Dress Her in Indigo

by John D. MacDonald

  “I think you’d better tell me, Mr. McGoo—”

  “McGee.”

  “Oh. Terribly sorry. McGee, then. Tell me just when and where you saw Charles Rockland.”

  “Walter Rockland.”

  “Terribly sorry. Charles didn’t sound quite right, did it? Rocko suits him better than either, of course.”

  “We saw him in Mexico City the day before yesterday, Mr. Bundy.”

  “Really?”

  “Just routine. After all, he did own the Chevy truck and camper that entered Mexico last January tenth, and Miss Bowie was one of the group. Miss Bowie, Miss Minda McLeen, Carl Sessions, and Jerome Nesta. He wrote to a friend in Miami and gave his Mexico City address. So we looked him up, of course.”

  “Naturally. Part of your investigation. Go on.”

  It was turning sour. You can take only so many chances. But when it does turn sour, at least you know at what point it started to go bad, and that can be useful. “Go on with what?”

  “With what he said to you about me, of course.”

  “Just that if you seemed uncooperative, to mention his name.”

  He finished the wine, licked his finger, ran it around and around the edge of the wine glass until he created a thin, high musical note.

  He smiled at me. It was a mocking and flirtatious smile. “Bullshit,” he said softly.

  I smiled back. “At least I gave it a try, Bruce.”

  “Dear fellow, little games of intrigue, little fabrics of deception, they’re too much a part of my scene. I had years of stage design in New York, and years of set design on the Coast. I’ll give you one little gold star for your forehead, though. You are a little more subtle than you look. Your type, all huge and hearty and outdoorsy, I expect just a kind of clumsy blundering about. Rocko, for example. Dear God, if at this stage of my life I hadn’t learned how to protect myself from anything any piece of rough trade could dream up, I’d be terribly vulnerable and innocent, wouldn’t I? Don’t you think you’d best leave now?”

  “Never argue with the umpire. Come on, Meyer.”

  He walked us out to the gate. As he unlocked it he said, “I suppose that if you are really what you claim to be, and you really want to know whether it was an accident or suicide, I’d think that that little brunette friend of the Bowie girl’s would give you the most clues. Actually, her father is clomping all over town trying to locate her. A perfectly dreadful, dreary man from one of those ghastly midwest states that begin with a vowel. Product of Kiwanis and Dale Carnegie, and once he affixes himself to you, you have to pry him off as if he were a fat little pilot fish.”

  As I thanked him his two guests arrived, spectacularly, in a little custom Lotus Elan convertible in bubblegum pink with black upholstery. The woman came out from under the wheel, leggy, slender, tall, nimble, in light-blue linen sheath dress to mid-thigh, sleeveless. She had a wild and riotous ruff of wind-spilled lion-mane hair, high-heeled sandals and purse to match the car. For just an instant she was twenty something, but then in the light across her face she was thirty-something, with a twenty-odd body. The boy was in his early twenties, in white shirt open at the throat, crisp khakis, and a powder blue jacket that was a precise match with the lady’s dress. He was brick-red from the sun. His hair was cropped to a copper bristle. He had a sullen face, heavy features, and he moved with the indolent indifferent, grace, and ease of one of the big hunting cats, or one of the many imitations of Brando.

  “Brucey!” she cried in joyous greeting.

  “Becky darling!” he cried.

  Giving us a sidelong questing glance, she ran to embrace the host, saying in a British accent, “David had the most fascinating day at the dig. They came upon a whole pocket of tiny beads of bone and jade, and the poor darling had to spend practically the entire day on his knees in the bottom of a monstrous hole, brushing the dust away and picking them up with tweezers. He desperately needs a huge whiskey, don’t you, darling?”

  The sunbaked boy grunted, and Bruce tried to move them inside. We had gone a half dozen steps when Becky gave that upperclass commanding caw. “You! I say, you two! Wait up a moment! Bruce? Dearheart, why must one set of guests leave when the next arrives? Your house is rather small, I grant that. But not that small.”

  I saw the way it might go, and came back as he murmured protestations to her. I said, “It really wasn’t a social call, ma’am. In fact we wouldn’t have even got inside the gate if I hadn’t tried a little doubletalk. But it only worked for a little while. Mr. Bundy called my bluff. So I don’t believe he’d be very happy about having us come back in as guests.”

  She measured me with vivid emerald wicked-gleam-of-mischief eyes through the rough spill of the red-blond-gold-russet hair and made up her impulsive mind and cried, “Nonsense! We are just too terribly inbred around here. One says the same old things to the same old faces in the same old places year without end. Bruce, dear, these gentlemen would make it a more lively evening.”

  “But Becky, they are insurance types, from Florida. And it’s all a very dull bit about the dead girl, the Bowie girl, and they know she traveled here with that Rockland boy. Apparently there was some sort of policy on the girl’s life.”

  “But Brucey, what if they are assurance types? Does that mean we have to sit about talking about premiums? Let us widen our horizons a bit, dear.”

  He hesitated and then, from the little lift and fall of his shoulders, I could see that he had given up. He said to us, “Lady Rebecca Divin-Harrison is one of our most attractive local institutions, and she has, as you may have detected, a whim of iron. Becky, may I present Mr. McGee and Mr. Meyer. Gentlemen, please come back into my home as my invited guests.”

  “Bravo!” said Becky. “That was really gracious, Bruce. Like a child taking medicine. Mr. McGee, I am Becky and you are …”

  “Travis. And Meyer is Meyer.”

  “And this is David Saunders, who is down here on a grant, grubbing about in the ruins. Bruce, dear, are you going to keep me out here on the street? I’m beginning to feel like Apple Mary.”

  So we went back in, with Meyer giving me an amused little wink, a little nod of approval. We went out onto the twilight patio, sweet with the evening song of the birds, heavy with the scent of flowers that were just opening for the hours of the night, with fleshy pink petals, and a smell something like jasmine.

  Each little group of strangers establishes its own set of balances and unspoken agreements. Tentative relationships are made and broken until the ones are found which are durable enough to last the evening, at least. From long habit, Meyer and I could talk on one level while maintaining an elliptical kind of communication on a level inaccessible to the other three. Bruce and Becky were doing the same thing, wherein innocent expression had subterranean values.

  Bruce bustled about, happily hostessing, making drinks, lighting the patio lanterns, summoning a solemn little Mexican woman to present the trays of hors d’oeuvres, with Bruce anxiously awaiting our verdicts on each delicacy.

  Becky was all animation, in constant movement, making wry and bawdy judgements, with hoots of harsh laughter. In her evident maturity, she was still totally girl, that special kind of girl who does not have any self-conscious awareness of herself, but can fling herself about, leggy and lithe, laugh with an open throat, comb her casual hair back with splayed fingers, scratch herself, kick off her sandals, stand ugly, lick crumbs from her fingertips. She was teeming and burning with endless and remarkable energies, with taut slender vibrating health. One could not imagine her ever being bored. Her drink was a pale Spanish sherry, in an old-fashioned glass with a single cube of ice, and she seemed able to make one last indefinitely.

  David Saunders was a familiar type, muscular, burly yet feline. He moved with languid grace. He sat immobile, thighs bulging the khaki slacks, apparently in total disinterest and indifference to anyone and anything about him. It was that special arrogance which relieves the possessor of any responsibility to communicate with any
one or please anyone. He could have been in a bus station, waiting for an overdue bus. But he did not become inconspicuous or invisible. There was a surly presence, an assurance, that made people try to please him, to bring him into the conversation. His drink, to Bundy’s apparent dismay, was bourbon and Coke, and he knocked them back with stolid, metronomic efficiency.

  I decided that I could risk, for the sake of possible returns, casting a large doubt on our insurance story, and Bruce’s statement of having done stage design in New York and set design in California gave me the opening. So at a handy opening, using that-reminds-me, I brought up a Famous Female Name in the Industry.

  “That wretched bitch!” Bruce said. “The most self-important little slut in the world, believe me. I did one totally commercial job for her. One of those period piece things, where they wrapped her little ass in crinoline, and had her bang her way through half the Confederate Army. I went a little camp with the decor, not to cut the picture, but to make a little gentle fun that only the cognoscenti would catch. So she raised stinking hell about my color patterns being wrong for her. She wants to act, direct, produce, write the script, and design the sets, and she doesn’t know thing one about her own trade. The only acting she does that seems authentic is when they have her horizontal. She is one of the reasons, dears, why I tucked away all their abundant bread into very good little securities, and when I had enough to live nicely on for the rest of my years, I told them all what they could kiss.” He paused and looked at me with a suspicious glint. “But don’t tell me she was buying her insurance in Florida.”

  “It was something else, Bruce. She partied on a sun deck with a mixed bare-ass group, and somebody with a good telephoto lens tried to get rich quick.”

  He nodded. “I remember a rumor that she was in that kind of trouble, but nothing happened.”

  “I got lucky.”

  “But why would you get involved in something like that, Travis?”

  “Because she came around and asked me.”

  “Why would she come to you?”

  “Because I solved another kind of problem for someone she knew.”

  “Then you aren’t really in the insurance business?”

  I smiled upon him. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess that lady would be willing to say it was a kind of insurance.”

  “But what are you trying to do here? Who are you … trying to insure, Mr. McGee?”

  “I think that if I had gone around telling people what I was trying to do for the actress, it wouldn’t have worked out as well as it did.”

  Meyer broke in and said, “We just go around helping people, Bruce. I think it’s some kind of guilt syndrome. Trouble with those windmills, you stick a lance into one in a good wind, and it will purely toss the hell out of you.”

  Bundy, after a few moments of narrow-eyed consideration, dropped it. And soon he began moving in on David Saunders’ blind side. But first there was a little exchange between Bruce and Becky that went over David’s sullen head.

  Bruce said, “Becky, darling, Larry told me last week that you practically gave him that marvelous ceremonial mask from Juchatengo.”

  I saw her eyes go blank and her mouth purse, and though she recovered in a sparkling instant, I felt reasonably convinced that there was no mask, perhaps not even anyone named Larry.

  “He seemed to want it.”

  “It upset him a little. I mean he knew how terribly acquisitive you had felt about it when you first got it, and he didn’t want to take advantage of your friendship.”

  “How silly!” she said. “I was cleaning out my little gallery and I remembered that he seemed to admire it, so I took it over and asked him if he’d like it. My word, had I wanted to keep it, would I have taken it to him?”

  “I guess he wanted to be certain it was not just an impulse you’d regret later.”

  “When you see him, tell him not to worry his little head. Actually, you know, I was very fair with him. I told him when I took it over there that it was really not as first class as I had thought at first. It’s very primitive, of course, and quite authentic, but it’s just one of those things you tire of seeing every day, I suppose because it hasn’t much subtlety.”

  “It’s probably more Larry’s sort of thing than yours.”

  “Very probably. I sensed that, I suppose.”

  Transfer accomplished, in good faith. And so Bundy engaged Meyer in amateur archeological talk, saying, finally, “I just cannot imagine how those priest types could bring the Indian peasants into this terribly inhospitable and certainly waterless countryside and establish a whole culture without losing untold thousands of them.”

  And that hooked Saunders into his first conversation of the evening. “From what we know now, the system was to send out a large party of specialists, carrying water supplies, just before the rainy season. If they couldn’t find reliable wells or springs, they would dig giant cisterns deep in the earth, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, like gigantic bottles made of stone and waterproofed with clay. Then around the top of the bottle, they’d make a hard surface, round, fifty or sixty feet across, and sloping toward the mouth of the bottle. The rains would fill the bottle and they’d put a big clay stopper in place to prevent evaporation. Next they would bring in the Indian families with grain and fowl and tools and tell them where to build the village and where to plant the grain.”

  Bruce cried that the information fascinated him. How clever those ancient peoples were! And how clever the ones who were now so carefully reconstructing all that lost marvelous history!

  And he kept him going a little while until it was time for dinner. I said we had to leave just to see how much he would protest. And he did, with an earnest vehemence, because it was obvious that if there were just the three of them, he couldn’t focus on David.

  So we, with show of reluctance, accepted the warm invitation.

  Five

  The food was excellent. Candles flared and flickered in the night breeze. He served a good and heady Greek wine.

  A round table. Superb silverware, table linen, glassware, pottery. Muted music from a good tape system somewhere in the house. Bundy had Lady Rebecca at his right, David at his left, with me at Becky’s right, and Meyer between me and David.

  Rebecca had begun to make an elegant presentation of herself to me, managing in her casual careless way of handling herself, to artfully establish all the sensory awarenesses—of vision, of scent, of apparently inadvertant touch. But more importantly, she knew well that most important ingredient of all charm, all seduction, the art of so listening and responding that she made me feel as if I were the most exciting and rewarding and important man she had met in untold years, that if I had not come along, her life would have continued in its drab and dreary pattern. It requires not only the ability to listen so carefully no word, no nuance, is missed, but also the ability to sense when a contrary opinion will further the growing sense of closeness. I knew what she was doing and knew some of the devices she was using, but that awareness did not prevent my growing feeling that this was, indeed, one hell of a lot of extraordinary woman and nice to be with and worth arranging any further closeness possible.

  Bruce Bundy, in another way and on another level, was targeting in on David Saunders. And it was interesting to see how much more masculine Bruce had become, in voice, gesture and opinion. And both Bruce and Becky were using Meyer as that necessary little dilution factor to mask their acquisitive intensity, directing questions and comment to him in much the same way the stage magician makes a great show of letting you look up his sleeves and into his top hat.

  Their eyes gleamed in the candlelight, and their faces were smooth and youthful and animated, and their voices were clever, articulate, and amusing. The pretty predators, using their tested skills for the newest stalk.

  David Saunders seemed to make, at table, a slightly porcine prey. He would dip his head almost to the plate, shovel in a heaping forkful, chew heavily with rolling bulge of muscle at th
e jaw corners, and then slosh it down with a gulp of wine, the throat bulging and shifting with the bulky swallow.

  So, half in self-defense, half in the interest of moving ahead with the mission, I found a hole in the conversation and ran it off at a new angle. “I’d like to meet and talk to Eva Vitrier. Can you arrange it, Bruce? Becky?”

  An instant of wary stillness, such as might happen to the smaller scavengers when they hear the carnivore coming back through the jungle toward the kill.

  “Oh, it would have to be Bruce. He seems to get along quite smashingly with the creature. And by the way, dear, her first name rhymes with favor rather than with fever. Shockingly rich, that one. And she doesn’t, as we say, mingle.”

  Bundy said, “I really don’t see very much of her. She comes and goes without much warning—I should say with no warning. She’s not a very social animal. Even were she here, Travis, it would be quite a feat to arrange an introduction. But I understand she left right after identifying that ghastly body. I could hardly blame her for wanting a change of scene.”

  “Where would she have gone?”

  “She’s never given me any other address,” he said.

  “But,” said Becky, “it’s rumored she has several of her little fortresses scattered about the world. The woman has this secrecy thing. Absolutely barmy.”

  “But she had those two girls at her place as house guests,” I said. “Seems like a sort of friendly sociable act.”

  “On the same order, one might say,” said Becky, “as that touching friendliness and sociability in a dinner invitation from the Borgias.”

  “Wear the big ring,” said Meyer, in nostalgic tribute to Lenny Bruce. It drew blank looks.

  I took a sneak shot at Bundy. “Didn’t you say you had to protect yourself from something Rocko dreamed up?”

  He pressed his gray-brown bangs with the palm of his hand. A ring fashioned of gold mesh gleamed in the candlelight.