Джон Макдональд - All These Condemned

Then, in some mysterious way, I was in the living room, weaving, trying to focus my eyes, and Judy Jonah was supporting me.

“Come on, now,” she said. “One big fat foot after the other.”

“Where’s everybody?”

“Out being mad and gay. Banging around in the boats. Churning around in the water. Come on, lamb. Judy won’t let you fall on your head.”

There was another blank and then I was in bed, and Judy was looking down at me, shaking her head. She walked to the foot of the bed and took my shoes off. I was still in my swim trunks. She floated a blanket over me.

“Preciate it,” I said. “Preciate it.”

“Poor old bear,” she said. She leaned over me, kissed me lightly on the lips, and then she was gone, the door shutting softly behind her. The bed started to veer dangerously around a circular track. I grabbed hold of it and steered it carefully into sudden sleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I looked at the window. The outside floodlights were on. I heard laughter. Somebody was running water in our bathroom. The door opened, and through the dressing room I could see Mavis outlined against the lighted bathroom as she turned in the doorway and clicked off the switch.

As she moved quietly through the room I spoke her name.

“So you aren’t really dead after all, dahling?”

“What time is it?”

“About nine. It’s quite warm. We’re all swimming. I imagine you feel dreadful, I hope.”

“Thanks so much.”

“You made a spectacle of yourself, you know. Stumbling around like that. I hope you feel stinking.” She swept out and banged the door shut.

I drifted off again. When I woke up I had a feeling it was much later. I felt a little better. I drank three glasses of water, put on a bathrobe, and went out into the living room. Two small lights burned. The music was FM unattended, some asinine disc jockey who said, “And it’s thirty seconds to Cinderella, cats, so I guess that winds up the ball game. Sorry, Eleanor, we didn’t get to spin that Julie platter for you, but...” I found the right knob and cut him off. I walked out on the terrace, to a warm night of a billion stars. Somebody came up the concrete steps with reckless speed. The hurrying figure rushed to the switch box and the banks of floodlights began to snap on, one section at a time, dimming the stars. I blinked at the lights and saw it was Steve. The others were down on the dock.

Steve grabbed my arm hard. “Paul, Wilma’s gone.”

I was fogged by long sleep. I stared stupidly at him. “Gone where?”

“We think she drowned.”

I kept thinking the whole situation could have used a better script. Heaven knows I’d become an expert on bad scripts during forty weeks of Judy-Time. That was the inane name the agency stuck on my half hour of frenzy.

It was so damnably disorganized, everybody running around and bleating, and Paul Dockerty the only one who made any sense. He got the phone calls placed as soon as he realized what had apparently happened. It was clear enough, all right. Her stuff on the end of the pier and all of us staring at the emptiest, blackest water there ever was. Sure, we’d been paddling around in it, very happy-time, floating and star watching and feeling that little thrill of danger that night swimming gives you. But after we knew what had gone on, I don’t think six strong men could have hurled me back into that water. Paul got Gil Hayes and Steve out there with him, diving in the area where we thought she had been. Wallace and Randy couldn’t swim well enough. So Randy handled the boat and shone the big flashlight down into the murk of the water. It was very still. We’d hear them cough and gasp when they came up. That fool of a Mavis Dockerty sat near my feet as I stood watching them out there. She made an interminable messy bleating sound as though her insipid little heart would break right in two.

We heard the sirens coming. It sounded as though they were riding across the black hills. Paul called in to me, asking me the time. I took my watch out of the pocket of my robe and held it so the bright lights were on the dial. “Nearly quarter to one,” I shouted.

I heard him say, “O.K. That’s enough. The experts are coming. It’s too late anyway, even if we had luck enough to find her. If it isn’t some kind of a stunt of hers, and if she isn’t sitting down the shoreline, laughing like hell, she’s as dead as that mackerel in the moonlight.”

His voice carried well over the water. “Don’t talk about her like that!” Mavis shrieked, and then started a more furious round of bleats.

There were two big young troopers in one car and a fat man with a dull, kindly face in the other. They came down and made a rough count of noses and stared out across the water. One of the troopers couldn’t seem to stop looking at me. It gave me an insane desire to burst into a routine for him.

Paul said, “I hear boats coming.”

The civilian was named Fish. He said, “I told the phone office to get the boys out of bed and have them come over here. They’ll drag for her.”

“She’s dead now,” Paul said. “Why don’t we wait until morning?”

“Well, we always start right out, soon as it happens. We always do. She couldn’t be playing one of those jokes now, could she?”

“I doubt it,” Paul said. “She would have heard the sirens and come in.”

I walked away from there and left them talking. I belted my robe a little tighter, lighted my last cigarette. I sat on the stone steps and looked out at the lake. Bugs beat their furry brains out against the nearby floodlights. I sat and thought of several ways I would have liked to hold Wilma under the surface, and started giving myself the creeps because I knew I couldn’t have.

Oh, she’d saved it and planned it, and even though I told myself I didn’t care, when she finally gave it to me, she had certainly done it in her own unique way. She made a habit of leaving you nothing. I decided I would stop thinking about it. It wasn’t any good to think about it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot that was good to think about.

I watched boats arrive, saw the grappling irons and hooks, looking like medieval torments, rigged under the lights while they split up the area. The officials were in a huddle at the end of the pier where Wilma had parked her things.

After a time Paul came slowly up the steps toward me. He stopped and shivered and said, “Stick around, Judy, while I get dry and get more cigarettes, will you? I want to talk to you.”

“Sure.”

He was back quickly and sat on the next step below mine, rubbing his wet hair with a towel. He said, his voice muffled, “That deputy sheriff named Fish found that two-piece suit of hers in the pocket of her robe. What was going on? Was she wearing a different one?”

“Nope. We were being naughty. Practically a group bacchanal, unless you can think of a more clinical description. By starlight.”

He turned and frowned at me. “You too, Judy?” It struck me as odd that the first question hadn’t concerned the tepid Mavis.

I pulled the top of my robe apart. “You will note, kind sir, that I am still clad in my old blue serge swim togs, the ones with the shine on the seat. For me, cold lake water has a strange lack of aphrodisiac appeal. And if I am to be groped at by starlight, I want some firm footing underneath. You may mark me down as a spoilsport.”

“How about Mavis?”

“A lady would say she didn’t know. But your lady is remarkably nude under that lush robe of hers. And a remarkable figger of a woman, I might add. The other spoilsports were Randy, who doesn’t swim well enough, and Wallace Dorn, who possibly couldn’t bear the loss of dignity.”