She turned then. I must have taken a step towards her, for she said crisply, “No, you don’t! Outside!” She meant it. She took a slip from a drawer, and slid it over her head.
“I’m sorry, Teacher. But you’re a very exciting girl.”
“Yes, yes, I know.” She tugged the slip down. “I’m irresistible to twenty-eight-year-old wolves. I’m female, breathing, and within reach.”
“Thanks a million,” I said. “From both of us.”
“You’re welcome. Now get out there and get busy. And start the tape over; you’ve missed part of it.”
“So you will give yourself that much?”
She waved a slender hand. “Out, Cyrano.”
Five
I shrugged, and went back to my study of Harris Chapman. She came out after a while and left to get the sandwiches. I looked after her. She could disturb a room by walking through it, and leave it empty by walking out of it. I forced my attention back to the tape. What was the matter with me, anyway?
When she returned, we didn’t even stop while we ate. She asked questions about the things we’d covered so far, and tried to catch me in errors. “Who is Robert Wingard?”
“Robin Wingard,” I said. “He’s manager of the radio station.”
“Good. And Bill McEwen? What does he do?”
“Bill McEwen is a girl.”
She shot me an approving glance. “Very good.”
“Her real name is Billy Jean, she’s twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and she’s half the editorial staff of the paper, and sells advertising.”
“Correct,” she said. “But don’t get too cocky. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface.” She finished half her sandwich, threw the rest of it in the kitchen garbage can, and started a fresh roll of tape on the recorder.
“I was born in Cleveland,” she began. “And went to school at Stanford. My mother died when I was in my early teens, and my father never remarried. He was a physician. A gynecologist, and a good one. In about thirty-five years of practice he must have made considerably over a million dollars, and when he died a few years ago he left an estate of less than twenty thousand. Bad investments. Some day, maybe, somebody will write a book about the investment habits of doctors— But never mind. It was his money. The point I’m trying to make is that it was probably his horrible example that first interested me in business and investment.
When we entered the war she enrolled in a business college for a quick course in shorthand and typing, and went to work in a defense plant. And she liked it, from the first. She was alert, interested, and highly competitive, and in less than a year she was the private secretary to one of the top brass of the firm. In the spring of 1944 she met and married Kenneth Forsyth. He was a flier sent home for reassignment as an instructor at an air base near San Antonio, Texas.
They were happy enough, but she couldn’t stand the boredom of having nothing to do but police a one-room apartment, so she went back to work, this time for the local office of one of the big nationwide brokerage outfits. She immediately fell in love with the stock market as if she’d invented it. Here was something you could get your teeth into; this was the whole world of business and industry, distilled. She studied it with the passionate intensity of another Baruch, trying to learn everything there was to learn about it. Forsyth remained in the service after the end of the war, but was transferred to another field near Dallas. Keeping house still bored her, so she went to work for the Dallas office of the same brokerage house.
Then in 1949 Forsyth was transferred to the air field at Thomaston, Louisiana, and she was out of a job. She found it unbearably dull. She didn’t like small towns and their clique-ridden social life, and for a woman with ambition and a restless mind it was stifling. Then she met Chapman. That changed everything.
He’d just opened his law office, and while he wasn’t very busy he did need somebody once in a while to type briefs and answer the phone. She offered to do it, partly out of boredom and partly because he interested her. And before long he interested her even more. Here was a man with drive, business ability, and daring, and he was wasting himself on a piddling law practice. They were attracted to each other from the beginning.
His first venture, in the process of becoming a millionaire in eight years, was a laundromat, and it was she who prodded him into it.
“He defended the owner of the laundromat in a minor damage suit,” she went on. “And got him off with a minimum judgment, but the man was in financial trouble and couldn’t even pay the legal fee in full. I had an idea and went out and surveyed his place. His trouble was location; he was in the wrong end of town, where most of the families had washing machines of their own, and he had a bad parking problem. To the south of town there was a large colored section swarming with children. I located a building that could be leased, and told Harris about it. Because of his father’s connection with the bank, he had no trouble borrowing the money. He bought the man’s machines at a terrific bargain, and moved them. We got a deacon of one of the colored churches to run it, and I kept the books. Eight months later he sold it for a net profit of six thousand dollars.”
They were on their way. Next came a couple of real-estate speculations that paid off to the tune of better than fourteen thousand. By late 1950 she was working for him full time, and the law practice was only a small part of his operations. He was far over-extended and in debt to his ears, but he was growing, right along with the big business boom of the early 1950’s. Chapman’s wife had left him now, and Marian Forsyth and her husband had had several painful and increasingly bitter arguments about her working for him. People were beginning to talk. She refused to quit. The showdown came in less than six months. Forsyth was transferred again.
The choice was hers, and she made it. She told Forsyth she wanted a divorce, and stayed in Thomaston. She was in love with Chapman.
She had no illusions as to what she was letting herself in for. He couldn’t marry her, as long as his wife was alive, and in a small town no matter how discreet they were with the affair everybody was going to know. I thought of the snubs, and frozen stares. They probably didn’t bother her a great deal, I thought—not during the six busy years while she had Chapman and the fascination of the job. But when he jilted her and left her standing alone and naked in the middle of town— That must have been a long, long mile to the city limits.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “A point’s just occurred to me. You’ve got to have a legitimate excuse for going back, or it won’t look right.”
She stopped the tape. “Of course. But I still own my house there. It will take two weeks at least to sell it and put my furnishings in storage in New Orleans. And don’t forget, I won’t arrive there until he’s left for his vacation, which will give it exactly the right touch.”
She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.
We went on. We finished that roll of tape with a detailed account of how Chapman acquired the rest of his holdings in the next five years and how she’d led him a little at a time into growth stocks in the big bull market from 1950 to 1955, into IBM and Dow Chemical, and Phillips Petroleum, and United Aircraft, and DuPont.
”Always for capital gains,” she went on. “Income wasn’t any good to him any more, not in the tax bracket he was in, or approaching. All those years I’d been studying stocks and the stock market paid off for him. He rode it up all the way. And last summer, when the market showed signs of running out of steam, we began switching to defense holdings—utilities, high-grade preferreds, and bonds. And cash. It’s safe—except from me.”
It was three-thirty when we came to the end of the roll. “Play it back,” she said, already making notes for the next session. I ran it. She fired questions at me until I was dizzy. She put on one of the rolls of recorded conversation between him and Chris Lundgren, and played it through. I listened, studying his speech, while she w
ent out in the kitchen and mixed us two Martinis.
She ht a cigarette, took a sip of her drink, and stopped the machine. “Tell me what you heard.”
“He’s abrupt on the phone,” I said, “at least in business matters. No asking how the other party is, or about families. He says G’bye just once and hangs up. Your name comes out almost Mer’n. He hits the first syllable of DuPont, and the u is iu. Dew-Pont. He slurs hundred a little more than most people. Hunrd. He still uses Roger once in a while, left over from his service days.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good ear. Keep it up.”
We knocked off at seven, changed, and took a cab over to Miami to have dinner at the Top O’ the Columbus. She was a knockout in a dark dress, so very tall and beautifully groomed and poised. It made me feel good to see men—and women—turn to look at her. We sat by one of the big windows looking out over Biscayne Bay and its perimeter of blazing lights.
You make all these other women look like peasants,” I said.
She. smiled. “Honing the old technique, Jerry? Why waste it on me?”
“No. I mean it.”
“Of course, dear. Conditioned reflexes are like that.” Then she went on. “Now here’s a point we have to consider. Lundgren’s voice, of course, you’ll recognize, but you’ve never heard hers.”
I sighed. “That’s easy. Until she identifies herself and I’m sure, I can say we have a bad connection and I can’t hear very well.”
On the way back we ran a test. I got out of the cab at a drugstore not too far away, gave her time to reach the apartment, and called her from the phone booth. She read Lundgren.
“Chris? Chapman,” I said. I asked how the market had closed, discussed some stock or another, and gave an order or two, and then stepped out of character to ask, “What do you think?”
“Good,” she said. “Very good.”
I walked back to the apartment in the warm and ocean-scented darkness, thinking of seventy-five thousand dollars. When I let myself in she was just coming out of the bedroom. She’d taken off the dress and slip and was pulling the blue robe about herself.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe just a shade less abrupt. But it’s a fine point—”
“Stop worrying,” I said. “I can do it.” I took hold of her arms. Then I was holding her tightly in mine and kissing her as if women were going to be transferred to some other planet in the morning.
When she could get her mouth free at last, she murmured, “But I thought we’d work for another hour or two.” Then she relented. “All right, Jerry—”
Enlightened management, I thought, never forgets the importance of employee recreation. If the seal balks, toss him another herring. I started to say something angry and sarcastic, but choked it off. I wanted her so badly I’d take her on any terms at all.
Afterwards, of course, we did go back to work.
* * *
The next day was a repetition of the first. She was relentless. Chapman and Chapman Enterprises and Thomaston ran into my brain until they overflowed. We filled two tapes. I played them back. She questioned me. I played them again. And all the while I was conscious that she herself was taking more and more of my attention. I was thinking about her when I should have been concentrating. I didn’t like it, but there it was.
We went out again for dinner, and came back and worked until eleven. I made love to her. She was as gracious about it, and as accomplished, and as completely unreachable as ever. I lay in the darkness thinking about her. It wasn’t that she was cold, or that she merely endured it. It was worse. It was so unimportant she had trouble even noticing it.
Chapman, I thought, might not be the dirtiest bastard who ever lived, but he was the stupidest. I tried to imagine what she was like before she became numb to everything except remembered humiliation and hatred. The next morning, just at dawn, I awoke to find her struggling in my arms, trying to break free.
“Jerry,” she snapped, “for heaven’s sake, what are you trying to do? Break me in two?”
Oh,” I said stupidly, looking round the room. “I must have been having a bad dream.”
It started to come back to me then. I could see it all with a horrible clarity. I’d been running after her across the Golden Gate bridge, and I’d caught her just before she could leap. I was trying to hold her back.
That day we filled the last roll of tape. She told me everything she knew about Coral Blaine, and she knew a lot—including the fact her name wasn’t Coral at all, but Edna Mae. Apparently she was a believer in the old maxim of military science that you never stop studying the enemy. She described her, psycho-analyzed her, and gave me a complete rundown on the affair from the time Chapman first gave her a job until the engagement was announced.
“I was scared the first time I saw her,” she said. “For years I’d done all the hiring and firing of office personnel. He never interfered, hired anybody himself, or cared. I’ll admit to being quite unfair a couple of times when I fired girls for no other reason than that they had their eyes on him— But never mind. At any rate, when I saw this Blaine number, I had a premonition. Flawless natural blonde, about five-foot-three, and of course only twenty-three years old, but it was that dewy and virginal look that frightened me. He’s forty—or will be next month.
“He saw the dew, all right; and I could see the cutlass between her teeth as she came over the rail. She was the daughter of an old friend of his, he said; she’d just graduated from some co-educational football factory in Texas and he’d promised her a job. I felt my way very slowly, and I hit resistance right away. I wasn’t going to be able to fire this one. Nothing overt on either side, of course, but the resistance was there, and it was firm. So I moved her up to a better job I knew she couldn’t handle. And all I accomplished was that I had to do her work myself. She came to work, incidentally, about three weeks after Mrs. Chapman died.”
It must have been bloody, I thought. And lonely as hell. A wife in the same position had status and the solid weight of community opinion going for her, but she had nothing. She knew she’d lost, of course, long before the blow actually fell, and in the end Chapman didn’t even have the decency to tell her himself. I gathered it wasn’t that he was ashamed to, or reluctant to face her; he just didn’t bother. Some business came up that was more important.
You’re not coloring this a little?” I asked.
She sighed. “I assure you I couldn’t be that stupid. I’m telling you exactly what happened, because I have to. God knows I don’t enjoy it; I’m no masochist. But obviously you have to know the truth, and not some dramatized version. I was informed of the engagement by Coral Blaine herself, in the office, on Monday morning, and if you have any doubts she knew exactly how to do it for the most exquisite effect, forget them. That was quite a day.”
Seven thousand years, I thought, from nine to five. With all those eyes watching, and nothing to crawl under and hide. An outstanding day, any way you looked at it. Then a sudden thought occurred to me, something I’d missed completely until now. It was what she had in mind for Coral Blaine.
“Do you think she’ll know?” I asked.
She nodded coolly. “Yes. I should think she’d be pretty sure I did it—somehow.”
As a study in the subtler forms of revenge, I thought, that would be hard to match. Coral Blaine was having a husband and a million dollars snatched out of her reachy little hands, and she was going to know it was Marian who’d done it to her. And that she not only would never be able to prove it, but that she’d actually helped prove it couldn’t have been Marian.
”If she’s only twenty-three,” I said, “she has a long and interesting life ahead of her, trying to figure that one out.”
“Yes, doesn’t she?”
We went back to work. While she was gone to get the sandwiches at noon I suddenly remembered what day it was. This was the eighth. I looked up florists in the phone book, called one, and ordered two dozen roses. It was around four o’clock and we were still
busy with Coral Blaine when the doorbell rang. I beat her to it, paid the delivery boy, and brought them in.
She glanced up as I put the long carton on the coffee table before her. “Flowers? Why?”
“Happy birthday,” I said.
She shook her head chidingly. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Then she opened the box, and exclaimed, “They’re beautiful, Jerry. But how did you know it was my birthday?”
“Your driver’s license,” I replied.
“Snoopy.” She filled a vase with water and put them on the phonograph console at the other end of the room. She admired them for a moment, and then came over and put her arms about my neck.
She smiled. “Dear Jerry, the indefatigable chaser of old streetcars he’s already caught.”
It was no use, I thought. She was impervious; nothing could get through to her, no gesture of any kind. She’d had it. Then I wondered if I even knew myself what I was trying to tell her. It seemed to be all mixed up.
We went back to work.
Six
She did some shopping the next morning, and left for Nassau around eleven. The minute she closed the door behind her, the apartment became almost achingly empty.
I assembled everything on the coffee table, and looked at it. Except for his identification, his clothes, and his car, here was Harris Chapman—seven rolls of tape, boxed, numbered, and indexed; horn-rim glasses; cigarette holder; the insipid filter cigarettes he smoked; the map of Thomaston she’d drawn with street names, locations of his businesses and his office, and an appended list of some twenty telephone numbers; three documents containing specimens of his signature, which had come from the old briefcase; and the bottle of gunk for lightening the dark shade of my hair and the sprouting mustache.
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