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

by One Fearful Yellow Eye(lit)

  "Car payments?"

  "No dice there. You see, it was a two-year-old Cad that the owner totaled, and the place Saul Gorba worked bid three-fifty for it. Then they found more wrong than the estimator thought there was. Gorba put down two hundred on it and agreed they could take another two-fifty out of his pay. That was back in April, I think. It was with the idea he could work on it in his spare time when he'd put in his regular hours, and buy the parts from them at cost or scrounge them from the yards, and they'd let him use shop tools. A lot of those guys work it that way for a personal car. They don't like them trying to fix iron up for resale as it puts them in competition with the shops they're working for. But Gorba didn't have a car so it was okay with the boss. So for about nine hundred, plus all the hours he put into it, he came out of it with a pretty good automobile. I understand he's handy with tools and catches on fast."

  "When did he finish it, Smith?"

  "August sometime."

  "What would be the chance of tracing them in a hurry?"

  After a short silence he said, "I wouldn't say it was real great, not if Gorba doesn't want to be traced. School records, medical records, IRS refunds, Social Security-he'd be carefuler than most. He had to rent the trailer someplace and he had to turn it in someplace, but he could unload it, drive it three hundred miles empty, and turn it in. With the car registration, he could cover up best by unloading it on a cash deal and buying something else under another name. My hunch would be check close on the daughter's friends. You tear a seventeen-year-old kid away from all her friends, she is going to find some way to drop them a card. But I don't like the feel of it, not with those checks unclaimed. What is it now? Thirteen hundred bucks. Listen, they're going to keep me on the run all day. This evening I maybe get a chance to cover a couple of. other angles. I'll be in touch."

  The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city. When you swallowed, you could taste the city. All the trees looked dead, and all the people looked like mourners. Happy Christmas. Bingle jells. Brace yourself for hate week.

  Heidi opened the red door with a fractional smile of cool welcome. She was in one of her painting suits. This one was yellow, like shark repellent. It had forty-three pockets with flaps and zippers.

  "Flow's our patient?" I asked, very jolly.

  "I made her go back to bed. She was shaky." Heidi had a blue smudge on the back of one hand, two speckles of bright red on her chin. The door to her studio was open. She was dressed for air-sea rescue, visible at thirty miles.

  I glanced through the doorway into her studio. She said, "Kindly do not express an interest in my work. I already know your opinion."

  "Look, I did not mean to rawhide you last night. I'm sorry."

  "It isn't something new, Mr. McGee. Men try to shake me up by saying ugly things. It's sort of an erotic compulsion, I guess."

  "Maybe you're an example of conspicuous waste."

  "Don't try to make phrases. You're not the type. She's in the second bedroom on the left."

  Susan Kemrner was propped up on two pillows. ` Her face was turned toward the gray light at the window, and tracked silver with tears. She looked at me, dabbed in gingerly fashion at the tear marks with a tissue, snuffled and hitched the pale blue blanket higher. The gestures had the flavor of bracing for an ordeal. It looked to me as though some of the puffiness was gone. But the areas of discoloration were larger, and the hues more varied.

  I pulled a chair over and sat by the foot of the bed, facing her. "Saul work you over?"

  "I'm not going to answer questions, Mr. McGee."

  "Why don't you just think the questions over, and answer the ones you feel like answering? I won't try to trick you. Take your time."

  "Who are you?"

  "A friend of yours. I might have some answers to some of your questions. If you have any."

  "Why should I want to ask you anything?"

  "You might want to know why Dr. Fortner Geis was anxious to help you. I guess he had the feeling you might get in a real jam. A ten-thousand-dollar jam, Susan. That's the amount of cash he sent Mrs. Stanyard."

  "Ten... thousand... dollars!"

  "If you didn't contact her in a year, then she was to give it to Mrs. Geis."

  "But... wouldn't it be mine anyway?"

  "How come?"

  "I mean it would have been money he got from my..." She stopped abruptly. I could guess at what was going on in her mind. Storybook stuff. Afternoon soap opera. There could be a dozen versions. Famous surgeon has a friend who has a daughter dying of a brain tumor. She is pregnant. Unmarried. Influential family. They don't want a scandal. The Doctor keeps the girl alive long enough so that she can have her baby, and then he arranges with his housekeeper for the housekeeper's daughter and her young husband, Karl Kemmer, to raise the baby as their own. So the money that had always come every month came from the annuity her real mother's people had bought for her, and the ten thousand is some kind of emergency fund entrusted to the Doctor long ago. I did not want to reach into her head and wrench any of her dreams loose. They had sustained her. One day she would be able to jettison them herself, after they had served their long purpose. There was strength in this girl. But very strong people can break when there is too much all at once.

  "How did Dr. Geis get word to you about contacting Mrs. Stanyard in case of trouble?"

  "I don't want to answer questions."

  "Take your time. See if there is any harm in answering that one, Susan."

  "But if I don't want any help, why should I answer anything?"

  "You have an orderly mind. But I gave you some help last night. You needed it and took it."

  She thought that over. "He wrote me a letter last August. The writing was shaky. We knew from Grandma he was going to die. The Sunday before I got the letter she told us he was failing. It just said if I needed help I should go to Mrs. Stanyard. I was to write down her phone and address and destroy the letter, and not tell anybody. I thought it sounded sort of... crazy. He said Mrs. Stanyard was a nurse and a nice person and I could trust her. I did like he said in the letter even if I didn't expect anything to happen, and sort of forgot it until... "

  "Until the day before yesterday.

  "But you wouldn't go to her apartment with her because you said they'd look for you there. What did that mean?"

  "Nothing."

  "Okay. Now then. You're in some kind of a jam. You can call on me, and I can be just as rough as I have to be to get you out of it. And you've got ten thousand to finance the operation. I am yours to command, kid."

  She turned her face toward the window. The tears started again. "But I can't do anything," she said hopelessly. "Nobody can do anything. She went away once in California and they put us in a place. There was just three of us then and we were little, and we almost didn't get Freddy back. The judge said he was disturbed."

  "Gretchen has gone off someplace?"

  Defiant eyes stared at me through the slits. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  I stood up. "I'm going to leave you alone for a little while to think something over. Let me see if I have the names right Freddy, Julian, Freda, and 'Ibmmy. Christmas vacation is coming up, Susan. I don't think it would be too difficult for an obviously respectable type like me to go gather up the kids. I know a crazy wonderful couple in Palm Beach. House as big as a hotel. Pots of money. Cook, maids, housekeeper, yard men. And scads of kids. They adopt them. Five more over Christmas would hardly be noticed. I could set it up with one phone call, and you've got the airplane money. Think it over."

  I walked out without giving her a chance to respond. Heidi did not hear me. I leaned against the studio doorway. She was reworking the bottom corner of a, big painting, standing bent over with her back to me. Her air-sea rescue costume was clinched tight around the slender waist, and stretched tightly across the pleasantly globular rear. I have always thought it fallacious to make an erotic specialty out of any particular portion of the form divine. When it i
s good it is all good, and some days some parts are a little better than others, but you need the entire creature to make any segment of it worthwhile. In three silent steps I could grab a double handful of all that and see if she could manage a standing high jump over the top of the painting.

  "AhHem!" I said.

  She straightened and whirled around. "Oh! Did you find out anything?"

  First I broke it to her that her patient was Gretchen's kid, and was the eldest granddaughter of Anna, the housekeeper, and briefed her on Gretchen's home life, hubby and sudden departure.

  She looked thoughtful and troubled instead of startled, and said that she guessed that subconsciously she must have had some hint. She had dreamed about Gretchen last night for the first time in years. So I went back to her specific question. Had I found out anything?

  "Just enough to make some guesses, and they are probably wrong. She thinks any kind of help is going to make things worse. I have a hunch the Gorba family moved well out of town. Fifty miles, a hundred miles. Mama Gretchen missed the lights and the action, so she took off. So Saul Gorba took a little hack at the ripening daughter, maybe to get even with Gretch for taking off. I would think she'd put up a pretty good scramble, so maybe she got her nails into his chops, or a solid little knee into his underparts, and he lost his temper and hammered her. I think he would know she wouldn't blow the whistle on him. With his record they would tote him off gladly, and the social workers would, in the absence of the old lady, stuff the kids into the handiest institution. I think she is hooked on being the little mother hen to these other four. I think she is worried to death about them right now. If she goes back, the stepdaddy tries again. And if she stays away and Gretchen is away, who looks after the little ones? Not so terribly little, actually. Fifteen, twelve, ten and six."

  She nibbled the wood end of a paint brush, frowning. "That sounds so ugly, the whole situation. It's so strange, really. Roger has such clear memories of Gretehen when she lived with us. Of course he's four years older. But I must have been almost eight years old when Gretchen got married. I can remember a lot of things from a lot earlier than that. But Gretchen is sort of dim. I can't see her face at all, or remember her voice. Roger says she was good to us. He says she was good-natured and sort of dumb and sloppy. But would she just walk out on her kids?"

  "Apparently she's done it before."

  "Poor Anna. She deserves a more reliable daughter. Couldn't Anna take her own grandchildren for a while? Maybe not. Probably Lady Gloria wouldn't want brats from her own so_ cial level cluttering up her illusions of grandeur."

  I started to speak and then let it stand. We could not head in that direction and get anywhere. She was blocked. So I made some unimportant small talk and then went back in to catch Susan's reaction. It was a firm shake of the head-from side to side: No more questions and no more answers. She didn't want to be any trouble to anyone. She would leave as soon as she felt well enough. Thanks a lot.

  I talked with Heidi again before leaving. She promised she wouldn't try to pump Susan Kemmer, but if the girl said anything useful, Heidi would get in touch with me right away.

  I went to the nearby Ambassador for some midmorning coffee and some midmorning thought. A trio of high-fashion models, young ones, were gathered there for some do. They chittered and squeaked at each other. Their starved faces were painted to a silver pallor, their tresses shaped by men who hate women, using only soup bowls and hedge clippers, their clothing created by those daring little hanky-stompers who vie with each other in seeing how grotesque they can make their clients. It is an in-joke with them, and it gives them hysterics when they get together. They whinny, fall down, and spill their money. I think they would do a lot less harm sculpting pop-art dogs.

  I ordered more coffee and went and phoned Janice Stanyard. No answer. I tried the hospital. She was in surgery, and scheduled through until at least four in the afternoon. I went back to my coffee and dug through the scrap paper in my side pocket and found the phone slip on Nurse Stanyard's call. It had come in at nine. So I went to the bus depot on East Randolph. It was to buses what Miami International is to airplanes. They had American, Continental, DeLuxe, Indiana, Santa Fe, Suburban, American Coach and so on big inside ramps and stations, gates and callers.

  In order to get anywhere I had to make certain assumptions. With her face in that condition, she wouldn't hang around waiting to make up her mind about calling Janice Stanyard. Give her ten minutes to get from the platform to a phone. Give Janice five minutes before calling me. So I was interested in anything arriving from, say, eighteen minutes before the hour to five minutes before the hour. After studying and cross-checking the printed schedules and the arrival boards, I came up with five possibilities, all based on the assumption she came in from out of the city somewhere. My only prayer was her very memorable condition. When you see a young girl with the kind of a face Dick Ti ger could give any contender back in his better days, it can stick in your mind. But I was at the wrong end of the day. Depot personnel on duty this Tuesday morning wouldn't have been around on Monday night at nine. If she was on one of the five arrivals, she would have used one of three gates to come into the terminal.

  Mark time. Futz around. Scratch. Fret. Watch girls. Wonder what the hell you are doing in this huge damp cellar full of three or four million people. Between announcements the speaker system in the depot was telling everybody about we three kings of Orient are. Damn you, Fort Geis, why didn't you leave a message in a hollow tree? Why didn't you realize what a pot of trouble you were leaving behind? It was an example of the terrible innocence of men who are superb in their own fields. Einstein had some grotesque political opinions. Jack Paar knew how we should get rid of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Vonnegut keeps losing airplane tickets.

  Forhier Geis had not the slightest idea that people representing a dozen different interests and points of view would compete for the chance to drag the widow into their particular cave and gnaw her bones clean. Six hundred big ones brightens the eyes, sharpens the taste, bulges the muscles. O speak to us from beyond, Great Surgeon.

  I trudged out into a hooing of damp and grisly wind, into the kind of gunmetal day when you wear your headlights turned on, and think of a roaring fire, hot buttered rum, a Dynel tigerskin, and a brown agile lass from Papeete. I took my dismals to the Palmen House and traded them to a sad-smiling man for a C-cup of Plymouth. We stood on either side of the bar and sighed at each other in wistful awareness of our mutual mortality, and I left half the drink and went off and phoned Heidi.

  When she answered I said, "Is the battered bird responding?"

  "Not so that anyone could notice. She's taking a bath and washing her hair. If it's any use to you, her clothes are from a cheap chain with about ten thousand outlets in Chicago, and her shoes seem to be a very good grade of cardboard, and her total of worldly goods comes to four dimes and four pennies, a red comb, half a pink lipstick, and one wadded-up bus schedule."

  "What bus line?"

  "Hmm. Let me go look. She's still sloshing in there." She came back and said, "North Central. I looked to see if she'd marked anything on it. She hasn't."

  "Thanks. It could be a help. You make a good secret agent."

  "Secret agent hell, McGee. It's pure female nosiness."

  I went back to my drink in better humor. I separated the North Central timetable from the others I had picked up. Bus Number 83 arrived every weekday night at 8:45, back at the point of origin from where it had left at 8:20 that morning. Elgin, Rockford, Freeport, Clinton, Moline, Galesburg, Peoria, Peru, Ottawa, Joliet, and home to the barn. I could guess the union wouldn't let them load that kind of a run on one man. Probably one man took it to --some midway point, possibly Moline, and his relief brought it on in and took it out the next morning and traded off again at Moline.

  So the driver who had brought her in Monday night would be bringing her in again on Wednesday night. The company ran shorter routes and longer routes, and the Chicago office address was pri
nted on the timetable. I signaled for a refill, left money as my surety bond, and went off and called North Central.

  "Give me somebody who knows your driver roster," I told the girl.

  "Herbison speaking," a man said, moments later.

  "State traffic control," I said. "Sergeant Ellis. Who brought your 83 in last night?"

  "Anything wrong, Sergeant?"

  "Just a routine check. Trying to pin down the time we lost some intersection lights."

  "Oh. Hold on." It took him twenty seconds. "Daniel D. DuShane, Sergeant." He explained I could contact him after two o'clock at a Galesburg address. He gave me the phone number. He said DuShane would be in again on 83 tomorrow night, that he was a good man, held a schedule well, and would probably be able to help me.