Charles Williams - Man on a Leash

“We were near the Los Angeles-Honolulu steamer lane, and late that afternoon we sighted a ship on the horizon and fired off some distress flares, but either it didn’t see us or didn’t give a damn, because it went on. And just about sunset, Steve died. I still wake up with a cold sweat, dreaming about that night. Jeri and I didn’t think we’d ever see dawn again, and before the night was over, we were so beaten we didn’t really care a great deal whether we did or not. But when daylight did come there was another ship in sight, way off on the horizon. All we could do was fire off the last of our flares and pray. Then we saw it had changed course and was coming. It was the Fairisle.

“Your father sent over a boat and took us off. An autopsy was performed on Steve when we reached Honolulu, and the doctors said he’d died of internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. I’d had it with oceans for all time, or thought I had. After I got back home and began to recover a little, I wrote the usual letters thanking him and the boat crew and also to the line praising him for his seamanship and for the royal way we’d been treated after we were picked up.

“That would have been the end of it, normally, except that about a year later I was in San Francisco on a shopping jag and walked out of the City of Paris one afternoon and bumped right into him. He invited me to have a drink. I don’t know what he did three days later, when the tugs pulled the Fairisle away from the pier and she started down the bay, but I went back to the Mark and collapsed; I think I slept the clock around twice. Your father was one hell of a charming and fascinating man, and he had a way with women, as perhaps you’ve heard.

“When he came back from that trip, I was waiting for him in San Francisco, flew to Los Angeles to see him there, and then flew to Honolulu. The following trip I sailed with him, to Hong Kong, Kobe, and Manila—the Fairisle has accommodations for twelve passengers, you know. In the next three years I made three more trips to the Orient with him, and when he retired, I was partly responsible for his settling here. He wouldn’t even consider La Jolla.

“There was never any question of marriage. I was in no hurry to be married again, and certainly not to him, and he said from the start he’d never try it again, that he wasn’t cut out for domesticity—which I could see even then was probably the understatement of the century.

“I have no doubt he had another girl, or perhaps several of them at different times, in San Francisco, but whether she or one of them was Jeri Bonner, I don’t think so. She was only twenty-four, for one thing, and surprisingly, he didn’t go for very young women. I know this is contrary to the classic pattern of the aging stud, needing younger and younger girls to get it off the runway, but maybe he was saving that phase for his eighties and nineties; his theory was that no woman under thirty even knew what it was all about. And there was the drugs; if she was using heroin, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her at all.”

And still the stuff had been in the house, and she’d known it was and just where to find it, Romstead thought. You never came up with any answers, only more questions. And though he liked her, the sexy Mrs. Carmody’s hymn to his father’s virtuosity as a lover was beginning to bug him; he’d been twenty days at sea. He thanked her for the drink, went back to the motel, and called Mayo.

“What did you find out?” she asked.

“Nothing you’d believe,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there. Around eleven P.M.”

“I’ll wait for you at your place.”

“Good thinking.”

“Sure. I thought it would be convenient. So if you’re going to whizz through town in five minutes again, you can tell me about it while you’re taking a cold shower.”

“Let’s make that ten instead of eleven.”

He went out to the office, paid the toll charges, and left a call for five P.M. It was still a few minutes to ten that night when he emerged from the elevator in the high-rise complex overlooking the Embarcadero and the bay and padded quietly along the carpeted hallway to his apartment.

The lights were dim in the living room. Mayo Foley, clad in a housecoat with apparently nothing under it, was listening to Ravel with her feet and long bare legs up on the coffee table beside a champagne bucket. She smiled, with that smoky look in the deep blue eyes he’d come to know so well, and said, “You’re just in time, Romstead; I was about to start without you.”

5

Mayo, whose real first name was Martha, was thirty-three, divorced, a creamy-skinned brunette with eyes that were very near to violet, and a registered nurse who’d always wanted to be a doctor but hadn’t quite been able to make it into medical school after four years of premed at Berkeley. In spite of the med-school turndowns, she was only mildly hung up on women’s lib, but she was a dedicated McGovernite and a passionate advocate of civil rights and environmental causes. She was also sexy as hell and possessed of a vocabulary that could raise welts on a Galapagos tortoise, as Romstead had learned early in their acquaintance when he’d jokingly called her a knee-jerk liberal. So far he had asked her at least three times to marry him, but she had refused, always gently, but decisively. Her first marriage had been a disaster, and she had reservations about him as a candidate for a second attempt.

He turned now and looked at her. She lay on her back, nude beside him in the faint illumination of the bedroom, totally relaxed, fluid, and pliant, a composition in chiaroscuro with the soft gleam of the thighs and the triangular wedge of velvet black at their juncture, the dark nipples of the spread and flattened breasts, pale blur of face, and the dark hair and the shadows of her eyes. This began to excite him again, and he turned and kissed her softly on the throat. It was after two in the morning now, and they had made love three times already, the last time very slowly and lingeringly, during which she had had a whole series of convulsive orgasms. Well, you could always try.

She pushed his hand away. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve, calling your father a stud.”

“Cut it out. I haven’t slept with another woman since I met you.”

“Well, I should hope not. I don’t see how you could work one into your schedule.”

“It’s just that I’ve been three weeks at sea. And I’m crazy about you.”

She reached over on the nightstand and lighted a cigarette. The tip glowed red in the darkness. “What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Wait a few minutes and try again.”

“Oh, that I know. If there’d been even the faintest doubt you’d keep trying, I’d have engulfed you like a Venus flytrap. You poor innocent, growing up in military schools.” She puffed on the cigarette. Her nipples looked purple in the glow. “I mean, what are you going to do about your father and the money he left you?”

“Three things,” he replied. “I thought about it all the way driving down tonight. I’ll tell you the third one first, since it involves you. Instead of selling them, for a change I’m going to buy a boat. I mean, one whole hell of a lot of boat. Money will be no problem. I get about a hundred and fifty thousand from the estate, and I’ve got a little over that myself, savings and so on and the money I got for my franchise in Costa Rica—”

“You mean from the CIA.”

“Are you still on that? I tell you I was working for myself.”

“All right, all right, you were just an innocent businessman. Go on about the boat.”

“Say a thirty-five to forty-foot ketch, which is about all two people can handle without having to work too hard at it. Everything on it—self-steering vane, radiotelephone, fathometer, Kenyon log, diesel auxiliary, tanks for a cruising range of four hundred miles under power, generator, refrigerator. You can do all that with a fairly small boat if you’re just putting in cruising accommodations for two, and you can do it for sixty thousand or less.