The Neon Jungle

  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

  The Neon Jungle 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 © 1953 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1981 by John D. MacDonald

  Foreword 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, Inc.

  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 1953.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8419-4

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-82685-5

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Logan Mock-Bunting / Getty Images

  v3.1

  The Singular John D. MacDonald

  by 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.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The Singular John D. Macdonald

  The Neighborhood

  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

  As it Was In the Beginning

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  YOU CAN FIND PEOPLE who will tell you about the neighborhood. Each will have his special vision. All those visions can never be added together, for perhaps, like a raddled and lusty woman reaching the weary end of middle age, the neighborhood has been all things to all men.

  But there is still violence in her.

  Ask that pair of college kids who came to sample the factory wenches last year, and broke their faces against stone Polack fists.

  There is still money in her.

  The numbers operators will tell you that. And those who get high rents for certain shabby houses near the Saegar Mill. And those Monday loan sharks, the six-for-five boys, who make a fine art of collection.

  She is still colorful.

  Down the narrow streets marches the neon. A fizzing and sputter and crackle of BAR GRILL LOUNGE INN and ROOMS APTS HOTEL and POOL BILLARDS BOWLING and TRIPLE FEATURE GIRLS BALLOOM CLUB FLOOR SHOW.

  But here the feathers hang tired on the rumps of the floor-show ponies, and there is no self-conscious reading of Proust in satined dressing rooms. These are weary bitter-mouthed dollies, who take a percentage on the drinks you buy them.

  The neon is green and red and blue, and there are always a few dead letters, though not usually as spectacular as the night the Essex Tavern lost its first two letters.

  Do not think that the neighborhood is linked to downtown. It is a separate country, and there are many dingy unlighted streets between that minor neon jungle and the richer flavors of downtown.

  And do not think that it is the abode, the stomping ground, of only the pimp, sharpie, and floozy set. There are the residential streets and they are narrow and poorly laid out, leading the visitor in infuriating circles. There are caste distinctions between the streets. There are churches and schools and many, many children.

  There are gaunt bleak-faced textile mills, rumbling, clattering on the hot summer days, going abruptly silent at five to disgorge the slack-clad girls who make crow noises and clown with each other as they walk home into the narrow streets, passing the asphalted playgrounds of the schools they so recently attended, some of them already swelling with the fruit that will become a new shrillness on those same playgrounds.

  There are empty mills with broken windows, like eyes that accuse.

  Once upon a time it was all land that belonged to Abraham Townsend, and he and his eight strong sons farmed it well.

  Later a grandson of Abraham started a general store, and that store became the nucleus of a village. There was another village two miles away, and they were of equal size. The new village was called, of course, Townsend, and it grew quickly. It became a gabled town of peasant houses. But the other village grew more quickly. Both of them, after the Civil War, became sprinkled with Victorian horrors, all gingerbread and turrets. Then Townsend was absorbed, and it became a part of the city, and the name was lost, and it became simply the neighborhood.

  It is all in the old ledgers down in City Hall.

  Children grow up quickly in the neighborhood.

  At night the lace-eared toms yell of love and passion in the narrow alleys, and the wagon picks up the broken-shoe bums from their newspaper nests. By day the sun bakes the narrow yards and not much wind gets in to stir the curtains, and milk sours quickly. A brave and wheelless Pierce Arrow sits window-deep in weeds in a vacant lot, and the rat-gnawed back seat is a place of juvenile assignation when dusk comes blue down the streets.

  In the look of the narrow houses at night on the residential streets there is a flavor of violence. Not the sort of violence of the neon jungle, but a violence that is more quiet, and desperate.

  It is a place of neighborhood stores and few chains. It is said that you can buy anything in the neighborhood. If you know where to look. Whom to see. When to see him.

  When the hot weather starts, the police know that one of the quiet narrow houses will erupt. On the slow warm evenings a street will come alive to the screams of that final terror. And always the neighbors know which house it will be. They run out and they look toward the house. They sit a cautious time before the tentative investigation. Usually the screams stop quickly. There is something ultimate about the homely weapons of the quiet streets. A hammer, a hatchet, a butcher knife, a piece of pipe. They are decisive. After the violence there is the dumb weeping.

  At night the only light in the Varaki Quality Market, a boxlike cinder-block structure, is the red neon around the clock. The family lives in the big shabby frame house adjoining the market. City houses stop on the nearby corner. A stranger to the neighborhood, anyone who had just moved onto the same block, for example, would perhaps not have sensed the drifting threat of violence that is like the trembling of the air before the first crash of thunder.

  But the others had been there a long time. And so, on that warm night, when the screaming started, they knew with neighborhood instinct precisely where to look. And the old women compressed their pale lips and nodded and nodded and waited silently for the end of the screaming.…

  One

  A CITY BUS HISSED at the corner and was silent, then snorted off through the milky dusk. She saw the light pattern through the elm leaves and saw the bus was headed downtown. Down where all the lights were. When she had come here the elm branches had been naked raw. And it had been harder then to stay in the small third-floor room in the vast shabby frame house and think of lights and people and movement and forgetting.

  It was like the leaves were growing to cover the city sounds, the city lights. This slow change. The small room becoming more womb than prison. She sat Buddha fashion on the straight hard chair near the window in the dusk grayness, motionless. She sat in black corduroy slacks, hands resting on the sharply flexed knees, head tilted a bit so that the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of her mouth made a thin upward line past the smooth cheek and half-closed eyes. The cheap phonograph on the floor beside the chair was turned so low that the golden ovals of the horn sounds came faintly through the needle hiss. The record ended and she took the cigarette from her mouth and leaned down and lifted the arm and set it back at the beginning. The silken heaviness of the dark copper hair swung forward and when she straightened up she swung it back with a quickness of her head.

  She thought of them down there, working in the stark white fluorescence, handling the late rush, and she thought carefully of how it would be to go down there now. She imagined just how it would be and she decided she could do it now. Gus had seemed to know just how the little man with the clown face had torn her apart, had opened up the neatly mended places, finding the fracture lines of old wounds. She had not broken in front of the little man. Gus had stepped in angrily.

  “Lieutenant, you know you talk to my daughter. You don’t talk that way.”

  “Daughter-in-law, Pop. Where the hell did Henry find her?”

  “Lieutenant, you go chase thiefs. Don’t bother good people. Bonny, you go upstairs. Rest. You work a long time.”

  She had left quickly, precariously, not looking at the grotesque clown face, stepping out from behind the cash register and crossing the store and going through the side door, through the narrow shed and up the steps into the big kitchen, managing even to smile and bob her head at the monolithic Anna standing by the stove, and through the rooms packed solidly with the massive furniture, and up the two flights of stairs, and down the hall, and into her own room, shutting the door behind her without a sound, and taking the three steps to the bed and lying there, moving over a bit so her forehead could be pressed against the wall, against the faded paper pattern of blue flowers.

  It is meant, she thought, that I shall be always rescued by the Varaki family. But they started rescuing m
e too late. They came after all the other things had been stamped on my face and in my eyes, the things the lieutenant saw so quickly and so easily, and so contemptuously.

  It isn’t true, she thought, that you go down like a rocket, like a dropped stone. It is, perhaps, more like a slow-motion picture of a bouncing ball. It starts, tritely enough, with a betrayal, with a heartbreak. It means so much then. Dev had meant too much back in the good years that were now like things on the other side of a wall. Dev with the Irish smile and the quick hands and the vanity. Dev, who did not like his hair mussed, and did not like to be touched, and at last was chased away by too much love, fearing that there was a stickiness in possession.

  And so then, that first time, you let go and took the first long fast drop down to the absolute bottom. The first drop of the ball. At the bottom was death and the slow-falling ball touched it, felt the coldness and the hardness and rebounded, climbing back up—all the way, you thought. But not quite all the way. A time of being poised there, and then another drop. And another, so that the touch of death came more often, and became more familiar, and became less frightening. Then you could look up and see where you used to be. Each bounce was less. Each time there was less resilience.

  Then deftly, miraculously, Henry Varaki had cushioned that last fall. She’d been in San Francisco then. The nights had been oddly merged, so that there seemed to be no days between them. She remembered being noisy in one place and being pushed out by someone whose face she tried to claw. Then, in the momentary sobriety of the drenching rain, the rain that caked her dress to her body, she thought they might phone the police, and that last thirty days had been a horror. She had run in the rain and fallen, and run some more. Then there was another place, and lights, and an alley fight between sailors, and more running. One high heel was gone and the running was a crooked, grotesque gallop. There was something hot and humming behind her eyes, something hot and roaring in her ears. She ran down a crooked street, tilted so that it swung her against the wall.…