I SHOULDN’T HAVE WALKED BACK. By the time I got back to my house, my groin was aching badly. But I hadn’t wanted to hang around Chantal’s and wait the time it would take a horsecab to come, if I called one. My side was better, though, and less feverish, after the rest I’d been able to give it from violent movement during the afternoon.
There was a note pinned to my door when I got back, inviting me to a party on board Sonny’s caique. The note was signed by both Sonny and Jane, and also by Jim Kirk. Apparently Kirk was co-hosting the party. I took it inside with me.
It seemed a bit much to me, having Kirk sign the note too. But Jane Duval wasn’t my business, and never had been.
In the house I put on the lights and got myself a drink. It had been after 7 o’clock when I went up to Chantal’s and now it was dark. The party on the caique was both visible and audible from my porch.
I debated whether I should go to it, and decided I probably should. Especially if Kirk was going to be there. I didn’t feel like it. I hadn’t had any lunch to speak of, but I wasn’t hungry. The old woman was gone. I didn’t feel like eating the dog vomit old Dmitrios passed off as food, again. Not the way I was hurting.
After a while I got myself a second drink and went upstairs and changed my slacks and got another shirt and put my sandals back on and went down and out and down to the taverna dock to borrow a skiff and row myself out.
The party was in full swing. Sonny came up on deck to get me when I hollered, and took me down. It was so archetypal of hippie parties that it could have been staged. Everybody was belowdecks, and there wasn’t all that much room, so that they were all pushed up together. They liked that. It was funky, unkempt, physically dirty, with overtones of potential orgy. The hash smoke was thick. Bottles of the local retsina were all over. Steve and Diane were there, and Georgina Taylor, Sonny and Jane, and Kirk, and some of the hippie couples from the Construction. Jane Duval was no housekeeper. The baby was asleep in a messy bunk in the roar of the record player. Life on board centered around the expensive, battery-operated record player, not around the galley.
The belowdecks was one big room without bulkheads, and the whole forward part of it was one large bed from planking to planking that could accommodate six sleeping people. Four couples were curled up on it. There was a lot of necking and near nude sex play by the couples, and not much reservation about changing partners in the middle. I’d seen it all a hundred thousand times.
The swing-table had been taken down for the occasion, and once in a while two or three couples danced the jerky freak dances in the compressed floor space.
“There’s some whisky hidden over here,” Sonny whispered to me, grinning foolishly. He was well stoned. “But only you and Jim are drinking it. Nobody else knows where it is. I’ll show you.”
Sonny and Kirk seemed to be the greatest of buddies. Georgina sat smoking hash and drinking retsina happily. The only one who seemed unhappy was Jane Duval.
I got a water tumbler of straight whisky and put the bottle back in its hiding place and sat down on the edge of a bunk. There were three of them, two of them one above the other, in addition to the huge bed forward. No sooner had I staked out my territory than Stevie-boy came over and squatted down beside me.
Steve was expansive. He was also finely stoned. He had been over to see Chuck, he told me smugly. He seemed very happy about Chuck. Chuck was fine, he told me, except he had broken his glasses.
“Oh?” I said. “How did he do that?”
“He stepped on them. He put them down by his pack on the dock to go in for a swim, and when he came back out he stepped right on them. Snapped them in the middle. But he’s got them taped together.”
“Pretty stupid,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“No. He can’t see a thing when he hasn’t got them on. He just didn’t see them.”
He could see well enough to ball-kick somebody, I wanted to say. But I didn’t say it. “Mmm,” I said. “And how is that machete of his?”
“Well, he seems to have lost it,” Steve said and grinned. “I don’t know exactly where. Somewhere in the water. Somewhere in the water between here and St. Friday’s.”
“It would be hard to find, then.”
“Yes. I guess it would,” he grinned.
I nodded. “Smart.” Apparently Chuck had told him nothing about our encounter, or our fight. Apparently he had lied to Steve about throwing the machete off the cliff, too.
I didn’t say anything, and Steve wandered away. He looked supremely, smugly happy. I got another glass of whisky and sat back down gingerly on my bunk. People seemed to know it was my territory and left it alone. Or maybe it was because I was directly below the snoring little girl. I sipped the whisky and looked around.
Jane Duval reigned over her party with a regal contempt, it seemed. She seemed to have a sardonic, but solid, sense of her total superiority. The contempt, to me, seemed only a very thinnest coating over a real and very deep anger, expressed by those expressive eyebrows of hers. In the heat in the close space she had taken off her tent dress. The scantiest of bikinis showed off that body of hers.
But her attitude toward me was a surprise. After a while she got up and came over and pretended to look at the baby and then sat down by me. Instead of hating me now, she acted intrigued, even flirtatious, in her contemptuous way.
I had assumed it was Kirk who wanted me invited. But now I wasn’t so sure.
“I’ve never met a real ‘private dick’ before,” she said, laying heavy on the Private dick. “I always thought they were ugly dirty little men with thick glasses. Like shyster lawyers.”
“Not today,” I said. “Today they all look like CPAs. They’re all computer analysts. I’m a vanishing breed.”
“You must have an exciting life. In your grubby little way.”
“In my grubby little way,” I said. If that was what passed for sophisticated repartee by her, Bennington must be worse than I had heard.
“What would you charge me for a divorce case, for example?” she said.
“I never take divorce cases. Too messy,” I said. I grinned. “Except, of course, if it’s a very, uh, special friend of mine.”
“The man? Or the girl?” she said.
I didn’t answer her.
“Do you know that I have slept with every man in this room? Except you?” Jane said.
“Bully for you,” I said. “Were they one-nighters, or longer liaisons?”
“It depended on the man,” she smiled. “Entirely on the man.”
I didn’t feel like going on with it, so I didn’t answer. When I didn’t, she got up and flounced across the cabin to the other small bunk, waving her bottom at me like a red flag in a bull’s pasture.
I couldn’t understand her change of attitude. Maybe it was just my continuing indifference. Indifference was one of the best tools to use on women that there was. If they weren’t interested in you, they respected and liked your indifference to them. If they were interested, it needled them and fired them up until they were breathing steam.
Anyway, her Bennington credentials were no great thing to me. They didn’t aid me at all in what I was looking for.
But it was Jim Kirk not Jane I’d come to watch. And he was very out of it and very cold. He took no part in the sexual antics and he didn’t smoke the hash. He stayed aloof and close to the whisky. I still couldn’t get a proper fix on him in the whole business.
At one point in the festivities the hash smoke and armpits were getting to me and I went up on deck for some air. A minute later Kirk followed me, and said he wanted to talk to me.
We went out on the point of the bow.
“You’re a pretty hard guy to convince,” Kirk grinned.
“About what?” I said.
“About leaving the island.”
“So it was you who got Chantal to jump on me?” I grinned back.
He didn’t answer. There was absolutely no fear in him and you could feel it. There was a strong streak of meanness and you could feel that too.
“I guess I am hard to convince,” I said. “I’ve been beaten up, shot at, threatened, crotch-kicked, and fired from a job I never got paid for anyway. What else can they do to me?”
“You’ve been sticking your nose in some things that aren’t any of your business. By mistake, maybe. Inadvertently. But some people don’t like that. So far you’ve been lucky. Very lucky.”
I decided I’d try him with the same thing I did Chantal. “Well, the people you’re talking about won’t have to worry any more. Because I’ll be leaving here soon. I’ve found the killer.”
He was totally surprised, like Chantal. He began to look pleased. “You have?”
“I think so. It’s one of these kids from the Construction. I won’t tell you the name yet, but Pekouris seems to agree with me. The kid had a blood-stained machete on him. I lifted it. I’ve got it hidden away. He used the same machete to do a guy in in Mexico, it seems.”
Kirk was overjoyed. “Crazy Chuck. Well, that is great news. So the whole thing is finished.”
“Yeah. I’ll hand it over to Pekouris.”
“Fine. I always hoped somebody would be able to pin the guy who did in my friend Girgis,” Kirk said piously.
I wanted to laugh. “So those people you mentioned can stop worrying.”
“If I knew who they were,” Kirk smiled, “I’d go tell them myself.”
“Too bad you don’t know them.”
Kirk’s smile turned into a mean grin. “Because it wouldn’t be wise for you to linger around here too long. In spite of your fantastic luck.” With a delicate movement that bespoke fine reflexes under all his meat, he pulled his hand from his pocket. “Because see this?”
He appeared to be holding a block of black wood, a little longer than a finger. But then he pushed with his thumb, and a chrome knife blade winked and seemed to dart out of its end all by itself like the tongue of a snake. It wasn’t a switchblade. The blade came straight out of the end. Without jerking his hand. I’d never seen a knife like it. It looked positively murderous. He pressed the point against my side.
“A lot of things could happen to you besides being shot at and missed.”
“So that was you, too, was it.”
“Who else?”
“Well, a good knifing’s about the only thing that hasn’t happened to me,” I said easily.
The blade snicked back into the knife without moving his hand. Kirk put it back in his pocket. “I just wanted you to understand.”
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” I said quietly. “Or be prepared to push. Because I’ll take it away from you and break it on your teeth. So, we both know where we stand, hunh?” I turned and walked away, offering my back.
I threaded my way through the messy tumble of gear and went down belowdecks again. In a minute Kirk came down too and grinned at me.
Two attempts to scare me seemed to indicate a pretty big involvement on Kirk’s part of some kind. But did it mean he had killed two people?
The smoky smelly party was still going on.
Finally it was Jane Duval who broke it apart. She stood up and contemptuously removed her bikini bra and said she was going for a swim. She had fine boobs, and apparently was proud of them. She paraded up on deck, with just about everybody following and whooping and yelling, and kicked off her bikini pants. She stood straight and slim for a moment, to make sure everybody got a good look at all of her, and then dove out into the harbor water.
I used the moment to quietly take my leave in the borrowed skiff.
But as I rowed ashore, something seized one of my oars. It was Jane. She floated up onto the surface, feet together, so that the water rolled away from off her dark crotch, and smiled at me a smile that did not change her angry eyebrows.
I didn’t respond, and waited patiently, and when she let go of my oar, I rowed on. She swam away with a laugh.
Behind me, I heard other oars and then Sonny calling. He had come out in his own skiff to look for her.
At the dock I tied the skiff and walked on home and went creakily to bed. I didn’t call Chantal. She wouldn’t even have been home yet, by the time I went to bed.