“You keep putting words in my mouth.”
“I don’t know. He never said. In a lot of ways Bert was a kid and I was his big brother in Korea. But he was an officer and I was a noncom. Everyone used to talk about conquests, but come to think of it, Bert didn’t.”
“I didn’t mean Bert wasn’t normal. I mean he’d led a sheltered life.” Karen blushed faintly. I hadn’t thought she was capable of it. “I’m going to hate myself tonight. The inquest must have wound me up, that’s all.”
“You wound yourself up, now you’re going to unwind while I listen.”
“I want to. I’m tired of us fighting with each other all the time. I can’t.”
“Baloney. If people want change they’ll just have to wait.” I locked the cash box, took Karen’s hand and half-dragged her into the back room.
“Sit down,” I said. “Maybe I never made my position clear to you. I have no patience for the police if Billy-boy Drake is one of them. You’re on my list right now, Karen. You’re near the top. I don’t want to make any mistakes. When I find the killer maybe I’ll turn him in and maybe I won’t, but he’ll be punished. Get that through your head. Here’s something else for you to think about. Someone tried to kill me today.”
“I—”
“Shut up. It’s open war now. Me and them, whoever they are. There’s something dirty going on here at Tolliver’s, I don’t know what. Bert was killed for it.” I tried to read Karen’s face. I’d hate to play poker with her. “Maybe they’ll kill me too and maybe they won’t. I’m not going anyplace. I set myself up as a clay pigeon once and I’ll do it again. Do you have anything to drink back here?”
Karen stared at me like she’d seen me for the first time. Her mouth hung open slightly. She said, “You mean that, all of it.”
“Dammit, get the truth serum.”
It struck her funny. I expected a nervous laugh but was treated to that mink coat smile for the second time. Karen opened a desk drawer and took out a fifth of Old Taylor and two shot glasses. “You rat,” she said, still smiling. “Two shots of sodium pentathol coming up.” She poured, all the while staring at me. I was some kind of strange animal.
We toasted wordlessly and drank. “More,” I said. We toasted and drank again. We did this five times and while I have an extensive capacity for whiskey I began to wonder. If Karen had a wooden leg it was more shapely than any I’d ever seen.
“This is silly, Gid. You can’t get me to talk like this. If I drink wanting to get drunk I never do.”
After that, I did the pouring. We kept right on drinking.
“See? It isn’t working.” But a thickness had crept into Karen’s speech. “It’s just no good, Gid. If you think I’m going to get so stinking you can ask anything you want, you’re mishtaken… mistaken. I’m free and… light this cigarette for me.”
I did. I felt unsteady, too, but not that unsteady. “Get it off your chest,” I said. “It’s a kind of psychotherapy.”
“Would Freud have approved of all this whishkey?” Karen tittered.
“Freud would have approved of anything.”
“That’s what you say. Don’t go thinking the wrong things because of what I said about not being a virgin. Are you trying to make me?”
The spring wasn’t just unwinding now, it was unwinding in all directions. “No,” I said. “When I try to make you, you’ll know it.”
“I’ve heard that song before, Gideon Frey. I’ve beaten off bigger wolves than you. It isn’t ladylike but I’m five foot nine in nylons and I have muscles. See?” Brother, we were moving about in a fog of alcohol. Karen wore a short-sleeved blouse and flexed her biceps. I laughed because it looked trim and feminine, the kind of arm which, if all the other items of equipment matched it, could win beauty contests hut not hurt anyone.
“You think I’m kidding. Lishen… listen. I had a twin brother I grew up with. Nature made me big and gave him a nasty temper. We fought all the time and I could take care of myself. Gee, how could I have married Bert? It wouldn’t have worked. I liked the guy, I felt sorry for him more than anything, I guess. Say, are you listening? Give me another drink.” Karen drank and sniffed and wiped tears from her eyes. “We used to go down to the beach and wrestle around in the water like anyone else. I could duck him or pin him on the sand and he used to call me his Amazon. His beautiful Amazon. You’re not listening. Am I beautiful?”
I nodded.
“Well, I’m not an Amazon. I weigh a hundred and forty-five pounds but I’m skinny. I can’t help it if I’m six feet tall in spike-heels.”
“You are not skinny. A little angular perhaps, but not skinny. Keep talking.”
“I don’t want to be anybody’s darn Amazon. When I fall for a man he’ll have to be able to throw me around with one hand. Shay, could you do that, Gid? Could you do that?”
I squinted and wasn’t sure which image of her to pick up, but I managed to find the right one and lifted her and put her on the desk. I placed my hands at the base of her ribcage and lifted her overhead while she giggled. I was Atlas holding up the world.
“Hercules my shipmate,” she squeaked. “Let’s go swimming.”
Someplace in the back of my mind the reason why all this had taken place still lurked. I rationalized and told myself maybe a good swim would make her feel like talking even more. We staggered out of the penny arcade and didn’t bother to lock up. We went upstairs and across the hall to the bathhouse. We had to walk past the pool to reach the locker rooms and people stared at us. So we were holding hands. So what? So we were smiling at each other but no one here knew we hated each other a little while ago. So what? So we were stumbling and making a great effort to walk a straight line and failing, that’s what. Brother, we were pie-eyed.
I managed to climb into a pair of trunks in the men’s locker room and found Karen wailing for me outside. “You didn’t rent that contraption here!” I yowled. “It’s gorgeous.”
She wore a two-piece suit of some iridescent yellow material. Enough on top to support her breasts, not rounded like Sheila’s, but firm and high-arched and struggling with the top of the halter. It looked like a game halter but I’d have put my money on what was inside if she indulged over-zealously in beach athletics. Enough downstairs to cover the delightful unmentionables, commencing just below the navel and ending right where the long, golden-smooth thighs began.
“Oh, it’s my suit,” Karen said. She pirouetted and showed the backs of curved calves and thighs and a hip flare which had to be padded to look like that only under the trunks of that Bikini you couldn’t have fit a Kleenex tissue. Picture Karen with a little patch of yellow iridescence on the mainsail and one on the poop deck and picture us both higher than box-kites on a windy day and running out to the beach after getting stamped at the Tolliver gate while all the women in line made nasty, jealous faces. Picture us running straight out into the water, kicking sand into a lot of faces and not caring and then plunging on into the slight gray swells which passed for waves here and surface diving and swimming out rapidly beyond all the bobbing bathing caps, then treading water and looking at each other, breathless and still high.
“I’ll bet we’re halfway out to Sandy Hook,” Karen said. “Where’d you learn to swim like that?”
“I used to be a life guard.” I waxed philosophical. “It’s strange,” I said while my chin dipped in and out of the water. “I was a life guard down at Riis Park before I managed a gas station in Staten Island, but that’s another story. Anyway, if someone drowned, we’d call the Royal Mounted Police if we had to in order to save him. We’d go out in a pontoon boat and we’d swim, and we’d drag him back to the beach and pump his lungs. They’d have an oxygen inhalator if it was needed and an emergency ambulance standing by ready to rush him to the nearest hospital and everyone at the beach would probably talk for the next two weeks how the guy almost drowned and what a terrible thing it was. Then maybe a year or two later the guy would go to Korea and get his head shot off by some kill-crazy gook so full of opium you could smoke him and put on a jag and the guy who almost drowned at the beach would become a statistic in the latest casualty report and no one but the immediate family would give a good God damn.”