Read Online The Turquoise Lament by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online
Authors: John D. MacDonald
Ads: Link
quite anything else either. And then to the slightly airport flavor of the Princess Kaiulani Hotel, where I steered her, slow, smiling and smashed, through interlocking lobbies track to that place where the Chinese food is the very best of Mandarin, the tastes less separated than Cantonese, more heavily spiced.
We made wishes with chopsticks, pulling them apart, then arguing over who got the largest portion of the bamboo base where it split. She won both sets, and said she would think about the wishes. Her small, strong-looking hands were deft with the chopsticks. She ate with hunger, glancing across the candlelight, smiling, saying, "Mmmm." She would swing and shake her head in a certain remembered way to settle the brown hair back. Nice. "And the two wishes?" I asked.
She took one more morsel of the squash, then dropped the sticks on the plate. She shook her head. "Oh, Trav, you know… if I could only have just one wish… how I need that one wish."
She jumped up and was gone. I waited ten minutes and then paid the check and tipped our waitress to look in the ladies' room. She came back and told me the lady would meet me in a couple of minutes in the lobby. The waitress had a sweet, worried smile. Lovers' quarrel?
Irregular formations of touring Japanese men moved through the lobbies with worried celerity, all their satin-black Nikons with the bulky nighttime headdress of rechargeable strobe. Why are their glasses frames always so shiny?
Pidge came to me, shy and damp-lashed, the nose red from blowing. "First date in forever, and I can't hack it," she said.
"Home?"
"To what passes for same. Yes. And a lovely, lovely time up until I went owly."
I drove back through practically no traffic, and she showed me where to duck into the ramp under the Towers, and where the car. belonged. On the way up in the elevator, I heard her sigh over the whisper of machinery. At eleven, I held the door open by leaning against the edge of it and said, "We'll tackle it tomorrow?"
She studied me and turned, just a little uneasy on her tall shoes. "No. Come on. Damn it all. Come on, let's pick the scabs off." So I let the urgent doors hiss shut behind us, and helped her with the double-key arrangement to number 1112.
I made a mild joke, something about her friend Alice Dorck being some kind of security-conscious international agent. She said Alice had answered the door once for a man who said he wanted to replace the filter in the air intake. She let him in, and in the process of raping her he broke two ribs and three fingers on her left hand, tore her earlobe, and squeezed her throat so hard she had traumatic laryngitis for two weeks. She said that after that, Alice tended to be lock-conscious.
No more jokes, I decided. Once inside I asked for a drink and was assured to see her pour one for herself. Down to cases.
"Here it is! This is the camera. Instamatic. I've had it forever. I buy Kodacolor in twelves. You can usually get it developed almost anyplace."
"And these are the twelve prints."
"How many times do you-"
"Now tell me again, Pidge. These three pictures, the last three on the roll. You took them in this order?"
"Y-yes. Yes, that's right."
"You looked through the finder and you took this picture. What did you see in the finder? Details!"
"Don't roar at me! I saw Joy Harris. I guess she'd come up through the small hatch, and she was stretched out on the bigger hatch cover. She was… on her side with her elbow stretched straight out and her head on her hand, and she was looking straight ahead. I thought about what a cute figure she had. Small but kind of lush. She had on bikini bottoms, faded blue or blue-green. The top was under her, on the hatch. Her blond hair was kind of damp-dark, like sweat or she'd washed it."
"She fitted in the frame?"
"Oh, sure. It takes in a lot. You hardly ever have to back off to get things in."
"And this one?"
"She hadn't seen me. Howie was asleep. I went back to the cockpit to see if we
We made wishes with chopsticks, pulling them apart, then arguing over who got the largest portion of the bamboo base where it split. She won both sets, and said she would think about the wishes. Her small, strong-looking hands were deft with the chopsticks. She ate with hunger, glancing across the candlelight, smiling, saying, "Mmmm." She would swing and shake her head in a certain remembered way to settle the brown hair back. Nice. "And the two wishes?" I asked.
She took one more morsel of the squash, then dropped the sticks on the plate. She shook her head. "Oh, Trav, you know… if I could only have just one wish… how I need that one wish."
She jumped up and was gone. I waited ten minutes and then paid the check and tipped our waitress to look in the ladies' room. She came back and told me the lady would meet me in a couple of minutes in the lobby. The waitress had a sweet, worried smile. Lovers' quarrel?
Irregular formations of touring Japanese men moved through the lobbies with worried celerity, all their satin-black Nikons with the bulky nighttime headdress of rechargeable strobe. Why are their glasses frames always so shiny?
Pidge came to me, shy and damp-lashed, the nose red from blowing. "First date in forever, and I can't hack it," she said.
"Home?"
"To what passes for same. Yes. And a lovely, lovely time up until I went owly."
I drove back through practically no traffic, and she showed me where to duck into the ramp under the Towers, and where the car. belonged. On the way up in the elevator, I heard her sigh over the whisper of machinery. At eleven, I held the door open by leaning against the edge of it and said, "We'll tackle it tomorrow?"
She studied me and turned, just a little uneasy on her tall shoes. "No. Come on. Damn it all. Come on, let's pick the scabs off." So I let the urgent doors hiss shut behind us, and helped her with the double-key arrangement to number 1112.
I made a mild joke, something about her friend Alice Dorck being some kind of security-conscious international agent. She said Alice had answered the door once for a man who said he wanted to replace the filter in the air intake. She let him in, and in the process of raping her he broke two ribs and three fingers on her left hand, tore her earlobe, and squeezed her throat so hard she had traumatic laryngitis for two weeks. She said that after that, Alice tended to be lock-conscious.
No more jokes, I decided. Once inside I asked for a drink and was assured to see her pour one for herself. Down to cases.
"Here it is! This is the camera. Instamatic. I've had it forever. I buy Kodacolor in twelves. You can usually get it developed almost anyplace."
"And these are the twelve prints."
"How many times do you-"
"Now tell me again, Pidge. These three pictures, the last three on the roll. You took them in this order?"
"Y-yes. Yes, that's right."
"You looked through the finder and you took this picture. What did you see in the finder? Details!"
"Don't roar at me! I saw Joy Harris. I guess she'd come up through the small hatch, and she was stretched out on the bigger hatch cover. She was… on her side with her elbow stretched straight out and her head on her hand, and she was looking straight ahead. I thought about what a cute figure she had. Small but kind of lush. She had on bikini bottoms, faded blue or blue-green. The top was under her, on the hatch. Her blond hair was kind of damp-dark, like sweat or she'd washed it."
"She fitted in the frame?"
"Oh, sure. It takes in a lot. You hardly ever have to back off to get things in."
"And this one?"
"She hadn't seen me. Howie was asleep. I went back to the cockpit to see if we
Similar Books
Deadly Dye and a Soy Chai: a Danger Cove Hair Salon Mystery (Danger Cove Mysteries Book 5)
Traci Andrighetti, Elizabeth Ashby
