The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “But how about the last few weeks?”

  “Now you want to take the usual suicide motives one by one? Hah? My people get a physical whenever there’s any halfway excuse for it, and last month I had the excuse with Lucille because she was over a week late and nervous about it and she wanted a rabbit test. It was negative, and she came around the next day or so. And if it hadn’t been negative, she wouldn’t have wanted anything done because that wasn’t her style. Gave her a complete check. So damned healthy she had enough vitality for three women. Sam hadn’t changed, so that part of her life hadn’t gone wrong. From her pay and the support from Kelse Hanson and some little investment, she had enough over so she was sending her mother a little every month. Rule out money. That marriage was dead and going to stay dead, because not only had she found out the difference between a man and a boy, Hanson wasn’t trying any kind of selling job on her. Too busy trying to crawl back into the college-boy role, like the first step in working his way back to the womb. Had my own guess about it. When the year was up she’d put in for the divorce and head north, and Sam would find out then what she was worth to him and go marry her and bring her back, but a man like Sam isn’t going to marry until he finds out, like a shot in the head, he can’t do without it.”

  “Doctor, you keep side-stepping.”

  “Give me a chance. Now how about momentary mental instability? Nothing neurotic about Lucille. Solid as a rock. These past few weeks? Hah? So I’ll say she had something on her mind. But I don’t know what it was.”

  “But you could make a guess?”

  Rufus Nile hopped down off the treatment table, yanked a drawer open, took out an opened bottle of Jack Daniels, held it up and said, “Hah?”

  “With plain water, thanks.”

  “End of the day.” He fixed the drinks in large paper cups. “Got a weakness for guessing. Take the situation with Sam. He doesn’t go around telling anybody anything without a reason. He made it awful damn fast. Honesty is relative. So here you have this intense physical affair going on. And she has standards set pretty high, in spite of the affair. For a woman like that it has to be something significant. Some kind of love. She never knew anybody like Sam Kimber before. Now just suppose she found out, as Sam got more chummy with her, that in a business way he was playing it so close to the line, you could flip a coin to find out whether to call him crooked or not? It’s just the sort of thing that would worry a woman like that in just the way she seemed worried. She’d know you can’t change a man like Sam. So it would trouble her. She’d wonder if that made the relationship a little more unsanitary. Understand, I’m only guessing. But there are people around who could have told her a few stories about Sam. And they wouldn’t sound pretty. But it isn’t anything she’d kill herself over. She might decide to start untangling herself, or she might decide the hell with it, but there wouldn’t be room for any third decision. I know if you can save your company that twenty-five thousand, you’ll be a big man and get a bonus maybe, but it wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be reasonable.”

  “But she was a very good swimmer.”

  “And it was about ninety-three in the shade and that lake always runs a little colder than the others. It can happen to the best. Abdominal cramps maybe, jacknifed her right up. Don’t suicides leave notes?”

  “Not when they know what it will do to the insurance, Doctor.”

  Nile shook his head quickly. “Stanial, you’ll make a good try at it, but you won’t make it stick.”

  Watching Nile obliquely and carefully, Stanial said in a joking tone, “Maybe I’d be better off if there was a murder clause, too.”

  “It would make more sense than suicide?”

  “Would it?”

  “Now hold on!” Nile said angrily. “I said no word about murder. I was just trying to say suicide is the most unlikely thing I can think of.”

  Stanial leaned against the window sill sipping his drink. As a professional he had learned long ago to divide the people he interrogated into his own categories, based on his own value judgments. Curiously, the most basic dividing line seemed to be based on self-awareness and self-respect. Without regard to lines of social or financial or educational demarcation, some people seemed to fit easily inside their skins, to be at home with themselves. They could be car washers or bank presidents, but they—like this Doctor Nile—made the whole thing easier by having no aching need to exaggerate or diminish their own importance in his eyes. They said what they believed rather than what they thought you wanted them to believe. So you could sort out what they said, knowing the significant things were indeed significant, not merely attempts to get attention or to avoid attention. When they lied, the motives were usually obvious and understandable. The ones not at home with themselves were difficult. They believed the world had judged them wrongly, when in fact they had made the faulty appraisal. And, bank president or car washer, they had in small doses those diseases the psychiatrists put names to—a fragment of neurosis, a crumb of paranoia, a taint of the psychotic. At the same time as they misled themselves, for reasons never obvious, they were also misleading you, because their vision of reality was flawed. You could not like them because in a very basic way they did not like themselves. But it was easy to like the Doc Niles of the world. It was something you had to sense. There were no rules. There was only practice.

  “Is accident more likely than murder?”

  “Certainly! Who’d kill Lucille?”

  Stanial gave Nile his most disarming grin. “Let’s see. You, because you’d fallen in love with her and couldn’t stand the thought of her seeing Sam Kimber all the time. Hanson, because he knew she’d refuse to come back to him at the end of the year. Sam Kimber, because he told her too much about his business affairs and she threatened to turn him in. Or somebody who wanted her out of the way so they’d have the inside track with Sam. Or some drunk who happened along.”

  “Hell, boy, you got imaginitis. That’s an acute inflamation of the imagination.”

  “It’s a reaction to too many dull insurance cases. I get one with a beautiful woman involved, I lose control.”

  “Or it could be Martha Carey, her landlady, striking a blow for chastity. Or one of Hanson’s college girls, making sure the marriage wouldn’t pick up again where it left off. Or one of Hanson’s pals who got turned down by Lucille and couldn’t stand the shame of it. Hah?”

  “You do pretty good too, Doctor.”

  “Any number can play. But it was an accident. One hell of a lot of people drown in Florida every year. They have a knack for it, seems like. There’s so damn much water, they lose respect for it. The times it makes you sick are the toddlers, whole platoons of them, that fall into the ponds and the lakes and the drainage ditches and the swimming pools. Somebody took their eye off the kid for thirty seconds. Had one last month. Two years old. Brought him around but he’d been out so long the brain damage was severe. Died of pneumonia on the fifth day. Probably just as well.”

  “Did you examine Lucille’s body?”

  “I’m not the coroner. That’s Bert Dell. He’s got better political connections, but he’s a good man. From the degree of cyanosis it was drowning beyond a doubt, and he estimated she was under for at least thirty minutes before they brought her up. Billy Gain had himself a time bleaching out that blue so they could leave the box open. Goddam barbaric custom.”

  “Agreed.”

  “An essential dignity to death. Hah? What kind of veneration is it to pretty up the husk? Another little remedy for pain and sorrow, Stanial?”

  “A light one, thanks.”

  “Can you fold your tent now, or are you going to keep talking to people?”

  “I couldn’t sell the company on doing less than rive interviews, and then I’ll have to talk to some of the people who were on the scene so I can make a detailed report. And I’ve got the younger sister in my hair.”

  “Saw her at the service, not to speak to. Nice-looking girl.”

  “She’s
afraid the company’ll try to put something over on her. I can’t seem to make her believe we won’t stoop to faking anything.”

  “You’ll talk to Sam Kimber?”

  “Have to.”

  Nile puffed his cheeks and patted his sturdy belly. “Word of advice, boy. Play it very very straight with Sam. You got a little tricky with me here and there, and that’s your job, I suppose. But just because Sam might look and act a little bit country-boy, don’t rate him low. He’d smile and look a little sleepy if you get cute with him, and it wouldn’t get you a thing. And ten minutes later he’d pick up the phone and make a call or two, and you’d be looking for work.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “He’s like an old ’gator. On the mud bank they look as if they’re smiling. That’s because they’ve got meat tucked away in the bottom of the pond, getting ripe.”

  “How about Hanson?”

  “There’s not a thing he can do for you or to you, except maybe try to punch you in the mouth if he’s drinking. And from the look of you, that would be a mistake. Never mess with a man who looks a couple of inches shorter than he is. I’d guess you at one-sixty if that didn’t look like an eighteen neck size.”

  “Seventeen and a half. One ninety-three.”

  “Wrestler?”

  “And the weights and the bars and the rings. Fun at the time, but I’m paying for it now, because I have to work out or it turns to flab. Thanks for the drink and thanks for the talk, Doctor.”

  “You have not called me Doc. And you haven’t asked for any free advice. So come around any weekday the same time and rap on the back door. This is the pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the Daniels’ hour. Bad luck on your mission, but good luck to you, boy.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I don’t want to step on any toes. There are towns where people don’t like questions of any kind about anything.”

  “No trouble here, Stanial. It’s a—what would you call it?—fragmented society. In one way or another, except for some of the oldest families out along Lake Larra, and a few old ones in town and some of the grove money, everybody is a come-lately. It’s growing fast and changing fast. Not for the better. County population twice what it was ten years ago. The lines are vague. I guess there aren’t any towns any more the way there used to be. Just shopping centers with houses around them.”

  Barbara Larrimore was quiet when he picked her up and walked her out to his dark little utilitarian two-door sedan. In the evening angle of the sun he saw that her eyes were puffy, the lids reddened, her lips swollen.

  “Have a nap?” he asked as they drove away.

  “A little one. I … didn’t think I was going to cry so soon. I thought it would come later. But after you left me I was thinking … off guard, I guess … how I’d tell Lu about all this. So much to tell her. And then all of a sudden I knew … I really knew … I’d never be able to tell her anything, ever again. The terrible finality of it hit me, I guess for the first time. And now it isn’t real again. It’s gone away for now, but it’ll come back again I guess.”

  “That’s the way it happens. Will Ocala be all right?”

  “Anything you say. Have you lost anybody that close to you, Paul?”

  “I’ve made a career of it.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m sorry. That sounded pretty smart. My parents are alive. In Michigan. I lost an older brother. He was the hero. I couldn’t do things right. I wanted to be able to do them right and get him to finally approve of me. And when I started to be able to do a few things right, then he wasn’t around. But when anything does work out and I feel good about it, there’s a little sort of flash in my mind. Sort of ‘How about this, Joe?’ And then I feel the loss. He was one of the most physically powerful people I’ve ever seen. And I tried to toughen myself up to his standards when I was a kid. I guess I’m still looking for his approval. And I lost a wife too—not in the same way, but as completely. And that gives you a funny feeling. If Janey was dead, then there would be that finality you mentioned. I mean a finality you can’t argue with. But she’s alive and in Texas. In the Hill Country. Kerrville. I know there’ll never be any contact with her ever again. But she’s still in the world, and I dream sometimes about seeing her, but when I wake up I know it’s the last damn thing I want to do.”

  “Are you talking like this to help me?”

  “Or myself. I don’t know, Barbara.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that. It makes it harder to talk. For both of us. I should have just let it happen. Tell me about Janey.”

  “It isn’t dramatic at all. Her people made her feel that she was very very precious and unique. And she had lessons in everything you can possibly teach a kid. And so her people thought it was a hell of a waste to throw it all away on a cop. Like in a primitive tribe, she’d have been the one worth the most head of cattle. But she didn’t seem to think that way. And if we’d had children, she might have stayed too busy to notice. Or gotten a job that would have been demanding. I guess she got the feeling after awhile life wasn’t making much use of her. When she wanted out, I let her go. What can you do? She was plain bored, and it made her irritable and sad. Now she has the big house and the entertainment and the kids and a hand in running some kind of an angora goat ranch. Everybody always liked her.”

  “She didn’t love you.”

  “That was the thing they didn’t give her any lessons in. She’d tell you she did, and believe it. And tell you that now she loves this Texan. But I don’t know. Maybe if any person has absolute self-confidence, they can’t really love anybody else.”

  She laughed abruptly. “That isn’t my problem.”

  After he had passed a slower car he looked over at her. When he had first met her he had mistaken her habitual expression for one of petulance, of a kind of permanent sulkiness. But now it seemed to him that the small frown lines and the set of her mouth indicated a resolute endurance. The sun was almost gone and she squinted ahead into the light, her head thrust forward, her hands placid in her lap. Her hair was a glossy brown with paler highlights, her forehead high, her eyes green-gray, her face a long oval, slightly plump. She had called Lucille the pretty sister, and from the pictures he had been given of Lucille, there was a conditional accuracy to that statement. This younger woman was attractive in her own way, less obvious. Her long round arms and legs and a kind of placidity of her body in repose gave an impression of indolence, of low vital forces, yet she moved with a deft swiftness at any small task. In the first talk with her he had thought her rather neutral, without sensual impact. But in the car with her now, he began to sense his own awareness of her, to see in the placement of an ear, hinge of the wrist, roundness of knee, those gentle perfections which eluded a hasty scrutiny.

  By the time they were half-finished with dinner he knew she had recovered enough of her normal spirit to be told of the interrogation of Doctor Nile. He found himself describing Nile in ways that would make her laugh. But she sobered when he told her of Nile’s guess as to why Lucille had seemed troubled during the past few weeks.

  “It fits the letter,” Barbara said. “Mr. Kimber trusted her with some kind of secret, and then she was trapped into telling somebody else. And maybe the kind of secret was bothering her—I mean if Mr. Kimber explained it one way and she found out there was some other way to explain it.… It gets vague doesn’t it.”

  “There’s a lot more people to talk to.”

  “But how can you find out what the secret was?”

  “Maybe it will be a case of finding out what it wasn’t. Like a crossword puzzle. Once you get one or two letters of the key word, the number of possibilities are reduced.”

  “She was killed, Paul,” Barbara said in a strange tone. “She came down here and they killed her.” The tears came with no warning. She buried her face in her hands. She went to the rest room. She was gone ten minutes. She came back and slid into the booth opposite him and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s
all right.”

  “Can you give me something to do tomorrow? I’ll be better if I have something to do.”

  “I’ll find something.”

  “Please don’t patronize me.”

  “I’ll find something. I haven’t gone far enough yet myself.”

  After he was in bed he read the selected letters of Lucille to her sister. One was exceptionally long:

  “In writing this way about Sam to you, Barb, I guess I’m sort of explaining things to myself. From your last letter I know you have been doing a lot of reading between the lines, and I guess it is time to tell you. It is funny, but I would not want to tell you all this if it had not been—excuse me, dear—for you and Roger. And you did have the guts to get out of it. It had no future and maybe this doesn’t have any either, but I am living too intensely in the present to have much thought of the future. I guess it was that way with Roger for a time. Maybe everybody thinks their own infatuation is unique, and maybe in some funny way it is always alike for everyone. But how can one admit that?

  “I have an awful time keeping myself from getting too elfin in this letter. I keep wanting to capitalize things and underline things and write Ha Ha here and there like some schoolgirl. I will put capitals on one thing. I am a Fallen Woman, I guess. Shameless. It is easy to say I was lonely. And I Was vulnerable. But it does not to any extent explain why it should have been Sam—and continues to be Sam.

  “I told you his age and his background and so on in other letters, but I didn’t describe him for you. He is almost six inches over six feet tall, and he has a long sallow homely face and eyes so pale they have hardly any color at all. He has dark stringy hair. He is a great long gnarled gristly slab of a man, all knuckles and angles, but he has a curious kind of style. Something in the way he moves, the way he walks and dresses and gets in and out of chairs. He looks cruel and forceful, and no one has ever made me feel so incredibly girlish.