Weep for Me
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
Weep for Me 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 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: 978-0-8129-8470-5
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
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
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 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 a June morning, I remember. The sort of morning when you look through the bars across the front of your teller’s window, and across the tan marble floor and out to where sunshine glints off the chrome of the cars waiting for the light. A day when the girls have changed to their summer dresses. I kept looking up and watching them when they waited for the light. The wind always whips around the bank corner. They would hold their hats, push down at the skirts that tried to balloon upward.
Pritch caught me at it. He came up behind me and said, “Kyle, that’s a hell of an occupation for a citizen about to be married.”
I guess I blushed, because he laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. “You’ll be like me, boy. Three kids and I still window-shop. Want to change windows? I can’t see the corner.”
“Maybe I ought to,” I said.
You could tell the sort of morning it was from the way the bank customers acted on the other side of the grille. Cheery. That doesn’t happen too often in a big city bank.
A man named Merton wanted his balance checked. I phoned upstairs. The M’s. That would be the tart-voiced old lady named Hotchkiss.
“Yes?” a low, soft voice said.
“Current balance on Merton, Lawrence T.”
“One moment, please.” Definitely not Old Lady Hotchkiss. This was a nice girl-voice. It seemed to go with the day. It made me feelgood.
She gave me the figure.
“Thanks,” I said. “Who is this, please?”
“Miss Rudolph,” the soft voice said. “Emily Rudolph.”
“Well?” Mr. Merton said impatiently.
“Sorry, sir.” I scribbled his balance on a slip of paper, shoved it under the grille to him. That’s the rule. It’s more private and there are fewer chances for misunderstanding. He grunted with that satisfaction which indicated the balance was higher than he had figured it, and walked away.
For nearly a half hour I was rushed. They come in droves sometimes. Sam Grinter, on my left, and Paul Raddmann, on my right, were working at the same top speed. When you first go “out front” you’re scared to death to work fast, because you are afraid of mistakes. I’d had three years behind the teller window. Kyle Cameron, teller number six at the First Citizens’ National Bank of Thrace, New York. When at last Tom Nairn, chief teller, gave me the nod for the lunch break, I was glad to put the little “Closed” plaque across the slot. I dropped the cash bin into the drawer, locked up, took my drawer key back, and hung it on the board behind O’Day, the vault guard.
I went back to my locker and took out the lunch I picked up every morning at the little corner restaurant near my so-called efficiency apartment. I bounced it in my hand a couple of times. I knew exactly what was in it. Jo Anne and I were saving money as fast as we could. Bringing a lunch to the bank from my breakfast spot was one way to do it. Ever since I first saw Jo Anne in History III at Thrace High, it had been one of those things with us. Jo and Kyle. Understood. Patent pending.
After business school I was drafted. That was in ’43, when I was twenty. After two and a half years as a company clerk, I was discharged at Dix, came back to Thrace, and joined the 52-20 Club while I looked around. My father had married again, after my mother died, while I was in Thrace High, and the house was full of little kids. Only three, but they seemed like a dozen. As soon as I landed a job in the bank, I moved to the little apartment. After nearly three years in the bank they made me a teller.
Now Jo Anne and I had enough in the bank so it looked as though we could be married in late July or August, depending on when we could arrange simultaneous summer vacations. Jo Anne was living with her folks and running an IBM key punch for the Thrace Insurance and Casualty Company.
Everything is all set in your life. A pretty little girl who loves you. A job where they like you. Money in the bank. You’re twenty-nine and you’ve got your health. You wear glasses behind the window and when you read, and your brown hair isn’t receding much at the temples, and you’ve got one of those standard issue faces. Jo Anne tells you you’re handsome, but the mirror says you are just a guy with normal features in all the normal places.
So you stand, bouncing the tired lunch in your hand, and it is sort of a turning point. You can sit down on the bench and open the lunch and eat it. And go back to work. Then you marry Jo Anne, and have three kids, and carry too much insurance, and fight your way through the joy and misery of a normal, contented marriage. You can stand on your flat feet behind the teller’s window until they promote you or retire you. If you get all the right breaks, maybe you and Jo Anne can one day retire to a little house in St. Pete, and remember the grandchildren’s birthdays and play a hot game of shuffleboard.
Or you can do like I did. You can go out into the festive colors of a day in June and drop the lunch into one of those orange trash cans with a lid that swings when you push against it. You can hear the lunch thud among the papers, and wonder why a little gesture like tha
t gives you a big sense of freedom and relief.
I stood on a corner and looked into my wallet. Two bucks. My friends who don’t work in banks get the idea that because a guy handles money all day, he’ll get a sort of contemptuous feeling toward his own cash. It isn’t that way at all. It’s as if there are two kinds of money—bank money and your money. Almost as though the bank money were printed in a different color ink.
It wasn’t that I wanted a fancy meal, anyway. I just wanted to be out in the sun, out where life was going on. So I had a quick sandwich in a drugstore, and did some walking. I watched the girls in their light dresses. I thought about the voice of Emily Rudolph. The office girls were on their lunch hour. Office girls and store clerks, swinging their trim little hips, belts snug around slender waists, breasts high and sharp against their summer dresses.
I knew that it was a good thing that Jo Anne and I were going to be married soon. Way back in high school we had decided that we wouldn’t do it until we were married. We figured that if we did, it would spoil the marriage. Probably most, kids who are serious about each other say that. Then each time they’re together they go a little further and a little further until one night in the back of a car, or out on a blanket someplace, they slip and slip good.
On the last date Jo Anne and I had before I left for the Army, we almost slipped. I can remember her tortured face, the moon shining on it, the way she rolled her head from side to side, saying, “No, no, no, no,” in a tiny monotone. And we didn’t. We left the car and walked down the country road for what must have been three miles. We didn’t talk much. We agreed that when I came back we wouldn’t put ourselves in that kind of spot again. And in the six years that I had been back, we hadn’t. When they had shipped our outfit to England, I had been, except for an experimental episode of childhood in a piano box with a neighbor girl, virginal. I had a girl in England, and later one in Brussels. I didn’t tell Jo Anne about them. There didn’t seem to be much point in hurting her that way.
And ever since my discharge, I’d been faithful to Jo Anne. If you go at it right, it isn’t too tough. There are plenty of nights when you can’t get to sleep. But I had a membership at the Thrace A.C., and a good rough workout can lower the blood pressure. Incidentally, it also keeps you in pretty good shape. But the average guy is not meant to live like a monk. And it was June and I walked among the shop girls on their lunch hour, feeling seven feet tall, and holding my arms so rigid that my shoulders ached.