The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries
- Автор: Пауэлл Тэлмидж
- Год: 2020
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press LLC
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries». Краткое содержание книги:
“That she does,” Marty said.
We went down the short gangway onto the deck. A girl came from aft, out of the cabin. Marty went forward to meet her, taking her hand in his.
A magazine illustrator couldn’t have done the portrait better. She was lithe and graceful in white shorts and halter, carrying the vigorous animalism of her sex appeal quite unconsciously.
She was gold, while Marty was dark-tanned leather. His coloring made her hair seem more golden, her eyes bluer, and her hair and eves possibly made her lips seem redder than they really were. The top of her head came just above Marty’s shoulder, and she leaned against him slightly in an automatic little gesture of affection.
“Peri,” Marty said, “this is Tom Dan ton. Tom, my wife.”
She offered her hand. Her fingers were slim, cool, strong.
“I’m very pleased to know you, Tom. Marty has told me a great deal about you.”
I said something or other and let go of her hand.
Marty told her I was joining the trip, and she remarked that it was nice.
“Bring your stuff on board this afternoon, Tom,” Marty said. “Well get underway with the tide tomorrow morning.”
The rubber soles of white canvas shoes squeaked softly behind me on the hot planking of the deck.
I looked over my shoulder. A man had come aboard. Wearing a T-shirt, ducks, and an old yachting cap, he was long, heavy, big-chested in the body and short in the legs. His face was square, his features blunt. His eyes were black and small, or perhaps they only looked that way because of his black, jutting, heavy brows.
He stood spread-legged, as if the deck of a boat were home to him. He took off the cap, with the inverted V crimped in the cracked bill, and wiped the sweatband. “You get to the marine supplier, Mr. Janus?”
“Not yet, Ralph. We’ll go over there now,” Marty said. “T ran into a friend. He’s going with us. Tom Danton, Ralph Corson.”
The stocky man looked me up and down, offered his hard, callused hand for a brief shake. “Glad to have you, Mr. Danton.” There was neither welcome nor disrespect in his tone. “You know anything about sailing?”
“A little.”
“He’ll pull his share,” Marty said.
“Then we won’t need another hired hand?”
“I think not, Ralph.”
The stocky man shrugged and went aft.
“He’s not the friendliest man alive,” Marty said, so that Ralph Corson wouldn’t hear, “but he’s a competent seaman.”
I soon found out that Marty had told the truth about Corson. We fished our way down the Keys. Corson knew his business, and I didn’t mind taking his orders and instructions. But in less than a week, I’d begun to hate the man.
I couldn’t single out a reason for this feeling. It wasn’t in anything he actually said or did. His orders were peremptory, even to Marty. That was all right, as it should be. Out here, Corson was captain of the boat.
Nor was the reason particularly in Corson’s attitude toward me. He treated me as something of a cluck, a habit of sea-wise men toward the landlubber. To him, I was no more than a shadow aboard. Still, this was not enough to arouse the feeling I felt for him.
Then late one afternoon, I knew suddenly why I felt as I did. The Atlantic was as smooth as a tub of oil. Sea and sky were hushed, and I had the feeling that we were in a vacuum. We were making for port in Key West under the power of the auxiliaries because of the expected light blow. Corson was on the bridge, at the helm.
Everything aboard the Peri was secured. Marty’s wife had made sandwiches for dinner, and there was nothing to be done, aside from Corson’s task. Peri and Marty were forward, sitting very close together in deck chairs. They were talking to each other, but their tones were low and intimate and could not be heard above the steady whisper of the diesels.
They made a fine picture, sea and sky for a backdrop, she like an enticing golden thing that had come out of the sea and Marty like the hero from some book who’d captured her mind, body, and soul. Marty said something to her, and they looked at each other. And Corson stood looking at their profiles, and a bestial thing came to his face.
He didn’t know I was watching. I’d been at the stern. He hadn’t heard me come forward. I’d been on the point of speaking to him when that change had come to his face. His eyes glittered, his lips pulled back tight to show his teeth. Dark blood suffused the heavy planes of his cheeks and jaws.
His lips twisted as he spoke noiseless words to himself. I could guess that it was a speech of raw animal desire and hatred. Lust for the woman and hatred, arising from envy, of the man who could own her, and this boat, and the services of other people.
I turned and went quietly sternward. I went in the galley and mixed a drink for something to do. There was a suffocating feeling in my chest and a band of steel tightening about my temples.
I shook with my hatred for Corson.
Because I wanted the woman as badly as he did.
The revelation was not sudden, though it seemed so at the moment. It filled me with a quick and deep shame.
Marty was my friend — and she was a part of Marty. Not for a moment was there any doubt of that. She didn’t worship or idolize him. She simply-belonged to him, completely, without reservation. She wanted nothing more. She would never ask nor seek for anything more. She had found the ultimate purpose of womanhood, a personality into which her own being could fuse until the two became a single entity.
Her life had a single mainstream and anything else — Corson and I, for example — were just objects on the distant shores of that stream.
So she was blameless. And yet she was wholly to blame, for in her, Marty had found the thing that every man seeks, the realization of the idealistic wish every man has felt to some degree when he was very young.
Corson and I had discovered there really was a woman like this in the world. It stirred the senses and fanned a fire, because there was the emptiness of the sea and sky, the smallness of the boat, the endless languorous days and nights — and the sight of her continually dangled before Corson and me.
I wanted to leave them in Key West. Instead, I told myself I couldn’t do it gracefully.
Although the season was late and there were reports of squally weather, Marty aimed the Peri at the Gulf, where he heard a few tarpon were still running.
“Those running this late,” he decided, “will be monsters. We might even set a record!”
The weather reports weren’t exaggerated, and the fifth day out, Corson asked Marty to make for Fort Myers.
“There’s even rougher weather ahead,” Corson said, “and this craft ain’t as seaworthy as she looks. She’s been built for looks, Mr. Janus — to...”
“Yes, Corson?
“All right,” Corson said, rubbing his palms on his ducks, “I’ll say it. The Peri’s a tub. I suspected it from the second I looked at her. Now I know it. She was built to grab a rich landlubber’s dollars. There’s too much of her topside. I don’t like the way she handles. I don’t like the roll of her. As a fancy toy, she’s fine, but it’d take a lot better craft than the Peri to weather the blow moving up from Dry Tortugas.”
“Well,” Marty said, “I guess I’m not the first man to get stuck.” He grinned wryly. “Nor the last. We’ll put in at Fort Myers.”
We failed to reach the port. The heavy blow caught us off the unexplored wilderness shown on the charts as Ten Thousand Islands.
The darkness and wind and rain came quickly. The tropical hush was filled with a roar. The sky disappeared, and the seas came over the Peri’s deck.
Just before the blow hit, Corson had seen the smudge of an island on our portside horizon. He swung the Peri wide, making for the island.