The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

by John D. MacDonald

“I keep track of Beethoven’s birthday, and the dog flies a DeHavilland Moth.”

  “What’s that?” Nudenbarger asked. “What’s that?”

  “Forget it, Lew,” Stanger said in a weary voice.

  “You always say that,” Nudenbarger said, accusingly indignant.

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

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

  “Done any time at all, Mr. McGee?”

  “No.”

  “Arrests?”

  “Here and there. No charges.”

  “Suspicion of what?”

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

  “Often?”

  “What’s often? Five times in a lifetime? About that.”

  “And you wouldn’t mention it except if I checked it would show up someplace.”

  “If you say so.”

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

  “Would it work with you, Stanger?”

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

  “Close enough.”

  “And sacked out?”

  “Slept like death until maybe eight o’clock.”

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

  “Who is she?”

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

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

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

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

  “Penny Woertz.”

  “The hundred bucks was the wages of sin, McGee?”

  “Just a not very funny joke. Private and personal.”

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

  “Some of it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll give you that name after we stop playing games.”

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

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

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

  I swallowed again. “It’s … unpleasant.”

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

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “She worried about him?”

  “Some.”

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

  “Richard Holton, Attorney at Law.”

  “The only name?”

  “The only boyfriend, I’d say.”

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

  “Yes. She talked to me about the doctor.”

  “What’s this about … let me find it here … here it is, ‘memory and digital skills’?”

  “It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

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

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “Pictures make you feel sick?” Nudenbarger asked.

  “Shut up, Lew,” Stanger said.

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

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

  “Is she all right?”

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

  “Use the what?”

  “It’s elect
rotherapy. She responds well to it. And … thanks for being concerned, Travis. We both … all appreciate it.”

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

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

  “Didn’t she die just a while back?”

  “That’s right.”

  “They find that kook wife?” Nudenbarger asked.

  “Tom Pike found her.”

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

  “Shut your goddamned mouth, Lew!” Stanger roared.

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

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

  “Sure. Okay.”

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

  “Before she kills herself?”

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

  “I want to help if I can. I didn’t know Penny Woertz very long. But … I liked her a lot.”

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

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

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

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

  “Going to her instead of to Holton himself?”

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

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

  “Depending on how I work up to it.”

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

  “She capable of it?”

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

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

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

  Ten

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

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

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

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

  “With songs and jokes and parlor tricks? I don’t think anything would work today. But … come along if you want to.”

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

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

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

  “What are you having?”

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

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

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

  “Can I have a look at it?”

  “Well … why not? But it isn’t anything like what I usually do.”

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

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

  She waved toward them. “These are the usual me. Kind of old hat. No op and pop. No structures and lumps and walkthroughs.”

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

  She looked surprised and pleased. “Member of the club?”

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

  “Tonal integrity?”

  “Sure. Structural perceptions. Compositionally iconoclastic.”

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

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

  She nodded thoughtfully. “So I’ll buy that. Anyway … I seldom do the figure. But here is my night work.”

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

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

  “I say let it sit. You’ll know more about it later.”

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

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

  “On one condition.”

  “Such as?”

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

  “I couldn’t let you do—”

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

  She covered her yawn with the back of her fist. “Bless you, bless you. I’m sold.”

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

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