Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

  “Mr. Jacob Quirk will be getting tired soon.”

  “We should have gone to my cabin,” Jane said with a gentle sigh. “I didn’t think it would be this nice, Steve. I didn’t know what to expect from you, really. You see, when I knew you’d be on this boat, it became important for me to see you, to talk to you. This part of it wasn’t necessary, I suppose. This part of it was an afterthought.”

  “After what?” I asked, amused by her flight of ideas, her honest pitch. “When did it hit you?”

  “After we began to talk, up in the bar.” She squeezed closer to me and leaned over to kiss me. It took a long time for the end of it, and I let her have it her own way, forgetting about Quirk for a while. Then she said, “Before the knee under the table, Steve. It actually happened when I was decent. I liked you. Do you believe me?”

  “I’d be a nut to doubt you.”

  “Even after what Nancy’s father told you about me?”

  “You want the truth?”

  “Always,” she whispered. “Never lie to me, Steve.”

  “The truth is that I don’t know what to think,” I said. “Old man Scott said you were easy. You know what he called you?”

  Jane didn’t say for a while. The answer came as softly as a whispered sigh. “A nympho? Was that it?”

  “That was exactly it.”

  “And I’ve lived up to his description?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I don’t feel at all sure of you. There’s more to you, Jane. There’s enough more to make me think Scott is a goddamned liar.”

  In a way I was leveling with her because it was impossible for me to analyze my deepest feelings. She was good in bed and attractive away from the mattress, a girl with hidden levels of feeling and thinking. In my book, the cheapies and the pushovers were most often the emotional deadbeats, the maniac dames without a scheme of life, without the strong understructures. I had met a few of them in the recent past. They were limited machines for the most part. They were women who reacted like poorly contrived automatons. They were bad motors in bad cars. You could only shift them from slow to fast, but the gears were missing. You could put the clutch in and keep them in motion, but only on one set of gears, straight into high and no thinking in between. And Jane? How was she different? It hit me that she had a more basic appeal than all the others. If she was sick, she wasn’t too far off the beam. She would be a hysterical sort of psychopath, the kind of woman who would erupt under special stimuli. The way she was beginning to crack now.

  She began to sob.

  Don’t mind me,” she said. “I do this when I’m happy, too, Steve. I’m happy because you’re here with me and it feels good. I mean the fact that you don’t think me half as bad as I am. And the fact that I can talk to you and have you believe me.” The sobbing rose until it became a painful sound, so close to me and yet so far away. She was lost in the deep pit of her personal disturbance. She would come out again when it had passed, when she was ready to tell me what was really boiling around in her mind. I held her tight to me and tried to comfort her. Because I was beginning to like her.

  And after a while she came out of it and asked for a cigarette and said, “You’re a good man, Steve. And you’re patient. But it’s going to pay off for you, because I have a lot to tell you about Nancy Scott.”

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. “You and Nancy are old friends?”

  “We went to college together. We were really close, Steve, because we were interested in the same sort of things. Nancy and I studied art and dramatics. We roomed together, all the way through college. We dated together and shared secrets. All of which should add up to the fact that I know Nancy pretty well.”

  She backtracked through her schoolgirl days, letting me see the pictures of the past in good perspective. She was clever and expert at this sort of thing. She could build images with words and project her ideas with clarity and conviction. Nancy Scott came alive for me, complete in every detail. Nancy was twenty-three and pert and pretty. Nancy was stacked. Nancy had melted the marrow of a gross of Yale boys who yapped and yodeled around her every week-end during her college days. And after that, when Nancy went out into the world to paint her interesting oils, she was once again besieged by a great and goggle-eyed gang of ardent boys of all types, from Greenwich Village to the upper-strata art cliques on the Fifty-Seventh Street belt. Nancy played the field. She was neither loose nor hide bound morally. She gave when she liked the man, and was known to have fractured at least three eligible wooers during the immediate period after her college days. Nancy never forsook her studies. She was a serious painter, a student of Huchero, the great modern.

  “How old is Huchero?” I asked.

  “Too old.” Jane laughed gently. “If you mean what I think you mean. Huchero is well past sixty, a charming character, but hardly a menace.”

  “He sounds like a foreigner.”

  “Not exactly. Huchero is a Puerto Rican. Never call a Puerto Rican a foreigner, or you’ll find your head rolling in a convenient sewer. The Puerto Ricans are proud of their Americanism. They keenly resent any implication that they exist as second-class citizens. Huchero lived for a long time in New York, and he’s as much a native New Yorker as Jimmy Walker ever hoped to be.”

  “He’s in New York now?”

  “He returned to the island a few years ago,” Jane said. “He wanted to spend his last years back where he was born. Huchero lives in Santurce now, right on the beach. One of the cutest homes in the San Juan area. I’ll take you there for a visit, Steve. Are you interested in art at all?”

  “I’m a Sunday painter, Jane. A cornball, but art has always fascinated me, ever since I thought I could startle the world as a kid by copying cartoons of Popeye the sailor.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Not right now,” I said. “I want you to finish the Nancy Scott story. When did she leave New York?”

  “About a year ago.”

  “Are you sure?” I was beginning to burn a little. Old man Scott had called me in on a comparatively cold trail. He had lied to me. He had told me that Nancy disappeared only three months ago. That left nine months or more of perfect vacuum. In the business of skip-tracing, nine months can mean the end of the line. Nine months backward in time could prove a dead end. Nancy had a head start away from her old man, a long run into the black hole of seclusion that could put her name in the file of “permanents,” like Judge Crater and others who were swallowed up and lost forever.

  “I’m quite positive Nancy left her father a year ago,” Jane said.

  “Maybe she returned to him?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You were in touch with her?”

  “Exactly,” Jane said. “From the time she left town with Rafael Miquello.”

  “Another artist?”

  “Not quite.” She hardened on the line, suddenly tight and tense against me. “Rafael is a louse, Steve. He’s the beginning and the end of the story. Let me tell you about him—”

  “Wait!”

  I whispered the word, caught up by the short hairs, suddenly, my ears tingling with the queasy sensation that we were being overheard. The cabin sang with silence. Out on deck, the whistling wind had subsided. The boat no longer rocked and rolled violently. Where was the listener? The cabin was on the port side of the boat, at the curve of the promenade, with one small window on each side of the room. The wooden shutters were pulled up high, so high that I could barely see over the edge. Out there the dull night lights glowed in the gloom. It would be easy for somebody to flatten himself against the wall of the deck and hold his ear to the shutter and stand there listening. Quirk? Could it be that Quirk stood out there? In the pause, I imagined his dumpy figure sweating out the enjoyment of our indoor sports, listening to Jane’s sighs and whispered words of passion. There could have been noises worth listening to for a middl
e-aged crud like Quirk. I strained forward to try for a squint abaft the shutters. I saw nothing. But along the quick and racing breath of the skittering wind, a certain odd sound hit my ears. It was the intangible tread of feet, soft and carefully set down. Step. Step. Step. Fading along the boarded deck, back toward the starboard side, the rubber-heeled rhythm of footfalls punctuated by the sly and sibilant squeak of the leather.

  Step. Step.

  Step.

  And then it was gone.

  “Somebody out there?” Jane whispered.

  “I think my cabin mate is a Peeping Tom,” I said. “He was probably out there for the past half hour or so.”

  “Was he—?”

  I put my hand over her mouth, gently. I bounced out of the berth and plastered myself at the shuttered window again. The footsteps were returning, but this time they were other feet. There was no squeal in this leather. The quiet padding approached from the stern, slowly and with a different tread. Then, crossing the area of my vision, walking with a clipped, stiff stride, I saw the purser. He came as far as the rim of the curve approaching the bow. There he paused and turned on his heel, his hands clasped behind his back, his long nose pointed my way. He stood in that pose for only an instant. Then he was gone, back toward the stern.

  Jane was standing near me now. “Your cabin mate again?” she asked.

  “Not this time,” I said. “Somebody else, out for a breath of air, no doubt.”

  “What’s your cabin mate’s name, Steve?”

  “Quirk. Jacob Quirk.”

  “That’s an odd name.”

  “He’s an odd character,” I said.

  “Where does he come from?”

  “Boston.”

  “Are you sure?” She stiffened against me, suddenly. “Are you quite sure it’s Boston?”

  “That’s what the man said. Why?”

  “What does he do?”

  “An English teacher,” I said. “He’s on his way for a dose of San Juan sunshine—on a sabbatical, I think he said. He’s a typical tourist, complete with a satchelful of eight millimeter Kodachrome for filming his travelogue for the folks back home.”

  But Jane wasn’t listening any more. She was tied in knots now, the upset coming through in the bite of her nails against my wrist.

  “What are you shivering about?” I asked.

  “I’d like to see your cabin mate, Steve.”

  “You will—tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” She trembled again. She was bundled close to me, her whole frame as taut and fearful as a frightened kid, burying her head in my chest and sobbing.

  “Easy, Jane.”

  “I’ve got to go, Steve.”

  “Why run away? It’s nice here, isn’t it?”

  “I must go. I must.”

  “At a time like this?”

  “It’s not you, Steve,” she whispered strangely, a note of hoarse anxiety throbbing in her voice. “It’s something I can’t explain.”

  Something was eating her. Something that paralyzed her with fear. Or was it only restlessness? Why did she fidget and squirm around so much? And so suddenly? She began to pull away from me, her tongue making quick licks at her lower lip, out of control now. She trembled as she eased her figure into her skirt and blouse. She was still one of the most terrific babes I had ever seen. But the picture was ruined, somehow, by her overpowering impatience, the almost maniac twitching and squirming she displayed for me. She grabbed me when she was finished, as though by holding me close, the wriggling panic would fade for her.

  “What’s bothering you, Jane?”

  “Later, Steve. In my cabin?”

  “You need a sedative, baby.”

  She toughened at the sound of the word. “Please come down to me? I’m on C Deck, and all by myself, in Cabin 215. I have a big room, but there are no shuttered windows. I have three portholes, too close to the waterline for leaving them open. Nobody can be listening outside of my room, Steve. Nobody.”

  She was jumping with emotion now. A fresh and biting terror was gnawing at her, throwing her completely out of whack. Was it fear that moved her now? How frightened can a dame get? She was on her feet and wringing her hands and stepping around the tiny cabin, pausing for a quick look out to the deck and then returning to sit and tremble and stand and shake again. Up and down. And down and up. She kept her mouth moving in a perpetual barrage of words, telling me her anxiety in a rush of verbiage, breathlessly and out of some wild horror.

  “Don’t stand there gaping at me that way, Steve. I don’t want you to think me an utter idiot. I’m scared. I’m scared silly because of what I’ve started with you. There’s so much to tell. There’s so much I want you to understand, I don’t quite know how to begin.” Now she was back at the window, still working her hands in knots, so that her fists went white as she clenched them and rapped them gently against the window ledge. Her neck showed the strain of her worry, tight and tense and suddenly thin and weak-looking. And her usually gay face seemed lined with deep worry, her eyes glazed and bright; her eyebrows down in a scowl she could not control. She was on the verge of hysteria and she certainly knew it. She came back to me and buried her head against me. “I’m afraid, Steve. I’m scared to death. Hold me tight.”

  “What scares you?”

  “It’s all knotted up inside me.” Her body shook with a fresh wave of trembling. “All knotted up.”

  “Who do you think was listening outside?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to be overheard.”

  “I’ll hunt up Quirk and break his head for him,” I said. “I wouldn’t have asked you down here if I thought he was that kind of jerk.”

  “Why bother? Come down to my cabin, Steve.”

  “You want me to come now?”

  “I wish you would.” She pulled me to her and kissed me again, but this kiss was loaded with a deep and penetrating unrest. She trembled on my lips and worked her anxious fingers up and down my shoulders. She broke away from me at last, standing at the door so that the light from the corridor out there silhouetted her full and delectable figure. Her head was an outline of gossamer lights and shadows and the yellow sheen came through in her hair so that it seemed more colorful than it really was. “Come soon,” she whispered. “And get me some more Aquavit, Steve. I have a feeling I’m going to need it.”

  “I’ll bring a bottle,” I said.

  And then she was gone.

  I switched on the light and started to dress, taking my time with my clothes. I wanted to be around when Mr. Jacob Quirk came in. I had a few things on my mind, a few ideas to sell him, the nasty little crumb. He had wrecked my party. He had ruined my evening, despite the fact that there might be more of the same to come, down in Jane’s cabin. It burned me when I thought of Quirk sneaking up to the window to eavesdrop. It stung me when I thought of what he might have heard. Yet I knew that the incident must dissolve only in angry words. Because Quirk was much too old to hit. So I began to curse him, deep inside my gut at first, and then bringing the obscenities to life on my tongue.

  “You dirty little crumb!” I yammered at my socks.

  And on that line, Jacob Quirk walked into the cabin.

  Buy The Sunburned Corpse Now!

  About the Author

  Lawrence Lariar (1908–1981) was an American novelist, cartoonist and cartoon editor, known for his Best Cartoons of the Year series of cartoon collections. He wrote crime novels, sometimes using the pseudonyms Michael Stark, Adam Knight and Marston la France.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents
either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1952, 1980 by Lawrence Lariar

  Cover design by Ian Koviak

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-5748-6

  This 2019 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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