The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

  “Problem?”

  “I don’t know. Girl finds she can get turned way, way on, big as can be, with a nice guy that comes along. So she’s kind of a lousy person.”

  “Glandular type, eh?”

  “A lousy nympho, maybe.”

  “Then, I’d have to be number eight hundred and fifty-six or something.”

  She lay in thought for a moment and then giggled. “Counting Rick, you got one figure right. The six. The other four, I was married to one and engaged to two and head over heels with the other. Compared to some of the R.N.’s I work with and was in training with, I’m practically a nun. But my old grandma would faint dead away.”

  “Nymphs are concerned only with self, honey. They lose track of who the guy is. Don’t know or care. A robot would suit them fine.”

  “I knew you were you, all along. Even more so when it got to the best part. What does that make me?”

  “Serendipitous.”

  “Is that dirty?”

  “No. That’s clean.”

  She stretched, yawned, shifted closer. “I keep wanting to say I love you, darling. That’s for my conscience, I guess. Anyway, I like the hell out of you.”

  “Same here. It’s the afterglow that proves it worked right.”

  She pushed herself up and knee-walked down and sorted out sheet and blanket and pulled them up over us, straightening and tucking and neatening, and then curled again, shivering once, fists and forehead against my chest, knees in my belly, her cheek resting on my underarm, with my other arm around her, palm against her back, fingertips wedged under the relaxed weight of her rib cage against the undersheet.

  I moved back and forth across the edge of sleep, thinking of that afterglow, trying to explain it to myself. With the mink, the musk ox, the chimpanzee, and the human, the proper friction at the proper places if continued for x minutes will cause the nerve ends to trigger the small glandular-muscular explosive mechanics of climax. And afterward there is no more urge to caress the causative flesh than there would be to stroke the shaker that contained the pepper that caused a satisfying series of sneezes.

  So in the sensual-sexual-emotional areas each man and each woman has, maybe, a series of little flaws and foibles, hang-ups, neural and emotional memory pattern and superstition, and if there is no fit between their complex subjective patterns, then the only product you can expect is the little frictional explosion, but when there is that mysterious fit, then maybe there are bigger and better explosions down in the ancient black meat of the hidden brain, down in the membraned secret rooms of the heart, so that what happens within the rocking clamp of the loins at that same time is only a grace note, and then it is the afterglow of affection and contentment that celebrates the far more significant climax in brain and heart.

  Her voice came from far off with an echo chamber quality, pulling me back across the edge of sleep. “… like they say female moths give off some kind of mating signal. Gees, I don’t bat my eyes and wiggle my behind and moisten my lips. But the bed patients make grabs at me. And the deliveryman from the dry cleaner. And Mr. Tom Pike, last spring.”

  “Pike?”

  “While his wife was in the hospital for a couple of days of observation after she emptied the pill bottle. It was in the office while she was waiting for Dr. Sherman to come back from an emergency. There was nothing crude about the pass, you understand. Tom Pike is a very tasty and very careful guy. And I felt so darn sorry for him, and I respect him so much for the way he’s handling the whole mess with Maureen … I almost got involved just out of pity.”

  “When was all that?”

  “March, I guess. Maybe April. One thing, I knew he’d be very careful and cautious and secretive and he wouldn’t go around bragging about his loving little nurse friend. I guess he’d have been a good thing, because then I wouldn’t have gotten messed up with Rick.”

  “Think he found some other recruit?”

  “I sort of hope so. Somebody sweet and nice and loving. But who would know? Somehow Mr. Pike gets to know everything about everybody, and nobody finds out much about him. It’s probably even more important he should have found a friend now that Mrs. Trescott is dead.”

  “Why?”

  “Now there’s just the three of them, and kid sister has a terrible yen for him, and nobody could really blame him for giving her some very long second looks either. And that would be as messy a triangle as you could find.”

  She yawned and sighed. “ ’Night, sweetheart,” she said.

  I slid almost back into sleep and stopped on the dreaming edge of it. Little by little I became ever more aware of every single place where flesh touched flesh. She had achieved such a honeyed and luxuriant completion that in some bewitched way it seemed to mark the spent flesh with a kind of sensuous continuity, as though it had not ended at all but was still continuing in some hidden manner. I was increasingly aware of the resting engines of our bodies, our slow thump of hearts, blood pulse, suck and sag of the bellows of four lungs, breathing commingled in the cozy bed, all the incredible complexity of cells and nourishments and energy transformation and secretions and heat balance going on and on. I wondered if she slept, but at my first tentative and stealthy caress she took a deep, quick breath that caught and she arched and stretched herself, made a purr of acceptance and luxurious anticipations.

  So into the tempos and climates of it again, bodies familiarized now. Fragments. Like things glimpsed at night from a moving train. Dragging whisper-sound of palm on flesh. Deep, deep, slow-thick into the clench of honey, clovery oils, nipples pebbled, lift-clamp of thigh, arrhythmic flesh-clap fading into tempo reattained, held long and longer and longest, then beginning quivering hesitation at the end of deepening, richening beat, a shifting of her, mouth agape, furnace breath, tongue curl, grit of tooth against tooth, hands then cup and pull the rubberous buttocky pumping, her bellows breath whistling exploding the words against my mouth—“Love you. Love you. Love you.” Then somehow opening more, taking deeper, pulling, demanding, a final grinding moaning agony of her, requiring me to drive, batter, cleave without mercy. Then slow toppling. The long slope. Hearts trying to leap from chests. Gagging gasps from the long run up the far side. Tumbling into the meadow. Tall grass. Clover and grass. Sag into sleep, still coupled, fall into sleep while still feeling in her depths the gentle residual claspings, small infrequent tightenings like that of a small sleeping hand when the brain dreams.

  Then in the morning, as I lay watching her get dressed and knowing that soon I had to stir myself too, she looked so frowning-thoughtful, I asked her if she was still working at that lousy-person syndrome of hers.

  She put her arms into the sleeves of the white dress after she had stepped into it and pulled it up. “You didn’t get to me all the way, Travis, because you’re some kind of fantastic lover.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I mean, you know, none of that sort of tricky stuff.”

  She came over and turned around to be zipped. I sat up and swung my legs out and, before zipping her, kissed the crease of her back about two inches south of her bra strap.

  “See?” she said.

  “See what?”

  “Well, that was just nice, honey. So I’m in love with you, sort of. And I wasn’t in love with you that first time we made it, and so it wasn’t so much, and then when I liked you more, then it got to be something else. So I’ve got a new philosophy about the bed bit.”

  “Pray tell,” I had said, zipping her up, giving her a pat on the rear.

  She moved away and turned, hitching at the white dress and smoothing it across her hips with the backs of her hands. “It isn’t all set yet. It’s sort of in bits and pieces. I’m going to live as if freckled girls have more fun. And to hell with all the whining and bleeding and gnashing my fool teeth about R. H. Holton, boy attorney. And if I’ve discovered that I just happen to love to make love with men I could fall in love with … people have to put up with a lot worse problems. Darling! Are you g
oing to get up and drive me home? It gets later and later and later.”

  So I had taken her home. End of brief affair. You could staple all the wrong tags on it. One-night stand. Pickup. Handy little shack job for the travelin’ man. Hell, Charlie, you know how them nurses are.

  So maybe the only adventures that don’t look trivial and tawdry are one’s own.

  It had been my impression that while deep in thought I had been packing up to get out of there and go back to Lauderdale. But I discovered I hadn’t packed a thing. I was atop the bedspread, shoes off, practicing deep breathing. And the next I knew it was eight o’clock on that Saturday night, and I wanted two quick drinks and two pounds of rare sirloin.

  Nine

  It was not two pounds of steak, but it was rare enough, and I had it in the Luau Room of the Wahini Lodge at about nine, after a long shower, shave, two long-lasting Plymouths on ice.

  The mood was the old yin-yang balance of conflicting emotions. There was the fatuous he-male satisfaction and self-approval after having roundly and soundly tumbled the hot-bodied she-thing, with her approvals registered by the reactive flutterings and choke-throated gasps. Satisfaction in the sense of emptied ease and relaxation, with texture memories of the responsive body imprinted for a time on the touching-parts of the hands and mouth. The other half was the drifting elusive postcoital sadness. Perhaps it comes from the constant buried need for a closeness that will eliminate that loneliness of the spirit we all know. And for just a few moments the need is almost eased, the deeply coupled bodies serving as a sort of symbol of that far greater need to stop being totally alone. But then it is over, the illusion gone, and once again there are two strangers in a rumpled bed who, despite any affectionate embrace, are as essentially unknown to each other as two passengers in the same bus seat who have happened to purchase tickets to the same destination. Maybe that is why there is always sadness mingled with the aftertastes of pleasure, because once again, as so many times before, you have proven that the fleeting closeness only underlines the essential apartness of people, makes it uncomfortably evident for a little while. We had fitted each other’s needs and could have no way of knowing how much of our willingness was honest and how much was the flood of excuses the loins project so brilliantly on the front screen of the mind.

  The loins tell you it is always bigger than both of anybody.

  Suddenly, I remembered the hundred dollars that Holton had made Penny stuff into her purse, and smiled. I would hear from her sooner than expected, because when she came across it and remembered, she would be in a horrid haste to get it back to me, as it would make a very sordid footnote to the smarmy night.

  And so when I went back to my room at ten thirty something and saw the red light on the phone winking, I was certain it would be Penny Woertz. But it was a very agitated Biddy, expressing surprise that I was still in Fort Courtney and asking me if I had seen or heard from Maureen. She had somehow sneaked down the stairs and out through the back of the house while Tom was in the living room working at the desk, and while Bridget had been out picking up odds and ends at one of the Stop ‘n’ Shop outlets. She had been gone since a little before seven. “Tom has been out hunting her ever since. I phoned everyplace I could think of and then I left too, about quarter to eight. Right now I’m at a place out near the airport and I happened to think she might come there to the motel, because she knew you were staying there.”

  “Police looking too?”

  “Well, not specifically. But they know she is around and if they see her, they’ll take her in. Travis, she’s wearing a pink chambray jumper with big black pockets and she’s probably barefoot.”

  “Driving a car?”

  “No, thank God. Or maybe it would be better if she did. I don’t know. She probably did the same as last time, walked over to Route Thirty and hitched a ride. She doesn’t have any trouble getting a lift, as you can imagine. But I am so afraid that some … sick person might pick her up.”

  “Can I help?”

  “I can’t think of anything you could do. If she does show up there, you could call nine-three-four, two-six-six-one. That’s Tom’s answering service. We keep calling in every fifteen minutes or so to see if there’s word of her.”

  “Are you with him?”

  “No. We can cover more places this way. I usually run across him sooner or later.”

  “Will you let me know when you find her?”

  “If you wish. Yes. I’ll phone you.”

  I hung up wondering why they didn’t think about the bottom of the lake. She’s had a try at about everything else except jumping out a high window. What was the word? Self-defenestration. Out the window I must go, I must go, I must go …

  Then some fragment of old knowledge began to nudge at the back of my mind. After I had the eleven o’clock news on the television, I couldn’t pay attention because I was too busy roaming around the room trying to unearth what was trying to attract my attention.

  Then a name surfaced, along with a man’s sallow face, bitter mouth, knowing eyes. Harry Simmons. A long talk, long ago, after a friend of a friend had died. He’d added a large chunk onto an existing insurance policy about five months before they found him afloat, facedown, in Biscayne Bay.

  I sat on the bed and slowly reconstructed the pattern of part of his conversation. My thought about the lake and the high window had opened a small door to an old memory.

  “With the jumpers and the drowners, McGee, you don’t pick up a pattern. That’s because a jumper damned near always makes it the first time, and a drowner is usually almost as successful, about the same rate as hangers. They get cut down maybe as rarely as the drowners get pulled out. So the patterns mostly come from the bleeders and the pill-takers and the shooters. Funny how many people survive a self-shooting. But if they don’t destroy a chunk of their brain, they get a chance at a second try. Like the bleeders cut themselves again, and the pill-takers keep trying. It’s always patterns. Never change. They pick the way that they want to go and keep after it until they make it. A pill-taker doesn’t turn into a jumper, and a drowner won’t shoot himself. Like they’ve got one picture of dying and that’s it and there’s no other way of going.”

  All right, then say that Harry Simmons might probably admit a very rare exception. But Maurie Pearson Pike had opted for the pills, the razor, and the rope. Three methods.

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

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

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

  But there were two men there, and they both stared at me with that mild, bland, skeptical curiosity of the experienced lawman. It must be very like the first inspection of new specimens brought back to the base camp by museum expeditions. The specimen might be rare or damaged or poisonous. But you check it over and soon you are able to catalog it based on the experience of cataloging thousands of others over the years, and then it is a very ordinary job from then on, the one you are paid for.

  The big, hard-boned, young one wore khakis, a white fishing cap with a peak, blue and white sneakers, and a white sport shirt with a pattern of red pelicans on it. It was worn outside the belt, doubtless to hide the miniature revolver that seems to be more and more of a fad with Fl
orida local law. The smaller older one wore a pale tan suit, a white shirt with no tie. He had a balding head, liver spots, little dusty brown eyes, and a virulent halitosis that almost concealed the news that his young partner had been wearing the same shirt too long.

  “Name McGee?”

  “That’s right. What can I do for you?” I was stripped to my underwear shorts and barefoot.

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

  “And for a starter,” I said, “search warrant?”

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

  “Poke around, Mr. Stanger. You too, Mr. Nudenbarger.”

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

  “Plenty cash, Mr. McGee.”

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

  He looked at me impassively. “I guess that’s pretty funny.”

  “Funny peculiar?”

  “No. Being funny like jokes. Being witty with stupid cops.”

  “No. The thing about the blue blanket—”