The timing would give her all day Sunday to work on his fears, with the Do Not Disturb sign on the room door, food and drink ordered up, and she would hide in the bathroom when it was brought in. She would have learned every scrap of usable information about him from what she could find in his billfold and elsewhere in the room and in his pockets. He could cash checks, couldn’t he? He could have his bank wire money, couldn’t he? She would have to leave town. She would remember a girlfriend in New Orleans. Monday morning he could go out and buy her some clothes and luggage for the trip, and get the money in cash. She would have to have money to live on until she could get a job. At least fifteen hundred over the airline fare to feel really safe. If he dragged his feet she could wonder out loud if maybe she ought to go back to Boston with him and see if his wife could help her get a job. Her name is Frances, isn’t it, honeh? Once he agreed, she would become very happy and excited and affectionate, and with any luck she could seduce him, a shameful confirmation of his guilt, and good for at least five hundred more for the poor dear girl. It wouldn’t work on a man who had been down the mean streets and seen the dark places. It would work on just such a man as honeh-bright, good, and decent and, in this first and last wild oat, gullible as the youngest sailor in the Navy.
It made me realize with what exquisite care, caution, and patience Fortner Geis had been cleaned. A man will let his money be taken only when the alternative is something he cannot endure…
What was it Fort could not face? And how much more dangerous was the predator who hunted him down than was this faked-up Cinny Lee?
SIX
NURSE JANICE Stanyard lived on Greenwood in one of those standard six-story apartment houses of yellow brick which were built in such profusion after World War II. They were planned to do an adequate and durable job of housing people, and were designed with the idea of minimum maintenance and upkeep, and with all the grace and warmth of the Berlin Wall.
She was on the fifth floor toward the rear, with windows that looked out over a tarred roof of a neighboring building to the Sunday emptiness of the broad asphalt parking area of a shopping plaza a half block away, the gray paving marked in the yellow herringbone pattern of the parking slots.
I had not known quite what to expect. My first impression as she let me in was certainly not of a femme fatale. She was a sturdy woman with a bigboned look a broad and pallid face without ani mation, dark brown hair turning gray. She wore scuffed loafers, white ankle sox, a baggy herringbone tweed skirt, a loose-fitting brown cardigan. The impression was that of an enduring and stolid woman with no interest in self-adornment. The furniture was plain, heavy, and not new. But it looked comfortable. The decor was a monotone of grays and browns without pattern or touches of color except for the dust jackets of hundreds of books in long low shelves, and the covers of the magazines in racks and stacks.
“Do sit down, Mr. McGee. I’m afraid I’m not going to be much help to you.” She sat at the corner of a couch and I sat in a facing armchair. I suspect that it was the quality of her voice, the earthy richness of the contralto modulation that made me look at her more closely. Her hands were large, and beautifully formed. Her throat was long and solid and graceful. Her eyes were particularly lovelylarge, the iris a deep clear blue, the lashes naturally dense and long. Once I had seen that much, I could then see the gentle contours of her mouth, and the rich curve of the strong calves.
What had seemed drabness, both in her and in the room, became merely understatement. I had the feeling this would be a comfortable room to be in, a comfortable woman to be with. She had the indefinable quality of restfulness, of making no trivial demands upon others or upon herself.
“You worked with Fort a long time and knew him well. I need to know more about him, and maybe then I can figure out why he did what he did.”
“Did you know the Doctor well enough to call him Fort?” There was cool surprise in her tone. “Well enough so he asked me to. In Florida. I stood up with Fort and Glory when they were married. I didn’t know him long. I liked him. I was supposed to come visit them here after the house was built. It didn’t work out. I wish it had.”
“He was a good man,” she said. “I miss him. But why did you sound as if he did some inexplicable thing? Fort usually had reasons for what he did.”
“Would you have any idea about what sort of estate he left? The size of it?”
“I wouldn’t know, really. When Glenna died he got her money. I don’t think it was really a lot. I think he used it on Heidi and Roger. They seemed to get anything they wanted at least, cars and sailboats and trips to Europe. Money wasn’t particularly important to Fort. I don’t mean he was indifferent to it. He would bill a patient according to what the patient could afford. From ten dollars to ten thousand. He didn’t spend much on himself. It wasn’t because he was stingy. He just didn’t have expensive hobbies. He invested his money after taxes and living expenses into good stocks mostly, I think. If I was forced to guess, I’d say he probably was worth half a million dollars when he died. Another man with the same ability and, reputation could have been worth… three or four times that, possibly.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Ten days before he died.”
“When was the last time you worked with him?”
“Last January, almost a year ago. The last operation he did. Craniotomy for a neurofibroma, extensive. He started it but he didn’t finish it. By then he had good people backing him up every time. His fingertips went numb. He couldn’t get the feeling back into them. It’s one of the symptoms of what he had. So he turned it over to his assistant. He stood by and watched. It went well. Outside, afterward, he told me that was the last he’d try. He thanked me for putting up with him in all those hundreds and hundreds of operations. At least I held the. tears back until I was alone. Everybody who ever worked with him felt the same way”
“Did you have any kind of contact with him between that time and when you visited him at his house?”
There was a little flicker behind the blue of her eyes, a half-second delay. “No. Why?”
I wondered if with a wicked needle I could penetrate that placid manner. “I suppose like all the rest of them, the reputation was a little larger than the man.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“There can be twenty or fifty men with the same ability, and one seems to get the good publicity.”
“You don’t seem to know what the hell you’re talking about!”
“Cutting is cutting, no?”
“And some of them are so concerned about setting records they go in there like a whirlwind, and some of them are so picky and cautious the patient is under for six hours when it could be done in four. Then there are people like Fortner Geis who are as quick as they should be and as careful as they should be, but there’s something else too, something that isn’t in the books, and you can’t describe what it is, and damned few surgeons in any generation have it. It’s an instinct for the living flesh under the knife. Two surgeons can make two cuts that look identical, and one will bleed like a pig and the other will be almost dry. One surgeon can cut to where something is supposed to be, and 4t isn’t there, and another will somehow guess that the patient doesn’t quite match the anatomy lessons and, without knowing how he does it or what clued him, go right to where he wants to be. Surgeons who worked beside Fort have a right to make comments about his ability. You don’t!”