Punch With Care Read online

  Asey mentally put Miss Shearing on his list for future reference.

  “An’ what,” he asked again, “are your own feelin’s about Mrs. Boone?”

  “Look,” Gerty said severely, “I don’t stick my neck out on my C.O.!”

  “Wa-el, what does the rest of the project think of her, then?” Asey persisted.

  “That’s another part of this problem I got—I mean, I have. Listen, Mr. Mayo, this crowd at Larrabee—well, they’re okay. They’re right. Only a lot of ’em aren’t shook down yet, see? Like Stinky.”^

  “Stinky who?”

  “Gee, I forget you don’t know!” Gerty said. “The way we been talking, it seems like I known you a long time—oh, God, that’s all wrong! Honest, what’m I going to do?” she asked unhappily. “If I got to stop and try to make it proper grammar all the time, then I get all dried up, and what comes out isn’t what I want to say!”

  She looked at him ruefully.

  “If it simmers down to a choice of grammar or of bein’ thwarted,” Asey said, “I think I’d be inclined to advise your forgettin’ the grammar. An’ I point out to you that I haven’t any blue pencil in my hand!”

  “Well, listen, see, it’s like this—say, whyn’t you come in and take a load off your feet?” She moved over obligingly and made room for him on the roadster’s seat. “Now, here’s the picture, see. Stinky—that’s Bill Cotton—he was a fly-boy. Chicken colonel. Big shot. Then, bingo—he’s back in school, see, a senior again. Okay! Then there’s Jack Briggs. Lousy eyes, see? Glasses. Limited service. P.F.C. Briggs, the desk-drawer commando. So he’s back being a senior, too. So what’s he going to do? He’s going to show Stinky who’s the brains-colonel, see? That’s what! He’s going to be the big shot in school—and the hell with all of Stinky’s fruit salad—” she paused.

  “Ribbons,” Asey said. “I know.”

  “Get the set-up?” she asked eagerly. “Stinky’s such a damn fool—of course, all men are, but—oh, excuse me, Mr. Mayo. I forgot.”

  “Oh, don’t mind me!” Asey said. “When Jennie lets her hair down in one of her off moods, she usually claims that all men are fools, an’ I’m the biggest fool she ever met—look, could you just maybe clarify this situation of Stinky an’ his friend Jack Briggs?”

  The way this saga of hers was shaping up, he thought to himself, it was going to take considerable clarifying and sifting before she worked her way back to the problem of what had been dumped into the mud hole.

  “Friend? Friend? That’s just exactly it! He isn’t! Jack isn’t his friend—but Stinky’s such a sap, he still thinks so! That’s more of this problem, see? Every time we go on one of these—these—” Gerty seemed to be searching for a suitable word, “these damn projects, Stinky lands up in a cooler somewhere, see, usually D and D—”

  “Uh-huh, city girl,” Asey said gently, “I know what a drunk an’ disorderly charge is.”

  “Well, so Stinky’s in the cooler, and Jack’s the bright boy with his work all done. Every time there’s an exam, Stinky’s in trouble the night before—see? Jack’s the bright boy again. And Stinky, the big sap, doesn’t have sense enough to open his eyes and see what’s rolling over him! Just a steam roller, that’s all, pushed by his old pal Jack! Now do you get it?”

  Asey said that he understood up to a certain point. “But what’s it all got to do with your shovin’ things into the mud hole? An’ with Mrs. Boone, as you suggested when you first started out?”

  Gerty looked at him for several moments, and then she sighed.

  “Look, Mr. Mayo. You see this car?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Look at it.” She waved her hand toward the Balkan prince’s fanciful gadgets. “Look. Ten grand!”

  Asey, in a position to know, nearly corrected her and said twelve.

  “Well,” Gerty went on, “Stinky stole it.”

  “Stinky? He stole it?”

  “That’s right! You heard. It’s not his, and I’m not minding it for him. He swiped it. It’s hot. Now, what would you do about that, to begin with?”

  “Wa-el, I been wonderin’,” Asey said, “for some time. You see, it’s mine.”

  Gerty looked as though he had thrown the roadster at her.

  “Wow!” she said softly. “Wow!”

  “Exactly,” Asey said. “Just so! You better talk quick, sarge, an’ you better get all the problems into the record. Begin with Boone, an’ work Stinky an’ Jack in where they belong, an’ this car, an’ whatever you stuffed into the mud hole besides the blanket. Put it all together in the form of a nice, concrete, truthful report, please!”

  Gerty smoked half of a cigarette before she answered, and then she sat up straight, and reported.

  “After leaving your house in the town at approximately twelve noon, Layne Douglass and I proceeded in her car to her house at Pochet Point, where we secured rations—I mean, lunch—which we took to the outside beach. We swam, ate lunch, and she made sketches. Slightly over an hour ago—my watch is being repaired in Boston—I started back to the Douglass’s house, leaving Layne still working on her sketches. Owing to lack of knowledge of the terrain, I took the wrong path, found myself on this road here, and the first thing I saw when I came around the curve there was this car, and Stinky in it.”

  “Wow!” Asey said. “Nothin’ wrong with your grammar when you report!”

  “But it takes so much time to think first! And so,” Gerty dropped her crisp manner, “I said to him, ‘Look, Stinky, where’d you steal that from?’ And he said what made me think he stole it, and I said, ‘So your rich grandfather died an hour ago and left it to you, and get the hell out of that car!’—You see what happened, don’t you, Mr. Mayo?”

  Asey allowed that he didn’t, quite.

  “Why, Jack suggested a party, like he always does—on projects, or before exams. So he and Stinky go to the town liquor store, and get a case of beer, and some gin. Then Jack wonders what’s the best way to get it to the Inn where we’re staying, and says they really need a car. Then he looks out the window and sees this roadster, and dares Stinky to take it. And Stinky does! That’s what happened!”

  “I thought,” Asey observed, “that you were at the beach with Layne Douglass.”

  “I was—but I know what happened! I know what would have happened later, too, more or less. It happens in different ways, but the results are always the same. Jack—he always rooms with Stinky—he says he’s got an errand to do, and he’ll fix Stinky a drink before he runs out. And that’s all, chum! However Jack manages, it’s as easy as that!”

  “An’ what was Stinky doin’ over here?” Asey inquired. “Samplin’? Or just en route somewheres?”

  “He was lost. First he took the wrong turn at the traffic light. Then he tried to get to the Douglass’s to find the right way back, and he got here instead. So,” Gerty said, “I told him to go get Layne, and she’d show us the way back. And the minute he got out of sight, I dumped all the liquor into the mud hole. I know how much dough this crowd has—and I know Jack can’t borrow enough to replace what I dumped, no matter how he scrapes around. So,” she concluded grimly, “that cracks his little plan for lousing Stinky up on this project, anyway!”

  “Just how were you plannin’ to fix up the car problem?” Asey asked.

  “I was going to make Stinky march it back to the owner and apologize like crazy. He will, too.”

  Asey looked at her thoughtfully., Something in her voice made him suspect that Stinky would probably arrive on his knees, dressed in sackcloth and possibly smeared with ashes.

  He asked about the blanket.

  “Oh, that? That belonged to Jack. Had his name on it. You know, it’s been cold on a lot of these projects we been on,” she explained. “We learned to go prepared, like with blankets, and red flannels and all. I don’t know why the blanket was in the car—maybe the boys took it to carry their bottles back to the Inn in. I was just so damn sore, I threw it in the muck, too.”

  “
Wa-el,” Asey said, “that accounts for the roadster, the mud hole department, an’ Stinky an’ Jack. Now—about Mrs. Boone. You started off with her, an’ never got to her. Just where does she enter into this problem of yours?”

  “The Sucker Club,” Gerty said promptly. “Boone’s the founder, organizer, and head girl—oh, there isn’t any such thing really, of course! That’s just what Layne Douglass and I call it. You see, Mr. Mayo, Boone’s the real trouble with Jack, and Stinky too. They’re both right guys. It’s just that Boone’s made suckers out of both of ’em, only they don’t know it! You ask Layne—she’ll tell you that’s the truth. We been talking about it on the beach just now.”

  “Made suckers out of ’em in what way?” Asey asked curiously. “What d’you mean?”

  “Gee, if you was—I mean, ‘were—only another girl!” Gerty sounded wistful. “Your Cousin Jennie’d see the picture before I got the words out of my mouth. Well, it’s like this, see. Boone’ll go to Jack and say she’s making a little speech, or writing a little article, and she’d like his point of view—now just what would a former enlisted man think of this?”

  Again she made that little gesture with her hand that was so like what Asey remembered of Mrs. Boone in her newsreel appearances, and yet so much a parody of it.

  “Then,” Gerty continued, “she goes to Stinky and asks him the hero’s point of view on the same thing. Now what would a fighting officer with twenty-one decorations feel about so-and-so? Oh, Mr. Mayo, don’t you see what she does to ’em? Don’t you see?”

  “I think I do,” Asey said slowly. “You mean they never they did in the war, because she keeps bringin’ it up.”

  “That’s it! Stinky’s flattered that a big shot like her should ask him, and he shoots his mouth off,” Gerty said. “And Jack, he’s flattered too that she asks him, but he’s a little sore because of her still thinking of him as a private, see? Then he goes and cooks up something else that gets Stinky into a mess, to prove that Stinky’s really the low boy in civilian life, see, and he’s the bright boy. It’s a circle that just keeps going round and round. And the suckers—oh, those two big suckers, how they go and fall for it!”

  “An’ for her, too?”

  Gerty sighed as she leaned back against the roadster’s seat.

  “Uh-huh. Her too,” she said.

  “No need askin’,” Asey remarked, “which one you’re feelin’ all that anguish for!”

  A little smile flitted across Gerty’s face. “Layne Douglass would kill me if she thought I said it, but it ain’t—ooop! isn’t—half the anguish she’s feeling about Jack and the way he’s acting, let me tell you!”

  “Oh?”

  “They were both in college together, you know, before he went into the army. If she wasn’t the refined type, she’d black both his eyes so quick! Honest, people can act so crazy, can’t they? Jack calls her ‘Doctor’ Douglass, like she was a professor about a hundred years old, and she calls him ‘Briggs’, like he was a kid freshman of sixteen, just out of high school! And yet, if you watch, you can see how her eyes follow him when she thinks he isn’t looking, and when he thinks she isn’t looking, he looks at her—gee! And if you said a word to either of ’em about it, they’d kick your teeth out.”

  She paused and gazed dreamily at the sand dunes beyond the meadow.

  “Either—they,” she murmured. “That’s wrong, isn’t it? Well, if you said a word to either, he—or she, as the case might be—would slap you down. I got to look up that either-they business again, I guess.”

  With difficulty, Asey suppressed a smile. “How does Layne feel about Mrs. Boone, in view of her makin’ a sucker out of Jack?”

  “Oh,” Gerty said wearily, “she thinks Mrs. Boone is Mrs. God! Sure, she kids about the Sucker Club, but she doesn’t hold anything against Boone—no, sir! She’s just livid with Jack because he don’t catch on. Thinks it’s his fault. Now me, I’m sore enough with Stinky, God knows, but I don’t kid myself, see, about whose fault it all is. 7’m not a one to underestimate the power of a woman—not a woman like Boone, anyway! I don’t think she doesn’t know her own strength—I know very damn well she knows it, and uses it, and but good!”

  “On Jack, for example?” Asey steered her back to the angle which interested him most. “I gather he’s fallen for her even though he really still loves Layne.”

  “Oh, Jack and Stinky both!” Gerty said. “They eat Boone up, both of ’em! They’re goggle-eyed with her. Punch drunk. And I tell myself,” she added with a touch of bitterness, “it can’t be only just on account of her lovely correct grammar!”

  Asey threw back his head and laughed until he choked.

  “Have you bothered,” he said when he got his breath, “to tell yourself that she’s married?”

  “Look, I seen that old, bald, weedy windbag!” Gerty retorted. “Married to Senator Willard P. Boone, a girl might as well be single!”

  “Now give the old fellow credit,” Asey said with a chuckle. “The papers always call him spry, an’ talk about what wonderful golf he plays, an’ I’m sure I seen pictures of him tossin’ out the first baseball, too.”

  “Oh, he’s agiler Gerty said crisply. “He’s quick on the old pins! Every blonde in school gets set to sprint when Old Horse-face comes to the campus! But I don’t count the senator. What I count is secretaries!”

  Asey raised his eyebrows.

  “Men secretaries, I mean,” Gerty said hurriedly. “Boone always has men because she claims girls got too jealous of her. Eric—that’s the one she’s got now—he’s in Washington this week, but Eric’s going into the diplomatic service, and so she’s hunting around for a successor. It’s a sort of a springboard job, being her secretary is. And,” she grinned, “and all of ’em bounce off into the nicest things!”

  “So?”

  “And I think—now look, Mr. Mayo, I’m just guessing at this!—I think that Jack Briggs wants to go into politics.”

  “And he certainly couldn’t ask for a nicer place to bounce into ’em from,” Asey said, “than bein’ her secretary. That what you mean?”

  “Yeah. Like Eric said to me last week, you meet such interesting people, working for her! And Stinky, he has some idea he’d either like to teach, or run a school,” Gerty went on. “He’d contact some pretty interesting people, too. Now I don’t think either of the boys would break down and say they covet Eric’s job, see? And I’m damn sure neither of ’em knows what they’d be getting themselves in for if they landed it. Our Mrs. Boone,” she added succinctly, “doesn’t do things for free! Only in their misty-eyed state, Jack and Stinky don’t notice that! But there’s the nice job, and there’s the two of ’em getting through school next month, see?”

  “An’ if one of ’em should get it—?” Asey left the sentence unfinished.

  Gerty winced. “Then either Layne Douglass is going to do some pillow-biting, or I—well, I don’t think that mummy’ll stick around Larrabee’s College to watch, if Stinky wins.”

  She was looking out over the meadow to the dunes again, but this time Asey knew that she wasn’t brooding about her grammar.

  “What did you do,” he asked curiously, “before you went into the army?”

  “Show business,” Gerty said. “I was twenty then, and I’d been in show business for five years. I didn’t know one part of speech from another, and I didn’t starve, and I won’t starve again for not knowing all the rules about infinitives—what are you asking all this for? ” She turned and shot the question at him suddenly.

  “All what for?” Asey returned. “About you? I didn’t mean to pry, but I was curious. I don’t run into ex-Wac sergeants every day in the we—”

  “Don’t stall, chum! You didn’t care a hoot about your car’s being swiped! It’s Boone you wanted to know all about—it’s her you been so interested in!”

  Asey observed that to his way of thinking, Carolyn Barton Boone was a very interesting person.

  “When you first came, you didn’t
look to see if your car was okay—you didn’t even take one little gander at the fenders!” Gerty said. “Instead, you looked for tracks of something that might’ve been shoved into the mud hole. You must’ve been watching me some time to know that I threw that blanket away—I’m just beginning to catch on! So Boone’s lost? Lost? Okay, chum, let’s have it! What’s happened to Boone?”

  Asey shrugged and said truthfully that he didn’t know.

  “She was at the Douglass’s,” he continued, as Gerty made a derisive sound of disbelief, “an’ then—well, they sort of lost track of her.”

  “Sure! Of course!” The irony in Gerty’s voice would have done credit, Asey thought, to Dr. Cummings. “And the minute she slipped out of sight behind that purple lilac, they called in Asey Mayo right away—just to help find her! Yeah, sure! But I got to admit that Little Lame-brain here took a long, long while to get hep—me, I was mostly worried about Stinky, and parking in a hot car! And how you eased all that dope out of me! ” She paused and looked at him with something akin to admiration. “I just made you a present of the whole damn setup, didn’t I? The works, from Shearing to Stinky!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be so suspicious-like,” Asey said, and meant it. “I told you the truth. I am huntin’ Mrs. Boone because—she’s lost!”

  “To the person sending in the best answer, in fifty words or less, to our question, ‘Why is Asey Mayo hunting Mrs. Boone?’, we will give, absolutely free and without charge, a two hundred and forty-eight piece set of genuine, bone-type china, with real simulated-gold trim,” Gerty said. “Including two pickle dishes. And just a tip, folks. The answer is not, and I quote, ‘Because she’s lost!’ Unquote. No, chum, I don’t think they rushed you into the cast for a bit-part. Something seems to keep telling me that you landed the lead.”

  Asey sighed.

  “I can see,” he said, “where you an’ my Cousin Jennie have a lot of things in common. She refers to that trait as her perspicacity, an’ Cummings calls it her intuition, an’ I sometimes feel, myself, that it’s something she does with mirrors.”