John MacDonald - Slam the Big Door

The still, heated air was an intricately symphonic construction of aromas. The major themes were the moldy damp, with a basic old-laundry motif, with a repetitive glissando of perspiration, and the final theme of old-smoke — spilled-beer. Through and above and between this almost Wagnerian ponderousness could be detected the sharp little discords of perfume, marijuana, orange peel, burned food, female, urine and tropic sex.

He had stood in rooms like this one in many places. You looked at where they’d chalked the outline of the body on the floor. You watched them dusting for prints. You marveled at how high the blood had spattered on the wall. You listened to the coarse humor of officials with heavy faces and dead eyes, and if they threw a joke right at you, you laughed it up, because if you could keep on being one of the boys you’d get first crack at the next tawdry little room where animal violence had been done.

But, he reflected, if violence were done here, you wouldn’t write a news story that gave the reader the reek of the place, the look of dreadful indifference. LUST MURDER IN RESORT BEACH LOVE NEST.

He moved to the bedroom door. He hoped he was wrong. But he wasn’t. The room was a suitable companion to the living room. It was empty. Troy’s suitcase stood in a corner. The shirt he had worn yesterday was across the foot of the bed.

This is what he wants, Mike thought. This is the way he wants it. This can make him content, because it’s the proper punishment for all his crimes. He is unworthy in his own eyes, and this is his bed of nails. This is his satisfying torment, his ceremony of purification. Once upon a time I knew a man who killed his wife. He loved her. He killed her unintentionally. He was proud of her. He wanted her as slim as the day he met her. So he hounded her, out of love. So she dieted intelligently and it did not do a bit of good because in maturity she had a natural heaviness, so she dieted unintelligently and that worked and she got down to the hundred and ten pounds he had been harping about, and she looked terrible, but he couldn’t see that. And then she could not reverse the process, and she weighed ninety-five when the doctors got a chance to work one of those miracles of medical science on her, but she was beyond the point of being able to use a miracle, and died weighing not much over seventy pounds, and they gave the man hell for permitting his wife to diet herself to death out of vanity. And it took him sixteen months to kill himself. He was a big man. It took him that long to eat himself to death. They had to use a special coffin. And dig a bigger hole than usual.

So is this so entirely different? You can nasty yourself to death. It’s part of the same wish. The death wish is the daughter of guilt. Let every man belly up to the bar and order his own poison.

There were some papers on top of the bureau. He moved over, silently, looked without touching. There was a carbon of a legal document. It was dated today. Notarized today. It transferred seven hundred shares of the Horseshoe Pass Estates Corporation from Dexter Troy Jamison to Mary Kail Dow Jamison, written so as to imply that the certificates, properly endorsed, would accompany the original. There was a stub of red pencil in the bureau-top tray. He turned the letter over and quickly wrote, “Troy — Mary will start proceedings at once. You need expect no police trouble over Debbie Ann. She will require surgery but is in no danger. A warehouse receipt for the rest of your things will be sent to this address. Mary requests you make no attempt to contact her. Mike.”

He hesitated, the pencil poised. Stick on a jolly postscript to my old buddy-buddy? Some little gesture of warmth? No, he doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want the obligation.

He started to walk out of the place, after putting the note in the middle of the sagging double bed, weighting it down with a half pretzel, and was vastly startled to be confronted by an enormous old woman who stood on runover shoes just inside the screen door, blocking the way and dwarfing the porch.

“What you doin’ here?”

“Leaving a note for a friend.”

“I own this here place. They’s payin’ for two and sleepin’ three. I got toll about somebody movin’ in with a suitcase yestiddy, so they owes more, startin’ then. You see ’em, you tell ’em.”

“I won’t see them.”

“Don’t keer about a thang but gettin’ full money.”

“I have a feeling they won’t be with you long.”

“That’ll be a good thang, mister, on account I got me too many complaints on them people.” She turned like the USS America , grasped the door frame, lowered her weight down the two steps with much grunting, and headed for her cottage.

He followed her slowly, went out to where he had parked the Porsche. The shabby gaudy shacks stood disconsolate in the late afternoon sun. The Wiltin’ Hilton, he thought. Bad housekeeping. Nobody has dusted the cabbage-palm fronds. Somebody left some fish in the sun. Come to this retirement paradise, all you senior citizens. (This seems more palatable than “oldsters.”) You’ve got your savings and you’ve got that Social Security, so take your choice. Be a guest of Ma Shelder and live right on the water. Or should you prefer to own your own home, the possibilities are infinite. Take Gracious Heights, for example. There you can buy the version of the Retire-a-Days which best suits you. These exquisite cinder-block homes range from $7,777.95 up to $13,333.50, including closing costs, complete with jalousied Florida room, modern kitchen, carport, septic tank and homestead exemption. Gracious Heights is only fifteen minutes from a new modern shopping center. (Clocked by Fangio in a D Jag with a running start.) You will live in the real Florida. (Entirely authentic, eighteen miles back into the scrublands, flat as a two-dollar tire.) Become an expert on the flora and fauna. (Chinch bugs, red bugs, cockroaches, fire ants, coral snakes, nutria, palm rats, buzzards, strangler figs, palmetto, saw grass, scorpions.) Retire the exciting way. (Gracious Heights is under an average six inches of water twice a day during the rainy season.) Or, if you prefer to build, spacious quarter-acre lots available, ten dollars down, ten dollars a month. (A quarter acre is roughly one hundred feet by one hundred feet.) Four more natural lakes ready soon.

Rodenska inserted himself into the Porsche, fumbled it into reverse, backed out and got away from there.

That was Monday. On Tuesday Hanstohm operated on Debbie Ann in the late morning. Sam Scherman observed the operation. He was pleased and optimistic about the eventual results. As Debbie Ann came out of the anesthetic in the recovery room, a nurse waited with wire clippers so as to be able to free her jaw quickly should Debbie Ann become nauseated and thus in danger of strangling. She was moved back to her private room in the late afternoon. Mary saw her and reported to Mike that she seemed very listless and groggy but otherwise all right.

They had dinner alone that night at the Key Club. Mary skillfully parried the questions of the overly curious who stopped at their table. She said there would be talk about the two of them being together — stupid, inventive talk, but she did not give one damn. They drank to that and drove home through a gusty night in the Porsche, with the top down, the radio tuned too loud to a Havana station.

On Wednesday morning Mike drove Mary to the hospital and waited there for her, and then they drove into town and conferred with the lawyer, vague elderly Morton Stalp, whom Mike had met during the course of his investigation. Stalp kept the books of the corporation. He explained all that had to be done to change the setup so deeds could be properly signed, and promised to start taking the first steps immediately. From there they went to the sales office on the property and talked to Marvin Hessler.