"Bullshit, McGee. Wanted to see if you handled yourself with any kind of sense at all. You do. Know why I'm talking to you about a patient... and the patient's family?"
"I guess you want to tell me why."
He brooded for a long tune, eyes half closed. "Trying to find the words for what she did for me. Even when there wasn't anything left of her but the pain and her eyes, I'd go sit by her bed when things went wrong for me, like when I lost a young one that I'd prayed I wouldn't lose. Dammit, I was borrowing guts from Helena Trescott. Leaning on her. We talked a lot, up until the tune I had to keep her too far under. One night she told me about a man named Travis McGee. She said that you might show up someday and you might ask a lot of questions. `Tell him how it was, Bill. Don't pretty it up. Trust him. Tell him what you know about my girls. I'm going to ask him to help Maureen, I think.' So, friend, she's the one who made it easy for you. Not your persuasive charm. Okay?"
"Okay. Thanks."
"So where were we?"
"The next thing I was going to try to do was to get you to give me your opinion of Doctor Sherman."
"Too bad about Stew. Good man. Vague spots here and there but generally solid. I mean in the medical knowledge sense. Damned fool about money, like most doctors. We're the prize pigeons of the modern world. Gold bricks, uranium mines in Uganda, you hold it up and we'll buy it."
"I understood he invested in Development Unlimited."
"Which may be as good as gold. The guys who have gone in swear by Tom Pike. Maybe they're getting rich. Good luck to them. I turned down my golden opportunity. I was pretty interested there for a while."
"What put you off it?"
"My brother. He and his wife were down visiting us. He's a big brain in financial circles in New York. Taught economics at Columbia, then got into securities analysis and real estate investment with a couple of the banks. Then he started a no-load mutual fund a few years ago. A hedge fund. They watch him like eagles up there, trying to figure out which way he's going to jump next. I was invited to one of those little get-in-on-the-ground-floor dinners Tom puts on from time to time. Stag. Took my brother along. Tom made quite an impressive talk, I thought. Had me about to grab for my checkbook. When we got home, Dewey told me what was wrong with the things Tom said. It boiled down to this. Tom used some wonderful terms, some very tricky ideas, a lot of explanations of tax shelters and so on. But my brother explained that it didn't hang together. As if he'd memorized things that wouldn't work in the way he said he was using them. Dewey said it was like a ten-year-old kid explaining Einstein to a roomful of relatives who never got past the tenth grade. The words were so big that, by God, it had to be good and had to be right. Dewey told me to stay out. Any spare change I have, I put in his mutual fund. And little by little he's going to make me rich. He promises me he will. You know, I hope he was wrong about Tom Pike. Because if Tom is goofing, a lot of men in Fort Courtney are going to get very, very badly hurt'. Look, I better go scrub. Nice to talk to you. She was one very special woman, that Mrs. Trescott."
I tried Hardahee again and struck out. But Janice Hoi-ton was home and said sure, I could stop by if I wanted to. I parked in front on the circular drive and went up and rang the doorbell. As I was waiting she came around the side of the house and said, "Oh. It's you. I'm fixing some stuff around in the back. Want to come around? I don't want to leave it half done."
She had newspapers spread on the grass, under a metal chaise, a piece of lawn furniture originally pale blue. The blue paint had been chipped off by hard use. She was giving it a spray coat of flat black DeRusto from a spray can. She wore very brief and very tight fawn-colored stretch shorts, and a faded green blouse with a sun back, and ragged old blue boat shoes. I stood in the shade within comfortable conversation range. She had a deep tan. She moved swiftly and to good effect, limber as a dancer when she bent and turned, and able to sit comfortable as a Hindu, fawn rear propped on the uptilted backs of the boat shoes. She was sweaty with sun and effort, her back glossy, accenting the play of small hard muscles under her hide as she moved.
She turned, tossing her black hair back, and said, "I ran off at the mouth Sunday night. It isn't like me. I must have been lonely."
"Funny. I had the feeling I talked too much. Had the feeling I'd bored you, Janice."
"Excuse me, but I forgot your first name."
"Travis."
"Okay, Travis. So we were a couple of refugees or something. And excuse me for something else. Meg got a glimpse of you and thought you looked very interesting. You know, she has been covering for me, but she doesn't know who I've been seeing. She decided it had to be you, so I didn't say yes and I didn't say no. She thinks it is awfully sophisticated for you to bring my husband home drunk so we can put him to bed and go out together. Hmmm. Have I missed anything?"
"That brace over there on the left, under the seat."
"Where? Oh, I see it. Thanks."
She covered the last blue neatly and precisely and straightened up, cocked her head to the side, shook the paint bomb. The marble rattled around inside. "Just about completely gone. I love to have something be just enough instead of too much or too little. Want a drink or a cold beer or anything? I've been promising myself a beer."
She led me into the cool house and the cheerful kitchen. She tried to thrust a glass upon me, then admitted that she too preferred it right from the bottle. She leaned against the sink, elegant ankles crossed, uptilted the bottle, and drank until her eyes watered.
"Hah!" she said. "Meg probably saw you drive up. She'll think this is terribly soigne too, a little visit just before lunch. She's probably lurking about in the shrubbery, panting."
"As long as I'm nominated, don't you think I ought to know where we've kept all these other assignations?"
"Not assignations. Just to be together. And talk. Talk about everything under the sun. Hold hands like school kids. Cry a little sometimes. Hell! Why shouldn't a man be allowed to cry?"
"They do, from time to time."
"Not enough. Not nearly enough. Well, we had to meet where there would be absolutely no chance of anyone seeing us together."
"Pretty good trick."
"Not terribly difficult, really. We'd arrange a time and both drive to the huge parking lot at the Courtney Plaza and once we had spotted each other, you'd drive out and I would follow you and you would find a place where we could park both cars and then sit together in one of them and not be seen. Out in one of the groves, or on a dark residential street, or out near the airport, someplace he
.. you thought we'd be safe."
"How would we arrange the date in the first place?"
"You won't have to know that."
"Is that what we were going to do last Saturday? Spend the whole day, or most of it, sitting around in some damned automobile holding hands and crying?"
"Please don't make cheap fun of it."
"Sorry."
"Saturday it might have become something else. Second phase of the affair, or something. Maybe it's just as well Rick spoiled it. I keep yearning for someplace where we could be really alone, really safe. Someplace with walls around us and a roof over us, and a door that will lock. But not a motel, for God's sake. I don't think I could stand a motel. And that would be a risk. You see he... he's in a position where a lot depends upon people having total confidence in him. It would be more than just... the appearance of infidelity."
"He's a banker?"
"You may call him a banker if you wish. He found a place for us for Saturday. He couldn't get away until about noon. So I was going to drive back and wait for him in the parking lot of a small shopping center north of town, then follow him to. the place. He said it was safe and private and nobody would know. He said that not even the person who lived there would ever know we'd been there. So I guess we both knew that if we were ever alone together in a place like that, nothing could help us or save us."
"But good old Rick decided to make the Vero Beach trip."
&nb
sp; "He was in horrible shape Monday morning, so stiff and sore and lame he could hardly get out of bed. And terribly hung over, of course. When I told him I'd taken Ms friend, McGee, back to the Wahini Lodge, he stared at me and then laughed in the most ghastly way. We're not speaking, of course. Just the absolute essentials."
She came and took my empty bottle and dropped the two of them into the tilt-lid kitchen can. "Again I'm doing all the talking, Travis. You have a bad effect on my mouth. Was there something you wanted to see me about, particularly?"
"I guess I've had you on my mind, Janice."
She stared at me, and her frown made two vertical clefts between her dark brows, over the generous nose. She shook her head slowly. "Uh-uh, my friend. If you're thinking what I think you're thinking. Help the embittered lady get her own back? Eye for an eye, and all that? What's the next part of the gambit? Healthy young woman deprived of a sex life, et cetera, et cetera? No, my dear. Not even to keep Meg happy by confirming her suspicions."
"Now that you bring it up, the idea has some merit, I guess. I've had you on my mind for a different reason."
"Such as?"
"Suppose I named your boyfriend by name. The dear, kind, tender, sensitive, wonderful and so on."
"You can't, of course. What are you getting at?"
"But if I did, would you feel you had to go to him and tell him that somebody knows?"
"On a hypothetical basis? Let me see. If you did name him, what would be your point, really, in wanting to be certain? What would you be after?"
"A clue to what kind of man he is."
"He is a marvelous man!"
"Does everybody think so?"
"Of course not! Don't be so dense! Any man who has strength and drive and opinions of his own will make enemies."
"Who'll badmouth him."
"Of course."
"Okay, his name is... Tompestuous K. Fliggle, Banker."
"Travis, you are an idiot."
"These are idiotic times we live in, my dear."
And the little inadvertent muscles around her eyes had clued me when I hit the first syllable of the invented name, which was as far as I cared to go.
At a few minutes past noon I read the nameplate on the mailbox at 60 Ridge Lane. Miss Hulda Wennersehn. The name of the real estate firm that managed the garden apartments was on a small sign at the corner. From the first drugstore phone I came to, I called the real estate offices and was switched to a Miss Forrestal. I told her I was with the credit bureau and would appreciate some information on Hulda Wennersehn. She pulled the card and said that Miss Wennersehn, age fifty-one, had been in number sixty for four years and had never been in arrears. I asked if Miss Wennersehn was employed by an insurance company and she said, "Oh, no, unless she changed jobs and didn't inform us. Of course, she'd have no reason to inform us, actually. But we have her as working for Kinder, Noyes, and Strauss. That's a brokerage firm. She works as a cashier." So thank you, my dear. So I phoned the brokerage house and the switchboard girl told me that, my goodness, it had been at least two years since Miss Wennersehn had worked there. She was working for a real estate company. She gave me the phone number. On a hunch I asked her if a Mr. Tom Pike had ever been with the firm, and she said that he had, but that had been some time ago. The number she gave me turned out to be Development Unlimited.
"Miss Wennersehn? I'll transfer you to... oh, excuse me, sir. She is still up at our Jacksonville office. Shall I see if I can find out when she'll be returning?" I thanked her and told her not to bother. I went back to the motel to see if there were any messages. Stanger was waiting for me.
16
SOMETHING HAD changed Stanger, tautened him, given him nervous mannerisms I had not noticed before. We went to 109. He moved restlessly about. I phoned for sandwiches and coffee.
When I asked him what was wrong, he told me to let him think. He paused at the big window and stood with Ms hands locked behind him, teetering from heel to toe, looking out at people playing in the pool.
"I could maybe go with one of those security outfits," he said. "Gate guard. Watchman work."
"You get busted?"
"Not yet. But maybe that's what they'll want to do."
"Why?"
"That Mrs. Boughmer was off on some kind of garden club tour. I finally got the daughter to let me in. Went into my act. Want to warn you you're in serious trouble. Withholding information about a capital crime. Maybe I can help you if you level with me now. And so on and so on. Until she split open."
"What was her problem?"
He turned and walked over and sat heavily in the armchair. "She was bellering and squeaking and sobbing. Spraying spit. Words all jammed together she was trying to say them so fast. Grabbing at my hands. Begging. Confessing. Jesus!"
"Confessing what?"
"That poor dun ugly girl was in love with Doc Sherman. Not so much romance and poetry. Passion. Hot pants. You saw her. Any man ever going to lay a hand on her? So there was something she was doing, God only knows what. Last to leave. Lock the doors. Leave the office lights on. Go into the dark treatment room. Do something in there. She wouldn't say what. Something, according to her, that was nasty and evil. Went on for years, I guess. Some kind of release. No idea what Broon was after or how he got in. She was working on the files after Sherman had died, a few days later. She was in the treatment room and the lights suddenly went on and Broon is in the doorway watching her. Told her to put her clothes back on and he'd talk to her in the office. Apparently, McGee, he convinced that poor sick sad homely woman that there was some law, crime against nature, jail her as a degenerate or some damned thing. Told her that if she ever tried to tell anybody Sherman didn't kill himself, he'd have her picked up and taken in right away. He took some kind of `evidence' away with him. How the hell was I supposed to know she was so close to the edge? All of a sudden she went rigid as a board, bit right through her lip, started whooping and snapping around, eyes out of sight. Followed the ambulance in. Some kind of breakdown. Left a neighbor woman on the lookout for , Mrs. Boughmer. Probably Dave Broon slipped the lock on the rear door that night and came easing in."
"That won't be anything to bust you for, Al."
"It isn't that. It's what comes next. Maybe."
"Which is?"
"Dave Broon. I've come right up to it with him. Too many years, too many things. No way to nail him according to the rules I'm supposed to follow. We're supposed to be on the same ball club. He gives the whole thing a bad smell. Maybe there's a time when you don't go by the book. Look, I've got to have somebody with me. The things I'm thinking scare me. I've got to have somebody stop me if I can't stop myself."
"Maybe you'd better think it over."
"Meaning you don't want any part of it."
"If you want me with you, okay. But just for the hell of it, before we see him, can you get a decent check on where he was the night Sherman died, and where he was the afternoon Penny Woertz died?"
"I don't know about last Saturday, but I remember he was up in Birmingham to bring a prisoner back when Sherman died. Anyway, let me see where that fancy little scut might be."
He moved to the bed and used the bedside phone. He would mumble greetings, ask about Broon, listen, hang up, dial another number. He made at least eight calls. He got up and said, "Guess I'll have some time to think it over. He's been here and there, but nobody's got a fix on him in the past hour or so. Might be hanging around the courthouse. He's got cronies over there who feed him little bits of information, probably for cash on the line. Or he could be at city hall for the same reason. Or he could be holed up in that so-called penthouse with a new playmate. Hasn't had one around for a while, so he's due."
He left, saying he would get in touch and pick me up so I could go with him to talk to Dave Broon. After he had gone, I put the lunch tray outside the door so no one would have any reason to come in after it. And before I left, I used one of the oldest and simplest tricks to warn me if anyone came into the room by way of th
e door while I was gone. I wadded up a sheet of the motel stationery and, as I left, I leaned over and reached back through the opening and placed it on the rug, close to the door, a precise placement because I could measure it by the length of my forearm, from the crook of elbow to the thumb and finger in which I held it. The door opened inward. Anyone entering would brush it away with the door. Even if they had the wit to try to replace it, they could never put it in the same identifiable position as before. When a door opens outward, it is easiest to close it against a bit of matchstick or toothpick inserted at some precise spot and broken off so that it is barely visible from outside the door. But a careful workman can defeat this protection, or the hair and chewing gum device, or the carbon-paper gimmick.
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