The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  I lit her trembling cigarette and then she switched around the room and said, “I am now a real drinking buddy of Mrs. T. Madison Devlaney III. I call her Squeakie, as does practically everyone. I poured drinks into her potted plants. Until she passed out. She is twenty-nine. She is two days younger than Vance M’Gruder. She has known him all her life. She has a teeny little voice, ten thousand freckles, ten million dollars, and she’s muscled like a circus girl. Swimming every morning, tennis every afternoon, potted every night. No tennis today. Strained ankle.”

  “What cover story did she buy?”

  “Trav, don’t be angry, but I couldn’t have gotten to her at all without using the best connection I have. Lysa Dean. That opens a lot of doors. And I do have those calling cards.”

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t. I just said don’t use her if you don’t have to.”

  “I had to. I told her that Lysa had met Vance. I told her that Lysa was forming a little production company of her own and, as a first picture, was thinking of basing it on one of the ocean races, perhaps the race to Hawaii, and she was asking me to find out just how much cooperation she could get from the people who do own the big boats. It’s nonsense, of course, but people know so little about the industry they’re ready to believe anything. I made up sort of a plot as I went along.”

  “So she bought it. That’s the important thing. What about M’Gruder?”

  “Let me see. Oh, lots of things about M’Gruder. He is a physical fitness nut. He is a fine deep-water sailor. He is fantastically stingy. He gets quarrelsome and violent when he gets drunk. The marriage to Patricia Gedley-Davies was, according to his friends, a grotesque mistake. She said that forty-two times at least. Grotesque mistake. Squeakie and her friends are convinced Patty was a London call girl. I wouldn’t say that anyone is particularly fond of Vance, but they are glad to see that marriage ended. They think it was bad form. And so lucky there were no children.” She took out her little note book. “The new wife is supposed to be enchanting. Her name is Ulka Atlund. She turned eighteen a few days before their marriage. Her mother is dead. Her father brought her over here two years ago. He came to lecture for a year at the University of San Francisco, and stayed for a second year. He opposed the marriage, then agreed on the basis that after the honeymoon, she continues her education. They plan to honeymoon for six months. They’ve been gone two months. Squeakie thinks she heard somewhere that Vance plans to have somebody else bring the boat back from Acapulco. Too much beating into the wind on the way back. She thinks Vance planned to spend that last two months of the honeymoon in his house at Hawaii. Then back to live here while Ulka goes back to college.”

  “What about the annulment?”

  “This is where it gets pretty untidy, Travis.”

  I got tired of the way she was roving around. I got her wrists and pushed her gently back until the backs of her legs hit the edge of a chair. She sat down and looked up at me, startled.

  “Let me tell you something, Miss Holtzer. This whole deal is untidy. The stupendous glamor of Lysa Dean did not suck me into this. You were the item that swayed me.”

  “What? What?”

  “If she’d sent anyone else, the answer would have been no. You looked so staunch and loyal and unyielding and severe. So damned decent. You made me feel like an unwashed opportunist. I have emotional reactions to people, Dana, no matter how much I try to deny it. I wanted to prove to you that I am good at what I do.”

  “But that’s absurd!”

  I backed away and sat on her bed. “It certainly is. Now, how untidy does this situation get?”

  She shrugged. “Squeakie doesn’t know for sure. Just secondhand and third-hand gossip. But Nancy Abbott came into it. Apparently, among Squeakie’s set, the favorite theory is that Patty M’Gruder had Nancy as a house guest in Carmel, and practically held her a prisoner there, because she … Patty … had fallen in love with Nancy. The theory is that Vance went along with it because it gave him a chance to get the proof he wanted that Patty had entered into the marriage contract under false pretenses, concealing her real inclinations. Vance used Nancy … Squeakie kept calling her ‘that poor poor sick child’ … to get the proof, and once he had it, there was no way in the world for Patty to fight his action to annul. It was all handled very quietly.”

  “That would explain what Nancy yelled at me, about Patty keeping her locked up.”

  “I suppose so. Patty left. Squeakie’s phrase for it was that she slunk away. Somebody saw her several weeks ago, in Las Vegas. Not in one of the big places out on the Strip. Down in town, working at something called The Four Treys. Making change, I think. Some kind of a small job. There certainly wouldn’t be many old friends seeing her there. Anyway, Mrs. T. Madison Devlaney didn’t know anything about … or at least say anything about any pictures. I was lucky to catch her. She and her husband and another couple are flying to Hawaii this week. That whole group seems to be very big for Hawaii. The Devlaneys keep a boat out there.”

  “You did very well, Dana.”

  “Thank you. They have a beautiful home. She really got terribly drunk. Did you learn anything at all?”

  “I don’t know. I traced a man who could have taken the pictures. But he lived three hundred miles away. It looks as if M’Gruder had the pictures taken. I think we can assume that, at least for now. But I can’t prove any contact between M’Gruder and the photographer. One thing makes me think I located the right man. He’s dead.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Let’s say that just for kicks or souvenirs or something he kept one set of prints for himself. He died. Those files got into the hands of somebody who …”

  “Of course.”

  “His name was D. C. Ives, possibly. And he lived in Santa Rosita, possibly. We check him out for a vulgar limey accent, and if so it will look a lot more certain.”

  “Is that what we do next?”

  “With one stop on the way, I think.”

  Nine

  On a bright clear cold Tuesday morning, I climbed the back slope of the ridge. Surf tumbled in, making a continuous roar against the rock. I reached and grasped the small trunk of a wind-dwarfed tree and pulled myself up to where I could look over the top. In my surprise I nearly ducked back out of sight. I had not expected the Chipmann sun deck to be so close. I looked down into it at about a thirty-degree angle. Perhaps that made it seem closer. But it was, I judged, three hundred feet away. It was a special irony that there should be a nude woman on the sun terrace. She was prone on a faded blue sun pad. The wall shielded her from some of the west wind, and she had set up an additional wind screen, one of those made of a shining metal to intensify the heat of the sun. She was of heroic dimension, a redoubtable female, body brown as coffee beans, hair bleached to hemp, thighs like beer kegs, shoulders like Sonny Liston. I assumed she had to be Mrs. Chipmann, the dear friend who loaned Carl their house for celebrity assignation. It seemed odd to see the sun terrace in such vivid colors after seeing it so many times in black and white. Her face was turned toward me. She wore sunglasses. There was a half glass of tomato juice on the cement next to the sun pad.

  There was absolutely no other place from which the terrace could be watched. She had every reason to think herself unobserved. I eased back, out of sight, and turned and looked down. I could see part of the rear end of our pale gray Avis car parked in the cut where I had left it. I looked around at the immediate area. It was nonsensical to expect to find anything, after a year and a half. But find something I did. It was tucked down into a cleft of stone as if someone had wadded it and wedged it there, a small crumpled cardboard container, once yellow, now bleached pulpy white by sun and rain and weather. I could make out ghost writing on it, white on white. Kodak—Plus-X Pan.

  I took it down with me and handed it to Dana as I got behind the wheel. She frowned at it, then saw what it was. She looked at me with a strange expression. “Why should this make it more real? God, could anything be more real than
those pictures? But this is … like archeology, sort of. It’s more … first hand.”

  “Don’t get hooked on the feeling, Dana. Investigation can be a disease.”

  “It’s a spooky feeling. I don’t think I like it. It’s unfair in a way, Travis. People get so exposed. It dwarfs people, doesn’t it? By dwarfing them, it makes you feel bigger. Is that the fascination?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But it does fulfill you in some way, doesn’t it?”

  “Let’s drop it, shall we?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was a sore …”

  “Shall we?”

  “Alright!”

  I drove swiftly southward with the sulks and with a silent woman. Ever since the popularization of the Freud-Fraud, we are all addicted to fingering ourselves to see where it hurts, Mommy. With no one to kiss and make well.

  So what if I am hooked on the hunt? All it does is make an orderly life untenable. You trade the kiddies and fireside and regular promotions and appointment to the house committee or the greens committee for a few, a very few, clear clean moments of a savage satisfaction akin to joy. And maybe in the process you keep a little essential privacy. Our dear Uncle owns over 23,000 polygraphs. Lie detectors. God alone knows how many industry owns. Not satisfied anymore with giving you the whole series of Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests, they want to make damn well certain you are not merely giving them the answers you think they want. They want to nail you into your permanent box right now, brother. Get in and lie still, and forty years from now we’ll bury you.

  I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.

  I am, to put it as bitterly as possible, a romantic. I know a windmill when I see one, by God, and I sneer at my white horse. It was appropriate that Lysa Dean should be the damsel in distress. She is such a sweet kid.

  “Anyway,” I said aloud, “she projects the image of a sweet kid.”

  Dana was inert for about two seconds, nodding her head, and then she gave a little jump and stared at me. “Don’t do that!”

  “Do what?”

  “Get inside my head like that! How did you know what I was thinking?”

  “I didn’t.”

  She looked dubious. I glanced at her a few times when I could take my eyes off that languorous and lethargic California traffic. And somehow all of a sudden we were closer. Maybe it is like the learning curve, shaped like a profile of a stairway. We both knew something had happened and didn’t know what it was. Her face colored and she turned away. I couldn’t really see her any more. That was another clue. I could remember meeting a darkhaired strong-featured composed woman. A stranger. This was not she. This was Dana. Somebody else. Dana’s eyes, Dana’s mouth, Dana’s hair and ears and body. Individual and unique and not related in any way to anyone previously known. Dana of the dear crooked tooth.

  Santa Rosita was a stunted version of the Santa Barbara code of existence. Three industries, electronics, plastics and tourists, and squeeze the bejaysus out of all three. It was sharing the big boom-boom. The incomparably dull tract houses, glitteringly new, were marching out across the hills, cluttered with identical station wagons, identical children, identical barbecues, identical tastes in flowers and television. You see, Virginia, there really is a Santa Rosita, full of plastic people, in plastic houses, in areas noduled by the vast basketry of their shopping centers. But do not blame them for being so tiresome and so utterly satisfied with themselves. Because, you see, there is no one left to tell them what they are and what they really should be doing.

  The dullest wire services the world has ever seen fill their little monopoly newspapers with self-congratulatory pap. Their radio is unspeakable. Their television is geared to a minimal approval by thirty million of them. And anything thirty million people like, aside from their more private functions, is bound to be bad. Their schools are group-adjustment centers, fashioned to shame the rebellious. Their churches are weekly votes of confidence in God. Their politicians are enormously likable, never saying a cross word. The goods they buy grow increasingly more shoddy each year, though brighter in color. For those who still read, they make do, for the most part, with the portentous gruntings of Uris, Wouk, Rand and others of that same witless ilk. Their magazine fare is fashioned by nervous committees.

  You see, dear, there is no one left to ask them a single troublesome question. Such as: Where have you been and where are you going and is it worth it.

  They are the Undisturbed. The Sleep-Lovers.

  And they fill out an enormous number of forms every year, humbly and sincerely. Each one is given a number to use all his life.

  Are they going to be awakened with a kiss? They feel vaguely uneasy about their young. My God, why can’t these kids appreciate this best of all possible worlds? What’s wrong with these restless punks? These … these goddam dropouts!

  Virginia, dear, through the strange alchemy of the gods, there are a disproportionate number of kids coming along these days with IQ’s that are soaring toward a level too high to measure. These kids have very cold eyes. They are the ones who, one day, will stop playing with transistors, diodes and microcircuitry and look at Barrentown and start asking the rude questions. Or build a machine that will ask.

  In the meanwhile, Virginia, Santa Rosita still exists, and it is as if some cynical genius had designed a huge complex penal colony in the sunshine, eliminating the need for guard towers and barbed wire by merely beaming a gigantic electronic message at the inmates, day and night, saying, You are in heaven! Be happy! If you can’t be happy there, you can’t be happy anywhere! Vote! Consume! Donate! And don’t forget to use your number.

  We drove in from the north at four in the afternoon of that first Tuesday in March, and I checked us into two singles in a chain motel—architecture: Lubratorium Moderne. She wanted to call Miss Dean, and I wanted to try the number for Mendez. After a small and cautious hesitation, I decided not to put it through the motel switchboard. Caution can be a way of life. Never leave anything which can be traced, when you do have a choice.

  A clear-voiced girl said, “Gallagher, Rosen and Mendez. Good afternoon.”

  “Uh … may I speak with Mr. Mendez, please.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  “Good afternoon. This is Mr. Mendez’ secretary. May I help you?”

  “I would like to speak with Mr. Mendez, please.”

  “He’s on another line. May I call you back, or would you like to hold?”

  I held. I riffled the phone book with my free hand. They were attorneys.

  “Yes? Hello?” Mendez said in an impatient and harried voice.

  “Sorry to bother you. We need an address for the next of kin for D. C. Ives.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Keller Photo, sir. We had a lens for repair. It was under the guarantee, but it took a long time. It had to go back to the factory in Germany, no charge of course, and now we …”

  “Miss Trotter? Give this fellow Jocelyn Ives’ address.”

  I heard him hang up. “Hello?” Miss Trotter said. “Just a moment, please.” She was back on the line quickly. “Have you a pencil? Miss Jocelyn Ives, 2829 Appleton Way. Phone 765-3192. Have you got that?”

  “Thanks. When did Ives die anyway?”

  “Oh, just a few days before Christmas. He held on longer than they thought he could, you know. Days and days, with all that terrible brain damage. It’s such a shame. He was so talented.”

  “Well, that’s the way it goes.”

  “I hope they find them some day.”

  “Don’t we all. Thanks, Miss Trotter.”

  I started out of the phone booth, and then
went back in and tried the number she gave me. It rang three times. A woman answered. “Is Georgie around?” I asked.

  “You’ve the wrong number, I expect,” she said. I thanked her and hung up. I walked thoughtfully back to the room. I knew that accent. It sounds cockney but isn’t. It is Australian.

  Dana had just finished talking to Lysa Dean. Miss Dean reported success with the promotion and a good audience response to Winds of Chance on premiere night. She was off soon, with group, to New York for additional promo work, panel shows and so on, four days there and then to Chicago.

  I reported what I had learned, and added what I could guess. Dana looked more intrigued than shocked. “Killed, eh?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “He was in a dangerous line of work.”

  “The quickest way is to give that sister a try.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “I might strike out. I’ll try it alone. Then you can try from another angle.”

  Appleton Way was dead end. Truck terminals were edging closer to it. Nearby blocks were being leveled for some unimaginable improvement. But the street still had an illusion of peace. It contained multiple housing, old garden courts of pseudo-Moorish styling, faded citrus-tone paint on old stucco. 2829 was one of the larger complexes, and her door was off an arched open corridor along the side. A dark door opening into the gloom of a small apartment with too few windows. She looked at me through the six-inch gap the safety chain allowed, and I saw that she was perhaps daughter rather than sister.

  “What do you want?”

  You have to have a flair for it, an immediate and unthinking appraisal of the vulnerabilities. This one was wary and haughty. I could see that she was a big pale girl, Alice through a strange looking-glass. A twenty-year-old spinster. There are such. A big awkward fatty body in an unlovely jumper. A child face. Reddened nostrils. Pale heavy lips.