A Flash of Green 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

  A Flash of Green 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 Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 1962 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1990 by Maynard 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 1962.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8528-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-82714-2

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover Design: Carlos Beltrán and Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Giorgio Fochesato/Getty

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  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

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Dedication

  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 wor
k 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

  WHEN SHE HEARD THE RATTLE of the old tin wheelbarrow, Kat Hubble knew it was after four. On Tuesdays, after he had finished up at the Lessers’, and on Fridays, when he was through at the Cable home, Barnett Mayberry would do one extra hour of yard work at her house before getting into his stuttering old car and driving back home to Pigeon Town, the Negro community on the far side of Palm City.

  Before Van had been killed, Barnett had come one full day a week, and though now it added up to only one quarter of the time, he seemed to keep the place looking as neat as ever, though of course she had begun no new landscape projects in this past year, and she did more of the work herself.

  The arrangement with Barnett had just seemed to happen. Beginning the week after the funeral, he had stopped by to take care of things which obviously needed attention, such as clipping the side hedge of Australian pine, and she had given him a dollar for each after-work hour. In some mysterious way it had become a routine. It so exactly fitted her diminished purse and her needs that she could not help suspecting it was not entirely satisfactory to Barnett, that he had entrapped himself through some murky idea of loyalty and pride in past projects. Yet when she had at last taxed him with it, he had looked rigidly beyond her and shuffled his feet and said, “I got a place for them dollahs, Miz Hubble. It working out good for me.”

  She had always felt slightly indignant that Van should be able to get along so effortlessly with Barnett and the other Negroes who had worked for them from time to time. But, as he had reminded her, there was quite an environmental gap between a girlhood in Plattsburg, New York, and a boyhood in Orlando, Florida.

  She would hear Van out in the yard, laughing with Barnett, and once when he came in she said, “Hee-hee-hee. Yuk, yuk, yuk. I’ll bet he doesn’t laugh that way when he’s with his own people.”

  Van had stared at her in honest surprise. “Of course he doesn’t, cutie. And he doesn’t talk the same way either. He uncle-toms me a little, but without losing his dignity, and I pull the mahster a little on him, but not too much. It’s a protocol thing, Kat, and it makes us both feel at ease because we both know so very damn well the limits of the relationship in which we have to operate. He’s just as respected a citizen in his neighborhood as I am in mine. If I try to push him beyond the limits he sets, he’ll just get slower and stupider until I leave him alone. And if he tries to take advantage of me, he expects to get chewed.”

  “But when I go out to tell him what I’d like him to do, he stares into space and acts terrified.”

  “He probably is. He knows you don’t know the rules. He knows you’re a Wellesley liberal. You might ask him what he thinks of Faubus. And the next time you listen to us have an attack of the jollies, dear heart, you might note that I probably laugh differently and speak differently than when I’m with my own people. He’s probably as wary with Burt Lesser as he is with you, and as comfortable with Martin Cable as he is with me.”

  Since Van’s death, Barnett had given her the curious impression he had been trying to put her at ease. He would make some empty remark and then laugh. Five years ago she had bought a little rubber tree in a pot for twenty-five cents. Now it was nearly twenty feet tall and continually covered with the upright bloody spears of new leaf growth. “Heee!” Barnett would say. “Little ol’ two-bits tree.” That was their signal for the vague social laughter. But once it had brought too clear a memory of Vance, and one laugh had become a sob and she had fled into the house.

  When she heard the sound of the wheelbarrow, she left the letter she was writing her sister and went out into the side yard. The lower Gulf Coast, from Tampa to the Keys, was enfolded in an airless July heat which was so merciless it had little flavor of tropic languor. Instead, it seemed to have a humming intensity, an expectancy, as though any moment the Gulf and the bays would be brought to the boiling point and all the roofs would break into flame. Each afternoon the thunderheads made their lazy, ominous, atomic symbols out over the Gulf. Sometimes there would be a riffle of rain-wet air turning the leaves, but all the storms moved ashore across other counties.

  Barnett had trundled the wheelbarrow over to the pile of cuttings under the punk trees. She saw that he was wearing one of Van’s discarded shirts, a pale-blue Orlon knit that she had always liked on Van until the sun of Saturday golf had faded it unevenly and he had given it to Barnett. She tested the familiarity of that shirt upon herself, like touching and retouching something which might be a little too hot to hold and then finding, with a certain pride, that you can hold it after all.

  Barnett Mayberry was of an unusual muddy saffron hue, and his features seemed more Asiatic than Negroid. When Van had been annoyed with him, he would call him, never to his face, “That damned Manchurian.”

  “Fixin’ to tote thisheer bresh over to burn, Miz Hubble.”

  “That’s fine, Barnett. I wanted to ask you about this thing that’s growing up into the live oak.”

  He followed her across the yard. “I seen him,” Barnett said. “This here a strangle vine.”

  “It’s growing awfully fast. Should it come out?”

  “Fixin’ to take him out. I’ll cut him off low now, and next week he lets go enough up there, I pull him down easy. Take a long long time to kill that tree, we let it go. By the time it die, all you can see is the strangle vine aholt all over it.”

  A car turned into her drive and stopped. It was an old blue Plymouth station wagon. She felt a quick pleasure as she recognized it as Jimmy Wing’s car and saw him clambering languidly out from behind the wheel, grinning at her, lifting his arm in a lazy greeting. He came across the yard toward them, loose-jointed, a sandy man in his middle thirties, a man with a long narrow head, a thrusting, fleshy nose, a face more deeply lined than his years warranted. His hair, brows, lashes and his light-blue eyes were not as dark as the slightly yellowed tan of his face. He had a crooked mouth and an ugly crooked grin—both sweet and wry in an attractive simultaneity. He wore a white short-sleeved sport shirt and light-gray slacks. He had the unconscious knack of giving the most ordinary clothes a look of elegance. She had decided it was partly because of the lazy grace of the way he moved, partly because of his spare bony frame, partly because he was so consistently immaculate.

  Whenever he recalled how she had disliked him before Van had been killed, she was astonished at how blind she had been. Jimmy had been the only one of Van’s close friends she had actively disliked.

  “If it’s any help to you, it’s worse in town, Kat. How you, Barnett?”

  Barnett’s grin was broad, his voice emphatic. “Fine, Mist’ Wing. Just fine.”

  “You get those pictures?”

  “I sure thank you, Mist’ Wing.”

  “She get in up there to Tuskegee?”

  “They said for her to come.”

  “That’s one fine girl, Barnett.”

  “What’s this all about?” Kat asked.

  She found herself walking toward the house with Jimmy and knew he had effortlessly avoided explaining in front of Barnett. And she knew she had once again violated some obscure clause of the protocol.

  “His daughter was valedictorian at their high school last month. Sandra Nan. Not much for looks, but hellish bright and energetic. Barlow got a good picture of her, so I had the darkroom make up three glossies and send them to the family.”

  “Darn it! I should have known that.”

  “He’s got one good boy, and one boy headed for trouble, so he’s batting high in the league.”

  “Jimmy, do you know everything about everybody i
n Palm County?”

  “Now, if I did, honey, everybody would be paying me not to work on the paper.”

  They went through the screened portion of the cage at the rear of the house. He slid a glass door open and they walked into the roofed portion of the patio.

  “Well, now!” he said, looking at her quizzically. “You’ve sissied out, Kat.”

  “And every time I turn the noisy thing on I remember how Van hated air conditioning, and I feel immoral and guilty. You know my tenants stayed to the middle of June, and you know it got hot early this year. So they wanted one and we dickered around, and we finally decided I’d pay a hundred dollars against it, and if they take the house again next year, I’ll cut the lease another hundred. It’s a three-ton thing, and it’s sticking in the wall between the living room and the bedroom wing. What can I fix you to drink?”

  “Can of beer is fine, if you’ve got it.”

  “Coming up.” She went to the kitchen and brought the two opened cans back to the glass-top patio table, sat across from him.

  “Will the whosises want the house next season?”

  “The Brandts. They say so. They’ll let me know for sure by the first of November. Let me make my full confession on the air conditioner, Jimmy. I wasn’t going to use it. I was just going to let it sit there. But you know how cold they keep the darn bank all day. When I’d get out, I’d just wilt. I held out until last week, wearing my prickly heat rash like a badge of honor or something. Then I woke up in the middle of the night and my hair was sopping wet and it was too hot to go back to sleep. So like a thief I snuck around and closed the windows and plugged the beast in, and slept so hard I nearly didn’t hear the alarm.”

  “Now you’re hooked.”

  “I’ve fallen so low I even like the noise it makes.”

  Jimmy stood up and walked toward the living room to stand and look the length of it. “Looks just the same,” he said.

  “It is, and it isn’t. Jean Brandt had different ideas. I suppose any woman would, really. She moved things around, and she stored things away. I’ve been getting things back the way they were, but they won’t be exactly the way they were. It looks a little different, and it feels different. Do you know? It was our house, but now I feel a little bit as if I were renting it too—from the Brandts. It isn’t as important to me as it was, which is very probably a good thing. I’m glad you talked me out of putting it on the market.”