Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

“It was a round thing with a sharp point and she got stuck with it right here.” He turned around and pointed at his own head to show us. “So that can only mean one thing, and that’s a murder. Now Les Riley, the sheriff, is sick abed, but there’s going to be other people here that’ll want to talk with you folks about this thing. The county attorney — that’s J. P. Walther — and a lieutenant from the criminal-investigation part of the state police are both coming, and more than likely they’ll both bring along some people with them. In the meantime, by reason of the authority vested in me I’m here and now telling you folks that you all stay right here. Joe, you take up a collection of car keys and label them. I don’t want you down on the dock or out on the grounds. You stay right here in this house. That clear to everybody?”

Steve spoke up. “It’s clear, sir. I’m sure we’ll all cooperate. My name is Winsan. Steve Winsan. As a public-relations counselor, I’m used to dealing with the press. In fact, Mrs. Ferris was a client of mine. Miss Jonah and Mr. Gilman Hayes are also clients. They have reputations to protect, sir. I’m asking you to let me handle the working press on this whole matter. With people like Judy Jonah and Wilma Ferris and Gilman Hayes involved, they’re going to swoop down on this place like locusts. It will require careful handling.”

“Now, I just don’t know about that,” the deputy sheriff said dubiously.

Steve interrupted to say, “And by the way, I’d like to write down your name, your full name, so the papers won’t get it wrong. And the names of these other gentlemen, of course.”

“I guess it’s a smart thing to use a man who knows his business,” Fish said, looking questioningly at the troopers.

“This whole place will be a three-ring circus before noon,” Steve said.

I was perfectly aware that I was going to be violently sick. I did not know how much time I had. As I walked toward the door, Fish said, “Where are you going, lady?”

“To lie down,” I told him. I did not look back. No one stopped me. I made our room in time.

I was sick and then I washed and then I stretched out on my unused bed. I tried to think coherently about myself. God knows I had seen enough sharpies in the past few years. I’d seen more than enough slick ones. I’d seen Randy moving ever closer to filth and had kept a certain pride in keeping myself clean. And then I had been taken like a schoolgirl by one of the worst ones. By one of the ones who cultivate a hearty honest manner.

Wilma’s death no longer seemed important to me. She had died a long time ago.

I slipped sideways into dreams that moved like acid across my mind, awakening in sweat only to slip back again, helpless against my exhaustion and my regret.

It was a three-hundred-mile drive to Wilma’s place at Lake Vale, and in spite of the work I had piled up, Mavis, my wife, absolutely refused to arrive Saturday instead of Friday. She said that she had accepted the invitation and promised we would arrive Friday in time for cocktails.

And then she gave me that bland look which is such an infuriating copy of Wilma’s and said, “But, darling, you work for her, don’t you? I should think it would be important to you.”

Yes, I worked for Wilma Ferris. There was no denying that. But my lovely wife couldn’t seem to get it through her thick head that I also had a reputation in the field to uphold. Before I had gone with Ferris, Incorporated, I had been a senior consultant with Ramsey and Shaver, Management Engineers. I had specialized in revamping the sales set up of the client firms. The works. Distribution, outlets, advertising, market surveys.

And it was a black day indeed when I resigned from Ramsey and Shaver and went to work for twice the money for Ferris, Incorporated. I made the change after she spent a whole morning sitting across a desk from me and making good hardheaded sense. The company certainly wasn’t sick. It was highly profitable. But not what it could be. She gave me the entire picture. The factory was in Jersey. They had two lines of cosmetics. The Ferris line was the specialty-shop line, high-priced. Symbol of luxury. The Wilma line was the bread and butter. The chain-store stuff, big quantities, low profit margin. But distribution on both lines was a shambles. Sales had started downward. The sales manager had recently done the firm a favor by dropping dead. She wanted the sales trend healthy, the whole sales end revamped. She offered a good salary. I talked it over with Mavis. I accepted it.

Because, you see, Wilma Ferris had talked hardheaded sense. At one point her voice got throatier, huskier, and she looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t ever try to kid me about the business, Paul. I started it with these two hands in a fourth-floor walkup. I started with Ferris Kreme. I mixed the glop up in a vat. I bought the jars wholesale. I designed the labels and stuck them on. I filled the jars and capped them and peddled them and collected my own accounts. Don’t ever try to kid me.”

“Why tell me that?”

“Lots of people try. They think they can walk off with a piece of the business just because I spend so damn little time at it. I spend little time at it because I’ve earned leisure. I’ve worked for it. I enjoy myself, Paul. I enjoy myself a hell of a lot. I hire people and let them work and leave them alone while I play.”

I wish to God she’d left Mavis and me alone.

Because that was the first time and the last time she ever made sense to me. After that I began to learn what she was. But by then our standard of living had gone up to match my new salary.

“Besides,” Mavis said, turning from the lengthy business of brushing her hair, speaking as though it were the clincher, “the Hesses will be there, and Judy Jonah and Wallace Dorn, and you’ll certainly have a chance to talk business with them, won’t you?”

Mavis felt we had to go because it was the first time we had been invited up to that reputedly fabulous place at the lake. But I could guess what sort of mess it would be. We’d been at Wilma’s apartment enough times to learn that. And people who knew had told me that if I thought Wilma a bit extroverted during her apartment parties, I should see her at the lake sometime. Or in Cuernavaca.

Mavis took over the packing and by the time we were ready to leave a stranger would have guessed we were about to take a cruise to Norway, stopping at Bermuda on the way back. I shuddered to think of how much of my fat pay was stowed away in those suitcases. I got Herman to help me, and between the two of us we got it all down to the apartment garage and loaded it in the back end of the new car. I know that Mavis looked very nice indeed, but it was spoiled for me because of her hair. She had started to fix her hair like Wilma’s. She sees too damn much of Wilma. They’re built somewhat alike — both tall women solid in the hip, big-breasted, slim in waist, ankle, wrist. Women that look and act alive and have some warm substance to them. They have none of the anemia of the high-fashion ads. I am a big man but, contrary to legend, my tastes have not run to miniature women.

This fixation of Mavis’ needs some explaining. I hear that it happens often. I have just never seen it happen before. I’ll have to expain how she was in order to explain how she is . I met her six years ago. She was twenty-one, to my thirty. She was a file clerk in a client plant in Troy, New York. I worked at the client plant for four months. There was something vague and unformed about her. Uninformed, too. Not that I can afford to be any intellectual snob. My college background was too much concerned with work sheets, reserves for depreciation, and time and motion study. But regardless of background, people do seem to acquire some stable theories and philosophies of existence, right or wrong. Mavis believed earnestly in any idea with which she happened to come in contact. And she would jettison it immediately when she ran smack into the next idea.