The Drowner by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

apartment, got us moved and has stayed with us ever since. I don’t want to sound like something out of Henry James, but genteel poverty is the worst kind, I think, because you have to keep imitating the standards you are supposed to live up to. Break one cup of the good tea service and it is a disaster, believe me. And one is always changing hems and necklines and dying things this season’s color, and scrounging up dues for something you can’t afford not to belong to because you’ll lose the contacts. Four females in an apartment, Mr. Stanial. It’s a stale life.
    “Lu fulfilled the quota. Kelsey was very charming and very decorative and very rich, in a background way. It was a lovely little wedding, and it damned near cleaned us out. But we made it. And then, as it turned out, we hadn’t made it at all. I brought Lu’s letters, just in case. I squirrel things away. String, letters, stamps with the stickum gone. Mother has congestive heart disease, and she can last six months or six years. I work in a brokerage office. I go to work and I come home. I could be twenty-five or fifty-five and it wouldn’t seem to make much difference…” She stopped abruptly and looked at him with a startled expression. “I don’t go on like this to people. It’s the crazy day and the crazy heat and the trip.” She stabbed her cigarette out in the shallow ashtray and was suddenly afraid she was going to start crying, so she stood up and moved away from him.
    “The letters would be a help, Barbara.”
    “Don’t patronize me!”
    “Don’t keep your guard so high. We’ll be working on this thing for a little while. Paul and Barbara is easier. Also, it helps me. You’ll talk a little more freely as Barbara.”
    She whirled and stared at him. “More freely than just now? No thanks. I worked myself into a nice case of self-pity, and it’s a lousy emotion. Not tears for my sister. Tears for me.”
    “How about the letters?”
    She got them out of the pocket of her suitcase and took them to him and sat near him again. “It’s sort of a… representative collection. The office letters, I guess you can call them. She’d write just the normal sort of things to me at home, or to mother mostly. The… very personal ones came to the office, Paul.”
    “Don’t be so uncertain, Barbara. My role is personal and confidential, and this is the death of a woman, and her emotional life is pertinent.”
    He held his hand out and she gave him the packet of letters. “I don’t see how you can just go around and find out anything from all these people here.”
    He explained his cover and showed her the insurance identifications which had been prepared for him. She understood much more quickly than Walmo had, saying, with approval, “And they all think you’re trying to prove suicide to save money for your company. Paul, will my staying here a few days spoil anything? Will anybody think anything is funny if you see me and talk to me?”
    He shrugged. “It will help, if anything. You and your mother are beneficiaries under this imaginary policy, and you’re indignant about this investigation and hang around to make sure I don’t cheat you. This sort of thing is standard procedure, actually. You have to give people a story they will understand and accept, and then they talk.”
    She studied him. “So I guess you should look sort of ordinary.” She flushed. “I just meant that…”
    “You try to look like what you’re supposed to be. It helps.”
    Knowing it sounded trivial, but unable to help herself, she said, “I guess it must be very interesting work.”
    His whole face and manner seemed to change, and he did not look ordinary at all. There was a look of black and bitter forces just below the surface of this man, a wretchedness and a fury that startled her at the same time as it intrigued her. And just as suddenly he forced himself back to blandness. “Sometimes,” he said. “Now, can I ask you how much of this you can