John MacDonald - The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

“What was her name?”

“Hilda something. Long last name. The cashier.”

“Hulda Wennersehn?”

“If you know about it, why are you asking me?”

“I don’t know about it. What happened?”

“They decided that in view of Tom’s knowing the man was retired and needed security, he had used bad judgment. They slapped his wrist by giving him a sixty-day suspension. And they busted a couple of the more recent trades and absorbed the loss in order to build the old man’s equity back to almost what he started with. That’s when Tom said the hell with it and started Development Unlimited.”

“And Miss Wennersehn now works for him.”

“So?”

“So nothing. Just a comment. How did the business community react to Pike’s problem?”

“The way these things go, at first everybody was ready to believe the worst. People pulled their accounts. They said that while he was looking good with their money, he was piling up commissions. They said he’d been lucky instead of smart. Then it swung right around the other way when he was pretty well cleared. He was out of the brokerage business, and so what he did was move his big customers right out of the market, off-the-record advice, and put them into land syndication deals. Better for him because you can build some very fancy pyramids, using equities from one as security for loans on the next, and he can cut himself in for a piece by putting the deals together. He’s moved very fast.”

“Credit good?”

“He got past that iffy place when Doc Sherman’s death fouled up some moves he was going to make. His credit has to be good.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s got bankers tied into the deals, savings and loan, contractors, accountants, Realtors. Hell, if he ever screwed up, the whole city would come tumbling down.”

“Along with the new building?”

“All four and a half million worth of it. Land lease in one syndicate, construction loans and building leases in another.”

“Very quick for a very young man.”

“How old are the fellows running the big go-go funds? How old are the executives in some of the great big conglomerates? He’s quick and tough and bold, and you don’t know what his next move is going to be until it’s all sewed up.”

“Last item. How well do you know Hardahee?”

“More professionally than socially. Wint is very solid. Happens to be under the weather right now. Scheduled this morning at ten on an estate case where I represent one of the parties at interest and Stan Krantz appeared and asked for a postponement because Wint is ill and nobody else over there is up on the case. It’s pretty complex. Jesus! All this work to do and I just can’t seem to make my mind work. McGee, what are you after? What’s this all about?”

“I guess it’s about a dead nurse.”

“That mean that much to you?”

“She was very alive and it was a dingy way to die.”

“So you’re sentimental? You’re carried away because she was so sore at me she took you on? All she was, McGee, was—”

“Don’t say it.”

“You mean that, don’t you?”

“Say it then, if you’re sure you want to find out.”

He looked at me and rubbed the back of his hand across his lips. “I think I’ll take your word for it.”

“You’re mean in a curious way, Holton. Small mean. Like some kind of a dirty little kid.”

“Go to hell,” he said with no emphasis at all. He swiveled his chair. He was looking out at his little oriental garden patio as I walked out. The rain had stopped.

It was five when I got back to 109. I unlocked the door and leaned over and reached around it. No wad of paper anywhere near where it should be. I opened the door the rest of the way. The balled-up piece of stationery was five feet from the door, where it had rolled when somebody had opened the door.

It seemed a fair guess that if it had been a maid or a housekeeper, I would have found it in the wastebasket. I checked the phones first. I took the base plate off the one by the bed and found that my visitor was going first class. He’d put a Continental 0011 in there, more commonly known as a two-headed bug. It would pick up anything in the room and also over the phone and transmit it on an FM frequency. Effective maximum range probably three hundred feet. Battery good for five days or so, when fresh. It goes for around five hundred dollars. So he could be within range, listening on an FM receiver, or he could have a voice-activated tape recorder doing his listening for him. Or he could have a pickup and relay receiver-transmitter plugged into an AC outlet within range, and be reading me from a much greater distance. One thing was quite certain. The sounds of my taking the screws out of the base plate with the little screwdriver blade on the pocket knife would either have alerted him at once or would when he played the tape back.

So I said, “Come to the room and we’ll have a little talk. Otherwise you’re out five hundred bucks worth of play toy.” I took it out and thumbed the little microswitch to off. I then made a fairly thorough check of the underside of all the furniture and any other place I thought a backup mike and transmitter might be effectively concealed. The professional approach is to plant two. Then the pigeon finds one and struts around congratulating himself, but he’s still on the air. If the same person, Broon, had checked me over the first time, then I had two more reasons to believe he wasn’t much more than moderately competent.

I was finding a good place for the gun when Stanger phoned me. He said he hadn’t been able to get a line on Broon as yet. He said the continuing investigation on the murder of Penny Woertz hadn’t turned up a thing as yet. He had checked on Helen Boughmer and found they had her under heavy sedation.

I told him I had no progress to report.

I didn’t actually. All I had was a lot more unanswered questions than before. I stretched out on the bed to ask them all over again.

Assume that Tom Pike had arranged that he and Janice Holton have their first assignation, in the full meaning of the word, in the apartment where Hulda Wennersehn lived. Janice couldn’t get in touch with him to tell him she couldn’t make it. So he had gone to the parking lot where they had arranged to meet and had finally realized she wasn’t going to be there. Assume he went to the apartment alone and that he went to Penny’s place in the late afternoon and she let him in and he shoved the shears into her throat. He tracked some blood into the Wennersehn apartment. He cleaned it up, cleaned up his shoes and maybe pants legs, and burned the rags.

But he had expected Janice to be there. He had changed his plan. What could the original plan have been? Janice certainly would have an understandable motive for killing her husband’s girlfriend. Having her nearby at the time of the murder could establish opportunity.

So if he planned to frame Janice Holton for the murder of Penny, and if Janice couldn’t show up to be the patsy, why would he go ahead and kill Penny anyway? Lorette Walker had found out from the cleaning woman that somebody had stretched out on Hulda Wennersehn’s bed.

So he had some thinking to do. He could cancel out and try to set it up another time. The death of the nurse would, of course, bust up the little duet of Penny and Rick, the two who had the unshakable belief Sherman hadn’t killed himself. Did Penny have some random piece of information that she had not yet pieced into the picture and that made haste imperative?

Or it could have been some kind of sick excitement that grew and grew inside the brain of the man stretched out on the bed, until at last he got up and walked to Penny’s place and did it because he had been thinking of it too long not to do it, even though the original plan was no longer possible.