The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “So how do you want me to handle it?”

  “I think the thing he would respond to best, the attitude he’d most quickly comprehend, would be your offer to sell him the body for a hundred thousand dollars. But I don’t want to move, to set it up, until we have a good line on Broon. I’d like him in custody first. Additional pressure. So we’ll get you back to your motel, and I want you to accept no calls and have your meals sent in until I instruct you further. Can you … ah … suppress your natural talent for unilateral action?”

  “I bow to the more devious mind in this instance, Mr. Gaffner.”

  There was no trace of humor in him. “Thank you,” he said.

  Twenty

  I slept undisturbed until past noon. The door was chained, the DO-NOT-DISTURB sign hanging on the outside knob.

  The first thing I remembered when I awoke was how, about an hour before first light, I had driven by the new building, with Gaffner beside me and Lozier following in the car they had arrived in.

  I drove by knowing she was still up there, behind the metal plate of the service hatch, waiting out the first hours of forever, leaning against the interior grill, firmly wrapped, neatly tied.

  Helena, I didn’t do very well. I gave it a try, but it was moving too fast. Dear Tom sidled her into the little office past the boxes, perhaps kissed her on the forehead in gentle farewell, opened the window as wide as it would go, and told her to look down, darling, and see where the lovely restaurant will be. She would turn her shoulders through the opening and peer down. Then a quick boost of knee in the girdled rump, hand in the small of the back. Her hand released the purse to clutch at something, clutch only at the empty air of evening, then she would cat-squall down, slowly turning.

  I showered, shaved. I felt sagging and listless. I had the feeling that it was all over. Odd feeling. No big savage heat to avenge the nurse, avenge the big blond childish delicious wife. Perhaps because nothing anyone could do to Pike would ever mean anything to him in the same sense that we would react to disaster.

  He was a thing. Heart empty as a paper bag, eyes of clever glass.

  As I was reaching for the phone, there was a determined knocking at my door. I called through it. Stanger. I let him in. He seemed strange. He drifted, in a floating way, as if happily drunk. But he wasn’t. His smile was small and thoughtful.

  He looked at his watch and sat down. “We’ve got a little time to spare.”

  “We have? That’s nice.”

  “I did a better job of bugging Mr. Tom Pike than I did on you. Was it that wad of paper on the floor?”

  “Lieutenant, I’m disappointed in you. Bugging people on your own team. Shame!”

  “My only team is me. I had a lot of thoughts about you. One of them was you were smoke screening the fact maybe Tom Pike brought you in here for some reason or other. Was it something about that paper on the floor?”

  I said it was and told him how it worked, then said, “So why didn’t you let me know last night?”

  “Wanted you to have all the window trimming there was. The more you could come up with, the better chance you had of selling Gaffner. You did good with that man.”

  “That was an expensive piece of equipment you planted on me, Al. City property?”

  “Personal. It wasn’t like planting it on a stranger. I knew I’d get it back. You might as well think it was Broon did it. But he didn’t because the very last time anybody saw him at all was a little before noon, Monday. He went to the Courtney Bank and Trust and opened his deposit box, and it gave me the ugly feeling he was gone for good. So it was mighty comforting to hear I’m going to meet up with him.”

  “You keep looking at your watch.”

  “So I do. But there’s still plenty of time. Don’t you want to know how I bugged old Tom?”

  “You’re going to tell me anyway.”

  “Why, so I am! Who else can I tell? I went right to a fellow who happens to be the second oldest of those six brothers of Penny Woertz and who happens to work for Central Florida Bell, and I told him I was in need of a little illegal help, and first thing you know, we had a nice tap on both Pike’s private unlisted lines. Nothing I can ever take to court, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Lord God, that man has had trouble this morning! Between keeping people busy hunting all over for his missing wife and trying to calm down the people who want to take their money out of his little syndicates and corporations, I bet you ol’ Dave Broon had to try a lot of times before he got through. About ten of eleven when he did. Had to put in thirty-five cents for three minutes.”

  “So?”

  “So thank God when Tom said they could meet at the usual place, Dave didn’t want any part of it. Saves a lot of trouble. Dave Broon picked the place. Six miles southwest of town. I just got back from there, checking it over, getting something set up. Pretty good place to meet. Big piece of pastureland. Used to be the old Glover place. Pike and some people bought it up a while ago to turn it into something called ranchettes. Two-acre country estates. There’s a gate with a cattle guard near the west side and a lot of open land and just one big old live oak shade tree smack in the middle, maybe a quarter mile from the nearest fence line.”

  “When do they meet?”

  “Two thirty. But I left Nudenbarger staked out. We can swing around and go in the back way and cut across to where I left him. Less chance of running into either of them.”

  “You seem very contented, Mr. Stanger.”

  “Sure. Broon told him to bring a big piece of money. They haggled some. Pike said thirty thousand was absolute tops. Broon said it would have to be an installment. Broon told him not to get cute. It’s sure empty out there. Bugs, buzzards, and meadowlarks. They’ll meet by the tree and have a nice talk.”

  “And you bugged the tree.”

  His face sagged and his mouth turned down. “You take the pure joy out of things, McGee. I’m sorry I decided to bring you along for the fun.”

  “I’m sorry I spoiled your fun. I haven’t had anything to eat yet. Is there time?”

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  Stanger drove the city’s sedan hard. He took a confusing route through the backcountry, along small dirt roads. At last he stopped and got out at a place that looked like any other. He extended the aerial of a walkie-talkie and said, “Lew? You read me?”

  “I read you, Al. No action yet. Nothing. Hey, bring that bug dope out of the glove compartment.”

  “Okay. We’ll be coming along now. Let me know if either one shows up before we get there.”

  He told me that he’d left Nudenbarger staked out with binoculars, a carbine, and the receiver-recorder end of the mike-transmitter unit he’d tied in the oak tree. He said we had a mile to go. He hadn’t wanted to put the car on any directly connecting road for fear Broon or Tom Pike would drive a circuit around the whole ranch to see if everything was clear before driving in.

  We had to crawl under one fence and climb over another. The air was hot and still, but there was a hint of coolness whenever the breeze stirred. Stanger seemed to be plodding along listlessly, but he covered ground faster than one would think.

  We came out onto a dirt road, crossed it, leaped a watery ditch on the other side. I followed Stanger into a clump of small pines, thick ones, eight to ten feet tall. He motioned me down, and we crawled the last dozen feet to where Nudenbarger lay on his belly close to the fence, staring through the binoculars. He turned and looked with a certain distaste at me and said, “Nothing yet, Al. Maybe they called it off, huh?”

  Stanger ignored him. He said to me, “Ringside. Like it?”

  We were sheltered on three sides by the pines. We could look under the bottom strand of wire and see the big oak tree about five hundred yards away. Stanger pointed out the gate they’d drive through. “Five after two,” he said. “Ought to get some action along about now.”

  And we did. A dusty beetle-green Ford two or three years old appeared in the distance, trail
ing a long plume of dust. The rain of yesterday had dried quickly and completely.

  “Broon,” Stanger said. The car slowed as it approached the open gate with the cattle guard steel rails paving the entrance, and then went on past, accelerating slightly. In a tone of approval Stanger said, “Took a look to see if Pike was early and now he’ll swing around the place. About four miles to go all the way around it. He’ll come right down this here dirt road behind us.”

  We waited. It stirred old instincts, old training. Terrain, cover and concealment, field of fire. The brown pine needles underneath me had a faded aromatic scent. Skirr of insects. Piercingly sweet call of meadowlark. Swamp-smell of the ditch water nearby. Sway and dip of the grasses in the breeze. The motor sound became audible, grew, and it went by behind us, shocks and springs chunking as it hit the potholes in the clay road base. Faded off. A drift of road dust filtered the sunlight for a few moments.

  Long minutes later we saw, far across the flat pastureland, distant glints as he drove along the opposite road, the one that paralleled the road behind us. He was behind the hedgerow of scrub pine and palmetto, chrome winking through the few open places.

  When he returned to the gate, he slowed and turned in and drove across the open pastureland, through the grass that had grown to over a foot high since the stock had been moved. The car rolled and bounced and he made a swing, a half circle and parked perhaps fifty feet beyond the lonely live oak.

  When he got out, Stanger reached and took the binoculars away from Lew Nudenbarger. “Not now, you damn fool! He’ll be looking in every direction, and you pick up the sun just right on a lens, he’s gone.”

  “Sorry, Al.”

  We watched the man walk slowly over to stand in the shade of the oak. Five hundred yards was too far for me to get much more than an impression of a smallish man with a trim and tidy way of moving, pale hair, brown face, white shirt, khaki trousers.

  I thought I saw him raise a hand to his mouth, and was suddenly startled by a small, dry coughing sound that came from the monitor speaker of the receiver. It stood on a level place between Stanger and Nudenbarger, a few feet back from the small crest.

  “Do the talking right there,” Stanger pleaded in a low voice. “Right there. Don’t, for God’s sake, set in the car and talk. We want you right there, you slippery little scut.”

  Minutes passed. And then a red car appeared far away, pulling a high-speed dust tower. It braked and turned into the gate. It was the red Falcon wagon, and the last time I had seen it in motion, Helena’s daughters had been in it.

  It followed the same route through the grass that Broon had taken. It made a wider circle around the tree, in the opposite direction, and stopped on our side but not in the line of vision.

  Stanger was looking through the glasses. He lowered them and hitched down and turned on the old Uher recorder, now functioning on battery pack and jacked into the receiver. He took another look through the glasses. “Dave got a gun in his hand,” he said.

  Broon’s voice came over the speaker, resonating the diaphragm as he shouted across the sunlit space. “Whyn’t you turn off the motor and get out?”

  Pike was so far from the mike his answer was inaudible.

  “Talk in the shade, brothers,” Stanger pleaded. “Go talk in the shade of the nice big tree.”

  “I wanted you to see the gun right off, Tom,” Broon called out to him. “So you wouldn’t get cute until I told you something. If I don’t make a phone call tonight to a certain party, an eight-page letter gets mailed special delivery to the state attorney. I spent half the night writing that letter. Now I’ll toss this here gun in my car and we can talk things out.”

  We watched the distant scene and saw them both walk slowly into the shade of the big oak. “Real nice,” Stanger whispered.

  Broon’s conversational voice over the speaker had a startling clarity and fidelity. His tone was mild. “I give you credit, Tom. You suckered me good. Never occurred to me there was something in that bottle different from what you were sticking into your wife. What the hell was it?”

  “Mostly nitric acid. I estimated it would eat through the lead stopper in about twenty-four hours.”

  “What made you so sure I’d put it in my lock box when you told me to keep it safe?”

  “I wasn’t sure. If you hadn’t, I was no worse, off, was I?”

  “You sure to God made me worse off. Turned everything in my box to a mess of dirty brown stinking mush. Papers and tapes and photos and one hell of a lot of good cash money. It even et a corner out of the box. That bank woman was real upset about the stink. Thing is, Pike, it ruined a lot of stuff that didn’t have a damned thing to do with you and me.”

  “You forced me to do something, Dave.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “You got too expensive. I couldn’t afford you.”

  “With folks standing in line to hand you their savings?”

  “But with you taking so big a cut, I couldn’t show a return. Then the supply dries up. I had to cut down on your leverage.”

  “It didn’t work. I’ve got a good memory. I got a lot of facts in that letter I wrote. They can be checked out. Pike, you just made it harder on yourself, because I got to collect all that money you burned up with that damned acid stunt, and we’re starting with that thirty thousand you better damned well have brought along.”

  “Things are too tight. I didn’t bring it.”

  “Then I’m going to pull the stopper, boy, and let you go right down the drain.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Now, just what gives you reason to think I won’t?”

  “Because you’re only half bright, David. But you’re bright enough to understand the way things are now. And you’re going to keep right on working for me. But your rates have gone down.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “If you were bright, you wouldn’t have left so suddenly. I knew from the way you acted that I’d destroyed the actual proof. You’d have made me believe you still had the edge. Now, letter or no letter, all you’ve got is your naked word against mine. Who will be believed, you or me? Think it over. With the Sherman tapes and the signed statement, you could destroy me, possibly. Now you’re only a potential annoyance. I brought along thirty-five hundred dollars for you, to show good faith. You’re bright enough to know I’m going to be a pretty good source of income for you. Nothing like before, of course. You’ll accept it.”

  “You sure of that? You sure I’ll settle for a little bit here and a little bit there?”

  “As opposed to nothing at all, why not?”

  “It won’t pay for the risk.”

  “What risk?”

  “Maybe I’m only half bright, like you say, but I’m bright enough to know you’re not going to last. They’re going to grab you, and when they do, you’ll put me in it right up to the eyeballs.”

  “Grab me for what?”

  “For killing folks. Maybe with Doc Sherman it was your only way out. But I think you liked doing it. You told me they’d grab Janice Holton for stabbing that nurse. But it went wrong somehow and you went ahead anyway, without any real good reason. Pretty soon you’re going to set up that suicide deal on your wife and enjoy that too. Then you’ll start thinking about somebody else. Maybe me. No, thanks. You’ve turned into a bug, Pike. I’ve seen them like you and seen what happens. Maybe it makes you feel so big you have to keep doing it.”

  “My poor wife threw herself out a twelfth-story window last evening, David.”

  “What! What the hell are you saying? There wasn’t a thing in the paper about—”

  “Believe me, she went out the window. I heard the sound of the impact and I know she didn’t walk away. I thought the workmen would find the body, but it seems to be gone.”

  “What the hell do you mean—gone?”

  “Today I learned from Biddy that her old friend, Mr. McGee, told her at the party that he saw Maureen sneaking out alone. Assume he knows the t
erms of the trust funds. So I think he’ll get in touch with me to sell me a little information. Your next job is to get to him first, David, and see if you can encourage him to tell you all about it.”

  Broon did not respond. I found it hard to relate the voices that came over the little speaker to the two men standing under a distant tree across the sunny pastureland.

  “You poor damned fool,” Broon said.

  “It’s really quite imperative to get going on it,” Tom Pike said, “because even if he hadn’t interfered, it will take several months before they’ll close out the trust and transfer the principal directly to Bridget.”

  “Somebody steals a body and you think it’s some kind of an inconvenience! You damned fool!”

  “Why get in an uproar, Broon? Body or no body, nobody can ever prove a thing.”

  “You don’t even realize it’s all over, do you? I’ll tell you, there’s only one way I can walk away from this one, partner.”

  Quite suddenly there was a grunt of effort, a gasp of surprise, over the speaker. The distant figures had merged abruptly, and as they spun around it looked, at that distance, like some grotesque dance. The taller figure went up and over and down, and we heard the thud of impact. Both of them were down and invisible. The grass concealed them. Dave Broon stood up, stared down for a moment. Stanger lowered the binoculars quickly. Broon made a slow turn, all the way around, eyes searching the horizon.

  “Shouldn’t we—”

  “Shut up, Lew,” Stanger said.

  Broon trotted out of the shade and across the sunlit grass to his car. He opened the trunk. Stanger put the glasses on him as he came back.

  “Coil of rope,” he said. “Tie him up and tote him away, maybe.”