by Orrie Hitt
“I still don’t see what she had to gain,” I said. “As soon as I got to the car and found the insurance policy on him gone, I knew that she’d taken it and that she’d done it for the money. But I don’t know why. It wouldn’t have worked.”
The sergeant favored me with a tight smile. “It might have worked to the extent of fifty thousand dollars,” he said.
“I don’t see how. The policy was obtained under fraud. The guy had a cancer.”
“Mr. Schofield didn’t have a cancer, Mr. Weaver.” I could only stare at him.
“There was nothing actually wrong with the man, Mr. Weaver. I understand he had a peculiar voice, but he’d had it all his life. There was nothing organic about it. The autopsy showed that.”
“Then why didn’t she have him examined for the insurance?” That was, I knew, a dumb question.
The sergeant’s smile broadened.
“He had lived with her for a number of years. He knew her better than anyone. Do you think, knowing some of the things he must have known, that he’d have sat around while she put a price like that on his head. Hell, no! He wasn’t that stupid. She had to get the right kind of a — dope — to go along with her on it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Don’t mention it.” He glanced at his report and then put it down again.
“I’d have kicked her claim right in the head,” I said. “She’d never have gotten away with it.”
He looked at me intently for a long minute.
“That’s why I say, Mr. Weaver, we will never know all of it. Had she placed you in such a position that you might have killed him, or thought you had, you wouldn’t have said a word.”
“I suppose not.”
“And had you been killed, along with him, you still wouldn’t have said anything.”
Somehow, I knew that this last was the way she had planned it. Right at that moment I felt lucky not to be sporting a pair of wings.
“There is some more you should know, Mr. Weaver.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t have to tell you, but I think I should.”
“I’m waiting.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out four or five pictures. He spread them out on the table. I didn’t look at them. I knew what they were. Pictures of Irene. Naked.
“We found others,” the sergeant said. “Lots of them in a box in the cellar. Some were just of her. Some were with other women. And some were with men. Different men, Mr. Weaver. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
My voice was hollow, like it was coming out of a huge drum.
“It was a business with her,” I said. “And with him. They were in it together.”
“There’s something more, Mr. Weaver.” He picked up the pictures and tore them into small pieces. “It’s not going to make you happy.”
“What has?”
He referred to another slip of paper, then slid everything off the table into a brown leather case.
“Her prints were on file with the FBI. At the age of fifteen she was picked up in New York and booked as a common prostitute. A year later a man was arrested for transporting her over a state line — New York to New Jersey — for immoral purposes. The next year she was arrested for performing at a private party. After she married Schofield, she sort of — ”
“Is there anything more?” I wanted to know, standing in the doorway.
He snapped the case shut, stood up.
“No,” he said. “Nothing more. Isn’t that enough?”
I walked out through the police room and down the steps to the street. The air felt good. It felt clean. And I felt dirty. Like I needed half a dozen baths as fast as I could take them.
But I had something else I had to do before I could get around to that. It was one way of making myself feel clean and normal.
Austin climbed into the car as I started the motor.
“Drop me off at the office,” he said.
We drove a short distance in silence.
“You made a mess of things, Nicky.”
“Why keep reminding me of it?”
“I won’t.” He lit a cigar and filled the car with smoke. “You like the insurance business, don’t you, Nicky?”
“It’s all right.”
“There was another thing that girl was dumb about,” he said. “She didn’t know it, but you hadn’t deposited the first premium on that policy. Why hadn’t you, Nicky?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There seemed to be plenty of time.”
“Maybe you were thinking it over. Maybe you didn’t know it.”
“Maybe.”
I parked the car in front of the office. “Have fun,” I said.
“I’ll expect you back to work on Monday,” Austin said. I looked at him and he grinned.
“Ever since you came in and laid the facts on the line, clean with me, I’ve been thinking about it. Naturally, I had to be sure. That’s why I picked up your book. Then I got to talking with the police and after all I’ve heard — well, I might have been tempted myself.”
He was using the right words to describe it.
“I didn’t carry it to the home office,” he went on. “I’m the manager of this district, Nicky. That’s what I get paid for. So I earn my money.”
“What about the policy?” I asked.
He shrugged and got out of the car.
“Forget it. I don’t know nothing about that. The guy died and the policy hadn’t been delivered. Thank God the police believed us and gave it to me. We just send it back as untaken. You’ll get stuck for the five-dollar medical fee.”
We both laughed at that one.
“Oh, I almost didn’t tell you, Nicky.” He glanced off down the street, away from me. “There was a woman called in and said she wanted to get in touch with you. She said she wanted to help — if she could. I guess you know who it was?”
“Yeah.”
He slammed the door.
“See you Monday,” he said. Then, “She’s a good kid, Nicky. Think it over.”
It wasn’t very far from the office and I got over there in no time at all. Her car was parked in the driveway and I pulled in behind that. She had left the trunk open and there was a lunch basket in there, covered over with a white napkin. She was just coming out of the garage, carrying a rake and a small sickle.
I went over and took them away from her.
“Hello, Bess,” I said.
“How are you, Nicky?”
“Okay.”
I tried to get the rake into the trunk of her car but it wouldn’t fit. I took the basket and the rest of the stuff around to the back of the Buick.
“More room in here,” I said. Then, “You must be going to stay for a week, with a lunch like that.”
She laughed and her brown eyes glowed soft.
“I was going to pick up the children at my mother’s,” she said. “The factory laid everybody off for the rest of the week and I thought it would be a good way to spend the day.”
“A fine way,” I said. I couldn’t think of a better one.
She got in beside me and her black shorts pulled up high on her brown legs. I knew that her breasts were there under the halter, round and smooth, but I hardly noticed them. I was looking into her eyes, trying to find something, watching it come right out at me.
“I read about it in the papers,” she said. “I’m sorry, Nicky.”
“There are some things they didn’t print.”
“Yes,” she said. “I imagined that.”
“I want to tell you,” I said. “All of it.”
Her face was close.
“You don’t have to. Not now.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say so I bent and kissed her. Her lips burned warm from the fire that flamed inside. She put her head on my shoulder and lay back, closing her eyes.
“I had to call you that morning,” she said. “She knew. I could feel it. I couldn’t go on that way.”
She sat up quickly
. I could see the tears in the corners of her eyes. I took out my handkerchief and wiped them away, one at a time.
“Oh, Nicky!” she said. “The children will be furious! We’re late already!”
Our lips touched again and I started the car. I put it in gear and backed out into the street. I could tell her some other time. I knew that she would understand. But right now we had more important things to do.
We had to get out to the lake and put in a full day’s work before darkness came to Pine Valley.
Later, that night, we might drive out to the hotel and catch Sally’s act, the last one she would give before she married that orchestra guy.
Whatever Bess wanted to do would be all right with me.
I’LL CALL EVERY MONDAY
by ORRIE HITT
Nicky Weaver knew plenty about insurance — and women.
There was Sally, just a kid who didn’t know what it was all about, and who turned to Nicky for a lesson. Later, much later, she gave Nicky a demonstration of what she had learned. And there was Bess who, in her quiet way, knew much more than Nicky was willing to admit. But, most of all, there was Irene — blonde, curvy, beautiful Irene — who told Nicky to come back on Monday. She also told Nicky other things — about her husband, the things he did, what he was — driving Nicky down a fast, dangerous road.
Set in a small New York town, this is the story of a smart life insurance man and a woman of design. Nicky was pretty sure that he knew how to beat his own company, using his own money, and he took the risk. He didn’t think much about what might happen if he should fail. He couldn’t think. Only about her. And this was the one thing that he had to do before she really belonged to him.
I’ll Call Every Monday is a frank book — a book of lust and love and violence. But it is also the story of flesh-and-blood people, of human beings caught in a spinning circle of desire.
There will be insurance agents who will say that it couldn’t be done, but Nicky Weaver knew better than that. He knew that he could do it — and that she would be there waiting for him.
You’ll like Nicky and the fast, uncensored life that he leads. And you’ll understand — if you’re human — why it happened the way it did.
If you liked I’ll Call Every Monday check out:
The Sucker
1
IT WAS early in the morning, not yet seven, when somebody out in front of the garage leaned an elbow down hard on a car horn. I cursed whoever it was and jerked the coffee pot off the rear burner.
“Slade!”
That was Cleo, in the next room.
I grinned, and shoved the coffee pot back on the fire. In a few minutes she would be up, wandering around in that red robe which kept falling open all the time. Some day, I figured, she was going to lose that robe. I didn’t know what I’d do if she did. I grinned again. Like hell I didn’t know.
“Hey, Slade, somebody’s out there!”
“I hear them, Cleo. Get up. Coffee’s on.”
Reluctantly I took my jacket from a nail, listening for her to yell some more, but she didn’t. It wasn’t so much the cold and the rain outside. I guess that after three weeks I just was pretty much fed up with Litchfield. I didn’t much care whether the garage did any business or not. At least, not this early in the morning.
Cleo had the only bedroom in the clapboard living quarters. I’d been losing my sleep on a cot set up alongside the grease pit, wondering all the time how it might be if she wasn’t so innocent and young.
I slid into the jacket, forced myself to go outside into the cold March rain. The car was parked alongside the gas pumps. It was a late Ford convertible, fire-engine red, and a guy had the hood up, stood there looking in at the motor.
I said, “The wires will get wet and then it won’t run at all.”
“Well, it’s not running anyway.”
The man stood up and shook the rain out of his hair. He was pretty tall, around six feet, and his face had a smooth, clean look to it.
“What seems to be the trouble?”
He lowered the hood and it closed with a slam.
“Radiator hose came loose,” he said. “Let all the damn water and anti-freeze out.”
The rain was coming down harder now, pouring out of the sky through a low fog. The wind was cold and sharp.
“We’ll run it in on the grease rack,” I said. “Nuts to working out here on it.”
The man glanced around, looking uncomfortable.
“It won’t cost you much,” I said. “If that’s what’s bothering you.”
“No, it isn’t that. Do you have a men’s room?”
“Sure.” We had a men’s room — if Cleo wasn’t already in it. “Around the corner, and down to the end of the building. It’s the door with the rope handle on it. The other one goes to the cellar.”
He went off through the rain, jumping across the puddles that lay brown and deep in the clay yard. In stormy weather the place looked almost worse than it was, if that were possible. The boards on the side of the shack were weatherbeaten and curled and they took on an ugly black appearance when they were wet. There were two windows in front, close to the ground, and they were both cracked. Some old tires and a couple of rusty car bodies lay scattered around in the high weeds.
I shrugged and went over and opened the door to the grease rack. It wasn’t exactly a rack, just a pit dug into the ground, and the oil down inside smelled like fish on a beach in hot sun. I pushed the cot out of the way, up against the wall.
Walking back to the car, I noticed the fancy wire wheels and the way the thing had been channeled and lowered in the rear. I’d never cared much for those real continental tire kits that stuck out past the trunk, but on this car it looked pretty good. Maybe it was because of the passenger inside.
“Hello,” I said. I slid in behind the wheel and closed the door. “I didn’t know anybody else was in here.”
“Well, you know it now,” she said.
They’d had the heater going and she had slipped out of her coat, down to a black dress with rather long sleeves. The dress was slashed low in front, halfway down to her middle, and she looked as if she was going to crawl out of the top of it any second. She had black hair, as black as the dress, and it fell in deep waves across her shoulders. Her complexion was good, not white and not pink, and her eyes seemed just a shade lighter than her hair. Her eyebrows were naturally arched, not the plucked and penciled kind, and she had a good nose. But it was her mouth that I noticed most. She had full red lips, wet and drooping just a trifle at the corners. Expensive lips. The sultry type that could get a guy in trouble.
I started the car.
“Dual exhausts,” I said, listening to the rumble. I goosed the engine and it snarled, backing off sharply. “Plenty of power. Plenty.”
“Seventy in second,” she said. “I don’t know what it will do in low.”
I put the car in gear but I kept watching her, the way she stretched out, her legs long and straight, her knees coming out from under the hem of her dress. She yawned, arching her body, and I thought she was going to punch a couple of holes in the top of the convertible.
I drove the car inside and parked it over the pit. The air was cold but I left the door open just to let the stink blow out. By the time I got the hood up and the extension light rigged, the guy was back from the john.
“Just a clamp come loose,” I told him. “It’ll only take a minute.”
He nodded and went around the car.
“You want to get out, Ruth?” he asked the girl.
She said something about her coat and he opened the door for her. He reached in and got the coat and when she held her arms back for it I expected that dress to rip wide open for sure.
“I hope we’re not here long,” she said. I could feel her nose going to work on that old oil in the pit. She came around the car, glancing down at my cot like it was something that I’d hauled up from the village dump. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“You�
��re not the only one,” I told her.
I put the clamp on and tightened it up. The hose was new, good stuff, and it wasn’t any trouble at all. I noticed the four carbs in a row on the manifold, chromed up bright, and the set of heads that looked like they were polished every morning.
“You a rodder?” I asked the guy. I was surprised because to me he looked a little old for it; thirty, maybe thirty-five.
“I sell the stuff,” he said. “Mostly mail order.”
“Looks like apple pie,” I said, admiring the engine.
He smiled and nodded. “Ever hear of Rockland Motors?”
“Can’t say I have — but I don’t keep up with things so good.”
“I told you we spend too much for advertising,” the girl said.
The guy started belly-aching about people not reading stuff sometimes and I went to the faucet and filled a can with water. The smell of the perking coffee came through the cracks in the building and I suddenly felt hungry.
“You want anti-freeze in this?” I wanted to know.
“To hell with it,” the guy said.
It can get pretty cold in the hills during March, even in lower New York State, but it was no skin off my rump so I dumped in the water.
“How about the battery?” the guy asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Anything.”
“And the windshield,” the girl said. “Inside and out.”
She stood there impatiently and I could see that her lines were fast and trim, built for speed and mileage.
“You can have anything you want,” I told her.
I got the sponge and did the windshield first. She watched me, eyebrows arched, as if she were putting the cot and the smell of the oil together and could not make them quite add up to me. I knew I shouldn’t, but I kept staring at her. I kept staring and it made her smile and that hit me low down in the guts, twisting them. I could almost feel my hands running along the side of her chin, touching the softness, going down her neck, maybe hurting her a little, sliding further down. I started to sweat and I shut my eyes, trying to see Kathy again, trying to hate this one, too. But when I opened them she was still there, only she wasn’t smiling and she’d drawn her coat up tight. And she didn’t look at all like Kathy. She didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen before.
