Sinful Woman

by James M. Cain

  She didn’t answer.

  He got up, took his hat, started for the door. His phone rang and he came back. When he hung up he put his hat back on the tree. “Your decree was entered an hour ago.”

  “Mr. Daly, what can I do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Can’t we phone the marriage license bureau and—”

  “They have no authority to refuse your sister a license, if, as I understand it, she’s of age. Besides, she can be married anywhere. Why don’t you talk to her?”

  Dismally, Sylvia drove back to the hotel, but there the clerk shook his head. “Your sister went out, I’d say it was over an hour ago, Miss Shoreham. No, she didn’t leave any message, or—” He broke off to answer his phone, then held up his hand. “It’s for you, Miss Shoreham. Would you like to take it here?”

  Trembling, she took the phone, but it wasn’t Hazel, it was Tony. “How’s it going, Miss Shoreham?”

  “Just terribly.”

  “I just called up to leave word that you needn’t bother about sending the car out or anything. If you’ll just leave the keys at the desk I’ll have somebody drop by for it.”

  “Thanks, Tony.”

  “Oh, and one other thing. That ring.”

  “Ring? What ring?”

  “It’s the ring I’ve seen you wear, the one with a coronet on it. I thought perhaps it’s the same one your husband—”

  “Yes, it is. What about it?”

  “He must have forgotten it, or dropped it, or something. One of the girls picked it up in the office. I’ll bring it in—”

  “No, no! Listen to me, Tony!”

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “He won’t get married without it. He’ll be out after it, and I might still be able to stop them. Say nothing to anybody about it, and don’t give it up, even to him. I’ll be right out, as fast as your car can take me.”

  In the casino of the Galloping Domino a fat little man sat playing roulette with one hand, holding a coffee cup with the other, and extending both feet to a Mexican boy who was just finishing an extensive job of polishing two soft calf boots. Behind him, a tall man and a little man stood admiringly, exclaiming over the acumen of his bets, which had now netted him an agreeable profit. In the office, a girl sat at the redwood desk, fingering a ring that lay on the blotter before her. On the steel oval she noticed tarnish, rubbed it on the virgin blotter. It made marks. Possibly to find a smaller blotter she opened the center drawer, then the righthand drawer. But this she closed quickly, for she had glimpsed something never far out of sight in gambling houses: the cold, oily sheen of pistol barrels and rifle butts.

  Outside, a car with its lights burning turned in at the gate, a girl at the wheel, a man beside her. He jumped out, ran into the casino. She continued around to the side, turned the car so it faced the road, stopped, and waited.

  “All right, Vicki, here’s your ring, and I guess you win. What’s the deal? A new contract? Sell Dimmy the stock? Do Queen of the Big House? Whatever it is, it’s all right, if you’ll only promise not to go through with this ghastly thing.”

  “Is O. K., Sylvia. We mek new contract, big money for you, vary big money. Sell Dimmy a stock, yes, he pay fine price. Pay one twanny five. Is nize, ha? Do Quin a Big ’Ouse. Ah, Sylvia, is fine picture!”

  “Just one little thing.”

  She went over, stood very close, looking him in the eye, and spit in his face. He took out a handkerchief, wiped his cheek, and stood looking at the floor a long time. Several times he started to speak, and couldn’t: of all the insults she had offered him in the last hour, this one alone seemed to have reached the quick of his nature. His mouth had just started to throb when there was a light tap, and the door to the casino opened.

  Chapter Four

  THE GIRL WHO NOW entered the room in a stagey green dress was a by-product of Hollywood that gets little attention in print, but that occurs with unhappy frequency in that enormous catch-basin of talent: the feeble residuary legatee of such life as remains in a family after some prodigious child has been born. Rarely on public view, they are to be seen in homes, clubs, and dressing rooms, these pale, futile, carbon-copies of greatness, having no identity of their own, no existence except what they can suck from somebody else. Most of them, however, are happier than the rest of us manage to be, for it is the irony of life that those whom they worship commonly love them to distraction, would do anything for them, try to do everything for them. The real story of many a celebrated actor, if anybody were cruel enough to print it, would turn out to be, not the romance that his fans talk about, or the success he has made in his profession, but his unremitting effort to bring Christmas into the life of some dimwit brother who means more to him than anything else on earth.

  How much this girl actually looked like Sylvia it would be impossible to say. Her figure, while not quite the sculptor’s dream that Sylvia’s was, was quite striking nevertheless, and similarly formed. Her hair, whatever its original color, had been bleached to the same shade of blondness as Sylvia’s, though it lacked Sylvia’s little glint of gold. Her eyes, a medium blue, weren’t so far from the gray of Sylvia’s. Her features, certainly, bore rather a marked resemblance. Yet, one suspected that actual similarity went no further than it commonly goes between two sisters. What made her look like Sylvia in so startling, in so shocking a way, was the slavish imitation of Sylvia that she indulged in, with every slightest grimace. From her walk, to her facial mannerisms, to the little wistful smile, to the sad look into distant spaces, she was Sylvia, at least in her own imagination, and could never, for one waking moment, be anybody else.

  She gave a little exclamation of delight at seeing her sister. “Has Vicki told you, Sylvia?”

  “ ... Yes, Hazel, he has.”

  “Are you going to forgive me?”

  “You haven’t done anything to me, darling.”

  “I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid.”

  “Vicki has something to tell you.”

  “No plizze, Sylvia, you tell.”

  Sylvia’s arm went around her, and into her eyes came a queer look, like the look that comes into the eyes of a cat that smells chloroform. In a frightened, throaty whisper she asked what they meant, but it was a long time before Sylvia could answer. Then, miserably, she said: “Vicki’s not going to marry you, darling.”

  “ ... Why?”

  “I asked him not to.”

  “But why?”

  “I didn’t think it would be good for you.”

  “You mean my trouble?”

  “It wouldn’t work out.”

  “But my trouble is all we ever talk about. He’s going to take me to Vienna when the war’s over, and there are doctors there that know all about it, and it’s going to be a simple matter for me to get cured.”

  “It might not turn out that way.”

  “But, Vicki—”

  “Isn’t really much of a psychiatrist.”

  Vicki, his mouth throbbing now in a veritable flutter, came over now, murmuring Hazel’s name in a frenzy of compassion. He patted her on the head, said: “I never know thees t’ing till Sylvia, today she tell. Todayheute I on’stan all. Is moch better, Hezzel, we do like Sylvia say. All lahve Sylvia, no? All t’ink Sylvia know best?”

  For answer Hazel opened her handbag, took out a cigarette. Then she began walking around. In spite of Sylvia’s reminders that the doctors had told her not to smoke, she kept snapping the cigarette against her thumbnail, in nervous, ominous taps. Then she moistened her lips, in the way Sylvia moistened them before beginning a big scene. Then she spoke in the quiet, vibrant way that Sylvia spoke when these scenes opened, the way that suggested patience, restraint, all the idealistic things she stood for. She said: “What I want to know is, why did you agree to this? What did she say to you, Vicki, that made you decide to give me up?”

  “I merely told him—”

  “No, please. Let Vicki talk.”

  “Say you nuts. Is all.”

>   “It couldn’t have been that. You knew that already.”

  “Din on’stan about thees t’ing.”

  “And it couldn’t have been about the money.”

  Sylvia looked up, startled, and Vicki seemed to have turned to wood. Hazel went on: “Certainly it was nothing of a business nature. We’ve talked this over many times, and both agreed that Sylvia would be much better off to stay with Phoenix, and I had agreed to turn the stock over to you as soon as we were married, since I better than anybody else know what’s good for her. Was it about business?”

  “Can be.”

  “Vicki, I don’t believe you.”

  She was sad, patient, detached, every inch Cavell rebuking a young nurse who had failed to bring a soldier his canteen of fresh water. After a pause in which she looked out the window with a little compassionate smile, she went on: “There’s only one other thing she could have told you ... Dirt! Dirt! ... Rotten, filthy dirt!”

  This was the celebrated Shoreham change of pace, the pregnant whisper with which Sylvia could get more terrible punch into a scene than most actresses could get with a hundred foot of screaming. Sylvia, who had sat down, started to speak, didn’t. She leaned back, closed her eyes. She acted as though she had been through this many times before, and knew there was nothing to do but let Hazel have her head until she ran down, when perhaps she would become manageable. Hazel went on: “Oh yes, there have been men in my life. I’m human. All too human. I didn’t think it hurt anybody. That I could have a little romance, a little touch of beauty to look forward to. Little did I dream that my own sister—”

  She broke off and stood with face twitching, tears welling into her eyes. This was another Shoreham specialty: a dead-end stop with tears, not with the assistance of a cut and glycerine, but straight into the camera, with real tears glittering in her eyes. After a long look at distant inspirations, Hazel went on: “My own sister. She’s been kind, you say. Yes, kind she has been. She feeds me, gives me a bed to sleep in, buys me shining raiment. She buys me silk, and costly furs, and fine motor cars, and little trinkets, to prove she loves me. But I, I have known the joy of giving, too. I have given a life. Little do they realize that I too might like to be an actress. Little do they know that I too crave admiration, that I too might like my name in shining lights from Maine to California, from China to Timbuctoo, from pole to pole and sea to sea and tiny isle to greatest continent. And it might be mine. Who knows? Am I not young? Am I not fair? But no. I renounced my share of the sun that she might shine. I gave up what might be mine, that she might have what should be hers. I, God help me, I loved her, and my reward was—this—”

  A wrenching monologue that was usually given Sylvia in Reel 5, this was spoken without so much as one motion, standing behind a desk. The usual way to close it out was not to attempt to finish it, or make a great deal of sense out of it, but to give Sylvia’s matchless voice its chance as long as the scene would hold, as well as her incredible capacity to speak with no pantomime whatever, then let her do some trivial thing to bring the story back to everyday realities. Hazel again tapped her cigarette, opened the middle drawer, as though looking for a match. She tried to close it, but she was rapidly losing muscular coordination as her break progressed, and it stuck. She pushed against it with her hip, and her dress caught in it. Yielding for a moment to blazing rage, she banged it with her fist, got it closed. Then she opened the righthand drawer.

  Sylvia was still sitting with her eyes closed, a look of terrible pain on her face. It was Vicki, who had wandered restlessly around the room, and was now behind Sylvia, who saw what Hazel lifted out of the drawer. With an exclamation he leaped forward, for the gun was leveled straight at Sylvia. Sylvia opened her eyes, didn’t move a muscle. She said: “I’ll be looking at you, Hazel. Every night.”

  “No!”

  “Yes!”

  The crack of the Shoreham voice was followed by a terrible stare. Hazel looked away, as a cat does from a human being, whimpered, lowered the gun. Vicki, who was standing within an inch of her, took it, put it back in the drawer.

  Sylvia said: “Damn you, Vicki.” Then she got up, went over to the wall behind her, and said: “You’d better go now. Because I don’t know how long God will give me strength to stay away from that desk. From what’s in that desk. Go. Don’t be there when I turn around.”

  Chapter Five

  COMPARED WITH SYLVIA’S GLOWING twenty-five, Dmitri Spiro’s age was sallowly middle; compared with her slender curvation, his contours were distressingly blimpish. Yet he was still under forty, and in spite of pallor, fat, and baldness, he gave off something describable as magnetism. Spiro wasn’t his name, but it was a fair approximation of his mother’s name, she having been Hungarian; his father’s Lithuanian name was wholly unsayable and unwritable, at least to Americans, and he had dropped it. He had started life as stable boy on the estates of the late Baron Vladimir Alexis Gustavus Adlerkreutz, near Memel, where his father had charge of the cattle and his mother had charge of the cheese, curds, and butter. Respect for the Herrschaft was a prominent feature of the Spiro household, and young Dmitri early learned the deep bow that a peasant must give them, and the correct way to take off his hat to them, and the rigid stance that was required in speaking to them, to be relaxed only in case of critical moisture in the nose, when relief with the back of the hand was permissible. He had one friend, however: the young Vicki Adlerkreutz, son of the baron, and owner of a fine Shetland pony.

  After the last war, however, his education was interrupted, for he returned to Buda-Pest, whence he had been taken as a child, and got work tending horses in one of the circuses there. It wasn’t long, however, before he persuaded the management to let him do a comic turn with the clowns.

  Comedians are the business men of the theatre; indeed comedy is a business, requiring bookkeepers to keep track of its jokes, its emoluments, and its taxes. After that, his rise in show business was rapid, as was his increase in weight, and acquaintanceship with actresses of the grand, or Viennese style. Soon he had a company, first in Buda-Pest, then in Vienna, a theatre, and a monocle. But then came certain upheavals, and long before Anschluss he left hurriedly, for Paris. There he tried to get started again, but succeeded only in losing such money as he had been able to salvage. He came to Hollywood, and had been there only a few days when he met, at Vine and Selma, his former friend, the young Victor Alexis Olaf Herman Adlerkreutz, now baron in sight of God and all men except Hitler, who had taken his estates. It was the greatest moment of his life when Vicki recognized him, kissed him on both cheeks, dragged him into the Brown Derby, and borrowed $5. For the rest of his day he relaxed, and permitted his head to swim, and inhaled the iridescent beauty of the sunshine at the reflection that he, Dmitri Spiro, a peasant boy, had been thus treated by Adlerkreutz, a baron of Lithuania, with full seignorial rights over the peasant girls of his domain, and no doubt a great many actresses too.

  From then on he and Vicki saw each other a great deal, and within a week had taken an apartment together in Beverly Hills. Then the ex-comic, the business man of the theatre, saw the use to which he could put his handsome friend. A young girl was just coming up in pictures, could be made into a star. She had been, not a waitress as she usually said, but a hostess in a Wilshire Boulevard restaurant that bought time on the air for a little lunch-hour feature called Your Favorite Celebrity. When the regular announcer failed to show up one day, she had taken over the mike, and managed it with such tact, wit, and charm, that overnight she was a celebrity herself. Then she got a part in a picture. So one night at the Mocambo, Dmitri appeared at her table with a sketch he had made of her, and asked her to sign it. It was small, risqué, and good. Laughing, she signed, and the next night he presented his friend, Baron Adlerkreutz. The month after that she made a picture, The Glory of Edith Cavell. The month after that, not quite sure how it happened, she was the Baroness Adlerkreutz, rather pleased at the title, wholly captivated by Vicki, and a little surprised, but not un
duly alarmed, to find that somewhere along the way she had signed a lot of contracts.

  From then on, Dmitri was successful indeed. Like most of his colleagues from the Danube country, he had a gift for the cute; i.e., for sentimental little situations with a slightly salacious twist, lending themselves to uniforms, peasant bodices, twirling slippers, and czarda music. Sometimes he used the same plot with goona music and South Sea atmosphere, with sarongs instead of bodices; once he switched to swing, with B-girls’ dirndles instead of sarongs, and the story became Love Pirate. Anyway he cut it up, it was the same old hotza; it didn’t make actresses but it made him; Sylvia slipped, but he grew rich. Now, as he sat here in this Western gambling hall, his appearance implied his career. The soft calfskin boots, now glowing under the Mexican boy’s fingers, suggested his present eminence, as well as his start among the horses. The whipcord riding breeches, fitted to his rotund rear, suggested the movies that now engaged him. The full duellist’s shirt, puffed at the throat by a silk handkerchief around his neck, suggested the mokos of Paris. His monocle, as well as his brown silk beret, suggested all the cafes of the world.

  He was playing the first four and the first twelve, risking two 25c chips at each spin, and greatly enjoyed Mr. La Bouche’s admiration, and Benny’s admiration, to say nothing of the admiration of the little blond croupier who was serving the table. He frowned when he saw Vicki come in, but was reassured when the sunny smile broke in his direction, and Vicki rattled something at him in German about ‘wir beide,’ which seemed to mean that Hazel was with him, and that the scheduled ceremony was not far off. Tony bustled up, told Vicki his ring was in the office, if that was what he came for. Dmitri went back to his game with zest, and paid no more attention to what went on in the forward part of the establishment, even when Mr. La Bouche held up his finger as though he heard something, and the croupier spoke of the backfiring of trucks, and how the road ought to be renamed Artillery Avenue. Presently, Benny said: “There goes Vicki.”