The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  I could make a few guesses. Bogen had fled with a good piece of money and a whole stack of unpleasant pictures, and holed up, perhaps in Los Angeles. He’d fled on December 6th. Those pictures could seriously upset an already disturbed mind. It was highly unlikely that he could have lifted any neat little list of names and addresses. Maybe the pictures covered quite a few of Ives’ quiet ventures. If Bogen wanted to get cute with anyone, he would be restricted to those faces he could recognize. Maybe there were a few more celebrity faces in the stack. What was the time sequence? In early January, a month after he fled Santa Rosita, he was out in Las Vegas leaving off the package for Lysa Dean at the desk at The Sands. The columns would have located her for him. No further contact in two months. Was he busy bugging some other famous people who had been captured by Ives’ sneaky lens? Was he waiting for Lysa Dean to come back to the Los Angeles area?

  At any rate, it would be a comfort to her to know the kind of nut who was running around with pictures that could ruin her, to know his name and his appearance. She would have to decide what that much was worth. I’d dug a pretty good hole in the expense money.

  Ives’ murderer was none of my business. The list of possibilities would have to be as long as my arm.

  But I didn’t like the way this one was ending. And I couldn’t see Lysa Dean being ecstatic about it either.

  Dana came out of her bedroom. She wore a pretty green outfit, and carried her repacked suitcase. She said, too cheerfully, “Are we ready?”

  She seemed very tense. I went and took the suitcase from her. With a quaver in her cheerful voice, she said, “This place gets on my nerves. It never did before. I don’t know why. I feel as if I hardly know the Dana Holtzer who lives here. I expect her to come in and ask me who the hell I am.”

  “Watch out for her. A very icy broad.”

  She paused in the doorway to look at me, her expression at once vulnerable and wary. “Travis?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “I can’t take too much change. So please don’t. Things that get brittle … they break, you know.”

  “I like you. That’s all it is.”

  She nodded. “But we have laughed too much. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand that. And you’ll be back in harness tonight.”

  “That picture you saw in there. Did it explain anything?”

  “I could have drawn it from memory before I even saw it. You don’t have to be explained to me. I don’t have to make adjustments with you and to you. Hell with it. Let’s go get on our airplane.” I tilted her chin up, kissed the corner of her mouth closest to the crooked tooth. A little peck, like cousins. So she smiled, and one tear spilled, and I followed her in flight, clackety-whack across terrazzo, green skirt whipping, powerful calves clenching, back very straight and head held high.

  We had twenty minutes before they called the flight. Our gear was checked aboard. Early afternoon. I bought a paper. I was scanning it. The name jumped out at me from a small item on page one of the second section. Casino employee slain in Las Vegas. Patricia Davies bludgeoned at doorstep of trailer last night. Once married to sportsman Vance M’Gruder.

  Without a word I pointed it out and handed it to Dana. She looked at me, her eyes wide.

  “I can’t pass that up,” I said. “It could be Sammy.”

  “But … our luggage is …”

  “Dana, you go on to New York. Take care of my stuff at the other end. I’ll check this out and be along.”

  “But I’m supposed to stay with you.”

  I took hold of her wrists and gave her a little shake. “You have to go to New York. You’re a big girl. I don’t have to draw diagrams for you. You and I have … run out of time.”

  She held my gaze and her mouth made the shape of that word. Time. Without making a sound. The strength in her face was softened. And younger. “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “Thank you, Travis, for knowing when the time ran out.”

  I released her, turning away, saying, “Your boss expects you. So go ahead.” She murmured something about arranging my ticket, and went off into the throng. I watched her go, and for an instant had in my mind the grotesque and unworthy image of the time when you feel the tarpon pick up speed for that last, great, heart-busting leap, and see him go high and see him, right at the peak of it, give that final snap of his head that throws your lure back into your lap. The image wasn’t even accurate. I’d turned conservationist. I’d let the line go slack and said goodby.

  I waited. And waited. Her flight was called. I went to the gate. I did not see her. I went to the airline desk. They checked the manifest for me. Slowly. Sir, the passenger canceled before flight time. I felt fear, worry, irritation. I had played the whole game too loosely, too confidently, and maybe somebody very fast and bright had moved out of the shadows.

  I prowled the martian reaches of the terminal, searching for my girl in green. And found her, saw her through the glass front of a men’s shop. I went striding in. A clerk was helping her. She gave me a startled and guilty look, then swung all that vivid force of personality upon me, saying, “Darling, I told you I’d forget the shirt sizes. It’s such a damn nuisance losing luggage. Are these all right? Wash-and-wear, so we could make do with two, don’t you think? But what size, dear?”

  “Seventeen and a half, thirty-six,” I said humbly.

  “Two of these in that size, please. And you don’t really mind stretch socks too much, do you? Size thirty-three shorts, mmm? No, don’t wrap them. I can pop them right in here.” She lifted the small suitcase up onto the counter, a cheap one of pale blue anodized aluminum. As she put the articles in, I got a glimpse of some feminine things, and some drug store parcels. She latched it and waited for her change.

  “We’ve got a flight in about twenty-five minutes,” she said.

  I carried the case out of the store into the waiting room area. I carried it to a quiet space and put it down and turned to her and said, “Have you lost your fool mind?”

  She locked strong icy fingers onto my wrist and looked up at me and said, “It’s all right. Really. It’s all right.”

  “But …”

  “I couldn’t get the luggage back. It was stowed aboard. It’ll be taken care of in New York. Look. I’ve been a grownup for a long time.”

  “It’s just that …”

  “Shut up, darling. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Do you want me to draw pictures for you? Stop looking like a spavined moose. Say you’re glad. Say something.”

  I put fingertips on her cheek, ran my thumb along the black gloss of her eyebrow. “Okay. Something.”

  She closed her eyes and shivered. “Oh God. No claims, Trav. Nothing like that. Either way.”

  “Either way.”

  “Just don’t laugh.”

  “You know better than that.”

  I read consternation in her expression. “Maybe I’m just not what you … Maybe you never really … You could have been just being polite and now …”

  “You know better than that too. Shut up, dear.”

  “I wired New York.”

  “Kindly excuse delay.”

  “Dammit, we’ve never even really kissed. My knees are all wobbly and strange. Please lead me to a drink, darling.”

  During the flight, in spite of all the persuasive immediate magic of Girl, in spite of scent, closeness, dark eyes to drown in, and the shallow-breathed feeling of expectancy, the workman part of my mind kept moving in old and seamy patterns. We’d made a big swing, and, one by one, we’d been dropping them out of the final count. Carl Abelle, terror of the ski lifts, dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope. Sonny Catton, cooked meat in a pretty whoosh and bloom of high octane. Nancy Abbott, cooked just as thoroughly but over a lower flame. No point in checking Harvey and Richie, the Cornell kids. Their biggest problem was to find someone, anyone, who would ever believe their story. Caswell Edgars was out of it. And out of just about everything else in the world too. Ives was gone, and violently. So was
Patty M’Gruder. If old Abbott, Nancy’s father, had any luck left, he was dead by now too. Less violently but less pleasantly. It was narrowing down. To a yacht bum named Vance M’Gruder, to a waitress named Whippy, to a retarded little man named Bogen. It was like going through an empty house, checking the closets. Either it was more complex than I could comprehend, or so it made even less sense. But there was a nastiness somewhere in it that was out of control. I sensed that, and sensed it was aimed at Lysa Dean, and maybe at me, and I couldn’t imagine who or how. I knew only two things. I was running out of closets. And I was glad I hadn’t been at that house party. So I held the hand of the girl, and told myself it was a fine world, and filed away my doom-thoughts.

  A bored kid built a shiny little model city with his new kit and when it was finished he gave it one hell of a kick and spewed bit hunks of it out across the desert floor. We tilted down across the afternoon, seeing an unreality of blue pools and green fairways against that old lizard-skin brown of the everlasting desert. We came in with a batch of pilgrims—the brand-new ones trying to be cool about their interest in the air terminal slots, about all the hawking and proclaiming and loud instant promotions. All the old pilgrims wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion. I noticed a pair of appraisers as our group came through the gate, backs against the wall, staring left and right, somnolently vigilant, bouncing the little black glances off the pilgrims like aimed bb shot. They have the index memories of the ten thousand faces in disrepute in Slotsville, plus a feel for new trouble on the way—the ones who have come to get it any way they can, including using a gun on the winners. My lady performed no transit services this time. It was a fine and pleasant distinction related to the absolute silence of the airplane ride, the hand tightly held, the dark eyes hooded. She stood four square, still and humble, patient and sensuous, while I, with no bag to retrieve, went off to dicker a vehicle and, with ironic impulse, took that most typical of game-town cars, a big airconditioned convertible, this one in metallic blue-green, white leather, ominously silent as Forest Lawn.

  There had been a place I liked, way out on the Strip, an utterly gameless and consequently expensive motor house called the Apache, and I knew it would be meaningless and would astonish her should I consult her. At the desk I said I had been there before, knew I wanted a double cabana at the pool, gave the porter a dollar to let me have the key and find my own way.

  It was a great long room in gold and green, with two huge beds, all of it too bright in the dazzle of poolside sun. I pulled the cords that creaked the heavy yellow draperies across the acre of window wall, turning the room into a shadowy gloom of gold. The whisper of the hushed cooled air made it an oasis, a thousand years from yesterday, and ten thousand years from tomorrow. Every fifth breath she took was very deep, with a little catch, like a hiccup at the high end. I put my hands upon her, at waist and nape of neck, stopping her sleepy sway. The man who sits in the steel office and throws the switches and pushes the buttons can rest his hand on his desk and feel, more like a low-cycle sound than any measurable vibration, the power that thrums in the bowels of the light plant. She felt unyielding and I could not guess how it would be for us. Then she gave a little crooked sigh, turned her mouth upward to me, leaned with heat and softness and purpose.

  There is one kind of rightness that is an almost-rightness, because it is merciless and total and ends in a deathlike lethargy.

  Then there is another kind of almost-rightness that can never be finished.

  Both of these make you strangers to each other. Both of these things make you untidily anxious to give and receive reassurances.

  But with Dana it was that rare and selfless rightness which moves with but the gentlest hiatus from one completion to the next, each a growth in knowing and closeness while, unheeded, the deep sweet hours go by. After all the fierceness is gone, it then astonishes by returning in that last time which ends it without question for now, and she is spent and dies there, slumbrous and fond.

  I fought sleep. I made myself get up. I covered her over and went and showered and dressed. I turned on a meager light in the room and sat on the bed, pushed black curls aside, kissed the sweet nape of a musky neck. She turned to peer up at me, her face soft and emptied and young. “Yuhraw dress!” she mumbled in accusation.

  “I’m going out for a little while. You sleep, honey.”

  She tried to frown. “Y’be careful, d’ling.”

  “Love you,” I said. It doesn’t cost a thing. Not when you do. I kissed a soft and smiling mouth, and I think she was asleep before I stood up. I left the low light on and let myself out.

  I walked toward the main buildings feeling all that strange ambivalence of the conquering male. Goaty self-esteem, slight melancholy, a mildly pleasant and unfocused guilt, a tin-soldier strut.

  But something more than that with her. A feeling of achieving and establishing identities, hers and mine.

  There had been no dishonesties. And so, in all that total giving and taking, I had been aware of her as Dana, so vital and so enduring. The slight physical strangeness of the very beginning of it had lasted but a very short time. Then she was all known and dear. As if we had been apart for a very long time and found each other again, quickly getting over the awkwardness of separation.

  After that it was a knowing and re-knowing in a profound way which has no words. It became a symbolic dialogue. I give thee. I take thee. I prize thee.

  And there was also the fatuous feeling of enormous luck. It is such a damned blind chance after all.

  I worked my way through two bemused gin and bitters while they seared my steak. Over coffee I stopped marveling at myself and got a local paper and read the more detailed account of the murder of Patty M’Gruder.

  Then I drove downtown and parked and wandered through that strange area of cut-rate stores, pastel marriage chapels, open-sided casinos bathed in a garish fluorescence. Spooks trudged amid the tourists, and the cops kept a close sharp watch. Old ladies yanked at the handles, playing their dimes out of paper cups. Music bashed across the dry night air, in conflict with itself, and in the noisier alcoves one could buy anything from a dream book to a plastic bird turd.

  The Four Treys was a long bright narrow jungle of machinery. What happened to the old-fashioned slot machine? Now you can pull two handles, hit three space ships and an astronaut and get a moon-pot, which is one and a half jack pots. The change girls sat behind wire, popping open the paper cylinders of silver, dumping it into paper cups for the people. At regular intervals came the clash of money into the scoop, and a shrillness of joy.

  I had just wanted a look. I needed no directions. Presently I got back behind the wheel of the luxury device afforded me by a famous movie star and drove off again through the neoned night.

  Twelve

  The trailer park was called Desert Gate. I had to go down through town and out the far side to get to it. It was a little after ten o’clock when I got there. Some orderly soul had set it up with the requirement that all trailers be parked in herringbone array on either side of a broad strip of asphalt going nowhere. The entrance was an aluminum arch, tall and skinny, with a pink floodlight on it.

  The trailers were large, all snugged down off their wheels, with little patios and screened porches added. About half of them were dark. Patricia had lived—and died in front of—the sixth one on the left. It was lighted. I parked and went to the porch door. As I raised a hand to bang on the aluminum frame, a big woman appeared, silhouetted in the inner doorway.

  “Whatya want?”

  “I want to talk to Martha Whippler.”

  “Who are you?”

  “The name is McGee. I was a friend of Patty’s.”

  “Look, why don’t you go away? The kid has had a hard day. She’s pooped. Okay?”

  “It’s all right, Bobby,” a frail voice said. “Let him in.”

  As I went in, the big woman stood back out of the way. W
hen I saw her in the light I realized she was younger than I had thought. She wore jeans and a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled high over brown heavy forearms. Her hair was brown and cropped short and she wore no makeup. The interior was all pale plywood paneling, vinyl tile, glass curtains, plastic upholstery, stainless steel. A slight girl lay on a day bed, propped up on pillows, long coppery hair tousled around her sad wan face. Her eyes were red. Her lipstick was smeared. She had a drink in her hand. She wore a very frilly nylon robe. Though she was a lot slimmer, I knew her at once.

  “Whippy!” I said, and then felt like a damn fool for not having figured it out.

  It startled her. She stared at me with disapproval. “I don’t know you. I don’t remember you from anyplace. People call me Martha now. Pat wouldn’t let them call me by my old name.” There was something quite solemn and childlike about her. And vulnerable.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll call you Martha.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Travis McGee.”

  “I never heard Pat say your name.”

  “I didn’t know her well, Martha. I know a few other people you might know. Vance. Cass. Carl. Nancy Abbott. Harvey. Richie. Sonny.”

  She sipped her drink, frowning at me over the rim of the glass. “Sonny is dead. I heard that. I heard that he burned up, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Nancy saw him burn.”

  She looked incredulous. “How could that happen?”

  “She was traveling with him then.”

  She shook her head in slow wonder. “Her traveling with him. Oh boy. Who could imagine that. Me, sure. But her? Gee, it doesn’t seem possible, believe you me.”

  “Martha, I want to talk to you alone.”

  “I bet you do,” the big girl behind me said.

  “Mr. McGee, this is my friend Bobby Blessing. Bobby, whyn’t you go away a while, okay?”

  Bobby studied me. It is the traditional look they reserve for the authentic male, a challenging contempt, a bully-boy antagonism. There seem to be more of them around these days. Or perhaps they are merely bolder. The word is butch. Having not the penis nor the beard, they damn well try to have everything else. One of the secondary sex characteristics they seem to be able to acquire is the ballsy manner, the taut-shouldered swagger, the roostery go-to-hell attitude. They have a menacing habit of running in packs lately. And the unwary chap who tries to make off with one of their brides can get himself a stomping that stevedores would admire. These are a sub-culture, long extant, but recently emerged from hiding. In their new boldness they do a frightening job of recruiting, having their major successes among the vulnerable platoons of those meek girls who, like Martha Whippler, are abused by men, by the Catton-kind of man, used, abused, sickened, shared, frightened and … at last, driven into the camp of the butch.