Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  “To the men?” He nodded. “You’re in charge here, Red. Any orders go through you.”

  After I grabbed a quick lunch I went back to the office. Liz gave me a glance of warning and amusement. E. J. was so angry he no longer sounded like a French horn. He sounded like a tailgate tram.

  “I understand you assaulted my son, Jamison! Explain yourself.”

  “Will you listen to what I say, or will you stand there and listen to what you’re going to say next?”

  “I am listening.”

  “I’ve been off the job a very short time, E. J. But in that time your Eddie has been very busy goofing up the operation. He’s meddled with delivery schedules and quantities, tried to make dangerous structural changes in the working drawings, given conflicting orders to the men on the job. The work crews were thoroughly demoralized. A couple of good men have quit. It will take all this week to get the job straightened out. Maybe the kid means well, but he’s arrogant, inexperienced and startlingly stupid, E. J. Give him something to do that will keep him out of my hair. Today he came out and started squealing at me from a hundred feet away to come running and saluting and saying yessir, yessir. So I bounced his outraged little hind end into a sand pile and he went off in a huff. The men on the job were very pleased with the whole thing. So suppose you tell Eddie that if he comes out and tries that bigshot act again, I’ll pack his mouth with wet cement.”

  “Who do you think you are?” E. J. brayed.

  “Your general manager. You’ve got a sour operation going in this Park Terrace thing. You’re going to lose your shirt on it, but maybe if it is run right, you can save your underwear. If Junior runs it, there are going to be little pieces of your tail scattered all over town.”

  “He … Eddie … is a good boy.”

  “Then, for God’s sake, let’s give him a chance to prove it. Get him a set of tools and some bib overalls and we’ll fix it with the union to start him as an apprentice carpenter.”

  E. J. bit his lip and said, “His mother would never …” He caught himself, but it was too late. Those four words gave me the whole score. Too late for E. J. And much too late for Junior. I felt a sudden pity for the little man whose luck had run good for so long and was now turning thoroughly bad. As long as I had decided to work, it was easier to work hard than make a pretense of it. And I didn’t have to do so much thinking about other things.

  It was on Wednesday, the fourteenth of May, that I didn’t get a chance to grab anything to eat until nearly three in the afternoon. I parked by a small drive-in and checked the rack outside. The morning papers were still in the rack. I hadn’t finished mine at breakfast, so I took one back to a small booth. The Vernon Examiner. I could find no mention of the Tampa deal and only slight mention of the crushing of Melendez.

  But, as I scanned an inside page, my own name jumped out at me. It was in a local column I never read. Social gossip stuff. It was called “All Over Town” and written by a withered little ferret of a woman named Conchita Riley with dyed black hair and a collection of barbaric earrings. One of those columns where every proper name is written in upper case. I remembered that she had been at the Brownells’ cook-out.

  “We hear that an old war buddy of JERRY JAMISON’S is recuperating at JERRY and LORRAINE JAMISON’S charming Tyler Drive home. Your reporter didn’t have a chance to meet the mysterious VINCE BISKAY, but the young marrieds who did some impromptu nurse duty last Sunday during the lawn party given by DAVE and NANCY BROWNELL report that he is a dreamboat. JERRY and VINCE were in World War II together and operated BEHIND JAPANESE LINES.”

  I had been eating hungrily, but it took an acute effort to swallow the last bite of hamburger. It seemed to congeal into glue in my mouth. I wondered if Lorraine had seen the column and called it to Vince’s attention. He was mending rapidly but it would mean only one thing to him. No matter what shape he was in, it was time to take off. I cursed the ubiquitous Conchita Riley. Though she was a triumph of journalistic inaccuracy, this time she had managed to get the name spelled correctly. It was too much to hope that it would pass unnoticed by everybody who had read the detailed account of the Peral-Melendez thing.

  I paid the check, jumped in the wagon and headed home. If Vince hadn’t seen it yet, it was damn well time he did. Over a block from the entrance to Tyler Drive the wagon sputtered and died, caught again, wheezed and died with finality. The gas gauge registered less than empty. I pulled it over to the curb on its final momentum. I had meant to get gas that morning, but had forgotten.

  It was about a four-minute walk to my house. The front door was open. The screen made a muted pneumatic hiss behind me. I went up the carpeted stairway and turned toward Vince’s room. The door was open. But I stopped short of the door. I was halted in my tracks by an unmistakable sound. I stood there and leaned my right shoulder against the wall. I shut my jaw so tightly my teeth and muscles ached. It was a warm afternoon on Tyler Drive. A delivery truck stopped near by. A distant phone was ringing. But near at hand, not fifteen feet away, I heard a sound that was familiar, though I had never paid such specific attention to it before. Not the rhythmic surging twang of cheap springs, nor the measured squeak and creak of a cheap bed frame. This was the soft and expensive billowing pulsation of discreet and expensive bedroom hardware—a sound like a rapid sighing. I felt sweat on my body. The sounds were approaching crescendo. I made crazy word games out of it. I was not precisely a voyeur. Just listening. Oyeur, Audio infidelity. Low fidelity. When the amplifier and the speaker were perfectly matched, you had presence.

  “Aaah!” she cried. “God!” she cried. “Aah!” she cried.

  And soon the sound was ended. I do not know how long I stood there, chin on my chest, eyes squeezed shut. I heard her speaking to him, and I could not hear her words, but the tone was clear. Little chortling tones, smug and sated, little wheedling tones, wanting to be told how fine it all was. And a rumble of his voice. I pushed myself away from the wall and my legs felt wavery. But they held me up while I walked into the room.

  He was taking a drag on a cigarette, his lazy eyes half shut. She was reaching out, trying to reach her glass on the night table without moving out of the half circle of his brown arm. Her bright blouse and slacks were a careless tangle on the floor beside the bed. Her blue eyes went staring wide and her hand knocked the drink to the floor.

  She came out of bed in one sleek movement, snatching up her clothes, her face red and ugly. “You Goddamn sneak!” she screamed at me. “You filthy stinking sneak!”

  She plunged by me and I turned and saw the final glimpse of the white wobble of her traitorous buttocks as she fled toward our room. Vince had pulled the sheet across him. He lay back on the pillow, fingers laced at the back of his neck, cigarette in the corner of his mouth, watching me. I stepped closer to the bed. I stepped on a piece of ice from the melted drink and it squirted under the bed, rattled against the wall.

  “You perfect bastard,” I said. My voice was dry dead things rubbing together.

  “How do you figure? You don’t want her, Jerry boy. She made her needs pretty obvious. And it was a long boring afternoon around here. Not that she improved it a hell of a lot.”

  “You bastard!”

  “Your record is stuck, lieutenant. Anyway, at the price I’m paying, I should get all the courtesies of the house.”

  “You won’t be staying.”

  “I’m in no shape to travel yet. I’m staying.”

  I handed him the folded paper. My thumb marked the column. I saw his face tighten. He sat up. “Who did this?”

  “How the hell do I know who did it? One of your public. Tinker Velbiss. Mandy Pierson. Maybe Lorraine. How the hell do I know who did it?”

  “I can’t stay here. Too much chance of some smart local reporter who reads his own paper and has a good memory. Anyway, it’ll be picked up in Washington by tomorrow. And we are both going to be in a sling, my friend.”

  “So you got to get out of here.”

  �
�But I can’t travel on my own. Jerry, you’ve got to find me a place. And when they come after me, you’ve got to do some very plausible lying. Three more days and I can take off. But right now I can just about walk. I’d attract too damn much attention.”

  I walked to the window and looked down on the quiet of the side yard. “I know a place. It’s forty miles from here. Morning Lake. Her people have a summer camp there. In the hills. They won’t go up there yet because the black flies are bad in May and June. I know where the key is. I could take you up there and lay in a stock of food. If you can do what you’ve just been doing, Vince, you’re well enough to cook.”

  “I’m well enough to cook.”

  I turned and looked at him. He was propped up on his good elbow. “So we can knock it all off this evening. We’ll split the money. I’ll get you settled. You move on when you’re well enough, and leave the place just as you found it. And I hope to God I never have to look at you again.”

  “How do I get out of there when I’m well enough to travel?”

  “The camp is two miles from the village. We go through the village to get there. You can get a bus there.”

  “It sounds all right to me.”

  I looked at him steadily. “But this is extra service, Vince.”

  It took him but a moment to catch on. “I’ll return your compliment. You bastard. How much?”

  “One more brick of hundreds for the extra service.”

  “Your help comes damn high.”

  “And one more brick in payment for services rendered … by my wife.”

  “What does that make you, Jerry boy?”

  “The most successful pimp in the county.”

  “You’re harder than I thought you were. It makes it one of the most expensive little romps in the hay in history.”

  “You can get along on what you’ll have left. If you try hard.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Then maybe I take off and you can stay right here. Maybe when I take off I won’t count so good. I might make a bad mistake.”

  He lounged back, rolling off his elbow and his hand went under the pillow and came out with a dwarf automatic. It had a foreign look to it. It was utterly steady, and aimed at my belt buckle. “You could make a hell of a bad mistake.”

  I grinned at him. “Where was that when you needed it?”

  “In my hip pocket, but I needed two hands to hold up Zaragosa and I never got a chance to go for it. And when I was in the back of your wagon I had it in my hand until I was damn sure you weren’t going to get cute. Then I put it in my suitcase.”

  “Trusting old Vince.”

  “It’s Jap. Recent. They’re making some nice ones now.”

  “How stupid do you think I am, Vince? How easy do you think I scare? Fire the silly damn thing and then figure out what you do next.”

  “You get more professional every day,” he said. He put it away. “Okay. You and sweet Lorraine earn a hundred thousand more. I better get out of here while I still own the suitcase.”

  “Get yourself dressed and packed up. We’ll take off as soon as we can make it.”

  I went down the hall. Our bedroom door was locked. I knocked and called to her but she didn’t answer. In the garage I found a can of gas for the power mower, gas that hadn’t yet had the oil mixed into it. As I started down the street with the can, I met Irene walking from the bus.

  I said, “Irene, Mrs. Jamison isn’t feeling well. She won’t want anything to eat, and I’ll eat out.”

  “Well, there was some ironing …”

  “Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Come on along. I’ll drive you back to where you can get a bus quicker.”

  “Ran out of gas, huh? Thought I recognized the station wagon back there.”

  I dumped the gas in the tank. After I turned it over a dozen times with the starter, it caught. I drove Irene to her bus stop, told her we would expect her in the morning. She got out and looked at me with a curious intensity and said, “Mr. Jamison, you take it to the Lord in prayer.”

  “I’ll do that, Irene.”

  “There’s nothing can’t be eased by prayer. You get down on your knees and pray to Him.”

  “Thanks, Irene.” She turned toward the bus stop. I circled back to the gas station, thinking about her. I wondered how much she saw, how much she knew, and how much she was able to guess.

  When the tank was filled I signed the slip and went back to the house and parked in the drive. For once Lorraine had put the Porsche in its stall. I went up and tried the bedroom door again. Still locked. Vince sat on the bed fully dressed, his right arm in the sling inside his coat, loose sleeve tucked neatly in the side pocket, straw hat at a rakish angle. I carried his suitcase. He managed to get down the stairs by himself, backing down so he could hold the railing with his good hand, and taking one stair at a time on his stiff left leg. It made him look white around the mouth, but he made it. I hoped it hurt as badly as it seemed to.

  He sat in the kitchen while I went down to the coal bin. This time I used work gloves to unstack the wood. When the suitcase was cleared I opened it and took out twenty-nine bundles of hundreds and tucked them neatly into the place where the suitcase had been. I restacked the wood and threw the work gloves aside and carried the suitcase back up to the kitchen. It was considerably lighter and easier to manage.

  “I suppose you want to check.”

  “If it isn’t too much trouble.”

  “Suppose she comes down?”

  “I don’t think she will, and neither do you.”

  I opened it. He counted it carefully. “Okay.”

  He put his dark glasses on and we went to the car. He got in awkwardly. I put the two bags in the back. I could have driven through town, but I took the long way around. It was just six o’clock when I turned off the narrow county road into the driveway that dropped steeply down to the lakeshore camp. I knew the camp well. E. J. had built it right after he and Edith were married. And he had done a damn good job. He had built it to last. In the first couple of summers of our marriage Lorraine and I had gone up there whenever we could. I remembered one hot August night when we were alone in the camp. We had been to a barn dance in the village. At about three in the morning, under a full moon, we’d gone skinny-dipping in the black water of the lake. I remembered how whitely she had gleamed in the water, remembered carrying her up to the camp, to the big old double bed, dripping wet and shivering deliciously in my arms.

  I wondered where and why it had all gone so wrong.

  “A revolting name,” Vince said.

  E. J. had named it Sootsus. I had become so accustomed to the name that I had forgotten how sickening it was.

  I parked in the turnaround behind the camp. I carried the two bags to the shallow porch, put them down and went over and got the key from its usual place tucked behind an edge of the windowframe.

  “When you leave, put the key back there.”

  “Righto.”

  I brought in the cardboard carton of groceries I had bought on the way up. I found the fuse box and closed the two knife switches and said, “Yank the power off when you leave.”

  “Check.”

  “Try to stay out of sight. It’s pretty secluded, but some of the neighbors might be in early. Don’t light it up like a church at night.”

  “Okay.”

  I couldn’t think of anything else. I turned to say good-by. He was leaning heavily against the kitchen table, the little Jap automatic pointed at my chest.

  “What the hell?”

  “Good-by and all that,” he said. “I just don’t want you any closer than you are right now. You are getting too cute and too hungry too fast, Jerry. And there’s a hell of a lot of money in the next room, and that is a deep lake. So we carried it off, and this is the end of it. For some funny reason I don’t trust you any more. I don’t trust you at all. So don’t get some cute ideas and try to come back here, Jerry.”


  “It never entered my head.”

  “But it might. Don’t be tempted. Adiósy, amigito.”

  “And good-by and bad luck to you, bastard.”

  And I marched out and drove off, gunning the wagon up the steep drive, feeling it weave as the rear wheels slipped. I was back home a little before seven. Dusk was on its way. The heat bugs sang in the elms and fancy plantings of Tyler Drive.

  A half tray of ice cubes were melting in the kitchen. Smoke wreathed upward from a smoldering lipsticked butt. I listened in the upstairs hall. The bedroom radio was on. The door was locked. I went down and used the melting ice with enough bourbon to fill a tall glass. I wandered upstairs with the tall glass. I went into the guest room. I looked at the rumpled bed. I picked up the glass she had knocked over. A piece as big as half a silver dollar had been knocked out of the rim. There was a damp stain on the dark blue rug.

  You can be reasonably certain of something, and yet have the ability to force it out of your mind, to tell yourself it never really happened, it was just your imagination and jealousy.

  But not this time.

  Not this unmistakable time.

  And I didn’t know why it should hurt so badly. I had thought I was out of love with her, completely. It shouldn’t hurt this way. Not this sick shame and pain that makes you want to drive your fist into the wall.

  Anyway, what did I have to kick about? Wasn’t this just another Tyler Drive pastime? Did I think the quickie with Tinker was epochal or something? The saucy goose deserves a propaganda. So Vince rolled in the hay with a bored, petulant, spoiled housewife who was making the most of her looks before alcohol took the last of her freshness and prettiness. It shouldn’t mean any more to me than it did to Vince. Or to her.

  I finished the bourbon. It was getting to me. I made another one. I went and knocked on the bedroom door.

  I knocked and knocked. She opened it. She stood swaying in a flowered robe, and looked at me with blurred face, sneering expression and said, “So come in, if you’re so damn anxious.”