John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

“Mike. Mike, I’m so...”

“Where will you go?”

“I... don’t think I want to visit anybody... and I don’t want anything fancy. I think I’ll drive over and stay in the Clewiston Inn. No. That would be too far. I wouldn’t feel right about it.”

“Why don’t you just drive up to Sarasota and check into a motel and give me a ring when you’re settled?”

“All right. I’ll have Debbie Ann drive me up so you’ll have a car here. She can tell you where I am. I can come back by cab if there’s an emergency, and she can come get me if there isn’t. I... don’t know why I should feel better. All I’m doing is leaning on you.”

Her eyes were wet. He kissed her good night, an impulse which surprised him but which she took gratefully and naturally, clinging to him for a short shuddering moment.

After he was in bed he spoke to himself harshly. The big mister fixit. Self-appointed. What do they matter to you? What does anybody matter to you? Just the boys. What thanks did you get last time? Did they strike off a medal?

He wanted, dolefully, desperately, to be back in the house in West Hudson. When you were in one room, it was if she was in the next room. The little sounds of housekeeping. That wild little yelp of exasperation when she broke something or burned something — a sound that was almost, but not quite, a dirty word. The quick fragrance. The things around her that she touched and loved.

So lie in this strange bed and go over all the times you were cross and cruel, the times you made her cry, and all the gestures of affection you never made, the presents you never brought to her, the days that had gone by without an avowal of love.

But there had been that one thing denied to so many others, the chance to say good-by. “It’s like I’m running out on you,” she had said. “No time to pack. No time to sort things. No chance to clean the closets. You’ll have to love our grandchildren enough for both of us.” He had promised her he would be duly doting.

He lay in the three o’clock darkness. A car went down the Key. A night heron flapped by, hooting with maniacal derision. Tears, heavy as oil, ran out of his eyes. His hands were fists. His throat felt rusty. He heard an airliner.

He slept late on Tuesday. When he got up, the Chrysler was back and the Porsche was gone. Durelda gave him breakfast on the patio. She said her tooth was better. She said the mister was sleeping and the missus had gone away for a little trip.

After breakfast he drove into Ravenna and found a stationery store and bought a package of coarse yellow paper and some soft pencils. It was the special armor of his trade. Operating on the smallest hints and clues, he had often, in the past, dug out stories that had nudged people in high places out of their upholstered niches in city and county government. It was no special trick. It required merely sturdy legs, a consuming diligence, and the knowledge that to most people the sweetest possible sound is their own voice. They can never hear it often enough. And everybody likes to give the impression that they are very well informed. To Mike Rodenska the miracle was not that chicanery was revealed but that it was so often successfully concealed.

He went first to the small sales office just inside the pretentious entrance to Horseshoe Pass Estates and talked to Marvin Hessler, the salesman-employee Troy had introduced him to when he had shown Mike the property. Marvin was wary at first, but after Mike had managed to give the impression that his investigative efforts might serve to put the project back on its feet, and thus protect a job Hessler had begun to be dubious of, he got complete cooperation. He scrawled key words as memory aids on the coarse paper, folded twice, bulging the pocket.

He looked at land which had been cleared and land which hadn’t. He saw half-dug canals with banks that were collapsing because the sea-walling hadn’t been done. He saw where the dredging had stopped, and where they had run out of fill. He looked at the plot map, read the restrictions and specifications which had been filed with and approved by the Ravenna County Board of Commissioners. He studied the engineering reports, the list of lots already sold, the clips of the advertising campaign, a copy of the original land purchase agreement.

The initial contact always gives you a lead to a few others. It is a geometric progression. He went to the office of the elderly, somewhat ineffectual-acting lawyer who had set up the corporation. By then Mike had become a Mr. Rodney, a staff writer for a large picture magazine which was contemplating doing a story on a typical Florida land-development project — not one of the monster ones, and not one of the little grubby ones — one about the size of Horseshoe Pass Estates. He got some information from the lawyer. He had lunch, picked up his cash from Western Union, added a couple of hundred in traveler’s checks and opened a bank account at the Ravenna National Bank, where he talked for over an hour with an amiable, elderly, low-pressure vice president about the opportunities for investment in Florida land. After he left the bank he became Mr. Rodney again, and talked to three real estate agents until he found one that suited his purposes, a brown, wiry, savage little woman in her fifties who had been born in Ravenna, who envied and despised the people who, through her efforts, had made large pieces of money in real estate, who was a confirmed and vicious gossip, and who seemed to know every local landowner and every parcel of land in the county, and every slick trick that had ever been pulled on the unsuspecting. Her name was Lottie Spranger.

After talking a half hour in her office they went across the street to a curiously tearoomy sort of bar and drank Cokes in a booth.

“A story like that wouldn’t hurt this area a bit,” she said, “and I’m all for it, but you’re making a terrible mistake picking that Jamison mess out there opposite the pass. Sure, it’s a pretty piece of land, but it’s dead.”

“You keep saying that, Miss Spranger, but I don’t quite see how it’s dead. Their sales office is open.”

“I’m not one to gossip, but I’ll tell you just what happened there. For your own good. Jamison is a fool, came down from the north, built some little houses, nothing special, then married Mary Kail who was married before to Bernard Dow, and he died and left her a stack of money. Jamison got his hands on that money and got big ideas and went in too deep. I’d say it’s a good buy for anybody right now, buying good lots in there at the price he’s got ’em down to, but people can’t see that. They haven’t got patience. Pretty soon Jamison is going to be dead broke, and then he’s going to have to unload his equity for whatever he can get for it, and the wolves are just setting-waiting to jump. After Jamison is out, whoever gets it will finish the development and clean up. There’s millions in that kind of deal. That’s choice land. There isn’t much of that left on this coast. It’ll be a high-class development. I’ll tell you this. Jamison fought pretty good there. He’s tried to sell treasury stock, bring people in with him, tried to borrow, tried to move those lots. Nothing has worked.”

“Who are these wolves you mention?”

“There’s big ones and little ones. This deal is big enough to interest the big ones. Purdy Elmarr. Wink Haskell. J. C. Arlenton. They sit way back quiet, but they run Ravenna County, Mr. Rodney. They make out like they’re just old cracker boys, but they’re made of money, and all that money started with land, and they still buy, swap and sell land. And when any of ’em hanker to own a piece of land, there isn’t anybody going to come in from the outside and grab it away.”