John D. MacDonald Page 14

  I looked into those eyes. I wondered how her nail scissors would look sticking out of her throat. “Like I said, thanks.”

  “You’re more than welcome, Judy.”

  I didn’t start really shaking until I got to my room. Even if the Judy fad had faded, I’d still had one thing: pride in being a workman. A trooper. A pro. And, damn her eyes, she’s picked that one thing to work on. Fourteen years of show business didn’t mean a thing. I was a girl they threw goo at, for shock value. Maybe everybody thought that. Damn her! So poisonously sweet, and taking an aimed kick at your best prop. Well, she’d wobbled me badly. Put a few fracture lines in my supports. But I’d last. I always had.

  But I was going to spend a lot of time thinking of ways to kill her. Acting lessons! For God’s sake. Be a willow tree. Be smoke rising from a fire. Be a sad grasshopper. I’d see Willy and I’d put a show back together, and find a sponsor and shove the show right down her throat.

  But…

  I sat there on the bed and looked at my hands. I sat and felt as if she’d poisoned me. Rejection. Something you put in the blood stream. It dulls the reflexes, waters down hope, hamstrings pride.

  I had been going to change. Instead, I put on a robe and headed back out. I wanted a highball that would look like iced coffee. I wanted a fist fight. I wanted a chance to make a big gesture. Any kind.

  When it was night we were splashing around. Then they had to take off their suits and turn off the lights and be real bold. Steve called me chicken. I told him I’d got over being childish when I’d got over being a child. I told them about Hash. About how all of us came in on the train into Perm Station and Hash made his bet and I held the stakes. One hundred and twenty bucks he bet. He had to get from the train to the taxi stark naked. He made quite a stir as he went through the station, running like the wind, suitcase in one hand, tram case in the other. Would have made it, too, but his bare feet slipped and he hit his head when he went down. He was fined a hundred bucks. I told them anybody could swim thusly if it was his inclination. But it took a different kind of mind to Minsky your way through Penn Station.

  Randy, Wallace, and I were the conformists. I swam around at a safe distance. Randy stayed on the dock, I think. Much giggling and splashing and games. How gay in the wilderness! I wondered what the loons thought. And the perch. I thought, so help me, of how enjoyable it would be if friend Wilma floated down the creek at the end of the lake and on down the river and out to sea.

  So when the shouting began to make sense and I suddenly became aware of trouble and made the dock and scrambled up and found out Wilma was gone, it gave me a feeling of nightmare. As if my wish had been too strong. A feeling of guilt. I got my robe on. Come on, Judy. You’re a comic. Say something funny now.

  Chapter Twelve

  (STEVE WINSAN—AFTERWARD)

  THERE is an old, not so funny Hollywood story about two studio heads walking down the street trying to think up a good sequence for a picture in process. Every time one of them gets an idea, he acts it out, with gestures. And the other shakes his head sadly. A safe is being lowered out of an office window. The rope breaks. The safe lands with damp finality on one of the two executives. The other one looks at the scene in eye-bulging horror and then yells, “Too gruesome, Sammy! We can’t use it!”

  There I was. Idea boy. Standing on the dock and thinking I should call Wilma and get her back in. Too gruesome, kid. We can’t use it. It isn’t a good PR pitch. The public won’t go for it.

  And then the night got bigger and blacker. The hills got older. The sky got farther away. The lake got deeper and darker. I shivered. You live in a place full of light bulbs and chrome and rare fillets and box-top contests. But when you die, you die in a place of mountains and sky, earth and fire, stars and the sea. I felt tiny as hell. I didn’t like the feeling. I felt like a pasteboard man on a dock somebody built with a toy kit, looking at the real world for the first time.

  Up until that moment I had a fighting chance. I might have been able to wiggle things around so as to save my own bacon by retaining at least one of the three sagging accounts. And that one was going to be Wilma. At least, working through Randy, with Noel working on him, I seemed to have the best chance there. I stood there and I saw an imaginary office in an almost first-rate hotel, and me in the office on a stinking salary beating my brains out trying to fatten the guest list with almost first-rate people, with the fractured nobility and with Texans who didn’t know any better, and trying to angle the name of the house into the columns of those big warmhearted columnists who would crucify their dear old mothers if by so doing they could add one more paper to the string.

  And then that lovely vision faded as I suddenly saw what was being handed me on a platter. It kindled a little fire of excitement in the pit of my stomach and then roared up through the flue. I felt twice life size. This was going to be it. When they recovered the body, I wanted to kiss the stone-cold forehead.

  It meant I had to do some very fancy operating. I had to be light on my feet. While I was still thinking, Paul enlisted me to go out there and do some futile diving for the body. I hoped we wouldn’t find her right away. Because it might be possible to revive her. This was going to be Steve’s big chance. I dived on order, but I did damn little hunting. I was too busy thinking.

  The tabloid boys were going to try to turn this into a sensation. There was all the raw material there. When the body was recovered, it was going to be awfully bare. And the house full of lintheads who would talk too much. We had to have a plot, a better one than the one we were stuck with. And the brass that would swoop down on us had to be handled. I would have to coach the people in the new plot and make it consistent. And keep the working press off their backs until they had it clearly in mind. The thing that seemed to make the most sense was to say that we’d all come up here to work out an idea for a new fall show, headlining Judy Jonah. Hayes could be worked into the idea somehow. Maybe sets, costumes. O.K., so we had the sales manager, the account executive, a public-relations consultant, her business manager. If it was handled right, it might generate a lot of public interest in the fall show, and might even make it worth while using Jonah again. The deal on the swimming was what would make it tough. It was too sweet a tabloid angle. What I should do was get to her room and get hold of a suit and smuggle it out and rip it a little and get it into the water. They would probably drag for the body. If I could get the suit on one of the grapples, the whole thing would look better.

  If I could cool it all off, if I could give them nothing to chew on, then Steve Winsan would be known around town as the bright eyes who saved the ball game. And that would mean new people on the list.

  I was getting pretty pooped with all the diving. Paul had us knock off as the officials arrived. I hung around to see what would go on. Cold as I was. Then the one named Fish caught me flat-footed by finding Wilma’s suit in the pocket of her robe. I went up to my room and dried off and changed and went back down, thinking hard all the time. I wanted to get them apart and tell them what I had cooked up. But Fish intercepted me on the dock.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Winsan. Steve Winsan.”

  “O.K., Mr. Winsan. Get in that boat there. That’s Will Agar. Got to have two men in a boat, one on the oars and one on the grapple.”

  “But…”

  “Suppose you co-operate, Mr. Winsan.”

  “I’ve got some phone calls to make.”

  “I already told the operator not to take any calls from this number unless I make them, so you don’t have to worry about it. Just get in the boat there and Will will tell you what he wants done.”

  What could I do? I got in the boat. Will was all teeth, Adam’s apple, and adenoids. Somebody yelled from the dock. “You, Will, go make your sweep to the north of Bobby.”

  The grapple was a crude thing, a piece of pipe on a heavy line with gang hooks fastened in a row.

  Will said, “Now if she comes fast, pull slow and easy. If it�
�s the body, it’ll come up slow. But if it goes tight, we got bottom. Then we got to work it loose.”

  I looked toward the shore in complete despair. They’d turned out some of the floods, the ones that were in our eyes. I could count fifteen boats. Holding the line, I could feel the pipe bumping along the bottom, dragging the hooks after it. Every once in a while we would catch. Each time it happened, it would give me a feeling of shock. Will would clamber back and test the tension of the line. “Hung up again,” he’d say. He’d circle back and work it loose. I was trapped out there in full view of the house, with no way of knowing what the damn fools there were saying to the officials. The house lights were on. I could see people moving around once in a while. And sometimes they’d wander out on the dock, alone or in pairs, and look out at us. Will wasn’t scintillating company. The long slow hours passed. My hands were getting raw from tugging the rough line loose. I had no cigarettes left. We would finish a sweep and then somebody would tell us where to go next. I could see a night city editor someplace. “You know, that Ferris woman. Lake Vale. I don’t give a damn if you don’t know where it is. Somebody knows where it is. Get one of those guys who fly fishermen around in float planes. I’m lining up somebody for pics. Phone your stuff in to Saul. He’s got all the stuff out of the morgue on her.”

  And I was afraid that while I was still out in this stinking rowboat I’d start seeing flash bulbs popping. With me out here fishing. Everything was a dull milky gray when Will said quietly, “O.K., pull it up, Mr. Winsan.”

  I asked him why. He didn’t answer. I turned and looked at him. He was looking at a boat about forty feet away. That boat had a kerosene lantern on one of the seats. There were two old guys in it. They were gingerly pulling in a line, hand over hand, both staring at the surface of the black water. For a few moments there it looked like one of those old paintings. The two old guys with the light orange on their faces, and the light making a flickering path on the water. Other boats had stopped moving. The world seemed very still. I saw the heavy whiteness break the surface, and then one man yelped and the other made a lunge, nearly upsetting their boat. The lantern rocked dangerously.

  “Here she is, boys,” a cracked old voice sang out.

  They got together and worked her up over the side. She came over the side, white and heavy, the lanterns making wet highlights on her, her head loose, black hair pasted flat. I heard the thumping as she tumbled onto the bottom of the boat. They covered her up and we headed in and the other boats came along.

  People were coming down from the house. I got out onto the dock. A big trooper and I were the nearest when the two old men came up beside the dock. We knelt and reached down for her as they strained and lifted her up. We got her. My God, she was heavy. She felt as heavy as two women, with that tarp wrapped loosely around her. The trooper tripped and half sat down backward and I couldn’t hold the weight, even though I tried. All I got was an end of the tarp and she rolled out, flaccid. In the lights she was a funny color. One eye was open. The other was covered with her black hair, wet and covering half her face. We fumbled to cover her up again, and I heard Judy Jonah yell at us to make it quick.

  I had forgotten my earlier feeling of coming too close to reality, and this brought it all back again. There was something immutable about that silent shape. You couldn’t tell it to go away. There were no lamps to rub, no incantations to say. It was there and undeniable and dead.

  There was a room. They took me to a doorway. A strange woman took me to the doorway. There was a stink of flowers. She gave me a little push. “Go in and say good-by to her, Stevie.” I went in. There was satin and silver handles. It wasn’t my mother. They had made it out of wax, and my mother never was so pink and still. And her hands were not like that. Not like white sticks with blue nails. Not so still. They had been busy hands. Busy with soap and towels and brush and broom and quick caresses.

  I turned and ran and the woman caught me and tried to hold me against her and I hit her with my fist and I guess I hurt her because she slapped me and then I cried and we both cried.

  It had been a long time since I had remembered that. I stood very still. They were telling us to get off the dock. I looked at a slim dark-haired woman. I couldn’t remember for a moment who she was. Noel. Like meeting someone on the street. You haven’t seen them for a long time. And I remembered, but remembering did not chase away any ghosts.

  I went to my room. I rolled up my sleeves. I scrubbed my hands. I wanted to scrub the skin off them. I wanted to get rid of the skin that had touched the heaviness of the body on the dock. I walked slowly toward the door to the corridor. And I heard someone coming. A woman. I opened the door. It was Noel. I spoke to her and took her hand and pulled her into the room and closed the door again. She would know where Randy was. I wanted to talk to him first. He could split the job with me. Maybe we’d have time enough.

  She said he was still sleeping. I looked at her. She was a stranger. But there are times when you need the closeness of a stranger. I put my hands on her slim waist and pulled her close to me, and kissed her hard, with a sort of defiance, trying to kiss away all this tarp and flowers and grapple business. But even as I was kissing her, I remembered the afternoon, and remembered that it hadn’t gained me anything. I’d just got her emotionally involved. I had to find out where she stood. And, from her attitude, figure a way of untangling myself. She certainly wasn’t a hell of a lot to look at. And she looked at me with a discouragingly glazed and sappy expression.

  So I delved a bit, cautiously, and found out, much to my relief, that she was off on a noble-wife kick. Standing bravely beside the unemployed husband. All very soap sales. It was an easy script to follow. I took my role. The disappointed lover. But not too insistent. The last thing I wanted to do was talk her out of the noble-wife part.

  “Then,” I said bravely, “I’m to consider this the brush-off?”

  It shows you how wrong you can be sometimes. I thought the little minx had been all loaded with sincerity. And what do I hear? One of my own lines, usually used in the brush-off scene. “We are a couple of adults, aren’t we?”

  My surprise showed. And she told me it didn’t mean as much as we said it did. I tell you, with that acting ability, she could have landed a part.

  I ruffled her hair and made with the “just grateful for knowing somebody like you” gambit. My kind of people. That’s what she was. I had a twinge of conscience about all the time I was losing, but suddenly I wanted her again. Maybe whenever there is death and violence around, you start wanting somebody. Maybe nature does it to you. Like affirming that you are the one who is alive. And we sat on the bed. But before it could become particularly interesting, the maid tapped on the door and said we were all wanted in the living room.

  I decided right away that was for the best. It broke it up and kept me from wasting any more good time. We made some fast repairs and got ready to go. I checked the hall and it was clear. I was amused at the way she had fooled me. Fooled old Steve, the expert. And I felt affectionate toward her. So as she moved by me in the doorway I gave her a little love pat.

  Once I was at a zoo. A human-interest thing, I think it was. Baby zebras or something. Can’t remember. But I remember the big tawny cat. It was asleep. One big paw was through the bars. A typical linthead tourist had picked up a little stick. He leaned over the railing and he was jabbing at the exposed paw, showing his cretin children what a big brave guy he was, poking at a lion.

  One minute the lion was asleep. The next minute that big paw flicked by the guy’s face so fast that he jumped back long after it had gone by. His kids started crying. His complexion was like spoiled library paste. I just patted her and she whirled and raked me. Her face was all twisted up and she hissed as she did it. And then she was gone. I stood and called her every name in the book and then went in and looked at myself in the mirror. Two long deep ones, with blood gathering slowly. I washed them. I found iodine in the cabinet, and some tape. I patched myself up. She
had no damn reason in the world to do that. Not a reason in the wide world. Nobody does that to me. I decided right then and there that I’d get her apart from the others somehow. I’d get her out beside the house and back her up against a wall. I wouldn’t mark her, but I’d damn well teach her a lesson she wouldn’t forget in a hurry. A couple of good solid thumps in the belly teaches them some manners. It knocks the wind and the fight out of them.

  I was the last one to arrive in the living room. I got a cold stare from everybody, and I saw the flicker of speculation as they looked at my taped face and wondered. I saw Judy glance at the tape and then look immediately at Noel.

  Even the servants were there, and the young doc with the sideburns. I sat as far away from Noel as I could get. I caught her eye and gave her a hard look.

  Fish started talking, and as soon as I got the sense of what he was saying, I forgot all about Noel and my plans and everything else except the fact of murder. For a time my mind was just a damn blank, with a great big red M printed across it. And then the damnedest thing. If she drowned, it was an accident, and something like that could not happen to Wilma. She had to be murdered. My God, she had been born to be murdered. Pushing people. Always pushing. No truth or sincerity in her. Everything an angle. Everything had to be used for her benefit. It was just a case of which damn worm had turned.

  And thinking of worms, I looked at Randy Hess.

  We got our orders, and we were told that the big brass was coming. I jumped at the first hunk of silence that came along, asking permission to handle the working press on this whole thing. Fish was dubious. I oiled him a little and saw him lean my way. Noel took off. It began to break up into little groups. Fish and the doctor got me aside. I was explaining how I would operate.

  I looked over the doctor’s shoulder.

  Ever since that moment I’ve been explaining it to myself. Here is what I say to myself: There is something inside you that goes ’way the hell back. Primitive. Atavistic. I keep telling myself that it was just as automatic as yanking your hand back when you put it on a hot stove. Nothing you can control. No part of guts or lack of same. Just a reaction. One minute I was looking and I saw it, and the next second I was running like hell in the opposite direction. I went through the door so fast that my hands slapped hard against the corridor wall as I made the turn. And I ran all the way down to my room before I stopped. I stopped and I listened.