1968 - An Ear to the Ground

by James Hadley Chase

‘Excuse me, Mr. Cohen, but the American Ambassador is calling from London and Hong Kong is still on the line.’

  Cohen raised his hands and grimaced at Harry.

  ‘You see, boy . . . no peace. Well, okay, you get back to Paradise City and clear up. Lisa will be down in a couple of days. Excuse me, huh? I know you two are going to be very, very happy.’

  Harry felt a touch on his arm from Miss Selby and he got slowly to his feet. He left the office as Cohen began talking on one of his many telephones.

  Miss Selby eyed Harry over. Her eyes were hostile, her smile freezing.

  ‘Congratulations, Mr. Lewis,’ she said and went to her desk.

  Harry walked to the elevator. He moved like a man under a shock.

  During the three weeks that Harry remained a bachelor, every now and then, he decided to cut and run, but he hadn’t the guts. The prize was too glittering. When he saw the house Lisa had chosen, his eyes nearly fell out of his head. It had eight bedrooms, eight bathrooms, four living rooms, a magnificent garden and swimming pool. . . the whole works.

  There was a Rolls, a Caddy and the Aston Martin in the garage. There was a Jap butler, a housekeeper and five other staff and three Chinese gardeners. There was a yacht which had luxury accommodation for twenty people . . . a small liner. Suddenly Harry was handed on a plate everything a man could dream of, but he also had Lisa.

  While he was clearing out his desk in the small poky office at the self-service store, the day following his interview with Sol Cohen, the door opened and Lisa came in. She shut the door and turned the key. She came across to where Harry was standing and looked up at him, her dark eyes shining. ‘Hello, Harry,’ Lisa said and smiled. ‘Surprised?’

  By now, Harry had made his decision. Whatever else he might have been, he was honest and he was now determined, since Lisa had bought him, he would somehow give her value for her money. He knew what she wanted, and if it half-killed him, he would give it to her. All the way back from Frisco, he had thought about the deal. At first, he had decided to pack his bag and get the hell out. Then he thought what it could mean to be the husband of the heir to the Cohen millions. The scale was too heavily balanced in Lisa’s favour, but often when he lay in bed in the dark and thought of what he was heading for, he still wanted to ran, but he didn’t. So now with this small, unattractive, enormously wealthy woman standing in front of him, Harry did what was expected of him.

  ‘Surprised?’ He laughed. ‘I’m crazy with joy!’ He pulled her to him, slid his hands up under her dress and captured her small, skinny buttocks in either hand. ‘I’m going to make you happy, Lisa,’ he said, and held her hard against him.

  ‘Sol Cohen came down for the wedding. There were close on eight hundred guests. . . it was one of the biggest turnouts in Paradise City. Sol was in tremendous form. He brought with him his personal present for the bride . . . the Esmaldi necklace.’

  ***

  Here Al Barney paused and regarded me with a cocked eyebrow.

  ‘I told you I’d finally get around to the necklace, didn’t I? Well, let me tell you about it. The Esmaldi necklace belonged to one of those South American dictators who are always in trouble. He had to get out fast. . . so fast, all he took with him was his wife’s necklace that had been in the family for a couple of generations. He ran into Sol Cohen and Sol bought the necklace off him. No one knows what he paid for it. Sol stashed it away, planning to give it to Lisa as a wedding present. The necklace consisted of one hundred matched diamonds the size of garden peas. The setting was platinum and the lot — so the newspapers said — was worth around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

  ‘Lisa wore it at the wedding. Then she put it in her Raysons’ safe and went off on the honeymoon in the yacht to the Bahamas.

  ‘She and Harry cruised for a month. During that time Harry gave her value for money. Lisa practically killed him. She was insatiable. There were times when he wanted to jump overboard and swim ashore, but he didn’t.

  ‘When the mood hit her, and sometimes it would hit her two or three times a day, she would look directly at him and say, “Harry. . .” Then she would leave her lounging chair and walk down to their cabin. Harry would follow like a sheep to the slaughter.

  ‘He had what she wanted and he gave it to her. If only she had been attractive! Harry often thought, but she was bony, her breasts were like poached eggs and her ribs showed, but at least she had technique! Boy! Had she technique!

  ‘After two weeks, Harry was longing to get off the yacht. If the goddamn yacht had struck a reef, he would have cheered with joy. But finally, like everything in this world, things had to come to an end, and they moved into their new, palatial home.

  ‘It was better then because Harry began to work at the downtown office. He had only Lisa in his hair from six o’clock in the evening onwards, but that was bad enough. He discovered there were two things that Lisa was mad about: he getting astride her and she getting astride a horse. She practically lived on a horse when he was in the office. She had three thoroughbreds and she was always out in the woods or galloping along the bridle paths, either on her own or with other women who were also horse crazy.

  ‘In the evenings, there were always parties: either thrown by Lisa or thrown by someone else. Harry was a great party man and he was popular. On the face of it, the marriage seemed to be going well. It was bed time that Harry feared. But so long as he did his duty, he found Lisa surprisingly easy to live with. It was doing his duty that stuck in his throat.

  ‘He hoped Lisa would get enough of sex to cool off as the time went on, but she didn’t. She just couldn’t get enough of him. There were times when it drove Harry crazy. There were times too when he unexpectedly ran into some of his past girlfriends who gave him the eye and he knew he had only to return the signal to have someone who really had a body and not a piece of scrawn, but Harry was honest. He knew the value of what he was getting and he was determined not to cheat — besides, he was so handled by Lisa, the urge just wasn’t there.

  ‘Every so often, when the party was grand enough, Lisa would wear the Esmaldi diamonds. The necklace made the other women tear their hair with envy. Watching her, Harry thought sadly what a waste of beauty it was. She just didn’t have the face or the neck to carry the necklace off. He got so he hated the necklace. There were times when one of the real beauties of Paradise City — and there were a number of them — was at a party and Harry longed to take the necklace off Lisa’s scraggy neck and put it on this particular beauty. He was sure the effect would have been out of this world.

  ‘He wasn’t too happy working in the office, handling Cohen’s fifty thousand acres of land. The office itself was pretty nice: very deluxe and his own private office top executive. But selling or trying to sell parcels of land bored Harry. He didn’t understand high pressure selling. He found it difficult to enthuse over maps and he wasn’t very good with customers who were suspicious.

  ‘He also disliked Harriet Bernstein, his secretary. Cohen had said she practically ran the business, and she did. She was around thirty-eight, short, fat, neatly dressed with a small hooked nose, beady, black eyes and a complexion like mutton fat. Harry knew, as soon as they first met, she neither liked him nor trusted him. His charm bounced off her like a golf ball slammed against a concrete wall. She was terrifyingly efficient. He had only to ask for a letter, a plan, a title deed to have it on his desk before the words were scarcely out of his mouth. She knew the credit rating of every customer. She knew who was worth a business lunch and who wasn’t. She had arranged for a table at the Yacht Club to be permanently at Harry’s disposal, and every morning when he came into his office, he found a neatly typed memo showing him his appointments and who he was lunching with and all the necessary details about his guest. He could understand Sol Cohen appreciating this kind of service, but it stifled Harry. There were times when some congenial customer came to see him who he would have liked to have taken to some waterfront sea food restaurant instead of the gran
d Yacht Club, but he just hadn’t the nerve to upset Miss Bernstein’s carefully planned schedule.

  ‘So Harry wasn’t all that happy at the office and not all that happy at home. At one time, before he married Lisa, he thought she would turn out to be a first-class bitch, but this wasn’t so. So long as the bed arrangements worked smoothly, Lisa was even fun.

  ‘They had been married for two years when the accident happened. During this time, Harry had got a better grasp of the business and had sold some thirty acres of building land which pleased Sol as the price was high. Harry was now used to luxury living. Because of him, Lisa’s parties were considered the best in the City. She, herself, was never too popular. She bored men, and the women envied her too much, but everyone liked Harry. Every so often they would go off on the yacht with a party. Harry learned to skin dive.’ Here Al Barney paused. ‘I taught him. He took to it like a fish. Well, anyway, he found life wasn’t all that bad, and after all, he was husky enough to satisfy Lisa, and she really doted on him.

  ‘After some trouble, he had finally sold a parcel of land to an Englishman who was looking for a place in the sun. He had exchanged contracts, shaken hands, and as his customer left the office, Harry sat back in his chair, feeling he wasn’t doing too badly. He decided he would take Lisa out that night to celebrate when Miss Bernstein came in. There was something about her fat face that made Harry stiffen. Usually, she was placid and coldly efficient, but now her face looked like mutton fat that had been dropped on the floor.’

  ***

  ‘Dr. Gourley wants to speak to you,’ she said, and her voice was shrill.

  Dr. Gourley was their personal doctor. Lisa liked doctors, and was constantly having checkups and making Harry have them too.

  Harry stared at her.

  ‘Dr. Gourley?’

  ‘There’s been an accident,’ Miss Bernstein said, and to his horror began to cry.

  Harry snatched up the telephone receiver.

  It appeared that Lisa had been thrown from her horse. Some dog had run across the bridle path and the horse had shied violently.

  The grave, quiet voice of the doctor sent a cold chill up Harry’s spine.

  ‘She’s at my clinic, Mr. Lewis. It’s bad. Will you come at once?’

  The accident fixed Lisa. She came down on a hunk of rock and jolted her spine out of shape. From that moment Lisa was a cripple from the waist down. Harry’s world turned upside down and inside out again. At first, he couldn’t believe what the doctor was telling him. Then it dawned on him there would be no more bed sessions, and he felt as if a ton of rock had been taken off his back. Then he felt shocked to think that Lisa wouldn’t walk again. Then finally, but this came later, he realised he was chained to a cripple.

  When Sol Cohen got the news, he had a fatal heart attack. He was dead before the snooty Miss Selby could reach a telephone to get help.

  Harry practically panicked when he heard that Sol Cohen was dead. What with Lisa in the clinic, semi-conscious and now Sol dead, he imagined he would have the Cohen kingdom to deal with. But he quickly found out that Sol had taken care of everything. There was a Vice President, a board of directors, lawyers, three hatchet-faced Trustees — all of them just waved Harry away and handled everything.

  It wasn’t until Lisa came out of the clinic in a wheelchair that Sol’s will was read. Everything went to Lisa. Harry wasn’t even mentioned. Sol might just as well have been alive for all the difference it made to Harry.

  But Lisa’s accident did make a change in Harry’s life. When the fact finally sank into her mind that she would never get laid again and would never ride a horse again, she went a little crazy in the head.

  Harry had always suspected that there was a bitch in her, and now the bitch came out into the open. From the moment she returned to the house, Harry’s life turned into a nightmare. The red light went up when she closed their joint account and reopened it in her name only.

  ‘Daddy has left everything to me,’ she said, staring at Harry, ‘so I am going to run everything. You have your money for cigarettes. I’m handling the rest of the money.’

  There were no more parties. ‘Who the hell wants to come here with me in this goddam wheelchair?’ Harry tried to talk her out of this mood without success. ‘Do you imagine I’m going to entertain all those so called glamorous whores so you can give them a sly feel? And listen . . . while we are on the subject of whores . . . if I can’t have it, you’re not having it! I warn you! do you understand?’

  Harry, shaken, said feebly, ‘Don’t talk like that, darling. This is as big a tragedy for me as it is for you.’

  She glared at him, her big eyes glittering. ‘Okay . . . so keep it a tragedy for you, Harry, or you’re out!’

  Two years of luxury living had not only made a big impact on Harry, it had also softened him. The thought of being out of a job, out of this beautiful house, out of his top executive office scared him silly. But at the back of his mind, he felt, if he really had to get laid, he would be able to manage it so discreetly that Lisa would never know. But he quickly found out that he was now surrounded by spies. Miss Bernstein, ToTo, the Japanese butler and Helgar were always spying on him.

  Helgar was Lisa’s nurse — a gaunt, tall Dane, around fifty-five with flaxen hair, a face like a horse and eyes like stone.

  Harry got the idea that this woman disliked him and would, if she could, stir up trouble for him. In his turn, he hated her.

  During the day, Lisa kept busy on the telephone in contact with Frisco, her bank and her lawyers and driving Miss Selby crazy. Harry had the satisfaction of knowing that she was just as bitchy to these people as she was to him. But it was the evenings and the weekends that Harry dreaded. After he had returned from work, he never knew in what mood he would find Lisa. Sometimes she would be reasonable, but always complaining, but most times she was sheer hell.

  In despair, one evening after she had snapped off the TV set and had flung her novel across the room, Harry had suggested they should have a party. ‘It would do you good,’ he said. ‘You can’t go on living…’

  ‘Shut up!’ Lisa screamed at him. ‘Do you think I want those creeps coming here and pitying me! If I’m caught, then you’re caught, and if you don’t like it, then get the hell out of here!’

  That’s how their life together was for the next few months. Things happened. For instance, Harry had got into the habit of buying clothes when he wanted them. He bought three lightweight suits, charged them to the joint account, forgetting the joint account no longer existed. The scene that followed him alerted him as to how bad Lisa’s mental state had become.

  When he returned home after a day in the office, Lisa threw the bills at him. ‘Pay them yourself!’ she screamed at him. ‘You have your own money! How dare you charge these to my account!’

  Harry remembered there wasn’t much in his account. Twenty thousand dollars a year sounded all right, but when he had to find his cigarettes, his drinks, his gas for the car, take care of the big tips at the Yacht Club and all the other incidentals of a rich man, there wasn’t much left. He realised the tailor’s bill would have to wait until he received his next monthly cheque from the Trustees.

  But there were also times when Lisa was pathetic. When she got rid of Helgar and was alone in her vast, ornate bedroom. This was the time when she was in the mood when she allowed Harry to comfort her, and because he was strictly honest, he made the effort and did his best. There were times when she asked him to open the Raysons’ safe and give her the Esmaldi necklace. She would put it on and wheel herself to the mirror and stare at herself and then weep bitterly. When she cried she shook as if her sobs would tear her to pieces and Harry felt pretty bad about this.

  Finally, after two months had dragged by, he risked an explosion and suggested that they went on the yacht and get the hell out of the house for a while. To his surprise, Lisa agreed. She was now getting sick of pitying herself. Harry then suggested they should take along with them a few of their
close friends. He was careful to suggest three women who had as much charm as a dentist’s drill and their husbands who lived for horses. Again Lisa agreed.

  The cruise was a success. A few days after their return, Lisa told Harry that she was going to throw a party. She had decided no one gave a damn that she was chained to a wheelchair so long as they could get drunk and eat the luxury food she provided . . . so, what the hell?

  Life then slowly came back to normal for Harry, but he had to be careful. It was like living with a time bomb in his lap.

  During any party, he dared not move far from Lisa’s chair. He had always to be near her or there would be a nerve shattering scene after the party. After some six months living like a monk, Harry found the sex urge getting on top of him, but he fought it off. He knew this was asking for the worst kind of trouble: besides, he couldn’t see how he could even hire a whore! He just had no opportunity. He left home at ten a.m. for the office and he knew Miss Bernstein, the spy, would telephone Lisa if he was even half an hour late. His lunch hour was given up to feeding clients. He returned home at six p.m. The rest of the evening was spent with Lisa until she went to bed at ten-thirty. Then he was on his own, but he knew Helgar and ToTo were prowling around and there was no chance of sneaking out. Anyway, in spite of this urge, there was no one woman in Paradise City he knew of worth fooling with at the risk of losing this luxury standard of life. So Harry gritted his teeth and remained celibate.

  This situation went on for another two months. Then Harry got a break. Lisa had thrown a small party and among the guests was Jack English. He was like Harry: married to a rich woman and scared silly of putting a foot wrong. English was nice: a quiet guy and Lisa liked him. He wasn’t much to look at: tall, thin with a face like a spaniel, but nice. He said suddenly to Lisa, ‘You know something? Harry’s getting fat. The trouble with him is he isn’t taking any exercise. I’m looking for a golfing partner. Don’t you think he should get off some of that fat?’ As Lisa hesitated, Harry’s heart stood still, then she looked at him: she was in one of her good moods.