The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

“And when I do … forget, that’s when I’m most vulnerable.”

  “Sure.”

  “I so want you to try to understand me. I’m not really very complex, Trav. I am the same as everyone. I have times when I feel desperate and self-destructive. I have times when I do foolish things. There are times when I do not give a damn what happens to me.”

  “Sure.”

  She reached and drew her fingertips across my cheek and whirled away and sat on the couch again. “I know you’re not a prude. I can sense that. This has to be as if I’m talking to my doctor or my lawyer. But I do feel so terribly shy about this.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed and made a rueful face. “A man happened to me. Of course. He was a very exciting chap. Exciting to me, at least. It happened a year ago last July, over eighteen months ago. We’d just finished shooting Jack and the Game. I was literally exhausted, but I went off with Carl. Carl Abelle. He had a ski school. We’d never had a chance to really be alone. He found a place for us. An absolutely fantastic little house. Do you know California? It was just below Point Sur, and clinging to the rock by its fingernails. Friends of his named Chipmann own it. They were in Switzerland. They have another house there. It was just the two of us …”

  Her voice trailed off into uncertainty.

  “Yes?”

  “Trav, I am under the most terrible disciplines most of the time. I do work very hard.”

  “So when you let go, you let go?”

  “More than most, I guess. Just a little time of not watching every ounce and every quarter inch, every blemish and drink and calorie and bruise … God damn it, to be a woman for a change. Fry eggs, let my hair go, get stoned, have a ball. I’m naturally a very passionate woman. But I keep it all under control. Until a time like that a year and a half ago. With Carl. That’s what I try to do. Get away like that, with a certain kind of man. Then everything that’s been saved up …”

  “Birds and bees. I didn’t think you went into a convent when you had time off, Miss Dean. I don’t follow this routine.”

  “It’s just to explain how things happened. It was such a very private place. Carl would drive off to buy food and liquor. There were steps cut into the stone, down to a little beach way way down that you couldn’t use at high tide. There was a terrace on the ocean side, twenty feet square, about. It was a little offset so you could get morning sun too. A low broad wall around it. And a great stack of weatherproofed sun mattresses and pillows in all kinds of colors. We’d arranged it so we could have three weeks alone. Maybe that was too long. I guess it was. We were marvelously right for each other, in a purely physical way. We knew that before we went there, of course. Except on a ski slope or in bed, Carl isn’t very stimulating. It was very intense for about a week, I guess. Day and night all mixed up. Eat when you’re hungry, sleep when you’re sleepy. When the edge was gone, we both started drinking more. And we spent more and more time on the terrace in the sun. I knew I was getting too brown, but I was too lazy and relaxed to give a damn. I was drinking a lot of vodka. Hot sun and vodka kept me in a sort of permanent daze. We’d make love there in the sun, all slow and sweaty and, I don’t know, remote somehow. I had a tube pregnancy when I was just a kid and damned near died and I don’t have to worry about taking care of anything. The thing is, we felt so private. You’d see a boat way out, or an airplane far away, or hear a truck sometimes on the highway. The phone was cut off. I had a little radio. You have to understand that nothing seemed important, absolutely nothing at all. Do you understand that, Trav?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Anyway, it must have been just about at the end of two weeks, we needed things and Carl drove to town to get them. He left in the early afternoon sometime. And he was gone so long I began to get damned annoyed at him. I belted the vodka pretty good, so by the time he did come back, I was getting kind of sloppy and confused. He came skidding back into the driveway with two cars following him, and the whole drunken bunch came marching into the house bellowing some goddam German skiing song. Five fellows and three girls. He’d known one of the girls up at the Valley. He ran into them in town, and had drinks with them, and decided we should have a house party. They damned near fell over when they saw who his girl was. They’d brought tons of food and beer and liquor and cigarettes from town. I was sore at him, but I thought that as soon as they had recognized me the damage was done, if any, and the hell with it. I guess I was getting bored with Carl and I lost any sense of caution. They were swingers, every one. The girls were darling. The fellows were fun. I guess there’s no good way to avoid telling you all, dear. It was a very scrambled evening, all things considered, and by late afternoon the next day the last holdout, the girl they called Whippy, she got tight enough to let Sonny peel her out of her swim suit and get her into the fun and games on the terrace. It just seemed to be a crazy time for everybody, and nobody seemed to care much, and you saw everything and did everything through a kind of sleepy crazy haze so that in my memory it’s all jumbled up. It was the first and last time I was ever in a situation like that. It’s sort of standard practice on the Riviera, with those car-light signals and horn signals to get recruits and all. It didn’t offend me. In some ways it was very exciting. But it was just too dangerous for anybody in my position. And I hadn’t wanted it to happen. Carl brought them back to the house and it just went on from there, and lasted, oh, four days I guess. When I got back to Brentwood it took me weeks to get back in shape. It all seemed like a dream. Then one day toward the end of August I got a big envelope in the mail. There were twelve photographs in it. Eight by ten glossies. There is a great deal of difference between remembering something and seeing it … like that. Seeing yourself … God! I flipped my lunch.”

  “It came by mail?”

  “Yes. To my home. God only knows how Dana didn’t get to it first. There was a note with it. I saved it. I put it in my wall safe. Here it is.”

  She took it out of the envelope and handed it to me. It was done with a carbon ribbon on an electric machine, with several strikeovers.

  “Save the envelope?”

  “Not that one. It was mailed at the main post office in Los Angeles. Not special or anything like that. Not even marked Personal on the outside. The address was typed with the same type as that note. No return address. Go on. Read it.”

  It read as follows: Lysa, dear: You are practical. You know how the industry makes book. So you have no choice, of course. I have ten complete sets of the enclosed and a good idea of how to distribute them. I recommend the investment. Installment plan, ducks. Ten thousand in used hundreds each time. Wrap in plain white paper. Tie securely. Each Sunday night starting a week from next Sunday, you or your dark secretarial type takes a drive. At midnight, precisely, pull into the Narana Kai Drivein at Topanga Beach. Order something, then walk alone with the packet in plain view, over to the public pavilion. Walk to the far edge of the concrete, next to the public phone booths. A phone will begin to ring. Count the rings carefully. Wait and it will ring again the same number of times. Go back to your car. Leave the drive-in at exactly twelve-thirty. Take note of the exact mileage on your speedometer. If it says, for example, eight and six tenths and the phone rang seven times, when the mileage ends in five and six tenths, (simple addition, dear) be ready. You will be heading west on 101. Be over in the right lane, your right window open, packet in your little right hand. Look for a light ahead and off to the right. Slow to thirty-five and get just as far right as you can. When you see a little green light blink twice, toss the packet out onto the shoulder immediately. If it blinks red twice, take the money home and come back the following Sunday. Each time you will receive the negative of one picture and all the prints made from that negative. They will come in the mail. If all goes well, and if you have no clever and silly ideas, we should be through with this whole affair in twelve weeks.

  “So damned complicated,” she said.

  “Actually pretty shrewd. Two people could man
age it with very little risk. One at the drive-in and pavilion to check you or Miss Holtzer out, then after you’ve heard the rings, phone up the road for his buddy to get into place at the designated spot. He gets a chance to see that nobody is hiding in your car. He follows you out of the lot, tails you until it looks safe, then passes you and gets there first and gives a headlight signal to his buddy to use the green lens on the flashlight. Not bad at all. Very difficult to trap them. What went wrong?”

  “Nothing. At least not then. I paid. One night there was a red light. I don’t know why. It took thirteen weeks. I got the stuff in the mail. The worst ones came toward the last. Dana made the deliveries. Her nerves are better than mine, I guess.”

  She jumped to her feet, flushing. “Don’t be dull, McGee. Close to seven million went into Winds of Chance. Risk money. The character who wrote that note knows this industry. He knew how I had to jump. It isn’t like the old days, where you could count on studio protection. Each picture is a separate packaging operation. There are just about ten men these days who can put the really big packages together. If each one of them got a set of those prints, why should they take any future chances on me? Those pictures are poisonous. What’s a hundred and twenty thousand compared to my potential? I liquidated some holdings that weren’t doing so good, and took my tax loss, and paid off. Don’t tell me what I should have done!”

  It was a good act and I had to admire it. “How can I help you if all you give me is a smoke screen?”

  “What the hell do you mean!” she shouted.

  “All the industry cares about is money in the bank. Your name on a picture puts money in the bank. Just like Liz, Frankie, the Swede, Mitchum, Ava. They have not been dear little buttercups all the way. The days of the Arbuckle effect are long gone, dear. In our culture there is going to be no huge concerted public censure to drive you off the wide screens. If you get a little rancid, the PR people have you endow a dog shelter, and all America loves you. Drop the act.”

  The faked indignation was turned off in an instant. She sat again, looked at me with sullen speculation. “Smart ass,” she said.

  “What is it, then, that made you pay off?”

  “A few little things. A while back I swung my weight around too much. It delayed the wrap-up and bumped the budget, and some people decided maybe they didn’t want to work with me. But I smartened up and settled down. I could read what it said on the wall. You know, like Monroe and Brando. But it left them edgy. Also, there’ve been a couple of little things from time to time. Not as bad as those pictures, but … along that line. It just didn’t seem to be the right time to make them feel any more insecure.”

  “And?”

  “Boy, you really want everything, don’t you?”

  “I’ve learned that it helps.”

  “I have a very dear friend. He’s very devout and very conservative and he owns great big vulgar hunks of California and Hawaii. If he can get the right paper signed by the Vatican and get loose, I’ll never have to take any crap from anybody again as long as I live. And one of those sets of prints would have gone to one man who would have felt obligated to give my friend a look at them. And that would have torn it.”

  “So those are the real stakes?”

  She moistened her lips. “Under community property, one half of about eighty million, honey. I am his dear faithful little darlin’. It made the whole thing a lot more … chancy. Otherwise I would have borrowed some muscle from an old buddy in Vegas and turned them loose on this clown photographer. They’d be smart enough to handle that, but they’re not smart enough to handle what I need now. Actually, if Mr. X had no knowledge of my friend, and how long it takes to bull something through that Vatican crowd, he made a very stupid pitch. But with my friend in the background, there was just too much chance it might backfire. Before you bet, you count what’s in the pot. All my potential plus my friend’s heavy purse. So I paid off.”

  “And hoped that was the end of it. And it wasn’t. Incidentally, can he clear you with his church?”

  “I was never married in his faith, so nothing counts. I get a clean bill. By the way, McGee, Dana doesn’t know a thing about my plans for my friend.”

  I asked her how she thought the pictures had been taken. “It had to be a long lens,” she said. “You can see the flattening and foreshortening effect. Off to the left, south of the house, I remember a little rocky ridge higher than the house with some knotty little trees clinging to it. It had to be from there. The angles match. But he had to be part mountain goat, and it had to be a tremendous lens.”

  “Is there any clue at all in that letter itself, any hint that’s made you think of a specific person?”

  “No. I read it over and over. He’s been around the industry in some connection, and I think he tried to sound as if he knew me, but he calls me Lysa instead of Lee. That could be a cover-up, of course. And it has a phoney kind of limey slant to it, calling me ducks.”

  “What size were the negatives?”

  “Little. Like so.” She indicated a 35mm frame size.

  “You checked them against the prints each time?”

  “Sure did. But in a lot of cases the prints were just an enlargement of part of the negative, even less than half sometimes.”

  “So you were all paid up well over a year ago. And you thought it was over. When was the next contact?”

  “Two months ago. Less than that. Early in January. An old friend, trying to make a comeback, was opening at The Sands in Vegas, and a bunch of us were rallying around to give him a good sendoff. It was in the papers that we were all going to be there. Dana was with me. We had a suite at the Desert Inn. Somebody left this envelope for me at the desk at The Sands. I guess they thought I was staying there. They sent it over. Dana got it. I was just waking up from a nap. She came in with the damnedest expression on her face and handed it to me. She had opened it. It was another set of the pictures. There wasn’t any return address. The desk had no idea who had left it off. Dana wanted to quit right then and there. She is a strange gal. I had to explain the whole thing the way I explained it to you, Trav. She knew right away that it was the same thing that had cost me all the money. She still wanted to quit. I had to beg her to stay. Our relationship hasn’t been the same since she saw the pictures. I don’t blame her. I’d still hate to lose her. This is the envelope. You can see how it was addressed. Somebody just cut my name off the front of a fan magazine, something like that. Here is the note that was with it.”

  It was quite different. Individual words and letters had been cut from newsprint and newspaper stock and pasted to cheap yellow copy paper. It said: Shameless whore of Babylon you will be cut down by the sord of decency and money will not save your dirty life this time but you better have money ready you whore of evil I will come to you and you will no the truth and I will set you free.

  She hugged herself. “That one just scares the hell out of me, Trav. It’s kind of sick and crazy and terrible. It just isn’t the same person. It can’t be.”

  “So you went and saw Walter?”

  “No. I just got more and more jittery the more I thought of it. I’m still shook. I was at a big party at the Springs and I got a little stoned and made a scene and dear Walt was there and he took me for a walk. I hung onto him and cried like a baby and told him my troubles. He said maybe you would help. I guess you can say something was stolen from me. My privacy or something. And somebody wants to steal my career or maybe my life. I don’t know. I’ve been carrying cash around with me. In thousand-dollar bills. Fifty of them. I don’t expect you to get back what I paid. But if you could, you could keep half. And if you can get that nut off me, you can have the money I’m carrying around.”

  “Are the pictures in that envelope?”

  “Yes. But do you have to see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was afraid of that. I am not going to let you see them until you say you’ll try to help me. Every time I think of that note I feel like a scared kid.
”

  “It’s a very cold trail, Lee.”

  “Walter said you are clever and tough and lucky, and he said being lucky is the most important.” She gave me an odd look. “I have this feeling that my luck is running out, darling.”

  “How many people know about this?”

  “The four of us, dear. You and Dana and me and Walter. But you know more than the other two. Not another soul. I swear.”

  “Wouldn’t it be logical for you to tell Carl Abelle?”

  “Sweetie, when one of those things is over, it is over all the way. Enough is enough forever.”

  “Could he have set you up for it?”

  “Carl? Definitely no. He’s a very sunny type. Very simple needs and very simple habits. Totally transparent, really.”

  “Usually I gamble expenses, then take them off the top before the fifty-fifty split. But this is a little too chancy for that.”

  “Expenses guaranteed up to five thousand,” she said without hesitation, “and when that’s gone we’ll talk some more.”

  “Walt must have said I could be trusted.”

  “What other choice do I have? That’s one thing about this. There hasn’t been any trouble making decisions. There’s been just one way to go. Will you try? Please? Pretty please?”

  “Until it looks hopeless.”

  She scaled the envelope into my lap. “God knows I’m not the shy type, sweetie, but I don’t think I could watch anybody look those over. I’ll take a walk. Take your time.”

  She went to the heavy door and let herself out quietly.

  Three

  After a little time I put the twelve photographs back into the envelope. I took a slow turn around the room. I am too big a boy to be churned up by the explicits of other people’s kicks.

  Nor did I feel any compulsion to make moral judgment. These were modern animals caught in black and white at their silly play. Such sport was not for me, and very probably not for anyone whose friendship I claimed. There seemed to be some kind of severe selection involved. An acceptance of that presupposed an inability to accept or believe in a lot of other things. Personal dignity for one.