The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  “I want to be sure you are Jocelyn Ives. Is there anything you could show me to prove it?” I kept my voice confidential.

  “Why should I bother?”

  “You do have the same accent.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I was associated with him in a certain venture quite a long time ago. I came here to make contact, and I just found out he’s dead.”

  She gnawed her lip and then, to my utter astonishment, gave me a huge conspiratorial wink. She closed the door, unlatched the chain and opened it wide. “Please come in,” she said heartily. When she had closed the door behind us, she said, “I do understand why you can’t give me your name.”

  “Uh … that’s good.”

  “Back through here. The place is a mess. I’m off work today.” I followed her along the murky hallway into a small living room. It was crowded with furniture too large and too expensive for the small apartment. Every surface was covered with large photographic prints, and scores of them were on the floor and leaning against the furniture and the walls. Many of them were matted. With clumsy awkward haste she cleared two chairs. “Do sit down. I’ve been sorting out. Lens Lab … that’s a local hobby group … they want to put on a show of his best work. At the library. There are so many. I get quite confused.”

  “I can see how you would. It looks like fine work.”

  “Oh yes! That’s my responsibility now, to see that everyone learns how good Father was. I am going to set up a traveling show also. And there is some interest in Rochester, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  She sat facing me and knotted her hands together and said, “I have been so hoping that somebody would show up. It’s been so terribly difficult for me.”

  “I suppose it has.”

  “Poor Mr. Mendez has been doing his best to get everything straightened out for tax purposes. But having quite a large amount of cash turn up has sort of complicated things. And, of course, I couldn’t explain the cash. Not to him. If it was supposed to be for necessary expenses, I’m sorry. It’s all tied up now with courts and tax people and things. I will get it eventually, I imagine, or whatever part of it they don’t take. At least the house can be sold. You know, I have been hoping someone would show up. And you look almost exactly like the kind of man I pictured.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I kept my mouth shut, as Father would have wished. And I guess I do not really have to have any posthumous glory for him. He said that was the thing none of you could ever expect. He taught me to be very careful and discreet about … the contacts, and not to ask him questions. I have been wondering if you could go to Mr. Mendez and explain to him the sort of work Father was doing for you. I think it might make the estate work easier.”

  “I’m sorry. I have no authority to do that.”

  “I was afraid so,” she said. “Oh dear. And the ridiculous police will have to go right on thinking it was just someone after his pocket money?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She studied me. “Really, how do I know you are what I think you are?”

  “We don’t carry that sort of identification.”

  “I suppose not. It wouldn’t be very safe, I expect.” She looked uneasy. “But why wouldn’t you have known he was dead?”

  “I’ve been out of touch.”

  I now had the shape of it all. There was something unwholesome about her, a greasy sheen to her flesh, a soiled smell in the dark little apartment. But she was his loved daughter. Blackmail needed a cover story. Perhaps it had been her guess at first, that Father was in some sort of patriotic undercover work, and when she faced him with it, it was easiest to go along. And, of course, the Enemy had slain him.

  I had to find the right way to open her up. I leaned toward her and said, “Jocelyn, I think I can promise you that some day it can all be told.”

  Tear tracks like the sidewalk marks of snails gleamed on the round pale cheeks, and she made a froggy sobbing sound.…

  Ten

  I liked the way Dana listened. She felt no compulsion to fill a silence with questions. She knew there was more to come. I could not see her distinctly. She sat over by the motel windows in darkness. The light was at my elbow, gleaming on the silver cup.

  “Ives liked to live well,” I said. “He did free-lance photography in Melbourne. Fashion, news breaks, everything. A Hollywood outfit made a movie over there. He got permission to work on the set. His stills were apparently damned good. The stars liked them. The studio brought him over. That was eight years ago. She was twelve. He had about four years of it, and did pretty well. And lived well. Then something went wrong. I guess he got himself on that little blacklist they have. I don’t imagine it is important to know what cooked him. The girl says it was jealousy. His work was too good. He moved up here to Santa Rosita. His studio was in his home. Weddings, parties, awards, portraits. A nice cover story. She thinks he had some other base in the city. She’s so proud of him. Proud of that cynical son of a bitch with his sports cars and fine house and housekeeper.”

  I got up and collected both silver cups and fixed us another.

  “She showed me the clippings. He went on a trip. She doesn’t know where. He was gone two days. He came back to the house. He went out again and said he would be back within the hour. That was ten in the evening last December tenth. They found his car, locked, on Verano Street. He was found about a hundred feet away, dragged behind a warehouse, with the top of his skull smashed in, pockets empty, watch gone. They thought he would be dead on arrival, but the heart kept beating for five days. As far as the girl knows, they haven’t a clue. Nobody knows what he was doing in that neighborhood. It’s mostly industrial small time, empty at night.

  After a long silence she said, “Did he leave her anything?”

  “Small insurance. The equity in the house. About thirty-eight thousand in cash, already impounded while they check his tax returns. Then a lot of cameras, studio equipment, dark room equipment, huge stacks of arty photographs.”

  She asked me if I was certain about Ives. I’d been saving it for her. I told her how I’d wormed it out of the girl. “So his loving daughter was the one who helped him operate that drop and flashed the green light at you to toss the money out.”

  Dana shook her head slowly. “And I imagined horrible hoodlums out there … and it was that poor simple girl helping Daddy in his spy business. What a total bastard he must have been, to endanger her so!”

  And I thought wistfully how easy it would have been for Lysa Dean to have busted it up in the beginning, before it got off the ground. “Ives could trust his daughter,” I explained. “And he didn’t have to split with her, and she didn’t even know what was in the packages. He used her the same way, with variations, on other projects.”

  “Loyal little helper,” Dana said. “Just like me.”

  “Let’s go eat.”

  She put her sweater on. At the door she stopped me and said, “Trav, you didn’t give her any little suspicion that … all was not what it seemed?”

  “When I left, I told her she could be proud of Daddy. She stood tall and the tears dripped off her fat chin.”

  She squeezed my arm. In the outside lights, her dark eyes were shiny. “Soft as butter,” she said.

  “The arm?”

  “Idiot, your darn arm is like a slab of redwood. I just meant I’m glad you left her that much.”

  “I wonder how long she’ll keep it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Somebody killed him. If they find him, he might have all the right reasons. I think I might talk to a cop.”

  “Why, dear?” she asked earnestly.

  “Dear?”

  “Oh, shut up! It was just a … reflex.”

  “You’ve done it twice today.”

  “Why will you talk to a cop?”

  “Because they very probably know a little more than Miss Ives thinks they know. And we’re close to the heart of
it now, Dana. Where did D. C. Ives’ file copies go?”

  • • •

  My man was Sergeant Starr. Bill Starr. He was a little fellow about forty, very jaunty and bouncy. He was twenty percent nose, and it looked as if that nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction. Under the nose was the abrupt curve of an amiable little smile. He was a clowner, a most happy fellow. He seemed to want you to like him. There was so much nose, there was a danger of misreading the eyes. They were small, cat yellow, and about as soft and mild as cross sections of brass rod.

  His tidy little gray office had a rack for cups won in various skills. Several of them were for pistol. He bounced up and perched on the corner of his desk and beamed at me and said, “Why should I play games with anybody, pal? Am I in a buyer’s market? Maybe, for residents. If I want to keep a source going. Sure. But I can park your gray tired ass in the tank and keep you there until you get eager to please.”

  I chuckled as merrily as he and said, “This friend I’m doing the favor for would be terribly upset. No influence here at all, of course. Except the kind of lawyers money will buy. Platoons of them, if need be. I have no record, Sergeant. But careless people have put me in from time to time, here and there. And I have been hit on the head by old-fashioned ones. So it would be an inconvenience for both of us. I’m eager to please right now. And eager to have you please me.”

  He picked the assorted cards and licenses off his desk and handed them to me. “McGee, there is every identification here except the right one.”

  “Cards are needed to do a favor for a friend?”

  “I’ll tell you again. If you have official status then maybe you can protect your client. But you have nothing. You have to tell me who hired you!”

  “But I told you, Sergeant, that we might get around to that, if things go well. Besides, I’m not hired. It’s just …”

  “Oh God yes. A favor for a friend.” He reached for his hat. “Let’s try some coffee.”

  He drew a car from the pool and we went ten blocks to a drive-in. The pretty waitress knew him by name, and brought us coffee and raised doughnuts.

  “I’ll start,” I said. “D. C. Ives. Sometimes a man has to be killed before people get the idea of some kind of hanky-panky.”

  “Hanky-panky. Now isn’t that sweet! Put it this way. It isn’t a legal requirement a man should have a checking account, but nearly everybody with forty-thousand-dollar homes does. An estimate of his take on a legit basis would be fifty or sixty a week. Living expenses better than a thousand a month. So he could be living off a big score from way back, or making little scores as he goes along.”

  “He was making it as he went along.”

  “Thanks a lot. I already figured that.”

  “Did you figure how?”

  “It’s your turn again, McGee.”

  “He had a studio and darkroom in his house, and he also had another setup. I’d guess somewhere near Verano Street. A limited setup. A quality enlarger for 35mm, a setup for making and drying eight by ten prints, no automation for quantity production—almost what you’d expect of an advanced amateur, a one-man operation.”

  “To do what?”

  “Isn’t it your turn, Sergeant?”

  “Okay. He would do there something he wouldn’t want to do home on account of his daughter. When she wasn’t in school, she helped him with the home setup. He did a lot of traveling. Short trips. Assignments, he called them. I say it wasn’t just a standard smut shop. The requirements in that field are too low. And the pay is low. What do you say it was, McGee?”

  “Discreet, careful, expert blackmail. Plus maybe some industrial espionage. And maybe just the long shots of people with the wrong people—the executive talking to the competition, the banker with the tout. Long lens stuff, up and down this coast. How would he get the work? Some from legitimate agencies, maybe. Some from the great unwashed. With really juicy negatives, he could wring a lot of money out, if the people were important.”

  “And eventually make a slip and get his head smashed in.”

  “Probably.”

  “McGee, if you are trying to do a favor for a friend by getting hold of prints or negatives, forget it.”

  “They’re gone?”

  “If he’d been killed immediately, maybe we’d have moved a little faster. We found his hidey-hole. A warehouse corner with its own entrance. It was an area check that turned it up. His prints were on everything. Not much file space for prints, but it was stone empty. No negatives. The file had been locked, and it was pried open. The door had been unlocked and relocked with a key. A good lock. There was a tin money box in the back of the file. It was busted open too.”

  “What are you holding back, Starr?”

  “Me? Me!”

  “So all right. My friend is a sick sad girl. She’s at Hope Island on Bastion Key in Florida. Her name is Nancy Abbott. She’s a drunk. She’s been at that retreat for months. Her rich architect daddy is dying, or dead by now, in San Francisco. Ives sneaked some nasty pictures of her a year and a half ago. Now give me the rest.”

  “I can check that out. The rest? Okay, I found out beyond any doubt that the break-in wasn’t accomplished until the day after Ives was clobbered. And in Ives’ pocket was a key to his little lab. Ives had an employee. Semi-retarded. Samuel Bogen, age 46. On and off welfare for years. Trouble twenty years ago. Peeping Tom and indecent exposure, and about four ninety-day falls for that. From what I can find out, Ives used him for scut work, paying him a dollar an hour for washing trays, drying prints, that sort of thing. By the time we got a line on him, Bogen had dropped off the face of the earth. He could be just a harmless spook. Or he could have flipped and bashed his boss. We think we traced him onto a Los Angeles bus. We’ve had an alert out on him ever since. Medium height, medium weight, glasses, bad teeth, hair brown turning gray, no special identifying marks or characteristics. No family. Left no lead behind in his furnished room three blocks off Verano Street. There is another thing too that makes me less interested in him. At about the right time, a car left the area at high speed. Bogen apparently never owned a car and doesn’t drive.”

  I couldn’t risk pursuing the Bogen matter further. I was afraid the little tiger would check it back and come up with Lysa Dean’s name.

  “So who was involved in the Abbott girl’s pictures?” he demanded.

  I was ready for that one. “A stock car driver named Sonny Catton. He was killed last year when he hit a wall.”

  “Where were the pictures taken?”

  “Up around Point Sur someplace, at a private home I think.”

  “A year and a half ago, you said? So why the heat to get them back now?”

  “She was worried about whether he was using them to blackmail her dying father.”

  “How did you track it back to this Ives?”

  “Sergeant, that’s a long long story. Let me ask you one. Suppose somebody had some work for Ives. They couldn’t get him. So they called Mendez, of Gallagher, Rosen and Mendez, and found out from Mendez he was dead. Does that mean anything?”

  “I wondered about that too. Charlie Mendez is clean. Small services for small fees. Like having mail come there.”

  “Summation, Sergeant?”

  “Who, me? Okay, D. C. Ives was very shifty and clever and careful. But one night he forgot to be careful and one of his pigeons got to him. When Bogen heard his boss was dying, he used his own key to get in. He took the dirty pictures and the money and ran.”

  “So that makes it a dead end for me, Sergeant.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It was just a favor for a friend.”

  Eleven

  We left early Thursday morning and drove down to the city, to Lysa Dean’s canyon home, secluded behind an impressive pink wall. The staff was cut down to one Korean couple, maid and gardener. When he recognized Dana, he smiled broadly and unlocked the big metal gates for us. It was a hot day. The wall enclosed about one acre. A Mexican archite
ct had done the house for her and the third husband. I guess you could call it Cuernavaca Aztec.

  Dana showed me around. The plantings were splendid. The pool was drained. The dogs had been boarded. Walking through the silence of terrazzo, puffy white rugs, dark paneling removed from ancient churches, I counted five full-length oil portraits of the owner. And not one of an ex-husband.

  Dana wanted to get different clothes. She showed me how she was set up. A small functional suite opposite the service area, with a rather stark bedroom, a large and luxurious bath, a small tidy office with a row of large gray filing cabinets, a battleship desk. There was a picture in the bedroom, Dana, younger, glowing, intense—holding the new baby in her arms. A young man with a homely, crooked, likable face was staring down at the child too, his arm around his wife.

  She saw me glance at it and said, too imperatively, “Please wait for me out there in the office. This won’t take a minute.”

  On an office shelf I saw bound, gold-lettered scripts for the Lysa Dean movies. Winds of Chance was among them. I took it down and opened it at random. It seemed highly improbable to me that anyone, living or dead, had ever said lines like that.

  I put the script back on the shelf and paced restlessly. There were loose ends. A lot of them. But I could not see how they were pertinent to what I’d been asked to do. I couldn’t recover any of the money Lysa Dean had paid Ives.

  It seemed reasonably evident that Bogen had gone into business for himself. His note to Lysa sounded as Starr had described him. He would have picked up a few crude lab techniques from Ives. If the police had been looking for him for three months without success, I didn’t have much chance of reaching out and picking him up.

  We could fly east and catch Lysa in New York. Make a report. Working a complaint through normal police channels, we could get all there was in the files on Bogen. The people responsible for protecting the star could be alerted to watch for anybody who might be Bogen. If she insisted, maybe we could work out a way to trap him, using her as bait. With a little bit of judgment and a lot of luck, I had pushed it about as far as I could.