The Drowner (12 page)
Authors: John D. MacDonald
Tags: #detective, #private eye, #murder, #crime, #suspense, #mystery
Mingled in the growing blood-roar in her ears she heard the meaningless festival of darkness around her, the yelps and laughings, a rip of fabric, slap of flesh, coy squeal of a faked indignation. She felt as if she were slowly being opened outward, and now his mouth was tracing her throat, while her head lolled and smiled to the increased chuffing of her breath, and she was so suffused in recurrent waves of bonelessness she felt herself sagging, and was but remotely, unimportantly, mildly astonished to feel that he had somehow and cleverly bared her left breast, lifting it to a knowing caress.
Abruptly all the lights came on and her dazed eye caught a photographic image of the pool people, saw it all in a moment of subjective frozen silence, saw naked Nina Furrbritt on the apron of the pool, teetering off balance, all naked pipestem legs and schoolboy hips and great implausible sallow melony breasts, saw the satyr bareness of Coop Toombs who had just pushed her, saw the abandoned party clothing in damp heaps, saw the great bobble and thrash of breasts and bellies and buttocks and wet grimacing faces in the wrestling game in the shallows of the pool. Time began again and the woman fell, and Coop Toombs dived after her, and there were yelps of dismay and derision at the sudden exposure. The hostess eeled quickly out of the pool and headed in a nude, awkward run toward the control panel for the lighting. Barbara shoved Mr. Furrbritt away from her and hitched her sheath top back up onto her left shoulder. The lights began to go out as the hostess tweaked the panel controls, amid cheers of approval.
Furrbritt moved in upon her again and she knocked him back with her forearm across his throat.
“The boat house!” he said irritably.
“What?” she asked blankly.
“The boat house! The loft, my dear child!” he cried irritably and grabbed her wrist. She snatched it away. In the faint light of the faraway outside floods the hostess had left burning, Mr. Furrbritt seemed to be doing a small, nervous, hoppity dance, all his casual authority forgotten. He snatched her wrist with greater strength and began dragging her along, and suddenly she was terrified.
With her free hand she hit George Furrbritt solidly on the nape of the neck. He spun and hissed at her and slapped her sharply across the face. Suddenly Kelsey Hanson loomed between them, clothed and sullen. He turned a broad back toward Barbara and made a small pivoting motion. There was a quick wet sound, not loud, but inexpressibly ugly. All the tidy, neat-boned confidence of Mr. Furrbritt dropped into the soaked peat moss of a planting area, and on the way down his head rang the reflector of a stake light like a gong. Hanson turned and grabbed her arm and yanked her away, led her around the busy pool, out a screened door, across an area of wet grass and into the mouth of a narrow wet woodsy path. She fought him, but he did not even seem to realize she was struggling. Wet leaves soaked her clothing. “You were right, Lucille,” Kelsey Hanson said. “Oh you were so damn right, Lu, honey. They’re lousy people and I should have listened to you. We’re going home where you belong, sweetheart.”
Eight
THE LEAGUE was scheduled at eight o’clock. Angie Powell arrived so late that by the time she had changed her shoes, she had time for just one practice ball. She was anchor man on the girls’ Kimberland team, with a 178 average. They were scheduled on lanes eleven and twelve. It annoyed her. She never did well on eleven. It was slightly tacky, just enough to pull her into a fat hit and too many baby splits.
She smiled and nodded and spoke to all the friends who greeted her. She wore white elk-hide shoes, white wool ankle socks, a short white pleated tennis skirt, a sleeveless white blouse with Kimberland written across the back in blue embroidered script. She had embroidered it herself, making it at the same time larger and more ornate than the stenciled ones. She wished she could write Kimberland on everything she wore.
The ball she owned was white. Inside the finger holes it was Chinese red. It was as heavy as most men used. She had worked carefully on her style to take maximum advantage of her height and strength. She took four steps and a long slide, starting the delivery with a slow push-away. At the end of the delivery she brought her right hand up sharply. It was a fast ball with a small quick hook into the pocket at the end of it. As she delivered the ball, she felt fleet and strong and precise. It had pleased her to be told she bowled like a man. But several months ago a friend had taken movies of her delivery, and she had been disappointed to see how she looked. There was far too much bounce of golden curls and girlish undulation of hip on the way to the line and, in the profile shots, too much flounce of breasts. So she had taken to binding her hair with a white ribbon, wearing a sturdier bra, consciously controlling her hip movement.
Midway through the first game she knew she was in trouble. She had one clean miss of the ten pin and two splits she had been unable to pick up. With the self-knowledge of the natural athlete, she knew that the flaw was in her concentration. Too many random things were intruding—the look on Gus’s face just before Mister Sam had slid him down the hall, the way Mister Sam looked and acted, the chance Gus would make trouble.
She pushed everything out of her mind except the clean mechanics of the delivery, and the variable geometry of the maple pins. Her team sagged with her and they lost the first game by over eighty pins. She had her first frame on lane eleven in the second game. She decided to adjust to the alley by giving the ball a little more speed, but without losing control at the top of the backswing. As it went down she saw it would be too thin, but at the final instant it ducked into the pocket and the picture strike cleared the lane completely. She spun and jumped into the air, clapping her hands, beaming at her teammates. She put four strikes together, and ended with 211 for the second game, which they won by sixty pins. They won the third game by forty pins, enough for the match, and she computed her average for the evening at 184.
Linda had to hurry home. So the four remaining teammates went to Ernie’s Place for the usual Po’ Boy sandwiches. Alma’s boy picked her up there. Jeanie and Stephanie kept trying to pump Angie about what had happened between Mister Sam and Gus Gable. She concealed her irritation with them. There was no reason for them to know anything about it. They just worked there. They didn’t know what loyalty meant, really. They just wanted something to talk about.
Stephanie had brought Jeanie in her car. Angie walked out with them as though to get into her little gray Renault and go home, but as soon as they drove out, she went back into Ernie’s and went to the phone booth and called Gus’ office number. It rang eight times, then ten. As she decided to let it ring fifteen, Gus answered.
“It’s Angie, Gus. Angie Powell. I thought you’d be working.”
“You mean you know why I’d be working.”
“I guess so. One of the things I wanted to say, you should have most of the files upstairs before three tomorrow.”
“Who’s taking over?”
“I couldn’t tell you that, Gus.”
“I swear to you, he was like a crazy man! There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Throwing me… literally
throwing
me out! You were there. Did you ever see anything like that in your life?”
“Never, Gus. Never. Honest, he hasn’t been himself since she died.”
“That’s for sure.”
“But he’ll be himself again a little later on.”
“Too late for me, though.”
“That depends.”
In a more cautious tone he said, “What do you mean by that, Angie?”
“I shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”
“So?”
“But you’ve been so much help to him. I know he needs you.”
“Sure. Try to tell him that.”
“I did try to tell him that.”
“Thanks, Angie. Keep trying.”
“I guess it’s more like it’s up to you. I mean if you want to work for him after what he did.”
“I want to work for him. I don’t get hurt feelings that easy, believe me.”
“Well… I have some ideas.”
“Like what?”
“You sound eager enough, Gus. But I couldn’t tell you like this, over the phone. And I don’t feel right about seeing you.”
“Why not?”
“Somebody might see us together. And that wouldn’t look right if Mister Sam heard about it. The state he’s in, he might not understand at all that I’d see you only to try to help him. I don’t give a darn about you, Gus. You know that. I just want for Mister Sam to have the best possible help in his troubles.”
“Nobody has to see us together.”
“And you wouldn’t tell anybody you were meeting me.”
“No.”
“Then have you got any ideas?”
“You could come to my place, maybe?”
“Oh, no. I couldn’t do that, Gus.”
“Sam wants to see me. He phoned. He sounds meaner than ever. He hasn’t cooled off a bit.”
“What does he want to see you about?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Did you agree to see him tonight?”
“No. He’s just not ready to talk sensibly. If you’ve got any ideas on how to handle him, truthfully I would appreciate it with all my heart.”
“I have to go on home now because Mama always waits up. But I could sneak back out again. If we could just ride around a little bit in your car I could tell you what I think. Maybe it would work and maybe it wouldn’t. Anyhow, if a little after midnight, you could park over on Tyler maybe, next to the furniture place that burned down, it’s just back across lots for me.”
“I know where you mean. Angie, I do appreciate this.”
“Maybe there’s nothing I
can
do, Gus.”
“But to tell the truth I am pleased by your willingness to try.”
“It’s just that it’s best for Mister Sam.”
“Of course, dear.”
As she was walking out of the place Ernie stopped her and said, “You know my kid sister, Pam. Well, she got admitted to Gainesville the way she wanted, but now she’s got the idea she should go to business school, and I was wondering about that place you went to in Orlando, Angie.”
Angie Powell gave the problem her complete attention. “Gee, I don’t know as it would be so good, a girl not having a place to stay, like I was at my aunt’s.”
“You think she’d get much out of it?”
“I guess it would be how hard she wanted to work at it, Ernie. I mean they can teach you if you want to work at it. I went there first to learn nursing.”
“I didn’t know that, Angie.”
“Oh sure. I was going to be a medical missionary. I was good on the class work, learning the anatomy and all, but it turned out I got a weak stomach. Anything bloody and I’d fall over like a tree. So I changed to secretarial.”
“But it’s a good school.”
“Sure is, Ernie, that is if you want to work.”
“I don’t know as Pam wants to work at anything. Say, I got the twin speedometers checked out and I can hold it right on the button now. How about coming out Sunday? We’re going to set the gates up and run slalom all day long.”
She looked at him sternly. “Ernie, you know better than that!”
He snapped his fingers. “Sunday. I forgot, Angie.”
“Any other day you can make it, Ernie, real early or after work.”
“I’ll let you know.”
She drove home. The pavement was dry but there were puddles in the gutters. She put her noisy little gray Renault in the back yard and went in through the kitchen carrying her bowling kit. Her mother sat in her reinforced chair at the kitchen table pasting green stamps in booklets. Mrs. Powell was a huge woman, almost as tall as Angie and grotesquely fat. The flesh of her ankles hung over the sides of her shoes. Her small and bitter mouth was tucked back behind her pendulous cheeks. Her nose was small and thin. She had the same odd and beautiful eyes as her daughter, an unusual lavender-blue, but her lashes were stubby and the whites of her eyes were muddy. In spite of her weight, Mrs. Powell was an active woman, participating in every aspect of church work, full of rancor and suspicion, responding with a notorious violence to every fancied slight, mercilessly castigating a sinful world. Her subdued little husband, Jimmy Powell, had worked behind the scenes in the post office for twenty-six years.
Mrs. Powell looked at her daughter from head to toe with a vivid animosity. “I can tell you, Angela, it is a thankless job for me to be head of the committee on clean reading and spend a whole afternoon like I done today weeding out the naked Communist filth down to the court house newsstand and then have you prancing around alone in the nighttime in a little skirt halfway up to your crotch.”
“Oh, Mama, please. I’ve told you and told you that…”
“You always tell me that when you go swimming you wear considerable less. And I suppose if you went walking and come onto a nudist camp, you’d strip everything off and parade yourself around jaybird naked just because everybody else is. I tried to raise you a decent Christian girl, and you go a-flaunting your body around raising dirty thoughts in the minds of men.”
“Mama, I can’t be responsible for what other people think.”
“And you come in here twenty minutes late, talking sassy to your mother, and how am I to know you haven’t been out squirming around in the bushes, doing the devil’s work, abandoning yourself to the pleasures of the flesh?”
“Mama, I went to Ernie’s with Alma and Jeanie and Stephanie and had a sandwich like always, and maybe we talked a little longer than usual.”
“A lot of dirty talk?”
“Mama!”
“I know what those office girls are like. Don’t you tell me!”
“We won, Mama.”
“Again? That’s wonderful, dear.”
“I got two-eleven in the middle game, and Jeanie did better than she ever did before.” She yawned, muffling it with her fist. “I’m pretty tired, Mama. You don’t have to worry about me.” She went around the table and kissed the great slab of cheek. “I’ll never in my whole life do anything to make you ashamed.”
“You’re a good girl, Angie. It’s just I worry about you. The devil waits around every turn. A man will say sweet words to you, but if you should listen, you soon find out that the only thing he ever did have on his mind was to get you over onto your back and have his dirty way with you. That’s the way the world is, ever since we were flang out of the Garden. I’m not a selfish woman. I’ve told you a hundred times I can get along having no grandchildren on account of it would mean selling you off into the vile bondage of marriage where a woman has no rights at all and is turned into a soiled vessel for the brute pleasure of some dirty-minded man, crying herself to sleep night after night after he’s shamed her and sickened her.”
