“Well, look—I doubt very seriously anybody could hand you a line six years long, so if he was really serious why didn’t he get a divorce?”
“He and his wife were both Catholics.”
“I see. And now that he can remarry—”
“Yes,” she said. “You see.”
“And I see something more. You’ll never get away with it.”
“Yes—”
“Look. He took everything you could give him for six years, and then when he finally could get married he jilted you for somebody else. If he’s killed, it’ll take the police about twenty minutes to figure it out.”
“You underestimate me,” she broke in. “I’m going to take a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars away from him, and kill him. And nobody will ever suspect I did it, for the simple reason they won’t even know it was done at all. Does that satisfy you?”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be done.”
She sighed. “You’re forgetting something I told you. That I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else on earth. I’m going to destroy him from the inside.”
“Hold it a minute,” I said. “If you knew so much about him, why didn’t you see this fluff-ball moving in on you?”
“See it? Don’t be ridiculous. I saw every stage of it before it even happened, but what do you suggest I should have done about it? Compete with a twenty-three-year-old professional virgin, after he was already tired of me? I saw it, all right; I had a front-row seat. He hired her as a stenographer, and I had the honor and privilege of training her. Sometimes I wake up at night—”
“If it’s that kind of thing,” I said, “why the money angle?”
“Money is important to me. I like success. I poured everything I had into making him one, thinking I was doing it for both of us. Do you think I’m going to move aside now and give it up? Let him hand it all to some simpering and feather-brained little bitch who can’t even balance a check book?”
“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.
“All right. First, about the apartment. We had to have a quiet place where we could work without being disturbed and with no chance of being overheard. The motel simply wouldn’t do. I was registered there under my right name, of course, and it’s imperative that no one ever finds out that I even know you—”
I interrupted her. “What about those detectives you’ve had following me around?”
“That’s a good point. I used another name, and paid them in cash. The fact they know your name is of no significance at all unless you can be traced to me in some way. I’m the one who knows Harris Chapman.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I rented the apartment on a six months’ lease, under your name. I’m Mrs. J. L. Forbes, and there’s nothing to connect me with the Mrs. Forsyth who stayed briefly at the Golden Horn. There’s no reason for you not to use your right name; you have nothing to hide, and you can go right on living here afterwards if you like. No one will notice if you’re gone from time to time, as you will be. It’s handled by a rental agency. The people who have the other apartment won’t be here until some time in December, so we have it all to ourselves and don’t have to worry about being heard through the walls.
“We don’t have much time. Today is the fifth, and he’ll be here the night of the thirteenth. In addition, I have to go to Nassau and New York—”
“Why?”
“Simply to prove I’ve been there. When I resigned and left on this trip, Miami Beach, Nassau, and New York were the three places I was going. If I changed my plans and spent all my time here it might look suspicious afterwards, especially since this is the place Harris Chapman is going to disappear. So I’ll go to both places long enough to send the usual asinine postcards and bring back some souvenir gifts. That means I’ll be gone from here about four days of the eight we have in which to coach you. However, we’ll use the tape recorder and you’ll have the tapes to study while I’m gone.”
“You’re sure he’s coming here?”
Yes. I made all the reservations for him. He goes on one big-game fishing trip every year, for his vacation. For the past two years he’s gone to Acapulco, but this time he’s coming to Florida again.”
“And somewhere along the line I’m going to take his place?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
”Just under two weeks. I think it can be done in twelve days.”
“Describe him,” I said.
“Apart from the fact you’re both about six feet, you don’t resemble each other at all, if that’s what you mean.”
“What else would I mean? You don’t think he’s going to be invisible for those twelve days, do you? He may be a voice on the telephone to the people at home, but down here— But never mind. Go ahead and describe him.”
“He’s thirty-nine. Six feet. A hundred and ninety-five pounds. Gray eyes. Somewhat fair complexion, always with a tan. Brown hair, beginning to gray at the temples except that he touches it up.”
“That’ll do,” I said. “I’m twenty-eight. The height is the same within probably an inch, but I’m fifteen pounds lighter. Blue eyes. Darker complexion. And hair that’s just a shade from being black. Q.E.D.”
“It’s nowhere near that simple,” she cut in impatiently. “In the first place, any police officer could write a book on the general unreliability of descriptions. And secondly, if you’ve had acting experience, you should know what I m driving at. You’re not merely trying to look like Harris Chapman—you’re assuming the whole character of Harris Chapman. And further, this same character projected quite logically into a strange and finally shattering experience—which is going to be what the witnesses will remember, and not the color of his hair. Incidentally, he wears a hat anyway. You’re simply going to make them remember the wrong things.”
“Such as?”
“Let me give you a brief sketch for a start. He’s quite vain about his appearance, uses a sun lamp in winter to keep his tan intact, and wears a thin, pencil-line mustache because he thinks his upper hp is too long. He has a tendency toward hypochondria and carries round a miniature drugstore with him, and worries constantly and probably needlessly about two things—cancer and mental illness, the latter because he has an older brother who cracked up in his late teens. When that smoking and lung cancer thing first started several years ago, he not only switched over to filter cigarettes, but smoked them in a filter holder.
“He wears glasses—horn-rims—and is somewhat hard of hearing in his left ear, the result of a diving accident when he was sixteen, though he refuses to admit it and claims his hearing is perfect in both ears. I’m perhaps making him sound doddering and fatuous, which he isn’t at all; he’s a hellishly attractive man with a lot of drive, but I’m stressing these quirks and idiosyncrasies for a reason—”
“Sure,” I said impatiently. “They’re character tags, and props. But, look—so I do wear horn-rimmed glasses, grow a mustache, use a long cigarette holder, and go round tossing pills into my face, what does it buy? I still won’t look like him, and I wouldn’t fool anybody who’s seen him since he was fifteen.”
“You won’t have to, obviously. None of the people you’ll be in contact will ever have seen him at all. And they never will.”
“But you’re forgetting something. As soon as he disappears, they’re sure as hell going to see photographs of him.”
“No,” she said. “That’ll be taken care of.”
“How?” I asked.
To be of any value in tracing him they’d have to be good likenesses and taken within the past ten years. There aren’t too many. I have most of them, and I know where the others are. He had one made for that saccharine little bitch about two months ago, but we can forget it. It’s one of those gooey and dramatic things with a ton of glamor and no resemblance.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me the rest of it.”
She told me. She talked for twenty minutes, and when she was through I was glad she di
dn’t hate me. Chapman didn’t have a chance. It was brilliant, and it was deadly, and I couldn’t see a flaw in it anywhere.
* * *
I awoke early the next morning, before seven o’clock, but she was already up. She stood in the doorway in blue lounging pajamas, sipping a glass of orange juice.
“The coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she said.
I lit a cigarette and propped myself on an elbow to look at her. “If I were a sculptor, I’d capture that head or go crazy and kill myself.”
She glanced coolly at her watch. “Never mind capturing my head; you’re supposed to assimilate what’s in it, and we start in ten minutes. When you shave, don’t forget the mustache.”
She sounded crisp and efficient, and I found out before the day was over I didn’t know the half of it. She had a genius for organizing material, and she was a slave-driver. By the time I’d showered and put on light slacks and a T-shirt, she had my coffee and orange juice ready on the coffee table in the living room and was seated with hers on one of the hassocks at the other end of it. Between us was the tape recorder. The microphone was mounted on a little stand, facing her, and beside it were some boxes of tape and two stenographer’s notebooks.
“I’ll be working from shorthand notes,” she said, “so there’ll be no lost motion, and when we come to a stop we’ll stop the tape. But before we start, we’d better break the job down and analyze it.”
”Right,” I said. “How many people do I have to talk to, and how often?”
“Two,” she said. “Chris Lundgren at the broker’s office in New Orleans, nearly every day. And to her, every day. Her name, incidentally, is Coral Blaine.”
I drank some of the coffee, and thought about it. “It’s rough. Look at it—I’ve got to know everything about Chapman that these people know, and everything about these people that Chapman knows, plus a thousand business details and dozens of other people. It’s damn near impossible.”
She interrupted. “Of course it’s impossible; no mind could absorb all that in eight days. But you don’t have to.”
“No?”
“Of course not.” She waved a slim hand. “You don’t have to pass an examination in all this stuff; all you have to do is carry on two or three short telephone conversations each day without making a really dangerous mistake. analyze it; what does it take, actually? A quick mind—which you have—some ability in bluffing and improvising, a grasp of most of the salient and obvious facts and a few of the ones that only Harris Chapman could possibly know, and there you are—the illusion is complete. And don’t forget, you’re always in control of the conversation; you’re the boss. When you see you’re about to get in over your head, change the subject. And in the end, there’s nothing connecting you but a piece of wire. Break it. And call back later with the right information. You’ll have a prompter.”
“You mean the tapes?”
She nodded. “They’ll be numbered, and you’ll know what’s covered in each one.”
“Good,” I said.
She smiled. “And don’t forget, it’s only the first week you have to be careful. After that, it doesn’t matter.”
I looked at her. I’d forgotten that, and it was one of the really brilliant angles of the whole thing. This girl was clever. And all she wanted out of life was to kill a man. It seemed a senseless waste. The thought startled me, and I shrugged it off. It was her life, wasn’t it?
“All right,” I said. “Roll One.”
* * *
“Harris Chapman was born in Thomaston April fourteen, nineteen-eighteen. Father’s name: John W. Chapman. Owned the Ford agency, and was one of the largest stockholders in the Thomaston State Bank. His mother’s maiden name was Mary Burke, and she was the only child of a Thomaston attorney. John W. sold out and retired in nineteen-forty, and moved to California. Both still living, in La Jolla.
“Only two children. Keith is two years older than Harris. The summer he was nineteen, after his freshman year at Tulane, he hit a twelve-year-old girl with his car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but shortly afterwards he began to go to pieces. He quit sleeping, or if he did sleep nobody could figure out when, and lost weight and became withdrawn. It was the onset of schizophrenia, of course, and probably the accident had little or nothing to do with it. At any rate, his condition became hopeless, and he’s spent more than half the past twenty-two years in one mental institution or another.
“Harris has always been haunted by this, as I told you, particularly because there had been a prior case of mental illness in the family, a great uncle or something. Fear of an hereditary taint, you see. Foolish, of course, but I told you he has a tendency toward hypochondria.
“He finished high school in nineteen-thirty-six. His mother wanted him to go to a Catholic school, so he went to Notre Dame. He graduated in nineteen-forty-one, and Pearl Harbor caught him in his first year at Tulane Law School.”
She stopped the tape, and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for her. “Any questions?” she asked.
“One,” I said. “Bring me up to date on the brother. Where is he now?”
“La Jolla, with his parents.” She pressed the “Record” switch and the tape began to roll again. “Harris finished out the term at Tulane and went in the Navy, and was commissioned an ensign that summer. He just barely got past the physical, with that bad ear.”
He’d had a tour of sea duty on an aircraft carrier. She went on talking. She’d pushed the hassock aside now and was sitting cross-legged on the rug with the stenographic notebook between her knees. I leaned back against a chair and watched her, studying the proud and slender face that could have been downright arrogant except for the saving loveliness of the eyes. It occurred to me she was the most striking-looking, and most fascinating, woman I’d ever seen.
She reached over and stopped the tape. “Are you listening?” she asked crisply.
“Sure,” I said, and repeated the last thing she’d said. Chapman had been transferred to shore duty in Seattle.”
“Oh,” she said. “The way you were looking at me—”
“Simply because I think you’re beautiful.”
She sighed. Going into the bedroom, she returned with a pillow. She dropped it beside the coffee table. “Lie down, facing the other way, and close your eyes. Concentrate.”
I lay down. She went on, pausing now and then to arrange her notes so there wouldn’t be any blank areas on the tape. Chapman was a full lieutenant at the end of the war. He went back to Tulane Law School at the beginning of the spring term in 1946, and before the end of it he was married to a New Orleans girl he met at a Mardi Gras ball. Her name was Grace Trahan. She was a slight, dark girl with a delicate constitution, very pretty in an ethereal sort of way, and apparently frigid to the point of phobia.
“He never said much about it,” she went on, “but I gather it was pretty horrible on their wedding night, and never did get any better. Psychic trauma of some kind, I suppose; probably something that happened in her childhood.”
They tried to make a go of it, but there were other factors besides her aversion to the bed. She thought they should have more financial help from his parents instead of struggling along on the GI Bill. And she didn’t want to leave New Orleans. Less than a year after he’d finished law school and moved back to Thomaston to open his office, they separated. She went home to mother. Her health was growing worse. She was anemic, among other things.
Marian stopped the tape again. I looked at my watch and saw with surprise it was after ten. “How are you getting it?” she asked.
“Fine,” I said. I sat up and lit cigarettes, and leaned back against the chair. “But when do you actually appear on the scene?”
“Very shortly,” she replied. “But I want to finish out this roll exclusively with Harris. It’ll be easier to refer to later.”
She made some more notes, started the tape, and went on, describing the town, the small country club, and some of his friends. We began to near the
end of the roll.
“He has a fast, aggressive way of walking. He won’t admit it, but he can’t carry liquor very well. Becomes argumentative if he has too much, which is usually anything beyond the third Martini. Music means nothing to him, and he’s a poor dancer. For the past two years on these annual fishing trips he’s picked up girls, probably very young ones. He doesn’t know that I’m aware of this, but I doubt he’d have bothered to he about it. After all, we weren’t married.
“Maybe it’s because of the legal training and courtroom experience, but he’s totally unafraid of scenes and will argue with anybody, anywhere. Waiters impress him not at all, and I’ve been through some bad moments when he’s sent the same dish back three times, or refused to tip a waiter who gave poor service. I don’t mean he’s loudmouthed or uncouth, but he is demanding and perhaps rather insensitive. He always adds up a bill before he pays it. He buys a new Cadillac every year. He’s a very poor driver, and drives far too fast. He’s very self-assured with women, the same as you are. You’ll have no trouble playing him. When they describe you afterwards, if you learn all this, they’re going to be describing Harris Chapman to the last gesture.”
She stopped the machine, and stood up. “All right. Re-roll that tape and start playing it back. I’ll run out and get us some sandwiches.”
“Incidentally, what about the housekeeping arrangements? Do we go out for dinner?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’ll be all right if we go round to different places so we won’t be remembered. We can fix our own coffee and orange juice for breakfast, and have sandwiches for lunch.”
“You turned the car back?”
“Yes. After all, I’m supposed to be in Nassau. You’ll rent one, of course, before he gets here, but in the meantime we can use cabs. All right, Jerry; re-roll that tape and get busy.”
She went into the bedroom. I started the tape, turned up the volume, and walked up and down as I listened to it. The bedroom door was open. I stepped inside. The blue pajamas were tossed casually on the bed and she was beyond it with her back turned, wearing only bra and pants as she stood before the clothes closet. I looked at the long and exquisitely slender legs, ever so faintly tanned below the line of her swim suit and pure ivory above as they flowed into the triangular wisp of undergarment about her hips.
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