The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  Then we went back to work. He would put a negative in the enlarger and focus it on the base, and I would tell him what I wanted. Then he would go to work. He would cut a piece of masking paper to fit Lysa Dean’s projected face. He would use sufficient exposure time to give him opportunity to dodge and burn in so that the face of someone else was emphasized. I ended up with fourteen useful prints, on double-weight paper. Some of those that took in more people were duplicated, altered slightly to highlight one and then another.

  Somewhere in the processing they ceased to have any fleshy impact. They became problems in light and shade and emphasis. He put them in his high-speed dryer, and after he had flattened them in a bonding press, I studied them under the bright lights. Lysa Dean’s features were white censored patches. Gabe was careful to give me the negatives as well as the test prints which hadn’t worked out. We argued price, with me trying to increase it, and agreed on a hundred dollars. Doris had gone to bed.

  He crutched his way to the door with me, and came out with me into the cold windy night.

  “Taking a little trip, I suppose,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “None of my business. I suppose somebody got too greedy.”

  “That’s usually the way.”

  “You watch yourself, Trav. A little animal like that, if she’d see a way out by pushing you over the edge, she’d take it. That’s an interesting little face, but it isn’t a good face.”

  The taxi slowed, putting his spotlight on the numbers. He turned into the drive. When I looked back I saw Gabe still standing there.

  Four

  When I got back to the Busted Flush I saw my lights still on. It was a little past eleven. The lounge door was locked. I went in and found Skeeter sound asleep, face down on the yellow couch in her baggy gray coveralls, one frail long-fingered hand trailing on the floor. Drawings of Quimby were propped everywhere. They were wise and funny and good. I admired them. In the middle of the floor was a big stamped brown envelope and a note to me:

  This LOUSY mouse. I am pooped out of my mind. PLEASE would you stuff him in this envelope. He is all weighed in and everything, and PLEASE would you seal him and run him to the P.O. He’s an airmail-SPECIAL mouse. Honestly, I had to sleep or DIE!!!!

  I looked down at her. It was typical. God knows how long she’d gone without sleep or when last she had thought of eating. Perfectionists who meet deadlines are usually pretty whipped out.

  I went through to the bow of the Flush and put my dirty pictures in the hidden safe. It might not take an expert all night to open it, but he’d sure raise hell finding it first. I assembled Quimby and sealed him and turned off one of the lights.

  She stirred and raised a sleep-bleared Raggedy Ann face, shoe-button eyes peering, cobweb hair afloat. “Whumya timezit?” she mumbled.

  I squatted beside the couch. “You eat anything?”

  “Huh? Eat? Uh.… no.”

  I knew the problems. I had lived with them. I went into the galley, picked cream of mushroom soup, opened the can, heated it, poured it steaming into a big two-handled mug. She was gone again. I sat her upright and fitted the mug into her hands. When I was sure she was going to keep on sipping at it, I left and took Quimby to the post office and dropped him into an airmail slot.

  By the time I got back, the empty mug was on the floor, and she had sagged off to sleep again. I picked her up. The fool girl seemed to have no substance at all. My guest stateroom would have to serve. I carried her in there and then, instead of dropping her into the bed and covering her over, on a strange and lonely impulse I sat on the bed still holding her in my arms. A faintness of marina lights came through the ports. Water slapped and licked at the curve of the barge hull. Mooring lines creaked.

  She put her arm around my neck and said, “I thought we gave up on this.”

  “We did. I thought you were asleep. Go back to sleep.”

  “I was asleep, damn it. What’s this brooding sorrow bit anyway? It’s the tenderness keeping me awake.”

  “I guess I wanted to hold onto you. That’s all. Go to sleep.”

  “Why should you want to hold me? My God, Travis, we ripped each other up pretty good and got over it a long time ago.”

  “Why do you have to know everything? That’s one of your problems.”

  “I have to know because I can’t go back to sleep, that’s why.”

  “Okay. I don’t have too many illusions. I just ran into something rotten, that’s all. I don’t feel shocked. Just sad.”

  “It was a rotten girl?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a kind of waste, I guess. Go to sleep.”

  She settled herself more snugly into my lap, arm around me, face in my neck. In a little while she drifted off, and the arm fell away. Her breathing turned deep.

  I guess it can be touching. A special kind of trust. Something warm to hold. The way a kitten will drowse in your lap, totally confident.

  Holding something alive, warm, sleeping is like handling fresh moist soil under the sun’s heat. Restorative.

  After a little while I had the idea that it would be an act of good fellowship to peel her out of those coveralls and slip her into the bed. A nice gesture. Sure. This is how McGee kids McGee.

  I gave a little shake like a hound coming out of water. During that little time when it had been good, before we had started sawing chunks off each other, I had discovered that narrow little body to be amazingly strong, curiously luxurious. And I had the lonelies.

  So I stood her on her feet and held her until she could stand up. “What the hell!” she said.

  I stood up and kissed her, gave her a swat on the fanny and told her to sleep tight. I heard the coverall zipper before I got the door entirely closed behind me.

  I showered with the strange feeling I was washing off the sweat and sunoil I had acquired on a bright terrace three thousand and more miles away.

  I put on a robe and went topside for a nightcap pipe, a load of Irish aromatic in a battered old large apple Comoy. I perched a haunch on the sundeck rail. The wind had died, but the surf still made that endless freight-train sound on the beach. Across the way the Alabama Tiger’s perpetual floating house party was muted down to a few girlish squeals and somebody playing bad bongo. Meyer’s craft was dark.

  Go mention it in the locker room, McGee. There you were with Lysa Dean, and she had on these skin-tight pants, fellas, and there was that big damn bed over there, and her hanging on me, sighing. Go on, McGee. Go on, man!

  Boys, once when I was riding my bicycle no hands, I hit a stone and removed about one-half a square foot of hide from assorted painful places. And once upon a time I won free dancing lessons from Arthur Murray because I knew, right off, what happened in 1776.

  When I got up in the morning Skeeter was gone, leaving the bed unmade and no coffee in the pot. But she left a drawing on the sink in the head. A rangy mouse who looked extraordinarily like me sat holding a Skeeter-like girl mouse asleep in his arms. The caption said, “Notorious mouse spares innocent prey. Vitamin deficiency suspected.”

  After breakfast I phoned her. She said her apartment was smelling much better, thank you.

  “McGee,” she said. “We might be turning into friends. That’s pretty good, don’t you think?”

  “You’re too dangerous on any other basis. What’s with this vitamin gag?”

  “I guess I was just sort of asleep. You started breathing hard. Then pow! On your feet, girl. And you went off like you used starting blocks.”

  “Friends play fair, Skeet.”

  “Well, hell. I don’t know. I hadn’t decided. You were blue. I practically had a Band-Aid complex. Woman’s work or something. I passed the buck by sort of sleeping. Anyway, I was terribly tired.”

  “Quimby is a fine mouse.”

  “Trav, dear, I am going to sleep for three days, and then you can take me fishing.”

  “Deal,” I told her. She hung up. It was a sad thing that we had a strange sexual antagonism that m
ade us want to chop each other to bits. We had to cut deep to see how much it would hurt. And it hurt aplenty. You can’t live with that. But you can learn to live very nicely without it.

  At eleven o’clock Dana Holtzer, as carefully poised as an unfriendly diplomat delivering an ultimatum, arrived with the money. Five thousand in cash. She had a receipt form for my signature, made out in the form of a letter of intent. The money was for “expenses in connection with research for a moving picture as yet untitled, to be purchased in treatment form at a price to be negotiated.…”

  Apparently I was dealing with something called Ly-Dea Productions. She had a file copy of the letter for me. She sat erect on the cushioned top of one of the stowage lockers along the lounge wall under the ports. She wore no hat. She wore a tailored navy blue suit with pleated skirt over a crisp white blouse. I could see no concession to anything in the set of her heavy mouth, the waiting attentiveness of very vivid dark eyes. Had I not seen her reaction to Skeeter’s mouse, I would have given up on her.

  “Tax reasons,” she said.

  “Of course,” I said, and signed her copy. She refolded it briskly and tucked it away.

  I wondered if anything would dent that efficient calm. I expected her to get up and trot off. But she had something else on her mind, yet wanted me to make a move first. I could guess why she had no particular enthusiasm for me. Her confidence would be given to large organizations with computers in the airconditioned basement to tell the other machines which cards to drop into the slot. Lysa Dean was in trouble. When you are in trouble, you go to J. Edgar Hoover, not to an obviously shopworn beach bum, a marina gypsy, a big shambling sharpshooter without an IBM card to his name. To Miss Holtzer I would look like more trouble, not less. My khakis were faded to pale beige, and the toes were out of my topsiders, and the old blue sweatshirt was fringed at the elbows. So I just fell into a chair, hooked a leg over one arm of it, and watched her mildly.

  She took it well and took it long, and then the pink climbed up her throat. “Miss Dean should be the one to tell you this,” she said.

  “Tell me what, dear?”

  “She could answer any objections better than I could. The agency is sending a competent girl out, to take over for me temporarily with Miss Dean. I’ll catch her up to date this evening.” She took a deep breath. “Miss Dean has assigned me to work with you on this matter, Mr. McGee.”

  “That is absolutely ridiculous!”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t my idea. But in all fairness, it does have some merit. I can get through to her immediately at any time. There may be information about her you might want to have, and information about her friends and associates. Also I may be able to take some details off your hands, travel arrangements, accommodations, notes, financial records. Miss Dean would feel … more at ease about all this if I am with you.”

  “I work alone, Dana. My God, I don’t need any Katie Gibbs–type services, believe me. I wouldn’t know how to act with you trudging behind me with a note book and a ledger. In a thing like this I might have to do a lot of … impersonations.”

  “I am quite flexible and resourceful, Mr. McGee.”

  I stood up. “But you don’t belong in this sort of thing. It looks as if it would be pretty messy, if I have any luck at all.”

  “I said yes to Miss Dean, but I do have one reservation. I must ask you if … if you are employed to kill anyone.”

  I boggled at her. “What?”

  “That’s a risk I wouldn’t care to accept.”

  I sat down and I laughed. She let me laugh it out, without a smile, with quiet patience. When I was through she said, “That’s answer enough. I had to ask. I have to think of risks.”

  “Miss Holtzer, I don’t know if I could stand the continuous weight of your disapproval.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I understand you saw those pictures by accident, the ones left at the desk at The Sands, and you wanted to quit then and there. Life is full of a number of things, Miss Holtzer, and many of them get a little grim from time to time.”

  Her dark eyes flashed. “Do they really?”

  “Haven’t you noticed?”

  With a thoughtful expression she took cigarettes from her purse, snapped her lighter, huffed a dragon-plume of smoke toward me. “What I tell you now is, of course, none of your business. But I think we should understand each other a little bit in the beginning. My personal life is out of bounds for any future discussion. I am in the business of selling skills, tact, great energy, adequate intelligence and total loyalty. I sell this package to Lysa Dean for fifteen thousand dollars a year. Assigned to you, you get the same package. When I saw what those pictures were, I went through them to see how damaging they might be. I read the note. To me it meant that Lysa Dean was not as good a gamble for me as she used to be. I worried about that before, when I went through that thirteen-week charade.”

  I saw her hand tremble slightly as she lifted her cigarette to her lips. “I am married, Mr. McGee. Or was married. My husband was epileptic. He was a talented writer, with a few very substantial television credits. Marriage was a calculated risk. We had a child, a boy. At first he seemed quite normal. Then we learned gradually that he was so seriously retarded an institution would be the only answer. It had no connection with my husband’s difficulty. We had to get away after we put the little boy in. He would never know us, or anyone. Bill had made a good sale. It was a good trip, actually, as good as two emotionally exhausted people could expect. We got well enough to head home. We stopped at a place at night for coffee, along the road. It was a bar. We were not drinking. Bill had a sudden seizure. They never lasted long, but they were quite violent. An off-duty police officer thought he was a murderous drunk and shot him in the head. He did not die. He is permanently comatose, Mr. McGee, with tubes for feeding and elimination, and the alcohol rubs to keep bed sores from rotting him away. It is a medical miracle, of course. That was four years ago. I need that fifteen thousand. It is barely enough for me and my family. If Lysa Dean is going down the drain in a messy way, it is my responsibility to leave her before it happens and go where an equivalent job has been offered. The job might not be open if I was in any way connected with scandal. Yes, Mr. McGee, the world can get a little grim from time to time.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Nothing, of course. I thought it would be easier to tell you now before you said more things you might regret later, that’s all. You haven’t hurt me. I’m not certain anything could hurt me, actually. I am sorry it is all so soap opera. I haven’t the … self-involvement necessary to make moral judgments. Lee was terribly foolish. The pictures offend me because they are vulgar. And they endanger me. If you can’t work things out for her, I will have to leave her. I think she senses that.”

  “Maybe you could be some help.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Drink?”

  Her smile was small, and perfectly polite, and totally automatic. “Bourbon, if you have it. Weak, with lots of ice and water.”

  I do not think she wanted it, but knew I wanted a chance to pull myself together, get the taste of my own foot off my front teeth. I had looked at that empty reserve and guessed repression and disapproval. She was merely burned out. Wires had crossed and a lovely machine had fuzed and quit, become a useless lump for her to carry around the rest of her life. I felt like a jackass adolescent who’d tried to tell a dirty joke in front of real people.

  When I went in with the drinks, she was standing with her back to me, feet apart, sturdy calves braced, fist on a rich curve of Mediterranean hip, head cocked, looking at a painting.

  “Like it?”

  She turned with a swift grace. “Very much.”

  “Syd Solomon. He lives over in Sarasota. It’s part of a Bahama series he did a few years back.”

  “It’s very rich. Are you a collector?”

  “Sometimes. I’ve got about five things aboard and maybe a dozen in storage. Every so often I switch th
em around.” She sipped her drink. “Is that all right?”

  “Yes. Thank you. What do you drink? What is that?”

  “Lately Plymouth gin on the rocks with two drops of bitters.” I could almost hear the little click as she filed that away. I had acquired a drinkmaker.

  She went back to the upholstered locker and sat and said, “By the way, my expenses won’t come out of what I brought you. Is there anything I can start doing today? My desk is fairly clean and the girl won’t be in until later.”

  I left her there and went to the safe and took out the envelope. I put Lysa Dean’s pictures back in the safe and brought out the ones Gabe had made. I handed them to her. She looked at three of them, and then looked at me with faint surprise and fainter approval. “You had this done, or did it, since you left her yesterday?”

  “I had it done.”

  “It’s quite clever. I see, I think, what you have in mind. These are no danger to her. Are the others safe?”

  “Yes.” I waited until she had glanced through the set and put them aside. “Would you take down a few things?”

  A note book, gold pen and attentive expression appeared with impressive speed. I gave her Gabe’s full name and address. “Make out a check for a hundred and mail it to him for the photo work. The checkbook is in the desk drawer over there. See if you can get a line on a Carl Abelle, possibly a ski instructor at the Mohawk Lodge in Speculator, New York, previously at Sun Valley. Phone him and fake it so that he won’t be left with a lot of curiosity. If he is there, find the best way to get there, and reserve us through for Tuesday.”

  “To stay at that lodge?”

  “Let’s save that until we get a look, if he’s there. Next, see what you can dig up about a Mr. and Mrs. Vance M’Gruder. Their home could be in Carmel. Ocean racing type. It’s a small fraternity, so it shouldn’t be rough.” I went over and sat beside her and handed her my notes. “These are the names and numbers of all the players, as much as she could remember.” I identified them in the pictures for her. “All clear?”