“I can’t imagine Lysa Dean in a situation where she thinks she’d need me.”
I thought I saw a little glimmer of distaste on the rather somber face of Miss Efficiency. “She’d like to talk to you about it.”
“Let me see. Walter did a script for her once upon a time.”
“They’ve been friends ever since.”
“Would you say her problem fits into the way I operate?”
She frowned. “I think so. I don’t know all the details.”
“Aren’t you in her confidence?”
“On most things. But as I said, I don’t know all the details of this. It’s been a personal kind of thing. But it is… something she wants to get back. And it’s valuable to her.”
“I can’t promise anything. But I’ll listen to her. When?”
“Now, if you could manage it, Mr. McGee.” The symphony ended. I got up and went and turned the set off. When I came back Miss Holtzer said, “We’d rather you didn’t mention this to anyone. Even her name.”
“I was just going to run out and tell a few friends.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve gotten so used to trying to protect her. She’s beginning a promo for Winds of Chance, starting Monday. The world premiere will be next Saturday night in eight Miami theaters. We came early hoping for a chance to see you. She’s staying at the house of a friend now. She’ll move over to the hotel penthouse on the beach tomorrow evening. She’ll have a full schedule, starting Monday.”
“Have you worked for her very long?”
“Two years. A little over two years. Why?”
“I wondered what you call yourself.”
“Personal secretary.”
“She tote a big staff around?”
“Not really. On the road like this there’s just me and her personal maid, her hairdresser, and the man from the agency. Really, I would rather you asked her the questions. Could you… get ready to go see her?”
“In Miami?”
“Yes. I have a car waiting, Mr. McGee. If… I could make a call?”
I took her into the master stateroom. The phone extension is in a compartment in the headboard. She looked up the number in a black leather note book from her big purse. She dialed the operator and made it a credit card call. “Mary Catherine?” she said. “Please tell her that our friend is coming back with me. No, that’s all. Pretty soon now. Thank you, dear.”
She stood up and looked around the room. I could not tell if the huge bed repelled her or amused her. I was tempted to explain it. It startled me that I should want to tell her that it had been part of the furnishings when I had won the craft in a long poker siege in Palm Beach.
The man wanted another advance to stay in the game, this last time putting up his Brazilian mistress as collateral, under the plausible assumption that she too went with the boat, but his friends saved me the delicate problem of refusal by leading him gently away from the game.
Miss Holtzer did not look particularly austere. She just looked as if she might put people in handy categories. She decided that she would pour herself some coffee while I changed, if that was permitted. I put on the very infrequent necktie, and a fairly heavy suit.
When we went back into the lounge, Skeeter said, “Hey, both of you look at this lousy mouse a minute.”
She showed us the drawing just completed. “This is when Quimby finds out for sure he’s really a mouse. That cat just told him. He’s crushed. He thought he was a real small pedigree dog. But I think maybe he looks more scared than crushed. When you look at it, is it as if he’s scared of the cat?”
“It’s absolutely charming!” Dana Holtzer said. “What a horrid thing, really, to find out that all along you’ve been a mouse.”
“Quimby can’t adjust,” Skeeter said.
They smiled nicely at each other. “Dana Holtzer, Mary Keith-known as Skeeter. We have to run. Skeet, make sure you lock up if I don’t get back before you go.”
“Sure. What’s bugging him is all that trouble learning to bark.”
“Forage if you get hungry.”
But she was back at work insulated and intent. Miss Holtzer and I headed into the wind, toward the parking areas. She said, “That’s a dear strange girl, and very talented. Is she a special friend?”
“They’ve just painted her apartment so I told her she could work on the boat. She has a deadline.”
Within another three steps, Miss Holtzer had tucked the escaping loose ends of personality back into her executive secretary shell. I had a memory of how pleasure in the mouse had brought her alive, younger and surprisingly more vivid.
But it was not in her manner or habit to give anything away. She would do her job, reserved, armored, efficient. She was not being paid to react to people, nor to show her own reactions, if any.
A glittering black Chrysler limousine was waiting, tended by a middle-aged man in dovegray uniform with silver buttons. He touched his cap and opened the door for us. He looked like a television U. S. Senator. And he had that uncanny ability of the skilled chauffeur to drift a big car through traffic with such rhythm that the bunglings of other drivers seemed like an untidy and unimportant mirage.
“Miss Dean’s car?” I asked.
“Oh, no. It belongs to the people where we’re staying.”
“When did you get in?”
“Yesterday.”
“Incognito?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a good trick.”
“Chartered airplane,” she said.
There was glass between us and the barbered neck of the skilled driver. Her face was turned away from me, looking placidly out at the gray day.
“Miss Holtzer.”
“Yes?” she said, turning with polite query.
“I’d like to know if I am right or wrong. I get this impression of quiet disapproval.”
I thought I saw a flicker of bleak amusement. “Is that sort of thing so important to you, Mr. McGee?”
“I’ve never thought so.”
“Mr. McGee, in the past two years I’ve been sent on so many curious errands, I would have become quite worn out if I’d tried to make value judgments about them.”
“Then you avoid having opinions?”
“Except where it is expected of me. She pays for opinions, Mr. McGee. Legal opinions, tax opinions, artistic opinions. She listens and makes up her own mind. She doesn’t particularly care for volunteer opinions.”
“And the job pays well?”
“It compensates me for what I do.”
“I guess I better give up.”
With an almost imperceptible shrug, she turned again to look out her window, presenting me with the nice modeling of the strong line of her throat, the neatness of an ear set into a casualness of cropped black curls, a fringe of black lashes visible beyond the smooth line of her cheek a faint and unobtrusive and understated fragrance of mild perfume.
Two
THE HOUSE was on a private island, over a small causeway from one of the main causeways between Miami and Miami Beach. A gardener swung the ornate gate open for us. We turned into a winding crunch of gravel between lush and carefully tailored jungle, rounded a buttress of pink and white stucco, parked in a small walled area by a garden.
It seemed to be a back stairway. Miss Dana Holtzer led me up half a flight and into a shadowed hallway. I sat on a Babylonian throne under a black gleam of hanging armor. There was no sound in the house. None. She came back, hatless and purseless, and beckoned to me with all the gravity of a head nurse. I followed her down a paneled and carpeted corridor. She rapped on a fortress door, pushed it open for me and stood aside, saying, “She’ll be with you in a moment.”
She closed the door and left me alone in what seemed to be a guest suite. I was in a long room with a high ceiling. Plum carpet. Paneling. Seven arched windows along one wall, high narrow windows with leaded panes, deep sills. Black Spanish furniture.