The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  He was flushed as he got to his feet, stuffing the revolver into his belt. “I don’t need lectures from some damned drifter.”

  “Stay busier. Join more clubs.”

  “Do I have your permission to go, Mister McGee!”

  “Nothing could give me more piercing delight.”

  “Come on, Pen.”

  “Go home to Janice,” she said. “You’ve been out enough nights.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I blew my stack when he said … uh—”

  “You were so ready, darling. You were just aching to believe something like that, something nasty. You want to think that because you got to first, second, third base, and home, anybody can. Anytime. Go to hell, Rick. You are a mean lousy little human being and you have a dirty little mind.”

  “Are you coming with me or aren’t you?”

  “I’m going to stay right here for a little while, thank you.”

  “Either you come with me—”

  “Or you’ll never forgive me, and we’re through, and so on. Oh, baby, are we ever through! If there’s no trust, there’s no nothing at all. Good-bye, Rickie dear. All the way home to Janice you can dwell on all the nasty things you think are probably going on right here on this bed.”

  He spun around, marched out, and slammed the door viciously.

  Her attempt to smile at me was truly ghastly. Her mouth wouldn’t hold together. “Hope you didn’t mind me … hope it was all right to …” Then the mouth broke and she sprang up and went, “Waw! Hoo Oh waw,” as she hobbled into the bathroom.

  Fort Courtney was nice enough if you didn’t mind it being full of sobbing women trotting into your bathroom, fifty percent of them running with a limp. I took the ice bucket outside and dumped the water out of it and scooped more cubes out of the machine. I thought of dumping out the spiked gin, then changed my mind, capped it, and put the bottle in a back corner of the closet alcove. I unwrapped a fresh glass and opened the second bottle of Plymouth and fixed myself a drink. When she finally came out, slumped, small, and dispirited, I offered her a drink.

  “Thanks, I guess not. I’d better be going.”

  “Got a car here?”

  “No. Rick dropped me off. My car is over at my place. I can phone for a cab from the office.”

  “Sit down for a minute while I work on this. Then I’ll drive you home.”

  “Okay.” She wandered over and got a cigarette from her purse and lit it. She picked up the thick red-blond wig between thumb and finger like somebody picking up a large dead bug. She dropped it back onto the countertop and said, “Fifteen ninety-eight, plus tax, to try to look like a sexpot.”

  “You didn’t do badly.”

  “Forget it. I’ve got freckles, straw hair, short fat legs, and a big behinder. And I’m clumsy. I keep falling over things. And people. Lucky little old me, falling for Rick Holton.” She hesitated. “Maybe I’ll change my mind about the drink. Okay?”

  I unwrapped the last glass and fixed her one, turned, and handed it to her. She took it over to the chair. “Thanks. Why should you do me favors, though? After what I tried to do to you.”

  “Guilt syndrome. I clobbered your romance.”

  She frowned. “It hurts. I know. I walked into it expecting to get hurt. You didn’t do it, really. You just brought it to a head a little quicker. He’s been beginning to want out. I could feel it. He was looking for a great big reason. Jesus, you made him mad!”

  “I think I was a little irritated too. I couldn’t find out what your plans were unless I faked you out.”

  She looked into her glass. “You know something? I think I ought to get smashed. I don’t have to drive. And from the way this one is making me feel numb around the mouth already, it shouldn’t take much.”

  “Be my guest. Just don’t sing.” I started to get her glass but she waved me off and went over and fixed her own.

  “You sure you don’t mind, McGee? Drunk females are horrid. I learned that from working the emergency ward.”

  “Look, how can you two be so sure that the doctor didn’t kill himself?”

  “Perfect health. Loved his work and his little projects. He had enthusiasm about things. Like a kid. And I know how he felt about the attempted suicides. Well, like Tom Pike’s wife. It just baffled him. He couldn’t understand how anybody could take their own life.”

  “He treated her?”

  “Both times. And it was close both times. If Tom hadn’t been on the ball, she would have bought it. He phoned the doctor when he couldn’t wake her up, and the doctor told him to rush her down to the emergency room. He met them there and pumped her out and gave her stimulants and they kept walking her and slapping her awake until she was out of danger. The other time Tom had to break the bathroom door down. She’d lost a lot of blood. There were two of those … hesitation marks, they call them, on her left wrist, where she couldn’t make herself cut deep enough. Then she cut deep enough the third time. It’s slower bleeding from a vein, of course. She’s a nice standard type, and Dr. Sherman put four pints back into her and did such a good job on her wrist I’ll bet that by now the scar is almost invisible.”

  “Reported to the authorities?”

  “Oh, yes. You have to. It’s the law.”

  “Did you have any idea anything at all might have been bugging the doctor?”

  “Gee, it’s hard to say. I mean he wasn’t one of those always-the-same people. When he’d get involved in some project, he’d get sort of remote, especially when things wouldn’t be going well. And he wouldn’t want to talk about it. So … maybe something was bothering him, because he’d been acting the way he usually did when things weren’t going the way he expected. But I just know he wouldn’t kill himself.”

  “Anything questionable in the autopsy?”

  “Like maybe he was knocked out first? No. No sign of it and no trace of anything but morphine, and that was more than a trace.”

  I was slouched deep in the armchair, legs resting on a round formica table. After the silence had lasted a little while, I looked over at her. She was staring at me. She had one eye a third closed and the other half closed. She had one brow arched and she had her lips pulled back away from her rather pretty teeth. It was a strange, fixed grimace, not quite smirk and not quite sneer.

  “Hi!” she said in a husky voice, and I suddenly realized that the stare had been meant to be erotic and inviting. It startled me.

  “Oh, come on, Penny!”

  “Well … listen. You’re cute. You know that? Pretty damned cute. What I was thinking, that sumbitch was so ready to think I cheated, right? I was thinking like they say about having the name and the game too. Whoose going anyplace anyways? Friday night, iznit? Dowanna waysh … waste the li’l pill I took this morning, do I?”

  “Time to take you home.”

  “Yah, yah. yah. Thanks a lot. You must find me real attractive, McGee. Freckles turn you off? Doan like dumpy-legged women?”

  “I like them just fine, nurse. Settle down.”

  She came around toward me and stood and gave me that fixed buggy stare again, put her glass on the table, then did a kind of half spin and tumbled solidly onto my lap, managing to give me a pretty good chop in the eye with her elbow as she did so. It hit some kind of nerve that started my eye weeping. She snuggled into me, cheek against my chest, and gave me another breathy “Hi!”

  “Penny-friend, it is a lousy way to try to get even with good old Rick. You’re bold with booze. You’d hate yourself.”

  “D’wanna take d’vantage of a girl?”

  “Sure. Glad to. You think it over and come back tomorrow night and scratch on the door.”

  She gave a long, weary exhalation and for a moment I wondered if she was suddenly passing out. But then in a level and perfectly articulated voice she said, “I have a good head for booze.”

  “Hmmm. Why the act?”

  “It ain’t easy, McGee, for a cold-sober girl to offer her all to the passing stranger. Maybe for some, but no
t for Penny Woertz. No! Don’t push me up. I can tell you easier if I’m not looked at.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “It’s a bad hang-up for me. With Rick. He really is mean. Do you know how a guy can be mean? Cruel little things. Know why he can get away with being like that?”

  “Because you’re the only one with the hang-up?”

  “Right. You’re pretty smart. Know what I’ll do now?”

  “What will you do?”

  “Get very firm with myself. Tell myself it was a no-good thing. Chin up, tummy in, walk straight, girl. Think of him every three minutes of every waking hour for two or three or four days, and then dial the private line in his office and humble myself and whimper and beg and apologize for things I didn’t do. And be ashamed of myself and kind of sick-joyful at the same time.”

  “No character, hey?”

  “I used to think I had lots. He got to me in … a kind of physical way. I think of him and get to wanting him so bad my head hums and my ears roar and the world gets tilty.”

  “Hmm. Humiliating?”

  “That’s the word. I want out. I want free. So while I was in your bathroom blubbering because he walked out, I had this idea of how to get loose, if I could work up enough nerve.”

  “Use me to solve your problem?”

  “I thought you’d jump at the chance. Not because I’m so astonishingly lovely, something that turns all the heads when I walk by. But I’ve had to learn that there is some damned thing about me that seems to work pretty good. I mean if I was in some saloon with Miss International Asparagus Patch, and a man moved in on us because he drew a bead on her, a lot of the time he’d switch targets, and I’ve never known why it happens, but it does. That’s why I was so sure I could pick you up in the bar.”

  “You do project a message.”

  “Wish I knew what the message reads.”

  “I think it says, ‘Here I am!’ ”

  “Darn it. I like men. As men. Six brothers. I was the only girl. I’ve never been able to really be a girl-girl, luncheons and girl talk and all that. But I don’t go shacking around. I love to make love, sure. But it never seemed to be any kind of real necessity, you know? Except now I’m hung up that way with Rick, and I don’t even like him very much. I don’t even know if … it would be any good at all with another man nowadays. I thought you’d be a good way to find out. I thought, once I’d pumped up the nerve, one little opening and Pow. Easier to play drunk. Hardly know you. Won’t see you again. So you come on with these scruples. Or maybe my mysterious whatzit isn’t on your wavelength, dear. Oh, Christ! I feel so awkward and timid and dumb. I never tried to promote a stranger before, honest.”

  “So if nothing much happened, wouldn’t you be hung up worse than ever?”

  “No. Because it would keep me from having the guts to phone him. After sleeping with you—win, lose, or draw—I’d feel too guilty. And that would give me the time to finally get over it. You see, I always have to go crawling to him. If when he doesn’t hear from me, he comes after me, I don’t know if I can stay in the clear. But … it would give me a pretty good chance.”

  She gave that deep long sigh once more. Strange little freckled lady, radiating something indefinable, something lusty and gutsy. Something playtime. So the world is a wide shadowy place, with just a few times, a few corners, where strangers touch. And she could be a partial cure for the random restlessness of the past weeks. Ol’ Dr. McGee. Home therapy. The laying on of hands. Therapeutic manipulation. The hunger that isn’t a damned bit interested in names or faces is always there, needing only a proper fragment of rationalization to emerge. So I drifted my fingertips along the sad curl of her back and found the same old zipper tab and slowly pulled it from nape to stern. She pushed up, swarmy-eyed, hair-tousled, to make the opening gift of her mouth in her acceptance.

  But stopped and focused, frowned. “It’s a sad story, okay. But it isn’t that sad! It shouldn’t make a strong man cry.”

  “I’m not. You got me in the eye with your elbow a while back.”

  Hers was a good laugh, belly laugh, total surrender to laughter, enough for tears, but with no edge of hysteria. While I got the lights, she hung her dress on a hanger and turned the bed down. We left the bathroom door ajar, a strip of light angling across the foot of the bed. She was constricted and muscle-taut and nervous for a time but not for long. And after more unmeasured time had gone by, I found out just what that mysterious aura was. It was clean, solid, healthy, joyous, inexhaustible girl, all clovery oils and pungencies, long limber waist and torso sophisticating the rhythmic counterpoint of solid, heated, thirsty hips, creating somehow along with release the small awarenesses of new hunger soon to rebuild.

  I awakened slowly to the morning sound of her shower and drifted off again, and was awakened a little later by sun-brightness shining into the darkened room, and saw her naked by the double draperies, holding the edge away from the window while she peered out at the day. With her other hand she was foamily scrubbing away at her teeth with my toothbrush and toothpaste.

  She turned away from the window and, seeing that my eyes were open, she roamed over to the bed, still scrubbing.

  “… ood oring, arley.”

  “And good morning to you too, tiger.”

  “O you O eye.”

  “What?”

  Removed brush. “I said I hope you don’t mind. Me using your toothbrush. I mean invasions of privacy are sort of relative, huh?”

  “Like the old joke, it’s been the equivalent of a social introduction.”

  When she started brushing again, I reached and caught her by the free wrist, pulled her closer. She removed brush, stared thoughtfully at me. “Really? You’re serious?” She smiled. “Well sure! Let me go rench.” She went into the bathroom. The water ran. The sound of spitting was p-too, p-tooey, like a small child. She came trotting back, beaming, launched herself into the bed, landing solidly, reaching greedily, and saying an anticipatory “Yum” with utmost comfortable satisfaction. In her own special field of expertise she was the least clumsy thing in probably the entire county.

  After we were dressed, she began to be increasingly nervous about leaving a motel room at high noon on Saturday. She was almost certain Rick was out there, waiting in murderous patience. Or that a group of her friends would be strolling by the room, for some unknown reason. She put the wig on as a partial disguise. She had me go out and start the motor in the rental, open the door on her side, and tap the horn ring when I was certain the coast was clear.

  She came out at a hunched-over half gallop and while scrambling into the car she gave her knee such a hell of a whack on the edge of the door that she spent the first three blocks all scrooched down, hugging her knee and moaning. Then from time to time she would stick her head up just far enough to see where we were and give me directions. She had an apartment in a little garden apartment development called Ridge Lane. After she insisted I drive around two blocks twice to make certain Rick’s red convertible wasn’t parked in the area, I drove into her short, narrow drive behind the redwood privacy fence and stopped a few inches behind the rear bumper of her faded blue Volkswagen in the carport. She spelled Woertz for me and said she was in the book. But I had the feeling she did not want me to call her. I had performed the required service. She did not want to trade one entanglement for another.

  I remembered a question I had forgotten to ask. “By the way, what were you people hoping to find on my person, Penny?”

  She shrugged. “We didn’t know, really. Anything that would tie you in somehow. Papers or money or letters or notes or something. When you come to a blind alley, you’re ready to try almost anything.”

  We sat there and suddenly both yawned at once, great luxurious shuddering jaw-creakers. Then laughed at ourselves. She kissed me, got out, and gave a squeak of pain when she put her weight on her leg. She bent and rubbed her sore knee, then limped to her door. When she had unlocked it and opened it, she smiled and waved and I ba
cked out.

  On the way back I stopped at a place as clean as any operating theater and had fresh juice, hot fresh doughnuts, surprisingly good coffee. Then, feeling a little bit ridiculous at being overly prim and fastidious, I walked a half block and bought a toothbrush before driving back to the motel. Yes, there are different degrees of personal privacy, and a toothbrush seems to be on some special level all its own, a notch above a hairbrush.

  The room had been made up. Though checkout time was eleven, I was certain they would not clip me for the ensuing night, as they just weren’t that busy.

  But I sat and yawned and sighed, feeling too pleasantly wearied to make any decisions. The episode, I told myself, had changed nothing. A dead doctor, no matter how he died, had nothing to do with a damaged young wife who seemed to want to die.

  Nothing new had been added except …

  Except something she had said in the middle of the night after that time that had been unmistakably the most complete one for her, not any kind of thrashing wildness, or spasmodic yelping, but just very lasting and very strong, fading very slowly for her, slowly and gently. It was one of those fragmented drowsy conversations as we lay in a night tangle of contentment, sheet and blanket shoved down to the foot of the bed, the flesh drying and cooling after the moist of effort. Her deep and slowing breath was humid against the base of my throat. Round knee against my belly, her slow, affectionate fingertips tracing over and over the line of my jaw from earlobe to chin. In down-glance I could see, against the light that lay in a crisp diagonal line across the foot of the bed, a round height of her hip, semiluminous, and a steep descent to the waist where rested, in dark contrast, my large hand with fingers splayed.

  “Mmmmm,” she said, “so now I know.”

  “Search for guilt?”

  “Too soon for that, darling. Feel too delicious for that. Later maybe. But … damn it all anyway.”