I didn’t realize he could get those eyebrows so high. “Who the hell do you think you are!”
“T. for Travis McGee. I know. You’ll buy the ground I’m standing on and have me torn down. I am an old buddy of the Widow Geis. Doctor Fort shoved the first legal team into the fray and Miss Heidi got very well. Am I getting past that hair in your ears? I wouldn’t want you to leave town without answering a question. Are you a miserable enough bastard to have found a way to gouge Heidi’s winnings back out of her poor old dad’s hide?”
“Gouge? Gouge?”
“There’s no estate left.”
“I know.”
“Now how would you know Gadgey?”
“Her brother Roger was wringing his hands about it. He’s a goddam stuffed shirt and… What gives you the right to ask me questions anyway?”
“Because I am helping the Widow Geis find out where all the money went.”
“All the money? For God’s sake, McGee, sure Heidi took a pretty good cut. I’ve still got eleven million in tax-exempt municipals, if you can comprehend what I’m talking about.”
“You’re talking about at least three hundred and thirty thousand a year you don’t even have to report on the good old ten-forty. Cut the shit, Trumbill. If it was a hundred and ten million, you still couldn’t impress me. You can afford to buy me a drink in your own club, can’t you? A double Plymouth gin on ice, plain. I’ll wait right here while you go make the arrangements.”
I watched him head for the bar and I wondered how far he could be pushed. He did not lumber. He had a springy and youthful stride. As he approached bearing my drink, I heard him chuckling. He handed it to me, bowed, and said, “Golly, sir, gee whiz, now you’ve got me so terrified I can’t think straight.”
“Thank you for the drink, Mr. Trumbill.”
“My pleasure, Mr. McGee,” he said. “Let’s sit in the lounge and get acquainted. There’s no particular reason why I give a goddam about your opinion about anything, but there’s one thing that needs correcting.”
I followed him to two wingback chairs with a small table between them, angled to look out at the scenery and provide privacy for conversation. “You have met Heidi?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“The ice queen. The snow maiden. But when you look at her, everything points the other way. When I married her three years ago, I thought I had the optimum solution. McGee, I am not a locker-room sex hero. I just happened to be born with a hell of a lot of sexual drive and capacity. Sleeping around is a damned bore. Everything about her looks as if she was made for it. Fantastic body. Healthy as a field hand. The way she walks, the timbre of her voice, the shape of her hands, it’s all provocative and invitational. I. thought to myself, hell, Gadge, there’s the answer. She was twenty-two and I was forty-eight. She’d be thirty-five when I was sixtyone, and she’d be getting ready to slow down a little when I damn well had to. But finding out she was a twenty-two-year-old virgin should have told me something. Let me tell you, I worked like a slave on that damned girl. The harder I tried, the nastier she thought it was. Finally I could practically see her flesh crawl when I touched her. The only response I ever got was a goddam martyred sigh: Sexual frustration is a hell of a sorry condition; McGee. So I went out to get what I couldn’t get from her. I think I was a little out of my mind. I grabbed onto anything warm and breathing that came within reach. And a couple of times when I was pig-drunk it happened to be her willowy little art-class boyfriends who wanted a way to get a hand in the till. When I gave no big gifts of money, they went whimpering to her about her gross, horrible brute of a husband. Now I give her this. She knows she’s frigid, and she knows that her condition had a lot to do with the situations I got into after I gave up with her. So she wasn’t going to try for a big settlement and big alimony. But her darling daddy egged her on and got her some hot legal talent, and they gave me a pretty fair bruise. It could have been even big ger if she’d really wanted to take it all into court, but they still had enough pressure to extract a generous agreement. Those months were the only time I ever went the AC-DC route, and it isn’t going to happen again because I’m never going to get into that kind of desperate mood again. So drop back on the double-gaited. I like girls. Always have. Always will. And I prefer girl-girls with all the girl-girl equipment to the girl-boys with the long locks and the squeaky voices: I don’t know why I should give a goddam about your opinion…”
“You’re repeating yourself. There’s another question I Want to…”
He looked at his watch. “Okay. Come down to the apartment and ask it there. I’m expecting some people and I want to be there when they get there.”
I got my coat from the attendant and we rode down to the sixteenth floor and got off. He explained that quite a few of the members kept an apartment in the building as a convenience, and if they were going to be away for six months or longer, the club management would arrange a sublet.
He unlocked it. It was as impersonal as a decorator’s advertisement.
As soon as I had a chance I asked my question. “Mr. Trumbill, last year, in April or May or June, while you and Heidi were still together…”
“I moved out the last week in May.”
“Okay. During those last two months did anything happen which seemed odd.”
“Odd?”
“Any kind of accident which could have been dangerous, or any near-accident, where Heidi was involved?”
“Why?”
“It could be important and the reasons would take too long to explain.”
“Important to whom, McGee?”
“Does it matter? Come on.”
“There wasn’t anything… unless you mean something like that damned candy.”
“Candy?”
“Oh, there was a kind she was nuts about. Chocolate cherries. A lot of juice inside. She never bought them for herself. Her father would bring her a box or have them sent over on special occasions. Birthdays, anniversaries. Sometime in early May-we’d had a big scrap-I walked through the living room. She was watching the news on television. I was going out, and I knew she damned well wasn’t going to say good-bye dear have a nice time. The Way she ate them, she didn’t nibble. She’d lift one out of the box, pop it into her mouth, and mash it. The box was half gone. She was down to the second layer. Suddenly she began making the damnedest noises, gasping and whoofing and spitting pieces of chocolate all over. She went to the kitchen on a dead run, scaring the hell out of the maid. She kept rinsing her mouth in cold water. Her eyes were running and her nose was running. She couldn’t say a word we could understand. Finally after she ate some crackers and rinsed her mouth out some more, she started chewing me out for pulling such a nasty trick. I finally convinced her I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She had gotten a chocolate that instead of having a cherry and cherry juice inside had apparently been filled with about a quarter ounce of straight Tabasco. She was furious. I was running late, so I left.”
“How did it happen?”
“She never found out. She opened all the ones left in the box. They were all perfect. She phoned her father and told him about it. He said it must have happened after the box was opened, because he had bought it one day, and brought it over to our place the next day in person, and the shop was certainly reliable. He said maybe it was some friend of mine who knew her habits. I guess you could classify that as an accident. It made her very uncomfortable, but I guess there are things you could put in candy that would do more than…”
The phone rang and he answered it, then hung up and told me his people were on the way up. I thanked him and said I’d run along. He said, “Meet the group, McGee. Highly talented people. We’re going to Guadeloupe and make a motion picture. Highly unusual script. Be released in France. Some of the crew is there now, picking locations.”