“Here I am, back to normal.” The greasy layers of makeup had been replaced, making strangely harsh the youthful contours of her face. “And I’m ready to go. You’ve been really nice. I’m glad I could meet you even if it was only for a few minutes.”
Steve followed her toward the door, amazed that this whole soap-opera episode was to be so easily concluded. “I’m glad I met you, too,” said Diane. Kelsy was going out the door, smiling back toward Diane. Steve shouted a warning as he saw her foot in its flimsy high-heeled shoe miss the step. Too late to catch her; he caught Diane, who was screaming and bolting forward. Kelsy had fallen full length on the sidewalk and for the moment she hadn’t moved. Diane knelt beside her to cradle her head. “Maybe we ought to get an ambulance,” Steve said, but Kelsy was already stirring, trying to rise.
“No, she’s all right, but we’d better get her inside.” Steve helped her to stand but she didn’t seem too steady on her feet, so he picked her up. She seemed small somehow, and lighter than she should have been. He put her on the couch.
Diane was carrying a cheap plastic suitcase. “This was left out by the curb. Her things must be in it.”
“But she can’t stay here.”
“Only for the night. In the morning I’ll see that she gets to the doctor’s office for a checkup.”
“This is crazy.” Diane came closer and put her arms around him. “It isn’t crazy, is it, for me to want your baby—no matter how it comes about.”
* * * *
Still half-asleep, Steve lurched across the living room on his way to the kitchen to make coffee. On the couch, Kelsy, covered to the neck with a wrinkled sheet, looked like something in a cocoon. Her face devoid of the makeup was youthful. She could be hardly out of her teens, he supposed, and as he looked at her, he speculated on the kind of life that would make a woman agree to the surrogate arrangement. He supposed he should feel pity and responsibility, yet as he stood there he was feeling a kind of anxiety, the feeling that at any moment she would awaken and blink and stare at him with eyes gone ferally red in reflected light. Stupid. He turned away.
As he was drinking the coffee, Diane joined him, her slim elegance enveloped in one of his old blanket-cloth robes. “It’s been over a week,” he said in a tentative voice. “Don’t you think it’s time she left to get a place of her own?”
“I hate to think of her being alone.”
“But this situation, it’s impossible. I can just imagine what the Cartons—or the Pendletons—are thinking.”
“I told Midge Pendleton that she’s my baby sister,” said Diane with a pleased, wicked grin that was uncharacteristic of her.
“But her clothes, her appearance—”
“I’ve been meaning to take her shopping—get her some nicer things. We can afford it.”
“But what about the money, the fee she got for the baby?”
“I’m afraid she has no head for money, poor thing, and, well, who cares about that. It’s not as if we ever thought we could buy a child.”
He paused. He guessed he had thought so, when the agreement was made. It had all seemed so clear, so businesslike.
“Don’t you feel the least bit responsible?”
“Of course I do,” he said, “but there’s something wrong about this. It’s—” He couldn’t explain. He could talk about the social and moral viewpoints, but that wouldn’t begin to touch it. The wrongness was the kind that made hair bristle at the back of the neck and brought an undefined sound of warning up from the throat.
* * * *
“What are you trying to pull?” he had burst into the living room, startling Kelsy, who was sitting on the floor putting together a jigsaw puzzle. “I happened to run into Doctor Joshua today,” he said, feeling as if he were playing the part of an irate father in a play. Kelsy’s condition wasn’t nearly so noticeable in the simple cotton smocks that Diane had bought for her, and with the makeup toned down, she looked like a teenager. “He told me that our surrogate mother had missed her last two appointments and that he couldn’t locate her at her old address.”
“What are you shouting about?” Diane stood in the kitchen doorway.
“I thought the reason for her being here was to care for her health.”
As jigsaw pieces scattered, Kelsy scrambled to her feet and hurried to stand beside Diane. He couldn’t tell if he were imagining it but her stomach seemed smaller under the loose blouse. It was smaller. Or did it only seem so?
“He doesn’t like me,” said Kelsy.
“She’s afraid of Doctor Joshua,” explained Diane, putting an arm around Kelsy’s shoulders. “We were going to find another doctor, one with more understanding, but we’ve been so busy shopping and—”
“We can’t have her living here—sleeping on the couch, taking up all your time.”
“The couch, I’ve been meaning to mention it to you. I think it’d be a good idea if we set the guest bed up again in the smaller bedroom.”
“But that’s the nursery. It’s all fixed up.”
“Of course it is—it will be. But it’s important for Kelsy to be comfortable.”
He felt that he stood at a crossroads of sorts, yet how could he be certain that the bulge under Kelsy’s smock was really diminished? And if it was, how did one explain it without sprawling over into the kinds of ideas that only crazy people believed in? He only knew that under the murky surface of doing one’s duty and living up to one’s responsibility to one’s fellow man, he hated her, with all the hatred of one species for another.
* * * *
The nursery was a pale yellow with large decals of teddy bears in various costumes. Huddled in a shadowy corner was the baby furniture. A mobile of glittering plastic animals hung over the bed and Kelsy was reaching up to touch it with a languid motion. As it spun, a music box tinkled out a tinny melody. She sat against the pillow with knees up, the posture easy for her now that her stomach had flattened. The absorption had been a gradual process which Diane had never mentioned, but Steve had watched each change with fascination, feeling a vague sense of loss. The process had given Kelsy an additional layer of fat so that the drawn-up knees were dimpled and her breasts were scarcely noticeable under the pink shift with its print of clowns and balloons. Her face had grown rounder, fuller, and there was never any makeup on it now. She was smiling an odd, secretive smile, thinking, he supposed, that she’d won. He stepped closer to the doorway; a board squeaked; she saw him.
“You scared me,” she said with a little pout. He could almost be charmed by it; he could see how Diane might be.
“You scared me,” he said with a smile that was only an ironic twist of the lips. “What are you, really?”
She looked at him out of large shining brown eyes and was silent. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Maybe this usurpation was as natural to her as the cuckoo laying its eggs in another bird’s nest.
It seemed equally instinctual when he reached for her, locking his hands around the chubby throat. There was a moment of self-loathing, of unreality before he began to squeeze.
He felt a blow from behind, at first unlocalized until a pain spread through his chest. He fell to the floor, his scrabbling hand confirming the double-looped shape of the handles of Diane’s sewing shears. Warm liquid flooded into his nose and mouth and he felt that he was drowning in lukewarm water, but the substance that dribbled out over his hand was red. His fading consciousness supplied a kind of glowing haze to the figures seated on the bed.
Diane’s expression was both fierce and gentle at once as she looked down on Kelsy’s tousled head cradled against her breast. Somewhere in the background the music box was endlessly droning its mechanical lullaby.
THE BODY IN THE ROCKPIT, by Rufus King
Originally published in The Saint Detective Magazine, October 1955.
She wore shorts well, and the Florida sun had baked her skin to a proper gold. Around her neck, in spite of the informal shorts, she wore a strand of black opals.
The bar
tender asked what her pleasure was. He had dark eyes, appraising eyes that could appraise anything whatever, and almost always it turned out that he was right. He figured the opals were genuine.
“Do you have allasch?” she asked.
“No, but we’ve kümmel. It’s about the same thing.”
“I know, but allasch is richer. More loose. All right, some kümmel, please.”
They were alone in the small shadowy bar, and the traffic of trucks and cars smashed past along Route 7 on its way to Miami or from Miami to the north. It was around three in the afternoon, the Sargasso Sea time for the tavern, before the regulars would get through work and drop in. Her age, the bartender decided, could be almost anything and it wouldn’t matter, but the one thing you could be certain of was that she was loaded, both physically and in the bank.
She dug out a lipstick and went to unnecessary work with it, while the upper fringe of an eye slipped past a compact’s mirror and took in the young cast of his features and his strong, well formed hands. Then down to his hips. Dancing hips. Either that or a boxer’s.
“Are you Spanish?” she asked.
“No, not Spanish,” he said. “Just mixed.”
“Me too. I’m Irish mostly. Black Irish. Have one with me, won’t you?”
“Thank you,” he said. “Are you visiting?”
“Well, no. Not unless you could call it visiting to stay in a house when the owners are gone from it.”
A glance brushed the fingers of her left hand. No rings. No band of white around the sun tan where a ring would have been removed. Not married. Good.
“This house,” he said. “It belongs to some friends?”
“Yes. Dick and Effie Carrington. They go back North for the summer. Michigan. What’s your name?”
“Phil.”
“Honestly? You’d expect something more like Carlos or Arturo. That’s olive you’ve got under your skin, not just sun tan on top of it. Mine’s Stella. Stella Huntering.” She waited to see whether the name registered, meant anything to him, but it didn’t, and she said, “I write.”
“Yes?” Phil was being nicely polite about it. “Books? What’s the name of some of them?”
“Well, Love’s Harbinger was the latest. Your wife may have read it when it ran in Ladies’ Home. Crockman published it this spring.”
“My wife didn’t read it,” Phil explained carefully, “because I am not married. I get it now, though. A friend of mine had a copy of it on her table. You’re pretty famous, Miss Huntering.”
“Well—yes. Call me Stella.”
“All right, Stella. My friend said the book was pretty deep. Are you working on anything now?”
“Yes. It’s why I’m down here during the off season. I wanted to get away from the usual pack of free-loaders that hang around. This house of my friends, it’s on the beach. North of Baker’s Haulover. They call it the Rockpit.”
“It’s nice there.”
“Very nice.”
“Nice people.”
“No people. Not now. Just the blue Atlantic Ocean, my frog fins, and me.”
“Frog fins—You go in for skin diving?”
“I love it.”
“I do a little too. One of the men who drop in here is a professional diver. He got me interested in it. He set me straight on a few things.”
“What things?”
“About the sharks mostly, and barracudas. And blood. I wanted no part of them. He says there are two kinds of sharks that will attack a man who isn’t bleeding from a wound. They’re the tiger and the hammerhead. Of course all sharks will attack anything that loses blood under water, whether it’s man or fish. A barracuda, he says, will also attack a man at night even without any loss of blood. Barracudas feed at night. One funny tiling he said about the blood.”
“What?”
“He said a shark can instantly sense it. It can sense the smallest amount and will attack at once, even if it’s from such a minor wound as a shaving cut. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but it’s interesting.” She seemed to be lapsing into a world of private thought.
“Isn’t this bar pretty much out of your territory?” Phil said.
“I like to drive around. I think best when I’m driving around and I like to drop in on new places. Let’s repeat, shall we?”
Phil poured repeats, saying, “You’ll get me tight. Do you come South often?”
“No. I don’t know much about Florida. It’s been Jamaica, mostly, or Capri. I’d like to know more about it around here, though.”
“I should think,” Phil said, “that would be easy.”
“No, it isn’t. I feel foolish going around alone to clubs and places at night. It’s the first time I’ve holed in, really.”
“Gets lonesome, doesn’t it?” He went on, professionally formal, “Or does your work occupy your time?”
She put a twenty on the bar. Phil made change. She left a fifty-cent tip. She said, “Sure I get lonesome.”
“We shut down at two in the morning,” Phil said.
* * * *
Was it love? Phil tried very honestly to figure it out. She had knocked him cold, with her Madonna face that could melt lava, while her fingers were cool and strongly soft as ice cream. Either you played the field or you stopped playing the field, and when you did stop it was like this and who wanted it? He did.
He’d done it for a week now, taking her every place, and it looped him silly to realize that he loved her more than any girl he had ever loved in his life, which was plenty. She was in his very rosy regard, a star with a halo on it, a statue in rare marble from his family’s homeland. Because you could trust her. She asked nothing of you and she said yes to even the slightest thing. Another drink? Yes. Some skin diving? Yes. Home? Yes. She said it honestly too.
With every honest, beautiful gesture she made, his admiration and wonder grew. Passion was there as well. Oh yes, otherwise he would never have bothered about her and got himself into this emotional stew that cooked up to how nuts he truly was about her.
Several afternoons later, when the doldrums as usual were blanketing the tavern, Phil again was alone, with the exception of one stranger. Phil’s thoughts were warmly boxed around Stella. She wasn’t going to show up because she’d flown to Nassau to join the Carringtons for a few days. They were the birds who had lent her the rockpit near Haulover and were taking a Caribbean cruise on their yacht. Stella’s absence was killing him.
Indifferently he sized the stranger up, indifferently because his thoughts were locked so fast around Stella. The guy would be around his own age, about his size, but heavier built. Good looking in an open way, with that curly hair that the broads most certainly would fall for—and probably had—in shoals.
Phil went automatically into his line.
“Are you just down for a while?”
“For a while. Fix one for yourself while you’re at it.”
“Thank you.”
One of the regulars came in, a very lovely fulsome redhead with eyes like great big emeralds. She sat down at that end of the bar which the regulars called the family end and said, “Hello, Phil.”
“Hello, Dora.”
He opened a Schlitz for her without asking and finished pouring a B &B for himself. “Boy, do I need this.”
“Don’t tell me it’s already phffft.”
“No, but she flew over to Nassau this morning.”
“Coming back?”
“Hell yes, it’s only for a couple of days.” Phil moved along the bar to the stranger, using the usual gambit to boost the dead afternoon sales. “What’s your name? I’d like you to meet Miss Bernhold.”
“Wiggen. Jerry Wiggen.”
“Mine’s Phil.” They shook hands. The guy’s hand was cold, in spite of the mercury outside hitting ninety. “Come on down to this end and join us.”
“Glad to.”
“Dora, meet Jerry. Jerry, this is Dora.”
The three of them settled do
wn to a spot of midafternoon drinking. They each bought a couple of rounds and, after a couple of hot contests for drinks on the pinball machine, Jerry had stopped being a tourist and begun to be one of the family. “Are you staying near here?” Dora asked him.
“No, I’m over at the beach. Near Baker’s Haulover.”
Phil’s hands stopped still in the mixing of another round while the coincidence struck him, because it had to be just plain coincidence, and Dora was saying, “How come you landed out here in the boondocks?”
“I—” Jerry emptied his glass before going on. “I’ve heard about it. From a friend. Told me it was a pleasant stopover for a quiet quarter of an hour. I wanted to check.”
Phil had finished mixing the new round. He had changed his own drink from B & B and had almost filled a glass with slugs of straight brandy.
“Watch it, stinkpot,” Dora said to him, eying the brandy. Then she said to Jerry, “Phil can’t take it without seeing Stella every minute of the day and, I might add, the night. She’s had him hopped to the ears for the past week, and this Hamlet act is because she’s ditched him for a couple of days in Nassau.”
“Shut up,” said Phil.
“Stella?” said Jerry.
“Yes,” Dora said. “The notable Miss Stella Huntering. No bargain-basement stuff for our Phil boy, nothing but the stars. Maybe you’ve heard of her? She writes.”
“Ah, yes—Love’s Harbinger.”
It was almost a sigh of satisfaction, the way the stranger said it, because he was a stranger again, withdrawn from the circle of the family.
Wiggen walked out through the shady quiet and into the smash of sun and traffic sound. He got into a convertible and joined the Miami-bound traffic, driving with the precision of a clever automaton.
He couldn’t kill her in the house.
That much Jerry knew. He had a curiously devious mind which lay stashed behind the open candor of his face. It was a mind well stocked with knowledgeable brilliance, all set for whenever he cared to use it.
The Murder Megapack Page 38
