A Deadly Shade of Gold by John D. MacDonald Page B
Authors: John D. MacDonald
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Detective and Mystery Stories, Political, Hard-Boiled, Fort Lauderdale (Fla.), Detective and Mystery Stories; American, McGee; Travis (Fictitious character), Private investigators - Florida - Fort Lauderdale
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night.
Six
Page 33
GRIEF IS a strange tempest. Nora Gardino, her strong and handsome face becoming mask-like, bobbed about in her own storm tides, supporting herself with whatever came to hand. But she found that her sense of purpose provided the most useful buoyancy. And as I was the instrument through which she expected to achieve a bloody vengeance, she came running to me whenever she felt as if she were drowning. She thought my methods far too indirect. She wanted immediate confrontations. She had no patience with research. She wanted us to go at once to Puerto Altamura and start slamming around. She threatened to go by herself. I explained to her that it worked on television dramas and in muscular movies, but in the far drearier vistas of life itself, a man could pry nothing open unless he had a pry bar. And knowledge is that pry bar.
Strangers do not suddenly open up because you confuse them. Confusion leads to a cautious silence. Strangers talk when they know that you have facts. They talk when it is in their interest to try to convince you your facts are wrong.
Shaja and I were partners in the cooperative venture of keeping her calm. She seemed like a pleasant child subject to temper tantrums, a child who might, unguarded, break every dish in the cupboard. There was a self-destructive aspect to Nora's urgencies. Soothed, she would pull herself together and give a plausible imitation of the way she had been before Sam had returned.
On the morning I was to fly up to New York, she drove me down to Miami International in her little black Sunbeam. We had time to spare, so we went to the restaurant atop the Airport Hotel and had coffee at a window table amid all those shades of blue, overlooked paved areas where the little yellow service vehicles sped back and forth in their ant-hill routines.
"I shouldn't be so impatient," she said. "But it just..."
"Look at it this way. You go charging at something, and nothing happens. Then you have to back off and try the vague chances, the off-beat things. By charging you may mess something up, and spoil all your chances. So armor yourself first. Later you may find out that the preparation wasn't necessary. But there's no harm done. This will keep, Nora. It's a case of whether you want an emotional release, or whether you really want to accomplish something."
"I want to...."
"Okay. We do this my way. I had to learn the hard way. I had to learn patience and care."
They announced my flight. She went down with me. At the gate she gave me a sister's kiss, her dark eyes huge in her narrow face, eroded by loss. "As long as you're not just kidding me along, as long a we really will do something, okay then, Trav. We'll do it your way."
New York, on the first day of March, was afflicted by a condition a girl I once knew called Smodge. This is a combination of rain, snow, soot, dirt, and wind. The black sky squatted low over afternoon Manhattan, and all the store lights were on, traffic braying, the sidewalk folk leaning sullenly into the weight of wind. There is a tax loophole in recent years which makes it possible for men to acquire tax-free fortunes by putting up the cheapest possible office buildings.
Like some hovering undisciplined anus, this loophole has excreted its garish cubes all over the Upper East Side. These are the buildings where they purposely build a roar into the heating and air conditioning systems to compensate for the tissue thickness of the walls. There, in a sterile and incomparable fluorescent squalor, in stale air, under low ceilings, are devised the creative Page 34
ideas to amuse, instruct, guide, and convince an entire nation. This time I was in no mood for the newer, or pseudo-Miami hotel architecture, and took a single at an eerie little ugly old hotel I had stayed at long ago, the Wharton, on West 49th, in the first block off Fifth. Red stone, oak lobby, high ceilings and Victorian plumbing.
At two forty-five I ducked out of the sleety wind into
Six
Page 33
GRIEF IS a strange tempest. Nora Gardino, her strong and handsome face becoming mask-like, bobbed about in her own storm tides, supporting herself with whatever came to hand. But she found that her sense of purpose provided the most useful buoyancy. And as I was the instrument through which she expected to achieve a bloody vengeance, she came running to me whenever she felt as if she were drowning. She thought my methods far too indirect. She wanted immediate confrontations. She had no patience with research. She wanted us to go at once to Puerto Altamura and start slamming around. She threatened to go by herself. I explained to her that it worked on television dramas and in muscular movies, but in the far drearier vistas of life itself, a man could pry nothing open unless he had a pry bar. And knowledge is that pry bar.
Strangers do not suddenly open up because you confuse them. Confusion leads to a cautious silence. Strangers talk when they know that you have facts. They talk when it is in their interest to try to convince you your facts are wrong.
Shaja and I were partners in the cooperative venture of keeping her calm. She seemed like a pleasant child subject to temper tantrums, a child who might, unguarded, break every dish in the cupboard. There was a self-destructive aspect to Nora's urgencies. Soothed, she would pull herself together and give a plausible imitation of the way she had been before Sam had returned.
On the morning I was to fly up to New York, she drove me down to Miami International in her little black Sunbeam. We had time to spare, so we went to the restaurant atop the Airport Hotel and had coffee at a window table amid all those shades of blue, overlooked paved areas where the little yellow service vehicles sped back and forth in their ant-hill routines.
"I shouldn't be so impatient," she said. "But it just..."
"Look at it this way. You go charging at something, and nothing happens. Then you have to back off and try the vague chances, the off-beat things. By charging you may mess something up, and spoil all your chances. So armor yourself first. Later you may find out that the preparation wasn't necessary. But there's no harm done. This will keep, Nora. It's a case of whether you want an emotional release, or whether you really want to accomplish something."
"I want to...."
"Okay. We do this my way. I had to learn the hard way. I had to learn patience and care."
They announced my flight. She went down with me. At the gate she gave me a sister's kiss, her dark eyes huge in her narrow face, eroded by loss. "As long as you're not just kidding me along, as long a we really will do something, okay then, Trav. We'll do it your way."
New York, on the first day of March, was afflicted by a condition a girl I once knew called Smodge. This is a combination of rain, snow, soot, dirt, and wind. The black sky squatted low over afternoon Manhattan, and all the store lights were on, traffic braying, the sidewalk folk leaning sullenly into the weight of wind. There is a tax loophole in recent years which makes it possible for men to acquire tax-free fortunes by putting up the cheapest possible office buildings.
Like some hovering undisciplined anus, this loophole has excreted its garish cubes all over the Upper East Side. These are the buildings where they purposely build a roar into the heating and air conditioning systems to compensate for the tissue thickness of the walls. There, in a sterile and incomparable fluorescent squalor, in stale air, under low ceilings, are devised the creative Page 34
ideas to amuse, instruct, guide, and convince an entire nation. This time I was in no mood for the newer, or pseudo-Miami hotel architecture, and took a single at an eerie little ugly old hotel I had stayed at long ago, the Wharton, on West 49th, in the first block off Fifth. Red stone, oak lobby, high ceilings and Victorian plumbing.
At two forty-five I ducked out of the sleety wind into
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