The Good Old Stuff (48 page)

He boiled out of the car and raced around the hood. I was out of my side before he could reach the door. The restaurant was a truck stop. They came out fast and stood back to give us room. The right that I blocked numbed my left arm from elbow to fingertips. I put a lot of pent-up irritation into the counter and the shock went all the way down to my heels. It stopped him. His arms sagged, and he shook his head like a great blond bear. In his second rush he got me back against the car. I hurt my knuckles on his head, then opened his mouth with an overhand left while he worked on my middle. He was tearing me apart in the middle. I had to fake out of it, so I sagged. He stepped back. I came up out of the crouch, all my wind gone, and drove ahead behind a straight right. But there wasn’t enough left for me to keep my feet. I went down onto my hands and knees at the same moment he dropped onto the gravel. We glared at each other for three seconds, and then he began to grin. In a moment we were laughing at nothing at all.

“Aren’t you guys even mad?” a trucker asked in an awed voice.

We were still laughing, idiotically, when I drove between the big stone gateposts of the house at Sharan Point.

The three of us were at the edge of the pool: Shay, Allana, and myself. Shay was face down on the mattress and Allana sat beside me on the edge of the pool, her feet dangling in the water. The wind ruffled the edges of the newspaper, the
Endor City Journal
.

THIRTEEN INDICTED, FOUR
ON MURDER CHARGE, IN
BLACKMAIL RING ROUNDUP

Allana frowned. “I feel guilty about it all. It doesn’t seem right that I not only get off without being charged for anything, but I get all Jim’s money.”

“You’ll have a job getting the insurance,” Shay said. “They don’t pay off on big policies where there’s something strange about it. My guess is that you’ll have to bring suit and prove that you were held against your will.”

“Maybe I won’t even try to collect,” Allie said.

Shay propped himself up on one elbow. “Don’t be a damn fool! Money won’t buy happiness, but it’ll make unhappiness a hell of a lot easier to endure. And don’t feel guilty. You gave the tip-off that helped in the roundup of the whole dirty crew. God knows how many poor innocents had the pressure put on them and paid and paid and paid. Old Jim just walked into a trap. And it would have been perfect. Young wife leaves. Farmer hangs himself in fit of depression. Young wife returns, full of remorse but loaded with dough. And their hired assassin did such a neat job it would have been next to impossible to prove murder unless he talked.”

“I—I’ve got to live with myself,” Allie said. “And right now I don’t think much of myself. I’m going away, I guess.”

“Worst thing you could do,” Shay said firmly. “Stay right in that little house. Face it out. You said you liked the country. Get a woman in to stay with you. The neighbors will never know what really happened, unless you tell them. In a year you’ll be a part of the community. Be smart about it. Learn to cook and bake. Take cakes and things around when your neighbors are sick. Cut down on the makeup and don’t dress ahead of the fashions, dress just a little bit behind them.”

She swirled her feet in the water. “Gee, maybe I could.”

“Sure you could,” I said.

She giggled. “Allana Montrose! The real name is Alice Mertz. Allie Mertz. Now it’s Allie Garver. I’m almost back where I started as far as names go. But not in the money department. There were seven kids. The old man had a candy store in Camden. He made book in the back, and when the horses were rough on the suckers, he’d close up and disappear. He’d come back in a week or two with a bad case of the shakes. Then one time he didn’t come back. I was next to the oldest. I quit high school and clerked at the K-Mart. Do you think I can act like a lady, Robby?”

“We’ll see that you do.”

“A lady,” Shay said, “usually has a speaking acquaintance with the arts. We can start right now. Those big windows up there are the windows to my studio. I do figures in clay and cast them myself. If you’d like, we could go up there and I
can show you the sort of work I do. Maybe a little later you’d like to pose.”

I glared at their backs as they walked toward the house, Allie small and trim beside Shay’s hulking build.

I swam two angry lengths and got dressed. They were still in the studio.

It was only three o’clock and only five miles to Bets’s house. I walked it.

“Murder for Money” originally appeared in the April 1952 issue of
Detective Tales
under the title “All That Blood Money Can Buy.”

“Death Writes the Answer” originally appeared in the May 1950 issue of
New Detective Magazine
under the title “This One Will Kill You.”

“Miranda” originally appeared in the October 1950 issue of
Fifteen Mystery Stories
.

“They Let Me Live” originally appeared in the July–August 1947 issue of
Doc Savage Magazine
.

“Breathe No More” originally appeared in the May 1950 issue of
Detective Tales
under the title “Breathe No More, My Lovely.”

“From Some Hidden Grave” originally appeared in the September 1950 issue of
Detective Tales
under the title “The Lady Is a Corpse.”

“A Time for Dying” originally appeared in the September 1948 issue of
New Detective Magazine
under the title “Tune In on Station Homicide.”

“Noose for a Tigress” originally appeared in the August 1952 issue of
Dime Detective
.

“Murder in Mind” originally appeared in the Winter 1949 issue of
Mystery Book Magazine
.

“Check Out at Dawn” originally appeared in the May 1950 issue of
Detective Tales
under the title “Night Watch.”

“She Cannot Die” originally appeared in the May–June 1948 issue of
Doc Savage Magazine
under the title “The Tin Suitcase.”

“Dead on the Pin” originally appeared in the Summer 1950 issue of
Mystery Book Magazine
.

“A Trap for the Careless” originally appeared in the March 1950 issue of
Detective Tales
.

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.