A Man of Affairs 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

  A Man of Affairs 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 © 1957 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, Inc., New York.

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

  eISBN: 978-0-8129-8492-7

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  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 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.

  ONE

  I got out of my car and stood beside it on the gravel driveway and looked at the big frame house. I had not seen it in over two years, not since the death of Louise’s father put an end to those futile and meaningless conferences he used to hold in his home. The house and grounds had not changed. The blinds were closed against the heat of a midmorning Monday in May. The plantings were as formal and rich and well-tended as ever.

  I tried to calm myself with a cigarette. It would do no good to rush in full of anger and indignation and confront Louise. Louise had too much experience with being bullied. Just a half hour earlier I had dropped into the bank to see Walt Burgeson, and he had been very uncomfortable as he had told me the sorry and disappointing news about Louise’s unexpected decision—the decision that might well spill all the apples out of our basket.

  Though I had seen Louise here and there during the two years since her father’s death, I’d had no close contact with her. Louise had been off with Warren Dodge on a honeymoon in Italy when her father, Thomas McGann, met his tragic, slapstick death, a death that must have infuriated him during his final microsecond of awareness. The way it was reconstructed, he had dropped the soap and it had bounded out of the shower stall. When he stepped out he stepped directly onto it, and in falling struck his head squarely and irrevocably on the porcelained rim of the toilet. He had been a big and ponderous man, muscled like a steer.

  I had a clear memory of how Louise and Warren Dodge had looked at the time of the funeral, after their flying trip home from Italy—Warren big and beefy, solemn and sullen, heavily scented with bonded whisky—Louise remote and subdued and pallid, more spiritless than even the death of her father would have seemed to warrant.

  There are only seventy thousand people in Portston and so I had seen her around fairly often during the two years. And thought she looked unhappy. And heard the unsavory rumors about her marriage. I didn’t need the rumors. I knew what sort of man she had married.

  I snapped the cigarette away, went to the door and pushed the bell. The door opened and a heavy Negro woman looked at me quite blankly. “I’d like to see Mrs. Dodge, please.”

  “She busy now.”

  “Go tell her Sam Glidden wants to see her right now!”

  Some of my urgency and anger must have been apparent. I’m big and I’ve been told by intimates that I look a good deal rougher and tougher than I am. I saw a wider stripe of the whites of her eyes as she closed the door. She was back in a minute and a half to say, “She says you come back in the garden.”

  I followed her through the house. There were glints of polish on the dark and heavy furniture, discreet gleams of brass and silver, a scent of cedar and wax and furniture oils. The house had a hushed feeling, a secret flavor.

  The small walled garden behind the house was sunny and bright with flowers. Louise got up from an aluminum chaise longue webbed with white plastic and took my hand and smiled her careful smile and said, “A long time, Sam. Too long.”

  “It’s good to see you, Louise.”

  She indicated a chair for me and sat back on the chaise longue, still smiling. But I sensed she knew well why I had come. “Beer or anything, Sam?”

  “Thanks, no.” I had to put her off balance a little bit. She was braced for argumentation. I offered her a cigarette and said, “I was remembering about once upon a time, Louise. The time when I was so in love with you I couldn’t even eat.”

  Her greeny-gray eyes went round-wide with surprise. “Good Lord! When?”

  “I was a senior in high, and you were a sophomore. You wore your hair a funny way. Braided and it went across here.”

  “My coronet braid.”

  “And you had a blue dress with white at the collar and white on the sleeves.”

  “I haven’t remembered that dress for years. It was a favorite.”

  “I suffered in silence. Sam Glidden had no business trying to get chummy with the McGann girl. We all knew your father sent you and your brother to public high school because he thought it was the democratic thing to do. Your brother had his own car, and you had your own crowd you ran around with, and as soon as the weather was warm enough you’d all go right from school to the country club to swim and play tennis.”

  She laughed aloud and it made me feel slightly hurt. “What’s so funny?”

  “Not what you think, Sam. Right about that time I had a grim little crush on you. But you were unattainable. Big popular senior, football hero. Big Sam Glidden wasn’t going to waste any of his time on a sappy little sophomore.”

  “We should have found out about that,” I said. She looked at me and after a few seconds her smile looked as though it had been pasted on, and then she looked away. I knew she was about to ask me why I had come to see her, so I beat her to the gun and said, “I’ll never forget how much I owe your father, Louise.”

  “He was … glad he could help you, Sam.”

  I had worked at the Harrison Corporation plant—Thomas McGann, President—every summer while I was in high school. In my senior year I had a choice of football scholarships; but in the final high school game, I got hit and the cartilage of my right knee was badly torn. The word got around the conference I would be out of the game for two years at least. A football scholarship had been my only prayer of get
ting to college in spite of reasonably respectable marks. That was 1946 and I was nineteen. I’d been too young for World War II, and the bum knee kept me out of Korea later.

  I applied for a job at Harrison, thinking I would save money for a year and then try college the following fall. I didn’t know that Thomas McGann was aware of my existence. When I applied for a job in June I got it immediately on the basis of my past working record with them, and three days later I was called out of the shop and sent up to Mr. McGann’s office. I soon found he’d followed my football career as well as my record with the company on summer jobs. And he knew my home situation. I was the only child of my mother’s first marriage. It had not been a good marriage. When I was eleven, after her fifth year of widowhood, she had married again, married a man she loved, a man who adored her. And there were, by that time, four half-brothers and half-sisters from that second marriage. It was a happy house without much money and without too much emotional room for me.

  Mr. McGann offered a deal. He would get me into a good college of business administration and back me for what I needed through four years if I would agree to come back and work for the Harrison Corporation. When I was on salary I could start paying him back.

  It took a long time for him to get it through my proud, thick head that it wasn’t charity. I took him up on it. When I was twenty-three I came back to work as assistant to the purchasing agent. Five years ago, when I was twenty-five, I paid him back the last dime.

  In view of what he had done for me, I had to choose my words carefully in talking to Louise. “I’m grateful to your father, Louise, but that doesn’t alter my objective opinion of him. He was an overbearing, strong-minded, stupid man who refused all advice, good or bad, a man who came dangerously close to running a sound company into the ground.”

  She stared at me for long seconds. She looked very lovely. She was wearing crisp white shorts with a red stripe down the sides, a red halter, red straw slippers. Her black and glossy hair was tied back with a white ribbon. She is not quite tall, and her bone structure is fragile and fine. Her flawless skin has a dusky, honeyed quality, and her legs are smooth and round and long. There is a look of brooding sensitivity about her face. I remembered how she was as a child, full of a dancing and endless vitality, a flame in shades of black and ivory. Now, in her, it is all muted. All fires are banked. But her new quietness does not give the impression of frigidity or sterility. At twenty-seven she has a way about her that is so much more provocative to me than any strip act that I could feel the annoying pulse-thud of awareness of her even while I was trying to make her understand what I had to tell her.