John D. MacDonald Read online

  I looked at Judy with gratitude, and with respect that she had sensed so quickly what was going on and how I could have made a fool of myself. Her face changed into the public Judy, and she gave me a distorted wink so vast I could almost hear it. Wallace Dorn gave his warning grunt and changed “own” to “clown” in such a way that the “c” changed “lean” into “clean,” and the “c” was on a bonus square.

  After the game we both owed Wallace. We paid him. Judy yawned and said, “Not another. I know when I’ve been stomped, pardner. I am going to go stare at a star and then crumple into bed.”

  “Need help looking at a star?” I asked her.

  “You take half the light years and I’ll take the other half.”

  We went by the dancers. They seemed unaware of us. We went down the stone stairway and out to the end of the left wing of the dock. Judy kept her hands shoved deeply into the big patch pockets of her wool skirt and scuffed her heels, shoulders a bit hunched against the night chill. There were almost too many stars. The red mat she had been sunning herself on was wet with dew. I flipped it over to the dry side and moved it near the edge. We sat down, dangling our legs toward the water. I lit her cigarette and turned and looked up over my shoulder toward the high terrace. The music was faint. Sometimes I could see them as far down as the waist when they moved near the edge of the terrace. Other times they were back out of sight.

  “Pretty fancy tumbril to ride in,” Judy said.

  It took me a moment to follow her. “How sharp is the knife?”

  “Sharp enough. People have heard it being sharpened. So I got canceled out of a couple of guest spots on summer shows. And the gang is beginning to break up. Can’t blame them. They need a warm spot come fall.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just so damn tired, Paul. I can always grow a new head. I’ve done it before. I’m a rough girl, Paul. I’m a fighter. So I keep telling myself. I could get a Vegas deal. But I’m just pooped. I don’t know. I’ve made it and I’ve kept more than most and it’s stashed where I can’t touch it, thank God. I’m supposed to react, I guess. Maybe she wants a down-on-the-knees response. I can always act, if it’ll keep her happy. Me for bed.” She got up. I stood up beside her. She put her fists up and began to wobble around the end of the dock, rubber-legged, lurching, snarling, “Yah, you never touched me, ya bum.”

  I was suddenly aware of the very special quality of her courage. I took her by the arms, holding her arms tightly just above the elbows. I shook her a little. I said, “I like you, Judy. I like you a hell of a lot.”

  “Leggo, or I’m going to cry right in your face.”

  I stood out there and watched her walk back to the shore, up the steps, out of sight across the terrace. I finished another cigarette and then went up. It was after one. Steve and Wallace Dorn had disappeared. Wilma and Gilman Hayes sat on a low couch. They stopped talking when I came in. Hayes sat with his big arms folded, looking at the ceiling. He looked sullen and stubborn.

  “Mavis went to bed,” Wilma said. We said good night. Hayes gave me a vague nod.

  Mavis, just a shade unsteady on her feet, was getting ready for bed, humming one of the Latin numbers. She gave me a warm moist smile. We went to bed. She was very ready, with swollen and eager readiness that completely ignored our increasing coolness toward each other. There was nothing flattering about it. Gilman Hayes had readied her, and the alcohol had primed her, and the music had quickened her. I was merely a convenience. A perfectly legal and uncomplicated and available convenience. There were no words of love. It was all very sudden and very tumultuous and very meaningless.

  Afterward I heard her breathing deepen and change into the breathing of sleep. The music was gone and the floodlights were out. There was a sound of water against the twin piers. She had managed to kill something. I did not know precisely how it was done. But I lay there and looked at the light patterns I could make when I squeezed my eyes shut, and I searched through my heart and could find no love for her. I was certain there had been love. But it wasn’t supposed to go away, like throwing away the pumpkins after Halloween. I looked for fondness, and found none. I looked for respect, and found none.

  She slept beside me, and she was just a big, moist, nubile, healthy, sycophantic young woman, too damn selfish to start bearing the children I wanted, big in the vanity department, small in the soul department, a seeker of sensation, an expert in the meaningless, a laboratory example of Mr. Veblen’s theories. I wanted to be rid of her, and I wanted to cry.

  Saturday was bright and hot and still. Breakfast was served in sections on the terrace as people got up, an affair of rum sours, huevos mexicanos, and Cuban coffee that was closer to a solid than a liquid. The combination melted mild hangovers. As people began to come to life it became pretty obvious that this was going to be one of those electric frantic days, with everyone galumphing about, working muscles, short of temper, drinking too fast, and playing too hard.

  Gilman Hayes put on a pair of trunks of jock-strap dimension and was hauled up and down the lake on water skis by Steve at the wheel of one of the runabouts. Hayes looked like one of the lesser inhabitants of Olympus. Mavis ahed and cooed from the end of the pier. I guess Steve got tired of it. He made a bad turn and put slack in the towrope and yanked hell out of Muscle Boy. Muscle Boy got indignant. Steve told him to go to hell and stretched his stocky body out in the sun and yelled to José to make with the Scotch. Randy, at Wilma’s request, took over the towing job. Hayes instructed Mavis on how to stay up on the skis. There was much giggling and shrill yelps and the support of an arm like an Atlas ad.

  I swam a little and drank a lot. Judy Jonah went through a regular conditioning routine, knee bends, back bends, holding one leg straight up, handstands. She had a trim figure. I enjoyed watching her. Wallace Dorn paddled around in the water between the two docks, looking as if he were enduring this indignity for the sake of mingling with the herd. Noel Hess sat fairly near me, ordering her drink freshened each time I did. I wondered about her. She’s dark and small and quiet. You never feel as if you know her. She seems to be watching you all the time. Yet you get a feeling of a lot of slow dark fire burning ’way down underneath all that placidity. She wore a yellow swimsuit and I noticed for the first time the almost textureless purity of her skin. The way she was built seemed to emphasize the ivoried intricacy of ankle joint and wrist and shoulder, making you conscious of the human form as something of delicate and vulnerable design. Wilma swam for a time, with a lot more energy than skill, and then waved in the trio off the lake and whooped up a game of croquet. She appointed Randy scorekeeper and referee, and the rest of us split into two teams of four.

  I was teamed up with Judy, Wallace Dorn, and Noel Hess, with Hayes, Mavis, Wilma, and Steve as the competition. Wallace, playing with bitter concentration, and Noel, with an unexpectedly good eye, kept up our end of the score. Judy clowned it, and I was getting too tight to be much good. There were ground rules. If you captured a ball you could hammer it into the lake. The person knocked into the lake had to chugalug a drink, retrieve the ball, replace it on the edge of the parking area. Whenever one team had gone the length of the course, everybody had a drink. It got pretty blurred for me. They kept knocking me into the lake. The voices started to sound funny, as though we were all in a tunnel. The stripes on the wooden balls got brighter. The grass got greener. I remember Judy pleading on her knees, hands clasped, while Steve took a gigantic swing and, losing his footing, knocked both her ball and his own down the cliff into the lake. I don’t know who won. I think I had some lunch.

  Then, in some mysterious way, I was in the living room, weaving, trying to focus my eyes, and Judy Jonah was supporting me.

  “Come on, now,” she said. “One big fat foot after the other.”

  “Where’s everybody?”

  “Out being mad and gay. Banging around in the boats. Churning around in the water. Come on, lamb. Judy won’t let you fall on your head.”
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br />   There was another blank and then I was in bed, and Judy was looking down at me, shaking her head. She walked to the foot of the bed and took my shoes off. I was still in my swim trunks. She floated a blanket over me.

  “Predate it,” I said. “Predate it.”

  “Poor old bear,” she said. She leaned over me, kissed me lightly on the lips, and then she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. The bed started to veer dangerously around a circular track. I grabbed hold of it and steered it carefully into sudden sleep.

  When I woke up it was dark. I looked at the window. The outside floodlights were on. I heard laughter. Somebody was running water in our bathroom. The door opened, and through the dressing room I could see Mavis outlined against the lighted bathroom as she turned in the doorway and clicked off the switch.

  As she moved quietly through the room I spoke her name.

  “So you aren’t really dead after all, dahling?”

  “What time is it?”

  “About nine. It’s quite warm. We’re all swimming. I imagine you feel dreadful, I hope.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “You made a spectacle of yourself, you know. Stumbling around like that. I hope you feel stinking.” She swept out and banged the door shut.

  I drifted off again. When I woke up I had a feeling it was much later. I felt a little better. I drank three glasses of water, put on a bathrobe, and went out into the living room. Two small lights burned. The music was FM unattended, some asinine disc jockey who said, “And it’s thirty seconds to Cinderella, cats, so I guess that winds up the ball game. Sorry, Eleanor, we didn’t get to spin that Julie platter for you, but…” I found the right knob and cut him off. I walked out on the terrace, to a warm night of a billion stars. Somebody came up the concrete steps with reckless speed. The hurrying figure rushed to the switch box and the banks of floodlights began to snap on, one section at a time, dimming the stars. I blinked at the lights and saw it was Steve. The others were down on the dock.

  Steve grabbed my arm hard. “Paul, Wilma’s gone.” I was fogged by long sleep. I stared stupidly at him. “Gone where?”

  “We think she drowned.”

  Chapter Three

  (JUDY JONAH—AFTERWARD)

  I KEPT THINKING the whole situation could have used a better script. Heaven knows I’d become an expert on bad scripts during forty weeks of Judy-Time. That was the inane name the agency stuck on my half hour of frenzy.

  It was so damnably disorganized, everybody running around and bleating, and Paul Dockerty the only one who made any sense. He got the phone calls placed as soon as he realized what had apparently happened. It was clear enough, all right. Her stuff on the end of the pier and all of us staring at the emptiest, blackest water there ever was. Sure, we’d been paddling around in it, very happy-time, floating and star watching and feeling that little thrill of danger that night swimming gives you. But after we knew what had gone on, I don’t think six strong men could have hurled me back into that water. Paul got Gil Hayes and Steve out there with him, diving in the area where we thought she had been. Wallace and Randy couldn’t swim well enough. So Randy handled the boat and shone the big flashlight down into the murk of the water. It was very still. We’d hear them cough and gasp when they came up. That fool of a Mavis Dockerty sat near my feet as I stood watching them out there. She made an interminable messy bleating sound as though her insipid little heart would break right in two.

  We heard the sirens coming. It sounded as though they were riding across the black hills. Paul called in to me, asking me the time. I took my watch out of the pocket of my robe and held it so the bright lights were on the dial. “Nearly quarter to one,” I shouted.

  I heard him say, “O.K. That’s enough. The experts are coming. It’s too late anyway, even if we had luck enough to find her. If it isn’t some kind of a stunt of hers, and if she isn’t sitting down the shoreline, laughing like hell, she’s as dead as that mackerel in the moonlight.”

  His voice carried well over the water. “Don’t talk about her like that!” Mavis shrieked, and then started a more furious round of bleats.

  There were two big young troopers in one car and a fat man with a dull, kindly face in the other. They came down and made a rough count of noses and stared out across the water. One of the troopers couldn’t seem to stop looking at me. It gave me an insane desire to burst into a routine for him.

  Paul said, “I hear boats coming.”

  The civilian was named Fish. He said, “I told the phone office to get the boys out of bed and have them come over here. They’ll drag for her.”

  “She’s dead now,” Paul said. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”

  “Well, we always start right out, soon as it happens. We always do. She couldn’t be playing one of those jokes now, could she?”

  “I doubt it,” Paul said. “She would have heard the sirens and come in.”

  I walked away from there and left them talking. I belted my robe a little tighter, lighted my last cigarette. I sat on the stone steps and looked out at the lake. Bugs beat their furry brains out against the nearby floodlights. I sat and thought of several ways I would have liked to hold Wilma under the surface, and started giving myself the creeps because I knew I couldn’t have.

  Oh, she’d saved it and planned it, and even though I told myself I didn’t care, when she finally gave it to me, she had certainly done it in her own unique way. She made a habit of leaving you nothing. I decided I would stop thinking about it. It wasn’t any good to think about it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot that was good to think about.

  I watched boats arrive, saw the grappling irons and hooks, looking like medieval torments, rigged under the lights while they split up the area. The officials were in a huddle at the end of the pier where Wilma had parked her things.

  After a time Paul came slowly up the steps toward me. He stopped and shivered and said, “Stick around, Judy, while I get dry and get more cigarettes, will you? I want to talk to you.”

  “Sure.”

  He was back quickly and sat on the next step below mine, rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He said, his voice muffled, “That deputy sheriff named Fish found that two-piece suit of hers in the pocket of her robe. What was going on? Was she wearing a different one?”

  “Nope. We were being naughty. Practically a group bacchanal, unless you can think of a more clinical description. By starlight.”

  He turned and frowned at me. “You too, Judy?” It struck me as odd that the first question hadn’t concerned the tepid Mavis.

  I pulled the top of my robe apart. “You will note, kind sir, that I am still clad in my old blue serge swim togs, the ones with the shine on the seat. For me, cold lake water has a strange lack of aphrodisiac appeal. And if I am to be groped at by starlight, I want some firm footing underneath. You may mark me down as a spoilsport.”

  “How about Mavis?”

  “A lady would say she didn’t know. But your lady is remarkably nude under that lush robe of hers. And a remarkable figger of a woman, I might add. The other spoilsports were Randy, who doesn’t swim well enough, and Wallace Dorn, who possibly couldn’t bear the loss of dignity.”

  He was still for a little while and then said, with shock in his voice, “Noel, too?”

  “Consider us both nonplused, Paul pal. I lay it to brandy. Or to atavism. Or obscure revenge on hubby. Or urging by one Steve Winsan. In any case, I say to hell with it. I feel like this is a conversation we should have over a back fence while hanging out the wash. There was chatter about getting back to Mother Nature. Though I am used to appearing before the public without benefit of dignity, I’m still a shy girl at heart. I draw lines. I get all crawly. I think about the decadence of modern society. See, I’m a thinker, said with no trace of a lisp.”

  “Where were you when it happened, Judy?”

  “I really don’t know, because no one seems to have any precise idea of when it did happen. Somebody started calling her. I think
it was Mavis. Then we all listened. Then Gil Hayes started bellering her name so big it echoed off the other side of the lake. And we all listened. No Wilma. So Steve came roaring up to put on the lights, giving his playmates very little time to get decent. I heard the mad scrambling. Steve must have donned shorts while at a full gallop. You entered the scene at that point, from the wings, looking like something pried out from under a stone. And then your executive talent asserted itself. Order out of chaos.”

  “My God, I wish Mavis would shut up.” There was no answer to that. I wished she would too. I looked at the back of his head. I liked the funny boyish way his uncombed hair grew in a sort of swirly thing on the crown of his head. Poor bear. Great big guy with an integrity you could sense. Maybe his claws and teeth were sharp enough in the world of business, but in a setup like this he was a toddler. Types like Steve and Wallace Dorn and Randy and Wilma and—go ahead, admit it—Judy the Jonah could disembowel him with a flick of the wrist. I guess this is the difference: We learn, maybe too early, that the deadliest battlegrounds are the cocktail parties, the dinner parties, the theatre parties, the quick drink before lunch. For a man like Paul Dockerty such things are supposed to be relaxation. So here he was in the midst of wolves, burdened with that silly wife who has—I should say had—that severe crush on Wilma, that silly wife without enough experience of the world to even sense the subconscious reason for that crush, though Wilma certainly knew the score. And, had she lived, I wouldn’t have put it past her to lead Mavis just far enough so the girl would one day get a pretty godawful look at herself and her motivations.

  Poor bear. Poor decent bear. Nice guy with a rugged face, bewildered by his lady, and more than half disgusted with her. Judy, my girl, it is a luxury you can’t afford, but oh, how nice it would be to take off the mask once more and hold the big bear in your arms, hold him safe and sweet, because it’s a long, long time between loves.