A Flash of Green by John D. MacDonald

highway.
    “Where is he keeping her?” Elmo asked.
    “He’s got her stashed out there in one of his sweetie display houses,” Leroy said. “He took the sweetie sign down. She seems to stroll over to the office once a day and type one letter, with two sweetie fingers.”
    “She’s sure-God built,” Elmo said.
    “She’ll weigh in at one-fifty,” Leroy said, “without a half ounce of fat on her. Buck should age visibly this summer.”
    “Won’t you help him out?”
    Shannard smiled into the distance. “Elmo, old friend, you should know me well enough by now to realize that my libido operates in inverse ratio to the availability of the merchandise. That girl is without the old-fashioned restraint I’m accustomed to. She would accommodate me as merely a sociable gesture, like a healthy handshake, or remembering my name. I’m too old to think of sex as merely sensible hygiene. Mine has to be sharpened by the sense of sin and guilt. And it has to be difficult to arrange, so as to provide the stimulation of anticipation. If Buck’s collegegirl could sunbathe, swim, drink gin and make love simultaneously, that’s what she’d do every day, just because they all make her feel so peachy fine. No thanks, Elmo. Buck can struggle with this one all by himself. The hell with the new freedom. Give me a troubled, anxious, guilty woman every time. They think they’re giving away something of value, at least. So they don’t give it so often they tax me too much.”
    “Laziest lawyer in town,” Elmo said. “But I like to listen to him talk. He belts me with fees that would take your appetite away.”
    “But I didn’t charge him a thing the first time he came to me, James,” Leroy said. “He was in coveralls, wearing a carpenter hat, and he bulled his way in and dumped his records on top of my desk. He stared at me as though he was thinking about hitting me in the mouth. Then he said, ‘The net worth is maybe four thousand. I owe eleven. I can take on a contract that’ll make me twenty before taxes. I need ten thousand by tomorrow noon at the latest. Find it for me and you do my law work from now on. But find it as a loan, because I’m not selling any piece of my company.’ On any average day, I’d have sent him right back out. But I was feeling euphoric. I had him sit in the outer office. I made a couple of phone calls to find out about him. Then I found him the money, right in my own bank account.”
    “At fifteen percent for three months. Just a little old sixty percent a year.”
    “Secured by a chattel mortgage on everything including the fillings in his teeth.”
    They grinned at each other. “Now I support you,” Elmo said. “I should claim you as an exemption.”
    “Don’t you?” Shannard asked. He hoisted his long body out of the chair. “You heading back to town too, James?”
    They said goodnight to Elmo and went along the path together.When they reached the open gate in the redwood fence, the pool lights and garden spots flicked out. Only one car was left in addition to Shannard’s Thunderbird and Jimmy’s old blue station wagon, and it was an elderly Chevy with Collier County tags.
    Shannard stopped in the darkness and said, “Being around Elmo is consistently interesting. He’s never ceased to surprise me. He’s impossible to predict, yet all the apparently meaningless things eventually fall into a pattern. Have you noticed that?”
    “Maybe I haven’t known him that well or that long.”
    “Let’s stop at the Spanish Mack for a nightcap.”
    As he followed the multiple taillights of Shannard’s car toward town, Jimmy Wing had the feeling he was the victim of some vastly complicated practical joke, the point of which would be made evident to him later on. Charity Prindergast was a bit player. He carried prop money. Elmo had learned his lines.
    But he knew that Elmo Bliss had probed for and found his special weakness, which was his understanding of his own role as an observer.