Judge Me Not

by John D. MacDonald

  Teed moved over behind him. “Try it again, Mr. Raval.”

  “How many times I got to tell you to call me Lonnie, fella?” He prodded another ball out of the group, addressed it, swung. The result was the same.

  The girl picked it up. “I’m gettin’ tired, Lonnie,” she called, her voice coming thinly up the slope.

  “Just keep picking up the balls, you,” Lonnie shouted back. Teed saw her shrug.

  “Try placing the ball more off your right foot,” Teed said. “You’re trying to scoop them. Let the pitch of the club head do the work. Just imagine you’re going to hit a low flat one.”

  Lonnie tried another. It lofted high, came down and put on the brakes.

  “Hey, now!” Lonnie said. The next one worked the same way. And the next. “Fifteen bucks an hour I give that schnook at the club, and you do me more good in three minutes than he does in the whole hour.”

  “Lonnie!” the girl called.

  “Shut up!” he shouted. He slammed another one, putting more meat behind it. The girl stood where she was, and Teed saw at once that she had lost track of the ball. “Fore!” Teed yelled.

  The girl tried to break away, her hands going up. It was like slow motion. She ducked directly into the path of the ball, and he saw it rebound high from her dark head, heard the “tok” sound it made.

  The girl sat down, hard and flat, both hands flat on the top of her head. Lonnie started rolling on the grass, hugging his stomach and making strangled noises. “Funniest… Jesus… Oh, oh, oh,” he gasped.

  Teed hurried down the slope. The girl still sat there holding her head, her face all screwed up. Between sobs she was spewing out a stream of gutter language that threatened to sear the green grass for yards around.

  Teed squatted on his heels. “I guess I didn’t yell in time,” he said.

  She looked at him as though seeing him for the first time. She slowly lowered her hands. “It wasn’t… your… fault.” Her mouth was trembling.

  She looked beyond him and Teed heard Lonnie approaching. Her eyes hardened. “Dammit,” she said, “it isn’t enough I got to chase balls like a stinkin’ caddy, but you got to clobber me on the head with one.”

  “Kindly shut your big loose mouth,” Lonnie said quietly. All fire left the girl’s eye. She stood up meekly. Lonnie took her by the upper arm. Teed saw the whiteness come around her mouth.

  “Meet Mr. Teed Morrow, darling,” he said. “Morrow, this is my secretary. Alice Trowbridge.”

  “How do you do,” she said.

  “Now, you were clumsy, weren’t you, darling?”

  “Yes, Mr. Raval.”

  “Go on up to the house and take an aspirin, darling.”

  He released her. Teed felt faintly ill as he saw the depth of the indentations his hard fingers had made in her arm. She walked up the slope, legs slim and brown under the crisp chartreuse shorts, back straight, head lowered. She didn’t begin to rub her arm until she had almost reached the garage.

  “Is this just a friendly visit?” Raval asked, dark eyes dancing.

  “Not likely. Mr. Dennison’s doctor told him he had to stop smoking cigars.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something? It sounds like one of those cute cracks that mean something else.”

  “Here’s the cigars you sent him, Raval.” He handed the box over.

  “That I sent him?” The surprise was just a shade too enormous, Teed decided. Lonnie took the box, hefted it. “Must be some kind of mistake.”

  “With five thousand cash in with the cigars, Lonnie. You aren’t kidding me and you certainly aren’t kidding Powell Dennison.”

  Raval grinned. “Come on up to the house. We can have a talk.”

  “There isn’t much to talk about, Lonnie.”

  “Hell, I thought we had mutual interests, Morrow.”

  Teed shrugged. “Suit yourself.” They went up to the house. There was a small patio on the side opposite the drive. A glass-topped table, some wrought-iron chairs. Raval ordered Sam to bring drinks and then to pick up the golf equipment.

  Teed lit Lonnie’s cigarette and his own with the new lighter. The box sat on the table between them. After Sam brought the drinks, Lonnie Raval said, “If there’s five thousand in that box, it sort of puts me in a spot. I got to report all my income. Now how the hell will I report that? A gift? I don’t want those Internal Revenue snoops raising hell with me and my accountants, do I?”

  “Better not put it down as a gift from Dennison, Lonnie.”

  “Look, fella. Get me off the spot. You can tell Dennison you gave me the dough. Keep it yourself.”

  “And then someday you’ll want a little harmless favor from me, Lonnie. I don’t want to have a ‘sold’ sign on me.”

  Lonnie clucked sadly. “You guys! You Christers.”

  “Must be we have you worried, Raval.”

  One dark eyebrow went up a little. The eyes were liquid, wet-black, beautiful. “Worried? Not such a good word, Morrow. You two are like maybe a pebble in my shoe. And I’m a lazy guy. I just hate to sit down and take my shoe off and shake the pebble out. Maybe I’m going to have to do it, though.”

  “Maybe we won’t shake out so easy,” Teed said, trying to match Raval’s casual confidence, trying not to show how much the quiet words had bothered him.

  “Now that just doesn’t make sense, Morrow. You and those silly goddam affidavits! Think I’m going to sit still and let you nibble on me? Take a message back to Dennison. Tell him Raval is scared of federal heat—so scared that he keeps his nose clean. Tell him Raval can find angles as far as state and local heat is concerned. And tell him that as far as a couple of amateur good-government bastards are concerned, Raval is laughing.”

  “And offering money.”

  Lonnie stared at him. “I could learn to dislike you, Morrow. Tell Dennison I’ve got a couple of boys who are so stupid they’re more trouble than they’re worth. I’ll set them up so Dennison can knock them over and be a hero.”

  “He’ll never go for that.”

  “Stay in my hair and you’ll both wish you never heard of this town.”

  “So far it only adds up to noise. What can you do? Have us killed?”

  Raval gave him a hurt look. “Jesus, boy. You better stay out of those B movies. How long do you think I’d last if I went around killing people? Jesus!”

  “I know that would be pretty crude, Raval. The point I was trying to make is that outside of killing us, there’s no way of stopping us.”

  “I don’t know why I have to explain all this to you, Morrow. Look. You and your boss nosed around the City Engineer’s office long enough to get the specs rewritten on the repaving of Grayman Street. It took most of the sugar out of that job and cost me personally twelve thousand. All right. Now suppose I was a manufacturer. Somebody starts cutting into my profit. What do I do? First I try to hire them. That doesn’t work. Do I kill them? Hell, no. I look them over until I find a little button. Like a doorbell. I just push on the button.”

  The man’s confidence made Teed’s mouth feel dry. “But…”

  “I take a look at a guy like you. Money doesn’t seem to interest you. Maybe you’ve got enough. So I try something else.” He threw his head back and yelled, “Alice! Alice, come on out here.”

  “Coming!” she called, from the recesses of the house. She appeared almost immediately. She had changed from the sun suit to a crisp white halter-back dress. She sat down in one of the chairs and said, poutingly, “What a terrible headache I got!”

  Lonnie Raval said, softly, affectionately, “Honey-lamb, what happens if I tell you to go out there and see how much grass you can eat?”

  She stared at him. “You going crazy?”

  “No. I mean, what happens if I really tell you to do that?”

  She held his gaze for a long moment and then her eyes dropped. “I guess maybe I’d do it, Lonnie.”

  “Show the man.”

  “Gosh, Lonnie, I…”

  “Show t
he man!”

  The tall, tanned girl walked out into the yard. Raval watched her without expression. She bent over and pulled up a clump of grass. She raised it slowly and put it in her mouth, started to chew.

  “O.K., honey-lamb. Spit out the nasty grass. Come back and sit down. Morrow, you see what I mean? Now this girl here, she was pretty snotty to me last year. So I had to find out which button to push. You find the button, and you own the person. I own her. Anything I tell her to do, she does, don’t you, baby?”

  She looked down at her hands. “Yes, Mr. Raval.”

  “You don’t ever want to make me mad, do you?”

  “No, Mr. Raval.”

  “Because when I get sore enough at you, you know what I’m going to do to you, don’t you?”

  Her voice was a barely audible whisper. “Yes, Mr. Raval.”

  Lonnie smiled at Teed. “I get a big yak out of how those newspaper guys make a big mystery out of how the Commies get those confessions. They ought to come talk to Raval.”

  Teed felt ill at having witnessed this humiliation of a human being.

  “Want to make a bet, Morrow?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You stay in town long enough, and I’ll own you too. I tell you to eat grass and you’ll eat grass. I know. You’re telling yourself you’re a big strong guy and you’d die before you’d take orders like that. That’s fairy-story stuff, Morrow. Hero stuff, like in the books. People aren’t like that. You can break people. You can break anybody in the world, if you know how to go about it. If you want to be smart, just join my team. Dennison doesn’t have to know. Keep the five grand. You like this little girl? Take her home with you. She’ll do anything you tell her to do.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “She’s a better piece than the Mayor’s wife, Morrow.”

  Teed stood up, unable to conceal his surprise.

  “Man, how do you think that old fud got to be mayor? Raval keeps up on things. Raval keeps track. See, already I got a little handle on you. Already I found one button. And I’ll find the button on Dennison, too. And you two gentlemen can hold hands and jump through a big hoop whenever I hold it up. Felice gave me a full report. She isn’t bright. Just sort of shrewd.”

  Raval looked lazily at Teed’s clenched fist and said, “It wouldn’t be at all smart to take a punch at me, Morrow.”

  “You won’t stop us,” Teed said. He turned on his heel and left. As he rounded the corner of the house, he glanced back. The man and the girl sat placidly on the terrace. A master-slave relationship. A little medieval nightmare in a sunlit world.

  He stepped on the starter. Under the hood a low whistle started. It increased in volume and pitch. It climbed up into a whistling scream that terminated in a sharp explosion. Clouds of white smoke rolled out of the vents.

  The stringy little man called Sam was standing by Lonnie Raval. They were both laughing so hard they were doubled over. The girl in the white dress was standing behind the two of them, her laughter shrill above theirs. Teed yanked the bomb loose from the spark plug and threw it on the grass. He slammed the hood down. At the end of the driveway, as he slowed to make the turn, he could still hear them laughing.

  Teed drove a mile before he permitted himself a small rueful grin. Raval had been all too convincing. The very casualness of his confidence had, in itself, been a weapon planned to undermine Teed’s confidence. Whatever else Raval was, Teed realized he was also an expert amateur psychologist. He had thrown in the knowledge of Felice Carboy at the proper moment to obtain maximum shock value. The little demonstration of his power over the girl had been adequately sickening.

  By the time he parked in the City Hall lot, most of his confidence had returned. The City Hall was of yellow brick and sandstone, with four two-story pillars across the front. A patch of paper-littered parched grass stretched across the front, bisected by the wide walk leading to the foot-cupped concrete steps. Behind the building a roofed walk led to police headquarters.

  Teed went into the Hall and up the stairs, heels clacking on the shiny metal treads, nostrils full of the stink of green floor-cleaning compound, ancient dust and the pink reek of the deodorant blocks in the urinals. Lonnie’s Mint. That was what the wise ones called the Hall. Its symbol was the shine on the pants seat of a third-rate lawyer. Justice was blindfolded, but she carried no scales. In Deron she lay flat on her back in the City Hall with her knees high and the soiled toga entangled around her waist, with tireless relays of public servants making certain that she stayed that way.

  Three City Hall girls came down the stairs toward him, high heels clacking, voices chattering about the week end.

  “S-s-st!” one said.

  “Good morning, Mr. Morrow,” they said, singsong, almost in chorus.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said.

  They passed him, and when he looked back down at them they were looking up the stairs. They clutched each other and giggled shrilly.

  Teed went into his office and through the connecting door into Powell’s outer office where sallow Miss Anderson, a trustworthy import, was filing letters.

  “He in?”

  “Expecting you, Teed. But Commissioner Koalwitz is in there right now.”

  “Give me a buzz when he’s free, please.”

  He went back out and sat at his own desk. The green rug was scuffed down to where brown showed through the pile. One of the slanting window ventilators was missing, the other one cracked. Green steel desk with brown-black cigarette scars in the paint. Calendar from Mooten Brothers, A Funeral to Fit Every Purse. Ash tray on the desk encircled by a miniature rubber tire. Chair that creaked. Another office in another public building—so like the ones that had gone before, the ones that would come afterward. Public buildings and pigeons. They seemed to go together. One landed on his windowsill, looked in with beady, wise glance.

  “Pigeon, I don’t think I’ll mention Felice to the boss. Check on that?”

  The pigeon shrugged and flew away.

  Chapter Three

  A half hour after he had returned from lunch there was a phone call for him.

  “Teed? Don’t use my name over the line. Do you know who it is?”

  “Of course.”

  “Teed, I’ve got to see you. Same place as yesterday.”

  “I thought we both chalked that one up to experience.”

  “Please. I’m begging you. How soon can you get away?”

  “I’ll be busy all this week, honey.”

  There was a long silence and he thought that she had hung up. “Listen to me, Teed. I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong for a long time. I found out something today. Just an hour ago. Something that you ought to know.”

  “What do you want to do? Change sides?”

  “Don’t sound so… so contemptuous, Teed. I’m taking a risk, you know. The least you can do is…”

  “I saw a man this morning. He knew more than I thought he knew.”

  Her tone was humble. “I’m… sorry about that, Teed. If I had it to do over again, I…”

  “If you know something you feel the City Manager should know, I suggest you make an appointment with Mr. Dennison.”

  “Damn you! Oh, damn you, Teed Morrow!”

  “Sticks and stones may break my bones…”

  “You think you know everything there is to know,” Felice said hotly. “I wanted to tell you something because, in spite of what you said to me yesterday, I still think there’s something decent about you. And I don’t like what’s planned for you.”

  He held the phone a bit tighter, but made his voice casual. “Don’t get so fussed. If you really think it’s that important, I’ll get away as soon as I can. Another hour or so here, and then an hour’s drive. O.K.?”

  She sighed. “That’s better, Teed. Much better. I’ll leave now, and I’ll be there waiting for you.”

  The phone line clicked dead before he could break again. He hung up slowly. Maybe she had gotten hold of something. Somet
hing too strong for her stomach. He shrugged. He was a fool if he did, and a fool if he didn’t.

  He turned back to the prints and specifications of the sewer job completed by the Lantana Brothers Construction Company in 1950. The construction company was a partnership and it was common rumor, though unproven, that Lonnie Raval was the silent senior partner. Powell wanted Teed’s opinion on whether it would be worth while to bring in an outside inspector to check the job and find out just how many corners had been cut. It had been an eight-hundred-thousand-dollar job, specifying the digging up of old pipe, replacing it with new pipe at a deeper level. City inspectors had been on the job as it was performed, but Teed knew that in Deron that meant less than nothing. If pipe of the cheapest quality in the proper diameter had been used, and the line hadn’t been deepened, the job might have cost Lantana Brothers four hundred thousand. But it was going to be awfully tough to bring in an outside expert and expect him to dig holes in the street without anyone noticing it.

  He scribbled on the bottom of Powell’s memo. “Why don’t we save it until we’ve got them on the run and can do it openly?”

  At a few minutes after three he checked out with Powell, left the office and headed for the lake. He pushed the car hard and made it in fifty minutes. Felice’s convertible was parked on the narrow lane. He parked beside it.

  The first thing he saw when he went in was the neat arrangement of Felice’s clothes on the cane-bottom chair. She was nude on the bed, one corner of the Indian blanket flipped across her.

  She raised her deeply tanned arms, her eyes smiling. “Hello, darlin’,” she said huskily. “You made me wait so terribly long.”

  He stood six feet from her. He took a cigarette out, tapped it on the new lighter, hung it in the corner of his mouth and lit it. She lowered her arms when she got tired.

  “I thought you had something to tell me.”

  “That can wait, can’t it, darlin’?” She raised her leg and kicked the flap of blanket aside, lay watching him with her eyes almost closed.

  In spite of himself he felt desire twist within him, a slow oily shifting. His hand trembled a bit as he lifted the cigarette to his mouth. To gain the necessary control, he turned his back on her, walked over to the bureau, flicked the ashes into the tray.