A Deadly Shade of Gold (24 page)

"No need for you to be eaten alive," I said. I took out the 6-12 and poured some into the palm of my hand. "Close your eyes." She obeyed. I greased her face, throat, arms and legs with the repellent. I made it utterly objective, with no slightest hint of caress. She stared at me and moistened her lips. I knew that the small courtesy had shaken her more than anything which had gone before.

I walked away from her again. I wanted to sag against a tree and give a great bray of laughter. I had properly anticipated most of it, but not the comedy of it. The most wretched melodrama becomes high comedy. This was a little darling, a little lavender-eyed blonde darling, trussed up like a comic book sequence, and I could not harm a hair of her dear little head. And, of course, she could not believe it either. Nobody hurts the darlings. So our spavined act was balanced on that point which was just beyond our comprehension or belief. She was right. It was some kind of a fantastic mistake. Nora had bought it more readily than blondie or I could. Her Mediterranean acceptance of the violence just under the surface of life, perhaps.

I turned and looked at her. She stood sweaty and indignant and uncomfortable, reaching high, ankles neatly together. She was, of course, weighing me most carefully, estimating my capacity for violence, even though she could not believe this was real. It was a ponderous, embarrassing joke. She was angry and wary. She was trying to guess if I could hurt her. I saw myself through her eyes-a great big brown rangy man, wiry hair, pale grey eyes, broad features slightly and permanently disarranged by past incidents.

I went close to her, and looked through the hypnotic impact of so much prettiness, and got a better look at the details of her. Caked lipstick bitten away, fingers narrow and crooked and not pretty, nail polish chipped and cracked, the thumbnails bitten deep, a furzy little coppery stubble in her armpits, little dandruff flakes in the forehead roots of the blonde hair, slender ankles slightly soiled, pores enlarged in her cheeks and a blackhead near the base of the delicate nose, a tiny hole burned in the front of the pale blue blouse, a spot on the hip of the white skirt. She was lovely, but not very fastidious. It made her seem a little sexier, and more manageable. The signs of soil were slightly plaintive.

"You and that woman are going to get into terrihle trouble about this," she said. "I'm an actress.

A lot of people know me. Apparently you don't know who I am."

"I think you got mixed up in a lot of things, Almah, without knowing how serious they were. I guess it works sort of like the law. Ignorance is no excuse."

"You don't make any sense. I am a house guest."

"That's what Carlos Menterez y Cruzada called a lot of his shack jobs, I guess. House guests. But you'd be a little young for the Havana scene. Actually I guess you aren't any different than any of the rest of them. But you are the last one he had. And when he had no more use for you, in that sense, you should have gone back where you belonged. The big mistake was hanging around, Almah."

She stared at me as though she was peering at me through gloom, trying to identify me. She started to say something and stopped and licked her lips again.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"I'm just somebody who's been ordered to confirm a few things. Double check the details.

They'll think you left when the going got rough. We sent some people in there last night to look around. It's all falling apart now. It's over for him, Almah. And it's over for you."

"But it isn't the way you think!"

"How do you know what we think?"

"You sound... you make it sound as if I'm there with Carlos out of some kind of loyalty or something. My God, it isn't like that! Honestly, I don't know anything about the political side of it. Listen, I came down here a lot, when there were parties and all. By boat a couple of times and private airplanes. For over two years, and I'd stay on for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. Okay, so I belonged to Carlos when I was here, and that was understood. Is that some kind of a crime all of a sudden? His wife is crazy. Ever since he built that house, she'd been out of her head. He liked me. He wanted me to stay there all the time, but I went back and forth. I mean I have a life of my own too."

"You should have left for good when you had the chance, Almah."

"You have to understand something. I lost some good opportunities on account of him. I mean they would have called me for more things, if I'd been handy all the time. A good series I could have been in. But they couldn't get hold of me for the pilot because I was here. So he owes me
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something. Right?"

"What are you driving at?"

"Look. There's a boy there with me. Gabe. Gabriel Day. You could check it out. He's a lawyer.

He can't practice in Mexico, but he knows the right forms and everything they have to use down here. He's been down here for three weeks. I sent for him. You can check that out. Carlos is going to sign something for me, and people are going to witness the signature, and then Gabe and I can go get the money. It's in Mexico City. He's got over six hundred thousand dollars there. That's why I'm staying. It isn't political or anything like that. This is all some kind of mistake."

"Sweetie, that's what they used to say in Batista's prisons and what they say now in Fidel's prisons. This is some kind of a mistake."

"I didn't have anything to do with the political part."

"No more than Sam Taggart did? He had enough to do with the political part so that it got him killed."

She stared. "Sam is dead?"

"'Thoroughly."

"Gee, it's hard to believe. He... He told me it was time to get out, when Carlos got the stroke and Sam couldn't get the money Carlos promised him. I guess they could have guessed it was Sam who... got rid of those people."

I sat on my heels, my back against the tree. I said, "I don't want to play psychological games with you, Almah. We know some of it, and there's some of it we don't know. But you have no way of knowing the parts we know and the parts we don't. I can't promise you anything, because there's nothing to promise. Suppose you just tell me the whole thing."

"And you'll let me go?"

"I want to see if you put in any mistakes."

"The way it started? All of it?"

"Yes."

"I guess you could say it started when Cal Tomberlin came down on his boat, with a lot of kids I know. That was about five months ago. Cal is sort of spooky. Maybe from having everything he ever wanted, and getting it right now. His mother was Laura Shane, from the old movies. And she put all the money she made into land. No taxes then. She got fabulously rich and Cal was the only child. He'd met Carlos one time in Havana, and they didn't get along, and he didn't know that Carlos was here calling himself Garcia. It made Carlos sort of nervous when Cal showed up.

Carlos had three collections in his study, in glass cases. The gold statues and the jade and the coins. But Cal Tomberlin saw the gold statues and wanted to buy them. He couldn't imagine anybody saying no. When he wants something, he has to have it. And sooner or later he gets it. It can be a boat or a special kind of car or a piece of land or somebody's wife or those horrid little
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gold statues. They were here about five days and he kept after Carlos all the time, and it got pretty ugly. Toward the end, Cal Tomberlin started making little hints, talking about what a nice hideaway Carlos had found for himself. But that just made Carlos more stubborn. Finally they left. Some of the kids stayed on for a while.

"About a month later, Cal Tomberlin came back on the boat again. What I think he was doing, he was just trying to put some pressure on Carlos to make a deal with him. Maybe he knew how much trouble he was causing. Maybe he was just trying to get even with Carlos for turning him down. But he brought a Cuban man with him, and the Cuban man stayed sort of hidden on the boat until there was a big party and Cal Tomberlin went down and got the man and smuggled him into the party. I was there when Carlos saw him. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. I didn't know anything could terrify Carlos so much.

"He never talked to me about such things, but that night in bed he had to talk to somebody I guess. He said that he had been in a business deal in Havana with that man's brother. It had gone wrong somehow, and the brother had killed his wife and himself, and then their son had tried to kill Carlos and had been arrested and had died of sickness in prison. He kept saying he would have to leave Mexico and go somewhere else. But after a few days he quieted down. He stopped going outside the walls for anything. I guess he couldn't think of a place where he would be safer.

"About two weeks later, that boat came down, that Columbine N out of Oceanside. It anchored out. That same man was on it, and two other men. They looked Cuban. I saw them in the village.

They called me a filthy name. Carlos had Sam find out everything he could about them. The boat was chartered, and they were running it themselves. It was small enough so they could have tied up at the docks, but they anchored out. They didn't do anything. It made Carlos very nervous.

He'd watch it with binoculars. The other two men were younger. I guess they could have been friends of the one who died in prison. They just seemed to be waiting for something.

"Then one night they tried to kill Carlos. When they ran, they left the ladder against the wall.

They'd fired at him, he thought with a rifle, from the top of the wall, from a place where you could see into his bedroom. It ripped through his smoking jacket and made a little red line across his belly, and just barely broke the skin. Instead of going all to pieces about it, he got very calm and thoughtful. I said he should get the police, but he said there were political reasons why he couldn't ask for that kind of protection. He had to make do with the people he had brought from Cuba.

"I think it was two nights later he came to my room as I was going to bed and told me he knew all about me and Sam. He knew I'd been cheating on him with Sam from just about the second time I'd come down to visit. He said it had amused him. I made some smart remark and he gave me a hell of a slap across the face and knocked me down. He wanted me to work on Sam to get Sam to do what Carlos wanted him to do. He told me the lie he had told Sam. He had told Sam that the men on the boat were Castro agents, and that for several years Carlos had been financing underground activities against Castro, and those men were assigned to kill him so it would stop.

"I guess Sam never thought much about that sort of thing. I guess it would sound reasonable to him. He offered Sam a hundred thousand dollars in cash to get rid of those men on the boat.

Carlos had it all worked out how it could be done. But Sam didn't want to kill anybody. It made me feel funny to think of Sam killing anybody. With Carlos not going out in his own boat any more, not since Cal had brought that Cuban man around, Sam didn't have much to do. The man who helped him on Carlos' boat is named Miguel. He's still at the house.

"When I was with Sam, it was usually on Carlos' boat, and sometimes in Sam's room. It wasn't anything important with us. It was just something to do. And I enjoy it. Unless there were parties, it was quiet around there. Sort of sleepy. Siestas in the afternoon. I don't like to sleep in the day. Maybe I'd be by the pool and Sam would give me a look and go away and I'd stay there and think about him, and then I'd have to go find him. I thought the servants probably knew. I didn't know Carlos knew.

"Anyway I made Sam tell me about it, not letting on I knew, and then I worked on him to do it. I told him if he didn't have any guts, I wasn't interested any more. And besides, it was sort of patriotic. I said if he did it, I'd arrange to go away with him for a while. He was always a little more eager than I was. I guess guys always are. I didn't tell him Carlos had promised me a little money for talking him into it. And I wouldn't do anything with him until he said yes. I told him when he said yes, it would be the most special thing that ever happened to him. It did get me pretty excited, thinking of him killing those men in the way Carlos had it all figured out.

"They did it. Sam and Miguel. On the first calm dark night. They went out in the dinghy from Carlos' boat, I guess about three in the morning, making no sound at all. They went aboard barefoot. Sam told me all about it. He held onto me, shivering like a little kid. He was too sick to make love. Twice he got up and he went and he was sick. It wasn't like he thought it was going to be. One of the men was sleeping on deck. Miguel sneaked over to him and cut his throat. Sam said the man flopped and thumped around while he was dying. But it didn't wake the others.

They went below. One of the men was easy. The other one put up a terrible fight. He knocked some of Sam's teeth out, hitting him with something. Sam strangled him. Then there was the woman. Nobody had known anything about the woman. She'd stayed below the whole time.

There was some kind of little light on below. She came out of the front of the boat somewhere, and flew at Sam. He got her by the wrists. He said she was dark and pretty. He said that holding her, he could feel Miguel putting the knife into her back, and he could see her face changing as she knew she was dead. That was what made him so sick. He cried in my arms like a little kid.

"The dinghy was tied astern. They cut the anchor lines. Sam started the boat up and they went out the main pass, dead slow, without lights, heading southwest. Once they were pretty well out, Sam put the boat on automatic pilot. Miguel had taken the other body below. Sam disconnected the automatic bilge pumps and opened a sea cock. He said Miguel had been scrambling around with a sack, getting money and watches and rings and cameras and things like that. He made Miguel quit and got into the dinghy. Sam closed it up below.

"He went to the controls then and yelled to Miguel to cast off, and he put it up to cruising speed, and ran and dived over the rail and swam back to the dinghy. They sat in the dinghy. He said they could see the boat for just a little while, and then they could hear it for a lot longer. When they couldn't hear it any more, they started the little outboard on the dinghy and came on back.