‘Oh, come, come, Mrs Meeker,’ said Yaeger playfully. ‘Your circumstances aren’t any secret. Why not take a handsome profit while you have the chance?’
‘Because this happens to be my home. So if you don’t mind—’
She saw him to the driveway where his car was parked, and after he was gone she stood there surveying her domain. Everywhere were shattered windows sealed with cardboard, roofs denuded of their tiles, stuccoed walls scabrous and cracked, and rank vegetation forcing its way through broken roads and walks. The roof of the building containing the indoor swimming pool had long ago collapsed. The doors of the garage which had once held half a dozen cars hung awry on their rollers, revealing bleak emptiness within.
To anyone passing on Collins Avenue, thought Mrs Meeker resentfully, the place must look abandoned. But it was not. It was her home, and it would remain her home.
However, she soon learned that Edward Yaeger was not one to be readily discouraged. He appeared at the house a week later while she and Polly were at an after-dinner game of cribbage, and he brought with him gaudy temptation.
‘I’ve been in touch with Mr August,’ he said, ‘and when he heard that you won’t set a price on the estate, he decided to offer one you can’t afford to turn down. A hundred thousand dollars.’ Yaeger was carrying a leather portfolio under his arm. Now he placed it on the table, opened it with smiling assurance. ‘In cash.’
Polly gasped at the display of packaged banknotes before her. Mrs Meeker felt somewhat unsettled by the spectacle.
‘Your client does have a dramatic way of doing things, doesn’t he?’ she finally managed to say.
Yaeger shrugged. ‘He believes that cash is the great persuader. If it is, all you have to do is sign this letter of agreement for the sale of the estate.’
‘Isn’t it risky carrying all that money around?’ asked Polly with wide-eyed admiration.
‘Hardly. If you look through that window at my car you’ll see an unpleasant-looking gentleman whose job is to provide an ounce of prevention. He’s one of Mr August’s most loyal employees, and not only is he armed with a gun, but he would have no objection to using it.’
‘Horrible,’ said Mrs Meeker. ‘Incredible. All this money, an armed bodyguard – really, your Mr August is too much for me. If I ever did sell Casuarina, it wouldn’t be to someone like that. But, as I’ve already made plain, I don’t intend selling.’
It was hard to convince Yaeger that she really meant it – in fact, it was hard to convince herself in the face of the offering before her – and that was bad enough. What was worse was Polly’s naive regard of Yaeger, the unabashed interest she was taking in him. He was, Mrs Meeker realized with concern, something new to the girl – an older man, attractive, urbane, overwhelmingly sure of himself. For his part, it was evident that he had taken close note of Polly with a coolly appraising eye and liked what he saw. Liked it a great deal.
When he finally accepted temporary defeat, he turned his attention to the playing cards and pegboard on the table, obviously looking for an excuse to dally.
‘It’s cribbage,’ said Mrs Meeker shortly. ‘I gather you don’t play.’
‘No, but I’m a quick learner at cards. Show me the game, and I’ll prove it.’
‘Isn’t there someone waiting for you in your car?’
‘He’ll wait,’ Yaeger said. ‘Waiting is his business.’
So, short of flagrant bad manners, there was nothing to do but show him the game. In truth, as Mrs Meeker explained the rules she found herself softening a little toward him. He listened intently, asked shrewd questions, and what more could any devotee of cribbage want than a willing convert? When the time came for a demonstration she shuffled the deck and started to deal.
‘Don’t we get a chance to cut the cards in this game?’ Yaeger asked smilingly.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Mrs Meeker. ‘As a matter of fact, I should be penalized two points just for not offering you the chance to cut. That’s the rule that’s used for very strict play. But I’ve been playing so long only with dear friends—’
‘That you’re inclined to skip the formality,’ said Yaeger. ‘Well, I’d much rather have the compliment of being thought a friend than the penalty,’ and, Mrs Meeker observed, when it was his turn to deal, he didn’t offer her the deck to cut either. After that, it was always a case of dealer cut for himself, as if they were the dearest of dear friends.
As he had remarked, he was a quick learner. At the start, unsure of the best discards, he made several blunders. then he gave Mrs Meeker an honest run for her money, losing the first game by a wide margin, but very nearly winning the second. And all this, Mrs Meeker observed, while he kept up a half-flirtatious dialogue with Polly. It was dismaying to watch the nonchalant skill with which he simultaneously handled both his cards and her moonstruck granddaughter. Somehow it seemed to deprecate cribbage and Polly together, just as the cash thrust under her nose had deprecated the true value of Casuarina to her.
All in all, it was a most disturbing evening.
Others followed. Yaeger came again and again to renew his client’s offer, to play cribbage, to court Polly. It led Mrs Meeker to wonder if she should not bar him from the house. But on what grounds? As for appealing to Polly, that would be useless. All you had to do was look at Polly while in the man’s company to see how useless.
So there was only one satisfaction to be gained from Edward Yaeger’s intrusion on the scene. He became a superb cribbage player and, as Mrs Meeker guiltily knew, a good game of cribbage was as heady for her as fine old wine. Other card games had never interested her. Cribbage, she would point out, was the only true test of guile and nerve. The trouble had always been in finding an opponent of proper mettle, but now in Edward Yaeger she had one. Although he lost more often than he won, he made every game a challenge.
She began to relish those nightly duels with him. Nothing had tasted as sweet in a long time as the movement of pegging another victory over this formidable adversary. And to give up this pleasure because she was vaguely repelled by his cocksure manner, his disdainfully smiling self-assurance – well, she couldn’t. Simply couldn’t.
But she was not unprepared for dire revelation when it came. It was young Duff Peabody who brought it. His father had handled Marcus senior’s legal affairs, and Duff had inherited not only the law office but a vested interest in the Meeker family. Especially Polly. As he had once frankly admitted to Mrs Meeker, having Polly working for him was a perpetual torment. For one thing, she was gaily and totally incompetent at her work; for another, her presence addled him completely. As far as he could see, the only solution was marriage to her, but, alas, Polly remained deaf to all his pleas.
Now he suddenly arrived at Casuarina in a lowering, gusty afternoon when Mrs Meeker was at the water’s edge attending to the gulls who flocked around her. He was in a really bad state, Mrs Meeker saw, and she let the gulls fend for themselves while she heard him out. It was a damned mess, he said. Luckily, Polly was innocently pleased to reveal her intention of marrying this thug—
‘Thug?’ said Mrs Meeker in alarm. ‘Marry?’
‘Yes,’ said Duff, ‘that’s the word she used – marry. And now that I’ve taken the trouble to look him up, I can tell you that your friend Yaeger is no better than a thug. The man he works for, Leo August, is a racketeer who runs a gambling syndicate behind a big-business facade. Yaeger is his front man in these parts. Not that he’s faking a good background and education. He has all of that, and that’s exactly what he sold to August. From what I was told, August yearns to get into the social swim. People like Yaeger impress him.’
Mrs Meeker found herself both angry and frightened. ‘But it’s all so obvious now. That large amount of cash. That ugly little man who’s always waiting in the car—’
‘Yes, that’s August’s pet gunman, Joe Michalik. He’s got a few murders to his credit, if not on his record.’
‘Does Polly know all this? Have you told her?�
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‘Of course. And when she put it to Yaeger he laughed it off. Made it look as if I was the jealous suitor trying to get rid of him.’
‘But she knows what men like that did to her father. I’ve never kept it a secret from her.’
‘And she refuses to draw any connection. As far as she’s concerned, Yaeger is the most glamorous thing that’s ever come her way, and that’s it. It’s impossible to talk to her.’
‘How awful. Duff, we must do something. What can we do?’
‘You mean, what can you do. Well, all this may be Yaeger’s way of pressuring you into selling the estate. What if you make a deal with him? You sell him Casuarina, and he says goodbye to Polly.’
‘Would someone like that keep any such bargain? And suppose he tells Polly I tried to buy him off? Can you imagine how she’d react? No, there must be some other way.’
But, Mrs Meeker knew, easier said than done. She stood there in despair while the gulls wheeled overhead screeching for their dinner, while lacy edges of the tide lapped at her bare feet. On an incoming wavelet rode the pale, blue-fringed bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war, and Mrs Meeker shudderingly backed away as the garish scarlet and purple of the creature’s pulpy body, the slender black threads of its deadly tentacles washed ashore. These men-of-war were old enemies. She had once been stung by one while swimming, and it had felt like a white-hot iron playing over her arm. It had been an agonizing two days before the pain receded, and ever since then she had waged unremitting war on any of the pulps that came into her ken.
Now she looked with disgust at this one helpless on the sand, its bladder inflated and swaying back and forth in the warm breeze.
‘Do fetch me that stick of driftwood, Duff,’ she ordered, and when she had, she thrust it hard into the bladder, which collapsed with a pop.
‘The object,’ she said, ‘is to deflate and then destroy.’
She carried the slimy residue of pulp inshore on the stick and buried it deep in the sand, leaving the stick as a grave marker. ‘Deflate and destroy,’ she said thoughtfully, staring at the upright stick while Duff watched her in puzzlement.
She suddenly turned to him. ‘Duff, I’m going to have a party.’
‘A party?’
‘Yes, this coming Saturday. And you’re to be there with a bill of sale for the estate. Can you prepare one on such short notice?’
‘I suppose so. But what made you—?’
‘Oh, do stop asking questions.’ Mrs Meeker knit her brow in concentration. ‘And I’ll have Polly invite her football-playing friends and some pretty girls. And, of course, Mr Yaeger and that nasty little associate of his—’
‘Michalik?’
‘Yes. And as for a collation – well, Frazier will have to persuade our shopkeeper friends to extend their credit just a bit further. That means we can have a buffet, then dancing afterwards, and perhaps games.’
‘With Yaeger and Michalik running them, of course,’ Duff said grimly. ‘You sound as if you’ve gone completely out of your mind.’
‘Do I?’ said Mrs Meeker. ‘Well, perhaps I do’ – which to Duff’s bafflement and concern were her last words on the subject.
She was not minded to offer further enlightenment when Duff arrived at the party Saturday evening. The patio and rooms fronting it were brightly lit and filled with young people alternating between dance floor and buffet. Yaeger and Polly were intent on each other; Michalik, gray-faced, stony-eyed, and dour, leaned against a wall and surveyed the proceedings with contempt; and Mrs Meeker was being royalty in a light mood, apparently delighted to find Casuarina once again alive with company and music.
She drew Duff aside. ‘Do you have the bill of sale ready?’
‘Yes, but I still don’t know why. You said yourself that selling won’t really settle matters.’
‘So I did, but you must have faith in me, dear boy.’ Mrs Meeker patted his hand. ‘Remember that man-of-war on the beach? I handled it quite competently, didn’t I?’
‘It’s hardly the same thing.’
‘Perhaps you’re wrong. Meanwhile, Duff, your job this evening is to stand by me. What I intend to do may seem foolhardy, but you’re not to put any obstacles in my way.’
‘If I only knew what you intended—’
‘You’ll know soon enough.’
Mrs Meeker left him glowering and went about her business of playing hostess. She bided her time. The cool night breeze rose, couples abandoned the patio and crowded indoors. The hour grew late. And so, Mrs Meeker told herself, it is now or never. She took a deep breath and moved, serenely smiling, toward Yaeger, who had a possessive arm around Polly’s waist.
‘Enjoying yourselves?’ Mrs Meeker asked, and Yaeger said, ‘Very much. But as for our business—’
‘I have the papers ready. And I suppose you have the money here?’
‘I have. If you don’t mind leaving the festivities for a few minutes, we can close the deal right now.’
Mrs Meeker sighed. ‘I can’t say I do mind. I’m afraid I am not up to parties like this any more. My idea of a good time is a little game of cribbage. Dear me, how angry Polly’s grandfather would get when I lured someone into a game during a party. He always felt it was the worst of bad manners, but I could never resist the temptation.’
‘No reason why you should,’ said Yaeger with heavy gallantry. ‘If you want a game right now, I’m your man.’
‘How kind of you. That table is all arranged. The noise in the room won’t bother you, will it?’
Yaeger laughed. ‘Yes, I noticed that table before. I had a feeling we’d come to this before the night was over.’
‘You’re an old conspirator,’ Polly told her grandmother fondly. ‘You really are, darling.’
‘Oh, sticks and stones,’ said Mrs Meeker. As she sat down and opened the deck of cards, she was pleased to see that interested onlookers were gathering around the table – among them Duff Peabody and the dour Michalik. ‘When it comes to cribbage I don’t at all mind being humored. How far would you go in humoring me, Mr Yaeger?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I mean, would you mind playing for stakes? I’ve never done it in all my life, and the idea seems quite exciting.’
‘All right, I leave the stakes to you. A dime, a dollar—’
‘Oh, more than that.’
‘How much more?’
Mrs Meeker riffled the cards. She set them neatly on the table before her. ‘I should like to play you one game,’ she said smilingly, ‘for a hundred thousand dollars.’
Even at this, she saw, Yaeger did not lose his poise. In the midst of the surprised clamor that rose around the table he sat observing her with an amused curl to his lips.
‘Are you serious?’ he said.
‘Entirely. Your Mr August is eager to get possession of this estate, isn’t he?’
‘He is.’
‘And I am just as eager to lay my hands on some money. A large amount of money. I think it would be entertaining to settle the matter over the cribbage board. Therefore, I’ll wager the signed bill of sale for Casuarina against your hundred thousand dollars. If I lose, Mr August gets the estate, and you, of course, would have the money for yourself.’
‘And suppose he loses?’ Michalik interposed in a hard voice. He turned to Yaeger. ‘Forget it, bigshot. You don’t play games with August’s money. Understand?’
The smile vanished from Yaeger’s face. ‘Michalik, remember that you’re hired help. When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it.’
‘But he’s right,’ said Duff Peabody. ‘Mrs Meeker, this is out of the question.’ He appealed to Polly. ‘Don’t you agree? Don’t you have something to say about this?’
‘I don’t know,’ Polly said unhappily. She stood with a hand on Yaeger’s shoulder as if drawing strength from him. ‘After all, Casuarina isn’t mine.’
‘And the money isn’t yours,’ Michalik told Yaeger contemptuously. ‘So don’t take any chances with it.’
It was, Mrs Meeker knew, the worst way to handle any male as arrogant as Edward Yaeger. And, as she could see, Leo August had been right. Cash was the great persuader. In Yaeger’s eyes was a visible hunger for that money.
Still he hesitated. But he was wavering. Mrs Meeker said, ‘Do you know, in all our games I’ve had the feeling you were humoring an old woman, that you weren’t really playing to beat her at any cost. Now I wonder. Do you admit that I’m the better player? Is that it?’
Yaeger set his jaw. ‘Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for? This isn’t like playing for matchsticks.’
‘Of course.’
‘And if I win, August gets this bill of sale and I get the money. If you win—’
‘Winner take all,’ said Mrs Meeker. ‘Those are the terms.’
‘One game?’
‘One game, and that settles it.’
‘All right,’ said Yaeger. ‘High card deals.’
It was only when she picked up her first hand that Mrs Meeker realized the full enormity of what she was doing.
Up to now she had not allowed herself to think of losing, to think of giving up Casuarina lock, stock, and barrel, and of making herself dependent on someone’s charity for survival. Whose, she had no idea, but someone’s it would obviously have to be. The thought was so unnerving that she discarded too cautiously, fell squarely into the trap Yaeger had set for her, and at the end of the first deal was already behind in score.
Watching his imperturbable expression, his deft handling of the cards, made it worse. She had meant what she told him. In their previous matches he had never seemed to extend himself. He had always been paying as much attention to Polly as to the game, and even then he had been a tough opponent. Now, relaxed in his chair, his eyes fixed with absolute concentration on his cards, he took on frightening dimensions.
Mrs Meeker found herself suddenly weak with apprehension. Her fingers, when she dealt, were clumsy. He was a professional – that was it. He would never have accepted the challenge unless he knew the odds favored him. So she had baited her trap perfectly – and now had a tiger by the tail.
The Specialty of the House Page 40
