April Evil

by John D. MacDonald

  “Tender and gentle, aren’t you? Like a pricker bush.”

  She picked up book, glasses and lotion. “Fold the blanket, Mooney, and bring it and the radio in the house. Make sure you shake the sand off the blanket. I’ll give you a beer for services rendered.”

  “On second thought, beer is fattening.”

  “All right. Bourbon.”

  “With just a splash of branch water, Lennie.”

  “Mrs. Parks, Mooney, Mr. and Mrs. Parks.”

  He wore a black scowl as he followed instructions. He went into the kitchen and put the blanket and radio down. He turned the radio off. She put water on top of the ice and bourbon in two tall glasses and handed him one.

  “For God’s sake don’t try to clink glasses, Mooney. This isn’t a class reunion.”

  “That’s a bad mood you’re in.”

  “I’m aware of it. I have troubles.”

  He sipped his drink. “Take me. I never have troubles. I travel light. No room in my pack for troubles. Or for houses or possessions or fat problems. When I get bored, I roll along to some other place.”

  “Are you getting bored here?”

  “The season is over. Your husband, forgive me, rubs me the wrong way.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “But off I go. And I never see him again.”

  “I think I envy you.”

  “Maybe, Lennie, there’s somebody you could be visiting. Pack a small bag. Come on along. We’ll do some loafing at Myrtle Beach and then you can come back here all … refreshed.”

  “You’re a cold bastard, Mooney.”

  “Do you mean I don’t pant and sigh and promise undying love and devotion? Then you’re right. I don’t. I make a flat offer.”

  As he finished his drink he became aware that she was looking at him strangely, her head tilted a little bit to the side, her forehead slightly wrinkled.

  “What’s up?”

  “You’re cold, Mooney, and you’re shrewd. Maybe you could give me an idea or two on my problem. It might mean some money for you. Maybe a lot of money.”

  “They call me honest Mooney.”

  “It would be honest, practically.”

  “Anything where I get a lot of money isn’t going to be honest.”

  “It could be, you know.”

  “Dishonesty is risk. I don’t take risks.”

  “No risks.”

  “So then pour another drink. I’ll listen. What is your problem?”

  She looked at him and seemed to be making up her mind about something. “Does Dil expect you right back?”

  “That I can check. Where’s the phone?”

  “Through there, on the right.”

  He went in and dialed the agency. When Clara answered he thickened his voice and added a touch of cracker. She told him Mr. Parks had left for the day. He told Lennie that.

  “Maybe he’s coming back here.”

  “No. He told me to tell you he’d get a ride to the Shermans’ party later on. That’s why he had me bring the car out. So you can get there.”

  She nodded. “Then you’ve got a little time?”

  “All the time we need.”

  “I’m all sticky from that lotion. I want to feel clean. You make another drink, Mooney. Make me one too and bring it on in.”

  He made the drinks. Just as he finished he heard the dull roar of the shower. He carried the two drinks down a hallway. The bathroom door was ajar.

  “Where do you want your drink?” he yelled.

  “Bring it in.”

  He took a deep breath and pushed the door open. It was a transparent glass shower stall. The hot water had steamed the glass. He could not see her clearly.

  “Give me a sip.”

  She opened the glass door and put her head out. He held the glass to her lips. His hands were shaking. She smiled at him. “Ever scrub a back?”

  “On special occasions.”

  “This is special, Mooney.”

  He was dubious. He felt that this was another form of torture. He suspected that she would change quickly and start laughing at him again. He told himself not to hope. He was dubious for some time. He even had faint misgivings when he carried her, dripping wet in his arms, her head nestled into the hollow of his throat, into the next room. But then the last faint doubt was gone, very thoroughly and completely erased from his mind. She had all the talent he had anticipated and more. After a long time he began to hear the surf again, and the thin harsh gull cries, and the sputtering sound of a light low-flying plane. He went to his clothes and got cigarettes on request and brought them back to the bed. At the next request he put on his shorts and shoes and went to the bathroom and got the two drinks. They needed more ice. He added more bourbon when he added ice. He took them back to the bedroom. She had put on a skirt and she was hooking her bra. Her hair was tangled and her face had the soft look of satiety. She sat on the dressing table bench and began brushing her hair as he finished dressing.

  She began to talk about her problem. He listened carefully to all of it.

  “I heard about the money. Those things get exaggerated, Lennie.”

  “Darling, this is true. It really is. But no lawyer will touch it. Uncle Paul’s contacts are too good. He’s too respected. They won’t admit he’s insane.”

  “And this Preston pair—they’re cutting you out.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’m no lawyer.”

  “I know that. But you’re shrewd, darling. You know people. You know how to handle people. I’ve thought of all kinds of wild things. Now I need ideas. I want you to have some ideas.”

  “What kind of an old joker is he?”

  “Tall. Cold eyes. Very dignified. A culture bug. Music and books and paintings and so on. Keeps his distance. No friends. He doesn’t like Dil at all. I don’t know whether he likes me.” She leaned toward the mirror to make up her mouth.

  Mooney sat on the edge of the bed, glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, watching her. “As I get it, people think he’s pretty crazy. But they like him. Like a town monument to something or other. The thing is to have him act more crazy.”

  “Like what?”

  “It would have to be faked.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If he did something really off-beat, something the whole town talked about, then one of the lawyers would take it.”

  “I’m positive they would. One was nearly willing. I could sense it. But not quite. Ben Piersall is the one I really want to handle it, but he wanted no part of it.”

  “But even Piersall would reconsider if, for example, the old doc started hearing voices, or coming to town without his pants.”

  “Of course, but …”

  “We have to think of how to make him do something irrational, something he won’t be able to explain.”

  Her face in the mirror nodded at him. “I see what you’re thinking, darling. I think maybe it’s pretty bright.”

  “It wouldn’t have to be anything too startling. It could be a lot of little things. If I could hear him talk, I could imitate his voice. You could brief me on what he calls people. Hell, I could call up Flamingo Builders Supply and order fifty gallons of polka dot paint. Or I could use his voice and put a wild ad in the paper, put it in over the phone. He’ll deny it. People will say he just didn’t remember doing it. Hell, Lennie, in a week or two I can have the whole town saying he’s really flipped. Where do I stand?”

  “Would you do it?” She turned around on the bench.

  “Where do I fit? What comes to me?”

  “I don’t know. I’d have to see if it works. I’d have to see what we get out of it.”

  “You said there’d be no risk. There’s risk in this.”

  “Not very much.”

  “Enough to be paid for.”

  “I can’t pay you any money. Not until afterward. I can’t pay you anything.”

  “Not anything at all?”

  Her eyes turned sly.
She sat facing him. She arched her back a tiny bit, lowered her head, looked at him through her lashes. “I could be a sort of … sort of promissory note.”

  “You certainly show promise.”

  “Is that all, Mooney? Hey, go away. Not now, darling. There isn’t time.”

  “Then when?”

  “When do you start?”

  “After you make a chance for me to hear the old coot talk.”

  “Tomorrow is Wednesday. Let me see. Pick me up here at ten in the morning. We’ll go out there. I’ll think of something. He’s never refused to see me. He’s just … cool toward me. Can you get away?”

  “I’ll get away.”

  “After we see him, we can talk about us.”

  “Just talk?”

  “About us and a place where we can meet and plan this thing. A quiet private place. You can think about that, about such a place, and you can think of ways we can make Uncle Paul look weird. I’ll try to think of some too. Where do you live, Mooney?”

  “A room at the Palm Lodge. It’s a little crummy, but it’s near the center of town.”

  “Dang it, I hoped maybe you lived in one of those nice private little cabanas at South Flamingo Beach.”

  “I’ve been considering a change.”

  They looked at each other. Mooney could feel the pulse in his throat. “I could move today,” he said.

  “Get one with a phone, darling.”

  He left by the back door and walked around the house. The motor scooter started on the third try. He drove back down the key, squinting against the warm wind. He thought of her, all wet and silky, and his loins felt an urgency that superseded the warm sense of depletion. He found that to be entirely at ease, he had to keep thinking of her. He did not like thinking of the other thing, the old man and his craziness. Nor did he want to think of the money. There were small shrill alarms in the back of his mind that could only be stilled by thinking intently of Lennie Parks.

  During his life he had cut corners in many small safe ways. But this was more than sharpshooting. Once, when he was twenty-five, he had been roughed up by a pair of cops. It had made him sick to his stomach. It was one of the memories he seldom took out and examined. This could be trouble before it was over. Maybe it would be best to forget it. He had finally had the woman. That should be enough. Pull stakes and roll. But it was much woman. Fire and ice. Too much to turn your back on, yet. Stay a while. Until it began to look too shaky, and then take off. The cabana rent would make a hole in the bankroll. With the season rolling to a stop, there wouldn’t be much coming in. But the woman was worth it. Thirty-four years or so of knowledge in a young girl body. It certainly wasn’t attraction or love on her part. She was trading. She was using what she had to make a deal with. It was his language, and he knew he had accepted it at its proper value. They weren’t kidding each other.

  He left the agency a little earlier than usual. He took his own car to South Flamingo Beach. The rental agent was still there. Six of the cabanas were empty. He picked one on the end. Cars parked by it could not be seen from either the beach or the road. It was on pilings. Heavy draperies could be drawn across the front windows. He paid a one-month rental, and took possession. He moved his stuff out of the Lodge into the cabana. He laid in a small stock of liquor. He dusted the place, rearranged the few pieces of furniture, fluffed the pillows—and ceased only when he realized that he was acting like a nervous and elderly bride. He was sardonically amused at himself.

  Before he went to bed he washed out an overdue stack of socks and underwear. In the night when the wind awoke him he thought of the old man and he was frightened. But it was her price, and he would pay it, and maybe there was no risk. Maybe there was no risk at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ronnie arrived in Flamingo on Wednesday, the thirteenth day of April. He stepped down from the silver car of the Seaboard Airline Railroad onto the open platform. He tipped the porter, picked his pigskin bag out of the lineup and moved off to one side, smelling the warmth of the air, looking at the women in their thin bright clothing.

  He spotted coin lockers in the waiting room. He put his bag in one, bundled his tweed topcoat in on top of it and, after a moment of hesitation, put his brown felt hat in also before slamming the door. He bounced the key on his palm, slipped it into his side pocket and turned, whistling thinly, back out into the sunlight.

  He was in his late twenties. He was slim and erect and blond and his suit sat well on him, gray gabardine hanging properly from good shoulders. He walked in a springy way and his expression was that of a man just about to smile. He had the nordic look of a ski instructor, the pale blue eyes of snow-country distances. He looked alert, intelligent and friendly.

  Ronnie was in the mood of a man on vacation. He walked slowly down Bay Avenue from the station, absorbing the mood and flavor of the town. He had seldom worked in a town this small. And though he was not here to perform his practiced, specialized task, habit was strong. He mapped streets as he walked, studied traffic density, measured the timing of the traffic lights.

  He had walked in just this way in many strange cities. He took infinite pains. Inattention to detail has ruined many small businesses. Ronnie was, in effect, a small business enterprise, solvent, successful. He had been on call for seven years, ever since he completed his first and only prison term at the age of twenty-one. When any syndicate underling became too greedy, or too ambitious or too unmanageable, or whenever a particularly vicious doublecross had been accomplished or was contemplated, there was a choice of specialists who could be contacted. Ronnie was one of them. The most successful one. During the seven years he had killed twelve men and two women.

  There were several reasons for his continuing success. There was his capacity for planning carefully. There was his use of a variety of techniques so that no standard pattern could be ascribed to him. He did not look or act the part. On rare occasions when he had been picked up, he made no attempt to deny a criminal record. But in his quiet voice, using excellent diction and grammar, he would point out that he owned a small and profitable tire-recapping business in central Pennsylvania, and he was on a business trip. He had papers to prove it. And he did own the small business, and it was profitable.

  It was in the tiny cluttered office of his small business concern that he would receive a phone call. It would come from a pay station in New York or Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans. It would be a voice he didn’t recognize. Go to Las Vegas and call such and such a number. He would make the trip. The phone call would result in a contact in a dark car or a dimly lighted room.

  The instructions were simple. “Frankie Delani in Reno.”

  And some time during the next month one Frankie Delani would cease to live—by knife or bullet, by a wire around the throat, or a fall from a high place, or a heavy blow on the head. And Ronnie would return to Pennsylvania. Soon thereafter he would receive payment. It would come in various ways. It was always in cash, in used bills. There was never any specific clue as to who had sent it. Sometimes he suspected. But he never knew. Sometimes when the amount seemed too small, he was annoyed. Other times it would be larger, more satisfying. But only Ronnie knew that he would have performed the assigned tasks with no pay at all. Once, between assignments, he had gone to a strange city. He had selected a name at random, taking it from a phone book. It had been very simple because, in this case, the man had had no presentiment of danger. But Ronnie had made the stalk as carefully as with the others.

  But he resolved he would not do that again. It had been pleasurable, but it had meant a step across a thin line. He was aware that he was not as other men. He had read enough to know that other men, if they could see inside him, would call him psychopathic. So long as he kept his wish to kill within the channel of those cases assigned to him, he could pose as a man of business and the difference would not show on the outside. But he was superstitiously afraid that were he to continue to kill without cause, he would become marked, and other men would be
gin to read the difference when they looked at his face.

  There were, in the country, perhaps twenty men who knew his function and his importance. Few of them knew him by sight. They did not want to know him better. Should he ever fail, they did not want any tie-in provable. Some of the men who knew of him were police officials. Those men, wise and cynical in their trade, felt that he performed a reasonably valid function. Without Ronnie, and a very few other specialists, open warfare could result. A strong syndicate meant more crime—but more of a surface appearance of law and order. Weak links in the administrative chain had to be removed. It pleased Ronnie to think that two of the men who had known of him—had been high enough up in their territories to know of him—had been eliminated through his efforts.

  The last time he had come to Florida, he had come on assignment. He had come to Tampa three years ago. The man was named Mendez. Mendez had been involved in a serious disagreement over control of bolita. Serious for Mendez. It had taken three weeks of planning. Mendez had a bodyguard. But he had a bad habit of walking out of a place ahead of them. Ronnie had blown Mendez’ chest open with a twelve-gauge shotgun on a rainy night as the man left a bar.

  This trip was different. This trip was a change in routine. A thick-set man with white hair and a thin high voice had given him the instructions in person. That, in itself, was a departure.

  “You know Harry Mullin?”

  “I know of him.”

  “Know he crashed out?”

  “I read about it.”

  “He’s got good connections. He’s got something lined up. He wants a box man and a gun. He asked for the Ace for the box. You’re the gun.”

  “It’s not my line.”

  “It was your line once.”

  “It didn’t work out.”

  “You’re going into it again, one more time.”

  “Okay. Why the pressure?”

  “No pressure. What we know about what Mullin has lined up, it sounds sour. Anyway, the word is that it has to go sour, not for Mullin but for the Ace. The Ace got loose too easy. Nobody wondered too much about it. Now we know.”

  “He made a little trade?”