Джон Макдональд - A Flash of Green

“It isn’t likely to come to that around here.”

“That’s nice to know. Funny, the girl doing the check-in.”

“The boy looks too young.”

“If you want to make my damn day perfect, now tell me the girl is fifteen.”

“Nineteen.”

“That’s a small help.”

“Are you going to make it?”

“We’ll make it,” Durley said. “If my wife has to make up every bed herself, and if I have to be desk clerk, bartender, chef and janitor, we’ll make it. We can’t afford not to. The trouble was, we missed the season that would carry us through the first summer.”

“The rates seem high.”

“The rear units have kitchen deals in them. We start at ten for a single. Once we hang out the low, low, summer rates signs, you’ll know we’ve been whipped. We’re not after the shoppers. It has to stay a class operation.”

Pritchard brought him the copies of the registration cards. Durley walked him to the lobby door. Durley said, “I don’t have to tell you what not to talk about and you don’t have to tell me, right? We understand each other. Come out to dinner. Bring a friend. The food is good. It cost a hundred grand over estimate, and it was four months late opening, but the food is good.”

Wing started to drive out, then turned and drove past the registration lobby and the big sapphire pool, back to the last unit. He estimated there were twenty rooms in the building. There were five cars parked in the darkness, faintly illuminated by a parking-area light on a tall pole. The little red car was nosed up to the low shrubbery in front of number sixty-six. The canvas top was up. The windows of sixty-six were dark. The little car looked more patient than furtive.

He turned around and drove out. Durley was standing in the parking area in front of the office watching him as he turned out onto the highway and headed back toward Palm City.

It was quarter after midnight when he knocked at the side door, the office door, of Elmo’s home.

Elmo let him in. “Set, boy. When you phoned I was so far asleep Dellie liked to shook me to death waking me up.” He yawned and leaned against the edge of his desk, looking at Jimmy sitting on the couch. “Saturday night I used to howl till break of day, but I’m slowed a lot. Wish you could have waited until morning.”

“I don’t want to see too much of you in the daylight, Elmo. Here or in public places. It might not be smart. And if I’d waited until tomorrow I might have changed my mind about the whole thing. And you had the idea this was urgent, the last time I talked to you.”

“Everything is urgent, boy. The only un-urgent thing in the world is taking your pleasure, and that’s a sometime urgent thing if you set it off too long. I hope to God you got something worthwhile on Sinnat.”

“I don’t know what it’s worth, but I damn well know it’s about the only thing you’re going to get.”

“Leroy said you’d get nothing at all. He poked around some.”

“When you ask me to do something, I don’t want a lot of other people I don’t know about doing the same thing.”

Elmo chuckled. He hitched himself up onto the desk, reached inside his silk robe and scratched his chest. “You got so many ideas about what you will do and what you won’t do, you leave me confused. So far, Jimmy, right up to now, I can’t see as you’ve done anything yet.”

“Maybe I’ve done something about Dial Sinnat. I don’t know how you can use it, or if you can use it. I don’t want to be mixed up in that end of it. I want that clear before we go into it, Elmo.”

“You keep this up, you’re going to put me in an ugly condition, boy. We’re going to get along fine. I won’t ask anything of you you can’t do. We went into that. I want you for what you can do... better than other people.”

“Sinnat is a tough-minded man. Pushing him the way I have in mind might not work out. By the way, he told Kat Hubble this deal is being handled smarter than any of the five men involved, and he wondered who could be the silent partner with the brains.”

Elmo’s eyebrows went up in wonder. “Well. How about that? So there’s another real good reason to make him stop thinking about any part of it. What have you got?”

“I had good luck getting it,” Jimmy said, and told him precisely what he had found out, and turned the copies of the registration cards over to him.

Elmo studied the copies, walked around his desk and sat down. “Too bad it had to be Burt’s boy.” He shook his head and smiled. “No beaches and backseats for that little gal. No bugs and bushes for her. She travels first class. Whether it’s any use to us, then, depends on how much he thinks of his little girl.”

“We can assume he’s partial to her.”

“You look beat and you talk mean, Jimmy. You tired?”

“A little. This isn’t my normal line of work.”

“It’s a little special for all of us. But don’t you start bleeding for her, hear? She’s a little girl got herself a husky young buck to while away the long summer with. You sure Burt’s boy is seventeen?”

“Positive.”

“I’ll have to check the law on it with Leroy, but I got the idea she’s been tampering with the morals of a minor. And there’s some kind of an ordinance about conspicuous cohabitation, but I don’t know as it would fit this here situation.”

“I hope this won’t turn into some kind of a public mess.”

Elmo looked benignly at him. “Now, if there is any way in the world of this turning into a public mess, this girl’s father is going to be the first one in the world to want to prevent it. The way I see it, those men that run fast and loose through all the women they can reach, it’s an entirely different thing when it comes to their own daughters. He might be right sensitive about this, Jimmy.”

“He might be.”

Elmo leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “There’s another way to go at it too. There’s no way in the world this little girl could prove it was Burt’s boy with her these two times. She could be claiming it was Burt’s boy just because if it came out it was somebody else, it would be a worse mess.”

“I don’t see what you...”

“She could be trying to hide the fact it was actual old Tom Jennings seducin’ her. Two birds with one stone, you could say.”

“Now wait a minute!”

“I was just thinking out loud.”

“But I don’t want anybody making it into more than...”

“Hold it!” Elmo said sharply, raising both hands. “Lord God, what the hell kind of game are we playing here? Get yourself back in focus, boy. What are we talking about? Robbing the poor? We got a snotty little rich girl playing around with Burt Lesser’s innocent boy. And we got Dial Sinnat, with more money than Carter got pills, and a little cute-ass wife a quarter century younger than him. And they’re outsiders , boy! They come down here from Rochester, New York, or some goddam place like that. You and I were born and raised here. If they died here, they wouldn’t even be buried here. And if they decide they don’t like it, they can go any damn place in the world and live fat. You look at that committee list. There isn’t a one of them didn’t come here from some other place. What the hell right have they got telling us what to do with the landscape we were raised in? Boy, you act as if I’m going to skin those folks, salt ’em down and fry ’em. All I’m going to do is give a little bitty nudge here and there, just enough to make every one of them take a sudden disinterest in Grassy Bay. I want to do it nice and gentle, with your help. If you haven’t got the stomach for a little thing like this, a little job that’s going to work out fine for everybody, with nobody getting hurt bad, then I can have Leroy bring some folks in who maybe set their feet down a lot heavier than you and me. Now, I’m not going to do any more thinking out loud. I’ll maybe find a good way to use this, and maybe I won’t, but you don’t have to know about it if it makes you feel easier. This is the way the world works, boy. This is the way things get done. You should know that much by now.”