The Only Girl in the Game 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 Only Girl in the Game 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 Trade Paperback eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1960 by John D. MacDonald

  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: 978-0-307-82704-3

  www.atrandom.com

  Cover design: Joe Montgomery

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Dean Koontz

  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

  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 Midwest, Las Vegas, and els
ewhere—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

  It was the middle of April, and the morning sun laid its white weight across all the architectural confections along the Las Vegas Strip, and shone with bright impartiality upon the grubbiness of the town itself, upon the twenty-four-hour-a-day marriage chapels, the sour little rooming houses and anonymous motels.

  In the big hotels … Sahara, Desert Inn, Tropicana, Riviera, New Frontier, Sands … the guests slept in too darkened rooms, in the chilly whisper of air conditioning.

  At the Cameroon, the front desk phoned at the customary nine o’clock, bringing Hugh Darren, the assistant manager, up out of a submarine nightmare where he had been fleeing through endless coral caverns from a Thing which wore the red compulsive face of Jerry Buckler.

  He put the phone back on the cradle and swung long legs out of his bachelor bed and sat there for a time, making the transition from the fading terror of the dream to a bright Wednesday, to the shifting intricacies, the partial projects of this day. He was nearing the end of his twenty-ninth year, and he sensed that thirty was a label of a significance he could not yet comprehend. He was a big lean limber man who gave the impression of leisure and indolence and low-pressure amiability. He moved with that elusive look of style and special favor that some athletes achieve. His hair was a crisp short brown, with ginger highlights; and his eyebrows were a lighter shade, unusually bristling and heavy over gray-blue eyes set aslant in the bony, slightly freckled, asymmetric face. It was an ugly-attractive face which had adjusted itself to a habitual expression of mild irony. He could not have imagined for himself any kind of life work which would not have required a constant involvement with people. He had the detectable composure of a man who knows he is very, very good at his work, and the humility to appreciate the luck that led him into it.

  Hugh Darren rubbed a coppery stubble with his knuckles, stretched until the flat muscles of his shoulders popped, remembered the last of the dream before, it was all gone and mumbled aloud, “Son of a bitch nearly caught me that time.”

  He walked to the window and yanked the cord to open the slats and let the desert sunshine into the room. It was a second-floor room in the rear of the building, in the old original wing. New construction had made these rooms unsuitable for paying guests, and they had been assigned for staff use. They used to look out across the brown floor of the desert toward the eroded mountains. Now they looked out at a blank wall of the new convention hall, and down into the rerouted service alley. He squinted at the too-blue sky and had a glimpse of a commercial jet swinging into its landing pattern before it disappeared behind the cornice of the convention hall. He looked down into the service alley and, with a professional eye, checked the neatness of the long rank of garbage cans outside the rear doors of the main kitchen.

  After he took his shower, and before he shaved, he phoned down for breakfast. It was wheeled in just as he finished shaving. He looked out at Herman, the bald maestro of the Cameroon Coffee Shop, and said, “Currying favor again, I see.”

  “Good morning, Mr. D.,” Herman said with broad gold-flecked grin. “We got the good sausage again. So I serve myself. So you remember Herman with pleasure, is it not so?”

  Hugh walked out of the bathroom in his robe, drying his face. “And you bring it up yourself when you want to be the first with the news. And it is always bad news. So where is the pleasure in that, my friend?”

  “No special news, Mr. D.”

  “But there happens to be one interesting little thing?”

  Herman inspected his place setting carefully and stepped back and shrugged. “Just a small thing. Mr. Buckler came back earlier than anyone expected. At three this morning, I think. Mr. Downey, the new man on the night desk, displeased him, and so he was fired.”

  Hugh Darren lowered his head, closed his eyes and told himself to count very slowly to ten.

  “Herman, I don’t know how I’d ever get along without you. Get Bunny Rice up here on the double.”

  Hugh Darren had barely begun his breakfast when Bunny Rice arrived. Bunny, when summoned, always arrived looking as though he had run all the way. When Hugh Darren came to the Cameroon the previous August to rescue what was possibly the poorest hotel operation on the Strip, he had given the most careful consideration to the selection of people to help him. Bunny Rice had then been working the front desk on shifts that changed from week to week.

  He was a spindly man whose greatest flaw was his tendency to come apart when faced with a crisis. But he knew his job and knew the town and the special problems of the area. He had energy, imagination, and a capacity for loyalty. And Hugh had judged him honest. And so Hugh had made him a special assistant in charge of hotel operations from midnight to eight A.M. In a normal hotel operation this would have been a job that held no challenge. But Vegas runs twenty-four hours a day.

  Bunny Rice, at his own volition, came on duty at eleven, and did not leave until Hugh was in his own office. Bunny Rice was pallid, with bulging blue eyes, thinning mousy hair, jug-handle ears, a long severe upper lip, and a mouth which tended t
o tremble when he was upset, as though he were fighting back tears. He nonetheless seemed to enjoy his new scope, new responsibility and increased pay. He lived with his wife and three children in a new housing development on the far side of town.

  “Sit down, Bunny. Relax. What’s this about Buckler firing Downey?”

  “There wasn’t a dam thing I could do about it, Hugh.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Because there wasn’t anything you could do either.”

  “Jerry was loaded?”

  “He was ugly drunk, Hugh. You know how he gets. If he’d gone right to bed there wouldn’t have been any problem. But he stopped at the desk to see if he had any mail. Downey may have seen him at a distance, but I don’t think he ever talked to him. Downey thought Mr. Buckler was a drunk trying to check in. I guess Mr. Buckler wasn’t talking very clearly. In the confusion, he got abusive, and Downey tried to get help from the casino guards to have him put out. So he fired Downey. Downey left right away. I filled in at the desk.”

  “Let me do some thinking. No, don’t go yet. Stick around a little while.”

  Hugh Darren finished his breakfast. He poured a fresh cup of coffee. “I guess it’s time, Bunny. I guess that’s the final straw. He goes or I go.”

  Bunny licked his lips. “It … makes me nervous, Hugh. I don’t like to think of how it’ll be here if you’re the one who goes.”

  “I won’t like it either. I’ve never made this kind of money before. And only a damn fool could say this kind of money doesn’t mean anything. And the job I want to do around here is only half done. But I just can’t keep taking the responsibility without having the authority.”

  “Who will you go to with this … ultimatum, Hugh?”

  Darren shrugged. “The man who can say yes or no. Al Marta. Who else?”

  Bunny Rice looked as though he wanted to wring his hands and sob. “I think you ought to … to talk to Max Hanes about it first, Hugh. Really I do.”

  “Max runs the casino operation. What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Just talk to him, Hugh. Please. Tell him what’s on your mind.”