Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

And then I remembered it was exactly the same thing for everybody else. Including Paul.

It was genuine, if feeble, daylight when they herded us into the so-called lounge and the one named Fish made a little speech. As I listened to him say that Wilma had been “stobbed” in the back of the head I wanted to say, “Oh, come now! Dragnet does better than this. Your routine is corny. Get some new writers. Get a bigger budget.”

And then it hit me that it was true. It wasn’t an act. It was murder. The taking of a life. I went cold all the way through. It wasn’t any game. The taking of a human life. I looked around at the others. My God, we were pretty people. I could eliminate myself. And Paul. But that was all. Six people left, and six good reasons. And six opportunities. It had been a dark, dark night.

Noel walked out of the room. She seemed so darn calm. If you had to pick a guilty-looking one, you’d pick Randy. He was a jittering shambles. Mavis was still blubbering. I couldn’t figure out where she got all the water. Paul looked grave and sobered. Our eyes met. It made warm things run up and down the Jonah spinal column. Wallace Dorn stood there with the disapproving expression of a master of hounds who has just seen a farmer shoot the fox. Steve was talking his way into a PR pitch. That suddenly rang some bells. Judy Jonah guest at murder party. TV comic in nude revel. Wild party ends in murder. Cosmetic Queen Slain. Wow! The networks have a code. I would be cooked like a White Tower hamburg in spite of having been a very good girl. It would be a more effective bounce job than Wilma, living, could have managed. Gilman Hayes sat on the floor reading a picture book.

Apparently we had to wait for the big shots to arrive. The big trooper sidled over to me, subtle as a hippo. By daylight he was younger than I had thought.

“I’ve sure liked you on the TV, Miss Jonah.”

“Thanks, friend. You’re one of the last survivors of a dwindling race.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

He was big and dumb and honest and sweet. I had pained him. “I’m planning to retire,” I said, wondering why I said that .

“You are? Well... I suppose it’s a case of quitting while you’re ahead.”

“I might get married, even,” I said. The conversation was rapidly working its way into a hole.

“That would be nice.” Boy, we were sparkling.

“It’ll be tough to do. I’ve done that bride routine so often.”

“Hey, I remember that! You did it in that movie. Where you got all fouled up with that long thing in back.”

“My train.”

“And then you got the hay fever from the bouquet.”

“And tried to keep from sneezing, like this.”

He watched me with pure delight and laughed and slapped my shoulder and nearly knocked me down. Then everybody was staring at us. The trooper turned bright red and began looking stern. We’d been whistling in church.

It was, all in all, a highly unreal Sunday morning. Vividly unreal. We seemed to be standing around like a cast waiting for the director. When you stay up all night it does strange things to the following morning. But I didn’t sag. I was aware of Paul in the room. I felt keyed up. Mavis had finally stopped.

What happened next was purely and simply nightmare. What happened next I do not really believe I will ever pry out of the back of my head. It’s still there, in color. Just last week I woke up out of a juicy nightmare about it and Paul held me safe and close, and a long way off a coyote howled. I needed a lot of comforting.

I knew I was going to have to go up there to Wilma’s place and do plenty of scrambling. She made that clear when she phoned me. She’s cute, like a crutch. “Randy has been telling me I’m dreadfully poor, darling. He keeps going over lists of things and making little check marks. He gave you three little marks. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I guess you’ll have to ask him.”

You never let a client see you squirm, especially if the client is Wilma Ferris. “We’ll still have our beautiful friendship, kid.”

“And poor Gil will be so depressed if he can’t read about himself in the papers any more.”

“I guess I can make it all right, Wilma.”

“I thought you would,” she said a bit obliquely, and hung up after telling me to be there by cocktail time. It meant canceling out some things in town, but nothing too special. She phoned me on Wednesday. I managed to keep telling myself everything was fine until late Thursday afternoon, and then I hit bottom. Dotty came in and stood by my desk and asked me if there was anything else and I growled at her to go on home.

After she left, banging the reception-room door behind her, I took a yellow pad and a soft pencil and tried to figure out just where the hell I was. I figured it out in the most pessimistic way possible. I assumed I’d lose all three of them. I had already figured on losing Judy Jonah. Willy, her agent, had given me the confidential word on the trouble he was having trying to place her show. It was, of course, too expensive to operate to take any gamble on sustaining, even if a decent half-hour spot could be opened up for it. And the way the rating had skidded, he had a big problem interesting any new sponsor. We agreed that it was highly unlikely that Ferris would go along with her another season.

A thing like that you can stand. But three at once makes a hell of a hole. I had to keep paying on the tax deficiency they’d nailed me for, and keep sending Jennifer her five-hundred-a-month alimony so she could sit on her scrawny tail out there in Taos, and keep paying the rent on the office and the apartment, and keep paying Dotty, and keep up the personal front. I’d built the list up to twenty-one hundred a week. And with a six-hundred drop it just wouldn’t add up. I couldn’t make it come out. And new clients don’t jump up out of the brush in the summer.

But all the time I knew I was worried about more than the six-hundred drop. This is a rumor town. What the hell has happened to Steve? Hear he lost Hayes and Jonah and Ferris. Guess he wasn’t doing a job for them. Just the faintest smell of failure and it would make it an awful lot tougher to plant a release and then maybe the remaining ones would get nervous, and then Steve would be really sunk. And there wasn’t a PR firm in town that would take me on. Not after the way I set myself up in business back there in ’48, walking out with the clients in my pocket. They’ve been waiting for me to fall on my face. Hell, a man has to take care of himself. They would have kept me on coolie wages until I was seventy, and then invited me to buy in — maybe a big two-hundredth part of the business.

I sat there and I was really scared. I knew who would be the fourth one to go. Nancy, my Big Author. I’d run out of angles as far as she was concerned. It didn’t seem to occur to her that maybe she better get another book published. I’d even run out of panel shows I could get her on. All I had to do was mention her name and the columnists I laughingly call friends would groan.

I sat there in the dying city and wished I’d been a little smarter. The cream is in the industrial accounts. A few of those and I’d be set. But my people are individuals, most of them in the arts or entertainment. I suppose that’s natural. That was my beat when I was on the paper. Clubs and galleries and theatres, radio stations, concert halls.

I sat there and I began to feel artificial. Something that had been made up. Packaging is everything. They don’t seem to give much of a damn about the contents any more. Make the outside pretty. Give it that glamour look. The hell with the product. The public will buy. And that was what I was in. The packaging business. Dressing up personalities.