Condominium

by John D. MacDonald

  “Somebody said they thought you had.”

  “And my three tracts of piney woods and pasturelands, including that one with the lodge on it.”

  “What are you doing with the money?”

  “I’m shipping it out of state, honey girl. No Florida banks for me. I’m putting it in certificates of deposit and spreading them around, even. I’ve been bracing myself to jump for a long time. The bubble was getting too big. It took some bankruptcies to cut the ass off’n everything. That’s when I started making my moves. How do the books look on that business of yours?”

  “Still pretty good.”

  “Sell it if you can. Right now.”

  “Serious?”

  “In a couple or four years you can buy it back for a dime on the dollar.”

  “What did you call that project?”

  “Harbour with a U, and Pointe with an E on the end. One hundred and sixty-eight units. From eighty-five to a hundred and twenty-five thousand.”

  “On the bay? Not on the Gulf even?”

  “High, eh?”

  “I thought Marty was a very smart businessman.”

  “I can’t give you the details. He was going to take the risk, and it was a very bad risk, but who could steer him off it? Not me. Not anybody. But then the bank put on the brakes, and he had to go elsewhere for the money, and they put strings on it. Now Marty is playing both ends against the middle, and there is no way he can take a loss. I don’t even think there’s any way he can keep from making a very nice package. He lucked into a nice arrangement.”

  “How about permissions, Cole?”

  “In perfect order, even to permits to burn what they clear off the land.”

  “Jesus God. I can guess how they rigged it. A sleepy afternoon and a long list, and that little jerk droning on and on, and things get by, don’t they?”

  “It’s the same the whole world over.”

  “Who are they paying off? Justin Denniver or Troy Abel?”

  “Question time, is it? Okay, what young promising attorney is humping what sexy real estate broker?”

  She thought of denial, rejected it, sighed and said, “You bastard! How many thousand other people have the same news?”

  “Maybe two or three people. And I won’t take out any ads.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for the advice. And the information.”

  “You just run for the storm cellar. Once it gets bad enough, you and I are going to have a lot of extra time on our hands.”

  “So?”

  “I’ll get back to you one of these years.”

  “Sure you will, Cole. ’Bye.”

  She sat slumped at her desk. She nibbled her lip, drew dollar signs on her scratch pad, rubbed her eye, dug at her scalp and thought of disaster. Cole had been right other times. He could feel the direction of every small breeze. Could it really get worse than this? She answered her own question out of her own knowledge. Yes, indeed. Much, much worse.

  The telephone rang and she picked it up at once. “This is Loretta.”

  “Mrs. Rosen, this is Mrs. Neale.”

  “Mrs.… Oh, Florence. Sorry, dear. For a minute there my brain was turned off. How are things, dear?”

  Florence Neale’s voice was calm and icy. “You did arrange a very attractive price on this second-floor apartment in Golden Sands, Mrs. Rosen.”

  “Yes? Yes, it was a fabulous bargain.”

  “At the closing, Mrs. Rosen, I got the strong impression that the previous owner, young Mr. McKay, is a good and close friend.”

  “I’ve known Greg for years. Being a realtor, I know most of the attorneys in—”

  “You frightened me off that dear little house on Domingo Terrace, talking about muggings and guard dogs. I would have been very happy there. Very happy.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You stood beside me at the bedroom window and we looked out at that lovely green tropical jungle beyond the parking area, looking east from my window, and I said I enjoyed being able to see trees and vines, and I distinctly remember your saying that it was all tied up in some kind of estate. I forget the name.”

  “Silverthorn.”

  “That’s it. I have been trying to reach you on the phone all weekend. Right at this moment, Mrs. Rosen, all that lovely greenery has been scraped and pushed into huge piles and they have been lighted, and dirty, greasy, oily smoke is covering this whole part of the key.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And I am told that an enormous project is going up there, and it will be under construction for two years. Mrs. Rosen, I do not know how many years I have left, but I do know that two years of noise, dust, dirt and confusion is too big a percentage of that time.”

  “I’m really sorry about—”

  “I am not going to put up with it. I expect that you will tell me that you had no idea this was going to happen. It really does not matter whether you are telling the truth or not. You advertise that you are an expert on Fiddler Key properties. You sold me an apartment at an oddly low figure. It was owned by a friend of yours. You assured me of peace and quiet and—”

  “Nobody can be absolutely certain of—”

  “I am giving you fair warning, Mrs. Rosen, that I intend to take this matter to court. I am suing to have the sale set aside on the grounds of misrepresentation, and my money returned, including my moving costs.”

  “But you have no basis for any such—”

  “I wrote you a long note after we inspected the apartment, Mrs. Rosen. It was only two months ago, so I imagine you remember it. As it was a business matter, I typed it on my departed husband’s old machine, and I did as he always told me to do, and as he did himself. I saved a carbon. May I read you the last line?”

  “You better do that.”

  “It says, ‘If I have misunderstood anything you have told me, please let me know before the closing. I have tried to write down all our understandings in this letter.’ ”

  “Are you sure I got it?”

  “Oh, yes. You made reference to it in the little memo you sent me telling me I was mistaken about the covered parking, that there were less spaces than apartments.”

  “That’s great, Florence. That’s really great.”

  “I believe I would be more comfortable if you were to call me Mrs. Neale.”

  “What are you trying to do to me?”

  “If you did not know that a big development was going to be put in behind this building, then you should have known. I depended on you to know, you see. I had been told you were competent. I thought it only fair to let you know what I plan to do, so that you can ask your lawyer friend to make restitution and avoid any ugliness and publicity. Good-bye, Mrs. Rosen.”

  Loretta went directly from the phone to the dead file of recent closings. She found the letter and read it through, made a face, and folded it and put it in her shoulder bag. She looked at her watch. Time to head for 2-F. She smiled bitterly. Now there were two pressing problems for the attorney to take care of.

  20

  CARLOTTA CHURCHBRIDGE came out of the master bedroom of 6-G into the living room, carrying a bag of laundry. She was a tiny tidy woman in her sixties, sun-brown and brisk, with deep weather wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. She kept her long hair carefully dyed horsetail black, and today, as she often did, she had braided it to keep it out of her way as she did the housework. She could have disappeared into the midst of any Central American village marketplace.

  Henry was still sitting with his morning coffee, reading a badly printed newspaper of tabloid size.

  She stopped and looked over his shoulder. “More junk from your personal madman?”

  “From the one and only C. Noble Winney.”

  “And he forced it on you. Read this, he said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Getting easier to force things on you, isn’t it, dear?”

  He turned and looked up at her, frowning. “What am I supposed to infer from that? That I’m getting
hooked on his point of view?”

  “Infer that if you sit around here reading junk all day you are going to end up looking like Mr. Winney, all gray and soft and fat and wheezy, with little red eyes and little blue lips.”

  He had started to be angry but he had to laugh. She had always delighted him, ever since he had met her when he had been in London as a young man posted to the United States embassy and she had been the smallest and the prettiest of the three daughters of the Guatemalan ambassador. They had been posted all over the world, and now there was a son in Anchorage, a son with two children in Melbourne, a son with one child in Guadalajara. Henry Churchbridge had never risen to top rank in the diplomatic service. He had read once about the two kinds of racing greyhounds which are automatically destroyed: those too stupid too chase the rabbit and those too bright to chase it. It had lodged in a back cupboard of his mind. He knew the quality of his own mind. He had watched too many men who were more highly regarded than he, fumble for the answer, the information, the insight which he could supply at once. They had not destroyed him. They had merely conditioned him to chase the rabbit, and because he did not really believe in the rabbit, he did not run as fast as he could.

  The retirement was comfortable, with its cost-of-living adjustments. And there was the inheritance from his mother, not large, but solidly invested. And Carlotta’s income, from a Zurich bank.

  “This is a new one,” he said. “It requires a great effort to achieve a suspension of disbelief.” He showed her a picture of three men in the newspaper and read aloud to her: “ ‘ “Baron” Edmond de Rothschild, center, is shown with Charles Bartel and Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir. Occasion was dedication of the second oil refinery to be operated by the Tel Aviv government. The Rothschilds financed both the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Khazar colonies in Palestine which led to the present Mid-East conflict. Their close kinsman, “Lord Bearsted” (real name: Mr. Samuels), owns most of Shell Oil Company, and the Shell tankers which fueled North Vietnamese Communists.’ ”

  She made a horrid face. “How can you stand reading that slime? My God, darling, there is enough hate in the world—”

  “Whoa!” he said, smiling. “Down, girl.”

  “Don’t ‘girl’ me, you damn chauvinist. But really, Henry dear. Why read that terrible stuff?”

  “I find that I am getting very interested in fear.”

  “Fear?”

  She sank into the nearby chair as he got up and began pacing back and forth, brow furrowed, as he searched for words. This man was very dear to her, and this was a familiar scene during the long years of marriage. He had a hungry, roving intellect which sought to take apart the mechanisms of his culture to find out how and why they worked. He was a tall man, too thin, with a fleshy, predatory nose, small pale blue eyes, a sallow complexion, a few remaining wisps of sandy-gray hair. But there had always been, and was now, a subtle elegance about him. It was in the way he held himself, in his gestures, in the timbre of his voice, in the swift change of facial expression.

  “I am becoming aware that Golden Sands and all of Fiddler Key stinks of fear. All the literature on these condominiums talks about the security measures. Look at Brooks Ames and his silly little platoon of vigilantes saving us night and day from unknown perils. Ames, and a lot of these good people, thinks that without the guard force, drug addicts and blacks and rapists and hoodlums and psychopaths will come skulking in here and break down the doors.”

  “But—”

  “Let me work my way through the whole thesis, dear. On the local level they are terrified of predatory tax increases, drunken drivers, purse snatchers, muggers, power failure, water shortages, inflation and the high cost of being sick. Nationally they are afraid of big government, welfare, crime in the streets, corruption, busing, and industrial, political and fiscal conspiracy. Internationally they are afraid of the Arabs, the blacks, the Cubans, the Communists, the Chinese, the multinational corporations, the oil cartels, pollution of the sea and the air, atomic bombs, pestilence, poisons and additives in food …”

  “Some of those things are certainly frightening.”

  “I know. I know. But it is the vast and wicked complex of interwoven fears, from the personal and the specific to the vast misty and uncharted, that gives all these people a feeling of helplessness when it comes to comprehending their total environment. A world of almost four billion people is so incredibly complex nobody can comprehend the causes and the trends and the nuances.”

  “So?”

  “But these people think they have a God-given right to understand. They are educated Americans. They think that if anybody can understand the world and the times, it is an educated American.” He hastened on before she could interrupt. “C. Noble Winney was an auditor, an accountant. Both sides of the sheet must balance. He could not cope with a nonsense world. He had to find a reason why he could not understand events. His only other choice was a permanent condition of confusion and terror. So one day he came across something which hinted at a vast conspiracy. He read further in that area. God knows, there is a very wide choice of fictional conspiracies to accept. The Rothschild anti-Semitic world-control mishmash made some kind of weird sense to C. Noble, and so now he documents it. He is still afraid, but he thinks he is doing something constructive to thwart the conspirators by exposing them to people who will join him in his work. Poor old Fred Dawdy in Three-E has been sold on it. He was ready to be sold. There are, of course, C. Noble Winneys on the far far left, too, blaming all world turmoil on the military-industrial complex of the right. The John Birch Society blames it all on a Communist conspiracy. Winney thinks that is simplistic. He sees conspiracies of both left and right, engineered by the Rothschilds. The Transcendental Meditators, the Jesus freaks, the diet faddists, the drunks, the bedroom athletes, the body builders, the spiritualists, every one of them has made their fear more controllable through having found the Real Answer. And every person with the real answer is savagely intolerant of anybody else’s answer, because he does not dare risk weakening his own. The fabric is too fragile to start with. They are all true believers and—”

  “What are you afraid of?” she asked him.

  It stopped him in mid-stride and he turned and looked at her. Then his mouth curved downward in a mocking, ironic smile. “The green ripper, I suppose.”

  When the middle son was small he had overheard some adult comment about the grim reaper, and the next morning at breakfast he said he’d had a bad dream about the green ripper. It took some deduction to find out what he meant. From then on the family had called death the green ripper. It seemed a far finer name than any other.

  “Like in any special form?” she asked.

  “Mostly that he doesn’t take you and leave me alone, or take me and leave you alone. And doesn’t take either of us in any especially ugly way, long and painful, and so forth.”

  “Like you always say, we’re way ahead. We beat the game.”

  “We’ve beaten it, yes.” He moved to the windows and looked out at the wide slice of Gulf visible between the Azure Breeze and the Surf Club. Small figures strolled along the white sand in the bright dazzle of noon sunshine. Small waves crested white and whacked soundlessly against the beach. Gulls teetered and dipped around a woman throwing bread. Far out he could see a coastal vessel dragging a dingy plume of smoke northward.

  “Maybe,” he said, “people are always afraid of the wrong things. Maybe Winney should be thinking about hurricanes and tidal waves.”

  “Now can you smell the smoke? You couldn’t before.”

  He lifted his head and snuffed. “I think so.”

  “I should hope you could. It really stinks. As if they were burning garbage instead of all those lovely trees. Five absolute mountains of garbage. I’ll go put this wash in, if there’s nobody down there I want to talk to, I’ll be back right away and start lunch.”

  “A walk after lunch?”

  “And then a swim. Fine.”

&n
bsp; He sat down and picked up the paper again after she left. On a back page he found a small headline, and the story had neither date nor source.

  Herbert Lehman Was Chief Protector of Alger Hiss

  New York—The late Senator Herbert Lehman of New York was the chief sponsor and protector of Alger Hiss. Lehman’s niece was a lawyer for Hiss, and Lehman himself tried to hide Hiss in his New York apartment. At the time of the Kennedy assassination, Lehman was the most powerful leader of the Left in America. He died—possibly an act of counterassassination—only a few days after the Dallas shooting.

  Henry Churchbridge closed the paper and tossed it aside. He could imagine poor old Fred Dawdy reading that item avidly. It linked Jack Kennedy and Alger Hiss, boiling and bubbling with the ferment of conspiracy and corruption. And old Governor Lehman could not bring libel suits from the grave. Hell, they could have stated that Herbert Lehman had been proven to be the real father of Marilyn Monroe, alias Rebecca Finestein, and all the old Fred Dawdys would nod wisely and buttonhole their neighbors and say that they, by God, had seen it in print, and They wouldn’t let them print it if it wasn’t so, would They?

  Buy gold. Store food. Arm yourselves. All the trite and time-worn warnings. C. Noble Winney was really afraid of the green ripper. That was the fear behind the fear. Everybody’s fear. And so now everybody could be too easily sold on conspiracy theories. The junk merchants rushed into print with their junk books. Supply and demand. If the People demand conspiracies, give them some. Give them some marksman prone behind the green knoll. Give them the mysterious group that hustled King’s killer into Canada. Give the Northeastern Media Establishment credit for enough sly trickery to bring down noble Richard. Make all the goofs nod and mutter and feel that they are really and truly on the track of the inside story. They could not believe the stark and terrible simplicity of events: that a weak, sexually warped little misfit in Dallas could combine a lot of luck with Marine Corps skills to kill the beloved president; that a dreary brooding little Arabian kitchen scut, semiretarded, should have brought a pistol to work, in some half-ass dream of glory and revenge and father-killing; that a smiling and demented young man with sewers in his head could, all alone, stalk and cripple a governor; that a chronic criminal, a brute from a demanding background, could be so confused about reality he should attempt to win the cheers of society by killing a black preacher. If these simple things can be true, then anyone is at the mercy of any whim of the beasts in the street. And that is, of course, unthinkable. And with just a little diddling of the facts, each case can be made to appear like an intricate conspiracy, so well conceived and well hidden that one sees only a rare change in the consistency of the shadows, as if there is some creature in the bottom of the well.