The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  After she hung up she stretched out again, knowing she would soon have to make the effort and take a shower. She hoped she had sounded more assured than she felt. The lie about legal things was flimsy. She wondered how Aunt Jen and her mother would react were they to know the real reason why she wanted to stay a few days. But it was impossible to subject them to that, when it might turn out false after all. It was horrid enough losing Lu without having to wonder if someone had killed her. If it was proven, they would have to know, of course.

  She was wise enough about herself to know that the suspicion of murder, ugly as it seemed, had helped sustain her throughout this incredible day of sacred words and burial. Somehow, were it pure accident, it made the world a nonsensical place. Lucille had deserved so much more, and had sounded in her letters as if she could be on the verge of finding it.

  Such an unreal day, riding in the back seat of the limousine with Kelsey Hanson, the two of them and a driver, the first car after the hearse, riding behind Lucille with the silent, suffering, estranged husband, through the hot glare of streets, where a few people stopped and stared.

  And the sudden geographical spasm made loss more endurable through making it less easy to comprehend. She had been taken from the narrow grubby orderly Maytime of Boston, held suspended in the placid jet over a pastel earth slowly turning, then pulled down into this rank and muggy place where the pretty people, under their tin palm fronds, buried her only sister and kept looking at her without anxiety as though to say, “See how nicely we do it?”

  She had finished her shower and she was tucking her thin white blouse into her dark skirt when there was a knock at her door. She went to the door and leaned close to it and asked who it was.

  “Stanial,” the voice said.

  “Just a moment please.” She stepped into her sandals, yanked a brush through her lively wiry brown hair, slashed her mouth quickly with lipstick, patted the bed smooth, dropped random clothing into the big bottom drawer of the bureau and let him in, performing all these actions without pause or hesitation, moving from one into the next with a balance and coordination that made it all a brief segment of a strange realistic dance.

  He was against the outside glare and she could not see him clearly until he was inside and the door was closed. And then she could not feel the confidence she had hoped to feel. He looked too ordinary. Just a rather bland youngish man of dark complexion, too carefully dressed for the climate and the area. As they met each other for the first time, shook hands rather stiffly, she thought, He could be coming to make an estimate. But not to sell anything, because he makes no attempt to be ingratiating. A man who comes to collect, or make out a form, and isn’t particularly interested because the account is so small. The only thing not quite ordinary about him was an impression of physical durability, not so much because of the heft of his shoulders as the deft and positive way he moved.

  There were two chairs. She brought the straight chair over from the desk and they sat by the window, facing each other across the lamp table.

  “It might be nothing at all,” she said.

  “It might be nothing, and it might be something, and we’ll satisfy ourselves one way or the other, Miss Larrimore.”

  “Did you bring the letter?”

  He took it out of his inside jacket pocket. “You can have it back. I have a photocopy.”

  “Did you think that part of it sounded … strange?”

  “Yes.”

  But his tone was so noncommittal she had to open the letter and look at the strange part again to reassure herself. The letter had arrived the same day as the news she was dead.

  The odd part read, “Problems, problems, problems. This is a strange one all tangled up into emotions and ethics and a couple of kinds of secrecy. I’m trying to sort it out and decide what to do. You seem to be my only outlet on some things, kid sister, so bear with me. The details later. I was very slickly trapped into betraying a confidence, and too much of a coward—as yet—to tell the person who trusted me that the secret is out. Not all the way, but enough to make me uneasy. Now a third person has entered the picture, and strangely enough so that, for the first time, I can believe I might actually be in some sort of danger. Nothing specific. Just a crinkly feeling at the back of the neck. Something of value is involved, of course. What else makes people sly and dangerous? I can take some sly little steps of my own to put B and C off the scent, or just tell A the whole thing, or do both in that order, which might make me look less of an idiot. Sorry to inflict the Ian Fleming bit, Barb, but you’ll get the whole story after it’s over.”

  Barbara looked defiantly at Paul Stanial. “It is enough, dammit! Lu was like a fish in the water. Cramps drown people because they panic.”

  “Her lungs were full of water and there wasn’t a mark on her.”

  “Investigation over?”

  She became uncomfortably aware of the compulsive impact of those very blue deep-set eyes, and before she looked away she thought she saw amusement.

  “I can give it the television treatment if you’d be more at home with that, Miss Larrimore.” He deepened his voice. “By God, little lady, this is more than coincidence, or my name ain’t Private Eye Maloney.” In his normal tone he said, “Or we can deal with facts. And when we can connect several facts with a supposition, we can check out the supposition.”

  “Please. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s hardly ever dramatic, Miss Larrimore. People hear about the dramatic ones and they remember the dramatic ones. And for everyone like that, there’s a thousand little dirty ones nobody remembers. And lots of times there’s nothing at all. You wait and watch and talk and think and you end up with nothing at all. You have to know that.” For a moment his poise was uncertain. “You’re another fact, you know.”

  “How?”

  “Complaints are rated by the people who make them. You seem like an organized person. Was your sister, too?”

  “Organized? She was a very stable person, Mr. Stanial. She didn’t exaggerate things or create mysteries. Neither do I.”

  “So the letter is more valid and the complaint is more valid. Do you follow me?”

  “I think so.”

  “A little background would help. On both of you.”

  “The Larrimore girls,” she said with a trace of bitterness, taking the proffered cigarette, leaning to the light. “She was the pretty one. The proper social standing, but not the money. Oh, little bits came in, decently inherited from great-uncles and so on, enough to make the college thing a little bit less of a scramble, but still a scramble. Daddy died when we were small, right in the midst of a business gamble which might have worked out if he’d lived. Mother is the sort of woman who would never marry again. So there was reluctant charity from both sides of the family, always called something else. And an old apartment on the wrong end of a good street. Mother collapsed and Daddy’s maiden sister, Aunt Jen, came to hold it all together temporarily. She found the apartment, got us moved and has stayed with us ever since. I don’t want to sound like something out of Henry James, but genteel poverty is the worst kind, I think, because you have to keep imitating the standards you are supposed to live up to. Break one cup of the good tea service and it is a disaster, believe me. And one is always changing hems and necklines and dying things this season’s color, and scrounging up dues for something you can’t afford not to belong to because you’ll lose the contacts. Four females in an apartment, Mr. Stanial. It’s a stale life.

  “Lu fulfilled the quota. Kelsey was very charming and very decorative and very rich, in a background way. It was a lovely little wedding, and it damned near cleaned us out. But we made it. And then, as it turned out, we hadn’t made it at all. I brought Lu’s letters, just in case. I squirrel things away. String, letters, stamps with the stickum gone. Mother has congestive heart disease, and she can last six months or six years. I work in a brokerage office. I go to work and I come home. I could be twenty-five or fifty-five and it wouldn’t seem to mak
e much difference.…” She stopped abruptly and looked at him with a startled expression. “I don’t go on like this to people. It’s the crazy day and the crazy heat and the trip.” She stabbed her cigarette out in the shallow ashtray and was suddenly afraid she was going to start crying, so she stood up and moved away from him.

  “The letters would be a help, Barbara.”

  “Don’t patronize me!”

  “Don’t keep your guard so high. We’ll be working on this thing for a little while. Paul and Barbara is easier. Also, it helps me. You’ll talk a little more freely as Barbara.”

  She whirled and stared at him. “More freely than just now? No thanks. I worked myself into a nice case of self-pity, and it’s a lousy emotion. Not tears for my sister. Tears for me.”

  “How about the letters?”

  She got them out of the pocket of her suitcase and took them to him and sat near him again. “It’s sort of a … representative collection. The office letters, I guess you can call them. She’d write just the normal sort of things to me at home, or to mother mostly. The … very personal ones came to the office, Paul.”

  “Don’t be so uncertain, Barbara. My role is personal and confidential, and this is the death of a woman, and her emotional life is pertinent.”

  He held his hand out and she gave him the packet of letters. “I don’t see how you can just go around and find out anything from all these people here.”

  He explained his cover and showed her the insurance identifications which had been prepared for him. She understood much more quickly than Walmo had, saying, with approval, “And they all think you’re trying to prove suicide to save money for your company. Paul, will my staying here a few days spoil anything? Will anybody think anything is funny if you see me and talk to me?”

  He shrugged. “It will help, if anything. You and your mother are beneficiaries under this imaginary policy, and you’re indignant about this investigation and hang around to make sure I don’t cheat you. This sort of thing is standard procedure, actually. You have to give people a story they will understand and accept, and then they talk.”

  She studied him. “So I guess you should look sort of ordinary.” She flushed. “I just meant that …”

  “You try to look like what you’re supposed to be. It helps.”

  Knowing it sounded trivial, but unable to help herself, she said, “I guess it must be very interesting work.”

  His whole face and manner seemed to change, and he did not look ordinary at all. There was a look of black and bitter forces just below the surface of this man, a wretchedness and a fury that startled her at the same time as it intrigued her. And just as suddenly he forced himself back to blandness. “Sometimes,” he said. “Now, can I ask you how much of this you can afford?”

  “I sneaked a thousand dollars out of a trust thing, fifteen hundred actually, a thousand for this. The Boston office explained to me that it won’t … last very long. I was thinking a thousand dollars might be enough, but now I guess it might not, really. Five hundred for the trip and all. I’ve got my ticket back, and I can take the time off charged to my vacation. And money to stay here a while.”

  He lost some of his poise again, and it made him look younger. “I want to tell you one thing. It’s sort of iffy, but it’s something you should understand. Because if you understand it in advance and have time to think about it, then there’s less chance of you doing something foolish if it comes up.”

  “What in the world …”

  The blue stare was cold and direct. “Law is a power equation, Barbara. Think of the things in a criminal case as a kind of a chain. The links are called accumulating evidence, proving motive, booking and charging, grand jury indictment, trial, conviction, sentence, appeal, confirmation, punishment. Money and power are like big nippers. They can open any link at any portion of the chain and the whole thing is over. Big local names in this, Barbara. Hanson. Kimber. So don’t be idealistic. I might be able to get the raw material for a pretty good file and turn it over to the authorities and have it sag into nothing. It would have to be a perfect file, unless it’s against sombody of no importance. And this power thing works more effectively in semi-rural areas like this one. There’ll be no fearless officials and no valiant newspaper to rally to the cause of eternal justice. Too much give and take is involved. It isn’t the best of all possible worlds, but it’s the best we have, and we’ve nailed some big ones.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you might find out who killed my sister and still not be able to …”

  “We might come up with a reasonable certainty, and it wouldn’t be enough. And you might have to live with it, knowing X is down here, fat and happy and unpunished. Could you live with it?”

  “Why, I would shout it from the housetops and …”

  “Do time for criminal slander, or get grabbed and committed to a mental institution. Barbara, we either play this cold and go as far as we can and then quit and drop it, or we don’t start it at all.”

  She looked down for a long time and then gave a small jerky nod. She looked up at him with a wan smile. “The education of Barbara Larrimore,” she said.

  “I’m sorry you have to find out these things this way.”

  “Will I be able to help you in any way?”

  “It might be possible. I just don’t know what will open up.”

  “Are you going to read the letters now?”

  “I’ll go over them tonight. By the way, I checked in here, too. I’m on the other side, in the back. Unit 51.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “I’ve got an appointment to see Doctor Nile. Do you have a car?”

  “No. This is so close in. Just three or four blocks to the middle of town.”

  “And people looking at you and telling each other who you are, and the bold ones coming over to extend sympathy? Are you ready for that?”

  “I was … wondering about it.”

  “Why don’t you try to take a nap? I’ll pick you up sometime after six and we’ll go eat over in Leesburg or Ocala. They’re both about thirty or forty minutes away.” He smiled. “And the mileage won’t go on my voucher. Sound all right to you?”

  “Yes it does, Paul. Thank you.”

  Four

  Doctor Rufus Nile was a short man of fifty, plump but without any suggestion of softness. He was a rubbery, darting, bouncing little man, pink and scrubbed and starched. He had an Einstein shock of gray hair, eyes a-goggle behind thick corrective lenses, a wide range of explosive conversational tricks, expressions, gestures—puffing his cheeks, smacking his lips, rolling his eyes, slapping, patting, thumping himself for all the world, Stanial thought, like a little kid who has to go, and translates discomfort into random energy.

  As a new floor covering was being put down in Nile’s office, they met in one of his treatment rooms, and during the first few minutes Stanial found himself making continual reappraisals of the little man. At first he thought him a clown striving for laughs. Then he wondered if perhaps Rufus Nile was a totally humorless man. His final appraisal was that this was a complex and, quite possibly, a shy man who had manufactured a public image to hide behind. The humor was there, but it was of a cold variety directed more subtly than any clown motions could be.

  Particularly disconcerting was Nile’s habit of asking a question, then abruptly tilting his head, shoving it forward, assuming a totally vacuous expression and following the question up with an insistent, “Hah?”

  “Did she seem troubled the last few weeks, Doctor?”

  “Troubled? How are you orienting this, Stanial? You want me to say depressed? Hah? No, my boy. You’re reaching too far, too far. I was fond of Lucille. Fond or not, I keep a close watch on my personnel. Doctors’ offices have a massive turnover, and you like to guess when you’re going to lose the next one. Never lost one this way though.”

  “Did you think you were going to lose her?”

  “A woman like that? Hah? Eventually. She was marking time. Had the blessed sense to wa
lk out on that Hanson pup. And agree to a one-year cooling-off period. So I knew I’d lose her at the end of a year.”

  “Was she disturbed at the failure of her marriage?”

  “What do you think? Hah? A woman like that? Marriage wasn’t a casual thing. Certainly disturbed. Upset. Sense of failure. It troubled her. That’s the word we started with. And she got involved with Sam Kimber. That troubled her too. I’m no moralist, Stanial. We all get into conflict with our own standards for ourselves, if we’re worth a damn. She was. The Sam Kimber thing surprised a lot of people, mostly the ones that take him at face value. Known Sam a long time. More complex than he lets on. God knows how it got started between them. Unlikely, sort of. And they kept it discreet. But a place this size, they weren’t about to keep it a secret. After Kitty Kimber died, Sam never took up with anybody. There were plenty of them who made the attempt. Sam did his prowling other places. And not often, I’d say. Anyway, I guess Lucille didn’t have an image of herself as a woman who’d get into that kind of a situation. A quiet woman, pretty and sort of cool and careful looking. But a good healthy female creature in the best part of her life. Pretty much alone and vulnerable and far from home. She was starting to turn a little brittle and precise. And Sam turned her back into a woman. My guess, it startled her considerable to find out she could get into a relationship as physical as that. I’d guess Sam brought her alive more than marriage ever did. All this isn’t any of my business, and it isn’t any of yours or any of the North Atlantic Mutual Life’s, but when you start hinting around about suicide it seems to me it’s time I tell you the reasons why the idea doesn’t fit. If she was feeling guilt, which I don’t doubt, it was less than the contentment. She’d come to work some mornings in a dream, slow and soft and misty, and dark circles around her eyes and a little Mona Lisa smile on her, and as a practicing physician I can say that maybe one woman in ten has the combination of glands and good luck and plain sensual capacity to get herself into that kind of condition. And it doesn’t exactly lead to a suicidal mood, Stanial, because it’s a celebration of the sweetness of life, and just as far from death as you can get.”