The Quick Red Fox Read Free Page B

open for us. We turned into a winding crunch of gravel between lush and carefully tailored jungle, rounded a buttress of pink and white stucco, parked in a small walled area by a garden.
    It seemed to be a back stairway. Miss Dana Holtzer led me up half a flight and into a shadowed hallway. I sat on a Babylonian throne under a black gleam of hanging armor. There was no sound in the house. None. She came back, hatless and purseless, and beckoned to me with all the gravity of a head nurse. I followed her down a paneled and carpeted corridor. She rapped on a fortress door, pushed it open for me and stood aside, saying, “She’ll be with you in a moment.”
    She closed the door and left me alone in what seemed to be a guest suite. I was in a long room with a high ceiling. Plum carpet.Paneling. Seven arched windows along one wall, high narrow windows with leaded panes, deep sills. Black Spanish furniture. The center portion of the room was sunken. At one elevated end was a canopied bed. At the other end was an elevated portion with a conversational grouping of furniture around a small slate fireplace. The sunken portion was furnished in rather formal fashion. On the bed level there were two doorways. One, ajar, opened into a dressing room area. I could see pieces of matched luggage in there. The other door was closed, and I could hear an almost inaudible whisper of running water.
    Though the draperies of all the windows were pulled aside, the room was not particularly bright. I went to a window. Tropical trees shaded it. Looking down I could see patches of shaded green lawn. Off to the left, through foliage, I could see one bright corner of a white swimming pool.
    The bathroom door opened suddenly and Lysa Dean came out. She was not smaller than I had expected because I was prepared for a woman smaller than she had looked to me on the VistaVision Screen, in living color, in close-up, each slanty gray-green eye as large as a Volkswagen sedan. She came across the bedroom elevation and down the three steps toward me. She made the absolute most of those three steps. She wore flat sandals with gold straps. She wore faun-colored pants in a fine weave. They fitted as tightly as pants, or paint, or a tattoo, could fit. She wore a strange furry blouse, with a big scooped neck and three-quarter sleeves. It looked as if Skeeter’s Quimby and a couple of hundred of his relatives had contributed their pale belly-fur to this creation. Around her slender throat was knotted a narrow loose kerchief of green silk precisely matching the single jewel she wore, an emerald as big as a sugar cube on the little finger of her left hand.
    She came swiftly toward me, hand outstretched, her smile full of the warm delight of a woman welcoming the returning lover. “So good of you to come!” she said in her light, breathy, personal voice. As I took her hand she turned slightly so as to face the bright and shadowed daylight. It is the most cruel light a woman can accept. Her hand was small and dry and warm, a trusting little animal as intimate as her voice.
    They have the distinctive occupational tricks. A lot of expressive business with mouth and eyebrows, animation with gestures.
    I could remember, quite vividly, a long conversation with a stunt man named Fedder. Arthritis had forced him out of the business.
    “Don’t let anybody tell you they’re not worth the effort,” he had said. “A lot of them aren’t. You got to look close to see which type. They all have to be damned good-looking and well-built. So suppose you get a chance at one who’s a pretty good little actress. Let it go. The thing there, they sublimate. That’s a word I learned once. They take all that steam and they shove it into their work and there isn’t enough left over for bed. Now suppose you got one
thinks
she’s a hell of an actress, but she’s a ham. You skip her too. She’ll take all that ham to bed with you and be so damn busy watching herself her heart won’t be in