Big Kiss-Off Read online

  Mimi met his eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  A long moment of silence followed, relieved only by the creak of the mooring ropes and the faint swish of the water in the bilge. A new feeling, a feeling of strain, filled the cabin. Cade refilled the girl’s glass. She liked him. He was affecting her just as she was affecting him. Under her calm exterior, she was as excited by the night and their mutual closeness as he was. He could tell by the beat of the pulse in her throat, the way she looked at him from time to time.

  “All right. Let’s go on with the story,” he said. “You had no money and no passport.”

  “No.”

  “But you wanted to come to the States. You had to come to the States?”

  “Sí.”

  “Why?”

  Mimi ran the tip of a pink tongue across her full lips.

  “Why?” Cade repeated. “Let’s have it. Being as pretty as you are, you could have been, well, let’s say you could have had a bad six days between here and La Guaira, if one or more of the crew had happened to discover you and failed to report you to the captain. Or you might have been drowned swimming ashore. Or I might have been a heel. I still might be, for all you know.”

  Although the hips of the white pants fit snugly, the legs were loose. Mimi thrust out her right leg and pulled up the leg of the borrowed pants to disclose a small but efficient looking knife strapped high on the inside of her cream-colored thigh.

  “So you have a knife,” Cade said. “Why have you taken the chances you have?”

  “To find Captain Moran.”

  The name meant nothing to Cade. “What’s this Moran to you?”

  Mimi’s Latin accent was more pronounced this time. “My ’usband. We were married in Caracas almost a year ago.” Her voice barely audible, she continued, “When my family find out, they were ver’, how you say, irritado!” She found the word she wanted. “Angry. We are ver’ ol’ family. They did not like I should marry foreigner.” Her lower lip thrust out in a sullen pout. “I am not so pleased myself.”

  “Why?”

  “He was supposed to send for me, but he did not. That is why I stow away, to come to him.”

  Realizing the leg of her pants was still pulled high on her thigh, Mimi blushed and rolled down the leg.

  Cade returned his eyes to her face. Of course. She had told him her name — Mimi Trujillo Esterpar Moran, and he had kidded her about the Moran sounding Irish. For some reason the thought of any other man having had Mimi made him furious. He asked, “How long were you together?”

  Mimi said, “One week. Just the week he was in Caracas.”

  “He hasn’t been back since? That is, to Caracas?”

  Mimi continued to pout. “No.”

  “He was Army?”

  Mimi’s smile was small. “A flyer. Just like you. He was on what you call mission.” She accented the on in mission.

  It was an effort for Cade to talk. “Where in the States is he stationed?”

  The black-haired girl shook her head. “That I do not know. I ’ave not heard from him since he left Caracas. But I ’ave written many letters, here. To the adress he gave me — Captain James Moran, Bay Parish, Louisiana, in care of one Tocko Kalavitch. That is why I stowed away in the boat that I did.” She seemed to be trying to convince herself. “And in the morning I will find him.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Maybe.” Cade said.

  If there were a Moran in Bay Parish, the man was new since his time. He didn’t know any Morans on the river. There were Morgans and Monroes and Moores and Mooneys. There was even a Serbian family that had changed its name to Morton, but he didn’t know any Morans. Cade felt deflated, let down. He poured more wine in his glass, wishing it were rum, wishing he had a case of rum. It would seem that the wrong people always got together.

  The things that could happen to a man.

  First, Janice.

  Then the Squid.

  Now this.

  “More wine?” he asked Mimi.

  “No, thank you,” she said, primly.

  He looked at her. And now the thought he had been keeping buried within him struggled to the surface. After all, why shouldn’t he just dump her in the river? Probably her whole outlandish story was a he. Probably she was just a plant, an emissary of Tocko and Company, intending some trick to do him damage once her disarming presence had lowered his guard. Cade lighted a cigarette. Well, he’d play along with her a while. He didn’t want to believe the worst of her. But he’d keep his guard high.

  It was, all things considered, Cade decided, one hell of a homecoming.

  4 The Glass Wall

  Morning dawned warm and familiar. Cade lay long moments after he’d been awakened, listening to the din of the river on one side and to the twittering of the birds on the other — thrushes, mocking birds and crested cardinals in the leafy trees rising out of the rich Delta mud back of the levee.

  There had been no birds in Pyongyang. There’d been a complete lack of a lot of things in Pyongyang. As Cade lighted his first cigarette of the day, he looked at the closed door of the forecabin.

  Mimi was cute. She was sweet. He liked her. But he wished the hell she had stayed in Caracas. He had enough problems of his own without having to worry about someone’s abandoned bride. From where he lay, it looked like a hit-and-run to him.

  Some smart punk forced down on a training mission had seen a way to spend a delightful week-end. It could be that, but Cade was fair. He could be doing Moran an injustice. If the guy were a jet pilot, and he probably was, he could be anywhere by now, all wrapped up in “Security.” According to what he’d heard on the coast, the big brass was shipping the boys out of Nellis about as soon as they were able to read a cockpit panel and do a power dive on a ground target without losing their heads and pulling out so fast they caught a bad case of stick reversal and skip-hopped a Sabrejet over two miles of sand and sage to wind up “an unavoidable training fatality.”

  It didn’t seem right that any man in his right mind, not under orders, would willingly walk out on a girl like Mimi.

  Cade wished he’d bought a larger boat, a boat with two heads. No matter how big a boat a man bought, he always needed a bigger one. The head was in the prow. To reach it he would have to pass through the forecabin.

  Cade swung his bare feet to the floor and cracked the forecabin door. Exhausted by her experience and the long swim, Mimi was still sleeping soundly. Her borrowed pants and shirt lay folded neatly on the starboard bunk. The sheet with which she’d covered herself had been too warm and she’d pushed it down until only her feet were covered. The small knife strapped to the creamy flesh of her thigh looked out of place, like some obscene foreign growth that had attached itself to her natural beauty.

  “No man in his right mind,” Cade said to himself.

  He closed the door as noiselessly as he had opened it and, padding out into the open cockpit, he used the fog-dappled Mississippi for his purpose. The fog was lifting rapidly. Early as it was, smoke was emerging from the chimneys of the houses. A half-dozen white and colored fishermen. were sitting on the banks of the canals and on the levee angling for their breakfasts.

  Cade tried to remember how long it had been since he had eaten hard-fried bream and hot corn bread for breakfast. He looked at the useless, heavy, deep-sea rods and reels racked in their cases beside the wheel. He should have brought a cane pole, a few feet of cheap fish line and a handful of .00 hooks.

  He got his sneakers and pants from the cabin aft, took the automatic pistol from under his pillow and thrust it into the right hip pocket of his dungarees. If Joe Laval and Tocko thought they were going to run him off the river, they were out of their minds. This was home. He liked it here.

  As he walked down the pier, a sleek thirty-two-foot guide boat put out from a basin, new since he’d been away, not far from the pilot boat landing. Cade could see five or six more boats in the basin, all apparently guide boats, all equipped with ship-to-shore telephone antennae. He wondered if T
ocko had added a fleet of charter boats to his various interests. If so, it could explain Laval’s actions. He and Tocko would resent a new boat on the river, would begrudge someone else the right to make a dime. Still, that didn’t seem reasonable. If Tocko Kalavitch had fifty guide boats, they’d be only a drop in the bucket compared to the earnings of his shrimp trawlers and oyster fleet.

  Anyway Cade looked at it, his welcome-home beating didn’t make sense. He reviewed what had happened for the twentieth time. Laval had said that Tocko wanted to see him. He’d said he didn’t want to see Tocko, and Laval had turned the Squid loose. Cade looked at his watch. Five minutes of seven. Tocko should be in his office by nine. Cade meant to be there shortly after the other man arrived.

  He walked down the path to the old Cain house. It wasn’t as weathered-looking by daylight as it had been at dusk-dark. There were good Unes to the old house. It had been built with slave labor when lumber had been cheap. There were more square feet in the open gallery under the screened second-floor balcony than there were in the average modern three-bedroom house. Someone had cut the grass and pruned the grove that his great grandfather’s father had set out. For being as old as they were, the trees were in fair condition. Cade lifted the sagging gate aside and stopped as he saw the freshly painted sign nailed to one of the fluted columns. It read —

  FOR SALE

  Tocko Kalavitch Enterprises

  Cade leaned against the fence doing a slow burn. He hadn’t commissioned Kalavitch to sell the house. He hadn’t commissioned anyone to sell it. The original house had been in the Cain family over one hundred years. The coach house, reputed to be built of the heart oak of the flat boat belonging to the original Cain, must be even older.

  The stinker, Cade thought, when I was reported missing, Tocko figured I’d never come back.

  He smoked two cigarettes, just sitting on the fence, looking at the old house, remembering the good times he’d had in it as a boy. All it needed was a clapboard replaced here and there and a couple of coats of paint and unless the river washed it away, as it nearly had on several occasions, countless more generations of Cains could live in it. The thought saddened Cade. If there would be more Cains. He was the last of his line. It could be he couldn’t have children. At least he and Janice hadn’t had any, although God knew, during the first year of their marriage, they had tried.

  Cade felt baffled, frustrated. He’d never felt quite the same before. It was almost like trying to climb a glass wall. Thinking of Janice made him think of Mimi — and Mimi belonged to another man. She was Señora Trujillo Estebar James Moran. Cade hoped for a moment Moran had had a flame-out, then quickly retracted the wish. God forbid. It was bad enough just flying one of the sucker-mouthed gadget-cluttered bastards. Mimi was nothing to him. Her attraction was purely physical. He’d help her locate Moran if he could. Then he’d shake her hand and tell her goodbye. Cade felt the bulge in his hip pocket. But first he’d talk to Tocko. It should be an interesting conversation.

  He climbed the levee and walked back out on the pier. Mimi was awake and up. He could see her in the cabin aft doing something in front of the stove. He jumped down into the cockpit. “Hi.”

  He was trying with all his might not to be suspicious of her. He didn’t want to be suspicious.

  Mimi cast him a hasty glance. “Good morning.”

  As she glanced away from the stove, the coffee she was making boiled over and the piece of forked bread she was holding over the big burner caught on fire. Mimi swore softly in Spanish, snatched the coffee-pot from the stove and extinguished the burning bread. Both were hot and she promptly put her fingers in her mouth.

  Cade watched her, amused. Anyway a man looked at her, she was cute. She’d rolled up the legs of his pants to pedal-pusher length. Every time she stooped or turned he caught a tantalizing glimpse of rounded cream-colored flesh that made Marilyn Monroe’s chief attractions look like she’d bought them second-hand at a war surplus sale.

  “Don’t you laugh,” Mimi said hotly. She laid the piece of burned bread on a plate. “Because you were so ver’ kind, I thought I would get the breakfast.” She returned her attention to something she was stirring in a pan.

  “Fine,” Cade said.

  He sat back of the small table, watching her, wishing she were Janice. The toast was charred. She’d used at least a half-pound of coffee to the pot. With some rare alchemic ability, she’d managed to mix and cook the powdered scrambled eggs to the same gooey consistency and shade of bilious green that countless army mess sergeants had spent years in achieving.

  The black-haired girl brushed a wisp of damp curl from her perspiring forehead. “Well, as you say, come an’ get it.” She studied the meal she’d concocted. “I am afraid I am not so good the cook, no?”

  “It’s fine, just fine,” Cade said. To spare her feelings he ate a forkful of the eggs and washed it down with a sip of bitter coffee. Surprisingly, when Mimi smiled, the eggs and the coffee tasted good.

  Mimi explained, “Is just I am not ever do it before. In Venezuela it is different. In Venezuela no lady cooks.”

  Cade bit into a piece of charred toast. “Your family has money, hey?”

  Mimi shrugged her shoulders. “In Venezuela ever’one has servants.”

  Except the Indians and mestizos, Cade thought. He asked, “What are you going to do if you can’t locate Moran? Write your family for dough and go home?” He translated. “Dough, money, bolivars.”

  A worried look replaced Mimi’s puzzled frown. “They would not send it if I did. They regused to give me money to come here.” She shook her head emphatically. “No. Now I can nevair go home. My father, he is ver’ proud. I am, how your say, make my bed.”

  And a very pretty bed, Cade thought. Aloud he said, “Then I hope you locate Moran. You’re too pretty to be turned loose on your own.”

  Mimi was pleased. She put the fingers of one hand to the back of her head and thrust out her chest in an entirely feminine gesture. “You think I am pretty?”

  Cade resisted an impulse to suck in his breath. “You get by.”

  When they’d finished breakfast, he dried and put away while she washed the few dishes they’d used. It was a homey, domestic moment. Cade enjoyed it. He enjoyed it very much but it deepened his resentment toward Janice. Everything could have been so wonderful.

  The moment the galley had been made shipshape, Mimi wanted to go ashore. Cade explained, “But Tocko Kalavitch, the man in whose care you addressed your letters to your husband, doesn’t arrive at his office until nine.” He added, “Besides, try as hard as I can, I can’t remember any Morans on this immediate stretch of the river.”

  Mimi eyed him suspiciously, “You are ’aving the fun.”

  “No, I mean it.”

  “You know this town?”

  “Every inch of it. And every reef and marsh and inlet and island for a radius of fifty miles. It so happens that I was born here and lived here until I was eighteen.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Mimi said. “I mean that you don’t know any Morans. You just don’t want me to find Jeem.”

  Her lower lip thrust out in a pout, she sat in one of the fishing chairs, her small hands in her lap, looking up at Cain from time to time through quarter-inch-long black lashes.

  “He has to be here.”

  “Okay. Maybe he’s mayor,” Cade said. “After all, I’ve been away twelve years.”

  At five minutes of nine, he examined the clip in his gun, returned the clip to the gun and fired a shot into the river to make certain the gun was working.

  “Why you do that?” Mimi asked. “Why you carry a gun?”

  “Just an old American custom. Especially down here in the Delta.”

  He walked with her up the road to town, wishing she was wearing a dress. She wobbled delightfully when she walked and the tight white pants emphasized the wobble.

  “What did you do with your dress?”

  Mimi told him, “I took it off, in the river. It
was tight and not good for swim.”

  A dozen men and women he hadn’t seen the night before stopped him to welcome him home. Whatever Laval and Tocko had to beef about, it was peculiar to them. Everyone else he’d met seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

  Morning was hot and humid. He could smell the rich Delta mud and the green growing things sprouting in it. There was no other place in the world like it. He’d come home. He meant to stay.

  As they walked up Main Street, Mimi laid a small hand on his arm.

  “You have been away a long time?”

  “Twelve years, I told you.”

  “Without once coming home?”

  “That’s right. You see, I stayed in the Army after the last big one, based at MacDill and Nellis and Langley jet fields. For the last two years, I’ve been sitting it out in a prisoner-of-war camp on the north side of the Yalu.”

  Mimi’s fingers bit into his arm. “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

  It was nothing. Other folks had said they were sorry but the feel of her small fingers on his arm, the tone of the girl’s voice, gave Cade a lift. If her man had been where he’d been, she would have been waiting for him, with the shades drawn and the cat put out, in her prettiest negligee, with a smile hovering between the tears on her cheeks. That was the kind of a girl she was.

  Cade lighted a cigarette as he studied the outside of Tocko’s new office. The one-story building was masonry and moderne, with a big picture window. The legend — Tocko Kalavitch Enterprises — was printed on it in gold leaf. He wasn’t surprised to find the building air-conditioned. The receptionist was young and smartly dressed. The outer office was expensively furnished.

  Bay Parish hadn’t changed, but Tocko had. The swaggering river gunman and narcotic-and-alien runner of twelve years ago was gone. Tocko was big time now, a Delta man of distinction. His black hair had silvered at the temples. He was wearing a silk shantung suit that had cost him two hundred dollars. A heavy diamond glittered on one of his fingers. As his smartly dressed young secretary ushered Cade and Mimi into his office, he stood up behind a glass-topped desk and extended a soft white hand.