Slam the Big Door

by John D. MacDonald

  “They don’t get along so good? The girl and Jamison?”

  “Not good and not bad either,” Rob said.

  Purdy spat over the railing into the yard. “Boy, what did you find out about that funny-name foreigner staying there? He got any cash money?”

  “His name is Rodenska, Mike Rodenska. He’s a newspaperman. His wife died a little while ago. He’s got some money.”

  “Has he got enough?”

  “I think he’s probably got enough, if he wants to go in with Jamison. I don’t know if Jamison has talked to him or not.”

  There was a long and thoughtful silence. “That’s a risk I guess we got to take,” Purdy said. “I’ve just about dried up every other place Jamison could go for cash money. Course, might be we could hedge it a little. Boy, you keep on seeing that Debbie Ann, and see if you can make you a chance to hint to that funny-name fella the land deal is sour.”

  Rob said thoughtfully, “Of course it wouldn’t be sour if Troy could get hold of …”

  “Boy,” Purdy said harshly. “One half percent of Twin Keys could be fifty thousand cash money.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything by what I just said, Mr. Elmarr. Not a thing. I was just working up to something else I think should be considered. I was wondering what there is to prevent Jamison getting in touch with, or being contacted by, one of the big land syndicates, say from the East Coast. They could see the potential in a minute. And he could still get out with a nice profit.”

  J. C. chuckled. “Run into that before, Raines. Tell him about that time they come in and tried to grab a deal Wink was interested in, Corey.”

  Corey laughed softly. “You can’t make a deal that big quick and quiet. Wink found out long before it was going to be closed. So he started scrambling around. First thing you know the tract comes up for a zoning change and the Ravenna County Board of Commissioners tabled it for further study. Next thing somebody brings an injunction against the bay fill that was going on. Then it turns out maybe somebody got a little sloppy approving the title on the tract. With one thing and another, the Miami boys pulled out, and soon as Wink got it, all those little problems sort of got themselves ironed right out.”

  “I get the picture,” Rob said, swallowing. “By the way, Jack Connorly has been after Jamison to run for commissioner in November.”

  “Honest to God?” Purdy said with blank astonishment. He rocked his chair down onto four legs, slapped his knees, and began to gasp with laughter. When he caught his breath he said, “That Connorly is pure horse’s ass, I swear. Gawd damn! Well, if he wants to make a big political figger out of Jamison, he better hustle his ass down the road, ’cause come November, Jamison is going to be back down to his proper size, building little bitty carports.” All amusement disappeared with an almost startling abruptness. “Anybody got anything to add?”

  “Just one little old thing I was saving, Purd,” J. C. said, fat little fingers laced across his stomach. “I got this in such a roundabout way, it isn’t worth trying to explain it. But it’s a good guess Jamison has got him another woman. Don’t know who she is, but she’s staying at Shelder’s Cottages on Ravenna Key, there on the bay side, just below Whitey’s Fish Camp. Don’t know if it will have any bearing on what we were talking about, but they say Jamison and Mary Kail ain’t getting on so smooth lately, and the reason might be right there at Shelder’s. You get any hint they’re scrappin’, Rob?”

  “Nothing specific. I think he’s drinking a little more than he was, from what Debbie Ann said. I thought it might be because he’s worried about his project. Pre-development sales are way off.”

  “Nothing surprising about that,” Corey Haas said. “He can’t make any time sales and give title, on account he has to have cash money to get the mortgage release. And there’s a strong rumor with the real estate boys the development may never get finished. Jamison has cut down to one salesman, and they set in that office over there without much happening. Just be-backs.”

  “Just what?” J. C. asked.

  “People use up an hour staring at a lot, scuffing their feet, then say we’ll be back. But they never do come back.”

  “That about does it for now,” Purdy Elmarr said. “You too dog-lazy to han’ me that bottle, J. C.? Thanks. Here you go, boy.…”

  A little over an hour later, his mouth slightly numbed by bourbon, Rob Raines plunged his little MGA west over bad roads toward the Tamiami Trail. Liquor made the world exceptionally vivid and slightly unreal. Thoughts, doubts, ambitions, boiled in his mind. Did I make the right impression? I know how they’re using me, but are they also planning to use me in some other way I don’t know about? This is the edge of the big time. One toe in the door. Handle it just right. No mistakes. Then there’ll be fifty thousand, maybe thirty to keep after taxes and all, and they’ll let me in on another one. Elmarr will still use Dillon and Burkhardt for most of his business, but they’re getting pretty old. They took Stan Killian in with them, but Stan is a tanglefoot. They’re all getting along. But they’ll last long enough for me to get in solid.

  He thought about Jamison. A sitting duck. He had that big advertising agency background, and he’d done well enough as a small builder, but he didn’t have a chance against Elmarr, Haas and J. C. Arlenton. Jamison had no briefing on those kind of men. They’d tear him apart like a chicken and suck the bones.

  He came out onto the Trail at the Stickney Point traffic light, and as he waited for his chance to turn south, all exhilaration faded and, without warning, he felt bleak, depressed.

  Is this what I wanted? Is this where I was headed? He turned south, into a long line of traffic on the Trail, boxed behind a car from Ohio. The hell with it. I’ll make mine. It’s all legal. That’s what the training is good for. So you know where the line is, and you can stay on the right side of it. That’s what they use you for, to find out just how far they can go. And the closer to that line you can work, and still guarantee safety, the more valuable you are to those boys.

  Forget all that idealism crap. It’s just a blindfold they put on you, so you won’t realize you’re living in a jungle. Whatever happened to Jamison was his own fault. He was like a stupid caveman who’d gotten lucky and felled a big piece of meat, and instead of hacking off all he could carry and taking it back to his cave, he was walking round and round it, stone ax in his hand. It was going to spoil before he could eat the whole thing, so now a bunch of them were watching him from the bushes, waiting for the right minute to spring. They weren’t even going to leave him with nothing—which they could. They were going to give him a little chunk to take home.

  His widowed mother, Dolores Raines, called Dee by her garden club friends, sat fatly on her heels in the backyard, wearing her big straw hat, bulging green slacks, khaki shirt and gardening gloves, troweling a flower bed. She grunted erect as he approached, turned, beamed at him, and kissed the corner of his mouth.

  “How did it go, sweetie? Are you going to be Purdy Elmarr’s new smart young lawyer? I’m so proud of you, sweetie.”

  “I guess it went all right. It’s just a little thing. I’m setting up a little corporation. Purdy and J. C. Arlenton and Corey Haas. We’re going to pick up some land, maybe.”

  “We, sweetie? Are you really in with them?”

  “Just barely, Mom. One half of one percent.”

  She hugged him and made a little squeal of ecstasy. “But it’s a start, sweetie! Even if you only make seven dollars, you’re in with some of the most powerful men in this part of the state.”

  “I might make a little more than seven dollars, Mom.”

  “You’ve had a lot to drink! I can tell by your eyes.”

  “Purdy Elmarr’s liquor, Mom.”

  They grinned at each other with private understanding. “Now don’t you get into any of those big poker games they have out there.”

  “He’s not about to ask me. Yet.”

  “Later on, sweetie, let’s go out to dinner to celebrate. Just you and me. A fat old la
dy and her wonderful, brilliant son.”

  “I’m sorry. I better change and go down and see Debbie Ann.”

  Dee’s mouth grew smaller. “I know she had a silly crush on you years ago even though she was years younger than you—hardly past childhood and you were almost a man, but I really don’t see what the great attraction is. She’s a divorced woman, Robert. I haven’t told you this before but I was actually shocked when I first saw her after she came back to live with Mary. She actually has a slutty look. I’m sure there are just dozens of really lovely girls around who would be delighted if you’d pay as much attention to them as you do to that …”

  “Jealous?” he asked innocently.

  “Oh, you!” She looked coy. “Maybe I am. A little.” She frowned. “Sweetie, I just don’t want my handsome intelligent son to get involved with a loose woman. I can remember how I used to worry about the two of you, years ago, wondering if she was … encouraging you in any way. She had that look, even then. I was so relieved when you broke up with her. And now, to have it start all over again … Really, sweetie, I am a woman of the world. I’m not an old prude. And I can see how she could be attractive to men … well, in a sort of primitive way … or you could say an animal way … and it wouldn’t particularly please me if that’s all you’re interested in, but it wouldn’t worry me the way it does thinking you might get serious about her.”

  “When I’m ready to get married, it won’t be to her, Mom.”

  She looked intently at him, sighed and smiled. “Just don’t let her trap you, sweetie. I guess it would be hard to trap a lawyer, wouldn’t it. Run along then. I guess men just have to be like that. You can settle down after you’re married, the way your father did. He certainly was no angel before he met me.”

  He went in the house and showered. He thought about Debbie Ann. He knew he had made a bad decision last night when he had ignored her objections, thinking that if he could arouse her, she’d let him into her room. But it had made her furious. He had been as angry as she was. What the hell difference could it make to her? She was divorced, wasn’t she? And it had actually been so damn easy that first and only time, long ago. There had been girls before her, a very few, and a lot of girls and women since her, but it had never been like that. In his tipsy haste and clumsiness he had hurt her badly, and by rights that should have ended any chance of her response, but she had come out of the paralysis of the unexpected pain within moments, erupting into a greedy gasping frenzy that had at first shocked him, and then almost immediately depleted him. He remembered how she had cried afterward, and how she had looked, sitting on the blanket, her face contorted, tears flowing, sniffling, her small body red in the glow of a sun that sat cloudless on the rim of the Gulf, as she wriggled back into the damp swim suit. He remembered how she had kept shuddering there in the hot sun at each touch of his hands, keeping her eyes squeezed tight shut as though that somehow kept him from seeing her.

  They had sailed back in dusk that turned into night, and she had refused to help with the boat, or look at him or speak to him. And after that, no matter how carefully he plotted, he couldn’t make her do it again. He couldn’t even get her alone.

  When he heard she had come back for a divorce, even though eight years had gone by, the wanting came back, strong as ever. Last night had been the best opportunity yet.

  As he dressed he told himself that he would have to hide his anger. Be very nice to her. Apologize extensively. Blame his insistence on alcohol. Because—and the thought chilled a little area in the back of his mind—if she refused to have anything to do with him, Purdy Elmarr would find out about it somehow. And he would be of no use to them. Any lawyer could set up a simple corporation. They weren’t paying him fifty thousand dollars for that. He knew what they thought. They thought they were paying him fifty thousand dollars to continue sleeping with Debbie Ann. It was a small hedge compared to a sixteen million gross. It was espionage money. He wished he could start earning it in the way they thought he was earning it. So change the approach. Maybe humility would work. All in all, it was something the law texts had not mentioned.

  And suddenly he realized he had a lot more at stake than he had counted on. He stood in shocked silence, thinking. If the deal went through, no harm would be done. It would be a private matter. But what if it didn’t work? It would make a juicy story for Corey and J. C. to tell around Ravenna, Venice, Sarasota and Bradenton.

  He could hear J. C. holding forth to a bunch of local businessmen at lunch, chuckling. “Purd, Corey and me figured we had that Jamison land practically in our pocket, boys. Hell, we even cut that Raines squirt in on a piece of it, on account of he’d cut himself in on a lot a pieces of somethin’ else raht under Troy Jamison and Mary Kail’s nose, so he was in a spot to steer it all our way a little, you know, but it just didn’t work out. But I bet it was the nicest kind o’ law work that boy ever had. Or ever will.”

  Rob Raines felt his face grow hot. A thing like that, a story that would accumulate artistic exaggeration as it passed from person to person, and lent itself so readily to coarse and obvious puns, could cook you for good. Ten years from now they’d still be telling it.

  “See that fella ’cross the street? Rob Raines. I’ll tell you how he got screwed one time.”

  Rob suddenly knew that those three men knew the additional risk he was taking. “God damn them!” he whispered. And he knew that the deal had to go through. He had to make it go through. Because, if it didn’t, what had looked like the beginning of importance could turn out to be the end of any possibility of importance. It would not be the same in a city. But here, up and down this chain of Gulf-side resort towns and cities, the business and legal community was like one small town. Everyone knew your triumphs and mistakes, your golf handicap, your political opinions, your amorous adventures, the size of your father’s and your grandfather’s estate, and whether your mother had married up or down to produce you.

  Had he previously established a public identity, had he made any particular start in establishing the legend of himself in the community, potential damage would not be as great. But he had been most careful. He had balanced the possibly critical opinions of the MGA and the sailing squadron and the addiction to rather expensive sports jackets, by subscribing to the opinions of the more conservative wing of the Democratic party, by avoiding divorce cases, drunk-driving cases and collision litigation, by serving on the hospital drive and the Community Chest, by entertaining and being entertained by the more responsible segments of Ravenna society. As an attractive young bachelor he had been able to be carefully selective. He had begun to acquire a small amount of estate work, and he had turned down one political opportunity that had seemed to him to require more work than kudos.

  But should Twin Keys fall through, the results of the four careful years of practice would be bitched. He would be known as that young lawyer who was so eager to get cozy with the Elmarr group he had been willing to further his ambitions in bed. It would make of him a figure of fun. The community would not be indignant. Or cruel. They would be amused. It wouldn’t be the end of him. But it would set a limit. He could go only so far.

  And so it was a sobered, apprehensive and completely determined young man who drove south to Riley Key through the gaudy lights of sunset, his brown hands sweaty on the wheel of the agile little car.

  Four

  AT THE KEY CLUB at the southern end of Riley Key, Sunday night was known, in the Club bulletins, as Family Night. The Club was housed in an old rambling roomy frame structure that had originally been a hunting and fishing lodge built by a Cleveland industrialist. He had owned six hundred feet of land from Gulf to bay, and had built the lodge on the bay side, close to a natural lagoon that cut into the Key from the bay side. When the Cleveland man had died in 1923 a group of his friends who had often been guests at the lodge, remembering the freedom of their annual visits, and the good times they had enjoyed, had banded together and purchased the lodge from the estate and, after establishi
ng ground rules and installing a Bahamian couple to operate it, had incorporated it as the ultra-private Key Club.

  In 1932, after most of the members had died physically or financially, the Club would have folded had not one of the original members, who had retired to Florida at precisely the right time, been determined to save it as a club. He opened the membership list to suitable applicants in Ravenna, fourteen miles to the north, and in the much smaller town of Gulfway, five miles to the south. At that time there were also a few wealthy retireds, a very few, who had settled on Riley Key and were potential members.

  The Club did not thrive, but it did continue to exist. It had been so solidly constructed of black cypress and hard pine that there were few maintenance problems.

  By 1959, though the original structure was largely unchanged, the Key Club was fashionable, expensive, exclusive and beautifully operated. There were rental cabañas on the Gulf side for landlocked members and the guests of waterfront members lacking guest facilities. The entire structure was air-conditioned. Kitchen facilities were entirely modern. Lighting effects were dramatic and professional. The lagoon had been widened and deepened, the channel dredged and marked. There were dockage facilities for a considerable number of sizable watercraft.

  Though it took a staff of sixteen to operate the Club and facilities, and monthly bills were prepared on the most modern of accounting equipment, and the initiation fee made the new member think thrice, the membership still insisted upon calling the Club homey and quaint, pointing out as evidences of quaintness the dark-beamed cathedral ceilings, the dusty throngs of stuffed fish mounted high on the walls, the enormous stone fireplaces.