Dress Her in Indigo Read online

  Praise for

  John D. MacDonald

  “My favorite novelist of all time.”

  —DEAN KOONTZ

  “For my money, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction—not crime fiction; fiction, period—and millions of readers surely agree.”

  —The Washington Post

  “MacDonald isn’t simply popular; he’s also good.”

  —ROGER EBERT

  “MacDonald’s books are narcotic and, once hooked, a reader can’t kick the habit until the supply runs out.”

  —Chicago Tribune Book World

  “Travis McGee is one of the most enduring and unusual heroes in detective fiction.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “John D. MacDonald remains one of my idols.”

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “A dominant influence on writers crafting the continuing series character.”

  —SUE GRAFTON

  “The Dickens of mid-century America—popular, prolific and … conscience-ridden about his environment.… A thoroughly American author.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “It will be for his crisply written, smoothly plotted mysteries that MacDonald will be remembered.”

  —USA Today

  “MacDonald had the marvelous ability to create attention-getting characters who doubled as social critics. In MacDonald novels, it is the rule rather than the exception to find, in the midst of violence and mayhem, a sentence, a paragraph, or several pages of rumination on love, morality, religion, architecture, politics, business, the general state of the world or of Florida.”

  —Sarasota Herald-Tribune

  Praise for the Travis McGee series

  “There’s only one thing as good as reading a John D. MacDonald novel: reading it again. A writer way ahead of his time, his Travis McGee books are as entertaining, insightful, and suspenseful today as the moment I first read them. He is the all-time master of the American mystery novel.”

  —JOHN SAUL

  “One of the great sagas in American fiction.”

  —ROBERT B. PARKER

  “In McGee mysteries and other novels as well, MacDonald’s voice was one of a social historian.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Dress Her in Indigo is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1969 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1997 by Maynard MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Lee Child

  Excerpt from The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald copyright © 1970 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Fawcett, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1964.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82672-5

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © moodboard/SuperStock

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Excerpt from The Long Lavender Look

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Lee Child

  Suspense fiction trades on surprising and unexpected twists. Like this one: A boy named John Dann MacDonald was born in 1916 in Sharon, Pennsylvania, into the kind of quiet and comfortable middle-class prosperity that became common in America forty or fifty years later but which was still relatively rare early in the century. Sharon was a satellite town near Pittsburgh, dominated by precision metalworking, and John’s father was a mild-mannered and upstanding citizen with secure and prestigious salaried employment as a senior financial executive with a local manufacturer. Young John was called Jack as a child, and wore sailor suits, and grew up in a substantial suburban house on a tree-lined block. He read books, played with his dog, and teased his little sister and his cousin. When he was eighteen, his father funded a long European grand tour for him, advising him by letter “to make the best of it … to eat and function regularly … to be sure and attend a religious service at least once on each Sunday … to keep a record of your expenditures as a training for your college days.”

  Safely returned, young Jack went on to two decent East Coast schools, and married a fellow student, and went to Harvard for an MBA, and volunteered for the army in 1940, and finished World War II as a lieutenant colonel, after thoroughly satisfactory service as a serious, earnest, bespectacled, rear-echelon staff officer.

  So what does such a fellow do next? Does he join General Motors? IBM? Work for the Pentagon?

  In John D. MacDonald’s case, he becomes an impoverished writer of pulp fiction.

  During his first four postwar months, he lost twenty pounds by sitting at a table and hammering out 800,000 unsold words. Then in his fifth month he sold a story for twenty-five bucks. Then another for forty bucks, and eventually more than five hundred. Sometimes entire issues of pulp magazines were all his own work, disguised under dozens of different pen names. Then in 1950 he watched the contemporary boom in paperback novels and jumped in with his first full-length work, which was followed by sixty-six more, including some really seminal crime fiction and one of history’s greatest suspense series.

  Why? Why did a middle-class Harvard MBA with extensive corporate connections and a gold-plated recommendation from the army turn his back on everything apparently predestined, to sit at a battered table and type, with an anxious wife at his side? No one knows. He never explained. It’s a mystery.

  But we can speculate. Perhaps he never wanted a quiet and comfortable middle-class life. Perhaps, after finding himself amid the chaos of war, he felt able to liberate himself from the crushing filial expectations he had previously followed so obediently. As an eighteen-year-old, it’s hard to say no to the father who just paid for a trip to Europe. Eleven years later, as a lieutenant colonel, it’s easier.

  And we know from what he wrote that he felt he had something to say to the world. His early stuff was whatever put food on that battered table—detective stories, westerns, adventure stories, sports stories, and even some science fiction—but soon enough his long-form fiction began to develop some enduring and intertwined themes. From A Deadly Shade of Gold, a Travis McGee title: “The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit.” From the stand-alone thriller Where Is Janice Gantry?: “Somebody has to be tireless, or the fast-buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay, and slay every living thing incapable of car
rying a wallet.”

  These two angles show up everywhere in his novels: the need to—maybe reluctantly, possibly even grumpily—stand up and be counted on behalf of the weak, helpless, and downtrodden, which included people, animals, and what we now call the environment—which was in itself a very early and very prescient concern: Janice Gantry, for instance, predated Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking Silent Spring by a whole year.

  But the good knight’s armor was always tarnished and rusted. The fight was never easy and, one feels, never actually winnable. But it had to be waged. This strange, weary blend of nobility and cynicism is MacDonald’s signature emotion. Where did it come from? Not, presumably, the leafy block where he was raised in quiet and comfort. The war must have changed him, like it changed a generation and the world.

  Probably the best of his nonseries novels is The Executioners, which became Cape Fear as a movie (twice). It’s an acute psychological study of base instinct, terror, mistakes, and raw emotion. It’s about a man—possibly a man like MacDonald’s father, or like MacDonald himself—who moves out of his quiet and comfort into more primeval terrain. And those twin poles are the theme of the sensationally good Travis McGee series, which is a canon equaled for enduring quality and maturity by very little else. McGee is a quiet man, internally bewildered by and raging at what passes for modern progress, externally happy merely to be varnishing the decks of his houseboat and polishing its brass, but always ready to saddle up and ride off in the service of those who need and deserve his help. Again, not the product of the privileged youth enjoyed by the salaried executive’s son.

  So where did McGee and MacDonald’s other heroes come from? Why Florida? Why the jaundiced concerns? We will never know. But maybe we can work it out, by mining the millions of words written with such haste and urgency and passion between 1945 and 1986.

  LEE CHILD

  New York

  2012

  He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.

  —GEORGE SAVILE, MARQUIS OF HALIFAX

  One

  On that early afternoon in late August, Meyer and I walked through the canvas tunnel at Miami International and boarded a big bird belonging to Aeronaves de Mexico for the straight shot to Mexico City. We were going first class because it was all a private and personal and saddening mission at the behest of a very sick and fairly rich man.

  We had the bulkhead seats on the port side because I am enough inches beyond six feet to cherish the extra knee room.

  Tourist cards in order, cash in the moneybelts, under-seat luggage only. And the unfamiliarly sedate wardrobes of the airborne businessman because there is a constant flow of them back and forth, the systems analysts and the plant location experts, the engineers and the salesmen, importers and exporters, con men and investment specialists.

  The Mexican peso is rock solid, the economy roaring, and the population zooming past fifty million. So it is protective coloration to join the flock, as most trips combine business and pleasure, and the pure tourist is fair game for every hustle in the book.

  But in one respect we were not entirely plausible. We’d spent the last few weeks aboard my houseboat, The Busted Flush, puttering around Florida Bay and the Keys with a small, convivial, and very active group of old and new friends aboard. When you get your clock adjusted to the routines of anchoring off shore, you keep the same hours as the sea birds, and the long hot bright days of summer had been full of fishing and swimming, walking the empty beaches of the off-shore keys, exploring in the dinghy rigged for sail, diving the reefs. So we were both baked to the deep red-bronze that comes from the new deep burn atop the years of deep-water tan, hair baked pale on my skull, salt-dried and wind-parched, the skin sea-toughened. Even Meyer’s heavy black pelt had been bleached a little and now looked slightly red when the light hit it the right way.

  So if we were of the business breed, it was something to do with engineering and the out-of-doors, like pipelines and irrigation projects.

  He had the window seat. We sat in the sweltering heat of the tin bird until finally they unsnapped the umbilical tunnel, swung the door shut, and taxied us out toward takeoff. Then the warm air that had been rushing out of the overhead vents turned to cool, and white shirts began to come unstuck.

  Meyer shrugged and smiled in a weary way and said, “That poor, sad son of a bitch.”

  No need to draw a picture. The memory of my short visit with Mr. T. Harlan Bowie was recent and vivid. Maybe any complex and demanding life in our highly structured culture is like that old juggling routine in which a line of flexible wands as long as pool cues is fastened to a long narrow table and the juggler-clown goes down the line, starting a big white dinner plate spinning atop each one, accelerating the spin by waggling the wand. By the time he gets the last one spinning, the first one has slowed to a dangerous, sloppy wobble, and so he races back and waggles the wand frantically and gets it up to speed. Then the third one needs attention, then the second, the fifth, the eighth, and the little man runs back and forth staring up in horrid anxiety, keeping them all going, and always on the verge of progressive disaster.

  So Mr. Bowie’s white spinning plates had been labeled Vice President and Trust Officer of a large Miami bank, Homeowner, Pillar of the Community, Husband of Liz, Director of This and That, Board Member of The Other, Father of Beatrice known as Bix, the lovely daughter and only child.

  He kept the plates spinning nicely, and I imagine he expected to eventually take them off the wands and put them down, with each deletion simplifying the task that remained, until maybe there would be just one plate called Sunset Years, placidly spinning.

  But somehow life is arranged so that if one plate wobbles too much and slips off the wand tip and smashes, the rest of them start to go also, as if the sudden clumsiness were a contagion.

  One morning Liz had asked him if he had time for another cup of candy. She became furious when he couldn’t seem to understand what she meant, and she got the steaming pot and poured another cup and said, “Candy!” She hesitated, frowning, and said, “Coffee? Of course it’s coffee! What did I call it?”

  By the time she was scheduled for all the neurological tests at the Baltimore clinic, she had lost the differentiation between genders, using he and she so interchangeably she had a fifty percent chance of being right at any given time, and she had admitted to having had sudden and severe headaches for several months, but had paid as little attention to them as possible, because she had never believed in babying herself. They took the top of her skull off like a lid and got some of it but knew they could not get all, and stuck a cobalt bead in there for luck, even knowing she had no luck left. She kept talking for half the time it took to die, but the words didn’t go together in any pattern anyone could translate. It took five months to kill her, if you start counting the morning she poured her beloved husband a cup of candy. It was hideously expensive and, to Harl Bowie, hideously incomprehensible. She died on Columbus Day. Daughter Bix had spent the summer at home and had stayed on, of course, rather than going back in September for her senior year at Wellesley. After Liz died, Bix told her daddy she would probably go back at mid-term.

  He was not paying much attention, not only because he was stunned by the loss of his wife, but also because there had been a merger of certain banks, and there was a new imperative computer system for the handling of trust account investments, and Harl Bowie had to keep running up to Atlanta for a week at a time to try to find out what the hell the quiet young men who had been posted in the trust department were talking about.

  But he paid a lot of attention when she told him right after Christmas that she had decided not to go back. She had decided to go to Mexico for a while “with some kids I know.” He had tried every bit of leverage he could think of, and he couldn’t move her an inch. He couldn’t even get any display of emotion out of her. She reminded him gently that she would become twenty-two in another month, and there was the twenty thousand
left her by her mother, and said it would be nice if he could stop being so manic about it because she was going, with or without approval.

  So she went, and he got some infrequent postcards, and in April he was driving through thunder to the airport for another bout with the systems analysis people in Atlanta, and a big semi coming the other way got a big blast of wind and lost it, and came piling and jackknifing across the medial strip into heavy oncoming traffic. They said it was a miracle half a dozen or more people weren’t killed, instead of just one man seriously injured, a local bank executive.

  T. Harlan Bowie had to be prybarred and torch-cut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry. As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace. Nobody could prove anything afterward. The lacerations were superficial. But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn, and all but severed. Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts.

  And it killed him—from the fracture point on down to his toes. Meanwhile the fates were laughing dirtily in the wings at another aspect of the treatment they were giving the poor, sad, sorry son of a bitch. T. Harlan Bowie had always been both shrewd and lucky with what Liz used to call “Harlie’s funny little stocks.” He liked to put his eggs in a couple of baskets and watch the baskets like an eagle. The day they told him they wanted to take the top of Liz’s skull off, he stopped watching the baskets. They were a couple of little technology companies. He had about an eighty thousand investment in them, evenly split. It was not savings, because bank officers don’t make enough to save money like that after taxes. It was the pyramided gains of a dozen years of those funny little stocks.