Virgin Cay

by Basil Heatter

  Her impatience was now almost uncontrollable. An hour before the time she had arranged to meet Robinson she was waiting at the old wreck. She kept staring out to seaward until her eyes and head ached, but in the blackness sea and sky seemed to merge together. It was past the time he had said now and there was still no sign of him. Twice she thought she heard the sound of a motor and she waited feverishly, but no boat appeared. The sense of panic mounted. What had gone wrong? Well, if he talked no one would believe him and there was no way anything could be traced back to her. She had covered all her tracks.

  She took a firmer grip on herself. There might be some simple explanation; everything might yet come out all right. Perhaps his motor had failed on the way back. She understood that outboard motors were chancy little devils. In that case he would have to sail back in Gwen’s boat. That could account for everything.

  Twenty agonizing minutes later she distinctly heard the sound of a motor. A moment later the sound stopped, to be followed almost immediately by the grinding of a prow on sand. She ran down to the water’s edge. It was the skiff all right and behind it, roped astern, was the sailboat.

  Robinson stepped out into the shallow water and pulled the bow of the skiff higher onto the beach. “Hello, Clare,” he said.

  She made an effort to control her impatience but even so her voice was shrill when she asked, “Did it go all right?”

  “Sure it did. Were you worried?” His voice mocked her.

  “Did she… struggle?”

  “You don’t really want all the pretty details, do you? As you can see, I got rid of her. Let’s just let it go at that. The less you know about it the better. Did you bring the money?” She handed him the envelope.

  “This time I’ll count it,” he said.

  She waited while he bent down behind the skiff and flicked a cigarette lighter and counted the bills.

  “It’s all there,” she said.

  “So I see.”

  He tucked the envelope into his shirt pocket and then waded out to the stern of the skiff and untied the sailboat and drew it in toward shore.

  “Are you leaving it here?” she asked.

  “It’s as good a place as any. The way the wind is this is just about where she might have drifted to with the sheet loose and the boom swinging free.”

  “What about our footprints? They’ll see that people have been around the boat.”

  “So what? Anybody might have stopped to take a look. Besides, it’s low tide now. When the tide rises it will wipe out most of the prints.”

  They stood there for a moment in silence and then she said, “Are you taking the morning plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I guess we won’t be seeing each other again.”

  “I guess not.” The conversation of two murderers on a beach at midnight, he thought. As prosaic as buying a pound of salami. Well, what had he expected, some slight show of remorse on Clare’s part? You might as well look for pity from a black widow spider. The bitch was like ice. Curiously enough, what bothered him most of all now was the knowledge that he had once made love to this woman. “Good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye.”

  He pushed the skiff out and turned it around and drew it out into the deeper water. A moment later she heard the sound of the motor. She listened to it until it faded out and was gone.

  She turned and began the long walk back to the house. She was cold and to keep herself from shivering she hugged herself with both arms as she walked.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The plane from Nassau was late. Robinson sat in the tin-roofed shack and looked out at the concrete landing strip alive with heat devils. “How much longer?” he asked the girl clerk behind the counter.

  The pretty girl in the sky-blue airlines uniform shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t be sure. The last word we had was that they were having a little trouble with the port engine but that they expected to take off any time now. But once they’re in the air it won’t take them more than half an hour to get here. Have you checked your luggage, sir?”

  He shook his head. “I have no luggage.”

  “Oh? Traveling light.”

  “You could call it that,” he said, thinking of the twenty thousand in the envelope buttoned inside his shirt pocket.

  The girl stared at him curiously. He got up and went outside and stood in the blaze of morning sun, smoking a cigarette. Two men wearing short-sleeved shirts and straw hats passed him and went into the shack. One of them had the flat cold eyes of a policeman. He gave Robinson a passing glance. Robinson felt his muscles tense. But the man was carrying an attaché case, and in the other hand was a wicker basket of rum. Policemen did not carry attaché cases and baskets of rum. And anyway, no one could have found out yet what he had done with the girl. He forced himself to relax.

  There had been a bad moment with Stanley Walker earlier in the day when they had said good-bye. Stanley had looked at him out of his poached-egg eyes and asked, “Where are you going from here, Gus?”

  “I don’t know yet, Stanley. I’ll make up my mind after I get to Miami,” he had answered cautiously.

  “Gus…”

  “Yes?”

  “Take me with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tears formed in Walker’s eyes and dribbled slowly down his cheeks into his untouched plate of bacon and eggs. “I feel so alone, Gus. When you’re gone there won’t be anybody. Not a friend in the world.”

  “That’s nonsense, Stanley. You’ve got dozens of friends here. Your house is crowded with them all the time.”

  Walker shook his head sadly. “Do you think these people are my friends? They’re not. They come here to drink my whiskey and to laugh at me. Stanley, the clown. Good old Stanley. Give him one more and he’ll stand on his head or fall into the swimming pool or pass out under a table. Old Stanley is always good for a laugh. Don’t you think I know how they really feel about me?”

  “Why don’t you stop drinking then?”

  “For what? What else is there in my life? You’ve got to help me, Gus.”

  “How can I help you? What would you do if you came with me?”

  “I don’t know. I thought… well I thought we could buy a boat together. I mean I’d put up the money for it and you’d run it. We could go anywhere you’d like. Anywhere you’d go if you were alone. Oh hell, Gus, I don’t care where we go just so it’s someplace warm and where the seas aren’t too big and where we can get ashore now and then for a drink. I’ve got to give up this way of life and I haven’t got the guts to do it myself. But with your help I could. With your help I could make it. You’ve got to do this for me, Gus. If I go on this way I’m just waiting to be shoveled into the grave.”

  “But why do you want to go off on a boat? You’re not in shape for it. You told me yourself you get seasick. If you want to get away why not just go to a hotel somewhere?”

  “Because that won’t accomplish anything. If I sit alone in a hotel room I’ll either jump out the window or wind up downstairs at the bar.” Walker’s hands were trembling. His eyes were like those of a sick dog. “I thought maybe if I got off on a boat where I was really up against it and where there wasn’t any booze around I could make it. You could force me to make it. Please, Gus.”

  Robinson shook his head. “It wouldn’t work, Stanley. Going to sea in a small boat in bad weather can be the most rugged experience a man can endure. You’re in no shape for it. It would kill you. And anyway,” he added brutally, wanting to end it, “I wouldn’t have the time or the inclination to nurse you. I hate to say it, but I suspect that what you need is a doctor, Stanley, not a sea voyage in a small boat.”

  Walker’s eyes filled with tears again. Suddenly he got up from the table and left the room. Robinson waited until Thomas came back and asked, “Is he all right?”

  “He’ll be all right after a while,” Thomas said.

  “Then I’ll leave now.”

  “He
’ll be out soon.”

  “No, it’s better this way. You say good-bye for me.” When he left the house he had felt like a thief. He had not taken anything from Walker except the last of his pride, and God knew there was little enough of that…

  He re-entered the shack and heard the girl say, “… it’s just awful. And they haven’t even found the body yet.”

  “When did it happen?” the man with the attaché case asked.

  “Sometime yesterday. She went out early in the morning and she was gone all day and then someone found her boat washed up on the beach this morning. There’s nothing wrong with the boat so they figure she just fell overboard and wasn’t able to get back.”

  “That’s awful. That’s an awful way to die. But she was really asking for it going out alone like that. Me, I’ll stick to Chris-Crafts. To hell with sailboats. How old was she?”

  “About my age, I think.”

  “But not as pretty I’ll bet,” the other man said.

  “I don’t know. They tell me she was really beautiful.”

  “Listen, honey, don’t you ever get over to Miami?”

  “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I get a free ride over.”

  “Next time you get over to Miami you give me a ring. I’m at the Dupont Plaza. You give me a ring and we’ll go out on the town. I’ll show you the best time you ever had. We’ve got a lot in common, kid.”

  “Do we?”

  “Yes, sir,” he repeated, staring at her with heavy significance. “A lot in common.”

  “I wonder what it is.”

  “That’s what we’ll find out, honey.”

  At last the plane, a rather small twin-engined British job, something like the old DC3s, dropped down onto the runway and taxied to a stop in front of the shack. The passengers, led by the pretty girl in blue, trooped out toward the plane. Several of them looked curiously at Robinson—a big, gaunt man in faded khaki and battered sneakers and without any hand luggage.

  He took a seat in the rear, fastened his seat belt and concealed his face behind a newspaper left behind by one of the passengers who had come in from Nassau. He felt reasonably secure now, but still one never knew. Despite all his careful planning something might have gone wrong. Yet the conversation of the airlines clerk seemed to indicate that everything was in order. They had found the boat and they believed she had fallen overboard. The pressure of the heavy envelope in his pocket was reassuring. There were times when he was inclined to believe that the whole Spanish Cay experience—beginning with the loss of the ketch and the long swim ashore and ending with the last voyage with Gwen—was nothing more than a strange dream. But the money was tangible. It had all happened.

  Through his small round window he could see the pilot smoking a cigarette and chatting with the airlines girl in the doorway of the shack. The minutes dragged on. It was stifling in the plane. The passengers sat in a brooding aura of mounting anger. Finally the engines turned over, crackled once or twice and then caught. The plane turned around and taxied down the runway and turned into the wind and came roaring back and lifted easily over the channel, and after that they were climbing over the southern tip of the island and there was only the blue sea beyond.

  They were flying parallel to the beach now and he could see Stanley Walker’s house and the wreck on the beach and beyond it Clare’s place. He examined the house carefully as they flew by but there was no sign of life on the terrace. Somehow he had imagined that she might be out there with her binoculars trained on the plane.

  Then the tip of the island was behind them and the white houses and the fringe of pines and the curling line of surf. Far off to port, looking like a chalk line scribbled on the vast blue cardboard of the sea, was a tiny spit of sand. He craned his neck to watch it as they swung by but at that height it was impossible for him to see if there was any living thing on it.

  The sand spit Robinson had observed from the plane window was not more than seventy-five yards long and fifteen yards wide. At no point did it rise more than three or four feet above the level of the sea. In August and September when the great storms come boiling up out of the overheated air above the Caribbean it was often entirely awash. Now it lay dead as a stranded whale. Not a single blade of grass punctuated its bone-white length.

  There was, however, one living thing on this rib of sand. Gwen Leacock sat in the shade of the green tarp Robinson had rigged for her. She was reading a paperback novel and eating out of a cold can of so-called Chinese chop suey. Beside her, half buried in the sand to keep it cool, was a five-gallon jeep can filled with drinking water.

  She looked up to see a flock of birds milling over bait in the water. Suddenly the water boiled; something was driving a school of small fish to the surface and the birds were attacking them from above. A big fin slashed like a sabre across the living carpet that agitated the water. The birds swooped screaming to the attack. At that moment, without warning, a hole seemed to open in the sea and out of its depths shot a great black and silver shape with spread dorsal and armored forehead. It hung for a moment in the foreign element, spear gleaming, and then dropped down with a mighty crash. She stared at it in astonishment, heart pounding. She had seen marlin before but never this close and never so unexpectedly. She waited for the fish to burst into the air again but it was gone.

  Then she heard the plane. She ducked out from under the tarp and shaded her eyes against the sun. The silver bug in the sky was far off but she recognized it as the Miami-bound plane and knew that Gus was aboard. Could he see her? She stood waving until the plane was gone and then went back to her book.

  But it was hard to concentrate. The glimpse of the plane and the knowledge that Gus might have seen her waving at him were too exciting. It brought back the sound of his voice, the odor of his sun-warmed flesh and the great strength of his arm as he had carried her back to the blanket. She was able to relive again that revelatory moment on the beach when the delicious warmth of fulfillment had coursed all through her veins like wine. She was still a little sore from it. Her thighs ached. But even the soreness was sweet to her now. She felt so marvelously alive. All her nerve ends seemed to be playing tag with each other beneath her skin.

  Had it all really happened as she remembered it? It seemed so impossible now. And yet here she was, marooned on this strip of sand in the middle of the ocean. That part was certainly real. And the lovemaking had been real enough too, as vouched for by all the delicious sensations that still seemed to wing through her body. She put down the book and began to go over the whole thing again from the beginning…

  She had taken the Lightning out to sea as he had directed her until she had seen him coming in the blue and white skiff. She headed the Lightning up into the wind and let it lie that way until he was alongside.

  “Hello Gus,” she called out. “Any luck?”

  “Just a couple of mackerel.”

  “I despise fish.”

  “That’s too bad. I thought we might have them for lunch.”

  “Raw? I don’t think even Gus Robinson is that rugged.”

  “Well, we’ll see. We might go ashore somewhere to build a fire.”

  He tied the skiff behind and took the helm and headed the Lightning seaward. As she looked back at the skiff she saw that he had a tarp in the bow and what appeared to be several packages under it.

  “This is all pretty mysterious, Gus,” she said.

  “Don’t you like mysteries?”

  “Up to a point, but I still like to know where I’m going.”

  “Wait and see, Gwen.”

  The land fell away behind them. She closed her eyes, relaxing to the motion of the boat. When she looked back again she could barely make out the tip of the radio tower. The muted alarm bell that had been ringing in her mind for the past hour let out a shrill clang.

  She sat up straight and said, “Gus. I want to know where we’re going.”

  He was clearly not joking when he answered, “Honey, I have bad news for you. You’re not going
to win that race after all. In fact you won’t even be in it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He sighed and said, “It’s a pretty involved story, Gwen, and you may have a little trouble believing it at first but the plain fact is I took you out here to kill you.”

  “I like you, Gus, but I don’t think much of your sense of humor. I’ve always hated practical jokers,”

  “I can assure you, Gwen, that I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

  It was beginning to get through to her now. He was serious. That explained all the mysterious preparations, the secrecy, his insistence that she not tell Dino anything about it.

  Her voice was very small when she said, “Why would you want to kill me?”

  He smiled at her and leaned forward to pat her arm. She shrank away. He said, “Don’t worry. I have no intention of killing you or anybody else.”

  “Then why are you acting so crazy? Why are you telling me all this?”

  “Because I’m going to ask you to help me, but before I do I want you to understand how serious the whole thing is. When I tell you I was hired to kill you I mean just that. Do you believe me?”

  “I suppose so, but who would want to see me dead?”

  “Clare.”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” He reached into his pocket and took out the envelope. “There’s the thousand dollars she gave me as a down payment. I’m supposed to get another nineteen thousand after I finish the job.”

  “But you don’t even know Clare. You only met her that one time at Stanley’s house.”

  “We’ve been meeting secretly. It began that first night when I was washed ashore.”

  She sat very still while he told her the whole story. The only thing he left out was the fact that he and Clare had gone to bed together. That part of it seemed to have no bearing on anything that had followed.

  “But I still don’t understand why Clare would want me dead,” she said at last. “Is she crazy?”

  “She may be a little crazy. But on top of that she’s a cold-hearted conniving bitch who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.”