The Quick Red Fox (17 page)

Both of these make you strangers to each other. Both of
these things make you untidily anxious to give and receive reassurances.

But with Dana it was that rare and selfless rightness which moves with but the gentlest hiatus from one completion to the next, each a growth in knowing and closeness while, unheeded, the deep sweet hours go by. After all the fierceness is gone, it then astonishes by returning in that last time which ends it without question for now, and she is spent and dies there, slumbrous and fond.

I fought sleep. I made myself get up. I covered her over and went and showered and dressed. I turned on a meager light in the room and sat on the bed, pushed black curls aside, kissed the sweet nape of a musky neck. She turned to peer up at me, her face soft and emptied and young. “Yuhraw dress!” she mumbled in accusation.

“I’m going out for a little while. You sleep, honey.”

She tried to frown. “Y’be careful, d’ling.”

“Love you,” I said. It doesn’t cost a thing. Not when you do. I kissed a soft and smiling mouth, and I think she was asleep before I stood up. I left the low light on and let myself out.

I walked toward the main buildings feeling all that strange ambivalence of the conquering male. Goaty self-esteem, slight melancholy, a mildly pleasant and unfocused guilt, a tin-soldier strut.

But something more than that with her. A feeling of achieving and establishing identities, hers and mine.

There had been no dishonesties. And so, in all that total giving and taking, I had been aware of her as Dana, so vital and so enduring. The slight physical strangeness of the very beginning of it had lasted but a very short time. Then she was all known and dear. As if we had been apart for a very long time and found
each other again, quickly getting over the awkwardness of separation.

After that it was a knowing and re-knowing in a profound way which has no words. It became a symbolic dialogue. I give thee. I take thee. I prize thee.

And there was also the fatuous feeling of enormous luck. It is such a damned blind chance after all.

I worked my way through two bemused gin and bitters while they seared my steak. Over coffee I stopped marveling at myself and got a local paper and read the more detailed account of the murder of Patty M’Gruder.

Then I drove downtown and parked and wandered through that strange area of cut-rate stores, pastel marriage chapels, open-sided casinos bathed in a garish fluorescence. Spooks trudged amid the tourists, and the cops kept a close sharp watch. Old ladies yanked at the handles, playing their dimes out of paper cups. Music bashed across the dry night air, in conflict with itself, and in the noisier alcoves one could buy anything from a dream book to a plastic bird turd.

The Four Treys was a long bright narrow jungle of machinery. What happened to the old-fashioned slot machine? Now you can pull two handles, hit three space ships and an astronaut and get a moon-pot, which is one and a half jack pots. The change girls sat behind wire, popping open the paper cylinders of silver, dumping it into paper cups for the people. At regular intervals came the clash of money into the scoop, and a shrillness of joy.

I had just wanted a look. I needed no directions. Presently I got back behind the wheel of the luxury device afforded me by a famous movie star and drove off again through the neoned night.

The trailer park was called Desert Gate. I had to go down through town and out the far side to get to it. It was a little after ten o’clock when I got there. Some orderly soul had set it up with the requirement that all trailers be parked in herringbone array on either side of a broad strip of asphalt going nowhere. The entrance was an aluminum arch, tall and skinny, with a pink floodlight on it.

The trailers were large, all snugged down off their wheels, with little patios and screened porches added. About half of them were dark. Patricia had lived—and died in front of—the sixth one on the left. It was lighted. I parked and went to the porch door. As I raised a hand to bang on the aluminum frame, a big woman appeared, silhouetted in the inner doorway.

“Whatya want?”

“I want to talk to Martha Whippler.”

“Who are you?”

“The name is McGee. I was a friend of Patty’s.”

“Look, why don’t you go away? The kid has had a hard day. She’s pooped. Okay?”

“It’s all right, Bobby,” a frail voice said. “Let him in.”

As I went in, the big woman stood back out of the way. When I saw her in the light I realized she was younger than I had thought. She wore jeans and a blue work shirt, sleeves rolled high over brown heavy forearms. Her hair was brown and cropped short and she wore no makeup. The interior was all pale plywood paneling, vinyl tile, glass curtains, plastic upholstery, stainless steel. A slight girl lay on a day bed, propped up on pillows, long coppery hair tousled around her sad wan face. Her eyes were red. Her lipstick was smeared. She had a drink in her hand. She wore a very frilly nylon robe. Though she was a lot slimmer, I knew her at once.

“Whippy!” I said, and then felt like a damn fool for not having figured it out.

It startled her. She stared at me with disapproval. “I don’t know you. I don’t remember you from anyplace. People call me Martha now. Pat wouldn’t let them call me by my old name.” There was something quite solemn and childlike about her. And vulnerable.

“I’m sorry. I’ll call you Martha.”

“What’s your name?”

“Travis McGee.”

“I never heard Pat say your name.”

“I didn’t know her well, Martha. I know a few other people you might know. Vance. Cass. Carl. Nancy Abbott. Harvey. Richie. Sonny.”

She sipped her drink, frowning at me over the rim of the
glass. “Sonny is dead. I heard that. I heard that he burned up, and it didn’t mean a thing to me.”

“Nancy saw him burn.”

She looked incredulous. “How could that happen?”

“She was traveling with him then.”

She shook her head in slow wonder. “Her traveling with him. Oh boy. Who could imagine that. Me, sure. But her? Gee, it doesn’t seem possible, believe you me.”

“Martha, I want to talk to you alone.”

“I bet you do,” the big girl behind me said.

“Mr. McGee, this is my friend Bobby Blessing. Bobby, whyn’t you go away a while, okay?”

Bobby studied me. It is the traditional look they reserve for the authentic male, a challenging contempt, a bully-boy antagonism. There seem to be more of them around these days. Or perhaps they are merely bolder. The word is butch. Having not the penis nor the beard, they damn well try to have everything else. One of the secondary sex characteristics they seem to be able to acquire is the ballsy manner, the taut-shouldered swagger, the roostery go-to-hell attitude. They have a menacing habit of running in packs lately. And the unwary chap who tries to make off with one of their brides can get himself a stomping that stevedores would admire. These are a sub-culture, long extant, but recently emerged from hiding. In their new boldness they do a frightening job of recruiting, having their major successes among the vulnerable platoons of those meek girls who, like Martha Whippler, are abused by men, by the Catton-kind of man, used, abused, sickened, shared, frightened and … at last, driven into the camp of the butch.

“I’ll be where I can hear you call me,” Bobby said without
taking her stony stare from my face. She went out, rolling her shoulders, hitching at her jeans.

I moved closer to Martha, and sat in a skeletal plastic chair half facing her. She looked down into her half of a drink and said, “You named the people that were there that time.”

“And left one out?”

“That movie actress,” she whispered.

“Have you told people about her being there?”

“Oh, nothing like that ever happened to me before. I couldn’t
tell
anybody about it. I mean I could talk to Pat about it sometimes. You know. I used to have nightmares. She took me back home with her from there. I knew … I always knew she would rather it was Nancy.”

She looked wistful. She had a cheap, empty, pretty little face, eyebrows plucked to fine lines, mouth made larger with lipstick.

“Did you ever get to see the pictures?” I asked her.

Even the most vapid ones have an urchin shrewdness about them, the wariness of the consistently defensive posture.

“What pictures?”

“The ones Vance had taken.”

“For hours and hours today they kept asking me questions, questions. How do I know you just aren’t another smart guy?”

“I can’t prove I’m not.” I hesitated. She was suggestible. I wanted the right approach, without fuss. Grief made an additional vulnerability. Kindly ol’ McGee seemed the best bet. I shook my head sadly. “I’m just a fellow who thinks Patricia got a very bad deal from Vance M’Gruder, very bad indeed.”

Tears welled. She snuffled into her fist. “Oh God. Oh God yes. That bastard. That total bastard!”

“Some of us have never understood why Pat didn’t fight it a little harder.”

“Gee, you don’t know what she had stacked against her. That rotten Vance had been planning it a long time. He got some kind of morality report on her from the London police from way before they were married, I guess to show that she knew she shouldn’t get married. And then he had the tape recorder things of her and Nancy at their house, and her and me at their house, and the pictures he hired that man to get, following them around. It must have cost an awful lot, the whole thing, but as Pat said, it was a hell of a lot cheaper than California divorce. She couldn’t get a lawyer to agree to fight it. I mean, after all, there wasn’t any question about the way she was.”

“Did you get to see those pictures, Martha?”

“Oh sure. The funny thing, they made it look like nobody else was around at all. I don’t know how that man got those pictures so close, Pat with me and with Nancy and with Lysa Dean, just one with Lysa Dean, one where you couldn’t tell it was Lysa Dean unless you knew.”

“So by the time you saw those pictures, you and Pat were together?”

“Yes. The rotten thing he did, we went up to the city to see some friends of hers, and we came back to Carmel, he was gone and the locks were changed, and our personal stuff was piled in a carport, and there was a man there to keep anybody from breaking in or anything. The way it was, she was still trying to get over being in love with Nancy, and maybe she never did. I guess maybe she never did get over it. But I did try to make her happy, I really did.”

“Why would somebody want to kill her, Martha?”

She sobbed again, and blew her nose. “I don’t
know
! I just don’t
know
. That’s what they kept asking me. Gee, we lived real quiet here, over a year now, and for a long time we’ve been working the same shift at the Four Treys, me as a drink waitress and her on a change booth. Just a few friends. She hadn’t got interested in any other girl or anything, and nobody was after me like that. There was just one thing.”

“What do you mean?”

She frowned and shook her head. “I don’t know. It started weeks ago. Before that, whenever she’d think of Vance she’d go into a terrible rage, and sometimes she’d cry. Weeks ago she got a letter from somebody. She didn’t let me see it and I can’t find it so I guess she destroyed it. She was kind of … far away for a few days after she got it and she wouldn’t tell me anything. Then one day when I was out, she made long-distance phone calls. She really ran up a terrible bill. Forty dollars and something. And later she made a few more calls. Then she got very pleased about something. She’d be grinning and humming around and I’d ask her why she felt so good and she’d say never mind. Sometimes she would grab me and dance me around and she’d tell me everything was going to be just fine, and we were going to be rich. It didn’t matter so much to me. I mean we were doing all right here. We didn’t
have
to be rich. I don’t know if it had anything to do with her being murdered last night.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“I
heard
it! My God, I was in bed half asleep. I was sort of worrying about her. I’ve got a virus and I was off work. She was supposed to be finished at eleven and home by quarter past, but it was a little after midnight when I heard the car motor. I could tell it was ours, it’s such a noisy little car. I’d left one light on for her. I wondered what she’d bring me. She’d bring me a little
present if I was sick. Some kind of joke sort of. The car stopped out there and I heard the car door, and then just outside that screen door, she yelled ‘What are you …’ Just those words. There was a kind of a terrible crunching sound. And a falling sound. And steps running. I turned on the lights and put my robe on and ran out and she was just outside the door on the ground, and her head …”

I waited several minutes while she slowly and painfully pulled herself back together.

“She was so alive,” Martha moaned.

“But several weeks ago she stopped being mad at Vance?”

“Yes. But I don’t know what it means.”

“After she was locked out of the house, she did have a chance to talk to her husband?”

“Oh, several times. She begged and pleaded.”

“But it didn’t do any good.”

“He wouldn’t even let her have her car. He said she was lucky to keep the clothes she’d bought. Finally he gave her five hundred dollars so she could afford to go away. I had about seventy-five dollars. We came here on a bus and got jobs. He was nasty to her.”

“Martha, does the name Ives mean anything to you? D. C. Ives?”

She looked blank. “No.”

“Santa Rosita?”

She tilted her empty little head. “That’s strange!”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a couple of days ago she was singing that old song. Santa Lucia. But she was saying Rosita instead of Lucia, and I said she had it wrong and she laughed and said she knew she did. Why did you ask about that? I don’t understand.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

“But if it has anything to do with who killed her …”

“Did she have any kind of appointment coming up?”

“Appointment? Oh, I’d forgotten. Just the other day she said she might have to take a little trip. Alone. Just for a day or two. It made me jealous. She teased me and let me get real jealous, and then she said it was a kind of a business trip, and she’d tell me all about it later.”