In the corridor light I noticed their hands were dirty. It is impossible to drink all evening without ending up with dirty hands. It is one of the unsolved mysteries of our age.
"Raht they yahs youwah nummer, sweetsie pah!" He put a soiled hand against the wall. "I don't believe I... I think I'm going to..." He slid slowly and fell on his side with a small thudding sound against the carpeting.
I offered to help her with him. She refused so very sweetly. She couldn't trouble me none. She said she could manage all raht. So I went around the corner and began humming just loudly enough so my voice would carry to where she was. I unlocked my door and opened it and then closed it again without going in, closing it audibly and cutting off the little tune just as it clacked shut.
I went back to the corner and put one eye around carefully. His topcoat was pulled out of the way. She was kneeling, just pulling his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket. Her thick white hair hung forward as she bent over him. Her underlip had fallen away from her teeth and I could hear how her excitement and fear was making her breath fast and audible. She kept snapping her head around to look the other way, toward the elevators. She shoved the currency into the slash pocket of her red coat, put the wallet back in his inside pocket. She picked his arm up and started to take the wristwatch, hesitated, let the arm fall. She picked the key off the carpeting, stood up, and, biting her lip, looked at him and at the door to his room. I could
guess what she was thinking of. Would it be worthwhile to unlock the door, drag him in, and go through his belongings? She stood crouched, fingers hooked, her stance ugly. It was a posture feral as any carnivore. It was the hunting stance, and it made me think of Fortner Geis' money, and the far cleverer beast who had gone after it and taken it from him.
I saw her decide to settle for what she had, and cut her risk by getting away quickly. She straightened, shook her hair back and I pulled back and flattened against the wall, realizing she would come my way, heading for the fire stairs.
The only sound she made was the quick whisking of fabric. She came around the corner in a hurry, saw me out of the corner of her eye, gasped, tried to run, but I caught her from behind, my left arm around her waist, right hand snaking into the right pocket of the coat and coming out with the folded wad of bills as I released her.
She spun, felt in the pocket, came cautiously toward me. "Hay-yuff, , huh?" she said in a husky whisper. "Gimme hay-yuff."
"Give you nothing, dear girl."
"Oney a feeyiffteh them, huh? Pitcher a Gen'I Grant for lil ol' Cinny Lee?"
She spread her coat, wet her mouth, arched her back. "You room raht close by, innit? Less you'n me tote that ole man inna his room so as nobody gets agitated bout him lyin inna, hall, then it give me time, I go inna your room, given you a ride like you never hay-yud afore, worthen at fifty plusen a teeyup for sure, lahk to pleasure me a big size mayyun all the whole naht long, honeh pah."
"Run on back to your cotton patch, corn pone." She had the heels of her hands on her hipbones, fingers spread on her thighs, pointing to the floor. I saw the hemline of the narrow skirt of her white dress climbing as she stealthily worked it up with her fingertips. I knew what she was going to try. If the kick had landed where she wanted it to, she could have plucked the cash out of my nerveless hand and gone tripping happily down the stairs, leaving me there making goldfish mouths, and sweating into the carpet. When it came I turned sharply and, as she missed, got my palm under the back of her ankle and gave the kick a lot more elevation than she wanted. The skirt ripped up the side and she went tumbling back, rolling up onto her shoulders, legs scissoring. I noticed with academic appraisal that she wore nothing under the dress, that she was an unpleasant soft white, almost blue white, and that she was by no means a natural blonde.
"And the accent is fake too," I said.
She sprang up, looked as though she might try for the eyes, and thought better of it. And in the brisk and nasal flatness of the pure Midwest accent, the kind you hear in the small towns of Indiana and Iowa, she suggested I perform an anatomical impossibility, and categorized me as an indulger in several of those specific practices most frowned upon in our culture. Somebody behind one of the closed doors yelled to knock it off for chrissake, and she stopped abruptly, ran to the stairway door, yanked it open, and disappeared.
I found the key on the carpet beside sweetsie pah, unlocked his door, scooped him up, carried him in, and dumped him on his bed. I went out and got his hat and brought it in, closing the door behind me. Turned a light on, worked him out to topcoat and suit coat. Hung them in the closet. Put money in billfold, billfold in suit coat. Loosened tie, belt, removed shoes. Turned out light. Stood for a moment looking down at him, hearing his steady snore. Poor honeh had slipped through the fangs of the cat, and he wasn't the type to give them a chance at him again. I had fanned the currency before putting it back where it belonged, didn't make an exact count, but saw it was over four hundred. We were both locked into this single century. As Fortner Geis had been. So help the fellow traveler, McGee. The Cinny Lees spring at you every chance they get.
If this man could be a four-hundred-dollar fool, Fort could have been one too-at fifteen hundred times the cost. I set his night latch and closed the door behind me and went back to my own leased cave.
After my light was out I made a better identification of Cinny Lee's emotional climate after she knew she'd lost it all. Outraged indignation. She had invested time, training, and experience, had cut him out of the pack, softened him perfectly, had slipped by the hotel security patrol, and had gotten the chloral hydrate into him at just the right moment. If he had not gone into that talking jag, if he'd had the room key in his hand instead of an inside pocket, if the big stranger hadn't come along, she would have gotten inside the room with him minutes before it hit him and knocked him out. Then, in privacy and safety she could have plucked him clean of every valuable from his gold wedding ring and cuff links to the change on his bureau. Then, if she was the, cool hardened operator I guessed she was, she would sneak out with his key, stash the loot, sneak back into the room, strip him to the buff, take all her clothes off, rip the cheap dress in strategic places, tip a chair and a lamp over-quietly-and get into bed with him and get some sleep and be ready, when he awakened with a savage and blinding headache and total loss of memory, to be crying hopelessly and pitifully. She had no idea where his money was. He could search her if he thought she had it. All she knew was he had forced her. He had torn her pretty new dress, see? Her father and her brothers would be frantic. She'd never been away from home all night before. She was really only fifteen. He'd been like some kind of crazy horrible animal. Oh, oh, what was she going to do. Oh boo hoo wah haw hoo, oh God. She'd better k-k-k-kill herself. Th-Throw herself out the windowwwwww...
The timing would give her all day Sunday to work on his fears, with the Do Not Disturb sign on the room door, food and drink ordered up, and she would hide in the bathroom when it was brought in. She would have learned every scrap of usable information about him from what she could find in his billfold and elsewhere in the room and in his pockets. He could cash checks, couldn't he? He could have his bank wire money, couldn't he? She would have to leave town. She would remember a girlfriend in New Orleans. Monday morning he could go out and buy her some clothes and luggage for the trip, and get the money in cash. She would have to have money to live on until she could get a job. At least fifteen hundred over the airline fare to feel really safe. If he dragged his feet she could wonder out loud if maybe she ought to go back to Boston with him and see if his wife could help her get a job. Her name is Frances, isn't it, honeh? Once he agreed, she would become very happy and excited and affectionate, and with any luck she could seduce him, a shameful confirmation of his guilt, and good for at least five hundred more for the poor dear girl. It wouldn't work on a man who had been down the mean streets and seen the dark places. It would work on just such a man as honeh-bright, good, and decent and, in this first and last wild
oat, gullible as the youngest sailor in the Navy.
It made me realize with what exquisite care, caution, and patience Fortner Geis had been cleaned. A man will let his money be taken only when the alternative is something he cannot endure..
What was it Fort could not face? And how much more dangerous was the predator who hunted him down than was this faked-up Cinny Lee?
SIX
NURSE JANICE Stanyard lived on Greenwood in one of those standard six-story apartment houses of yellow brick which were built in such profusion after World War II. They were planned to do an adequate and durable job of housing people, and were designed with the idea of minimum maintenance and upkeep, and with all the grace and warmth of the Berlin Wall.
She was on the fifth floor toward the rear, with windows that looked out over a tarred roof of a neighboring building to the Sunday emptiness of the broad asphalt parking area of a shopping plaza a half block away, the gray paving marked in the yellow herringbone pattern of the parking slots.
I had not known quite what to expect. My first impression as she let me in was certainly not of a femme fatale. She was a sturdy woman with a bigboned look a broad and pallid face without ani mation, dark brown hair turning gray. She wore scuffed loafers, white ankle sox, a baggy herringbone tweed skirt, a loose-fitting brown cardigan. The impression was that of an enduring and stolid woman with no interest in self-adornment. The furniture was plain, heavy, and not new. But it looked comfortable. The decor was a monotone of grays and browns without pattern or touches of color except for the dust jackets of hundreds of books in long low shelves, and the covers of the magazines in racks and stacks.
"Do sit down, Mr. McGee. I'm afraid I'm not going to be much help to you." She sat at the corner of a couch and I sat in a facing armchair. I suspect that it was the quality of her voice, the earthy richness of the contralto modulation that made me look at her more closely. Her hands were large, and beautifully formed. Her throat was long and solid and graceful. Her eyes were particularly lovelylarge, the iris a deep clear blue, the lashes naturally dense and long. Once I had seen that much, I could then see the gentle contours of her mouth, and the rich curve of the strong calves.
What had seemed drabness, both in her and in the room, became merely understatement. I had the feeling this would be a comfortable room to be in, a comfortable woman to be with. She had the indefinable quality of restfulness, of making no trivial demands upon others or upon herself.
"You worked with Fort a long time and knew him well. I need to know more about him, and maybe then I can figure out why he did what he did."
"Did you know the Doctor well enough to call him Fort?" There was cool surprise in her tone. "Well enough so he asked me to. In Florida. I stood up with Fort and Glory when they were married. I didn't know him long. I liked him. I was supposed to come visit them here after the house was built. It didn't work out. I wish it had."
"He was a good man," she said. "I miss him. But why did you sound as if he did some inexplicable thing? Fort usually had reasons for what he did."
"Would you have any idea about what sort of estate he left? The size of it?"
"I wouldn't know, really. When Glenna died he got her money. I don't think it was really a lot. I think he used it on Heidi and Roger. They seemed to get anything they wanted at least, cars and sailboats and trips to Europe. Money wasn't particularly important to Fort. I don't mean he was indifferent to it. He would bill a patient according to what the patient could afford. From ten dollars to ten thousand. He didn't spend much on himself. It wasn't because he was stingy. He just didn't have expensive hobbies. He invested his money after taxes and living expenses into good stocks mostly, I think. If I was forced to guess, I'd say he probably was worth half a million dollars when he died. Another man with the same ability and, reputation could have been worth... three or four times that, possibly."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Ten days before he died."
"When was the last time you worked with him?" "Last January, almost a year ago. The last operation he did. Craniotomy for a neurofibroma, extensive. He started it but he didn't finish it. By then he had good people backing him up every time. His fingertips went numb. He couldn't get the feeling back into them. It's one of the symptoms of what he had. So he turned it over to his assistant. He stood by and watched. It went well. Outside, afterward, he told me that was the last he'd try. He thanked me for putting up with him in all those hundreds and hundreds of operations. At least I held the. tears back until I was alone. Everybody who ever worked with him felt the same way"
"Did you have any kind of contact with him between that time and when you visited him at his house?"
There was a little flicker behind the blue of her eyes, a half-second delay. "No. Why?"
I wondered if with a wicked needle I could penetrate that placid manner. "I suppose like all the rest of them, the reputation was a little larger than the man."
Her eyes narrowed. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"There can be twenty or fifty men with the same ability, and one seems to get the good publicity."
"You don't seem to know what the hell you're talking about!"
"Cutting is cutting, no?"
"And some of them are so concerned about setting records they go in there like a whirlwind, and some of them are so picky and cautious the patient is under for six hours when it could be done in four. Then there are people like Fortner Geis who are as quick as they should be and as careful as they should be, but there's something else too, something that isn't in the books, and you can't describe what it is, and damned few surgeons in any generation have it. It's an instinct for the living flesh under the knife. Two surgeons can make two cuts that look identical, and one will bleed like a pig and the other will be almost dry. One surgeon can cut to where something is supposed to be, and 4t isn't there, and another will somehow guess that the patient doesn't quite match the anatomy lessons and, without knowing how he does it or what clued him, go right to where he wants to be. Surgeons who worked beside Fort have a right to make comments about his ability. You don't!"
She sat glaring at me. I smiled and said, "I gave you a cheap opportunity to put the knock on him, Mrs. Stanyard. Just checking."
Anger changed to a puzzled indignation. "Why do that? What's the point?"
"I guess the point is that he would have left around seven hundred thousand and something, but he canceled out his insurance for the cash value, and he cashed in everything else too, except a small equity in the house and a life annuity option policy for Gloria that'll bring her ninety something a week. It took him thirteen months. He finished the job last July. He did it on the sly and covered his tracks. The money is gone and everybody is upset, each one for his own reasons. So when I find out that the Doctor and his favorite nurse had an affair going for ten or eleven years and then he married somebody else, I want to see if there is enough hate left for the nurse to leap at the chance to lay a little bad-mouth on the famous surgeon."
"She told you about Fort and me?"
"She did."
"She had no right!"
"Heidi mentioned it first. I think she said she was twelve years old when she saw you and the Doctor necking. And just how much poking around would I have to do, amid the medical brotherhood and sisterhood; before somebody mentioned old times?"
"You make it sound dirty!"
"Do you know how it sounds to me?"
"I can't imagine caring."
"It sounds as if it was a very good thing for two lonely people to have. I think you are much woman, Mrs. Stanyard. I know where your husband is. I know Gloria thinks the affair ended a year or two before she met Fort. If he could change six hundred thousand in assets into cash and put the cash where nobody can find it, keeping you on the string would be no special problem."
"He wasn't that kind of man. I'm not that kind of woman. I didn't even know, if he told her about me. But from the way I acted toward her when they came back fr
om Florida, she certainly would have had to guess something. I like her very much."
"He told her. In detail."
"And she told you. I don't think I care at all for her telling you."
"After what Heidi said, she had to tell me something. And the detail was so I'd understand. She was anxious to make sure I didn't think less of Fort or of you. Of course, I go around making these moral judgments all the time. Meaningful relationship. That phrase has sure God been worked to death. Like constructive and sincere. What it is, Janice, it's a curious, confusing bitch of a world, and you don't get a very long ride on it, and it is hard to get through to anybody merely by making mouth-sounds. So we all do some taking, up to the point where we don't gag on it. And we all do some giving, because taking doesn't taste right without it. With any luck we can sneak through without crapping up too many other lives, and with a little more luck we can make things shine for somebody sometime."
As she was staring at me, a chunky Siamese cat, a pale one like tea with cream, came in through the door that probably led to the bedroom. He stretched each hind leg separately, gave me casual inspection with eyes as blue as his mistress's, though slightly crossed, came over and snuffed at my shoes, and went on out to, the kitchen, indolently purposeful.
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