Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

“I wouldn’t want you going in for any false economy, Randy. Not at Wilma’s expense.”

“I don’t think you realize how serious this is, Steve. She’s got to pull in her horns. She’s got to take it easy. I mean very easy, or she’ll never get her head back above water. I risked my... position with the things I told her. She’s got to get that Gilman Hayes off her back, let the apartment go — it’s too big, anyway, and rent the Cuernavaca house. Since she’s going to have to live a good deal quieter, anyway, I see no reason why she should continue to retain you. I told her that. Furthermore, Steve, I see no reason for her to retain you even were she quite solvent.”

“And let things like that magazine story go through?”

“The public has a short memory.”

For a few minutes there he sounded fairly impressive. I remembered people saying he was a pretty good man before he went to work for Wilma. He had one of those little businesses that do accounting work, personal financial management, and insurance work for their clients. He had built it up himself, and when he took on Wilma she kept him so busy with all kinds of weird errands and services that he started dropping his other clients, and ended up working for her, giving up his office, maintaining a so-called office in her apartment.

“I don’t think it would be wise to stop retaining me, Randy.”

“And I think it would be.”

“So there we are.” I stood up. “I better look for somebody else to convince, Randy.”

He shrugged. “You can talk to her, of course. I can’t stop that. But I’m pretty certain she’s made up her mind, decided to take my recommendations. Her attorneys are backing me up. She could get out of the hole immediately by selling her interest in the company, but I don’t believe she’d want to give up control.”

“Understatement of the year.” He got up too, and we started to walk back. He had griped me. I stopped and halted him by taking hold of his arm. “You were kicking some opinions around, Randy. Here’s one of mine: I think she needs a business manager like she needs Gilman Hayes. You’re just sort of a superbutler, and I bet she could get a better one cheaper.”

He looked at me and looked away and he looked pinched around the mouth. He yanked his arm free. I said, “Did you put yourself on that list of economies, Randy? Or are you suffering from the delusion that you’re essential?”

He walked away from me and he didn’t look back. He carried his narrow shoulders in a funny rigid way, as if he were balancing something on his head. If I was an unnecessary expense, what in the world was he? I laughed out loud. I felt a little bit better. Not much, though. I got the glooms again when I rejoined the group and tried to figure out some way to work on Wilma. She has all the vulnerability of a meat ax. And I very well knew that she was waiting for me to start begging. That would be the end. That would be when she would start to smile and go to work with the knife, enjoying her work. I sat and chattered away at that Mavis Dockerty, a great mass of nothing if I ever saw same, and all the time I was trying to think of some pry bar to use on Wilma. Like attacking the Washington Monument with a wooden spoon. I drank a little too much without intending to, and then made a damn fool of myself by telling Dockerty the score when he got me aside. I cannot understand most of those guys in business. They seem to do all right, but in an environment like this one, they don’t even know what’s going on. They can’t seem to see a knife when it’s sticking right out of your back.

It wasn’t until dinner that I got the idea. It happened this way:

Wilma and Randy were talking about something in low tones. And Wilma raised her voice and you could hear it all over the room when she said, “For God’s sake, stop blithering and dithering!” and Randy turned meekly to his plate. Right at that moment I happened to glance at Noel Hess. I saw on her face an expression of complete contempt. It was a look that included Wilma and Randy and perhaps the surrounding area for a good half mile. She turned then and caught me looking at her, and blushed and began to eat again.

There was no pry bar to use on Wilma. But here was a dandy little brunette pry bar with which I could bring Randy right up on his tiptoes. I had never particularly noticed her before. She was a subdued type, which seldom appeals to me. Pale and a bit thin-faced, with a long upper lip and rather small dark eyes. But as I made a more careful inventory, I saw things about her that I liked. I did a quick review to see if I’d said anything to her or near her that would spoil my pitch. No, the Steve Winsan impersonation had been unfractured. I wondered if Wilma had told Randy that she and I had been intimate. If so, maybe Randy had told Noel. And, if so, that might cancel me out before the starting gate opened. She had given Wilma that sort of look. And she was doubtless all too well aware of Randy’s consistent infidelities prior to Wilma’s acquisition of Gilman Hayes, aware of the complete range of the services performed. Suddenly, thinking of the whole thing, I felt a little ill. We’d been a bunch of dogs trotting after Wilma, tongues lolling in the country sun. And now I was going to try to complicate it with deliberate seduction. I wondered if, at this late date, I was getting a weak stomach. A man saves himself first. She’d maybe already started an interesting career of getting even with Randy. But she didn’t look the type, somehow. She even looked a little bit like a girl I’d once known in the Methodist Sunday School in Deephaven, Minnesota, back in the days when I’d attend with my hair pasted down and watch her for the full hour and wonder how I was going to tell her that I was perfectly convinced I was going to be a famous surgeon and I wanted her to wait for me. Back in the days when I was full of dreams and glories and a girl was a sweet and fragile and precious thing.

I knew the plan wasn’t too good. I might get nowhere. And even if I did, it was no guarantee that I could get her to put the pressure on Randy. And if she consented to that, and if Randy told Wilma he’d reconsidered, Wilma could still tell him she’d already made up her mind.

But at least it was a plan, and even if it didn’t work, it promised a less boring week end.

I didn’t get much of a chance after dinner. Wilma and I got into our usual gin game, noisy and deadly serious. Randy dithered. That silly Dockerty bitch danced with Muscle Boy. The others played Scrabble. And Noel, unfortunately, went off to bed. I watched for some reaction on Wilma’s part to the dance team. She didn’t seem to notice them. As this was an atypical reaction on Wilma’s part, I began to suspect that Gilman Hayes might lose more than my PR representation before the week end was over.

Once when Wilma was shuffling I leaned back and looked around at the shadows and silences in the big room, at the tricky spots on the game boards, at the glass and the dancing and the groomed softness of the women, all of us here interlocked with each other in curious ways in this architectured thing of warmth and careful lights, while outside there were the lake and the contours of the hills, which would not change a tenth of an inch in ten of our lifetimes. Bass would be drifting deep by the rocks, gills straining the cool water, and deer would be bedded down up the slopes away from the lake. But I had walked for a long time on a narrow and dangerous place that grew ever narrower, and to turn around and walk back was a feat of balance beyond my abilities.

“Wake up, dreary,” Wilma said. “Take a dull card.”

I took a card and I had to look at it longer than usual before I saw that it was a six of spades and that it fitted so neatly with other sixes that I was able to go down for seven.