Kiss and Kill

by Richard Deming

  En route I glanced at Mavis’s left hand, noted it was bare and asked, “What did you do with that wedding band and engagement ring?”

  “They’re in my bag,” she said. “Why?”

  “Put them on.”

  She gave me a puzzled look, but obeyed.

  At the hotel I registered as Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Kinn of Houston, Texas. Mavis said nothing until the bellhop had deposited our bags in our room and departed. Then she thoughtfully regarded the double bed with which the room was furnished.

  “Don’t I even get asked?” she inquired.

  I pulled a bottle of bourbon from one of my bags, set it on the dresser and phoned room service for soda and ice.

  When I hung up, she said, “Don’t I get answered either?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Didn’t you say you wanted this to be a permanent partnership?”

  “I was thinking of a business partnership.”

  “With me, it’s all the way or not at all,” I told her. “That’s the way it is. You can still walk out.”

  Her lower lip stuck out petulantly. “You could be a little more romantic about it.”

  “I know how to be romantic,” I assured her. “You’ll be treated like a queen. I’m starting us off this way on purpose.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want you to have no doubt in your mind from the beginning about who’s boss.” I tapped my chest. “This guy is. In business, in bed, everywhere. I give the orders and you take them. You want to stay under my conditions, or take your cut and leave right now?”

  She studied me for a moment more. “Do you have to make it an ultimatum?” she complained. “Couldn’t you at least say you want me because I appeal to you as a woman?”

  “If you didn’t appeal to me as a woman, you’d be registered in another room.” I crooked a finger at her. “Come here.”

  She hesitated, then warily moved toward me.

  Pulling her against my chest, I wound my fingers in her black hair and jerked her head back. She put up a token struggle when I kissed her, but after a moment her arms slid about my neck. Her lips opened under mine and her body strained against me.

  She whispered, “You can be boss, Sam. Everywhere.”

  Picking her up bodily, I tossed her on the bed. Her eyes grew wider and wider as I tossed my coat onto a chair, tossed my tie after it and began to strip off my shirt.

  A knock came at the door. I had completely forgotten ordering ice and soda from room service.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE NEXT MORNING, I bought a nearly-new Mercury sedan, and we headed east. Two days later we hit St. Louis.

  Our headlong flight halfway across the country was the unnecessary sort of blunder I never made in later years. Back then, the minute a deal was closed, I felt impelled to run. But there really had been no reason for haste in leaving Los Angeles. Mrs. Hollingsworth hadn’t the slightest suspicion that she’d been taken. I could have stayed around for several more days, then announced that my vacation was over and I had to return to New York. Assuring the old woman that I’d keep her posted on developments probably would have postponed any suspicion on her part for weeks.

  As it was, my sudden departure without even saying good-by must have aroused her suspicion at once. The wire service report of our bunco dodge reached St. Louis about the same time we did. It only got brief, inside-page coverage that far from Los Angeles, but it gave our descriptions and said we were wanted for fraud.

  We were far enough away now to be reasonably safe, though. The police don’t seem to hunt down bunco artists as relentlessly as they do more violent criminals, such as bank robbers. While it wouldn’t be wise to return to California for some time, we didn’t have to fear that every St. Louis policeman we saw would have our descriptions memorized and was on the lookout for us.

  We checked into the Chase Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Doud of Chicago and started to spend our money.

  Mavis had the time of her life. It was the first time she had ever had all the shopping money she wanted. I turned her loose in the stores with instructions to outfit herself from head to toe.

  The result was miraculous. Except for her liking for flashy jewelry, Mavis had excellent taste when she had the money to indulge it. In her new clothes she actually looked like an heiress.

  I wouldn’t let her buy any jewelry, not trusting her taste in that area. But I bought her some myself. I got her a plain, smart-looking wristwatch and a half-carat diamond ring to replace the chip she wore. I also got her a couple of expensive pins and a few sets of earrings. When I gave it all to her, she examined it dubiously.

  “It’s all very nice,” she said. “But isn’t it kind of plain?”

  “That’s the idea,” I told her. “I want you to look like a lady, not a barroom pickup. From here on out you’re never to wear any jewelry I don’t personally select. Understand?”

  “All right, Sam,” she said reluctantly.

  For a whole month we did nothing but play. Mavis made a delightful playmate. She was full of life, eager for new experiences, and as enthusiastic as a child at a circus whenever I took her anywhere. I took her to baseball games, fights, auto races, to Forest Park Highlands, and even to the zoo. We hit every show and every night club in town. We sampled every recreational facility St. Louis had to offer.

  And we spent a lot of time simply making love. It was like being on a honeymoon.

  Although I controlled the spending of money, had our local bank account in my name and wrote all checks, I took advantage of Mavis’s bookkeeping experience by making her the family accountant. Near the end of June she balanced up my checkbook and announced, “You know we’ve gone through over five thousand dollars in only a month, Sam?”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said. “How do we stand?”

  “About five thousand left. Didn’t you have anything when we met?”

  “About what you did,” I said. “Under two hundred. I hadn’t made a score for some time.”

  Actually Cora Hollingsworth was the first big score I’d ever managed to pull off. My stake before meeting Mavis had never climbed over a couple of thousand. But I didn’t tell her that.

  Mavis was frowning down at the paper containing her computations. “At this rate we’ll be broke in another month, Sam. Shouldn’t we start economizing?”

  “I like to live high,” I told her. “It’s time to go back to work.”

  We started that same evening. I brought out my potential sucker list and went over it.

  My sucker list had been compiled over a number of years from numerous sources. From newspaper reports of top income-tax payers, from inheritance reports, from Who’s Who, from magazine articles on prominent people, from the society pages of major city newspapers and from the bunco-game grapevine, which stretches from coast-to-coast and keeps members of the fraternity informed as to what marks have recently been taken, and how, and constantly adds new prospects to the list. For every large city in the country I had a list of at least a dozen possibles.

  From my St. Louis list I picked a couple of rich widows, a widower and a prominent society matron who was noted as a patroness of struggling young artists.

  “Four possibles,” I said. “Well start weeding them out tomorrow.”

  “How?” Mavis asked.

  “The newspaper morgues. We compile all the background material we can on all four. Then pick the one we figure has the kindest heart.”

  “Are we going to try the same stunt we pulled in Los Angeles?”

  “If any of the possibles have a weakness for sad stories. If not, we’ll dream up some angle to take advantage of whatever weaknesses they have. If none have any that seem promising, we’ll move on to some other city.”

  The next morning I visited the Post Dispatch and Mavis went to the Globe Democrat. The story that we were magazine writers doing research for some personality pieces got us into both morgues without difficulty. At noon we met to compare notes.

  We settled on one o
f the widows, a Mrs. Sarah Brewster. She gave heavily to charity and did a lot of personal welfare work, such as delivering baskets to the poor at Christmastime. She sounded like a carbon copy of Mrs. Cora Hollingsworth.

  Mrs. Brewster was a permanent resident at the Jefferson Hotel. I moved in there, leaving Mavis at the Chase, and within a week had her lined up for the kill with the same dodge we had used in California. Three days later we blew town with eight thousand dollars of Mrs. Brewster’s money.

  Mrs. Brewster had been just as nice an old lady as Cora Hollingsworth. But if Mavis suffered any conscience pangs this time, she managed to suppress them. The only emotion she exhibited was glee at the ease with which we had extracted the money.

  During the next six months we pulled the same pitch twice again, once in Pittsburgh and once in Seattle. We had a close call in Seattle. As I came out of the bank after cashing the mark’s check, I bought a morning paper. On its front page was a warning against the racket we had just pulled, along with a resume of our scores in Beverly Hills, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.

  I didn’t wait to get out of town before converting the cashier’s check into cash. I cashed it at a bank three blocks from the first, picked up Mavis and we took off fast. Apparently our mark didn’t read the morning paper, for we squeaked through without running into any road blocks.

  We stopped in Salt Lake City long enough to sell the car, and flew from there to Houston, Texas.

  We decided to lay low in Houston for a while. We now had a fifteen-thousand-dollar stake and, even with our taste for high living, could afford a lengthy vacation.

  We spent Christmas at the Shamrock Hotel. Christmas Eve, possibly under the influence of the season, I asked Mavis to marry me.

  We were in the Shamrock’s cocktail lounge having an after-dinner drink when I asked her. She paused with her drink half raised and slowly set it down again. Her green eyes were bright when she looked at me, but there was an odd, waiting expression on her face. She didn’t make any answer. She just continued to stare at me.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” I said. “I asked how you’d like to get married.”

  “I heard you,” she said. “I was just wondering why.”

  “Why I asked you?”

  “Why you want to marry me.”

  I frowned at her. “We’re living as man and wife anyway. We make a perfect business team. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a permanent relationship. Why not make it legal?”

  She smiled a little ruefully. “All perfectly logical reasons.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” I inquired. “Don’t you want to get married?”

  “There isn’t anything I’d like more,” she assured me. “I happen to be in love with you.”

  “Then why all the shilly-shallying?”

  She lifted her shoulders in a resigned shrug. “You reeled off three sensible reasons for wanting to marry me. None of them the one reason every woman wants to hear.”

  I examined her dubiously. Women are such incurable romantics. “You mean I haven’t said I love you?”

  “Not ever,” she informed me. “Not since the day we met. You treat me like you love me, most of the time. You act proud of me in public. You hardly ever fail to tell me how nice I look when we start out. And in bed—well, you don’t act as though I repel you. But not once, ever, have you said those corny little words: I love you.”

  “I’m just not demonstrative,” I said. “Of course I love you. Satisfied?”

  She gave me a wry smile. “What woman wouldn’t be after such a passionate avowal?”

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” I said impatiently. “You want to get married or not?”

  “You’re the boss in this family,” she said. “We do whatever you want to do.”

  We were married on New Year’s Day. We took a six-week honeymoon cruise to South America, then returned to Houston and stretched our honeymoon to another six weeks at the Shamrock.

  Toward the end of March, Mavis announced that we had a little over four thousand dollars left in the bank. It was time to go back to work.

  “We have to dream up a new racket,” I told Mavis. “The POW gimmick has about worn itself out. Let’s see what the Houston sucker list has to offer.”

  The Houston list turned up two old ladies who would have been perfect marks for the prisoner-of-war dodge. But I was afraid of it. Our previous scores had been too well publicized.

  “I don’t see a single weakness we might capitalize on among these other people,” I told Mavis. “There’s a guy who collects stamps, another who’s a nut on sailboating. There’s a couple of women who spend all their time at club meetings. Period. Give me a couple of days to think.”

  It was Mavis who finally produced an idea, though I was the one to recognize it as a possibility. She was reading the paper in bed one morning while I shaved, when she suddenly emitted a little laugh.

  “Listen to this, honey,” she called through the open bathroom door. “People put some of the funniest things in personal ads.”

  “Yeah?” I inquired.

  “Comely widow, age 35, desires correspondence with single or widowed gentleman of same age. Must be strong, healthy, willing to work, able to manage fight gym left by deceased husband. Object: matrimony.”

  I grinned into the mirror and went on shaving. “The world is full of screwballs,” I said. “How about phoning room service for breakfast?”

  For some reason the item stuck in my mind. As we lingered over our breakfast coffee, I said, “Wonder if that widow has any money in addition to the gym.”

  “The one in the ad?” Mavis inquired.

  “Yeah,” I said. “See if you can find that item again.”

  Mavis rose to get the paper and began to turn pages. “Here it is,” she said finally, handing me the folded paper and pointing out the item.

  I read it over, noting that a box number was given for replies.

  “It says she’s a comely widow,” I commented. “According to Webster, that means agreeable to the sight.”

  “That’s her own description,” Mavis said. “She’s probably a living horror. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t have to advertise for a husband.”

  “There’s one way to find out.”

  Mavis raised her eyebrows inquiringly.

  “I’m going to answer the ad,” I told her. “Maybe she has some money we can shake loose.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but my decision was the turning point of our lives. It was to start us in a new and permanent career.

  It was our entry into the big time.

  CHAPTER V

  MAVIS pointed out that the ad asked for a man of thirty-five, and I had just passed my thirty-first birthday in February.

  “Of course, some men don’t change much between thirty and forty,” she said. “Maybe you could pass for a young-looking thirty-five.”

  I went to look in a mirror, and decided I could.

  Mavis and I spent a lot of time drafting a letter. We were pretty proud of the finished product. It went:

  Dear Madam:

  This is in answer to your personal ad in this morning’s paper. I am a single man of thirty-five with no relatives except a younger sister. I believe I have all the qualifications to manage a fight gymnasium.

  I had two years of college at the State University of Iowa, majoring in physical education. I was on the university boxing team both years. Later, for seven years, I was an athletic trainer and faculty manager of the boxing team. For the past three years I have been a fight trainer in New York State. Recently the owner and manager of the training camp where I worked died, and the camp was sold to a man who converted it into a vacation resort. I am therefore free of any commitments at the moment.

  I am six feet three, weigh 210 and have a fairly presentable appearance.

  Any matrimonial discussion would have to await our meeting and getting to know each other, of course. But even if this didn’t work out, perhaps we could come to a business agreement abo
ut managing your gymnasium.

  Very truly yours,

  Samuel Plainfield.

  I thought that the Shamrock would be an unlikely address for a man answering a matrimonial ad. I rented a post office box and gave its number as my return address.

  Two days later I got an answer. It read:

  Dear Mr. Plainfield:

  I got your letter. You sound like a good prospect. Now let me tell you about me.

  My husband has been dead six months, and the guys running the gym he left me are robbing me blind. I could sell it, but it brings a pretty good income when it’s run right, and I’d have to take a gypping if I let it go right now when its income is down. Not that I really need its income, because my husband left me pretty well fixed besides the gym. But I’m tired of being robbed. I’m also tired of sleeping alone, if you get what I mean. I’m the kind of woman who needs a man around.

  Like I said in the ad, I’m thirty-five, too. And not a bad looker, if you like them a little on the plump side. I’m five feet four and weigh 142 pounds. I can knock off twenty pounds with hardly no effort at all with a diet I got, though, if you like them slimmer.

  Like you, I don’t want to buy no pig in a poke, so I’m not promising anything until we meet. But if you’d like to talk it over, come out to the house any evening after seven P.M.

  Yours truly,

  Mrs. Hannah Stokes.

  The return address was in the thirty-nine hundred block of Case, which is a solid, upper-middle-class residential section.

  Mavis said, “She sounds like a dream. I think I’m jealous.”

  “You should be,” I said dryly. “She has so much more than you do.”

  “Probably all in the wrong places,” Mavis murmured. “I hope.”

  I had some preparations to make before I called on Mrs. Hannah Stokes. All of the clothes I owned would have been as out of character as my Shamrock address. I went down to a department store and bought a cheap ready-made suit, a pair of cheap shoes and a dollar necktie.

  When I called on the widow that evening, I looked like what I was supposed to be: a man of moderate income all dressed up for a blind date. I arrived at five minutes after seven.