The Deep Blue Good-By Read Free Page B

so I've told you. I don't know where he is now. I don't know if Mrs. Atkinson knows, if she isn't still with him someplace. And if anybody could find him, what could they do?"
    "Was there a name and port of registry on the boat?"
    "Called it the Play Pen, out of Miami. Not a new boat, but the name new. He showed a couple of people the papers to prove it was his. I'd say it was a custom boat, maybe thirty-eight foot, white topsides, gray hull and a blue stripe."
    "Then you left Candle Key."
    "Not long after. There just wasn't enough money with just one of us working. When I was little a tourist lady saw me dancing alone and gave me free dancing lessons every winter she came down. Before I was married I danced two years for pay up in Miami. So I came back into it and it's enough money so I can send Christine enough and she can get along. I didn't want to be in Candle Key any more anyway."
    She looked at me with soft apologetic brown eyes, all dressed in her best to come talk to me.
    The world had done its best to subdue and humble her, but the edge of her good tough spirit showed through. I found I had taken an irrational dislike to Junior Allen, that smiling man. And I do not function too well on emotional motivations. I am wary of them. And I am wary of a lot of other things, such as plastic credit cards, payroll deductions, insurance programs, retirement benefits, savings accounts, Green Stamps, time clocks, newspapers, mortgages, sermons, miracle fabrics, deodorants, check lists, time payments, political. parties, lending libraries, television, actresses, junior chambers of commerce, pageants, progress, and manifest destiny, I am wary of the whole dreary deadening structured mess we have built into such a glittering top-heavy structure that there is nothing left to see but the glitter, and the brute routines of maintaining it.
    Reality is in the enduring eyes, the unspoken dreadful accusation in the enduring eyes of a worn young woman who looks at you, and hopes for nothing.
    But these things can never form lecture materials for blithe Travis McGee. I am also wary of all earnestness.
    "Let me do some thinking about all this, Cathy."
    "Sure,' she said, and put her empty glass down.
    "Another drink."
    "I'll be getting along, thank you kindly."
    "I can get in touch through Chook."
    "Sure."

Page 9
    I let her out. I noticed a small and touching thing. Despite all wounds and dejections, her dancer's step was so firm and light and quick as to give a curious imitation of joy.
    I walked through the lounge and tapped at the door and went into the master stateroom.
    Chook's fresh clothing was laid out on my bed, and her sodden stomp-suit was in a heap on the floor. I heard her in the tub, wallowing and sloshing and humming.
    "Yo,' I said toward the half-open door.
    "Come in, darling. I'm indecent."
    The bathroom was humid with steam and soap. The elderly Palm Beach sybarite who had ordered the pleasure barge for his- declining years had added many nice touches. One was the tub, a semi-sunken, pale blue creation a full seven feet long and four feet wide. Chook was stretched out full length in it, her black hair afloat, bobbing around in there, creamy with suds, utterly luxuriant. She beckoned me over and I sat on the wide rim near the foot of the tub.
    I guess Chook is about twenty-three or -four.
    Her face is a little older than that. It has that stern look you see in old pictures of the Plains Indians. At her best, it is a forceful and striking face, redolent of strength and dignity. At worst it sometimes would seem to be the face of a Dartmouth boy dressed for the farcical chorus line.
    But that body, seen more intimately than ever before, was incomparably, mercilessly female, deep and glossy, rounded-under the tidy little fatty layer of girl pneumatics-with useful muscle.
    This was a special challenge, and I didn't know the terms, knew only that most of the time they are terms one cannot ultimately afford, not with the ones who,