Not likely.
Backtrack. A little look of surprise at hearing my name. Surprise to find me with her husband.
Possibility: Friend of Biddy’s. Had met her in supermarket or somewhere. Biddy spoke of an old friend named McGee from Lauderdale.
Or: In the process of checking me out Saturday evening, and checking Holton out, Stanger made some mention of me to Janice Holton. “Do you know, or do you know if your husband knows, anybody named Travis McGee from Fort Lauderdale?”
Possible, but I didn’t like the fit. They were like limericks that do not quite scan, that have one syllable too much or one missing. My brain was a pudding. I walked across to a shopping plaza, bought some swim pants in a chain store, came back and put them on and padded out to the big motel pool. There was a separate wading pool full of three- and four-year-olds, shrieking, choking, throwing rubber animals, and belting each other under the casually benign stare of four well-greased young mothers. So I dived and did some slow lengths of the main pool and then gradually let it out, reaching farther, changing the kick beat, stretching and punishing the long muscles of arms, shoulders, back, thighs, and belly, sucking air and blowing out the little layers of sedentary stale-ness in the bottoms of my lungs. I held it just below that pace at which I begin to get too much side roll and begin to thrash and slap, and then brutalized myself by saying, Just one more. And one more. And one more. Finally I lumbered out, totally whipped, heart way up there close to a hundred and a half, lungs straining, arms and legs weak as canvas tubes full of old wet feathers. I dried my face on the bath towel I’d brought from the room and then stretched out on it to let the sunshine do the rest.
Meyer calls it my “instant I.Q.” In a sense it is. You oxygenate the blood to the maximum and you stimulate the heart into pumping it around at a breakneck pace. That enriched blood goes churning through the brain at the same tune that it is nourishing the overworked muscle tissues. Sometimes it even works.
But I put my fat, newly enriched, humming head to work on the Janice-Lauderdale problem, and its final report was, “Damned if I know, fella.”
So I went back to 109 and before I dressed, I tried the office of the fat little John Wayne, M.D., got hold of a cheery, cooperative lady who told me that Dr. Stewart Sherman’s receptionist and bookkeeper was Miss Helen Boughmer, and she did not know if she was working or not, but I could reach her through the phone listed for Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer. She asked me to wait a moment and gave me the number to write down.
Mrs. Robert M. Boughmer was very firm about things. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t possibly call my daughter to the phone. She is not well today. She is in bed. Does she know you? What is this all about?”
“I’d like a chance to ask her some questions about an insurance matter, Mrs. Boughmer.”
“I can definitely say that she is not interested in buying any insurance and neither am I. Good-day.”
“Wait!” I missed her and had to call again. “Mrs. Boughmer, I am an insurance investigator. I am investigating a policy claim.”
“But we haven’t had any accidents with the car. Not for years.”
“It’s some information on a death claim.”
“Oh?”
“On Doctor Sherman. Just a few routine questions, ma’am.”
“Well… if you’ll promise not to tire Helen, I think you might be able to talk to her at about four o’clock, if you’ll come here to the house.” I said I would. It was at 90 Rose Street, and she told me how to find it. “It’s a little white frame house with yellow trim, on the right, on the second corner, with two big live oak trees in the front yard.”
After I hung up, I phoned the Pike place and Biddy answered.
“Well, hello!” she said. “Yes, Maurie is doing just fine, thank you. We were just about to have a swim before lunch.”