The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  “Let me see. Walter did a script for her once upon a time.”

  “They’ve been friends ever since.”

  “Would you say her problem fits into the way I operate?”

  She frowned. “I think so. I don’t know all the details.”

  “Aren’t you in her confidence?”

  “On most things. But as I said, I don’t know all the details of this. It’s been a personal kind of thing. But it is … something she wants to get back. And it’s valuable to her.”

  “I can’t promise anything. But I’ll listen to her. When?”

  “Now, if you could manage it, Mr. McGee.” The symphony ended. I got up and went and turned the set off. When I came back Miss Holtzer said, “We’d rather you didn’t mention this to anyone. Even her name.”

  “I was just going to run out and tell a few friends.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve gotten so used to trying to protect her. She’s beginning a promo for Winds of Chance, starting Monday. The world premiere will be next Saturday night in eight Miami theaters. We came early hoping for a chance to see you. She’s staying at the house of a friend now. She’ll move over to the hotel penthouse on the beach tomorrow evening. She’ll have a full schedule, starting Monday.”

  “Have you worked for her very long?”

  “Two years. A little over two years. Why?”

  “I wondered what you call yourself.”

  “Personal secretary.”

  “She tote a big staff around?”

  “Not really. On the road like this there’s just me and her personal maid, her hairdresser, and the man from the agency. Really, I would rather you asked her the questions. Could you … get ready to go see her?”

  “In Miami?”

  “Yes. I have a car waiting, Mr. McGee. If … I could make a call?”

  I took her into the master stateroom. The phone extension is in a compartment in the headboard. She looked up the number in a black leather note book from her big purse. She dialed the operator and made it a credit-card call. “Mary Catherine?” she said. “Please tell her that our friend is coming back with me. No, that’s all. Pretty soon now. Thank you, dear.”

  She stood up and looked around the room. I could not tell if the huge bed repelled her or amused her. I was tempted to explain it. It startled me that I should want to tell her that it had been part of the furnishings when I had won the craft in a long poker siege in Palm Beach. The man wanted another advance to stay in the game, this last time putting up his Brazilian mistress as collateral, under the plausible assumption that she too went with the boat, but his friends saved me the delicate problem of refusal by leading him gently away from the game.

  Miss Holtzer did not look particularly austere. She just looked as if she might put people in handy categories.

  She decided she would pour herself some coffee while I changed, if that was permitted. I put on the very infrequent necktie, and a fairly heavy suit. When we went back into the lounge, Skeeter said, “Hey, both of you look at this lousy mouse a minute.”

  She showed us the drawing just completed. “This is when Quimby finds out for sure he’s really a mouse. That cat just told him. He’s crushed. He thought he was a real small pedigree dog. But I think maybe he looks more scared than crushed. When you look at it, is it as if he’s scared of the cat?”

  “It’s absolutely charming!” Dana Holtzer said. “What a horrid thing, really, to find out that all along you’ve been a mouse.”

  “Quimby can’t adjust,” Skeeter said.

  They smiled nicely at each other. “Dana Holtzer, Mary Keith—known as Skeeter. We have to run. Skeet, make sure you lock up if I don’t get back before you go.”

  “Sure. What’s bugging him is all that trouble learning to bark.”

  “Forage if you get hungry.”

  But she was back at work, insulated and intent. Miss Holtzer and I headed into the wind, toward the parking areas. She said, “That’s a dear strange girl, and very talented. Is she a special friend?”

  “They’ve just painted her apartment so I told her she could work on the boat. She has a deadline.”

  Within another three steps, Miss Holtzer had tucked the escaping loose ends of personality back into her executive secretary shell. I had a memory of how pleasure in the mouse had brought her alive, younger and surprisingly more vivid. But it was not in her manner or habit to give anything away. She would do her job, reserved, armored, efficient. She was not being paid to react to people, nor to show her own reactions, if any.

  A glittering black Chrysler limousine was waiting, tended by a middle-aged man in dove-gray uniform with silver buttons. He touched his cap and opened the door for us. He looked like a television U. S. Senator. And he had that uncanny ability of the skilled chauffeur to drift a big car through traffic with such rhythm that the bunglings of other drivers seemed like an untidy and unimportant mirage.

  “Miss Dean’s car?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. It belongs to the people where we’re staying.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Incognito?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a good trick.”

  “Chartered airplane,” she said.

  There was glass between us and the barbered neck of the skilled driver. Her face was turned away from me, looking placidly out at the gray day.

  “Miss Holtzer.”

  “Yes?” she said, turning with polite query.

  “I’d like to know if I am right or wrong. I get this impression of quiet disapproval.”

  I thought I saw a flicker of bleak amusement. “Is that sort of thing so important to you, Mr. McGee?”

  “I’ve never thought so.”

  “Mr. McGee, in the past two years I’ve been sent on so many curious errands, I would have become quite worn out if I’d tried to make value judgments about them.”

  “Then you avoid having opinions?”

  “Except where it is expected of me. She pays for opinions, Mr. McGee. Legal opinions, tax opinions, artistic opinions. She listens and makes up her own mind. She doesn’t particularly care for volunteer opinions.”

  “And the job pays well?”

  “It compensates me for what I do.”

  “I guess I better give up.”

  With an almost imperceptible shrug, she turned again to look out her window, presenting me with the nice modeling of the strong line of her throat, the neatness of an ear set into a casualness of cropped black curls, a fringe of black lashes visible beyond the smooth line of her cheek, a faint and unobtrusive and understated fragrance of mild perfume.

  Two

  The house was on a private island, over a small causeway from one of the main causeways between Miami and Miami Beach. A gardener swung the ornate gate open for us. We turned into a winding crunch of gravel between lush and carefully tailored jungle, rounded a buttress of pink and white stucco, parked in a small walled area by a garden.

  It seemed to be a back stairway. Miss Dana Holtzer led me up half a flight and into a shadowed hallway. I sat on a Babylonian throne under a black gleam of hanging armor. There was no sound in the house. None. She came back, hatless and purseless, and beckoned to me with all the gravity of a head nurse. I followed her down a paneled and carpeted corridor. She rapped on a fortress door, pushed it open for me and stood aside, saying, “She’ll be with you in a moment.”

  She closed the door and left me alone in what seemed to be a guest suite. I was in a long room with a high ceiling. Plum carpet. Paneling. Seven arched windows along one wall, high narrow windows with leaded panes, deep sills. Black Spanish furniture. The center portion of the room was sunken. At one elevated end was a canopied bed. At the other end was an elevated portion with a conversational grouping of furniture around a small slate fireplace. The sunken portion was furnished in rather formal fashion. On the bed level there were two doorways. One, ajar, opened into a dressing room area. I could see pieces of matched lug
gage in there. The other door was closed, and I could hear an almost inaudible whisper of running water.

  Though the draperies of all the windows were pulled aside, the room was not particularly bright. I went to a window. Tropical trees shaded it. Looking down I could see patches of shaded green lawn. Off to the left, through foliage, I could see one bright corner of a white swimming pool.

  The bathroom door opened suddenly and Lysa Dean came out. She was not smaller than I had expected because I was prepared for a woman smaller than she had looked to me on the VistaVision Screen, in living color, in close-up, each slanty gray-green eye as large as a Volkswagen sedan. She came across the bedroom elevation and down the three steps toward me. She made the absolute most of those three steps. She wore flat sandals with gold straps. She wore faun-colored pants in a fine weave. They fitted as tightly as pants, or paint, or a tattoo, could fit. She wore a strange furry blouse, with a big scooped neck and three-quarter sleeves. It looked as if Skeeter’s Quimby and a couple of hundred of his relatives had contributed their pale belly-fur to this creation. Around her slender throat was knotted a narrow loose kerchief of green silk precisely matching the single jewel she wore, an emerald as big as a sugar cube on the little finger of her left hand.

  She came swiftly toward me, hand outstretched, her smile full of the warm delight of a woman welcoming the returning lover. “So good of you to come!” she said in her light, breathy, personal voice. As I took her hand she turned slightly so as to face the bright and shadowed daylight. It is the most cruel light a woman can accept. Her hand was small and dry and warm, a trusting little animal as intimate as her voice.

  They have the distinctive occupational tricks. A lot of expressive business with mouth and eyebrows, animation with gestures.

  I could remember, quite vividly, a long conversation with a stunt man named Fedder. Arthritis had forced him out of the business.

  “Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not worth the effort,” he had said. “A lot of them aren’t. You got to look close to see which type. They all have to be damned good-looking and well-built. So suppose you get a chance at one who’s a pretty good little actress. Let it go. The thing there, they sublimate. That’s a word I learned once. They take all that steam and they shove it into their work and there isn’t enough left over for bed. Now suppose you got one thinks she’s a hell of an actress, but she’s a ham. You skip her too. She’ll take all that ham to bed with you and be so damn busy watching herself her heart won’t be in it. The ones to wait for, and go a long way out of your way to get, they’re the ones that plain started off with such damn good glands they don’t have to do any acting. The camera picks up how good they’d be. Man, they can’t rest from tracking it down and trying it out. The next one is always going to be the biggest and best yet. They’ve got what you call a real strong interest.”

  I had the feeling Fedder would approve of this one. I had not expected her to have such a genuine flavor of youthfulness. By every way I could measure it, she had to be about thirty-three. Yet she was a young girl, and not in any forced way. She had the slimness, the clear-eyed look of enormous vitality, the fine-grained and flawless skin, the heavy swing of burnished hair. Her impact, so carefully measured it seemed unaffected, was of a kind of innocence aware. A gamin sparkle, hinting at a delicious capacity for naughtiness.

  But I had known enough of them to know that this was but one role. The enticing woman who is not in the industry will have five or six faces to wear. One like this would have dozens, and this was the one she had momentarily selected for me.

  She had the showbiz trick of close-range conversation. Normal people keep their faces a yard apart. Eight inches is the focal distance on the Coast. Eight inches keeps you aware of the girl-breath heat against your chin, and the up-thrust breast-bud an inch and a half from your chest.

  “Any friend of Walt’s …” I said inanely.

  “I treasure that man.” She backed away a quarter step to give me a cock of the head and an urchin appraisal. “He said you were big, but he didn’t say how huge, Travis. Trav? He called you Trav, I think. I’m Lee to my friends. Dear Trav, he told me you were big and rough-looking and sour and sometimes dangerous, but he did not tell me you are so terribly attractive.”

  “A veritable doll,” I said.

  “It’s so wonderful of you to agree to help me.”

  “I haven’t.”

  She was quite motionless for a thoughtful second, her smile in place. The capped teeth gleamed, between moistness. Green of iris speckled amber near the pupil. Delicate geometry of the hairs of red-gold brows. Fantasy length of the darker lashes. Faintest of fuzz on her upper lip. It was an unusual and grotesquely familiar face, the features slightly sharp, extremely sensuous, unmistakable. With her head slightly bowed, looking up at me through her lashes, the gold-red weight of hair at the right side of her face had swung slightly forward. Suddenly I knew what she reminded me of. A vixen. A quick red fox. I had seen one in heat long ago on an Adirondack morning in spring, pacing along well in front of the dog fox with a very alert and springy movement, tail curled high, turning to see if he still followed, tongue lolling from between her doggy grin.

  She turned abruptly away, walking toward the elevated part of the room where the chairs and fireplace were. “But you will help me,” she said in a small voice.

  I followed her. She sat on a small couch and pulled her legs up. She took a cigarette from a table box. I held the light for her. She huffed smoke from the delicate oval nostrils of the slightly pointed nose, and as I sat in a big chair half facing the couch she smiled across at me. “You are refreshing, Trav McGee.”

  “How am I managing that, Lee?”

  Her shrug and laugh were self-deprecatory. “You don’t say what I always hear. I loved you in this. I adored you in that. I see every picture you make. You look better off the screen than on, actually. You know what I mean.”

  “I’ll go through all that when I ask for the autograph.”

  “You know, you are sour, aren’t you? Or are you afraid of seeming to be impressed. Or don’t you give a damn? It’s a little unsettling, dear.”

  “Your Miss Holtzer unsettled me the same way.”

  “Dana is a gem. When she reacts, she lets you know it.”

  I shrugged. “I loved you in this. I adored you in that. You look just fine in person.”

  Again she was motionless. It was an odd feeling to be so close to her. It made me aware of the uncounted millions of men all over the world who had stared at her image, coveted her, lusted after her, mentally stripped her and plundered those silky little loins. I wondered how many secret, solitary orgasms had been engineered with her in mind. The unmeasurable scope and intensity of all that vast and anonymous wanting gave her a curious physical impact. True, she had spent years being starved, pummelled, flexed, rubbed, plucked, burnished, perfumed and trained into the absolute peak of lovely physical condition. Without a chromium ego and a savage will she could not have endured it so long. But one could also believe that, as sex symbol, she also carried sex to an ultimate otherwise unknown—providing ecstasies unimaginable, greater heats, deeper spasms, longer agonies than mortal woman could know. And this, of course, was the nonsense a man must guard himself against. Her physical confidence, approaching arrogance, would lead the unwary to believe it.

  “Excuse me, please,” she said politely, and hurried the length of the room, toward the dressing room. A girlish graceful haste, forever eighteen. She came back with a large manila envelope and put it on the table beside the cigarette box.

  “That big chest down there is a bar. If you want to fix yourself anything, I would like some of the sherry. Just half a glass, please.”

  As I walked to the bar, she raised her voice and said, “It is so terribly difficult to know where to start, dear. You don’t seem to make it any easier for me.”

  “Just tell me the problem. You told Walt, didn’t you?”

  “Just some of it. But I would
guess you want to … know all of it.”

  “If I’m to help you.”

  As I carried the drinks toward her, she said, “Celebrity! If all the ones who’d like to be one only could know what it means. You become such a target, actually. Slimy schemes to fasten themselves onto you for the free ride. You cannot make a single careless move.”

  This was the new pose. She sipped her wine. I sat down. The suffering celebrity. Public responsibility.

  She gave me a sad smile. “It isn’t worth it, you know. But you have to get into it as far as I am to realize it isn’t worth it. And then it’s too late. You can’t get out. They still follow Garbo. How long since she made a picture? A thousand years, at least. Oh, there have been some satisfactions, of course. But the things I really treasure—contentment, friendships, peace of mind, marriage—none of those things could survive all the rest of it. There is a terrible loneliness, Trav. Like being on top of a mountain, alone.”

  “They pay you for it.”

  “And they pay very well indeed. I’ve had good advice. I have quite a lot of money. Of course, it is invested in a lot of things, but if I should take it all out, it would be quite a large sum. That’s why I did try to … buy my way out of trouble.”

  “Blackmail?”

  She put her glass aside and got up quickly, pacing about in an agitated way. “Can you see how valuable it is to me … how essential to have a little time when I can be myself? Like here with you now. We can talk like two people. I don’t have to pose with you. I have to forget sometimes that I am Lysa Dean, and just be plain Lee Schontz from Dayton, Ohio, the fireman’s daughter. Sixteen-ten Madison Street.” She whirled and stopped with a leg-warmth against my knee. “You can understand that basic human need, can’t you?”

  “You can’t live up to the public image at all times.”

  “Thank you for understanding!”

  This was another role. I guessed it was a speech out of an old movie, edited to fit the present need.