The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’ll be where I can hear you call me,” Bobby said without taking her stony stare from my face. She went out, rolling her shoulders, hitching at her jeans.

  I moved closer to Martha, and sat in a skeletal plastic chair half facing her. She looked down into her half of a drink and said, “You named the people that were there that time.”

  “And left one out?”

  “That movie actress,” she whispered.

  “Have you told people about her being there?”

  “Oh, nothing like that ever happened to me before. I couldn’t tell anybody about it. I mean I could talk to Pat about it sometimes. You know. I used to have nightmares. She took me back home with her from there. I knew … I always knew she would rather it was Nancy.”

  She looked wistful. She had a cheap, empty, pretty little face, eyebrows plucked to fine lines, mouth made larger with lipstick.

  “Did you ever get to see the pictures?” I asked her.

  Even the most vapid ones have an urchin shrewdness about them, the wariness of the consistently defensive posture.

  “What pictures?”

  “The ones Vance had taken.”

  “For hours and hours today they kept asking me questions, questions. How do I know you just aren’t another smart guy?”

  “I can’t prove I’m not.” I hesitated. She was suggestible. I wanted the right approach, without fuss. Grief made an additional vulnerability. Kindly ol’ McGee seemed the best bet. I shook my head sadly. “I’m just a fellow who thinks Patricia got a very bad deal from Vance M’Gruder, very bad indeed.”

  Tears welled. She snuffled into her fist. “Oh God. Oh God yes. That bastard. That total bastard!”

  “Some of us have never understood why Pat didn’t fight it a little harder.”

  “Gee, you don’t know what she had stacked against her. That rotten Vance had been planning it a long time. He got some kind of morality report on her from the London police from way before they were married, I guess to show that she knew she shouldn’t get married. And then he had the tape recorder things of her and Nancy at their house, and her and me at their house, and the pictures he hired that man to get, following them around. It must have cost an awful lot, the whole thing, but as Pat said, it was a hell of a lot cheaper than California divorce. She couldn’t get a lawyer to agree to fight it. I mean, after all, there wasn’t any question about the way she was.”

  “Did you get to see those pictures, Martha?”

  “Oh sure. The funny thing, they made it look like nobody else was around at all. I don’t know how that man got those pictures so close, Pat with me and with Nancy and with Lysa Dean, just one with Lysa Dean, one where you couldn’t tell it was Lysa Dean unless you knew.”

  “So by the time you saw those pictures, you and Pat were together?”

  “Yes. The rotten thing he did, we went up to the city to see some friends of hers, and we came back to Carmel, he was gone and the locks were changed, and our personal stuff was piled in a carport, and there was a man there to keep anybody from breaking in or anything. The way it was, she was still trying to get over being in love with Nancy, and maybe she never did. I guess maybe she never did get over it. But I did try to make her happy, I really did.”

  “Why would somebody want to kill her, Martha?”

  She sobbed again, and blew her nose. “I don’t know! I just don’t know. That’s what they kept asking me. Gee, we lived real quiet here, over a year now, and for a long time we’ve been working the same shift at the Four Treys, me as a drink waitress and her on a change booth. Just a few friends. She hadn’t got interested in any other girl or anything, and nobody was after me like that. There was just one thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know. It started weeks ago. Before that, whenever she’d think of Vance she’d go into a terrible rage, and sometimes she’d cry. Weeks ago she got a letter from somebody. She didn’t let me see it and I can’t find it so I guess she destroyed it. She was kind of … far away for a few days after she got it and she wouldn’t tell me anything. Then one day when I was out, she made long-distance phone calls. She really ran up a terrible bill. Forty dollars and something. And later she made a few more calls. Then she got very pleased about something. She’d be grinning and humming around and I’d ask her why she felt so good and she’d say never mind. Sometimes she would grab me and dance me around and she’d tell me everything was going to be just fine, and we were going to be rich. It didn’t matter so much to me. I mean we were doing all right here. We didn’t have to be rich. I don’t know if it had anything to do with her being murdered last night.”

  “Where were you when it happened?”

  “I heard it! My God, I was in bed half asleep. I was sort of worrying about her. I’ve got a virus and I was off work. She was supposed to be finished at eleven and home by quarter past, but it was a little after midnight when I heard the car motor. I could tell it was ours, it’s such a noisy little car. I’d left one light on for her. I wondered what she’d bring me. She’d bring me a little present if I was sick. Some kind of joke sort of. The car stopped out there and I heard the car door, and then just outside that screen door, she yelled ‘What are you …’ Just those words. There was a kind of a terrible crunching sound. And a falling sound. And steps running. I turned on the lights and put my robe on and ran out and she was just outside the door on the ground, and her head …”

  I waited several minutes while she slowly and painfully pulled herself back together.

  “She was so alive,” Martha moaned.

  “But several weeks ago she stopped being mad at Vance?”

  “Yes. But I don’t know what it means.”

  “After she was locked out of the house, she did have a chance to talk to her husband?”

  “Oh, several times. She begged and pleaded.”

  “But it didn’t do any good.”

  “He wouldn’t even let her have her car. He said she was lucky to keep the clothes she’d bought. Finally he gave her five hundred dollars so she could afford to go away. I had about seventy-five dollars. We came here on a bus and got jobs. He was nasty to her.”

  “Martha, does the name Ives mean anything to you? D. C. Ives?”

  She looked blank. “No.”

  “Santa Rosita?”

  She tilted her empty little head. “That’s strange!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just a couple of days ago she was singing that old song. Santa Lucia. But she was saying Rosita instead of Lucia, and I said she had it wrong and she laughed and said she knew she did. Why did you ask about that? I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But if it has anything to do with who killed her …”

  “Did she have any kind of appointment coming up?”

  “Appointment? Oh, I’d forgotten. Just the other day she said she might have to take a little trip. Alone. Just for a day or two. It made me jealous. She teased me and let me get real jealous, and then she said it was a kind of a business trip, and she’d tell me all about it later.”

  “Where was she going to go?”

  “Phoenix. Gee, we don’t know a soul in Phoenix.”

  “How soon was she going?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded as if she meant real soon.”

  I couldn’t shake loose anything else of interest. She was worn out. But she was still alert enough to ask again who I was and what I wanted. I had to answer a question with a question.

  “What are you going to do now, Martha?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “It’s your chance to get out of … this kind of situation.”

  Her little mouth firmed up. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that. Listen, Pat got me out of a lousy situation. I don’t want anything like that again ever. What do you know about anything?”

  “Don’t get sore.”

  “Why shou
ldn’t I? Jesus Christ! Anything you people don’t understand, it has to be lousy. Pat always said that. The world doesn’t have to be your way. We never asked anybody to approve or disapprove. It’s our own business. Who did we hurt?”

  “You?”

  “Me! That’s some joke. That really is. Honest to God, when I remember the way it used to have to be, when I thought that was the only thing there was, boy, it makes my stomach turn right over. I’ve got friends who want to take care of me.”

  “I bet you have.”

  She stared at me, narrowed her eyes, threw her head back and yelled, “Bobby! Bobby!”

  I left without any particular haste, but without delay either. Even so, they were between me and my car. Bobby had a friend, equally sizable. In the angle of the light the friend looked like the young Joe DiMaggio, but with a black dutch bob, and wearing desert rat khakis. Joe carried a putter. The gold head and chrome shaft glittered.

  They separated and moved in from either side.

  “Don’t make any stupid mistakes,” I said, coming to a halt.

  Joe had managed to train herself down to a good imitation of a baritone. “You bassars got to get a lesson not to come around here bothering the brides.”

  “What have you got here?” I asked. “A colony?”

  “Smart ass,” Bobby said as they moved in.

  They generally do very well against the undoctrinated male. There is a chivalrous reluctance to hit a woman. Martha had come to the trailer doorway to watch the sport. I had learned a painful lesson long ago when reluctance had slowed reaction time, and I had spent the next several days walking around like an eighty-eight-year-old man. It is the type of mistake you are not likely to make twice in one lifetime. And these two were more dangerous than male thugs because their aberrations fired their hatred of the authentic male. They might not know when to stop hitting.

  The light was tricky and the putter made me nervous. If I tried sweet reason, she was going to try to sink it into my skull. So I moved with no regard for chivalry. I feinted toward Bobby, and lunged at Joe. I got a hand on the putter shaft before she could build up any momentum with it. I wrested it out of her hand, reversed it, sidestepped her, and laid the limber end of it across the seat of those khakis. It made a little whirring in the air, and a mighty crack on impact. Joe leaped high and, probably much to her own disgust, gave a high girlish scream of anguish. I turned in time to see Bobby hurl a rock at my head. It tickled the hair on the crown of my head, and the fright lent considerable enthusiasm to my pursuit. Bobby turned in flight. I welted her three hearty times across tight denim, and she joined her yelps to those of her buddy. Joe grappled with me, trying to trip me. She was sobbing in frustration, and she smelled like a mule skinner. I spun her away, and whacked her another beauty. She screamed and gave up and started running toward the trailer.

  Bobby made the mistake of running right along beside her, about five feet away from her. I sped into the gap with forehand and backhand. Martha Whippler had come to the doorway to watch them brutalize me. They nearly trampled her in their haste to get out of range. They sounded as if they were trying to yodel. I laughed, hurled the putter well out of the colony, and drove away from there.

  Back in the muted silence of the big room at the Apache, Dana slept on. Remembering that the Apache food service would be closed, I had stopped at an implausible delicatessen in town. I turned more lights on. I unsacked my purchases, pried the top off the beef stew with noodles. It was still steaming. I carried it over and sat on the floor beside the bed and wafted it back and forth in front of her face. Her nose twitched, twitched again. Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She focused on me. She gave a great start.

  “Hey!” she said. “Hey now!” She gave a great creaking, stretching, shuddering yawn and then reached for the container. She hitched herself up, arranged the pillows, tucked the sheet around her, under her arms, and lifted a huge plastic forkful into the greedy waiting mouth. “Oh!” she said. “Oh my God, Trav, nothing has ever tasted like this.”

  I moved a small table close to her elbow, brought over the garlic dills, the hot tea and the strawberry cheesecake. I sat on the foot of the bed, admiring her. When the edge of hunger began to be eased, she began to be uncomfortable.

  “Did you eat?” she asked.

  “Like a wolf.”

  She poked at her tangled hair. “I’m a mess, I bet.”

  Her dark vital eyes were puffy, shadowed with fatigue. Her lips were swollen, pale without lipstick. There was a long scratch on her throat, three oval blue smudges on the front of her left shoulder, where my fingers had bruised her.

  “You look just fine, Dana.”

  Her face got pink. She would not look directly at me. “I bet. Uh … what time is it?”

  “Twenty of one.”

  She said she would finish the cheesecake later. She asked me to please turn my back. She lugged our suitcase into the bathroom. I heard her take a quick shower. In a little while after the water stopped, she came shyly out, hair brushed, mouth made up, and she was wearing a little blue hip-length nightgown, diaphanous, with lace at throat and hem. Rather than making any attempt to model it, she scuttled for the bed in a knock-kneed half-run, slightly hunched over. She piled in, covered herself and said, blushing furiously, “It isn’t exactly what I thought I was buying.”

  I laughed at her. She frowned part way through the cheesecake and then managed a timid smile, a direct but fleeting glance. “I’m not used to this sort of situation, Trav. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Nobody else is.”

  She swallowed and looked pained. “I was so … I don’t know what you must th.… I never … Oh hell, anyway!”

  “Stop fussing. So it’s a new relationship. We are something to each other we weren’t before. And took a risk. You know that. Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after. And, coming back here to you after where I’ve been makes us seem like the innocence of angels.”

  She showed her concern. “What happened, dear?”

  The cheesecake and tea were long gone by the time I finished with the facts and the speculations.

  She looked dubious. “It seems like an awful lot of guessing.” I went through it once more, in précis form. “What do we know about M’Gruder? He is feisty, rich, ruthless and stingy. And, with no occupation, he is highly mobile. He’s brown and fit and damned callous. Okay, as the purchaser of a service, he got into direct contact with Ives. Ives, seeing a golden opportunity, recognizing Lysa, took all the pictures he could get, hundreds of them, knowing he could crop and enlarge to exhibit every relationship that went on during those four days. Assume that when M’Gruder learned where the party was going to be, he got to a phone and alerted his hired photographer. We know one thing about Ives. He was greedy. He did his job for M’Gruder and got his fee. He collected big from Lysa Dean. He took a hack at the Abbott money and struck out, because Nancy was past protecting.

  “Now we have to guess. M’Gruder was hot to marry the young Atlund girl. Her professor father disapproved. M’Gruder won him over. I think that with a Swedish girl’s traditional respect for parental authority, the professor had to be won over or there would have been no marriage. I think Ives made the mistake of trying to blackmail a previous client, someone who knew who he was and where to find him. The timing fits. Ives threatened to show Professor Atlund the terrace pictures featuring M’Gruder. Anything that rancid would have bitched the marriage forever. The professor would not have his dear girl marrying a libertine like that. Ives did not think M’Gruder dangerous. Maybe he underestimated his stinginess. M’Gruder followed him, saw a good opportunity, and smashed the top of his head in. A couple of weeks later he married his Ulka.

  “Take it a step further. We have to assume that Patty M’Gruder learned the name of the photographer from Vance. He would delight in telling her how smart he had been, how cleverly he had cut her loose from the M’Gruder money. He would want to rub h
er nose in it. He would have to hate her. He is a very virile type, and it would be an outrage to his pride to realize his English wife had merely pretended pleasure with him, and actually preferred girls. Patty got a letter from somebody. Gossip, perhaps. Vance’s child bride and the problem with the professor. It started her thinking. She had known of Ives’ death. She knew Vance. She knew him damned well, and how his mind operated, and his capacity for violence. Somehow, checking this out by phone, she became convinced Vance had done in Ives. So she sent a letter to Vance. It would be a very veiled hint. Come through with the money you cheated me out of, boy, or the Santa Rosita police are going to take an interest in you. Words to that effect. He couldn’t risk that. I’d say he’d write back something about planning to be in Phoenix and be willing to discuss her financial situation at that time. She would realize she had struck gold. Now he could not risk being publicly in Las Vegas. When women die, they check out their ex-husbands. I say he set up a good solid alibi in Phoenix, and came over here last night and killed her. He smashed the top of her head in. He would imagine he had no other choice. She hated him as much as he hated her. She would show no mercy. She would bleed him forever.”

  She thought it over. “I guess it does make sense. But, Trav, is it our problem? Isn’t Samuel Bogen our problem, really?”