The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “Would they fire her?”

  “They sure to hell would.”

  “Lorette, if I’d had that bottle locked up in my suitcase and she’d gone digging around in there and tapped it, then I might have called the desk. Maybe I would have called anyway if she’d been giving me sloppy service since I’ve been here. But she’s kept this place bright as a button, and I plain forgot that bottle and left it on the closet floor over there where any maid would find it. So I share the blame.”

  “And maybe you don’t want to have to tell a lot of folks how come you keep your sleeping medicine in with the gin?”

  “I think you’re a nice bright girl and you can cover for her without any trouble at all.”

  “Because it’s slack right now I can do hers and mine both, what rooms we got left. But one more thing. If you turned her in, could she rightly say that you’ve been messing with her some?”

  “No. She couldn’t say that.”

  “Then, I’ll be back in just a little while.”

  It was five minutes before she came back. She held the door open for a tall young boy with enormous shoulders, who pushed a laundry hamper on wheels into the room. He parked it beside Cathy and picked her up easily and lowered her into it. Lorette covered her with a couple of rumpled sheets and said, “Now Annabelle will be waiting right there in Two eighty-eight, Jase. You just put Cathy on the bed there and let Annabelle tend to her, hear?”

  “Yump,” said Jase, and wheeled her out.

  “Finish up fixing your bed for you, mister.”

  “Thanks.”

  As she was finishing she giggled. She had a lot of lovely white teeth. She shook her head. “That ol’ girl is sure going to wonder what in the world happened to her.”

  “Explain the situation, will you?”

  “Surely. If you’re not checking out, she’ll be coming by to say thank you tomorrow, I expect.” She paused at the door, fists in the pockets of her uniform skirt. “It’s important Cathy shouldn’t get fired, mister. She needs the job. She lives with her old mother, and that old woman is mean as a snake. All crippled up with arthritis. She about drove Cathy’s man away, I guess. There’s three little kids, and Cathy could manage all right on the job money, but she’ll see a dress and keep thinking about it until she just has to have it, no matter what, and she’ll put it on layaway, and then she’ll have to use the money for other things at home, and she’ll be afraid she’ll lose the dress and what she paid on it, and then, well, she’ll take chances she wouldn’t otherwise and do things she wouldn’t otherwise. She’s older than me but lots of ways she’s like a kid. This place does a lot of commercial trade, and what she does, when you unlock a number and it’s a single in there, he’s maybe just waking up or he’s getting dressed, she gives a big smile and says something like good morning, sir, sure sorry if I disturbed you. And he looks her over and says, Honey, you come on right in here, and, well, she does. Then it’s ten dollars or twenty to keep from losing the dress, but she’s going to get caught someday and lose this good job. The reason I’m telling you all this is on account of from what I said about her messing around, I didn’t want you thinking she was nothing but a hustler. It’s only sometimes with her, and even if I wouldn’t go down that road, it doesn’t mean she isn’t no friend of mine. She’s my friend. She used to let me hold her first baby. I was ten years old and she was fifteen. And … thanks for coming and telling one of us.”

  She left and I screwed the bottle cap tight and put the doctored—and watered—gin in my carry-on suitcase, wondering all the while if it wouldn’t be a sounder idea to pour it out.

  • • •

  D. Wintin Hardahee was with a client. I left the motel number and room number. He called back ten minutes later, at eleven o’clock.

  “I was wondering if maybe I could scrounge a little more information from you, Mr. Hardahee.”

  “I am very sorry, Mr. McGee, but my work load is very heavy.” The soft voice had a flat and dead sound.

  “Maybe we could have a chat after you get through work.”

  “I am not taking on any new clients at this time.”

  “Is something the matter? Is something wrong?”

  “Sorry I can’t be more cooperative. Good-bye, Mr. McGee.” Click.

  I paced around, cursing. This nice orderly prosperous community was getting on my nerves. A big ball of tangled string. But when you found a loose end and pulled, all you got was a batch of loose ends. It seemed like at least a month ago that I had thought to check out Helena’s estate arrangements. I thought maybe Hardahee could work it through his New York classmate. But Hardahee wasn’t going to work out anything for me. So what could turn him off so quickly and so completely? Lies? Fear?

  I stretched out on the bed and let the confusing cauldron bubble away, giving me glimpses of Penny, Janice, Biddy, Maureen, Tom Pike, Rick, Stanger, Tom Pike, Helena, Hardahee, Nudenbarger, Tom Pike.

  Pike was getting pretty damned ubiquitous. And little bits of conversation kept coming back. I heard parts of the night talk with Janice Holton and something bothered me and I went back over it and found what bothered me, then slowly sat up.

  She had asked about my imaginary wife. “Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lauderdale?”

  Review. I had not said one damned word about Lauderdale. Holton had checked the registration. So he knew. But was there any reason for him to have said word one about it to his wife? “Look, darling, my girlfriend wanted to stay in the motel room with some jerk from Lauderdale named McGee.”

  Not likely.

  Backtrack. A little look of surprise at hearing my name. Surprise to find me with her husband.

  Possibility: Friend of Biddy’s. Had met her in a supermarket or somewhere. Biddy spoke of an old friend named McGee from Lauderdale.

  Or: In the process of checking me out Saturday evening, and checking Holton out, Stanger made some mention of me to Janice Holton. “Do you know, or do you know if your husband knows, anybody named Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale?”

  Possible, but I didn’t like the fit. They were like limericks that do not quite scan, that have one syllable too much or one missing. My brain was a pudding. I walked across to a shopping plaza, bought some swim pants in a chain store, came back and put them on and padded out to the big motel pool. There was a separate wading pool full of three- and four-year-olds, shrieking, choking, throwing rubber animals, and belting each other under the casually benign stare of four well-greased young mothers. So I dived and did some slow lengths of the main pool and then gradually let it out, reaching farther, changing the kick beat, stretching and punishing the long muscles of arms, shoulders, back, thighs, and belly, sucking air and blowing out the little layers of sedentary staleness in the bottoms of my lungs. I held it just below that pace at which I begin to get too much side roll and begin to thrash and slap, and then brutalized myself by saying, Just one more. And one more. And one more. Finally I lumbered out, totally whipped, heart way up there close to a hundred and a half, lungs straining, arms and legs weak as canvas tubes full of old wet feathers. I dried my face on the bath towel I’d brought from the room and then stretched out on it to let the sunshine do the rest.

  Meyer calls it my “instant I.Q.” In a sense it is. You oxygenate the blood to the maximum and you stimulate the heart into pumping it around at a breakneck pace. That enriched blood goes churning through the brain at the same time that it is nourishing the overworked muscle tissues. Sometimes it even works.

  But I put my fat, newly enriched, humming head to work on the Janice-Lauderdale problem, and its final report was, “Damned if I know, fella.”

  So I went back to 109 and before I dressed, I tried the office of the fat little John Wayne, M.D., got hold of a cheery, cooperative lady who told me that Dr. Stewart Sherman’s receptionist and bookkeeper was Miss Helen Boughmer, and she did not know if she was working or not, but I could reach her through the phone listed for Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer. She asked me to wait
a moment and gave me the number to write down.

  Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer was very firm about things. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t possibly call my daughter to the phone. She is not well today. She is in bed. Does she know you? What is this all about?”

  “I’d like a chance to ask her some questions about an insurance matter, Mrs. Boughmer.”

  “I can definitely say that she is not interested in buying any insurance and neither am I. Good day.”

  “Wait!” I missed her and had to call again. “Mrs. Boughmer, I am an insurance investigator. I am investigating a policy claim.”

  “But we haven’t had any accidents with the car. Not for years.”

  “It’s some information on a death claim.”

  “Oh?”

  “On Doctor Sherman. Just a few routine questions, ma’am.”

  “Well … if you’ll promise not to tire Helen, I think you might be able to talk to her at about four o’clock, if you’ll come here to the house.” I said I would. It was at 90 Rose Street, and she told me how to find it. “It’s a little white frame house with yellow trim, on the right, on the second corner, with two big live oak trees in the front yard.”

  After I hung up, I phoned the Pike place and Biddy answered.

  “Well, hello!” she said. “Yes, Maurie is doing just fine, thank you. We were just about to have a swim before lunch.”

  “I wondered if I could come out and talk to you about something after lunch.”

  “Why not? What time is it? Why don’t you make it about two thirty or quarter to three? She’ll be having her nap then. Will that be okay?”

  I said it was just fine. I dressed and had lunch at the motel and then went strolling through the rear areas looking for Lorette. There was a service alley behind the kitchen. When I walked along it, past a neat row of garbage cans, I came to an open door to a linen storage room. I looked in and saw Lorette, still in uniform, sitting on a table laughing and talking and swinging her legs. There were two older black women in there, not in uniform. The rubber-tired maid carts were aligned against the wall near a battered Coke machine and a row of green metal lockers.

  She saw me and the talk and laughter stopped. She slid off the old wooden table and came and stood in the doorway, her face impassive, her eyes down-slanted. “You want something, sir?”

  “To ask you something,” I said, and walked on to a place where the roof overhang shaded a portion of the alley and a flame vine was curling up a post that supported the overhang. She had not followed me. I looked back and she shrugged and came slowly toward me. She put her hands in her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall.

  “Ask me what?”

  “I didn’t know if you could talk in front of those other women. I wanted to know how Cathy is.”

  “Jes fine.” Her face was blank and she let her mouth hang slightly open. It made her look adenoidally stupid.

  “She come out of it okay?”

  “She gone on home.”

  It was all too familiar and all too frustrating. It is the black armor, a kind of listless vacuity, stubborn as an acre of mules. They go that route or they become all teeth and giggles and forelock. Okay, so they have had more than their share of grief from men of my outward stamp, big and white and muscular, sun-darkened and visibly battered in small personal wars. My outward type had knotted a lot of black skulls, tupped a plenitude of black ewes, burned crosses and people in season. They see just the outward look and they classify on that basis. Some of them you can’t ever reach in any way, just as you can’t teach most women to handle snakes and cherish spiders. But I knew I could reach her because for a little time with me she had been disarmed, had put her guard down, and I had seen behind it a shrewd and understanding mind, a quick and unschooled intelligence.

  I had to find my way past that black armor. Funny how it used to be easier. Suspicion used to be on an individual basis. Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her.

  “Nothin’ wrong.”

  “You could talk to me before. Now you’ve slammed the door.”

  “Door? What door, mister? I got to get back to work.”

  Suddenly I realized what it might be. “Lorette, have you slammed the door because you know that this morning I stood out in front of this place talking to a couple of cops?”

  There was a sidelong glance, quick, vivid with suspicion, before she dropped her eyes again. “Don’t matter who you talkin’ to.”

  “Looked like a nice friendly little chat, I suppose.”

  “Mister, I got to go to work.”

  “That housekeeper here, Mrs. Imber? If she hadn’t happened to look into 109 on Saturday afternoon and saw me there sacked out, it wouldn’t have been any nice friendly conversation with the law. And it wouldn’t have happened out in front of this place. It would have been in one of their little rooms, with nobody smiling. They would have been trying to nail me for killing that nurse.”

  She turned and leaned against the shady wall, arms folded, her face no longer slack with the defensive tactic of improvised imbecility. She wore a thoughtful frown, white teeth biting the fullness of her underlip. “Then it was that nurse girl with you in the room Friday night, Mr. McGee?”

  “That’s how I got acquainted with the law, with Stanger and Nudenbarger.”

  “The way I know you had a woman with you, Cathy she told me Stanger asked her if when she did the room she saw any sign you’d had a woman in there. That was before you helped her some. No reason to try to save any white from the law anytime. She said you surely had a party. So it was a lucky thing about Miz Imber checking the room, I guess.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Her brown-eyed stare was narrow and suspicious. “Then, what call have you got to fool around with those two law?”

  “I liked the nurse. If I can help find out who killed her, I’d buddy up to a leper or a rattlesnake. It’s a personal matter.”

  Her eyes softened. “I guess being with someone you like, being in the bed with them, and they’re dead the next day, it could be a sorrowful thing.”

  It struck me that this was the first sympathetic and understanding response I’d had from anyone. “It’s a sorrowful thing.”

  With a sudden thin smile she said, “Now, if she was so nice and all, how come she was giving it away to such a mean honk lawyer like that Mr. Holton? Surprised I know? Man, we keep good track of everybody like Holton.”

  “What’s your beef with him?”

  “When he was prosecutor, he got his kicks from busting every black that come to trial, busting him big as he could manage. Ever’time he could send a black to Raiford State Prison, it was a big holiday for him, grinning and struttin’ around and shaking hands. The ones like that, they can’t get anybody for yard work or housework, at least nobody worth a damn or a day’s pay.”

  “She didn’t like Holton, Lorette. She was trying to break loose. Being with me was part of the try. Didn’t you ever hear of any woman with a hang-up on a sorry man?”

  There had been antagonism toward me when she had talked of Holton. I was on Holton’s team because of my color. But by telling her how it was between Penny and Rick, I had swung it all back to that familiar lonely confusing country of the human heart, the shared thing rather than the difference.

  “It happens. It surely happens,” she said. “And the other way around too. Well, yes, I heard you was with those two this morning. Lieutenant Stanger, he isn’t so bad. Fair as maybe they let him be. But the one called Lew, he likes to whip heads. Don’t care whose, long as it’s a black skull. Stanger don’t stop him, so the day they go down, they both go down like there was no difference at all.”

  “I wanted to ask you how Cathy made out. I had no way of knowing how much she drank out of that bott
le.”

  Her stare was wise, timeless, sardonic. “Why, now, that big ol’ gal is just fine. Big strong healthy gal. On account of you didn’t get her fired, she might be real thankful to you. How thankful do you want she should be, man?”

  “Dammit, why do you think that’s what I’ve got in mind?”

  She laughed, a rich, raw little sound, full of derision. “Because what the hell else could you want from black motel maids? Sweepin’ and cleanin’ lessons? A walk in the park? A Bible lesson? Those women back in that room, now. I know exactly what they’re thinking. They got it all figured that finally, somehow a whitey got to me, and probably tomorrow I switch with Cathy, one of mine for her One-O-nine, because I decided to be motel tail and pick up some extra bread. Those women know there’s not another damned thing in the world about me or Cathy you could be after. And that’s how it is.”

  “And that is exactly what you believe about me?”

  “Mister, I don’t know what to believe about you, and that’s the truth.”

  “I hunted you up because I wanted to see how Cathy made it. And I wanted to ask a favor.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ve seen a lot of towns like this one. Enough to know that the black community knows everything that happens in the white community. Maids and cooks and yard men make one of the best intelligence apparatuses in the world.”

  “Sneaky niggers listening to everything, huh?”

  “If I happened to be black, you can damned well bet I’d keep track, Mrs. Walker. Just to keep from getting caught in the middle of anything. I would have to be just that much faster on my feet, just to get a job and keep a job. I’d listen and I’d know.”

  She tilted her head as she looked up at me. “You almost know where it is, don’t you, man? If you were black, now, wouldn’t you be too smart to be a yard man?”

  “Exactly the same way that if you were white, you’re too smart to be a motel maid.”

  “So what makes you think I’m so stupid I’d get myself messed up in some white killing by coming to you with anything I hear about it?”

  “Because I liked that nurse. Because without special help the cops might plumber this one. Because you can follow your hunch, which tells you I’d never make any attempt to bring you into it at all. But the big reason you’ll do it is because it’s one of the last things in the world you ever thought you’d do.”