by Orrie Hitt
“Well, then, I’ll drive over to the doctor’s with you,” I said. I laughed, like I meant it. “Moral support, you know.”
Austin nodded his head approvingly.
“Pick me up at the station at two,” she said. “He won’t wait for the train. I’ll leave the oven of the gas stove turned on and he’ll have to come back to shut that off.”
“All right,” I said. “At two.”
“Don’t fail me, darling.”
“Of course not.”
“I love you, Nicky.”
“You could double that,” I said. “Any time you want to, Mr. Schofield.”
I watched the smile crawl over Austin’s face. He was thinking of fifty thousand of insurance. I was thinking of something else.
We said good-bye and I hung up. I could feel the sweat standing out on my forehead, running in tiny rivulets from my armpits down across my ribs. The street noises that came in through the open window sounded unreal and far away.
“That’s the way to do it,” Austin said. “Nail them down quick.”
“Sure.”
“The big ones are easier than the little ones.”
“That’s right.”
“That’ll be a big boost for the district,” he said. “Big enough for a day off?” I wanted to know. “Why not?”
“How about tomorrow?”
Friday was pay day, and most of the morning was taken up with a sales meeting and coffee in the hole-in-the-wall across the street. The afternoon was a lost cause.
“Have fun,” he said, and started figuring how many points that fifty would give the district on the country-wide production sheet.
There was no one out in the agents’ room and that suited me fine. By Monday they would forget about the Schofield application, except as referring to it as my “big case” and when it might be issued, if I thought I could place it, and other unimportant details. Now that the fat was in the fire I wanted them to forget about it as quickly as possible. In the insurance business that means about six weeks. After that period of time nobody knows, or seems to care, what anybody else has done in the past. By that time the district has a new quota.
“You going to take care of that death claim on Ragna Dolan?” Marie wanted to know.
“I might as well.”
“Here’s the papers, Nicky — right in your mailbox.”
I went over and got the blue forms out from behind the little glass door. I made a mental note of the parents’ address and stuffed the papers in my pocket. Then I put the debit book in my desk and left it there. I wouldn’t have any use for that thing until the first of the week.
Erie Street was on the far side of town, pushed up against the railroad tracks from which it had received its name, just a jumble of houses and sidewalks and kids’ toys and broken-down cars. I found the Dolan home in the middle of the block.
There was a bottle of beer on the kitchen table.
“Drink?” Mrs. Dolan asked me. She was a large woman, with stringy blond hair and a brewer’s breath that would floor a horse.
“Thanks, no.”
“Hotter than a bastard,” Dolan said, pouring himself some beer. He was a puny little guy with a dirty face. “Well, how much are we gettin’?” he wanted to know.
I told him five hundred. I didn’t bother explaining that she had knocked herself off on the last day of the grace period, or the provisions of the extended insurance clause, or anything like that. He wasn’t interested in anything except the money. So I just started asking them questions and filling out the form. About half-way through I had to wait while they settled an argument as to whether they would buy a car or a television set with the proceeds of the policy. Neither one of them mentioned the undertaker. Finally, I got going on the form again, after they had decided to buy both, making a down payment on each.
I had them sign the forms and got ready to go.
“The son-of-a-bitch that got into her ought to be made to pay,” the father said, polishing off the bottle of beer. I had an idea that Dell had paid plenty.
“You’d have thought she’d have told us,” Mrs. Dolan complained as I kicked the door open.
“Yeah,” I said, and went down the steps.
I drove downtown and had dinner in a restaurant not far from the station. It was still early, so I sat around reading the News and wondering if the Giants had a chance of clinching last place in the National League.
I parked in front of the station at exactly two. I started to get out of the car, but she was already coming out the door. She was dressed in a tan dress that fitted her like an extra sunburn, and she carried a small overnight bag in one hand. Her blond hair glistened in the sun, and the smile on her lips and in her eyes were for me alone.
“Nicky!” she breathed, getting in.
I threw the bag in back.
“I guess you left the gas oven on,” I said.
The wind caught at her hair as we slid into the street.
“He was sore as hell.”
I laughed, beat the light at the corner, and turned left on 17K. A couple of blocks further on we hit the city line. I poured the power to the Buick and we swallowed up the road.
She moved over close to me, her head on my shoulder, her soft hair flying up around my face. I got one arm around her and cupped one breast.
“Nicky,” she said, looking up at me, her face serious. “Nicky, I’m scared.”
“How will he know?”
“Not that,” she said. “For you. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
I’d thought it all over very carefully.
“You won’t,” I said.
She kissed me on the cheek.
“I wish I could be sure, Nicky.”
I went back to the one thing that we had talked about, the one thing that could call a halt to what we were about to do. “You could divorce him, Irene,” I said.
“You know how it would be,” she said. “He’d never leave us alone. Those pictures would follow us, no matter where we went. He’d see to that. And then something would happen. Something terrible.”
She was so right that I got scared just thinking about it.
“But we don’t have to do anything about the insurance,” she said. “We can let it go.”
And I knew that we couldn’t. As long as he lived he would use her, use her body just as he had been using it. There was no telling what, in a moment of anger, she might do about it. But if the insurance was there on his life, the insurance that said he must die the way God intended him to die, she might not ever do anything about it. She wouldn’t be tempted. And neither would I.
“I still don’t see how you’re going to work it,” she said.
“There’s nothing to it.”
“Well, tell me.”
I slowed the car, relaxing my mind from the road, so that I could get it across to her.
“You remember me asking you all about his personal history? Where he was born, and stuff like that?”
She nodded.
“Well, I just filled out an application in his name, using that information, and signed it. That’s the only bad point in the whole thing. Me signing it. I guess you could call it intent to defraud.”
“We can’t do it, Nicky!” she said, tugging on my arm. “We can’t!”
We could. We would. She was right in what she’d said he’d do if she got a divorce. I could see that. And I could also see that if this insurance wasn’t there on his life, holding her back, that some night she’d take a gun and make an ex-artist out of him. Any price I had to pay was better than that.
“It doesn’t figure out as bad as it sounds,” I said. “There’s no question about the policy being issued. I’m about his size and the doctor doesn’t know either one of us, and I’m the one who’ll sign the medical statement. The signatures on both parts of the application will be the same. Insurance companies don’t check that, anyway.”
“They will if he dies,” she said. “For fifty thousand dollars
they’ll tear Pine Valley apart.”
“We can always back out,” I said. “Supposing he doesn’t die for two years?”
“But he will,” she said. “He’s slipping all the time. This morning he had trouble getting a shot down.”
“Well, if he did live that long, we’d be beyond the contestible clause in the policy.”
“I don’t know what that is. I just know that he won’t live that long, Nicky.”
“All right. What if he dies in six months? So what? There are a couple of things we could do and not get in any trouble. I could lay the facts on the line with the company, as the agent, telling them that the insured who has died had attempted to defraud the company. On a deal like that, they’d refund the premiums paid in and be glad to get off so easy. Or, if we don’t want to draw any attention to ourselves, we just let the policy lapse and forget about it. They won’t know in New York whether he’s alive or dead. They’ll just say that I did a lousy underwriting job. Either way we’re out in the open.”
“And if we tried to collect?”
That was the one thing that bothered me. I couldn’t tell, now, what we’d want to do about it — then. Of course, this deal would stand me about six hundred bucks a year in premiums on Shep Schofield’s life, less my regular thirty per cent commissions, but it wasn’t that so much. It was that fifty grand. Anybody will look twice and maybe take a long chance on that kind of money. It was a fifty-thousand-dollar bridge that we’d either cross or burn when we got to it.
“If we submit a claim,” I said, slowly, “we just have to sit tight and let the company hoe gravel. As long as he hasn’t been to any other doctor, except his brother, they won’t be able to find out anything. Life insurance companies are dumb, Irene. They don’t check handwriting — all they check is medical details. If you can pass on that score they give you first prize. I’d say that there’d be a good chance that we could collect.”
She lit cigarettes for us.
“What about this doctor in Newburgh who’s going to examine you? Supposing he saw you again?”
“He won’t.”
“We could always go to South America or some place like that.”
I gave her a good going over with my hand. She squealed and crept in closer.
“Or to bed,” I said.
Near the outskirts of Newburgh we found a tourist court by the side of a lake. The guy gave us the one that sat away from the others, up near the edge of the water. I paid him for two nights’ frolic and carried Irene’s bag inside. It was just the right size for us. There was a two-by-nothing space where we could mix drinks, and a room with a bed where we could do other things.
“I won’t be in town long,” I told her. “Just to get examined and to pick up some food and stuff.”
“I’ll take a nap. And maybe a swim.”
“All right.”
We kissed briefly and I went out to the car. She waved to me from the door as I drove away.
The doctor’s office was off the wide main street in Newburgh and I found that without any trouble. There wasn’t anybody else in the office and the girl told me to go on in. I entered a small white room and found a middle-aged doctor rewinding a fly rod.
“Just thinking about going out and using this thing,” he said.
I told him who I was and what I wanted. He put the fish pole aside and got out a white form.
“Name?”
“Shephard Schofield.”
“Hell of a funny name. Occupation?”
“Artist.”
“No wonder. Where do you live?”
“Pine Valley.”
“How’s the summer business over there? When were you born?”
“October 27, 1916.”
“Where?”
“Port Jervis.”
“I wouldn’t brag about it. Take off your clothes.” I took off my stuff and piled it on a chair. He went on asking questions. Had I ever been sick? No. Ever had the clap? No. “Jump up and down,” he said.
I did that and after he told me to stop he listened to my heart and took my blood pressure. “Could you?”
I took the little glass jar and went over to the sink and did it.
“Put your clothes back on while I test this,” he said.
He went into another room. I got dressed and stood around waiting for him. I looked at the fly rod and saw that he had done a miserable job rewinding it. Pretty soon he came back.
“You’re a good risk,” he said. “I’ll tell them to give you a hundred thousand if you want it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I went out and down to the car. I drove around the block and stopped at a liquor store. I ordered some stuff, good stuff, put a fifty on the counter and picked up two-eight in change. After I put the bottles in the car I went down the street to a grocery store and picked up some cigarettes, ginger ale and club soda. Then I drove back to the cabin.
I carried the bottles and cigarettes in and stacked them on the drainboard of the little sink by the squeaking refrigerator.
“Nicky?”
I walked into the bedroom. It was hard to see in there, because she had pulled the shades all the way down. “Yeah?”
“How did it go?”
Slowly my eyes became accustomed to the darkness in the room. “Fine,” I said. “Healthy as a bull.”
She laughed, low and soft. I heard the swish of the sheet being thrown aside. I went over to the bed and looked down at her. My head started to pound. She didn’t have anything on.
“Prove it,” she murmured.
She didn’t have to ask me twice.
CHAPTER XII
WE SPENT MOST OF SUNDAY MORNING in the lake, swimming and horsing around like a couple of kids. Then we lay down in the sand, side by side, and let the sun burn hot over us.
“I wish that this could last forever, Nicky.”
“Why not?”
“I mean, that we could start out together right now.”
A large fly zoomed near her, and I brushed it away.
“You don’t have to stay with him,” I said. “You can pack it in right now. There’s no law that says you have to.”
She shook her head and looked down at the sand.
“You know how it would be,” she said. “He’d make it hell for us. We wouldn’t have anything except a little more time together. It wouldn’t be worth it. He’d see to that.”
“If he tried anything like that, Irene, I’d — ”
She reached over and put a warm hand across my mouth.
“You see?” she asked, her smile gentle. “You know what would happen. We can’t have that.”
“No.”
“We just have to wait.”
I rolled over in the sand and brought her to me, kissing her. I could feel her full breasts leaping at me through the halter, the rounded lines of her buttocks under my hand.
“We shouldn’t do that out here, Nicky.”
“Can’t I kiss you?”
“Sure. But when you do, I want to do other things.”
“So do I.”
“We’ve done a lot of that in the last couple of days, Nicky.”
“But not enough.”
She laughed and pulled herself loose. She stood up quickly, brown and beautiful in the sun.
“Come around the end of the week,” she said, throwing a handful of sharp sand down on my back.
I got up.
“I didn’t know it was rationed,” I said. “Once a month it is,” she said.
She turned and ran up the slope toward the cabin, her body moving all over and dragging me after her. I knew what she was talking about. Maybe, in a way, I was lucky.
I cleaned up the bottles and the junk that was lying around while she dressed. Then I put on my own clothes, hung the trunks I had borrowed from the court owner on the clothesline and carried our stuff out to the car.
“Our place,” Irene said, glancing back at the little cabin as we swung out of the driveway. “I’ll always think
of it as that.”
“We’ll have another one.”
“That’s all I wait for,” she said.
We drove along slowly, talking some more about the place and how good it had been for us out there. I told her about the time I was a kid and the club I’d worked at, having a whale of a time but not knowing it then. Somehow, it got around to Dell Walters’ wife, and the dreams Dell had had about that place in the country, and how Dell’s widow was clinging to that dream because it was about the only thing she had left.
“What kind of a place is it?” Irene wanted to know.
“I’ve never been there.”
“But you told her you would, didn’t you?”
“What else was I supposed to say — at a time like that?”
“But you could look at it?”
“I suppose so.”
“I don’t know why you don’t.”
She asked me where it was and I told her, as well as I could remember, the directions Mrs. Walters had given me.
“I think I know where it is,” she said. “It’s right on our way home. You cut across a dirt road, right over the mountain. It’s along that. It’s even shorter that way.”
“I’m not in any hurry,” I said.
She squeezed my arm tight.
“I’ll show you the road, when we get to it.”
About ten miles out of town she pointed to a brown dirt road that swung like a snake’s skin off the main highway and up the side of a ridge. The stones caught in the tires and thundered under the fenders of the car.
“This is some goat’s trail,” I told her.
“It’s better further on. The best way is to come in from the other direction.”
After the ridge there was a deep valley and then another ridge, higher than the first one, boring up into the blue sky. When we got to the top of that the road widened out and the pine trees stretched high and straight on either side.
“County line,” she said, as we hit the macadam.
There were a lot of rhododendron bushes and laurel along the sides of the road, looking cool and green in the heat. We passed a parked car and further on we saw a man and woman and a couple of kids picking low huckleberries. The kids had purple stains all over their faces and the woman was yelling something at them. The man grinned at us and we waved back.
