The Drowner

John D. Macdonald

The Drowner

One

ONE DAY after it was all over, after it was ended and done and there was no going back to change any part of it, Paul Stanial realized, checking the dates, that he and the Hanson woman had gone swimming on the same day, at the same hour, over a hundred miles apart, and had walked from the same noontime simmer of May in Florida, across sand into coolness. But on that day he had never heard of her, or even of the grove-country lake in which she had died that day.

Nevertheless, it had changed his life at a time it most desperately needed changing, and he found a strange significance in the fact that her swim in that silent lake had ended her life, and that his swim off that junk beach below Lauderdale had been part of the procedures that were sickening him, and had led him to demand the change which brought his life into tangent with hers, after hers was over.

His was a cool and watchful mind, full of measurements and dimensions, capable of fits of black rage over which he had achieved a precarious control, but not prone to make fanciful relationships between unrelated events. By the time he could see this fateful coincidence, he knew just how it had been for her. And though he never saw Lucille Hanson alive, by then he had talked to those who had known her, and he had seen where it had happened, and he knew the flavors of her mind and spirit from reading her letters. He saw it over and over, like an arbitrary eye suspended perhaps twenty feet above the shoreline of Dayker’s Lake. He saw the old car nose down through the brush on the sand road in the bright noon-time heat and stop, facing the lake. He saw the woman get out, leaving the car door open, and take off her denim wrap-around skirt and toss it into the car. She wore a white swim suit and sandals. Her hair was fair, a golden white, and her body was tanned. Her rather narrow face, long throat, small breasts and long slender waist gave her a deceptive look of fragility. But there was a sturdy breadth to her round strong hips, and her thighs and calves were rounded and heavy. He saw her mash a mosquito against the top of a solid thigh, and reach into the car, get her gear, slam the car door and walk quickly to the edge of the small sandy beach. He saw her spread her towel, put the other articles down, step out of her sandals, and then walk to the water, tucking her pale hair into the blue swim cap, her expression that of a woman alone, slightly solemn, preoccupied, thinking of the two men who loved her, perhaps, and the one she loved.

And then the objective eye turned and he saw her swim out, the strong legs pumping, the arms reaching smoothly, the head turning at the right beat to take the deep easy breath. From that vantage point he watched just how it was done to her, saw how she was given no chance at all. He watched below then, down in the amber murk of twenty feet, watched her come down slowly and alone when it was over for her, turning, unmarked except for that emptiness of death upon her face, sinking to the weeds and mud of the bottom, rebounding slightly, turning in a random current, and then settling, sprawled on her side, eyes open, an edge of white teeth showing, a last reflex moving the left hand, some gassy bubbles and then weedy silence in the brown-gold depths.

But his own swim that same day, that same hour, on a trashy dazzle of beach at Hallandale, adjacent to glossy motels, had been entirely different in flavor. The agency had used him on this one because, he realized with a certain sourness, he looked enough like the other beach bums to be next to invisible in the throng. His natural skin tone was dark enough to take and hold a deep tan. His hair was black and his deep-set eyes a clear, bright blue. He was tall and long-legged, with flat hips, a lithe, narrow waist, but a deep chest, short broad neck, and wide, heavily muscled shoulders. From a distance his trimness made him look years younger than he was.

The assignment was a soft, beefy, youngish man from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, named Geoffrey Rogers. He had married a monied woman who was anxious to divorce him, but Rogers was holding out for a private settlement before agreeing. They’d been given the word he was taking a little break in the Miami area with a blonde hostess from a Detroit night spot. The office had traced him through the phone number he had given the airlines for his return reservation, and had found him holed up in cabana unit G of the Beach-scape Motel, registered as Mr. and Mrs. R. Jeffries of Lansing.

Paul Stanial had been detailed to pick up all the client would need to pry herself loose from Rogers with minimum expense. So he checked into the cheapest single at the Beach-scape so as to have the run of the place and the beach. He wired a battery-driven, 35-millimeter camera into a small green plastic tackle box, loaded with a 36-exposure roll of Kodachrome, and cut a hole under the side latch for the wide-angle lens. He cut another hole on top next to the carrying handle, big enough so he could stick his index finger through it and punch the shutter button. Properly set for bright sunlight, he was in focus from four feet to infinity, and the wide-angle simplified the aiming problem. They were so sexually engrossed in each other, he was in no danger of being detected as he took his shots of them, some from as close as five feet. She was a vapid-faced woman with a rich body just beginning to go to seed. They sprawled and necked on their beach towels in a meaty abandon, while he sunned nearby and caught some of the more incriminating pawings. He took them leaving and entering their cabana, and he got one on the terrace of the cabana with Rogers supine on a white sun chaise, the woman straddling his thighs, facing him, leaning toward him, his hand under her bikini top and her hand rammed up the leg of his swim trunks. Moments later they got up and went into the cabana and drew the draperies across the picture window. Stanial put the camera in his room and went for a swim. He swam out and floated on the swells and wondered how many waves it would take to wash away the stink of that pair, and suddenly he knew he couldn’t take much more of this kind of assignment. Something had to change before he found he had stopped giving a damn what he had to do, so long as he was paid.

He took the film to a special order lab, asked for one color slide of each exposure, and waited fifty minutes in an air-conditioned bar down the street while they ran it through the electronic processing equipment. He signed the charge slip, went out and sat on a bench and held each slide up to the light. They were no example of the art of photography, but they clearly established the identities and the specific relationship between the pair.

He went back to the office and turned the slides and the photostat of the registration over to Kippler and sat while Kippler looked carefully at each picture.

“This broad is really stacked,” Kippler murmured. “And eager. Say, this one nails it good, her opening the door and the number showing up good on the door, and him with the towels and stuff. By the way, Charlie got a Thermofax of the car rental sheet. Rogers used his own name on that so he could use his credit card.” He pursed his lips and studied one picture. “There’s too much in focus, so it wasn’t telephoto. What’d you do, fella? Join the group?”

“Is that the next step?”

Kippler looked at him thoughtfully. “What’s chewing you?”

“I’ve had too much of this kind of thing, one after the other. I’m fed up to here with it. Is this the only kind of business you get down here?”

“It’s a big part of it.”

“For God’s sake, get me some cop work so I can live with myself for a little while. I’ve got cop training. This kind of assignment sickens me.”

“So maybe you’re a little stale, Paul. Try B and B. Broad and bottle.”

“Let me ask you one question, Mr. Kippler. Am I worth hanging onto?”

“You’re working out pretty good here.”

“Then please assign me to something more like police work, and soon, or I’m going to have to get out. I don’t care if it’s something that checks out to be nothing at all, just so long as I get a change from the bedroom circuit.”

“You’re working in the world’s biggest bedroom.”

“I can take it, if I get a change once in a while.”

Kippler sighed. “I shouldn’t do this. But the very next thing that comes along, you get it. The thing I have for you now, I don’t even want to show you the file until you’re in a better mood. So come in in the morning, and best of all, come in with a slight hangover, Paul.”

And so, that evening, thinking Kippler’s advice might do some good, he dated a girl he knew slightly. They cruised the beach and had a little too much to drink and he kept telling himself he was having a good time, that he was relaxing. He went back with her to her small apartment on the mainland, and as soon as they were inside the small living room, before she had turned a light on, she turned hard into his arms and broke her mouth upward against his in a breathless hunger, dug her nails into his back and canted her body into him in total, unmistakable presentation of herself. For a moment it was fine, until suddenly in the darkness she was the very same woman Rogers had been enjoying, the same woman he had seen over and over again, in different shapes and sizes.

He pushed her away and went clumping down the stairs, hearing the anger and the disappointment in her voice as she called his name. He drove without thought of destination, left the city and drove north for an hour and found a beach road, a tract for sale, parked and walked through the sea oats and rough grasses to an empty starlit beach, and a sound of surf.

He sat on the dry sand and tasted the seawind. The fuzziness of the drinks had faded away, but he felt caught in the torment of an agony he could not define, akin to the yearnings of the adolescence a decade and a half behind him. He knew out of a cumulative knowledge that Paul Stanial could not survive much longer as this particular human being unless he found his own meaning again. He wanted prideful work, to use all his skills, all his energies and abilities. And he wanted a woman to go with the work. A woman who knew what he was and what he needed, so that he in turn could give himself to her. So that there could be a communication beyond words and rituals. Not a child-woman who knew none of the tastes and terrors of the world. Nor one hardened by too many emotional abrasions. Just a woman of taste and sensitivity, of such restraint she would not give of herself until she knew the extent of the gift would be known, and then would give deeply and gladly and forever, knowing she would be cherished. Is this, he wondered, too puerile, too romantic an image? I don’t want a breath-taking beauty. I want her to value herself, and me. And I want to value her and my work. I want some damned purpose, some dedication.

Once he had thought he had the job and the woman, but they had both soured. Now, he realized, with some bitterness, that he was living the daydream of ten million men—to be single, mature, husky, well-paid and have a job in the Miami area with freedom of movement and the chance to develop all the contacts any man could use.

He looked south where the sky reflected the pink-white glow of the Lauderdale, Hallandale, Miami complex. Sure, fellas. Break all ties and come on down. The biggest hedonistic complex in the known world. One big noisy sunny cauldron of busy butts and ripe red mouths, rare steaks and guitars, skinny-dipping and party games, twisters and gin, kicks and tits, laughter and brass horns, oiled brown backs and tall teased hair. Wade in, guys. Welcome to the most concentrated, gut-wrenching loneliness ever devised by man. After a long time he stood up and stretched until the hard muscles of his shoulders popped and creaked, yawned until his jaw ached. The last resentment, he thought. One final day of yearning for what might have been. Then he spat into the sand and headed back to the car.

Later, after he knew all that was worth knowing about the life and death of Lucille Hanson, he was to remember that day and that evening. It was all beginning then, of course. Perhaps a good starting place was in the afternoon, when that old musician walked down to the boathouse to tell Kelsey Hanson his wife was dead…

Kelsey Hanson, all hungers appeased and brute-softened muscles relaxed, lay snorting in his sleep on a white sun cot on the second floor cypress sun deck of an elaborate boat-house overlooking Lake Larra. He wore brief shiny blue trunks. The hero mouth hung open.

Between her little drowsings there on the big beach towel spread on the cypress planking of the floor, the naked girl looked at him without enthusiasm. She was nineteen, and a student at the local college. Her name was Shirley Feldman. She wished Kelsey could sleep a little more attractively. She yawned and steeped herself in the languor of the afternoon sun, hidden from the world by the wooden wall around the sun deck. Sweaty-sweet, limber-small of waist, usefully round of hip, she was a breasty, brown, sturdy little girl with a face narrow and sensitive and small under the hard mushroom mop of black hair. The sun was a hearty and indifferent weight against her body, yet with a hot sly touch on the places it seldom reached. Her pumpkin-colored play suit, her scuffed sandals and sensible underwear lay spilled a yard away, efficiently shed in a four-breath hiatus between the wine and the loving.

If only he didn’t sleep like… like a slob. It confused the images, she thought. It made her feel used. There was a choice of patterns. The older man—he was at least thirty—seeks a new clarity of vision through the eyes of an intellectual woman, able to detect the fraudulence of his emotional attitudes and postures and point them out to him in reasoned statement. Mid-century man, without direction, re-examining his male purposes. That made it the project pattern, the one she had discussed at such length with Debbie. But when Debbie had given up and—in a sense—passed him along, Debbie had claimed the whole thing was just a sales posture, saying that Hanson had signed up for a few courses and had hung around the college merely to score with the gullible ones that would believe the lost lamb attitude. But there had to be more to him than that. Debbie had failed because she didn’t have the patience to get past his defenses. Debbie said, with an ugly mouth, he could cry on cue by thinking of sliced onions.