Authors: John D. MacDonald
“You’re a legitimate target, Lyd. You turned yourself into a target by leaving me. So you’ve got to expect Tom Dorras to come around. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.”
“Do you think I’m incapable of handling the situation?”
“Does it make any real difference? Tom D. will have a little smirk and a little wink for anybody who asks him if he saw you when he was up in Corpus.”
“So what fools believe is more important to you than what you know is true?”
“A lot of things I thought were true haven’t turned out so good.”
“So I’m supposed to come home just to keep you from feeling inadequate?”
“Honey, I’m adequate. Some day Tom Dorra will sign a testimonial to that effect if anybody asks him to. What’s the matter now?”
“I’m crying. Do I have your permission?”
“For the love of …”
“I don’t want to spoil the Sam Boylston image. Oh God, I thought we were getting somewhere the last time we talked.”
“The day you tell me exactly where we are supposed to be getting to, then we can start getting there. Try writing it down. It might help.”
“Good luck about Leila.”
“Thanks for calling.”
“Don’t mention it,” she said and hung up.
After thirty thoughtful seconds, he picked up the hand microphone, pressed the dictate button, and began to work his way through the stack of correspondence on his desk. After one false start, he pushed Lydia Jean and Leila back into storage cupboards in the back of his mind and closed those doors which would isolate them completely until he would be free to once again give them his attentions.
CRISSY HARKINSON AROSE
a little before noon on the day after first taking the boy, Oliver Akard, into her bed. The double thicknesses of draperies kept the room in semi-darkness, the switch on the bedside phone had been turned off, and the little Cuban maid had long since been taught to work in silence until the coffee summons from the bedroom of the mistress released her from such constraint.
She remembered that her last glance at the luminous dial of the radio clock, just after the boy had slipped out onto the dark terrace and closed the sliding door, had shown that it was just four in the morning.
She trudged slowly, solidly, heavily, through the dressing room alcove and into her bath, touched the silent switch and, when the cruel lights flickered and went on, she stared mockingly and mercilessly at herself in the mirror, at the tangle of her hair, deep smudges of fatigue under her eyes, face slack under the tan, mouth pale and
swollen—pulpy looking. Her body felt stretched and wearied and lamed. At thirty-six, my lady, she told herself, such a romping takes one hell of a toll, and he lives up to Kinsey’s report on that age group, and you have got your work cut out for you to hew your way quickly back down to that twenty-eight you damned well have to make him believe.
She started with an amphetamine, and then a long hot sudsy languid shower, turning to a very brisk cold shower. Then harshly astringent lotions, a soothing gentleness of cream, subtle care with the eye makeup, including the drops of magic which made them shine with the imitation of youth. The amphetamine had begun to hit, lifting her spirits, taking away the weariness which had seemed bone-deep, and after she had brushed and poked her almost-dry hair into the casual and youthful style which seemed to do the most for her this year, she selected and put on a pale, fitted, silver-blue housecoat with a fussy girlish frothiness of lace at the throat. She turned this way and that, smoothing the fabric down over her hips with the backs of her hands, moved a little closer to the mirror and gave herself what she called her Doris Day smile.
“You might just make it, kid,” she whispered.
She went to the bedroom intercom, pressed the lever and said, “Francisca?”
She heard the quick light sound of the girl’s approaching footsteps and then the merry voice of first greeting.
“I think maybe you could squeeze about three or four of those big oranges. Enough for a tall glass. And a pot of coffee.”
She went over and pulled on the drapery cords, hand over hand, opening the whole side of the bedroom to the bright day. She bent over the low broad bed and balled up the tangle of pale yellow sheets, carried them in and stuffed them into the hamper. From the linen closet she selected pale green sheets and pillow cases and tossed them onto the bed for Francisca to make it up. From the rug beside
the bed she picked up the orange and white striped shift, shook it out, reflected with bitter humor she hadn’t gotten much use out of it this time, took it in and hung it up carefully.
When Francisca knocked and brought the tray in, Crissy Harkinson went to her chaise and sat and swung her legs up, and gave the maid a mechanical smile as she reached and took the tray with its short legs and set it across her thighs.
“Was come for a school theeng,” Francisca said. “Small girls on bicycle. Teekits to send off the music somewheres. One dollar from the bockus I give. Hokay?”
After a pause for comprehension, Crissy said, “That was fine, dear. Would you do the bed now, please?”
She unfolded the morning paper. Friday. The twentieth day of May. Her heart tilted for a moment, and she felt sick. It was beginning to be too long. Garry had guessed it might be two days, certainly not more than four. God, if it had gone wrong somehow, then the big chance was gone, and it was the only one you’d ever get, girl. The years are running the wrong way for you. If Garry messed it up, then you’re back to sweating out the other choices, all of them bad. There’s only one big thing left to go, and that’s this house, and when you sell it, you have three choices. Live the way you like to live on the money you get, and it will last maybe four years and then you are forty and you can decide whether it will be the sleeping pills or a cruddy little job, a cruddy little room, sore feet from standing all day behind a cruddy counter. Or invest the money and get some funny little income for life, and go see if any of the old contacts were still in the business and, out of pity or sentimentality, wanted to make room in the circuit for a one-time upper-level hooker who’d retired too many years ago, at the personal request of State Senator Ferris Fontaine. Or take the house money and make the gamble of building a front with it, maybe the tragic, youngish widow, obviously well provided for, demure as hell, visiting Hawaii or Acapulco
or some damn place to try to take her mind off her grief, and then sort out the possibles and take dead aim at some old goof with a fat portfolio and stampede him into marriage, hoping his heart isn’t too damned sound. But what if the pigeon turned out to be canny enough to get her checked out first? Or what if he happened to be putting on a front with money as small as hers? Or what if he kept living another twenty-five years, so that when she finally got it—the total freedom and total security she’d wanted all her life—she’d be over sixty years old?
No. Garry Staniker had worked it. It was the only way things would come out fair. The Senator had not really meant to cheat her. She knew she was probably the only toy the old boy had ever bought himself in his whole chinchy, skinflint life, the only time he had ever spent real money with any kind of pleasure at all. Over seven years of a good honest return on the investment too. You spend money on what’s important, and she remembered how strange it had seemed to her, when they had met, that an old guy with so much power and influence in the state would be so uneasy and ashamed and apologetic.
It had been one of those long weekend arrangements, six of the kids supplied on request and flown down to Key West where some kind of contractor had a big house with a wall around it and was putting on a special house party with the idea of softening up some politicians who were in a position to do him some good. It came to three hundred each after the usual cut was taken off the top, and that was better than good during the slow season, and there was some iced champagne on the company plane that ferried them down, so all the kids were in a mood to have fun.
When they were sorted out, she turned out to be Fontaine’s, and she remembered how, to the twenty-seven year old woman she was then, he seemed older than God, though later she found out he was sixty-one then. But as she got to know him, he seemed funny and
sweet and nice. He was very courtly and old-timey. When they were alone was when he got all shy and strange and funny. She finally understood from what he was saying that it would not make any difference in the money arrangements, and he would just as soon have his friends believe that she was earning the money as expected, but it just wasn’t possible, and that was that, and he did not care to talk about it any further.
There was just the one double bed in the room they’d been given, a bed with a huge carved Spanish headboard. After the light was out she got him talking again and got him around to talking about the problem, which he seemed to find easier to do in the dark. He said, no, he hadn’t been sick. He had just gradually become—incapable a couple of years ago, and he did not care to go through the dreary experience of proving it again. He told her about his life. He had married young. There hadn’t been the time or the money for play. He said there had been some episodes, as he called them, during his middle years when he had become successful as a rancher. His home base he said was at one of his ranches, a long way east of Arcadia. Twenty-six thousand acres. Brahma and Black Angus.
She made her cautious beginning by explaining to him that she could get to sleep much easier if she was close to someone, and after certain reluctance he held her with his arm around her, and her head on his shoulder. She kept thinking of twenty-six thousand acres, and imitated deep sleep, a purring snore, but a restless sleep in which she shifted, burrowed against him, put her round arm carelessly across him, a great fan of her soft hair—much longer then—across his throat. She wondered at the increased knocking of his heart, but was not sure there could be any ultimate victory until, at last, she felt him with infinite stealth move his hand, bit by bit, until he could touch the strong round breast of the girl he thought asleep.
Ten days later at his telephoned request, she took a commercial flight to Miami where he had registered them both on the same floor
of one of the big beach hotels. She sidestepped his attempts to talk of future arrangements until she had managed to prove to his satisfaction and hers that what had been thought impossible was becoming easier at each opportunity. The next day he sent her, alone, to look at the apartment he could arrange if it suited her.
Over dinner in his one-bedroom suite that evening they struck their bargains. She could count upon his visiting her for a couple of days on the average of once each month. It might be oftener at times or less frequent, but it would probably average out that way. He wanted total discretion on her part. He said he felt he did not have the right to demand physical faithfulness of her. He would leave that up to her, stipulating only that she was not to have anyone visit her at the apartment, nor was she in any direct or indirect way to sell herself. The apartment lease and the utilities would be taken care of. He would give her money to open a checking account, and she would give him the name of the bank and the account number, and a deposit would be made, untraceable, to her account each month. What did she think it should be?
“Fifteen hundred dollars a month,” she said.
“You trying to gouge me, girl?” he asked, scowling.
“Senator, I don’t think it’s nice to argue about money. I told you what I need. I don’t
have
to argue about money. I can remember from high school, from economics class, a monopoly can set its own rates because there’s noplace else to buy what it’s selling. I’m going to gouge you pretty good, but I’m going to give you fair value. If you don’t want it that way, let’s call the whole thing off right now.”
He stared at her, and he chuckled for a long time, shook his head, chuckled some more, and from then on did not deny her what she asked. By the time she picked out the land and the house was completed, he had regained a virility which, he claimed, seemed like unto what he could dimly remember of himself as a bridegroom. With the house went a stolid square humorless but efficient Swedish
woman. Ferris Fontaine had hired her, and when Crissy made mild objection to her, she gathered that Fontaine had once done her delinquent son a favor of such magnitude the woman’s personal loyalty to the Senator was beyond measure. Crissy gradually became aware that Fontaine had been testing her discretion and her judgment in small ways for some time. When he had satisfied himself about her, the Biscayne Bay house, because it had been located and designed for total privacy, became a place where he held secret meetings of men with whom he was involved in various intricate business affairs. Crissy acted as hostess, knowing when to absent herself to let them talk, learning from the Senator which drinks she should make a little heavier than usual. Though the relationship between Fontaine and Crissy could not help but be obvious to all who were invited there, the Senator never permitted other girls in the house.
Three years ago, perhaps as a reward for how well she had handled things when he used the house for meetings, and perhaps out of the money which had been the result of such meetings, he had bought her the pleasure cruiser, the handsome Odalisque, and had hired Garry Staniker to captain it and maintain it.
“Use it all you want and any way you want, honey. It’s registered to you, but I’ll be using it now and then. Some of the cagiest ones will loosen up a little when you get ’em off on the water.”
By then the Senator was sixty-seven. Though he seemed far more vigorous and vital than when she had first met him, she knew it was time to take the final step, and one evening when they were there alone, she brought it up with more of an air of casual confidence than she felt.
“It’s been six years, darling,” she said.
He sipped his ale, belched comfortably and said, “Six very wonderful years, little girl.”
“Thirty-three makes a pretty old little girl, Fer.”