Steven Shephard shifted his disinterested gaze from the windowpane that was darkening with gathering dusk to the photograph beneath it. His gaze remained disinterested while it rested on the picture, but he said aloud, moodily, “Bitch.” He appeared pleased with the sound of the spoken word, and a faint smile congratulated himself for his audacity in saying it aloud.
He touched his lips with the tip of his tongue and spoke aloud again, almost wonderingly and certainly with an intonation of pleasurable surprise: “You’re a bitch, Emily. You always were a bitch, and always will be. A well-bred one, of course.” His voice insisted that he was determined to be completely honest even in the aloneness of the cabin where only he himself could hear his voice.
He dropped his gaze from the photograph to the floor between his knees and thought about the young girl dancer at the Bright Spot.
His hands clenched slowly into fists on the bed beside him, and his eyeballs became moist and humid. Strange, atavistic roilings were in his bloodstream. There was a warmth in his loins which slowly spread over his body and took unholy possession of him. He would see her again tonight. For two nights he had stubbornly remained closeted in his cabin, denying the newly-discovered demands of the flesh, drinking sufficient whiskey, hour after hour, to blur the insistent knowledge within him that this was for him: that he, Steven Shephard, after thirty years of carefully-regulated, according-to-the-book, safe-and-sane and socially-correct sexual attitudes, had thrown all this aside and succumbed (happily, by God, and with a youthful fervor that Emily had never known he possessed) to the allure of quivering young flesh that nakedly and unashamedly sought lust for the sheer sake of lust, that traded sweat and torment and passion for sexual release and for nothing else, that knew no other reason for living and sought no other reason.
Shephard heard a scraping sound outside the window and jerked his head up angrily to glare at the, now, opaque glass. That would be Peterson, the motel manager. He was always snooping at the windows. As soon as darkness came, he began his stealthy rounds. Normally, Shephard didn’t mind being spied upon. Alone in the cabin, he had little to hide from Peterson’s pruriently peering eyes. But now, with his heart pounding and with the clear image of Sloe Burn’s lasciviously nubile body searing across his mind, he felt ashamed and trapped, as though the man outside his window had discovered him committing an unmanly and erotic act on his own body.
He stood up and squared his shoulders, walked a trifle unsteadily to the door and jerked it open. The afterglow of twilight lingered in the sky and, as he had suspected, Peterson rounded the corner of his cabin from the windowed side, and shuffled toward him.
The motel manager was a small, gnomelike man, with a bushy-haired head that was too large for the rest of him, and wizened features and humid eyes that refused to meet another man’s gaze directly. He always held his over-sized head cocked slightly on one side which gave him a sly look of cunning.
He said, “Evening, Mr. Tucker,” Coming to an uneasy halt a couple of feet from the figure in the open doorway. “Everything okay?”
Shephard said, “You ought to know, Peterson. Couldn’t you tell by peeking in my window?”
“Now see here now,” protested Peterson with a righteous whine in his voice. “You have absolutely no right to make a statement like that, Mr. Tucker. It’s untrue and uncalled-for and downright libelous. I’m making my evening rounds, as usual, to see everything’s quiet and shipshape. Is it my fault if you leave your shade up so’s anyone can see in your room?”
“You know as well as I do that the shade is broken and won’t come down. I complained about it the first day I was here.”
“Well, now, I don’t recollect that, Mr. Tucker. I sure don’t. I’ll have a man around to tend to it first thing in the morning.”
“That’s what you promised me a week ago.”
“Slipped my mind, I guess.” Peterson shook his head and rubbed his jaw reflectively. “So many little things breaking down all the time here. I keep telling the owners and telling them we got to keep things in better shape if we want to attract the right sort of people, but they’re so tight they hate to spend a nickel on maintenance. Aside from the window shade, you’re cozy and comfortable, huh? Hardly even go out at all, do you?”
His voice had an intimate sort of buddy-buddy quality to it that hinted he was aware of all Shephard’s secrets; it offered soothing assurance that the guest in No. 3 had nothing to fear from him,… and it discreetly invited further confidences any time Shephard felt the need for human companionship.
Shephard said, “I’m comfortable enough,” and stepped back surlily to close the door in Peterson’s face. The interior of the cabin was quite dim by this time, and he pressed the wall switch to light the room with a yellowish glow from the low-wattage bulb in the ceiling.
He was trembling with a listless sort of anger as he crossed to the dresser and slopped half an inch of whiskey into the bottom of a water glass. He turned the tap and ran water on top of the whiskey, wondering disinterestedly why the manager irritated him so.
He took a long swallow of the heavily-watered whiskey and enjoyed the faint warmth of it as it trickled down into his stomach.
He had just found out in these past few weeks what mighty fine stuff whiskey was. Before that he had always confined his drinking to parties because that was the only socially acceptable way to drink, and invariably he had drunk too much and made a fool out of himself and suffered the joint hells of a hangover and Emily’s sharp tongue the next day for his disgraceful conduct.
But this slow and carefully spaced solitary drinking was something very different, and he was as pleased with himself for discovering the process as though he had achieved a tremendous scientific breakthrough of some sort.
About an ounce every two hours was the ticket. You started early in the morning when you first woke up, and you got that soothing warmth in your stomach that brought on a sort of torpid indifference to the fact that it was another day. So you closed your eyes and dozed for awhile, and dreamed meaningless little dreams, mostly about when you were a little boy.
And then you aroused yourself enough to eat something, maybe. An egg or a piece of cheese and a slice of bread. And then you drank another ounce and dozed some more, and the day went on in a kind of pleasant blur that kept reality at bay and wafted you along to the enveloping darkness of another night.
This would be his last drink in the cabin until he came home later. Much later, he told himself, with restrained gladness. Midnight or three o’clock in the morning, or whenever he damn well pleased. And he must remember to bring another bottle back when he did come because there was only about one more drink left in the bottom of this one and he couldn’t face the thought of going out in the daylight tomorrow to buy another.
He seated himself carefully again on the side of the bed, hunched forward a little with shoulders stooped and both hands nursing the glass. A sedate, nondescript sort of man, and to see him sitting there, sipping pleasurably at the nauseatingly warm and slightly alcoholic drink no one in the world could possibly have guessed that he had two hundred thousand dollars worth of United States bills in his possession.
7
The bright spot was a large, square, ugly, one-story, stucco building squatting all by itself in the middle of a two-acre palmetto-fringed clearing about half a mile from the Trail and just outside the city limits of Miami.
It got its name from a ten-foot revolving disc of burnished brass mounted on a wooden tower a hundred feet above the ground and lighted at night by two spotlights so that it reflected a dazzling brilliance and was a landmark that could be seen for miles. It was approached by a narrow, twisting road through the surrounding palmetto hummocks, which debouched onto a large parking area capable of accommodating the same number of automobiles as the number of persons who could be squeezed inside the building. This was necessary because at least ninety percent of the patrons who visited the Bright Spot came alone in their cars. It was not a place that encouraged couples or foursomes, and the continuous floor-show from 8:00 P.M. until closing time had not been designed for mutual enjoyment either by mixed couples or even by a group of men friends out for a convivial evening on the town.