John D. MacDonald - Soft Touch

SOFT TOUCH

Chapter I

When I got home at six o'clock on an April Friday, the first hot day of the year, Lorraine's copper-colored Porsche was parked crooked in the driveway, keys in the ignition. After I put the station wagon in the garage, I ran hers in.

I went into the kitchen. She could be in the house or she could be somewhere in the neighborhood acquiring her evening edge. There was no point in yelling. If she didn't feel like answering, she wouldn't answer. And say later she hadn't heard a thing.

A man should like to come home at night. It had been a long time since I had looked forward to coming home. And this was the worst day of all. For the eight childless years I have been married to her, I have worked for her father, E. J. Malton of the E. J. Malton Construction Companya little white-skinned man with a face like a trout and a voice like a French hornone of those completely terrifying little men who combine arrogant stupidity with a devout conviction of their own infallibility.

I didn't know then that this was the night Vince Biskay was going to show up out of the past, a tiger in the night, a tiger coming to call, offering the silky temptation of big violent money. And if I'd- known how it was going to work out for me, I would never have come home that night. Or any other night.

But I went dutifully into the dull house at 118 Tyler Drive, the eight-year-old wedding present from her parents, and I found her in the bedroom, sitting at her dressing table in yellow bra and panties, doing her nails, half of an old fashioned handy at her elbow.

She gave me a quick glance in the mirror and said, "Hi."

I sat on the foot of my bed and said, "What's up?"

"What do you mean, what's up? Does something have to be up?"

"I thought maybe you were getting fixed up to go out."

"I'm doing my nails. Obviously."

"Are we going out?"

"Who said we were going out? Irene's going to get dinner."

"She wasn't down there when I came in."

"So maybe she went to the John in the cellar. How should I know? She didn't clue me."

"All right, Lorrie, all right. I've got the picture. You're doing your nails. We're eating in. And did you have a happy, happy day?"

"It was so warm Mandy had her gardener fill the pool. But the water was too stinking cold."

By then I could tell how slopped she was. Not too bad. The one at her elbow was probably her third. Two years after we were married the drinking began to turn from a habit into a problem. A problem she still won't admit. I don't know why she drinks. The too simple answer is that she's unhappy. She's married to me. So part of the blame belongs to me.

We got that adoption thing all lined up once, four years ago. But Lorraine, just before it went through, ran drunk through a stop sign and piled up the MG and got that little scar at the corner of her pretty mouth, and had her license lifted and I paid the two-hundred-dollar fine. The adoption people canceled us out. And I haven't suggested we try again. Nor will I.

I watched her and again felt astonished that the heavy drinking has left no mark on her. She is a damned attractive female. They spoiled her and spoiled her brother rotten, and so she is unhappy, shallow, lazy, short-tempered, cruel and amoral. Yet sometimes there is a sweetness ... So rarely. Once in a rare, rare while we are very good together, and when it is good it is like a 8

beginning, and you can kid yourself into thinking the marriage will improve. But it won't.

I went to her and put my hands on her bare shoulders, my thumbs on the soft nape of her neck. She shrugged my hands away irritably. "For God's sake, Jerry."

"Just a thought."

"Aren't you getting enough from Liz down at the office?"

"You know that's nonsense," I said. I sat on the bed again and lighted a cigarette. I had to tell her how the only good part of my little world had just come to a dirty end.

"Today, Lorrie, your old man took over Park Terrace."

"So?"

"Maybe you could try hard to understand. He promised me a free hand. It's the biggest development the company has ever gotten into. I've worked like a dog for months and months so we'd put up some expensive spec houses we can move. It isn't a seller's market any more. Now he's changed his mind and he's going to put up one hundred homes just as dull as this one, the same house he's been building for years. And it will be a fiasco and everything will go down the drain. Everything he owns and we own."

She turned around on the bench and looked at me coldly. "You know so damn much, Jerry. Daddy has gotten along fine. And he'll keep on getting along just fine."

"A lot of stupid men have done fine in a business way. Good luck and good timing. He's run out of luck this time. He took it away from me today. All that work down the drain. So... I'm getting out."

Her eyes widened. "Just how do you expect to do that?"

"I don't know. I'll need some capital to get going on my own again. Sell our stock back to the corporation. Unload this crumby house to somebody who's impressed by the neighborhood."

"The house is in our names, and I won't sign a thing.

This is all a lot of talk. You won't get out You couldn't make a living."

But I had made a living, before I met her. After I got out of the army in that second war, I had the restless itch. I had done some roving and some roaming, and I had gotten into several kinds of choice troublebigger trouble than the kind I had gotten into in high school and my two years of college. The trouble hadn't scared me at all until one day I found myself in a Reno motel with a small group of deadly chums and we were planning how we would knock over one of the casinos. I'd been hypnotized by all those heavy stacks of money. And that scared me good and so I'd come home to Vernon, taken some odd jobs and then, on money borrowed from my mother the year before she died, money that was all that was left of my father's small estate, I had drifted sideways into home construction. Jerry Jamison, Builder. And I liked it. I learned the trade. I did well at it.

Until, at a contractors' picnic, I met Lorraine Malton, fresh out of college, in July of 1957. She was with her father, E. J. I had met him a few times and thought him tiresome, self-important, and not very bright. But I had never seen anything more delightful than Lorrie. Glossy black hair and eyes of a wonderful clear blue. She wore white sharkskin shorts that day and a yellow blouse, and her legs were a longness of honey and velvet. When she moved it was like dancing, her narrow waist emphasizing the dainty abundancies that kept her constantly encircled by all the unattached men at the picnic. She had a cute squinty grin and no time for me at all.

I guess I was ready to be married. I campaigned hard. Perhaps if I hadn't been so eager I might have been able to see her more clearly, see the petulance and the greedi-'ness and the drinking. She had been brought up to believe she was the most important person in the world. And the verve that all pretty young girls possess kept her basic character from showing itself too clearly.