Darker Than Amber

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Authors: Travis McGee
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enough for her to retrieve the money she had hidden away and make her escape undetected.

Observations and assumptions of possible pertinence:

1. Miss Bellemer exhibited certain histrionic talents which could presumably be useful in a confidence game. 2. A series of multiple murders can be successful only if the victims have neither friends nor family anxious to conduct an intensive search. 3. This area is a place where lonely and well-to-do men in their middle years come to begin a new life. 4. In casual conversation with Meyer, Miss Bellemer displayed an intensive knowledge of the shopping conditions in the various islands of the Caribbean, from Curacao to Grand Bahama, which might well have been acquired through frequent cruises, then abruptly changed the subject. 5. Disposal of bodies at sea would constitute no problem provided the passenger in question was not known to be missing, but this would seem a curious and difficult situation to arrange. 6. Callous as it may seem, it is not difficult to imagine several people of the same stamp as Miss Bellemer carrying out murder after murder, provided some way had been found to reduce the risk. 7. The operation is continuing and is sufficiently profitable to warrant the swift and merciless execution of anyone who might possibly endanger it. 8. As an estimate of the size of the operation, assuming Miss Bellemer's savings were fifty per cent of her percentage, and that she received twenty-five per cent of the take on each individual operation, we can extrapolate somewhere around $400,000 gross for the three couples during the two-year period. It is more likely she saved but twenty-five per cent, which would indicate a probable total gross of three quarters of a million dollars.

"Meyer," I said, "you have a curious mind."

"And," he said comfortably, "some excellent pictures of the bitch."

"And you forgot that she started to call the driver of that convertible something. Ma.... As in the beginning of Mack, Manny, Manuel and so forth."

"Forgot that. Another thing I meant to put in. She said she and Griff had to lie low when they got back from an operation. Makes the cruise more of a likely idea."

"And another item. A guess. They'll have to recruit and train a new girl to work with Griff."

We had gotten right up to the point of asking the question. It was almost a tangible thing, something that lay puddled on the cockpit deck between our chairs, streaming and stinking in the warm night. I had been saving my tobacco ration, my single evening pipe. I tugged the pouch out of the side pocket of my slacks, unzipped the pipe compartment, took out the Charatan sent me long ago by a lovely and grateful client with superb taste. The shape is Bell Dublin. It is a straight grain of Coronation quality. Before sending it to me from London she had some small silver numbers inlaid in the heavy part of the bit. 724. The twenty-fourth night of a memorable July, a little code which, if her husband Sir Thomas could interpret it, would bring him in search of McGee, complete with horsewhip and incipient apoplexy.

I packed it carefully with carrinmore Flake. Whenever, in the rotation of my small assortment, I work my way around to the Charatan, though it is an excellent pipe to smoke, I feel somewhat pretentious and effete. I can never completely overcome my middle-class reservations sufficiently to take a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pipe for granted.

I keep kitchen matches and cleaners in the pipe compartment of the pouch. I lit it. The pulsing flame illuminated my face.

An angular girl-shape walking along the dock stopped and said, "Hey, Trav. Hey, Meyer."

"How you, Sandy?"

"Oh, just fine. Didn't know you got back."

"Tied up about dark. What's new?"

"Babs made it. Twins like the doe said it would be. Twin boys. Day before yesterday. And Barney was out on a half-day charter last week, Thursday I think, fifteen miles southeast, and a waterspout ran right over him, over the transom and off

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