She scowled into her weak drink. “Hmm. Let me think. Memorial Day came on Sunday last year. So it was the following Saturday which would be…”
“June fifth.”
“I remember he didn’t expect to be home that morning. He had surgery scheduled. It was a primary cancer of the spine, which is very rare and supposed to be inoperable. It was a twenty-eightyear-old woman,.and she seemed very strong, but they phoned from the hospital Friday and said she had died. Fort was depressed. The husband wouldn’t give permission for an autopsy.”
“So I suppose the smoke bomb was the final straw?”
‘lie was upset. Not too badly though. He went for a long walk down the beach. I remember I wanted to go with him, but he wanted to be alone that time. It wasn’t like him. I was hurt, sort oЈ But I guess you aren’t doing a husband any favors by smothering him, by hanging on to him every second.“
“Glory, I know you kept pretty good tabs on him. When did he have a chance to pick up the cash and leave it somewhere?”
“It must have been done at the same time. That’s the only thing I can figure out. When he got it at one bank or another, he must have gotten rid of it right away. He must have mailed it. Even if I had seen him mailing it, I wouldn’t have paid any particular attention. He was always mailing things in heavy manila envelopes to doctors all over the world. Case histories, notes, things he was going to publish, film strips of operations. And the mail he got at the hospital was always full of things like that. Later that kind of mail came here.”
In the artsy-fartsy tales of intrigue, the pigeon has to tote the bundle of bread to the city museum and stuff it under the tunic of the third mummy from. the left, whistle the motif from “Lazy Bones,” stick his right thumb in his left ear, and walk out sideways. A real live thief will go to the main post office, lay down cash, and rent a box under any name which happens to strike his fancy. If he does not want to take any chance on handwriting or latents, he will take the order form away and have somebody else fill it out for him, and bring it back in gloved hand. If it is a one-shot payoff, he will get a hungry bellhop to go open the box with the key, and then he will. tail the kid through the streets until he is certain the kid is not under observation. If it is on the installment plan he is going to be certain enough that his pigeon will not get restless so that he can risk a bus ride to the main post office to clean out the box whenever it seems convenient. Otherwise the cleanest one I ever saw took place in a big busy New York restaurant during the lunch rush on a weekday. He was carrying the package as directed. He got a phone call. A muffled voice told him to take his package to the checkroom and ask the girl to put it with number 308, and go right from there to the men’s room before returning to the dining room, and not to fake out because he was being watched. I got to the checkroom girls perhaps ten minutes after one of them had given the coat, hat, and parcel to number 308. They could not remember one single fragment of description. They were indignant to think I expected them to. Obviously he had checked his coat and hat, then used a pay booth to phone the restaurant number and have my pigeon paged. At Shor’s you can see the check counter from the pay phones. He timed it right, when whole flocks of lookalikes were heading back from lunch to the Big Media. And he needed the money.
“Penny?” said Gloria Geis.
“Do you think you could make a chance for me to have a little chat with Anna Ottlo?”
“Why? What about?”
“Maybe I want to see if she’d like to cook aboard a houseboat for a single gentleman, quiet, respectable, appreciative.”
“Oh, go to hell, McGee. Okay. I’ll remember a phone call I have to make.”
I went sauntering toward the good smells. Anna Ottlo looked anachronistic in that mechanized, stainless-steel kitchen. Broad, hefty, florid, with white hair and blue apron and twinkling eyes, she looked like a television commercial grandmaw who was going to tell me how to get the stains out of the sink, or grow coffee on mountains, or get rid of that oily taste. Real grandmothers don’t look quite like that anymore. I think it is the water-skiing that keeps them firmed up.
“You like roast pork, sir? Yah?” she said beaming.
“I think you could make old floor mats taste good, Anna.”
“To the big strong man, all taste wnderful the foods.”
I leaned against a hotel-sized refrigerator, drink in hand. “Had any word yet from Gretchen?” I asked.
She stopped slicing a tomato, turned and stared at me, her smile still there, but without meaning. “Nein!” she said. “Nothing. No Gott damn goot, that girl. Trink beer, throw away money, play with mens. Years I hear nothing. Not even how many babies. Gone off someplace. Some man, yah?”
“She’s got a husband, hasn’t she?”
“This Gorba? From jails? Hah! Best she can get. Another mans wink the eye, off she goes, babies and all. Now I forget. All done. Over. I said give me the babies. I can take care, raise goot. More time you have for beer and betting money and boyfriend. Big fight. No goot, my only child, that one. Bad life.” She tapped her temple, shook her head sadly. “Not much bright.”
After dinner Glory told me that she wouldn’t be staying there as long as she had planned. “I’d be completely alone. Anna wants to leave, after Christmas.”
“New job?”
“Not right away. Later, probably. She says she wants to go and visit an old friend. Mrs. Kemmer, the mother of the boy Gretchen married. She’s somewhere in Florida, and Anna wants to spend the winter with her, and maybe stay down there if she can find work, after she’s had a rest. All this hasn’t been exactly easy on her either. I guess I’m going to have to find an apartment, and something to do. I’ll have to stay in Chicago until… things are settled. But when I can leave, I’m never coming back. I don’t think Heidi and Roger will miss me dreadfully, do you?”
“They’ll brood about it.”
“Trav? Are you finding out anything?”
“It’s at that point where I don’t really know. I don’t want to talk about it until I have something worth telling you. Or asking you.”
She tried to smile. It was a ghastly grimace. “I dreamed you were dead, Trav. It scared me.”
“It scares me too, but nobody has figured out a good way to avoid it. The guy who does will clean up.”
“Fort knew when. You and I don’t. I guess that’s the big difference. All we know is Sometime.”
“That’s what you know when you’ve grown up. The ones who never grow up keep thinking Never. Not me, boss. Take those others, but don’t take me.”
She hunched her shoulders. “Yesterday wasn’t so great. I couldn’t find any meaning in anything. I felt lost. I kept thinking I could find my way back if I took just a little more of that. But I didn’t know how it would hit me. It might be too strange. I even thought of trying to get you to come out and be with me.”
“Don’t go freaking around alone, Glory. Ever. How much of that have you got left?”
“Just a little bottle. It’s in a diluted form so that each drop out of a medicine dropper is fifty micrograms. If I had to guess I’d say there’s a hundred drops in the bottle.”
“Flush it down the toilet.”
“Maybe I will. A little later. When I know I won’t need it ever again.”
“Why would you need it?”
“Because yesterday I thought it would be easier to be dead than be alive.”
“I guess it would be a lot easier. No decisions. No headaches. No constipation.”
“Sometimes you make me feel just as silly as I very probably am.”
Fifteen minutes after I left to drive back to the city I felt as silly as a girl myself. It can happen when you get too cute. It can happen when you have a memory a little too fresh in your mind of disillusioning a muscular and hairy karate expert. I saw a movement in the bushes where there should have been no movement. I saw it in my side view mirror as I drove out of the driveway. So I drove briskly off into the curving maze of Lake Pointe, circled, left the car in a dark place near a house without lights, and went skulking back.