John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Hey! Hey there, Janice doll! This here is Travis McGee, my ver’ good buddy. He’s going to come in and have a li’l drink. We’re all going to have a drink. Right?”

As he struggled to get out of the car I took him by the arm and levered him out. We supported him, one on either side, and after we got him through the door, she gave directions in a voice strained with effort. She turned on the light of what was obviously a guest room. We sat him on the bed and he sat with his eyes closed, mumbling something we could not understand. When he started to topple over backward, I grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him so that he landed on the pillow. She knelt and unlaced his shoes and pulled them off. I picked his legs up and swung them onto the bed. She loosened his belt. When he gave a long, ragged snore, she looked at me and made a mouth of distaste. I followed her as she walked out. She turned the lights off and closed the guest room door.

I followed her into the living room. She turned, standing more erect, and said, “Thanks for your help. This doesn’t happen often. That is not an excuse or an apology. Just a statement of fact.”

I worked the revolver out of my trouser pocket and gave it to her. “If it happens at all, he shouldn’t run around with this thing.”

“I’ll put it away and tell him he must have lost it. Thank you again.”

“May I use your phone to call a cab?”

She stepped to the front window and looked across the street. “My friend is still up. She’ll come over and listen for the kids while I take you in.”

“I don’t want to trouble you, Mrs. Holton.”

“I’d like some air. And you’ve been to a lot of trouble.”

She went to the phone in the foyer and dialed, then had a brief low-voiced conversation. We went out and got into the car. She asked me to wait for a moment. When the door opened in the house across the street and a woman came out and started across, she told me to start up. She waved and called, “Thanks a lot, Meg.”

“Perfectly okay, Jan. Take your time, honey.”

Janice Holton untied the kerchief and put it over her dark hair and fastened it under her chin. From her manner it was going to be a swift and silent trip.

“I guess what racked your husband up was having some person or persons unknown kill his girlfriend.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she had turned quickly and was staring at me. “I couldn’t care less what... racks him up, Mr. McGee. I feel sorry for the girl. As a matter of fact I regret never having had a chance to thank her.”

“Thank her?”

“For letting me out of bondage, let’s say.”

“Unlocked your chains?”

“You’re not really interested in the sordid details of my happy marriage, are you?”

“It just seemed like a strange way to put it.”

“I find myself saying some very strange things lately.”

“Right at the bottom of the certificate, Mrs. Holton, there’s the fine print that says you live happily ever after.”

I suppose that you could call it role-playing, maybe in the same sense that the psychologists who use group therapy use the term. Or you could call it, as Meyer does, my con-man instinct. Okay, call it a trace of chameleon blood. But the best way to relate to people is to fake their same hang-ups, and when you relate to people, you open them up. So I lie a little. Instant empathy. To crack her facade I had to make out like an ex-married, so I spoke with the maximum male bitterness.

“You sound like you had the tour too, Mr. McGee?”

“Ride the rolly-coaster. Find your way through the fun house. Float through the tunnel of love. Sure. I had a carnival trip, Mrs. Holton. But the setup tends to do a pretty good job of gutting the husband. I believed the fine print. But she turned out to be a bum. So I end up paying her so much a month so she can keep on being a bum. So I’m a little bitter about the way the system works.”

“For a girl married to a lawyer, it doesn’t exactly work out that way. I believed the fine print too, Mr. McGee. I considered it an honorable estate, an honorable contract. And, by God, I worked at it. I knew after the first year it wasn’t going to be the way... you hope it will be. So I tried to understand him. I think Rick feels that he is... unworthy of being loved. So he can’t ever believe anyone loves him, really. So he has a thousand mean snide little ways of spoiling things. He loves the boys, I know. But any kind of... family ceremony, something for warmth and love and fun — oh, can he ever clobber everybody. Tears and shambles and nastiness, and everything you try to plan... birthdays, anniversaries, he has such a cruel way of making things turn sour. But I was stuck with it. I thought I was stuck with it. You know, if you’re a grown-up, you add up the ledger. A successful man, a faithful man, not a drunk or a chaser. But then... the sneaky business with Miss Woertz changed the ledger.”

“And let you out of bondage?”

“Kept me from agonizing over... making the marriage work. Sort of... canceled all my vows.”

“Did you find out about her quite recently?”

“Oh, no. I found out practically as soon as it started. He started that crusade about finding out what really happened to Dr. Sherman. You know about that?”

“He told me about it. Was that just to help cover up the affair with the nurse?”

“Oh, no. He’s sincere about it. But when it threw them together, he sure put in a lot of hours in so-called investigation. Somebody called me up and told me about it, in a very nasty whisper. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was true, somehow. Then I saw all the little clues.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “The most convincing one was the way he became so much sweeter to me and the boys.”

“So are you going to divorce him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t love him anymore. But I haven’t got a dime of my own. And I just don’t know if I could get enough alimony and child support if I bring suit.”

I turned in at the Wahini Lodge and parked away from the entrance lights, over near the architectured waterfall and the flaming gas torches.

“You’re too darned easy to talk to, Mr. McGee.”

“Maybe because we just wear the same kind of battle scars. I had to get out of my setup just as fast as I could.”

“Any kids?”

“No. She kept saying later, later.”

“It makes a difference, you know. It’s a pretty nice house, nice neighborhood, good school. There’s medicine and dental work and shoes and savings accounts. It’s an arrangement, right now. I do my part of the job of keeping the house going. But I won’t ever let him touch me again. It would turn my stomach. He can find himself another playmate. I don’t give a damn. And we don’t have to socialize, particularly.”

“Can you live the rest of your life like that?”

“No! I don’t intend to. But I have a friend who says that we... says that I had better just sort of go along with it as is for the time being. He is a dear, gentle, wise, understanding man. We’ve been very close ever since I found out about Rick. His marriage is as hopeless as mine but in a different way. I’m not having an affair with him. We see each other and we have to be terribly careful and discreet because I wouldn’t want to give Rick any kind of ammunition he could use if and when I try to get a divorce. We don’t even have any kind of special understanding about the future. It’s just that we both... have to endure things the way they are for a while.”

“Then, I guess the family outing Rick told me about, the trip to Vero Beach yesterday, must have been pretty grim.”

She had turned in the bucket seat to face me, her back against the door, legs pulled up. “Was it ever! Like that old thing about what a tangled web we weave. I didn’t have any idea he’d want to spend any part of Saturday with his wife and children. I’d told him I was going to drive over and see June and leave the boys off with my best friend on the way. She lives twenty miles east of here. Her boys are just the same ages, practically. I’d fixed it with June to cover for me in case Rick phoned me there for some stupid reason. And I was going to drive to... another place close by and spend the day with my friend. But out of the clear blue Rick decided to come too! I didn’t see how in the world he could have found out anything. But he was so ugly I decided he must have had a little lovers’ spat with his girlfriend. When I left the boys at my friend’s place, I had a chance to phone my sister and warn her, while Rick was out in the car, but I couldn’t get hold of my friend to call the date off. Rick was in a foul mood all day.” Again the mirthless laugh. “What a lousy soap opera!”