Big Kiss-Off Read online

  Moran tried to refill Mimi’s glass. She shook her head. “No, thank you. I ’ave plenty.” He brushed her hair with his lips. “The whole thing has been a tragic mix-up but I see how it happened now, at least, as far as Mimi and I are concerned.”

  Mimi looked less like a little white kitten than she had. “How?” she asked flatly.

  “You addressed your letters to me in care of Tocko, didn’t you?”

  “In care of Mr. Kalavitch, Bay Parish, Louisiana.”

  “And there you are. If you’ll pardon the expression, the louse never turned them over to me. And that old witch of a postmistress is just as bad. Probably because Tocko paid her not to, she never sent out my letters to you.”

  Mimi’s accent became more pronounced. “Then you deed write?”

  “Every week. I even sent you passage money to join me, three hundred and twenty-five dollars.” Moran lit a cigarette from the stub of the one he was smoking. “Maybe we can sue the old bag for interfering with the mail or destroying money orders.”

  Cade wondered if Mimi believed Moran. It was hard to tell. Her big eyes gave no clue to the way the wheels in her mind were turning.

  Janice pushed her chair back from the table. “It’s getting late.” She stroked the back of Cade’s hand with her fingers. “I know that Jim and Mimi want to be alone.” She bent and kissed Cade’s cheek. “And it’s been more than two years since I’ve seen you, darling. We can talk this all out in the morning. I’m only glad it’s turned out the way it has.”

  Moran smoothly helped Mimi to her feet. “Come on, darling. I guess we can take a hint.”

  Mimi stood, swaying slightly, her eyes searching Moran’s face. “You are certain you wrote me? You are certain you sent me the passage?”

  Moran kissed the tip of her nose. “Of course. And I can tell you I was plenty hurt when I didn’t hear from you.”

  Janice laughed. “Hurt? The man was furious. He thought one of two things had happened. Either your family forced you to annul the marriage and wouldn’t even let you answer his letters or you’d met one of your own countrymen you liked better than you did him.”

  “Oh,” Mimi said. The word could mean anything. Her eyes still uncertain, glancing at Cade from time to time, almost as if she expected him to stop them, she allowed Moran to propel her across the floor of the dining room.

  Janice linked her arm through one of Cade’s and followed them. “The hell with the dishes. The full staff won’t be down until Thursday but there’s a girl who lives back in the swamp who comes in every day.”

  The wood-paneled lobby was deserted. The reel was still on the counter but the youth Cade had seen behind the desk was gone. Here the night noises of the swamp and the thud thud of the gasoline power plant were more pronounced than they had been in the dining room. A long, dimly lighted hall led to the rear of the building. Beside the entrance to the hall a stairway led up to a balcony and rooms on the second floor.

  Moran locked the front door of the lodge, while Janice turned out most of the lights.

  And so to bed, Cade thought. Both Moran and Janice had lied about one thing. They were more than business partners. They were two of a kind and they worked very well together. Smooth. Like the flesh on the inside of a woman’s thigh, Cade told himself.

  Finished with locking the front door, Moran took Mimi’s arm again and walked her toward the hall. “Well, see you both in the morning.”

  “In the morning,” Janice said. She stood, with one hand on the rail of the stairs leading to the upper floor. “Goodnight.”

  A few feet down the hall, Mimi turned. “Good night, Cade,” she said, softly. “Thank you for being so kind. You are, as we say, true caballero.”

  Cade wished he could see her face.

  “Sure,” Moran said, soberly. “I owe you a lot, fellow. And I’ll make it right with you, too.” He opened one of the doors in the hall, stood aside to allow Mimi to pass him, then closed the door quietly behind them.

  “My room is upstairs,” Janice said.

  Cade realized a lump had formed in his throat. He followed Janice up the stairs and waited while she unlocked the door of a room opening off the balcony, still wondering how far she intended to go to make her fantastic story stand up.

  As Janice lighted a bed lamp made from a polished cypress knee, she smiled. “This was to have been one of the guest rooms, at twenty-five dollars a day. But now that you’re home, we’ll keep it for ourselves.” Janice switched on another lamp, on the dressing table. “You came by boat, honey?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Your own?”

  “A thirty-eight foot twin-screw job that I bought in Corpus.”

  “How wonderful,” Janice enthused. “That gives us another guide boat.” She patted his cheek. “And a good man to handle it. You should see the reservations, darling. We’re booked practically solid for the season. And why shouldn’t we be? This will be the only resort of its kind, the best fishing and swimming in the world, the utmost in privacy with no questions asked. And only a few minutes by air from New Orleans.”

  Cade continued to study the room. It was entirely feminine. The bedspread was pastel silk. So were the drapes on the windows. The open closet door revealed only dresses. If Moran had shared the room with Janice, there were no visible signs of his occupancy.

  Cade walked to the screened window and looked out. Night lay dark and heavy on the Bay. The moon was waning. The stars seemed less bright. The only light was the bulb on the pier. Even at the distance, he could see the Sea Bird tugging at her mooring ropes and, beyond her, the dark bulk of the cutter.

  “Who owns the cutter?” he asked.

  “The contractor who’s building the pier,” Janice said. “His men are living aboard.”

  Cade wondered how big a fool Janice thought he was. A contractor wouldn’t use a cutter. He’d use a tug and a barge. Something more than renting luxury rooms to amorous businessmen with attractive secretaries and a secondary desire to fish was being planned for the lodge. Well, he’d wanted a showdown with Janice — and here he was.

  As Cade turned from the window he realized he was still carrying his cap. He hung it on the back of a chair. Janice kicked off her shoes and, sitting on the bench in front of the dressing table, began to comb her hair, smiling at him in the mirror between strokes.

  The lump in Cade’s throat dissolved. His knees were suddenly weak. The whole scene was fantastic. It was exactly as he had dreamed it would be, only grotesquely distorted and somehow sordid.

  Janice met his eyes in the mirror and stopped smiling. “You’re still angry with me, aren’t you, darling?”

  Cade was frank. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “You’ve been listening to the nasty narrow little minds in Bay Parish.”

  “Among other things.”

  “What things?”

  “After all, you did divorce me.”

  “I thought I explained that.”

  “You might have waited.”

  Janice nodded. “Yes. I should have known better. I see now I was wrong. But at the time it seemed the logical thing to do.”

  “What beats me is how you managed it,” he said. “You had no real grounds, here or in any other state. And all the courts were turning thumbs down on proceedings against G.I.’s in combat abroad.”

  “I didn’t get the divorce in this state, but it was the pollys here who fixed it for me through their connections. I told you — I’m pretty thick with them. I have been for some time.”

  “So is Tocko, I bet,” growled Cade.

  It was hot and close in the room. The gun in Cade’s pocket felt too heavy.

  Janice continued to study his face in the mirror. “You’re very angry with me, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Put yourself in my position.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  Finished with her hair, Janice stood up and caught the hem of her dress with both
hands. “Angry enough to shoot me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Isn’t that why you brought the gun?”

  Cade breathed hard as Janice pulled her dress over her head and hung it neatly on a hanger. All she was wearing under the dress was a short white petticoat and her hose. He’d forgotten how truly lovely she was. Janice meant, obviously, to go all the way to back her claim that she still loved him, that she’d thought he was dead, that all she had really done was to look out for herself.

  Janice came back to the bed, stripped off the pastel silk spread and folded it neatly. Then, sitting on the edge of the bed, she rolled down one of her hose, her blonde hair falling over her face, as Cade had dreamed a thousand times of seeing it fall.

  “I can’t say I blame you,” she said. “From your point of view, it was a nasty, despicable thing for me to do. But any mistakes I’ve made have been of the head and not of the heart. So I’m an avaricious little bitch, I can’t help it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes and hooked her thumbs in the elastic waistband of the petticoat. “I’ve seen too many wives of dead and ‘missing’ officers running billing machines or clerking in dime stores. And I wasn’t having any.”

  The petticoat followed her hose to the floor and she sat looking up at Cade with her gray-green eyes slitted and sullen, reminding him somewhat of Mimi.

  “Well — ?” Janice asked, quietly. “Well — ?”

  13 The Futile Gun

  The night heat fondled Cade’s body with little, black, moist fingers. He lay looking at the ceiling that he couldn’t see, acutely conscious of Janice’s breathing. He’d never felt so emotionally or physically depleted.

  This was the dream he’d dreamed?

  He moved slightly and Janice moved with him, as if even in her sleep she was reluctant to lose contact. Whatever else she was not, Janice definitely was a good actress. For some reason of her own, she wanted him to think she was still in love with him. She’d done her best to further the illusion. Just the same, her best hadn’t been enough. Cade felt shamed and put upon and soiled — as if he’d been had. What Janice had given him held little value for her. She’d given the same to Tocko and Moran. Cade was certain of that now. Janice had been too eager to please him. There was something in the back of her greedy little mind, something for which she still needed him.

  Cade eased his way to the edge of the bed and the spring, giving under his weight, made the bed sway like a boat. Over the shrilling of the cicadas and the booming of the frogs, he could hear Mimi’s small, militant voice.

  “Thees woman no love you. All the time you thought you were happy, she was just sleeping weeth the silver maple leaves on your shoulders.”

  Cade wondered what Mimi was thinking now. He felt a twinge of remorse. Still, all he had done was what she had asked him to do. She’d been determined to get to Moran. He hoped she was satisfied.

  The air in the room was stifling him. Carefully, so as not to awaken Janice, Cade eased out of bed and dressed. Perhaps it would be cooler on the pier. Perhaps he could think more clearly. Janice’s talk of a swank resort was a lot of foolishness. There weren’t enough rooms in the lodge to make it pay. The pier had cost more than she could hope to take in in five seasons. Then there was the single-stack cutter. She and Moran were up to something, something that tied in with Janice’s hectic affair with Tocko, with his being warned out of Bay Parish by Joe Laval, with Laval being murdered.

  As he felt his way down the dim stairs to the lobby, Cade wondered if it were possible that Moran had shot Laval. He’d heard a light plane in Bay Parish. Moran was a flyer.

  The silence in the lobby was complete. Cade turned too sharply at the foot of the stairs and the gun bulging his pocket slammed against the newel post. The silence magnified the sound. Cade stood holding his breath, looking down the hall at the door of the room into which Moran and Mimi had disappeared and realized he was jealous. After what he’d just been through with Janice!

  Men, Cade decided, were complex creatures, almost as complex as women. He reached for the hook of the front screen door and found it already unhooked. Someone else had been unable to sleep. Moran? Mimi? The youth he’d seen behind the desk?

  Cade waded the loose sand to the pier. The air sweeping over the dark bay was cooler and cleaner there. There was a faint slap of waves on the beach and farther out, a suggestion of whitecaps. Cade turned his attention from the water to the cutter made fast to the T-shaped pier. A white “S” enclosed in a white circle was painted on the stack. The insignia was vaguely familiar. Cade tried to place it and couldn’t. One thing, however, was certain. The cutter was built for speed. It was not a contractor’s boat.

  He turned and looked back at the lodge. Only the lobby was lighted. There were no lights in any of the other rooms. Cade tried to put Mimi out of his mind. So Moran was a bastard. So, according to Miss Spence, he had at least three other wives. What happened to Mimi wasn’t any of his affair. She’d stowed away in La Guaira to join Moran. She’d swum the river in the dark. She’d kept herself pure for the guy. Cade hoped she was happy.

  He started to turn back to the pier and stopped as a faint light, feeling its way out past a drawn shade, showed in one of the cottages. So a cottage was occupied, and not by a tired businessman and his amorous secretary.

  Cade raised his eyes to the tall web of steel behind the cottage. It was the first time he’d noticed the tower. It was substantial, solid. It looked like a professional two-way affair, perhaps a ship-to-shore sending outfit. Either that or a powerful ham set.

  In a luxury fishing lodge?

  Cade felt the butt of the gun in his pocket, as he walked out on the pier. The small cruisers he’d noticed were old work tubs with peeling paint. Sandwiched between them were several new skiffs, one a fourteen-foot job, powered with a new fifteen horsepower Sea Horse with two cruise-a-day tanks. Janice was getting money from somewhere, more, a lot more, than she could have possibly gotten from the sale of the old house.

  Sweat started on his face again and trickled down his sides. He wished now he’d stayed in New Orleans. He hadn’t accomplished a thing by coming to the Bay. His intended showdown with Janice had turned out to be just a show — an amorous interlude that had been all play-acting and had left him disgusted with both himself and her. He still didn’t know a thing more than he’d known when he first heard Janice had been in Bay Parish and had sold his properties.

  He stooped to feel the tautness of one of the lines mooring the Sea Bird and the sweat dribbling down his sides turned cold. There was someone behind the next piling. Cade drew his gun from his pocket and looked around the piling. Mimi was sitting on the far side, swinging her bare feet over the planking.

  She looked up at him with wet eyes, “’Allo.”

  In the light from the bulb on the pier head, Cade could see that her face was stained with tears and that the bodice of her dress had been torn and pinned together.

  He returned the gun to his pocket, lighted a cigarette and squatted down beside her. “Smoke?”

  Mimi took the offered cigarette. “Thank you.”

  Cade had a fair idea of what had happened. He wished he could think of something to say to comfort her. It wasn’t nice to see a dream dissolve. He knew.

  Mimi sucked at the cigarette in silence. Then, wiping her wet cheeks with the back of one hand, she announced, “Is all right now. I weel not cry any more.”

  “It didn’t go so good, huh?”

  Mimi shook her head. “No. I ’ave been ver’ bobo, like you say, a leetle fool.”

  “In what way?”

  “Jeem has no affection for me.”

  “No?”

  “No.” Mimi’s small chin jutted. “All he did was use me in Caracas. I was ver’ pleasant way for him to spend a week. I am not even his wife.”

  “He admitted it?”

  Mimi shook her head. “No.” She put her free hand on her left breast. “It is a feeling I have here. I could tell when we were alone
.” Her breathing grew labored. “He has no love for me. All I am to him is a woman. All he wanted was encore. And when I wouldn’t he hit me with his fist and knocked me down on the bed.”

  The bitterness in his voice surprised Cade. “Why didn’t you use your knife?”

  Mimi’s bitterness matched his own. “Because he took it away from me.” She studied her bare feet. “But my knife and my shoes were all he did get.” She began to cry without sound. “It is funny, no, how you can want someone so badly and then not be in love at all? That is why my dress is torn. And now I do not know what to do.”

  “How about going back to Caracas?”

  “No. My family would not receive me.”

  Cade sighed. “I tried to tell you. Miss Spence, that’s the postmistress in Bay Parish, said the return addresses of at least three other girls writing him read — Mrs. James Moran.”

  “Now you tell me thees.”

  “Would you have believed me if I had told you before?”

  Mimi thought a moment. “No.” She continued to cry without sound.

  “Where is Moran now?”

  “I don’t know. He called me bad names and tried to stop me but I ran from the room an’ out here.”

  Cade looked back at the lodge. Janice’s window was lighted. She was awake and knew he was gone. It could be Moran was with her, comparing notes.

  What wind there had been had died. The bay no longer lapped at the beach. The whitecaps were gone. Cade began to sweat again. His throat contracted. The roof of his mouth was dry. He felt as if he were sitting on a cork waiting for all hell to pop.

  “Rest and quiet, that’s an order, Colonel” the medic in Tokyo had told him. “When you get back to the States buy a boat, take it easy. Crawl into the bunk with your wife and a jug of rum and don’t get out of the sack for two months.”

  So he’d bought a boat. He’d drunk a few bottles of rum. He’d even been to bed with his wife; that is, his former wife. All that was missing was the rest and quiet, with a murder charge and Mimi added. The situation had all the qualities of a nightmare. Cade was almost afraid to open his mouth for fear the mounting hysteria inside him would rush out.