John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Doing what?”

“It’s called Development Unlimited. It’s sort of a promotion company. They do a lot of land-syndication things. I don’t really know how it works, but it’s supposed to be a wonderful idea for people in high tax brackets, like doctors and so on. They pay a lot of interest in advance when they buy the land, and then they sell it later for capital gains. Tom is very clever at things like that. And they set up shares in apartment houses and do something very clever about depreciation and losses and cash flow and all that. He tried to explain it to me, but I have no head for that kind of thing. I guess he’s doing well because he has to go out of town a lot and arrange deals in other places too. To have Maurie the way she is makes... his success so kind of hollow. He is really a marvelous human being.”

“He seems to be.”

She wanted to show me her studio and her paintings. But she was making too obvious an effort to entertain me. The shine had gone out of her day. I said I should be getting along. I wrote out my address for her and told her to send me the name of the man who had bought the Likely Lady when she went through her mother’s papers.

We stood out by my car and told each other we hoped we’d see each other again someday. Maybe we did hope so. Hard to say.

I got back to the Wahini Lodge at three. I stretched out on the bed and told myself that it had to be the end of the obligation, if there was any. I had taken a good look. It was a sorry little situation. Prognosis bad. When you can’t identify the disease, the prognosis is always bad. And two nice people, Tom Pike and Bridget Pearson, were stuck with it. Maybe if Maurie could knock herself off in such a way that Tom wouldn’t blame Biddy and she wouldn’t blame him or herself, they might be able to make a life. A lot of widowers have married kid sisters and enjoyed it.

The restlessness was back in full force. I didn’t want to go home to Lauderdale. I didn’t want to stay where I was. And I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I felt like a bored kid on a rainy day. Maurie kept sliding into my mind and I kept pushing her out. Go away, woman. Have a nice sleep.

I went into the bathroom. I glanced at my toilet-article kit atop the pale yellow formica of the countertop, and my random restless thoughts were gone in an instant, and I was totally focused, the back of my neck feeling prickly and cool.

Caution is like the seat belt habit. If you are going to use seat belts, then you’d better make it automatic by latching your belt every single time you get into the car. Then you stop thinking about the seat belt and you do not have to make any decisions about seat belts because you are always strapped in.

I have a lot of little rituals that are completely automatic. They are the habits of caution. A lot of these habits are seemingly casual and accidental arrangements of things. When I leave the toilet kit open, the last thing I usually replace in it is the toothbrush. I am a brush-last type. I lay it, bristles-up, across the other items in such a way that it is fairly stable and is on a perfect diagonal, aimed from corner to corner out of the case. When I reach into the case in the morning to take the stuff out, I am not consciously aware of the precise placement of the toothbrush. I am suddenly very aware, however, if it is not in its proper place and alignment.

I reconstructed the morning. By the time I came back from breakfast, the maid had done the room. I had been in the bathroom, and had the brush been in the wrong place, I would have noticed it. I studied the new position of it. No passing truck, no sonic boom, could have moved it so far from its proper position.

All right. So somebody had been messing with my stuff, poking around. Petty thief with a passkey. Very easy to prove. All I had to do to prove it was lift the soap dish. (Only masochists use those sorry little slivers of lilac that motels call soap.) Two twenties, folded twice. I unfolded them. There were still two. A dumb thief would take them both. A slightly less stupid thief would take one.

If you are in a line of work where people can get very emotional about the fact you are still walking around and breathing, a forty-dollar decoy is a cheap method of identifying the visitor. Had the money been gone, it would not have been absolute assurance that it had been a visit by a sneak thief. A professional of enough experience and astuteness would take it anyway, knowing that if I had left any little trap around the place, the missing money would be a false trail.

I went back to the bed, sat on the edge of it and glowered at the carpeting. I had brought nothing with me that could possibly clue anybody about anything. My temporary address was known to Biddy, Tom Pike, the car rental girl, and whoever they might have told or who might have questioned them.

Biddy and Tom knew that I would be away from the motel at lunchtime. Tom would have had time to come to the motel before going home. Looking for what? Helena’s letter? Work on that assumption and stay with it until it breaks down. But why? What could be in the letter? Unless Biddy was one hell of an actress, she hadn’t known there was a letter until I told her. Seemed doubtful that Helena would mention having written me a letter. It was too highly personal a letter, for one thing. D. Wintin Hardahee had known for sure. And maybe a nurse had known. Forget the why of it, at least for now. Start at a known point or with a known angle, which is the basis of all navigation.

I knew that it could be some foul-up in identification. Maybe I looked like somebody somebody was looking for. Maybe it had been a little once-over by the law. Maybe there was a nut on the loose with a toothbrush fetish.

I phoned Mr. D. Wintin Hardahee, of Folmer, Hardahee, and Krantz, located in the Courtney Bank and Trust Company building on Central Avenue. I got through to his secretary, who said that Mr. Hardahee was in a meeting. She did not know when it would be over. Yes, if I wanted to take a chance on coming in and waiting to see him, that was all right, but if the meeting lasted past five, he would not be able to see me until Monday.

I was going to walk very lightly and keep looking and listening for anything off-key in my immediate area.

And I was no longer restless. Not at all.

At four thirty Hardahee’s matronly secretary came into the paneled waiting room to lead me back to his office. As middle partner in the firm, he had a corner office with big windows. He was round, brown, bald, and looked very fit. He had some tennis trophies atop a bookcase. He spoke in the hushed little voice I remembered from our phone conversation, a voice that did not suit him at all. He leaned across his desk to shake hands and waved me into a deep chair nearby.

“She was a fine woman. Shame to go that way,” he said. He seemed to be slightly wary and curious. “Is there any way I can help you, Mr. McGee?”

“I just wanted to ask a couple of questions. If any of them are out of line, just say so.”

“I’ll tell you what I can. But perhaps you should understand that I was not Mrs. Trescott’s personal attorney. Her affairs are handled in New York, legal, tax and estate, and so on. Apparently she telephoned or wrote her people in New York and asked them to recommend someone here to handle a confidential matter for her. A classmate of mine is one of the partners in the firm she had been dealing with up there, so when they gave her my name, she phoned me and I went to see her in the hospital. Perhaps they’ll call on me to handle some of the estate details at this end, but I have no way of knowing.”

“Then, you didn’t tell anyone about the letter and the check?”

“I told you that she wanted it handled as a confidential matter. She wrote a check on her New York account and I deposited it in our escrow account. When it cleared, I had a certified check made out to you, as she requested. She gave me a sealed letter to go with it. If you were not the recipient, I would disclaim knowledge of any such transaction.”