“No thanks. I’ll try again.”
Meyer had gone over to B-80 to look at the thirty-one-foot Rawson. After that he had an appointment with the insurance agent. Then he was going to go buy clothes. And get a haircut.
I roamed around the houseboat, seeking out small chores, trying not to notice the big ones that needed doing. Restless, restless. I knew too much About Cody T. W Pittler, and at the same time not nearly enough. I wanted to bounce what we knew about him off some knowledgeable person, and I suddenly realized that the ideal person would be Laura Honneker. About eleven years ago, after she had been practicing her profession of psychiatry in Fort Lauderdale for a little over two years, an unstable patient had broken into her office and made off with a batch of patient files. Though in the files she had referred to the patients by initials other than their own, she had foolishly left her crossindex in the same file cabinet and he had taken that too.
Her patients had begun to complain. They were outraged at the calls they were receiving from the thief. Along with all the usual dirty words, he was telling them details of their lives known only to them and to Dr. Honneker.
She did not want to take the matter to the police. She did not want the responsibility of what that would do to the patient who had taken the files. A mutual friend told her about me, and she asked me to come see her. I explained that I attempted to recover things of value which could not be recovered in any normal manner, and I usually kept half the value. She said that in one sense the files had no value, but in another sense, if the misuse of them destroyed her in Fort Lauderdale professionally, they were very valuable. So we agreed that I would bill her according to the difficulty I encountered.
She was about my age, maybe two years younger. She was a big Norse-looking woman, fair and well scrubbed, with a trick of establishing very direct eye contact, her eyes a skeptic green. She was tall and aglow with health. I found out that she ran miles on the beach at first light every day, back when it wasn’t dangerous.
I phoned in and brought her crazy man to the office the next day, files and all. He was a heavy little man who believed the world was out to get him, and the best defense was to be offensive. He sat in the corner like a naughty child while she went through the files to be certain they were all there. She asked me if it had been a lot of trouble, and I smiled at the heavy little man and said, “No trouble at all.”
She ordered him into the next room, and he trudged in and closed the door without making a sound.
“What would be a fair fee for your trouble, Mr. McGee?” she had asked.
The question seemed to be put in a challenging way. So I had replied, “We should set up an appointment and negotiate it, don’t you think?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“We could negotiate over dinner.”
She thought that over, smiled, agreed. We set a date. I picked her up at her place. It was a pleasant evening. We had a lot of attitudes in common. The way we negotiated it, she bought the dinner and I bought the wine. I sensed that she had all her defenses ready in case I threatened to presume too much. When we said good night at her door, I said I would give her a ring sometime. She said that would be nice. But we both knew it wouldn’t happen.
About six months later I went to a big party at a conspicuously large and expensive house on the bay. I do not generally go to cocktail parties. I forget why I went to that one. Some people named Hunter gave the party. I arrived late and found, among the celebrants, one Dr. Laura Honneker, solemnly, quietly smashed. She walked and talked very very carefully. She told me in a slow and precise speech pattern that she did not drink, but that the previous night, at 3:00 A.M., a woman she thought she was helping had put the bedside gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger, thus awakening her husband in the ugliest possible way. So she had decided to have a cocktail. Or two.
I soon discovered she had been targeted by Ron Robinette, who was then living aboard a half million worth of motor sailer over at Bahia Mar, with an income from mysterious sources. He was big and ruddy with hair dyed black, teeth capped white, a lot of chest hair showing, and a constant smile underneath his little mean eyes. He hovered close and managed to keep touching her, establishing management and control. I saw him muttering into her ear and saw her shaking her head no. But Robinette manages to score in situations much less promising than this one.
So I worked it out and went over to them and said, “Time we took off, Laura honey, or we’ll be late for dinner with the others.”
“Others?” she said.
I got her by the elbow, and she resisted for just a moment and then came along, docile and unsteady.
“Now hold it, McGee,” Robinette said, following closely. He put his hand on my shoulder.
I spun, shrugging his hand off, and said, “Screw around with me, Ronnie, and I’ll do exactly what I did last time.”
He tried to bring himself up to the point of actual resistance, but his memory was too good. He shrugged and gave me an evil look and turned away. Ten seconds after I handed her into the passenger side of my old Rolls pickup, she passed out. I wanted to take her to her place, but I couldn’t rouse her. I rifled her purse and found her apartment keys, but they had no number on them. I knew the building but not the number. So I took her back to the Busted Flush, toted her aboard-she was a considerable burden-and laid her down on the bed in the spare cabin. I eased her shoes off. She was so slack I wondered if she had something else beside too much booze, some kind of illness. I took her pulse. It was a heavy, slow ta-bump, ta-bump, ta-bump. She didn’t feel feverish. So I left her there. I fixed myself a light supper and then read until after eleven.
Before I went to bed, I looked in at her. She had pulled her dress off and dropped it on the floor. I put a blanket over her and left a robe and a disposable toilet kit on the chair near the bed.
By midmorning, when I was on the second half of the paper and the second cup of coffee, I heard the shower. Soon she came out wearing the robe, her head wrapped in a white towel.
She said she felt rotten. She turned gray at the offer of eggs and settled for coffee, black. She seemed very ill at ease. Finally she said, “What am I doing here anyway?”
“Nursing a hangover, I think,” I told her. And I told her about snatching her away from one Ron Robinette, thinking to drive her home, but having her pass out on me.
“Robinette. Big fellow with a red face. Smiles a lot?”
“The same.”
“What was wrong with him taking me home?”
“I thought you deserved better. After all, you are an old acquaintance of mine, right? And Robinette has a case of what you professional people call satyriasis. You’d have been screwed lame by now, conscious or unconscious, sitting, kneeling, lying down, or standing on one leg. You’d walk funny for a week. And I didn’t touch you, except to tote you from my pickup to your bed.”
I felt a lot of tension go out of her, tension and suspicion. “Oh,” she said. “And thanks. Who took my dress off?”
“It had to be you, because it wasn’t me, Laura.”
“I can’t even remember,” she said. “I guess you saved me from an ugly experience, which would have been my own fool fault. I was depressed. I hardly ever drink. I had some martinis. Then things got kind of blurred. It isn’t fair. A man can get depressed and drink too much and he… he isn’t vulnerable the way a woman is.”
When her hair was reasonably dry, she combed it out, went in and dressed, and I drove her back to her car. Before she got out of Miss Agnes, she frowned at me and said, “If you hadn’t known me at all, would you have rescued me from that man?”
“I doubt it. I can’t run around under the trees catching everything that falls out of the nests, Doctor. Why should I steer Robinette to somebody else who might have just as bad a time?”