John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“Fifty pound?”

Even with that dusky skin her sudden furious blush was apparent. “It’s nothing, mister. Anyplace like this, sooner or later somebody’ll give the boss gal some kind of special name. The one they give me, it comes from the way I’m built, that’s all. Somebody saw me walk by and said, ‘There she go. Ninety pound of mean. Forty pound of gal and fifty pound of boobs.’ So it’s Fifty Pound. Used to fuss me, but I don’t mind now.”

“See what you can find out, Lorette, about a man who works for the sheriff. Dave Broon.”

She looked as if she wanted to spit. “Now, that one is all mean. Mr. Holton, he’s part-time mean. Mr. Broon, he wants to know something, maybe a deputy picks up some boy out in Southtown and then Mr. Broon visits with him. When they bring the boy back, he walks old and he talks old, and he keeps his head down. But he doesn’t say a thing about Mr. Broon. One thing I know, he’s rich. Big rich. It’s in other names but he owns maybe forty houses in Southtown. Rains through the roof. Porch steps fall off. Three families drawing water from one spigot, but the rent never goes down. It goes up. Cardboard paper on the busted windows. Tax goes up on other places, never goes up on Mr. Broon’s houses.”

“You told me that the Holtons couldn’t get domestic help because of Holton’s attitude toward your people. I know that Mr. Pike and Miss Pearson have been trying to get somebody to look after Mrs. Pike. I noticed they have the yard work done by a white man. Any special reason for that?”

She stood by the door and all expression had left her face. “It’s something went on long ago, three years, maybe more, just after that house was built and him new married. Had a live-in couple quartered over the boathouse. Young couple. Good pay. They drank some kind of poison stuff that you spray on the groves. Para... para...”

“Parathion?”

“Sounds right. Both died in the hospital. Mr. Pike paid for a nice funeral.”

“Accident?”

“Not with the bag right there on the floor next to the table and the powder still stuck to the spoon. Put it in red wine and drank it. Must have seen it in the movies, because they busted the glasses, threw them at the wall.”

“So?”

“So the man had been in Southtown three days before. Quiet boy. Got stinking smashed pig drunk. Cried and cried and cried. So drunk nobody could hardly understand him. Something about signing a paper so they wouldn’t have to go to jail. Something about some nasty thing somebody was making his wife do on account of they signed the paper. And about not being able to stand it. Nobody knows the right and wrong of it. Nobody knows what happened.”

“But the Pikes can’t get any help out there?”

“They maybe could have. People were thinking on it. Then just before they let Mr. Pike get out of the broker business instead of putting the law on him, he was trying to learn to play golf, and he hit a colored caddy with a golf stick. Laid his head open. Mr. Pike give up trying the game after that. Gave Danny a hundred dollars and paid the hospital. Nobody else seen it. Mr. Pike said Danny walked the wrong way at the wrong time.”

“Into his backswing?”

“That’s what it was, the way they said it. Danny said he had a cold and he sneezed and Mr. Pike missed the ball entire and come at him with his eyes bugged out, making crazy little crying sounds, and Danny turned to run and he knows Mr. Pike couldn’t run that fast, so he figures Mr. Pike threw it at him. Then those that had any idea of working out there, they decided against it.”

“Why were they going to put the law on him when he was in the brokerage house?”

She looked astonished. “Why, for stealing! How else you going to get in trouble in that kind of job? Mr. McGee, I’ve got to get back on the job. See you tomorrow I guess. You don’t see me, it’ll mean I didn’t get anything much tonight out home.”

I could get in touch with neither Janice Holton nor D. Wintin Hardahee, so I backtracked to pick up a loose end that would probably turn into nothing. I placed a call to Dr. Bill Dyckes, the surgeon who had operated on Helena Pearson Trescott. A girl in his office told me he was operating but would probably phone in when he was through, so I did not leave a message but drove over to the hospital to see if I could make contact with him there.

A very obliging switchboard girl put a call through to the doctors’ lounge on the third floor in the surgical wing and caught him there and motioned me to a phone. I said I was an old friend of Helena Trescott and just wanted to ask him a couple of questions about her. He hesitated and then told me to come on up, and gave me directions.

He came out of the lounge and we walked down the corridor to a small waiting room. He wore a green cotton smock and trousers and a green skullcap. There was a spray of drying blood across the belly of the smock, and he smelled of disinfectants. He was squat and broad and younger than I had expected. His hands were thick, with short, strong-looking fingers, curly reddish hair on his wrists, backs of his hands, and down to the first knuckle of the fingers.

He dropped heavily onto a sofa in the waiting room, sighing, stretching, then pinching the bridge of his nose. He looked up at the wall clock. “Next one’ll be all prepped by eleven fifteen, and please God it will be nice, straight, clean, and simple because I’m scheduled for a son of a bitch this afternoon. What’d you want to know about Mrs. Trescott, Mr. McGee?”

“Did she ever have any chance at all?”

“Not by the time I went in the first time. Big juicy metastasized carcinoma right on the large bowel with filaments going out in every direction. Got the main mass of it and as much more as I could. Left some radioactive pellets in there to slow it some.”

“Did you tell her she wouldn’t make it?”

“I tell each one as much as I think they can safely take, when it’s bad news. I realized later I could have told her the works. But I didn’t know her well enough then to know how gutsy and staunch she was. So I said I thought I’d gotten it all, but I couldn’t be sure, so we’d go into some other treatment to make sure. I didn’t tell the daughters because I figured she could read them loud and clear. Told Tom Pike so that he could help cushion it for the girls when the time came.”

“Then, how was she the second time?”

“Downhill. Had to go in to clear a stoppage. Damned jungle in there by then. Nothing like the anatomy books. Malignant is quite a word. Turned a good experienced operating-room nurse queasy. Then by the last time there wasn’t anything about her that wasn’t changed by it, in one way or another, except her eyes. Great eyes on that woman. Like the eyes of a young girl.”

“Too bad that Maureen is in such condition now.”

“I didn’t get in on that. It isn’t something you go after with a knife. But just about everybody else has had a piece of the action. She’s had every test anybody around here has ever heard of, and some I think they made up. It would take two men to lift her lab files.”

“Does it boil down to some specific area?”

“If by that you mean her head, yes. If you mean neurology, yes. No physical trauma, no tumor, no inhibition of nourishment. Something is screwing up the little circuits in there, the synapses. Tissue deterioration? Rare virus infection? Some new kind of withdrawal that’s psychologically oriented? Some deficiency from birth that didn’t show until now? Secretion imbalance? Rare allergy? My personal guess, which nobody will listen to because it’s not my field, is that the trouble is in some psychiatric area. That fits the suicide impulse. But the shrinkers have gone through that and out the other side, they say. Series of shock treatments, no dice. Sodium Pentothal, no dice. Conversation on the couch, nothing. I thought you were interested in Mrs. Trescott.”