She made a face at herself in the glass.
“You’d better take the luminol,” she said in a whisper. She took the luminol with a glass of water from the chromium-plated thermos carafe that was on the locker by the bed.
It makes you nervous, she thought. But you have to sleep. I wonder how Eddie would be if we were married. He would be running around with some one younger I suppose. I suppose they can’t help the way they’re built any more than we can. I just want a lot of it and I feel so fine, and being some one else or some one new doesn’t really mean a thing. It’s just it itself, and you would love them always if they gave it to you. The same one I mean. But they aren’t built that way. They want some one new, or some one younger, or some one that they shouldn’t have, or some one that looks like some one else. Or if you’re dark they want a blonde.
Or if you’re blonde they go for a redhead. Or if you’re a redhead then it’s something else. A Jewish girl I guess, and if they’ve had really enough they want Chinese or Lesbians or goodness knows what. I don’t know. Or they just get tired, I suppose. You can’t blame them if that’s the way they are and I can’t help John’s liver either or that he’s drunk so much he isn’t any good. He was good. He was marvellous. He was. He really was. And Eddie is. But now he’s tight. I suppose I’ll end up a bitch. Maybe I’m one now. I suppose you never know when you get to be one. Only her best friends would tell her. You don’t read it in Mr. Winchell. That would be a good new thing for him to announce. Bitch-hood. Mrs. John Hollis canined into town from the coast. Better than babies. More common I guess. But women have a bad time really.
The better you treat a man and the more you show him you love him the quicker he gets tired of you. I suppose the good ones are made to have a lot of wives but it’s awfully wearing trying to be a lot of wives yourself, and then some one simple takes him when he’s tired of that. I suppose we all end up as bitches but who’s fault is it? The bitches have the most fun but you have to be awfully stupid really to be a good one. Like Helène Bradley. Stupid and well-intentioned and really selfish to be a good one. Probably I’m one already. They say you can’t tell and that you always think you’re not. There must be men who don’t get tired of you or of it. There must be. But who has them? The ones we know are all brought up wrong. Let’s not go into that now. No, not into that. Nor back to all those cars and all those dances. I wish that luminol would work. Damn Eddie, really.
He shouldn’t have really gotten so tight. It isn’t fair, really. No one can help the way they’re built but getting tight has nothing to do with that. I suppose I am a bitch all right, but if I lie here now all night and can’t sleep I’ll go crazy and if I take too much of that damned stuff I’ll feel awfully all day tomorrow and then sometimes it won’t put you to sleep and anyway I’ll be cross and nervous and feel frightful. Oh, well, I might as well.
I hate to but what can you do? What can you do but go ahead and do it even though, even though, even anyway, oh, he is sweet, no he isn’t, I’m sweet, yes you are, you’re lovely, oh, you’re so lovely, yes, lovely, and I didn’t want to, but I am, now I am really, he is sweet, no he’s not, he’s not even here, I’m here, I’m always here and I’m the one that cannot go away, no, never. You sweet one. You lovely. Yes you are. You lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, yes, lovely. And you’re me. So that’s it. So that’s the way it is. So what about it always now and over now. All over now. All right. I don’t care. What difference does it make? It isn’t wrong if I don’t feel badly. And I don’t. I just feel sleepy now and if I wake I’ll do it again before I’m really awake.
She went to sleep then, remembering, just before she was finally asleep, to turn on her side so that her face did not rest on the pillow. She remembered, no matter how sleepy, how terribly bad it is for the face to sleep that way, resting on the pillow.
There were two other yachts in the harbor but every one was asleep on them, too, when the Coast Guard boat towed Freddy Wallace’s boat, the Queen Conch, into the dark yacht basin and tied up alongside the Coast Guard pier.
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
Harry Morgan knew nothing about it when they handed a stretcher down from the pier, and, with two men holding it on the deck of the gray-painted cutter under a floodlight outside the captain’s cabin, two others picked him up from the captain’s bunk and moved unsteadily out to ease him onto the stretcher. He had been unconscious since the early evening and his big body sagged the canvas of the stretcher deeply as the four men lifted it up toward the pier.
“Up with it now.”
“Hold his legs. Don’t let him slip.”
“Up with it.”
They got the stretcher onto the pier.
“How is he, Doctor?” asked the sheriff as the men shoved the stretcher into the ambulance.
“He’s alive,” said the doctor. “That’s all you can say.”
“He’s been out of his head or unconscious ever since we picked him up,” the boatswain’s mate commanding the Coast Guard cutter said. He was a short chunky man with glasses that shone in the floodlight. He needed a shave. “All your Cuban stiffs are back in the launch. We left everything like it was. We didn’t touch anything. We just put the two down that might have gone overboard. Everything’s just like it was. The money and the guns. Everything.”
“Come on,” said the sheriff. “Can you run a floodlight back there?”
“I’ll have them plug one in on the dock,” the dockmaster said. He went off to get the light and the cord.
“Come on,” said the sheriff. They went astern with flashlights. “I want you to show me exactly how you found them. Where’s the money?”
“In those two bags.”
“How much is there?”
“I don’t know. I opened one up and saw it was the money and shut it up. I didn’t want to touch it.”
“That’s right,” said the sheriff. “That’s exactly right.”
“Everything’s just like it was except we put two of the stiffs off the tanks down into the cockpit so they wouldn’t roll overboard, and we carried that big ox of a Harry aboard and put him in my bunk. I figured him to pass out before we got him in. He’s in a hell of a shape.”
“He’s been unconscious all the time?”
“He was out of his head at first,” said the skipper. “But you couldn’t make out what he was saying. We listened to a lot of it but it didn’t make sense. Then he got unconscious. There’s your layout. Just like it was only that niggery looking one on his side is laying where Harry lay. He was on the bench over the starboard tank hanging over the coaming and the other dark one by the side of him was on the other bench, the port side, hunched over on his face. Watch out. Don’t light any matches. She’s full of gas.”
“There ought to be another body,” said the sheriff.
“That’s all there was. The money’s in that bag. The guns are right where they were.”
“We better have somebody from the bank to see the money opened,” said the sheriff.
“O.K.,” said the skipper. “That’s a good idea.”
“We can take the bag to my office and seal it.”
“That’s a good idea,” said the skipper.
Under the floodlight the green and white of the launch had a freshly shiny look. This came from the dew on her deck and on the top of the house. The splinterings showed fresh through her white paint. Astern of her the water was a clear green under the light and there were small fish about the pilings.
In the cockpit the inflated faces of the dead men were shiny under the light, lacquered brown where the blood had dried. There were empty .45 caliber shells in the cockpit around the dead and the Thompson gun lay in the stern where Harry had put it down. The
