Nightmare in Pink (8 page)

I answered it and Nina said, "Well?"

"Oh. Hi, darling."

"You have a girl over here. Remember?"

"What's your name again?"

"My name is I love you McGee."

"You sound pretty merry."

"I feel absolutely stupendous. I have deep black circles under my eyes, and I have this uncontrollable twitch, and I limp on both hind legs, and I never felt better in my life. And I miss you. Terribly. What have you been doing? Sleeping? What's the matter with you? No stamina?"

"When did you wake up?"

"Five minutes ago. And I'm about to take a great big steaming hot bath and wash my hair."

I told her about Terry's call, but I did not tell her Terry's suggestion about Bonita Hersch. She was disappointed. I said I would make it just as soon as I could.

I paused at the entrance and looked into the brunch area. A lot of the tables had emptied. They were at a table on the right, over at the side. Terry spotted me and waved. She wore a casual tweed suit, a small brown hat, and looked smart and very much at ease. As I walked toward the table I looked at the other woman. There was a stiffness in her posture. She wore a black dress. Her fur was over the back of her chair. She wore a rather intricate hat atop a careful sculpturing of pumpkin-gold hair. From a distance she bore a rather striking resemblance to Princess Grace Kelly Ranier. But as I neared the table I saw there was a coarseness in her face, features slightly heavier. She looked to be about thirty.

A waiter quickly moved a chair to the table. "Hello, darling," Terry cawed. "Bonita dear, this is Travis McGee, Trav, Miss Bonita Hersch. You're a few minutes late, darling."

"Sorry"

Her smiled was wicked. "You're not too terribly attentive, dear. I'd hate to think that I bore you."

"You couldn't bore me, Terry" I said, and asked the waiter to bring me some coffee.

"Isn't he decorative, Bonita? Look at those monstrous shoulders. But he's really frightfully proper and dull and just a little bit stupid."

"Take it easy, Terry."

"My God, is that a command? Aren't we masterful today? Perhaps you bore me."

"Come off it, Terry, for God's sake."

"Am I embarrassing you, Trav? Gracious! Isn't it odd how the friends of one's friends never quite work out? Next time I see Bunny I shall tell her that you certainly lived up to the advance billing, but by the cold light of day, you depress me." She gathered her purse and cigarettes and stood up looking at us with seamed monkey-smile. I got slowly to my feet.

"Oh, stay right here, dear. Wait for your coffee and have a nice little chat with Bonita. You and she should get along marvelously. She's a dreary little typist who seems to think she's going to marry my sister's husband, poor thing. She's rather sexy in a crude way, don't you think? Have a charming time, dears."

She went swiftly away, smiling at friends, her stride vital and youthful.

"She is a terrible, terrible woman," Bonita said in an awed and trembling voice. "Nobody has ever talked to me like that before."

I took a more careful look at Bonita Hersch. Her grooming was almost too perfect. Every little golden hair was in place. Her eyes were a pale cold gray-blue. Under the disguise of lipstick, her upper lip was very thin and her under lip was full and heavy. Her hands were wide and rather plump, with short thick fingers.

"She was very rude to you, Miss Hersch."

"She invited me here."

"That makes it unforgiveable."

"It certainly does. And she got everything wrong. Things aren't at all… the way she said they are. Do you know her well?"

"Not very well. Somebody asked me to look her up. She's a spoiled woman, Miss Hersch."

"I am not going to try to understand why she was rude." There was a little more edge and authority in her voice, but it was a light-bodied voice. It had a hushed and confidential quality about it.

"Let's try to forget Terry Drummond. I don't have to have that coffee. Maybe we could go somewhere else and I could buy you a drink?"

She turned those appraising eyes on me. A sharp pink tongue-tip was momentarily visible at the corner of her mouth. She looked at a small jeweled watch, lifting the ornamental cap with the edge of her thumbnail. "I think that would be very nice, Mr. McGee."

"Fine," I said. I stood up and took her chair. She stood up and moved away from the table and waited for me to hang her fur wrap on her shoulders. She had a long slender back. Her breasts were small and high. The black dress was exquisitely fitted to her, particularly effective in displaying the long ripe lines of her heavy and elegant and firmly-girdled hips. She smiled formal thanks, with a little flicker of darkened eyelashes over her shoulder at me, and then walked out ahead of me, walking with that very slight awkwardness, more illusion than reality, of long-waisted women sensuously and consciously overripe in hip and thigh. At each short stride the calves of her legs swelled round and smooth under sheer nylon, making her ankles look more fragile than they were.

She settled into the cab, in a spiced fragrance of her perfume and smiled and said, "If I might choose…"

"Of course."

"Driver, Armitage Inn, please. Lexington at Fif… "

"I know where it is, lady."

"As you interrupted me, driver, I was about to tell you to go to the side entrance." There was a little silken whip in that voice, and it made a nice little pop when she got her wrist into it.

Her morale was improving. I saw what was wrong about her. She was just too bloody refeened.

"Do you live in the city, Mr. McGee?"

"Florida, Miss Hersch."

"Can we be… what did she call you. Trav? Trav and Bonita? I must warn you. Please do not call me Bonny. I wondered about your marvelous tan, Trav. Are you in business in Florida?"

"I'm a boat-bum, Bonita."

"Oh?" I detected a faint chill.

"I have a custom houseboat down there. I live aboard. I get into a few little things now and then, but mostly I do as little as possible."

"It sounds like a lovely life." The chill was gone.

I could realize how bright Terry had been. She had put Bonita Hersch in such a bad light that the woman would feel obligated to correct the picture. And she had given me, by indirection, the sort of credentials which would make me seem both interesting and harmless to Bonita.

I had to admire her choice of a place. We were given a deep red-leather booth with sides high enough to assure privacy. There was inoffensive background music, lighting designed to make women lovelier, and excellent service.

She shook her head sadly. "That woman. What did she call me? A dreary typist. Now it seems amusing. I do type. Once upon a time I was a typist. But I've never felt particularly dreary. I'm an executive secretary-private secretary to Charles McKewn Armister. And I certainly do not care to marry anyone. Then I would feel dreary. Do you know, that implausible woman offered me a huge sum of money to send Mr. Armister back to his wife? She couldn't be more mistaken, really."

"What gave her the idea you could?"

"She misinterpreted a certain situation, Trav. In a way I can't blame her for that. I imagine a great many people have the same idea. But she could have listened to an explanation. You see, I live in Mr. Armister's apartment. But so does Mr. Baynard Mulligan, his personal attorney and the head of his legal staff. And a chauffeur. And a cook. It's quite large. There are five bedrooms and four baths in addition to the servants' quarters. I worked for Mr. Mulligan for several years. When Mr. Armister's secretary retired a year ago, I replaced her, at Mr. Mulligan's suggestion and with Mr. Armister's approval. I'm perfectly willing to admit that it is a strange arrangement, but I function as a housekeeper, in a sense. I run the staff and supervise the buying and the menu, that sort of thing. They are both very busy men. It's a convenience for them. It costs me very little to live these days, but I must admit that I hated giving up my own little place. I'm actually starved for privacy, Trav. I would have loved to have had you see my precious little apartment."

"Then there never was anything between you and Charlie Armister?"

I was again aware of her calculating appraisal. "Nothing important or enduring. Just a little time of foolishness. It ended months ago. Proximity I suppose. It can be so dangerous, you know. And Charlie is a dear, dear man. He made me forget one of my basic rules of behavior. A girl should never never never have an affair with the man she works for. It's such a stupid thing to do. It always has to end, you know, and then there's the terrible awkwardness of trying to work smoothly together, and usually the man gets rid of the secretary somehow. And it might mean a much less important job. I've seen that kind of thing happen far too often. So I've made it a rule. It seems Charlie was the exception. But we survived it nicely, without impairing the working relationship."

"That was fortunate."

"Yes, indeed it was. I have a tremendous capacity for loyalty Trav. I give the man I work for all my energy and competence. That's what I'm paid to do, to increase his working efficiency, protect him, advise him when he asks. There has to be… a rather formal flavor about it to make it work. Do you understand?"

"I think so."

"Any wise and ambitious woman will compartment her office life and her private life. I imagine Mrs. Drummond heard some rumor or other, and she must think it is still going on. But it isn't, of course. She could just as well try to bribe Martha, our German cook, to send Charlie back to Joanna."

"That marriage is on the rocks?"

"Apparently. He was terribly repressed, and now he's broken out and I don't believe he'll ever want to go back to the kind of life he led before. He's really a very happy man now."

"Is he going with anyone?"

"Trav! Remember what I said about loyalty? I really can't discuss the man I work for, can I?"

I swallowed the temptation to ask her what she had been doing. I smiled at her, thinking that this was as nasty a bit as I had come across in a long time. I could sense the ruthless pursuit of the career. And her equivalently ruthless pursuit of sexual gratification. This was the product of a dozen highly competitive offices, of skilled infighting, merciless intrigue.

Her heart was as cold as a stone at the bottom of a mountain lake.

Her bosses would remember her as a jewel. Her lovers would remember her as an enchanting mistress. She would embody all the cheap glamour techniques, the skillful arrangements of Sex-and-the-Single-Girl. She would pick her lovers the way an IBM sorter finds a new sales manager. Married men would suit her best. They weren't as likely to be a nuisance, create scenes and difficulties. I saw a succession of dapper and slightly puffy fellows with little black mustaches, gold billclips, hard-top convertibles and small stock options. They would all say Bonita is a good sport. Bonita knows how to make a man feel like a king. There were no hard feelings. We're-still-good-friends. Very clever girl. Fastidious.

A precious little apartment and sexy hostess pyjamas, candlelight and little taste-treats cooked in shiny copper pots. Mild music and deft little conversational bits, and then after she had stacked the pots and dishes for her precious little maid to take care of the next day, she would delicately bower herself in silk and perfume, all coiffed and tidily diaphragmed, with the lights just so, and pull the poor dazzled son-of-a-bitch, marveling at his luck, onto those deep soft hungry cannibal loins. Because when a girl does without, she gets a little edgy, and lots of authorities say it is sort of a beauty therapy, my dear, keeping the glands in order and all. It's good for the akin.

But if poor Harry the Mustache happened to work for the same outfit, and happened to get in her way or the way of her boss, she could open his throat with the same indifferent skill with which she had learned to cut radishes into precious little rosettes. And when one Harry would become too accustomed to her, and begin to take all that stylized graciousness for granted, with too little humble gratitude, she would skillfully shuck him and begin her patient search for the next one. From each she would absorb some special field of knowledge-wines or paintings, sports cars or antique glass-because she wants so terribly to become truly and totally refeened.

This was a guileful, perfumed monster. God only knows where they come from. They Clump up in the big cities. Somehow they all manage to look quite a lot like each other. They consider themselves sophisticates. They buy growth stocks. They worry a lot about their breasts and about secretarial spread. The idea of ever having a baby is some kind of grotesque joke. It would hurt. And then you'd be stuck with it. Their conversation is fantastically up to date. They get the very best of service everywhere they go. And when, at last, they begin to get a little scared, they go on the biggest and most careful hunt of all. The big game they are after has a triple listing-D and B, Social Register and Who's Who. And with all their polished skills, they wrench the poor bastard away way from his wife, nail him, and-in smug luxury-ruin all the years he has left.

Her smile was practiced and charming. Her makeup, hair styling and dress design were carefully planned to enhance every good feature.