Nightmare in Pink by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

park walks. I picked through the magazines on the coffee table, and sat and leafed through one.
    There were some excellent color reproductions of three recent paintings by Tapies, work that had the burned, parched, textured, solemn, heartbreak look of his native Spain. I lusted to own one. I told myself I could bundle monkey-face into the sack and use her up, and she'd buy me one as a party favor. And she could buy all my clothes. In no time at all I too could look like a fag ski instructor. She could trundle me off to Athens. Teresa Howlan Gernhardt Delancy Drummond McGee.
    I wondered how many hours a day it cost her to keep that figure in such superb condition. Diet, steam, massage, exercise, lotions, hormones, dynamic tension. And lotsa lovin', that most effective suppling agent of all. From the neck down she was Doriana Gray, dreading the magic moment when, over night, every excess would suddenly become visible.
    In twenty minutes she opened the door cautiously and stared out at me, brown face slightly puffed. "Oh," she said.
    "Should I have left?"
    "Don't be an idiot."
    "Two fingers and one cube?"
    "Please." She sat in a wing chair by the windows. I took her the drink. She looked up at me with a wan smile. "You know, McGee, you are sort of a walking emetic. You are a big rude finger down my throat."
    I smiled at her. "You wouldn't settle for a standoff. You had to keep prodding, Terry."
    "Okay. Now you're the dominant male. Now you're in charge. But people just don't talk to me like that."
    "Because you're rich. Everybody you meet gives a damn about that. The rich are an alien race."
    "And you don't give a damn?"
    "Of course I do. But I can't con you and lick your pretty sandals simultaneously, honey."
    "My God, you really and truly make me feel like a young girl again, Trav."
    "It should be a relief to you to be able to drop the act you put on."
    "I guess it is. Sort of. But what do I do for defense?"
    "You go all demure."
    "Jesus!" She gave her barking laugh. "Okay. We're friends. And if I'm not good at it, it's because I don't have many, and the ones I have are women." She held her hand out. I shook it. I sat on the couch. "Now we can talk about Charlie," she said.
    "It will be a different kind of talk than it would have been."
    "You're that smart too, aren't you? I mean smart in that way. Son of a gun. Charles McKewn Armister, the Fourth. He and my sister Joanna are the same age. And sort of the same kind of sturdy quiet smiling people. Built solemn sand castles. When they were twelve, thirteen, fourteen, in that range, she crewed for him, and they took about every cup the club put up. In tennis doubles they were almost unbeatable. Everybody knew they would be married and have healthy beautiful children, and everybody was right. I was a slimy child, two years older. When he was sixteen and I was eighteen, I tried to seduce him. I didn't really want him. It was just mischief. He always seemed sort of sexless to me. Maybe I was just curious. It took Charlie a hell of a long time to figure out what I was trying to do, and when the light dawned, he was aghast. He panicked. He fled. I thought I was terribly wicked that summer. I was merely silly and unhappy and reckless. And notorious. I had to buy an abortion in Boston, and got septic, and damn near died, so I wonder who that baby would have been, and who the others would have been if I could have had them. But this isn't about Charlie, is it?
    "Back to Charlie. I never saw much of Charlie and Joanna. In my cluttered lousy life they seemed to be a nice far-off focus of sanity. I was the wild Howlan sister and she was the tame one. So now she sits stunned out there in that ugly gray castle on the island, wondering if he's ever coming back. I go out there and get her drunk and make her talk it out. It always looked like such a terribly normal marriage. But it wasn't. I mean I would have thought Charlie would have been one of those bluff types, a cheerful clap on your haunch