Buck Flake was considerably more obvious. He was a relative newcomer to the area. He had been about twenty-five when he had come down from New Jersey ten years previously with some money he was supposed to have made in the scrap business. He had gone into some dangerous land speculation, saved his own skin with some tricky maneuvering, and finally traded himself into the huge tract which he had developed into Palm Highlands. He was loud, crude, huge and muscular, but now the muscles were softening rapidly as the belly expanded. His jaw was so wide and the space between his temples so narrow, he had an odd pinhead look. A good portion of his success had been gained at the expense of some of the unwary ones who had assumed Buck Flake was as stupid as he looked and acted.
With an awesome celerity, Major appeared at Jimmy’s side and placed a drink on the table in front of him, saying, to himself, “Kitchen whiskey and one cube for Mr. Wing.”
“Thank you, Major.” Major and Ardelia, his wife, worked full-time for the Bliss family. Their grown children helped out. The whole Major Thatcher family lived on a back acre Elmo had deeded them, in a frame house Elmo had bought when it was in the way of a new county highway, and had moved onto the land.
The girl was swimming again. Elmo gestured toward her and said, “Leroy here was just now telling Buck what a damn fool he is, but Buck won’t listen to advice from a real expert.”
“What’s all this about advice?” Buck demanded, obviously annoyed. “Why should I have advice? I told you the score. She works for me in the office. She’s been working for me a couple of weeks.”
“Listen to the protestations of utter innocence,” Shannard murmured. “That poor confused child bears the fabulous name — Charity Prindergast. Please understand, James, we have extracted this data from Buck a fragment at a time. She went down to Lauderdale from some midwestern university for the spring orgy, and apparently developed such a taste for gin she never quite managed to get back across the city line, until Buck went over to Lauderdale a few weeks ago and found her there, living in squalor and confusion on the pittance her dismayed parents were sending her. Out of the goodness of his great heart, he brought her back here and gave her honest work — at least honest to the degree that the Palm Highlands development can be considered honest.”
“We build a damn good house for the money,” Buck said.
“Our Mr. Flake claims that his employment of Miss Prindergast has nothing at all to do with the fact his sweet wife Elizabeth and their two sturdy sons are spending the summer on her parents’ farm in Pennsylvania. Yet, when questioned, Mr. Flake admits that though he writes his wife faithfully, he had made no mention of his charitable gesture.”
Buck scowled and then grinned. “All right, you bastards, so I shouldn’t have brought her over here.”
“You probably couldn’t help it, Buck,” Leroy said. “You tend to consume as conspicuously as possible. The brightest colors, the biggest tail fins, the table closest to the floor show. Miss Charity is a spectacular morsel, and you have a great talent for vulgarity, Buck.”
“Now hold it, you—”
“But you must face the fact you will pay a price for unseemly display. Even if you should send the nubile creature on her glazed way before Elizabeth returns, she will inevitably be told about her, due to your carelessness, and then, my dear fellow, that dear little wife of yours will flay you, salt you down, and hang your carcass in the sun. Your lies will not work, and finally you will be blubbering and whimpering for forgiveness. All you have to decide now is whether the lassie is worth it.”
“Get him the hell off me, Elmo,” Buck said.
“Consume conspicuously,” Elmo said. “That’s a nice way to put it, Leroy. I guess I do that too, in ways a little different from Buck here.” He stood up. “Come along, Jimmy. You boys excuse us and yell for Major when you need him.”
They went out through the door and up the path that branched toward the house. Elmo chuckled and said, “Leroy is teasing him, and Buck, he doesn’t want to get too mad about it on account he knows I don’t like him bringing that hard-drinking girl here to my house. Buck doesn’t use much sense about a lot of things. That’s the trouble with getting people together on anything, Jimmy. Everybody is a damn fool in his own way.”
Elmo led the way around the side of the house and up the steps into the air-conditioned silence of his study. The big pale desk was shaped like a boomerang. Elmo turned on a single brass lamp on the desk. The floor was cork, the walls burlap, the chairs and couch of dark leather. Elmo had patterned it after the private office of a bank president in Jacksonville, even to the gun rack and built-in television and high-fidelity music system.
Elmo sat in the deep chair behind the desk and put his feet up and looked across the desk at Jimmy Wing. “I should have brought it up right here in the first place, instead of at the courthouse this morning. Then you wouldn’t have spent all day wondering about the rest of it.”
“I’ve done some guessing.”
“Mostly what we need to go into is where we both are going to fit into this thing. Take me. I’ve made it plain I’m not running again. One term on the county commission is enough. I’ve told everybody I have to give more time to my building business. Do you have the idea I’m getting out of politics, Jim?”
“No. You took to it too well.”
“Do you think it’s been a good thing for Palm County, me being four years on the commission?”
“Elmo, that’s a strange question, and I don’t know where you’re heading with it. I know damn well you’re not fishing for compliments, so I’ll give you an honest answer. On the whole, I think you’ve been of more benefit than Elihu Kibby would have been. Will that do?”
Bliss made a soft sound of amusement. The lamplight was strong across his mouth and left his eyes in semishadow. His sports shirt was a soft shade of green-gray, with a tiny monogram on the breast pocket in black.
“Playtime is over, Jimmy,” Elmo said. “We’ve had the four years of fun.”
Jimmy Wing knew he had been invited into another room in that structure which was Elmo Bliss. Another door had been opened — another degree of intimacy. He could look back at all the other lighted rooms, at the connecting doors which stood wide open, and remember the time when each had been opened for him. Now here was another degree of closeness, yet with the inference there were still other rooms beyond. He felt a degree of excitement and alarm which he could not rationalize. Somehow closeness was in ratio to menace, as though, in the ultimate room, the door would slam shut and there would be darkness and a knife. He told himself that the suggestion of menace came merely from the awareness that it was contrived — that Bliss opened the doors for his own purposes when the time was right, that Bliss was using him.
“Four years of many things,” Jimmy said, smiling, stalling.
“And four more years to come, and four after that, and God knows where we’ll be by then, boy. Depends on the size bite I can take. I learned in a lot of hard ways that the way you set your teeth, and the timing of it, they’re the only things that count. Bite too big and you strangle on it. Bite too small and you starve.”
“Is that all there is to it, Elmo? The jungle approach?”
Elmo took a long time in unwrapping a slim cigar, lighting it. “I play a game, Jim. Nobody knows I’m playing it. What I do, I make out I’m the man I’m talking to. I add up all I know about him and I try to become him and look out of him at Elmo Bliss and see what he sees. You’ve got simple ideas about me, I think. You think I’m some kind of animal. Now when I look at you, maybe I see some kind of animal too, but sort of a sorry animal.”