John MacDonald - The Good Old Stuff

Prine Smith stared at him. “Are you crazy?”

Hewett said softly, “I know she’s dead. I know it. She would have come back.”

“Young girls disappear every day,” Stacey Brian said. “That she happened to come to our place was coincidental.”

June and Georgie listened with great intentness, their mouths open a bit.

“Are you serious, Falkner?” Prine Smith asked, still scowling. “Do you actually think that just by having us down here you can break open a case that the metropolitan police haven’t been able to unravel?”

Park shrugged. “It might work that way.”

“I don’t get it. If one of us should be guilty, which is silly even to think of, wouldn’t you have given him warning by now?”

“Of course.”

Prine Smith sighed. “Okay. Have your fun. It’s your money, and I guess you know what you want to do with it. Me, I’m going to relax and enjoy myself.”

“That’s what you’re all supposed to do,” Park said amiably.

Hewett had been drinking steadily and with purpose. He said, “Her eyes were tilted a little, and the black lashes were so long they were absurd. She came up to my shoulder, and when she laughed she laughed deep in her throat.”

“Knock it off,” the redheaded Stacey Brian said sharply. “Drop it, Bill.”

“Sure,” Bill Hewett said. “Sure.”

The dusk was upon them, and the music was a wry dirge. Taffy’s face was shadowed. A gull swung by, tilting in the wind, laughing with disdain. The soft waves were the tired breath of the water. Death whispered in the thin jacaranda leaves.

Hewett laughed with excessive harshness. “Sure,” he said again. “Forget her. We’re all nice clean young men, we four. Our best friends don’t have to tell us, because we’ve bought the right products. We have built-in value, four-way virtue. Remember the brand name. Go to your nearest crematory and ask for our product. That’s a joke, son. But forget little dead girls because little dead girls have nothing in common with these four upright, sterling, time-tested young men of market-proven value. You can’t write a commercial about a dead girl. The product will never sell.”

“Shut up, Bill,” Guy said.

June hugged her elbows, though the dusk was warm. Mick’s face, behind the bar, was carved of dark stone. Over on the mainland a diesel train bellowed, a distant creature of swamps and prehistory.

“You people can eat any time,” Mrs. Mick said.

Taffy lay on her face in the sun by the pool. Falkner sat cross-legged beside her, rubbing the oil into the long clean lines of her back.

“Mmmmm,” she said, with sleepy appreciation.

June came to the edge of the pool, her dark hair plastered wet to her head. She hung on and said, “Hello, people.”

“How goes the war of the sexes?” Falkner asked.

June pursed her lips. “Georgie has attracted the big handsome hunk, Guy Darana, and also Mr. Muscles, the newspaper guy. I am left with the agile little redhead, who can sling passes from any off-balance position. Hewett is not interested.”

“How is Georgie doing?”

“Reasonable. Guy and Prine Smith are now on the beach showing off.”

“Back to the battle, June,” Park directed. “Take Stacey Brian down there and see if you can confuse things.”

June swam away. Taffy yawned. “Legs,” she said.

Park moved down a bit, filled his palm with oil. Taffy sat up suddenly.

“No, dearie. I think I do this myself,” she said. She took the bottle from him. “An aged creature like me has to be well smeared with this glop or the wrinkles pop out like wasteland erosion.” As she worked she looked over at him. “Falkner, my man, this little house party makes me feel physically ill. Why don’t you break it up?”

“Just when everybody’s having so much fun?”

“Fun! They’ve all got the jumps.”

“Sure they have. Right from the beginning each of them, the three un-guilty ones, whoever they might be, have had a dirty little suspicion. They were trying to forget it. Now I’ve reawakened the whole thing. They’re drinking too much and laughing too loudly, and they’re all wound up like a three dollar watch. We just wait and see.”

Her brown eyes were suddenly very level, very grave. “But you usually add another ingredient, Park.”

“This time, too. Maybe tonight.”

“Do you really think one of them killed that girl?”

“I do.”

“But why?” Taffy wailed.

“Why do people kill people? Love, money, position, hate, envy, passion, jealousy. Lots of reasons.”

“Please be careful, Park. Don’t let anything happen to you.”

“Am I that valuable?”

“With you gone, what would I do for laughs?”

He leaned his hand tenderly against her bare shoulders and pushed her into the pool.

He had gone apart from the others, and now he sat on the sand with his hands locked around his knees and he thought of the small thin sound she had made as he struck her and how he had caught her as she fell and listened, hearing the pulse thud in his ears, the hard rasp of his own breathing. She had felt so heavy as he had carried her quickly to where he had planned. She was realty a small girl. There was no blood .

Again the dusk, and the music and the cocktails. And Mick behind the bar and Taffy in pale green and all of them suntanned by the long hot day, tingling from the showers, ravenous, bright-eyed.

“I don’t want to be a bore, Park,” Prine Smith said, “but what are you accomplishing?”

Falkner shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. Maybe we ought to talk. That is, if nobody objects.”

“Talk,” Bill Hewett said tonelessly.

“Objectivity,” Park said, “is often easier at a distance. The police concentrated on the apartment. That, I feel, was a mistake. The fact that the body has not appeared indicated to me that it was a crime carefully planned. Too carefully planned to assume that the murderer would select a city apartment as the scene of the crime and hope to get away with it, to walk out with the body. She was seen going into the apartment. She was not seen coming out. The apartment had a phone. All four of you were able to prove that you could not possibly have gotten back to the apartment before eleven. But you couldn’t prove, had you been asked to do so, that Lisa Mann had not come to you. She could have been summoned by phone to the place where she was murdered and where the body was disposed of so successfully.”

“Just how do you dispose of a body successfully?” Prine Smith asked.

“Fire, the sea, chemicals. But, best of all, legally. Death certificate and a funeral.”

Something deep inside him laughed. The forest floor had been thick with loam under the needles. He had scraped away the needles, and the edge of the new spade had bitten deeply, easily. The hole was not long enough for her, and so he put her in it curled on her side, her knees against her chest. Later, after he had patted the earth down, replaced the needles of the pines, he burned the new shovel handle and the old coveralls. He kicked the hot shovel blade over into the brush. No trace. None .

“Why would anyone kill her?” Hewett asked. “Why? She was my girl. There wasn’t any question of that. What good would she do anyone dead?”

“Sometimes a man kills,” Falkner said, “for the very simple reason that the act of killing gives him pleasure.”

“It would be nice to meet him,” Hewett said. “Nice.” He looked hard, first at Guy, then Prine Smith, then Stacey Brian.

“Off it!” Prine said harshly. “We were over that. You know we aren’t capable of anything like that.”

Hewett continued to stare and there was a trace of madness in his eyes. Slowly it faded. He walked over to the bar. Mick filled his glass.