Cry Uncle (5 page)

The flames of his anger still nipped at him,
crackled and glared. No, he wasn’t going to write Pamela Hayes a
letter.

She hadn’t shown up at her office in a full
week. Obviously she’d taken a powder. Mick was going to have to
track her down.

He had to, before the D.A. put together a new
case against him. He had to find that big-eyed, big-mouthed bitch
and shut her up before she caused him any more problems. It was her
own fault, really. She shouldn’t have been where she was when she
was, snooping, watching, witnessing things that weren’t supposed to
have witnesses. If only she hadn’t been there, he’d be a free man
today.

But as long as he wasn’t free, neither was
she. She’d seen him, she’d spoken against him, and now she was
going to pay.

All Mick had to do was find her.

***

DEEPER AND DEEPER, Pamela thought as she
studied the blurred diagram Joe had sketched on a textured napkin
at the Shipwreck last night. The ink had bled in spots, and his
handwriting left a great deal to be desired. She could find
scarcely any resemblance between his drawing and the map she’d
obtained from the Chamber of Commerce six days ago, when she’d
cruised the last few weary miles of Route One onto the island and
comprehended that she had truly, literally gone as far as she could
go.

One part of her considered Jonas Brenner her
salvation: marry him and she’d be under his wing. Surely the matron
saints of feminism would forgive her for shucking her own last name
and submerging her identity within a man’s. Once her arrangement
with Joe had run her course and she divorced him, she could go back
to being Pamela Hayes.

But another part of her couldn’t shake the
frightening notion that rather than saving herself, she was sinking
deeper and deeper into trouble. Her mind conjured the image of a
person in quicksand who, instead of stretching out and floating on
the ooze, tried to fight her way out and wound up being sucked down
to her death. The woman staring at her from the mirror above the
scratched dresser looked an awful lot like someone trapped in
quicksand.

Sighing, she turned away from her wan
reflection and gazed at the neat, stark efficiency apartment that
had been her home for the past few days. She suspected the
apartment building had once been a motel; her front door opened
onto a second-floor balcony that ran the length of the building to
a flight of stairs on either end. The exterior was ticky-tacky
tropical—faded pink stucco, wrought-iron railings, rippling roof
tiles that were just a bit too orange to be believable. The
interior was just plain tacky—carpeting rough enough to file one’s
nails on, ceilings textured to resemble cottage cheese, a
kitchenette as small as a coat closet and furniture constructed of
cardboard-thick wood held together with paste.

She wondered what Joe’s house looked like,
and his furniture. As an architect, she used to think such things
mattered.

Now all that mattered was saving her
neck.

She opened the front door, stepped out onto
the balcony, and glanced toward Kitty’s windows. The curtains were
drawn. It was nearly eleven o’clock; Joe had told Pamela to arrive
at his house in time for lunch. If Kitty was still sleeping, Pamela
didn’t want to disturb her.

She reentered her own apartment, crossed to
the dresser and studied her image in the mirror one last time. The
word drab sprang to mind.

Most of the clothing she owned had been
purchased for work and the cooler climate of Washington
state—wools, tweeds, silk blouses and tailored suits. One local
shopping trip had harvested the sleeveless shift she’d worn last
night and the cotton walking shorts she was wearing now. The
cream-colored shell she had on looked too formal, but it would have
to do. If Joe had been looking for a babe, he wouldn’t have
proposed marriage to Pamela.

She gathered up her map, her purse, and her
cocktail napkin and left the apartment. This time, she noticed,
Kitty’s curtains were open. She told herself she only wanted a
clarification of where Joe lived, but deep inside she knew she
really needed a pep talk. If anything, she was edgier today than
she’d been last night. Perhaps Kitty could offer some guidance.

Pamela tapped lightly on Kitty’s door. “Hold
your goddamn horses!” Kitty’s voice bellowed from inside.

Pamela’s tension increased. She didn’t know
much about her neighbor, other than that she worked the evening
shift at the Shipwreck, her hair was bleached a radioactive shade
of blond, and she had the sort of physical endowments that made
women like Pamela feel pathetically scrawny. Yet something about
Kitty had put Pamela at ease yesterday morning, when they’d met in
the laundry room. As they’d folded their clothing across a long
Formica-topped table from each other, Kitty had somehow convinced
Pamela that Joe was the greatest thing since French fries and if
Pamela didn’t marry him she’d regret it for the rest of her
life.

“
Marry him?” Pamela had
asked, wondering why, if this guy was so great, he needed Kitty to
find him a wife.

“
He’s got a legal situation.
Nothing major, nothing criminal. It’s just, he’s looking for a fine
upstanding woman like yourself who’ll serve as his wife for a short
while. Someone who’ll take his name and wear his ring. Nothing
serious.”

Nothing serious? Pamela had thought. Taking a
man’s name and wearing his ring sounded pretty serious to her. So
serious she wouldn’t consider it. Pamela was definitely not the
home-and-hearth type. She was devoted to her career and her craft,
and she’d always been an exceedingly private person. Marriage meant
opening up to someone else, making oneself vulnerable, feeling
someone else’s fears as longings as if they were one’s own. Pamela
simply wasn’t ready to make a commitment like that, and everyone
who knew her knew that.

Which meant that if she got married, the
likelihood of her being found, by Mick Morrow or anyone else, might
decrease. Who would hunt for a single-minded, independent woman
like architect Pamela Hayes in a cozy, domestic setting? Who would
expect to find her doing her impersonation of a wife?

“
Marry him,” she’d ruminated
once Kitty had run out of superlatives for Joe.

“
Yeah. He’d make one helluva
husband. And you better believe I know a thing or two about
marriage.”

Pamela smoothed the cocktail napkin between
her hands and gazed hopefully at the open curtains, longing for
Kitty to give her another inspiring speech before she paid a call
on what might soon become her new home.

At last the door swung open. Kitty filled the
doorway, a vision of wild platinum hair and cleavage in a colorful
silk kimono. Her face broke into a smile. “Oh, Pamela! I didn’t
realize it was you. I thought it was this jerk who tried to pick me
up at the bar last night. A real loser, you know? Swore he was the
reincarnation of Ernest Hemingway, which was reason enough to want
to punch him in the nose. He kept saying he was going to look me up
in the phone book and come after me.”

Pamela found nothing amusing about that. Her
own experience with Mick Morrow made her suspicious to the point of
paranoia about men who threatened to come after women. She stepped
inside Kitty’s apartment—a mirror-image of hers, only embellished
with great quantities of clutter—and closed the door behind her.
Then she drew the chain lock. “Make sure you look through your
peep-hole before you open your door to anyone,” she instructed
Kitty.

Kitty appeared unconcerned. “The island is
full of guys who think they’re Ernest Hemingway. I’m used to it.”
She bounded across the room to her unmade bed and did a belly-flop
onto it, her head propped in her hands and her knees bent so her
feet hovered above her rump. She looked like a superannuated
teenager at a pajama party, eager to gossip and giggle about boys.
“So, what did you think of Joe?”

“
He’s...very nice,” Pamela
said, lifting a filmy garment of some sort from a chair and
lowering herself to sit. “He wants me to go to his house
today.”

“
To meet Lizzie Borden,”
Kitty guessed.

“
Lizzie Borden?”

“
Okay, his niece hasn’t
taken a hatchet to anyone yet. She’s a maniac, though. Take her
with a sense of humor and you’ll be fine. I adore that
kid.”

A maniacal child, Pamela thought. Alternately
referred to as a lower order of vertebrate or America’s most famous
ax murderer.

“
But look, Pamela...” Kitty
tilted her head slightly, her dark eyes narrowing as she appraised
Pamela. “Can we speak frankly? If you’re going to marry Joe, you
ought to jazz yourself up a little, know what I mean?”

Pamela didn’t take criticism from others
well—usually because she spent too much of her time and energy
criticizing herself. “Jazz myself up,” she said warily, trying not
to bristle.

“
A couple of weeks down here
and you’ll develop some color, you know? But right now, you look
kind of washed out. Here.” She sprang from the bed, hauled Pamela
out of her chair, and dragged her into the bathroom. A forceful
nudge landed her on the toilet seat. “I’m just going to give you a
little color, okay? Nothing extreme.”

With that, Kitty attacked Pamela’s face with
a vast array of cosmetics brushes. Choking clouds of tinted powder
billowed into the air as Kitty went at her with blusher and eye
shadow. Pamela tried in vain to glimpse herself in the mirror above
the seat, but all she saw was the reflection of Kitty’s arm
wielding her brushes like Jackson Pollock assaulting a canvas.

Pamela hoped she wouldn’t look like a Jackson
Pollock painting when Kitty was done.

“
It’s not as if the
situation between Jonas and me has anything to do with physical
attraction,” she protested feebly as Kitty laid down a brush and
brandished a mascara wand.

“
Jonas? Did he ask you to
call him that?”

“
It’s his name.” It only
just occurred to Pamela that she preferred Jonas to Joe. She liked
the Biblical ring of it.

“
Gee, he never told me that.
I guess he must be serious about you.”

“
Of course not,” Pamela
scoffed. “He just wants to marry me.”

Kitty stepped back and assessed her
handiwork. “Not bad. All you need now is...” She rummaged through a
drawer and pulled out a rainbow-striped ribbon. “There you go,” she
said, arranging it around Pamela’s hair. “You ought to do something
about those earrings,” she muttered, now that Pamela’s ears were
exposed, along with the plain gold buttons that adorned the lobes.
“They’re awfully boring. But earrings are one thing I don’t
lend.”

Pamela almost responded that if necessary she
could borrow some earrings from Joe. Instead, she rose from the
commode and confronted herself in the mirror. The face that stared
back at her looked a bit feverish, but that was an improvement over
her usual waxy pallor. Kitty stood beside her, beaming proudly at
what she’d wrought, making Pamela feel as if she were part of some
pagan ritual, the sacrificial virgin who’d been primped by the
tribal matriarch before offering herself to the gods so the crops
would grow and the local volcano wouldn’t erupt.

“
So what do you think? You
look gorgeous,” Kitty answered her own question.

“
Thank you.” Pamela didn’t
agree that she looked gorgeous, but if she said so, Kitty might
think she was referring to the make-up job and not the face behind
it. “Actually,” she said, turning from the mirror and following
Kitty out of the cramped room, “I didn’t come here for you to
attempt to make me pretty. I came to get directions to Jonas’s
house.”

“
That bum! He invited you
over and he didn’t tell you where he lives?”

“
He did tell me,” Pamela
defended him. She pulled out her cocktail napkin and showed the
blurry diagram to Kitty. “He gave me this, but I can’t make heads
or tails of it.”

Kitty took the napkin, squinted at it,
rotated it a hundred and eighty degrees, then shook her head.
Without having to be asked, Pamela supplied her with the Chamber of
Commerce map. “Ah, here we go. See, here’s Leon Street. You’re
going to head down to South Street and hang a left, and then you
just keep going till you get to Leon Street and make a right. Easy
as pie.”

“
What does his house look
like? Have you been there?”

Kitty’s laugh was just a tad too knowing.
“Sweetie, there isn’t a woman on this island who wouldn’t want to
call that house home.”

“
What is it, a
palace?”

“
No—but a prince lives
inside. Go get him, Pam. Be the first one to reel him
in.”

Pamela might be the first, but she wouldn’t
be the last. This was a marriage with a built-in conclusion. And as
far as reeling Joe in, the only reason he was biting on her hook
was because of Elizabeth. Lizzie Borden. Lizard.

Pamela shrugged back her shoulders and girded
herself to meet the maniac. “Okay,” she said, tucking an errant
strand of hair into her ribbon. “Here goes nothing.”

“
Here comes the bride,”
Kitty sing-songed as she ushered Pamela to the door. “You’re going
to love being married, Pamela. Trust me—I’ve done it plenty of
times myself.”

Done what? Pamela wondered as she waved and
departed from Kitty’s disorderly apartment. Marriage, or the part
of marriage she and Joe weren’t going to do? Last night he had
promised her that she would have her own bedroom. Without separate
beds, the deal was off.

Pamela wasn’t a prude—and, tribal sacrifices
to the contrary, she wasn’t a virgin. But she wasn’t going to get
involved any more than she had to with Jonas Brenner. This was a
business arrangement. Safety for her, a custody judgment for him.
Sex would only complicate matters.