“Hardly ever. I know. How did the opening go yesterday?”
“As expected. Well, more people than I expected, actually. Poor Mark was darling about like a mother hen. One too many people compared Kirstarian to Segal, so he made a fantastic scene and stalked out. Mark sold three pieces, and it made him so happy he drank all the champagne we had left and I had to put him to bed.” She sat on the arm of the couch and looked across at me. “It’s so strange. That girl. I have the feeling I knew her long, long ago. But I couldn’t have. She’s too young for that. Who is she, Travis?”
The temptation was to drop the bomb and say it was her half-sister. But that wasn’t going to do anyone any good. I said, “You don’t know her. She very probably knows something about where your father’s money went. But she might not even know she knows. She is a good and staunch girl.”
“I sensed that about her.”
“The problem is the money.”
“Oh yes, the money. And poor elfin little heartbroken Gloria, the waitress type, knows absolutely nothing about it. Right?”
“As far as anyone can tell.”
“Well, she certainly fooled John Andrus without any trouble. And she sold my father a bill of goods. So I guess you don’t present any special problem.”
I smiled at her. “Heidi, she had to be lousy and crooked and dirty because she had the unholy impertinence to marry the daddy. She cast an ugly spell over him. She even seduced him physically, fornicated with him, and made him think he was enjoying it. What a degrading thing for the big wise important daddy to be doing! Didn’t he know it made darling daughter feel actually ill to wake up in the night and think that right at that moment that woman was making him do that sick ugly animal thing?”
She turned ice-pale, jumped trembling to her feet and said, “Stop that! Stop it!”
“Where do you think you came from, Heidi? Did they find you out in the cabbage patch? There’s only one known way he could get to be your father.”
She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. In a thin prim little voice she said, “It killed her. She died.”
So I got out of there after suitable apologies. Two swings, two hits. Anybody who wanted to find a woman under that luscious structure was going to have to tear it down and start over. Marriage to her had been as exciting as two years of root canal treatments, on a dead fang.
I knew that Francisco Smith had better find me Mother Gretchen, and fast.
NINE
FRNSISCO SMITH woke me up with his phone call at quarter past eight on Tuesday, that thirteenth day of December.
“Got something to write on?” he asked.
“Hold on,” I said, and got set and told him to go ahead.
“Okay, here’s the number of the annuity policy. GLC 085-14-0277. Four hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents gets mailed out the first of every month. The guy at Great Lakes is named Rainey. T. T. Rainey. The September check came back addressee moved, no forwarding address. They tried a trace. The Gorba family left last August 22nd. A Sunday. The couple and the five kids, in a big gray Cadillac sedan, towing a U-Haul. License 397110. Dropped the apartment keys in the super’s box. Rent paid to the end of August and a month deposit in advance. Mrs. Gorba was paid by the week. She picked up her pay at the restaurant when she left work Friday evening. He was paid twice a month. His pay is still sitting there at the body shop. They left the apartment in good shape. They didn’t pick up the utilities deposits. They left clean. At least there’s no judgments filed against them.”
“Is Great Lakes still trying to find them?”
“No. They tried it on the cheap and gave up quick. They weren’t like somebody trying to collect. They sent out the check for a double payment October first and it came back too. So they put it and the November and December checks in an interest account. The January check will go in the same account, the one made, out to her mother like the checks. But she turns eighteen in January, so if nobody shows up, they’ll start a new interest account in the name of Susan Kemmer.”
“Car payments?”
“No dice there. You see, it was a two-year-old Cad that the owner totaled, and the place Saul Gorba worked bid three-fifty for it. Then they found more wrong than the estimator thought there was. Gorba put down two hundred on it and agreed they could take another two-fifty out of his pay. That was back in April, I think. It was with the idea he could work on it in his spare time when he’d put in his regular hours, and buy the parts from them at cost or scrounge them from the yards, and they’d let him use shop tools. A lot of those guys work it that way for a personal car. They don’t like them trying to fix iron up for resale as it puts them in competition with the shops they’re working for. But Gorba didn’t have a car so it was okay with the boss. So for about nine hundred, plus all the hours he put into it, he came out of it with a pretty good automobile. I understand he’s handy with tools and catches on fast.”
“When did he finish it, Smith?”
“August sometime.”
“What would be the chance of tracing them in a hurry?”
After a short silence he said, “I wouldn’t say it was real great, not if Gorba doesn’t want to be traced. School records, medical records, IRS refunds, Social Security-he’d be carefuler than most. He had to rent the trailer someplace and he had to turn it in someplace, but he could unload it, drive it three hundred miles empty, and turn it in. With the car registration, he could cover up best by unloading it on a cash deal and buying something else under another name. My hunch would be check close on the daughter’s friends. You tear a seventeen-year-old kid away from all her friends, she is going to find some way to drop them a card. But I don’t like the feel of it, not with those checks unclaimed. What is it now? Thirteen hundred bucks. Listen, they’re going to keep me on the run all day. This evening I maybe get a chance to cover a couple of. other angles. I’ll be in touch.”
The day was like a dirty galvanized bucket clapped down over the city. When you swallowed, you could taste the city. All the trees looked dead, and all the people looked like mourners. Happy Christmas. Bingle jells. Brace yourself for hate week.
Heidi opened the red door with a fractional smile of cool welcome. She was in one of her painting suits. This one was yellow, like shark repellent. It had forty-three pockets with flaps and zippers.
“Flow’s our patient?” I asked, very jolly.
“I made her go back to bed. She was shaky.” Heidi had a blue smudge on the back of one hand, two speckles of bright red on her chin. The door to her studio was open. She was dressed for air-sea rescue, visible at thirty miles.
I glanced through the doorway into her studio. She said, “Kindly do not express an interest in my work. I already know your opinion.”
“Look, I did not mean to rawhide you last night. I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t something new, Mr. McGee. Men try to shake me up by saying ugly things. It’s sort of an erotic compulsion, I guess.”
“Maybe you’re an example of conspicuous waste.”
“Don’t try to make phrases. You’re not the type. She’s in the second bedroom on the left.”
Susan Kemrner was propped up on two pillows. ` Her face was turned toward the gray light at the window, and tracked silver with tears. She looked at me, dabbed in gingerly fashion at the tear marks with a tissue, snuffled and hitched the pale blue blanket higher. The gestures had the flavor of bracing for an ordeal. It looked to me as though some of the puffiness was gone. But the areas of discoloration were larger, and the hues more varied.
I pulled a chair over and sat by the foot of the bed, facing her. “Saul work you over?”