The Quick Red Fox Read Free Page A

did not look particularly austere. She just looked as if she might put people in handy categories.
    She decided she would pour herself some coffee while I changed, if that was permitted. I put on the very infrequentnecktie, and a fairly heavy suit. When we went back into the lounge, Skeeter said, “Hey, both of you look at this lousy mouse a minute.”
    She showed us the drawing just completed. “This is when Quimby finds out for sure he’s really a mouse. That cat just told him. He’s crushed. He thought he was a real small pedigree dog. But I think maybe he looks more scared than crushed. When you look at it, is it as if he’s scared of the cat?”
    “It’s absolutely charming!” Dana Holtzer said. “What a horrid thing, really, to find out that all along you’ve been a mouse.”
    “Quimby can’t adjust,” Skeeter said.
    They smiled nicely at each other. “Dana Holtzer, Mary Keith—known as Skeeter. We have to run. Skeet, make sure you lock up if I don’t get back before you go.”
    “Sure. What’s bugging him is all that trouble learning to bark.”
    “Forage if you get hungry.”
    But she was back at work, insulated and intent. Miss Holtzer and I headed into the wind, toward the parking areas. She said, “That’s a dear strange girl, and very talented. Is she a special friend?”
    “They’ve just painted her apartment so I told her she could work on the boat. She has a deadline.”
    Within another three steps, Miss Holtzer had tucked the escaping loose ends of personality back into her executive secretary shell. I had a memory of how pleasure in the mouse had brought her alive, younger and surprisingly more vivid. But it was not in her manner or habit to give anything away. She would do her job, reserved, armored, efficient. She was not being paid to react to people, nor to show her own reactions, if any.
    A glittering black Chrysler limousine was waiting, tended by a middle-aged man in dove-gray uniform with silver buttons. He touched his cap and opened the door for us. He looked like a television U. S. Senator. And he had that uncanny ability of the skilled chauffeur to drift a big car through traffic with such rhythm that the bunglings of other drivers seemed like an untidy and unimportant mirage.
    “Miss Dean’s car?” I asked.
    “Oh, no. It belongs to the people where we’re staying.”
    “When did you get in?”
    “Yesterday.”
    “Incognito?”
    “Yes.”
    “That’s a good trick.”
    “Chartered airplane,” she said.
    There was glass between us and the barbered neck of the skilled driver. Her face was turned away from me, looking placidly out at the gray day.
    “Miss Holtzer.”
    “Yes?” she said, turning with polite query.
    “I’d like to know if I am right or wrong. I get this impression of quiet disapproval.”
    I thought I saw a flicker of bleak amusement. “Is that sort of thing so important to you, Mr. McGee?”
    “I’ve never thought so.”
    “Mr. McGee, in the past two years I’ve been sent on so many curious errands, I would have become quite worn out if I’d tried to make value judgments about them.”
    “Then you avoid having opinions?”
    “Except where it is expected of me. She pays for opinions, Mr. McGee. Legal opinions, tax opinions, artistic opinions. Shelistens and makes up her own mind. She doesn’t particularly care for volunteer opinions.”
    “And the job pays well?”
    “It compensates me for what I do.”
    “I guess I better give up.”
    With an almost imperceptible shrug, she turned again to look out her window, presenting me with the nice modeling of the strong line of her throat, the neatness of an ear set into a casualness of cropped black curls, a fringe of black lashes visible beyond the smooth line of her cheek, a faint and unobtrusive and understated fragrance of mild perfume.

Two
    The house was on a private island, over a small causeway from one of the main causeways between Miami and Miami Beach. A gardener swung the ornate gate