Meyer appeared, sat down with a heavy sigh. “I am entombed down there, in a ghastly flickering glow of tiny light bulbs.” He pointed aft. “I have our mail drop. The first stairway through that door, halfway down, at the curve, a fire hose in a case. The top is recessed a little. So, the top right corner of it, the right as you face it.”
“Very good.”
“And it has struck me that we might make use of the PA system. I have heard them paging people.”
“Also very good, depending. I’m off. She had a list. So it’s an odds-on chance they split up. Go play with your doll.”
At almost two-thirty I spotted her, alone, just going into the Nassau Shop, carrying one dressbox-size package. I followed her in. She put the sunglasses in her purse. She strolled slowly back through the store and stopped at a circular rack containing Daks skirts. I was loafing about eight feet away when the clerk approached her.
When she spoke I learned she had a child voice, a little thin dear girlie voice. “This one, in the green, this is just linen, isn’t it? No other fabric to keep it from wrinkling?”
“Pure linen, miss.”
“So you put it on and an hour later it looks like you’d slept in it. No thanks.”
“A beautiful wool, perhaps, miss? In this soft gray?”
“I guess not. Thanks anyhow.”
I circled and came upon her at the end of a counter, face to face, glance to glance in the instant of passing, sensed behind her eyes the little click of appraisal and dismissal, as if back in there was mounted one of the tired old cameras used by defeated photographers on the littered boardwalks of unfashionable resorts.
Hers was a pointy little face under the bulk of hat and weight of hair. The fur of her eyebrows angled up in a habitual query that no longer asked any questions. It was a small mouth, with the pulp of the unpainted lips so bulgingly, ripely plump she had the look of getting ready to whistle. Sharp little nose and sharp little chin, and an angled flatness in her cheeks. The feature that unified all the rest of it was the eyes, very very large, widely set, brilliantly and startlingly green. She was all erotic innocence and innocent eroticism, moving by me, knowing I would turn to stare, that I would see the arrogance, the slow laziness, the luxurious challenge of the lazy scissors of the long weight of white thighs and the soft flexing perkiness of the little rump. She made me think of a Barbie Doll.
I did not know what to try or how to try it. I could not appraise how much nerve she had or how much intelligence. Nor how completely Terry owned her. If, by luck, I rested the edge of the wedge at exactly the right point, tapped with proper impact, the crystalline structure might cleaver. More probably any attempt would glance off, arouse suspicion, send her trotting to wherever Ans Terry awaited her, with a description of me. But if she could be convinced, very quickly, that she was marked for execution also…. I had to stake the whole thing on how much she knew about what had happened to Tami. Then I found one possible way I could do it, with a fair chance of its working.
She had gone to a counter where, under glass, elegant little Swiss watches were displayed. The clerk helping her went off to get something out of stock. I moved quickly to stand beside her and said in a low voice, “If you’re Del Whitney, I have to talk to you. I’ve got a message from Tami.”
“You’ve got me confused with somebody. Sorry.”
“Tami gave me the message before they killed her, and she told me how I could find you.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to stare up at me from under the flat brim of the hat. I turned my head slightly, looked at her, saw her absolute rigidity, eyes made even larger by shock. The clerk was returning. “K-k-killed!” she whispered.