Ed McBain - Puss in Boots

Matthew kept looking at him.

“Sorry,” he said at last. “Just an idea.”

It was not until two days later that Tick and Mose found Amber Wilson.

She was the color of her given name, amber to be sure, a girl who — or so her neighbors had reported — referred to herself with great dignity as “black,” although she could have passed for white anywhere in the world. What you’d call a mulatto, Mose guessed, or a quadroon, or an octaroon, or a nectarine, or whatever the hell. What his grandfather back in Georgia would have called a “high yeller gal.”

She was sitting on a blanket on the Sabal Key beach, wearing a green maillot slit high up on the leg and slashed low between her abundant breasts. Two white boys wearing swim trunks and Duke University sweatshirts were tossing a Frisbee some ten feet from where she sat. Tick and Mose, dressed for the street, came slogging through the sand toward where she sat studiously ignoring the boys trying to get her attention.

“Miss Wilson?” Tick asked.

She looked up. Her eyes were the color of the sky, a pale, bluish gray. Somewhat slanted. Set in an oval face with high cheekbones. Mose wished he’d have been the one who took her to Mexico. He also wondered why Jake Delaney had sent her back home. Jake had seemed very intelligent otherwise.

“The lifeguard over there says you’re Amber Wilson,” Tick said. “Mind if we sit down and talk to you a minute?”

Tick knew she was thinking cops.

“Okay?” he said.

Amber shrugged.

Both men sat on the blanket. The Duke Frisbee players, probably Boggers, were wondering what she saw in these two jerks that she didn’t see in them. They picked up their toy and wandered farther up the beach.

“We’ve been trying to find you since Monday,” Tick said, figuring he’d let her go on thinking they were cops for just a little while.

“Oh?” Amber said. “How’d you find me now?”

“Lady who lives next door to you said you went to the beach.”

“Well, I guess I did,” Amber said, “since here I am at the beach.”

“We hear you just got back from Mexico,” Mose said, getting straight to the point as usual. There were times when Tick wondered why he bothered with Mose at all.

“If you heard I was busted at the border, that’s bullshit,” Amber said. “Are you cops or what?”

“We’re looking for Jake Delaney,” Tick said, ignoring the question.

“He’s in Mexico, and he didn’t do anything, either.”

“We know he didn’t do anything,” Tick said. “But we’re real anxious to talk to him.”

“What about?”

He wondered if she knew Prue was dead.

“When did you go down to Mexico?” he asked.

“We left on the fifteenth,” Amber said.

“Last month?”

“Well, since today’s the seventeenth, and the fifteenth of this month would’ve been two days ago, then it couldn’t have been this month, could it, since I’m sitting on the beach here, don’t you think?”

Wise-ass nigger, Mose thought.

“You’re saying it was last month,” he said.

“Bright,” Amber said.

Like to punch you right in your fuckin’ nigger mouth, Mose thought.

Tick was thinking if she left five days before Prue got killed, then maybe she didn’t know about the murder. He was also trying to think whether or not this was good or bad for them. He figured he’d play it by ear a bit longer.

“Why’d Jake go down to Mexico?” he asked.

“Business,” she said.

“Dope?” Mose asked.

Good old Mose.

Amber merely looked at him. Her look could have killed a cockroach.

“We’re friends of his,” Tick said, figuring he’d quit playing games.

“I’ll bet you are,” Amber said.

“We worked with him on that movie out on Fatback Key.”

She studied him.

“Really,” he said.

She kept studying him.

“That’s what we want to talk to him about.”

“I don’t know anything about that movie,” she said.

“ ’Cause we understand he went down there to scout out a situation for the director of the movie,” Tick said, and watched her eyes.

She didn’t even blink.

“What we want to ask him—”

“You’re cops, ain’t you?” Amber said.

“No, no,” Tick said.

“Who you think you’re kidding here?” Amber said. “The lady got herself juked, and now you’re giving me all this jive about Jake scouting a situation for her, you’re cops.”

So she knows about Prue, Tick thought.

“We’re not cops,” he said.

She studied him again.

“Really,” he said.

“We worked with him,” Mose said.

“You I wouldn’t believe if you told me you’re wearing a red shirt,” Amber said, which he was wearing.

“We’re not cops, I mean it,” Tick said. “All we want to know is what kind of situation he was scouting for her. We’d ask him ourselves, only he’s in Mexico. He’d tell us in a minute if he was here. We’re friends of his, for Christ’s sake.”

“It wasn’t nothing illegal,” Amber said.

“Then what was it?”

“Whyn’t you go to Mexico and ask him?”

“Where in Mexico?” Tick asked.

“Mexico City.”

“Scouting for what?”

“How much is this worth to you?” Amber asked.

It always got down to money. You talked with a hooker, it was always cash on the line. There were no hookers with hearts of gold left in the entire world. But he had learned his lesson with Kim Arden née Mary Androssini.

“All I can spare is a hundred dollars,” he said.

“Make it two hundred,” Mose said.

Tick’s mouth fell open.

“I mean, make it fifty,” Mose said, and grinned apologetically.

“No, two hundred sounds about right,” Amber said.

“What am I buying for two hundred?” Tick asked.

“You want to know what he was scouting in Mexico, don’t you?”

“Something else I want to know, too.”

“What’s that?”

“The square handle of the girl who was in the movie with him.”

Amber looked at him.

“Do you know her name?”

“I know her name,” Amber said.

“Her address, too?”

“No.”

“Then all it’s worth is a hundred.”

“Make it a bill and a half.”

“You’ve got it,” Tick said, and reached for his wallet. He counted out six twenties and three tens.

“Thanks,” Amber said, and slipped the money into her beach bag.

“So?” he said.

“How do you want it?”

“First the girl’s name.”

“Margaret.”

“What’s her last name?”

“Dill.”

Easy to remember, Tick thought. Like a dill pickle.

“Does she live here in Calusa?” he asked.

“Yeah, but I don’t know where. I already told you I don’t know her address.”

Punch her right in her nigger mouth, Mose thought.

“Jake never dropped anything that would—”

“No. He just kept talking about her all the time. Meg this, Meg that—”

“He called her Meg?”

“Yeah.”

“You said Margaret.”

“Meg’s her nickname. They were real tight, huh? I think he was making it with her even when they weren’t in front of the camera. Well, you know Jake.”

“So it’s Margaret Dill,” Tick said.

“Meg,” Mose said.

“Either one,” Amber said, and shrugged.

“All right, what about Jake? What’s he doing down there in Mexico?”

“Like you said. Scouting for the lady directed the movie.”

“Where? Mexico City?”

“Mexico City.”

“What kind of scouting?”

“For bread,” Amber said. “And a place to work.”

“A place to work? In Mexico?”