The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  But you could get involved here, he thought. In ways you don’t need. Like being able, right now, to see with a fearful clarity the precise way Barbara’s hair lies against the gentle area behind her ear, and the round and fluent padding of the socket of the hip, matching with such a curious elegance the neighbor concavity of the waist. A girl austere, complex and too remote, and any commitment would be full of the severe kinetics of demand. Better, he thought, the brown and obvious and unvowing frolickers of North Miami Beach, the twisters, the yea-sayers, the beach and bar release for the ex-cop pooped from a day investigating supermarket pilferage. This one’s tokens would be real hearts and real flowers, and all he had left in stock was candy and wax.

  But exactly who the hell had Roger been?

  Suddenly, from his subconscious, came the certainty that he knew what the other key would fit. Kimber’s shack.

  And the pending interview with Kimber became just that much more crucial.

  Sam Kimber was beginning to take a more specific form. He sensed that danger might lie in underestimating the man.

  Gus Gable had his coat off and there was a scurf of cigar ashes down the front of his white shirt. The papers were spread out on Sam’s desk. Sam was stretched out on the big red leather couch, a can of beer in his hand, his eyes half closed. His slacks and sport shirt were badly wrinkled, and he had a twenty-four hour stubble of gray beard on his long sad cheeks and lantern jaw.

  Gus looked at him with exasperation. “I can truly say, Sam, you don’t seem to get the significance of getting moving on this thing.”

  Sam said idly, “You’ve done a fine job and I can understand you want to see it all the way through. Fine, Gus. But we’ll get the money to them. Don’t you fret.”

  Gus walked over and looked down at him. “It isn’t that. Sure. They’ll get the money. They always do. It’s how to raise it the best possible way. And that means starting right now. I’ve figured out just how it can be done, but I get the idea you’re not listening.”

  Kimber yawned. “Guess I better settle down and listen, it being the only way I’m going to get rid of you.”

  Gus pulled a chair close and sat down. “You don’t dare sell any of the land you hold because they got you classified as a land merchant, and anything you get would be taxed as straight income, right? And you got the land so damn cheap, if you raised a quarter million that way to pay them off, you’d be in the bag for two hundred thousand more on this year’s taxes, so you’d get nowhere, or, if they closed the fiscal year on you, you’d be worse off. And if you unload a quarter million in liquid assets, then you bitch your chances of making the bond on the jobs you want to bid.”

  “Sounds right dismal,” Sam murmured.

  “So here’s what we do. We take that tract along Flamingo Lake and that tract out beyond Beetle Creek and we put them into one package. Now if we try to incorporate a development outfit, Jacksonville is going to call it a device. So we look around fast, and we find where there’s some development money looking for a home. We let it be known those two tracts can be had, if they let you in on it. We let the other guys set it up, then give you stock in return for the land. You’ll have to take a beating on it, Sam, because you’re in a pocket. You won’t be able to have control. It would look funny. Then you put up the stock as collateral with Charlie Diller for a loan big enough to pay off the tax bill. And then, after enough time has passed, you can sell the stock, pay off the loan and pay capital gains on the stock sale.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Have you listened close, Sam?”

  “Doesn’t it mean somebody could be picking up some prime land without hardly any damn risk at all?”

  “To keep from giving you control, they’d have to come up with a good chunk into the kitty for the rest of the stock, for operating expenses and working capital.”

  Sam opened his eyes all the way. “That can be done with notes back and forth, boy. I may have lost a little interest in things, but I haven’t lost my mind. Hell, we’d be further ahead working it through a dummy setup.”

  “Granted!” Gus said angrily. “And they’re watching you like a tree full of hawks watching a chicken. I tell you in all truth and flat out, Sam, I’ve got my reputation on the line too, and sincerely, if you try one cute thing I have to get out to keep myself clean, and let them know I’ve gotten out. You’re a big valuable client, Sam, and you’ve paid me a lot of money, but you try anything and they’ll think we figured it out together. Then what kind of a reception do I get the next time? Listen to me, Sam. Believe me! For the rest of your life you have to be as clean …”

  “As a whistle, Gussy. As a whistle.” Sam slowly levered himself up, stood up and flipped the empty beer can into the basket beside the desk. He walked through the ante-office with that long slow slouching stride which had Gable almost trotting to keep up with him.

  “Go home, Angie,” he said as he passed her desk.

  “When I’m finished,” she said tartly.

  He went into his bachelor apartment with Gus at his heels. He selected fresh clothes and tossed them onto the oversized bed.

  “I want your personal assurance, Sam, you’re going to do the smart thing under the circumstances.”

  As he slowly unbuttoned his soiled shirt, Sam Kimber said, “Summertimes, you wanted to get the stink off you, you’d grab a sliver of yella soap and go down to the creek where it ran deep and black. Trouble was, the skeeters hung out there big as humming birds with a bore rod on ’em like a leather punch. Everyday skeeters didn’t bother me a damn, but those grandaddies down there could punch right on through to the marrow.”

  “I’m just trying to …”

  “What you’d do, you’d trade the stink for welts. If they’d got together right, they could have wedged a man up in a tree crotch and bled him to a crust.” He balled the soiled shirt, slacks, shorts and socks and dropped them into a pigskin hamper. “Found me a homemaking magazine one time in a ditch where some tourist lady flang it from her fast car and it had the goddamdedest biggest whitest shiniest bathroom in it you ever heard of. Vowed I’d get me one of them and pretty soap with a sweet smell and big soft brushes with long handles and towels big as bed sheets and thick as a young girl’s wrist and I’d scrub and soak me down to the last little thin layer of hide and I’d stay in there the whole summertime long.” As he adjusted the heat and force of the big adjustable shower heads, he smiled vaguely at Gus Gable and said, over the steamy roar of the water, “Funny thing, you know, for a man to break his ass all his life to buy the best bathroom in Florida.” He stepped in and closed the glass door of the giant stall, and Gus Gable wandered disconsolately back out into the bedroom. He went to the kitchen and opened himself a can of beer and felt guilty about it. That damned Kimber could drink beer all day long and his belly stayed fiat. Gable had the feeling that every can of beer he had ever drunk had added its inevitable gram of fat, and he would never lose it.

  A few minutes after the shower had stopped, Gus went back into the bathroom. Sam stood at the sink with a towel knotted around his waist, shaving with a straight razor. The mirror was set high, and the oversized stainless steel sink was set into a counter placed at the right height for Sam Kimber. Gus always felt irritable in Sam’s apartment. He felt dwarfed and pulpy. There were tufts of black hair on Sam’s long back. Ropey muscles moved under the yellowish hide. His legs were heavily furred.

  “Where were you all day, Sam?”

  “Out at the shack.”

  “They kept trying to get you out there.”

  “I heard the phone ringing a few times. Didn’t feel like answering.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Walked around some. Got up at first light. Took me a bass outen the pond there, but by the time I crumbed some and fried it, I was past eating. Figure to sell it, I guess.”

  “Not this year, Sam. You can’t afford to sell any property this year.”

  Sam rinsed and dried the razor, put it in the case, walr
used his face in cold water and said, “How are you on my giving it away?”

  “Not to a private party, Sam.”

  “How would you feel about the scouts?”

  “I can work it up and see what it would do for you.”

  “You do that, Gussy.” Gus followed him out of the bathroom. “I’m just not about to go back out there, not any time.”

  Sam put on a pale blue shirt and dark gray slacks. He went to the kitchen and, without asking Gus, made two strong drinks of bourbon over ice in chunky oversized old-fashioned glasses. He handed one to Gus, gestured with his own in silent toast, took a small swallow and said, “All dressed up and no place to go.” He looked at Gus and his expression was odd, a simultaneous frown and smile, expressing a strange ironic agony. “And me a man growed,” he said softly.

  “What, Sam?”

  Gus followed him into the living room. Sam slumped on a couch and said, “Get cleared away here, and I was thinking I might go way the hell down off the coast of Chile and see if maybe I could tie into one of those granddaddy tuna they talk about. Something I never tried.”

  “Maybe there’d be a chance of working something out with the marine biology people at Miami to get a partial write-off. I can look into it, Sam.”

  Sam stared at him and shook his head. “Don’t you beat all!”

  “Hell, you pay me to think of things like that. And I’ve saved you ten times what you’ve paid me.”

  “Might go to Orlando tonight and look up a little old red-top gal I haven’t seen in three years, Gussy. Figure me a partial write-off on that? Then again, it might turn out mighty like that fried bass. Just when it’s ready, you don’t want it.”

  “What I want is to know if you’ll go ahead with my proposal.”

  “I’ll think on it.”

  Gus hitched forward on his chair, holding his drink between his knees. “Sam, can I speak real frank?”

  “Try it and see how it goes.”

  “I can truly say I’m not a complete damn fool.”

  “Not in your line of work, Gussy.”

  “I have to speak up now because you’re taking this all so casually, the financial jam you’re in. Hell, I know the quarter million is nothing compared to your net worth if we could liquidate it slowly and carefully over a long period. But it is still serious. You’ll admit that?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “I’ve never mentioned this directly to you before because I didn’t want to get any answers. I think I know you pretty well. You keep things to yourself. Nobody ever gets to know all there is to know.”

  “Keep showing the hole cards and it’s showdown, and there’s no fun in that.”

  “Sam, I’ve talked myself into believing that personal balance sheet we worked out gives the complete and total story. Let me finish. But I’m not a damn fool. I went back a way, Sam. Quite a few years. I tried computing net worth a different way, the way the tax people do sometimes. They take income after taxes and take off the estimated living expenses, and see how much you should have piled up over so many years, then compare it to what you say you’ve piled up. I went just far enough to feel glad they didn’t try that with you, Sam.”

  Sam came smoothly to his feet. “Right now you’ve got my whole attention, Gus. Say what you’re trying to say.”

  “I just … think you’ve got a hole card. I don’t know how much. Cash money, probably. Maybe as little as fifty thousand or as much as a hundred and fifty thousand. It worries me, Sam.”

  “You worry me.”

  “Every single transaction is going to be monitored. I just don’t want you thinking you can feed any of that into this problem without it being noticed. In other words, it goes back to what I said about this being the wrong time to get cute.”

  Sam Kimber took one long stride, wrapped his big hands around Gus’ upper arms and plucked him up off the chair. The glass fell from Gus’ numbed hand, and he gave a small sound of pain and surprise. Sam straightened with him and held him suspended in the air, his startled face six inches from Sam’s. He heard the creak of Sam’s shoulder muscles and saw the cords stand out in Sam’s throat. Sam smiled at him and said in a very soft voice, “Now where would I keep money like that?”

  “In … in a s-safe place. Geez! Let go!”

  “Like where?”

  “I don’t know!” Gus said in despair. “Honest to God!”

  “I am going to tell you one small thing,” Sam said with a deadly precision. “This place is soundproofed. I think you are a liar. I give you one chance to tell me where I kept that money, one specific place, and if you name the wrong place, I am going to break every fat finger on your left hand, one at a time. And then I am going to ask you again.”

  “We’ve known each other for …”

  The iron fingers sank more deeply into his arms. “Be right the first time!”

  “For God’s sake, Sam! You gave it to Lucille to keep!”

  Kimber transfixed him with a look that froze his heart, then abruptly opened the big hands. Gus landed on his heels with such a jar he nipped the tip of his tongue painfully. He sighed and lowered himself to sit on the floor like a fat tired child. His hands were strangely white and completely numb and he could not lift his arms. When he worked his fingers, a painful tingling began.

  “Dear God,” he muttered and sobbed once, a harsh sound which surprised him.

  Sam squatted on his heels and stared into Gus’s face. “Let’s go into the thing real deep, Mr. G. Real, real deep.”

  Gus sighed. “I have to protect myself.”

  “You’re next thing to dead this minute, so you better start.”

  Gus told himself that was a joke, and he looked directly at Sam to make certain, but that terrible look was still there, and Sam’s face was wet and rigid and gray.

  Gus swallowed convulsively. “Once I was pretty sure you had cash someplace, I wondered where it would be. You’d know enough not to keep it in lock boxes. I remembered a trip you took without much point to it, and guessed you’d gone and brought it back. I decided you’d hidden it. Maybe here. Maybe at the shack. I thought about that a long time. Honest to God, Sam, it’s just that I … start wondering about something and I can’t rest until I know. It’s just the way I am. Then I decided something else. You were so insistent I let you know right away if there was any chance of an indictment for fraud and a chance of federal prison. You’re not a man who could stand prison. And you have to make business trips. And you couldn’t carry that money around, could you? You’d have to leave it with somebody. Somebody who’d bring it to you if things went real bad. And the more I thought about it, the more sure I was it had to be Lucille. So I figured out something to say to her. If she didn’t have the money, it wouldn’t mean anything to her. But if she did have it, then I’d know.”

  “And you just had to know. When did you find out?”

  “Three weeks ago, I guess. You’d gone to Tampa. I had an appointment with Doc Nile. I was the only one in the waiting room. I leaned around the little desk and whispered in her ear. I said, ‘Hope you’ve put it in a safe place.’ If she’d looked at me confused and asked what, I’d have said I was talking about my file card in Doc’s office there. It startled her and her eyes got round and she said, ‘Of course, it’s in … What are you talking about?’ But it came too late. I said I was talking about the money. She bit her lip and said you’d told her nobody else knew. The it began to make me nervous, thinking she’d tell you how I trapped her. Then Doc took me and when he was through I waited until she was off and we had some coffee. I told her I was trying to look after your best interests on this tax thing and you were a hard man to work with, the way you keep things to yourself. I told her I had figured out there had to be some cash money somewhere, and she’d seemed the likely one to hold onto it for you in case things went bad for you. She seemed confused about the money. She didn’t have any idea of the amount there was, and she thought it had nothing to do with your personal finances.”
<
br />   “So you just had to let her know it was money I was holding out.”

  “No, Sam! Honest and truly, once I got the drift of what you’d told her about it, I went right along with it. She halfway promised not to mention our little talk. I think she started to get troubled about the money, but then she settled down again. I said I’d worked with you a long time, and the only thing I wanted to do was protect you.”

  A blue-white flash seemed to originate inside Gus Gable’s head. There was a painful ringing in his left ear, blood in his mouth. As he pushed himself back to a sitting position he realized Sam must have struck him. He had not seen the slightest movement before the open-handed blow.

  “So you bragged on how smart you were, Gussy. Who to?”

  “I didn’t say a word! Honest and truly, I didn’t say a word to anybody! I was trying to forget it ever happened, because I wanted it all the way out of my mind when I was talking to the people in Jacksonville.”

  Kimber rose slowly from the tireless squat and looked at Gable. He reached toward Gus with a big hand. Gus flinched back. “Come on, get up,” Sam said. Gus took the extended hand. Sam yanked him up so hard Gus’s feet left the floor and he took several little running steps to get his balance. He found himself running toward a chair, and made a half turn and fell into it, panting. He took his handkerchief out and mopped his face.

  “I say in all sincerity, Sam, in all these five years I’ve never seen you act …”

  “I must be a little upset, Gussy.”

  “You shouldn’t knock anybody around this way.”

  Sam moved closer. “Is that advice?” His color was still odd.

  “All I meant was …”

  “Can’t you get one little idea of what this is about, you silly little son of a bitch? Lucille is dead and the money is gone.”

  Gus formed his lips as though to say something, and then let his mouth sag open. He wiped his face again. “Gone?”

  “One hundred and six thousand dollars cash money. Thirty years ago one time I was seven weeks shrimping, and we put into Key West ahead of a blow. A Swede from St. Pete had won all the cash money aboard, eighteen dollars, and he didn’t get a quarter mile from the dock afore somebody opened him wide with a fish knife and took it offen him.”