The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  She started to get up, undoubtedly to bring the wallet back to me, but then out of some prideful and defiant impulse, she settled back and flipped it at me. I picked it out of the air about six inches in front of my nose, and slipped it back into the hip pocket. She folded the bills and undid one button of the high-collared uniform blouse and tucked the money down into the invisible, creamy, compacted cleft between those outsized breasts. She re-buttoned and gave herself a little pat.

  She made a rueful mouth. “Talk to you so long out in the back, and now I’ve been in here with the door shut too long, and I tell you that everybody working here keeps close track.”

  She got up and took the ashtray she had used into the bathroom and brought it back, shining clean, and put it on the bedside table.

  “Going to make me some nice problem,” she muttered.

  “Problem?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle. I’m kind of boss girl, right after Miz Imber. Up to me to keep them all working right. Lot of them may be older, but nobody can match me for mean. Can’t tell them why I spent all this time in here with you alone. So they’re going to slack off on me, thinking that on account of I suddenly start banging white, I lost my place. Oh, they’ll try me for sure. But they’ll find out they’re going to get more mean than they can handle from ol’ Fifty Pound.”

  “Fifty pound?”

  Even with that dusky skin her sudden furious blush was apparent. “It’s nothing, mister. Anyplace like this, sooner or later somebody’ll give the boss gal some kind of special name. The one they give me, it comes from the way I’m built, that’s all. Somebody saw me walk by and said, ‘There she go. Ninety pound of mean. Forty pound of gal and fifty pound of boobs.’ So it’s Fifty Pound. Used to fuss me, but I don’t mind now.”

  “See what you can find out, Lorette, about a man who works for the sheriff. Dave Broon.”

  She looked as if she wanted to spit. “Now, that one is all mean. Mr. Holton, he’s part-time mean. Mr. Broon, he wants to know something, maybe a deputy picks up some boy out in Southtown and then Mr. Broon visits with him. When they bring the boy back, he walks old and he talks old, and he keeps his head down. But he doesn’t say a thing about Mr. Broon. One thing I know, he’s rich. Big rich. It’s in other names but he owns maybe forty houses in Southtown. Rains through the roof. Porch steps fall off. Three families drawing water from one spigot, but the rent never goes down. It goes up. Cardboard paper on the busted windows. Tax goes up on other places, never goes up on Mr. Broon’s houses.”

  “You told me that the Holtons couldn’t get domestic help because of Holton’s attitude toward your people. I know that Mr. Pike and Miss Pearson have been trying to get somebody to look after Mrs. Pike. I noticed they have the yard work done by a white man. Any special reason for that?”

  She stood by the door and all expression had left her face. “It’s something went on long ago, three years, maybe more, just after that house was built and him new married. Had a live-in couple quartered over the boathouse. Young couple. Good pay. They drank some kind of poison stuff that you spray on the groves. Para … para …”

  “Parathion?”

  “Sounds right. Both died in the hospital. Mr. Pike paid for a nice funeral.”

  “Accident?”

  “Not with the bag right there on the floor next to the table and the powder still stuck to the spoon. Put it in red wine and drank it. Must have seen it in the movies, because they busted the glasses, threw them at the wall.”

  “So?”

  “So the man had been in Southtown three days before. Quiet boy. Got stinking smashed pig drunk. Cried and cried and cried. So drunk nobody could hardly understand him. Something about signing a paper so they wouldn’t have to go to jail. Something about some nasty thing somebody was making his wife do on account of they signed the paper. And about not being able to stand it. Nobody knows the right and wrong of it. Nobody knows what happened.”

  “But the Pikes can’t get any help out there?”

  “They maybe could have. People were thinking on it. Then just before they let Mr. Pike get out of the broker business instead of putting the law on him, he was trying to learn to play golf, and he hit a colored caddy with a golf stick. Laid his head open. Mr. Pike give up trying the game after that. Gave Danny a hundred dollars and paid the hospital. Nobody else seen it. Mr. Pike said Danny walked the wrong way at the wrong time.”

  “Into his backswing?”

  “That’s what it was, the way they said it. Danny said he had a cold and he sneezed and Mr. Pike missed the ball entire and come at him with his eyes bugged out, making crazy little crying sounds, and Danny turned to run and he knows Mr. Pike couldn’t run that fast, so he figures Mr. Pike threw it at him. Then those that had any idea of working out there, they decided against it.”

  “Why were they going to put the law on him when he was in the brokerage house?”

  She looked astonished. “Why, for stealing! How else you going to get in trouble in that kind of job? Mr. McGee, I’ve got to get back on the job. See you tomorrow I guess. You don’t see me, it’ll mean I didn’t get anything much tonight out home.”

  I could get in touch with neither Janice Holton nor D. Wintin Hardahee, so I backtracked to pick up a loose end that would probably turn into nothing. I placed a call to Dr. Bill Dyckes, the surgeon who had operated on Helena Pearson Trescott. A girl in his office told me he was operating but would probably phone in when he was through, so I did not leave a message but drove over to the hospital to see if I could make contact with him there.

  A very obliging switchboard girl put a call through to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor in the surgical wing and caught him there and motioned me to a phone. I said I was an old friend of Helena Trescott and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions about her. He hesitated and then told me to come on up, and gave me directions.

  He came out of the lounge and we walked down the corridor to a small waiting room. He wore a green cotton smock and trousers and a green skullcap. There was a spray of drying blood across the belly of the smock, and he smelled of disinfectants. He was squat and broad and younger than I had expected. His hands were thick, with short, strong-looking fingers, curly reddish hair on his wrists, backs of his hands, and down to the first knuckle of the fingers.

  He dropped heavily onto a sofa in the waiting room, sighing, stretching, then pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked up at the wall clock. “Next one’ll be all prepped by eleven fifteen, and please God it will be nice, straight, clean, and simple because I’m scheduled for a son of a bitch this afternoon. What’d you want to know about Mrs. Trescott, Mr. McGee?”

  “Did she ever have any chance at all?”

  “Not by the time I went in the first time. Big juicy metastasized carcinoma right on the large bowel with filaments going out in every direction. Got the main mass of it and as much more as I could. Left some radioactive pellets in there to slow it some.”

  “Did you tell her she wouldn’t make it?”

  “I tell each one as much as I think they can safely take, when it’s bad news. I realized later I could have told her the works. But I didn’t know her well enough then to know how gutsy and staunch she was. So I said I thought I’d gotten it all, but I couldn’t be sure, so we’d go into some other treatment to make sure. I didn’t tell the daughters because I figured she could read them loud and clear. Told Tom Pike so that he could help cushion it for the girls when the time came.”

  “Then, how was she the second time?”

  “Downhill. Had to go in to clear a stoppage. Damned jungle in there by then. Nothing like the anatomy books. Malignant is quite a word. Turned a good experienced operating-room nurse queasy. Then by the last time there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t changed by it, in one way or another, except her eyes. Great eyes on that woman. Like the eyes of a young girl.”

  “Too bad that Maureen is in such condition now.”

  “I didn’t get in on that. It
isn’t something you go after with a knife. But just about everybody else has had a piece of the action. She’s had every test anybody around here has ever heard of, and some I think they made up. It would take two men to lift her lab files.”

  “Does it boil down to some specific area?”

  “If by that you mean her head, yes. If you mean neurology, yes. No physical trauma, no tumor, no inhibition of nourishment. Something is screwing up the little circuits in there, the synapses. Tissue deterioration? Rare virus infection? Some new kind of withdrawal that’s psychologically oriented? Some deficiency from birth that didn’t show until now? Secretion imbalance? Rare allergy? My personal guess, which nobody will listen to because it’s not my field, is that the trouble is in some psychiatric area. That fits the suicide impulse. But the shrinkers have gone through that and out the other side, they say. Series of shock treatments, no dice. Sodium Pentothal, no dice. Conversation on the couch, nothing. I thought you were interested in Mrs. Trescott.”

  “In the whole family, Dr. Dyckes.”

  “And I just sit here and open up like the family Bible, eh? And you take it all in, just like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to listen to a doctor violate the ethics of his profession.”

  “I … I thought you were responding to an expression of friendly interest and concern, Doctor, and——”

  “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 time, 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 time 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 Dr. 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 Holton 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 soigné 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 schoolkids. 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.”

  “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 his 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?”