The Drowner

by John D. MacDonald

  “Maybe there’s something in the air out there.”

  She smiled at him. “You’re quite nice. And now I’m feeling shy. I thought I was cold sober, but I wasn’t. Suddenly I’m quite shocked at myself for the … intimate revelations. So maybe now I’m getting sober.”

  “There isn’t anybody else to talk to.”

  “Of course. In a way, that makes it worse. The compulsive confessor.”

  “Not your fault, Barbara. It’s a cop talent. I look understanding and nod at the right places and hang on every word and make little sympathetic sounds. People tell me everything.”

  “I bet they do at that, you poor guy. And you couldn’t care less.”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And when I want to hear more, I can always drop the significant question in the right place.”

  “Let’s hear one.”

  His eyes wavered momentarily. He moistened his lips. “Sure. Who was Roger?”

  He saw her stiffen and saw her mouth change. He met her glance and he was the first to look away, but not before he sensed, from a change in his pulse, that their emotional relationship to each other had suddenly changed.

  “You are very good at that, Paul.”

  “Cancel that one. It was a mistake.”

  She took a cigarette from the pack on the table. The angle of the lamp light made her smooth face, under the turban, as empty as a mask. In the V-neck of the robe her throat was a soft column, firm, with a dusky pocket at the base of it. He looked for a visible pulse and saw none, but knew that if he held his lips there he could feel a pulse against them. He experienced such a rush and torment of desire for her, he felt his shoulders lift, and felt the small creak of his back teeth as his jaw tightened. She was still looking down, gravely and thoughtfully. She shifted her quilted yellow hips in the chair. She gave such an aura of roundness, such a long slow firm roundness of arm and roundness of leg, dusky-sweet and tentative—a lip curling just so, an eyelid creased just so, and the soft clue to breasts set uncommonly wide in the long round torso. It was no longer possible for him to diminish his awareness of her by telling himself this was indeed quite a plain girl, solemn, rather sulky looking, too self-involved. Desire had worked too much of its transforming magic, and objectivity could not suppress the growing inventory of small delights and perfections.

  She lifted her gaze suddenly, staring across at him through the slow gray lift of smoke, a gray-green stare, ancient and challenging.

  “In that one letter, of course. But you see, you ask a good question and get a tiresome answer. He is a very decent man, really. A few years older than you, I’d say. With a look of sadness and patience. But he could make you laugh. A half-defeated man. Three children, and a wife with a totally dull and ordinary and inflexible mind. But very sincere and very dependent. There are always stages, you know. It started with liking. With friendship. Working in the same place all day, laughing at the same things. So you explore points of view, and find so much alike it turns into wistful romantic love, all very bittersweet and sad because you know you can’t do anything about it. And the whole city turns into a sort of foreign film, so that even the way the birds fly has artistic significance. So with a terrible reluctance, inch by inch, you talk each other into thinking that somehow you have earned the right to go to bed. And that means plots of course, schemes and inner shiverings and a girlish terror of anticipation. And it is going to be magic, of course. Our little bit of happiness. Ah, we are such ineffably precious people, the little vulgarities of assignation will not touch us at all!”

  “What are you trying to do to yourself?”

  “It’s been done, and it’s over, Paul Stanial. We outgrew the sighings, the wine and candlelight phase very quickly. To our mutual astonishment, because we never thought of ourselves that way, it turned into an intensely physical affair. What was supposed to be just the affirmation of love, the symbol of love, became the end in itself, keeping us so drugged and so busy there was no time for love. And one day after a long time of it, too long a time of it, I went off to that dreary little room. He had to be late that day. There was one window. I stood at the window and looked at the people on the street, three stories below. There was a very cold pale winter light. I was so anxious for him it made me feel sick. There was a bar across the street. I saw a man and a woman come out. They were not young. They stood and seemed to be arguing. Suddenly he grabbed the front of her coat and began to beat her, cuffing her face forehand and backhand with deliberate blows that knocked her head halfway around each time. And I thought, in my superiority, how vulgar, how tawdry and crude and shameful. He released her and the woman went crying up the street, her shoulders all huddled. He stood with his fists on his hips and watched her go, and then he spat into the street and went back into the bar. I turned from the window and saw how the little room looked in that cold light. It was not a room in any loving or living sense. It was just a bed with walls around it. We’d stopped having very much to say to each other. Suddenly I realized it took an effort for me to see his face with any clarity. And there were thousands and thousands of people like this in little rooms like this, emptying themselves of their horrid little itchings, forgetting each other’s face and having very little to say. It was a vulgarity worse than being beaten in the street. It couldn’t possibly be me in that room. It was like waking up in a hospital with no memory of the accident. I put my clothes back on as fast as I could and got out of there, because I knew that if he arrived before I left, I might never have the will to leave again. The next day, the day I quit my job, I had coffee with him in a crowded place. And there still wasn’t anything to say, very much. Just sort of good-by. I told Lu about it, eventually. I think she tried to understand. But she looked at me strangely—as if she’d heard I was a thief. Or took drugs. My resignation didn’t go through. He got me transferred to a different office in the same firm.”

  She looked at him with a half-smile and a quizzical frown. “I thought I was so unique. And any situation I got into would be special because it was me. But I got into one of the most ordinary tiresome situations in the world. The office affair. Everything we said to each other from the beginning, if there was a tape of it, and tapes of a hundred other couples, I’ll bet the only way you could tell them apart is by the names. All the rest of it is alike.” Her eyes filled and the tears broke loose, ran slowly down, effecting no change in her expression.

  “You listen so well,” she said, and wiped her eyes on the yellow sleeve.

  “Who are you making fun of now?”

  “Both of us, Paul. Both of us.”

  “Can you sleep now?”

  “How did you know I wouldn’t have been able to, until now?”

  “You seemed tense. Now you don’t.” He stood up. After he had opened the door onto the warm night, he turned in the doorway and took hold of her arms just above the elbows. He sensed her uncertainty, her vulnerability, her subdued alarm. He could sense exactly what she was thinking.

  He gave her a little shake, a small gruffness of affection. “Sleep well,” he said and walked into the night. He heard the door close. He walked slowly to his own place, feeling a smugness of great virtue and restraint. He knew he could have taken her. The day had cast her adrift, and she was there for the taking. Salvage, to be towed to the closest port. But, as salvage, a motorless, rudderless craft. It would all be on his terms, not hers. Sleep and time would restore her.

  After he was in bed it occurred to him there might never be another chance. His smugness evaporated. If that was the way it turned out, he had made the wrong choice of regrets. Which, too, was part of the pattern which dogged him. The vast vault of the silky night stretched over ten times ten thousand tousled, dreaming, round-legged girls, gentle and humid and golden in the night silence, their breathing sweet, their pillowed hair soft and long, and on the cruel bachelor rack he loved every one and wanted every one, without names, without tensions, without regrets—just a long sweet worship at the shrine of girlness i
n the tangly night.

  Ten

  Sheriff Harv Walmo stood on the weedy sidewalk of Tyler Street and looked at Paul Stanial with an expression of mournful irritation. “Damn it to hell, I can’t go by the way you feel about it.”

  “I just said it seems a little too neat.”

  “All I can go by are the facts turned up in my investigation. He left his office about quarter to twelve. It looks like he figured on going back there on account of the way he left stuff spread all over his desk. They say he always picked up. Maybe his heart was starting to go and it felt stuffy to him in the office so he drove around for air. I know Sam Kimber fired him yesterday and flang him out of the office bodily. So he was driving around, maybe feeling worse, and when it hit him he didn’t even get a chance to stop the car. But his foot was off the gas so it was moving slow. You can see where it bunked the curb over there and then came on over across here, and you can see the track it made right on over to that cabbage palm it hit dead on, but not hard. Then that Mrs. Antry, she phoned in about looking out her bedroom window and seeing a car in the lot with the lights on and the motor running, and my deputy checked and radioed in for the ambulance. But he was past needing an ambulance. What the hell, Stanial, the man had a rough day losing a big account and he was working hard. Besides, the coroner says it was a heart attack.”

  “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I just say it seems too neat. What was he doing over here?”

  “Just riding around I’d say. This isn’t any kind of through street to anyplace. Just riding around in the night.”

  “He’s tied into the Lucille Hanson thing.”

  “How? What does that mean? Because he’s worked for Sam Kimber a long time? Stanial, I said it before and I’ll say it again. You got anything looks like legal evidence, you can bring it to me and I’ll open it all up. I haven’t got a closed mind on this thing. But I just can’t go ahead with nothing to go on. You got the first thing you can give me?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then if you’ll excuse me, I got to go back to my office where there’s a lot of other things with something to go on. I suppose you fellas like to stretch these here things out as long as you can.”

  “Not this time, Sheriff. Thanks for the personal tour.”

  Mrs. Betty Schaud, Gus Gable’s secretary, was a small spare woman with iron-gray hair, a cold square face, and all the social charm of the attendant in a gas chamber. It was only with the greatest reluctance she let Paul Stanial use the telephone. He phoned upstairs to Sam Kimber and stated his problem. Kimber told him to put the Schaud woman on. He handed her the phone. He could hear the measured and emphatic resonance of Sam Kimber’s voice. The woman did not change expression, but her face became sweaty, and red spots of color appeared in her cheeks.

  After she hung up she said, “This is all very unusual.”

  “Sudden death is always a little bit unusual.”

  “Come this way.”

  She took him into Gus’ private office. The big desk was piled with folders and stacks of documents. “The Sheriff examined this room,” she said. “As soon as our Mr. Grady has a chance, he’ll go over this work and dispose of it properly. Please understand that this is a special favor to Mr. Kimber. I wouldn’t say you have any legal right to be here. Whatever you want, please do it. I have other work to do.” She stood beside the desk and folded starched arms.

  When Stanial sat in Gable’s chair, she gave a snort of disapproval. He looked at the documents on the desk. They all seemed to refer to some aspect of Kimber’s varied operations.

  The desk pad was a big scratch pad, the top sheet covered with a maze of doodles and numerals. The switch-button telephone was on a side table. There was a smaller scratch pad beside it. He rolled the chair closer and examined the top sheet. After some silent minutes of examination, he stood up and tore the top sheet off.

  “Not one scrap of paper leaves this office,” Mrs. Schaud said.

  He handed it to her. She looked at it and then looked at him, puzzled. “This is just doodling. But I can’t let you have it anyway.”

  “Got a Verifax or equivalent? I’d like a copy. Keep the original in a safe place.”

  She gave the sigh of someone imposed upon to the limit of endurance. He waited in the outer office. She disappeared and reappeared with a clear copy. He took it up to Sam Kimber’s office. Angie Powell looked crisp and lively in a blue and white striped blouse and a blue skirt. He guessed that she saved that particularly vivid smile of welcome for people who had gained Mister Sam’s approval.

  He went into Kimber’s office and closed the door.

  “How are things down there?”

  “Running on momentum, I guess.”

  “What I’ll do, I’ll leave it up to that Bruner and McCabe to get my records out of there. All morning I’ve geen wondering if what I did helped kill that little son of a bitch. What have you got there?”

  Stanial explained what it was. He went around behind the desk and studied it over Kimber’s shoulder.

  “What the hell does it mean?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s stuff he wrote down last week. But there’s this twelve in block letters, underlined, and he left the office at quarter of.”

  “So it could have been an appointment he made over the phone?”

  “And if so, this other stuff might be a clue to the appointment.”

  Kimber touched the crude drawing of a buxom female torso with a fingertip. “With a woman, if this means anything. But what the hell is this f-r-n-t-r?”

  “I don’t know, but look over here. Tyler. That’s why I got interested in this thing. That’s where he died. Tyler Street.”

  “But that’s got initials. A. P. Tyler. It doesn’t have to mean the street. This funny thing, this f-r-n-t-r, it looks as if it has smoke coming off of it, Paul.”

  “I can’t figure out what …”

  “Wait a minute! There was a furniture store on Tyler that burned about a year ago. Hell, Stanial, are we getting too carried away on this thing? It’s so mixed up you can invent about anything you want.”

  “So let’s go take a look at it.”

  Kimber hesitated, shrugged. “Why not?”

  Sam Kimber was the one to spot the cigar near the base of the pile of covered lumber. He picked it up, rolled it between his fingers. “Dry,” he said. “So it wasn’t out here in the rain. Don’t know if it’s Gus’ brand. See the wrapper anyplace?” Stanial found it by a tuft of grass. Kimber identified it as Gus’ customary brand. Stanial investigated the area with painstaking care. He found another cigar butt, as dry as the unlighted one. He found enough fragments of ash which the hard rain would have washed away to indicate Gus had spent some time in the area.

  “Where is this getting us?” Sam demanded.

  “A suppositional structure. He had a midnight date here. He could have sat on this lumber and waited. Maybe the other party showed up, maybe not. He peeled this cigar and bit the end off, but he never lit it. Why? Maybe suddenly he felt sick and dropped it and barely managed to get to his car and get it started before he died. Or maybe the other party started a scuffle. Maybe the exertion killed him, and they stuck him in the car and got him rolling. Too bad these damn cinders won’t take a track.”

  “Not very much, is it?”

  “Not enough to go to Walmo with. Maybe enough to take to the lab section of a big metropolitan force and have them vacuum this area down to the last blade of grass. But not enough for Walmo.”

  They made slow progress back out to the curb, with Stanial looking carefully for any further sign or track.

  Kimber leaned against his car, his expression sour. “You know what we’re both thinking, don’t you? I never got a chance to get back to Gus, and maybe if I did, I could have shook a little more information out of him. And maybe somebody realized it.”

  “The next step is an autopsy, if Walmo can be hustled into it.”

  “I can hustle him,” Kimber said grimly.

  H
e walked around the car to get in, and stopped suddenly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Come here.” Mystified, Stanial followed him across the street and about a hundred feet south. He stopped near the school and pointed beyond the school building. “See through there? That gray house? You can’t see much of it. The Powell house. Angie. Angie Powell. A. P. And that girl drawing.” He looked at Stanial with a strained expression. “And now you’ve got me doing it, because that’s plain going too damn far.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Listen, I know Angie as well as I …”

  “You told her you thought Gus might try to make trouble for you.”

  “And she looked worried on account of she is loyal. That’s all. Chrissake, Paul, if she went around knocking off everybody who …”

  “There’s something strange about her. You know she didn’t approve of Lucille.”

  “Strange? She’s just a very decent, religious, clean-living girl is all.”

  “Then why do you have to shout that at me, Sam?”

  Kimber took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “I just know we’re on the wrong track. That’s all.”

  “But she’s in a position to know a great deal about your personal affairs and habits, Sam. She could know about the money.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “From Gus?”

  “God, Stanial, I don’t know.”

  “She’s a big powerful young girl.”

  “Everybody likes Angie.”

  “And she’s like a fish in the water, apparently.”

  “Why would she want that money?”

  “Would it be the money? I don’t know. I talked to her the day I was trying to see you for the first time. She sounded odd. I can’t put my finger on it. She sounded emotionally disturbed.”

  Kimber wiped his face again. “Take all that walking back and forth through the office and it gets you to thinking. Lot of girl. A big ol’ back-buster of a girl, so one time I made my try. Before Lucille come along. The look in her eyes, it would like to make you cry. Told me she promised God and her mother she’d never do anything dirty. Thought she had to quit right then and there. Paul, I just don’t know. It doesn’t seem possible.”