The Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  “With a girl with dark hair?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “It isn’t much of a starting place, is it?” Darrigan said ruefully.

  She finished her drink and tilted her chair back. “I understand that the wife is young.”

  “Comparatively speaking. Are you French?”

  “I was once. You’re quick, aren’t you? I’m told there’s no accent.”

  “No accent. A turn of phrase here and there. What if the wife is young?”

  “Call it my French turn of mind. A lover of the wife could help your Mr. Davisson find … his adventure.”

  “The wife was with a group all evening.”

  “A very sensible precaution.”

  He stood up. “Thank you for talking to me.”

  “You see, you’re not as quick as I thought, Mr. Darrigan. I wanted you to keep questioning me in a clever way, and then I should tell you that Mr. Davisson kept watching the door during his two drinks, as though he were expecting that someone had followed him. He was watching, not with worry, but with … annoyance.”

  Darrigan smiled. “I thought you had something else to tell. And it seemed the quickest way to get it out of you, to pretend to go.”

  She stared at him and then laughed. It was a good laugh, full-throated, rich. “We could be friends, my dear,” she said, when she got her breath.

  “So far I haven’t filled in enough of his day. I know what he did up until very early afternoon. Then there is a gap. He comes into the Aqua Azul bar at eight thirty. He has had a few drinks. I like the theory of someone following him, meeting him outside. That would account for his leaving his car at the lot.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “See if I can fill in the blanks in his day.”

  “The blank before he arrived here, and the more important one afterward?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m well known up and down the Gulf beaches, Mr. Darrigan. Being with me would be protective coloration.”

  “And besides, you’re bored.”

  “Utterly.”

  He smiled at her. “Then you’d better get dressed, don’t you think?”

  He waited outside while she changed. He knew that she would be useful for her knowledge of the area. Yet not sufficiently useful to warrant taking her along had she not been a mature, witty, perceptive woman.

  She came out wearing sandals and a severely cut sand-colored linen sun dress, carrying a white purse. The end tendrils of the astonishing hair were damp-curled where they had protruded from her shower cap.

  “Darrigan and Marrick,” she said. “Investigations to order. This might be fun.”

  “And it might be dull.”

  “But we shan’t be dull, Mr. Darrigan, shall we. What are you called?”

  “Gil, usually.”

  “Ah, Gil, if this were a properly conceived plot, I would be the one who lured your Mr. Davisson to his death. Now I accompany the investigator to allay suspicion.”

  “No such luck, Kathy.”

  “No such luck.” They walked along the shell path to the main building of the Aqua Azul. She led the way around the building toward a Cadillac convertible the shade of raspberry sherbet.

  “More protective coloration?” Darrigan asked.

  She smiled and handed him the keys from her purse. After he shut her door he went around and got behind the wheel. The sun was far enough gone to warrant having the top down. She took a dark bandanna from the glove compartment and tied it around her hair.

  “Now how do you go about this, Gil?” she asked.

  “I head south and show a picture of Davisson in every bar until we find the one he was in. He could have called his wife earlier. I think he was the sort to remember that a cocktail party was scheduled for that evening. Something kept him from phoning his wife.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to phone her until it was too late.”

  “I’ll grant that. First I want to talk to a man named Drynfells. For this you better stay in the car.”

  The Coral Tour Haven was a pink hotel with pink iron flamingoes stuck into the lawn and a profusion of whitewashed boulders marking the drive. Drynfells was a sour-looking man with a withered face, garish clothes, and a cheap Cuban cigar.

  Darrigan had to follow Drynfells about as they talked. Drynfells ambled around, picking up scraps of cellophane, twigs, burned matches from his yard. He confirmed all that the Clearwater police had told Darrigan.

  “You couldn’t decide on a price, Mr. Drynfells?”

  “I want one hundred and forty-five thousand for that piece. He offered one thirty-six, then one thirty-eight, and finally one forty. He said that was his top offer. I came down two thousand and told him that one forty-three was as low as I’d go.”

  “Did you quarrel?”

  Drynfells gave him a sidelong glance. “We shouted a little. He was a shouter. Lot of men try to bull their way into a deal. He couldn’t bulldoze me. No, sir.”

  They had walked around a corner of the motel. A pretty girl sat on a rubberized mattress at the side of a new wading pool. The ground was raw around the pool, freshly seeded, protected by stakes and string.

  “What did you say your name was?” Drynfells asked.

  “Darrigan.”

  “This here is my wife, Mr. Darrigan. Beth, this man is an insurance fellow asking about that Davisson.”

  Mrs. Drynfells was striking. She had a heavy strain of some Latin blood. Her dark eyes were liquid, expressive.

  “He is the wan who is wanting to buy our beach, eh?”

  “Yeah. That bald-headed man that the police were asking about,” Drynfells said.

  Mrs. Drynfells seemed to lose all interest in the situation. She lay back and shut her eyes. She wore a lemon-yellow swimsuit.

  Drynfells wandered away and swooped on a scrap of paper, balling it up in his hand with the other debris he had collected.

  “You have a nice place here,” Darrigan said.

  “Just got it open in time for last season. Did pretty good. We got a private beach over there across the highway. Reasonable rates, too.”

  “I guess things are pretty dead in the off season.”

  “Right now we only got one unit taken. Those folks came in yesterday. But it ought to pick up again soon.”

  “How big is that piece of land you want one hundred and forty-five thousand for?”

  “It’s one hundred and twenty feet of Gulf-front lot, six hundred feet deep, but it isn’t for sale any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Changed my mind about it, Mr. Darrigan. Decided to hold onto it, maybe develop it a little. Nice property.”

  Darrigan went out to the car. They drove south, stopping at the obvious places. They were unable to pick up the trail of Mr. Davisson. Darrigan bought Kathy Marrick dinner. He drove her back to the Aqua Azul. They took a short walk on the beach and he thanked her, promised to keep in touch with her, and drove the rented sedan back to Clearwater Beach.

  It was after eleven and the porch of the Bon Villa was dark. He parked, and as he headed toward his room a familiar voice spoke hesitantly from one of the dark chairs.

  “Mr. Darrigan?”

  “Oh! Hello, Mrs. Davisson. You startled me. I didn’t see you there. Do you want to come in?”

  “No, please. Sit down and tell me what you’ve learned.”

  He pulled one of the aluminum chairs over close to hers and sat down. A faint sea breeze rattled the palm fronds. Her face was a pale oval, barely visible.

  “I didn’t learn much, Mrs. Davisson. Not much at all.”

  “Forgive me for coming here like this. Colonel Davisson arrived. It was as unpleasant as I’d expected. I had to get out of the house.”

  “It makes a difficult emotional problem for both of you—when the children of the first marriage are older than the second wife.”

  “I don’t really blame him too much, I suppose. It looks bad.”

  “What did he accuse you of?”
>
  “Driving his father into some crazy act. Maybe I did.”

  “Don’t think that way.”

  “I keep thinking that if we never find out what happened to Temple, his children will always blame me. I don’t especially want to be friends with them, but I do want their … respect, I guess you’d say.”

  “Mrs. Davisson, do you have any male friends your own age?”

  “How do you mean that?” she asked hotly.

  “Is there any man you’ve been friendly enough with to cause talk?”

  “N-no, I—”

  “Who were you thinking of when you hesitated?”

  “Brad Sharvis. He’s a bit over thirty, and quite nice. It was his real estate agency that Temple sent me to for a job. He has worked with Temple the last few years. He’s a bachelor. He has dinner with us quite often. We both like him.”

  “Could there be talk?”

  “There could be, but it would be without basis, Mr. Darrigan,” she said coldly.

  “I don’t care how angry you get at me, Mrs. Davisson, so long as you tell me the truth.”

  After a long silence she said, “I’m sorry. I believe that you want to help.”

  “I do.”

  She stood Up. “I feel better now. I think I’ll go home.”

  “Can I take you home?”

  “I have my car, thanks.”

  He watched her go down the walk. Under the streetlight he saw her walking with a good long stride. He saw the headlights, saw her swing around the island in the center of Mandalay and head back for the causeway to Clearwater.

  Darrigan went in, showered, and went to bed. He lay in the dark room and smoked a slow cigarette. Somewhere, hidden in the personality or in the habits of one Temple Davisson, was the reason for his death. Darrigan found that he was thinking in terms of death. He smiled in the darkness as he thought of Kathy Marrick. A most pleasant companion. So far in the investigation he had met four women. Of the four only Mrs. Hoke was unattractive.

  He snubbed out the cigarette and composed himself for sleep. A case, like a score of other cases. He would leave his brief mark on the participants and go out of their lives. For a moment he felt the ache of self-imposed loneliness. The ache had been there since the day Doris had left him, long ago. He wondered sourly, on the verge of sleep, if it had made him a better investigator.

  Brad Sharvis was a florid, freckled, overweight young man with carrot hair, blue eyes, and a salesman’s unthinking affability. The small real estate office was clean and bright. A girl was typing a lease agreement for an elderly couple.

  Brad took Darrigan back into his small private office. A window air conditioner hummed, chilling the moist September air.

  “What sort of man was he, Mr. Sharvis?”

  “Was he? Or is he? Shrewd, Mr. Darrigan. Shrewd and honest. And something else. Tough-minded isn’t the expression I want.”

  “Ruthless?”

  “That’s it exactly. He started moving in on property down here soon after he arrived. You wouldn’t know the place if you saw it back then. The last ten years down here would take your breath away.”

  “He knew what to buy, eh?”

  “It took him a year to decide on policy. He had a very simple operating idea. He decided, after his year of looking around, that there was going to be a tremendous pressure for waterfront land. At that time small building lots on Clearwater Beach, on the Gulf front, were going for as little as seventy-five hundred dollars. I remember that the first thing he did was pick up eight lots at that figure. He sold them in 1980 for fifty thousand apiece.”

  “Where did the ruthlessness come in, Mr. Sharvis?”

  “You better call me Brad. That last name makes me feel too dignified.”

  “Okay. I’m Gil.”

  “I’ll tell you, Gil. Suppose he got his eye on a piece he wanted. He’d go after it. Phone calls, letters, personal visits. He’d hound a man who had no idea of selling until, in some cases, I think they sold out just to get Temple Davisson off their back. And he’d fight for an hour to get forty dollars off the price of a twenty-thousand-dollar piece.”

  “Did he handle his deals through you?”

  “No. He turned himself into a licensed agent and used this office for his deals. He pays toward the office expenses here, and I’ve been in with him on a few deals.”

  “Is he stingy?”

  “Not a bit. Pretty free with his money, but a tight man in a deal. You know, he’s told me a hundred times that everybody likes the look of nice fat batches of bills. He said that there’s nothing exactly like counting out fifteen thousand dollars in bills onto a man’s desk when the man wants to get seventeen thousand.”

  Darrigan felt a shiver of excitement run up his back. It was always that way when he found a bit of key information.

  “Where did he bank?”

  “Bank of Clearwater.”

  “Do you think he took money with him when he went after the Drynfells plot?”

  Sharvis frowned. “I hardly think he’d take that much out there, but I’ll wager he took a sizable payment against it.”

  “Twenty-five thousand?”

  “Possibly. Probably more like fifty.”

  “I could check that at the bank, I suppose.”

  “I doubt it. He has a safe in his office at his house. A pretty good one, I think. He kept his cash there. He’d replenish the supply in Tampa, picking up a certified check from the Bank of Clearwater whenever he needed more than they could comfortably give him.”

  “He was anxious to get the Drynfells land?”

  “A very nice piece. And with a tentative purchaser all lined up for it. Temple would have unloaded it for one hundred and seventy thousand. He wanted to work fast so that there’d be no chance of his customer getting together with Drynfells. It only went on the market Wednesday, a week ago today.”

  “Drynfells held it a long time?”

  “Several years. He paid fifty thousand for it.”

  “Would it violate any confidence to tell me who Davisson planned to sell it to?”

  “I can’t give you the name because I don’t know it myself. It’s some man who sold a chain of movie houses in Kansas and wants to build a motel down here, that’s all I know.”

  Darrigan walked out into the morning sunlight. The death of Temple Davisson was beginning to emerge from the mists. Sometime after he had left the Coral Tour Haven and before he appeared at the Aqua Azul, he had entangled himself with someone who wanted that cash. Wanted it badly. They had not taken their first opportunity. So they had sought a second choice, had made the most of it.

  He parked in the center of town, had a cup of coffee. At such times he felt far away from his immediate environment. Life moved brightly around him and left him in a dark place where he sat and thought. Thought at such a time was not the application of logic but an endless stirring at the edge of the mind, a restless groping for the fleeting impression.

  Davisson had been a man whose self-esteem had taken an inadvertent blow at the hands of his young wife. To mend his self-esteem, he had been casting a speculative eye at the random female. And he had been spending the day trying to engineer a deal that would mean a most pleasant profit.

  Darrigan and Kathy Marrick had been unable to find the place where Davisson had taken a few drinks before stopping at the Aqua Azul. Darrigan paid for his coffee and went out to the car, spread the road map on the wheel, and studied it. Granted that Davisson was on his way home when he stopped at the Aqua Azul, it limited the area where he could have been. Had he been more than three miles south of the Aqua Azul, he would not logically have headed home on the road that would take him through Indian Rocks and along Belleaire Beach. He would have cut over to Route 19. With a pencil Darrigan made a circle. Temple Davisson had taken his drinks somewhere in that area.

  He frowned. He detested leg work, that dullest stepsister of investigation. Sharing it with Mrs. Marrick made it a bit more pleasant, at least. It took him forty-five
minutes to drive out to the Aqua Azul. Her raspberry convertible was under shelter in the long carport. He parked in the sun and went in, found her in the lobby chattering with the girl at the desk.

  She smiled at him. “It can’t be Nero Wolfe. Not enough waistline.”

  “Buy you a drink?”

  “Clever boy. The bar isn’t open yet. Come down to the cabaña and make your own and listen to the record of a busy morning.”

  They went into the cypress-paneled living room of the beach cabaña. She made the drinks.

  “We failed to find out where he’d been by looking for him, my dear. So this morning I was up bright and early and went on a hunt for somebody who might have seen the car. A nice baby-blue convertible. They’re a dime a dozen around here, but it seemed sensible. Tan men with bald heads are a dime a dozen too. But the combination of tan bald head and baby-blue convertible is not so usual.”

  “Any time you’d like a job, Kathy.”

  “Flatterer! Now prepare yourself for the letdown. All I found out was something we already knew. That the baby-blue job was parked at that hideous Coral Tour Haven early in the afternoon.”

  Darrigan sipped his drink. “Parked there?”

  “That’s what the man said. He has a painful little store that sells things made out of shells, and sells shells to people who want to make things out of shells. Say that three times fast.”

  “Why did you stop there?”

  “Just to see if anybody could remember the car and man if they had seen them. He’s across the street from that Coral Tour thing.”

  “I think I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Let’s go, then. He’s a foolish little sweetheart with a tic.”

  The man was small and nervous, and at unexpected intervals his entire face would twitch uncontrollably. “Like I told the lady, mister, I saw the car parked over to Drynfells’s. You don’t see many cars there. Myron doesn’t do so good this time of year.”

  “And you saw the bald-headed man?”

  “Sure. He went in with Drynfells, and then he came out after a while.”

  “After how long?”

  “How would I know? Was I timing him? Maybe twenty minutes.”