The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “He did not make any passes, Barb. He just is not that sort of man. He was kind to me, and we had fun. And I really don’t think anyone … that is to say either one of us, thought it would become anything else. But he was so terribly depressed about a tax thing, and he called me up long distance and he sounded weary and depressed and sick at heart and he asked me to come to him. Just like that! It was absurd. I hung up on him. What did he think I was? Where did he get all that confidence? And twelve hours later while I was packing my smallest suitcase and driving out to catch the little airplane to Jacksonville, I was still telling myself it was ridiculous. I certainly didn’t owe him anything like that. How could he expect me to come on the run?

  “I was absolutely terrified, believe me. He is such a powerful animal, and there is such an aura of force and cruelty, I felt as if I had been hypnotized into becoming some sort of sacrificial creature. But he was so gentle! And really not confident at all. And we were funny and shy. Like honeymoon kids somehow, which was the last thing I expected. But now I can hardly remember what it was like then, dear. Because it has become so much. If I had any lingering doubts about leaving Kelsey, they are gone now. I do not want to be vulgar in this letter, but Kelsey made love as if he were trying to get a berth on the Olympic team. I was an obedient bit of athletic equipment, alert to all the clues and signals, and he often gave me the feeling that if afterward I cheered and applauded he would spring up and take bows. If I failed to simulate a frantic ecstasy, he took it as an insult to his talent. But Sam concerns himself with me. I never knew it could be possible to laugh aloud just for joy when making love. I’d always been sort of anxious and earnest about it, and sort of dismally convinced in my heart of hearts that I was really not very sexy. But Sam has turned me into an absolute glutton. I have to keep proving the same miracle to myself, over and over. I’m such a shameless yearning wench that all he has to do is look at me just so and I turn humid and my knees start to sag no matter where I am. So I guess I never really knew who I was. I am not sure I am what Sam has made me, either. Perhaps it is a swing of the pendulum. But while it continues it is at least a very precious sickness. I want nothing beyond his great long knotty frame stretched out beside me, his slow hands and his love words. I was never all the way alive until now. When you told me about Roger I only pretended to understand. I thought I did, but in a little cold part of my Puritan soul I was aghast at my kid sister being so compulsive about sensuality, and perhaps I thought you were of some coarser fabric than I. But now, bless you, I know what you were trying to tell me, and I now respect what strength it must have taken for you to end it with such a terrible abruptness. If I were to suddenly be told I could never touch Sam again, I would rend my hair, roll in ashes and sit on public streets howling like a dog. So now you know the best or the worst of me, Barb. But we can perhaps understand each other more than ever before. The only flaw in all this electric happiness is the awareness of sin. We try to keep it quiet, but I do not think anyone can look at me without knowing. He has a little house in the woods. He calls it a shack, but it is really solid and cozy. I am at the shack now, writing this, waiting for the sound of his car on the little private dirt road, knowing my heart will jump up into my throat when I hear it. Here I am in an odd garment, one of his white shirts, the sleeves rolled up, the shoulder seams down almost to my elbows, comfortably aware he will find it a highly sexy costume. I have just enough perfume, and my bare toes are pink and lonely, and little shudders of come-what-may run up and down my ribs. You see, dear, I have fallen into the habit of telling you more than I could tell you face to face. But there is no one else to talk to this way.”

  After he had read the other letters and had turned out the light, he kept thinking back to this letter. He wondered about Roger. And he found himself wishing, with unexpected force, that he had known Lucille Larrimore Hanson. She had been so unusually articulate in her letters, he knew he would have liked her if he could have met her. It seemed wasteful and unfair.

  A dream of Lucille awoke him in the night. It was vivid, and close to nightmare. He was sweaty when he awoke. She had been in a huge glass jar, like a laboratory specimen, naked, adrift in clear fluid, her blonde hair floating wide. She kept turning, bumping the sides in a slow movement as though there was a current within the jar. Then Janey spoke to him abruptly over some sort of public address system, her voice metallic. “You were too late, Paul. You are always too early or too late. But you never listen. It never happens right. It is never going to.”

  He went up the stairs to find Janey and get her away from the microphone before everyone heard what she was saying to him. But he got into the wrong room where Rufus Nile, prancing and puffing, was working upon a figure on a slab. The figure was Barbara. Water poured from her mouth and nose. Nile was cutting her clothing off with little gold scissors. He beamed at Stanial. “Get the other jar ready, boy. She wanted you to help.”

  He broke out of the sleep filled with inexplicable guilt. He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of the room and smoked a cigarette. The air-conditioner masked the sounds of the night. It made him feel as if the room were in transit, on some strange vehicle moving steadily through the night.

  Five

  Augustus Dumas Gable, in his Jacksonville hotel room, wiped his face on a hand towel and hoped there was nothing wrong with his heart, no small flaw as yet undetected, because it would be a tragic irony to lose it all that way after finally getting so close to making it. He did not know how much more of it he could endure. One moment he would feel cold and chilled and hollow, convinced of failure, depressed beyond words. Without warning a great hot shuddering flood of triumph would well through him and he would want to yell, stand on his head and giggle.

  The unexpected delay in the decision was the worst part of it. Maybe something was going wrong, but he did not dare ask. These tax boys had to be dealt with delicately. You could dicker with them on a rational basis. Once a citizen had bitched his returns just enough to give them an opening, their objective was to grab all the golden eggs possible without destroying the goose. That meant a settlement just short of the point where the citizen would say the hell with it and take his chances in court. But if you tried to hustle them or con them or, God forbid, try a little discreet bribery, they would smile sadly, slay the goose and pluck him clean. He knew he had gone just as far as he dared, and the rest of it was the waiting.

  Long ago Gus Gable had been deeply amused when he had heard Willie Sutton’s answer to the question as to why he had robbed banks. Because that’s where the money is. Gus was sufficiently objective to realize his own motives had been identical. He had guessed where the money would be, and prepared himself for participation. He had supported himself as a bookkeeper while he had gone after the law degree. After his third, and at last successful attempt to get admitted to the bar, he had stayed with the bookkeeping rather than the practice of law, and gone after the CPA. He passed that with less trouble. And then he began to prove he had been right. A tax attorney who is also a CPA is a rare and valued animal. As he began to thrive, he continued to live small and put the additional income into employees who could take the dog-work off his shoulders. Now he had busy offices on the second floor of Sam Kimber’s building, and he represented half the business interests in the county. Find an obscure but totally legitimate precedent whereby a man can save an unexpected $500 on an annual tax bill, and at his next club meeting he will sing the praises of Gus Gable. And better yet, the word gets around, “When you’re in trouble, get hold of Gus.”

  It was a legitimate recommendation. He had kept his contacts with the tax people on a fruitful level of mutual cooperation. He had not lied or fudged the figures for any client. In another time, in another place, Gus Gable might have been a guide in rough country, and with the same incomparable thoroughness he would have known every obscure track, every water hole, every sign of game and weather.

  With great care and hope and patience he had been tucking money aside
and awaiting a chance. He was not married. He had no dependents. He had no expensive personal habits. He had seen lesser men take wild gambles and hit unexpected jackpots. He knew he did not have the stomach for the gambles. He had to find absolutely the correct, the flawless circumstances, and he had sorted out and discarded, reluctantly, several promising situations in the past three years. And now he knew it was within his grasp, courtesy of Sam Kimber.

  In one sense it would be a violation of an ethical relationship. When Sam learned the whole story, as was unavoidable, he might be furious, but given time to think it over he would see the reasons. Gus was merely picking up the slack that would go to someone else otherwise, and at the same time helping Sam out of a hole with more alacrity than might have happened otherwise.

  In its simplest sense, Sam’s tax problem meant he was going to have to unload asset values. And Gus Gable was going to be right there to pick them up. With a little help.

  And when it was over, Gus Gable was going to have a fat piece of money tucked away, and life was going to change. He was forty-two years old, and he knew he had waited long enough. It would be legal money, his beyond the shadow of a doubt. He found it difficult to think beyond the actual fact of the money. The images beyond the money were vague. They were like the color plates in magazine advertisements. Gus Gable, at the flying bridge of his custom Rybovitch, bringing a record tuna back to the dock at Cat Cay. Gus Gable at the wheel of his white XK-Jag. Gus Gable in Rome. And, undefined but inevitable, was the Golden Girl—beside him on the flying bridge, beside him in the car, beside him at the sidewalk cafe—merry and laughing and dear. Six months of work alternating with six months of play for the rest of his life.

  He found it mildly incongruous at times, a dream that could not happen. He was forty-two, and his dark hair was thin, and his belly was soft, and his brown eyes were weak behind the astigmatic lenses. He had an office pallor, a J. C. Penney wardrobe, a voice husked by twenty cheap cigars a day, a stomach made delicate by too many years of fried foods, a shabby furnished apartment with indifferent maid service, a three-year-old Chevy which he drove badly, and no hobbies at all. For the past few years he had been grossing about seventy thousand, putting forty back into salaries and overhead, and, after taxes and living expenses, investing between fifteen and eighteen thousand a year in blue chip securities. On an average of once a month he would drive over to Tampa on a Saturday, register at a place where he was known as Robert Warren, phone the right number and be sent a blonde whore on an overnight basis, receiving always a clean, reasonably attractive and competent one, a service to be expected by a steady customer who paid well, caused no trouble and did not demand anything out of the ordinary. Sometimes he would get the same one several times running, but he never requested one by name. They were not the Golden Girl. They were just mild, rather dull-minded women who talked aimlessly about their daytime jobs, their kids in school, the men who ran out on them. In the beginning, when he had first started to use the number, they had sent some who were too young or too skinny or who drank too much, and one who was a hysterical amateur, but he had complained each time and so, for the past four years none had been really unsuitable. He would keep them until mid-morning on Sunday, and then nap until late afternoon when he checked out and drove back home.

  But the money was going to change it all, somehow. Change pallor to bronze, flatten the belly, improve his reflexes, enable him to find the Golden Girl and, having found her, make her love him for his own sake, with the money just an incidental thing they could both enjoy. And he would know how to talk to her and make her laugh. And everybody would see her with him and envy him.

  He wiped his face again and cleaned his glasses. He opened his brief case and took out the summary sheets on a pending hearing, but the figures and ratios made no sense to him. As he was putting them away the phone rang, and he lunged across the bed and caught it before the second ring.

  “Gus?”

  “Right here, Clarence. Ready and waiting.”

  “It just came downstairs. To round it off, two hundred and thirty-one thousand three hundred. Sixty days’ grace. The formal notification goes out Monday. Make you happy?”

  “Clarence, old friend, I will say gratified. It will squeeze Sam badly, but I think it is eminently fair all around. His acceptance will be automatic. And I am indebted to you.”

  “Sorry about the additional delay but it was one of those things. Compromise settlements have gotten some nasty publicity, so some additional review was in order. We wouldn’t want Kimber crowing about how light he got off, you know.”

  “It’s hardly light. You have my word, Clarence, and you’ve had the total picture in hand. He couldn’t stand more.”

  “Do I have to tell you you don’t know a thing until formal notification?”

  “I will spread it around immediately, old friend, so that your whole shop will never trust me again.”

  “I had to mention it.”

  “Of course, dear boy.”

  As soon as that call was over, Gus Gable placed a long-distance call to Charlie Diller at the Citrus Central Bank and Trust Company, to the private number that did not go through the bank switchboard. To Gus’s annoyance, Diller’s girl answered. He slurred and deepened his tone and said he was a Mr. Warren calling from Jacksonville, knowing that city would be key word enough for Charlie. The girl said he had stepped out of his office for just a moment, and could he hold on, please. Moments later Charlie said, “Hello? I … I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

  “It’s approved on a sixty-day basis, so you can start clearing the rails.”

  “Well … I suppose it’s okay to go ahead.”

  “I can safely say this is no time for you to even sound as if you’re dragging your feet, Charlie. You have the blank notes I signed and you have the certificates and you have a personal piece of the pie, and so I truly suggest you jam it through your loan committee with all the muscle you’ve got, and I want it sitting in that special account today.”

  “Now see here!”

  “Charlie, the special teasing and pleading is over and the deal was made, and so maybe I don’t sound entirely respectful, but the private letter of agreement with your name on it is in my file just like the other copy is in yours, and if I hesitate a little you should jack me up the same way I’m doing it to you now.”

  “But I keep wondering why you’re so certain he’ll take this way out.”

  “Because it’s his best move, and I can prove to him it’s his best move, and Mister Sam has never done the second best thing in his life.”

  “I’ll get on it right away,” Charlie said with a little more enthusiasm.

  “And my next call is to him.”

  Gus placed a person-to-person call to Sam Kimber. He heard Angie Powell telling the operator Mr. Kimber was out and they did not know when he would return, and so he asked to speak to Angie.

  “Well hi, Gus,” she said. “Honest, it isn’t a gag. We just plain don’t know where he is. I tried the shack awhile back but there wasn’t any answer out there. You know, he almost always lets us know, but he isn’t himself, not since that Lucille drowned. He’s like in a daze or something, like he doesn’t give a darn. Honest, I put all these letters on his desk and he was in here for an hour early, but when he left I came in and he didn’t even sign them. I don’t think he even looked at them. I don’t know what he was doing in here all that time. We closed up yesterday to go to the funeral and I heard that after everybody left he was still there, just sitting in his car. Is there anything I can do?”

  “I guess the best thing to do is take a confidential message for him, Angie, and try to get it to him as soon as you can locate him. Tell him it went through. Tell him it is six thousand three hundred and something over my last estimate, with sixty days to pay it off.”

  “Six thousand three over. Gee, Gus, I know that a week ago this would have had him feeling relieved, but now I’ve got the feeling I could tell him and he’d just gi
ve me a blank look.”

  “I’ll start back right away, tell him, and we’ll go over it together and figure the best way to do it. And would you phone downstairs and tell Betty I should be in my office by three o’clock at the latest, and I want Jimmy and Roscoe in my office by three-thirty with the Juice-Master audit. And you set me up with Mister Sam for five o’clock if you can, Angie honey.”

  “All I can do is try, Gus.”

  When Angie Powell came out of Sam Kimber’s private office, Paul Stanial looked up from his magazine with one heavy black eyebrow raised in inquiry. She read the expression and said, “Not him, sir. Somebody else trying to get in touch with him.” She went to her desk and Paul listened as she placed a call to somebody named Betty and relayed instructions from somebody named Gus. The older woman in the ante-office had gone downstairs with an armful of file folders, and for the first time Paul Stanial was alone with the most girl he had seen in a long time. After she had proven she was at least an inch taller than his five foot eleven, it had shocked him to see she was wearing sandals with no suggestion of a heel lift. It awed him to wonder what she would be like in four-inch heels with her hair teased into one of those towering beehives.

  He decided that Sam Kimber, at six and a half feet, kept her around as an office playmate built to scale. But during the long time of waiting he had learned that she was more than an ornament. Working at top speed and with apparently flawless efficiency, she handled calls and visitors and small decisions with a bright confidence. Her dark gold hair was in lively curls which bounced when she walked. She wore a lemon-yellow skirt and an off-white blouse. She was structured supremely to scale, even to having a little more face, more gleaming teeth and larger eyes than lesser creatures. He estimated her at a minimum hundred and sixty pounds, and when first watching her thought her snugly girdled, then changed his mind and decided the lack of bounce and shake was due merely to a good taut musculature, an athletic solidity. Early twenties, he guessed. No rings on her fingers. No jewelry at all. A scent of soap and flower perfume. In spite of the sturdy profusion of breast and hip and sculptured calf, and the confident efficiency with which she worked, she gave an elusive and odd impression of childishness. He thought it might be because of her voice, pitched rather high, and with the clarity of a child’s voice, combined with a sort of solemn expression of blankness when her face was in repose.