One Fearful Yellow Eye (13 page)

"Maybe," I said, "the money's for Gretchen."

"For who?"

"For Gretchen. I guess you could call her an indiscretion. Long ago. Way back when Glenna was dying,"

She looked puzzled. "I don't know anything about that. It doesn't sound right, somehow. He worshipped his first wife."

"At least he always thought he did. Until he took a little acid LSD, provided by a buddy."

"Dr. Wyatt? Hayes Wyatt?"

"Glory took the trip too. I guess they were both getting a bad hang-up on his situation being terminal."

She nodded. "Dr. Wyatt has had a lot of success with it with terminal cases, where the pain is bad and they're terribly frightened, or terribly depressed. It's disassociative, you know. It gives them a breathing space to kind of sort out what it all means."

"And he sorted Glenna out and found out he didn't like her at all. Glory says it surprised him."

"Who was Gretchen?"

There was no reason not to tell her. There was even the chance it might knock loose some useful memory. But I told her and it didn't. The tale intrigued her. It gave another dimension to her hero, Fort Geis. But at the same time it diminished her. She had thought of herself as one third of the women in Geis' maturity-Glenna-Janice-Gloria. News of hearty little Gretch made it a foursome. It complicated her mental biography of the great man. It put two little vertical lines between her eyebrows, and I no longer had her full attention.

So, with promises to get in touch if either of us learned anything, I went back out into the last gray fading of the daylight in the damp and windy streets. I knew the sun was still shining way down there at Bahia Mar in the bottom right corner of the map, and the Busted Flush would be creaking and sighing when the dying wash from the incoming charterboats got to her. The sandy little brown broads would be ornamenting the sunset beach, casting the swift sidelong glance, trying not to blow their cool with the slightest trace of smile, and other kids would be playing the big game of pretending to be surfers, as they rode their bright boards in the gigantic, savage, towering breakers two feet high that break for twenty feet and six whole seconds sometimes.

[Surfers of the World, save your money and dream long dreams of getting to that one unspoiled beach that makes both California and Hawaii look like a sometime thing. Two whole miles of ocean straight out from the beach, six feet deep on the median tide, all -sand, and flat as pool tables. On the prevailing wind out of the southwest, girls and boys, those rollers start to build way down by Mozambique and Madagascar, and have a twothousand-mile run across the Indian Ocean before they crest white two miles off the great beach at Galle, Ceylon, and run all the way in with such a perfect symmetry and geometry that when you look down on it from twenty thousand feet it is like looking at a swatch of fabric, a pure pinstripe white on a pale tan-green background. As a special added convenience, just a bit south, toward Dondra Head, the deeps are close to the beach, so that after you get beyond the first few, you have nothing to fight on the way out.]

But I was too far from a softer sunset and a better beach. I knew that with a little luck I could either get part of my path smoothed for me, or find out something that would convince me it would make a lot more sense to head south right away. In the premature fading of daylight, I drove my rental car back through the damp and windy streets to the hotel and went up to the room; practicing a glassy smile to see if it would help lift me out of a mood turning as gray as day's end. See, brain-pan? The mouth is smiling. Feel the smile muscles? Hi ho, hi ho. The eyes are squinching too. McGee is one happy fella. Right?

I think I was trying too hard with the smile. When the elevator door opened at my floor, a substantial matron in a fur hat was waiting to board. When she glimpsed me, she sprang back a good distance and then waited until I was four strides away before scuttling into the Otis-Box.

I turned on the lights in the room and emptied all the cards out of my wallet on the bed. You may charge me, dear people, with being a CardCarrying American. I find these little tickets to perpetual consumption distasteful. I do not like to see my name on them, deeply embossed into everlasting plastic. They make me feel as if I should wear a leather collar and hang them all thereon. When there is a mistake in the billing on any of them, if you persist, you can fight your way past the icy and patronizing indifference of the electronic computers and reach a semi-human who can straighten things out. It only takes a year or so.

Yet in our times the thick wad of credit cards is a cachet of respectability, something more useful to me than any questionable convenience. When a cop lays upon you the white eye, and you stand there hunting for a driver's license as identification, and he watches you fumble through AmEx Diners, Carte Blanche, Air Travel, Sheraton, Shell, Gulf, Phillips, Standard, Avis, and Texaco before you find it, he is reassured. You may have thirty-seven cents and a dirty shirt, but you are completely on record and in good standing with the Establishment. If all you have is the license and a bale of vulgar cash money, it piques his curiosity. Who is this bum who can't get credit cards like honest people?

I found Maurie Ragna's personal card among the seldom used credit cards tucked into a side pocket of the wallet. He had written his unlisted phone number on the back of it. An East Chicago number, over the line in Lake County, Indiana, where as I understood it, the authorities were still as cooperative and hospitable to Ragna and his playmates as they had once been in Calumet City and Cicero. The Outfit, as it is known.along the lake, had responded to the roust by moving over the line into Gary and East Chicago.

I had come along once at the right time and, down in the Keys, had pried Maurie out of an exceptionally ugly situation, wherein he had no future at all to speak of. Grateful as he was, he was astonished any bystander would voluntarily involve himself. As it was, he couldn't put any weight at all on his feet for days, and walked in a very tender way for much longer. But that is an old and complex story, and he had tried to show appreciation by gifting me with cars, broads, and vacations on the cuff, but I had settled for a dozen mohair cardigans and passed along eleven of the twelve to friends. So this was the first time l was making a call on an old obligation, and if he was not yet buried out in the desert near Vegas, or chained to the bottom of lake or river, it might hearten him.

The number answered. A skeptical fellow who spoke in grunts took my name and where I could be reached and said if Ragna never got back to me he was maybe out of town or something.

It took an hour and a half. He was bursting with hospitality. He offered a car and driver, a choice of any kind of action I felt like, a certified stupendous broad, baby, name the age you like, the size, the build, the color, Swede, Jap, Spic, Polski, call it, McGee baby.

His voice sagged when I said maybe later, that right now I wanted information. When I said important information he brightened. I went into the indirect and elliptical phraseology of those whose lines are ninety percent certain of being permanently bugged.

"You are so right," he said. "It hasn't come to my ear but it can be checked. If say'some associate of some associate built the action on the Doc, then you scuffle around too much, I got enough going here and there you should get maybe only roughed up some, a three-day rest with nice nurses. But you could not clout any of it back, so scuffling would be a waste, right? Now on the little guy Smith, I will find out who owns how much of him. Hang easy Mister M. Give me one hour, two tops."

I ordered up some ice. Long long ago a lass had gifted me with a solitary drinker's kit. It is a squatty pewter flagon, cylindrical and with a king-sized oldfashioned-shaped drinking cup in pewter which fits upside down over the flagon with threads at the midway point of the flagon, so that assembled it is a perfect cylinder. With a nice regard for the emotional climate of the man who, when it is necessary, can drink alone without feeling degenerate, she'd had a single word engraved upon both flagon and glass: Mine. I had thought it all too elfin, thanked her too
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effusively, and put it away in a locker, and had come across it when packing for this trip and suddenly realized her instincts had been better than mine. It was not elfin. It was factual, and a derisive comment on all the His and Hers items in this chummy civilization. So I had filled it with Plymouth and brought it along, and it was indeed Mine.

I lounged and brooded and sipped and awaited Maurie Ragna's report. Sober sociological evaluations of the genus Hoodlumae americanus leave out their capacity for compulsive friendship. Once one accepts you he will lay gifts upon you like a potty rich uncle. You can do no wrong. You are forever his big great friend and buddy and chum and pal. If you get big-mouth disease, it is to him a disease, and he will have you gunned down, and he will cry, and send a whole truck of flowers. There are various levels of ethical values within the genus. I knew Ragna had a high contempt for those who deal in hash and grass, or schoolgirl recruitment, or housewife call circuits. He concentrates on such moral areas as bootlegging liquor and cigarettes, setting up casinos, operating resort properties here and there where he can supply a complete line of wheels, booze, hookers, and blue entertainment, as well as the more mundane items-such as vending machines, kitchen equipment, bed vibrators, and intercom equipment.

At last the call came back. "Took me too long, buddy boy, on account of a party I had to be sure of, he's at Acapulco and the call didn't go through so easy. It is no part of our action in any way, and though attractive, we stay off it, so go ahead and scuffle and stay lucky, you bum. I don't want you dead. About this Franky, he is owned like up to the throat and the word has gone to him to bust his ass doing any small thing anybody with your name wants done."

"It is a big help and a load off my mind, friend."

"Some phone calls, some lousy sweaters. Ask for something big so I can get even, will you?"

"When I need it, I'll holler."

After I'd said good-bye and hung up, I thought of a possibility which this contact with Ragna had suggested. The gambling itch was in many cases like other forms of addiction, a search for an excitement which turns the mind off. Maybe Geis had found a poker table. A big game would know just how high they would let the Doctor go on markers, and it was possible to lose six very big ones. It has been done before and will happen again. In some London clubs the biggest chip in play is worth twenty-eight thousand, and there are some in play every night. And if Geis had been expertly plucked, they would collect on the markers ruthlessly.

But I had to give that up. If the score had been made that way, Maurie would have come up with the information.

I rubbed a thumb across misted pewter and read the name again. Mine. That was the name of the problem. All mine.

SEVEN

FRANCISCO SMITH cut me off when I tried to tell him over the phone what I wanted from him. The agency offices were in the Monadnock Block on West Jackson. He named a lunchroom a block and a half away. I said I was six four, Florida tan, gray topcoat, no hat.

I got there within the half-hour, and had a sixminute wait over bad coffee before he arrived at quarter to ten, came directly to the booth, and sat opposite me.

"," he said to me. "Coffee black," he said to the chubby waitress. When she went away he said,

"With everything in the shop bugged every way those sons of bitches can dream up, I couldn't take a chance you might say too much about what you want."

He was on the short side of medium height, stocky, balding, mottled red face, rimless glasses with gold bows and nosepiece, and lenses strong enough to magnify the size of his weak-looking blue eyes. Medium blue suit, dark blue topcoat, light gray felt hat. He talked with very little lip movement, rather like an unskilled ventriloquist. You would have to glance at him a dozen times in a dozen places in one day before you'd begin to wonder if you had ever see him before. All the cities of the world are stocked ,with innumerable replicas of Frankie Smith. They are clerks, fry cooks, building inspectors, watch repairmen, camera salesmen, estimators, adjustors, civil servants, church wardens, florists.

"I want to know all about the job you did for Dr. Fortner Geis."

He looked puzzled. "Keeping an eye on that Gretchen Gorba and her kids? It went on quite a while. Better than two and a half years. Just a spot check to see how they were making it. He pulled us off it last summer. Early July? No. Early August. He died a couple of months later. Big play in the papers."

"He was a big man."

Smith studied me. He nodded abruptly. "I think I get the picture. The contract with us would be sort of proof the kid was his. Susan: The oldest. Hell, copies of all the reports are in the dead file. The court can make us turn them over if it comes to that. There could be a nice piece of change in it for an eighteen-year-old kid, enough to split it a lot of ways."

"Did he tell you Susan was his daughter?"

"Hell no. Look, if you tell us to run a complete check on Joe Blow, we'll do it. But to keep our own noses clean, we'll want to find out why you're so in terested in Joe. We got the contract three years ago next month. Gretchen Gorba is a big good-natured slob. She likes the horses and draft beer and shacking up, in any order they happen to come along. So I put a big old boy in our shop onto it. He's the kind women tell things to. He took a furnished room in a handy neighborhood, and as soon as he started laying her, she started telling her sad story, about how she was the housekeeper's daughter, and when the Doctor's wife was dying, the Doc knocked her up when she was just a dumb kid, and the Doc and her mother arranged to marry her off to somebody, and the Doc set up a lifetime annuity of a hundred a week for the kid named Susan.

Gretchen whined to our boy that she had braced the Doc to improve the income, on account of having five kids, and her husband in prison, but he didn't scare and he didn't give. But from talking to him, I got the idea that if we'd reported they were having a hard time, he would have done something. She was making between sixty-five and seventy-five a week depending on the tips, and averaging maybe thirty a week to the bookies, so that if she was getting more, the bookies would get more. She bets the doubles and the parlays, a guaranteed way to stay busted."