The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “While you were … conducting this unofficial investigation of Sherman’s death, were you telling Janice about it, about things like the file the Boughmer woman wouldn’t produce?”

  “I guess I was telling her more than I usually would. Hell, I was trying to cover for the time I was spending with Penny. But Janice was turning ice-cold, and fast. She wasn’t buying it. I kept trying, but she wasn’t buying it. She found out, I guess.”

  “Somebody told her about it practically as soon as it began.”

  “No kidding! Some real pal.”

  “Do you think she’s found some other man?”

  “I keep trying not to think about that. What’s it to you?”

  “Let’s say it isn’t just a case of big-nose, Holton.”

  “I get home and that damned Meg is either over at the house with her kids, or the kids are over at Meg’s house. No note from Janice. No message, nothing. So she comes home and I say where have you been, and she says out. Looks so damned smug. But I keep telling myself that when she comes home, she doesn’t have that look. You know? Something about the mouth and the hair and the way they walk. A woman who’s been laid looks laid. Their eyes are different too. If she’s got somebody, he’s not playing his cards right. If she likes him and she’s sore at me, and I know she’s known about Penny, all he’d have to do would be lay one hand on her to get her going, and she’d take over from there. A lousy way to talk about the wife, I guess. But I know her. And she’s no wife now. Not anymore. Never again, not for me.”

  “Does she think Sherman was murdered?”

  “She was fond of him. She’s sure of it. Not from anything I dug up or any chain of logic I explained. She operates on instinct. She says he couldn’t have and to her that’s it.”

  “So she wanted to have you find out who did it?”

  “Not because she was hot to have somebody punished, but more because it would clear his name.”

  “What do you know about the trouble Tom Pike got into at Kinder, Noyes, and Strauss?”

  “What? You jump around pretty fast. All I know is the shop talk I heard about it. He was a very hot floor man. He had people swearing by him. He went in there and built up one hell of a personal following. High fliers, discretionary accounts, a lot of trading in and out, accounts fully margined. And he’s a very persuasive guy. He made a lot of money for a lot of people in this town, in a very short time. But there was one old boy who came down to retire, and he had a portfolio of blue chips. He had Telephone and General Motors and Union Carbide. He signed an agreement to have Tom Pike handle his holdings on a discretionary basis. As I understand it, Tom cashed in all the old boy’s blues and started swinging with the proceeds. Fairchild Camera, Texas Instrument, Teledyne, Litton. At the end of three months the total value of the old boy’s holdings was down by about twelve thousand. And Tom had made about forty trades, and the total commissions came to eight grand. The old boy blew the whistle on Tom, claiming that the agreement was that Tom would commit only twenty percent of his holdings in high-risk investments, that Tom had ignored the understanding and put the whole amount in high fliers, and had churned the account to build up his commissions. He had his lawyer send the complaint directly to the president of the firm in New York. They sent down a couple of lawyers and a senior partner to investigate. Brokerage houses are very sensitive about that kind of thing. Big conference, as I understand it. Complete audit of all trades. Tom Pike claimed that the man had told him that he was after maximum capital gains in high-risk issues and that he had other resources and could afford the risk. The man denied it. It looked as if Tom was in serious trouble. But one of the female employees was able to back up Tom’s story. She said the man had phoned her to get verification of the status of his account and his buying power, and that when he had been twenty-five thousand ahead of the game, he had told her over the phone that getting out of the tired old blue chips and letting Mr. Pike handle his account was the smartest move he had ever made. The old man denied ever saying that.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Hilda something. Long last name. The cashier.”

  “Hulda Wennersehn?”

  “If you know about it, why are you asking me?”

  “I don’t know about it. What happened?”

  “They decided that in view of Tom’s knowing the man was retired and needed security, he had used bad judgment. They slapped his wrist by giving him a sixty-day suspension. And they busted a couple of the more recent trades and absorbed the loss in order to build the old man’s equity back to almost what he started with. That’s when Tom said the hell with it and started Development Unlimited.”

  “And Miss Wennersehn now works for him.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing. Just a comment. How did the business community react to Pike’s problem?”

  “The way these things go, at first everybody was ready to believe the worst. People pulled their accounts. They said that while he was looking good with their money, he was piling up commissions. They said he’d been lucky instead of smart. Then it swung right around the other way when he was pretty well cleared. He was out of the brokerage business, and so what he did was move his big customers right out of the market, off-the-record advice, and put them into land syndication deals. Better for him because you can build some very fancy pyramids, using equities from one as security for loans on the next, and he can cut himself in for a piece by putting the deals together. He’s moved very fast.”

  “Credit good?”

  “He got past that iffy place when Doc Sherman’s death fouled up some moves he was going to make. His credit has to be good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s got bankers tied into the deals, savings and loan, contractors, accountants, Realtors. Hell, if he ever screwed up, the whole city would come tumbling down.”

  “Along with the new building?”

  “All four and a half million worth of it. Land lease in one syndicate, construction loans and building leases in another.”

  “Very quick for a very young man.”

  “How old are the fellows running the big go-go funds? How old are the executives in some of the great big conglomerates? He’s quick and tough and bold, and you don’t know what his next move is going to be until it’s all sewed up.”

  “Last item. How well do you know Hardahee?”

  “More professionally than socially. Wint is very solid. Happens to be under the weather right now. Scheduled this morning at ten on an estate case where I represent one of the parties at interest and Stan Krantz appeared and asked for a postponement because Wint is ill and nobody else over there is up on the case. It’s pretty complex. Jesus! All this work to do and I just can’t seem to make my mind work. McGee, what are you after? What’s this all about?”

  “I guess it’s about a dead nurse.”

  “That mean that much to you?”

  “She was very alive and it was a dingy way to die.”

  “So you’re sentimental? You’re carried away because she was so sore at me she took you on? All she was, McGee, was—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?”

  “Say it then, if you’re sure you want to find out.”

  He looked at me and rubbed the back of his hand across his lips. “I think I’ll take your word for it.”

  “You’re mean in a curious way, Holton. Small mean. Like some kind of a dirty little kid.”

  “Go to hell,” he said with no emphasis at all. He swiveled his chair. He was looking out at his little oriental garden patio as I walked out. The rain had stopped.

  Seventeen

  It was five when I got back to 109. I unlocked the door and leaned over and reached around it. No wad of paper anywhere near where it should be. I opened the door the rest of the way. The balled-up piece of stationery was five feet from the door, where it had rolled when somebody had opened the door.

  It seemed a fair guess that if
it had been a maid or a housekeeper, I would have found it in the wastebasket. I checked the phones first. I took the base plate off the one by the bed and found that my visitor was going first class. He’d put a Continental 0011 in there, more commonly known as a two-headed bug. It would pick up anything in the room and also over the phone and transmit it on an FM frequency. Effective maximum range probably three hundred feet. Battery good for five days or so, when fresh. It goes for around five hundred dollars. So he could be within range, listening on an FM receiver, or he could have a voice-activated tape recorder doing his listening for him. Or he could have a pickup and relay receiver-transmitter plugged into an AC outlet within range, and be reading me from a much greater distance. One thing was quite certain. The sounds of my taking the screws out of the base plate with the little screwdriver blade on the pocket knife would either have alerted him at once or would when he played the tape back.

  So I said, “Come to the room and we’ll have a little talk. Otherwise you’re out five hundred bucks worth of play toy.” I took it out and thumbed the little microswitch to off. I then made a fairly thorough check of the underside of all the furniture and any other place I thought a backup mike and transmitter might be effectively concealed. The professional approach is to plant two. Then the pigeon finds one and struts around congratulating himself, but he’s still on the air. If the same person, Broon, had checked me over the first time, then I had two more reasons to believe he wasn’t much more than moderately competent.

  I was finding a good place for the gun when Stanger phoned me. He said he hadn’t been able to get a line on Broon as yet. He said the continuing investigation on the murder of Penny Woertz hadn’t turned up a thing as yet. He had checked on Helen Boughmer and found they had her under heavy sedation.

  I told him I had no progress to report.

  I didn’t actually. All I had was a lot more unanswered questions than before. I stretched out on the bed to ask them all over again.

  Assume that Tom Pike had arranged that he and Janice Holton have their first assignation, in the full meaning of the word, in the apartment where Hulda Wennersehn lived. Janice couldn’t get in touch with him to tell him she couldn’t make it. So he had gone to the parking lot where they had arranged to meet and had finally realized she wasn’t going to be there. Assume he went to the apartment alone and that he went to Penny’s place in the late afternoon and she let him in and he shoved the shears into her throat. He tracked some blood into the Wennersehn apartment. He cleaned it up, cleaned up his shoes and maybe pants legs, and burned the rags.

  But he had expected Janice to be there. He had changed his plan. What could the original plan have been? Janice certainly would have an understandable motive for killing her husband’s girlfriend. Having her nearby at the time of the murder could establish opportunity.

  So if he planned to frame Janice Holton for the murder of Penny, and if Janice couldn’t show up to be the patsy, why would he go ahead and kill Penny anyway? Lorette Walker had found out from the cleaning woman that somebody had stretched out on Hulda Wennersehn’s bed.

  So he had some thinking to do. He could cancel out and try to set it up another time. The death of the nurse would, of course, bust up the little duet of Penny and Rick, the two who had the unshakable belief Sherman hadn’t killed himself. Did Penny have some random piece of information that she had not yet pieced into the picture and that made haste imperative?

  Or it could have been some kind of sick excitement that grew and grew inside the brain of the man stretched out on the bed, until at last he got up and walked to Penny’s place and did it because he had been thinking of it too long not to do it, even though the original plan was no longer possible.

  Of course, it was possible that he might have at last decided to just go talk to the nurse and see if she did have the missing bit of information that he suspected she might have. Then, while he was with her, she might have made the intuitive leap, and suddenly he had no choice but to kill her, suddenly and mercilessly.

  But my speculations kept returning to what the original plan could have been. What good would it do to knock Janice Holton out or drug her and set her up for the murder when under interrogation she would explain why she was at the Wennersehn apartment and who she was with? I tried to figure out how he could have planned to leap that hurdle. Kill them both and set it up as murder and suicide? That would have been a complex and tricky and terribly dangerous procedure.

  Suddenly I realized that he could have framed her very safely, very beautifully, if she were unable to remember how she came to be there, in fact could not remember the assignation with Pike or even being in the Wennersehn woman’s apartment or in Penny’s apartment.

  I found myself pacing around the room with no memory of getting off the bed. Suppose Pike had some way of making certain Maureen didn’t remember a thing. No memory of suicide attempts. Couldn’t Janice have no memory of committing a murder? Suppose she found herself in Penny’s apartment with the dead girl, with no memory of how she got there?

  Penny had been going to tell me something Dr. Sherman said about memory and digital skills. Digital? Skill with numbers or with fingers? Manual skills, maybe.

  Maybe that Dormed thing fouled up memory. Electrosleep. Portable unit, Biddy had told me.

  I needed some fast expert opinions. I had no problem remembering the name of the neurologist in Miami. When your spine has been damaged by an angry man belting you with a chunk of two by four and your legs go numb, and somebody fixes what you were certain was a broken back and wasn’t, you don’t forget the name.

  Dr. Steve Roberts. I got through to him in fifteen minutes. “Excuse me, Trav,” he said. “This lady I live with has just handed me a frosty delicious glass. There. I have tested the drink and kissed the lady. What’s on your mind? Back trouble?”

  “No. Some information. Do you know anything about an electrosleep machine called a Dormed?”

  “Yes, indeed. Nice little gadget. Very effective.”

  “If somebody used one a great deal, could it destroy their memory?”

  “What? No. Absolutely not. Not enough current to destroy anything. If you keep hitting people with big charges, you don’t destroy any particular process. You just turn them into a vegetable in all respects. Each series of shock treatments destroys brain cells. So do alcoholic spasms, if you have enough of them over a long enough period of time.”

  “How about convulsions? Like a woman might have if she had a kidney failure and lost a baby.”

  “Eclampsia, you mean? No, I doubt it. That sends the blood pressure up like a skyrocket, and before any brain damage could occur, you’d probably have a broken blood vessel in the brain. Where are you, anyway?”

  “Fort Courtney.”

  “Practicing medicine without a license?”

  “Practicing, maybe. But not medicine. Steve, can you think of any way you could make a person lose their memory?”

  “All of it? Total amnesia?”

  “No. Just of recent things.”

  “How long do you want this effect to last?”

  “Permanently.”

  “Sometimes a good solid concussion will do it. Traumatic amnesia. Lots of people who recover after an accident lose a couple of hours or days out of their life and it seems to be gone forever. But there’s no guarantee.”

  “Is there any chemical or medical way to do it?”

  “Well … I wouldn’t say that there’s anything you could call a recognized procedure. I mean, there isn’t much call for it, as I imagine you can understand.”

  “Is there a way?”

  “Will you hold a minute. I think I can lay a hand on what I want.”

  I waited for at least two full minutes before he came back on the line. “Trav? I have to give you the layman’s short course in how the brain works. You have about ten billion neurons in your head. These are tiny cells that transmit tiny electric charges. Each little neuron contains, among other things, about twenty mil
lion molecules of ribonucleic acid, called RNA for short. This RNA manufactures protein molecules—don’t ask me how. Anyway, these protein molecules are related to the function we call memory. With me so far?”

  “I think so.”

  “In certain experiments it has been shown that if you force laboratory animals to learn new skills, more RNA is produced in the brain, and thus more protein molecules are produced. Also, if you inject rats with magnesium pemoline, which doubles, at least, the RNA production, you have rats that learn a lot faster and remember longer. So they’ve tried reverse proof by injecting rats and mice with a chemical that interferes with the process by which the RNA produces the protein molecule. Teach a mouse to find its way through a maze, then inject it, and it forgets everything it just learned.”

  “What do they inject?”

  “A substance called puromycin. At one university they’ve been treating goldfish with it, and they have some very stupid goldfish out there. Don’t learn a thing and can’t remember a thing.”

  “What would happen if you injected a person with puromycin?”

  “I don’t think anybody ever has. If it works the way it does on the lab animals, you’d wipe out the memory of what had recently happened, maybe forever. Personally, I’d rather be given magnesium pemoline. In fact, I don’t know how I’m getting along without it. As to puromycin, I have no idea what the side effects would be.”

  “Could anybody buy it?”

  “Any doctor could, or any authorized lab or research institute. What in the world have you gotten into?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Will you tell me someday?”

  “If it wouldn’t bore you. Say, what about memory and digital skills?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, make a comment.”

  “There seems to be a kind of additional memory function in the brain stem and in the actual motor nerves and muscles. We’ve discovered that a man can have a genuine amnesia, regardless of cause, and suppose he has been a jeweler all his life and you hand him a jeweler’s loupe. More often then not, without knowing why he does so, he will lift it to his eye, put it in place and hold it there, like a monocle. Give a seamstress a thimble, and she’ll put it on the right finger. We had a surgeon here once with such bad aphasia he couldn’t seem to make any connection to reality at all. But when we put a piece of surgical thread in his hand, he began to tie beautiful little surgical knots, one-handed, without even knowing what he was doing. Shall I go on?”