John D McDonald – Travis McGee 07 Darker Than Amber

She hurried to her new purse and took out a comb and seated herself in front of the mirror. She unpinned her hair, let it fall long, and, biting her lip, combed the pale thick weight of it. She fashioned it into a high ponytail, fixing it so most of the weight of it fell forward across the front of her right shoulder. With pink lipstick she widened her mouth. She put on a new pair of sunglasses, dainty frames and a pixie tilt, then stood up and faced me, smiling for inspection.

“This is the way I walk off this Eyetalian sheep.”

“The walk will give you away.”

She trudged over to the door and back, toeing out, slouching, swinging her arms too freely. “Will it?”

“Okay. You’re eighteen. A backward eighteen.”

She took the glasses off, planted herself, looked up at me with her head cocked. “You’ve decided yes. I can tell.”

“On one condition.”

“Anything!”

I put the sheaf of ship’s stationery and my pen on the glass of the dressing table. “Sit here and write what I tell you to write.”

When she had seated herself and picked up the pen, I told her to date it yesterday. “To the Police Department, Broward Beach, Florida. Dear sirs..

“Hey! What are you”

“Write it. You can tear it up if you want to, if you don’t understand why it has to be done. You can tear it up, and then you can get out of this stateroom.”

She hunched over the paper like a schoolgirl and wrote.

I dictated. “I have decided to take my own life by jumping into the sea before this ship gets to Florida. I am going to give this letter to someone to mail to you.”

“Just a little slower, please.”

“I would rather kill myself… than wait and have them kill me the way they did Evangeline Bellemer. Period. I think that everybody connected with this should pay for their crimes. Period. That is why I… am making a full confession… at this time. I will tell you where… you can find them all… and what we have been doing.. for the last two years.”

I waited. She finished the final words and turned and stared at me. “You sure do want a hell of a lot of insurance.”

“Use your head, woman. Insurance for you too. They’ll break Ans Terry down in five minutes and he’ll verify you jumped overboard. The cops will pick up everybody who was in on it, and there’ll be nobody left to come after you if they ever did get any clue. Nobody will be looking for you, nobody from either side.”

“I… I guess you’re right. But I just hate to put it down on paper. Couldn’t we do it later? You could trust me to write it all out after we’re safe, dear.”

“When you’ve written the whole thing out and signed it and I have it in my hand, addressed and stamped and sealed, then we’ll talk about how much I trust you, Del.”

“Jesus, you’re hard, aren’t you?”

“And free as a bird, and planning to stay that way. If you don’t like it, go take your chances with Terry and Griff.”

She spun back and snatched the pen up. “All right, all right, damn you! What next?”

“Miss Bellemer was living at… Eight Thousand Cove Lane, Apartment Seven B, Quendon Beach… under the name of Tami Western. Period. What’s Griff’s name?”

“Walter Griffin.”

“Walter Griffin lives at the same address in Apartment Seven C. He very probably arranged to have her killed by being struck by a car, when ordered to do so by… what’s Mack’s name?”

“Webster Macklin.”

At Meyer’s three solid knocks upon the stateroom door she jumped violently. I’d worked out a code with Meyer, based on several of the plausible things you can call out when somebody knocks.

“Yes?” I called. That let him know our guess was right and she had simplified things by leaving Fourteen unlocked and it was safe to leave Ans his little keepsake.

“Sorry. Wrong room,” he rumbled.

I kept her going. She balked now and again, such as when I demanded she put down the specifics of the most recent murder. He had been a fifty-four year old divorced chemist from Youngstown, Ohio, taking a vacation alone, and they had come aboard on separate tickets at separate times as Mr. and Mrs. A. B. Terry, and he had twenty-six thousand dollars in cash in a money belt, the proceeds of the sale of some bonds and the cash value of his insurance policies. Ans Terry was now wearing the money belt, and Mr. Powell Daniels was sticking out of the silted bottom somewhere west-southwest of Miami, wearing under his resort clothes an entirely different sort of belt, one of those designed for scuba diving, with every compartment snapped shut on its wafer of lead.

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