John D. MacDonald
Suspicion Island
He flew in from the West, so the flight stopped at Tampa International and then went on to Miami. He looked down at the hot October land, at the saw-grass plains cut by the impossibly straight canals. In the beginning, it had been fury that had sustained him. A rage that the things he had planned had been taken away. Then all that had faded into a pain of loss. And loss had eventually turned into a cold curiosity, an almost wry desire to know why and how this had been done to him when he was away.
Home is the soldier, he thought. Home again, and two wars is too many. This one is a war for the professionals. They’ve given up the parades. Social note for the season, please: Captain Paul Rayder, U.S.A., Infantry, returns to his broken home and abandoned business enterprise after two years of, shall we say, inadvertent active duty. During his sojourn among the up-and-down hills, the captain saw many interesting things. He was decorated for valor, and — combination social and humor note — he became known to his company as the “Iceman.”
Over a year of rehearsing the scene with Valerie and not being able to wait to say the lines — yet now the big plane moved too fast, and he’d mislaid the script. He felt as though he couldn’t take a breath that was deep enough. The back of his neck was full of wires pulled too tight.
The plane banked for its landing, and he saw, beyond the pastel cubic city, the billion-dollar playground of the beach, framed by blue. For reassurance, he touched his pocket, felt through the cloth the texture of the letter from Dobson. “It took some hunting, boy. She’s moved a couple of times, but still in town. Thirty-third Street, on the beach. In the first block off Collins. A thing called Seawinds Court Hotel, Number 18. None of my business, Paul, but why bother? I don’t think it’s anything you’d want back. Incidentally, she calls herself Valerie Mason.”
The plane touched and shrieked and touched and rolled, and Paul unhooked the belt. After waiting around to collect his heavy bag, he took a cab and told the driver to take him down Northwest Thirty-sixth Street to Biscayne and over Venetian Causeway. The familiar pre-season frenzy of construction was on.
He directed the driver to a small hotel he remembered, one that was clean and comfortable and, at this time of year, certainly not full.
He signed the card, and the elderly desk clerk said, “I thought you looked familiar, Mr. Rayder. You used to stay here, didn’t you?”
“Not for the last couple of years. I want something quiet, please.”
“Glad to have you back with us.”
The room was high and on the side away from Collins Avenue, where he could see the Atlantic with the white boats trolling their way in after a day of charter fishing. He unpacked, feeling unreal being back here, back where you could pick up a phone and order almost anything you could pay for. Someday there would be time to vegetate, time to let the wires go slack, time to let this slowly become reality, while the other turned into a crazy sequence that had happened to some half-remembered stranger. A stranger who wrote the letters — “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Blank: During the time your son served with Company B, he proved himself to be...” Funny how the ones with soft eyes never lasted. So in the end you had yourself a bunch of pros.
It was four-thirty. He knew he could catch Jerry Dobson in his office. He stripped to the waist, stretched out on the bed, and gave the number. While the distant phone rang, he looked down at his rib cage, at the too visible ribs, at the last pallid vestiges of what had been a deep year-round tan. Dobson’s girl answered and connected him with Jerry.
“Paul! Good to hear your voice. Rough trip? You sound beat.”
“Sort of a long trip.”
“Have you gone over to see her yet?”
“I’m about to go over.”
“If you catch her in you’re going to need a drink afterward. Where are you?”
Paul told him, and agreed to meet him in the lobby at six. He asked if the account was set up so he could start writing checks.
Jerry said, “Yes. I put two thousand in a checking account and the balance in an interest-bearing account. I’m sorry that she— I tried to block it. You know that. But setting her up with a power of attorney left her in the driver’s seat. I’ll say this: she got a good price.”
“Isn’t that just dandy.”
“I know how you feel. Anyway, I fixed it so you got the house, at least. Lord knows why she didn’t sell that, too. Paul—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t let it get you down when you go see her.”
“See you here at six, then. ’By.”
“I’ll bring the warehouse receipt for your personal stuff. I put it in storage for you. See you.”
Paul Rayder hung up, stripped, took a quick shower. In the bathroom mirror his face had, to him, an alien look, thin, weathered, expressionless. It did not seem to belong here in funtown.
It was a quarter after five when he found the Seawinds Court Hotel. It was jammed in between taller buildings, and it had a seedy look. An old man was scratching futilely at the shell walk. Paul went down to Number Eighteen and up two weathered steps to the shallow community porch. A card with curled corners was thumbtacked to the door-frame. V. MASON, it read. The door was open, and he looked through the screen into the dim, shadowy room. He knocked on the screen and saw her walk tall out of an adjoining room, walk toward the door in flaring yellow skirt, black narrow halter, tossing a sheaf of the coarse blue-black hair back in a familiar way, squinting toward the light with an automatic welcoming smile.
The smile faltered, and she stared through the screen at him, her eyes going wide. “Paul! I didn’t—”
“I want to talk to you.”
She turned away, and he pulled the door open and stepped in. She bent over a cigarette box on the coffee table, stood up with the table lighter, lit her cigarette, and with her back to him, said, “There isn’t anything in particular we can say to each other.”
“I just want to know why,” he said. He sat down, wondering why there seemed to be no anger in him. Only a sadness, and a regret.
She turned and faced him, cupping her elbow in her palm, the cigarette hand canted outward from the wrist, smoke drifting toward the black hair.
“The judge accepted the reason in the Virgin Islands. Incompatibility. Haven’t you heard?”
“I want your personal reason.”
“Maybe I just didn’t fit the concept, Paul. Loyal, tough-fibered little woman, keeping the home fires burning. I wasn’t having any fun. And it was just too much work. So when I got a good price, I sold out.”
“Just like that. Just like that, after all the blood and sweat we both put into it. We started on a shoestring. We had something. If you were sick of it, Jerry could have found a manager. And we had it free and clear, so if you still wanted a cash settlement, Jerry could have mortgaged the place. A chance for golden eggs, and you sell the goose. What am I supposed to do? Start over again? I did that once. That other war clobbered me, and I came back. Now this. I want to know why. Why.”
“I told you I got a good price. And for a property settlement. I took half. You insisted. Isn’t it funny, dear? You don’t talk about us, about our marriage. You want to know about your business.”
“That’s what it comes down to. Because the whole thing Seems so... vindictive. As if you were trying to hurt me. For a year I’ve been thinking. It’s like something some other woman would do to some other guy. Not what you’d do to me. All those tears when I took off. Those letters you should have written on asbestos. Then the cooling off. I didn’t get it.”
“I’m living the way I want to live, Paul. I shouldn’t have married anybody. You better go, because I have a date.”