The Quick Red Fox (18 page)

“Where was she going to go?”

“Phoenix. Gee, we don’t know a soul in Phoenix.”

“How soon was she going?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if she meant real soon.”

I couldn’t shake loose anything else of interest. She was worn out. But she was still alert enough to ask again who I was and what I wanted. I had to answer a question with a question.

“What are you going to do now, Martha?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“It’s your chance to get out of … this kind of situation.”

Her little mouth firmed up. “I don’t know what you think you mean by that. Listen, Pat got me out of a lousy situation. I don’t want anything like that again ever. What do you know about anything?”

“Don’t get sore.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Jesus Christ! Anything you people don’t understand, it has to be lousy. Pat always said that. The world doesn’t have to be your way. We never asked anybody to approve or disapprove. It’s our own business. Who did we hurt?”

“You?”

“Me! That’s some joke. That really is. Honest to God, when I remember the way it used to have to be, when I thought that
was the only thing there was, boy, it makes my stomach turn right over. I’ve got friends who want to take care of me.”

“I bet you have.”

She stared at me, narrowed her eyes, threw her head back and yelled, “Bobby! Bobby!”

I left without any particular haste, but without delay either. Even so, they were between me and my car. Bobby had a friend, equally sizable. In the angle of the light the friend looked like the young Joe DiMaggio, but with a black dutch bob, and wearing desert rat khakis. Joe carried a putter. The gold head and chrome shaft glittered.

They separated and moved in from either side.

“Don’t make any stupid mistakes,” I said, coming to a halt.

Joe had managed to train herself down to a good imitation of a baritone. “You bassars got to get a lesson not to come around here bothering the brides.”

“What have you got here?” I asked. “A colony?”

“Smart ass,” Bobby said as they moved in.

They generally do very well against the undoctrinated male. There is a chivalrous reluctance to hit a woman. Martha had come to the trailer doorway to watch the sport. I had learned a painful lesson long ago when reluctance had slowed reaction time, and I had spent the next several days walking around like an eighty-eight-year-old man. It is the type of mistake you are not likely to make twice in one lifetime. And these two were more dangerous than male thugs because their aberrations fired their hatred of the authentic male. They might not know when to stop hitting.

The light was tricky and the putter made me nervous. If I tried sweet reason, she was going to try to sink it into my skull.
So I moved with no regard for chivalry. I feinted toward Bobby, and lunged at Joe. I got a hand on the putter shaft before she could build up any momentum with it. I wrested it out of her hand, reversed it, sidestepped her, and laid the limber end of it across the seat of those khakis. It made a little whirring in the air, and a mighty crack on impact. Joe leaped high and, probably much to her own disgust, gave a high girlish scream of anguish. I turned in time to see Bobby hurl a rock at my head. It tickled the hair on the crown of my head, and the fright lent considerable enthusiasm to my pursuit. Bobby turned in flight. I welted her three hearty times across tight denim, and she joined her yelps to those of her buddy. Joe grappled with me, trying to trip me. She was sobbing in frustration, and she smelled like a mule skinner. I spun her away, and whacked her another beauty. She screamed and gave up and started running toward the trailer.

Bobby made the mistake of running right along beside her, about five feet away from her. I sped into the gap with forehand and backhand. Martha Whippler had come to the doorway to watch them brutalize me. They nearly trampled her in their haste to get out of range. They sounded as if they were trying to yodel. I laughed, hurled the putter well out of the colony, and drove away from there.

Back in the muted silence of the big room at the Apache, Dana slept on. Remembering that the Apache food service would be closed, I had stopped at an implausible delicatessen in town. I turned more lights on. I unsacked my purchases, pried the top off the beef stew with noodles. It was still steaming. I carried it over and sat on the floor beside the bed and wafted it back and forth in front of her face. Her nose twitched, twitched
again. Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She focused on me. She gave a great start.

“Hey!” she said. “Hey now!” She gave a great creaking, stretching, shuddering yawn and then reached for the container. She hitched herself up, arranged the pillows, tucked the sheet around her, under her arms, and lifted a huge plastic forkful into the greedy waiting mouth. “Oh!” she said. “Oh my God, Trav, nothing has ever tasted like this.”

I moved a small table close to her elbow, brought over the garlic dills, the hot tea and the strawberry cheesecake. I sat on the foot of the bed, admiring her. When the edge of hunger began to be eased, she began to be uncomfortable.

“Did you eat?” she asked.

“Like a wolf.”

She poked at her tangled hair. “I’m a mess, I bet.”

Her dark vital eyes were puffy, shadowed with fatigue. Her lips were swollen, pale without lipstick. There was a long scratch on her throat, three oval blue smudges on the front of her left shoulder, where my fingers had bruised her.

“You look just fine, Dana.”

Her face got pink. She would not look directly at me. “I bet. Uh … what time is it?”

“Twenty of one.”

She said she would finish the cheesecake later. She asked me to please turn my back. She lugged our suitcase into the bathroom. I heard her take a quick shower. In a little while after the water stopped, she came shyly out, hair brushed, mouth made up, and she was wearing a little blue hip-length nightgown, diaphanous, with lace at throat and hem. Rather than making any attempt to model it, she scuttled for the bed in a knock-kneed
half-run, slightly hunched over. She piled in, covered herself and said, blushing furiously, “It isn’t exactly what I thought I was buying.”

I laughed at her. She frowned part way through the cheesecake and then managed a timid smile, a direct but fleeting glance. “I’m not used to this sort of situation, Trav. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Nobody else is.”

She swallowed and looked pained. “I was so … I don’t know what you must th.… I never … Oh
hell
, anyway!”

“Stop fussing. So it’s a new relationship. We are something to each other we weren’t before. And took a risk. You know that. Somebody, Hemingway maybe, had a definition of a moral act. It’s something you feel good after. And, coming back here to you after where I’ve been makes us seem like the innocence of angels.”

She showed her concern. “What happened, dear?”

The cheesecake and tea were long gone by the time I finished with the facts and the speculations.

She looked dubious. “It seems like an
awful
lot of guessing.” I went through it once more, in précis form. “What do we know about M’Gruder? He is feisty, rich, ruthless and stingy. And, with no occupation, he is highly mobile. He’s brown and fit and damned callous. Okay, as the purchaser of a service, he got into direct contact with Ives. Ives, seeing a golden opportunity, recognizing Lysa, took all the pictures he could get, hundreds of them, knowing he could crop and enlarge to exhibit every relationship that went on during those four days. Assume that when M’Gruder learned where the party was going to be, he got to a phone and alerted his hired photographer. We know one thing about Ives. He was greedy. He did his job for M’Gruder and got his fee. He collected big from Lysa Dean. He
took a hack at the Abbott money and struck out, because Nancy was past protecting.

“Now we have to guess. M’Gruder was hot to marry the young Atlund girl. Her professor father disapproved. M’Gruder won him over. I think that with a Swedish girl’s traditional respect for parental authority, the professor had to be won over or there would have been no marriage. I think Ives made the mistake of trying to blackmail a previous client, someone who knew who he was and where to find him. The timing fits. Ives threatened to show Professor Atlund the terrace pictures featuring M’Gruder. Anything that rancid would have bitched the marriage forever. The professor would not have his dear girl marrying a libertine like that. Ives did not think M’Gruder dangerous. Maybe he underestimated his stinginess. M’Gruder followed him, saw a good opportunity, and smashed the top of his head in. A couple of weeks later he married his Ulka.

“Take it a step further. We have to assume that Patty M’Gruder learned the name of the photographer from Vance. He would delight in telling her how smart he had been, how cleverly he had cut her loose from the M’Gruder money. He would want to rub her nose in it. He would
have
to hate her. He is a very virile type, and it would be an outrage to his pride to realize his English wife had merely pretended pleasure with him, and actually preferred girls. Patty got a letter from somebody. Gossip, perhaps. Vance’s child bride and the problem with the professor. It started her thinking. She had known of Ives’ death. She knew Vance. She knew him damned well, and how his mind operated, and his capacity for violence. Somehow, checking this out by phone, she became convinced Vance had done in Ives. So she sent a letter to Vance. It would be a very veiled hint. Come through with the money you cheated me out
of, boy, or the Santa Rosita police are going to take an interest in you. Words to that effect. He couldn’t risk that. I’d say he’d write back something about planning to be in Phoenix and be willing to discuss her financial situation at that time. She would realize she had struck gold. Now he could not risk being publicly in Las Vegas. When women die, they check out their ex-husbands. I say he set up a good solid alibi in Phoenix, and came over here last night and killed her. He smashed the top of her head in. He would imagine he had no other choice. She hated him as much as he hated her. She would show no mercy. She would bleed him forever.”

She thought it over. “I guess it does make sense. But, Trav, is it our problem? Isn’t Samuel Bogen our problem, really?”

“At this moment, my darling Dana, some very shrewd cop may be checking out some small slip M’Gruder made. The death of Patricia
has
to require he be checked out. So they grab him for murder first. Do you think he would maintain a chivalrous silence? He would want to lay all the facts on the line, with little distortions here and there, to try to show justification or at least a plausible excuse for murder. Once they round up Cass and Carl and Martha Whippler and start questioning them one at a time, how long do you think Lysa Dean would stay in the clear. Make up a headline, honey. Star Implicated in Orgy Murder. She’d be even worse off. I have to find out how good these guesses are. If she’s going to be in the soup, the best I can do is warn her. Maybe she can take some steps. Long-term contracts. Public relations advice. Something.”

Dana frowned. “I see what you mean. But he could have just
said
Phoenix.”

“I think he’s there. It’s close. I want to check it out.”

“All right, dear.”

I patted her on the foot. “I like obedient women.”

She yawned. “I just feel terribly passive, I guess.”

“Entirely, completely passive?”

She pursed her lips. She tilted her head. She laid a finger alongside her nose. “Well … I wouldn’t go so far as to say
that
.”

I had the random idea of poking around the Four Treys to see if I could find small hint of a visit from Vance M’Gruder the night of Patty’s death, but my few small memories of the hard-nosed vigilance of the Las Vegas cops outweighed the impulse. They deal, day and night, with every kind of spook and hustler in the world, and they would be focused very intently on this murder, and I did not relish the prospect of being bounced up and down while trying to explain my passing interest.

Besides, if M’Gruder was as bright as I imagined, he would not have put in an appearance in the stage lighting of any of the downtown casinos. He would have her Desert Gate address. Once he got to town it would be no great feat to find out when her shift ended. As I shaved I tried to guess his most plausible mode of transportation. It was just about three hundred miles to Phoenix. I decided that if I were doing it, I’d settle for a good
fast car. With enough muscle under the hood, and the right kind of springing for the mountain curves, you could safely call it a five-hour run. Leave Phoenix at six and arrive at eleven. Spend an hour hunting her down and killing her. Back by five-thirty in the morning. Sneak into the bridal bed. A private car was safer than a bus, a scheduled flight or a private plane. Cash for gas. No records, no fellow passengers. Properly done, casually done, he could have people convinced he had never left at all. If he had the cold nerve necessary to make that earlier run to Santa Rosita …

We walked to the dining room for breakfast, my lady wearing that green which was all she happened to have. My drowsy lady walked close at my side, without haste, her smile as inward and bemused as that of the Mona Lisa. She hugged my arm and beamed up at me and gave me a sleepy wink. And then she yawned.

Between us we ate a mountain of wheat cakes, a bale of bacon.

I found a Phoenix paper in the lobby rack, checked through it and found a society editor by-line. I coached Dana and put her into a phone booth with a fake name and a reasonably plausible cover story. I stood outside the booth and saw her eyes go fierce and bright. She gave me a savage little nod. When she came out, she said, “What a sweet woman! The M’Gruders are staying with a couple named Glenn and Joanne Barnweather. She spake their names with social awe. Old friends of his, apparently. They flew in from Mexico City about five days ago, she thinks. She had an item on it. They’re staying at the Barnweather ranch out beyond Scottsdale. You were sure, weren’t you?”

“Not completely. But I’m beginning to be. So let’s go take a look at them.”