John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

“I wondered if I could come out and talk to you about something after lunch.”

“Why not? What time is it? Why don’t you make it about two thirty or quarter to three? She’ll be having her nap then. Will that be okay?”

I said it was just fine. I dressed and had lunch at the motel and then went strolling through the rear areas looking for Lorette. There was a service alley behind the kitchen. When I walked along it, past a neat row of garbage cans, I came to an open door to a linen storage room. I looked in and saw Lorette, still in uniform, sitting on a table laughing and talking and swinging her legs. There were two older black women in there, not in uniform. The rubber-tired maid carts were aligned against the wall near a battered Coke machine and a row of green metal lockers.

She saw me and the talk and laughter stopped. She slid off the old wooden table and came and stood in the doorway, her face impassive, her eyes down-slanted. “You want something, sir?”

“To ask you something,” I said, and walked on to a place where the roof overhang shaded a portion of the alley and a flame vine was curling up a post that supported the overhang. She had not followed me. I looked back and she shrugged and came slowly toward me. She put her hands in her skirt pockets and leaned against the wall.

“Ask me what?”

“I didn’t know if you could talk in front of those other women. I wanted to know how Cathy is.”

“Jes fine.” Her face was blank and she let her mouth hang slightly open. It made her look adenoidally stupid.

“She come out of it okay?”

“She gone on home.”

It was all too familiar and all too frustrating. It is the black armor, a kind of listless vacuity, stubborn as an acre of mules. They go that route or they become all teeth and giggles and forelock. Okay, so they have had more than their share of grief from men of my outward stamp, big and white and muscular, sun-darkened and visibly battered in small personal wars. My outward type had knotted a lot of black skulls, tupped a plenitude of black ewes, burned crosses and people in season. They see just the outward look and they classify on that basis. Some of them you can’t ever reach in any way, just as you can’t teach most women to handle snakes and cherish spiders. But I knew I could reach her because for a little time with me she had been disarmed, had put her guard down, and I had seen behind it a shrewd and understanding mind, a quick and unschooled intelligence.

I had to find my way past that black armor. Funny how it used to be easier. Suspicion used to be on an individual basis. Now each one of us, black or white, is a symbol. The war is out in the open and the skin color is a uniform. All the deep and basic similarities of the human condition are forgotten so that we can exaggerate the few differences that exist.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked her.

“Nothin’ wrong.”

“You could talk to me before. Now you’ve slammed the door.”

“Door? What door, mister? I got to get back to work.”

Suddenly I realized what it might be. “Lorette, have you slammed the door because you know that this morning I stood out in front of this place talking to a couple of cops?”

There was a sidelong glance, quick, vivid with suspicion, before she dropped her eyes again. “Don’t matter who you talkin’ to.”

“Looked like a nice friendly little chat, I suppose.”

“Mister, I got to go to work.”

“That housekeeper here, Mrs. Imber? If she hadn’t happened to look into 109 on Saturday afternoon and saw me there sacked out, it wouldn’t have been any nice friendly conversation with the law. And it wouldn’t have happened out in front of this place. It would have been in one of their little rooms, with nobody smiling. They would have been trying to nail me for killing that nurse.”