Seven

Book 487: Murder Room

by John D. MacDonald

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

Synopsis

A choice collection of seven short stories by one of America's foremost storytellers and the author of the best-selling Travis McGee series.

Featuring 'Dear Old Friend', 'The Annex', Quarrel', 'Double Hannenframis', 'The Random Noise of Love', The Willow Pool and 'Woodchuck', this collection displays MacDonald at his classic best. Starring a cast of immoral broads, hedonistic thrill-seekers, naïve victims and profligate playboys, these seven short stories showcase the writing that propelled John D MacDonald to success.

Release date: September 18, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 224

Sample

“I got to tell you what this flippy husband of mine pulled tonight, Irene. I’ll wait till Joe brings the drinks in. Well, hey! The booze is here already, huh?
Here’s to it. If you get to it and can’t do it, and so forth. Cheers. Joe, what I wanted to tell you and Irene was what Marty pulled tonight that made us a little late getting here.
Anyways, he gets all ready, see, and we’re at the door, practically, and I get a look at the necktie he has on and I told him it’s all dirty around the knot, so he should go change it.
What he does with a necktie, like a nervous habit, is all the time tightening the knot and they get cruddy looking all the time, and guess who has to go through them every so often and weed out the
cruddy ones to send to the cleaners. So he goes back to change to a clean tie, and I wait and I wait and I wait, and finally I go charging in to find out what’s holding him up, and you know
what I find? You wouldn’t believe it! Here is this nut I’m married to, sitting on the side of the bed in his underwear. It’s like he’s some kind of go-to-bed machine. When
he takes off the tie it starts the machinery. Tie, shirt, shoes, socks, pants. So he looks up at me with this kind of dumb look on his face, and I ask him is he maye going to come over here to see
our good friends Joe and Irene in his underwear? He gives a kind of a jump and looks at himself and looks around, and then he has to get back into his clothes again. Isn’t that the limit? On
the way over here I say to him, boy, it’s really going to kill Joe and Irene about why we’re late, and he says to me, he says, ‘Glad, what’s the point in telling
anybody?’ So I say to him, ‘Jesus, Marty, you got to have a sense of humor, haven’t you? When something funny happens what’s the point in not telling your practically best
friends?’ I always say if you can’t laugh at yourself you’ve had it, brother. Right? Right?”

When I push the button for her apartment, her voice comes over that tube thing. It makes her voice sound whispery and hollow and strange. “Yes?” And I seem to
always just catch myself in time and say, “It’s Martin.” It sounds strange on my mouth to call myself Martin. It makes her glad for me to call myself that. And the way she says
it, it becomes a different name. Mar-tin. Martin Harris. She says she doesn’t know any Marty Harris at all. She says she would not be in love with any Marty Harris. But she is in love with
Marrr-tinnn. There are sweet little curves of the mouth, and she keeps her lips apart so that I can see the pink point of her tongue touch up there behind her upper teeth to make the t, and
then drop to make the vowel sound, and then go back up again and flatten itself against the space behind her upper teeth to make the long nnnnn, the way she drags it out, in a kind of
teasing, teasing in her own special way I never knew before. Like saying my name that way, over and over, after we have had love together, over and over, with a smiling look in her eyes, so that I
know, just from her saying my name, that she wants us to do it again, as soon as I am ready, as soon as I can.

“Hey, you guys. Listen to this one. Yeah, right from the same place as always. Honest to Christ, I don’t know where that old joker out there gets hold of so many
new stories alla time. Way the hell and gone out at the other end of Queens, the furthest account I’ve got and maybe the smallest. Marty, you used to cover that area, din’t you? You
remember that Crandall that’s got the stationery store and looks like some kind of dignified bishop? Din’t he always have a joke every time you go check the tape and post his books? You
know, I even wonner if that old bastid invents them. Somebody has to make up jokes. Anyways, here’s the one he tells me yesterday. There is this guy in a bar bragging to his buddies he can
tell how old a woman is and what color hair she’s got even blindfolded. So they put up some money and he covers it and they go over to a cathouse and explain the bet to the madam. She goes
along with it and they blindfold the guy and they bring in three hustlers, a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. The blonde is twenty and the brunette is thirty and the redhead is forty. They line
them up without a stitch on. So this guy goes to the blonde first and gives her a good grope and . . . Hey, Marty! You heard it maybe? Where the hell are you going? Marty? Couldn’t you anyway
answer me, you son of a bitch? You see that, you guys? What the hell is the matter with him lately. Should a guy just walk out on a joke, even if he has heard it? Shouldn’t he answer or
apologize or something? What should it cost him. I tell you, I am getting goddamn tired of the way he’s acting lately. Where the hell was I? Oh yeah. The blindfolded guy, he gives the blonde
a good feel, and then he says . . .”

Sometimes with Andrea, when we have made love solemnly and slowly, making it all last, when it is a second time, soon after the first, gentle, not so hungry, making it go on
and on, there can be that feeling that right now, right here, you know all there is to know. You have found the secret to the whole thing. It is the way you wake up in the night sometimes with the
answer to everything so clearly in mind you know that if you can write it down, it will change the world. But it fades away before you can capture it.

Sometimes it is like last Friday, when I figured that if I worked fast enough and hard enough I could cover every account on my sheet for that day, and get to her place by one thirty, and have
from then until ten after five, the latest I could leave and still get back to the office in time to turn everything in.

But on the third from the last account they had put that new girl on the cash register. She had screwed up the tape and the department symbols and the totals. Even working through without lunch
I didn’t clear it until after two o’clock. There were two more places to cover, and so I said the hell with it, and I saw a cab with people getting out, so I took the cab and I was
holding Andrea in my arms at two thirty, saying her name and, for some fool reason, feeling like crying.

Last Friday, in all that dreamy gentle on-and-on of the second time, it wasn’t as if I were doing anything, or we were doing anything. It was like being in some kind of small boat on
little waves in a long dream. While it was going on I could hear the whole city out there, all the nearby things, trucks and horns and things like that, and then things farther away, like sirens
and airplanes and steamship horns. Under it all I could hear that great soft sound that is under all the other sounds, that muffled humming droning sound of some kind of a giant machine down there
under all of the city. It had always been there, I guess, but I had never listened to it.

Then all of my hearing turned back inward, away from the drone and the far things and the near things, back to the nearest thing of all, all the sounds of our gentle loving. Martin and Andrea.
Andrea and Martin, making their magic thing. A little padded, secretive creak of bed and bedding. A small gritty sound of strands of her long blond hair caught between her cheekbone and the edge of
my jaw as I rubbed my face across hers seeking her mouth. Bump of hearts. A humming of my blood in my ears, as when you listen to a seashell. A tiny husky whispery sound of the caress of her hands
on my back. When she shifts slightly, a moist sound, repeated twice, as if her other lips are also kissing, also greedy. Then in a cant and change and deepening and reaching of her stroke, and in a
harsher and faster huff-sigh, huff-sigh of her misty hot breath, she tells me that soon she will come.

Last Friday, as her arms tightened, as her breath began to reach and catch, over and over, I decided that this time it would be all for her alone, and I elbowed myself higher to look down upon
the changing, growing strangeness of her small face, her eyes wide-staring, turning from side to side, mouth agape, tongue curled up and back, breath now snorting and whistling, her fingers digging
small and hard into my back, thighs rolling farther open, knees higher.

I could feel my mouth smiling, and it was a great glory and a pride to bring her into it, to make her feel such a torrent of pleasure. I was a part of the great engine of the city, and I took
her through all of it, through the ultimate clenching and bursting and kitten cries, and down into the softness that changed her sweaty face, back to the awareness of here and now and me, so that
she looked into my eyes and whispered, “I love you so much. So much. So much.”

“Marty, honest to Christ, you are going to drive me out of my skull! Din’t you hear one word I was saying? Great! Maybe you recall the name Debbie. It means
something to you? Good! Congratulations! Debbie is our daughter. I knew you’d remember her if you tried, Marty. In three days she’s fourteen. What she wants is a wiglet. A good one.
From human hair, yet, hand tied. There’s a special sale. Thirty-two fifty plus tax. What I was asking when you had your ears turned off, I’ve got twelve fifty out of the house money.
Can you come up with twenty more for this daughter you can hardly remember seeing around the house? Marvelous! Real generosity from practically a stranger to us all lately. Honest to God, I
don’t know what’s happening to you lately. Last month you go to take off your necktie and you take off everything. Wednesday night you don’t come to bed and you don’t come
to bed, and finey I come out to wake you up. But do I have to? No. There you are in your lounger chair, eyes wide open, and what are you watching? You are watching a big snowstorm and listening to
a big loud hiss because the channel was off the air maybe almost an hour. Marty, you sit around here like a big lump of dead meat. If I tell you maybe the kitchen is in flames you would nod your
head and smile and say ‘That’s nice, Glad.’ Can you talk to me? Do you want to talk to me? Is it trouble on the job, Marty? Is maybe that McCracken leaning on you again like two
years ago over something that wasn’t your fault? Do you feel sick or anything? You should get a checkup. You eat and you don’t know what you’re eating. Do I hear you laugh
anymore? Like never! Do you want to go anywhere, do anything? Excuses. Too tired. Honey, there is something wrong with your energy. We’re seventeen years married two months from tomorrow.
You’re forty. I’m thirty-nine. That’s the prime of life, right? Hah! Are you still listening? Do I still have your attention, sir? Good. Thank you so much. You want to know how
many times you come over into my bed in the last four months? Want to guess? Three times! I keep track. I put marks on the calendar. Such a great lover! What a big treat for me those times you do
me a favor. Climb on, fall off, and the next minute a big snore. Listen, damn you, Marty, I am a normal healthy woman and I got normal healthy sex urges, and I am not about to retire from being a
woman all of a sudden just because you stop being a man. Something has got to be wrong with you. All of a sudden you are a nothing, a lump. You are not even here anymore. So go to a doctor, because
there are only two answers. I am not stupid, baby. I think it better turn out that you are sick, because if you’re not, then you are getting it someplace else. You turned forty years old six
months ago. Seven months ago. So men get funny ideas when they’re all of a sudden forty years old. And it’s the springtime of the year. But don’t think I am going to be sweet and
understanding if it comes out you’ve got yourself some cheap juicy little piece of ass maybe half your age you met servicing one of those accounts of yours. I swear before God and all the
angels, Marty, if I found out you’ve been banging some young kid, I am going to show you what hell on earth is all about. And you better believe it. You hear me? You listening to me,
Marty?”

Another strange and special part of being with Andrea is the feeling of being like one of those . . . I can’t think of what they call them. A long word. They go way off
someplace and live with some native tribe and write down everything about customs and so on.

It is so magical and strange just to watch her, to watch all the woman-things she does. It is as if I’d never married Glad, never been married at all, never been with a woman at all, and
had no idea of all the little things they do. Somehow, watching Andrea is like watching a little girl having a pretend party, filling little tin teacups with sand.

I got to her place at three yesterday, and she had to leave at four thirty for a get-together of a bunch of her girl friends from the place where she used to work. She said if I didn’t
want her to go she wouldn’t. But I told her to go ahead. She should get out more, I think. What kind of a life is it for her, waiting around to see if I can finish up early enough to come by
and make love with her before I have to turn in the day’s stuff at the office? Besides, she had already arranged to take that night off from her job where she works from six until two in the
morning, cashier in an all-night cafeteria. That neighborhood is getting rougher. She has only one block to walk to the subway. Smart guys are always making a pass when they pay their tab. One of
them could be sick in the head and wait outside for her. Or maybe some punks could come in and try to knock off the place, all zonkered up on speed, and she doesn’t open the cash drawer fast
enough. And girls get raped on the subway. You keep reading about it. I keep thinking about those things and wish she didn’t have to work.

But I couldn’t swing it. I have enough trouble coming up with the sixty-five a month for the half of the rent that the girl she shared the apartment with used to pay. I don’t know
why it seems strange to me that she should work. People work. When I was twenty-two I felt grown up. I was grown up. But she seems to be playing at being a grown-up. She’s a kid in a
lot of ways. She’s got no sense of time or money. She is dumb especially about money, always run. . .