The Turquoise Lament

by John D. MacDonald

  “Shall I look Pidge up and talk to her?”

  He looked eager. “Would you? Would you give it a try?”

  “Of course.”

  “And get back to me?”

  “Why not?”

  “I hate to say this. But you see if you think she needs help. If you think she does, maybe she’ll listen to you.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He walked with me down the long jetty, past all the boats. He knew a lot of people for having been there such a short time. Hey there, Howie. How’s it going, fella?

  At the end of the jetty, he made a short sound of laughter without mirth. “When things start to go bad, they really go,” he said. “I’ve told you enough. You shouldn’t hear it all from me. Something else happened when we were a week out from here. You let her tell you about that one, and draw your own conclusions. That’s why she got off the boat and why I can’t even talk to her.”

  I shook his hand. He didn’t let go. He looked at me with his big dumb brown brute eyes, and they watered, and in a husky voice, he said, “What I really want is … I want her back … If you could just.…”

  He let go and spun away. His voice had broken. He started walking slowly back out the jetty toward the Trepid. It was a listless and dejected walk. A big dumpy giant, sad in the Christmas-coming sunshine.

  Four

  It was late afternoon when I got back to Pidge’s borrowed apartment. She seemed remote, ill at ease, and strangely indifferent to my reaction to whatever Howie had told me. She took me down to the ninth floor and showed me the little studio apartment she had borrowed. She gave me the key and said I could come up when I’d freshened up.

  I said it had been a while since I’d done any hotel-hopping, so how about humoring me and going out with me. She brightened perceptibly. By the time she phoned down and said she was ready and would meet me at the garage level, she sounded almost cheerful.

  She wore a handsome pants suit and had carefully applied a fiesta face. She found it easy to smile. She had the use of the white Toyota of the missing Alice Dorck, and said that she was getting almost used to the traffic, so maybe …?

  She sat very erect behind the wheel, with firm grip and frown of concentration. She angled the little car through holes just before they started to close. She whipped around the indecisive and tucked herself away from the certifiable maniacs. She picked productive lanes and managed to locate, without hesitation, the last parking slot in the lot off Seaside.

  It was a good night for strolling, the air balmy and soft. Along Waikiki the hotels have not yet had to adopt the Miami Beach hospitality routine of posting armed guards at doorways who demand a look at your key and, if you look kinky, escort you to the desk for official clearance. At Waikiki you can still walk in and buy a lady a drink. We worked the little cluster across from the International Market—the Outrigger, the Surfrider, the Moana, checking out the outdoor bars. Get the rum drink in the squat glass and you get a stick of fresh pineapple to stir it with. Get the Mary, which she was drinking with both care and thirst, and the stir-stick is a stalk of celery.

  I steered the talk to safe places, back to Bahama seas and Florida beaches. She cheered up and freshened, and her voice broke free of the mono-level, moving up and down the scale of her emotions. Have a drink; take a walk; drink again.

  In the most inconspicuous way, I was trying to get her well smashed. Yes, in vino there is veritas, if you can translate it, if you can figure out which side of the truth you are seeing. The International Market was closing. We roamed through a corner of it and I bought her one flower, the color of cinnamon, not quite an orchid, not quite anything else either. And then to the slightly airport flavor of the Princess Kaiulani Hotel, where I steered her, slow, smiling and smashed, through interlocking lobbies back to that place where the Chinese food is the very best of Mandarin, the tastes less separated than Cantonese, more heavily spiced.

  We made wishes with chopsticks, pulling them apart, then arguing over who got the largest portion of the bamboo base where it split. She won both sets, and said she would think about the wishes. Her small, strong-looking hands were deft with the chopsticks. She ate with hunger, glancing across the candlelight, smiling, saying, “Mmmm.” She would swing and shake her head in a certain remembered way to settle the brown hair back. Nice.

  “And the two wishes?” I asked.

  She took one more morsel of the squash, then dropped the sticks on the plate. She shook her head. “Oh, Trav, you know … if I could only have just one wish … how I need that one wish.”

  She jumped up and was gone. I waited ten minutes and then paid the check and tipped our waitress to look in the ladies’ room. She came back and told me the lady would meet me in a couple of minutes in the lobby. The waitress had a sweet, worried smile. Lovers’ quarrel?

  Irregular formations of touring Japanese men moved through the lobbies with worried celerity, all their satin-black Nikons with the bulky nighttime headdress of rechargeable strobe. Why are their glasses frames always so shiny?

  Pidge came to me, shy and damp-lashed, the nose red from blowing. “First date in forever, and I can’t hack it,” she said.

  “Home?”

  “To what passes for same. Yes. And a lovely, lovely time up until I went owly.”

  I drove back through practically no traffic, and she showed me where to duck into the ramp under the Towers, and where the car belonged. On the way up in the elevator, I heard her sigh over the whisper of machinery. At eleven, I held the door open by leaning against the edge of it and said, “We’ll tackle it tomorrow?”

  She studied me and turned, just a little uneasy on her tall shoes. “No. Come on. Damn it all. Come on, let’s pick the scabs off.” So I let the urgent doors hiss shut behind us, and helped her with the double-key arrangement to number 1112.

  I made a mild joke, something about her friend Alice Dorck being some kind of security-conscious international agent. She said Alice had answered the door once for a man who said he wanted to replace the filter in the air intake. She let him in, and in the process of raping her he broke two ribs and three fingers on her left hand, tore her earlobe, and squeezed her throat so hard she had traumatic laryngitis for two weeks. She said that after that, Alice tended to be lock-conscious.

  No more jokes, I decided. Once inside I asked for a drink and was assured to see her pour one for herself. Down to cases.

  “Here it is! This is the camera. Instamatic. I’ve had it forever. I buy Kodacolor in twelves. You can usually get it developed almost anyplace.”

  “And these are the twelve prints.”

  “How many times do you—”

  “Now tell me again, Pidge. These three pictures, the last three on the roll. You took them in this order?”

  “Y-yes. Yes, that’s right.”

  “You looked through the finder and you took this picture. What did you see in the finder? Details!”

  “Don’t roar at me! I saw Joy Harris. I guess she’d come up through the small hatch, and she was stretched out on the bigger hatch cover. She was … on her side with her elbow stretched straight out and her head on her hand, and she was looking straight ahead. I thought about what a cute figure she had. Small but kind of lush. She had on bikini bottoms, faded blue or blue-green. The top was under her, on the hatch. Her blond hair was kind of damp-dark, like sweat or she’d washed it.”

  “She fitted in the frame?”

  “Oh, sure. It takes in a lot. You hardly ever have to back off to get things in.”

  “And this one?”

  “She hadn’t seen me. Howie was asleep. I went back to the cockpit to see if we had moved too far off course. I’d put a loop over a spoke. It was okay, so I went back up the side deck on the starboard side and she had rolled over onto her face, so I got a little closer and took this one. See? The hatch is bigger. I was closer. I was thinking that I was getting real evidence. I wanted to get her face. I was thinking of yelling at her and taking it when she j
umped up. It said ‘eleven’ through the little window, so I cranked it up to twelve, and that was the last one on the roll. As I was wondering what to do, she sat up and put the bikini top on. I backed off. When I looked again, she was standing at the rail. Right here. So I took the last picture of her. Her hair was blowing in the wind. She sensed it, I guess, because she turned and saw me before I could lower the camera. I ran from her. How about that? My boat and my camera and my marriage. And I ran.”

  “And you took these first nine on the roll?”

  “Sure. These are all at St. Croix, the dock area and the other boats and so on. That one was a real nice trimaran from Houston, the biggest I ever saw. I didn’t know they made them that big. See? Howie is in these two. Yes, I took them all at St. Croix.”

  “Then what about the film?”

  “I told you before that—”

  “More detail this time.”

  “Jesus, you are a terrible person. You know that? All right, all right. I went below. Once you finish a roll, you just keep on winding and it all goes over into the other side and you see little lines through the window. Then you open it here and take it out. That’s what I did. I hid it in a place nobody knows about but me.”

  “You sound certain.”

  “I am certain. In my music box. You think you are looking right through it where the little dancer turns around and around, but you’re not. It’s mirrors in there, at angles so you think you’re looking through. It’s ‘Lara’s Theme,’ and there’s a certain place where I push the little nub to stop it. If anybody opened it when I wasn’t there I would know because the music wouldn’t start in my place, where I always stop it when I hide anything in there. Nobody got at that film, if that’s what you mean. God, how I wish they had! After we were tied up at Fort-de-France, I took it out of the box and it wasn’t out of my hand until I gave it to the man in the camera store.”

  “By then you knew the girl wasn’t on the boat.”

  “I didn’t know anything by then. I didn’t know what to believe. When I got the film back and saw these three pictures and she … just wasn’t in them, the whole world turned black. Black with little specks roaming around in it, and a roaring going on. Travis, I’m getting so tired of …”

  “Let’s go back to the voices you heard.”

  “Why? I heard voices. Everybody hears voices. All crazy people hear voices.”

  “Always the same girl?”

  “Yes. Joy. I never could make out the words. The laugh was the same. It was Joy and Howie talking and laughing. Much more of this?”

  “Quite a lot, I think.”

  “Then we need another drink.”

  She brought the drinks back to the sofa in the living room. When she touched glasses, she touched a little too hard, spilling drinks from both our glasses. She giggled and mopped it up.

  She said, “To answer the question you haven’t asked, Yes, the son of a bitch was trying to run right over me with the Trepid.”

  “And you think he could see you?”

  “Why not? It wasn’t black night yet. And I didn’t have any trouble seeing him.”

  “He handled the boat in such a way, he made you fall overboard?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  “But he threw you a life ring.”

  “I think he just didn’t have the guts to do it. I think he knocked me overboard and then panicked and threw the ring. While he was working his way around and back, he got his courage up again and decided to run me down, and then at the last minute he veered off and threw me a line. Like the rifle.”

  “He didn’t mention that.”

  “I can see why he didn’t.”

  “He said there was something else, and you should tell me about it.”

  “It’s the rifle my father bought for sharks. It goes in an aluminum case he bolted to the side of the instrument panel in the wheelhouse, sort of in the corner, barrel up. The case has pressure clips and a rubber lip. It would even float. Anyway, he taught me to use it when I went with him the first time. It’s a Remington seven hundred. I forget what it shoots.”

  “Probably three-oh-eight?”

  “Right! Sometimes they get funny about a gun and you have to let the customs people keep it for you while you’re in port, but in a small boat usually it’s okay. Which you already know. We were a week from Honolulu, dead flat calm, grinding along at about six knots, which is the best for stingy, on automatic pilot. I was sitting on the roof, forward, reading and drying my hair. BAM! Out of nowhere! I spun around and he was in back of me, not eight feet away. He had the rifle and he had a couple of empty cans in the other hand. He had a dazed look on his face. He said he thought he had unloaded it. He didn’t know how it went off. Anyway, it was pointed almost straight up when it went off, he said. But I know how that thing sounds when it’s straight up or out to the side or pointing away from you. It’s more like whack. Or smack. Not like BAM. This ear still isn’t right. It rings a lot. Trav, I think that slug was inches from my head.”

  “How did he act?”

  “Really shocked. Like … almost too shocked. He cried. He threw up. That was later. He’d been going to ask me to throw the cans off the bow, out as far as I could. Then he was going to try to plink them from the stern as we went by.”

  “And you decided right then to leave him as soon as you docked?”

  “Not right then. No.”

  “Something else happened that last week?”

  “Oh, no. I mean I think I’d sort of decided even without the rifle part. Maybe without falling over-board, or the voices, or the girl who wasn’t there.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Neither do I. Oh, God, Trav, I’m drunk. I can’t say words right. I’m seeing two of things. You got me drunk.”

  “You mean that it wasn’t going so well, as a marriage.”

  “Please let me sleep!”

  “Okay. You can have a nap. I’ll wake you up.”

  “I mean really go to bed. Please. And you go away, huh?”

  “Not until we get through all of it.”

  “What in hell else can there be? You’re turning me inside out on these things.”

  “You said you had to find out something. We’re trying to find out.”

  “I’ve got to go wash my face and get out of these clothes. I get all sweaty thinking of how scared I got.”

  “Make it fast.”

  She came back in ten minutes with scrubbed face and brushed hair, wearing a shortie caftan in a big flower print. She was barefoot, and she was drugged and dazed by drink and weariness and strain.

  She plumped down on a stool, fists between her knees, and swayed, yawned, and said, “Honest to God. Really, McGee. I just.…”

  “Did Joy have moles?”

  “Huh? What?”

  “Moles, marks, visible scars, insect bites, any kind of flaw when you looked at her through the finder?”

  “N-no.”

  “The laughter you heard. They were both laughing at you.

  Right?”

  “Yes. Yes, they were.”

  “And you’re no damned good in bed.”

  She peered at me. “Huh? Whaddaya mean? I was pretty much okay with Scott. You could say I was a lot better than okay. Chee, you jump around so.”

  I remembered Scott was the boyfriend who flunked out when her father was killed. “But nowhere near okay with Howie.”

  She reached and got her glass. The ice was long melted, the drink still strong. She drank and made a face. She told it piecemeal, the first pieces the most difficult. Good old Uncle Travis.

  She had wanted every part of the marriage to be great. Howie was a strange person. You wanted to know him. He was like a little house with a door in the front and a door in the back. One room. He’d let you in his house and it was fun. Chuckles and games. No pressure. So you wanted to know him better and so you went through the doorway into what was going to be the next room of his personal house, but you found yourse
lf back out in the yard, and the little house looked just the same, back and front. One room.

  “Me, I’m a personal person,” she said. She’d finished her drink. She leaned toward me and put her palms against the side of my face, cupping the sockets of the jaw. She slid forward off the stool, round knees bumping the rug, stood erect on her knees, and tugged at me until our noses were six inches apart, each of us well inside the other’s living space, each breathing into the other’s domain.

  “Look inside of me,” she said.

  Well, so they were lady eyes, slightly inflamed, gray but so almost blue they would be blue at times, a tiny spangle of small pale tan dots in the left one, in the iris at seven and eight o’clock, close to the wet jet black of the pupil. They wobbled and then fixed full focus upon my eyes. They were lady eyes for ten heartbeats, and then something veered and dipped inside my head. There was a dizziness, then everything except her eyes seemed misted out of focus, and the eyes seemed larger. She became a special identity to me. Linda Lewellen Brindle? There had been a kid named Pidge; who had a terrible crush. There had been a bride in white called Linda by the Man with the Book. She was an identity which had no name as yet, this new one. Pidge was a name suitable for the yacht-club porch at Bar Harbor, or doubles in Palm Springs.

  “Hey, Lewellen,” I said, changing the last-name tempo, turning it into a half-whispered name of a suthrun gal. Lou Ellen. Somehow right.

  It startled her. She sat back onto her heels and frowned up at me, shaking her hair back. “Who told you that? That was my grandpop’s idea. They all said it was flaky. They all said you couldn’t saddle a kid with such a weird name. Lou Ellen Lewellen. I didn’t even know until I was maybe ten, and hated Pidge and hated Linda, and called myself Lou Ellen for … oh … a couple of years. I almost forgot until now.”

  “It just seemed to fit.”

  “Are you going to call me that?” The strangeness that had started working at six inches was now working just as well at a yard away.