The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything

Chapter Four

There were nine messages in his box at the Hotel Birdline in downtown Miami. They all requested that he return the phone calls of Mr. D. LeRoy Wintermore, of Wintermore, Stabile, Schamway and Mertz, the law firm which handled Uncle Omar’s personal matters — as opposed to the captive attorneys who handled the corporate affairs of Krepps Enterprises and all the other interlocking corporations.

Wintermore was a fragile snow-crested old man with, as Kirby had once heard his Uncle Omar say, a skeptical attitude toward all established institutions, including the law.

Kirby packed his two suitcases of personal gear before phoning Wintermore. It took him seven minutes. He phoned the number on the most recent slip and found he had reached D. LeRoy Wintermore at his home. It was Sunday, of course, but it did not feel like Sunday.

“Dear boy!” Wintermore said. “I was fretful about you. When you found what — uh — dispensation Omar had made, you seemed a shade surly.”

“I wasn’t exactly ecstatic. I don’t think I’m greedy especially, but after all, there is supposed to be fifty-million kicking around some place.”

“Possibly it was his intention to improve your character, Kirby.”

“I have more than I can use now.”

“At any rate, there seem to be a few minor difficulties to be ironed out. They want you at a high level conference at the Krepps offices tomorrow morning at ten.”

“They?”

“Your uncle’s elite corps of earnest executives. I shall be there too, by request, and if it appears that you need legal representation, I shall be ready to stand at your side. Fearlessly.”

“What’s up?”

“I have no idea, but they seem to have the impression there was some sort of collusion going on between you and Omar. Hidden assets. Something idiotic. They seem agitated. And something else has disturbed them. Since last Wednesday, every one of Omar’s houses and apartments has been thoroughly ransacked.”

“Really?”

“And they seem to want to connect it all up with whatever mysterious services you performed for Omar.”

“Did he ever tell you what my work was?”

“Dear boy, I never asked.”

“Mr. Wintermore, even though the only things mentioned in the will are the watch and the letter, won’t I get all Uncle Omar’s personal records and papers?”

“In the normal course of events, you would.”

“But now I won’t?”

“Omar had a rather serious warning of his heart condition three months ago. He came to my office and took personal material from our files and left us just the basic essential documents. I asked him what he was going to do with the papers he took. He said he was going to burn them. He smiled rather broadly and said he was going to burn everything. And then he took a silver dollar out of my left ear. He was extremely clever with his magic tricks. It is my understanding he did burn everything, except for one case of documents now in the main vault at Krepps Enterprises. A lovely man, dear boy. Lovely. But with a secrecy fetish. And the executive staff over there seem to find you infected by the same disease.”

“I was following orders. I’ll be there at ten, Mr. Wintermore.”

He hung up and looked around the room and wondered if he would ever find reason to check into the Hotel Birdline again. It was centrally located, but sometimes the nights were made hideous by people hammering on the wrong doors and cawing in the hallways and striking one another with the damp sounds of expert impact until the sirens came. But it was cheap and reasonably clean and he could always get a room in or out of season, and the management stored, free of charge, that small store of personal possessions he did not take along with him on his world-wide errands of mercy, support and investment.

Now he carried his suitcases down to the desk, experiencing stomach pains which reminded him he’d forgotten lunch. Hoover Hess, the owner, was working the desk. He was a loose, asthmatic, scurfy man with the habitual expression of someone having his leg removed without anesthetic. His smile was a special agony. He had gone as high as a seventh mortgage and been down as low as a second. He averaged out at about four.

He smiled. “Hey, Kirb, this thing with your uncle. I’m sorry as hell. It happens like that sometimes. Bam! You’re gone before you got time to fall down. How old was he?”

“Just turned seventy, Hoover.”

“Well, I guess now you’re set, hey?”

“Not exactly. I want to check out. I’ll be over at the Elise on the Beach.”

“Like I said, set. Taking a suite? Why not? Live it up, Kirb. Order up some broads. Order up some tailors. Drink that stuff from the good years.”

“Well, I’ll be sort of a guest over there, Hoover.”

“Sure. Until the legal thing clears and they give you the bundle. I understand. And I’m sorry to lose a good customer. What I want you should do, Kirb, when you get the bundle, we’ll sit down some place and let me show you the books on this thing. What I figure, consolidate the mortgages. It would be just the right kind investment for you.”

“I really won’t have anything to invest, Hoover.”

“I know how it goes. You got to have an answer. Every clown in the world comes around with hot deals, but you know me a long time, right? You don’t have to give Hoover Hess any brushoff. I know you good too, Kirb. You play it just right. Nice and smooth and quiet. No fuss from any broad you bring here, right?”

“But I didn’t—”

Hoover Hess waved a pale freckled hand. “Sure. Be cute. That’s the way you play it. The one I see those times, she was a lady. The glasses is always good, the flat heels, the outfit like a school teacher. Some guy hasn’t been around, he gets fooled, right? But you been around, you watch her walk, and you know it’s class stuff, chin up, swinging that little round can only one sweet little inch side to side walking through here to the crummy elevator.”

Kirby suddenly realized Hess was talking about Miss Farnham, Wilma Farnham, the only other staff member of Uncle Omar’s secret give-away program, the one-woman clipping service, keeper of the files, translator of foreign news items, totally devoted to Uncle Omar’s hidden program. She had been on the job six years, working out of a small office in a building far from the main offices of Krepps Enterprises. His field reports went to that office. The money was arranged through that office. Uncle Omar had assigned rough priorities to the projects she dug up. Then the two of them, Kirby and Miss Farnham, had worked out the schedules. When he was in town they often had evening conferences over work in progress and future missions in his room at the Birdline. She always pushed hard for the health things, the bush hospitals, the village ambulance services, the child nutrition programs. She was consistently dubious about the struggling little entrepreneurs, and always made Kirby feel she thought him too gullible for the job. She had worshipped Uncle Omar. He felt guilty, realizing this was the first time since returning he had wondered what would become of her now. But there stood Hoover Hess, leering at him.

Feeling that he was betraying and degrading Miss Farnham, he gave Hess a broad, knowing, conspiratorial wink.

“Out of them glasses,” Hess said, “and out of them old-lady clothes, with her hair mussed and a drink in her, I bet she’s a pistol, Kirb.”

“How much do I owe you this time?”

“You’re past checkout, but I won’t charge you for today. You come in dawn Friday. Make it three nights, plus two phone calls. Comes to eighteen eighty-four. No credit card?”

“I had to turn them in.”

“So who needs cards with so much cash coming? You can just sign if you want.”

“I’ll pay cash, Hoover. Thanks.”

When he had his change, he walked to the lobby booth. No point in trying the office to get Wilma Farnham. It was listed under O.K. Devices. O. K. for Omar Krepps. He looked up Miss Farnham’s private number. After the phone rang eight times he gave up and took a cab back out to the Beach and checked into the Hotel Elise. The desk clerks were extraordinarily cordial. Room 840 was ready for Mr. Winter. It was approximately six times the size of his room at the Birdline, with chaises, tables, gentle music, six shower controls, a sun deck, an ocean view, vases of cut flowers, bowls of fruit, his dry-cleaned suit hanging in the closet, the other laundry on a low chest of drawers. When he was alone, he went out onto the sun deck. He could not see the deck where he had walked out to be confronted by Charla supine, but he estimated it was perhaps forty feet to his right, screened by an architectural concession to privacy. He looked down. Little brown people were stretched out on the bright sun cots near the cabanas, looking like doll bodies awaiting the attentions of the costumer. He went back into the room and over to the biggest bowl of fruit. When he looked at it, it made him think of Charla. He selected a pear, and it turned out to be such a superior pear, he had to eat it over the bathroom sink, a deep oval of stainless steel set into a long countertop covered with cherry-colored tile. He looked at the rounded shape of the sink and thought of Charla. He bit into the pear and thought of Charla. He glared into his own mirrored eyes and thought of Charla. Finally he had to dry his sweaty face on a hand towel and go stand in front of the nearest air-conditioning vent.

He went down into the ornate maze of bars and shops and dining rooms in the bowels of the hotel and found a grill room that would serve him a steak sandwich and coffee. It was after four. He tried to sort things out logically. He wasn’t very good at it. Miss Farnham had always seemed skeptical of his attempts at orderly analysis. Uncle Omar had never seemed to mind when he reached conclusions he could not justify through any exercise of logic.

Betsy Alden presented too many possibilities. He did not even want to think about her. Thinking about her was like having a dull headache. She could be a neurotic having hallucinations. She could be absolutely accurate. Or she could be at any point between those two extremes.

I am not, he thought, so remarkable, so enchanting, so superior, that Joseph and Charla lay all this on because they can’t help themselves. All over the world, whenever they found out I might come up with funds, I’ve been hustled, but never so good, never so completely. So they do want something. And it isn’t the way you hustle a potential employee. As far as I know, I haven’t got anything they want. But they think I have it or will have it. There is something somebody wants. It did well by Uncle Omar. Well enough, so that all the outposts have been ransacked, but according to Mr. Wintermore, there would have been nothing in any one of them, not even at the island.

I told them I have nothing. I’m still being hustled. I was too drunk to lie, so they must think I have something I don’t know I have, or will get something later that I don’t know about. The letter. As good a guess as any. Or maybe, as Betsy suggested, the personal papers.

So what are the ethics? Go along with it? Tell Betsy when I get a clue? Do I owe her anything? Maybe. It depends on how accurate she was. A little free ride shouldn’t corrode the soul.

But how much corrosion is implicit in Charla Maria Markopoulo O’Rourke? Suddenly he realized he could readily check it out, indirectly at least. If Charla and Joseph were as influential as they seemed to be, and as powerful as Betsy implied, the Miami papers would have something about them in the morgue.

“Darling!” Charla said, sliding into the booth to sit facing him, reaching across to take his hand in hers. “Wherever have you been?” She wore a blue and white cotton print cut alarmingly low, and a totally frivolous hat. He felt the heat of her hands through white gloves. She stared at him so earnestly, so glowingly, so heatedly, he almost turned around to see who she could be looking at directly behind him. It was a dark corner of the grill, a paneled booth, a lamp with an orange shade. The impact of her made her seem larger than life, a face seen by courtesy of Eastman color when you sit too close to the screen. The nose was snubbed, the cheeks broad, the gray-green eyes slightly Asiatic, the hair milky, heavy, the shade of old ivory, mouth broad, lips heavy and slightly parted and delicately moist, disclosing the small, white, even teeth.

“Just — uh — errands,” he said.

She released his hands, pouted at him. “I’ve been forlorn. I’ve missed you terribly. I even wondered if you’d been waylaid by my poor little confused niece.”

“Uh... no.”

“That’s good, dear. She may try to tell you some of her mad nonsense. I should warn you in advance, I guess. I feel disloyal telling you these things about her because, after all, she is the daughter of one of my half-sisters. I guess we should have realized we’d have a problem with her when she was expelled from that nice school in Switzerland. But she did seem so sweet, at fifteen. We did our best by her, Kirby, but she has — a very weak grasp on reality. Possibly we should have institutionalized her. But — family, you know — one keeps trying. Actually, that’s why I had her come here this time. More bad reports. But it might not do any good. She seems totally rebellious.”

“Bad reports?”

“We try to keep track of her, discreetly. Darling Kirby, I don’t want to bore you with family problems. But she is really terribly — unstable. She acts out her own fantasies.”

“Oh?”

“She has accused me and Joseph of truly horrible behavior, and I haven’t known whether to laugh or cry. Unscrupulous men have taken advantage of the way she seems compelled to act out the dreams in her strange mind.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She seems very erratic this time. She may approach you, Kirby. And she may try to make you a key figure in one of her fantasies. And when she does, she will probably throw herself at you.”

“Throw herself at me?”

“It will just be another little drama she is constantly writing for herself in her mind. If it should happen, I can’t tell you what to do. You seem like a most decent person, Kirby. If you refuse to play the male lead opposite her paranoid heroine, she’ll probably find someone who will. She’s reasonably attractive. Maybe it would be best if you — humored her. You would be gentle, wouldn’t you?”

“B-But—”

“Thank you so much, dear. Just indulge her. Say what she wants to hear. I’ll be trying to find another opening for her. I have some good friends in the entertainment world. Don’t you think it is better for her to be free than to be shut away somewhere?”

“I guess so.”

“One doctor suggested that it is a sublimation of something she does not want to face. By accusing me of vicious, horrible, incredible things she seems to ease her own feelings of guilt. To her I am some sort of dream figure living amidst monstrous conspiracies. Joseph and I joke about it sometimes, but it is a heartbreaking kind of humor. We’re really not complicated. Perhaps we like to live too well, but we can afford it — even though we are always being cheated somehow. And maybe you will be taking that worry off our minds, dear.”

“I haven’t really—”

“They gave you an impossible room and I made them change it. Tomorrow you and I are going shopping. I know exactly the sort of clothing you should be wearing. And that haircut is really tiresome if I may say so. It’s as if you are trying to sneak through life without being noticed, Kirby. And you have so much possibility. When I’m through with you, you’ll walk through the world as if you own it and women will turn to stare at you and their eyes will go wide and their little hands will get moist and they’ll make sly little plots to meet you.”

“I don’t think I exactly want that kind of—”

“You’ll relish it, believe me. Come on now, dear. Joseph will be waiting for us in the suite. We’ll have some drinks there, and the limousine will pick us up at seven-thirty and take us to a perfectly fabulous restaurant.”

By ten-thirty that evening, Kirby Winter found himself taking particular pains to enunciate clearly. And sometimes, if he closed one eye, he could keep Joseph in better focus.

“Nice of you to invite me on a cruise,” he said. “But I don’t want to feel—”

“Obligated?” Joseph cried. “Nonsense! It is our pleasure!”

Kirby carefully turned his head and said, “Where’d she go?”

“To freshen her make-up perhaps.”

“I don’t dance often, Joe. I didn’t mean to come down on her foot like that.”

“She forgave you.”

“But I keep remembering that scream.”

“She is just unusually sensitive to pain, Kirby. Her nerves are closer to the surface than most. But since she is equivalently sensitized to pleasure, I imagine it is a characteristic she would not willingly give up.”

“ ’Mazing woman,” Kirby said solemnly. “ ’Mazing.”

“I was just thinking, my boy, if you should feel you might be leading a parasitic life on the Glorianna, if it would offend your instincts, there is one project you might take on. And a worthwhile one I would say.”

“Like what?”

“You were close to Omar Krepps. A fantastic man, fantastic career. But the world knows little about him. He saw to that. I think it would be a rather nice gesture of devotion and respect, dear boy, if you busied yourself with a biography of him. Later we could get some professional to put it in proper shape for publication. Just think of all his quiet charities which will never be recorded unless you do it. And there might be a kind of poetic justice in it. It might make you a bit of money.”

“Interesting,” Kirby said.

“I imagine that for a project like that, you could gather up his personal papers, documents and records.”

“And bring them aboard, huh?”

“You’d be working aboard, would you not?”

“The mystery of Omar Krepps.”

“Might make rather a nice title, that.”

“Sometimes you sound English.”

“I did have some schooling in England.”

“You know, I bet you’d like to help me sort out those cases of personal records.”

“Is there that much!”

“Hell, yes.”

“I’d be happy to help, of course, if you need me.”

Kirby felt shrewd as a fox. “All in storage under my name at the Hotel Birdline. Cases of crud. Diaries.”

“I had no idea you had all that. You didn’t mention it the other night.”

“Forgot it.”

“When the Glorianna gets in, we can have it all brought aboard.”

“Oh sure.”

“Aren’t you acting a little strange, Kirby?”

“Me? Strange?” As he grinned the room tilted and then came slowly back. He felt reckless. “Joseph, old buddy, we’re all strange, each in our own little way. You, me, Charla and Betsy.”

“Betsy?”

He grinned broadly and drained his Irish coffee. “She’s maybe the weirdest one of all. She can tell what’s going to happen before it even happens. She’s a witch, maybe.”

Joseph’s big, bronzed, glossy face was suddenly like something on a coin. “Just what did she predict, Kirby?”

Suddenly, too late, the alarms rang. The fox became a rabbit and ran under a bush.

“Who predict what, Joseph?”

“Has Betsy been talking to you?”

“Excuse. I think maybe I might be going to be a little bit sick.”

He went into the men’s room, leaned close to the mirror, and made strange savage faces at himself until somebody else came in....

“Naughty boy,” the gentle, chiding, loving voice said, husky-sweet in the night. “Oh, yes indeed, a very naughty boy.” Fingers stroked his forehead. He opened his eyes cautiously. He saw a dark edge of building overhead, and half a sky full of stars. A head, bending over him, blocked out some of the stars. The face was in dark shadow, but light came from somewhere behind her, silvering the outline of her head.

“Dear God,” he whispered.

“Oh yes, darling boy, you drank much too much. And such a waste, really. Such a waste of all manner of good things.”

He moved his head slightly. There was a smooth, rounded, pneumatic warmth under the nape of his neck. As he began to wonder just what it was, a stir of the warm night breeze ran along his body and he felt as if he was entirely naked. He moved one hand cautiously. He was naked. He sat up abruptly in spite of the pain which split his head in two. He got his head up into the light for a moment before Charla took him by the shoulders and yanked him back down so firmly his head bounced once off the resilience of her thigh then settled into its previous position. At least he had gathered some information. He was on a sun deck, on a sun cot, and from the micro-glimpse of the room beyond, he guessed it was his own. Charla sat at the end of the cot, his head on her lap. And at least there was a reassuring layer of fabric over the rubbery convexity of his fleshy pillow.

“Don’t leap like that, dear one,” she said.

“I was just—”

“So naughty,” she crooned. “Getting so squiffed. Lying to me. You shouldn’t lie to me. You did see Betsy.”

“For a minute.” He hesitated. “Where my clothes?”

“Right here on the floor, sweet. After we got you up here and you passed out out here on the deck, you felt so sweaty and hot and miserable, I took them off.”

“Oh.”

“I’m really very angry with you. You don’t know who your real friends are, do you?”

“I don’t feel very good.”

“Of course you don’t! And you haven’t acted very well. Just rest now. You’ve spoiled it all for us, for tonight. Didn’t you know you were spoiling things for your Charla?”

“I didn’t know it was—”

“Did you think I’d be so vulgar as to make an appointment? I’m a woman, darling. Maybe there’ll be another night. Maybe not. Who can say?”

“The liquor hit me.”

The fingertips closed his eyelids, then moved gently across his lips. “Maybe you were exhausted, dear. Maybe poor, stringy, little Betsy used all your resources.”

“No! We just sat in a hotel and talked.”

“Her hotel?”

“No. Just a hotel. In the lobby.”

“And you listened to that poor crazed mind and began to doubt us. Where is she staying, dear?”

“An apartment.”

“Do you know the address?”

“She didn’t tell me.”

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough lying for one night?”

“Really, she didn’t tell me. She said she’d get in touch.”

“She knows you’ve moved here?”

“Yes.”

“And when she does get in touch with you, you’ll let me know, won’t you, lover. Immediately.”

“Oh yes. I’ll do that, Charla.”

She sighed. He felt the perfumed warmth of her exhalation against his face. “You have put me off, you know. Just a little. I told you, I have to be a little more than half in love. I think I was. But not now.”

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

She held his head, eased herself out from under him and lowered his head to the woven plastic of the sun cot. She stood beside the cot for a moment looking down at him. Because of the darkness of the night, he was just able to keep from making some violent, ludicrous concession to modesty.

“I’ll try to forgive you, darling. But you really must be very good from now on. I must leave you now.”

The remembered mouth came slowly down upon his, flexing, changing, with soft heated movements. His arms went around her without volition, holding her with an increasing strength until suddenly he made a great Hoo-Aah sound and leaped like a stung horse, galvanized by the sudden, shocking, forceful, momentary grasp. She pulled free and, from the doorway into the room, laughed in a gentle mocking way, and was gone.

He lay quivering under the stars, then went in and had an icy shower, and left a call for nine o’clock. It was a few minutes before three. He found a switch for the deck light and picked up his clothes. After he sorted them out and hung them up, he turned off the deck light and went out again into the April night to sit on the wide concrete wall at the end of the deck, sit naked on the abrasive texture, his back against the solidity of the hotel, knees flexed, forearms on his knees, hands slack, cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He could look to his left and straight down, down past architectural solutions, straight down through an obscured and dizzy vista to a tiled death below. He could look straight out at a night-dark sea and sense the slow pulse of the swells and the tides. He could look to his right and see the few highlights of the aseptic sun cot, a prop in a play now over. The wind was fresher, almost cool enough to be uncomfortable. His heart rapped a little too fast, and he had a dull headache. But these physical stigmata were minor compared with his emotional trauma. Charla, with a single vulgar tweak, had reduced him to clownishness, had turned consternation into farce, had shown, symbolically, her ability to destroy his pride, dignity and manhood at her option.

He thought sourly of all the should-have-done things. Another man, a real man, might well have burst from the couch with a roar of rage at such playful violation of privacy, grasped her, swung her onto the couch and ravished her there, under the stars, a fitting punishment for impertinence. (But maybe that was really what she was asking of him!)

He wondered what, long ago, had created this incapacity to deal with people like Charla. He looked out at the sea and wondered why he should be afraid of anything, of anyone. The sea went on, and the shore people changed, but there were stars so lasting that the sea itself was smaller than the life of one man in comparison. Compared to the sea, compared to the stars, of what moment was one snatch of the fishwife hand, one small humiliation, on one night, for one man?

He thought of her hands, small, strong, quite square-looking, beautifully kept, the nails long and curving, the pads of the palms prominent.

He groaned and snapped his cigarette toward the sea and went to bed.