Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  “That would be a very sickening situation. Any one of the four would know me by sight. I think if I talked very, very fast I might turn it into a deal. But the odds are small, I mean that one would come along. And in that case, you’re still in the clear. If there’s a hassle, drive away from it. Ditch the car. Go home.”

  “Like you came into the water and hauled me out when I got shot in the shoulder?”

  “Have I even hinted at that? Have I?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the word, Jerry?”

  “When do you have to leave?”

  “The ticket says one-fifteen tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Would you leave earlier or later if I said yes or no right now?”

  “In any case, I’d have to grab the same airplane.”

  “So when you leave, you’ll know.”

  “Will you give Lorraine the word?”

  “If I say yes? Not a chance.”

  “Good. What will be the reason for your trip?”

  “Job-hunting. Vince, if I say yes, I might need some financing. I’m that broke.”

  “No problem. I’ve got it with me.”

  “If I say yes.”

  “I heard you, boy. It has to be two. Just two. And I hope it’s you. That’s damn near a song lyric.”

  I started the car. “Copyright it, Uncle Vince. Make a mint.”

  “Somebody beat me to it. It had to be you. Remember?”

  “Kindly don’t sing it.”

  “One thing, Jerry. One last thing. Don’t get futzed up with the morals of the thing. Peral is a tiger. Melendez is a shark. We are just a couple of cuties who zip in and grab the piece of meat and get out fast. And incidentally stop a nasty little civil war. Keep thinking of that. Hell, I hope you haven’t gone too stale for the job, Jamison.”

  “Look, Vince. One thing. Just one guy in transit with all that money. Is that logical?”

  “In the first place, Melendez has him thoroughly cowed. In the second place, it would attract attention to mount a guard on it. In the third place, he is put on at one end, watched at the stop en route, and picked up at this end, so where could he go, even if he got the yen?”

  I drove back home. Lorraine had gone out some place, leaving no note or word with Irene. Irene fixed us lunch. We talked about old times and places. At one point I looked across the table at Vince and it struck me that I had never really known him, and never would. And I wondered if anybody had ever gotten close enough to him to be able to think they knew him well, how his mind and heart worked. He had the look of indolence and effectiveness of one of the great carnivores. There was a taint of the tiger in him. The tiger is not a herd beast.

  I remembered a night long ago when we had flanked a patrol and sent them wildly down a slope to whère our people had set the bamboo stakes at a fatal angle, cruelly barbed. The next day, at midmorning, Vince and I had gone back with some boys. There were still seven of them impaled on the stakes and four held to a thin thread of life. The rain came down. I remembered how Vince set the click of his grease gun to semi-automatic and sauntered down to where they were. I saw him in the haze of the rain curtain, on that morning when all the color had been leached out of the world, the broad brim of the Aussie hat protecting the smolder of the native cigar stub in the corner of his mouth. Like a man picking blooms in a strange garden, he had moved in that easy way from one to the other and shot each one in the head. The sound of the four shots went dead in the rain. Then he signaled and we came down and stripped them of weapons and ammunition and grenades and the contents of their pockets and any articles of clothing that might be useful to our people, and went back the way we had come.

  And I remembered the way he liked to go off alone through the hills, and come back an hour or a day later. “Little friends, I have found a fine brisk little bridge with a permanent guard post.” Then he would draw it up, sketching in the terrain and we would discuss ways and means.

  All that life had become natural to me. But it was a long time back, and all this talk of planned revolution and millions and couriers seemed, in the quiet setting of my home, to be a rather extravagant and ambitious television spectacular which was falling flat.

  But at times I could bring myself to believe it was all true. My tendency to believe, my ability to return to the thought and action patterns of fourteen years ago was like a faulty fluorescent tube. It would glow steadily for a time, then falter and flicker.

  I waited until I was driving him to the airport on Sunday. He hadn’t pressed me for a decision. When I had to stop for a light I said, “Okay, Vince. We’re back in business.”

  Though I heard no sound I had the impression he had exhaled in a long sigh. “Good deal, Jerry. Get to the Tampa Terrace before noon, or at least close to noon on the sixth. Make your own reservation. Pick a name. Something ordinary.”

  “Robert Martin.”

  “Okay. If there’s any change there’ll be a message at the desk for you. If not tell them it will be one or two nights and you’ll let them know. Stay in the room and I’ll get in touch. Better put the car in a lot somewhere near the hotel.”

  I let him off at the main entrance to the terminal. As we had approached he had taken five hundred in fifties from his wallet. I had protested, but he said if I didn’t have to use it, I could give it back. He walked through the wide doors and out of sight, not looking back. On the way home I had to stop for another light. Two cops stood on the corner, talking. I looked at them and felt a barely perceptible quiver of un-easiness. I knew it was but the first of many symptoms.

  On Sunday night a pack of Lorraine’s special friends trooped in to drink my liquor. I had endured them for years, even tried to like them. Brittle, nervous, flirtatious women with laughter like the breaking of glass. And their dominated husbands, brown, drunk, noisy—masters of the crude double meaning, Don Juans of the locker room.

  Now, by reason of the decision I had made, I was through with them. They were strangers.

  That night before I went to bed I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. And saw another stranger with a closed and wary face, coarse ginger hair going gray. I snapped the light out. The house was still. They had taken Lorraine off with them to the club, for drinking and groping and fumbling, for funny jokes and laughing, for wide slack kisses, and a fat tab added to the monthly statement.

  I woke up when she came in. She turned all the bedroom lights on. I pretended sleep. I heard her leg thud into a chair, and heard her slurred and mumbled, “Son vabish.” When she began to snore I got up and turned out the lights she had forgotten. In the darkness there was an odor of her in the room, stale perfume, smoke, liquor, and an acid trace of perspiration.

  No place for Lorraine in my new world to be.

  But room for Liz?

  4

  I registered at the Tampa Terrace at ten minutes after noon on Tuesday, the sixth of May, as Robert Martin. I had my suit coat over my arm and my white shirt was pasted to my back from the exertion of walking the two and a half blocks from the parking lot. I was ninety per cent certain that there would be a note from Vince saying it was all off. But there was nothing at the desk for me.

  After the bell hop closed the room door behind him, there was nothing to do but wait. I had left on Saturday morning, allowing three days for the sixteen-hundred-mile trip. I had hit a lot of heavy rains on the way down. Tampa was a blazing steam bath, but the room was air-conditioned.

  I tried to read a magazine I had bought in the lobby, but I couldn’t focus my mind on it. I walked back and forth, from the windows to the bureau, stubbing out cigarettes with only half an inch smoked from them. I cursed Vince for making me wait.

  The twelve days in Vernon since Vince had left had been strange. Lorraine and her parents had the idea that I would get back to my meaningless job as soon as I “came to my senses.” But I had gone back to the office only to pick up my final salary check. I had cashed it rather than deposit it. I had done some job-hunting, more as camo
uflage than anything else.

  George Farr, one of the smartest and most successful builders in the entire area, surprised me by wanting to talk to me personally. I had expected the brush-off.

  He leaned back and chewed on the bow of his glasses and said, “With all due respects to your father-in-law, Jerry, it’s damn well time you cut yourself loose from that operation. Maybe it’s a break for both of us. I need a top sergeant. The doc says I’ve got to shift to a lower gear. I need somebody to ramrod the jobs in progress, goose my supers, ride herd on materials, battle the architects, and asskiss the clients. I’ll stay busy enough to feel important, but you’ll be driven nuts. Two hundred bucks a week and an annual bonus based on a percentage of the net. And you can start today.”

  It sounded good. It sounded damn good. And I could take Lorraine’s offer. “It … it sounds fine. But I’ll have to think it over.”

  “Right now we’ve got a shopping center, two motels, an automobile agency and a co-op apartment house on the books. There’s other stuff I want to bid on, but I haven’t got the supervisory personnel.”

  “I’ll have to let you know, George.”

  I felt dazed as I drove away. Dear Hotel—If anybody should try to leave a message for a fictitious Robert Martin, or ask for him at the desk on May sixth, kindly give him the enclosed envelope.

  Dear Vince—Here is your five hundred. I am very sorry. I have decided I have no use for that much money after all. Thanks for yanking me out of the river that time.

  When I went home Lorraine kept yapping at me. “What are you going to do? Just hang around the house? What are we going to live on?”

  “I’ve got some plans.”

  “Fine. Great big brave plans. Mother was here while you were gone. She said Daddy’s very upset about this whole thing. They can’t understand why you’ve turned on him this way after all he’s done. She cried, even.”

  “Lorraine. Get off my back.”

  “But what are you going to do!”

  “I’m going to take a little trip.”

  “Where, for God’s sake?”

  “Look up some people I used to know. Maybe I’ll be able to borrow enough money to get started on my own again.”

  “Who would lend you money?”

  “They come running after me, trying to stuff it in my pocket. Why don’t you go get a nice bottle and pass out some place?”

  “It’s my right to know what you’re going to do!”

  So I spent as little time as possible around the house. She was belting herself as never before. I learned how to make one beer in a neighborhood bar last a full hour.

  On the Friday before I left I went, on impulse, to a drugstore near the office and phoned Liz and asked her if she could sneak out for coffee. She said she was caught up and E. J. was out and she’d be right along. She sat across from me in the booth and told me precisely how everything was going to hell. Even though I had left, I couldn’t enjoy hearing that. You put a part of your life into something and it is a sad thing to hear how a stubborn and stupid old man is ruining it.

  She seemed a little sad too. “Miss you around there, Jerry. I really do. It’s dull around there. What are you going to do?”

  I lied about job-hunting, about looking for backing.

  “Hope you can start your own shop, Jerry. And I hope you’ll need a gal in the office.”

  “Lorraine would just scream with joy if I hired you.”

  She looked at me steadily. “Would you care if she did?”

  We were getting into places we had never been before. I looked back at her and said, “No. Maybe she’s part of my past.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Suppose I’ve been lying, Liz. About job-hunting and setting up shop.”

  She frowned at me. “I don’t follow you.”

  “I can’t tell you much. I don’t want to tell you much. Just suppose that I suddenly … came into a large chunk of money. Large.”

  “How nice for you.”

  “I’m going away for a while. I may come back with it.”

  There was sudden comprehension and concern. “You wouldn’t do anything … really stupid?”

  “No. It would be safe. Money to keep.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Her hand rested beside her coffee cup. I reached across the booth and took hold of her hand and wrist. I saw from the way the shape of her mouth changed that I had gripped her too tightly and hurt her. She made no protest. I had not touched her before.

  “Maybe when I come back with it, we could take off for good.”

  “Where?”

  “There’d be enough to go anywhere.”

  She looked beyond me, her stare curiously intent. She ran the tip of her tongue across her lower lip. “It’s a dull life here, Jerry. It’s getting duller instead of better.”

  “Later we could make it legal.”

  “Later we can talk about it. We can talk about the whole thing. Just get the money.”

  I released her hand. She sipped her coffee. She looked at me over the rim of the cup. She set it down empty and gave me a wry smile of guilt and promise that quickened my heart. “Get the money,” she said in almost a whisper. “Then we’ll talk.”

  I left on Saturday after a messy brawl with Lorraine. I had a little over a thousand dollars with me. I drove southeast through heavy rains. Mr. Robert Martin, lying on sagging beds, watching on old ceilings the light patterns of the traffic and the colored neon, smelling the effluvium of questionable plumbing and the rankness of old linoleum, hearing in the trafficky night the empty bam of a juke box base, a girl-laugh like a shriek of anguish, and beyond the thin wall, the dreary honking of a phlegm-ridden salesman of plastic novelties.

  The room phone rang at twenty past three. I answered it and Vince said he’d be right up. He came in, striding lithely, taut, brown and grinning. He wore a cocoa straw hat, massive sun glasses. As I closed the door he tossed a brown paper bag on the bed. He went over to the bureau and looked at the brimming ash tray.

  “We’re a little jumpy today, aren’t we?”

  “Cut it out, damn it!”

  He went over and opened the bag and flipped the chauffeur hat to me. I put it on. It was a half size small, but I could pull it down so that it looked right.

  ‘Where’s the gray suit?” I opened the closet door. He looked at it. “Okay. We’ll pick up a black bow tie. It’ll look more like a uniform then.”

  He took his hat and glasses off and lay on the bed. “Our little man comes in tomorrow on 675 at three in the afternoon.”

  “Nothing has changed? Nothing has gone sour?”

  “You keep this up and you could hurt my feelings. I have a rental sedan. Raoul thinks I’m in São Paulo taking care of a little matter for him. Carmela is all alerted. General Peral will receive the detailed account of vile conspiracy at three tomorrow, his time. Four o’clock here. It’s all a big delicious piece of cake, Jerry boy, oozing chocolate.”

  “So what now?”

  He swung off the bed and went to the bureau and took a city map out of his pocket. The route was marked. I studied it. We went down to the street. The sedan was in a metered parking slot. It was a black Chrysler, about three years old, and highly polished. We went out to Tampa International, slowed by the curbing in front of the main doors, then turned out again. He held the map and the watch, and told me what speed to maintain in each portion of the trip. It was an involved route, ending at the hospital. We went back and went over it again, and I made two small errors. When I did it the third time, I was perfect. Then we started from where my car would be parked, and found the quickest possible way to the department store and from there to Route 301 north. It was not sufficiently complicated to require going over a second time.

  When it was time for evening visiting hours at the hospital, we went in through the side door where I would be leaving, and found our way to the corridor to the emergency ward. Vince had made one small change in plans. He had
been able to rent the sedan at a centrally located place. He said it seemed smart, and I agreed, to return the sedan and pay the rental fee. He had acquired a small bottle of gasoline and it would take but a moment to wipe the decal off the sedan door. He would put the decal on as near to the time of arrival of the flight as seemed feasible.

  We parted near the hotel at ten o’clock on Tuesday night. He said he had a place to stay. I slept poorly. In the morning I dressed in white shirt, black bow tie, gray suit. I had coffee in the hotel and then checked out and carried my suitcase and the hat in the paper bag to my car, put the suitcase in and relocked it. I had but a three-minute wait out in front of the parking lot before Vince came along in the black Chrysler. I put the bag on the floor in back and took the wheel. We made a final run-through, paying particular attention to time. Twenty-eight minutes, plus or minus two minutes depending on traffic and lights from Tampa International to the hospital. Three minutes after arrival, I would be in my car with the money. Vince had to dispose of the pouch and the hat, return the sedan, remove the decal, and walk six blocks. We allowed thirty minutes for that. It would take me only ten minutes to drive to the department store. That would leave me twenty minutes dead time. It was decided I would cruise around the block for twenty minutes. He would spot the car and I would pick him up on the fly. It added up to seventy-three minutes. If the flight was on time, we should be out of town and headed north by quarter after four.

  Vince had his own suitcase in the Chrysler. We had sandwiches and coffee at twelve-thirty. The rehearsals had given me a feeling of confidence. I knew that I could do precisely what was expected of me. Vince had found the mailbox where he would dispose of the pouch and the trash container where he would leave the hat. We drove to the lot. I drove my car, with him following me, and we parked mine across from the side entrance of the hospital. We transferred his suitcase to my car and relocked it. It was a quiet street. He moistened the stolen decal, slid it deftly off its backing onto the sheen of the black door. I put on the chauffeur hat. He sat in the back of the Chrysler. We drove toward the airport and parked a few minutes away from the main entrance. He took out the hypo case and loaded the cylinder, sucking the demerol up through the rubber top of the small bottle, and wedged the hypo down behind the seat on the side where he would sit.