John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“But how does Tom Pike come into the picture?” I asked.

“I was looking for motive. I heard a couple of people saying that Stew had died at one hell of an inconvenient time as far as Tom was concerned, and he might take a real bath on some of his deals. So I wondered if maybe somebody had killed the doctor just to put the screws on Tom. You see, Stew Sherman was the Pike family doctor, and when Tom started Development Unlimited two years ago, Stew invested with him in a big way. He’d always made pretty good money in his practice and on top of that he had the money his wife left when she died three years ago. Tom had put together some marvelous opportunities for Stew and the others who went in on the first deals he made. They stood to make really fantastic capital gains. Money is always a good motive. So I had a long talk with Tom. At first he didn’t want to tell me anything. He said everything was fine. But when he saw what I was driving at, he got very upset and he opened up. The doctor had been fully committed on three big parcels of land east of town. Tom had put together a fourth deal, and Stew had made preliminary arrangements to borrow a large sum of money from the bank, using his equity in the first three parcels as collateral. Based on the bank’s preliminary approval, Tom had gone ahead and committed the group on the fourth deal. Now not only was he going to be badly squeezed on the fourth deal, but the Internal Revenue Service had come in on an estate tax basis and froze the doctor’s equities in the other three parcels, and actually could order sale of those equities in order to meet the estate tax bite. Tom told me that Doctor Sherman couldn’t have died at a worse time, not only for the sake of his own estate, but also because of what it could do to the others who were in on all four syndicates. He told me that he was going to have to do one hell of a lot of scrambling to keep the whole thing from falling apart.”

“I assume he made out all right.”

“The word is that he squeaked through, but that it cost him. As a matter of fact, Stew’s sons tried to bring some kind of action against Tom because there was a lot less left than they thought there ought to be. But there was no basis for action. I asked Tom if anybody could have killed the doctor in order to mess up the deals he had on the fire. The idea shocked the hell out of him. He said he could think of some people who might have wanted to, but they would have had no way of knowing how badly it would pinch him. He agreed that it seemed very, very strange that the doctor should kill himself, but he couldn’t offer any alternative.”

“But some tall man has been putting the squeeze on Tom Pike?”

“That’s one of those funny breaks you get, the kind that may mean something or nothing. In late August, Tom Pike drew twenty thousand in cash out of one of his accounts. A lot of real estate deals are cash deals, so it wasn’t anything unusual. I found out how much by checking back, quietly, through a friend, after I heard what happened. One of my law partners mail-ordered a big reflector telescope for his twelve-year-old kid’s birthday and had it sent to the office. He set it up, tripod and all, and was fooling around putting the different eyepieces on and aiming it out the office window at the shopping plaza a block away. He had it at two hundred and forty power, meaning that something two hundred and forty yards away looks like one yard away. He focused it on a car parked all alone in an empty part of the lot and when he got it sharp and clear, he found he was looking at Tom Pike standing and leaning against the car. He wondered what he was waiting for. Just then another car pulled up and a tall man got out. My partner said he had never seen him before. He had a lot of tan and looked rugged and wore a white sport shirt and khakis. Tom gave the stranger a brown envelope. The stranger opened it and took out a sheaf of bills and riffled the end of the sheaf with his thumb. My partner said he could damned near see the denomination. He then put the brown envelope into his car and took out a white envelope or package and gave it to Tom Pike, who stuffed it away so quickly my partner didn’t get much of a look at it. They got into their cars and took off. He mentioned it to me a couple of days later. We were talking about a divorce action we’re handling and he said maybe we should invest in a telescope and told me about spying on Tom. There could be a lot of answers. Maybe it was a cash option on ranch land or grove land. Maybe he was buying advance highway information from a road engineer. But maybe it was the tall man who was in Stew’s office that night and got into the act somehow.”

“So just how did you come up with me?”

“I was at the bar with a client last night when you came in with Tom’s sister-in-law. She started crying and you took her out. I told my client I’d be right back. I saw you unlock One-O-nine and took a look at your plate and saw it was a rental number. I got your name at the desk. I have a cop friend I give some work to when he’s off duty and he tailed you today and phoned me when you pulled into the Pike house. I met him here and he went through your room while I hung around the house phone to give him a warning call if you got back too soon. He didn’t find a thing that would give us a clue. I don’t have any official status, of course. And even if I did, I could still get in real trouble taking you in for a shakedown. Penny and I worked out the idea of her seeing if she could pick you up. I knew about the opened bottle from what my cop friend told me. Penny had something she thought would work fast. While you were eating I spiked your bottle.”

“How did you get in?”

“With the passkey from my cop friend. He’s got a master key for every big motel in the area.”

I looked at them. “You people are very diligent and so on. And damned stupid. So if I didn’t want to get picked up? So I wanted to come back here all by myself and kill the bottle?”

“I was five minutes away. She was going to phone me and I was going to come over, use the phone, and get you out of the room on some pretext. She was going to use the passkey and dump the bottle or steal it.”

“Because,” she said in a small voice, “to make one drink strong enough, I had to put enough in so that all of it would have killed you, through suppression of the sympathetic nervous system.”

“Why did Pike give you the twenty thousand?” Holton asked.

“Amateur to the end,” I said. “I never met him until today. Can I prove it? No, sir. I can’t prove it. Do I want to try to prove it? No. I can’t be bothered. Do you want to try to prove it? Go ahead, Holton.” I spun the cylinder of his Police Positive. Full load. I handed it to him. “The doctor was probably a nice guy. And you are probably fairly nice people yourselves. But you two are a nurse and a joiner and if you found somebody who really killed the doctor, he’d probably kill the two of you also. You belong on serial television. If I had killed the doctor, I would rap your skulls, put you in the trunk of the car, and drop you into one of the biggest sinkholes I could find and cave some of the limestone sides down onto you.”

He was flushed as he got to his feet, stuffing the revolver into his belt. “I don’t need lectures from some damned drifter.”

“Stay busier. Join more clubs.”

“Do I have your permission to go, Mister McGee!”

“Nothing could give me more piercing delight.”

“Come on, Pen.”

“Go home to Janice,” she said. “You’ve been out enough nights.”

“Look, I’m sorry I blew my stack when he said... uh—”

“You were so ready , darling. You were just aching to believe something like that, something nasty. You want to think that because you got to first, second, third base, and home, anybody can. Anytime. Go to hell, Rick. You are a mean lousy little human being and you have a dirty little mind.”