The Quick Red Fox (16 page)

We left early Thursday morning and drove down to the city, to Lysa Dean’s canyon home, secluded behind an impressive pink wall. The staff was cut down to one Korean couple, maid and gardener. When he recognized Dana, he smiled broadly and unlocked the big metal gates for us. It was a hot day. The wall enclosed about one acre. A Mexican architect had done the house for her and the third husband. I guess you could call it Cuernavaca Aztec.

Dana showed me around. The plantings were splendid. The pool was drained. The dogs had been boarded. Walking through the silence of terrazzo, puffy white rugs, dark paneling removed from ancient churches, I counted five full-length oil portraits of the owner. And not one of an ex-husband.

Dana wanted to get different clothes. She showed me how she was set up. A small functional suite opposite the service area, with a rather stark bedroom, a large and luxurious bath, a
small tidy office with a row of large gray filing cabinets, a battleship desk. There was a picture in the bedroom, Dana, younger, glowing, intense—holding the new baby in her arms. A young man with a homely, crooked, likable face was staring down at the child too, his arm around his wife.

She saw me glance at it and said, too imperatively, “Please wait for me out there in the office. This won’t take a minute.”

On an office shelf I saw bound, gold-lettered scripts for the Lysa Dean movies.
Winds of Chance
was among them. I took it down and opened it at random. It seemed highly improbable to me that anyone, living or dead, had ever said lines like that.

I put the script back on the shelf and paced restlessly. There were loose ends. A lot of them. But I could not see how they were pertinent to what I’d been asked to do. I couldn’t recover any of the money Lysa Dean had paid Ives.

It seemed reasonably evident that Bogen had gone into business for himself. His note to Lysa sounded as Starr had described him. He would have picked up a few crude lab techniques from Ives. If the police had been looking for him for three months without success, I didn’t have much chance of reaching out and picking him up.

We could fly east and catch Lysa in New York. Make a report. Working a complaint through normal police channels, we could get all there was in the files on Bogen. The people responsible for protecting the star could be alerted to watch for anybody who might be Bogen. If she insisted, maybe we could work out a way to trap him, using her as bait. With a little bit of judgment and a lot of luck, I had pushed it about as far as I could.

I could make a few guesses. Bogen had fled with a good piece of money and a whole stack of unpleasant pictures, and holed
up, perhaps in Los Angeles. He’d fled on December 6th. Those pictures could seriously upset an already disturbed mind. It was highly unlikely that he could have lifted any neat little list of names and addresses. Maybe the pictures covered quite a few of Ives’ quiet ventures. If Bogen wanted to get cute with anyone, he would be restricted to those faces he could recognize. Maybe there were a few more celebrity faces in the stack. What was the time sequence? In early January, a month after he fled Santa Rosita, he was out in Las Vegas leaving off the package for Lysa Dean at the desk at The Sands. The columns would have located her for him. No further contact in two months. Was he busy bugging some other famous people who had been captured by Ives’ sneaky lens? Was he waiting for Lysa Dean to come back to the Los Angeles area?

At any rate, it would be a comfort to her to know the kind of nut who was running around with pictures that could ruin her, to know his name and his appearance. She would have to decide what that much was worth. I’d dug a pretty good hole in the expense money.

Ives’ murderer was none of my business. The list of possibilities would have to be as long as my arm.

But I didn’t like the way this one was ending. And I couldn’t see Lysa Dean being ecstatic about it either.

Dana came out of her bedroom. She wore a pretty green outfit, and carried her repacked suitcase. She said, too cheerfully, “Are we ready?”

She seemed very tense. I went and took the suitcase from her. With a quaver in her cheerful voice, she said, “This place gets on my nerves. It never did before. I don’t know why. I feel as if I hardly know the Dana Holtzer who lives here. I expect her to come in and ask me who the hell I am.”

“Watch out for her. A very icy broad.”

She paused in the doorway to look at me, her expression at once vulnerable and wary. “Travis?”

“Yes, honey.”

“I can’t take too much change. So please don’t. Things that get brittle … they break, you know.”

“I like you. That’s all it is.”

She nodded. “But we have laughed too much. Do you understand that?”

“I understand that. And you’ll be back in harness tonight.”

“That picture you saw in there. Did it explain anything?”

“I could have drawn it from memory before I even saw it. You don’t have to be explained to me. I don’t have to make adjustments with you and to you. Hell with it. Let’s go get on our airplane.” I tilted her chin up, kissed the corner of her mouth closest to the crooked tooth. A little peck, like cousins. So she smiled, and one tear spilled, and I followed her in flight, clackety-whack across terrazzo, green skirt whipping, powerful calves clenching, back very straight and head held high.

We had twenty minutes before they called the flight. Our gear was checked aboard. Early afternoon. I bought a paper. I was scanning it. The name jumped out at me from a small item on page one of the second section. Casino employee slain in Las Vegas. Patricia Davies bludgeoned at doorstep of trailer last night. Once married to sportsman Vance M’Gruder.

Without a word I pointed it out and handed it to Dana. She looked at me, her eyes wide.

“I can’t pass that up,” I said. “It could be Sammy.”

“But … our luggage is …”

“Dana, you go on to New York. Take care of my stuff at the other end. I’ll check this out and be along.”

“But I’m supposed to stay with you.”

I took hold of her wrists and gave her a little shake. “You have to go to New York. You’re a big girl. I don’t have to draw diagrams for you. You and I have … run out of time.”

She held my gaze and her mouth made the shape of that word. Time. Without making a sound. The strength in her face was softened. And younger. “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “Thank you, Travis, for knowing when the time ran out.”

I released her, turning away, saying, “Your boss expects you. So go ahead.” She murmured something about arranging my ticket, and went off into the throng. I watched her go, and for an instant had in my mind the grotesque and unworthy image of the time when you feel the tarpon pick up speed for that last, great, heart-busting leap, and see him go high and see him, right at the peak of it, give that final snap of his head that throws your lure back into your lap. The image wasn’t even accurate. I’d turned conservationist. I’d let the line go slack and said goodby.

I waited. And waited. Her flight was called. I went to the gate. I did not see her. I went to the airline desk. They checked the manifest for me. Slowly. Sir, the passenger canceled before flight time. I felt fear, worry, irritation. I had played the whole game too loosely, too confidently, and maybe somebody very fast and bright had moved out of the shadows.

I prowled the martian reaches of the terminal, searching for my girl in green. And found her, saw her through the glass front of a men’s shop. I went striding in. A clerk was helping her. She gave me a startled and guilty look, then swung all that vivid force of personality upon me, saying, “Darling, I told you I’d forget the shirt sizes. It’s
such
a damn nuisance losing luggage.
Are these all right? Wash-and-wear, so we could make do with two, don’t you think? But what size, dear?”

“Seventeen and a half, thirty-six,” I said humbly.

“Two of these in that size, please. And you don’t really mind stretch socks too much, do you? Size thirty-three shorts, mmm? No, don’t wrap them. I can pop them right in here.” She lifted the small suitcase up onto the counter, a cheap one of pale blue anodized aluminum. As she put the articles in, I got a glimpse of some feminine things, and some drug store parcels. She latched it and waited for her change.

“We’ve got a flight in about twenty-five minutes,” she said.

I carried the case out of the store into the waiting room area. I carried it to a quiet space and put it down and turned to her and said, “Have you lost your fool mind?”

She locked strong icy fingers onto my wrist and looked up at me and said, “It’s all right. Really. It’s all right.”

“But …”

“I couldn’t get the luggage back. It was stowed aboard. It’ll be taken care of in New York. Look. I’ve been a grownup for a long time.”

“It’s just that …”

“Shut up, darling. Shut up, shut up, shut up. Do you want me to draw pictures for you? Stop looking like a spavined moose. Say you’re glad. Say something.”

I put fingertips on her cheek, ran my thumb along the black gloss of her eyebrow. “Okay. Something.”

She closed her eyes and shivered. “Oh God. No claims, Trav. Nothing like that. Either way.”

“Either way.”

“Just don’t laugh.”

“You know better than that.”

I read consternation in her expression. “Maybe I’m just not what you … Maybe you never really … You could have been just being polite and now …”

“You know better than that too. Shut up, dear.”

“I wired New York.”

“Kindly excuse delay.”

“Dammit, we’ve never even really kissed. My knees are all wobbly and strange. Please lead me to a drink, darling.”

During the flight, in spite of all the persuasive immediate magic of Girl, in spite of scent, closeness, dark eyes to drown in, and the shallow-breathed feeling of expectancy, the workman part of my mind kept moving in old and seamy patterns. We’d made a big swing, and, one by one, we’d been dropping them out of the final count. Carl Abelle, terror of the ski lifts, dangerous as a prat fall on a bunny slope. Sonny Catton, cooked meat in a pretty whoosh and bloom of high octane. Nancy Abbott, cooked just as thoroughly but over a lower flame. No point in checking Harvey and Richie, the Cornell kids. Their biggest problem was to find someone, anyone, who would ever believe their story. Caswell Edgars was out of it. And out of just about everything else in the world too. Ives was gone, and violently. So was Patty M’Gruder. If old Abbott, Nancy’s father, had any luck left, he was dead by now too. Less violently but less pleasantly. It was narrowing down. To a yacht bum named Vance M’Gruder, to a waitress named Whippy, to a retarded little man named Bogen. It was like going through an empty house, checking the closets. Either it was more complex than I could comprehend, or so it made even less sense. But there was a nastiness
somewhere in it that was out of control. I sensed that, and sensed it was aimed at Lysa Dean, and maybe at me, and I couldn’t imagine who or how. I knew only two things. I was running out of closets. And I was glad I hadn’t been at that house party. So I held the hand of the girl, and told myself it was a fine world, and filed away my doom-thoughts.

A bored kid built a shiny little model city with his new kit and when it was finished he gave it one hell of a kick and spewed bit hunks of it out across the desert floor. We tilted down across the afternoon, seeing an unreality of blue pools and green fairways against that old lizard-skin brown of the everlasting desert. We came in with a batch of pilgrims—the brand-new ones trying to be cool about their interest in the air terminal slots, about all the hawking and proclaiming and loud instant promotions. All the old pilgrims wore the memory of pain, and were impatient to get to that certain table at that certain place, in time for crucifixion. I noticed a pair of appraisers as our group came through the gate, backs against the wall, staring left and right, somnolently vigilant, bouncing the little black glances off the pilgrims like aimed bb shot. They have the index memories of the ten thousand faces in disrepute in Slotsville, plus a feel for new trouble on the way—the ones who have come to get it any way they can, including using a gun on the winners. My lady performed no transit services this time. It was a fine and pleasant distinction related to the absolute silence of the airplane ride, the hand tightly held, the dark eyes hooded. She stood four square, still and humble, patient and sensuous, while I, with no bag to retrieve, went off to dicker a vehicle and, with ironic impulse, took that most typical of game-town cars, a big airconditioned
convertible, this one in metallic blue-green, white leather, ominously silent as Forest Lawn.

There had been a place I liked, way out on the Strip, an utterly gameless and consequently expensive motor house called the Apache, and I knew it would be meaningless and would astonish her should I consult her. At the desk I said I had been there before, knew I wanted a double cabana at the pool, gave the porter a dollar to let me have the key and find my own way.

It was a great long room in gold and green, with two huge beds, all of it too bright in the dazzle of poolside sun. I pulled the cords that creaked the heavy yellow draperies across the acre of window wall, turning the room into a shadowy gloom of gold. The whisper of the hushed cooled air made it an oasis, a thousand years from yesterday, and ten thousand years from tomorrow. Every fifth breath she took was very deep, with a little catch, like a hiccup at the high end. I put my hands upon her, at waist and nape of neck, stopping her sleepy sway. The man who sits in the steel office and throws the switches and pushes the buttons can rest his hand on his desk and feel, more like a low-cycle sound than any measurable vibration, the power that thrums in the bowels of the light plant. She felt unyielding and I could not guess how it would be for us. Then she gave a little crooked sigh, turned her mouth upward to me, leaned with heat and softness and purpose.

There is one kind of rightness that is an almost-rightness, because it is merciless and total and ends in a deathlike lethargy.

Then there is another kind of almost-rightness that can never be finished.