A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “Let’s get this sitter off duty. Miss Natalie Sinnat, the sweet dreamer.”

  “She’s a wonderful girl, Di.”

  “Excuse me if I agree.”

  Natalie looked up quickly as they walked in. She put her book aside and stood up. “So soon?” she said, smiling.

  “Martin Cable passed out early,” Di said. “Fell right off his chair wearing a wide drunken smile. Eloise slung him over her shoulder and packed him off home.”

  “Again?” Natalie said, shocked and solemn, her eyes sparkling. “The kids were utter lambs, Kat, as usual. No phone calls. I dipped into the Coke supply.”

  Her father looked at the four empty bottles on the coffee table and said, “Don’t you mean you wallowed in it, child?”

  She blushed visibly and immediately and said most casually, “Oh, Jigger saw me walk the kids home and he came with us and hung around for a while.”

  “Indeed!” Di said. “Isn’t he a little young for you? A gloriously beautiful chunk of muscle, I grant you, but that Lesser boy can’t be over seventeen. I’ve made attempts to talk with him, but he seems to have the same shining emptiness as a brass spittoon, child.”

  She picked up the empty bottles to take them to the kitchen and looked angrily at her father. “I know he’s young. And he has sort of a crush and I can’t help that. But he’s not empty! He’s just very defensive with adults. He’s a lonely, unhappy boy, and he’s really terribly sensitive, Father.”

  “Excuse me!” Di said. “I wouldn’t deny him the chance to unburden his troubled heart to an understanding older woman.”

  “You’re terribly amusing, Father,” she said tonelessly, and took the empty bottles to the kitchen. When she came back she said to Kat, “You don’t mind Jigger having been here, do you?”

  “Of course not, dear.”

  “He has to have somebody to talk to. If he didn’t have, I’m afraid he’d … get into some kind of crazy mess.”

  “Like what?” Dial demanded.

  “Let’s go, Father.”

  After they were gone and Kat had looked at her children, she remembered that this time she had forgotten to even go through the motions of trying to pay Natalie. Maybe, she decided, it was easier to forget the ritual, and not make the attempt.

  Natalie was a very poised and adult nineteen. She was a dusky, very slender brunette, with a small piquant face, wide-spaced brown eyes, with a good sense of style and color, and a pert, trim way of handling herself. She was a child of divorce, and this was the first complete summer she had been permitted to spend with her father. In the fall she would return to the University of Michigan where she was taking an undergraduate degree in fine arts. Three mornings a week she was teaching a children’s art class at the Palm County Art Center. She drove a little red Jaguar with a steely competence, sailed Claire’s tender Thistle in hard winds, swam, sunned, sketched and helped with the house, the twins, the entertaining.

  As Kat got ready for bed, she had a feeling of loneliness more acute than on the ordinary evenings of her life. For a long time she had wondered why it should always be worse after being out, and thought it was because of coming back to an empty house. Then she had gradually realized that it was worse because there was nobody to tell things to. She would come back full of things to tell, little observations of humor and drama, of things said and done, and there was no one to listen and care. On the ordinary nights nothing happened and so there was no fund of things to relate, and emptiness did not seem as critical. Whenever they had spent an evening apart, Van had enjoyed listening to her. She had liked making him laugh.

  There should be a service for widows, she thought. Good listeners who could be acquired by appointment. One of them would be here for the ritual Sanka, eagerly listening, making little exclamations, laughing in the right places.

  There has to be somebody to listen to you, because of you, not what you say. Without them, you walk around with the weight of all the untold things. When something happens you say to yourself, I must remember this, so I can tell it just the way it happened. When there is no one to listen, all these things clot in your mind.

  When she was in bed she thought that she might talk to Jimmy Wing about the meeting. She turned her bed lamp on again, dialed all but the last digit of his number, and then hung up, clicked the light off and lay back in darkness. It was too late to phone him.

  Nine

  IN THE BRIGHT SUNLIGHT of the Saturday mid-morning Jimmy Wing saw himself sidelong in a downtown shop window, sandy and listless, slowed by the heat, squinting into the chrome dazzle of Center Street. It struck him that he should look so unremarkable, that the blackmail mission should have worked no change upon him.

  “Blackmail” was the word he had awakened with, so apt and harsh it soothed him to use it, depriving him of pretense. Yet it had overtones of melodrama which gave it a twist of comedy. It needed wax on the tips of the mustache, and hidden cameras, tape recordings, pilfered letters, a lock box. Then they would set a trap for him, and the slug would smash him against the wall. He would fall, twitch and die, as the music came up and the good guy embraced the lovely girl.

  But he had learned that most people who do questionable things are as unremarkable as the people who don’t. Most people who are thrown into a cell for good reason are vastly astonished to find themselves there, because they look and feel like anyone else. It is all some kind of mistake.

  Having faced the idea of digging up something Elmo could use against Dial Sinnat, he examined himself with care and concern, looking for some obvious alteration of the spirit. But he felt only a mild chagrin, a fussy anxiety about being successful at it—and not being caught at it, and a very subtle feeling of unreality, no more than a hangover or a slight fever would induce.

  He had remembered old gossip, a fistfight, a damage suit which had been quietly dropped, and he had refreshed his memory in a microfilm booth at the paper. It seemed to make sense to go to a man’s enemies first. Rule one for the amateur blackmailer.

  He walked around the corner onto Veronica Street and into the old Central Commerce Building, and climbed one flight of stairs to the offices of the accounting firm of Malley and Rand. The door was unlocked. The secretarial desks were empty. Chet Rand was behind his desk, his office door open. He was a soft, florid, red-headed man. His scowl turned to a smile as he recognized Jimmy Wing.

  “Officially we’re closed, Jimmy,” he said. “But not for big financial figures like you. What have they got you doing now? Selling advertising?”

  Jimmy sat down and looked at him amiably. “If you’re closed, why are you working? Too many accounts with two sets of books?”

  “We recommend three these days. Four if it’s a partnership. What I’m doing, pal, is trying to save the skin of a stupid son of a bitch who just happened to forget to declare a little windfall he got three years ago.”

  “What I want to talk about goes back a little further than that, Chet. I’m being the diligent reporter. Research. This is a confidential visit.”

  “I won’t give you a crumb about any of our clients.”

  “I wouldn’t ask. This is more personal. A story might break about an old buddy of yours. He might be getting into the same kind of trouble he got into once before.”

  “An old friend of mine?”

  “Dial Sinnat.”

  Rand’s mild worn urban face changed in a startling way. For a few moments he looked capable of a dangerous violence. In a soft voice a half octave lower than his normal tone he said, “Is this your idea of a funny joke, Wing?”

  “I’m serious.”

  Chet Rand leaned back. “I get a lousy reaction to that name. But now I realize it isn’t fair. I tried to kill him once, and I don’t go anywhere where I might run into him. But I guess it wasn’t his fault. I was in a lot better shape then than I am now. I’m nearly twenty years younger than he is. But he like to kill me before they broke it up.”

  “You dropped the suit, didn’t you?”


  “There was a lot of pressure on me from all directions. From Ruthie and Don Malley and from just about every member of the Board of Governors of the Yacht Club. So I dropped it.” He gave Wing a strangely shy smile and looked away. “What I wasn’t willing to admit then, even though I guess I knew it all the time, I had to admit later. Ruthie was a slut. After what happened with Sinnat, I watched her closer. I didn’t lose my head the next time. I got the evidence on her and I used it to bulldoze her into a divorce. Somebody saw her in Phoenix over a year ago. I don’t know where the hell she is now. I keep wondering about her.”

  “There was a dance that night, wasn’t there?”

  “Nothing special. Just one of the Friday night things they used to have. I don’t know if they still have them. I resigned after it was all over. Sinnat had been at the hospital most of the day. Claire had twins that evening. Di came to the club from the hospital in a mood to buy champagne. I guess he got there about nine-thirty. Ruthie and I had a nice little load already, and the champagne topped it off. I guess it was about midnight I realized I hadn’t seen Ruthie for a while. I’d been playing poker dice at the bar. I went and looked in the car. She wasn’t there. I went out onto the docks looking for her. A wind had come up. Any noise I was making couldn’t be heard over the waves slapping the pilings and the boats creaking. I went way out on the end of the T and I wouldn’t have seen them at all if the moon hadn’t come out from behind a cloud at the right time. They’d pulled a bunk mattress out onto the cockpit deck of Johnny Shilling’s old Matthews, and if they hadn’t been in such a big hurry and stopped to rig a side curtain, they’d have been home free. It was a farce, I suppose. Like a dirty joke, where the husband always walks in. But it isn’t funny to the husband, Jimmy. It isn’t funny at all. They looked like farm animals, somehow. I went out of my mind. I smashed a boat hook on him, they tell me, and tried to skewer him with the splintered end. When he took it away from me, I tried to strangle him, but by the time they broke it up I had this new twist in my nose and I needed two hundred bucks worth of dental work. He’s a bull. We’d been friends. I did some work for him. We’d been in their house. They’d been in ours. Ruthie cried and lied and lied and cried. I don’t blame him now. I know she was a slut. I don’t blame him, but I still hate him.”

  “Did Claire ever find out about it?”

  “How could she help not hearing about it, in this town? But Claire is a tough girl, Jimmy. She’s a realist. She knows he’s no angel. She has a good life. Why should she mess it up because he did a little roaming when she was out of circulation? Hell, I can talk about it now, but there was a couple of years there when I couldn’t. If I was alone and began to think about it, I’d begin to cry. Isn’t that the damnedest thing? Not sad tears, but the way kids cry when they get mad. What kind of trouble is he getting into now?”

  “I can’t talk about it, Chet. Wait and read about it in the paper.”

  “What good does it do you to listen to all that old stuff?”

  “Background information, Chet.”

  “I don’t want it in the paper, by God!”

  “It won’t be, believe me. We don’t run a scandal sheet.”

  “Is it woman trouble?”

  “It could be in that area.”

  “I won’t wish him any luck. But how can anybody bruise the man? Name him as corespondent? There’s nobody to fire him, and she won’t divorce him. I’m telling you, pal, I spent at least a year trying to think of some way to mess him up, but short of shooting him, I couldn’t come up with a thing. They don’t give a damn for public opinion. He spends five mornings a week in the brokerage outfit. He’s quick and shrewd and he does very well at it. He’s healthy as a pig. And I’m now willing to admit he probably wouldn’t mess with any woman who wasn’t ready and willing. And Claire certainly doesn’t mess around.”

  “And I suppose that when you worked on something for him, he wasn’t trying anything cute?”

  Chet Rand looked at Wing narrowly. “Boy, you’re giving me the idea you’re fishing. The more I think about the story you walked in here with, the fishier it sounds.”

  “What would I be fishing for? I’m just a newspaper type.”

  “His personal financial records are complete and accurate. He’s got fat holdings on tax exempts, a slew of blue chips, and quite a lot of very very nice growth stuff. He doesn’t have to cut any tax corners. At least, that’s the way he was set four years ago. That closes that door. About the only tender spots I can think of would be his kids.”

  Wing stared at him. “Four-year-old twins?”

  “We keep the Art Center books. There’s a Natalie Sinnat drawing twelve bucks a week teaching a class of kids. Nineteen and cute.”

  “I forgot about her. She’s spending the summer down here.”

  “Maybe she isn’t as tough-minded as Claire and Di.”

  “A man would have to be a thousand percent bastard to get at a man that way, Chet.”

  Rand shrugged. “It would depend on what he had to have, and how far he’d have to go to get it. Bastardliness is relative, friend. Two months ago a partner in an old firm died. The business is worth maybe three hundred thousand. The surviving partner is buying out the widow for five thousand, because that’s the figure given in the original partnership agreement drawn up in 1932, and never updated. The partners and their wives have been close for thirty years. Now the widow can’t understand how good old Joe can do this to her. But the law says he can, and he’s doing it. Don’t talk to me about thousand percent bastards.”

  “I wasn’t fishing, Chet.”

  “Of course you weren’t. This was a private talk, Jimmy. Be at ease.”

  “Thanks for … talking about your own bruise, Chet.”

  “It doesn’t bother me much any more, I just wonder where she is, sometimes, and how she’s making out. Listen. Whatever you use on Sinnat, don’t try a boat hook. It won’t work.”

  On the short ride back to the newspaper in the bake-oven heat of his old station wagon, Jimmy Wing found his sense of unreality slightly enhanced. When a traffic light stopped him, he stared at his own hand resting on the steering wheel, a long hand, veined and freckled, fuzzed with pale fur, grasping the wheel with indifferent simian competence, as apart from him as though he looked over the shoulder of a stranger.

  The hand is the animal reality, he thought, for blows and tools and caresses. Morality is an unreal conjecture, for younger men than I am. Morality is the conflict of rationalizations. I am trapped by myself, unable to do more or less than the old limitations permit.

  He had a specific visualization of rationalizations, seeing a little apart from the commonplace furniture of his mind, a cave pink and membranous, where the things too easy to believe were like flat leech-creatures which inched up from the dark floor to affix themselves to the soft walls. If they were peeled away quickly they did no harm. But the longer they remained the more difficult they were to dislodge. Eventually they made themselves so much a part of the walls there was no way to find them, or even to know they were there. And so truth, forever out of focus in any case, was prey to these further distortions assembled over the years. They made a comfortable muffling, a padded toughened wall, as opposed to a Calvinist rawness.

  The girl lives in the unreal context of wealth, youth and beauty. It would be a favor to her to show her the world has edges and thorns.

  Besides, the time to make any decision is after you find out what, if anything, is usable.

  And if you don’t do it, somebody else will.

  He phoned Kat from the place where he had lunch. She said she was just leaving for Jackie Halley’s house. She said she wanted to talk to him, but she’d be at the Halleys’ all afternoon. She said she had a lot to tell him and ask him. Could he stop by the Halleys’ about six o’clock? He told her that if he couldn’t make it, he’d phone her there and set up something else.

  After he had turned in his Sunday edition copy, he drove to the Palm County Art Center buildi
ng. It was on city-owned land at the foot of Center Street, fronting on the bay. The big tract also contained the Community Auditorium, the Teen House, the public library and the new headquarters for the city police. In the early thirties when the tract had been available for back taxes, the Cable family had purchased it and turned it over to the city for civic uses.

  The Art Center was an incongruous piece of architecture for even that tropic coast, red brick Georgian with white pillars and fake shutters, more suitable to a shopping center in Williamsburg. He parked in the wide and empty asphalted area which served all the buildings in the tract. A sign on the front door of the Center announced that it was closed. The door was unlocked.

  He walked through the arched entrance to the main gallery where Morton Dermond was supervising the efforts of a half dozen young people who were uncrating and hanging a show.

  “Doris, darling,” Dermond yelled, “the reds in that one will absolutely slay that wonderful Ricardi. You’ll have to get it much further away. Try the west wall, dear.”

  He came smiling over to Jimmy Wing. “This show is so colorful, we’re having a hideous time hanging it. How are you, Jimmy? I’m really terribly excited about this show. It’s a shame we couldn’t have gotten it during the season, but it’s really much too good for us at any time of year. It’s a traveling show. California artists. I was able to get it only because they had a little gap in their scheduling. It’s on its way from the Delgado to the Four Arts. Please don’t tell me you are going to review it! But you might do better than poor Dottie Grumbann at that. The dear thing comes to an absolute cultural stop over anything more complex than a Picasso.”

  “Is this a bad time to talk to you, Mortie? I’m just feeling out a possible feature story on these summer classes for kids.”

  “I can talk, if we stand here where I can see what’s happening. Charles! I want to save that center wall for the Deibenkorn, please. Why don’t you get it and hang it next, dear boy?”