John D. MacDonald Page 6

  But all the time I knew I was worried about more than the six-hundred drop. This is a rumor town. What the hell has happened to Steve? Hear he lost Hayes and Jonah and Ferris. Guess he wasn’t doing a job for them. Just the faintest smell of failure and it would make it an awful lot tougher to plant a release and then maybe the remaining ones would get nervous, and then Steve would be really sunk. And there wasn’t a PR firm in town that would take me on. Not after the way I set myself up in business back there in ’48, walking out with the clients in my pocket. They’ve been waiting for me to fall on my face. Hell, a man has to take care of himself. They would have kept me on coolie wages until I was seventy, and then invited me to buy in—maybe a big two-hundredth part of the business.

  I sat there and I was really scared. I knew who would be the fourth one to go. Nancy, my Big Author. I’d run out of angles as far as she was concerned. It didn’t seem to occur to her that maybe she better get another book published. I’d even run out of panel shows I could get her on. All I had to do was mention her name and the columnists I laughingly call friends would groan.

  I sat there in the dying city and wished I’d been a little smarter. The cream is in the industrial accounts. A few of those and I’d be set. But my people are individuals, most of them in the arts or entertainment. I suppose that’s natural. That was my beat when I was on the paper. Clubs and galleries and theatres, radio stations, concert halls.

  I sat there and I began to feel artificial. Something that had been made up. Packaging is everything. They don’t seem to give much of a damn about the contents any more. Make the outside pretty. Give it that glamour look. The hell with the product. The public will buy. And that was what I was in. The packaging business. Dressing up personalities.

  I went into the small bathroom off my office and turned on the fluorescent lights on either side of the mirror. It is not a kind light. If I squinted a little, blurring my image, I was still Steve Winsan, that fabricated product, that All-American tailback type, bluff and hearty and confident as all getout. The man to see. But with my eyes wide open, my face under the naked lights looked like the face of a tired character actor. That was it, maybe. I’d been playing the part of Steve Winsan so damn long it was going stale on me. I was sick of Steve Winsan and of a world full of things that didn’t work quite right any more because they weren’t making good products any more. They were fudging. Filling the armpit salve with air bubbles. Making nail polish guaranteed to flake off in twenty-four hours. Publishing books guaranteed to stand only two readings before the pages started to fall out. Putting fenders on cars you could dent with the heel of your hand. Make them stand still for the upkeep. Put crumby steel in their razors, weak thread on their buttons, waterbase paint on their walls. Keep them coming back. Hooray for enterprise. Hooray for Stephan Winsan Associates, which vends a product nobody ever heard of thirty years ago, and practically anybody can do without right now. There was nothing wrong with me that a double orchidectomy couldn’t cure.

  So I went home and changed clothes and went out on the town and I was gay as hell and got home earlier than usual and quite alone and set the alarm, and by eleven o’clock I was being a Fancy Dan in the parkway traffic, tooling the MG in and out of the lanes and wondering why the hell I owned a car when I used it not more than three times a month and why I had three suits ordered and why I’d given Dotty a raise, and why Jennifer couldn’t fall off one of those New Mexican cliffs, and what the hell I was going to say to Wilma that would make her pat me on the head and call me back into the fold. And I wished that I had never clambered into that nine-foot bed of hers, because all it had done was use up a weapon that might have come in handy this week end. Wilma is the sort you do not gain ascendancy over by pouncing on. Her only involvement, apt though it may be, is physical. All you lose is your dignity, and all you gain is the responsibility of coming on the run should she crook her finger again. Much the same loss that Dotty had suffered with me.

  I ate a late lunch on the road, a heavy lunch to put a good base under the drinks that would be flowing. I arrived a bit early and thought I might be the first. But the Hesses’ car was there, between Wilma’s and the station wagon. Just as I got out of my car, Judy Jonah came boiling down the drive in that Jag of hers. She swung in beside me.

  She got out of the car and put her fists on her hips and stared at the house. “Wow!” she said.

  “First time you’ve seen it?”

  “Uh-huh. Looks edible, doesn’t it? How are you doing, Steve?”

  “Medium. Did Willy say anything to you yet about that Millison thing?”

  “It sounds great,” she said with a look of disgust. “He’ll have something real gay lined up. Like catching a custard pie in the puss. Something subtle like that.”

  “A thousand-dollar pie, my lamb.”

  “Not by the time I get it, it isn’t.”

  “He’s a replacement. They’ve got the hell budgeted out of him. That’s all he can do.”

  José came out to get our luggage. For once he seemed almost mildly glad to see me.

  “Don’t think I’m not grateful, Steve. Willy told me that you found out about it and sicked him onto it.” She smiled at me but there was a little bit of frost behind it. We used to get along a lot better. And then I made a mistake. One of those things. It wasn’t even very important to me. All she had to do was say no. But she said no and, at the same time, gave me a wicked smack across the mouth. It cut my lip and I came within a tenth of a second of really hanging one on her, I was so mad. She told me she would stay on as a client merely because she thought I knew my business, but my professional services were the only ones she required, or would ever require. Hence the little suggestion of coolness.

  “Where is Willy, by the way? Come on, we go around this way.”

  “Absent by request. Wilma says this is social.”

  “Wilma says.”

  She gave me an oblique look, a quick flash of those expressive blue eyes. “I should have at least brought a writer, I guess.”

  “I’ll feed you some lines.”

  “Brother, this is really a place.”

  Wilma and the Hesses and Gilman Hayes were on the big terrace just outside the lounge. Hayes was dressed for the water, standing, talking to them, and I wondered why he didn’t have spangles on his trunks. He said hello to Judy in a bored way and gave me the shallowest possible nod. Wilma did her normal amount of gushing. Randy gave me a nervous cold hand and Noel smiled. Judy was in a rush to get her suit on while there was still sunshine. I was in a rush to get Randy off in a corner somehow, but I couldn’t be obvious about it. Wilma said she’d given me the same room as last time. I told José what I wanted as soon as he came out to the terrace bar again. Hayes went down the steps and out onto the big dock. I hate the big arrogant muscular son-of-a-bitch. I made him and I hate him. I would like to unmake him. Do a reverse PR job on him. But he’s Wilma’s playmate, and if I want to cut my throat I can borrow a straight razor someplace.

  Judy came hurrying out in her yalla swimsuit and went running down and out the left-hand side of the dock and off in a flat dive. The next time I looked down they were both spread out in the late sun. I didn’t get my chance to cut Randy out of the herd until after the Dockertys arrived and Wilma took them in to show them their room.

  “Let’s take us a walk, kid,” I said to Randy.

  He looked uneasy, “Sure, Steve. Sure.”

  We went around the wing of the house and out to the tables near that croquet layout. We sat down there and I rapped a cigarette on the tin tabletop and lighted it “Wilma gave me some yak over the phone Wednesday, Randy. Something about saving money.”

  “My God, she has to, Steve. She had to borrow to pay taxes. This thing put her in the hole when she built it, and she’s never got well since she built it. I’ve been after her and after her. Now, for the first time, she’s beginning to listen.”

  “I’d hate to think for even one minute, Randy, that you’d want to
do any cuts in my direction.”

  “Now, don’t try to get hard with me, Steve.”

  “Look, you call yourself her business manager. You’re more of a personal secretary, aren’t you?”

  “I manage all her affairs.”

  “It looks to me more like she does the managing. Now, how about that profile thing? Happen to remember that?”

  “I certainly do. You did a good job there, Steve.”

  I knew I’d done a good job. I’d happened to have a friend on a magazine. He let me get a look at a piece they were considering. It was an article on Wilma Ferris. A girl had done it. It was good work. She was a couple of years out of Columbia, free-lancing. It was one of those snide jobs. The magazine wanted a fairly extensive rewrite on it, but the top editorial brains were excited about it. And well they should have been. Nothing libelous, but very, very tongue in cheek. And it would have done, quite a job of blowing the Wilma Ferris myth sky high, the mythology I had created. My friend wasn’t placed high enough to clobber it. It was one very hot item indeed. The girl had all the dope. And our Wilma, on her way up the cosmetic ladder, had been one very rough girl.

  I had to move on it. I went to a friend on another magazine. I did him a favor once. I had something coming. And he was placed high enough. He gave the freelancer a staff job. She withdrew the article from the first magazine. He lined up a tame seal to do the rewrite, and between us we took all the sting out of it and stuck in some of the usual glop. The deal was that he would fire the girl after the article was published. But as it turned out, she began to work out pretty well on the staff, so they kept her. So nobody was hurt.

  “I wouldn’t want you going in for any false economy, Randy. Not at Wilma’s expense.”

  “I don’t think you realize how serious this is, Steve. She’s got to pull in her horns. She’s got to take it easy. I mean very easy, or she’ll never get her head back above water. I risked my… position with the things I told her. She’s got to get that Gilman Hayes off her back, let the apartment go—it’s too big, anyway, and rent the Cuernavaca house. Since she’s going to have to live a good deal quieter, anyway, I see no reason why she should continue to retain you. I told her that. Furthermore, Steve, I see no reason for her to retain you even were she quite solvent.”

  “And let things like that magazine story go through?”

  “The public has a short memory.”

  For a few minutes there he sounded fairly impressive. I remembered people saying he was a pretty good man before he went to work for Wilma. He had one of those little businesses that do accounting work, personal financial management, and insurance work for their clients. He had built it up himself, and when he took on Wilma she kept him so busy with all kinds of weird errands and services that he started dropping his other clients, and ended up working for her, giving up his office, maintaining a so-called office in her apartment.

  “I don’t think it would be wise to stop retaining me, Randy.”

  “And I think it would be.”

  “So there we are.” I stood up. “I better look for somebody else to convince, Randy.”

  He shrugged. “You can talk to her, of course. I can’t stop that. But I’m pretty certain she’s made up her mind, decided to take my recommendations. Her attorneys are backing me up. She could get out of the hole immediately by selling her interest in the company, but I don’t believe she’d want to give up control.”

  “Understatement of the year.” He got up too, and we started to walk back. He had griped me. I stopped and halted him by taking hold of his arm. “You were kicking some opinions around, Randy. Here’s one of mine: I think she needs a business manager like she needs Gilman Hayes. You’re just sort of a superbutler, and I bet she could get a better one cheaper.”

  He looked at me and looked away and he looked pinched around the mouth. He yanked his arm free. I said, “Did you put yourself on that list of economies, Randy? Or are you suffering from the delusion that you’re essential?”

  He walked away from me and he didn’t look back. He carried his narrow shoulders in a funny rigid way, as if he were balancing something on his head. If I was an unnecessary expense, what in the world was he? I laughed out loud. I felt a little bit better. Not much, though. I got the glooms again when I rejoined the group and tried to figure out some way to work on Wilma. She has all the vulnerability of a meat ax. And I very well knew that she was waiting for me to start begging. That would be the end. That would be when she would start to smile and go to work with the knife, enjoying her work. I sat and chattered away at that Mavis Dockerty, a great mass of nothing if I ever saw same, and all the time I was trying to think of some pry bar to use on Wilma. Like attacking the Washington Monument with a wooden spoon. I drank a little too much without intending to, and then made a damn fool of myself by telling Dockerty the score when he got me aside. I cannot understand most of those guys in business. They seem to do all right, but in an environment like this one, they don’t even know what’s going on. They can’t seem to see a knife when it’s sticking right out of your back.

  It wasn’t until dinner that I got the idea. It happened this way:

  Wilma and Randy were talking about something in low tones. And Wilma raised her voice and you could hear it all over the room when she said, “For God’s sake, stop blithering and dithering!” and Randy turned meekly to his plate. Right at that moment I happened to glance at Noel Hess. I saw on her face an expression of complete contempt. It was a look that included Wilma and Randy and perhaps the surrounding area for a good half mile. She turned then and caught me looking at her, and blushed and began to eat again.

  There was no pry bar to use on Wilma. But here was a dandy little brunette pry bar with which I could bring Randy right up on his tiptoes. I had never particularly noticed her before. She was a subdued type, which seldom appeals to me. Pale and a bit thin-faced, with a long upper lip and rather small dark eyes. But as I made a more careful inventory, I saw things about her that I liked. I did a quick review to see if I’d said anything to her or near her that would spoil my pitch. No, the Steve Winsan impersonation had been unfractured. I wondered if Wilma had told Randy that she and I had been intimate. If so, maybe Randy had told Noel. And, if so, that might cancel me out before the starting gate opened. She had given Wilma that sort of look. And she was doubtless all too well aware of Randy’s consistent infidelities prior to Wilma’s acquisition of Gilman Hayes, aware of the complete range of the services performed. Suddenly, thinking of the whole thing, I felt a little ill. We’d been a bunch of dogs trotting after Wilma, tongues lolling in the country sun. And now I was going to try to complicate it with deliberate seduction. I wondered if, at this late date, I was getting a weak stomach. A man saves himself first. She’d maybe already started an interesting career of getting even with Randy. But she didn’t look the type, somehow. She even looked a little bit like a girl I’d once known in the Methodist Sunday School in Deephaven, Minnesota, back in the days when I’d attend with my hair pasted down and watch her for the full hour and wonder how I was going to tell her that I was perfectly convinced I was going to be a famous surgeon and I wanted her to wait for me. Back in the days when I was full of dreams and glories and a girl was a sweet and fragile and precious thing.

  I knew the plan wasn’t too good. I might get nowhere. And even if I did, it was no guarantee that I could get her to put the pressure on Randy. And if she consented to that, and if Randy told Wilma he’d reconsidered, Wilma could still tell him she’d already made up her mind.

  But at least it was a plan, and even if it didn’t work, it promised a less boring week end.

  I didn’t get much of a chance after dinner. Wilma and I got into our usual gin game, noisy and deadly serious. Randy dithered. That silly Dockerty bitch danced with Muscle Boy. The others played Scrabble. And Noel, unfortunately, went off to bed. I watched for some reaction on Wilma’s part to the dance team. She didn’t seem to notice them. As this was an atypical reaction on
Wilma’s part, I began to suspect that Gilman Hayes might lose more than my PR representation before the week end was over.

  Once when Wilma was shuffling I leaned back and looked around at the shadows and silences in the big room, at the tricky spots on the game boards, at the glass and the dancing and the groomed softness of the women, all of us here interlocked with each other in curious ways in this architectured thing of warmth and careful lights, while outside there were the lake and the contours of the hills, which would not change a tenth of an inch in ten of our lifetimes. Bass would be drifting deep by the rocks, gills straining the cool water, and deer would be bedded down up the slopes away from the lake. But I had walked for a long time on a narrow and dangerous place that grew ever narrower, and to turn around and walk back was a feat of balance beyond my abilities.

  “Wake up, dreary,” Wilma said. “Take a dull card.”

  I took a card and I had to look at it longer than usual before I saw that it was a six of spades and that it fitted so neatly with other sixes that I was able to go down for seven.

  When I woke up in the morning with a barbiturate taste, it took the usual chill shower and the usual Dexedrine before my motor started to turn over smoothly. This would be, I suspected, muscle day. Wilma likes to exhaust her guests. If she can send them back to the city with aching bodies, she thinks they remember it as a good gay time. It was warm and breakfast on the terrace was fine in the sunlight, and finer still when I was able to sit at a table with Noel. I had given the gambit some careful thought. I had to make her curious about me as a person, and it had to contain a strong hint that I was not like the others.