Zuckerman’s secretary laughed. “Pay no attention to him. Mr. Zuckerman has to deal with all kinds of jerks. He’s a foreigner who runs a business and isn’t making much money at it. I think he thought that everyone would get rich off of government contracts, but it hasn’t happened in his case. He wants his rent reduced and Mort already did that once. I think that man just simply doesn’t like dealing with Jews.” She shrugged eloquently. “It comes with the route.”
“I thought he was undressing me,” Grace said, and the others nodded. Amanda wondered if he could mentally undress three women at the same time.
“He even does that to me,” Judith said and smiled. “Maybe he should get a girlfriend, or at least get laid.”
“Y’know,” Grace said. “Both Amanda and I have boyfriends. So why don’t we fix Sandy up with Prince Charming?”
Sandy scowled with mock anger. “Just now I am not that hard up. However, see me in a week.”
“Never would be better,” Amanda said. She was going to arrange a meeting between Sandy and Tim’s nephew. Sandy had been a little plump before crossing the Pacific and was rapidly gaining back the weight. Perhaps a boyfriend would help her keep it off.
Amanda continued. “Did you see the look in his eyes? Along with undressing us, he looked absolutely murderous.”
“I doubt that very much,” said Zuckerman, who’d heard most of the conversation. “He’s an immigrant having a tough time because of the war, which would make anyone angry.”
They entered his office and sat around his desk. Zuckerman and Grace lit up cigarettes. “As you probably guessed, I do have information regarding Mack’s will. First, advertising for heirs in the appropriate places has resulted in no one who claims any relationship to Mr. Garver, AKA Mack. Therefore, that is no longer a legal issue. He did have an ex-wife but the terms of the divorce are clear. She is owed nothing. The state of California, those greedy banditos residing in Sacramento, is another matter. Mr. Goldman has negotiated with them and they are willing to be reasonable. In return for thirty percent of anything over one hundred thousand dollars in cash, stocks, or anything else of value in the box, you three will keep the first hundred thousand, and seventy percent of anything thereafter.”
Amanda nodded. “That almost sounds fair.”
Zuckerman agreed. “Someone in Sacramento must be having a bad day. But yes, it does look like the best we can do. Nor are the police in any way interested in something that happened in the middle of the ocean. Mack’s death will be listed as accidental. More important, the next time you are in San Francisco could result in your seeing the contents of the box rather than having to wait years until a court sorts this out. Someone from the state will be watching over your shoulder, of course, but that’s life.”
They agreed that the decision was a good one. Like little kids, they wondered what was in the box. Realistically, they knew that it would be at least several weeks before they could manage to take the time off and arrange travel. While there hadn’t been any major battles recently, there were still a large number of casualties from previous engagements who needed their attention. The safe deposit box and its unknown contents would have to wait.
* * *
Krause was pleasantly surprised when Braun showed up with a Mexican woman who looked like she was in her late twenties. A little plump, but not all that bad looking, he decided. In fact, she looked better the more he stared at her. It had been a reluctantly celibate existence for both of them since moving to San Diego.
Braun grinned. “Her name is Juanita Morales and she’s going to entertain us tonight.”
Juanita looked around their apartment and decided she’d seen worse. After all, these were two men living together, so what did she expect? She’d come from Escondido in northern Mexico as a small child and recalled dirt floors and sharing them with a goat, so what did she care if the place was littered? The men did not appear queer and only wanted sex. As long as they paid, that was fine by her. They talked like they were foreign, but she’d been told by “Bill” that they were Swedes, whatever that meant.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what I’ll do. Normally I charge by the trick, but since there’s two of you and I’ll bet you want me to stay all night and play with you until you get tired, it’ll be thirty dollars and I’ll do anything you want, but I don’t get hurt. Oh yeah, you got to use rubbers unless I’m sucking your cock. It’s going to be more if you want all of us doing it at the same time.”
They negotiated down to twenty dollars and they each gave her ten. They also assured her that there would be no threesomes.
“Let’s get started,” she said and stepped out of her dress and underclothing. She was voluptuous and Krause stared, getting aroused. She had large, full breasts with dark nipples and he couldn’t take his eyes off them. Juanita laughed at him.
Braun had rank, so he went first while Krause went to the garage downstairs. Krause was second and was pleased that Juanita was somewhat exuberant when his turn came. He had the feeling that paying her ten dollars each for the night was an overcharge. Braun had found her at a bar frequented by sailors, and the idea of going with someone who wasn’t in the military and had his own place appealed to her. He also said there was no pimp in the picture to complicate matters.
Juanita didn’t get tired of their alternating until it was almost dawn. This was just as well since the two Germans were exhausted. She finally serviced them orally and asked to be driven home, and Braun said he would do it. She asked if she could come back some time and they both agreed.
Krause went to bed and slept in until midafternoon. Braun had gone directly to bed after returning. It had been a good night and they agreed that they needed a day off. Krause realized he’d left his cigarettes in the Ford and went down to the garage. He’d just put the pack in his shirt pocket when something on the back seat caught his eye. It was a woman’s purse. Damn it to hell, he thought as he realized the implications. He raced upstairs.
“Was it necessary to kill her?”
Braun shrugged. “I thought it best. She was a lot of fun, but she’d seen us, our place, and God only knows what else she might have noticed.”
“How did you do it?”
“Easy. I told her I’d give her five more dollars if she’d let me take pictures of her naked on the beach. When she thought she was posing, I shot her in the back of the head and left her there. Don’t worry, there was nobody around.”
Krause grudgingly accepted the need to maintain secrecy, but some aspects worried him. For instance, would anyone miss her? Or would someone recall her going off with a middle-aged white man in a Ford, which might be something unusual for a hooker who specialized in sailors?
Braun caught the worried look on Krause’s face and misunderstood. “Don’t worry, Gunther, we’ll get us another playmate sometime soon in the future. Maybe the next one I won’t bring back here. By the way, here’s your ten dollars back.”
Harris was pleased. For once his request for information and help from local police had gotten results. Generally there was no love lost between the FBI and the San Diego cops and he’d been afraid that his asking for cooperation had wound up in a waste basket. Most of the local cops were extremely territorial and he was the outsider. They even thought he talked funny, originally being from out east and all that.
He’d pressed the point with his local contact, a detective named Flaherty. He’d said he was looking for possible saboteurs and maybe that had gotten their attention and enabled them to look past their prickly pride. Or were they prideful pricks, he wondered? Flaherty said he’d keep an eye out. It helped that the cop was a good guy and that Harris was the one who’d told him about the possibility of sabotage and murder by Germans. Harris had worked with Flaherty before and there was a level of mutual respect.
The woman on the slab looked up at the ceiling through lifeless eyes. She was naked. Her body was pale and there were a number of bruises and cuts. Harris wondered if they were from crawly t
hings gnawing on her after she died and decided he didn’t want to know.
“Where’s her clothing?” he asked and was informed that she’d been found naked on the beach yesterday morning by a couple of very surprised hikers.
Flaherty volunteered that she was probably a local whore and their immediate assumption was that she’d gotten killed by a jealous boyfriend. What had made Flaherty curious was the fact that she’d been shot by a nine-millimeter bullet to the back of the head, just what Harris had asked the locals to be on the lookout for.
Flaherty held a handkerchief to his nose. The body was getting a little ripe. “I took the liberty of circulating her photo around some areas on the assumption that, looking Mexican, she was probably a prostitute. I was right. A couple of her coworkers gave me a name, Juanita Morales, said she worked alone, and said she left with a middle-aged white guy the night before she was found.”
“Anything more about him?”
Flaherty sniffed. “Nah. They were all busy earning a living and didn’t notice anything special about her new friend. They said he was kind of nondescript, frankly.”
“Great work, detective.”
“You think the killer’s the guy who’s wrecking your trains?”
“I would put serious money on it,” Harris said. “I owe you.”
“What do you want me to do with the body?” Flaherty asked. An autopsy would be performed, but that would confirm the obvious—death by bullet to the head. The police would keep her prints and a photo on file as a matter of course.
“Just give Miss Morales a decent burial. She may have died actually helping her country.”
“She’s Mexican,” Flaherty said with a slight grin.
“Okay, helping our country.”
Harris drove away with the bullet in a paper bag. An hour later and back on base, he and another agent were peering through microscopes, comparing the bullet recovered from the woman to the bullets extracted from the border guards and the Mexican kids.
“Son of a bitch,” Harris snarled, although he was not surprised. The grooves on the bullets had all matched. Whoever the saboteur and killer was, he was still on the loose and still killing.
CHAPTER 15
TIM ROLLED ON HIS SIDE AND LOOKED AT AMANDA, WHO WAS lying on her own beach blanket and looking contentedly at the full, billowing clouds. He thought they were cumulus but wasn’t sure. She knew he was staring at her and smiled slightly. She hoped he liked how she looked in her new two-piece bathing suit. Both Sandy and Grace insisted that it accentuated her very slender figure, while the light blue color went well with her lightly colored hair.
“Honey,” Grace had said, “if I had a flat belly and perky little breasts like that, I’d wear one of those suits too.”
However, Grace added, she didn’t. Her figure was more on the voluptuous side and she really needed something to help tuck in her tummy. Like most women, she wore a girdle when out in public. Amanda generally did, too, although she didn’t think she needed one. Not wearing a girdle was liberating but it scandalized older women, which she sometimes found amusing. Where was it written in law that women, especially slender ones, had to wear a heavy and constricting girdle that made a woman sweat and itch? Grace said it made it so much harder for a man to undress her if she wasn’t willing, so maybe that was a selling point.
Sandy sat a few yards away from them with Steve Farris. They seemed to be hitting it off. After some initial shyness, there was now a lot of laughter coming from their blanket. Grace and Merchant were somewhere off on their own. The difference in rank was too much for them all to be comfortable, especially Steve, who was still only a first lieutenant, and Merchant, the Army’s equivalent of a full colonel. Amanda thought that the military’s fixation with rank was silly, but it was something they had to live with.
Amanda rolled onto her side so she could face Tim. “Like what you see?”
“Immensely. You’re beautiful.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the women who lie half naked on a beach with you.”
“I’d even say it if you were totally naked.”
She giggled. Sandy and Steve turned to see if they were missing something, decided they weren’t, and went back to their own conversation. Amanda liked what she saw of Tim in a bathing suit, even though it was baggy and too large for him and admittedly borrowed from a friend. He was muscular and had told her that he worked out at one of the base gyms to relieve stress. She thought that lying on a California beach was a much better way of alleviating stress. The only mildly disturbing factor was the presence of several destroyers and patrol craft at the opening to San Diego Bay. She rationalized their presence by thinking that they would have been there in peacetime as well.
“Tim, every now and then you have a good idea and this is a wonderful one. Your nephew seems like a nice man and it looks like he and Sandy are hitting it off.”
The four of them were on a beach a mile south of San Diego and it was a Sunday afternoon. A number of other couples had similar ideas, which meant there was little real privacy. Steve’s unit was through packing, and his battalion had been given the weekend off, which was why they were near San Diego and not Steve’s small base. On Monday they’d be heading north and on to the vast wilderness of Alaska to confront the Japanese army that was slowly approaching Fairbanks. Steve was less than thrilled and Tim shared his worry. After all, the woods up north were filled with angry, hungry, and fanatic Japs.
“Will you ever go back to Hawaii?” Tim asked.
“No,” she said softly. “That part of my life is over. I wanted to spend a year or so there on a kind of lark that turned into a tragedy. From what I’ve heard about the horrors of living on the Islands, especially Oahu, I wonder if anyone will ever want to go there on vacation again. I’ll continue nursing here until I get the chance to go back east and then on to med school. Do you think I can make it and become a doctor?”
“Easily,” he responded.
Nor would she have much trouble getting into any med school. Not only was she very bright and well educated, but her nursing experience would help her immensely. And it would not hurt at all that her father was a senior surgeon on the staff at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. But would she like it as a woman doctor in what was a man’s world?
She sat up and brushed sand off her pale skin. “Let’s go in the water. I can’t stand too much sun.”
She’d earlier explained that her badly sunburned body was pretty well healed, but that her new skin was still very tender. The doctors explained that she might be susceptible to sunburn for quite some time, perhaps forever. Therefore, her time on the sun-drenched beach would be limited and infrequent, unless she wanted to wear clothing, which struck her as silly. Why go to the shore if you had to stay dressed? Today was just too nice to spend indoors and, besides, even southern California weather couldn’t be wonderful all the time, especially with winter on the horizon. She would take a few chances and enjoy life.
They waded in and then swam out beyond a large seaweed encrusted raft that shielded them from being seen by anyone on the beach. No other swimmers were in the area so they were deliciously alone. The water came just up to their chests and they stood comfortably, letting this day’s fairly gentle waves splash around them. If the sea had been any rougher, they wouldn’t have been able to stand out there. They would have had to climb onto the raft.
Pleased by the privacy, they slipped into each others’ arms and kissed tenderly, then passionately. Tim was aroused and didn’t care if Amanda knew it.
She nuzzled under his chin. “I guess you really do like me.”
Tim kissed the top of her head. He slid his hands down and lifted her up, squeezing her bottom. So far she’d permitted him very few liberties and he wondered what would happen today, out of view and already half undressed.
She read his mind. “You’re a very good man, Tim. Someday you and I will make love, just not right now.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t. I was hurt once, betrayed by someone I loved very much, and I thought he loved me.”
The light dawned. “Is that why you came to Hawaii? Not just for the sailing and not just on a lark?”
“Partly,” she said and wiggled against him, arousing him even more. “The young man in question, and I will never tell you his name because you might want to challenge him to a duel, said he wanted to marry me and when I wouldn’t go to bed with him, told everyone I had. Then he spread it around that I had done some strange things with him. Look, there are a lot of people who do and that’s their business, but they keep it quiet. When he broadcast such lies, I felt like my reputation and trust had been destroyed.”
“People don’t want to believe the truth, do they?”
“Not when salacious tales are so much more fun. And there’s no way I could deny it. I tried, but people preferred to believe the more interesting lies. Tim, I’m no saint. A long ways from it in fact, but I do consider myself a private and discreet person.”
“Is that why we’re hiding behind a raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?”
“Absolutely,” she said and kissed him hungrily, teasing him with her tongue.
She pulled back and smiled. She slipped out of her top and guided his hands across her small and firm breasts. He hoisted her farther up, thankful for the ocean’s buoyancy, so he could kiss and nibble them. Her breasts were beautiful and delicious, tasting like salt water. She groaned with pleasure and let him shift the bottom of her suit so he could caress her even more intimately. After a few moments she groaned and shuddered, almost clawing at his shoulders.
She smiled tenderly and pulled his swim trunks town to midthigh. It was her turn to caress him, and she did until he climaxed.
“Who taught you to do that?” he asked.
Rising Sun Page 26
