Contrary Pleasure

Book 123: Murder Room

by John D. MacDonald

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Traditional Mysteries; Noir

Synopsis

For years the Delevan family image reflected only the best of everything - wealth, position, influence, and the kind of expensive good looks that take generations to cultivate. No one dared suspect that their glittering façade, their cherished privacy masked hidden lusts, furtive pleasures and twisted dreams that would soon erupt into a pattern of strange violence that threatened to destroy them all.

Release date: June 11, 2013

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 256

Sample

This was a time of day he was most apt to like. A June evening, and a silence along the office halls after the twittering departures of the secretaries, young tamping of heels
on the steel stair treads worn to silver, the last typewriter tilted back into its desk with decisive thump, the whirl and rattle and subsonic resonances of the mill itself stilled, the last cars
leaving the lot.

He sat quite still at his desk, breathing the silence. He heard the sounds of the girl in the outer office, a stealthy sliding of desk drawer and the small, bright snap of purse, then her steps
on the rug as she came to the doorway.

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Delevan?”

“No. You can go now, Miss Daley.”

“Good night, sir.”

He treated this one with controlled patience and was amused at himself because the net, to her, was perhaps an impression of kindliness. Whereas the bitterly efficient Miss Meyer, now on her
annual vacation, was often target for unwarranted irritation. Meyer was his right hand, comrade in many battles, she of stone routines, of razored loyalties. The only one who seemed even less than
he to have a life outside the worn and ugly walls. Together now in this place for twenty-five years. And this was the year that it was half his life. He had thought about that a great deal lately.
As though the very figures had some symbolic meaning. Last year more of his life had been spent outside the Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated, than in it. And next year the outside life would
become the minor fraction. It added a haunting significance to this year, like the echo of a sound that cannot be identified. When, he thought, had he passed the midpoint of the years he would be
here? A prisoner can compute his term. One who will be pensioned can estimate retirement. But a man who works to keep a thing alive cannot guess how long he will be successful.

He wondered if Meyer ever thought in this way. You could not get close to her, ever. They had come here at almost the same time. It was difficult to think of her outside the offices and more
difficult to imagine her on vacation. Once, on a Saturday, he had been walking along one of the downtown streets and had seen her in a shoe store, salesman talking earnestly up at her, her lips
pursed as she studied the shoe she was considering. It was strange to think of her as a person who must buy shoes, wash her face, think of the future, talk with friends. If she bought the wrong
size, her feet would hurt. That was a shocking concept. And oddly heartbreaking.

This was the time of silence. It was a healing time of transition from the life inside to the life outside. On those days when his younger brother, Quinn Delevan, waited to ride home with him,
the healing process was flawed. He was then too aware of Quinn down the hall, glancing at his watch, aimlessly handling papers.

Benjamin Delevan stood up and pushed his chair forward again, socketing it neatly into the kneehole of the desk. He closed his windows and closed his office door behind him. There was nothing at
all on top of the secretarial desk in the outer office. Perhaps Meyer had explained, in her cool voice, “Mr. Delevan likes it that way.”

He stood for a moment. The corner in its airlessness seemed faintly perfumed by the girl who had sat there these past few days. He shut the outer door of the office behind him and walked down
the corridor, walked stolidly down the steps of steel and rubber to the tile of the ground floor. The watchman gave him his nightly surly nod and performed the ritual of leaning in over the
switchboard and pulling the night plug from his phone. He always yanked it free with more emphasis than necessary. Benjamin Delevan suspected that it was an evening routine which obscurely
comforted them both.

His car was in the small ell of the parking lot reserved for the executive personnel, nosed against the brick on which was affixed the small wooden signs of reservation. B.
DELEVAN. The car had been shaded from the late sun, but the steering wheel was still warmer than his hands. He drove out of the lot and down the narrowness of Hickman Street with its sidings
and warehouses on either side, caught the green light at the end and turned out onto the six-lane asphalt of Vaunt Boulevard, into the tapering flow of the evening rush, up over the sleek hump of
City Bridge, and out the long glossy blue river of the boulevard with its bright new yellow traffic-lane markings, its synchronized lights, past showrooms and used-car lots, angular new shopping
centers and, further out, the drive-ins, the outdoor movies, an anachronistic and spanking new miniature golf course. For many years he had had to fight and inch his way through the narrow old
streets of the city of Stockton, cursing the delivery trucks, the suicidal pedestrians, the uncoordinated lights. All the cities of the Mohawk Valley had been like that. Strangled spasms of evening
traffic. Rome and Troy, Syracuse and Albany, Utica and Rochester. But now Mr. Dewey’s Thruway was taking away the congestion of the cross-state traffic, and the cities themselves were
building these hushed black rivers to drain the twisted stone swamps of the old parts of the cities.

Though now it was much easier to commute—he could make the trip from the plant to Clayton Village in twenty minutes of restful driving rather than fifty minutes of nerve fray—he
often had the feeling that something had been lost. The cars had jammed up where carriages had once rolled. Some elms survived there, and stone quarried long ago, and scrollwork on the Victorian
cornices. There were curbs dished by many years, and ornate iron on the lamp standards, and the prehistoric bulge of old trolley tracks under the skin of patched asphalt. When the main street made
an entirely unnecessary turn, you could think of some stolid farmer of long ago who made his neighbors go the long way around his property and perhaps stood in the evening and leaned on the fence
rail and gave them uncompromising stares, sound in his belief in ownership.

But now the sleek highway, through condemnation proceedings, implemented by bond issue, symbol of sterile union of slide rule and high-compression ratio, had flattened a swath through the most
ancient slums, riding smoothly on rough fill that had once been buildings of old stone, bursting out into the flatlands beside the river where once there had been only marsh and discarded
bedsprings and snaky adventures for small boys. It had simplified flow, enriched the farsighted, and spawned those bordering strips of plastic and glass brick, fluorescence and floodlight, where
the Deal of the Day turned slowly under candy-striped canopy, where every orange was precisely the same size, and sapphire from Ceylon tipped the juke needles.

Sometimes on the drive home he would imagine a civilization where this delicately engineered river of asphalt had become too cramped, too slow, too dangerous. Then it would become secondary and
the bright plastic would fade and the light tubes fail and fabrics with catchy chemical names would flap in the night wind off the marsh. It would die then, but without grace. Not the way the old
city had died. The old city died in the way a forgotten doll is found up there behind trunks with rounded tops, wooden legs carved with care. And this would die like a tin toy, stamped into the
ground and rusting.

When he thought that way, he could see the little indications of the decay. Streaks rusted down from the air conditioning units. Balled napkins hurrying along, enclosing mustard. A big window
labeled with paint that had run. This stuff would not last bravely, with dignity. There was no stubborn persistence in it. It too quickly acknowledged defeat. There were no lost causes for it.

Ten miles from the city he turned right, a gentle diagonal right down an incline to the octagonal yellow of the stop sign, and then turned left again, through the tunnel under the highway he had
just left, leaving it to hurry on westward while he turned south along the winding two-lane farm road that had led to the village square.

Off to his right as he neared the village was a new suburban development that had grown up in the past few years, was still growing. It had its own shops, primary school, playgrounds, park,
social clubs. The houses had been put up in wholesale lots, with three and sometimes four variations of the basic design. This variation, plus the alterations in color, plus variations in
plantings, plus subtle changes in the way the houses were placed on their lots, partially destroyed the flavor of sameness.

Once he had read in the newspaper, with a certain amount of wonderment, that each house in Amity Park contained: electric stove, refrigerator, washer, dryer, dishwasher, and disposal; attic room
that could be finished off at owner’s option; tile shower; breezeway; radiant-panel heat; concrete slab foundation with utility room; television corner; heatolater fireplace. And, knowing
that, he would drive by, as on this June evening, by the streets with their new names—Three Brooks Lane, Dell Road, Grindstone Road, Persimmon Lane—and see the sprinklers turning and
the bikes racing and the bent backs over the new plantings and the cars being washed and diapers drying—and it would suddenly look most odd and fearful. As though all these people had come
from some alien place beyond the sun and through their very pronounced and exaggerated conformity sought to deceive us who were born here. The street scenes were too suburban, the young wives too
consciously harassed and pretty, the young husbands too solemn and jolly, the children entirely too childlike. Where did they come from? Certainly not from the city. They had never lived anywhere
else on this planet. Only here, at Amity Park, the alien eyes cold and waitful, aware of the times that were coming.

One day in the hallway at the office one of the young men in Accounting had come up to him and said, a bit too brashly because of his shyness, “Moved out your way last week, Mr. Delevan.
Out to Amity Park. Ellen said it would be a lot better for the kids.” Delevan said what was expected of him and then remembered that the man’s name was Fister, and it pleased him to be
able to use the man’s name so easily. But he was disappointed to have the game he played compromised in this fashion. It was better when he had not known any of them. Then he could have
maintained some of the variations of the game. Such as all the young men climbing into their Fords and Plymouths and Chevvies after kissing their young wives and setting out toward the city, but,
of course, never going there, flickering off, instead, into some obscure dimension from which they would emerge, putting on their man-faces, at five.

Perhaps, he thought, it is just because you cannot understand that way of life. It is in some obscure attunement with the new boulevard, with too much electronics. Or maybe, Benjamin, you are
merely a snob.

The village square looked changed and naked and for a few moments, as he waited for the light to change, he was puzzled. Then he noticed the raw stumps and realized that they had taken down more
of the elms. He wondered if they had been standing when he had driven through the town that morning on his way to the city. Maybe they had been gone for days. Or weeks. And he had not noticed.
Dutch elm disease was bad this year. At least there wasn’t any of it up on the hill yet. But there might be. He decided to ask Sam about sprays. If one tree went, it cost a fortune to get it
felled and removed.

The light changed and he turned right onto Gilman Street, accelerating for the steepness of Gilman Hill, wondering if he could get all the way up without that robot under the hood shifting him
back to a lower gear. It was a daily contest with the robot, and it never failed to annoy him. Yet he was unable to stop playing that particular game. It seemed an infringement on his dignity, a
continual persecution by servo-mechanism, even when he won. In the winter he seldom won. He wished they would make this same car with a manual shift. Every day they took more decisions away from
you.

It was nearly six thirty. A bit later than usual. The big car moved smoothly up the hill. He decided as he neared the crest that on this night the robot had been decisively defeated, but at that
moment a child’s ball rolled into the road. He swerved away from it, lifting his foot from the gas pedal, and heard the disheartening clunk as the car went into a lower gear. He felt annoyed
out of all proportion to the defeat and at the same time amused at his own childishness.

Once he was over the crest of the hill, the robot permitted a return to the higher gear. Ahead, on his left, was the land his father had purchased. Eight acres which the will had divided into
four parcels of two acres each, one for each of the four children of Michael Delevan. And they had not even known he owned the land until the will was read. It had seemed a strange remote place
then, a hilltop near an outlying village. But with the years, with the growth of commuting, Clayton Village had changed character. The old man had made a good guess. When the village became
fashionable as a commuter community, there were the four Delevan kids with nice big lots on high ground. The four Delevan kids. Ben, the eldest, Quinn and Alice, the twins. Robbie, the kid.

It was so alarmingly easy, even at fifty, to think of yourself again as one of the Delevan kids. Half a century and yet the mind, with one deceptive twist, could wipe away the years. Fifty had a
dreadful sound. The very consonants of the word itself. A withered, secretive sound. A dried bell. Half of a century. Five decades. Two and a half generations. This, you knew, was beyond midpoint.
More than half of life was gone. There were some who lived to be a hundred. But it was not life. It was a trick, faintly obscene, to be treated by the working press with that familiar mixture of
heavy-handed humor and bathos.

It seemed utterly unfair of the old man, Michael Delevan, to have made this one good guess on property value, thus leaving one false hint of shrewdness after having, with blind and stubborn
arrogance, with both greed and carelessness, milked the Stockton Knitting Company into spavined sickness before he died. It could never come back completely. It could never be well again. It could
be levered and pried and prodded along, staggering from one year into the next.

There were four parcels of land on top of the hill. The parcel nearest the village was vacant, brush-grown, wild. That was the place where Robbie, the youngest of the Delevan children, might
build one day should he come back from far places.

Benjamin, the eldest, the President and Chairman of the Board of the Stockton Knitting Company, Incorporated—he who now drove this big car swiftly through the transition hour of Job to
Home—lived in the middle house. He lived in that white house with his wife, Wilma, that white-haired lady who had comfortably shared so many of his years, and with his teen-age son, Brock,
and with his teen-age daughter, Ellen.

Ben’s was the middle house, with the twins on either side of him. In the house nearest the village lived Quinn Delevan, vice-president of the company, low-handicap golfer, mild husband of
the husky Bess, stepfather of her son, David.

Quinn’s twin was Alice, who shared his tallness and thinness and quietness. She was now a Furmon, having married the hearty George Furmon, having borne his three children—two of them
simultaneously in accord with that hereditary gene. It was George Furmon who had built the three white houses on the hill, building his own no more honestly and solidly than the two he built for
Benjamin Delevan and for Quinn Delevan—his wife’s twin brother. They were rambling houses, pleasant to live in, hellish to heat, cool in the summer, designed for maximum privacy.

Ben turned in his driveway remembering again that he had forgotten to order gravel for the driveway, the coarser grade Sam had recommended so that it could not be so easily washed away by the
spring rains. Sam Coward was the leathery old man who took care of the grounds around the three houses. If requested to plant something that did not appeal to him, it would be taken with some
mysterious blight. Left to his own plans and programs, he made everything grow with unexpected lushness, and on this day the lawns looked remarkably well, Ben thought.

As he made the turn in the drive to park by the garages he saw, to his instantaneous dismay, that his terrace was crowded with people. He thought for a moment that it was a party which had
slipped his mind. But as he glanced quickly at individuals, he saw that it was all family. Though they lived here together, it was a rare time when everyone was together. He stopped the car and saw
them there, looking toward him. Quinn and Alice with the twin stamp and the Delevan stamp on their lean faces, meaty florid George Furmon. And the two women, brought into the tribe, into the name,
by marriage—breasty, vivid Bess, who was Quinn’s wife. And his own wife, Wilma, sitting there with their two almost adult children, Brock and Ellen. Out in the yard, in the long
shadows, the blond little girl called Sandy—Alice’s youngest—turned solemn and dedicated and tireless cartwheels on the deep, soft green of the grass.

He stopped the car and reached to turn off the key, seeing them all there as people dear and well-known to him, and then suddenly seeing them all as strangers again. Very pleasant people.
Sitting there in sunlight, in assurance, in their casual ease. With bright clothes and wrought-iron furniture on flagstones, and late sun prisming through the shaker and pitcher and glasses,
touching the acid yellow of lemon rind. He had a sudden and vivid urge toward violence, wanting to put the big car in gear so that it would surge through the tailored hedge and bound up over the
flagstone edge and into the lot of them. It was so clear an image that he could hear the screams, the sound of breaking glass, the coarse grinding of wrought iron against the bowels of the car.

He turned the key and turned the motor off and sat for a moment feeling oddly pleased with the image he had created, and somewhat shaken. The pleasure was that oblique pleasure of imagined
horror. These random impulses toward violence seemed to occur too often lately. Crazy impulses. Perhaps everyone had them. But only a madman would go around responding to such impulses. Maybe with
all normal people it remained in proper perspective. A game. Nothing more.

Yet when he got out of the car and walked toward the gap in the hedge, smiling, they still looked like strangers to him, so much so that he was, in turn, sharply aware of how he must look to all
of them, a rather dumpy man in a dark, rumpled suit, balding, his jowls shadowed with the day’s beard, his hat in his hand, like someone approaching with faint apologetic air to beg from
them, without quite knowing what he intended to ask for. Or how he would use it were it given him.

“The gang’s all here,” he said, almost pleased with the fatuousness of the expression.

“You’re late, dear,” Wilma said, and met him at the edge of the terrace for the uxorial kiss, which he implanted quickly on her soft, dry, textureless mouth. There was about
her an unaccustomed air of excitement. That air, combined with the gathering of the clan, meant news. For one good moment he wondered if it meant that Brock had been accepted by a decent college,
though God knew the odds were against that. He glanced at his son, but it was not a moment when he could read his son’s face. Brock sat slouched, his head tilted back, eyes shut against the
sun as he slowly drained a bottle of Coke.

Ben nodded and spoke to all of them, Quinn and Bess, George and Alice, Brock and Ellen.

“Shall we tell him now or wait until he sits down?” George Furman asked, his heavy voice a little loose at the edges, as it became each day of his life at five thirty. And there was
a slurred bite of sarcasm which, to Ben, meant that George did not consider the news as impressive as the others did.

“I’ll get a drink and then sit down,” Ben said. He was aware of their faces. At least it wasn’t bad news. Perhaps a local scandal of some sort that did not affect them.
Yet Wilma wouldn’t bring up something like that with both kids around. She avoided such topics when the children were there, even though she knew they had their own sources and would find out
in any case.

Ben poured himself a martini. The glass was warm from being in the sun. The drink was acid and tepid. He sat down with it, took a sip, said, “Ready or not.”

The women all tried to speak at once, but Wilma got the floor. “What do you know, Ben? Robbie has gotten married. In Mexico City. He’s flying up with her. He’ll be here
Saturday, three days from now.”

It took him a moment to comprehend. “Good Lord,” he said softly. “Is she a Mexican?”

“Oh, no, dear,” Wilma said. “Her name is—was—Susan Walton, and she was a civil service person in the embassy there. I guess it was all very sudden.”

Robbie Delevan, the youngest of the Delevans, only twenty-eight, had been working in Mexico City on some sort of vague project that bore a dim relationship to the State Department. They had not
seen him in over two years. It was one of Wilma’s self-imposed “duties” to write to him regularly, but Robbie had been neither a very interesting nor a very consistent
correspondent.

“Here’s the letter, dear,” Wilma said. “And her picture.”

Ben looked at the picture first. A young girl who looked into the camera in a clear-eyed way, not quite smiling. A girl with pale hair and a look of graveness and dignity and a soft, young
mouth.

“Hmm,” he said.

“My sentiments exactly,” George said thickly.

“Read the letter, dear,” Wilma said in the soft voice of command.

The letter said the expected things. Much in love. Arranged our leave at the same time. Suzy had no family. Decided we’d be married here. Flying to Washington first and then up to see you.
Should arrive Saturday the twenty-third. And it was near the end of the letter that Ben read a line that gave him a twinge of alarm: “Could be I have had enough of foreign parts. But
we’ll talk about that when we see you all.”

One dead-weight Delevan on the executive payroll of the Stockton Knitting Company was quite enough. It would indeed be unfortunate if Robbie thought that, because of his name and his
inheritance, he could ask that a place be found for him. A well-lighted place with short hours, handsome salary, and pleasing title.

The bride had added a postscript to the letter: “Dear Robbie’s Family—I’m nervous as a bride. Robbie says that’s to be expected. I want you to know that we’re
very happy, and I’m looking forward to meeting you all at last. Robbie has told so much about you that I feel as if I know you already. All our love—Suzy.”

“That’s a sweet note from her at the end, isn’t it?” Bess said warmly.

“She sounds like a good addition,” Ben said. He liked the look of her handwriting. It was not peculiarly slanted, nor tinted, nor affected. It had a look of decision.

He left them talking and planning, and went into the house. He stopped in the kitchen and floated two ice cubes in bourbon in an old-fashioned glass and took the drink to his bedroom. He was
glad he hadn’t had to finish the warm martini. He sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the ice to chill the bourbon. The window was open and he could hear them talking out on the terrace,
the sound of the voices, but not the actual words. The voices had a summer sound. Already there were insects in the fields. The birds were making a great racket these mornings.

He heard his daughter laugh. Clear young voice of seventeen. Clean and young and fresh. Gay enough and sad enough to break your heart. There was nothing more miraculous than a daughter of
seventeen.

Lately all of them had seemed like strangers, except Ellen. He wondered if Ellen would grow up to be like his own mother. Whenever he thought of that long-dead woman, that was the phrase he
used. His own mother. A private person, not shared by the rest of the children of Big Mike.

He remembered his own mother as being tiny and crisp and tidy and always laughing, and with a smell of soap when she hugged him, wh. . .