Murder in the Wind

by John D. MacDonald

  The job in the brokerage office had been pleasant work. He had enjoyed it. Of course he had still missed Georgiana dreadfully, but it was nowhere near as sharp an anguish as it had been up north.

  And then Agnes Steppey had stopped by to ask advice. She was a rather nice looking woman of about fifty-five. She was tanned a deep brown and she wore an orange blouse and what seemed like quite a lot of costume jewelry. She had a rather deep laugh, and sparkling dark eyes. She looked almost, that first day, as if she were some kind of a gypsy.

  He studied the list of the stocks her late husband had left her and he saw at once what the trouble was. Carl Steppey had been buying growth stocks, and from the dates of purchase it looked as though he had done quite well indeed. They made a healthy capital gains picture, but they certainly weren’t producing income.

  He explained very carefully to Mrs. Steppey what ought to be done, how she should unload all but one or two of the items on the list and reinvest the funds in the type of security which would bring her an adequate guaranteed income. She caught on quite readily, and after it had all been juggled around she had lost a certain amount of face value through taxes and brokerage fees, but her income had been jumped from about twenty-one hundred a year to over thirty-eight hundred.

  They got on well together. She got into the habit of stopping in when she was downtown, and he would go around the corner with her for coffee. It was inevitable that they should talk about losing a wife and a husband. It surprised him to find she had three grown boys. One was an engineer in an aircraft plant in California. One had gone to Annapolis and was making a career of the Navy. The youngest was homesteading in Alaska. She showed him pictures of them, of their wives, of her three young grandchildren.

  There was one thing about Agnes that had distressed him in the beginning. It still distressed him, but he didn’t see quite what he could do about it. She had a certain coarse turn of speech sometimes. She loved indecent stories, and actually told them very very well. But it did not seem to him to be a proper thing for a lady to excel in. They talked about how lonely it was to be single, and without his ever quite knowing how it came about, they were suddenly talking about marriage and a month later they were married.

  There certainly was a great difference between the first wife and the second. Georgiana had always been so sensitive and rather shy. She had never talked about the sexual side of marriage. When he had married Agnes he had not thought very much about the sexual aspects of it. He had even hoped that Agnes would agree that they had both outgrown that sort of thing—outlived it, rather. But buxom, earthy Agnes had other plans. At first it made him feel quite ridiculous, but soon he began to take a peculiar pride in being able to respond almost as well as when he had been a very young man. Agnes distressed him with bawdy comments about the food she bought for him, and he had been very reluctant to go to a doctor for those injections. But when you overlooked that side of Agnes, she was really a wonderful person to be with, and he felt lucky to have married her. Except when he thought of Georgiana, and then he felt guilty about marrying again.

  The nearest he had come to a quarrel with Agnes was when she had said, “That Georgiana of yours must have been a poor man’s version of Alice Blue Gown. An original gutless wonder. Did you ever get up enough nerve to go to bed with her?”

  Agnes had apologized later and he had forgiven her. Agnes seemed to think there was nothing strange or unusual about their leading a personal life that would have been normal for a couple in their thirties. Charles liked it, but he could not quite get accustomed to it. You just had to face the fact that Agnes and Georgiana were two different types. Agnes was more like Babe Flagan than she was like Georgiana.

  There was another difference too. Georgiana had always treated him and his work with respect. But Agnes was always puncturing his dignity. “Please, I beg of you, don’t start telling me again about that mausoleum of a bank you once worked in. Carl used to say all big city bankers are disappointed undertakers. If you must keep dithering around looking for a job, let me see what I can do, dear.”

  And the job working for Johnny Flagan was what she had done. But Johnny had misrepresented the job. That was what had caused all the trouble. Johnny had made it sound as though all he wanted was a sort of spy and errand boy. So Charles had decided to show Johnny that he was capable of accepting responsibility, even if the job was a great deal smaller and less important than the job in The Bank.

  But Johnny didn’t want anyone to accept responsibility. He wanted to do it all himself. He had to be the king pin. Nobody else could have a chance.

  It was too bad that tree had missed Johnny Flagan. Because he was certain that the reason Johnny was taking him back up to Georgia was to humiliate him. Flagan had come from nothing, and he had to prove his worth by stepping on everybody else. Flagan was small town. He’d never be anything but small town. He’d be lost in the city. He was probably shrewd enough for a small town, but that was as far as he’d ever get.

  He realized Johnny was saying something to him.

  “What’s that, Johnny?”

  “Go get the bags out of the car and take them to the house, Charlie.”

  “Sure thing, Johnny.” He felt the willing smile on his mouth and turned his back and walked toward the Cadillac. Now I’m a bell hop. A flunky. Carry my bag, Charlie. Go get this. Go get that. He was so intent on his hatred for Johnny Flagan that he was almost unconscious of the renewed fury of the wind.

  He got the idea just as he reached the car. Stevenson was a nice man. Stevenson was easy to talk to. If Ricardo and the group pulled out, Johnny would be unable to swing the charter. He knew that Johnny had told Stevenson he could handle it all by himself if need be, but Charlie knew that was a lie. Johnny had told him in confidence that if Ricardo pulled out he wouldn’t take the chance of taking over all those shares himself. The idea was still a good one. Maybe Stevenson would listen to a proposition. Get Ricardo to pull out. Then Johnny would too, and they’d withdraw the application for a charter. Then Stevenson and Ricardo could form a new group and re-apply for a charter. And, because of the information Charlie had given them, they might in return let him have a few shares and give him a position.

  Agnes would be very annoyed. She wouldn’t want to leave Sarasota, especially to live in a small town in Georgia. But he thought she would agree. It would be nice to be associated with Stevenson.

  And it would be particularly nice to get even with Johnny Flagan for calling him stupid and calling him a clerk and a bore.

  Johnny would find out who was a clerk.

  He carried the bags back. They were hard to manage in the wind. The wind kept banging them against his thin legs. As he reached the house he saw that the young couple who had decided to walk out had changed their mind and were on the way back. He carried the bags inside and Johnny took his bag without a word of thanks. Charlie Himbermark had been nervous about the hurricane, but he was nervous no longer. He knew that it would be over sometime, and they would get up to Georgia sooner or later, and when they did he would find a chance to have a private chat with Stevenson. A chat between gentlemen. A little dignity and mutual respect.

  Whatever happened to Johnny, he had asked for it. He just didn’t know how to handle people.

  Johnny motioned to him to come out into the kitchen. Charlie went out. Johnny had opened his bag. He took a quart of bourbon out and broke the seal and unscrewed the cap and handed it to Charlie.

  “Take a knock, Charlie. Then you’ll stop jittering.”

  “I’m not jittering.”

  “Then you should be. This is going to be a real ass buster of a hurricane.”

  “What can happen?”

  “The damn thing you better think about is the water coming up high enough to wash this castle away. The second probability is it getting blown down. Take a drink.”

  Charlie stared at him. Johnny looked serious. And he knew this country and these storms. Charlie took three shallow swallows of the tepid li
quor. It scalded his throat and heated his belly and spread warmth through him. Johnny took the bottle, wiped the neck on the palm of his hand, upended it and drank deeply, his throat working. He lowered it, said, “Haw hoo wow!” recapped it and put it back in the bag.

  “It would blow this house down?” Charlie asked incredulously.

  “Snatch the roof off then blow the walls down, Charlie, my boy. Don’t tell that to the others, though. If you do we’ll have to waste bourbon on them. Now don’t tag along after me. I’m going to go make the acquaintance of that big black-haired dolly with the tan and the nice big boobies.”

  Charlie watched him swagger out of the barren kitchen. After he had gone the wind seemed louder. It seemed to threaten to move the house. There was a calendar on the wall between the boarded-up windows. Charlie walked over to it and tried not to hear the whine and whistle of the wind as he looked at it. July 1926. The paper was curled and yellowed. The twenty-fourth of July was crudely circled in red. Above the month was a colored picture of a canoe on an indigo lake passing in silhouette in front of an enormous yellow moon, with a girl and boy in the canoe. The advertisement at the top was for a garage in Gainesville. He wondered idly what the date meant, why it was circled. Was that the day they had left the house? Or a date of death?

  The wind slammed the house again and started something vibrating, a loose board or lath or piece of roofing. Himbermark rubbed his hands together and discovered they were damp. In between the wind sounds he could hear the others talking.

  He thought of the trooper on the road. He would learn that the other cars hadn’t gotten through. They would investigate. Help would come. It was inconceivable that they would all be ignored. Yet suppose the main bridge was cleared just after they started through, and the trooper got word over his radio. If there was a trooper at the far end, he might not expect another group of cars through the detour. And the trooper who had let them through would think they had made it all the way.

  He moved cautiously to the doorway and looked into the dim room. No one was looking toward him. He ducked back and got the bourbon and this time he took a longer drink. It did not burn his throat as much, nor was the heat of it as evident. He recapped it and hid it away.

  Stevenson would be easy to talk to. Stevenson wasn’t like the other men in The Bank, but he was more of a gentleman than Flagan. And he didn’t think that Stevenson thought much of Johnny Flagan. He had seen the pained look on Stevenson’s face that time he had met him in Johnny Flagan’s suite at that hotel. The three of them had been talking in the parlor of the suite. The door to the bedroom was closed. Right while they were talking the bedroom door had opened and that woman had come out, pouting and sulky, dressed only in one of those skimpy little terrycloth beach robes that came down just below her hips. She had tousled reddish blond hair and a thick sleepy-looking face and she said, “How long’s all this quack going on, Johnny? We’re outa liquor and now I’m outa cigarettes, damn it.”

  Johnny had grinned and jumped up and given her a fresh pack of cigarettes, turned her around gently, then hoisted the back of the beach coat and given her a sharp palm crack on the bare whiteness of her. She had made a little shriek and jumped back into the bedroom and slammed the door. Then Charlie could hear her laughing in there. He had been embarrassed and he had looked over at Stevenson and saw that Stevenson had looked pained and disturbed.

  “Sarah Jean gets herself all nervous and restless,” Johnny said.

  “Maybe we ought to finish this up some other time,” Stevenson said.

  “Hell no, Steve. She’ll keep. She’s a good kid. She came over with me from Augusta yesterday afternoon.”

  And in a few moments they were back into the conference again, discussing the new shares that Ricardo had lined up, and talking about the way the charter was going to go through. Charlie found he wasn’t following it very closely, that instead he was thinking of the girl in the bedroom, wondering just how Johnny had met her in Augusta and how it happened that she was willing to come along with him. He wondered what sort of person she was, and what kind of boldness it was that Johnny had that enabled him to bring her over here so casually and treat her with such affectionate contempt.

  He went down in the creaky elevator with Stevenson afterward and he wondered if he should say anything about the woman. Something casual and sophisticated. Or maybe express distaste for the arrangement.

  But he couldn’t think how to say it, and Stevenson didn’t say anything, so the opportunity passed.

  Yet it was undeniable that Stevenson had looked disapproving. He had good reason. It was his home town, the place where he was raising his kids. And he was associated in business with a man who would bring a woman like that to his home town.

  Perhaps Stevenson was looking for some chance to get Johnny Flagan out of the picture. Then it could be a new life, a new job, a good start.

  The warm tide of pleasure ebbed quickly away. He looked at his thin hands, at swollen arthritic knuckles, grainy skin on the backs. Stevenson wouldn’t want him. You couldn’t think of a new start at this age. It was funny about age. Funny how easily you could forget that you were old, be trapped into thinking a young man’s thoughts. He remembered how it was at forty, when you could think that if you were lucky and healthy, there could be just as much life ahead of you as there was behind you. But when you were over sixty, you knew the biggest part was behind you. And you didn’t know if you had one more year or ten. Or even fifteen. Sometimes fifteen seemed like a lot of years. Other times it seemed like a meager unfair amount, like you were being cheated. That was when you looked at the young ones and felt stinging envy and thought how if you had their life, you wouldn’t waste a moment of it. Not a single second.

  Stevenson wouldn’t want him. Johnny was disgusted with him. Johnny had a right to be. He’d known he shouldn’t have talked, shouldn’t have tried to make a big impression up there. But you had to let people know you were alive. That you meant something.

  A small girl came out into the kitchen and looked up at him. She was a plump pretty child. She had been crying recently. She sucked on her fingers and looked up at him.

  “Hello, honey. What’s your name?”

  She took her hand out of her mouth. “Jan. My daddy’s sick.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “His head is hurt.”

  A small boy came out into the kitchen and took Jan’s hand impatiently. “You come on back. Mother wants you. Come on.” He towed her into the other room.

  Himbermark heard Johnny Flagan’s voice, raised above the wind sound, and he went to the doorway to hear better.

  “… all stuck here until this thing blows itself out. It’s pushing the Gulf in on us, and we may have to move upstairs before it’s over. Now this pile here is the stuff out of the cars. We haven’t got much food or much to drink. I’ll take charge of it and dole it out to whoever needs it most if nobody’s got any objection.”

  He paused and looked around expectantly. “Okay then. If you got anything in the cars that can be eaten or drunk up, we ought to get it before this thing gets any worse. The water may get kind of deep out there, and maybe we ought to get the luggage and stuff in here and get it all upstairs. I introduced myself to some of you. I’m Johnny Flagan. The Dorns over there, the couple with the kids, had some bad luck. Mr. Dorn got smacked on the head when that tree went down. Most of you can get your own stuff. But somebody should get the Dorns’ stuff out of the wagon. And get Mrs. Sherrel’s stuff too. I noticed a cistern out in back of here. The pipe running into the kitchen is dry, but it may just be clogged up, and there may be water we can drink in the cistern. I’ll go out and check that over. If there is, we’ll fill everything we got.”

  “There’s some pots and pans in our station wagon,” Mrs. Dorn said.

  “Fine. We ought to get those in here. And don’t forget flashlights. Bring all the flashlights in. Blankets, car robes. We’ve got to figure on being here all night the way this thing looks. W
e got to have some kind of sanitary arrangement too. We aren’t going to be able to go out in this mess. There’s a little room off the kitchen, a sort of pantry. The floor is rotten and some of it is gone, but the rest of the floor feels solid enough. We’ll use that as a kind of a privy. There ought to be water under the house pretty soon anyhow. Now let’s get this thing organized. Your name is Malden? Suppose you and Bunny Hollis unload the Dorn car and the Sherrel car when you get your own cars emptied. Mrs. Sherrel, maybe you can get on the door and open it and close it for people as they bring stuff in. Just bring it in and put it in this room. Charlie, suppose you and these two young fellas carry it upstairs as they bring it in. We’ll get ourselves all straightened out here, and we’ll be cozy as if we were in a hotel.”

  Charlie could sense the relief the others felt at having somebody take over. And he felt a reluctant admiration for Johnny Flagan. The thirteen people had stopped being enclosed in their own isolated small groups and had become members of the larger group, co-operating for survival.

  13

  Hope Morrissey had been thinking about her father’s grove as the panel truck rattled steadily northward through the rain, Billy Torris driving, and Frank asleep in the back. She thought of how it was when the trees were in blossom. Then you would lie on your bed at night and the sweet heavy smell would come in through the screen and the blossoms made the trees look pale at night.

  She liked to think about the grove, but she did not want to go back there. Her father, Sam Morrissey, was a silent man who drove himself every hour of the day. He had set out more trees than one man could handle, yet he made himself finish the work that had to be done, the endless spraying, pruning, fertilizing. He walked with a long, tired, lunging stride, big hands swinging, and when he came into the house he brought with him a smell of sweat so sharp and tangible that you thought it should be visible around him, like a cloud. He seemed but barely aware of his children, and spoke to them only when it was necessary. For all his labor he did not seem to gain ground. He was an unlucky man. The wind would change unexpectedly and drift the protective smudge away from the tender trees in the frosty night. When any piece of equipment broke down it was never an obvious and readily replaceable part that failed. It would be some obscure gear or pinion that was seldom known to fail. The parts would not be in stock. The equipment would sit idle until a new part could be obtained by air express from the factory. And then, more often than not, it would be a part for a different model. He could have made up for his bad luck by the intensity of his labor were it not for the streak of quarrelsomeness in him. He continually felt wrongly used by the pickers, the truckers, the packing plants, the Association. He brooded about the way he was being wronged while he worked. And when he could stand it no longer he would stop work and find the man at fault and tell him off.