"Looks like her old man beat her up."
"Sergeant, I hope you locate her. It's no town for a kid like that to be wandering around in. And I hope you bend her old man a little. A guy who hits his kid like that is some kind of animal."
"Thanks for your help, Mr. DuShane."
"I guess I should have turned her over to the cops at the depot."
Back in my rental when I got the engine going and the heater on high and the wipers knocking the snow off, I dug an Illinois map out of the glove compartment and finally located Bureau. It was halfway between Joliet and Rock island, and lay about eight miles south of Interstate 80. The legend said that from the size of the circle marking it the population was between zero and two hundred and fifty. The idea of a town of zero population bemused me. Should it not have been from one to two hundred and fift? My eye, sliding, picked up the name of a town of the same size on the other side of the river. Florid. It looked like a typo. Florid, Illinois. The Florid Hotel. The Florid Bank. A cominunity of fat happy little people suffering from high blood pressure.
So I had enough leverage now, properly used, to unlock Miss Susan Kemmer. And Y knew I was sitting in a snowy automobile playing map games because I was reluctant to go use the leverage. Respect for the sanctity of the individual is a terrible burden in my line of work. I have seen cops whose greatest jolly is in taking your head apart and spreading all the pieces out on the table, under the interrogation lights. The totally dismembered personality can be put back together again, but the pieces never fit quite the way they did. And they come apart easier the next time. The old field strip.
Five o'clock and blundering old mother night had come in ahead of time to squat upon the city, upon two hundred thousand hair-trigger tempers clashing their way back toward good old homeheated television dinners, steam heat, the headachy little woman, the house-bound kids, and the dreadful feeling that Christmas was going to tear the guts out of the checking account.
I found a parking slot around the corner from Heidi's place, and as I was going to enter the downstairs foyer, I turned on impulse and looked upward and picked out a big fat drifting flake, stuck my tongue out, and maneuvered under it. Consumer report. The snow is still pretty good. Cold as ever. Melts as fast. You can't hardly taste the additives.
She let me in through the red door, into lamplight glow. Her creative day had ended and she was austere and queenly in a white knit dress with long sleeves-an off-white, neckline prim, shift-like in the loose beltless fit of it, hemline just above the knees in that third-grade look which gives women with legs as good as hers an innocently erotic flavor, and gives women with bad legs the clown look of Baby Snooks.
"What a Christly ghastly depressing day," she said. She hiccuped. Astoundingly, she giggled. She looked appalled at herself, turned with careful stateliness, and said, walking away from me, "Don't think you've discovered some kind of secret vice, McGee. I felt chilly and I had some sherry. The work was going well and I kept drinking it and I didn't realize how many times I'd filled the glass and suddenly I was quite drunk. It isn't habitual."
"I'd never tab you as a wino, honey."
She revolved like a window display, hiccuped again, and said, "I shall be perfectly all right in a few minutes."
"How's your house guest?"
"Still sleeping. She must have been exhausted. Let's go see, shall we?"
I went down the short hallway with her. She turned on the hallway light: The room door was closed. She turned the knob carefully and swung the door open, hand still on the knob. I was right behind her. The wide vague band of light from the open doorway reached to the bed on the far side of the room. The young girl froze and gasped. She was standing beside the bed, and had obviously just taken off the borrowed nightgown and laid it on the bed and had been reaching toward the chair where her clothes were. The light was too shadowy to expose the facial damage. She had a ripeness, a pale heartiness in the light, and she quickly clapped one arm across her big young breasts and shielded her ginger-tan pubic tuft with her other hand.
A sound came from Heidi which turned every hair on the nape of my neck into a fine wiry bristle, crawled the flesh on the backs of my hands, and turned the small of my back to ice.
It was a tiny little-girl voice; thin and small, with none of the resonances of her maturity. It was a forlorn and sleepy little question. "Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, I'm scared. I had a bad dream. Daddy?"
Then she backed into me, banged the door shut. She stepped on my foot, turned into my arms, shuddered, and said, in that same infinitely pathetic little voice, "I'm going to tell on her. I'm going to tell on Gretchen! She was all bare!"
I held her. She was breathing rapidly, breathing a warm sherry-scented breath into my throat. Suddenly she slid her arms around my neck and held me with all her strength, crushing her soft and open mouth into mine, rocking and grinding her hips into me. There was so much frantic hunger from such a delicious direction, I was at least twotenths of a second catching up to her. Suddenly she sagged, fainting limp, and groaned, and would have fallen.
I helped her into the living room. She coughed and gagged. She stretched out full-length on the couch and rolled her head from side to side. I turned out the lamp shining down into her eyes and sat on the floor beside her and held her hand.
"What happened to me?" she asked. The little-girl voice was gone.
"Listen to me, Heidi. I want to tell you a sad story about a sensitive and complicated little girl in a silent house. She must have been about seven years old, and there were nurses and the smells of medicine and the adored mother was dying, and she felt frightened and alone, and had nightmares."
She did not move as I reconstructed it for her. Her hand lay cool and boneless in mine. I finished it. There was no response.
"How vile!" she said in an almost inaudible tone. "How ugly and terrible."
"Sure. A lonely man, wretchedly depressed. A young girl with a terrible crush on him. A slowwitted, amiable, romantic girl with all the ideas of soft surrender out of the love pulps and confessions. So she crept into his dark room and into his bed after God only knows how many nights of thinking about it. Soft, loving, willing young flesh and he took her. You came in on one of those nights to be comforted. She was just climbing out of his bed. There is a sexual undertone to every little girl's love for her daddy."
"'No!"
"It must have terrified them to think that you might tell. But you went back to your own bed in another part of the house. And the doors slammed shut. It was too terrible a betrayal for you to endure. So it got pushed into a back closet of your mind, and the door was locked. But Heidi, you had to push other things in there too, and lock them away. The love for the father. And your own sexual responses. Slam the doors. Forget. The way you've forgotten how Gretchen looked, forgotten her voice. It turned you off, Heidi. Sex is vile. The world is vile. Love is ugliness."
"Amateur diagnostics. Christ! It's the parlor game I'm most sick of."
"Look at me! Come on. One more little minute before you run and hide. You reverted all the way back. You regressed to seven years old. Then you slammed the door. Then you came at me like a she-tiger. Like rape. You couldn't have made it plainer."
"No. No."
"Don't lie, damn you! Don't hide! Who was I?"
She closed her eyes. Her lips moved. "Daddy."
"Who were you?"
"I was... me. And I was Gretchen too. All in one."
"How did you feel?"
"... Aching. Empty. Wanting. As if something secret and delicious was starting to grow, something that could grow and burst, over and over. Then everything went dark and dead."
"Poor chick," I said. "It's all bottled up. It's all twisted and strange. So that everything he did was a denial of you the way you denied him. Janice Stanyard. Gloria. For about twelve fantastic seconds you started to break through. And you lost it. But it proves you could."
"No!"
"You want to enjoy your hang-up? You want to live
a half-life in a half-world?"
She rolled her head from side to side and her hand tightened on mine. "No, but..."
"But..."
"It's no use. Gadge tried everything. Drinks, pills, different ways. It was just nightmare. Just all that terrible poking and jostling. So ugly." Her voice trailed off. "So stupid and degrading and... vile."
"Heidi, in that hallway shock turned your mind off, and your body came alive, and your body knew what it wanted."
"I don't want to be turned into an animal."
"Like Gretchen? You damm fool, do you know why that girl in there triggered it? Because she looks like her mother did eighteen years ago. She's your half-sister."
She stiffened, yanked her hand away, sat up and stared down into my face. "Oh... my... God!... Oh... my... GOD!"
"You sensed it, didn't you?"
"I could feel... something strange. Like an echo, like a memory I never had."
I moved up onto the couch beside her and took hold of both her hands. She looked at me, solemn and troubled, and extraordinarily lovely and alive. "And that girl in there is an animal?" I asked.
"No. No, of course not. She's a good person."
"So is Gloria. So is Janice Stanyard. So was your father. All this priss-prim condemnation act of yours is a by-product of what happened to you when you walked into that room at the wrong time, at the wrong time in your life and in your father's eighteen years ago."
She frowned. "It could be. Maybe. I don't know."
"Want to find out?"
"What do you mean?"
"After this is all over. After I'm through here, I'm going to find a place where the sun is hot and lasts all day. Come along with me. I'm the world's worst setup for screwed-up broads. I hate waste. You're worth special effort."
She bit her lip. "All that again? No."
"You responded to me once."
"That doesn't mean anything."
"You must have some strong motivation to break out in some kind of direction or you wouldn't have let your pretty partner, Mark Avanyan, buddy you up with his musician friend-VanSomething."
She gave a delicate little shudder. "Anna VanMaller. She finally started to arouse me. It was creepy and terrible. I kicked her and I ran and threw up. She was furious. I'd rather be... the way I am, even."
"Even?"
She tilted her head, then blushed deeply and looked down and away, but she didn't pull her hands away. "I guess that was a little too significant, Travis. Okay, I'm aware of the deficit. It's probably lousy, but I don't know how lousy because I don't know what it could be like."
"Just one rule. If you say yes, you can't call it off. You endure it, until I give up."
"Gadge gave up."
"I'm not Gadge. You're twenty-five. You are a beautiful woman, Heidi. What if this is the last chance?"
She pulled her hands away, shook herself as if returning to reality, and stared at me with a little curl of contempt on her lips.
"So you'll make this terrible sacrifice, huh? Wow! I'm impressed. If you're the great lover who finds out how to turn me on, it gives you an ego as big as the Tribune Tower. And I can learn a wet smile, pose for a centerfold, and become a happy bunny. And if you try and try and I never make it, then you've had the loan of what I'm told is very superior equipment for God knows how long, and you can trudge away shaking your head and feeling sorry for the poor frigid woman. Tails you win, tails I lose, buddy. If foul-ups are your hobby, go find a different kind. I'm too bright to buy that line of crap, my friend. I'm not a volunteer playmate."
I got up and ambled around the semi-darkened room, scrubbing at my jaw with a thoughtful knuckle. She took very dead aim. She got inside. She made it sting. I will not fault my talent to kid myself.
I wandered, making bleak appraisals, and ended up standing behind the couch talking down at the top of her bowed blonde head.
"The first step has to be absolute honesty Heidi. Okay. You are flat right, and you are flat wrong. Here's how you are right. I've got a plain simple old elemental urge to tumble you into the sack on any terms. You have that cool remote princessly look in total contrast with a very exciting body and exciting way of moving and handling yourself. It intrigues. Man wants to possess. He wants to storm the castle, bust down the gates, and take over. But I think-I'm not really sure--but I think that if that was my total motive, I'm enough of a grown-up not to try to get to you by sneaking up on your blind side. Grabbing something because it looks great is kind of irresponsible. Life is not a candy store.
"Likewise, dear girl, life is not a playground full of playmates where all good men are supposed to come to the aid of old Hooo the Hef and dedicate themselves sincerely and with a sense of responsibility and mission to liberating the maximum number of receptive lassies from the chains and burdens of our Puritan heritage.
"I think my shtick Heidi, is that I enjoy all the aspects of a woman. I like the way their minds work. I like the sometimes wonderful and sometimes nutty ways they figure things out and relate themselves to reality. I like the arguments, the laughs, the quarrels, the competitions, the making up. A nearby girl makes the sky bluer, the drinks better, the food tastier. She gives the days more texture, and you know it is happening to her in the same way.
"How this relates to Heidi Geis Trumbill is that I have the feeling it is a damned shame you stand outside the gates with a kind of wistful curiosity about what it's like inside. I want to be sort of a guide, showing off new and pretty country to the tourist. Life is so damned valuable and so totally miraculous, and they give you such a stingy little hunk of it from womb to tomb, you ought to use all the parts of it there are. I guess I would say that I want to be friends. A friend wants to help a friend. I want to peel away that suspicion and contention because I don't think it's really what you're like. If we can get friendship going, then maybe we can get a good physical intimacy going, and from that we can fall into a kind of love or fall into an affection close to love. If it happens, it adds up to more than the sum of the two people, and it is that extra part out of nowhere that has made all the songs and the poetry and the art.
"So it wouldn't be a performance. No great-lover syndrome. No erotic tricks, no Mother McGee's home-cooked aphrodisiacs. The only trick would be, I guess, to get you to like yourself a little. Then the rest would come.
"So you know what's wrong with the whole statement, just as 1 do. Why doesn't he get his own true permanent forever girl? Maybe it is some kind of emotional immaturity. Somehow I don't think so. I have a theory I can't prove. I know this. If I became one woman's permanent emotional stability and security, there would be a moral obligation on my part to change the way I live, because I'd have no right to ask her to buy a piece of my risk-taking: Yet risk is so essential to me-for reasons I can only guess at-giving it up would make me a different kind of man. I don't think I'd like him. I don't think she would. I don't know if all this is excuse, explanation, sales talk or what. I really don't know. It's what I think I think."
I stood there. She did not move or speak. I heard a deep sigh. Then in a lithe movement she turned, rolling up onto her knees, and stood on her knees looking up at me across the back of the couch. Her eyes were evasive. She put her hands out and I took them.
"So I'll try friendship," she said. "I've tried everything else. I don't even know very much about being a friend, Travis. I should make some gesture to seal the bargain, I suppose."
She uptilted her face, eyes closed, mouth offered. But I could tell that she was steeling herself. Her hands had a clammy feel of nervous tension. So, briefly and lightly, I, kissed one closed eye and then the other. I released her hands and said, "Contract confirmed."
She looked startled, stepped backward off the couch, and said, "You kind of lost me a little with that risk-taking part."
"I conned John Andrus into giving me that card. I knew Gloria before your father did., They met down in Lauderdale. I stood up with them when they got married. She phoned me in Florida and asked me to com
e up and help. You could say I'm in the salvage business. Suppose some very sly, slick, sleek operator worked on you and suckered you out of the settlement Gadge made on you. The statutes are full of gimmicks. Semi-legal theft. I might be induced to give it a try. Whatever I could recover, I'd keep half. Half is better than nothing. No recovery and I've gambled my expenses and lost. Make a recovery, and expenses come off the top before I split. Somehow people on a dead run with a jaw full of stolen meat react badly to having it taken away from them."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 08 - One Fearful Yellow Eye Page 17