One Fearful Yellow Eye (18 page)

I asked her who did it and she just looked at me."

"No questions. Part of the deal. It's good of you to take her in. But what's with this child thing?

How much older are you? Seven years?"

"Seven hundred. How long will she be here?"

"Two days, three, four. I don't know. Just don't let her take off before i get here in the morning.

She might want to:"

She drifted about, touching small things, straightening them. She turned and looked at me.

"You're really strange, Travis McGee. You took it absolutely for granted I'd take her in. I just don't do things like that."

"Hardly ever. I know. How did the opening go yesterday?"

"As expected. Well, more people than I expected, actually. Poor Mark was darling about like a mother hen. One too many people compared Kirstarian to Segal, so he made a fantastic scene and stalked out. Mark sold three pieces, and it made him so happy he drank all the champagne we had left and I had to put him to bed." She sat on the arm of the couch and looked across at me. "It's so strange. That girl. I have the feeling I knew her long, long ago. But I couldn't have.

She's too young for that. Who is she, Travis?"

The temptation was to drop the bomb and say it was her half-sister. But that wasn't going to do anyone any good. I said, "You don't know her. She very probably knows something about where your father's money went. But she might not even know she knows. She is a good and staunch girl."

"I sensed that about her."

"The problem is the money."

"Oh yes, the money. And poor elfin little heartbroken Gloria, the waitress type, knows absolutely nothing about it. Right?"

"As far as anyone can tell."

"Well, she certainly fooled John Andrus without any trouble. And she sold my father a bill of goods. So I guess you don't present any special problem."

I smiled at her. "Heidi, she had to be lousy and crooked and dirty because she had the unholy impertinence to marry the daddy. She cast an ugly spell over him. She even seduced him physically, fornicated with him, and made him think he was enjoying it. What a degrading thing for the big wise important daddy to be doing! Didn't he know it made darling daughter feel actually ill to wake up in the night and think that right at that moment that woman was making him do that sick ugly animal thing?"

She turned ice-pale, jumped trembling to her feet and said, "Stop that! Stop it!"

"Where do you think you came from, Heidi? Did they find you out in the cabbage patch? There's only one known way he could get to be your father."

She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. In a thin prim little voice she said, "It killed her.

She died."

So I got out of there after suitable apologies. Two swings, two hits. Anybody who wanted to find a woman under that luscious structure was going to have to tear it down and start over.

Marriage to her had been as exciting as two years of root canal treatments, on a dead fang.

I knew that Francisco Smith had better find me Mother Gretchen, and fast.

NINE

FRNSISCO SMITH woke me up with his phone call at quarter past eight on Tuesday, that thirteenth day of December.

"Got something to write on?" he asked.

"Hold on," I said, and got set and told him to go ahead.

"Okay, here's the number of the annuity policy. GLC 085-14-0277. Four hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents gets mailed out the first of every month. The guy at Great Lakes is named Rainey. T. T. Rainey. The September check came back addressee moved, no forwarding address. They tried a trace. The Gorba family left last August 22nd. A Sunday. The couple and the five kids, in a big gray Cadillac sedan, towing a U-Haul. License 397110. Dropped the apartment keys in the super's box. Rent paid to the end of August and a month deposit in advance. Mrs. Gorba was paid by the week. She picked up her pay at the restaurant when she left work Friday evening. He was paid twice a month. His pay is still sitting there at the body shop.

They left the apartment in good shape. They didn't pick up the utilities deposits. They left clean.

At least there's no judgments filed against them."

"Is Great Lakes still trying to find them?"

"No. They tried it on the cheap and gave up quick. They weren't like somebody trying to collect.

They sent out the check for a double payment October first and it came back too. So they put it and the November and December checks in an interest account. The January check will go in the same account, the one made, out to her mother like the checks. But she turns eighteen in January, so if nobody shows up, they'll start a new interest account in the name of Susan Kemmer."

"Car payments?"

"No dice there. You see, it was a two-year-old Cad that the owner totaled, and the place Saul Gorba worked bid three-fifty for it. Then they found more wrong than the estimator thought there was. Gorba put down two hundred on it and agreed they could take another two-fifty out of his pay. That was back in April, I think. It was with the idea he could work on it in his spare time when he'd put in his regular hours, and buy the parts from them at cost or scrounge them from the yards, and they'd let him use shop tools. A lot of those guys work it that way for a personal car. They don't like them trying to fix iron up for resale as it puts them in competition with the shops they're working for. But Gorba didn't have a car so it was okay with the boss. So for about nine hundred, plus all the hours he put into it, he came out of it with a pretty good automobile. I understand he's handy with tools and catches on fast."

"When did he finish it, Smith?"

"August sometime."

"What would be the chance of tracing them in a hurry?"

After a short silence he said, "I wouldn't say it was real great, not if Gorba doesn't want to be traced. School records, medical records, IRS refunds, Social Security-he'd be carefuler than most. He had to rent the trailer someplace and he had to turn it in someplace, but he could unload it, drive it three hundred miles empty, and turn it in. With the car registration, he could cover up best by unloading it on a cash deal and buying something else under another name. My hunch would be check close on the daughter's friends. You tear a seventeen-year-old kid away from all her friends, she is going to find some way to drop them a card. But I don't like the feel of it, not with those checks unclaimed. What is it now? Thirteen hundred bucks. Listen, they're going to keep me on the run all day. This evening I maybe get a chance to cover a couple of.

other angles. I'll be in touch."

The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city. When you swallowed, you could taste the city. All the trees looked dead, and all the people looked like mourners.

Happy Christmas. Bingle jells. Brace yourself for hate week.

Heidi opened the red door with a fractional smile of cool welcome. She was in one of her painting suits. This one was yellow, like shark repellent. It had forty-three pockets with flaps and zippers.

"Flow's our patient?" I asked, very jolly.

"I made her go back to bed. She was shaky." Heidi had a blue smudge on the back of one hand, two speckles of bright red on her chin. The door to her studio was open. She was dressed for air-sea rescue, visible at thirty miles.

I glanced through the doorway into her studio. She said, "Kindly do not express an interest in
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my work. I already know your opinion."

"Look, I did not mean to rawhide you last night. I'm sorry."

"It isn't something new, Mr. McGee. Men try to shake me up by saying ugly things. It's sort of an erotic compulsion, I guess."

"Maybe you're an example of conspicuous waste."

"Don't try to make phrases. You're not the type. She's in the second bedroom on the left."

Susan Kemrner was propped up on two pillows. ` Her face was turned toward the gray light at the window, and tracked silver with tears. She looked at me, dabbed in gingerly fashion at the tear marks with a tissue, snuffled and hitched the pale blue blanket higher. The gestures had the flavor of bracing for an ordeal. It looked to me as though some of the puffiness was gone. But the areas of discoloration were larger, and the hues more varied.

I pulled a chair over and sat by the foot of the bed, facing her. "Saul work you over?"

"I'm not going to answer questions, Mr. McGee."

"Why don't you just think the questions over, and answer the ones you feel like answering? I won't try to trick you. Take your time."

"Who are you?"

"A friend of yours. I might have some answers to some of your questions. If you have any."

"Why should I want to ask you anything?"

"You might want to know why Dr. Fortner Geis was anxious to help you. I guess he had the feeling you might get in a real jam. A ten-thousand-dollar jam, Susan. That's the amount of cash he sent Mrs. Stanyard."

"Ten... thousand... dollars!"

"If you didn't contact her in a year, then she was to give it to Mrs. Geis."

"But... wouldn't it be mine anyway?"

"How come?"

"I mean it would have been money he got from my..." She stopped abruptly. I could guess at what was going on in her mind. Storybook stuff. Afternoon soap opera. There could be a dozen versions. Famous surgeon has a friend who has a daughter dying of a brain tumor. She is pregnant. Unmarried. Influential family. They don't want a scandal. The Doctor keeps the girl alive long enough so that she can have her baby, and then he arranges with his housekeeper for the housekeeper's daughter and her young husband, Karl Kemmer, to raise the baby as their own. So the money that had always come every month came from the annuity her real mother's people had bought for her, and the ten thousand is some kind of emergency fund entrusted to the Doctor long ago. I did not want to reach into her head and wrench any of her dreams loose.

They had sustained her. One day she would be able to jettison them herself, after they had served their long purpose. There was strength in this girl. But very strong people can break when there is too much all at once.

"How did Dr. Geis get word to you about contacting Mrs. Stanyard in case of trouble?"

"I don't want to answer questions."

"Take your time. See if there is any harm in answering that one, Susan."

"But if I don't want any help, why should I answer anything?"

"You have an orderly mind. But I gave you some help last night. You needed it and took it."

She thought that over. "He wrote me a letter last August. The writing was shaky. We knew from Grandma he was going to die. The Sunday before I got the letter she told us he was failing. It just said if I needed help I should go to Mrs. Stanyard. I was to write down her phone and address and destroy the letter, and not tell anybody. I thought it sounded sort of... crazy. He said Mrs.

Stanyard was a nurse and a nice person and I could trust her. I did like he said in the letter even if I didn't expect anything to happen, and sort of forgot it until... "

"Until the day before yesterday.

"But you wouldn't go to her apartment with her because you said they'd look for you there.

What did that mean?"

"Nothing."

"Okay. Now then. You're in some kind of a jam. You can call on me, and I can be just as rough as I have to be to get you out of it. And you've got ten thousand to finance the operation. I am yours to command, kid."

She turned her face toward the window. The tears started again. "But I can't do anything," she said hopelessly. "Nobody can do anything. She went away once in California and they put us in a place. There was just three of us then and we were little, and we almost didn't get Freddy back.

The judge said he was disturbed."

"Gretchen has gone off someplace?"

Defiant eyes stared at me through the slits. "I don't know what you're talking about."

I stood up. "I'm going to leave you alone for a little while to think something over. Let me see if I have the names right Freddy, Julian, Freda, and 'Ibmmy. Christmas vacation is coming up, Susan. I don't think it would be too difficult for an obviously respectable type like me to go gather up the kids. I know a crazy wonderful couple in Palm Beach. House as big as a hotel. Pots of money. Cook, maids, housekeeper, yard men. And scads of kids. They adopt them. Five more over Christmas would hardly be noticed. I could set it up with one phone call, and you've got the airplane money. Think it over."

I walked out without giving her a chance to respond. Heidi did not hear me. I leaned against the studio doorway. She was reworking the bottom corner of a, big painting, standing bent over
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with her back to me. Her air-sea rescue costume was clinched tight around the slender waist, and stretched tightly across the pleasantly globular rear. I have always thought it fallacious to make an erotic specialty out of any particular portion of the form divine. When it is good it is all good, and some days some parts are a little better than others, but you need the entire creature to make any segment of it worthwhile. In three silent steps I could grab a double handful of all that and see if she could manage a standing high jump over the top of the painting.

"AhHem!" I said.

She straightened and whirled around. "Oh! Did you find out anything?"

First I broke it to her that her patient was Gretchen's kid, and was the eldest granddaughter of Anna, the housekeeper, and briefed her on Gretchen's home life, hubby and sudden departure.

She looked thoughtful and troubled instead of startled, and said that she guessed that subconsciously she must have had some hint. She had dreamed about Gretchen last night for the first time in years. So I went back to her specific question. Had I found out anything?

"Just enough to make some guesses, and they are probably wrong. She thinks any kind of help is going to make things worse. I have a hunch the Gorba family moved well out of town. Fifty miles, a hundred miles. Mama Gretchen missed the lights and the action, so she took off. So Saul Gorba took a little hack at the ripening daughter, maybe to get even with Gretch for taking off. I would think she'd put up a pretty good scramble, so maybe she got her nails into his chops, or a solid little knee into his underparts, and he lost his temper and hammered her. I think he would know she wouldn't blow the whistle on him. With his record they would tote him off gladly, and the social workers would, in the absence of the old lady, stuff the kids into the handiest institution. I think she is hooked on being the little mother hen to these other four. I think she is worried to death about them right now. If she goes back, the stepdaddy tries again. And if she stays away and Gretchen is away, who looks after the little ones? Not so terribly little, actually.