Jérôme passed the pictures to Jean-Paul, who passed them to Yves-Louis. There was muttering, head-scratching, shrugging, pursed lips, screwed-up eyes—a whole gamut of gestures and expressions. What it all came to was that none of them had ever seen or heard of Danielle Payton.
“Curious,” I said mildly. We were sitting in canvas chairs on a glossy teak deck, protected from the noontime sun by a striped canvas awning. The three ex-paras were at their ease in bathing suits and sunglasses. Their tanned bellies, I saw, were trim and hard. I was sweating from the heat.
“More curious than that, even,” pointed out Yves-Louis, the white-haired one with the steam-shovel hands, “is why you should come to us with these pictures. Or are you merely a pollster asking people at random?”
“I’m a friend of the family,” I said evasively. “Danielle here has not been seen for almost two weeks now. Her daughter is most perturbed, and so are her friends. We know that she has a wide circle of acquaintances, especially in the yachting world. So.…”
“Hmmm,” said Jérôme, running his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair. “She is more than merely attractive. I’m sure I’d remember if I’d ever met her.”
“She has extremely beautiful legs,” I prodded. “Long and shapely. And she wears very short minis.”
Jean-Paul leaned forward to examine the pictures again. “You make me regret not knowing her. I adore long, shapely legs.” He grinned, and tugged at his neat little moustache.
The eyes of the Frenchmen were unreadable behind their sunglasses. I got to my feet. “Strange,” I mused. “I wonder what she was doing when I saw her on your boat? Well, no matter. If I find her before the police do, I’ll ask her.”
I turned toward the gangplank, but found Jérôme blocking my way. He laid his hand delicately on my forearm. “A beer, perhaps, while we discuss this further?”
I returned to my seat and waited for Jean-Paul to come up from below with cans of Heineken.
“You alarm us,” said Yves-Louis with perfect calm. “You say you have seen this Mrs. Payton on our boat?”
“Some time ago, and only briefly. But she appeared to be at home on it,” I said, stretching the truth only a little. “I take it you didn’t know she had paid you a visit?”
“Exactly,” said Jérôme, tapping his bare knee thoughtfully. “Of course, our ship is easy enough to wander in and out of, we’re without deckhands at the moment. But you also mentioned—”
“The police,” said Jean-Paul. “In rather ominous tones.”
“Did I ? You must have a sensitive ear. Or perhaps an over-developed one.” I smiled at them blandly.
Jérôme sighed and removed his sunglasses. He hitched himself forward in his chair until his knees were almost touching mine. His eyes were as inscrutable as any I’d ever seen. “Monsieur LaRoche. The three of us here are graduates of a hard school. I suspect the same is true of you. We have learned that there is a time for subtlety and a time for directness. I believe that this is a time for directness.”
I inclined my head. “Perhaps.”
“Not perhaps at all, Monsieur LaRoche. This is now the second time we have encountered you under somewhat peculiar circumstances. We are wary men, by nature and by experience. We are also men of direct action when we deem it necessary. Do you follow me?”
“Of course. But I don’t understand your use of the word peculiar to describe our encounters. Sheer happenstance is the term I’d use.”
“Would you now?” said Yves-Louis sardonically. “A woman is missing and the police are mentioned. There is a strong implication that we ourselves could find ourselves involved in—what?”
Jean-Paul waggled a finger. “It sounds particularly menacing coming from a man who has previously spoken to us in rather mysterious fashion about a property of ours.”
“And when that man is from Chicago,” said Jérôme, “our suspicions are of course heightened. In fact, we are ready to assume the worst.”
“Chicago?” I said, baffled. “What’s Chicago got to do with anything?”
“You are from Chicago, are you not? You told us so yourself.”
“Oh.” Obviously, for reasons that were still obscure, this had not been one of my more inspired lies. “Yes, of course.”
“This is the first time we’ve actually met an American gangster,” said Yves-Louis seriously, “but I doubt if you’re much different, or any more…accident-proof, shall we say, than any gangster from Marseille or Nice.”
I suppose my mouth was hanging open. After a while I closed it. “Gangster?” I muttered. “That’s a hard word.”
Jérôme shrugged. “It’s a hard world.”
“So anyone from Chicago’s a gangster?”
“What else are we to think? We’ve seen the same thing many times in France, particularly southern France. A peaceful man has a nice little business, a hotel for instance, which attracts the attention of the sharks in the water around him, and they begin to move in on him. It’s an old story.”
“And you think I’m a shark. Al Capone himself, perhaps.”
Jérôme studied me carefully before he replied. “Perhaps the shark’s representative. It might be that you personally don’t have the requisite ruthlessness.”
I was now beginning to get the hang of this totally unexpected conversation. “And the morsel of…bait your shark is circling, I suppose, is the Hotel Taaone?”
Yves-Louis pulled his chair closer. By now I was fairly well hemmed in. “What else?” he said, his eyebrows raised.
I searched my mind for something to say. Peaceful Tahitians and tourists strolled along the waterfront sidewalk a few yards away, and automobiles rushed by in an endless stream. The sky was bright and cloudless. There was a homey smell of cooking from the yacht beside us. It seemed absurd in such a setting to even consider the possibility of violence. But little more than twelve hours before I would have told myself the same thing as I climbed abroad another boat moored here in Papeete harbor, only fifty yards or so away. I rubbed the soreness in my neck thoughtfully and said, “I have talked to the owner of the Taaone since I saw you last. He’s definitely not interested in selling. In fact, he’s somewhat concerned about sharks of his own.”
It was Jérôme’s turn to look baffled. “The owner? Of the Hotel Taaone? Oh, you must mean that West fellow.” He snorted disgustedly.
“Who else?” I asked.
Jérôme turned to exchange a look with the two others. “He must be telling people that he’s the owner.” Jean-Paul shrugged minutely, while Yves-Louis tapped his lips with a finger. “It is conceivable,” Jérôme went on, “that all four of us are laboring under certain misunderstandings and are actually talking at cross purposes. It is even possible, I suppose, that you are not a Chicago gangster.”
“In which case,” I said, “you’ve gone far afield from what I’m interested in—Danielle Payton.”
“Yes, the Payton woman.” Yves-Louis scratched the nape of his neck for a long moment. “Let us assume for the sake of discussion that you are not attempting to use the fact of her…disappearance as a weapon, or threat, however oblique, against us. In which case, the question is—”
“What was she doing on your boat?”
“Exactly. When did you actually see her?”
“That’s hard to say. About three weeks ago, I’d say. About a week before she…went missing. It was late one afternoon, and I was having a drink across the street. Naturally I assumed that she was visiting you.”
“Naturally,” Yves-Louis said sardonically. “She didn’t act suspiciously?”
“She wasn’t making off with a chest-load of the family silver, if that’s what you mean. As I said, she seemed perfectly at her ease.”
“Bizarre,” said Jérôme. “Let me see those photos again.”
The three of them huddled around the photographs, murmuring softly. Yves-Louis looked up. “Mrs. Payton is a striking woman, but we have been thinking of her only in terms of the boat. Now that we’ve considered it more carefully, it’s quite possible that we have seen her—but under other circumstances.”
“In the nightclubs,” said Yves-Louis.
“The Manana, the 106, the Roll’s, one of those,” elaborated Jean-Paul. “We would have taken her for just another American tourist.”
“I might even have danced with her one time,” said Jérôme. “As you say, she has great wheels.”
Jean-Paul gestured with his hands. “Who knows? In a moment of enthusiasm one of us might have asked her to drop by for a drink.”
“So one day she came by on the spur of a moment, found nobody aboard, and went off,” finished up Yves-Louis, rather lamely to my mind. I eyed them dubiously.
They returned my gaze blandly. It was impossible to tell whether they were speaking the truth, or, if they were lying, what their motives would be. And actually, if you analyzed it, they were admitting to nothing at all.
“A boat is such…a handy means…of getting away from it all,” I said obliquely, certain I didn’t have to spell things out for these three. I was right.
“There is some question then about how Mrs. Payton…departed?” asked Jérôme. I nodded. He considered. “Since you pointedly mentioned the police, I assume that the usual domestic motives are ruled out. This leaves us with,” he began to enumerate the possibilities on his fingers, “accident; amnesia; sudden death, whether natural or otherwise; abduction; precipitous flight to avoid some humiliating inconvenience such as conviction and incarceration; and…dare we say…? defection to Communist China?” He smiled ironically.
I snorted. “I think we can leave that last one out.” But I was impressed by the speed with which his mind worked. Unless of course he had a guilty conscience and already had the answers worked out beforehand. “I can’t give you any details at the moment,” I said. “If you should think of anything, though, you might call me or Mrs. Payton’s daughter, Tamara.” I gave them the Punaauia number and got to my feet.
I turned back from the gangplank. “One last thing, just to satisfy my curiosity. You gentlemen appear to be dubious about Bob West being the owner of the Hotel Taaone.”
“For a simple reason,” said Yves-Louis. “We are the owners of the Hotel Taaone. And have been for six or seven years now. In fact, we are at present in Tahiti checking up on our investment.”
“That’s not quite the way I heard it,” I said doggedly.
“No, probably not,” said Jean-Paul. “Your compatriot, Monsieur West, however, is far from being the owner. Although I suppose it could be possible for you to misunderstand his actual position, without any actual misrepresentation being involved.”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Monsieur West merely has the gérance libre of the hotel. He has been renting it from us for a number of years now.”
“Renting it?”
“Of course. They don’t do that in Chicago?” he added silkenly. “But perhaps not. It’s really quite simple. Monsieur West has a contract with us—or with our company, I should say. For five years he can run the hotel and make whatever money he can from it. In return he pays us—our company—a certain amount of money every month. Anything above that is his to keep.”
Jérôme smiled coldly. “It is, of course, none of your business, Monsieur LaRoche, but the fact is that for the past year Monsieur West has not been doing at all well with his management. He is in arrears in his rent to us, and he has been seriously neglecting the hotel’s maintenance and upkeep.”
“In short,” said Jean-Paul, “he is in violation of his lease on a number of counts, and we are about to repossess our hotel.”
“Before any further deterioration takes place,” concluded Yves-Louis.
I fingered the end of my chin. It was scratchy: I hadn’t shaved this morning. “Very interesting,” I said. “But as you said, it’s none of my business.” I stepped down to the sidewalk. “In any case, I’ve pretty well decided that I won’t be buying any hotels in French Polynesia.”