The Quick Red Fox

by John D. MacDonald

  It was such a fabulous con job, I could feel the dirty dreams seeping into my mind. Help her cover up the mistakes she’d made. That was the unspoken offer. And you get the girl on a platter. Mmmm … trade the Busted Flush for a really good motor sailer, crew of three—captain, steward, deck hand—and see how many sheltered coves in the world’s oceans had really top-grade moonlight. And, of course, remember never to turn your back to her …

  “Ullie, dear, we can’t get onto a new subject until we finish the first one. I repeat your interesting statement. ‘When I found him I could not lose him.’ But he finally worked himself into a position where you had to lose him. I knew he was prying at you to find out where you’d gone, and I wondered why he thought you’d gone anywhere. Then Glenn told me about Vance thinking he might buy the car. Men who think of buying cars kick the tires and slam the doors and check the mileage. So he checked the mileage, and then he checked it again and found a great big inexplicable addition, taking it up to past two thousand. He hadn’t put it on, so you had, and Patty was dead in the same way Ives was dead, and he found himself in a pretty eerie marriage. I’ll make a little guess, Ullie. From the way he acted this morning, I don’t think he got much sleep. I think he kept digging at you until you opened up and told him the whole thing. Then after you told him, you realized he couldn’t exactly forgive and forget. He couldn’t handle it. It was too much. Maybe he felt so wretched he didn’t want to take any morning ride, but you knew that sooner or later you could maneuver it so that all the rest of us would be ahead of you two.”

  “Could I be such a monster, darling? Could you believe that of me, really?”

  That narrow leather pouchpurse was in the chaise beside her hip. She made a futile grab for it as I took it quickly. It was new. I examined it and found a little area still moist near the bottom seam. The leather thongs were long and sturdy. Holding it by the thongs, I felt the deadly heft and balance of it. It was like a sock with a rock in the toe. It was a skull smasher, wicked as a medieval flail. I opened the pouch top, reached in and fumbled past lipstick, little comb, cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a rabbit. It was carved of some dense gray stone, sitting hunched, ears laid back, crude, a lump about two-thirds the size of a baseball.

  “There is the leg work with the gas stations, and there are the miracles of modern chemistry, Ullie. The tiny little blotch of blood on this, with maybe a sweet little tuft of hubby’s hair stuck thereon, scrubbed off nicely right there in Joanne’s bathroom. But a police lab can prove it was human blood hereon, though they can’t type it. And they can dismantle the plumbing and find traces in the drain in there. I imagine that after Ives and Patty you disposed of the bags. They’d have been a lot messier.”

  “That’s a very old bunny,” she said. “It’s primitive folk art from Iceland.”

  “Ullie, a good enough lawyer might be able to plead you sick and buy the experts to back him up. Age would be a consideration, of course. And beauty. Maybe you are sick. I don’t know. Perhaps it is just an egoism so intense other people don’t seem quite real to you. Murder wouldn’t seem real then either, I suppose.”

  She tilted her head. “Vance cried and cried. He hugged me and said he would get me the best.…” She stopped, gnawed her thumb knuckle, looked at me in a speculative way. The admission had been made, and I could not tell if it was inadvertent, or meant to look inadvertent. “You can understand, Travis. There’s such a thing as thinking of the best for everybody concerned. I’d very much like to have you take me home to Father. I know you would like each other, very much. He is very old-fashioned, you know. He would want me to wait a year. Waiting isn’t too hard, is it, when you’re sure?”

  I bounced the bunny in the palm of my hand, dropped it back into the lethal sack, yanked the drawstring tight. I could not even tell if she knew what a desperate game she was playing. She sat up, reached and closed her warm strong hand around my wrist. I was planning the words to tell her I was blowing the whistle when I heard the door behind me open slowly. I realized, as I turned, I had spent a long time with the bereaved widow, and Dana might be having problems keeping people out.

  Dana stared in at us from the doorway. “Joanne has to …”

  “I’m through here, honey,” I said. “Tell Glenn to phone the law. This eerie child killed all three of them, and she made so many mistakes it won’t be hard to …”

  I had made the elementary mistake of taking my eyes off Ulka. When the pouch bag was ripped out of my hand, I did not bother to turn around and see what she was going to do with it. I dived to my left, away from the chaise, but bunny-rabbit still glanced off my skull and came down onto my shoulder, smashing the collarbone. I sprawled on the floor, with my ears roaring and with lights spangling my vision, absolutely unable to avoid a second and mortal crunching if she had taken time. But a vagueness moved past me with tiger pace, and I made a stifled whimper which was supposed to be a roar of warning to Dana. As vision cleared, as I got onto my knees, I saw Dana go down flat and heavy and hopelessly limp, onto her face. I heard a distant shout of query and alarm. I began the slow crawl toward my woman.

  Fifteen

  I had a pretty fair concussion, just enough so that I had blackouts, and they kept shining lights into my eyes, testing my reflexes, and giving me mental arithmetic to solve. My right arm, taped across my chest, felt leaden, and the smashed bone caused enough pain to keep them sticking needles into me. It made me groggy, and I kept asking about Dana. Miss Holtzer is in surgery. Miss Holtzer is still in surgery. Miss Holtzer is in the recovery room.

  Then it was Sunday morning and I was told that Miss Holtzer was doing as well as could be expected. It is a dim phrase. Who sets up the expectations?

  Glenn Barnweather arrived with a big solemn face, a hundred sighs, a sad shaking of the head, a rich smell of bourbon to tell me Ulka was dead. I already knew that, but I didn’t know how.

  “She took off in the Corvette, northeast out 65 like a goddam road race, and they still can’t figure how she got past as many curves as she did. They put a roadblock up there in the straight, way beyond Sunflower, one car blocking the road, and she came down on it at, they estimate, a hundred and thirty or better. Tried to cut around it. Hit the gravel, skidded, hit a rock, went two hundred and fifty feet through the air, hit and bounced and went over a rim and down a thousand-foot slope, bouncing all the way, and the final couple of hundred feet on fire. Like you told the cops, McGee, she must have been crazed with grief. That’s right, isn’t it? Crazed with grief.”

  “Out of her head completely. Maniacal strength. You’ve heard of that.”

  “I’ve heard of that. And Diana Hollis turns into Dana Holtzer. What goes on, old buddy?”

  “We have to try to protect a lady’s reputation, don’t we?”

  “Oh, sure. Hell, what you do is your own business, I guess, but Jo is going to come in here and really blow her stack.”

  “I guess she checked with the Divers.”

  “And Mary West, who wouldn’t tell her a damned thing. So she’s steaming.”

  “Glenn, how about you finding out just how Dana is. I would appreciate it very much.”

  “Glad to do anything for an old buddy who tells me every little thing,” he said. He came back in a half hour. “She’s one sick gal, Trav. They spent six hours picking little bits of bone out of the front of her brain, right here. And I find out she works for Lysa Dean. That’s going to intrigue hell out of Jo. They say Dana’s going to be okay.” He stood up. “You’ll be able to see her by tomorrow.”

  More officials visited me. I told my tale of hysterical violence again, the young bride crazed by her terrible loss.

  Joanne came in. She was furious. After fifteen minutes she was merely resentful, reluctantly accepting the fact there must be some good reason why she’d never find out all she wanted to know. She was decent enough to do some errands for me, like telling The Hallmark to save the room for me, like getting a phone put in, like getting a resident neuros
urgeon to come in and give me some straight answers on Dana. He said she should take two months’ rest and recuperation before going back to work. I had passed my tests and would be released Monday, unless I acquired some new symptoms. He said not to worry about how she’d act on Monday when I could see her for a few minutes. She would be dazed and semi-conscious still, and might not know me.

  After he left I was planning to try to locate Lysa Dean, but she phoned me, putting one very nervous quaver in the switchboard operator’s voice. Lysa was terribly dramatic and terribly concerned about everything, full of elaborate reassurances about hospital bills—but shrewd enough to play the whole thing as though I was Dana’s dear friend who had accompanied her on her little vacation. She said she and her whole entourage would stop off on the way back to the Coast, but she couldn’t be sure exactly when they could manage it.

  On Monday I got dressed and paid my bill and had five minutes with Dana. She was in an adhesive turban, face bloated, shiny, streaked with bruise marks, slits revealing dazed eyes, mouth cracked and puffy. She seemed to know me. She squeezed my hand. I could not understand her mumblings. The nurse stood by and called time on me and sent me away. I moved back into The Hallmark. On Tuesday I saw her three times, morning, afternoon, evening, ten minutes each time. She knew me, and her diction was better, but she was unaware of what had happened to her and seemed in no hurry to find out. She had a tendency to drop off and start snoring in the middle of a vague remark, but she did like her hand held.

  At midnight on Tuesday I was awakened by a phone call from an abjectly apologetic fellow telling me that Lysa Dean was in residence at the best hotel in town, and wanted to see me right away. I told him to tell Lysa Dean to go emote up a rope and hung up. I picked up my phone and told The Hallmark switchboard to leave me in peace until nine the next morning. The pinned bone made dressing too much of a problem. If she wanted me, she knew where I was.

  Just as I got back to sleep, forty minutes later, there was a brisk knock at my door. Muttering various Anglo-Saxon expressions, I got up and adjusted my sling and went in my shorts to the door. A portly chap in a black suit entered, followed by a Hallmark porter carrying the luggage which Dana and I had checked on to New York and couldn’t retrieve in time.

  “I’m Herm Louker,” he said with an air of imparting information any fool would know. When I looked blank he said, “From the agency.” It was supposed to explain everything.

  He dipped two fingers into a breast pocket, pulled out two crisp dollars, crackled them very loudly as he handed them to the porter.

  Herm looked somewhat like a penguin. He had the same walk. He wore a hairpiece, with a deep wave. His eyes were cigar holes in a hotel towel. He had gold jewelry. He settled himself into a chair, sliced the end off a cigar with a gold knife, lit it with a gold lighter.

  “Let me make myself entirely clear, Mr. McGee. The client’s interest is my interest. Aside from loving that little woman personally, because she is all doll, through and through, what I got in my mind is a maximum protection of her interests and mine and the industry’s.” He held up a fat warning hand. “In addition to that, before we go further, I’ve got also a nervous stomach, and I want to know no more than I already know. I have been with her in Miami, New York and Chicago, and she was a great little trouper, performing in every way. They love that girl all over America. She is all star.”

  “So I’d better know how much you know.”

  “Merely that there has been, we shall say, an indiscretion. Show business people, Mr. McGee, are high-spirited and hot-blooded, and some people can take advantage. What we have going is an unfortunate situation where some character wants to give her a rough time. What the little lady feels is that after you started to perform, then you went off on a tangent. Time has been wasted. We got certain information from you in New York. One Samuel Bogen wanted already by the cops. There is no picture. Fingerprints only. A complete description which could be ninety-five thousand guys including me, almost. So we laid on special guards with that description in mind. Nothing in New York. Nothing in Chicago. No contact. As I get it, certain financial inducements were offered. Our star gets nervous, Mr. McGee. What we need now is some way to bring this to a head. If you can solve that, the little lady says she will live up to her end of your deal. I do not want to know your deal, believe me.”

  “I had one idea worked out.”

  “So?”

  “I wanted to be part of it. I’m not in top shape at the moment.”

  “So I see.”

  “It depends on several things. Could you set up a time for her arrival at Los Angeles by air and give it a lot of publicity around Los Angeles?”

  “But naturally. It’s done every day.”

  “The man who is after her is disturbed. I think that except for one trip to Vegas, he’s stayed in the Los Angeles area. He might come to the airport. He might be waiting at her house. He may want money. He may want to kill her. He might not even know which he wants.”

  “Please. It gives me cramps.”

  “You have to know a few things, Mr. Louker. We don’t want to endanger your star. You could arrange a reasonably good facsimile?”

  “The right size, right dye job, right clothes, dark glasses, makeup, a quick study in the way she waves and walks. Sure. Ten minutes on the phone I’ve got one, believe me.”

  “But she gets maximum protection too.”

  “I would insist.”

  “Now here is the delicate point, Mr. Louker. If this Bogen is picked up, the cops are going to know the name he is using and the address he is using in about three minutes. Somebody has to be ready to move very quickly. At that address are going to be some things which should be destroyed, or maybe your star’s career goes down the drain. Somebody has to be smart and quick.”

  “Are you going to give me more cramps?”

  “Photographs, Herm. Of your star in a circus. A mob scene. If they got out it might not dent her too badly as long as she stays big at the box office. But two dog pictures in a row could cook her.”

  He got up and tiptoed about, patting his stomach, moaning softly. There was a lot of stomach. It started under his chin and descended in a long penguin curve to his knees.

  “How can we get the pictures?” he demanded, more of himself than of me.

  “Get a very nimble lawyer, and charge Bogen with stealing them from her. Get them impounded for her identification, then returned to her for destruction, and give him some impressive pieces of cash to hand out if he has to. Hell, you people have given out little gifts other times.”

  He studied me. “I know you from someplace, maybe? Like in Rome with Manny?”

  “No.”

  “It will come to me. We’ll work it out somehow.” He took a wad of currency out and counted out a thousand dollars. “She said expenses. You can sign the receipt okay?”

  I managed. He wished me well and left, looking gastric.

  Dana wasn’t very responsive the next morning. After I left her room the head nurse on the floor intercepted me. She was wearing a curious expression, as if she had just discovered that if she flapped her arms hard enough, she could fly.

  “Lysa Dean came to see her.”

  “Was she conscious then?”

  “Oh no. Miss Dean was very shocked. She was very upset. I think she has a very warm heart.”

  “She must have.”

  “She left this for you, sir.”

  I opened it with one hand on my way down the hall. Heavy blue paper, scented. Sprawling backhand in blue ink. “I must see you. Please. L.”

  The cab took me there. The desk said sorry, she isn’t registered here, sir. I gave them my name. Oh. Go right up, sir. She has the west wing on the fourth floor. A cop type guarded the wing. He glanced at the sling and spoke my last name with a question mark after it. Last door on the right, he said.

  She sat on a dressing table bench in a white robe. A man was saying rude words over a phone. A thin man was fixing her hair.
A girl in glasses was reading her a script aloud in a nasal monotonous voice. She shooed them all out.

  “Dear McGee,” she said. “Your poor arm, dear. Oh my God, the way Dana looked. It broke my heart. It really did. I actually wept.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Please don’t be sullen. We’re going to do what you suggested to Herm. They’re going to fly a girl in. I’m going to hide out here like a thief, dear. God, things are going to get into the damnedest mess without Dana. They’re going to pot already. How could she?”

  “I guess it was just thoughtlessness.”

  She studied me, head cocked on the side. Then she laughed aloud. “Oh, no! Really? But when I kidded you in Miami, I never really thought you could actually get her. You must be very damned …”

  “You would be doing me one of the world’s greatest favors to please shut your mouth, Lee. There’s been a lot of dying done. My shoulder aches. Dana is worth ten of you.”