“But it…”
“I know it wasn’t like that. But for seven of the thirteen months he was cashing things in, you were working with him.”
“Not anything like the way we used to work, tluough. No routine things at all, no matter how intricate. He was sort of… wrapping up what he knew and what he was still learning. His postoperative dictation was about twice as long as it had ever been, because he was making suggestions ahout alternative techniques he knew he was never going to have time to attempt. He wanted to leave something other surgeons could use. And he wanted to spend as much time as he could with Ocrria and his grandchildren.”
“Do you remember anything at all strange during those seven months? Any mysterious letters or visits, phone calls? Did he seem troubled?”
“No. But he didn’t trouble easily, you know. He had his own philosophy about worry. He always told me that people spend so much time fretting about what they did yesterday and dreading what might happen tomorrow, they miss out on all of their todays. He said that when you realize you can’t change the past or predict the future, then you come alive for the first time, like waking, up from half-sleep.”
“You might be questioned by people who are better at it than I am, and a lot more merciless.”
“Why do you say that?”
“They’ll catch you up a lot quicker when you lie about having no contact with Fort from January to when you visited him.at his home.”
“Lie! I swear to you I did not see him once during that time.”
“That isn’t what I said. A contact is not necessarily a confrontation.”
“I don’t have to take this, you know.”
“Phone? Letter?”
“Damn you!” She stood up and went to the windows, stood there with her back to the room. Her anger made a pink tint on the pallor of her neck below the graying hair. I went over and stood behind her and to her left. The sky above the distant parking plaza was as gray as the asphalt. Three kids were running diagonally across the lot, a big yellow dog loping along with them.
“Use your head, Janice. If you don’t know how to handle it with me, how can you expect to handle it when the cold winds really start to blow?”
“He had reasons for everything he did.”
“And never miscalculated? Never made an error? Do you really believe that he wanted Gloria to be persecuted, treated as a suspicious person and watched and followed the rest of her life?”
She turned and stared up into my eyes. “Will it be like that?”
“Not if it was six thousand or sixty thousand. It’s six hundred thousand. It hasn’t hit the news yet. The bank and the lawyers and the tax people have kept the lid on it. Fort’s mind was clouded in one way. I can draw pictures for you. There have been people killed in this happy village for forty cents. No matter how carefully the missing money is reported, there are going to be some types sitting around wondering which way and how soon they’ll pick up the bride and take her to a cozy place and treat her pretty little feet with lighter fluid. They’ll think that either she knows or she doesn’t, but that much cash is worth the try. She’ll end up in the river wrapped in scrap iron either way.”
Her eyes widened and her throat bulged as she dry-swallowed twice, and, with her color going bad, she braced a hand against the window frame and closed her eyes for a moment. I asked her if she was going to faint.
“No. I don’t faint. It was just the idea anybody… could do that to Gloria Geis.”
“And if she doesn’t know, there’s always Heidi and then Roger and then you. It’s big loot, and it is in the handiest form loot comes in. You don’t have to fence it.”
Her color was better. She swallowed again. “I… I guess I do have some of it. Not here. It’s in my box at the bank. The letter is here. But I don’t think it will mean anything, and it says not to tell anybody. But, as you say, I don’t think he realized what could happen… Excuse me.”
She went over to a desk and opened a drawer. and sorted through a half-box of new stationery, riffling it with her thumb until she came to the letter. She looked at it before she handed it to me. She shook her head. “I hate what happened to his muscular control. His hands were so good.”
It was small, shaky, uncertain writing, but reasonably legible. It was dated the previous August eleventh.
Janice, dear,
Put this in your lock box at your bank.
I have gotten word to someone to come to you in case of emergency. You will find out what might have to be done. Use the money for that purpose. You will understand why I couldn’t ask G for this kind of help. If no one comes to you within a year of my death, please get the money to G. I would write more, but it is hard to write. I know I impose. Thanks for many things, and thanks for this.
Fortner
“It’s ten thousand dollars,” she said. “In hundred dollar bills, mostly. It was in a manila envelope wrapped with rubber bands inside another manila envelope. I think he thought it was ten thousand even, but it was a hundred dollars short. It came in the regular mail.”
“You saw him after that. Did you mention the note and the money?”
“When I started to, he closed his eyes and shook his head. Gloria was out of the room just then.”
I read it once more and gave it back to her to put away. “Not a clue,” I said. “Some unknown person may or may not come to you for help, and if they come, they’ll tell you what kind of help they need. Isn’t that just dandy? Only five hundred and ninety thousand to go.”
“I wish I could help. I really do.”
She meant it. Sincerity and conviction, and a great directness. But I had to come to the usual screeching halt. I didn’t have her lashed up to a polygraph with a good man watching the styluses or styli or whatever the hell the proper plural might be. Pen points, maybe. And I didn’t know if she was one of the small percentage who can fool the polygraph every time. In a world of plausible scoundrels and psychopathic liars, hunch can take you only so far.
I have to keep remembering at all times that sweet little old lady on the veranda in Charleston, South Carolina, the one who told me the story of her life in a sighing little voice, a story so sad that my eyes were misty and my voice thick by the time she shot at me with the Luger she was holding in her lap under the corner of her shawl. The slug took a little bite out of the side of the collar of my white shirt and exposed a dime-sized piece of blue necktie.
“Maybe,” I said, “the money’s for Gretchen.”
“For who?”
“For Gretchen. I guess you could call her an indiscretion. Long ago. Way back when Glenna was dying.”
She looked puzzled. “I don’t know anything about that. It doesn’t sound right, somehow. He worshipped his first wife.”
“At least he always thought he did. Until he took a little acid LSD, provided by a buddy.”
“Dr. Wyatt? Hayes Wyatt?”
“Glory took the trip too. I guess they were both getting a bad hang-up on his situation being terminal.”
She nodded. “Dr. Wyatt has had a lot of success with it with terminal cases, where the pain is bad and they’re terribly frightened, or terribly depressed. It’s disassociative, you know. It gives them a breathing space to kind of sort out what it all means.”
“And he sorted Glenna out and found out he didn’t like her at all. Glory says it surprised him.”
“Who was Gretchen?”
There was no reason not to tell her. There was even the chance it might knock loose some useful memory. But I told her and it didn’t. The tale intrigued her. It gave another dimension to her hero, Fort Geis. But at the same time it diminished her. She had thought of herself as one third of the women in Geis’ maturity-Glenna-Janice-Gloria. News of hearty little Gretch made it a foursome. It complicated her mental biography of the great man. It put two little vertical lines between her eyebrows, and I no longer had her full attention.