A Deadly Shade of Gold

by John D. MacDonald

  "John Smith is a little too much, I guess. Mack Smith?"

  "You want to play it close, don't you?"

  "The name might mean something to Tomberlin."

  "How about the face?"

  "It won't mean a thing. When can you set it up?"

  "Tomorrow evening. We'll go to his house. He seldom goes out. There'll be the usual group of sycophants hanging around him. I'll invent some excuse for dropping by You'll have to play a part, Mack Smith."

  "Who will I be?"

  She stretched her long and opulent body and said, "I think the proper designation is Connie's Latest, if you don't mind too much. I shan't kid you, my dear. It is the best protective device you could imagine. I am the complete bitch, and it doesn't bother me a bit. I have a very rational approach to my needs and desires. I am thirty-five years old, darling, and I shall never marry again, and there is no reason why, with my looks and my money, I should settle for an empty bed. My nerves get a little flippy when I do. But I also treasure my emotional independence. So I am notorious for averaging about three young men a year. They are usually somewhat younger than you, but built along the same lines.

  "My God, this California has the world's greatest supply of huge, healthy, beautiful young men. Tomorrow night you must act as they always do in the beginning-earnest and humble and anxious to please. That is when they are very nice, seeing to drinks and cigarettes and wraps, and holding doors, and looking so humbly grateful and happy. After a few months, when they begin to take too much for granted, then they get tiresome and I have to boot them out. Mack, my dear, I would look naked in public places without one of my young men at my side. I got rid of the last one over two weeks ago, and enjoying my little spell of spinsterhood, and I'm not yet ready to go prowling for the next. But Cal will be perfectly willing to accept you as the next one, the current one. Where did I find you?"

  "I was running a boat for some friends of yours."

  "Perfect. I was up at Monterey last week. Their name is Simmins. Gordon and Louise. I hired you away from them because I am thinking of buying a boat. But Cal won't be particularly curious." S

  he held her glass out and I made her a fresh drink. She brushed my hand with her fingertips and said, as she took it, "Are you going to suggest that we might as well have the game as well as the name?"

  I sat closer to her and said, "It would be normal to think about it, Connie. You are pretty spectacular, and you know it. But I don't think it is a very good idea."

  "That is what I was going to tell you. If you suggested it."

  "What are your reasons?"

  "My dear, my young men think they are so bold and wild and free. But they are so easily tamed. And it is to my taste to have them tame. They respond to reward and punishment. So there is no emotional involvement. They are a charming convenience. Can you understand why I want it just that way?"

  "I think so."

  "You and I would be another thing, my friend. It would take us too long to find out who is winning, and in the process I might lose. I would not want that. It would diminish my personal liberty. I fought hard for it and I enjoy it. I am a violent, petulant, spoiled woman, and I wouldn't suit you unless you could dominate me and teach me manners, in and out of bed. I can sense that in you. And the money does not impress. I can sense that too. So I would not have that weapon either. No, I don't play the games I can't win, Mr. Smith, Mister Mysterious Smith. But what were your reasons?"

  I smiled at her. "It would feel a little too much as if I had been standing in line, Connie."

  Her eyes changed to narrow slits of gold and her lips lifted away from her teeth. Then suddenly she gave that huge laugh and gave me a punch on the shoulder that made my hand go numb.

  "See? You would beat me with that sort of talk. One day I would find myself weeping and begging your forgiveness. Like a woman. My God, we might be good enough together to take the risk. But no. Maybe five years ago. Maybe. Not now. I am too old to be physically beaten, and that is one of the things you would find it necessary to do. Because I am insufferable. I know it. Come with me."

  She took me into a study which was also a trophy room. African game. Some very good heads. Leopard, lion, buffalo. There was a case of fine weapons behind glass. There were framed photographs of her, younger, slimmer, just as vital, standing by the dead elephant, rhino, great ape.

  "My guns," she said. "My dear dead animals. I took my sainted husband on safari five years running, thinking it would turn him into enough man for me. He killed like an accountant signing a ledger. He bent over a bush to pick a flower for me and a snake struck him in the throat. He was dead before he could fall to the ground. If it was permitted, I would have his head in here, mounted like the others. And the heads of all the young men. Now you know me better, Mack Smith. You might be enough man for me. I think I will always wonder about that. It's bad luck we're past the years of finding out. Be here at six tomorrow. We will use my car. Good night."

  I found my way out. I heard that laugh as I was leaving. I wondered if she had laughed the same way after downing old jumbo, the tusker, shown in the framed glossy, recumbent beside Mrs. Melgar in her safari pants, her smile, her big bore weapon at port arms.

  I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelts, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white tail deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast.

  They have all their earnest rationalizations about game control. It is good for animals to shoot them. It may serve some purpose to gut shoot them with a plastic arrow. We have so bitched up the various ecologies in all our areas, game control is a necessity. But it should be done by professionals paid to do it, the ones who cherish the healthy flocks, the ones who do not get their charge out of going bang at something with thrice the animal dignity they can ever attain.

  I do violate my own concepts by slaying the occasional fish. And eating him. But spare me the brotherhood of the blood sports, the hairy ones, all the way from Macmillan and his forty grouse a day to some snot kid who tries to slay every species of big game in the world, with the assistance of his doting daddy.

  There is one thing which strikes me as passing strange. Never have I met a man who had the infantry memories, who had knocked down human meat and seen it fall, who ever had any stomach for shooting living things. I could not imagine Paul Dominguez ever shooting even a marauding crow. He would need no romantic fantasies about himself. His manhood would need no artifical reinforcing-Now I was momentarily associated with a killer female. Perhaps with her too it was a search for balls. She tended to scare the hell out of me. In fact, she reminded me of that horse she mentioned. If I got involved, she would feign docility for the chance of heaving me into an arroyo or crushing me against a stone.

  A hard rain came smashing down as I ran for Mrs. Broadmaster's tiny front porch. It was a little after ten. Ten minutes later Junebug knocked at my door. She said she had seen the lights. She wore a transparent rain cape with hood over a fuzzy yellow jump suit. She carried most of a bottle of scotch in her hand. She'd had a couple of belts to build boldness. She said she'd come for a cozy nightcap.

  She was like a sad and anxious little yellow chicken in that jump suit. It was raining hard, and she was spanking clean and smelled soapy and fresh, and she was touchingly nervous
about her earthy intentions, and I did not want to prove that most females were not as overwhelming as Mrs. Melgar, and I had the hunch that the slightest touch would slip her out of that jump suit like a squeezed grape, and afterward she could have a nice little cry about Poor Engineer. But it was not my night for Junebugs. I played dense, evaded small traps, and finally managed to send her off home with just a few small scratches on her pride.

  I felt virtuous as all hell. I took a hot bath in Francine's pebbly tub. But suddenly as I was sweating it out, and sipping a strong nightcap, I felt a sudden slide into depression. It was compounded of the old scars on my legs, of the garishness of the bathroom light, of the lingering soreness in my ribs from being hurled against the Jap truck, of the look of Francine's plastic tile, and a douche bag hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and the scrawniness of the pink towel I would have to use to dry off for bed. I felt the brute rejection of my apartness in this world, of too many losses and too few gains, of too much of the dirty underside of things, of too much vulnerability.

  It had all the sour tang of that post-coital depression which occurs when something hasn't meant enough. On the floor of my mind, splintered mahogany floated in the puddled metallic blood. Connie had talked of the empty bed. But I still weaseled it. I left it to chance. I put a robe on and let the Junebug number ring once before I hung up. I left the door ajar and sat in the dark living room. She pushed the door open cautiously and said, "Was that you?"

  And she was a warmth to cling to, to keep from drowning.

  I had a drink in Connie's apartment while she finished dressing. She came out with the happy walk of a woman who knows she will be approved. She wore a dark sheath dress of some kind of knitted material. She was almost but not quite too big for knitted fabrics. Her shoulders were bare and honey-brown, smoothly muscled and magnificent.

  "You're very elegant, Connie."

  "Thank you. Wear that same look all evening, dear, and you'll fit the category."

  "Drink?"

  "The same as before. Please."

  She went to the phone and called the basement and told them to bring her car around front. She came back and took her glass, touched it to mine. "To whatever you're after, Mack Smith. Mysterious Mack Smith. Your eyes intrigue me, Mr. Smith. Are pale-eyed people cruel? Your eyes are the color of rain on a window in the early morning. At first glance last night, I thought you looked quite wholesome. That's a deception, isn't it?"

  "I have wholesome impulses."

  "Kindly keep them to yourself. You know, I think you are just as violent as I am. But your control is better. What are you after?"

  "A close look at Mr. Tomberlin."

  "That's all?"

  "I might bend him a little."

  "What did he do to you, dear?"

  "Let's say he set something in motion and it didn't work out very well for anybody except him.

  "Who did you last work for?"

  "Gordon and Louise Simmins of Monterey. Why?"

  "Am I a better employer?"

  "The relationship is a little more personal."

  "My dear, the people at Tomberlin's will be a mixed bag. Fragmented groups spread about the place, serviced by his Hawaiian army. Circulate at will. I phoned him today. He is leaving in two or three days. He likes to go down to Montevideo this time of year. He has a beach house down there. It's autumn there. Tonight is part of the series of little parties he gives himself before he leaves. He'll stay in Uruguay a few weeks, then go up to Canada for part of the summer, then back to his Cobblestone Mountain lodge for the rest of the summer and into the autumn here, then back into the big house October through May. That is the overall pattern, but he is forever whipping off on mysterious little trips. He has the boat, of course. And, one big bastard it is, some sort of a converted Canadian cutter. And a small airplane. But he has never learned to drive a car.

  "Do you want to know these things about him? He drinks iced tea, gallons of it a day. Strangers think he is belting strong highballs, but it is always iced tea. He designs his own clothes and has them made, and some of his outfits are very strange. He has these enormous living expenses, and platoons of accountants and tax attorneys in the background somewhere, but he is very cheap about odd little things. The liquor will flow freely this evening, but it will be the cheapest you can buy. He never carries any money with him, and he's never been known to grab a check anywhere. His drivers have to buy those strange kinds of gasoline that nobody has ever heard of."

  She put her empty glass down and said, "Are we ready?"

  I draped the pale fur over her shoulders, a broad stole about ten feet long, big enough for a big woman. She wore cat's eye studs in pierced ears, and a single ring, a narrow oblong emerald that reached from knuckle to knuckle. She brought no purse. She loaded me with her cigarettes, lighter, compact and lipstick-typical burden for the captive male. She led me like a small parade. Down in front the doorman handed her into the car with humble tender ceremony. He gave me one glance of knowing appraisal. I got behind the wheel, ideniified the right gadgets, and stomped the car off into the bright evening.

  Eighteen

  THE TILTED rocky area immediately surrounding the Tomberlin place was enclosed by a high wire fence. The gate was open. A broad little uniformed man with a merry Chinese face intercepted us, peered in at Connie Melgar, then backed, grinning, touching his cap.

  There were at least twenty cars in the parking area, ranging from a glossy Bentley to a scabrous beach buggy. The big house was spilled down the rock slope. The garages were on the highest level, at the brow of the slope, with what seemed to be servants' quarters off to the right. We went down a broad stone stairway to the left of the house, sheltered by a cantilevered roof affixed to the side of the house.

  The house was of bleached grey wood, pale stone, glass, aluminum and slate. It was like three sizeable houses, each on stilts, each on a different level down the rock slope, all butted against each other. If there was an architectural unity about it, one would have to get a long way off to see it.The middle house was over a swimming pool big enough to extend half of itself out into the last of the evening sunlight, where there was a wide apron and a garden.

  Our staircase crossed the pool and continued on, I saw, ending at a huge deck in front of the lowest portion of the house, a deck overlooking a steep drop and a broad and lovely view. But Connie turned off down a narrow branching staircase that brought us down to poolside under the middle segment of the house. Some sleek young things were enjoying the pool, swimming back and forth from sunlight to shadow.

  We climbed a curve of staircase into the middle portion of the house, to a vast room vaguely reminiscent of a Miami Beach hotel lobby, but in better taste. People stood in chatting groups. Tawny little men in white coats brought their drinks to them. Chunky little Eurasian girls in uniform circulated with trays of little hot meats and pastries. The guests seemed like glossy people, filling the room with a cocktail buzz, a controlled laughter. Eyes slanted toward us in swift appraisal, and I adjusted my mild and fatuous smile.

  A slender blonde woman detached herself from her group and came hurrying over to us. She was slightly long in the tooth, but she had carefully preserved a lot worth preserving. She gave little coos of pleasure and she and Connie exchanged a small kiss of greeting and told each other how marvelous they were looking.

  "Rhoda, dear, may I present Mack Smith. Rhoda Dwight, one of my oldest and dearest friends." There was a dirty little emphasis on "oldest".

  Rhoda beamed at me, squeezed my hand. "Connie, darling, where have you been hiding such a beautiful man?"

  "Mack is helping me find a nice boat, dear. When we find one, he's going to run it for me."

  "What fun! I hope I'll be asked to come cruising with you, dear. But don't you get quite horribly seasick, Connie?"

  "We may never take it away from the dock darling. How is Norm, by the way?"

  "Who? Norm? But why in the world should you ask me how he is? Shouldn't I be
asking you?"

  Connie gave her a tiger smile. "Now isn't that strange! I haven't seen the dear boy in months. It must be some mistake, darling. I was told you were seen with him in Santa Barbara just last week. Really I didn't think anything of it. After all, you and Quenton both seemed to like the lad."

  "I haven't been to Santa Barbara in decades, darling."

  "There's no reason for you to be upset, Rhoda."

  "Upset? What gives you that odd idea?"

  A little man came up to take our drink orders. Connie began slapping at my pockets to locate her cigarettes. Rhoda gave us a glassy smile and drifted away.

  "Bitch," Connie rumbled. "Scavenger bitch." Our drinks came. As she had promised, they were inferior. She touched my arm. "There's the man. Come on."

  Calvin Tomberlin was in a small group. He was a grotesque. He was of middle size, fairly plump, and stood very erect. He was completely hairless, without brows or lashes. He wore a toupee so obviously fraudulent it was like a sardonic comment on all such devices. It was dusty black, carefully waved, and he wore it like a hairy beret. His eyes were blue and bulged. His face was pale pink, like roast beef. His lips were very heavy and pale, and they did not move very much when he spoke. His voice was a resonant buzz, like a bee in a tin can. He wore a pewter grey silk suit, with a boxy jacket, cut like a Norfolk jacket but without lapels. He wore a yellow ascot with it.