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Overview
As a teenage wild child, Jane Ann Paulson had earned her wicked reputation, but no one deserves the shocking death she receives. When the police find a suspect, everyone relaxes . . . everyone except for Hugh MacReedy. A construction engineer by trade, Hugh has no business investigating a murder. But he happens to owe a big debt to the innocent man they’re sending to the electric chair. And so Hugh begins to look into Jane Ann’s death, not knowing that her quiet little town is sitting on some ugly secrets, that he’s about to blow the lid off each and every one of them, and that he’s just put a very tempting target on his back.
Features a new Introduction by Dean Koontz
Praise for John D. MacDonald
“The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”—Stephen King
“My favorite novelist of all time.”—Dean Koontz
“To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen.”—Kurt Vonnegut
“A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about the best.”—Mary Higgins Clark
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307827197 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/11/2013 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 611,605 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Date of Birth:
July 24, 1916Date of Death:
December 28, 1986Place of Birth:
Sharon, PAPlace of Death:
Milwaukee, WIEducation:
Syracuse University 1938; M.B. A. Harvard University, 1939Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When I read the small item in the Chicago paper and the whole world seemed to stop, I remembered that I had thought about Vicky that very morning, thought about her while I was shaving.
That in itself was not too much of a coincidence, because I had thought of her often during the three years since I had seen her. Usually she came into my mind when I was depressed—in the middle of a sleepless night, or during the sour mood of hangover. That was when I thought of Victoria Landy. Any thought of her was merely another way of calling myself a damn fool. You never forget the chances you have missed, the good things you have thrown away.
I felt a touch on my shoulder and looked up from the paper and realized that the waitress had been asking me something and had finally reached across the counter. “Something wrong with you?” she asked. She was blond and heavy and she looked concerned about me.
“No. I’m okay. Sorry.”
“I asked if you want some more coffee.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
It was just a small item on a back page. I had nearly missed it. The name had jumped out at me. Landy.
APPEAL DENIED IN LANDY CASE
Warrentown [UP]. Sept. 12. Today one of the last chances for Alister Landy, college student convicted of rape murder, flickered out when his attorney’s motion for a new trail was denied. In view of the wide interest shown in the trial and the nature of the crime, informed sources say that commutation of the sentence by the Governor is highly unlikely. It is expected that a new date for the execution will soon be set.
That was all. But it was enough. It could not be a case of identical names. I could fill in too many blanks. Alister Landy had been in Sheridan College in the town of Dalton. Warrentown was the county seat, thirty-five miles away. And Alister was Vicky’s kid brother.
I left the hotel coffee shop and went up to my room. I had not unwrapped some of the fishing tackle that had been delivered the day before. I unwrapped it and sat on the edge of the bed and tried to take some satisfaction from the look and feel of the good star drag reel, the fiberglass boat rod. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Vicky and about what this would be doing to her.
I had thought about Vicky that same morning. I had felt depressed, and yet there were no good reasons for feeling depressed. I had just gotten back after spending two and a half years out of the country as assistant superintendent on the construction of two military airfields in Spain. Telboht Brothers, the construction firm I work for, had been the successful bidders. The job was over. I’d had enough of red tough rock and red baked sand and green local labor and broken-down equipment. I flew into Chicago and delivered some inspection reports and certifications to the home office and got straightened away with the payroll people and with the bank where my savings had been adding up.
Sitterson, the Project Superintendent, was in, and I had a talk with him. It didn’t come out the way I thought it would. He seemed reserved, cool. He didn’t give me any information. I finally had to ask for it.
“I’d like to take my full sixty days, Mr. Sitterson. But can you give me any idea of what job I’ll be going on when I report back in?”
“Not right now. But there’ll be a place for you. You know that, MacReedy.”
It wasn’t enough. I had expected to hear him say that they’d make me super on one of the small jobs. God knows I’d worked hard enough as Mooney’s right hand man during the two and a half years in Spain. I knew every phase of the work. Maybe theory was a little shaky, but I knew all the practical angles. But Sitterson wasn’t as cordial as he had been when he had flown over to check the job eight months before. He had called me Hugh then, and he had half promised a better job when the Spanish job was finished.
I couldn’t figure out what had changed. Mooney had flown back to Chicago for a conference about two months ago. Probably they had discussed me. But I couldn’t see Mooney sticking a knife in me. He was too big a man to do it out of jealousy. And I knew he liked me. He was always after me to change my personal life. “Save your money, Hugh. You don’t have to spend every last dime.”
“It’s adding up in the bank, isn’t it?”
“Sure. For a big fling as soon as you get the chance. You’ve got a decent education, kid. You don’t have to live like a construction bum.”
“My father was a construction bum, Al.”
“I know, I know. And you know I was a kid engineer on that Oregon bridge job when the hoist cable let go. I knew Bucky and for a little guy he was all man. And he left you and your mother without dime one.”
“I’ve got nobody to support, Al.”
“Maybe you should have.”
He kept after me like that. And he didn’t like it when I took ten days off in Spain. He didn’t begrudge me the ten days. I had earned them. But it pained him that I should take off with Felizia and spend the ten days at Fuengirola, swimming, eating, drinking and making love instead of going perhaps to Madrid and making like a tourist.
Mooney certainly would have had to tell Sitterson that I performed on the job. If I could do the job, Telboht Brothers would make money and hit completion dates and keep the bonding companies happy. What I did in my off time was my own business.
I spent two days and nights in Chicago with friends from the home offices. I got respectably drunk, bought a car and equipment for the trip I planned. I picked the car off a lot, a two-year-old Chrysler wagon. I found a garage that would let me use tools. I pulled the head and the wheels and found it worth buying. I installed rings, new front shocks and a new fuel pump.
Then I was ready to go. I had sixty days and it was October and I knew just what I wanted to do. I wanted to drive down to Guaymas on the Golfo de California and fish. And I didn’t want to go alone. So first I would go to New Orleans and look up Scotty. Unless he had married, which was unlikely, his list would be as active as ever. And he would know what I wanted. Not a model, no young girl with delusions of eternal love—rather, a mature and restless woman who would like the idea of going with me to Mexico, who would want some laughs, want to catch some fish, and be willing to part when it was over without remorse or recriminations.
Yet on the morning of the day I planned to leave Chicago I did not feel that special sense of excitement that goes with vacation. I had sixty days and six thousand bucks to spend and a good plan for spending it, but there was no lift. Instead, there was a feeling of depression, of let-down. I tried to attribute it to hangover.
When you are depressed, the face in the mirror does not seem to be your own. My face showed a mixed heritage. My father was Scotch-Irish, a small wiry cat-quick man, tough and pugnacious, his face fist-marked by bigger men he had fought. My mother was tiny, a Pole with pale hair and tilted sea-gray eyes. Her half-dozen brothers were huge slow lumbering men. I had her eyes and her heavy Slavic cheekbones. I had his copper hair, streak-bleached by the savage Spanish sun. I had inherited height and bulk from the male side of her line, along with my father’s quickness. This combination had kept me from being marked as he had been marked. A small scar here under the eye. A slight flatness at the bridge of the nose. Nothing else. The deep tan was occupational and unmistakable, a tan shared by tropical sailors, by Miami beachboys, by Colorado prospectors and by construction workers.
I shaved away stubble that was like fine copper wire. My head pulsed with the dull ache of hangover. And I thought of Vicky. I thought of what-might-have-been.
I had been an engineer on nine miles of new state highway on the Warrentown-Dalton road. We were straightening it and four-laning it. There were three big cuts, and a lot of fill. It was rolling, beautiful country. Because the job was closer to Dalton than to Warrentown, we set up just outside of Dalton. I had been there for a few days when we made the estimates for the bid, running soil tests and analyzing cores. I was in the first group to go back when our bid was the one accepted, and I worked with the boys rechecking the survey and the specifications.
Dalton was a college town. Sheridan College, a small all-male liberal arts college of good reputation. The Department of Archeology there had found some Indian relics in one of the hills where we had to make a cut. They had written to the state capital and somebody there got in touch with the home offices in Chicago and we got word in the field to co-operate with the college.
I was elected to go talk to them and find out what they wanted us to do. Sheridan College was on a hill south of the village. It was a beautiful September morning a little more than three years ago. I had rented a room in an old house just off the central square. The central square had a New England look, with big elms, walks, benches, a beat-up bandstand. There were white churches and stores and a big inn. I went back to my room and changed from sweaty khakis to slacks and a sports shirt, and drove one of the company sedans south on College Street and up the hill to the college buildings. I got there at eleven and classes were changing. College kids were criss-crossing the campus. I felt elderly and superior to them. I’d been out four years. I was twenty-six. I’d worked in Peru and in Cuba. I had been bitten by a tropical snake. I had seen a man pulled into the gearing of a stone crusher. I’d seen a gas truck slip off a mountain at dusk and, two hundred feet down the stone slope, strike and bloom like a strange blue and yellow flower. I felt superior to these kids, and slightly appalled that they should look so young.
