This latter wasn’t really dye, she said, and if I didn’t use too much of it there wouldn’t be any noticeable artificial effect, but rather like that of brown hair bleached down a few shades by the sun. I went into the bathroom, combed in a light application of it, and started practicing the signature. When my wrist was tired, I loaded the recorder with the first roll of tape, and turned it on. Her voice issued from the loudspeaker, and when I closed my eyes she seemed to be there in the room. I forced myself to concentrate.
When my brain was numb from memorizing, I went back to the signature again. I found I didn’t have as much talent for forgery as I did for mimicry, but after several hundred attempts I could see definite improvement. I kept at it. After a while I tried breaking it down into individual letters and writing each one hundreds of times to correct my errors. Around seven I walked over three or four blocks to a restaurant for dinner, and came back and worked until midnight. When I turned out the light, she was all around me in the darkness.
The next day was Sunday. I worked from seven a.m. till midnight with only brief periods out for food, attacking the job with intense concentration to keep her out of my mind. I was closing in on him. Whole sections of those five hours of recorded data were stamped into my mind intact. I could see him now, and feel him, and there was no longer even any need to practice his speech. The signature was improving. I went on writing it, hour after hour, and listening to the tapes. It was harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life. When I went to bed I was dizzy with fatigue.
She had left me five hundred dollars in cash. On Monday morning I went over to Miami and picked up a rental car, one with a trailer hitch. I drove out US 1 to a sporting goods place that rented boats and motors. Using my right name and my California driver’s license, plus the local address on Dover Way, I rented a complete outfit—sixteen-foot fiberglass boat, twenty-five-horse Johnson outboard, and a trailer with a winch. I put up a deposit against the week’s rental, bought a spinning rod and some lures, asked the man about bonefishing flats in the Keys, and headed south on the highway.
In a little over an hour I was on Key Largo. I checked my highway map, noted the speedometer reading, and turned off US 1 into the dead-end road going towards the upper end of the Key, watching for launching sites. I found one, made a notation of the mileage, and went on. In a little over a mile there was another, and I noted the speedometer reading at this one also. I needed at least two I could find fast and in the dark, so I’d have an alternate in case the first one was being used or someone was camped near it. There was nobody in sight at either of them now. I practiced maneuvering the car with the trailer behind it. It was awkward at first, but after about fifteen minutes I became fairly adept.
I backed down to the water once more, put on the fishing clothes I’d brought, and launched the boat. There was a moderate south-east breeze, but the water over the flats inside the line of the reefs was smooth. It took about fifteen minutes to run out over the reefs to the edge of the Stream. The boat handled nicely in the moderate sea and ground-swell off-shore, and would do all right provided the weather was no worse than it was now. I ran back, winched the boat on to the trailer, and drove back to Miami Beach.
There was a driveway along the side of the apartment and a garage in the rear. I backed into it, uncoupled the trailer and locked it in the garage, and left the car in the drive. When I let myself in the front of the apartment, there was a card from her in the letter-box.
It had been mailed Sunday afternoon in Nassau, and said she was flying to New York Monday night. It was printed in block letters, and was unsigned. “I miss you,” she said. I wondered if she did. For a moment she was all around me in the apartment, the remembered gesture of a hand, the swing of a silken ankle, and the smooth dark head it was a joy forever to watch.
I showered, and shaved, using a safety razor to get around the mustache. The latter was beginning to show, and surprisingly it made me look a little older, which was fine. I went to work, practicing the signature. I could forge it well enough now to fool myself at times, but I had to learn to do it faster and more naturally. The next morning I drove over to Miami to a salvage store and bought a second-hand tarpaulin, about eight by eight. On the way back I stopped at a building supply place and bought four concrete blocks, saying I wanted them to patch a wall. At a dime store I picked up a roll of wire and a cheap pair of pliers. I put everything in the trunk, and locked it. I went back to the apartment and worked with furious concentration until midnight.
When I awoke in the morning and realized what day it was, there was a fluttery, sick feeling in my stomach. This was the thirteenth. He was supposed to be here tonight. I was scared. It was easy to say something was fool-proof—but was it, ever? A million things could go wrong. I tried to work some more, but had trouble concentrating. I didn’t need any more preparation, anyway; I either had it pat now, or I never would. The only thing it took from here on was nerve. I wasn’t at all sure I had that.
The morning passed with no word from her. Maybe he wasn’t coming. I began to hope something had happened so he couldn’t get away. Then at five-thirty in the afternoon the phone rang. It was a call from Mrs. Forbes, in New York, the operator said. Would I accept the charge? I said yes. She came on the line.
“Jerry? Listen, dear, I’m calling from a phone-booth because I didn’t want this call on my hotel bill. He’s on his way.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yes. I just talked to a friend at home. He left late yesterday afternoon, intending to stay in Mobile last night. He should be there between midnight and two a.m. I’m leaving right away, and I’ll be in Miami shortly before nine. Don’t come to the airport.”
“Right,” I said.
“Is everything all right there?”
”Yes. Except that I wish you were here.”
“I will be, very shortly. Good-bye, dear.”
The afternoon was interminable; I paced the living room, chain-smoking cigarettes while I thought of a Cadillac and a DC-7 converging on Miami in a sort of cataclysmic and irrevocable vector. I wanted her here worse than I’d ever wanted anything, and I hoped he’d never arrive. He was a fast and reckless driver; maybe he’d have a wreck and kill himself. I went out and tried to eat dinner, and didn’t know afterwards whether I had or not.
It was nine-thirty when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I opened the front door. She was coming up the walk with the cab driver behind her carrying the small overnight case. The rest of her luggage would still be in New York, in her hotel room. A very smart-looking hat was slanted across the side of her head, and she wore gloves and carried a light coat on her arm.
She smiled, brushed my lips lightly with hers, and started to fumble at her bag. I gave the driver some money. I didn’t know how much, but it appeared to satisfy him. He turned and went down the walk. Then we were inside, and I pushed the door shut with my shoulder, and put down the bag.
She broke it up, finally, and gasped. “Jerry! After all—”
“Let me look at you,” I said. I held her at arm’s length. I’d smeared her lipstick quite badly and tilted the hat a little out of position, but there was no doubt of it. She was the smartest-looking and the loveliest woman on earth.
I told her so. Or started to. “Are you drunk?” she asked.
No, I said. “I haven’t even had a drink. God, how I’ve missed you. I can’t keep my hands off you.”
She smiled. “You must have been working long hours. No girls at all?”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not getting through to you. It’s not girls. It’s you—”
“Jerry, you’re talking gibberish,” she said. “And could we sit down?”
I’m sorry,” I said. I led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her. I took her in my arms again. She tried to fend me off, shaking her head protestingly. “I think I must be getting too old to cope with the under-thirty type of wolf.”
“Listen, Marian,” I said. “Damn it, will y
ou listen to me?” I removed the hat and dropped it on the coffee table, and put my hand against her cheek, turning her face and looking at the smooth dark line of her hair and the incredible blue eyes. I was overcome again with that crazy yearning to imprison and possess every last bit of her. I kissed her again, and it was the wildest and most wonderful thing I’d ever known.
She stirred. “Jerry, what on earth is the matter with you?”
“I love you,” I said. “I should think that would be obvious to a fourteen-year-old girl—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She tried to pull back. I held her more tightly. “Jerry,” she protested, “this is hardly the time—”
“Will you, for the love of God, listen to me a minute?” I said. “And try not to kick my teeth out, for once? I’m in love with you. I’m absolutely crazy about you. God knows I missed you while you were gone, but I didn’t realize until I saw you coming up that walk just how much you did mean to me—“
She tried to break in.
“Don’t interrupt,” I said. “I’m going to get through to you some way, if it takes the rest of the night. I’ve tried to tell you before how wonderful I think you are, but you seem to think it’s just some sort of conditioned reflex because I noticed you weren’t wearing a beard. There must be some way I can make you understand. Listen. You’re what I came back for, when I ran off to New York. I know that now. All I want out of this business is you, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for the police—”
She stiffened in my arms. “What are you saying?”
“That we’re going to call this thing off. It’s too dangerous. And it’s crazy. I want you, and I don’t want to be running and hiding all the time like an animal. I realize I’m not one of the solider types of prospect for the vine-covered mortgage and the lawn mower, but I can hold a job when I want to. I want to marry you—”
She broke free and pushed away from me. She laughed, but the sound of it was more like that of a bad skiing accident. “You want us to go steady, is that it? Oh, my God. I wonder how I’d look in crinoline petticoats and bobby socks. Or maybe you could just introduce me as your mother—“
I grabbed her arm and shook her. “Marian! Stop it! For Christ’s sake, I never heard of anybody who could make such a Federal case out of being thirty-four years old. You don’t look twenty-eight.”
Her face was distorted with contempt or bitterness; I wasn’t sure which. “You fool! Don’t you even know yet? Didn’t you hear me say I’d already graduated from college when we got into the war? I’m referring to the Second World War. Or didn’t you study that one in school? Do you have any idea how long ago that was? I’m not thirty-four. I’m thirty-eight years old.”
She began, to laugh again. I caught her, but she turned her face away and went on laughing. “I had one last little shred of dignity left, and you want me to throw that away and start cradle-robbing—”
I caught the turning and twisting face between my hands and held it still so she had to look at me. “I don’t give a damn if you’re thirty-eight,” I said savagely. “Or fifty-eight, or ninety-eight. All I know is what I see and feel. You’re the loveliest woman, probably, that I’ve ever known, and the smoothest, and there’s a grace about you that makes me catch my breath when I look at you. I think you begin being feminine where all other women leave off. When you go out of a room, you leave it empty and when you come back you re-decorate it—”
“Will you stop it?” she lashed at me. “Even if I were capable of ever loving anybody again, do you think I’d marry a man ten years younger than I am, and as attractive as you are, and cringe every time people looked at us and wondered what I’d used to buy you with? I’ll assure you, laddie boy, I don’t look twenty-eight to women. And I can’t compete in that division any more. I’ve just had that demonstrated to me, quite publicly and convincingly.”
“Forget that meat-headed Chapman for a minute,” I said, “if he’s too stupid to know what he had, that’s his hard luck, and he’ll find it out soon enough—”
“Precisely. In about four hours.”
“No! Dammit, no! It’s dangerous, and I don’t want you to do it. Chapman hasn’t got anything you need, or even want—”
She broke in coldly. “I beg to differ with you. He has something I want, and intend to have—a lot of money I helped him make for both of us. That’s the only thing left now. I suppose it’s utterly impossible for you to understand, being a man and a very young one, but I’m through. Finished. I’m all over. I’m something that’s already happened. If I started now and worked at it night and day, by the time I could feel like a woman again, I won’t even be one. Not an operating model, anyway, or one that anybody but the utterly desperate would have. I poured the last six years of my life into an aging adolescent, and all I’ve got left to show for it is humiliation. There are probably women more philosophical than I am who could adjust to that and absorb it and come out of it healthy again. But I can’t. Maybe it’s unfortunate but I don’t even intend to try. I have nothing more to lose, and I’m not going to stand in the wreckage of my own life like some placid and uncomprehending cow and see them get away with it.”
I’m not going to let you do it—”
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said furiously. “There’s no risk at all. And doesn’t the money mean anything to you?”
“Yes. It does. It means plenty. But I’ve just discovered you mean more. And if that sounds like something out of a shampoo ad, I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“And this is Jerome Langston Forbes?” she asked pityingly.
I sighed. “All right, rub it in. This is Jerry Forbes, the angle boy. The guy who discovered before he was twenty that this place is just a nut-hatch for the rest of the universe. And maybe when you stop to think about it, it still is. After all these years I finally go overboard completely for a girl, and I have to pick the one who’s decided to throw away her union card in the female sex.” I lit a cigarette, and stood up.
“Then you won’t help me?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I went in and sat down on the bed. I felt like hell. I stretched out, with the ashtray on my chest, and looked up at the ceiling. There didn’t seem to be any answer.
I was still lying there ten minutes later when I heard her come into the room. She lay down across the bed with her face very near mine. “I’m sorry, Jerry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t really grasp what you were saying. When you have nothing left inside but bitterness, a lot of things don’t come through very well.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
Her eyes looked into mine from a distance of a few inches. “What if I would go away with you afterwards?”
“You would?”
“Yes. God knows why you’d want me, but if you still do, I’ll go.”
I thought about it for a minute, wavering. “It still scares me. You know what we’re fooling with.”
“Yes. And you know how we’re going to do it. Nothing can go wrong.” She smiled faintly, and touched my lips with a finger. “You understand it’ll have to be a long time afterwards? Maybe a year. And that it’ll have to be somewhere a long way off, where there’s no chance that anybody who knew him will ever hear your voice.”
“Of course.”
“All right. I have a little money, too. We’ll have well over two hundred thousand. Somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, or the Aegean. Or if you want to fish, somewhere in the tropics. Ceylon, perhaps. Just the two of us. And no strings attached. When you get tired of me—“
I drew a finger along her check. “I’d never get tired of you.”
“You will, when you get old enough to need younger women.”
“But I wouldn’t have to wait a full year?” I asked. “I mean, before I can even see you again?”
”No. We can meet somewhere after I’m sure I’m not being watched, in a month or so. will you do it, Jerry?”
I thought of that dream I’d had when she was
trying to jump off the bridge, and felt cold in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it was a warning that something could go wrong. But I knew I was whipped. By this time I was conditioned to taking her on any terms I could get her.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”
Seven
I looked at my watch for the hundredth time, conscious of the increasing tightness of my nerves. The waiting was bad; there was too much time to think. It was forty-five minutes past midnight. I was in the rental car, parked on Collins Avenue across from the entrance to the Dauphine. This was another of those glorified motor hotels of the Gold Coast Strip, about two blocks from the Golden Horn. He had a reservation. She’d made it for him, along with his fishing reservations at Marathon, in the Keys.
I lit another cigarette, and went on watching the oncoming traffic, which was definitely thinning now. I’d already checked the area for phone booths, to be sure I could get to one when I wanted it. I nervously looked at the time again. I’d been here an hour and a half. Maybe he wouldn’t drive all the way through from Mobile in one day. His plans could have changed in the two weeks since their bitter fight and her resignation, and he might be going somewhere else. He could have been in a wreck—I came alert. It was another Cadillac.
Well, I’d seen at least a hundred so far; there was no shortage of them in Miami Beach. But this was one of the big ones, and it was a light gray hardtop. Out-of-state license plate. Then I could see the pelican on it. The car was turning into the driveway of the Dauphine. It was Chapman, all right. And he was alone. I exhaled softly. That was the thing we had to know for sure. If he was going to live it up this trip, he hadn’t picked up a girl so far.
The Cadillac stopped in the circular drive before the glass front wall of the lobby, partially screened from the street by the boxes of tropical vegetation bearing colored lights. I got out and crossed the street.
Chapman had already gone inside, and a porter with a luggage barrow was removing three large expensive-looking bags from the trunk of the car. I went into the lobby and turned towards the two telephone booths at the left rear, beside the archway that opened into the dining room. Nobody paid any attention to me. Chapman was standing at the desk. He was just as she had described him. We looked nothing alike except that we were the same height and—within the limits of the average description— the same build. He wore a lightweight gabardine suit and a cocoa straw hat, white shirt, and a conservatively striped tie. And the glasses, of course.
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