John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 08 - One Fearful Yellow Eye

by One Fearful Yellow Eye(lit)

  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.

  "Who are you?" Janice asked me.

  "T. McGee. T for Travis. Friend of Glory." I motioned toward the kitchen. "Who was that who went through?"

  "Ralph. Maybe I made things shine for Fort. My husband will be a four-year-old child as long as he lives. There was that much damage. I visit Charlie every week. I'm a quiet person. I don't require much of life. After Fort and I became lovers, I couldn't understand why I'd put up such a desperate fight for my so-called honor. Maybe I thought that if someone made love to me, I'd start to resent Charlie. I didn't want that. Fort needed me: My God, there was a man I would have crawled through broken glass for, jumped out windows for. And I couldn't willingly give him something... nobody was using and Charlie wouldn't miss. But Fort made it happen anyway, bless him. And then all of a sudden it was just something two people could have. Closeness and pleasure, and all the ordinary little things. Socks and shaving and reminding him of haircuts, and waking up and hearing somebody breathing beside you, feeling the warmth of their body near you. When he wanted me, I wanted him because he wanted me. It was like a voyage, I guess. We traveled from one place in our lives to another, and then what we needed from each other was over. I never made any demand on him after it was over. Sometimes I would wish he was with me so I could tell him some dumb thing, like how my alarm clock finally quit-he hated it. It had a terrible ring. I'm a heavy sleeper. Once, after he was married, I did ask him to come here. He came as soon as he could. He knew it wasn't... what some -small-minded man might have guessed it could be. It was a year ago last May. On Memorial Day. I didn't know if I should report it, or what I should do.

  "Report what?"

  "I went to see Charlie and I got back at ten-thirty at night. When I went into the kitchen there was my poor old Ethel cat dead in the middle of the floor. She was Ralph's mother. Somebody had put a big meat skewer out of the drawer right through her, just behind the shoulder, right through her heart, and left it in her. It was such a horrid, pointless thing to do. A very sick mind, certainly. There was still some warmth in her body, and all the blood was not clotted on the tile floor. I'd left a kitchen light on, knowing it would be after dark when I got back, and they like a light to eat by when they get hungry. Ralph is like Ethel was. They leave a little in their dish and go back and have a little snack every now and then. There's a ladder that is fastened to the outside of the building and it passes right by the kitchen window. The weather forecast said no rain, so I'd left the bottom sash all the way open. Somebody had kicked the screen out and come in through the window in the night. It wouldn't be hard to do. Poor Ralph scrunched down in the back of my closet on my shoes, still growling, and terrified. Fort answered the phone and he got here at eleven-thirty. I was a mess, of course. It upset him terribly too. Ethel had been very fond of him."

  "Did you report it?"

  "We decided not to. I'm not a sissy usually, but I was all shaken up. I packed an overnight bag and Fort dropped me at a hotel. He had wrapped poor Ethel up in an old sheet. I couldn't find any damage beyond the broken screen, and nothing seemed to be missing. He put Ethel in the trunk of his car, and the next day we buried her at a place down on Marley Creek where we used to have picnics sometimes. I had the super come and look at the broken screen. He was upset. But he wasn't going to do anything about it. I had people come and put steel mesh on that window and I told the other people who had windows close to that ladder what had happened and what I'd done about it, and what it had cost."

  She stopped, frowned at me, shook,her head. "What in the world could the Doctor have done with six hundred thousand dollars in cash? It wouldn't be like him to do something like that." "Could his illness affect his mind?"

  "Oh no. And the few times I saw him, toward the end, he was perfectly all right. He knew he'd never get out of that bed. The pain was bad and getting worse, but he decided he'd rather fight it than be so drugged he couldn't communicate with anyone." "And he was an honest man?"

  "Certainly. Oh, he didn't make a big thing of it, and go around glowing with righteousness-you know the type."

  "Mrs. Stanyard? Janice?"

  "Janice is fine."

  "You didn't know a thing about the missing money. But you can count on other people getting around to you before very long."

  "I don't understand."

  "Excuse the bluntness, but when the wife and children get dealt out, they dig up the past, and you are the ex-mistress, the trite old triangle of doctor, wife, and nurse."

  "But it..."

  "I know it wasn't like that. But for seven of the thirteen months he was cashing things in, you were working with him."

  "Not anything like the way we used to work, tluough. No routine things at all, no matter how intricate. He was sort of... wrapping up what he knew and what he was still learning. His postoperative dictation was about twice as long as it had ever been, because he was making suggestions ahout alternative techniques he knew he was never going to have time to attempt. He wanted to leave something other surgeons could use. And he wanted to spend as much time as he could with Ocrria and his grandchildren."

  "Do you remember anything at all strange during those seven months? Any mysterious letters or visits, phone calls? Did he seem troubled?"

  "No. But he didn't trouble easily, you know. He had his own philosophy about worry. He always told me that people spend so much time fretting about what they did yesterday and dreading what might happen tomorrow, they miss out on all of their todays. He said that when you realize you can't change the past or predict the future, then you come alive for the first time, like waking, up from half-sleep."

  "You might be questioned by people who are better at it than I am, and a lot more merciless."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "They'll catch you up a lot quicker when you lie about having no contact with Fort from January to when you visited him.at his home."

  "Lie! I swear to you I did not see him once during that time."

  "That isn't what I said. A contact is not necessarily a confrontation."

  "I don't have to take this, you know."

  "Phone? Letter?"

  "Damn you!" She stood up and went to the windows, stood there with her back to the room. Her anger made a pink tint on the pallor of her neck below the graying hair. I went over and stood behind her and to her left. The sky above the distant parking plaza was as gray as the asphalt. Three kids were running diagonally across the lot, a big yellow dog loping along with them.

  "Use your head, Janice. If you don't know how to handle it with me, how can you expect to handle it when the cold winds really start to blow?"

  "He had reasons for everything he did."

  "And never miscalculated? Never made an error? Do you really believe that he wanted Gloria to be persecuted, treated as a suspicious person and watched and followed the rest of her life?"

  She turned and stared up into my eyes. "Will it be like that?"

  "Not if it was six thousand or sixty thousand. It's six hundred thousand. It hasn't hit the news yet. The bank and the lawyers and the tax people have kept the lid on it. Fort's mind was clouded in one way. I can draw pictures for you. There have been people killed in this happy village for forty cents. No matter how carefully the missing money is reported, there are going to be some types sitting around wondering which way and how soon they'll pick up the bride and take her to a cozy place and treat her pretty little feet with lighter fluid. They'll think that either she knows or she doesn't, but that much cash is worth the try. She'll end up in the river wrapped in scrap iron either way."

  Her eyes widened and her throat bulged as she dry-swallowed twice, and, with her color going bad, s
he braced a hand against the window frame and closed her eyes for a moment. I asked her if she was going to faint.

  "No. I don't faint. It was just the idea anybody... could do that to Gloria Geis."

  "And if she doesn't know, there's always Heidi and then Roger and then you. It's big loot, and it is in the handiest form loot comes in. You don't have to fence it."

  Her color was better. She swallowed again. "I... I guess I do have some of it. Not here. It's in my box at the bank. The letter is here. But I don't think it will mean anything, and it says not to tell anybody. But, as you say, I don't think he realized what could happen... Excuse me."

  She went over to a desk and opened a drawer. and sorted through a half-box of new stationery, riffling it with her thumb until she came to the letter. She looked at it before she handed it to me. She shook her head. "I hate what happened to his muscular control. His hands were so good."

  It was small, shaky, uncertain writing, but reasonably legible. It was dated the previous August eleventh.

  Janice, dear,

  Put this in your lock box at your bank.

  I have gotten word to someone to come to you in case of emergency. You will find out what might have to be done. Use the money for that purpose. You will understand why I couldn't ask G for this kind of help. If no one comes to you within a year of my death, please get the money to G. I would write more, but it is hard to write. I know I impose. Thanks for many things, and thanks for this.

  Fortner

  "It's ten thousand dollars," she said. "In hundred dollar bills, mostly. It was in a manila envelope wrapped with rubber bands inside another manila envelope. I think he thought it was ten thousand even, but it was a hundred dollars short. It came in the regular mail."

  "You saw him after that. Did you mention the note and the money?"

  "When I started to, he closed his eyes and shook his head. Gloria was out of the room just then."

  I read it once more and gave it back to her to put away. "Not a clue," I said. "Some unknown person may or may not come to you for help, and if they come, they'll tell you what kind of help they need. Isn't that just dandy? Only five hundred and ninety thousand to go."

  "I wish I could help. I really do."

  She meant it. Sincerity and conviction, and a great directness. But I had to come to the usual screeching halt. I didn't have her lashed up to a polygraph with a good man watching the styluses or styli or whatever the hell the proper plural might be. Pen points, maybe. And I didn't know if she was one of the small percentage who can fool the polygraph every time. In a world of plausible scoundrels and psychopathic liars, hunch can take you only so far.

  I have to keep remembering at all times that sweet little old lady on the veranda in Charleston, South Carolina, the one who told me the story of her life in a sighing little voice, a story so sad that my eyes were misty and my voice thick by the time she shot at me with the Luger she was holding in her lap under the corner of her shawl. The slug took a little bite out of the side of the collar of my white shirt and exposed a dime-sized piece of blue necktie.

  "Maybe," I said, "the money's for Gretchen."

  "For who?"

  "For Gretchen. I guess you could call her an indiscretion. Long ago. Way back when Glenna was dying,"

  She looked puzzled. "I don't know anything about that. It doesn't sound right, somehow. He worshipped his first wife."

  "At least he always thought he did. Until he took a little acid LSD, provided by a buddy."

  "Dr. Wyatt? Hayes Wyatt?"

  "Glory took the trip too. I guess they were both getting a bad hang-up on his situation being terminal."

  She nodded. "Dr. Wyatt has had a lot of success with it with terminal cases, where the pain is bad and they're terribly frightened, or terribly depressed. It's disassociative, you know. It gives them a breathing space to kind of sort out what it all means."

  "And he sorted Glenna out and found out he didn't like her at all. Glory says it surprised him."

  "Who was Gretchen?"

  There was no reason not to tell her. There was even the chance it might knock loose some useful memory. But I told her and it didn't. The tale intrigued her. It gave another dimension to her hero, Fort Geis. But at the same time it diminished her. She had thought of herself as one third of the women in Geis' maturity-Glenna-Janice-Gloria. News of hearty little Gretch made it a foursome. It complicated her mental biography of the great man. It put two little vertical lines between her eyebrows, and I no longer had her full attention.

  So, with promises to get in touch if either of us learned anything, I went back out into the last gray fading of the daylight in the damp and windy streets. I knew the sun was still shining way down there at Bahia Mar in the bottom right corner of the map, and the Busted Flush would be creaking and sighing when the dying wash from the incoming charterboats got to her. The sandy little brown broads would be ornamenting the sunset beach, casting the swift sidelong glance, trying not to blow their cool with the slightest trace of smile, and other kids would be playing the big game of pretending to be surfers, as they rode their bright boards in the gigantic, savage, towering breakers two feet high that break for twenty feet and six whole seconds sometimes.

  [Surfers of the World, save your money and dream long dreams of getting to that one unspoiled beach that makes both California and Hawaii look like a sometime thing. Two whole miles of ocean straight out from the beach, six feet deep on the median tide, all -sand, and flat as pool tables. On the prevailing wind out of the southwest, girls and boys, those rollers start to build way down by Mozambique and Madagascar, and have a twothousand-mile run across the Indian Ocean before they crest white two miles off the great beach at Galle, Ceylon, and run all the way in with such a perfect symmetry and geometry that when you look down on it from twenty thousand feet it is like looking at a swatch of fabric, a pure pinstripe white on a pale tan-green background. As a special added convenience, just a bit south, toward Dondra Head, the deeps are close to the beach, so that after you get beyond the first few, you have nothing to fight on the way out.]

  But I was too far from a softer sunset and a better beach. I knew that with a little luck I could either get part of my path smoothed for me, or find out something that would convince me it would make a lot more sense to head south right away. In the premature fading of daylight, I drove my rental car back through the damp and windy streets to the hotel and went up to the room; practicing a glassy smile to see if it would help lift me out of a mood turning as gray as day's end. See, brain-pan? The mouth is smiling. Feel the smile muscles? Hi ho, hi ho. The eyes are squinching too. McGee is one happy fella. Right?

  I think I was trying too hard with the smile. When the elevator door opened at my floor, a substantial matron in a fur hat was waiting to board. When she glimpsed me, she sprang back a good distance and then waited until I was four strides away before scuttling into the Otis-Box.

  I turned on the lights in the room and emptied all the cards out of my wallet on the bed. You may charge me, dear people, with being a CardCarrying American. I find these little tickets to perpetual consumption distasteful. I do not like to see my name on them, deeply embossed into everlasting plastic. They make me feel as if I should wear a leather collar and hang them all thereon. When there is a mistake in the billing on any of them, if you persist, you can fight your way past the icy and patronizing indifference of the electronic computers and reach a semi-human who can straighten things out. It only takes a year or so.

  Yet in our times the thick wad of credit cards is a cachet of respectability, something more useful to me than any questionable convenience. When a cop lays upon you the white eye, and you stand there hunting for a driver's license as identification, and he watches you fumble through AmEx Diners, Carte Blanche, Air Travel, Sheraton, Shell, Gulf, Phillips, Standard, Avis, and Texaco before you find it, he is reassured. You may have thirty-seven cents and a dirty shirt, but you are completely on record and in good standing with the Establis
hment. If all you have is the license and a bale of vulgar cash money, it piques his curiosity. Who is this bum who can't get credit cards like honest people?

  I found Maurie Ragna's personal card among the seldom used credit cards tucked into a side pocket of the wallet. He had written his unlisted phone number on the back of it. An East Chicago number, over the line in Lake County, Indiana, where as I understood it, the authorities were still as cooperative and hospitable to Ragna and his playmates as they had once been in Calumet City and Cicero. The Outfit, as it is known.along the lake, had responded to the roust by moving over the line into Gary and East Chicago.

  I had come along once at the right time and, down in the Keys, had pried Maurie out of an exceptionally ugly situation, wherein he had no future at all to speak of. Grateful as he was, he was astonished any bystander would voluntarily involve himself. As it was, he couldn't put any weight at all on his feet for days, and walked in a very tender way for much longer. But that is an old and complex story, and he had tried to show appreciation by gifting me with cars, broads, and vacations on the cuff, but I had settled for a dozen mohair cardigans and passed along eleven of the twelve to friends. So this was the first time l was making a call on an old obligation, and if he was not yet buried out in the desert near Vegas, or chained to the bottom of lake or river, it might hearten him.