Charles Williams: Gulf Coast Girl

He gestured casually with the muzzle of it for me to move back and stay there. I moved. There was something about him.

He smiled. “Damned dramatic,” he said, almost approvingly. “Hell’s own shakes of an entrance.” Then he looked boredly at the gun in his hand and dropped it back in the right-hand pocket of his jacket.

I was ten feet from him. And I remembered how fast it had appeared in his hand before. He was safe enough, and knew it. I watched him, still feeling the hot proddings of anger but beginning to get control of myself now. I’d come out without even stopping to think because I couldn’t take any more of the noises coming from in here, and now I didn’t have the faintest idea what I’d walked into, except that it looked dangerous. I couldn’t place them. They weren’t police. And they obviously weren’t private detectives hired by her husband, because it was her husband they were looking for. Somebody named Macaulay, and she’d told me her name was Wayne. It was a total blank.

The one I’d hit was getting up. Pug was written all over him, in the way he hitched up his trousers with his wrists and the heels of his thumbs, shook his head to clear it, and began advancing catlike on the balls of his feet with his hands out. He was a good six inches shorter than I was, but he had cocky shoulders and big arms, and I could see the bright, eager malice with which he sized me up. He was a tough little man who was going to cut a bigger one down to size.

“Drop it,” the lounging one said.

“Let me take him.” The plea was harsh, and urgent.

The other shook his head almost indifferently. He was long and loose-limbed and casual, dressed in a tweed jacket and flannels. It was impossible to tab him. He might have been an intercollegiate miler or a minor poet, until you ran into that cool and unruffled deadliness in the eyes. He had that indefinable something about him which enables you to tell the master craftsman from the apprentice in any trade, whether you know anything about it or not. There was something British about his speech.

“All right,” the pug said reluctantly. He looked hungrily at me, and then at the girl. “You want me to ask her some more?”

I waited, feeling the hot tension in the room. It was going to be rough if he started asking her some more. I wasn’t any hero, and didn’t want to be one, but it wasn’t the sort of thing you could watch for very long without losing your head, and with Tweed Jacket you probably never lost it more than once.

Tweed Jacket’s amused gaze flicked from me to the girl and he shook his head again. “Waste of time,” he said. “He’d scarcely be here, under the circumstances, unless the rules have changed. Might go through the rooms, though, and have a dekko at the ash trays. You know his brand of cigarettes.”

The pug went out, managing to bump against me and push me off balance with a hard shoulder as he went past. I said nothing. He turned his face a little and we looked at each other. I remembered the obscene brutality of the way he was holding and hitting her, and the yearning in the stare was mutual.

There was silence in the room except for Shannon Wayne’s stirring on the sofa. She sat up. The whole side of her face was inflamed and her eyes were wet with involuntary tears. The bathing suit was one of the old ones with shoulder straps and one of them was torn loose so the front of it slanted downward across a satiny breast. She fumbled at the strap, watching Tweed Jacket with fear in her eyes. The button was gone. She held it together and went on enduring.

Tweed Jacket apparently found us tiresome in the extreme. He crushed out his cigarette, whistling a fragment of the “Barcarolle” from The Tales of Hoffman . The pug came out of the last room.

“Water haul,” he said, spreading his hands.

Tweed Jacket’s eyebrows raised. “Beg pardon?”

“Nothing. Nobody here for a long time, from the looks of it.”

“Right.” Tweed Jacket unfolded himself languidly and stood up.

The pug looked at me, his hazel eyes bright with wickedness. “How about Big Boy? We better ask him, hadn’t we?”

“Rather unnecessary. I’d suggest you stick to business, old boy.”

There was no longer any doubt as to who was boss, but the pug wanted me so badly he tried once more. “This is a quiet place to ask, and he might know Macaulay.”

Tweed Jacket waved him toward the door. “Quite unlikely,” he said. His eyes flicked over the girl’s figure again with that same cool amusement. “I’d say his interest in Macaulay was vicarious, to say the least. Vive le sport.” They went out.

In the dead silence I could hear their footsteps retreating along the pier, and in a moment the car started. I breathed deeply. I was pulled tight and soaked with sweat. Tweed Jacket’s urbane manner covered a very professional sort of deadliness, and it could easily have gone the other way. Only the profit motive was lacking. He simply didn’t believe Macaulay was here.

I turned. She was still holding the front of the bathing suit. “Thank you,” she said, without any emotion whatever, and looked away from me. “I’m sorry you had to become involved. As soon as I can change, I’ll drive you back to town.”

I walked over in front of her, so mixed up now I didn’t know anything. “It’s all right,” I said. “But I wonder if you’d tell me what this is all about? And why you threw that gun in the lake?”

She looked through the place I’d have been standing if I had existed. “Really,” she said coldly, “I thought you had that all figured out.”

She was about as beautiful when she was angry as at any time. I tried to filter that out of my mind and look at her objectively. It wasn’t easy.

What had changed the picture? Nothing had really happened to prove I was wrong about it, but I was suddenly very ashamed of myself. It was odd, especially when I still didn’t know why she’d done it, or why she had told me her name was Wayne while they’d called her Macaulay. All I was sure of was that I’d jumped to the wrong conclusion.

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I’d like to apologize, if it’s worth anything.”

Her face brightened a little. Then she smiled. With the eyes still full of tears that way, it could catch hold of you right down in the throat.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s my fault, anyway. I don’t know how I could have been so stupid as not to realize that was the way it would look. What else could you think?”

I was uncomfortable. “I’d like to forget it,” I said, “if you could. But what in the name of God did you do it for?”

She hesitated. “I’d hoped I would have more time to make up my mind before I told you. If I told you at all. But you were too observant.”

“Make up your mind about what?”

Her eyes met mine simply. “About you.”

“Why?” I asked.

She stood up. It was obvious she was under a strain. “Would you—excuse me a minute? I’d like to change, and maybe if I had a chance to think—”

“Sure,” I said. She went out. I sat down and lit a cigarette. There was no use trying to guess what it was all about, or what she really wanted. I thought of the two men who had just left. There was something deep and probably quite dangerous going on under the surface here, but I couldn’t see what I had to do with it.

I switched back to her, and as usual I couldn’t get my thoughts sorted out. I was conscious of being happy about something, and in a moment I realized it was simply knowing I’d been wrong about the whole thing. That made no sense at all, of course. Maybe I ought to see a psychiatrist, I thought sourly.

She came out in a few minutes, dressed and looking as smooth as ever. She had put on fresh make-up, and the ugly redness was gone from the side of her face. She touched it gently.