The Beach Girls 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

  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

  The Beach Girls 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

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  Copyright © 1959 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1987 by Dorothy P. MacDonald and Maynard MacDonald

  All rights reserved.

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

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in paperback by Fawcett, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1959.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82701-2

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  ONE Captain Orbie Derr

  TWO Joe Rykler

  THREE Captain Lew Burgoyne

  FOUR Christy Yale

  FIVE Alice Stebbins

  SIX Rex Rigsby

  SEVEN Leo Rice

  EIGHT Anne Browder

  NINE Christy Yale

  TEN Happy Birthday

  ELEVEN Happy Birthday to You

  TWELVE Happy Something

  THIRTEEN

  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 ever
y 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

  Captain Orbie Derr

  It was a right pretty evening when Leo Rice arrived at the Stebbins’ Marina. Friday, it was. The first day of August. It was later on the same month that everything went to hell for just about everybody. Maybe he was, like Joe Rykler explained to me, a catalyst. But I’ve got the general opinion everything was due to go to hell anyway. Things had been working up to it. I won’t deny he didn’t have something to do with it. But it took more than just one man to ruin what Joe Rykler calls a way of life.

  It was a fine evening. Breeze out of the east off the Atlantic, moving about four knots. A pink glow of sunset reflected on the quiet thunderheads out over the Atlantic.

  A bunch of us were on D Dock, as usual, lounging around on cushions and chairs taken off the boats. Tin washtub full of ice and beer. I’d set my charcoal grill up on the dock and loaded it. Later on we’d light it and cook the ’burgs.

  Me and Joe Rykler and Anne Browder and Christy Yale and Gus Andorian. Bud and Ginny Linder. Alice Stebbins, who owns the marina. Charterboat row is opposite D Dock, and on that evening Lew Burgoyne had come over from there and joined us. He captains the Amberjack III.

  It was nice there, opening a beer once in a while, having a lazy argument about nothing at all, watching the night come on. The car lights were on over the other side of the Inland Waterway, going north and south on A-1-A, going back and forth across the hump-back bridge over Elihu Inlet. There wasn’t much boat traffic up and down the Waterway, and not much in the big Stebbins’ Marina basin, just kids and old fellas running in to tie up their outboards over at A Dock where they keep the small stuff. On the other side of us, beyond the rickety old marina buildings, traffic moved slick and fast, whispering by north and south on Broward Boulevard. It made D Dock like an island, a special quiet place, water licking gently at the hulls of the tied-up boats.

  I was looking out toward the Waterway when I saw the old Higgins Sedan, coming down slow from the north, make the turn in between the rickety markers on either side of the entrance to the basin. I saw right away that he was cutting the north marker too tight. It’s silted-up there. You have to give it a lot of room, just like you do the black nun-buoys on your way out Elihu Inlet on anything less than half tide. I sucked in my breath and held it the way you do watching anybody about to go aground, but somehow he eased over and came on into the basin dead slow, heading for the T at the end of C Dock where the gas pumps are.

  Everybody had stopped talking. We were all watching him. Old Billy Looby, who’s been dockboy ever since 1919 when Jess Stebbins had bought the land and started out renting boats and selling bait, went trotting on out the length of C Dock past the cruisers of the winter residents who store them at the marina over the hot months.

  The fella at the wheel of the Higgins give it a little reverse power on both engines to stop himself, then cut both engines. Sound carried good. We heard Billy yell, “You want gas?”

  “No thanks. I’d like to tie up.”

  “For how long? Overnight?”

  “Longer than that. Maybe a month.”

  Billy turned and stared over toward us and then yelled in his shrill old-man’s voice, “Alice, this here fella—”

  “I heard him,” Alice bellowed. When she wants to let go you can hear her over on the public beach. “Put him in D-13.”

  “D-13?” Billy repeated blankly. He was as surprised as we were.

  “Show him where it is and tell him to back it in.”

  As Billy was pointing and explaining, Joe Rykler said, “Alice, you are dumping an inept stranger into our little community. What’s wrong with B Dock where he can be happy with the rest of the tourists?”

  “Rotten pilings which got to be replaced, busted dock boards which got to be replaced, and a creosote and cu-prinol job. I got to have Billy and Bunny Beeman move what’s already there. And who is running this god-damn marina anyhow?”

  “You are, Alice. You are,” Joe said.

  There are fifteen slips along D Dock. Ten boats moored there. The permanent residents. Even though D-13 was the last one out toward the end—right next to Rex Rigsby’s Bahamian ketch, The Angel—we all felt a sort of resentment that Alice was moving somebody in with us.

  Billy had trotted back to shore and he went loping out D Dock to help the stranger with the lines. We get hardly any tide movement inside the basin, but I had a hunch the wind was going to bother the guy when he backed into the narrow slip between the pilings. Maybe there was somebody below to help him with the bow lines and fend the Higgins off the pilings, but I had another hunch he was alone.

  I saw him ease around and make his swing. He made it too late. Just before he banged his transom into a piling, he went out again and started from further upwind. But he didn’t have the smallest idea of how to use his props and rudders to swing the rear end of that boat. Billy was yelling instructions the guy
couldn’t hear over the sound of his engines. Billy is a mean little old son of a bitch, and I knew Billy would enjoy to see him foul up good. Give him something to feel superior about. So I got up and went on out to see if I could give him a hand.

  He came in too fast, staring back over his shoulder. He gave the starboard piling a hell of a thump. I ran out the narrow walkway between the slips, made a flying leap and landed sprawling in the cockpit just as the man, un-nerved by the thump, shoved the shift levers forward and moved back out again.

  “Let me have it,” I said. “Get the bow lines.”

  He gave up the controls willingly and went forward. The port engine was running ragged, and I could tell by the feel of the wheel the steering cable was frayed. I eased it back in, swung the bow left and right so he could slip a loop over both pilings, moved it back to the dock, yelled to him when to make the bow lines fast. I cut the engines. Billy and I rigged the two stern lines.

  The man came back to the cockpit and, in what was left of daylight, I got my first good look at him. He was about forty, a big lean guy, deeply tanned, with one of those pleasant ugly faces. He wore khaki shorts and he looked as if he was in fine shape. But he didn’t look sure of himself—I mean in more ways than not being able to handle thirty-four feet of boat. Like he’d been gutted. Like some of the running parts had been taken out of him and put back in with string.

  He stuck his hand out. The palm was calloused. “I’m Leo Rice,” he said. “I’m grateful to you. I had the feeling I was going to knock the dock over.”

  He spoke in a careful, educated way that didn’t go with the calloused hand or the ropy brown muscles in his shoulders.

  “Orbie Derr,” I said. “Guess you’re not used to boats.”

  “I bought this up in Jacksonville two weeks ago. They gave me a short course in navigation and boat handling. If there’s anything I haven’t done wrong yet, I can’t think of it.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that the first thing he did wrong was to buy the boat. I could tell it had had hard use and not much care. Somebody had fixed it up cheap and flashy for a quick sale. Slapped paint over the corrosion.