by Orrie Hitt
“Which one would you recommend?” she wanted to know.
“It depends on what you have in mind. For saving money, why, the twenty-year endowment — ”
Her eyes came open and she stared straight back at me.
“Just death,” she said. “That’s all it’s for.”
“Well, then, the straight life would be cheapest.”
“And pays off the same as the others?”
“Well, sure.”
“I just wanted to buy a thousand-dollar policy, Mr. Weaver.”
“That’s all right.”
She sat up, bent forward and put the glass down on the ground beside the bench. Her halter was loose and I felt my temperature getting up to sunstroke stage. She picked up the glass again and leaned back.
“Maybe you’d like another drink, Mr. Weaver?”
“Well, thanks,” I said opening my briefcase. “But I don’t do much of it during the day. Some other time, if that’s all right with you.”
Those gray-blue eyes fastened on me and I felt something turn over and crawl around inside. I didn’t know what it was. I’d never had that same feeling before. She laughed and her face lighted up and I felt better.
“Why, certainly,” she said. “We’ll have that drink another time.”
I got out a non-medical app and started filling it out. I never like to chase people to the doctor if I can help it; that’s always inconvenient for the client and sometimes after you’ve gone they change their mind, forget the whim of a moment, and never show. By making most of your apps non-medical you have pretty much complete charge of the situation and if there are any flubs along the way you know whom to blame. The only thing about those non-medical apps is that with a woman there’s some questions there that you might be tempted to back away from.
I didn’t do that with this girl. I asked her all of them. I wanted to know more about what I was looking at.
I got out my pen and held it over the app.
“What’s your full name?”
“Irene Schofield.”
I printed that good and clear. Then I asked her about the address, if it was an R F D; it was and I indicated that.
“Occupation?”
She smiled and toyed with her glass.
“Why, housewife.”
That bothered me some, but I didn’t show it.
“Who would you want named as the beneficiary, Mrs. Schofield?”
“My husband.”
“And his name?”
“Shephard Schofield.”
“What does he do?”
“What do you mean, what does he do?”
“His occupation. I have to put that down, so that the company knows the source of the premium money.”
“Oh. Nosey, aren’t they?”
I grinned.
“That’s for your protection,” I said. “It wouldn’t do a person any good to buy something that they couldn’t afford.”
She looked through the grape leaves, down across the valley.
“He’s a painter,” she said.
“Oh.”
“He paints pictures.”
“An artist?”
She smiled and looked back at me.
“Yes; that’s right.”
I turned the app over and got to the personal side of things.
“I can either ask you these questions or have you go to a doctor and let him do it,” I said. “It saves time if I do.”
“All right.”
“I forgot to get your date of birth, Mrs. Schofield.”
She laughed and set the glass down.
“That’s a polite way of asking a woman’s age, isn’t it?”
“I should have found out about that, first thing,” I said.
“Because of the premium?”
I nodded.
“Well, I was born October 11, 1926.”
I started throwing the questions at her and putting down her answers.
“Good health?”
“Just a bad disposition at times.”
“No operations?”
“No.”
“Who’s your family doctor?”
She thought about that.
“None, now,” she said. “My husband’s brother was a doctor, but he’s dead. He died about a year ago and we haven’t had one since.”
“Ever been — ” I hesitated and gave her a helpless look.
She caught the look and her breasts came out straight and she laughed right back at me, her face alive.
“No,” she said. “I’ve never been. You know how it is.”
“Height?”
“Five-seven.”
“Weight?”
“One eighteen.”
“Waist?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Measurements around the — ah, chest?”
“Thirty-nine bust.”
I wrote that down and before I could get to the next question she said:
“Thirty-seven hips.”
“It doesn’t ask that.”
“Well, I didn’t know.”
I asked her some more, about her family and like that. She didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and her mother and father were both dead. They’d been killed in an automobile accident, so any family history of disease wouldn’t enter into the non-medical. It was a clean case without any of the usual complications.
“I’ll have to get you to write your name in a couple of places,” I said.
I got up and went over to her. I used the briefcase as a sort of desk and stuck the pen in her hand.
She was close and warm and I could feel the woman of her getting down inside of me. I began to wish that she’d sign the thing, if she was going to, and let me crawl off to a safe distance.
“I do have some other insurance,” she said, pointing to a block that I’d missed. “Would you want to know about that?”
“Oh, sure. I just figured that you didn’t have any other.”
“Well, I do.”
She signed her name in a neat scrawl, in both places. I went back and sat down.
“About your other insurance,” I said. “What are the amounts, who are they with and how long have you had them?”
There were three policies, all with different companies and all for a thousand dollars, taken out within the previous two years. I was curious as to why she thought she ought to have more, but it really wasn’t any of my business and something like that could ruin the sale.
“What about Mr. Schofield?” I asked. “How much coverage does he have on his life?”
In New York State you can get a thousand on the wife, without having any on the husband. But when you get over that amount the husband has to have adequate coverage on himself. Of course, you can always phony up an application, putting down what he doesn’t have, but it’s better to play it straight if you can.
“Oh, around twenty thousand,” she said.
She stood up and that seemed to settle everything for the moment. I put the junk back in the briefcase, then remembered that I hadn’t told her how much the premium would be. I did.
“Would it be all right if I paid you when you brought out the policy, Mr. Weaver?”
I pushed the rate book down inside the briefcase and yanked the zipper around.
“Certainly.”
We left the glasses there for the bees and walked around the corner of the house. The sun was up hotter now and I liked the way it glistened off her shoulders, shooting down across her moving legs and caressing the fluid action of her muscles.
She walked out to the car with me.
“When can I expect you to come back, Mr. Weaver?”
“It’ll take a couple of weeks for the policy to go through. If that’s all right with you?”
“That would be fine,” she said. “You might call, to be sure that I’m home.”
“I’ll call.”
“You don’t think there will be any trouble about getting it, do you?”
“Well, I guess
you didn’t have any trouble with the others.”
“No.”
“Then, you’ll get this one okay, too.”
I noticed that she was looking off down across the field, to the naked spot where the lake cut in through the woods. I glanced in that direction, blinking against the heat waves. After a while I saw the figure of a man crouched by the side of the flat, green water. He seemed to have something in front of him, but at that distance it was impossible to tell what it was or what he was doing.
“Mr. Schofield?”
She nodded, and as she did some of her hair got caught in a breeze and came over against my cheek.
“He’s trying some landscape.”
“You’re going to have one hell of a long front yard,” I said.
She laughed and squeezed my arm unconsciously.
“I mean, he’s doing a painting.”
“Oh. So that’s what he paints?”
“Not generally.”
“What, then?”
“Figures,” she said, smiling at me. “Figures, Mr. Weaver.”
“Your sentences are too short,” I told her. Her hair was back into my face again and I let it stay there. “What kind of figures are you talking about? You’re not talking about just ordinary numbers, are you?”
“No. Human figures, Mr. Weaver.”
“I see.”
I felt like telling her that if I was her husband, and I was a painter, I wouldn’t be down there drawing out the uninteresting lines of some God-damned lake. Especially if I was a figure painter. I’d have this charge of dynamite up in one of those bedrooms, with all her clothes off, and I wouldn’t care if it was daylight or dark or if the lights were on or off. Because I wouldn’t be doing any painting. That would be for sure.
“Maybe I’ll have the pleasure of meeting him the next time,” I said.
I had it figured that I might be able to stick another five or ten on her old man.
“We’ll see,” she said quietly.
I opened the door and got into the car. The cushions were hot and I could smell the new car odor all around me. There’s something incredibly exciting about a new car. Or a new woman.
“Don’t forget to call me,” she said. “First.”
“I’ll call you.”
“Okay.”
“And thanks.”
“Thank you for coming,” she said. “You were very prompt.”
I backed the car out of the driveway. She stood there in front of the garage, watching the way the big Buick slid across the gravel. When I reached the highway she waved at me, then turned and walked into the garage.
Maybe I should have pressed her more for a deposit on the policy. Any other case I would have stayed all day in an effort to wrap my fingers around a check or some of that folding green stuff. But with Mrs. Schofield I wasn’t worried. It would be even better if she wouldn’t pay me.
I’d rather take it out in trade.
CHAPTER IV
ON THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY MORNing Dell Walters got the axe across his neck. That’s another quaint thing about the debit business — you never know when it’s going to happen or who’s going to swing it. In this case, it was a mild-mannered jerk from Northern’s home office, checking on some lapsed policies, that got Dell at the end of a long walk across a short plank.
“I’ve been in this racket ten years,” Dell said, later, pushing his book around on top of the desk and staring down at the floor. “It’s the same, day in and day out. The pressure is always there, knocking you down.”
“You get pressure in any business,” I said. I didn’t feel very sorry for Dell. He’d done it by himself.
He looked old and tired and I guess he was thinking of his wife and those kids.
“To hell with it,” he said, leafing through the book he’d known so well — and hated. “To hell with it, Nicky.”
“But, Jesus, Dell!” I said. “Insuring tombstones!”
“They used to. Bill Klein tells about it.”
“Maybe they didn’t have inspectors then.”
“I guess not.”
There were just the two of us in the office. The others had doing and when I’d see her again. What the hell was the matter with the home office?
“This Irene Schofield must be pretty important,” Margie said.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“In that case, here’s the policy.”
“Jesus, Margie, what are you trying to do to me?”
I took the policy from her and went over and got my book, opened it up and glanced at my route list. Most of the calls for the week were blackened out, showing that the call had been made and the cash collected. Accounts which would be in danger of lapse on the following Monday were indicated in red. I had three of those, but I promptly forgot about them because there was plenty of time left in the week to get around to that. One of them, I knew, I’d wind up paying myself. I couldn’t expect to get anything in return. She was just an old woman who lived by herself and had the doctor running in and out every day. It was one of those things that you do without much reason for doing it.
“No more apps?” Margie called.
“I gave you one.”
“I’ve got that, Nicky.”
“Well?”
“How about the rest?”
“Tomorrow, baby.”
I had three industrial apps in my book. I’d feed the kitty with those for the rest of the week. Industrial insurance simply means insurance in amounts of less than five hundred dollars which is paid for on a weekly or monthly premium basis. Ordinary insurance is the kind of contract I’d written on Mrs. Schofield, a thousand dollars or more at a clip.
Margie laughed and I picked up the book and went out. I felt good, and even waiting five minutes for the elevator didn’t annoy me. It was Wednesday, I had my collections about done for the week. I also had enough business to keep Austin happy until the next Tuesday morning.
When I got down to the street I crossed over and went into the drugstore. By that time the gang had left and only the dumpy-looking girl who wiped the grease up and down the counter was in there. She knew that I seldom drank any coffee, so she just looked up at me in a disinterested sort of a way and kept on buffing what was left of her fingernails.
I went to the rear of the store and wedged myself into the phone booth.
Miss Hankins answered the phone and I asked her if Sally was there. She said that she was and that she’d call her.
After a while the phone banged around on the other end.
“Hi!” Sally said, the sleep still in her voice.
“Wake you?”
“Sort of, Nicky.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
I put one elbow on the book of matches, struck a match and lighted my cigarette.
“About tonight, Sally. I can’t take you out to work, but I can pick you up after. I’ve got an appointment with a doctor at nine on some insurance. Okay?”
I had met this doctor, a fellow in his early thirties, the previous week while completing a death claim on an accident case. He’d had a little free time and we’d got to talking about the army and that kind of stuff. Then I’d got around to insurance and I’d spoken about going over his program with him. I’d finally made an appointment. The set-up looked like it would be easy talking and I had an idea that I might be able to slice a piece of cake for myself when I visited the doc’s house.
“Jesus, Sally!” I said, hearing her cry into the silence. “What’s the matter?”
“No — nothing.”
“You sure?”
I could still hear her crying, but her voice sounded fairly steady.
“I’m all right.” Then, “Thanks, Nicky.”
She hung up and I sat there talking to myself in the booth. I knew that something was wrong with Sally. And I knew that it wasn’t just because I couldn’t take her out to work that night. What the hell, I’d only been able to take her a couple of times since she�
��d started working out there. There hadn’t been anything between us, nothing at all. She was a good-looking number and I was interested in her in more ways than one, but she’d stayed on her side of the wide seat in the Buick and we’d only done a little talking about this or that.
I went out to the counter and surprised the girl and ordered a been in and made their deposits, but they hadn’t hung around. Dell had been the last one called into the inner sanctum and I’d still been there, waiting on the girl to come back from the post office, when he’d come out, not walking straight because the tears were in his eyes and everything was coming down around him.
“I’ll get my final next week,” he said.
That meant that he’d be out with George Austin all the next week, going into every house where Northern had an account, checking the premium books and putting his initials in there in green — if they were right.
“There isn’t anything else wrong, is there, Dell? I mean I know about the tombstones and how you got the names in the graveyard and wrote the policies and paid the first premium yourself. It was a dumb thing to do, but I guess you thought it was all right or you wouldn’t have done it.”
Dell walked over to the window and looked out, down into Park Place where he’d probably looked a thousand times before.
“It was one way to get money,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He turned away from the window, quickly. I could see that he was still having trouble keeping his eyes dry.
“But it wasn’t just that, Nicky. You’re new in this business and there’s some things you don’t know, can’t feel. I’ve been on this same debit for five years. I know the people and they know me. We know each other too well. We know each other so good that none of them have looked like prospects for the last two years.”
“I can see how it could happen.”
“But you don’t,” he said. “You can’t. It’s one of those things that you have to learn in this business. They ought to switch guys around on the debits every two or three years.”
