Judge Me Not (4 page)

“Jake!” Powell said sharply.

She walked with too much casualness, too much hipsway, to the kitchen door, standing for a moment, looking at them, posing in a way that was comic drama and pathos at the same time. “Good night, all,” she said, looking only at Teed.

They were silent until the stair creak had ended, until her bedroom door had banged shut.

Powell sighed. “A handful, that one.”

Marcia put her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her fist. “She thinks she’s in love with you, Teed. Been mooning around lately. She’s never been—quite this obvious about it before.”

It was a relief to have it in the open. “It puts me on a spot,” he said.

“I know,” Marcia said.

“What spot? What kind of spot?” Powell demanded.

“Don’t you see it, Daddy?” Marcia said, almost impatiently. “If he laughs at her or brushes her off too hard, she’ll do something terribly silly, or terribly wrong. If he acts so that she thinks he’s encouraging her, it will just get worse. Teed has to walk right on top of the fence until she gets over it.”

Teed gave her a grateful look.

“By next summer,” Powell said, “she’ll be working at that summer camp, and then in September she’ll be going away to school.”

“October to June seems short to you, Daddy. To Jake it’s like several years.”

“I’ll have a talk with her,” Powell said heavily.

“Please,” Marcia said. “No.”

Later, after the dishes were cleaned up, Powell Dennison made one of his customary awkward attempts to throw Marcia and Teed together. “You see him out, please, Marcia. Teed, let me know as soon as you get back in the morning.”

Teed and Marcia went out onto the front porch. The midnight was cool. She leaned against the railing, her arms folded against the cold. He stood with the cigar box, re-wrapped in the brown paper, under his arm.

“I think you’re handling it very well,” Marcia said.

“Oh, Jake? I’m not doing anything. She’s quite a kid, you know.”

“She’s a very lusty young girl,” Marcia said remotely. The distant street light touched her pale hair, making it look silver, making it look like the smooth sheen of fast water in moonlight.

“ ’Night, Marcia. Thanks for the party.”

“Good night, Teed.”

As he backed out the driveway he saw that she still stood there, hips braced against the railing, arms folded, shoulders slightly hunched. In some obscure way she always managed to annoy him. She was like the clear ice on a winter stream where, if you look closely, you can imagine that you see the water bubbling by underneath. Seven years of responsibility for the household. Maybe that had done it.

Responsibility like that could do odd things to a girl like Marcia. With the death of her mother, the home could have fallen apart. Powell Dennison, with his dedication to his work, Jake, with her streak of wildness, both needed some focal point, some sane stability on which to depend. Marcia gave of herself, gave up her freedom, gave up a part of her individuality, for the sake of the home.

And, as with all forms of martyrdom, Teed knew that the danger was that she would learn to like it, possibly had already begun to like it, to value the deep sad wells of self-pity more than the lost freedom.

Once again he found himself thinking of the lovely Ronnie, of days long gone. Ronnie, who couldn’t wait. Ronnie, the Dayton wife of the insurance man. He knew he had been a fool to expect her to wait. There was no waiting in Ronnie. A war made no difference to her vast insatiable impatience.

So the little dark man had grabbed her deftly a month
after Teed had left. There had been two possible futures for Ronnie. Either someone married her and chained her with children, with clockwork pregnancies, or she would become a tramp—not because there was any evil in her, any coarseness—but merely because she was driven and harried and spurred on by both a strong consciousness of the passing of time, and by the delusion that there was only one way, one fundamental way of making time stand still for a little while. Teed knew the accepted explanations of nymphomania. None of them seemed to fit Ronnie. He had a symbolic picture of her in his mind. A tiny naked Ronnie running, endlessly screaming, down a narrow empty street, running by all the sleep-shops, by the window displays of bedroom suites, by the deodorant and cosmetic ads that implored her to smell better, taste better, look juicier, acquire that wanted look—while behind Ronnie bounded the tireless beast which has a clock dial instead of a face, and carries the little packages of wrinkles, of gray hairs, of varicose veins, of sagging wattled tissues. In a nation where youth is a synonym of happiness, time-conscious women spend billions to cheat the hand of a clock, to prove that a calendar can lie. Teed went to sleep while playing the frayed old game entitled What Might Have Been. And Ronnie walked into his dreams, carrying a little wooden purse shaped exactly like a coffin, and one of the silver handles was actually a lipstick.

At nine-thirty the next morning Teed turned into the drive of Lonnie Raval’s home on Roman Hill, in one of the most exclusive residential suburbs of Deron. The drive slanted up to an oval turn-around with a three-car garage beyond it, an antique lamppost on a patch of green in the middle of it.

A small, stringy, dish-faced man wearing a white jacket came out the side door and stood waiting for Teed to approach.

“I’d like to see Mr. Raval.”

“Out in the back. What’s in the box?”

“Cigars. I’m …”

“I know who you are, Morrow, and where you work. He’s out in the back.”

Teed walked around the garages. He glanced back. White-Jacket was following him at a careful thirty-foot interval. Lonnie Raval stood forty feet behind the garage.
New golf balls were blazing white against the grass. Lonnie had an iron in his hand. He was a tanned man of medium height with strong shoulders. He was dark-haired, entirely unremarkable except for his eyes, which were long-lashed, liquid, melting black.

He smiled at Teed. “Hi, fella! Glad to see you. O.K., Sam.” White-Jacket turned without a word and went back around the garage toward the house.

“Trying to get more loft and more backspin,” Lonnie explained. He addressed a ball, swung hard. The ball went out in an arc that was too flat. A hundred yards down the manicured slope, a leggy brunette in a chartreuse sun suit scuffed over to the ball, picked it up and put it into the cloth bag she carried. There was something bored and petulant about her stance and her walk.

“Now what the hell am I doing wrong, Morrow?”

Teed moved over behind him. “Try it again, Mr. Raval.”

“How many times I got to tell you to call me Lonnie, fella?” He prodded another ball out of the group, addressed it, swung. The result was the same.

The girl picked it up. “I’m gettin’ tired, Lonnie,” she called, her voice coming thinly up the slope.

“Just keep picking up the balls, you,” Lonnie shouted back. Teed saw her shrug.

“Try placing the ball more off your right foot,” Teed said. “You’re trying to scoop them. Let the pitch of the club head do the work. Just imagine you’re going to hit a low flat one.”

Lonnie tried another. It lofted high, came down and put on the brakes.

“Hey, now!” Lonnie said.

The next one worked the same way. And the next. “Fifteen bucks an hour I give that schnook at the club, and you do me more good in three minutes than he does in the whole hour.”

“Lonnie!” the girl called.

“Shut up!” he shouted. He slammed another one, putting more meat behind it. The girl stood where she was, and Teed saw at once that she had lost track of the ball.

“Fore!” Teed yelled.

The girl tried to break away, her hands going up. It was like slow motion. She ducked directly into the path of the ball, and he saw it rebound high from her dark head, heard the “tok” sound it made.

The girl sat down, hard and flat, both hands flat on the top of her head. Lonnie started rolling on the grass, hugging his stomach and making strangled noises. “Funniest … Jesus … Oh, oh, oh,” he gasped.

Teed hurried down the slope. The girl still sat there holding her head, her face all screwed up. Between sobs she was spewing out a stream of gutter language that threatened to sear the green grass for yards around.

Teed squatted on his heels. “I guess I didn’t yell in time,” he said.

She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. She slowly lowered her hands. “It wasn’t … your … fault.” Her mouth was trembling.

She looked beyond him and Teed heard Lonnie approaching. Her eyes hardened. “Dammit,” she said, “it isn’t enough I got to chase balls like a stinkin’ caddy, but you got to clobber me on the head with one.”

“Kindly shut your big loose mouth,” Lonnie said quietly. All fire left the girl’s eye. She stood up meekly. Lonnie took her by the upper arm. Teed saw the whiteness come around her mouth.

“Meet Mr. Teed Morrow, darling,” he said. “Morrow, this is my secretary. Alice Trowbridge.”

“How do you do,” she said.

“Now, you were clumsy, weren’t you, darling?”

“Yes, Mr. Raval.”

“Go on up to the house and take an aspirin, darling.”

He released her. Teed felt faintly ill as he saw the depth of the indentations his hard fingers had made in her arm. She walked up the slope, legs slim and brown under the crisp chartreuse shorts, back straight, head lowered. She didn’t begin to rub her arm until she had almost reached the garage.

“Is this just a friendly visit?” Raval asked, dark eyes dancing.

“Not likely. Mr. Dennison’s doctor told him he had to stop smoking cigars.”

“Is that supposed to mean something? It sounds like one of those cute cracks that mean something else.”

“Here’s the cigars you sent him, Raval.” He handed the box over.

“That
I
sent him?” The surprise was just a shade too enormous, Teed decided. Lonnie took the box, hefted it. “Must be some kind of mistake.”

“With five thousand cash in with the cigars, Lonnie. You aren’t kidding me and you certainly aren’t kidding Powell Dennison.”

Raval grinned. “Come on up to the house. We can have a talk.”

“There isn’t much to talk about, Lonnie.”

“Hell, I thought we had mutual interests, Morrow.”

Teed shrugged. “Suit yourself.” They went up to the house. There was a small patio on the side opposite the drive. A glass-topped table, some wrought-iron chairs. Raval ordered Sam to bring drinks and then to pick up the golf equipment.

Teed lit Lonnie’s cigarette and his own with the new lighter. The box sat on the table between them. After Sam brought the drinks, Lonnie Raval said, “If there’s five thousand in that box, it sort of puts me in a spot. I got to report all my income. Now how the hell will I report that? A gift? I don’t want those Internal Revenue snoops raising hell with me and my accountants, do I?”

“Better not put it down as a gift from Dennison, Lonnie.”

“Look, fella. Get me off the spot. You can tell Dennison you gave me the dough. Keep it yourself.”

“And then someday you’ll want a little harmless favor from me, Lonnie. I don’t want to have a ‘sold’ sign on me.”

Lonnie clucked sadly. “You guys! You Christers.”

“Must be we have you worried, Raval.”

One dark eyebrow went up a little. The eyes were liquid, wet-black, beautiful. “Worried? Not such a good word, Morrow. You two are like maybe a pebble in my shoe. And I’m a lazy guy. I just hate to sit down and take my shoe off and shake the pebble out. Maybe I’m going to have to do it, though.”

“Maybe we won’t shake out so easy,” Teed said, trying to match Raval’s casual confidence, trying not to show how much the quiet words had bothered him.

“Now that just doesn’t make sense, Morrow. You and those silly goddam affidavits! Think I’m going to sit still and let you nibble on me? Take a message back to Dennison. Tell him Raval is scared of federal heat—so scared that he keeps his nose clean. Tell him Raval can find angles as far as state and local heat is concerned. And tell him that as far as a couple of amateur good-government bastards are concerned, Raval is laughing.”

“And offering money.”

Lonnie stared at him. “I could learn to dislike you, Morrow. Tell Dennison I’ve got a couple of boys who are so stupid they’re more trouble than they’re worth. I’ll set them up so Dennison can knock them over and be a hero.”

“He’ll never go for that.”

“Stay in my hair and you’ll both wish you never heard of this town.”

“So far it only adds up to noise. What can you do? Have us killed?”

Raval gave him a hurt look. “Jesus, boy. You better stay out of those B movies. How long do you think I’d last if I went around killing people? Jesus!”

“I know that would be pretty crude, Raval. The point I was trying to make is that outside of killing us, there’s no way of stopping us.”

“I don’t know why I have to explain all this to you, Morrow. Look. You and your boss nosed around the City Engineer’s office long enough to get the specs rewritten on the repaving of Grayman Street. It took most of the sugar out of that job and cost me personally twelve thousand. All right. Now suppose I was a manufacturer. Somebody starts cutting into my profit. What do I do? First I try to hire them. That doesn’t work. Do I kill them? Hell, no. I look them over until I find a little button. Like a doorbell. I just push on the button.”

The man’s confidence made Teed’s mouth feel dry. “But …”

“I take a look at a guy like you. Money doesn’t seem to interest you. Maybe you’ve got enough. So I try something else.” He threw his head back and yelled, “Alice! Alice, come on out here.”

“Coming!” she called, from the recesses of the house. She appeared almost immediately. She had changed from the sun suit to a crisp white halter-back dress. She sat down in one of the chairs and said, poutingly, “What a terrible headache I got!”

Lonnie Raval said, softly, affectionately, “Honey-lamb, what happens if I tell you to go out there and see how much grass you can eat?”

She stared at him. “You going crazy?”

“No. I mean, what happens if I
really
tell you to do that?”

She held his gaze for a long moment and then her eyes dropped. “I guess maybe I’d do it, Lonnie.”