A Flash of Green

by John D. MacDonald

  “In the red Jag? I’ve seen him too. But I don’t know who she is. She looked pretty nice.” Bobby snickered. “I saw him twice with her, and the second time I saw him, he didn’t want me to. He slid way down in the seat, but he wasn’t quick enough.”

  “Where was that?”

  “You know that brand-new motel, set way back, where Bay Highway comes out onto the Tamiami Trail below Everset? The Drowsy Lady Motor House, very fancy?”

  “Yes.”

  “About a week and a half ago, when Jesse Gardner came down and gave the exhibition at Cabeza Knolls, he stayed there. He gave me a good interview, remember? Anyhow, he had to catch a real early flight so I agreed to go down there at dawn and pick him up and take him to the airport. I got there about twenty after five. He was in a unit in the building furthest back. You have to drive around behind it. Just as I went down the driveway to that building, the red Jag was coming out. It was just getting light. The girl was driving. Jigger didn’t duck quick enough. I guess he hasn’t got anything against girls.”

  Wing was tempted to ask more questions, but instead he finished his coffee and said, “We won’t worry about him, then. We’ll worry about you, Bobby, and how you’re going to get friendly with Miss Frosty.”

  “No thanks. If I had the time and the money to have a steady girl, I wouldn’t want one who could snap my spine in her bare hands. And I wouldn’t want any sexpot pushover anyways.”

  “At fifteen?”

  “Since thirteen, Jimmy. It’s no secret. And she isn’t the only one in West Bay Junior High. There’s a whole crowd of them in that school, and, I don’t know, they make me nervous. The way they look at you, you know they just don’t give a damn. They don’t even go steady. They just go around in a rat pack and do any damn thing. They know how to keep from getting in trouble, but it just doesn’t seem right. I know I’m only eighteen, but those kids make me feel as middle-aged as you are.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  “Aw, you know how I mean it, Jimmy. Say! Why couldn’t we do a story on it together? I could get the facts.”

  “Much as I hate to deprive you of the chance to do creative research, Bobby, we don’t work for a crusading paper. Too many of our advertisers have probably fathered those little sluts. Borklund would drop in a dead faint if I suggested it.”

  “I guess he would. When I get out of college, I’m going to work for a paper with some guts. Why do you hang around this crummy town, Jimmy? You’re good enough to get on a better paper.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “I mean it. Why do you stay here?”

  “I left once, and it didn’t work out.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I always get lost driving around a strange city. I haven’t got much sense of direction.”

  “Don’t talk down to me, Jimmy.”

  Wing stood up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Okay. I won’t. I’ll tell you one of the great truths I’ve learned. Every place in the world is exactly like every other place.”

  Bobby, looking up at him, shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe that. I wouldn’t want to let myself try to believe that. If that’s true … there wouldn’t be much point in anything.”

  “It’s just something you don’t want to find out too soon,” Jimmy Wing said, and walked out and back to the newsroom. He checked the files for the previous week and found that Gardner had given his exhibition of golf on a Wednesday afternoon at Cabeza Knolls.

  It took him a half hour to drive to the Drowsy Lady. He arrived a little before ten-thirty. On the way out he had time to plan his approach.

  Floodlights blazed against the lobby entrance to the Drowsy Lady. As Wing turned in he remembered, fondly, Van Hubble’s explosive reaction to motel architecture. Van had been a mild man, until something offended his sense of taste and decency.

  “They cantilever a great big goddam hunk of roof at a quote daring unquote angle and hang big vulgar sheets of glass off it and light it up like an appendectomy. You can’t tell a bowling alley from a superburger drive-in from a motel from a goddam bank, Jimmy. They all turn people into bugs crawling across aseptic plastic. It’s all tail-fin modern, boy. It’s cheap, jazzy and sterile. It isn’t architecture. There’s nothing indigenous about it. It’s all over the country, all the same, like a red itch, like junk toys dumped out of a sack. And it’s so stinking patronizing.”

  A huge sign displayed a single heavy-lidded feminine eye, the trademark of the establishment, repeated on highway signs thirty miles in every direction.

  He parked and went into the tall lobby. The restaurant had closed at ten. A desk clerk placed a registration card in front of him with a hospitable flourish.

  “Is the manager around?”

  “What would you like to see him about? Maybe I can help you.”

  “I’m not selling anything, if that’s what’s worrying you. Is he around?”

  “He’s in the cocktail lounge, watching the fights. I could get him now, if it’s that important.…”

  “I’ll go watch the fights too. What’s his name?”

  “Mr. Frank Durley. He’s a heavy-set man, bald.”

  The cocktail lounge was very dark. Some lens spots shone directly down onto the bar, and there was a light behind the bottle racks. So much crowd noise came over the television set Wing got the impression there were a lot of people in the room. After he felt his way to the bar his vision adjusted and he saw there were but five people in addition to the bartender. A couple in a corner were leaning toward each other, ignoring the television set. Three men sat at the bar, watching it. The bald man sat alone. The other two were together.

  Wing ordered a beer. He had taken a first sip when the fight was stopped in the seventh round. The bartender went to the set and turned it off, turned on some kind of background-music system, and increased the intensity of the light over the bar.

  Durley got off the bar stool and said, “So you make another half buck off me, Harry.”

  “A pleasure,” the bartender said.

  As the manager started to leave, Jimmy Wing stopped him, introduced himself. When he said it was private, Durley led the way over to a table in the corner near the door.

  “This is a delicate matter,” Jimmy said. “I’m a reporter for the Record-Journal, but this isn’t newspaper business. It’s more a favor for a friend.”

  “That’s how come the name struck a bell. James Wing. I’ve seen it in the paper. I’ve seen you before too. Out here?”

  “I came out to your opening in April. I don’t remember meeting you then. I met two of the owners.”

  “I’m one of the owners too, fella. And manager. What’s this delicate matter you got on your mind?”

  “A couple of kids. They’ve checked in here at least once, I think. Both the girl’s parents and the boy’s parents are friends of mine. I want to nail it down, prove it, so the parents can straighten those two out and get them off this kick.”

  Durley had a fleshy, unrevealing face, a casual voice. “You want to nail it down.”

  “I suppose the registration card would be the best way.”

  “You got any kind of writ or warrant to check my books?”

  “Mr. Durley, that isn’t a very cooperative attitude.”

  Durley leaned forward, wearing a rather strange smile. “You want to know about my attitude? I got this kind of an attitude. I got the attitude of a man with a heavy piece of money in this thing. I sold out a nice operation in Jersey. You know when we were due to open? December first last year. So we open in April with the season over. You know the occupancy I run? Forty percent is a good night, a helluva good night. You know where the break-even is? Seventy-one per cent. So you come around doing a favor for a friend. I’m hurting, fella. I’m hurting real bad, and I’ll rent units to anything that’s warm, breathing and has money. Nobody around here ever heard of your kids. Anybody rents an overnight key here, they buy privacy too. You want something on anybody, fella, you don’t get
it the easy way, not from me. You go around the other way, like following them. If we got to do a hot-pants trade to keep alive, we’ll do it until we get fat enough to pick and choose. You following me? In the meantime, they rent the key and they buy privacy. We need the local plates we’re getting, and if I fink on any of that business, word gets around and we lose it. Right now I’m running a hot-pillow trade in a six hundred thousand dollar plant, which makes no sense at all and sometimes makes me feel ashamed, but I’m doing it to survive, and I’ll keep doing it until I decide I don’t have to. That’s the kind of attitude I’ve got.”

  Jimmy Wing poured the rest of his beer into his glass. He smiled and shook his head and said, “Rough talk, Mr. Durley. This local trade, you put them way in the back units so the cars are out of sight?”

  “I got a lot of book work to do tonight, fella, so if you’ll …”

  “Wait a minute. You’re in Palm County. I was born and raised here. I know a hell of a lot of people, Durley. I’ve done favors for so many of them, they’d do little favors for me without asking why. I know everybody in the courthouse.”

  “Where are you going with it?”

  “You got hard with me, right sudden. I don’t know as that’s too smart. This isn’t like Jersey. This is small town around here. Do all your signs conform to county ordinances? How much inspection are you getting on those county licenses you took out? How about sanitation? How about setbacks? All your kitchen help fingerprinted? Maybe it could even be a lot easier than that, Mr. Durley. Maybe a sheriff’s deputy could take a swing through all your parking areas every hour on the hour all night long, with that big red flasher working so nobody would miss him. Now, I’m telling you just as honestly as I can that the biggest mistake you can make right now is to decide I’m bluffing.”

  Durley went over to the bar and came back with a drink. He sat quietly for almost a full minute. Finally he said, “I got so much on my mind, sometimes I forget how to be smart.”

  “It was a week ago last Wednesday. They were in a unit in the last building in the back. Dark-haired girl, small and pretty. Big husky blond boy. Red Jaguar.”

  “They would have checked in in the evening.”

  “Probably. And left very early.”

  “Let’s go check it with Pritch. He was on.”

  They went into a small office beyond the switchboard. The desk clerk could not recall at first, and remembered when Wing said it was the night Gardner had stayed there.

  “Oh, I think I’ve got it now. Let me check the cards.”

  Pritchard came back with a card in his hand. “The girl came alone and registered right after I came on. Here’s the time stamp. Twelve after four. Haughty as hell. Wanted one way in the back. Went and looked at it and came back and paid cash. Eighteen fifty-four, with tax. She wanted to pay on her way in instead of out because she said she and her husband would be leaving early. Yes, I remember seeing the car out in front. Red Jag. She’s got here on the card Michigan plates.”

  “That would be right,” Jimmy said.

  “She said they’d take occupancy later on. And she …” He stopped, snapped his fingers, and excused himself again.

  Durley examined the card and handed it to Wing. The writing was firm, large, angular, yet unmistakably feminine. Mr. and Mrs. Nathaniel Tannis of Flint, Michigan. Wing was dryly amused to notice that Tannis was Sinnat spelled backward.

  Pritchard came back and placed an identical card on the desk between them. “They’re in the house tonight, Frank. I thought it was familiar. But Gil checked them in before I come on. Is there something wrong?”

  “Nothing you have to know about, Pritch,” Durley said. “All you have to remember is how Mr. Wing here is a man we’re real good buddies with. We’re such good buddies, you take these two cards in and run off a photo copy for our good friend Mr. Wing.”

  The clerk took the cards away. “I appreciate this,” Jimmy said.

  “That’s why I’m doing it. So you’ll appreciate it. So if I get in a jam I’ve got a local buddy to turn to. I wouldn’t want anybody thinking of all the things you thought of, and wanting a shakedown.”

  “It isn’t likely to come to that around here.”

  “That’s nice to know. Funny, the girl doing the check-in.”

  “The boy looks too young.”

  “If you want to make my damn day perfect, now tell me the girl is fifteen.”

  “Nineteen.”

  “That’s a small help.”

  “Are you going to make it?”

  “We’ll make it,” Durley said. “If my wife has to make up every bed herself, and if I have to be desk clerk, bartender, chef and janitor, we’ll make it. We can’t afford not to. The trouble was, we missed the season that would carry us through the first summer.”

  “The rates seem high.”

  “The rear units have kitchen deals in them. We start at ten for a single. Once we hang out the low, low, summer rates signs, you’ll know we’ve been whipped. We’re not after the shoppers. It has to stay a class operation.”

  Pritchard brought him the copies of the registration cards. Durley walked him to the lobby door. Durley said, “I don’t have to tell you what not to talk about and you don’t have to tell me, right? We understand each other. Come out to dinner. Bring a friend. The food is good. It cost a hundred grand over estimate, and it was four months late opening, but the food is good.”

  Wing started to drive out, then turned and drove past the registration lobby and the big sapphire pool, back to the last unit. He estimated there were twenty rooms in the building. There were five cars parked in the darkness, faintly illuminated by a parking-area light on a tall pole. The little red car was nosed up to the low shrubbery in front of number sixty-six. The canvas top was up. The windows of sixty-six were dark. The little car looked more patient than furtive.

  He turned around and drove out. Durley was standing in the parking area in front of the office watching him as he turned out onto the highway and headed back toward Palm City.

  It was quarter after midnight when he knocked at the side door, the office door, of Elmo’s home.

  Elmo let him in. “Set, boy. When you phoned I was so far asleep Dellie liked to shook me to death waking me up.” He yawned and leaned against the edge of his desk, looking at Jimmy sitting on the couch. “Saturday night I used to howl till break of day, but I’m slowed a lot. Wish you could have waited until morning.”

  “I don’t want to see too much of you in the daylight, Elmo. Here or in public places. It might not be smart. And if I’d waited until tomorrow I might have changed my mind about the whole thing. And you had the idea this was urgent, the last time I talked to you.”

  “Everything is urgent, boy. The only un-urgent thing in the world is taking your pleasure, and that’s a sometime urgent thing if you set it off too long. I hope to God you got something worthwhile on Sinnat.”

  “I don’t know what it’s worth, but I damn well know it’s about the only thing you’re going to get.”

  “Leroy said you’d get nothing at all. He poked around some.”

  “When you ask me to do something, I don’t want a lot of other people I don’t know about doing the same thing.”

  Elmo chuckled. He hitched himself up onto the desk, reached inside his silk robe and scratched his chest. “You got so many ideas about what you will do and what you won’t do, you leave me confused. So far, Jimmy, right up to now, I can’t see as you’ve done anything yet.”

  “Maybe I’ve done something about Dial Sinnat. I don’t know how you can use it, or if you can use it. I don’t want to be mixed up in that end of it. I want that clear before we go into it, Elmo.”

  “You keep this up, you’re going to put me in an ugly condition, boy. We’re going to get along fine. I won’t ask anything of you you can’t do. We went into that. I want you for what you can do … better than other people.”

  “Sinnat is a tough-minded man. Pushing him the way I have in mind might not w
ork out. By the way, he told Kat Hubble this deal is being handled smarter than any of the five men involved, and he wondered who could be the silent partner with the brains.”

  Elmo’s eyebrows went up in wonder. “Well. How about that? So there’s another real good reason to make him stop thinking about any part of it. What have you got?”

  “I had good luck getting it,” Jimmy said, and told him precisely what he had found out, and turned the copies of the registration cards over to him.

  Elmo studied the copies, walked around his desk and sat down. “Too bad it had to be Burt’s boy.” He shook his head and smiled. “No beaches and backseats for that little gal. No bugs and bushes for her. She travels first class. Whether it’s any use to us, then, depends on how much he thinks of his little girl.”

  “We can assume he’s partial to her.”

  “You look beat and you talk mean, Jimmy. You tired?”

  “A little. This isn’t my normal line of work.”

  “It’s a little special for all of us. But don’t you start bleeding for her, hear? She’s a little girl got herself a husky young buck to while away the long summer with. You sure Burt’s boy is seventeen?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’ll have to check the law on it with Leroy, but I got the idea she’s been tampering with the morals of a minor. And there’s some kind of an ordinance about conspicuous cohabitation, but I don’t know as it would fit this here situation.”

  “I hope this won’t turn into some kind of a public mess.”

  Elmo looked benignly at him. “Now, if there is any way in the world of this turning into a public mess, this girl’s father is going to be the first one in the world to want to prevent it. The way I see it, those men that run fast and loose through all the women they can reach, it’s an entirely different thing when it comes to their own daughters. He might be right sensitive about this, Jimmy.”

  “He might be.”

  Elmo leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “There’s another way to go at it too. There’s no way in the world this little girl could prove it was Burt’s boy with her these two times. She could be claiming it was Burt’s boy just because if it came out it was somebody else, it would be a worse mess.”