A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “No banking hours tomorrow. Do you want to come over?”

  “You come to our house, honey. Two birds with one stone. I didn’t get a chance to tell you before, but Ross wants to use you again. Now, don’t look at me like that. It’s a stinky little six bucks for an hour or any part thereof, and the sketch has been okayed, so he knows exactly what the pose will be. There’s a swirly skirt of mine he wants you in, and it won’t take more than fifteen minutes. How about right after lunch? Bring your kids.”

  “It always makes me feel like such an idiot.”

  “Don’t be so self-conscious, honey. Ross loves your good bones, and he says you’ve got the best color values of any redhead he’s ever used. And he says you’re as easy to work with as a pro. And I’m so horrible at it. Poor guy. I freeze every time. I hunch my shoulders and the pictures come out looking as if I had one of those iron things holding my head steady like they used in the olden days. And I haven’t got good arms, he says.”

  The group was breaking up. Kat said goodbye to Melissa and the colonel and went out to her brick-colored Volkswagen parked in the sandy shade next to the Jennings’ semicircular driveway. As she drove a mile south on Mangrove Road toward Sandy Key Estates, she thought of the meeting and how it had disappointed her. Probably, from an organizational point of view, they were better organized than they had been the last time, but there was a quality of indignation and enthusiasm which was lacking. At the first meeting two years ago, everybody had tried to talk at the same time, presenting all kinds of ideas. Perhaps now they were better qualified to combat the Grassy Bay fill, but there did not seem to be as much spirit, as much righteous anger.

  The side door key was under the mat, and she was glad Roy and Alicia were becoming so reliable about replacing it. She went into the empty house and felt a familiar twinge of guilt as she snapped the big air conditioner on. She took off her blouse and skirt in the bedroom and went back and stood in the cool wind of the noisy unit until she felt chilled by the evaporation of the mist of sweat on her body.

  She phoned the Sinnat home. The cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Riggs, answered. She asked her to tell Esperanza to shoo the kids on home. Mrs. Riggs asked her to hold the phone. Claire came on the line and said, “I knew you’d be late on account of the meeting, Kat. So we asked the kids to stay for a hamburger cook-out, and Gus is over here fogging us down. Here’s the deal, dear. You come on up whenever you feel like it, and the upper classes will have steak later on. Then when my pair are sacked out, either Nat or Esperanza can take yours home and sit with them until you’re damn well ready to call it a night.”

  “Claire, I just can’t keep imposing on—”

  “You’ve never imposed on anybody, Kat. Di wants you around tonight. As soon as he got home a few minutes ago he phoned Martin and Eloise, and they’re coming over too, later on, but without the little Cable heirs, thank the good Lord. We were talking about it when you phoned. Di wants to nail Martin about why he’s optioned that land to the developers. You know Di, so it ought to be something to hear. He thinks it would be a good thing if you were here.”

  “But I work for Martin!”

  “You work in the bank and so does Martin. Don’t be so darn timid, Kat, really. You were a friend and neighbor long before you worked for him. We’ll expect you, dear.”

  “Well … all right, but I’m not going to get into any hassle. I’ll just listen.”

  “Come along whenever you’re ready.”

  Seven

  BRIAN HAAS MUTTERED, stirred, opened his eyes at a few minutes before five. Jimmy Wing put his book aside. The small bedroom was hot.

  Haas slowly fumbled the sheet down to his waist. His broad chest was shiny with sweat. His color was very bad. He looked at Jimmy.

  “Still Friday?” he asked, his voice slow and toneless.

  “Still Friday. Almost five o’clock.”

  “One long son of a bitch of a day. How long have you been here?”

  “Fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Nan around?”

  “She said she’ll be here a little after five.”

  “Can you pour me some water?”

  Wing poured a glass from the pitcher on the night stand. Haas hitched himself up in the bed and took the glass in both hands, shaking so badly he spilled perhaps a third of the water down his chin and chest. Wing took the glass, and Haas slid back down with a sigh.

  “Been shooting me with something new,” he said. “It’s like the whole world was in slow motion. How about Borklund?”

  “You’ve got a virus.”

  “A two-quart virus.”

  “Was it that much?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I bought four pints. I always buy pints. It cuts the losses if you drop one, I guess. I think I finished two before the car got stuck. I can remember waking up on the sand and killing another and feeling around for a full one and not finding it.”

  “Couldn’t that much kill you? Taking it so fast?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  Haas stared at him and Jimmy Wing thought he saw a flicker of amusement in the dark deep-set eyes. “Only the drunks know there’s no point in it, Jimmy. The civilians say it’s immaturity, or a need for love, or a physiological deficiency, or an escape from reality, or some such crap. I’m a drunk. So I drink. It’s that simple.”

  “We civilians have to find reasons for things.”

  “Happy hunting.”

  “Is it over for this time?”

  “It might be.”

  “It’s rough on Nan.”

  “It’s no picnic for me, fella. My life is full of places I can’t ever go again, and people I can’t ever see again. If it gets too rough, she can join that group. I can’t talk to you about it, Jimmy. You never joined the club. You haven’t been there. We’ll always be talking about two different things, so let’s skip it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re not sore?”

  “No. I’ll even change the subject. The Save Our Bays people are back in action. Emergency session right about now. There’s a new move coming up to turn Grassy Bay into suburbia.”

  Brian Haas closed his eyes. It was a full minute before he opened them again and turned his head toward Jimmy Wing. “That’s a good subject. Keep going.”

  He told Brian no more than Brian would reasonably expect him to know. As he finished he heard Nan coming up the stairs. She came in and said, “Howdy, Jimmy. My God, you got the uglies, Haas!”

  “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” Brian said.

  She sat on the foot of his bed, patted his leg and said, “How goes the remorses?”

  “Same old ones. Familiar faces. Like abandoned children who finally tracked Daddy down.”

  “How are these shots working?”

  “They’re pretty good, Nan. Too good, maybe. I should be praying for death right now. I should be shaking the bed and gagging.”

  “I know. Do you miss it?”

  “In a funny way. It’s always been like paying my way. Maybe I’ve enjoyed the dramatics in some inverted way. It doesn’t seem right to feel no worse than a flu case.”

  “He’ll be here at six to give you the last one. Could you eat?”

  “They’re good, but they’re not that good.”

  Jimmy stood up. “I’m off. You want to set up the board, I can give you one hour tomorrow, starting at high noon. Give me white, and I’ll give you another crack at the queen’s gambit.”

  “If I can see the board. Right now there’s four of you. It’s a side effect, I guess. How do you think we’ll go on this Grassy Bay thing this time?”

  “The paper? We’ll come out for progress. Ben listens to J.J., who is no idiot.”

  “Can we bore from within, like last time?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see, Bri.”

  He went down to his car and drove to the newspaper offices. To the old yellow-tan Florida-Moorish building on Bayou Street, all courts
and arches, dusty ivy and vivid, unkempt flower beds. He parked quite close to the circulation shed where, in another life, when he was nine years old, he had come in the first gray of morning to pick up the papers for his route. He went in through the side door of the main building, took some notes out of his box, and went back to his desk in a relatively quiet, windowless corner. One note asked him to call a number he recognized as the number for Bliss Construction. He called. A girl switched the call to Elmo.

  “I’m going to be working late here, it looks like,” Elmo said. “So why don’t you stop on by when you get a chance?”

  “It won’t be until about eight.”

  “I’ll be right here.”

  He went to work on his accumulated notes. “At a special luncheon meeting of the Chamber of Commerce, County Planning Director Edison Kroot announced that fallout shelter builders will get full cooperation from county zoning and building authorities.…”

  “Five science courses in Palm County high schools will become part of a Federally subsidized teacher-testing study this coming fall, according to Dr. Wilde Sumnor, Superintendent of Public Instruction.…”

  “The El-Ray Snack House was burglarized Thursday night …”

  “… went through the stop sign at the intersection of North Street and Palm Way …”

  “… remains in critical condition in …”

  “… resigns post as …”

  The copy girl took the yellow sheets to the news desk. The evening tempo of work was increasing. Wire service material was being fitted into the makeup, along with the ads and syndicated materials already positioned. Except for late sports, the back pages were being locked up, one by one, working forward to page one, which would be held open until half past midnight. Borklund stopped by his desk, inquired about Brian Haas, and tried to load some phone work on Wing, but he avoided it by saying there were still a couple of things he had to go out and get. The teletypes chattered, phones rang, linotypes clucked steadily, and the Saturday edition began to take on form and pattern. It was a kind of work which, for many years, had given him satisfaction. But in this past year it had seemed to become smaller and less meaningful. The wire service reporting was leaden and clumsy. Each local story he wrote seemed to have been written before. Only the date had been changed. He could not know if his restlessness and sense of boredom was due to Gloria’s final escape into her nonworld, or to the limits of all the demands made upon him, or to his increasingly obsessional relationship with Kat. But he knew that now it was all changed, and would all be different.

  He welcomed the new and not yet known things that would happen, but at the same time he was alarmed, uneasy. You walk into a new room, close the door and pull a lever. Then you begin to wish you hadn’t. But the lever has also locked the door.

  When he had awakened, he had taken the two fifty-dollar bills from his wallet and turned them over and over in his hands. The money had looked theatrical, implausible. He had been offered all the usual things in the past, the junkets and free rides, the Christmas whiskey and the unofficial due bills, the lighters and cigarette cases and desk sets. And, sometimes, cash. He had used a flexible judgment based less on morality than on convenience. He took what it had seemed plausible to take, measuring himself against what he believed others would take and did take, seeking that comfortable level where he could be labeled neither prude nor rascal, and avoiding those gifts which implied too direct an obligation for future favors. But he had returned the rare gifts of currency. Gift certificates had been the nearest thing to cash he had accepted.

  But this money was not, of course, a gift or bribe. Elmo had made that clear. It was specific pay for specific employment. He had become a moonlighter. And, should the job itself become distasteful, or should the fact of having two jobs become burdensome, he would tell Elmo his acceptance had been a little too hasty. Elmo, of course, would take it gracefully. There would be no instructive visit to one of the back-country sloughs, not for a mildly recalcitrant member of the press.

  But Ulysses S. Grant looked out from the money with a brooding, dubious expression. Hadn’t he had some money trouble himself?

  Now there was a summons from Elmo, and the money had given it a different flavor than had been apparent in the summonses of past years. His response to it had been altered also, in just as subtle a way. He wondered how many more there were who now played the same game, who had become a part of the expanding universe of Elmo Bliss, willingly or unwillingly—even knowingly or unknowingly. Frannie had said that he made her feel alive. Maybe that was the most effectively deadly subversion of all. All the children felt gloriously alive, marching away from Hamlin.

  • • •

  The offices of Bliss Construction were in a small one-story building in a commercial area on Bay Highway, south of the city, just over the city line, about a mile and a half north of the light where Mangrove Road turned toward Grassy Key. Behind the office structure, and enclosed by hurricane fence, were the storage buildings, a workshop and the vehicle park. His transit-mix cement plant and his hot-mix asphalt plant were in a heavy-industry zone north of Palm City. Though Elmo had expanded with startling speed throughout the fifties, he had the curious ability to give each new venture the flavor of having been his from the very beginning. His expansion no longer seemed as brash and reckless as it had been. He had adjusted so readily to being one of the city’s most influential businessmen that it was easy to believe he always had been. The tales of his early wildnesses were told with that same fond nostalgia usually reserved for incidents of a prior century. Jimmy Wing had wondered why this could be true, and had finally realized that Elmo would have been unable to achieve this quality of acceptance in a more static community. Palm County growth had been dramatic. Total county population had been a little over twenty-five thousand when Elmo had been swinging a brush hook on a county road gang. Now it was over seventy-five thousand, and most of the newcomers had arrived after Bliss Construction was an established firm. To them, the Elmo Bliss of the wild years had the quality of myth.

  Elmo’s office headquarters was set back just far enough from the curbing of Bay Highway to provide room for a loop of asphalt drive in front of the entrance. The long dusk had ended when Jimmy Wing arrived. Tinted floodlights were buried among the broad shining leaves of the shrubs in the planting area that stretched the length of the front of the building. The right half of the structure was unlighted. The blinds were closed in the left half, but light escaped at the edges of them. He parked behind Elmo’s blue pickup truck. It was, he knew, a considered part of the image, a truck with the worn, battered, dusty look of the ranch lands, a more telling symbol than any Cadillac or Mercedes could be. Beyond the truck, in a more shadowy place, was a stubby, elderly Renault, sun-seared and rusty.

  He tried the door and found it locked. Over the hum of traffic on Bay Highway he heard from inside the building a shrill yapping laugh of a woman. He pressed the bell beside the door. An inner door opened, and light streamed out into the reception desk area. A bright fluorescence flickered on, and a woman came toward the locked door, smiling, patting her hair, hitching her skirt. She was young, short, sturdy, her slender waist latched so tightly in a wide belt it accentuated hips and breasts far beyond their need for emphasis. Her face was broad, pale, pretty in a rather insipid way, roughened by acne scars. Her hair was dyed a dark red, and worn in a rather incongruous and inappropriate beehive style. She jounced toward the locked glass door on very high heels, coming down hard with each step. She looked cheap, trivial, empty and troublesome, but Wing had learned, during Elmo’s term on the commission, that she was shrewd, competent and trusted.

  She opened the door and said, “Hey, Jimmy.”

  “Evening, Miz Sandra.”

  She locked the door again and said, as they walked toward Elmo’s office, “How about with my little sister in the Sunday paper, hey?”

  “All set. They were going to make it a one-column cut, but now they’ll use it three columns wide
.”

  “It’s only fair, her being the one in the family with looks, and marrying better than me or Ruthie. When I married Pat we didn’t have the money to have a picture took, even.”

  Elmo was sorting papers on his desk. The desk and the room were like his study at his home. He looked up with an abused grin and said, “Rick Willis keeps telling me everything is running just fine, but whenever I spend two days away from this desk, I get all this here crud to sort out. Make yourself a drink, Jimmy.”

  The doors of the bar cabinet in the corner were open. He heard Elmo and Sandra Straplin talking about the work she was to do. He opened the small built-in refrigerator and found some beer on the bottom shelf, dark frosty bottles of imported Tuborg. He opened one and took it over to the long deep couch under the windows.

  “You want I should do any of it tonight, like maybe the airmail to Costex, Elmo?” she asked, standing beside Elmo, frowning down at him.

  “No. You have it all for me to sign tomorrow, so you just tell me when to come on in here.”

  She riffled the sheaf of papers in her hand. “About like two o’clock?”

  He slapped her on the haunch and turned it into a little push, urging her toward the door. “Two o’clock will be just fine, Sandra. Goodnight, girl.” He turned to Jimmy. “You follow along and lock that outside door behind her, boy, so we can talk easy. I got to get this desk cleaned the hell off.”

  Sandra put the papers in her desk drawer, took her purse from another drawer, turned out the reception room lights. They went to the door and she said, “What you do, you turn this hickey here to the right. Guess you’ll be coming around more often?”

  “Are you telling me or asking me, Sandra?”

  The nearest light standard on Bay Highway shone a pale white light through the glass door, slanting across her wide white face. Her perfume was a very sweet and heavy flower scent. She smiled up at him. “Neither one, Jimmy. Just making talk.”