The Quick Red Fox

“I hope they find them some day.”

“Don’t we all. Thanks, Miss Trotter.”

I started out of the phone booth, and then went back in and tried the number she gave me. It rang three times. A woman answered. “Is Georgie around?” I asked.

“You’ve the wrong number, I expect,” she said. I thanked her and hung up. I walked thoughtfully back to the room. I knew that accent. It sounds cockney but isn’t. It is Australian.

Dana had just finished talking to Lysa Dean. Miss Dean reported success with the promotion and a good audience response to Winds of Chance on premiere night. She was off soon, with group, to New York for additional promo work, panel shows and so on, four days there and then to Chicago.

I reported what I had learned, and added what I could guess. Dana looked more intrigued than shocked. “Killed, eh?”

“So it would seem.”

“He was in a dangerous line of work.”

“The quickest way is to give that sister a try.”

“Can I come with you?”

“I might strike out. I’ll try it alone. Then you can try from another angle.”

Appleton Way was dead end. Truck terminals were edging closer to it. Nearby blocks were being levelled for some unimaginable improvement. But the street still had an illusion of peace. It contained multiple housing, old garden courts of pseudo-Moorish styling, faded citrus-tone paint on old stucco. 2829 was one of the larger complexes, and her door was off an arched open corridor along the side. A dark door opening into the gloom of a small apartment with too few windows. She looked at me through the six-inch gap the safety chain allowed, and I saw that she was perhaps daughter rather than sister.

“What do you want?”

You have to have a flair for it, an immediate and unthinking appraisal of the vulnerabilities. This one was wary and haughty. I could see that she was a big pale girl, Alice through a strange looking-glass. A twenty-year-old spinster. There are such. A big awkward fatty body in an unlovely jumper. A child face. Reddened nostrils. Pale heavy lips.

“I want to be sure you are Jocelyn Ives. Is there anything you could show me to prove it?” I kept my voice confidential.

“Why should I bother?”

“You do have the same accent.”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I was associated with him in a certain venture quite a long time ago. I came here to make contact, and I just found out he’s dead.”

She gnawed her lip and then, to my utter astonishment, gave me a huge conspiratorial wink. She closed the door, unlatched the chain and opened it wide. “Please come in,” she said heartily. When she had closed the door behind us, she said, “I do understand why you can’t give me your name.”

“Uh… that’s good.”

“Back through here. The place is a mess. I’m off work today.” I followed her along the murky hallway into a small living room. It was crowded with furniture too large and too expensive for the small apartment. Every surface was covered with large photographic prints, and scores of them were on the floor and leaning against the furniture and the walls. Many of them were matted. With clumsy awkward haste she cleared two chairs. “Do sit down. I’ve been sorting out. Lens Lab… that’s a local hobby group… they want to put on a show of his best work. At the library. There are so many. I get quite confused.”

“I can see how you would. It looks like fine work.”

“Oh yes! That’s my responsibility now, to see that everyone learns how good Father was. I am going to set up a traveling show also. And there is some interest in Rochester, of course.”

“Of course.”

She sat facing me and knotted her hands to gether and said, “I have been so hoping that somebody would show up. It’s been so terribly difficult for me.”

“I suppose it has.”

“Poor Mr. Mendez has been doing his best to get everything straightened out for tax purposes. But having quite a large amount of cash turn up has sort of complicated things. And, of course, I couldn’t explain the cash. Not to him. If it was supposed to be for necessary expenses, I’m sorry. It’s all tied up now with courts and tax people and things. I will get it eventually, I imagine, or whatever part of it they don’t take. At least the house can be sold. You know, I have been hoping someone would show up. And you look almost exactly like the kind of man I pictured.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I kept my mouth shut, as Father would have wished. And I guess I do not really have to have any posthumous glory for him. He said that was the thing none of you could ever expect. He taught me to be very careful and discreet about… the contacts, and not to ask him questions. I have been wondering if you could go to Mr. Mendez and explain to him the sort of work Father was doing for you. I think it might make the estate work easier.”

“I’m sorry. I have no authority to do that.”

“I was afraid so,” she said. “Oh dear. And the ridiculous police will have to go right on thinking it was just someone after his pocket money?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She studied me. “Really, how do I know you are what I think you are?”

“We don’t carry that sort of identification.”

“I suppose not. It wouldn’t be very safe, I expect.” She looked uneasy. “But why wouldn’t you have known he was dead?”

“I’ve been out of touch.”

I now had the shape of it all. There was something unwholesome about her, a greasy sheen to her flesh, a soiled smell in the dark little apartment. But she was his loved daughter. Blackmail needed a cover story. Perhaps it had been her guess at first, that Father was in some sort of patriotic undercover work, and when she faced him with it, it was easiest to go along. And, of course, the Enemy had slain him.

I had to find the right way to open her up. I leaned toward her and said, “Jocelyn, I think I can promise you that some day it can all be told.”

Tear tracks like the sidewalk marks of snails gleamed on the round pale cheeks, and she made a froggy sobbing sound…

Ten

I LIKED the way Dana listened. She felt no compulsion to fill a silence with questions. She knew there was more to come. I could not see her distinctly. She sat over by the motel windows in darkness. The light was at my elbow, gleaming on the silver cup.

“Ives liked to live well,” I said. “He did freelance photography in Melbourne. Fashion, news breaks, everything. A Hollywood outfit made a movie over there. He got permission to work on the set. His stills were apparently damned good. The stars liked them. The studio brought him over. That was eight years ago. She was twelve. He had about four years of it, and did pretty well. And lived well. Then something went wrong. I guess he got himself on that little blacklist they have. I don’t imagine it is important to know what cooked him. The girl says it was jealousy. His work was too good. He moved up here to Santa Rosita. His studio was in his home. Weddings, parties, awards, portraits. A nice cover story. She thinks he had some other base in the city. She’s so proud of him. Proud of that cynical son of a bitch with his sports cars and fine house and housekeeper.”

I got up and collected both silver cups and fixed us another.

“She showed me the clippings. He went on a trip. She doesn’t know where. He was gone two days. He came back to the house. He went out again and said he would be back within the hour. That was ten in the evening last December tenth. They found his car, locked, on Verano Street. He was found about a hundred feet away, dragged behind a warehouse, with the top of his skull smashed in, pockets empty, watch gone. They thought he would be dead on arrival, but the heart kept beating for five days. As far as the girl knows, they haven’t a clue. Nobody knows what he was doing in that neighborhood. It’s mostly industrial small time, empty at night.”

After a long silence she said, “Did he leave her anything?”

“Small insurance. The equity in the house. About thirty-eight thousand in cash, already impounded while they check his tax returns. Then a lot of cameras, studio equipment, dark room equipment, huge stacks of arty photographs.”

She asked me if I was certain about Ives. I’d been saving it for her. I told her how I’d wormed it out of the girl. “So his loving daughter was the one who helped him operate that drop and flashed the green light at you to toss the money out.”

Dana shook her head slowly. “And I imagined horrible hoodlums out there… and it was that poor simple girl helping Daddy in his spy business. What a total bastard he must have been, to endanger her so!”

And I thought wistfully how easy it would have been for Lysa Dean to have busted it up in the beginning, before it got off the ground. “Ives could trust his daughter,” I explained. “And he didn’t have to split with her, and she didn’t even know what was in the packages. He used her the same way, with variations, on other projects.”

“Loyal little helper,” Dana said. “Just like me.”

“Let’s go eat.”

She put her sweater on. At the door she stopped me and said, “Trav, you didn’t give her any little suspicion that… all was not what it seemed?”

“When I left, I told her she could be proud of Daddy. She stood tall and the tears dripped off her fat chin.”

She squeezed my arm. In the outside lights, her dark eyes were shiny. “Soft as butter,” she said.

“The arm?”

“Idiot, your darn arm is like a slab of red wood. I just meant I’m glad you left her that much.”

“I wonder how long she’ll keep it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Somebody killed him. If they find him, he might have all the right reasons. I think I might talk to a cop.”

“Why, dear?” she asked earnestly.

“Dear?”

“Oh, shut up! It was just a… reflex.”

“You’ve done it twice today.”

“Why will you talk to a cop?”

“Because they very probably know a little more than Miss Ives thinks they know. And we’re close to the heart of it now, Dana. Where did D. C. Ives’ file copies go?”

My man was Sergeant Starr. Bill Starr. He was a little fellow about forty, very jaunty and bouncy. He was twenty percent nose, and it looked as if that nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction. Under the nose was the abrupt curve of an amiable little smile. He was a clowner, a most happy fellow. He seemed to want you to like him. There was so much nose, there was a danger of misreading the eyes. They were small, cat yellow, and about as soft and mild as cross sections of brass rod.

His tidy little gray office had a rack for cups won in various skills. Several of them were for pistol. He bounced up and perched on the corner of his desk and beamed at me and said, “Why should I play games with anybody, pal? Am I in a buyer’s market? Maybe, for residents. If I want to keep a source going. Sure. But I can park your gray tired ass in the tank and keep you there until you get eager to please.”

I chuckled as merrily as he and said, “This friend I’m doing the favor for would be terribly upset. No influence here at all, of course. Except the kind of lawyers money will buy. Platoons of them, if need be. I have no record, Sergeant. But careless people have put me in from time to time, here and there. And I have been hit on the head by old-fashioned ones. So it would be an inconvenience for both of us. I’m eager to please right now. And eager to have you please me.”

He picked the assorted cards and licenses off his desk and handed them to me. “McGee, there is every identification here except the right one.”

“Cards are needed to do a favor for a friend?”

“I’ll tell you again. If you have official status then maybe you can protect your client. But you have nothing. You have to tell me who hired you!”

“But I told you, Sergeant, that we might get around to that, if things go well. Besides, I’m not hired. It’s just… ”

“Oh God, yes. A favor for a friend.” He reached for his hat. “Let’s try some coffee.” He drew a car from, the pool and we went ten blocks to a drive-in. The pretty waitress knew him by name, and brought us coffee and raised doughnuts.

“I’ll start,” I said. “D. C. Ives. Sometimes a man has to be killed before people get the idea of some kind of hanky-panky.”

“Hanky-panky. Now isn’t that sweet! Put it this way. It isn’t a legal requirement a man should have a checking account, but nearly everybody with forty-thousand-dollar homes does. An estimate of his take on a legit basis would be fifty or sixty a week. Living expenses better than a thousand a month. So he could be living off a big score from way back, or making little scores as he goes along.”

“He was making it as he went along.”

“Thanks a lot. I already figured that.”

“Did you figure how?”

“It’s your turn again, McGee.”

“He had a studio and darkroom in his house, and he also had another setup. I’d guess somewhere near Verano Street. A limited setup. A quality enlarger for 35mm, a setup for making and drying eight by ten prints, no automation for quantity production-almost what you’d expect of an advanced amateur, a one-man operation.”

“To do what?”

“Isn’t it your turn, Sergeant?”

“Okay. He would do there something he wouldn’t want to do home on account of his daughter. When she wasn’t in school, she helped him with the home setup. He did a lot of traveling. Short trips. Assignments, he called them. I say it wasn’t just a standard smut shop. The requirements in that field are too low. And the pay is low. What do you say it was, McGee?”

“Discreet, careful, expert blackmail. Plus maybe some industrial espionage. And maybe just the long shots of people with the wrong people-the executive talking to the competition, the banker with the tout. Long lens stuff, up and down this coast. How would he get the work? Some from legitimate agencies, maybe. Some from the great unwashed. With really juicy negatives, he could wring a lot of money out, if the people were important.”

“And eventually make a slip and get his head smashed in.”

“Probably.”

“McGee, if you are trying to do a favor for a friend by getting hold of prints or negatives, forget it.”

“They’re gone?”

“If he’d been killed immediately, maybe we’d have moved a little faster. We found his hideyhole. A warehouse corner with its own entrance. It was an area check that turned it up. His prints were on everything. Not much file space for prints, but it was stone empty. No negatives. The file had been locked, and it was pried open. The door had been unlocked and relocked with a key. A good lock. There was a tin money box in the back of the file. It was busted open too.”

“What are you holding back, Starr?”

“Me? Me!”

“So all right. My friend is a sick sad girl. She’s at Hope Island on Bastion Key in Florida. Her name is Nancy Abbott. She’s a drunk. She’s been at that retreat for months. Her rich architect daddy is dying, or dead by now, in San Francisco. Ives sneaked some nasty pictures of her a year and a half ago. Now give me the rest.”

“I can check that out. The rest? Okay, I found out beyond any doubt that the break-in wasn’t accomplished until the day after Ives was clobbered. And in Ives’ pocket was a key to his little lab. Ives had an employee. Semi-retarded. Samuel Bogen, age 46. On and off welfare for years. Trouble twenty years ago. Peeping Tom and indecent exposure, and about four ninety-day falls for that. From what I can find out, Ives used him for scut work, paying him a dollar an hour for washing trays, drying prints, that sort of thing. By the time we got a line on him, Bogen had dropped off the face of the earth. He could be just a harmless spook. Or he could have flipped and bashed his boss. We think we traced him onto a Los Angeles bus. We’ve had an alert out on him ever since. Medium height, medium weight, glasses, bad teeth, hair brown turning gray, no special identifying marks or characteristics. No family. Left no lead behind in his furnished room three blocks off Verano Street. There is another thing too that makes me less interested in him. At about the right time, a car left the area at high speed. Bogen apparently never owned a car and doesn’t drive.”

I couldn’t risk pursuing the Bogen matter further. I was afraid the little tiger would check it back and come up with Lysa Dean’s name.

“So who was involved in the Abbott girl’s pictures?” he demanded.

I was ready for that one. “A stock car driver named Sonny Catton. He was killed last year when he hit a wall.”

“Where were the pictures taken?”

“Up around Point Sur someplace, at a private home I think.”

“A year and a half ago, you said? So why the heat to get them back now?”

“She was worried about whether he was using them to blackmail her dying father.”

“How did you track it back to this Ives?”

“Sergeant, that’s a long long story. Let me ask you one. Suppose somebody had some work for Ives. They couldn’t get him. So they called Mendez, of Gallagher, Rosen and Mendez, and found out from Mendez he was dead. Does that mean anything?”

“I wondered about that too. Charlie Mendez is clean. Small services for small fees. Like having mail come there.”

“Summation, Sergeant?”

“Who, me? Okay D. C. Ives was very shifty and clever and careful. But one night he forgot to be careful and one of his pigeons got to him. When Bogen heard his boss was dying, he used his own key to get in. He took the dirty pictures and the money and ran.”

“So that makes it a dead end for me, Sergeant.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was just a favor for a friend.”

Eleven

WE LEFT early Thursday morning and drove down to the city, to Lysa Dean’s canyon home, secluded behind an impressive pink wall. The staff was cut down to one Korean couple, maid and gardener. When he recognized Dana, he smiled broadly and unlocked the big metal gates for us. It was a hot day. The wall enclosed about one acre. A Mexican architect had done the house for her and the third husband. I guess you could call it Cuernavaca Aztec.

Dana showed me around. The plantings were splendid. The pool was drained. The dogs had been boarded. Walking through the silence of terrazzo, puffy white rugs, dark paneling removed from ancient churches, I counted five full-length oil portraits of the owner. And not one of an ex-husband.

Dana wanted to get different clothes. She showed me how she was set up. A small functional suite opposite the service area, with a rather stark bedroom, a large and luxurious bath, a small tidy office with a row of large gray filing cabinets, a battleship desk. There was a picture in the bedroom, Dana, younger, glowing, intense-holding the new baby in her arms. A young man with a homely, crooked, likable face was staring down at the child too, his arm around his wife.

She saw me glance at it and said, too imperatively, “Please wait for me out there in the office. This won’t take a minute.”

On an office shelf I saw bound, gold-lettered scripts for the Lysa Dean movies. Winds of Chance was among them. I took it down and opened it at random. It seemed highly improbable to me that anyone, living or dead, had ever said lines like that.

I put the script back on the shelf and paced restlessly. There were loose ends. A lot of them. But I could not see how they were pertinent to what I’d been asked to do. I couldn’t recover any of the money Lysa Dean had paid Ives.

It seemed reasonably evident that Bogen had gone into business for himself. His note to Lysa sounded as Starr had described him. He would have picked up a few crude lab techniques from Ives. If the police had been looking for him for three months without success, I didn’t have much chance of reaching out and picking him up.

We could fly east and catch Lysa in New York. Make a report. Working a complaint through normal police channels, we could get all there was in the files on Bogen. The people responsible for protecting the star could be alerted to watch for anybody who might be Bogen. If she insisted, maybe we could work out a way to trap him, using her as bait. With a little bit of judgment and a lot of luck, I had pushed it about as far as I could.

I could make a few guesses. Bogen had fled with a good piece of money and a whole stack of unpleasant pictures, and holed up, perhaps in Los Angeles. He’d fled on December 6th. Those pictures could seriously upset an already disturbed mind. It was highly unlikely that he could have lifted any neat little list of names and addresses. Maybe the pictures covered quite a few of Ives’ quiet ventures. If Bogen wanted to get cute with anyone, he would be restricted to those faces he could recognize. Maybe there were a few more celebrity faces in the stack.

What was the time sequence? In early January, a month after he fled Santa Rosita, he was out in Las Vegas leaving off the package for Lysa Dean at the desk at The Sands. The columns would have located her for him. No further contact in two months. Was he busy bugging some other famous people who had been captured by Ives’ sneaky lens? Was he waiting for Lysa Dean to come back to the Los Angeles area?

At any rate, it would be a comfort to her to know the kind of nut who was running around with pictures that could ruin her, to know his name and his appearance. She would have to decide what that much was worth. I’d dug a pretty good hole in the expense money.

Ives’ murderer was none of my business. The list of possibilities would have to be as long as my arm.

But I didn’t like the way this one was ending. And I couldn’t see Lysa Dean being ecstatic about it either.

Dana came out of her bedroom. She wore a pretty green outfit, and carried her repacked suitcase. She said, too cheerfully, “Are we ready?”

She seemed very tense. I went and took the suitcase from her. With a quaver in her cheerful voice, she said, “This place gets on my nerves. It never did before. I don’t know why. I feel as if I hardly know the Dana Holtzer who lives here. I expect her to come in and ask me who the hell I am.”

“Watch out for her. A very icy broad.”

She paused in the doorway to look at me, her expression at once vulnerable and wary. “Travis?”

“Yes, honey”

“I can’t take too much change. So please don’t. Things that get brittle… they break, you know.”

“I like you. That’s all it is.”

She nodded. “But we have laughed too much. Do you understand that?”

“I understand that. And you’ll be back in harness tonight.”

“That picture you saw in there. Did it explain anything?”

“I could have drawn it from memory before I even saw it. You don’t have to be explained to me. I don’t have to make adjustments with you and to you. Hell with it. Let’s go get on our airplane.” I tilted her chin up, kissed the corner of her mouth closest to the crooked tooth. A little peck, like cousins. So she smiled, and one tear spilled, and I followed her in flight, clackety-whack across terrazzo, green skirt whipping, powerful calves clenching, back very straight and head held high.

We had twenty minutes before they called the flight. Our gear was checked aboard. Early afternoon. I bought a paper. I was scanning it. The name jumped out at me from a small item on page one of the second section. Casino employee slain in Las Vegas. Patricia Davies bludgeoned at doorstep of trailer last night. Once married to sportsman Vance M’Gruder.

Without a word I pointed it out and handed it to Dana. She looked at me, her eyes wide. “I can’t pass that up,” I said. “It could be Sammy.”

“But… our luggage is…”

“Dana, you go on to New York. Take care of my stuff at the other end. I’ll check this out and be along.”

“But I’m supposed to stay with you.”

I took hold of her wrists and gave her a little shake. “You have to go to New York. You’re a big girl. I don’t have to draw diagrams for you. You and I have… run out of time.”

She held my gaze and her mouth made the shape of that word. Time. Without making a sound. The strength in her face was softened. And younger. “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “Thank you, Travis, for knowing when the time ran out.”

I released her, turning away, saying, “Your boss expects you. So go ahead.”

She murmured something about arranging my ticket, and went off into the throng. I watched her go, and for an instant had in my mind the grotesque and unworthy image of the time when you feel the tarpon pick up speed for that last, great, heart-busting leap, and see him go high and see him, right at the peak of it, give that final snap of his head that throws your lure back into your lap. The image wasn’t even accurate. I’d turned conservationist. I’d let the line go slack and said goodby.

I waited. And waited. Her flight was called. I went to the gate. I did not see her. I went to the airline desk. They checked the manifest for me. Slowly. Sir, the passenger canceled before flight time. I felt fear, worry, irritation. I had played the whole game too loosely, too confidently, and maybe somebody very fast and bright had moved out of the shadows.

I prowled the martian reaches of the terminal, searching for my girl in green. And found her, saw her through the glass front of a men’s shop. I went striding in. A clerk was helping her. She gave me a startled and guilty look, then swung all that vivid force of personality upon me, saying, “Darling, I told you I’d forget the shirt sizes. It’s such a damn nuisance losing luggage. Are these all right? Wash-and-wear, so we could make do with two, don’t you think? But what size, dear?”

“Seventeen and a half, thirty-six,” I said humbly.

“Two of these in that size, please. And you don’t really mind stretch socks too much, do you? Size thirty-three shorts, mmm? No, don’t wrap them. I can pop them right in here.” She lifted the small suitcase up onto the counter, a cheap one of pale blue anodized aluminum. As she put the articles in, I got a glimpse of some feminine things, and some drug store parcels. She latched it and waited for her change.

“We’ve got a flight in about twenty-five minutes,” she said.

I carried the case out of the store into the waiting room area. I carried it to a quiet space and put it down and turned to her and said, “Have you lost your fool mind?”

She locked strong icy fingers onto my wrist and looked up at me and said, “It’s all right. Really. It’s all right.”

“But…:

“I couldn’t get the luggage back. It was stowed aboard. It’ll be taken care of in New York. Look. I’ve been a grownup for a long time.”

“It’s just that…”

“Shut up, darling. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Do you want me to draw pictures for you? Stop looking like a spavined moose. Say you’re glad. Say something.”

I put fingertips on her cheek, ran my thumb along the black gloss of her eyebrow. “Okay. Something.”

She closed her eyes and shivered. “Oh God. No claims, Trav. Nothing like that. Either way.”

“Either way.”

“Just don’t laugh.”

“You know better than that.”

I read consternation in her expression. ‘’Maybe I’m just not what you… Maybe you never really… You could have been just being polite, and now…“

“You know better than that too. Shut up, dear.”

“I wired New York.”

“Kindly excuse delay.”

“Dammit, we’ve never even really kissed. My knees are all wobbly and strange. Please lead me to a drink, darling.”

During the flight, in spite of all the persuasive immediate magic of Girl, in spite of scent, closeness, dark eyes to drown in, and the shallow-breathed feeling of expectancy, the workman part of my mind kept moving in old and seamy patterns. We’d made a big swing, and, one by one, we’d been dropping them out of the final count.

Carl Abelle, terror of the ski lifts, dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope. Sonny Catton, cooked meat in a pretty whoosh and bloom of high octane. Nancy Abbott, cooked just as thoroughly but over a lower flame. No point in checking Harvey and Richie, the Cornell kids. Their biggest problem was to find someone, anyone, who would ever believe their story. Caswell Edgars was out of it. And out of just about everything else in the world too. Ives was gone, and violently. So was Patty M’Gruder. If old Abbott, Nancy’s father, had any luck left, he was dead by now too. Less violently but less pleasantly.

It was narrowing down. To a yacht bum named Vance M’Gruder, to a waitress named Whippy, to a retarded little man named Bogen. It was like going through an empty house, checking the closets. Either it was more complex than I could comprehend, or so it made even less sense. But there was a nastiness somewhere in it that was out of control. I sensed that, and sensed it was aimed at Lysa Dean, and maybe at me, and I couldn’t imagine who or how. I knew only two things. I was running out of closets. And I was glad I hadn’t been at that house party. So I held the hand of the girl, and told myself it was a fine world, and filed away my doom-thoughts.

A bored kid built a shiny little model city with his new kit and when it was finished he gave it one hell of a kick and spewed bit hunks of it out across the desert floor. We tilted down across the afternoon, seeing an unreality of blue pools and green fairways against that old lizard-skin brown of the everlasting desert. We came in with a batch of pilgrims-the brand new ones trying to be cool about their interest in the air terminal slots, about all the hawking and proclaiming and loud instant promotions. All the old pilgrims wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion.

I noticed a pair of appraisers as our group came through the gate, backs against the wall, staring left and right, somnolently vigilant, bouncing the little black glances off the pilgrims like aimed bb shot. They have the index memories of the ten thousand faces in disrepute in Slotsville, plus a feel for new trouble on the way-the ones who have come to get it any way they can, including using a gun on the winners.

My lady performed no transit services this time. It was a fine and pleasant distinction related to the absolute silence of the airplane ride, the hand tightly held, the dark eyes hooded. She stood four square, still and humble, patient and sensuous, while I, with no bag to retrieve, went off to dicker a vehicle and, with ironic impulse, took that most typical of game-town cars, a big airconditioned convertible, this one in metallic blue-green, white leather, ominously silent as Forest Lawn.

There had been a place I liked, way out on the Strip, an utterly gameless and consequently expensive motor house called the Apache, and I knew it would be meaningless and would astonish her should I consult her. At the desk I said I had been there before, knew I wanted a double cabana at the pool, gave the porter a dollar to let me have the key and find my own way.

It was a great long room in gold and green, with two huge beds, all of it too bright in the dazzle of poolside sun. I pulled the cords that creaked the heavy yellow draperies across the acre of window wall, turning the room into a shadowy gloom of gold.

The whisper of the hushed cooled air made it an oasis, a thousand years from yesterday, and ten thousand years from tomorrow. Every fifth breath she took was very deep, with a little catch, like a hiccup at the high end. I put my hands upon her, at waist and nape of neck, stopping her sleepy sway.

The man who sits in the steel office and throws the switches and pushes the buttons can rest his hand on his desk and feel, more like a low-cycle sound than any measurable vibration, the power that thrums in the bowels of the light plant. She felt unyielding and I could not guess how it would be for us. Then she gave a little crooked sigh, turned her mouth upward to me, leaned with heat and softness and purpose.

There is one kind of rightness that is an almost-rightness, because it is merciless and total and ends in a deathlike lethargy.

Then there is another kind of almost-rightness that can never be finished.

Both of these make you strangers to each other. Both of these things make you untidily anxious to give and receive reassurances.

But with Dana it was that rare and selfless rightness which moves with but the gentlest hiatus from one completion to the next, each a growth in knowing and closeness while, unheeded, the deep sweet hours go by. After all the fierceness is gone, it then astonishes by returning in that last time which ends it without question for now, and she is spent and dies there, slumbrous and fond.

I fought sleep. I made myself get up. I covered her over and went and showered and dressed. I turned on a meager light in the room and sat on the bed, pushed black curls aside, kissed the sweet nape of a musky neck. She turned to peer up at me, her face soft and emptied and young. “Yuhraw dress!” she mumbled in accusation.

“I’m going out for a little while. You sleep, honey.”

She tried to frown. “Y’be careful, d’ling.”

“Love you,” I said. It doesn’t cost a thing. Not when you do. I kissed a soft and smiling mouth, and I think she was asleep before I stood up. I left the low light on and let myself out.

I walked toward the main buildings feeling all that strange ambivalence of the conquering male. Goaty self-esteem, slight melancholy, a mildly pleasant and unfocused guilt, a tinsoldier strut.

But something more than that with her. A feeling of achieving and establishing identities, hers and mine.

There had been no dishonesties. And so, in all that total giving and taking, I had been aware of her as Dana, so vital and so enduring.

The slight physical strangeness of the very beginning of it had lasted but a very short time. Then she was all known and dear. As if we had been apart for a very long time and found each other again, quickly getting over the awkwardness of separation.

After that it was a knowing and re-knowing in a profound way which has no words. It became a symbolic dialogue. I give thee. I take thee. I prize thee.

And there was also the fatuous feeling of enormous luck. It is such a damned blind chance after all.

I worked my way through two bemused gin and bitters while they seared my steak. Over coffee I stopped marveling at myself and got a local paper and read the more detailed account of the murder of Patty M’Gruder.

Then I drove downtown and parked and wandered through that strange area of cut-rate stores, pastel marriage chapels, open-sided casinos bathed in a garish fluorescence. Spooks trudged amid the tourists, and the cops kept a close sharp watch. Old ladies yanked at the handles, playing their dimes out of paper cups. Music bashed across the dry night air, in conflict with itself, and in the noisier alcoves one could buy anything from a dream book to a plastic bird turd.

The Four Treys was a long bright narrow jungle of machinery. What happened to the old-fashioned slot machine? Now you can pull two handles, hit three space ships and an astronaut and get a moon-pot, which is one and a half jack pots. The change girls sat behind wire, popping open the paper cylinders of silver, dumping it into paper cups for the people. At regular intervals came the clash of money into the scoop, and a shrillness of joy.

I had just wanted a look. I needed no directions. Presently I got back behind the wheel of the luxury device afforded me by a famous movie star and drove off again through the neoned night.

Twelve

THE TRAILER park was called Desert Gate. I had to go down through town and out the far side to get to it. It was a little after ten o’clock when I got there. Some orderly soul had set it up with the requirement that all trailers be parked in herringbone array on either side of a broad strip of asphalt going nowhere. The entrance was an aluminum arch, tall and skinny, with a pink floodlight on it.

The trailers were large, all snugged down off their wheels, with little patios and screened porches added. About half of them were dark. Patricia had lived-and died in front of-the sixth one on the left. It was lighted. I parked and went to the porch door. As I raised a hand to bang on the aluminum frame, a big woman appeared, silhouetted in the inner doorway.

“Whatya want?”

“I want to talk to Martha Whippler.”

“Who are you?”

“The name is McGee. I was a friend of Patties.”

“Look, why don’t you go away? The kid has had a hard day. She’s pooped. Okay?”

“It’s all right, Bobby,” a frail voice said. “Let him in.”

As I went in, the big woman stood back out of the way. When I saw her in the light I realized she was younger than I had thought. She wore jeans and a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled high over brown heavy forearms. Her hair was brown and cropped short and she wore no makeup.

The interior was all pale plywood paneling, vinyl tile, glass curtains, plastic upholstery, stainless steel. A slight girl lay on a day bed, propped up on pillows, long coppery hair tousled around her sad wan face. Her eyes were red. Her lipstick was smeared. She had a drink in her hand. She wore a very frilly nylon robe. Though she was a lot slimmer, I knew her at once.

“Whippy!” I said, and then felt like a damn fool for not having figured it out.

It startled her. She stared at me with disapproval. “I don’t know you. I don’t remember you from anyplace. People call me Martha now. Pat wouldn’t let them call me by my old name.” There was something quite solemn and childlike about her. And vulnerable.

“I’m sorry. I’ll call you Martha.”

“What’s your name?”

“Travis McGee.”

“I never heard Pat say your name.”

“I didn’t know her well, Martha. I know a few other people you might know. Vance. Cass. Carl. Nancy Abbott. Harvey. Richie. Sonny.”

She sipped her drink, frowning at me over the rim of the glass. “Sonny is dead. I heard that. I heard that he burned up, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.”

“Nancy saw him burn.”

She looked incredulous. “How could that happen?”

“She was traveling with him then.”

She shook her head in slow wonder. “Her traveling with him. Oh boy. Who could imagine that. Me, sure. But her? Gee, it doesn’t seem possible, believe you me.”

“Martha, I want to talk to you alone.”

“I bet you do,” the big girl behind me said.

“Mr. McGee, this is my friend Bobby Blessing. Bobby, whyn’t you go away a while, okay?”

Bobby studied me. It is the traditional look they reserve for the authentic male, a challenging contempt, a bully-boy antagonism. There seem to be more of them around these days. Or perhaps they are merely bolder. The word is butch. Having not the penis nor the beard, they damn well try to have everything else.

One of the secondary sex characteristics they seem to be able to acquire is the ballsy manner, the taut-shouldered swagger, the roostery go-to-hell attitude. They have a menacing habit of running in packs lately. And the unwary chap who tries to make off with one of their brides can get himself a stomping that stevedores would admire.

These are a subculture, long extant, but recently emerged from hiding. In their new boldness they do a frightening job of recruiting, having their major successes among the vulnerable platoons of those meek girls who, like Martha Whippler, are abused by men, by the Catton-kind of man, used, abused, sickened, shared, frightened and… at last, driven into the camp of the butch.

“I’ll be where I can hear you call me,” Bobby said without taking her stony stare from my face. She went out, rolling her shoulders, hitching at her jeans.

I moved closer to Martha, and sat in a skeletal plastic chair half facing her. She looked down into her half of a drink and said, “You named the people that were there that time.”

“And left one out?”

“That movie actress,” she whispered.

“Have you told people about her being there?”

“Oh, nothing like that ever happened to me before. I couldn’t tell anybody about it. I mean I could talk to Pat about it sometimes. You know. I used to have nightmares. She took me back home with her from there. I knew… I always knew she would rather it was Nancy.”

She looked wistful. She had a cheap, empty, pretty little face, eyebrows plucked to fine lines, mouth made larger with lipstick.

“Did you ever get to see the pictures?” I asked her.

Even the most vapid ones have an urchin shrewdness about them, the wariness of the consistently defensive posture.

“What pictures?”

“The ones Vance had taken.”

“For hours and hours today they kept asking me questions, questions. How do I know you just aren’t another smart guy?”

“I can’t prove I’m not.” I hesitated. She was suggestible. I wanted the right approach, without fuss. Grief made an additional vulnerabil ity. Kindly ol‘ McGee seemed the best bet. I shook my head sadly. “I’m just a fellow who thinks Patricia got a very bad deal from Vance M’Gruder, very bad indeed.”

Tears welled. She snuffled into her fist. “Oh God. Oh God yes. That bastard. That total bastard!”

“Some of us have never understood why Pat didn’t fight it a little harder.”

“Gee, you don’t know what she had stacked against her. That rotten Vance had been planning it a long time. He got some kind of morality report on her from the London police from way before they were married, I guess to show that she knew she shouldn’t get married. And then he had the tape recorder things of her and Nancy at their house, and her and me at their house, and the pictures he hired that man to get, following them around. It must have cost an awful lot, the whole thing, but as Pat said, it was a hell of a lot cheaper than California divorce. She couldn’t get a lawyer to agree to fight it. I mean, after all, there wasn’t any question about the way she was.”

“Did you get to see those pictures, Martha?”

“Oh sure. The funny thing, they made it look like nobody else was around at all. I don’t know how that man got those pictures so close, Pat with me and with Nancy and with Lysa Dean, just one with Lysa Dean, one where you couldn’t tell it was Lysa Dean unless you knew.”

“So by the time you saw those pictures, you and Pat were together?”

“Yes. The rotten thing he did, we went up to the city to see some friends of hers, and we came back to Carmel, he was gone and the locks were changed, and our personal stuff was piled in a carport, and there was a man there to keep anybody from breaking in or anything. The way it was, she was still trying to get over being in love with Nancy and maybe she never did. I guess maybe she never did get over it. But I did try to make her happy, I really did.”

“Why would somebody want to kill her, Martha?”

She sobbed again, and blew her nose. “I don’t know! I just don’t know. That’s what they kept asking me. Gee, we lived real quiet here, over a year now, and for a long time we’ve been working the same shift at the Four Treys, me as a drink waitress and her on a change booth. Just a few friends. She hadn’t got interested in any other girl or anything, and nobody was after me like that. There was just one thing.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know. It started weeks ago. Before that, whenever she’d think of Vance she’d go into a terrible rage, and sometimes she’d cry. Weeks ago she got a letter from somebody. She didn’t let me see it and I can’t find it so I guess she destroyed it. She was kind of… far away for a few days after she got it and she wouldn’t tell me anything. Then one day when I was out, she made long-distance phone calls. She really ran up a terrible bill. Forty dollars and something. And later she made a few more calls. Then she got very pleased about something. She’d be grinning and humming around and I’d ask her why she felt so good and she’d say never mind. Sometimes she would grab me and dance me around and she’d tell me everything was going to be just fine, and we were going to be rich. It didn’t matter so much to me. I mean we were doing all right here. We didn’t have to be rich. I don’t know if it had anything to do with her being murdered last night.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“I heard it! My God, I was in bed half asleep. I was sort of worrying about her. I’ve got a virus and I was off work. She was supposed to be finished at eleven and home by quarter past, but it was a little after midnight when I heard the car motor. I could tell it was ours, it’s such a noisy little car. I’d left one light on for her. I wondered what she’d bring me. She’d bring me a little present if I was sick. Some kind of joke sort of. The car stopped out there and I heard the car door, and then just outside that screen door, she yelled `What are you…‘ Just those words. There was a kind of a terrible crunching sound. And a falling sound. And steps running. I turned on the lights and put my robe on and ran out and she was just outside the door on the ground, and her head…”

I waited several minutes while she slowly and painfully pulled herself back together. “She was so alive,” Martha moaned.

“But several weeks ago she stopped being mad at Vance?”

“Yes. But I don’t know what it means.”

“After she was locked out of the house, she did have a chance to talk to her husband?”

“Oh, several times. She begged and pleaded.”

“But it didn’t do any good.”

“He wouldn’t even let her have her car. He said she was lucky to keep the clothes she’d bought. Finally he gave her five hundred dollars so she could afford to go away. I had about seventy-five dollars. We came here on a bus and got jobs. He was nasty to her.”

“Martha, does the name Ives mean anything to you? D. C. Ives?”

She looked blank. “No.”

“Santa Rosita?”

She tilted her empty little head. “That’s strange!”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a couple of days ago she was singing that old song. Santa Lucia. But she was saying Rosita instead of Lucia, and I said she had it wrong and she laughed and said she knew she did. Why did you ask about that? I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“But if it has anything to do with who killed her…”

“Did she have any kind of appointment coming up?”

“Appointment? Oh, I’d forgotten. Just the other day she said she might have to take a little trip. Alone. Just for a day or two. It made me jealous. She teased me and let me get real jealous, and then she said it was a kind of a business trip, and she’d tell me all about it later.”

“Where was she going to go?”

“Phoenix. Gee, we don’t know a soul in Phoenix.”

“How soon was she going?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if she meant real soon.”

I couldn’t shake loose anything else of interest. She was worn out. But she was still alert enough to ask again who I was and what I wanted. I had to answer a question with a question.

“What are you going to do now, Martha?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“It’s your chance to get out of… this kind of situation.”

Her little mouth firmed up. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that. Listen, Pat got me out of a lousy situation. I don’t want anything like that again ever. What do you know about anything?”

“Don’t get sore.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Jesus Christ! Anything you people don’t understand, it has to be lousy. Pat always said that. The world doesn’t have to be your way. We never asked anybody to approve or disapprove. It’s our own business. Who did we hurt?”

“You?”

“Me! That’s some joke. That really is. Honest to God, when I remember the way it used to have to be, when I thought that was the only thing there was, boy, it makes my stomach turn right over. I’ve got friends who want to take care of me.”

“I bet you have.”

She stared at me, narrowed her eyes, threw her head back and yelled, “Bobby! Bobby!”

I left without any particular haste, but without delay either. Even so, they were between me and my car. Bobby had a friend, equally sizable. In the angle of the light the friend looked like the young Joe DiMaggio, but with a black dutch bob, and wearing desert rat khakis. Joe carried a putter. The gold head and chrome shaft glittered.

They separated and moved in from either side.

“Don’t make any stupid mistakes,” I said, coming to a halt.

Joe had managed to train herself down to a good imitation of a baritone. “You bassars got to get a lesson not to come around here bothering the brides.”

“What have you got here?” I asked. “A colony?”

“Smart ass,” Bobby said as they moved in. They generally do very well against the undoctrinated male. There is a chivalrous reluctance to hit a woman. Martha had come to the trailer doorway to watch the sport. I had learned a painful lesson long ago when reluctance had slowed reaction time, and I had spent the next several days walking around like an eighty-eight-year-old man. It is the type of mistake you are not likely to make twice in one lifetime. And these two were more dangerous than male thugs because their aberrations fired their hatred of the authentic male. They might not know when to stop hitting.

The light was tricky and the putter made me nervous. If I tried sweet reason, she was going to try to sink it into my skull. So I moved with no regard for chivalry I feinted toward Bobby, and lunged at Joe. I got a hand on the putter shaft before she could build up any momentum with it.

I wrested it out of her hand, reversed it, sidestepped her, and laid the limber end of it across the seat of those khakis. It made a little whirring in the air, and a mighty crack on impact. Joe leaped high and, probably much to her own disgust, gave a high girlish scream of anguish. I turned in time to see Bobby hurl a rock at my head. It tickled the hair on the crown of my head, and the fright lent considerable enthusiasm to my pursuit. Bobby turned in flight. I welted her three hearty times across tight denim, and she joined her yelps to those of her buddy. Joe grappled with me, trying to trip me. She was sobbing in frustration, and she smelled like a mule skinner. I spun her away, and whacked her another beauty. She screamed and gave up and started running toward the trailer.

Bobby made the mistake of running right along beside her, about five feet away from her. I sped into the gap with forehand and backhand. Martha Whippler had come to the doorway to watch them brutalize me. They nearly trampled her in their haste to get out of range. They sounded as if they were trying to yodel. I laughed, hurled the putter well out of the colony, and drove away from there.

Back in the muted silence of the big room at the Apache, Dana slept on. Remembering that the Apache food service would be closed, I had stopped at an implausible delicatessen in town. I turned more lights on. I unsacked my purchases, pried the top off the beef stew with noodles. It was still steaming. I carried it over and sat on the floor beside the bed and wafted it back and forth in front of her face. Her nose twitched, twitched again. Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She focused on me. She gave a great start.

“Hey!” she said. “Hey now!” She gave a great creaking, stretching, shuddering yawn and then reached for the container. She hitched herself up, arranged the pillows, tucked the sheet around her, under her arms, and lifted a huge plastic forkful into the greedy waiting mouth. “Oh!” she said. “Oh my God, Trav, nothing has ever tasted like this.”

I moved a small table close to her elbow, brought over the garlic dills, the hot tea and the strawberry cheesecake. I sat on the foot of the bed, admiring her. When the edge of hunger began to be eased, she began to be uncomfortable.

“Did you eat?” she asked.

“Like a wolf.”

She poked at her tangled hair. “I’m a mess, I bet.”

Her dark vital eyes were puffy, shadowed with fatigue. Her lips were swollen, pale without lipstick. There was a long scratch on her throat, three oval blue smudges on the front of her left shoulder, where my fingers had bruised her.

“You look just fine, Dana.”

Her face got pink. She would not look directly at me. “I bet. Uh… what time is it?”

“Twenty of one.”

She said she would finish the cheesecake later. She asked me to please turn my back. She lugged our suitcase into the bathroom. I heard her take a quick shower. In a little while after the water stopped, she came shyly out, hair brushed, mouth made up, and she was wearing a little blue hip-length nightgown, diaphanous, with lace at throat and hem. Rather than making any attempt to model it, she scuttled for the bed in a knock-kneed half-run, slightly hunched over. She piled in, covered herself and said, blushing furiously, “It isn’t exactly what I thought I was buying.”

I laughed at her. She frowned part way through the cheesecake and then managed a timid smile, a direct but fleeting glance. “I’m not used to this sort of situation, Trav. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Nobody else is.”

She swallowed and looked pained. “I was so… I don’t know what you must th… I never… Oh hell, anyway!”

“Stop fussing. So it’s a new relationship. We are something to each other we weren’t before. And took a risk. You know that. Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after. And, coming back here to you after where I’ve been makes us seem like the innocence of angels.”

She showed her concern. “What happened, dear?”

The cheesecake and tea were long gone by the time I finished with the facts and the speculations.

She looked dubious. “It seems like an awful lot of guessing.”

I went through it once more, in precise form. “What do we know about M’Gruder? He is feisty, rich, ruthless and stingy. And, with no occupation, he is highly mobile. He’s brown and fit and damned callous. Okay, as the purchaser of a service, he got into direct contact with Ives. Ives, seeing a golden opportunity, recognizing Lysa, took all the pictures he could get, hundreds of them, knowing he could crop and enlarge to exhibit every relationship that went on during those four days. Assume that when M’Gruder learned where the party was going to be, he got to a phone and alerted his hired photographer. We know one thing about Ives. He was greedy. He did his job for M’Gruder and got his fee. He collected big from Lysa Dean. He took a hack at the Abbott money and struck out, because Nancy was past protecting.

“Now we have to guess. M’Gruder was hot to marry the young Atlund girl. Her professor father disapproved. M’Gruder won him over. I think that with a Swedish girl’s traditional respect for parental authority, the professor had to be won over or there would have been no marriage. I think Ives made the mistake of trying to blackmail a previous client, someone

John D. MacDonald

who knew who he was and where to find him. The timing fits. Ives threatened to show Professor Atlund the terrace pictures featuring M’Gruder. Anything that rancid would have bitched the marriage forever. The professor would not have his dear girl marrying a libertine like that. Ives did not think M’Gruder dangerous. Maybe he underestimated his stinginess. M’Gruder followed him, saw a good opportunity, and smashed the top of his head in. A couple of weeks later he married his Ulka.

“Take it a step further. We have to assume that Patty M’Gruder learned the name of the photographer from Vance. He would delight in telling her how smart he had been, how cleverly he had cut her loose from the M’Gruder money. He would want to rub her nose in it. He would have to hate her. He is a very virile type, and it would be an outrage to his pride to realize his English wife had merely pretended pleasure with him, and actually preferred girls. Patty got a letter from somebody. Gossip, perhaps. Vance’s child bride and the problem with the professor. It started her thinking. She had known of Ives’ death. She knew Vance. She knew him damned well, and how his mind operated, and his capacity for violence. Somehow, checking this out by phone, she be222

THE QUICK RED FOX

came convinced Vance had done in Ives. So she sent a letter to Vance. It would be a very veiled hint. Come through with the money you cheated me out of, boy, or the Santa Rosita police are going to take an interest in you. Words to that effect. He couldn’t risk that. I’d say he’d write back something about planning to be in Phoenix and be willing to discuss her financial situation at that time. She would realize she had struck gold.

“Now he could not risk being publicly in Las Vegas. When women die, they check out their ex-husbands. I say he set up a good solid alibi in Phoenix, and came over here last night and killed her. He smashed the top of her head in. He would imagine he had no other choice. She hated him as much as he hated her. She would show no mercy. She would bleed him forever.”

She thought it over. “I guess it does make sense. But, Trav, is it our problem? Isn’t Samuel Bogen our problem, really?”

“At this moment, my darling Dana, some very shrewd cop may be checking out some small slip M’Gruder made. The death of Patricia has to require he be checked out. So they grab him for murder first. Do you think he would maintain a chivalrous silence? He would want to lay all the facts on the line, with little distortions here and there, to try to show justification or at least a plausible excuse for murder.

“Once they round up Cass and Carl and Martha Whippler and start questioning them one at a time, how long do you think Lysa Dean would stay in the clear. Make up a headline, honey. Star Implicated in Orgy Murder. She’d be even worse off. I have to find out how good these guesses are. If she’s going to be in the soup, the best I can do is warn her. Maybe she can take some steps. Long-term contracts. Public relations advice. Something.”

Dana frowned. “I see what you mean. But he could have just said Phoenix.”

“I think he’s there. It’s close. I want to check it out.”

“All right, dear.”

I patted her on the foot. “I like obedient women.”

She yawned. “I just feel terribly passive, I guess.”

“Entirely, completely passive?”

She pursed her lips. She tilted her head. She laid a finger alongside her nose. “Well… I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

Thirteen

I HAD the random idea of poking around the Four Treys to see if I could find small hint of a visit from Vance M’Gruder the night of Patty’s death, but my few small memories of the hardnosed vigilance of the Las Vegas cops outweighed the impulse. They deal, day and night, with every kind of spook and hustler in the world, and they would be focused very intently on this murder, and I did not relish the prospect of being bounced up and down while trying to explain my passing interest.

Besides, if M’Gruder was as bright as I imagined, he would not have put in an appearance in the stage lighting of any of the downtown casinos. He would have her Desert Gate address. Once he got to town it would be no great feat to find out when her shift ended.

As I shaved I tried to guess his most plausible mode of transportation. It was just about three hundred miles to Phoenix. I decided that if I were doing it, I’d settle for a good fast car. With enough muscle under the hood, and the right kind of springing for the mountain curves, you could safely call it a five-hour run.

Leave Phoenix at six and arrive at eleven. Spend an hour hunting her down and killing her. Back by five-thirty in the morning. Sneak into the bridal bed. A private car was safer than a bus, a scheduled flight or a private plane. Cash for gas. No records, no fellow passengers.

Properly done, casually done, he could have people convinced he had never left at all. If he had the cold nerve necessary to make that earlier run to Santa Rosita…

We walked to the dining room for breakfast, my lady wearing that green which was all she happened to have. My drowsy lady walked close at my side, without haste, her smile as inward and bemused as that of the Mona Lisa. She hugged my arm and beamed up at me and gave me a sleepy wink. And then she yawned.

Between us we ate a mountain of wheat cakes, a bale of bacon.

I found a Phoenix paper in the lobby rack, checked through it and found a society editor by-line. I coached Dana and put her into a phone booth with a fake name and a reasonably plausible cover story. I stood outside the booth and saw her eyes go fierce and bright. She gave me a savage little nod.

When she came out, she said, “What a sweet woman! The M’Gruders are staying with a couple named Glenn and Joanne Barnweather. She spake their names with social awe. Old friends of his, apparently. They flew in from Mexico City about five days ago, she thinks. She had an item on it. They’re staying at the Barnweather ranch out beyond Scottsdale. You were sure, weren’t you?”

“Not completely. But I’m beginning to be. So let’s go take a look at them.”

We went back to the room and packed. A tremendous chore. She made a housewifely ceremony of it, trotting around the room in a charade of seeing that no meager possession was overlooked, earnest frown between her eyes, white teeth biting into the fullness of underlip.

I caught her as she went by, planted a kiss upon the frown lines and told her that she was a fine girl. She said she was glad I thought she was a fine girl, but it might be a pretty good Idea to just leggo of the fine girl or maybe we wouldn’t be out of there by noon, which she had happened to notice was checkout time.

We were on our way with the top down heading toward Boulder City by noon, after one quick stop at a department store for a stretch denim skirt and halter top and bright yellow scarf for her, white sport shirt for the driver.

The car was heavy and agile. The day had a honeymoon flavor. The sun and the dry wind baked us. We laughed. We made bad jokes. She slanted dark eyes at me, lively with her mischief. This was the way I had wanted her to be. Totally alive and free, not tucked back into her own darkness.

But, totally alive, she was an impressive handful. This was not some pretty little girl, coyly flirtatious, delicately stimulated. This was the mature female of the species, vivid, handsome and strong, demanding that all the life and need within her be matched. Her instinct would immediately detect any hedging, any dishonesty, any less than complete response to her-and then she would be gone for good. Wholeness was all she could comprehend or accept. For now there were no shadows in her eyes, no hesitations as a bad edge of memory stung her. Even in this pursuit of murder, it was a fine fine world.

When we stopped for lunch in an outdoor patio in heavy shade, I looked at her and said, “Why?”

She knew what I meant. She scowled into her iced coffee. “I guess way back after you came back to the room after seeing Carl Abelle. I don’t know. You could have stomped around, the hard-guy grin and all that. But you felt bad about hurting and humiliating him. And he isn’t much, certainly. So I figured out you don’t go around proving you are a man because you are already sure you are. It isn’t all faked up. And in the same way you didn’t have to try to use me to prove what a hell of a fellow you are. Even though we were both… being attracted in a physical way. I know this sounds as if I’m some kind of an egomaniac, but I just thought well… heck, if being a man is a good and valid thing, then there should be like an award of merit or something, an offering. In Abner-talk, namely me. As if I’m so great.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Dana. You are implausibly… astoundingly, unforgettably great. And I don’t mean just in a…”

“I know. It isn’t me, and it isn’t you. Let’s not talk about it. It’s the total of us, the crazy total. I’m not going to talk about it, or think of what comes after. Okay? Okay, darling?”

“No talk. No analysis.”

“We are kind of beautiful,” she said. “It’s enough to know that, I guess. Alone I’m just… sort of efficient and severe and a little heavy-handed. Defensive. Alone you’re just sort of a rough, wry opportunist, a little bit cold and shrewd and watchful. Cruel, maybe. You and your sybarite boat and your damned beach girls. But we add up to beautiful in some crazy way. For now.”

“For now, Dana?”

“I’m no kid, Travis. I know hurt is inevitable, always-”

“Shut up.”

“I talk too much?”

“Only sometimes.”

So off we went, to Kingman, to Wikieup, to Congress-up into cold places, down into heats-to Wickenburg, to Wittman, and down into the richness of the old Salt River Valley where Phoenix presides over the boom that threatens never to quit. It has become a big fast rough grasping town, where both the irrigation heiresses and the B girls wear the same brand of ranch pants.

The sun was low behind us as we came in, breasting the outgoing traffic of the close of Friday business. I cruised and settled for a glassy sprawl called The Hallmark, a big U of stone, teak and thermo-windows enclosing a great green of lawn and gardens, a blue of water in a marbled pool in the shape of a painter’s palette.

In a nearby specialty shop, still open, we let Lysa Dean refurbish our dwindled wardrobes to the extent of swim trunks for me and a swim suit for the lady. We fixed ourselves tall ones of gin and bitter lemon. Dana swam with utmost earnestness, chin held very high, using a stroke I told her was early sheep dog.

In the bathroom, in fading light of day, her body bore the halter marks of the long sunny ride, her broad flat breasts pale, responsive to soapy ablutions cooperatively offered. In a predictable haste, I toted the untoweled seal-shape of her, dripping, to bed, a firm, lithe, gleaming, chuckling burden which seemed to have no weight at all. Ceremonial celebration of our twenty-fourth hour.

Eased and complete, in mild and affectionate embrace, we took up the duty of talking about M’Gruder, weighing the merits of the possible methods of contact.

I could not tell her precisely what I hoped to accomplish. If M’Gruder was the man, I wanted to stir him up. I didn’t want him to believe he had any chance at all. A man running is a dead man. A trial would finish Lysa Dean as well. And when you take someone’s money for expenses, there is a morality involved. He would have some confidence he had gotten away with it. I had to blast that out of him and set him running. And arrange a chase.

The Barnweather number was listed. We went over it carefully. I coached her. She added a few ideas. There was a phone extension in the bath. I went in there and listened.

A servant said the M’Gruders were in the guest house. He gave Dana another number to call.

A man answered. A cultivated baritone, loosened slightly by drink, admitting that he, indeed, was Mister M’Gruder himself.

“You don’t know me, Mr. M’Gruder.”

“From your charming voice, that is my loss, my dear. What is your name?”

“I’ve just picked a new name for myself. I wondered if you’d like it. Patty Ives. Do you like that name?”

It was a slow five-count before he spoke. His voice was under careful control. “You sound as if you thought you were telling me something. But I am afraid I don’t follow.”

“I guess I do have you at a disadvantage. I know so much more about you than you know about me.”

“I don’t wish to be rude, but I don’t like guessing games, whoever you are. So if you don’t mind…”

“I thought we might make a date for a quiet talk, if you would like to sneak away from your little bride, Vance. We have mutual friends. Carl Abelle. Lysa Dean. Cass Edgars. Nancy Abbott. Martha Whippler. Of course Sonny Catton is dead. Poor Sonny”

Again I could have counted to five. “I think you might be a very foolish girl.”

“Foolish, but not very greedy. And very, very careful, Vance.”

“Let me put it this way. You might have something you think is valuable. But suppose it is only an annoyance?”

“Oh, wouldn’t it have to be a lot more than that!”

“You are talking in circles, my dear. I am quite certain I can be forgiven for old indiscretions. Life with my ex often became very unwholesome. Mrs. M’Gruder is aware of that. I’ve reformed. The police were here yesterday afternoon, cooperating with the Las Vegas police, I imagine. To make certain I hadn’t killed Patty. I’m not sorry she’s dead. I’m not that much of a hypocrite. She was a horrid woman. I had to get free of her in any way I could. All this is none of your business, of course. But I didn’t want you to think you’ve alarmed me. You just make me feel… irritable. Please don’t phone me again.” Click.

I reached and put the phone on the hook and then sat back on the wide yellow rim of the little triangular tub. In a few moments Dana appeared in the bathroom doorway. She had put on my sport shirt. She leaned against the door frame and said, “Well?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Either we’re dead wrong, or he’s got the nerve of a headwaiter. So much points his way. Damn it, it has to be him. We’re going out there.”

“Just like that?”

“We’re going to be invited out, I hope.” There is one theory that there are but a hundred thousand people in the United States, and the rest of the 189,900,000 is a faceless mob. The theory further states that any person in the hundred thousand can be linked to any other by no more than a three-step process.

Example: Ron knew Carol’s brother at Princeton; Carol’s husband worked with Vern at the Ford Foundation; Vern’s cousin met Lucy at the film festival. Thus when Ron and Lucy meet as strangers, and sense that they are each members of the hundred thousand, they can play a warm and heartening and satisfying game of who-do-you-know, and, with little cries of delight, trace the relationship.

By dint of past endeavors I had acquired provisional membership in the group, and it seemed likely to me that Glenn and Joanne Barnweather would be solid members. So I had to tap other members most likely to know them. I tried Tulio in Oklahoma City and drew a dead blank.

I remembered Mary West in Tucson. She knew them, but not well. But she did know Paul and Betty Diver in Flagstaff who knew them intimately, and she was certain she could get Betty to play along. If there was any hitch, she would phone back. If not, I would hear from Joanne Barnweather directly. She briefed me on what I’d have to know about the Divers.

We had a twenty-minute wait before the phone rang. “Trav McGee?” a woman asked. “This is Joanne Barnweather. I just got a call from our very dear mutual friend, Paul Diver, saying you’re in town. Could you come out to the place? Are you free?”

“If I can bring along a gal.”

“Of course you can, dear. Glenn and I will be delighted. We’ve got some people in to meet our houseguests and we’re just churning around here, very informal, drinking up a small storm and waiting for time to throw a steak on. Do come as you are. We’ll be delighted to see you.” She gave me directions.

Dana had been nestled close to me, listening. When I hung up she gave me a look of mock admiration. “You are a scoundrel, McGee.”

“Darling, go put on your green.”

“She said to come as we are.”

“Then at least button my shirt.”

Fourteen

ON THE way out, under a chilly spangle of stars, I had briefed Dana on how we’d handle it. She was to stay away from M’Gruder, target on his young Swede bride if possible. I would do what I could with M’Gruder.

The Barnweather place was a simple little quarter-million-dollar ranch house a few hundred yards into a lot of rocky acreage, with fifteen cars glinting in the starlight, music and festive sounds coming from the floodlighted pool area.

I sensed that Dana took a deep breath and braced herself as we walked toward the party jabber. There were infrared heaters focused on the broad terrace area at the house end of the pool. A gleaming, beaming little fellow in a red coat tended bar.

These were a pack of the young marrieds, the success-prone ones. The tense and girlish mothers of three and five and seven young, their beefier husbands, expansive with bourbon and land deals. About thirty-five people in all, forming and reforming their little conversational groups. Dress was varied, all the way from shorts and slacks to some of those fanciful ranch coats on the men, the pale whipcord jobs with the pearl buttons and pocket flaps. The audible talk had that Southwest flavor so quickly acquired by the people who move there from Indiana and Pennsylvania.

When we hesitated, a slender pretty woman came smiling toward us, holding one hand out to each of us. “Trav? I’m Joanne.”

“And this is Diana Hollis.” We had decided it was possible Lysa Dean had spoken of her girl Friday to M’Gruder, and the name was just unusual enough to stick in his mind.

“So glad you could come, dears. Come meet the group.”

She steered us over for a drink first, and then swung us through the throng, rattling off the names and identifications. Glenn was one of the burly ones in whipcord. Joanne made a little more special thing of the introduction to their house guests.

Vance M’Gruder was a little balder, a little browner, a little taller than he had seemed in the pictures. He was a type. The totally muscled sportsman-muscles upon muscles so that even his face looked like it leather bag of walnuts. Polo muscles, tennis muscles, sail-handling muscles, fencing muscles-the type who does handstands every morning of his life, works out with professionals whenever possible, and has a savage and singleminded desire to whip you at anything you’re willing to play with him, from squash racquets to tetherball. He had the personality to go with the body-a flavor of remote, knowing, arrogant amusement.

His young bride was one of the most striking females I have ever seen in my life. You had a tendency to speak to her in a hushed voice, an awed voice. The Swedes grow some of the finest specimens of our times. This Uika Atlund M’Gruder was big enough for M’Gruder to keep her in flat heels at all times. She wore a woolly tangerine-colored shift. Her arms were bare. The others were bundled in jackets, sweaters, tunics, shawls, stoles.

She looked as if she had enough animal heat to keep her entirely comfortable at thirty below. Her body, under the touch of the fabric, was ripe, leggy and entirely perfect. Without makeup, her features were almost those of some heroic, dedicated young boy, a page from the time of King Arthur. Or an idealized Joan of Arc. Her tilted gray-green-blue Icelandic eyes were the cold of northern seas. Her hair was a rich, ripe, heavy spill of pale pale gold, curved across the high and placid brow. She had little to say, and a sleepy and disinterested way of saying it. Her eyes kept seeking out her husband.

Over all that stalwart Viking loveliness there was such a haze of sensuality it was perceptible, like a strange matte finish. It was stamped into the slow and heavy curve of her smile, marked by the delicate violet shadows under her eyes, expressed by the cant of her high round hips in the way she stood.

Though by far the youngest person there, she at the same time seemed far older. She had been bolted to the bowsprit of an ancient ship for a thousand years. And every woman there hated her and feared her. The look of her confirmed my guesses about Vance M’Gruder. Wearing this one like a banner or a medal was the ultimate cachet of competitive masculinity. She had a strange primitive flavor of sexual docility. She was indentured to M’Gruder, totally focused upon him, yet were she taken from him by someone with more strength and force and purpose, she would shift loyalty without question or hesitation.

A man like M’Gruder would go to any length to acquire her. And he had. I was certain of that. I thought of M’Gruder’s past habits and inclinations, and I wondered if, when his physical resources began to flag he would stimulate himself by corrupting her. A woman to him would be something owned, to use as he wished.

Later, standing in a group with M’Gruder, I looked over and saw Dana alone with Ulka, talking quietly to her. Ulka nodded. She was watching Vance. I could not get anywhere with Vance. I tried to play do-you-know with him, bringing up the names of some of the Florida sailboat bums I know. Yes, he knew them. Sure. So what. I guessed he could not become interested in trivia.

He had taken two horrible risks to acquire and keep the Viking princess. Maybe somebody was getting set to drop the noose on him and end it. Apprehension could make small talk almost impossible. I could not comprehend M’Gruder’s promise to put this creature back into college. I found it hard to believe that a professorial type had spawned her.

In days of old whenever one of these rarities appeared, one of the king’s agents would run to the castle with the news, and the girlchild would disappear forever into one of the royal suites, and her family would get a little stack of gold coins in exchange. In these more random times they are grabbed off by oil men, celebrity athletes, television moguls and M’Gruders. But the man who has one stays nervous, because, unless you are a king, you don’t really get to own it. It is on temporary loan from providence.

Later I sat near Ulka in a big game room in the house while she carved and chewed her way through a huge rare steak, knife and teeth flashing, jaw muscles and throat working, her eyes made blank by a total concentration on this physical gratification. The effort made a sweaty highlight on her pale brow, and at last she picked up the sirloin bone and gnawed it bare, putting a slick of grease on lips and fingertips. There was no vulgarity in this hunger, any more than when a tiger cracks the hip socket to suck the marrow.

The party fragmented, and there was room enough for them to roam all the house and grounds, various degrees of alcohol dividing them more positively than social class or business interest. I had lost track of Dana, and I went night-walking in unhurried search. Skirting a tall cactus garden, floodlighted in eerie blue, I heard, off to my right, a conspiratorial rasp of female venom. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” It was more contemptuous than indignant. I sought to move quietly out of range. I did not care how husbands were gutted in this desert paradise. I imagined it was done the same as elsewhere.

But the male voice stopped me. “All I want to know is where you…” The rest of the sentence was lost. He had raised his voice to cut her off and lowered it as she fell silent. But it was Vance M’Gruder.

“You are so smart! You are soooooo smart! 0h, God, what a brilliant mind I married!”

“Sssh, Ullie. Don’t shout!”

“Maybe it was one of my Mexican boyfriends. How about that? Hah? How about that? And just what would you do about it?” Sweet voice of Ulka Atlund M’Gruder, bride of two months. And where was the sleepy remote smile? The placid acceptance? This was the malignancy of a taunting woman, an emasculating woman. He shushed her again and they moved off, out of range. I circled and discovered I had been near the path that probably led over to the guest house.

I admit feeling a certain dirty little satisfaction. It was as if the fox had made one leap just high enough and found out the grapes actually were sour. Here was this brown hard bundle of sport muscles trying to kid the calendar by wedding the glorious child bride, and now all his game-skills and all his money and his social standing were no defense at all against that killer-instinct which could launch her right at his most vulnerable point, his aging masculinity. Seeking paradise, he had embraced a sweet disaster.

The party dwindled. Laughter was drunken. A group sang “The Yellow Rose of Texas.”

I stood with Dana, saying goodnight, and Joanne Barnweather swayed against us, and said, ‘’You all come riding tomorrow morning, you hear? Got lovely horses. Jus’ lovely. Diana, sweetie, like I said, I got stuff’ll fit you. Don‘ worry ’bout it. Jus’ you all and us and the M’Gruders. You know what, Diana? Ulka liked you. She wants you ‘long. How about that anyhow? To find out she likes anybody. Crissake, we’ve known Vance forever and we love the sweet ol’ son of a bitch, and it was great he got loose from that limey dyke, believe me, but hones’ I can’t figure this Ulka. Sheese! A zombie, thass what she is. I shouldn’t talk like this, but I’m a wee little bit stoned, sweeties. What you do, you get here like nine in the morning, okay?“

On the way home Dana said, “Horses scare me.”

“How did you make out?”

“Didn’t you hear? She likes me. But I never would have been able to tell. Trav, that child has very limited reactions, really. I had a friend who got like that once. They said finally it was a hypothyroid condition. She sort of drifted, slept fourteen hours a night and couldn’t keep track of conversations. Believe me, dear, I tried. I really tried. I had about forty minutes alone with her. I tried to drop key words into it to get some kind of a reaction. After a long struggle I did find out that her husband played poker last Wednesday night. He loves a good poker session, she said. She said he didn’t come back until Thursday just before noon. I practically had to shake her to get that much out of her.”

I did not tell Dana I felt uneasy. I had the feeling the play was being taken away from us. I had made a move. Now either this was all innocence, or M’Gruder was making one. I resolved to handle myself as though he were making a move. Violence is the stepchild of desperation.

We both had to borrow gear. Glenn Barnweather’s pants were too short in the leg and big in the waist for me. Dana had a slightly different problem with Joanne’s twill britches.

The waist was fine and the length was good, but in thigh and bottom Dana filled them to bursting. The stable hands saddled the mounts while a rather shaky Joanne doled out therapeutic rum sours. Joanne assigned the mounts.

Dana, as a novice, got a rather plump and amiable mare. I was given a hammerhead buckskin with a rolling eye. He sensed a certain incompetence and tried to simultaneously nibble my leg and bash me into a post. I sawed him and kicked him into a dubious docility. By all odds, as we went clattering and snorting up a long baked slope, Joanne and Vance were the best of the group. Elbows in, heels correct, moving like a part of the animal. Glenn on a big red stallion was a close second. Ulka and I were about on a level. She looked glorious in pale blue denim with a white cowgirl hat on the back of her fair head, laced under her chin. Ulka seemed much merrier than on the night before. But Vance looked wretched. He had a greenish look under his tan. His eyes were bloodshot. With the air of a man under great tension he had knocked down three sours in rapid order before mounting.

Joanne chattered about the ranch and what they were eventually going to do with it. She pointed out where things would be. My damned horse kept trying to stumble to see if he could loosen me a little bit, then hurl me the rest of the way. For a time I rode beside Ulka. She dipped into a pale leather pouchpurse she wore looped around one wrist and got out cigarettes, leaned and gave me one, then leaned and after several near-misses, managed to give me a light. We smiled in wordless idiocy at each other.

Her big breasts bounced very firmly under the denim. Her classic nose was shiny. I lost her when my horse moved up from a canter into a full run. He didn’t seem to like a canter. He tended to drop back into a spine-shattering trot, or suddenly go like hell. He kept me busy. Suddenly everybody, at Glenn’s suggestion, went careening across rocky flats toward a distant stand of trees. My horse was beginning to take me a little more seriously. We were spread out. Dana was up with Glenn, hunched toward the horse’s neck, perhaps grasping at the saddle horn, pale pants bouncing. Joanne was at my left and a half a length ahead of me.

That was when Ulka Atlund M’Gruder gave her terrible, piercing scream. The horses had violent reactions. I went up with mine and came down with mine, then spurred him forward and caught at Dana just as she began to slip off the side of her mare’s neck, hauled her back toward the saddle. Glenn had taken off to the left.

I looked and saw M’Gruder’s horse running wildly in that direction, with a terrible rag-doll figure bounding along the rocks beside the rear hooves. It slipped free and lay still, wet-shiny with some patches of red. Ulka dismounted and, screaming again, ran stumbling across the rocks to drop beside the figure. I dropped off and knotted my barbarous steed to a dwarfed bush. Dana’s mare suddenly took off, heading for home. Joanne reined around and set out after Dana. I ran over to the body. It took one look to identify it forever as such. I pulled Ulka to her feet and walked her away from it. She was shuddering, over and over.

“He just leaned forward and slipped off,” she said in her thin little voice with just a trace of accent. “He slipped off but his foot was caught. He just leaned forward and slipped off. Oh my God.” She dropped onto her knees and haunches, face in her hands.

They brought the body back in a jeep and transferred it into an ambulance near the Barnweather house. The necessary red tape was handled with dispatch. We all agreed that M’Gruder had not seemed well. Ulka said that he’d had a stomach upset and had not slept. She rested in Joanne’s bedroom. Joanne and Dana were with her. Her father was notified.

He would arrive in Phoenix Sunday morning to take her back to San Francisco. The funeral would be there. M’Gruder’s lawyer was notified. Reporters hovered around, sitting in cars, looking irritable.

I sat in the terrace shade with Glenn Barnweather. He kept shaking his head and saying, “A hell of a thing, hell of a thing,” and then fixing himself another stiff bourbon.

“He certainly had everything to live for,” I said.

“Christ, you ought to see his place in Hawaii. Her place now, I guess. You know why it hits her so damned hard having it happen right now? I got woozy last night. If I’d gone to bed, I’d have been sick. I took a little walk. Sounds carry in the night. They were having one hell of a battle last night. Screaming at each other. I couldn’t hear the words. It went on a long time. You wouldn’t think she could get that worked up, would you? Maybe it was their first fight. I had the idea he was in charge. Maybe he thought so too. A man married two months and he can stay out all night for poker when there’s that item home in bed, you know he has to be boss.”

“Poker?”

“Down in town at the club last Wednesday. It’s a regular thing. All-night session once a month. He dropped about two thousand. I got some of it. I would have had more, but he came back pretty good toward the end.”

When you sell yourself something, and all the parts fit, you resent the hell out of having somebody kick the foundation out from under it. You want to grab the structure to keep it from falling down.

“He played all night long?” I said, looking at that big red earnest face, looking in vain for any hint of lie or evasion.

His fleeting grin was mildly lewd. “Well into the bright cruel light of day, McGee. I can understand anybody being startled, after a good look at that Swede bride. Maybe poor Vance had to take a breather. She looks like one hell of a project.”

My pretty tower fell down. Fallacious suppositions make a hell of a jangle when they hit the dirt, particularly when you dislike the person you’ve nominated. I’d heard one little piece of that quarrel too, a piece that could be related to the previous Wednesday night. Maybe I’d heard him asking her where she’d gone that night. And she taunted him about Mexican boyfriends…

“Did Ulka have a night on the town too?” I asked him.

“She was going to, but not what you’d call a real swinging situation. One of Joanne’s concert things. I miss every one I can. Cocktails and a dinner party and a concert party. It was all set up, and Ulka decided not to go, and Joanne went alone.”

“Maybe Ulka went out later. Did they have a rental car?”

“I loaned them the Corvette I bought Jo. It’s the three-sixty and it’s just too much car for her. It scares her. Vance was wondering about buying it and they could drive it to San Francisco and have the rest of their stuff shipped. Okay with me, but we didn’t get around to making the deal. It’s new. About fifteen hundred miles on it. It scares Jo. She gets absent-minded and gooses it and it scares her.”

“Was that Wednesday night the only time they’ve been apart?”

“He stuck pretty close to her.”

“They drive around in that car much?”

“We were keeping them too busy. What’s this all about?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Idle chatter.” After some small talk, he fixed himself another drink and ambled off into the house. I went. down the path to the guest house. The Sting Ray was in the carport, top down. I looked at the speedometer, and then walked slowly and thoughtfully back to the main house. I couldn’t tell Glenn what was on my mind. The toppled pieces of my theory suddenly looked good again. I was putting it back together, with a new name on it. The problem was motive. A weird guess stopped me in my tracks. I took long strides the rest of the way to the main house.

I whispered to Dana in the hallway. “Honey, just keep anybody from going into that bedroom. Make any excuse you can think of.”

“You look so strange, darling.”

“I feel strange.”

“Can you tell me?”

“When I’m sure. Then I can tell you.”

I went into Joanne’s bedroom and closed the door behind me. It was a long room. The draperies were drawn. It was early afternoon. Ulka reclined on a quilted yellow chaise with a fuzzy yellow blanket over her lap. Her slanted eyes were reddened. She was still in her stretch denim, and drifting on the airconditioned chill was the faint effluvium of saddle horse. She watched me with apparent unconcern as, without greeting, I pulled a hassock over close to the chaise and sat facing her. She had so much presence I had to remind myself she was, after all, just an eighteen-year-old girl, with the very last diminishing hint of a childish roundness in her cheeks.

Silence is a useful gambit, but I could not tell if it was having any effect at all upon her. “Well, Ullie,” I said.

“I will never let anyone else ever call me Ullie, all my life.”

“That’s very sentimental, Ullie. Very tender-hearted. I guess you are a very tender-hearted girl. You didn’t want your father upset, did you? Those pictures Ives took of your husband-to-be would have upset the professor. He would have forbidden the marriage. And you are a dutiful daughter. Ives was a very greedy fellow. He knew how badly Vance wanted you. He must have asked for a great deal of money. You know, it wasn’t smart of Ives to blackmail his previous client with the pictures he took, because Vance knew him. Ives must have decided Vance was incapable of violence.”

She frowned and shook her pretty head. “Ives? Pictures? Blackmail? Why do you come In here with this crazy talk?”

“Ives had to get it in one big chunk because as soon as you were married to Vance, there was no more leverage Ives could use. I guess Vance must have confessed the problem to you and showed you the pictures, perhaps to see if you would marry without Daddy’s permission, so he could save a bundle. It’s pretty sad and funny, Ullie. Your great respect for your father, and no respect for life.”

“You should not call me Ullie. I will not permit it.”

“Vance must have thought it was just a marvelous accident when Ives got killed. All he cared was that it got him off the hook, and when no confederate appeared to pick up where Ives had left off, he knew he was home free. He was going to have the girl, the gold ring and everything. His tragedy was in slowly finding out what a psychotic bitch you really are.”

“Who are you? You must be mad, entirely.”

“Let’s check it out together, Ullie. No one suspected Vance. Patty his ex-wife, was the only one in the world in a position to brood about it and begin to add two and two. And finally she got an answer and checked it out as closely as she could, and knew she had Vance right where she wanted him. She had every reason to want to get back at him. Believing Vance had killed Ives, and knowing that he could be a good big source of income to her for the rest of her life, she got in touch with him. I think we can figure out how that went wrong, Ullie. Vance could prove where he was on the night of December fifth. But where was his darling girl? Quite a husky girl. And someone who could get close to Ives and close to Patty at night, in lonely places, whereas Vance couldn’t have managed it. After you’d bashed Ives, Patty was a necessity. Clumsy murder is like housework, dear. Once you begin, you’re never really finished.”

“All this is so absurd, and so boring.”

“Patty would have persisted, and sooner or later Vance would have had to face the idea that you killed Ives. Maybe he couldn’t stomach that. Maybe he would have turned you in. He was finding out that his marriage wasn’t what he had counted on.”

“We couldn’t have been happier!”

“Ullie! Ullie! What about the Mexican boyfriends? Just little flirtations, I imagine. Just enough to keep him off balance, make him sweat.”

“How could you…” She stopped. I could guess she remembered how he had tried to shush her. Her breathing had gone slightly shallow and there were spots of color in flawless cheeks. I saw her recover herself with an effort, slowing and deepening her breathing.

“I don’t imagine Vance really wanted to play poker. You left unobserved, you got back unob served. Home free. But all it would take would be legwork, Ullie. One of those plodding methodical checks of every gas station along the way. You didn’t have the range. Some little joker is probably still dreaming about you, the most beautiful girl he ever saw, coming in out of the night in that Sting Ray.”

“So? I got very restless. I took a drive. I drive very fast. Can I help it if Vance got very suspicious of me, if he got very foolish ideas? You don’t know how it is… how it was. He wanted to be… so very young and lively and fun, to be like boys I know. But really he wanted things quieter. I could see strangers laughing at him. He should have had dignity? Certainly I wanted all that money and travel and clothes and fun. A professor has a shabby little life. All my life I knew the husband I would have, older and very rich and strong, to buy me everything and adore me, to sit and smile at me and admire me when I danced with all the young men, and trust me. When I’d found him I could not lose him. But every day was a contest to see… which one of us was younger. He did not understand how love should be a perfection. All he cared was how many times he could take me. He thought that was another way to be young. Why did he have to prove so much? I can tell about you. You would understand. You are older too, but not as old as he was. You are stronger, Travis McGee. There is the money now. I listened when you told Joanne about your funny little boat with the funny name.” She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them wide and looked at me. “You see, I have always… felt like a special person. As if my life would be… beautiful and Important. Things happen in strange ways. Vance was not the one. But suddenly you are here. It is strange. It is so strange the way we both have that little feeling it would be… what was planned for us all along.”

It was such a fabulous con job, I could feel the dirty dreams seeping into my mind. Help her cover up the mistakes she’d made. That was the unspoken offer. And you get the girl on a platter. Mmmm… trade the Busted Flush for a really good motor sailer, crew of three-captain, steward, deck hand-and see how many sheltered coves in the world’s oceans had really top-grade moonlight. And, of course, remember never to turn your back to her…

“Ullie, dear, we can’t get onto a new subject Until we finish the first one. I repeat your interesting statement. ‘When I found him I could not lose him.’ But he finally worked himself into a position where you had to lose him. I knew he was prying at you to find out where you’d gone, and I wondered why he thought you’d gone anywhere. Then Glenn told me about Vance thinking he might buy the car. Men who think of buying cars kick the tires and slam the doors and check the mileage. So he checked the mileage, and then he checked it again and found a great big inexplicable addition, taking it up to past two thousand. He hadn’t put it on, so you had, and Patty was dead in the same way Ives was dead, and he found himself in a pretty eerie marriage. I’ll make a little guess, Ullie. From the way he acted this morning, I don’t think he got much sleep. I think he kept digging at you until you opened up and told him the whole thing. Then after you told him, you realized he couldn’t exactly forgive and forget. He couldn’t handle it. It was too much. Maybe he felt so wretched he didn’t want to take any morning ride, but you knew that sooner or later you could maneuver it so that all the rest of us would be ahead of you two.”

“Could I be such a monster, darling? Could you believe that of me, really?”

That narrow leather pouchpurse was in the chaise beside her hip. She made a futile grab for it as I took it quickly. It was new. I examined it and found a little area still moist near the bottom seam. The leather thongs were strong and sturdy. Holding it by the thongs, I felt the deadly heft and balance of it. It was like a sock with a rock in the toe. It was a skull smasher, wicked as a medieval flail. I opened the pouch top, reached in and fumbled past lipstick, little comb, cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a rabbit. It was carved of some dense gray stone, sitting hunched, ears laid back, crude, a lump about two-thirds the size of a baseball.

“There is the leg work with the gas stations, and there are the miracles of modern chemistry, Ullie. The tiny little blotch of blood on this, with maybe a sweet little tuft of hubby’s hair stuck thereon, scrubbed off nicely right there in Joanne’s bathroom. But a police lab can prove it was human blood hereon, though they can’t type it. And they can dismantle the plumbing and find traces in the drain in there. I imagine that after Ives and Patty you disposed of the bags. They’d have been a lot messier.”

“That’s a very old bunny,” she said. “It’s primitive folk art from Iceland.”

“Ullie, a good enough lawyer might be able to plead you sick and buy the experts to back him up. Age would be a consideration, of course. And beauty. Maybe you are sick. I don’t know. Perhaps it is just an egoism so intense other people don’t seem quite real to you. Murder wouldn’t seem real then either, I suppose.”

She tilted her head. “Vance cried and cried. He hugged me and said he would get me the best…” She stopped, gnawed her thumb knuckle, looked at me in a speculative way. The admission had been made, and I could not tell if it was inadvertent, or meant to look inadvertent. “You can understand, Travis. There’s such a thing as thinking of the best for everybody concerned. I’d very much like to have you take me home to Father. I know you would like each other, very much. He is very old-fashioned, you know. He would want me to wait a year. Waiting isn’t too hard, is it, when you’re sure?”

I bounced the bunny in the palm of my hand, dropped it back into the lethal sack, yanked the drawstring tight. I could not even tell if she knew what a desperate game she was playing. She sat up, reached and closed her warm strong hand around my wrist.

I was planning the words to tell her I was blowing the whistle when I heard the door behind me open slowly. I realized, as I turned, I had spent a long time with the bereaved widow, and Dana might be having problems keeping people out.

Dana stared in at us from the doorway. “Joanne has to…”

“I’m through here, honey,” I said. “Tell Glenn to phone the law. This eerie child killed all three of them, and she made so many mistakes it won’t be hard to…”

I had made the elementary mistake of taking my eyes off Ulka. When the pouch bag was ripped out of my hand, I did not bother to turn around and see what she was going to do with it. I dived to my left, away from the chaise, but bunny-rabbit still glanced off my skull and came down onto my shoulder, smashing the collarbone. I sprawled on the floor, with my ears roaring and with lights spangling my vision, absolutely unable to avoid a second and mortal crunching if she had taken time.

But a vagueness moved past me with tiger pace, and I made a stifled whimper which was supposed to be a roar of warning to Dana. As vision cleared, as I got onto my knees, I saw Dana go down flat and heavy and hopelessly limp, onto her face. I heard a distant shout of query and alarm. I began the slow crawl toward my woman.

Fifteen

I HADa pretty fair concussion, just enough so that I had blackouts, and they kept shining lights into my eyes, testing my reflexes, and giving me mental arithmetic to solve. My right arm, taped across my chest, felt leaden, and the smashed bone caused enough pain to keep them sticking needles into me. It made me groggy, and I kept asking about Dana. Miss Holtzer is in surgery. Miss Holtzer is still in surgery. Miss Holtzer is in the recovery room.

Then it was Sunday morning and I was told that Miss Holtzer was doing as well as could be expected. It is a dim phrase. Who sets up the expectations?

Glenn Barnweather arrived with a big solemn face, a hundred sighs, a sad shaking of the head, a rich smell of bourbon to tell me Ulka was dead. I already knew that, but I didn’t know how.

“She took off in the Corvette, northeast out 65 like a goddam road race, and they still can’t figure how she got past as many curves as she did. They put a roadblock up there in the straight, way beyond Sunflower, one car blocking the road, and she came down on it at, they estimate, a hundred and thirty or better. Tried to cut around it. Hit the gravel, skidded, hit a rock, went two hundred and fifty feet through the air, hit and bounced and went over a rim and down a thousand-foot slope, bouncing all the way, and the final couple of hundred feet on fire. Like you told the cops, McGee, she must have been crazed with grief. That’s right, isn’t it? Crazed with grief.”

“Out of her head completely. Maniacal strength. You’ve heard of that.”

“I’ve heard of that. And Diana Hollis turns into Dana Holtzer. What goes on, old buddy?”

“We have to try to protect a lady’s reputation, don’t we?”

“Oh, sure. Hell, what you do is your own business, I guess, but Jo is going to come in here and really blow her stack.”

“I guess she checked with the Divers.”

“And Mary West, who wouldn’t tell her a damned thing. So she’s steaming.”

“Glenn, how about you finding out just how Dana is. I would appreciate it very much.”

“Glad to do anything for an old buddy who tells me every little thing,” he said. He came back in a half hour. “She’s one sick gal, Trav. They spent six hours picking little bits of bone out of the front of her brain, right here. And I find out she works for Lysa Dean. That’s going to intrigue hell out of Jo. They say Dana’s going to be okay.” He stood up. “You’ll be able to see her by tomorrow.”

More officials visited me. I told my tale of hysterical violence again, the young bride crazed by her terrible loss.

Joanne came in. She was furious. After fifteen minutes she was merely resentful, reluctantly accepting the fact there must be some good reason why she’d never find out all she wanted to know. She was decent enough to do some errands for me, like telling The Hallmark to save the room for me, like getting a phone put in, like getting a resident neurosurgeon to come in and give me some straight answers on Dana.

He said she should take two months’ rest and recuperation before going back to work. I had passed my tests and would be released Monday, unless I acquired some new symptoms. He said not to worry about how she’d act on Monday when I could see her for a few minutes. She would be dazed and semiconscious still, and might not know me.

After he left I was planning to try to locate Lysa Dean, but she phoned me, putting one very nervous quaver in the switchboard operator’s voice. Lysa was terribly dramatic and terribly concerned about everything, full of elaborate reassurances about hospital bills, but shrewd enough to play the whole thing as though I was Dana’s dear friend who had accompanied her on her little vacation. She said she and her whole entourage would stop off on the way back to the Coast, but she couldn’t be sure exactly when they could manage it.

On Monday I got dressed and paid my bill and had five minutes with Dana. She was in an adhesive turban, face bloated, shiny, streaked with bruise marks, slits revealing dazed eyes, mouth cracked and puffy. She seemed to know me. She squeezed my hand. I could not understand her mumblings. The nurse stood by and called time on me and sent me away. I moved back into The Hallmark. On Tuesday I saw her three times, morning, afternoon, evening, ten minutes each time. She knew me, and her diction was better, but she was unaware of what had happened to her and seemed in no hurry to find out. She had a tendency to drop off and start snoring in the middle of a vague remark, but she did like her hand held.

At midnight on Tuesday I was awakened by a phone call from an abjectly apologetic fellow telling me that Lysa Dean was in residence at the best hotel in town, and wanted to see me right away. I told him to tell Lysa Dean to go emote up a rope and hung up. I picked up my phone and told The Hallmark switchboard to leave me in peace until nine the next morning. The pinned bone made dressing too much of a problem. If she wanted me, she knew where I was.

Just as I got back to sleep, forty minutes later, there was a brisk knock at my door. Muttering various Anglo-Saxon expressions, I got up and adjusted my sling and went in my shorts to the door. A portly chap in a black suit entered, followed by a Hallmark porter carrying the luggage which Dana and I had checked on to New York and couldn’t retrieve in time.

“I’m Herm Louker,” he said with an air of imparting information any fool would know. When I looked blank he said, “From the agency.” It was supposed to explain everything. He dipped two fingers into a breast pocket, pulled out two crisp dollars, crackled them very loudly as he handed them to the porter. Herm looked somewhat like a penguin. He had the same walk. He wore a hairpiece, with a deep wave. His eyes were cigar holes in a hotel towel. He had gold jewelry. He settled himself into a chair, sliced the end off a cigar with a gold knife, lit it with a gold lighter.

“Let me make myself entirely clear, Mr. McGee. The client’s interest is my interest. Aside from loving that little woman personally, because she is all doll, through and through, what I got in my mind is a maximum protection of her interests and mine and the industry’s.” He held up a fat warning hand. “In addition to that, before we go further, I’ve got also a nervous stomach, and I want to know no more than I already know. I have been with her in Miami, New York and Chicago, and she was a great little trouper, performing in every way. They love that girl all over America. She is all star.”

“So I’d better know how much you know.”

“Merely that there has been, we shall say, an indiscretion. Show business people, Mr. McGee, are high-spirited and hot-blooded, and some people can take advantage. What we have going is an unfortunate situation where some character wants to give her a rough time. What the little lady feels is that after you started to perform, then you went off on a tangent. Time has been wasted. We got certain information from you in New York. One Samuel Bogen wanted already by the cops. There is no picture. Fingerprints only. A complete description which could be ninety-five thousand guys including me, almost. So we laid on special guards with that description in mind. Nothing in New York. Nothing in Chicago. No contact. As I get it, certain financial inducements were offered. Our star gets nervous, Mr. McGee. What we need now is some way to bring this to a head. If you can solve that, the little lady says she will live up to her end of your deal. I do not want to know your deal, believe me.”

“I had one idea worked out.”

“So?”

“I wanted to be part of it. I’m not in top shape at the moment.”

“So I see.”

“It depends on several things. Could you set up a time for her arrival at Los Angeles by air and give it a lot of publicity around Los Angeles?”

“But naturally. It’s done every day.”

“The man who is after her is disturbed. I think that except for one trip to Vegas, he’s stayed in the Los Angeles area. He might come to the airport. He might be waiting at her house. He may want money. He may want to kill her. He might not even know which he wants.”

“Please. It gives me cramps.”

“You have to know a few things, Mr. Louker. We don’t want to endanger your star. You could arrange a reasonably good facsimile?”

“The right size, right dye job, right clothes, dark glasses, makeup, a quick study in the way she waves and walks. Sure. Ten minutes on the phone I’ve got one, believe me.”

“But she gets maximum protection too.”

“I would insist.”

“Now here is the delicate point, Mr. Louker. If this Bogen is picked up, the cops are going to know the name he is using and the address he is using in about three minutes. Somebody has to be ready to move very quickly. At that address are going to be some things which should be destroyed, or maybe your star’s career goes down the drain. Somebody has to be smart and quick.”

“Are you going to give me more cramps?”

“Photographs, Herm. Of your star in a circus. A mob scene. If they got out it might not dent her too badly as long as she stays big at the box office. But two dog pictures in a row could cook her.”

He got up and tiptoed about, patting his stomach, moaning softly. There was a lot of stomach. It started under his chin and descended in a long penguin curve to his knees.

“How can we get the pictures?” he demanded, more of himself than of me.

“Get a very nimble lawyer, and charge Bogen with stealing them from her. Get them impounded for her identification, then returned to her for destruction, and give him some impressive pieces of cash to hand out if he has to. Hell, you people have given out little gifts other times.”

He studied me. “I know you from someplace, maybe? Like in Rome with Manny?”

“No.”

“It will come to me. We’ll work it out somehow.” He took a wad of currency out and counted out a thousand dollars. “She said expenses. You can sign the receipt okay?”

I managed. He wished me well and left, looking gastric.

Dana wasn’t very responsive the next morning. After I left her room the head nurse on the floor intercepted me. She was wearing a curious expression, as if she had just discovered that if she flapped her arms hard enough she could fly.

“Lysa Dean came to see her.”

“Was she conscious then?”

“Oh no. Miss Dean was very shocked. She was very upset. I think she has a very warm heart.”

“She must have.”

“She left this for you, sir.”

I opened it with one hand on my way down the hall. Heavy blue paper, scented. Sprawling backhand in blue ink. “I must see you. Please. L.”

The cab took me there. The desk said sorry, she isn’t registered here, sir. I gave them my name. Oh. Go right up, sir. She has the west wing on the fourth floor. A cop type guarded the wing. He glanced at the sling and spoke my last name with a question mark after it. Last door on the right, he said.

She sat on a dressing table bench in a white robe. A man was saying rude words over a phone. A thin man was fixing her hair. A girl in glasses was reading her a script aloud in a nasal monotonous voice. She shooed them all out.

“Dear McGee,” she said. “Your poor arm, dear. Oh my God, the way Dana looked. It broke my heart. It really did. I actually wept.”

“That’s nice.”

“Please don’t be sullen. We’re going to do what you suggested to Herm. They’re going to fly a girl in. I’m going to hide out here like a thief, dear. God, things are going to get into the damnedest mess without Dana. They’re going to pot already. How could she?”

“I guess it was just thoughtlessness.”

She studied me, head cocked on the side. Then she laughed aloud. “Oh, no! Really? But when I kidded you in Miami, I never really thought you could actually get her. You must be very damned…”

“You would be doing me one of the world’s greatest favors to please shut your mouth, Lee. There’s been a lot of dying done. My shoulder aches. Dana is worth ten of you.”

She went back and sat on the bench. “At least I know why you two were futzing around out here on my expense money. Making the fun last, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Damn you, tell me the real reason.”

“The man who took you for a hundred and twenty thousand was murdered. It looked as if M’Gruder might have done it and could be arrested for it sooner or later. Then that house party would have figured in the trial. I wanted to check it out.”

The quick red fox stared at me with foxy eyes, instantly aware of the implications. She fingered her throat. “Off the hook on that, eh?”

“Yes. And I have a hunch you’ll be in the clear on the other too. I wonder about you, Lee. Take a look at that house party list. Nancy Abbott is beyond hope. Vance and Patty and Sonny Catton are dead. The photographer is dead: Poor little Whippy is trade for the butch.”

“Really? What is all this? The hand of God? Punishment? Don’t be an ass, McGee. Sometimes the swingers go quicker. Maybe because they don’t have their feet braced. If that kind of little fun-party could kill, honey, lower California would be shrinking. You know, you do drag a little. Have you noticed it? Oh, hell, I don’t want to fight you. It’s going to be weeks and weeks before Dana can get back on the ball. That’s what they told me. I’ll keep her on salary, of course. And there’s a sick benefit thing she’s entitled to. Scotty will check that all out for her and take care of it. I think…”

Herm came to the door and beckoned to her. She excused herself and went to him. They talked a few moments in low tones. He left and she came slowly back to me. “There’s a meeting I don’t dare miss. Damn it. I did want to see Dana, at least once more. Herm is going to have to smuggle me into town and bring the stand-in along later. McGee, my darling, I’ve got a thousand things to do…”

“You sent for me. Remember?”

She snapped her fingers. “Of course. Darling, you got the thousand expenses? You understand that our deal was to get me completely free and clear. Right? It’s all or nothing, you understand. If your plan works, you come to see me and we’ll settle up. All right? Darling, I do love Dana like a sister, but sick people depress me so. Could you find some nice little dude ranch or something for her, and a woman to take care. I’ll have Victor Scott work out the money end with you. Would you mind terribly? After all, you must find each other attractive. I’m entirely clear publicity-wise on this end because, thank God, there isn’t a shred to link me to Vance in any way.” She patted my face. “Be a dear and take care of our girl. Give her my love, and bring her back to me when she’s truly healthy again.”

On Thursday afternoon the improvement in Dana was astonishing. The puffiness was gone, but there were saffron marks of the bruises. She wore lipstick. She was propped up. Her smile of greeting was shy.

They let me have an hour with her. She was anxious to know what had happened. I knew it might tire her, but I had to brief her before some official visited her and asked questions. I caught her up to date, including the plan to trap Bogen.

When I got back to The Hallmark at four that afternoon, there was a message to call a Los Angeles operator. When it went through, Lysa came on the phone, yapping with glee and relief. “McGee, darling? It worked, you shrewd, shrewd man! Our own people got him, and took away the nasty little gun he was going to shoot me with. Shoot the stand-in, I mean. And they went to his nasty little rooms and got all the photographs, and then they turned him and his nasty little gun over to the law. My God, I didn’t even know the terrible tension I was under. It’s such a relief.”

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you asked about Dana?”

“Give me time, for God’s sake! All right. How is she?”

“Much, much better.”

“That’s fine. That’s good to hear.”

“You and I have a little accounting to do.”

“I know that. Damn it, what makes you so sour? Give me a chance. What’s today? Thursday. Let me look at my book.” I waited five minutes and she came back on the line. “Darling, I’ll be home Monday afternoon. You fly in and come talk to me about it.”

“Talk to you about it?”

“Darling, you don’t exactly have a contract, you know. And a frightened person can make some very rash promises. Technically, you really weren’t in at the kill, were you?”

“Monday afternoon,” I said and hung up. I did not know why I had been sour with her. Something was wrong, and I did not know what it was.

On Sunday afternoon I found out what my instincts had been trying to tell me. The nurse and I helped Dana into the wheelchair and I rolled her to the big sun room, to a private corner.

“Here’s the way I have it lined up,” I told her. I sat holding her hand. “Ten days before they spring you, then say a week or so more before you can travel, honey. So I tote you east, get you settled aboard, and after a few days we can go cruising. How does that sound?”

She gently, firmly pulled her hand away from mine. She looked away from me. “Travis, you have been very good to me.”

“What’s the matter?”

“It was all… mixed up and crazy. It wasn’t me, really. I don’t know how to tell you. I’m not like that. I’m married. I don’t even know how I could have been so… so silly. I think it was because of working for her, maybe. I’m not going back to her.”

I put my fingertips under her chin and turned her head and made her look at me. I looked at her until she flushed and twisted her head away. She meant it. A new conception. You could get a hit on the head that could knock love out of you for good and all. When their eyes go that dead for you, there’s no way to ever get back. I knew what my instincts had been trying to tell me.

“You don’t have to stay around,” she said. “I mean, I’m used to looking after myself. I’ll be fine, really. I do want to thank you for everything. I feel so sorry about… giving you the wrong idea and a lot of false hopes and…”

“You can still be honest, can’t you?”

“Of course.”

“How do you feel about my coming to see you here, Dana?”

She hesitated, then lifted her chin a half inch. “I d-dread it, Travis. I’m terribly sorry. It just keeps reminding me of something I’d rather forget.”

Then all that was left us was the goodby ritual, which was, after the details of what to do with her belongings, and my promise to send a nurse to wheel her back to her room, a handshake. McGee, the great lover. This was one I wanted to keep. No, not this one. I didn’t even know this one. The one I wanted to keep was the one Ullie had bashed on her way to go kill herself. This Dana wanted to forget that Dana. And damn well soon would. So shake hands with your darling and say goodby and try not to see the evident relief she tries to hide.

The cab deposited me in front of Lysa Dean’s iron gates on Monday afternoon. The Korean let me through the gates. The maid let me into the house and then disappeared. The house was as silent as when I had been there with Dana. The big oil portraits of Lysa Dean stared emotionally at me through the halfgloom of draperied sunlight.

I roamed and plinked two notes out of the gold and white piano. Lysa Dean came swiftly into the room, in black knit pants and a white silk overblouse, an effective combination to go with gold-red hair in a room of whites and blacks and golds. She wore woolly white slippers and carried a white envelope in her hand. She hurried to me, stretched up to kiss me with the faked sweet-shyness of a welcoming child, and took me by my good hand to a vast couch in a shadowed alcove.

“How is dear Dana?” she asked.

“Marvelously improved.”

“When can she come back to work, dear? I really need her, desperately.”

“She’ll have to take it easy for a while.”

“McGee, darling, do use your influence on her. Tell her Lysa needs her sooooo much.”

“I’ll tell her that the very first chance I get.”

“You are a huge old sweetie. Now what about the photos I gave you in Miami?”

“I’ve destroyed the ones I had made, with your face blanked out. When I get back, I’ll destroy the other ones… unless you want them.”

“God, I don’t ever want to see them again. Darling, they say that little Bogen is way way off. If he’d tried to fire his rusty little gun, it would have blown his hand off. They are going to put him away.”

“So now your life is all neatened up, Miss Dean. And you’ll get to marry your dear friend. Congratulations. Is that my money you keep hanging onto?”

She handed me the envelope. I fumbled it open, and saw that it was light, and found that it counted up to ten thousand. It wouldn’t count one inch past that. Before I could get the first word out, she was hanging onto me, laughing and teasing, saying, “Now darling, do be realistic, after all! I gave you all that nice travel money, and sent you off with quite a handsome and exciting gal, and you had some exciting and delicious adventures, all on the house. I’m really not made of money, darling. Taxes are fantastic. Really, when you think of it, I think you are doing terribly well out of this, and some of my advisors would think I was out of my head to give you all this.”

As she was talking she got the money out of my hand and slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket, and was going quite directly and efficiently to work on me, with the quickness of a lot of little kissings, and an arching and presentation of all the celebrity curves and fragrances, a lot of cleverness of little hands, and a convincing steaminess of breath and growing excitement, worming her way astride my lap.

This was the artist at work, at the work she knew best, operating from a life-long knowledge of the male animal, and quite convinced, apparently, that a good quick solid bang would send the man away too happy to care about being shorted, too dazed to object. Already she was beginning to work her way out of those soft knit pants and simultaneously beginning the little pressures which were supposed to topple me over onto my back on the big couch under a picture of the lady herself.

I got my good left arm in between us and my palm flat against her wishbone, then abruptly straightened my arm, sending her catapulting back, scrambling, slipping on the smooth hard terrazzo, sitting hard on a white furry rug and riding it back like a sled to end up under another picture so soulful the artist had indicated a halo effect.

She bounded up, hair masking one eye, yanking the knit pants up over the white behind. “What the hell!” she squalled. “Jesus Christ, McGee, you could have bust my tail bone!”

I was standing up, fixing my sling, starting toward the door.

“It’s okay, Lee baby,” I said. “I’ll take the short count. You don’t have to try to sweeten it. It wouldn’t mean one damn thing to you, and it would mean just a little less than that to me.”

I left amid a shrieking of ten-letter words, and I was hastened on my way by a hail of elephants. She had a collection. She threw fast, but not well.

I crunched down the finest grade of brown gravel, past sprinkler water pattering on fat green leaves. The Korean let me out. I could feel the meager money-weight in my jacket pocket. I stopped and took my arm out of the sling and stuffed the sling in a pocket. The arm did not feel good swinging, so I tucked a thumb in my belt.

I walked and thought of what a weird way to lose a good woman. I saw old men carefully driving lookalike cars with names like Fury and Tempest and Dart. Through a fence I saw a quintet of little girls dashing in and out of the silvery spray of a sprinkler, shrilling. A dog smiled at me.

What a ridiculous way to lose a woman. They do not like pedestrians in that neighborhood. Polite cops stopped, asked polite questions, and politely drove me to the nearest taxi stand. I got into the cab and the only place to go was my hotel room, and I didn’t want to go there, but I couldn’t think of anything else.

When we stopped for a light I saw a magic store, and I asked the driver if he thought they might sell love potions in there. He said that if I was looking for action, just say the word.

I went back to the hotel, and seventy minutes later I was on the Miami jet.

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Table of Contents

Travis McGee #4 The Quick Red FoxJohn D. MacDonaldTHE QUICK RED FOX