John MacDonald - The Deep Blue Good-Bye

I waited until noon and then drove up to the Citrus Inn. Apartment 2A was in the center section on the second floor, I wore a courting costume, summer version. T shirt, khaki slacks, baseball cap, straw shoes, an eager smile, and a bottle of good bourbon in a brown paper bag. I rapped on the scarred and ornate old wooden door, and rapped again, and a girl-voice yelled in an exasperated tone, “Just a minute!”

The Inch rattled. The door opened an inch and a half, and I saw a tousle of dark hair and a segment of tan face and a cold green unfriendly eye. “Whaddya want?”

“I’m looking for Deeleen.”

“She’s not here.”

“Are you Corry?“

“Who the hell are you?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“Like who?”

“Marianne, works at Charlie Char-Broil.”

“That silty bitch hasn’t got any friends.” Had I done any pleading or begging, she would have slammed the door. So I stood easy, mildly smiling. It’s a relaxed area. There is a code for all the transients. if you are presentable, unhurried, vaguely indifferent, it is a challenge. I was having better luck with this than I expected, up to this point. I wanted it to continue. If you push against hostility and suspicion, you merely increase it. In a few moments I saw a little less animosity

“What’s with this Marianne and you looking for Deeleen? I don’t get it.”

“I don’t want to confuse you, Corry.”

“There’s some facts of life I should know?”

“I used to see Deeleen around there and never got to know her, and then she left and I was wondering about her, if she’d left town, and I asked around and Marianne said maybe she was still here. So this was an empty day, and I had this jug, so I thought I would come see. But if she’s as friendly as you are, I guess it wasn’t much of an idea.”

She examined me for at least twenty silent seconds. “Stick around a minute,” she said, and closed the door. It was ten minutes before she came out. She had stiffened her dark hair somehow until it looked like a Japanese wig. She wore a swim suit and an open cabana coat. The swim suit was a black and white sheath, the black faded and the white slightly grubby. Though flawed by a bulldog jaw and a little too much meat across the hips, she was reasonably presentable. She closed the door and smiled up at me and said, “You’re practically a giant, huh? You got a name?”

“Trav.”

“There’s a kid in the apartment sleeping it off. She was whoopsing half the night from beer. Come on, I’ll show you something.”

I followed her down the short corridor to a back window overlooking the dock. A girl in a very brief bikini lay on a pad on the cabin roof of the Play Pen. I looked down at her over Corry’s shoulder.

She looked up at me quizzically. “I don’t blame you at all to come looking, she’s built so cute, huh?”

“Tasty.”

“But if she’s absolutely the only idea you came up here with, honey, you can save your self the trouble. She’s all set up with the guy owns the boat.”

“It’s a lot of boat. Whose is it?”

“An old guy named Allen. We call him Dads. We’re going to go far and wide on that boat, man. We’re going to the Bahamas on that boat. Would you believe it, he says it’s hard to find people to go cruising with you? Isn’t that a crazy problem. But the way things are, honey, she won’t play. It could screw up the boat ride.” She turned toward me from the window with just the slightest hint of the stylized posture of the model, the small mechanics of display, seeking approval. “So?”

She had invited inspection and I gave it, then said, “You have to know when to change your ideas. You have to stay loose.”

“The thing is,” she said, “I wouldn’t want you should have any terrible disappointment. I mean on account of Dee.”

This was the small smoky game of appraisal and acceptance, offer and counter-offer. She had narrowed it down to that one response necessary to her esteem. So I responded as she wished. “If that was you down there in the sun, Corry, and Dee up here with me, then I could feel disappointed.”

She smirked and beamed and preened, then linked my arm and took me down onto the dock. “Hey!” she said. Deeleen sat up, owlish in huge black glasses. “Where is everybody?” Corry asked as I helped her aboard.

“Dads took off someplace in Pete’s car. Pete went down to see Mitch about if he’s got the motor back on the little boat yet. Patty okay?”

“She’s still sacked out up there.”

Deeleen got up and came clambering slowly and cautiously down into the cockpit. At a thirty-foot distance she was a very attractive, ripe-bodied young girl. At close range the coarseness, and the sleaziness of the materials used in construction were all too evident. Her tanned hide had a coarse and grainy look. Her crinkle of putty-colored hair looked lifeless as a Dynel wig. The strictures of the bottom half of the bikini cut into the belly-softness of too many beers and shakes, hamburger rolls and french fries. The meat of her thighs had a sedentary looseness. Her throat and her ankles and the underside of her wrists were faintly shadowed with grime. There was a coppery stubble in her armpits, and a bristle of unshaven hair on her legs, cracked red enamel on her toenails. The breast band of the bikini was just enough askew to reveal a brown newmoon segment of the nipple of her right breast.

“Deeleen, I want you should meet Trav,” Corry said.

“Hi,” Deeleen said, looking me over. She had a broad mouth and a pink stain of lipstick on one front tooth. She was obviously awaiting further identification.

“That Marianne works at the Char-Broil, she told him one time we were out this way, and he came around. I was telling him about going on the cruise with Dads.” It was very casual, but totally explicit. He came looking for you, but I told him the score and he settled for me.

Deeleen gave a little shrug of acceptance and slumped into a canvas chair, spraddled and hot. There was a little roll of fat around her waist. She hitched the bikini top up. High against the meat of the insides of her thighs a fringe of pubic hair escaped the scanty fabric which encased the plump and obvious pudendum. A few years ago she would have been breathtakingly ripe, and even now, in night light, with drinks and laughter, there would be all the illusions of freshness and youth and desirability.

But in this cruelty of sunlight, in this, her twentieth year, she was a record of everything she had let them do to her. Too many trips to too many storerooms had worn the bloom away. The freshness had been romped out in sweat and excess. The body reflects the casual abrasions of the spirit, so that now she could slump in her meaty indifference, as immunized to tenderness as a whore at a clinic.

“What’s with squirrel-face Marianne?” she asked indifferently.

“Nothing new.”

Corry shed her cabana coat, put canvas cushions on the wide transom and stretched out. They had stopped surveying me. I had passed inspection.

“Even with that wind it’s almost too goddamn hot,” Corry said. “Anybody figured out what we’re going to do?”

“I’ll wait’n see what Dads wants.”

Corry turned more toward Dee, closing me out of the conversation. “Was it the way you figured?” she asked.

Dee gave a flat, mirthless laugh. “Only more so.”

“Anybody want a drink?”

They both stared at me as though startled to find I was still there.

“Sure,” Deeleen said. “What is it?”

“Bourbon.”

“Okay.” Corry said.

“But he locked it when he took off,” Dee said. “You can’t get down where the ice and glasses and stuff is. Corry, you want to bring stuff down from upstairs?”