"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 swang 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.



17



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 playtoy." 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 tune, 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 girl friend. 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? Lorrette 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. Electro-sleep. 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 Donned?"



"Yes, indeed. Nice little gadget. Very effective."



"If somebody used one a great deal, could ft 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 1 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 million 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 pem-oline, 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 loup. 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?"



"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 lake-shore 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 bed sheet, 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 airfilters.



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.



18



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 tune 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 bullpen, 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 tout 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.



I opened the door a careful fraction of an inch. A chattering group was approaching. When they had passed, I took the chance and walked out, perhaps too exaggeratedly casual, but there was no one there to fault the performance. I leaned against the corridor wall. Mrs. Mace brought me my drink, scuttling, holding it high, proud of her accomplishment. It was an extraordinarily nasty martini. I gave extravagant thanks. She said I should come by Sunday and swim in her pool. She would round up a swinging group. We'd all drink gallons of black velvets. Delighted. Yes, indeed.



We drifted along behind a group and ended up in the big room. Biddy came quickly to me and drew me aside. She looked determined and angry.



"Trav, I haven't told Tom and I don't intend to. Sooner or later he's going to find out she's missing and that will be time enough. I'm just not going to let my sister spoil the best part of it for him. She's done enough spoiling already. Would you please do me a very special favor?"



"Sure."



"Go down and start checking every bar you can find, and there are quite a few within three or four blocks of here. If you find her and if she isn't in bad shape yet, bring her back, please. But if she's had it, stay with her and put her in the station wagon down below. The tag



"I know the car."



"Thanks so much! Poor Trav. Always doing stupid favors for the dreary Pearson family. And look, dear, do not ever let Tom know that I knew she was missing. He'd kill me. He would think I should have told him at once. But, darn it all... and... thanks again."



I started the slow journey through the crush of guests. I had to pass a group standing in respectful attention, listening to Tom Pike. He stood, tall, vital, dark, handsome, a little bit slouched, a little bit rustic and cowlicky and subtly aw-shucks about everything, his voice deep, rich, resonant as he said, "... job-creating opportunities in urban core areas, that's the answer if we're going to continue to have a viable center-city economic base here in Fort Courtney. The companion piece to this fine building should be-if we all have the guts and the vision-an enclosed shopping mall taking up that short block on Princess Street. Urban renewal to help tear down the obsolete warehouses and get the city to vacate the street, and I don't see why we couldn't have..."



I was by him, and a pack of ladies whooping at something that had just about tickled them to death drowned out the rest of the visionary address to the potential investors.



I rode down with a silent couple in the elevator. She stared with prim mouth and lofty eyebrows at the ceiling of the small machine. With clamped jaw and moody brow he stared at the blue carpeting underfoot. As we walked down into the parking area she did not realize I was as close behind them as I was. In a thin, deadly, indifferent tone she said, "Sweetheart, why don't you let me drive home alone while you go right on back up there and stroke Gloria's vulgar little ass all you want. She may be missing the attention."



He did not reply. I walked to my car and unlocked it and got in and clenched the wheel so tightly my knuckles made crackling sounds. I shut my eyes so tightly I could see rockets and wheels of fire. Little improvements come along, because the luck can go either way, and when you play the longer odds you open up the chance of the good luck and the bad. Her reaction helped. I had not expected it. I had wanted her to tell him that McGee had seen Maureen leaving by a route other than the one he knew she had taken, and so that would target him in on me, bring him in close enough for me to see what he was. But it was better the way she was doing it. And I had to find Stanger, and find him fast.



I didn't get to Stanger until nine fifteen. I told him that it might save a lot of time and a lot of questions later if it went down on tape on the very first go-round.



"You look funny," he said. "You look spooked."



"It's been one of those days, Al."



"What's this all about?"



"When the tape is running."



"All right, all right!"



So he left Nudenbarger on traffic cruise by himself and rode down to headquarters with me in my car. I said I'd like to do it in the car if possible. He came out with a battered old Uher with an adaptor for the cigarette lighter. I found a bright white drive-in on Route 30 and parked at the far edge with the rear against the fence. A listless girl made two long walks to take the order and bring out the two coffees and hook the tray onto the car. Stanger had checked the recorder. It had some hiss but not too much. The heads needed cleaning and demagnetizing.



He rewound and started it again on record and established his identity, the date and time, and said he was taking a voluntary statement from one Travis McGee of such and such a place, said statement having some bearing, as yet unknown, on the murder by stab wound of Penny Woertz, and that said victim had been acquainted with said McGee. He sighed and handed me the mike.



As soon as I got into it, he stiffened and he boggled at me. As I kept on he wanted to interrupt so badly he began making little lunges and jumps, so I didn't give him an opening. At one point he bent over, hands cupping his eyes, and I could hear him grinding his teeth. I finished. I turned the remote switch on the mike and said, "Want me to turn it back on for questions?"



"No. No. Not yet. Oh, good Jesus H. Jumpin' Sufferin' Christ on the rocks! Oh you lousy dumb bastard! Oh, why did I ever think you had one brain cell to rub up against another. You silly bastard, I have got to take you in and shut the iron door on you. For God's sake, it is going to take me half the night just to write up the charges. And you have the gall, the nerve, the lousy... impertinence to ask me to sneak down there and grab that dead broad out of that crazy hidey hole and make like I found her in a ditch, and keep anybody from coming up with the ID and keep her the hell on ice as a Jane Doe until God only knows how.... No! Dammit, McGee. No!" It was an anguished cry.



"Why don't you ask me some questions. Maybe it'll calm you down, Stanger. You've got all night to go collect her."



He nodded. I turned the mike on.



"Are you absolutely certain she was dead?"



"She fell a hundred and twenty feet onto concrete."



"So all right! Did you realize when you touched the outside and inside knob on that office door and messed with the window and picked up the pocketbook, you were removing evidence of a crime, if there was one?"



"He wouldn't leave anything useful. I moved the body too. Jumped, fell, or pushed, it would look just the same."



"But what the hell do you expect to accomplish?"



I turned off the microphone. "Al, you won't play it my way?"



"I can't! It's such a way-out--"



"Who can make a decision to try my way? Your chief?"



"Old Sam Teppler? He's going to keel over in a dead faint if I try to tell him, even."



"How about your state attorney for this judicial district. Gaffney?"



"Gaffner. Ben Gaffner."



"Is there any chance he'd buy it? There's all kinds of prosecutors. What `kind is he?"



Al Stanger got out of the car and slammed the door. He walked slowly around the car, scuffing his heels on the asphalt, hitching at his trousers, scratching the back of his neck. He came and looked down at me across the hook-on tray.



"Gaffner is on his fourth term. He gets a hell of a lot of respect. But nobody gets very close to him. He likes to nail them. He drives hard. His record keeps him in. He isn't fancy. He builds his cases like they used to build stone walls in the old days. All I can say is... maybe. You'd have to sell him the whole thing. All the way down the line. He's straight and he's tough, and he likes being just what he is. But I'd even hate to try to explain to him why you're not behind iron right now, McGee."



"Let's give it a try."



He went to a public phone booth on the corner line of the gas station across the highway. I could see him in the floodlighted booth, talking for a long tune. I could not tell from his dispirited pace as he came back what the answer had been.



He got in beside me and pulled the door shut. "He's based fifty-five miles from here. In Lime County. He'll leave in about ten minutes, he said, and bring two of his people. They'll make good tune. They'll plan on me opening up one of the circuit court hearing rooms in the courthouse and we'll meet them there."



"What did you say to him?"



"Told him I had a nut here that wanted me to help him hide the body of a murder victim."



"What did he say?"



"He asked me why I'd called him, and I told him because I thought maybe the nut had a pretty good idea. So ,he said he'd better come over and listen. I don't think he'll buy it."



"No harm in trying to sell it."



"Why don't I just lock you up nice?"



"Because at heart you're a dandy fellow."



I blinked the lights and the girl came and got the tray and her money. Stanger checked in and said he was going off shift a little early instead of staying on until midnight. He told them to have the dispatcher tell Lew Nudenbarger. We went down to the courthouse. He located the night man and had him unlock the small hearing room next to the offices of the circuit judge on the second floor, and told him to stay by the side door near the parking lot, as Mr. Gaffner would be coming along.



The countersunk fluorescence shone down on a worn red rug, a mahogany veneer table with ten armchairs aligned around it. The air was close and still, and the room had no windows. Stanger fussed with the thermostat until something clicked and cool air began to circulate. We laid out the various items on the oiled top of the table. The two prescription vials, one partially used. The two-headed bug. The recorder, now with AC line cord plugged in. One blue lizard envelope purse that matched the blue lizard pumps wrapped up with the dead wife of Tom Pike. Holton's revolver. The pry bar, which could be matched to the forced entry marks on the sliding glass doors and the metal medicine chest.



We waited for Gaffner, with Stanger wearing a tired little smile.



19



BEN GAFFNER sat at the middle of the long table. He directed me to sit opposite him, Stanger at my left. His two men sat at his right and his left. The thin, pale one named Rico was his chief investigator. The round, red one named Lozier was the young attorney who assisted him throughout the circuit.



Gaffner was an orderly man. He arranged in useful order in front of him a yellow legal pad, four sharp yellow pencils, glass ashtray, cigarettes, lighter. Rico had brought along a recorder, a Sony 800. He plugged it in, threaded a new tape, tested it, put the mike on top of a book in the center of the table, tested it again, changed the pickup volume, and nodded at Gaffner.



Only then did Gaffner look directly at me. The tape reels turned at slow speed. He had a moon face and his small and delicate features were all clustered in the center of the moon. His hair was cropped close except for a wiry tuft of gray on the top near the front, like a handful of steel wool. His eyes were an odd shade of yellow, and he could hold them on you without shifting them or blinking them or showing any expression. It was effective.



"Your name?" he said finally. Uninflected. No accent, no clue to area of origin. Name, age, address, occupation, marital status, local address.



"It is my understanding that you are making a voluntary confession, Mr. McGee. I must warn you that--"



"I am aware of my rights regarding self-incrimination, remaining silent, right to counsel, and so forth, Mr. Gaffner. I waive them freely and voluntarily, with no threats, promises, or coercion on your part."



"Very well. You will tell me in your own words your actions in regard to the alleged crime which you--"



"We're not going to do it that way, Mr. Gaffner."



"We are going to do it my way."



"Then, you had a long drive for nothing. Al, lead me to that iron door of yours."



Gaffner kept those yellow eyes on me for a long ten count. "How do you suggest we do this, McGee?"



"I want to start over five years ago and tell you how and where I met Helena Pearson Trescott and her daughters. I won't waste your time with anything not pertinent to the case I hope you will be able to take to the grand jury. Some of the subsequent events will be guesswork."



"I am not interested in your conjectures."



"I am not interested in how much or how little interest you have in my conjectures. I am going to give them to you, right along with what facts I have. Without the conjectures the facts won't hang together. You'll just have to endure it, Mr. Gaffner. Maybe you could just tell yourself you might get some leads out of them."



After another long yellow unwinking stare he said, "Proceed, then. Try not to ramble. When I hold up my hand like this, please stop, because I will want to write a note on this pad. When I stop writing, continue, and try to continue where you left off. Is that clear?"



"Perfectly."



It took a long time. It took both sides of a five-inch reel of tape and half of another before we were done. He wrote many pages of notes, his writing swift, neat, and very small.



My chain of motive and logic went thus:



Dr. Stewart Sherman had indeed killed his wife, and in the course of his investigation the special investigator for Courtney County, Dave Broon, had come up with something that, if he reported it or turned it in, would have been enough to give a reasonable assurance of an indictment by the grand jury. A practicing physician would be far more useful to Dave Broon than a man indicted for murder. A man of Broon's shrewdness would probably lock it all up very carefully, perhaps by trading cooperation and silence for a written confession which could be tucked away.



Next consider Tom Pike's narrow escape when he was being investigated for unethical practices while working as a stockbroker. The intervention of Miss Hulda Wennersehn was almost too opportune. One might detect here the possibility of Dave Broon stepping in and doing Pike a great favor. It would be profitable to help Pike. Maybe he dug up information on the Wennersehn woman to use as leverage, or maybe he already had something and was waiting for a good chance to use it. This would give Broon a certain hold over Pike as well. Pike was becoming more and more successful, and possibly overextended.



Then we have Helena Pearson Trescott, before her first operation for cancer, telling her daughters the terms of her will and the surprising size of her estate. Maureen would certainly have told Tom the terms. Then we have the surgeon, Dr. Bill Dyckes, telling Tom Pike, but not the daughters, that Helena will not recover from the cancer of the bowel. Suddenly the expected baby is a potential source of loss compared to (under the terms of the will) the optimum solution. The ideal order would be for Helena to die first, then for Maureen to die without issue, and for Tom Pike to marry Bridget.



The family doctor is, by accident or plan, Dr. Sherman. One can assume that through a mutually profitable relationship Pike and Broon have become confidants. Trust could be guaranteed by putting various damaging pieces of information in a safe place, available only upon the death of either conspirator.



So pressure is put on Sherman to induce spontaneous abortion of the child Maureen Pike is carrying. There are drugs that can be given by injection that will dangerously inhibit kidney function. Do it, or face complete exposure and disgrace and perhaps a life term. It works almost too well, making Maureen dangerously ill.



Here there is an area of pure guesswork. Why was it so necessary to wipe out Maureen's memory of the immediate past? Did she suspect the shot Sherman gave her had killed the child? Or, more probably, when she appeared to be comatose, she could have heard too much of some quiet bedside conversation between Dr. Sherman and her husband. Nothing could make a woman keep her mouth shut about that. If memory could not be wiped out, she would have had to be killed, in spite of the money loss it would mean. Sherman had been doing animal experimentations on memory, on the retention of skills once learned, of retraining time when such skills were forgotten. As the doctor on the case, he could easily give Maureen a massive dose of puromycin. When it wiped memory clean of all events of the previous several days, one can assume Pike would soon realize how useful that effect could be. It could help him lay the groundwork for her death, which would have to come after Helena had died, and it would be a way of keeping Bridget there in the house, with the two of them, where she could fall in love with Tom Pike.



Once she is home from the hospital, Tom Pike, with Biddy's unwitting cooperation, keeps his wife on puromycin. Her day-by-day memory function is fragmented. Her learning skills are stunted. A side effect is a kind of regression to childhood, to sensual pleasure, to the naughtiness of running away. But this helps keep Biddy near. She cannot leave her sister. So while Helena still lives, he sets the stage for eventual successful suicide. There is no risk in feeding her the sleeping pills and waiting a seemingly risky length of time before taking her in. She will have no memory of it. No harm in putting her in the hot tub, making the hesitation marks on her wrist, then one cut deep enough, and waiting, then breaking down the unlocked door. She will not remember. She will not know that it was he who fashioned the clumsily knotted noose instead of she.



But he was not aware of the way potential suicides stay usually with one method and never more than two. But here we have four.



The reason Dr. Sherman became ever more troublesome seems clear. He would slowly come to realize that there was a very small chance of their ever using the evidence of his wife's murder against him, because if indicted, he would certainly be expected to tell of the induced abortion performed at the request of Pike, with leverage by Broon, and tell of the drug that he had been supplying Pike to inject into Maureen, the drug that had caused the mental effects that baffled the neurologists and the psychiatrists. Meanwhile he had been induced to invest everything in Pike's ventures, even to cashing in his insurance policies and investing the proceeds.



Maybe Sherman began to talk about confession. Maybe he began to gouge money out of Pike in return for supplying the puromycin.



How was that murder done? A week before she died, Penny Woertz had a dream that reminded her of something. A trap door in Sherman's forehead, a little orange light like the one that winks on the face of the Donned control. Count the flashes. Could she have remembered some casual comment that Sherman made about some trouble with the electrosleep device he had supplied for Maureen Pike and taught Biddy to operate?



A careful check might reveal that on the night the doctor died the daughters and Helena might have driven down to the Casey Key house. And it might reveal that Pike was out of town, in Orlando or Jacksonville. There he could have rented a car, gone home, gotten the Dormed and put it in its case and taken it down to Sherman's office to be tested. It was portable. The case was pale. The machine was heavy. A tall man had been seen leaving Sherman's office. Tall is relative. Pike was fairly tall. Six feet almost? Height is such a distinctive thing that a pair of shoes with extreme lift is a very efficient disguise. I have a pair of shoes with almost a four-inch lift. It takes my six four up to six eight. With them I wear a jacket a couple of inches longer than my normal forty-six extra long. People remember the size. They remember seeing a giant. They remember little else about him.



Simplest thing in the world to take it in for Sherman to check. "Maureen says it hurts her. Biddy and I have tried it. There are little sharp pains at first. Try it and see."



In moments the doctor is asleep, with the impulses set at maximum. Take the key out of the pocket. Unlock the drug safe. Roll the sleeve up. Tie the tubing around the arm. Inject the lethal shot of morphine. Untie the rubber tubing. Go and collect all the puromycin out of the backroom supplies. Wait a little while and then take the headpiece off, unplug the machine, repack it in its case, and leave.



Helen Boughmer promises trouble. Tell Broon to find a way to shut her mouth. Broon has no trouble.



Holton and Nurse Woertz begin to make a crusade of the whole matter. Nothing they can find out, probably. Broon discovers and reports to Pike that Holton and the nurse have become intimate. Then whisper the news to Janice because, disloyalty being contagious, she can be a good source of information about Holton's progress in his independent investigation. Make the casual contact with her. By being sympathetic, play upon her hurt and discontent. Keep it all on a platonic basis, but be as cautious and discreet as though it were a physical affair-because were Biddy to learn of it, some unpleasant new problems would arise.



Helena dies. Perhaps the new source of funds, a large lump sum from her estate, is becoming more and more imperative. Broon had gained a lot of leverage with the murder of Sherman and could become increasingly expensive to Tom Pike.



Enter McGee, a worrisome development to Tom Pike when he learns that Helena has been writing to McGee. He does not know if Helena suspected anything. The story of tracing the Likely Lady seems implausible. Then he gets the little query from Penny Woertz. Did you tell the doctor you were having trouble with the Donned? Did he check it for you?



Put Broon onto McGee. Then Broon reports that Hoi-ton has asked him to check McGee's room. Puzzling. Then, Broon reports, Holton and the nurse and McGee spent quite a bit of time together in 109 and then Holton left. The nurse stayed with McGee all night. But by then Pike has arranged how to take care of Penny Woertz. He has already arranged the Saturday date with Janice. He has temporarily transferred the Wennersehn woman to Jacksonville and has the key to her apartment, two doors from Miss Woertz.



At that point something made me aware of Stanger and I glanced at him and saw him glaring at me in anger and indignation.



"Sorry, Al. When he missed connections with Janice, I think he went to the apartment alone. Had he met her and had she followed him there in her car, I think that he would have spent a good part of the afternoon making love to her. After all, it wasn't going to be anything she could talk about later. Then, perhaps, when she napped, he would go over to Penny's place. She would let him in. He would kill her with whatever weapon came easiest to hand. Go back and perhaps pin down the sleeping woman and inject her with a massive shot of puromycin. Lead her in her dazed condition over to Penny's apartment. Shove her in and close the door. Drive away. She would not recall having any date, any assignation. She would be in the dead nurse's apartment, with the shears in the dead throat of the woman who was sleeping with her husband. Traumatic emotional amnesia. Not a terribly unusual thing.



"But he lay there for a long time thinking it over and maybe decided it was a risk he could accept. Blood spattered on his shoes and pants legs. He went back to the Wennersehn apartment and cleaned himself and the floor and burned the rags in the fireplace. The maid swept the fireplace out on Monday."



"Who will verify that?" Gaffner asked.



"It better be Tom Pike. My source is not available. I completely forgot who told me."



"We can give you a long time to sit and think."



"I have a terrible memory."



Yellow stare. Small shrug. "Continue."



I told them that investigation would probably prove that Tom Pike landed in Jacksonville Sunday morning in plenty of time to direct-dial Rick Holton and whisper to him about the note, knowing that bullheaded Holton would track it down. And, having done so, because of the contents that Tom had conned out of Nudenbarger, might solve the McGee problem suddenly and dramatically, which would take Holton out of the play too.



When that didn't work, Pike had put Broon back to work on me. I mentioned that Broon could well own over forty rental houses in Southtown, and it might be interesting to find out how he could live so well and afford to buy real estate too.



"And that brings me up to the point where I burgled the Pike house and picked up this stuff. It's in detail on Al's tape, so I suggest you listen to that."



We all did. I was glad of the break. My throat felt raw.



One of the group was missing. When I had told of the letter and the check for twenty-five thousand forwarded to me by D. Wintin Hardahee, and how he had been cooperative at first and then had brushed me off completely, Gaffner had sent Mr. Lozier, who knew Hardahee, out to bring him in, with instructions not to tell him what it was all about.



Lozier came in alone and sat down quietly and listened to the balance of the tape I had made in the car. Gaffner turned to Lozier and said, "Well?"



"Well, sir, that is just about the weirdest--"



"I was asking about Hardahee."



"Sir, I didn't tell him what it was about. He came willingly. And all of a sudden, halfway here, he started crying. I pulled over, and when he could talk, he said that he had promised Dave Broon he would cooperate and Broon had promised not to turn him in."



"For what?"



The young lawyer looked very uncomfortable. "Apparently, sir, Mr. Hardahee has been having... uh... a homosexual affair with his tennis partner, and Dave Broon bugged the cabin where they've been meeting for over a year."



"How was he asked to cooperate?"



"Broon wanted to know the contents of the letter Mrs. Trescot wrote to Mr. McGee. He convinced Broon he had never had a chance to read it. He told Broon about the check to Mr. McGee. Mr. Broon asked him to give Mr. McGee no advice or cooperation at all. Broon told him that he might hear from Mr. Pike about an investment opportunity, and when he did, it might be a good thing to go into it, substantially."



"Where is Hardahee?" Gaffner asked softly.



"He's sitting down in the car, sir."



"Well, Larry, suppose you go down and drive the poor sad silly son of a bitch home. Tell him we'll have a little talk someday soon. Tell him that in the absence of a complaint, there's no charge."



As Lozier left, Gaffner turned to Stanger. "Would it be asking entirely too much to have you go out and come back here with Broon, Lieutenant?"



"I swear to God, I have been hunting that man here and there and up and down the whole day long, and he is plain gone."



He shifted his unwinking stare to me. "And it is your thought, Mr. McGee, that Mr. Pike will suddenly crack under the strain and start bleating confessions at us all?"



"No, sir. I don't think he will ever confess to anything at all. I don't think he feels any guilt or remorse. But you see, if Maureen disappears, there is no proof of death. He can't bail out by marrying the younger sister. If he's in a tight spot, he'll have to make some kind of move." It astonished me a little to hear myself call him "sir." It is not a word I use often or loosely.



"Don't you think, Mr. McGee, that you are assuming that a very intelligent man like Pike has committed some very violent and foolish acts?"



"Right now they seem violent and foolish because we all have a pretty good idea of the things he's done and why he's done them. But when things get more and more complex, Mr. Gaffner, it leaves more room for chance. For luck, good and bad. Where would we be with all this if I hadn't come into the picture? Not that I've been particularly bright about any part of this. I was something new added to the mix and I guess I've been a catalytic agent. His luck started to run the other way. The biggest piece of bad luck was when I decided not to park over by the other cars. When she hit the overhead, it was a hell of a sound. I didn't know what it was. I knew it was something right over my head. One hell of a smack to make the whole prestressed roof ring like a drum. Okay. No workmen around. Building empty except for the party on the top floor. So I had to find out what made that noise. Maybe I knew what it had to be. Maybe my subconscious fitting things together in a single flash of intuition. What if I hadn't found her?"



"He doesn't know you found the body."



"And so he's handling it according to plan. She ran off again. Big search. Worry. Then in the morning the workmen find it, and it fits with her recent history of suicide attempts and her condition. He's going through the motions now. He thinks he's home free. Violent, yes. Foolish, however, is another word. I think he's legally sane, but I think he's a classic sociopath. Do you know the pattern? Superficially bright, evidently quite emotional, lots of charm, an impression of complete honesty and integrity."



"I have done the necessary reading in that area, Mr. McGee," Gaffner said.



"Then you know their willingness to take risks, their confidence they can get away with anything. They're sly and they're cruel. They never admit guilt. They are damned hard to convict." He nodded agreement.



I told him about the couple who had worked for the Pikes. I told him of the golf club incident. Then I described Tom Pike's bedroom, the strange sterility and neatness of it, how impersonal it seemed, without any imprint of personality.



Gaffner asked Stanger if he could add anything. "Not much on him," Al said, examining the sodden end of a dead cigar. "Florida born. Lived here and there around the center of the state, growing up. His folks worked the groves, owned little ones and lost them, took over some on lease, made out some years and crapped out other years. Don't know if there's any of them left or where they are now. Tom Pike went off to school up north someplace. Scholarship, I think. Came here a few years ago, just married, had money enough to build that house out there. I guess there must have been credit reports on him for the size loans he's got into and I guess if they turned up anything out of line, he wouldn't have got the loans. The people that don't like him, they really don't like him a damn bit, but they keep their mouths shut. The ones that do, they think he's the greatest thing ever walked on two legs."



After a silence Ben Gaffner said softly, "Ego. The inner conviction that everybody else in the world is soft and silly and gullible. Maybe we are, because we're weighted down with excess baggage the few Tom Pikes of this world don't have to bother with. Feelings. The capacity to feel human emotions, love, guilt, pity, anger, remorse, hate, despair. They can't feel such things but don't know they can't, so they think our insides are just like theirs, and they think the world is a con game and think we fake it all, just as they have learned to do."



I said, "You've done your reading, sir."



"What have we got right now? Let's say we could open Broon up and make him the key witness for the prosecution. If he confirms what you think he can confirm, McGee, then I'd take a chance on going for an indictment. But Pike is going to be able to get top talent to defend him. The jury is going to have to either believe Broon or believe Pike. Circumstantial case. Pike is likable and persuasive. And I'm saddled with a story to present that sounds too fantastic and I'm saddled with medical experts who'll be contradicted by his medical experts. One long, long trial, a lot of the public monies spent on it, and I would say four to one against a conviction."



"About that," Stanger agreed unhappily.



"So what if there's no way to open Broon up? Or what if he's gone for good? Nothing to go on. I'd be a fool to go after an indictment."



"Gone for good?" Stanger asked. "Little cleanup job by Pike?"



"Only if Pike could be sure Broon wouldn't leave any-thing behind that might turn up in the wrong hands. Otherwise, on the run. Cash in the chips and leave for good, knowing that sooner or later Pike would want to get rid of the only link to all the rest of it."



"So where does that leave us, Mr. Gaffner?" Stanger asked.



"I think you and Rico better start moving. What tune is it? Three fifteen. Best get a panel delivery. We'll have to make sure Pike isn't in that area anywhere. Get that body out of there at first light. Drive it back over to Lime City. Is that old phosphate pit on the Hurley ranch dry at the bottom?"



"Since he cut through, it runs off good."



"About eighty-foot drop down that north wall. Get hold of that big matron with the white hair."



"Mrs. Anderson."



"She can keep her mouth shut. 1 want the fancy clothes off that body, tagged and marked and initialed by both of you and put away in my safe, Rico, and I want her dressed in something cheap and worn out. Put her at the bottom of that drop, then, soon as you can, you get her found. You could tell Hessling to go check a report of kids messing around there last night. Then I can come in on it through normal channels and we'll process an autopsy request, and I'll make sure I have somebody come in to backstop Doc Rause and run a complete series on the brain tissue."



He turned toward me with the slow characteristic movement of his round head, moon face. "It isn't all that big a risk, in case we get nowhere. She kept wandering off and had to be found. So she wandered off and hitched a ride maybe, and ended up dead in the bottom of a phosphate pit."



Stanger said, "Won't Pike make sure she's listed as missing, and won't she fit the description enough so that he might come over to make the identification?"



"We'd better make a positive on her. We can change our mind later on. Who do you think, Rico?"



The pale, mild investigator said, "That drifter girl that jumped bond on that soliciting charge four, five months back? If the prints matched, it could be a screwup in the filing system that we could catch later on."



"I like it," Gaffner said. Lozier had returned. He said Hardahee had pulled himself together. Gaffner said they would decide later on if they wanted an affidavit from Hardahee.



Then Gaffner swiveled his head slowly and nailed us each in turn with the yellow appraisal. "All of you listen carefully. We are engaged in foolishness. You do not have to be told to keep your mouths shut. I do not buy all of McGee's construction. I buy enough of it to continue the idiocy he started. We are all going to remember that our man won't get jumpy. He won't become superstitious and fearful. Psychos are notoriously pragmatic. If a body is gone, somebody took it. He'll wait to find out who and why, and while he is waiting he'll make the perfectly normal and understandable moves of the alarmed husband with a missing wife. Stanger, you and Rico better get going. And after Rico is loaded and gone, Stanger, your job is find Broon for me. Lozier, wait in the hall out there while I have a word with Mr. McGee."



The table had been cleared of gear. All that remained were the overflowing ashtrays. Gaffner looked as fresh and rested as when the session had begun.



He stood at attention and looked up into my face. "You're the bait, of course. When the woman is not found, Miss Pearson is going to feel more and more guilty. She is going to blame herself. And so she will confess to her brother-in-law that she knew Maureen was gone and didn't tell him. She will say that you saw Maureen leaving. Then you are the key, because you can supply the information about the body. No body, and the whole scheme is dead."



"So he has to talk to me."



"And he is still wondering what's in that letter Mrs. Trescott wrote you."



"And what he says to me, that's what you have to know. That's what you need so you can move. What if he decides to accept his losses, write this one off, go on from here? What if he can squeak through, assuming he is in a little financial bind?"



"As soon as the working day starts, Mr. McGee, I am going to make some confidential phone calls to some of the more important businessmen I know over here in Fort Courtney. I'll tell them it's just a little favor. I can say that as a matter of courtesy I was told that the Internal Revenue people are building up a case against Pike for submitting fraudulent tax returns, and it might be a good time to bail out, if they happen to be in any kind of joint venture with him. I think he might feel a lot of immediate pressure. You could provide the answers that would relieve it. I think we can hurry him along."



"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.



20



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 smokescreening 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 tune. 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 tune?"



"Fifteen minutes."



Stanger drove the city's sedan hard. He took a confusing route through the back country, 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, trailing 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 pasture-land, 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 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 damn 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 damn 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 terms 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 pasture-land.



"You poor damn 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 damn 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."



"But if he drives off--" Nudenbarger started to say.



"If I can't punch that engine dead at this range with that there carbine, Lew, I'm not trying.".



Broon squatted over Tom Pike for a little while, then straightened and took Pike under the armpits and dragged him about fifteen feet. He dropped him there and went quickly to the tree, jumped and caught a limb, quickly pulled himself up and out of sight in the leaves.



"Son of a gun!" Stanger said.



"Why is he climbing the tree?" Lew asked plaintively.



"He took the end of the rope up with him. What do you think?"



Nudenbarger looked baffled. I comprehended the shape and the sense of it. And soon it was confirmed when Tom Pike sat up in the grass quite slowly, slumping to the side in an unnatural way.



Then he rose slowly up from a sitting position.



"Oh, God!" cried Nudenbarger.



"Keep your damned voice down to a soft beller!" Al snapped.



Over the speaker came a strange sound, a gagging, rasping cry. Pike ran a few steps in one direction and was snubbed to a halt. He staggered back. He tried the other direction and did not get as far.



Stanger said, not taking his eyes from the glasses, "Got the fingers of both hands into that loop now, holding it off his throat."



"Broon!" the deep voice cried, cracked and ragged.



He seemed to run in place and then he moved up a little bit. Straight up. And a little bit more. His legs made running motions. He began turning. Then his shoes were above the highest blades of grass. Dave Broon dropped abruptly into view. Nudenbarger raised the carbine and Stanger slapped the barrel down.



Broon got into the red wagon and swung it in a quick turn and parked it close to where Pike hung.



He got out, backed off, looked at Pike, and then ran for his car.



"Now!" Al Stanger said. He snatched up the carbine and vaulted the fence with an agility that astonished me. By the time we were over the fence, he had a twenty-yard lead. As the green Ford began to roll, picking up speed, Stanger stopped, went down onto one knee, and fired four spaced, aimed shots. At the fourth one the back end of the car bloomed into a white-orange poof of gasoline, and as the car kept moving, Broon tumbled out the driver's door, somersaulting in the grass. He got up and started to run at an angle toward the far side of the pasture but stopped quickly when Stanger fired his fifth shot.



He turned, hands in the air, and began to walk slowly toward the tree. The car had stopped in tall grass, tinkling, frying, blackening. He walked more quickly. And then he began to run back toward the tree.



"Head him off, Lew. Grab him."



Lew had good style. He loped in that loose deceptive stride of a good NFL end getting down for the long bomb. Stanger and I headed for the tree. He jogged. I started to run by him and he blocked me with the barrel of the carbine extended.



Thus we all got to the red wagon at about the same time. Nudenbarger was taking no chances with Dave Broon. He had one meaty hand clamped on the nape of Broon's neck and had Broon's arm bent back up and pinned between Broon's shoulderblades by his other paw.



Broon was hopping up and down, grunting, struggling, yelling, "Cut him down! Al! Hey, Al! Cut him down!"



We looked up at Tom Pike. He turned slowly toward us. His clenched fists were on either side of his throat, fingers hooked around the strand of rope that crossed his throat. He looked like a man chinning himself, face blackening with total effort.



I saw that I could swing him over and up onto the roof of the station wagon and get the pressure off his throat immediately. As I moved toward him quickly, Stanger clanked the carbine barrel against the back of my skull. The impact was exquisitely precise. It darkened the day without turning the sun out completely. It loosened my knees enough to sag me to a squat, knuckles against the turf, but not enough to spill me all the way. I turned and stared up at Al, blinking away darkness and the tear-sting of skull pain.



"Don't go messing with the evidence, boy," he said.



"Don't do this to me, Al!" Broon begged. "Please, for God's sake, don't do it like this."



Nudenbarger, with Broon firmly in hand, was staring slack-mouthed at Tom Pike. "Jesus!" he said softly. "Oh, Jesus me!"



And Tom Pike continued the slow turn. He lifted his right leg slowly, the knee bending. Classic shoes, expensive slacks, navy socks of what looked like brushed Dacron. The leg dropped back.



"See him twitching any, Lew?" Stanger asked mildly.



"Well... that leg moved some."



"Just reflex action, Lew boy. Posthumous nervous twitch, like. Doesn't mean a thing."



Broon said, "You're killing me, Al. You know that."



"You're all confused. You killed Tom Pike, Davey."



"You're miserable, Al. You're a mean bastard, Al Stanger."



Slowly, slowly, Tom Pike turned back to face us. He had changed. The look of muscular tension had gone out of his fists and wrists. They were just slack hands, pinned there by the loop, fingers pressing into the flesh of the throat. His chin had dropped. His toes pointed downward. His face had become bloated and the eyes no longer looked at anything at all.



"See now how it was just the nerves twitching some?" Al asked gently.



"You were right, Al. He's dead for sure," Lew said.



I pushed myself up and fingered a new lump on the back of my head. "How long would you say he's been dead, McGee? All things considered."



"I'd say he must have been dead by the time Broon started to drive away, Al. All things considered."



"Guess we shouldn't touch a thing. Get a reconstruction by the lab people to match up with the eyewitness account." He handed me the carbine and went over and took handcuffs out of a back pocket. He snapped one around Broon's wrist, told Lew to bend him over a little, and snapped the other around Broon's opposite ankle. Lew let go and Stanger gave Broon a push. Broon sat in the grass, knees hiked up.



"Lew, you cut across and get the car and bring it around in here. Might as well stop and pick up our gear over there on the way. We'll be waiting right here."



With a last look at the body, Nudenbarger hurried off.



The body had stopped turning. Stanger stared into the distance, sighed, spat. "Sorry I had to rap you like that."



I looked into his small dusty brown eyes. "I guess it was the quickest way to stop me, Al."



"Feel all right?"



"Just a little bit sick to my stomach."



"Funny. So do I."



21



I STAYED AROUND and did what I could to help Bridget Pearson through the worst of it. In a conference about strategy, Ben Gaffner had accepted my suggestion that nothing would be gained by opening up the actual way in which Maureen had died. It could bring down on us a lot of awkward questions from high places.



Better to make it an identification error over in Lime County and let the phosphate pit story stand.



He agreed that there was so little to go on that Dr. Sherman's death might as well remain on the books as suicide. But the Penny Woertz murder had to be taken out of the active file, and properly closed. That meant some acceptable explanation of motive. Dave Broon came in handy. He was smart enough to have started talking about strangling Tom Pike in a fit of anger and then, upon discovering he was dead, trying to string him up to make it look like suicide.



That gave Gaffner a choice-to play ball with Broon or to go for murder first. Murder first would need only the eyewitnesses to state that they had seen Pike trying to get free as Broon was slowly hauling him clear of the ground. Gaffner had, Broon brought in for a private playback of the tape of the conversation under the live oak. Broon then said it was his certain knowledge that Pike was having an affair with the nurse and had killed her out of jealousy. Gaffner, out of respect for the reputation of the deceased Miss Woertz, edited it down to Pike's pursuit of her, with the crime of passion occurring doubtless when his advances were repulsed. All this cooperation earned Broon the chance at a plea of guilty to murder second, with, whether the sentence was ten, fifteen, or twenty, a chance at parole in six.



Even though by funeral time-a ceremony for two, for Mr. and Mrs. Pike-the swarm of auditors and examiners were beginning to find that Tom Pike had been distributing newly invested capital to previous investors and calling it a distribution of capital gains, Fort Courtney was full of people who could not, and would never, believe that such a brilliant and warm and considerate and handsome and well-mannered man could have ever juggled a single account in any questionable manner, to say nothing of stabbing anyone.



No, it all had to be some kind of vicious and clever conspiracy, engineered by Them. They were the subtle, hidden enemy, hiring that Broon person, making some kind of intricate deal with him, and then probably taking over toe wonderful properties Tom Pike had such great plans for at the time of his death.



So the funeral was well-attended. Biddy knew that all the allegations were so absurd as to be grotesque. And so did Janice Holton. Biddy was so certain, that I could not risk the slightest slur or shadow of doubt to color anything I said to her, or she would never have let me try to help her in any way. She kept going on tranquilizers and raw courage. I helped her close up toe house. It would be sold once all estate and inheritance matters were straightened out, and the funds would go to the unfortunate who had invested in Development Unlimited. Fortunately, as there was no doubt of Maureen's having died first, the trust fund would go directly to Bridget. Because Maureen had signed certain papers in connection with her husband's enterprises, had he died first, it was possible the monies might have been diverted to toe creditors of Development Unlimited.



She said she was going to drive on down to Casey Key and open up toe old house and stay there for a time, quite alone. She said she would be all right. She would walk the beach, get a lot of painting done, sort herself



out.



The morning I was packing to leave the Wahini Lodge, Lorette Walker stopped by and said she heard from Cathy I was checking out. I asked her to come on in. She leaned against the countertop and lit a cigarette and said, "Stayed you a long time, huh?"



"I couldn't tear myself away from this garden spot."



"Lot of things happened. Always like that wherever



you go?"



"I'm happy to be able to say no."



"That's no good way to fold a shirt! Mess it all up for sure." She came over and took the shirt back out of the bag, spread it out on toe bed, folded it quickly and deftly, and put it in the bag. "Best way," she said, backing off. "Sorry I couldn't do you much good on what you wanted me to find out."



lot of good. You'll never know how



"You did a much."



"But nobody come hard-nosing around to try to make



me say it twice."



"I told you I'd leave you out of it." She said wistfully, "Could be better for me if you never did keep your word."



"How do you mean?"



"I told myself, back there when I wanted to trust you some, I said okay, gal, you just go ahead and he'll mess you up good. Be a good lesson. Stop you from ever going soft again for any whitey."



"That's why you did it?"



She put on a look of owlish innocence. "Well, then there was that chance of toe airplane ride you mentioned. I figured on Paris. Anyway, here's toe change from that two hundred. I spent eighty of your dollars on people that didn't have anything worth telling."



"So let's split what you've got left there." She flared immediately. "So it means I got no right to tell myself I ever did a damn thing for you just for a favor? You buying me for this sixty dollar, you think?"



"Right off the slave block, woman. You did a favor, but I've got no right to do a favor, according to you. I know you didn't expect a dime, but by God you'll take that sixty dollars and you'll buy yourself a pretty suit, something tailored, maybe a good medium shade of blue, and you will wear that damned suit, and you will accept it as a gesture of friendship and trust."



"Well... I guess you don't need no lessons in coming on mean, mister. I... I guess I can take it like it's meant. And thank you very much. You're sure? The only thing I got a right to do with it is buy a winter suit?"



"That's how it has to be," I said, putting the sixty left over into my wallet.



She shrugged and smiled. "Well, then... got to get



on back up to those rooms. We run pretty full last night."



I held my hand out. "You helped a lot. And a pleasure



to get to know you, Mrs. Walker."



After a moment of wary hesitation she shook hands. "Same to you. Good-bye."



She opened the door and turned back, her hand on the knob, and looked at me and moistened her lips. "McGee, you have a nice safe trip back home, hear?" She bolted out and closed the door. My last glimpse and last impression of her was of the slender and vital brown of her quick legs. Another lady in a plain brown wrapper. No, that was not a good analogy, because there was nothing very plain about that sleek wrapper. It was special- flawless, matte finish and inordinately lovely.



I went back knowing that whatever had been wrong with me, any restlessness, irritability, mooniness, had come to an abrupt end. Seeing him hanging and turning so slowly had brought me back to the fullness of life, probably just because his was so evidently gone. I was full of offensive cheer, bounding health, party plans.



Three months later, on a windy gray afternoon in January, Bridget Pearson appeared. She apologized for showing up at Bahia Mar without any advance notice at all. She said it had been an impulse.



She came aboard The Busted Flush and sat in the lounge and took neat small sips of her drink and seemed to smile too quickly and too often. The weeks had gaunted her down and in some eerie way she had acquired that same slightly haggard elegance that Helena had evidenced at the time we sailed away in the Likely Lady. The long legs were the same, and the way she held her hands, and I knew that all of her was so much the same that it would be like an old love revisited.



She told me that she was restless, wondering what to do with herself, thinking maybe she might go on a trip of some sort. She said she kept coming up with strange little inconsistencies in her memories of Tom Pike. They bothered her. As if there had been something warped and strange that she had been too close to. Was everything the way she believed it had been? Could I help her understand?



Why, now, don't you trouble your purty little head about a thang, little sweetheart. Why, for goodness sake, ol' Uncle Trav will take you on off a-cruisin' on this here comfortable and luxurious ol' crock houseboat, and he'll just talk kindly to you and comfort you and love you up good, and that'll put the real sunshine back in your purty little smile.



I thought of what it would do to her eyes and to the shape of her mouth if I ever told her how it had been for her mother and me aboard the Likely Lady in that long-ago Bahama summertime. I tried to sort out the intervals. I am X years older than this lovely young lady and I was X years younger than her lovely mother.



No, thanks. It was too late for me to take a lead role in a maritime version of The Graduate. And even had it been possible under my present circumstances, I did not want to astound myself with the unavoidably queasy excitements of an incestuous sort of relationship.



I let too many long moments pass. I could sense that she had thought it all over quite carefully and had come with the definite purpose of opening the door a little way, thinking that I would take over from there. The half-stated offer was withdrawn. We made a little polite talk. I told her I had not seen anything particularly inconsistent about Tom Pike." And that was the truth. She said she was going to meet some friends in Miami and she had better go. I told her I was sorry she couldn't stay longer. She turned when she was halfway along the dock and gave me a merry wave and went striding on, out of my life.



I went back below and freshened my drink and mixed some Plymouth with some fresh grapefruit juice for the lady.



She was sitting on the side of the big bed in the master stateroom, filing her nails. She wore a big fuzzy yellow towel wrapped and tucked around her. She lifted her head sharply to toss her dark hair back and looked at me with a twisted and cynical smile.



"A wealth of opportunity, McGee?"



"Or it never rains but it pours."



"Let me see. Finders keepers, losers weepers. How did she seem?"



"Gaunt. Haunted. At loose ends."



"Wanting comforting? How sweet! And did you tell the poor dear thing to come back some other day?"



"Any show of jealousy always comforts me," I said, and gave her her drink. She sipped it and smiled her thanks and reached and put it on the top of the nearby locker. I stretched out behind her and propped my head up on a pair of pillows.



"Sorry I was here?" she asked.



"Been the same thing. I would have had to go with my instinct. And it said no dice."



"She's very pretty."



"And rich. And talented."



"Hmmm!" she said. The file made little rasping sounds. I sipped my drink. "Mr. McGee, sir? Which really surprised you most? Her showing up or me showing up?"



"You. Definitely. Looked down from the sundeck and saw you standing there and nearly choked to death." I reached an idle finger and hooked it into the back of the wrapped and tucked towel. One gentle tug untucked it and it fell, pooling around her. She slowly straightened her long, slender, lovely back. She reached and picked up her drink and took half of it down, then replaced it.



"May I assume you are quite serious, Mr. McGee?"



"It is crummy weather out there, and you have an extraordinarily fine back, and you were pleasantly bitchy about Miss Pearson, so I am serious, my dear."



"Shall I bother to finish these last three fingernails?"



"Please do, Mrs. Holton."



"I shall try to finish them, Mr. McGee. I think it would be good for my character, what little I have left."



So I listened to the busy little buzz of the nail file and admired her, and sipped the drink, and thought about the way she had looked that day I had watched her spray-painting that old blue metal chaise.



And then I heard the wind-blown January rain move in from the sea and across the beaches and the boat basin and roar softly and steadily down on the weather decks of my houseboat.




ABOUT THE AUTHOR



John D. MacDonald was graduated from Syracuse University and received an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Dorothy, had one son and several grandchildren. Mr. MacDonald died in December 1986.



Other Books by John D. MacDonald


All These Condemned


April Evil


Area Of Suspicion


Ballroom Of The Skies


The Beach Girls


The Brass Cupcake


A Bullet For Cinderella


Clemmie


The Crossroads


Deadly Welcome


Death Trap


The Deceivers


The Drowner


The Empty Trap


The End Of The Night


The Executioners


A Flash Of Green


The Girl, The Gold Watch & Everything


Judge Me Not


A Man Of Affairs


Murder In The Wind


The Neon Jungle


On The Run


One Monday We Killed Them All


The Only Girl In The Game


Please Write For Details


The Price Of Murder


Slam The Big Door


Soft Touch


Where Is Janice Gantry?


Wine Of The Dreamers



And in the Travis Mcgee Series


01 The Deep Blue Good-By


02 Nightmare In Pink


03 A Purple Place For Dying


04 The Quick Red Fox


05 A Deadly Shade Of Gold


06 Bright Orange For The Shroud


07 Darker Than Amber


08 One Fearful Yellow Eye


09 Pale Gray For Guilt


10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper



The End


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