John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

I went over to her and picked her up and sat her on the edge of the bed. She sat blubbering like a defeated child. I squatted and examined her ankle. It was solid and shapely, and beginning to puff on the outside, just below the anklebone.

“I l-l-love him!” she said. “That was a... a wicked... a wicked evil thing for you to do. That was... a wicked evil lie.”

Her wig was askew and I reached and plucked it off. She was a sandy redhead with a casual scissor cut. Without the wig her face was in better proportion, but the eye makeup, particularly with much of it making black gutters down her cheeks, looked ridiculous.

“Wick-wick-wicked!” she moaned.

“But there’s nothing wicked and evil about picking me up and knocking me out with a Mickey? Go wash that goop off your face, girl. Besides, if I busted it up, maybe I did you a favor. He’ll never leave Janice and marry you.”

I helped her up. She went limping toward the bathroom. She stopped suddenly and stood quite still, then turned and stared at me. “That was right aft-after he came in, that about Jan-Janice! Then you were never... Then you just pretended... all along you knew ?”

“Go wash your dirty face, honey.”

When she closed the door, I emptied Rick’s pockets and took the stuff over to the desk and looked at it under the light.

The identification startled and alarmed me. I had thumped and wired up one Richard Haslo Holton, Attorney at Law. He was a county Democratic committeeman, an honorary Florida sheriff, past president of the Junior Chamber, holder of many credit cards, member of practically everything from Civitan to Sertoma, from the Quarterback Club to the Baseball Boosters League, from the Civic Symphony Association to the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Association.

He carried a batch of color prints of a smiling slender dark-haired woman and two boys at various ages from about one year to six years. One does not go about needlessly irritating any member in good standing of any local power structure. I had the feeling he was going to wake up in a state of irritation.

Penny came out of the bathroom with her face scrubbed clean and with the big black lashes peeled off and stuffed away somewhere. She had stopped streaming, but she was tragic and snuffly.

Just then Mister Attorney made a sound of growling and an effort to sit up. It seemed useful to leave a small but lasting impression on both of them. So I went over and scooped him up, slung him, and dropped him in a sitting position in the black armchair. It shocked and surprised him. He was meaty and sizable. I had done it effortlessly, of course. It had given me an ache in all my back teeth, ground my vertebrae together, pulled my arms out of the sockets, and started a double hernia. But, by God, I made it look easy.

“Now let’s all have a nice little chat,” I said.

“— your — — in — —!” he said.

I smiled amiably. “I can phone Mrs. Holton and ask her to come over and join us. Maybe she can help us all communicate.”

So we all had a nice little chat.

Seems that Miss Penny Woertz was the loyal devoted office nurse for one Dr. Stewart Sherman, a man in the general practice of medicine. He was inclined, however, to get so involved in special fields of interest that he often neglected his general practice.

In early July, three months ago, Dr. Sherman had gone down to his office on a Saturday evening. Penny knew that he had been anxious to get his notes in shape so that he could finish a draft of a paper he was writing on the effects of induced sleep in curing barbiturate addiction.

He was a widower, a man in his middle fifties, with grown children married and living in other states. He lived alone in a small apartment and did some of his research work there and did the rest of it in one of the back rooms of his small suite of offices. The body was not discovered until Penny came to work on Monday morning at ten, as was her customary time.

The body was on the table in the treatment room. The left sleeve of the white shirt had been rolled up. A length of rubber tubing that had apparently been knotted around the left arm above the elbow to make the vein more accessible was unfastened but held there by the weight of the arm upon it. Over the countertop was an empty container and an empty syringe with injection needle attached. Both the small bottle with the rubber diaphragm top and the syringe showed traces of morphine. The drug safe was unlocked. The key was in his pocket. His fragmentary prints were found on the syringe and the bottle. Beside the empty bottle was a small wad of surgical cotton with a streak of blood diluted by alcohol on it. The autopsy conducted by the county medical examiner showed that the death, to a reasonable medical certainty, was due to a massive overdose of morphine. According to Penny, nothing else was missing from the drug safe, or from the other stocks of drugs used in the treatment of patients. But she could not tell whether anything was missing from the back room stocks especially ordered by Dr. Stewart Sherman and used in his experimentations.

She had unlocked the door when she arrived.

By then I had unwired Rick Holton. His attitude was a lot better and the wire had been painful.

He said, “At one time I was the assistant state attorney here in Courtney County. The way it works, the state attorney has a whole judicial district, five counties, so he has an assistant prosecutor in each county. It’s elective. I’d decided not to run again. The state attorney is still the same guy. Ben Gaffner. The day I heard that Stew Sherman was supposed to have killed himself, I told Ben that I would just never believe it. Well, dammit, they had the autopsy, and Sheriff Turk investigated and he turned the file over to Ben Gaffner, and Ben said there was no reason in the world why he should make a jackass of himself by trying to present it to the grand jury as something other than suicide, which it damned well was — according to him.”

“The doctor couldn’t have killed himself!” Penny said.

“That’s what I felt,” Rick said. “So because they were closing the file, I thought what I’d do was use what time I could spare to do some digging. Ben gave me his unofficial blessing. The first time I interviewed Penny, I found out she felt exactly the same way.”

So that was how their affair had started. From what I had heard while pretending to be unconscious, I knew it was going sour. And now they were very stiff with each other, harboring delicious resentments.

As I thought the tensions between them might inhibit their communicating with me, I tried to take them off the hook. I told Holton that when the taste of the gin had clued me, I decided to give her some real reason to be jumpy and maybe teach her that pretending to be a hooker could be a messy little game, so I had peeled her out of her dress and bra. “She put up a good fight,” I said.

He looked a little happier. “I see. So you made me so goddamned mad at her, I gave you an opening. You’re pretty good, McGee.”

“If I’d known you were a member of the bar and every lunch club in town, I wouldn’t have tried you. It was a very small opening and you carry a very damaging caliber. If you’d had the hammer back, I wouldn’t have tried you. But why me? Like I told you, I never heard of the doctor.”

He summarized what he had been able to dig up. He had an orderly mind and professional knowledge of the rules of evidence. With Penny’s help he had located two people who had seen a very tall man let himself out of Dr. Sherman’s offices late Saturday night. One guessed eleven thirty. The other guessed a little after midnight. Penny knew that when the doctor was working on his research projects, he would not answer the office phone. The answering service had recorded no calls for the doctor that evening. One witness said that the man had gotten into a dark blue or black car parked diagonally across the street, a new-looking car, and had driven away. That witness had the impression that the car bore Florida plates but had a single digit before the hyphen rather than the double digit designating Courtney County. He had taken affidavits and put them in his private file on the case.