Slam the Big Door 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

  Slam the Big Door 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 © 1960 by John D. MacDonald

  Copyright renewed 2008 by Dorothy P. MacDonald and Maynard 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 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 1960.

  ISBN 978-0-8129-8525-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-307-82722-7

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  Cover photograph: © Cultura RM / Masterfile

  www.atrandom.com

  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

  Epilogue

  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 cardplayer. 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 cardplayer 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.

  One

>   THE BIG HOUSE—the home of Troy and Mary Jamison—was of stone and slate and glass and redwood—with contrived tiltings and flarings of its egret-white roof. It stood on the bay side of the north end of Riley Key, overlooking the Florida Gulf, partially screened from occasional slow traffic on the lumpy sand-and-shell road that ran the seven-mile length of the Key by a grove of ancient live oaks, so gnarled and twisted, so picturesquely hung with fright wigs of Spanish moss that Mike Rodenska, walking across to the Gulf Beach in the sunlight of an early April Sunday morning, had the pleasant fancy that the oaks had been designed by the same architect who had contributed the light and spaciousness and a certain indefinable self-consciousness to the Jamison home. The architect had drawn the trees and subcontracted them to an artistic oak-gnarler.

  There was a shell path leading from the sleeping house to the road edge where a big rural-delivery box, lacquered pale blue, stood solidly on a redwood post. Aluminum letters, slotted along the top of the box, spelled out D. Troy Jamison.

  All these years of knowing the guy, Rodenska thought, seventeen years of war and peace, and I never knew about that “D” until it popped up on a baby-blue mailbox.

  The dulled edges of the broken white shell bit into the tender soles of his feet, and he walked gingerly. He wore dark blue swim trunks with a wide white stripe down the sides, carried a big white beach towel, a cigar case and tarnished lighter.

  He was a sturdy man, Mike Rodenska, who couldn’t stop lying a little bit about his height, and felt disappointed in himself whenever he caught himself in the lie, because he despised all forms of deceit. He was half-bald, with a fleshy nose and a solid thrust of jaw. There was a wryness and a gentleness about him, particularly evident in the brown eyes, deeply set under a grizzle of brow. He had been Troy and Mary Jamison’s house-guest for the past five days of perfect Florida weather, and he had used the beach opposite the house with such diligence that the new deep red-brown tan over a natural swarthiness disguised the softness of all his years of newspaper work.

  Beyond the road there was a path through small creeping plants and taller sea oats down to the wide beach. The path curved and he started to walk across the plants, winced and hobbled back to the path, sat down, pulled his left foot up onto his knee and picked three sandspurs from the sole of his foot.

  A very bright man, he said to himself. You learn easy, Rodenska. Before, you wore shoes. These are the things that stuck to your socks yesterday, boy. They have a place, a destiny. They stick to you, they get farther from mother, then they settle down and raise baby sandspurs. Nature’s devices.

  He got up and followed the path down to the beach. The morning sun was low behind him, so the Gulf was not yet a vivid blue. It was gray and there was a silence about it, a long slow wait between the small lazy nibblings of immature waves against the flat wet sand left by the outgoing tide.

  A flock of short-legged sandpipers ran south along the beach, pausing to stab needle bills into the wet sand, eating things too small to be seen, their legs a comic and frantic blur—a batch of tiny men grabbing breakfast on the way to work.

  “Eat well,” he said. “Be my guest.”

  He spread his white towel. Nine pelicans in single file flew north, a hundred feet off the beach, beating slow wings in unison, stopping at the same moment to glide long and sure, an inch above the grayness of the water, full of a banker’s dignity and memories of prehistory.

  “The loan committee,” said Mike Rodenska. “Renew my note, hey?”

  The Jamison cabaña, of enduring tidewater cypress, weathered to a silver gray, stood on thick stubby pilings just above the three-foot drop where the big storms had cut into the beach far above the high-tide line. He could see glasses standing on the porch railing, glinting in sunlight, a few with an inch of amber in the bottom, stale forgotten liquor from last night’s party.

  He walked along the beach, wet sand cool on the soles of his feet, and came suddenly upon a line of footprints that led directly into the water—narrow feet with high arches. Feminine. He looked up and down the beach and saw no evidence of her return, and he suddenly felt very alert and apprehensive about the whole thing. Some of the ladies last night could have … but logic came quickly. Wet sand. Outgoing tide. And with the last footprint so close to the lethargic suds it had to be a recent thing. He looked up and saw a towel and beach bag on the cabaña steps, then he stared out and at last spotted, at an angle to the south, the tiny white dot of a swim cap over a half mile out.

  He waded in and swam, making a great splashing and snorting, losing his wind with a quickness that hurt his pride. He floated on his back, gasping, and as his breathing became easier he was pleasantly conscious of the almost imperceptible lift and fall of the swell. He winded himself again in a grim sprint toward the beach, and had a fit of coughing as he walked up to his towel. When he looked for her again he saw her about two hundred yards out, coming in, using a slow and effortless crawl, rolling on the beat for air, snaking her brown arms into the water. He took pleasure in watching her. She stood up and waded ashore, and he admired the width of shoulder and slenderness of waist before—as she took off her white cap and fluffed that coarse black, white-streaked hair—he realized it was Mary Jamison. She wore a gray sheath swim suit with some pale blue here and there, and as she walked up to him the sun touched droplets on her thighs and face and shoulders, turning them to mercury.

  “Good morning, Mike.”

  “What year was it you won the Olympics?”

  “Oh, pooh! What would you expect? I could swim as soon as I could walk. That makes forty-one years of practice.”

  “You do this every morning?”

  “When it gets too cold I use the pool.”

  “You looked so alone ’way out there, Mary.”

  “That’s the good part of it,” she said, and added quickly, “How does coffee sound?”

  “Hot and black? Like a special miracle, but you shouldn’t go all the way back …”

  “Just to the cabaña.”

  “Oh. I keep forgetting the conveniences around here.”

  “Sugar?”

  “Maybe half a teaspoon, thanks,” he said. “Help you?”

  “Stay in the sun, Mike.”

  He watched her walk up to the cabaña. A little heaviness in hips and thighs. A little softness in upper arms and shoulders. Otherwise, a girl’s body. Make them all swim, he thought. For forty-one years. What if I’d had that routine? With me it would be forty. Thirty-nine, starting at one year. Rodenska—beach boy. Flat belly. Good wind. All I needed was money. Does swimming keep your hair? Are there any bald beach boys? In Hawaii, no.

  Troy’s letter hadn’t said much. But the inference was he had landed neatly on his feet in this marriage. “Mary and I want you to come down, Mike. We’ve got a beach place with plenty of room. We built it three years ago. You can stay just as long as you want.”

  And so, Mike had been prepared for a younger Mary, a second-marriage type, golden and loaded. Not this gracious woman who had greeted him with genuine warmth when they arrived, after Troy had driven all the way up to Tampa in the big Chrysler to pick him up and bring him to Riley Key. She was obviously the same age as Troy or a little older, with strong features—a hawk nose, flat cheeks, wide mouth, dark eyes that held yours steadily, rosettes of white in her curly black hair. She had such a special poise and dignity that, after the first ten minutes with her, Mike could not imagine her doing any crude or unkind thing. He found himself thinking—not without a twinge of guilt for the implied disloyalty—that Troy had received better than he deserved.

  She came down from the cabaña with a tin tray, quilted in the Mexican manner, with fat white beanwagon mugs of steaming coffee, a battered pewter bowl full of Triscuits, and big soft paper napkins weighted down with her cigarettes and lighter. She had brushed her hair, put on lipstick and sunglasses with red frames.

  As she put the tray on the sand in front of the towel and sat beside him, she said, “I took a chan
ce you might share one of my vices. There’s just a dash of Irish in the coffee, Mike.”

  He grinned at her. “I’ll force myself.”

  “What did you think of the party?”

  “I was supposed to bring it up first and say thanks. Thanks. I got names and faces all screwed up. I got sorting to do.”

  “The party was too big.”

  “No, Mary. I like a big party. You know, you get a sort of privacy in a big party. You can do more looking. I’m a people-watcher. Like a hobby. No binoculars, like with birds. I got an hour to kill, I sit in a bus station.”

  “Maybe I can help you do some sorting.”

  “A pink-faced joker, sixtyish, in Bermuda shorts, with a political voice. Taps you—or at least me—on the chest to make his point. Soon as he found out I was newspaper—or ex-newspaper, or whatever the hell I am—he cornered me and made oratory.”

  “That one is easy. Jack Connorly.” He saw her make a face.

  “No like?”

  “I guess you could say he’s trying to be Mister Republican in the county, but he’s about fifth or sixth in line, I’d say. He’s been after Troy to run for the County Commission.”

  “Troy!”

  She giggled. “That’s my reaction too.”

  “My God, will he?”

  “Honestly, Mike, I don’t know. He won’t say yes and he won’t say no.”

  “So that’s why Connorly was bugging me about the duty of the citizen and all that jazz. I’ll have to have a little chat with our boy.”

  “Jack’s wife is the little dark jumpy-looking one. He’s in real estate.”

  “Now how about the blonde on the aluminum crutches?”

  “Beth Jordan. She chopped herself to ribbons last year. She ran her Porsche under the back of a truck. They didn’t expect her to live, but now they think she’ll be off the crutches in a few more months. Did you notice the scars?”

  “It was too dark.”

  “They’ve spent thousands on plastic surgery.”