Read Online One Fearful Yellow Eye by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online
Authors: John D. MacDonald
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Detective and Mystery Stories, Political, Hard-Boiled, Florida, Fort Lauderdale (Fla.), McGee; Travis (Fictitious character)
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Then I took a cab back out to East Burton, to a quainty old pile of red stone squatting close to the narrow sidewalk. There were four mailboxes and push buttons in the small foyer. Over the tube when I gave her my name, her voice, reduced to a frail buzzing sound, demanded to know what I wanted. So I said I had a note from John Andrus. She said she was on the second floor in the back and the door catch made a sound like a rattlesnake as she pressed the release.
Her heavy door was Chinese red, and when she pulled it open I saw how accurate Gloria's description of her had been. She was a tall slender golden-blonde, features so coin-cut, so classic and clear, she had an ice-maiden look.
She looked at Andrus' card, front and back, handed it back, and said, "You're not exactly my picture of a banking type, Mr. McGee. Come in, please."
I followed her into a high-ceilinged living room. She wore white canvas coveralls, too big for her, man-size, the pant cuffs turned up. She had fashioned a belt out of a red scarf rolled to narrow width, and cinched the baggy garment around the narrowness of her waist. She had appraised me with blue-gray eyes which told me nothing, merely looked at me and made a record and filed it under McGee. Minimum makeup, no jewelry of any kind. She had that rare Page 26
and contradictory look of being both slender and substantial, a look which I suspect comes from a certain breadth of shoulder, fruitful width of pelvic structure. Though the coveralls were spotted with stains of paint old and new, she looked groomed and immaculate.
She turned and leaned against a table edge, crossed her ankles, crossed her arms under her breasts and said, "So?"
Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.
But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semibattered, loose-jointed way I seem to got the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Mother Nature sets up some kind of overriding counterirritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn't too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I'm sorry it can't be.
I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other. I know when you can hear that large No: when they are too wrapped up in exactly the right guy to even be aware you are alive, when they are one of the cool voyagers from the Isle of Lesbos, and when they are seriously thinking of killing you. I could not fit Heidi into any Pattern.
"Sometimes," I said, "the banking types get some help from non-banking types."
"Let me say I think they need it. Talk about impartial. Hah! It's perfectly obvious John Andrus has let that sweet demure elfin little bitch sell him down the river. Any slight suggestion that she might not be a hundred and ten per cent perfection, and he gets furious."
"Kind of a strange marriage, I guess."
Suddenly she approved of me. "Do take off your coat, Mr. McGee. Care for a drink?"
As she went and fixed herself a beaker of dry sherry and some gin over ice far me, I wandered over and looked through a wide arched doorway into her studio. It had a lot of tall windows for good north light, and it was painted a good off-white. It had at least the look of a working artist's studio-work tables, easels, bouquets of worn-out brushes in old paint pots, new work on
Then I took a cab back out to East Burton, to a quainty old pile of red stone squatting close to the narrow sidewalk. There were four mailboxes and push buttons in the small foyer. Over the tube when I gave her my name, her voice, reduced to a frail buzzing sound, demanded to know what I wanted. So I said I had a note from John Andrus. She said she was on the second floor in the back and the door catch made a sound like a rattlesnake as she pressed the release.
Her heavy door was Chinese red, and when she pulled it open I saw how accurate Gloria's description of her had been. She was a tall slender golden-blonde, features so coin-cut, so classic and clear, she had an ice-maiden look.
She looked at Andrus' card, front and back, handed it back, and said, "You're not exactly my picture of a banking type, Mr. McGee. Come in, please."
I followed her into a high-ceilinged living room. She wore white canvas coveralls, too big for her, man-size, the pant cuffs turned up. She had fashioned a belt out of a red scarf rolled to narrow width, and cinched the baggy garment around the narrowness of her waist. She had appraised me with blue-gray eyes which told me nothing, merely looked at me and made a record and filed it under McGee. Minimum makeup, no jewelry of any kind. She had that rare Page 26
and contradictory look of being both slender and substantial, a look which I suspect comes from a certain breadth of shoulder, fruitful width of pelvic structure. Though the coveralls were spotted with stains of paint old and new, she looked groomed and immaculate.
She turned and leaned against a table edge, crossed her ankles, crossed her arms under her breasts and said, "So?"
Personal chemistries have not yet been isolated and analyzed by the physiologists. Here was a specimen in her twenty-five-year-old prime, in full bloom. Certainly the female of my species, beyond question. She had walked with a promising curl of power in the haunch. Her arms were crossed under a hammocked roundness of breast, and her mouth was of an understated sensuality in shape and dimension.
But we were saying no to each other without any words. In my out-sized, wind-weathered, semibattered, loose-jointed way I seem to got the right responses for my full and fair share of the fair ones, but I could not see any signs of impact, or experience any. Maybe Old Mother Nature sets up some kind of overriding counterirritant when the genetics are a bad match. I knew this could be a heady package for somebody, but not for the McGee. I had caught the smiling eye of the girl at the corner of Huron for a half-second, and it had been a resounding yes, both ways. A conditional yes. Yes, if it wasn't too late for us by the time we met. Yes, but I'm sorry it can't be.
I wondered about the No which Heidi Geis Trumbill and I were saying to each other. I know when you can hear that large No: when they are too wrapped up in exactly the right guy to even be aware you are alive, when they are one of the cool voyagers from the Isle of Lesbos, and when they are seriously thinking of killing you. I could not fit Heidi into any Pattern.
"Sometimes," I said, "the banking types get some help from non-banking types."
"Let me say I think they need it. Talk about impartial. Hah! It's perfectly obvious John Andrus has let that sweet demure elfin little bitch sell him down the river. Any slight suggestion that she might not be a hundred and ten per cent perfection, and he gets furious."
"Kind of a strange marriage, I guess."
Suddenly she approved of me. "Do take off your coat, Mr. McGee. Care for a drink?"
As she went and fixed herself a beaker of dry sherry and some gin over ice far me, I wandered over and looked through a wide arched doorway into her studio. It had a lot of tall windows for good north light, and it was painted a good off-white. It had at least the look of a working artist's studio-work tables, easels, bouquets of worn-out brushes in old paint pots, new work on
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