needle into every phony who happened into my path. When it came time to embark on the next profitable crusade, it would be for the sake of someone considerably more helpless than our Eurasian Jane Doe.
But those certainly were fantastic legs. I started mousing around the galley early, certain both boat guests were asleep. It startled me when Meyer came aboard. He came onto the stern deck and knocked softly on the lounge door. I went and opened it for him.
'Lock yourself out? Why?'
'For the same reason I got up and buttoned the whole boat up after you'd sacked out last night. I started wondering if anybody could have stayed on the bridge to make sure she stayed down. Not likely. But it's not a bit of trouble to lock up.'
'Where have you been, Meyer?'
'A morning stroll. The view from the bridge. About two miles there and two miles back. That adds up to a six-egg breakfast. I wanted to confirm some guesses.'
'Such as?'
'It sounded to me as if they took off in the direction of Miami. The tire marks check out. They swerved over onto the wrong side of the bridge to jettison their sweet cargo. Skid marks. And then more skid marks where they scratched off and swerved back into their own lane. They stopped fairly near this end of the bridge, and it has enough center rise so they couldn't see the road behind them while stopped. But from the top of the rise you have a good straight shot for about four miles south. And, from where they dumped her over, you can see a good mile straight ahead. With their lights out, nobody coming from the direction of Marathon would notice them on the wrong side of the bridge. But they had to know it would be clear enough. So I walked further and, about two hundred yards south of the bridge, the shoulder is so wide you can park there and see around the bridge. Tires had mashed the grass down.'
He took an object from his shirt pocket, a very generous cigar butt, better than three inches long, wrapped in a tissue. He held it on the palm of a big paw, prodded it with a thick hairy finger. 'We had a good rain about eight last night, remember? This hasn't been out in the rain. Looks like a very good leaf. From where I found it, right at the edge of the brush, the passenger threw it out. I don't think you could throw a cigar that far from a car on the highway proper. And this isn't the kind you throw away. The wet grass put it out. You don't throw it away unless you've lit it to settle your nerves, and then somebody says let's go, and you have a girl to dump over a bridge railing in the next minute. Then you throw away a good cigar. Nice teeth marks, Travis. Big choppers. They'll stay nice and clear even after this has dried out all the way. So would you humor an aging economist and tuck it away in a good safe place? One of us might meet the fellow again.'
He rewrapped it carefully and I accepted it. 'Anything else, Inspector?'
'Ah, yes. As an ignorant tourist I queried a surly old fellow about water depths. Except in the main channel under the center of the bridge, most of the rest of the area averages about three feet at low tide. One exception, the hole where we were fishing, where the outgoing tide sets up a good swirl. Fifty feet in diameter, twenty and thirty feet deep. The highway people worry about it undercutting some of the bridge piers eventually. Over the main channel the bridge walls are considerably higher, too high to conveniently hoist a girl over. So either the man with the cigar, or the fellow racing the engine, or perhaps a third man if there was one, knows the waters hereabouts. In fact, dear heart, there might be other cement blocks down there, with empty loops of wire. When the crabs and the other scavengers have picked them clean, the ligaments would rot and the bones separate at the joints. The slender bones of the leg would slip out of the loops as soon as the feet were gone, and it would not make much difference by then, I imagine. We may have discovered the southeastern repository for surplus bawds. The fatal ka-slosh on many a dark night, my boy. And the slow empty dance of the tethered bawds in the final caress of the current deep and black, the wild hair drifting, and the aimless sway of their emptied arms, and the slow oceanic tilting of their sea-cool hips in the
'Meyer! At eight in the morning?'
'Extreme hunger gives me poetic delirium. Travis, good lad, you look unwell.'
'I was, for a moment. You see, Meyer, I was down there. And it was black. And when I wound my fist in her hair to try to lift her, and found I couldn't, she was just enough alive to reach up and put both hands on my wrist, as gently as a sick child. If she hadn't done that, I wouldn't have been able to stay down long enough to get her loose. Yes, Meyer, it was deep and black. And not very nice.'
'I am often guilty of vulgarity. Forgive me. Have we a nice mild onion I can chop into my six scrambling eggs?'
We were on second coffees when we heard her running the water in the head. Soon she appeared in the doorway, looking down at us in the booth adjoining the stainless-steel galley, wearing the black pants and the white shirt with its trimmings of lace.
'Good morning to Meyer and McGee,' she said. 'If there is really no other woman aboard, one of you is a perfect jewel, washing out the dainty underthings.'
'Always at your service, Miss Doe,' Meyer said. He got up. 'Sit here, my dear. Opposite the McGee. Boat owners get waited on hand and foot. I'm chef as well as laundress. And your turn will come. Coffee black and hot first?'
'Please.' She slid rather stiffly into the booth, grimaced as she lowered herself. 'How do you feel?' I asked her.
'As if somebody had tried to break my back.'
As he placed the coffee in front of her, Meyer said, 'Thank me for that too. I stretched you out across a boat seat and I could feel your ribs give every time I pushed the air out of your lungs. But I was reasonably careful not to break any.'
The morning light was brilliant against her face as she sat opposite me. Her dark hair was brushed to a gloss, hung free, two dark curved parentheses which framed the lovely oval of her face, swung forward as she dipped her head and lifted the cup to her lips. She had made up her mouth carefully with the lipstick from the convenience kit. The pale down on her face, just below the darker hair of the temples, grew quite long. There was one faint horizontal wrinkle across the middle of her forehead, twice arched to match the curve of her brows. And a slightly deeper horizontal line across her slender throat. A few pores were visible in the ivoried dusk of her skin where it was taut across the high solidity of oriental cheekbones, but there was no other mark or flaw upon her, except the cheekbone scar shaped like a star.
In that light the color of her eyes surprised me. Light shrunk the pupils small. The irises were not as dark as I had imagined. They were a strange yellow-brown, a curious shade, just a little darker than amber, and there were small green flecks near the pupils. Her upper lids had that fullness of the Asiatic strain, and near-death had smudged the flesh under her eyes. She looked across at me and accepted the appraisal with the same professional disinterest with which the model looks into the camera lens while they are taking light readings.
'And otherwise?' I asked.
She lifted her shoulders slightly, let them fall. 'I slept fine. You men will have to fill in some blanks. Where are we?'
'Tied up at Thompson's Marina at Marathon.'
'And last night, after I corked off, did you dear boys go honking and blustering over to the beer joints to make the big brag about what you rescued from the briny?'
Her voice was mild, but there was a curl to her lips.
Meyer smiled down at her. 'I don't know how McGee reacts to that, my dear, but personally I find the inference offensive. How would you like how many eggs?'
'Uh... two. Easy over.'
'With a little slab of sauteed fish? And a quarter of one of Homestead's better cantaloupes?'
'Yes.... Yes, please. Mr. Meyer?'
'Just Meyer.'
'Okay. Meyer, I'm sorry I said that. It's just that I'm a little spooked.'
'Forgiven,' Meyer said. 'We bluster, dear. We bluster all to hell and gone. But honk? Never!' Meyer served her, poured us both more coffee, then came and wedged in beside me with his own cup.
'I don't know how you saved me,' she said. Meyer explained it all, how we happened to be there, what we saw and heard, and who had done what. As he explained, she ate with a delicately avid voracity, a mannerly greed, glancing up at Meyer and at me from time to time.
'McGee stayed down just long enough to make my blood run cold,' Meyer said. 'I know it was better than two minutes.'
She looked at me, eyes narrowing slightly in a speculation I could not read. I said, 'I knew you were alive when I got to you. So that was the only good chance I had to bring you up alive, to get you loose that first time.'
'And you heard the car leave?'
'Before you touched bottom,' I said.
Her plate was empty. She put her fork down with a little clink sound. 'Then we three, right here, are the only people who know I'm alive. Right?'
'Right,' said Meyer. 'Our plans before you... uh, excuse me, dropped in... were to leave sometime this morning and head for Miami. Want to come along?'
She shrugged. 'Why not?'
'My dear,' Meyer said, 'it would seem as if someone took a violent dislike to you last night.'
'Is that a
