Probably she thought she was treating me in a very special way by telling me the details of her childhood, girlhood, life with Ans Terry. The things she remembered were empty and trivial. The shallowness of her mind gave her a Curious flavor of innocence.
She had taken no part in the direction of her life. She had let life happen to her, and her pleasure was in her clothes, in her figure, in pleasing and being admired by men, in enjoying sex, in changing her hairdo.
She was twenty-three. Any pattern of life she had drifted into would have left her essentially the same, with the same interests and the same emptinesses.
At last I told her it was time we were leaving. She pinked her mouth again, put the dark glasses on, snapped her purse shut and said, “Boy, I was really getting fed-up with these cruises.”
I left her there and took a look and found the dockside cafe. I went back and got her and took her down the gangplank.
A gate in the wire fence had been left ajar. We went through and she stood in the shade of the customs shed while I phoned for a taxi. We had a five-minute wait.
When we walked through the sunlight to the open door of the cab, she gave me an assured little smile and a hearty swinging thud with a healthy hip.
The driver, following my directions, drove out of the port area onto Route One and turned left. After four blocks, I said, “Driver, I’ve got some phone calls to make. Would you please pull into that shopping center ahead on your right and park as close as you can to the drugstore.”
He found a slot at the very end of the herringbone pattern, the closest parking area to the drugstore. The cab was airconditioned.
I patted her on the leg and said, “Just hold still a while, honey. There are some things I have to take care of, a few little arrangements to make. For us. Shouldn’t be more than five minutes or so.”
“Okay, honey,” she said.
I reached, tapped the driver on the shoulder, put a five in his hand. “In case you get restless,” I said.
“In the rain, five o’clock traffic, a fare has to make the airport in four minutes, I get restless, buddy. Otherwise, never.”
I whispered in Del’s ear. try to be inconspicuous. Just in case.”
“Anything you say, that I do.”
They had expanded the shopping center by opening an entire new area behind it, on the side street. Some of the shops had merely doubled their area and taken another store front on the new side. The drugstore was one. Meyer and Merrimay were in the last booth in the row opposite the counter. She was back to blonde, the wig stowed away, the transparent film peeled from the flesh beside her eyes so that their contour was back to normal. Her mouth was redrawn to her own taste. And somewhere she had changed to a short-sleeved red and white striped blouse, a split red skirt. They both looked and acted very edgy.
“How close could he park?” Meyer asked. “Smack dab in front.”
“Good!”
She stood up, showed us the dime in her outstretched hand. “It had better be the same girlish voice as before, don’t you think?”
“Yes indeed,” Meyer said. She hurried off toward the booths. “There is a very dandy girl. She thought of a good way to get the confession to them. She kept her Vangie suit on, and her Vangie hair, and she stopped a kid a half block from the station and gave him a buck to hustle it to the homicide people.”
“When did she phone back?”
“Ten-thirty. She got right through to the top brass. They admitted right off it was a very interesting document, and a copy had already been rushed up to Broward Beach. Then she asked them if they’d like to lay their hands on the girl who wrote it. She’d changed her mind about killing herself. She was trying to get out of the area. She said she could hear them drooling. They tried to stall her, keep her on the line. She told them to have a prowl car waiting six blocks north of here, in the Howard Johnson parking lot, and hung up.” Merrimay came back to the booth and said, “We better take off, don’t you think?”