John D. MacDonald Read online

  I smiled. “And it didn’t mean as much as we said it did.”

  He ruffled my hair. “I guess not, kitten. But you’ve been awful good for me. I want you to know that. I mean just knowing somebody like you.”

  And that was the end of it, of course. I felt more soiled than when I had gone to look at her body. Than when I had sat and looked at the face of my sleeping husband, hating him. More soiled, because at least those emotions had been direct and honest. But this with Steve had been a cheapness. A baseness. Week-end entertainment, married-love variety. I sat and smiled at him and saw how he was. All the pose and the faking. Making his living from poses and takings and posturings and lies so that there was no longer any Steve Winsan left at all. Maybe there had been such a man once. Now he was an attractive shell stuffed solid with press clippings.

  He kissed my ear playfully. It made my ear ring. His hand was on my waist. “Now that we understand each other, kitten, let us do some relaxing. Hell, I think I can steer some people to Randy if he wants to set up an office again. It would be nice to keep you right in New York.”

  “That’s sweet of you,” I said.

  His square hand left my waist and gently pulled my sweater free of my skirt in back, crept up my spine to the fastening of my bra, and fumbled there a very short time before the fastening was released. It was something he had learned to do very well indeed.

  There is something perverse within you. It says that when you have been tricked and humiliated, you must seek further degradation. I sat in numbness, with his hands on me, perfectly willing to respond with completely faked emotions, perfectly willing to accept his meaningless and casual use of me, accepting him as a punishment, as ashes on the head of mourning. There was nothing at all left now, not even a way of escape.

  And there was a soft servile tapping at the door and the voice of Amparo, the sturdy and very lovely Mexican maid. “Meester Weensan?”

  He ceased his tactile deliberations. “What do you want?”

  “The policia, they say come right away, sir, to the beeg room, sir. Everywan.”

  He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and shrugged and called to her that he would be right along. We got off the bed. He rolled his sleeves down and put on his jacket while I fastened my bra and tucked my sweater back in. There was a crudeness in being there like that together, with the homely formulae of fixing our clothing—a crudeness and the death of magic.

  He opened the door and looked up and down the hallway and then said, “O.K., Noel.” As I started to go by him, out into the hallway, he clapped his square hand against my haunch in what I guessed was supposed to be rude affection and the affirmation of possession.

  But I have never liked to be touched except by those I love. I turned sharply and I do not know what my face looked like, but I do know that I made the quick sound of exhalation and warning that a cat will make as I raked at his face. He gasped with pain and jumped back. I went down the hallway alone.

  They were in the big living room. The lounge, as Wilma had called it. The big expanse of glass was gray. There was rose color outlining the eastern hills. I realized it was Sunday morning, and there was something shocking in realizing that.

  The two troopers, Carran and Maleski, were there, and the bulky officiousness of Deputy Sheriff Fish and the sideburned young coroner, all with the looks of ranks closed against us. José Vega, the butler-bartender-handy man, stood in a corner with the mild docility of the horse he so much resembled. His elder sister, the cook, Rosalita Vega, stood beside him. Amparo Loma, the pretty maid, sat uneasily on a chair as though she had been invited to sit down, had sat down obediently, and suddenly found herself to be the only servant seated and did not know quite how to terminate the embarrassment.

  My husband came into the room soon after I did. He was fusty with doped sleep, rumpled and vague-looking, yawning and nervous at the same time. He gave me a nod and sat over beside Judy Jonah and asked, too loudly, “What’s up, anyway?” Nobody answered him.

  Gilman Hayes, Wilma’s protégé, sat on the floor near the pale lamp wearing his Basque shirt and ragged shorts, long hard round brown legs crossed. He was looking with contempt at a book of reproductions. Wallace Dorn sat on the couch with the Dockertys. They talked in very low voices. Finally Steve entered the room. He gave me a sharp unpleasant look and sat as far from me as possible. He had two strips of tape on his left cheek. I felt a cold amusement.

  “That’s everybody,” Trooper Maleski said. “You want to take it, George?”

  Deputy Sheriff Fish looked both pleased and self-important. He took a step forward and cleared his throat. “We… I figured you people better all know the score just as soon as possible. When we got here last night, those of you we talked to give us the pretty clear idea of how it was an accidental drownding. Doc Andros here says she drownded, all right. That was the cause of death, he says. But he didn’t like the look of the pupils of her eyes, he says. So he gave her an extra good looking over and he finds out she was stobbed in the back of the head with something sharp. It punched a hole in her head bone and maybe if she wasn’t in the water she might of died of it eventually. But being in the water and still breathing, she just naturally drownded. We’ve been over that dock and those boats there with fine-tooth combs and there’s nothing she could have fell on to do that.

  “It was a round thing with a sharp point and she got stuck with it right here.” He turned around and pointed at his own head to show us. “So that can only mean one thing, and that’s a murder. Now Les Riley, the sheriff, is sick abed, but there’s going to be other people here that’ll want to talk with you folks about this thing. The county attorney—that’s J. P. Walther—and a lieutenant from the criminal-investigation part of the state police are both coming, and more than likely they’ll both bring along some people with them. In the meantime, by reason of the authority vested in me I’m here and now telling you folks that you all stay right here. Joe, you take up a collection of car keys and label them. I don’t want you down on the dock or out on the grounds. You stay right here in this house. That clear to everybody?”

  Steve spoke up. “It’s clear, sir. I’m sure well all cooperate. My name is Winsan. Steve Winsan. As a public-relations counselor, I’m used to dealing with the press. In fact, Mrs. Ferris was a client of mine. Miss Jonah and Mr. Gilman Hayes are also clients. They have reputations to protect, sir. I’m asking you to let me handle the working press on this whole matter. With people like Judy Jonah and Wilma Ferris and Gilman Hayes involved, they’re going to swoop down on this place like locusts. It will require careful handling.”

  “Now, I just don’t know about that,” the deputy sheriff said dubiously.

  Steve interrupted to say, “And by the way, I’d like to write down your name, your full name, so the papers won’t get it wrong. And the names of these other gentlemen, of course.”

  “I guess it’s a smart thing to use a man who knows his business,” Fish said, looking questioningly at the troopers.

  “This whole place will be a three-ring circus before noon,” Steve said.

  I was perfectly aware that I was going to be violently sick. I did not know how much time I had. As I walked toward the door, Fish said, “Where are you going, lady?”

  “To lie down,” I told him. I did not look back. No one stopped me. I made our room in time.

  I was sick and then I washed and then I stretched out on my unused bed. I tried to think coherently about myself. God knows I had seen enough sharpies in the past few years. I’d seen more than enough slick ones. I’d seen Randy moving ever closer to filth and had kept a certain pride in keeping myself clean. And then I had been taken like a schoolgirl by one of the worst ones. By one of the ones who cultivate a hearty honest manner.

  Wilma’s death no longer seemed important to me. She had died a long time ago.

  I slipped sideways into dreams that moved like acid across my mind, awakening in sweat only to slip back again, helpless against my exhaustion
and my regret.

  Chapter Two

  (PAUL DOCKERTY—BEFORE)

  IT WAS a three-hundred-mile drive to Wilma’s place at Lake Vale, and in spite of the work I had piled up, Mavis, my wife, absolutely refused to arrive Saturday instead of Friday. She said that she had accepted the invitation and promised we would arrive Friday in time for cocktails.

  And then she gave me that bland look which is such an infuriating copy of Wilma’s and said, “But, darling, you work for her, don’t you? I should think it would be important to you.”

  Yes, I worked for Wilma Ferris. There was no denying that. But my lovely wife couldn’t seem to get it through her thick head that I also had a reputation in the field to uphold. Before I had gone with Ferris, Incorporated, I had been a senior consultant with Ramsey and Shaver, Management Engineers. I had specialized in revamping the sales set up of the client firms. The works. Distribution, outlets, advertising, market surveys.

  And it was a black day indeed when I resigned from Ramsey and Shaver and went to work for twice the money for Ferris, Incorporated. I made the change after she spent a whole morning sitting across a desk from me and making good hardheaded sense. The company certainly wasn’t sick. It was highly profitable. But not what it could be. She gave me the entire picture. The factory was in Jersey. They had two lines of cosmetics. The Ferris line was the specialty-shop line, high-priced. Symbol of luxury. The Wilma line was the bread and butter. The chain-store stuff, big quantities, low profit margin. But distribution on both lines was a shambles. Sales had started downward. The sales manager had recently done the firm a favor by dropping dead. She wanted the sales trend healthy, the whole sales end revamped. She offered a good salary. I talked it over with Mavis. I accepted it.

  Because, you see, Wilma Ferris had talked hardheaded sense. At one point her voice got throatier, huskier, and she looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t ever try to kid me about the business, Paul. I started it with these two hands in a fourth-floor walkup. I started with Ferris Kreme. I mixed the glop up in a vat. I bought the jars wholesale. I designed the labels and stuck them on. I filled the jars and capped them and peddled them and collected my own accounts. Don’t ever try to kid me.”

  “Why tell me that?”

  “Lots of people try. They think they can walk off with a piece of the business just because I spend so damn little time at it. I spend little time at it because I’ve earned leisure. I’ve worked for it. I enjoy myself, Paul. I enjoy myself a hell of a lot. I hire people and let them work and leave them alone while I play.”

  I wish to God she’d left Mavis and me alone.

  Because that was the first time and the last time she ever made sense to me. After that I began to learn what she was. But by then our standard of living had gone up to match my new salary.

  “Besides,” Mavis said, turning from the lengthy business of brushing her hair, speaking as though it were the clincher, “the Hesses will be there, and Judy Jonah and Wallace Dorn, and you’ll certainly have a chance to talk business with them, won’t you?”

  Mavis felt we had to go because it was the first time we had been invited up to that reputedly fabulous place at the lake. But I could guess what sort of mess it would be. We’d been at Wilma’s apartment enough times to learn that. And people who knew had told me that if I thought Wilma a bit extroverted during her apartment parties, I should see her at the lake sometime. Or in Cuernavaca.

  Mavis took over the packing and by the time we were ready to leave a stranger would have guessed we were about to take a cruise to Norway, stopping at Bermuda on the way back. I shuddered to think of how much of my fat pay was stowed away in those suitcases. I got Herman to help me, and between the two of us we got it all down to the apartment garage and loaded it in the back end of the new car. I know that Mavis looked very nice indeed, but it was spoiled for me because of her hair. She had started to fix her hair like Wilma’s. She sees too damn much of Wilma. They’re built somewhat alike—both tall women solid in the hip, big-breasted, slim in waist, ankle, wrist. Women that look and act alive and have some warm substance to them. They have none of the anemia of the high-fashion ads. I am a big man but, contrary to legend, my tastes have not run to miniature women.

  This fixation of Mavis’ needs some explaining. I hear that it happens often. I have just never seen it happen before. I’ll have to explain how she was in order to explain how she is. I met her six years ago. She was twenty-one, to my thirty. She was a file clerk in a client plant in Troy, New York. I worked at the client plant for four months. There was something vague and unformed about her. Uninformed, too. Not that I can afford to be any intellectual snob. My college background was too much concerned with work sheets, reserves for depreciation, and time and motion study. But regardless of background, people do seem to acquire some stable theories and philosophies of existence, right or wrong. Mavis believed earnestly in any idea with which she happened to come in contact. And she would jettison it immediately when she ran smack into the next idea.

  Her vacillating earnestness so delighted me that I didn’t pay much attention to her lack of any vestige of a sense of humor. I can’t remember the name of that play by Old Whiskers where he takes a dumb girl and has the guy make her into a lady. There is some of that tendency in every man, I guess. Not that I wanted to make Mavis into a lady. She was ladylike enough. But I thought I could start with this big pretty sort of formless girl and marry her and she would learn what I liked and become what I liked.

  It didn’t work that way. I married her and she stayed the same old Mavis. Take her to a movie and for the next two days she’d be Betty Grable until she saw the next movie. She kept changing her hair, her accent, her style of dress, even her responses to affection. You couldn’t call it shallowness. She just hadn’t solidified into any one special individual. And I began to accept the fact that she never would, and accepted her for herself. She amused me. She fed me well. She was warm in bed. And she was decorative. If that is what you get, you can make it do. Even if there is no intellectual stimulation. Almost, I used to think, like having a great big beautiful playful red setter in the house.

  That’s the way she was. Until we fell into the orbit around Wilma Ferris. Wilma is the strongest woman I know. My God, she’s strong. She keeps pressure on you all the time. As they say about certain entertainers, she’s always on. There is never any directness or simplicity. Only the impression thereof. And my girl became like a big fluttery moth circling the hot flame. She dived in finally and came out and she wasn’t Mavis any more. She was another edition of Wilma. Not deep on the inside, where Wilma is like steel. But all the outward manifestations. Wilma seemed to polarize her. To line up all her molecules or something. So she thinks Wilma is the mostest woman that ever walked the earth, and each day there is less of Mavis and more of Wilma. And the hell of it is, perfecting the facsimile means getting as close to Wilma’s standard of living as we can.

  That alone I could adjust to. But my Mavis was a good girl. I mean good in the old-fashioned sense. Where things are black and other things are white. Wilma operates in an even shade of gray. And I have sensed that Wilma is superimposing her own moral standards on my Mavis. That frightens me.

  I think there was a time when I could have told Mavis a little story about Wilma. And the little story would have severed that umbilical cord through which she feeds Mavis. But I waited too long, and if I told her now she might look at me with that derision I saw that afternoon in Wilma’s eyes.

  Wilma asked me to come up to her apartment. A chat about our tie-up with the advertising agency, Fern and Howey. But from the moment I walked in, I sensed how it was. She had set her de luxe stage, and all I had to do was reach out. I damn near did. I was very, very close. But I kept remembering Randy Hess, remembering that big ring she had put in his nose, and I didn’t want any such ring in my nose. A business relationship was entirely enough. I gingerly untangled myself and made it just obvious enough so that she could hint that I was s
cared. I said it wasn’t that, exactly, and was rewarded with her look of derision. From that afternoon on she started seeing even more of Mavis. It sounds a little crazy to say that because she batted zero with me, she would concentrate on making my wife emotionally dependent on her, but not when you know Wilma. She has to win, somehow. I think it was Steve Winsan who told me about the titled lady in Cuernavaca who consistently and politely declined all invitations to attend parties at Wilma’s place. Not long after that the Mexican authorities found an irregularity in the titled lady’s residence permit, and the lady had to go back from whence she came.

  Wilma had been entertaining the Mexican official who was in charge of those permits.

  She has to win, somehow.

  I can understand some of it and I don’t blame her. She came from nothing. From a complete nothing. The lower East Side, they say, where you learn a hell of a lot about survival. Maybe it was there that she learned she had to win all the time. And maybe if she was still struggling, that desire to win would be channeled in the right direction. But she has won, and so it has been diverted to a lot of social and personal stuff, where it becomes just so much malicious mischief, and worse. Like those two husbands she took on. One ended up a hopeless alcoholic, and the first one shot himself. They were sort of unstable guys to start with. I sometimes think she is attracted to instability, that she sort of feeds on it. Randy Hess is a pretty good example of that.

  I’ve made her sound like a mess. Actually she is a hell of a lot of woman. You’ve got to admire her. But sort of in the way you admire a parade going by. With a lot of drums.

  We got in the car and started up the parkway and you could feel what kind of day it was going to be in the city. A bake job. One of those Dutch-oven days followed by a night when all that stone would be radiating heat until dawn.