Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  He sat in moody silence until I said, "It seems to be tied in to the death of Doctor Sherman."

  "Please don't tell me that. I've got a file on him that you can't hardly lift. And there's nothing to go on."

  "Maybe Penny Woertz had some casual little piece of information and she didn't know it was important."

  "You're reaching, McGee."

  "Maybe she'd even told it to Rick Holton and it didn't mean anything to him either, yet. If somebody could play on his jealousy and get him to shoot me after she'd been killed, that puts the two of them out of circulation. Maybe Helen Boughmer knows something too, but somebody has done such a good job of closing her mouth, I don't think she'll be any good to you."

  "Thanks. You try to give me a motive for one murder by hooking it up to another one last July. I am going to keep right on thinking the doc injected himself in the arm."

  "Got any reason why he did that?"

  "Conscience."

  "Had he been a bad boy?"

  "Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn't do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor's life pure hell on earth. Damn voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn't let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died."

  "He arrange it?"

  Stanger shrugged. "If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn't miss a trick."

  "Want me to beg? Okay. I'm begging."

  "Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of groveland. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She'd had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he'd better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He'd pick up a month's supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needlemark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn't forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn't much point in it. I don't remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren't any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn't enough. Also, they'd had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it."

  After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smartass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.

  It pleased him. "He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?"

  "Lovely. And doesn't leave you anyplace to go."

  "It's the reason I was willing to lean a little bit toward suicide. Stew Sherman was a pretty right guy. And killing is sort of against everything a doctor learns in school and in his practice."

  "And what if somebody else figured it out too and trapped the doctor somehow into admitting it?"

  "Strengthens the suicide solution."

  "Sure does."

  "And I couldn't come up with a single motive for murder. His dying didn't benefit anybody in any way, McGee."

  "Right back where we started?"

  "I don't know. Sure like to know why that Boughmer girl changed her mind so fast. Or who changed it for her. Isn't she one sorry thing though? Just imagine what she'd look like if you stripped her down to the buff."

  "Please, Al."

  He chuckled. "When I was little, we had a scrawny little old female cat out at the place. Had some Persian in her, so she looked pretty good. Picked up some kind of mange one spring, and in maybe ten days every last living hair fell off that poor beast. Honest to God, you'd look at her and you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. McGee, now I know that Helen is a sad, ugly, nervous woman, and I'm ashamed of myself, but if I can get to her when her mother can't pull out of the line and block for her, I think I could scare that Helen so bad she just wouldn't know what in the world she was telling me. Suppose I just do that. Tomorrow, if I can. What are you figuring on doing?"

  "I might try to have a talk with Janice Holton and see if I guessed right about the boyfriend."

  "So what if you did?"

  "It will prove it wasn't somebody else instead of Tom Pike. So we can mark that part of the file closed."

  "Anything else?"

  "Find out if I can why Hardahee brushed me off."

  "If he doesn't want to see you, you're not going to see him."

  "I can give it a try. By the way, how are your contacts in Southtown?"

  "As good as anybody's, which doesn't mean much. You think there's some Negra mixed up in this mess?"

  "No. But Southtown supplies this city with cooks and maids and housekeepers and yard men. Waiters, waitresses, all kinds of manual labor. There can't be much going on among the white middle classes that they don't know about."

  "You know, I think about that a lot. If I could ever tap that source, I think I'd have fifty percent of my job licked. They hear a hell of a lot, see a lot, and guess the rest. Sometimes I get a little help. But not lately. Sure God not lately. Those movies that have Southren law officers in them give us a pretty bad smell, regardless of how you handle yourself. I try to level with them, but shit, they know as well as I do there's two kinds of law here, two kinds of law practically everyplace. One of them kills a white man, they open the book to a different place from where a white man kills a Negra. Rape is a different kind of word there in Southtown too. Put it this way. A neighborhood where you got lots of garbage collection, good pavement, good water, good mail service, good streetlights, nice parks and playgrounds, rap
e and murder are great big dirty ugly scary words. Sorry, friend. None of them are on my side and I can't think of a way to change it one bit."

  It was late. We had talked a long tune. He leaned and rubbed the final sodden inch of cigar out in the glass motel ashtray. We were quiet. He was a strange one, I thought. A man softened and souring in his years, looking used up, but he wasn't. There are many kinds of cop. This one was a good kind. Flavor of cynical tolerance, grasp of all the unchanging human motivations, respect for the rules and procedures of cop work.

  He laughed softly. "Just thinking about Southtown, one Christmastime long back. Maybe nineteen forty-eight, forty-nine. I'd been three years in the paratroopers, so I got appointed Sanny Claus by the City Council, jump into the park a day or two before Christmas, and the toys would come down on the next swing around, in a cargo chute. Kids swarming all over."

  It gave me a grotesque mental picture of Santa Stanger lifting some little blond supplicant onto his red velvet knee, and with one Ho Ho Ho of that venomous breath turning her crisp and sere as a little autumn leaf.

  "One year Sid dropped me too damn high. Maybe seven thousand. Supposed to make it last longer. Wind started gusting strong and I tried to spill some air to get down far enough so I could use the shrouds to steer me into the park. But I could see right away I couldn't even come close. So I rode the wind and it carried me all the way to Southtown. Sid made his next swing around pretty low and dumped the chute with the toys upwind of the park and put them right where I was supposed to already be. But I was by then steering myself into a field right behind Lincoln School right in the heart of Southtown. Landed good and collapsed the chute and balled if up and slipped out of the harness, and then I looked around and standing around me in a big silent circle there's more dang colored kids than I ever seen in one place before. All big-eyed, just looking. There I am saying Merry Christmas! ! ! and saying Well, Well, Well! and saying You been good little boys and girls? and they just look. All of a sudden I can hear old Boyd coming to get me- he's been dead for years-with that siren on high scream all the way, the gusty wind blowing the sound of it around. Ten seconds later I could see just a few of those colored kids way in the distance, just the ones too little to run so fast, and twelve seconds later there wasn't a kid in sight, and I was all alone in that field when Boyd came showboating up to me, making a skid turn that stopped him where I could reach out and touch the door handle. Took me back to the park and I spread that sack of toys so fast they didn't get the pictures for the paper. They took a toy away from a pretty little girl and gave it to me to give back to her, so they got their picture, and that was the last time. The next year I said I had a bad ankle, and they didn't have anybody wanted to jump, so from then on they didn't do it anymore. I used to wonder what those little colored kids thought, hiding behind things and under things, and seeing the cop car pick up Sanny Claus. Maybe it didn't puzzle them at all, them thinking anybody can get arrested anytime."

  He stood up and yawned. "Be getting along."

  I walked out into the night with him and said, "Al, I have one little ice-cold patch on my back, the size of fifty cents, just under the left shoulderblade. It seems to happen when there are things I should know and don't know, and find out later."

  "With me, the back of my neck gets a kind of cool feel."

  "I didn't bring a handgun."

  He thought that over and said, "The check I ran on you, nobody said you were about to become a director of any kind of bank, but nobody could say you should have been busted if they'd had more evidence either. How do I know you wouldn't be a problem to yourself and anybody who happened to come along?"

  "You'd have to make a guess."

  He took me to his car and unlocked the trunk. He said, "You took this off Holton and gave it to his wife and told me and I took it off her, so we'll leave it that you took it off him and you'll get around to turning it in to me later on, because I haven't talked about it or filled out the forms yet, and not having to fill out forms is a blessing these days."

  "Remember, I phoned you about it and you said bring it in as soon as I had a chance?"

  "Remember clear as day, McGee." He watched me as I turned toward the light, swung the cylinder out and checked the full load, used the ejector to spill the six rounds into my hand, snapped the cylinder back, checked the knurled safety to be certain it would not fire either double action or with the hammer back while on safe, then dry-fired it four times into the turf, twice on double action, twice with hammer back, to check the amount of trigger pull and trigger play, swung the cylinder out, reloaded, put it on safe, and thrust it inside my shut and inside the waistband of my slacks, metal cool against the bellyflesh.

  He got into the car and drove away. I saw pink lightning, a pale competition for city neon, then heard deep, fumbling thunder, a hesitant counterpoint to the truck sounds. There was just a hint of rain freshness in the wind.

  Third tune I'd gotten my hands on this same.38. Forgive me, Miss Penny, for tricking you and then bad-mouthing you that first time to get it away from your lover. You see, I didn't know you then, knew nothing about your silly honest earnest heart. Who were you staring at when you fell to your knees on the kitchen floor, putting your hands in disbelief to the blue handle of the shears? Did you think it some monstrous mistake and wanted only a chance to explain? But no chance. Tumbled and bled and died. Always tripping, falling, hurting yourself. Freckled clumsy girl.

  Two portly tourists, male and female, she in a slack suit that matched his sport shirt, came plodding down the walk. They were in the floodlight pattern and did not see me in the shadows.

  She was speaking in a thin and suffering voice. "... but no, you can't stand it to have anybody think for one stinking minute that you aren't rolling in money and so you have to tip every grubby little waitress like she was some kind of queen bee, and all it is, Fred, is just currying favor, trying to be a big shot, just showing off with the money we both saved to take this vacation, but if you have your way, the way you throw it around, we'll have to go home--"

  "Shaddap!"

  "They laugh at you when you tip too much. They think you're a fool. You lose all respect when you--"

  "Shaddap!"

  She began again, but they were too far away from me to hear her words. The tune was the same, however.

  15

  UP EARLY ON Tuesday. Fifteenth day of October. Pull the cords and slide the draperies away, feel crisp pile of miracle motel rug under the toes. Wonder who the hell I am. That is the blessing of morning routines-soap, brush, towel, lather, paste, razor. Each morning you wake up a slightly different person. Not significantly. But the dreams and the sleep-time rearrange the patterns inside your head. So what you see in the mirror is almost all you, and three percent stranger. It takes the comfort of routine to fit yourself back into total familiarity.

  Even the little concerns are therapeutic. Does that tooth feel a little bit hollow? Seems like a lot of hair coming out. Little twinge in the shoulder when you move the arm just so. Sudden sideways unexpected glimpse in the mirrored door. Belly a little soft? Pat yourself, wash the hide, scrape the beard, brush teeth and hair. Little comforting attentions. Recognition symbols. Here I am. Now then. Me. The only me in existence.

  Came walking slowly back from breakfast, marveling at how this tidy prosperous community of Fort Courtney kept producing more and more unknowns, making all its secret equations ever more insoluble. The doctor's wife, slick little Dave Broon, Hardahee's change of attitude, the strangeness of Helen Boughmer, the whisperer, and all the other little fragments of this and that. The diffusion was too wide. No new fact, no sudden inspiration, was going to link everything together into any pattern I could understand. So find one chunk of it, break it down, find out all the why and the who and the what-for.

  There was a maid cart outside 109. The door was open. I went in and found Cathy doing the bathroom, Lorette Walker making up the bed.

  " `Mawnin', suh," they said. I sat in the
armchair and waited and watched. Brisk work, sidelong downcast glances, a kind of humble knowing arrogance. Two to a room, one of the classic defensive maneuvers of the Negro motel maids across twenty states, where, as an indigenous morning recreational device, they are, when young enough and handsome enough, fair game for paper salesman, touring musician, minor league ballplayer, golf pro, stock car driver, mutual fund salesman.