I got up and squeezed past them and sat on the other side of Susan. When I put my arm around her shoulders she flinched violently and moved one hand enough to peer at me. In the reflected light of the noisy movie I could see that her eye was puffed and discolored.
“I’m a friend,” I said. “We want to help you, Susie. Doctor Geis told Mrs. Stanyard to give you any help you might need. Why won’t you go to her apartment?”
“He’ll look there,” she said in a very small voice. “If someone hurt you, we should report it to the police.”
“No. Please. All I asked her for is some money, so I can go to a hotel. That’s all. I can’t stay with her.”
“She shouldn’t be alone,” Janice said.
I thought of a wry possibility and said, “If she’ll have you, Susan, will you stay with a friend of mine, a woman who lives alone?”
“Who?” Janice asked.
“If she knows, I can’t stay there,” Susan said. “I’ve been telling Mrs. Stanyard. I don’t want her to know where I’ll be.”
“Don’t be idiotic!” Janice said crossly.
“He could make her tell,” Susan said to me.
“Maybe it isn’t exactly idiotic,” I told Janice. “Sit tight. Let me check.”
I found the phones and looked up the number. After the fifth ring, Heidi Trumbill answered in a blurred, irritable voice.
“Travis McGee, Heidi.”
“Who? Who?”
“I saw you Saturday. John Andrus wrote a note to you about me on the back of his card.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. How could I forget? Dear Mark has been babbling about you ever since. He was very taken.” I heard her yawn, a very rich, gasping, jaw-creaking yawn. “This better not be a social call, McGee.”
“It isn’t. I’m making a little progress with our problem.”
“Really!”
“And because what I am doing is in your interest, I have to ask you for a little help.”
“Such as?”
“A young female is involved. She’s been roughed up. She needs a safe place to hide out, to hole up and get some rest and recuperation. She has some information I want and I won’t be able to get it out of her until she feels safe and unwinds a little. Miss X. No names. No questions. No answers. You have room for her there. Okay?”
“Are you drunk by any chance?”
“Not noticeably.”
‘What do you think I am? Some kind of rest camp? Some kind of a house- mother?“
“Heidi, I think that in many respects you are a silly, arrogant, pretentious bitch. But I also think you are probably a patsy for starving kittens and busted birds.”
“And painters who can’t paint? And sculptors who can’t sculpt? Say it all, McGee.”
“If the spare bed isn’t made up, make it up. We’ll be along in a bit.”
“You are so sure of yourself, damn your eyes. How soon?”
“Half an hour.”
“See you,” she said and hung up. I got back to the mouth of the aisle just as the marching-into-thesunset music swelled strong, and the thin gray line of customers began getting up to walk through the spilled popcorn and paper cups toward their shrunken realities outside. My two females got up and we headed out of the palace. Susan was in a blue cloth coat and she kept her mouth and chin ducked down into a concealing billow of blue knit scarf, and kept her face turned away from the public as much as possible.
Before we went out into the icy night I stopped them and said, “You’ve got a car Janice?”
“Yes.”
“If you have any company, what happened was you got a call from the Trailways station. It was a girl. She told you Dr. Geis had said you would help her. She didn’t give her name. You went there and she was gone. You waited around, then decided to see the movie. You thought she might be one of the Doctor’s patients.”
“Where will she be? Where are you taking her?”
“A safe place, where she’ll get rest. and care. I’ll be in touch.”
She hesitated, then touched the girl on the arm. “You can trust me, dear. I’ll help you any way I can. And you can trust Mr. McGee; You have to tell someone what kind of trouble you’re in.” When Susan Kemmer did not answer, Janice gave a helpless little shrug and walked out. I gave her thirty seconds, then pushed the door open for the girl. I’d parked a block away. I held her upper arm; walked her into the wind. She was limping.
Heidi buzzed the downstairs door open, and when we got to the red door at the second-floor rear, she was standing in the open doorway, the lighted room behind her silhouetting her. She took Susan’s coat and scarf and laid them aside. I had Susan sit in a chair and I said, “For reasons I won’t go into, we’ll keep this whole thing anonymous. Friends helping friends. Miss Brown, meet Mrs. Jones. Let’s get a good look at you, dear.”
I tilted the opaque lampshade to put the full light on her, and with my fingertips I lifted her reluctant chin. Heidi, looking in from the side, made a little whimper of concern. Young lips mashed, puffed, and scabbed. Nose intact. Eggplant bruises on the cheekbones, a quarter-inch slice of one blue eye visible between puffed flesh, and a slightly wider segment of the other. They looked out at us calmly enough. Left brow slightly split. Forehead bruise shaded with saffron.
“Yesterday?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Yesterday morning. Real early.”
I put one hand behind her head and with the fingers of the other hand prodded at her cheekbones and at the brows to see if there was any give or shift of broken bone. She winced but endured.
“Double vision? Any nausea today?”
“No sir.”
“Are you hungry?”
“I… don’t know. My teeth are loose over on this side.”
“Open wide.”
I wiggled them with a fingertip. Four in a row on the lower jaw, right side. “You won’t lose them. They’ll tighten up again, kid.”
Heidi said she had the ingredients for an eggnog, and she brought me some cotton pads and rubbing alcohol along with adhesive tape and scissors before she went to mix it. I had the girl stretch out on the couch and I knelt beside her. I loosened the caked blood on the split brow, wiped it clean, dried it, then used the strips of adhesive scissored to narrow widths to pull the split together. She sucked air a few times, but she was pleasantly stoical.
Heidi was able to produce a mild sedative. The girl took it with the tall eggnog. When I was able to look past the battered face I saw that she was practically type-cast, an almost perfect fraulein type, fair and blue-eyed, plump as a little pigeon, round sweet face. She should milk cows, and hop around in the Bavarian village festival in her dirndl to the accordion music while her boyfriend blew foam off his stein and slapped his leather pants and yodeled once in a while.
I decided it was no time to question her. Heidi took her in to bed her down and came back in about ten minutes. She wore a navy-blue floorlength flannel robe, starkly tailored. Again I wondered about that total lack of physical communication and awareness between us. It was incredible that a mouth curved thusly, eyes placed so, body with that look of slenderness and ripeness and power, hair and eyes gleaming with animal health, provocative grace in every movement; incredible that it could all add up to absolute neuter.
“I think she was asleep before I closed the door,” Heidi said. “The child is exhausted in every way. Her body is terribly bruised. The worst bruise is on her thigh. It looks as if she was kicked. I asked her who did it and she just looked at me.”
“No questions. Part of the deal. It’s good of you to take her in. But what’s with this child thing? How much older are you? Seven years?”
“Seven hundred. How long will she be here?”
“Two days, three, four. I don’t know. Just don’t let her take off before i get here in the morning. She might want to:”
She drifted about, touching small things, straightening them. She turned and looked at me. “You’re really strange, Travis McGee. You took it absolutely for granted I’d take her in. I just don’t do things like that.”