The Quick Red Fox (13 page)

“No. I never said.”

“Sonny traded the waitress for the tall brunette, and then he burned. It’s a harsh way to make bread, man, that chance of burning. I read it someplace.”

“Put on my records, Cassie doll baby bug, huh?”

I don’t think either of them noticed we’d left, or cared particularly. Though it was warm in the car, Dana shuddered.

“Scratch one more contestant, Dana doll baby bug.”

“Please don’t,” she said in a thin voice.

“Like they say, lives of quiet desperation.”

“Trav?”

“Yes?”

“I think that terrace was a damned unlucky place to be. Sonny Catton, Nancy Abbott, Carl Abelle … and Caswell Edgars.”

“Punishment from on high?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it can happen, Trav.”

•  •  •

She took care of Carmel with some phone calls. The M’Gruder place had been sold almost a year ago. We had less luck with newspaper accounts. I did dig up some background on M’Gruder. There had been an elder brother, killed in a war. M’Gruder’s father had invented a little gadget. Every cracking plant in the world had to have one or two of them. Vance M’Gruder had married one Patricia Gedley-Davies some three years ago in California, after apparently importing her from London. She had crewed for him in smaller sailboats. There was no social prominence, nor any attempt apparently to achieve any. But there was money, and so one would think the annulment would be more than a six-line paragraph on page 36. It had happened about two months after the house party.

Dana Holtzer sat in my hotel room with her shoes off and her feet up, frowning thoughtfully after having made a Sunday afternoon call to Lysa Dean.

“This annulment thing,” she said. “What you think of, in a state with a community property law, it’s the cheap way out.”

“Yes indeed.”

“And this was a closed session or closed hearing or whatever you call it, just the judge and them and a lawyer, and everybody agreeing to everything, and a declaration by the judge that the marriage had never existed in fact or something. And this wasn’t a humble woman, Trav. Sort of noisy and bossy. Let’s say she came from nothing, and she married a rich man. Would she give up without a battle? What made her give up without a battle?”

“And where is she?”

We couldn’t answer our questions, but we could look for answers. I decided we would split up on Monday, to save time. I would pursue a small idea of my own. She would use Lloyd’s Register as her guide book, and work the boaty people, the
ocean sailing types, with appropriate cover story, and see what she could get in the way of gossip.

It rained all day, matching the mood of the offices I visited. Investigation agencies have very little need for decor. They like to keep the overhead down. Their usual customer does not shop around, looking for better draperies. Most of them are sad, soft, pale, meaty people. They operate with about the same verve as do the people who come to spray your home with bug juice.

I had my lines down pat by the time I hit the third one. My name was Jones, said with that emphasis which indicated it was anything but Jones. My employment was “managing my own investment program.” That brought a little flicker into tired eyes. My young Italian wife was playing around. I was positive of two men. Perhaps there were three. I wanted somebody who could get some flagrante pictures of her, very quietly and inconspicuously, without her knowing. Then, with the pictures in hand, I could dicker with her and get out of the marriage without too much expense.

No sir, we don’t do that kind of thing.

Who does? Where should I go?

I just wouldn’t know, mister.

At four o’clock I hit one who was sufficiently unsavory and hungry. He had the cop look. Not the good cop look, but the apple-stealing look. It was a very good guess that he had been busted for the wrong combination of greed and stupidity, and that he wasn’t going to do too well in this line of work either. He had a desk in one of those warehouse offices, the kind where you get the desk, the mail drop, switchboard service and an hourly rate on secretarial help—along with a ragtag collection of phone solicitors, speculators in distressed merchandise, independent jewelry salesmen and so on.

He listened to my story and looked at me with the concealed anguish of a toothless crocodile inspecting a fat brown dog on the river bank. He wanted to know how to get at me. We hitched chairs close and hunched toward each other. He had that breath which exceptionally bad teeth can create.

“Now, Mr. Jones, I maybe can help and maybe I can’t. A thing like this, it would be strickly a cash arrangement. You unnerstand?”

“Of course.”

“Now I’ve got a guy in mind. He’s tops. What he goes after, he gets. But he comes high.”

“How high?”

“Considering the risks and all I would say this guy couldn’t be touched for less than five thousand, but he’s a real pro, and he will come up with shots of that little two-timing wop that’ll nail her but good. This guy, he’s got all the techniques and equipment, but he’s funny. He doesn’t feel like working, he doesn’t work.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“Like an artist, like, he’s got temperamental, you know?”

“I guess I know what you mean.”

“What would happen, he would work through me. Now I don’t want to be wasting my time trying to talk him into anything. What I need, I need a guarantee of good faith on your part, I mean that you want to go ahead at least far enough to take care of the first part of the trouble I’m going to, namely trying to get him on the phone long distance.”

I took my wallet out below the desk edge, took a hundred-dollar bill and put it near his elbow. “Is this okay?”

A big paw fell on it and it was gone. With the back of the
other paw he wiped his mouth. “Just fine. Now you go wait out in the hall. There’s a bench out there to sit on.”

I sat for nearly fifteen minutes. Odd-looking people came and went, tenants and clients and customers. Underside people. The ones that somehow seem to be clinging to the damp underside of reality. The ones that look as if they could truly astonish a psychiatrist or a bacteriologist.

He came out and hunkered in close beside me, to rot my collar with his foul exhalations. “What happened, I can’t get him, but the way it looks I got some leads, there’s somebody can do a nice job, give me a little time on it.”

“Why can’t you get the man you were talking about?”

“He’s been dead a while. I didn’t know that. I didn’t hear about it, the way things are, him out of town.”

“What was his name?”

“There are guys around just as good. What I want, you give me how I can get in touch with you, and when I get a good man lined up, one I can guarantee will do this little job, then …”

“I’ll give you a ring in a few days.”

“On account of I got to do some digging to find the exact right guy for your problem, what about you give me the same figure again as a retainer?”

“We better talk about that if you can find anybody.”

After a few more half-hearted attempts, he went shuffling back into his rental bull pen, pants droopy in the seat, hair grizzled gray on the nape of his thick neck.

I made it to the nearest rancid saloon in about eight big bounds, shut myself into a phone booth and called back. I had remembered the name of the switchboard girl on duty. It was posted on her board.

“Miss Ganz, this is Sergeant Zimmerman. Bunco Squad. Within the past twenty minutes you placed a long distance call for Gannon.”

“Who? What?”

“Please give me the name, number and location of the call he placed.”

“But I’m not supposed to …”

“I can send for you, Miss Ganz, and have you brought down here if you want it that way.”

“Did … did you say Zimmerman?”

“If you want to play it safe, Miss Ganz, call me back here at headquarters. We have a separate number.” I gave her the pay phone number. She had been starting to cool off, and I had to take the chance or get nothing.

In thirty seconds the phone rang. I put my thumb in the side of my mouth, raised my tone level a half octave and said, “Bunco, Halpern.”

“Sergeant Zimmerman, please.”

“Just a minute.” After a ten count, I said, “Zimmerman.”

“This is Miss Ganz,” she said briskly. “About what you wanted, the call was to a Mr. D. C. Ives, in Santa Rosita. 805-765-4434. That number had been disconnected. Then he called a Mr. Mendez in Santa Rosita, 805-384-7942. They talked for less than three minutes. Is that what you wanted, Sergeant?”

“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Miss Ganz. We’ll protect our source in this matter. We may have to ask you for some other favor along the same line in the future.”

“You’re very welcome,” she said.

A nice efficient careful girl. She had to make certain she was really talking to the cops.

Dana got back to the hotel a little after six. She looked pallid
and twitchy. Her smile came and went too quickly. She had called me as soon as she got in, and I went down the hallway to her room. A woman in that condition needs to be hugged and held and patted a little. But we weren’t on any kind of basis where I could do that.

I lit her trembling cigarette and then she switched around the room and said, “I am now a real drinking buddy of Mrs. T. Madison Devlaney III. I call her Squeakie, as does practically everyone. I poured drinks into her potted plants. Until she passed out. She is twenty-nine. She is two days younger than Vance M’Gruder. She has known him all her life. She has a teeny little voice, ten thousand freckles, ten million dollars, and she’s muscled like a circus girl. Swimming every morning, tennis every afternoon, potted every night. No tennis today. Strained ankle.”

“What cover story did she buy?”

“Trav, don’t be angry, but I couldn’t have gotten to her at all without using the best connection I have. Lysa Dean. That opens a lot of doors. And I do have those calling cards.”

“I didn’t say you shouldn’t. I just said don’t use her if you don’t have to.”

“I had to. I told her that Lysa had met Vance. I told her that Lysa was forming a little production company of her own and, as a first picture, was thinking of basing it on one of the ocean races, perhaps the race to Hawaii, and she was asking me to find out just how much cooperation she could get from the people who do own the big boats. It’s nonsense, of course, but people know so little about the industry they’re ready to believe anything. I made up sort of a plot as I went along.”

“So she bought it. That’s the important thing. What about M’Gruder?”

“Let me see. Oh, lots of things about M’Gruder. He is a physical fitness nut. He is a fine deep-water sailor. He is fantastically stingy. He gets quarrelsome and violent when he gets drunk. The marriage to Patricia Gedley-Davies was, according to his friends, a grotesque mistake. She said that forty-two times at least. Grotesque mistake. Squeakie and her friends are convinced Patty was a London call girl. I wouldn’t say that anyone is particularly fond of Vance, but they are glad to see that marriage ended. They think it was bad form. And so lucky there were no children.” She took out her little note book. “The new wife is supposed to be enchanting. Her name is Ulka Atlund. She turned eighteen a few days before their marriage. Her mother is dead. Her father brought her over here two years ago. He came to lecture for a year at the University of San Francisco, and stayed for a second year. He opposed the marriage, then agreed on the basis that after the honeymoon, she continues her education. They plan to honeymoon for six months. They’ve been gone two months. Squeakie thinks she heard somewhere that Vance plans to have somebody else bring the boat back from Acapulco. Too much beating into the wind on the way back. She thinks Vance planned to spend that last two months of the honeymoon in his house at Hawaii. Then back to live here while Ulka goes back to college.”

“What about the annulment?”

“This is where it gets pretty untidy, Travis.”

I got tired of the way she was roving around. I got her wrists and pushed her gently back until the backs of her legs hit the edge of a chair. She sat down and looked up at me, startled.

“Let me tell you something, Miss Holtzer. This whole deal is untidy. The stupendous glamor of Lysa Dean did not suck me into this. You were the item that swayed me.”

“What? What?”

“If she’d sent anyone else, the answer would have been no. You looked so staunch and loyal and unyielding and severe. So damned
decent
. You made me feel like an unwashed opportunist. I have emotional reactions to people, Dana, no matter how much I try to deny it. I wanted to prove to you that I am good at what I do.”

“But that’s absurd!”

I backed away and sat on her bed. “It certainly is. Now, how untidy does this situation get?”

She shrugged. “Squeakie doesn’t know for sure. Just secondhand and third-hand gossip. But Nancy Abbott came into it. Apparently, among Squeakie’s set, the favorite theory is that Patty M’Gruder had Nancy as a house guest in Carmel, and practically held her a prisoner there, because she … Patty … had fallen in love with Nancy. The theory is that Vance went along with it because it gave him a chance to get the proof he wanted that Patty had entered into the marriage contract under false pretenses, concealing her real inclinations. Vance used Nancy … Squeakie kept calling her ‘that poor poor sick child’ … to get the proof, and once he had it, there was no way in the world for Patty to fight his action to annul. It was all handled very quietly.”

“That would explain what Nancy yelled at me, about Patty keeping her locked up.”

“I suppose so. Patty left. Squeakie’s phrase for it was that she slunk away. Somebody saw her several weeks ago, in Las Vegas. Not in one of the big places out on the Strip. Down in town, working at something called The Four Treys. Making change, I think. Some kind of a small job. There certainly wouldn’t be many old friends seeing her there. Anyway, Mrs. T. Madison
Devlaney didn’t know anything about … or at least say anything about any pictures. I was lucky to catch her. She and her husband and another couple are flying to Hawaii this week. That whole group seems to be very big for Hawaii. The Devlaneys keep a boat out there.”