“Next item. Neither Heidi nor Jeanie brought up the Gretchen thing. And they had their chance.”
“They never knew about that.”
“Now to get back to Jeanie Geis. She was terrified, and then she lied about it. Why?”
“I think I can answer that, Trav” She explained that nearly two years back, when their eldest child was five, there had been an attempt to kidnap him. The boy, Branton Fortner Geis, named after both grandfathers, had actually been taken, but the kidnapper had evidently lost his nerve because after he had driven the boy all the way into the city, he
. had abandoned him in Grant Park near the fountain. The boy had been driven around for some time, because it gave his parents about three hours of terror before a park policeman took him in and he was identified.
“Since then it has been a thing with Jeanie. She takes the kids wherever she can, and doesn’t let them out of her sight. She even got a pistol permit, and she spent hours and hours on the police range; and she’s an expert now. Their home has all kinds of burglar alarms and floodlights, and their sitter is a retired cop. He has a license to carry a gun too, and he takes them back and forth to school. I think she goes a little too far. I don’t think it’s what you could call a normal childhood for them. Roger is just sort of… tolerant of Jeanie’s precautions. I guess you can’t blame her too much. But it’s such a twitch with her, I guess that’s the first thing that would enter her mind if you walked up to her and said you wanted to talk about money. You aren’t exactly a clerical type, Mister McGee. You are huge and it is obvious you have been whacked upon, and you look as though you damn well enjoyed returning the favor.”
“An obvious criminal type?”
“To - Jeanie, for a couple of seconds. Until her mind went to work on it, and she got a better look at you. ° Nobody would walk up to her in broad daylight with all those people around and say Lady I got one of your kids.”
“So why did she lie later?”
“A white lie, dear, to avoid telling you what she thought you were. It wouldn’t be terribly flattering. Besides, she’s a little punchy about the precautions. She gets a certain amount of snide comment from the other mothers.”
“It explains why the maid wouldn’t unchain the door or answer questions. But, baby, it does not explain her earnest sales talk about let’s all forget the whole thing. Why don’t you take Glory to Florida, and so forth and so forth.”
“How do you explain it then?”
“I don’t know. When I get reactions I don’t understand it’s like an itch I can’t reach. I have to make the logical or illogical connection between six hundred thousand gone into thin air and somebody being kidnapped. When did the boy get grabbed?”
“Let me think. I have to remember what we were… oh, we’d just come back from New York Fort read a paper at a medical convention. It was quite warm… May. That was it. A year ago last May.”
“Two months later Fort started cashing in his securities. What about this? Suppose somebody got a message to Jeanie. Come up with lots of cash or we’ll take one of your kids. So she comes running to Fort. And… No, there’s two big holes in that.”
“Like what?”
“One. She’d tell Roger. He’d know that’s where the money went, and he wouldn’t be making such a jackass of himself about it. Two. Fort was certainly smart enough to know it would be an awful lot cheaper to get Jeanie and the kids out of reach. Fly them to Switzerland for example, and put the cops to work on the problem. I suppose the kid was too little to give any description of the person or persons who took him riding, or the car they took him in.”
“Branty said it was a nice man who sang a lot.”
“That doesn’t sound like a nervous type.”
“Somebody saw the car driving away. They said it was a blue Dodge. I think it was about a week later they found what could have been the same car, but they couldn’t be sure. It had been stolen from a shopping center the morning of the day the boy was taken, and they found it in a big used-car lot out near Midway Airport with no plates on it, and no fingerprints or anything. Nobody could say how long it had been there.”
“It doesn’t fit.”
“What doesn’t?”
“The car is clouted in a very professional way, from the kind of place where the pros work, and it is unloaded in a very professional way, as if it had been iron they’d used in a bank job. But the man gets nervous and changes his mind and leaves the kid off. It couldn’t have been the same car, Glory. That’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
Her mouth trembled for a moment and then she smiled. Her eyes were shiny. “We better face it, McGee. Nothing about this whole thing is ever going to make any sense, and for the rest of my life people are going to keep an eye on me, just in case.
At quarter to ten after Glory had stashed the dishes, we tried Janice Stanyard again. She picked up the phone on the first ring.
“Janice? This is Gloria Geis.”
“Hello! I’ve been wondering about you, dear. I was wondering if I should ask you to come in and have lunch with me some day.”
“I’d like that, I really would. I tried to get you earlier.”
“Today? I was over in Elgin.”
“How is he?”
“Fine. He had a bad cold but it’s nearly gone now. What did you call me about, dear?”
“Well… I want to introduce you to a friend of mine from Florida. He’s on the line too. Travis McGee. Janice Stanyard.”
“Hello, Mrs. Stanyard.”
“How do you do, Mr. McGee.” Her voice sounded puzzled. It was a good voice, a firm and nicely articulated contralto.
“Trav would like to come and talk to you, Janice.”
“He would? What about?”
Gloria started to explain, but I broke in and said, “It’s just a little confusion about Doctor Geis’ estate, and Glory thinks you might have some answers.”
“But I wouldn’t know a thing about that!” “Sometimes the way these things work out, Mrs. Stanyard, you can help out without realizing you can. I’d just like to drop by anytime tomorrow at your convenience for a few minutes.”
“But…”
“We’d both be very grateful to you.”
“Well… would three tomorrow afternoon be all right?”
“Just fine.”
“Will you come too, Gloria?” she asked.
“Just me,” I said quickly, “and now I’ll hang up and let you people fix up that lunch date.”
As I was leaving, I remembered my other question. I asked Glory who had done the investigation work for Fort when Gretchen had asked him for more money. “He dealt with a Mr. Smith. But I don’t know the name of the company.” We went to his study and looked up Smith in his address book and found a Francisco Smith, hyphen, Allied Services, in the Monadnock Block on West Jackson. I checked the yellow pages and found Allied Services under Investigators.
A funny thing happened to me on the way to the hotel room. I was a long way from the elevators. When I approached the last right-angle turn before my room, I came upon a couple standing and talk ing in low tones. I heard her say in wheedling tones, “Whey ya yuh room key, honeh? It hey-yuv the nummah onto it.”
He peered at me and said, in surprisingly articulate tones, slightly Bostonian, “Sir, I have a distressing concept worthy of scholarly research, and it should appeal to anyone of conjectural turn of mind. Have you a moment?”
I stopped and said, “Conjecture away, friend.”
“Is there a sense of entrapment in being locked into your own century without chance of escape? What is the effect on the psyche? Those of us born in the first two decades of this century are subliminally aware, my good sir, of that marker on the grave which will say nineteen hundred and this to nineteen hundred and that. Do you follow me?” He was fifty-something, excellent suit, topcoat, shoes, hat, shirt. But the hat was dented and sat askew, stubble on the jowls, necktie awry. His face had the slack sweatiness of heavy drinking, and he had trouble focusing his eyes on me.