"I mean it. She's a very, she's sort of an odd girl. Uh, very proper." "Even under emergency conditions like this?"

"I wouldn't want to risk it. Really, it would be a terrible risk for me to leave here. Any cab driver might recognize me."

"Well, my friend, you can't stay here. I'm a very odd girl too."

"Is it or is it not important to you to help me?" "Indeed it is, but there are some kinds of help, " "I was thinking, Betsy, I could write a note to her telling her to trust you. You know, she really doesn't think much of my judgment. Then you could go out there and stay there with her tonight and talk the whole thing out and maybe you and she can figure out what it is that Charla is after. I can reduce the risks by staying here alone. Then you can come back tomorrow and if you've learned anything we'll know what to do, and if you haven't, then we can try to figure out the next step."

At first Betsy was reluctant, but at last she agreed the idea had some merit. She made drinks while he wrote the note. Then, having laid in some stores during the day, she cooked ham and eggs in the tiny kitchen corner. Just before she left, a little before nine, she showed him where the television set was. She crawled on her hands and knees to the intricate headboard of the enormous bed, flipped the switch that moved a ceiling panel aside exposing the picture tube built into the ceiling. The other controls were next to the switch.

"If Charla locates the place, ask her to watch TV with you, Kirby."

"If I can arrange my life properly, I'll never see that woman again."

"What's the matter. Scared of her?"

"Totally."

Betsy gave him a wan smile. "Frankly, so am I."

Chapter Seven.

After checking again to be certain the door was locked, and after a lengthy hunt for the final elusive light switch, Kirby Winter crawled to the middle of the giant bed. There was a troublesome fragrance of Betsy about the pillow. It was a warm night, with a murmurous traffic sound, a ripped-silk sound of far off jets, the adenoidal honk of boat traffic. The ten-o'clock news had displayed other pictures of him, still shots, grinning like an insurance salesman. And there was one picture of Wilma Farnham, looking severe. The newscast made them sound like the master criminals of the century. Informed sources believed that Winter and the Farnham woman had already fled the country. They had both made mysterious disappearances under the very noses of the ladies and gentlemen of the press. One could see them chummed up on Air France, snickering, tickling, getting bagged on champagne, heading for that stashed fortune and a simple life of servants, castles, jewels, furs and tireless lechery.

He wondered about Betsy and Wilma. By now they would be deep in all their long talking, and he blushed to think of Wilma, distrait, uttering all her shy girlish confidences. "And all the time he really was terrified of women. You should have seen him run from me in absolute horror."

He was physically exhausted, but he could not slow his mind down. He knew he would not sleep, but suddenly he was down in the jungly world of nightmare. Wilma, giggling, opened zipper compartments in long cool pale thighs to show him how solidly stuffed they were with thousand-dollar bills. Charla had little gold scissors, and she smirked and cooed as she cut the ears from little pink rabbits which screamed every time. She was bare and golden, oiled and steaming, and when she turned he saw the vulgar placement of the little tattoo which read "Ninny." He walked into the scene in the little gold telescope and found Uncle Omar there, off to one side, chuckling. Uncle Omar thrust a deck of cards toward him and told him to take any card, but when he took the card it was warm and heavy and moving, and suddenly he was back in an old car in a heavy rain of long ago, and he found the dream blending into a reality of some warm, solid, busy, rubbery creature burrowing against him, snuffling and giggling and snorting, raking him with small claws. In a few moments of night fright, he tried to dislodge it, thrust it away from him, but the very act of clutching at it, the agile roundnesses under his hands, turned fright into a sweet aggression, his mind, standing aside, awed, wringing its hands, finding no way to intercede.

In a vague and troubled way, as he became aware of the helpless inevitability of it, he felt all the responsibilities of literary allusion, of equating it with fireworks, ocean surf, earthquakes or planetary phenomena. At the same time he was remotely, fretfully concerned with ident.i.ty, wondering if it were Charla, Betsy, Wilma, but soon realizing that particular problem was, as of the moment, entirely academic. He just did not have time to give a d.a.m.n.

So it transpired without benefit of a.n.a.logy, or time to create one, aside from the hurried thought it was rather like some sort of absurd, stylized conflict, like a sword fight to music where you duck in time and in relation to the imposed necessities of tempo. As the fight was both won and lost, in a white blindness, he sensed, from a long way off, her vast tensions, some s.p.a.ced yippings, then a b.u.t.tery melting of the creature quelled.

And then there was a head beside him, wedged into his neck, tickling him, and a breath making long slow hot whooshings against his throat, and a hand that came up to idly roam his indifferent cheek.

"Hoooo, boy!" she whispered. "Hooooo, Bernie! Oh, you the doll of all times. The livin' most."

"Um," he said, pleased that his heart had decided not to hammer its way out of his chest.

"Suh-prize, suh-prize, huh, sweetie? Nice suh-prize?"

"Um."

"Couldn't make the d.a.m.n key work for h.e.l.l. Figured on you changed the lock, and I would truly kill you dead, you'd done that to Bonny Lee one time. Then it worked and I come a-mousing in, felt the bed, looking for two pair of feet. I find two pair, Bernie-boy, there be the gawdd.a.m.nedest fracas around here you heard ever."

"Uh."

"You doan talk much to a gal missed you so bad, honey. Don't you get the idea now I could be hustling you for any piece of that TV crud, on account of you just use them sick-looking broads you brang down here like always. I come here because you're just the most there is anywhere, and I love you something terrible, and it was real wild and nice, hey now?"

"Um."

She ran her fingertips across his upper lip. "Hey! You gone and shaved it off! Now what in the world you look like, I wonder."

She scrambled away from him. She fumbled with the headboard control panel for a few seconds and then a bright overhead spot blinded him. He shut his eyes tightly, opened them a little bit and squinted at the girl.

She was kneeling, staring down at him, a deeply browned leggy girl. Her brown eyes were huge and round. Her mouth was shaped into a round shocked circle. She had big round brown b.r.e.a.s.t.s with a startling white stripe across them. She had a flat tummy, smooth muscles of a swimmer, and under a tight tangled cap of white curls, a lovely, delicate, angelic face, bronzed and innocent.

"Who you, you tow-head son of a b.i.t.c.h!" she yelled. "What kinda smart-a.s.s trick you pulling anyways? I'm gonna rip the face right offen you!" Her fingers curled dangerously.

"Now hold it!"

"For what? What do you think I am anyhow? Where's Bernie?"

"1 don't know."

"You were supposed to be him, gawdd.a.m.n it!"

"I don't know about that."

"Anybody pull what you pulled, mister, somebody ought to take a rusty knife to em and plain, "

He sat up and glared at her. "What the h.e.l.l is the matter with you?" he roared. "I was sound asleep! I didn't know who you were, and I don't know who you are. I was so sound asleep I didn't know even what you were."

A corner of her mouth twitched. "You could have got the general idea I was a girl."

"That occurred to me!"

"Don't you roar at me, you sneaky ba.s.sar! You woke up, all right, soon enough, and you could have figured it out, being in Bernie's bed, maybe some mistake was happening. But did you say a d.a.m.n word?"

He stared at her. "When? And what was I supposed to say? My G.o.d, girl, it's like a man falling off a building; you'd expect him to tie his shoes and wind his watch on the way down."

Her mouth twitched again. "Real something, wasn't it?" Without warning her eyes filled and she put her hands over her face and began to sob like a child. She toppled sideways and lay curled up, shivering and weeping.

"Now what?" he said with exasperation.

"S-S-Sneaky b-b-ba.s.sar!"

"Why are you crying?"

"What you d-done to me. In my whole 1-life I never had no affair with s-somebody I din even know. Makin' me feel like a s.l.u.t girl. Makin' me feel all cheap and r-r-r-rotten. Oh, oh, oh."

"You hush, whatever your name is."

"Doan even know my name!" she wailed. "Bonny Lee Beaumont, gawdd.a.m.n you!"

"My name is, " He hesitated. "Uh, Kirk Winner." He pulled her right hand away from her face and grasped it and shook it. "Now we're introduced. For G.o.d's sake, stop blubbering."

"But I din know you then!"