John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

So I played out the charade and walked her out, her elbow socketed in the palm of my hand, and she was thinking out loud of maybe some other place we could go, and rejecting each one for one reason or another as soon as she mentioned it, and I drew her into a dark alcove near the grinding roar of the central air conditioning, and after a sudden and startled rigidity and instinctive defensive tactics, she somewhat hesitantly made a presentation of her mouth, which somehow imitated avidity yet tasted prim, then she let herself be guided to 109 and ushered in, her voice getting too shrill and tight in her effort to stay loose.

“Gin?” she said. “That’s your drink, isn’t it? I adore it, but I don’t like to drink it in public because I get too wildly happy and loud and everything. But could we have some, darling?”

There was a double handful of melting cubes afloat in ice water in the bottom of the ice bucket. She decided she did not want any mix with hers either. We clinked glasses and she smilingly fluttered her long plastic eyelashes at me. She took a hummingbird sip and sat and put the drink down on the rug and slipped her left shoe off and tenderly squeezed her bruised toes.

I had taken a mouthful of the Plymouth. I am a taster when I like the taste. But it was subtly wrong, just wrong enough so I knew that the hunch had been right. A bad Penny. Under pretext of taking a second swallow, I let the first slide back into the glass. It left me with an astringent prickling of the membranes of the mouth and a slight aftertaste of dust.

“Excuse,” I said, and went into the bath. There, behind the closed door, I dumped the drink into a pocket I made in a face towel. It saved the ice. I rinsed glass and ice and made myself some tap water on the rocks. I flushed the toilet and stood for a few moments assembling the pieces of the procedure before I went back out. She hadn’t been near the opened bottle of Plymouth, at least on this visit to my quarters.

So she or some associate had done the doctoring. Then she was there to make sure I had a drink, to take the chain off the door if necessary, assuming there was an associate in their venture. And unless you wanted to risk putting somebody so far under they might not make it back up again, it was efficient to be there to know when it took effect.

I went back out and noticed that two thirds of her drink was gone. Back among the melting cubes, I assumed. She had both her shoes off. She was sitting with her legs crossed. The hem of the white dress was hiked to midthigh. She was a little long-waisted girl. Her legs could have been called chunky had they not been beautifully shaped.

“Am I supposed to drink alone?” she asked, pouting.

“Never compete with a gulper,” I said, and drained the tap water potion. I went over to the counter where the bottle and ice were and said, “In fact, I will have another one down the hatch before you finish that little piece of gin you’ve got left, angel.”

She came over in considerable haste and came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me. “Darling, let’s not drink too much, huh? It can spoil things for people, you know. I think we’ve both had... just exactly the right amount.”

It was a helpful clue. If the idea of my having two alarmed her, then it had to be fast-acting. But I thought I might quite plausibly give her a little lesson in anxiety before I faked being overcome. So, instead of making the drink, I turned and began chuckling and wrapped my arms around her. She stood very small in her stocking feet. She tried to seem cooperative until I found the zipper at the nape of her neck and opened it in one tug all the way down to the coccyx. Chuckling blandly, I peeled the dress forward off her shoulders, and she became nervously agitated, hopping and struggling, saying, “No! No, darling! Let’s be... Hey! More leisurely... Hey!.. Please!” I pulled the dress sleeves down her arms, inhibiting her struggles. She wore a pale yellow bra with white lace. “You’ll tear my... Wait! Don’t...” I found the bra snap and got the edge of a thumbnail under it and popped it open, and the bra straps slid down her arms. “No! Dammit! Hey! Please!”

She got one arm out of the sleeve and tried to pull her dress back up, but as she did so I pulled the other arm free, then caught both wrists in one hand, put the other around her waist, and lifted her off the floor. When I shook her a little, still chuckling, the dress and bra slid off her and fell to the floor, and I swung her in the air and caught her. an arm around her shoulders, the other under her knees, and chuckling inanely, toted her over to the bed. She had begun a silent battle, in deadly earnest, to retain the little yellow matching panties, and finally I took pity on her and groaned as hollowly as I could and toppled heavily across her, my chest across her sturdy agitated thighs.

She was breathing hard. She pushed at me. “Hey! Wake up!” I did not move. She caught a fold of flesh on the side of my throat under the ear and gave a painful, twisting pinch. Then she pulled my hand toward her and put her fingertips on my pulse. Satisfied, she pushed at me and wormed her legs out from under me. She grunted with the effort. I kept my eyes closed. The bed shifted as she got off it. In a few moments I heard the little clicking snap of the bra catch and soon the almost inaudible purr of the nylon zipper, the rezipping divided into three segments, as it was hard to reach. Then a faint thudding of her footsteps became audible and I knew she had put her shoes back on.

She picked up the phone on the bedside stand and dialed for an outside line. She dialed a number. She waited a few moments then said, “Okay,” and hung up. Clack of her lighter. Huff of exhalation. Smell of cigarette. I identified the next move as her unlatching the door, probably to leave it ajar for whoever had the word that things were now okay in 109. The edge of the bed had caught me across the lower belly. My toes rested on the rug.

“Come on !” she whispered. “Come on , Rick darling.”

Make it six or seven minutes from phone call to arrival. Male voice, after the door was gently closed. “Everything okay, honey?”

“No problems.”

“Nice work. I hated the idea of you coming to his room. I was afraid maybe he’d decided he didn’t want a drink, and then he’s such a big, rough-looking son of a bitch, I was afraid—”

“Just like I hate the idea of your sleeping with your dear wife, Janice, every damned night, darling?” Her voice was bitter.

“And you know why it has to be that way.”

“Do I?”

“No time to open the same damned old can of worms, Penny. Let’s see if we’re going to do any good.”

He took me by the belt and pulled me back off the bed. I let myself tumble, completely slack. I ended up on my side, knees bent, cheek against the bristle of the rug. He pulled at my shoulder and I rolled slowly onto my back. He rolled me another half turn, facedown, and I felt him work the wallet out of my hip pocket, heard the distinctive sound as he sat on the bed. Sizable, I guessed. Young voice. Physically powerful.

“Anything?” she asked.

“Not in this. Pockets of his jacket?”

“Just this stuff. Nothing.”

“I better check the side pockets of his pants.”

“Would there be anything in... in the lining of anything, or in his shoes?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check it if we draw a blank. The thing that bothers me is that this son of a bitch doesn’t have enough on him.”

“What do you mean, dear?”

“The average guy has pieces of paper on him. Notebook, notes, addresses, letters, junk like that. McGee here has got car rental papers, a plane ticket to Lauderdale, keys, drivers license, and a half-dozen credit cards and... a little over eight hundred in cash. Here. Take these two fifties.”