The Beach Girls by John D. MacDonald Page A

it.”
    “But Lucille wouldn’t—”
    She looked at me flatly, with animosity. “She did, old buddy. Eagerly and frequently. With bells on, after Rex got her conscience quieted down. The first time was not exactly rape, but she cried and carried on about it. After that it all got too damn cozy. The wide blue sea is a romantic place, Leo. And don’t blame her too much. You have to understand that, like two goofs, we’d put ourselves in the hands of a greedy, adept, merciless son of a bitch.”
    I flew from there to Nassau looking for Rigsby. The
Angel
was gone. I found out it had been docked at YachtHaven. I hung around until, by luck, I found a man who had seen the next to the last chapter of the story, and remembered it well, probably because it had bothered him.
    Rigsby had been aboard the
Angel
at dusk, with a young couple. A dark-haired woman had come out onto the dock, visibly wobbly with drink. She had stood beside the
Angel
, begging and pleading with Rigsby. My informant hadn’t been able to hear her very well. It had been something about love and something about money. Rigsby answered her curtly. The man had heard him telling her to go away, she was boring him. She continued the scene. People on other boats were watching. Finally Rigsby had bounded up onto the dock and slapped her so hard he knocked her down. She got up slowly, without a sound, and walked away. That was the night she had killed herself.
    It is difficult for me to explain what this information did to me. Lucille had always been a woman of style and poise and dignity. He had dirtied all that. In that, and in other ways, he had made it impossible for her to live with herself, much less come back to me.
    I went back home with that sour knowledge heavy on my heart. I told myself it was over. I told myself it was no more her fault than if she had been run over by a truck. It was my inattention that had made her nervous and vulnerable. Aboard the
Angel
they had been a pair of rabbits in the cave of the panther.
    I tried to throw myself into my work with such intensity I could blank out that part of my mind which concerned itself with her. Hard work had become tasteless. Finally, telling myself that if I knew more about Rigsby, I would get over it more quickly, I put a top firm of investigators on him and paid them a great deal of money to do a thorough job. They couldn’t trace him back to his origins. It was an ordinary-sounding account.
    He had no police record. It was only by reading between the lines that you could detect the stink of him. Three times he had been named corespondent in divorce suits. He was a brawler, and twice had put men in the hospital, but no charges had been filed. He used Elihu Beach as his home port and kept the
Angel
at the Stebbins’ Marina.
    The summary was very cautiously worded. They saidthat even though there was no police record, it was considered possible that Rigsby was unscrupulous in money matters, particularly where women were involved. It was believed that it was his habit to borrow sums of money from women with whom he became emotionally involved, and make no effort to return such sums when the affairs were terminated. In addition to Lucille, there had been three other suicides among his intimates, two female and one male.
    I read the report so many times that I inadvertently committed long passages to memory.
    And I began to make mistakes in my work. Not crucial ones, but it was a warning that sooner or later I would make one so large it might negate the progress of years.
    I knew then that I had to go after Rigsby. It had become obsessive. It took over three months to so organize my work, splitting up duties and responsibilities, that I could ask a leave of absence from the Board, reasonably certain that my executive assistant could carry on throughout the summer. I talked to Sam Brayman who handles my personal legal matters. I had decided he would be the only one who would know how to contact me. Sam was