, I know," he said, mockingly. "Because otherwise you won't have enough to fly home. You'll have to take that horrid old bus." He clucked his tongue.
She looked amazed. "Why, how did you know that, Si? That I'm almost broke, I mean?"
He didn't tell her. He didn't think she'd like to hear that she was joining the not-so-exclusive sorority of vacationing girls that he was supposed to "pay back Thursday" on account of they were leaving Friday. It would be better just to let her think that something went wrong and his "bank loan" didn't come through when she was unable to get in touch with him, Thursday and "it was too bad but of course, he'd mail it to her"....In a pig's hind end.
He shrugged, toyed with his empty glass. "How about buying me a drink?" The two double Martinis were beginning to creep up on him a little. He didn't usually like to start drinking so early in the day but this had been a bad day. First that stinking, beautiful letter from Norma that tore his guts out even though he tried not to let it. Then, Elena, back at the motel, acting so strangely when he left there, this noon time.
He wondered what Elena wanted, now? Why did she keep calling? He'd told her the last time that if she kept embarrassing him by repeatedly calling the Club when he refused to talk with her that....
Suddenly he remembered that there'd been something different about her this morning. She'd been secretively excited about something and she'd been reasonably sober for a change.
"Get back from your swim early today, Si, please. Please, darling, it's important," she'd said. "I'll have a surprise for you. You'll go crazy when you learn what it is."
He hadn't paid much attention at the time. Elena went in for fads and was always buying him expensive presents for a "surprise". But she had been unusually her up about it, today, now that he thought about it. What in hell was she up to, anyhow?
A waiter brought his drink and Mimi paid him and Si gulped half of it and shivered and then smiled across the glass at Mimi.
"That's right," he said, after awhile. "That's nice. Just sit there and look beautiful for me and don't talk and let me just drink and look at you and remember the last time you didn't talk and maybe pretty soon I'll get in the mood for another session where everything is wonderful because you-just-don't-talk, huh, honey? Okay?"
She smiled a little sadly. Gently, she said: "You're getting drunk, honey."
"Sure." He leered at her. "You ought to be glad. I'm extra good when I'm drunk. Remember? You really love it when I'm drunk. You go crazy. You-"
"Si," she cut in. "Why do I have to be so nuts about you? Why can't I hate you, Si? No matter how mean you are to me; no matter what horrible things you say?"
He laughed. "Maybe you're too thick-skinned. A polite word for stupid."
"I don't know." She shook her head slightly, in bewilderment.
He drained the rest of the Martini and a fine buzz set in, now. He felt good. He began to have hopes for this lousy day, after all.
"Okay, Mimi," he said. "I'll tell you why I've been such a bastard today. Something's bugging me. I got a letter from my wife this morning. She asked me to come back to her. This is the third time. She says it's over a year now and she thought she'd be used to going it alone by now but she still isn't and-"
He broke off and looked up from the Martini glass. Mimi's gray eyes were larger than usual, the only indication of her surprise, but he knew that if he waited too long she'd come on with the usual routine: Why, Si, I didn't know you were married and you've got a hell of a nerve to sit there with your bare face hanging out and casually let it drop that....And so on, ad nauseum.
Before she had a chance, he continued: "And you know something, Baby? I think I'll go back. I just might do that. The other times she begged me, I wanted to, but I figured it wouldn't work because I'd just go lousing it right up again because it just isn't in me to play it straight and there's something about Norma and the kid, Tommy, that bothers me after I louse 'em up and so I just figured it wouldn't work."
"Oh, Si!" she said. There was a catch in her voice. "You poor, mixed-up guy!"
"Yeah," he said. He was caught up in his own self-dramatizing, now. "And you know something? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it would work. Hell, you should try everything twice. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going back to Norma. I'm going to get the hell out of here, go back to the motel, pack and head for-"
"Mr. Walker!" the barman's voice cut in.
Si looked around and saw him holding the phone, with one hand over the mouthpiece. Si swore and got up and walked angrily over to the bar. He glowered at the barman as he reached for the phone.
The barman grinned. "I'm tired of that phone ringing for you. You don't want her to bother you, tell her yourself."
Si cursed himself for not having left a tip for the barman, before. He snatched the phone, said hello and gestured to the barman to swirl him another drink.
Elena's thick voice filled his ear: "Listen, you lousy beach-bum bastard, who do you think you are, pulling this stuff on me? Get the hell back here in one dam' hurry. You work here, remember? You're nothing but a dam' handyman and I'm the one who pays your salary and when I-"
He slammed the receiver down. The barman looked at him but didn't say anything. Si held his hand on the phone, trying to get his breath, with the anger about to explode inside of him.
He picked up and drained the new drink the barman had made. He stood there, staring at the white-knuckled contrast against the tan of the rest of his hand as he pressed down on the phone.
This was it. He didn't have to take stuff like this. It was time to get out. By God, he would leave tonight. Elena had been getting too possessive the last few weeks, anyhow, as though she was married to him instead of that besotted little ape who was legally her husband. She even talked about things on long-range terms, as though they were going to be together forever.
The phone rang again, as Si had known it would, and he picked it up. He didn't say anything. Elena's voice was quieter now, though still thick with drunkenness.
"Si," she said, breathlessly. "Si, listen, honey-love, I'm sorry. Truly. I shouldn't have lost my temper. Please talk to me."
He let her wait a moment and then he said: "That's more like it. Now, what is it? I'm busy."
"Yeah, busy!" Sarcastic. "Don't think I don't know what you're busy at. Well, you're going to have to get wn-busy, do you hear? You're coming right out here. Right now. You've got to, Si. Do you understand?"
He understood, all right. When Elena was drinking she got so hot pants she could hardly stand it; she was like a wild woman; alcohol acted on her almost like Spanish Fly....But, today, he wasn't interested-not when luscious Mimi was waiting just as avidly for him, right at hand.
"Nuts to you, Elena," he said. "I don't have to do anything."
The desperation in her voice became more pronounced. "Please, Si! Something's happened and I need you quickly. Si, if you're not here in half an hour, you know what I'll have to do?"
"Cut your throat, I hope," he said.
"L: you're not here in thirty minutes, I'm calling the Highway Patrol to pick you up for stealing my car." She slammed the receiver down in his ear, this time.
He held the phone in front of his face and regarded it with open-mouthed amazement. It was the first time Elena had got that rough with him. Now he knew damned well it was time to check out on her. This was what was meant when they said they were crazy about you. Crazy was right. Nutty as fruit cakes, they got.
For a moment he was a little nervous about her threat. And aghast because he'd gotten so used to thinking of it as "his" car. It had gotten so that he almost believed it was his, himself, he'd become so used to driving it, taking it whenever and wherever he wanted, the past few months.
At first he tried to kid himself that Elena wouldn't have the nerve to do that but actually he wouldn't put it past her. She was an awfully strong and determined woman about everything. Especially when she was drunk. He remembered one time when he'd said he was walking out on her, following an argument. She'd taken a gun out of her dresser drawer and told him if he tried to move out that door, she'd shoot him. He knew that she wasn't kidding and he'd done some fast talking to soft-soap her into putting the gun away.
It would probably tickle her to bring him to her now in the way she'd threatened. She could always refuse to press charges, of course, and laugh it off with the law as a "mistake".
She'd given him thirty minutes, though; which probably meant that she'd actually wait an hour before doing anything so drastic.
He swung away from the bar and went back to the table.
Mimi started to question him about the phone call but he instantly told her to shut up and he sat for a moment, staring broodingly down into his empty glass. Then he suddenly became aware of the warm softness of Mimi's naked thigh pressing against his own, under the table. The violent anger in him changed suddenly into just as violent desire for the succulent ripeness of Mimi's young body.
His hand went down under the table and gently caressed the silken soft, fleshy inside of her thigh. Then his fingers clamped tightly into the smooth plumpness; kneading it almost savagely.
Mimi winced and sucked in her breath through her teeth in an animal-like sound of pain and passion, mixed.
"Let's get out of here," Si said, without looking at her. "Let's go to your place. And don't argue; don't even talk."
They both moved simultaneously, squeezed out from under the table and stood up. Mimi pattered, barefoot, after Si's long-striding figure.
CHAPTER TWO
The ride to the furnished Duplex Mimi shared with two other girls vacationing with her, cleared Si's head a little, mellowed the effects of too many Martinis. He pulled into the driveway and waited while Mimi got out and went to a side door, to check and make sure neither of her roommates were using the place. A moment later, she appeared at the doorway again, gave a low whistle and beckoned Si to come in.
The living room was small, stuffy and cluttered with the usual cheap, stolid looking, furnished-apartment type of pieces. He watched Mimi walking around, throwing up windows. She said:
"Phew! It's stifling in here." She finished with the windows and started across the room toward a small bathroom. "Make yourself comfy, Si, hon, while I shower off."
He reached out and took hold of her wrist and pulled her roughly toward him. She arched against him and let her head fall back, her eyes closed. Her shoulders hunched and she shivered as his lips moved and found a nerve center at the side of her throat; his mouth opened against her throat and he tongued the sensitive nerve center.
"Hon-honey, wait," she gasped. "You'll have to wait, darling and let me shower, first."
His fingers fumbled with the catch at the back of her bathing suit top. The pressure of her naked thighs against his; the way she was already grinding her soft belly against the readiness of him, was driving him insane.
"No!" he said, against her ear. "I can't wait. Right now. Right here."
"No," she managed. "You'll have to wait. I-I'm all sand. Remember? You put it down inside my suit."
"Oh, Christ," he said. He let her go.
When she backed away from him, though, Si had unfastened the top of her suit, held it in his hand. It came off in his hand. For a moment, she stood, stunned, looking at him and in that moment he couldn't get enough of feasting his eyes on the twin, globular lovelies that now swung free, milky white against the tan of her shoulders and midriff, except for the pink points that now stood at rigid attention in the center of each firm-fleshed rondure.
Then she backed away, trying ineffectively with her tiny hands to cover herself; one pink nipple poked playfully between her splayed fingers.
"Si, you fool!" she exclaimed, embarrassed. "That was mean!"
Moving around him toward the bathroom, her face flushed, hotly.
"Aha!" he said. "I see you come from Montana."
"What?" she said. "I told you, Si; I live in New Jersey."
"Uh-uh-uh!" He waggled a finger at her. "Don't try to get out of it. Right there in front of you is irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Such Buttes could only come from Montana. End of joke. Get it?"
She shook her head, dumbly.
"You will!" he told her, leering at the double-meaning. "L: you ever get that lovely little fanny under the shower and get back out here."
As she turned and ran for the bathroom, Si flopped onto his back onto the studio couch, to wait. In a moment he heard the roar of the shower, in the bathroom. He lit and smoked a cigarette. As he finally snuffed it out, the sound of the shower cut off. He turned his head toward the bathroom door. He bet himself that Mimi would come out, looking coy, with a big bath towel wrapped around her from under the armpits to just below the hips and with another smaller towel piled turban-like around her head.
She did.
He got up off the couch. "What's with the towel?" he asked, softly. "Is that supposed to look sexy or something? Now I'm cued-in to get myself all excited, is that it?"
"What do you mean, Si?" She watched him walk slowly toward her. "I-well-I didn't have my robe in there. You didn't expect me to come prancing out here with nothing on, did you?"
"Why not? You've got something I've never seen before? It's supposed to be a surprise? You're going to have the great unveiling in a few moments or something, while thousands cheer?"
She stared at him blankly. Finally, she said: "Why are you angry at me all the time, Si? What's the matter with us, honey; we're always fighting?"
"Oh, God!" he said. "Now I've started you talking again. Why did I do that? Remember, you promised not to talk. So, no more dialogue. Okay?"
She nodded and took her full lower lip between her teeth as though to control herself and looked up at him now with such a worried-child-anxious-to-please expression that he felt a hot flood of genuine affection mingle with his physical desire for her, different than any sensation he had ever experienced with her before.
Almost gently, he reached out and unfastened the top of the towel where it was folded and caught, just above the tops of her breasts. It dropped to the floor at her feet. She gave a little gasp of surprise but her eyes stayed right on his. They grew large and darker looking, then slowly closed as his face came toward hers.
Their mouths touched gently, softly, at first-tantalizingly so. Then his twisted and opened against hers; his tongue came out and her own lips parted moistly to receive it. His big hands held her bare shoulders, cupping them, moulding them, then slid down over the sleek smoothness of her upper arms. Then they moved to the warm, downy hollow of her back, urged her fiercely against him. She came to him, eagerly, with a small whimpering sound. He felt the hot tips of her breasts burning against his chest. She began to quiver and tremble.
He eased his mouth from hers. He brought one hand around to the front of her, to cup the swelling roundness of her breast, fondle it, teasingly. The stiff, rubbery nipple bored into his palm. He could feel her heart beating wildly beneath the soft flesh.
"It's so warm and alive," he whispered. "It's like a plump, frightened dove, nestling in my hand!"
Mimi's hands roved over his arm, feeling their sinewy, muscular strength. She arched her hips against him.
"Oh, Si! ... Si, darling!" She began to tremble.
Little moaning sounds broke from her moistly opened lips as his hands moved caressingly, ever more intimate, over her, seeking expertly the secret places of her, stimulating further already aroused erogenous nerve centers.
They stood, moving and thrusting at each other for some moments before her legs finally gave way and he let the full weight of her, hanging from her arms about his neck, pull him down to the floor with her.
He reached between them and fumbled open the tops of his swimming trunks, forced them down, but he had to stand before he could get them completely off his legs. She lay there, panting, looking up at him, her eyes big and glazed with the fever of need and desire. Her arms reached up to him, her fingertips waggling impatiently for him to join her.
Dropping to his knees beside her, his head bent to the madly heaving swells of her bosom. While his eager mouth nibbled at her upthrust nipples, his hands coursed feverishly up and down the satiny inside of her thighs and her legs flung open wantonly.
Ferociously, she yanked him down to her but still he kept her waiting. He knew that they were both now roused to such a feverish pitch that perfect timing was of the essence, because by now neither would have any control left to wait for the other; when the moment arrived, they must both be ready to immediately, simultaneously, go soaring into the stormy, lightning-slashed wonderworld of ultimate ecstasy.
There was an instant of timeless, exploding, excruciating ecstasy as they finally became one-in a tumult of agelessly savage, unrestrained movement. And the world burst for them both into liquid silken fire that bathed them and laved them to the very core of their being, then floated them to unbearable heights of sensation-then brought them tumbling pleasantly, slowly down a softly billowing slope of fleecy clouds, back down to earth again, back to themselves....
They were both slick with sweat and in a few moments Mimi got the towel and dried them both off. Then she fit cigarettes for both of them. Mimi sprawled on her tummy, her elbows braced on the floor, her chin in her hands, looking down at Si, watching him blow smoke toward the ceiling.
"I'm going to miss you awfully, Si," she said. "And not just because you're so good at that, either."
"Good at what?" he said, innocently, exhaling smoke.
"Oh, you know."
"No, honestly, I don't," he kidded. "Tell me. You mean, at Badminton?"
"No, silly," she laughed. "At foedminton."
He sat up, looking surprised. "Now, wait a minute. Where did that come from? Don't go turning clever on me. It's very disconcerting."
"Don't worry." She picked a speck of tobacco from her kiss-swollen lower lip. "I'm dumb in lots of ways but at least I know it. I don't try to pretend otherwise. But there's one thing I'm not so dumb about, Si."
"Yeah? What?"
"You."
"Me? What about me?"
She ran her hand across his chest. "I don't kid myself about you, Si. I know I'm not for you. You couldn't ever love or even really care anything about a girl like me. All anyone like me will ever be to you is just a quick bounce on the bed. I know that."
"So?" he said. "What else is new?"
"I'm just telling you something, trying to help you."
"Look, join the Salvation Army or something, why don't you and skip helping me? In fact let's drop this attempt at deep-type dialogue. It's getting me down."
She glanced down at him, said, mischievously: "I wondered what had done it." He laughed.
"Seriously, Si, I know more about you than you think. Sure I'm dumb but the trouble with smart people like you is that they always think the dumb ones are even dumber than they are. For instance, I know that you don't really own any motel; that you just work at one. I know that isn't your car, really, it belongs to your boss, a woman who's much older than you and is nuts about you. I've just been kind of going along with the gag on that, not letting you know I knew so you wouldn't get mad at me. I had to tell you now because I want you to know it doesn't make any difference to me."
"Bully for you." He took hold of her wrist, roughly. "All right, where'd you hear all this? Who's been talking about me?"
"Don't get mad, Si, but I think a lot of people know. Some girl at the beach told one of my roommates and she told me, of course. But do you know what I think about the way you act, Si?"
"I couldn't care less." He stood up, suddenly, picked his swim trunks from the floor and put them on. "I'm going."
"Anyhow," she persisted. "I think it's because you're carrying a terrific torch for your wife. That's why you're kind of-you know-nasty and bitter, as though you hate everybody and everything. It's-well-like a protest or something....Listen, why don't you go back to her, really, Si? To your wife. Like you said, before. I think it would really be best for you. I don't think you'll ever be happy away from her."
The accuracy of the things she said made anger pile inside of him but then before he could explode with it, it seemed to just as suddenly evaporate. Then he merely felt tired and confused. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly as he eased down onto a chair. For the first time since he'd known Mimi, he spoke softly, almost kindly, to her.
"You know, you could be right, Meem. Only the trouble is, I'm afraid I'd never be happy with her, either. Oh, yeah, for awhile, maybe, but then, sure'n hell, I'd make it rough again for her and the boy. It's a crazy thing. You see, I don't act like a son of a bitch because of the way I feel about her, because I miss her and everything. I've always been that way. Even when I'm with Nora, to some extent. I know this sounds corny-but remember the song: 'You Always Hurt The One You Love'? Well, that's me. Something's wrong with me, Mimi. I-"
He broke off, threw up his hands helplessly. "Well, I ruin everything good that ever happens to me. I don't know why; I just do."
She got up from the floor and came over to stand next to him. Her hand rested gently on his arm. "Si, I gave you twenty bucks, before. If I gave you another twenty, you'd have enough to take a bus to New York, to go back to your wife right now. That's what you ought to do, Si. Will you do it?"
He looked up at her in open-mouthed wonderment. Then he shouted: "A bus? Are you crazy?
Look, for Christ's sake, if I want to go...." He broke off, the sympathy and sincerity in her expression suddenly too much for him. He got up and pushed past her, moved toward the door.
She started after him. "Si! Don't leave. I want to talk to you some more. Where are you going?"
"None of your God damned business," he told her, without looking back. He slammed the door on the way out.
Outside, getting into the convertible, he felt anger but it was a weird, frustrated kind of anger that he couldn't find a target toward which to turn it. He should have been angry at Mimi-yet he couldn't be. Then the anger in him changed to something else entirely. For the first time in years he felt almost like crying. He could hardly control it. His throat felt sore and his eyes burned, although no wetness came to them. He told himself: What was there to go getting the blues about? Just because that little blonde chump was begging him to make an even bigger sucker out of her than he already had-to take her for some more loot? It was crazy, man, but daft; real daft.
CHAPTER THREE
Later, when he turned into the driveway of the deluxe motel called the Tropigardens Villa, it was almost sundown. There was nobody in the cook rattan furnished lobby of the Registration Building, so he went right on through to the door marked Private, the entrance to the living quarters of Paul and Elena Crandall, the owners.
The living room, with its widely spaced furniture and great picture windows overlooking the Gulf, seemed even larger and cooler than it really was. The woman standing near the small bar in the corner looked large, too, but not cool. She was wearing shorts and halter, with frilly, little-girl motif to them that merely accentuated the lushness of her overly developed figure. It made the mature ripeness of her body seem almost obscene-the stout heaviness of her thighs, which for all their fleshiness, were not out of proportion to the rest of her and were at the same time attractively tanned and firm as a much younger woman's; the curving ampleness of her womanly hips; the slight roundness of belly that was unnoticeable, almost, in contrast to the great melons of her breasts, bulging invitingly from the top of the halter that was incapable of fully restraining them.
Her face was the only real giveaway of Elena Crandall's true age. It looked weather-beaten instead of just tanned and she never could quite get rid of the fine network of lines around the eyes and mouth, the beginnings of double chins. Yet her eyes offset these faults. They were the dark and hot and hungry eyes that never seem to age, that always look liquid and hot with an ageless greed for love that is insatiable.
Seeing Si, she raised a highball glass full of thick dark Jamaica rum. Her sullenly ripe mouth twisted. "Ah!" she said. "The Prodigal returns!"
Si flung himself into a contour chair, completely relaxed, now. "Why do you always talk like a silent movie caption writer, for God's sake?" he asked.
She downed the glass of rum and walked toward him with a surprisingly slinkish and attractive grace for such a big woman. She forced a laugh with no humor in it. A smile was mask-like on her face. She said: "You're such a kind, lovable beast, aren't you?"
"You don't like a Great Dane, why don't you buy yourself a lap dog?" Then he added: "Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot. You already have one-that creep you call a husband."
She ignored this. "How was she, Si?"
He shrugged. "How are any of them?" He let his eyes move over her. "Only thing, some are younger and thinner than others. Thank God."
She made the small laugh again, just as forced. Si was puzzled; that remark should have really stung her.
"Cops didn't pick you up, eh?" She said. "They're slipping."
"Or you are. I don't believe you even called them."
She shrugged. "What difference does it make? You're here. Momma called and you came running. Right?"
"Wrong." He hauled himself out of the contour chair. He pushed past her toward his own room in the back of the place. "I came back to pack and get out of here. I'm checking out, Elana. But for good."
"Oh?" She followed him into the pine-paneled den where he slept. She watched him take a suitcase and some of his clothes out of the closet. She watched him put on a sport shirt and a pair of slacks.
"I see," she said. "I figured you were getting tired of me. I guess I just knew it was time. I get hunches about things like that."
"I'm going to New York. Back to my wife and little boy. I'm sick of this; of all this. Corny though it sounds, I'm going to try to be a man for a change."
Suddenly she came over to him. She cupped his face in her hands. She moved in tightly against him so that he was aware of every full-fleshed curving part of her body; felt the heat of her right through his clothing. Her lushly rounded thighs moved against him; one of them thrust between his legs. Her enormous breasts were warm, soft pillows against his chest, their proportionately large nipples suddenly pushing, plum-big against her halter, against his shirt, making him feel their fiery erectness pressed against his chest.
"All right," she whispered. "Start being one now, then....Or are two women in one day too much for you?"
Her hand came between them. She smiled, tauntingly. "I guess it is, huh? Poor thing; poor, poor thing!"
In spite of himself, he began to react to her expert caressing. He didn't want to. He wanted only one thing, now, really-to get out of there. He shoved her savagely away.
"What's the matter?" she laughed. "Did I make it hard for you-to go?"
He turned away from her without answering, went back to packing his suitcase.
"You're really serious, aren't you?" she said, wonderingly, watching him.
When he still didn't answer, she almost spat it at him: "You jerk! You big, egotistical jerk. What do you think you're going to use for money?"
"I've got some money." He carefully folded the two hundred dollar sharkskin suit Elena had bought him and put it in the suitcase. "About fifty bucks. You're going to give me another hundred. Just put it down as a bonus-for services above and beyond the call of duty. I'm sure you know what I mean. Or if it'll make it simpler for you, I'll just take it from the cash register on the way out."
"Uh-uh-uW" Elena said, almost playfully. "That'd be stealing, you know. The police wouldn't like to hear about a departing employee sticking his hand in the till before he left."
He snorted, disdainfully. "You forget, there are some things your husband, Paul, wouldn't like to hear about. You holler copper and I'll holler Poppa."
She came up behind him as he bent over the bed. She swayed drunkenly, heavily against him, her huge breasts like hot soft cushions against his back. Her hands moved around his waist, crept under his shirt, caressed the flat, muscle-ridged belly, then slid downward, under his belt. She sucked in a sudden noisy breath as her questing fingers teasingly explored, then discovered and paid tribute.
"Oh, honey!" Her voice was almost gutteral with suddenly enflamed passion.
Si straightened up, feeling his blood begin to thicken and surge through him in roaring torrents.
He tried to twist and get away from her. He took hold of her arm, tried to force her hand away from him. But she held on tightly.
"Goddam it, Elena, leave me alone," he shouted at her. "I haven't got time."
She kissed the side of his neck, bit him impishly there, then moved her lips to his ear. He felt her tongue, wet and burning hot, dart into his ear. He shivered and duck bumps stood all over him.
"Make time," she whispered into his ear, between flickings of her tongue. "Si, lover, I'll give you the hundred dollars; just be nice to me; nice to me, baby?" She was purring it at the end.
He couldn't stand, then, what she was doing to his ear. He turned his head to escape it and instantly, her mouth moved around and fastened over his; her tongue forcing, probing, demanding, then entering between his lips. He had to respond. Any man would. Then he felt her yank at him and there was a ripping sound. He stepped back and looked down and saw that she had ripped his slacks and his shorts, simultaneously. Both were slipping down over his hips. He made a frantic grab at them but she was faster.
She yanked his hand away and he felt his clothing heap about his ankles.
She looked at him and her face twisted, frenzied, her eyes wild as an animal's. Her breathing was so heavy, she sounded as though she was in pain. She flung herself upon him, then, caught him by surprise, got her ankle between his and tripped him, bearing him backward to the floor, with the heaviness of her own weight.
For a moment, he lay there, partially stunned, staring up at her in surprise. Then he said: "Why you bitch, you crazy bitch, you!"
She laughed and tore at her halter with both hands and it came completely away. Her mountainous breasts heaved, tumultuously. Their buds were dark red, now, almost brown, burstingly distended. Si stared up at them, fascinated as he always was, no matter how many times he fastened his eyes upon them, by their fleshly abundance; marveling that in spite of their tremendous thrusting weight, there was no sag.
He saw her, with two twisting yanks, rip her shorts down the middle and let them fall from her. Her rounded belly heaved with the effort. Then with a little animal cry, she descended upon him. She straddled him like a victorious wrestler, leaning her weight forward on her hands, which clasped his arms about the biceps, the fingers keading, digging luxuriously into the muscled flesh.
Her breasts hung over his face like succulent ripe tropical fruits, waiting to be plucked from the vine. In an almost hypnotic tone, then, she began to croon to him:
"I love you, Si. I want you and I love you and I'll never let you go, not ever, do you hear? Oh, Baby, I love you, love you, love you!"
Then she bent forward still more and a fiery, berry-plump tidbit brushed his lips. His tongue came out to meet it, touched it and he felt her writhe convulsively. Her legs slid out sideways and she collapsed upon him, slithered upon him.
"Your husband, Paul?" he cried out. "Where is he? Is it safe?"
"Yes," she told him, her eyes glowing crazily. "It's safe. Paul's right here in the house, right in the next room, but it's safe, Si!"
He didn't know whether to take her seriously or not. He still wasn't so depraved that he was going to take this woman right here where there was a chance her husband might stumble drunkenly in upon them, any minute.
But he had no choice now. Her mouth sought his again, captured it. The voluptuousness of her pagan body smothered him, moving, never still, until it, too, finally found a captive and held tightly, imprisoning.
A rising, keening sound of unbearable excitement came from her throat, then ... Without ever easing her weight from him at all, she began a series of serpentine movements, remarkably agile, for a woman of her size, seemingly effortless and without specific purpose, yet every undulant contortion went a step further toward drawing him up, up, up into a vortex of swirling, blood-heating sensation, without any effort on his part at all.
His hands slid over her velvety smooth back and shoulders, down into the sensitive hollow of her spine and locked fingers there, pressing her to him, stilling all other motion, except that of her hips.
Torturously slow, the dead weight of her keeping him from forcing the pace more swiftly, he felt a balloon of unbearable sensation form in him and begin to swell and swell until every muscle and tendon in him was drawn tight as a bowstring. Then there was the explosive bursting. He felt her teeth sink into his shoulder. He heard the anguished crying out of her. And all the time that one slow, rhythmic moving of her never varied....
He got dressed again, without looking at her, still sprawled out upon the floor, dragging deeply, contentedly, now, upon a cigarette.
Somehow, afterward, with Elena he always felt soiled, contaminated. The very satiation she brought him left him feeling nothing but loathing for both of them, but mostly for himself. With other women, there was always a feeling of victory for Si, afterward. He always felt that he had used them. But not with Elena. He always knew and couldn't kid himself, that she had used him. The knowledge of this, somehow, seemed to emasculate him. He hated her for it. He wanted to hurt her for it.
"Si?" she said.
"What?"
"Have you changed your mind, darling?"
"No!"
He finished packing the suitcase, violently slammed down the lid. "I told you I was checking out. You don't think your raping me is going to change that, do you?"
She chuckled. "I guess I did do that, didn't I? Well, you can't say you didn't like it?"
He picked the suitcase up off the bed, still without looking at her, headed for the door. He heard her scramble to her feet, behind him. She cried out: "Si! Wait!"
She ran around in front of him. Her eyes held his desperately, now. She took hold of his arms. "No, Si, you are not going. Remember I told you I had a surprise for you? Over the phone. Remember?"
He clucked impatiently, shook her hands from his arms and started to move around her. "You know what you can do with it?"
She moved in front of him, blocking him, again. "No. Just let me show it to you, Si. It'll only take a second. I promise you, once you see it, you won't leave. Believe me!"
She took his free hand, then and led him out into the other room. She turned toward the bedroom and the bath. She stopped at the closed bathroom door, opened it, reached in and snapped on a wall switch in there.
"Look, Si." There was a trembling excitement in her voice, now. "In here, in the bathroom. My surprise."
He stepped into the doorway. The bathroom was ultra-modern. It even had a sunken bathtub. He saw that the tub was now filled with scummy looking green water. Things were sticking out of the top of the water. For a moment he didn't realize what they were. Then he let the suitcase he was carrying, fall to the floor with a thud. He shook his head, blinked and looked again and he couldn't make it change, couldn't make it go away. There was still a man's bald pate and the caps of knobby knees, sticking out of the water.
Si backed out of the doorway. He put his hand up over his eyes and slumped weakly against a wall. He knew; he was sure but he had to ask, anyhow. In a voice that no longer sounded like his own, he said: "Paul? Your husband, Paul?"
"Yes," she said. "Now, get a grip on yourself, darling. We've got a lot to talk about, a lot to do."
"Oh, God!" he said. "Oh, my God, no!"
He finally took his hand down from his eyes. He looked across the room and saw the bar. He pushed away from the wall, walked to the bar, feeling as though he was walking on ping-pong balls. His trembling hands found a fifth of gin. He poured a half highball glass full, spilling some of it. He got it to his mouth and slugged it down, gagging, choking, but welcoming the big burn of it in his guts.
He looked up to see Elena standing in front of him. She was still nude. It seemed suddenly ridiculous, seeing her standing there like that, at a time like this. It filled him with an almost uncontrollable urge to burst into hysterical laughter. He watched her pick up a pack of cigarettes, shake one out, put it in her mouth and light it. While she did that, her eyes stayed on his. They held a wild, triumphant gleam.
"Now, you see why you can't leave me," she said.
"You're insane," he told her. "You-you can't possibly get away with this. What's the matter with you, Ellie?"
"Nothing's the matter with me. It was him." She jerked her head toward the bathroom. "Paul. He had to suddenly get smart, the sodden little wretch. By some freak of chemical magic he got too sober, last night-sober enough to decide to go into the office and for the first time in months, to check on the books."
He stared at her, dumbfounded. "The books? What do you mean?"
"I did it for you, Si. I was trying to get enough cash for us to run away, together. I've been fooling around with the books, taking large sums of cash and putting it into a secret special account for us."
"And he found out?"
She nodded. "He blew his cork. He told me he had me over a barrel, then. He said, wife or no wife, he'd have me prosecuted for embezzlement....Unless I got rid of you. He said he'd dam' well see to it that I toed the line all the way from now on. Can you imagine, Si? That besotted little ape trying to dictate to me like that. So I knew what I had to do, of course."
She laughed a little crazily, then cut it off abruptly. She leaned toward him, her eyes pleading with him. "You see how much I love you, Si? I did it for you, really. I killed someone for you, Si?"
He felt almost sick to his stomach. He turned quickly to the bar, poured himself another stiff slug of gin, gulped it. This one hit hard and almost instantly spread its power all through him. His head seemed to clear. And the first thing that came to his mind was that this was it; this was the thing that had been waiting to happen to him for so long, to punish him for the awful things he'd always done.
Mother had told him, all those years ago:
"You know right from wrong, Simon. And you must always do what's right, no matter what. Always, always be mother's little perfect gentleman because when we do wrong things, we always get punished, don't we? Maybe not right away; maybe not in any way we expect, but in some way. Some awful, awful soul-searing way. Just remember that, Simon dear.'"
But he never had; he never really had been....
All the hungover mornings he'd awakened in other men's beds, beside other men's wives and remembered all the women he'd hurt, he'd known, really known, something like this was going to happen to him, though.
Now it had. The time had come.
CHAPTER FOUR
After awhile, he forced himself to calm down; he forced away some of the sick panic. He leaned an elbow on the small bar. He told himself he had to fight back for control of this situation, right now.
"What do you think you're going to tell the police, Elena? That it was an accident; he drowned in the bathtub? You won't be able to get away with that."
She shook her head. "No, it's going to look as though he drowned in the Gulf."
"How will you get his body down there?"
"You'll help me. It's dark out. Nobody'll see us. In the morning he'll be found washed up onto the beach. A drunk went swimming and never came back. That's all."
"Don't be stupid, will you? You never hear of autopsies? There'll be an autopsy. They'll find fresh water, tap water, in his lungs, Elena. It would be better to leave him there and-"
"Oh, Si," she cut in. "Maybe I'm not as cute as some of your little hot pants blondes at the Beach Club but neither am I as dumb. He drowned in salt water from the Gulf, Si. I know what I'm doing.
I lugged it up here, two buckets at a time, this morning, before daylight. Nobody saw me."
He stared at her, incredulously.
She smiled. "Does that make you feel better. Now, take another drink to brace yourself and then let's get busy; let's get this over. And stop worrying. We'll get away with it."
"Where do you get that we stuff?" he demanded, savagely. "You're not implicating me in this. You do it yourself. You're a big, strong woman. Drag him out of here and lug him down to the beach, yourself. You got him into the tub by yourself, didn't you?"
"That was different. He was just passed out. He didn't even struggle much when I held his head under. But now-well, he's dead and probably stiff and all slimy and slippery from the water and-"
"Shut up!" he screamed it at her. The verbal picture she created almost made him sick to his stomach. "I'm getting out of here."
He moved away from the bar, headed back into his own room, picked his wallet up from a table and stuffed it into his rear pocket.
When he came back out, Elena said: "You know what I'll get for this place, when I sell it? At least a hundred thousand, Si. I've got about fifteen thousand in cash, already put away in my special account. Then there's insurance on Paul. All together, there'll be at least a hundred and fifty thousand; maybe more. Think about that much money, Si."
"I can't." He walked past her, picked up the suitcase. "Not getting it that way. You can have it all to your clever self, sweetie. You've earned it."
He headed for the door. He stopped half way as she said: "You're not going anywhere. Have you forgotten how it will look to the police, tomorrow, when Paul's corpse is found?"
"I don't care how it'll look to them."
"Don't you?" She laughed, lightly. "Suppose I tell them that you went swimming with Paul? Suppose I suggest that you could have held him under, out there, so you'd have a chance with the rich widow you work for, or maybe because Paul wanted you fired? How about that?....I'm afraid that's what I'd have to do, if you tried to run out on me, now, Si."
He turned slowly, thinking about what she'd said.
Elena smiled. "Don't look so shocked, darling. I'll do it, if I have to. I'll do anything to keep you." The smile faded and in its place came an expression of almost witch-like ferocity.
"Even though all you'd be doing would be convicting yourself?" He said.
She looked startled. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, you're clever about some things, Elena-stupid about others. You've forgotten the time element."
"The time element?"
"Sure. The police lab will be able to determine the time Paul died. That will eliminate me. I can prove I was nowhere near here at that time. That'll leave only you, Elena. So go ahead and try to suck me into it."
He headed for the door once more. Just before he reached it, he heard her move suddenly. He heard a desk drawer being yanked out. He heard her say:
"Don't touch that door, Si."
Something in her tone made him draw his hand away from the knob as though it was red hot. He wheeled around. She was standing by the desk with a snub-nosed .32 in her hand. Still stark naked, the magnificent globes of her breasts heaving with emotion, with her long, full-fleshed legs spraddled apart, her expression now fanatical with a weird hate-love mixture of emotions upon it, she looked in that moment like some savage Amazon, just stepped from a dank green, steaming jungle. She thrust the gun forward, aimed at his stomach.
"You're not running out on me, Si." Her voice began to rise, hysterically. "Not after all I've done. You're all I've got left. You don't throw me aside when you're through with me like the others. I'm not some dumb little chippy. I'll kill you, Si, before I'll let you do that. They can't punish me anymore for two killings than they can for one. Come back in here and unpack that bag and make up your mind you're mine from now on."
He saw her trigger finger, white at the knuckle, from pressure. He didn't know whether she'd intentionally kill him or not, but in that moment, he knew that the gun could go off. In her overwrought condition it might take only a nervous spasm of her finger. Sweat broke out all over him. He was almost shattering sick with fear. He couldn't seem to think. But instinct; the instinct to fight against anything that seriously threatens life; took over.
Surprised at the calm softness of his own voice, he said: "Aw, come on, now, Kitten. If you're that serious, maybe we'd better talk about it some more."
Slowly, he began to edge toward her. She watched him, her eyes narrowed, cat-like, the pupils dilated.
"Don't get smart, Si. Don't try anything foolish. I'll really shoot. You know that."
She started to back away from him as he kept moving toward her, talking soothingly, instinctively, not even knowing what he was saying. Then, she moved backward against an ottoman. It threw her off balance. That same instant, Si hurled the heavy suitcase at her. It hit her hand first, knocked the gun flying. Then it crashed full against her chest. Already off balance, she flipped backward hard over the ottoman. She crashed to the floor like a broken field runner brought down with a savage tackle. Her head struck the corner of a cocktail table, the impact making a small, horrible crunching sound. Then she lay there by the table, very still.
Si ran toward her, kneeled beside her. "Elena?" he whispered. "Are you all right? I had to do it, Elena. You made me."
Her mouth was open and her eyes were staring. There was a deep, badly discolored gouge at her right temple, which, strangely, wasn't even bleeding.
Si reached down, picked up her wrist and felt for a pulse. There was none. He let the wrist fall limply to the floor. He tried to get up off his knees but couldn't right then. How long it really was before he managed to do that, he didn't really know. The next thing he knew was that he was standing by the bar, trying to get more gin inside an old fashioned glass than he was sloshing all around it. He forced his hands to be steady, then, momentarily and got the drink poured and downed it.
Slowly, thought, reason, came back, took the place of the big, stupid void that had been in his mind since the instant that he realized that Elena Cran-dall was dead. He began to talk to himself:
"Take it easy," he said. "Very easy now, boy.
Okay, she's dead. There was an accident, she fell and hit her head in some fluke way and she died. But it wasn't any fault of yours, really. Forget about throwing the suitcase. You only meant to knock the gun out of her hand. You didn't mean to kill her; you didn't kill her; she only fell and it was an accident. So what are you worried about? Nobody'll blame you."
But then he asked himself, what about Paul Crandall's corpse in the bathtub? How would he explain that? How could he prove he hadn't done that?
Then he decided he'd tell them he just got there. He just came in and found things like this-Elena dead on the floor, Paul in the bathtub. He wouldn't know from nothing. He could pretend he didn't even know about Paul being there. He'd be just as surprised as the cops when they found him there. He could prove he was with Mimi all afternoon. That would clear him on Paul's death, for sure, because of the time angle. As for Elena, the cops would figure that after she drowned Paul in the bathtub, she got drunker and drunker, waiting for darkness so that she could get rid of him, then she staggered and tripped and fell and hit her head. The police would figure it like that, Si told himself. Especially if he boldly, innocently called them.
He started toward the phone and then he saw Elena's big purse, lying on a table. He remembered, crazily, that tomorrow was payday and that now there was nobody to pay him; he no longer even had a job. God knows when he'd get any more money. He opened Elena's purse, meaning to take whatever cash she happened to have in it. But when the catch of the purse snapped open and he saw what was inside of it, he yanked backward as though he'd been hit.
The roll of money inside the purse was so fat and bulky that as soon as the catch was sprung it uncoiled and spilled out the top. He stood, staring down at the money, at the thick sheaf of hundreds, fifties, twenties, his jaw gaping. He had never before seen that much cash in one lump; he could hardly believe his eyes. There before him, was thousands of dollars, he was sure. It looked like at least fifty one hundred dollar bills. He didn't even try to estimate the fifties and twenties. And then he didn't have to. Under the money was a tissue thin white carbon copy of a bank receipt and a small savings account book.
He lifted them out, opened the bank book, first and saw that the last item was for a withdrawal of $5,300., which closed out the account. That accounted for part of the money. The carbon copy of the bank receipt, signed with Elena's big scrawl showed that she had this day cashed in $9,500 worth of savings bonds.
He remembered now, Elena telling him that there was almost $15,000 in cash that she'd embezzled. He wondered if she'd drawn out all that cash to show him as a convincer, as a clincher, in case she failed to get him to go along with her any other way. He'd never know, now, of course. It didn't really matter. All that mattered was that here was money; all that big, beautiful money right here in front of him.
"It's mine, now. My money. Oh, Christ, won't I have a ball with fifteen grand in cash!! But not if the cops come into it. The money would be impounded. Eventually it would go to heirs. Elena didn't have any, Si knew, but Paul Crandall did. Si remembered hearing about a neice of Paul's in New York, that he was crazy about, a girl he was putting through College up there.
Si sat down in a chair to think, first pouring himself another drink. He was amazingly calm now, it seemed. His mind was razor sharp. In fact he was thinking too fast and furiously. They were crazy thoughts, too, most of them. Or were they?
Supposing Paul and Elena Crandall suddenly decided to go away on a long vacation? Suppose they left tonight, on the spur of the moment, not consulting anybody, because it was nobody's business, leaving Si Walker, a trusted employee, in charge of the place, to run it for them until they got back? Who'd question that? Especially if Si told anybody who did question it, that he knew Mrs. Crandall had drawn quite a bit of money from the bank the day they left. The bank would verify that fact and that would settle it, for anybody nosey enough to check up.
Why didn't the Crandalls take their car? They were going to fly, that's why. Where to? They hadn't told him, because they didn't want anybody to contact them, wanted to be free from all business headaches-that way, no matter what might go wrong he'd have to take care of it, couldn't get in touch with them.
He stood up, grinning, thinking about it. It was perfect. It would be three weeks or a month, at least, before there'd be any serious question about where the Crandalls were. Meanwhile, Si would be taking in rentals. There were sixteen three room 50 units, renting for an average of $90 a week, summer rates. That would be almost $1500 a week coming in, at least a good part of it in cash. He'd have dl that money, too. At the end of three or four weeks he could take off. With that kind of money, in Mexico or South America, where he'd be safe, he could buy into some kind of business, be set for the rest of his life.
During those three weeks he could live it up. He would hire a day and night clerk to run the motel for him. He could explain his sudden affluence by saying that the Crandalls had given him a cash bonus before leaving, for taking on all that responsibility for them. It would figure. Who'd question it?
But there was one thing wrong-two things. Two corpses.
He thought about taking them both down to the Gulf, when the tide was going out, throwing them in. With luck they might never be washed ashore or if they were, it would probably be at some distant place, some days from now and the bodies would be unidentifiable. That would be with luck. Without luck they could be fished out by some fisherman, or....
That was out. He couldn't take such a chance. The only other answer was to bury them in some lonely place. But could he do that? Did he have the guts? He looked toward Elena's dead body, its nakedness now seeming obscene. The thought of handling those dead bodies almost made him physically ill.
Then he suddenly heard a car drive up, outside. Panic lanced through him. He jumped as though he'd been shocked by an electrical current. Quickly he gathered up the money scattered about the table and stuffed it back into Elena's purse. Then he dropped the purse behind the sofa. After that, he took hold of Elena's limp wrist, dragged her corpse behind the sofa, too. He didn't know, that moment, why he did these things; he acted purely on instinct.
He heard the bell ring at the desk outside in the reception lounge. He gathered himself together, then and somehow, calmly and smilingly, went outside to the desk.
A middle-aged man and woman, with the tired, drawn looks of tourists who have been riding for a long, long time, were standing there.
"Good evening," Si said, amazed at the casualness of his tone. "Can I be of service, please?"
The woman's pudgy face brightened when she looked at Si and her hands moved self consciously to her gray, wind-disarrayed hair. "Why, yes," she said. "We wrote for reservations, saying we'd arrive today." She beamed at him. "You're new here since we were here last year, aren't you? We're old customers, practically old friends, of the Crandalls. The name is Fenwick."
"Oh, surely, Mrs. Fenwick." There was an acidy nervous knot in Si's stomach. He was sure the pounding of his pulses could be heard a block away. But the couple at the desk didn't seem aware of any of this.
He turned to the reservation file and found the Fenwick's card. "Here we are, Mr. and Mrs. Fenwick. We have you down for number nine. That's a fine unit, halfway down the walk to the beach. If you'll just sign the register, please, I'll go out and help you with your luggage. Unfortunately, our porter hasn't come in yet, tonight."
Si was quite pleased with the way he carried that off. Anyone would think he'd been running the motel for years.
Outside, helping Mr. Fenwick, a lumpily fat man whose conversation seemed to be limited to grunts and wheezes, Si heard Mrs. Fenwick ask: "Where are Paul and Elena? Tell them we'd like to have a drink with them after we get cleaned up a little."
Si didn't hesitate. Just as though he was a dummy, issuing forth somebody else's words, entirely uncontrolled by himself, he heard his own voice saying: "I'm afraid that's not possible. You see, they just left for an extended vacation. First one they've taken in years. They won't be back for several weeks, at least."
"Oh," Mrs. Fenwick said. "That's too bad. We've been looking forward to seeing them. We've always enjoyed their company so much. But I do know they've worked very hard building up this nice business, so I don't begrudge them a little rest. I hope they have a wonderful time."
"I'm sure they will," Si said.
And so it was done; the die was cast. He had committed himself, now. It was done so quickly and easily that he felt little reaction at the time, except for a peculiarly exhilarated, breathless, moving-through-space feeling, something like what a man might feel, who has been standing on the edge of a high dive platform for a long time and now has leapt-but not yet landed.
CHAPTER FIVE
It was nearly three A.M. before all the lights were out in the row of brick motel units that lined each side of the promenade that led down to the beach. At that time, Si Walker loaded both corpses into old gunny sacks, carried them out of the apartment.
Getting Paul Crandall's body out of the bathtub full of scummy sea water gave him some horrible moments, but he was well fortified with numerous belts of booze and he finally made it.
He buried them both in a patch of wildly overgrown, sand-duned wasteland at the rear of a vacant waterfront lot, next to the motel property. By then it was nearly daylight but he felt no exhaustion.
Back at the motel, he spent some more time cleaning up all evidence. By six A.M., he was finished. It was broad daylight and he felt no inclination to sleep. Except for a sour stomach from too much drinking, a little raw sensation about the eyes from lack of sleep, he felt fine. He showered and dressed and went out for breakfast. He ate more heartily than he had in months.
Later, he seemed to have no difficulty explaining the absence of the Crandalls to guests and the various tradesmen who stopped by. Everybody seemed to accept the fact that they'd gone away for awhile, leaving Si in charge. By noon time, Si was beginning to accept the situation himself, to believe in it. The events of the night before seemed more like a bad dream, then reality.
In the afternoon, he hired two clerks, one for the day and one for the night shift and a handy man. He figured this wouldn't make too much of a dent in the motel's gross intake. Help was cheap in Florida. He got the three of them for less than $200 a week. And he'd be damned if, in his suddenly elevated position, as manager, he was going to take care of such menial tasks, himself.
He moved his own clothes and personal belongings out of the den and into Paul Crandall's bedroom. The Crandalls hadn't been sleeping together for years, so each had their own room.
That night he made a tour of the Beach joints but his bar-hopping stirred up nothing in the way of feminine companionship. Most of the places were crowded with couples and other lone men like himself, on the make. He did run into a couple of women, drinking alone. Both of them gave him the eye and he knew he could make time but they somehow didn't appeal to him, hardly seemed worth the effort. He knew that now, with his new affluence, he could be fussy.
At a little after midnight, bored, Si Walker returned to the motel, getting a big kick out of the new night clerk addressing him as "Sir." He watched TV for awhile, then went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, get some of the too-much-liquor-and-cigarettes taste out of his mouth. Just as he was about to switch the light on in what had been Paul Crandall's bathroom, Si noticed a small pinpoint of light on the wall, about eye level, near the shower curtain.
Walking closer, he saw that a small hole had been drilled through the wall. He grinned to himself. He'd often wondered what old Paul Crandall did for his sex life, if anything-and now he knew. Obviously, he had been a Voyeur, or in more common terms, a "Peeping Tom".
Si moved up close and put his eye to the tiny hole in the wall and was surprised to notice that it gave a clear view into the next unit of the motel. As well as he could figure out, it should be Unit 4. For a moment he couldn't remember, who was registered in number four. Then it came to him. Two young women had checked in there the day before. He hadn't paid too much attention to them. They were very ordinary types, not exactly homely, but neither of them was even close to being pretty. They dressed rather dowdily. Si had figured them to be a couple of school teachers on vacation, possibly and then dismissed them from his mind.
On the other side of the peephole, the fight was on and Si could tell by the furniture of the room, that it was the bedroom. But it seemed to be unoccupied, at the moment. He was about to turn away when suddenly a figure in the other room, crossed his line of vision. It was one of the girls.
She was the shorter of the two and the younger, Si remembered. She was sandy-haired and her face was heavily freckled but that was the only part of her that was, Si saw, now. She had just come from the shower, apparently. Glistening drops of moisture still glistened on her shoulders. She was a solidly built, almost chunky-looking, girl, in her early twenties. Her nose was pugged and her mouth was too large, almost shapeless. Watching her, though, Si found her body oddly attractive. She was broad-shouldered and unusually narrow-waisted, yet her hips swelled out in full, feminine curves, then tapered down into short but nicely shaped thighs. Her skin held the extreme whiteness of the true redheads, giving it the smoothly textured look of fine porcelain, with just a touch of rosy underhue.
She was standing in front of a dresser mirror, fluffing out her hair. As she turned a little sideways, Si saw that her breasts were only average size but were exquisitely formed. They held the roundness of oranges and were delightfully tip-tilted, the perky, russet-colored nibs that crested them, pointing slightly upward. They jiggled gelatinously as the girl tousled her hair. As she bent forward to examine her face in the mirror, the twin moons of her plump behind thrust out, saucily.
Several times the girl at the mirror, half turned toward what apparently was a doorway to the other room, out of sight of the peephole. Si saw her lips move and knew she was speaking to somebody in that other room, but there was no sound. The walls were pretty well sound-proofed.
He fit a cigarette and shifted his feet into a more comfortable position, all the time, keeping one eye glued to the hole in the wall. He found that looking at the girl's naked figure excited him much more than it ordinarily would, because he was feasting his eyes on it without her knowledge. He remembered that someone had once told him that there was a bit of Voyeur in every man; that practically all men got an added thrill out of the "sneak-peek"; that seeing a shapely girl in a Bikini on a beach, wouldn't unduly excite them and yet a view of the same girl's legs, halfway up the thigh when an errant breeze flipped her skirt up, would send their blood gauge soaring. He began to understand that, now.
As he watched, he now saw a curious thing. The girl in front of the mirror, opened a drawer and took out a good sized jewelry box. From it she took cheap, heavy, imitation silver bracelets-about a dozen of them and slipped some of them on each arm. They were large metal rings and hung loosely on her arms. Then she took some large, gaudy looking necklaces from the box and put them on so that they hung in layers about her throat.
After she had loaded her wrists and neck with the cheap jewelry, she opened another draw and took out a pair of stockings. She sat down on the vanity bench in front of the dresser, her back to the mirror, now and began to draw on the stockings, one by one. As she did so, she was facing the peephole in the wall and Si for a moment felt as though his eye might pop right out at the view he was afforded.
The hose were rolled, to begin with. First she eased one on over her foot, rolled it slowly up over her ankle, then up a sturdily curved calf to just below the knee. Then she smoothed down the silken covering on her calf and proceeded to roll the hose on up over a dimpled knee, to about a third way up her round-fleshed thigh, where she left part of it still rolled and biting almost imperceptibly into the tender flesh.
The same operation was repeated with the other leg. And all the time her legs kept opening and closing, affording Si fleeting glimpses of the shadowy dell beyond. She stood up, stretched her body taut, then slowly ran her palms down over her smooth hips and back up, across her stomach, stopping them, finally, to cup her breasts, one in each hand. Still holding them like this she moved across the room, out of his sight.
Perspiration was beginning to break out on Si, now. He strained forward, trying, by force of will to enlarge the scope of the view afforded by the tiny hole, or draw the girl back into his range of vision. He must have stayed like that for five minutes-maybe more. The girl did not reappear.
Si took his eye away from the peephole and straightened up, found that he was stiff and aching all over from tension. The blood was roaring thickly through him from the excitement of the spectacle he'd seen. He felt like a violin that has been tuned too finely, too tightly and all the springs are about to snap.
He staggered out into the other room and poured himself a drink and called Mimi. There was no answer. She was either out someplace or perhaps had left already to go home.
In desperation, he took a cold shower. It cooled his body but not his emotions. It doused the flame of his desires but left the embers burning still deep within him.
He looked at his watch, saw that it was still only one o'clock in the morning. But all the bars along the Beach had a one o'clock closing time. Of course, he could always drive over through St. Petersburg and across the Bay to Tampa. They stayed open over there until 3 A.M. and there were some After Hours clubs that kept open all night but there would be nobody around the clubs but B-Girls and hustlers, this time of night. He had never in his life, paid for his pleasure; he wasn't going to start now-although he felt the closest to it he ever had.
Finally, he got dressed, anyhow, deciding to go to one of the all-night diners along the beach, get something to eat and have some coffee. There might be a pretty waitress in the place he could con into a quick date-or he might even run into some girl he knew, with some other guy, talk her into ditching the other guy and going out with him. He didn't really have hopes for any of these things, though. He headed out for the lobby in a gloomy mood.
CHAPTER SIX
She was standing by the cigarette machine in the lobby, when Si walked out. Even though her back was turned to him and she was wearing an ankle length housecoat, he recognized her immediately by her touseled, sandy hair. She was having trouble getting a package of cigarettes. The machine kept returning her coins.
Si walked over to her. "Having trouble?" She glanced around, looking a little startled. He saw that her rather plain face had a scrubbed and shiny look from getting rid of the heavy makeup she'd applied earlier. He saw that her heavy lips now looked swollen and puffy from the kisses they'd received. She blushed a little at the way he stared at her. She turned her eyes away, back to the machine.
"Yes," she said. Her voice was throaty, nicely toned. "I keep putting in a quarter and a nickel but the silly thing won't put out any cigarettes."
Excitement began to mount in him, standing here, talking to this girl that not too many minutes ago he'd secretly watched. Waves of heat seemed to suddenly flow through him.
"Maybe it's like a woman," he said, boldly. "Maybe it needs to be coaxed and treated just right before it puts out."
She turned and flashed him a startled glance and he saw that her eyes were green and quite attractive looking, up close. He saw, too, that they held the smoky, smoldering look of love-need that he'd long ago learned to recognize in a woman.
A little stiffly, she asked: "What is that supposed to mean?"
He feigned innocence. "Why, nothing special," he said. "Let me see the coins you're using. I'll demonstrate."
She handed him a quarter and a nickel and he saw that the nickel was new and shiny. He substituted it for an older nickel from his pocket. He put both coins into the slot in the machine then stroked the side of the machine caressingly, with his hands.
"Now, nice machine; pretty machine, give to Poppa, Baby!"
The machine growled and purred and finally clattered out a package of King Size cigarettes. As she reached down to pick them up, the girl said, laughing, in spite of herself: "I guess you were right. You must have magic touch."
"Believe me, I have," he said, low.
She flashed him a half frightened, half shy glance and he thought to himself: Here's a woman that most men would pass by without a second look. She seems to be plain and prissy looking, innocent, naive, uninteresting, as though she'd never had a passionate thought in her life and never would have.
Then she started to turn away. "Thanks for the help," she said.
He took hold of her arm, forcefully, yet gently.
"Whoa!" he said, lightly. "Don't you want to know what the trick is? You may be in the same spot again sometime and not have me around to rescue you."
She turned to face him again. "Something to do with the coins?"
He nodded. "For some crazy reason most of these machines reject a new and shiny coin. Probably to avoid taking slugs and counterfeits."
"Oh," she said. "I see." She caught his staring at the place on the housecoat where the loose folds of it, wrapped around her, subtly outlined her breasts. She blushed again and turned away again.
"We haven't introduced ourselves yet," Si said, quickly. "I'm Si Walker, the manager of this motel. You're one of the girls in Unit 4, aren't you?"
"Yes," she said. "Lisbeth Snowden."
"Hi, Liz," he said, without thinking.
Violent red stained her face. Her eyes flashed fire for an instant. She snapped it A him: "Don't call me that?'
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "I-uh-wasn't thinking of the connotation involved. How about Beth?" The high color of anger faded and she managed a slight smile. "That's better. That's what everybody calls me."
"Where's your roommate?"
"Oh, Donna?" Her eyes swung away from his. "She's sleeping."
"How come you're not?" He glanced at his watch, said, kiddingly. "It's after one in the morning. Isn't that a little late for a young girl like you to be up and around?"
She shrugged. "I'm not so young. Twenty-four. And I-couldn't seem to get to sleep, so I came out for some cigarettes."
"Insomnia, eh? I was having a little of that trouble, myself. I was just going to take a ride in the night air." He added, meaningfully. "I hoped maybe it would cool me off a little."
She said: "Well, I'd better be getting back."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "What else is there to do?"
"I just told you. What I'm going to do. Go for a ride. Maybe you could stand some cooling off, too."
She glanced at him in sharp surprise, then, but he just smiled blandly. "What do you say? Come on. Take a ride with me. We'll look at the water, breathe in some of that good salt air, then come back and sleep like babies. It'll be good for you."
"Oh, no. I couldn't!"
"Why not, Beth?"
"Well, I-I'm not dressed, in the first place." She glanced down at the housecoat. She pushed her touseled hair with her fingertips.
"You look gorgeous to me and nobody else is going to see you."
She looked pleased. "Thank you."
"So, if there's no second place, let's go." He took her arm with his hand. He felt her stiffen, resist, yet somehow he felt sure it was just a token resistance. He didn't let go of her arm.
"No, no. I can't," she said. But she didn't sound very sure of it.
"Sure, you can." He knew that sometimes it just takes a little extra pressure to break down resistance, to get somebody to do something that they're not really dead set against. "Don't be a ninny. I'm harmless. I don't bite." Gently, he urged her toward the door.
She went along with him, then, saying weakly: "Well, I shouldn't but-but maybe just for a little while....We won't be long; we won't go far, will we?"
"Of course not," he said.
Out at the parking lot behind the motel, half a dozen other cars were parked. A high trellis of tropical vines shielded the windows of the motel from the eyes of anyone parking a car. It also shielded the lot from the eyes of anyone in the motel. The lot was on a raised cement platform that overlooked the Gulf.
When they climbed into the Caddy, Si looked out over the water. It was dappled with moonglow and every once in awhile there was a phosphorescent flash as a mullet broke the water. It was cool and quiet and peaceful out there. He got a bright idea. If they went for a ride and he decided to park somewhere they could well be interrupted this time of night by police in a squad car. They had a habit of patrolling out of the way spots along the beach, looking for lovers. But they would never come back here on private property. So this was as good-if not better-than any parking place he could find elsewhere. They were perfectly safe from interruptions, here.
"Why don't we skip the ride, Beth?" he suggested. "Just sit here. We have everything we need, privacy, a perfect view of the water and all the clean fresh salt air we can inhale. And I won't have to bother driving, watching out for speeding drunks going home along the Beach road."
"It is beautiful here," she said, dreamily. She was slumped down in the seat, comfortably, a respectable distance from him. She had her arms crossed in front of her, hugging the housecoat about her.
In the softness of the moonlight, with the slight sprinkling of freckles across her plain face, with that freshly washed and scrubbed look, she seemed almost like an innocent child, sitting there. He suddenly arched with wanting her. At the same time he was torn with curiosity about her.
"Beth," he said, softly. "It must've been fate, our running into each other, this way tonight."
"What do you mean?" She shot him a curious glance.
"I noticed you when you and Donna checked in, yesterday. I-well-I was hoping we could get to know each other."
She didn't say anything. She just sat there, looking out through the windshield across the moonlit Gulf, her touseled sandy hair blowing in the slight breeze from the water.
"I dreamed about you last night, Beth." He gave an embarrassed laugh. "I guess that sounds silly, doesn't it?"
She turned her head toward him. She shook her head slowly, negatively. "I don't think so, Si. Tell me about it."
He hesitated. "You'll probably get mad. It-well-it was kind of a wild, strange dream. You sure you want to hear it?"
Almost breathlessly, she said: "Yes."
"Well, in this dream, we were living in the past century. You know, we were both wearing old fashioned clothes and all. And we'd just been married. It was the first night of our honeymoon."
He paused, but she didn't say anything, didn't try to stop him. He took a deep breath and plunged on. "When it was time to go to bed, I came into your room, Beth." His voice became low, husky, now. "You were waiting for me. Beth, you were wearing long, silk black hose, rolled high on your thighs and around your neck and around your wrists were lots of jangling ornamental bracelets and necklaces. And, Beth-that was all you were wearing."
He heard her take in a deep, gasping breath. She was staring at him in wide-eyed disbelief. She let out a little agonized cry. "You-you're crazy," she gasped. "You're insane. I'm getting out of here."
She reached to open the door handle. He moved faster, though. He reached out and took hold of her arm and roughly twisted her around toward him. His arm went around the tinyness of her waist, pulled tightly against him. Through the housecoat, he could feel the soft moundings of her breasts, her heart walloping wildly against his.
"No, I'm not," he told her. "I saw you, I tell you, in this dream. Just like that. You were beautiful, Beth, maddeningly beautiful and I began kissing you and running my hands over you and-"
He broke off as he felt her shiver all over and twist in his embrace. She arched back away from him, looking horrified. In a sick, amazed voice she said: "You-you know, don't you? You know, somehow?"
"Know what, Beth?" he said, innocently. "It was only a dream."
She shook her head, wildly. "No! No! It was more than that. You must be psychic or something! You couldn't possibly have dreamed just that, exactly that, unless somehow...."
Her voice broke and she began to sob, child-like. She buried her face against his shoulder. He held her gently, his hand reaching up under her hair at the nape of her neck, soothing the sensitive nerve centers there.
"There, there," he cooed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you upset. I'm sorry, Beth, honey."
"It-it isn't your fault," she sobbed. "It's me. Oh, if you only knew how awful I was, Si, the terrible, terrible things I've done, you wouldn't ever want to be near me. I'm bad, Si. I'm so terribly bad."
"No, you're not, Baby," he whispered into her ear. "You couldn't be."
The sobbing lessened and she turned her tear-wet face up to his. "Yes, I am, Si. Listen, you know why you dreamed a weird dream like that, Si?"
"No," he said.
"Because it-it's true. I mean, part of it's true, anyhow. You weren't there, but I've been dressed like that, actually, Si!"
"And you think that is bad?"
She bit her hp. "Si. That isn't all. That isn't why I say I'm bad. I...."
He stopped her with his hand placed over her lips. "You don't have to tell me what you are." He told her. "I know. You are essentially a normal, healthy, vibrant young woman, with normal, healthy needs."
She looked up at him, starry-eyed. "Oh, Si, Si," she whispered. "If only that was true. If only I could be sure. Si, I've never, never talked to a man like this before. I've always felt uneasy, uncomfortable with a man. But I'm not that way with you."
Very gently he took hold of her chin, tipped it up; then his whole hand cupped her face, holding it firmly, while his mouth moved toward hers.
"Oh! Oh, Si," she murmured, squirming on the seat. "If-if you must, don't-don't be too gentle. Be rough with me, Si. Don't be slow and tantalizing. If you're going to do anything, God damn you, go ahead and do it, fast and hard and get it done with." Her voice rose determinedly, almost furiously, at the end. And before the words were hardly out of her mouth, her hand reached up and pulled his face down to hers. She smashed his mouth against hers and twisted it there, violently.
He understood how it was with her, immediately. It was the same way with him. He'd been tortured enough tonight.
His tongue forced its way between her swollen lips. His hand dove under the folds of her housecoat, found her breast and instantly, forcefully cupped it and kneaded it, the nipple immediately fat and hard against his palm. Then his other hand swept down over her belly.
Beth came right up off the seat of the car, groaning as her mouth broke away from his. Her back arched like that of a cat in a fit.
He tore apart the front of the housecoat and lowered his face to the conical, moon-drenched mounds of her proud breasts. His lips attacked the quivering, flint-hard tips. At the same time he felt her hand on his thigh, moving, questing, fumbling-then seizing with compulsive force.
She wore nothing under the housecoat. He shoved her roughly away, just long enough to loosen his own garments. Then he assaulted her, savagely, without a wasted movement and she was with him, helping him, every inch of the way. As they fused into one being, volcanos of bottled up emotion exploded inside Si Walker, as they surged and undulated.
It was over in a few minutes but the time meant nothing; it could have been an eternity....
The next morning Si Walker was at the desk when Donna McCrea came out to ask if they had any idea where her friend, Beth, was. When the clerk told Donna that the other woman had checked out the night before, Donna's face seemed to crumple, to fall apart. Watching her, Si had to feel a little sorry for her. But not too much.
It was now the third day after the deaths of Paul and Elena Crandall and Si Walker hardly thought about them, anymore; it was as though they'd never existed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the following Monday, though, Si was brought rudely back to earth. A young woman arrived at the motel that morning, asked for the Crandalls, was told that they were away. Then she checked in and asked that whoever was in charge come to see her, as soon as possible. Her name was Fran Emerson.
She'd been assigned to unit 6 and when Si Walker came back from some shopping in town, that morning, he went to see what she wanted. He saw that she was an attractive young woman, basically, who seemed to go out of her way to make herself appear otherwise. She wore severely tailored suits. She wore heavy-rimmed glasses and no makeup. She was olive complected and had good, pert features. Her hair was cut in a French manner so that it was too short and seemed plastered all over hear head in uneven snips. She stared coldly at Si as he introduced himself, told her he was the manager.
"That's very interesting," she said. "In view of the fact that I'm Paul Crandall's niece and he asked me to come down here and visit him, just last week. He said nothing about going away."
Si felt as though a great wad of cotton waste was suddenly caught in his throat. His ears began to roar; his hands started to sweat in the palms. He fought off the panic, managed to gain some semblance of control.
"I'm sorry, Miss Emerson but they must have made a sudden change of plans."
"Very sudden," she said, sarcastically. "And very strange. You see, Uncle Paul wanted me to come here because he was in some kind of trouble; he was afraid of something. He said he needed help from somebody he could trust."
"Afraid?" Si gulped.
She shook her head impatiently. "The letter was incoherent. Uncle Paul was probably drunk when he wrote it, so that I couldn't gather what it was really all about. But I knew one thing-there was genuine fear in that letter-of something. Maybe of his wife, Elena; I don't know. I do know he and that bitch never did get along well together and that she bullied him all the time."
Si just stared at her. He didn't know what to say.
"So this bit about them going trotting off on a little vacation, suddenly, doesn't ring quite true to me," she said, curtly.
He forced a laugh. He held up the palms of his hands. "Well, as you said, Miss Emerson, Paul Crandall did hit the bottle pretty hard. That letter was probably part of a drunken hallucination or something."
"Don't give me that, Walker," she said, vehemently. "Do you think I'm a fool? I wouldn't check out of College and come traipsing down here just because of a sloppy, drunken letter. There was genuine fear in that letter of Uncle Paul's, I tell you. It was there, between the lines-fear, awful, terrible fear. Now, where are they? I want to get in touch with my uncle immediately."
He gave her the routine about they didn't tell him nor anybody where they were going because they didn't want to be disturbed.
"Oh, come on," she said, suspiciously. "You can do better than that. I know Elena Crandall. That money-hungry old bag wouldn't keep herself out of touch with this little gold mine of a place. And it's hard for me to believe she'd hire a manager and a desk clerk and a handy man, too. They've never had them before. Elena was always one for keeping down overhead to the nth degree. Now, I want to know where they are-really are."
Si tried to think. Finally, he blurted: "Well, now you've put me on the spot, you might as well know the truth. Paul Crandall's drinking had been catching up with him. He'd hit the very bottom-the D.T.'s-the whole bit. Bad. The doctor told Elena that the only hope for him was to get the guy to a sanatarium. But Paul was afraid, didn't want to go, refused. He was afraid of places like that."
Si Walker was amazed now, at his own creativity. The more he talked, the better it sounded. And now his face brightened. He laughed. "You see, Miss Emerson, that explains what he was afraid of, in that letter he wrote to you."
She thought about this, her shrewd, intelligent gray eyes behind the glasses, studying him appraisingly. She chewed thoughtfully on her full, bee-stung lower lip. Finally, she shrugged.
"All right. Maybe I'll buy that. What sanitarium did they take Uncle Paul to?"
"They didn't tell me. They didn't want anybody to know about this, except me. You know how it is, with things like that-you don't want other people to know your troubles. And Elena, of course, she was afraid it might hurt business if people knew."
Fran Emerson shrugged again. "Well, I'll stick around for a few days and have a little vacation, anyhow. I need a good rest."
"They'll probably be gone several weeks," Si said. "At least."
"Huh!" she said. "Not if I know Uncle Paul. Once they get him dried out, which'll only take a few days, he'll high tail it out of that place, somehow. He's done it before."
Then she slammed the door in his face.
Si walked back to the lobby, stroking his face, thoughtfully. Fran Emerson worried him. If she started checking around, making inquiries, she could arouse suspicions of other people. This was the one thing that could nail him to the wall. Why, suppose she even found out who the Crandall's doctor was, went to him and learned that this last story Si had told her, was completely false.
Then he told himself that she probably wouldn't do that right away. She'd hang around for a few days, expecting them to come back. Maybe during that time, he could find some way to get around her.
That day and part of the next, Si Walker saw Fran Emerson several times. He went out of his way to be nice to her, to charm her. He went through his whole bag of tricks. Nothing worked. She remained cool and distant. After awhile, this began to bug him. He'd never met up with a woman who could continue giving him the cold shoulder once he really made up his mind to make her notice him. He didn't understand it.
At breakfast, the following morning, he sat, uninvited, down with her. She stiffly acknowledged his good morning greeting and then turned her attention back to her food. When Si told her that she was really a very pretty girl, if she'd get a more attractive pair of glasses, fix her hair different and try wearing some more feminine looking clothes, she very carefully set down her knife and fork. She carefully removed her glasses and Si saw that without them, her eyes were truly beautiful, the thick, black lashes in startling contrast against the fight gray color of her eyes.
"Mr. Walker," she said, coldly. "You're quite a handsome, personable man. Really quite attractive. I'm sure women swarm after you to the point where you have to beat them off with a club. This is really too bad. Beacuse it's turned you into an egotistical oaf who becomes absolutely unbearable when somebody doesn't fall all over him. Mr. Walker, I've lived in New York, Hollywood, Paris and London. I've seen lots of men with nice features, attractive hair and big shoulders. That's not what I'm interested in, in a man. In fact I consider it a liability, not an asset. So go make your pretty smiles and flex your impressive muscles for somebody else. You're wasting your time with me. I didn't like you right from the beginning. Now I'm beginning to loathe you. So please go away."
She made a flicking motion with the tips of her fingers, as though to brush away some insect that had been buzzing around her. Then she went back to eating her breakfast.
Si Walker felt as though he'd been slapped in the face with a stinking, dirty wet baby diaper. All of his guts seemed to have been hollowed out. He felt sick. He wanted to say something back at her; wanted to strike at her, hurt her with words, the way she had done with him, but he somehow wasn't able. He couldn't think of a thing to say. He could only churn with sick hurt, inside of him. He got up, blindly and stumbled from the table. He went back to the Crandall's apartment and tried to get drunk. After half a fifth, he saw that it wasn't going to work. He gave it up, put on his swim trunks and headed for the beach. He gave himself a good workout in the hot sun, swam out half a mile into the great green Gulf. When he got back, he was exhausted and fell asleep on the hot sand.
It was afternoon when he awakened and returned to the motel. As he passed through the lobby, the clerk called: "Mr. Walker, may I speak to you?"
Si walked over to the desk. The clerk said, a little nervously: "I-uh-don't know whether I did the right thing or not, sir, but the young lady put me in a spot."
"What young lady?"
"That Miss Emerson, sir. In unit six. She wanted to get into the Crandall's apartment. She insisted on it. She showed me a letter from Mr. Crandall, which proved who she was. I didn't know what to do, sir."
"You gave her a key?" Si exploded.
The little clerk winced. His hands fluttered nervously about his tie. "Why, yes, sir. What else could I do? She had to get some papers of her uncle's, she said, that were in the apartment. She was quite insistent. She said if I didn't give her the key, cooperate, she'd see to it that her uncle fired me, when he returned."
Si smote the desk with his fist with all his might. "That bitch!" he shouted, redfaced. "That nosy little bitch!"
He swung away from the desk, hurried to the apartment. He looked around carefully, but could see no sign of the place having been searched. No furniture was out of place. Nothing seemed to have been even touched. Yet he knew that she'd been in here, snooping around. God knows what she might have found. He had to learn.
He helped himself to a couple of good, stiff drinks, trying to figure what he should do. Then he thought about the money, the fifteen thousand dollars he'd hidden underneath some of his shirts in the dresser. He ran into the bedroom, yanked open the drawer. He breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing in the drawer looked as though it had been disturbed. The money was still there.
There was only one thing to do, now, though. He had to have a showdown with this woman about this. If he just went to her, real straightforward and brassy, it would probably allay any superstitions she might have. Not only that but if he didn't confront her about it, it would look bad. She'd learn that he'd found out about her entering the place. A horrifying thought struck him, then.
Perhaps there was some secret paper Paul Crandall had hidden somewhere and told his niece about it, when he'd written to her. It would be just like that drunken old coot to have suspected that Elena was out to kill him, and make a written statement to that effect, to be turned over to the police in case anything happened to him. He had to find out.
Resolutely, he turned and left the apartment. He strode, still wearing his abbreviated bathing trunks, down the walk until he came to Unit 6. He knocked on the door. He heard bare feet patter across the floor, inside. Then the door opened. For an instant he didn't recognize Fran Emerson. She wasn't wearing her glasses. She wasn't wearing anything but the tiniest of Bikini type bathing suits. It was flaming red. What there was of it. The tiniest triangle of material mounded slightly at the apex of her thighs, attached by almost string-thin strips that passed high around her beautifully molded hips. The bra top was little more than two more tiny dabs of cloth that covered her nipples and served just barely to constrain the swelling peaks that flowed out of the material on the sides and tops. Her navel was a jewel-like dimple in the flatness of her tummy. Her legs were long, flowing, beautifully curved poems of creamy white flesh.
Si felt his blood run hot within him. He couldn't take his eyes off of her.
At the same time he saw that he'd caught her by surprise, too. For one fleeting moment, her smoky gray eyes moved interestedly over his finely muscled chest and broad shoulders, his well developed biceps, then lingered on the triangular brevity of his trunks, belying her previous statement that such things did not interest her. But she recovered almost instantly. She tilted her pretty chin, holding her head up, haughtily.
Cooly, she said: "Yes, Walker?"
"You don't like first names, Fran?" he countered. "I didn't even know you had one."
"Sure you did. It's Si-short for Simon."
"How exciting!" Her softly husky voice dripped sarcasm.
Si had been thrown off stride by seeing how beautiful Fran Emerson was in a bathing suit, but now she was stinging him back to reality. He remembered what he'd come here for.
"I hear you've been busy snooping around my apartment." he said.
"Your apartment? I was under the impression it belonged to my uncle Paul and his wife."
He shrugged. "I'm using it while they're away. With their permission."
"That doesn't make it yours."
"And Paul Crandall being your uncle doesn't give you any right to trespass. What were you doing in there, anyhow?"
"Looking around."
"For what?"
"Well," she said, rolling her eyes upward. "You see, it's this way, Si, darling-I'm so mdhdly, mahdly infatuated with you, I just had to see where you pad down. Dig? I thought I could know you better, dontchaknow, that way." She clasped her hands under her breasts, pressed them there, forcing the fine, creamy mounds to swell to the top of the Bikini to the point of theatening to spill over. "Now, dahhleeng, if you'll just clip off a lock of your pretty, pretty hair to keep in my locket, I'll be in Swoonsville the rest of my young life."
He knew she was riding him. It made him feel foolish. He had no defense against it. In desperation, he said: "Aw, come on, will you, knock it off. You do nothing but throw low punches."
She laughed then. Her teeth were tiny and even and white. He got a glimpse of her tongue, clear red and moist and serpent like, flicking over her teeth.
"Now, that's more like it," she said. "I've been waiting for you to crawl, just a little." She stepped out of the way, beckoned him inside. "Come on in out of that hot sun and I'll tell you all about it."
He stepped past her into the motel unit. She left the door open, went over and picked up a cigarette, lit it. She blew out smoke, picked a speck of tobacco from the tip of her scarlet tongue.
"Why do you think I'd go snooping-as you put it-in the Crandall's apartment?"
He turned his hands palms up. "I don't know. It got me curious. I figured the best way to find out would be to come and ask you."
She smiled. "All right. An honest question deserves an honest answer. For one thing, I was curious about what kind of a place Paul and Elena had; I've never been here before. And I wanted to borrow a manicuring set of Elena's. I forgot to bring mine with me. But that little creep of a clerk annoyed me, so I gave him some story about a mysterious paper. And I knew he'd tell you all about it. I figured that would get a rise out of you, too."
He let his eyes roam boldly over her. Softly, he said, now: "You don't have to go to all that trouble to get a-well-a rise out of me. You do it just by letting me look at you. Sweetie, you should never wear clothes. You look terrible in them and you were born to be seen without them."
A flicker of pleasure at his compliment, showed in her eyes and then was gone. "Is that so?" she said. "You put a lot of stock in physical so-called beauty, don't you, Si?"
He looked puzzled. "Sure, I like to look at a well proportioned body. Who doesn't?"
She blew out smoke. "That's not the point. What I'm saying is that you make the mistake that most men make. You equate a woman having a pretty face and a healthy body, with the fact of her being sexy. Don't you?" Before he could answer she rushed on: "In other words because I have well-shaped breasts and legs, you automatically figure that I should be a good lay. Isn't that right?"
He knew she was trying to shock him and he tried to pretend he wasn't. But he was-a little. She was always doing this to him, throwing him off-guard. He tried to think of some flip, smart remark to toss back to her; he couldn't.
"By the same token," she went on, "you figure that if you go to a lot of trouble overdeveloping your muscles, knocking yourself out with workouts with barbells and such, that will, in turn, make you a good man in the hay with a woman....Well, I've got news for you, Charlie. It doesn't necessarily work that way. I'm lousy in bed. You probably are, too."
He felt himself flush all over. He felt veins swell in his neck as temper rose within him. But before he could say anything, she continued:
"I lived in Hollywood long enough to learn that some of the screen's fieriest looking sexpots, with the biggest boob measurements, couldn't ever register above 32 degrees in the sack. They couldn't even 80 make a good man work up a sweat. Not that they ever encountered many good men; most of the pretty boy stars they went out with were in the same category as themselves. An actress I know, who is not a raving beauty but who is 100 percent all-woman, who's slept with almost every star in the business, told me that the only man in the whole industry worth a damn in bed, was an ugly little Frenchman, skinny and not over five feet tall."
Through his teeth, his voice quavering with temper, Si finally blurted: "Why are you telling me all this? What are you trying to prove?"
She looked him over, from head to toe, almost scornfully, now. "This, Si. You may very well be a nice guy, an interesting guy but if so, I'll never get to know it, as long as I let you go around, preening yourself like a peacock and thinking I'm going to throw myself into your arms, just like every other girl. So back off and take a new tack."
"Oh, I see," he said. "Maybe you prefer the intellectual type. Maybe I can make out, if I start talking to you about Dylan Thomas or how do you like Leonard Bernstein's new album or quote you whole pages from Dostoevski; Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski, that is. Would you like that better?"
She looked surprised. She wasn't any more surprised than Si Walker. He had hardly realized what he was saying; was merely striking back by instinct. But now he saw that he had regained the advantage, he pressed it. He walked up close to her. Right into her face, he said, evenly:
"I've got news for you, honey-chile. Just because a guy takes care of his body, takes some pride in his health and physical appearance, doesn't necessarily mean he's a meathead. I've read as many books as you have, listened to as many concerts, seen as many ballets. That doesn't make me any better or any worse than a guy who can't spell c-a-t. And don't talk about me flaunting my physical charms. Look at you-that thing you're wearing. If you're not proud as hell of those big beauties of yours and those luscious legs, why don't you cover them up a little-more? You're like a lot of broads. You show everything you've got, then put on the big freeze if some guy comes sniffing around."
He saw that he'd stung her. She raised her finely winged brows, made a cute "O" of her opened mouth. "You think I display too much of my body, sonny? Does it bother you?"
Before he could answer, she stepped back away from him. She quickly reached behind her and unfastened the string that held her bra, in the back. The string fell away, dangled but the bra didn't fall. It remained in place, held up by the high, jutting shelf of her breasts. Then she gave her shoulders a brief, cute shrug. The plump mounds under the bra quivered and the wisp of cloth fell to the floor. Her large, gourd-shaped breasts swung free, the aroused tips sticking out of the dark aureoles that surrounded them, like new pencil erasers. Then she reached behind her waist, the motion causing the globularly heaped mounds of soft flesh to jiggle and sway, enticingly, as she unhitched the bottom part of the Bikini. She wriggled her superbly carved hips and that wisp of material fell away from her. She stood there, smiling, proudly, with one leg bent in at the knee, in a typical model's pose, accentuating the lyrical curves of her legs and hips.
Si Walker could only stare at her, his breath beginning to come in short inhalings and exhalings. Finally, he gasped: "Gosh, Fran!" But the way he said it, it was like a prayer of adoration.
Then she turned to a chair and picked up a towel and draped it in front of her, covering herself.
"Now, you'd better go, Si," she said, casually. "You're beginning to bore me."
He began to get his breath back. He raised his glance to her eyes, saw the amused expression in them. He said: "God damn you, I ought to rape you. You've asked for it. For two cents I'd do it. Maybe that's what you need-that's what you want, even."
Cooly, she told him: "If you take a step toward me, if you lay a hand on me, I'll scream bloody murder and bring everybody for miles around here. I'll tell them you broke in here and tried to attack me."
He stared hard at her. "You will?" He started toward her, slowly.
She looked surprised, a little frightened. "Si! I warned you. Another step-"
She was just opening her mouth to scream, when he strode toward her, clapped his hand over her mouth. He curled his other arm around her tightly. The towel fell away from her. She struggled and fought, furiously. She tried to kick him, trip him. None of it worked. He held her helpless. He kept his hand over her mouth and she was able to make nothing but muffled sounds. He hugged her to him so tightly he could feel the fleshy, cushiony spread of her breasts flattened against his chest, their nibs like tiny spears of flame. Her skin felt feverish under his hands. She glared at him but she no longer struggled.
"See!" he said. "You won't scream at all. I can do what I want with you, right now and you wouldn't be able to make a sound. And afterward, you wouldn't want to make a sound. Not of protest, anyhow. But you were probably right, before; you probably are a lousy lay-most women who subconsciously want to be raped, usually are. So I don't think I'll bother."
He flung her away from him. She felt back into a chair, glaring at him, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. Si headed for the door without looking back at her. It was one of the greatest efforts he'd ever made in his life because she'd gotten to him; the feel of her in his arms, under his hands had made him on fire with desire for her, but somehow he accomplished it.
Just before he reached the door, she got up, grabbed a lamp from a table and hurled it after him. It struck the door jamb next to him as he went out, shattering. He didn't even look back. He just went on out.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The rest of the afternoon, Si Walker tried to forget Fran Emerson. He went over to St. Petersburg and spent five hundred dollars on some new clothes. Ordinarily, going on such a spending spree would have been a big kick. Today, it did nothing for him. When he got back to the motel, about dinner time, he unpacked the new clothes, hung them up in the closet, then flopped onto the bed. He closed his eyes but pictures of Fran kept running through his mind. He kept seeing her standing there, so damned regal and dignified and wonderful, in all her naked glory. She was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. He kept thinking about the way they'd fought, both verbally and physically. He could still feel his fingers touching her skin, the way it sent little electric shocks up his arms, the way it felt like five silk.
At the same time, he knew, too, that if he had raped her, this afternoon, she couldn't have prevented it but she wouldn't have accepted it, either. It would have been a defeat for him, really. Which was the real reason he hadn't gone ahead and done it. He knew instinctively that no man would ever really take Fran Emerson by force. When she let some man make love to her it would have to be because she damned well wanted him to. He wondered if that time would ever come with him.
He told himself that it didn't matter, really. She was only one woman. There were millions of others-and with bodies just as beautiful. But at the same time he knew that somehow, they weren't like Fran. She had something; there was something special about her that got him. It wasn't just because she was playing hard to get, either. He'd had that tried on him, many times. She wasn't playing, he knew, she was hard to get Because she hadn't really bought him, yet; he hadn't really sold her, the way he always had with other girls almost from the first moment he met them. She was willing for him to do that, he felt, but he hadn't, yet, and until he did....
Suddenly he could stand it no longer. He jumped up and went to the phone, asked the desk clerk to connect him with Unit 6. When he heard her softly throaty voice answer, he said, quickly:
"Look, I'd like to declare a truce on account of I hate eating diner alone. It gives me a complex. It gives me heartburn and all the other diners stare at me and wonder if maybe I don't use the right kind of deoderent or something. So, look, if I put all my muscles in the drawer, remember not to eat peas with my fork, will you have dinner with me? I won't speak until spoken to; I won't put my elbows on the table. I'll say Grace before we eat; I'll toss your salad for you. Okay?"
She snickered. "Oh, Si, you're incorrigible."
"Sure, kid," he said. "Whatever that means. Well, what do you say? Is it a deal? No fight, no fuss, just good food, pretty dinner music and a big meathead of an animal to pick up your check."
She sighed. "All right. If you'll stow that humble routine, Si. On you it doesn't look good. You're obnoxious the other way, but at least it's not phony. Give me a half hour to put on a face."
"I'll be in the lobby waiting, panting. Okay?"
He hung up feeling like a kid going out on his first date.
When she joined him in the lobby, his eyes almost bugged from his head. She was wearing a simple white Summer cocktail frock that, hanging on a store hanger, would have looked like nothing. On Fran Emerson, it was like a gown on a Greek goddess. It snugged in just right at her infinitisimal waist; it was cut in a low square at the bodice, that permitted the top slopes of her magnificent breasts to swell gently into sight; it clung affectionately to the long clean sweep of her thighs as she walked. The simple black high heeled pumps that she wore, emphasized the exquisiteness of her calves. She wore just slight touches of makeup that made her face radiantly beautiful. She had left the ugly glasses in her room. She had changed her hairdo, so that it hung in cute bangs over her high forehead.
Just looking at her, that first moment and Si's pulses pounded like savage drums.
Her eyes moved appreciatively over Si, admiring the expensive white imported linen jacket he'd bought that day, setting off his darkly tanned good looks.
"You look beautiful, Si," she said. "Even though I hate to say it."
"That makes two of us. Only I'm not kidding."
She held out her hand. "You said a truce. Want to shake on it?"
He took her hand and at the touch of her fingers against his, he was almost reduced to trembling; all the warm, beautiful delicious hotness of her seemed to flow out through her finger-tips into his own flesh. He ached to take her in his arms, right then and there.
But, instead, he let her fingers trail out of his. He took her arm lightly, led her toward the door. As they went out he said: "You dig seafood, Momma?"
"Crazy," she said. "You know a good place?"
He did. It was out over the water. It was small and dimly fit and they sat at a window table, where they could look out at the moon-shining Gulf. There was a three piece group playing quiet progressive jazz that didn't intrude on conversation but gave it extra meaning.
They ordered Martinis and sipped them, not talking. Si was satisfied, just being there with Fran. He didn't care if neither of them ever spoke again. After awhile, though, she said: "I like that music. I don't really go for Progressive, ordinarily, but this is nice. And it's not dance music. I was so afraid you were going to take me someplace where there was dancing. And that would have been embarrassing."
"Why?" he asked, surprised.
"Because I've got a funny thing about dancing."
"What is it?"
"It's hard to explain and it sounds crazy. I've never really told anybody."
"Tell me?"
"All right." Her eyes looked away from his, out through the window, at the water. "I'm very direct, Si." She smiled. "As you've probably noticed. I have a theory about dancing, that it's really not the purely social pastime, it's supposed to be. To me it's always seemed a kind of sneaky, under-the-table so that it's socially acceptable, pre-love-play. What I mean is that when a man holds a woman close in his arms that way and she lets him, it's really sort of an explorative bit on the part of them both, from a sexual standpoint. I know it is with me. If I don't like a man, I can't enjoy dancing with him. If I do like him and I dance with him, I feel as though we're teasing each other. Oh, I don't know...." She broke off in confusion. "I told you it sounds crazy."
He nodded seriously. "I think I know what you mean. What you're really trying to say is that to you, dancing is sort of fooling around when you don't really intend to follow it through. And you're a girl who doesn't fool around, unless she does intend to follow it through."
She looked at him big-eyed. "You're right," she admitted. Then she looked away from him again. For long moments, neither of them spoke. Then, finally, still not looking at him, she said, softly:
"Si, that's why I've acted the way I have with you. I shouldn't have done what I did, this afternoon. I've been picking on you ever since I first met you and it wasn't fair. But you know why I did it?"
He shook his head. Her eyes turned back to his, now and they looked soft and smoky and sort of contentedly sleepy looking.
"Because from the first moment I saw you, Si, I was strongly attracted to you. And I didn't want to be. I was afraid of it. So all that hostility on my part was purely a defensive gambit. You see, Si, if I ever do go to bed with you, it won't be just because I'm physically attracted to you, have the big sex yen for you. I've been through that bit. I slept with a boy I thought I was in love with, when I was sixteen. For the next couple of years, it looked as though I was going to make a career of it. Then all of a sudden the whole thing began to pall on me. There were no more kicks. It was suddenly no good any more, for me, when it was just purely physical. I found out, then, that it wasn't too hard to fight off that kind of yen for a man. I also found out that when I did and when a man found out he wasn't going to get into my pants the first date or after two or three dates, even, not until I damn well made my mind good and made up that he was going to mean something to me, that I liked him in other ways-why, then I found out that most men just didn't interest me."
He thought about that. After a moment, he said: "Where do I fit in?"
"I-don't know," she answered, thoughtfully. "You attract me more strongly than anybody I've ever met, Si. But maybe that's because-" She paused and dropped her glance, "-because I-well-I haven't let myself go in a long time." She smiled a little ruefully. "And you are a beautiful specimen, you know. But, Si, let me get to know you, first?" There was almost a pleading tone, at the end.
He reached out and closed his hand over hers, briefly, then took his hand away again.
"I'll be the soul of patience," he said.
He was but it took all his effort. After dinner, he took her over to Tampa, to one of the strip clubs. They both got a little drunk and Si enjoyed himself more than he had with any woman, except his wife, since he had started going out with girls. Yet he didn't kiss her once. He didn't even hold her hand. Even though, once, when they got into the car, after leaving the Strip joint, she turned on the seat and looked straight into Si's eyes and the desire in her was naked in the heat of the look she gave him that moment. She sort of shivered all over. Her voice husky with emotion, she told him, then:
"Oh, God, Si, I want you so badly, I can't hardly stand it."
Then she shook her head violently and ordered almost angrily: "Start the dam' car and let's get out of here."
When they got back to the motel, he took her to her door. She didn't ask him in; he didn't try to kiss her good night. He just said it, orally and left.
He didn't sleep well that night.
The next two days were more of the same. They were together all the time. They went swimming; they played golf and tennis. Si taught her how to do tricks on the chinning bar and other equipment at the local equivalent of "Muscle Beach". He was pleased to find out that in spite of her complete femininity, she was a natural athlete, with quick reflexes and fine coordination. They had a weiner roast on the beach one night; they even went to a movie and held hands all through the picture like a couple of pre-teenagers.
During those days, in the moments he was alone, Si wondered what had happened to him. Not since he was fourteen, had he dated a girl and not tried to make-out as soon as possible-and succeeded, usually, if not on the first date, on the second. He tried to tell himself that he was just playing it cute; biding his time. But he knew that wasn't exactly true. There was more to it than that. Several times he caught himself thinking that he was in love with Fran Emerson but then instantly dismissed such a notion. After he broke-up with his wife, Norma, Si had convinced himself that he was the kind of person who was incapable of love, so-called real love, the kind that required you to make sacrifices, to accept the good and the bad in someone, to be kind and thoughtful toward them as well as passionate. He had read somewhere that there were such people-devoid of the capability to love. He decided he was one of these. He accepted it.
Yet there was some attraction that Fran held for him that went beyond the physical. He found himself content and happy, just being with her. This disturbed him in the moments when he was alone. He didn't like things he didn't understand.
At times, of course, during those days with Fran, there were moments when his physical self control was stretched to the breaking point; times when he knew the same thing happened with her. Perhaps he would be helping her out of the car and her skirt would skid way up past her knees for a moment and he was afforded a maddeningly fleeting glimpse of the rosy, round shapeliness of her naked thighs. Or the resilient softness of a plump, quivering breast would brush against his arm. Sometimes it just took the fleeting touch of their hands to send his gourge rising. Several times, when the conversation ran out and they'd just look into each others eyes, he would feel himself being drawn to her, almost as if by a giant magnet, the power of which he could not fight and in that moment he'd feel as though his heart was swelling and pounding until his whole body seemed filled by it, was one great rigid ache.
But always, the moment would pass and nothing happened.
Once, at a night club, she suddenly asked him: "Si, are you married? Don't lie to me, please."
He hung his head. "I was afraid you were going to get around to asking that."
Quickly, she told him: "It doesn't matter. Not right now. While you're with me, you're not married, never have been. While you're with me, you've never even known another woman, Si. I mean, that's the way I tell myself it is, because that's the way I want it to be."
"It is," he told her, simply.
The third day, the break came.
It was a hot, clear, Florida day. They went swimming. After awhile, they took a big canvas inflated float Si had bought, and both of them climbed up on it, straddling it and paddled out into deep water. When they were several hundred yards out, Fran looked back over her shoulder and asked: "Where we heading, Skipper?"
"Straight out," he said. "As far as we can go. In about six or seven weeks we should land in one of those small Central American countries; Costa Rica or some place like that."
"You should have told me," she answered. "I'd have packed a tooth brush. But I don't like Central America. Couldn't we make it the South Pacific-Pago Pago or some such place. I've always wanted to go there."
"Why not?" he said. "You in a hula skirt; what more could a guy ask?" The very thought sent a shiver of anticipation through him. "Of course, when we get to Central America we'll have to put wings on this thing, to fly overland until we hit the Pacific but what's a small problem like that."
"But what will we live on? I'm not very good at climbing coconut trees."
"You don't like breadruit and mangoes, we'll just live on love. Anyhow, it's too late for you to back out, now. You've already admitted that I'm the skipper of this craft. Give me any trouble, I'll arrest you for Mutiny. Maybe make you walk the plank. Maybe even keelhaul you."
She laughed, delightedly.
Then, softly, Si said: "Oh, Baby, would I love to keelhaul you."
"That isn't what it means, silly."
"How do you know. Were you ever a sailor?"
"Nope. Were you?"
"Yup. Served two years Before The Mast. On the Staten Island ferry. Big seafaring man-that's me."
Fran shipped her paddle. She moved back and leaned against Si. "Just let's drift awhile, darling. Let the tide and the breeze take us where it will." She let her head rest back on his shoulder.
He put his own paddle up on the side of the float. He let his right arm steal around her. His hand came to rest on the dimpled faint swell of her belly. Over her shoulder, he found himself looking down into the bra top of her swim suit. She wasn't wearing the Bikini, today; just an ordinary two piece suit. She let out a big sigh and hunched her shoulders up. The movement bunched her breasts together, forming a deep cleavage between the bulges of warm, sunkist flesh that now overflowed the top of the material. The sight made something like flashes of lightning shock through Si's whole body.
"I'm so happy, Si," Fran whispered. "I could sit like this, drifting into the wonderful land of Nowhere, with you, forever. Si, there's nothing out there in front of us but sea and clouds and sky."
"You're crazy," he told her. His fingertips began to move caressingly on her belly. He delicately touched the tiny gem-like indentation in the center of it. "That isn't the sea, Fran. It's a carpet of liquid jewels, dropped down by the gods for us to play with. You want to see?"
He dipped a hand into the water, raised it and let a drop drip from his fingers. It fell onto the top slope of her breast, rested there, glittering in the sun. "There," he said. "See. I just gave you one of the jewels."
He brushed his lips against the sun-toasted warmth of her smooth shoulder. "And those aren't clouds, out there. They're big white puffs of pure cotton candy, made especially for us. After awhile, when you get hungry, I'll reach up and pull one down for you."
"Oh, Si! Si, honey!" she murmured.
He glanced sideways and saw that her eyes were closed as she rested her head on his shoulder. He watched the steady rise and fall of her breasts; he felt the warm, satiny smoothness of her back, leaning against his chest. His heart began to slam so hard he thought it would burst through his rib cage. He suddenly couldn't stand it any longer. He let his hand trail up from her stomach, slide over the round jut of one silk-and-lastex enclosed mound. As his hand pressed into it, she made a little moaning sound, twisted sinuously in his arms.
"No, Si, don't, please," she protested, weakly.
"I've got to," he said firmly. "I can't help it. You've got to let me."
His fingers trembling, clumsily, he began to fumble with her shoulder strap. She suddenly leaned forward. "No!" she cried out, vehemently.
When he tried to pull her back against him again, she said: "All right, then! I'll fix you."
She tipped the float over, tumbling both of them into the water.
Si came up, spluttering, spitting out water, rubbing it from his eyes. The water was as warm as tea. He was hanging on one side of the float, now; Fran was on the other, grinning impishly at him.
"That was a dirty trick," he told her.
"I know it," she said, smiling a little sadly. "It was my fault. I led you on. I'm sorry, Si."
He reached down his foot and was surprised to feel it touch sand. "Hey!" he said. "I can touch. We must be on a sand bar." He let his weight go down on his feet, then straightened up. He was standing in water only up to his waist. "See!" he said.
Fran tried it and the water came up to just below her bra. "Mmmm;" she said. "The sand feels so nice and soft out here. Si, let's stay out here and look for Sand Dollars. Can we anchor the float in some way?"
"I think so." He took one of the paddles and drove the blade down into the sand, then he hooked one of the lifting rings on the float, over the top of the paddle. He moved around to the other side of the float and did the same thing.
Then they both swam about, underwater, looking for Sand Dollars and odd shaped shells. In about ten minutes, they had quite a few of them piled onto the float. Then, suddenly, Fran said: "Si, did you ever go swimming in the nude?"
"Sure," he answered. "When I was a kid."
She wrinkled up her nose in pleasurable reflection. "Me, too. I used to love it. I haven't done it in years, though." She glanced toward the shore. There were quite a few people on the beach and a number in the water, but the nearest ones were still several hundred yards away.
"Nobody can see us out here, can they?" She asked in an excited voice. "I mean, really see us?"
"I doubt it."
"Si, I want to swim in the nude with you-if you'll promise me one thing."
"What?"
She was looking at him with her eyes dark and very serious, now. "You've got to promise not to touch me."
The thought of being nude with her in this translucent, .warm salt water, made liquid lava of his blood. But it would be agony not to be able to touch her, hold her. He didn't know whether he could stand it. But then he thought that at least he could have the pleasure of seeing her wonderful, adorable body.
He shook his head. "I guess I'm crazy, but I promise."
She flashed him a warm, grateful smile. "Thanks, honey. We'll have fun."
Then she lowered herself until the water was up to her throat. She was several yards away from him but he could see her wriggling to get out of the tight two piece suit. Then, without rising up out of the water, she reached up and deposited the two parts of the suit onto the float.
Meanwhile, Si was struggling to get his trunks off. He was so excited by the prospect of this nude swimming party with Fran, that he had some difficulty.
"What's the matter?" Fran called. "Why don't you take your trunks off?"
"There seems to be a slight problem."
She looked blank, then smiled knowingly. "You mean there are obstacles in the way? What happened, did a fish get into your breetches?"
"No," he said, grinning, finally wriggling out of the trunks. "An eel."
She laughed gaily and suddenly arched up and partway out of the water, her hands clasped over her head. In the bright sunlight Si got a fleeting glimpse of the firm, raised, gourd-shaped protuberances that mounted her chest, as she arched up for a dive. Then as her body curved and her head followed her arms into the water, he was treated to a glorious vision of her highly rounded, shining wet white flanks, for an instant before the dive was completed.
She swam toward him and her head popped out of the water, only a few feet away from him. Tiny pearls of water glistened from the tip of her retrousse nose, jeweled the tips of her long, tangled black lashes.
Suddenly she began to furiously splash water in his face.
For a flick of a second before water splashed in his eyes, he saw that she'd risen up straight. He glimpsed her bare shoulders and the thrusting bare white bombs of her breasts, completely out of the water, glistening wet in the sun. The great dark nipples pointed straight at him, like miniature warheads. But then his vision was obscured by the big barrage of water she splashed toward him.
Roaring indignation, he charged after her. She stumbled backward, then twisted and began swimming away from him in fast, furious strokes. She was a good swimmer and fast. But he was better, faster. He caught up to her, grabbed a kicking ankle and held onto it, until she stopped struggling. Still holding the ankle, he lifted, lifted, until she was up-ended over backward, the rest of her going under water. Then he twisted until her rear end was out of the water, as he held her, almost upside down, now. He looked at those shiny wet moons of firm rosy flesh and couldn't resist the opportunity, with his free hand he brought his palm down in a solid smack across her exposed fanny. Then he turned her loose.
Her head broke the surface and she frowned at him, pouting. "Si, that hurt!" She said, ruefully, reaching back and rubbing herself. Then a smile slowly formed on her pretty face. "But I guess I deserved it."
She backed away from him, then, for several yards, then called: "See if you can swim between my legs."
He dove in, breast-stroked toward the white blur of her. As he got closer, the clear Gulf water permitted more and more vision. Finally, close to her, he could quite plainly see the graceful curving rise of her columnar thighs. They looked ice-cream-white and smooth, underwater. He took one last powerful stroke and glided head-first, between her legs. As he did so, his cheek brushed momentarily against the inside of one thigh. The warm silkiness of it was maddening....Then, convulsively, her thighs came together, imprisoning his head between them, for a moment. Then, just as suddenly, they parted and she flipped completely away from him in a side dive.
Whn they both broke out of the water, Fran's face looked flushed, her eyes feverish. "That wasn't fair," she chided. "You promised."
"I'm sorry," he said. "But a guy should be allowed one slip." He grinned. "I was hoping you'd think it was just some fresh fish."
This forced a laugh out of her and soon they were again frolicking in the water like a couple of playful porpoises. After awhile, Fran said: "Si, do you know, I've never learned how to float. Will you teach me how?"
He walked over close to her. "Sure," he answered. "But I'll have to touch you. I'll have to hold you up."
"Well, let's say that won't count."
He reached a hand around and pressed it into the warm hollow of her spine. "Okay," he said. "Now, lean backward against my hand. Throw your feet up, keeping your legs together. Arch your back and hold your breath. That's all there is to it."
She followed his instructions. First the pinkly painted tips of her toes popped out of the water; then the ends of her breasts broke into view, right under his eyes, the tender looking tips standing rigidly, inflamed, like tiny beacons, as the upthrust globes rose and fell with her breathing. Si let his palm move caressingly in the hollow of her back. He glanced at her face and saw that her eyes were closed. Her nostrils were flaring now and he could hear her quickened breathing. Her lips parted, moistly, showing faintly, the white shine of her teeth.
Si's hand pressed more firmly, moved more insistently against the sensitive nerve centers at the base of her spine. He couldn't keep his eyes away from the twin treasures protruding, beckoning, inviting, from the warm water.
He felt as though he was about to burst with the want of her.
He saw her eyes flicker open a little. They looked slumbrous, almost entranced. She murmured: "Your hand feels good on my back. Keep rubbing my back like that, Si. It's wonderful. I-I'm like a cat about having my back rubbed. I could almost purr."
Desperately, then, he blurted: "No, Fran, I can't. I've got to stop. I can't take it any more, being close to you like this, seeing-seeing you and....." He broke off, incoherently.
Her hand trailed down through the water, brushed against his thighs, fumbling....
"All right, Si," she whispered, swiftly. "Then, I guess it's time. I love you, Si. I want you. Want you!"
He bent his head and his lips close over a stiffened dark little nubbin, rising out of the water. His tongue paid homage to it. Fran let out a little cry. His free hand came up and slid over her tummy, down onto the taut-muscled sleekness of her thighs. They roamed and roved over them, ever near, and ever far from their final goal, as Fran writhed and twisted in delicious torment. He moved his mouth up onto her throat, along the smooth line of her jaw and onto her succulent mouth. Their lips touched and twisted, tasting, getting into the perfect adjuncture with each other, then buried deep into each other. Their tongues sought and tried to entwine.
They entwined and twisted in the warm water but couldn't seem to accomplish the final reward they both now were so arduously demanding of each other. Finally, Fran blurted:
"The float, Si! Let's go to the float. Quickly!"
She turned and swam toward it, with Si right behind her. When she reached it, she turned her back to it and hooked her elbows well up onto it, hoisting herself slightly off the bottom, the buoyancy of the float, supporting her weight, then.
Si moved toward her. He felt soft and splendid gates opening for him and he moved between them and they closed around him, holding him. Both arms went around her waist. Her breasts crushed burning hot against his chest; the little spears in their centers tried to pierce his chest. The warm salt water flowed and swirled around them, urging them, helping them. Their mouths glued together and they both surged simultaneously, twisting ... and their separate rhythms became one, working in perfect syncopation.
A roar began to sound in Si's ears; a roar like all the surf in the world booming at once; then was not only in his ears but seemed to fill his whole flexing, pistoning body. And there in the water, with Fran, he became part of Nature itself because now the great tides of the Ocean were in him, part of him. He felt himself rolling with them, being swept up by them, carried with them but instead of mere water, the waves that engulfed his senses, now, were of slick, liquid silk and warm honey, mixed.
The keening pleasure sound issuing from Fran's flung-back throat told him that she was riding the same tides with him.
At the climactic moment when their senses split like atoms, Fran went weak and her elbows unhooked from the raft. Both of them slipped down, down into the water, not even aware that zero moment, that they were immersed. They touched the sand, soft and welcoming and wallowed in it. And not until it was completely, wonderfully over, did Si, knowing that neither of them could stay under another moment, brace his feet on the sandy bottom and shove upward, bringing them both to the surface, Fran still clinging to him.
CHAPTER NINE
Half an hour later, back in Fran's apartment, they had a tall, cool Tom Collins and smoked a couple of cigarettes. Then Fran stood up, rubbed her arms and made a small face of displeasure.
"Salt water always makes me feel all icky and sticky. I'm going in and take a shower." She swung toward the bathroom. Halfway across the room, she paused, glanced back over her shoulder at him, coquettishly. "Care to join me?"
He grinned, shook his head, admiringly. "Woman, you're insatiable."
She tossed her head, feigned disdain. "Well, if you get drowned, it's your own fault. You broke down the dam."
A moment later, she popped back out of the bathroom, wearing a white Terry cloth robe. She came over and sat on his lap, the robe falling open.
She curled her arms around his neck. "You sure you don't care to join me?"
His hand moved inside the robe, began to roam. But before he could hardly get started, she jumped up, took his hand, pulled him to his feet.
"Come on. In the shower." She pulled him after her, into the bathroom. Inside, she let her robe shrug from her shoulders and stood naked before him. While his hands lovingly massaged the conical swells of her breasts, she went to work on his swim trunks. When she encountered difficulty, getting them off, she said:
"Mmmmm! You do have problems, trying to get these things off in a hurry, don't you."
But then she got them free and they slid to his ankles and he stepped out of them and both of her hands moved to him as she whispered: "But your problems are my problems, too, aren't they, angel?"
In the glass encased shower, they stood under luke warm water and each one soaped the other until both of them were slick and frothed with the scented foam. They continued the lazy lathering until the bathroom mirror was steamed up but not from the heat of the water. Then they hurriedly rinsed off and ran into the other room, together, still wet.
This time there was no hurry. This time there was solid comfort. For an hour or more the room was haunted with their sounds of ever increasing delight, as together they climbed the mountain of ecstasy and reached the purple, rainbow-painted summit together, at exactly the same instant of timelessness. And Fran was forced to turn her face to the pillow and bury her mouth against it to somewhat still the audible outbursts that were pile-driven up from the depths of her, so that the neighbors wouldn't hear.
For a long time afterward, Si lay with his head pillowed on the bounteous cushion of Fran's breast, while her fingertips stroked his temple. After awhile, she said: "Are you sure you love me, Si? I mean, really sure?"
He turned his face a little and nuzzled the scented valley between her breasts. "Surer than I've ever been of anything in my life."
"Then, you wouldn't keep any secret from me, would you?"
"What kind of secret?"
"About the Crandalls, Si," she murmured.
He stiffened a little. "What about them?"
"You don't want to tell me?"
He sat up on the bed, reached over to the night table for cigarettes. He stuck two in his mouth, lit both of them, then took one and leaned over Fran and gently placed it in her mouth. He let his eyes sweep over her nude, gracefully coiled length. He couldn't seem to get enough of looking at her.
She puffed on the cigarette, let the smoke dribble from her kiss-swollen mouth, then languidly removed the cigarette.
"Si," she said. "I've been waiting, hoping you'd tell me because it would have been better that way. I mean, so I wouldn't have to pry it out of you. But I guess you're not going to. And that means you don't trust me. Where there isn't trust, how can there be love?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." He tried not to sound scared, irritated but his voice betrayed him.
"Si. In that letter I got from Uncle Paul, he told me that Elena was having an affair with their handy man, a guy named Si Walker."
"Oh!" Si gave a relieved laugh. "Well, you know how it is. Sure, she gave me a play. And hell, Elena may have been an older woman but she was still very attractive. After all, I was only human."
Very softly, Fran said: "You keep using the past tense, lover." She sat up, took a pillow and propped it up against the head of the bed. She leaned back against it, crossing her long, lovely legs. Even in that half reclined position, her breasts thrust forward solidly. "Si, I knew Elena. If she ever got her nympho paws on a man like you, she'd never let go. She wouldn't go trotting off to any sanitarium with Uncle Paul. I don't believe she'd go, anyhow, under any circumstances. Another thing, Si, when I looked around their apartment, there was no evidence of people going away for awhile. The place looked more like the way it would if they were still living in it."
He turned toward her, his eyes narrowed a little. "What are you getting at, Fran?"
She looked at him from the corners of her eyes. "I think you underestimate me, Si. I'm really a pretty tough little cookie. Selfish, too. I like to look out for little Fran-and whatever belongs to her. You come under that heading now, Si. And I'm not squeamish, either. To be frank with you, I don't now and never did give a dam' about Uncle Paul-except that half of this place belongs to him-and when he dies will belong to me."
"Why are you telling me all this, Fran?"
"I'm not sure." She twisted to put out the cigarette in the tray on the night table. "Why am I, Si?"
She looked at him long and levelly and his eyes were the first to break away.
When he didn't answer, she went on: "You know, if anything's happened to the Crandalls, it'll come out, sooner or later. It has to."
"What do you mean-happened to them?"
She shrugged. "Let's say-an accident or something?"
He didn't answer.
She leaned close to him, began toying with the curly hair on his chest. "If anything, let's say, has happened to them, I could probably be a big help to prevent any real trouble."
He was getting more nervous by the minute. "Look, can't we talk about something else?"
"Why? This subject intrigues me."
"Well, it doesn't me. I've got to go, Fran. I've got some business to discuss with the clerk before he leaves."
He swung his legs down off the bed but before he could stand, Fran reached out and took hold of his arm. Her cool fingers curled around it, gently, digging slightly into the muscular bulge of it.
"Wait." Her voice was soft but deadly firm. "I want to get this settled right now."
In panic, he roughly yanked his arm away from her, stood up. He walked over and picked up his swim trunks. "There's nothing to settle. I don't even know what you're talking about. I think you've flipped, or something."
She watched him yank his trunks up over his hips.
She said, smiling: "They go on easier than they come off, don't they?"
As he pulled up the zipper, she said, nonchalantly: "Si, Paul and Elena Crandall are dead, aren't they?"
His brain suddenly felt as though it had turned to mush. He couldn't think. The inside of his belly churned. For a moment he couldn't even see Fran Emerson, or the room he was in or anything; he went bat-blind for a moment. In that moment he was no longer a human being; he was just one big solid chunk of quivering fear-filled protoplasm. Then the shock affect slowly wore off and his ability to think came back. With it was a terrible nausea. He tried to fight it but couldn't. He had to run to the bathroom and just barely made it. He retched until he felt as if his insides would be torn out. When it was over, he was too weak to stand. He leaned against the wall, his forehead against its coolness. His head and his whole body was running with perspiration.
Then he felt a towel wiping him off. He looked up and saw that it was Fran. She didn't speak. She just dried the sweat from him. Then she wet a washcloth in cold water and held it to his forehead. A little strength came back to him and he forced himself unsteadily to his feet. Fran helped him into the other room. He half fell on the bed, lay there, staring up at the ceiling. He felt Fran's weight push down the bed and the coolness of her fingertips on his forehead, on his face.
"I guessed right, honey, didn't I?" she said.
He didn't answer; couldn't.
"Look, lover," she said, then. "You don't have to be afraid of me. Si, I love you. You think I'd want you to be hurt, to be taken away from me, now that I've just found you?" He still didn't answer.
She bent and kissed him lightly on the lips. She whispered: "Did you kill them?"
He shook his head violently. He cried it out: "No! Goddamn it, no, I didn't!"
"You need my help, Si," she said. "But I can't help you unless I know all about it. Pull yourself together, Si and tell me. Everything."
He turned his head and looked at her. Her face looked soft, her eyes kind, sympathetic and filled with love for him as they moved over his face as though trying to memorize it. In a few moments, speaking so softly, she could scarcely hear, he began to tell her the whole story.
When he finished, she told him: "You did right, honey. If you'd gone to the police, they'd never have believed you. They'd have figured you and Elena were in it together, killing Uncle Paul. Then they'd have said you and Elena had a drunken fight and you hit her or something and she fell and was killed. They probably couldn't nail you for anything but manslaughter on that, Si, but they'd have gotten you for Paul's death. Any prosecutor could have made it look to a jury as though you and Elena were conspirators. You wouldn't have had a chance."
"I-guess not," he said. "But what am I going to do, now, Fran?"
"Let things remain as they are. We'll think of something. Try not to get upset about it anymore. We've got to be cold and calm and logical about this, Si. We can go on just as things are, for another few weeks at least. Your story about them going away will last at least that long without anybody questioning it."
She got up and began to pace the room, then, still nude. He watched her, abstractly marveling at the beautiful fluid grace of her fine young body, but only in the way that he might admire a lovely statue, now.
Suddenly, she turned to him. Her eyes were wide with excitement. Two spots of color flared on her cheeks. "Si, I think I've figured it out. If we could get rid of Elena's corpse in some way, just leave Uncle Paul's there-later, we could discover his remains. It would look as though Elena killed him and ran for it. It's perfect, isn't it?"
He thought about it. It did make some sense. "Except how would we get rid of her corpse?" he asked.
She flicked a thumbnail against her teeth, thoughtfully. "I'm trying to think." She turned her eyes to him. "Si, how long would it be before she's nothing but bones, out there? It would be comparatively easy to get rid of parts of a skeleton."
He shuddered. "I don't know."
"We can find out, somehow."
He sat up. "Are you serious?"
"Of course I am. Look, with Uncle Paul known to be dead, I'm his heir. Half of this place will be mine, Si. I can sell it. We'll have a lot of money. And I'm the second beneficiary on his insurance. If the police think Elena killed him, she'll no longer be a lawful beneficiary and I'll get his insurance money, too. We'll be rich. We can go away somewhere together, darling."
She came running over to him, like a child delighted with a new toy and took his face between her hands and kissed him full on the lips.
"You feel better now?"
"A little."
"Go on back to your place, take a shower and get dressed and we'll go out for dinner. We'll talk about it some more, then."
When he hesitated, she told him: "Don't be afraid, Si, please. I won't betray you. I'm going to help you. It'll all work out all right, you'll see."
"Yeah. Sure," he said, without enthusiasm.
But he did as she suggested.
The trouble was that now it was all out there, gaudy and frightening, in his conscious mind where he couldn't avoid looking at it. He could no longer pretend it never happened. It was like the time when he was a child and while his mother was out one day, accidentally broke one of her prized vases. In a panic, he had hidden the pieces. When she came home and didn't discover right away, what had happened, he was able to pretend it never had; several days went by and he completely forgot about it. Then, suddenly, a week later, his mother discovered the vase was missing and began to question him about it. He lied, of course, and swore that he hadn't known anything about it-and she pretended to believe him. She never mentioned the subject again. But he could no longer just pretend it hadn't happened. For weeks he was tortured by guilt because of the act and because of lying his way out of the blame.
It was that same way, now. He couldn't get the fact out of his mind, now, that he was criminal-a criminal in fact, who had helped to hide a murder and his own part in accidentally causing the death of another person-a criminal, in possibility, who might be accused and convicted of murder, or as an accessory to it, which could be one and the same thing.
That night, all through dinner with Fran and afterward, he was quiet, preoccupied. He tried to match her cheerfulness but it rang hollow. He left her early and went to bed, tried to sleep.
In the half-world of semi-consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, his mind went back, way back. Scenes from his childhood and youth flowed before his mind's eye in kaleidescopic patterns.
When he was eleven-that was when they were wealthy, before his father went away-Si Walker had a governess. She was a pretty young woman, who had come to America from France, only five years before. She was sweet and jolly and kind and Si adored her. She was a simple, earthy, uncomplicated woman and their relationship right from the beginning was more like that of two childhood friends, instead of an adult and a child. She entered joyously into all his games with him. She was always laughing, never sad.
Then, one day, Lizette came into his room, as he was getting undressed for bed. She entered just as he was about to pull on his pajamas. He stood frozen with embarrassment for an instant, aware of Lizette's eyes on him. Her dark brown eyes grew big with surprise and her full, sensual mouth formed an O.
"Zuts!" she exclaimed, admiringly. "Simon ees getting to be a real beeg boy, eesn't he?"
Then she laughed, easily and he was no longer self conscious; there didn't seem to be anything wrong in Lizette having seen him without clothes.
His parents had gone away somewhere for the night. He had hardly been in bed ten minutes, when Lizette came in. She was wearing the sheerest of nighties and Si looked at her, curiously, his eyes big with youthful wonder as he saw the way her small, perky breasts poked against the thin cloth, the tiny pointed peaks clearly visible; saw the mysterious dark triangle below her navel, limned through the gown.
She smiled at him, put her finger to her lips in a conspiratorial manner. She whispered: "Would my Simon like Lizette to get into bed wiz heem for a few moments, to keep heem warm?"
Speechless, Si nodded his head affirmatively.
"He weel not evair, evair tell anyone? It weel be our own leetle secret, forevair and evair?"
After that first night, every time his mother and father would go out, it would happen again. Sometimes, Lizette would have him come to her room, get into her bed with her, for a change.
It was on one of these nights, that Si's father, a big, red-faced man with an iron-gray mustache, whom Si saw very seldom and had never really gotten to know, came back early. Mr. Walker entered Lizette's room and suddenly flashed on the light. He caught them completely by surprise. It was a warm night and they had thrown the covers back.
Lizette never said a word but just lay there, staring in big-eyed horror and fright at Mr. Walker. Si's father said only one thing: "Simon! Go to your room, shut the door and stay there!" But the way he said it, made Si jump. He fairly leaped from the bed, ran trembling, past his father and down the hall to his own room. But he didn't go inside. He was afraid for Lizette. He was afraid his father would hurt her, punish her and that wouldn't be fair, for her to take the punishment alone because it was partly his fault, too. If his father punished Lizette, bad, he'd have to go back and tell him it wasn't all her fault.
He stood outside his own room for some minutes, listening. There was no sound from Lizette's room. Then suddenly he heard her cry out, as though in pain. Then he heard her cry: "Oh, mon Dieux!" Then the sounds subsided into a series of low moans.
His heart pounding, Si tiptoed back toward Lizette's room. As he drew closer, he heard strange sounds, pantings and thrashing around. He was almost petrified with fear. His father was really punishing Lizette, hurting her bad, maybe killing her.
He forced himself to peek around the door jam. The sight that met his eyes was completely unexpected. Both Lizette and his father were now undressed. They were both on the bed. They seemed to be wrestling, yet at the same time they were kissing each other. Then Lizette's pretty, naked legs began to flail in the air and she gasped: "Oh, my darleeng! Darleeng!"
And somehow, Si knew that his father wasn't really punishing Lizette. He didn't know just what was going on. But he was afraid they'd catch him, watching them, so after a few more moments he went back to his own room and got into bed. He lay stiffly on his back; after awhile, hearing his father leave Lizette's room and pass along the hallway toward his own bedroom. For a long time, Si stayed awake, strange, puzzling thoughts and pictures going through his mind, before he went to sleep.
A week later, he caught his mother crying, in the Library. She told him, then, that his father had gone away and was never coming back. He and she would be alone from now on.
Si looked at his mother, dumbfounded, shocked. Finally, he managed to ask: "But where's he going to? Why is he?"
His mother, a slight, prematurely gray woman with an aesthetic face, looked pitiful enough to break his heart, with the tears running on her pale face, her eyes glassy with fear and hurt and hatred all mixed together.
"I-I don't really know, Simon, where he's going," she quavered. "He's gone somewhere with that nasty little whore, Lizette! He's left us, Simon for that-that hussy, for that-"
Her voice broke. Staring wildly into space, she cried out: "Oh, that sneaking, dirty little whore! Whore, whore!" She kept spitting the word out.
As the weeks went by and his father didn't come back and his mother seemed more and more unhappy-especially when Mr. Walker started sending her less and less money-Si began to wonder if it wasn't all partly his fault. If he and Lizette hadn't....well, then his father could never have caught them and then they wouldn't have wrestled in that crazy way on the bed and maybe his father wouldn't ever have run away with Lizette. For several weeks he was morose and filled with feelings of guilt about this. Especially since his mother constantly voiced her hatred of the French woman and Si felt as though he should hate Lizette, too, but yet he somehow couldn't; he could only be still very fond of her and wish she was back because she was the nicest governess he'd ever had.
Within a year, Si and his mother had to move out of the big mansion. They got rid of the two big cars and the chauffeur. They moved into a smaller apartment and Si was taken out of Private School and put into a public one. At first he was miserable; the other kids wouldn't make friends; they picked on him, called him "sissy" and sometimes beat him up. He'd try to fight back but usually those kids were bigger and he was kind of frail and he didn't have a chance. But after awhile the bullies got tired of picking on him; he made a few friends and began to like public school.
All during his childhood and his youth, Si Walker got into the usual scrapes and jams. He got caught stealing candy and cigarettes from the corner store. But his mother got him out of it. She told the store proprietor that she didn't believe a word of it, her son, her Simon, was no common little thief; the other boys had just tried to implicate him from pure meanness or something; or else he was being framed. Anyhow, rather than subject her Simon to the humiliation of an investigation, she would give the store owner fifty dollars, if he'd drop the charges. He did, of course.
A smiliar thing happened when Si was caught cheating on an exam in school. She got him out of that, too.
When he was fourteen, the mother of the fifteen year old girl, next door, caught Simon and her daughter, in the basement. The girl had all her clothes off. There was no doubt about what they were doing. When the girl's mother reported this to Si's mother, Mrs. Walker told the woman that her daughter must have seduced Simon; he was a good, pure boy, who never even knew about such things before.
All his life it was like that.
Often he wished that just once she would admit that he was wrong, that he was capable of doing wrong and let him take his medicine. After one sorape, he tried to get her to do that. She wouldn't hear of it. She told him he was crazy, that no son of hers could possibly get drunk with a bunch of teenage rowdies and wreck a house where a party was going on; Simon was just an innocent victim; somebody had doped or spiked his soft drink, or something.
After every one of these episodes he would be tortured by guilt feelings, a feeling of unworthiness. He thought of himself as a Jekyll-Hyde character; one side of him the fine, clean, upstanding Ail-American boy his mother thought he was; the other side a sneaking, depraved, immoral young scalawag.
It never occurred to him, of course, that he was no better nor any worse than the average young man of his age and times. Except by the ridiculous high standard of perfection his mother had set up for him in her own mind.
When he was seventeen his mother died suddenly of a stroke. It was only coincidence, of course, that this event happened almost simultaneously with a period he was shacking up with a girl who was a marijuana user and enjoying some of the wild, weird Pot parties she and her friends threw in Village basement apartments. Si convinced himself that somehow his mother had found out about this and that the shock of it was too much for her.
He went through the five thousand dollars insurance she left him, in about two months, in one long, riotous binge. In the week-long hangover that followed he was almost devoured by remorse. He swore that he would change. He would live up to the expectations of his mother, finally make her happy, even though it would be after she was dead.
The next week he met a girl named Norma Gates. He was down and out, at the time. She helped him. She loaned him money, helped him get a job. She was sweet and wholesome and so crazy about him she could never seem to do enough for him. A month after he met her, they were married. Toward the end of the first year, their son, Tommy, was born. For two years Si Walker trod the straight and narrow. He worked hard, received several promotions. He and Norma and Tommy lived in a small apartment in Queens. They were almost unbelievably happy. But the third year, something deep inside of Si began to gnaw at him; he didn't know what it was; it was in the form of a vague restlessness, uneasiness. He began to have fits of terrible depression. He began to pick fights with Norma on the flimsiest of excuses. He began to make life miserable for her.
Then he met a girl in the office where he worked. It started off with dates for lunch, then cocktails after work. Then he spent a night in her apartment. The following Friday night they went away for a weekend, together. A month later, he walked out on Norma and Tommy.
Now, sprawled on the bed in the Crandall's motel apartment, Si Walker went back over all that in his mind. And he was sure, now, that the time had come to make final payment for all his depredations.
He finally fell into a troubled sleep, filled with horrible nightmares.
CHAPTER TEN
At a little after six the next morning, he awaked and could not get back to sleep. He got up, showered and dressed. He had a murderous headache that Bromos and aspirin didn't seem to help. Finally he went out to the bar in the living room and poured himself a triple shot of bourbon. He almost gagged, getting it down but then the liquor settled and in a few minutes the headache started to ease. He fixed himself another shot, this time with ice and soda in a highball glass, then put a stack of records on the HiFi and sat down to listen to it.
He kept sitting there, making numerous trips to the bar for refills, playing records and not thinking, just sort of floating in an alcoholic vacuum. By ten o'clock that morning, he was quite drunk. But not in a thickened speech, staggering sort of way. He seemed to retain full command of his faculties. His mind, though relaxed, now, seemed to him to be razor sharp. He began to feel exhilarated. He began to think about Fran Emerson. He was glad, now, that she'd forced him to tell her the whole story about the Crandalls. It was the best thing that could have happened to him, really. Fran was smart, plenty smart and cool. He could use her help. Between the two of them, they'd work this problem out and, like she'd said, they'd end up rich. They'd be some team, the two of them. What was there to worry about? They'd have a ball.
Then he remembered the money he had hidden away, that Fran didn't even know about. He ran into the bedroom, yanked open the dresser drawer, lifted up a pile of shirts to make sure the money was still there. He counted it. There was still a little less than $14,000. All that cash. All that beautiful moola. Even if he and Fran had to run for it, suddenly, couldn't wait around to claim her share of her Uncle's estate, this kind of money would still take them a long way. He wondered if he ought to tell Fran about it. He didn't know. He couldn't make up his mind.
He went back out into the living room and poured himself another big dollop of bourbon. He looked at the bottle. It had been full when he started; now there was only about a quarter of a bottle left. He laughed. He always had been a guy who could belt away lots of booze without getting sloppily plastered-and he was improving with age, by God.
He suddenly felt lonely. He wanted to see Fran, not to make love to her, necessarily, just to see her, be with her, hear her talk, look at her. He went back into the bedroom, stripped and put on his new swimming trunks that he'd just bought. They were white and a sort of male Bikini type outfit. Actually they were little more than a rather fancy looking athletic supporter. He posed before the mirror, admiring himself. He'd drive the women on the beach crazy with this one.
He did a little Cha-cha step out into the living room again, in time with the music from the HiFi set. He finished off the bottle of bourbon, then decided he'd better take Fran something to drink; it wasn't fair for him to be feeling so good and her stone cold sober in the marketplace. She should be flying, too.
He searched through the liquor cabinet until he saw an unopened bottle of Pernod. He took it out, held it up to the light, saw the 100 Proof mark on the label, remembered that Pernod had a reputation for being an aphrodisiac. "Aha!" he chortled. "Who knows, my sweet? It's a little early for a matinee. But who knows on this glorious, wonderful day? Perhaps the new firm of Walker and Emerson should form a merger."
Tucking the bottle under his arm, he went over and shut off the HiFi. He left the apartment.
When Fran let him in she was still wearing her pajamas. They were Hibiscis red silk of a Chinese Mandarin design. They were buttoned high about her neck. But the soft, clinging silk shivered provocatively over the points of her breasts. Her hair was touseled from the pillow and she still hadn't put on makeup. Her eyes still looked sleepy and her mouth a little puffed, still, from slumber.
"Voila!" Si said, flourishing the bottle. "I'm a gift bearing Greeks. Open up and let me in."
She looked at him, surprised, then saw the bright glaze of his eyes, the flush on his cheeks, and smiled.
"Whatever you had for breakfast, sweetie," she said, "must've been eighty proof, as least."
He pushed her, inside. "You're wrong. It was a hundred." He held up the bottle. "Just like this. But I got tired of drinking alone. I decided it's immoral, immoderate, imbecilic, insouciant, whatever the hell that is and indecent." He leered at her. "You wouldn't want me to be immoral, would you.
He walked over to her, made a fiendish face, growled and lowered his face toward the jut of her breasts. "Grrrrrr!" he said. "I'm a wolf and you look simply delicious in those pajamas. I think I'll eat you."
She leaned back away from him, making a face. "Well," she said, "That's the best offer I've had all day." Then her eyes moved to his bathing trunks. "Speaking of being indecent, that outfit certainly is. Wow! And Va-va-vroom!"
He struck a magazine type "strong man" pose for her. She laughed. "Don't flex your muscles at me like that, Buster," she told him. "Or I'll-"
Before she could finish, he put the bottle down, stalked toward her, wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her tightly to him. He held her so hard she could scarcely get her breath. "You'll what?" he demanded with fake fierceness. "If there's going to be anything doing around here, Vll do it."
When she leaned back away from him, he looked down at the perky points punching out the silk of her pajamas. He lowered his face to them and touched first one, then the other, with his tongue. The wet silk stuck and clung to the suddenly excited pinnacles of her breasts.
"God," he said, "but you're ravishing in those things."
She squirmed out of his embrace. "Down, boy, down!" she cautioned.
"That's a fine thing to tell me, after that," he answered.
She giggled, then turned and picked up the bottle of Pernod. "Is this stuff any good? I've never drank it."
"Open it," he ordered. "Try it. It'll drug you; it'll fly you straight to Heaven. It'll make you attack me like a love-starved vixen after its mate."
She pretended to be shocked. "It will? Then I'd better not have any. I'm not up to such gymnastics, early in the morning."
He shook his head. "'s not early in the morning. Eleven o'clock. Almost noon. Cocktail hour, almost." He went over and took the bottle from her. "I'll fix you one."
"No, Si," she said. "Really, it's too early."
"Nonsense." He waved a hand, deprecatingly. "Never too early."
A sudden wave of dizziness took him and he staggered against the wall. "Whoa, there, Nellie!" he mumbled. "Hold her, Newt, she's a-rearin'." He began to chuckle to himself as he leaned against the wall.
Fran came over to him. "Si, are you all right?" she asked, a little concerned.
He blinked at her owlishly. "Sure 'm all right. Just a little plotzed, is all. Nicely, comfortably smashed. Y'know? 'S Fun. Y'oughtta try it." He put his arm around her, tried to lead her out to the kitchen. "Come on. Fix you a drink. Nice, nice little drinkee."
"All right," she said. "I'll have one with you, if you'll promise me something."
"What's that?"
"That after I have a drink, you'll go swimming with me."
He squinted at her, shrewdly, then waggled a finger at her. "Aha!" he said. "Wise guy, huh? You think I'm too drunk. You figure a little cooling off period in the Gulf will sober me up." He put his forearm up against his forehead, poked out his lower lip and blew breath up over his perspiring face. He grinned a little wryly. "Y'know something? You could be so right, kitten? I have been boozing it up too hard, too early."
He started out into the kitchen again. "Okay, come on. I'll fix us drinks and then we'll go swimming. I'll get sober as a judge." He thought about that. "Hey, where the hell did that expression come from? I've known a lot of judges. Got drunk once in awhile just like everybody else."
He took a knife and cut the seal on the bottle, unscrewed the cap. He took down ice cubes and got glasses from a shelf. Fran watched him slosh the amber liquid over the ice cubes; it turned a smoky yellow color when it touched the ice.
"It's changing color," Fran said.
"Sure. Pernod does that when it hits the ice. Delicious. Good for you, too. Puts ants in your pants."
Her eyes moved over Si, grew dark, sultry looking. "I've already got 'em, lover. I don't need artificial stimulation."
He handed her a glass. She sipped at it, made a peculiar, not unpleased expression. "Mmm," she said. "Tastes like Anise or licorice."
He sipped his own drink. "Love licorice. Hey, you made a pun; it certainly does taste liquorish. End of joke. Anyhow, as I was saying, when I was a kid, we used to buy these big long licorice straps. For a penny, yet. Remember?"
She nodded, took another sip of the drink and headed out of the kitchen.
"Hey, where you going, beautiful?"
"Put my bathing suit on. Don't go away. Be right back."
"You couldn't chase me."
He went back out into the living room, sipping at his drink, while Fran was in the bathroom. He picked up a literary magazine she'd been reading the night before. It was folded open to an article about Jean Paul Sartre. He'd just started to read when Fran came out of the bathroom. Her glass was empty. She smacked her lips. "It was a good drink, sweetie. Thanks for bringing it over."
In her other hand she was holding a bottle of Baby Oil. He gestured toward it. "What are you going to do with that?"
"I use it before I go to the beach to keep from getting sunburned." She set her glass down, then camp over to him. She poured some of the oily white liquid into her palm, reached up and rubbed it onto his shoulder.
"That's silly," he said. "I'm already tanned. I don't need it."
"Would you deprive a girl of the excuse to run her hands over your big, handsome, manly physique?"
Then she took his hand, poured some of the oil into the palm. The Baby Oil was slightly scented. "You rub some on me, too."
He saw the smoldering look in her dark eyes, then. He chuckled. "Good ol' Pernod," he said. "Never fails."
He began to smooth the oil over her shoulders, down the soft, satiny flesh of her upper arms. At the same time, she was smearing the creamy unguent-over his chest and muscle-ridged stomach, her fingertips, somehow burning through the coolness of the oil. After a moment, Si said, huskily: "I'm afraid you have the advantage of me, Madame."
"How?"
"I'm not wearing any top. You can do a much better job on me."
She pouted up at him, made a small, passionate looking smile. "That isn't very fair, is it, honey? Why don't you do something about it?" She turned her back toward him. He ripped at the bow tying the top of her suit. He flung it away. She turned back to him, taking in a deep breath that hollowed in her tummy and swelled the taut-fleshed gourds of her breasts. The crimson tips pointed up at him, saucily. He took the oil and poured some in both palms. He rubbed the slippery, creamy stuff over the upthrust mounds, slidingly, slitheringly, while Fran gasped her pleasure and the greased movements of her own hands became more insistent.
After a few moments, she was trembling all over, her lovely flesh prickled with duck bumps. She whispered: "Why don't we do it all over?"
Putting action to the word, she quickly unfastened Si's trunks, yanked them down. His own hands stripped away the bottom part of her swim suit. They continued, then, to lave each other with the cool, paradoxically soothing, yet arousing, lubricant, their fingers lingering in the most sensitive places, laving, torturing with delight.
The whole bottle of oil was gone then and they were both shining, glistening slick with it, from head to foot. Si tried to take Fran in his arms, letting out a long, pent-up groan of frustration. But she eeled away from him, her skin slipping easily from under his fingers.
She backed off, smiling wickedly, tauntingly. "No," she said. "You'll have to catch me first. If you can catch me and hold me....That was the whole idea, Si!"
"Why, you-" Grinning, he started after her. She dodged and twisted, lithely. Several times he almost caught her but always her oiled flesh slipped through his hands. It was maddening. The more she avoided him the more he had to have her. Then when he finally did catch her, hold her, wrestled her to the floor, she continued to wriggle and twist, her strong, finely fleshed arms and legs slipping and skidding against his. He couldn't pin her down. They were both now gasping with their physical efforts and with the terrible self-frustrated need for each other.
Just as Fran began to struggle less furiously and Si was about to achieve his desires, suddenly, with a little teasing squeal of delight, she rolled out from under him, away from him. But he moved quick as a savage jungle beast, now. He caught her while she was still on her tummy. He pininoned her beneath him. He buried his face against her velvetty, creamed back. He pushed against rising mounds of tensed resilience and suddenly the creamy slickness of her worked for him and not against him. With a long drawn wailing cry, Fran arched, then fell forward again. Her face rested on her crooked arm and she bit into her own flesh to try to give relief to the sensation-hammered explosion that was being detonated within her.
But there was no surcease. Si was suddenly a superman, posessed of satanic staying powers. Several times her own ecstasy became so unbearable she had to try to squirm away from him. He wouldn't let her go. But finally her senses could stand no more; they left her in a swirling, fire-works exploding burst of flaring lights that faded into soft, warm, oily all encompassing, welcoming darkness....
They never did go swimming. Fran fixed him some lunch. Then she went with him back to his place, to get another drink. Once there, he sprawled on the couch, after turning on the HiFi, smoking, sipping at a rum drink, this time. He left lethargic, drained. He didn't feel like talking; he just wanted to rest. While he did so, Fran fidgeted round, looking through the record collection, examining the books and magazines in the place. Si kept telling her to relax, have a drink with him. She wouldn't. She said she didn't really care anything about drinking; a couple was all she ever wanted; it didn't do anything for her, after that.
Several times he caught her staring at him, quizzically, almost calculatingly. Once, he asked her: "What are you looking at?"
"You, Si," she answered.
"Why?" He drained his glass, reached down to the bottle on the floor, next to the sofa, poured himself a new drink.
"Because you're a very strange man."
He waved a limp hand at her. "Not strange. Just happy, lazy, contented." He grinned, knowingly. "And pleasantly pooped. Stop the deep stuff, will you and relax, baby."
"Sure, Si." she said. "Don't let me bother you. Listen, I'm going back to my place for a little while. I've got to do my nails. I'll come back when I've finished. Okay? You can take a little snooze, or something. Maybe you'll feel better, then."
He yawned, sipped at his drink. "Okay. Leave the door open when you go out, so you can get back in without my having to get up."
She came over and kissed him lightly on the forehead, then left.
For fifteen minutes, he continued to drink slowly, steadily, while he listened to the music. His eyes grew heavier. He grew delightfully fuzzy. He drifted off to sleep....
It was starting to get dark when he awaked. He felt terible. His mouth tasted sour; his head throbbed. He went in and showered and felt a little better. He got dressed, then dug under the pile of shirts in the drawer to get some money from the pile he had hidden there. He took out a hundred dollars and was about to cover up the rest of the cash again when a small, awed voice, right behind him, said: "Ooooh! That looks like a miniature Fort Knox. How much is there, Si?"
He straightened like a sprung jack-in-the-box, swiveled around, jarred hard.
Fran, dressed in a simple blue cocktail frock, looked fresh and rested and beautiful, was standing there. She wasn't looking at him. She was still staring down at the money.
"Your life savings, Si?" She asked, sarcastically. Her eyes swung to his, hard, accusing, now.
He tried to laugh it off. "Oh, just a little windfall I fell into."
"Sure," she said. "You held out on me, didn't you? How much is there, Si? It looks like thousands, to me. Where'd it all come from?"
He told her, then. When he finished, he said: "But I wasn't exactly holding out on you, sweetheart. Honest. I was going to tell you, later. I wanted it to be a surprise."
"Oh, sure." She turned away from him, biting at her lower lip. "You think I'm dumb? I know what you were going to do. When you'd had enough fun with me, when you got tired of me, you were going to use that money to run out on me."
The injustice of this walloped him. It wasn't true. He hadn't ever thought of such a thing. He tried to tell her. He couldn't seem to make it get through to her. She just laughed at him.
He tried to take her in his arms. She fought him off. "Cut it out, Si. I'm in no mood for that kind of thing. I'm almost sick to my stomach, learning how you tricked me like this."
"But I didn'tl I've tried to tell you, to explain. You've got to understand, Fran. You know me better than that."
"Apparently I don't know you at all," she answered. "I should have known. You double-crossed my Uncle Paul, who gave you a job; you double-crossed Elena-you've probably double-dealt everybody who's ever cared anything about you in your whole life."
"Shut up," he roared. "Don't say that." He slapped her stinging hard across the cheek.
The palm of her hand went to the red finger marks on her cheek. Her eyes grew big and dark with shock and hurt, then brimmed with tears that, strangely, never flowed over. Without another word, she turned and started for the door. He ran after her, tried to stop her. She twisted away. He tried to get in front of her.
"No, Fran!" he cried. "You can't go, like this. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. You can have all the money. You're the only thing that's really important to me."
Still, she kept going toward the door. This time when he tried to stop her, she got both hands against his chest, shoved with angry strength. Her leverage was just right. Si was off balance at the time. He staggered backward and fell. He fell hard and heavy, the back of his head striking the wall. He felt what seemed to be a blaze of electric flashes go off in his head. Then he was spiraling down, down into twisting darkness....
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A half hour later, he got up off the floor, slowly, dizzily, not remembering, at first, what had happened. He figured he got drunk and fell and passed out. Then as he moved his head, there was a sharp pain in the back of it. He reached back there and felt the tender knot on the back of his head. Then the scene with Fran returned to his memory. He staggered to a chair and fell into it, tried to think. He didn't know what to do. He knew he had to make things right with Fran, though, somehow. It was important. She was all he had left.
Not only that, but she knew too much about him, about what had happened to Paul and Elena Crandall. He couldn't afford to have her for an enemy.
He forced himself to his feet, moved stiffly toward the bar. He poured himself a double shot of rum, swilled it down. It didn't seem to do anything for him. After the first burn to his throat it was as though he'd drunk water. Desperately, he filled a highball glass of the stuff and took it all in three big gulps. This time, the big dose of liquor went off like a bomb in his stomach. His head began to roar and blood pounded through his veins; his pulses galloped. In ten minutes he was quite drunk. All that he had taken that day, began to really pile up on him. But it seemed only to affect his mind, which became a confused blur, so that he couldn't seem to think coherently. But he was able to walk all right, to use his hands.
He made his way to the door, went out through the lobby and then turned down the walk toward Fran's unit. He knocked on the door. There was no answer. He knocked harder. Still no answer. He ran to one of the windows, looked in. The apartment was ablaze with lights but he could see no sign of Fran. Then he ran to the parking lot. Her car was gone.
Dejectedly, Si walked back to his own apartment, to get his own car keys. He had to go look for Fran. She'd probably gone to one of the bars along the Beach. He'd find her; he'd make her understand that he really was going to split that money with her.
The money!
He remembered that he'd left the drawer open, the money uncovered. H couldn't have that. He ran into the bedroom. The dresser drawer was still open. But when he looked into it, the clean shirts were all pushed up to one side and the money was gone.
The money was gone!
The words rang in his mind. But he couldn't believe it. He stared down at the bare bottom of the drawer. Wildly, he reached in, pushed the shirts this way and that, then tossed them out onto the floor. He wondered if in his drunkenness he could have hidden it someplace else and just didn't remember. He ripped open other drawers. He tossed out clothes wildly. He ran around the room, then, searching, making little crying sounds of despair. He looked under the mattress, in the closets. Then it came to him very solidly and definitely; the money was no longer here in his place. Fran had taken it.
He fell back onto the bed and sobs shook him, choked out of his throat. He needed all that money; it was his; he had to have it.
After awhile he told himself to cut it out, calm down, there was no sense in getting panicky. So, Fran had taken the money; she probably did it just to frighten him, or to make sure he didn't run off with it. She'd probably just hidden it in her place. Yes, he told himself, that was it. All he had to do, was go out and find Fran. It was easy; it was very simple when he made himself approach it logically.
He pulled himself together, left and got into the Caddy. He drove North along the Beaches, stopping in every bar he saw, looking in, looking for Fran. He didn't find her. He killed about an hour and a half, hitting all the bars in that five-mile stretch, stopping in some of them long enough to refortify himself with a couple of drinks. There was a high, fine, keening sound in his ears, when he finally headed back toward the motel.
He was still a quarter mile from the motel when he saw the tremendous blaze of lights, near the beach, in back of and to the right of the motel. He slowed down, staring at the lights, stupidly, wondering what they were, what was going on. Then, when he reached the motel driveway, he saw the two police cars pulled in there, a uniformed patrolman standing by one of them.
Something's happened, he thought, there's been an accident. Maybe it's Fran; maybe she's been hurt; maybe that crazy damned fool kid tried to kill herself, maybe even succeeded.
But almost instantly, came another thought: No. It's not that. It's nothing like that.
And because of some protective instinct that cut through the drunken fog in his mind, he didn't pull into the motel driveway, he kept on going. He pulled the Caddy off alongside the road, several hundred yards from the motel. He cut through a neighboring motel, ran down to the beach. He walked up along the long strip of beach, shared by all the motels, toward that big blasting blaze of lights. When he got near enough, he crept up behind the protection of a great dune and peered over it.
He saw then that the blaze of light came from Police Emergency flood lights set up around the section of vacant beach lot where he'd buried Paul and Elena Crandall. Several policemen were methodically digging in the lot. They'd already excavated a large area. He knew that eventually they'd find the corpses.
But how did they know about them? he cried out within himself. "Who told them?"
And then he got his answer. He saw Fran Emerson, standing, talking with a Police Lieutenant. She was pointing toward where the other officers were digging, talking animatedly.
"Goddamn her, that rotten little two-timing bitch!" he screamed inside his head.
Suddenly he hated her. She looked ugly to him, standing over there with the police lieutenant. He wondered what he'd ever seen in her.
Then he told himself: "I'll fix her. If I die for it, I'll get even with her." His hands clawed open at his sides, then clenched as though he could feel her soft, white throat between them.
He tried to think what he should do, now. He was no longer a free man. He was a jungle animal, now, hunted. With that knowledge, even through his blurred drunkenness, all the instincts of a hunted animal began to take over. He told himself that he couldn't be caught; he couldn't let them catch him, no matter what. He couldn't stand being in prison, standing trial, winding up in the death house. And they still didn't have him. He'd get away. He still had most of that hundred dollars in his pocket.
But he would need a gun. So that he could kill, if he had to, rather than be captured.
He remembered that he had hidden Elena's .32 in the apartment. He circled around, through back lots and motel parking lots until he came to his own place. He remembered the patrolman in the front of the place and didn't go around that way. Instead he crept up to a window of his own apartment. He looked inside and saw no one. The window was open. He took out his pocket knife and cut the screening, crawled inside. He went and got the .32, stuffed it into the tops of his trousers. He took time to pour a big drink for himself before he left. He needed it badly, now.
While he was finishing the drink he thought again about the fourteen thousand dollars Fran had stolen from him. It came to him that chances were, she had hidden that money in her place, planning to keep it for herself, not to tell the police about it.
He went back out through the window and moved down to the windows at the back of Fran's unit. He cut the screen there, too and climbed inside. He began to search the place, frantically. He had been looking for several minutes, when suddenly he heard the door of the apartment open. He wheeled around, yanking the gun from his belt.
It was Fran. She stood there, staring at him, her eyes big, dark frightened pools, her big breasts heaving against the front of her dress. Her fingers kept working nervously against her thighs. Just as she started to turn and run back out, Si leveled the gun at her.
"If you move or cry out, I'll blow a fat hole right through your belly, Fran. I mean it."
She looked at the wild animal desperation on his sweating face and knew that he spoke the truth.
He told her: "Get in here and close that door behind you."
Moving like an automaton, she did as he ordered. He gestured with the gun toward a chair. "Sit down."
She edged sideways toward a chair, never taking her eyes from his. She eased down onto the chair as though it was filled with broken glass. She perched warily on the edge of it.
"What did you tell them?" he demanded. "Come on, Fran, spill it."
She opened her mouth and her lips moved but no words came out. Then, finally, she managed: "I-I didn't, Si! I swear I didn't tell. They-"
He walked toward her, slapped her ringing hard, making her hair jounce. "Don't he to me. I don't want to hear lies. I know what happened. You thought I was passed out for the night, didn't you. You were peed-off because I slapped you, before, so you took the money. Then you figured if you turned me in, you'd have that loot plus what you'd inherit-and you wouldn't be involved at all. Isn't that it?"
He could tell by her expression that he had hit on the truth. He reached down and grabbed the front of her dress, yanked her to her feet. The angry movement ripped her dress down the front and it gaped open. She was wearing only a half bra and her breasts bulged out over the top of it. Even in that time of desperation he was momentarily moved by the firm, round perfect form of them. Then she clasped the torn dress together in front of her.
"I want that money. I'm going to need it to get away. Where is it?"
Tears were dribbling down her cheeks, now. She shook her head, her small fists clenched in front of her, holding the torn dress. "I-I don't have it," she said. "I turned it over to the police. I did, Si, I truly did."
"In a pig's eye," he snarled. "You know better than that. Don't con me. I've got to have that money." He raised the gun, threateningly. "Do you tell me where you hid it or do I have to whip it out of you?"
She shook her head again. "It isn't here. I told you, I gave it to the police."
"You're lying," he screamed. He swung the gun barrel. It clipped her across the cheek, laying the soft flesh open in an ugly abrasion. Blood oozed out. Fran touched her cheek with the back of her hand, then looked down at the smear of blood on it.
"Where is it, I said." He raised the gun again and she flinched away from him, sobbing, brokenly, now.
Then she whispered, choking out the words. "In the bathroom. In there." She gestured with her hand.
Si paused past her, heading for the bathroom. Before he reached the door, he heard her run toward the front door. He whirled. She slammed open the door, screamed: "Help! He's here! Help!"
He heard the reverberating boom of the shot in the small room. He felt the powerful buck of the .32 against his fist. He saw Fran arch backward. He saw a blossom of red spread around a black hole in her dress between the shoulder blades. He saw her clutch at the doorway, then as her legs went out from under her, saw her hands clawing at the door jamb, sliding down it as she tried to keep from falling. She half twisted around before she hit the floor. She was looking right at him, then and her eyes were glazed.
Very softly, she said: "You bastard! You filthy bastard!"
Then her face went lax and completely without expression. Her opened eyes went very blank. She lay there, terribly still.
Si looked down at the still smoking gun barrel in his hand. The echoing sound of the shot still sounded in his brain. Slowly, like a sleep walker, he moved toward Fran. He kneeled down beside her. He said:
"Fran, I-I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. But I had to do it, Fran. Don't you understand? Don't hate me, Fran."
Then he heard shouts outside and the sound of footsteps pounding up the walk from the beach. He straightened, turned and fled toward the window by which he'd entered. He went through it head first, hit the ground on his shoulder, rolled over, then scrambled to his feet. He took off toward that side of the beach, ran down to where he'd parked the Caddy alongside the road, then cut up toward it.
He was too late. A police car, the red light atop of it, still twirling, was parked behind his. Two cops were checking the license number. He heard one of them say:
"That's it, all right. That's the Crandall's license j number."
Si scuttled backward toward the beach, his stomach boiling, sick with fear.
When he hit the beach he began to run again, : furiously, his feet pounding the hard packed sand near the water. His mind was racing just as crazily. ' He knew that in no time the whole beach area would be swarming with police. He had to get another car, to get away. But where would he get one? How?
He continued to run even after a stitch caught him like an ice pick between his ribs with every step and he didn't think there was another ragged breath ' left in his lungs. But he kept on until he reached a I cove that backed-up still undeveloped lots. The beach was rough there, littered with driftwood. He came to a sand dune and couldn't run any further. He collapsed on the sand, sucking for breath like a gaffed fish, blood pounding in his ears like deafening drums.
Then as his wind slowly came back, he heard a strange sound, the other side of the dune. It sounded like a girl, giggling. He inched his way to the top of the dune, peered over it. A bright moon hung in the sky over the Gulf now, like a big slice of yellow peach. It bathed the beach area in an eerie glow. About a hundred feet from the other side of the dune, Si saw two figures on a blanket. They looked white and ghostly in the moonglow. He watched them, saw the piled up clothing at the edge of the blanket, then saw their naked bodies intertwine. The girl was no longer giggling. The sound of her heavy breathing was audible, even at that distance. Then he heard her cry out, softly: "Oh, Larry, Larry! Hurry, honey! What are you waiting for! H-u-r-r-y!"
Then there was a long wailing sound, carried on the night breeze as Larry hurried. Si watched their glistening white, interlocked bodies in sudden tumult on the blanket.
Then it came to him: How did they get here on the beach? It was quite away from the road at this point. They couldn't have walked all the way. They wouldn't have left their car parked up on the highway, either, to attract the attention of police.
He backed down off the dune, circled around up toward a patch of pine trees, behind the beach. He saw the car, then. It was an old jaloppy, parked at the end of a rutted, unpaved road. He ran toward it, praying that the key had been left in the ignition. In their anxiety to get to the beach, it might well be.
He reached the car, glanced inside, saw the key sticking in the ignition notch, a key ring holding several other keys, dangling from it. He yanked open the door and climbed in, behind the wheel. He turned the ignition key, pushed down on the accelerator. The car's motor roared into life. To Si, the .sound was deafening in the night silence.
There wasn't room or time to turn around. The guy on the beach with the girl, might come running when he heard the sound of the motor. Si shoved the car into reverse, after switching on the lights. He started to back up the rutted path that led toward the highway.
I Once, he looked back, through the windshield and in the distant glare of the headlights, saw the man who owned the car, standing up there, waving at him, yelling at him. The man looked quite comical, standing there, stark naked, trying to cover himself with one hand. Si almost laughed.
Finally he backed out onto the highway and turned the car toward one of the causeways that led to the mainland. He felt elated. He had a chance, now. They wouldn't be looking for him in a car like this. He made sure he didn't drive too fast, in case any speed-cops were lurking along side streets. Finally he came to the palm-tree-lined straightaway that led to the causeway. He came in sight of it and saw the flashing police lights, the two cars partly blocking the road. His heart seemed to come ramming up against the back of his teeth. He braked hard, the car swaying.
They'd set up roadblocks at all the causeways.
He swung the car about in a sudden U-turn and headed back the other way. Looking back in the rear view mirror, he saw headlights swing out from the roadblock. They'd seen his lights swing around. They knew it was him. They were coming after him. His foot jammed down on the gas pedal. He watched the speedometer needle up to seventy. The car engine made a steady dependable roar and he blessed the guy who owned it. This was a real hot rod. He got the thing up to eighty, then ninety. But the headlights behind him were still drawing closer. He wasn't going to be able to lose them.
He was back on the Beach highway, now. Far up ahead he saw the headlights of his car sparkle on a red reflector on the sides of the road. He knew what it was-a culvert, running under the road, for a drainage ditch that led down to the water. He got a crazy idea.
He reached the culvert and slammed on the brakes. The car skidded and swerved and he finally brought it to a stop, sloughed full across the road. The instant it stopped he jumped out. He saw the headlights of the police car, on-rushing. He heard the scream of their brakes, saw it swerve but they couldn't stop in time. He heard the rending crash as the police car struck the one he'd been driving. He ran into a patch of jungled undergrowth on the side of the road away from the Gulf, just as the beam from a flashlight speared him in its bright glare. There was the sound of a shot and a bullet screamed over his head. He heard shouting. He plunged headfirst into the jungled underbrush but acting purely on protective instinct, now, not thinking consciously, at all, he cut sharply to his left, toward the culvert. He reached the culvert and rammed down into the drainage ditch that led into it. He crawled through the culvert, disturbing some small animal that was nesting in the tangle of branches and leaves that cluttered the culvert, sending it scuttling and crying out in terror, before him.
Emerging from the culvert, he stumbled on down the overgrown drainage ditch toward the beach. His clothes were ripped now and filled with sand spurs. His cheek was scratched and bleeding but he wasn't even aware of any of this.
Finally, doubled over, almost, fighting for breath, he reached the beach. He paused there, then, to his right, toward an expanse of smooth white beach behind the Club where he'd been with the girl, Mimi, several days before ("My God, was that only several days?") he saw a number of flat objects in a pile there. He knew what they were. He ran toward them.
He picked up the top inflated rubber float and ran with it toward the water. He ran out in the water almost to his knees, then pushed the float out in front! of him, landed on top of it in a belly whopper, started paddling furiously with his hands, on each side.
The Gulf was calm and there was practically no; surf. There was an outgoing tide, which helped him He kept paddling and when he finally looked back, the beach was already several hundred yards away. He saw the gleam of flashlight back there, at that distance, looking more like fireflys and knew it was the police from the wrecked squad car, searching for him.
Exhausted, now, he stopped paddling and just lay there, trying to get his breath, resting, exhaustion crawling all through him, numbing him. After awhile, he thought, suddenly: I made it; I got away, They can't get me, now.
Then he glanced back. There were no longer any flashbeams shining on the beach. The beach was just a stretch of black horizon. He listened to the waves lapping at the tiny inflated float. He realized that since he'd stopped paddling, the float had already been carried out to sea, some distance more. W. remembered the outgoing tide. Then he felt a strong breeze against his sweat-wet clothing, beginning toj chill him a little. He wet his finger and held it up. The breeze was coming from the shore. It would help to blow him out to sea.
Then the thought came to him; But had he got away?
Where the hell was he? Way out in the Gulf on a tiny inflated raft. He couldn't possibly swim back that far. He could feel the motion of the tide and knew that out here it was too powerful for him to make any headway with just his hands, trying to paddle back to shore.
He lay there, trying to think. He thought: "Maybe tomorrow, some freighter will pick me up. Or maybe the wind and the tide will change and carry me back to some other part of the shore. At least I'm not dead; I'm not in jail, awaiting a murder trial."
Nature took over, then, in a few moments and sprawled out on the rubber float, with the cool Gulf breeze riffling his hair, he fell, finally, into an exhausted, coma-like sleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Day One
The sun was a giant fried egg up there in the great, sizzling blue skillet of the sky. It was spluttering and splattering hot grease on him. Only of course, that was really just drops of wind-blown spray hitting his feverish body. He lolled on the float, looking for the hundredth time at his wrist watch, forgetting that it was water-logged and stopped. He wondered what time it was. He tried to tell by the sun but couldn't any more. The big, frigging circle of hellfire never seemed to move; it seemed forever to stay just above him, as though it was sitting on his head. Several times, looking up at it, he thought he saw a face in it, grinning down fiendishly at him; a silly face such as you sometimes saw painted on the sun in advertisements or illustrations for children's books.
Once, he rolled over off the side of the float, holding onto the side of it with one hand, ducked himself into the water, to cool off, to get his body momentarily away from the beating of the broiling tropical sun. It felt good at first. He told himself that he would stay there, immersed, until the sun set, finally, if it was ever going to do that.
Then he looked fearfully about him, remembering i the sharks. He saw no dorsal fins cutting through the water but that didn't mean they weren't there. He remembered once, on the beach, seeing a fifteen, year old boy who, equipped with a face mask and snorkle, had ventured too far out past the swimming area, being brought in, screaming like a banshee,; with pain. The stringy, crimson stump of the boy's thigh looked as though the rest of the leg had been hacked off with a dull knife.
With a little cry of terror, whimpering from his throat, Si Walker pulled himself back up onto the float.
Once, as the sun did start to go down, he saw what looked to him like a boat, on the distant horizon. He sat up, precariously on the float and began to wave his arms, to shout. He shouted until his parched throat was raw and too full of pain to continue. All that happened was that the tiny spot on the horizon grew smaller. It was going away from him.
He ripped off his shirt, waved that violently. Then, trying to make a larger, more easily visible signal flag, he also took off his trousers and shorts, tied those onto the shirt. The speck on the horizon grew ever smaller.
Insane with frustration, now, he stood up, naked, violently waving his signal flag. The float wobbled and dipped under his spraddled feet. His arms flailed to maintain his balance but finally he tumbled over. The momentum of the fall shoved the float away from him. The knotted clothing fell from his hand. When his head broke water, the tiny float looked as though it was miles away, yet it was only a dozen yards. He started swimming toward it, forgetting, in his panic, all he'd ever learned about swimming. Ordinarily he was a fine swimmer, but now, berserk with fear of not catching up with the float, he flailed at the water wildly, like the .rankest beginner.
When he finally reached the tiny float again, he was so exhausted, it was quite some time before he could hoist himself up onto it again.
Then the sun finally went down behind the vast expanse of water. Night came on and was cool to Si's naked body; it was blessed relief and he lay there, gulping it in. Then the stars came out and the moon and slowly the air grew too cool; then cold. Si lay shivering. Later, in exhausted slumber, he still shivered and shook like a hound dog caught in the rain.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Day Two
The sun again; his enemy; that fiendish live thing up there that struck down at him without surcease, that tore at him, tortured him....
By noon time, his loins and the bottoms of his feet, even his underarmpits, never exposed to the sun, were burned shiny red and swollen, blistering, oozing fluid. His eyes were puffed, red-rimmed, salt-encrusted slits that were on fire, that someone was pushing burning splinters into.
He sat looking at the gun and his pocket knife, on the float, between his swollen feet. He had taken them out of his clothing before making the clothes into a signal flag. He stared down cunningly at the weapons. They were his friends. If another ship didn't show up, soon, if he wasn't rescused, he would use one or the other to take him out of this. He wasn't afraid to die, that way; it would be better than to be broiled alive, slowly, an inch at a time, by the sonofabitching sun, up there.
He shook his fist at the blazing ball of fire over his head.
His tongue was now a thick, monstrous thing in his mouth. He could no longer swallow, even if there'd been any saliva left in his mouth. His lips were now a swollen, cracked caricature.
At three o'clock, that afternoon, he knew the time had come. He couldn't take it any longer. He spent some time, making up his mind, between the gun and the knife. He finally decided on the gun. It would be quicker. There would be that terrible boom of sound which he probably wouldn't even hear, then there would be a blasting strike of pain in his head so great, so numbing and shock-filled, he wouldn't even feel it. There would be no pain, really. It would be simple; it would be all over, quickly.
Then he remembered a friend of his who had been a medical student for awhile, telling him about a man who'd been brought into the Emergency Ward of the hospital. The man had tried to blow his brains out. He had missed. Literally. A freak thing had happened. The slug had glanced off the hard bony structure of his skull, skidded around it, furrowing under the skin, across his forehead and out the other side.
Oh, dear God, if something like that should happen to him!
But it wouldn't, of course. Freak things like that happened only once in a million times.
He reached and tried to pick up the .32 His fingers were clumsy, his coordination off kilter and it took him a long time to fumble the gun up into his fist. Then he raised it to his temple. He tried to squeeze the trigger and couldn't. He cursed himself for being such a weasely coward. But it didn't do any good. Then he pushed the muzzle of the revolver into his mouth. It hurt his cracked lips and swollen tongue. It jarred, painfully, against his teeth. It tasted faintly of oil and made him gag. He finally had to painfully remove it from his mouth.
Then, openly crying, the salt tears, running over his burned lips, hurting them, he pressed the muzzle of the gun against his heart and now, somehow, found the courage to pull the trigger. There was a clicking sound. He waited to feel the bursting of his heart. There was nothing. It was a few seconds he-fore he realized the gun hadn't gone off. He kept holding it against his chest, squeezing the trigger. Nothing but the same futile clicking of the hammer occurred.
He began to laugh, then, hysterically, as he took the gun from his chest, looked down at it. Damn thing had gotten wet. Damn thing wasn't any good, wouldn't fire. Get rid of the damned thing.
He flung it skittering out away from the float, into the water.
After awhile, he forced himself to pick up the knife, with great difficulty, opened the blade. It was only a pocket knife and the blade was but about 3 inches long. He tested it with the ball of his thumb. But it was sharp; quite sharp enough. He tried to slash it quickly down across the front of his wrist He couldn't seem to do it hard enough. He wondered if he was getting too weak. Several times the knife blade bit through the outer layer of skin, though, scratched, drew blood. He looked down at the tiny lacerations on his wrist and remembered, now, his medical student friend, telling him about that, too. Every suicide-with-a-knife-or-razor-blade victim that was brought in, if he succeeded, had those smaller gashes about the big one that had finally done the trick. They were called "hesitation marks".
Si dropped the knife to the float. He had hesitated too long. He knew, now, that he'd never do it. The instinct to live was still too strong within him.
The next thing he thought of, was to plunge the knife into the rubber float, let the air ooze out of it, leave him with nothing to support him. He'd soon drown. But he couldn't bring himself to do that, either. The thought of drowning, way out here, of having barracuda tear at his naked body, of flopping around on the bottom, a lifeless thing, while the crabs ate his eyeballs, was too much for him. The fear of that was even greater than his torture by the sun and thirst and hunger.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Day?
The little float hobbled like a cork in the Gulf. The sun-blackened, swollen creature sprawled on it, lay very still, now. If he could have looked up, he would have seen that the wind and tide had brought him back, near the shore, now. The shore line was faintly visible, only a few miles away. The float was slowly but surely, being borne in that direction.
But Simon Walker knew nothing of that; knew nothing except the dreams that went on his feverish, sun-baked brain.
He dreamed of tiny, icy-cold lakes in the mountains and he was swimming in them, every now and then, opening his mouth to gulp down the welcome treat of cold, clear, refreshing water.
Then, it seemed to him, he was a boy again, about thirteen years old. His mother was having one of her tea parties and all the local society matrons were there, all gusseyed-up and looking smug and overfed and self-satisfied. Si was dressed in a Little Lord Fauntelroy outfit of blue velvet, with patent leather shoes. Before the party, his mother had told him that he must be on his good behavior; he must be very polite and charming to "the ladies", because Mother was so very, very proud of her precious little gentleman and wanted them all to see what a wonderful boy she had.
Then, later, his mother had called him into the big drawing room, to put him on display for the ladies. He hated this. He felt like a sickly, skinny little worm. He twisted and writhed within himself.
He heard his mother say: "This is my son, Simon. Isn't he a fine looking boy?"
And all the ladies bobbed their fancily coiffed heads and beamed their sugar-sweet, sickening smiles at him. His mother said: "Say hello to the ladies, Simon." Somehow he managed to tear a gulping salutation from his embarrassed throat. He made a nice, gentlemanly little bow and said: "Good afternoon, ladies."
Then one of the women, a great fat doughball of a woman with a blue-veined nose, wearing pince nez perched upon it, with coils of pearls around her fat, wattled throat, said:
"My, doesn't he look just like his father."
And Simon thought he would die. He'd never been so mortified. He felt his face flaming. Without thinking, in an impulse of temper, he shouted at the fat lady:
"Don't you say that, you hear. My father is bad.
He ran away with a hoor. You know what a hoor is? It's a bad woman, just like you!"
All the ladies stared at him, horrified. The fat one whom he'd addressed, fainted and slid from the chair to the floor, her skirt flaring up, exposing her great, elephantine thighs.
Then Simon seemed unable to move. And another terrible thing happened. Suddenly, for no reason, his trousers fell down. He stood there, before the tea party ladies, naked to the waist, and soon they all pointed at him and then made "for shame" motions by sliding the forefinger of one hand over the outstretched forefinger of the other and they broke into uproarious laughter, ridiculing him and then he saw their faces change slowly and instead of the tea party ladies, his mother's friends, they became his wife, Norma and the girl called Mimi and Elena Crandall and Beth and Fran Emerson and all the other women he'd ever known intimately. And their hideous laughter rang and rang in his ears....
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The two little girls, still holding their toy sand pails and shovels, wearing skimpy sunsuits over their plump little four year old figures, looked down at the funny man on the float, who had been washed up onto this stretch of small, private beach, and they laughed and laughed, because he looked so puffy and roly-poly and he was making such a funny face, looking up at them, with his big, fat, clown-like lips pulled back in a grin and his eyes nothing but slits in his bloated sun-blackened face.
Their laughter, for an incredible instant, cut through to his tortured brain. He managed to force one swollen eye open an infinitesimal bit and saw the blur of them, moving over him. He tried to speak, to tell them something; there was something he had to tell them but he couldn't seem to think what it was and it didn't really matter because he found that he couldn't talk anyhow. And this seemed very sad to him, somehow. So sad that a drop of moisture; maybe it was a tear, maybe it was some other waste liquid, oozed from between his thickened hds and rolled down his cheek.
One of the little girls stopped laughing, at this. She pointed. She lisped: "The funny man'th crying, look! Lookit!"
Then the two of them; they didn't know why; were suddenly frightened. They turned and ran screaming up the beach toward the cottage on the edge of it, shouting: "Momma, Momma, come quick! The funny man'th crying, crying!"....
In the prison ward of the hospital, after several days of touch-and-go, the doctors began to succeed. They knew he was going to live. His body healed slowly but surely. He began to eat, normally. In a month, he had regained his lost weight, regained his good looks. He was shaved; his hair trimmed.
"He's really quite handsome," one of the nurses said to her supervisor, after leaving him, one day. "It seems such a shame; such a shame."
"Yeah," the supervisor said. She shook her head, grimly. "Nature sure plays some weird pranks. There he is, a big, beautiful hunk of man, physically, who would drive any woman crazy-until she looks into those empty eyes and sees that there's no mind there; no mind there at all, now, because the sun burned it out of him."
When he was up and around, he would sit, looking out the window, but not really knowing what he was looking at. They were just "things". He amused himself, sometimes, by scrawling big black crazy-marks on a piece of paper, with a crayon. That was the only thing that seemed to interest him, even vaguely. He wouldn't listen to the radio, nor watch television, nor read. He wouldn't speak to any one. He had never spoken one word since they'd brought him to the hospital. He smiled, all the time, though, a faint, knowing, secret smile.
At the Sanity Hearing, he was declared hopelessly insane, of course and ordered to be incarcerated in the ward for the criminal insane, at Chata-hoochee State Hospital.
When the guards were taking him out of the County Court House, quite a crowd had gathered, to see him. The case had caused quite a furor in the newspapers. The newspaper pictures showed only his handsomeness, somehow, not the mindlessness behind it. Because of this, as was usual in such cases, he drew a lot of fan mail from women, many of them even offering to marry him. He never saw the letters, naturally; he couldn't have read them, if he did.
There were mostly women in the morbidly curious crowd outside the courthouse. Some of them, strangely, were quite young, quite pretty, quite intelligent looking. As the two guards led Simon Walker past them, toward the waiting patrol wagon, some of the women oohed and ahed over the general murmur of interest that flowed through the crowd.
Suddenly Si jerked to a stop and the two guards couldn't budge him as he braced himself, turned toward the crowd of women staring at him. He smiled his secret smile at them and now they saw the emptiness of his eyes and flinched before it. They went quiet.
He looked at them and somewhere, deep in the twisted recesses of his brain, something said to him: "Look at all the pretty ladies, Simon. You like pretty ladies. Show them a good trick."
Then the women in the crowd saw a great wet stain appear on the front of his trousers and begin to spread. They gasped and some of them screamed when they realized what had happened.
He just stood there, smiling at them, until the guards yanked him almost off his feet, and cursing, trundled him toward the waiting patrol wagon.
