The Quick Red Fox (21 page)

She frowned and shook her pretty head. “Ives? Pictures? Blackmail? Why do you come in here with this crazy talk?”

“Ives had to get it in one big chunk because as soon as you were married to Vance, there was no more leverage Ives could use. I guess Vance must have confessed the problem to you and showed you the pictures, perhaps to see if you would marry without Daddy’s permission, so he could save a bundle. It’s pretty sad and funny, Ullie. Your great respect for your father, and no respect for life.”

“You should not call me Ullie. I will not permit it.”

“Vance must have thought it was just a marvelous accident when Ives got killed. All he cared was that it got him off the hook, and when no confederate appeared to pick up where Ives had left off, he knew he was home free. He was going to have the girl, the gold ring and everything. His tragedy was in slowly finding out what a psychotic bitch you really are.”

“Who are you? You must be mad, entirely.”

“Let’s check it out together, Ullie. No one suspected Vance. Patty, his ex-wife, was the only one in the world in a position to brood about it and begin to add two and two. And finally she got an answer and checked it out as closely as she could, and knew she had Vance right where she wanted him. She had every reason to want to get back at him. Believing Vance had killed Ives, and knowing that he could be a good big source of income to her for the rest of her life, she got in touch with him. I think we can figure out how that went wrong, Ullie. Vance could prove where he was on the night of December fifth. But where was his darling girl? Quite a husky girl. And someone who could get close to Ives and close to Patty at night, in lonely places, whereas Vance couldn’t have managed it. After you’d
bashed Ives, Patty was a necessity. Clumsy murder is like housework, dear. Once you begin, you’re never really finished.”

“All this is so absurd, and so boring.”

“Patty would have persisted, and sooner or later Vance would have had to face the idea that you killed Ives. Maybe he couldn’t stomach that. Maybe he would have turned you in. He was finding out that his marriage wasn’t what he had counted on.”

“We couldn’t have been happier!”

“Ullie! Ullie! What about the Mexican boyfriends? Just little flirtations, I imagine. Just enough to keep him off balance, make him sweat.”

“How could you.…” She stopped. I could guess she remembered how he had tried to shush her. Her breathing had gone slightly shallow and there were spots of color in flawless cheeks. I saw her recover herself with an effort, slowing and deepening her breathing.

“I don’t imagine Vance really wanted to play poker. You left unobserved, you got back unobserved. Home free. But all it would take would be legwork, Ullie. One of those plodding methodical checks of every gas station along the way. You didn’t have the range. Some little joker is probably still dreaming about you—the most beautiful girl he ever saw, coming in out of the night in that Sting Ray.”

“So? I got very restless. I took a drive. I drive very fast. Can I help it if Vance got very suspicious of me, if he got very foolish ideas? You don’t know how it is … how it was. He wanted to be … so very young and lively and fun, to be like boys I know. But really he wanted things quieter. I could see strangers laughing at him. He should have had
dignity
! Certainly I wanted all that money and travel and clothes and fun. A professor has a shabby little life. All my life I knew the husband I would have,
older and very rich and strong, to buy me everything and adore me, to sit and smile at me and admire me when I danced with all the young men, and trust me. When I’d found him I could not lose him. But every day was a contest to see … which one of us was younger. He did not understand how love should be a perfection. All he cared was how many times he could take me. He thought that was another way to be young. Why did he have to prove so much? I can tell about you. You would understand. You are older too, but not as old as he was. You are stronger, Travis McGee. There is the money now. I listened when you told Joanne about your funny little boat with the funny name.” She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them wide and looked at me. “You see, I have always … felt like a special person. As if my life would be … beautiful and important. Things happen in strange ways. Vance was not the one. But suddenly you are here. It is strange. It is so strange the way we both have that little feeling it would be … what was planned for us all along.”

It was such a fabulous con job, I could feel the dirty dreams seeping into my mind. Help her cover up the mistakes she’d made. That was the unspoken offer. And you get the girl on a platter. Mmmm … trade the
Busted Flush
for a really good motor sailer, crew of three—captain, steward, deck hand—and see how many sheltered coves in the world’s oceans had really top-grade moonlight. And, of course, remember never to turn your back to her …

“Ullie, dear, we can’t get onto a new subject until we finish the first one. I repeat your interesting statement. ‘When I found him I could not lose him.’ But he finally worked himself into a position where you had to lose him. I knew he was prying at you to find out where you’d gone, and I wondered why he thought you’d gone anywhere. Then Glenn told me about
Vance thinking he might buy the car. Men who think of buying cars kick the tires and slam the doors and check the mileage. So he checked the mileage, and then he checked it again and found a great big inexplicable addition, taking it up to past two thousand. He hadn’t put it on, so you had, and Patty was dead in the same way Ives was dead, and he found himself in a pretty eerie marriage. I’ll make a little guess, Ullie. From the way he acted this morning, I don’t think he got much sleep. I think he kept digging at you until you opened up and told him the whole thing. Then after you told him, you realized he couldn’t exactly forgive and forget. He couldn’t handle it. It was too much. Maybe he felt so wretched he didn’t want to take any morning ride, but you knew that sooner or later you could maneuver it so that all the rest of us would be ahead of you two.”

“Could I be such a monster, darling? Could you believe that of me, really?”

That narrow leather pouchpurse was in the chaise beside her hip. She made a futile grab for it as I took it quickly. It was new. I examined it and found a little area still moist near the bottom seam. The leather thongs were long and sturdy. Holding it by the thongs, I felt the deadly heft and balance of it. It was like a sock with a rock in the toe. It was a skull smasher, wicked as a medieval flail. I opened the pouch top, reached in and fumbled past lipstick, little comb, cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a rabbit. It was carved of some dense gray stone, sitting hunched, ears laid back, crude, a lump about two-thirds the size of a baseball.

“There is the leg work with the gas stations, and there are the miracles of modern chemistry, Ullie. The tiny little blotch of blood on this, with maybe a sweet little tuft of hubby’s hair stuck thereon, scrubbed off nicely right there in Joanne’s bathroom.
But a police lab can prove it was human blood hereon, though they can’t type it. And they can dismantle the plumbing and find traces in the drain in there. I imagine that after Ives and Patty you disposed of the bags. They’d have been a lot messier.”

“That’s a very old bunny,” she said. “It’s primitive folk art from Iceland.”

“Ullie, a good enough lawyer might be able to plead you sick and buy the experts to back him up. Age would be a consideration, of course. And beauty. Maybe you are sick. I don’t know. Perhaps it is just an egoism so intense other people don’t seem quite real to you. Murder wouldn’t seem real then either, I suppose.”

She tilted her head. “Vance cried and cried. He hugged me and said he would get me the best.…” She stopped, gnawed her thumb knuckle, looked at me in a speculative way. The admission had been made, and I could not tell if it was inadvertent, or meant to look inadvertent. “You can understand, Travis. There’s such a thing as thinking of the best for everybody concerned. I’d very much like to have you take me home to Father. I know you would like each other, very much. He is very old-fashioned, you know. He would want me to wait a year. Waiting isn’t too hard, is it, when you’re sure?”

I bounced the bunny in the palm of my hand, dropped it back into the lethal sack, yanked the drawstring tight. I could not even tell if she knew what a desperate game she was playing. She sat up, reached and closed her warm strong hand around my wrist. I was planning the words to tell her I was blowing the whistle when I heard the door behind me open slowly. I realized, as I turned, I had spent a long time with the bereaved widow, and Dana might be having problems keeping people out.

Dana stared in at us from the doorway. “Joanne has to …”

“I’m through here, honey,” I said. “Tell Glenn to phone the law. This eerie child killed all three of them, and she made so many mistakes it won’t be hard to …”

I had made the elementary mistake of taking my eyes off Ulka. When the pouch bag was ripped out of my hand, I did not bother to turn around and see what she was going to do with it. I dived to my left, away from the chaise, but bunny-rabbit still glanced off my skull and came down onto my shoulder, smashing the collarbone. I sprawled on the floor, with my ears roaring and with lights spangling my vision, absolutely unable to avoid a second and mortal crunching if she had taken time. But a vagueness moved past me with tiger pace, and I made a stifled whimper which was supposed to be a roar of warning to Dana. As vision cleared, as I got onto my knees, I saw Dana go down flat and heavy and hopelessly limp, onto her face. I heard a distant shout of query and alarm. I began the slow crawl toward my woman.

I had a pretty fair concussion, just enough so that I had blackouts, and they kept shining lights into my eyes, testing my reflexes, and giving me mental arithmetic to solve. My right arm, taped across my chest, felt leaden, and the smashed bone caused enough pain to keep them sticking needles into me. It made me groggy, and I kept asking about Dana. Miss Holtzer is in surgery. Miss Holtzer is still in surgery. Miss Holtzer is in the recovery room.

Then it was Sunday morning and I was told that Miss Holtzer was doing as well as could be expected. It is a dim phrase. Who sets up the expectations?

Glenn Barnweather arrived with a big solemn face, a hundred sighs, a sad shaking of the head, a rich smell of bourbon to tell me Ulka was dead. I already knew that, but I didn’t know how.

“She took off in the Corvette, northeast out 65 like a goddam
road race, and they still can’t figure how she got past as many curves as she did. They put a roadblock up there in the straight, way beyond Sunflower, one car blocking the road, and she came down on it at, they estimate, a hundred and thirty or better. Tried to cut around it. Hit the gravel, skidded, hit a rock, went two hundred and fifty feet through the air, hit and bounced and went over a rim and down a thousand-foot slope, bouncing all the way, and the final couple of hundred feet on fire. Like you told the cops, McGee, she must have been crazed with grief. That’s right, isn’t it? Crazed with grief.”

“Out of her head completely. Maniacal strength. You’ve heard of that.”

“I’ve heard of that. And Diana Hollis turns into Dana Holtzer. What goes on, old buddy?”

“We have to try to protect a lady’s reputation, don’t we?”

“Oh, sure. Hell, what you do is your own business, I guess, but Jo is going to come in here and really blow her stack.”

“I guess she checked with the Divers.”

“And Mary West, who wouldn’t tell her a damned thing. So she’s steaming.”

“Glenn, how about you finding out just how Dana is. I would appreciate it very much.”

“Glad to do anything for an old buddy who tells me every little thing,” he said. He came back in a half hour. “She’s one sick gal, Trav. They spent six hours picking little bits of bone out of the front of her brain, right here. And I find out she works for Lysa Dean. That’s going to intrigue hell out of Jo. They say Dana’s going to be okay.” He stood up. “You’ll be able to see her by tomorrow.”

More officials visited me. I told my tale of hysterical violence again, the young bride crazed by her terrible loss.

Joanne came in. She was furious. After fifteen minutes she was merely resentful, reluctantly accepting the fact there must be some good reason why she’d never find out all she wanted to know. She was decent enough to do some errands for me, like telling The Hallmark to save the room for me, like getting a phone put in, like getting a resident neurosurgeon to come in and give me some straight answers on Dana. He said she should take two months’ rest and recuperation before going back to work. I had passed my tests and would be released Monday, unless I acquired some new symptoms. He said not to worry about how she’d act on Monday when I could see her for a few minutes. She would be dazed and semi-conscious still, and might not know me.

After he left I was planning to try to locate Lysa Dean, but she phoned me, putting one very nervous quaver in the switchboard operator’s voice. Lysa was terribly dramatic and terribly concerned about everything, full of elaborate reassurances about hospital bills—but shrewd enough to play the whole thing as though I was Dana’s dear friend who had accompanied her on her little vacation. She said she and her whole entourage would stop off on the way back to the Coast, but she couldn’t be sure exactly when they could manage it.

On Monday I got dressed and paid my bill and had five minutes with Dana. She was in an adhesive turban, face bloated, shiny, streaked with bruise marks, slits revealing dazed eyes, mouth cracked and puffy. She seemed to know me. She squeezed my hand. I could not understand her mumblings. The nurse stood by and called time on me and sent me away. I moved back into The Hallmark. On Tuesday I saw her three times, morning, afternoon, evening, ten minutes each time. She knew me, and her diction was better, but she was unaware of what had
happened to her and seemed in no hurry to find out. She had a tendency to drop off and start snoring in the middle of a vague remark, but she did like her hand held.