I felt a prickling of the flesh on the backs of my hands. But it was a clumsy fit, no matter how you looked at it. The suffering husband making a narrow save each time. Or the kid sister? Was there a third party who could get close enough to Maurie?



What about motive? The big ones are love and money. The estate was "substantial." What are the terms? Check it out through soft-voiced D. Wintin Hardahee. And noble suffering Tommy had made the discreet pass at Freckle-Girl. So on top of that we have a dead family physician labeled suicide, and he had treated Maureen, and does that make any sense or any fit? Penny believed with all her sturdy heart that Dr. Stewart Sherman could not have killed himself.



The tap at my door had to be Penny bringing back the two fifty-dollar bills, and as I went toward the door I was uncomfortably aware of a hollow feeling in the belly that was a lustful anticipation that maybe she could be induced to stay awhile.



But there were two men there, and they both stared at me with that mild, bland, skeptical curiosity of the experienced lawman. It must be very like the first inspection of new specimens brought back to the base camp by museum expeditions. The specimen might be rare or damaged or poisonous. But you check it over and soon you are able to catalog it based on the experience of cataloging thousands of others over the years, and then it is a very ordinary job from then on, the one you are paid for. The big, hard-boned, young one wore khakis, a white fishing cap with a peak, blue and white sneakers, and a white sport shirt with a pattern of red pelicans on it. It was worn outside the belt, doubtless to hide the miniature revolver that seems to be more and more of a fad with Florida local law. The smaller older one wore a pale tan suit, a white shirt with no tie. He had a balding head, liver spots, little dusty brown eyes, and a virulent halitosis that almost concealed the news that his young partner had been wearing the same shirt too long. "Name McGee?"



"That's right. What can I do for you?" I was stripped to my underwear shorts and barefoot.



"Well, for a starter, just turn around real slow with your arms out, then you can go stand by the window." He flipped his wallet open and gave me the glimpse of the little gold badge. "I'm Stanger," he said, and, indicating the younger one, "he's Nudenbarger. City."



"And for a starter," I said, "search warrant?"



"Not unless I have to have one, McGee. But you make us go through the motions, everybody gets pissed off, and it's a hot night, and it all adds up the same way anyway. So you-if you want to-you can like invite us to just poke around."



"Poke around, Mr. Stanger. You too, Mr. Nudenbarger."



He checked my wallet on the countertop while Nudenbarger checked the closet, the suitcase, the bathroom. Stanger wrote down some bits of information copied off credit cards into a blue pocket notebook, dime-sized. He couldn't write without sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. Credit cards hearten them. The confetti of the power structure.



"Plenty cash, Mr. McGee."



Cash and credit had earned me the "mister." I moved over and sat on the bed without permission. "Seven hundred and something. Let me see... and thirty-eight. It's sort of a bad habit I'm trying to break, Mr. Stanger. It's stupid to carry cash. Probably the result of some kind of insecurity in my childhood. It's my blue blanket."



He looked at me impassively. "I guess that's pretty funny."



"Funny peculiar?"



"No. Being funny like jokes. Being witty with stupid cops."



"No. The thing about the blue blanket--"



"I keep track of Beethoven's birthday, and the dog flies a DeHavilland Moth."



"What's that?" Nudenbarger asked. "What's that?"



"Forget it, Lew," Stanger said in a weary voice.



"You always say that," Nudenbarger said, accusingly indignant.



It is like a marriage, of course. They are teamed up and they work on each other's nerves, and some of the gutsy ones who have gone into the dark warehouse have been shot in the back by the partner/wife who just couldn't stand any more.



Stanger perched a tired buttock on the countertop, other leg braced with knee locked, licked his thumb, and leafed back through some pages in the blue notebook.



"Done any time at all, Mr. McGee?"



"No."



"Arrests?"



"Here and there. No charges."



"Suspicion of what?"



"Faked-up things. Impersonation, conspiracy, extortion. Somebody gets a great idea, but the first little investigation and it all falls down."



"Often?"



"What's often? Five times in a lifetime? About that."



"And you wouldn't mention it except if I checked it would show up someplace."



"If you say so."



"You have been here and there, McGee, because for me there is something missing. Right. What do you storm troopers want? What makes you think you can come in here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But you don't object at all."



"Would it work with you, Stanger?"



"Not lately. So okay. Would you say you left about noon and got back a little after one today?"



"Close enough."



"And sacked out?"



"Slept like death until maybe eight o'clock."



"When you make a will, Mr. McGee, leave a little something to Mrs. Imber."



"Who is she?"



"Sort of the housekeeper. Checking on the job the maids do. Opened your door with her passkey at four o'clock, give or take ten minutes. You were snoring on the bed."



"Which sounds as if it was the right place to be."



"A nice place to be. Let me read you a little note. I copied this off the original, which is at the lab. It goes like this:... By the way, it was sealed in an envelope and on the outside it said Mr. T. McGee, One-O-nine. So we check some places and find a place with a One-O-nine with a McGee in it. Which is here, and you. It says: `Dear Honey, What do I say about the wages of sin? Anyway, it was one of his lousy ideas and overlooked, so here it is back. Woke up and couldn't get back to sleep and went into the purse for a cigarette and found this. Reason I couldn't get back to sleep? Well, hell. Reasons. Plural. Memories of you and me... getting me a little too worked up for sleepy-bye. And something maybe we should talk over. It's about something SS said about memory and digital skills. Have to go do a trick as a Special at eight, filling in for a friend. I'll drop this off on the way. No man in his right mind would pick a girl up in the hospital lot at four fifteen on Sunday morning, would he? Would he? Would he?' "



Stanger read badly. He said, "It's signed with an initial. P. Nobody you ever heard of?"



"Penny Woertz."



"The hundred bucks was the wages of sin, McGee?"



"Just a not very funny joke. Private and personal."



Nudenbarger stood looking me over, a butcher selecting a side of beef. "Get chopped up in the service?"



"Some of it."



Nudenbarger's smirk, locker-room variety, didn't charm me. "How was she, McGee? Pretty good piece of ass?"



"Shut up, Lew," Stanger said with weary patience. "How long did you know Miss Woertz, McGee?"



"Since we met in the bar last night. You can ask the man who was working the bar. His name is Jake."



"The room maid said you must have had a woman in here last night. So you confirm that it was the nurse. Then you took her back to her apartment at about noon. Did you go in with her?"



I did not like the shape of the little cloud forming on the horizon in the back of my head. "Let's stop the games," I said.



"She mention anybody she thought might be checking up on her?" Stanger asked.



"I'll give you that name after we stop playing games."



Stanger reached into the inside pocket of his soiled tan suitcoat, took an envelope out, took some color Polaroids out of it. As he handed them to me he said, "These aren't official record. Just something I do for my own personal file."



He had used a flash. She was on a kitchen floor, left shoulder braced against the base of the cabinet under the sink, head lolled back. She wore a blue and white checked robe, still belted, but the two sides had separated, the right side pulled away to expose one breast and expose the right hip and thigh. The closed blades of a pair of blue-handled kitchen shears had been driven deep into the socket of her throat. Blood had spread wide under her. Her bloodless face looked pallid and smaller than my memory of her, the freckles more apparent against the pallor. There were four shots from four different angles. I swallowed a heaviness that had collected in my throat and handed them back to him.



"Report came in at eight thirty," he said. "She was going to give another nurse a ride in, and the other nurse had a key to her place because she'd oversleep sometimes. The other nurse lives in one of those garden apartments around on the other side. According to the county medical examiner, time of death was four thirty, give or take twenty minutes. Bases it on coagulation, body temperature, lividity in the lower limbs, and the beginning of rigor in the jaws and neck."



I swallowed again. "It's... unpleasant."



"I looked in a saucepan on the stove to see if she was cooking something. I picked up the lid and looked in and the sealed-up note to you was in there, half wadded up, like she had hidden it in a hurry the first place she could think of. That part about remembering you and getting all worked up would be something she wouldn't want a boyfriend to read. Think the boyfriend knew she spent the night here in this room?"



"Maybe. I don't know."



"She worried about him?"



"Some."



"Just in case there was two of them, suppose you give me the name you know."



"Richard Holton, Attorney at Law."



"The only name?"



"The only boyfriend, I'd say."



Stanger sighed and looked discouraged. "Same name we've got, dammit. And he drove his wife over to Vero Beach to visit her sister today. Left about nine this morning. Put through a call over there about an hour and a half ago, and they had left about eight to drive back. Should be home by now. This is still a pretty small town, McGee. Mr. Holton and this nurse had been kicking up a fuss about Doc Sherman's death being called suicide. That's the SS in the note, I guess?"



"Yes. She talked to me about the doctor."



"What's this about... let me find it here... here it is, `memory and digital skills'?"



"It doesn't mean a thing to me."



"Would it have anything to do with the doctor not killing himself?"



"I haven't any idea."



"Pictures make you feel sick?" Nudenbarger asked.



"Shut up, Lew," Stanger said.



It was past midnight. I looked at my watch when the phone rang. Stanger motioned to me to take it and moved over and leaned close to me to hear the other end of the conversation.



"Travis? This is Biddy. I just got home. Tom found her about twenty minutes ago."



"Is she all right?"



"I guess so. After looking practically all over the county, he found her wandering around not over a mile from here. The poor darling has been bitten a billion times. She's swelling up and going out of her mind with the itching. Tom is bathing her now, and then we'll use the Donned. Sleep will be the best thing in the world for her."



"Use the what?"



"It's electrotherapy. She responds well to it. And... thanks for being concerned, Travis. We both... all appreciate it."



I hung up and Stanger said with mild surprise, "You know the Pikes too?"



"The wife and her sister, from a long time ago. And their mother."



"Didn't she die just a while back?"



"That's right."



"They find that kook wife?" Nudenbarger asked.



"Tom Pike found her."



Nudenbarger shook his head slowly. "Now, that one is really something, I swear to God! Al, I'll just never forget how she looked that time last spring she was missing for two days, and those three Telaferro brothers had kept her the whole time in that little bitty storeroom out to the truck depot, keeping her boozed up and bangin' that poor flippy woman day and night until I swear she was so plain wore-down pooped that Mike and Sandy had to use a stretcher to tote her out to--"



"Shut your goddamn mouth, Lew!" Stanger roared.



Nudenbarger stared blankly at him. "Now what in the world is eating you, anyway."



"Go out and check in and see if there's anything new and if there is, come get me, and if there isn't, stay the hell out there in the car!"



"Sure. Okay."



After the door had closed gently behind the younger man, Stanger sighed and sat down and felt around in the side pocket of his jacket and found a half cigar and lit the ash end thoroughly and carefully. "Mr. Tom Pike should send that wife off someplace. Or watch her a little more close. She's going to go out some night and meet up with some bug who'll maybe kill her."



"Before she kills herself?"



"Seems like if a man has good luck in one direction, McGee, it runs real bad some other way. When she lost the second kid, something went wrong in her head. I say it would be a blessing if she had made a good job of it when she tried. Mr. McGee, I think it would be a good thing if you stayed right in town for a few days."



"I want to help if I can. I didn't know Penny Woertz very long. But... I liked her a lot."



He pulled on the cigar. "Amateur help? Run around in circles and get everything all confused?"



"Let's just say it wouldn't be quite as amateur as the help you're running around with right now, Stanger."



"It like to broke Lew's heart when they picked him off his motor-sickel and give him to me. What you might do, if it wouldn't put you out any, is see if Rick Holton made the trip he said he made. It's unhealthy for me to check up on a man in Holton's position. I think maybe Janice Holton would be easy to talk with, easier for you than me."



Once again I remembered Harry Simmons, and I said, "If she phones you to check on me, confirm the fact that I'm an insurance investigator looking into a death claim on Dr. Sherman."



"Going to her instead of to Holton himself?"



"Just to see if she thinks he's sincere in believing it was murder or if he's been faking it in order to snuggle up to Nurse Woertz."



He whistled softly. "You could lose some hide off your face."



"Depending on how I work up to it."



"If they'd both been in town, both Rick Holton and his wife, and they weren't together, I'd want to make sure I knew where she was at the time that girl got stuck with the shears."



"She capable of it?"



He stood up. "Who knows what anybody will do or won't do, when the moon is right? All I know is that she was Janice Nocera before she married the lawyer, and her folks have always had a habit of taking care of their own problems in their own way."



I remembered the pictures of her and the kids, the ones I had taken out of Holton's wallet. Handsome, lean, dark, with a mop of black hair and more than her share of both nose and mouth, and a jaunty defiance in the way she stared smiling into the lens.



"And I'll be checking you out a little more too," he said, and gave me a small, tired smile and went out.



10



PAGE ONE of the Fort Courtney Sunday Register bannered LOCAL NURSE SLAIN. They had a sunshiny smiling picture of her that pinched my heart in a sly and painful way.



Very few facts had been furnished by the law-just the way the body had been discovered, the murder weapon, and the estimated time of death. As usual, an arrest was expected momentarily.



It was almost noon on Sunday when I phoned Biddy. She sounded tired and listless. She said Tom had flown up to Atlanta for a business meeting and would be home, he thought, by about midnight. Yes, it was a terrible thing about Penny Woertz. She had always been so obliging and helpful when Maurie had been Dr. Sherman's patient. Such a really marvelous disposition, never snippy or officious.



"Suppose I come out there and see if I can cheer you up, girl?"



"With songs and jokes and parlor tricks? I don't think anything would work today. But... come along if you want to."



I pressed the door chime button three times before she finally came to the door and let me in.



"Sorry to keep you standing out here, Trav. I was putting her back to sleep."



She led the way back into the big living room, long-legged in yellow denim shorts with brass buttons on the hip pockets, and a faded blue short-sleeved work shirt. She had piled her long straight blond hair atop her head and anchored it in place with a yellow comb, but casual tendrils escaped, and when she turned and gave me a crooked smile of self-mockery, she brushed some silky strands away from her forehead with her fingertips. "I'm the total mess of the month, Travis. Would you like a drink? Bloody Mary? Gin and tonic? Beer?"



"What are you having?"



"Maybe a Bloody would be therapeutic. Want to come help?"



The big kitchen was bright and cheerful, decorated in blue and white. The windows looked across the back lawn toward the lake.



She got out the ice and ingredients and I made them. She leaned against the countertop, ankles crossed, sipped and said, "If I suddenly fall on my face, don't be alarmed. I did a damfool thing last night after we got her settled down. I had to get my mind off... everything and I went out to the boathouse and painted a fool thing I'll probably paint out. It was five before I went to bed and Tom woke me up at eight when he left."



"Can I have a look at it?"



"Well... why not? But it isn't anything like what I usually do."



We carried our drinks. There was an outside staircase to the big room over the boathouse, which she had fixed up as a studio. A window air-conditioner was humming. She turned on a second one, then went over and turned on an intercom and turned the volume up until I could hear a slow rhythmic sound I suddenly identified as the deep and somewhat guttural breathing of someone in deep sleep.



She said, "Maurie can't wake up, actually, but I just feel better if I can hear her." The studio had a composite smell of pigments and oils and thinner. The work stacked against the walls and the few that were hung were semi-abstract. Obviously she had taken her themes from nature, from stones, earth, bark, leaves. The colors were powerful. Some of the areas were almost representational.



She waved toward them. "These are the usual me. Kind of old hat. No op and pop. No structures and lumps and walk-throughs."



"But," I said, "one hell of a lot of overpainting and glazes, so you can see down into those colors."



She looked surprised and pleased. "Member of the club?"



"Hell, woman, I even know the trick words that mean absolutely nothing. Like dynamic symmetry."



"Tonal integrity?"



"Sure. Structural perceptions. Compositionally iconoclastic."



She laughed aloud and it was a good laugh. "It's such terrible crap, isn't it? The language of gallery people and critics, and insecure painters. What are your words, Professor McGee?"



"Does a painting always look the same or will it change according to the light and how I happen to feel? And after it has been hung for a month, will it disappear so completely the only time I might notice it would be if it fell off the wall?"



She nodded thoughtfully. "So I'll buy that. Anyway... I seldom do the figure. But here is my night work."



It was on an easel, a horizontal rectangle, maybe thirty inches by four feet. At dead center was a small clearing, a naked female figure sitting, jackknifed, huddled, arms around her legs, face buried against her knees, blond hair spilling down. Around her was angry jungle, slashes of sharp spears of leaf, vine tangle, visceral roots, hints of black water, fleshy tropic blooms against black-green. It had a flavor of great silence, stillness, waiting.



We studied it and could hear the deep sonorous breathing of the sleeping sister. Biddy coughed, sipped her drink, said, "I think it's too dramatic and sentimental and... narrative."



"I say let it sit. You'll know more about it later."



She put her drink down, lifted it off the easel, and placed it against the wall, the back of the canvas toward the room. She backed off. "Where I can't see it, I guess."



She showed me more of her work and then she turned the intercom off and one of the air-conditioners. We walked back to the house. "Another drink and maybe a sandwich?"



"On one condition."



"Such as?"



"Quick drink and simple sandwich and then you go fall into the sack. I am reliable, dependable, conscientious, and so on. If you're needed for anything, I'll wake you up."



"I couldn't let you do--"



"Hot shower, clean sheets, blinds closed, and McGee taking care."



She covered her yawn with the back of her fist. "Bless you, bless you. I'm sold."



After we ate, she led me upstairs and down the carpeted hallway to Maureen's room. Maureen slept on her back in the middle of a double bed. The room was air-conditioned to coolness. She wore a quilted bed jacket. The sheets and pillowcases were blue with a white flower pattern. The blanket was a darker blue. Her face and throat were puffed, red-blotched. There was a mixture of small odors in the silence, calamine and rubbing alcohol and perfume. Flavors of illness and of girl. She wore opaque sleep-glasses in spite of the room being darkened.



Biddy startled me by speaking in a normal conversational tone. "I'm going to keep her asleep until at least six o'clock. Oh, she can't hear us. Not while the Dormed is on."



As she took me over to the bed to show me what she meant, I saw the small electric cord that led from the heavy pair of glasses to a piece of equipment on the bedside stand. It looked like a small ham radio receiver. There were three dials. A tiny orange light winked constantly. She explained that it was an electrosleep device invented in Germany and distributed in England and the United States by one of the medical supply houses. There were electrodes in the headset, covered with a foam plastic, two which rested on the eyelids, and one at the end of each earpiece where they made contact with the mastoid bone behind each ear. She said that you moistened the foam rubber pads with a salt solution and put the headset on the patient. The control unit was a pulse generator that sent an extremely weak electrical impulse-in fact a thousand times weaker than the current a flashlight bulb requires-through the sleep centers in the thalamus and hypothalamus.



"It's perfectly safe," she said. "It's been used on thousands and thousands of patients. You just adjust the strength and the frequency with these two dials. The other is the on and off switch. Dr. Sherman got it for us and trained me in how to use it. You see, he was afraid of the side effects of making her sleep with medication, in her condition, whatever it is. We do have to give her shots when she gets too upset, but this is usually enough."



"What does it feel like?"



"Very... odd. No discomfort at all. All I felt was a kind of flickering in my eyes. Not unpleasant, really. I was trying to fight it. I was telling myself that this certainly wouldn't put me to sleep. And then there wasn't the flickering sensation anymore, and kind of... a slow warm delicious feeling all over me, like sinking slowly in a hot sudsy perfumed tub. And I was gone! It is marvelous sleep, really. Deep and sweet and refreshing. Once she's asleep, you can take them off and the Dormed sleep will just turn into absolutely natural sleep. Or like now, I'm leaving it on at very low strength, and she will sleep on and on until I take them off. You could parade a brass band through here, and she'd sleep like a baby. It's a marvelous invention. It's a portable unit, with a neat little gray suitcase thing it fits into, with a place for the salt solution and all."



"Is there anything I have to do about it while you sleep?"



"Nothing. Well... what I do isn't necessary. I just come in and look at her and see if that little light is going on and off. It hasn't ever stopped or anything. And only once did she ever move her head enough to move the headset out of place."



"But you'd feel better if I did the same thing?"



"I guess so. Yes."



"Off with you, then."



We went into the hall and she pointed out her door. "Just knock until I answer. Don't settle for a mumble. Get a real answer." She looked at her watch. "And don't let me sleep past five o'clock. Okay?"



"Five o'clock."



"If you get hungry or thirsty or anything--"



"I know where things are. Bug off, Bridget. Sleep tight."



In thirty minutes the house was filled with that special silence of Sunday sleep. Little relays and servo devices made faint tickings and hummings. Refrigerator, deep freeze, air-conditioning, thermostats, electric clocks. Kids water-skied the lake, outboards droning, a faint sound through the closed windows.



Where do you look when you have no idea what you are looking for? An alcove off the living room apparently served as a small home office for Tom Pike. The top of the antique desk was clean. The drawers were locked, and the locks were splendid modern intricate devices, un-pickable, except in television drama. On a hallway phone table I found a black and white photograph in a silver frame. Helena, Maureen, and Bridget on the foredeck of the Likely Lady. Boat clothes, sweaters for cool sailing. Mick Pearson's girls, all slender, smiling, assured, and with the loving look that could only mean that it had been Mick's eye at the finder, Mick's finger on the shutter release.



So roam the silence and up the padded stairs, long slow steps, two at a time. A closed door at the back of the house, unlocked, opening into a master bedroom. Draperied window-wall facing the lake. One end was sitting room, fireplace, bookshelves. An oversized custom bed dominated the other end. It seemed too sybaritic, a bit out of key with the rest of the house. Two baths, two dressing rooms. His and hers. Sunken dark blue tub in hers, square, with clear glass in the shower-stall arrangement. Strategic mirroring there, as on the walls nearest the oversized bed.



The big bed was neatly made, so on Sunday, at least, Biddy was maid, cook, and housekeeper. Maureen's bath had been cleared of the daily personal things. Winter clothing in her dressing room closets. Bottles of perfume and lotion on her dressing table just a little bit dusty. But he lived here, very neatly. Sport shirts here, dress shirts there. Jackets, slacks on one bar. Suits hanging from another. The shoe-treed shoes on a built-in rack. Silk, cashmere, linen, Irish tweed, English wool, Italian shoes. Labeling from Worth Avenue, New York, St. Thomas, Palm Springs, Montreal. Taste, cost, and quality. Impersonal, remote, correct, and somehow sterile. Apparently no sentiment about an ancient sweater, crumpled old moccasins, baggy elderly slacks, or a gummy old bathrobe. When anything showed enough evident signs of wear, it was eliminated.



I searched for more clues to him. Apparently he did not have anything wrong with him that could not be fixed by an aspirin or an Alka Seltzer. He did not leave random notes to himself in the pockets of his suits and jackets. He did not seem to have a single hobby or a weapon or a book not devoted to economics, law, securities, or real estate.



So I gave up on Tom Pike and walked quietly down the hall and into Maureen's room. The deep breathing was just the same. She had not moved. The little orange light on the face of the control unit of the Dormed went off and on as before. I went to the side of the bed. Her arms rested at her sides, atop the blanket. I cautiously picked her left hand up. It was warm and dry, and complete relaxation gave it a heaviness, like the hand of a fresh corpse. The back of the hand was scratched, and welted with insect bites. I turned the inside of the wrist toward what light there was and, bending close to it, I could make out the white line of scar tissue across the pattern of the blue veins under the sensitive skin. I placed the hand the way it had been and looked down at her. The heavy glasses made her look as if both eyes had been bandaged. I could see the slow, steady beat of a tiny pulse in her throat. Even welted and mottled, dappled with the dry orange-white spots of lotion, she was a cushioned and luxurious and sweetly sensuous animal.



Sweet outcast. All the lovely, wifely tumbling in that outsized bed, mirrored hoyden, romping in sweet excitements with the lean and beloved husband. But then paradise is warped and the image becomes grotesque. Instead of babies, two sudden agonies, and two little bloody wads of tissue expelled too soon from the warm black safety of the womb. Then a world gone strange, like something half dreamed and soon forgotten. Exchange the springy bed for the sacking on the floor of the little storage room at the truck depot where, booze-blind, lamed, and sprung, you are kept at the rough service of the Telaferro brothers. Excuse me, my dear, while I pry around your outcast room looking for answers to questions I haven't thought of. Or one I have: Would you really rather be dead?



But there was nothing. There was a steel cabinet in the bathroom, resting on a bench, securely locked. Medicines, no doubt. There seemed to be nothing left in the bedroom or bath that she could hurt herself with. There was a rattling purr at the end of each exhalation. Her diaphragm rose and fell with the deep breathing of deep sleep.



I was glad to leave her room and leave the sound of breathing. Somehow it was like the coma that precedes death. I went down and found a cold beer, turned on the television set with the volume low, and watched twenty-two very large young men knocking one another down while thousands cheered. I watched and yet did not watch. It was merely a busy pattern of color, motion, and sound.



Blue handles of kitchen shears. Helena climbing naked in the red light of the Exuma sun, rising to teeter on the rail, then find her balance, then dive into the black-gray water of the cove at Shroud Cay and then surface, seal-sleek, hair water-pasted flat to the delicate skull contours. Penny Woertz snuggling against me in the night, her back and shoulders moist with exertion, making little umming sounds of content as her breath was slowing. Biddy sobbing aloud as she trotted into my bathroom, her running a humble, awkward, clumsy, bovine, knock-kneed gait. Memory and digital skills. The bleeders don't jump, and the hangers don't bleed. Twenty thousand to a tall man. Jake saying "Bon voyage." The `Bama Gal erupting into the sunlight after all the weeks on the murky bottom. Tom Pike lifting his face from his hands, eyes streaming. Mick thumping the cabin trim with a solid fist as he showed me the honest way the Likely Lady had been built. Substantial means more than comfortable and less than impressive. Maurie streaking greasy fingers across the rounded, pneumatic, porcelain-gold of her thigh. Rick Holton flexing and rubbing his wrists after I'd unwound the tight bite of the hanger wire. Blue handles of kitchen shears. Penny's clovery scents. Five dozen silk ties with good labels. Orange light winking. An umber-orange mole, not as big as a dime. Huddled nude in a Gauguin jungle.



The mind is a cauldron and things bubble up and show for a moment, then slip back into the brew. You can't reach down and find anything by touch. You wait for some order, some relationship in the order in which they appear. Then yell Eureka! and believe that it was a process of cold, pure logic.



Finally, on my fourth visit to the electrosleep bedside, it was exactly six o'clock, so I gently removed the headset, put it aside, and turned the Dormed off. I watched her, ready to go awaken Biddy if Maureen woke up. For several minutes she did not move. Then she rolled her head over to one side, made a murmurous sound, then rolled all the way over onto her side, pulled her knees up, put her two hands, palms together, under her cheek, and soon was breathing as deeply as before.



As the room got darker I turned on a low lamp on the other side of the room. I sat in a Boston rocker near the bed, watching the sleeping woman and thinking that this was probably where Biddy sat and watched her, while she thought about the marriage and thought about her own life.



At a little after eight I knocked on Biddy's door. After the second attempt I heard a groggy, querulous mutter. I waited and knocked again and suddenly she pulled the door open. She had a robe around her shoulders and she held it closed with a concealed hand. Her hair was in wild disarray and her face was swollen with sleep. "What time is it!"



I told her it was a little after eight, that I had unhooked Maurie from her machine at six, and that she was still sleeping. She yawned and combed her hair back with her free hand. "The poor thing must have been really exhausted. I won't be a minute."



When she was dressed, she sent me downstairs, saying she'd bring Maurie down in a little while. I found the light switches. As I was making a drink the phone rang. It was just one ring. No more. And so I decided Biddy had probably answered it upstairs. As I was carrying my drink into the living room it rang again, and once again it was just one ring.



Soon they came down. Maurie wore a navy blue floor-length robe with long sleeves and white buttons and white trim. She was scratching her shoulder with one hand and the opposite hip with the other, and complaining in a sour little voice. "Just about eaten to pieces. How do they get in with the house all closed up?"



"You'll just make them worse by scratching, dear."



"I can't help it."



"Say hello to Travis, dear."



She stopped at the foot of the stairs and smiled at me, still scratching, and said, "Hello, Travis McGee! How are you? I had a very good nap today."



"Good for you."



"But I itch something awful. Biddy?"



"Yes, honey."



"Is he here?" Her tone and expression were apprehensive.



"Tom went on a trip."



"Can I have peanut butter sandwiches, Biddy, please?"



"But your diet, dear. You're almost up to a hundred and fifty again."



Her tone was wheedling, sympathy-seeking. "But I'm real tall, Biddy. And I'm starving. And I had a good nap and I itch something awful!"



"Well..."



"Please? He isn't here anyway. He won't know about it. You know something? Some son of a bitch must have kicked me or something. I'm so sore right--"



"Maureen!"



She stopped, gulped, looked humble. "I didn't mean to."



"Please try to speak nicely, dear."



"You won't tell him?"



Biddy took my glass and they went out into the kitchen. In a little while Maureen came walking in very slowly and carefully, carrying my fresh drink. I thanked her and she beamed at me. Somehow she had managed to get a little wad of peanut butter stuck on the end of her nose, possibly from licking the top off the jar. She went back. I heard them talking out there but could not hear the words, just the tone, and it was like a conversation between child and mother.



When they came back in, Maureen pulled a hassock over in front of the television set. Biddy plugged a set of earphones into a jack in the rear of the set and Maureen put them on eagerly and then was lost in the images and the sound, expression rapt, as she ate her sandwiches.



Biddy said, "She loves to watch things Tom can't stand."



"Does she remember running away last night?"



"No. It's all gone now. Slate wiped clean."



"She won't say Tom's name?"



"Sometimes she will. She's so terribly anxious to please him, to have him approve of her. She just gets... all tightened up when he's here. Really, he's wonderfully kind and patient with her. But I guess that... a child-wife isn't what a man of Tom's intelligence can adjust to."



"If you think of her just as a child, she's a good child."



"Oh, yes. She's happy, or seems happy, and she likes to help, but she forgets how to do things."



"It doesn't seem consistent with suicide attempts, does it?"



She frowned. "No. But it's more complex than that, Travis. There's another kind of child involved, a sly and naughty child. And the times she's tried, she's gotten into the liquor and gotten drunk first. It's almost as if alcohol creates some kind of awareness of self and her condition, removes some block or something. We keep it all locked up, of course, ever since the first time. But the tune she locked herself in the bathroom and cut her wrist, I'd forgotten and left a half quart of gin on the countertop with the bottles of mix. I just didn't see it, somehow. And she sneaked it upstairs, I guess. Anyway, the empty bottle was under her bed. Then the time Tom found the noose, we know she got into something, but we don't know what it was or how. Vanilla extract or shaving lotion or something. Maybe even rubbing alcohol. But of course she couldn't remember. It's quite late. Can I fix you something to eat?"



"I think I'll be moving along, Biddy. Thanks."



"I owe you, my friend. I was irritated you let me sleep so long. But I guess you knew better than I how badly I needed it. I was getting ragged around the edges. The very least I can do is feed you."



"No thanks, I..."



She straightened, head tilted, listening, and then relaxed. "Sorry. I thought it was that damned phone again. I think something's wrong with the line. For the last two or three months every once in a while it will give one ring or part of a ring and then stop, and there won't be anybody there. Just the dial tone when you pick it up. Did you say you would stay?"



"I'd better not, thanks just the same."



Maureen's good-night was a smile and a bob of the head and a hasty return to the color screen where a vivid-faced girl was leaning over a wire fence amid a throng, cheering a racehorse toward the finish line. The only sound was the insectile buzzing that escaped from Maureen's padded earphones.



As I walked to the car in the drive I heard the clack behind me as Biddy relocked the heavy front door.



11



-----SUNDAY DINNER was finished



by the tune I got to the motel dining room, but they could provide steak sandwiches. There was one whispering couple on the far side of the room and one lonely fat man slumped at the bar. Both the couple and the fat man were gone when I went to the bar for a nightcap. I sat on the far stool by the wall, where Penny had been sitting when I had first seen her.



Jake, the bartender, wore an odd expression as he approached me. "Evening, sir. Look, if I got you in any kind of jam--"



"I told Stanger he could check it out with you, that I met her right here Friday night."



He looked relieved. "What happened, he mouse-trapped me. He came up with this thing about we let them come in and hustle, we could lose the license. And one thing and another, he worked it around to you and that girl, and I thought he had been tipped and I couldn't exactly deny it, so I said sure, they left together, but how could I know they weren't friends or something already. Honest to God, sir, I didn't know it was the same one in the paper this morning until he said so. Then I'm left hanging, wondering if you were some kind of crazy that took her home and... there are some very ordinary looking guys who are very weird about hustlers. But I couldn't imagine you doing... Anyway, when I saw you come in, I felt better, I don't know why."



"I think maybe some Black Jack on one rock."



"Yes, sir, Mr. McGee." When he served it with a proper flourish, he said, "Jesus, I've felt half sick ever since. And... I guess you've got a right to feel a lot sicker than me." The implied question was very clear.



"Jake, we walked out of here and shook hands and sang one small hymn and said good-night."



He flushed. "I'm sorry. It's none of my business. I was just thinking she didn't have the right moves, you know? So what she is doing is trying to get even with a boyfriend who's cheating on her by doing some swinging herself, so she takes you home and the next day she tells him how she got even, and he can't stand it. She's laughing at him. He grabs the first thing and--"



"Stares in horror at what he's done and, sobbing his heart out, dials the cops."



"It's just that you try to figure out what happened."



"I know, Jake. I'm sorry. Everybody plays that particular game. That's because we always want to know why. Not so much how and who and when. But why."



"Can I ask you something? Did you stop in your room before you came in to eat?"



"No. I parked in front. The question implies I've been away from the place. So somebody has been trying to get me."



He looked uneasy. "Well, it's Mr. Holton. He comes in off and on and he's never any trouble. He's a lawyer. He was here about five o'clock looking for you. He had two quick ones and he came back about quarter to six. He'd have some and then go looking for you and come back. I let him have more than I would somebody else, on account of he's local and a good customer and he's always treated me good. Well, he finally got mean and loud and I finally had to cut him off. From the way he walked out... maybe a half hour before you came in to eat... he could have passed out in his car by now. Or maybe he's still on his feet and waiting for you by your room. He began telling me, toward the end, that he was going to whip your ass. Looking at you, I think maybe it wouldn't be so easy to do, unless he sucker-punched you, which he acted mad enough to do. I thought you might want to keep your eyes open on your way back to the room."



It earned him the change from a five for the one drink.



I decided to walk around to 109 rather than drive, as I had planned. I went the long way around and moved onto the grass and kept out of the lights. I stopped and listened and looked and finally discerned a burly shadow standing near a tall shrub and leaning against the white motel wall. I reconstructed the memory of what he had done with the revolver when he got it back. He had shoved it into his belt on the left side, under his jacket, well over toward his hip, grip toward the middle, where he could reach it easily with his right hand. I squatted and figured out a plausible route and then pulled my shoes off and circled and ducked quickly and silently through two areas of light, and then crawled slowly and carefully on hands and knees into the shelter of the foliage just behind him and to his right. As I neared him I heard his bad case of hiccups, a steady solid rhythmic case, each one a strangled, muffled sound due to his effort to stay quiet enough to ambush me. From then on I made each move on the hiccup, a jerky progress as in the most ancient motion pictures. At last, unheard, I was on my hands and knees right behind him and slightly to his right, just where a large and obedient dog would be. I inched my knees closer and put my weight back and lifted both hands. On the next hiccup I snapped my hands out and grasped his heavy ankles and yanked his legs out from under him, giving enough of a twist so that he would land on his left side. As he landed I scrambled onto him, felt the checkered wooden grip, and yanked the revolver free and rolled across the grass with it and stood up.



He pushed himself slowly to a sitting position, rolled up onto his knees, put his hands on the wall, and slowly stood up. He turned and put his back against the wall and shook his thick head.



"Bassard," he said thickly. "Dirry stud bassard."



"Settle down, Richard. I cured your hiccups." He grunted and launched himself at me, swinging wildly while he was still too far away to punish anything but the humid night air. I ducked to the side and stuck a leg out and he went down heavily onto his face. And once again, with the painful slowness of a large damaged bug, he got himself up onto his feet, using a small tree as a prop.



He turned around and located me. "Wages of sin," he mumbled. "My lousy ideas. Memories. All worked up. I read it, you bassard. Made her sore at me, you tricky bassard. Kept her here and soft-talked her an' pronged her, you lousy smartass."



And with a big effortful grunt he came at me again. As he got to me I dropped, squatting, fingertips on the grass. As he tripped and spilled over my back I came up swiftly and he did a half turn in the air and landed flat on his back. He stared at the sky, breathing hard. He coughed in a shallow gagging way.



"Sick," he said. "Gonna be sick." I helped him roll over. He got onto hands and knees, crawled slowly and then stopped, braced, vomited in dreadful spasms.



"So sick," he moaned.



I got him onto his feet, and with one arm across my shoulders, my arm around his clumsy waist, I got him into the room. Once in the bathroom he was sick again. I held his stupid head, then sat him on the closed lid of the toilet and swabbed the mud and vomit off him with a wet towel. He swayed, eyes half closed. "Loved that girl. Loved her. Lousy thing. I can't stand it." He opened his eyes and looked up at me. "Honest to God, I can't stand it!"



"We better get you home, Rick."



He thought that over and nodded. "Best thing. Bad shape. Who cares anymore? Janice doesn't give a shit. Penny the only one cared. Gone. Some sumbitch killed her. Some crazy. Know it wasn't you. Wish it had been you. Fix you good."



"Where do you live, Holton?"



"Twenny-eight twenny, Forest Drive."



I got his car keys from him and the description of his car, and went around to the front and drove it back to the room. I went in and brought him out and helped him into the red convertible, and got behind the wheel. He muttered directions.



When I had to stop for a light, he said, "Sorry I had to smack you around, McGee. You know how it is."



"Sure. I know how it is."



"Get it out of my system. Hated you. Shouldna layed my girl, my wonnerful freckly nurse-girl. But man to man, shit, if she wanned it, she wanned it, and why should you turn it down, huh? Great kid. Greatest piece of ass in the worl'. You're a nice guy, McGee. I doan wanna like you, you sumbitch, but I do. Hear that? I do."



I had to shake him awake to get more directions. When I turned into the asphalt drive, he was asleep again. It was a cement-block house, one story, white with pink trim, a scraggly yard, house lights on, a gray Plymouth station wagon in one half of the carport.



I turned away from the carport and stopped near the front door. The outside light went on and the door opened and a lean, dark-haired woman looked out through the screen door.



I got out and came around the car. "Mrs. Holton?"



She came out and looked at her sleeping husband. She wore dark orange slacks, a yellow blouse, and she had a bright red kerchief tied around her slender, dusky throat. Gypsy colors.



"Unfortunately, yes. Who are you?"



"My name is McGee."



I had the feeling that it startled her slightly and I could think of no reason why.



"I'll help you get him in."



She reached and took hold of his jaw and turned his head slightly. She raised the other hand, held it poised for a moment, and then whip-cracked her lean palm across his face twice, very quickly and with great force. It brought him struggling up out of the mists, gasping and looking around.



"Hey! Hey there, Janice doll! This here is Travis McGee, my ver' good buddy. He's going to come in and have a li'l drink. We're all going to have a drink. Right?"



As he struggled to get out of the car I took him by the arm and levered him out. We supported him, one on either side, and after we got him through the door, she gave directions in a voice strained with effort. She turned on the light of what was obviously a guest room. We sat him on the bed and he sat with his eyes closed, mumbling something we could not understand. When he started to topple over backward, I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so that he landed on the pillow. She knelt and unlaced his shoes and pulled them off. I picked his legs up and swung them onto the bed. She loosened his belt. When he gave a long, ragged snore, she looked at me and made a mouth of distaste. I followed her as she walked out. She turned the lights off and closed the guest room door.



I followed her into the living room. She turned, standing more erect, and said, "Thanks for your help. This doesn't happen often. That is not an excuse or an apology. Just a statement of fact."



I worked the revolver out of my trouser pocket and gave it to her. "If it happens at all, he shouldn't run around with this thing."



"I'll put it away and tell him he must have lost it. Thank you again."



"May I use your phone to call a cab?"



She stepped to the front window and looked across the street. "My friend is still up. She'll come over and listen for the kids while I take you in."



"I don't want to trouble you, Mrs. Holton."



"I'd like some air. And you've been to a lot of trouble."



She went to the phone in the foyer and dialed, then had a brief low-voiced conversation. We went out and got into the car. She asked me to wait for a moment. When the door opened in the house across the street and a woman came out and started across, she told me to start up. She waved and called, "Thanks a lot, Meg."



"Perfectly okay, Jan. Take your tune, honey."



Janice Holton untied the kerchief and put it over her dark hair and fastened it under her chin. From her manner it was going to be a swift and silent trip.



"I guess what racked your husband up was having some person or persons unknown kill his girl friend."



Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she had turned quickly and was staring at me. "I couldn't care less what... racks him up, Mr. McGee. I feel sorry for the girl. As a matter of fact I regret never having had a chance to thank her."



"Thank her?"



"For letting me out of bondage, let's say."



"Unlocked your chains?"



"You're not really interested in the sordid details of my happy marriage, are you?"



"It just seemed like a strange way to put it."



"I find myself saying some very strange things lately."



"Right at the bottom of the certificate, Mrs. Holton, there's the fine print that says you live happily ever after."



I suppose that you could call it role-playing, maybe in the same sense that the psychologists who use group therapy use the term. Or you could call it, as Meyer does, my con-man instinct. Okay, call it a trace of chameleon blood. But the best way to relate to people is to fake their same hang-ups, and when you relate to people, you open them up. So I lie a little. Instant empathy. To crack her facade I had to make out like an ex-married, so I spoke with the maximum male bitterness.



"You sound like you had the tour too, Mr. McGee?"



"Ride the roily-coaster. Find your way through the fun house. Float through the tunnel of love. Sure. I had a carnival trip, Mrs. Holton. But the setup tends to do a pretty good job of gutting the husband. I believed the fine print. But she turned out to be a bum. So I end up paying her so much a month so she can keep on being a bum. So I'm a little bitter about the way the system works."



"For a girl married to a lawyer, it doesn't exactly work out that way. I believed the fine print too, Mr. McGee. I considered it an honorable estate, an honorable contract. And, by God, I worked at it. I knew after the first year it wasn't going to be the way... you hope it will be. So I tried to understand him. I think Rick feels that he is... unworthy of being loved. So he can't ever believe anyone loves him, really. So he has a thousand mean snide little ways of spoiling things. He loves the boys, I know. But any kind of... family ceremony, something for warmth and love and fun-oh, can he ever clobber everybody. Tears and shambles and nastiness, and everything you try to plan... birthdays, anniversaries, he has such a cruel way of making things turn sour. But I was stuck with it. I thought I was stuck with it. You know, if you're a grownup, you add up the ledger. A successful man, a faithful man, not a drunk or a chaser. But then... the sneaky business with Miss Woertz changed the ledger."



"And let you out of bondage?"



"Kept me from agonizing over... making the marriage work. Sort of... canceled all my vows."



"Did you find out about her quite recently?"



"Oh, no. I found out practically as soon as it started. He started that crusade about finding out what really happened to Doctor Sherman. You know about that?"



"He told me about it. Was that just to help cover up the affair with the nurse?"



"Oh, no. He's sincere about it. But when it threw them together, he sure put in a lot of hours in so-called investigation. Somebody called me up and told me about it, in a very nasty whisper. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. I didn't want to believe it, but I knew it was true, somehow. Then I saw all the little clues." She gave a mirthless laugh. "The most convincing one was the way he became so much sweeter to me and the boys."



"So are you going to divorce him?"



"I don't know. I don't love him anymore. But I haven't got a dime of my own. And I just don't know if I could get enough alimony and child support if I bring suit."



I turned in at the Wahini Lodge and parked away from the entrance lights, over near the architectured waterfall and the flaming gas torches.



"You're too darned easy to talk to, Mr. McGee."



"Maybe because we just wear the same kind of battle scars. I had to get out of my setup just as fast as I could."



"Any kids?"



"No. She kept saying later, later."



"It makes a difference, you know. It's a pretty nice house, nice neighborhood, good school. There's medicine and dental work and shoes and savings accounts. It's an arrangement, right now. I do my part of the job of keeping the house going. But I won't ever let him touch me again. It would turn my stomach. He can find himself another playmate. I don't give a damn. And we don't have to socialize, particularly."



"Can you live the rest of your life like that?"



"No! I don't intend to. But I have a friend who says that we... says that I had better just sort of go along with it as is for the time being. He is a dear, gentle, wise, understanding man. We've been very close ever since I found out about Rick. His marriage is as hopeless as mine but in a different way. I'm not having an affair with him. We see each other and we have to be terribly careful and discreet because I wouldn't want to give Rick any kind of ammunition he could use if and when I try to get a divorce. We don't even have any kind of special understanding about the future. It's just that we both... have to endure things the way they are for a while."



"Then, I guess the family outing Rick told me about, the trip to Vero Beach yesterday, must have been pretty grim."



She had turned in the bucket seat to face me, her back against the door, legs pulled up. "Was it ever! Like that old thing about what a tangled web we weave. I didn't have any idea he'd want to spend any part of Saturday with his wife and children. I'd told him I was going to drive over and see June and leave the boys off with my best friend on the way. She lives twenty miles east of here. Her boys are just the same ages, practically. I'd fixed it with June to cover for me in case Rick phoned me there for some stupid reason. And I was going to drive to... another place close by and spend the day with my friend. But out of the clear blue Rick decided to come too! I didn't see how in the world he could have found out anything. But he was so ugly I decided he must have had a little lovers' spat with his girl friend. When I left the boys at my friend's place, I had a chance to phone my sister and warn her, while Rick was out in the car, but I couldn't get hold of my friend to call the date off. Rick was in a foul mood all day." Again the mirthless laugh. "What a lousy soap-opera!"



I could not leave at that moment because it would give her the aftertaste of having been pumped, of having talked too much. So I invented a gaudy confrontation between me and the boyfriend of a wife I never had. I spun it out and when I was through, she said, "It's wretched that people have to be put through things like that just because a wife or a husband is too immature to... to be plain everyday faithful. Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lauderdale?"



"No. She moved away. I have no idea where she is now. I send the money to a Jacksonville bank. If I want to find out where she is, all I'd have to do is stop making payments. Look, do you want to come in for a nightcap?"



"Golly, where did the time go? Meg is a good neighbor, but I don't want to take too much advantage. Mr. McGee?"



"Travis."



"Travis, I didn't mean to sound like a long cry of woe, but it's made me feel better somehow, comparing bruises with somebody."



"Good luck to you, Janice."



"And to you too." I had gotten out. She clambered over to the driver's seat, snapped the belt on, and pulled it back to her slender dimension. "Night, now," she called, and backed out and swung around and out onto the divided highway, upshifting skillfully as she went.



I projected a telepathic suggestion to her unknown friend. Grab that one, man. Richard Haslo Holton was too blind to see what he had. She's got fire, integrity, courage, restraint. And she is a very handsome lively creature. Grab her if you can, because even though there are quite a few of them around, hardly any of them ever get loose.



No messages, no blinking red light on the phone. The maid had turned the bed down. Small hours of the morning. When I put the light out, a freckled ghost roamed the room. I said good night to her. "We'll find out, Miss Penny," I told her. "Somehow we'll find out and you can stop this wandering around motel rooms at night."



12



I HAD A hell of a night. Hundreds of dreams and from what little I could remember of them, they all had the same pattern. Either somebody was running after me to tell me something important and I could not stop running from them or understand why I couldn't stop, or I was running headlong after somebody else who was slowly moving away no matter how hard I ran, moving away in a car or a bus or a train. Sometimes it was Penny, sometimes Helena. I woke with an aching tiredness of bone, a mouth like a cricket cage, grainy eyes, and skin that seemed to have stretched so that it was too big for me and wanted to hang in tired, draped folds.



After endless toothbrushing and a shower that did no good I phoned the Fort Courtney Police Department and left word for Stanger that I had called.



My breakfast had just been served when he settled into the chair across the table from me and told the waitress to bring him some hot tea.



"You look poorly, McGee."



"Slept poorly, feel poorly."



"That's my story, every morning of my life. You get yourself a swing and a miss with Janice Holton?"



"They took the trip to Vero Beach together. And you could confirm it by finding out who she left the kids with, an old friend twenty miles from here, in the direction of Vero Beach. And Holton is serious about believing somebody killed Doctor Sherman. The Holton marriage has bombed out. She knew about the nurse. She's going through the motions for the sake of the kids until she can find some way to land on her feet. And I think she will, sooner or later."



He blew on his hot tea and took a sip and stared at me and shook his head slowly. "Now, aren't you the one! By God, she cozies up pretty good to some damn insurance investigator."



"I didn't have to use it. You gave me a better approach."



He aimed his little dusty brown eyes at me. "I did?"



I put my fork down and smiled across at him. "Yes, indeed you did, you silly half-ass fumbling excuse for a cop."



"Now, don't you get your--"



"You knew Holton was screwing her, Stanger. You knew that the note you found made it clear to anybody who can read simple words that she and I had something going for us. So what did you think Holton would do after he saw the note or a copy of it? Chuckle and say, Well, well, well, how about that? You probably know even that the ex-assistant state attorney carries a gun. But did you make any effort to tip me so I wouldn't get shot? Not good old Stanger, the lawman. Thanks, Stanger. Anytime I can do any little thing for you, look me up."



"Now, wait a minute, goddamn it! What makes you think he read the note?"



"Some direct quotes sort of stuck in his mind. He recited them."



He drank more of his tea. He found a third of a cigar on his person, thumbnailed the remains of the ash off it, held a match to it.



"He try to use the gun?"



"He didn't get the chance. I was tipped. I found him staked out and waiting, so I sneaked up on him and took it away. I don't know whether he was going to use it or not. Give him the benefit of the argument and say he wouldn't. He knew I hadn't put the shears in her neck. He knew I was cleared of that. Let's say he resented the rest of it, though. Incidentally, I gave the gun to his wife and she seemed to think it would be a good idea to tuck it away. Maybe there shouldn't be a gun in that happy household."



"So you took the gun away from him and?"



"I yanked his legs out from under him to get it. Then I had to trip him onto his face, and then I had to block him and somersault him onto his back. The last one took it out of him. He'd been drinking. It made him sick. I drove him home in his car. We became dear old buddies somehow. Drunks are changeable. He was passed out by the tune I got him home. I helped get him to bed. She had a neighbor watch the kids while she drove me back. She's known about the affair since it started. He sleeps in the guest room. I like her."



He held up the hand with the cigar in it. He held it up, palm toward me, and said, "I swear on the grave of my dear old mother who loved me so much she didn't even mind me becoming a cop that I just can't figure out how the hell Rick Holton got hold of that note. Look, as an ex-prosecutor he's got a little leverage. Not too much but some. I think he would know where to look, who to bug, if he knew there was a note. But how could he know? Look, now. The Woertz woman knew because she wrote it. I knew because I found it. Jackass Nudenbarger knew because he was with me when I found it. You knew because I read it to you. And down at the store, two men. Tad Unger did the lab work and made photocopies. Bill Samuels acts as a sort of clerk-coordinator. He sets up the file and keeps it neat and tidy and complete to turn over to the state attorney if need be. He protects the chain of evidence, makes the autopsy request, and so on." Had I thought for a moment, I would have realized there had to be an autopsy. They would want to know if a murdered unmarried woman was pregnant, if there was any sign of a blow that had not left any surface bruises, contusions, or abrasions, if she was under the influence of alcohol or narcotics, if she had been raped or had had intercourse recently enough to be able to type the semen. And the painstaking, inch-by-inch examination of the epidermis would disclose any scratches, puncture wounds, minor bruises, bite marks. And there would be a chemical analysis of the contents of the stomach, as death stops the normal digestive processes.



"You all right?" Stanger asked softly.



"I'm just perfect. When did they do the autopsy?"



"They must have been starting on it when I was talking to you in your room Saturday night."



"And those two men, Unger and..."



"Samuels."



"They wouldn't volunteer any information about the note?"



"Hell no. The days of volunteering any information to anybody about anything are long gone. Order yourself more coffee. Don't go away. Be right back."



It took him ten minutes. He sat down wearily, mopped his forehead on a soiled handkerchief. "Well, Bill Samuels was off yesterday and Holton came in about eleven in the morning. A clerk named Foster was on duty and Holton told him that the state attorney, Ben Gaffner, had asked him to take a look at the note that had been found in the Woertz girl's apartment. So Foster unlocked the file and let him read the photocopy. It still doesn't answer the question."



"Can I give it a try?"



"Go ahead."



"Would Holton know you were on the case?"



"Sure."



"Would he know he wouldn't be able to get much out of you?"



"He'd know that."



"Would he know who's working with you?"



"I guess he'd know... Oh, goddamn that motor-



sickel idiot!"



He told me that as long as I'd had the grief of it, I might as well have the pleasure of seeing the chewing process. I signed the check for my breakfast and his tea and followed him out.



The car was parked in the shade. Nudenbarger, now in a sport shirt with green and white vertical stripes, was leaning against it smiling and talking to a pair of brown hefty little teen-age girls in shorts. He saw us coming and said something. The kids turned and looked at us, then walked slowly away, looking back from time to time.



"All set?" he asked, opening the car door.



Stanger kicked it shut. "Maybe on the side you could rent that mouth. People could store stuff in it. Bicycles, broken rocking chairs, footlockers. Nice little income on the side."



"Now just a minute, Al, I--"



"Shut up. Close that big empty stupid cave fastened to the front of your stupid face, Nudenbarger. Stop holding the car up. I just want to know how stupid you are. Every day you become the new world's champion stupid. How did you get mousetrapped into talking about the note the nurse left?"



"Mousetrapped? I wasn't mousetrapped."



"But you talked about it, didn't you?"



"Well... as a matter of fact--"



"After I told you you had never heard of any note?"



"But this was different, Al."



"He just walked up and asked you what we found in the apartment?"



"No. What he said was that he was upset about her being killed. He was out to the place real early yesterday. I'd just got up and I was walking around calling the dog. He said he and his wife were very fond of her and grateful to her. He said he didn't want to get out of line or step on any toes, but he wondered if maybe outside investigators ought to be brought in, and he thought he might be able to arrange it. Al, I know how you feel about anything like that, so I told him it looked like we could make it. He asked if we had much of anything to go on, and I said we had that note and told him what I could remember of it and said that the fellow she wrote it to, meaning you, McGee, had checked out okay."



"What kept you from falling down laughing?"



"About what, Al?"



"That line about him and his wife being fond of the little nurse. And grateful to her? Jesus!"



"What's wrong with that?"



"Why in the world would Janice Holton be grateful to Penny Woertz?"



"Who said anything about Janice Holton?"



"Didn't you say Holton told you that--"



"Holton! It was Mr. Tom Pike that stopped at the place. I haven't said one damn word to Mr. Holton. Mr. Tom Pike only had a couple of minutes. He was on his way to the airport and he was taking the shortcut, the back road past my place, and saw me and stopped because, like he said, he was upset about the girl getting killed. Now you agree it was different? Do you?"



The anger sagged out of Stanger. "Okay. It was different. He's the kind of guy who'd want to help any way he can. And the nurse helped take care of Mrs. Pike. Now, dammit, Lew, did you say one word to anybody else about any note?"



"Never did. Not once. And I won't, Al."



"You shouldn't have told Pike either."



Stanger turned to me. "Back where we started. Look, I'll get it out of Holton and if I think you ought to know, I'll let you know, McGee."



I motioned to him and took him out of earshot of Nudenbarger. "Any more little errands on the side, as long as I'm stuck here?"



He scowled, spat, scuffed his foot. "I've got men ringing every doorbell in the whole area around that Ridge Lane place. Somebody had to arrive and kill her and leave in broad daylight. Somebody had to see something on Saturday afternoon. I've got men going through the office files of Doc Sherman that went into storage when he died, and the files that were taken over by the doctor who took over Sherman's practice, Doctor John Wayne. Hell of a name, eh? Little fat fellow. Sherman treated some crazies when he was researching barbiturate addiction. So we don't want to rule out the chance of an ex-patient going after the office nurse. She'd been working as a special-duty nurse, so I got hold of the list of patients she took care of ever since the doctor died, and we're going through those. On top of that I've got a good man digging into her private life, every damned thing he can find, the ex-husband, previous boyfriends. Nothing was stolen from the apartment. She lived alone. Those are good solid front doors and good locks on the kitchen doors. I think she would have to know somebody to let them in. No sign of forcible entry. From the condition of the bed, she was sleeping and got up and put the robe on and let somebody in. No makeup. A man or woman could have shoved those shears into her throat. We've got a blood pattern, a spatter pattern. Whoever did it could have gotten some on them from the knees down. To reconstruct it, she put both hands to her throat, staggered back, fell to her knees, then rolled over onto her back. She hadn't been sexually molested. There were indications she'd had intercourse within from four to six hours from the time of death. She wasn't pregnant. She was going to start her period in about three days. She had a slightly sprained ankle, based on some edema and discoloration. There was a small contusion just above the hairline at the center of her forehead and a contusion on her right knee, but these three injuries had occurred a considerable time before death. We're processing a court order to get into her checking account records and her safety deposit box. Now if you can come up with something I just haven't happened to think of, McGee..."



It was a challenge, of course. And I was supposed to be overwhelmed by the diligence and thoroughness of the law.



"What about delivery and service people? Dry cleaners, laundry, TV repairs, phone, plumber, electrician? What about the apartment superintendent, if any?"



He sighed heavily. He was upwind of me and even outdoors he had breath like a cannibal bat. "Son of a gun. Would you believe me if I told you that was all in the works, but I just forgot to mention it?"



"I'd believe you, Stanger. I think you might be pretty good at your job."



"I'll write that in my diary tonight."



"What about the nurses' day room at the hospital? She'd probably have a locker there. There might be some personal stuff in it."



He sighed again and took out his blue notebook and wrote it down. "One for you."



"Maybe there's another one too. If there is, can I check it out? I have... a personal interest in this, you know."



"If there's another one, you can check it out."



"I don't think a registered nurse would be doing the billing and the bookkeeping and keeping the appointment book. So there probably had to be another girl working for Sherman, part time or full time."



He squinted at the bright sky. He nodded. "And she was on vacation when he killed himself. Just now remembered. Okay, go ahead, dammit. Can't recall her name. But Doctor Wayne's office girl would know. Just don't try to carry the ball if you come up with anything. Report to me first."



"And you tell me what you find out from Holton."



"Deal."



He trudged toward the waiting car. I went back inside and used a pay phone in the lobby to call Dr. Wayne's office. The answering service told me they opened the office at noon on Mondays.



I went back to 109. The cart was outside the door, the maid just finishing up. She was a brawny, handsome black woman. Her skin tone was a flawless coppery brown, and across the cheekbones she looked as if she had an admixture of Indian blood.



"Be through here in a minute," she said.



"Take your time."



She was making up the bed. I sat on the straight chair by the desk module that was part of the long formica countertop. I found the phone number for D. Wintin Hardahee and as I wrote it down I saw the maid out of the corner of my eye and for a moment thought she was dancing. When I turned and looked at her, I saw that she was swaying, feet planted, chin on her chest, eyes closed. She lifted her head and gave me a distant smile and said, "Feeling kind of... kind of..." Then she closed her eyes and toppled forward. Her head and shoulders landed facedown on the bed and she slipped and bounded loosely off and landed on the floor, rolling onto her back. Suddenly I knew what must have happened. I went to the closet alcove and bent and picked the doctored bottle of gin out of the corner where I had put it and, stupidly, forgotten it. There were a couple of fresh drops of colorless liquid on the outside of the bottle, on the shoulder of it. Any moisture would have long since dried up in the dehumidifying effect of the air conditioning. I licked a drop off with my tongue tip. Plain water. So she had taken a nice little morning pickup out of the bottle and replaced it with tap water.



I went to her and knelt beside her. Her pulse was strong and good, and she was breathing deeply and regularly. She wore a pale blue uniform trimmed with white. Over the blouse pocket was embroidered, in red, "Cathy."



After weighing pros and cons and cursing my idiocy for leaving the gin where somebody might find it, I went looking for another maid. There was a cart on the long balcony overhead, in front of an open door to one of the second-floor units. I went up the iron stairs and rapped on the open door and went in. The maid came out of the bathroom. She was younger than Cathy, small and lean, with matte skin the shade of a cup of coffee, double on the cream. She wore orange lipstick, had two white streaks bleached into her dark hair, and a projection of astonishingly large breasts. Her embroidery said "Lorette."



"Sir, I just now started in here. I can come back if--"



"It isn't my room. Are you a friend of Cathy's?"



"You looking for her, great big strong girl, she's working the downstairs wing right under here, mister."



"I know where she is. I asked you if you're a friend of hers."



"Why you asking me, mister?"



"She might need a friend to do her a favor."



"She and me, we get along pretty good."



"Would you come down to Room One-O-nine?" She looked very skeptical. "What she wants to do and what I want are a couple of different things, mister. I do maid work, period. I don't hold it against her, but she ought to know by now if she wants a girl for anything else, she can go call that fat Annabelle or that crazy kid they got working in the kitchen."



"I got back to my room a couple of minutes ago, Lorette. Your friend Cathy tapped one of my bottles. She thought it was gin. It was sleeping medicine. She's down there passed out. Now, if you don't give a damn, say so."



Her eyes were round and wide. "Cold stone passed out? You go on down, please, and I'll come right along quick."



Ten seconds after I was back in the room, she pushed the door open and stood on the threshold, staring in at Cathy.



"It's like you said?" she asked. "You didn't mess with her any kind of way, did you?"



"There's the bottle over there. Go take a slug and in a little while you can lie down right beside her."



She made up her mind and pulled the door almost closed as she came in. She dropped to her knees and laid her ear against Cathy's chest. Then she shook her and slapped her. Cathy's sleeping head lolled and Cathy made a little whine of irritation and complaint.



"Can you cover for her?" I asked.



She sat back on her heels and nibbled a thumb knuckle. "Best thing is get Jase to bring a laundry cart and he'p load her in and put a couple sheets over her and put her in an empty." She stared suspiciously up at me. "That's no kind of poison, is it? She'll come out of it okay?"



"In two to three hours, probably."



She stood up and stared at me, head tilted. "How come you don't just call the desk?"



"Would they fire her?"



"They sure to hell would."



"Lorette, if I'd had that bottle locked up in my suitcase and she'd gone digging around in there and tapped it, then I might have called the desk. Maybe I would have called anyway if she'd been giving me sloppy service since I've been here. But she's kept this place bright as a but-



ton, and I plain forgot that bottle and left it on the closet floor over there where any maid would find it. So I share



the blame."



"And maybe you don't want to have to tell a lot of folks how come you keep your sleeping medicine in with



the gin?"



"I think you're a nice bright girl and you can cover for



her without any trouble at all."



"Because it's slack right now I can do hers and mine both, what rooms we got left. But one more thing. If you turned her in, could she rightly say that you've been messing with her some?"



"No. She couldn't say that."



"Then, I'll be back in just a little while."



It was five minutes before she came back. She held the door open for a tall young boy with enormous shoulders, who pushed a laundry hamper on wheels into the room. He parked it beside Cathy and picked her up easily and lowered her into it. Lorette covered her with a couple of rumpled sheets and said, "Now Annabelle will be waiting right there in Two eighty-eight, Jase. You just put Cathy on the bed there and let Annabelle tend to her, hear?"



"Yump," said Jase, and wheeled her out.



"Finish up fixing your bed for you, mister."



"Thanks."



As she was finishing she giggled. She had a lot of lovely white teeth. She shook her head. "That ol' girl is sure going to wonder what in the world happened to her."



"Explain the situation, will you?"



"Surely. If you're not checking out, she'll be coming by to say thank you tomorrow, I expect." She paused at the door, fists in the pockets of her uniform skirt. "It's important Cathy shouldn't get fired, mister. She needs the job. She lives with her old mother, and that old woman is mean as a snake. All crippled up with arthritis. She about drove Cathy's man away, I guess. There's three little kids, and Cathy could manage all right on the job money, but she'll see a dress and keep thinking about it until she just has to have it, no matter what, and she'll put it on lay-away, and then she'll have to use the money for other things at home, and she'll be afraid she'll lose the dress and what she paid on it, and then, well, she'll take chances she wouldn't otherwise and do things she wouldn't otherwise. She's older than me but lots of ways she's like a kid. This place does a lot of commercial trade, and what she does, when you unlock a number and it's a single in there, he's maybe just waking up or he's getting dressed, she gives a big smile and says something like good morning, sir, sure sorry if I disturbed you. And he looks her over and says, Honey, you come on right in here, and, well, she does. Then it's ten dollars or twenty to keep from losing the dress, but she's going to get caught someday and lose this good job. The reason I'm telling you all this is on account of from what I said about her messing around, I didn't want you thinking she was nothing but a hustler. It's only sometimes with her, and even if I wouldn't go down that road, it doesn't mean she isn't no friend of mine. She's my friend. She used to let me hold her first baby. I was ten years old and she was fifteen. And... thanks for coming and telling one of us."



She left and I screwed the bottle cap tight and put the doctored-and watered-gin in my carry-on suitcase, wondering all the while if it wouldn't be a sounder idea to pour it out.



D. Wintin Hardahee was with a client. I left the motel number and room number. He called back ten minutes later, at eleven o'clock.



"I was wondering if maybe I could scrounge a little more information from you, Mr. Hardahee."



"I am very sorry, Mr. McGee, but my work load is very heavy." The soft voice had a flat and dead sound.



"Maybe we could have a chat after you get through work."



"I am not taking on any new clients at this time."



"Is something the matter? Is something wrong?"



"Sorry I can't be more cooperative. Good-bye, Mr. McGee." Click.



I paced around, cursing. This nice orderly prosperous community was getting on my nerves. A big ball of tangled string. But when you found a loose end and pulled, all you got was a batch of loose ends. It seemed like at least a month ago that I had thought to check out Helena's estate arrangements. I thought maybe Hardahee could work it through his New York classmate. But Hardahee wasn't going to work out anything for me. So what could turn him off so quickly and so completely? Lies? Fear?



I stretched out on the bed and let the confusing cauldron bubble away, giving me glimpses of Penny, Janice, Biddy, Maureen, Tom Pike, Rick, Stanger, Tom Pike, Helena, Hardahee, Nudenbarger, Tom Pike.



Pike was getting pretty damned ubiquitous. And little bits of conversation kept coming back. I heard parts of the night talk with Janice Holton and something bothered me and I went back over it and found what bothered me, then slowly sat up.



She had asked about my imaginary wife. "Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lauderdale?"



Review. I had not said one damned word about Lauderdale. Holton had checked the registration. So he knew. But was there any reason for him to have said word one about it to his wife? "Look, darling, my girl friend wanted to stay in the motel room with some jerk from Lauderdale named McGee."



Not likely.



Backtrack. A little look of surprise at hearing my name. Surprise to find me with her husband.



Possibility: Friend of Biddy's. Had met her in supermarket or somewhere. Biddy spoke of an old friend named McGee from Lauderdale.



Or: In the process of checking me out Saturday evening, and checking Holton out, Stanger made some mention of me to Janice Holton. "Do you know, or do you know if your husband knows, anybody named Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale?"



Possible, but I didn't like the fit. They were like limericks that do not quite scan, that have one syllable too much or one missing. My brain was a pudding. I walked across to a shopping plaza, bought some swim pants in a chain store, came back and put them on and padded out to the big motel pool. There was a separate wading pool full of three- and four-year-olds, shrieking, choking, throwing rubber animals, and belting each other under the casually benign stare of four well-greased young mothers. So I dived and did some slow lengths of the main pool and then gradually let it out, reaching farther, changing the kick beat, stretching and punishing the long muscles of arms, shoulders, back, thighs, and belly, sucking air and blowing out the little layers of sedentary stale-ness in the bottoms of my lungs. I held it just below that pace at which I begin to get too much side roll and begin to thrash and slap, and then brutalized myself by saying, Just one more. And one more. And one more. Finally I lumbered out, totally whipped, heart way up there close to a hundred and a half, lungs straining, arms and legs weak as canvas tubes full of old wet feathers. I dried my face on the bath towel I'd brought from the room and then stretched out on it to let the sunshine do the rest.



Meyer calls it my "instant I.Q." In a sense it is. You oxygenate the blood to the maximum and you stimulate the heart into pumping it around at a breakneck pace. That enriched blood goes churning through the brain at the same tune that it is nourishing the overworked muscle tissues. Sometimes it even works.



But I put my fat, newly enriched, humming head to work on the Janice-Lauderdale problem, and its final report was, "Damned if I know, fella."



So I went back to 109 and before I dressed, I tried the office of the fat little John Wayne, M.D., got hold of a cheery, cooperative lady who told me that Dr. Stewart Sherman's receptionist and bookkeeper was Miss Helen Boughmer, and she did not know if she was working or not, but I could reach her through the phone listed for Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer. She asked me to wait a moment and gave me the number to write down.



Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer was very firm about things. "I'm sorry, but I couldn't possibly call my daughter to the phone. She is not well today. She is in bed. Does she know you? What is this all about?"



"I'd like a chance to ask her some questions about an insurance matter, Mrs. Boughmer."



"I can definitely say that she is not interested in buying any insurance and neither am I. Good-day."



"Wait!" I missed her and had to call again. "Mrs. Boughmer, I am an insurance investigator. I am investigating a policy claim."



"But we haven't had any accidents with the car. Not for years."



"It's some information on a death claim."



"Oh?"



"On Doctor Sherman. Just a few routine questions, ma'am."



"Well... if you'll promise not to tire Helen, I think you might be able to talk to her at about four o'clock, if you'll come here to the house." I said I would. It was at 90 Rose Street, and she told me how to find it. "It's a little white frame house with yellow trim, on the right, on the second corner, with two big live oak trees in the front yard."



After I hung up, I phoned the Pike place and Biddy answered.



"Well, hello!" she said. "Yes, Maurie is doing just fine, thank you. We were just about to have a swim before lunch."



"I wondered if I could come out and talk to you about something after lunch."



"Why not? What time is it? Why don't you make it about two thirty or quarter to three? She'll be having her nap then. Will that be okay?"



I said it was just fine. I dressed and had lunch at the motel and then went strolling through the rear areas looking for Lorette. There was a service alley behind the kitchen. When I walked along it, past a neat row of garbage cans, I came to an open door to a linen storage room. I looked in and saw Lorette, still in uniform, sitting on a table laughing and talking and swinging her legs. There were two older black women in there, not in uniform. The rubber-tired maid carts were aligned against the wall near a battered Coke machine and a row of green metal lockers.



She saw me and the talk and laughter stopped. She slid off the old wooden table and came and stood in the doorway, her face impassive, her eyes down-slanted. "You want something, sir?"



"To ask you something," I said, and walked on to a place where the roof overhang shaded a portion of the alley and a flame vine was curling up a post that supported the overhang. She had not followed me. I looked back and she shrugged and came slowly toward me. She put her hands in her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall.



"Ask me what?"



"I didn't know if you could talk in front of those other women. I wanted to know how Cathy is."



"Jes fine." Her face was blank and she let her mouth hang slightly open. It made her look adenoidally stupid.



"She come out of it okay?"



"She gone on home."



It was all too familiar and all too frustrating. It is the black armor, a kind of listless vacuity, stubborn as an acre of mules. They go that route or they become all teeth and giggles and forelock. Okay, so they have had more than their share of grief from men of my outward stamp, big and white and muscular, sun-darkened and visibly battered in small personal wars. My outward type had knotted a lot of black skulls, tupped a plenitude of black ewes, burned crosses and people in season. They see just the outward look and they classify on that basis. Some of them you can't ever reach in any way, just as you can't teach most women to handle snakes and cherish spiders. But I knew I could reach her because for a little time with me she had been disarmed, had put her guard down, and I had seen behind it a shrewd and understanding mind, a quick and unschooled intelligence.



I had to find my way past that black armor. Funny how it used to be easier. Suspicion used to be on an individual basis. Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.



"What's wrong with you?" I asked her.



"Nothin' wrong."



"You could talk to me before. Now you've slammed the door."



"Door? What door, mister? I got to get back to work."



Suddenly I realized what it might be. "Lorette, have you slammed the door because you know that this morning I stood out in front of this place talking to a couple of cops?"



There was a sidelong glance, quick, vivid with suspicion, before she dropped her eyes again. "Don't matter who you talkin' to."



"Looked like a nice friendly little chat, I suppose."



"Mister, I got to go to work."



"That housekeeper here, Mrs. Imber? If she hadn't happened to look into 109 on Saturday afternoon and saw me there sacked out, it wouldn't have been any nice friendly conversation with the law. And it wouldn't have happened out in front of this place. It would have been in one of their little rooms, with nobody smiling. They would have been trying to nail me for killing that nurse."



She turned and leaned against the shady wall, arms folded, her face no longer slack with the defensive tactic of improvised imbecility. She wore a thoughtful frown, white teeth biting the fullness of her underlip. "Then it was that nurse girl with you in the room Friday night, Mr. McGee?"



"That's how I got acquainted with the law, with Stanger and Nudenbarger."



"The way I know you had a woman with you, Cathy she told me Stanger asked her if when she did the room she saw any sign you'd had a woman in there. That was before you helped her some. No reason to try to save any white from the law anytime. She said you surely had a party. So it was a lucky thing about Miz Imber checking the room, I guess."



"Yes, indeed."



Her brown-eyed stare was narrow and suspicious. "Then, what call have you got to fool around with those two law?"



"I liked the nurse. If I can help find out who killed her, I'd buddy up to a leper or a rattlesnake. It's a personal matter."



Her eyes softened. "I guess being with someone you like, being in the bed with them, and they're dead the next day, it could be a sorrowful thing."



It struck me that this was the first sympathetic and understanding response I'd had from anyone. "It's a sorrowful thing."



With a sudden thin smile she said, "Now, if she was so nice and all, how come she was giving it away to such a mean honk lawyer like that Mr. Holton? Surprised I know? Man, we keep good track of everybody like Holton."



"What's your beef with him?"



"When he was prosecutor, he got his kicks from busting every black that come to trial, busting him big as he could manage. Ever'time he could send a black to Raiford State Prison, it was a big holiday for him, grinning and struttin' around and shaking hands. The ones like that, they can't get anybody for yard work or housework, at least nobody worth a damn or a day's pay."



"She didn't like Holton, Lorette. She was trying to break loose. Being with me was part of the try. Didn't you ever hear of any woman with a hang-up on a sorry man?"



There had been antagonism toward me when she had talked of Holton. I was on Holton's team because of my color. But by telling her how it was between Penny and Rick, I had swung it all back to that familiar lonely confusing country of the human heart, the shared thing rather than the difference.



"It happens. It surely happens," she said. "And the other way around too. Well, yes, I heard you was with those two this morning. Lieutenant Stanger, he isn't so bad. Fair as maybe they let him be. But the one called Lew, he likes to whip heads. Don't care whose, long as it's a black skull. Stanger don't stop him, so the day they go down, they both go down like there was no difference at all."



"I wanted to ask you how Cathy made out. I had no way of knowing how much she drank out of that bottle."



Her stare was wise, timeless, sardonic. "Why, now, that big ol' gal is just fine. Big strong healthy gal. On account of you didn't get her fired, she might be real thankful to you. How thankful do you want she should be, man?"



"Dammit, why do you think that's what I've got in mind?"



She laughed, a rich, raw little sound, full of derision. "Because what the hell else could you want from black motel maids? Sweepin' and cleanin' lessons? A walk in the park? A Bible lesson? Those women back in that room, now. I know exactly what they're thinking. They got it all figured that finally, somehow a whitey got to me, and probably tomorrow I switch with Cathy, one of mine for her One-O-nine, because I decided to be motel tail and pick up some extra bread. Those women know there's not another damn thing in the world about me or Cathy you could be after. And that's how it is."



"And that is exactly what you believe about me?"



"Mister, I don't know what to believe about you, and that's the truth."



"I hunted you up because I wanted to see how Cathy made it. And I wanted to ask a favor."



"Like what?"



"I've seen a lot of towns like this one. Enough to know that the black community knows everything that happens in the white community. Maids and cooks and yard men make one of the best intelligence apparatuses in the world."



"Sneaky niggers listening to everything, huh?"



"If I happened to be black, you can damn well bet I'd keep track, Mrs. Walker. Just to keep from getting caught in the middle of anything. I would have to be just that much faster on my feet, just to get a job and keep a job. I'd listen and I'd know."



She tilted her head as she looked up at me. "You almost know where it is, don't you, man? If you were black, now, wouldn't you be too smart to be a yard man?"



"Exactly the same way that if you were white, you're too smart to be a motel maid."



"So what makes you think I'm so stupid I'd get myself messed up in some white killing by coming to you with anything I hear about it?"



"Because I liked that nurse. Because without special help the cops might plumber this one. Because you can follow your hunch, which tells you I'd never make any attempt to bring you into it at all. But the big reason you'll do it is because it's one of the last things in the world you ever thought you'd do."



She snickered. "My grandma kept telling me, she'd say, `Lorrie, when you got your haid in the lion's mouth, just you lay quiet. You keep forgetting and it's gone get you in bad trouble.'"



"So?"



"Mr. McGee, I got to do the late checkouts. Cathy wasn't all as fine as I said. She said she felt far off. She worked slow and her tongue sounded thick and she said she felt like her skull was cracked open up on top. So Jase drove her on home, and I got two of her late rooms and three of my own to do up."



"Will you think about it, at least?"



With an enigmatic smile she walked away slowly. She had her hands in the pockets of the uniform skirt. She scuffed her heels and went a dozen steps, then stopped and looked back at me over her shoulder, her smile merry and impudent.



"I might see if there's a thing worth knowing. But if there was and I told you and you told somebody I told you, if they come to me about it, they're going to come up onto the dumbest black girl south of George Wallace."



Nobody looks far enough down the road we're going. Someday one man at a big button board can do all the industrial production for the whole country by operating the machines that make the machines that design and make the rest of the machines. Then where is the myth about anybody who wants a job being able to find it?



And if the black man demands that Big Uncle take care of him in the style the hucksters render so desirable, then it's a sideways return to slavery.



Whitey wants law and order, meaning a head-knocker like Alabama George. No black is going to grieve about some nice sweet dedicated unprejudiced liberal being yanked out of his Buick and beaten to death, because there have been a great many nice humble ingratiating hardworking blacks beaten to death too. In all such cases the unforgivable sin was to be born black or white, just as in some ancient cultures if you were foolish enough to be born female, they took you by your baby heels, whapped your fuzzy skull on a tree, and tossed the newborn to the crocs.



And so, Mrs. Lorette Walker, no solutions for me or thee, not from your leaders be they passive or militant, nor from the politicians or the liberals or the head-knockers or the educators. No answer but time. And if the law and the courts can be induced to become color-blind, we'll have a good answer, after both of us are dead. And a bloody answer otherwise.



13



I STOPPED in the driveway at 28 Haze Lake Drive at ten of three. As I got out of the car motion caught my eye and I saw Biddy waving to me from the window of the studio over the boathouse.



She opened the door as I got to the top of the outside staircase. She seemed to be in very good spirits. She wore baggy white denim shorts and a man's blue work shirt with the sleeves scissored off at the shoulder seam. The seams came about four inches down her upper arms. She had a little smear of pale blue pigment along the left side of her jaw and a little pattern of yellow spatter on her forehead. The familiar slow heavy breathing was coming over the intercom.



"Maybe it's the extra sleep you let me have, Travis. Or maybe because it's a lovely day. Or maybe because Maurie seems so much better."



"Electrosleep?" I asked, gesturing at the speaker.



"Oh, no. Just to get her to sleep and then I took it off. It's more natural that way, even though I don't really think she gets quite as much rest out of it."



I looked at the canvas she was working on. "Seascape?"



"Well, sort of. It's from the sea oats that used to grow in front of the Casey Key place, the way you could see the blue water through the stems and the way they waved in the breeze. It's coming along the way I want it. We can keep talking while I work."



"So she's much better?"



"I'm sure of it. Strange how maybe something changed for her when she was lost and we were trying to find her. At least she didn't go off and let somebody buy her too many drinks and get into some kind of nasty situation. I guess she must have been wandering around in the brush. But she doesn't remember anything about it. She just seems to... have a better grip on herself. Tom is terribly pleased about it. I even think it might be all right to take her to the opening tomorrow night, but Tom is dubious."



"Opening of what?"



"Maybe you noticed that big new building at the corner of Grove Boulevard arid Lake Street? Twelve stories? Lots of windows? Well, anyway, it's there and it's new, and it's a project Tom has been working on for almost a year now. He organized the investment group and got the land lease. The Courtney Bank and Trust will move into the first four floors next week, or start moving next week. Almost all the space is rented already. Tom is moving his offices to the top floor. It's really a lovely suite of offices, and the decorators have been working like madmen to get it done in time. So tomorrow night it's sort of a preview of the new offices of Development Unlimited, a party with bartender and caterer and all, beginning just at sundown. He thinks it will be too much for her, but if she is as good tomorrow as she is today, I really think we ought to try it. If she begins to act as if she can't handle it, I can always bring her home. She is sleeping well now, because I made her swim and swim and swim."



I looked down into the back lawn and saw a chin-whiskered man in overalls and Mennonite hat guiding a power mower.



"What did you want to ask me about, Trav?"



"Nothing of any importance. I wondered if you know a Mrs. Holton. Janice Holton?"



"Is she sort of... dark and vivid?"



"Yes."



"I was introduced to her once, I think. But I really don't know her. I mean I would speak to her if I saw her, but I haven't seen her in weeks and weeks. Why?"



"Nothing. I met her Sunday night after I left here, and she looks like somebody I used to know. I didn't get to ask her. I thought you might know something about her, like where she's from, so I could figure out if she's the same one."



"I really don't know a thing about her except she seems nice. She must have had quite an impact on you, if you came all the way out here to ask me that."



"I didn't. I just had some odds and ends. That's one of them. I wondered about something else. I don't mean to pry. But remember, I'm sort of an unofficial uncle. Did your mother leave you enough to get along on?"



She rolled her eyes. "Enough! Heavens. When she knew she needed the first operation, back before Maurie became so sick with that miscarriage, she told each of us how she had set things up and asked us if we wanted anything changed while she still had time. Some enormously clever man handled her finances after Daddy died, and made her a lot of money. There are two trust accounts, one for me and one for Maurie. After estate taxes and legal costs and probate costs and all that, there'll be some fantastic amount in trust for each of us, close to seven hundred thousand dollars! So as soon as it's settled and the Casey Key house is sold and all, we'll start getting some idiotic amount like forty thousand a year each. I had no idea! It's tied up in trust until each of us reach forty-five, or until our oldest child gets to be twenty-one. If we have no children, then of course we just have access to the whole amount when we're forty-five. But if we do, then each child gets a hundred-thousand-dollar trust fund when it gets to be twenty-one, and because, by the time you're forty-five, you certainly know there aren't going to be any more kids, the same amount is sequestered-is that the word?-for your kids, like if you have five all under twenty-one, then a hundred thousand would be set aside for each one for their trust funds, and you would get what's left over."



"What happens if either of you die?"



"All the money would be left in trust for the kids, if I was married and had any. And if not, the trust would just sort of end and Maurie would get the amount that's in trust. God, Travis, it is such a horrid feeling thinking these past weeks what would happen if Maurie did manage to kill herself. Hundreds of thousands of dollars directly to me, and all that income from the trust. It's spooky, because I never knew and I never thought of myself that way. I knew there would be some, of course. But past a certain point it just gets ridiculous." She turned from the painting, brush in hand, and smiled at me. "Dear Uncle, you do not have to worry about my finances." Her face saddened abruptly. "Mother just didn't have much of a life, the last six years of it. After we got back to the Key, after my father died, we'd take long walks on the beach, the three of us, every morning. She talked to us. She made us understand that Mick Pearson just could not have ever accepted a neat, tidy, orderly, well-regulated little life. He had to bet it all, every time. And I remember that she said to us that if she'd only had five years of him, or ten, or fifteen instead of twenty-one, she would still have settled for that much life with him instead of forty years with any other man she'd ever met. She said that was what marriage was all about and she hoped we'd both find something just half as perfect."



"Did she have her first operation here?"



"Yes. You see, Maurie was almost five months pregnant and she'd lost the first baby at six months. It was an absolutely stupid accident the first tune. She drove down to pick up a cake she'd ordered for Tom's birthday and it was in July two years ago, and she was driving back in a heavy rain and she started to put on the brakes and the cake started to slide off the seat, and she grabbed for it and when she did, she stomped harder on the brake and the car slid and she went up over the curb and hit a palm tree, and the steering wheel hit her in the stomach, and about three hours later, in the hospital, she aborted and the baby was alive, actually, a preemie, but less than two pounds, and she just didn't make it. It was very sad and all, but Maurie told me on long distance there was no point in my coming down. She recovered very quickly. So I guess mother thought she'd better come over and keep Maurie from running into any palm trees so she would have her first grandchild. After she was here a week or so, she noticed some bleeding and had a checkup and they decided they'd better operate. She had Doctor William Dyckes, and he is fabulously good. When we knew she was going to be operated on, I came down to be with her and do what I could. Then, three days after she was operated on, Maurie went into some kind of kidney failure and had convulsions and lost her second baby, and hasn't been right since. While they were both in there, I flew up and packed and closed my apartment and put stuff in storage and had the rest shipped down."



"When was all that?"



"A year ago last month. Or a lifetime ago. Take your pick. Doctor Bill operated on Mother again last March. And then she died on the third of this month." She frowned. "Only eleven days ago, Tray! But it seems much longer ago. And it was, of course. They kept her so doped, trying to build her up at the same time, for the operation. She was so tiny and shrunken. She looked seventy years old. You'd never have known her. And she was so... damn brave. I'm sorry. Excuse me. What the hell good is bravery in her situation?"



"Was there any chance?"



"Not the faintest. Bill explained it to Tom and me. I had to give permission. He said he thought it might help her to do another radical, take out more of the bowel, cut some nerve trunks to ease the pain. He wasn't kidding me. I know he didn't give her much chance of surviving it. But... he liked Mom. And she might have lasted for another two months, even more, before it killed her."



I sat and made casual talk for a little while, watching her at work. She asked me to come to the party Tuesday evening. I said I might if I didn't have to leave town before then. She said that if Tom wasn't tied up, the three of them were going to drive down to Casey Key next Sunday, and she would look for that information about the Likely Lady.



I found the Boughmer house at 90 Rose Street without difficulty, but it was twenty after four when I walked up the porch steps and rang the bell. The blinds were closed against the afternoon heat. A broad doughy woman appeared out of the gloom and looked out at me through the screen. She wore a cotton print with a large floral design. She had brass-gold hair so rigidly coiffed it looked as if it had been forged from a single piece of metal.



"Well?"



"My name is McGee, Mrs. Boughmer. I called about talking to your daughter on that insurance matter?"



"You're not very businesslike about arriving on time. You don't look like a business person to me. Do you have any identification?"



I had found three of the old cards and moved them into the front of the wallet before I got out of my car. Engraved, fancy, chocolate on buff. D. Travis McGee. Field Director. Associated Adjusters, Inc. And a complex Miami address, two phone numbers, and a cable address.



She opened the door just far enough for me to slip the card through. She studied it, ran the ball of her thumb over the lettering, opened the door, and gave it back to me.



"In here, please, Mr. McGee. You might try the wing chair. It's very comfortable. My late husband said it was the best chair he ever sat in. I will go see about my daughter."



She went away. It was a small room with enough furniture and knickknacks in it for two large rooms. The broad blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, humming and whispering. I counted lamps. Nine. Four floor and five table. Tables. Seven. Two big, four small, one very small.



She came marching back in, straight as a drill sergeant. A younger woman followed her. I stood up and was introduced to Helen Boughmer. Thirty-three, maybe. Tall. Bad posture. Fussy, frilly, green silk blouse. Pale pleated skirt. Sallow skin. Very thin arms and legs fastened to a curious figure. It was broad but thin. Wide across the shoulders, wide across the pelvis. But with imperceptible breasts and a fanny that looked as if it had been flattened by a blow with a one-by-ten plank. Pointed nose. Mouse hair, so fine the fan kept stirring it. Glasses with gold metal frames, distorting lenses. Nervous mannerisms with hands and mouth. Self-effacing. She sat tentatively on the couch, facing me. Mom sat at the other end of the couch.



"Miss Boughmer, I'm sorry to bother you when you're not feeling well. But this is a final report on some insurance carried by Doctor Stewart Sherman."



"What policy? I knew all his policies. I was with him over five years. I made all the payments."



"I don't have those details, Miss Boughmer. We do adjustment work on contract for other companies. I was just asked to come up here and conduct interviews and write a report to my home office on whether or not, in my best opinion, the doctor's death was suicide."



"She was on her vacation," Mom said.



"Well, I was spending it right here, wasn't I?"



"And is there anything wrong with having a nice rest in your comfortable home, Helen?" She turned toward me. "It's a good thing she didn't spend her hard-earned money going around to a lot of tourist traps, because she certainly hasn't worked a day since her precious doctor died. She doesn't even seem to want to look for work. And I can tell you that / certainly believe in insurance, because we wouldn't be living here right now the way we are if Robert hadn't been thoughtful enough to protect his family in the event of his death."



Helen said, "I just don't know what insurance it could be. He cashed in the big policies because he wanted the money to Invest with Mr. Pike. And the ones he kept, they'd be so old I guess they'd be past the suicide clause waiting period, wouldn't they?"



I had to take a wild shot at it. "I'm not sure of this, Miss Boughmer, but I have the feeling that this could have been some sort of group policy."



"Oh! I bet it's Physicians' General. That's a term policy and he had no value to cash in, so he kept it. And I guess there could be a suicide clause for the life of the policy. Do you think so?"



"I would say it's possible." I smiled at her. "There has to be some policy where the problem exists, or I wouldn't be here, would I?"



"I guess that's right," the receptionist-bookkeeper said.



"There was no note left by the deceased and no apparent reason for suicide. And the company is apparently not interested in taking refuge in a technicality if the claim should be paid to the heirs. Would you say it was suicide, Miss Boughmer?"



"Yes!"



Her tone had been so wan the sudden emphasis startled me.



"Why do you think so?"



"It's just like I told the police. He was depressed, and he was moody, and I think he killed himself. They interviewed me and typed it out and I signed it."



"I've interviewed Mr. Richard Holton and, prior to the tragic murder of Miss Woertz last Saturday, I talked to her about it too. They were both most vehement in saying that it could not possibly have been suicide."



"Like you said at first," her mother said, "crying and raving and ranting around here, making a fuss like you didn't make when your poor father died. You told me fifty tunes your wonderful doctor couldn't have ever killed himself. You were going to find out what happened to him if it took the rest of your life, remember? And not two days later you decided all of a sudden that he had killed himself."



She sat with her hands clasped on her lap, fingers interlaced and rigid, head downcast. She looked like a child praying in Sunday school.



"After I thought it over I changed my mind," she said, and I found myself leaning forward to hear her.



"But Miss Woertz didn't change her mind."



"That's got nothing to do with me."



"Is it your impression that Miss Woertz was a stable, rational human being, Miss Boughmer?"



She looked up swiftly and down again. "She was a very sweet person. I'm sorry she's dead."



"Hah!" said Mom. "To this child everybody is a very sweet person. She's easily led. She'll believe anybody. Anybody with half an eye could see that Penny Woertz was a cheap, obvious, little thing. Why, she couldn't have cared one way or another whether Doctor Sherman killed himself or was murdered."



"Mom!"



"Hush up, Helen. All the little Woertz person wanted to do was dramatize. One of the ladies in my garden club, a very reliable lady, and she's never had to wear glasses a day in her life, saw that nurse and Mr. Holton, a married man, embracing and kissing each other in a parked car in the lot at the hospital just over three weeks ago, practically under one of the streetlights in the parking lot. Do you call that rational and stable, Mr. McGee? I call it sinful and wicked and cheap."



"Mom, please!"



"Did she ever try to take any of that work off your



shoulders? Did she? Not once did she ever--"



"But that wasn't her job! I did my job and she did hers."



"I bet she did. I bet she did more than her job. I bet there was more going on between her and your marvelous doctor than you could ever see, the way you think she was so sweet and wonderful."



The girl stood up quickly and wavered for a moment, dizzy. "I don't feel so good. I'm sorry. I don't want to talk about it any more."



"Then, you go to bed, dear. Mr. McGee didn't mean to tire you. I'll be up in a little while to see if there's anything you need."



She stopped in the doorway and looked toward me, not quite at me. "Nobody can ever make me say anything else about the doctor. I think he killed himself because he was moody and depressed.".



She disappeared. "I'm sorry," Mrs. Boughmer said. "Helen just isn't herself these days. She's been a changed girl ever since that doctor died. She worshipped the man, God knows why. I thought he was a little on the foolish side. He could have had a marvelous practice if he'd had any energy or ambition. He was all right until his wife died three years ago. Then he sort of slacked off. She wouldn't have put up with all those stupid projects of his. Research, he called it. Why, he wasn't even a specialist. And I think the drug companies are doing all the research anybody needs."



"Your daughter hasn't looked for work since?"



"Not after she got through straightening out all the files for Dr. Wayne to pick up and trying to collect the final bills. But there doesn't seem to be much point in people paying doctor bills to a dead doctor, does there? No, she just seems to feel weak. She doesn't seem to have the will or the energy to go out and find another job. She's a good hard worker too. And she was a very good student in school. But she's always been a quiet girl. She always liked being by herself. Thank the Lord we have enough to live on. I have to scrimp and cut corners with her not working, but we get by."



"She seemed certain that the doctor hadn't killed himself?"



"Positive. She was like a maniac. I hardly knew my own daughter. Her eyes were wild. But I think it was the second day she was at the office, cleaning things up, she just came home late and went to bed and didn't want anything to eat. She hardly said a word for days. She lost a lot of weight. Well, maybe she'll start to perk up soon."



"I hope so."



14



NINE THIRTY Monday evening. Stanger was suddenly standing at my elbow at the bar at the motel and suggested it might be better if we talked in my room. I gulped the final third of my drink and walked around with him. The air was very close and muggy. He said a storm would help, and we might get one in the night.



Once we were in the room, I remembered something I kept forgetting to ask him. "Holton has some buddy on the force who opens motel doors for him and such like. Who is that?"



"Not on the city force. That's Dave Broon. Special investigator for the Sheriff's Department. Slippery little son of a bitch for sure. The sheriff, Amos Turk, didn't want to take him on in the first place. That was about seven years back. But there was political pressure on Amos. Dave Broon has a lot of things going for him all the time. You want a nice little favor done, like maybe some chick starts putting the pressure on you threatening to go to your wife, Dave is your boy. He'll check her out, scare her to death, and put the roust on her, but then when Dave wants something out of you, he's got the names, dates, and photostats of the motel register, so you do him a favor. He's built up a lot of political clout around this part of the state. Lot of the lawyers use him on special little jobs because he's careful and he keeps his mouth shut."



"Next question. Is D. Wintin Hardahee his own man?"



"God, you do get around some, McGee. Far as I know, he is. Soft voice, but don't mess with him. Hard-nosed and honest. Nobody tells him what to do."



"And what about Holton and the note?"



"Don't I get to ask any questions?"



"And you'll get answers. What about Holton?"



"That boy was so bad hung this morning he couldn't move his eyeballs. Had to turn his whole head. Kept sweating a lot. Cut his face all up shaving it. What happened was they got in from Vero Beach Saturday night after ten. Car radio was busted. He had a beer and went right to bed and he said he hadn't had much sleep Friday night. Drove around for a long time after he left here. Parked by the Woertz apartment for a while, but she didn't come home. Got in at three, he thinks. So he slept heavy Saturday night. Got up about ten thirty Sunday morning. His wife was already up. He was sitting on the edge of the bed when the phone rang. Picked it up and said hello. No answer for a moment and he thought it was the same kind of trouble they've been having with the line. Ring once and no more. Then he said somebody whispered to him. He didn't get it at first. They repeated it and hung up. Couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. It made no sense to him. The whisper said, `The police found a note she left for her new lover.' Some damfool prank, he thought. Then he saw the front page of the paper, and without breakfast or a word to anybody he came downtown and conned Foster into letting him see the note. Hunted around for you. Got ugly drunk. Might have shot you. Told me he'd given it some serious thought."



He stared over at me. "What the hell is wrong with you?"



"It goes clunk, Stanger. Things float around loose in your head and then there is a clunk, and they've lined up and make sense."



"Let me in on this clunk."



"Did you mention to Janice Holton anything about a certain McGee from Fort Lauderdale?"



"Not word one."



"Phone rings once and that's all. In the Holton house and in the Pike house too."



"Slow and steady, man. Try speaking American."



"Janice has a nice warm wonderful tender man she sees on the sly. Nothing physical about the relationship, she says. She found out about Holton and Penny from somebody who whispered the news to her over the phone."



"Do tell!"



"Lover's code, Stanger. The sneak play. You have a place you meet. A nice safe place. So you call up and let the phone ring once and you hang up. The other party looks at his or her watch. Five minutes later it rings again. Meet me at five o'clock at the usual place if you can, honey. Or eight minutes later, or two minutes later, or twelve minutes later for noon or midnight. So Tom Pike told her about me, some casual thing about a man named McGee who'd known his wife, sister-in-law, and mother-in-law in Lauderdale nearly six years ago, and who came to lunch. Maybe my coming to lunch busted up a tryst. She let it slip casually without thinking."



"So who whispers? Tom Pike for chrissake?"



"It doesn't make much sense."



"When Holton got his call from the whisperer, Tom Pike was flying to Jacksonville. Okay, so Nudenbarger told him about the note, but what would be the point? I mean even if he could make the call. Get Holton all jammed up? What for? Tom Pike isn't the kind to walk out on his marriage, fouled up as it is. And if he's got Janice Holton on the string, what is he proving or accomplishing?"



"Janice was supposed to have a big date with him Saturday, out of town, I guess. But Rick fouled it up by going along, and she couldn't get word to Tom that she was stuck with her husband and would actually have to go see her sister over in Vero Beach."



Stanger said thoughtfully, "I'm not going to fault those two, not for one minute, McGee. Janice is a hell of a lot of woman. Two sorry marriages, and they weren't the ones who made the marriages sorry. Jesus! It's a lot better than if he got involved with the kid sister."



"Who happens to be in love with him."



"Think so?"



"Sure of it."



"Then, Janice could be a kind of escape valve. Well, Tom Pike would step slow and careful, and if we hadn't... you hadn't added it up, I'll bet a dime nobody would have ever found out about it. I'd say one thing, if it isn't like you say physical, it must be a pretty good strain on them. That Janice is more than something ready. It's going to get physical, friend. What have we got? Some damn whisperer trying to make trouble for people."



"Al, out of the whole town, who would you pick as the whisperer? Not by any process of logic. Just by hunch."



"I guess the one I told you about. Dave Broon."



"On somebody's orders?"



"Or playing a personal angle. Turk puts him on a case, he's cute. He's got good moves. He comes up with things. And he's lucky. That's a help in cop work. But he doesn't give a goddamn about whether anything is right or wrong, anybody is legal or illegal. It isn't his business to find new work for the sheriff. If he spotted the mayor's wife shoplifting, he'd follow her home and invite himself in for a drink and a little chat. That kind."



"Could he have found out about that note without you knowing he found out about it?"



"Oh, hell yes. Far as I know he might have the leverage on somebody so that he gets a dupe of every photocopy of any evidence they run through our shop. This whole city and county is a big piece of truck garden to Dave Broon. He goes around plowing and planting and fertilizing, and harvesting everything ripe."



"How is he with bugs?"



"Not an expert but maybe better than average. He has good contacts. If it was something tricky, he'd bring in one of the experts from Miami. He can afford it."



"So we could be bugged?"



"It's possible," he said. "But not likely."



"He isn't too bright, Stanger. Not bright enough to be alarming."



"Dave alarms me, friend."



I showed him the toilet kit and the toothbrush, and the two twenties under the soap dish, and explained the situation. At first it bothered Stanger that if Broon was reasonably sure he had not left any traces, why should he advertise by taking the money? I finally made him see that taking it was the lesser of the two risks, because if I did have some way of learning that my room had been gone over carefully, finding the money untouched would alert me that it was not just petty theft.



"Broon has a family?"



"Never has. Lives alone. Lives pretty good. Recently moved to a penthouse apartment on a new high-rise out by Lake Azure. Usually got some broad living there with him. Big convertible, speedboat, big wardrobe. But on the job he dresses cheap and drives a crummy car. I've worked with him sometimes. He has a way of making the suspect choke up and then get in a big hurry to tell all."



"Description?"



"Five seven, maybe a hundred and forty pounds. Knocking fifty but does a good job of looking thirty-five. Blond, and I think it's a dye job and a hairpiece. Keeps himself in good shape. Works out a lot. Manicures, massages, sunlamp in the winter. Either his teeth are capped or it's a hell of a good set of plates. Gets good mileage out of the accents he uses. All the way from British to redneck. He's in so solid with the party, he just about sets his own work week, and there's not a damned thing Amos Turk can do about it. Couple of years ago one of Turk's big deputies took a dislike to the way Dave was goofing off and making him do the work. Dave was giving away fifty pounds, better than six inches in height and reach, and at least twenty years. They went out into the parking lot. I guess it took six minutes. Didn't even muss up Dave's hair. Then they picked the deputy up and put him in a county car and took him over to the hospital. He never has looked exactly the same and he calls Dave by the name of Mr. Broon, sir. Just say he's tough and he's careful and he's smart enough. The odd job he's best at is if somebody needs a little extra leverage to use on somebody else. Then they get hold of Dave Broon and tell him to see what he can come up with. And it's a rare human person there isn't something about that you can put to use, if you know what it is."



Then I gave him a complete rundown on my talk with Helen Boughmer. He said it sounded as if something or somebody had scared her, and I did not tell him that his appraisal seemed to belabor the obvious.



He reported no progress to speak of on the murder of the nurse. He said, "Trouble with that damned place, the architect laid out those garden apartments for privacy. They kind of back up to little open courts, and there's so many redwood fences it's like a maze back in there. If whoever killed her came to the back door, which might be the way it was because of her being found in the kitchen, I might as well give up on shucking my way through the neighborhood. No fingerprints, but come to think of it, in thirty-one years of police work I've never been on a case yet where there was a single fingerprint that ever did anybody any good or any harm in the courtroom."



He sat in moody silence until I said, "It seems to be tied in to the death of Doctor Sherman."



"Please don't tell me that. I've got a file on him that you can't hardly lift. And there's nothing to go on."



"Maybe Penny Woertz had some casual little piece of information and she didn't know it was important."



"You're reaching, McGee."



"Maybe she'd even told it to Rick Holton and it didn't mean anything to him either, yet. If somebody could play on his jealousy and get him to shoot me after she'd been killed, that puts the two of them out of circulation. Maybe Helen Boughmer knows something too, but somebody has done such a good job of closing her mouth, I don't think she'll be any good to you."



"Thanks. You try to give me a motive for one murder by hooking it up to another one last July. I am going to keep right on thinking the doc injected himself in the arm."



"Got any reason why he did that?"



"Conscience."



"Had he been a bad boy?"



"Nobody is ever going to prove anything on him, and it wouldn't do much good now anyway. But let me tell you something. I have lived a long time and I have seen a lot of things and I have seen a lot of women, but I never saw a worse woman in my life than Joan Sherman. Honest to Christ, she was a horror. She made every day of that doctor's life pure hell on earth. Damn voice onto her like a blue heron. She was the drill instructor and he was the buckass private. Treated him like he was a moron. One of those great big loud virtuous churchgoing ladies with a disposition like a pit viper. Full of good works. She was a diabetic. Had it pretty bad too but kept in balance. I forget how many units of insulin she had to shoot herself with in the morning. Wouldn't let the doctor shoot her. Said he was too damned clumsy with a needle. Three years ago she went into diabetic coma and died."



"He arrange it?"



Stanger shrugged. "If he did, he took such a long time to figure it out, he didn't miss a trick."



"Want me to beg? Okay. I'm begging."



"Back then the Shermans lived about six miles out, pretty nice house right in the middle of ten acres of groveland. We were having a telephone strike and things got pretty nasty. They were cutting underground cables and so on. She'd had her car picked up on a Friday to be serviced, and they were going to bring it back Monday. Because of the phones out that way being out, he thought he'd better drive in Sunday morning and see to some patients he had in the hospital. Besides, he had to pick up some insulin for her, he told us later, because she used the last ampule she had that morning. He'd pick up a month's supply at a time for her. He made his rounds and then he went to his office and worked awhile. Nobody would think that was strange. He stayed away from her as much as he dared and nobody blamed him. He said he was supposed to get back by five because a couple was coming for drinks and dinner. But he lost track of the time. The couple came and rang the bell and the woman went and looked in the window and saw her on the couch. She looked funny, the woman said. The husband broke in. No phone working. They put her in the car and headed for the hospital. They met Doc Sherman on his way out and honked and waved him down. She was DOA. They say he was a mighty upset man. There was a fresh needlemark in her thigh from her morning shot, so she hadn't forgotten. He said she never forgot. They did an autopsy, but there wasn't much point in it. I don't remember the biochemistry of it, but there just aren't any tests that will show whether you did or did not take insulin. It breaks down or disappears or something. County law checked the house. The needle had been rinsed and put in the sterilizer. The ampule was in the bathroom wastebasket. There was a drop or so left in it. That tested out full strength. The doctors decided there had been a sudden change in her condition and so the dose she was used to taking just wasn't enough. Also, they'd had pancakes and maple syrup and sweet rolls for breakfast. He said she kept to her diet pretty well, but Sunday breakfast was her single exception all week. Now, tell me how he did it. That is, if he did it."



After a few minutes of thought, I had a solution, but I had been smartass too often with Stanger, so I gave up.



It pleased him. "He brought home an identical ampule of distilled water, maybe making the switch of the contents in his office. Gets up in the night and switches the water for the insulin. She gets up in the morning and shoots water into her leg. Before he goes to the hospital, he goes into the bathroom, fishes the water ampule out of the wastebasket, takes the needle out of the sterilizer, draws the insulin out of the one he filched and shoots it down the sink, puts the genuine ampule in the wastebasket, rinses the needle and syringe, and puts it back into the sterilizer. On the way into town he could have stopped, crushed the ampule under his heel, and kicked the powdered glass into the dirt if he wanted to be real careful. I think he was careful, and patient. I think maybe he waited for a lot of years until the situation was just exactly right. I mean maybe you could stand living with a terrible old broad like that if you knew that someday, somehow, you were going to do it just right. Nice?"



"Lovely. And doesn't leave you anyplace to go."



"It's the reason I was willing to lean a little bit toward suicide. Stew Sherman was a pretty right guy. And killing is sort of against everything a doctor learns in school and in his practice."



"And what if somebody else figured it out too and trapped the doctor somehow into admitting it?"



"Strengthens the suicide solution."



"Sure does."



"And I couldn't come up with a single motive for murder. His dying didn't benefit anybody in any way, McGee."



"Right back where we started?"



"I don't know. Sure like to know why that Boughmer girl changed her mind so fast. Or who changed it for her. Isn't she one sorry thing though? Just imagine what she'd look like if you stripped her down to the buff."



"Please, Al."



He chuckled. "When I was little, we had a scrawny little old female cat out at the place. Had some Persian in her, so she looked pretty good. Picked up some kind of mange one spring, and in maybe ten days every last living hair fell off that poor beast. Honest to God, you'd look at her and you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. McGee, now I know that Helen is a sad, ugly, nervous woman, and I'm ashamed of myself, but if I can get to her when her mother can't pull out of the line and block for her, I think I could scare that Helen so bad she just wouldn't know what in the world she was telling me. Suppose I just do that. Tomorrow, if I can. What are you figuring on doing?"



"I might try to have a talk with Janice Holton and see if I guessed right about the boyfriend."



"So what if you did?"



"It will prove it wasn't somebody else instead of Tom Pike. So we can mark that part of the file closed."



"Anything else?"



"Find out if I can why Hardahee brushed me off."



"If he doesn't want to see you, you're not going to see him."



"I can give it a try. By the way, how are your contacts in Southtown?"



"As good as anybody's, which doesn't mean much. You think there's some Negra mixed up in this mess?"



"No. But Southtown supplies this city with cooks and maids and housekeepers and yard men. Waiters, waitresses, all kinds of manual labor. There can't be much going on among the white middle classes that they don't know about."



"You know, I think about that a lot. If I could ever tap that source, I think I'd have fifty percent of my job licked. They hear a hell of a lot, see a lot, and guess the rest. Sometimes I get a little help. But not lately. Sure God not lately. Those movies that have Southren law officers in them give us a pretty bad smell, regardless of how you handle yourself. I try to level with them, but shit, they know as well as I do there's two kinds of law here, two kinds of law practically everyplace. One of them kills a white man, they open the book to a different place from where a white man kills a Negra. Rape is a different kind of word there in Southtown too. Put it this way. A neighborhood where you got lots of garbage collection, good pavement, good water, good mail service, good streetlights, nice parks and playgrounds, rape and murder are great big dirty ugly scary words. Sorry, friend. None of them are on my side and I can't think of a way to change it one bit."



It was late. We had talked a long tune. He leaned and rubbed the final sodden inch of cigar out in the glass motel ashtray. We were quiet. He was a strange one, I thought. A man softened and souring in his years, looking used up, but he wasn't. There are many kinds of cop. This one was a good kind. Flavor of cynical tolerance, grasp of all the unchanging human motivations, respect for the rules and procedures of cop work.



He laughed softly. "Just thinking about Southtown, one Christmastime long back. Maybe nineteen forty-eight, forty-nine. I'd been three years in the paratroopers, so I got appointed Sanny Claus by the City Council, jump into the park a day or two before Christmas, and the toys would come down on the next swing around, in a cargo chute. Kids swarming all over."



It gave me a grotesque mental picture of Santa Stanger lifting some little blond supplicant onto his red velvet knee, and with one Ho Ho Ho of that venomous breath turning her crisp and sere as a little autumn leaf.



"One year Sid dropped me too damn high. Maybe seven thousand. Supposed to make it last longer. Wind started gusting strong and I tried to spill some air to get down far enough so I could use the shrouds to steer me into the park. But I could see right away I couldn't even come close. So I rode the wind and it carried me all the way to Southtown. Sid made his next swing around pretty low and dumped the chute with the toys upwind of the park and put them right where I was supposed to already be. But I was by then steering myself into a field right behind Lincoln School right in the heart of Southtown. Landed good and collapsed the chute and balled if up and slipped out of the harness, and then I looked around and standing around me in a big silent circle there's more dang colored kids than I ever seen in one place before. All big-eyed, just looking. There I am saying Merry Christmas! ! ! and saying Well, Well, Well! and saying You been good little boys and girls? and they just look. All of a sudden I can hear old Boyd coming to get me- he's been dead for years-with that siren on high scream all the way, the gusty wind blowing the sound of it around. Ten seconds later I could see just a few of those colored kids way in the distance, just the ones too little to run so fast, and twelve seconds later there wasn't a kid in sight, and I was all alone in that field when Boyd came showboating up to me, making a skid turn that stopped him where I could reach out and touch the door handle. Took me back to the park and I spread that sack of toys so fast they didn't get the pictures for the paper. They took a toy away from a pretty little girl and gave it to me to give back to her, so they got their picture, and that was the last time. The next year I said I had a bad ankle, and they didn't have anybody wanted to jump, so from then on they didn't do it anymore. I used to wonder what those little colored kids thought, hiding behind things and under things, and seeing the cop car pick up Sanny Claus. Maybe it didn't puzzle them at all, them thinking anybody can get arrested anytime."



He stood up and yawned. "Be getting along."



I walked out into the night with him and said, "Al, I have one little ice-cold patch on my back, the size of fifty cents, just under the left shoulderblade. It seems to happen when there are things I should know and don't know, and find out later."



"With me, the back of my neck gets a kind of cool feel."



"I didn't bring a handgun."



He thought that over and said, "The check I ran on you, nobody said you were about to become a director of any kind of bank, but nobody could say you should have been busted if they'd had more evidence either. How do I know you wouldn't be a problem to yourself and anybody who happened to come along?"



"You'd have to make a guess."



He took me to his car and unlocked the trunk. He said, "You took this off Holton and gave it to his wife and told me and I took it off her, so we'll leave it that you took it off him and you'll get around to turning it in to me later on, because I haven't talked about it or filled out the forms yet, and not having to fill out forms is a blessing these days."



"Remember, I phoned you about it and you said bring it in as soon as I had a chance?"



"Remember clear as day, McGee." He watched me as I turned toward the light, swung the cylinder out and checked the full load, used the ejector to spill the six rounds into my hand, snapped the cylinder back, checked the knurled safety to be certain it would not fire either double action or with the hammer back while on safe, then dry-fired it four times into the turf, twice on double action, twice with hammer back, to check the amount of trigger pull and trigger play, swung the cylinder out, reloaded, put it on safe, and thrust it inside my shut and inside the waistband of my slacks, metal cool against the bellyflesh.



He got into the car and drove away. I saw pink lightning, a pale competition for city neon, then heard deep, fumbling thunder, a hesitant counterpoint to the truck sounds. There was just a hint of rain freshness in the wind.



Third tune I'd gotten my hands on this same.38. Forgive me, Miss Penny, for tricking you and then bad-mouthing you that first time to get it away from your lover. You see, I didn't know you then, knew nothing about your silly honest earnest heart. Who were you staring at when you fell to your knees on the kitchen floor, putting your hands in disbelief to the blue handle of the shears? Did you think it some monstrous mistake and wanted only a chance to explain? But no chance. Tumbled and bled and died. Always tripping, falling, hurting yourself. Freckled clumsy girl.



Two portly tourists, male and female, she in a slack suit that matched his sport shirt, came plodding down the walk. They were in the floodlight pattern and did not see me in the shadows.



She was speaking in a thin and suffering voice. "... but no, you can't stand it to have anybody think for one stinking minute that you aren't rolling in money and so you have to tip every grubby little waitress like she was some kind of queen bee, and all it is, Fred, is just currying favor, trying to be a big shot, just showing off with the money we both saved to take this vacation, but if you have your way, the way you throw it around, we'll have to go home--"



"Shaddap!"



"They laugh at you when you tip too much. They think you're a fool. You lose all respect when you--"



"Shaddap!"



She began again, but they were too far away from me to hear her words. The tune was the same, however.



15



UP EARLY ON Tuesday. Fifteenth day of October. Pull the cords and slide the draperies away, feel crisp pile of miracle motel rug under the toes. Wonder who the hell I am. That is the blessing of morning routines-soap, brush, towel, lather, paste, razor. Each morning you wake up a slightly different person. Not significantly. But the dreams and the sleep-time rearrange the patterns inside your head. So what you see in the mirror is almost all you, and three percent stranger. It takes the comfort of routine to fit yourself back into total familiarity.



Even the little concerns are therapeutic. Does that tooth feel a little bit hollow? Seems like a lot of hair coming out. Little twinge in the shoulder when you move the arm just so. Sudden sideways unexpected glimpse in the mirrored door. Belly a little soft? Pat yourself, wash the hide, scrape the beard, brush teeth and hair. Little comforting attentions. Recognition symbols. Here I am. Now then. Me. The only me in existence.



Came walking slowly back from breakfast, marveling at how this tidy prosperous community of Fort Courtney kept producing more and more unknowns, making all its secret equations ever more insoluble. The doctor's wife, slick little Dave Broon, Hardahee's change of attitude, the strangeness of Helen Boughmer, the whisperer, and all the other little fragments of this and that. The diffusion was too wide. No new fact, no sudden inspiration, was going to link everything together into any pattern I could understand. So find one chunk of it, break it down, find out all the why and the who and the what-for.



There was a maid cart outside 109. The door was open. I went in and found Cathy doing the bathroom, Lorette Walker making up the bed.



" `Mawnin', suh," they said. I sat in the armchair and waited and watched. Brisk work, sidelong downcast glances, a kind of humble knowing arrogance. Two to a room, one of the classic defensive maneuvers of the Negro motel maids across twenty states, where, as an indigenous morning recreational device, they are, when young enough and handsome enough, fair game for paper salesman, touring musician, minor league ballplayer, golf pro, stock car driver, mutual fund salesman.



After all, it is the only situation where white male and black female meet in the context of bedroom, and the quarry cannot exactly go running to the management to complain about a guest. Other defensive devices are the switchblade in the apron pocket, the kitchen knife taped to the inside of the chocolate thigh, the icepick inside the fold of the uniform blouse. Some, after getting tricked, trapped, overwhelmed by a few shrewd, knowing, determined white men, become part-time hustlers. Others cannot accept or adjust. Classic tragedy is the inevitable unavoidable tumble from some high place, where the victim has no place to turn, toppled by some instrument of indifferent fate. A high place is a relative thing. Pride of any kind is a high place, and any fall can kill.



"I see you didn't get fired, Cathy," I said as she came out of the bathroom with the towels.



She cast a swift and wary look at Lorette and then said, "No, suh. Thank you kindly."



There was a silence. I saw that they had begun to dust areas already dusted and were making other busy movements without improving anything. Lorette Walker, her back to me, said, "I can take off now, and this here girl can finish up.".



"You look finished. You can both take off."



Lorette straightened and turned to face me, swinging that stupefying bosom around. "You want us both leaving, after I went to all the trouble of telling this here girl she should leastway give you the chance to collect on that favor you did her?"



Cathy stood at semiattention, staring at the wall beyond me, Indian face impassive. She was a big brawny woman, wide through the shoulders and hips, nipped narrow at the waist, with strong dark column of throat, husky shapely legs planted, her body looking deep and powerful through the belly and loins.



"Cathy?" I said.



"Yassa."



"There's no point in Mrs. Walker making us both uncomfortable. So why don't you just take off?"



Cathy looked toward Lorette, eyebrows raised in question. Lorette said something to her in a slurred tone. Cathy scooped up the sheets and towels and with one swift and unreadable glance at me, went out and pulled the door shut. I heard the fading jingle of the service cart as she trundled it away.



Lorette came over and sat on the bottom corner of the bed, facing me, studying me. Small and pretty brown face, coffee with double cream, with no highlights at all on the smooth matte skin, with eyes so dark the pupils and irises merged. She fished cigarettes and matches from her skirt pocket, lit one, crossed slender legs as she exhaled a long plume. There was challenge and appraisal in her stare.



"Black turn you off, man?"



"Not at all. Suspicion does, though. It's an ugly emotion."



"And ugly living with it or having to live with it. Maybe you don't want it from Cathy on account of it would hurt your chance of making it with me, you think."



"How did you ever guess? I forced poor Cathy to drink that doctored gin, and I arranged to have the nurse killed, just so you and I could meet right here and arrange the whole thing. Take a choice of places, honey. Guatemala City? Paris? Montevideo? Where do I send your ticket?"



She was simultaneously angry and amused. Amusement won. Finally she said, "There's just one last thing I got to be sure of. Tell me, are you any kind of law at all? Any kind?"



"Not any kind at all, Lorette."



She shrugged, sighed, and said, "Well, here I go. Out



where the nurse lived there's a white woman in number



sixty, pretty close by. She's got her a Monday-Thursday



cleaning woman, half days. Last Monday the cleaning



woman got there and found a note from the woman she'd



be away a week, don't come Thursday. The woman



works in an office job. The cleaning woman didn't work



Thursday and went there yesterday, Monday, like always.



She can tell the woman that lives there isn't back yet, but



somebody has been in there. Friend, maybe; Somebody



lay on the bed a time. One person. Left a head mark in



the pillow, wrinkled the spread. Something was spilled,



and somebody used her mop, pail, things like that, and



didn't put them back exactly the same. Scrubbed up part



of the kitchen floor, part of the bathroom floor, and



burned up something in the little fireplace those apartments have got, and she said to her it looked like ashes from burning cloth, and she couldn't find some of her cleaning rags anyplace. Don't know what good it is to you. Maybe something or nothing."



"I suppose she cleaned the place as usual and swept out the fireplace?"



"That's what she did. She told me the name of that woman, but I plain dumb forgot it."



"Never mind. I can find out."



"The cleaning woman, she said it's not far from the kitchen door of that place to the kitchen door of the nurse place. Down the walk and around a corner, behind a fence the whole way, a big high pretty fence with little gates in it to little private yards."



"Thanks. Did you get anything else?"



"There's a lot of people in Southtown who plain wouldn't tell anybody anything, black or white. Or they tell a little and hold back some if they think you want to know bad enough to lay a little bread on them. It isn't on account of being mean. Somehow there's never enough money to even get by on. Maybe if..."



I worked my wallet out of my hip pocket and flipped it over onto the bed by her hip. With the half-cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, head aslant to keep the smoke out of her eyes, she opened it and thumbed the corners of the bills. "Take what you think you might need."



"And if I just take it all, man?"



"It would be because you need it."



Bright animosity again. "Never come into your mind I was cheating you?"



"Mrs. Walker, there's seven hundred and something in there. I've got to go along with the value you put on yourself, and you've got to go along with the value I put on myself."



She stared at me, then shook her head. "You some kind of other thing for sure. Look. I got two hundred. Okay? Bring you change, prob'ly."



She started to get up, undoubtedly to bring the wallet back to me, but then out of some prideful and defiant impulse, she settled back and flipped it at me. I picked it out of the air about six inches in front of my nose, and slipped it back into the hip pocket. She folded the bills and undid one button of the high-collared uniform blouse and tucked the money down into the invisible, creamy, compacted cleft between those outsized breasts. She re-buttoned and gave herself a little pat.



She made a rueful mouth. "Talk to you so long out in the back, and now I've been in here with the door shut too long, and I tell you that everybody working here keeps close track."



She got up and took the ashtray she had used into the bathroom and brought it back, shining clean, and put it on the bedside table.



"Going to make me some nice problem," she muttered.



"Problem?"



"Nothing I can't handle. I'm kind of boss girl, right after Miz Imber. Up to me to keep them all working right. Lot of them may be older, but nobody can match me for mean. Can't tell them why I spent all this time in here with you alone. So they're going to slack off on me, thinking that on account of I suddenly start banging white, I lost my place. Oh, they'll try me for sure. But they'll find out they're going to get more mean than they can handle from ol' Fifty Pound."



"Fifty pound?"



Even with that dusky skin her sudden furious blush was apparent. "It's nothing, mister. Anyplace like this, sooner or later somebody'll give the boss gal some kind of special name. The one they give me, it comes from the way I'm built, that's all. Somebody saw me walk by and said, `There she go. Ninety pound of mean. Forty pound of gal and fifty pound of boobs.' So it's Fifty Pound. Used to fuss me, but I don't mind now."



"See what you can find out, Lorette, about a man who works for the sheriff. Dave Broon."



She looked as if she wanted to spit. "Now, that one is all mean. Mr. Holton, he's part-time mean. Mr. Broon, he wants to know something, maybe a deputy picks up some boy out in Southtown and then Mr. Broon visits with him. When they bring the boy back, he walks old and he talks old, and he keeps his head down. But he doesn't say a thing about Mr. Broon. One thing I know, he's rich. Big rich. It's in other names but he owns maybe forty houses in Southtown. Rains through the roof. Porch steps fall off. Three families drawing water from one spigot, but the rent never goes down. It goes up. Cardboard paper on the busted windows. Tax goes up on other places, never goes up on Mr. Broon's houses."



"You told me that the Holtons couldn't get domestic help because of Holton's attitude toward your people. I know that Mr. Pike and Miss Pearson have been trying to get somebody to look after Mrs. Pike. I noticed they have the yard work done by a white man. Any special reason for that?"



She stood by the door and all expression had left her face. "It's something went on long ago, three years, maybe more, just after that house was built and him new married. Had a live-in couple quartered over the boat-house. Young couple. Good pay. They drank some kind of poison stuff that you spray on the groves. Para... para..."



"Parathion?"



"Sounds right. Both died in the hospital. Mr. Pike paid for a nice funeral."



"Accident?"



"Not with the bag right there on the floor next to the table and the powder still stuck to the spoon. Put it in red wine and drank it. Must have seen it in the movies, because they busted the glasses, threw them at the wall."



"So?"



"So the man had been in Southtown three days before. Quiet boy. Got stinking smashed pig drunk. Cried and cried and cried. So drunk nobody could hardly understand him. Something about signing a paper so they wouldn't have to go to jail. Something about some nasty thing somebody was making his wife do on account of they signed the paper. And about not being able to stand it. Nobody knows the right and wrong of it. Nobody knows what happened."



"But the Pikes can't get any help out there?"



"They maybe could have. People were thinking on it. Then just before they let Mr. Pike get out of the broker business instead of putting the law on him, he was trying to learn to play golf, and he hit a colored caddy with a golf stick. Laid his head open. Mr. Pike give up trying the game after that. Gave Danny a hundred dollars and paid the hospital. Nobody else seen it. Mr. Pike said Danny walked the wrong way at the wrong time."



"Into his backswing?"



"That's what it was, the way they said it. Danny said he had a cold and he sneezed and Mr. Pike missed the ball entire and come at him with his eyes bugged out, making crazy little crying sounds, and Danny turned to run and he knows Mr. Pike couldn't run that fast, so he figures Mr. Pike threw it at him. Then those that had any idea of working out there, they decided against it."



"Why were they going to put the law on him when he was in the brokerage house?"



She looked astonished. "Why, for stealing! How else you going to get in trouble in that kind of job? Mr. McGee, I've got to get back on the job. See you tomorrow I guess. You don't see me, it'll mean I didn't get anything much tonight out home."



I could get in touch with neither Janice Holton nor D. Wintin Hardahee, so I backtracked to pick up a loose end that would probably turn into nothing. I placed a call to Dr. Bill Dyckes, the surgeon who had operated on Helena Pearson Trescott. A girl in his office told me he was operating but would probably phone in when he was through, so I did not leave a message but drove over to the hospital to see if I could make contact with him there.



A very obliging switchboard girl put a call through to the doctors' lounge on the third floor in the surgical wing and caught him there and motioned me to a phone. I said I was an old friend of Helena Trescott and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions about her. He hesitated and then told me to come on up, and gave me directions.



He came out of the lounge and we walked down the corridor to a small waiting room. He wore a green cotton smock and trousers and a green skullcap. There was a spray of drying blood across the belly of the smock, and he smelled of disinfectants. He was squat and broad and younger than I had expected. His hands were thick, with short, strong-looking ringers, curly reddish hair on his wrists, backs of his hands, and down to the first knuckle of the fingers.



He dropped heavily onto a sofa in the waiting room, sighing, stretching, then pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked up at the wall clock. "Next one'll be all prepped by eleven fifteen, and please God it will be nice, straight, clean, and simple because I'm scheduled for a son of a bitch this afternoon. What'd you want to know about Mrs. Trescott, Mr. McGee?"



"Did she ever have any chance at all?"



"Not by the time I went in the first time. Big juicy metastasized carcinoma right on the large bowel with filaments going out in every direction. Got the main mass of it and as much more as I could. Left some radioactive pellets in there to slow it some."



"Did you tell her she wouldn't make it?"



"I tell each one as much as I think they can safely take, when it's bad news. I realized later I could have told her the works. But I didn't know her well enough then to know how gutsy and staunch she was. So I said I thought I'd gotten it all, but I couldn't be sure, so we'd go into some other treatment to make sure. I didn't tell the daughters because I figured she could read them loud and clear. Told Tom Pike so that he could help cushion it for the girls when the time came."



"Then, how was she the second time?"



"Downhill. Had to go in to clear a stoppage. Damned jungle in there by then. Nothing like the anatomy books. Malignant is quite a word. Turned a good experienced operating-room nurse queasy. Then by the last time there wasn't anything about her that wasn't changed by it, in one way or another, except her eyes. Great eyes on that woman. Like the eyes of a young girl."



"Too bad that Maureen is in such condition now."



"I didn't get in on that. It isn't something you go after with a knife. But just about everybody else has had a piece of the action. She's had every test anybody around here has ever heard of, and some I think they made up. It would take two men to lift her lab files."



"Does it boil down to some specific area?"



"If by that you mean her head, yes. If you mean neurology, yes. No physical trauma, no tumor, no inhibition of nourishment. Something is screwing up the little circuits in there, the synapses. Tissue deterioration? Rare virus infection? Some new kind of withdrawal that's psychologically oriented? Some deficiency from birth that didn't show until now? Secretion imbalance? Rare allergy? My personal guess, which nobody will listen to because it's not my field, is that the trouble is in some psychiatric area. That fits the suicide impulse. But the shrinkers have gone through that and out the other side, they say. Series of shock treatments, no dice. Sodium Pentothal, no dice. Conversation on the couch, nothing. I thought you were interested in Mrs. Trescott."



"In the whole family, Doctor Dyckes."



"And I just sit here and open up like the family Bible, eh? And you take it all in, just like it was the most ordinary thing in the world to listen to a doctor violate the ethics of his profession."



"I... I thought you were responding to an expression of friendly interest and concern, Doctor, and--"



"Bullshit, McGee. Wanted to see if you handled yourself with any kind of sense at all. You do. Know why I'm talking to you about a patient... and the patient's family?"



"I guess you want to tell me why."



He brooded for a long tune, eyes half closed. "Trying to find the words for what she did for me. Even when there wasn't anything left of her but the pain and her eyes, I'd go sit by her bed when things went wrong for me, like when I lost a young one that I'd prayed I wouldn't lose. Dammit, I was borrowing guts from Helena Trescott. Leaning on her. We talked a lot, up until the tune I had to keep her too far under. One night she told me about a man named Travis McGee. She said that you might show up someday and you might ask a lot of questions. `Tell him how it was, Bill. Don't pretty it up. Trust him. Tell him what you know about my girls. I'm going to ask him to help Maureen, I think.' So, friend, she's the one who made it easy for you. Not your persuasive charm. Okay?"



"Okay. Thanks."



"So where were we?"



"The next thing I was going to try to do was to get you to give me your opinion of Doctor Sherman."



"Too bad about Stew. Good man. Vague spots here and there but generally solid. I mean in the medical knowledge sense. Damned fool about money, like most doctors. We're the prize pigeons of the modern world. Gold bricks, uranium mines in Uganda, you hold it up and we'll buy it."



"I understood he invested in Development Unlimited."



"Which may be as good as gold. The guys who have gone in swear by Tom Pike. Maybe they're getting rich. Good luck to them. I turned down my golden opportunity. I was pretty interested there for a while."



"What put you off it?"



"My brother. He and his wife were down visiting us. He's a big brain in financial circles in New York. Taught economics at Columbia, then got into securities analysis and real estate investment with a couple of the banks. Then he started a no-load mutual fund a few years ago. A hedge fund. They watch him like eagles up there, trying to figure out which way he's going to jump next. I was invited to one of those little get-in-on-the-ground-floor dinners Tom puts on from time to time. Stag. Took my brother along. Tom made quite an impressive talk, I thought. Had me about to grab for my checkbook. When we got home, Dewey told me what was wrong with the things Tom said. It boiled down to this. Tom used some wonderful terms, some very tricky ideas, a lot of explanations of tax shelters and so on. But my brother explained that it didn't hang together. As if he'd memorized things that wouldn't work in the way he said he was using them. Dewey said it was like a ten-year-old kid explaining Einstein to a roomful of relatives who never got past the tenth grade. The words were so big that, by God, it had to be good and had to be right. Dewey told me to stay out. Any spare change I have, I put in his mutual fund. And little by little he's going to make me rich. He promises me he will. You know, I hope he was wrong about Tom Pike. Because if Tom is goofing, a lot of men in Fort Courtney are going to get very, very badly hurt'. Look, I better go scrub. Nice to talk to you. She was one very special woman, that Mrs. Trescott."



I tried Hardahee again and struck out. But Janice Hoi-ton was home and said sure, I could stop by if I wanted to. I parked in front on the circular drive and went up and rang the doorbell. As I was waiting she came around the side of the house and said, "Oh. It's you. I'm fixing some stuff around in the back. Want to come around? I don't want to leave it half done."



She had newspapers spread on the grass, under a metal chaise, a piece of lawn furniture originally pale blue. The blue paint had been chipped off by hard use. She was giving it a spray coat of flat black DeRusto from a spray can. She wore very brief and very tight fawn-colored stretch shorts, and a faded green blouse with a sun back, and ragged old blue boat shoes. I stood in the shade within comfortable conversation range. She had a deep tan. She moved swiftly and to good effect, limber as a dancer when she bent and turned, and able to sit comfortable as a Hindu, fawn rear propped on the uptilted backs of the boat shoes. She was sweaty with sun and effort, her back glossy, accenting the play of small hard muscles under her hide as she moved.



She turned, tossing her black hair back, and said, "I ran off at the mouth Sunday night. It isn't like me. I must have been lonely."



"Funny. I had the feeling I talked too much. Had the feeling I'd bored you, Janice."



"Excuse me, but I forgot your first name."



"Travis."



"Okay, Travis. So we were a couple of refugees or something. And excuse me for something else. Meg got a glimpse of you and thought you looked very interesting. You know, she has been covering for me, but she doesn't know who I've been seeing. She decided it had to be you, so I didn't say yes and I didn't say no. She thinks it is awfully sophisticated for you to bring my husband home drunk so we can put him to bed and go out together. Hmmm. Have I missed anything?"



"That brace over there on the left, under the seat."



"Where? Oh, I see it. Thanks."



She covered the last blue neatly and precisely and straightened up, cocked her head to the side, shook the paint bomb. The marble rattled around inside. "Just about completely gone. I love to have something be just enough instead of too much or too little. Want a drink or a cold beer or anything? I've been promising myself a beer."



She led me into the cool house and the cheerful kitchen. She tried to thrust a glass upon me, then admitted that she too preferred it right from the bottle. She leaned against the sink, elegant ankles crossed, uptilted the bottle, and drank until her eyes watered.



"Hah!" she said. "Meg probably saw you drive up. She'll think this is terribly soigne too, a little visit just before lunch. She's probably lurking about in the shrubbery, panting."



"As long as I'm nominated, don't you think I ought to know where we've kept all these other assignations?"



"Not assignations. Just to be together. And talk. Talk about everything under the sun. Hold hands like school kids. Cry a little sometimes. Hell! Why shouldn't a man be allowed to cry?"



"They do, from time to time."



"Not enough. Not nearly enough. Well, we had to meet where there would be absolutely no chance of anyone seeing us together."



"Pretty good trick."



"Not terribly difficult, really. We'd arrange a time and both drive to the huge parking lot at the Courtney Plaza and once we had spotted each other, you'd drive out and I would follow you and you would find a place where we could park both cars and then sit together in one of them and not be seen. Out in one of the groves, or on a dark residential street, or out near the airport, someplace he



.. you thought we'd be safe."



"How would we arrange the date in the first place?"



"You won't have to know that."



"Is that what we were going to do last Saturday? Spend the whole day, or most of it, sitting around in some damned automobile holding hands and crying?"



"Please don't make cheap fun of it."



"Sorry."



"Saturday it might have become something else. Second phase of the affair, or something. Maybe it's just as well Rick spoiled it. I keep yearning for someplace where we could be really alone, really safe. Someplace with walls around us and a roof over us, and a door that will lock. But not a motel, for God's sake. I don't think I could stand a motel. And that would be a risk. You see he... he's in a position where a lot depends upon people having total confidence in him. It would be more than just... the appearance of infidelity."



"He's a banker?"



"You may call him a banker if you wish. He found a place for us for Saturday. He couldn't get away until about noon. So I was going to drive back and wait for him in the parking lot of a small shopping center north of town, then follow him to. the place. He said it was safe and private and nobody would know. He said that not even the person who lived there would ever know we'd been there. So I guess we both knew that if we were ever alone together in a place like that, nothing could help us or save us."



"But good old Rick decided to make the Vero Beach trip."



"He was in horrible shape Monday morning, so stiff and sore and lame he could hardly get out of bed. And terribly hung over, of course. When I told him I'd taken Ms friend, McGee, back to the Wahini Lodge, he stared at me and then laughed in the most ghastly way. We're not speaking, of course. Just the absolute essentials."



She came and took my empty bottle and dropped the two of them into the tilt-lid kitchen can. "Again I'm doing all the talking, Travis. You have a bad effect on my mouth. Was there something you wanted to see me about, particularly?"



"I guess I've had you on my mind, Janice."



She stared at me, and her frown made two vertical clefts between her dark brows, over the generous nose. She shook her head slowly. "Uh-uh, my friend. If you're thinking what I think you're thinking. Help the embittered lady get her own back? Eye for an eye, and all that? What's the next part of the gambit? Healthy young woman deprived of a sex life, et cetera, et cetera? No, my dear. Not even to keep Meg happy by confirming her suspicions."



"Now that you bring it up, the idea has some merit, I guess. I've had you on my mind for a different reason."



"Such as?"



"Suppose I named your boyfriend by name. The dear, kind, tender, sensitive, wonderful and so on."



"You can't, of course. What are you getting at?"



"But if I did, would you feel you had to go to him and tell him that somebody knows?"



"On a hypothetical basis? Let me see. If you did name him, what would be your point, really, in wanting to be certain? What would you be after?"



"A clue to what kind of man he is."



"He is a marvelous man!"



"Does everybody think so?"



"Of course not! Don't be so dense! Any man who has strength and drive and opinions of his own will make enemies."



"Who'll badmouth him."



"Of course."



"Okay, his name is... Tompestuous K. Fliggle, Banker."



"Travis, you are an idiot."



"These are idiotic times we live in, my dear."



And the little inadvertent muscles around her eyes had clued me when I hit the first syllable of the invented name, which was as far as I cared to go.



At a few minutes past noon I read the nameplate on the mailbox at 60 Ridge Lane. Miss Hulda Wennersehn. The name of the real estate firm that managed the garden apartments was on a small sign at the corner. From the first drugstore phone I came to, I called the real estate offices and was switched to a Miss Forrestal. I told her I was with the credit bureau and would appreciate some information on Hulda Wennersehn. She pulled the card and said that Miss Wennersehn, age fifty-one, had been in number sixty for four years and had never been in arrears. I asked if Miss Wennersehn was employed by an insurance company and she said, "Oh, no, unless she changed jobs and didn't inform us. Of course, she'd have no reason to inform us, actually. But we have her as working for Kinder, Noyes, and Strauss. That's a brokerage firm. She works as a cashier." So thank you, my dear. So I phoned the brokerage house and the switchboard girl told me that, my goodness, it had been at least two years since Miss Wennersehn had worked there. She was working for a real estate company. She gave me the phone number. On a hunch I asked her if a Mr. Tom Pike had ever been with the firm, and she said that he had, but that had been some time ago. The number she gave me turned out to be Development Unlimited.



"Miss Wennersehn? I'll transfer you to... oh, excuse me, sir. She is still up at our Jacksonville office. Shall I see if I can find out when she'll be returning?" I thanked her and told her not to bother. I went back to the motel to see if there were any messages. Stanger was waiting for me.



16



SOMETHING HAD changed Stanger, tautened him, given him nervous mannerisms I had not noticed before. We went to 109. He moved restlessly about. I phoned for sandwiches and coffee.



When I asked him what was wrong, he told me to let him think. He paused at the big window and stood with Ms hands locked behind him, teetering from heel to toe, looking out at people playing in the pool.



"I could maybe go with one of those security outfits," he said. "Gate guard. Watchman work."



"You get busted?"



"Not yet. But maybe that's what they'll want to do."



"Why?"



"That Mrs. Boughmer was off on some kind of garden club tour. I finally got the daughter to let me in. Went into my act. Want to warn you you're in serious trouble. Withholding information about a capital crime. Maybe I can help you if you level with me now. And so on and so on. Until she split open."



"What was her problem?"



He turned and walked over and sat heavily in the armchair. "She was bellering and squeaking and sobbing. Spraying spit. Words all jammed together she was trying to say them so fast. Grabbing at my hands. Begging. Confessing. Jesus!"



"Confessing what?"



"That poor dun ugly girl was in love with Doc Sherman. Not so much romance and poetry. Passion. Hot pants. You saw her. Any man ever going to lay a hand on her? So there was something she was doing, God only knows what. Last to leave. Lock the doors. Leave the office lights on. Go into the dark treatment room. Do something in there. She wouldn't say what. Something, according to her, that was nasty and evil. Went on for years, I guess. Some kind of release. No idea what Broon was after or how he got in. She was working on the files after Sherman had died, a few days later. She was in the treatment room and the lights suddenly went on and Broon is in the doorway watching her. Told her to put her clothes back on and he'd talk to her in the office. Apparently, McGee, he convinced that poor sick sad homely woman that there was some law, crime against nature, jail her as a degenerate or some damned thing. Told her that if she ever tried to tell anybody Sherman didn't kill himself, he'd have her picked up and taken in right away. He took some kind of `evidence' away with him. How the hell was I supposed to know she was so close to the edge? All of a sudden she went rigid as a board, bit right through her lip, started whooping and snapping around, eyes out of sight. Followed the ambulance in. Some kind of breakdown. Left a neighbor woman on the lookout for , Mrs. Boughmer. Probably Dave Broon slipped the lock on the rear door that night and came easing in."



"That won't be anything to bust you for, Al."



"It isn't that. It's what comes next. Maybe."



"Which is?"



"Dave Broon. I've come right up to it with him. Too many years, too many things. No way to nail him according to the rules I'm supposed to follow. We're supposed to be on the same ball club. He gives the whole thing a bad smell. Maybe there's a time when you don't go by the book. Look, I've got to have somebody with me. The things I'm thinking scare me. I've got to have somebody stop me if I can't stop myself."



"Maybe you'd better think it over."



"Meaning you don't want any part of it."



"If you want me with you, okay. But just for the hell of it, before we see him, can you get a decent check on where he was the night Sherman died, and where he was the afternoon Penny Woertz died?"



"I don't know about last Saturday, but I remember he was up in Birmingham to bring a prisoner back when Sherman died. Anyway, let me see where that fancy little scut might be."



He moved to the bed and used the bedside phone. He would mumble greetings, ask about Broon, listen, hang up, dial another number. He made at least eight calls. He got up and said, "Guess I'll have some time to think it over. He's been here and there, but nobody's got a fix on him in the past hour or so. Might be hanging around the courthouse. He's got cronies over there who feed him little bits of information, probably for cash on the line. Or he could be at city hall for the same reason. Or he could be holed up in that so-called penthouse with a new playmate. Hasn't had one around for a while, so he's due."



He left, saying he would get in touch and pick me up so I could go with him to talk to Dave Broon. After he had gone, I put the lunch tray outside the door so no one would have any reason to come in after it. And before I left, I used one of the oldest and simplest tricks to warn me if anyone came into the room by way of the door while I was gone. I wadded up a sheet of the motel stationery and, as I left, I leaned over and reached back through the opening and placed it on the rug, close to the door, a precise placement because I could measure it by the length of my forearm, from the crook of elbow to the thumb and finger in which I held it. The door opened inward. Anyone entering would brush it away with the door. Even if they had the wit to try to replace it, they could never put it in the same identifiable position as before. When a door opens outward, it is easiest to close it against a bit of matchstick or toothpick inserted at some precise spot and broken off so that it is barely visible from outside the door. But a careful workman can defeat this protection, or the hair and chewing gum device, or the carbon-paper gimmick.



The day blackened, the sky cracked open, and the rain came down, storm gusts whipping the spray of the rebound and the mist of the hot streets, tearing brown fronds off the cabbage palms, shredding the broadleaf plantings, swinging signs and traffic lights. Same kind of storm wind that had made the Likely Lady rock her weight against the anchor lines, creaking and grunting. It had been cozy below.



I tried Hardahee. She said he had left for the day, and I could not tell if she was lying. I found Rick Holton's law office. The girl took my name and disappeared. She came back and led me down a paneled corridor. He had a big desk with a window wall behind it that looked out onto a little enclosed court paved with Japanese river stones and with some stunted trees in big white pots. Rain ran down the window wall. He had a lot of framed scrolls on the persimmon paneling of his walls, and framed photographs of politicians, warmly inscribed.



He tried the big confident junior chamber smile, but it had sagged into nothing before the girl had closed the office door.



"Sit down, McGee. Told Sally I didn't want to see anybody. Supposed to be getting through all this damned desk work. Jesus! I read things three times and don't know what I've read. Know where they're getting with the investigation? Noplace. I think it was some crazy. Hell, Penny would have opened the door to anybody. They panicked and ran. One of those lousy meaningless things. They'll pick him up for something else someday, and he'll start talking and hand them this one."



"It might open up. Stanger might come across something."



"He's good."



"Better than your friend Dave Broon?"



He shrugged. "Dave is handy for odd jobs."



"Can I get your opinion on a few things, Holton? Not legal opinion. Personal."



"For what it's worth, which isn't much lately. Everything seems to be going sour. You know, the deal with Penny was going sour. We were about ready to close the books. So why do I miss her so damn much?"



"She was pretty special."



"So Janice was very special. Past tense. I blew the whole bit. For a roll in the hay with Penny Woertz. Nowhere near as good-looking a girl as Janice. What was I trying to prove? With Janice you don't just make a sincere apology and go on from there. Done is done. Total loyalty, given and expected. I've lost her. Funny thing, driving back from Vero Beach, when I had no idea in the world Penny was already dead, I tried to tell Jan that it was something that had just sort of happened. I said it was over. I wasn't sure it was over, but I had the feeling that if I told Jan it was, then I'd have to make sure I kept on feeling just the way I felt when she wouldn't leave your room Friday night when I did. That was before we picked up the kids at Citrusdale. She let me talk. I thought she was really thinking it over, giving me a chance. I reached over and put my hand on her arm. You know, she actually shuddered? And she said in a polite voice to please not touch her, it made her stomach turn over. That was the end of it, right there."



"When you were waiting for me Sunday night, did you have any idea of shooting me, Holton?"



He tilted his chair back and looked up at the soundproofed ceiling, eyes narrowed. "That was pretty dim. Jesus, I don't know. I'd read a stat of that note she wrote you. It made it pretty clear about you two. I was aware of the gun. I had the feeling that my whole life was so messed up nothing mattered too much. And you'd hit me harder than anybody ever hit me in my life. I'm still sore from it. Four days and I still hurt when I take a deep breath. I've got a lousy temper. Maybe, McGee. All things considered, I just might have. Scares me to think of it. Without Janice and without Penny, things aren't all that bad. I've got a lot of friends. I do a good job for my clients. I made a good record as an assistant state attorney and I've got a good chance of becoming county attorney next year, and that's worth a minimum forty thousand, plus other business it brings in. They say money won't buy happiness, but you can sure rent yourself some. I'm grateful to you for suckering me. And thanks for taking me home. Where's the gun anyway?"



"I turned it over to Stanger and he gave it back to me."



He was puzzled. "Why'd he do that?"



"It's just sort of a temporary loan, just a little delay in officially turning it over to him."



"When you give it back to Mm, tell him to hang on to it. I don't think I ought to have one around. Not for a while. Maybe not ever. But why does Al Stanger think you need a gun?"



"Just a whim, maybe."



"You mean you'd rather not say? Okay. Yesterday morning I checked out what you said about yourself. I phoned Tom Pike and he said you were an old friend of Mrs. Trescott and her daughters."



"If you could check that easily, why didn't you check before you and Penny pulled that stupid deal, that grade C melodrama?"



He blushed. "So now it seems wild and stupid. We sort of talked each other into it. If it had worked-and you have to admit it came close-then I would have maybe found out from whatever papers you were carrying on your person, the missing piece. We'd narrowed it down to one theory that looked better and better. The tall man could have been in some kind of drug traffic."



"Oh, come on!"



"Wait a minute now! I held back a little on you when we talked in your room. Penny followed my lead. The man seen leaving Sherman's office was carrying a case of some kind, light-colored and heavy. No controlled drugs were missing, according to the office records. But there was no control on the stuff he ordered for his experimentations. He did some animal experimentations along with the other stuff. He could have been ordering experimental compounds, couldn't he?"



"Aren't you reaching?"



"I talked to Helen Boughmer the day after he died. She was convinced that a lot of stuff might be missing from the room in back, and she was going to check the file of special orders against the inventory of what was left. She believed he'd been killed. And two days later, she'd changed completely. She said she had changed her mind. She said she believed he'd killed himself. She said she had checked the special orders and nothing was missing. I asked her to produce the file. She claimed she couldn't find it. And she never did find it. Now somebody, dammit, had to get to her. If Sherman had killed himself, why would anybody take the tune and trouble to shut her mouth. She was a changed woman. She acted terrified."



"Then, why would I come back here, if I was the one who killed Doctor Sherman? What would there be here for me?"



"Now you can say I'm reaching. Why would Tom Pike pay you twenty thousand in cash? It was one of those crazy breaks you get sometimes that one of my partners here saw him giving the money to a man who matches your description. Let's say Sherman stepped out of line when Maureen Pike was so critically ill at the time of her miscarriage, and gave her something not authorized for use on patients. Suppose he did this with Tom's knowledge and consent, and whatever it was, the side effect was some kind of brain damage? Hell, it kind of dwindles off because it doesn't seem as if it would give anybody enough leverage to pry money out of Tom Pike. But you'd seen Tom, and even if we didn't find a thing except a heavy piece of money on you, that would mean some kind of confirmation."



"Personal opinion again, please. Do you think Doctor Sherman killed his wife?"



"Ben Gaffney and I-he's the state attorney-went up one side of that and down the other. Going after him with a circumstantial case just didn't add up. We could show motive and opportunity, but there was absolutely no way to prove the cause of death. Do I think he did? Yes. So does Ben. The specialists we talked to said it was highly unlikely there could have been such a sudden deterioration in her condition that she could go into deep coma after the amount of insulin she had apparently taken. But `highly unlikely' isn't enough to go to court with. So we closed out the investigation finally."



"Who was handling it?"



"The death occurred in county jurisdiction. Dave Broon was handling it, under joint direction of my office and the sheriff. If Dave could have come up with something that strengthened the case, it would still have been a pretty unpopular indictment."



"Now, to get back to Sherman's death, do you have the feeling that Penny had any kind of lead at all that she hadn't told you about yet?"



He looked startled and then grim. "I see where that one is aimed. I don't really... wait a minute. Let me think." He leaned back and ground at his eyes with the heels of his hands. "I don't know if this is anything. It would have been... a week ago. Last Tuesday. She was working an eleven-to-six-in-the-morning shift, a postoperative case, and that was the last time she was on that one. I pulled out of here early. About quarter to four and went over to see her. She'd just gotten up. She had dreamed about Doctor Sherman. She was telling me about it. I wasn't paying much attention. She stopped all of a sudden and she had a funny expression. I asked her what the trouble was and she said she'd just thought of something, that the dream had reminded her of something. She wouldn't tell me. She said she had to ask somebody a question first, and maybe it was nothing at all, but maybe it meant something. Very mysterious about it."



"Can you remember anything about the dream?"



"Not much. Nutty stuff. Something about him opening a door in his forehead and making her look in and count the times a little orange light in there was blinking."



"But you don't know if she asked anyone that question?"



"She never brought it up again."



"While you were... conducting this unofficial investigation of Sherman's death, were you telling Janice about it, about things like the file the Boughmer woman wouldn't produce?"



"I guess I was telling her more than I usually would. Hell, I was trying to cover for the time I was spending with Penny. But Janice was turning ice cold, and fast. She wasn't buying it. I kept trying, but she wasn't buying it. She found out, I guess."



"Somebody told her about it practically as soon as it began."



"No kidding! Some real pal."



"Do you think she's found some other man?"



"I keep trying not to think about that. What's it to you?"



"Let's say it isn't just a case of big-nose, Holton."



"I get home and that damned Meg is either over at the house with her kids, or the kids are over at Meg's house. No note from Janice. No message, nothing. So she comes home and I say where have you been, and she says out. Looks so damned smug. But I keep telling myself that when she comes home, she doesn't have that look. You know? Something about the mouth and the hair and the way they walk. A woman who's been laid looks laid. Their eyes are different too. If she's got somebody, he's not playing his cards right. If she likes him and she's sore at me, and I know she's known about Penny, all he'd have to do would be lay one hand on her to get her going, and she'd take over from there. A lousy way to talk about the wife, I guess. But I know her. And she's no wife now. Not anymore. Never again, not for me."



"Does she think Sherman was murdered?"



"She was fond of him. She's sure of it. Not from anything I dug up or any chain of logic I explained. She operates on instinct. She says he couldn't have and to her that's it."



"So she wanted to have you find out who did it?"



"Not because she was hot to have somebody punished, but more because it would clear his name."



"What do you know about the trouble Tom Pike got into at Kinder, Noyes, and Strauss?"



"What? You jump around pretty fast. All I know is the shop talk I heard about it. He was a very hot floor man. He had people swearing by him. He went in there and built up one hell of a personal following. High fliers, discretionary accounts, a lot of trading in and out, accounts fully margined. And he's a very persuasive guy. He made a lot of money for a lot of people in this town, in a very short time. But there was one old boy who came down to retire, and he had a portfolio of blue chips. He had Telephone and General Motors and Union Carbide. He signed an agreement to have Tom Pike handle his holdings on a discretionary basis. As I understand it, Tom cashed in all the old boy's blues and started swinging with the proceeds. Fairchild Camera, Texas Instrument, Tele-dyne, Litton. At the end of three months the total value of the old boy's holdings was down by about twelve thousand. And Tom had made about forty trades, and the total commissions came to eight grand. The old boy blew the whistle on Tom, claiming that the agreement was that Tom would commit only twenty percent of his holdings in high-risk investments, that Tom had ignored the understanding and put the whole amount in high fliers, and had churned the account to build up his commissions. He had his lawyer send the complaint directly to the president of the firm in New York. They sent down a couple of lawyers and a senior partner to investigate. Brokerage houses are very sensitive about that kind of thing. Big conference, as I understand it. Complete audit of all trades. Tom Pike claimed that the man had told him that he was after maximum capital gains in high-risk issues and that he had other resources and could afford the risk. The man denied it. It looked as if Tom was in serious trouble. But one of the female employees was able to back up Tom's story. She said the man had phoned her to get verification of the status of his account and his buying power, and that when he had been twenty-five thousand ahead of the game, he had told her over the phone that getting out of the tired old blue chips and letting Mr. Pike handle his account was the smartest move he had ever made. The old man denied ever saying that."

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