Nightmare in Pink (4 page)

"There would be no way to clip that outfit?"

"Absolutely none. How did we get onto this subject?"

"One more question, Mr. Imber. Do you think the change of policy was smart?"

"That all depends."

"On what?"

"If you wish to take maximum advantage of a fortune of perhaps sixty or seventy millions of dollars, conserve it and increase it, while at the same time taking advantage of every tax break and every change in the economic climate, then the previous operation was better. But there are human values too. For example, Mr. Armister could have decided the work was too confining and restrictive. So he could seek a static rather than an active position. He might eventually have it in mind to cut down to the point where he could disband all operations and turn the holdings over to the trust departments of his banks. It might mean as much as a five percent change in his annual position, say three million dollars. That is what he would be in effect paying for the privilege of not taking risks."

"How old is he?"

"I would say he is about forty-four now. Inherited money is a terrible responsibility Mr. McGee. It can become a crushing burden. Naturally I have no right to make guesses about what Mr. Armister wants or doesn't want."

"Did Howard ever complain about the new policy?"

"Why have you come to see me?"

"I wanted to find out about Howard's job."

"But why?"

"Miss Gibson is curious."

"Why should she be curious?"

"I wish I could tell you, Mr. Imber. But I gave my word."

"I certainly hope she isn't doubting Howard's honesty. He was a completely reliable man."

"Did he complain about the new policy?"

"Just once. Just before I left. Together we had worked out a very sound land-use program for a large tract in Maryland, and figured the investment needed to begin the first phase. Then Mr. Mulligan told Howard they had decided to put it on the market. It was a bitter disappointment. Howard tried to fight the decision but got nowhere. I remember him walking back and forth in front of my desk, cursing the entire organization." He looked at his watch. "I'm very sorry, but…"

I got up quickly. I thanked him for giving me the time. His handshake was abrupt, cold and strenuous. I glanced back at him as I went out his doorway. He was sitting erect, registering disapproval. I had slandered one of his gods. I was a reckless layman. And I suspected that he was annoyed with himself for talking perhaps too much and too freely. There is only one way to make people talk more than they care to. Listen. Listen with hungry earnest attention to every word. In the intensity of your attention, make little nods of agreement, little sounds of approval. You can't fake it. You have to really listen. In a posture of gratitude. And it is such a rare and startling experience for them, such a boon to ego, such a gratification of self, to find a genuine listener, that they want to prolong the experience. And the only way to do that is to keep talking. A good listener is far more rare than an adequate lover.

I gave my name and she came to the phone in person and demanded that I come see her immediately before her extremely dull cocktail guests arrived. I taxied up to her big old duplex overlooking the park. I waited in the foyer. The tall old rooms were full of Regency furniture, gold brocade and fresh flowers. From the buffet preparations, I could she expected at least fifty.

She came trotting toward me, all smiles and pearls, piled white hair, green gown and little yips of welcome. She pulled me into a small study off the foyer and closed the mahogany door. She held my hands and peered up at me said, "McGee, McGee, you beautiful shifty scoundrel, if only I were thirty years younger."

"It's good to see you again, Mrs. Thatcher."

"What!"

"It's good to see you again, Connie."

She drew me over to the couch and we sat down. "I can't hope that you came to see an old lady just out of affection and old times, McGee. So there is something you want. From the look of you, you haven't settled down yet, and never will. You are a brigand, McGee."

"You never found me a nice girl, Connie."

"I sent you one, dear. But that was only for therapy."

"How is Joanie?"

"Back with her husband, but you would know that, wouldn't you, because it was your advice, so she told me. She's had her third child by now. Happy, they say. Was I a wicked old woman to send her to you?"

"You know you were."

"She needed a fling, and she could have fallen among thieves. She came back all aglow; McGee. I was eaten with jealousy. Tell me, what intrigue are you mixed up in now, and will you make any money?"

"What do you know about Charles McKewn Armister, the Fourth?"

She stared at me, head slightly cocked, one eye narrowed. It is easy to see how beautiful she must have been. "It's an interesting question," she said. "I know what there is to know."

"Which is why I came to you."

"When I was a little girl I fell off a horse one of many many times-and his grandfather picked me up. And for a time I thought I would marry his father, a romantic fellow much given to kissing and writing love poems. But young Charlie has always been a stick. He was a very proper little boy. He married young. I think they were both twenty. Joanna Howlan he married. Money to money. They had summer places close together at Bar Harbor. A proper girl for him, I guess. One of those sturdy freckled girls, good at games, with a nice smile, and as proper as he. Two children of the marriage, a boy and a girl. The boy is twenty-two I would guess, and off in some far place in the Peace Corps, the girl eighteen and in Holyoke."

She scowled into space. "I don't know how to say it, McGee. Charlie and his wife have no flair for the use of money, at least not that much money. It's the cult of simplicity. They take all the magic out of it. Some kind of inverted snobbism, I guess. Social guilt. I just don't know. They have the old place on the Island, and an apartment in town and a smallish place at Hobe Sound. They are quiet, gentle, careful, dull people, and like I said, very good at games. Tennis and sailing and such. Charlie works very hard, they say, tending the money, making it grow and giving it away properly. It's strange we should mention a fling before, because I hear Charlie is having himself one."

"Hmmm?"

"At the time of life when you can most expect it from a man who marries young, McGee. He had some kind of a breakdown a year ago. One of those anxiety things. Now he and Joanna are separated, but no one has said anything about divorce. He has his own apartment in town now. And he has created a drunken fuss in a few public places, bless him, after years of restraint. And I did hear something strange about the menage he's set up for himself."

Her eyes clouded. "Let me think. When a woman forgets gossip, McGee, she is nearing the end of her road. What was it? Oh! I heard he is living with his lawyer and his secretary. Now there is a lurid arrangement for you!" She shook her head. "How could I have forgotten, dear boy? It might be handy though. He would be right there to prepare releases, wouldn't he? The lawyer is Baynard Mulligan. I've met him. Quite amusing and attractive, really. A rather nice Virginia family, but I understand they lost their money when he was small. Let me see now. He married Elena Garrett when he was thirty and she was no more than nineteen. But it didn't work out at all. It lasted four years, I think. They say she became alcoholic. Now she's married to some little teacher person over at Princeton, and has become very earnest and happy and she's having child after child. Baynard didn't remarry. Let me see what else I know about Charlie Armister."

"You are fantastic, Connie, and I am grateful, but for the last five minutes I've heard your guests arriving."

"McGee, darling, the bar is in a perfectly obvious place, and this is a hideously boring batch, actually the sort of party I'd have the Armisters at, if they were together and in the city. I get all the dead ones together and let them amuse each other. It's better than inflicting them in little dabs on my lively friends. I'll go out there when I'm ready. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Charlie Armister is his sister-in-law. Joanna's elder sister. Give me a moment and I can tell you the exact name. Teresa Howlan Gernhardt… ah… Delancy Drummond. Terry she is called. Very international, and she's a charming earthy bawd, and has a marvelous figure for her age. She must be forty-six. She's usually in Rome or Athens, but I've heard she's here now, probably to hold her sister's hand. It's remarkable two girls could be so unlike. McGee, darling, I do suppose you are brassy enough to go ask Terry about Charlie, and she's probably annoyed enough to tell you. Where would she be? Mmmm. Either at the Plaza or at the Armister apartment. Try them both, dear. But don't get the wrong apartment. The old one, the one where she'd be, is the one on East Seventy-ninth. I think Charlie's hideout is further down. Now, I think I must go join my guests, much as I dread it. And you must come back and tell me the scandalous reason why you should be interested in Charlie Armister. I won't tell a soul."

"The hell with Charlie. I'm interested in that secretary."

We stood up. I bent and kissed her soft wrinkled cheek.

"Slip out swiftly, my dear, before any of these old battlewagons can clutch you and start honking at you. And phone me again soon."

I went out, smiling. The old elevator was rattling up the shaft so I took the stairs down. Constance Trimble Thatcher has her own kind of wisdom. There had been one morning when I had thought she had lost her mind. That was the morning Joanie had appeared at my gangplank looking pallid and jumpy and sacrificial in her resort wear. With trembling hand she had thrust a note at me. I saw her chin shaking as I looked at her after reading it. It was in Connie's oversized purple script, and all it said was,

"Be very sweet to this dear exhausted harried child. Some utter idiots wanted to clap her into a rest home. But, as her godmother, I think I know better what she requires."

The next day I had cast off and gone chugging down to the Keys bearing my wan, huddled, jittery passenger. Three weeks later I delivered her to the Miami airport for her flight back. She was ten pounds heavier, brown as walnuts, her hair bleached three shades lighter, her hands toughened by rowing, her muscles toned and springy. We kissed the long humid goodbys, and she laughed and cried-not in hysterics, but because she had good reasons for laughing and good reasons for crying, and we both knew just how she could pick up the pieces of her life and build something that would make sense. Captain McGee. Private cruises. Personalized therapy. And a little twinge of pain when the plane took off, pain for McGee, because she was too close to what-might-have-been. If there's no pain and no loss, it's only recreational, and we can leave it to the minks. People have to be valued.

There was a preponderance of poodles. This is the most desperate breed there is. They are just a little too bright for the servile role of dogdom. So their loneliness is a little more excruciating, their welcomes more frantic, their desire to please a little more intense. They seem to think that if they could just do everything right, they wouldn't have to be locked up in the silence-pacing, sleeping, brooding, enduring the swollen bladder. That's what they try to talk about.

One day there will appear a super-poodle, one almost as bright as the most stupid alley cat, and he will figure it out. He will suddenly realize that his loneliness is merely a by-product of his being used to ease the loneliness of his owner. He'll tell the others. He'll leave messages. And some dark night they'll all start chewing throats.

A six-foot girl walked slowly by leading a little gray poodle in a jeweled collar. He peered out at me from under his curls with his little simian eyes. She wore flowered stretch pants and a furry white sweater. She slanted a quick look of speculation at me. She went by. Her haunches moved with a weighty slowness in time to her strolling gait. The poodle stared back at me. Bug off, he said. There isn't enough love to go around. You are the familiar enemy.

"Classy neighborhood, huh?" Nina said.

I sprang up and said, "You sneaked up on me."

"We call that one the Snow Maiden. She has about forty sweaters. All tight. All white."

"It's a lot of girl."

"Waiting long? Come on up."

As we slowly climbed the stairs, she said, "I slept like a felled ox, Trav. I didn't even hear the alarm. And all day I've been just dragging around. If I'd put my head down for one minute, I'd have gone to sleep. Reaction or something."

"You blew a lot of old fuses last night."

"And burned out the wiring." She leaned against the wall and handed me her key, and yawned. I let us in. The place was more orderly.

"Housework?" I said.

"A little bit last night. It was messy."

"I'll take you out to dinner tonight."

"Let me get out of my shoes and have a drink and think about it, dear. Fix me bourbon on ice, will you? You know where the things are. Knock and hand it in. A shower might wake me up."

"No sherry?"

She gave me a rueful smile. "I was on sherry because I was scared of what anything stronger would do to me. I was afraid of losing control. I'm a bourbon girl from way back."

She dragged her way into the bedroom and closed the door. I fixed drinks. When I rapped on the bedroom door, nothing happened. I could hear the shower. I went into the bedroom. Her clothing had been tossed on her unmade bed. The bathroom door was ajar. The shower roared. There was a warm, steamy, flowery scent of girl. I knocked on the bathroom door. In a moment a wet arm came out. I put the glass in the hand. It went back in.

"Thank you," she called. "You know what?"

"What."

"I'm getting a bonus."

"That's nice."

"On the Marvissa account. We got it. They took my design. It was a competition. Five hundred dollars."

"Congratulations."

"And I was so tired, my only response was a weak and humble little smile. I'll be out in a few minutes, dear."

I went back into the living room. The heady scent of soapy girl seemed to follow me out. I ordered McGee to stop picturing her in the shower. I told him he had seen whole platoons of showering women, and scrubbed many a glossy back in his day, and this was a damned poor time for adolescent erotic fantasies. And the business of the drink had not been a tricky invitation. It had been a friendly innocence. This was Mike's kid sister. It would have a flavor of incest. And this wasn't what he had meant by shaking her up. So I paced and smirked woodenly at her drawings, and wrenched my mind into other patterns.

At last she came out in feathery slippers and a long pink-and-black robe cinched tightly around the tininess of her waist, with a little mist of perspiration on her upper lip, and some of the ends of the blue-black hair dampened.

"I'll dress when we decide what kind of a place we're going."

"Sure. Refill?"

"Please."

So with new drinks, we sat and I told her about my day, Sergeant Rassko and Robert and Constance Trimble Thatcher. I made it complete. The Rassko thing was obviously a strain for her, so when I came to Robert I funnied him up more than he merited, and made her laugh a little. She was intrigued with Connie, qnd with the idea that so social and lofty a lady would be so gossipy with me.

"You must have some special credentials, Trav."

"I did her a favor once when she was very depressed. Her self-esteem was at a low ebb. She doesn't know many people like me. I guess I amuse her. And in some funny way, we're alike."

"You and Constance Trimble Thatcher?"

"We're both impatient with fraud. With all pretentious and phoney people. She can afford to be. With me it's an extravagance."

"Am I phoney?"

"You design the vulgar pots and sell them to the vulgar people. When you start believing them, you become fraudulent, Miss Nina. You make a plausible adjustment to the facts of life. I don't. And that isn't a virtue on my part. It's the disease of permanent adolescence. Honey, when you take your tongue out of your cheek, you become suspect."

"The Marvissa containers are hideous."

"Of course."

"But I'm proud of the bonus, Trav."

"Why not? Nina, once you accept the terms of the compromise, you'd be a damn fool not to do your best within those limitations. Beat them at their own game, and be proud you can."

"Okay, sir."

"Now. More questions about what Howie told you about the thievery."

"I told you, he only suspected it. He was very troubled about it. He said he couldn't prove anything. I asked him why not. He said I would have to take a course in accounting before he could even begin to explain it to me. But he tried to explain it. He said suppose you have a hundred buckets full of water and a hundred empty buckets, and all of a sudden you start pouring water back and forth from one to another as fast as you can. He said you could keep it moving around so fast that nobody would ever notice there was less and less total water all the time, and the only way it could be checked would be to stop the whole thing and carefully measure what was left."

"How about names?"

"He didn't like to talk about it to me. I'd always start pleading with him to quit. I kept telling him that if there was something nasty going on, he might get blamed or something. I told him it was making him gloomy."

"What did he say about quitting?"

"That it was a good idea. In a little while. It irritated him that he couldn't sit down and have a good tald with Mr. Armister. When he first went with them he said they used to talk things over, discuss future planning and so on. He said Mr. Armister had sound ideas. But then Mr. Armister got sort of… hearty and cheerful and indifferent. He said it had to be some kind of high-level conspiracy, and he used to wonder if Mr. Armister was engineering it somehow, draining it out and hiding it away maybe in Switzerland for tax evasion reasons. He said he guessed he was getting too nosy, because Mr. Armister kept hinting that it might be a good time for Howie to locate somewhere else, with a nice bonus and good letters of commendation."

"But he never found anything specific."

"Not that I know of."

"And what was he going to do if he did? Did he say?"

"No. But he used to look very grim and angry, as if he would go to the authorities or something if he found out. I loved him, Trav, but I have to say that Howie was just a little bit stuffy. He had very rigid ideas of right and wrong. He was… sort of repressed." She blushed slightly. "I believed that after we were married, I could sort of loosen him up."

I leaned back and said, "Sixty to seventy millions is a lot of water to pass from bucket to bucket. Quite a lot could get spilled. Ten percent would be six or seven million. Would you happen to know the name of the affectionate secretary?"

"Sure. Bonita Hersch. Howie couldn't stand her. She was Mr. Mulligan's secretary until Mr. Armister's secretary retired, and then she moved up."

"Why did he dislike her?"

"I guess because things changed there after she became Mr. Armister's secretary. You know how offices are. Or do you? They can be nice, everybody getting along, or it can get very formal. She built a wall around Mr. Armister and set the other people against each other. Trav?"

"Yes, Miss Nina."

"What do you really think about all this?"

I turned and looked into the intent blue eyes, thicketed with those long lashes, at the face small and young under the weight of blue-black curls.

"I think it is a lot of money. We're all still carnivorous, and money is the meat. If there's a lot of money and any possible way to get at it, I think people will do some strange warped things. Hardly anybody is really immune to the hunger, not if there's enough in view. I know I'm not."

"Is that one of those facts of life you were lecturing me about?"

"I was patronizing you, baby. I do a lot of talking. It makes me believe sometimes I know who I am. McGee, the free spirit. Such crap. All I've ever done is trade one kind of bondage for another. I'm the victim of my own swashbuckled image of myself. I'm lazy, selfish and pretty shifty, Miss Nina. So I have to have an excuse structure. So I glamorize my deficiencies, and lecture pretty little women about truth and beauty. Are you wise enough to understand that? If so, you are wise enough not to trip over my manufactured image."

"I think you are very strange."

"Don't get intrigued. It's not worth it. I'm a high level beach-bum. And I'm about as permanent as a black eye."

There is a time in all such things when eyes look into eyes, with vision narrowing and intensifying until there is nothing left but the eyes, searched and searching. This is a strange and tingling thing that narrows the breath but it is a communication, and once it has happened there is an awareness beyond words.

She licked a dry mouth and half-whispered, "I've run into doors. I've had my share of black eyes. I've gotten over them."

"Shut up."

"Mike said you were such a hell of a fine soldier."

"The result of a pertinent observation. I noticed that the better you were, the longer you lasted. Out of pure fright, I put my heart into it."

"Mike said you were going into business with your brother when you got back."

"When I got back, there wasn't any business. They had taken it away from him, and he had worked too hard at it, and he killed himself."

Blue eyes came closer and the voice was more of a whisper. "Mike said you have a strange thing about women."

"I happen to think they are people. Not cute objects. I think that people hurting people is the original sin. To score for the sake of scoring diminishes a man. I can't value a woman who won't value herself. McGee's credo. That's why they won't give me a playboy card. I won't romp with the bunnies."

With her lips two inches from mine and her lids looking heavy, she said, "Mike said it's a disaster to play poker with you."

"I live aboard my winnings. It's called the Busted Flush."

"Take me for a boat ride," she said, and rested her fists against my chest and fitted a soft sighing mouth to mine. It started in mildness, and lifted swiftly to a more agonizing sweetness of need than one can plausibly expect from a kiss. Her arms pulled, and she gave a wrenching gasp, and I held her away. She stared, blind and wide, then plunged up and wandered away, went over to her push pin wall and began idly straightening drawings.

"We have to decide where to eat so you can get dressed."

"Trav?"

"Go with the basic black something suitable for baked mussels, pasta, a big garlic salad ice cold, a bottle of Bardolino, espresso."

"Trav, damn it!"

"And shoes you can walk in, because we'll want to walk a little while after dinner and look at the lights and look at the people."

She turned and looked at me and shook her head in a sad exasperation and went into the bedroom and closed the door.

I held it all off until we were down to the second cups of the thick bitter coffee. I held it off by regaling her with folksy legends of the palm country, and bits of marina lore-such as my neighbor boat which housed the Alabama Tiger's perpetual floating house-party, and how to catch a snook, and the best brand of rum in Nassau and such like. I paused for a moment.

"Trav?" she said, in that same old tone of voice, and I was locked into the intensity of her blue eyes and we were back with it.

"As you told me in the beginning, you are a darling girl. And a darling vulnerable girl because somebody dimmed your lights back on August tenth, and because last night you whooped and coughed up enough of yourself to be equivalent to ten sessions on the couch and you want to transfer to me more than you should. You are just too damned willing to give all that trust and faith and affection, and it scares me. And when a damn fool shoots fish in a barrel, he also blows hell out of the barrel."