Murder for the Bride 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.”

  —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

  Murder for the Bride 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 © 1951 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  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: 978-0-307-82699-2

  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

  Chapter Eighteen

  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 e
voke 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

  It was one of those days when everything goes wrong. I should have guessed that the letter would mean trouble.

  Paul Harrigan and I had been working in a swamp for the six weeks following my three-day honeymoon with Laura. It was a juicy Mexican swamp five miles west of Tancoco, about a hundred miles south of Tampico. Trans-Americas Oil, our employer, had a contract with Permex of Mexico to find, or try to find, new oil reserves. On the basis of aerial photo maps, Sam Spencer had shoved two-man crews into the more promising spots to bounce echoes off the substrata and map in detail any promising-looking domes. It’s a simple operation in open country. Harrigan and I were given a swamp. Every inch of the way had to be hacked out, and the equipment had to be lugged by hand.

  It was one of those days. It seemed even hotter than usual, the clouds of insects shriller and hungrier, the black muck stickier. Wild parrots in their clown suits made noises like a fingernail on a blackboard, and even the orchids looked like open wounds.

  One of the labor gang chopped his leg instead of a vine. We got the bleeding stopped and built a fitter and sent him on back along the trail to Tancoco with instructions to Fernando, our base-camp man, to send him in the truck down to the doctor in Tuxpan. Later Harrigan made a check with the compass and advised the world at large in a profane bellow that the most recent trail wandered off in the wrong direction.

  Sam Spencer was using the mails to ride us about the time we were taking. He didn’t want us to finish any more badly than I wanted to be done with it and get back to Laura. I had begun to think at thirty-two that marriage was for the other boys, not for me. There had been girls aplenty, but it had reached the serious stages with no more than three—and even then there had been something missing. With Laura there was nothing missing. It was all there. And to hell with what other people thought of my Laura. We met right after I got back to New Orleans after six months in Venezuela. We were married that same week.

  Harrigan was having a bad time with me. I did everything except walk into trees and talk to myself. Every time I shut my eyes I could see her silver-blonde hair, jet eyebrows, sooty smudge of lashes, sherry-brown eyes. I could remember so clearly the feel of her in my arms, the sting of those pouting, arrogant lips, every line of her tall, warm, wonderful figure. Laura Rentane—now Mrs. Dillon Bryant.

  We were just getting back to work after the noon break when the boy came from the base camp with the mail. Two letters. One to Paul Harrigan from Spencer. One to me, on New Orleans Star News stationery, with Jill Townsend’s name typed in under the printing on the top left corner.

  Whenever Sam Spencer used to call me back to New Orleans, I used to get in touch with Jill. We had a lot of laughs, a lot of fun. She’s a little girl—the top of her dark head reaches no higher than my lips—but her slimness and the way she carries herself make her look taller. Her eyes are gray and sharp with intelligence, and her face is out of kilter in a funny way, the small chin canted a bit to the left, the left side of her mouth and her left eye set just about a millimeter higher than the features on the right side. It gives her a wonderfully wry look. The paper had her on society stuff for a long time before, in her spare time, she unraveled a particularly unpleasant smuggling angle, got her life threatened, got some people sent to one of Uncle Sam’s jails, and got herself promoted.

  When Laura and I were trying to cut the red tape to get married quickly, Jill helped us. Laura didn’t seem to care much for Jill, and that annoyed me a little because Jill helped a lot with the papers and also with finding Laura a little apartment in the Quarter. Then I realized that Laura couldn’t be expected to take a shine to someone classified as an ex among her new husband’s old friends.

  I tore the envelope open. The sticky heat of the swamp had dampened the paper so that you couldn’t even hear it tear. My fingers left dark smudges on the paper. I wondered what on earth Jill was writing me about. I’d told her to keep an eye on Laura, if she could, because Laura didn’t know anyone at all in town, and because, if you don’t watch it, you can get tangled up with some pretty funny people who live in the Quarter.

  “Dear Dil,” it read. She had typed it. “I think you had better get on back here. Laura is in trouble. I can’t find out just how bad it is, but without trying to alarm you too much, I think I can say it is probably the worst kind of trouble. I guess she should have gone to Mexico with you, Dil.”

  That’s all there was. I stood and read it three times. I couldn’t seem to get the meaning of it clear in my head.

  I think I tried to laugh. All I did was make a sound as though somebody had just cut my throat.

  Harrigan stopped growling at Sam Spencer’s letter and stared at me. “What’s with you?”

  I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I handed him the letter and walked away and stood with my back to him. I got out a cigarette and got it lighted on the second try.

  He came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. I skittered away from
it like a nervous horse. “Easy, boy,” he said.

  “Oh, sure! Easy! What the hell, Paul!”

  “You can take the jeep to Tuxpan and get an airplane ride to Mexico City. That will be the quickest.”

  “Leaving you holding the bag here.”

  “What good would you be? Dammit, Dil, why did you marry her without knowing anything about her?”

  I turned on him. “Watch it, Paul!”

  “Have I said a word so far? No. Now I’m talking, boy. For your own good. Nobody could stop you. None of your friends. You had to go ahead and marry her. Women like that are always getting their hooks in the good guys.”

  “Paul!”

  “Shut up. That Jill Townsend is tops. Everybody hoped it would be Jill. So did she, I think. I’m trying to prepare you, boy. I don’t know what you’re going to find up there. I do know it won’t be pretty, whatever it is. Laura is an international tramp, boy, and the sooner …”

  I saw my fist going out as if it belonged to somebody standing behind me. A big hard brown fist, with a hundred and ninety pounds behind it. Big Paul Harrigan is my height, six-one, but he outweighs me by thirty pounds. My fist went out as though in slow motion and I saw him just shut his eyes and turn his face a little and take it. It made a sound like hitting a wall with a wet rag. He went back lifting his arms to catch his balance, not quite making it, falling on hip and elbow. He sat up and there was blood on his mouth.

  “I had to, Paul,” I said, as if I were begging him for something. “I had to!”

  “A woman like that,” he said heavily, contemptuously. “A hard-eyed, sullen, discontented little …”

  “Shut up!” I yelled. “You keep on and I’ll hit you again, even if you are sitting down. She isn’t like that, I tell you. You got her wrong, Paul. All wrong.”

  He got up. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, then looked at the bright smear of blood. He sighed. “O.K., boy,” he said. “I was asking for trouble. Come on. I’ll drive you so I can bring the jeep back.”

  “Fernando can …”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  We didn’t talk. Paul drove hard and fast. Dust boiled up in a long cloud behind the jeep. I was wondering what trouble Laura could be in. I had wanted Laura to come to Mexico. She said she’d been out of the States too long. I pleaded with her and she said no. Jill found the apartment for her. On Rampart. Three rooms and a little porch with lacy ironwork.