Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  Nudenbarger shook his head slowly. "Now, that one is really something, I swear to God! Al, I'll just never forget how she looked that time last spring she was missing for two days, and those three Telaferro brothers had kept her the whole time in that little bitty storeroom out to the truck depot, keeping her boozed up and bangin' that poor flippy woman day and night until I swear she was so plain wore-down pooped that Mike and Sandy had to use a stretcher to tote her out to--"

  "Shut your goddamn mouth, Lew!" Stanger roared.

  Nudenbarger stared blankly at him. "Now what in the world is eating you, anyway."

  "Go out and check in and see if there's anything new and if there is, come get me, and if there isn't, stay the hell out there in the car!"

  "Sure. Okay."

  After the door had closed gently behind the younger man, Stanger sighed and sat down and felt around in the side pocket of his jacket and found a half cigar and lit the ash end thoroughly and carefully. "Mr. Tom Pike should send that wife off someplace. Or watch her a little more close. She's going to go out some night and meet up with some bug who'll maybe kill her."

  "Before she kills herself?"

  "Seems like if a man has good luck in one direction, McGee, it runs real bad some other way. When she lost the second kid, something went wrong in her head. I say it would be a blessing if she had made a good job of it when she tried. Mr. McGee, I think it would be a good thing if you stayed right in town for a few days."

  "I want to help if I can. I didn't know Penny Woertz very long. But... I liked her a lot."

  He pulled on the cigar. "Amateur help? Run around in circles and get everything all confused?"

  "Let's just say it wouldn't be quite as amateur as the help you're running around with right now, Stanger."

  "It like to broke Lew's heart when they picked him off his motor-sickel and give him to me. What you might do, if it wouldn't put you out any, is see if Rick Holton made the trip he said he made. It's unhealthy for me to check up on a man in Holton's position. I think maybe Janice Holton would be easy to talk with, easier for you than me."

  Once again I remembered Harry Simmons, and I said, "If she phones you to check on me, confirm the fact that I'm an insurance investigator looking into a death claim on Dr. Sherman."

  "Going to her instead of to Holton himself?"

  "Just to see if she thinks he's sincere in believing it was murder or if he's been faking it in order to snuggle up to Nurse Woertz."

  He whistled softly. "You could lose some hide off your face."

  "Depending on how I work up to it."

  "If they'd both been in town, both Rick Holton and his wife, and they weren't together, I'd want to make sure I knew where she was at the time that girl got stuck with the shears."

  "She capable of it?"

  He stood up. "Who knows what anybody will do or won't do, when the moon is right? All I know is that she was Janice Nocera before she married the lawyer, and her folks have always had a habit of taking care of their own problems in their own way."

  I remembered the pictures of her and the kids, the ones I had taken out of Holton's wallet. Handsome, lean, dark, with a mop of black hair and more than her share of both nose and mouth, and a jaunty defiance in the way she stared smiling into the lens.

  "And I'll be checking you out a little more too," he said, and gave me a small, tired smile and went out.

  10

  PAGE ONE of the Fort Courtney Sunday Register bannered LOCAL NURSE SLAIN. They had a sunshiny smiling picture of her that pinched my heart in a sly and painful way.

  Very few facts had been furnished by the law-just the way the body had been discovered, the murder weapon, and the estimated time of death. As usual, an arrest was expected momentarily.

  It was almost noon on Sunday when I phoned Biddy. She sounded tired and listless. She said Tom had flown up to Atlanta for a business meeting and would be home, he thought, by about midnight. Yes, it was a terrible thing about Penny Woertz. She had always been so obliging and helpful when Maurie had been Dr. Sherman's patient. Such a really marvelous disposition, never snippy or officious.

  "Suppose I come out there and see if I can cheer you up, girl?"

  "With songs and jokes and parlor tricks? I don't think anything would work today. But... come along if you want to."

  I pressed the door chime button three times before she finally came to the door and let me in.

  "Sorry to keep you standing out here, Trav. I was putting her back to sleep."

  She led the way back into the big living room, long-legged in yellow denim shorts with brass buttons on the hip pockets, and a faded blue short-sleeved work shirt. She had piled her long straight blond hair atop her head and anchored it in place with a yellow comb, but casual tendrils escaped, and when she turned and gave me a crooked smile of self-mockery, she brushed some silky strands away from her forehead with her fingertips. "I'm the total mess of the month, Travis. Would you like a drink? Bloody Mary? Gin and tonic? Beer?"

  "What are you having?"

  "Maybe a Bloody would be therapeutic. Want to come help?"

  The big kitchen was bright and cheerful, decorated in blue and white. The windows looked across the back lawn toward the lake.

  She got out the ice and ingredients and I made them. She leaned against the countertop, ankles crossed, sipped and said, "If I suddenly fall on my face, don't be alarmed. I did a damfool thing last night after we got her settled down. I had to get my mind off... everything and I went out to the boathouse and painted a fool thing I'll probably paint out. It was five before I went to bed and Tom woke me up at eight when he left."

  "Can I have a look at it?"

  "Well... why not? But it isn't anything like what I usually do."

  We carried our drinks. There was an outside staircase to the big room over the boathouse, which she had fixed up as a studio. A window air-conditioner was humming. She turned on a second one, then went over and turned on an intercom and turned the volume up until I could hear a slow rhythmic sound I suddenly identified as the deep and somewhat guttural breathing of someone in deep sleep.

  She said, "Maurie can't wake up, actually, but I just feel better if I can hear her." The studio had a composite smell of pigments and oils and thinner. The work stacked against the walls and the few that were hung were semi-abstract. Obviously she had taken her themes from nature, from stones, earth, bark, leaves. The colors were powerful. Some of the areas were almost representational.

  She waved toward them. "These are the usual me. Kind of old hat. No op and pop. No structures and lumps and walk-throughs."

  "But," I said, "one hell of a lot of overpainting and glazes, so you can see down into those colors."

  She looked surprised and pleased. "Member of the club?"

  "Hell, woman, I even know the trick words that mean absolutely nothing. Like dynamic symmetry."

  "Tonal integrity?"

  "Sure. Structural perceptions. Compositionally iconoclastic."

  She laughed aloud and it was a good laugh. "It's such terrible crap, isn't it? The language of gallery people and critics, and insecure painters. What are your words, Professor McGee?"

  "Does a painting always look the same or will it change according to the light and how I happen to feel? And after it has been hung for a month, will it disappear so completely the only time I might notice it would be if it fell off the wall?"

  She nodded thoughtfully. "So I'll buy that. Anyway... I seldom do the figure. But here is my night work."

  It was on an easel, a horizontal rectangle, maybe thirty inches by four feet. At dead center was a small clearing, a naked female figure sitting, jackknifed, huddled, arms around her legs, face buried against her knees, blond hair spilling down. Around her was angry jungle, slashes of sharp spears of leaf, vine tangle, visceral roots, hints of black water, fleshy tropic blooms against black-green. It had a flavor of great silence, stillness, waiting.

  We studied it and could hear the deep sonorous breathi
ng of the sleeping sister. Biddy coughed, sipped her drink, said, "I think it's too dramatic and sentimental and... narrative."

  "I say let it sit. You'll know more about it later."

  She put her drink down, lifted it off the easel, and placed it against the wall, the back of the canvas toward the room. She backed off. "Where I can't see it, I guess."

  She showed me more of her work and then she turned the intercom off and one of the air-conditioners. We walked back to the house. "Another drink and maybe a sandwich?"

  "On one condition."

  "Such as?"

  "Quick drink and simple sandwich and then you go fall into the sack. I am reliable, dependable, conscientious, and so on. If you're needed for anything, I'll wake you up."

  "I couldn't let you do--"

  "Hot shower, clean sheets, blinds closed, and McGee taking care."

  She covered her yawn with the back of her fist. "Bless you, bless you. I'm sold."

  After we ate, she led me upstairs and down the carpeted hallway to Maureen's room. Maureen slept on her back in the middle of a double bed. The room was air-conditioned to coolness. She wore a quilted bed jacket. The sheets and pillowcases were blue with a white flower pattern. The blanket was a darker blue. Her face and throat were puffed, red-blotched. There was a mixture of small odors in the silence, calamine and rubbing alcohol and perfume. Flavors of illness and of girl. She wore opaque sleep-glasses in spite of the room being darkened.

  Biddy startled me by speaking in a normal conversational tone. "I'm going to keep her asleep until at least six o'clock. Oh, she can't hear us. Not while the Dormed is on."

  As she took me over to the bed to show me what she meant, I saw the small electric cord that led from the heavy pair of glasses to a piece of equipment on the bedside stand. It looked like a small ham radio receiver. There were three dials. A tiny orange light winked constantly. She explained that it was an electrosleep device invented in Germany and distributed in England and the United States by one of the medical supply houses. There were electrodes in the headset, covered with a foam plastic, two which rested on the eyelids, and one at the end of each earpiece where they made contact with the mastoid bone behind each ear. She said that you moistened the foam rubber pads with a salt solution and put the headset on the patient. The control unit was a pulse generator that sent an extremely weak electrical impulse-in fact a thousand times weaker than the current a flashlight bulb requires-through the sleep centers in the thalamus and hypothalamus.

  "It's perfectly safe," she said. "It's been used on thousands and thousands of patients. You just adjust the strength and the frequency with these two dials. The other is the on and off switch. Dr. Sherman got it for us and trained me in how to use it. You see, he was afraid of the side effects of making her sleep with medication, in her condition, whatever it is. We do have to give her shots when she gets too upset, but this is usually enough."

  "What does it feel like?"

  "Very... odd. No discomfort at all. All I felt was a kind of flickering in my eyes. Not unpleasant, really. I was trying to fight it. I was telling myself that this certainly wouldn't put me to sleep. And then there wasn't the flickering sensation anymore, and kind of... a slow warm delicious feeling all over me, like sinking slowly in a hot sudsy perfumed tub. And I was gone! It is marvelous sleep, really. Deep and sweet and refreshing. Once she's asleep, you can take them off and the Dormed sleep will just turn into absolutely natural sleep. Or like now, I'm leaving it on at very low strength, and she will sleep on and on until I take them off. You could parade a brass band through here, and she'd sleep like a baby. It's a marvelous invention. It's a portable unit, with a neat little gray suitcase thing it fits into, with a place for the salt solution and all."

  "Is there anything I have to do about it while you sleep?"

  "Nothing. Well... what I do isn't necessary. I just come in and look at her and see if that little light is going on and off. It hasn't ever stopped or anything. And only once did she ever move her head enough to move the headset out of place."

  "But you'd feel better if I did the same thing?"

  "I guess so. Yes."

  "Off with you, then."

  We went into the hall and she pointed out her door. "Just knock until I answer. Don't settle for a mumble. Get a real answer." She looked at her watch. "And don't let me sleep past five o'clock. Okay?"

  "Five o'clock."

  "If you get hungry or thirsty or anything--"

  "I know where things are. Bug off, Bridget. Sleep tight."

  In thirty minutes the house was filled with that special silence of Sunday sleep. Little relays and servo devices made faint tickings and hummings. Refrigerator, deep freeze, air-conditioning, thermostats, electric clocks. Kids water-skied the lake, outboards droning, a faint sound through the closed windows.

  Where do you look when you have no idea what you are looking for? An alcove off the living room apparently served as a small home office for Tom Pike. The top of the antique desk was clean. The drawers were locked, and the locks were splendid modern intricate devices, un-pickable, except in television drama. On a hallway phone table I found a black and white photograph in a silver frame. Helena, Maureen, and Bridget on the foredeck of the Likely Lady. Boat clothes, sweaters for cool sailing. Mick Pearson's girls, all slender, smiling, assured, and with the loving look that could only mean that it had been Mick's eye at the finder, Mick's finger on the shutter release.

  So roam the silence and up the padded stairs, long slow steps, two at a time. A closed door at the back of the house, unlocked, opening into a master bedroom. Draperied window-wall facing the lake. One end was sitting room, fireplace, bookshelves. An oversized custom bed dominated the other end. It seemed too sybaritic, a bit out of key with the rest of the house. Two baths, two dressing rooms. His and hers. Sunken dark blue tub in hers, square, with clear glass in the shower-stall arrangement. Strategic mirroring there, as on the walls nearest the oversized bed.

  The big bed was neatly made, so on Sunday, at least, Biddy was maid, cook, and housekeeper. Maureen's bath had been cleared of the daily personal things. Winter clothing in her dressing room closets. Bottles of perfume and lotion on her dressing table just a little bit dusty. But he lived here, very neatly. Sport shirts here, dress shirts there. Jackets, slacks on one bar. Suits hanging from another. The shoe-treed shoes on a built-in rack. Silk, cashmere, linen, Irish tweed, English wool, Italian shoes. Labeling from Worth Avenue, New York, St. Thomas, Palm Springs, Montreal. Taste, cost, and quality. Impersonal, remote, correct, and somehow sterile. Apparently no sentiment about an ancient sweater, crumpled old moccasins, baggy elderly slacks, or a gummy old bathrobe. When anything showed enough evident signs of wear, it was eliminated.

  I searched for more clues to him. Apparently he did not have anything wrong with him that could not be fixed by an aspirin or an Alka Seltzer. He did not leave random notes to himself in the pockets of his suits and jackets. He did not seem to have a single hobby or a weapon or a book not devoted to economics, law, securities, or real estate.

  So I gave up on Tom Pike and walked quietly down the hall and into Maureen's room. The deep breathing was just the same. She had not moved. The little orange light on the face of the control unit of the Dormed went off and on as before. I went to the side of the bed. Her arms rested at her sides, atop the blanket. I cautiously picked her left hand up. It was warm and dry, and complete relaxation gave it a heaviness, like the hand of a fresh corpse. The back of the hand was scratched, and welted with insect bites. I turned the inside of the wrist toward what light there was and, bending close to it, I could make out the white line of scar tissue across the pattern of the blue veins under the sensitive skin. I placed the hand the way it had been and looked down at her. The heavy glasses made her look as if both eyes had been bandaged. I could see the slow, steady beat of a tiny pulse in her throat. Even welted and mottled, dappled with the dry orange-white spots of lotion, she was a cushioned and luxurious and sweet
ly sensuous animal.