Soft Touch 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

  Soft Touch 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 © 1958 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 1986 by John D. MacDonald

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Dean Koontz

  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 by Dell, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1958.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82683-1

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  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 Mi
dwest, 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.

  1

  When I got home at six o’clock on an April Friday, the first hot day of the year, Lorraine’s copper-colored Porsche was parked crooked in the driveway, keys in the ignition. After I put the station wagon in the garage, I ran hers in.

  I went into the kitchen. She could be in the house or she could be somewhere in the neighborhood acquiring her evening edge. There was no point in yelling. If she didn’t feel like answering, she wouldn’t answer. And say later she hadn’t heard a thing.

  A man should like to come home at night. It had been a long time since I had looked forward to coming home. And this was the worst day of all. For the eight childless years I have been married to her, I have worked for her father, E. J. Malton of the E. J. Malton Construction Company—a little white-skinned man with a face like a trout and a voice like a French horn—one of those completely terrifying little men who combine arrogant stupidity with a devout conviction of their own infallibility.

  I didn’t know then that this was the night Vince Biskay was going to show up out of the past, a tiger in the night, a tiger coming to call, offering the silky temptation of big violent money. And if I’d known how it was going to work out for me, I would never have come home that night. Or any other night.

  But I went dutifully into the dull house at 118 Tyler Drive, the eight-year-old wedding present from her parents, and I found her in the bedroom, sitting at her dressing table in yellow bra and panties, doing her nails, half of an old fashioned handy at her elbow.

  She gave me a quick glance in the mirror and said, “Hi.”

  I sat on the foot of my bed and said, “What’s up?”

  “What do you mean, what’s up? Does something have to be up?”

  “I thought maybe you were getting fixed up to go out.”

  “I’m doing my nails. Obviously.”

  “Are we going out?”

  “Who said we were going out? Irene’s going to get dinner.”

  “She wasn’t down there when I came in.”

  “So maybe she went to the john in the cellar. How should I know? She didn’t clue me.”

  “All right, Lorrie, all right. I’ve got the picture. You’re doing your nails. We’re eating in. And did you have a happy, happy day?”

  “It was so warm Mandy had her gardener fill the pool. But the water was too stinking cold.”

  By then I could tell how slopped she was. Not too bad. The one at her elbow was probably her third. Two years after we were married the drinking began to turn from a habit into a problem. A problem she still won’t admit. I don’t know why she drinks. The too simple answer is that she’s unhappy. She’s married to me. So part of the blame belongs to me.

  We got that adoption thing all lined up once, four years ago. But Lorraine, just before it went through, ran drunk through a stop sign and piled up the MG and got that little scar at the corner of her pretty mouth, and had her license lifted and I paid the two-hundred-dollar fine. The adoption people canceled us out. And I haven’t suggested we try again. Nor will I.

  I watched her and again felt astonished that the heavy drinking has left no mark on her. She is a damned attractive female. They spoiled her and spoiled her brother rotten, and so she is unhappy, shallow, lazy, short-tempered, cruel and amoral. Yet sometimes there is a sweetness … So rarely. Once in a rare, rare while we are very good together, and when it is good it is like a beginning, and you can kid yourself into thinking the marriage will improve. But it won’t.

  I went to her and put my hands on her bare shoulders, my thumbs on the soft nape of her neck. She shrugged my hands away irritably. “For God’s sake, Jerry.”

  “Just a thought.”

  “Aren’t you getting enough from Liz down at the office?”

  “You know that’s nonsense,” I said. I sat on the bed again and lighted a cigarette. I had to tell her how the only good part of my little world had just come to a dirty end.

  “Today, Lorrie, your old man took over Park Terrace.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe you could try hard to understand. He promised me a free hand. It’s the biggest development the company has ever gotten into. I’ve worked like a dog for months and months so we’d put up some expensive spec houses we can move. It isn’t a seller’s market any more. Now he’s changed his mind and he’s going to put up one hundred homes just as dull as this one, the same house he’s been building for years. And it will be a fiasco and everything will go down the drain. Everything he owns and we own.”

  She turned around on the bench and looked at me coldly. “You know so damn much, Jerry. Daddy has gotten along fine. And he’ll keep on getting along just fine.”

  “A lot of stupid men have done fine in a business way. Good luck and good timing. He’s run out of luck this time. He took it away from me today. All that work down the drain. So … I’m getting out.”

  Her eyes widened. “Just how do you expect to do that?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll need some capital to get going on my own again. Sell our stock back to the c
orporation. Unload this crumby house to somebody who’s impressed by the neighborhood.”

  “The house is in our names, and I won’t sign a thing. This is all a lot of talk. You won’t get out. You couldn’t make a living.”

  But I had made a living, before I met her. After I got out of the army in that second war, I had the restless itch. I had done some roving and some roaming, and I had gotten into several kinds of choice trouble—bigger trouble than the kind I had gotten into in high school and my two years of college. The trouble hadn’t scared me at all until one day I found myself in a Reno motel with a small group of deadly chums and we were planning how we would knock over one of the casinos. I’d been hypnotized by all those heavy stacks of money. And that scared me good and so I’d come home to Vernon, taken some odd jobs and then, on money borrowed from my mother the year before she died, money that was all that was left of my father’s small estate, I had drifted sideways into home construction. Jerry Jamison, Builder. And I liked it. I learned the trade. I did well at it.

  Until, at a contractors’ picnic, I met Lorraine Malton, fresh out of college, in July of 1950. She was with her father, E. J. I had met him a few times and thought him tiresome, self-important, and not very bright. But I had never seen anything more delightful than Lorrie. Glossy black hair and eyes of a wonderful clear blue. She wore white sharkskin shorts that day and a yellow blouse, and her legs were a longness of honey and velvet. When she moved it was like dancing, her narrow waist emphasizing the dainty abun-dancies that kept her constantly encircled by all the un-attached men at the picnic. She had a cute squinty grin and no time for me at all.

  I guess I was ready to be married. I campaigned hard. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so eager I might have been able to see her more clearly, see the petulance and the greediness and the drinking. She had been brought up to believe she was the most important person in the world. And the verve that all pretty young girls possess kept her basic character from showing itself too clearly.

  So we were married on the fifteenth day of August, and, after an unforgettably strenuous Bermuda honeymoon, we moved into the wedding present house a block away from her parents. The week after we returned the thriving little business of Jerry Jamison, Builder, was absorbed by a stock deal into the E. J. Malton Construction Company, along with my good work crew foremanned by Red Olin. I got some stock and I became General Manager at twelve thousand a year. Both Lorrie and her brother, Eddie, Junior, then nineteen, had been given small blocks of stock. Eddie was a slack, dim, acne-ridden young man.