John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 02 - Nightmare In Pink

by Nightmare In Pink(lit)

  ."Is something so terribly funny?" Nina demanded.

  "No, I just..." I was saved by the telephone. She hurried to it and answered.

  "Hello? Oh hi, Ben. What? No. No, I'm sorry I guess not. No, dear, it isn't like that. I'm on two more accounts now, and there just doesn't seem to be any time."

  Her voice went on, polite, personal, unswervingly firm in rejection of whatever pitch Ben was making. I wandered over to the pushpin wall and looked at her work. One drawing of a jar was striking. It had a severe and classic beauty. She hung up and came over to me.

  "Do you like that one?" she asked.

  "Very much."

  "You've got a pretty good eye, McGee. The client didn't like it. We go around telling each other that good taste will sell. Maybe it will, at the right time and the right place. But that is why commercial is a kind of vulgarity upgraded just enough to look like good the best ones in the business are the ones who can toss that kind of crap off naturally, and really believe it's great."

  I looked down at her thoughtful face. "The trouble with that jar, Nina, what's there to put in it?"

  "You have a point. Wait right here." She went into the small bedroom and closed the door. I prowled the place. I looked at the books and the records. Aside from an unwholesome taste for string quartets, and a certain gullibility about pre-digested sociology, she passed the McGee test with about a B+. Hell, an A-. Maybe somebody had given her the Vance Packard books. He has the profitable knack of making what everybody has known all along sound like something new and astonishing. The same way Norman Vincent Peale invented Christianity and James Jones designed the M-1 rifle. I could relate all three to her handsome jug. Theirs was an upgraded vulgarity.

  She came out suddenly and marched across to me and put ten thousand dollars into my hand. I sat on her couch and bounced it in my hand and took the two rubber bands off it. Three packs of used bills in the bank wrappers, initialed by whoever had done the wrapping. Two packs of fifty fifties. One pack of fifty hundreds. She stood in her pale gray blouse and her suit skirt, in her dark pumps and her nylons and her discontent, and looked at me with a small defiant face. This was her gesture of disappointing love, and it seemed a shame to bitch it for her. I riffled the edges of the bills in silence, and snapped the rubber bands back on. I flipped the little brick of money at her head and she dodged wildly and stuck one hand up and surprised herself by catching it. She stared blankly at me. "What's wrong?"

  I swung my legs up and stretched out on her couch, fingers laced at the nape of my neck. "It's a pretty little egg, honey, but I want to meet the goose."

  She stomped her foot. "You son-of-a-bitch!"

  "It tempted me a little, but not enough. This goose seems to be named Armister."

  "Get out of here!"

  "Let's have a nice little talk."

  In her fury she made an unwise lunge to yank me off the couch. I caught her wrists. She was a very strong little girl. She nearly got her teeth into my hand before I could get my forearm under her chin. She tried to kick, but she didn't have the room or the leverage. But she fought-grunting, writhing, flinging herself around until she landed in a sitting position, with a great padded thump, beside the couch. She slumped then, breathing hard in exhaustion, a tousle of the blue-black hair hiding one blue eye.

  "Damn you!" she gasped. "Damn you, damn you, damn you!"

  "Will you listen?"

  "No!"

  "It's all very simple. How about this guy, this wonderful marriageable Howard Plummer? What kind of a dreary excuse for a girl are you?'

  "I'm not listening to you."

  "The tiresome thing about you, honey, is that if he was still alive, you probably wouldn't listen to him either. Suppose you found the money and he was still alive. I can see the scene. Your eyes flash fire. Fists on your hips. A hell of a nasty tone of voice. Howie, darling, prove to me you're not a thief, and it better be good. Why, that poor slob really lucked out of marrying you, darling girl. Howie, darling, this little red smudge on your collar better be blood, you two-timing bastard. Howie, baby, don't you take a step outside our happy home without letting me know where you are every single minute."

  "You... you filthy..."

  "You poor righteous little prude. Poor Miss Prim."

  "What are you trying to do to me?"

  "Make you give your man the same break any court would give him. Innocent until proven guilty. And the court wouldn't have gone to bed with him before condemning him without a trial, baby."

  I released her wrists. She belted me a good one, and a micro-second after it landed, I jarred her down to her heels with an open handed blow. The blue eyes swarmed out of focus and came back, shocked and wide, and then the tears hit her. They choked her and ripped her up, and she leaned into me, grinding her face into the side of my knee. I stroked her hair. It was all spasms, as convulsive as trying to steady a vomiting drunk.

  I wondered if she had really cried since her Howie had died. She was ridding herself of poison, coughing it out. It took her a long time to slow down and begin to ride it with any kind of reasonable rhythm. I got up and boosted her onto the couch and went off and found her bathroom, brought her back a cold wet washcloth and a big soft dry towel. I sat on the floor beside the couch and patted her once in a while. She drifted into a limp exhaustion, punctuated by a hiccup now and again. She sighed and turned her face toward me. I swabbed it with the cold cloth and she dried it on the towel. She stared at me, quiet and solemn as a justly punished child.

  "Trav. Tray, I've been horrible."

  "So?"

  "Don't you see? I didn't even give him a chance. He couldn't explain, and I didn't even give him a chance."

  "Do you understand that, Nina?"

  "N-No."

  "You had to muffle the pain any way you could. Lessen the loss. By trying to believe he lied and cheated. But you couldn't really believe it. It's a proof of how much love there was."

  "But it's so unfair to him."

  "Not to him, honey. To his memory, maybe. Not to him."

  "What... what can I do now?"

  "There's just one thing we can do. It's what I came to do. It's what Mike sent me to do. Let's find out what happened."

  "But you made me think it was just the money that..."

  I pushed her hair back away from the other puffy eye. "Mike said I might have to shake you up.

  She stared at me. She shook her head slowly from side to side. She made a mouth. "You two. You and Mike. How could you know more about me that I knew?"

  "Is it a deal?"

  Her smile was frail, but it was a smile. "We'll have a lot of nice little talks."

  After she regained enough energy to check the larder, she told me how far and in what direction I had to go to find a delicatessen. When I returned, she had changed to baggy slacks and a big pink hairy sweatshirt. She had fixed her face and her hair and set a table for us by the window. She unloaded the sacks, accusing me of exotic and extravagant tastes. But she found herself hungrier than she had expected. Her voice was still husky from her tears, and I had left a small bruise along her left jaw.

  After we had eaten and she had stacked the few dishes, we sat on the couch with drinks. "I didn't even know he had been killed until noon of the next day," she said in a soft thoughtful voice. "And I fell all apart. Those days are a blur. Sedatives, good friends standing by; I wanted to die too. It seemed such a horrid waste, to lose him that way. Sort of by mistake. Because somebody was greedy and scared and careless, some dirty sick animal out of nowhere. But I held myself together somehow. His sister flew out from California. There was a service here because of his friends here. She took care of his things, giving some away, giving me what she thought I'd like to have of his, closing his apartment. The body went back to Minnesota to be buried there in the family plot with his parents. I couldn't have stood going there and enduring another service. I think his sister understood. I hope she did. It wasn't until after she was gone that I remembered his things he
re. I was in such a daze. We weren't exactly living together. Just sort of. After we were married, we were going to live here and give up his apartment. It was handier for both of us. He had a key to here. And some personal things here. I didn't know exactly what he'd brought over. I'd already started taking up less room with my stuff to give him room. We knew what furniture of his we were going to bring over. I'd given him half my closet shelf. So finally I got the courage to go through the things he'd brought over, stopping every once in a while to lie down and cry myself sick. Over little things. I had to stand on a chair to reach the back of the shelf. The money was last. It was in the corner. It was wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. He died a week before my twenty-fourth birthday, Tray, and I didn't want to open it because I thought that if it was a gift for me hidden there, it would just break my heart so badly I'd never never get over it. I sat on the bed and unwrapped it... and it was the money. And suddenly there was a coldness in my heart, and I suddenly decided that he... that he... "

  "Easy, Nina."

  "When you think you know everything about a person and..."

  "We both know it was a defensive emotional reaction."

  "I wish I was as certain as you are, Trav. Maybe I am a lousy little righteous prude."

  "And maybe we find out it was just what you thought it was."

  She nodded. She slipped her hand into mine. "I know. I've thought of that. But now I know I do have to find out. And for that I have... I have to thank you. What should we do about the money?"

  ''We'll know later what has to be done. If it's all right with you, I'll take it along and put it in the hotel safe. Now tell me about his work."

  In a little while she began yawning, and I knew she'd given all she had to give, for one day. She found a heavy manila envelope and I sealed the money into it. She came with me to the door and, sleepy as a child, unthinkingly lifted her face for a kiss. Her mouth was soft. She backed away suddenly and put her hand to her throat.

  "I wasn't trying to be.. "

  "Go to bed, Miss Nina. good dreams."

  "I might. I just might."

  "Go to sleep. Dream

  Three

  AFTER BREAKFAST I made some phone calls and found out which precinct I should contact. I went to the precinct and stated my wishes. They looked it up. Their man who had worked the case, along with the Homicide people who had covered it, was a Sergeant T. Rassko. I couldn't even find out that much until a Lieutenant Bree had questioned me with care and suspicion.

  "I don't get the point," he kept saying, as he teetered and patted his stomach. "Whadaya tryna complish?"

  I tried again. "Lieutenant, you know what a veteran is?"

  "Don't get smart with me."

  "This veteran is in a veterans hospital. Ever since Korea. Blind and busted up. Plummer was going to marry this veteran's kid sister. I'm the veteran's best friend. He asked me to find out how Plummer got killed."

  "Whadaya tryna complish? It was in the papers. You want to make out we're not doing a job around here? You want to tell us something we don't know already? I don't get the point."

  "Lieutenant, please, imagine that you are a blind veteran in a hospital. Your sister's fiance gets killed."

  "Better than she should have married him, the one my sister married."

  "Would you be satisfied with hearing somebody read you a little newspaper item, or would you want to have a friend go see where and how it happened and come and tell you about it?"

  Comprehension began, twinkled, flowered into a smile. "Hey, you just want to tell him how it was covered, hey?"

  "That's it."

  "Let's see your identification again, McGee." He studied my Florida driver's license. There is a space for occupation. It is a challenge to invention. This year I had written Executive in the little box. As he handed it back, the cop-eyes took the practiced flickering inventory-tailoring, fabric, shirt collar, knuckles and fingernails, shoe shine, haircut-all the subtle clues to status.

  "What kind of work you in, Mr. McGee?"

  "Marine fabrications consultant."

  "Yeah. You sit over there and I'll see what I can do." He walked heavily away, portly, whiteIi aired, slow of wit. I sat on a worn bench and watched the flow of business. It is about as dramatic as sitting in a post office, and there are the same institutional smells of flesh, sweat, disinfectants and mimeo ink. Two percent of police work is involved with blood. All the rest of it is a slow, querulous, intricate involvement with small rules and procedures, violations of numbered ordinances, complaints made out of spite and ignorance, all the little abrasions and irritations of too many people living in too small a space. The standard police attitude is one of tired, kindly, patronizing exasperation.

  Thomas Rassko, Detective Sergeant, looked and acted like a young clerk in a fashionable wen's store. Quiet, bored, indifferent, quietly dressed, pale and cat-footed. Bree had cleared me, but I was obviously a waste of time. He led we to the visitor's chair beside a bull-pen desk, went away and came back with a thin file packet.

  He sat down and opened it and sorted the contents and said, "Deceased- white male American age twenty-seven. Estimated time of death, between eleven and midnight on Saturciay August tenth. The body was found just inside the truck driveway to a warehouse at three eighteen West Nineteenth Street. There was a notification by the warehouse watchman at one thirty-five." He sorted some eight-by-ten glossies and handed me one. "This will give you the best idea of it."

  Howard Plummer lay in the harshness of the electronic flash, face down on asphalt, close to a brick wall. He was turned slightly toward the wall, legs sprawled loose, one arm under him, the jacket of his pale suit hiked above the small of his back. Both side pockets of his pants and one hip pocket were pulled inside out.

  "You could practically call it accidental death," Rassko said. "A standard mugging that went wrong. The way they work it, there are usually two of them. They pick somebody welldressed, maybe a little bit smashed, and follow along close, and when the situation is right, no traffic, and a handy dark corner, the stronger of the two takes him from behind, an arm around the throat, yanks him into the dark corner, and the other one cleans him--wallet, watch, everything. By then, if he hasn't blacked out, they yank his pants down around his ankles, give him a hell of a shove and then run like hell. This Plummer was husky. Big enough to make them nervous, maybe. Or maybe he struggled too hard. Or maybe they were amateurs. Like sometimes we get sailors who get rolled and then try to take it back from anybody who comes along. That forearm across the throat can be very dangerous. They probably thought he had just blacked out, but the larynx was crushed. They let him drop and they ran, and he strangled to death."

  "No leads at all?"

  "This is a very low category of crime, Mr. McGee. Punk kids come in from way outQueens, Brooklyn, even Jersey-so it isn't necessarily a neighborhood thing. Maybe they never even found out the guy died. They aren't newspaper readers. Our informants came up empty so far. There was nothing for the lab to go on. We couldn't find anybody who saw anything. We estimate he had about fifty dollars on him. His wallet never showed up. Nobody, not even his girl, could tell us the make wristwatch he was wearing, so we don't know if it was pawned."

  "What was he doing in that neighborhood?"

  Rassko shrugged, "It was a hot Saturday night. His girl had to go to some kind of a business dinner at a hotel. He left his apartment about six. We couldn't trace him. Maybe he was just cruising. We don't know whether he was walking east or west when he got hit. Maybe he took a girl home and he was walking looking for a cab. Too bad. Nice fellow, I guess, good education, good job and about to be married. Like I said, it's almost like accidental death. But it was no place for a well-dressed man to be walking alone at night, especially if he'd had a few drinks. That's asking for it."

  "Did you have any trouble identifying him?"

  "No. His name was written on the label in his suit, and the name was in the phone book. What we do to speed it up, we
take a Polaroid flash of the face and send a man to check with the neighbors. The first contact verified the identity. I don't know where else we can go with it. Tomorrow or next year we may break somebody in connection with something else and hear all about this one, so we can close the file. There's only so much work you can do on a thing like this, and then it stops making sense to go further on account of the rest of the work load. But we don't forget it. We keep the live cases posted."

  I thanked him for giving me so much time. I went out into the bright beautiful October day and walked slowly and thoughtfully back toward midtown. It was just past noon and the offices were beginning to flood the streets with a warm hurrying flow of girls. A burly man, in more of a hurry than I was, bumped into me and thrust me into a tall girl. They both whirled and snarled at me.