Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  He had been listening with one tenth of his attention, picking stemware from the slotted rack overhead, dusting and polishing it, replacing it at the other end of the rack, pushing the glasses along. He liked to have the stemware gleaming and perfect, picking up a sparkle from the overhead lights.

  As the voice went on and on, and as he made small sounds of sympathy in the right places, he wondered what ironies of fate had brought him right to this point in the forty-first year of his life. He was five ten and weighed two sixty-five. He had glossy curly black hair, bright blue eyes, boyish red lips, pink cheeks and a flawless complexion. Once upon a time he had been a very fast running back up in Georgia, but he had crossed up the gambling interests on a point spread in a bowl game and so they had broken his knees with a ball bat. After that he had driven stock cars and then worked on a drilling rig in the Gulf, in an emerald mine in Brazil and on a shrimp boat out of Key West. Finally he had gone into partnership with a Cuban, smuggling hash from Jamaica into Miami. After their most successful trip, the Cuban suddenly shot Tom Shawn in the stomach. Tom drowned him in the pool of a motel near where they were staying, hid the total profits in a safe place and collapsed just inside the doorway of a hospital emergency room. After he was out of surgery and out of danger he repeated his story of having been shot while waiting on a street corner for the light to change, repeated it until they bought it. He had come across the state to Athens with the money, at thirty-seven years of age, and after tending bar for a year he had bought his own place. He thought of it as refuge and a kind of retirement. The world out there had begun to make him too jumpy. Each year you had less chance of guessing what people would do to you next. He was making out well. He overlooked no possible source of income. He was not bored. He watched and waited. He had a hunch that someday there would appear to him the chance to make a truly big score with absolutely no risk at all. He did not know what, how, or when. Enough to keep waiting and score in small ways off customers like Brasser here.

  He had learned how to tell about them. This lady was well down the tube. If you couldn’t tell by listening to her, you could tell by looking at her. Once upon a time she could have been a very special piece, he thought. But what booze does to these old ladies, they all begin to look like twins of each other. They all get the weird lumps and creases on their face. Their arms and legs get thin as sticks, and they get a big bloated belly. Stary eyes and scaly skin, dead-looking hair, hoarse loud voice telling the same old stories over and over and over.

  Two village businessmen came in and sat at the two barstools farthest from Peggy Brasser. He moved down, greeted them by first names, took the order for two Schlitz, served quickly and deftly, plucked up the five, banged the register, slipped the bills and change in front of them.

  “Ross been in?”

  “Not today, Henry.”

  “You see him, tell him the order he gave Wendy came in. Wait a minute. You go off at six?”

  “Not today. Lou’s got the flu so I’m working through. So I see Ross, I’ll tell him.”

  Tom Shawn had backed off to that carefully calculated distance which let the conversation go either way. If the two men wanted a private talk, they had only to lower their voices and he would move away. But if they wanted to include him in the conversation by speaking up, he could move closer. The two men lowered their voices. He had to move to where Peggy could rope him with her voice.

  “Hey, Tom, you want to hear what was one of Charley’s favorite bartender jokes? Charley had a million jokes, and nobody could tell them like my Charley. You hear the one about the guy that was always unlucky?”

  Not more than twenty-eight times, he thought. “Unlucky?”

  “This guy liked to go in the bar and bet. Ball games, pinball, matching coins, whatever, always this unlucky bum would lose. He brooded about it, see. One day he finds something weird going on about himself and he goes to the doc and the doc examines him and says, ‘It’s nothing to worry about, Willy. What you had all the time was a third testicle and it just now descended. It’s very unusual.’ So this Willy, he thought and thought and thought, and he come up with a great idea. He waits until the bar is full of all the guys that had been taking him for years, and he bangs on the bar for attention and he puts down two hundred bucks and says, ‘Listen, you guys, I’m betting even money that between me and Joe the bartender, we got five balls.’ Just about the time they are covering the last of the two hunnerd, Joe leans across the bar to Willy, and he is looking nervous, and he says, ‘I don’t know what you’re up to, pal, but you better have four.’ ”

  She hooted and slapped the bar and laughed and laughed. Tom laughed. She had raised her voice to bring in the other two customers, but they had kept their attention on their conversation.

  The bell on the package store door dingled, and he went through the doorway behind his bar to the brightness of the store and sold a pint of blended to a yard man, and a bottle of Smirnoff to the tourist who came in right after the yard man. As the tourist left, Francine arrived. She was a tall girl with narrow shoulders and heavy hips. She wore a brick-colored slack suit over a low-cut yellow blouse. She took the coat of the suit off and hung it in the back room, while he told her Lou wasn’t coming in. She punched the cash drawer open on the package goods register and said, “Want to watch me count it?”

  He looked at the tape. “As of right now you got eighty-eight sixty-four, so go with that or count it and tell me if it’s over. It sure God won’t be under.”

  “Not enough pennies and nickels.”

  “I got a roll of each for you in the other machine. Come buy them when you got to have them.”

  “I think I’m coming down with what Lou’s got. Honest to God, Tom, there was almost too much table business last night for one girl to handle. It gets like that, can we close bottle sales down earlier?”

  “Eight?”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “But only if you got full tables and booths.”

  When he walked back through to the bar, the businessmen were gone. An old tourist couple were just settling themselves on the barstools, and Darleen Moseby had come in and was sitting two places away from Peggy Brasser. Tom made straight-up extra-dry House of Lords martinis with lemon twist for the old couple and took Darleen her no-cal cola. Peggy put her ten on the bar and slipped from the stool and steadied herself by grabbing the edge of the bar.

  “Girl can’t spend her life in this snake pit,” she said. “See you around, hey, Tom?”

  “You take care, Peggy.”

  “Surely will,” she said, wheeled about, swayed, then strode directly to the heavy door, pushed it open and went out into the blinding glare of sunlight as the door hissed shut behind her.

  “I couldn’t stand listening to her as much as you do,” Darleen said. “She’d drive me up the wall.”

  She was a small girl with a warm golden tan. With her face scrubbed clean of makeup, with colorless brows and lashes, with her swim-damp hair hanging darkened and lank, she looked hardly more than high-school age. Her short terry beach coat was parted, showing her flawless figure in an orange string bikini. She was barefoot. From instep and arch to earlobe and hairline she was exquisitely fashioned in every small texture and detail, as if of finer materials than most of the race of man.

  “You weren’t swimming in the Gulf, were you?”

  “With those yucky dead fish floating around? You got to be kidding, sweetie. I asked Bernie could I swim in the motel pool, and all the business we steer, what could he say but yes?”

  “Darleen, I told you before, I wisht you wouldn’t walk around the sidewalks barefoot. It’s all spit and dogshit out there.”

  “My God, Tommy, I’m about to take a big hot bath and I watch where I walk, okay?”

  He left her and made another round for the tourist couple and came back, leaning on the bar to keep the conversation private.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said.

  “It was like six thirty.”


  “Go okay?”

  She had dug a cigarette out of her beach basket. She did not answer until she lighted it and took a deep drag. “Sure. Why not?” she said listlessly.

  “Why not? I talked to Lou on the phone when he called to tell me he’s not coming in. He said the one you took off with, he said it was about ten o’clock, he looked hard case.”

  “He was okay. I got an instinct, Tommy. Five minutes talking and I knew he was okay. I’m not taking any dumb chance of getting beat up on again. Look, he’s out of Tampa, selling and servicing some kind of machines they use in banks. He was going to drive back, but what he did was phone his old lady and say he was staying over. Say, I almost forgot, I see Dusty coming out of the Suprex and she said Louise was feeling enough better maybe both of them would come in tonight. It’s the kind of flu doesn’t last long, I guess. Louise will be in anyway, and maybe the both of them.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She yawned, pink tongue curling. “Geez, I don’t know. I’m kind of beat. I’m going to get me a hot bath and go to bed and if I wake up in time, okay, I’ll come in and see if there’s any action. Hey, you didn’t line me up, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t set up a thing.”

  “You decide anything about Francine yet?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe it’s a bad idea.”

  “Look, she needs the extra money bad. She’s got the kid and she’s got her old mother. If you don’t run her, she’ll freelance and get jammed up.”

  “I mean, Darleen, she’s a kind of weird-looking girl.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There are plenty guys like that kind. I talked to her, you know, and she gets chances enough. The thing is, she’s scared. She needs somebody to screen out the freaks, and some muscle if she needs it, and no trouble from the deputies, and an okay from Bernie at the motel. Look, if you can run three of us, you can run four hookers, Tommy.”

  “I want to stay small and quiet. You know that.”

  “Francine Hryka won’t be any trouble. I’ll kind of help out. The way she wants to do it, she stays on waitress nights like now, and works in some afternoon business. If she can clear three tricks a week it’s about what she needs extra, after your cut.”

  “Let me think about it, okay?”

  “You don’t help her out pretty soon, friend, she’ll quit you and go work massage.”

  He smiled at her and put his big hand over hers and squeezed her small hand into a fist, watching her mouth go loose and her color change with the pain. “What you do, honey, you keep on hustling your ass and you leave management to me.”

  “Tommy, please …”

  “I want you back here on this barstool at no later than eight thirty.”

  “Sure, sure. Okay.” She slid off the stool and went out through the back to Tom Shawn’s little frame house, her eyes stinging as she blinked the tears back.

  Peggy Brasser had stopped at her second bar, her usual spot, and after the bartender had served her, she realized she had lost track of time. She didn’t want to gulp her drink, and she didn’t want to miss her television program. She asked Teddy if she could carry the drink out, and he found a big paper cup and dumped it in. She tipped him a dollar and walked back to her car, parked diagonally in front of the lounge. She got in and pulled her skirt up a little and tucked the paper cup between her thighs. She waited until she thought nothing was coming and then backed smartly into Beach Drive. There was the yap of a horn, a yelp of brakes, and a pickup truck swerved around her, the passenger leaning out the window to yell, “Crazy old bitch!”

  “He’ll kill somebody going so fast,” she said righteously.

  She drove north up Fiddler Key toward home, driving at a sedate fifteen miles an hour, stacking the irritated traffic up behind her. She always remembered lately to drive with care. That damned prissy young judge had told her with such obvious relish that she’d had her last chance, that one more DWI and he would not only give her a one-year suspension, but he would guarantee she would spend a full thirty days in the county stockade. Nobody seemed to understand that it had been an accident which could have happened to anyone. It was night and the oncoming lights were bright, and so instead of turning in at Golden Sands she had gone one driveway too far and turned in at Captiva House, and then, because she had expected the driveway to be straight she had not anticipated the sudden curve of the road and so had driven through the fence and into the shallow end of the Captiva House swimming pool, and that old fart who’d been swimming at the time was only faking a heart attack in hopes he could get well on somebody’s insurance.

  From time to time she took a quick neat little sip of her drink and put it back between her thighs. Once she made the turn into the Golden Sands drive, the sun was behind her. She drove around to the back of the building and into the vehicle entrance for the ground-floor parking facilities. She had to make a curve around the laundry room to get to her assigned slot. As she approached the curve she was heading west, and a shaft of sunlight came through the pillars and momentarily blinded her. She stabbed the brake, and the bourbon and ice sloshed out of the paper cup into her crotch. She looked down, and when she looked up again she was inches from that goddam skinny blue bicycle that some goddam old fool had gotten permission to keep padlocked to a goddam ring bolt that had been set into the wall for that very goddam purpose. She wrenched the wheel but it was not in time. The front right corner of her bumper wedged into the bike somewhere in the pedal area, between the wheels, and wrenched it free of chain and ring bolt, and scraped it along the wall for twenty feet before it seemed to come apart and sag down under her front wheel, then bump against the underside of the car as she finally stopped.

  A brown skinny old man with curly white hair came running toward her, his mouth open and his eyes bugging. He wore a khaki shirt and shorts, and he had a bright orange pack on his back.

  “What are you doing? What are you doing?” he cried.

  She got out as he got down on hands and knees and peered under her car. “What I am doing is running over some goddam bicycle chained right in my way.”

  He straightened up, still on his knees. “My machine has been parked there for over three months and it is not in anybody’s way.”

  “Your machine, hah? Who the hell are you?”

  He reached under and tugged and pulled out a warped skinny wheel with a random tangle of bent spokes aiming in all directions, a limp tire sagging off the rim, a jumble of bent gears fastened to the hub.

  “Ruined,” he said in a dragging voice. “Absolutely ruined.”

  “I’ll pay for your toy, dads.”

  He hopped spryly to his feet, tossing the wheel aside. “Toy? Toy! Madam, I have done three centuries on that machine.”

  “That’s some long time.”

  “A century is a hundred miles done in one day.”

  “You kidding? You? A hundred miles in one day?”

  “In six hours and seven minutes, to be precise. That was my best time.”

  She looked him over. “Recently?”

  “Last month. It was a splendid machine, and I couldn’t guess how many hours of work I’ve put in on it. It fitted me perfectly. It weighed just under twenty-six pounds. I just changed from Shimano to SunTour derailleur and installed an elliptical sprocket and … But why am I standing here like an idiot talking to you? You are obviously so drunk you can hardly stand. And you have … uh … apparently had some kind of personal mishap there.”

  “Right. I spilled my drink.”

  “You were drinking while driving? I know who you are, of course. You are the notorious Mrs. Brasser in Four-A. I think you are a menace. I shall now place a call to the authorities.”

  “Now wait a minute! Who are you?”

  “I am Roger Jeffrey. From Five-B.”

  “You rent it?”

  “What possible difference could that make to you? We own it, Mrs. Brasser. We moved in during January. Your car is blocking the way if an
yone wants to get in or out. Perhaps you should move it. Or shall I?”

  She realized she had the paper cup in her hand. She finished the dregs of her drink, handed him the cup, got in, started the engine and backed smartly away. He began hollering and waving his arms. The bike made a long scraping sound. She stopped, shifted, darted forward. He leaped out of the way. She had thought he would go the other way. She had turned in the direction of his leap. She nearly got him. The scraping noise stopped and the back wheel bumped over something. She looked in her side-view mirror and saw a squashed mess of blue tubing and shiny metal bits back there. She drove another thirty feet and put her car in its slot. She locked it and turned and found Roger Jeffrey standing there.

  “What’s the matter with you, Roger?”

  “Did … did you try to run me down?”

  “For God’s sake! You’re trembling like a leaf. Hey, you want a drink?”

  “I do not want a drink. I am going to report you for drunken, reckless, insane driving, destroying personal property, leaving the scene of an accident and—”

  “I am going to buy you a brand-new bike. Right? And we are going to forget all this police talk. Right?”

  “Wrong.”

  “Now be a nice guy, will you? I’ve got enough problems already. I’m a widow. You shouldn’t go around yelling at widows. Come on, Roger. You call the cops, and you won’t get dime one out of me, and the insurance company I’ve got, you’ll get a check for half what that thing was worth in like 1980. Know what I’ll do for you? I’ll buy you one with a motor! How’s that.”

  “Please. I don’t want anything with a motor.”