“Maybe, but—”
“Try me,” Samantha said.
She began work the following Monday, answering mail and telephone, getting out circulars, soliciting customers, contacting boat captains, talking to salesmen. She knew boats. She could discuss them intelligently and affectionately. She harassed and badgered and cajoled all the captains in the area, until she finally succeeded in lining up a dozen of them who agreed to carry charter parties for Luke, giving him first call over the marinas on the bigger islands. She talked to fishermen, learning where the fish were running best and then passing on the information to marina customers. She was tightfisted with money; she constantly argued with salesmen about the price of canvas, or varnish, or block ice. Attractive but not beautiful, she did not scare away the customers’ wives. Instead they enjoyed stopping by the office to ask her about the shops in Key West or Miami, or sometimes to have a glass of iced tea with her, away from boats and the stink of fish. She worked hard in those early days of the business — but more than that, she set a tone of relaxed efficiency that colored the entire operation and was in no small way responsible for its success.
Accepting Samantha on her own terms, of course, was certainly simpler than any attempt to know her as a complex woman would have been. She ran the marina for Luke, and she did it easily and efficiently. He never questioned her about herself. Their relationship was pleasant and businesslike. In February of 1962, some five months after she began working for him, he found himself involved in a way he had neither anticipated nor desired.
The last fishing party had come in at about nine o’clock that night and had paid Luke for the charter boat. He had squared it away with the captain — a one-eyed man who lived on Ramrod and had miraculously escaped being called Popeye — and then, because it was late and because both he and Samantha were exhausted after a long day, he asked her if she would like a drink before she left. He felt a slight pang the moment the words left his lips, as though this puncturing of their businesslike understanding would inescapably lead to complications.
“I’d love one,” Samantha said, and she looked at him steadily and lingeringly, with much the same expression that had been on her face the day she applied for the job and told him she had ten cats to feed.
They drank a great deal that night, and they talked a great deal. They talked in the small marina office, Luke with his feet up on the desk, Samantha curled up opposite him in the battered leather chair that was a survivor of the marina in Islamorada. She spoke softly and easily, the way she seemed to do everything, and he listened to her with growing interest, filling their glasses, watching her intently. She had been married when she was eighteen, she told him, to a man who ran a seaquarium just outside St. Pete. That was where she was born, that was where she had lived most of her life until her mother bought the house down here in Ocho Puertos. He was a very nice man, her husband, older than she; she always seemed to go for older men. She supposed that was because her father died when she was seventeen — Electra and all that jazz, you know. She looked up at Luke and smiled wanly, and then sipped her drink and leaned her head against the side of the chair, burnished blond against black leather. She did not know whether the marriage had been a good one or not, she said. It had seemed very good to her, but that was because she had loved him so much — he had a mustache, one of those very black handlebar things; he took great pride in his mustache.
He had left her when she was twenty-two years old. There was a water ballet company — you know, aquacade swimmers — and he told Sam he had fallen in love with one of the girls in the company. Sam looked her up one day; she was a very pretty little thing with good legs, a swimmer’s legs. Her husband sold the seaquarium to a man from Texas, and left with the swimmer a week after the divorce was final. She had never seen him since. She heard once that he was running a sideshow at the Seattle Fair, but she was not sure it was true.
He had left her five years ago, and she had lived with her mother until two summers ago, when her mother died of cancer. So here she was, a divorced lady of property — she looked up and smiled wanly again — living on the edge of the world “with ten cats, ten, count them.”
She sipped her drink. The ice rattled in her glass.
Without looking at him she said, “I’m very lonely, Luke. I’m so very goddamn lonely,” and began crying.
They made love in his room behind the marina office. He could remember everything they did together, could remember the taste of her mouth, and the softness of her hair, and the gentle sound of her weeping.
He could also remember telling her he loved her.
The telephone rang.
It was seven twenty-five.
Jason lifted the receiver.
“Costigan’s Marina,” he said, and waited. “This is Jason.”
Luke, sitting behind the desk, caught his breath. She’s all right, he told himself; don’t worry about her, she’s all right. He found himself staring at Jason’s shoes, tracing the crisscrossed ladder pattern of his brown shoelaces, and then the knot at the top of each shoe, and then the pale tan socks Jason was wearing. She’s all right, he thought.
“What? What do you mean?” Jason said.
There was, in the next ten seconds, an eternity of time during which Luke felt as though he were sliding toward a black uncertain abyss.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Jason said. “Sy, don’t give me stupid answers.” He paused. “Let’s start from the beginning, right? Did you go into the bedroom? Fine. Was the bed slept in? Fine. Then she was there last night, is that right? Right. Did you and Chuck go through the whole house? You did. And she’s not there. Was her boat at the dock?”
Jason was waiting. Luke, watching him, felt suddenly relieved. It was entirely possible that Samantha
“Sy, was her boat at the dock?” Jason repeated. “What? You what?”
It seemed to Luke in that moment that Jason would tear the phone from its wire and hurl it against the wall. His face went white and his grip tightened on the receiver, and he began trembling with the sheer physical exertion of controlling himself. Very quietly, as though forcing himself to be gentle, as though he would explode into a hundred flying fragments if he did not speak softly, he said, “Well, Sy, suppose you just go out and take a look at the dock now, huh? Would you do that for me? Go ahead, I’ll wait.”
He stood beside the desk with the phone pressed to his ear, waiting. Benny and Willy watched him silently. The fifth man in the room, who was thus far nameless to Luke, continued leaning against the filing cabinets with his eyes closed, as though he were asleep. Patiently Jason waited. At last he said, “Hello, yes, what did you find?” He listened carefully, and then looked up at the clock. “Any sign of her out on the water?” he asked. “Mmm,” he said. He looked at the clock again. “Mmmm. Well, you just sit there on that dock and call me the minute you’ve got her. Right.” He put the phone back onto its cradle.
“What is it?” Benny asked.
“The Watts girl. She must be out on the water. We’ll have to wait till she gets back.”
Benny looked at the clock. “It’s almost seven-thirty, Jase.”
“I know what time it is.”
“Three more calls and the check-ins are done.”
“I know that.”
“When will you call Fatboy?”
“As soon as we get the girl.”
“When’ll that be? She might stay out there all day. Maybe she took the boat out for a long trip. How do we know? She can be heading for Miami for all we know.”