"A profitable hobby?"
"Once in a while. Not real often."
He was silent for a time. I listened to the surf. I ran my tongue over and around my teeth, collecting sand.
"I shall require you to accept certain assurances, Mr. McGee. We have no interest in any friends of yours, to do either good or harm. We are very careful people. You will gain nothing by reporting this to anyone. We examined everything you are carrying, and have replaced everything, exactly as we found it. If you had seemed overly nervous or hysterical about this, we would have been forced to execute you. In simplest terms, you go your way and we will go our way. Keep your mouth shut. We are not likely to meet one another again."
"I am glad to hear that."
They did not hang around to say good-bye and shake hands. A terse and guttural order was given. My face fell into the sand. The weight was lifted away, and a quick nip at my wrists freed them. I rolled over slowly and sat up. I worked at the small hard damp knot at the back of my head. My fingers were cold, and the tightness of the binding had numbed my fingers. When I at last uncovered my eyes, I was alone in the dunes. I was further,from Gloria's house. Her house was completely dark. I massaged my neck and rolled my head around to loosen the kinked muscles. I found the strip of fabric which had been around my wrist, and put it with the fabric which had been tied around my eyes and stuffed them into my topcoat pocket. They were going to be very valuable clues. I found out later that one was my necktie and the other was the entire tail off my shirt.
I could find no specific impact point on my skull. The whole right side of it, from front to back, felt slightly tender.
The hideous and unspeakable bruise was upon my ego. I had been taken on open ground with a contemptuous efficiency, dropped, trussed, dragged, inspected, and dismissed. It had been done without giving me the slightest chance of any kind. Yet it was not because they thought me particularly dangerous, but because they were what the Limey whisper described-"very careful people." And, I could add, very skilled people. Very well-trained and conditioned people.
They worked with military precision, spoke of execution as if it was their right by nature of their trade, and left me without a clue as to age, description, dress-or even how many there were.
At the end of a fifty-mile hike I got into the rental car, and as I started it up, I realized I was perfectly willing to take the word of the whisperer. They were not interested in Gloria Geis. Or in me. Or in the Doctor's money. On the drive back into the city I could come up with only one wild guess-that the piece of empty lake beach was some kind of rendezvous point for transshipment of something, import or export, by boat from beach to ship or ship to beach or even beach to beach.
I knew one thing without having to guess. I did not want to try my luck against them in groups of two or more. Just as I had no interest in finding out if I had hands as fast as Cassius Clay, or if I could stop one James Taylor coming down the sidelines, all by myself.
There were two phone messages at the desk for me. A Mr. Smith had phoned, and would phone back in the morning before nine. A Mrs. Stanyard had called and left her number.
I got back to the room a little past eleven-thirty. I phoned Janice Stanyard immediately, and after it rang ten times I hung up. I showered again to get the sand and grit out of my scalp and limber up the muscles in my neck and shoulders. My head had begun to ache. It was that kind of dull traumatic throb which sets up echoes of queasiness in the gut and makes the eyes hypersensitive to light. And it makes you wonder if some little blood vessel in the brain might be ruptured and bleeding.
I sat on the bed and just as I reached toward the phone to try Nurse Stanyard again, it rang, startling me. It was Janice Stanyard.
"I called you back fifteen minutes ago, Janice, but there..."
"I'm not home. And... I need help." Her voice was very tense, very guarded.
"Help you get. Any flavor."
"Thank God! The person I'm supposed to help is with me. I have to get back to her. We're at the Oriental Theater. It's a movie house on West Randolph, just west of State. We're in the middle of the last row downstairs on the left. Please hurry!"
I hurried. The box office was closed. I told the ancient ticket taker I wanted to catch the end of the feature. He pocketed my dollar, put a fist in front of a huge yawn, and waved me in. On the huge screen was an extreme closeup of a blonde singing Troooo Laahv to an enchanted throng of about twentyseven widely scattered customers, singing through a mouth big enough to park a pair of Hondas in. An usher bird-dogged me with wary flashlight until he heard Janice greet me, and then he moved away.
I sat beside Janice. A blonde sat on the other side of her, hunched and still, head bowed, hands covering her face. There was no other customer within fifty feet of us.
"She phoned me from the Trailways bus station. It's in the next block east. She said Doctor Geis had written her to contact me if she needed help."
"Susan Kemmer?"
"Yes. How did you..."
"Why wouldn't she go home with you?"
"She's afraid to. She's been terribly beaten. She won't tell me who did it. She seems... dazed. I phoned you before I left for the bus station. I've been phoning you from here. It seemed like... a good place to wait."
I got up and squeezed past them and sat on the other side of Susan. When I put my arm around her shoulders she flinched violently and moved one hand enough to peer at me. In the reflected light of the noisy movie I could see that her eye was puffed and discolored.
"I'm a friend," I said. "We want to help you, Susie. Doctor Geis told Mrs. Stanyard to give you any help you might need. Why won't you go to her apartment?"
"He'll look there," she said in a very small voice. "If someone hurt you, we should report it to the police."
"No. Please. All I asked her for is some money, so I can go to a hotel. That's all. I can't stay with her."
"She shouldn't be alone," Janice said.
I thought of a wry possibility and said, "If she'll have you, Susan, will you stay with a friend of mine, a woman who lives alone?"
"Who?" Janice asked.
"If she knows, I can't stay there," Susan said. "I've been telling Mrs. Stanyard. I don't want her to know where I'll be."
"Don't be idiotic!" Janice said crossly.
"He could make her tell," Susan said to me.
"Maybe it isn't exactly idiotic," I told Janice. "Sit tight. Let me check."
I found the phones and looked up the number. After the fifth ring, Heidi Trumbill answered in a blurred, irritable voice.
"Travis McGee, Heidi."
"Who? Who?"
"I saw you Saturday. John Andrus wrote a note to you about me on the back of his card."
"Oh. Yes, of course. How could I forget? Dear Mark has been babbling about you ever since. He was very taken." I heard her yawn, a very rich, gasping, jaw-creaking yawn. "This better not be a social call, McGee."
"It isn't. I'm making a little progress with our problem."
"Really!"
"And because what I am doing is in your interest, I have to ask you for a little help."
"Such as?"
"A young female is involved. She's been roughed up. She needs a safe place to hide out, to hole up and get some rest and recuperation. She has some information I want and I won't be able to get it out of her until she feels safe and unwinds a little. Miss X. No names. No questions. No answers. You have room for her there. Okay?"
"Are you drunk by any chance?"
"Not noticeably."
'What do you think I am? Some kind of rest camp? Some kind of a house- mother?"
"Heidi, I think that in many respects you are a silly, arrogant, pretentious bitch. But I also think you are probably a patsy for starving kittens and busted birds."
"And painters who can't paint? And sculptors who can't sculpt? Say it all, McGee."
"If the spare bed isn't made up, make it up. We'll be along in a bit."
"You are so sure of yoursel
f, damn your eyes. How soon?"
"Half an hour."
"See you," she said and hung up. I got back to the mouth of the aisle just as the marching-into-thesunset music swelled strong, and the thin gray line of customers began getting up to walk through the spilled popcorn and paper cups toward their shrunken realities outside. My two females got up and we headed out of the palace. Susan was in a blue cloth coat and she kept her mouth and chin ducked down into a concealing billow of blue knit scarf, and kept her face turned away from the public as much as possible.
Before we went out into the icy night I stopped them and said, "You've got a car Janice?"
"Yes."
"If you have any company, what happened was you got a call from the Trailways station. It was a girl. She told you Dr. Geis had said you would help her. She didn't give her name. You went there and she was gone. You waited around, then decided to see the movie. You thought she might be one of the Doctor's patients."
"Where will she be? Where are you taking her?"
"A safe place, where she'll get rest. and care. I'll be in touch."
She hesitated, then touched the girl on the arm. "You can trust me, dear. I'll help you any way I can. And you can trust Mr. McGee; You have to tell someone what kind of trouble you're in." When Susan Kemmer did not answer, Janice gave a helpless little shrug and walked out. I gave her thirty seconds, then pushed the door open for the girl. I'd parked a block away. I held her upper arm; walked her into the wind. She was limping.
Heidi buzzed the downstairs door open, and when we got to the red door at the second-floor rear, she was standing in the open doorway, the lighted room behind her silhouetting her. She took Susan's coat and scarf and laid them aside. I had Susan sit in a chair and I said, "For reasons I won't go into, we'll keep this whole thing anonymous. Friends helping friends. Miss Brown, meet Mrs. Jones. Let's get a good look at you, dear."
I tilted the opaque lampshade to put the full light on her, and with my fingertips I lifted her reluctant chin. Heidi, looking in from the side, made a little whimper of concern. Young lips mashed, puffed, and scabbed. Nose intact. Eggplant bruises on the cheekbones, a quarter-inch slice of one blue eye visible between puffed flesh, and a slightly wider segment of the other. They looked out at us calmly enough. Left brow slightly split. Forehead bruise shaded with saffron.
"Yesterday?" I asked her.
She nodded. "Yesterday morning. Real early."
I put one hand behind her head and with the fingers of the other hand prodded at her cheekbones and at the brows to see if there was any give or shift of broken bone. She winced but endured.
"Double vision? Any nausea today?"
"No sir."
"Are you hungry?"
"I... don't know. My teeth are loose over on this side."
"Open wide."
I wiggled them with a fingertip. Four in a row on the lower jaw, right side. "You won't lose them. They'll tighten up again, kid."
Heidi said she had the ingredients for an eggnog, and she brought me some cotton pads and rubbing alcohol along with adhesive tape and scissors before she went to mix it. I had the girl stretch out on the couch and I knelt beside her. I loosened the caked blood on the split brow, wiped it clean, dried it, then used the strips of adhesive scissored to narrow widths to pull the split together. She sucked air a few times, but she was pleasantly stoical.
Heidi was able to produce a mild sedative. The girl took it with the tall eggnog. When I was able to look past the battered face I saw that she was practically type-cast, an almost perfect fraulein type, fair and blue-eyed, plump as a little pigeon, round sweet face. She should milk cows, and hop around in the Bavarian village festival in her dirndl to the accordion music while her boyfriend blew foam off his stein and slapped his leather pants and yodeled once in a while.
I decided it was no time to question her. Heidi took her in to bed her down and came back in about ten minutes. She wore a navy-blue floorlength flannel robe, starkly tailored. Again I wondered about that total lack of physical communication and awareness between us. It was incredible that a mouth curved thusly, eyes placed so, body with that look of slenderness and ripeness and power, hair and eyes gleaming with animal health, provocative grace in every movement; incredible that it could all add up to absolute neuter.
"I think she was asleep before I closed the door," Heidi said. "The child is exhausted in every way. Her body is terribly bruised. The worst bruise is on her thigh. It looks as if she was kicked. I asked her who did it and she just looked at me."
"No questions. Part of the deal. It's good of you to take her in. But what's with this child thing? How much older are you? Seven years?"
"Seven hundred. How long will she be here?"
"Two days, three, four. I don't know. Just don't let her take off before i get here in the morning. She might want to:"
She drifted about, touching small things, straightening them. She turned and looked at me. "You're really strange, Travis McGee. You took it absolutely for granted I'd take her in. I just don't do things like that."
"Hardly ever. I know. How did the opening go yesterday?"
"As expected. Well, more people than I expected, actually. Poor Mark was darling about like a mother hen. One too many people compared Kirstarian to Segal, so he made a fantastic scene and stalked out. Mark sold three pieces, and it made him so happy he drank all the champagne we had left and I had to put him to bed." She sat on the arm of the couch and looked across at me. "It's so strange. That girl. I have the feeling I knew her long, long ago. But I couldn't have. She's too young for that. Who is she, Travis?"
The temptation was to drop the bomb and say it was her half-sister. But that wasn't going to do anyone any good. I said, "You don't know her. She very probably knows something about where your father's money went. But she might not even know she knows. She is a good and staunch girl."
"I sensed that about her."
"The problem is the money."
"Oh yes, the money. And poor elfin little heartbroken Gloria, the waitress type, knows absolutely nothing about it. Right?"
"As far as anyone can tell."
"Well, she certainly fooled John Andrus without any trouble. And she sold my father a bill of goods. So I guess you don't present any special problem."
I smiled at her. "Heidi, she had to be lousy and crooked and dirty because she had the unholy impertinence to marry the daddy. She cast an ugly spell over him. She even seduced him physically, fornicated with him, and made him think he was enjoying it. What a degrading thing for the big wise important daddy to be doing! Didn't he know it made darling daughter feel actually ill to wake up in the night and think that right at that moment that woman was making him do that sick ugly animal thing?"
She turned ice-pale, jumped trembling to her feet and said, "Stop that! Stop it!"
"Where do you think you came from, Heidi? Did they find you out in the cabbage patch? There's only one known way he could get to be your father."
She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. In a thin prim little voice she said, "It killed her. She died."
So I got out of there after suitable apologies. Two swings, two hits. Anybody who wanted to find a woman under that luscious structure was going to have to tear it down and start over. Marriage to her had been as exciting as two years of root canal treatments, on a dead fang.
I knew that Francisco Smith had better find me Mother Gretchen, and fast.
NINE
FRNSISCO SMITH woke me up with his phone call at quarter past eight on Tuesday, that thirteenth day of December.
"Got something to write on?" he asked.
"Hold on," I said, and got set and told him to go ahead.
"Okay, here's the number of the annuity policy. GLC 085-14-0277. Four hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents gets mailed out the first of every month. The guy at Great Lakes is named Rainey. T. T. Rainey. The September check came back addressee moved, no forwarding address. They tried a trace. The Gorba
family left last August 22nd. A Sunday. The couple and the five kids, in a big gray Cadillac sedan, towing a U-Haul. License 397110. Dropped the apartment keys in the super's box. Rent paid to the end of August and a month deposit in advance. Mrs. Gorba was paid by the week. She picked up her pay at the restaurant when she left work Friday evening. He was paid twice a month. His pay is still sitting there at the body shop. They left the apartment in good shape. They didn't pick up the utilities deposits. They left clean. At least there's no judgments filed against them."
"Is Great Lakes still trying to find them?"
"No. They tried it on the cheap and gave up quick. They weren't like somebody trying to collect. They sent out the check for a double payment October first and it came back too. So they put it and the November and December checks in an interest account. The January check will go in the same account, the one made, out to her mother like the checks. But she turns eighteen in January, so if nobody shows up, they'll start a new interest account in the name of Susan Kemmer."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 08 - One Fearful Yellow Eye Page 14
