“Don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. Give me a ring next Decoration Day, at my apple stand.”
I got out of there. I looked back. I saw the red end of his cigarette. I went down onto the pier, onto the one that had nobody else on it. I sat cross-legged in the dew. I heard one of the men say, “Got a hell of a nice bass right there off these rocks three years ago. Went a little over four pounds. Got him on a frog.”
And the other man in the boat said, “Can’t use frogs, myself. They hold onto the line with their hands. Makes me feel sick, sort of. I use bugs.”
“Hold it. Hung up something.”
I held my breath. Then I heard him say, “Solid bottom. Rocks again. Swing it the other way, Virg.” And after a moment, “O.K. It come free.”
I had a hell of a mood. I wanted sad flamenco guitars and Spanish types singing through their noses while I swayed and snapped my fingers and let the big pearly tears roll down my damask cheeks. I sat there a long time and then went up to the house and went to the kitchen and begged a monstrous sandwich off Rosalita, she of the face like a family vault. Emotion gives me hunger.
It was nearly dawn when they got her. I went down to the dock. They did a fumbling job of getting her up out of the boat and they dropped her. I expected Wilma to sit up and give them hell for being so clumsy. But she was dead. Not a messy death. Not like on that South Carolina road when Gabby, in the sedan ahead of us, turned out into the path of the lumber truck. They were a mess. All of them. Mitch went into shock, I guess. I can remember him trotting up and down the shoulder of the road, picking up the sheets of the arrangements that were blowing all over, making a neat pile of them, looking at each one to see if he’d found any part of “Lady, Be Good,” because he’d paid Eddie Sauter to do that one for us in between those good Good-mans.
No, this one was a lot cleaner. Noel was there too. I wondered what she was thinking, looking at the body. That body was a trap that had caught Randy and Gilman Hayes without question, and probably Steve Winsan and perhaps Wallace Dorn. And Paul? That thought hit me and it did bad things to the digestion of my sandwich. If Paul belonged on the list too, it gave Wilma a perfect batting average on her house guests. No, I thought. Not Paul. The sandwich subsided. And I wondered why that sort of fidelity had suddenly meant so much to me. It was Mavis’ lookout, not mine. I had no claim. A kiss in a car? In Wilma’s set a kiss in a car was as consequential as combing your hair. But, damnit, I was not of that set. I was there only because it was bread and butter.
And then I remembered it was exactly the same thing for everybody else. Including Paul.
It was genuine, if feeble, daylight when they herded us into the so-called lounge and the one named Fish made a little speech. As I listened to him say that Wilma had been “stobbed” in the back of the head I wanted to say, “Oh, come now! Dragnet does better than this. Your routine is corny. Get some new writers. Get a bigger budget.”
And then it hit me that it was true. It wasn’t an act. It was murder. The taking of a life. I went cold all the way through. It wasn’t any game. The taking of a human life. I looked around at the others. My God, we were pretty people. I could eliminate myself. And Paul. But that was all. Six people left, and six good reasons. And six opportunities. It had been a dark, dark night.
Noel walked out of the room. She seemed so darn calm. If you had to pick a guilty-looking one, you’d pick Randy. He was a jittering shambles. Mavis was still blubbering. I couldn’t figure out where she got all the water. Paul looked grave and sobered. Our eyes met. It made warm things run up and down the Jonah spinal column. Wallace Dorn stood there with the disapproving expression of a master of hounds who has just seen a farmer shoot the fox. Steve was talking his way into a PR pitch. That suddenly rang some bells. Judy Jonah guest at murder party. TV comic in nude revel. Wild party ends in murder. Cosmetic Queen Slain. Wow! The networks have a code. I would be cooked like a White Tower hamburg in spite of having been a very good girl. It would be a more effective bounce job than Wilma, living, could have managed. Gilman Hayes sat on the floor reading a picture book.
Apparently we had to wait for the big shots to arrive. The big trooper sidled over to me, subtle as a hippo. By daylight he was younger than I had thought.
“I’ve sure liked you on the TV, Miss Jonah.”
“Thanks, friend. You’re one of the last survivors of a dwindling race.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
He was big and dumb and honest and sweet. I had pained him. “I’m planning to retire,” I said, wondering why I said that.
“You are? Well … I suppose it’s a case of quitting while you’re ahead.”
“I might get married, even,” I said. The conversation was rapidly working its way into a hole.
“That would be nice.” Boy, we were sparkling.
“It’ll be tough to do. I’ve done that bride routine so often.”
“Hey, I remember that! You did it in that movie. Where you got all fouled up with that long thing in back.”
“My train.”
“And then you got the hay fever from the bouquet.”
“And tried to keep from sneezing, like this.”
He watched me with pure delight and laughed and slapped my shoulder and nearly knocked me down. Then everybody was staring at us. The trooper turned bright red and began looking stern. We’d been whistling in church.
It was, all in all, a highly unreal Sunday morning. Vividly unreal. We seemed to be standing around like a cast waiting for the director. When you stay up all night it does strange things to the following morning. But I didn’t sag. I was aware of Paul in the room. I felt keyed up. Mavis had finally stopped.
What happened next was purely and simply nightmare. What happened next I do not really believe I will ever pry out of the back of my head. It’s still there, in color. Just last week I woke up out of a juicy nightmare about it and Paul held me safe and close, and a long way off a coyote howled. I needed a lot of comforting.
Four
(STEVE WINSAN—BEFORE)
I KNEW I WAS GOING TO have to go up there to Wilma’s place and do plenty of scrambling. She made that clear when she phoned me. She’s cute, like a crutch. “Randy has been telling me I’m dreadfully poor, darling. He keeps going over lists of things and making little check marks. He gave you three little marks. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I guess you’ll have to ask him.”
You never let a client see you squirm, especially if the client is Wilma Ferris. “We’ll still have our beautiful friendship, kid.”
“And poor Gil will be so depressed if he can’t read about himself in the papers any more.”
“I guess I can make it all right, Wilma.”
“I thought you would,” she said a bit obliquely, and hung up after telling me to be there by cocktail time. It meant canceling out some things in town, but nothing too special. She phoned me on Wednesday. I managed to keep telling myself everything was fine until late Thursday afternoon, and then I hit bottom. Dotty came in and stood by my desk and asked me if there was anything else and I growled at her to go on home.
After she left, banging the reception-room door behind her, I took a yellow pad and a soft pencil and tried to figure out just where the hell I was. I figured it out in the most pessimistic way possible. I assumed I’d lose all three of them. I had already figured on losing Judy Jonah. Willy, her agent, had given me the confidential word on the trouble he was having trying to place her show. It was, of course, too expensive to operate to take any gamble on sustaining, even if a decent half-hour spot could be opened up for it. And the way the rating had skidded, he had a big problem interesting any new sponsor. We agreed that it was highly unlikely that Ferris would go along with her another season.
A thing like that you can stand. But three at once makes a hell of a hole. I had to keep paying on the tax deficiency they’d nailed me for, and keep sending Jennifer her five-hundred-a-month alimony so she could sit on her scrawny tail ou
t there in Taos, and keep paying the rent on the office and the apartment, and keep paying Dotty, and keep up the personal front. I’d built the list up to twenty-one hundred a week. And with a six-hundred drop it just wouldn’t add up. I couldn’t make it come out. And new clients don’t jump up out of the brush in the summer.
But all the time I knew I was worried about more than the six-hundred drop. This is a rumor town. What the hell has happened to Steve? Hear he lost Hayes and Jonah and Ferris. Guess he wasn’t doing a job for them. Just the faintest smell of failure and it would make it an awful lot tougher to plant a release and then maybe the remaining ones would get nervous, and then Steve would be really sunk. And there wasn’t a PR firm in town that would take me on. Not after the way I set myself up in business back there in ’48, walking out with the clients in my pocket. They’ve been waiting for me to fall on my face. Hell, a man has to take care of himself. They would have kept me on coolie wages until I was seventy, and then invited me to buy in—maybe a big two-hundredth part of the business.
I sat there and I was really scared. I knew who would be the fourth one to go. Nancy, my Big Author. I’d run out of angles as far as she was concerned. It didn’t seem to occur to her that maybe she better get another book published. I’d even run out of panel shows I could get her on. All I had to do was mention her name and the columnists I laughingly call friends would groan.
I sat there in the dying city and wished I’d been a little smarter. The cream is in the industrial accounts. A few of those and I’d be set. But my people are individuals, most of them in the arts or entertainment. I suppose that’s natural. That was my beat when I was on the paper. Clubs and galleries and theatres, radio stations, concert halls.
I sat there and I began to feel artificial. Something that had been made up. Packaging is everything. They don’t seem to give much of a damn about the contents any more. Make the outside pretty. Give it that glamour look. The hell with the product. The public will buy. And that was what I was in. The packaging business. Dressing up personalities.
I went into the small bathroom off my office and turned on the fluorescent lights on either side of the mirror. It is not a kind light. If I squinted a little, blurring my image, I was still Steve Winsan, that fabricated product, that All-American tailback type, bluff and hearty and confident as all getout. The man to see. But with my eyes wide open, my face under the naked lights looked like the face of a tired character actor. That was it, maybe. I’d been playing the part of Steve Winsan so damn long it was going stale on me. I was sick of Steve Winsan and of a world full of things that didn’t work quite right any more because they weren’t making good products any more. They were fudging. Filling the armpit salve with air bubbles. Making nail polish guaranteed to flake off in twenty-four hours. Publishing books guaranteed to stand only two readings before the pages started to fall out. Putting fenders on cars you could dent with the heel of your hand. Make them stand still for the upkeep. Put crumby steel in their razors, weak thread on their buttons, waterbase paint on their walls. Keep them coming back. Hooray for enterprise. Hooray for Stephan Winsan Associates, which vends a product nobody ever heard of thirty years ago, and practically anybody can do without right now. There was nothing wrong with me that a double orchidectomy couldn’t cure.
So I went home and changed clothes and went out on the town and I was gay as hell and got home earlier than usual and quite alone and set the alarm, and by eleven o’clock I was being a Fancy Dan in the parkway traffic, tooling the MG in and out of the lanes and wondering why the hell I owned a car when I used it not more than three times a month and why I had three suits ordered and why I’d given Dotty a raise, and why Jennifer couldn’t fall off one of those New Mexican cliffs, and what the hell I was going to say to Wilma that would make her pat me on the head and call me back into the fold. And I wished that I had never clambered into that nine-foot bed of hers, because all it had done was use up a weapon that might have come in handy this week end. Wilma is the sort you do not gain ascendancy over by pouncing on. Her only involvement, ept though it may be, is physical. All you lose is your dignity, and all you gain is the responsibility of coming on the run should she crook her finger again. Much the same loss that Dotty had suffered with me.
I ate a late lunch on the road, a heavy lunch to put a good base under the drinks that would be flowing. I arrived a bit early and thought I might be the first. But the Hesses’ car was there, between Wilma’s and the station wagon. Just as I got out of my car, Judy Jonah came boiling down the drive in that Jag of hers. She swung in beside me.
She got out of the car and put her fists on her hips and stared at the house. “Wow!” she said.
“First time you’ve seen it?”
“Uh-huh. Looks edible, doesn’t it? How are you doing, Steve?”
“Medium. Did Willy say anything to you yet about that Millison thing?”
“It sounds great,” she said with a look of disgust. “He’ll have something real gay lined up. Like catching a custard pie in the puss. Something subtle like that.”
“A thousand-dollar pie, my lamb.”
“Not by the time I get it, it isn’t.”
“He’s a replacement. They’ve got the hell budgeted out of him. That’s all he can do.”
José carne out to get our luggage. For once he seemed almost mildly glad to see me.
“Don’t think I’m not grateful, Steve. Willy told me that you found out about it and sicked him onto it.” She smiled at me but there was a little bit of frost behind it. We used to get along a lot better. And then I made a mistake. One of those things. It wasn’t even very important to me. All she had to do was say no. But she said no and, at the same time, gave me a wicked smack across the mouth. It cut my lip and I came within a tenth of a second of really hanging one on her, I was so mad. She told me she would stay on as a client merely because she thought I knew my business, but my professional services were the only ones she required, or would ever require. Hence the little suggestion of coolness.
“Where is Willy, by the way? Come on, we go around this way.”
“Absent by request. Wilma says this is social.”
“Wilma says.”
She gave me an oblique look, a quick flash of those expressive blue eyes. “I should have at least brought a writer, I guess.”
“I’ll feed you some lines.”
“Brother, this is really a place.”
Wilma and the Hesses and Gilman Hayes were on the big terrace just outside the lounge. Hayes was dressed for the water, standing, talking to them, and I wondered why he didn’t have spangles on his trunks. He said hello to Judy in a bored way and gave me the shallowest possible nod. Wilma did her normal amount of gushing. Randy gave me a nervous cold hand and Noel smiled. Judy was in a rush to get her suit on while there was still sunshine. I was in a rush to get Randy off in a corner somehow, but I couldn’t be obvious about it. Wilma said she’d given me the same room as last time. I told José what I wanted as soon as he came out to the terrace bar again. Hayes went down the steps and out onto the big dock. I hate the big arrogant muscular son-of-a-bitch. I made him and I hate him. I would like to unmake him. Do a reverse PR job on him. But he’s Wilma’s playmate, and if I want to cut my throat I can borrow a straight razor someplace.
Judy came hurrying out in her yalla swimsuit and went running down and out the left-hand side of the dock and off in a flat dive. The next time I looked down they were both spread out in the late sun. I didn’t get my chance to cut Randy out of the herd until after the Dockertys arrived and Wilma took them in to show them their room.
“Let’s take us a walk, kid,” I said to Randy.
He looked uneasy, “Sure, Steve. Sure.”
We went around the wing of the house and out to the tables near that croquet layout. We sat down there and I rapped a cigarette on the tin tabletop and lighted it. “Wilma gave me some yak over the phone Wednesday, Randy. Something about saving money.”
“My Go
d, she has to, Steve. She had to borrow to pay taxes. This thing put her in the hole when she built it, and she’s never got well since she built it. I’ve been after her and after her. Now, for the first time, she’s beginning to listen.”
“I’d hate to think for even one minute, Randy, that you’d want to do any cuts in my direction.”
“Now, don’t try to get hard with me, Steve.”
“Look, you call yourself her business manager. You’re more of a personal secretary, aren’t you?”
“I manage all her affairs.”
“It looks to me more like she does the managing. Now, how about that profile thing? Happen to remember that?”
“I certainly do. You did a good job there, Steve.”
I knew I’d done a good job. I’d happened to have a friend on a magazine. He let me get a look at a piece they were considering. It was an article on Wilma Ferris. A girl had done it. It was good work. She was a couple of years out of Columbia, free-lancing. It was one of those snide jobs. The magazine wanted a fairly extensive rewrite on it, but the top editorial brains were excited about it. And well they should have been. Nothing libelous, but very, very tongue in cheek. And it would have done quite a job of blowing the Wilma Ferris myth sky high, the mythology I had created. My friend wasn’t placed high enough to clobber it. It was one very hot item indeed. The girl had all the dope. And our Wilma, on her way up the cosmetic ladder, had been one very rough girl.
I had to move on it. I went to a friend on another magazine. I did him a favor once. I had something coming. And he was placed high enough. He gave the freelancer a staff job. She withdrew the article from the first magazine. He lined up a tame seal to do the rewrite, and between us we took all the sting out of it and stuck in some of the usual glop. The deal was that he would fire the girl after the article was published. But as it turned out, she began to work out pretty well on the staff, so they kept her. So nobody was hurt.
“I wouldn’t want you going in for any false economy, Randy. Not at Wilma’s expense.”
All These Condemned Page 6
