Weep for Me

by John D. MacDonald

Genres: Hard-Boiled; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

Weep for Me, one of many classic novels from crime writer John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.
 
When Kyle Cameron meets temptation in the memorable shape of Emily, the strange, lovely new girl at the bank, his life changes forever. Emily has a fortune that frees him from his worst nightmares. But the relationship comes at a terrifying cost. Soon Kyle enters a world in which it will be impossible ever to feel safe again. He has placed his life in the hands of an insatiable woman with no fear of death . . . and no regard for anyone who stands in her way.
 
Features a new Introduction by Dean Koontz
 
Praise for John D. MacDonald
 
“The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King
 
“My favorite novelist of all time.”—Dean Koontz
 
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut
 
“A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark

Release date: June 11, 2013

Publisher: Random House

Print pages: 256

Sample

Chapter One
 
It was a June morning, I remember. The sort of morning when you look through the bars across the front of your teller’s window, and across the tan marble floor and out to where sunshine glints off the chrome of the cars waiting for the light. A day when the girls have changed to their summer dresses. I kept looking up and watching them when they waited for the light. The wind always whips around the bank corner. They would hold their hats, push down at the skirts that tried to balloon upward.
 
Pritch caught me at it. He came up behind me and said, “Kyle, that’s a hell of an occupation for a citizen about to be married.”
 
I guess I blushed, because he laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “You’ll be like me, boy. Three kids and I still window-shop. Want to change windows? I can’t see the corner.”
 
“Maybe I ought to,” I said.
 
You could tell the sort of morning it was from the way the bank customers acted on the other side of the grille. Cheery. That doesn’t happen too often in a big city bank.
 
A man named Merton wanted his balance checked. I phoned upstairs. The M’s. That would be the tart-voiced old lady named Hotchkiss.
 
“Yes?” a low, soft voice said.
 
“Current balance on Merton, Lawrence T.”
 
“One moment, please.” Definitely not Old Lady Hotchkiss. This was a nice girl-voice. It seemed to go with the day. It made me feelgood.
 
She gave me the figure.
 
“Thanks,” I said. “Who is this, please?”
 
“Miss Rudolph,” the soft voice said. “Emily Rudolph.”
 
“Well?” Mr. Merton said impatiently.
 
“Sorry, sir.” I scribbled his balance on a slip of paper, shoved it under the grille to him. That’s the rule. It’s more private and there are fewer chances for misunderstanding. He grunted with that satisfaction which indicated the balance was higher than he had figured it, and walked away.
 
For nearly a half hour I was rushed. They come in droves sometimes. Sam Grinter, on my left, and Paul Raddmann, on my right, were working at the same top speed. When you first go “out front” you’re scared to death to work fast, because you are afraid of mistakes. I’d had three years behind the teller window. Kyle Cameron, teller number six at the First Citizens’ National Bank of Thrace, New York. When at last Tom Nairn, chief teller, gave me the nod for the lunch break, I was glad to put the little “Closed” plaque across the slot. I dropped the cash bin into the drawer, locked up, took my drawer key back, and hung it on the board behind O’Day, the vault guard.
 
I went back to my locker and took out the lunch I picked up every morning at the little corner restaurant near my so-called efficiency apartment. I bounced it in my hand a couple of times. I knew exactly what was in it. Jo Anne and I were saving money as fast as we could. Bringing a lunch to the bank from my breakfast spot was one way to do it. Ever since I first saw Jo Anne in History III at Thrace High, it had been one of those things with us. Jo and Kyle. Understood. Patent pending.
 
After business school I was drafted. That was in ’43, when I was twenty. After two and a half years as a company clerk, I was discharged at Dix, came back to Thrace, and joined the 52-20 Club while I looked around. My father had married again, after my mother died, while I was in Thrace High, and “the house was full of little kids. Only three, but they seemed like a dozen. As soon as I landed a job in the bank, I moved to the little apartment. After nearly three years in the bank they made me a teller.
 
Now Jo Anne and I had enough in the bank so it looked as though we could be married in late July or August, depending on when we could arrange simultaneous summer vacations. Jo Anne was living with her folks and running an IBM key punch for the Thrace Insurance and Casualty Company.
 
Everything is all set in your life. A pretty little girl who loves you. A job where they like you. Money in the bank. You’re twenty-nine and you’ve got your health. You wear glasses behind the window and when you read, and your brown hair isn’t receding much at the temples, and you’ve got one of those standard issue faces. Jo Anne tells you you’re handsome, but the mirror says you are just a guy with normal features in all the normal places.
 
So you stand, bouncing the tired lunch in your hand, and it is sort of a turning point. You can sit down on the bench and open the lunch and eat it. And go back to work. Then you marry Jo Anne, and have three kids, and carry too much insurance, and fight your way through the joy and misery of a normal, contented marriage. You can stand on your flat feet behind the teller’s window until they promote you or retire you. If you get all the right breaks, maybe you and Jo Anne can one day retire to a little house in St. Pete, and remember the grandchildren’s birthdays and play a hot game of shuffleboard.
 
Or you can do like I did. You can go out into the festive colors of a day in June and drop the lunch into one of those orange trash cans with a lid that swings when you push against it. You can hear the lunch thud among the papers, and wonder why a little gesture like that gives you a big sense of freedom and relief.
 
I stood on a corner and looked into my wallet. Two bucks. My friends who don’t work in banks get the idea that because a guy handles money all day, he’ll get a sort of contemptuous feeling toward his own cash. It isn’t that way at all. It’s as if there are two kinds of money—bank money and your money. Almost as though the bank money were printed in a different color ink.
 
It wasn’t that I wanted a fancy meal, anyway. I just wanted to be out in the sun, out where life was going on. So I had a quick sandwich in a drugstore, and did some walking. I watched the girls in their light dresses. I thought about the voice of Emily Rudolph. The office girls were on their lunch hour. Office girls and store clerks, swinging their trim little hips, belts snug around slender waists, breasts high and sharp against their summer dresses.
 
I knew that it was a good thing that Jo Anne and I were going to be married soon. Way back in high school we had decided that we wouldn’t do it until we were married. We figured that if we did, it would spoil the marriage. Probably most, kids who are serious about each other say that. Then each time they’re together they go a little further and a little further until one night in the back of a car, or out on a blanket someplace, they slip and slip good.
 
On the last date Jo Anne and I had before I left for the Army, we almost slipped. I can remember her tortured face, the moon shining on it, the way she rolled her head from side to side, saying, “No, no, no, no,” in a tiny monotone. And we didn’t. We left the car and walked down the country road for what must have been three miles. We didn’t talk much. We agreed that when I came back we wouldn’t put ourselves in that kind of spot again. And in the six years that I had been back, we hadn’t. When they had shipped our outfit to England, I had been, except for an experimental episode of childhood in a piano box with a neighbor girl, virginal. I had a girl in England, and later one in Brussels. I didn’t tell Jo Anne about them. There didn’t seem to be much point in hurting her that way.
 
And ever since my discharge, I’d been faithful to Jo Anne. If you go at it right, it isn’t too tough. There are plenty of nights when you can’t get to sleep. But I had a membership at the Thrace A.C., and a good rough workout can lower the blood pressure. Incidentally, it also keeps you in pretty good shape. But the average guy is not meant to live like a monk. And it was June and I walked among the shop girls on their lunch hour, feeling seven feet tall, and holding my arms so rigid that my shoulders ached.
 
I was ten minutes late getting back to my window, and Tom Nairn gave me a cold eye. Paul Raddmann, on my right, said, “About time, Junior.”
 
I unlocked, set up for business, and opened the window by taking away the plaque. When I hit a lull, I moved over to the wire grille that separated me from Sam Grinter and said, “Understand there’s a new gal upstairs. Seen her?”
 
Sam rolled his eyes ceilingward and said, “Woof! Or maybe grrr. Where have you been? She’s been up there nearly a week.”
 
“Fine friends I’ve got!”
 
“Man, you’re in the husband category, practically. You don’t want to meet any new talent.”
 
I told him to kindly go to hell, then smiled in my best bank-teller way at a lady approaching my window. I hoped her last name began with M and she wanted her balance checked. No luck.
 
At three o’clock Dwyer, one of the two floor guards, locked the doors, stood nearby, and let the last few customers out. I checked the slips and entries against cash and came out on the button. I made up the vault bundle, filled out my change requests, and beckoned to Tom Nairn. He initialed the close-out and went with me into the vault as I carried my drawer in. Adams was waiting with his key, and we slid the drawer into the vault recess, each using our keys simultaneously to lock it in.