The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “No. That should do it.”

  “Don’t turn your back on anybody holding a two by four.”

  “Never again.” I thanked him and hung up.

  An hour later I stood screened by the shrubbery on the grounds of a lakeshore house, empty and for sale, and saw the station wagon come out of the Pike driveway and turn toward me on the way to town. The two daughters of Helena, blond, dressed for the party, smiling, Biddy at the wheel and Maureen beside her.

  I could reasonably assume that Tom Pike was already in the city, making certain of the arrangements, seeing that his guests would be taken care of. I moved through the screen of plantings, along the road shoulder, angled back along the property line to a point where I could look at the big house. Both cars were gone. Mosquitoes sang their little hunger note into my ears, and a bluejay flew to a pine limb directly over me and called me foul names and accused me of unspeakable practices.

  I crossed the drive and the yard to the rear door and knocked loudly and waited. After the second try, with no answer, I tried to slip the lock, but there was too much overlap in the door framing, so I went along the back of the house and used a short sturdy pry bar on the latch of the first set of sliding glass doors. I had stopped en route at a shopping plaza and bought it, thinking of the sturdy construction of the steel cabinet I had seen in Maureen’s bathroom. The metal latch tore easily and I slid the glass door and sliding screen open, glad that they had not yet adopted that most simple and effective device now being used more and more to secure sliding glass doors, one-inch round hardwood cut to proper length and laid in the track where the door slides.

  I slid the foot-long pry bar back inside my slacks, the hook end over my belt, and went swiftly upstairs to Maureen’s room. There was a party scent of perfume and bath soap in the still air, overlaying the constant undertone of medications. I knelt on the yarn rug in the bathroom and examined the lock on the metal cabinet. It was solid-looking, with such a complex shape of orifice for the key I could assume that trying to pick it would take too much time and patience. I bent the steel lip with the chisel-shaped end of the bar far enough so that I could work the curved nail-puller end into it. I held the cabinet with one hand and pulled slowly on the bar until suddenly the lock gave way and a flying bit of metal clinked against the tile wall.

  There were all the usual bathroom nostrums and medications in the cabinet, things that could be harmful to children—iodine, aspirin, rubbing alcohol. There were syringes and injection needles laid out on a pad of surgical cotton. There was a box of disposable sterilized hypodermics. There was a little row of prescription medicines, pills in bottles and boxes, and there were only three small bottles of medication for injection, with a screw cap covering the rubber diaphragm through which the colorless solution was to be drawn into the hypo. Each had a prescription number, the same number. Two were full, one half empty. It seemed to be a very meager supply compared with enough needles for a nurse’s station. The drugstore was Hamilton Apothecary, Grove Hills Shopping Center.

  I knelt, pondering, automatically listening for any sound in the house. Biddy had said she had learned to give Maureen shots. So the prescription sedative could have been drawn off in whole or in part, and puromycin injected into the bottle. I took one of the two full bottles and the partially empty one. The twist caps on the full ones were still sealed. I realized that the placement of the three bottles bothered me. They were set out midway on the metal shelf, neither back against the rear, nor out at the edge. The other items on the other shelves were set back, taller items at the rear. So something could have been taken out, something that had stood behind the smaller bottles.

  I got up and prowled and found a small flashlight on the nightstand in Biddy’s room. I knelt again and shone the beam of light at a very flat angle against the metal shelf. There was a very, very faint coating of dust on the shelf, and I discovered that in the area behind where the three small bottles had stood there were four circular areas about the size of fifty-cent pieces where there was no dust. So four bottles or containers had rested there and had been removed very recently.

  Deductive logic is self-defeating in that it is like the old-time taffy pull. Stretch it too far and too thin and it cools and sags and breaks. I had projected reasoning into an area where there were too many plausible alternatives.

  Also I had the suspicion that all along I had been trying to make logical deductions on the basis of someone’s actions and reactions who did not move in any reasoning predictable pattern.

  If there had been something removed from the cabinet and if that substance was essential to keep Maureen Pearson Pike in her present childlike state, then either the necessity for keeping her in that condition had ended or she could not return to this house.

  I reached my rented car in two minutes, no more. The sun was going down. A fat lady on hands and knees, grubbing in a flower bed, straightened up and stared at me from under the brim of a huge Mexican straw hat, her mouth a little round O as I went by at a full run, shoe soles whapping the suburban asphalt. I waved.

  I made it into town in perhaps eight minutes, leaving a black spoor of rented rubber here and there. The new building was up on pillars, to provide parking room underneath. The earth around the building was still raw from construction efforts, the big sign listing prime contractor, architect, subcontractors, and future occupants still in place, portions of the sidewalk still fenced off, with temporary wooden walkways along the curbing. While still a half-dozen blocks away I had seen, in the dusk, the lighted windows at the top floor. Perhaps forty cars were under the building, clustered in a casual herd over near the ramp and stairways that led up into the building. With no lights in the parking area, they looked like a placid herd of some kind of grazing creature, settling down for the night.

  I started to park near them, then thought I might want to leave quickly, and latecomers might block me in. I swung around to the right, away from them, and parked, heading out, not far from the entrance I had used and off to the right of it. I got out and took my jacket off the seat and put it on. Revolver and pry bar were tucked away under the front seat, so I locked up.

  Just as I took the first step toward the car cluster and the entrance up into the new building, I heard a faint cat sound, a thin yowl, then a thick, fat, heavy sound that ended the cat cry. It was a whomping thud, as if somebody had dropped a sack of wet sand onto the cat. There was a curious aftersound, a resonating, deep-toned brong, a vibration of the prestressed and reinforced structure overhead. I turned and went out that entrance driveway toward the sidewalk. The building was set back in that area, so that the roofing over the first part of the parking area was but one story high.

  There were no pedestrians on the street. At the furthest corner cars were stacked waiting for the light to change. I went over to the temporary wooden walkway, roofed for pedestrian protection. I jumped and caught the wooden edge, pulled myself up onto the rough plywood roofing, and from there clambered up onto the permanent roof over that portion of the parking area underneath.

  That roof portion was about fifty feet deep and a hundred and fifty wide. There was a long band of fading red across the western horizon, and the daylight had diminished everything to varying shades of gray. I could see from the construction thus far that doors opened out onto the roof area, and that it was designed to become some sort of patio, perhaps an outdoor dining area for a restaurant lease in the new structure.

  Evidently large items of equipment had been derricked up onto that area and uncrated there and taken in through the double doors. The skeletal crates, pried and splintered, and various wrapping and packing materials were piled near the wall of the structure. That wall soared twelve stories straight up to the lighted windows of the top floor. I came upon the body of Maureen Pearson Pike just beyond the jumble of crates and packing materials.

  She lay on her back about three feet from the side of the building and almost parallel to it. The upper part of her body was a little closer
to the building than her legs were. She wore a gray-blue suit, a white blouse, one blue lizard pump. The other was nearby. I had seen the color of the suit when she and Biddy had gone driving by.

  She was ugly, even though her face was undamaged. The impact had jellied her, inside the durable human hide. She was a long sack, roughly tubular, still enclosing all the burst meat and smashed bone, except where pink splinters came through the left sleeve of the suit near the elbow. Her mouth was wide open and unmoving. Her eyes were half open. She was flattened against the roof and bulged wrongly along the contours of her, so that the woman-shape was gone.

  She had landed, as if with a purposeful neatness, with most of her on a crumpled sheet of heavy brown packing paper. It was that slightly waxy waterproofed paper they use to wrap pieces of heavy equipment when they are shipped in open crates, bolted down to heavy timber pallets. Where it was torn I could see that it was a sandwich of two layers of brown paper enclosing a black, tarry core.

  I sat on my heels beside her. I touched the gloss of her hair, then closed her eyes. I smelled all those sharp familiar odors of sudden death. She was cooling meat, the spoiling process beginning. Still on my heels, I craned my neck and looked up. No row of heads up there, staring in sick fascination down the steep canyon drop to the disastrous impact.

  I turned and looked at the building across the street. It was a much older building, an office building four stories high. All the windows were dark. I moved the edge of a crate that pinned the paper down. I gently moved her legs onto the paper. I brought a corner of it up and around her and tucked it under the flattened waist at the far side of her. I moved between her and the building and hesitated, then put my hands against the body and rolled it. That single piece was not big enough. I found another, bigger piece, big as a bedsheet, and swiftly straightened it out, put a corner under her and rolled her halfway up in it, then folded the top and bottom corners in, and rolled her up the rest of the way.

  In the pile of crates I found some tangles of heavy hairy twine. I cut three pieces with my pocketknife and then I tied the long cylindrical bundle once around the middle and at points midway between the middle and each end.

  I started to lose myself as I was doing the knots. I found myself making them too neat and making little throat sounds of satisfaction at how neat and nice they were, and at what a splendid job I was doing. So I hauled myself back from that dark brink and made a quick search of the area and came upon a place a little better than I had hoped to find. It was a service hatch set into the side of the building, perhaps three feet square. Four big wing nuts held the metal plate in place. I took it off. The space was only about two feet deep behind it, ending at the grilled cover for some kind of big foam air filters.

  I went to her and looked up, looked at the windows across the street, and then picked her up. She was a stubborn, clumsy burden, improbably heavy. I had to stand it on end, lock my arms around it, and carry it in a straining, spread-legged waddle, across sixty feet of roof to the open service hatch. The paper was cracklingly heavy, the body somberly resistant. I forced it into a sitting position, pushed it back first into the space, then bent the legs at the knee and pushed them in. The body lay tilted against the grillwork.

  Parcel. All tied and stowed. Girl in a plain brown wrapper. Suddenly I realized that though I knew from the weight distribution which end was head and which feet, I had lost track of back and front. So either I had forced her into a sitting position or she was …

  It was a sick horror, a viscid something that wells into the brain and stops all thought and motion. I shuddered and slammed the metal plate back on and turned the wing nuts down solidly. Only when I straightened did I realize I was soaked. I had sweated through my shirt, jacket, and the waistband of my slacks.

  I went swiftly across the roof, made certain I would not be observed, then dropped to the plywood roof of the walkway and swung down and dropped to the sidewalk. As I started in, a car horn gave a warning beep and I moved aside. More guests for the party. I took my time and let them go up in the elevator first.

  Eighteen

  I stepped out of the elevator into party time. Gold rug, deep and resilient. Air-conditioning laboring against too much smoke and too much body heat. Jabble and roar of dozens of simultaneous conversations. Two men in red coats at the bar set up in the impressive reception room of Development Unlimited. Waitresses edging and balancing their careful way through the crush with trays of cocktails, trays of cocktail food with toothpicks stuck in each exotic little chunk. Girl in a cloth of gold mini-something and a gold cowboy hat and a golden guitar, wandering about with a fixed smile she had learned to wear while singing.

  As I had come up alone in the elevator I had stared at myself in the mirror in the elevator. My face looked grainy and did not seem to fit. I had prodded at it with my fingers to make it fit. And I wondered if one eye had always looked bigger and starier than the other, and I had just never noticed. My lightweight jacket was dark enough so that it was not too evident how I had sweated it out. But it had been nervous sweat. It had turned ice-cold. Not only did I feel as if I smelled somewhat like a horse, I felt that the exercise boy should trot me back and forth in front of the stalls for a time and rub me down or I’d catch the grobbles.

  The guests were the business and investment community, the successful men of Fort Courtney and their women. Professional men, growers, bankers, merchants, contractors, Realtors, brokers. Forties and fifties and sixties. Booming voices that spoke of confidence, optimism, low handicaps, capital gains. Many of their women had brittle questing eyes, appraising the hair, dress, and manner of their friends and acquaintances, checking to see who had come with whom.

  It was easy to pick out the office staff. They were younger, and they seemed tense with the effort to be sociable and agreeable. I picked up a drink at the bar as protective coloration and moved along into what was apparently the largest area of the office suite, the bull pen, soon to be filled with girls, files, desks, duplicators, and electronic accounting equipment.

  I saw Biddy Pearson in a small group at the far side of the room, talking animatedly. I worked my way over toward her, circling other conversation groups. She wore a little turquoise suit with a small jacket and short skirt. The jacket and the skirt fastened down the left side from shoulder to hip with five big brass old-fashioned galoshes-clamps, three on the jacket and two on the skirt. Her stockings were an ornate weave of heavy white thread with a mesh big enough for the standard seining net for bait.

  She spotted me and looked flatteringly pleased and beckoned me over, introduced me to Jack and Helen Something, Ward and Ellie Somethingelse, and I moved in such a way as to block her out of the group just enough so that it dispersed. I did not trust my voice. I was afraid it would make a quacking sound. But it came out with reasonable fidelity as I asked her, “How are things going?”

  “Beautifully! Tom is so pleased. Don’t you think the decorator did a fabulous job?”

  “Very nice.”

  “And Maurie is being an absolute dear! She seems to understand how important this is, really. And she’s really being quite gracious.” She went to tiptoe and lifted her chin to look about for Maureen.

  So you take the gamble as you find it, and you make it up as you go along. “She certainly looks very, very lovely. That’s a good color on her.”

  “Oh! You saw her already.”

  “Yes. Down in the lobby.”

  She was still looking for her, so it was a slow take. She turned toward me. “What? Where?”

  “Down in the lobby.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been here just long enough to get a drink. Five minutes ago? She got off the elevator when I got on.”

  She clamped her fingers around my wrist. “Was she alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “My God, Travis, why didn’t you stop her and bring her back up here?”

  “Look, Biddy. She looked fine. She told me to go right on up and
join the party. She said she had to get something out of the car. She said she’d be right back. Was I supposed to grab her and bring her back up here, kicking and screaming?”

  “Oh, she’s so sly! Oh damn her, anyway. Just when everything was going so well. Tom was dubious about bringing her. But she seemed so … kind of better organized. Excuse me. I’d better find Tom. I thought she was still with him.” She made a wry mouth. “And he probably thinks she’s with me. He’ll be sick, absolutely sick.”

  I found windows and oriented myself and went to a wide corridor that led past small offices to the big offices at the end. People were roaming up and down the corridor, being given the tour by some of the Development Unlimited staff. I turned a corner and went into an office and looked out and down and estimated I was not more than fifteen feet too close to the street side. I moved back toward the corner of the corridor and realized it had to be a room with a closed door. Almost all the others were open for inspection.

  A pretty little redheaded woman came trotting along and stopped and stared up at me. She wore green and a pint of diamonds and a wide martini smile. “Well, hello there, darling! Are you one of his darling new engineers? Christ, you’re a towering beast, aren’t you? I’m Joanie Mace way down here.”

  “Hello, Joanie Mace. I’m not an engineer. I’m a mysterious guest.”

  “With a lousy empty glass? Horrors! Wait right here, mysterious guest. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. I’m a handmaiden.”

  She trotted away. My side of the corridor was empty. I heard voices approaching. I opened the door and stepped into a small office, unlighted. As I closed the door I saw that it was stacked with cartons of office forms and supplies. I made my way to the windows and found that the center window was fixed glass but that the narrower ones on either side cranked inward. A sliding brace stopped them when they were open perhaps eighteen inches. They were five feet tall, and the sill was a foot from the floor. The one on the left was open. I leaned and looked down. It was the right one. I closed it, then pulled my jacket sleeve down across the heel of my hand and pressed the turn latch until it clicked into the fully latched position. As I turned, my toe came down on something soft. I could tell by the feel of it that it was a small leather evening bag. I shoved it into the front of my shirt and tightened my belt another notch.