Where Is Janice Gantry?

by John D. MacDonald

  I heard Pat’s damp friendly chuckle. “You get any more of those ideas, Mr. Cal, you just let me know, hear?”

  McAllen, after he pushed the button to break the connection, turned to me with a slight look of distaste. “Is that man any good?”

  “He’s average. There’s better ones and worse ones, Cal.”

  “Who is this Maurice Weber?”

  “Nobody knows much about him. He doesn’t what you call mingle. Or his wife either. I think it was about four years ago a man whose name I can’t remember came down and bought that piece of Gulf to bay land, four hundred feet of Gulf beach and bay frontage, about eight hundred feet deep. The land went for a hundred and ten thousand, I believe. That man had working drawings with him, and he put the job out on bid, and it went for a hundred and twenty-five thousand I think. He stayed right down and supervised the job, and let a contract for all the plantings and the boat basin and dock on the bay side. Just as everything was finished, a couple arrived in a big green Continental full of luggage and moved in. When a few neighbors tried to pay the usual call they got neatly brushed off. Mr. and Mrs. Weber had not arrived yet. The couple in residence were the servants who were getting the house ready. And when the Webers did arrive, it would perhaps be best not to pay any social calls, due to Mr. Weber’s health.”

  “They apparently don’t have to scrimp.”

  “You haven’t heard it all. The agent furnished the house with the help of the servant couple. A man arrived with a fifty-four foot Matthews, brand new, and he turned out to be a combination boat captain and gardener, a rare and wonderful combination. When the whole place was ready, even to cut flowers and beds turned down, I’ve heard, Mr. and Mrs. Weber appeared and moved in. And they’ve been there ever since.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Michigan, I believe.”

  “What did he do?”

  “The local word is that he was an investment banker.”

  “Are they old?”

  “Yes and no. The few people who have gotten a good close look at him say he’s in his middle fifties. His wife is supposed to be breathtaking, and in her early thirties.”

  “Haywood got friendly with her somehow?”

  “That’s the gossip.”

  “And then Mr. Weber caught him while he was trying to open a safe?”

  “He wasn’t trying to open it. It was set into the back of a closet in the dressing room off the master bedroom. He had a big pry bar. He was tearing the wall down. He apparently intended to pry the safe loose and carry it out. As I remember the story in the papers, it weighed less than a hundred pounds empty. It was a barrel job, small but damn sturdy.”

  “Everyone was away from the house?”

  “It was late in the afternoon on a nice day in March, two years and four months ago. The Webers had gone out on the boat, with their hired captain. It was a Thursday, the house servants’ day off. Presumably the servants had locked the house. But he had not broken in.”

  “And he knew exactly where the safe was.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he had either wormed that information out of the Weber woman, or she was in partnership with him.”

  “I thought you were in corporation law.”

  “The logic, or illogic of human behavior, Sam, has damn little to do with the law. Why wasn’t all this brought out?”

  “Who by, Cal? He made no fuss when they came and got him. He would permit no attempt to raise bail for him. He sat in a cell for three weeks until Circuit Court was in session, and he pleaded guilty and they sent him away.”

  “How come he got caught? I know all this was in the papers, but I paid no attention to it. I didn’t know any of the people involved.”

  “He had bad luck. Ordinarily the servants wouldn’t be back until ten o’clock. The Webers had left the dock right after lunch, planning to be back at about five-thirty. He admitted entering the house at quarter to three. He could see the boat basin from the window in the dressing room. He had parked the agency car he was using where it couldn’t be seen from Orange Road or from their boat should they return earlier. But at about two-thirty one of the diesels conked out on the boat. Weber had his man turn back and leave it at Jimson’s Marina and stay with it to get it repaired. The Webers taxied home. They arrived a little after four. Charlie was too busy to hear the cab. Weber found the front door unlocked. When he walked in he heard somebody in the bedroom wing making a hell of a noise. He got a gun from his study and went in and caught Charlie hard at work. He disarmed him. Mrs. Weber called the law. And that was that. It was such a shock to Mrs. Weber that she took to her bed.”

  “She did indeed?” He stood up with a sudden restlessness. “But this gets us no place. Millhaus has been out there. Janice is not … a devious sort of person.”

  “I can’t get used to hearing her called Janice.”

  “Sis is an absurd name for her. It has a connotation of … sexlessness.”

  By a quick struggle I managed to squelch all the too obvious comments that drifted to the top of my mind. “I guess it does at that.”

  “She likes me to call her Janice. She says it makes her feel girlish and helpless.”

  “She’s pulled too much weight too long. She needs somebody to lean on.”

  “I would very much like … that privileged position, Sam.”

  And right then he didn’t look either cold or colorless. I saw more jaw than I had noticed previously, and his hands looked more powerful and capable than I would have guessed had I not noticed them.

  He put one of those hands out and said, “I’ve disliked you intensely for months, Sam. Ever since she told me about … your affair.”

  “Wouldn’t she, though? She’s incapable of hiding anything. It was stupid to tell you, but it’s her way of leveling.”

  “You’re not the way I pictured you in this situation, Sam, so maybe none of it was the way I thought. You do value her?”

  “Very much, Cal. She wants marriage, you know. And kids.”

  For half a moment he lost control of the shape of his mouth. “We’ve got to find her, Sam. And I don’t know … what to do.”

  “I heard the local news. And I heard the news out of St. Pete. It’s one of those things that people get excited about, Cal. The papers should be out soon. It’ll be big. She’s got hundreds of friends. There’ll be a lot of pressure on the police to find her. A lot of people will be looking, Cal.”

  After I left Cal McAllen’s office I knew it was time for one of my rare visits to D. Ackley Bush. I phoned him from my office desk.

  “Samuel! For God’s sake, my dear boy! Who am I to deny anyone willing to voluntarily expose himself to intelligent conversation? A meeting set for this evening has been canceled, so I am entirely free. I have been working again at my Yoga. Kishi is irreparably Oriental, but he seems to think it a kind of madness. He mutters and slams pots about. When can I expect you?”

  “Five-thirty okay?”

  “Splendid! The glasses will be chilled and ready.”

  It was almost exactly five-thirty when I turned into Ack’s driveway. For the past thirty years—which would be approximately half his life—he has lived in the same bachelor beach house toward the south end of Horseshoe Key. When he came down and built it, there were only three cottages on the whole south half of the Key. A narrow causeway and a one lane plank bridge led out to the Key from the mainland. It was then very much the same as it had been when Caloosa Indians had encamped there, building their ceremonial mounds, unaware of the Spanish fist hovering over them. The interior of that house was one of the most vivid memories of my childhood, the crackle of fat pine in the fireplace of coquina rock, the leathery, musty smell of the books on rainy days, full of excitement, adventure, heroes.

  Ack swung the door wide for me, beaming his pleasure. He is a round, pink, bouncing little man, with a Carl Sandburg thatch of white hair. He seems full of the scrubbed delight and harmless energy of a happy child, but there is a
wicked light of irony in his bulging blue eyes which gives but faint warning of a tongue which serves him as mace, bludgeon, sabre and scalpel.

  He herded me into the living room, like a range dog penning a seed bull, into that low-ceilinged place of books and paintings, sculpture and ceramics. The sepulchral, emaciated Kishi—who is somewhere between thirty-eight and one hundred and eight—trudged in with the frosty treasure of the chilled martini pitcher, gave me a rare smile that came and went so quickly I could not be certain I had not imagined it, filled the chilled glasses ceremoniously, and took the pitcher back out to put it on ice. I knew he would keep returning with it at those measured intervals he considered correct.

  Ack said, “We were to meet to devise some new way to terrorize our County Commissioners, the poor things. But it had to be postponed. Are these dry enough for you, Samuel?”

  “Just right. You’re still up to here in the world’s work, Ack?”

  “Every gadfly do-gooder busybody board and committee within fifty miles. Somebody has to be tireless, my boy, or the fast buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet. And with my left hand I strike the occasional blow of culture.”

  Suddenly the habitual animation in his face died away and he looked as morose as I had ever seen him. “But lately, Samuel, I have attacks of futility. Maybe there have been too many physical intimations of morality. I find myself wondering what the hell I have done with my life. I acquired too many graduate degrees too quickly and burned out a few little switches and came down here three decades ago to rest for one year, and write a book. I never finished it. I’ve even stopped mentioning it. The question of human function does open up a philosophical question as yet unanswered by the race—what is a valid pattern of existence? Thank God for the buccaneer ancestor who solved my money problems. I would have been very inept at making money, you know. These days I look around me and count failures. You are one of them, you know.”

  “Thanks so much, Doctor Bush.”

  “Seriously. The year you were born was the year I began renting your father’s bay boat and his services as guide and captive audience. On one of his garrulous days, he would say three whole sentences. A marvelous man. He endured all the clatter of my compulsive chatter. He was amused by me. We became close and special friends in that curious way possible only to two men who have absolutely nothing in common.”

  “Except fishing.”

  “Ah, we killed monsters in those days! My regard for him was so high that I wished to open up the wide world of the mind and imagination to you, his only child. This is a most difficult task when the child is incurably muscular, good at games, gifted with the reflexes of a hungry weasel. But when you became old enough so that I could tell you had a good mind, flexible and sufficiently tough, I thought I had won the battle.”

  “This was the place to come on rainy days, Ack.”

  Kishi drifted silently in and refilled the long-stemmed glasses.

  Ack shrugged. “A partial victory. I might have won. But when they were—drowned, both of them—you had just turned fifteen, hadn’t you?”

  “On Friday. They drowned on Sunday. I was supposed to go along, but I wanted to stay home and ride the motor bike he built for me.”

  “That was when I lost, Samuel. Thought became too painful for you. It was easier to find the exhaustion and sleep that came through the hard use of the brute muscle. So, in your muscle years, you lost your true image of yourself. You know that, I hope. You are an imposter, Samuel. You treat the world to a careful picture of the retired, slightly bitter professional athlete, large, insensitive, uncomplicated.” He smiled. “It is such a waste, you know, playing a life role merely because it feels comfortable and undemanding. Growth is a function of conflict.”

  “I’ve had all the conflict I can use, Ack.”

  “At thirty? Really, my dear boy!”

  “How much have you grown in thirty years?” I regretted it as soon as I asked. It inferred a contempt I did not feel. It categorized him as a ludicrous little man.

  “Touché,” he said, but his smile looked like a clever makeup job.

  “I didn’t mean that, Ack. You touched a sore spot, so I hit back.”

  “With excellent aim, my dear boy. I have a shallow, pyrotechnic, unchanging brilliance with which I awe the peasants, but there is no solidity, no basic texture, hence no capacity for creative growth. That is precisely why I never went back. I nearly destroyed myself trying to keep up with the Joneses in the academic world. Here, you see, I can be Jones. It is very satisfying. I never quite found the time to settle down and write the book which would have … established my basic triviality. I am in hiding, just as you are, but with better cause. Now that we have taken off our masks, my dear boy, we should be more at ease with each other.”

  “I don’t like to hear you low rate yourself, Ack.”

  “Don’t sit there glooming at me like a ruptured buffalo, Samuel. I am not emotional about my defects, I assure you. When I feel inadequate, I merely go out and harpoon some public official, winch him up onto dry land and gut him in public. It’s a cruel pastime, but mine own. This month, in a sublime exercise of stupidity, they are trying to quietly turn over a public park to the State Road Department, an organization dedicated to stamping out every green and growing thing. We shall flay them briskly, salt them down and then, on their promise to behave, give them permission to climb back into their own skins, like donning winter underwear.”

  I could see that through a determined effort he was regaining his good spirits. “I have come to you, Ack, because you know everything about everybody.”

  The comment delighted him. “It’s all very simple, my dear boy. I have insatiable curiosity, an infallible memory, uncomparable persistence and a fondness for intrigue and espionage. And thirty years of exercising these talents locally, remember. But I am not a common gossip. I am an uncommon gossip. I store up the best tidbits so I can use them to implement my civic projects. I prefer to call it well-organized blackmail.”

  “Do you know that Sis Gantry is missing and the police are looking for her?”

  He was surprised and shocked by the news. He hadn’t heard any newscasts or seen the evening paper, and for once, no one had called him. As I started to tell him an edited version of the whole thing, I suddenly realized that I was going to feel a lot better if I told someone the complete story. So I paused and started to go back to the very beginning of it, which was my relation with Sis …

  “We can skip all that history, Samuel. I am aware of the precise period when you were indulging yourself with the almost too obvious charms of that husky maiden, and I suspect that under the circumstances it was a therapeutic venture for both of you. The Gantry family was indignant, but fortunately you and the lady went at it in such a sensibly private and circumspect way that you never had to discuss it with her pack of muscular brothers. And you two were capable of ending the romp without ending the friendship, a rare and refreshing sign of mutual maturity.”

  “How the hell would you …”

  “Even the Florence County raccoons are in my service, dear boy. Please continue.”

  I enjoyed astonishing him with the report of Charlie Haywood’s visit. I covered every significant event, including my association with LeRoy Luxey and my talk with Cal McAllen. Kishi’s fourth silent visit made me aware of a slight numbness around the mouth, a familiar syndrome based on Ack’s martini formula. The Gulf rested silently against the white beach. The sun was down and, through the panes of the large casement window I could see a small patch of the sea, gray-purple in what was left of the light, stretching out to a narrow crimson band across the horizon.

  “It is a complex equation,” Ack said, “with so many factors missing it cannot yet be solved, but we can have the inescapable feeling that the answer, when we find it, will bear a relation to the Weber menage.”

  “Your neighbors?”

  “Not exactl
y. They are a quarter-mile south of here. And not exactly neighbors of anyone, Samuel. The semantics of the word imply some form of human contact. A morning nod, at least. But even that is missing.”

  “Ack, do you know anything about them?”

  “Do I know anything useful about them? This intrigues me enormously, Samuel. I have tried to focus my lense upon them. They are a challenge. They have a fetish for privacy. It has the stature of mania. The house and grounds and plantings were designed to achieve maximum privacy. They have been in residence a little less than four years. They have slept in that house every night, so far as I know. They have gone nowhere. The mode of existence is abnormal, to say the least. Most abnormal for monied people. I can tell you some odd things.”

  “If you ever get around to it, Ack.”

  He ignored me. He had gotten up to pace thoughtfully back and forth in a restricted area between crowded bookshelves. He was in his habitual costume for all informal events, a Churchillian jump suit with D.A.B. embroidered on the breast pocket. This one was slate blue. He orders them from some California outfit, and has them in all possible shades.

  “Mail, for example. They receive a wide range of magazines, but not one of them is specialized, indicative of any field of interest. And they get the junk mail, of course. The circulars. Early each month Mr. Weber receives a registered letter, special delivery, from Chicago. About twice a month Mrs. Weber receives a personal letter addressed in a female hand, mailed from Richmond, Virginia. They receive no other mail. Have they no friends, relatives, business contacts?”

  “The question is rhetorical.”

  “Finances. Land and construction were paid for by cashier’s check drawn on a Chicago Bank. They maintain no local bank account. The servants pay all local bills in cash. Even when he purchased a second automobile …”

  “I heard about that. It made people think Charlie was after the cash.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “Maybe he was after the cash, but not for the obvious reasons. I don’t know. Keep talking.”