One Fearful Yellow Eye (29 page)

We're going for a nice long ride."

"But we were going to go fishing with Meyer, honey."

So we stopped and told Meyer it was off. I said we were going over to Marco Bay, between the mysterious Everglades and the glorious Gulf, to see if, perchance, a good cook I had met in Chicago had settled herself there to live the golden years in the golden way.

We took a cab over to the garage. Heidi was enchanted with my old stately transportation, name of Miss Agnes, one of the really big old Rolls-Royces. She had suffered a curious trauma, perhaps during the Great Depression, when somebody had converted her into a pickup truck and painted her bright blue.

In the bright clear cool morning we struck west across the Tamiami Trail, sitting high above the squatty and more frangible products of later years, Miss Agnes going along with stately rumble and faint wind-hiss, floating up to her mild and amiable eighty miles an hour when I had clear pieces of road.

And so at eleven-thirty I parked in a broad lot next to the sales office of the Marco Bay Development Corporation. I left Heidi by the truck and went into the office. It looked like functional slices of three kinds of jet aircraft fastened together with aluminum windows. The salesmen weren't in. A Miss Edgerly was. She was all wrists, eyebrows, and big rabbity teeth, and determined to be helpful if it killed both of us.

"Gee now. From Chicago in late December." She went trotting from file to file. She was about eleven inches across the shoulders and forty inches across her secretarial butt, making the pink blouse and madras shorts less than totally attractive.

"With a thick German accent? Gee now. Well, heck, I can check it by date but that's about the last way left." She riffled through more files, pulled out a sheet. "Gee now, actually the only sale from the Chicago area was Mr. and Mrs. Hennigan, and that was just on account of our handling the resale of the Torbadill house at the end of Citrus Lane. Poor Mrs. Torbadill had... well, catering to an older group we often have to handle the resale of some very excellent properties."

I knew why she looked distressed. It's the old sun-city syndrome. Instead of fun in the sun in the golden years the oldsters find they've locked themselves into a closed society with a mortality rate any combat infantry battalion would find impressive. You have to make friends fast because they aren't going to be around long. Spooks in the sunshine. Change the club rosters once a week. For Sale signs sprout as fast as the pretty tropical flowers and trees.

"I guess that's it," she said. "I'm terribly sorry. Over here are some pictures at the Welcome Party. Everybody who moves into Marco Bay has a Welcome Party at the Golf and Tennis Club.

I think this is... yes, this is Mrs. Hennigan." And with the eraser end of her yellow pencil she tapped the fleshy smiling face of Anna Ottlo. "But of course she just doesn't fit the sort of person you are describing." She leaned close, squinting to read the typed legend taped to the bottom edge of the glossy color print. "Perry and Wilma Hennigan are retireds from Chicago, all right."

"I suppose there's the off chance they might know where the other lady is, if they know her at all.

Long as I'm here I might as well ask. How do I get to..."

"Well, hey, come look here at our wonderful map that's just been brought up to date!"

It was so big I hadn't seen it. Vivid green plaster for the grass. Blue mirror glass for water, in the bay, the canals, the community pools, the private pools. Some kind of gray flexible strip for the roads, complete to yellow center line.

I followed the pencil eraser. "Right down Mainway all the way to Grapetree Circle, and then three quarters of the way around it and down Osprey Lane to the end where it runs into Citrus Lane, and then take your right and go to the end." She bounced the eraser off the roof of an L-shaped house on a point of land that jutted into the bay. Most of the houses sat shoulder to shoulder. The one she indicated, and a very few others, had a lot of lateral privacy. "You can't miss it!" she cried, spinning toward me, beaming, and smelling of peppermint.

"Looks pretty elaborate."

"Oh, it is! It's one of our Adventure in Living series, the biggest one. Tropic Supreme. It's thirtyone thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine, plus the lot, but including closing costs and title insurance, and the poor Torbadills added the Kingway Pool, a second Florida room, and marvelous, absolutely marvelous plantings. They picked one of the choicest pieces of land, and they bought these three additional lots for privacy. They furnished it beautifully too. Why I would say they had, at least, at the very least, sixty thousand in it. It's really the nicest home in the entire development. And just when they had it exactly the way they wanted it, poor Mrs.

Torbadill... well, that's another story, isn't it?"

"The Hennigans must be pretty well-heeled too." "It was a fantastic bargain, actually. Forty-nine five for everything, even including the boat poor Mr. Torbadill bought and only used twice."

"It still adds up to big monthly bite though."

"I heard they paid a considerable part of it in cash."

"You've been very helpful, Miss Edgerly." "That's what we're here for. To be of service." When I went back out to the lot, Heidi was stand ing leaning against Miss Agnes, hands in her skirt pockets, ankles crossed. When someone has become very dear it is rare that you get a chance to see them anew, as though for the first time. I saw her before she saw me approaching. She stood there in her relaxed and slender elegance, chin up, expression cool, looking perfectly capable of buying the entire project and moving everybody out and building herself a castle.

I told her the whole bit. "Darling," she said, "are you quite certain it was Anna?"

"Positive."

"But how absolutely weird!"

"So we find out what goes on."

I drove the route pointed out to me. A pickup truck means a service call, even if the basic vehicle happened to cost three thousand pounds back in the days when a pound was worth five dollars. So the glances were casual. The separate generations belong together. No matter how lush the flower beds; how spirited the bridge games, the shuffleboard competitions, the golf rivalries-nor how diligently the Hobby Center turns out pottery waterbirds, bedspreads and shell ashtrays, this kind of isolation still makes a geriatric ghetto where, in the silence, too many
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people listen to their own heartbeats.

I had noticed a small community bayfront park at the intersection of Osprey Lane and Citrus Lane, so I pulled in there and turned Agnes off and reached across Heidi into the back of the shallow shelf under the glove compartment and took out the little canvas zipper case, extracted the Bodyguard, and worked it into my right-hand pants pocket.

"To see Anna Ottlo?" she said incredulously. "Hear dem bells. In the back of my head. Better safe than sorry. A stitch in time. A penny saved. Hell, dear, I'm cowardly."

"But clean."

"You wait here. Think pretty thoughts. Paint a painting in your head."

Circular drive. Double carport. Dark blue Buick station wagon in one stall. Power mower and golf cart in the other. Drops from the sprinkler pattering off elephant ear leaves. Birds yammering. Blue bay beyond. Sizable cinderblock house, awning windows, Bahama gray with white trim, glaring white roof.

When I pressed the button the chimes came loud and clear through the screening of the , door.

They were not as ornate as the Shottlehauster set. When I heard a female voice call, "Coming," I moved a little to one side, turned my back toward the door. "Yes?" she said. "Yes? What is it?" I heard the spring creak on the screen door and I turned and caught it and faced her.

"Hello there, Anna!"

She had been somewhat thinner in the Welcome Party picture, and since _ then she had lost a great deal more weight. Her white hair had been dyed a peculiarly unpleasant shade of building-brick red, and cut into a style that would have looked cute on a young girl, the bangs curving down to eyebrow level. She wore dangling gilt earrings, a yellow blouse, purple pants, and zoris. It was a grotesque outfit for a woman in her middle fifties. The meaty face had lost no weight, and the pottery-blue eyes were the same.

"Anna, what happened to the vaudeville accent?" She frowned and shook her head. "Young man, you apparently think I am someone else."

"I think you're trying to be someone else."

She turned and shouted into the sunny vistas of the house. "Perry! Sweetheart! Come here, dear.

There's a man here saying the strangest things. Hurry, sweetheart!"

"Cleverness isn't enough," I said. "It takes luck too."

"You must be insane, young man." I realized how perfect a place she had picked. Guaranteed respectability. Immediate group identification. She was wearing the uniform of the day. Again she turned and shouted over her shoulder, "Will you please come out here at once, Perry, and help me with this...."

It covered any small sound he might have made when he came up behind me. Something flickered in front of my eyes and then as I gasped with surprise, the standard reaction, something was yanked to a fatal tightness around my throat. I spun to grapple with whoever had sneaked
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up behind me, and I saw a plump bald man hop nimbly backward. But the pressure on my throat did not lessen. I could not take a breath. My ears began to roar. I tried to get my fingertips under whatever it was, but it was sunk too deeply into the flesh. I reached to the nape of my neck and felt some kind of a clip device and felt of the free end that dangled down my back. I fumbled with the metallic-feeling clip. The screen door had shut. She stood watching me through the screen. He stood with the same expression-interest and mild concern. Vision began to darken. I thought of the gun and I willed my hand to go down and take it out of the pocket and put one through the screening and one into the plump belly. But my hand was more interested in trying to dig enough meat out of my throat to get to the tightness and pull it free.

Roaring had turned to a siren sound. I felt a jolt and a faraway pain in my knees. The world went from dark gray to black and I pitched from my kneeling position, face forward over the edge of the world, spinning down and down and down.

Brightness shone through my eyelids. My chin was on my chest. I tried to swallow the gravel packed into my throat but I couldn't budge it. I opened my eyes and tried to sit higher in the chair and saw at once why I could not. It was a tubular aluminum lawn chair, the kind with a double bar for the armrests. My forearms were fastened with wide white surgical tape from wrist to elbow to the chair arms, wrapped around arm and armrest, tight and overlapping, so that my hands had darkened and puffed. My legs were straight out, heels resting on terrazzo, pants cuffs hiked up by the same kind of tape which had also been used to fast en my ankles together.

I lifted my head. I was on the sort of jalousied porch locally called a Florida room. Anna sat ten feet away and a little off to my left. Behind her was a picture window from ceiling to floor and ten feet wide, framing the swimming pool beyond. There was a row of little white seahorses on the glass to keep the unwary from trying to walk through it. I could see a dense hedge of punk trees, tailored grass, concrete pool apron, redwood picnic furniture, a stone barbecue, a wall of pierced concrete block painted white. A blow-up duck, big enough to ride, floated high on the pool water, being drifted in random turning patterns by the light breeze.

On the table beside Anna was my undersized.38 special. She was using yellow needles and knitting something out of bright blue yarn.

She gave me a merry little glance and said, "You're very heavy, Mr. McGee. It took both of us to drag you."

I started to speak, but it was a rusty whisper. I cleared my throat and managed a guttural rasp.

"Was the code word sweetheart?"

"Hoping we'd never have to use it. You certainly had good luck. But when you add stupidity, what good is the luck?"

"Where is sweetheart?"

"Taking a little stroll. He wants to know how you got here and if you brought anyone along."

"Nobody important. Some state cops."

"I hardly think so."

"Not a trace of accent. You're very good."

"Thousands and thousands of hours, Mr. McGee, in my room, listening to your damned dreary radio programs, practicing into a tape recorder, playing it over and over and over, correcting it each time. Discipline. Endless self-discipline. Endless patience. And now, you see, we are quite safe. You are an annoyance only."

"You dosed Gloria, didn't you?"

"I knew where it was and what it was, and knew it would not change the taste of her morning orange juice. It was interesting, but it was just a little bit careless. I indulged myself. When she asked me what I was mailing to Marco Bay, I should have made quite sure, don't you think?

Perry is very annoyed. The silly sentimental little bitch was quite amusing, gasping and panting and slapping at her clothes to put out imaginary fires."

"Anna, wouldn't it have been a lot easier to live the lush life by marrying your daughter off to the Doctor?"

The needles stopped clicking and she stared at me. "My daughter! If I'd ever had children, my dear man, I can assure you they would have had considerably more intelligence than Gretchen.

But then again, had she been brighter, perhaps she couldn't have been persuaded to believe I was her mother. I had her on my hands only seven years, thank God. A tiresome child. Oh, you asked about the marriage. If the man in that untidy situation had been very rich and very obscure, it might have been an acceptable solution. But Fortner Geis was somewhat of a celebrity, and it would have been a treat for your dirty-minded newspapers, and I could not risk their prying into my personal history, of course."

"What are you wanted for?"

She saw me start and look beyond her. She turned and saw the bald man bringing Heidi around the house. He had her hand in his and she walked quite rigidly, with a twist of pain on her lips.