Straits of Fortune - Anthony Gagliano [27]
TWO
AN HOUR LATER I sat on the edge of my bed fully dressed, watching Vivian, just out of the shower, drying off with one of my tattered beach towels. If trouble had a body, hers was it. Then I zipped up her dress, and she slipped on her pumps. It had been a great show, but I was feeling impatient. A part of me was already out on the water doing what had to be done, and I was anxious to get going. I rechecked my gear and tried to think if there was anything I might have forgotten. I felt like a drawn bow, poised, ready to fire.
It was time to go. Vivian sensed my mood and was very quiet. I lifted the kayak up and balanced its weight over my left shoulder. Vivian carried my life vest and held the door for me while I maneuvered the eight-foot-long craft through the door as noiselessly as possible. As usual, I had some trouble on the stairs and had to turn and reposition either the kayak or myself several times, but that was the only hitch with the going-down part. The street was quiet, empty, and Sternfeld didn’t poke his head out as we passed his door. It was the time of night when he turned off his hearing aid and let the silence and the sleeping pills put him to sleep.
As quietly as I could, I got the kayak up onto the roof of the Thunderbird I’d bought that afternoon from Paul March and lashed it snugly to the bike rack with some bungee cords.
“Where’d you get this ghetto cruiser from?” Vivian asked.
“From a friend.”
“I’m not so sure I would call him that.”
“You’d better hope it lasts one more night,” I told her. “You’ll have to come back for me in it. The kayak won’t fit on the Porsche.”
“I’ve never driven a car this old,” she said doubtfully.
“It’s not old, it’s an antique.”
“Antiques usually go up in value.”
We drove in silence. I was trying to work myself into a state of mind that was matter-of-fact, calm and confident, cut and dried, with no room for conflicting emotions concerning the task. The fact that it was Matson who needed burying made it easier. I could still see the leering delight in his eyes and the elfin whiteness of his skin, his pale cock curved like a tusk, but I rejected these images as they arose. I needed clarity now, not conflict. I needed to be alert, not paranoid, a fairly tall order considering the circumstances and the people I was working for.
“I never really thanked you for not telling my father about Williams and Nick,” Vivian said suddenly, and apropos of nothing. “I never thought you would, though.”
She was referring to something that had happened at a party at her father’s house a long time back, before Matson, when I was still very much in the picture and walking the rapidly vanishing line between hired help and new boyfriend. Out behind the house on the wooden deck, with the Atlantic Ocean as a backdrop, three hundred people in formal dress were beginning to act informally, men and women naked in the swimming pool, the training wheels of civility getting looser and looser with every glass of champagne.
I went upstairs, made a wrong turn, and opened what I thought was the door to a bathroom. It wasn’t. If not for the music from the deck below, I might have heard the telltale low moans that always mean the same thing. I flicked on the light and saw Williams lying back on the couch and Nick on his knees, his head bobbing up and down like a monk praying. A moment of surprise and I shut the door, but not quickly enough: They both had seen me. I went on my way, not really caring, but from then on, Williams treated me like an enemy, and Nick, who had never liked me to begin with, had reinforced his air of determined belligerence whenever I was around.
“Williams was mortified,” Vivian said. “You know how he likes to play that macho thing. He was so worried you’d tell the Colonel that he honestly considered killing you. Can you believe it?”
“What made him change his mind?”
“Nick talked him out of it.”
“That doesn’t sound like the Nick I know. I was never his cup of tea, you realize, especially after I started in with you.”
“Nick thought