A Tan and Sandy Silence

by John D. MacDonald

  “If you think there was.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then there never was such a girl.”

  “Poor Carl. Do you always get what you want?”

  “I usually get what I think I want.”

  She tilted her shoulders one way, her hips the other. Her look was challenge. “And sometimes you find out you didn’t really want it after all. Me, too. Win a little, lose a little, huh?”

  “If you wanted Brego, you’d still have him. I wouldn’t have gotten to say more than two words to you.”

  “Like I was saying when we were so rudely interrupted, you want to come into my house? It’s hot out here when the wind quits.”

  So we went in, and I wondered why I could find no trace of a Canadian accent. She had to be Lisa Dissat.

  Eleven

  Though the plantings were different, the patio furniture of a different style and arrangement, the pool and the cold water shower head were placed just as in my rented garden. I went to the shower and turned it on and sluiced off the sand that had caked thickly on my sweaty back and on my left side where I had rolled to get up quickly. The woman stood and watched me and then took a big, striped beach towel from a stone bench and brought it to me as I stepped out of the spray and turned the shower off.

  As I dried myself, I realized how sexually aware of her I had become. Physical readiness. All her honey-brown curves and cushions were there, appropriate, ready for more.

  It is such an old old thing, the pattern of male conflict that wins the female. It is deep in the blood and the secretions, a gut knowledge. We are mammals still caught up in all the midbrain mechanisms of survival. The bison female stood long ago and watched the males thud their brute heads together, tear up the sod with their hooves, watched the loser lope heavily away, and then she waited patiently to be mounted by the victor. The stronger the male, the stronger the calves, and the better protected the calves would be during the long months of helplessness. The victorious male, turning from battle to the prize of battle, would be physiologically ready to mate her and have no question about her readiness.

  I knew the musky readiness of the woman. She told me in the way she stood, in the way she looked at me, in the shape of her placid mouth. Maybe ten percent of what we can say to each other is with words, and words can conceal as easily as they can reveal. The rest of it is body language, our cants, tilts, postures, textures.

  And who can prove there is not an actual telepathic signal being transmitted? Tiny electrical discharges occur in the living mind in great and complex profusion. Strong emotion, tautly focused, may send out an impulse so strong it can be read. Hate, fear, anger, joy, lust … these all seem contagious beyond all objective reason. I knew she was so swollen, so moist, so ready, that if I trotted her into the shadowy coolness of the apartment and into her bed, there would be no time or need for foreplay, that she would cling and grind and gasp and within a minute begin to go into a climax.

  The violence had caught us up in the first act of the fleshy ceremony, and I wanted to take that quick, primitive jump so badly I felt hollowed out by the ache of it. Bed was her country. That was where, after the first great surge, she would take command. I would become what she was accustomed to and lose any chance of keeping her off balance. I shook myself like a big tired Labrador after a long swim, balled the damp towel, and flipped it at her face. She moved in her slow sensuous dream, getting her hand partway up before it hit her squarely in the face. It fluttered to the floor.

  “Hey!” she said, frowning. “What’s that for?”

  “Pick it up!”

  “Sure,” she said. She picked the towel up. “What are you sore about? Why are you getting ugly and spoiling the fun?”

  “He was supposed to hammer me to bloody ruin out there. That was supposed to be the fun. Thanks a lot.”

  She came toward me. “Darling, you’ve got it all wrong. I was getting bored with him! I was so glad you came along.”

  “Sure, Mary. Only I know the Bregos of this world. They don’t start anything they don’t think they can win. Their cheap women chouse them into it because they like the blood. You set me up by reacting to me. If you’d cooled it, there’d have been no fight. He was going to smash me around and that was going to turn you on for him, so you’d hustle him into your sack for a quick hump. A little midday entertainment. No thanks.”

  She leaned forward from the waist, face contorting, voice turning to a squalling fishwife. “Goddamn you! You moved in on us with all that crap about me looking like somebody else. You thought I was worth the chance of getting your ass whipped. Don’t slam the gate on the way out, you son of a—”

  Her lips started to say the obvious word, but I had fitted my big right hand to her slender throat, just firmly enough to cut off her wind, not firmly enough to crush any of the tender bones and cartilage. The ball of my thumb reached to the big artery in the side of her throat under the jaw hinge, and my first and middle finger reached to the artery on the left side of her throat.

  Her eyes went wide, and she dropped the towel and put her nails into the back of my hand and my wrist. I pinched the arteries gently, drastically reducing the flow of blood to the brain. It gave her a gray-out to the edge of fainting. Her eyes went out of focus, and her mouth sagged. When I let up, she tried to kick me, so I pinched again. Her arms fell slack to her sides. When I released the pressure, adjusting my hand enough so that she could breathe, she raised her hands and then hung them upon my wrist.

  I smiled at her, pulling her a half-step closer and said, “If you get loud and say nasty things, dear, if you get on my nerves, I can hold you like this, and I can take this free hand and make a big fist like this, and I can give you one little pop right here that will give you a nose three inches wide and a quarter inch high.”

  “Please,” she said in a rusty little voice.

  “You can get a job as a clown. Or you can see if you can find a surgeon willing to try to rebuild it.”

  “Please,” she said again.

  I let go of her and said, “Pick up the towel, love.”

  She coughed and bent and picked it up and backed away. I turned away from her and went to the cottage apartment and pulled the door open and went in. I went to the kitchen alcove and checked the bottle supply. I heard her slide the glass door shut again.

  I fixed some Booth’s with Rose’s lime juice and a dash of bitters, humming softly but audibly. I took my glass over to the couch and sat and smiled at her and said, “Did I ever tell you I read minds?”

  “You must be some kind of a crazy person.” It was not said as an insult. It was said softly, wonderingly.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. “Many messages are coming through. Ah, yes. You are wondering if you can get the hotel management to throw a net over me and get me out of here. No, dear. I think they would believe me instead of you. If they make life difficult, I could go down to the harbor and find your friend Brego and bounce him up and down until he agrees to write out a personal history of your touching romance and sign it. Then I could go find your husband and peddle it to him. It would cut the heart out of any alimony payments.”

  “I just want you to—”

  “Where and when did you meet Brego?”

  “On the beach. Over a week ago. My neck hurts.”

  “Of course it hurts a little! How could I do that without giving you a sore neck? Let me see. What else is in your mind? You’re wondering if I’m going to lay you and if I’ll be nicer to you afterward. The answer to both questions, dear, is: time will tell.”

  She went over to the kitchen bar. Ice clinked into a glass. She came back with a drink and sat on a hassock five feet away from me. Her eyes looked better. Her confidence was coming back. She squared her shoulders, tugged the bikini top and bottom into better adjustment, tilted her head, and risked a meager smile. “I guess all that lunch talk about land investments was a lot of crap, huh?”

  “What makes you think
so? It’s what I do.”

  “You don’t act like it’s what you do. Like the way you were with Carl and with me, Gavin. I mean … well, it’s like you enjoyed hurting.”

  “Well … let’s suppose there’s a man with a good idea where a new interstate is going or a new jetport, and suppose we teamed up, and you had some nice long weekends with him, and he clued you about where to buy the raw land. Mary, I just couldn’t stand having you get tricky with me about something like that. I wouldn’t want to worry about you selling that information to somebody else. I’d have to have you so trained for the work that if I just stare at you for ten seconds, you start to have the cold sweats and the gags. Hurting is purely business. I guess I enjoy anything that helps make money.”

  She thought that over, sipping, frowning. “But it’s not as if I was going to work with you, Mr. Lee.”

  “Time will tell.”

  “You keep saying that. Well, I’m not going to work with you or for you. For that kind of work you’re talking about, what you want is some kind of a hooker, it seems to me.”

  “Does it seem like that to you? Really? I wouldn’t say that. You’re built for the work. You have just enough cheap invitation in the way you look and the way you handle yourself to keep a man from wasting a lot of time on unnecessary preliminaries.”

  “Now wait one goddamn minute—”

  “Are you still with Brego? No. Then shut up.”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t get sore.”

  “Fifty bucks makes you a hooker. For five hundred you’re a call girl. Five thousand makes you a courtesan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind. But when we move the decimal point one more place, your end of the arrangement is fifty thousand. That makes you a career woman.”

  The pointed tongue moved slowly across the underlip. She swallowed and said, “I’ve got my own thing going, thanks.”

  “Alimony is a cheap hustle.”

  “It all depends.”

  “On how much he’s got? On the evidence? On the law? It has to be a cheap hustle, because when there’s enough money involved, there’s more profit from going in some other direction.”

  I had wanted to test just how deep the hardness went. Her eyes changed. She slopped some of her drink onto her bare knees, wiped it off with her hand. “That’s crazy talk.”

  “Not for careful people who’ve got the right contacts.”

  “For me, no thanks. I just wouldn’t have the nerve, Gav.”

  I got up and moved around, carrying my drink. I did not know where to take it from there. I could guess that she had been ordered to keep to herself in Grenada but had finally gotten so bored she had become reckless and picked up Brego. Now the Brego game had mushroomed into something a lot less comfortable for her. If she could live quietly at the inn for the length of time she was supposed to, she could get away with it. She wasn’t too much shorter than Mary or too much younger. Dark hair. All American women look alike to the help.

  I hadn’t wanted to let myself think about Mary. From the physical description the housekeeper had given Jeannie Dolan, this woman was the Canadian, Lisa Dissat. If she was here, Mary was dead. I had the beginnings of an idea. I went back to the conversations at lunch. Neither the first name of her supposed husband nor her Stateside residence had come up.

  After mental rehearsal and rewrite I sat once again and looked placidly at her and said, “The way you spell that last name is bee-are-oh-el-el?”

  “Yes.”

  “Kind of unusual. It rings a bell someplace. Mary Broll. Mary Broll. It’s been bothering me ever since I met you in the bar.”

  “Why bother with it? Want me to fresh up your drink?”

  “Got it!”

  “Got what?”

  “Where’d you register from? One buck will get you five it’s the Fort Lauderdale area. Sure! We had a syndicate set up a couple of years back and we wanted a builder in the Lauderdale area who could put up a hotel and marina complex in a hurry. Heavy-set fellow name of Broll. Big. Not old. Frank? Wally? Jerry?… Harry! Damn right. Harry Broll.”

  “Maybe there’s more Brolls than you know, Gav.”

  “Bring me your purse, honey.”

  “What?”

  “Go get your purse. Your pocketbook. Your handbag. Bring it to dear old Gavin Lee so he can look at your ID, dear.”

  She gave me a broad, bright smile, and her teeth chattered for a moment before she got herself under control. “Okay. My secret is out. You are speaking of the man I used to love.”

  “How long have you been married to him?”

  “… Nearly four years.”

  “Any kids? No? Lucky. Kids seem to get the rough end of the stick. Bring me the purse, honey.”

  “Why should I? I told you, didn’t I?”

  “Honey, if we stop getting along, we’re going to have to hurt your neck a little until we get squared away.”

  “Please. It makes me sick to my stom—”

  “Get the purse!”

  She brought it to me. I found the billfold. I examined the identification. I looked at the signature on the driver’s license. I knew my Mary had signed it, and I knew, looking at it, that she was dead.

  “Honey, go over to that desk and take a piece of paper and sign your name on it. Mary D. Broll. And bring it back here to me.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I am the fellow who sat across the table from Mary D. Broll at Le Dome of the Four Seasons in Lauderdale two years ago last month. There were about ten of us at that dinner. Harry was making the big gesture, trying to sucker us into letting him build for us. I spent the evening trying to make his wife. She wouldn’t give me a clue. I always have a better memory for the ones who get away. Here’s her signature right here. Go over there and forge it for me, honey.”

  “Who are you?” she demanded, close to tears.

  I gave her a broad, egg-sucking smile. “Me? I am the fellow who all of a sudden owns himself a whole woman, right from dandruff to bunions and everything in between. Broads like you don’t play games like this unless there’s money in it. And now it’s our money, dear. I am the fellow who is going to get it all out of you, and I am going to beat on you until you convince me there’s nothing left to tell. Me? Hell, baby, I am your new partner.”

  “Please. Please. I can’t tell you—”

  “The little lady in this corner is getting one chance and one chance only, to go over to the desk and sign her real, true, legal name to a piece of paper and bring it back to the gentleman. And if it turns out that it is not her real true name, it is going to be one of those long afternoons. We’re going to have to stuff a towel in the little lady’s mouth so the screaming won’t spoil anybody’s vacation.”

  She walked to the desk, her back very straight. She wrote on a piece of paper and brought it back and handed it to me and began to weep. She covered her face and ran for the bedroom. Damned few women look well from a rear elevation, running away from you in a bikini. She was not one of them. She had written her name neatly. It was a schoolgirl neatness. Lisa Dissat.

  I slowly crumpled the sheet of hotel paper. I felt tired. I got up and walked back to the bedroom where she lay upon the unchanged sheets she and Brego had stained, sweated, and rumpled. She was on her side, knees hiked up, clenched fists tucked under her chin. She made sucking sounds, whining sounds. Fetal agony.

  In the better interrogations there is always a good guy and a bad guy. I had been the bad guy. Time to change roles. I went into the bathroom and took a hand towel and soaked it in cold water. I wrung it out, took it to the bed, sat on the side of the bed, and cupped my hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward me. She resisted and made protest sounds, then let herself roll onto her back.

  I hitched closer and gently swabbed her face and forehead. Her eyes went wide with astonishment. The last thing she had expected was gentleness. She snuffled. Her face looked touchingly young. Tears had washed away the challenge and the har
dness.

  “Have you got anything with you to prove your name is Lisa Dissat?”

  “N-no.”

  “And you’re pretending to be Mary Broll?”

  “Yes. But I—”

  “Does Broll know you’re impersonating his wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you having an affair with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’s the real Mary Broll?”

  “… I don’t know.”

  “Lisa?”

  “I didn’t know what he was going to do! I didn’t!”

  “Lisa!”

  “I couldn’t have changed anything.”

  “Just say she’s dead, Lisa. Go ahead.”

  “I didn’t know he—”

  “Lisa! Say it!”

  “She’s dead. Okay. She’s dead.”

  “Harry killed her?”

  She looked startled. “Oh, no!”

  “Who killed her?”

  “Please, Gavin. If he ever knew I told anybody—”

  “You’re in a real box, dear. You can worry about what’s going to happen in the future, or you can worry about what’s going to happen in the next ten minutes.”

  “I don’t even know if he really meant to.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “… Paul. Paul Dissat. He is … my first cousin. We worked for the same man. In Quebec. Mr. Dennis Waterbury. Paul got me the job there. I’m a secretary. I was a secretary. Paul is an accountant. He is … very trusted. I think he might be crazy. Really crazy. Maybe he really planned to kill Harry’s wife. I don’t know. I don’t even know if he knows.”

  “How much money is involved?”

  “An awful lot. Really, an awful lot of money.”

  “Stop crying.”

  “I want to talk about it, and I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been scared for so long! I want you to make me tell you all of it, but I’m afraid to tell you.”

  Twelve

  It was a very long afternoon for both of us. But longer for Lisa Dissat, because from time to time she tried to get cute. But the more she tried it, the more conditioned she became, and the more quickly she would correct herself.