Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  She was nineteen and living on a generous allowance and in two more years she would be twenty-one and on that birthday she would receive something like three million. She had had the most sophisticated education in the world, yet she was almost entirely naïve. She still wore her baby fat. She could blush like a sunset. Within a month she was deeply, hopelessly in love with him. It had not been hard to manage. The hard thing was to get her to keep her mouth shut and wait. He explained that she had to be of age first, or all the relatives would cause trouble. He kept his hands off her. That was not a great chore.

  Four days after her twenty-first birthday, Bunny made an appointment with Harrison Oldbern, Betty’s father. He did not state his business. Harrison Oldbern was on the Board of Governors of the Oswando Club, a thin alert tanned man, sportsman, deep-water sailor, shrewd businessman.

  “Sit down, Bunny. First time you’ve seen the office, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir. Pretty impressive.”

  “Drink? I’m afraid I’m only going to be able to give you about ten minutes.”

  “I’d like a Scotch and water, thanks.”

  As Oldbern mixed the drinks he said, “What’s on your mind, Bunny? Contract for next year? I think I can personally assure you that the membership wants you to stay. You’re doing a marvelous job with the kids. In fact we’re going to raise the ante a little. We don’t want to lose you.”

  He brought the drinks over and handed Bunny his. Bunny looked up at him and said, “It isn’t anything like that, Mr. Oldbern. Betty and I want to get married.”

  Oldbern’s face stiffened. He stared at Bunny. “Betty? She’s just a kid.”

  “She’s over twenty-one, sir.”

  “How old are you, Hollis?”

  “Thirty-five, sir.”

  Oldbern went behind his desk and sat down slowly. “What kind of nonsense are you trying to pull? What the hell is going on?”

  “The usual thing, I guess. Love.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “Nearly two years. But we thought it would be best to wait until we were both sure.”

  “You mean wait until she reached twenty-one.”

  “It happened to come out that way.”

  “Yes, it happened that way. Hollis, you’re a dirty conniving back-stabbing son of a bitch.”

  Bunny looked down at his drink. “I’m sorry to hear you talk that way, sir. Betty and I have been hoping there wouldn’t be too much friction.”

  “I’ll never permit it.”

  “Betty says we’re going to get married no matter what anybody says. Being twenty-one, I guess she’s her own boss on that. I’m not married and I never have been. She’s certainly in her right mind. I just don’t understand how anybody would go about stopping it.”

  Oldbern waited long moments. He leaned back in his chair. “Betty is not a pretty girl, Hollis. She is not even close to being pretty. She happens to have three million dollars.”

  “She knows I wouldn’t marry her for her money. She knows me better than that. We’ve gotten well acquainted over the past two years. She knows I have ideals, Mr. Oldbern.”

  “You haven’t any more ideals than a mink.”

  “I just hoped it could be handled without friction.”

  “I’ll put a firm of investigators on you. I’ll have a report on your past that’ll make Betty’s eyes stand out on stalks.”

  “You know, Mr. Oldbern, I haven’t looked at another woman for two years. That’s the honest truth. I’ve felt pretty bad about some of the things I’ve done. That’s why I told Betty a pretty complete history. I don’t think you could surprise her. She knows I’ve changed and she knows why. She’s watched me work with the kids there at the club. Love can change a man, Mr. Oldbern.”

  “You thought of everything, didn’t you? You’ve had two years to work on it.”

  “I’d hoped we could get along.”

  “Do you have a price, Hollis?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can write a fairly large check.”

  “I’m not thinking about money, Mr. Oldbern. I’m in love with your daughter. And she’s in love with me. We want to be married. That seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it?”

  “My God, I wish I knew this had been going on. Have you two been …”

  “No sir. I swear that all I’ve ever done is kiss Betty. I guess I’ve done that pretty often. And I talked her out of running away to be married last year. She wanted to do that.”

  “But you knew it might mean a cash loss.”

  “I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I think you ought to face this, Mr. Oldbern. It’s going to happen.”

  The man looked older. “Sit down, Hollis. Let me think.”

  Bunny sat down. The man sat with his hand cupped over his eyes. He sighed heavily a few times. When he took his hand away, he looked intently at Hollis. “I understand you, you know. I know what you’re doing. She’s so damn vulnerable. Are you going to try to make her happy? Are you going to even try?”

  “Of course I’m going to try.”

  “Are you going to ask me to give you some kind of a job with a title? You certainly can’t stay on at the club.”

  “Her income figures out to about a hundred and sixty thousand a year before taxes. Taxes will take a lot, but we can live comfortably on the balance. We’re thinking about trying some place along the Mediterranean coast. After the honeymoon, that is. I’m paying for the honeymoon with the money I’ve saved up.”

  “White of you, Bunny.”

  “I think she’ll feel better about the honeymoon if she isn’t paying for it.”

  “There isn’t anything I or anyone else can do, is there?”

  Bunny permitted himself his usual likeable grin. “If there is, I wasn’t able to think of it.”

  “I certainly hoped she’d do better when she married.”

  Bunny still grinned. “Like you said, she isn’t what you’d call a pretty girl. Maybe she’s doing about as well as she can do, Mr. Oldbern. Maybe she’s doing better than she would have. We think we’d like a small quiet wedding. Just the family.”

  “When do you want it?”

  “A month from tomorrow.”

  The capitulation was far easier than Bunny had expected. He wondered if Oldbern would have made a more valiant effort to defend his chick had the chick been more decorative, more personable.

  Bunny stuck his hand across the desk. Oldbern looked at him, started to take his hand and then changed his mind. “You did this damn neatly, Hollis. But I don’t have to shake your hand. I don’t have to do that.”

  “Suit yourself, Mr. Oldbern.”

  He remembered how jubilant he was as he went down in the elevator. He wished Cutler hadn’t died. It would be nice for Cutler to read all about it. The sullen skinny kid from the public courts.

  Three zero zero zero zero zero zero.

  The wedding had been quiet. The tabloids were noisy. None of the news accounts bothered him. One columnist got a half millimeter under his hide:

  “Bunny Hollis, ex-almost tennis great, and bronzed glamor boy emeritus, proved yesterday to fellow refugees from sports headlines that with patience, a file of scrap books and the ability to balance a tea cup, a spotted past can be parlayed into a glowing future. Our Bunny bided his time at the swank Oswando Club where, for the past few years he has been teaching the game he once played well to the children and the wives of the almost rich, the middle rich and the big rich. And yesterday, just a little over a month after a coarse wad of cash was handed over to twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Oldbern, Bunny cut his notch in that bankroll in a double ring ceremony attended only by the family and exceptionally close friends. The groom, a well-preserved thirty-five, wore a dark suit and a satisfied smile. Though the former Miss Oldbern does not come up to the standards of pulchritude this correspondent has noted among Bunny’s previous playmates, we believe that Bunny has at last firmly established the standard of living whic
h for so many years he has tried to become accustomed to. No prior marriages blot our Bunny’s escutcheon. And that, fellows, is what we mean by patience. He began giving Miss Oldbern tennis lessons two years ago. They left cozily in a Mercedes-Benz, a wedding present from the bride’s aunt, Janice Stawson Fielding Chancellor—who is soon, it is rumored, to become the Baroness Von Reicker.”

  Bunny remembered the column again and glowered at his own image in the motel mirror. He went back into the bedroom. Betty still slept, in the same position as before. He looked at her fondly and thought, Good kid. They had driven down to Miami, with stops at Nags Head and Myrtle Beach. They had taken a boat to Curacao, had flown to Nassau, and flown back to Miami for the car.

  He had expected to be bored by the honeymoon, bored by the aura of adoration, but to his surprise he had had fun. It had at first shocked and alarmed him and then pleased him to find that he had married a virgin bride. He was quite aware that the incidence of twenty-one-year-old virgins in her particular social and financial strata was very very small. It had given him a very strange feeling to be able to lead her with gentleness through the fears and pain of the first nights, then through the passive acceptance of nights that followed and then at last into more than acceptance—into a gratifyingly lusty participation. It gave him a strange feeling of responsibility to be the only man she had ever known. And he felt a certain amount of pride in realizing that through gentleness and understanding he had been able to arouse her completely. He knew how easily it could have gone the other way—how through brutality she could have been made frigid for life.

  Knowing her for two years, knowing her shyness, her physical awkwardness, he had expected her to be a woman of meager desires. He thought her flames would be turned low and would flicker. But she soon became a woman of considerable ardor, sensitive, imaginative, demanding in her lovemaking. He knew she was not pretty. Her figure was fair, at best. Yet during the last week at odd moments he would happen to notice her with half his mind when she moved, when she turned away from him, when she walked toward him, when she pulled herself onto a swimming float or dived into a breaking wave—and at those moments he would feel a quick surprising surge of desire for her. Her skin was marvelously clear and unblemished. She was tidy as a cat and her body was fragrant. In a dark room her brown hair would crackle and there would be faint sparks when he ran his fingers quickly through it.

  He knew he did not love her. But he was fond of her. She had her own quiet sense of fun. And secure in her own conviction that she was loved, she had begun to blossom for him.

  He sat on the edge of her bed and put his hand on her waist, shook her gently. “Come on, fat lamb.”

  She spoke clearly, and without opening her eyes. “Not so daggone fat. I’m being deprived of my starches.”

  “How long have you been awake, you sneak?”

  “Maybe five minutes.” She opened her eyes. They were pale gray eyes. He had talked her into using dark pencil on her pale brows, into touching up her eyelashes that were like fine gold wire. It gave her eyes more expression and he realized that while he had been in the bathroom she had gotten up and fixed her eyes, run a brush through her hair, used a breath of perfume.

  “And this week,” she said, “I shall lose another two pounds. In a few months I will weigh one hundred and fifteen. And then I shall wonder why I wasted all this unearthly beauty on a tired old man.”

  “Mmmmhmmm,” he said. “Tired.” He grinned and caressed her.

  “Are you being bawdy, Mr. Hollis?” she asked primly.

  “A touch. Just a wee bit.”

  “That’s what I hoped,” she whispered, smiling, reaching her arms out toward him.

  The hard rain came down. The room was gray with the light of the dull morning. Somehow it became a very special time for them. They had a cigarette and then, after showers, got dressed and packed quickly and got in the car and headed north in the dusky gloom of the constant rain.

  The sports car was built like a low fleet expensive boat. It squatted low on the road, thrillingly responsive. The wind out of the west did not make it sway. But Bunny saw the hard sway of the palms and the pines and he wondered about the hurricane. They had thought it was going to catch them in Miami and they had talked about it and been excited by the idea and been disappointed when the storm had veered to the west below Cuba.

  When they stopped in a roadside restaurant for a late breakfast, the few customers were all talking about the storm. An old man with the long sallow knotted face and pale narrow deep-set eyes of the cracker said, “They say they know where it is. I ain’t fixin’ to listen too hard to ’em, with their planes and charts and all. You get this here rain and then it comes right at you like you had the bar’l of a gun aimed right down your gullet. Nobody knows where it is. Where the hell you think all the birds went? Me, I say it’s fixin’ to roar right down on us. I got me all boarded up and ready, by God. Try to breathe this here air. There ain’t enough goodness in it. You got to keep a-fillin’ your chest. That’s one sure sign.”

  When they were back in the car Betty said, “He sounded awfully certain, that old man in there.”

  “So we’ll add a few knots and get out of here. It would have been fun in Miami, but I wouldn’t want to have to sit it out in a car.”

  The gray car, gray as the rain, sped through the moist heavy air. It threw up a great spume of spray behind it. When the winds became strong enough to make the car swerve, he had to slow down.

  [Slow down. And in that time of slowing a big dark blue Cadillac swings out and passes the Mercedes, and he gets half a glance at the two men in the Cadillac, at the Florida plate.

  The driver of the Cadillac gets a certain savage satisfaction out of passing the sleek foreign car. The Cadillac trembles on a long curve and he knows that he is holding it on the edge of control. The smaller man beside him seems about to speak, to complain about the speed, but he does not.

  Ten minutes later the Cadillac passes the station wagon which had passed the Mercedes when it was stopped at the restaurant.

  Traffic is thinning out. The rain and wind have become too heavy, too frightening.

  The cars head north, up Route 19.

  There is an impersonality about train and bus and plane. You buy the ticket and you are, for a time, with strangers. You are linked only by common destination, by the need to be at another place at another time. Yet you look at the other, at the cool inward faces, the man with the briefcase, the lame girl with the silly hat, the sticky-faced child, and you wonder about them—casually, with no special interest.

  The highway is the coldest of all. You are alone and all other vehicles are mindless, untenanted.

  Yet when there is a common destination, unplanned and violent as that destination may be, and when the vehicle engines are stilled, you are with strangers who mean even less than the accidental companions of train, bus and aircraft.]

  4

  Johnny Flagan stood shaving in the light of cold fluorescence in his bathroom. The motor in the shaver made a high whining hum which sagged in pitch when the head bit into the crust of hard sandy whiskers along his jaw. He was a suety man in his fifties, with gingery gray hair surrounding a bald spot the size of a coaster. He stood spread-legged, slabs of fat moving on his sloped shoulders as he steered the razor. He had once been a strong man. But the years had run through the puffy body, the years of the cigars and the bourbon and the hotel room women. Years of the quick meeting and the dickering and the club cars. There were brown blemishes on his lard white shoulders and back, a matronly cast to his hips. But all the drive was still there, the hint of harshness.

  He was an amiable looking man. Sun and whisky kept his soft face red. He smiled easily and had the knack of kidding people. He wore round glasses with steel rims and the glasses were always slipping a little way down his blunt nose and Johnny Flagan would look over his glasses at you and grin wryly about his morning hangover and you would never notice that the grin did nothing to change
the eyes. The eyes were small and brown and watchful and they could have been the noses of two bullets dimly seen in the cylinder when you look toward the muzzle of a gun.

  If you walked down the street with him you would soon come to believe that he knew more than half the people in Sarasota.

  But what does he do?

  —You mean Johnny Flagan? What does he do? Well, he’s got a lot of interests you might say. He was in on some pretty good land development stuff on the keys. He’s got a fellow runs a ranch for him down near Venice. Santa Gertrudis stock, it is. He’s got a piece of a juice plant over near Winter Haven. Then he’s director on this and that. And he’s got some kind of interest in savings and loan stuff. Hell, Old Johnny keeps humping.

  —He seems like a nice guy.

  —Sure. He’s a nice fella. Got a raft of friends. You get him going sometime telling stories. He’s really something.

  Successful and honest, I suppose.

  Successful, sure. You understand I’m not a fellow to talk about anybody. Gossip. That kind of thing. But you go throwing around that word honest, and there’s a lot of people got different ideas of what it means. Johnny’s a sharp one. I don’t think he ever in his whole life done anything he could get hisself jailed for, but you get on the other end of a deal from him, and you got to play it close. Like that time, hell it was seven eight years ago, there was this old fellow down Nokomis way didn’t want to let loose of some land Johnny wanted to pick up. Both Johnny and the old man were pretty damn sure the State Road Department was going to put the new road right through his land. Well sir, one day these young fellows come to the old man’s house and they’re hot and they want a drink of water. They got transits and so on, all that surveying stuff, and the old man gives them the water and they get to talking and it turns out they’re surveying for the road and it just doesn’t come nowheres near the old man’s land. Very next day the old man unloads his land on Johnny, trying to keep a straight face. Inside fourteen months the new road cuts right across the land and Johnny has himself a bunch of prime commercial lots. That old man just about drove them nuts up there in Tallahassee, but he never could find out just who those surveyors were or where they come from. Sure, Johnny’s honest, but he’s damn sharp.