One Fearful Yellow Eye (3 page)

Waldren, Farhauser and Schrant. Old Mr. Waldren kept asking me questions. He looked as if he was taking a nap all the time I was answering. But finally he said he would see that I was not bothered anymore, but I had better stay right here at the house, for the time being. I know I'm being watched. I think it's Roger or Heidi though, paying someone to keep an eye on me. I yelled help, Trav. I don't want the damned money. But I don't want people following me for the rest of my life trying to catch me with something I haven't got."

"Was there any change in Fort's attitude or manner?"

"When he started selling things? I didn't notice a thing different. He seemed happy. That's what I wanted. I mean we couldn't be all the way happy, knowing the time was growing short. But we could give it a good try. And we did. That's another thing. I don't think he was trying to cheat on estate taxes or anything like that. I don't think he wanted to cash in those things. So somebody was making him do it somehow. And so that was making him unhappy, but he kept it from me.

He hid it from me. And I would like to get my hands on somebody who'd do that to him when he had so little time left, damn them."

"Would the illness affect his mind in any way?"

"Absolutely not!"

"Could he have been planning some... easier way of handling his estate and died before he had a chance to tell you?"

"They kept asking me that, sort of. No. Those last days before he went into a coma, I sat by him all day long. Held his hand. We'd talk. He'd nap and we'd talk more. He had a chance to say everything to me. He knew he was going. And... God, how he hated to leave me. He wasn't afraid of death. He was a man. It was the same way he used to hate to leave me when he had to go to a meeting. That's all. How much in love do you have to be before people believe it? I would have burned every inch of all that money to give him one more day." She stopped looking fierce and glanced at her watch. "Medium rare? Butter on the baked? Garlic dressing?"

"Your memory is still working, kid."

She trotted out toward the back of the house to tell Anna to serve as soon as it was ready. When she came back I asked her how well-fixed Fort's children were. She said that Heidi seemed to be doing just fine. She was twenty-five-married at twenty-two and divorced at twenty-four. It had been a second marriage for her husband, Gadge Trumbill, usually referred to in the society pages as a prominent sportsman. When Heidi had tired of Gadge's fun and games on the side, it was rumored that she employed people thorough enough to make an iron-clad list of positives which had included eleven wives of fellow members of the Harbour Yacht Club, but that the generous settlement and alimony had been the result of the respondent's unfortunate carelessness in not hiding more successfully his occasional penchant for willowy young men. Heidi Trumbill was living in a studio apartment at 180 East Burton Place, was busily painting very large abstracts, and was showing and selling them at a gallery four blocks away on East Scott Street called Tempo East. Gossip of the more rancid variety pointed out that her partner in the gallery operation, Mark Avanyan, was one of those who had made Gadge's second divorce considerably more expensive than his first. It made for interesting speculation.

"She is one very icy dish indeed," said Glory. "Take Grace Kelly like ten years ago, and give her a little more height and heft, and put her in a part where she's a nun who has to dress in civilian clothes to smuggle the code to the French army, and you'd be close. She's really beautiful, she's one of those people you can hardly believe they have even a digestive system. She's a lot brighter than Roger, I think. He lives in Evanston, where else? He'll be thirty soon. He works downtown in one of those big new office buildings. He's a specialist in the commodities market, and his father-in-law is very big in the commodities market. Jeanie, his wife, seems nice enough. She's one of those brown tennis-playing ones, and they have three kids, and they go to horse shows and eat off the tailgate and talk about hocks and fetlocks and all that.

"Neither of them are hurting a bit, but you'd think I'd pulled some tricky thing to get them tossed out naked into a blizzard. From everything Fort told me about Glenna, she must have been a doll. How could those two have such dreary people for their children?"

We ate busily and finally she looked over at me and said, "What I really had the most need of, Trav, was somebody to be my friend and take it for granted I haven't stolen money, and who'd know I didn't know anything about the money when I married Fort. I didn't make friends here.

We wanted all our time together. There wasn't enough to share. But I thought, too, it is a lot of money and it does have to be somewhere. And I remembered the way you... make a living.

Maybe I'm crazy to think you or anybody could ever find out where it went."

"It went somewhere. It's a nice jackpot. He had to have a good reason. Let's just say I don't have the feeling I'm wasting my time. If I can get some kind of line on what happened, then I'll see if
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my fee for mula grabs Sonny and Sis. If the only way they can possibly get what they had coming is through me..."

"Expenses off the top and cut the rest down the middle. You know that is okay with me on my share, dear. When I think it even entered my mind to turn mine over to those two... I'd rather give it to a home for... old television comedians!"

She looked so totally outraged and indignant I had to laugh. She put her plate aside and I saw she had not eaten much.

"Where's that wolf-like appetite I remember from old?"

"I don't know. It's fine for five minutes and then gaah. I guess I could have expected some kind of crazy thing happening, like the money. What is it, Travis? Why in the world should my life be some sort of continuous soap opera? I think I had six uneventful years. The first six. Gloria Anne Ridgen. Then all hell broke loose. Is there such a thing as drama-prone? You know, you go hunting for the action. My daddy bought me a ride on a merry-goround, and that was the time the man running it had to be drunk and decided he wasn't going to stop it. When they died I had to live with my nutty old aunt, and if my astrology tables were wrong any given day, she wouldn't let me go to school. The boy I went with in high school was walking by a building and somebody dropped a can of paint, and when he woke up from the coma a year later, he had the mind of a two-year-old. In college my roommate was a secret klepto and hid the loot in my luggage and when they began to narrow it down, she turned me in, and six months later she got caught and they apologized and asked me to come back to school and the day I was due to leave I got infectious mononucleosis and my dog was run over. All I want is a plain, neat, ordinary, unexciting life. But what happens? In Buffalo one day I got off the bus downtown on a hot afternoon and the bus door closed on my wraparound skirt and drove off and left me spinning like a top in my little yellow briefs on the busiest corner in town. You know, I dream about that.

There I am, and everybody is applauding and I can't stop twirling."

Anna Ottlo had gone to bed. We took the dishes out to the big bright kitchen and she rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. I was aware of the wind, and of the emptiness of the stretch of dunes and winter beach outside, and of the comfort of the house.

"Was this whole thing in the news?" I asked her.

"No. From what John Andrus says, It isn't news until there's some kind of legal thing that goes on, the probate or something. He can explain."

I decided it would be better not to tell her what had entered my mind. If a man, before dying, had converted his holdings into over half a million in cash, there would be a certain number of dim minds in a city of this size who would be inspired to pay a night visit to the little woman and see if she could be persuaded in ugly ways to tell where the deceased had hidden it away. It would be a clumsier variation of Heidi's and Roger's incorrect suspicion.

She turned lights off, and when one was left, we said goodnight by the embers of the fire.

"You're so good to come," she said softly, standing close, hands holding my wrists, head tilted back to look up into my eyes.

"Beach bums have to take care of each other, Glory."

"But it's never your turn."

We were smiling, and then there was that awkwardness born of a simultaneous remembering of a special closeness of long ago. Her gaze slid away, and I bent to her quick kiss, and we said goodnight. I took one glance back into the big room after she had turned the last light out, and I could see her small brooding silhouette in front of the ember glow.

THREE

THERE WAS a watery sunlight when I got up, and a diminishing wind. I found the bright and cheerful breakfast alcove off the kitchen. Anna said Miss Glory had gone walking along the beach and should be back soon, and I should eat.

"Eat like the bird, Miss Glory is. Too thin, ya?" Anna said.

"She looks healthy."

"Need some fat. Better in the winter some fat."

When she brought my bacon and eggs to the breakfast booth I asked her if she had worked long for Dr. Geis.

"From I was thirty only." she said proudly. "Refugee. Only the German language I had. My little girl eleven. Husband had one grandmother Jew. He got us out, was to come later." She shrugged. "The Doctor Geis helped looking for him after the war. Never found. Then it was the house in the city we were in, ya? Heidi has only one year then and Roger has five years. All happy. Three years I am here and the lady then has the bad sickness of the heart. A very sad thing for the house. Weaker weaker weaker, and the last year in bed. Nurses. Even such a man like the Doctor Geis, he cannot the lady save." Her broad heavy-featured face looked tragic, but then as she looked beyond me out the window, she smiled suddenly, "Here comes Miss Glory."

Gloria came striding through the loose sand and stamped her feet when she reached the flagstone walk. She had on wine-red wool slacks, a stocking cap with a red topknot, her hands shoved deeply into the slash pockets of a short leather coat. She smiled at me through the window, and came in, yanking the stocking cap off, shaking her black crisp hair out, shedding the leather coat. As she slid in opposite me, Anna brought her a steaming cup of coffee. Gloria had red cheeks. She wore a black lightweight turtleneck sweater.

"My word! Can we afford to feed this creature, Anna?"

"Good to cook for a big stomach."

"Sleep well, Trav? It's going to be glorious later on. There's that feel in the air. It's going back up into the fifties, I bet."

She had a toasted English muffin, and we took our second coffees into the living room where she called John Andrus and told me he said he would try to get out to the house by ten-thirty.

"Who does he think I am?"

"Sort of an appointed big brother. An old friend. Somebody I trust. I told him I wanted him to
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explain the things I don't quite understand, so you can advise me and help me."

"What does he think I do for a living?"

"Well, I said you're in marine supplies. Okay?"

"It's nice to know what you said," I told her. "And after we get into it, could you sort of remember something you have to go do?"

"Darling, it will be a pleasure. When he talks about that stuff, it makes my head hurt."

John Andrus was a likable guy in his late thirties. He was stocky, dark-haired, well-tailored, with the strong features of a character actor. We talked in Fort's study. Andrus had brought along the documents in a black dispatch case.

"This report summarizes an awful lot of leg work," he said. "He had thirteen months of activity.

It would average a little under fifty thousand a month converted into cash. He didn't want to attract attention, obviously. He opened up checking accounts in six other banks. He fed the money through the seven accounts. Apparently he also, in addition to cashing checks at the banks, cashed checks at clubs, restaurants, and hotels where he was well-known. He cashed in his securities holdings at at least four different brokerage houses. I think this summary by month of the assets converted to cash and the cash withdrawals through the checking account is very close to actuality. See, here is the biggest month for sale of assets, over two hundred thousand. He converted seventy-two thousand into currency last January, and that was the biggest month. The smallest was last June. Twenty-one thousand. He was a very respected and respectable man, Mr.

McGee."

"Strange behavior."

"We're a little dazed, frankly. We had the estate set up so beautifully. Residuary trusts, insurance trusts, 28 beautifully drawn instruments. And when the time comes to put them into effect, we can't find anything except some very minor asset values. It wasn't really big money, of course.

But it's enough to be worth handling properly. We've been through all his personal papers and records, and there isn't a clue. It's distressing."

"To you and the IRS too."

He frowned. "Unfortunately the man assigned to it was not too experienced. He got very agitated. He was going to attach everything in sight, the small equity left in the house, Mrs. Geis'

insurance, the cars and so on. So we elected, as executor, to have the estate appraised one year from the date of death, as is our option. I imagine the IRS man thought it was some sort of attempt to evade estate taxes."

"But you don't."

He looked shocked. "Of course not! Fortner Geis was not a stupid man, and I think he was an honest man. I think he would... weigh all the alternatives, and do what he felt he had to do."

"Which one of us is going to say the nasty word, Mr. Andrus?"

He shrugged. "Okay. Blackmail. I investigated that possibility with Mrs. Geis, and with the
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daughter, Mrs. Trumbill, and with young Mr. Geis. I also checked with... some of the doctor's associates. It is a complete blank. Well, not exactly a complete blank. Mrs. Trumbill was very distressed when her father married a woman so much younger, and a woman... not quite on the social level of the Geis family, let us say. She suggested that her father might be paying out large sums to protect Mrs. Geis."