All the way

“Oh, yes, Mr. Chapman. How are you?”

“Just fine. I was hoping you could help me out with something. I want to open an account in a local bank, and wondered if you could recommend one. I thought you might have connections—”

“I sure have. The Seaboard First National. Go in and see John Dakin. He’s the Assistant Cashier, and a good friend of mine. I’ll call him as soon as they open in the morning.”

“Thanks a million.”

“You given any more thought to that piece of frontage we were looking at?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I drove up that way this afternoon, when I came up from the Keys.”

“You’re at the Clive now?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d be glad to drive down and talk it over with you a little more. Unless you’re busy, that is.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything this evening. I might be in the dining room, but I’ll leave word at the desk.”

“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll see you in about forty-five minutes.”

The dining room was just dim enough. He was one of the people they’d be certain to question afterwards, or at any rate one of the shrewdest. I couldn’t take too many chances with him. The other time I’d been wearing the dark glasses except for the few minutes in his office when I first met him, he wouldn’t get much of a look at me here, and this was the last time I’d see him. I took a table for two along the wall, and was just finishing the soup when he came in. I stood up and we shook hands. “I forgot to ask if you’d had dinner.”

“Yes, thanks, I’ve had mine.”

“Well, have a drink, anyway.” I beckoned the waiter over. He ordered a bourbon and water. When the waiter returned with it, I said, “Would you take this knife away and bring me a new one? It looks dirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

We talked real estate in general for a few minutes. The waiter brought my entree. I’d ordered roast beef. There was gravy on it.

“No, no,” I said. “I don’t want that gravy on it, waiter. Would you change that, please?”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

He departed. “I don’t know why they ruin meat that way,” I said to Fitzpatrick. “All that damned grease to give you indigestion.”

“Yes,” he replied easily. “I know exactly what you mean.”

We’d just resumed our conversation when the waiter came back with the new order of roast beef. I looked at it, and then at him, and shook my head. “We don’t seem to get together at all. I don’t like to create an international incident, but I’m positive I said all outside slices, well-done.”

”Yes, sir.” He was silently raging now, but he took it away again.

I addressed Fitzpatrick. “Sorry to create a fuss, but by God, the prices you pay, the least you can do is get what you order.”

He smiled. “Not at all. If more people had that attitude, service would be a lot better than it is.” Fitzpatrick was a smooth article.

I ate some of the dinner, ordered coffee for myself and another bourbon for Fitzpatrick. While we were waiting for it to come, I took one of Chapman’s pill-bottles from my pocket, shook out a pill, and swallowed it with some water. I had no idea what it was, but it probably wouldn’t hurt me. Then I stuck a cigarette in the holder, and lit it with the butane lighter. Fitzpatrick, I thought, should be able to give them a pretty good description of Chapman.

The drinks came. “All right, let’s get right to the point,” I said. “I want to make an offer on that piece of frontage, but there’s no use wasting your time and mine. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. What do you think?”

He lit a cigarette. “Ethically, of course, I couldn’t say, even if I knew. We represent the seller, and the only price we know anything about is the one he tells us. But let’s put it this way; I’ve been in the business a long time and I never saw anybody get hurt making an offer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I’m on vacation, of course, and all I have with me is traveler’s checks. I can’t give you a check on my bank at home, but I called my broker in New Orleans on Friday and told him to send me some money. It just came.” I took out the Webster & Adcock envelope and dropped it on the table. “As soon as I open that account in the morning, I’ll give you a check for five thousand dollars to submit with the offer. Could you have one of your men pick it up here at the hotel?”

“Of course. We’d be glad to.”

“Good. Tell the owner if he’s really interested in a deal he’d better let me know tomorrow, because if he does accept I’ve got to raise the balance of a hundred and seventy thousand dollars cash to complete the transaction, and nobody’s got that lying around in a banking account. I don’t want to call off my vacation to go home and raise it, but it happens I can swing it by liquidating securities in my account with Webster & Adcock, and I can do that by telephone. It’ll take a few days for my deposits to clear New Orleans, of course, before the bank here will honor any checks on the account, but it’ll still be the simplest way to handle it.”

He nodded. “That would be fine all round.”

I stood up. “Okay, then. You can have somebody pick up my check here at the desk around ten-thirty in the morning. And call me right away when you hear from the owner.”

I went back up to the room. All this jockeying around with offers was a nuisance, and it was going to cost us five thousand dollars, but for purposes of verisimilitude it was absolutely essential. I mentally went over our timetable. We were right on schedule, and doing beautifully. It was time now to start lining up the girl.

I went out and took a cab, and told the driver I was alone in town and wanted to see some of the night life. He had nothing better to offer than a cheap night club. I had a drink, and departed in another cab. The driver of this one had a more sophisticated outlook, or fewer scruples. He looked over my identification. I voiced some preferences. He drove me back to the hotel, and I gave him my room number.

It was around ten-thirty when she knocked on the door.

Ten

She wouldn’t do at all; I could see that within the first ten minutes. She was dark and rather pretty, particularly with her clothes off, but she was a good-natured, somewhat unimaginative girl with no particular tensions or any animosity toward anything or anybody. I didn’t like flying in the face of psychiatric dogma by saying there was such a thing as a well-adjusted prostitute, but that was exactly what she was. She was lazy, the hours were good, and she earned considerably more than the average nuclear physicist. And she’d lived around Miami for years, and was crazy about it. She was out.

I completed the transaction with her, more as a gesture of conformity than from any particular interest in her, gave her the fifty dollars she asked for, added ten more for no reason that I could think of, and she left. I’d have to try again tomorrow.

I awoke around seven, went through that first terrible instant of remembering that left me sick and shaking, and then tried to appraise it clinically to see if it was any better or worse than on preceding mornings. It appeared to be about the same. Well, it would go away in time.

I had coffee and orange juice sent up, and put in an hour’s practice on the signature. From now on, it was dangerous. The traveler’s checks didn’t mean anything; nobody ever bothered to look at the signatures unless they’d been reported stolen. But now it was banks, who were notoriously touchy on the subject. Then I reminded myself for the hundredth time that I was being silly. I was overlooking the point of the whole thing, the real beauty of it.

The only thing I was going to forge, aside from a receipt which would be filed without even a glance, was the endorsement of a check. And who ever looked at that unless there was some question it was the payee who had cashed it? It was just as she had pointed out to me the first time. As far as anybody in the world knew—except the two of us—I was Harris Chapman. I acknowledged receipt of the check, told the man who’d sent it to me that I’d cashed it, and that was the end of the line. And as for getting the money out of the bank—that was the real honey of the deal; I wouldn’t be trying to copy a signature, because it would be my own. Not my name, of course, and it would be only my version of Harris Chapman’s signature, but it would be what was on the signature card, because I’d opened the account. No, if we ended in disaster, it wouldn’t be this forgery thing that tripped us.

It went off without a hitch. I arrived at the bank shortly after it opened, and inquired for Dakin. He was at one of the desks behind a railing at one end of the main lobby, a nervous, self-consciously hearty, and overworked man who couldn’t have described me ten minutes later if I’d been wearing a monocle and a sharpened bone through my nose.

“Oh, yes. Yes. Mr.—” His eyes swept toward the memo pad to verify his old friend’s name. “Mr. Fitzpatrick called. Glad to have you as a depositor, Mr. Chapman. And we know you’ll like Miami.”

I filled in the form, signed two copies of the signature card, endorsed the check, and gave it to him. He carried it off to one of the tellers’ windows and returned with my deposit receipt and a check-book. He assured me it wouldn’t take over three or four days for it to clear New Orleans. I went back to the hotel, wrote out a check for five thousand dollars, borrowed an envelope from the cashier, and left it at the desk to be delivered to anybody from Fitzpatrick Realty.

Up in the room again, I got out the list of securities, opened the Herald to yesterday’s closing stock prices, and made a rough outline of what to sell. It would just about clean out the account; there’d be less than twelve thousand dollars left in it. I put through the call to New Orleans.

“Hello, Chris? Chapman—”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Chapman. I see Warwick opened at two and a half again this morning, so we may not—”

“Never mind that,” I cut in brusquely. “It’s chicken feed. I’m on my way now on that deal I told you about—oh, incidentally, the twenty-five thousand dollars was here when I checked in at the Clive last night. Thanks a million. I opened an account and deposited it this morning. The deal’s going through at my price, beyond any shadow of doubt, and I’m going to need a hundred and fifty thousand dollars within the next few days. You got my list handy, and a pencil?”

“Yes, sir. But you’re not going to—?”

I paid no attention. “Sell the Columbia Gas, the PG &E, that DuPont Preferential, Champion Paper Preferential, and the AT&T— That should be pretty close to a hundred thousand. Now, let’s see—”

“But, Mr. Chapman, those are all good, sound issues. I hate to see you sell them.”

“What?” I asked absently. Then I did a take, and barked into the phone. “Goddammit, Chris, I’m not interested in being on the defensive. There’s no way to stand still in this economy; you keep going ahead, or you’re eaten alive by ducks. Let’s face it. The bull market’s dead, and I’m not interested in making four cents in dividends and giving three of them to the Government. I want to make money, and right now Florida real estate’s the place to make it; not in the stock market. When the market starts to move again, I’ll get back in, but for now I’m going to put that money to work.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do about it. We went on with the list.

“All right,” I concluded. “The largest block in there is a thousand shares. You can unload it all in an hour without even a ripple. Get the check off to me as early as you can this afternoon, registered airmail, care of the Clive Hotel, so I’ll have it by the time the banks open in the morning. It’s going to take several days to clear. Got it?”

“Yes. I have it all.”

“Fine,” I said. “G’bye.” I hung up, and breathed softly with relief.

That much of it was past now; the Chris phase was complete, and he’d never suspected a thing. It called for a drink, in spite of the hour. I was just pouring it when the phone rang. It was Fitzpatrick.

He was in high spirits. “Well, Mr. Chapman, it looks as if you’ve got yourself a deal. I talked to the owner a few minutes ago, and I think he’s about ready to accept.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m raising the money now.”

A woman’s voice cut in on the line. “Mr. Chapman, I’m sorry to interrupt. This is the hotel switchboard—”

“Yes?” I asked.

“We have a very urgent long-distance call from Thomaston, Louisiana.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “I mean—put it on.”

“Harris! Thank God they located you.” It was Coral Blaine. “I’ve been trying for over an hour, but I’d forgotten what hotel you said. This whole place is in an uproar—”

“What is it?” I broke in.

“We’ve got to have the combination of that old safe, and you’re the only one who knows it. Barbara says you’ve got it written down somewhere in your office, but we can’t find it.”

I could feel the whole thing caving away beneath us, but I had to try. “Get hold of yourself!” I snapped. “What old safe are you talking about? And what’s happened?”

“Harris! The one that was moved out of here about six months ago when you bought the new one. It was stored in the warehouse, remember? And just before you left you told Mr. Elkins to sell it to the junk yard—”

Someone knocked on the door.

“ . . . Well, yesterday afternoon he and some more men moved it outside on to the loading platform, but the junk man forgot to pick it up. It was unlocked. And this morning about eight-thirty, some first-graders on the way to school—”

I could feel myself growing sick. “Oh, Jesus, not that!”

“No,” she interrupted. “Not one of the children. A dog. Judy Weaver’s miniature poodle—”

My knees bent, and I sat down. “Well, don’t tell me the whole goddamned town—”

There was another knock on the door.

“Harris! will you please stop swearing! That silly girl is practically out of her mind. They’ve got her under a sedative now, but when she wakes up she’ll start all over again. The Humane Society is driving me crazy. Mrs. Weaver says they’re going to sue you. Everybody in town is simply furious, and people have been calling up here until I’m ready to scream. Some machine shop has drilled a hole in the safe so the stupid dog can breathe, but they can’t get him out. The radio news got hold of it, and now the New Orleans papers are calling up. Barbara says you’ve got the combination—”

Maybe it would help, I thought bitterly, if she told me that again. Whoever it was in the corridor was banging on the door again. I had to get away from that voice and try to think.

“Hold it,” I said. “Somebody’s at the door.”

I put down the phone and answered it. It was a porter. “Telegram, sir,” he said. I handed him a coin of some kind, and took it.

I closed the door and leaned against it. We’d had it. It wasn’t on the tapes; I knew that. I’d been through everything in the wallet. The little address book! I grabbed it out of my pocket and flipped madly through it. Nothing but addresses.

I looked at the phone lying on the desk. This was the way it ended. You learned everything there was to learn, you took care of every contingency, you memorized, you rehearsed, you perfected—and then some kid locked a dog in a safe a thousand miles away and you were done.

I still had the telegram in my hand. Through the little glassine window I could see some figures, and Brindon, La. I’d never heard of it.

Louisiana!

I slashed it open and stared at the text.

RIGHT THIRTY-TWO LEFT TWO SLANT NINETEEN RIGHT THREE SLANT SIX REPEAT RIGHT THIRTY-TWO . . . TAPED BENEATH PENCIL DRAWER.

I sighed, and pushed myself off the door on watery knees. Picking up the phone and holding it a little way from my face, I said, “Sit down, and I’ll be right with you, as soon as I deal with this crisis.”

I spoke into it. “Coral? You there? That combination is taped to the bottom of the pencil drawer in my desk. But, hold on, I’ll give it to you. Write it down—” I repeated it off the telegram.

“Thank Heavens—”

I interrupted crisply. “One of you go see Mrs. Weaver right away and see if you can smooth this over. Mrs. English, maybe; she’s good with people. Buy Judy the biggest stuffed toy you can find, one of those thirty-five dollar jobs. And, Coral, I hate to be crabby, honey, but I’m working on a real big deal down here—”

“Darling, I am sorry about it.”

When I’d hung up I went over and lay down on the bed. I could have used a drink, but I doubted I could pour it.

She’d heard about the uproar and driven to some nearby town to send the telegram, probably from a pay phone. I closed my eyes, and I could see her so vividly it hurt. When they made her, I thought, they made only one.

It wasn’t only that she’d saved us this time; she’d put the thing on ice once and for all. I could make mistakes by the dozen from now on and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Only Chapman could have known that combination.

* * *

Her name sounded like something dreamed up by a cheap press-agent. Justine Laray. Not that it mattered. What did matter was that I was sure I’d found what I was looking for.

She knocked on the door around eleven p.m., and when I opened it and she came in, she sized me up, appraised the luggage and the fat wallet lying on the dresser—all in one glance and without even appearing to—and gave me a bright smile that promised unimaginable ecstasies and almost concealed the contempt she felt for any jerk who couldn’t get a woman without buying one.

It would be a hundred dollars, honey. And when I fatuously agreed to this overcharge it merely increased her contempt. I was sweet, and much better-looking than a lot of those fat expense-account creeps—ugh! Not that she’d ever done much of this, of course. She was really in show business. A song stylist.

“That right?” I said heartily. I slapped her on the behind. “We’re going to get along fine, sweetie. I always like people with talent. Never had any myself, except for making money. And women.”

It might have been a little cruder than usual, but she’d heard the tune. “You don’t mind if I get it now, do you?”

“Hell, no,” I waved a hand toward the wallet. “Take it out of there. Why not take two while you’re at it, and stay all night? Christ, if you don’t get it the Government will, and they don’t even kiss me. I’ll mix us a little drink, huh?”

I’d been cashing the traveler’s checks at a steady rate, and the wallet held close to three thousand dollars now. The rest of the checks were lying beside it.

“You know, I just might do that,” she said archly. She took four fifties from the wallet.

She was around twenty-five, a rather slender girl with nice teeth, short dark hair, and eyes that were almost black. There was nothing of the Latin about her, however. Her skin was dead white, and the eyes were cold. I put ice and Scotch in two glasses and set them on the dresser.

“Come on, sweetie, get out of those hot, sticky clothes and into a cold highball. You still got to meet the Credentials Committee.”

We went to bed. I’d had more fun in dentists’ offices. She probably had, too; but at least she was being paid to endure it. If she drank enough, she might talk about herself.

“You’d never think I was thirty-nine years old, would you?” I said. “Come on, you’d have said thirty-two, wouldn’t you? Hit me in the stomach. Hell, go on; hit me. . . .”

I went to Notre Dame. No, I didn’t play football. I didn’t have to; my old man had plenty of money. But don’t think I was one of those pantywaists that had it all given to me. I made it myself. Radio stations, newspapers, real estate. I was going to be around here at least a week, on a real-estate deal. Stick with me, if you can stand the pace, and we’ll have a ball. Feel the muscles in that stomach, Marian. Like the old washboard, huh?

She drank; she had to, to stand me. She began to get a little tight.

Miami, hah! And Miami Beach. Brother, you could have ’em. What a girl had to put up with from those fat expense-account types that think they’re better”n she is, the hairy pigs. Vegas was for her. Or L.A. She could go to work tomorrow. Did I know she was a song stylist? Brother, the crummy breaks she’d had in this crummy place. That agent of hers—Hah! this was an agent? He couldn’t book Crosby. And that room-mate running off with three of her best dresses. Imagine, stealing from another working girl. . . .

Hey, where you get this Marian routine? My name’s Justine. I already tolja that three times already. Sure, you called me Marian. Three times, for Crissakes. Whatta you carryin’ a torch, or something? Look, don’t call me Marian, or Sweetie, or Hey You. I got a name, just like anybody else. And you use it, buster. You think I’m some cheap tramp that you just grunt or point or something and hand me ten bucks and I fall over. . . .

In the morning she gave me her telephone number so we could eliminate the middleman. I gave her an extra fifty.

“You call me, honey,” she said, putting on lipstick and giving me an arch glance. I was a crude, repulsive, egocentric blow-hard who couldn’t even remember her name, and she detested me, but oddly enough I seemed to have nearly as much money as I boasted I had, and I threw it around.

* * *

The registered airmail from Webster & Adcock arrived at nine-thirty. I slit it open, and looked at the check for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Five minutes after the bank opened, I endorsed it, wrote out a deposit slip, and added it to the account.

Back at the hotel, I called Fitzpatrick. He’d already notified me, shortly after noon yesterday, that the owner had accepted the offer.

“Fitzpatrick,” I said now. “I just received the money from my broker, and deposited it. I’ll be able to give you a check for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars by Friday. Or Monday, at the latest.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Chapman. Just fine.”

“In the meantime I’m going to take a good look at the whole South Florida real-estate picture, and may get into it a little deeper. Keep me in mind.”

“Yes, sir. As a matter of fact, we have a number of other real good listings I’d like to show you-”

“Thanks. But I think I’ll run over to the Naples area for a day or so. I’d keep in touch. G’bye.”

I called Chris and told him the check had arrived and that I’d deposited it. He was cool, but polite. I was still a client, if a rather shrunken one. The public stenographer in the hotel addressed an envelope for me and I signed the receipts and mailed them back to him. Next I called Captain Wilder in Marathon. He was out in the Stream, but I left a message with his wife that I’d got tied up on a business deal and would have to cancel the other three days’ fishing.

Coral Blaine was next. She started to tell me of some trouble at the radio station. There’d been an FCC violation of some kind. I cut her off. I was in the saddle now.

“Tell Wingard to take care of it,” I said shortly. “Authorize him to order anything he needs. I’m up to my ears in this real-estate deal. In fact, I’ve canceled the rest of my fishing reservations, and I’m going to spend the balance of the trip looking over the situation down here.”

“Darling, I wish you wouldn’t work so hard.”

“I like to work. So aside from the FCC, everything’s serene there? No more dogs locked in safes?”

She laughed sheepishly. “I am sorry about that. Wasn’t it the silliest thing?”

“It could have been serious as hell. And I’m not so sure it was an accident, either.” The dog thing had been a break we hadn’t counted on, but it was too good to waste.

“Harris, what do you mean? Of course it was an accident.”

“Maybe. But, look-Suppose somebody was trying to cut my throat? Give me a bad name, and make me lose advertisers? A thing like that could ruin me—people going around saying Chapman’s a sonofabitch that’d leave an unlocked safe around where kids can play in it. Suppose she’d actually—I mean, suppose it had been one of the kids? Instead of just a dog—”

“Harris, what on earth are you talking about?”

“Oh, I guess it’s silly,” I said, abruptly changing tone. ”Well, angel, I’m off to Naples to look over some property. I’ll call you later.”

* * *

I arrived in Naples early in the afternoon, and checked in at a motel. After driving round a while I called a few real-estate people on the phone, introduced myself, and made some inquiries. I plugged in the tape recorder, and began erasing the tapes, running them through the machine on “Record” with the volume turned all the way down. It was a slow process, as each took nearly an hour. I finished three of them. Once, I put one of them on “Play Back” for a few minutes just to hear her voice. I sat on the floor with my eyes closed, and I could almost imagine she was there in the room.

Around ten that night I was sitting at the bar in a very dimly lighted cocktail lounge. Among the eight or ten customers at the tables behind me was a dark-haired girl in her late twenties. She was sitting at a table for two, with a man about my size. I watched them from time to tune in the mirror. After a while her escort excused himself and went to the men’s room. I stuck a cigarette in the holder, lit it, and got off the stool as if to go out. Then I saw her, and stopped. I walked over to her table.

“Look, Marian,” I said angrily, “what are you doing here? I know you’re up to something. Why don’t you leave me alone?”

She was too amazed even to speak. People nearby turned and stared.

“Spreading lies behind my back!” I went on, beginning to shout. “Well, you’re wasting your time, Marian. Everybody knows how fair I was. I was more than fair—”

She had recovered now. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked coldly. “I never saw you before in my life.”

The bartender was on his way; and so was her escort, just emerging from the John. I straightened, and looked blankly around, and then at her. “Oh,” I said in confusion. “I—uh—I’m sorry. I thought you were somebody else.”

Her escort wanted to swing on me, but the bartender broke it up. He put his hand on my shoulder in friendly fashion and we walked to the door. “Easy does it, Jack.” Just as the door was closing, I heard him say to someone at the end of the bar. “Mother, dear. You never know. I’d have sworn he was cold sober.”

The next day I drove up to Fort Myers. I spent several hours driving round and talking real estate, mostly over the telephone, and finished erasing the tapes so I could dispose of them. Even if they were ever found, they’d be harmless.

I called Coral Blaine. I told her how much I missed her, and that I’d probably be home a little ahead of schedule. “The minute I clean up that real-estate deal on Monday, I’m going to start back.”

“That’s wonderful, darling.”

“I wonder if I ought to hire detectives to watch her?” I said.

“Watch who?” she asked, puzzled.

“Marian Forsyth!” I said angrily. “Good God, Coral, she can’t fool you that easily, can she? Don’t you know she’s up to something? She’s dreamed up some kind of grudge she thinks she has against me, and there’s no telling what she’ll do. You keep all my papers locked in the safe every minute. And especially my income-tax records—”

“Dear,” she broke in wearily, “I wish we could stop talking about Marian Forsyth. I’m sick of her. I don’t trust her any more than you do, but I don’t see what she could do to you.”

”All right, angel,” I said. “Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”

Late that night I threw the blank tapes and the recorder into the Caloosahatchee River. Thursday afternoon I was back in Miami, at the Clive. I called Justine Laray. She was glad to hear from me; she thought she’d lost me.

Eleven

Chumps of my caliber didn’t come along every day, and she was beginning to get bigger ideas. She didn’t ask for the money in advance this time, and she did a better job of hiding her contempt and being professionally gay in the face of my crudities and oafish bragging about money, sexual prowess, and stomach muscles.

It now appeared that this crummy room-mate had stolen all her clothes.

“I could go back to work in night clubs tomorrow if I had the wardrobe,” she said, lying naked in bed with the highball glass and a cigarette. “But, God, you got no idea, honey, what those gowns cost—”

“Where’s the strain?” I asked. “Hell, at a hundred bucks a jump—”

She was very brave about it. She never told anybody, as a rule, but I was so understanding and, well, sort of nice— There was her little boy, see. Oh, yes, she’d been married. And this lousy bas— Her husband had died, that is, after a long and expensive illness. . . .

The Carthaginian B-girls had probably used more or less the same version during the Punic Wars. “Gee, that’s rough,” I said. “And he doesn’t even know? I mean, all the money you send him at that school, he thinks you’re a big-shot singer? Well, how about that?”

“So if I can just get back on my feet—”

“You just stick with me, Marian,” I said expansively. Maybe we’ll do something about this gown business. Maybe tomorrow, huh, if I can get free for a few minutes from this deal. Say, did I tell you I stood to clean up about eighty thousand? Not bad for a little over a week, huh, baby?”

In the morning I gave her three hundred dollars, slapped her on the rear, and winked. “We got to stab Uncle for a little business expense some way, don’t we, kid?”

Sure, I still had her phone number. And if I got a chance I’d pick her up and we’d go shopping.

* * *

As soon as she left, I checked out of the hotel, had the car brought around and the bags loaded, and drove over to Miami Beach. I left it in a parking lot six or eight blocks away, and walked to the apartment. It was hot and intensely still with the air-conditioner turned off. The minute I opened the front door and stepped into the room where we’d spent so many hours she was all around me, as if the slender elegance, and color, and grace of movement were physical things that could reverberate in an empty room like sound waves and keep on echoing long after the person who had set them in motion was gone.

I tried not to look at the water-stained spot on the rug.

I changed into flannels and a sports shirt, left off the glasses and the hat, put my own wallet in my pocket, walked back to Collins Avenue, and took a cab to Miami. At another car-rental agency I rented a pick-up truck, using my own name and driver’s license, and took off for the Keys. On the way out of town I watched closely for that roadside curio place where I’d stopped before so I’d have its exact location fixed in my mind.

I had a large-scale map, and a pretty good idea of where I’d find the type of place I was looking for, but it was a long way down the small Keys and interminable bridges of the Overseas Highway. On Sugarloaf Key, some hundred and thirty miles from Miami, there was a back-country road that took off through the mangroves and salt ponds and ran along an outer line of small keys parallel with the highway. It was a wild area with practically no houses and plenty of places a car could be hidden.

Shortly after two p.m. I found just the spot I wanted, and checked the mileage back to the nearest bus stop on the highway. I started back. Just before three, I stopped at a roadside place on Big Pine Key and called the bank. Marian had said that on an amount that large they’d rush collection, but I had to be absolutely sure. I got hold of Dakin. He asked me to hold on, and checked.

“Yes, sir. Both your deposits have been collected. The second one came through this morning.”

“Thank you very much,” I said.

All I had to do was write a check Monday morning for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. We were ready for the last act.

* * *

It was after dark when I got back to Miami Beach. I put the pick-up truck in the garage at the apartment, changed back into Chapman’s suit and the glasses and hat, and went over and picked up the Cadillac. I drove to Hollywood and checked in at the Antilles Motel. It was one of those I’d spotted before, an older type built when land was cheaper, with carport spaces between the units. It sat back off the street on US 1 not too far from the center of town.

The woman in the office was a spry and chatty type of about fifty. I signed the registry card, and told her I’d be there three or four days at least. I was working on a real-estate deal, with Fitzpatrick. Oh, yes, she knew the firm. They were quite nice. I paid her for three days, and said I’d like to have a unit as far back as possible, away from the highway noise. She took me back to the next to the last unit in the right-hand row. It would do nicely, I said. In addition to the front door, there was a side door opening into the car park. The bath was a combination tub-and-shower arrangement, with a curtain rod and plastic curtain. There was a telephone. I asked her what time she closed the switchboard in the office. “Eleven p.m.,” she said.

The next morning I stopped at the office on the way out. She was talking to the colored maid. When the maid left, I asked quietly, after a glance behind me at the door, “Is there a woman registered here who has real blue-black hair, worn in a chignon ? A slender woman, in her thirties?”

“Why, no,” she said, puzzled. “Why?”

“I just wanted to be sure,” I said. “If she checks in, don’t tell her I asked, but let me know right away.”

“Yes, of course,” she said uncertainly. “Could you give me her name?”

“Oh, she won’t be using her right name,” I said. “She’s too clever for that.”

I had some breakfast in town, and drove up to Palm Beach, mostly killing time. In a hardware store, I bought a two-foot steel wrecking bar. I put it in the trunk, and came back to Fort Lauderdale. I cashed several of the checks in a bank, and one in a bar. I sat in the bar for four hours, nursing three drinks, staring straight ahead at nothing and speaking to no one.

At last the bartender became concerned. “are you all right, mister?” he asked.

I turned my head slightly and stared at him. “What do you mean, am I all right?”

“I—I mean, I thought maybe you didn’t feel well, you’re so quiet.”

”Well, I’m all right,” I said. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I’m sorry I bothered you—”

“Maybe I have to have a basal metabolism and a blood count before I can drink in your goddamned bar, is that it? Or you want me to take a Rorschach?”

“Okay, okay, forget it.”

I went on muttering after he retreated, and got up and walked out.

Around eight p.m. I registered in a motel on the outskirts of town, lay on the bed with my clothes on until nearly ten, and then grabbed up the phone and called the office. “Will you, for Christ’s sake, stop that stupid phonograph?”

The manager was puzzled. “What phonograph? Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said angrily. “Somewhere back here. If only they’d stop playing that same goddamned record over and over and over— Never mind! I’ll go somewhere else.”

He was standing in the driveway shaking his head as I shot past him in the Cadillac.

I drove down to Miami and called Coral Blaine from a phone booth at two a.m. She was somewhat piqued—she’d been worried, and I’d got her out of bed.

“You haven’t called since Thursday night, and when I tried to reach you at the Clive Hotel they said you’d left.”

“I’ve been moving around,” I said.

“There’ve been several things at the office. The bank wants to know if you’d like to extend the loan on that Washburn property. And the tax people have questioned the depreciation figures on that new gin machinery.”

“Okay. Call Wellman and tell him we’ll renew the loan for another year at the same rate of interest. If he tries to raise us, we’ll pay it off now. I’ll take up the tax thing when I get back. But never mind all that. Do you still see Marian Forsyth around there?”

“Somewhere, practically every day. But, dear, do we have to start on her again?”

“Tell me something. Do you ever speak to her?”

“No. She never speaks to me. Why should I?”

“Clever,” I said, as if talking to myself. “Damned clever.”

“What did you say, darling?”

“Oh,” I said. “Nothing. But, look, angel, I’ll be able to wind up this real-estate deal Monday morning, and probably be home sometime Tuesday.”

I drove back to the motel in Hollywood and went to bed.

* * *

The next morning I drove down to Miami Beach, parked the Cadillac in the business area not too far from Dover Way, left the hat and glasses in it, and walked to the apartment. I changed to khaki fishing clothes and a cap, backed the pick-up out of the garage, and drove down to the Keys. It was one-thirty p.m. when I reached the turn-off on to the back road on Sugarloaf. Since it was Sunday, fishermen were rather numerous, pulling boats behind their cars or casting from the bridges. Three miles from the highway there was a dim trace of a road leading off to the left through heavy scrub where the water’s edge was a tangle of mangroves. The mangroves thinned out after about a mile, giving way to open areas where boats could be launched. Several cars with empty boat trailers were parked in the vicinity, but there were no people around at the moment. The nearest boat I could see was about a half-mile offshore. I parked the truck off to one side, locked it, and started walking back. There was only a remote chance anybody would bother it, and it would attract no attention, since everyone would merely assume it belonged to another fisherman.

I came back out on to the secondary road, and had gone less than a half-mile toward the highway when a man and his wife stopped and picked me up. They were from Marathon, and had spinning rods in the back seat. I told them the battery had gone dead in my car and I was going out to the highway to pick up a new one. They dropped me at the filling station and general store. I drank a can of beer and read the Sunday papers until the Key West-Miami bus came through. When I got off at the Greyhound terminal in Miami I ducked into a phone booth and called Justine Laray, a little anxiously because it was already after eight p.m. Call girls didn’t stay home all the time. But luck was with me. She was in.

“Where on earth have you been?” she asked. “I thought you were going to call me Friday.”

“I’ve been out of town,” I said. “But, look, do you want to take a little trip? I’ve got to go up to Palm Beach for a couple of days, and we just might get a chance to look into the gown situation around there.”

“I’d love to go, honey.”

“Pack an overnight bag, and I’ll pick you up as soon as I can get loose here. Where you live?”

She gave me her address.

“I’ll see you,” I said.

I took a cab over to Miami Beach to the apartment, and changed back into Chapman’s clothes. Next I removed all identification and the cards from his wallet, dropped them in the pocket of my jacket, and counted the money in it. Nearly all the checks were cashed now, and even with the way I’d been throwing it around it came to a little over three thousand, four hundred dollars, mostly in twenties and fifties with four or five hundreds scattered through it. It made an impressive-looking roll, and the wallet would scarcely bend any more. I shoved it in my pocket, and then made a bundle of the fishing clothes and the cap, making sure my own wallet was still in the trousers.

I called Justine again.

“Look, sex-pot, I’m still tied up in this deal, over in Miami Beach. But I’d tell you what. I thought we’d stay in Hollywood tonight at that motel where I’ve been, and go on up to Palm Beach tomorrow. So why don’t you run on up to Hollywood? I’d just go on out the beach and cut across.”

“But how am I going to get there? And where do I meet you?”

“Hell, take a cab. I’d pay for it. There’s a bar—the Cameo Lounge. Meet me there at, say, ten-fifteen.”

I locked the apartment and walked over to where I’d left the Cadillac that morning. I put the fishing clothes in the trunk, along with my canvas shoes and a flashlight. Going up to a drugstore in the next block, I got a handful of change, went to the phone booth, and put in a call to Robin Wingard’s home address in Thomaston. He was in.

“Oh, hello, Mr. Chapman,” he replied. “How are you? And did Miss Blaine tell you—”

“You mean the FCC citation?” I interrupted. “Yeah. I told her to authorize you to get anything you needed to take care of it. But I’m calling about something else.”

“Yes, sir?”

I lowered my voice a little. “Listen. This is strictly between the two of us; don’t even mention it to Miss Blaine. I don’t want to worry her. Is Mrs. Forsyth there in town?”

“Why, yes. I saw her on the street just this afternoon.”

”Has she been around the station, or the studio?”

“Why, no-o. She hasn’t been to either one.”

“But you are positive she’s in town?”

“Oh, yes. Unless she left tonight. But why?”

“I can’t go into it now,” I said. “But here’s what I want you to do. Under no circumstances, is she to get into the station, or the studio. If she tries to force her way in, or sneak in, call the police. If necessary, hire Pinkertons.”

“But—I don’t understand.”

“I can’t explain now. But I’ll be there by Tuesday afternoon, and in the meantime don’t let her get past you. G’bye.”

I drove to Hollywood, found a place to park near the Cameo shortly before ten-fifteen, and waited. Justine arrived in a taxi about ten minutes later, and went inside. I lit a cigarette and remained where I was for another forty minutes, watching the doorway to be sure she didn’t leave. She’d have had two or three drinks by now, and she’d be smoldering.

I went in. It was very dimly lighted, a small place with a precious aspect about it and a Hammond organ that fortunately wasn’t being played at the moment. There were six or eight customers. She was at a small table about halfway back, grimly watching the door. She had a new permanent, and was wearing a dark blue dress and white mesh gloves, and the overnight case was on the floor beside her.

“Well! You finally got here,” she said, as I sat down. “I was just about to go back.”

“Sorry I was late, cutie,” I said. “Couldn’t get away.”

The casual manner and the “cutie” didn’t improve her feelings any, but she was trying to get them under control. It would be poor policy to blast the goose just as it was about to produce the golden egg.

”It’s all right,” she said with an effort.

“Well, I wound up the deal.” I stuck a cigarette in the holder and lit it. “I guess our trip’s off, baby.”

“What?”

“Yeah. I can start home in the morning—”

“Well! Of all the stupid—!” The black eyes were venomous. “After I spend a fortune in cab fare, and sit here like a mope for an hour and a half waitin’ for you to decide to show up—”

The bartender and several customers turned and stared.

“Hey,” I said soothingly, “take it easy, Marian.”

She slammed her drink down. “And will you, for Chrissakes, stop calling me Marian! I’m sick of it!”

“All right, all right, I’m sorry, honey—” I looked around uncomfortably. “I didn’t mean it. Let’s have a drink.”

I motioned for the bartender, who hadn’t missed a word of it, and ordered two Martinis. It took several minutes to cool her off. “We had another pair of drinks, and decided to go somewhere else. I could see her eye the car appraisingly, though she said nothing. We drove over to the beach to another bar. I was acting a little drunk now, and tried to paw her in the parking lot. She shoved me away.

“Le’s ginna back,” I said.

“Oh, shut up!”

We went inside and had two more drinks. I noticed she was leaving most of hers now.

“Why don’t we go on to the motel?” she asked. “We can have some drinks there.”

I bought a bottle of Scotch from the bartender. He didn’t want to sell it to me but I persuaded him with an extra five dollars. We drove to the motel. It was after midnight now, and most of the units were dark. I turned the car and backed it into the carport between the units. I was staggering a little, and as I was fumbling the door open I dropped her bag. It clattered on the step.

“Be careful!” she said angrily.

Inside, I switched on a light, put the Scotch and the bag on the dresser, and started to paw her again. “Wait a minute, can’t you?” she snapped. She slipped off the dress and put it on a hanger in the closet, and took off her shoes. They were blue, with very high heels. I broke the seal on the bottle, and poured two water tumblers half-full.

“Live it up, kid,” I said, handing her one.

“I’m goin’ to put a little water in mine,” she said, and went into the bathroom. She closed the door. I quietly unsnapped the overnight case and opened it. She had other shoes, all right. I grabbed out a pair of her nylons, and a pair of pants, shoved them under the mattress on the bed, and closed the bag. When she came out I could tell by the color of her drink she’d poured most of it out before she added the water.

“S down the ol’ hatch,” I said, weaving a little, and gulped part of mine. The shoes were lying on the carpet near the corner of the bed. “Howz bout a kiss?” I said, and stepped toward her. I landed on them, and heard one of the heels snap. So did she.

“Now look what you’ve done, you stupid idiot!” she lashed out. “Of all the clumsy, big-mouthed apes!”

I weaved, fixed her with a glassy stare, and contemptuously kicked the shoes under the bed. Hauling out the wallet, I fumbled a fifty out of it and threw it on the bed. “Go buy self ‘nother pair. But don’ heave your weight ‘round. I could buy you for cat food.”

I tried to stuff the wallet back into my pocket. It fell to the floor. I reached down for it, and fell over. She stared at me with contempt. I got up, tossed the wallet on the dresser, and went into the bathroom. Turning on the water in the basin, I made a retching sound, and washed my face. When I came out, she was smiling.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “It was my fault, for leavin’ ’em there. Here, let me pour you another little drink.”

“Sgood idea,” I replied. “Pologize. Din mean word of it.” I drank part of the whisky, dropped the glass on the rug, and collapsed on the bed. “Lie down few mince. Feel better.”

She stretched out beside me, and stroked my face with her hand. “There, there, honey. Ju-u-st relax. You just had a little too much.”

I closed my eyes. We lay perfectly still for about ten minutes, and then she said, “Honey?”

“Ummmff?” I muttered, and stirred a little.

She waited another twenty minutes before she tried again. I went on breathing heavily, and made no reply. After a few more minutes she moved cautiously away from me, and got up. I heard the rustle of the dress as she put it back on, and the careful unsnapping of the bag to get the other pair of shoes. I had to listen carefully to hear the door open, but there was a faint click as it closed.

I slid off the bed, parted the curtains at the front window just a fraction of an inch, and peered out. There was no one in sight except her. All the units across the way were dark, and the woman who ran the place had long since gone to bed. She reached the entrance, turned left, toward the center of town, and disappeared.

She should know enough not to take a cab all the way to Miami and at this time in the morning, so she’d probably head for the bus station. She knew I had her address, and the chances were she wouldn’t stop this side of California. With a married man she could tough it out and play the percentages, but she should be pretty sure by now that I was single. I’d cried enough about what the tax people did to me because of it.

I went over to the dresser. She’d left the wallet. Removing the identification had been superfluous, but it was a precaution I had to take. Chapman was going to be all over the front pages in a few hours, and having his identification turn up somewhere in a garbage can would have been disastrous.

Twelve

I replaced all the identification and the cards in the wallet, and looked at my watch. It was one forty-five. Taking two water tumblers out in the bathroom, I rinsed them and rubbed them with a towel to remove prints. It didn’t really matter—the maid would replace them with two fresh ones, wrapped in waxed paper as these had been. I set to work on the three bags, one of which was open on the luggage stand. They were fiberglass, and would probably show prints. I wiped them all over very carefully with the towel to remove any already there, and then replaced them with numbers of deliberately smeared prints—touching them, particularly around the hardware and handles, with my fingers and hands, but always sliding just a little. I did the same thing with all the doorknobs, bathroom fixtures, and the glass top of the dresser. The bottle of whisky I’d take with me, and the one that had been in his luggage originally I’d already thrown away.

I pulled out the nylons and the pair of pants I’d shoved under the mattress, held them under the tap in the wash basin until they were thoroughly wet, squeezed out the excess water, and draped them on a coat hanger from the closet. I hung them from the shower head that projected from the wall above the tub, and then slid the shower curtain about halfway out on its rod so they were hidden from view.

I retrieved the shoes from under the bed. The broken heel was still attached, but dangling. Turning out the lights, I lay down on the bed with a cigarette. It was difficult to stay awake. I’d really had more to drink than I was accustomed to. After about an hour, I got up without turning on the lights, slipped out the side door into the carport, and unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac. Going back inside, I returned with the whisky bottle and the shoes. Stumbling, I fell heavily against the side of the car, bumped once against the wall of the carport, and dropped to the floor. I remained utterly silent for at least five minutes, and then got up with a great scraping of shoes against concrete, bumped against the car once more, put the shoes and bottle in the trunk, lowered the lid very gently, and pressed until the latch clicked. I tiptoed back inside, closed the door, and lay down again.

It was nine when I awoke. My clothes were badly rumpled. I had a slight hangover, but it wasn’t bad. I washed my face, but didn’t shave, and when I appraised myself in the mirror I looked like a man on the wrong end of a two-day binge. Shoving the empty wallet in my pocket, I put on the hat and glasses and took one last look around. Everything was all right. Except for the pants and the nylons drying in the bathroom, there was nothing to indicate a woman had ever been here.

I went out, being careful not to leave any prints on the knob as I closed the door, got in the car, and drove out. The woman who ran the place was in the doorway of the office; she smiled, and I solemnly tipped my hat. It was a few minutes past ten when I reached downtown Miami and finally found a parking place. The briefcase the tapes had been in was on the back seat. I got out with it and walked to the bank.

I wrote out the check for a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and presented it at a window. The teller was a girl. She did a take, raised her eyebrows, looked at me again, and disappeared. I gathered it wasn’t every day she cashed checks in that amount for grimy and disheveled characters who’d obviously slept in their clothes and hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. Well, I’d expected a certain amount of consternation. I stuck a cigarette in the holder and lit it.

Dakin came out. As I’d suspected before, he never remembered what anybody looked like. He glanced uncertainly around at the people at other windows, and when the girl nodded towards me, he said, “Ah, yes. Mr. Chapman.” We shook hands.

“Do you really want this in cash?” he asked incredulously.

I stopped humming The Music Goes Round and Round, glanced at him as if I thought the question tiresome, and said, simply, “Yes.”

I knew then they’d already checked the signature against the card and knew it was genuine. They suspected a con game of some kind, or that I was in some kind of trouble at home and had worked out this deal for disappearing with a lot of ready cash, but in the end there was nothing they could do about it. I’d put the money in the bank, so who had a better right to take it out? He did ask, since it was made out to cash and the girl hadn’t actually seen me sign it, if I’d mind making out another?

“Not at all,” I said. I made out another, signed it, and said, “But I’m in rather a hurry, if you don’t mind.”

He looked at the signature, and shrugged. There was a slight service charge for transferring the funds. They brought the money, packed it into the briefcase for me, I paid the service charge, tipped my hat politely to the girl, and walked out with the briefcase under my arm.

When I reached the car I placed it on the seat beside me, unzipped it, and removed ten fifties from one of the bundles. I placed them in the wallet and started out US 1. At the edge of Coral Gables there was a large sporting goods store I’d already located. I stopped and bought a six-foot aluminum car-top boat. While the men were installing the carrier atop the car and securing the boat and oars to it, I walked impatiently up and down, chainsmoking cigarettes and muttering about the delay. It came to a little over a hundred dollars. I gave the clerk three fifties, and when he brought my change, I asked, “How far is it to Lake Okeechobee?”

“You’re headed the wrong way,” he said. “It’s north. Go back—”

“Thanks,” I said, paying no attention. I was already walking out.

It was only a few miles from there to the roadside curio stand. I began watching for it, and when I saw it ahead I checked the mirror to be sure no one was too close behind me. I was clear. I kept booming right on at fifty until I was slightly past the place, and then hit the brakes in a crash stop. Rubber screamed, and the car yawed back and forth across the pavement, finally sliding to a stop on the gravel several hundred yards away. I put it into reverse, and shot backwards, and slid to a stop again right before the place.

The cold-eyed proprietor was waiting on a pair of tourists from Michigan. They were looking at seashells on a long table—or had been. They’d stopped everything now to stare at me. I leaped out of the car and ran over to the row of ornamental flamingos beside the fence. Grabbing one of them up, I lifted it, as if estimating its weight. It was one of the type normally set in paddling pools, with a circular concrete base at the bottom of the thin steel legs.

I turned towards him with an imperious gesture. “I’ll take one of these.”

He regarded me coldly. It was possible, of course, that he didn’t like anybody, but I felt sure he remembered me. “I’m waiting on these people, mister,” he said. “What’s the hurry?”

“Look,” I said, beginning to shout. “I didn’t stop here to tell you the story of my life. All I want to do is buy one of your goddamned flamingos—”

I grabbed it up in my arms as if to take it to the car, but lost my grip on it and let it drop. It fell over on the gravel. I lunged for it again. At that moment his wife hurried out of the shop and said anxiously, “I’ll take care of these customers, Henry.”

The Michigan couple was fascinated with the performance. Henry grabbed the flamingo away from me and stalked to the car. Nodding curtly to the trunk, he asked, “You got the keys?”

“The keys?” I was aghast. “No, no, no! Put it in here!” I yanked the rear door open. “On the seat.”

He looked at the pale blue leather and then at me. “Mister, it ain’t none of my business what you do with your car, but you ort to put it in the trunk.

I removed the cigarette holder from my mouth and stared at him in sheer outrage. “In the trunk? Who the hell ever heard of putting a flamingo in a trunk?”

This broke the tourists up at last. They had to turn away, and I heard strangled sounds of laughter.

“I mean—damn it—” I went on, gesturing wildly. “There’s no room. My—my suitcases are in there.”

He dropped the flamingo on the seat. I shoved a fifty-dollar bill in his hand and got in and roared away. As soon as I was out of sight I slowed to forty; there was still a lot of time to put in, and only the remotest chance that Henry would call the police and report me as a menace to navigation. If I were picked up he might have to part with the change from the fifty. I stopped in Homestead and bought a roll of heavy white cord.

It was shortly after two p.m. when I turned off into the large parking area at the Theater of the Sea, located between Tavernier and Islamorada on the Overseas Highway. It was one of the well-known tourist attractions of the Keys, a large souvenir shop and a fenced area containing the aquarium ponds and tanks stocked with marine life. There were two performing porpoises, and a guide who conducted a tour. I went inside, bought a ticket, and waited for the next tour.

When the crowd was large enough, some fifteen or twenty tourists, we started around, staring at the fish and listening to the lecture. I paid scant attention and spoke to no one until the guide was squatted at the end of one of the ponds coaxing a jewfish to come up and gulp the mullet he had in his hand. In a moment it did, and then settled slowly back into the rather murky water.

The guide rose. I pushed my way through the crowd around him, and demanded, “Did you say that was a jewfish?”

“That’s right,” he replied. “They’re one of the grouper family—”

I stared at him suspiciously. “I thought they lived in salt water.”

Someone giggled at the rear of the crowd. “They do,” the guide explained with weary patience. “These are all salt-water fish.”

I pursed my lips and nodded. “Just as I suspected. All I can say is it’s a hell of a way to treat fish.”

He sighed, opened his mouth to explain that the ponds were filled with sea-water, but turned away with a well-you-run-into-all-kinds expression on his face. The crowd tittered. The tour went on. I remained on the outskirts, aloof and disapproving.

I arrived in Marathon at four-thirty p.m., after stopping several times along the way to get out and look at the water. One hour and twenty minutes to go. I checked my watch against a time announcement on the car radio to be sure it was still reasonably accurate, and hunted up a bar. It was quiet, with hardly anyone in it, and there was a telephone booth at the rear. There was also one out front on the sidewalk, in case the first happened to be occupied.

I ordered one Scotch and water and nursed it for an hour. The bartender tried once or twice to start a conversation, but I gave no indication I even heard him. At exactly five-fifty, I got up and started out, and then stopped abruptly. “Oh, my God, I’ve got to make a phone call—” Getting several dollars’ worth of change, I went back to the booth and called Coral Blaine.

“Where are you, dear?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you—”

“I’m at Lake Okeechobee,” I replied.

“Then you’re on your way home?”

I paid no attention. “It’s funny, though. I keep thinking I’ve been here before. I’ve never been in Lake Okeechobee have I?”

“Heavens, dear, I don’t know. I’ve never heard you mention it. But I’m glad you’ve started back—”

“Tell Wingard it was too late,” I said. “But he can forget it now.”

“Oh,” she said, a little uncomfortably, I thought. I was listening carefully for clues. “That was what I wanted to get in touch with you about. He was in this morning—”

And he’d told her, of course. “It was too late before I figured it out,” I went on, ignoring her completely. “It wasn’t your fault. You kept telling me Marian was there—”

“Darling,” she interrupted, “couldn’t we stay off that subject, just once?”

I nodded. There it was. I was sure now.

“You kept telling me she was,” I continued, “but I didn’t believe you, because I kept seeing her down here. Everywhere I went. What she was doing, of course, was going back and forth. But I don’t know why I didn’t figure out about the radio station in time. I knew how clever she was—”

“Harris, is this some kind of joke?”

“All she had to do was walk in there and pick up the microphone and spread her lies to everybody in the country, and turn ’em all against me. Make ’em think I didn’t treat her fairly. The way they turned against Keith, and it wasn’t his fault at all. The girl walked right into his car—”

“Harris—!”

“People believed her, too. I can tell. I see ’em looking at me on the street— But I stopped her, even if it was too late. She’s here with me now.”

“Harris, will you please listen to me? You’re mistaken—”

“Oh, no,” I said triumphantly. “Maybe she’s got you believing those lies too. Don’t defend her. You know it was all lies. And she is with me. Right here. I’ve got her out in the car. She broke into my room last night, and when I woke up she was leaning over whispering lies to me. I tried to make her shut up—”

“You don’t know what you’re saying!” Her voice was growing shrill. “It’s utterly impossible.”

She had turned the knife that Monday morning, but in the field of really exquisite deadliness she was an amateur. While she was sitting there listening to me say I’d just killed Marian Forsyth, Marian was standing at the next desk, talking to Barbara Cullen.

I dropped my voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

”You’ll hear from me. I’ll be in a foreign country, angel, where they didn’t hear the things she told about me, and I’ll send for you.” I hung up.

I went back to the bar, ordered another drink, and sat for ten minutes or so staring moodily at the mounted sailfish above the backbar mirror.

“Beautiful fish,” I said to the bartender. “You know, they catch a lot of those down in the Keys.”

He was so happy at having somebody to talk to again he did a clown routine. He picked up the bottle from which he’d just poured my drink, stared at it unbelievingly, and shook his head. “Pal, you’re right square in the middle of the Keys.”

“Lovely country,” I said. “Next time you go, you ought to take the whole family; they’d love it.” I got up and went out.

I went on towards Sugarloaf Key, still driving under forty. There were several problematical factors now, but I was sure I had plenty of time and didn’t want to make that turn off the highway until it was dark. A lot depended on when she decided to call the Florida highway patrol—if she did at all. It would be the logical thing to do. There was still a good possibility I hadn’t really killed anybody, but not much doubt that I was foaming mad and might at any minute. But Marian had insisted her first concern would be getting off the ship herself before it went down, and that she’d chicken out at the prospect of having to call and have her insane fiance picked up and spread all over the front pages before she had a chance to start disowning him.

But at any rate, she was going to have to tell somebody, and that somebody would call the Florida authorities. But the Okeechobee thing should have stuck in her mind; God knows I’d hit it hard enough. Of course, the operator would have said it was Marathon calling, but nobody ever paid any attention to that, and she’d said it to Mrs. English, anyway. The chances were there would be no alert in this area until they started picking up my trail, and I needed less than an hour now to duck into the hole and pull it in after me.

When I reached Big Pine Key I could see I was still too early, so I pulled off the highway, drove up a back road for a mile or so and parked, still facing away from the highway. Two or three cars went past. If they noticed me, so much the better. It would take a long time to search Big Pine; it was one of the largest of all the Keys.

When it was completely dark, I turned and went back. There wasn’t a great deal of traffic on the highway. As I began closing on the turn-off at Sugarloaf there was only one car behind me. I slowed and let it pass, and then made the turn. I speeded up, hurtling over the bumpy country road. In a few minutes I came to the trace of a road going off to the left, and in only two or three more to the openings through the wall of mangroves where boats could be launched. My headlights splashed against the pick-up truck. Aside from it, the place was utterly deserted.

The faint ruts ran on for another two or three hundred yards through heavy brush that scraped the car on both sides, made a sharp turn toward the water, and dead-ended among the mangroves. There was a narrow channel here, going through them to open water, but it was never used for launching boats because the underbrush and mangroves were so heavy on all sides it would be impossible to turn or maneuver. I stopped just above high tide, and cut the lights and engine. Impenetrable darkness closed in around me, and thousands of mosquitoes, and utter silence except for the faint lapping of the water. There was no surf, because of the shallow water and the mangrove islands farther out.

Getting out, I fumbled the key into the lock, and opened the trunk. When I’d located the flashlight, I turned it on, unfastened the boat, and lifted it down. I dragged it down to the edge of the water, put the oars in it, the concrete flamingo, the ball of cotton cord, and my canvas shoes. Taking out my khaki shirt, I wiped the steering wheel, dash, door handles, and trunk handle, and then rubbed and wiped my hands and fingers over them to leave a satisfactory number of unusable prints in case they did start to check.

I opened the whisky, took a drink of it, poured the rest into the water, and threw the bottle far over into the mangroves. Lifting out Justine’s shoe with the broken and dangling heel, I dropped it beside the rear of the car, under some overhanging brush, and checked it with the flashlight. It couldn’t be too obvious. I nudged it farther out of sight with my foot. Good. I dropped the other shoe in the boat. Closing the car, I pushed off. The water was quite shallow and I had to wade out several steps before I could get aboard.

I sat down and poled it out of the narrow channel with one of the oars. When I reached open water I threw the other shoe overboard. It would move around with the tide, and might or might not be found, but it made no difference. I turned off the flashlight and began rowing parallel to the shore, watching the dark wall of the mangroves. In a few minutes I could see the break in them, and pulled in to the beach. I switched on the flashlight again, and saw the pick-up truck. Pulling the boat up, I squeezed the water out of my trouser legs, took off the wet leather shoes, and put on the canvas ones. They had corrugated crepe-rubber soles.

I carried the flamingo up, unlocked the trunk, and placed it on the floor in front. Then the ball of cord, and the wet shoes. I put the oars in back, carried up the boat, and placed it on top of them. Carrying the flashlight, I followed the ruts on through the brush to the Cadillac. I walked towards the edge of the water, threw the light in, and could see the marks of the boat and my tracks on the soft bottom as I’d waded out. The leather shoes had left some fairly good imprints above high tide, also, and I walked down, leaving the distinctive track of the canvas ones on top of them in places.

I opened the trunk and took out the steel wrecking bar I’d bought. Slamming the lid down so it locked, I stuck the flat end of the bar under the edge of it and began prying upward. It was stubborn, and I had a large area of steel bent and chewed before the lock finally gave up and it flew open. Then I closed and locked all the doors, and used the end of the bar to knock in the right front window so I could reach the latch. I rifled the glove compartment, leaving everything strewn on the floor. Taking out the briefcase and my fishing clothes, I took one last look around with the flashlight to be sure I hadn’t overlooked anything, and walked back to the truck.

Standing in the darkness, with the mosquitoes chewing me, I took off his suit, shirt, and tie. I dropped the glasses in one coat pocket, bent the hat into a mass of straw, and shoved it in the other. I put on the khaki fishing clothes and the cap, transferred the money from his wallet to my own, put his back in his trousers, along with the cigarette holder, lighter, and his car keys. Taking the flashlight, I went down to the edge of the water and made a mark by which to gauge the ride.

Placing the light on the seat of the truck, I wrapped his clothes around the long steel legs and curving neck of the flamingo, and tied them with the ball of white cord. There was a hundred yards of it, and I used it all. I looked at my watch. It was only shortly after eight. There were cigarettes and matches in the glove compartment of the truck. I lit one and sat down, suddenly conscious that I was tired. It had been the day-long tension; and I remembered now I never had eaten anything. At nine I went down and looked at my mark. The tide was coming in. That was all right; I didn’t want to go out on to the highway with that boat until at least midnight. Of course, even if they were looking for him they didn’t know yet that he’d had a boat, but they would later.

At one a.m. the tide was at slack high water as nearly as I could tell. I drove out to the highway. There were very few cars on it now, passing at widely spaced intervals I waited until there was no one coming from westward before pulling on to it, and drove fast so as not to be overtaken. The oncoming cars, of course, could see nothing but my headlights.

At the approach to the Bahia Honda bridge a road led down off the highway to a picnic ground at the edge of the channel. I drove down, got out with the flashlight, and threw the beam outward on to the water. The tide was ebbing now, beginning to swirl around the pillars of the bridge.

I carried the boat down, put it in the water, and swamped it. It had flotation units, of course, and didn’t sink entirely. I shoved. It disappeared downstream in the darkness, headed seaward on the tide, at least fifteen miles from the car. It might not be found for days, or even weeks. I threw the oars in, and then the steel wrecking bar, heaving it as far as I could into deeper water.

Nothing remained now except the flamingo. I placed it on the seat beside me in its mummy wrappings of clothes. The Bahia Honda channel was the deepest in the Keys, and the bridge the highest, so no fishing was permitted from it. Waiting until no cars were coming, I shot on to the highway and up the incline of the bridge. When I reached the top, at mid-channel, I slammed on the brakes and hopped out. One pair of headlights was coming towards me, still over a mile away. I ran around the truck, yanked the door open, and heaved the flamingo over the rail.

It was a few minutes past five a.m. when I backed into the driveway at the apartment and put the truck in the garage. I went inside, turned on the air-conditioning unit, and poured an enormous drink of whisky. I was wrung out, and empty, and felt dead. I’d been onstage continuously for just a few hours less than thirteen days.

It was complete now. That was the whole package, and looking at it as objectively as I could, I didn’t think they’d ever untie it. I dropped the briefcase on the bed and started to open the zipper. Then I shrugged, pushed it off on to the floor and lay down. It didn’t seem to matter whether it was full of money or wallpaper samples. All I wanted was Marian Forsyth.

This struck me as an odd reaction for Jerome Langston Forbes. Maybe I’d been somebody else for so long I’d forgotten my own behavior patterns.

Thirteen

I shaved off the mustache the next morning, lay in the sun in the back yard for a few hours to erase the faint difference in the tan on my upper lip, and got a haircut, a short brush job. If the barber even suspected the bleached effect on the outer ends wasn’t entirely due to the sun, he merely thought I was queer.

The story broke a little more slowly than we’d anticipated, but once it did it gathered momentum like a rocket. On Wednesday morning Harris Chapman was a prominent Louisiana businessman who was reported missing somewhere in the Lake Okeechobee area after an apparently incoherent telephone call to his private secretary—and two days later the headlines were screaming FLAMINGO KILLER.

I could piece the sequence together pretty well from the newspaper accounts. Coral Blaine waited a full twenty-four hours before notifying the Florida highway patrol and asking them to make a search. She had no address except that I’d said I was in Lake Okeechobee, and reported I’d talked in a rambling fashion. Maybe I’d had a sun-stroke. To the police it meant merely another drunk. But it got into the paper on Wednesday morning, complete with name, and then the deluge began.

I gathered the Antilles Motel was first. I’d been missing forty-eight hours by then. My room wasn’t paid for after Sunday, but she wasn’t particularly worried, since the luggage was still there. The police probably pricked up their ears then. If this was a binge, it was a honey. The pants and stockings probably weren’t mentioned at first, but the motel did lead to Fitzpatrick, and Fitzpatrick to the bank, and then it began to hit the fan in handfuls. Drawing out that much money in cash was highly irregular, and they’d disapproved— How much money?

A hundred and seventy thousand dollars.

A hundred and—what? In cash?

By this time police lieutenants and city editors were probably trying to juggle three telephones at once. The money hit the headlines on Thursday morning, a hundred and seventy thousand in twenty, fifty, and a hundred dollar bills, in a briefcase. That was fine. The sooner, and the longer the time between this and the eventual finding of the car, the better.

Then the motel again, and the stockings and pants. No. Nobody’d ever seen a girl, and I’d left there alone that morning. Then, probably, the bartender at the Cameo, though it was happening so fast now it was impossible even to guess the sequence of the explosions. Girl with an overnight case. Argument. He’d called her Marian, and she flipped her lid. Who was she? Just a babe, and from the language she used—Then who was Marian? Tell me, Jack, I never heard of her.

The bartender at the second place remembered us together. Somebody had heard a girl’s voice say something about one o’clock that morning when I’d driven into the motel. And some bumpings in the car park some time later. And the car was backed in. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the room to indicate a woman had ever been there except the one thing a man would be certain to overlook if it happened to be out of sight.

The picture was developing fast now, and you could imagine what it was like around the detective squad-rooms and city desks with the headlines and the story almost in sight. Missing millionaire may have slain night-life girl. Then Naples and the mysterious Marian again, and the car-top boat, and Lake Okeechobee. Then Coral Blaine’s admission, at long last, as to what I’d really said, and the flood burst.

But in the end it was Henry who clinched it, and topped them all, and gave it the tag every sensational story has to have. Flamingo. The Flamingo Killer. Flamingo Mystery Girl. There were pictures of Henry, and of Henry’s curio stand, and of Henry’s pink birds with their reinforcing-steel legs and sinuous concrete necks. Henry’s “as told to” first-person story appeared on the front page of one edition. I’d been there once before, and he’d recognized me. He’d even told me, he recalled, that the flamingos were made of concrete. And this time I was going past at about seventy and all of a sudden I saw the flamingos or remembered ’em and slammed on my brakes and backed up and grabbed one to see how heavy it was— And then, when he’d asked me to open the trunk I’d gone pale and sweaty and shaky and there was a wild crazy look in my eyes, and I’d screamed, ‘No, no, no!’ And then I’d said, ‘Who the hell ever heard of putting a flamingo in a trunk?’ Oh, I was crazy, all right. There was no doubt I was crazy as a loon.

The police, of course, had already checked the telephone company and learned the long-distance call had been made from Marathon. At first this raised some doubt I was as insane as I was trying to appear to be, since it looked like the workings of a logical mind deliberately throwing the police a false trail. But after talking to the guide at the Theater of the Sea and that bartender at Marathon they decided it was probable I did think I was at Lake Okeechobee. And I’d admitted to Coral I was puzzled by the fact it was somehow familiar. I’d been in Marathon for three days only the week before. The erratic pattern was there, the utter derangement alternating with moments of purpose and relative lucidity. I’d been in a screaming hurry at Henry’s place, and then I’d stopped for an hour to gawk at fish and leaping porpoises while the body of a dead girl was folded in the trunk of my car.

But what girl? That was still a mystery.

Two Deputy Sheriffs found the car on Thursday afternoon about five o’clock. That was nearly four days after it was abandoned and some twelve hours after it was known all over the State that it probably had a hundred and seventy thousand dollars in it. The story was plain. I’d gone out in the ocean in a six-foot boat with a girl’s body and a concrete flamingo, and I’d never come back. Some man wearing rubber-soled shoes had come along later, pried open the trunk, and made off with the hundred and seventy thousand dollars. They found the blue shoe with the broken heel.

And by Friday morning they were pretty sure who the girl was. They finally located the taxi driver who’d taken her to Hollywood. He remembered where he’d picked her up. The girl’s name was Justine Laray, the paper said, and her occupation was unspecified, but she had a police record in Miami and in Pittsburgh for soliciting, vagrancy, and one conviction for shop-lifting. Nobody in her apartment house could recall having seen her since Sunday night. Some of her clothes were still in the apartment, but nobody knew just how many things she’d had. There was no suitcase at all. But the taxi driver and the Cameo bartender both swore she’d had only one with her. So maybe that was all she had. They were both sure she’d worn blue shoes.

On December 2, just a week after the car was abandoned, two fishermen found the boat near Pigeon Key, some twenty-five miles from where the car had been. No body was found. Of course they didn’t expect to find the girl’s if it was tied to the flamingo, but Chapman’s should have come ashore. They nearly always did, in drownings. The police were suspicious or this, but admitted it could have become snagged in coral along the reefs or wound up in the impenetrable tangle of mangroves along the shore.

A lot of space was given to Marian and her former relationship with him, but as far as I could determine from the papers she was never suspected. What could they suspect her of? Driving him mad by remote control? She was in Thomaston all the time; that was established from the first day. They ran a picture of him—probably the one she’d mentioned—but there was more glamor and character than resemblance, and it had been taken without the glasses. If anything, it looked less like him than I did.

And not once from beginning to end, as well as I could tell from the papers, did anybody ever question the fact that it was Chapman.

As she had pointed out, why should they? He said that was his name. And what reason would he have for lying about it? Would somebody pretend to be Chapman, just to go mad and drown?

After two weeks other sensations began to crowd it off the front page, but it didn’t die entirely. Several things kept it alive. One was the continuing search for the man who had looted the car, and for Chapman’s body. Then there was the concrete flamingo; that had caught the morbid public fancy.

But everybody had accepted it now, and we were safe. She’d write, or call, and let me know where she was.

She didn’t. Another week went by. I was growing to hate the apartment. Being away from her was bad enough but being reminded of her every minute I was in the place made it unbearable. And he was in it. I had the rug shampooed, and all the time the men were working on it I wondered if I were going as mad as Lady Macbeth.

But I couldn’t leave. I could have had the mail forwarded, of course, but suppose she telephoned? There was no way at all I could find out where she was. Presumably she’d left Thomaston, but she was supposed to get in touch with me. I waited, hating the place but hating to leave it, even for food. Even when I was sunbathing in the back yard I left the door open so I’d be able to hear the phone. Two hours before the postman was due I was pacing the floor by the front window, watching for him.

Then, on December 18, it came at last. It was early in the morning. The boy had thrown the paper up on the walk and I was starting out to get it when a Post Office van stopped and the driver got out with an Airmail Special. It was from Houston, Texas. I ran back inside, forgetting the paper, and tore it open.Dear Jerry:This is a very difficult letter to write, but I’ve avoided it as long as I can. I lied to you. I suppose you have begun to realize that by now, and I’m not asking for forgiveness, but I do think I should have the courage to face you and admit it. So if you still want to, will you come to see me here at the Rice Hotel?Sincerely,Marian.

I stared at it, bewildered. What did she mean, she’d lied to me? And then, suddenly, I remembered the other thing she’d said, that night of the 13th. “I took advantage of you.” None of it made any sense. She hadn’t lied about anything, as far as I could see.

But I was wasting time like a fool when I could be on my way to Houston. I grabbed the phone and began calling for reservations. I could get a flight out at one p.m. That would give me just about time enough to pick up the money. It was in a safe-deposit box in a Miami Beach bank. I hurried into the bedroom, changed clothes, and started packing. The phone rang. The airline, I thought, as I picked it up.

“Mr. Forbes? I have a telegram from Houston, Texas. The text reads as follows: URGENT DISREGARD LETTER SEE NEWS STORY. There is no signature.”

“Thank you,” I said. I hung up and ran out in the yard for the paper I’d completely forgotten.

It was on the front page, date-lined New Orleans but with the usual eye-catching local headline tag:—FLAMINGO CASE—NONSENSE, SAYS PSYCHIATRIST

I sat down, feeling a chill of apprehension.New Orleans, La. Dec. 18—Dr. J. C. Willburn, well-known professor of psychiatry and author of a number of books on mental illness, stated today that in his opinion it was highly improbable if not completely absurd that Harris Chapman could have deteriorated from apparent good mental health to a psychotic condition in two weeks, no matter how deep-seated his feeling of guilt.Dr. Willburn, who is on leave of absence, became interested in the case at its outset, and for the past three days has been in Thomaston interviewing dozens of Chapman’s friends and associates. He says he unearthed no prior instances of hallucination or irrational behavior at all and that the picture he has of Chapman is that of a practical, hard-driving, relatively insensitive, vigorous man in the prime of life, too given to hard work for brooding or much introspection—”

The whole thing exploded in the papers again. The police said they’d never ruled out the possibility the insanity was faked. I was scared all over again, but what was even worse I didn’t dare try to get in touch with her. But at least I could get out of the damned apartment, because I knew now where she was. I canceled the lease by paying an extra month’s rent, and moved to the Eden Roc Hotel. I bought some expensive clothes and luggage, spending money like a maharajah, and I drank too much.

The story went on. Another psychiatrist intimated that Willburn’s statement was ill-advised. Nobody could form a psychiatric opinion from second-hand evidence gleaned from lay observers; Chapman could have been in a potentially dangerous mental condition for months. A third psychiatrist said the second psychiatrist was ill-advised. The police were still suspicious of the fact his body had never been found. And by now they knew I’d bought the wrecking bar. The man in Palm Beach who’d sold it to me gave them a good description. So was this the act of a madman buying a weapon to defend himself against a woman he’d wronged, or that of a coldly logical schemer buying it to jimmy open his own car and fake the theft along with the rest of the fantastic hoax?

But what object could he have had?

By now it was almost inevitable. On December 20, when I grabbed the paper off the breakfast trolley in my hotel room and spread it open, the bottom began falling out of everything.—FLAMINGO CASE—WAS CHAPMANREALLY CHAPMAN?

The story didn’t mean anything itself; it was merely a rehash of all the old evidence with the addition of a lot of conjecture. But now that the question had finally been asked, they’d check those signatures, start pinpointing descriptions— But I had to be sure before I ran, so I could warn her. I waited. It was like walking on eggs. Two hours later the afternoon papers were out.RIDICULOUS, SAYSCHAPMAN FIANCEE

The police had already questioned her about that, she explained to the reporter in a long-distance interview. Of course she’d talked to Mr. Chapman. He’d called her every day. She would never understand what hold that woman—Mrs. Forsyth—had over him, or what she had said or done that goaded him beyond endurance—

Stripped of the vituperation, it said simply: The man she’d talked to was Chapman.

I grabbed the phone and called the travel desk. “Get me a reservation to Houston on the first flight you can.”

The girl called back five minutes later and said there’d been a cancellation and I could get out at eleven-thirty. It was ten now. I started throwing things in bags. I’d already bought an attache case with a good lock; calling the desk to get my bill ready and send a boy for the bags, I ducked out to a cab, and went to the bank. In a cubicle in the safe-deposit vault, I emptied the bundles of currency into the case, took the same cab back, and told the driver to wait while I checked out. We made it to the airport with five minutes to spare. I was over the weight allowance, and had to pay excess baggage. They were just starting to pull away the loading ramp when I sprinted out the gate with the attache case under my arm.

I had to change planes in New Orleans. It was seven-thirty p.m. when we came in at Houston International. I hurried to the first booth and called the Rice Hotel.

“Mrs. Forsyth,” I said.

“Just a moment. I’m sorry, sir. She isn’t registered.”

I fought down an impulse to yell at her. “But she was there—”

“I’ll connect you with the desk, sir.”

“Never mind,” I said. I collected my luggage and caught a cab into town, and went to the Rice.

The clerk consulted his records. “Yes, sir. She checked out two days ago. No forwarding address.”

“All right, give me a room,” I said.

I tipped the boy and as soon as he left I flipped through the phone book to detective agencies. Several had night numbers listed. I called one.

He arrived in about thirty minutes, an untidy and owlish-looking man named Krafft. I told him what I wanted.

“She was here at the hotel until two days ago,” I said. “Just find out where she went, as fast as you can. I don’t even know whether she had a car. If she left town, the chances are it would be by air, so try the airlines first.”

He called back in less than an hour. “Mrs. Forsyth left here the afternoon of the eighteenth on an American Airlines flight to San Francisco.”

”Good,” I said. “Does your agency have an office there?” “Yes, sir. All major cities.”

“Okay, look— Wire or teletype right now and tell them to start on it. If they find her, keep track of her. I don’t care what it costs. I’ll be at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, just as soon as I can get there.”

I couldn’t get out until the next day. It was ten-thirty p.m. when I checked in at the Mark Hopkins. I’d wired for a reservation. There was a note waiting for me to call a Mr. Ryan, at a Garfield number. As soon as I was up in the room I called him.

“Mr. Ryan? This is Forbes, at the Mark Hopkins.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Forbes. About Mrs. Forsyth—”

“Have you found her?” I broke in.

“Not yet. She arrived here the night of the eighteenth and registered at the Palace. Checked out at two-thirty p.m., eighteenth, no forwarding address. We’ve covered all the airlines and railroads, so apparently if she’s left town it was by bus or private car. But she left the hotel by cab. We haven’t been able to find the driver yet. She might have taken an apartment, or be visiting a friend. Can you give us any hints? I mean, apart from the description?”

“Yes,” I said. “She went to Stanford, so you might try around Palo Alto; she could be looking up somebody down there. I doubt she’s looking for a job, but if she does, it’ll probably be in a brokerage house. She has a beautiful flair for clothes. Keep an eye on the City of Paris and I. Magnin’s, and so on. If she’s taken an apartment it will probably be in a good neighborhood.”

“We’re checking the apartment angle now. Utilities, and so on.”

“All right,” I said. “Just find her. Use as many men as you can put on it.”

They found her the next afternoon. Ryan called a little after five. “You were right about the Palo Alto thing. She’s been down there. She came back today, and registered at the Fairlane Hotel. It’s a fairly small place, on Stockton. Room six hundred and eight.”

“Thanks a million,” I said. “Just send me your bill.”

I depressed the switch, looked up the number, and gave it to the operator.

“Mrs. Forsyth, please,” I said, when the Fairlane answered.

“One moment, sir.”

The phone buzzed twice. “Hello.” It was her voice. I could almost see her.

“Marian!” I said. “Marian—”

She screamed.

Fourteen

It was five o’clock and traffic was snarled. When we were within a block of it I tossed the driver a dollar and ran. I didn’t even pause at the desk. When I got out of the elevator, I asked the operator, ”Six hundred and eight?” He pointed to the right.

It was the third door. I rapped. She opened it almost at once. She was a little thinner, and very pale, but as smooth and striking as ever. She was wearing a dark tailored suit. I pushed the door shut. There was the same wonderful, slender feel of her in my arms. I kissed her. She tried. I could feel her trying, but she couldn’t quite do anything with it. It was no wonder, I thought, with what had just happened. But it was impossible to let her go. I kissed her eyelids and her throat, and the smooth dark hair.

Finally she whispered. “You did have one very small piece of luck, Jerry; I’m not much given to crying. Otherwise you’d need a shower curtain.”

“Why?”

“Your kissing me this way after what I did to you.”

“What did you do?”

“I sold you out, I suppose you’d call it, in about the most cynical way it would be possible to do it.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said.

“I think we’d better sit down,” she suggested. “Take the armchair.” She sat on the side of the bed. I looked around. It was any small hotel bedroom anywhere—Venetian blinds, glass-topped desk, telephone, grayish carpet, and twin beds with dark green spreads and metal headboards finished to resemble limed oak. She crossed her knees and pulled down her skirt. I looked at the slender, tapering fingers.

“Why did you run away from Houston?” I asked. “I was going to warn you if it became serious.”

“I wasn’t running from the police,” she said. “From you. I lost my nerve again.”

“Will you go with me to Reno tonight and marry me?”

She closed her eyes and lowered her face slightly. Then she shook her head. “No, Jerry.”

“Will you go away with me without marrying me?”

“Please, Jerry—” She stopped, but then made an effort and went on. “I’ve already told you I lied to you. About our going away together. Maybe I wasn’t consciously lying at the time, I don’t know. I might even have thought I could do it. But that isn’t the point.

“Listen, Jerry,” she went on, “I asked you to do something criminal, for money. As long as you were cynical enough to do it for money, only half the responsibility was mine. Do you understand? But then you said you’d changed your mind. You wouldn’t do it. But you were in love with me, you said. So I said, that’s fine, Jerry. If you won’t commit a crime for money, commit a crime because you’re in love with me—”

Her hands were twisted tightly together and shaking, and she stopped for an instant and clenched her teeth to stop the tremor of her chin. It was as if her whole face had already shattered, and she was merely holding it together with an effort of will.

“—After all, old men commit sexual offenses against children somewhere every day, don’t they? So let’s be efficient. Let’s don’t waste a nice handy thing like your being in love with me, when it could be put to some practical use, like luring you into becoming involved in a capital crime and ruining your life—”

I reached over and caught her arms. “Will you stop it? The whole thing was my fault. If I’d had the guts of an angleworm I could have made you give it up.”

She shook her head. “There’s no way you could have stopped me, Jerry. You don’t stop a blind obsession like that. The only thing I could see was that I’d lost everything after it was already too late to start over again, so the thing to do, obviously, was to destroy everybody else too. Including you.”

“I’m not destroyed, if you mean Chapman. After what he did to you, he doesn’t bother me.”

“He will,” she said. “Unless you get the fact firmly fixed in your mind that you didn’t do it. I did.”

“Cut it out,” I told her. “We both did it. But do you think it will continue to hold up? Remember, if they ever put a real expert on those forgeries they’re going to look very fishy.”

“There’s no reason they ever should. However, I’d like to point out something; you’re in the clear, even if they find out it was an impersonation. They can’t prove you ever met me before it happened. You were using the name of Hamilton, remember. And when I came down from New York, I called you as Mrs. Forbes, but I used another name on the plane tickets. Also, en route from the airport to the apartment, I switched taxis in Miami.”

I nodded. “When can I bring the money over to you?”

“Tomorrow,” she said apathetically. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It wasn’t the money at all, was it?”

“No.” Then she added. “Or maybe I tried to think it was, partly.”

I lit a cigarette and walked across the room to look out at Stockton Street through the slats of the blind. I came back and stopped in front of her. “Is it just the voice?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. That thing when you called just now was only because I was off guard, and didn’t know you were anywhere near. The principal reason I don’t want to go with you is that I’ve done you enough harm already. Why add to it?”

Did the other men who’ve been in love with you have this same trouble getting a message through?” I asked. “Did any of them ever manage to convince you that you might be the thing he needed, or wanted, or cared about?”

Her hands were beginning to twist and shake again. “Jerry, please don’t.”

“No,” I said. I crushed out the cigarette. “If I hadn’t given up too easily the other time, I might have won. So this time I’m going to try just once more. And after that I’ll shut up for good.” I squatted beside the bed, balancing myself on my toes with my forearms across her lap. “I know you don’t love me,” I said. “Maybe you’ve been hacked down so thoroughly it’ll be years before you can care anything about anybody. But I’ll settle for less. I’ll try to say this without slopping over or getting too sticky about it. I just want you. I want to be with you. I want to try to help you. Maybe together we can still work this out some way; at least we could try. We’ll go anywhere you say, on any terms you want, if you’ll just give me a chance. After a while I think you’d associate the voice with me instead of with him. I don’t think they ever made anybody else like you, and probably they never will again. I’m crazy about you, and I always will be. But that’s enough of that. I think you’ve quit trying to deny that I’m in love with you. It’s just a question of whether you’ll go with me. will you, Marian?”

I looked up at her. She’d turned her face away, and the chin was locked again and she was crying without making any sound at all. She looked at me at last, and shook her head.

I stood up. She started to come with me to the door, but stopped with one hand resting on the back of the chair. By this time she could trust herself to speak, and she said, “Good night, Jerry,” and held out her hand.

“Good night, Marian.” I looked back from the open doorway, and, as always, she reminded me of something very slender and beautifully made and expensive—and utterly wasted—like a Stradivarius in a world in which the last musician was dead. I closed the door and went on down the hall.

She killed herself that night. She must have taken the capsules shortly after I left, as nearly as I could tell from the medical reports in the news. There was nothing about it in the morning papers, of course, and I still didn’t know it until noon when I walked into the El Prado bar on Union Square with a Call-Bulletin under my arm.

I spread it open and took a sip of the Martini.SUICIDE CONFESSES—Mrs. Marian Forsyth, 34—

It caught me without defense at all and kept swamping me and I couldn’t get it under control. I pretended to choke on the Martini and got the handkerchief out and honked and sputtered and snorted while I was heading for the men’s room to spare the dowagers behind the snowy tablecloths and half-acre menus the sight of a grown man crying in the El Prado in broad daylight. Fortunately, there was no one in the John. I was all right by that time, and could wash my face and go back outside. I folded the Call and drained the Martini and walked all the way back up Nob Hill to the Mark. I sat down on the bed to read it, but it was a long time before I even opened the paper. She was dead; what else mattered? The headline said something about a confession, and it occurred to me that if she had left one they’d be here for me before very long. I really ought to do something about it.

Why hadn’t I left her alone? She had that absurd feeling of responsibility for my being mixed up in the thing, and apparently my presence reminded her of it. Maybe if I’d stayed away from her she might have been able to handle the other thing.

And I could have stopped her that night if I’d said no and stuck with it. I rubbed a hand across my face. It was nice to think about it now. And I had a hunch now wasn’t the only time I was going to think about it.

I read the story. She’d died of an overdose of sleeping pills. The medical examiner believed she had been dead since before midnight, and that she must have taken them very early in the evening.

I thought of her alone in her agony. She had no one. She had a bleak, miserable, impersonal hotel room and her own courage and that almost unshakable poise, and that was it. She hadn’t asked for any help, or cried out. She’d merely held out her hand, and said, “Good night, Jerry,” and waited for me to leave so she could take them.

Christ, I thought shakily, I’ve got to stop this. I’ll be walking out the window.

There were two notes. The first was to the local police and contained instructions regarding the burial arrangements. The second read:TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:On 28 November, 1957, an automobile belonging to Mr. Harris Chapman of Thomaston, Louisiana, was found abandoned on Sugarloaf Key, in the State of Florida. It is believed that Mr. Chapman is dead, but this has never been officially ascertained.Mr. Chapman is dead. I destroyed him. I am solely responsible for this act, and may God have mercy on me.In making the above statement, I am aware that I shall be dead within the next few hours.(Signed) Mrs. Marian Forsyth.

I went over to the window and stood looking out. I was free now of even the possibility of suspicion or arrest. Down in the hotel safe was an attache case containing almost a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. It was all mine—money, immunity, everything. I was the beneficiary of a tormented girl who had just committed suicide in a hotel room. And I couldn’t even go to her funeral.

She’d asked to be buried in a little country churchyard only a few miles from Thomaston. What would I do if somebody spoke to me? Pretend to be mute? All I could do was send flowers.

She took all the blame for this thing we had done, gave me all the money, and I sent dowers to her funeral.

Well. I’d been looking for a free ride all my life, hadn’t I? So now I had one.

* * *

I went to Mexico—not to Acapulco, but to a little fishing village just up the coast from La Paz, in Baja California, where there were no tourists, practically no accommodations, and no one who spoke English. It seemed that now I had plenty of money, all I wanted to do was live like a beachcomber. I wore dungarees and swimming trunks and lived on tortillas and beans and drank nothing at all.

After a while I quit waking up with the cry frozen in my throat as she went over the bridge railing and fell down through the fog, and gradually I quit staring at darkness for hours on end with that thing running through my mind: why hadn’t I stopped her? She was caught in a blind obsession, not knowing—or perhaps not even caring—that if she killed Chapman it would destroy her. But I’d known it, hadn’t I? I’d been warned. And I’d failed her.

For the only time in my glib and cheaply cynical, wise-guy existence I’d really meant something that I said, and I hadn’t been able to make her understand it or believe me. I simply hadn’t tried hard enough. During those twenty minutes in the apartment that night I’d had the opportunity to stop this obscene and senseless waste of a woman who was worth a thousand of me, and I’d muffed it, and let her go on down the drain, and if I didn’t stop lying here at night thinking of how many years of my life I’d give just for one more chance at those twenty minutes I’d go mad. That was the thing I had to whip.

But it was going away. I was slowly whipping it. And even if the Mexicans heard me when I woke in the night, it didn’t matter. They didn’t understand English.

She had wanted to confess, there in that last hour, but it was evident that she was driven by an equally strong, or even stronger, compulsion to protect me for the rest of my life. She felt responsible for me. It was a sort of noblesse oblige. She was older than I was, and more intelligent, and she felt she had taken advantage of the fact that I had fallen in love with her.

I thought about guilt. That was the theme. She was going to kill Chapman and make it appear he had been destroyed by his own conscience and his haunting fear of the taint of mental illness. It had worked, and then she’d inevitably been destroyed by her overpowering burden of guilt. It went on, like a string of popping firecrackers setting each other off.

Except that here it stopped. I had no feeling of guilt for him, not any more. In the first place, I had a much more elastic conscience; it had been stretched considerably over the years to fit different shapes of situations. And I hated him, furthermore, for what he had done to her. And in the end, I hadn’t actually killed him anyway. Perhaps that was the final irony of it. She’d told me how to save myself.

Always hold on to that, she’d said. You didn’t do it. I did.

Three months passed, and I knew I was all right. It was all going away. The police couldn’t touch me, and I was safe in that epidemic infection of guilt. Marble shattered, but not rubber.

* * *

I went back to San Francisco in the spring, completed transferring the money from the safe-deposit box into three banking accounts, and booked a passage on a Grace Line freighter for the Canal zone. I knew now what I was going to do—go into business as a big-game fishing guide in the Gulf of Panama. I’d liked Panama, and there was a boatyard I knew there where I could have a magnificent sports fisherman built for much less than I could in the States, a real sixty-thousand-dollar job with the best of everything.

But in the week before the ship sailed there was one thing I had to do before I left for good. I flew to New Orleans. First, I spent two days in the public library, going back through the newspaper files. There was no further mention of the case after the latter part of February; it was apparently headed for oblivion, unsolved—not if she had done it, of course, but how.

The police were almost certain now that she had left her hotel in New York that night of 13 November and flown to Miami under the name of Mrs. Wallace Cameron. Then they’d lost her trail in Miami. The night clerk at the Dauphine remembered he’d given Chapman a letter when he checked in, and that Chapman had asked for a cab and gone out somewhere within a few minutes after arriving, but whether it had been to meet her nobody would ever know. Had she come to kill him? Or to taunt him with something guilty in his past that eventually drove him mad?

Three handwriting experts were convinced that the signatures on the two checks and the receipts were forgeries, while Coral Blaine and Lundgren were just as strongly convinced the man they had talked to could have been no one but Chapman. Police had followed my trail back and forth across Florida, and while they had a dozen different versions as to my age and the color of my hair and eyes, the composite picture was that of Chapman, just as she had said it would be. The only things the witnesses were certain about were the wrong things, the ones I’d deliberately planted.

Chapman Enterprises was being liquidated by his father. Coral Blaine was gone from Thomaston. The whole senseless tragedy was complete, except for how, and that was unanswerable. But they did know who had been responsible for it all, because she had admitted it—the rejected and embittered woman who had been his mistress.

I rented a car and drove up-state, buying the flowers at one of the towns along the way. The name of the little community was Bedford Springs, but it wasn’t on any of the highway maps, and all I knew about it was that it was some fifteen miles from Thomaston.

I’d puzzled for a long time as to why she’d wanted to be buried in a backwoods churchyard in Louisiana when her family would be in Cleveland. Then I’d finally decided perhaps something good had happened to her in Bedford Springs at some time in the past. I’d understood her coming to San Francisco, where she’d been married to Forsyth, and the trip down to Stanford, and what she was doing in those last few days when she knew it couldn’t go on any longer.

It was late afternoon when I found it. It was miles off the highway, and there wasn’t any town at all, just a white frame church set under some oaks in gently rolling country of small farms and hardwood and pine. There weren’t even any houses near it. It was late April now, and all the trees were fully leaved. I got out of the car in front of the church and walked down to the little cemetery that was fenced and appeared to be well-tended. Across the back of it was a row of slender arbor vitae and beyond that a wooded ravine and tall trees, and off to my right about a half-mile a man was plowing on the side of a sandhill with a mule. There was no sound at all except that of the birds and the trickling of water somewhere in the rave.

I found her grave, and put the flowers on it, and looked around, thinking it was one of the most remote and beautiful places I’d ever seen. Then suddenly I knew why she had remembered it in that final hour of her torment in the hotel room in San Francisco, and what it had represented to her. Peace. Just peace. It hit me without any warning, as it had in the El Prado bar, and I started crying. I couldn’t help it.

* * *

I sat in the car and stared across the railroad tracks at the cotton gin. On the side of it was a large sign that said: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. The day I ever felt any guilt for him, I thought—that would really be the day. I’d never owned any part of her for an hour, and she’d given him all of herself for six years and then he’d thrown her away as if she were something you merely bought and used like an expendable item of inventory.

The town was as familiar as if I’d lived in it for years. The street names clicked and fell into place in my mind as I drove across it. I found her house and parked in front of it in the lengthening shadows of the elms. It was a two-story white frame with a neat lawn and some nasturtium beds in front, only four blocks from the center of town. When the weather was nice she sometimes walked to work. I got out of the car.

Somehow it wasn’t late afternoon now, but early morning, and I could see her ahead of me in the sunlight with that beautiful walk she had and the erect, patrician slenderness and the smartness that must have appeared so out of place in this little farming town, and the sleek dark head, complete with the shallow saucer of a hat slanted across the side of it, the one she’d worn the night she came back from New York. And, somehow, even though I was behind her I could see the fine blue eyes that were almost but not quite violet and their nearly unshakable self-possession and poise, and the cool and ineffably feminine humor in them as she leaned her chin on her laced fingers that afternoon in Key West and asked, And what other personality problems do you have, Mr. Hamilton, besides shyness? And the same eyes filled with the sheen of tears as she shook her head there in the hotel room in San Francisco. No, Jerry. It’s too late. Our fine pink flamingo is made of concrete, and I can’t carry it any longer. But you let me have it, and I’ll find a place to put it down.

This was the square, in the center of town. I turned, right at the corner, and walked along the south side of it, facing the entrance to the courthouse where sparrows fluttered about the eaves. How many thousand times had she stepped along this walk, on Monday mornings and Saturday nights and the white noons of southern Augusts? The doorway was between Barton’s Jewelery Store and the Esquire Shop. I went up the stairs where the slender heels had tapped, and turned right in the corridor at the top. The etched glass of the doorway bore the gold-leaf legend: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. I pushed it open and went in.

The brown-haired woman in the ante-room looked up pleasantly, and asked, “Yes, sir. May I help you?”

The inner door was closed. I crossed to it and pushed it open. Mrs. English was watching me with a puzzled frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “Where you looking for someone?”

There were the three desks, and the safe, and the water cooler, and all the steel filing cabinets, and to the right the two windows looking out into the square. At the third desk, near the door going into his private office, a brown-eyed girl with a little dusting of freckles across her nose was busy at her typewriter. She looked up questioningly.

The large desk in the center was hers. I crossed to it, and touched it with my hands. Barbara Cullen had quit typing now, and was staring at me, and I was aware that Mrs. English had got up and was standing in the doorway.

“Could I help you?” Barbara Cullen asked.

In the slow unfolding of horror I seemed to be standing outside myself, watching what I was doing but without any power to control or change a movement of it. I might still get away, if I ran now without opening my mouth, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I stood there, merely feeling the desk with my hands. Then I crossed the room to Chapman’s office, and went inside. Opening the center drawer of his desk, I lifted out the pencil drawer and turned it upside down to stare at the little card that was taped to the bottom of it.

Right to thirty-two, left two turns to nineteen—

Both girls were in the doorway behind me. They gasped, and when I turned they looked frightened and started to back away.

“Who are you?” Barbara Cullen asked nervously. “What do you want here?”

I went back to the large desk in the center of the room and stood behind it, looking out at the square. Mrs. English retreated to the ante-room. Barbara stood as far away as she could, staring at me. The silence stretched out and tightened across the room.

I gripped the edge of the desk. God, there must be something left of her, somewhere. She’d sat here for six years, with her bag in that lower left-hand drawer, touching this, putting papers in that basket, picking up the phone— She’d sat here, where I was standing now, and when she glanced up she looked out that window at spring sunlight and the slow eddying of traffic in winter rains and high-school football rallies and funeral processions and the blue October sky.

I stared down at the whitening knuckles of my hands. “Barbara,” I said, “it wasn’t her fault. You’ve got to believe it. Some way, I’ve got to make them understand—”

She cried out. I looked up then, and her eyes were widening with horror. “How did you know my name?” she asked. But it wasn’t that. It was the voice; she’d already recognized it.

”Sit down, Barbara,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. But I’ve got to tell somebody. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t let her go on lying there taking all the blame, when it was my fault. I could have saved her. She couldn’t help herself—”

I heard Mrs. English dialing, out in the ante-room, but I went on talking, faster now, the words becoming a flood. All that time in Mexico hadn’t meant a thing; you never whipped it or drove it away. You merely drove it underground, into your subconscious, where it could fester beyond your reach.

When the men came up the stairs and into the room behind me I was still talking, and Barbara was listening, but the look of horror on her face was giving way to something else. Maybe it was pity.