She struggled diligently, digging and prodding and rubbing.
"No use," she said finally. She came around me, slid onto my lap, arm around my neck. She kissed my ear, huffed a little blast of warm breath into it. "What we're going to do, we got plenty of time. Del... I mean Nel is going to relax you her way. All you do, is you just lie down and close your eyes tight."
"Too much chance of Arturo not being able to make his arrangements stick."
She shrugged, sighed, got up. "Okay. But when we get where we're going, sweetheart, we're going to have us what they call acres of afternoon, and you can believe it. You're going to get so relaxed you won't know or care who you are any more. Me too."
She paced for a little while, looked at my watch again, then curled up on the bed, propped on the pillows, and prattled on and on about her childhood in Austin, Minnesota.
As I listened, I could not help relating her to the theory Meyer had propounded in the small hours. She could blithely accept the abrupt disappearance of Ans Terry from her life forever after seven years of his ownership because she was the "I" and Ans was the "Not-I," hence merely an object, and when any object lost its utility to the "I," it could be discarded without a backward glance. Of late he had lost his utility as a pleasure object, and I had moved in to fill the void. The fourteen victims were forgotten the moment she felt assured she could escape punishment. Her tears for Vangie had also been without concession to the tradition of mourning a friend, because Tamie too had been an object, something that had hung on a wall of one of the rooms of her life, and were life to take her back into that room, she would miss Vangie the way one might miss a mirror that had always hung in a certain spot. If one became associated with an object that could inflict pain when displeased, one merely took the precaution of pleasing the object.
Probably she thought she was treating me in a very special way by telling me the details of her childhood, girlhood, life with Ans Terry. The things she remembered were empty and trivial. The shallowness of her mind gave her a Curious flavor of innocence.
She had taken no part in the direction of her life. She had let life happen to her, and her pleasure was in her clothes, in her figure, in pleasing and being admired by men, in enjoying sex, in changing her hairdo.
She was twenty-three. Any pattern of life she had drifted into would have left her essentially the same, with the same interests and the same emptinesses.
At last I told her it was time we were leaving. She pinked her mouth again, put the dark glasses on, snapped her purse shut and said, "Boy, I was really getting fed-up with these cruises."
I left her there and took a look and found the dockside cafe. I went back and got her and took her down the gangplank.
A gate in the wire fence had been left ajar. We went through and she stood in the shade of the customs shed while I phoned for a taxi. We had a five-minute wait.
When we walked through the sunlight to the open door of the cab, she gave me an assured little smile and a hearty swinging thud with a healthy hip.
The driver, following my directions, drove out of the port area onto Route One and turned left. After four blocks, I said, "Driver, I've got some phone calls to make. Would you please pull into that shopping center ahead on your right and park as close as you can to the drugstore."
He found a slot at the very end of the herringbone pattern, the closest parking area to the drugstore. The cab was airconditioned.
I patted her on the leg and said, "Just hold still a while, honey. There are some things I have to take care of, a few little arrangements to make. For us. Shouldn't be more than five minutes or so."
"Okay, honey," she said.
I reached, tapped the driver on the shoulder, put a five in his hand. "In case you get restless," I said.
"In the rain, five o'clock traffic, a fare has to make the airport in four minutes, I get restless, buddy. Otherwise, never."
I whispered in Del's ear. try to be inconspicuous. Just in case."
"Anything you say, that I do."
They had expanded the shopping center by opening an entire new area behind it, on the side street. Some of the shops had merely doubled their area and taken another store front on the new side. The drugstore was one. Meyer and Merrimay were in the last booth in the row opposite the counter. She was back to blonde, the wig stowed away, the transparent film peeled from the flesh beside her eyes so that their contour was back to normal. Her mouth was redrawn to her own taste. And somewhere she had changed to a short-sleeved red and white striped blouse, a split red skirt. They both looked and acted very edgy.
"How close could he park?" Meyer asked. "Smack dab in front."
"Good!"
She stood up, showed us the dime in her outstretched hand. "It had better be the same girlish voice as before, don't you think?"
"Yes indeed," Meyer said. She hurried off toward the booths. "There is a very dandy girl. She thought of a good way to get the confession to them. She kept her Vangie suit on, and her Vangie hair, and she stopped a kid a half block from the station and gave him a buck to hustle it to the homicide people."
"When did she phone back?"
"Ten-thirty. She got right through to the top brass. They admitted right off it was a very interesting document, and a copy had already been rushed up to Broward Beach. Then she asked them if they'd like to lay their hands on the girl who wrote it. She'd changed her mind about killing herself. She was trying to get out of the area. She said she could hear them drooling. They tried to stall her, keep her on the line. She told them to have a prowl car waiting six blocks north of here, in the Howard Johnson parking lot, and hung up." Merrimay came back to the booth and said, "We better take off, don't you think?"
We walked into the new area. She had her car, a little white Corvair hardtop. She handed me the keys. Meyer clambered into the back seat.
As I backed out of the parking slot, I said, "Morbid curiosity, anyone?"
"Might as well see the end of it," Meyer said. I circled the block, drifted into the lot on the other side, went up an aisle two parked rows away, turned into an empty slot. Through the tilted back window of the cab we could see her pale head.
The patrol car came in with a deft swiftness, stopped with a small yelp of tires directly behind the cab, blocking it there. The blinker light was revolving, bright even in sunlight. A pair in pale blue piled out with guns in hand. Shoppers stopped and gawked.
The cab door popped open and Del sprang out and took off between the parked cars, running diagonally away from us. The short green skirt did not impede her, and she ran well on those long legs. Yelling at her to stop, the police ran after her. One followed her between the cars. The other sprinted down the aisle to circle her and cut her off.
For a time our vision of the chase was obscured, and then we could see them catch her in an open space. She tried to flail them with the white purse and one snatched it away. She kicked at them, but one got behind her and grabbed her around the middle, pinning her arms, and lifted her off her feet. The other one snapped a cuff onto her right wrist, snapped the other onto his own left wrist. Then she stood docile, head lowered.