If all goes well, and if you have no clever and silly ideas, we should be through with this whole affair in twelve weeks.
"So damned complicated," she said.
"Actually pretty shrewd. Two people could manage it with very little risk. One at the drive-in and pavilion to check you or Miss Holtzer out, then after you've heard the rings, phone up the road for his buddy to get into place at the designated spot. He gets a chance to see that nobody is hiding in your car. He follows you out of the lot, tails you until it looks safe, then passes you and gets there first and gives a headlight signal to his buddy to use the green lens on the flashlight. Not bad at all. Very difficult to trap them. What went wrong?"
"Nothing. At least not then. I paid. One night there was a red light. I don't know why. It took thirteen weeks. I got the stuff in the mail. The worst ones came toward the last. Dana made the deliveries. Her nerves are better than mine, I guess."
She jumped to her feet, flushing. "Don't be dull, McGee. Close to seven million went into Winds of Chance. Risk money. The character who wrote that note knows this industry. He knew how I had to jump. It isn't like the old days, where you could count on studio protection. Each picture is a separate packaging operation. There are just about ten men these days who can put the really big packages together. If each one of them got a set of those prints, why should they take any future chances on me? Those pictures are poisonous. What's a hundred and twenty thousand compared to my potential? I liquidated some holdings that weren't doing so good, and took my tax loss, and paid off. Don't tell me what I should have done!"
It was a good act and I had to admire it. "How can I help you if all you give me is a smoke screen?"
"What the hell do you mean!" she shouted.
"All the industry cares about is money in the bank. Your name on a picture puts money in the bank. Just like Liz, Frankie, the Swede, Mitchum, Ava. They have not been dear little buttercups all the way. The days of the Arbuckle effect are long gone, dear. In our culture there is going to be no huge concerted public censure to drive you off the wide screens. If you get a little rancid, the PR people have you endow a dog shelter, and all America loves you. Drop the act."
The faked indignation was turned off in an instant. She sat again, looked at me with sullen speculation. "Smart ass," she said.
"What is it, then, that made you pay off?"
"A few little things. A while back I swung my weight around too much. It delayed the wrap-up and bumped the budget, and some people decided maybe they didn't want to work with me. But I smartened up and settled down. I could read what it said on the wall. You know, like Monroe and Brando. But it left them edgy. Also, there've been a couple of little things from time to time. Not as bad as those pictures, but... along that line. It just didn't seem to be the right time to make them feel any more insecure."
"And?"
"Boy, you really want everything, don't you?"
"I've learned that it helps."
"I have a very dear friend. He's very devout and very conservative and he owns great big vulgar hunks of California and Hawaii. If he can get the right paper signed by the Vatican and get loose, I'll never have to take any crap from anybody again as long as I live. And one of those sets of prints would have gone to one man who would have felt obligated to give my friend a look at them. And that would have torn it."
"So those are the real stakes?"
She moistened her lips. "Under community property, one half of about eighty million, honey. I am his dear faithful little darlin'. It made the whole thing a lot more... chancy. Otherwise I would have borrowed some muscle from an old buddy in Vegas and turned them loose on this clown photographer. They'd be smart enough to handle that, but they're not smart enough to handle what I need now. Actually, if Mr. X had no knowledge of my friend, and how long it takes to bull something through that Vatican crowd, he made a very stupid pitch. But with my friend in the background, there was just too much chance it might backfire. Before you bet, you count what's in the pot. All my potential plus my friend's heavy purse. So I paid off."
"And hoped that was the end of it. And it wasn't. Incidentally, can he clear you with his church?"
"I was never married in his faith, so nothing counts. I get a clean bill. By the way, McGee, Dana doesn't know a thing about my plans for my friend."
I asked her how she thought the pictures had been taken. "It had to be a long lens," she said. "You can see the flattening and foreshortening effect. Off to the left, south of the house, I remember a little rocky ridge higher than the house with some knotty little trees clinging to it. It had to be from there. The angles match. But he had to be part mountain goat, and it had to be a tremendous lens."
"Is there any clue at all in that letter itself, any hint that's made you think of a specific person?"
"No. I read it over and over. He's been around the industry in some connection, and I think he tried to sound as if he knew me, but he calls me Lysa instead of Lee. That could be a cover-up, of course. And it has a phoney kind of limey slant to it, calling me ducks."
"What size were the negatives?"
"Little. Like so." She indicated a 35mm frame size.
"You checked them against the prints each time?"
"Sure did. But in a lot of cases the prints were just an enlargement of part of the negative, even less than half sometimes."
"So you were all paid up well over a year ago. And you thought it was over. When was the next contact?"
"Two months ago. Less than that. Early in January. An old friend, trying to make a comeback, was opening at The Sands in Vegas, and a bunch of us were rallying around to give him a good sendoff. It was in the papers that we were all going to be there. Dana was with me. We had a suite at the Desert Inn. Somebody left this envelope for me at the desk at The Sands. I guess they thought I was staying there. They sent it over. Dana got it. I was just waking up from a nap. She came in with the damnedest expression on her face and handed it to me. She had opened it. It was another set of the pictures. There wasn't any return address. The desk had no idea who had left it off. Dana wanted to quit right then and there. She is a strange gal. I had to explain the whole thing the way I explained it to you, Trav. She knew right away that it was the same thing that had cost me all the money. She still wanted to quit. I had to beg her to stay. Our relationship hasn't been the same since she saw the pictures. I don't blame her. I'd still hate to lose her. This is the envelope. You can see how it was addressed. Somebody just cut my name off the front of a fan magazine, something like that. Here is the note that was with it."
It was quite different. Individual words and letters had been cut from newsprint and newspaper stock and pasted to cheap yellow copy paper. It said:
Shameless whore of Babylon you will be cut down by the sord of decency and money will not save your dirty life this time but you better have money ready you whore of evil I will come to you and you will no the truth and I will set you free.
She hugged herself. "That one just scares the hell out of me, Trav. It's kind of sick and crazy and terrible. It just isn't the same person. It can't be."
"So you went and saw Walter?"
"No. I just got more and more jittery the more I thought of it. I'm still shook. I was at a big party at the Springs and I got a little stoned and made a scene and dear Walt was there and he took me for a walk. I hung onto him and cried like a baby and told him my troubles. He said maybe you would help. I guess you can say something was stolen from me. My privacy or something. And somebody wants to steal my career or maybe my life. I don't know. I've been carrying cash around with me. In thousand-dollar bills. Fifty of them. I don't expect you to get back what I paid. But if you could, you could keep half. And if you can get that nut off me, you can have the money I'm carrying around."
"Are the pictures in that envelope?"
"Yes. But do you have to see them?"
"Yes."
"I was afraid of that. I am not going to let you see them until you say you'll
try to help me. Every time I think of that note I feel like a scared kid."
"It's a very cold trail, Lee."
"Walter said you are clever and tough and lucky, and he said being lucky is the most important." She gave me an odd look. "I have this feeling that my luck is running out, darling."
"How many people know about this?"
"The four of us, dear. You and Dana and me and Walter. But you know more than the other two. Not another soul. I swear."
"Wouldn't it be logical for you to tell Carl Abelle?"
"Sweetie, when one of those things is over, it is over all the way. Enough is enough forever."
"Could he have set you up for it?"
"Carl? Definitely no. He's a very sunny type. Very simple needs and very simple habits. Totally transparent, really"
"Usually I gamble expenses, then take them off the top before the fifty-fifty split. But this is a little too chancy for that."
"Expenses guaranteed up to five thousand," she said without hesitation, "and when that's gone we'll talk some more."
"Walt must have said I could be trusted."
"What other choice do I have? That's one thing about this. There hasn't been any trouble making decisions. There's been just one way to go. Will you try? Please? Pretty please?"
"Until it looks hopeless."
She scaled the envelope into my lap. "God knows I'm not the shy type, sweetie, but I don't think I could watch anybody look those over. I'll take a walk. Take your time."
She went to the heavy door and let herself out quietly.
Three
AFTER A little time I put the twelve photographs back into the envelope. I took a slow turn around the room. I am too big a boy to be churned up by the explicits of other people's kicks.
Nor did I feel any compulsion to make moral judgment. These were modern animals caught in black and white at their silly play. Such sport was not for me, and very probably not for anyone whose friendship I claimed. There seemed to be some kind of severe selection involved. An acceptance of that presupposed an inability to accept or believe in a lot of other things. Personal dignity for one.
But something still bothered me, something I could not quite define. So I took them out and shuffled through them again. The clue was there. It was the terrible loneliness on their faces. Each one of them, in all that lazy confusion of intimacies, in that lexicon of clinical descriptions, looked utterly, desperately alone.
And they were beautiful people. Lysa Dean was the featured player in every shot, and her body was as superb as its promise.
I felt as if I had glimpsed the edge of some great paradox. The grotesque ultimate of togetherness is the final loneliness of the human spirit. And once you had been that far out on that barren limb, there was no chance of ever coming all the way back.
I shrugged and looked at them again to see if they told me anything about time lapse. I put them away again.
From the varying lengths of shadow in the pictures, from the changing positions on the sunny terrace, I could tell that they had been taken over a matter of hours, perhaps on separate days.
Soon she returned, coming in with a look half challenge, half calculated demureness. "Well?" she said.
"It doesn't look as if it was a hell of a lot of fun.
That response startled her. She stared at me. "Oh, you are so right! You know, it seems to me as if it was all a thousand years ago. I guess I've been trying to fade it out of my mind. Oh Christ, there's kind of a sickly excitement about it, I guess. But what I remember now is being constantly cross and irritable and impatient. And sleepy. Just terribly sleepy and never being allowed to sleep long enough, and having the feeling that all the rest of them were just one... one thing somehow. Not like the pictures."
"Are these exactly like the other pictures you got?"
"They are the twelve exact same shots, but not exactly like the others. These are fuzzier and grayer, sort of. Not as sharp. But I didn't save any of the others to compare, of course."
"We have to look through these together so you can give me the names to go with the faces, Lee, and tell me what you know about each one."
"I suppose it has to be done."
"Like a trip to the dentist. I think there's at least one fair picture of every other person in the group."
She made a face. "Those pictures are such a big boost to my pride, Travis. It does something for a girl to look like a fifty-peso floozy in a back-room circus in Juarez."
I turned a light on and we sat at the desk in the sunken part of the room. I found a pencil and paper. I pointed to the pictures and asked the questions. She answered in a thin small breathy voice, her face half turned away. I took the following notes.
1. Carl Abelle-about 27-six-footer-husky, blond-has left the Valley-try Mohawk Lodge near Speculator, New York.
2. Nancy Abbott-about 22-tall, dark, slender, heavy drinker, good singing voice, believed to have been divorced, perhaps daughter of an architect. Took ski lessons from Abelle at Sun Valley. Believed to be a house guest of
3. Vance and Patty M'Gruder, perhaps of Carmel, married couple in middle twenties, apparently well-off, Vance a sailboat buff, ocean racing etc., have house in Hawaii (?), husband very tanned, short, broad, muscular, going prematurely bald, wife lush & fair, very long blonde hair, quarrelsome, strong English accent.
4. Cass-could be first name, last name or nickname. Seemed to have known M'Gruders previously. About thirty. Dark, hairy, handsome, very powerful. Amusing (?). A painter, perhaps. Friend of...
5. Sonny, a little younger than Cass, slender, cold-eyed, flavor of violence, untalkative, occupation unknown, who had brought along...
6. Whippy. About nineteen then. Copper curls, freckles, perhaps a waitress or clerk, scared of Sonny.
7. Two college boys from the east on a summer trip, apparently joined the group at the bar where Abelle ran into Nancy Abbott. Boys about 20 or 21, Harvey a big blond cheery one and Richie a smaller dark nutty one. Cornell.
On the clearest prints of each I had marked the corresponding number from my notes. I could sense Lee's relief when I put the photographs back into the envelope.
"Who got it all started?" I asked her.
She tightened up again. "Why? What do you mean?"
"I don't think a camera gets that lucky. Somebody had to set you up. Or maybe the real target was somebody else, and you turned out to be a bonus."
"It was a long time ago, and I was tight most of the time."
"Tell me what you can remember of how it got started."
She got up slowly and went over and rested her fists on a windowsill, staring out, the fox pelt hair softly backlighted. I leaned a shoulder against the wall by the window. She talked. Her voice was small. I could not see much of her profile because of the way the hair swung forward. Round of forehead, soft snub tip of nose. I did not press her. I let her find her own words in her own time.
Her memory was more acute as regards textures than incident. Six men and four gals that first evening and night. Four places to go-two bedrooms, a long couch in the living room, the leathery sunpads on the night terrace. It was a prowling thing then, pursuits and tensions, Lysa Dean a primary target for all but Carl, low lights and ultimate arrangements, and some re-pairings when partners slept.
In phrases and fragments, theatrical sighs and beautifully timed hesitations, she painted the flavor of the hot bright terrace on that first full day of houseparty. Pitchers of Bloody Marys, vodka haze, arrows of white sunlight through squinting eyes, compulsive beat of the music on the portable radio, oil and aromatics of sun lotion, jokes and tipsy laughter.
A game of forfeits, with the rules rigged so that to play was to lose, and to lose was to soon be naked. In half-sleep, mildly and amiably drunk, after the game had ended, she had fended off the increasing insistence of Cass, whining at him irritably when he became too bold.
Finally, propping herself up to drink again, she saw several sound asleep, and saw others who were accepting wh
at she had refused. So, squeezing her eyes hard shut to achieve the illusion of privacy, she had surrendered herself to Cass and her own responses.
She straightened and turned toward me and hooked the fingertips of both hands into my belt, leaned her forehead against my chest. She sighed and said, "Then I guess it stops mattering so much. I don't know. You just seem to learn how to turn one whole part of your mind right off. It's all just something that happens. Everybody is in the same boat. So it doesn't seem to make any difference any more. Nothing does."
She sighed again. In the cold soft light I could see the scalp, clean and white as bone under the coppery spring of hair. "I don't know who started it. Patty was bossy. I can remember people getting mad. Whippy cried sometimes. Cass knocked Carl down once, I don't know why. One of those college kids, the big one, kept getting sick. He couldn't drink. It's all so vague, sweetie. If you watched, and you were all turned off, it was just sort of stupid and boring, and if you'd, started to hum a little, you could get into that one or set up something else, or go take a shower, or go make a sandwich, or go build another pitcher of drinks. It just... wasn't all that important."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 04 - The Quick Red Fox Page 3