One Fearful Yellow Eye (19 page)

Fifteen, twelve, ten and six."

She nibbled the wood end of a paint brush, frowning. "That sounds so ugly, the whole situation.

It's so strange, really. Roger has such clear memories of Gretehen when she lived with us. Of course he's four years older. But I must have been almost eight years old when Gretchen got married. I can remember a lot of things from a lot earlier than that. But Gretchen is sort of dim.

I can't see her face at all, or remember her voice. Roger says she was good to us. He says she was good-natured and sort of dumb and sloppy. But would she just walk out on her kids?"

"Apparently she's done it before."

"Poor Anna. She deserves a more reliable daughter. Couldn't Anna take her own grandchildren for a while? Maybe not. Probably Lady Gloria wouldn't want brats from her own so_ cial level cluttering up her illusions of grandeur."

I started to speak and then let it stand. We could not head in that direction and get anywhere.

She was blocked. So I made some unimportant small talk and then went back in to catch Susan's reaction. It was a firm shake of the head-from side to side: No more questions and no more answers. She didn't want to be any trouble to anyone. She would leave as soon as she felt well enough. Thanks a lot.

I talked with Heidi again before leaving. She promised she wouldn't try to pump Susan
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Kemmer, but if the girl said anything useful, Heidi would get in touch with me right away.

I went to the nearby Ambassador for some midmorning coffee and some midmorning thought.

A trio of high-fashion models, young ones, were gathered there for some do. They chittered and squeaked at each other. Their starved faces were painted to a silver pallor, their tresses shaped by men who hate women, using only soup bowls and hedge clippers, their clothing created by those daring little hanky-stompers who vie with each other in seeing how grotesque they can make their clients. It is an in-joke with them, and it gives them hysterics when they get together.

They whinny, fall down, and spill their money. I think they would do a lot less harm sculpting pop-art dogs.

I ordered more coffee and went and phoned Janice Stanyard. No answer. I tried the hospital. She was in surgery, and scheduled through until at least four in the afternoon. I went back to my coffee and dug through the scrap paper in my side pocket and found the phone slip on Nurse Stanyard's call. It had come in at nine. So I went to the bus depot on East Randolph. It was to buses what Miami International is to airplanes. They had American, Continental, DeLuxe, Indiana, Santa Fe, Suburban, American Coach and so on big inside ramps and stations, gates and callers.

In order to get anywhere I had to make certain assumptions. With her face in that condition, she wouldn't hang around waiting to make up her mind about calling Janice Stanyard. Give her ten minutes to get from the platform to a phone. Give Janice five minutes before calling me. So I was interested in anything arriving from, say, eighteen minutes before the hour to five minutes before the hour. After studying and cross-checking the printed schedules and the arrival boards, I came up with five possibilities, all based on the assumption she came in from out of the city somewhere. My only prayer was her very memorable condition. When you see a young girl with the kind of a face Dick Ti ger could give any contender back in his better days, it can stick in your mind. But I was at the wrong end of the day. Depot personnel on duty this Tuesday morning wouldn't have been around on Monday night at nine. If she was on one of the five arrivals, she would have used one of three gates to come into the terminal.

Mark time. Futz around. Scratch. Fret. Watch girls. Wonder what the hell you are doing in this huge damp cellar full of three or four million people. Between announcements the speaker system in the depot was telling everybody about we three kings of Orient are. Damn you, Fort Geis, why didn't you leave a message in a hollow tree? Why didn't you realize what a pot of trouble you were leaving behind? It was an example of the terrible innocence of men who are superb in their own fields. Einstein had some grotesque political opinions. Jack Paar knew how we should get rid of the Berlin Wall. Kurt Vonnegut keeps losing airplane tickets.

Forhier Geis had not the slightest idea that people representing a dozen different interests and points of view would compete for the chance to drag the widow into their particular cave and gnaw her bones clean. Six hundred big ones brightens the eyes, sharpens the taste, bulges the muscles. O speak to us from beyond, Great Surgeon.

I trudged out into a hooing of damp and grisly wind, into the kind of gunmetal day when you wear your headlights turned on, and think of a roaring fire, hot buttered rum, a Dynel tigerskin, and a brown agile lass from Papeete. I took my dismals to the Palmen House and traded them to a sad-smiling man for a C-cup of Plymouth. We stood on either side of the bar and sighed at each other in wistful awareness of our mutual mortality, and I left half the drink and went off and phoned Heidi.

When she answered I said, "Is the battered bird responding?"

"Not so that anyone could notice. She's taking a bath and washing her hair. If it's any use to you, her clothes are from a cheap chain with about ten thousand outlets in Chicago, and her shoes seem to be a very good grade of cardboard, and her total of worldly goods comes to four dimes and four pennies, a red comb, half a pink lipstick, and one wadded-up bus schedule."

"What bus line?"

"Hmm. Let me go look. She's still sloshing in there." She came back and said, "North Central. I looked to see if she'd marked anything on it. She hasn't."

"Thanks. It could be a help. You make a good secret agent."

"Secret agent hell, McGee. It's pure female nosiness."

I went back to my drink in better humor. I separated the North Central timetable from the others I had picked up. Bus Number 83 arrived every weekday night at 8:45, back at the point of origin from where it had left at 8:20 that morning. Elgin, Rockford, Freeport, Clinton, Moline, Galesburg, Peoria, Peru, Ottawa, Joliet, and home to the barn. I could guess the union wouldn't let them load that kind of a run on one man. Probably one man took it to --some midway point, possibly Moline, and his relief brought it on in and took it out the next morning and traded off again at Moline.

So the driver who had brought her in Monday night would be bringing her in again on Wednesday night. The company ran shorter routes and longer routes, and the Chicago office address was printed on the timetable. I signaled for a refill, left money as my surety bond, and went off and called North Central.

"Give me somebody who knows your driver roster," I told the girl.

"Herbison speaking," a man said, moments later.

"State traffic control," I said. "Sergeant Ellis. Who brought your 83 in last night?"

"Anything wrong, Sergeant?"

"Just a routine check. Trying to pin down the time we lost some intersection lights."

"Oh. Hold on." It took him twenty seconds. "Daniel D. DuShane, Sergeant." He explained I could contact him after two o'clock at a Galesburg address. He gave me the phone number. He said DuShane would be in again on 83 tomorrow night, that he was a good man, held a schedule well, and would probably be able to help me.

I felt reasonably cheery through the first half of my second knock, then I began to realize how rickety was my structure of hunch and logic. There were too many things wrong with it. If Gorba had cleaned out the Doctor's estate, and if he was as bright as Francisco Smith had reported, it seemed to me he would have done one of two thingseither stayed put, kept his job, bided his time-or gone too far for the North Central Transportation Company to get anywhere near him.

Also, if he had made that big a score, it didn't seem, like a very good idea.for Gretchen to go off rambling.

True, one of the kids was his, the youngest one, but it seemed out of character for a type who could score so cleverly to saddle himself with even one, much less five. He did not seem to be the homebody sort.

In that mood, you can lose the whole thing. Okay. So a happy singing drunk had been charmed by the happy face of a small boy and taken him for a ride, gotten timid-or sober-and dropped him in the park. Neighborhood teen-age clowns had wired the joke bomb on Glory's little car.

Some twitch maniac, turned on with some kind of bug juice, had come looking for people to scrag and had settled for Ethel cat. One of Gadge Hairynose Trumbill's countryclub wives had boobytrapped the candy box as a sick little vengeance. Susan Kemmer had been bashed about by a hulk of a boyfriend.

Go home, McGee. It's too big and too scrambled and it happened too long ago. Smuggle Glory out of the polar regions. Take her home. Boat her, beach her, bake her, brown her, and bunk her. You too are a sucker for busted birds, starving kittens, broody broads. Healer McGee, the big medicine man. She's got that big fireplace out there, right? A stock of sauce, right? A fantastic grocery department, right? So go lay it all out and cry a little. She might even come up with an idea.

So in the endless twilight of noonday I went northward, locked into the traffic flow, listening to ghastly news from all over. Premier assassinated tax boost seen Wings lose again bombs deemed defective three coeds raped teenage riot in Galveston cost of living index up again market sags Senator sues bowl game canceled wife trading ring broken mobster takes Fifth bad weather blankets nation...

The announcer was beginning to choke up. I turned him off. I couldn't stand it As I felt my way down through the Lake Pointe area, the wind was coming off the lake, bellowing and thrashing, and taking little plucks at the steering wheel. The driveway and the lighted house beyond was safe haven, and I slammed my car door, put my head down, and plunged through tempests. Anna Ottlo let me in.

"Ach! Thank Gott! Thank Gotti" she cried. She kept winding and unwinding her plump red hands in her napkin.

"What's the matter? Where's Mrs: Geis?"

It took me long minutes to piece it together. Anna had cleaned up after breakfast, and after she had finished the housecleaning, she had asked Gloria-if it was all -right if she went to her room and lay down for a little while. She had bad pains in one hip. She thought it was the dampness.

The doctor was giving her cortisone. Her hip would stop hurting if she could get off -her feet every now and then. She had dropped off to sleep. A little while ago, maybe fifteen minutes ago, she had awakened with a start and been shocked to find it was almost twelve-thirty. She had gone hunting for Gloria to ask her what she would like for lunch. Gloria was not anywhere in the house. Her car was in the garage. She thought perhaps she had gone walking on the beach. But she had never gone walking when the weather was this bad. She had been acting very strange.

Anna Ottlo had been wondering if she should call the police when I had arrived.

"The wasser," she said, her eyes miserable, her mouth sick. "I keep tinking of the wasser."

So I took off into the whirling gloom. I would guess the temperature at thirty degrees, and the wind seemed to take the whole thirty points off it. The wind, hard and steady, but with sudden gusts of greater violence, picked sand off the lips of the dunes and dry-lashed my face with it.

I loped and bawled her name, shielded my eyes from the sting of sand, and stared up and down the shelving beach. Beyond the sand belt the spray whipped at me. There was no color in the world. Gray sand, gray water, gray beach, gray sky. I was trapped in one of those arty salon photographs of nature in the raw, the kind retired colonels enter in photography contests.

Through watery eyes I saw somebody wa ' g a flag at me, a hundred yards away. The some ody turned out to be a twisted and barren bush a undred feet back from the smack of the lake wa s.

The flag, however, was a pair of pale green nylon briefs. Ladypants. Elasticized waist, some dainty bits of machine lace. Fresh clean new-sodden with spray.

Twenty feet beyond the bush was the touch of color in the gray world. Patch of dark red. Ran to it. Pulled it out of the sand. More than half of it was covered by the drift of sand. Dark red wool dress. Glory's size. Damned fool. Damned little fool with the broken heart. I wondered if the waves would shove her back onto the beach. As I started toward the beach I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned quickly and saw Gloria crouched on the crest of a small dune thirty feet away. Her posture was like that of a runner waiting for the gun. Her knuckles were in the sand. I could see a glint of her eyes through the sodden mat of hair. Her mouth hung open, the small row of bottom teeth visible. She was egg-naked.

I called her name and hurried toward her. She whirled and ran from me. It was the dreadful reckless run of absolute and total panic. She would stumble and fall and roll to her feet and as I closed on her, she would dart off in another direction. When I could get near her, I could hear the horrid sound she was making in competition to the sound of waves and wind. I was as desperate as she. That wind had to be sucking the heat and the life out of her. Finally I feinted one way and as she cut back I dived and got one hand on her slender ankle and brought her down. She kicked me in the face with her free foot.

She had fantastic strength. Her face was madness. As I struggled with her she suddenly snapped at my hand and got it between her teeth, right at the thumb web. With her eyes tight shut she ground with hcr jaws, making a whining and gobbling sound. I put my other hand on the nape of her neck and got my thumb on one side and my middle finger on the other in the proper places under the jaw corners and clamped, shutting off the blood supply to the brain. She slumped and rolled onto her back. I stripped my topcoat off, laid it down, put a foot on it so it wouldn't blow away, and lifted her onto it. As I did so I remembered long ago at Sanibel when I had first been surprised at how her small body which looked so trim and lean and tidy in clothes could have such a flavor of ripeness and abundance. I guess it was the ivory smoothness of her combined with a dusky, secretive, temple-magic look to the contours of breasts, belly, rounded thighs.