1970 - There's a Hippie on the Highway (14 page)

‘Okay, Mai, get your clothes on. We’re going to Headquarters.’

‘I told you, I don’t know! You can’t take me back!’

‘Don’t get excited,’ Lepski said. ‘You’ve got to come, baby. You’ve already talked too much. So get your clothes on. Don’t mind me. I’m a married man.’

Then two things happened almost at once. The door flung open and Mai screamed as she threw herself flat on the divan, burying her face in the cover as if trying to hide herself.

Lepski swung around.

A short, squat man, a white handkerchief masking his face, was already shooting. Lepski saw the gun flashes, saw Mai bounce high on the divan, saw blood spray the wall as bullets smashed into her head. Then he threw himself flat, clawing at his gun as the door slammed shut.

He was up again, gun in hand, racing for the door as feet pounded down the stairs.

He could hear Do-Do screaming and again the deafening bang of a gun. He reached the head of the stairs to find Do-Do’s vast body blocking the corridor. He took the flight in a leap, crashing onto the lower landing, jarring his bones, staggered, recovered himself as he heard the roar of a high powered car taking off.

By the time he had got onto the waterfront, the large, excited milling crowd made any attempt at pursuit impossible.

Chapter Six

A
s red streaks began to lighten the night sky, Harry Mitchell came cautiously out of his cabin. He had on swim trunks and was carrying Baldy Riccard’s suitcase. The only two things he had kept from the case was the Luger automatic pistol and the box of cartridges. These he had hidden under a loose board by his bed.

He stood in the doorway for a long moment. The time was 04.55. No lights showed. Nothing was to be heard except the rustling of palm leaves as the slight breeze stirred the hot air.

Satisfied he had the place to himself, he walked quickly and silently down to the beach and into the sea. He turned on his back, holding the suitcase on his chest, and with powerful leg movements, headed away from the shore. When he was above deep water, he twisted over, releasing the case. Then diving, he followed its slow descent until it settled on the ocean bed. He surfaced and peered down, but the suitcase was gone: only the inky water marked the spot where it was.

He swam slowly back to the beach, and as he began to walk across the sand to his cabin, he saw a light go up in Solo Dominico’s room.

He reached the cabin, shut himself in and dried himself off.

Then he put on slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and rope soled shoes.

He had a little over twenty minutes before he had to join Solo. He sat on his bed and lit a cigarette. While he smoked, his mind went to the previous night. He felt hot blood move through his veins as he pictured again his explosive coupling with Nina. As a sexual experience, this had been unique. He thought of his dead wife, Joan, who had been afraid of sex, and with whom he finally was unable to live. The draft order, calling him to the Army, when he had almost made up his mind to leave her, had given him the welcomed excuse. So he had gone. He had realised when he got the news of her suicide that he had failed to conceal his eagerness to leave her. He hadn’t intentionally meant to hurt her, but because the two years he had lived with her had stifled him as nothing he could imagine could ever stifle a man, he had become indifferent to her feelings. If he had been more patient, he told himself, more understanding, if he had made an effort to help her, they might have ironed out their problems.

Thinking about this and thinking honestly, he doubted it. Sex to him was the most natural thing: something to enjoy, not to brood about, not to make more important than anything else in his life. Sex was to have when the urge came and to wait for when the urge wasn’t there. Her complications and her fears had hurt him, then finally bored him.

There was a letter waiting for him when he left the ship at Saigon. She said she was a mess. One of the things for which he had once loved her was her complete honesty. She said she should never have married, and she was sorry.

She concluded:
I guess I’m not the only woman who feels as I do, Harry. It’s not that I am incapable of loving a man - it’s the bed business I can’t go along with. I do love you . . . enough to give you your freedom. Be happy, Harry. Find some other girl who is not the mess I am. I am a mess . . . such a mess. I don’t want to go on. They say you come back again. With luck, I might have a second chance. It would be wonderful if we met again, after years and years, and I wasn’t the mess I am now, wouldn’t it? Goodbye. Joan.

He had a telegram from his father saying she had been found in the bath with her wrists slashed and he had better apply for compassionate leave and come home. But there was a battle about to begin, and Harry didn’t apply for leave. He went into battle, depressed and shocked and guilt ridden. By the time the battle was over, after he had seen the dead and the wounded, after he had dropped out of the hot sky through a hail of machine gun bullets, after he had spent two weeks in a foxhole, hating himself for his own awful body smell and after he had killed four little yellow men, Joan’s suicide was no longer important.

More important to him had been Nhan, the Vietnamese girl whom he had discovered on a street corner, stirring a delicious smelling soup made in a battered can that had once held a gallon of sweet-sour cucumbers. The whiff of cooking had made him stop, and he had squatted by her side, accepting the bowl of soup she had offered, and they had talked.

Nhan spoke fair English. She wore her long, black hair in a pigtail: that told him she was a virgin: only married Vietnamese women wore their hair up.

He had been on leave for two weeks. Every morning around 11.00, he had arrived at the street corner to drink Nhan’s soup. Then one day, he discovered he was in love with her. Later, she told him she had fallen in love with him the moment she had seen him.

They had begun an association which was to Harry the fulfillment of a dream: love with no complications.

He stubbed out his cigarette, wincing as he thought of that day when he had come back to Saigon after four weeks in the bullet torn paddy field and was told Nhan was dead. A bomb, viciously tossed into the market, had killed ten Vietnamese, including Nhan, plastering their bodies against a wall in a messy horror that had to be hosed away by the fire brigade.

Harry rubbed his temples with his fingers. Now last night and the beginning of something new. This was his first encounter with a woman who felt about sex as he did: utterly uninhibited, using him to satisfy her sexual demands. Thinking about this, Harry decided it was what he needed. He was sick of complications: so sick of women who gave themselves to him only to involve him, to shackle him, to stifle him in their web of possessiveness.

Nina, with her sensual beauty, had been a devastating surprise of the unexpected. Now, she promised to give him what he had been seeking.

He remembered Randy’s warning: She’s for nobody, unless you want to tangle with Solo.

Solo didn’t worry him. He was sure that if it came to a real fight, he could take Solo, but that wasn’t the problem. Solo was Nina’s father.

He rubbed his temples, frowning. She had come to him. She had thrown herself at him. Could Solo complain? His chattel, she had said. What right had any father to regard his daughter as his chattel?

Complications . . . problems . . . complications . . . problems.

Impatiently, Harry got to his feet and left the cabin. He went along to the kitchen where he found Solo sipping steaming coffee, a cigar between his thick fingers as he sat at the table, the overhead light casting his enormous shadow half on the table and half on the floor.

‘Hi, Harry!’ Solo grinned. ‘I tried to tell you last night. I won’t need you this morning. I want you to get on with the high dive board. I talked to Hammerson. He is sending the timber this morning.’ Solo’s little eyes screwed up as he regarded Harry. ‘I came to your cabin late to tell you, but you weren’t there.’ He leaned forward, his eyes quizzing. ‘Did you find a little girl to spread on the sand?’

His face wooden, Harry said, ‘That’s my business, Solo.’

Solo finished his coffee at a gulp.

‘I don’t care if you stick it into them, Harry, but no pups. I don’t want trouble around my beautiful restaurant.’

‘I am an adult,’ Harry said impatiently. ‘I’m not one of your hired kids . . . relax.’

‘Yeah . . . I was forgetting. Excuse me.’ Solo crossed the kitchen and picked up four big wicker baskets. ‘You get on with the high dive board, hey?’ He started for the door, then paused, his head on one side as he peered at Harry. ‘What did you say you were?’

‘An adult . . . a grown up person.’ Harry felt a warning prickle of danger.

‘Is that right? A grown up person, hey?’ Solo suddenly released a harsh bellow of laughter. ‘Excuse me. That’s what we’re all supposed to be . . . hey?’

‘That’s the theory,’ Harry said quietly.

‘But some are more than others, hey?’ Solo’s little eyes turned misty. ‘I bet you think you’re a little more grown up than me, hey?’

‘Did I say so, Solo?’

‘Oh no, but then you say very little, Harry, and that makes you a very smart boy.’ Solo opened the door. ‘I’ll be back around ten.’ He went out into the half-light and Harry, standing motionless, waited for some minutes. It wasn’t until he heard the Buick start up and drive away that he relaxed. He looked at his wristwatch. The time was 05.40. He crossed to the stove, took off the coffee pot and poured himself a cup.

Something wrong, he thought. Could Solo have become suspicious already? He sipped the hot, black coffee, uneasy and puzzled. Something wrong, he told himself again.

‘Harry?’

The soft whisper made him turn sharply, slopping his coffee.

Nina stood in the doorway. She had on a shortie, see-through nightdress, her silky hair in disorder. She looked as if she had just rolled out of bed.

Harry felt a rush of blood through his body at the sight of her. He put down the cup and crossed towards her. She retreated, beckoning to him. Following her down the passage, he came to her room.

He was too aware of her to register much of the room except it seemed to fit her personality. It was bright, gay, big and neat and a blaze of colours.

He stood by the door which he had closed and watched her slip out of her nightdress. Then naked, she faced him, her arms thrown wide, her lips parted in a fixed smile of desire, her dark nipples erect and hard.

Again Harry felt the prickle of danger.

I am an adult, he had said to Solo. Was this true? Was this blatant sexual offering something a thinking adult could possibly accept? Wasn’t he really acting like one of those goddamn adolescents like Randy?

She moved to the bed and lowered herself onto it, looking at him.

‘Come to me.’

He longed to throw off his clothes and join her, but there was this warning bell ringing in his mind. He must not let any woman dominate him: even a woman who apparently was demanding nothing in return.

He remained by the door.

‘Put on your swimsuit, Nina,’ he said, his voice unsteady. ‘Let’s swim.’

‘Later . . . come to me.’

She leaned back on her elbows, her knees slightly apart: there was naked desire in her eyes that hammered at his determination.

‘I’ll wait,’ he said and went from the room. He walked slowly back to the kitchen and poured himself another cup of coffee. He saw his hands were shaking. He spooned sugar into the cup, spilling sugar on the floor. He sipped the coffee, staring out of the window at the lightening sky. He heard her come down the passage and he turned, his heart thumping.

She was wearing a scarlet bikini, a towel in her hand. She smiled at him.

‘So let’s swim.’

He stopped at his cabin to put on his wet swim trunks while she walked on slowly across the sand. When he reached the beach, she was swimming well and strongly, and with a racing dive, he went after her. When he caught up with her, she trod water and smiled at him.

‘You are an odd ball, Harry. Couldn’t you have given me a little pleasure?’ She flicked water into his face and then dropped on her back, still smiling at him.

‘I had been talking to Solo,’ Harry said. ‘He was too close. I keep remembering he is your father.’

‘Phooey! In another hour, everyone will be up. Let’s swim back. You can’t be this stupid! I want to be loved!’

‘It’s too dangerous. Even this is dangerous. Do you want me to have trouble with your father?’

‘Are you frightened of him?’

‘No, but I am frightened of what could happen. I could kill him . . . I might have to kill him.’ He peered at her in the half-light. ‘Would you want that?’

She grimaced. ‘You are so serious. Can’t you take what I’m offering without all this fuss?’

Harry started back. After a moment, she joined him, saying nothing until they reached the shore. As they walked up the slope that led to dry sand, she said, ‘So when do we make love again?’

‘Is there any chance of me going with you to Sheldon Island on Sunday?’

She stopped abruptly.

‘Who told you about Sheldon Island?’

‘Randy . . . he said you went there to be alone.’

She smiled.

‘That’s a marvellous idea . . . there we can be alone for hours and hours. My father sleeps most of Sunday. The restaurant is closed. He lets me have the boat. Yes . . . then Sunday.’

‘Okay. The day after tomorrow. Keep away from me until then, Nina. I’ll meet you at the boat station at six o’clock.’

‘Yes . . . I’ll bring food.’

He left her and reentered the sea, swimming with swift strong strokes towards the coral reef where he planned to build the high dive board.

* * *

Lieutenant Alan Lacey of the Miami Homicide Squad was a little man with a hatchet-shaped face, thin lips and small eyes that were as animated as sea washed pebbles. He was a man disliked by the Force, by criminals and even by his wife. He liked being disliked. He felt he was achieving something by making people afraid of him. He was a man of cunning rather than brains. At the age of fifty-seven, he was very conscious that he now would remain a Lieutenant and further promotion was out of his reach. This soured him. Any smart cop, any ambitious, eager young recruit was immediately submitted to his sadistic, razor-sharp tongue. If there was anything Lieutenant Lacey hated more than anything else, it was an ambitious cop.