Touch of Danger

by James Jones

  Everybody had used her in her life. She had been used, and cheated, by just about everybody she had ever come in contact with. Now, somebody else had used and cheated her in the final, worst way possible.

  And I had been worrying about Pete Gruner getting it.

  “Perhaps you had better take us home,” Chantal said quietly from behind me.

  “Yes. Come on,” I said.

  Well, I had just saved myself several hundred dollars of Kronitis’s retainer money, I thought. I gave Chantal a bleakly bitter smile.

  Down by the water a pompous little man with a watermelon paunch was taking things over. He was a doctor, apparently. He motioned the crowd back, and said something to two big fishermen. The fishermen went obediently into the water to haul Marie out for him.

  I suddenly wanted to go down there and slug him in his pompous paunch and then break his jaw for him.

  “Come on,” I said, “let’s go.”

  “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  We passed the chief of police and two of his young men. They were carrying their inevitable stretcher and blankets. The chief nodded to me. He had started smiling warily at me since Pekouris had adopted me.

  I thought he must think I was doing a bang-up job of being around to find his bodies for him.

  Chapter 40

  WE DIDN’T TALK IN THE HORSECAB. I was in a state of semi-shock. Chantal was sensitive enough to know that and kept her mouth shut.

  I couldn’t get over it about Marie. I couldn’t come out of it. I was in that state of straining disbelief, where you try to reconstruct the sequence of reality. You want to make events that have already flowed past you in the time river take a different pattern, so they will cause a different ending, which itself has already flowed past you into inevitability. I called it the If Only Blues.

  If only I had gone out with her when she.

  If only I hadn’t got hurt and stayed in the.

  It was a fruitless process. But I couldn’t come out of it. Your language got jerky, battering against that brick wall of passed reality. You didn’t finish sentences.

  At the house Chantal set out a full bottle of brandy on the polished, heavy table in the stone living room.

  I gave her a silly grin and said, “Thanks but I’m going back to Scotch. It’s better for me for long-range imbibing.”

  She poured and downed two quick brandies for herself, then got a Scotch bottle and put it by the brandy bottle, softly. “And you’re going to do some long-range imbibing?”

  “You understand she was killed, don’t you?” I said. “Murdered?”

  She stared at me. “No. I didn’t understand that.”

  “She wasn’t hit by any shark,” I said. “She was hit by a boat. Which then turned and came back and hit her a second time—probably as she was struggling in the water with her amputated, or nearly amputated, arm. Which arm she had thrown up, for protection, to ward off the first pass. Probably, she saw the second pass coming, and was able to jerk her head out of the way, but in doing so bobbed her shoulder up into the propeller.”

  Chantal didn’t say anything.

  “That’s the way I piece it together,” I said. “From the evidence.”

  “God,” she said, in a long sigh.

  After a moment she put her glass down. She picked up the brandy bottle as if it seemed too heavy to lift.

  “You’re sure it was a boat.”

  “No question.”

  “And you’re sure they came back, and hit her a second time?”

  “No question, either. A double-motored boat couldn’t have hit her on both sides at once just like that. Too far apart. Even a double outboard couldn’t.”

  She downed the third brandy.

  “Whoever killed her is also the person or persons who killed Girgis,” I said.

  “I think you’ve got murder on the brain,” Chantal said in a low voice.

  “If I find Girgis’s murderer, I’ll find Marie’s. I know that.”

  “You thought a lot of her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t sleep with her, though. If that’s what you mean.”

  “Then you were the only one who didn’t.”

  “She was young. When you’re that young, and Marie, you don’t realize you’ll survive the anguish of being young. That it will pass and you’ll survive it.”

  “Survive it,” Chantal said. “But survive it only to gain another anguish.”

  “But of a different quality. Less intense. One that you can live with, and know you can survive.”

  “Sometimes, I wonder.”

  “No you don’t. You’ve never wondered for a second.”

  She picked up the brandy bottle and looked at it and waggled it, thoughtfully. “Aren’t you going to have a drink?”

  “Sure. I’ll have one in a minute,” I said. “I think I’ll have quite a few.”

  She sighed, and brushed her hair back with the back of her hand. “I don’t blame you.”

  “She got cheated again,” I said. “Marie always got cheated by somebody. The really young almost always get cheated. That’s how they pay their dues. They don’t like it. I don’t like it. There’s nothing anybody can do about it. And now somebody, somebody or other, has cheated her again. She never got her chance to learn you can survive youth.”

  “I suppose this has become a vendetta for you, now; hasn’t it?”

  “It sure has,” I said.

  “I think I’ll leave you down here,” Chantal said. She lifted her hip off the edge of the big table where she’d been sitting, still waggling the brandy bottle, and studying it. “But I’ll be upstairs. If you want me for anything. Anything at all,” she added.

  “Thanks. I’d like to be by myself a while.”

  “I understand.” She went to the stairs, and started up with the brandy bottle.

  I got up and got myself a glass. I got a big one. I filled the crystal tumbler two-thirds full of straight whisky. I didn’t want any ice in it. I wanted it to burn.

  I took the whisky and walked over with it to the lighted portrait of Chantal as a young woman, and stood looking at it and put down two hefty belts of the Scotch. Chantal must already have been three or four years older than Marie, when this portrait was done. The whisky burned, all the way down, satisfyingly.

  I turned around and saw she was still standing on the stair, looking at me looking at her portrait. When she saw me look at her, she said simply, “Good night,” and went up one step. Then she stopped. She came back down three steps.

  “I’m afraid that I think I’m falling in love with you, Lobo,” she said, and smiled, and ran up the stairs. I listened to her go on up.

  I took my glass back to the table and reloaded and sat down in one of the big chairs.

  There wasn’t any question in my mind that she’d been knocked off. There wasn’t any question in my mind that whoever had done her in had also done in Girgis. But from that point on it began to go haywire. Just like with Girgis’s case. I couldn’t read it.

  On the surface of it, it had to be tied in with the hashish racket. But I believed the local hash trade wasn’t important enough to kill one person over. And now there were two killings.

  That seemed to lay it right back at the feet of my young friend Chuck.

  I was sure he was perfectly capable of it. But why. Why Marie, too?

  I didn’t think Jim Kirk was a killer. I didn’t believe he could so wantonly do in a young looker like Marie. Kirk appreciated ladies as much as I did. Certainly he wouldn’t kill two people over this petty hashish racket. That brought me right back to where I’d started.

  It had to be a speedboat that had done her in. Kirk had one. But Chuck and Steve had one too, I remembered. A boat as slow and hard to maneuver and with such a deep draft as the Daisy Mae couldn’t have done it. I had checked her face carefully, and had not found a single scratch or abrasion like a deep draft boat would certainly hav
e made. A speedboat could skim along over the surface like a razor blade cutting through face hair.

  But just about everybody on the damned island had a speedboat.

  Maybe there was something in this heroin business. They were all so close-mouthed about it. Could there be some kind of big heroin operation going on in conjunction with, or even totally separate from, the hashish? Going along parallel to it, separately, but involving the same people? Personal relations were always so insanely hard to unravel. They were never simple. Mainly because everybody lied.

  The heroin business was something I was going to have to look at closer. I could start tomorrow with Pekouris. He was so circumspect, Pekouris. Maybe he knew something. And I could talk to Pete Gruner.

  I got up and went over and reloaded my crystal tumbler another time. She had very nice glassware in her medieval fortress, Chantal. What had she said? Falling in love with me?

  I knew one thing. I was going to get the son of a bitch if it took me ten years, and every nickel I could scrape together.

  I sat back down. I was inflicted with—penetrated by, as they say—a mental picture sequence, like a series of movie shots, of Marie’s last moments in the water. It was as if some fanatic automatic button pusher ran it over and over.

  I was the man strapped in the chair and being tortured. She probably didn’t even know what was happening when they made the first pass. Probably thought it was an accident. Then, suddenly, no arm, or nearly none. Would she even have been able to take care of it, in the water? Hurt bad, like that? Did she know about pressure points? How to keep swimming with a severed artery? Probably she would have died from the first pass anyway. The best bet would have been to use the line from her speargun for a tourniquet. Would she have thought of that? But by then they would have turned and been coming back. Did she see them far off? Or only up close, at the last moment? Maybe she thought they were coming back to help her? Then they didn’t. She had had the presence of mind to jerk her head aside. Did she know by then?

  Over and over. My mad Nazi SS colonel with the red armband wouldn’t stop pushing the button.

  But the whisky was beginning to bring me down off it a little. Slowly my mind stopped yawing and plunging around out of control. And after that I just sat.

  And then it all began to well up in me. All the stuff I had tried so hard to keep down so long. I had known a moment was coming, sometime, when it would all come out.

  Apparently, the moment was right now. It poured down over my head, and over me, like the contents of a tenement dweller’s slop bucket over the head of an unsuspecting pedestrian.

  The little Greek man in Paris; my divorce; my life, and the virtual dissatisfaction it had become; my bad marriage; my virtual estrangement from my daughters; the enormous sums I didn’t have and was having to lay out anyway to keep the whole mob in the style to which they wanted to become accustomed. It went back a lot further even: to my partner and his death in Chicago in 1955; to the move from Denver two years before; to my subsequent heroization in Chicago after I’d caught and killed his murderer; to my whirlwind courtship, and my involvement in Chicago that followed it; to the move to New York five years after that; to the grim years in New York that followed.

  There was no one spot, one moment, that I could point my finger to. That was the bitch. No one act, no one decision was bad. No one major move or change was wrong. And yet here I was, sitting here, just the same.

  Why had we gone into the business in the first place? We wanted adventure. We were young, and we wanted action not contemplation. Natural enough. We moved to Chicago simply because there wasn’t enough to keep us occupied in Denver, and we were getting bigger. But my partner wouldn’t have been killed, if we hadn’t gone into the business. Probably, he wouldn’t have been killed if we had stayed in Denver. It was my three months as a Chicago hero—“PRIVATE EYE SHOOTS MAD DOG KILLER IN FLAMING GUN BATTLE”—that introduced me to my wife.

  The three months as local hero put me up there. And I couldn’t stand it. After Chicago, I always left a place for the right reasons morally, and the wrong reasons financially. At that, it took me five years, a marriage, a wife and one daughter later, to leave Chicago. Joanie tagged along, papoose on her back, reluctantly.

  Probably I should have given in to her and become a corporation lawyer then. That was when that corporation lawyer fight began. And it had never ended. I could have made the switch then. I had all the opportunities. I could have made it later. The opportunities didn’t stop. Probably, I should have given up, and settled in, and become a stuffy whatchama-call-it, living off of other people’s fat.

  Because being morally right didn’t get me anything. People didn’t admire you when they didn’t know you were a failure by choice, for moral reasons. They didn’t admire you even when they knew it. They thought you were a nut. Or a fool.

  Instead, I threw it all up, and moved to New York, and hung out my little sign, and started over.

  But I couldn’t stand Chicago. I couldn’t stand the big-shots. I couldn’t stand what you had to do to be one. Also it was boring. And I was haunted by my partner, and his death. Jeff Watson. Who was Jeff Watson? Who ever heard of him? Jeff Watson, Wasp. Another Wasp. Another Wasp from Denver. Denver in the Heartland. Jeff Watson, another Wasp from Denver in the Heartland. Shot dead by a doped-up Negro gunman on South State Street in Chicago. That was back before it was even fashionable.

  I never should have sent him out. I should have gone myself. The guy wouldn’t have killed me. I wouldn’t have trusted him. Like Jeff Watson Wasp from Denver in the Heartland did.

  And in New York? Deterioration. The life of Lobo Davies, in a word. Deterioration, here. Deterioration, there. Water, water, everywhere. East Hampton for expensive summers. Living above my means to be bored by the expensive rich. Deterioration. An apartment in the East Sixties. Deterioration. Two lovely young daughters totally estranged from their father by their mother, going to ritzy schools, hunting the rich husband.

  Deterioration.

  Fortunately, my wife had fallen heir to a little money from a maternal uncle. After Chicago.

  I got up and got myself another crystal-tumblerful of whisky.

  They weren’t even hippies, in revolt. Sometimes I wished they’d run away and be hippies. At least, then, I could go and find them. I knew how to do that. But not them. Nothing but Princetons and Harvards around the house. And not your ordinary Princetons and Harvards, but your Groton’s and St. Paul’s Princetons and Harvards. Deterioration.

  Deterioration in everything but the work. And even that was a joke. Lobo Davies, Finder of Lost Children. Lobo Davies, nursemaid to the hairy. Find your children cut-rate and quicker, with Frank “Lobo” Davies—another Wasp from Denver the Mile-High City in the Heartland of the West.

  Sometimes I felt all the Spades and Jews and Puerto Ricans, Japs and Chinese on the West Coast, Wetbacks from the Texas border, had all formed a circle, and stood and pointed their finger at Frank Davies and hollered, “Wasp!”

  Every con-man and teen-age grifter in the world pointing in shame and hollering “Wasp!” with one hand, and reaching for my pocket with the other.

  Because I owed it to them. They said.

  Poor old Lobo Davies, who couldn’t help it if his family had been in America before the Revolution. Who was ready to apologize for being born White, but couldn’t find anyone to listen.

  I was ashamed and embarrassed for having been brought up not to lie and steal. Nobody cared.

  Once I had had some vague hazy ideal about helping people and having some fun and notoriety at the same time.

  Instead, here I was. A rather vulgar Wasp private eye descended to breaking the fingers of little Greek men in shabby hotels.

  I couldn’t even protect the only bit of true gentility and integrity I’d found here, in their lousy country. Couldn’t even save it from being chopped to shark meat, by some vicious speedboat’s propellers, in the azure Grecian sea.

  Vanity. I
was willing to admit that. But there wasn’t even any satisfaction even in that. Vanity had also got me moving in the first place. I couldn’t even get any relief even in that. Vanity giveth; and vanity taketh away.

  Who cared?

  Only Lobo Davies. Lobo Davies down in Greece, in the sumptuous medieval fortress living room of a genuine bona-fide Countess he was studding for, sitting in a big deep chair, drinking her Chivas Regal Scotch by the crystal-tumblerful. Hot damn.

  I got up and put my crystal tumbler carefully on the heavy polished table. What had she said? She was falling in love with me? That was a hot laugh.

  I wandered up the old stone staircase and down the old stone corridor upstairs, to her bedroom. She was asleep, brandy bottle at bedside. I shook her shoulder gently until Chantal opened her eyes and looked at me.

  “No, don’t move over.” I coughed.

  “How would you like to hear the story of my life?” I said.

  I pulled up the chair.

  Chapter 41

  I TOLD HER MOST OF IT. I didn’t tell her about the little Greek in Paris. I figured she might know the man or his family, and anyway it was Freddy Tarkoff’s private business with me. But I told her about the big Spade on Chicago’s South Side. The one who killed my partner, and that I went down into the South Side after, myself. The police were looking for him and couldn’t find him. I found him because I had close friends on the South Side. I told her there was one moment when I probably could have saved his life. For about thirty seconds during our discussions he’d been about ready to give it up and turn himself over, if I’d asked him. I didn’t ask him. Instead, I let him think he’d fooled me into trusting him. I did it deliberately. So he went on sweet-mouthing me, with his slippery mean eyes. Until he thought he could get the drop on me, like he had my partner. When he went for the gun he had hidden in the back of his belt, I was all ready and waiting. The luridly described “FLAMING GUN BATTLE” of the headlines was only three shots really, one from his gun that went past my chest as I turned sideways, and two from mine.