John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

She left and I screwed the bottle cap tight and put the doctored — and watered — gin in my carry-on suitcase, wondering all the while if it wouldn’t be a sounder idea to pour it out.

D. Wintin Hardahee was with a client. I left the motel number and room number. He called back ten minutes later, at eleven o’clock.

“I was wondering if maybe I could scrounge a little more information from you, Mr. Hardahee.”

“I am very sorry, Mr. McGee, but my work load is very heavy.” The soft voice had a flat and dead sound.

“Maybe we could have a chat after you get through work.”

“I am not taking on any new clients at this time.”

“Is something the matter? Is something wrong?”

“Sorry I can’t be more cooperative. Good-bye, Mr. McGee.” Click .

I paced around, cursing. This nice orderly prosperous community was getting on my nerves. A big ball of tangled string. But when you found a loose end and pulled, all you got was a batch of loose ends. It seemed like at least a month ago that I had thought to check out Helena’s estate arrangements. I thought maybe Hardahee could work it through his New York classmate. But Hardahee wasn’t going to work out anything for me. So what could turn him off so quickly and so completely? Lies? Fear?

I stretched out on the bed and let the confusing cauldron bubble away, giving me glimpses of Penny, Janice, Biddy, Maureen, Tom Pike, Rick, Stanger, Tom Pike, Helena, Hardahee, Nudenbarger, Tom Pike.

Pike was getting pretty damned ubiquitous. And little bits of conversation kept coming back. I heard parts of the night talk with Janice Holton and something bothered me and I went back over it and found what bothered me, then slowly sat up.

She had asked about my imaginary wife. “Do you ever run into her? Is she still in Lauderdale?”

Review. I had not said one damned word about Lauderdale. Holton had checked the registration. So he knew. But was there any reason for him to have said word one about it to his wife? “Look, darling, my girlfriend wanted to stay in the motel room with some jerk from Lauderdale named McGee.”

Not likely.

Backtrack. A little look of surprise at hearing my name. Surprise to find me with her husband.

Possibility: Friend of Biddy’s. Had met her in a supermarket or somewhere. Biddy spoke of an old friend named McGee from Lauderdale.

Or: In the process of checking me out Saturday evening, and checking Holton out, Stanger made some mention of me to Janice Holton. “Do you know, or do you know if your husband knows, anybody named Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale?”

Possible, but I didn’t like the fit. They were like limericks that do not quite scan, that have one syllable too much or one missing. My brain was a pudding. I walked across to a shopping plaza, bought some swim pants in a chain store, came back and put them on and padded out to the big motel pool. There was a separate wading pool full of three- and four-year-olds, shrieking, choking, throwing rubber animals, and belting each other under the casually benign stare of four well-greased young mothers. So I dived and did some slow lengths of the main pool and then gradually let it out, reaching farther, changing the kick beat, stretching and punishing the long muscles of arms, shoulders, back, thighs, and belly, sucking air and blowing out the little layers of sedentary staleness in the bottoms of my lungs. I held it just below that pace at which I begin to get too much side roll and begin to thrash and slap, and then brutalized myself by saying, Just one more. And one more. And one more. Finally I lumbered out, totally whipped, heart way up there close to a hundred and a half, lungs straining, arms and legs weak as canvas tubes full of old wet feathers. I dried my face on the bath towel I’d brought from the room and then stretched out on it to let the sunshine do the rest.

Meyer calls it my “instant I.Q.” In a sense it is. You oxygenate the blood to the maximum and you stimulate the heart into pumping it around at a breakneck pace. That enriched blood goes churning through the brain at the same time that it is nourishing the overworked muscle tissues. Sometimes it even works.

But I put my fat, newly enriched, humming head to work on the Janice-Lauderdale problem, and its final report was, “Damned if I know, fella.”

So I went back to 109 and before I dressed, I tried the office of the fat little John Wayne, M.D., got hold of a cheery, cooperative lady who told me that Dr. Stewart Sherman’s receptionist and bookkeeper was Miss Helen Boughmer, and she did not know if she was working or not, but I could reach her through the phone listed for Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer. She asked me to wait a moment and gave me the number to write down.

Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer was very firm about things. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t possibly call my daughter to the phone. She is not well today. She is in bed. Does she know you? What is this all about?”

“I’d like a chance to ask her some questions about an insurance matter, Mrs. Boughmer.”

“I can definitely say that she is not interested in buying any insurance and neither am I. Good day.”

“Wait!” I missed her and had to call again. “Mrs. Boughmer, I am an insurance investigator. I am investigating a policy claim.”

“But we haven’t had any accidents with the car. Not for years.”

“It’s some information on a death claim.”

“Oh?”

“On Doctor Sherman. Just a few routine questions, ma’am.”

“Well... if you’ll promise not to tire Helen, I think you might be able to talk to her at about four o’clock, if you’ll come here to the house.” I said I would. It was at 90 Rose Street, and she told me how to find it. “It’s a little white frame house with yellow trim, on the right, on the second corner, with two big live oak trees in the front yard.”

After I hung up, I phoned the Pike place and Biddy answered.

“Well, hello!” she said. “Yes, Maurie is doing just fine, thank you. We were just about to have a swim before lunch.”

“I wondered if I could come out and talk to you about something after lunch.”

“Why not? What time is it? Why don’t you make it about two thirty or quarter to three? She’ll be having her nap then. Will that be okay?”

I said it was just fine. I dressed and had lunch at the motel and then went strolling through the rear areas looking for Lorette. There was a service alley behind the kitchen. When I walked along it, past a neat row of garbage cans, I came to an open door to a linen storage room. I looked in and saw Lorette, still in uniform, sitting on a table laughing and talking and swinging her legs. There were two older black women in there, not in uniform. The rubber-tired maid carts were aligned against the wall near a battered Coke machine and a row of green metal lockers.

She saw me and the talk and laughter stopped. She slid off the old wooden table and came and stood in the doorway, her face impassive, her eyes down-slanted. “You want something, sir?”

“To ask you something,” I said, and walked on to a place where the roof overhang shaded a portion of the alley and a flame vine was curling up a post that supported the overhang. She had not followed me. I looked back and she shrugged and came slowly toward me. She put her hands in her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall.

“Ask me what?”

“I didn’t know if you could talk in front of those other women. I wanted to know how Cathy is.”

“Jes fine.” Her face was blank and she let her mouth hang slightly open. It made her look adenoidally stupid.

“She come out of it okay?”

“She gone on home.”

It was all too familiar and all too frustrating. It is the black armor, a kind of listless vacuity, stubborn as an acre of mules. They go that route or they become all teeth and giggles and forelock. Okay, so they have had more than their share of grief from men of my outward stamp, big and white and muscular, sun-darkened and visibly battered in small personal wars. My outward type had knotted a lot of black skulls, tupped a plenitude of black ewes, burned crosses and people in season. They see just the outward look and they classify on that basis. Some of them you can’t ever reach in any way, just as you can’t teach most women to handle snakes and cherish spiders. But I knew I could reach her because for a little time with me she had been disarmed, had put her guard down, and I had seen behind it a shrewd and understanding mind, a quick and unschooled intelligence.