All the way

hell, I’d kept myself from being implicated, hadn’t I? I wasn’t going to kill anybody, and wind up in the death- house.

But she hadn’t asked me to, had she? All she’d wanted me to do was get that money for her—from a man who would already be dead. Still, I’d be an accessory.

What had she meant?

How would I know? I thought. I’d run off before she could tell me.

The next morning I bought an overcoat and hat and started out. I answered some ads first, without any luck, and then started hitting the agencies blind. My feet got tired. I filled in forms. I left my name and telephone number. The weather was still blustery and cold, with a lowering gray sky like dirty metal. If this were the movies I thought, I’d pass a travel-agency window and there’d be a big sun-drenched picture of a brunette in a bathing suit sitting on the beach in front of a white hotel with the caption: COME TO MIAMI. She was a blonde, as it turned out, and the invitation was: COME TO KINGSTON. A man was landing a marlin off the end of a pier. With a flyrod, as nearly as I could tell. You could see Jamaica was a fisherman’s paradise. I came back to the bar across the street from the hotel around two and had a Scotch while I wondered what she was doing. And how a girl managed to look elegant in a bathing suit. Not lifted-pinkie elegant, but 18th-century elegant. I went up to my room and lay down on the bed. It was raining now; I could see it falling into the airwell. I picked up the phone and asked for Long Distance.

”Miami Beach,” I said. “The Golden Horn Motel. Personal call to Mrs. Marian Forsyth.” At least I could talk to her.

“Hold the line, please.”

I waited. I could hear the operator.

“Golden Horn,” a girl’s voice said. “Who? Mrs. Forsyth? Just a moment, please . . . I’m sorry; she’s left.”

I dropped the phone back on the cradle. Well, it wasn’t everybody who was smart enough to turn down a seventy-five-thousand-dollar proposition before he’d even heard it. And I’d never see her again. I lit a cigarette and watched the rain, and thought of some of the places we could have gone together—Acapulco, and Bimini, and Nassau. . . .

Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was Miami Beach. Her voice was exactly as cool, urbane, and pleasant as ever. “I finally decided you were never going to call, so—“

I suppose I could ask, I thought. But why bother? There was something inevitable about her; if I’d been holed up in a Lamasery in Tibet it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

“You win,” I said. “I’ll be there some time tonight.”

“That’s wonderful, Jerry.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You’re sweet. Then you did try to call me?”

“You know damn well I did. Where?”

“Two hundred and six Dover Way,” she replied. “It’s a wonderful place to work.”

I caught a flight out of Idlewild at five forty-five. The rain had stopped, but it was colder. As I was going up the loading ramp of the DC-7, a colored boy from the catering department was coming down. I dropped the overcoat on his arm. “Have a good Christmas,” I said.

When we were airborne and the NO SMOKING sign went off, I lit a cigarette. How she’d learned where I was in New York was routine, actually. She’d known all the time. All her detectives had to do was notify their New York office what flight I’d taken out of Miami, and have me picked up at Idlewild again and tailed to the hotel. The rest of it, however, was considerably more subtle—waiting me out till I called first and learned she’d left the motel without a forwarding address. And then giving me a long half-hour to think about what I’d thrown away for ever, like an old man remembering some girl who’d done everything but draw him a diagram when he was fifteen. That was a nice touch.

We were down at Miami shortly after nine. I waited impatiently out front for my bag and took a cab. It seemed to take for ever, through the downtown traffic and across the MacArthur Causeway. Dover Way was on the Biscayne side, not far from the bay, a quiet side street only three or four blocks long. 206 was half of a side-by-side duplex set back off the street with a hedge in front and shadowy, bougainvillea-covered walls on both sides. I paid off the cab and went up the walk. Lights were on beside the door, but the adjoining apartment appeared to be dark. I pressed the button.

She was wearing a dark skirt and severe white blouse. I kicked the door shut, dropped the bag, and took her in my arms. She submitted to being kissed in that same cool way—quite gracious about it but not particularly eager that it become a trend. She smiled. “How do you like our place?”

It was small, well-furnished, air-conditioned, and very quiet. The living room, which seemed to be more than half of it, was carpeted in gray, and the floor-length curtains at the window in front and the larger one on the left were dark green. The sofa and three chairs were Danish modern, and there was a long coffee table that appeared to be teak and was protected with plate glass. There were three hassocks covered with corduroy in explosive colors. Straight opposite, an open doorway led into the bedroom. Just to the right of it another opened into a small dining area and kitchen. To the left of the bedroom doorway were some built-in bookshelves with sliding glass doors. A radio-phonograph console in limned oak stood in the corner.

The tape recorder she’d bought was set up on one end of the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran across the carpet to a wall outlet. There were several boxes of tape beside it, and some stenographer’s notebooks and pencils.

“I was working,” she explained. She sat down on one of the hassocks beside the coffee table and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for her, and one for myself, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

I looked round the apartment. “You were pretty sure I’d come back, weren’t you?”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve been studying you for a week.”

“And seventy-five thousand would do it? All it took was a little time?”

She nodded. “Actually, I don’t think you care a great deal for money as such, but you have some very expensive tastes. And you’re quite cynical.”

She was probably right, I thought. I looked at the classic line of the head and the brilliant coloring and the severe formality of the blouse that came up to end in a plain band collar round the softness of her throat and wondered if she’d considered the possibility I might have come back because of her. I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

“Because maybe I did, in part.”

“That sounds rather unlikely. At any rate, I wouldn’t have depended on it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re quite an attractive young man. I doubt you have any great problem with girls; and the country’s full of them.”

“You’re overdoing the modesty. And why did you call me a young man?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Twenty-eight?”

“And what’s thirty-four?”

“So you checked my driver’s license?”

“Of course. Not for your age, naturally, but to find out who you were. Incidentally, you don’t look thirty.”

“You’re quite flattering,” she said. “And now if we’re through assessing my drawing power, why don’t we get down to business?”

This was beginning to bug me a little. No woman had any right to be as attractive as she was and at the same time as contemptuous of the fact and of its effect on somebody else. I took her hand and pulled her down on the floor beside me and held her in my arms and kissed her. Instead of objecting, however, she put her arms around my heck. In a moment her eyes opened, very large and dreamy, just under mine. I kissed her again, feeling a tremendous excitement in just touching her.

After a while I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom and turned off the light and undressed her very slowly, and she was as beautifully adept and as pleasant and as far away and unreachable as ever. Clearly, the simplest way to rid the agenda of distracting minor issues like sex was to get them over with.

Four