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 Company—a little white-skinned man with a face like a trout and a voice like a French horn—one 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 trouble—bigger 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.

So we were married on the fifteenth day of August, and, after an unforgettably strenuous Bermuda honeymoon, we moved into the wedding present house a block 10

away from her parents. The week after we returned the thriving little business of Jerry Jamison, Builder, was absorbed by a stock deal into the E. J. Malton Construction Company, along with my good work crew fore-manned by Red Olin. I got some stock and I became General Manager at twenty thousand a year. Both Lorrie and her brother, Eddie, Junior, then nineteen, had been given small blocks of stock. Eddie was a slack, dim, acne-ridden young man.

I had it the best. I was vigorous, with a gorgeous, lusty and loving wife. The corporation was stagnant, but I was going to make the old flooph see the light and start to wheel and deal in some modern house construction.

And that was only eight years ago. And now I was forty-three, with the house, some cash value in insurance, and eleven hundred bucks in the joint checking account—if Lorraine hadn't been shopping today. During the eight years the dividends on the stock had been too liberal. E. J. enjoyed passing out checks at Christmas. And both Lorrie and her mother had one approach to money—if it was there, spend it.

"I'm going to get out," I told her.

She turned her back, huffed on her nails and then began to brush her hair. "You're boring me, Jerry. Honestly you are. You won't get out. Go take your shower or something."

As I was wondering how it would feel to spin her around and bust her solidly in the mouth, I heard the front door chimes.

"Who the hell would that be?" I asked.

"And how the hell would I know? Go answer it."

I went down and opened the front door. A man as tall as I am stood there, and the familiar grin was wide and strong.

"Vince!" I said. "You bastard! My God, come in."

He came in, and he put his suitcase down in the hall, and we pumped hands and thumped shoulders and he said, still grinning, "Greetings, lieutenant."

The last time I had seen Vince was in Calcutta in August of 1945, twenty years ago. As my air transpor-

tation home had lifted off the runway I had looked down and seen him for the last time. He was standing beside the borrowed jeep between the two White Russian girls with whom we had spent the past two weeks, and he was drinking from a bottle and waving at the same time.

I could see at once that he had weathered the years a little better than I had. He was deeply tanned and his grip was hard and firm. He is a big man, and something about his cat-lazy way of moving, his air of potential recklessness, has always reminded me of that Mitchum in the movies. Vince has a square jaw, high hard round cheekbones, and an odd slanting flatness about his eyes. There was a subtly foreign flavor about the cut of his suit, the trim of his hair, the large red stone in the gold ring on the little finger of his right hand.

"I shall build drinks," I said, "and you will become a house guest."

"What else?" he said, and followed me out into the kitchen to lounge against a counter top and watch me.

Vince Biskay and I had achieved a special closeness during the war. We met when we were both assigned to Operations in O.S.S. Detachment 404 operating out of Ceylon under Lord Louis's headquarters. Operations behind Jap lines had required a special kind of go-to-hell talent, and I suspect we were prime examples of what was needed. We worked well together. So we were sent together on one extended and three short operations, accompanied only by native agents. That was our war. A pretty nervous war, at times. You can lie on your face in the jungle brush and hear the Jap patrol clink and jangle by on the trail eight feet away from you, and when they are out of earshot, you can throw up because you've been that scared. Captain Biskay was in charge every time. We found out what they sent us to find out and radioed the data back to the Trinco tower. We destroyed what we could, and we armed the ones who wanted to fight. And I learned a lot they never taught me at Benning.

And now, twenty years later, he was in my kitchen and we clinked two strong Scotch and waters together, 12

and I asked him how long he'd managed to stay in Calcutta after I left.

"A couple of weeks more, I think. Then I had to get out while I had my health."

"You had my address. Not one damn postcard in twenty years."

"I didn't say I'd write."

"What are you doing in Vernon?"

He held his glass up to the light. "Came to visit, old pal. Came to see you."

"You look prosperous enough. What have you been doing?"

"Many many things, Jerry."

"Married?"

"I tried it. I didn't like it."

He was being almost rudely evasive, yet I got the impression that he was studying me with great care. I could sense that he was under some kind of strain. He was just a little too relaxed, and I remembered that that was the way he had always been when we had something laid on and we were getting close to the time for jump-off.

Lorraine came into the kitchen bearing her empty glass, wearing her maroon tailored doeskin slacks and a white orlon blouse.

"I heard you talking to . . ." Then she saw Vince and said, "Oh! How do you do?"

"Honey, this is the fabulous Vince Biskay, the legendary guy I've told you about. My wife Lorraine, Vince."

I saw her react to him. I had seen a lot of women react to Vince. I felt a little twist of jealousy as I saw the heightened color, a shine in the eyes, a flirtatiousness in the smile, a barely perceptible arching of the back.

They went through the so-nice-to-meet-you routine. I built Lorraine a new drink. I was very jolly, doing the happy-marriage bit. Even as I was doing it, I knew it was off key. A good marriage has a distinctive and unmistakable flavor. It can't be faked. There is a warmth about it. When it is a marriage of strangers, no affectionate gestures, no amount of folksy enthusiasm can delude the discerning observer. And I was certain that

Vince, with that almost feminine intuition of his, sensed the drabness and sourness of our relationship.

When I alerted Lorraine to the fact that Vince had his suitcase with him and would stay with us, she responded with unexpected enthusiasm. She usually avoids all house guests. She became the jolly hostess, and took Vince up to show him the better of the two guest rooms where he would stay.

I went back out into the kitchen and told Irene there would be three for dinner. She is a drab and faded woman, so deeply and emotionally concerned with her relationship to her church that she seems remote to everything else in the world. She is a good cook and housekeeper.

I went into the living room and I heard Vince and Lorrie coming down the stairs. I heard Lorrie laugh. It was her social laugh, the one she uses when she's being particularly charming. But there was an added texture to it, a throaty sexuality.

Lorraine was very vivacious during dinner, dominating the conversation. But immediately after dinner she began to sag in the familiar way. Her eyes went dull and her diction went to hell and she could not follow the conversation. At about ten o'clock she gave us a glassy good night and went wobbling off to bed, precariously carrying her bedside jolt of raw brandy.