One Fearful Yellow Eye

One Fearful Yellow Eye

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #8 One Fearful Yellow Eye

John D. MacDonald

One

AROUND AND around we went, like circling through wads of lint in a dirty pocket. We’d been in that high blue up yonder where it was a bright cold clear December afternoon, and then we had to go down into that guck, as it was the intention of the airline and the airplane driver to put the 727 down at O’Hare.

Passengers reached up and put their lights on. The sky had lumps and holes in it. It becomes tight-sphincter time in the sky when they don’t insert the ship into the pattern and get it down, but go around again. Stewardesses walk tippy-dainty, their color not good in the inside lights, their smiles sutured so firmly in place it pulls their pretty faces more distinctly against the skull-shape of pretty bones. Even with the buffeting, there is an impression of silence inside the aircraft at such times. People stare outward, but they are looking inward, tasting of themselves and thinking of promises and defeats. The busy air is full of premonitions, and one thinks with a certain comfort of old Satchel’s plug in favor of air travel: “They may kill you, but they ain’t likely to hurt you.”

It is when you say, “What am I doing here?”

I was here because of the way Glory Doyle’s voice had sounded across the long miles from a Chicago December down to a balmy morning aboard the Busted Flush at Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.

“Oh Trav,” she said, a wan voice, deadened and miserable, “I guess there’s only one word. I guess the word is help. It’s a lousy leverage, huh?”

“But I’d use it on you if I had to, Lady Gloria.”

“You’ll come up here? You really will?”

It was a valid assumption she was a few thousand feet below me, below layers of snow flurries and pockets of sleet. And then we dipped a sickening wing, leaving my stomach back up there at ten o’clock high, stood precariously still on big flaps, then steadied down into the runway lights streaming by bumped and squeaked, brake-blasted, and everybody began smiling at everybody for no special reason, and began gathering gear, as the hope-you-enjoyed-your-flight-aboard-the speech came on, articulated by one of our stewardesses over a PA system which seemed to be constructed of an empty tomato can and a piece of waxed string. The speaker systems, and the interior beanwagon plastic decor seem planned to give the air passenger the minimal confidence in the unseen parts of the mechanism. As if the brass did not expect the fad to last.

The sludge upstairs was rain by the time it settled onto Chicago. When I was ten feet into the scurrying cross-traffic of the terminal building, amid fluorescence and PA instructions, Glory Doyle-correction-Glory Doyle Geis, or alternately Mrs. Doctor Fortner Geis, or acceptably, widow of Dr. Fortner Geis, came flying at me, to hug and hiccup and make glad sounds, lift a mouth up as high as she could get it, which is perhaps a little over five feet off the ground when she is in four-inch heels.

It had been four years for us. She was thinner than she should have been. Deep vertical creases between black brows, lines bracketing the mouth, smile lines deep at the corners of the eyes. But even so, looking younger than the thirty-four I knew she had to be. After the kiss, I held her off a half-step, hands on her shoulders, to look at her. She tilted her head, made an upside-down smile, and her brown eyes filled quickly with tears.

“McGee, McGee, McGee,” she said. “God, it’s so good!”

Hers is a moppet face, mostly eyes and a mouth made for laughing, helter-skelter crop of black hair, tidy little figure, and remorseless energies.

She looked at her watch. “Let’s talk over a drink before we have to plunge into the damned traffic.” She guided us into a three-deep bar, and moved around to the far side, around a corner, and while I was putting our order in, she managed to ease onto the last stool as it became vacant, hitched it close to the wall to give me a leaning space, my back to the neighboring stool.

“Your luggage?” she asked.

“Just what I carried off. Just this.”

“Always simplify. Peel it all down. One of the rules of McGeeism.”

I could see what four years of marriage to Geis had done for her. She had far more assurance. She wore a dark green knit suit under a tweedy rain cape, and a frivolous little Sherlock Holmes hat that went with the cape. The diamonds in the wedding ring winked in the backbar glow as she lifted the Irish and soda to touch the rim of my gin over ice, and said, “To crime, Travis dear.”

“And little women.”

She drank and smiled and said, “But you had eyes for all the great huge broads, sweetie. What was that funny name everybody called that dancer? The one named McCall?”

“Chookie. She married one Arthur Wilkinson, who builds spec houses and makes her very happy indeed.”

“And Meyer?”

“Sends his love. He’s as hairy and bemused as ever.”

“And the Alabama Tiger?”

“The party still rolls on, never really quits.”

“It’s a lot cozier aboard the Flush, Trav. Golly, I miss that whole bit, you know? If Fort hadn’t come along just when he did, I could have turned into a beach girl forever, and ended up as one of those nutty old biddies who go pouncing around after seashells. It was just right, you know. My whole damned life fell all to bits and pieces, and you helped me put the pieces back together, and then I had to have somebody who needed me instead of the other way around, and Fort came by But… it was too short. Four years. Not enough, Trav. Very good years, but not enough by half.”

“I would have come up, but I was over in the Islands, and when I got back your letter was two weeks old at least.”

“He was buried on October tenth. My God, a beautiful day, Trav. One of the greatest you could ever see. A real sparkler. We knew. Right from the first night I dated him, he leveled with me. I went into it knowing. But you kid yourself… when you’re that happy.” She lifted her shoulders slowly, let them fall, then grinned at me and said, “You are certainly a pretty spectacular sight, man, around this pasty old town. I never saw you out of context before. You’re a little startling. I was aware of people looking at you, saying with that size and that much tan, he’s a TV actor hooked on sun lamps, or from an NFL team in Texas or California, or some kind of rich millionaire playboy up from Acapulco, or you have this big schooner, see, and you go all over the Pacific. Hell with them. Let them wonder. Now let’s go home.”

The rain had stopped but it seemed darker. The highways were wet. She had a very deft little hunk of vehicle, a Mercedes 230 SL, in semi-iridescent green-bronze, automatic shift. I am no sports-car buff. But I enjoy any piece of equipment made to highest standards for performance, without that kind of adornment Meyer calls Detroit Baroque.

She said, “I better drive it because I’m used to the special ways they try to kill you here, and the places where you’ve got to start cutting out of the flow or get carried along to God knows where.”

“Fine little item.”

“Fort’s final birthday present, last May. It’s a dear thing. If I do anything that bothers you, McGee, just close your eyes.”

Glory and the car were beautifully matched. They were both small, whippy, and well-made, and seemed to understand each other. There was that good feel of road-hunger, of the car that wants to reach and gobble more than you let it. We sped north on the Tri-State, and she had that special sense of rhythm of the expert. It is a matter of having the kind of eye which sees everything happening ahead, linked to a computer which estimates what the varying rates of speed will do to the changing pattern by the time you get there. The expert never gives you any feeling of tension or strain in heavy traffic, nor startles other drivers. It is a floating, drifting feeling, where by the use of the smallest increments and reductions in pedal pressure, and by the most gradual possible changes in direction, the car fits into gaps, flows through them, slides into the lane which will move most swiftly. She sat as tall as she could, chin high, hands at ten after ten, and made no attempt at chatter until the stampede had thinned.

“We jump off this thing at Rockland Road,” she said, “and take a mess of shortcuts you couldn’t possibly find again, and end up at Lake Pointe, with the terminal E, twenty-five bitch miles from O’Hare, where awaits a shaggy house, shaggy beach, shaggy drink in front of one of the better fireplaces in the Western world.”

“Will I be staying near there?”

“In there, stupid. Not in the fireplace. There’s a ton of room, and help to run it. And a lot of talking to talk, dear Travis.”

On some of the curves of her shortcuts she showed off a little, but not enough to break the rear end loose. She knew the route through the curves and laid the little car on the rails through each one, steady as statues.

She laughed, and it was a fond laugh. “That man of mine. That Fort. Do you know what came with this thing? Lessons from a great old character named Kip Cooper who raced everything on wheels on every course there is. When old Kip finally approved, then and only then was this my car. Have you still got that absolutely ridiculous and marvelous old Rolls-Royce pickup truck?”

“Please, you are speaking of Miss Agnes. Yes, but lately I’m feeling wistful about her. She’s becoming obsolete. You have to be up to speed when you bust out into the turnpike traffic, or you’re a menace, and the old lady just hasn’t got enough sprint. She accelerates like the average cruise ship. I’m going to have to save her for back roads, lazy days, picnic times.”

We slowed and went between fat stone columns. Private. Slow. Lake Pointe. Residents and guests only. In the gray light through the branches of the bare black trees I saw fragments of houses, a wall, a dormer, a roof angle. When the leaves were out it would be impossible to see them from the smooth curves of wide private asphalt road.

Glory drove to the far end of the area, by a sign that said Dead End, and into a driveway. She parked by garages. The house faced the dunes and the lake. It was a long house, of gray stone, pale blue board and batten, dark blue tile roof. We went in through a side door into a foyer, and a big broad smiling woman in an apron came to meet us.

“Anna, this is my old friend Mr. Travis McGee. Anna Ottlo.”

“I am please to meet,” Anna said, bobbing her head.

“Trav, you’re in the east wing. Anna will show you the way. This is going to be just the two of us, informal. I’m going to change to a corduroy jumpsuit, if that clues you.”

“Miss Glory, the Mr. Andrus was phoning again. Best thing, I told him, you phone him in the morning, yes?”

“Perfect, Anna. Thanks.”

I started to contest Anna to see who would carry my flight bag, but she looked so distressed I had to let her have it. I was put in a fine room, more apartment than room. There was a hidden unit of stove, sink, and refrigerator for breakfast. She showed me the button that rolled the panel back to expose the built-in television set. She showed me where the light switches were, and where I could find more clean towels.

After she left me, I unpacked, changed from the suit to the pair of slacks and gray flannel shirt I had stuffed into the bag as an afterthought. An ancient and treasured shirt, that good Limey wool that turns softer as it grows older. French doors opened onto a planked deck facing the expanse of dunes and wind-twisted dwarfed trees between the house and the lake shore. The temperature was dropping, the wind increasing out of the north, and in the last grayness of the day I saw a full line of red in the west, like distant cities burning. The cloud cover was breaking up and I saw the first star. Wish I may, wish I might… I found myself wishing that Glory Doyle Geis would find some good and rewarding thing to do with her life from now on in, find someone who would sense how much she had to give, and how badly she needed someone to need her-as Fort Geis had.

The wind began to search out my tropic bone marrow, and I could smell a sourness in the wind. I remembered that it blew across a dying lake. For a hundred years the cities had dumped their wastes and corruptions and acids into it, and now suddenly everyone was aghast that it should have the impertinence to start dying like Lake Erie. The ecology was broken, the renewing forces at last overwhelmed. Now the politicians were making the brave sounds the worried people wanted to hear.

Now they were taking half-measures. Scientists said that only with total effort might the process be slowed, halted, reversed. But total effort, of course, would raise havoc with the supposedly God-given right of the thousand lake-shore corporations to keep costs down by running their poisons into the lake. Total effort would boost the tax structure to pay for effective sewage disposal systems.

So in the night wind, the lake stank, and I went back in out of the wind, and thought of the endless garbage barges that are trundled out of Miami into the blue bright Atlantic. People had thought the lake would last forever. When the sea begins to stink, man better have some fresh green planets to colonize, because this one is going to be used up.

I found my way to the big living room. High beamed ceiling. Low fat lamps with opaque shades. Off-white walls, with good strong paintings. Islands of furniture, demarked by bright rugs, and between those areas, a floor of pale planking in random width, polished to semi-gloss. Slate fireplace big enough for an ox roast, with a broad hearth raised two feet above the floor level. Bookshelves on either side of the fireplace, and, built into the shelves on the right, a high-fidelity installation, doors open, reels turning on the tape deck, making a sound of indolent piano in the room, at a volume just high enough to be audible over the crackle of logs and the wind sound around the corners of the house. Glory sat on a crimson cushion on a corner of the hearth away from the direct heat of the fire. She wore a pale blue wide-wale corduroy jumpsuit, silvery where the nap caught the light.

She sat huddled, drink in her hand, looking into the flames. I stood and looked at her for a few moments. By some trickery of firelight, I could see how she would look when she became very old. She would become one of those simian little old ladies, wrinkles leathery against the round bones, eyes bright with anthropoid shrewdness.

So I put a heel down on the polished wood as I approached, and she snapped her head around, her brooding look gone in an instant. She motioned toward a chair which had been pulled close.

“Did I say it was a great fireplace, McGee?”

“It’s a great room.”

The drink tray was on a low table between my chair and where she sat. Into a heavy half-sphere of Swedish glass she dropped three ice cubes, then with a knowing, mocking look showed me the label on the bottle of gin before pouring it over the cubes.

“Good memory,” I said.

“What do you mean? For heaven’s sake, remember how we had to practically go on an expedition from that crazy cottage on Sanibel so the lord and master could restock the Plymouth gin supply? I remember that day so well. When we got back, finally, you walked me so far along that beach that before we got back I wanted to sit down in the sand and cry. I’ve never been so pooped in my life. I thought you were being cruel and heartless. It wasn’t until later I realized it was one of your ways of putting the jumbled jangled lady back together. And then I wondered why you bothered. I certainly wasn’t much good to you or anybody until later.”

“I used to wonder too.”

Four and a half years ago I had gone dawnwalking and found Glory Doyle sleeping on the public beach. She was twenty-nine. She was broke, loaded with flu virus, hysterical, suicidal, and mean as a snake. I packed her back to the Flush like a broken bird. As she was mending, reluctantly, I pried the story out of her, bit by bit. She had no intention of telling anyone her troubles. She had no people. At twenty-two she had married a man named Karl Doyle. He was a chemist doing industrial research for a firm in Buffalo. He was handsome, amiable, competent, and an emotional cripple. He was not capable of love because of his deep feeling of insecurity. The more she gave, the more he demanded. His jealousy of her was like a terrible disease. They had a daughter, and he resented the child deeply because it took some of her attention from him. After their son was born, he became worse. As he became ever more violent and unpredictable, she begged him to get professional help. She fought to make the marriage work, and she was a fighter, warm, understanding, gutsy. One night after he beat the little girl for a minor infraction of his ever more stringent rules, she took the kids to the home of her best friend and stayed there with them. When he called she said that when he started going to a psychiatrist, she would come back to him. One Saturday morning when it was her turn to do the marketing, she came back to the house to find that her husband had broken in, had killed the friend, both children, and himself. She could not remember very much about the next few weeks, but finally, after everything was settled, all she had was the car, her clothes, and a few hundred dollars. She headed south. Somewhere in the Carolinas the car got low on oil and the motor burned out. She sold it for junk and continued by bus. She had planned to get a job in Florida. But when she got to Lauderdale and rented a cheap motel room a few blocks from the beach a strange lassitude came over her, the end product of her conviction of guilt. She slept twenty hours a day. The money slowly dwindled away. She began to hear voices, and she knew that when she went out people nudged each other and pointed at her and told each other of the terrible thing she had caused. She was warned about the rent until one day she came back and found a new lock on her room, found that they were holding her possessions. She was feverish and dizzy. I found her on the beach the following dawn. She had fallen asleep while awaiting the necessary energy to walk into the sea and swim out as far as she could.

Somehow you can tell the real crazies from the broken birds. This one was pure bird. She’d had just a little more than she could handle. She had to have somebody to hang onto, somebody who could make her see that her disaster was as much her fault as is that cyclone or flood or fire which takes all but one of a family. Her nerves were shredded, digestion shot, disposition vile. She was without hope or purpose, and she had gone a dangerous distance along the path toward despising herself. But in the end it was her sense of humor which saved her. There was a compulsive clown carefully hidden away, who had almost forgotten tricks and jokes and absurdities. When I got her weary enough and healthy enough, the clown part began to make tentative appearances, and the good mending started.

After it had turned into a physical affair between us, another danger arose. She began to become too emotionally dependent on me. She was a very affectionate woman, needing and giving the casual touches and pats which to her were as necessary a part of communication as words. I felt too fatuously delighted with myself for bringing her back into reality to let her slip into another kind of fantasy. So, after helping her get a job as a diningroom hostess in a Fort Lauderdale hotel on the beach, I firmly, gently, carefully disentangled myself.

It was through her job she met Dr. Fortner Geis. He was staying alone at the hotel.

A log shifted in the fire. She sighed audibly. The music ended and she went over and punched the button to reverse it, so that it would play the other half of the tape.

“I loved this house,” she said.

I looked at a large painting on the opposite wall, the colors vividly alive, the composition very strong. A small gallery spot shone on it. I got up and went halfway to it, and then made out the artist’s signature and went back to the chair.

“An incredible old man,” I said.

“Fort and I picked that out in New York three years ago. It had just come into the gallery. Fort met Hans Hoffinan once, years ago. He told me that Hoffman had such an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm, that youthfulness that comes from being eternally inquisitive. I told Fort he had exactly the same thing. He looked so startled I had to laugh at him. Golly I’m going to miss that painting.”

“Do you have to sell it?”

“In November, two weeks after Fort died, a very polite and considerate man showed up with a perfectly legitimate bill of sale for that Hoffman. He’s a Chicago collector, and he paid Fort seven thousand five for it. He said that he had added it to his fine arts rider on his insurance policy, and he insisted on leaving it here until I decide what I’m going to do. It wasn’t a shock, Trav. Not by then. By then I knew I couldn’t consider anything mine. Not even the house.”

“I don’t understand.”

She took my empty glass and said, “The lady yelled help. Remember?”

TWO

I KNEW SHE must have planned how she would tell me, but when she started, I could see that it seemed wrong to her. She stopped and hopped up and began pacing around.

At last she stopped in front of me and said, “Okay. Look at it this way. Look at me and Fort from the outside, the way his son and daughter saw us. Their mother, Glenna, died eighteen years ago, when Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven. So they were the privileged children of Dr. Fortner Geis. Money and prestige. Money in the family from their mother’s side, plus what Fort added to it by becoming a great neurosurgeon-and the prestige of being the children of a man who’d made himself an international reputation. Fort told me he’d made a lot of mistakes in his life, but the worst one of all was the one he made five years ago, after the diagnosis was absolutely certain, after the prognosis was definite, deciding to tell Roger and Heidi that he probably had not more than three more years left. Damn it, Trav, he wasn’t looking for sympathy or being dramatic. He was a doctor. He knew a fact pertinent to their lives. So he told them. He’d always worked too long and too hard for the relationship with his kids to be terribly close. They set up a death watch, practically. They started dropping in on him, full of brave and noble cheer. And it started depressing him to the point where finally he had to get away by himself. He canceled out everything for a month and came down to Fort Lauderdale and didn’t let anybody know where they could find him. He told me he had some adjusting to do. He said he had been too busy to think about dying. And if a man was going to die, he should have some time for contemplation, so he wouldn’t die without coming to any decision about what it had all meant. He wanted to walk on the beach, look at the birds, read something other than medical journals. And he started coming into the dining room at odd times for coffee when I could sit with him and we could talk. Dammit, Trav, I had no idea he was important. I knew he was a doctor. I knew he was a widower. He said he was taking his first vacation in twenty-five years. There was that wonderful… simplicity about him.”

“I know,” I said. “That long nobbly face and the spaniel eyes and the slow grin.”

“Loneliness,” she said. “Both of us. We never talked trivia. We started talking from the heart right off. He’d loved Glenna deeply. He still missed her. And when we finally had a date, he told me what was wrong with him, and how long he probably could keep operating, and how soon he would die. We’d each taken our lumps. I told him… what had nearly sunk me without a trace. He was fifty, Travis. I was twenty-nine. Something in us responded to each other. He said it was because we knew what some things cost, and why other things were worthless, and too many people never found out. Then he asked me to marry him, and he said that if I felt squeamish about his being sick, I’d better not, because he desired me, and that was the kind of marriage he wanted with me, along with being friends and in love. He said he would have two years anyway before there was any outward sign or feeling, and it would get bad, but not too bad, when the medication stopped working. So I thought it over for two days, and knew I wanted him, and proved there was no squeamishness, and married him with the idea we’d be going back to some sort of old frame house with a downstairs office and waiting room in front, and some old dragon of a nurse. We had three and a half good years, Travis. We laughed a lot. I tell you, we laughed a hell of a lot. The pain started last April, but it didn’t get as bad as he thought it was going to. And in September, he just started… dwindling away. Very quietly.”

She sat down again. “Anyway, he was like a kid when he brought me back here to Chicago. I’d been too dumb to know who he was. He had this house designed and built for us, and sold the one in town. He cut his work back to just the experimental part. He didn’t do any routine operations. It gave us more time. But you can guess what his friends and his kids thought. They made him so mad. They looked at me as if I was some kind of a bug. They acted as if marriage was some act of senility or something. I was the smart little operator, a waitress type, who nailed the poor guy when he was depressed about knowing he wasn’t going to get anywhere near three score and ten. And the inference was that I probably liked it better that way. Roger was the worst. He’s twenty-nine. He’s a market analyst. He’s a self-satisfied fink. He had the gall-and the stupidity-to go to Fort and suggest that inasmuch as I’d married him so late in his life, it would be a lot fairer to his kids to just leave me a reasonable bequest in his will. Fort had made a new will by then. It was pretty complicated, with trusts and so on, but the basic idea was he’d leave me half and them each a quarter. I told him I didn’t want to make that kind of hard feeling, and he got so annoyed I had to drop the whole thing. I had to go to the bank with him a few times to see Mr. Andrus, the assistant trust officer, and sign things. He’s very nice. I decided that after it was all over I could talk to him and see about some way of taking just what I’d need to get settled into a new life, and let his children have the rest of it. As it turned out, there was no problem.”

“How do you mean?”

“He just didn’t leave anybody anything. There wasn’t anything left to leave.”

“What do you mean? Had he been kidding people?”

“No. Starting about a year ago in July, he started changing things into cash. Mr. Andrus is going to bring the list around tomorrow. You see, he didn’t have things actually put away in trust where he couldn’t get at them. Mr. Andrus can explain all that. And his lawyers had no way of knowing what he was doing. He just… sold the stock and the bonds and everything and kept putting the money in checking accounts. Then he kept drawing cash. Nobody knows where it went. He mortgaged this house right to the hilt. He cashed in his insurance policies. All but one. I’m the beneficiary on that. And it pays me f-f-four hundred dollars a m-month as long as I… as long as I… I-I…”

“Whoa, girl.”

She rubbed the corduroy sleeve across her eyes. “Damn! I’m not the crying kind. It’s just that everybody has been so damned ugly to me.”

“How much has disappeared?”

“A little over six hundred thousand dollars.”

“In a little over a year!”

“He did it in such a way it wouldn’t attract attention. He opened other checking accounts, and he’d make deposits to other banks by check and then draw the cash. Three was enough for the funeral, and enough to run this house for… oh, until February or March. Roger and Heidi seem to think it’s some kind of cute stunt I’ve pulled. They act as if I’d drugged him or hypnotized him or something. The Internal Revenue people and the state tax people started treating me like a criminal or something. They came with a warrant and they searched every inch of this whole house and made inventories of everything. They kept coming back and asking the same questions. I told Mr. Andrus I couldn’t stand it, and he took me right down to Fort’s attorneys. Waldren, Farhauser and Schrant. Old Mr. Waldren kept asking me questions. He looked as if he was taking a nap all the time I was answering. But finally he said he would see that I was not bothered anymore, but I had better stay right here at the house, for the time being. I know I’m being watched. I think it’s Roger or Heidi though, paying someone to keep an eye on me. I yelled help, Trav. I don’t want the damned money. But I don’t want people following me for the rest of my life trying to catch me with something I haven’t got.”

“Was there any change in Fort’s attitude or manner?”

“When he started selling things? I didn’t notice a thing different. He seemed happy. That’s what I wanted. I mean we couldn’t be all the way happy, knowing the time was growing short. But we could give it a good try. And we did. That’s another thing. I don’t think he was trying to cheat on estate taxes or anything like that. I don’t think he wanted to cash in those things. So somebody was making him do it somehow. And so that was making him unhappy, but he kept it from me. He hid it from me. And I would like to get my hands on somebody who’d do that to him when he had so little time left, damn them.”

“Would the illness affect his mind in any way?”

“Absolutely not!”

“Could he have been planning some… easier way of handling his estate and died before he had a chance to tell you?”

“They kept asking me that, sort of. No. Those last days before he went into a coma, I sat by him all day long. Held his hand. We’d talk. He’d nap and we’d talk more. He had a chance to say everything to me. He knew he was going. And… God, how he hated to leave me. He wasn’t afraid of death. He was a man. It was the same way he used to hate to leave me when he had to go to a meeting. That’s all. How much in love do you have to be before people believe it? I would have burned every inch of all that money to give him one more day.” She stopped looking fierce and glanced at her watch. “Medium rare? Butter on the baked? Garlic dressing?”

“Your memory is still working, kid.”

She trotted out toward the back of the house to tell Anna to serve as soon as it was ready. When she came back I asked her how well-fixed Fort’s children were. She said that Heidi seemed to be doing just fine. She was twenty-five-married at twenty-two and divorced at twenty-four. It had been a second marriage for her husband, Gadge Trumbill, usually referred to in the society pages as a prominent sportsman. When Heidi had tired of Gadge’s fun and games on the side, it was rumored that she employed people thorough enough to make an iron-clad list of positives which had included eleven wives of fellow members of the Harbour Yacht Club, but that the generous settlement and alimony had been the result of the respondent’s unfortunate carelessness in not hiding more successfully his occasional penchant for willowy young men. Heidi Trumbill was living in a studio apartment at 180 East Burton Place, was busily painting very large abstracts, and was showing and selling them at a gallery four blocks away on East Scott Street called Tempo East. Gossip of the more rancid variety pointed out that her partner in the gallery operation, Mark Avanyan, was one of those who had made Gadge’s second divorce considerably more expensive than his first. It made for interesting speculation.

“She is one very icy dish indeed,” said Glory. “Take Grace Kelly like ten years ago, and give her a little more height and heft, and put her in a part where she’s a nun who has to dress in civilian clothes to smuggle the code to the French army, and you’d be close. She’s really beautiful, she’s one of those people you can hardly believe they have even a digestive system. She’s a lot brighter than Roger, I think. He lives in Evanston, where else? He’ll be thirty soon. He works downtown in one of those big new office buildings. He’s a specialist in the commodities market, and his father-in-law is very big in the commodities market. Jeanie, his wife, seems nice enough. She’s one of those brown tennis-playing ones, and they have three kids, and they go to horse shows and eat off the tailgate and talk about hocks and fetlocks and all that.

“Neither of them are hurting a bit, but you’d think I’d pulled some tricky thing to get them tossed out naked into a blizzard. From everything Fort told me about Glenna, she must have been a doll. How could those two have such dreary people for their children?”

We ate busily and finally she looked over at me and said, “What I really had the most need of, Trav, was somebody to be my friend and take it for granted I haven’t stolen money, and who’d know I didn’t know anything about the money when I married Fort. I didn’t make friends here. We wanted all our time together. There wasn’t enough to share. But I thought, too, it is a lot of money and it does have to be somewhere. And I remembered the way you… make a living. Maybe I’m crazy to think you or anybody could ever find out where it went.”

“It went somewhere. It’s a nice jackpot. He had to have a good reason. Let’s just say I don’t have the feeling I’m wasting my time. If I can get some kind of line on what happened, then I’ll see if my fee for mula grabs Sonny and Sis. If the only way they can possibly get what they had coming is through me…”

“Expenses off the top and cut the rest down the middle. You know that is okay with me on my share, dear. When I think it even entered my mind to turn mine over to those two… I’d rather give it to a home for… old television comedians!”

She looked so totally outraged and indignant I had to laugh. She put her plate aside and I saw she had not eaten much.

“Where’s that wolf-like appetite I remember from old?”

“I don’t know. It’s fine for five minutes and then gaah. I guess I could have expected some kind of crazy thing happening, like the money. What is it, Travis? Why in the world should my life be some sort of continuous soap opera? I think I had six uneventful years. The first six. Gloria Anne Ridgen. Then all hell broke loose. Is there such a thing as drama-prone? You know, you go hunting for the action. My daddy bought me a ride on a merry-goround, and that was the time the man running it had to be drunk and decided he wasn’t going to stop it. When they died I had to live with my nutty old aunt, and if my astrology tables were wrong any given day, she wouldn’t let me go to school. The boy I went with in high school was walking by a building and somebody dropped a can of paint, and when he woke up from the coma a year later, he had the mind of a two-year-old. In college my roommate was a secret klepto and hid the loot in my luggage and when they began to narrow it down, she turned me in, and six months later she got caught and they apologized and asked me to come back to school and the day I was due to leave I got infectious mononucleosis and my dog was run over. All I want is a plain, neat, ordinary, unexciting life. But what happens? In Buffalo one day I got off the bus downtown on a hot afternoon and the bus door closed on my wraparound skirt and drove off and left me spinning like a top in my little yellow briefs on the busiest corner in town. You know, I dream about that. There I am, and everybody is applauding and I can’t stop twirling.”

Anna Ottlo had gone to bed. We took the dishes out to the big bright kitchen and she rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. I was aware of the wind, and of the emptiness of the stretch of dunes and winter beach outside, and of the comfort of the house.

“Was this whole thing in the news?” I asked her.

“No. From what John Andrus says, It isn’t news until there’s some kind of legal thing that goes on, the probate or something. He can explain.”

I decided it would be better not to tell her what had entered my mind. If a man, before dying, had converted his holdings into over half a million in cash, there would be a certain number of dim minds in a city of this size who would be inspired to pay a night visit to the little woman and see if she could be persuaded in ugly ways to tell where the deceased had hidden it away. It would be a clumsier variation of Heidi’s and Roger’s incorrect suspicion.

She turned lights off, and when one was left, we said goodnight by the embers of the fire. “You’re so good to come,” she said softly, standing close, hands holding my wrists, head tilted back to look up into my eyes.

“Beach bums have to take care of each other, Glory.”

“But it’s never your turn.”

We were smiling, and then there was that awkwardness born of a simultaneous remembering of a special closeness of long ago. Her gaze slid away, and I bent to her quick kiss, and we said goodnight. I took one glance back into the big room after she had turned the last light out, and I could see her small brooding silhouette in front of the ember glow.

THREE

THERE WAS a watery sunlight when I got up, and a diminishing wind. I found the bright and cheerful breakfast alcove off the kitchen. Anna said Miss Glory had gone walking along the beach and should be back soon, and I should eat.

“Eat like the bird, Miss Glory is. Too thin, ya?” Anna said.

“She looks healthy.”

“Need some fat. Better in the winter some fat.”

When she brought my bacon and eggs to the breakfast booth I asked her if she had worked long for Dr. Geis.

“From I was thirty only.” she said proudly. “Refugee. Only the German language I had. My little girl eleven. Husband had one grandmother Jew. He got us out, was to come later.” She shrugged. “The Doctor Geis helped looking for him after the war. Never found. Then it was the house in the city we were in, ya? Heidi has only one year then and Roger has five years. All happy. Three years I am here and the lady then has the bad sickness of the heart. A very sad thing for the house. Weaker weaker weaker, and the last year in bed. Nurses. Even such a man like the Doctor Geis, he cannot the lady save.” Her broad heavy-featured face looked tragic, but then as she looked beyond me out the window, she smiled suddenly, “Here comes Miss Glory.”

Gloria came striding through the loose sand and stamped her feet when she reached the flagstone walk. She had on wine-red wool slacks, a stocking cap with a red topknot, her hands shoved deeply into the slash pockets of a short leather coat. She smiled at me through the window, and came in, yanking the stocking cap off, shaking her black crisp hair out, shedding the leather coat. As she slid in opposite me, Anna brought her a steaming cup of coffee. Gloria had red cheeks. She wore a black lightweight turtleneck sweater.

“My word! Can we afford to feed this creature, Anna?”

“Good to cook for a big stomach.”

“Sleep well, Trav? It’s going to be glorious later on. There’s that feel in the air. It’s going back up into the fifties, I bet.”

She had a toasted English muffin, and we took our second coffees into the living room where she called John Andrus and told me he said he would try to get out to the house by ten-thirty.

“Who does he think I am?”

“Sort of an appointed big brother. An old friend. Somebody I trust. I told him I wanted him to explain the things I don’t quite understand, so you can advise me and help me.”

“What does he think I do for a living?”

“Well, I said you’re in marine supplies. Okay?”

“It’s nice to know what you said,” I told her. “And after we get into it, could you sort of remember something you have to go do?”

“Darling, it will be a pleasure. When he talks about that stuff, it makes my head hurt.”

John Andrus was a likable guy in his late thirties. He was stocky, dark-haired, well-tailored, with the strong features of a character actor. We talked in Fort’s study. Andrus had brought along the documents in a black dispatch case.

“This report summarizes an awful lot of leg work,” he said. “He had thirteen months of activity. It would average a little under fifty thousand a month converted into cash. He didn’t want to attract attention, obviously. He opened up checking accounts in six other banks. He fed the money through the seven accounts. Apparently he also, in addition to cashing checks at the banks, cashed checks at clubs, restaurants, and hotels where he was well-known. He cashed in his securities holdings at at least four different brokerage houses. I think this summary by month of the assets converted to cash and the cash withdrawals through the checking account is very close to actuality. See, here is the biggest month for sale of assets, over two hundred thousand. He converted seventy-two thousand into currency last January, and that was the biggest month. The smallest was last June. Twenty-one thousand. He was a very respected and respectable man, Mr. McGee.”

“Strange behavior.”

“We’re a little dazed, frankly. We had the estate set up so beautifully. Residuary trusts, insurance trusts, 28 beautifully drawn instruments. And when the time comes to put them into effect, we can’t find anything except some very minor asset values. It wasn’t really big money, of course. But it’s enough to be worth handling properly. We’ve been through all his personal papers and records, and there isn’t a clue. It’s distressing.”

“To you and the IRS too.”

He frowned. “Unfortunately the man assigned to it was not too experienced. He got very agitated. He was going to attach everything in sight, the small equity left in the house, Mrs. Geis’ insurance, the cars and so on. So we elected, as executor, to have the estate appraised one year from the date of death, as is our option. I imagine the IRS man thought it was some sort of attempt to evade estate taxes.”

“But you don’t.”

He looked shocked. “Of course not! Fortner Geis was not a stupid man, and I think he was an honest man. I think he would… weigh all the alternatives, and do what he felt he had to do.”

“Which one of us is going to say the nasty word, Mr. Andrus?”

He shrugged. “Okay. Blackmail. I investigated that possibility with Mrs. Geis, and with the daughter, Mrs. Trumbill, and with young Mr. Geis. I also checked with… some of the doctor’s associates. It is a complete blank. Well, not exactly a complete blank. Mrs. Trumbill was very distressed when her father married a woman so much younger, and a woman… not quite on the social level of the Geis family, let us say. She suggested that her father might be paying out large sums to protect Mrs. Geis.”

“From what?”

“When her father brought her back here, Mrs. Trumbill thought it would be wise to… have her stepmother investigated. She got a report on what had happened to Mrs. Geis’ first husband and her two children in Buffalo over six years ago.” He hesitated, looked troubled, and said, “I have a lot of respect for Gloria. I like her a great deal. And I do not like Heidi Geis Trumbill. Mrs. Trumbill suggested to me that perhaps Gloria in a jealous rage had killed her neighbor and her first husband, and the two children who witnessed it, and then someone who could prove that’s what happened showed up and the doctor was paying that person to keep silent.”

“Heidi seems to have a nasty mouth.”

“She thinks Gloria had her father hypnotized. I felt duty-bound to check out her murder theory. Nonsense, of course. According to the Buffalo police reports, a neighbor saw Gloria turn into the driveway and get out of the car with a bag of groceries about two minutes after the woman had phoned the police about hearing the shots. When I told Mrs. Trumbill about that, she gave me a strange little smile and said perhaps if we kept on digging we’d probably find something sufficiently nasty in Gloria’s background to account for where the money went. And, if not, it was obvious that she had talked the Doctor into putting his estate into cash and turning it over to her. How could we be sure, she asked, that Mrs. Geis hadn’t already taken it out of the country?” He sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t let it bother me. Estate work gives you a chance to see people at their worst.”

“How much would Heidi have gotten?”

“The way it was set up, and you must understand that there were insurance policies cashed which would have built the estate up to over seven hundred thousand. Once the estimated taxes and expenses were paid, Gloria would have gotten three hundred thousand, and his children a hundred and fifty thousand each. Three trust funds. Heidi’s was the most restrictive. She was limited to the income only, say seventy-five hundred a year, and at the time of her death the principal amount was to be divided equally among her children, if any, and her brother’s children. Roger was to be given the right to withdraw in any year up to ten per cent of the amount originally placed in trust for him. Gloria was to have the house and all physical property, and the right to withdraw all or any part of the monies in trust at any time. When he learned of this provision, Roger said it proved that his father was not of sound mind at the time the instruments were drawn up, because it did not make sense to give a woman untrained in the handling of money complete freedom of access to three hundred thousand dollars, while restricting the son, who was in the business of handling money, access to not more than fifteen thousand a year of the principal amount.”

“Great kids, those two.”

“Unfortunately I’d say they’re about average.”

“If nobody ever finds out where the money went, what happens? Can Gloria lose that insurance money?”

“No. There’ll be no estate taxes at all. The governrnent can’t merely assume she has the money, and procede against her on that basis. I imagine they’ll keep careful track of her, and if she seems to be spending more than her income, they would ask awkward questions.”

“She thinks she’s being watched now.”

“She might be. If it bothered her too much, I’d arrange to find out who is behind it. Oh, there was something else I discovered when I was asking Mrs. Geis about the possibility of blackmail. She said that there was a clumsy attempt to blackmail the Doctor over two years ago, nearly three years ago in fact.”

“On what basis?”

He looked uncomfortable. “I think it would be more proper if Gloria told you about it.”

“Sure. I understand.”

“Mr. McGee, I think it would make sense if you would advise Mrs. Geis to close this house and let us put it on the market. I think we might be able to clear fifteen out of it, possibly a little more. I hate to see her run through what she has in her own checking account so quickly.”

“She said Fort’s attorney, Mr. Waldren, advised her to stay put.”

“It was my impression he meant she should stay in the Chicago area. Well… I have other reports here, but they don’t help us much. He died on October seventh. It wasn’t until early November we began to realize most of the capital asset value had disappeared. By then the trail was cold. He’d wound it all up four months earlier, in July. If he was turning the money over to someone, we have no way of telling when or how or who.”

“Gloria said he seemed happy that last year-as happy as you could expect a man to be under those circumstances.”

“That’s puzzling, Mr. McGee. He would have had to be under strain no matter what the reason behind it was.”

“Strain,” I said. “I guess it’s relative. I remember a story about him in Time magazine. I can’t remember the details. It must have been at least ten years ago. He flew over to some place in the Middle East and took a benign tumor out of some politician’s brain. He operated for nine hours, and he could have lost the patient at any minute of those nine hours, and there was a chance that if he did lose him, some of the wild-eyed members of the party would have gunned him down when he left the hospital in spite of the troops they’d assigned to guard him. There was some background in the article on him too. In World War II in Europe he went AWOL from the General Hospital where he was on the neurosurgical team, and they found him at a field hospital trying out and getting good results with a nerve graft technique that had to be done as soon as possible after the wounds happened. He’d made his request through channels and nothing happened, so he reassigned himself. The only time I knew him was when he was in Florida and married Gloria. Okay, a very mild and gentle guy. But he had that look. The ones who get past the point of ever having to prove anything to themselves or anyone else have that look. We laid on the bachelor brawl bit for him. By two in the morning there were just the three of us left, Fort, a friend named Meyer, and me. Fort started telling doctor stories. He talked until dawn. Meyer said it had been a long time since he’d had anything shake him up that much, anything that started him thinking in a different kind of pattern. I have this feeling, Mr. Andrus. Anybody who tried to lean on that nice mild guy would do better trying to pat tigers, I think.”

“So what did happen?”

“Somebody as essentially tough as Fortner Geis found some leverage that would work on Fortner Geis, and they were smart enough to stay back out of range while they squeezed him. And he was fatalist enough to adjust, to accept a lesser evil. Next step: accepting Fort as the kind of man he was, that leverage had to come from something in the past, some place where their lives crossed. Somebody has a very large and nervous amount of cash. If they were hard enough and smart enough to squeeze it out of Fort, they must have some very good idea of how to get the juice out of it without alerting the IRS computers.”

John Andrus nodded slowly. “The more you have, the easier it is to add more without attracting attention.”

“And if you can’t do it that way, you have to have a lot of patience and control. You have to sit on it and then have some logical reason to pull up stakes and go elsewhere. Then, if you can get to Brazil or Turkey, and move very carefully, you can dig yourself in as a rich man without creating too much suspicion.”

“Yes. It could be done,” he said.

“Another thing interests me. The man applying the squeeze apparently knew or had some way of knowing how much Fort had. Otherwise I think Fort would have come up with, say, a quarter of a million and then made the squeezer believe he had it all.”

Andrus began staring at me with a curious expression. “Mr. McGee, a lot of people have done a lot of wondering about this whole thing. And I’ve sat in on most of it. So you come along and for the first time I am beginning to get some kind of an image of what the person or persons had to be like. A very vague image, of course. But somehow… things seem to be narrowing down for the first time. Did Gloria tell me you’re in the marine supply business?”

“Supply and salvage. Maybe I have a talent for larceny. A great parlor trick, thinking like a thief.”

“Are you going to… pursue your theories?”

“I might look around a little, sure. Just as a favor for an old friend.”

He put his papers away and snapped the catches cm the dispatch case. “Is there any way I could make things easier for you? Unofficially”

“Did you have something in mind?”

“I don’t think any friend of Mrs. Geis’ is going to get any casual conversation out of Heidi Trumbill or Roger Geis.” He took out two calling cards and with a slender gold pen wrote on the back of each, “Any cooperation you can give Mr. McGee will be appreciated-John Andrus.”

“Thanks. Little talent for larceny yourself?”

“If there is, I hope to God they never notice it down at the Trust Department. Or run across one of those cards.”

After we’d said good-bye to him, I went walking on the lake shore with Glory. She told me it was turning into a beautiful day. I told her that twenty-five more degrees would make a Floridian happier. Then I told her what John Andrus had said about cutting her expenses by giving up the house.

“Oh, I suppose that’s very logical and bankerly,” she said. “But Fort built it for us. The happiest time of my life was right here. Fort is here too, when I wake up, in those minutes before I remember he’s gone. And he’s in the next room, or around a corner, or on his way home. Those things hurt, Trav. They sting like mad. But when I leave here, then he’s really gone forever. How else could I… buy the feel of having him near? The first insurance check came December third, last week. One every month for the rest of my life. Four hundred dollars: I’ll put that into the kitty to hang on to the house a little longer. I’m not even going to think of what comes next, or plan anything, until I am all packed and on my way down the road. Don’t expect me to be practical and logical, dear. Okay?”

“Okay. John Andrus seems fond of you.”

“I know. In a very nice and special and, thank God, unsexy way. He has an adored wife and teenage daughters. I think I was a refreshing experience to him because he finally realized I was absolutely sincere in not giving a dang about money, really. Oh, it’s kind of delicious to have it. But too many of the things I like best don’t cost a thing. At first poor John seemed to think I was trying to knock the Establishment. We were standing in the yard a month ago. One of the last leaves came off the maple. So I picked it up and made him look very closely and carefully at it. I made him see it. Then I asked him what it was worth, without cracking a smile. I could almost see the light bulb going on in the air over his head, like cartoons. Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates? So now John thinks I am very nice in spite of being quite mad.”

“I had to hold the world out to you the way you held the leaf out, Miss Glory, and make you look at it. Question. Does this hotel serve lunch?”

“Anna wouldn’t miss the chance. She goes around smiling, she’s so happy to have somebody around here who eats.”

“What will happen to her when you close the house?”

“From what has happened so far, I imagine you will see the most noted socialite hostesses from the entire lake shore skulking around in the brush and crawling across the dunes, with money in one hand,and leg irons in the other, wearing fixed glassy smiles. Anna Ottlo can name her own ticket.”

It wasn’t until cocktail time in front of the fireplace that I got around to the blackmail attempt John Andrus had thought more fitting for Glory to tell me.

“Heavens, he could have told you! He’s really very circumspect. But… I’m glad he didn’t, really. Becuuse I think that you might not understand just how it happened. Fort, all his life, was very attractive to women. I guess he made every woman feel… valuable. He listened. He was interested. He liked them.

“Travis, I have to go way back to what life was like for him with Glenna, the things he told me about their marriage. They were very close. They were very important to each other. It was wretched timing for them that as soon as he got out of the army-he was about the same age then that Roger is now-and he and Glenna were just one month apart, they found out Glenna had congestive heart disease, and had maybe had it for some time without knowing it. Let me see now, Roger was eight and Heidi must have been four, because when she died three years later, Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven.

“Because Glenna had some money, they’d been able to marry and have children when Fort was going through the intern and resident thing, and they’d been able to have a nice home in the city, with Fort devoting more time, both before and after the war, to staff surgery and instruction than to surgery for private fees. He came back to find that Anna Ottlo had become indispensable to Glenna, and that her daughter Gretchen, who was fourteen then, had become almost an older sister to Roger and Heidi.”

She turned her glass slowly, then held it and looked at the firelight through what was left of her weak highball. She gave me a small and humble smile.

“I’m not as objective as I sound, you know. I’m still jealous of Glenna for having so many more years of him than I did, and I resent her, sort of. That’s kind of lousy, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s kind of nice. It’s part of the human condition.”

“The human condition isn’t very logical. When Fort married Glenna, I was spilling pablum. Anyhow, as more background, I have to give a little sex lecture. Sex and the doctor. It’s something Fort explained to me. There are all those doctor-nurse stories, and there is a certain basis of truth in them, and here is one incident Fort told me about that explains that strange kind of truth. He said that when he was operating in the General Hospital, doing more operations in one day than he ever had before or ever would again, he had the luck to get hold of a great operating-room nurse, a big severe steady tireless girl named Fletcher. First Lieutenant Lois Fletcher. He said you have to acquire some kind of emotional immunity to all that terrible waste, all that young battle-torn meat. He said you get a kind of black humor about it, and a good team, like he and Fletcher were, get in the habit of saying things to each other that would make a layman think they were heartless monsters. Fletcher’s husband was a sergeant with the First Marine Division in the Pacific. He said that he and Fletcher were not promiscuous types, even in that permissive and demanding place. But one week they had, he said, a run on paraplegics. A terrible incidence of them, and not one of what he called the happy ones-where you could go in and take out a splinter of metal and relieve the pressure and know that the feeling would return to the lower body. After several days of that he said they finished one night, took off the bloody gowns, and went and sat in silence having coffee. They were both beat. Suddenly he said they were looking into each other’s eyes, and they just got up without a word and went off to an empty room and closed the door and with a kind of terrible exhausted energy they made love. He said she clung to him and cried almost soundlessly, and they made love again and again. A despairing affirmation, he said. That was his phrase. And he said it was transcendent. That’s the important idea, Trav, the one to remember. He said it was a way of turning the mind off, where all the horrible wheels are going around and around, and losing yourself in sensation for a little while. He said that was the only time for them, and the team was a little awkward the next day or so, getting signals slightly crossed, but from then on they were okay again, and they never spoke of it to each other.”

She stopped and sat, scowling.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I talk too much. Maybe now it’s going to sound like a bigger deal than it was. Anyway, here’s the scene. They have tried everything for Glenna. But the heart just does less and less of its job. She has been in bed for ten months. He has been back home for three years. Now it is suddenly necessary to have nurses around the clock. He does not know how long she will last. Actually, she lasted about six weeks more. She would not benefit by being put in a hospital to die. It would frighten her. Circulation is so bad the organs are not able to function properly. There is a danger of gangrene of her feet. But worst of all, because the brain is not properly supplied, her mind is failing. She moved from lucidity to fantasy and back, sometimes thinking he is her father. He is in hell. To provide better accommodations for the nurses, he moves to a small bedroom in the back of the house above the kitchen and pantry and service areas, the area where Anna and her daughter sleep. Both Anna and her daughter Gretchen are terribly worried about him. Their hearts go out to him. Anna cooks his favorite things so he will be tempted to eat. Gretchen’s feeling toward the Doctor are complicated by two factors. First, she has such a fantastic crush on him, she can think of nothing else all day long. Second, she is not really very bright. She is not a retarded child. Just a little slow of wit, with a short attention span. She has romantic dreams of sacrifice, for the sake of love. She is seventeen, intensely physical, completely mature, and healthy as a plow horse. The doctor is thirty-five, suffering, miserable, wanting Glenna to die before she becomes a total vegetable, yet unable to comprehend how he can make a life without her.

“And now, Trav, the final little factors that made such a weird thing possible. An old house, thick walls, heavy doors. He had found that he can sleep if he drinks a great big slug of bourbon as he is going to bed. The infatuated girl is in the next room, her mother in the room beyond. Fort awakens, half-stoned, with the naked girl snuggled against him in darkness, hugging him, gasping into his throat, her body all hot velvet, smooth as a seal he said, her blonde hair long and perfumed, her hands damp and cold with nervousness. There is a perversity about the tempted animal, Fort explained to me. First you say you are imagining it or dreaming it, and then when it begins to become all too real, you tell yourself that in a moment you will wake up all the way, register shock, and end the self-indulgence before it goes too far.”

“But there was the word you told me to remember. Transcendent.”

“Yes. Turning off all the awful engines in the mind. He said that only when the child began orgasm did he suddenly realize what a shocking and fantastic and inexcusable thing had happened. Afterward he told her that he was as guilty as she, and they would talk to her mother about it the next day. She wept and begged him not to, and said she would never tell, and said she loved him, she would die for him, all she wanted was to please him a little, to make him happier, to make him forget a little bit.

“In the morning it seemed very unreal to him. And he could not imagine how in the world he’d tell Anna Ottlo that the master of the house had romped the housekeeper’s more than willing daughter.”

As she told what happened I could see just how he could have been in the emotional condition to get into such a bind. The girl had come sneaking back the next night, of course, and then he knew he couldn’t tell Anna. He knew after it had happened again. He made her promise never to come back again, and never to tell. So she stayed away one night and then she came back saying she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t stay away from him, loved him and so on. Fort was, from my candid appraisal, a thoroughly masculine type. He was thirty-five, and he certainly hadn’t had any sex in his marriage for a long time. From what Glory was telling me, I could see how it could happen even with a man like Geis, to whom you could apply the adjective good without feeling self-conscious about it.

The girl Gretchen, from Glory’s second-hand description, was a sturdy fraulein, extremely blonde, big breasts, big hips, China-blue eyes, who’d blush so furiously every time she ran into Fort during the day he wondered how soon somebody would guess what was going on. So each day the beloved wife faded further toward death, and each night Fort would lose himself in that firm, eager, abundant young flesh. I could guess that she was not sensuously complex, just hearty and lusty, and it was very probable that as they became closely attuned, they would find the joining becoming almost ritualistic in its sameness, the hands, heads, mouths, legs always placed just so, the bodies becoming like one entity, so that no matter which one began the completion first, the laggard would be brought quickly along by the body’s awareness of it being the time of climax. It would be ritualistic and hypnotic, and a man like Fort would feel guilt and shame, but it would be cushioned by his knowing that no matter how wretched the inevitable ending of it would be, the bad ending of marriage and the bad ending of his wife’s life was just as inevitable. In such a situation there could be almost a compulsion to find a guilt-feeling. When the beloved is dying, we want to be blamed and punished. Without that there seems to be nothing left but an indifferent malevolence of fate.

She fixed new drinks, handed me mine and said, “Fort told me it all became unreal to him. And then Glenna died. He moved back to the bedroom where she had died. He’d become so… habituated to Gretchen he could not comprehend not wanting her. But suddenly he didn’t. She couldn’t risk sneaking through the house. Two days after the funeral she was waiting in the garage when he came home from the hospital. She told him she was pretty sure she was pregnant. He gave her a test. She was. She said there was no reason why he couldn’t marry her. Now if Fort had been a weak, silly, sentimental man, he might have done just that. But he was always able to look at things objectively. A marriage that grotesque would have been as bad for her as for him. So he told her it was ridiculous to even think of such a thing. He came home in the middle of the morning the next day, when his kids were in school. He had told Gretchen to stay home from school. She was slow in school. She was in the tenth grade, and kept asking her mother to let her drop out. Fort brought Anna and her daughter into the living room and had them sit down and he told Anna what had happened and what the situation was.”

“That must have been a dandy morning.”

“Fort told me that it had to be done. When something has to be done, you do it. You have no choice. Gretchen tried to lie, and say that Fort had seduced her. Anna knew Fort better than that. She got in about three good whacks, and Gretchen, bawling, told the whole truth. Fort said Anna was very pale. She asked questions about exactly how the affair had begun, and then sent Gretchen off to her room. Fort said Anna was eminently practical. She blamed him only for not telling her the first time it happened. She said it was best to assume the girl had been impregnated that very first night. Then there was less guilt. A man was a man. The girl was very ripe and eager. But the girl’s idea of marriage to Herr Doktor was, of course, impertinent. Arrangements could be made if it was known how much the Doctor would settle on the unborn child. She said that if Gretchen were a bright girl and doing well in school and deserved more education, perhaps an abortion would be best. But a girl like her daughter would be much better off married, and with children. Fort said that as soon as Glenna’s estate was settled, he would arrange very quietly to buy a single payment annuity which would provide the child with approximately a hundred dollars a week for life, and in the interim, he would turn over a hundred dollars a week out of pocket to Anna to give to Gretchen. Anna said that was more than enough, much more. Fort said he would not feel right about making it any less. Two weeks later Gretchen was married to a twenty-year old boy named Karl Kemmer. Karl’s mother was, like Anna, a refugee, an older woman than Anna. She had lost two older sons in the war. She had gotten Karl out and into the States less than a year earlier. He was an apprentice, learning sheet-metal work. Fort said he seemed like a very decent kid. Gretchen gave birth to a girl. They named her Susan. Through his lawyer, a man who has since died, Fort arranged the annuity in the name of Susan Kemmer with the money to be paid monthly to her parent or guardian until she reached eighteen, and then paid directly to her.”

“How did Gretchen react to that?”

“Not so great. She blamed her mother for not siding with her to get Fort to marry her. Fort said that while Anna and Gretchen were still getting along, Anna enjoyed being a grandmother. Then the marriage started to go bad. Maybe Karl Kemmer resented the bargain he made. Gretchen started going with other men. Fort said she and Anna had battles about it. When Susan was three, Gretchen had a little boy. When the little boy was a year old, Karl Kemmer was killed in an industrial accident. After another quarrel, Gretchen left town suddenly with a married man, taking both children with her. Fort said Anna was grim and remote and unapproachable for a time, and then she became herself again. But she would not mention Gretchen. She told Fort she did not have a daughter.”

“So it had to be Gretchen who tried to shake Fort down a couple of years ago?”

“Three years ago next month. She waylaid him at the hospital. She said she didn’t want to come here because she didn’t want her mother to know she was back in Chicago. She’d been back three months. She didn’t want her mother to know that things hadn’t gone too well for her. Fort said she was heavy and coarsened, but sexy in a full-blown blowzy way. She said she was doing waitress work in a restaurant on West Lake Street, and living with her five kids in a fourth-floor walkup in the Maywood section. She had married somebody out West. I can’t remember the name he told me. And she’d had three children by him and one had died, and she had married another man and had one child by him who was then three years old. I can’t remember the third husband’s name either, but she told Fort he was in prison. She said that even with the money coming in for Susan, she couldn’t seem to make ends meet, so she’d come to tell him he had to start sending her another hundred a week.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“It irritated Fort and it puzzled him that she should put it in the form of a demand, and look so perfectly sure of herself. So he asked her why she thought he’d do that. So she said she’d found out he’d just moved into a fine new house and he had a new young wife and probably the new young wife thought she’d married a great man, but she wondered how the new young wife would react if Gretchen paid her a little visit and told her that while his first wife was on her death bed, the big famous Dr. Geis was busy knocking up a young dumb kid, his housekeeper’s daughter, right in the same house, every night for weeks. Fort said he wasn’t irritated anymore. Just sad. So he told her about how he and I had no secrets, and he had told me the whole thing, so there wasn’t any way she could put that kind of pressure on him. Then in that gentle way of his he asked her why she would try such a thing, and why she would make what had happened between them, foolish as it might have been, sound so much dirtier than it had actually been. So she began to cry and she told him that her husband had told her to try it. He realized that she was basically unchanged. She was still a slow-minded, amiable, romantic kind of person. He said he would look into her situation and see if he could give her some help if she really needed it.”

“I would guess she did.”

She explained that Fort hired investigators to make a full report, and asked them to go into detail about the daughter Susan, age fourteen then. He showed Glory the report. It said she had been the common-law wife of the man out West and she was the common-law wife of the man in prison in Wisconsin. She was a sloven, but good with her kids, affectionate with them like a mother bear, hugging them and whacking them. But not much sense of responsibility. She’d get off work and go to a beer Joint, and Susan would be the sitter for the littler ones. She apparently could be picked up without to much trouble, but she never took men back to her place. Susan sounded pretty special. Bright and blonde and pretty, and very earnest about seeing that the kids got proper food and were dressed adequately. And she kept the apartment clean. It looked as if they could get along on the four hundred from the annuity and the two hundred and fifty or so that Gretchen was making in wages and tips, but Gretchen liked to play the numbers and the horses too well. If there was more money, she’d just bet more.

“Fort and I talked over what if anything he ought to do. In the end he got in touch with Gretchen and told her that if she stopped gambling, all her kids would be better off, and he had no intention of giving her any money. Then he had the same investigators get word to Susan that if any emergency ever came up that she couldn’t handle, she was to contact them, but it would be best not to tell her mother about it. We wondered what we should try to do when Susan became eighteen and began getting her own money directly. We talked about it as if… Fort would still be around. She’ll be eighteen next year. We wanted to make sure she’d go to college and not get cheated out of it by having to look after the other kids. She certainly wasn’t any threat-Gretchen wasn’t-to Fort. It was just sort of dreary and sad. I’d half decided that after Fort died, I’d go to Susan and explain everything and see if I could sort of… look after her. After all, I guess I’m only a couple of years too young to be her mother. So that’s all it was. Look how long it took me to tell it. That’s what comes from living alone. Dinner now?”

“Unless you want to see a grown man cry.”

When we were eating I asked her if Anna knew about Gretchen’s attempted shakedown. She said Fort hadn’t told Anna about it, but he had told her about Gretchen being in town with five children. At first Anna hadn’t wanted to do anything about it, but Fort had sensed it was pride and bullheadedness. She had visited once when Gretchen was there and it had ended very badly, so from then on she had visited when she knew the kids would be there and Gretchen would be working.“

“Did you go see Susan yourself?”

“I waited too long. I had… a sentimental idea, Trav. I thought I would find out very carefully if she knew Fort was her father. If she did, I wanted to find out if she had any bad feeling about him. If she did, I was going to try to make her see how it was, how it happened, how Fort had done what he could, and then, if she was willing, bring her out here to see him. I know he wanted to see her. I mean from the report I guess he had the feeling he had fathered at least one pretty good kid. But he had felt reluctant to upset whatever adjustment the girl had made. I went there in September and they were gone. They’d been gone a couple of weeks. I asked Anna about it. She looked pretty bleak. She said that if she’d known I was going there, she would have told me they were gone. She said it was her idea Gretchen didn’t want Anna buttering up the kids, so she just moved, maybe somewhere else in the city, maybe out of town. No forwarding address. Probably some new man, Anna said, looking as if she wanted to spit.”

“Glory, have you got that investigator’s report?”

“No. I thought they’d find it when they went through everything. But I guess Fort destroyed it.”

“I wonder why he’d do that?”

“I guess he had a good reason. Trav, Fort had a lot of… wisdom. I guess that’s the word. He thought things out and did what he felt would be best for everyone. Like when…”

“When what?”

“Nothing.”

“From the expression on your face when you stopped yourself, it wasn’t exactly nothing, girl.”

“It was just a personal thing, between Fort and me.”

“And has nothing to do with anything else?”

“Nothing.”

But I knew she was troubled, and so I decided not to take her off the hook. Again I went to the kitchen with her while she stowed the dishes. Again we had a nightcap by the last small tongues of flame in the glowing bed of embers. She talked trivia, and kept lapsing into silence, and finally out of a silence she said a bad word.

“Hmmm?” I said.

“Okay, okay, okay. That personal thing. Maybe it does have something to do with something. Trav, Fort and I had kind of let ourselves drift into a fool’s paradise. We’d begun to believe it wouldn’t end, and then the pains began. And when they did, neither of us were as good about it as we thought we were going to be. We disappointed ourselves. Depression and irritability and restlessness. It looked as if it was going to be totally lousy from then on in. We just didn’t seem to be able to handle it… and get any good out of the time we had left. So Fort got something from a friend of his. Dr. Hayes Wyatt. He’d told Fort one time about the good results he’d been having with terminal patients using psychedelics. As Fort explained it to me, when there is pain, after a while the patients begin to identify the pain with death. Then the pain becomes like something that’s after them, trying to take them away, and that makes the pain worse because there’s fear there too. So he talked our problem over with Hayes Wyatt and Hayes thought it would be a good idea for both of us and told Fort what kind of a procedure might work best, and gave Fort a tiny little vial of it. LSD-25. Do you know about it?”

I did not tell her how it could still give me the night sweats to remember one Doctor Varn and the Toll Valley Hospital where they had varied the basic compound and boosted the dosage to where they could not only guarantee you a bad trip, they could pop you permanently loose from reality if you had any potential fracture line anywhere in your psyche. As a part of mending the damage they did to me, a bright doctor gave me some good trips and had given me in that special way the ability to comprehend what had happened in my head during the bad ones.

“I’ve been there,” I told her.

She lighted up. “Then you know! You can’t tell anybody what it’s like.”

“I haven’t taken the social trips with a batch of acid heads who want to freak around. It was a medical thing, controlled.”

“Oh, it has to be!” she said. “Fort measured the dosages onto little wads of surgical cotton. He gave me four hundred micrograms the first time, and stayed with me. It took about eight hours before it began to wear off. I watched over him after he took five hundred micrograms. It’s spooky you know. It was much too much to get the kind of good out of it we wanted. It took us too far to let us make any good bridge between here and there. But then we knew: And then, twice, we took a little less than a hundred micrograms at the same time. We could talk. We could talk with a closeness we never had before, and we’d thought we were as close as two people could get. What you learn is that you are… just one part of the whole human experience, part of a great rhythm of life and death, and when you have that insight, there’s no fear. I knew the ways we would always be together, and I knew the ways we would have to part and I could accept that. Twice was all we needed. It gave us peace. It gave us a special happiness, not more than we had before, but different. It made us able to understand and accept… our identities.”

“And you found out why you were so badly racked up when I found you on the beach?”

“Of course! Because I was wishing he’d die without letting myself know I was wishing it. And when he died and the kids died with him so horribly, losing the kids was the penalty I had to pay for wishing him dead. And Fort, to his utter astonishment, found out that he had secretly resented Glenna. She was one of those terribly terribly sweet women who never raise their voices, and who are fantastically strong and tough and aggressive underneath. He discovered that he had pretended love and created a myth-woman to fit that love, and that underneath she was maybe not a nice person at all. So he could not ever let himself comprehend he was glad she was dying. Accepting Gretchen’s silliness gave him a guilt he could admit.”

“So after the LSD, you both could handle the situation.”

“He died damned well, and I helped him die well, and… those insights are still with me, Trav, still helping me. But I had never thought of how… it could relate to the money. Psychedelics give you an acceptance of inevitable things. Sort of-‘so be it.’ It would have given him the chance to weigh the difference in importance between death and money, and money is so… kind of insipid compared to true identity. Without that experience, Trav, I couldn’t stay here. It would smash me to stay here. Now I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

There is, I thought, almost no useful thing the human animal will not in his eternal perversity misuse, whether it be alcohol, gasoline, gunpowder, aspirin, chocolate fudge, mescaline, or LSD.

I once helped a baffled father get his daughter out of an acid party in downtown Miami. She went from the party directly into a private sanitarium. She had been a mildly disturbed personality before she got into that cult group. There were nine kids in that small room, aged eighteen, nineteen, and twenty. They had taken the trip together and they were about three hours into it, and had taken a heavy dose, so heavy there was no relating or identity between any of them. They brooded over the infinite in separate silences, isolated, somnambulistic, while the record-player needle made a hissing sound where, at the beginning of a record, it was trapped in a locked groove. Only two of them were having a bad trip. One boy sat in yoga position in a corner, facing into the corner, beating wearily at the side of his head with his fist and weeping hopelessly. The girl we were after was on her belly, creeping slowly backward; her shift hiked high above her waist by the friction, her eyes full of terror. The kids had not picked anyone to be the gooney-that wingless bird which never flies-so that no one took a bad trip and harmed himself. The girl we took out of there had chewed her fingers to bloody ragged ruin. The others dreamed, swayed, smiled-and we left them there.

FOUR

THE NEXT day was Saturday, and after breakfast I had Glory drive me into town and drop me. I told her I would poke around and be in touch. It was another one of those days Chicagoans have no right to expect in December, bright and balmy. My topcoat was more than adequate. I decided a large impersonal commercial hotel would make sense, so I took a cab to the Drake, checked into a single, found Mrs. Heidi Trumbill in the book at the 180 East Burton address, and phoned her. It was ten-fifteen.

After four rings a female voice said with considurable impatience and exasperation, “Yes? Yes?”

“Mrs. Trumbill, my name is McGee and…”

“Please try again at eleven-thirty, will you? I’m working with some acrylic paints, and they’re drying so fast I’ll lose what I’m after if I keep answering this goddam phone!” She hung up. ForcefuIly.

I went out and walked south on Michigan Avenue. In nice weekend weather it is one of the specialties of the house. Chicago is a strange one. It is not on my list of favorite places. Insofar as restaurants and lounges and hotels are concerned it is strictly hinterland, strictly hick. And as you go down the scale it becomes more shabby and shoddy than rough. I do not know why anyone should expect anything special in that line from a place where the Hefner Empire seems to represent some sort of acme of sophistication, based as it is upon fantastic centerfold mammalians for the pimpled self-lovers, upon a chain of bunny-warrens styled to make the middle-class sales manager feel like a member of an in-group, and upon a laborious philosophical discourse which runs interminably in the ad-happy magazine and in the polysyllabic style of the pseudo-educated, carrying the deathless message that it is healthy to screw and run if everybody is terribly sincere about it.

A great university they have indeed, but if you take a train there from the center of the city, you pass through whole areas of the South Side which make the worst of Harlem look like Scarsdale. It is a gigantic shameful tinderbox everybody is trying not to notice. If you are a stranger and want to leave the university area after dark, they insist on getting you a cab.

The best of Chicago, I think, must go on quite privately, and it must be very fine indeed. Private homes and private clubs, and a lot of insulation and discretion, because as I hiked along Michigan I saw and admired what I had come to see, strolling, window-shopping flocks of women of that inimitable smartness, style, loveliness, assurance, and aroma of money which will make headwaiters and captains all over the Western world leap, beaming, to unhook their velvet ropes before they even hear the name. I feel that they live in Chicago in very much the same spirit the early settlers lived in the wilderness full of Indians. They keep the big gates closed. They consort with each other, and they import those specialties their rude environment cannot supply, and when they need relief from that nerve-twanging combination of unending drabness and glittering boosterism, they take their ease at the truly smart spots of the world and, when asked where they are from, tell the truth with that shocking inverted pride of the fellow pinned to the sod with a spear who said it only hurt when he laughed.

Statistically it is probably the one city in the world where the most people have been killed in arguments over professional athletes. The middle of the city, where nine bridges cross a large sewage canal called the Chicago River, is beginning to look as if Martians had designed it. For untold years the city has limped along under what might well be the most arrogant, ruthless, and total political control in the country. In a kind of constant hysterical spasm of self-distaste, the city uglifies itself further each year by chopping away more trees and paving more areas for all those thousands of drivers who seem to have learned their art at Daytona.

So I walked in the sunlight, and appreciated all the lovely ladies, and looked at the rich goods in the rich store windows. They had strung their Christmas lights, thousands and thousands of tiny white transparent bulbs festooning the bare branches of the trees which, by some oversight, still remain standing along Michigan Avenue. At the corner of Huron something that was entirely girl came swinging along, and wrapped the whole thing up for me. Nearly six lithe feet of her, and unmistakably great handloomed tweeds in conservative cut, lizard purse and walking shoes and hair chestnut-brown and gleaming with health, styled with no trickery, bobbing to her resolute stride, and one gloved finger hooked through the string of a parcel wrapped in gold foil paper, and on her mouth a lovely secret smile, perhaps part memory, part anticipation, and part appreciation of the day and of the good feel of taking long strides, and part being lovely and young. There is something about seeing one like that which tries to break your heart. You will never know her, but you want it all to be great for her, all the parts of it, the wine, the weather, the food, the people, the beds, the kids, the love, and the being old.

I walked all the way down to Monroe and then over to Wabash and into one of the great pipe stores of the Wwstern world, Ivan Reis, across from the old Palmer House, and celebrated my luck at having seen so marvelous a girl at so marvelous a moment by gifting myself with a pale Ropp with a birds-eye grain, comfortable bite, and generous bowl.

Then I took a cab back out to East Burton, to a quainty old pile of red stone squatting close to the narrow sidewalk. There were four mailboxes and push buttons in the small foyer. Over the tube when I gave her my name, her voice, reduced to a frail buzzing sound, demanded to know what I wanted. So I said I had a note from John Andrus. She said she was on the second floor in the back and the door catch made a sound like a rattlesnake as she pressed the release.

Her heavy door was Chinese red, and when she pulled it open I saw how accurate Gloria’s description of her had been. She was a tall slender golden-blonde, features so coin-cut, so classic and clear, she had an ice-maiden look.

She looked at Andrus’ card, front and back, handed it back, and said, “You’re not exactly my picture of a banking type, Mr. McGee. Come in, please.”

I followed her into a high-ceilinged living room. She wore white canvas coveralls, too big for her, man-size, the pant cuffs turned up. She had fashioned a belt out of a red scarf rolled to narrow width, and cinched the baggy garment around the narrowness of her waist. She had appraised me with blue-gray eyes which told me nothing, merely looked at me and made a record and filed it under McGee. Minimum makeup, no jewelry of any kind. She had that rare and contradictory look of being both slender and substantial, a look which I suspect comes from a certain breadth of shoulder, fruitful width of pelvic structure. Though the coveralls were spotted with stains of paint old and new, she looked groomed and immaculate.

She turned and leaned against a table edge, crossed her ankles, crossed her arms under her breasts and said, “So?”

Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.

But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semibattered, loose-jointed way I seem to got the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Mother Nature sets up some kind of overriding counterirritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn’t too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I’m sorry it can’t be.

I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other. I know when you can hear that large No: when they are too wrapped up in exactly the right guy to even be aware you are alive, when they are one of the cool voyagers from the Isle of Lesbos, and when they are seriously thinking of killing you. I could not fit Heidi into any Pattern.

“Sometimes,” I said, “the banking types get some help from non-banking types.”

“Let me say I think they need it. Talk about impartial. Hah! It’s perfectly obvious John Andrus has let that sweet demure elfin little bitch sell him down the river. Any slight suggestion that she might not be a hundred and ten per cent perfection, and he gets furious.”

“Kind of a strange marriage, I guess.”

Suddenly she approved of me. “Do take off your coat, Mr. McGee. Care for a drink?”

As she went and fixed herself a beaker of dry sherry and some gin over ice far me, I wandered over and looked through a wide arched doorway into her studio. It had a lot of tall windows for good north light, and it was painted a good off-white. It had at least the look of a working artist’s studio-work tables, easels, bouquets of worn-out brushes in old paint pots, new work on easels and on the walls, deep painting racks, scabs of paint on the floor, stacks of paintings leaning against the walls.

She came up and handed me my drink and stood beside me looking into the studio. “Please don’t ask me to explain my work.”

She had a rare talent for irritating me. So I said, “I doubt if you could, Mrs. Trumbill.”

With a cold smile as she turned toward me, she said, “And what is that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry, I don’t think you know what you’re doing.”

“My dear man, abstract expressionism has been around so long that it…”

“That it gets imitated too much. You’ve got some color sense. You go too far in setting up weird composition. But that doesn’t mean you are setting problems or trying to solve them. It’s glib stuff, Heidi. It hasn’t got any bones. It hasn’t got any symbol values, any underlying feeling of weight or inevitability. It’s just sort of shock-pretty, and you certainly get some satisfaction out of doing it, but just don’t start taking it or yourself too seriously.”

Fury drained the color out of her face. She went striding away, whirled so quickly she slopped some of her sherry onto the living-room rug. “Just who the hell are you? My work sells! I’ve been in damned good juried shows. I’ve had some fantastic reviews.”

“I’m just a guy who buys a painting once in a while.”

“Then what could you possibly know about it? You jackasses learn a couple of stock words and voila! you’re a critic yet.”

“There’s nothing wrong with decoration, Heidi.”

“You will call me Mrs. Trumbill if you don’t mind.”

“I mind, Heidi. Your stuff will melt right into the wall after a week. Nobody will see it. That’s no disgrace. It’s decorative, but it ain’t art.”

“Get out of here!”

“You can call me Trav, or Travis.”

There was a piece of paper on a table beside a lamp. I saw a pencil on the coffee table. I took the blank paper over and put it beside the pencil. “Just make me a sketch of that lamp and the window beyond it, girl, and I’ll go quietly.”

“Oh, you mean draw you a cow that looks like a cow?” she said with a poisonous and knowing smile.

“Go ahead. Funny, but everybody I can think of right off the top of the head could sure God draw a fat realistic cow if they ever happened to want to. Hans Hoffman, Kline, Marca-Relli, Guston, Solomon, Rivers, Picasso, Kandinsky Motherwell, Pollock. And you know it, baby. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You dabblers bug me. You want the applause without all the thousands of hours of labor learning how to draw, how to make brush strokes, learning all the thing’s that give painting some bite and bones even when you don’t use any part of it. Go ahead, draw the lamp. Quick sketch. Prove I’m a jackass.”

She trotted over, flounced down, took the pencil and made some quick lines, then stuck her tongue tip out of the corner of her mouth and drew a more careful line, then she got up and threw the pencil at the paper. It went bouncing under a chair.

“Shit!” she said. “So I fake it. Everybody does. And I get away with it.”

“Suddenly I think I like you a little better, Mrs. Trumbill.”

Her smile was wan and strained. “I’m underwhelmed, Mr. McGee. People don’t talk to me like that often.”

“Drenches out the glands, they say.”

She studied me. “I suppose it’s an approach, actually. You get nasty to a girl and it shocks her so she gets hung up. Nice try.”

I gave her my most amiable grin. “Miss Pussycat, I have the feeling if some jolly experimental giant crammed us both buck naked into a one-man sleeping bag, we’d apologize to each other, get back to back, and try to get a little sleep.”

“And that too is an absolutely transparent pass, damn you.”

“Try me. You turn on my lights not at all, Miss Heidi.”

“I damned well could if I should ever develop a taste for huge dull muscular men, but I’m afraid I put all that behind me when I reached sixteen. Can’t we please finish whatever it is you came for and break this off?”

“Pleasure. We’re checking out Gloria Doyle Geis very carefully.”

“It’s about time, wouldn’t you say?”

“I know you made some suggestions to Andrus.” She sat on the couch again.

“But he won’t really see what a cheap little adventurer she is. I think I’ve figured it all out. Of course there isn’t anything on her record. I think she had an accomplice. They worked out some kind of a story about something she was supposed to have done, and then the accomplice blackmailed all that money out of my poor sick confused father. She had him on drugs, you know. I think that could be proved in court. Now all she has to do is just sit tight and pretend she doesn’t know a thing. Believe me, that money is hidden in some safe place and when the fuss dies down, she and her unwashed friend will disappear with it.”

“Makes sense, I guess.”

“You know it does. My God, he denied his own children, his flesh and blood, by leaving that grubby little waitress a whole half of his money anyway. But oh no, that wasn’t enough for her. There’s no limit to the greed of that kind of person.”

“Pretty tough to prove that was the way he was cheated.”

“You people should track down all her old boyfriends, and you can tell just by looking at her that there are plenty of them and they weren’t very carefully selected either. Did you know she knew Daddy was dying when she married him? What kind of a person would be so eager to marry a dying man who was pretty well-off? Ask yourself that.”

“I guess she didn’t get a very warm welcome from the family when he brought her back here from Florida.”

“You can say we made it very clear to her how we felt.” She shook her head, slowly. “And to think that Roger and I used to think what a shame it would be if Stanyard’s husband died and Daddy made an honest woman of her. But we would certainly have settled for Stanyard a dozen times over rather than darling Gloria.”

“Stanyard?”

“Chief OR nurse of neurosurgery at Methodist Hospital where Daddy did most of his operations. Her husband was hurt about the same time Mommy passed away. It was a fishing accident and they resuscitated him, but he’d been out too long and because of no oxygen going to the brain, there was a lot of damage. I guess he’s sort of half in a coma. He’s in an institution near Elgin. He sort of wanders around, I understand, and he can say a few words, and he seems glad to see her in a vague way. They had a little boy and he drowned when the boat was swamped. Stanyard has some kind of a thing about getting an annulment or a divorce. She was at the funeral. I hadn’t seen her in years and years. I don’t know when she and Daddy started having a thing. Probably not a very long time after Mommy died. I’m not censuring them, you understand. Two lonely people with the same interests. She’s still fairly attractive-as nurse types go. And they did make a big effort to be discreet, at least. But the summer I was twelve, one evening after dark she drove him home because his car was being fixed, and I looked through the hedge and saw them kissing. You know how kids are. It made me feel quite ill and wretched and confused. I told Roger and he said to keep my mouth shut. He said he’d known it for a year at least. I guess it really must have shaken her up when he married that Doyle person. Poor thing. When he had to go off on trips to do special operations he’d arrange to have Stanyard go along as her nurse. She was-is-very good, I guess. I mean nobody would question his wanting her right there for tricky operations. But I guess it was… quite a handy arrangement for them.”

I said nothing. She realized how patronizing she had sounded. She colored slightly. “I’m not really a prude, Mr. McGee. When it’s your own father… somehow it’s more tawdry. You expect more. Mommy was such an absolute angel. I guess I should realize that Daddy was a man, with a man’s… requirements. But it seems like such an insult to my mother’s memory, the affair with Stanyard and then marrying the Doyle person. I guess that because a man is famous in his field, it doesn’t mean he can’t be foolish and gullible about women. Of course, I didn’t exactly make one of the world’s best marriages.”

“Better luck next time.”

Her smile was cold. “No need for a next time, thank you.”

At that moment the red door swung open and a young man came hurrying in, saying, “Really, it’s too much! Darling, that wretched Kirstarian is absolutely intent on ruining the entire exhibition, and I just…”

He stopped and stared at me, eyebrows arching in surprise. “Well, excuse me! I didn’t know anyone was…”

“Mark,” she said wearily, “you’ve promised and promised not to come charging in here. If you ever do it again, I’m going to make you give me that downstairs key back.”

“I was just terribly excited, Heidi. This is really a crisis! Wait until you hear! But shouldn’t you introduce us?”

“Mr.Travis McGee. Mark Avanyan. Mark and I run a little gallery on East Scott Street.”

“The Tempo East,” he said. He wore a shaggy green turtleneck and skinny jeans in an almost white denim. He had the build of a good welterweight in peak condition. His hair was a half-inch length of dense black pelt that began about an inch and a half above his dark heavy brows. He smiled approvingly at me. “It’s so marvelous to see somebody who looks really outdoors.” He sat on a bright blue hassock and tucked his sneakers under him and scowled and said, “Kirstarian is absolutely adamant, darling. He brought in a new piece and he says it goes in the show or there won’t be any show. And I can’t endure it. It is absolutely ghastly.”

He turned to me and explained, “Kirstarian calls his latest work Stappenings. For static happenings. He makes these marvelous life-size wire armatures of people and objects and wraps them with muslin and then sprays them with some sort of hardener. They have tremendous presence, they really do. And I have been working myself into exhaustion since dawn, practically, making the most effective arrangements, and then he comes in with his… impossible thing.”

“What is it, dear?” she asked.

“It’s two large dogs-uh-copulating like mad. They are sort of vaguely dogs, you know. Kirstarian just stands there, saying it is one of the statements he wishes to make in this show, and he is not going to let anyone censor his work. And there are those fat white terrible beasts, and it is the only thing people are going to look at, and it seems like some sort of terrible vulgar joke he’s trying to play on us. Actually, he hates me. I’m just becoming aware of it. Heidi, darling, we’re not ready to show something like that. I mean you could say that Chicago isn’t ready. And the preview is tomorrow. And we’ve publicized it. Darling, you have to do something.”

“He’s your friend, dear.”

“Not any longer, believe me.”

“Run along, Mark, dear. Run on back and tell him to wait and I’ll be by in a little while to take a look.”

As he started to leave he looked into the studio at the new painting on the easel. “Heidi!” he cried. “It’s stunning. And I believe it’s transitional. Your work is getting so strong!”

After saying he hoped we’d meet again, he went hurrying off.

“Poor Mark,” she said. “Everything is always a crisis. But he does work very hard. Had we finished?”

“There’s a couple of questions. I’d like to get a look at those problem dogs. If you want to change, I could ask the questions on the way.”

She changed to a gray flannel suit worn over a pale green sweater, and agreed it would be pleasant to walk the four blocks or so to the Tempo East Gallery. I did not have to shorten my normal stride very much to stay in step with her. I said, “Did you have any idea the bulk of the estate had been liquidated before the bank told you?”

“I had no idea! Roger and I knew he’d changed his will and was cutting us each from a half to a quarter. Roger even had his attorney look into it, but there was nothing we could do. I suppose we could have guessed the woman might be capable of some sort of trickery.”

“How was your relationship with your father the last year of his life?”

“Unfortunate. The Doyle person poisoned his mind against his own children. We saw him a few times, of course. He seemed pleasant but… remote. Not terribly interested in what we were doing. Oh, he was a lot of help to me with the wedding, and later with the divorce from Gadge. Actually Jeanie-Roger’s wife-seemed to get along with him better than we did. She’d stop with the kids. Daddy enjoyed seeing his grandchildren.”

“Gloria Geis claims that all she gets from the estate is the insurance policy that brings her in less than five thousand a year.”

“A lovely smokescreen. That’s what I think.”

“Maybe that nurse blackmailed your father.”

“Stanyard? Janice Stanyard? Nonsense!”

“Actually, since you couldn’t have touched the principal, your inheritance would have been just the seventy-five hundred a year, right?”

“Meaning I shouldn’t care so much about it? Mr. McGee, I do not like to be cheated. The amount is not the point at issue. I can get along without it, of course. My alimony’s four times that, and I do sell many of my paintings, regardless of your opinion of my work.”

“And there’s an income from the gallery?”

“A small one. My divorce was final about… fourteen months. There was a settlement and the alimony agreement, and at Daddy’s suggestion John Andrus advised me on handling the settlement money. I bought the building where my apartment is, and I bought some good blue-chip stocks, invested in the gallery, and put what was left in a savings account. I can get along nicely, thank you. But why should that make me feel indifferent about someone else having something Daddy intended I should have?”

“Is Roger doing as well?”

“Better, if anything. Jeanie has her own money. And Roger is very good with money, very shrewd. But he doesn’t like being cheated any better than I do. Here we are.”

The sign on the door said the gallery was closed. As she was looking for the key in her purse Mark Avanyan opened the door for us. When we went in, he gestured toward the dog tableau, gave a loud theatrical sigh, and turned away. Though small, the gallery was well-lighted, attractive, pleasantly designed not to detract from any work being shown. Kirstarian stood with his back toward us, arms folded, and he was as motionless as all his white muslin people. They made an eerie effect, white mummies frozen at some moment of action. The form was entirely derivative, of course. A movable spot on one of the ceiling tracks shone down upon the large dogs. Mark had not reported inaccurately.

Kirstarian turned very slowly to face us. I was astonished to see how young his face and his eyes were in that small area not obscured by the huge, untrimmed black beard. He wore the kind of black suit favored by European intellectuals, and I had thought from the shape of him that he was at least middle-aged. But he was merely a plump young man with bad posture.

“Avanyan,” he said in a slow and heavy voice, “is incurably middle-class. He is a silly little tradesman and this is his silly little shop. Perhaps, Mrs. Trumbill, you have more integrity.”

Heidi stared at the muslin sculpture, fists on her hips. “This is a necessary statement?” she asked.

“An expression of eternal relationships. Yes.”

“Dear Jesus,” whispered Mark Avanyan, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling.

I broke the impasse by saying, “I think it’s fabulous, Mr. Kirstarian.” I caught his hand and pumped it

“Thank you, sir. But, please, not mister. Just Kirstarian.”

“Let me give you my card,” I said. I had managed to turn him and position him perfectly. I fumbled in my wallet and dropped several cards. “Oops!” said I, and ducked for them as they were still fluttering down, and put my right foot crosswise, an inch behind the heels of his shabby black shoes. As I straightened up, I managed to nudge him in the chest with my shoulder. He teetered, waved his arms wildly, then sat solidly upon his dogs. As I had dared hope, the hardening agent made the structures brittle. Muslin love ended in a huge Nabisco crunching, a spanging of wires, a rattle of dogfragments across the floor.

With loud sounds of apology and dismay, I lifted him up out of the unidentifiable ruin. As he sputtered I turned him and heartily whacked all the white powder off the back of his shiny black suit. He was in despair at the tragic accident. He kept picking up parts and dropping them. We all tried to comfort him. He said he hadn’t even photographed it. He went trudging sadly off, a blackness marching through the brightness of the Saturday midday.

At one point during the helpless laughter I learned something about Miss Heidi. She clung to me, tears rolling down her face, and then suddenly, became aware of my hands on her waist. She froze at once, and turned rigidly away, taking a tissue from her purse and dabbing at her eyes. She said she had some errands, and left so abruptly it was very much like flight.

After she left, when Mark wanted to know how I knew Heidi, I explained that I was investigating the disappearance of Fortner Geis’ estate. He had no ideas. He wanted to be helpful, because I had extricated the gallery from an idiotic impasse. There is a delicate protocol in such relationships. He was carefully flirtatious, looking for any subtle encouragement. So I managed to drop into the conversation quite casually those clues which turned him off for good. His acceptance of the inevitable was philosophic.

I am always skeptical of the male who makes a big public deal out of how he hates fairies, how they turn his stomach, how he’d like to beat the hell out of them. The queens are certainly distasteful, but the average homosexual in the visual and performing arts is usually a human being a little bit brighter and more perceptive than most. I’ve had the opinion for a long time that the creative work of the homosexuals tends to be so glossy and clever and glib that it has a curious shallowness about it, as though the inability to share the most common human experience of all makes it all surface and no guts, and when there is an impression of guts it is usually just another clever imitation.

But once he knows that it is absolutely no dice, there is no persistence. They know how to keep their worlds separated. And most of them are wryly aware of the ugly fact that the overly male type who thinks he hates them so thoroughly is the man who is, deep in his heart, unsure of his own masculinity. The man who knows that his preferences are solidly heterosexual has no need to go about thumping everybody who lisps.

That outraged and muscular attitude always reminds me of a curious aspect of the Negro problem in the South. It is something seldom if ever touched upon in learned surveys of the situation, but the intelligent Negroes have been sourly amused by it for many years. When you see photographs of violence directed against Negro civil rights workers, photographs in newspapers and magazines and on the television screen, it is inevitable that among the most hate-filled and violent faces on the whites you will spot an interesting incidence of a touch of the tar brush a few generations ago. Through ugliness and violence they are trying to overcompensate for that inner awareness of an ancestor who studied himself in the mirror one day and decided he could pass and get away with it, and who-young man or young woman-went underground and reappeared a hundred or five hundred miles away as a white, married white, and prayed to God almighty that every baby would be fair enough. And, because the dark skin of the Negro is genetically a recessive characteristic, the babies were fair-unless, of course, by cruel chance both parents carried the recessive gene. Other characteristics of race are there, exposed these days by the impartial lens.

So, sitting in the back of the gallery, drinking cold beer, from a small refrigerator, I asked him what made Heidi tick. I knew that in the close associations of work they would have been like girls together, exchanging confidences.

“Poor Heidi,” he said. “She’s blocked. She’s all tied in knots. She can’t make out. Gadge had sort of a snowmaiden complex, I guess. But the kiss didn’t awaken the virgin, the way it says in the books. To her it was just a lot of terrible senseless nastiness. Heavens, Gadge Trumbill would have been one of the least likely anyway. He’s a possessor. He’s a brutalizer. Horribly demanding. I met him through Heidi, of course. And I rue the day. I suppose it does give Heidi and me some kind of sick something in common. Disaster victims. A dear friend of mine, Anna VanMaller, the cellist, you must have heard of her, took a great interest in Heidi last spring, but poor Heidi can’t go either way. She sublimates every bit of sexual drive into her work, and she uses the most fantastically subtle erotic symbolism without even realizing it. I keep telling her psychiatry might help, but she says she is perfectly happy the way things are. I think it is some sort of a father thing. When she was little, she adored him. Once I tried to tell her that she married an older man because the father had betrayed her by marrying the Doyle woman, and I actually thought she was going to scratch out my eyes. I will tell you this, though. It is a damned good thing Dr. Geis brought some good tough lawyers into that divorce action last year. I think Heidi would have settled for peanuts, just to get out of Gadge’s bed forever. Funny, though, if Heidi had turned into what Gadge thought she might become, he wouldn’t have had to go catting around after everybody in sight.”

As I trudged back to the hotel for a late lunch, I decided there was no point in trying to sort out the fragments of inference and information until I had more.

In many ways life is less random than we think. In your past and mine, there have been times when we have, on some lonely trail, constructed a device aimed into our future. Perhaps nothing ever comes along to trigger it. We live through the safe years. But, for some people, something moves on the half forgotten path, and something arches out of the past and explodes in the here and now. These are emotional intersections, when lives cross, diverge, then meet again.

Rational examination of the specifics, like Janice Stanyard, Gretchen’s disappearance, Heidi’s coldness, Anna’s denial of her daughter, would do me no good, not yet.

I had to get more of the feel of Former Geis’ life before I could understand how he could accept so blandly a condition which caused him to steal the inheritance his heirs expected and then die without leaving any explanation, though he knew that it would create a curious kind of emotional and legal chaos.

It is almost impossible to bully a dying man, particularly one with the inner strength of Fortner Geis.

FIVE

AFTER LUNCH I rode up to my floor in an elevatorload of very noisy jolly fellows wearing nickname badges and smelling of sour mash.

I sat on my bed and checked the big phone directory and found several Stanyards. One was Mrs. Charles Stanyard. The others were male. It was a number on Greenwood. I had picked up a city map. Apparently the address would be reasonably handy to Methodist Hospital. Glory had given me Roger Geis’ address in the Evanston area off Glenview. I wasn’t interested in Roger. If there was anything he could add, Heidi would have known it. I was more curious about his wife, Jeanie, who’d gotten along well with Fort. Most of all I wanted to talk to Gretchen, to Susan, and again to Anna Ottlo.

I arranged for a rental Ford and drove out to the Roger Geis home, red brick with stubby white pillars, some fine old trees. I got there a little after three. The maid was there alone with the youngest child. She wouldn’t take the chain off the door, and told me through the opening that the mister was playing golf, and that Mrs. Geis was at the Countryside Tennis Club with the two older children. When I asked her how to find it, she closed the door.

I got my directions at a gas station. The day was turning colder, but most of the dozen courts were in use. In a large play area noisy platoons of small children were keeping two young girls very busy. I asked a big winded lady carrying three rackets if Jeanie Geis was on the courts, and between pantings, she pointed to a game of mixed doubles and told me she was the girl on the far court. I moved over and watched them. Jeanie was a sturdy woman nearing thirty, not tall, a bit heavy in the leg. Brown legs, arms, face, hair. The heavy legs were the hard, muscular, springy legs of the athlete. She covered more than her share of the court. Her partner was a spry old man with white hair. They were playing a boy and girl in their early twenties. It was very respectable tennis, craftiness against power. Jeanie’s little white pleated skirt whipped around as she twisted, cut back, dashed to the net. They weren’t jolly about saves and misses. It was a blood game. On set point, Jeanie banged a cross-court shot to the young girl’s backhand, and the girl took a nasty fall trying to get to it, but missed it. They gathered around her. She had taken some hide off her arm. She said she was all right.

As they all started back toward the small clubhouse, I asked Mrs. Geis if I could have a word with her. The others went ahead.

“Yes? What about?” She had that husky semi drawl of the better finishing schools, an effective delivery styled to give equal and additional impact to witticism, cattiness, or love words.

“Excuse the expression-money,” I said. And there, for a few moments, was the jackpot, and I couldn’t bet my hand because I didn’t know what cards I was holding. Jackpot in the sudden draining of all blood and color from under the tan, in a sudden sickness of pleasant green eyes and in the shape of the mouth, and in a rigid kind of stillness. These are the parts of a terror almost animal in its intensity, when the body aches to spin and run blindly. But before I could find any way to make any use of it, I saw the swift return of control. It seemed almost as if control had returned through an exercise of logic. She had looked more carefully at me and had decided I did not fit into the pattern of fear, and so it had to be a misunderstanding on her part.

“Pretty broad topic to discuss, Mr…”

“McGee. Travis McGee.”

“I’ve heard that name before. Where? I have a fantastic memory for names. Faces mean nothing. Could we move along? I don’t want to get chilled.” As I began walking beside her she said, “Got it! Daddy Fort and Gloria were talking about you… oh, at least three years ago. I’d taken the kids by. He was kidding her, in a nice way. Something about her Florida boyfriend. You? The tan would fit.”

“Old friend, yes.”

“Wait just a moment, please.” She went quickly over to the playground. As she was speaking to one of the girls in charge, two kids, a boy and girl perhaps seven and five, came running to her. She squatted and gave them a simultaneous hug. They went racing back to their group and she spoke to the girl again and then came back to where I waited. “I had to make sure we had the signals right. The sitter is going to pick them up here and take them home. And I go from here to join Roger at a cocktail thing. We’ll have time to talk after I shower and change. You go through that door and turn left for the lounge. You could wait for me there. Order yourself a drink, please.”

The lounge was comfortable. The healthy tennis set was noisily taking on a small Saturday night load before heading off to do the serious drinking elsewhere. The lounge had seen a lot of hard use, and the drinks were substantial. I picked a corner table where there seemed the most chance of privacy. After a half-hour Jeanie Geis joined me, looking more elegant in dark green cocktail dress, high heels, mink over her arm, than I’d expected. As I was seating her, the bar man brought her a Gibson, straight up. “Thank you, Jimmy, and another whatever he’s having for my guest, Mr. McGee. How’s Skippy making it?”

“You know. Drifting and dreaming. Twenty times maybe she’s tried on the wedding dress, her mother telling her she’s going to wear it out.”

“She’s a dear doll and she’s getting a nice guy.” When he was out of earshot she looked speculatively at me and said, “As a friend of Glory’s, it has to be Daddy Fort’s money you wanted to talk about. But why me?”

“I talked to Heidi. I don’t think your husband could add anything. Incidentally, Heidi doesn’t know I’m Glory’s friend.”

“How could I add anything Roger couldn’t? I mean it is all terribly mysterious, and Heidi and Roger are furious, and it puts Gloria in a very odd position. But if she asked you for help, if she asked you to come and see if you can find out what did happen, I can understand but I don’t have to approve.”

She hesitated as Jimmy put the new drink in front of me, continuing as he moved away. “It’s over, isn’t it? If Fort thought anything should be explained to the family, he would have. And maybe you should explain why you came to me? Are you implying I’d keep anything from my husband?”

“I am not concerned exclusively with what people know they know, Mrs. Geis. From what Heidi told me, you were getting along with the Doctor better than his own children. So you saw him oftener. So you could have pertinent knowledge you don’t realize is pertinent.”

“Are you some kind of a detective?”

“Me? No. Just a friend of Glory’s. You come in from the outside, sometimes it’s easier to see the shape of things. You must have had some guess as to why Fort did what he did.”

Her mouth firmed up. “Mr. McGee, the only thing I can tell you is what I have told my husband. And though I do not think it good taste to tell this to a stranger, Roger and I have come closer to… very real trouble in our marriage over this than anything. Heidi is in no financial pain. Neither are we. Gloria is the worst off, but if people would just leave her alone, I think she’d be quite content. We’re not close friends. We don’t have enough in common. But I realize how good she was for Fort. And certainly she’ll marry again, and she should be able to marry quite well. She has a special style of her own, and a capacity for loyalty, and a very personal kind of warmth, and the urge to take care of a man and please him. I have told Roger that I think it is shameful and vulgar and disgraceful to keep prodding at this whole thing. It isn’t a financial motive at all, really. It took me a long time to understand it. Foriner Geis was a very strong personality. When his wife died, he lost himself in his work. Roger and Heidi thought he.was rejecting them. It turned them into emotionally insecure people. Heidi is a crashing neurotic. I’ve had to work twice as hard as anybody knows to make this marriage of mine work. I think that all the time they hoped that one day he would… accept and cherish them. What happened? An affair with a nurse that lasted for years. That was a rejection. Then, after they learned he had a fatal illness, he came back here from vacation with a bride. That hurt them. It was a symbolic rejection when he changed his estate arrangements. in her favor. They hate her. The final rejection was to find that he had somehow arranged to leave them nothing. They talk about money but they are really looking for some proof of love. Heidi is far worse than Roger, God knows why. I feel this way. Fortner Geis must have had a very sound and good reason for not telling Gloria and Heidi and Roger what he was doing and why he was doing it. To me that -means that if they do ever find out, it might be worse than not ever knowing. They should trust him, accept it, forget it.”

Had I not seen the earlier and more extreme reaction, I might have missed this one. It was just a hair too much intensity, too much edge in that hoarse social voice.

“Did you make any guesses why he did it?”

“It doesn’t matter to me why he did it.”

“You liked him?”

“I think… he was the finest man I’ve known.”

“But he fouled up his kids, didn’t he?”

“Did he? Maybe their mother did. They were eleven and seven when she died. She had enough time. And, believe me, I have heard far too much talk from Heidi and Roger about how sweet and brave and noble she was. She’s assumed the stature of a mythological being, Mr. McGee. She’s hard to believe in.”

“Mrs. Geis, I’m a little puzzled by one thing. Who did you think I was when I stopped you and said I wanted to talk about money?”

“I had no idea who you were.”

“Then why were you terrified?”

She frowned and smiled at the same time. “Terrified? Oh come now, really! Why should I… Oh!”

“Oh what?”

The green dress made her fine green eyes greener. Though they had shifted about during all the previous conversation, now they were very steady on mine, and she had widened them a little bit. “They kept us on the run for two long sets, trying to wear the old man down. When I stopped to talk to you, I suddenly felt quite faint. The world had a swimmy look and my ears were ringing, and then it went away; or I would have had to sit down right in the middle of the walk.”

“Son of a gun!” I said. “That must have been it.” It was more gallant than telling the lady she was a lousy liar. “I guess I should tell Gloria she shouldn’t let all this bother her so much. Having Fort’s children hate and resent her so much confuses her She’s one of those people without malice. Did you ever tell her your rejection theory?”

“Yes. She seemed to understand how it could be that way”

Night had come: The lights were on. She craned her neck to look at the clock over the bar. I walked her out to the parking lot to her car. After she got in, she looked out at me and said, “I think it would do Gloria a lot of good to get away now. Maybe she could go back to Florida with you, Mr. McGee. You’d be doing her more good that way than by… trying to find out why the Doctor did what he did.”

“It’s an idea,” I said.

I found my way, after several wrong turns, to Lake Pointe, the handsome house, snap and hiss of logs aflame, chunky glass in my hand, Glory Doyle Geis in wine slacks and white sweater sitting on a cushion on the raised hearth, dainty, bitter-sweet, semi-sad in the firelight.

“Not so good of a day for me,” she said, “and I don’t really know why. I couldn’t settle down to anything. Kept roaming. I’m supposed to be inventorying the books. They go to the university library. What did you do? Who did you talk to?”

“Heidi. And Mark Avanyan. And a fat boy named Kirstarian. Jeanie Geis. I saw the happiest girl in Chicago, but I didn’t meet her. I busted hell out of some very advanced sculpture. I nearly ran over a black cat wearing a red collar.”

“Tell me all!” she cried, her face lighting up.

“First you tell me about Janice Stanyard.”

She studied me for a few moments. “You mean you’re annoyed I didn’t tell you about her before?”

“Didn’t you think it was pertinent?”

“Not particularly”

“You sound as frosty as Miss Heidi.”

She looked dismayed, then grinned. “I didn’t know I could. Anyway, when I tell you you’ll understand. Fort told me about her while we were still on our wedding trip, before we came back to Chicago. We were talking about different kinds of love. And he just sort of casually mentioned he’d had a long affair with a nurse. He said it started a year after his wife died. And it ended two years before he met me. When I realized that was nearly eleven years, I was furious! And he laughed at me. He didn’t explain for a while because he said he wanted to prolong the pleasure of having me so jealous of another woman. He said it was marvelously flattering at his age. But when he saw I was really getting upset, he told me just how it was.”

About her husband’s accident and the little boy drowning?“

“Yes. He said she had worked with him long enough by that time so that she was like an extension of himself, like having another pair of hands. She knew his procedures, knew the instruments he would want at each stage, and also knew what to have ready to hand him when things went wrong this way or that way. She did not disturb his concentration the way other surgical nurses did. He said she seemed glad to share the enormous work load he had shouldered after Glenna died. After a year had gone by he knew he was changing in some way he did not like. He was thirty-six. He had not been with a woman for a year. He was putting so much of his total energy into his work he did not feel any particular tension because of physical desire. As a doctor he knew that continence does an adult no particular physical harm. He told me that the idea of regular sex as a necessity for health is something young men use as part of their persuasion technique. Fort told me he began to feel remote. He said that was the best word for it. He had less feeling of involvement with his patients, less triumph when things went well, less regret when they didn’t. He couldn’t chew out people who made foolish errors the way he used to. It didn’t seem worth the effort somehow. And he knew his praise was becoming half-hearted, which is worse than no praise at all.

“So he went to his friend Doctor Hayes Wyatt with the problem. Dr. Wyatt gave him a complete physical, and then listened to Fort describe the remoteness. Then he told Fort that no matter how much he might try to deny it or ignore it, he was still a mammal. By questioning him, Dr. Wyatt showed how much warmth there had been in Fort’s childhood. He’d been breast-fed, hugged, patted, cuddled, kissed, spanked. People with austere childhoods could adjust to the life Fort was living. But for Fort, some essential assurance-area was being starved. He felt remote because his body, untouched, was beginning to doubt the reality of its own existence. Hayes Wyatt told Fort that casual sex relationships would not do very much to help him. He said Fort should marry an affectionate and demonstrative woman.”

“Like Glory Doyle.”

“Sure. What was I then? About fifteen? Great. Fort didn’t want marriage; not then. For weeks he wondered what he was supposed to do, what would be best for him. One day, after they scrubbed, there was a long delay in setting up the proper anaesthesia for a complicated spinal disc operation, and he realized that Janice Stanyard was once again talking about her two Siamese cats, and it was a little bit too much like the way people talk about their children. He watched her and thought about her for days. He knew she admired and respected him, and he knew they liked each other. She was twentyseven, nearly twenty-eight. He said he would like to meet those most unusual cats. He went to her apartment a few times. One night, like a fatuous pretentious damned fool-Fort said-he asked her what she thought about the sort of ‘arrangement’ he had in mind.

“She was puzzled, hurt, offended. She still loved Charles and always would. It was ugly to think they could enter into that kind of thing without love. It would not hurt anybody else, she agreed, but it would cheapen both of them. A month later they were in Atlanta on an emergency, a small-caliber bullet lodged in the frontal lobe of a young girl, pressing against the optic nerve. It was long and precarious, and it went well. They had dinner together at their hotel, with wine, feeling good about the day’s work. He seduced her that evening in her room. He spent the night in her bed. When he awoke in the morning he found himself looking into her sleeping face not a foot away. Her arm rested on him. Her round knee was against his thigh. Fort said he had a terrible sinking of heart, a dread about the inevitable scene when she awakened. He remembered all the tears, the protestations, and even, after she had been at last aroused, the small dead voice in which she had begged him not to. He said her face looked as calm and unreadable as the face of a statue. Her slow warm exhala tions brushed against his lips. At last she stirred and her eyes opened. At first they were blank and unfocused. Then they focused on him and she gave a great start and pulled her arm back. She looked, into his eyes, half-frowning, and he told her that it was a mistake, all a mistake, and he was sorry. He said the corners of her mouth turned up, she stretched and yawned, then put her arm around him, hitched close, put her face in his throat, made kind of a little purring sound of contentment and in moments went back to sleep. Fort said it was a kind of love, always gentle, always placid, always kind. He said that the sexual release was less important to them than the nearness of someone, the warm flesh and the breathing and the beating of the nearby heart when you woke up in the night. Once it had begun, he said she accepted it undemandingly, and with the enormous practicality of which most women seem capable. He said they tried to be discreet, taking the chances which came along rather than trying to make chances. Remoteness went away. As a team they functioned as perfectly as before, no better and no worse. He said that once again his work came alive, and the intense involvement with it returned. So, I’m grateful to her, Trav. She kept him whole and alive for all those middle years of his life. He said there wasn’t any decision to end it. They just seemed to need each other less often and finally not at all, without jealousy or suspicion or regret. He said that it was an affair without the words people say during affairs. When they were together, when they talked, it was oot about their work, or about Glenna or his children, or her husband. It was easy, homely talk, he said, about the cafeteria coffee, and if it was the right time for her to trade her car, and what the cleaner was doing to his suits, and how she had, liked Kup’s show the other night, and who to vote for this time, and how the weather was hotter or colder than usual. That’s what is was, Trav. An arrangement. It was a good thing for them. Heidi told you about her?”

“To say it would have been bad enough if he’d married that nurse person, but it would have been better than marrying you.”

“What a disastrous marriage!” she said bitterly. “I made the poor man so miserable. Damn her!”

“Don’t let it get to you. She isn’t worth it. Did you ever meet Janice Stanyard?”

“Oh yes. While Fort was still operating. She must be about forty-five now. She is… attractive in her own way. You don’t see it at first. She grows on you, sort of. You see, she knew Fort’s bad prognosis before his children did. He handed her the results of the tests moments after he read them. Then when he came back from Florida married to me, the first time I met her was in the staff lounge at Methodist. Fort introduced us and then made out like there was something he had to go and do. She wasn’t antagonistic, just very curious about me, about what sort of person I am. Finally she decided in my favor. We were sitting on a couch. She took hold of my hand and held it so tightly it went numb. She told me to help him. I knew what she meant. She said he was great and good, but he might be scared. I said I loved him with all my heart. And so we sat there with goofy smiles and the tears running down our faces. She’s nice, Trav. She came here a few times toward the end. She was at the funeral. We had a few minutes alone, afterward. She hugged me and said nothing better could have happened to him than me. I haven’t seen her since.”

“And it didn’t occur to you, Glory, that if he had a very tough decision to make, if he was in a real bind, he might go to the person he had worked with for years, whom he liked and respected and trusted, and to whom in a strange way he had been in effect married.”

After a few moments of round eyes and parted lips, she said, “But he was closer to me!”

“Which could have been his reason for not bringing you into it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe he said nothing to her. Maybe she knows the whole thing. I have to talk to her.”

“Of course.”

“So call her and I’ll get on an extension.”

But when nine rings brought no answer, as we went back to our places by the hearth, Anna came in and said proudly that the kidney mutton chops she had were so thick, maybe she should start them now. I knew that with absolutely no trouble at all, Anna could balloon me-up to a mighty two fifty, and it would take me months to fit back into my clothes. When I said I hadn’t planned to stay to dinner, she said with a kind of contemptuous sadness that if I hadn’t stopped by, Miss Glory would have insisted on some cold cereal and a piece of dry toast.

With icy gin replenished I told Glory about the rest of my day. I pointed out the significance of learning that Fort had taken direct steps to improve the terms of Heidi’s divorce. “He’d already started liquidating the previous July. He knew Roger was pretty well set. He knew then he wasn’t going to be able to leave them anything, so he made sure Heidi got some security out of Trumbill’s money.”

“Which didn’t exactly pinch Gadge Trumbill,” Glory said. “He had an ancestor who homesteaded two hundred and forty acres. The Chicago Civic Center is right smack in the middle of it, and the old -boy believed in leasing instead of selling.”

“Next item. Neither Heidi nor Jeanie brought up the Gretchen thing. And they had their chance.”

“They never knew about that.”

“Now to get back to Jeanie Geis. She was terrified, and then she lied about it. Why?”

“I think I can answer that, Trav” She explained that nearly two years back, when their eldest child was five, there had been an attempt to kidnap him. The boy, Branton Fortner Geis, named after both grandfathers, had actually been taken, but the kidnapper had evidently lost his nerve because after he had driven the boy all the way into the city, he

. had abandoned him in Grant Park near the fountain. The boy had been driven around for some time, because it gave his parents about three hours of terror before a park policeman took him in and he was identified.

“Since then it has been a thing with Jeanie. She takes the kids wherever she can, and doesn’t let them out of her sight. She even got a pistol permit, and she spent hours and hours on the police range; and she’s an expert now. Their home has all kinds of burglar alarms and floodlights, and their sitter is a retired cop. He has a license to carry a gun too, and he takes them back and forth to school. I think she goes a little too far. I don’t think it’s what you could call a normal childhood for them. Roger is just sort of… tolerant of Jeanie’s precautions. I guess you can’t blame her too much. But it’s such a twitch with her, I guess that’s the first thing that would enter her mind if you walked up to her and said you wanted to talk about money. You aren’t exactly a clerical type, Mister McGee. You are huge and it is obvious you have been whacked upon, and you look as though you damn well enjoyed returning the favor.”

“An obvious criminal type?”

“To - Jeanie, for a couple of seconds. Until her mind went to work on it, and she got a better look at you. ° Nobody would walk up to her in broad daylight with all those people around and say Lady I got one of your kids.”

“So why did she lie later?”

“A white lie, dear, to avoid telling you what she thought you were. It wouldn’t be terribly flattering. Besides, she’s a little punchy about the precautions. She gets a certain amount of snide comment from the other mothers.”

“It explains why the maid wouldn’t unchain the door or answer questions. But, baby, it does not explain her earnest sales talk about let’s all forget the whole thing. Why don’t you take Glory to Florida, and so forth and so forth.”

“How do you explain it then?”

“I don’t know. When I get reactions I don’t understand it’s like an itch I can’t reach. I have to make the logical or illogical connection between six hundred thousand gone into thin air and somebody being kidnapped. When did the boy get grabbed?”

“Let me think. I have to remember what we were… oh, we’d just come back from New York Fort read a paper at a medical convention. It was quite warm… May. That was it. A year ago last May.”

“Two months later Fort started cashing in his securities. What about this? Suppose somebody got a message to Jeanie. Come up with lots of cash or we’ll take one of your kids. So she comes running to Fort. And… No, there’s two big holes in that.”

“Like what?”

“One. She’d tell Roger. He’d know that’s where the money went, and he wouldn’t be making such a jackass of himself about it. Two. Fort was certainly smart enough to know it would be an awful lot cheaper to get Jeanie and the kids out of reach. Fly them to Switzerland for example, and put the cops to work on the problem. I suppose the kid was too little to give any description of the person or persons who took him riding, or the car they took him in.”

“Branty said it was a nice man who sang a lot.”

“That doesn’t sound like a nervous type.”

“Somebody saw the car driving away. They said it was a blue Dodge. I think it was about a week later they found what could have been the same car, but they couldn’t be sure. It had been stolen from a shopping center the morning of the day the boy was taken, and they found it in a big used-car lot out near Midway Airport with no plates on it, and no fingerprints or anything. Nobody could say how long it had been there.”

“It doesn’t fit.”

“What doesn’t?”

“The car is clouted in a very professional way, from the kind of place where the pros work, and it is unloaded in a very professional way, as if it had been iron they’d used in a bank job. But the man gets nervous and changes his mind and leaves the kid off. It couldn’t have been the same car, Glory. That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”

Her mouth trembled for a moment and then she smiled. Her eyes were shiny. “We better face it, McGee. Nothing about this whole thing is ever going to make any sense, and for the rest of my life people are going to keep an eye on me, just in case.

At quarter to ten after Glory had stashed the dishes, we tried Janice Stanyard again. She picked up the phone on the first ring.

“Janice? This is Gloria Geis.”

“Hello! I’ve been wondering about you, dear. I was wondering if I should ask you to come in and have lunch with me some day.”

“I’d like that, I really would. I tried to get you earlier.”

“Today? I was over in Elgin.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. He had a bad cold but it’s nearly gone now. What did you call me about, dear?”

“Well… I want to introduce you to a friend of mine from Florida. He’s on the line too. Travis McGee. Janice Stanyard.”

“Hello, Mrs. Stanyard.”

“How do you do, Mr. McGee.” Her voice sounded puzzled. It was a good voice, a firm and nicely articulated contralto.

“Trav would like to come and talk to you, Janice.”

“He would? What about?”

Gloria started to explain, but I broke in and said, “It’s just a little confusion about Doctor Geis’ estate, and Glory thinks you might have some answers.”

“But I wouldn’t know a thing about that!” “Sometimes the way these things work out, Mrs. Stanyard, you can help out without realizing you can. I’d just like to drop by anytime tomorrow at your convenience for a few minutes.”

“But…”

“We’d both be very grateful to you.”

“Well… would three tomorrow afternoon be all right?”

“Just fine.”

“Will you come too, Gloria?” she asked.

“Just me,” I said quickly, “and now I’ll hang up and let you people fix up that lunch date.”

As I was leaving, I remembered my other question. I asked Glory who had done the investigation work for Fort when Gretchen had asked him for more money. “He dealt with a Mr. Smith. But I don’t know the name of the company.” We went to his study and looked up Smith in his address book and found a Francisco Smith, hyphen, Allied Services, in the Monadnock Block on West Jackson. I checked the yellow pages and found Allied Services under Investigators.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the hotel room. I was a long way from the elevators. When I approached the last right-angle turn before my room, I came upon a couple standing and talk ing in low tones. I heard her say in wheedling tones, “Whey ya yuh room key, honeh? It hey-yuv the nummah onto it.”

He peered at me and said, in surprisingly articulate tones, slightly Bostonian, “Sir, I have a distressing concept worthy of scholarly research, and it should appeal to anyone of conjectural turn of mind. Have you a moment?”

I stopped and said, “Conjecture away, friend.”

“Is there a sense of entrapment in being locked into your own century without chance of escape? What is the effect on the psyche? Those of us born in the first two decades of this century are subliminally aware, my good sir, of that marker on the grave which will say nineteen hundred and this to nineteen hundred and that. Do you follow me?” He was fifty-something, excellent suit, topcoat, shoes, hat, shirt. But the hat was dented and sat askew, stubble on the jowls, necktie awry. His face had the slack sweatiness of heavy drinking, and he had trouble focusing his eyes on me.

And he was being tugged this way and that way by the girl who was going through his pockets with great energy, muttering about the room key and saying, “You wah somepin, honeh. Somepin for shu-wah.”

“I follow you,” I said.

“But this lovely child is going to break through into the next century, at exactly the age I am now, and the prospect makes me desperately envious. You, sir, could well manage it too, I suspect, but in the fullness of your years and with dimming…”

With a little squeal of satisfaction she yanked the key out of one of his pockets, stared at the tag, then looked at the nearby room numbers. She wore a bright red cloth coat over a very short white dress that was cleft almost to the navel. Her pouty, saucy, cheap little face peeked out from between the two heavy wings of white-blonde hair that hung straight from center part to collarbone.

In the corridor light I noticed their hands were dirty. It is impossible to drink all evening without ending up with dirty hands. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of our age.

“Raht they yahs youwah nummer, sweetsie pah!” He put a soiled hand against the wall. “I don’t believe I… I think I’m going to…” He slid slowly and fell on his side with a small thudding sound against the carpeting.

I offered to help her with him. She refused so very sweetly. She couldn’t trouble me none. She said she could manage all raht. So I went around the corner and began humming just loudly enough so my voice would carry to where she was. I unlocked my door and opened it and then closed it again without going in, closing it audibly and cutting off the little tune just as it clacked shut.

I went back to the corner and put one eye around carefully. His topcoat was pulled out of the way. She was kneeling, just pulling his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. Her thick white hair hung forward as she bent over him. Her underlip had fallen away from her teeth and I could hear how her excitement and fear was making her breath fast and audible. She kept snapping her head around to look the other way, toward the elevators. She shoved the currency into the slash pocket of her red coat, put the wallet back in his inside pocket. She picked his arm up and started to take the wristwatch, hesitated, let the arm fall. She picked the key off the carpeting, stood up, and, biting her lip, looked at him and at the door to his room. I could guess what she was thinking of. Would it be worthwhile to unlock the door, drag him in, and go through his belongings? She stood crouched, fingers hooked, her stance ugly. It was a posture feral as any carnivore. It was the hunting stance, and it made me think of Fortner Geis’ money, and the far cleverer beast who had gone after it and taken it from him.

I saw her decide to settle for what she had, and cut her risk by getting away quickly. She straightened, shook her hair back and I pulled back and flattened against the wall, realizing she would come my way, heading for the fire stairs.

The only sound she made was the quick whisking of fabric. She came around the corner in a hurry, saw me out of the corner of her eye, gasped, tried to run, but I caught her from behind, my left arm around her waist, right hand snaking into the right pocket of the coat and coming out with the folded wad of bills as I released her.

She spun, felt in the pocket, came cautiously toward me. “Hay-yuff,, huh?” she said in a husky whisper. “Gimme hay-yuff.”

“Give you nothing, dear girl.”

“Oney a feeyiffteh them, huh? Pitcher a Gen’I Grant for lil ol‘ Cinny Lee?”

She spread her coat, wet her mouth, arched her back. “You room raht close by, innit? Less you’n me tote that ole man inna his room so as nobody gets agitated bout him lyin inna, hall, then it give me time, I go inna your room, given you a ride like you never hay-yud afore, worthen at fifty plusen a teeyup for sure, lahk to pleasure me a big size mayyun all the whole naht long, honeh pah.”

“Run on back to your cotton patch, corn pone.” She had the heels of her hands on her hipbones, fingers spread on her thighs, pointing to the floor. I saw the hemline of the narrow skirt of her white dress climbing as she stealthily worked it up with her fingertips. I knew what she was going to try. If the kick had landed where she wanted it to, she could have plucked the cash out of my nerveless hand and gone tripping happily down the stairs, leaving me there making goldfish mouths, and sweating into the carpet. When it came I turned sharply and, as she missed, got my palm under the back of her ankle and gave the kick a lot more elevation than she wanted. The skirt ripped up the side and she went tumbling back, rolling up onto her shoulders, legs scissoring. I noticed with academic appraisal that she wore nothing under the dress, that she was an unpleasant soft white, almost blue white, and that she was by no means a natural blonde.

“And the accent is fake too,” I said.

She sprang up, looked as though she might try for the eyes, and thought better of it. And in the brisk and nasal flatness of the pure Midwest accent, the kind you hear in the small towns of Indiana and Iowa, she suggested I perform an anatomical impossibility, and categorized me as an indulger in several of those specific practices most frowned upon in our culture. Somebody behind one of the closed doors yelled to knock it off for chrissake, and she stopped abruptly, ran to the stairway door, yanked it open, and disappeared.

I found the key on the carpet beside sweetsie pah, unlocked his door, scooped him up, carried him in, and dumped him on his bed. I went out and got his hat and brought it in, closing the door behind me. Turned a light on, worked him out to topcoat and suit coat. Hung them in the closet. Put money in billfold, billfold in suit coat. Loosened tie, belt, removed shoes. Turned out light. Stood for a moment looking down at him, hearing his steady snore. Poor honeh had slipped through the fangs of the cat, and he wasn’t the type to give them a chance at him again. I had fanned the currency before putting it back where it belonged, didn’t make an exact count, but saw it was over four hundred. We were both locked into this single century. As Fortner Geis had been. So help the fellow traveler, McGee. The Cinny Lees spring at you every chance they get.

If this man could be a four-hundred-dollar fool, Fort could have been one too-at fifteen hundred times the cost. I set his night latch and closed the door behind me and went back to my own leased cave.

After my light was out I made a better identification of Cinny Lee’s emotional climate after she knew she’d lost it all. Outraged indignation. She had invested time, training, and experience, had cut him out of the pack, softened him perfectly, had slipped by the hotel security patrol, and had gotten the chloral hydrate into him at just the right moment. If he had not gone into that talking jag, if he’d had the room key in his hand instead of an inside pocket, if the big stranger hadn’t come along, she would have gotten inside the room with him minutes before it hit him and knocked him out. Then, in privacy and safety she could have plucked him clean of every valuable from his gold wedding ring and cuff links to the change on his bureau. Then, if she was the, cool hardened operator I guessed she was, she would sneak out with his key, stash the loot, sneak back into the room, strip him to the buff, take all her clothes off, rip the cheap dress in strategic places, tip a chair and a lamp over-quietly-and get into bed with him and get some sleep and be ready, when he awakened with a savage and blinding headache and total loss of memory, to be crying hopelessly and pitifully. She had no idea where his money was. He could search her if he thought she had it. All she knew was he had forced her. He had torn her pretty new dress, see? Her father and her brothers would be frantic. She’d never been away from home all night before. She was really only fifteen. He’d been like some kind of crazy horrible animal. Oh, oh, what was she going to do. Oh boo hoo wah haw hoo, oh God. She’d better k-k-k-kill herself. Th-Throw herself out the windowwwwww…

The timing would give her all day Sunday to work on his fears, with the Do Not Disturb sign on the room door, food and drink ordered up, and she would hide in the bathroom when it was brought in. She would have learned every scrap of usable information about him from what she could find in his billfold and elsewhere in the room and in his pockets. He could cash checks, couldn’t he? He could have his bank wire money, couldn’t he? She would have to leave town. She would remember a girlfriend in New Orleans. Monday morning he could go out and buy her some clothes and luggage for the trip, and get the money in cash. She would have to have money to live on until she could get a job. At least fifteen hundred over the airline fare to feel really safe. If he dragged his feet she could wonder out loud if maybe she ought to go back to Boston with him and see if his wife could help her get a job. Her name is Frances, isn’t it, honeh? Once he agreed, she would become very happy and excited and affectionate, and with any luck she could seduce him, a shameful confirmation of his guilt, and good for at least five hundred more for the poor dear girl. It wouldn’t work on a man who had been down the mean streets and seen the dark places. It would work on just such a man as honeh-bright, good, and decent and, in this first and last wild oat, gullible as the youngest sailor in the Navy.

It made me realize with what exquisite care, caution, and patience Fortner Geis had been cleaned. A man will let his money be taken only when the alternative is something he cannot endure…

What was it Fort could not face? And how much more dangerous was the predator who hunted him down than was this faked-up Cinny Lee?

SIX

NURSE JANICE Stanyard lived on Greenwood in one of those standard six-story apartment houses of yellow brick which were built in such profusion after World War II. They were planned to do an adequate and durable job of housing people, and were designed with the idea of minimum maintenance and upkeep, and with all the grace and warmth of the Berlin Wall.

She was on the fifth floor toward the rear, with windows that looked out over a tarred roof of a neighboring building to the Sunday emptiness of the broad asphalt parking area of a shopping plaza a half block away, the gray paving marked in the yellow herringbone pattern of the parking slots.

I had not known quite what to expect. My first impression as she let me in was certainly not of a femme fatale. She was a sturdy woman with a bigboned look a broad and pallid face without ani mation, dark brown hair turning gray. She wore scuffed loafers, white ankle sox, a baggy herringbone tweed skirt, a loose-fitting brown cardigan. The impression was that of an enduring and stolid woman with no interest in self-adornment. The furniture was plain, heavy, and not new. But it looked comfortable. The decor was a monotone of grays and browns without pattern or touches of color except for the dust jackets of hundreds of books in long low shelves, and the covers of the magazines in racks and stacks.

“Do sit down, Mr. McGee. I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help to you.” She sat at the corner of a couch and I sat in a facing armchair. I suspect that it was the quality of her voice, the earthy richness of the contralto modulation that made me look at her more closely. Her hands were large, and beautifully formed. Her throat was long and solid and graceful. Her eyes were particularly lovelylarge, the iris a deep clear blue, the lashes naturally dense and long. Once I had seen that much, I could then see the gentle contours of her mouth, and the rich curve of the strong calves.

What had seemed drabness, both in her and in the room, became merely understatement. I had the feeling this would be a comfortable room to be in, a comfortable woman to be with. She had the indefinable quality of restfulness, of making no trivial demands upon others or upon herself.

“You worked with Fort a long time and knew him well. I need to know more about him, and maybe then I can figure out why he did what he did.”

“Did you know the Doctor well enough to call him Fort?” There was cool surprise in her tone. “Well enough so he asked me to. In Florida. I stood up with Fort and Glory when they were married. I didn’t know him long. I liked him. I was supposed to come visit them here after the house was built. It didn’t work out. I wish it had.”

“He was a good man,” she said. “I miss him. But why did you sound as if he did some inexplicable thing? Fort usually had reasons for what he did.”

“Would you have any idea about what sort of estate he left? The size of it?”

“I wouldn’t know, really. When Glenna died he got her money. I don’t think it was really a lot. I think he used it on Heidi and Roger. They seemed to get anything they wanted at least, cars and sailboats and trips to Europe. Money wasn’t particularly important to Fort. I don’t mean he was indifferent to it. He would bill a patient according to what the patient could afford. From ten dollars to ten thousand. He didn’t spend much on himself. It wasn’t because he was stingy. He just didn’t have expensive hobbies. He invested his money after taxes and living expenses into good stocks mostly, I think. If I was forced to guess, I’d say he probably was worth half a million dollars when he died. Another man with the same ability and, reputation could have been worth… three or four times that, possibly.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Ten days before he died.”

“When was the last time you worked with him?”

“Last January, almost a year ago. The last operation he did. Craniotomy for a neurofibroma, extensive. He started it but he didn’t finish it. By then he had good people backing him up every time. His fingertips went numb. He couldn’t get the feeling back into them. It’s one of the symptoms of what he had. So he turned it over to his assistant. He stood by and watched. It went well. Outside, afterward, he told me that was the last he’d try. He thanked me for putting up with him in all those hundreds and hundreds of operations. At least I held the. tears back until I was alone. Everybody who ever worked with him felt the same way”

“Did you have any kind of contact with him between that time and when you visited him at his house?”

There was a little flicker behind the blue of her eyes, a half-second delay. “No. Why?”

I wondered if with a wicked needle I could penetrate that placid manner. “I suppose like all the rest of them, the reputation was a little larger than the man.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“There can be twenty or fifty men with the same ability, and one seems to get the good publicity.”

“You don’t seem to know what the hell you’re talking about!”

“Cutting is cutting, no?”

“And some of them are so concerned about setting records they go in there like a whirlwind, and some of them are so picky and cautious the patient is under for six hours when it could be done in four. Then there are people like Fortner Geis who are as quick as they should be and as careful as they should be, but there’s something else too, something that isn’t in the books, and you can’t describe what it is, and damned few surgeons in any generation have it. It’s an instinct for the living flesh under the knife. Two surgeons can make two cuts that look identical, and one will bleed like a pig and the other will be almost dry. One surgeon can cut to where something is supposed to be, and 4t isn’t there, and another will somehow guess that the patient doesn’t quite match the anatomy lessons and, without knowing how he does it or what clued him, go right to where he wants to be. Surgeons who worked beside Fort have a right to make comments about his ability. You don’t!”

She sat glaring at me. I smiled and said, “I gave you a cheap opportunity to put the knock on him, Mrs. Stanyard. Just checking.”

Anger changed to a puzzled indignation. “Why do that? What’s the point?”

“I guess the point is that he would have left around seven hundred thousand and something, but he canceled out his insurance for the cash value, and he cashed in everything else too, except a small equity in the house and a life annuity option policy for Gloria that’ll bring her ninety something a week. It took him thirteen months. He finished the job last July. He did it on the sly and covered his tracks. The money is gone and everybody is upset, each one for his own reasons. So when I find out that the Doctor and his favorite nurse had an affair going for ten or eleven years and then he married somebody else, I want to see if there is enough hate left for the nurse to leap at the chance to lay a little bad-mouth on the famous surgeon.”

“She told you about Fort and me?”

“She did.”

“She had no right!”

“Heidi mentioned it first. I think she said she was twelve years old when she saw you and the Doctor necking. And just how much poking around would I have to do, amid the medical brotherhood and sisterhood; before somebody mentioned old times?”

“You make it sound dirty!”

“Do you know how it sounds to me?”

“I can’t imagine caring.”

“It sounds as if it was a very good thing for two lonely people to have. I think you are much woman, Mrs. Stanyard. I know where your husband is. I know Gloria thinks the affair ended a year or two before she met Fort. If he could change six hundred thousand in assets into cash and put the cash where nobody can find it, keeping you on the string would be no special problem.”

“He wasn’t that kind of man. I’m not that kind of woman. I didn’t even know, if he told her about me. But from the way I acted toward her when they came back from Florida, she certainly would have had to guess something. I like her very much.”

“He told her. In detail.”

“And she told you. I don’t think I care at all for her telling you.”

“After what Heidi said, she had to tell me something. And the detail was so I’d understand. She was anxious to make sure I didn’t think less of Fort or of you. Of course, I go around making these moral judgments all the time. Meaningful relationship. That phrase has sure God been worked to death. Like constructive and sincere. What it is, Janice, it’s a curious, confusing bitch of a world, and you don’t get a very long ride on it, and it is hard to get through to anybody merely by making mouth-sounds. So we all do some taking, up to the point where we don’t gag on it. And we all do some giving, because taking doesn’t taste right without it. With any luck we can sneak through without crapping up too many other lives, and with a little more luck we can make things shine for somebody sometime.”

As she was staring at me, a chunky Siamese cat, a pale one like tea with cream, came in through the door that probably led to the bedroom. He stretched each hind leg separately, gave me casual inspection with eyes as blue as his mistress’s, though slightly crossed, came over and snuffed at my shoes, and went on out to, the kitchen, indolently purposeful.

“Who are you?” Janice asked me.

“T. McGee. T for Travis. Friend of Glory.” I motioned toward the kitchen. “Who was that who went through?”

“Ralph. Maybe I made things shine for Fort. My husband will be a four-year-old child as long as he lives. There was that much damage. I visit Charlie every week. I’m a quiet person. I don’t require much of life. After Fort and I became lovers, I couldn’t understand why I’d put up such a desperate fight for my so-called honor. Maybe I thought that if someone made love to me, I’d start to resent Charlie. I didn’t want that. Fort needed me: My God, there was a man I would have crawled through broken glass for, jumped out windows for. And I couldn’t willingly give him something… nobody was using and Charlie wouldn’t miss. But Fort made it happen anyway, bless him. And then all of a sudden it was just something two people could have. Closeness and pleasure, and all the ordinary little things. Socks and shaving and reminding him of haircuts, and waking up and hearing somebody breathing beside you, feeling the warmth of their body near you. When he wanted me, I wanted him because he wanted me. It was like a voyage, I guess. We traveled from one place in our lives to another, and then what we needed from each other was over. I never made any demand on him after it was over. Sometimes I would wish he was with me so I could tell him some dumb thing, like how my alarm clock finally quit-he hated it. It had a terrible ring. I’m a heavy sleeper. Once, after he was married, I did ask him to come here. He came as soon as he could. He knew it wasn’t… what some -small-minded man might have guessed it could be. It was a year ago last May. On Memorial Day. I didn’t know if I should report it, or what I should do.

“Report what?”

“I went to see Charlie and I got back at ten-thirty at night. When I went into the kitchen there was my poor old Ethel cat dead in the middle of the floor. She was Ralph’s mother. Somebody had put a big meat skewer out of the drawer right through her, just behind the shoulder, right through her heart, and left it in her. It was such a horrid, pointless thing to do. A very sick mind, certainly. There was still some warmth in her body, and all the blood was not clotted on the tile floor. I’d left a kitchen light on, knowing it would be after dark when I got back, and they like a light to eat by when they get hungry. Ralph is like Ethel was. They leave a little in their dish and go back and have a little snack every now and then. There’s a ladder that is fastened to the outside of the building and it passes right by the kitchen window. The weather forecast said no rain, so I’d left the bottom sash all the way open. Somebody had kicked the screen out and come in through the window in the night. It wouldn’t be hard to do. Poor Ralph scrunched down in the back of my closet on my shoes, still growling, and terrified. Fort answered the phone and he got here at eleven-thirty. I was a mess, of course. It upset him terribly too. Ethel had been very fond of him.”

“Did you report it?”

“We decided not to. I’m not a sissy usually, but I was all shaken up. I packed an overnight bag and Fort dropped me at a hotel. He had wrapped poor Ethel up in an old sheet. I couldn’t find any damage beyond the broken screen, and nothing seemed to be missing. He put Ethel in the trunk of his car, and the next day we buried her at a place down on Marley Creek where we used to have picnics sometimes. I had the super come and look at the broken screen. He was upset. But he wasn’t going to do anything about it. I had people come and put steel mesh on that window and I told the other people who had windows close to that ladder what had happened and what I’d done about it, and what it had cost.”

She stopped, frowned at me, shook,her head. “What in the world could the Doctor have done with six hundred thousand dollars in cash? It wouldn’t be like him to do something like that.”

“Could his illness affect his mind?”

“Oh no. And the few times I saw him, toward the end, he was perfectly all right. He knew he’d never get out of that bed. The pain was bad and getting worse, but he decided he’d rather fight it than be so drugged he couldn’t communicate with anyone.”

“And he was an honest man?”

“Certainly. Oh, he didn’t make a big thing of it, and go around glowing with righteousness-you know the type.”

“Mrs. Stanyard? Janice?”

“Janice is fine.”

“You didn’t know a thing about the missing money. But you can count on other people getting around to you before very long.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Excuse the bluntness, but when the wife and children get dealt out, they dig up the past, and you are the ex-mistress, the trite old triangle of doctor, wife, and nurse.”

“But it…”

“I know it wasn’t like that. But for seven of the thirteen months he was cashing things in, you were working with him.”

“Not anything like the way we used to work, tluough. No routine things at all, no matter how intricate. He was sort of… wrapping up what he knew and what he was still learning. His postoperative dictation was about twice as long as it had ever been, because he was making suggestions ahout alternative techniques he knew he was never going to have time to attempt. He wanted to leave something other surgeons could use. And he wanted to spend as much time as he could with Ocrria and his grandchildren.”

“Do you remember anything at all strange during those seven months? Any mysterious letters or visits, phone calls? Did he seem troubled?”

“No. But he didn’t trouble easily, you know. He had his own philosophy about worry. He always told me that people spend so much time fretting about what they did yesterday and dreading what might happen tomorrow, they miss out on all of their todays. He said that when you realize you can’t change the past or predict the future, then you come alive for the first time, like waking, up from half-sleep.”

“You might be questioned by people who are better at it than I am, and a lot more merciless.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They’ll catch you up a lot quicker when you lie about having no contact with Fort from January to when you visited him.at his home.”

“Lie! I swear to you I did not see him once during that time.”

“That isn’t what I said. A contact is not necessarily a confrontation.”

“I don’t have to take this, you know.”

“Phone? Letter?”

“Damn you!” She stood up and went to the windows, stood there with her back to the room. Her anger made a pink tint on the pallor of her neck below the graying hair. I went over and stood behind her and to her left. The sky above the distant parking plaza was as gray as the asphalt. Three kids were running diagonally across the lot, a big yellow dog loping along with them.

“Use your head, Janice. If you don’t know how to handle it with me, how can you expect to handle it when the cold winds really start to blow?”

“He had reasons for everything he did.”

“And never miscalculated? Never made an error? Do you really believe that he wanted Gloria to be persecuted, treated as a suspicious person and watched and followed the rest of her life?”

She turned and stared up into my eyes. “Will it be like that?”

“Not if it was six thousand or sixty thousand. It’s six hundred thousand. It hasn’t hit the news yet. The bank and the lawyers and the tax people have kept the lid on it. Fort’s mind was clouded in one way. I can draw pictures for you. There have been people killed in this happy village for forty cents. No matter how carefully the missing money is reported, there are going to be some types sitting around wondering which way and how soon they’ll pick up the bride and take her to a cozy place and treat her pretty little feet with lighter fluid. They’ll think that either she knows or she doesn’t, but that much cash is worth the try. She’ll end up in the river wrapped in scrap iron either way.”

Her eyes widened and her throat bulged as she dry-swallowed twice, and, with her color going bad, she braced a hand against the window frame and closed her eyes for a moment. I asked her if she was going to faint.

“No. I don’t faint. It was just the idea anybody… could do that to Gloria Geis.”

“And if she doesn’t know, there’s always Heidi and then Roger and then you. It’s big loot, and it is in the handiest form loot comes in. You don’t have to fence it.”

Her color was better. She swallowed again. “I… I guess I do have some of it. Not here. It’s in my box at the bank. The letter is here. But I don’t think it will mean anything, and it says not to tell anybody. But, as you say, I don’t think he realized what could happen… Excuse me.”

She went over to a desk and opened a drawer. and sorted through a half-box of new stationery, riffling it with her thumb until she came to the letter. She looked at it before she handed it to me. She shook her head. “I hate what happened to his muscular control. His hands were so good.”

It was small, shaky, uncertain writing, but reasonably legible. It was dated the previous August eleventh.

Janice, dear,

Put this in your lock box at your bank.

I have gotten word to someone to come to you in case of emergency. You will find out what might have to be done. Use the money for that purpose. You will understand why I couldn’t ask G for this kind of help. If no one comes to you within a year of my death, please get the money to G. I would write more, but it is hard to write. I know I impose. Thanks for many things, and thanks for this.

Fortner

“It’s ten thousand dollars,” she said. “In hundred dollar bills, mostly. It was in a manila envelope wrapped with rubber bands inside another manila envelope. I think he thought it was ten thousand even, but it was a hundred dollars short. It came in the regular mail.”

“You saw him after that. Did you mention the note and the money?”

“When I started to, he closed his eyes and shook his head. Gloria was out of the room just then.”

I read it once more and gave it back to her to put away. “Not a clue,” I said. “Some unknown person may or may not come to you for help, and if they come, they’ll tell you what kind of help they need. Isn’t that just dandy? Only five hundred and ninety thousand to go.”

“I wish I could help. I really do.”

She meant it. Sincerity and conviction, and a great directness. But I had to come to the usual screeching halt. I didn’t have her lashed up to a polygraph with a good man watching the styluses or styli or whatever the hell the proper plural might be. Pen points, maybe. And I didn’t know if she was one of the small percentage who can fool the polygraph every time. In a world of plausible scoundrels and psychopathic liars, hunch can take you only so far.

I have to keep remembering at all times that sweet little old lady on the veranda in Charleston, South Carolina, the one who told me the story of her life in a sighing little voice, a story so sad that my eyes were misty and my voice thick by the time she shot at me with the Luger she was holding in her lap under the corner of her shawl. The slug took a little bite out of the side of the collar of my white shirt and exposed a dime-sized piece of blue necktie.

“Maybe,” I said, “the money’s for Gretchen.”

“For who?”

“For Gretchen. I guess you could call her an indiscretion. Long ago. Way back when Glenna was dying.”

She looked puzzled. “I don’t know anything about that. It doesn’t sound right, somehow. He worshipped his first wife.”

“At least he always thought he did. Until he took a little acid LSD, provided by a buddy.”

“Dr. Wyatt? Hayes Wyatt?”

“Glory took the trip too. I guess they were both getting a bad hang-up on his situation being terminal.”

She nodded. “Dr. Wyatt has had a lot of success with it with terminal cases, where the pain is bad and they’re terribly frightened, or terribly depressed. It’s disassociative, you know. It gives them a breathing space to kind of sort out what it all means.”

“And he sorted Glenna out and found out he didn’t like her at all. Glory says it surprised him.”

“Who was Gretchen?”

There was no reason not to tell her. There was even the chance it might knock loose some useful memory. But I told her and it didn’t. The tale intrigued her. It gave another dimension to her hero, Fort Geis. But at the same time it diminished her. She had thought of herself as one third of the women in Geis’ maturity-Glenna-Janice-Gloria. News of hearty little Gretch made it a foursome. It complicated her mental biography of the great man. It put two little vertical lines between her eyebrows, and I no longer had her full attention.

So, with promises to get in touch if either of us learned anything, I went back out into the last gray fading of the daylight in the damp and windy streets. I knew the sun was still shining way down there at Bahia Mar in the bottom right corner of the map, and the Busted Flush would be creaking and sighing when the dying wash from the incoming charterboats got to her. The sandy little brown broads would be ornamenting the sunset beach, casting the swift sidelong glance, trying not to blow their cool with the slightest trace of smile, and other kids would be playing the big game of pretending to be surfers, as they rode their bright boards in the gigantic, savage, towering breakers two feet high that break for twenty feet and six whole seconds sometimes.

[Surfers of the World, save your money and dream long dreams of getting to that one unspoiled beach that makes both California and Hawaii look like a sometime thing. Two whole miles of ocean straight out from the beach, six feet deep on the median tide, all -sand, and flat as pool tables. On the prevailing wind out of the southwest, girls and boys, those rollers start to build way down by Mozambique and Madagascar, and have a twothousand-mile run across the Indian Ocean before they crest white two miles off the great beach at Galle, Ceylon, and run all the way in with such a perfect symmetry and geometry that when you look down on it from twenty thousand feet it is like looking at a swatch of fabric, a pure pinstripe white on a pale tan-green background. As a special added convenience, just a bit south, toward Dondra Head, the deeps are close to the beach, so that after you get beyond the first few, you have nothing to fight on the way out.]

But I was too far from a softer sunset and a better beach. I knew that with a little luck I could either get part of my path smoothed for me, or find out something that would convince me it would make a lot more sense to head south right away. In the premature fading of daylight, I drove my rental car back through the damp and windy streets to the hotel and went up to the room; practicing a glassy smile to see if it would help lift me out of a mood turning as gray as day’s end. See, brain-pan? The mouth is smiling. Feel the smile muscles? Hi ho, hi ho. The eyes are squinching too. McGee is one happy fella. Right?

I think I was trying too hard with the smile. When the elevator door opened at my floor, a substantial matron in a fur hat was waiting to board. When she glimpsed me, she sprang back a good distance and then waited until I was four strides away before scuttling into the Otis-Box.

I turned on the lights in the room and emptied all the cards out of my wallet on the bed. You may charge me, dear people, with being a CardCarrying American. I find these little tickets to perpetual consumption distasteful. I do not like to see my name on them, deeply embossed into everlasting plastic. They make me feel as if I should wear a leather collar and hang them all thereon. When there is a mistake in the billing on any of them, if you persist, you can fight your way past the icy and patronizing indifference of the electronic computers and reach a semi-human who can straighten things out. It only takes a year or so.

Yet in our times the thick wad of credit cards is a cachet of respectability, something more useful to me than any questionable convenience. When a cop lays upon you the white eye, and you stand there hunting for a driver’s license as identification, and he watches you fumble through AmEx Diners, Carte Blanche, Air Travel, Sheraton, Shell, Gulf, Phillips, Standard, Avis, and Texaco before you find it, he is reassured. You may have thirty-seven cents and a dirty shirt, but you are completely on record and in good standing with the Establishment. If all you have is the license and a bale of vulgar cash money, it piques his curiosity. Who is this bum who can’t get credit cards like honest people?

I found Maurie Ragna’s personal card among the seldom used credit cards tucked into a side pocket of the wallet. He had written his unlisted phone number on the back of it. An East Chicago number, over the line in Lake County, Indiana, where as I understood it, the authorities were still as cooperative and hospitable to Ragna and his playmates as they had once been in Calumet City and Cicero. The Outfit, as it is known.along the lake, had responded to the roust by moving over the line into Gary and East Chicago.

I had come along once at the right time and, down in the Keys, had pried Maurie out of an exceptionally ugly situation, wherein he had no future at all to speak of. Grateful as he was, he was astonished any bystander would voluntarily involve himself. As it was, he couldn’t put any weight at all on his feet for days, and walked in a very tender way for much longer. But that is an old and complex story, and he had tried to show appreciation by gifting me with cars, broads, and vacations on the cuff, but I had settled for a dozen mohair cardigans and passed along eleven of the twelve to friends. So this was the first time l was making a call on an old obligation, and if he was not yet buried out in the desert near Vegas, or chained to the bottom of lake or river, it might hearten him.

The number answered. A skeptical fellow who spoke in grunts took my name and where I could be reached and said if Ragna never got back to me he was maybe out of town or something.

It took an hour and a half. He was bursting with hospitality. He offered a car and driver, a choice of any kind of action I felt like, a certified stupendous broad, baby, name the age you like, the size, the build, the color, Swede, Jap, Spic, Polski, call it, McGee baby.

His voice sagged when I said maybe later, that right now I wanted information. When I said important information he brightened. I went into the indirect and elliptical phraseology of those whose lines are ninety percent certain of being permanently bugged.

“You are so right,” he said. “It hasn’t come to my ear but it can be checked. If say’some associate of some associate built the action on the Doc, then you scuffle around too much, I got enough going here and there you should get maybe only roughed up some, a three-day rest with nice nurses. But you could not clout any of it back, so scuffling would be a waste, right? Now on the little guy Smith, I will find out who owns how much of him. Hang easy Mister M. Give me one hour, two tops.”

I ordered up some ice. Long long ago a lass had gifted me with a solitary drinker’s kit. It is a squatty pewter flagon, cylindrical and with a king-sized oldfashioned-shaped drinking cup in pewter which fits upside down over the flagon with threads at the midway point of the flagon, so that assembled it is a perfect cylinder. With a nice regard for the emotional climate of the man who, when it is necessary, can drink alone without feeling degenerate, she’d had a single word engraved upon both flagon and glass: Mine. I had thought it all too elfin, thanked her too effusively, and put it away in a locker, and had come across it when packing for this trip and suddenly realized her instincts had been better than mine. It was not elfin. It was factual, and a derisive comment on all the His and Hers items in this chummy civilization. So I had filled it with Plymouth and brought it along, and it was indeed Mine.

I lounged and brooded and sipped and awaited Maurie Ragna’s report. Sober sociological evaluations of the genus Hoodlumae americanus leave out their capacity for compulsive friendship. Once one accepts you he will lay gifts upon you like a potty rich uncle. You can do no wrong. You are forever his big great friend and buddy and chum and pal. If you get big-mouth disease, it is to him a disease, and he will have you gunned down, and he will cry, and send a whole truck of flowers. There are various levels of ethical values within the genus. I knew Ragna had a high contempt for those who deal in hash and grass, or schoolgirl recruitment, or housewife call circuits. He concentrates on such moral areas as bootlegging liquor and cigarettes, setting up casinos, operating resort properties here and there where he can supply a complete line of wheels, booze, hookers, and blue entertainment, as well as the more mundane items-such as vending machines, kitchen equipment, bed vibrators, and intercom equipment.

At last the call came back. “Took me too long, buddy boy, on account of a party I had to be sure of, he’s at Acapulco and the call didn’t go through so easy. It is no part of our action in any way, and though attractive, we stay off it, so go ahead and scuffle and stay lucky, you bum. I don’t want you dead. About this Franky, he is owned like up to the throat and the word has gone to him to bust his ass doing any small thing anybody with your name wants done.”

“It is a big help and a load off my mind, friend.”

“Some phone calls, some lousy sweaters. Ask for something big so I can get even, will you?”

“When I need it, I’ll holler.”

After I’d said good-bye and hung up, I thought of a possibility which this contact with Ragna had suggested. The gambling itch was in many cases like other forms of addiction, a search for an excitement which turns the mind off. Maybe Geis had found a poker table. A big game would know just how high they would let the Doctor go on markers, and it was possible to lose six very big ones. It has been done before and will happen again. In some London clubs the biggest chip in play is worth twenty-eight thousand, and there are some in play every night. And if Geis had been expertly plucked, they would collect on the markers ruthlessly.

But I had to give that up. If the score had been made that way, Maurie would have come up with the information.

I rubbed a thumb across misted pewter and read the name again. Mine. That was the name of the problem. All mine.

SEVEN

FRANCISCO SMITH cut me off when I tried to tell him over the phone what I wanted from him. The agency offices were in the Monadnock Block on West Jackson. He named a lunchroom a block and a half away. I said I was six four, Florida tan, gray topcoat, no hat.

I got there within the half-hour, and had a sixminute wait over bad coffee before he arrived at quarter to ten, came directly to the booth, and sat opposite me.

“,” he said to me. “Coffee black,” he said to the chubby waitress. When she went away he said, “With everything in the shop bugged every way those sons of bitches can dream up, I couldn’t take a chance you might say too much about what you want.”

He was on the short side of medium height, stocky, balding, mottled red face, rimless glasses with gold bows and nosepiece, and lenses strong enough to magnify the size of his weak-looking blue eyes. Medium blue suit, dark blue topcoat, light gray felt hat. He talked with very little lip movement, rather like an unskilled ventriloquist. You would have to glance at him a dozen times in a dozen places in one day before you’d begin to wonder if you had ever see him before. All the cities of the world are stocked,with innumerable replicas of Frankie Smith. They are clerks, fry cooks, building inspectors, watch repairmen, camera salesmen, estimators, adjustors, civil servants, church wardens, florists.

“I want to know all about the job you did for Dr. Fortner Geis.”

He looked puzzled. “Keeping an eye on that Gretchen Gorba and her kids? It went on quite a while. Better than two and a half years. Just a spot check to see how they were making it. He pulled us off it last summer. Early July? No. Early August. He died a couple of months later. Big play in the papers.”

“He was a big man.”

Smith studied me. He nodded abruptly. “I think I get the picture. The contract with us would be sort of proof the kid was his. Susan: The oldest. Hell, copies of all the reports are in the dead file. The court can make us turn them over if it comes to that. There could be a nice piece of change in it for an eighteen-year-old kid, enough to split it a lot of ways.”

“Did he tell you Susan was his daughter?”

“Hell no. Look, if you tell us to run a complete check on Joe Blow, we’ll do it. But to keep our own noses clean, we’ll want to find out why you’re so in terested in Joe. We got the contract three years ago next month. Gretchen Gorba is a big good-natured slob. She likes the horses and draft beer and shacking up, in any order they happen to come along. So I put a big old boy in our shop onto it. He’s the kind women tell things to. He took a furnished room in a handy neighborhood, and as soon as he started laying her, she started telling her sad story, about how she was the housekeeper’s daughter, and when the Doctor’s wife was dying, the Doc knocked her up when she was just a dumb kid, and the Doc and her mother arranged to marry her off to somebody, and the Doc set up a lifetime annuity of a hundred a week for the kid named Susan. Gretchen whined to our boy that she had braced the Doc to improve the income, on account of having five kids, and her husband in prison, but he didn’t scare and he didn’t give. But from talking to him, I got the idea that if we’d reported they were having a hard time, he would have done something. She was making between sixty-five and seventy-five a week depending on the tips, and averaging maybe thirty a week to the bookies, so that if she was getting more, the bookies would get more. She bets the doubles and the parlays, a guaranteed way to stay busted.”

“So Doctor Geis asked you to keep checking?”

“To keep an eye on them. I would have thought that Gretchen’s mother, Mrs. Ottlo, could have done it just as well and saved him the fees. But I guess Mrs. Ottlo wasn’t getting along so good with her daughter. She’d pick times to visit when Gretchen was working and the kids would be there. She’d bring food and presents. It could have been that the Doc was afraid Mrs. Ottlo would be too proud to let him know if Gretchen and the kids were having a hard time. After about five or six months he asked me to set something up with Susan. I handled it myself. Fifteen years old. Hell of a good kid. Smart. I gave her a phone number she could call day or night in case of any trouble where she needed help. She agreed to keep it from her mother. But she wanted to know who had this big interest in her family. I found out she had the idea she was adopted. Kids get that idea. Mama had gotten slopped a few times and said just enough so Susan thought the annuity was probably from her real parents. So I didn’t say yes and I didn’t say no. I left it the way I found it. Once it was set up that way, the Doc was able to cut down the expense of our checking them out so often. But I think it was the next January or February, two years ago minus a few weeks, he phoned me and said he’d heard through Mrs. Ottlo that Gretchen’s husband had been released on parole and had rejoined the family, and he wanted to know what effect that would have on Susan. So I had a friend pull the file on Saul Gorba and give me a nice long look at it.”