All These Condemned Read online

  Praise for

  John D. MacDonald

  “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

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

  —DONALD WESTLAKE

  “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

  All These Condemned 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.

  2014 Random House Trade Paperbacks Edition

  Copyright © 1954 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1982 by John D. MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  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 LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in paperback in the United States by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, in 1954.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8422-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-82718-0

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: Henrik Halvarsson/Noll Images

  v3.1

  They reckon death a blessing,

  Yet make of life an anxious joy,

  A villa thin with gilded laughter,

  All these condemned.

  DECIMUS JUNIUS JUVENALIS

  Satire Number Twelve

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  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

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  Dean Koontz

  WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, I had a friend, Harry Recard, who was smart, funny, and a demon card player. Harry was a successful history major, while I passed more time playing pinochle than I spent in class. For the three and a half years that I required to graduate, I heard Harry rave about this writer named John D. MacDonald, “John D” to his most ardent readers. Of the two of us, Harry was the better card player and just generally the cooler one. Consequently, I was protective of my position, as an English major, to be the better judge of literature, don’t you know. I remained reluctant to give John D a look.

  Having read mostly science fiction, I found many of my professors’ assigned authors markedly less exciting than Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, but I was determined to read the right thing. For every Flannery O’Connor whose work I could race through with delight, there were three like Virginia Woolf, who made me want to throw their books off a high cliff and leap after them. Nevertheless, I continued to shun Harry’s beloved John D.

  Five or six years after college, I was a full-time writer with numerous credits in science fiction, struggling to move into suspense and mainstream work. I was making progress but not fast enough to suit me. By now I knew that John D was widely admired, and I finally sat down with one of his books. In the next thirty days, I read thirty-four of them. The singular voice and style of the man overwhelmed me, and the next novel I wrote was such an embarrassingly slavish imitation of a MacDonald tale that I had to throw away the manuscript.

  I apologized to Harry for doubting him. He was so pleased to hear me proclaiming the joys of John D that he only said “I told you so” on, oh, twenty or thirty occasions.

  Over the years, I have read every novel by John D at least three times, some of them twice that often. His ability to evoke a time and place—mostly Florida but also the industrial Midwest, Las Vegas, and elsewhere—was wonderful, and he could get inside an occupation to give you the details and the feel of it like few other writers I’ve ever read. His pacing was superb, the flow of his prose irresistible, and his suspense watch-spring tight.

  Of all his manifest strengths as a writer, however, I am most in awe of his ability to create characters who are as real as anyone I’ve met in life. John D sometimes paused in the headlong rush of his story to spin out pages of background on a character. At first when this happened, I grumbled about getting on with the story. But I soon discovered that he could make the character so fascinating that when the story began to race forward again, I wanted it to slow down so I could learn more about this person who so intrigued and/or delighted me. There have been many good suspense novelists in recent decades, but in my experience, none has produced characters with as much humanity and truth as those in MacDonald’s work.

  Like most who have found this author, I am an admirer of his Travis McGee series, which features a first-person narrator as good as any in the history of suspense fiction and better than most. But I love the standalone novels even more. Cry Hard, Cry Fast. Where Is Janice Gantry? The Last One Left. A Key to the Suite. The Drowner. The Damned. A Bullet for Cinderella. The Only Girl in the Game. The Crossroads. All These Condemned. Those are not my only favorites, just a few of them, and many deal with interesting businesses and occupations. Mr. MacDonald’s work gives the reader deep and abiding pleasure for many reasons, not the least of which is that it portrays the contemporary life of his day with as much grace and fidelity as any writer of the period, and thus it also provides compelling social history.

  In 1985, when my publisher, Putnam, wanted to send advance proof copies of Strangers to Mr. MacDonald among others, I literally grew shaky at the thought of him reading it. I suggested that they shouldn’t send it to him, that as famous and prolific as he was, the proof would be an imposition on him; in truth, I feared that he would find the novel unsatisfying. Putnam sent it to him anyway, and he gave us an enthusiastic endorsement. In addition, he wrote to me separately, in an avuncular tone, kindly advising me how to avoid some of the pitfalls of the publishing business, and he wrote to my publisher asking her to please carefully consider the packaging of the book and not condemn it to the horror genre. She more or less condemned it to the genre anyway, but I took his advice to heart.

  In my experience, John D. MacDonald, the man, was as kind and thoughtful as his fiction would lead you to believe that he must be. That a writer’s work accura
tely reflects his soul is a rarer thing than you might imagine, but in his case, the reflection is clear and true. For that reason, it has been a special honor, in fact a grace, to be asked to write this introduction.

  Reader, prepare to be enchanted by the books of John D. MacDonald. And Harry, I am not as much of an idiot as I was in years gone by—though I know you won’t let me get away with claiming not to be to any degree an idiot anymore.

  One

  (NOEL HESS—AFTERWARD)

  WHEN AT LAST THEY FOUND HER and took her out of the water I knew I had to go down and look at her. It was more than that sweaty curiosity that surrounds the sudden death of a stranger on a city sidewalk. But there was some of that, too. In all honesty I had to admit that there was some of that, too.

  I had left Randy, my husband, asleep in the bedroom she had assigned to us, that smallest of the guest bedrooms. I supposed she had selected it coldly for us, with an objective consideration of our status, half guest, half employee.

  Randy had remained awake for a time, dithering about the future, growing increasingly more haunted, until at last emotional exhaustion had taken him, aided a bit by the sleeping pills I began to use long ago, when he first took her on as a client, even before her affairs became his exclusive concern, before she began to devour him with the dainty and absentminded finesse of a mantis.

  I had left him there and gone to the big living room, overlooking the lake. There was one small light in the room, in a far corner. A mammoth trooper stood at parade rest, hands locked behind him, leather creaking as he breathed with big slow lungs, looking out the window at the pattern of the lights and the boats. I wondered where the others were. I felt very tiny and feminine beside the trooper. He smelled of wool and leather and, oddly, the woods.

  “It must be getting chilly out there,” I said. “I could have Rosalita make some coffee.”

  He looked down on me. “That’s been taken care of, ma’am.”

  His tone made me feel ineffectual. “Do you think there’s much chance of finding … the body?” I asked him.

  “Lake bottom is bad on this side, ma’am. Lots of big rocks. They keep hanging up the grapples on the rocks. But they’ll get her. They always do.”

  “There seem to be an awful lot of boats out there.”

  “People around here pitch in when there’s a drowning. I don’t know as I remember your name. I’m Trooper Maleski.”

  “I’m Mrs. Randolph Hess.”

  “I got you placed now, Mrs. Hess. Your husband is another one worked for her. Hard to keep people straight here. Some of them in pretty bad shape when we got here. I guess there was a lot of drinking.”

  “Not everyone,” I said, and I wondered why I should be so defensive.

  “She put on a lot of parties here, they tell me. Pretty fancy layout. Lot of privacy. You get a lot of drunk people around the water and sooner or later you’re going to have an accident.” His voice was full of ponderous morality. We had kept our voices low. It seemed instinctive in the wake of death.

  “I guess this Mrs. Ferris was a pretty well-to-do woman.”

  “A wealthy woman, Mr. Maleski.”

  “They’ll be reporters here in the morning, I’d say. They’ll get the word and drive up here. Or maybe rent a float plane, the smart ones. What kind of job has that fellow Winsan got?”

  “He’s a public-relations man.”

  “I get it now. He’s out in one of the boats trying to help out. He’s sure eager to find her before any newspaper people get up here. I guess he doesn’t want them to find out she was swimming naked. But I’d think that would come out in the coroner’s report anyway.”

  “Steve would try to prevent any scandal he could, Mr. Maleski.”

  “He’s got himself a job this time. They’d already started dragging for her when that deputy sheriff found her swimming suit shoved in the big pocket of that robe. It makes it harder, dragging for her.”

  His slow words made a mental image that was, for a moment, entirely too vivid. The room went far away from me and there was a noise like the sound of surf in my ears. Reality returned slowly. I stood beside him and we looked out. The gasoline lanterns on the boats made vivid patterns on the water. The lights were so perfectly white they looked blue. In contrast the flashlights and the kerosene lanterns were orange.

  The look of lights moving on the water stirred some reluctant memory in me. It took a long time to bring it clear, as though I forced a key to turn in a rusted lock. Then I remembered and was saddened by the memory. When I was small my parents had taken me to the west coast of Florida, to a shabby little fishing village. There had been a secret in the house. I was aware of the existence of a secret, without knowing what it was. I knew only that it was bad. People were always talking in whispers in the next room. And one night my father fell down and died, and I knew what the secret had been. We had rented a house on a bay there, and during the October nights the commercial fishermen had spread their gill nets in the bay waters, and they had lights on their staunch and clumsy boats, and there had been a great number of them out the night my father had died. It had perhaps been a very good night for fishing.

  The trooper had been silent a long time. He said, quite unexpectedly, “You know, Mrs. Hess, I can’t get over that Judy Jonah. I guess I’ve seen her on the TV a hundred times. I used to think she was the funniest woman in the world. She hasn’t seemed so funny lately. But anyway, I always thought she was a great big woman. She’s not much bigger than you are, is she?”

  “They say you look bigger than you are.”

  “That must be it. I guess she hasn’t got much to be funny about tonight, eh?”

  “Not very much.”

  “You could have knocked me over with a pin feather when I walk in and see her. Last person in the world I expected to see up here in the woods.”

  “Do you know where she is now, Mr. Maleski?”

  “She was down on the dock a while back, just looking, wearing a man’s jacket. She must have gone around in the back someplace.”

  I thought of Judy. She wasn’t going to do any more weeping than I would. Not over Wilma Ferris. We had other things to weep over.

  “Have you been up here before? I guess you would have,” the trooper said.

  “Many times.”

  “I guess she put a lot of money in this place. Fanciest place for miles around. Maybe in the whole country. You know, I always thought it was a kind of crazy house, all this glass and a flat roof in snow country, and those terrace things sticking out. I mean it looks funny as hell from the lake when you’re out in a boat. But standing in here like this, I guess a fella could get to like this sort of thing.”

  “That was her stock in trade.”

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Hess?”

  “The way people could get to like this sort of thing.” The way Randy got to like it too well, and what it was doing to Mavis Dockerty while Paul had to stand by and watch it happen to her, and the way Gilman Hayes was soaking it all up. Even Steve Winsan and Wallace Dorn and myself—all of us jumping and whirling in marionette blindness while Wilma Ferris toyed with apparent purposelessness with our strings.

  “I guess I see what you mean,” the trooper said. “She used it for sort of business purposes. Like getting a fella off guard.”

  “Like that,” I said.

  “There was the eight guests and Mrs. Ferris and the three Mexican servants. Twelve in all. Is that right?”

  I counted them in my mind. “That’s right.”

  “If anybody wants servants up here, they got to bring them up. There isn’t anybody up here does much of that kind of work. How about these Mexicans? Where’d she find them?”

  “They came up from Mexico. She has a house down there. In Cuernavaca. She has them come up here for the summer.”

  “Is her house down there like this one?”

  “No. It’s very, very old. With a high wall around it. A Spanish house near the center of the town. She has … had that
house and this one and the apartment in New York.”

  “Nice work if you can get it,” the trooper said. “I’ve seen her in the village a lot of times. Well, not a lot. Maybe three or four times. I’ve only been up here two years. I used to be in the troop up in Malone. She was a good-looking woman. How old would you say she was?”

  “She kept that a state secret, Mr. Maleski. When she was divorced the last time, Time covered it in their Milestones column and said she was forty-two. Wilma was furious. She wanted to be considered as being about thirty-four or so. I would say she was probably forty-five. She didn’t look it.”

  The trooper grunted. “Damn well told she didn’t! Forty-five. That’s hard to believe.”

  “She worked at it, Mr. Maleski.”

  I suddenly realized that I was looking at the outline of the hills in the east and had been able to see them for some time. I stepped closer to the window. The stars had paled; just a few of them were visible.

  “Dawn coming,” the trooper said. “Going on for five now, daylight time.”

  The lights on the boats had lost some of their intensity. The water was no longer jet. It was the color of wet slate. And I heard the call then from one of the boats, a cry that had a different note from those that had gone before. All the other boats seemed to stop, and I sensed a change in the big body of the trooper beside me, a new alertness. The other boats began to move in a new way, began to converge.

  “Looks like they got her,” the trooper said.

  He walked ponderously to the door that opened onto the main terrace. I followed him. He opened the door and then realized I was going along with him. He stopped as though to bar the way. “You better stay in the house here. Might be messy to look at.”

  “I’m going down there, Mr. Maleski.”

  Talking there so long in quiet voices, we had achieved a sort of friendliness. I saw it leave his face. I was no longer a woman he had talked to in a friendly way in the semidarkness. I was one of them. One of the moneyed drinkers, the nude swimmers, the mate traders.