Please Write for Details by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

they’ll find out some day. Nobody wants to give you a chance. They all the time want to laugh at you instead. I don’t let them bother me too much. They can go on out and bowl and drink beer and pick up girls, but let me tell you, I go on back to the room and get the stuff all laid out and I start in painting. You know,I even forget what time it is or whether I had dinner or not. The painting is the main thing with me. Mr. Klauss!”
    “Uh?”
    “Hey, I thought you were going to sleep or something. Honest to God, this is going to be a great thing. Mexico! And nothing to do all day every day but paint. It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I’m so damn excited right now I feel like running up and down the aisle. You know, this is the second time in my life I ever been on an airplane?”
    And on and on and on. Paul Klauss could imagine, dismally, that the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop would be peopled with dozens of dull, intense, and pimpled young men named Harvey Ardos, all of whom have the same long, black, dank hair and the same stained line around the collar of their cheap white shirts. And so it would be another wasted summer. Two of them in a row. And time was going by too fast to risk the ruin of two summers in succession.
    Paul Klauss was thirty-four. In the right light he could pass for twenty-six or seven. He was a trim-bodied man, five feet eight inches in height, who, by the way he carried himself and through the assistance of his constant use of elevator shoes, gave the impression of being five ten or perhaps a little more. His hair was dark blond and carefully tended. Feature by feature he somewhat resembled a blond Gregory Peck, but the pale eyelashes were longer than they needed to be, and there was a look of weakness around the mouth.
    His life was orderly, exceedingly well organized. He was a bachelor, and owned and operated a small men’s clothing store near the University of Pennsylvania. He lived in a small and tasteful apartment ten blocks from the store. He did not drink or smoke. He took splendid care of himself, and purchased many medicines and devices which promised to prolong the appearance of youth indefinitely. He had no close friends. All other potential interests in his life were subordinated to his single, intense, almost psychotic compulsion—the hunting of women.
    He operated his shop diligently and successfully because it provided the funds necessary to his compulsion. He had made his apartment most attractive, not because he particularly cared about his own surroundings, but because he saw a direct relationship between the frame and the eventual picture. Though not a particularly vain man, he tried to look as well as possibleat all times because it enhanced his average. He had foregone the luxury of having any specific and positive personality of his own because it was so much more effective to guess what sort of person the woman would be most vulnerable to, and then assume that personality.
    He had both the cold gray eye and the unthinking cruelty of the professional hunter of any sort of game. Some men climbed mountains because they were there. Other men spent frozen hours in duck blinds, or sweaty hours on a high platform over a staked goat. Paul Klauss had equivalent patience and equivalent skills. And he paid just as much attention to the efficacy of his weapons and their condition.
    When he was twenty he had begun his first journal. He had used his specialized but prodigious memory to look back across the last five years of his existence and recall each name, each face, each figure, each circumstance, each perfumed nuance and set them down in perfect order of accomplishment, in prose as cold and functional as his eyes. Ever after that he kept his journal up to date, making the entries as they occurred. When he was twenty-five he purchased several soft and expensive loose-leaf binders and a quantity of heavy, creamy bond paper. He transcribed all his previous records