April Evil

by John D. MacDonald

  Joe’s eyes brightened. “Law trouble?”

  “In a way.”

  “You know, Ronnie, I knew right off you were an operator. You know a funny thing? I got the roust out in L.A. It got to be time to leave. You know how it goes?”

  “I know how it goes.”

  “But it was a break, me being related to the old duck.”

  Ronnie sneered in a delicate way. “Sure. A rich relative. Like in the fairy stories. I’ve heard that crap before, Joe. That car of yours. Is that your rich relative’s limousine?”

  Joe flushed angrily. “Take it easy. I was leveling. That’s the car we come out here in. The old guy, Doctor Tomlin his name is, is loaded. Laurie, that’s my wife, kind of a funny-acting kid, she gets along good with the old boy. He’s paying her to stay with him. I never had it so good. No kidding. It’s a big stone house and he’s really loaded.”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you believe me? Damn it, you can ask anybody in town. The people that live here. They know about him. He’s got a safe in his house. He keeps it all there in cash. Maybe a million bucks. How do you like that?”

  “Roll up your sleeve. I want to see where you get those dreams, Joe.” He got up from the booth. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, kids. I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls.”

  He went out onto the sidewalk and walked slowly to the corner. He bought cigarettes, lighted one and smoked for a time and walked slowly back. When he slid into the booth Joe had a shamefaced look. Sally’s lipstick was smeared, her hair tousled.

  “Honest, Ronnie, the old man …”

  “I know, Joe. He keeps a box full of thousand-dollar bills under his bed. Have a drink.”

  “I guess it sounds funny, all right. Hell, what difference does it make? I’m living without working.”

  After a long delay, the liquor began to take effect on Joe Preston. He didn’t bother to comb the dank lock back. His eyes didn’t track and focus properly. His mouth was loose. He had crowded Sally back into a corner of the booth. Other customers began to arrive. Joe, thick-tongued and rambling, told Ronnie and Sally how important he had been out in Los Angeles. He dropped a few names. Ronnie knew the names, and in two cases, knew the men. He didn’t let Joe know that.

  Ronnie gauged the time carefully. He said, “We have to run along.”

  “Party’s just getting under way, isn’t it, honey?” Joe said to Sally. “You just run along then, Ronnie.”

  Sally looked at Ronnie and he shook his head. “I have to go too.”

  “What do you wanna do that for, honey? You know I like you? You’re a dish, honey. A big beautiful dish. Like a dish of vanilla ice cream. I love ice cream.”

  “Maybe you can show us that big beautiful stone house you dreamed up, Joe.” Ronnie said it carefully, watchfully.

  Joe straightened up. “Okay, wise guy. I’ll show you the house. I’ll show you the whole deal, wise guy.” He was full of drunken indignation.

  They got him out into the Buick. He staggered badly. His face was beaded with sweat, full of a greenish pallor. Ronnie thought he had let it go too far, but Joe pulled himself back together. They stopped at the bowling alley. Joe insisted he could drive his own car. He wanted Sally to ride with him. Ronnie followed the tan Chevy. It wandered loosely down the street, nudging the curbs when it turned corners. When they came to the stone house, Joe bumped the gates with the front bumper of his car, and leaned on the horn. Ronnie saw a stocky colored man hurry out to the gates. Joe had to back off so they could be swung open. He drove through and Ronnie followed him in the Buick.

  Joe stumbled out of the car and made a wide sweep of his arm toward the house and said, “Told you! Great big stone son of a bitch, isn’t it?”

  Sally had gotten out on the other side. Joe tried to go around his own car, but blundered into the fender and bounced off to land on his hands and knees. Sally helped him up and he clung to her, his arm around her neck, smiling foolishly at the sturdy young woman with sun-streaked hair who came around the corner of the house.

  “Hey Laurie. Wancha meet some friends of mine. Laurie, this is Sally. And he’s Ronnie. Nice people.”

  Sally was trying to disentangle herself from Joe’s heavy arm. Laurie looked irritated and angered. She acknowledged the introductions with a cold nod. Ronnie moved closer to her and said in a low tone, “I thought we’d better see that he got home okay.”

  “He doesn’t look very okay.”

  “He’ll fold up in a few minutes. How about my helping you get him to bed?”

  “We can manage, thank you.”

  Ronnie went over and pulled Joe free of Sally. “Come on, fella. You’re going to bed.”

  “Nuts. It’s early. It’s daylight. See that house. Got half the money in the world in there. Honest. The doc is a stingy old son of a …”

  “Joe!” Laurie said sharply.

  He grinned at her. “Sorry, button. I just …” The grin faded and his color went bad. He turned toward the nearby hedge. Ronnie went with him and held him and kept him from falling as he vomited. “Guess I better … go bed,” Joe mumbled.

  “Lead the way,” Ronnie said to Laurie.

  “There’s no need to …”

  “It’s no trouble. If I let go now, he’ll drop.” Joe stood limply erect, sagging against Ronnie, his eyes half closed.

  Laurie shrugged and turned. Ronnie followed her in, urging Joe along. An old man stood in the lower hallway. “What is this?” he demanded.

  “Joe got drunk and some people brought him home, Doctor Paul.” She did not attempt to make any introductions. The staircase was wide. Wide enough so that Laurie took Joe’s other arm and helped with him. Joe was mumbling but Ronnie could not understand what he said. They went down a long wide hallway to a room near the back of the house. He held Joe while she took the spread off the big double bed. She turned the crisp white sheet back. Ronnie turned Joe around and let him down. Joe sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, head lowered. Laurie pushed him gently back. Ronnie saw the unexpected tenderness in her face. She was, Ronnie decided, a farm type. Milk maid. Hay mows and barn dances—and a good thing to have in a feather bed when the winter nights were long and cold.

  She knelt to take off his shoes. As she worked at the laces she looked obliquely up at Ronnie, tossing her head to get the streaky hair away from her eye. “Really, I can manage now. Thank you.”

  “I can find my way out.”

  She stood up. “I’m sorry. I’ll come down …”

  “Stay with your boy. Get him tucked in. It’s okay. Glad to help out.”

  “I’m sorry I was cross. But seeing him come home like that. It hasn’t happened in a long time.”

  “Not since Los Angeles?”

  She looked at him steadily. “That’s right. Not since Los Angeles.”

  He went down the stairs alone. The lower hallway was empty. He went over to an open doorway and looked into the study. The walls were lined with books. The old man was reading a newspaper. He looked up at Ronnie.

  “Well, we got him in okay.”

  “Splendid,” the old man said absently and raised the newspaper again.

  “I’m surprised a punk like that lives in a layout like this.”

  The old man lowered the paper and stared at him. “Are you? It is surprising, isn’t it? Good day.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Sally was standing by the Buick. The Negro stood by the open gates. Ronnie motioned Sally into the car, got in behind the wheel and backed violently out.

  “You know,” Sally said, “he’s a real nice fellow.”

  “He’s just dandy. A bowling fool.”

  “It was nice to bowl again. I could do better the next time, maybe.”

  “For Christ sake, shut up!”

  She flounced further away from him and they did not speak again on the way back to the rented house on Huntington Drive.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Lenora Parks had spent two hours of Thursday m
orning on the private gulf beach in front of their Seascape Estates home, coming in only when it was time to pay off the woman who had spent the morning cleaning the house. She had spent part of the two hours with a neighbor and had been glad when the neighbor had gone home to change and go marketing. She liked the solitude of the beach, liked the wave sound and the feel of the sun on her body. She liked to roll over on the fleecy blanket and press her body against the sun-hot sand underneath. Solitude was always good. But today there was more reason than before to be alone and to think.

  She knew that she could not use her mind the way she would like to use it. It would be good to be able to pile thoughts and plans and conclusions one on the other like blocks, keeping the edges squared and making a sturdy structure. But her thoughts seemed more like little silver darts that flashed across consciousness, embedding themselves in random targets. She could not close out the world and think. The world presented myriad sensual stimuli and these deflected the silver darts. Out on the beach the sun heat had softened her thoughts into a drugged and lazy optimism. Everything was going to work out. The good years were ahead.

  But now she was back in the house, in the shower stall, soaping her breasts while the needle spray stung her back, and it did not look as though anything was going to work out for her, ever. Thirty-five years had gone by, and nothing was the way she had planned it. Nothing was as she thought it would be. Things had gone off the track when she had lost Ben Piersall, long ago. Ben was now an adult, a man of warmth and strength and certainty. And she was married to a child. A balding, heavy-bellied, querulous, disappointing child.

  She had no illusions about his faithfulness. There had been affairs for her throughout the years of marriage. Far too many of them. She had sought a little gleam of magic. All she had received was the excitement of stolen pleasure, the mild contempt of the community, a certain adeptness in the arts of physical love, a practiced caution and slyness, and the feeling of having been used too often and seldom well.

  She rinsed her body, turned off the water, and stepped, dripping, onto the fleecy mat. She turned toward the mirror and quickly squared her shoulders, arched her back, to pull her breasts high and firm. Of late when she looked at her body in the mirror, if the mirror was not steamed, she veiled her eyes and looked through lowered lashes, misting the image so that she saw only the trimness, the ripened daintiness. When vision was too clear she saw the parchmenting of the skin under her eyes, the sag of broken tissue of her breasts, the minute crenelations on the insides of her thighs. Deep tan could preserve the illusion of firmness better than a pasty whiteness. Deep tan hid the broken blue trace of veins on the backs of her calves, on the under portion of the round breasts. She toweled herself slowly, enjoying the erotic play of the towel’s roughness on the delicacy of nerve ends.

  Until quite recently the marriage had been endurable. It had never been good. Until quite recently there had been times when they had fun. Stay home and get a little high and laugh together. It was as though they felt young, with a lot of life ahead, a lot of chance to correct things. But they didn’t seem to feel young any more. Something had passed by them. She remembered a time when she was a little girl, and her parents had taken her to New York. On a Sunday morning in the hotel room she had heard the clear gay brass of the bugles, the roll and thump of the drums, the music of one band blending into the music of the next.

  She had waited with eight-year-old excitement and tension and impatience while her sleepy parents took an eternity getting up and getting dressed. They would not let her lean out the window to see the bands passing the end of the street. They did agree to skip breakfast and go watch the parade. They walked to the corner, Lenora dancing ahead. When they got to the corner the crowd was breaking up. The last band had passed. She caught a glimpse of it in the distance, all sheen and glimmer in the sun. She had wanted to catch up with it, but her father said you couldn’t do that. They marched too fast. You couldn’t ever catch up.

  It was like that with Dil. The crowd was breaking up. Something went on down the avenue, shining and magical, and you couldn’t catch up with it.

  Ben Piersall had been the third boy to possess her, and the first one with whom it had been good. Between Ben and Dillon there had been several. Six or seven. For the first two years of marriage there had been none. And then it had started again. The first marital infidelity had been consummated on the bunk of a cabin cruiser anchored off a small island in Tampa Bay. Dil and the other woman had gone to cast into the tidal current at the south end of the island. She had stayed behind to nurse a hangover acquired at a dance the night before at the St. Petersburg Yacht Club. The man who owned the cruiser had come back to see if it was in danger of going aground in the tide change. And it had happened with greedy, ruthless quickness, leaving her with a feeling of shame that had not lasted, as she had expected, the rest of her life. It had lasted about three days.

  There had been many other episodes. Some of them had been carefully planned. Some had been an improvisation of the moment. But not one episode had been calculated to achieve an advantage, to trade acquiescence for gain. Until Mooney.

  She could not define her attitude toward Mooney. She knew she would never have entered into any relationship with him purely out of boredom or curiosity. It was not a question of social position. Mooney was probably much higher on the social scale than the big shy blond awkward young milkman of three autumns ago. Mooney had just not appealed to her physically. She had given herself coldly for the first time. She had half expected to be sickened by such an unemotional sacrifice. But it had left her feeling nothing. Nothing except an odd closeness to Mooney. It was a closeness not related to the physical but rather to an attitude, a personal reaction to life. In Mooney she recognized too many facets of herself. Slyness, opportunism, callousness. Plus a sensuality that demanded nothing more than the gratifications of the moment.

  She knew that when she had been young she had not been like that. But then, probably neither had Mooney. No one began life with cynical appraisal. She saw that Mooney was, in many ways, ridiculous. But his absurdities were also her own. This sense of kinship had made the second episode far more stirring than the first. She knew that she was looking forward to seeing him today. She felt a thrill of excitement when she thought of it. Yet she was skeptical enough of herself to wonder if her anticipation was self-induced in order to rationalize the realization that this time, this first time, she was putting a price on her competent services—and there was a name for that.

  As she walked naked into her bedroom, she heard the double chime of the front door. She slipped quickly into a blue robe and zipped it up the front. Jim Stauch stood outside the screen in the sunlight, blinking with lizard slowness.

  “Hi there, Jim!” she said.

  “Hello, Lennie.” He came into the house, taking his hat off, wiping his florid brow with a white handkerchief. She walked with him into the living room. They were about the same height.

  “I’m not expecting Dil for lunch, Jim.”

  He sat down and put his hat on the floor beside the chair. “I know that. Want to have a little chat with you, Lennie. I’ve been thinking about talking to you for a couple of days. I guess Dil won’t like my coming here to have a little talk with you.”

  She sat down facing him. “What do you mean?”

  “Dil’s got himself in a little jam.”

  She made a face. “That’s nothing new.”

  “You know about it?”

  “Not about this jam. What is it this time?”

  “Well, it’s a little matter of a bad check.”

  Lenora had been sitting on the edge of the chair. She leaned back. She felt slightly ill. “That’s a brand new kind of trouble. It’s worse than usual. How much, Jim?”

  “Four thousand.”

  “Wow!”

  “It isn’t exactly a bad check yet. It’s dated two weeks ahead. I just don’t think he’s going to be able to make it good.”

  “I d
on’t think so, either. What do you want to do about it?”

  Jim waited a few moments and said, “I figure on collecting it, Lennie.”

  “How do you expect to do that? We haven’t got that kind of money.”

  “You’ve got this house.”

  “I happen to know we can’t borrow any more on it.”

  “That doesn’t mean you don’t have an equity. Myra’s been giving me a bad time for a long time, Lennie. She figures I’m doing well enough lately so we shouldn’t have to live back in the piny woods. She wants herself a beach place. We’ve been here a couple of times on parties, and this is the kind of place she wants. I want you to start thinking about it. If Dil can’t make good on that check, I’ll set a fair sale value on the house. I’ll buy it and with the money you folks get you can pay off the mortgage, pay me off, and have enough left to put a down payment on a place of your own.”

  Lenora stared at him. “I don’t think I understand. This is our home, Jim. We live here.”

  “Folks have lost homes before, and there’s a lot of them that’ll lose them in the future, Lennie. The ones that lose them are the ones that live too rich, live over their head. That’s what you and Dil have been doing.”

  “You’ll take it away from us.”

  “I surely will.”

  “How did it happen? That check?”

  “Little card game with the boys. He backed a hand real heavy. Backed it with bad checks. And it turned out second best.”

  Lenora got up abruptly. “God damn it!”

  “I never liked to hear a woman cuss. I can’t seem to get used to it.”

  “Jim, you aren’t going to keep this a secret. You know that. Everybody in town is going to know you took our home away from us.”

  “I’ve thought about that, Lennie. I thought about it a long time. The way it looks to me, I don’t think you two have so many friends in this town as you might think. Myra and me, we have a lot of friends. I think they’ll say I gave you folks a break.”

  “Dandy break! You’re so damn generous.”