One Fearful Yellow Eye Read online

  Somehow you can tell the real crazies from the broken birds. This one was pure bird. She'd had just a little more than she could handle. She had to have somebody to hang onto, somebody who could make her see that her disaster was as much her fault as is that cyclone or flood or fire which takes all but one of a family. Her nerves were shredded, digestion shot, disposition vile. She was without hope or purpose, and she had gone a dangerous distance along the path toward despising herself. But in the end it was her sense of humor which saved her. There was a compulsive clown carefully hidden away, who had almost forgotten tricks and jokes and absurdities. When I got her weary enough and healthy enough, the clown part began to make tentative appearances, and the good mending started.

  After it had turned into a physical affair between us, another danger arose. She began to become too emotionally dependent on me. She was a very affectionate woman, needing and giving the casual touches and pats which to her were as necessary a part of communication as words. I felt too fatuously delighted with myself for bringing her back into reality to let her slip into another kind of fantasy. So, after helping her get a job as a diningroom hostess in a Fort Lauderdale hotel on the beach, I firmly, gently, carefully disentangled myself.

  It was through her job she met Dr. Fortner Geis. He was staying alone at the hotel.

  A log shifted in the fire. She sighed audibly. The music ended and she went over and punched the button to reverse it, so that it would play the other half of the tape.

  "I loved this house," she said.

  I looked at a large painting on the opposite wall, the colors vividly alive, the composition very strong. A small gallery spot shone on it. I got up and went halfway to it, and then made out the artist's signature and went back to the chair.

  "An incredible old man," I said.

  "Fort and I picked that out in New York three years ago. It had just come into the gallery. Fort met Hans Hoffinan once, years ago. He told me that Hoffman had such an almost childlike quality of enthusiasm, that youthfulness that comes from being eternally inquisitive. I told Fort he had exactly the same thing. He looked so startled I had to laugh at him. Golly I'm going to miss that painting."

  "Do you have to sell it?"

  "In November, two weeks after Fort died, a very polite and considerate man showed up with a perfectly legitimate bill of sale for that Hoffman. He's a Chicago collector, and he paid Fort seven thousand five for it. He said that he had added it to his fine arts rider on his insurance policy, and he insisted on leaving it here until I decide what I'm going to do. It wasn't a shock, Trav. Not by then. By then I knew I couldn't consider anything mine. Not even the house."

  "I don't understand."

  She took my empty glass and said, "The lady yelled help. Remember?"

  TWO

  I KNEW SHE must have planned how she would tell me, but when she started, I could see that it seemed wrong to her. She stopped and hopped up and began pacing around.

  At last she stopped in front of me and said, "Okay. Look at it this way. Look at me and Fort from the outside, the way his son and daughter saw us. Their mother, Glenna, died eighteen years ago, when Roger was eleven and Heidi was seven. So they were the privileged children of Dr. Fortner Geis. Money and prestige. Money in the family from their mother's side, plus what Fort added to it by becoming a great neurosurgeon-and the prestige of being the children of a man who'd made himself an international reputation. Fort told me he'd made a lot of mistakes in his life, but the worst one of all was the one he made five years ago, after the diagnosis was absolutely certain, after the prognosis was definite, deciding to tell Roger and Heidi that he probably had not more than three more years left. Damn it, Trav, he wasn't looking for sympathy or being dramatic. He was a doctor. He knew a fact pertinent to their lives. So he told them. He'd always worked too long and too hard for the relationship with his kids to be terribly close. They set up a death watch, practically. They started dropping in on him, full of brave and noble cheer. And it started depressing him to the point where finally he had to get away by himself. He canceled out everything for a month and came down to Fort Lauderdale and didn't let anybody know where they could find him. He told me he had some adjusting to do. He said he had been too busy to think about dying. And if a man was going to die, he should have some time for contemplation, so he wouldn't die without coming to any decision about what it had all meant. He wanted to walk on the beach, look at the birds, read something other than medical journals. And he started coming into the dining room at odd times for coffee when I could sit with him and we could talk. Dammit, Trav, I had no idea he was important. I knew he was a doctor. I knew he was a widower. He said he was taking his first vacation in twenty-five years. There was that wonderful... simplicity about him."

  "I know," I said. "That long nobbly face and the spaniel eyes and the slow grin."

  "Loneliness," she said. "Both of us. We never talked trivia. We started talking from the heart right off. He'd loved Glenna deeply. He still missed her. And when we finally had a date, he told me what was wrong with him, and how long he probably could keep operating, and how soon he would die. We'd each taken our lumps. I told him... what had nearly sunk me without a trace. He was fifty, Travis. I was twenty-nine. Something in us responded to each other. He said it was because we knew what some things cost, and why other things were worthless, and too many people never found out. Then he asked me to marry him, and he said that if I felt squeamish about his being sick, I'd better not, because he desired me, and that was the kind of marriage he wanted with me, along with being friends and in love. He said he would have two years anyway before there was any outward sign or feeling, and it would get bad, but not too bad, when the medication stopped working. So I thought it over for two days, and knew I wanted him, and proved there was no squeamishness, and married him with the idea we'd be going back to some sort of old frame house with a downstairs office and waiting room in front, and some old dragon of a nurse. We had three and a half good years, Travis. We laughed a lot. I tell you, we laughed a hell of a lot. The pain started last April, but it didn't get as bad as he thought it was going to. And in September, he just started... dwindling away. Very quietly."

  She sat down again. "Anyway, he was like a kid when he brought me back here to Chicago. I'd been too dumb to know who he was. He had this house designed and built for us, and sold the one in town. He cut his work back to just the experimental part. He didn't do any routine operations. It gave us more time. But you can guess what his friends and his kids thought. They made him so mad. They looked at me as if I was some kind of a bug. They acted as if marriage was some act of senility or something. I was the smart little operator, a waitress type, who nailed the poor guy when he was depressed about knowing he wasn't going to get anywhere near three score and ten. And the inference was that I probably liked it better that way. Roger was the worst. He's twenty-nine. He's a market analyst. He's a self-satisfied fink. He had the gall-and the stupidity-to go to Fort and suggest that inasmuch as I'd married him so late in his life, it would be a lot fairer to his kids to just leave me a reasonable bequest in his will. Fort had made a new will by then. It was pretty complicated, with trusts and so on, but the basic idea was he'd leave me half and them each a quarter. I told him I didn't want to make that kind of hard feeling, and he got so annoyed I had to drop the whole thing. I had to go to the bank with him a few times to see Mr. Andrus, the assistant trust officer, and sign things. He's very nice. I decided that after it was all over I could talk to him and see about some way of taking just what I'd need to get settled into a new life, and let his children have the rest of it. As it turned out, there was no problem."

  "How do you mean?"

  "He just didn't leave anybody anything. There wasn't anything left to leave."

  "What do you mean? Had he been kidding people?"

  "No. Starting about a year ago in July, he started changing things into cash. Mr. Andrus is going to bring the list around tomorrow. You see, he didn't
have things actually put away in trust where he couldn't get at them. Mr. Andrus can explain all that. And his lawyers had no way of knowing what he was doing. He just... sold the stock and the bonds and everything and kept putting the money in checking accounts. Then he kept drawing cash. Nobody knows where it went. He mortgaged this house right to the hilt. He cashed in his insurance policies. All but one. I'm the beneficiary on that. And it pays me f-f-four hundred dollars a m-month as long as I... as long as I... I-I..."

  "Whoa, girl."

  She rubbed the corduroy sleeve across her eyes. "Damn! I'm not the crying kind. It's just that everybody has been so damned ugly to me."

  "How much has disappeared?"

  "A little over six hundred thousand dollars."

  "In a little over a year!"

  "He did it in such a way it wouldn't attract attention. He opened other checking accounts, and he'd make deposits to other banks by check and then draw the cash. Three was enough for the funeral, and enough to run this house for... oh, until February or March. Roger and Heidi seem to think it's some kind of cute stunt I've pulled. They act as if I'd drugged him or hypnotized him or something. The Internal Revenue people and the state tax people started treating me like a criminal or something. They came with a warrant and they searched every inch of this whole house and made inventories of everything. They kept coming back and asking the same questions. I told Mr. Andrus I couldn't stand it, and he took me right down to Fort's attorneys. Waldren, Farhauser and Schrant. Old Mr. Waldren kept asking me questions. He looked as if he was taking a nap all the time I was answering. But finally he said he would see that I was not bothered anymore, but I had better stay right here at the house, for the time being. I know I'm being watched. I think it's Roger or Heidi though, paying someone to keep an eye on me. I yelled help, Trav. I don't want the damned money. But I don't want people following me for the rest of my life trying to catch me with something I haven't got."

  "Was there any change in Fort's attitude or manner?"

  "When he started selling things? I didn't notice a thing different. He seemed happy. That's what I wanted. I mean we couldn't be all the way happy, knowing the time was growing short. But we could give it a good try. And we did. That's another thing. I don't think he was trying to cheat on estate taxes or anything like that. I don't think he wanted to cash in those things. So somebody was making him do it somehow. And so that was making him unhappy, but he kept it from me. He hid it from me. And I would like to get my hands on somebody who'd do that to him when he had so little time left, damn them."

  "Would the illness affect his mind in any way?"

  "Absolutely not!"

  "Could he have been planning some... easier way of handling his estate and died before he had a chance to tell you?"

  "They kept asking me that, sort of. No. Those last days before he went into a coma, I sat by him all day long. Held his hand. We'd talk. He'd nap and we'd talk more. He had a chance to say everything to me. He knew he was going. And... God, how he hated to leave me. He wasn't afraid of death. He was a man. It was the same way he used to hate to leave me when he had to go to a meeting. That's all. How much in love do you have to be before people believe it? I would have burned every inch of all that money to give him one more day." She stopped looking fierce and glanced at her watch. "Medium rare? Butter on the baked? Garlic dressing?"

  "Your memory is still working, kid."

  She trotted out toward the back of the house to tell Anna to serve as soon as it was ready. When she came back I asked her how well-fixed Fort's children were. She said that Heidi seemed to be doing just fine. She was twenty-five-married at twenty-two and divorced at twenty-four. It had been a second marriage for her husband, Gadge Trumbill, usually referred to in the society pages as a prominent sportsman. When Heidi had tired of Gadge's fun and games on the side, it was rumored that she employed people thorough enough to make an iron-clad list of positives which had included eleven wives of fellow members of the Harbour Yacht Club, but that the generous settlement and alimony had been the result of the respondent's unfortunate carelessness in not hiding more successfully his occasional penchant for willowy young men. Heidi Trumbill was living in a studio apartment at 180 East Burton Place, was busily painting very large abstracts, and was showing and selling them at a gallery four blocks away on East Scott Street called Tempo East. Gossip of the more rancid variety pointed out that her partner in the gallery operation, Mark Avanyan, was one of those who had made Gadge's second divorce considerably more expensive than his first. It made for interesting speculation.

  "She is one very icy dish indeed," said Glory. "Take Grace Kelly like ten years ago, and give her a little more height and heft, and put her in a part where she's a nun who has to dress in civilian clothes to smuggle the code to the French army, and you'd be close. She's really beautiful, she's one of those people you can hardly believe they have even a digestive system. She's a lot brighter than Roger, I think. He lives in Evanston, where else? He'll be thirty soon. He works downtown in one of those big new office buildings. He's a specialist in the commodities market, and his father-in-law is very big in the commodities market. Jeanie, his wife, seems nice enough. She's one of those brown tennis-playing ones, and they have three kids, and they go to horse shows and eat off the tailgate and talk about hocks and fetlocks and all that.

  "Neither of them are hurting a bit, but you'd think I'd pulled some tricky thing to get them tossed out naked into a blizzard. From everything Fort told me about Glenna, she must have been a doll. How could those two have such dreary people for their children?"

  We ate busily and finally she looked over at me and said, "What I really had the most need of, Trav, was somebody to be my friend and take it for granted I haven't stolen money, and who'd know I didn't know anything about the money when I married Fort. I didn't make friends here. We wanted all our time together. There wasn't enough to share. But I thought, too, it is a lot of money and it does have to be somewhere. And I remembered the way you... make a living. Maybe I'm crazy to think you or anybody could ever find out where it went."

  "It went somewhere. It's a nice jackpot. He had to have a good reason. Let's just say I don't have the feeling I'm wasting my time. If I can get some kind of line on what happened, then I'll see if my fee for mula grabs Sonny and Sis. If the only way they can possibly get what they had coming is through me..."

  "Expenses off the top and cut the rest down the middle. You know that is okay with me on my share, dear. When I think it even entered my mind to turn mine over to those two... I'd rather give it to a home for... old television comedians!"

  She looked so totally outraged and indignant I had to laugh. She put her plate aside and I saw she had not eaten much.

  "Where's that wolf-like appetite I remember from old?"

  "I don't know. It's fine for five minutes and then gaah. I guess I could have expected some kind of crazy thing happening, like the money. What is it, Travis? Why in the world should my life be some sort of continuous soap opera? I think I had six uneventful years. The first six. Gloria Anne Ridgen. Then all hell broke loose. Is there such a thing as drama-prone? You know, you go hunting for the action. My daddy bought me a ride on a merry-goround, and that was the time the man running it had to be drunk and decided he wasn't going to stop it. When they died I had to live with my nutty old aunt, and if my astrology tables were wrong any given day, she wouldn't let me go to school. The boy I went with in high school was walking by a building and somebody dropped a can of paint, and when he woke up from the coma a year later, he had the mind of a two-year-old. In college my roommate was a secret klepto and hid the loot in my luggage and when they began to narrow it down, she turned me in, and six months later she got caught and they apologized and asked me to come back to school and the day I was due to leave I got infectious mononucleosis and my dog was run over. All I want is a plain, neat, ordinary, unexciting life. But what happens? In Buffalo one day I got off the bus downtown on a hot afternoon and the b
us door closed on my wraparound skirt and drove off and left me spinning like a top in my little yellow briefs on the busiest corner in town. You know, I dream about that. There I am, and everybody is applauding and I can't stop twirling."

  Anna Ottlo had gone to bed. We took the dishes out to the big bright kitchen and she rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. I was aware of the wind, and of the emptiness of the stretch of dunes and winter beach outside, and of the comfort of the house.

  "Was this whole thing in the news?" I asked her.

  "No. From what John Andrus says, It isn't news until there's some kind of legal thing that goes on, the probate or something. He can explain."

  I decided it would be better not to tell her what had entered my mind. If a man, before dying, had converted his holdings into over half a million in cash, there would be a certain number of dim minds in a city of this size who would be inspired to pay a night visit to the little woman and see if she could be persuaded in ugly ways to tell where the deceased had hidden it away. It would be a clumsier variation of Heidi's and Roger's incorrect suspicion.