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, idenьfied 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.