Where Is Janice Gantry?

by John D. MacDonald

  “You have your own kind of sense. You can say anything to me, Sam. You know that.” She giggled. “Come to think of it, I guess you’ve said everything to me there is to say.”

  “Hush a minute. You are a very lusty, vital, hot-blooded, demanding wench.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir!”

  “You are going to be, to put it mildly, a sexual responsibility to this guy if you marry him.”

  “So?”

  “So, as of now, you don’t love him. But if he can … discharge the responsibilities of his office and set you up in the motherhood department, and if you like him already, you are going to end up loving him and it is going to be fine.”

  “If, if. You keep saying if.”

  “But if the bed part is bad, the whole thing is going to be a trap you’ll be too stubborn to try to get out of, and it will be a hell on earth, because the physical part of it is going to be a lot more essential a part of marriage to you than it might be to a lot of other women.”

  “I can see it coming, you scoundrel. I should seduce the gentleman.”

  “It makes sense, Sis.”

  “My little schemes have failed thus far. Got any ideas?”

  “Have you told him yes yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then do so, and drive to some motel outside the county and celebrate the coming marriage, and if it doesn’t work out, change your mind.”

  “And hurt him?”

  “If it doesn’t work out, you won’t be squeamish about hurting him.”

  She beamed and said, “Maybe you are a wise man.”

  “I can only be wise about other people. Take care, Sis.”

  I reached the door and put my hand on the latch and then turned and frowned at her and said, “There’s one other thing that should be done.”

  “Yes?”

  “But it might not be too smart. Skip it.”

  She came quickly to me and hooked two fingers in my shirt pocket and gave an irritable tug and said, “What, Sam? What other thing?”

  “Well, it sort of relates to the fact that knowledge is power.”

  She stamped her foot. “Stop being so damn shifty!”

  “I just had the idea that before you get this motel deal all set up, you could send Cal to me for detailed information on the best way to attack this special problem he’ll be facing … uh … what to do and what not to do …”

  She tried a hard right and I caught that wrist, and I just barely caught the left wrist in time to jump out of the way of some very sincere kicks. Her face was bright red and she was grunting with effort and trying to keep from laughing at the same time.

  “Oh, you dirty stinking thing!” she groaned.

  When I felt the tension go out of her muscles I cautiously released her. We were standing close, and smiling at each other.

  “You are a monster,” she said gently.

  “I bet you can lick that lawyer man in a fair fight, lady.”

  Her breasts lifted and fell with a mighty sigh as she looked up at me, and I saw the way her eyes and her mouth changed.

  “Sam, my darling, you’ll always be a part of my life,” she whispered.

  “It was a good part, wasn’t it?”

  She dropped her eyes and said, “This is … shameless and disloyal and … and sick, I guess. But could we … what was that word you used?… celebrate once more what it all used to be? Sam?”

  Right at the edge of an eager agreement, no matter how unwise, I remembered Charlie. “Could you … drive out about nine o’clock, or could I pick you up?”

  She took another deep shuddering breath and then squared her shoulders and said, “No, dear. That would be too cold-blooded, and it would give me too much time to think and … too much guilt afterward. If it could have happened right now … if you could have broken speed laws taking me down to the cottage … The hell with it, Sam. At very best it was a very bad idea.”

  “I hope you’ll be happy, Sis.”

  “I want enough of them so I can name one of them Sam without anybody getting any cute ideas about it.”

  “If they’re all girls?”

  “Sam is still a good name.”

  As I walked by the front of the building toward my car I looked in and saw her covering her typewriter, her face thoughtful. She looked up and smiled and gave me a final bawdy wink.

  After I had crawled into the bread-baking heat of the wagon I remembered too late, the tailored red leather couch in Tom Earle’s small private office. She was right—I was a monster, a hopeless lecher. It made me feel guilty to realize it had even entered my mind. I knew Sis well enough to know she would have taken the offer of the random bounce on her employer’s red couch in one of two ways. She would have become savagely angry or semi-hysterical with laughter. With all her potential of eagerness, she yet required that dignity which is a product of total privacy and ample time.

  As I drove over toward town to check a claim that could be looked at only after working hours, I improved my morale by telling myself no hopeless lecher could long endure without a girl. And I was enduring quite well, and was convinced that the months of girlishness were not corroding my masculinity in any way. And how many months was it? Five and a bit, since that turbulent weekend in March with that miraculous tourist lady down in Fort Myers. A policy holder with one of my client companies had stove in the front of her husband’s blue Buick and, for business reasons, he had to fly back to Philadelphia, leaving her to wait for the repairs and then drive the car north. I came onto the scene after the husband had departed, and she had described him for me, saying, “This is the first time in our entire married life that I have had one minute of freedom from that tubby, arrogant, possessive, jealous little man, and I certainly do not intend to spend the rest of my life daydreaming wistfully what I might have done the only damned time I was ever given a chance, Mr. Brice. So might we carry these drinks into the bedroom?”

  She had been a tall carroty redhead, so uncompromisingly scrawny that I would have never considered making a pass at her. But her approach had been so shockingly abrupt, I couldn’t think of any simple way to evade it, and there didn’t seem to be time for any complicated way. So I found myself, drink in hand, trailing her stupidly into the bedroom of the motel suite. I soon found that the look of scrawniness disappeared completely when the clothing was gone. I was the instrument by which she was determined to avenge herself on life for dealing her sixteen years of very dreary marriage, and she was almost frighteningly determined not to waste a single moment. I went to look at the Buick on Friday afternoon and finally got to look at it on Monday morning, and I had to work fifteen straight twelve-hour days to catch up on my work after that redheaded weekend.

  Aside from such unexpected, unsought interludes, I was learning that a man can live without a woman. Sometimes the house is too empty. Sometimes the restlessness is like sickness. But I guess I wasn’t learning to live without any woman. I was still learning to live without Judy.

  I met Judy Caldwell during the tail end of the season of my last year of college ball. I was two months away from twenty-two, and she was a nineteen-year-old import from a girls’ college in the east, flown in for the football weekend by a fraternity brother who was so serious about her and had talked so much about her that we were prepared for a letdown. But when Judy entered a room and when she smiled and looked around, before saying a word, she turned all other females in the room to wax and ashes. With that careful, casual ruff of blonde amorous hair, the mobile mouth, those bottomless violet eyes, and her trim, taut look of tension under control, I thought her the most alive thing I had ever seen in my life. Before I ever heard her voice, I wanted to own her forever.

  She was, in the most comprehensive meaning of the phrase, a status symbol. In any given year there are not many nineteen-year-old girls of that wondrous breed. In a generation there are pitifully few—in any age bracket.

  If you acquire one of them, you can walk them into any public place in the civilized wo
rld and be marked at once as a man of rare luck, and special talent.

  Some of them move inevitably into the entertainment world. Liz Taylor and Julie Newmar are in that special pattern.

  They are beautiful and animated and they live deeply, wildly, constantly on some far out edge of emotional tension. They are incomparably feminine. They need and seek all the symbols of male strength, despising weak men. When they have decided exactly what they want, they go after it with a ruthlessness that would confound any pirate. No one can predict their next mood, especially themselves.

  They are tidy as panthers, and as blandly vain. Physically, they are like a blow at the heart. The skin texture is so flawless as to be unreal. Their bodies, in repose, or in movement, have an intricacy of curvings, lines, textures and hollows that make other women look curiously unfinished. They eat like wolves, laugh with the throat open wide, and wear the face of a child when they sleep. They sense that they are placed here for the purpose of living—and there will never be enough time for all of it.

  In any ten-minute span they can take you through fifty emotions, which will include a great many you never heard of and can never describe.

  In the bleakness of the jealousy of the men who cannot have them and the women who cannot match them, petty words are spoken: shallow, silly, arrogant, spoiled, wild, untrustworthy …

  But to the few men in each generation who can possess one of these, to the extent that any of them can be truly possessed, they are the incomparable reward. They love with a savage, surpassing joy. They have passion without limit. They are so far beyond any restraint that it becomes a special innocence, touching and beyond price.

  Judy was one of that unique sisterhood and she was, of course, a status symbol. And she could not avoid or prevent those things that weigh so heavily on the other end of the scale.

  You find yourself so unashamedly adored that the bright hot light of that adoration constantly illuminates your own unworthiness.

  And the status symbol works both ways. You must be her symbol also. Defeat is unforgivable, because she equates defeat with weakness. She who is destined to belong to kings can never scrub cottages. She goes with success, and she leaves with it also.

  And once you have been showered by that special bounty, you can never fit yourself comfortably back into that world from which all magic has fled. She is in your nerves and your blood and your flesh forever.

  All you can do is try to avoid comparison, because it can be a knife in your heart. I kept her out of my mind when I was with Sis. But there was one time when she slipped past my defenses, and suddenly I was in the midst of a coarse, meaningless, doughy frolic with some strange dull girl, and it all stopped within a single heavy beat of my heart. I had to plead a sudden illness—wondering aloud about food poisoning, knowing I could not speak of the poisoned heart. I went alone into the night and stood on my dock and looked at the stars and told all the smiling ghosts of Judy that it wasn’t fair to take everything away. She must have relented, because it was once more the way it should be with Sis when we were together again.

  I checked the freshly battered junker in town, and so it was a little after seven on that August evening when I got back to the cottage. Charlie had just finished off a fried slab of the morning snook. He said he had slept until six, when the alarm had awakened him. He did not think the phone had rung again, or that anybody had knocked at my door. He said he was ready to go as soon as it was dark enough.

  “You certainly seem calm, Charlie.”

  “When you know what you’re going to do, there’s no point in worrying any more. You can start worrying again if it doesn’t work.”

  “About the gun, I hope you’re not going to ask me if you can please borrow the gun.”

  “I won’t need a gun. Sam, are you trying to find out what I’m going to do?”

  “I don’t think I want to know what you’re going to do. I have the feeling that already I know more than I want to know. You were picked up when you were working on the safe out at the Weber house on the Key. You got pretty bitter about Charity Weber. I can think of all kinds of things that could have been going on, and I don’t want any more clues.”

  He opened a fresh pack of cigarettes I had brought him and said, “I guess you don’t want to get mixed up in anything, Sam.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “You got it the way you want it, I guess. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s like you got a hole and you pulled it in after you. That’s another reason I came here. I knew you’d live quiet and keep your head down. I guessed you wouldn’t turn me in, and I guessed you wouldn’t try to help me, either. I don’t want any help. I can tell right now how anxious you are to be rid of me, so you can forget you had anything to do with it.”

  “It sounds as if you—”

  “I’m not criticizing you, Sam. It’s your life and your choice, and maybe a hell of a lot of people would be better off if they just stepped aside the way you have. You’ve got the books and the records and that little boat tied up to your dock down there, and a job that doesn’t get you too involved. I guess I envy you.”

  He stepped over to the sink and began to scrub the frying pan.

  “I’ll do that later on, Charlie.”

  “No trouble. That’s a damn fine fish.”

  “I can let you have twenty bucks to take along with you if it would help out.”

  “Thanks, Sam. It’ll help. Even if I find out I don’t need it, it will help the morale to have it in my pocket.”

  We left the cottage at twenty minutes of eight. During the four-mile trip to the city line the neon gets more frequent and more expensive. He crouched on the floor beside me, one shoulder tucked down under the glove compartment. He had asked to be let off in town handy to some pay phone he could use with a minimum chance of being seen and recognized. I had suggested the outdoor booth at West Plaza, at the big shopping section, not far from the mainland end of City Bridge. The booth was brightly lighted, but set so deep in the parking area, so far from traffic that it was unlikely anyone would come within a hundred feet of him.

  Charlie said it sounded all right. I pulled off into the shadows of the lot, away from the street lights. The stores were closed, their night lights shining. The big drugstore was open, with fifteen or twenty parked cars clustered close to it. All the rest was a dark desert of empty asphalt. He moved up onto the seat, poked the cotton into place, tugged the bill of the cap down to eyebrow level. The sunglasses were in the breast pocket of the sports shirt, along with the cigarettes I had brought him. “Thanks a lot, Sam,” he said.

  We shook hands. His hand was hot and dry, leathery with callouses. “Best of luck, Charlie.”

  He got out of the wagon and walked toward the booth. I could see nothing furtive about the way he walked. He did not look back. I saw him step into the booth, close the folding door and open the phone book. I swung around in a big arc and headed out onto the street.

  I could have gone home. That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to cook myself a meal, put the sheets and pajamas he had used in the laundry bundle, clean the place up, put Peggy Lee on the changer and go sit on my screened porch in the dark, in the canvas womb of the safari chair, and drink some big drinks and think small, random, unimportant thoughts, and listen to Peggy and forget the existence of Charlie Haywood. Sis was to be married. Judy was forever lost to me. Charlie would never bring me into his problems again.

  I will never know why I didn’t do just that.

  It’s what I should have done.

  But there was something particularly touching about the gallantry of the new Charlie Haywood. He had been an ineffectual boy. They had ground him into a man. Maybe I wanted to help him. Or maybe I just wanted to watch. Maybe he had stung me a little with his remarks about having crawled into a hole and pulled it in after me. I knew how true it was. I knew why I had done it. But it hurt my pride to have it pointed out. The big wheel had gone too fast for me, and it had flung me o
ff, and I wasn’t about to climb back on.

  So instead of heading on home, I hit the brake at the first cross street and doubled all the way back and came back onto the parking lot from the far side.

  It wouldn’t hurt me at all, I told myself, to kill another ten minutes and see what Charlie did next.

  3

  I parked on the far side of the group of cars near the drugstore. I slid out and stood up cautiously and looked out across the roofs of the cars toward the distant booth. He was still in there, and he was talking over the phone. I saw him hang up and step out of the booth. He walked a dozen feet, paused in a hesitant way, and then came angling over toward the drugstore, giving a perfect imitation of a man killing time. I could guess at what the casual manner was costing him.

  I pleaded with him mentally not to go into the drugstore. There was a gift shop beside the drugstore. The night lights were on in the gift shop. The show window was illuminated, but not brilliantly. He stopped there and stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the merchandise.

  It was a perfect device. He was just outside the brightness that streamed out of the drugstore, yet he looked as if he might be waiting for someone to come out.

  I had gotten back behind the wheel. I could see him through the windows of the car next to mine, a spare shadowy figure in the humid night.

  Now what? I asked myself. Sam Brice, public eye. On any T.V. show they would have cast me as the heavy. Maybe at twenty-nine, moving too fast toward thirty, I would still have been acceptable for the rugged hero part had I not spent eleven seasons in football. Four in junior high and Florence City High, as All-State fullback. Four in the semi-pro brand of college ball played in Georgia, as defensive linebacker and defensive end. Three seasons—almost three seasons—in the National Football League as a two hundred fifteen-pound offensive tackle, a little bit light for that job of work, but compensating with quickness and balance.

  Take those eleven years of eating cleats and spitting blood and being bounced off the frozen turf, and add the unavoidable social fist fights, and you have a face to loan bill collectors. Store teeth, a crooked jaw, a potato nose, miscellaneous scars and lumps and the tracery of long ago clamps and stitches.