“Then what?” I asked.
“Then I come back and hide on this boat and I tell you where it is and you go get it for me, Trav. And you keep a piece of it.”
“You wondered if I was legitimate. To this extent, Vangie, that I couldn’t go liberate money that belongs to somebody else and turn it over to you.”
“Somebody else!” She pulled the dark glasses off and looked directly into my eyes. That dark amber was as merciless as the eyes of the big predator cats, and as empty, and as hungry. “Dead ones, Charlie,” she said. “You want to rent an accountant and divide it up and go stuffing it into the graves? You want to worry yourself, think about all the dead ones to come. Me leaving isn’t going to stop a thing. They break in another girl. Listen, it’s a tiny piece of the whole deal, and it’s mine!”
I glanced at Meyer and saw that it had shaken him as much or more than it had shaken me.
“Ten thousand for you,” she said. “How about it?”
“The standard fee is half. If I recover it, which means if I even try. That’s something we’ll talk over when you come back.”
“If I have to come back. If I can’t get in and out with it alone. Half is one hell of a cut, McGee.”
“And half of nothing is still nothing at all.”
“My dear,” Meyer said, “if things should go wrong for you, wouldn’t you feel better if you had written it all out and put it in a sealed envelope and left it in my care?”
She reached and touched his cheek. “You are the nicest, Meyer. So nice you’d have to blow the whole bit, and it would mess up my girlfriends and keep the law looking for me forever. If I get my hands on that money, I want to stay dead, thank you.”
“Knowing that your… friends are still murdering for profit?”
“People are dying all over the place for all kinds of reasons, Meyer, and if I’m out of this one, it couldn’t bother me less.”
Well after dark, wearing the black slacks, white blouse, dark glasses, and white kerchief around her hair, and carrying my two hundred in the pocket of the slacks, she went down the stern gangplank, gave me a quick wave and walked off into the night. Meyer had moved back aboard his own boat. I drifted after Vangie and memorized the plate of the cab she got into, went back and wrote it down, buttoned up the Flush, picked up Meyer and went off to eat Chinese. When we got back, we went below and he hunched over his little portable typewriter and composed a summary as follows:
For the past two years Miss Bellemer, a hardened prostitute twenty-six years of age, has been operating in this area with a group of accomplices in some manner more profitable and more dangerous than common prostitution. Three women were involved. It can be assumed the other two are of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer. She called one of them DeeDee Bea, spelling uncertain. There was a strong impression that the operating unit for each venture was a team of two, one woman and one man. For a time she worked with a man named Frankie. More recently her partner has been one Griff. No names of other associates are available as yet.
Logic tells us that the operation was some variation of a confidence game, its success dependent on the allure of the women in the ring. Miss Bellemer admitted in an indirect fashion she had felt sorry for one of the victims, had in fact warned him, even though she knew she was placing herself in grave danger thereby. Apparently, despite her warning, the victim was disposed of. Because Miss Bellemer was sentenced to death by her associates for this lapse, we can assume that the victims of their operations have been disposed of through murder.
There is a strong hint of some persons in a position of authority over these three operating units of one man and one woman each. For the time being, we shall assume there are two, hot headed males, and that one of them was the driver of the car that took Miss Bellemer to the place where she was supposedly drowned.