Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  “No. I don’t.”

  “You might change your mind.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Where’d you find the note from her?”

  “In the bedroom.”

  “Mind showing me?”

  “Not at all.” I took him upstairs. I propped the note against the dressing table mirror. It was a conspicuous place, readily noticeable when you walked into the room.

  He looked around, walking slowly and heavily, whistling softly and expertly. “Nice place.”

  “Too big for just the two of us.”

  “What are you going to do? Keep on living here?”

  “I guess so. For a little while, anyway.”

  He opened her closet door and said, “She left a lot of stuff.”

  “She took a lot of stuff too. She had a lot of stuff. She bought clothes by the bale.”

  “Where was Biskay? What room?”

  I showed him. “What shape was he in? Get around all right?”

  “Arm in a sling and a bad limp,” I said. “But he could get around.”

  “What was the limp from?”

  “They operated on his hip too, I think.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Paul, you’re sounding like a cop. Vince wasn’t the sort of guy who told you very much about his problems.”

  “A guy takes him in and he takes off with the guy’s wife. Must be pure son of a bitch.”

  “I didn’t think he’d do a thing like that.”

  “Some people just don’t give a damn, I guess.”

  “That’s the way Vince is.”

  We went back downstairs and he went over and picked up his hat, grunting as he did so. He said, “Mr. Malton gave us some good shots of her. If there’s something we can use on Biskay, it won’t be any trick finding a car that conspicuous. Or a woman that conspicuous. I saw her a couple of times. Didn’t know who she was until I saw the pictures. She looks like that movie woman. Elizabeth Taylor.”

  “People have always told her that. She liked being told that.”

  “Nice to see you again, Jerry. Maybe we can have a beer together some time.”

  “I’d like that, Paul.”

  “They never did get that nose set all the way straight, did they?”

  “That was the Proctor game.”

  “I remember that big fullback they had. He was hard to stop, that boy was. Well, be seeing you.”

  He went out and got into a sedan at the curb, waved as he started up. When I exhaled I felt as if I was getting rid of stale air I had been retaining for an hour. It was going to be all right. There wasn’t going to be any problem. It had been awkward trying to lie about Philadelphia, but I didn’t think he had suspected anything. And he’d left the note from Lorraine behind. He had copied it. I thought again about how they could determine the age of handwriting. I took both notes and tore them up and flushed them down the drain.

  And the moment they were both gone it occurred to me that it hadn’t been proven that the note was in her handwriting.

  10

  I arrived at Camp Sootsus at dusk the same evening of Paul Heissen’s visit to the house. I retrieved the black tin suitcase and put it in the wagon and got out of there. I hid it in the cellar under the wood, after replacing the bundles that had been my share. I liked looking at it all back together again. All in the same place. A dizzying, overpowering amount of tightly packed bills. It made my breath shallow to look at it.

  On Friday morning I went to Park Terrace and told Red there was some stuff I wanted to put in storage. I told him the dimensions of the crate I wanted. I told him I wanted it sturdy. He put a carpenter on it. By the time I had finished the usual check of progress on the job, the man had finished it and put it in the station wagon. It was made of scrap half-inch plywood braced with one-by-twos and screwed together. On the way home I stopped and bought twine and heavy brown wrapping paper.

  Irene had left for the day by the time I got home. I made certain the doors were locked. I wrapped the bricks of tightly wired money, four bricks in a package, side by side. Seventeen brown packages. There was two hundred thousand dollars in each package except the last one. The brick of five hundreds went in that one, so there was four hundred thousand in the last one. I packed them into the crate. It nearly half filled it. I wrestled it up the cellar stairs and into the living room. I filled the crate the rest of the way with books, my books from the living room shelves. I fitted the lid on, screwed it down, wrote my name on the plywood top with a red crayon.

  I found a storage warehouse in the yellow pages and phoned. They said they would take a single crate. I told them it was heavy. The truck arrived within the hour. Two men carried it out and drove away with it. The warehouse receipt was on flimsy orange paper and it had a lot of fine print on the back. I read every word of it. I had automatic insurance of five dollars per cubic foot. The crate was two by two by three. Sixty dollars insurance. In case of loss.

  I needed a good place to put the receipt. I roamed through the house until I found the right place. Lorraine had decided one time that she would like to learn how to play the recorder. So she had bought herself a very fine one, and an instruction book. She had made mournful hooting sounds around the house for about ten days before giving up for good. I took the leather case from the closet shelf, untwisted the mouthpiece, rolled the receipt into a tube and inserted it and put the mouthpiece back on and put the recorder back on the shelf.

  Then I sat down in the living room, legs outstretched, ankles crossed. I went over the whole thing. As near as I could tell, it was clean. There was nothing to do but wait it out.

  I became aware of Lorraine looking at me. I looked at her across the living room and then got up and went over and picked up the picture in its frame of hammered silver. It was a black and white picture, taken in Bermuda. During our honeymoon. She wore white shorts and a black sweater. She stood smiling into the camera, holding the handlebars of an English bike, looking ready to swing onto it and pedal away. I remembered how it had been in Bermuda.

  I looked at her face in the picture and all of a sudden I felt ill. I felt as though I stood on a high place, with nothing under me but a terrible emptiness. I put the picture down. She didn’t stop watching me. I moved over to the side and she was still watching me, and smiling. It was an odd smile. As though she knew something I didn’t. As though she remembered something I had forgotten.

  The black tin suitcase! Thank you, Lorraine. I got it out of the cellar. I stomped the catches with my heel until they were ruined. I drove to the city dump and when I was certain I was not observed. I threw it over the crest of a mountain of trash.

  Saturday was an interminable and boring day. I got quietly tight all by myself on Saturday night and went to bed early, so early that when I awakened at eight on Sunday morning I had slept through any possibility of hangover. I put on slacks and a sports shirt, made my breakfast, and made the Sunday paper last a long time.

  The day ahead seemed as empty and endless as Saturday had been. I had resented the meaningless activities of most of my Sundays with Lorraine, but at least there had been something going on. At eleven I went out and did some aimless work in the yard.

  I was clipping the hedge and just beginning to work up a sweat when Tinker Velbiss appeared on the other side of the hedge. She wore a green and white striped blouse with a demure collar, knee-length tailored green shorts. Her hair was orange flame in the sun. Her nose was peeling from recent sunburn, and she seemed to have a great many more freckles than usual. She stood hipshot, smiling at me, a very saucy look in her eyes.

  “Don’t you have enough muscles?” she asked.

  “Good morning.”

  “I had to come and see you. Sort of an anniversary, isn’t it?”

  I looked at her blankly. “Anniversary?”

  “Last Sunday, stupid! Or were you too crocked to remember? How desperately flattering!”

  “I remember distinctly.”

 
; “Oh, thank you, thank you.” Last Sunday was an eon back. Last Sunday was something that had happened to a Jerry Jamison I could barely remember.

  “You didn’t waste any time running to Mandy Pierson with a play by play, Tink.”

  She gave me a look of forced and solemn innocence. “I never did.”

  “Mandy seemed to have the score.”

  She walked around onto my side of the hedge and said, “You’re angry, aren’t you? Well, maybe I did give her sort of a little bit of a hint. You must think I was perfectly bold and awful last Sunday. I was just reckless and a little drunky and so damn terribly tired of Charlie. But you see, Charlie reaped all the benefits. Well, almost all. I’ve been a perfect lamb to him all week. A lot happens in a week, doesn’t it, sweet? Any picture postcards from Lorraine?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You look all hot and sticky. Why don’t you ask me to sit in the shade and have a drink? Where’s your lawn furniture?”

  “I didn’t get around to telling Irene to have somebody bring it up out of the cellar. But you can have a drink. Where’s Charlie?”

  “Oh, he’s having a big boyish day for himself. He’s at the club. It’s some kind of a tournament thing. You know he can’t ever win anything because he turns in low scores so he can admire the nice low handicap they post for him in the pro shop. Then in a tournament he has to grovel around saying he’s off his game. He’s out there hacking and slicing away, gay as a lark. It lasts way into the evening and then they have a big beer thing. I dumped my little monsters with Charlie’s mother. I have to pick them up at seven tonight. So I thought I would use some of this big broad day over here with you going cluck cluck about Lorraine. Are you still terribly annoyed at me?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  We went into the kitchen and it seemed very dim in there after the bright hot sunshine.

  “Something tall and ginny,” she said. “Do we have tonic? Good. I’ll break out the ice, dear.”

  “Why the hell did you inform Mandy, Tink?”

  “Oh, we’re very good friends, sort of. Anyway, we’ve got the goods on each other. A sort of enforced trust you might say. Anyhow, I didn’t come right out. I just hinted a little bit.”

  “Did you and Lorraine play the same little game?”

  “Glory, no! Lorraine gets too potted. She might let something slip in front of Charlie.”

  I poured gin into the first glass. As I was about to stop she reached over and held the neck of the bottle down with one finger until the glass was half full. “That’s mine,” she said. “I don’t like the taste of tonic.”

  When the two drinks were ready we clinked glasses and sipped. She cocked her head on one side and said, “Glory, you’ve got to stop being all funny and shy with me, Jerry. It makes me feel slutty.” She put her glass on the counter, took mine out of my hand and put it aside, then came into my arms, fitting the warm length of herself adeptly against me, kissing me with a heady and lusty abandon.

  “There now,” she said, and picked up her drink. “Let’s be friends.”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Good friends?”

  “Yep.”

  “Expecting any company?”

  “No, why?”

  “Let’s go on a picnic, darling.”

  “Picnic?”

  “Of course. Everybody goes on Sunday picnics. Where’s that red plastic thing you people have that keeps ice cubes cold?” I found it for her. “Now we lay in a stock of ice. And that’s a nearly new bottle of gin. Let me see. We have glasses. Cigarettes. Five bottles of tonic. Hmm. You will go on a picnic, won’t you?”

  “All right.”

  “Now you go around like a dear and make sure the doors are locked.”

  I stared at her. “Where do we have this picnic, Tinker?”

  “Upstairs, darling, of course! Aren’t you being a little bit dull today? I come over offering solace and comfort and picnics and things and you just give me that buggy-eyed boggle. Come along, dear. These are really the best picnics. No ants.”

  After the long interlude of casual sexual abandon with Tinker, I lay on my bed with a new drink within reach, cigarette in hand, ash tray cool on my chest and felt drab, hopeless and depressed. I could hear her paddling about, jingling the hangers in Lorraine’s closet, opening drawers, going through Lorraine’s things. I wished she would stop. I wished she would put on her green shorts and her striped blouse and go away, but I felt too listless to tell her to.

  I felt very queer about myself. It seemed to me that I had shut away all real awareness of what I had done, closed it up in a corner of my mind and nailed the door shut. But in the depression that invariably follows a loveless conjoining, the secret door had sagged open and I had to take an unwilling look at the deeds, and the implications of the deeds.

  It hadn’t been what I had wanted to happen to me. This wasn’t the life I had wanted to have. I was supposed to be one of the good guys. Jerry Jamison. I’d been brought up thinking of myself as one of the good guys. If you were the other kind you eventually got shot down, you spun and fell dramatically in the cowtown dust, or they clanged the big doors shut behind you, big doors in a gray wall.

  I had to pick the words up one at a time, hold them gingerly with the fingers of my mind, turn them this way and that and look at them curiously. Murderer. Thief.

  It couldn’t be me. I went back over the chain of events trying to see where I could have broken the pattern. I wanted to be able to tell myself that once it had begun, I had been swept along with it, powerless to change any of it. But I could see a dozen ways and times I could have broken free of it. One bleak fact kept intruding itself. I kept remembering the look of the money when I had opened that black suitcase. And I had known when I had first looked at it that it was all going to be mine. Somehow.

  So what the hell was wrong with me? Had I been just an artificial good guy, who had lacked the motivation to turn him into a bad guy? Or had the eight years with Lorraine changed me? Or just the feeling of being in a trap I couldn’t get out of.

  But it had been done. Lorraine and Vince were gone for good. And no matter where I was, there would never be one day free of fear. Or free of memory. Or free of this feeling of sickness inside.

  Tinker said, “Honey, she must have really left in a rush.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She only bought this last week. I was with her. I think it’s pretty dreamy. It cost forty-nine fifty. It’s the softest cash-mere I ever felt.”

  I raised my head and looked at her. She had put the soft gray sweater on. A sweater on a naked woman is a singularly unappealing garment. And Tinker had recently had a touch of sun. Her long plump legs were pink, and from the tops of her thighs to the edge of the gray sweater she was redhead white.

  “She forgot it, I guess.”

  “I don’t see how she could have.” Tinker turned away from the mirror. “Upstairs we’re about the same, but I’m hippier. Honey, why can’t I sort of borrow this? It’s a good color for me. If she comes back, she won’t mind. And if she doesn’t, it will be a sort of keepsake.”

  “I don’t give a damn what you do.”

  “Thank you, darling. You’re so tender and sweet.”

  I sat up and took a long pull on my drink. Tinker had made it. It was mostly raw gin. I felt it hit and radiate. I wanted a lot of gin. I wanted enough so it would stop the big wheel that kept going around in my head. The wheel had vivid pictures all around the rim of it. Pictures of Vince and Lorraine and the money.

  She wheedled another sweater, a pleated skirt, a handful of costume jewelry, two pair of shoes and a pair of sandals. Her feet were the same size as Lorraine’s, just a shade wider. Then she felt hungry. She put on a yellow robe of Lorraine’s and went downstairs, scrambled some eggs and fixed bacon and brought two plates up. We ate and we had another drink, and she came back to bed. We were both getting quite thoroughly plotzed.

  When I was awakened by the front doorb
ell I looked at my watch and saw that it was a little after five. Tinker was curled against me, humid in sleep. I pushed her away and she mumbled a complaint. I heard the doorbell again. I felt like I had an icepick socketed in each temple, and a mouth like a bus station ash tray. But the gin was still at work. I felt tall and wobbly on my legs, and remote from reality. I looked at Tinker. She slept with her mouth open and there were two pimples on her left shoulder.

  I found my robe and put it on, combed my hair back with my fingers and went down the stairs. The doorbell rang again.

  It was Liz Addams. She was very agitated. She came into the hallway and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re home. Jerrv. Are you all right? You look so strange.”

  “Just woke up. I’m a little fuzzy.”

  “And a little drunk?”

  “Maybe. Just a little.”

  “Jerry, two men have been questioning me. Asking all sorts of odd things about you. I don’t know what it’s all about, but it seemed so strange. They’re from some kind of Washington agency I never heard of before. I thought you should know about it and …”

  I was standing with my back to the stairway. She looked over my shoulder. She stopped talking. Her eyes widened, and then suddenly her face went quite still and dead. Something went out of her eyes, something I had needed, and even before I turned, I knew that I would never see that particular light in her eyes again.

  Tinker had come down, barefoot, to within four steps of the bottom of the stairs and stood in plain sight. She had put Lorraine’s robe over her shoulders, sleeves dangling, and she was holding it together in front. Her red hair was tousled, her face blurred and puffed with sleep, her lips swollen. She was so very obviously a woman who had just gotten out of bed.

  “Oh!” she said in a small voice. “I thought it was Mandy. Mandy Pierson. I mean your voices sound alike. I’m so terribly sorry, really.”