Taming a Sea Horse (13 page)

"Un huh."

"Is Vern Buckey the toughest man in Lindell?"

"Nope."

"You want me to hire you some more to find April?"

"Yes. You and I both have a… we know her. Most people don't. We invested some energy in her. Most people haven't."

"Good money after bad," Patricia Utley said.

"Yep."

"Okay," she said. "Do you need an advance?"

"Yes."

"I'll send it. Do you have any, ah, clues?"

"Not much," I said. "All I can think of is that Ginger and April are connected and maybe if I find out what happened with Ginger I'll be able to find what happened to April."

"What progress have you on Ginger?" I told her.

"Perry Lehman?" she said.

"Yes."

"Crown Prince?"

"Yep. Know him?"

"Not personally, but anybody in the sex business knows his operation. Very impressive."

"He's a slime ball," I said.

"Oh, no doubt," she said. "I have heard stories. He pays well but he tends to use up a lot of girls, and I understand he has ties to the mob."

"So I hear."

"Very impressive operation, though," Patricia Utley said.

"That's what his marketing director told me. She says he's selling self-image."

"He's selling what I'm selling. He's just packaging it for national consumption."

"I prefer the cottage industry approach," I said. "Actually, if the truth be known, I prefer amateurism in this area."

"Tastes vary," she said. "Are you off to the Caribbean?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's tough, dirty work, but someone's got to go down there and do it."

"I knew you wouldn't flinch," she said. "How are you going to go about it? If there is something amiss they'll not welcome you at the Crown Prince Club."

"I thought I'd acquire a membership under false pretenses," I said.

"Well, I trust your resourcefulness," she said. "I'll send you your money."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome."

I hung up and sat back at my desk and put my feet up and tried to think of someone I knew who was sleaze berry enough to join the Crown Prince Club. And kind enough to lend me his membership.

I couldn't find anyone I knew who had the right combination of sleaze and kindness to get me into the St. Thomas Crown Prince, so I decided to wing it.

Susan and I flew on Pan Am via New York and got into St. Thomas early in the afternoon. The corrugated-iron air terminal on the island looked like an exhibition hall at the Minnesota State Fair, full of odd little booths.

We picked up a rental car and a map and drove the narrow road through Charlotte Amalie to Frenchman's Reef. The island looked as it ought to, a lot of greenery, a lot of flowers, cruise ships in the harbor, stuccoed tropical-looking buildings with red tile roofs rising along the island's central ridge. Frenchman's Reef was a big Holiday Inn with a good beach and ocean views and a balcony on each room big enough to dance on if you were a hamster.

In our room Susan said, "What first? A swim or a margarita?"

"I'm here to work," I said.

"But I'm not," Susan said. "I'm here as a paid companion."

"Paid," I said. "I hadn't heard about paid. What is it going to cost me?"

"A frozen margarita whenever I want it," she said.

"Okay, but for that you have to come across."

Susan put her hands on either side of my face and kissed me on the mouth lightly. "You jerk," she said, "you could have gotten it free." She spoke with her lips brushing mine.

"I never had a head for business," I said.

"Speaking of head," she said, and then started to giggle.

"Dr. Silverman," I said, holding her away from me at arm's length with my hands on her shoulders. "You are a highly educated Jewish psychotherapist approaching middle years. And here, in this sophisticated island hideaway, I find you talking dirty and giggling like an oversexed teenage shiksa."

"Talk to me, baby," Susan murmured, "whisper in my ear."

And we both began to laugh and I pulled her back in against me.

An hour and twenty minutes later we went down to the beach in our bathing suits and sat at the outdoor bar.

"You owe me five margaritas," Susan said.

"Cheap at ten," I said. We ordered two. Frozen for Susan, on the rocks for me. Frozen went in too slowly.

"People are looking at you," Susan said.

"My massive upper body?" I said. "My wasp waist? My Romanesque profile outlined against the azure sea?"

"The several bullet scars against the pale white skin? Don't you ever work on a tan?"

"My face and neck are tan," I said.

"And your forearms. The rest of you looks like Casper the burly ghost."

"We northern Europeans don't care to be made sport of by a swarthy Levantine."

"Well, you need to be careful," she said, "or you will burn badly."

"I'm too tough," I said.

"I'd smite the sun if it offended me," Susan murmured.

I grinned and held out my hand toward her and she took it and we sat in our beach chairs and looked at the water holding hands. My margarita had disappeared. Susan's glass was still half full. I gestured at the woman tending bar. She made me another one and brought it over and took my empty glass.

"Have you a plan?" Susan said.

"I've been executing it," I said, "for the last hour and a half."

"Besides that."

"After dinner," I said, "I'm going to wander over to the Crown Prince Club and see if I can mix and mingle and look like an upward mobile nitwit with severe sexual dysfunction."

"And blend in with the clientele."

"Yes," I said.

The sea was very blue and the sand in front of us was sugar-white and the waves came in steady but not aggressive. The beach was half full of people in brief bathing suits. The cellulite count was high.

"I assume my presence would be inappropriate."

I nodded and finished off my second margarita. "You have several disabilities," I said. "You are an adult, you appear intelligent, and there seems to be some force in you. I'm afraid that even if they didn't catch on that you weren't a hostess, you might scare all the customers. They're not used to intelligent adults. Probably give them the bends."

"You say I'm not a nymphet?"

"Afraid not."

Susan took a big gulp of her margarita. "Damn," she said, "you put your faith in aerobics and what does it get you."

"Hell," I said, "I'm not a nymphet either."

"That's true," she said. "It helps."

She finished the margarita and stood and walked into the water. I went after her, and for an hour we swam and rolled in the affable surf under the Caribbean sky near the bar.

Then we had another margarita and went back to the room and got ready for dinner. I've had tougher duty.

We went to dinner at Secret Harbor.

"I came here once when I was married," Susan said. "It was very nice."

The dining room was under a roof, but without walls, within feet of the water. The air was pleasant. The tables were well spaced. The waitress was a young woman from Quincy, Massachusetts. We began with a bottle of Iron Horse champagne and had duck with a lime and raspberry sauce and a salad of limestone lettuce and two slices of fruit tart. We had a second bottle of champagne with dinner and afterward we each had two Baileys on the rocks. It was nearly ten-thirty when we finished. We spoke hardly at all and looked at each other almost all the time. The ocean murmured very softly and somewhere people were dancing to swing music and the sound of it drifted in on the quiet air.

"I've revised my plan," I said.

"Really?"

"Yes. My plan now is to go back to the hotel with you and go to sleep and get up tomorrow, fresh as a sea trout, and go over to the Crown Prince Club and knock them dead."

"At eight in the morning?"

"Well, maybe we'll have breakfast and swim awhile and have lunch and swim awhile and I'll go at cocktail time."

"The man of steel is full and sleepy," Susan said.

"I think there was krypton in that drink," I said.

"You're kind of cute when you're human," she said.

"And when I'm not?"

She reached over and took my hand and there was no banter in her voice.

"You're lovely," she said.

The Crown Prince Club on the east end of the island looked like a sugar plantation designed by Ralph Lauren. There were cottages constructed from simulated coconut logs and thatched with simulated palm fronds scattered among real palm trees over a couple of acres of absolutely immaculate land. Near the long white beach was the Princedom, a long house built of the same materials as the cottages where the dining room, bar, and workout room were located. There was no fence but a number of strapping blackamoors in raspberry Lacoste shirts and white shorts strolled about the grounds, their biceps gleaming darkly in the dappling shade of the palm trees.

On the beach many of the women were topless, and both sexes were smeared with oil and glistening in a tan frenzy. Waitresses in minimal designer castaway outfits moved among the sunbathers with drinks on trays. Dimly through the palms I could see some tennis courts in use and in front of the Princedom a buffet was being set up next to a semipermanent bar emplacement of simulated palm logs. I moved toward the buffet, where people in white slacks and flowered shirts were already beginning to gather. In the center of the buffet table was a fountain of amber liquid. There were punch cups set out and people were filling them from the fountain. It looked like rum punch. There were large platters of oysters on the table, and lobster tails and cold meats. There was fruit salad in a scooped-out watermelon, and assorted bread and rolls. There was cheese and salad and nearby a whole pig turned slowly on an electric rotisserie. I looked closely. It wasn't Perry Lehman. I shrugged. I was used to disappointments.

Nobody said hey you to me. No one required me to show my membership card, nobody seemed to notice that I was somewhat old and somewhat large and somewhat well conditioned for the group assembled here at the Princedom. I had a cup of punch. I was right, it was rum. I glanced over the assorted buffet items. A man in a white chef's hat appeared carrying a huge bowl of jumbo shrimp and set the bowl down on the table.

"Local catch?" I asked.

"No, man, there don't be no local catch."

"You mean there's no fish around here? We're in the middle of the ocean."

"There's fish, man, there's no fisherman."

"Except maybe a fisher of tourists," I said.

"You got it, man."

He went away back in a side door to the Princedom. I took a shrimp. On the long veranda of the Princedom a three-piece combo was getting organized. There was an electric keyboard, drums, and bass. Two more men in white coats appeared carrying a great tub of iced beer. They set it on an upturned barrel and went back into the Princedom.

A voice next to me said, "Hadn't you ought to try the oysters?"

It was an oriental woman, Chinese maybe, or part Chinese. She had long shiny black hair brushed back away from her face. She was wearing an aquamarine-colored bikini with a short white lace shirt over it. The collar was turned up and the loose sleeves were pushed halfway up her smooth arms. She wore strapless high-heeled shoes. Her nails were painted the same aquamarine as the bikini and her lipstick was a pink so pale as to be nearly white. She had small breasts and firm thighs. A vaccination mark on her thigh meant she was probably older than she looked.

"I think that's a myth," I said.

"Oysters?" She widened her eyes and glanced at me from a slightly oblique angle. Enticing.

"Yeah, I don't think they do anything for potency."

She smiled, still looking slightly sideways at me. "Oh, that's too bad. Do you need any help with your potency?"

"Not as long as I take my powdered rhino horn," I said.

Her seductive sideways look shifted a bit to the hint of puzzlement, but she caught it, got it back in place, and smiled knowingly.

"Well, I hope you keep taking it," she said. "What's your name?"

"Chris Marlowe," I said.

"I'm Suki," she said. "Can I make you up a plate from the buffet?"

"I think that might be out of step with current feminist attitudes," I said.

"Oh, pooh," Suki said. "Oriental women are trained to please men"-she smiled cutely -"in every way," she said. "It is our pleasure."

"Heavens," I said, "what would Eleanor Smeal say?"

Suki shook her head. "I don't know Eleanor, but I know you, Chris, and I want to give you whatever you want."

"I can dig it," I said. "Just make me up a light assortment. I'll take the grapes with the skins."

Suki looked confused again for a moment, but she smiled right on through it and went to get me a plate. I had a second rum punch while I was waiting. The band began to play. Their first selection was a slightly overarranged version of Ricky Nelson's song "Garden Party." There was a good crowd around now. A lot of the people at the buffet table were women making up plates for men. Serving men was apparently not an exclusively oriental tradition.

Suki came back with my plate. She had quite carefully arranged a little of almost everything.

"Let's go to the veranda," she said, "and you can enjoy your meal."

"Sure," I said, and followed her as she carried the dinner plate ahead of me up onto the porch.

We sat together on a wicker love seat with a low table in front of us. The band had started to play "Sleepy Lagoon." Clearly they were working thematically. Suki offered me an oyster on a small fork. I ate it.

I said, "A bit more sauce on the next one, my dear."

"Certainly, kind master," she said, and smiled and put a little more cocktail sauce on the next oyster. "I'm sorry we don't have any powdered horn."

"It's okay," I said. "I'll make do with oysters."

"Oh, Chris," she said. "So, are you married?"

I winked at her. "Of course not," I said. She smiled at me and put a shrimp in my mouth.

"I believe you," she said. "Which bungalow you in?"

"Over there," I said. "Why do you ask?"