The Good Old Stuff

by John D. MacDonald

  He looked at me as though he smelled something bad.

  “Mr. Pell, Mrs. Pell considers your offer to be unsatisfactory.”

  I had offered ten thousand cash for a cancellation of the alimony agreement. This was a poker game we were playing. They were bucking aces backed.

  “What does she want?”

  “We feel certain you could manage to scrape up thirty thousand, Mr. Pell.”

  I yawned. I made it a nice big juicy yawn. “I guess it’s ten thousand or nothing. I’m retiring. No more work for Simon Pell.”

  Marj worked her fingernails like a cat. “If I take the ten, you’ll go right back to your job, damn you!”

  “And if you don’t take it, I’m through working. Why should I work just so you can get half? You were a dope. You should have taken a property settlement instead of that silly fifty-percent business, Marj. You’re over a barrel and you know it.”

  “We can’t force him to work, Marjorie,” Charles Hanneman said.

  Marj switched tactics. She leaned across Hanneman’s beefy thighs and laid her moist eyes and cream of raspberry lips against my little gray soul. “You’re making things so dreadfully difficult, Sim, darling.”

  “Gosh,” I said, “I thought you were having fun. A nice train ride like this. You and the majestic Mr. Hanneman. It gives you such a cozy excuse, you know.”

  She chopped to my face with those claws. I got a coat sleeve in the way, and she broke one nail back to the quick.

  Charles Hanneman said floridly, “I don’t care for those implications, Pell.”

  I swallowed the remains of the bourbon and waved for more. I said, “And you, sir, should smarten up. Missy, here, is a playmate for men, not boys. She walks in an aura of dangling scalps. She’s a gun-notcher. She’s a pelt-stretcher. Why don’t you trot home to the wife and kiddies, Mr. Hanneman? Your wife probably senses the phoniness of your excuse for this trip anyway.”

  He rose to his full height, towering red-faced. He clenched his fists. “Stand up, sir!”

  I smiled at him. He made the mistake of reaching with both hands for my new lapels. I put a hoof in his midriff and snapped my knee straight. The Hanneman bulk moved backward toward the waiter bringing my drink. In the narrow space, the waiter did a pass with the tray that would have pleased a matador. He watched Hanneman bounce off the doorframe and land on hands and knees on the rug. Then he served my drink with a special flourish and a white-toothed grin.

  Hanneman grunted and stood up and clamped both hands over his kidneys. He wore the expression of someone listening for something. It had happened so quickly that the other people in the lounge car looked at the poor man who had tripped and fallen. Up the line, a perfect hood type in a sharp suit with the face of a depraved weasel watched alertly. Too alertly. As though he knew too much of the score.

  Hanneman crouched behind a facade of upright dignity. “I shall not stoop to your level, Pell,” he said. He turned and strode off.

  Marj stood up. She wears clothes that pretty up the merchandise, though the merchandise is such that it would make a flour sack blush. She gave a flaunt and twitch of her hips that melted ice in the drinks all down the line.

  “You dirty little monster,” she said in that musical sand-throated gargle.

  She tilted off on her mission of mercy to soothe the back-wrenched ego. I glanced up the lounge. The hood type’s nose was back in his scratch sheet. Up the line was an empty seat by a cornflower blonde. The petaled eyes drifted across my face with a sensation like butterfly wings. She looked like the kind who wants to talk baby talk and is smart enough not to.

  I trotted up and sat beside her. She smelled the grandma’s garden.

  I breathed deeply and said, “Hah!”

  The blue eyes were sly. “What’s with the ‘Hah’?”

  “It’s a substitute. I get tired of an opening wedge about weather, or how slow the trains are, or do you live in California. Hence the Hah.”

  “Hah to you too. Now where are we?”

  “Launched on my favorite hobby. Hacking at attractive females.”

  “Hack away, MacDuff. You’ll just dull your little hatchet. The girl is armor-plated. I’ll angle you for a free dinner and then pat you on the head. I never get tight and I’m not impulsive, and I’ve got four brothers, every one of them over six feet.”

  “Round one coming up. I just got back from Nam. I haven’t talked with a girl like you for many long months. My name is Simon Pell.”

  “I just got back from Hawaii, and you’ve never talked to a girl like me, and my name is Skipper Moran. End of round one.”

  “You must have read Thurber. The war between the sexes.”

  “Nope. Just another Sweet Briar graduate. Fencing Three is a compulsory course.”

  Then we laughed and began to get on well. So I drank two more than enough; and then we ate, and then we drank some more; and then, as promised, she patted me on the head and went off to bed, leaving my tentative kiss planted firmly in midair.

  I trudged back to my little bedroom, whupped for the nonce. Marj was waiting outside my door. “Please may I come in, Sim? I have to talk to you.”

  Her underlip was out like a candy shelf and her eyes looked like a stoked furnace.

  I opened the door and waved her in. Courtly. Controlled. She had changed clothes. Where do they get that line about a “simple print dress”? Maybe the print was simple, but the dress was pretty complex. It had to be complex. It had a job to do. It had to fit like the hide of a speckled trout, play give-and-take with varied sinuosities, and still manage to make the package look like a lady.

  She sat on the little padded shelf seat that folds down out of the wall beside the closed door. I sat on the unmade bed. She looked at me until smoke drifted out of my ears.

  “We had something, Sim. Where did we lose it? How did we lose it?”

  “Our pockets were picked, maybe?”

  “Be serious, Sim. I’m serious. I’m dreadfully serious. You stopped loving me, Sim.”

  “I’ve always hated crowds, honey. I got out when it started to look as if I was going to have to stand in line.”

  “Don’t be cruel, Sim. Don’t throw that up to me. I’m weak. I know I’m weak. I don’t know how I could have done that to you.”

  “You’re weak like the Kremlin.”

  “I know why you say such dreadful things to me, Sim,” she said softly. “It’s because I hurt you so dreadfully. You’re striking back.”

  I smiled at her. “When they flew me to Japan, there was a nurse there. A little bitty thing with a face like a hopfrog and a figure like a milepost. She smelled of anesthetic and walked so heavy she kept shaking the bed. I would rather spend five minutes with her than ten lifetimes with you, darling.”

  She shut her eyes and her lips went taut. I guessed she was mentally counting to ten. She got it under control and stood up dramatically, spreading wide her arms. The simple little print cooperated nicely. She said, “Do I mean nothing to you, Sim?”

  She moved closer to me, she and her perfume. I knew her, knew exactly how she looked in shadow or sunlight or under a two-hundred-watt bulb.

  “Aren’t you getting a little hippy, Marj?” I asked her solemnly.

  She pivoted and tried to spoon out my right eye with her thumbnail. I stood up and hammered her twice with the heel of my hand. Her eyes went blank and her knees wobbled. She sat down hard. Panting. And then she started to cry.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now that we’ve had our little drama, get to the point.”

  She looked at me. Now she was herself. Chrome steel and broken glass. “I’ve got to have money. Quickly.”

  “How much and what for?”

  “Thirty thousand dollars. I pay it or go to prison. I did something silly.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I met a man. I thought he was nice. He sent me to Juarez, and a Mexican gave me a package to bring back. He wouldn’t give it to me until I signed a receipt. I took the packa
ge back to the man, and he gave me five thousand dollars. They picked him up twenty minutes later.

  “A month ago another man contacted me. He has the receipt I signed. He wants thirty thousand dollars for it. If I don’t give him the money, he’ll turn it over to the authorities and put them on me. I didn’t sign my right name. But the handwriting is mine, and the cops have my description. I told him he had to wait until you came back, when I could get the money from you.”

  “What was in the package?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t try to kid me, Marj.”

  “All right. It was heroin.”

  “And you knew it in advance, before you went after the package.”

  “No, I didn’t.’

  “Keep lying, baby, and I won’t even give you the right time.”

  “All right—so I knew what it was! But it meant five thousand dollars. That stinking allotment from you didn’t even buy cigarettes.”

  “Anybody that gets messed up in a filthy business like that deserves to go to prison, Marj.”

  She started to cry again. She covered her face and sobbed incoherently. “Work in prison laundry … starchy foods … come out when I’m an old woman.…”

  “Where does Hanneman fit?”

  “He’s nothing. He’s just on the string. I can brush him any time.” She said it calmly, the tears gone.

  “Why do you expect me to give you the money?”

  “Because it is all your fault, Sim. If you hadn’t gone running off like a fool, I would have had enough money so I wouldn’t have gotten in a jam. Now you’ve got to get me out of it. You’ve got to!”

  I pitied her. It wasn’t her fault she had been born this way. Marj grew up without the very essential knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

  “How much time have you got?”

  “A week from today. He won’t give me any more time.”

  “What am I supposed to get out of it?”

  “I’ll do anything you want me to do. Anything, Sim.”

  “There’s nothing you can do for me, Marj. When you cured me, you cured me for good. I really loved you. Seems funny as hell, now.”

  “I wish I were back with you, Sim.”

  “My friends miss you too.”

  “Now you’re being cruel again. Please don’t be cruel, Sim. Give me the money. You have it. I know you have it.”

  I sat and thought of all the times she had lied to me, her eyes bland and sweet and her mouth like an angel’s. Turnabout was fair play.

  “I guess I’ve been kidding you along, Marj,” I said. “When I was ordered to active duty I liquidated my securities and put the whole works into irrevocable annuities. I couldn’t touch it if I wanted to.”

  She looked at me. I saw her face change. First, incredulity. Then horrified belief. Then a fear that ripped through her like a rusty bayonet.

  She stood up and reached blindly for the door. I said, “Let me know if they give you enough cigarettes while you’re doing time. I can afford that for old time’s sake.”

  Marj went out and shut the door softly behind her. I looked at the door a long time. You think of some way to take revenge, and then you get your chance, and it leaves an evil taste in your mouth. I’d been a patsy for her, and now the situation was reversed. The saddle was strapped to her back now. And I had sharp spurs. Let her tremble. Let her eat dirt. Let her come out of the pokey with all the hopes and juices and muscled sheen dried up forever.

  Serves her right, I said. But I knew that I couldn’t do it. I knew I was going to give her the money. Kiss it goodbye. I don’t know why I thought I owed her anything. On the other hand, maybe it was a good deal. In one year I’d make it back, once I got out from under that fifty-percent agreement.

  Anyway, I could let her sweat it out until we arrived in New York. That would be time enough. I undressed and turned out the light and shoved the shade up. Starlight was bright, and I lay in the rattle-sway of the train, cradled in the night roar of wind and steel wheels. I like trains. I had told her I wouldn’t talk to her anywhere else.

  I fumbled up out of sleep and snarled at the door. I wrapped myself in the sheet and, without turning the light back on, pushed the latch over. She came in with the recognizable perfume floating around her and shoved something toward me. “Take this, Sim.”

  When awakening, I’m not at my best. I’m dull. I’ve got a reaction time like somebody in a morgue drawer. So I took it. It was sticky.

  She shut the door with herself on the inside. I clamped the sheet with my arm, got the light on, and stared stupidly at what I was holding: a big fat switch knife with a six-inch blade. A blade that looked as though it had spent all day on the farm, butchering pigs.

  I opened my hand. The knife fell out. I looked stupidly at the blood on my hand. And then I looked at Marj. She was the color of a skid-row handkerchief. Her eyes were holes in the side of the world, leading nowhere. She wore a blue something-or-other hung over her shoulders. Underneath the blue was black. Black lace and shiny black satin. She had blood on her hand, too. She was breathing fast and hard, putting considerable strain on the black lace.

  I looked at the knife and then at her. “Who the hell did you kill?”

  Her words were like moths trying to get out of a lampshade. “I didn’t kill anybody. Charles was in my compartment. I went down to the women’s room. When I came back, he was dead. I’ve got to get him out of there!”

  “Complain to the conductor.”

  “Hell with you, Sim. Now you’re in it too. You help me, or I say you came in and stabbed him. Jealous. Ex-husband. I’ll swear it on the stand, on a million Bibles. I’ll never change my story.”

  “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know who did it. Or why. I just know he’s there and he’s too heavy to lift.”

  “So you came and gave me the knife. How sweet of you, darling!”

  “I couldn’t take a chance on your saying no, Sim. Get him back in his place. Then we can put the knife back in him and get the blood off us.”

  “Otherwise?”

  “They’ll try to hang it on me, Sim. And I’ll tell them I saw you do it.”

  It was nice and tight. A comfy fit. It was like a size fifteen collar on a size sixteen neck. A rope collar.

  “You’re in the next car, aren’t you? Anybody see you come in here?”

  There was triumph in her eyes. “I knew you’d help me. Nobody saw me.”

  She scouted the corridor while I pulled on pants and a shirt and shoved my feet into the trick shoes. I wished very much that I hadn’t socked him in view of the whole lounge car. We went to her compartment in the far end of the next car toward the engine.

  Charles Hanneman was exceedingly dead. He knelt beside the bed, chest and face flat against it, hands all tangled up in the blankets. The hole, like a wet coin slot, was on the left side of his back, just below the shoulder blade. Blood had run down his white shirt into the waistband of his trousers. Not much blood. I had recently seen some very messy bodies. This one had all its parts and did not bother me. And it didn’t seem to bother Marj.

  “I’d hate to think you did this, Marj,” I said.

  “I didn’t, if that makes any difference to you.”

  “Where’s his place?”

  “The second bedroom down the aisle.”

  Hanneman’s suit coat was there. I worked his putty arms into the sleeves, rolled him onto his back onto the floor, and buttoned the coat in front.

  “How do you want to do this?” she asked.

  “I can manage him alone. Take a quick look and see if his bedroom is okay. Then come back and make like a guide.”

  I pulled him into a sitting position, then hoisted him up onto the edge of the bed and held him so he wouldn’t topple over. His fat flesh jounced peacefully in the vibration of the train.

  She came back and nodded. I pulled his arms over my shoulders, held his wrists down in front of me. Then I stood up, leaning forward like a m
an carrying a trunk.

  I staggered like a nine-day drunk. I was carrying the horrid results of too much pastry and too many mashed potatoes. The motion of the train didn’t help a bit. By the time I rolled him off onto his own bed, my eyes were out on the end of stalks and I was puffing like an also-ran at Santa Anita.

  She tried to hand me the knife.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “You take that into the women’s room, and if you’re real bright you’ll find some way to drop it out onto the tracks.”

  Hanneman’s wallet had fallen out of his pants pocket. Marj sat on her heels on the floor and opened it. She looked at the sheaf of Uncle Sugar’s IOUs and her eyes shone like a bride’s.

  “This will make it look like robbery,” she said.

  “Odd, isn’t it? Let me see the wallet.”

  She gave it to me, without currency. The card case was quite full. It was very interesting. Charles Hanneman, Attorney at Law. And some others, equally crisp, equally new. C. Arthur Hineman, M.D.; Charles A. Hand, Bursar, Powelton College; C. Andrew Hanson, Broker.

  “What do you know!” I whispered.

  “What’s that? What’s so interesting?” she said, breathing down my neck.

  “Never you mind. Pop will take care of this.”

  She used the blue thing to wipe the door, inside and outside. The coast was clear and we parted. I disposed of the wallet and cards in the manner I had suggested to her. I went back and sat on my bed and thought about obese, florid confidence men.

  When she tapped on my door, I let her in without turning on the light. She came into my arms, trembling and whimpering. I held her and made comforting sounds. Pore little girl. Pore tired little girl. She was nice to hold. Her lips came up tentatively, then enthusiastically. I broke the clinch with the heel of my hand against her pretty chin. She blundered around in the little bedroom, grumbling and kicking anything handy, and then left in a tizzy.

  As soon as she had gone, I put the light on and started hunting. It didn’t take long. It was under the bed where she’d tossed it, covering the sound with her pretended anger. I reached under and pulled the knife out and presently sent it to join the wallet.