April Evil 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

  “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

  BY JOHN D. MACDONALD

  The Brass Cupcake

  Murder for the Bride

  Judge Me Not

  Wine for the Dreamers

  Ballroom of the Skies

  The Damned

  Dead Low Tide

  The Neon Jungle

  Cancel All Our Vows

  All These Condemned

  Area of Suspicion

  Contrary Pleasure

  A Bullet for Cinderella

  Cry Hard, Cry Fast

  You Live Once

  April Evil

  Border Town Girl

  Murder in the Wind

  Death Trap

  The Price of Murder

  The Empty Trap

  A Man of Affairs

  The Deceivers

  Clemmie

  Cape Fear (The Executioners)

  Soft Touch

  Deadly Welcome

  Please Write for Details

  The Crossroads

  The Beach Girls

  Slam the Big Door

  The End of the Night

  The Only Girl in the Game

  Where Is Janice Gantry?

  One Monday We Killed Them All

  A Key to the Suite

  A Flash of Green

  The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything

  On the Run

  The Drowner

  The House Guest

  End of the Tiger and Other Stories

  The Last One Left

  S*E*V*E*N

  Condominium

  Other Times, Other Worlds

  Nothing Can Go Wrong

  The Good Old Stuff

  One More Sunday

  More Good Old Stuff

  Barrier Island

  A Friendship: The Letters of Dan Rowan and John D. MacDonald, 1967–1974

  The Travis McGee Series

  The Deep Blue Good-by

  Nightmare in Pink

  A Purple Place for Dying

  The Quick Red Fox

  A Deadly Shade of Gold

  Bright Orange for the Shroud

  Darker Than Amber

  One Fearful Yellow Eye

  Pale Gray for Guilt

  The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

  Dress Her in Indigo

  The Long Lavender Look

  A Tan and Sandy Silence

  The Scarlet Ruse

  The Turquoise Lament

  The Dreadful Lemon Sky

  The Empty Copper Sea

  The Green Ripper

  Free Fall in Crimson

  Cinnamon Skin

  The Lonely Silver Rain

  The Official Travis McGee Quizbook

  April Evil is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Random House eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1956 by John D. MacDonald Publishing, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  A shorter version of this work appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine, copyright © 1955

  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.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82700-5

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  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

  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 a
bility 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 accurately 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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The couple arrived in Flamingo, a town of twelve thousand population on Florida’s west coast, at about eleven-thirty on the morning of the eleventh of April. They arrived in a gray Buick sedan with Illinois plates. The big car was dirty after the long trip. Racked clothing hung in the back.

  The gray Buick cruised the main shopping section on Bay Avenue for a few minutes and then pulled into a drive-in restaurant on the west end of Bay Avenue near the approach to the causeway and bridge that led to Flamingo Key.

  It was a hot day, too hot to eat in the car. There was no one in the other cars. The other customers were all inside the restaurant. A waitress in a green cotton uniform stood in the angular patch of shade made by the building itself, her back against the pink wall, and watched the couple as they got out of the gray car. She smoked a cigarette and watched them and wondered idly about them.

  The man was tall. He was about thirty years old. He had the look of someone still recovering from a serious illness. He slid carefully out from behind the wheel and stood by the car, his posture bad, shoulders thrust forward. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the collar open, gray pants that were baggy at the knees. The shirt and trousers looked as though they had been made for a larger man. The trousers were gathered at the belt line and hung slack in the back.

  He stood blinking in the bright sunshine, his shadow black against the blue-black of the asphalt. His color was not good and the glossy black of his hair seemed the most alive thing about him. He stood and looked toward the causeway. He rubbed his left arm and elbow gingerly. It was pink from the sun, from resting on the sill of the car window as he drove.

  The woman was still in the car, putting on lipstick. The man turned and looked up Bay Avenue toward the shopping section and then turned farther and looked at the waitress. There were deep lines in his cheeks. There were dark patches under hot dark eyes. His nose was long, thin at the bridge, wide at the nostrils. He looked at the waitress with a complete lack of expression. That is not something often seen. The dead wear no expression. Neither do the victims of dementia praecox when in catatonic state. Something behind the face looked out of the dark eyes at her, and the face told her nothing. The waitress felt oddly uncomfortable. She was a handsome husky girl, accustomed to stares, but not of that sort. She looked away.

  The man spoke in a low impatient voice to the woman in the car. She got out quickly. She was a tall girl of about twenty-five, as tall as the man in her high heels. She wore a sheer white blouse. Her tan linen skirt was badly wrinkled. She smoothed it across her hips with the back of her hand. Her blonde hair was cropped short, and the waitress decided it was not becoming to her. It made the girl’s face look too large, too heavy. The girl had the wide cheekbones, the short upper lip, the wide-set blue eyes, the heaviness of mouth that have become a stereotype of sensual beauty. Her tall figure was good, but slightly heavy. There was a look of softness about it. Her legs were very white. The girl’s face was passive, with a hint of almost bovine endurance. She walked in an oddly constricted way. It was a walk in which there was body-consciousness and a flavor of humility. She walked as though she half expected a sudden blow, and yet would not mind too much if it came.

  The man locked the car quickly and passed the girl on the way to the door and held it open for her. The waitress snapped her cigarette out onto the asphalt. She thought that the couple had not had a very good trip. It looked as though the girl had gotten the wrong man, and that was too bad. But a lot of us get the wrong ones. And it’s too late then and not much you can do about it. There are more wrong ones than right ones.

  The waitress went in the side door of the restaurant. The man had taken a paper from the rack by the door. They had taken a table for two. The man read the morning Flamingo Record. The waitress was glad it was not her table. The girl sat quite still and looked beyond the man, out the big side window toward the blue water of the bay and the white houses on the key beyond the bay. At intervals she lifted a cigarette slowly to her mouth, and as slowly returned it to hold it over the chipped glass ashtray on the formica table.

  By two o’clock, using the name Mr. and Mrs. John Wheeler, the couple had rented the Mather house on the bay shore three miles south of the center of town. Hedges, the realtor, had tried to interest them in a house on the key, but they had not wanted to be on the key. The Mather house was long, low—a three-bedroom two-bath cypress house with a terrace that faced the bay, a new dock but no boat. The nearest house north of it was over two hundred feet away, and almost entirely screened by dense plantings. The vacant land south of the house was thickly overgrown with palmetto and cabbage palm and weeds.

  The Mather house had a curving shell drive, live oaks heavy with Spanish moss, some delicate punk trees, a few pepper trees, a clump of coconut palm. There was a phone in the house on temporary disconnect, and Hedges promised to have it hooked up that same day. The man had paid in cash, seven hundred and seventy-
two dollars and fifty cents. This included the three per cent state tax. It covered the rental up to May fifteenth.

  After the transaction was complete, Bud Hedges, not a very imaginative or sensitive man, wondered why he should have strange fancies about the couple. They had not responded to any of his eager listing of the delights of a vacation in Flamingo. Even the dusty gray car had seemed blunt and sullen. He wondered why he had taken the precaution of jotting down the number from the Illinois plates. He shrugged off his strange feelings. The money was in hand. Mrs. Mather would be pleased. He had made thirty-seven-fifty for an hour of work during the month when the tourist season was ending. And the Wheelers had gotten what they wanted, a house with a maximum of privacy. He had not expected them to pay that much freight. The man’s shoes had been black, cheap, cracked across the instep. Hedges always looked at their shoes. It was a better index than automobiles. You couldn’t buy shoes on time.

  They looked the house over more carefully after Hedges had gone. They carried the luggage in. The man wandered around the grounds while the girl unpacked. He went down and stood on the dock. Mullet jumped in the bay. A man in a yellow boat with a very quiet outboard motor trolled in a wide circle. A gray cabin cruiser went south by the channel markers. He could see the narrow pass between Flamingo Key and Sand Key, see the deeper blue of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico beyond the pass.

  The girl came out on the front terrace and called to him. “It’s all unpacked. We got to get some stuff.”

  He walked up to the terrace. “Like what?”

  “You know. Staples. Bread and butter and eggs and cans and stuff.”

  “Can you cook?”

  “I can cook some. You don’t want to go out much, do you?”

  “No. I don’t want to go out much.”

  “I fixed the trays and turned the ’frig on high. There ought to be ice pretty quick.”

  “Little homemaker.”

  “Well … hell.”

  “Pick up a couple bottles too. Here.”

  She took the money. He heard the car leave a few minutes later. He paced through the empty house. He turned on a radio in the big kitchen. He found soap operas, hill-billies and Havana stations. He turned it off, drank a glass of water, frowned at the sulphur taste. He tried the phone but it wasn’t hooked up yet. He went in and tested the beds. They felt all right. He took a shower. After the shower he dressed in the cotton slacks and aqua sports shirt he had picked up in that store in Georgia. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror as he combed his black glossy hair.