“So what did happen?”
“Somebody as essentially tough as Fortner Geis found some leverage that would work on Fortner Geis, and they were smart enough to stay back out of range while they squeezed him. And he was fatalist enough to adjust, to accept a lesser evil. Next step: accepting Fort as the kind of man he was, that leverage had to come from something in the past, some place where their lives crossed. Somebody has a very large and nervous amount of cash. If they were hard enough and smart enough to squeeze it out of Fort, they must have some very good idea of how to get the juice out of it without alerting the IRS computers.”
John Andrus nodded slowly. “The more you have, the easier it is to add more without attracting attention.”
“And if you can’t do it that way, you have to have a lot of patience and control. You have to sit on it and then have some logical reason to pull up stakes and go elsewhere. Then, if you can get to Brazil or Turkey, and move very carefully, you can dig yourself in as a rich man without creating too much suspicion.”
“Yes. It could be done,” he said.
“Another thing interests me. The man applying the squeeze apparently knew or had some way of knowing how much Fort had. Otherwise I think Fort would have come up with, say, a quarter of a million and then made the squeezer believe he had it all.”
Andrus began staring at me with a curious expression. “Mr. McGee, a lot of people have done a lot of wondering about this whole thing. And I’ve sat in on most of it. So you come along and for the first time I am beginning to get some kind of an image of what the person or persons had to be like. A very vague image, of course. But somehow… things seem to be narrowing down for the first time. Did Gloria tell me you’re in the marine supply business?”
“Supply and salvage. Maybe I have a talent for larceny. A great parlor trick, thinking like a thief.”
“Are you going to… pursue your theories?”
“I might look around a little, sure. Just as a favor for an old friend.”
He put his papers away and snapped the catches cm the dispatch case. “Is there any way I could make things easier for you? Unofficially”
“Did you have something in mind?”
“I don’t think any friend of Mrs. Geis’ is going to get any casual conversation out of Heidi Trumbill or Roger Geis.” He took out two calling cards and with a slender gold pen wrote on the back of each, “Any cooperation you can give Mr. McGee will be appreciated-John Andrus.”
“Thanks. Little talent for larceny yourself?”
“If there is, I hope to God they never notice it down at the Trust Department. Or run across one of those cards.”
After we’d said good-bye to him, I went walking on the lake shore with Glory. She told me it was turning into a beautiful day. I told her that twenty-five more degrees would make a Floridian happier. Then I told her what John Andrus had said about cutting her expenses by giving up the house.
“Oh, I suppose that’s very logical and bankerly,” she said. “But Fort built it for us. The happiest time of my life was right here. Fort is here too, when I wake up, in those minutes before I remember he’s gone. And he’s in the next room, or around a corner, or on his way home. Those things hurt, Trav. They sting like mad. But when I leave here, then he’s really gone forever. How else could I… buy the feel of having him near? The first insurance check came December third, last week. One every month for the rest of my life. Four hundred dollars: I’ll put that into the kitty to hang on to the house a little longer. I’m not even going to think of what comes next, or plan anything, until I am all packed and on my way down the road. Don’t expect me to be practical and logical, dear. Okay?”
“Okay. John Andrus seems fond of you.”
“I know. In a very nice and special and, thank God, unsexy way. He has an adored wife and teenage daughters. I think I was a refreshing experience to him because he finally realized I was absolutely sincere in not giving a dang about money, really. Oh, it’s kind of delicious to have it. But too many of the things I like best don’t cost a thing. At first poor John seemed to think I was trying to knock the Establishment. We were standing in the yard a month ago. One of the last leaves came off the maple. So I picked it up and made him look very closely and carefully at it. I made him see it. Then I asked him what it was worth, without cracking a smile. I could almost see the light bulb going on in the air over his head, like cartoons. Then, bless you, I fed him that speech you made a lifetime ago on Sanibel Island. If there was one sunset every twenty years, how would people react to them? If there were ten seashells in all the world, what would they be worth? If people could make love just once a year, how carefully would they pick their mates? So now John thinks I am very nice in spite of being quite mad.”
“I had to hold the world out to you the way you held the leaf out, Miss Glory, and make you look at it. Question. Does this hotel serve lunch?”
“Anna wouldn’t miss the chance. She goes around smiling, she’s so happy to have somebody around here who eats.”
“What will happen to her when you close the house?”
“From what has happened so far, I imagine you will see the most noted socialite hostesses from the entire lake shore skulking around in the brush and crawling across the dunes, with money in one hand,and leg irons in the other, wearing fixed glassy smiles. Anna Ottlo can name her own ticket.”
It wasn’t until cocktail time in front of the fireplace that I got around to the blackmail attempt John Andrus had thought more fitting for Glory to tell me.
“Heavens, he could have told you! He’s really very circumspect. But… I’m glad he didn’t, really. Becuuse I think that you might not understand just how it happened. Fort, all his life, was very attractive to women. I guess he made every woman feel… valuable. He listened. He was interested. He liked them.
“Travis, I have to go way back to what life was like for him with Glenna, the things he told me about their marriage. They were very close. They were very important to each other. It was wretched timing for them that as soon as he got out of the army-he was about the same age then that Roger is now-and he and Glenna were just one month apart, they found out Glenna had congestive heart disease, and had maybe had it for some time without knowing it. Let me see now, Roger was eight and Heidi must have been four, because when she died three years later, Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven.
“Because Glenna had some money, they’d been able to marry and have children when Fort was going through the intern and resident thing, and they’d been able to have a nice home in the city, with Fort devoting more time, both before and after the war, to staff surgery and instruction than to surgery for private fees. He came back to find that Anna Ottlo had become indispensable to Glenna, and that her daughter Gretchen, who was fourteen then, had become almost an older sister to Roger and Heidi.”