One Fearful Yellow Eye

Smith had a good memory for details. Gorba had served over four and half years of a six year sentence in Wisconsin. Gretchen had lined up a job for him in a body and fender shop through the shop foreman who was a friend and regular customer at the restaurant where she was working. Through a reciprocal arrangement on parole supervision, a duplicate file was sent along to the Cook County authorities, and that was the one Smith had examined. Gorba had been just past thirty when he had been tried, convicted, and sentenced. He and Gretchen had been living as common-law man and wife in Milwaukee. She claimed that during the two years they had been together, she had thought he was a salesman. They rented a small frame house in a quiet lower-middle-class area. She thought he sold novelties and specialty items and office supplies. He had a small hand press in the basement and he told her it was for sample letterheads. He had a large supply of the different colors of safety paper used for bank checks, and he had a perforator, cutting board, several styles of check-writers, several typewriters.

His business trips lasted a week or two, and he would take a week off between each trip. His trips took him into Iowa; Minnesota, and Illinois. His procedure was to acquire legitimate checks made out for commercial payroll purposes, or for payment on small accounts. One source was through mail -order, where he would, using a false name and a post office box, send in an overpayment by money order and get a company check back representing his refund.

Once he had acquired, for example, a check from the XYZ Company in Madison, Wisconsin, he would take it home and, in his basement shop, make a dozen acceptable duplicates of it, in size, paper stock, imprint, check-writer patterns, typing, carefully traced signatures, and even to the careful duplication in India ink of the magnetic ink symbols used by the automated sorting equipment in the banks. With the dozen checks made out in varying and plausible amounts, usually in odd dollars and cents between one hundred and two hundred dollars, he would hit Madison with them, using a falsified driver’s license as identification, and cashed them without great difficulty as payroll in a dozen different places, clearing up to two thousand dollars. He was neat, personable, and careful to make significant alterations in his appearance for each job.

Shortly before he was arrested, he had told Gretchen that he was getting a chance at a better territory soon, and they would probably be moving to eastern Ohio.

An alert supermarket manager in Racine thought the check he had just cashed did not look quite right somehow. He compared it with another payroll check from the same company and discovered that the check paper was a slightly different shade of green, and that the check-writer numerals were larger. He ran out and caught Gorba as he was getting into his car. After he grabbed Gorba, the next thirty seconds cost the manager over three weeks in the hospital. An off-duty cop was trundling a wire basket of weekend groceries out to his car, and it took him a long and painful time to subdue the suspect.

Smith said, “A loner. A real weirdo. They confiscated twenty-eight grand he had squirreled away in hidey-holes in that basement. Previous arrests and convictions were not in any kind of pattern like you expect. Assault with a deadly weapon. Conspiracy to defraud. Impersonating an officer. Attempted rape. In and out of four colleges. An IQ like practically a genius. Emotionally unstable, they said. She had the youngest by him after they put him away. Tommy.”

“He doesn’t sound like the kind who’d be attracted to Gretchen.”

‘’Why not? Those jumpy ones, sometimes what suits them best is some big dumb happy broad. No demands. No arguments. And also you have to figure it made a nice cover for him for those two years, the wife and family, quiet neighborhood, just another salesman. Anyway, I had to report to the Doc on how it was going to work out, and it didn’t look so great to me. But it was the longest stretch he’d pulled, and it settled him down, apparently. His record on the inside was good. The parole officer said his attitude was good. Gretchen was clamhappy to have him back, and at the suggestion of the parole officer, they made it legal. The foreman was satisfied with him. He kept to himself but he did his work at the shop. Gretchen kept on with the waitress work. With more pay coming in, they got an apartment in the same building but down on the second floor, with one more bedroom, three instead of two. I wouldn’t say the relationship with the kids was real close, but it was workable. And I guess Mrs. Ottlo, the kids’ grandma, approved, maybe because it was legal. I guess she started getting along better with her daughter, because she took to going there Sunday afternoons when everybody was home, having dinner with them.“

“And now she has no idea where they went. No forwarding address.”

He stared at me. “You kidding?”

“They moved out last August, apparently.”

Frowning, he counted slowly on his fingers, lips moving. “He was going to be on parole in sixteen months, so it would run out last August, about. Maybe the brightest ones are the biggest damned fools. Maybe he kept his head down until he had his clean bill, then headed for someplace where he could go back into business for himself. Want me to try to trace them for you?”

“What are the rates?”

“Very funny! Expenses only, and on my own time, as you damn well know. And no written reports.”

“Just checking,” I said.

“Nothing has changed, and never will.” He took his glasses off and wiped them on a paper napkin. I wondered what hold they had on him. He apparently thought I knew about it.

“See what you can do,” I said. “I’m in 944 at the Drake. Meanwhile, I’d like some specific information out of your records on Susan and her brothers and sisters.”

He returned in less than half an hour, sat across from me, and said, “Had to wait until the file girl went for her coffee break. Want to write this down? Susan Kemrner will be eighteen on January fourth. Gretchen had one kid by Kemmer. Freddy. He’s fifteen. She had a common-law setup out in California with somebody named Budrow. She had two by him. Julian is twelve and Freda is ten. The last one, Tommy, was by Gorba, and the kid is six now. The annuity is with Great Lakes Casualty Mutual. Their Chicago office is in the National Republic Bank Building on South La Salle.”

“What happened to Budrow?”

“Just took off, I guess.”

“Can you get on this right away, Smith?”

“All I can tell you is I’ll do the best I can. It shouldn’t be hard. I’ll see what I can turn up at the places they worked, and see what happened with the kids’ school records, and see where the annuity checks are going. Saul Gorba is maybe foxy enough to slip out of sight if he was by himself. A whole family is something else. I could get shot with luck and hit it the first try and know by tonight. Or it could take a week of leg work.”

“Find out if they left owing.”

He looked slightly contemptuous. “The first thing I would do is check the Credit Bureau. There could be a tracer request and the new address already.”

It took me four dimes to track down Martin Hollinder Trumbill the Fourth. In a brassy bass rumble he said he was too damned busy getting ready for a trip to see anybody about anything. I pulled a gentle con on him by saying that if he could see me, then maybe I wouldn’t have to spoil his trip. After we went around and around on that for several minutes, he asked me to meet him at twelve-thirty at the bar of the Norway Club atop the Lakeway Tower.

I was five minutes late and he was ten minutes late. He didn’t come in from outside. He came in from some nearby area where the club members evidently worked out. His hair was damp and he had the glow of sauna and sunlamp. He was fifty, bronzed, about five nine, with most of his hair, a ruggedly handsome face, a body like a bull ape, as broad and thick through the shoulder as any NFL tackle. Arrogant little simian eyes stared out at me from under great grizzled black tangles of eyebrow. Tufts of black hair grew out of nostrils and ears, and his big hands had a heavy pelt on the backs and on the backs of the fingers down to the middle. knuckle. A shetland sport jacket, perfectly tailored to his broad, long-armed, bandy-legged build, softened somewhat the brute impact of him. But I wondered what he was trying to prove by making his barber leave the nostril and ear hair alone.

An attendant had pointed me out to him as the man who was waiting for him. A drink appeared on the bar and he took it and walked away toward the view windows. A powder snow was falling, and the wind whipped it against the curved glass. I followed him as he expected I would.

“In thirty seconds make me believe you could spoil anything for me, or I’ll have you thrown out.” He spoke without turning to look at me.

I said, “Golly, sir, gee whiz, now you’ve got me so terrified I can’t hardly think straight.”

He pivoted and stared at me. “What the hell is this?”

I smiled upon him. “I guess I don’t like jackasses. I guess I don’t like rich jackasses. I guess I don’t like rich, rude, double-gaited jackasses. Now would you like to try again? You got off on the wrong foot, Gadgey.”

I didn’t realize he could get those eyebrows so high. “Who the hell do you think you are!”

“T. for Travis McGee. I know. You’ll buy the ground I’m standing on and have me torn down. I am an old buddy of the Widow Geis. Doctor Fort shoved the first legal team into the fray and Miss Heidi got very well. Am I getting past that hair in your ears? I wouldn’t want you to leave town without answering a question. Are you a miserable enough bastard to have found a way to gouge Heidi’s winnings back out of her poor old dad’s hide?”

“Gouge? Gouge?”

“There’s no estate left.”

“I know.”

“Now how would you know Gadgey?”

“Her brother Roger was wringing his hands about it. He’s a goddam stuffed shirt and… What gives you the right to ask me questions anyway?”

“Because I am helping the Widow Geis find out where all the money went.”

“All the money? For God’s sake, McGee, sure Heidi took a pretty good cut. I’ve still got eleven million in tax-exempt municipals, if you can comprehend what I’m talking about.”

“You’re talking about at least three hundred and thirty thousand a year you don’t even have to report on the good old ten-forty. Cut the shit, Trumbill. If it was a hundred and ten million, you still couldn’t impress me. You can afford to buy me a drink in your own club, can’t you? A double Plymouth gin on ice, plain. I’ll wait right here while you go make the arrangements.”

I watched him head for the bar and I wondered how far he could be pushed. He did not lumber. He had a springy and youthful stride. As he approached bearing my drink, I heard him chuckling. He handed it to me, bowed, and said, “Golly, sir, gee whiz, now you’ve got me so terrified I can’t think straight.”

“Thank you for the drink, Mr. Trumbill.”

“My pleasure, Mr. McGee,” he said. “Let’s sit in the lounge and get acquainted. There’s no particular reason why I give a goddam about your opinion about anything, but there’s one thing that needs correcting.”

I followed him to two wingback chairs with a small table between them, angled to look out at the scenery and provide privacy for conversation. “You have met Heidi?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“The ice queen. The snow maiden. But when you look at her, everything points the other way. When I married her three years ago, I thought I had the optimum solution. McGee, I am not a locker-room sex hero. I just happened to be born with a hell of a lot of sexual drive and capacity. Sleeping around is a damned bore. Everything about her looks as if she was made for it. Fantastic body. Healthy as a field hand. The way she walks, the timbre of her voice, the shape of her hands, it’s all provocative and invitational. I. thought to myself, hell, Gadge, there’s the answer. She was twenty-two and I was forty-eight. She’d be thirty-five when I was sixtyone, and she’d be getting ready to slow down a little when I damn well had to. But finding out she was a twenty-two-year-old virgin should have told me something. Let me tell you, I worked like a slave on that damned girl. The harder I tried, the nastier she thought it was. Finally I could practically see her flesh crawl when I touched her. The only response I ever got was a goddam martyred sigh: Sexual frustration is a hell of a sorry condition; McGee. So I went out to get what I couldn’t get from her. I think I was a little out of my mind. I grabbed onto anything warm and breathing that came within reach. And a couple of times when I was pig-drunk it happened to be her willowy little art-class boyfriends who wanted a way to get a hand in the till. When I gave no big gifts of money, they went whimpering to her about her gross, horrible brute of a husband. Now I give her this. She knows she’s frigid, and she knows that her condition had a lot to do with the situations I got into after I gave up with her. So she wasn’t going to try for a big settlement and big alimony. But her darling daddy egged her on and got her some hot legal talent, and they gave me a pretty fair bruise. It could have been even big ger if she’d really wanted to take it all into court, but they still had enough pressure to extract a generous agreement. Those months were the only time I ever went the AC-DC route, and it isn’t going to happen again because I’m never going to get into that kind of desperate mood again. So drop back on the double-gaited. I like girls. Always have. Always will. And I prefer girl-girls with all the girl-girl equipment to the girl-boys with the long locks and the squeaky voices: I don’t know why I should give a goddam about your opinion…”

“You’re repeating yourself. There’s another question I Want to…”

He looked at his watch. “Okay. Come down to the apartment and ask it there. I’m expecting some people and I want to be there when they get there.”

I got my coat from the attendant and we rode down to the sixteenth floor and got off. He explained that quite a few of the members kept an apartment in the building as a convenience, and if they were going to be away for six months or longer, the club management would arrange a sublet.

He unlocked it. It was as impersonal as a decorator’s advertisement.

As soon as I had a chance I asked my question. “Mr. Trumbill, last year, in April or May or June, while you and Heidi were still together…”

“I moved out the last week in May.”

“Okay. During those last two months did anything happen which seemed odd.”

“Odd?”

“Any kind of accident which could have been dangerous, or any near-accident, where Heidi was involved?”

“Why?”

“It could be important and the reasons would take too long to explain.”

“Important to whom, McGee?”

“Does it matter? Come on.”

“There wasn’t anything… unless you mean something like that damned candy.”

“Candy?”

“Oh, there was a kind she was nuts about. Chocolate cherries. A lot of juice inside. She never bought them for herself. Her father would bring her a box or have them sent over on special occasions. Birthdays, anniversaries. Sometime in early May-we’d had a big scrap-I walked through the living room. She was watching the news on television. I was going out, and I knew she damned well wasn’t going to say good-bye dear have a nice time. The Way she ate them, she didn’t nibble. She’d lift one out of the box, pop it into her mouth, and mash it. The box was half gone. She was down to the second layer. Suddenly she began making the damnedest noises, gasping and whoofing and spitting pieces of chocolate all over. She went to the kitchen on a dead run, scaring the hell out of the maid. She kept rinsing her mouth in cold water. Her eyes were running and her nose was running. She couldn’t say a word we could understand. Finally after she ate some crackers and rinsed her mouth out some more, she started chewing me out for pulling such a nasty trick. I finally convinced her I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She had gotten a chocolate that instead of having a cherry and cherry juice inside had apparently been filled with about a quarter ounce of straight Tabasco. She was furious. I was running late, so I left.”

“How did it happen?”

“She never found out. She opened all the ones left in the box. They were all perfect. She phoned her father and told him about it. He said it must have happened after the box was opened, because he had bought it one day, and brought it over to our place the next day in person, and the shop was certainly reliable. He said maybe it was some friend of mine who knew her habits. I guess you could classify that as an accident. It made her very uncomfortable, but I guess there are things you could put in candy that would do more than…”

The phone rang and he answered it, then hung up and told me his people were on the way up. I thanked him and said I’d run along. He said, “Meet the group, McGee. Highly talented people. We’re going to Guadeloupe and make a motion picture. Highly unusual script. Be released in France. Some of the crew is there now, picking locations.”

There was a brisk rap on the door, and he went and let four of them in, two young women, two young men. They were laughing and gay and all a little tight. One was a Limey lass, the height of mod exhibitionism,. her little-girl skirt a good four inches above the kee, and a metallic golden serpent wrapped around her left leg just below the knee. While she was saying, with little chopping motions of her hands, “What a fantastically gawstly city Gadge darling, ectually!” he was introducing her as Pansy Perkins, certainly I’d heard of her.

“Certainly I haven’t, sorry” I said. “I live a quiet life.”

With a speculative glint she started appraising me, but Trumbill put a huge paw on her slender shoulder, and as he introduced a busty Italian girl whose name was vaguely familiar (she took a slender cigar out of the center of her considerable mouth to acknowledge the introduction) and then a Pierre something, talented director, all in black, even to little black onyx buttons in his pierced ears, and a Willy something, fat, pasty, scruffy, with too blatant an Irish accent, Gadge was at the same time stroking the throat of his Pansy with a spatulate thumb, an attention which unfocused her eyes, loosened her mouth, and sagged her head like a wilting poppy.

“We are going to go down there and do something true,” Trumbill said. “We are going to work hard and we are going to work well, and get it all down the way it happens.”

Suddenly I realized who he was trying to be. “For God’s sake, Papa, don’t forget the wineskins. Catch a brave and true marlin. But if this curious quartet has conned you into backing some feelthy movies, why bother trying to snow me? I don’t care who reels you in, Pansy or Pierre. Papa never had that kind of problem.”

Pierre hissed like a pooty tat, and the Italian gave an evil grin around her cigar, and Irish belched loudly, and Pansy murmured a few gutter words. Martin Hollinder Trumbill the Fourth gave a tight grin and rolled his big shoulders, clapped his hands like a gunshot, and came at me very Black Belt, springing and landing this way and that, paws in chopping position as he yelled, “Huhh!” and “Haaah!”

His quartet backed out of the way, looking expectant. Their imitation Papa would defend the honor of the group and throw Bigmouth all over the place. I pointed beyond him at Pierre and yelled, “No knives, you!”

Gadge turned quickly to see the imaginary knife, and opened up his left side just enough. I screwed my heels down into his gunmetal carpeting, pivoted hips and shoulders like Palmer needing an eagle on a par five, and bombed him on the left side, just above the belt, slightly around to the rear, straight punch, hooking slightly at impact, good snap, lots of follow-through.

He groaned, arched, grabbed at the impact point with both hands, and stood with his face screwed up like a little brave boy on the playground trying not to cry.

As I headed for the door I said, “Get it looked at before you leave, Trumbill. I may have tore up that kidney some.”

The four rushed to him with little coos and murmurings and cries of compassion. I left as they were leading him to a chair. As I was going down in the elevator I realized that my appraisal of the relationship was not quite accurate. Those four might be under the impression they had a captive placid beast and if they kept scratching it behind the ears, it would moo with joy and give milk indefinitely.

They would discover eventually that it was much more like the relationship of shark and remora fish. The four remora fish would suck hold of the shark for the ride. Sharks are messy eaters. Remora are sustained by the bits of torn meat afloat when the shark feeds. But when any remora becomes too greedy and a little. careless, he becomes a part of the very meal he is trying to share, an accident seldom noticed by the shark.

I did know that I wanted no judo or karate games. The expert can whip you with no fuss, and the amateur can kill you without meaning to, if you give them a chance to play their Asiatic game. The mystique of judo is based upon an irrationality. It supposes that the opponent is going to play by their rules. The way to meet it is with a hefty glass ashtray smacko in the chops, or knocking a kneecap loose with a leg off a chair or coffee table, or faking them out and giving them enough bright and sudden pain they forget their trick art. The gutsy dramas on the mass media tend to make us forget that the average urban male is so unaccustomed to sudden pain that if you mash his nose flat, he’ll be nauseated for hours, spend two days in bed, and be shaky for the rest of the week.

The temperature had dropped. Snow was bounding like wedding rice off the pavements. It stung my tropical nose, and the wind yanked at my topcoat, congealed my blood, and made my bones feel like old icicles wrapped in freezer bags. Santas dinglejangled their street-corner appeals, hopping from foot to foot, changing the bell from hand to hand, saying thank you sir with a huff of frosty breath, and the department stores sang “Ave Maria” in stereo high-fidelity while stocky ladies whomped each other with purses and elbows as they competed for Bargain Gifts Galore, and the stone-faced virgins who staff the toy areas drove away the urchins who had come to play with the trains.

I found a warm and tranquil place where they put beef in the beef stew, and ground their own Colombian coffee beans, and even had a waiter who expressed a certain tender anxiety that I should be content with what he brought me. In the darkness of the afternoon when I left the car lights were on, the snow was horizontal, the girls hugged and scuttled, and I couldn’t get my rental car started.

EIGHT

THE PHONE was ringing when I unlocked my room door at the Drake. It was Maurie Ragna phoning to see if I had talked to Smith and if he had been cooperative.

“I’d say he was very anxious to please, Maurie.”

“Good. Good. Kid, what I wanted to tell you, I suddenly have to make a little business trip. Three days, four days. But what I am going to do, I’m going to have somebody stand by this number with the word if you call for any help, you get it.”

“Don’t go to all that trouble.”

“Right now I’d be dead a long time and he talks about trouble! Look, I worry about you. It’s a big pieCe of money you’re working on, sweetie. I can give you some top-quality walkaround muscle for as long as you want. Looks like a bond salesman. Drives like Phil Hill. Knows the fastest route from anywhere to anywhere. Licensed to carry. Quick as a cat, with a left hook you got to see to believe. Kid, I would feel a lot better about you, and I swear to God, which you should know anyway, it isn’t a way of moving in on your action.”

I assured him that such a thought would never enter my mind, and I managed to refuse the offer without hurting his feelings too much.

My full and rightful share of Chicago’s pollution had fallen onto me all day, a Monday fallout, rimming my collar with gray, It was four in the afternoon, but from my hotel window it looked like midnight. I ordered up a jug of ice, broke out my travel-keg of Plymouth, and built a tall one. I showered first, then drew a tub as hot as I could stand it, and once I had made a gingerly descent into it, I reached and gathered up the icy glass and took one long draw upon it and put it back away from the steam.

Some of the small sybaritic enhancements of life are worth far more than they cost, and one of them is the very hot tub combined with a sup of dry and icy gin which goes freezing down the throat, bombs the gut, then spreads its inside warmth in pleasant counterpoint to the tub water. To hell with all their hot rocks, whipping each other with greenery and diving into snowbanks. McGee will take a hot hotel tub and a very cold gin.

This is when the mind works. There is a hairy chimp caged in the back of the mind. The bananas hang out of reach. If you can make him stop leaping and chittering and clacking his angry teeth, make him settle down and look around the cage, usually he can find some boxes which he can pile on top of each other, and some sticks, and some string to tie the sticks together. Then he can climb onto the top box and knock down some bananas.

The biggest box in my cage was the concept of how very busy that month of May had been, nineteen months ago. A singing fellow had snatched Branton Fortner Geis and let him go loose in a downtown park. Ethel the Cat had been skewered by a prowler and left in her blood puddle on the nurse’s kitchen floor. Heidi, the snow virgin, had chomped tabasco candy and sprung into considerable activity.

Symbols of violence. Demonstration. Kindly note, Dr. Geis, that I could have strangled the kid instead of letting him loose. I could have skewered the nurse instead of the cat. The candy could have had the bland and deadly flavor of almonds instead of the heat of tabasco. So let us start negotiations, Doctor, sir, and you can give me six hundred thousand arguments as to why l should not ugly up your last year or so of life.

So I sipped of coolness again, and became Fort Geis. Okay, I have dealt in the very basic life-,anddeath business for many years. I have stuck my fingers into the brain-meat after lifting off the sawed lid of bone and laying it aside. Had I been hooked on money, I would have laid away a lot more. Now here is a crazy who wants to take away what I have put aside. Pay off, Doc, or you’ll die absolutely alone, because everyone who loves you and whom you love will go first. I’ll wear you out with funerals, man. Dying alone is a dreary bit.

But, I say, as the Doctor, how did you know I was dying? And, second question, how do you know how much I can come up with?

Drop that for the moment, chimp… It won’t hold your weight.

So as the good Doctor Geis, I look around. Nurse Stanyard can make it. Heidi is married to a lot of tax-free municipals. Roger is doing well. But what about the new wife? So negotiations are in order. Look here, old chap, I can’t leave Glory without a bean. You’ll have to cut the demand a bit so that I can leave some of the insurance intact so she’ll have an income. Money is not important to her. It doesn’t have to be much. A little security for the girl.

Then, as I have begun the payoff routine, I find my daughter Heidi is divorcing Trumbill. She will need money. She depends upon it. I find out she is going to let Gadge off lightly. But if she can’t get it from me, she better get it from him, so I run in a legal team to pluck him pretty well.

So why did I send ten thousand to Janice Stanyard with such a vague note? Why did I refuse to talk about it to her when she came to the side of the deathbed? Who has Janice’s name and address to use in case of emergency? The signs pointed to Susan, the daughter he had fathered by the housekeeper’s daughter during his first wife’s final fatal illness. Susan had been given a place to turn, but that had ended when the Doctor canceled his arrangement with Francisco Smith and Allied Services.

But why Susan? Why would anyone be in danger if Geis was paying off like a good pigeon? I might guess that the insurance saved for Glory was by arrangement, but that the ten thousand for Susan-if it was Susan-had been palmed and tucked aside, without ‘permission of the fellow turning the thumbscrew. Again, a box that would crumple if I put any weight upon it.

So let us see how well Saul Gorba fits. A very meticulous, sly, clever, unbalanced fellow. Arrives in the city four or five months before Geis begins the thirteen-month span of Operation Payoff. Leaves a month after the payoff ends. A nice stick, but too flimsy to whack loose any of the bananas tied to the top of the cage. -

Last sip of the ice-diluted gin. Cubes clicked against my teeth. I came sloshing and wallowing up out of water gone tepid, all long brown hide flawed by the healed places which marked old mistakes in judgment and reflexes, pelted moderately with sunbaked hair. Wiped misted mirror with the corner of a bath towel. Stared into my spit-pale gray eyes as I slowly dried myself. What are you doing here, laddy buck? This is a dirty one. Something is twisted. Something has gone bad. You are going to lift the wrong rock, and something is going to come out from under it as fast as a moray, aiming right for the jugular.

And, bless us every one, wouldn’t that be a dingy way to die, in one of the greasy twilights of Chicago in December, a page 40 paragraph in the World’s Greatest Newspaper.

Look, Maurie, old sweetie buddy of mine, you are so right about stumbling around alone, my solo gig, white knightism. The ladies have discovered that it stings too much to dangle the tresses down the tower wall for some idiot to use as a climbing rope.

And all the dragons go around looking just like anybody else.

On this kind of a Monday I know I’m going to get killed in this line of work. It should interest the statisticians. As I am the only fellow in my line of work, it would give it a rating of 100% mortality. Just as, until we lost an astronaut, travel in orbit was the afest travel man ever devised with 0% mortality for millions upon millions of passenger miles. Safer than wheelchairs.

Maurie, baby, make me the resident muscle at one of your island operations, with all the beach and broads and booze a man can use, and I shall have cradles built and the Flush deckloaded onto a freighter and let you guarantee all, the rest of that retirement I am taking in installments every time I get well enough.

But in the cage the chimp was looking at the big box and scratching himself like a Red Sox outfielder. No bananas yet, so I called Glory Geis, who chortled happy welcome, and I fenderfought my way to the lake-shore fireside, where once again in the blue jump suit the graceful ragamuffin lady in her second widowhood plied me with a potion which sharpened the taste buds for what the kitchen would provide.

The snow had stopped. The wind still blew, whining around the house corners, intruding upon fire-crackle and music off the tape. When I asked my key question about accidents she looked blank., “Heavens, I can’t think of anything like that. We had such a quiet life, Trav. Just being together. It was -all we wanted or needed. No, there was nothing.”

“Okay. Not here then. You went shopping and a truck nearly ran you down. Something fell off a high building and nearly hit you.”

“Nothing like that! Really! What are you trying to get at? What does it mean?”

“Maybe nothing. I look for patterns. Did anybody bully you off the road in that hot little job Fort bought you?”

“No. I’ve never put a scratch on it. The only time it had to go in for repairs was when somebody played a joke.”

“A joke?”

“Oh, one of those fool tricks that kids send away for. They put one on my dear little car. The yard man was edging the driveway and he came in to get the keys so he could move it. I left it in his way. Actually, I’d left it out all night. It was a Friday night, and I was going to go out again so I didn’t put it away, and then I didn’t go out and I forgot it and left it out and in his way. He used to come Saturdays. It was warm and the house was open, one of the first warm days, and Fort was here, and we heard this funny siren sound. It went up and up and up, and then there was a bang, and we went hurrying out and the yard man was standing about fifty feet from my car, staring at it with horror, and there was white smoke pouring out from the hood. You know those silly torpedo things they sell to play tricks on your friends. Some of the neighborhood teenagers had put one on my little car.”

“It damaged it?”

“It buckled the hood a little and blew some of the wiring loose. But that isn’t the kind of thing you mean.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. Doc, I could have put the skewer through the nurse, drowned the grandson, poisoned the candy, and wired the little Mercedes so it would blow her into the tops of several of your tall trees, a little here and a little there. “When did that happen?” I asked casually.

She scowled into her weak drink. “Hmm. Let me think. Memorial Day came on Sunday last year. So it was the following Saturday which would be…”

“June fifth.”

“I remember he didn’t expect to be home that morning. He had surgery scheduled. It was a primary cancer of the spine, which is very rare and supposed to be inoperable. It was a twenty-eightyear-old woman,.and she seemed very strong, but they phoned from the hospital Friday and said she had died. Fort was depressed. The husband wouldn’t give permission for an autopsy.”

“So I suppose the smoke bomb was the final straw?”

‘lie was upset. Not too badly though. He went for a long walk down the beach. I remember I wanted to go with him, but he wanted to be alone that time. It wasn’t like him. I was hurt, sort oЈ But I guess you aren’t doing a husband any favors by smothering him, by hanging on to him every second.“

“Glory, I know you kept pretty good tabs on him. When did he have a chance to pick up the cash and leave it somewhere?”

“It must have been done at the same time. That’s the only thing I can figure out. When he got it at one bank or another, he must have gotten rid of it right away. He must have mailed it. Even if I had seen him mailing it, I wouldn’t have paid any particular attention. He was always mailing things in heavy manila envelopes to doctors all over the world. Case histories, notes, things he was going to publish, film strips of operations. And the mail he got at the hospital was always full of things like that. Later that kind of mail came here.”

In the artsy-fartsy tales of intrigue, the pigeon has to tote the bundle of bread to the city museum and stuff it under the tunic of the third mummy from. the left, whistle the motif from “Lazy Bones,” stick his right thumb in his left ear, and walk out sideways. A real live thief will go to the main post office, lay down cash, and rent a box under any name which happens to strike his fancy. If he does not want to take any chance on handwriting or latents, he will take the order form away and have somebody else fill it out for him, and bring it back in gloved hand. If it is a one-shot payoff, he will get a hungry bellhop to go open the box with the key, and then he will. tail the kid through the streets until he is certain the kid is not under observation. If it is on the installment plan he is going to be certain enough that his pigeon will not get restless so that he can risk a bus ride to the main post office to clean out the box whenever it seems convenient. Otherwise the cleanest one I ever saw took place in a big busy New York restaurant during the lunch rush on a weekday. He was carrying the package as directed. He got a phone call. A muffled voice told him to take his package to the checkroom and ask the girl to put it with number 308, and go right from there to the men’s room before returning to the dining room, and not to fake out because he was being watched. I got to the checkroom girls perhaps ten minutes after one of them had given the coat, hat, and parcel to number 308. They could not remember one single fragment of description. They were indignant to think I expected them to. Obviously he had checked his coat and hat, then used a pay booth to phone the restaurant number and have my pigeon paged. At Shor’s you can see the check counter from the pay phones. He timed it right, when whole flocks of lookalikes were heading back from lunch to the Big Media. And he needed the money.

“Penny?” said Gloria Geis.

“Do you think you could make a chance for me to have a little chat with Anna Ottlo?”

“Why? What about?”

“Maybe I want to see if she’d like to cook aboard a houseboat for a single gentleman, quiet, respectable, appreciative.”

“Oh, go to hell, McGee. Okay. I’ll remember a phone call I have to make.”

I went sauntering toward the good smells. Anna Ottlo looked anachronistic in that mechanized, stainless-steel kitchen. Broad, hefty, florid, with white hair and blue apron and twinkling eyes, she looked like a television commercial grandmaw who was going to tell me how to get the stains out of the sink, or grow coffee on mountains, or get rid of that oily taste. Real grandmothers don’t look quite like that anymore. I think it is the water-skiing that keeps them firmed up.

“You like roast pork, sir? Yah?” she said beaming.

“I think you could make old floor mats taste good, Anna.”

“To the big strong man, all taste wnderful the foods.”

I leaned against a hotel-sized refrigerator, drink in hand. “Had any word yet from Gretchen?” I asked.

She stopped slicing a tomato, turned and stared at me, her smile still there, but without meaning. “Nein!” she said. “Nothing. No Gott damn goot, that girl. Trink beer, throw away money, play with mens. Years I hear nothing. Not even how many babies. Gone off someplace. Some man, yah?”

“She’s got a husband, hasn’t she?”

“This Gorba? From jails? Hah! Best she can get. Another mans wink the eye, off she goes, babies and all. Now I forget. All done. Over. I said give me the babies. I can take care, raise goot. More time you have for beer and betting money and boyfriend. Big fight. No goot, my only child, that one. Bad life.” She tapped her temple, shook her head sadly. “Not much bright.”

After dinner Glory told me that she wouldn’t be staying there as long as she had planned. “I’d be completely alone. Anna wants to leave, after Christmas.”

“New job?”

“Not right away. Later, probably. She says she wants to go and visit an old friend. Mrs. Kemmer, the mother of the boy Gretchen married. She’s somewhere in Florida, and Anna wants to spend the winter with her, and maybe stay down there if she can find work, after she’s had a rest. All this hasn’t been exactly easy on her either. I guess I’m going to have to find an apartment, and something to do. I’ll have to stay in Chicago until… things are settled. But when I can leave, I’m never coming back. I don’t think Heidi and Roger will miss me dreadfully, do you?”

“They’ll brood about it.”

“Trav? Are you finding out anything?”

“It’s at that point where I don’t really know. I don’t want to talk about it until I have something worth telling you. Or asking you.”

She tried to smile. It was a ghastly grimace. “I dreamed you were dead, Trav. It scared me.”

“It scares me too, but nobody has figured out a good way to avoid it. The guy who does will clean up.”

“Fort knew when. You and I don’t. I guess that’s the big difference. All we know is Sometime.”

“That’s what you know when you’ve grown up. The ones who never grow up keep thinking Never. Not me, boss. Take those others, but don’t take me.”

She hunched her shoulders. “Yesterday wasn’t so great. I couldn’t find any meaning in anything. I felt lost. I kept thinking I could find my way back if I took just a little more of that. But I didn’t know how it would hit me. It might be too strange. I even thought of trying to get you to come out and be with me.”

“Don’t go freaking around alone, Glory. Ever. How much of that have you got left?”

“Just a little bottle. It’s in a diluted form so that each drop out of a medicine dropper is fifty micrograms. If I had to guess I’d say there’s a hundred drops in the bottle.”

“Flush it down the toilet.”

“Maybe I will. A little later. When I know I won’t need it ever again.”

“Why would you need it?”

“Because yesterday I thought it would be easier to be dead than be alive.”

“I guess it would be a lot easier. No decisions. No headaches. No constipation.”

“Sometimes you make me feel just as silly as I very probably am.”

Fifteen minutes after I left to drive back to the city I felt as silly as a girl myself. It can happen when you get too cute. It can happen when you have a memory a little too fresh in your mind of disillusioning a muscular and hairy karate expert. I saw a movement in the bushes where there should have been no movement. I saw it in my side view mirror as I drove out of the driveway. So I drove briskly off into the curving maze of Lake Pointe, circled, left the car in a dark place near a house without lights, and went skulking back.

Bare-handed hero. But I cannot think of any kind of weapon small enough to lift: that would have done me much good. I cased the empty bushes. I made a slow circle of the house. From out in the dunes I saw Glory move past an uncurtained window. I stood up and somebody hit my head on a line drive to third, where it was fielded on one hop and hurled across to force the base runner at second, but he came in spikes high to break up the double play, and the second baseman threw my head over the first baseman and smack into the wall in front of the box seats along the first base line. My head rolled dead, eyes turned completely around so that they looked back into the blackness of my brain where fireworks were on display.

Then I was in a pocket in the dunes with a mouth half full of damp cold sand, my hands fastened behind me with something, and with something tied around my eyes. Somebody of considerable muscular weight and with very hard knees knelt on my back. They put a hand on my forehead and lifted my face out of the sand. They lifted it too far. They lifted it until my neck creaked.

“Hey!” I said, and spat sand. “Wait!” I said and spat sand.

A whisper came from lips close to my ear. It seemed to be a whisper with an English accent. “If I tell him to snap your neck, he will snap your neck.”

“I believe you.”

“What is your interest in this, Mr. McGee?”

“Interest in what?”

“Are you trying to find out if I will actually tell him to pull your head back another…”

“No! I was visiting Mrs. Geis. I’m an old friend. I saw something move in the bushes when I drove out.”

“You are a big man. You are in very good shape. You move very well through the night. With professional competence.”

“They put me in a brown suit and taught me a lot of things like that. Could he ease the tension a little? I’d hate to go through life looking straight up.”

“Terribly amusing,” he said. He spoke in a language I could not identify. The fellow on my back lowered my forehead a generous inch and a quarter.

I said, “Did you fellows squeeze a lot of money out of Doctor Geis before he died?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“It would be a matter of no interest to us.”

“Gloria Geis asked me to come up from Florida and see if I could find out. It’s sort of a hobby with me, helping my friends.”

“A profitable hobby?”

“Once in a while. Not real often.”

He was silent for a time. I listened to the surf. I ran my tongue over and around my teeth, collecting sand.

“I shall require you to accept certain assurances, Mr. McGee. We have no interest in any friends of yours, to do either good or harm. We are very careful people. You will gain nothing by reporting this to anyone. We examined everything you are carrying, and have replaced everything, exactly as we found it. If you had seemed overly nervous or hysterical about this, we would have been forced to execute you. In simplest terms, you go your way and we will go our way. Keep your mouth shut. We are not likely to meet one another again.”

“I am glad to hear that.”

They did not hang around to say good-bye and shake hands. A terse and guttural order was given. My face fell into the sand. The weight was lifted away, and a quick nip at my wrists freed them. I rolled over slowly and sat up. I worked at the small hard damp knot at the back of my head. My fingers were cold, and the tightness of the binding had numbed my fingers. When I at last uncovered my eyes, I was alone in the dunes. I was further,from Gloria’s house. Her house was completely dark. I massaged my neck and rolled my head around to loosen the kinked muscles. I found the strip of fabric which had been around my wrist, and put it with the fabric which had been tied around my eyes and stuffed them into my topcoat pocket. They were going to be very valuable clues. I found out later that one was my necktie and the other was the entire tail off my shirt.

I could find no specific impact point on my skull. The whole right side of it, from front to back, felt slightly tender.

The hideous and unspeakable bruise was upon my ego. I had been taken on open ground with a contemptuous efficiency, dropped, trussed, dragged, inspected, and dismissed. It had been done without giving me the slightest chance of any kind. Yet it was not because they thought me particularly dangerous, but because they were what the Limey whisper described-“very careful people.” And, I could add, very skilled people. Very well-trained and conditioned people.

They worked with military precision, spoke of execution as if it was their right by nature of their trade, and left me without a clue as to age, description, dress-or even how many there were.

At the end of a fifty-mile hike I got into the rental car, and as I started it up, I realized I was perfectly willing to take the word of the whisperer. They were not interested in Gloria Geis. Or in me. Or in the Doctor’s money. On the drive back into the city I could come up with only one wild guess-that the piece of empty lake beach was some kind of rendezvous point for transshipment of something, import or export, by boat from beach to ship or ship to beach or even beach to beach.

I knew one thing without having to guess. I did not want to try my luck against them in groups of two or more. Just as I had no interest in finding out if I had hands as fast as Cassius Clay, or if I could stop one James Taylor coming down the sidelines, all by myself.

There were two phone messages at the desk for me. A Mr. Smith had phoned, and would phone back in the morning before nine. A Mrs. Stanyard had called and left her number.

I got back to the room a little past eleven-thirty. I phoned Janice Stanyard immediately, and after it rang ten times I hung up. I showered again to get the sand and grit out of my scalp and limber up the muscles in my neck and shoulders. My head had begun to ache. It was that kind of dull traumatic throb which sets up echoes of queasiness in the gut and makes the eyes hypersensitive to light. And it makes you wonder if some little blood vessel in the brain might be ruptured and bleeding.

I sat on the bed and just as I reached toward the phone to try Nurse Stanyard again, it rang, startling me. It was Janice Stanyard.

“I called you back fifteen minutes ago, Janice, but there…”

“I’m not home. And… I need help.” Her voice was very tense, very guarded.

“Help you get. Any flavor.”

“Thank God! The person I’m supposed to help is with me. I have to get back to her. We’re at the Oriental Theater. It’s a movie house on West Randolph, just west of State. We’re in the middle of the last row downstairs on the left. Please hurry!”

I hurried. The box office was closed. I told the ancient ticket taker I wanted to catch the end of the feature. He pocketed my dollar, put a fist in front of a huge yawn, and waved me in. On the huge screen was an extreme closeup of a blonde singing Troooo Laahv to an enchanted throng of about twentyseven widely scattered customers, singing through a mouth big enough to park a pair of Hondas in. An usher bird-dogged me with wary flashlight until he heard Janice greet me, and then he moved away.

I sat beside Janice. A blonde sat on the other side of her, hunched and still, head bowed, hands covering her face. There was no other customer within fifty feet of us.

“She phoned me from the Trailways bus station. It’s in the next block east. She said Doctor Geis had written her to contact me if she needed help.”

“Susan Kemmer?”

“Yes. How did you…”

“Why wouldn’t she go home with you?”

“She’s afraid to. She’s been terribly beaten. She won’t tell me who did it. She seems… dazed. I phoned you before I left for the bus station. I’ve been phoning you from here. It seemed like… a good place to wait.”

I got up and squeezed past them and sat on the other side of Susan. When I put my arm around her shoulders she flinched violently and moved one hand enough to peer at me. In the reflected light of the noisy movie I could see that her eye was puffed and discolored.

“I’m a friend,” I said. “We want to help you, Susie. Doctor Geis told Mrs. Stanyard to give you any help you might need. Why won’t you go to her apartment?”

“He’ll look there,” she said in a very small voice. “If someone hurt you, we should report it to the police.”

“No. Please. All I asked her for is some money, so I can go to a hotel. That’s all. I can’t stay with her.”

“She shouldn’t be alone,” Janice said.

I thought of a wry possibility and said, “If she’ll have you, Susan, will you stay with a friend of mine, a woman who lives alone?”

“Who?” Janice asked.

“If she knows, I can’t stay there,” Susan said. “I’ve been telling Mrs. Stanyard. I don’t want her to know where I’ll be.”

“Don’t be idiotic!” Janice said crossly.

“He could make her tell,” Susan said to me.

“Maybe it isn’t exactly idiotic,” I told Janice. “Sit tight. Let me check.”

I found the phones and looked up the number. After the fifth ring, Heidi Trumbill answered in a blurred, irritable voice.

“Travis McGee, Heidi.”

“Who? Who?”

“I saw you Saturday. John Andrus wrote a note to you about me on the back of his card.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. How could I forget? Dear Mark has been babbling about you ever since. He was very taken.” I heard her yawn, a very rich, gasping, jaw-creaking yawn. “This better not be a social call, McGee.”

“It isn’t. I’m making a little progress with our problem.”

“Really!”

“And because what I am doing is in your interest, I have to ask you for a little help.”

“Such as?”

“A young female is involved. She’s been roughed up. She needs a safe place to hide out, to hole up and get some rest and recuperation. She has some information I want and I won’t be able to get it out of her until she feels safe and unwinds a little. Miss X. No names. No questions. No answers. You have room for her there. Okay?”

“Are you drunk by any chance?”

“Not noticeably.”

‘What do you think I am? Some kind of rest camp? Some kind of a house- mother?“

“Heidi, I think that in many respects you are a silly, arrogant, pretentious bitch. But I also think you are probably a patsy for starving kittens and busted birds.”

“And painters who can’t paint? And sculptors who can’t sculpt? Say it all, McGee.”

“If the spare bed isn’t made up, make it up. We’ll be along in a bit.”

“You are so sure of yourself, damn your eyes. How soon?”

“Half an hour.”

“See you,” she said and hung up. I got back to the mouth of the aisle just as the marching-into-thesunset music swelled strong, and the thin gray line of customers began getting up to walk through the spilled popcorn and paper cups toward their shrunken realities outside. My two females got up and we headed out of the palace. Susan was in a blue cloth coat and she kept her mouth and chin ducked down into a concealing billow of blue knit scarf, and kept her face turned away from the public as much as possible.

Before we went out into the icy night I stopped them and said, “You’ve got a car Janice?”

“Yes.”

“If you have any company, what happened was you got a call from the Trailways station. It was a girl. She told you Dr. Geis had said you would help her. She didn’t give her name. You went there and she was gone. You waited around, then decided to see the movie. You thought she might be one of the Doctor’s patients.”

“Where will she be? Where are you taking her?”

“A safe place, where she’ll get rest. and care. I’ll be in touch.”

She hesitated, then touched the girl on the arm. “You can trust me, dear. I’ll help you any way I can. And you can trust Mr. McGee; You have to tell someone what kind of trouble you’re in.” When Susan Kemmer did not answer, Janice gave a helpless little shrug and walked out. I gave her thirty seconds, then pushed the door open for the girl. I’d parked a block away. I held her upper arm; walked her into the wind. She was limping.

Heidi buzzed the downstairs door open, and when we got to the red door at the second-floor rear, she was standing in the open doorway, the lighted room behind her silhouetting her. She took Susan’s coat and scarf and laid them aside. I had Susan sit in a chair and I said, “For reasons I won’t go into, we’ll keep this whole thing anonymous. Friends helping friends. Miss Brown, meet Mrs. Jones. Let’s get a good look at you, dear.”

I tilted the opaque lampshade to put the full light on her, and with my fingertips I lifted her reluctant chin. Heidi, looking in from the side, made a little whimper of concern. Young lips mashed, puffed, and scabbed. Nose intact. Eggplant bruises on the cheekbones, a quarter-inch slice of one blue eye visible between puffed flesh, and a slightly wider segment of the other. They looked out at us calmly enough. Left brow slightly split. Forehead bruise shaded with saffron.

“Yesterday?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Yesterday morning. Real early.”

I put one hand behind her head and with the fingers of the other hand prodded at her cheekbones and at the brows to see if there was any give or shift of broken bone. She winced but endured.

“Double vision? Any nausea today?”

“No sir.”

“Are you hungry?”

“I… don’t know. My teeth are loose over on this side.”

“Open wide.”

I wiggled them with a fingertip. Four in a row on the lower jaw, right side. “You won’t lose them. They’ll tighten up again, kid.”

Heidi said she had the ingredients for an eggnog, and she brought me some cotton pads and rubbing alcohol along with adhesive tape and scissors before she went to mix it. I had the girl stretch out on the couch and I knelt beside her. I loosened the caked blood on the split brow, wiped it clean, dried it, then used the strips of adhesive scissored to narrow widths to pull the split together. She sucked air a few times, but she was pleasantly stoical.

Heidi was able to produce a mild sedative. The girl took it with the tall eggnog. When I was able to look past the battered face I saw that she was practically type-cast, an almost perfect fraulein type, fair and blue-eyed, plump as a little pigeon, round sweet face. She should milk cows, and hop around in the Bavarian village festival in her dirndl to the accordion music while her boyfriend blew foam off his stein and slapped his leather pants and yodeled once in a while.

I decided it was no time to question her. Heidi took her in to bed her down and came back in about ten minutes. She wore a navy-blue floorlength flannel robe, starkly tailored. Again I wondered about that total lack of physical communication and awareness between us. It was incredible that a mouth curved thusly, eyes placed so, body with that look of slenderness and ripeness and power, hair and eyes gleaming with animal health, provocative grace in every movement; incredible that it could all add up to absolute neuter.

“I think she was asleep before I closed the door,” Heidi said. “The child is exhausted in every way. Her body is terribly bruised. The worst bruise is on her thigh. It looks as if she was kicked. I asked her who did it and she just looked at me.”

“No questions. Part of the deal. It’s good of you to take her in. But what’s with this child thing? How much older are you? Seven years?”

“Seven hundred. How long will she be here?”

“Two days, three, four. I don’t know. Just don’t let her take off before i get here in the morning. She might want to:”

She drifted about, touching small things, straightening them. She turned and looked at me. “You’re really strange, Travis McGee. You took it absolutely for granted I’d take her in. I just don’t do things like that.”

“Hardly ever. I know. How did the opening go yesterday?”

“As expected. Well, more people than I expected, actually. Poor Mark was darling about like a mother hen. One too many people compared Kirstarian to Segal, so he made a fantastic scene and stalked out. Mark sold three pieces, and it made him so happy he drank all the champagne we had left and I had to put him to bed.” She sat on the arm of the couch and looked across at me. “It’s so strange. That girl. I have the feeling I knew her long, long ago. But I couldn’t have. She’s too young for that. Who is she, Travis?”

The temptation was to drop the bomb and say it was her half-sister. But that wasn’t going to do anyone any good. I said, “You don’t know her. She very probably knows something about where your father’s money went. But she might not even know she knows. She is a good and staunch girl.”

“I sensed that about her.”

“The problem is the money.”

“Oh yes, the money. And poor elfin little heartbroken Gloria, the waitress type, knows absolutely nothing about it. Right?”

“As far as anyone can tell.”

“Well, she certainly fooled John Andrus without any trouble. And she sold my father a bill of goods. So I guess you don’t present any special problem.”

I smiled at her. “Heidi, she had to be lousy and crooked and dirty because she had the unholy impertinence to marry the daddy. She cast an ugly spell over him. She even seduced him physically, fornicated with him, and made him think he was enjoying it. What a degrading thing for the big wise important daddy to be doing! Didn’t he know it made darling daughter feel actually ill to wake up in the night and think that right at that moment that woman was making him do that sick ugly animal thing?”

She turned ice-pale, jumped trembling to her feet and said, “Stop that! Stop it!”

“Where do you think you came from, Heidi? Did they find you out in the cabbage patch? There’s only one known way he could get to be your father.”

She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. In a thin prim little voice she said, “It killed her. She died.”

So I got out of there after suitable apologies. Two swings, two hits. Anybody who wanted to find a woman under that luscious structure was going to have to tear it down and start over. Marriage to her had been as exciting as two years of root canal treatments, on a dead fang.

I knew that Francisco Smith had better find me Mother Gretchen, and fast.

NINE

FRNSISCO SMITH woke me up with his phone call at quarter past eight on Tuesday, that thirteenth day of December.

“Got something to write on?” he asked.

“Hold on,” I said, and got set and told him to go ahead.

“Okay, here’s the number of the annuity policy. GLC 085-14-0277. Four hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents gets mailed out the first of every month. The guy at Great Lakes is named Rainey. T. T. Rainey. The September check came back addressee moved, no forwarding address. They tried a trace. The Gorba family left last August 22nd. A Sunday. The couple and the five kids, in a big gray Cadillac sedan, towing a U-Haul. License 397110. Dropped the apartment keys in the super’s box. Rent paid to the end of August and a month deposit in advance. Mrs. Gorba was paid by the week. She picked up her pay at the restaurant when she left work Friday evening. He was paid twice a month. His pay is still sitting there at the body shop. They left the apartment in good shape. They didn’t pick up the utilities deposits. They left clean. At least there’s no judgments filed against them.”

“Is Great Lakes still trying to find them?”

“No. They tried it on the cheap and gave up quick. They weren’t like somebody trying to collect. They sent out the check for a double payment October first and it came back too. So they put it and the November and December checks in an interest account. The January check will go in the same account, the one made, out to her mother like the checks. But she turns eighteen in January, so if nobody shows up, they’ll start a new interest account in the name of Susan Kemmer.”

“Car payments?”

“No dice there. You see, it was a two-year-old Cad that the owner totaled, and the place Saul Gorba worked bid three-fifty for it. Then they found more wrong than the estimator thought there was. Gorba put down two hundred on it and agreed they could take another two-fifty out of his pay. That was back in April, I think. It was with the idea he could work on it in his spare time when he’d put in his regular hours, and buy the parts from them at cost or scrounge them from the yards, and they’d let him use shop tools. A lot of those guys work it that way for a personal car. They don’t like them trying to fix iron up for resale as it puts them in competition with the shops they’re working for. But Gorba didn’t have a car so it was okay with the boss. So for about nine hundred, plus all the hours he put into it, he came out of it with a pretty good automobile. I understand he’s handy with tools and catches on fast.”

“When did he finish it, Smith?”

“August sometime.”

“What would be the chance of tracing them in a hurry?”

After a short silence he said, “I wouldn’t say it was real great, not if Gorba doesn’t want to be traced. School records, medical records, IRS refunds, Social Security-he’d be carefuler than most. He had to rent the trailer someplace and he had to turn it in someplace, but he could unload it, drive it three hundred miles empty, and turn it in. With the car registration, he could cover up best by unloading it on a cash deal and buying something else under another name. My hunch would be check close on the daughter’s friends. You tear a seventeen-year-old kid away from all her friends, she is going to find some way to drop them a card. But I don’t like the feel of it, not with those checks unclaimed. What is it now? Thirteen hundred bucks. Listen, they’re going to keep me on the run all day. This evening I maybe get a chance to cover a couple of. other angles. I’ll be in touch.”

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city. When you swallowed, you could taste the city. All the trees looked dead, and all the people looked like mourners. Happy Christmas. Bingle jells. Brace yourself for hate week.

Heidi opened the red door with a fractional smile of cool welcome. She was in one of her painting suits. This one was yellow, like shark repellent. It had forty-three pockets with flaps and zippers.

“Flow’s our patient?” I asked, very jolly.

“I made her go back to bed. She was shaky.” Heidi had a blue smudge on the back of one hand, two speckles of bright red on her chin. The door to her studio was open. She was dressed for air-sea rescue, visible at thirty miles.

I glanced through the doorway into her studio. She said, “Kindly do not express an interest in my work. I already know your opinion.”

“Look, I did not mean to rawhide you last night. I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t something new, Mr. McGee. Men try to shake me up by saying ugly things. It’s sort of an erotic compulsion, I guess.”

“Maybe you’re an example of conspicuous waste.”

“Don’t try to make phrases. You’re not the type. She’s in the second bedroom on the left.”

Susan Kemrner was propped up on two pillows. ` Her face was turned toward the gray light at the window, and tracked silver with tears. She looked at me, dabbed in gingerly fashion at the tear marks with a tissue, snuffled and hitched the pale blue blanket higher. The gestures had the flavor of bracing for an ordeal. It looked to me as though some of the puffiness was gone. But the areas of discoloration were larger, and the hues more varied.

I pulled a chair over and sat by the foot of the bed, facing her. “Saul work you over?”

“I’m not going to answer questions, Mr. McGee.”

“Why don’t you just think the questions over, and answer the ones you feel like answering? I won’t try to trick you. Take your time.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend of yours. I might have some answers to some of your questions. If you have any.”

“Why should I want to ask you anything?”

“You might want to know why Dr. Fortner Geis was anxious to help you. I guess he had the feeling you might get in a real jam. A ten-thousand-dollar jam, Susan. That’s the amount of cash he sent Mrs. Stanyard.”

“Ten… thousand… dollars!”

“If you didn’t contact her in a year, then she was to give it to Mrs. Geis.”

“But… wouldn’t it be mine anyway?”

“How come?”

“I mean it would have been money he got from my…” She stopped abruptly. I could guess at what was going on in her mind. Storybook stuff. Afternoon soap opera. There could be a dozen versions. Famous surgeon has a friend who has a daughter dying of a brain tumor. She is pregnant. Unmarried. Influential family. They don’t want a scandal. The Doctor keeps the girl alive long enough so that she can have her baby, and then he arranges with his housekeeper for the housekeeper’s daughter and her young husband, Karl Kemmer, to raise the baby as their own. So the money that had always come every month came from the annuity her real mother’s people had bought for her, and the ten thousand is some kind of emergency fund entrusted to the Doctor long ago. I did not want to reach into her head and wrench any of her dreams loose. They had sustained her. One day she would be able to jettison them herself, after they had served their long purpose. There was strength in this girl. But very strong people can break when there is too much all at once.

“How did Dr. Geis get word to you about contacting Mrs. Stanyard in case of trouble?”

“I don’t want to answer questions.”

“Take your time. See if there is any harm in answering that one, Susan.”

“But if I don’t want any help, why should I answer anything?”

“You have an orderly mind. But I gave you some help last night. You needed it and took it.”

She thought that over. “He wrote me a letter last August. The writing was shaky. We knew from Grandma he was going to die. The Sunday before I got the letter she told us he was failing. It just said if I needed help I should go to Mrs. Stanyard. I was to write down her phone and address and destroy the letter, and not tell anybody. I thought it sounded sort of… crazy. He said Mrs. Stanyard was a nurse and a nice person and I could trust her. I did like he said in the letter even if I didn’t expect anything to happen, and sort of forgot it until… ”

“Until the day before yesterday.

“But you wouldn’t go to her apartment with her because you said they’d look for you there. What did that mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Okay. Now then. You’re in some kind of a jam. You can call on me, and I can be just as rough as I have to be to get you out of it. And you’ve got ten thousand to finance the operation. I am yours to command, kid.”

She turned her face toward the window. The tears started again. “But I can’t do anything,” she said hopelessly. “Nobody can do anything. She went away once in California and they put us in a place. There was just three of us then and we were little, and we almost didn’t get Freddy back. The judge said he was disturbed.”

“Gretchen has gone off someplace?”

Defiant eyes stared at me through the slits. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I stood up. “I’m going to leave you alone for a little while to think something over. Let me see if I have the names right Freddy, Julian, Freda, and ‘Ibmmy. Christmas vacation is coming up, Susan. I don’t think it would be too difficult for an obviously respectable type like me to go gather up the kids. I know a crazy wonderful couple in Palm Beach. House as big as a hotel. Pots of money. Cook, maids, housekeeper, yard men. And scads of kids. They adopt them. Five more over Christmas would hardly be noticed. I could set it up with one phone call, and you’ve got the airplane money. Think it over.”

I walked out without giving her a chance to respond. Heidi did not hear me. I leaned against the studio doorway. She was reworking the bottom corner of a, big painting, standing bent over with her back to me. Her air-sea rescue costume was clinched tight around the slender waist, and stretched tightly across the pleasantly globular rear. I have always thought it fallacious to make an erotic specialty out of any particular portion of the form divine. When it is good it is all good, and some days some parts are a little better than others, but you need the entire creature to make any segment of it worthwhile. In three silent steps I could grab a double handful of all that and see if she could manage a standing high jump over the top of the painting.

“AhHem!” I said.

She straightened and whirled around. “Oh! Did you find out anything?”

First I broke it to her that her patient was Gretchen’s kid, and was the eldest granddaughter of Anna, the housekeeper, and briefed her on Gretchen’s home life, hubby and sudden departure.

She looked thoughtful and troubled instead of startled, and said that she guessed that subconsciously she must have had some hint. She had dreamed about Gretchen last night for the first time in years. So I went back to her specific question. Had I found out anything?

“Just enough to make some guesses, and they are probably wrong. She thinks any kind of help is going to make things worse. I have a hunch the Gorba family moved well out of town. Fifty miles, a hundred miles. Mama Gretchen missed the lights and the action, so she took off. So Saul Gorba took a little hack at the ripening daughter, maybe to get even with Gretch for taking off. I would think she’d put up a pretty good scramble, so maybe she got her nails into his chops, or a solid little knee into his underparts, and he lost his temper and hammered her. I think he would know she wouldn’t blow the whistle on him. With his record they would tote him off gladly, and the social workers would, in the absence of the old lady, stuff the kids into the handiest institution. I think she is hooked on being the little mother hen to these other four. I think she is worried to death about them right now. If she goes back, the stepdaddy tries again. And if she stays away and Gretchen is away, who looks after the little ones? Not so terribly little, actually. Fifteen, twelve, ten and six.”

She nibbled the wood end of a paint brush, frowning. “That sounds so ugly, the whole situation. It’s so strange, really. Roger has such clear memories of Gretehen when she lived with us. Of course he’s four years older. But I must have been almost eight years old when Gretchen got married. I can remember a lot of things from a lot earlier than that. But Gretchen is sort of dim. I can’t see her face at all, or remember her voice. Roger says she was good to us. He says she was good-natured and sort of dumb and sloppy. But would she just walk out on her kids?”

“Apparently she’s done it before.”

“Poor Anna. She deserves a more reliable daughter. Couldn’t Anna take her own grandchildren for a while? Maybe not. Probably Lady Gloria wouldn’t want brats from her own so_ cial level cluttering up her illusions of grandeur.”

I started to speak and then let it stand. We could not head in that direction and get anywhere. She was blocked. So I made some unimportant small talk and then went back in to catch Susan’s reaction. It was a firm shake of the head-from side to side: No more questions and no more answers. She didn’t want to be any trouble to anyone. She would leave as soon as she felt well enough. Thanks a lot.

I talked with Heidi again before leaving. She promised she wouldn’t try to pump Susan Kemmer, but if the girl said anything useful, Heidi would get in touch with me right away.

I went to the nearby Ambassador for some midmorning coffee and some midmorning thought. A trio of high-fashion models, young ones, were gathered there for some do. They chittered and squeaked at each other. Their starved faces were painted to a silver pallor, their tresses shaped by men who hate women, using only soup bowls and hedge clippers, their clothing created by those daring little hanky-stompers who vie with each other in seeing how grotesque they can make their clients. It is an in-joke with them, and it gives them hysterics when they get together. They whinny, fall down, and spill their money. I think they would do a lot less harm sculpting pop-art dogs.

I ordered more coffee and went and phoned Janice Stanyard. No answer. I tried the hospital. She was in surgery, and scheduled through until at least four in the afternoon. I went back to my coffee and dug through the scrap paper in my side pocket and found the phone slip on Nurse Stanyard’s call. It had come in at nine. So I went to the bus depot on East Randolph. It was to buses what Miami International is to airplanes. They had American, Continental, DeLuxe, Indiana, Santa Fe, Suburban, American Coach and so on big inside ramps and stations, gates and callers.

In order to get anywhere I had to make certain assumptions. With her face in that condition, she wouldn’t hang around waiting to make up her mind about calling Janice Stanyard. Give her ten minutes to get from the platform to a phone. Give Janice five minutes before calling me. So I was interested in anything arriving from, say, eighteen minutes before the hour to five minutes before the hour. After studying and cross-checking the printed schedules and the arrival boards, I came up with five possibilities, all based on the assumption she came in from out of the city somewhere. My only prayer was her very memorable condition. When you see a young girl with the kind of a face Dick Ti ger could give any contender back in his better days, it can stick in your mind. But I was at the wrong end of the day. Depot personnel on duty this Tuesday morning wouldn’t have been around on Monday night at nine. If she was on one of the five arrivals, she would have used one of three gates to come into the terminal.

Mark time. Futz around. Scratch. Fret. Watch girls. Wonder what the hell you are doing in this huge damp cellar full of three or four million people. Between announcements the speaker system in the depot was telling everybody about we three kings of Orient are. Damn you, Fort Geis, why didn’t you leave a message in a hollow tree? Why didn’t you realize what a pot of trouble you were leaving behind? It was an example of the terrible innocence of men who are superb in their own fields. Einstein had some grotesque political opinions. Jack Paar knew how we should get rid of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Vonnegut keeps losing airplane tickets.

Forhier Geis had not the slightest idea that people representing a dozen different interests and points of view would compete for the chance to drag the widow into their particular cave and gnaw her bones clean. Six hundred big ones brightens the eyes, sharpens the taste, bulges the muscles. O speak to us from beyond, Great Surgeon.

I trudged out into a hooing of damp and grisly wind, into the kind of gunmetal day when you wear your headlights turned on, and think of a roaring fire, hot buttered rum, a Dynel tigerskin, and a brown agile lass from Papeete. I took my dismals to the Palmen House and traded them to a sad-smiling man for a C-cup of Plymouth. We stood on either side of the bar and sighed at each other in wistful awareness of our mutual mortality, and I left half the drink and went off and phoned Heidi.

When she answered I said, “Is the battered bird responding?”

“Not so that anyone could notice. She’s taking a bath and washing her hair. If it’s any use to you, her clothes are from a cheap chain with about ten thousand outlets in Chicago, and her shoes seem to be a very good grade of cardboard, and her total of worldly goods comes to four dimes and four pennies, a red comb, half a pink lipstick, and one wadded-up bus schedule.”

“What bus line?”

“Hmm. Let me go look. She’s still sloshing in there.” She came back and said, “North Central. I looked to see if she’d marked anything on it. She hasn’t.”

“Thanks. It could be a help. You make a good secret agent.”

“Secret agent hell, McGee. It’s pure female nosiness.”

I went back to my drink in better humor. I separated the North Central timetable from the others I had picked up. Bus Number 83 arrived every weekday night at 8:45, back at the point of origin from where it had left at 8:20 that morning. Elgin, Rockford, Freeport, Clinton, Moline, Galesburg, Peoria, Peru, Ottawa, Joliet, and home to the barn. I could guess the union wouldn’t let them load that kind of a run on one man. Probably one man took it to -some midway point, possibly Moline, and his relief brought it on in and took it out the next morning and traded off again at Moline.

So the driver who had brought her in Monday night would be bringing her in again on Wednesday night. The company ran shorter routes and longer routes, and the Chicago office address was printed on the timetable. I signaled for a refill, left money as my surety bond, and went off and called North Central.

“Give me somebody who knows your driver roster,” I told the girl.

“Herbison speaking,” a man said, moments later.

“State traffic control,” I said. “Sergeant Ellis. Who brought your 83 in last night?”

“Anything wrong, Sergeant?”

“Just a routine check. Trying to pin down the time we lost some intersection lights.”

“Oh. Hold on.” It took him twenty seconds. “Daniel D. DuShane, Sergeant.” He explained I could contact him after two o’clock at a Galesburg address. He gave me the phone number. He said DuShane would be in again on 83 tomorrow night, that he was a good man, held a schedule well, and would probably be able to help me.

I felt reasonably cheery through the first half of my second knock, then I began to realize how rickety was my structure of hunch and logic. There were too many things wrong with it. If Gorba had cleaned out the Doctor’s estate, and if he was as bright as Francisco Smith had reported, it seemed to me he would have done one of two thingseither stayed put, kept his job, bided his time-or gone too far for the North Central Transportation Company to get anywhere near him. Also, if he had made that big a score, it didn’t seem, like a very good idea.for Gretchen to go off rambling.

True, one of the kids was his, the youngest one, but it seemed out of character for a type who could score so cleverly to saddle himself with even one, much less five. He did not seem to be the homebody sort.

In that mood, you can lose the whole thing. Okay. So a happy singing drunk had been charmed by the happy face of a small boy and taken him for a ride, gotten timid-or sober-and dropped him in the park. Neighborhood teen-age clowns had wired the joke bomb on Glory’s little car. Some twitch maniac, turned on with some kind of bug juice, had come looking for people to scrag and had settled for Ethel cat. One of Gadge Hairynose Trumbill’s countryclub wives had boobytrapped the candy box as a sick little vengeance. Susan Kemmer had been bashed about by a hulk of a boyfriend.

Go home, McGee. It’s too big and too scrambled and it happened too long ago. Smuggle Glory out of the polar regions. Take her home. Boat her, beach her, bake her, brown her, and bunk her. You too are a sucker for busted birds, starving kittens, broody broads. Healer McGee, the big medicine man. She’s got that big fireplace out there, right? A stock of sauce, right? A fantastic grocery department, right? So go lay it all out and cry a little. She might even come up with an idea.

So in the endless twilight of noonday I went northward, locked into the traffic flow, listening to ghastly news from all over. Premier assassinated tax boost seen Wings lose again bombs deemed defective three coeds raped teenage riot in Galveston cost of living index up again market sags Senator sues bowl game canceled wife trading ring broken mobster takes Fifth bad weather blankets nation…

The announcer was beginning to choke up. I turned him off. I couldn’t stand it

As I felt my way down through the Lake Pointe area, the wind was coming off the lake, bellowing and thrashing, and taking little plucks at the steering wheel. The driveway and the lighted house beyond was safe haven, and I slammed my car door, put my head down, and plunged through tempests. Anna Ottlo let me in.

“Ach! Thank Gott! Thank Gotti” she cried. She kept winding and unwinding her plump red hands in her napkin.

“What’s the matter? Where’s Mrs: Geis?”

It took me long minutes to piece it together. Anna had cleaned up after breakfast, and after she had finished the housecleaning, she had asked Gloria-if it was all -right if she went to her room and lay down for a little while. She had bad pains in one hip. She thought it was the dampness. The doctor was giving her cortisone. Her hip would stop hurting if she could get off -her feet every now and then. She had dropped off to sleep. A little while ago, maybe fifteen minutes ago, she had awakened with a start and been shocked to find it was almost twelve-thirty. She had gone hunting for Gloria to ask her what she would like for lunch. Gloria was not anywhere in the house. Her car was in the garage. She thought perhaps she had gone walking on the beach. But she had never gone walking when the weather was this bad. She had been acting very strange. Anna Ottlo had been wondering if she should call the police when I had arrived.

“The wasser,” she said, her eyes miserable, her mouth sick. “I keep tinking of the wasser.”

So I took off into the whirling gloom. I would guess the temperature at thirty degrees, and the wind seemed to take the whole thirty points off it. The wind, hard and steady, but with sudden gusts of greater violence, picked sand off the lips of the dunes and dry-lashed my face with it.

I loped and bawled her name, shielded my eyes from the sting of sand, and stared up and down the shelving beach. Beyond the sand belt the spray whipped at me. There was no color in the world. Gray sand, gray water, gray beach, gray sky. I was trapped in one of those arty salon photographs of nature in the raw, the kind retired colonels enter in photography contests. Through watery eyes I saw somebody wa ‘ g a flag at me, a hundred yards away. The some ody turned out to be a twisted and barren bush a undred feet back from the smack of the lake wa’s. The flag, however, was a pair of pale green nylon briefs. Ladypants. Elasticized waist, some dainty bits of machine lace. Fresh clean new-sodden with spray.

Twenty feet beyond the bush was the touch of color in the gray world. Patch of dark red. Ran to it. Pulled it out of the sand. More than half of it was covered by the drift of sand. Dark red wool dress. Glory’s size. Damned fool. Damned little fool with the broken heart. I wondered if the waves would shove her back onto the beach. As I started toward the beach I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned quickly and saw Gloria crouched on the crest of a small dune thirty feet away. Her posture was like that of a runner waiting for the gun. Her knuckles were in the sand. I could see a glint of her eyes through the sodden mat of hair. Her mouth hung open, the small row of bottom teeth visible. She was egg-naked.

I called her name and hurried toward her. She whirled and ran from me. It was the dreadful reckless run of absolute and total panic. She would stumble and fall and roll to her feet and as I closed on her, she would dart off in another direction. When I could get near her, I could hear the horrid sound she was making in competition to the sound of waves and wind. I was as desperate as she. That wind had to be sucking the heat and the life out of her. Finally I feinted one way and as she cut back I dived and got one hand on her slender ankle and brought her down. She kicked me in the face with her free foot.

She had fantastic strength. Her face was madness. As I struggled with her she suddenly snapped at my hand and got it between her teeth, right at the thumb web. With her eyes tight shut she ground with hcr jaws, making a whining and gobbling sound. I put my other hand on the nape of her neck and got my thumb on one side and my middle finger on the other in the proper places under the jaw corners and clamped, shutting off the blood supply to the brain. She slumped and rolled onto her back. I stripped my topcoat off, laid it down, put a foot on it so it wouldn’t blow away, and lifted her onto it. As I did so I remembered long ago at Sanibel when I had first been surprised at how her small body which looked so trim and lean and tidy in clothes could have such a flavor of ripeness and abundance. I guess it was the ivory smoothness of her combined with a dusky, secretive, temple-magic look to the contours of breasts, belly, rounded thighs. Now perfection was abraded by sand, gouged and torn by the falling. I wrapped her up and ran for the distant house.

Once I got what I hoped was the right routine going-electric blanket turned high and heaped with other blankets, brandy forced past clenched teeth, I remembered who would have the biggest stake in giving her every attention she should have. I looked him up in the book and used the bedside phone. Her lips were blue. She made grunting sounds.

The office nurse said that Dr. Hayes Wyatt was with a patient and if I would leave my name and number. I have no idea what I said to her. I have absolutely no memory of it. I do know that the next voice I heard was that of Dr. Wyatt.

I got through it and he kept saying, “What? What? What?”

“Now goddam it, Doctor, pull yourself together. Gloria Geis had been freaking up and down this beach bareass naked God only knows how long, and I think it was the acid you let Fort Geis have, and she tried to chew my hand off and it scares me to look at her, so having you keep saying what what what isn’t doing anybody any good at all.”

Once he moved, he moved well. He got to the house ten minutes before the ambulance did. He took her to Methodist Hospital where the widow of Fortner Geis would get every attention in the bookI waited an hour before he came down and sat beside me in the lounge. He was a spare dusty tall remote man. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

“We’ll wait and see,” he said. “She was all right last night and all right at breakfast. So as it wasn’t repeated dosages we have to assume a massive dose. No matter how much or how little you take, it wears off in twelve hours at the outside. By ten o’clock tonight I should know a little more. She’s in restraint now. She’s being treated for shock and exposure. Did you notice her hands?”

“Yes.”

“She chewed her arms and her knees badly, but the hands are the worst. I don’t like that. It sounds as if the disassociation was total. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That she could stay out in left field from here on.”

“Or come back in two days. Or two years. I shouldve gotten it back. I shouldn’t have taken her word she’d gotten rid of it.”

“She dumped it out. She must have found a new source.”

He looked at me with surprise, started to protest, and then understood. “But I don’t want to evade moral responsibility, Mr. McGee.”

“Maybe Fort should have made sure it was dumped. Maybe he did. Maybe she found a wandering Mexican and bought mushrooms.”

“Psychedelics have a legitimate scientific…”

“So does alcohol. And Demerol. And every day they pump out some little kid who eats all the aspirin in the house.”

“You should be… an assurance salesman.” He looked mildly pleased with himself. It was a joke. I do not think he had made many jokes in his lifetime.

“Doctor, with the best response you could hope for, how long would she be in?”

“At least ten days. At the very least. I’m going to stay right with her. I’ll leave word at the switchboard that I will accept calls from you.”

I phoned Anna Ottlo. I could hear her snuffling after I told her the score. I told her that as far as I could see, she could start closing the house, and packing up all Glory’s personal gear. I said I would relay the news to John Andrus at the bank and to Roger Geis and Heidi Trumbill. She wanted to know how soon she could come and see Gloria at the hospital. I told her I’d let her know.

After I hung up I remembered I had forgotten lunch, and it was almost three-thirty.

TEN

I HAD a sandwich and coffee at a twenty-four-hour place near enough to the hospital to get the random hours business of nurses and interns, clerks and dietitians, Gray Ladies and residents. There was a gabble of young nurses in a corner. The ceiling fluorescence was as bright as any operating room. My Formica tabletop was white as a surgical dressing. One young nurse had a lovely curve of temple brow, cheek, jaw.

I tried to contrast them with the spidery moonpainted fashion racks I had seen at the Ambassador, thinking that nursing seems to attract young women structured in a curious way-pretty and slender from throat to waist, and there swelling into sedate and massive hips, hefty peasant legs. Debutante riding along in an ox cart. Or, by analogue, some variant of the myth-man who, from the waist down, was horse.

Try as I might, I could not keep my mind twisted away from that great gray howl of beach where the pursuit still went on, the tall sun-bronzed man made clumsy by the scuttling and dartings of the little naked woman. That look of madness is ugly beyond belief when you see it on the face which once had shown you love. And, in my arms and hands, I had the tactile memory of how the total panic of the inner beast felt.

Once, long ago, I went drift fishing with friends for smallmouth black bass in the St. Lawrence River near Alexandria Bay, using live minnows and fly rods, pulling in the lines to run upriver, then drifting down again over the good places. At noon we beached the boat on a small island and cleaned and cooked some of the catch over a driftwood fire. One man cast a minnow from the shore and hooked and brought in a river eel perhaps two feet long, maybe a little more, and in thickest crosssection no greater than the average banana. My friend lived on the river, and he hauled the eel onto a bit of hard ground and told me to stand on it. I thought he was out of his mind. Two hundred and twenty pounds of man on two pounds of eel. I’d crush it flat. He insisted. I pinned it with one foot, then put the other and my full weight on it. As it writhed it kept lifting me an inch or so. I stepped off. It was undamaged.

In her induced terror, Glory had that same incredible muscular tension, so that if I held her too tightly, the muscles would break her bones, unhinge her joints, as sometimes happens under shock treatment. We use only the smallest part of the power of both brain and muscles. Even our senses are dulled in the state we call conscious ness: Under hypnosis the good subject can read a newspaper across a room, hear sounds otherwise inaudible, detect differences in the weight of seemingly identical objects.

Perhaps it is merely sentimentality-that strangely unearned emotion-which makes you want to have the fates and fortunes of life favor the good guys. Glory was a good guy. She had had more than her share already. There is a grotesque and continuous tragedy about some lives which would be too extreme for even a soap-opera audience to stomach.

So I white-eyed a nurse into receptivity across forty feet of plastic restaurant, chomped down a plastic sandwich, gulped down acid coffee and plastic pie, and with accelerating stride got to the men’s room just in time to whonk and brutch the belated lunch into a toilet. Homage to a one-time love. A sick heart makes a sick stomach. They had cleaned and dressed my hand. They do not give you a series of shots for girl-bite. Wasn’t she the lucky one to think of asking you to fly up here and help her, T. McGee? You did great.

I shed coat and jacket and rolled up my shirt sleeves and drew a lavatory bowl of cold water. I wallowed and scrubbed and made seal sounds, and then found out that the management had thoughtfully provided one of those warm air tubes for the drying bit, the special kind that leave you feeling coated with grease rather than water. Small children think they are fun. Every adult in the land hates them. They are part of the international communist conspiracy. A nation forced to dry itself in a machined huff of sickly warm air is going to be too irritable, listless, and disheartened to fight. Americans unitel Carry your own towels. Carry little sticks with which you can wedge those turn-off faucets open so you can get two hands under the water at the same time. Carry your own soap so you need not wash your paws in that sickly green punch-button goo that leaves you smelling like an East Indian bordello. Carry your own toilet paper, men. The psychic trauma created by a supply of the same paper stock used for four-color ads in Life magazine cannot be measured.

The cold-sweat sensation ended. I reassembled the hero, stared into his deadly mirrored eye, nodded reassuringly at the poor suggestible slob, and strode out into a blackening world where the wind had ended, where great slow flakes the size of quarters and half-dollars came falling down to melt into a black sticky slime on the sidewalks and on the fourteen million tons of scrap paper that littered the city.

At a drugstore full of games, toys, and sporting equipment, I downed a fizzing nostrum for uglygut, and from a booth got Heidi first. The fraulein was napping. I told her that Gloria Geis was hospitalized, that she had suffered a little bout of nervous exhaustion.

“Is my heart supposed to go out to her?” asked the ice maiden.

“I don’t think that’s what she had in mind. But tell your brother. Maybe you two can have a good chuckle over it. Mrs. Ottlo will be leaving for Florida when she gets the house closed. I imagine John Andrus will be in touch with you about odds and ends.”

“I hope you and John Andrus understand that the little bitch is probably faking.”

I quoted her word for word to John Andrus when I phoned him at the bank. He was shocked and concerned about Gloria, and I didn’t tell him any more than I had told Heidi. I said Hayes Wyatt was on the case and any reports on her condition would have to come from him. John Andrus said he would swing into action about the house, the furnishings, storing Gloria’s possessions, and finding her a place to live. Then he said, “Are you making any headway?”

“I wish to God I knew, John. I’ll be in touch.”

I got more change and went back to the booth and phoned the bus driver, Daniel D. DuShane in Galesburg. A woman answered and told me to hold on while she went to get him.

When he came on I gave Sergeant Ellis a new job. I put him in Missing Persons investigating a female juvenile runaway.

“Five two, about seventeen, blonde, about a hundred and twenty pounds, blue coat, blue scarf. She could have come into the city on number 83 last night. She might have had facial contusions and abrasions.”

“Sure thing. She was on my load, Sergeant. You know, I been thinking ever since maybe I should have reported her as soon as I got in. No luggage, no purse even.”

“Where did she board you?”

“It’s a crossroads. From Peoria I’m-routed up 29 on the west side of the river to Peru and LaSalle. There’s a kind of village name of Bureau, where 26 comes in from the left. There’s a crossroads gas station and lunchroom there name of Sheen’s. It’s like a hundred miles from Chicago, so I must get there usually about I’d say six o’clock give or take some, depending. Once in maybe ten times I get a pickup there, and what Sheen does, he’s got an amber blinker he can turn on and I can see it way down the road, so when it’s on I hit the air horns and swing in and the fare comes running out, so it isn’t too much time out of my schedule. I had the inside lights out, and she boarded and I turned on the front lights to take the money. She said Chicago and gave me a dollar and the rest of it all in change, and I gave her the ticket and looked up and the first thing I thought was she’d busted up a car and had to take the bus home. The light kind of shone up onto her face and it gave me a real jolt. She went back and took an empty, and later when I had the inside lights on at Ottawa, I saw her back there with her head kind of wrapped up in the scarf so it hid most of the damage. Runaway, huh?”

“Looks like her old man beat her up.”

“Sergeant, I hope you locate her. It’s no town for a kid like that to be wandering around in. And I hope you bend her old man a little. A guy who hits his kid like that is some kind of animal.”

“Thanks for your help, Mr. DuShane.”

“I guess I should have turned her over to the cops at the depot.”

Back in my rental when I got the engine going and the heater on high and the wipers knocking the snow off, I dug an Illinois map out of the glove compartment and finally located Bureau. It was halfway between Joliet and Rock island, and lay about eight miles south of Interstate 80. The legend said that from the size of the circle marking it the population was between zero and two hundred and fifty. The idea of a town of zero population bemused me. Should it not have been from one to two hundred and fift? My eye, sliding, picked up the name of a town of the same size on the other side of the river. Florid. It looked like a typo. Florid, Illinois. The Florid Hotel. The Florid Bank. A cominunity of fat happy little people suffering from high blood pressure.

So I had enough leverage now, properly used, to unlock Miss Susan Kemmer. And Y knew I was sitting in a snowy automobile playing map games because I was reluctant to go use the leverage. Respect for the sanctity of the individual is a terrible burden in my line of work. I have seen cops whose greatest jolly is in taking your head apart and spreading all the pieces out on the table, under the interrogation lights. The totally dismembered personality can be put back together again, but the pieces never fit quite the way they did. And they come apart easier the next time. The old field strip.

Five o’clock and blundering old mother night had come in ahead of time to squat upon the city, upon two hundred thousand hair-trigger tempers clashing their way back toward good old homeheated television dinners, steam heat, the headachy little woman, the house-bound kids, and the dreadful feeling that Christmas was going to tear the guts out of the checking account.

I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi’s place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report. The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. You can’t hardly taste the additives.

She let me in through the red door, into lamplight glow. Her creative day had ended and she was austere and queenly in a white knit dress with long sleeves-an off-white, neckline prim, shift-like in the loose beltless fit of it, hemline just above the knees in that third-grade look which gives women with legs as good as hers an innocently erotic flavor, and gives women with bad legs the clown look of Baby Snooks.

“What a Christly ghastly depressing day,” she said. She hiccuped. Astoundingly, she giggled. She looked appalled at herself, turned with careful stateliness, and said, walking away from me, “Don’t think you’ve discovered some kind of secret vice, McGee. I felt chilly and I had some sherry. The work was going well and I kept drinking it and I didn’t realize how many times I’d filled the glass and suddenly I was quite drunk. It isn’t habitual.”

“I’d never tab you as a wino, honey.”

She revolved like a window display, hiccuped again, and said, “I shall be perfectly all right in a few minutes.”

“How’s your house guest?”

“Still sleeping. She must have been exhausted. Let’s go see, shall we?”

I went down the short hallway with her. She turned on the hallway light: The room door was closed. She turned the knob carefully and swung the door open, hand still on the knob. I was right behind her. The wide vague band of light from the open doorway reached to the bed on the far side of the room. The young girl froze and gasped. She was standing beside the bed, and had obviously just taken off the borrowed nightgown and laid it on the bed and had been reaching toward the chair where her clothes were. The light was too shadowy to expose the facial damage. She had a ripeness, a pale heartiness in the light, and she quickly clapped one arm across her big young breasts and shielded her ginger-tan pubic tuft with her other hand.

A sound came from Heidi which turned every hair on the nape of my neck into a fine wiry bristle, crawled the flesh on the backs of my hands, and turned the small of my back to ice.

It was a tiny little-girl voice; thin and small, with none of the resonances of her maturity. It was a forlorn and sleepy little question. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, I’m scared. I had a bad dream. Daddy?”

Then she backed into me, banged the door shut. She stepped on my foot, turned into my arms, shuddered, and said, in that same infinitely pathetic little voice, “I’m going to tell on her. I’m going to tell on Gretchen! She was all bare!”

I held her. She was breathing rapidly, breathing a warm sherry-scented breath into my throat. Suddenly she slid her arms around my neck and held me with all her strength, crushing her soft and open mouth into mine, rocking and grinding her hips into me. There was so much frantic hunger from such a delicious direction, I was at least twotenths of a second catching up to her. Suddenly she sagged, fainting limp, and groaned, and would have fallen.

I helped her into the living room. She coughed and gagged. She stretched out full-length on the couch and rolled her head from side to side. I turned out the lamp shining down into her eyes and sat on the floor beside her and held her hand.

“What happened to me?” she asked. The little-girl voice was gone.

“Listen to me, Heidi. I want to tell you a sad story about a sensitive and complicated little girl in a silent house. She must have been about seven years old, and there were nurses and the smells of medicine and the adored mother was dying, and she felt frightened and alone, and had nightmares.”

She did not move as I reconstructed it for her. Her hand lay cool and boneless in mine. I finished it. There was no response.

“How vile!” she said in an almost inaudible tone. “How ugly and terrible.”

“Sure. A lonely man, wretchedly depressed. A young girl with a terrible crush on him. A slowwitted, amiable, romantic girl with all the ideas of soft surrender out of the love pulps and confessions. So she crept into his dark room and into his bed after God only knows how many nights of thinking about it. Soft, loving, willing young flesh and he took her. You came in on one of those nights to be comforted. She was just climbing out of his bed. There is a sexual undertone to every little girl’s love for her daddy.”

“‘No!”

“It must have terrified them to think that you might tell. But you went back to your own bed in another part of the house. And the doors slammed shut. It was too terrible a betrayal for you to endure. So it got pushed into a back closet of your mind, and the door was locked. But Heidi, you had to push other things in there too, and lock them away. The love for the father. And your own sexual responses. Slam the doors. Forget. The way you’ve forgotten how Gretchen looked, forgotten her voice. It turned you off, Heidi. Sex is vile. The world is vile. Love is ugliness.”

“Amateur diagnostics. Christ! It’s the parlor game I’m most sick of.”

“Look at me! Come on. One more little minute before you run and hide. You reverted all the way back. You regressed to seven years old. Then you slammed the door. Then you came at me like a she-tiger. Like rape. You couldn’t have made it plainer.”

“No. No.”

“Don’t lie, damn you! Don’t hide! Who was I?”

She closed her eyes. Her lips moved. “Daddy.”

“Who were you?”

“I was… me. And I was Gretchen too. All in one.”

“How did you feel?”

“… Aching. Empty. Wanting. As if something secret and delicious was starting to grow, something that could grow and burst, over and over. Then everything went dark and dead.”

“Poor chick,” I said. “It’s all bottled up. It’s all twisted and strange. So that everything he did was a denial of you the way you denied him. Janice Stanyard. Gloria. For about twelve fantastic seconds you started to break through. And you lost it. But it proves you could.”

“No!”

“You want to enjoy your hang-up? You want to live a half-life in a half-world?”

She rolled her head from side to side and her hand tightened on mine. “No, but…”

“But…”

“It’s no use. Gadge tried everything. Drinks, pills, different ways. It was just nightmare. Just all that terrible poking and jostling. So ugly.” Her voice trailed off. “So stupid and degrading and… vile.”

“Heidi, in that hallway shock turned your mind off, and your body came alive, and your body knew what it wanted.”

“I don’t want to be turned into an animal.”

“Like Gretchen? You damm fool, do you know why that girl in there triggered it? Because she looks like her mother did eighteen years ago. She’s your half-sister.”

She stiffened, yanked her hand away, sat up and stared down into my face. “Oh… my… God!… Oh… my… GOD!”

“You sensed it, didn’t you?”

“I could feel… something strange. Like an echo, like a memory I never had.”

I moved up onto the couch beside her and took hold of both her hands. She looked at me, solemn and troubled, and extraordinarily lovely and alive. “And that girl in there is an animal?” I asked.

“No. No, of course not. She’s a good person.”

“So is Gloria. So is Janice Stanyard. So was your father. All this priss-prim condemnation act of yours is a by-product of what happened to you when you walked into that room at the wrong time, at the wrong time in your life and in your father’s eighteen years ago.”

She frowned. “It could be. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Want to find out?”

“What do you mean?”

“After this is all over. After I’m through here, I’m going to find a place where the sun is hot and lasts all day. Come along with me. I’m the world’s worst setup for screwed-up broads. I hate waste. You’re worth special effort.”

She bit her lip. “All that again? No.”

“You responded to me once.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“You must have some strong motivation to break out in some kind of direction or you wouldn’t have let your pretty partner, Mark Avanyan, buddy you up with his musician friend-VanSomething.”

She gave a delicate little shudder. “Anna VanMaller. She finally started to arouse me. It was creepy and terrible. I kicked her and I ran and threw up. She was furious. I’d rather be… the way I am, even.”

“Even?”

She tilted her head, then blushed deeply and looked down and away, but she didn’t pull her hands away. “I guess that was a little too significant, Travis. Okay, I’m aware of the deficit. It’s probably lousy, but I don’t know how lousy because I don’t know what it could be like.”

“Just one rule. If you say yes, you can’t call it off. You endure it, until I give up.”

“Gadge gave up.”

“I’m not Gadge. You’re twenty-five. You are a beautiful woman, Heidi. What if this is the last chance?”

She pulled her hands away, shook herself as if returning to reality, and stared at me with a little curl of contempt on her lips.

“So you’ll make this terrible sacrifice, huh? Wow! I’m impressed. If you’re the great lover who finds out how to turn me on, it gives you an ego as big as the Tribune Tower. And I can learn a wet smile, pose for a centerfold, and become a happy bunny. And if you try and try and I never make it, then you’ve had the loan of what I’m told is very superior equipment for God knows how long, and you can trudge away shaking your head and feeling sorry for the poor frigid woman. Tails you win, tails I lose, buddy. If foul-ups are your hobby, go find a different kind. I’m too bright to buy that line of crap, my friend. I’m not a volunteer playmate.”

I got up and ambled around the semi-darkened room, scrubbing at my jaw with a thoughtful knuckle. She took very dead aim. She got inside. She made it sting. I will not fault my talent to kid myself.

I wandered, making bleak appraisals, and ended up standing behind the couch talking down at the top of her bowed blonde head.

“The first step has to be absolute honesty Heidi. Okay. You are flat right, and you are flat wrong. Here’s how you are right. I’ve got a plain simple old elemental urge to tumble you into the sack on any terms. You have that cool remote princessly look in total contrast with a very exciting body and exciting way of moving and handling yourself. It intrigues. Man wants to possess. He wants to storm the castle, bust down the gates, and take over. But I think-I’m not really sure-but I think that if that was my total motive, I’m enough of a grown-up not to try to get to you by sneaking up on your blind side. Grabbing something because it looks great is kind of irresponsible. Life is not a candy store.

“Likewise, dear girl, life is not a playground full of playmates where all good men are supposed to come to the aid of old Hooo the Hef and dedicate themselves sincerely and with a sense of responsibility and mission to liberating the maximum number of receptive lassies from the chains and burdens of our Puritan heritage.

“I think my shtick Heidi, is that I enjoy all the aspects of a woman. I like the way their minds work. I like the sometimes wonderful and sometimes nutty ways they figure things out and relate themselves to reality. I like the arguments, the laughs, the quarrels, the competitions, the making up. A nearby girl makes the sky bluer, the drinks better, the food tastier. She gives the days more texture, and you know it is happening to her in the same way.

“How this relates to Heidi Geis Trumbill is that I have the feeling it is a damned shame you stand outside the gates with a kind of wistful curiosity about what it’s like inside. I want to be sort of a guide, showing off new and pretty country to the tourist. Life is so damned valuable and so totally miraculous, and they give you such a stingy little hunk of it from womb to tomb, you ought to use all the parts of it there are. I guess I would say that I want to be friends. A friend wants to help a friend. I want to peel away that suspicion and contention because I don’t think it’s really what you’re like. If we can get friendship going, then maybe we can get a good physical intimacy going, and from that we can fall into a kind of love or fall into an affection close to love. If it happens, it adds up to more than the sum of the two people, and it is that extra part out of nowhere that has made all the songs and the poetry and the art.

“So it wouldn’t be a performance. No great-lover syndrome. No erotic tricks, no Mother McGee’s home-cooked aphrodisiacs. The only trick would be, I guess, to get you to like yourself a little. Then the rest would come.

“So you know what’s wrong with the whole statement, just as 1 do. Why doesn’t he get his own true permanent forever girl? Maybe it is some kind of emotional immaturity. Somehow I don’t think so. I have a theory I can’t prove. I know this. If I became one woman’s permanent emotional stability and security, there would be a moral obligation on my part to change the way I live, because I’d have no right to ask her to buy a piece of my risk-taking: Yet risk is so essential to me-for reasons I can only guess at-giving it up would make me a different kind of man. I don’t think I’d like him. I don’t think she would. I don’t know if all this is excuse, explanation, sales talk or what. I really don’t know. It’s what I think I think.”

I stood there. She did not move or speak. I heard a deep sigh. Then in a lithe movement she turned, rolling up onto her knees, and stood on her knees looking up at me across the back of the couch. Her eyes were evasive. She put her hands out and I took them.

“So I’ll try friendship,” she said. “I’ve tried everything else. I don’t even know very much about being a friend, Travis. I should make some gesture to seal the bargain, I suppose.”

She uptilted her face, eyes closed, mouth offered. But I could tell that she was steeling herself. Her hands had a clammy feel of nervous tension. So, briefly and lightly, I, kissed one closed eye and then the other. I released her hands and said, “Contract confirmed.”

She looked startled, stepped backward off the couch, and said, “You kind of lost me a little with that risk-taking part.”

“I conned John Andrus into giving me that card. I knew Gloria before your father did., They met down in Lauderdale. I stood up with them when they got married. She phoned me in Florida and asked me to come up and help. You could say I’m in the salvage business. Suppose some very sly, slick, sleek operator worked on you and suckered you out of the settlement Gadge made on you. The statutes are full of gimmicks. Semi-legal theft. I might be induced to give it a try. Whatever I could recover, I’d keep half. Half is better than nothing. No recovery and I’ve gambled my expenses and lost. Make a recovery, and expenses come off the top before I split. Somehow people on a dead run with a jaw full of stolen meat react badly to having it taken away from them.”

She sat and stared at me. “Half? Half of six hundred thousand?”

“Half of her end of it, and that would be subject to adjustment. The circumstances are always different. You can see how far I would have gotten with you if I told you who I was trying to help.”

“She sent for you!”

“Surprise?”

“I want to be able to keep hating her, Travis.”

“Then don’t get to know her, if there’s ever any chance left for you to get to know her.”

“Do you know where the money went?”

“I might. I don’t know. Susan Kemmer could be the key.”

She looked toward the bedroom. “She knows?”

“I don’t think so. But she knows things I have to know.”

“Poor little doll. I must have frightened her.” She got up and went to the bedroom. There was a line of light under the door. I hung back. Heidi knocked and the girl said to come in.

In a little while Heidi came back out and left the door open and beckoned me back into the living room. “She was just sitting in there in the chair all dressed. Quiet as a mouse. I apologized for walking in on her before. I said I thought she was sleeping. She just shrugged and said it didn’t matter. I told her you want to talk to her. Do you want me to be there?”

“It might help. But it might get ugly. Don’t try to step in unless I cue you. The cue word is hell, said loudly. Then you hustle to her and hug her and comfort her and chew me out. You’re the guy in the white hat.”

I went in with her. Heidi sat on the bed. The girl had made the bed. I leaned against a chest of drawers. “Well, Susan, I guess we’d better start leveling with each other.”

“There’s nothing I want to talk about, Mr. McGee.”

“I know that. But you have to.”

“I don’t have to.”

“It won’t keep me from finding out. It will just save me a lot of time and effort. I know you caught that North Central bus at Bureau, at the crossroads, at a place called Sheen’s, a hundred miles from here. I know that Saul and Gretchen and you five kids left Chicago on Sunday the 22nd of August in the car Saul bought at the place he worked and fixed up. You were towing a U-Haul trailer. So the little family holed up a hundred miles west of here almost four months ago. Saul’s parole period was over. That’s just a sample, honey. I’m not going to tell you all I know. I’m going to hold back so that I can tell if you’re lying to me.”

She stared at me, startled, wary, worried. “You don’t want to help me. You fooled Mrs. Stanyard too. You’re after him!”

“The easiest way to attract attention would be to keep you kids out of school. And he apparently wanted to lay low. So all I have to do is drive over there with you in the morning and hit the high schools in the area and find out which one you’ve been going to. Then get the home address from the school.”

“No. Please. Please don’t.”

“Why the hell are you being so stubborn, girl?”

Heidi hurried to her on cue, sat on the arm of the chair, and put an arm around Susan and glowered at me and said, “Stop bullying her!” Susan had begun to cry.

“Stubborn is bad enough without being stupid too.”

“She’s not stupid!”

“Sure she is. She takes after her mother. She takes after Gretchen.”

“She’s not my real mother!” Susan declared.

I shook my head sadly. “Honey Gretchen is your real mother and Dr. Geis was your father. And your friend and protector there is your big half-sister. Say hello to Sister Heidi.”

And Heidi stopped faking it. “Damn you!” she yelled at me, her face pink. “What are you trying to do to herl”

“Shake her up. She needs it.”

“Leave her alone!”

I smiled. “Okay, sis. You tell her the tender love story.” I closed the bedroom door on my way out. I sat in the living room and picked up an art magazine and began leafing through it. I was a great guy. I did things to people for their own good. It gave me that nice warm righteous glow.

The art magazine told me that when abstract expressionism reflected utter disenchantment with the dream it still reverted to rhetorical simplifications even in its impiety, and that it is not a unified stylistic entity because of its advocacy of alien ideas on the basis of a homiletic approach to experience. Funny I’d never realized it.

After I spent twenty minutes admiring my sterling character, Heidi came out red-eyed and wan and said, “It’s tearing her to ribbons. She’s had all she can take.”

“Loan me your white hat and stay here,” I said, and went in. The girl looked at me. It’s the look the caged things have in small roadside stands.

I sat on the bed and said, “Growing up hurts, kid.”

“You made everything awful.”

“Your father was a fine man. Possibly a great man. Your mother was a sweet dumb sexy kid and she caught him at the wrong time or the right time, and there you sprouted. Miracle of life. Ah, sweet mystery. Et cetera.”

“But why didn’t he ever want to see me?”

“Let me see now. Could it be because he thought you might not be old enough to take that kind of a jar? And maybe you aren’t old enough yet. He made the deal he thought best for you long ago. It didn’t turn out so great. But he knew you did. He paid to have you checked out. He liked the report. I think it would be safe to say he was proud of you. But l have the feeling that his little affair with the housekeeper’s daughter cost him a lot more than the annuity and paying to have reports made on you, and the ten thousand he left with Mrs. Stanyard. I have the feeling his little bout with statutory rape eventually and indirectly cost him just about everything he ever saved. Six hundred thousand dollars. And I think Saul Gorba got it.”

“No! Oh, no, it wasn’t anything like that. Honest. They explained it all to us kids. Saul tried to go straight, really. But there was a man at the body shop. He knew Saul had a prison record. So he started stealing. It was some way of putting the wrong amount on the bills and receipts. Saul explained it. Then the man ‘ put some forms in the back of Saul’s locker and he found them and he knew what was happening, and he was going to be framed. Momma was so upset. Saul said that with his record he didn’t have a prayer. He said he’d be sent back to prison and he said that he was pretty sure the welfare would take over and split us up and call Momma an unfit mother on account of they’d picked her up twice in Chicago on D and D and let her off with a fine, but it was on the record. He said our only chance was to just leave. He said he’d found us a nice place in the country, and we weren’t to tell anybody we were leaving.”

“It sounded logical to you?”

“It was the only way we could stay together as a family.” She frowned. “I would be all right, but it would be terrible for Julian and Freda. I don’t think Freddy cares one way or another. And Tommy is only six. He needs the rest of us.”

“Where did you go?”

“Saul rented a farmhouse. It’s RFD 3 Box 80, Princeton. It’s off the Depue Road, all by itself at the end of a little dirt road. It’s about two and a half miles from Bureau crossroads.”

“Nice place?”

“Kind of shacky, but there’s lots of room. Forty acres. Everything had grown up weeds and bushes. It had been empty a long time. They said we couldn’t attract any attention. Our name was going to be Farley. And we had moved there from Chicago for Saul’s health. We were going to farm it. We all had to practice the name. He put the Cadillac in one of the sheds and nailed up the door. He walked out and hitchhiked and came back the next day with an old pickup truck. He made a kind of workshop in another shed. When it was time to go back to school, he had our school records. He came back to the city and got them and he changed the names so you couldn’t tell. They had driver’s licenses and he fixed up birth certificates for us and everything. He said we were going to be the Farley family for the rest of our lives, and we shouldn’t ever tell.”

“Did you mind that?”

“Nobody minded much. Anything is okay with Momma, the way she is. It made-me feel bad that I couldn’t write to my friends. They’d never know what happened to me. It was hard to get used to it being so quiet all the time. But after a while it didn’t seem so quiet. You just heard other things. Wind and birds and bugs.”

“Did your mother or Saul try to find work?”

“No. Saul would go away once in a while and be gone overnight. He’d go in the old truck. We all worked fixing the old place up for winter. Then one day when we came home on the school bus there wasn’t anybody there. That was… just three weeks ago today. We thought they’d gone off in the truck. Saul came back alone in the truck and he wanted to know where Momma was. We told him she was gone when we came home. I looked and found that a suitcase and a lot of her clothes were gone. Saul cursed and stormed around. He said we’d just have to all sit tight and wait for her to come back. It bothered him a lot. I’d wake up in the night and hear him walking around downstairs.”

“He did beat you up?”

“He was upset and he’d been drinking. All night maybe. He came into my room before daylight and he woke me up and handed me my coat and told me to come along and not wake the other kids. He said he had something to tell me about my mother. We went out to his workshop place. He had wired it for lights and he had a space heater going. He acted strange and he kept looking at me in a funny way. He had me sit down on the cot and he sat and put his arm around me and he was kind of half crying. He said he was pretty sure that she had been gone so long now, she was never coming back.

“I told him I thought she’d be back and he told me she had threatened to go away for good because they hadn’t been getting along. He kept rubbing his hand up and down my arm. He said there was just the two of us now to take care of everything. He said I was just like a regular mother to the other kids. He said I was a better mother in every way than she was. He said we had to stick together. I said I’d better go back to bed and I started to stand up, but he got my wrists and pushed me down flat on the cot. He lay down beside me and put my wrists around behind me and held them there in one hand, hurting me.

“In a funny whispery little voice he said everything was going to be wonderful. He said he loved me, and we were going to be a little family, just him and me and little Tommy, and we were going to leave soon and drive to Mexico in the Cadillac, just the three of us, and he was going to divorce Momma and marry me and we’d live in a big house with a swimming pool and have servants. He said that on the way out of town when we were fifty miles away he’d call the welfare to take care of the other three and they’d be in good hands. He kept stroking me with his free hand and I was starting to cry and begging him to stop. He kissed my neck and told me I was his little darling and he had been watching me ever since we’d left Chicago, and he had just one more little thing to take care of and then we would go on a wonderful trip. Then he opened my coat and pushed his hand up under my pajama top and started squeezing and rubbing me. It scared me so I yanked my wrists loose and I hit at him and kicked him and he fell backward off the cot. I tried to get by him and get out but he grabbed me and pulled me down and then he got up and picked me up and threw me back onto the cot. He said I was old enough and big enough for it, so I better relax and enjoy it, because I was going to have a lot of chances to get used to it. I remember scratching and biting and kicking at him and all of a sudden he was on the floor again, kneeling, all hunched over, looking up at me and holding onto himself.

“His eyes are funny. They’re sort of pale brown but when he gets mad they look yellow. Golden almost. He stood up slowly and when I tried to dodge around him he hit me in the mouth with his fist and knocked me down. He picked me up and hit me a lot more times, holding me with one hand and hitting me with the other. It all got blurred. He let go of me and I fell down and he kicked me a couple of times and went away and left me there. It was getting light. Pretty soon I could get up and I went back to my room. I didn’t see him. I locked the door. Mr. McGee, I knew that if I went down to the road and hitched a ride into Princeton and told the police, he’d go to jail and the welfare would get us. And I knew if I stayed there, he’d keep at me until he got what he wanted. When the kids knocked on the door to find out about breakfast I said I was sick and I told Freda and Julian to help Freddy get breakfast for everybody. I stayed in there all day. After everybody was asleep, I sneaked down and got something to eat. I knew I was safe because I could hear Saul snoring. You can always hear him all over the upstairs part after he’s had a lot of beer. I took food up to my room. Monday morning when Freddy knocked at my door I said I was better but I wasn’t well enough to go to school. I’d remembered about Mrs. Stanyard. He reminded me, saying I better not go to her. I had the money I’d been putting away to buy baby chicks in the spring. I heard the truck go rattling out about two o’clock, so I got dressed and left and cut across lots and came out on the Depue Road and followed it to Route 26 and walked to the crossroads where I’d heard you could get the bus to Chicago.

“The waitress at Sheen’s was nice. She let me lie down in back on a couch in a room off the kitchen, and she brought me things to eat even though I couldn’t pay for them. I told her I fell downstairs. She said her boyfriend had a bad temper too. I think that when… Momma comes back everything will be all right again. But he couldn’t have stolen all that money you said.”

“He had to steal something.”

“What do you mean?”

“What did seven of you live on for four months?”

“Oh, it was hardly any rent way out away from anything in that shacky place, and we’ve always had that four hundred and thirty-three dollars every month.”

“Not since August first, Susan. The company is holding four checks right now. The January one will be the last one made out to your mother. In February it starts to come directly to you, if they can manage to find out where you are.”

She stared at me and even with the puffed lids she opened her eyes as wide as I had seen them. “But, I thought that was where she got the money to… to go on a vacation!”

“Did Saul quarrel much with her?”

“Oh yes. But it…” She stopped and put her hand to her throat. “No! He wouldn’t!”

“Let’s hope it’s a lousy guess.”

She said, “I have to get back there! I left Freddy a note. I said I was going.to go off to get Momma and bring her home and not to worry, and be good, and help each other and not fight. If he… if he…” She could not continue.

“Sit tight, honey. Draw me a map so I can find the place. I am a registered licensed sneak. I’ll go check on your clan, gather them up, and haul them back here. You’ve got more friends on your side than you know what to do with. Me, Heidi, Mrs. Stanyard. And there’s always your grandmammy Mrs. Ottlo.”

“She doesn’t like children very much,” Susan explained. “I think they make her nervous.”

Heidi spoke from the doorway, startling me. “She’s right, you know. When we were little if we got in her way in the kitchen when she was busy, she’d do things that would hurt like fury, like snapping your ear with a fingernail, and giving a little pinch and twisting at the same time. She’d laugh but it was… kind of a mean laugh.” She tilted her head and frowned. “I remember once Gretchen showing us her back. She took her blouse off. She must have been about thirteen, and that would make me about four and Roger was probably eight. Anna had thrashed her with a belt. I can remember the marks still, the dark places and the little streaks where it had broken the skin.”

“Please hurry,” Susan said to me.

ELEVEN

I TOOK Heidi into the outside corridor beyond her red door and said, “Settle her down. Get a sleeping pill into her. I’m not going to go fumbling around in the boonies in the black black night. And I don’t think he’s going to do any harm to those kids. I’ve got a hunch they might be there alone, and Saul Gorba may be rocketing south with the loot. The boy is fifteen. He should be able to cope.”

“When are you going out?”

“In time to pick a nice observation post and see who gets on the school bus. I’ll report by phone. Like having a sister?”

“I don’t know how I feel yet. I like her.”

“A staunch one. The kind that knows how to cope. Go in and be family. She needs it.”

“Okay.” She gave me a nervous smile. I guess it is the smile dentists see when the patient walks in and looks at the chair and the drills and then at the dentist. “I could need it too.”

“So cozy each other, Heidi. Everybody has days like this.”

The smile turned wry. “That’s a little hard to believe.”

I had noticed a change in her. The little provocative animal grace of her moments was gone. She had taken to walking like a stick doll. But at the eame time she had stopped saying no. I knew she kept remembering the bargain she had made. But there was a certain little awareness mixed with trepidation. I had the feeling that if I made a sudden movement she would make exactly the same protective gestures Susan had made when we had looked into the room and seen her in the light from the hallway.

I rested my hand on the warm shoulder under the off-white knit and felt her tense up, and saw her throat work in a convulsive swallow.

I leaned and kissed her just to the starboard of the right eye and gave her shoulder a little pat and said, “Walk out there on that stage and give it all you’ve got, Gwendolyn, and I’ll make you a star.”

“Oh God, McGee, am I that obvious?”

“It’s only terror, honey. No worse than a bad cold.”

I drove famished to my hotel, ate hugely and well, and found no messages waiting. It was nine forty-five when I got to the house that Fort built, out at Lake Pointe. Bits of light shone through cracks in the drawn draperies and closed blinds.

Anna called through the door. “Ya? Ya?”

“McGee again, Anna.”

I heard the rattle of chain and the chunking of the bolt, and she opened the door part way and said, “Comen in, please sir.”

I slid through and she rebolted and rechained the door. She was concealing something in the folds of her dress and when she saw that I was aware of it, she held it out, a big ugly Army issue Colt.45 automatic pistol. She held it clumsily.

“Are you frightened of something?”

“Hear noises, maybe. Herr Doktor’s gun.”

I took it from her. Full clip, a round in the chamber and the safety on. I put it on the table beside the door.

“How is she? How is the dear little missus?”

“I’ll phone from here in a little while and find out. Anna, we have to have a heart-to-heart talk. And it might make you very unhappy.”

She accepted the formality of the situation. She invited me into the kitchen into the booth. She served us coffee and little cakes and eased herself shyly into the booth across from me.

I had to start by saying that I knew Susan had been fathered by Fortner Geis. It distressed her that I should know. She acted as if it was her own guilt, her own shame. She kept telling me how “goot” the Doktor had been, and what a “bat” girl Gretchen was. Very stupid girl. You have to do your best. Some people are “veak.” Gretchen had a veakness for men. Five children, four fathers.

Yes, she said, she had made it a habit to go visit Saul and Gretchen every Sunday. If a daughter tries, it is a duty, nein? They had married officially at her urging. True; Saul Gorba was a criminal, a veak man, but brilliant. A pleasure to talk to. In prison he had studied many things. Languages. German. He had learned German so quickly. She helped him with his accent, with the idioms. She had the Germanic reverence for the erudite mind. She said she would take along small gifts for the kinder, help Gretchen cook the dinner, mend the clothes of the kinder, of them all a family to make.

Then poof. Shrug. Cast eyes heavenward. What Kcuot is it? They are gone. No message, no word, no Ietter. Like animals of the forest. No consideration. It Is never to try again with such a daughter, you van believe.

Key question. Anna, did you talk about Doctor Geis? Did you talk about Gloria and Heidi and Nager to Saul and Gretchen?

Deep blush, bowed head, contrite little nod. What lit harm to talk? It is her life more with this family than that one, nein? A good man dying slowly, the civar wife trying to hold death back from him by love, his own children hating the wife, it is a sadnoss, and who else to talk to?

Did Saul encourage such talk? Did he ask questions?

Oh yes. Why asking?

And you know of the missing money?

She said with firmness that whatever the Doktor did, it was right. One should trust.

So it was time to pull the pin. “Anna, I am convinced that Saul Gorba used the information he got from you to extort all that money from Dr. Geis.”

Much the same effect could have been achieved py cleaving her open from the crown of her head to the brow line.

“Lieber Gott!” she whispered. “Can not be. Can not be! The Doktor would not give to him!”

“I don’t think the Doctor knew who he was giving the money to. Someone gave him some little demonstrations. Someone said, in effect, you are dying and you know it. Dying is at best a lonely thing. If you want to hang onto all the money that won’t do you any good anyway, you can really die alone. I have shown you how easily it can be done. Your grandson, your second wife, Nurse Stanyard, your daughter Heidi, and the daughter you had by Gretchen will all predecease you. I think he made a logical decision. I think he sensed he was dealing with somebody merciless and perhaps a little mad. And I think he was strong enough to make his decision and then not let it bother him. He made sure Heidi got a good settlement from Trumbill. He saved out a single insurance policy for Gloria. Susan was already taken care of.”

She mumbled and groaned about the cruelty of it, about how she could not believe it. Then her eyes widened and she said, “Ah! With the money he left. They ran far.”

“Not very far. Now I have to ask you if you will take the responsibility for your five grandchildren.”

“How do you mean, sir?”

“Gloria told me you plan to go to Florida and stay with your old friend Mrs. Kemmer. Let me see. Her son Karl fathered one of the tribe before he died, didn’t he?”

“Freddy. Strong boy.”

“Suppose I bring all five of them to you tomorrow and drop them in your lap. Susan’s checks haven’t been cashed for four months. There’s a sizable emergency fund too. They are going to need stability and order. Susan is responsible and mature and devoted to the younger ones. There’d be money to set up a place here or in Florida. I couldn’t promise anything, but I think there might be some financial help from Heidi to make college possible for Susan. Flow about it?”

“But there is Gretchen!”

“I don’t think so. It’s only a hunch, but I better tell you. I don’t want to, believe me. I think she’s dead. I think Saul killed her. She disappeared three weeks ago. And Saul has the hots for Susan. He gave her a very bad time. Gretchen drank. She wasn’t smart. She was too friendly. She talked too much.”

Anna Ottlo got up with astonishing agility and balled her apron up over her head. It was a gesture I had heard of but never seen. She trotted into a sort of pantry arrangement off the kitchen and I could hear her in there whuffling and snorting and moaning. I ate a little cake. It didn’t swallow readily. I washed it down with cooling coffee. She came trudging back, knuckling her eyes like a fat child. She plumped herself down and sighed and shook her head.

“I’m going to go jounce Gorba around some. He’s going to get a real good chance to work on his languages if they don’t electrocute him. He can pick up Croatian, Tasmanian, and Urdu. He can have a ball. But even with what all those kids have been though, this will shake them badly.”

She sighed again. She looked down at her hands, at the palms and then the backs. “All the life,” she said. “Verk, verk verk. I have the arthritis: I have the high blood. Cook, clean, sew, scrub for children? Six years is the little one. How much more years of that? Nerves make the heart flutter like a bird and the eyes go black. No. I am sorry. After the Iong verk there is rest. I must have. Susan is eighteen years soon, ya? With those checks I think the judge says she can have the brothers and sister, take care. Maybe the welfare comes and looks sometimes to make sure. She is young. She can do it. I know that one. She would want it. A good lawyer could fix, nein? Maybe I am selfish old woman. Too bad. Did I ask Gretchen to have five kinder? Life is too hard. Time to sit on the porch now. Rock the chair. Warm in the sunshine. Don’t blame, please sir.”

“Okay. I don’t blame. W C. Fields had a thing about children too.”

“Who? Who?”

“Skip it.” I looked at my watch. “Want to get on an extension while I find out about Gloria?”

“Oh yes!”

The operator at the hospital had me hold. I had a two-minute wait before Hayes Wyatt in his dusty, reedy voice said, “Mr. McGee?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Bad news, I’m afraid. Pneumonia. Pulmonary edema, and we can’t seem to hit it with antibiotics. Did a tracheostomy. Got her in a tent and a good team doing everything indicated, but we can’t seem to make a dent in the fever. Almost a hundred and five, and if we get another three-tenths we’re going to pack her in ice. So I haven’t the faintest idea how much residual disturbance we’ve got from the dose she took, and the question may be academic. The first thing is to try to get her through the night. I better get back there, but here’s someone who wants to talk to you.”

“Travis? Janice Stanyard. I’m on the case with Dr. Wyatt.”

“Is she going to make it?”

“If she’s tough enough. I wondered how…”

“Everything is just fine. How would you respond to my dumping five kids on you tomorrow for an indefinite stay? Buy you some rollaways. Bedding, chests of drawers, cardboard closets.”

“I would love it!”

“Go back to work, woman.”

“Yes sir!”

“I’m just checking possibilities. Don’t count on the kids for sure.”

“All right, but really I would…”

“I believe you. When should I phone back to check?”

“It will go one way or another by dawn, I would guess.”

Anna let me out. She was snuffling. She said Mrs. Stanyard was nice lady.

I placed my dawn phone call long-distance, from a red brick Georgian motel just off the Interstate west of Peru, Illinois. My heart sank when I was told that Dr. Wyatt had left the hospital. I asked for Janice Stanyard. She came on, her voice blurred and dragging with exhaustion. “She was tough enough, Travis.”

“Thank God!”

“She’s sleeping now. I’m about to go home and do some of the same. She’s going to be very weak. And we don’t know about the other yet.”

I went out into a bright gray Wednesday world to find that a warm wind was blowing in from somewhere. Maybe all the way up from McGee country. I had driven through inches of sticky snow, but it had all been transformed into busy water, hustling down every slope it could find. I had no idea how early the school bus picked up the kids. I had forgotten to ask Susan. I did know that the coming Friday was the last day before Christmas holidays. And I knew the kids walked out to Depue Road and caught the bus there. The place was marked on the map Susan had drawn for me.

I knew that getting into position was more, important than my morning stomach. It was flat lands, with a few gentle rolls and dips and hollows. It all looked bleak in the overcast morning light. There were some substantial farms, all trimmed and tended, and there were deserted places with tumbled buildings, fencing rusting away, leafless scrub tall in the silent fields, and it made you wonder how this one had made it and that one hadn’t.

I parked by a produce stand on Route 26, shuttered and vacant. I was there a little before seven, and I had a forty-minute wait before I saw the yellow bus in my side mirror, coming around the bend. I let it get out of sight before I started up. I hung well back and then picked up speed after it made the turn onto Depue Road. Susan had said their dirt road was a mile from the corner and came in on the right, and I could tell it by the bright red paint on the post that held up the mail-box. There was no name on the mailbox.

I saw the red post all right. The bus didn’t even hesitate. It rolled on by I looked up the muddy rutted road and, half-obscured by a knoll, I saw what had to be the house, set way back, two stories, steep, swaybacked roof, stingy little windows and not many of them, clapboards painted a dirty gray white. Two shutters crooked, one missing. A cheerless and isolated place.

Once well past it I dropped back and kept the bus just barely in sight. I tried to figure it out. Okay, the procedure would be to slow down, maybe look up the road to see if the kids were coming on the run. Stop and blow the horn maybe. So the driver knew they weren’t going to be there. So I’d better know what he’d been told.

Seven miles further, at the big central school complex, I found out the driver was a she, a brawny, likely, and clear-eyed lass in ski pants, mackinaw, and stocking cap, with shoulders like Arnold Palmer.

“Excuse me,” I said, with my best civil-service smile and patronizing manner. “District survey. A little spot check on percentage of equipment utilization. Hope you didn’t get nervous to have me following you.”

“Nervous? What about?”

I glanced at Susan’s map and put it away. “My route sheet shows that your first stop on Depue Road is a mile from the corner. Five children. Farley.”

‘’Got on at Shottlehausters‘. Four. One’s sick. Oldest. High school senior.“

“Got on where?”

She raised her voice as though addressing the deaf, and enunciated more clearly. “Shottlehausters‘. Shottlehausters’. The big place on 26 three mile afore Farley’s. They’re staying there a time.”

“Oh. I see: Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

So I went back a lot faster than I had come. I guessed that when she said three mile she meant three mile. But she had been wrong. It was three miles and one half of a tenth of a mile to the giant wine-red mailbox, “Shottlehauster” lettered in white in elegant script to a broad gravel drive, a long low white ranch-style house, and, beyond, the quonset equipment shed, white barns, triple silo standing against the wide march of rich and pampered farmland. I turned in, parked and got out, hesitating over whether to go to the front of the house or the back. I could hear a loud twanging and thumping of folk-rock. A bakery truck was parked at an angle near the back entrance. Darling Bakery. “Fresh as a Stolen Kiss.” “Darling Bread is Triple Enriched.” Bright blue and lemon yellow decor.

At this time of day the back door would be more customary I decided, for a hardworking credit bureau fellow. To get to the back door I had to pass the kitchen windows. In the dingy morning the fluorescents were all on, bright enough so that it was like glancing through the tied-back cafe curtains into a stage set, the floor level in there maybe three feet higher than the level of the gravel driveway. I would say I was opposite that first window frozen in midstride for a second and a half. It took half a second to figure out what I was looking at, and half a second of confirming it, and half a second to get my direction reversed and get out of the way.

The Darling Bread Boy was bellied up to a long efficient counter top. Blue work shirt to match his truck. “Darling” embroidered in an arc across chunk shoulders. But the “a” and the “r” in “Darling” were covered by two gigantic vertical fuzzy pink caterpillars. Then beyond the edge of the center island in the kitchen I saw the lady feet in fuzzy white socks, clamped and locked together, pressing quite neatly the tail of the blue shirt against his butt. Saw one hairy straining leg with his trousers puddled around the ankle. Caterpillars became her sweatered forearms, her hands hooked back over the hanging-on place of the trapezius muscles, as though trying to chin herself. And over the Bread Boy shoulder was her effortful jouncing bouncing face, eyes squinched tight shut, mouth raw, like indeed with the struggle to chin herself on that horizontal bar of muscle. The twangity-thump of country git-ar with electronic assist came from the truck radio (paternalistic bakery management) and from the kitchen radio in unison, and for a oouple of micro-seconds before I sorted the scene out I had thought he was attempting a crude, vulgar, unskilled version of some contemporary dance. But it was busy old rub-a-dub-dub, humpety-rump, dumpety-bump, with the counter-topped farm wife all wedged and braced.

I fled bemused to my rental. The idling truck made little pops and puffs of exhaust smoke. Where the hell did they think they were? Westport? Bucks County? Didn’t they know this was the heartland of America? Didn’t she know Jack LaLanne was the only acceptable morning exercise for the busy housewife?

I started the car engine and put the automatic shift into drive and kept my foot on the brake pedal. I wondered if maybe it was the architecture which had debauched her. I could not conceive of it happening in the traditional old farm kitchens. But she could see slightly glossier versions of her own fluorescence, stainless steel, ceramic island, rubber tile, pastel enamels, warm wood paneling in the Hollywood product on both Big Screen and home tube, so there she was on the set, and she had to say the lines, but after you said the lines enough times All of a sudden you’d get interrupted by something a little more direct than a commercial message from your sponsor. But it didn’t count too much because it was as unreal sort of as a giant hand coming up out of the suds, or a washer going up like an elevator, or a nut riding a horse through the back yard and turning everything radiant white.

The instant Darling Boy came trotting into view I started ahead so that he could be certain he had glimpsed my arrival. Chunky redhead with a freckly, good-natured, clenched-fist face, carrying cheerfully wrapped bakery items in his big blue aluminum home-delivery basket. He gave me a glance, a happy morning nod and grin, and swung aboard his service van and rolled on out, a thousand loud guitars fading down the road, but still playing faintly inside the house.

The incident had decided me in favor of the front door. Storm door, then a big white front door with a narrow insert of vertical glass. Brass knocker shaped like the American eagle. Brass and pearl bell button which, when pushed, set off the biggest and most complicated chime set in the Sears catalogue. When it had played through to its finish, faintly heard through the doors, I felt like applauding. I waited and then thumbed them into encore, and when the presentation number was half over I saw her coming toward the door, patting her hair, hitching at her clothes, giving that sucked-in bite that goes with fresh lipstick.

She opened the door inward, pushed the storm door open six inches and with a cheery smile, said, “You want Harry, he had to go up to Moline again early, but he ought to be home by supper.”

She was weathering the downslope of the thirties very nicely, a small sturdy woman with a wide face, pretty eyes, network of grin wrinkles, mop of curly dark hair with a first touch of white ones over her ears. Fuzzy pink sweater, denim ranch pants in stretch fabric. White moccasins, white sox. A shapely and durable figure, breasts rather small and abrupt under the pink fuzz.

“You’re Mrs. Shottlehauster?”

“Yes, but honest to Betsy, if you’re selling something I just haven’t got the time, and you can believe it.”

“I’m not selling anything, and you can believe it. I’m trying to get a credit report on some people named Farley on Depue Road, and I’m not having much luck. I found out their kids know your kids. I don’t want to bother you, but if you could spare just a minute or two to answer some questions…”

“Heck, I can spare time for that. You come right on in, Mr…”

“McGee: Travis McGee, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m Mildred Shottlehauster,” she said, leading me through the entrance hallway into a twolevel living room decorated in too many colors and patterns, and too densely populated with furniture, some of it good, and most of it borax.

“You sit right there and be comfortable,” she said. “We’ve got those four Farley kids staying with us, and I certainly would like to know how long, not that they’re any special problem or anything. I’ve got my six, and once you get up to six I guess it doesn’t make too much difference if you have six or ten. And they’re really good kids. They’re almost too meek and quiet and polite. They make mine seem like wild Indians or something. Mine are sixteen, fourteen, twelve, eleven, eight and seven so… ”

“I’d never believe it, Mrs. S.”

“Well thank you, kind sir, she said. Anyhoo, the Farley children seem to fit right in and actually there’s less fighting and squabbling when they’re here. Harry and I. are just doing the neighborly thing. Monday night it was, just on toward dark, you remember how raw and nasty it was, Mr. Farley came to the door and wouldn’t come in. He hemmed and hawed and said that his wife had to go to Chicago, and Susan, the oldest-a perfectly darling girl she’d gone off to join her mother and he suddenly found out he had to go on a business trip for a few days and he didn’t want to leave the other four alone and could we give them bed and board for a few days. He said he could pay for it. Well, we forgave him for offering money for a neighborly deed because… well, that family is right off the city streets and they can’t be expected to know how we do things here in the country. When we said he certainly could bring them over, he said they were out in the truck, and so they were, chilled to the very bone. They came shivering in with their little bags and bundles of clothes and toothbrushes. I must confess I had qualms about my pack getting too friendly with those kids when they first came here. I mean they are sort of underprivileged, and you don’t know what nasty tricks and habits children can pick up in the slums, and pass along, do you? It was last August my Bruce came racing home to tell me some family named Farley had moved into the old Duggins place. It’s been empty three years since old Sam died, and he must have been older than God, and his only kin a sister in Seattle who couldn’t care less, and nobody knew she’d even put it up for rent with that Country Estate Agency over in Princeton, but it’s plain to see it’s the kind of run-down place you could get for practically nothing, not like when you’re nearer the city and they get picked up for vacation houses and so on. But you can believe it, those Farley kids, Freda and Julian and Freddy and Tommy, they’re dandy kids. What did you want to ask me? Oops, I’ve got to go check the pies. I got stuck again. Four cherry pies for the Mission Aid supper and my dang oven thermostat is screwjee. Would you like some coffee, Mr. McGee? It’s on the stove. Come on along.”

I followed her out toward the whomping of the music, and she twisted the dial down to background size with a single expert tweak as she went by the radio. “I caught the coffee thing from Harry,” she said. “He was in the Navy, so it’s always on the fire, grind our own beans, never let it begin to bubble, like some people are about wine, I guess.” And as she spoke she deftly assembled tall white cup and saucer, poured it steaming rich, slid it into position at the end of the center island which was a breakfast bar, put sugar and cream within reach. She went over and stood at her eye-level wall oven, all copper and chrome, and peered in through the glass front at her pies.

“The only way I’m going to be able to tell is from the color of the crust. Lousy thermostat. Hey, want a cinnamon pecan roll? The bakery just delivered fresh, and they’re the special this week.”

She poured coffee for herself, got out the butter and the rolls, and sat around the corner of the bar end of the island at my left.

“Marvelous coffee, Mrs. Shottlehauster.”

“Specialty of the house, thank you kind sir,” she said. “What is it the Farleys want to buy?”

“I don’t know. We’re a service organization and we work for a lot of different client companies. The point is are they a good credit risk up to such and such an amount.”

She munched slowly, frowning. The pad of muscle at the corner of her jaw bulged with each bite. There was a flake of cooked sugar on her narrow underlip and, her tongue slipped cleverly out and hooked it in. “I like to try to be fair to everybody. So I just couldn’t say. It just depends on how much they can put into the spring planting, if they know what to plant, if they know how to go about getting help from the county agent and the state, if they’re all willing to work like Arabian slaves… I just don’t know, honestly. Mr. Farley is well-spoken. You can tell he’s had some advantages. I tried to be neighborly, and so did a couple of other women, but we spread the word that nobody else need waste their time. I stopped there last September and didn’t even get invited in. They just stared at me, and I had the idea they were laughing at me somehow. You know? She’s a big heavy woman, coarse-looking, and I don’t want to hurt their chances, but she smelled like a brewery, and it was a hot day and she wasn’t… properly covered up. I guess that kind of thing doesn’t mean much on a credit report.”

“It’s very helpful, really.”

“I’ve been noticing what a wonderful tan you’ve got, Mr. McGee.”

“I just got transferred up here from the Southwest. We get moved around a lot.”

“I guess you must think I’m some kind of a nut; inviting you in and all, and being absolutely all alone here until the bus brings the kids back, but I’ve got a sixth sense about people, and there’s a 16-gauge automatic shotgun standing, in the corner there by the front door and you wouldn’t have gotten a foot over the doorstep if I hadn’t known right off you were perfectly all right, if I hadn’t known I could trust you.”

“I do appreciate that.”

She smiled at me, and her pretty eyes had a slightly glazed look and they seemed to go in and out of focus. Her hand shook as she lifted the coffee cup. As she put it down she took a high quick shallow breath, shuddered, and her tongue hooked at crumbs that weren’t there. Under the brightness of the artificial daylight I saw a little sheen of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. A gentle sweet steam seemed to be rising from her. She hitched her hips on the stool and said in a huskier tone, “Since my littlest one started school and Harry took to being away politicking here and there, these winter days do seem to get awful long for an outgoing-type person like me.”

No trouble diagnosing the problem. She was a little bit scared, and a little bit excited, and she wasn’t accustomed to making a pass at a total stranger and she didn’t know exactly how to go about it, but Bread Boy had not taken the edge off her and the only thing she could think of was how, without a total loss of all pride and dignity, she could hop back onto that counter top, sans moccasins, stretch jeans, and plain, practical briefs, and get rid of that aching weight, that burden teetering on the brink. She shivered again and gave a high tense artificial laugh and said, “Somebody keeps walking across my grave, I guess.”

I looked at my watch and said, getting up quickly, “Holy Maloney, Mrs. Shottlehauster, this has been so pleasant I lost track of the time. I certainly do appreciate your kindness.”

“Don’t you have time for just one more cup of coffee?”

“I wish I did.”

As I drove away from the impressive farm, I tried to tell myself I was a very decent and restrained chap, quite above the shoddy device of rationalizing it as an act of mercy. But I knew I was lying to myself. I knew from a little sense of heaviness in my loins that had I not had that startled moment of peeping tomism, I might possibly have succumbed to the environment, realizing for the first time the grotesque eroticism of a kitchen deed, amid rich good smells of coffee and pies baking and country woman, as if desire had a curious link with the homely processes of hearty food. A brisk and staunch and amiable little woman, fruitful as the land, her needs earnest and simplified and swiftly and with abundant energy gratified, without residual obligation or accusation. Trot off and set herself to rights and come back with the grace to blush a little, then pay off with a pat, a sisterly kiss, more good coffee and another thickly buttered cinnamon pecan roll.

So it had not been restraint after all, not a moral hesitation. It had been just my supercilious sense of my own dignity. McGee could not take over the morning chore where Darling Bread Boy had left off. Fastidiousness. A stuffy sense of social stratum, and of course no chance to exercise that jackassy masculine conviction that the lady would not have yielded to anyone less charming and persuasive. Every day, no matter how you fight it, you learn a little more about yourself, and all most of it does is teach humility.

I knew something about her too. In any other part of the house it would be a horrified No. What do you think I am? The rest of the house gave her the sense of her value, wife of Harry, mother of six, doer of good deeds. The kitchen was her domain. There any little clinging web of guilt could be swiftly scrubbed away, like a thousand other things spilled and broken. Kitchens took care of simple hungers. Stir, mix, bake, and serve, then clean up the litter, polish, and scrub, and it is bright and new again-as if you hadn’t cooked a thiog.

I turned the nose of the car into the third of a mile of muddy ruts that led to the Farley farm. I stopped and stared at the road. I patted the slash pocket of the topcoat, feeling the little lump of the Airweight Bodyguard. Six rounds of 158 grain.38 Special. I traveled with it wrapped in a washcloth and tucked into a slightly oversized soap dish. This will not delude professionals. It escapes casual snoopers.

I fed the gas evenly and fought the eagerness of the back end to swing itself into the ditch on either side. Mud slapped up into the fender wells, but I kept the momentum all the way up the gradual slope, speedometer saying thirty and thirty-five, car going about eight or ten. Once over the slight rise the speed began to catch up with the reading, and

I eased off and ran on into the dooryard and found a slightly less soggy place to swing around and aim it back out before stopping. I got out and with the motor dead the wet landscape had a silence like being inside a huge gray drum. The air tasted thick. I could hear the hum of my blood in my ears. There was no smoke at the chimney, no face at the window. An old pickup truck stood beside the house. Road salts had rusted fist-sized holes in it.

I squelched my way to the front stoop, stepped up, knocked on the door and said, loudly, “Mr. Faaaaarley! Oh Mr. Faaaaaaaarley!”

Cheery and jolly. Mr. Faaaarley, your kindly insurance agent has come to call, heigh ho. Nothing.

And so I went around the side of the house prepared to see the empty shed where the salvaged Cadillac had been hidden. I got into mud that grabbed and held. Ruined the shoes. Added ten pounds to each foot and made me walk like a cautious comedy drunk doing the chalk-line bit, and made me sound like a hippo in a swamp. A shed was open. Boards had been ripped away, the door pulled back, hanging at an odd angle from one hinge. It revealed the pale luxury sedan, a front view, the hood up and the doors open.

“Oh, Mr. Faaaaarley! Yooo hoooo!”

My voice seemed to wedge itself into the heavy air, then fall into the mud. I got to the shed and stepped inside, stamped my feet, and had considerable cause for thought. Tools lay about. Somebody had undone, with very little finesse, most of Saul Gorba’s work. Interior door panels levered off with pry bars. All the seats ripped loose, dumped out, slashed open. Overhead fabric slashed open and pulled down. The trunk was open. The front end of the car rested on the hubs and the back end was jacked up. All the wheels and the spare lay around, tires deflated, pulled halfway off the rims: The big air filter lay in parts nearby. There was a ripe stink of gasoline. The gas tank had been hacksawed open.

The car was a dead animal. Somebody had opened it up to see what it had been feeding on. There was a sadness about the scene. I could see that Gorba had been working on the car prior to its demolition. He had a set of body and fender tools. He had quart cans of enamel (Desert Dawn Beige), and baking lamps. He had two cans of that plastic guck they use these days to fill the dents. It is cheaper and quicker than beating them out with a rubber mallet and leading the rips and grinding the job to smoothness with a power wheel before sanding and painting. He had packs of sandpaper to smooth the goop down after it hardened.

He had been making it very pretty. There was some masking tape on the back window yet. Everything in the shed had been given the same complete attention as the car. I squelched my way to the house and peered through the windows. Everything I could see had been pried open, broken open, ripped open, and spilled widely. The kitchen was left the way the Three Stooges leave kitchens.

Total silence.

I tried the only other outbuilding with an entire roof on it. The door was open an inch. I pulled it open the rest of the way, using my fingertips on the wooden edge of it, avoiding the metal handle. That kind of silence and that kind of total and ruthless search can teach you a spot of caution.

The door, squeaked as it opened. There was a gray and dusty daylight in his little work chamber. And an elusive stink.

He sat on a chair placed against the wall, erect as an obedient child. Hands high, the backs of the hands against the wall. Head up. Can that be you, Mr. Faaarley? How straight you sit! But of course, sir! That leather belt around your chest has been nailed to the studding on either side. And your ankles are wired to the chair legs. And that other band of leather around your forehead has been nailed to the old wood too, with the same kind of galvanized roofing nails, one over each ear, the same ones they drove through your wrists and palms before all the unpleasantness. My goodness, they dropped the cold chisel among your poor teeth, sir. And ripped away your pants for further intimate attentions which have left that faint stink of burning on the silent air. And there is just an ugly crusted paste in one eye socket, poor Mr. Faaaarley, but the other one is whole, a-bulge, and I saw an eye like that when I was very small, and crept on my belly to the edge of the lily pond intending to entice the granddaddy bullfrog to bite on the scrap of red flannel concealing the trout hook.

From the nightly ga-runk, I thought he would be gigantic, and he was, but I was not prepared to part the last curtain of the pond-side grass and find him not eight inches from my face:

And, Mr. Farley, then as now, I stared with awe into one froggy yellow eye. It was not the yellowpredator eye of the great blue heron or the osprey, or the intractable black panther. Its fierceness was not as aimed, not as immediate. Like yours it was a golden eye, and like yours it was a bland and dif fuse venom, a final saurian indifference from across the fifty thousand centuries of the days of the great lizards.

One fearful yellow eye. A terrible hatred, so remote and so knowing and so all encompassing that it translates to mildness, to indifference.

Oh, they used you badly Farley Saul Gorba.

I found myself leaning against the outside of the shed, breathing deeply, my face sweaty in the fiftydegree day, and with an acid taste of coffee in the back of my throat.

I made myself go back in. I made myself touch him. Death had stiffened his body. I could find no wound that could have caused death. But enough pain can burst the heart or blow the wall out of a blood vessel in the brain. And he had been in the hands of someone who enjoyed that line of work. “Did you tell?” I asked him.

What do you think? said the stare of the froggy eye.

It was a good thing he was stiff, perhaps twelve or more hours dead. But I still had the problem of foot tracks, tire tracks, the motel registration, plenty of soil on shoes and car for analysis, testimony by the brawny bus-girl and the itchy farm wife.

I plodded to my car, only then noticing that the farm truck had been given its share of the attention too.

I put my hand on the door handle and wondered what it was in the back of my mind that was trying to claw its way out. Something did not make any sense: I had seen some contradiction and I did not know what it was. I moved along the car and, in irritation, thumped a body panel with my fist and felt the metal skin give and spring back…

The thought got through and it brought me up onto my muddy toes like a bird dog. The body and fender tools and the loving care expended on that Cadillac did not jibe with the use of that plastic goop. And somebody must have had some feeling the money was in the car somewhere. I went back to the car in a muddy noisy lope. I saw canvas work gloves on a nail and put them on. I picked a big screwdriver off the floor and with the metal end played a tune along the curve of a front fender. Pang pang pang pank pock tunk. Grab a rubber mallet. Dig the screwdriver end in. Whack. The hardened goop chipped away. It flew out in large chunks. It exposed, barely visible through heavy pliofilm, an oval etching of General Grant. The packet was almost an inch thick.

Pang pang pang pank pock tunk. I got better at it. I put the packets aside. I whistled between my teeth. Lordy me o my I said. Treasure hunt. Here’s another. And another.

Admirable idea. Take the rubber mallet, put a careful ding in the tailored metal wide, long, and deep enough to fit the pliofilmed money-package into it. Pack in the plastic glop and let it harden to hold the money in place. Then sand off the roughness of that first shaping of it to the curve -of the metal, paint, and bake.

Gorba had the brains and I had the luck. I worked as hard and fast as I could, dug out eleven packets, couldn’t find another place on the body that went tunk instead of pang. I’d had the luck to watch the process one day while roaming around a repair garage, and then to tell the manager what a cheap-ass system it was. He had the kindliness and patience to tell me some of the facts of life. Costs were going up so fast anything more than a gentle nudge would total a car. So be glad there was a new system that would keep the insurance cost from going out of sight a little while longer. If I wanted to complain about something, he said, I should complain about the shyster operators who’d buy one for dimes that had been in a head-on, then scour around for the same year and model that had been crunched hard enough in the rear end to be a total, saw both in half, weld the two good halves together, repaint and sell it a long way from home plate. The plastic just didn’t fit the personality of a painstaking man very good with his hands.

I whacked the crumbs of hardened goo off the packets, stowed them in my pockets, ran to the car, carved the mud off my shoes with a sodden piece of wood, and made as good time as I dared driving over to Peru, a small city of about 9000. I put the car in a big gas station in town, told the man to fill it and see if he could hose the worst of the mud off. I bought myself a pair of shoes and, in the dime store, some wrapping paper, twine, tape, and mailing labels. I parked on a quiet street, put on the new shoes, dropped the muddy ones onto the floor in back, packed the money and the gun into the shoe box, wrapped it neatly and solidly, filled out the label, drove to the post office, and mailed it to myself at the Drake. Parcel post. Fifty dollars’ insurance. Special handling.

I was hurrying through the things I knew I ought to do because I couldn’t find any good handle on the main problem.

The main problem was all too vivid. Country areas have their own kind of radar, and it is as old as man, old as the first villages after he got tired of being a roaming hunter and sleeping in a different tree every night. Once Gorba’s mistreated corpse was found, Mildred Shottlehauster would leap into the act, grabbing her little moment of importance, and she would call the sheriff, maybe calling him Ted or Al or Freddy or Hank darling, and tell him about this great tall suntanned pale-eyed fellow driving a such and such, calling himself McGee and talking about a credit investigation and finding out there was nobody at the farm, but maybe he went up there and somebody was there, huh? And when this got around, Brawn-Baby, the gauntleted girl bus driver with the shoulders, would connect and come up with something else, and the ripples in that little pond would finally lap at the doorstep of my Georgian motel where Hank darling would get the license number off the registration.

There was some merit in stopping it dead right at the source, right in Milly’s kitchen before she started to make waves. I could hustle back there and make it before lunch, and play it cool, and tell her she’d been so helpful I thought I’d tell her I’d had to turn down the Farley family, and even though she had very probably been slowly turned off by the passage of time, with just a little firmness and insistence she would come back with a rush, and I could finish what Bread Boy had left undone, and later save her face with some sincere and solemn hoke about a sudden attraction so strong we really couldn’t help ourselves. And then when she all of a sudden had an overwhelming urge to call Sheriff Darling Dear, doubtless a political buddy of her husband,, she would yank her little competent hands back from that phone as if verily it were a snake. They could bring McGee back and he could answer the right question in the wrong way, and the earth would open and the Shottlehausters’ farm and hopes would slide slowly in.

Could do. Even had she known Bread Boy for years, the very basic rationalization was the same, the first hurdle overcome.

Listen, guys, let me tell you about the time I was up in Illinois and there was this little farm wife, six kids, and I’m telling you, I set her onto a counter top and she was as hot as a…

Not today, fellows. Not to save the McGee skin. Had I taken the opening being so tentatively and warily offered when I had been with her before, it would have left a tired taste in the mouth and bad air in the lungs and a sorry little picture in the back of the mind. But this was too cold-blooded to be even thinkable.

So, okay, stop off and see Mildred and tell her that I’d gone to the farm and Farley was dead in a very ugly way, and I didn’t want to be brought into it, and if I was I’d have to account for all my, time in the area, and I’d spent some of that time looking in her kitchen window and reading the legends and persuasions on the Darling truck. Sure. Rub her nose in it. Grind her right into the dirt: She who play kitchen game pay big price sooner or later, hey?

Think a little, you big stupid beach bum!

I finally got the rusty gears working upstairs, popped thumb and finger, and hightailed it for the Shottlehauster farm, rehearsing my end of the dialogue en route.

She was surprised to see me. I exuded total con fidence. Something had come up. I needed her help. I’d lied about the credit investigation. Sorry.

Have to do that kind of thing sometimes. Line of duty. I sidestepped her questions, borrowed her phone, and made a collect call to Heidi and, with Mildred at my elbow, I asked Heidi to put Susan on.

“Susan? McGee here. The kids have been staying with the Shottlehauster family since Monday evening. They’re okay, and they’re in school right now. But I think I’d better bring them back to Chicago. I just stopped at the farm. He’s there all right. And somebody has killed him. Very unpleasantly.”

At my elbow I heard Mildred give a gassy squeak. “Susan?” I said. “Are you all right?”

“I… I’m trying to be sorry about him. But I can’t.”

“Now would you do me a favor? Please talk to Mrs. Shottlehauster and ask her to help me get the kids out of the school here. This can be a very ugly thing and they ought to be well out of range. Don’t tell her anything about me except she can trust me. Okay?”

I handed Mildred the phone. She stammered and said, “It’s a t-terrible thing, dear. I’m so sorry.” She listened for a little while and then she said, “Of course, Susan dear. You can depend on me. I’ll pack their things and Mr. McGee can bring them along.”

After she hung up I ordered her to sit down in her own living room. She was big-eyed and solemn. She said she knew who to call in the school system. She said she was a past president of the PTA.

“Here is what I want you to do. I know you have no training in this sort of thing, but you seem very understanding and intelligent. Here is your story. Susan called you from Chicago. She said a friend would stop by about noon to pick up the things her brothers and sister brought over here, and then go to the school and get them, and would you please arrange it, tell the school it is an emergency. Then she began to cry. You thought Mrs. Farley might be very ill. Mr. Farley had told you both of them were in Chicago. So you asked about Mrs. Farley. Susan then told you that her mother has been missing for three weeks and she thinks something terrible happened to her. So you did as the girl asked. A man came by and picked up the children’s things. Just a man. He didn’t give a name. But you knew he was all right because of having talked to Susan. Now, do you have a car here that you can use to get up that muddy road at the farm?”

“Harry’s old Land Rover will go through anything.”

“Do you mind seeing something pretty horrible?”

“I’m not a sissy, Mr. McGee.”

“Back to your story. You will go to the farm because you thought Farley acted peculiarly Monday night. You wonder if he is there or Mrs. Farley is there. And you are a little uneasy about having made the arrangements on the word of a seventeen-yearold girl without consulting the parents. You’ll find him in the first shed beyond the foundations where the barn was. I think he’s been dead since sometime yesterday, but that’s just a guess. You will notice that the whole place is ransacked. So you will go to a phone and report it.”

She nodded. “To the sheriff. Jimmy Tait. He’s an old friend.”

“Good. Now then, by the time he gets around to questioning you, I’ll be well on my way to Chicago with the kids. You don’t know where Susan phoned you from. Suddenly you will remember running into Mrs. Farley a month ago. Think of a logical place. She was tight. She seemed very upset. She talked strangely. It didn’t make any sense to you. Something about the Outfit, and something about her husband thinking she was going to fink out, and something about pushers.”

Solemn as a library child she said, “Outfit. Fink out. Pushers.”

“And then she said something about old farms having their own graveyards and laughed in a crazy way.”

“But why do you want me to say all that?”

“Mrs. Shottlehauster. Mildred. If you were trained in this work you could go ahead without question. But I am going to take the chance of telling you what we think. Believe me, it will cause me serious trouble if you tell anyone this. Your husband, anyone at all. We believe Farley is a known criminal. We have no LD. yet. Last Sunday Farley made advances to Susan.”

“His own daughter!” Scandal made her eyes sparkle.

“Only the smallest one is his.”

“Tommy?”

“Yes. When she resisted him, he beat her badly. She didn’t let the other kids see her condition. She took a bus to Chicago Monday evening. She came to us and told us she believed Farley had killed her stepmother three weeks ago and buried her somewhere on the farm. She said Farley was hiding out there, and she had no idea why. I was sent to look things over. You know the rest.”

“It’s so terrible. Those nice kids!”

I looked at her with a firm official frown. “When you know things other people don’t, Mildred, it’s a terrible temptation to tell so that you can feel important. I trust you to resist that impulse. Your only reward will be the knowledge you lived up to your obligation as a good citizen. That will be in our files, but we can’t thank you in any public way.”

“Pusher means about drugs, doesn’t it?”

“Please don’t ask me any more questions because I’ve already told you more than I’m authorized to tell.”

She glowed with her new responsibility. Her little jaw firmed up with resolve. She would hug her secret closely, cherishing the knowledge she was in our files. In my flush of success with her, I had the eerie temptation to tell her I was the man from A.U.N.T. Association Uncovering the Narcotics Traffic. But there is a limit to what you can make them buy.

She jumped to her feet. “I’ll phone the school and then I’ll pack their things, sir.”

“Forgive me for lying to you the last time I was here?”

“Oh yes! You’ve got a job to do.”

TWELVE

FIVE DAYS later, on Monday morning a little after ten, I sat in John Andrus’ office at the bank. A quiet paneled room. We were alone. The door was closed. He had told his girl to hold his calls. He was troubled. He frowned, sighed, shook his head.

“It’s a very awkward situation,” he said for the third time.

“It doesn’t have to be. Just keep it clear in your mind what we keep on the record and what we keep off the record.”

“As a trust officer I have certain…”

“I know, John. Fiduciary responsibilities. I gave you every last dollar I chipped out of that damned car.

“One hundred and seventy-eight thousand, six hundred and fifty dollars. How am I supposed to account for it? How did I get it? Where’s the other four hundred and twenty thousand?”

“You worry too much. Let’s take it one at a time. I told you Janice Stanyard will lie beautifully if she has to. Geis gave her a package to hold for him. She forgot about it. She found it the other day on her closet shelf, opened it, found all the money, contacted Heidi at once, and Heidi said to bring it to you.”

‘Fine,“ he said wearily. ”Wonderful.“

“And when the estate is appraised next October, if the tax boys get sticky about it, you call that number I gave you, and you will get three characters who’ll swear that for over a year the Doctor was going over to Gary once or twice a month and playing high-stakes poker in a fast game and losing very very heavily. That is, if we don’t turn up the rest of the money somehow in the meantime. Which doesn’t look likely. Those three will give you an expert performance, and nobody will break them down.”

Staring at me he shook his head in mild wonder. “Where did you develop contacts like that, damn it? How can you so blandly and so confidently come up with people perfectly willing to perjure themselves about something that doesn’t concern them at all?”

“I did a favor for a local operator once. He’s the type who stays grateful. Maybe local is the wrong word. This is home base. He operates in a lot of areas. John, if nobody comes up with any more of Fort’s money, how does the estate thing stand?”

He hesitated and then said, “Rough estimate. Seventy-five for Gloria and half that for each kid, Heidi and Roger.”

“Nice if I could have picked up the whole thing out there. Or if they had found anything when they took the place apart, inch by inch. Of course it would have been a rough go proving it was Fort’s money if they’d found the rest of it, but you could have swung it.”

“Vote of confidence. Hahl”

“John, there’s just too many possibilities. He took a lot of little trips. So he was stashing it elsewhere. Or whoever came after him, maybe because he talked just a little bit too much about making a nice score, found everything except what I found. I think it’s over. They identified him as Saul Gorba. They know he had an aneurysm that blew under the high blood. pressure pain gives you. They assume that whoever worked on him left with what they’d come for. It is obvious Gorba was hiding out. And it is a safe assumption he strangled Gretchen and buried her five feet under, suitcase and all. And they know the kids don’t know anything about anything. Murder first, felony murder, by person or persons unknown. We got a little back. We pick up the pieces, the world goes on.”

“Wonder why he killed Gretchen?”

“Maybe because she kept wondering where the money was coming from, and even though she wasn’t too bright, she had been given enough twos to add to twos over a long time, and when the answer began to show, she didn’t like it. She was an amiable earthy slob, but she wasn’t crooked. And putting leverage on a dying man is pretty ugly. Or maybe he just decided the daughter looked a lot better. We’ll never know”

“One comment, Trav. It really surprised me to have Heidi pick up the tab for that double funeral.” And one of the eeriest ones I had attended. Saturday afternoon. Two boxes. One floral piece on each one. Select little group. The five towheads. Gretch must have had muscular genes. The kids all looked alike. Fair, blue-eyed, round-faced, sturdy. Seeing them together it was an astonishment that Susan had been able to sustain her personal myth of a different parentage. In dark glasses, dark hat and veil, Susan’s damages were obscured. So it was the kids and Janice and Heidi and John Andrus and Anna Ottlo and me, and a sonorous voice reading a standard service, and a tired woman diddling with the keys on a small electric organ. Anna whuffawed and snuffled and grunted her anguish. Some tears were shed for Saul Gorba, the tears of Tommy, his natural child. Most of his were for Gretchen, but he had some for Saul. There had been a relationship between them not shared by the others.

“Maybe Heidi Trumbill is mellowing. John, thanks for getting the law boys onto it and getting that money turned loose for Susan.”

“She should get it by tomorrow.”

“And thanks for getting the court order set up to have the kids stay with Janice.”

“On this money, Trav, I have to escrow it until the estate appraisal is firm next October, but Gloria can borrow against it right here if she needs to. She ought to know that.”

“When I see her this afternoon I’ll see if I can get it through to her.”

In a lounge at the hospital, in a low voice Dr. Hayes Wyatt explained it in layman’s terms. “Think of the senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste as being receptors, Mr. McGee. They have no analytical function. Think of a bundle of wires running from each receptor to the part of the brain which acts as a computer. The psychedelics are disassociative in that they loosen these customary connections between receptors and the analysis function. Messages become false and the analysis unreal. Hallucination. As the period of disassociation ends the connections grow tight again and the subject comes back into his familiar ‘ reality. The massive overdose she took tore all the wiring loose. It has to be fitted back slowly and carefully. To continue the analogy you can say the wiring is hanging free and it is in approximately the right areas, so it touches and brushes the proper connection quite often. But there is a continual hallucination which of course creates terror, so it is best to keep her mildly tranquilized. There are motor defects. She will say a nonsense word when she means to say something quite different. This alarms her too. I think there is a certain amount of progress. I don’t know how long it will continue, or if she will ever get all of the way back.”

“Why did she do it?”

“She remembers wanting to take some. She can’t remember the actual act. Possibly she is a semiaddictive, and even though LSD-25 is not physiologically habit-forming, the addictive personality has a tendency to overdose himself with any escape drug when depressed. She would be dead, of course, if you hadn’t found her when you did. Even then it was terribly close. Try to be perfectly natural with her. Cheerful. Confident. Ignore anything she says or does which seems out of line.”

So I saw her, and her smile came and went too quickly and her eyes were strange. She called me Trav and she called me Howie, and she got scared of something on the bed I couldn’t see. She dug her nails into my wrist and told me in a weak voice, “The cliffs are crooked near the edge. They wouldn’t be that way home. They don’t stop them here. They don’t care.”

I smiled my cheery way out and stopped a little way down the corridor and leaned against the wall, feeling more years than I had, more sourness than I was due.

I hunted up Hayes Wyatt and said, “So wouldn’t she be able to hook those wires up faster where she knew what the hell she was looking at, where she knew the smells and the way things feel, and the sounds?”

“Home? Yes, of course, that would be useful, I think. But I understand that as a practical matter she can’t afford the care she’d need there, much less maintain the house, so I haven’t…”

“But you’d approve it?”

“Certainly, but not right away. A week from now perhaps, with a guarantee she’d be taken…”

So I hauled Janice Stanyard and Susan down to John Andrus’ office. I gave my pitch. “The house is up for sale. Glory’s personal stuff is in storage. Anna Ottlo has gone to Florida. Okay. The court recommended to Mrs. Stanyard here that she find a bigger place. Susan here has the annuity income. Gloria has the insurance income, and she can borrow against the seventy-five she’s got coming if she has to. And Mrs. Stanyard has certain… resources. Financial. Aside from being a trained nurse.”

“Which I insist be used for Susan and the others,” Janice said with great firmness and dignity.

“And,” I continued, “Dr. Hayes Wyatt says that Gloria’s chances are going to be a lot better in familiar surroundings. The house is big enough. It’s a fine house, a fine location. So it makes a crazy menage any way you look at it, but what I say is that Janice and Susan and Glory dump everything into the pot and dig in there, and everything has a lot better chance of working out all the way around.”

So Susan scowled and scowled and then slowly lit up. The last stains of brutality were almost faded away. “Hey!” she said softly. “Hey now!”

And Janice said, “It just might…”

And John said, “I could see my way clear…”

Hayes Wyatt fudged the estimate of time by one day so we could bring her home in the early afternoon on Christmas Day. Heidi and Janice and I and the kids had trimmed the tree the night before. And on the previous day, on Friday the 23rd, I had lost my wits, my judgment, and my self-control in Carson, Pirie, Scott.

She sat in a big chair, blanketed and feet up, and smiled and smiled and smiled, and had some bad times but not as many as we had been told to ex_pect. John Andrus and wife stopped by gift bearing. So did Hayes Wyatt and wife. So, to my surprise, did Roger and Jeanie Geis and their kids. But Heidi told me on the side that she had gone and roughed brother up pretty good. He didn’t like it, but he was there. He endured it. He wore a little obligatory smile.

Janice and Susan and Freddy, the oldest boy, had done a great job of settling them all in.

And so, all turkeyed up and tuckered out, I took the thoughtful snow maiden back to her shelter at 180 East Burton Place, and when she tried to end the evening with a friendly social handshake, I dug her private and special gift out of the car trunk and said that he who bears gifts gets a nightcap. And then she looked even more thoughtful and said she had a gift for me, so I should come on up, but give her a minute or two to wrap it.