A Key to the Suite by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

of himself at this convention. I’ll have to meet him and have a chance to talk to him a little bit before I tell you if I’ll take it on. I have an instinct for these relationships, Mr. Frick. And I can make a very good guess—which will keep you from wasting your money. Now tell me about this man.”
    “His name is Floyd Hubbard, and lately he’s been working out of the Houston office. His wife is named Janice, and he’s got a little boy four years old and a little girl not a year old yet. He gets good money, and he’s a metallurgist by trade, on the research end.”
    “Describe him.”
    Frick did, to the best of his ability. As he had been talking, he had been looking at her. He had the strange feeling he could not bring her face into the proper focus. When he looked at the flat planes of her cheeks, he could not see the rest of her face. When he looked at her eyes, dark and gray-blue, the rest of her seemed blotted out somehow. Feature by feature, from the lean little nose to long firm heavy lips, to the small round imperative chin, everything seemed just right, except he could not see it all at once, as a face.
    As he re-examined the rest of her, he had the feeling she’d acquired more curves and more ripeness since she’d walked in. He thought it strange that there seemed to be just exactly enough of everything. And everything had begun to look curiously precious, as if this woman had been fashioned with more than ordinary care. Suddenly he saw all of her at once, saw her face as a face, an entity, and saw that she was so lovely, he felt as if his heart had been slit and drained and hung empty in his chest. His hands began to sweat. To restore perspective, he began to examine her bare shoulders again and discovered that he could see no ugliness of bone, only a tenderness of hollows which demanded the gratitude of many kissings.
    And it’s all for sale, he thought. It was an incredible thought, one that threatened to blow a ragged hole in his brain tissue.
    “That’s all you can tell me about him?”
    “That’s all I know. Cory … uh … how did you … uh …”
    She gave him a cold sweet smile. “How did a girl like me get into a life like this? Just lucky, I guess. Let’s not waste time with that sort of nonsense, Mr. Frick. We have to come up with a plausible way for me to be thrown in contact with Floyd Hubbard, some way that won’t make him suspicious. Any suggestions?”
    “I haven’t been able to come up with one. I mean we could say you’re working for me, but it would look funny, I think.”
    “It would look implausible. I have one contact I could use that might work out. And it’s actually a kind of work I tried to make a living at, approximately ten thousand years ago.”
    “Huh?”
    “A friend of mine publishes a regional magazine, Mr. Frick. I even sold him some junk articles a long time ago.” She looked at a tiny gold watch. “It’s too late to phone him now. Conventionsare a big local industry. I know I could sell him on the idea of my doing an article on one particular company at one particular convention. What’s your company?”
    “AGM. American General Machine.”
    “If I go ahead with it, my friend can clear me with the hotel PR man, and then anyone who happens to check will find out it is all true, true, true.”
    “So how come you pick this convention and pick us?”
    “This convention fits into my busy schedule, let us say, Mr. Frick, and picking AGM was just the result of closing my eyes and sticking a pin in a list. The winners never question their luck, Mr. Frick. The losers are the ones who say they’ve been jobbed.”
    “You know,” he said, “I like it. I really like it.”
    “Good.”
    “Just … just how will you work it with Hubbard, I mean if you decide you can handle it okay?”
    He saw that sweet icy smile again. “Things run to pattern,” she said flatly. “We will become terribly attracted to each other, and get around to admitting