His personal broker would call once in a while and try to report what was going on, but Harl didn’t want to talk about it or hear about it or even know about it. After Liz died, he was too upset about being so damned alone, and about Bix, to have even the slightest stir of curiosity about his two little dog stocks. Then, of course, there were the weeks in the hospital, and by early July they moved him from the hospital to an elegant place that was a combination rest home and therapy center. When he found out that the tab was running seventy-five a day plus extras, it stimulated the money-nerve and he began to check things out. An old and good friend had emptied out the house on Cricket Bayou, the redwood and coquina stone house Liz had loved so, had stored Harl’s personal stuff, and had gotten a very good price for the house the day after it was listed. The personal accident and disability and major disaster insurance was paying off handsomely. His attorney had negotiated a surprisingly fat settlement from the company which handled the trucker’s liability insurance. The premature retirement benefit and the bank insurance disability income clause were spewing more money diligently.
So he called his broker finally and heard the awed, hushed and respectful tone, and finally comprehended that the two funny little technology stocks had both come out with a couple of earnings quarters of a fantastic richness, that they had valuable patents in areas Harl had never even heard of, that one was listed on the big board and the other one had applied, and the stock of both of them had been generously split a couple of times. So in one of them, what had cost him six dollars was worth two hundred and fifty, and the laggard had gone only from eight dollars to a hundred and twenty. So there was upwards of two million two, or an aftertax one million six.
He laughed after he found that out; he laughed himself sick. He had his broker arrange a negotiated sale through the floor specialists, and he put the tax money aside in treasury bills, and he stuffed the rest of it into tax-free municipals, and there he was all of a sudden with a tax-free income coming in on the basis of like two hundred and forty dollars a day forever, and it was money he didn’t have to touch because what was coming in from all other sources was more than sufficient to his needs, even in Garden Suite Number Five in Tropicana Grove Retreat.
His lawyers had been trying to locate Bix in Mexico to tell her that daddy had been badly injured.
But the last plate had to smash and did so when a man with a polite and careful voice tracked T. Harlan Bowie down by long distance from the State Department to tell him that Miss Beatrice Tracy Bowie had been killed near Oaxaca when the vehicle in which she had been riding had gone off a mountain road, and the Mexican authorities wanted to know where the body was to be shipped and who would arrange and pay for the shipment.
Poor sick sorry rich and sad son of a bitch.
All you can say is: Well, that’s the way it goes sometimes. It goes very bad sometimes because they give you the bad in great big indigestible wads. As if they want to write you off in a hurry. As if the idea is to tear down your whole scene and sow the area with salt and acid, and be off looking for the next fellow who happens to be standing and smiling and thinking that life is pretty good lately.
So only-daughter was airfreighted back to eternal rest beside mother Liz in one of those happyvale places where the markers are flush with the ground level, the walks and gates have names, and stereotaped organ music comes wafting out of the pole-mounted guaranteed weatherproof highcompliance speaker systems.
Nobody knew whether she had enjoyed Mexico. So three days ago T. Harlan Bowie got Meyer on the phone and they had a long talk, and then Meyer said I should accompany him to Miami and talk to a friend of his. I said I did not want to talk to anybody about anything, because it had been a very nice cruise and I wanted to slob around and savor it in full measure.
Meyer then reminded me that I had met Bix Bowie, and that last year, a week or so after her mother’s funeral, he had brought her around and we had gone with her and some other people on the Flush up the waterway, and the girl had seemed to have a good time, but it was hard to tell. He explained that he had been a sort of unofficial godfather to the girl when she was smaller, before she had gone away to school.
It stirred my memory, but I could not get a clear image of the girl herself. The world seems overful of quiet pretty blondes lately, and the trouble is that when they are silent and withdrawn one no longer knows whether it is shyness, total disinterest, or a concealed and contemptuous churlishness.
But I could see that it had racked my friend Meyer, and that if I continued to drag my feet, he was going to say please, and then I would be unable to help myself, so I agreed before he had a chance to say the magic word friends should not have to use on one another.
On the way down he talked a little about how Liz used to ask him to show up at school when there had been some kind of bring-a-parent situation and Harlan Bowie was too tied up to make it. He thought Bix was glad he would show, but he could never be certain. He had never been able to reach through to her. She had extraordinary composure and control. He and Liz had attended her high school graduation together, because Harl had an appointment in Tallahassee that day.
I said I thought a father should be able to manage at least a graduation for an only child and only daughter. And Meyer said it had often seemed so to him, too.
So we drove on down to Tropicana Grove Retreat, and Meyer was so troubled, I found myself getting emotionally hung on this blonde I couldn’t remember. By God, anybody who cruises with McGee deserves better treatment than the fates, or her father, had apparently given her.
The establishment was in a quiet area in Coral Gables, with low buildings, a lot of very handsome old banyans, lots of plantings, summer birdsongs, and old parties being wheelchaired along curved walks. They made a phone call from the office. A stocky woman in a gray and white uniform appeared and introduced herself as Mrs. Kreiger and smiled in pleasant recognition at Meyer, and led us back through garden walks to Garden Suite Five. T. Harlan Bowie sat in a wheelchair in the airconditioned, carpeted living room, watching a cable television picture of the changing prices on a brokerage house board, while a man was talking about the rails confirming the Dow. He turned it off with the remote control.
Tall thin frail man. His handshake was fragile and tentative. His eyes had that look. It is not so much a haunted look or a hollow-eyed look. It is a look of constant and thoughtful appraisal that keeps going on and on in spite of all conversations, all diversions. Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is ninety-nine percent aware and convinced of his own mortality. But then comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel. When a man becomes one hundred percent certain of his inevitable death, he gets The Look.
He had a long face, high forehead, the finebodied white hair of the erstwhile blonde. Mrs. Kreiger told him she would be back in an hour to take him to therapy. She had broad pale lips, lovely eyes, a tidy muscularity in the way she moved. She told us happily, in a little more than a trace of German accent, that Mr. Bowie had moved the toes on his right foot.
He flushed. Part irritation. Part Aw shucks, it was nothin‘, guys.
He looked at the door she closed behind her and said, “Und soon, Herr Bowie, ve vill haff you running races, nein?” He asked us to sit. He said to Meyer, “Did you tell Mr. McGee what we discussed?”
“Some of the background, Harl. Not what you want done.”
He turned the chair slightly to face me more directly. “Mr. McGee, I know damned little about what my daughter, Bix, felt and thought and believed. I’ve had a lot of time to think. And a lot of the thinking has been painful. Appraisal of myself as a father-very, very poor. I know that when she was a toddler we were close. She adored me. That was the good part of it. Our only chick. Liz had had a bad time. Couldn’t have more. You know, Bix never went through any ugly period at all. Beautiful baby, lovely little girl, handsome teenager. No acne, no braces, no gawky period. Liz and I were too aware of her being an only child, I guess. And awed by how damned pretty she was, and upset at all the admiration she got. So we were too harsh with her. Two against one. United front. She had to strain like hell to get our approval, and we were too chinchy about giving it out. We made her obedient and docile and sweet, and we probably made her unsure of herself. But how can you tell? How many chances do you get to raise a child? I was very, very busy. So I wasn’t paying attention, not to Bix as a person. She was an object. Beautiful child.
“Then when Liz… got sick, Bix came down. She stayed with her mother right through it. And it wasn’t pretty. Bix was a rock. I took her for granted. I took her strength for granted. God only knows how badly it tore her up. She never let me know. Without Liz I was a zombie. I went through the motions. It should have been the two of us then. Father and daughter. But each of us was alone in a private way. I had my own hell. I don’t know where she was spending her time. She was just… around.”
He gave me a despairing look, and made an empty gesture with his hands. “I’m dithering. I’m not saying it. Look. I don’t even know how she lived when she was here with me in Miami. I’d find her in the house with friends. Pretty oddball-looking kids. I’d go through and they’d stare at me as if I came from Mars; as if my house were a bus station and I were some strange type in transit. Empty eyes, loud music. She went to Mexico in early January this year. Seven months later she was dead. I want to know… what it was like. I want to know-Oh God help me-I just want to know if she was having a good time.” His voice broke and he put his hand across his eyes.
Meyer said, “Harl had an agency do a little investigating. But the reports are facts without any flavor. He’d follow the back trail himself, if he could. He tried to think of somebody who could get away, somebody without a regular job or a family and he thought of me. When we talked about it, I said you were the man for the job. He wants us both to go. All expenses. Take our time and do it right and come back and tell him how it was for her.”
“And find out,” Bowie said, “what kind of people she was running around with-find out if they could have played… some kind of cruel game.” I questioned him, and he explained. After he had had word of his daughter’s fatal accident, he had received a letter that had been written and mailed at least a week before she had died, but had been sent to the house that had been sold and had taken a long time in transit. He took it out of the drawer and handed it to me.
Ordinary mail. Sent from Oaxaca in July, with a date stamp so blurred it could have been the 23rd or the 28th. Cheap envelope, cheap paper. Blue ballpoint. It was small untidy writing, half script, half printed, with no clue to the sex of whoever wrote it. No salutation or date or signature.
You want Bix to come back ever, or ever want to come back even, you better come after her or send somebody pretty quick because she doesn’t have any idea what’s happening to her lately.
“My daughter always knew exactly what was happening,” Bowie said. “Somebody was trying to create a problem for her. I don’t know why. A cruel little game of some kind. The part about her not wanting to come back certainly means that this note has no relationship to the accident.”
So we had talked a little longer, but by then I knew it was for no other reason than to have us report on the end of the short and happy life of Miss Bowie. But he did not look as if he really wanted to hear anything too ugly.
Maybe it wasn’t very pretty for Bix Bowie. Maybe it was a dingy way to die.
So we had the brief reports from the investigation agency, and we had the translation of the Mexican police report of the death, and we had some duplicate prints made from a negative Harlan Bowie had given us. The picture did not restore my memory of her. Full face, half a smile. A flash picture taken the last Christmas the family was intact. Home from school. Without a schoolgirl look. Mature woman. Long creamy spill and fall of thick, ivory-blond hair. Watchful eyes. Meyer told me they were dark, dark blue. Mouth curved with secrets untold. The expression was contradictory. She looked bland and reserved, almost content. But the slant of the flashbulb light picked up a little bulge at the corner of the jaw, a little knot of muscle, a look of tension held under the clench of teeth, under iron control.
The tin bird whoofed down the runway and lifted sharply, while everybody played the habitual game of total indifference which hides the shallow breathing and contracted sphincters of the Air Age.
I looked across the blue bay at the fantasy known as Miami Beach. Cubes of maple sugar. Candy minarets. Special low summer rates. We were off to start at the end of her life and work back.