Dress Her in Indigo (7 page)

As I thanked him his two guests arrived, spectacularly, in a little custom Lotus Elan convertible in bubblegum pink with black upholstery. The woman came out from under the wheel, leggy, slender, tall, nimble, in light-blue linen sheath dress to midthigh, sleeveless. She had a wild and riotous ruff of wind-spilled lion-mane hair, high-heeled sandals and purse to match the car. For just an instant she was twenty-something, but then in the light across her face she was thirty-something, with a twenty odd body. The boy was in his early twenties, in white shirt open at the throat, crisp khakis, and a powder blue jacket that was a precise match with the lady's dress. He was brick-red from the sun. His hair was cropped to a copper bristle. He had a sullen face, heavy features, and he moved with the indolent, indifferent grace and ease of one of the big hunting cats, or one of the many imitations of Brando.

"Brucey!" she cried in joyous greeting.

"Becky darling!" he cried.

Giving us a sidelong questing glance, she ran to embrace the host, saying in a British accent,

"David had the most fascinating day at the dig. They came upon a whole pocket of tiny beads of bone and jade, and the poor darling had to spend practically the entire day on his knees in the bottom of a monstrous hole, brushing the dust away and picking them up with tweezers. He desperately needs a Iarge whiskey, don't you, darling?"

The sunbaked boy grunted, and Bruce tried to wove them inside. We had gone a half dozen steps when Becky gave that upperclass commanding caw. "You! I say, you two! Wait up a moment! Bruce? Dearheart, why must one set of guests leave when the next arrives? Your house is rather small, I grant that. But not that small."

I saw the way it might go, and came back as he murmured protestations to her. I said, "It really wasn't a social call, ma'am. In fact we wouldn't have even got inside the gate if I hadn't tried a little doubletalk. But it only worked for a little while. Mr. Bundy called my bluff. So I don't believe he'd be very happy about having us come back in as guests."

She measured me with vivid emerald wicked-gleam-of-mischief eyes through the rough spill of the red-blond-gold-russet hair and made up her impulsive mind and cried, "Nonsense! We are just too terribly inbred around here. One says the same old things to the same old faces in the same old places year without end. Bruce, dear, these gentlemen would make it a more lively evening."

"But Becky, they are insurance types, from Florida. And it's all a very dull bit about the dead girl, the Bowie girl, and they know she traveled here with that Rockland boy. Apparently there was some sort of policy on the girl's life."

"But Brucey, what if they are insurance types? Does that mean we have to sit about talking about
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premiums? Let us widen our horizons a bit, dear."

He hesitated and then, from the little lift and fall of his shoulders, I could see that he had given up. He said to us, "Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison is one of our most attractive local institutions, and she has, as you may have detected, a whim of iron. Becky, may I present Mr. McGee. and Mr. Meyer. Gentlemen, please come back into my home as my invited guests."

"Bravo!" said Becky. "That was really gracious, Bruce. Like a child taking medicine. Mr. McGee, I am Becky and you are..."

"Travis. And Meyer is Meyer."

"And this is David Saunders, who is down here on a grant, grubbing about in the ruins. Bruce, dear, are you going to keep me out here on the street? I'm beginning to feel like Apple Mary."

So we went back in, with Meyer giving me an amused little wink, a little nod of approval. We went out onto the twilight patio, sweet with the evening song of the birds, heavy with the scent of flowers that were just opening for the hours of the night, with fleshy pink petals, and a smell something like jasmine.

Each little group of strangers establishes its own set of balances and unspoken agreements.

Tentative relationships are made and broken until the ones are found which are durable enough to last the evening, at least. From long habit, Meyer and I could talk on one level while maintaining an elliptical kind of communication on a level inaccessible to the other three. Bruce and Becky were doing the same thing, wherein innocent expressions had subterranean values.

Bruce bustled about, happily hostessing, making drinks, lighting the patio lanterns, summoning a solemn little Mexican woman to present the trays of hors d'oeuvres, with Bruce anxiously awaiting our verdicts on each delicacy.

Becky was all animation, in constant movement, making wry and bawdy judgments, with hoots of harsh laughter. In her evident maturity, she was still totally girl, that special kind of girl who does not have any self-conscious awareness of herself, but can fling herself about, leggy and lithe, laugh with an open throat, comb her casual hair back with splayed fingers, scratch herself, kick off her sandals, stand ugly, lick crumbs from her fingertips. She was teeming and burning with endless and remarkable energies, with taut slender vibrating health. One could not imagine her ever being bored. Her drink was a pale Spanish sherry, in an old-fashioned glass with a single cube of ice, and she seemed able to make one last indefinitely.

David Saunders was a familiar type, muscular, burly yet feline. He moved with languid grace. He sat immobile, thighs bulging the khaki slacks, apparently in total disinterest and indifference to anyone and anything about him. It was that special arrogance which relieves the possessor of any responsibility to communicate with anyone or please anyone. He could have been in a bus station, waiting for an overdue bus. But he did not become inconspicuous or invisible. There was a surly presence, an assurance, that made people try to please him, to bring him into the conversation. His drink, to Bundy's apparent dismay, was bourbon and Coke, and he knocked them back with stolid, metronomic efficiency.

I decided that I could risk, for the sake of possible returns, casting a large doubt on our insurance story, and Bruce's statement of having done stage design in New York and set design in California gave me the opening. So at a handy opening, using that-reminds-me, I brought up a
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Famous Female Name in the Industry.

"That wretched bitch!" Bruce said. "The most self-important little slut in the world, believe me. I did one totally commercial job for her. One of those period piece things, where they wrapped her little ass in crinoline, and had her bang her way through half the Confederate Army. I went a little camp with the decor, not to cut the picture, but to make a little gentle fun that only the cognoscenti would catch. So she raised stinking hell about my color patterns being wrong for her. She wants to act, direct, produce, write the script, and design the sets, and she doesn't know one thing about her own trade. The only acting she does that seems authentic is when they have her horizontal. She is one of the reasons, dears, why I tucked away all their abundant bread into very good little securities, and when I had enough to live nicely on for the rest of my years, I told them all what they could kiss." He paused and looked at me with a suspicious glint. "But don't tell me she was buying her insurance in Florida."

"It was something else, Bruce. She partied on a sun deck with a mixed bare-ass group, and somebody with a good telephoto lens tried to get rich quick."

He nodded. "I remember a rumor that she was in that kind of trouble, but nothing happened."

"I got lucky."

"But why would you get involved in something like that, Travis?"

"Because she came around and asked me."

"Why would she come to you?"

"Because I solved another kind of problem for someone she knew."

"Then you aren't really in the insurance business?"

I smiled upon him. "Hell, I don't know. I guess that lady would be willing to say it was a kind of insurance."

"But what are yod trying to do here? Who are you... trying to insure, Mr. McGee?"

"I think that if I had gone around telling people what I was trying to do for the actress, it wouldn't have worked out as well as it did."

Meyer broke in and said, "We just go around helping people, Bruce. I think it's some kind of guilt syndrome. Trouble with those windmills, you stick a lance into one in a good wind, and it will purely toss the hell out of you."

Bundy, after a few moments of narrow-eyed consideration, dropped it. And soon he began moving in on David Saunders' blind side. But first there was a little exchange between Bruce and Becky that went over David's sullen head.

Bruce said, "Becky, darling, Larry told me last week that you. practically gave him that marvelous ceremonial mask from Juchatengo."

I saw her eyes go blank and her mouth purse, and though she recovered in a sparkling instant, I
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felt reasonably convinced that there was no mask, perhaps not even anyone named Larry.

"He seemed to want it."

"It upset him a little. I mean he knew how terribly acquisitive you had felt about it when you first got it, and he didn't want to take advantage of your friendship."

"How silly!" she said. "I was cleaning out my little gallery and I remembered that he seemed to admire it, so I took it over and asked him if he'd like it. My word, had I wanted to keep it, would I have taken it to him?"

"I guess he wanted to be certain it was not just an impulse you'd regret later."

"When you see him, tell him not to worry his little head. Actually, you know, I was very fair with him. I told him when I took it over there that it was really not as first class as I had thought at first. It's very primitive, of course, and quite authentic, but it's just one of those things you tire of seeing every day I suppose because it hasn't much subtlety."

"It's probably more Larry's sort of thing than yours."

"Very probably. I sensed that, I suppose." Transfer accomplished, in good faith. And so Bundy engaged Meyer in amateur archeological talk, saying, fmally, "I just cannot imagine how those priest types could bring the Indian peasants into this terribly inhospitable and certainly waterless countryside and establish a whole culture without losing untold thousands of them."

And that hooked Saunders into his first conversation of the evening. "From what we know now, the system was to send out a large party of specialists, carrying water supplies, just before the rainy season. If they couldn't find reliable wells or springs, they would dig giant cisterns deep in the earth, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like gigantic bottles made of stone and waterproofed with clay. Then around the top of the bottle, they'd make a hard surface, round, fifty or sixty feet across, and sloping toward the mouth of the bottle. The rains would fill the bottle and they'd put a big clay stopper in place to prevent evaporation. Next they would bring in the Indian families with grain and fowl and tools and tell them where to build the village and where to plant the grain."

Bruce cried that the information fascinated him. How clever those ancient people were! And how clever the ones who were now so carefully reconstructing all that lost marvelous history!

And he kept him going a little while until it was time for dinner. I said we had to leave just to see how much he would protest. And he did, with an earnest vehemence, because it was obvious that if there were just the three of them, he couldn't focus on David.

So we, with show of reluctance, accepted the warm invitation.

Five

THE FOOD was excellent. Candles flared and flickered in the night breeze. He served a good and heady Greek wine.

A round table. Superb silverware, table linen, glassware, pottery. Muted music from a good tape system somewhere in the house. Bundy had Lady Rebecca at his right, David at his left with me
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at Becky's right, and Meyer between me and David.

Rebecca had begun to make an elegant presentation of herself to me, managing in her casual careless way of handling herself, to artfully establish all the sensory awarenesses-of vision, of scent, of apparently inadvertent touch. But more importantly, she knew well that most important ingredient of all charm, all seduction, the art of so listening and responding that she made me feel as if I were the most exciting and rewarding and important man she had met in untold years, that if I had not come along, her life would have continued in its drab and dreary pattern. It requires not only the ability to listen so carefully no word, no nuance, is missed, but also the ability to sense when a contrary opinion will further the growing sense of closeness. I knew what she was doing and knew some of the devices she was using, but that awareness did not prevent my growing feeling that this was, indeed, one hell of a lot of extraordinary woman and nice to be with and worth arranging any further closeness possible.

Bruce Bundy, in another way and on another level, was targeting in on David Saunders. And it was interesting to see how much more masculine Bruce had become, in voice, gesture and opinion. And both Bruce and Becky were using Meyer as that necessary little dilution factor to mask their acquisitive intensity, directing questions and comment to him in much the same way the stage magician makes a great show of letting you look up his sleeves and into his top hat.

Their eyes gleamed in the candlelight, and their faces were smooth and youthful and animated, and their voices were clever, articulate, and amusing. The pretty predators, using their tested skills for the newest stalk.

David Saunders seemed to make, at table, a slightly porcine prey. He would dip his head almost to the plate, shovel in a heaping forkful, chew heavily with rolling bulge of muscle at the jaw corners, and then slosh it down with a gulp of wine, the throat bulging and shifting with the bulky swallow.

So, half in self-defense, half in the interest of moving ahead with the mission, I found a hole in the conversation and ran it off at a new angle. "I'd like to meet and talk to Eva Vitrier. Can you arrange it, Bruce? Becky?"

An instant of wary stillness, such as might happen to the smaller scavengers when they hear the carnivore coming back through the jungle toward the kill.