Darker Than Amber Read online

  The repair was a minor job, one I could have done myself if I’d been able to diagnose it. I heard the word on the snook hole, remembered the way Meyer would talk a good one up to the side of the boat, and that was how we happened to be under the bridge in a rented skiff Monday midnight, casting the active surface plugs into a splendid snook hole, with the skiff tied to one of the bridge pilings. In the current boil of the incoming tide they had been feeding nicely. I’d had good results with a Wounded Spook with a lot of spinning clattering hardware on it to fuss up the water and irritate them. We’d hooked into at least ten good ones, lost seven amid the pilings, boated three in the eight- to twelve-pound range.

  But we were down to that just-one-more-cast. After midnight on a Monday in June, traffic is exceedingly sparse. The concrete bridge span was about twenty feet above the water. We were in the shadows under the bridge. I heard a car coming; it seemed to be slowing down. There was a sudden screech of brakes overhead. And, moments later, the girl came down. She came down through the orange glow of bridge lights and the white pallor of moonlight. Feet first. Pale skirt fluttered upward baring the long legs. Just one glimpse of that, and she chunked into the water five feet off the bow of the skiff, splashing us, disappearing. Motor roared, tires squealed, car rocketed off.

  It was a forty-foot drop for her. Twenty feet of air, twenty feet of depth. I would have expected her to bob up but for one thing. She hit my line. The surface plug was a few feet beyond where she hit. And she took it right on down to the bottom, and there the plug stopped taking out line against the drag.

  I had twelve-pound mono on that reel. I pulled at it, and it held firm. I tossed my wallet into the bottom of the skiff, shoved my rod at Meyer and asked him to keep the line tight. I yanked my boat shoes off, went over the side, took a deep breath and let half of it out, and pulled myself down the monofilament, hand over hand, sliding my hands along it, grasping it between thumbs and fingerpads. Soon, in the blackness, I reached and touched the hair afloat, dug my fingers into it, got a good hold to try to lift her. Two hands, with that extraordinary gentleness of the last margin of consciousness, closed softly around my wrist. I pulled my way down her body, down to the ankles to find why I couldn’t lift her off the bottom. I felt the double ridges of wire biting into the slenderness, leading down and through one of the three oval holes in a hefty cement block. I felt swiftly for the place where it was fastened, felt the hard twist of wire close to the block. I knew that if I had to go up for more air and come back … no girl. And my lungs were beginning to try to pump the air in, so that I had to use an effort of will to keep my throat closed against the blind effort. It had been done with pliers. Heavy wire. I knew which way it had to twist. It tore the pads of my thumb and fingers. I hooked fingers into the pocket of my shirt, ripped it off, wrapped it around the wicked ends of the wire, then untwisted as hard as I could. The world was getting a little dreamy. Just slightly vague. But the wire began to unwrap, and the free ends made it easier by giving me more leverage. I wanted to stretch out, yawn, sing some old sad songs, and float on out to sea in the delicious softness of the tide. The wires were free. I yanked them through the hole in the cement block. I kicked hard against the bottom and came slowly up, smiling perhaps, nodding a little, loosely hugging the hips of the drowning girl. I was thrust rudely out of sleepy-bye into the ugliness of coughing and spewing and retching in the fractured moonlight, then trying to hold her so her face was out of the water. That was when I saw Meyer, standing in the skiff, outlined against the lights, carefully playing us two big blundering fish and trying to work us toward the boat. Soon I could help. He knelt and got hold of the girl and worked her aboard over the flat stern, and as I hung on, waiting for strength to climb aboard, I saw him tumble her roughly face down over one of the seats, stand straddling her, reach his hands under her, and pull up slowly, then let her drop and shift his hands and push downward against her back just above the waist.

  My feet were beginning to trail outward in the increasing strength of the outgoing tide. Had she been dropped five minutes later I wouldn’t have been able to get down to her against that tide run.

  I wormed up over the transom, sat there gasping.

  “While you were down there,” Meyer said, his voice distorted by effort, “I went over to town and had a couple of beers.”

  “She was alive when I got there, buddy. She grabbed my wrist. So I had to unwire her from her anchor on the first trip.”

  “Some tenderhearted guy,” Meyer said, “didn’t have the heart to tell her they were all through. Easier to kill them than hurt their feelings.”

  “Is that the best way to do that?”

  “Shut up. It’s my way. And I think it’s working.”

  I fumbled in the tray of the tackle box and found my small flashlight. I’d recently put new batteries in it. Her soaked skirt was bunched, covering her from mid-thigh upward. Quite a pity, I thought, to discard such a long and lovely pair of legs. I rested the flashlight where it shone upon her ankles and hunched down with the fish pliers and nipped the wire. Freed of that stricture the legs moved a little apart, bare feet both turned inward. Bent over in that position, I saw a glitter under the edge of the bunched skirt, reached and lifted it slightly and saw my Wounded Spook against the back of her left thigh, the rear set of gang hooks set deeply. I clipped the leader off it right at the front eyelet, and just as I did so she gave a shallow, hacking cough and spewed water into the bilge, then gagged and moaned.

  “Any more criticisms?” Meyer asked.

  “What ever happened to mouth-to-mouth?”

  “It sets up emotional entanglements, McGee.”

  After more coughing, she made it clear she wanted no more punishment. Meyer, deft as a bear, rolled her over, scooped her up, placed her in the bow, fanny on the floorboards, shoulders and back against the angle of the gunnels. I put my light on her face. Dark hair was pasted down over one eye. She lifted a slow hand, thumbed the hair back over her ear, squinted, turned her face away from the light, saying, “Please.”

  I turned the light away, totally astonished to find that it was a face which lived up to the legs, maybe more so. Even in the sick daze of waking up from what could have been that last long sleep, it was delicately Eurasian, sloe-eyed, oval, lovely.

  As he moved to reach the lines to free them, Meyer said, “Damned handy, Travis. As soon as you run out, they drop you another one. Stop panting and start the motor, eh?”

  Two

  Back at thompson’s, I ran the skiff up alongside the starboard stern of The Busted Flush. She was tied up with the port side against the pier. While Meyer held it there, I scrambled aboard. He lifted her to her feet, and I reached over the rail, got her, swung her aboard, tried to put her on her feet and had to hold her to keep her from falling. Meyer went chugging off in the skiff to leave it over at the small boat dock where it belonged.

  I took her down into the lounge and on through, past the galley to the master stateroom. She stood braced, holding tightly to the back of a chair while I turned the lights on and pulled the pier-side draperies shut. Her head was bowed. She looked up at me and started to say something, but the chattering of her teeth made it unintelligible. I took my heaviest robe from the hanging locker and tossed it onto the big bed, then got her a big towel from the locker in the head and threw it in onto the bed and said, “Get out of that wet stuff and dry yourself good.”

  I went to the liquor locker, found the Metaxa brandy and poured a good three inches into a small highball glass. I carried it to the stateroom and knocked, and in her chattery voice she told me to come in. She was belting the robe. Her clothing was in a sodden little pile on the floor. I handed her the glass. It chittered against her teeth. She took it down in three tosses, shuddered, then sat on the edge of the bed, hugging herself.

  Meyer appeared in the doorway. “Chills? Hmm. Shock. Reaction. Miss, if you have the energy, a hot shower or, better yet, a hot tub. And then another drink. Okay?”

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nbsp; She gave a tense little bob of her head, and Meyer scooped up the wet clothing. In moments I heard the roar of the water into the huge elegant sybaritic tub the original owner had installed to please the tastes of his Brazilian mistress, before I won the vessel from him—sans mistress—in a Palm Beach poker session.

  “S-s-s-something … in my … l-l-l-leg,” she said.

  I got the needlenose pliers, the good wire cutters, and Dr. Meyer to assist me. We had her lie prone on the giant bed, custom built-in equipment on the boat when I had won her, and Meyer folded the robe back, untangling it from the barbs of the other set of gang hooks on the belly of the speckled plug. I swung the big bed lamp over to bear upon the operating area. There are too many trite words for legs like that. Ivory. Grecian marble. I was considerably more accustomed to brown legs. These had a dusky pallor. But pallor did not mean softness. The chills were in cycles. When a chill tightened her up, the long muscles of calf and thigh, dancer’s muscles, swelled—changing the elegant curvatures of those legs in repose. The backs of the thighs and the calves had a fine-grained, flawless, matte finish, and the area of the backs of her knees were shinier, faint blue veining visible under the skin.

  We had to adjust our operating technique to the chills, but the brandy was beginning to work, diminishing the violence of them. First, with Meyer steadying the triple shank of the imbedded gang hook, holding it with the needlenose pliers, I nipped through it with the wire cutters, tossed the body of the plug aside. Of the gang hook, two hooks were sunk into her beyond the barb. With Meyer still holding the shank, I clipped the free hook off.

  “This is the part that will hurt, dear,” Meyer said.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  There is only one way to remove a fish hook. You have to push it the rest of the way through, bring the point back out through the skin.

  Meyer changed the grip and angle of the pliers, waited for a small chill to end, then made a slow steady twist of his wrist. The two barbed points made two little tents in the skin as they came up from underneath, pushed against the essential toughness, no matter how delicate it may seem, of human hide, then simultaneously pierced through. She made no sound or motion. Wondering if she had fainted, I moved to look at her face. She lay with her eyes open, totally relaxed.

  I carefully clipped the barbs off. Bright dark droplets of blood stood out against fairness. I plucked the barbs from the smooth surface of hide, and Meyer, holding the same grip on the pliers, rotated his wrist the other way and brought the barbless curves of metal back out through the channel where they had first dug in. Dab of iodine then, on each of the four small holes, and one round ouchless waterproof patch, size of a half dollar.

  “A great honor, Doctor,” I said, “to assist you in the technique which bears your name.”

  Unfolding the back of the robe down over her legs he said, gutturally, “You may haff the object ve remoofed to keep alvays, Kildare.”

  “Clowns,” the girl murmured. “My God.”

  Meyer hastened out, turned off the bath water. “Your bath awaits, milady. In several minutes I will knock, enter with averted stare, hold the second drink in your direction. The water is very hot. Force yourself into it. What do we call you?”

  She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been. “Jane Doe will do just fine,” she said.

  “Your comedy team is Meyer and McGee,” he said. “I am Meyer, known as Meyer. The pretty one is McGee, known as Travis, and this is his simple little unassuming houseboat, Jane Doe.”

  “Delighted,” she said, barely moving her lips, and stood up and brushed by us and went into the bath and closed the door.

  I went into the guest stateroom which Meyer was occupying. There is a big drawer under the bed. An ironic type had once named it the broad bin, and unfortunately I have been unable to think of anything else to call it. I found girl’s pajamas, roomy flannelette in blue and white stripes. I found some black Dacron sailcloth slacks in size twelve, and a white pleated Dacron shirt with long sleeves and with an edge of Dacron lace on the collar and cuffs. I found a pair of zoris that looked about the right size. And I took out one of the little packages, seal unbroken, the better hotels provide for female guests whose luggage has been taken to some highly unlikely place by their friendly airline. The essential toiletries, with a stylized picture of either a blonde or a brunette imprinted on the flexible plastic.

  I put them in on the big bed of the boat’s owner, debated making the bed up fresh, remembered that the linen had had but one night’s use by McGee, and she was not exactly in a condition to be overly fastidious. As I came out of the master stateroom, Meyer came out of the bath after delivering the drink.

  “Come take a look,” he said. I followed him to the galley. He had drawn a small washtub of fresh water, put her clothing in it to rinse the salt out of the fabric. Mother Meyer.

  “What we have, Doctor Watson,” he said, “is a raw silk sleeveless blouse in natural color, and an Orlon fleece wraparound skirt, both items with the label of something called, God help us all, The Doll House, in Broward Beach. And we have these lacy little blue briefs, and the matching bra, about a B-cup size 34 I would judge, excellent quality and unlabeled, possibly from a custom house. No shoes. And, as you may have noticed, no jewelry, no wristwatch. But pierced ears, indentation of a ring on the ring finger of the right hand, and though she’s no sun bunny, a stripe of pallor on the left wrist where the wristwatch was worn.”

  I followed him into the lounge. “Age, Mr. Holmes?”

  “Some oriental blood. Complicates the problem. I’ll say twenty-six, but give me two years either way.”

  “How about the long decorative fingernails, Mr. Holmes? Too long for useful work, no? And broken practically down to the quick on the third and fourth fingers of the right hand, possibly from a struggle.”

  “Very good, Doctor Watson, my dear fellow. Is there not one other thing worth consideration?”

  “Uh … the scar on the right cheekbone?”

  “Meaningless in itself. Come, man!” I looked blank. He said, “I shall give you a little help, Doctor. Imagine how some other young woman might react to the same set of circumstances.”

  I thought of Vidge. She wouldn’t have endured so placidly the pain of removing the fish hooks. She would have been bleating and hooing and thrashing, and she would have been demanding doctors and policemen. When I said Jane Doe’s acceptance of our help seemed significant, he beamed at me and said that her muscle tone, the rich trimness of her figure, her acceptance of the situation all seemed to point to some aspect of the entertainment world, probably one of the more sleazy segments of it, a so-called exotic dancer, a hinterland belly dancer, a bunny at one of the more permissive key clubs, a singer on one of the little cutrate cruise ships. All her symptoms of near-death had been physical, but emotionally she seemed to have an acceptance of it so placid as to be a little eerie. As if she knew the world as a place where sooner or later they heaved you off a bridge.

  We heard a door open, the gargling sound of the tub water running out, the sound of the stateroom door closing. In a few minutes we went as a committee of two, rapped on her door, and heard her call to us to come in. She lay in the middle of the giant bed under the coverings in the striped pajamas, her head, turbaned in a maroon towel, resting on two pillows. Her color had improved. We stood at the foot of the bed. “Much better, eh?” Meyer said.

  “I got a little buzz from that big knock of brandy. On account of I guess nothing to eat since breakfast maybe.”

  “No trouble to fix you something, Jane Doe,” I said.

  She frowned. “I don’t know about solid food. I got a feeling maybe I wouldn’t hang onto it so long. Maybe some warm milk and a coupla aspirin, Mr.… I forgot your name.”
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  “Travis McGee. The hairy one is Meyer. How about a big warm eggnog with no stick, vanilla, nutmeg on top?”

  She looked wistful. “Gee, when I was a little kid … sometimes … that would be nice, honest.” She glanced toward the chair where the clothing was. “There’s a girl on board?”

  Sometimes when you think you can be casual, it doesn’t work at all. When you think something is healed, but then when you least expect it you learn all over again that some things never heal. My voice gave me away when I said, “The girl who owned those clothes is dead.”

  The normal automatic response would have been to say something about being sorry, but she said, “Then they ought to fit fine. In that big crazy blue tub I was wondering if I was dead, and if you dream things more real-like when you’re dead. I guess when I wake up tomorrow I’ll know for sure.”

  “In the morning,” Meyer said, “when you feel better, you can tell the whole thing to the police.”

  Again I was aware of that utter emptiness behind those dark eyes, and of something else back there, a cold and bitter humor, the kind of humor which can make a joke when the hangman adjusts the noose.

  “What’s to tell?” she said. “I tried to kill myself and it didn’t work.”

  I said, “You tucked that cement block under your arm and hopped over the bridge rail.”

  “It wasn’t easy. You forgot all about the eggnog maybe?”

  In an absolutely casual and offhand way, Meyer said something that seemed to be all L’s and vowel sounds.

  She said, “No, I …” She stopped, stared at him with narrow eyes and lips sucked bloodless. “Damn sneaky,” she said.

  Meyer smiled happily. “Jane Doe from Main Street, Honolulu. Forgive me. I heard just that faintest breath of Island accent in your voice. And you do have that very unique loveliness of the Hawaiian mix, my dear.”