All the way

All The Way

by Charles Williams

1958

One

I was talking sailfish with some man from Ohio when I noticed her. I’d just lit a cigarette and had turned to drop the lighter back in the pocket of the terry-cloth robe beside me. She was off to the right and a little behind us, sitting cross-legged on a large beach towel with her face lowered slightly over the book spread open between her knees. At the moment she registered merely as a pair of nice legs and a sleek dark head, but after I’d looked away something about her began to bother me.

“I thought I’d go nuts,” the Ohio man was saying. “This damn sail must have trailed us a hundred yards. He’d come up behind the bait and follow it like a kitten after a ball of yarn—”

“They’ll do that sometimes,” I said. “Did the skipper try slowing down, and speeding up?”

“Sure. Tried everything. But we never could coax a strike out of him. Finally went down.”

I frowned, thinking of the girl, and turned to shoot another glance at her. Somehow she seemed vaguely familiar, but that still wasn’t it exactly. What the devil was it? Then I began to catch on. The pose was phony. She wasn’t reading that book; she was listening.

To us? That didn’t make sense. What woman would waste her time eavesdropping on a pair of filberts second-guessing a sailfish? But there it was. There were a few sunbathers sprawled around in the vicinity, but ours was the only conversation near enough to be heard. Maybe I was mistaken—No. There was no doubt of it. The little frown of concentration on her face wasn’t directed at the book at all, but towards a spot just to the left of it, towards us. And her eyes didn’t move when she turned a page.

Well, maybe she was a screwball, or a fisherman herself. But she didn’t appear to fit either category—if they were two categories. I tried to tag her, and the only thing I could come up with was clothes-horse, which was a little on the bizarre side in view of the fact she was about seventy per cent naked at the time. I wondered how a woman could look smart, patrician, and faintly elegant while wearing a bathing suit, and decided it must be the chignon and the beautifully tapered hands.

Or the sun, I thought, or the two Martinis. Knock it off. I shrugged, and went back to the conversation. “You going out again tomorrow?” I asked the Ohio man.

It was a still and muggy afternoon in early November. The place was Key West, and we were lying on the narrow strip of sand in front of the private beach club to which I’d been given a guest card by the motel where I was staying.

“No,” he said. “My wife wants to go over to Havana. We’re taking the plane in the morning. How about you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping to find somebody to split a charter with.”

“I know what you mean,” he replied. “It’s a shame to have to charter the whole boat when you’re alone. Damned expensive, and they fish two lines or four just as easy as one.”

I glanced round at the girl, and a slight movement of her face told me I’d almost caught her looking at me. I was conscious again of the impression I’d seen her before. But where? I’d been so many places the past two weeks they were hard to sort out. It couldn’t have been here. This was only the third day I’d been in Key West, and the other two I’d spent out in the Stream, fishing. Miami Beach? Chicago? Las Vegas?

Maybe if I saw her with her clothes on, it would help. I tried a tailored suit, and one of the new sheath things, and then some hand-knitted jersey, but got no make. Slacks? She wouldn’t be caught dead in them, I decided; women who could wear slacks never did.

The Ohio man looked at his watch and stood up, brushing sand from his thick-set body. “I’ve got to get back and start packing. Take it easy, pal.”

He departed. The girl went on staring at the pages of her book. Far out, a westbound tanker hugged the edge of the reef to avoid the current of the Stream. I’d better start packing myself, I thought, and get out of Key West. I had to come up with something pretty soon; in another week or ten days I’d be broke. Sooner, if I spent any more on fishing trips.

I wondered about the girl again. Propping myself on an elbow, I glanced round at her. “What’s the world record for dolphin?”

I expected a blank stare, of course, or one right out of the deep freeze, but instead she said calmly, without even looking up, “Hmmm. Just a moment.” She leafed back through the book and ran her finger down a column. “Seventy-five and a half pounds. It was taken off East Africa.”

It caught me completely off-balance. She glanced up finally. Her eyes were a very dark blue, almost violet, in a thin but fine-boned face. They regarded me with urbane coolness, but then amusement got the upper hand. “All right. I was listening.”

I sat up and slid over by her. Picking up the book, I glanced at the jacket. It was a volume on salt-water fishing. “I wouldn’t have said you were a fisherman.”

She reached for the packet of cigarettes at her side. When I held the lighter, she smiled at me over the flame. “I’m not, as a matter of fact. If you’d asked me for the world’s record Striped Limbo, I’d still have tried to look it up.”

“Then why the book?” I asked.“Your boy friend a fisherman?”

She shook her head. “No, it’s not that. I just wanted to try it.”

“Why?” I asked. She still didn’t look like an outdoor type.

“A man I used to work for. He talked so much about marlin and sailfish I decided if I ever had a chance I’d see what the attraction was. Maybe you could tell me something about the boats.”

“Sure,” I said. “The charter fleet ties up over in Garrison Bight. Along Roosevelt Boulevard, I think it is. Most of them charge sixty a day, but a few are higher. The only one I’ve fished with is Captain Holt, of the Blue Runner. He’s good, and so is his Mate; they’ll put you into fish if anybody will. He charges sixty-five.”

“They’re rather expensive, aren’t they?”

“Nothing’s ever cheap about boats,” I said. “And don’t forget you’re hiring two men all day, plus gasoline, tackle, bait, and so on. Plus a lot of skill you can get only with experience. Are you alone?”

While I was speaking I noticed the same intent expression on her face I’d seen before. It puzzled me. “Oh,” she said abruptly, as if she’d been thinking of something else. “I—yes, I’m alone.”

“Well, look,” I said, “if you want to go out tomorrow, why don’t we team up? It’s a lot less expensive—thirty-two dollars fifty apiece.”

She appeared to think about it. “We-ell—”

”Come on, I’ll buy you a drink,” I told her. “We can talk it over.”

She smiled. “All right.” I helped her up, and gathered up her towel and my robe. She was a little over average height, I noted, and very slender. Too slender, I thought, to attract much attention among all the stacked and sun-gilded flesh lying around on Florida beaches, but she was smart-looking and exquisitely feminine and she moved nicely. She appeared to be around thirty.

The bar was located on a screened porch at one end of the dining-room. It was empty at the moment except for the white-jacketed barman and two men arguing about the Detroit Lions. We sat down at one of the small tables along the screened wall facing the beach. The barman came over. She ordered a Scotch on the rocks, and I asked for a Martini. A big fan in the corner blew humid air across us.

“My name’s George Hamilton,” I said.

She dropped the book on a chair beside her. “Forsyth. Marian Forsyth. How do you do, Mr. Hamilton?”

“Have you been here long?”

“Just two days,” she replied.

“You know, I keep thinking I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

Again I was conscious of the urbane amusement in the eyes. “Really? I thought we had by-passed that one.”

“No,” I said. “It’s on the level. There is something familiar about you. Where are you staying?”

“The Hibiscus Motel, just up the street.”

“Then we’re neighbors. I’m there too.”

“That might have been where you saw me. In the lobby, perhaps.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “But I don’t see why I’d be so hazy about it. You’re quite striking, you know. I mean, the Black Irish coloring, and the classic line of that hair-do. It sings.”

She propped her elbows on the table, with her chin on her laced fingers, and smiled. “And what other personality problems do you have, Mr. Hamilton, besides shyness?”

I grinned. “I’m sorry. Seriously, though, if any Charles or Antoine ever tries to tout off that chignon, shoot him.”

“That seems a little drastic, doesn’t it? But—if you insist.” Then she added, “Incidentally, I’m not Irish. I’m Scottish. My maiden name was Forbes.”

I was reaching for cigarettes in the pocket of the robe, which was on the chair beside me. When I glanced up at her, there was nothing in her face but that same cool good humor. “Oh?” I said. Then I remarked, “I didn’t know you were married.” She wore no ring.

“I’m divorced,” she said. “Where are you from, Mr. Hamilton?”

The barman brought over the drinks. “Texas,” I told her.

She took a sip of the Scotch and looked at me thoughtfully. “I’d never have known it. You don’t sound a bit like a Texan.”

“I’m not a professional,” I said. “It’s a fallacy, anyway. All Texans don’t go around saying ‘Howdy, pardner.’”

“Yes, I know. I’m from Louisiana, myself. But I do have a pretty fair ear for accents. You’ve lost yours entirely.”

“I never really had one,” I said. “But while we’re on this Professor ‘Iggins kick, you can spot it if you listen closely. I still boot one occasionally. Thanksgiving, for instance. And afternoon. That over-stressed first syllable is pure Texan.”

She nodded. “And Southern. You must have a good ear yourself.”

I shrugged. “I had a little speech training. At one time I was going to be an actor.”

She regarded me with interest. “But you’re not in show business?”

“No,” I said. “Advertising. But how about the fishing? Do you want to try it?”

“Oh, yes. Very much. But I’m not sure yet I can make it tomorrow. Could I let you know tonight?”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t we have dinner together?”

She smiled. “I’m afraid I couldn’t, tonight. But thanks, anyway. Suppose I call you around ten or eleven. Will you be in then?”

I said yes. She asked several more questions about fishing, refused the offer of another drink, and left to go back to the motel. I swam for a while, wondering about her. I couldn’t place her at all. Was she really interested in fishing, or was she just a girl away from home looking for a little fun? If the latter, I thought, she had a very cool approach to it. I wondered if she had money. A bathing suit revealed a lot of interesting statistical data, but it didn’t say a damn thing when it came to financial status.

I was lying in bed around eleven reading The Hidden Persuaders when the phone rang. “Well, I can go,” she said eagerly.

“That’s great. Here’s hoping you land a sail.”

“I just hope we can still get a boat. Do you think they’ll all be taken?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the off-season. And I’ve already talked to Holt; he’s open tomorrow. I’ll call now and confirm.”

“I hate to keep bothering you with questions,” she apologized, “but what shall I take? What time do we leave, and how long are we out?”

“What room are you in?” I asked. “If you’re dressed, I could come over—”

The brush was polite, but firm. She was about to go to bed. She repeated the questions.

“Hat, or fishing cap,” I said. “Long sleeves, dark glasses, tan lotion. That sun is murder. We’ll leave the dock at eight, and come in around four-thirty or five. They furnish the tackle; all we have to bring is our lunch. There’s a restaurant on Roosevelt that’ll be open. I don’t have a car, but I’ll call a cab—”

“I have one,” she interrupted. “I’ll meet you in the parking area behind the motel at seven-thirty. Will that be all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

“Just one other thing,” she asked. “Could you tell me what the outriggers are for?”

I wondered why she wanted to go into that in the middle of the night over the phone, but shrugged. She seemed to have an insatiable curiosity about the mechanics of big-game fishing.

“They serve several purposes,” I told her. “The line is run out from your rod tip and trolled from the end of the outrigger, clipped in a gizmo like a big clothes-pin. Takes the load off your arms, for one thing. And it’s springy on the end, so it gives the bait a good action. But the big reason, of course, is the automatic dropback when a sail-fish strikes. I suppose the book told you that a billfish of any kind always stuns his bait before he takes it in his mouth. So when he raps it with that bill, it snaps the line off the outrigger; that releases about twenty feet of slack, and the bait stops dead in the water. Just as if it had been alive and he’d killed it.”

”I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Hamilton. I’m looking forward to it, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

After she’d hung up I lay there thinking about her, studying the whole thing a little warily. She didn’t ring true, somehow. Then I dismissed the worry. Hell, she couldn’t possibly know me, and I was three thousand miles from Las Vegas. The prospect of another fishing trip was irresistible, anyway, and she might turn out to be a very interesting deal. I don’t get you at all, Mrs. Forsyth, but you’re beginning to intrigue me. We’ll see what we can find out tomorrow.

It wasn’t much—at least, not to begin with. And then when I finally did figure out what she was doing, she puzzled me even more.

* * *

It was a beautiful day. When I awoke it was a little after seven and already full daylight inside the room. I crossed to the window and parted the slats of the closed Venetian blind. The sky was clear, and fronds of the coconut palms in the courtyard between the two wings of the motel stirred gently in a light breeze that appeared to be from the south or south-east. The Stream would be in lovely shape. I was eager to be under way. When I’d shaved and showered, and emerged from the room with the beach bag containing glasses, fishing cap, tan lotion, and cigarettes, she was just coming out of No. 17, diagonally across from me. She had on a conical straw hat, blue Bermuda shorts, and a simple blouse with long sleeves, and was carrying a big purse. She waved and smiled. “Good morning, Mr. Hamilton.”

I learned nothing from the car. As the great American status symbol it was useless, because it wasn’t hers; it was a rental she’d picked up at the airport in Miami. She was wearing a watch, however, that had cost at least five hundred. She didn’t have much to say while we were eating breakfast, and afterwards, while we were running out to the Stream with the engines hooked up, talking was difficult because of their noise. We sat forward under the canopy to avoid the tatters of spray flung backward as the Blue Runner knifed into the light ground-swell at top cruising speed.

“Is it always this noisy?” she asked, having to raise her voice.

I shook my head. “Just while we’re running out. When we start fishing, we troll on one engine, throttled down. Hardly any noise at all.”

“Oh,” she said, as if relieved.

The boat was a thirty-five-foot sports fisherman with topside controls and big outriggers capable of bouncing a marlin bait. Holt kept her in superb condition so her white topsides sparkled in the sun. He and his Mate were both taciturn types whose sole interest in life was fishing. They were good, too. I’d enjoyed fishing with them.

It was a few minutes before nine and Key West was down on the horizon when we crossed the edge of the Stream shortly to the south and east of Sand Key light. It was beautiful, running dark as indigo in a ragged line beyond the reefs with just enough breeze to ripple the light ground-swell rolling up from the south-east. The Blue Runner slowed, and Sam the Mate came down from topside. He swung out the outriggers, nodded for Mrs. Forsyth to take the port chair, and put out her line, baited with balao. She watched as he clipped it to the outrigger halyard and ran it out to the end. He fitted the butt of the rod into the gimbal in her chair.

She took it and looked round at me. “Now what do I do?”

Normally I detest people who want to talk when I’m fishing, but this was different. I was curious about her, and becoming more so all the time. “Just watch your bait,” I said. “You see it? A little to your right, and about seventy-five feet back?”

She looked. It skipped across the surface momentarily, and slid under again, fluttering. “Yes. I can see it now.”

“Keep your eye on it,” I said. “Watch it every minute-”

She nodded. “That’s so I’ll know when I get a bite?”

I restrained an impulse to wince. “Strike,” I said. “These fish out here don’t nibble; they hit. But that’s not the reason for watching it. You’ll know when you get a strike, whether you see it or not. Sam or the Skipper will tell you, for one thing. Sam’ll be standing up in back of the chair, and the Skipper’s topside, so they can both see down into the water better than we can because our angle’s too flat and there’s more defraction. They’ll always see the fish before you will, and they’ll generally know what it is by the time it hits. But if you don’t see it, you’re losing half the fun of this type of fishing. The strike is the big thrill. It’s like dry-fly fishing, on a magnified scale.”

I glanced at her. She was wearing dark glasses now, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but I had that feeling I’d had the other times that she was hanging onto every word with rapt attention. Sam handed me the other rod. I threw the reel on free spool and thumbed it lightly while he ran the line up the outrigger. For the time I forgot her, watching my own bait with the old eager anticipation while we trolled quietly. The sun was hot. Flying fish skittered out of the blue side of a swell. A tanker in ballast went past to seaward, rocking us in its wake. Water boiled under my bait, and there was a slight click as the line snapped off the outrigger.

“Mackerel,” Holt said laconically.

I lowered the rod tip till the slack was gone, and then raised it, setting the hook. It was a small one, not over three pounds. “Good marlin bait,” Sam said, as he grasped the leader and dropped it in the box. I glanced at Mrs. Forsyth. She was lighting a cigarette. The fish appeared to bore her. Well, it wasn’t much of a fish.

An hour went by. I landed a barracuda of about fifteen pounds, and then a bonito that came in badly slashed by barracuda. She had no action at all, but she didn’t appear to mind. She seemed to be lost in thought. We went on trolling. I watched my bait.

“Bird,” Sam said behind us.

“I see him,” Holt replied. The beat of the engine picked up, and we swung in a sharp turn.

Mrs. Forsyth glanced round at me. “We aren’t going to chase birds, are we?”

“Man-o”-war,” I said. “A frigate bird.” I stood up and looked forward, and spotted him. He was about a half-mile ahead, off the starboard bow. She stuck her rod in the holder on the rail and came over to look too.

“When you see one hovering like that,” I told her, “he’s usually following a fish—”

“Why?” she asked.

“Table scraps,” I explained. “When the fish locates a school of bait and starts to feed, he drives them to the surface. That gives the bird a chance at ’em.”

She nodded. “I see.”

Captain Holt was starting forward. “Probably dolphin,” he said. “I see some dunnage.”

“How about taking it on the port side?” I asked.

“Sure.”

”Get set,” I told Mrs. Forsyth. She sat down in the chair and I fitted the rod into the gimbal for her. “There’s a big plank up ahead, and we’re going to pass it on your side. If he hits, lower your rod and reel in till the slack’s gone, and then strike once by raising the tip—”

“How do they know it’s a dolphin?” she asked, watching me with that intent expression on her face.

“They don’t actually,” I said. “It’s just an educated guess. Dolphin like to he under anything floating on the surface.”

We came abeam of the plank, and then it began to drop astern. I stood up to watch. Her bait fluttered past it, started to draw away.

“Here he comes!” Holt said tersely.

It was one of those moments that’d still give you a thrill if you fished for a hundred years. I saw the blue bolt of flame under the surface, and then he came clear, quartering and behind the bait, a bull of eighteen or twenty pounds flashing green and gold and blue in the sunlight, and took the bait going down. Her line snapped off the outrigger. I hoped he wouldn’t take mine too. Sometimes they will—take both baits in one blinding strike so fast you think you’ve hooked two separate dolphin all at the same instant.

He didn’t. He took only hers, set the hook himself when she forgot to hit him, leaped, made one fast, slashing run, leaped three more times, and was gone. She reeled in. Sam looked at the leader. “Kink,” he said.

“What did I do wrong?” she asked, casually taking cigarettes from the breast pocket of her blouse.

“Nothing,” I said.

“But he got away.”

I was beginning to get it now, though it made no sense at all. The whole thing had bored her profoundly and she didn’t mind in the slightest that she’d lost the fish, but she wanted me to explain why.

I explained. “When he was jumping, he threw a kink in the leader. Wire’ll always break if it kinks. It happens to everybody.”

“Oh,” she said thoughtfully.

She wasn’t interested in fishing, and never had been. She was listening to my voice.

There was no possible explanation for it, but I knew I was right. I watched her closely the rest of the day, checking it, and found that whenever I was talking, no matter what the subject, she listened in that same way. She said nothing about herself except that she was the private secretary to a businessman in a small town named Thomaston in central Louisiana. It might even be true, I thought, in spite of the expensive watch. She could have presents like that any time she wanted them. There was no longer any doubt that fishing bored her. She raised a sail, and lost it, with no more interest than she’d shown in the dolphin. I hooked up with a six-foot sail, and landed it; it wasn’t badly hurt and there was little blood, so we released it. That was it for the day, except for two or three small dolphin and another bonito. We were back at the dock at four forty-five.

We paid Holt, and I drove her car back to the motel. Outside No. 17, she held out her hand and smiled. “It’s been wonderful. I enjoyed every minute of it.”

“Would you like to go out again tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’d rather not take that much sun again so soon.”

“How about dinner tonight?”

I got the same cool, polite brush. “Really, I couldn’t. But thank you just the same.”

I went back to my own room. After I’d showered and changed into gray flannel slacks and a light sports shirt, I sat down in front of the air-conditioner with a cigarette and went back over the whole thing from the time I’d noticed she was eavesdropping. She’d looked me over and dropped me. Why? And what had she really wanted? An adventure, an interlude, a break? Whatever it was, I’d failed to measure up somewhere. Well, you couldn’t win ’em all. The phone rang.

“I’m just stirring some Martinis,” she said warmly. “Why don’t you come over, Mr. Hamilton, and have one with me to celebrate your sailfish?”

You never know, I thought; maybe that’s why they’re so fascinating. “Love to,” I said. I dropped the phone back in the cradle and was out the door in two strides.

I knocked on No. 17, and stepped inside. She’d changed into a pleated black skirt and white blouse, and was very smart and very, very attractive from the sling pumps to the sleek dark head. There was a bucket of ice on the glass top of the dresser, and she was stirring Martinis in a pitcher.

She turned and smiled. “Do sit down, Mr. Forbes.”

Two

The way she said it told me there was no point in trying to bluff. I stepped inside and closed the door. Her room was exactly the same as mine, furnished with a brown carpet and curtains, twin beds with yellow spreads, a dresser, and a glass-covered desk at the right of the door. The telephone was located on the desk, and beside it— almost under my hand—were two sheets of motel stationery covered with the slashes and pot-hooks of shorthand. Two names were spelled out in the message; one of them was Murray, and the other Forbes.

I glanced up at her. “You just got this?”

She nodded coolly, and poured the Martinis. “Just a few minutes ago.”

“But you knew who I was all the time? You practically told me there in the bar.”

She smiled. “I couldn’t resist it; you were so insufferably smug. And I wanted to see how you’d react.”

“Are you from the police?”

“Of course not,” she said. She handed me the Martini, and picked up her own. “Here’s to your sailfish. Or should we drink to Mr. Murray’s durability, or the high cost of extradition?”

“What about Murray?” I demanded.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“How could I? I was afraid to call anybody on the Coast. And there was no mention of it in the papers I could get.”

“Then you were still afraid you’d killed him?”

I took a sip of the drink; I needed it. “No. I assumed he was tougher than that. But felonious assault is pretty damn serious itself. What do you know about it?”

“Would you hand me those notes, please?”

I took them off the desk and passed them to her, so completely at sea now I didn’t feel anything at all. She walked around between the beds and sat down on the farther one with a leg doubled under her and the pleated skirt spread carefully over her knees. Taking a sip of the Martini, she said, “Hmmm,” as she studied the shorthand. Then she put her drink down on the night table and groped for a cigarette. I held the lighter for her. She smiled, and nodded to the armchair near the end of the bed. “Please sit down.”

“What about Murray?” I said impatiently.

“Broken jaw,” she said, consulting her notes. “Mild concussion. Something or other to the something sinus— ethmoid, I think. Scalp lacerations. Various minor injuries. A hundred and fifty dollars’ damages to his camera and possibly two hundred to the furnishings of a motel room. He’s recovering satisfactorily, and the woman’s husband appears to have used a little influence to smooth it over and keep it hushed up. You might go to jail for any one of half a dozen misdemeanors if they could get their hands on you, but there’s no felony charge. Nothing they would extradite you for.”

I sighed with relief.

“You apparently don’t care much for private detectives.”

“I can contain my enthusiasm for them,” I said. “Snoopy bastards. I had to have that film, anyway; and since I didn’t know how to get into a Speed Graphic, I opened it on his head.”

“You were lucky it was no worse.”

I lit a cigarette. “Would you mind telling me who you are, and just what this is all about?”

“I’ve already told you who I am,” she replied, taking a sip of her drink. “Mrs. Marian Forsyth.”

“And you’re a private secretary to some businessman in Louisiana,” I said. “Don’t give me that.”

“I am,” she said. “Or was, rather. However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”

“Except for a minor point,” I said. “I wasn’t the racetrack tout; I was the man behind him. I made him. It was a public-relations deal. But never mind that. How’d you find out all this?”

She smiled. “You’ll love this. From a private detective.”

“But for God’s sake why? And where was it I saw you before?”

“Miami Beach,” she said. “Six days ago.”

“Oh. Then you were staying—”

She nodded. “At that same Byzantine confection you were. The Golden Horn.”

The Golden Horn was one of those chi-chi motels in the north end of Miami Beach that really aren’t motels at all except that you can park your own car if you want. I didn’t have a car, of course; I’d stayed out there merely because they were less expensive than the big places. I thought of it now, trying to remember when I’d seen her.

“It was by the pool,” she said. “You were trying to pick up some girl from—Richmond, I believe.”

I frowned. “I remember the girl, all right. Silver blonde with a seven-word vocabulary. Priceless, hilarious, hysterical—I can’t remember the other four. But I don’t know why I’m so vague about seeing you. As attractive—”

“Competition, perhaps,” she said. “The pool side is not my terrain. Nor the beach. I’m too thin.”

“You’re entitled to your own opinions,” I said. “Don’t try to brain-wash me. I still say I’d have noticed you. I could spot the line of that head a hundred yards—”

“I had my hair up, and I was wearing a swimming cap,” she said crisply. “Now, if we’re through discussing my visibility, or lack of it, would you care to know what I was doing?”

“That one I’ve already figured out. You were listening.”

She gave me an approving glance. “Right.”

“But why? What was it about my voice? If you’re a talent scout for Decca, I can’t sing a note.”

For the moment, let’s just say your voice has a certain unique quality that interests me. And it might make you a great deal of money.”

“How?” I asked.

I can’t tell you right now; maybe I won’t at all. I don’t know. But at any rate you know now why I started investigating you—especially after I began to suspect your name wasn’t really George Hamilton.”

“What tipped you off about that?” I asked. “I thought I was pretty careful.”

“Pure chance,” she replied. “It just happened there was a man named Forbes registered there at the same time—”

“Oh,” I said. “Sure. I remember now. And he was paged, there by the pool. But, dammit, I wouldn’t have believed it was that obvious.”

“It wasn’t,” she replied. “On the contrary, you recovered beautifully. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking right at you. Naturally it made me wonder, since I’d just heard you tell the girl your name was Hamilton. I don’t remember whether that was before or after you told her your father was Chairman of the Board of Inland Steel.”

“It was a waste of breath,” I said. “She was a girl who liked to strike closer to the source. She collected the board chairmen themselves. But what did you do then?”

She finished her drink and started to get up. “Let me,” I said, and refilled the glasses with what was left in the pitcher. I sat down again. “Go on.”

“I went up to my room,” she said. “It was on the second floor, overlooking the patio and the pool, and I could watch you from the window. I called the desk and asked them to page Mr. Hamilton.”

“Oh. I remember that call. So you were the mixed-up type from Eastern Airlines that kept insisting she’d found the luggage I hadn’t even lost?”

She nodded coolly. “That’s right.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons. I had to find out if you really were registered under that name, or just lying to the girl on the grounds that you should always lie to girls. And I wanted to hear your voice over the telephone—”

“And that was the same deal last night?” I interrupted. “I mean, when you asked all those questions about fishing, over the phone?”

“Of course.” She gestured impatiently with a slim hand. “But to get back—primarily, I wanted to watch you while you were being paged.”

“I see.” This girl was clever. “And I flunked?”

“You flunked. The boy called you three times from the other end of the pool before you remembered who you were.”

“Well, there was an awful lot of blonde extruded from that bathing suit—”

“I allowed for a certain amount of preoccupation. But your subconscious should have been on duty, anyway. It was fairly obvious you hadn’t been Mr. Hamilton for very long.”

I nodded. “So then you put the private snoops on me? You know, sometimes I get the impression I’m a kind of backlog for the whole damned industry.”

“Well, perhaps if you behaved yourself—”

“If you’re referring to this last deal,” I said, “the woman told me she was separated from her husband. What was I supposed to do, get an affidavit? But never mind that. How did the snoops find out where to dig? After I rocked that one up with his camera, I was running scared, believe me; he didn’t seem to be the healthiest. I think I used three different names from Las Vegas to Los Angeles International to Chicago to Miami, and I registered from San Antonio, Texas.”

It was quite simple,” she said. “I got your correct name and your Los Angeles address off an old credit card.”

“What?”

”When you try to change your identity, you should clean out your wallet.”

“I don’t leave my wallet lying around—”

“No. But you don’t take it in swimming with you, either.”

I was beginning to feel like an absolute chump. This girl had picked me to pieces as if I’d been an oaf at a county fair.

“Listen,” I said, almost angrily, “I know I’m not that stupid. When I was in the pool or on the beach, it was in my room. And the room was locked.”

“I know,” she said. “But you have a bad habit of not turning the key in at the desk. And the next afternoon you went swimming off the beach. Remember? I merely took the key from the pocket of your wrap and went up to the room.”

I shook my head. “You’ve got a really cold nerve. Don’t you know that’s a serious offense, whether you took anything or not?”

“There was really no risk,” she said. “Your room overlooked the beach, so I could see you out there. And the whole thing didn’t take five minutes.”

“You don’t let anything stop you, do you? So then what?”

“That was when I called the detective agency. They put their Los Angeles office on it, and when you checked out of the Golden Horn they told me where you were staying down here. I came down. I wanted to keep in contact, and perhaps meet you, but not commit myself until I received the report from California and learned a little about you. When we came in a while ago, I called Miami. They’d heard from the West Coast at last, and they gave me the report over the phone. Parts of it were quite interesting, so I called you to come over.”

”What do you want?” I asked.

“Primarily, to know quite a bit more about you. What are your plans?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If your information’s accurate, I suppose I can go back to my right name and start looking for a job. Probably in New York.”

“How much money do you have?”

“Little over four hundred.”

“That’s not much. And good jobs aren’t easy to find at twenty-eight with your record of moving around. Let me make you an offer.”

“Go ahead.

“Put it off for a few days. I have a proposition in mind, but I can’t tell you what it is until I’m sure of several things. You don’t stand to lose anything; if nothing comes of it, you’ll still have your four hundred dollars. I’ll make up anything you’ve spent.”

“What kind of proposition?” I asked.

“I’d rather not say yet. But how would you like to go back to Miami Beach?”

“When?” I asked.

She stood up. “Right now. I’m expecting some very important mail, and I have to do some shopping in the morning, so I thought we’d drive up tonight.”

I rose. “Sounds fine to me.” Then I took hold of her arms, and said, “In fact, I’ve just had a wonderful idea—”

The blue eyes were coolly satirical. “That I don’t doubt in the slightest. No.”

“But you haven’t even heard it—”

“I don’t have to. But it just happens I still have my room at the Golden Horn, and that I’m expecting the mail there, under my own name. I’d suggest you re-register as George Hamilton; after all, they’ll probably remember you.”

”But—”

“I’ll drop you in downtown Miami Beach, and you can take a cab. I’d rather no one knew of our relationship.”

“Relationship,” I said. “Hah!” She smiled, but said nothing.

* * *

“We’d stopped for dinner in Marathon, so it was shortly after eleven when she let me off in Miami Beach. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. “Call me in room three-one-six.”

“Sure,” I replied. I carried the bag into a bar and killed about ten minutes over a drink before I called a cab and went out to the Golden Horn. It’s still slow in the Miami area in November, so I wasn’t worried about getting a room. It turned out I could have one fronting the ocean if I wanted. “Third floor, if possible,” I said.

I signed the registry card and followed the boy across the corner of the patio court, past the illuminated pool and palms bearing clusters of colored lights. We entered a corridor in the left wing and took an elevator to the third floor.

312 was round the comer from her room. It was like the one I’d had before, with turquoise walls and beige carpet and an oversized bed. The bedspread was persimmon, as were the floor-to-ceiling curtains covering the bay window at the far end. The bath had a tub and stall shower and was finished in persimmon tile. The boy put the bag on the luggage stand beside the dresser over on the right, adjusted the air-conditioner thermostat, thanked me for the tip, and left. I waited three minutes before I stepped down the corridor and knocked on 316. The door opened slightly and she looked out round the edge of it.

“I might have known,” she said.

“I just thought of several more things I should tell you about myself,” I replied. “It was in Panama I first became interested in big-game fishing-”

“I see. And you’re afraid you might forget them before morning?”

“They might be lost for ever. But I don’t have to come in; I can tell you from out here in the corridor. Or through the door.”

She sighed. I couldn’t tell whether she was really angry or not. “Just a moment.” She disappeared. I heard a rustling sound, and then she pulled the door open and I stepped inside. She closed it. Her room was the same layout and color scheme. She’d scrubbed off what makeup she’d been wearing, even the lipstick, and had on a rather conservative nightgown under the négligé she was struggling with, but she was unbelievably exciting. I didn’t know why.

“Mostly trivial,” I said. “But revealing. For instance, when I was a kid, all the other slobs put their money in the Christmas Club, but I kept mine in a regular account. Got two per cent.”

“You don’t have to hit me over the head,” she replied. I kissed her. This was even more exciting, in spite of the fact she obviously didn’t care whether it was or not. She finally broke it up, but she said, “All right.” It was rather the way you’d buy a potato peeler from a salesman to get rid of him, but by this time I didn’t even care what the terms were.

* * *

She was smooth, deft, experienced, and agreeably cooperative about the whole thing. I lay there afterwards in the annealed and quiescent dark trying to pin down her exact attitude, and decided the word I was looking for was pleasant. That was it. She was quite pleasant about it—the perfect hostess, in fact.

She said something, but I missed it. I was still thinking about her, trying to remember exactly what she looked like—”

“You’re not even listening,” she said.

“What?”

“Speech. It may have escaped your attention, but for a long time now people have been able to communicate—”

“Oh. I’m sorry. What was it?”

“You mentioned acting. Was that by any chance the truth?”

“Yes. But just amateur. In school. I never did try to turn pro; not enough talent.”

“Were you a fast study?”

“Fairly so,” I said. “I usually knew my lines by the time we finished the first rehearsal. For some reason I learn fast, or easily. Just luck, I suppose.”

“Tell me about your family.”

“I’m it, except for my step-father. My mother and father were divorced when I was about five. He was a geologist; spent most of his time in South America, usually at high altitudes. My mother wouldn’t live up there. He was killed the next summer; a station wagon he was riding in went off the road into a gorge. My mother remarried a couple of years afterwards. Widower several years older than she was, partner in a Houston brokerage firm. He’s retired now, lives on a big place near Huntsville and raises Black Angus cattle. My mother died while I was at sea, during the Korean thing. She left me a little money; that’s when I bought the bar in Panama.”

“What happened to the bar?”

“It was put out-of-bounds for military personnel because of a couple of bad fights, so I sold it.”

”At a loss?”

“No. I was lucky. This live one was fresh from the States and didn’t know what out-of-bounds meant down there. I think he wanted to make it a fag hangout, anyway.”

“What did you do with the money when you got back to the States?”

“Lost most of it in Las Vegas.”

“Tell me about the tout business.”

I reached over and turned on the reading lamp on the night table. She looked at me questioningly. “What’s that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just got tired of talking to you in the dark. I wanted to look at you.”

“Why?”

“Tell me,” I said. I raised myself on an elbow and ran a finger-tip along the line of her cheek. “You’re beautiful. Is that it?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I was never less silly. How about striking? Exciting? It’s a quality of some kind—fragile, elegant, cool, hard-boiled, and sexy—all at the same time. There’s no such combination? I was afraid not.”

She shook her head with exasperation, but she did smile. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. And I had some weird idea I was going to talk to you—”

“I am talking.”

“Like an idiot. Why the campaign; you’re already here, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be so cynical.”

“Turn out the light.”

I turned it out, and took her in my arms and kissed her. She came to me readily, and was as deftly and pleasantly co-operative as before. If that was the only way to achieve a calm and rational conversation, by God she was willing.

“What about the tout business?” she asked after a while.

“It was nothing,” I said. “You know how they operate. You’ve seen ’em by the dozens passing out their sheets at the entrance to racetracks—Clocker Joe, Stablehand Maguire, Exercise Boy—no imagination, competing with each other, and working for buttons. So I made a deal with this one; I’d put him in the big time for half the take. We set it up as a telegraphic service and I bought time on a Tijuana radio station to sell him—a real saturation build-up about the time Santa Anita was opening. Lot of spot announcements and a quarter-hour of hillbilly junk with a plug every minute or two. That’s about all there was to it, besides convincing him he had to raise his prices. Obviously, nobody has any confidence in a cheap tip on a horse race; you’ve got to charge plenty to be good. We were splitting two thousand a week for a while.”

“What happened?”

“He couldn’t stand prosperity; turned out to be a lush. Kept getting his records all fouled up so he couldn’t remember who got the winners yesterday. And you’re dead without records, obviously.”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully.

I woke once during the night. She was lying quite still beside me, but after a while I began to suspect she was awake. I put my hand on her thigh. It was tense and rigid. Her arms felt the same way, and when I slid my hand down to hers, lying at her side, I found it was clenched into a fist.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She made no reply. I asked again. She still said nothing. I gave up, and after a while I went back to sleep.

Three

When I awoke it was after eight. I groped for a cigarette, lit it, and turned to look at her. She was sleeping quietly with the dark hair like spilled ink across the pillow. She had the flat stomach and narrow hips of a fashion model and rather small breasts that were spread out and flattened as she lay on her back. I looked at the slender patrician face with the long lashes like soot against her skin; it was a willful face, I thought, and it just escaped being bony, but the bones were good. She was no pin-up, but she reminded me of something very thin and expensive that was made before good workmanship went out of style. I wondered what she wanted.

Her bag was on the dresser; it might tell me something, I thought. I went over and opened it. A thin folder held eleven $100 Express checks. I pulled out the wallet and checked her driver’s license. What little she’d told me about herself appeared to be the truth. Mrs. Marion Forsyth, it said, 714 Beauregard Drive, Thomaston, La. Hair, black. Eyes, blue, 5’-7”. 112 pounds. Born 8 November, 1923. She’d be thirty-four in a few days. This surprised me; I wouldn’t have thought she was over twenty-nine or thirty. The wallet held about six hundred dollars. I dropped it back in the bag.

I dressed, and looked out into the corridor. It was clear. I went back to my room, called down for orange juice and coffee and the Miami Herald, and had a quick shower and shave. It was nine twenty-five and I was just finishing the coffee when she called. She was going over to Miami, and would be back at noon. The message was as clipped and precise as an inter-office memo.

I killed a couple of hours swimming off the beach and had just come in and changed when the phone rang. This time her voice was a little friendlier, and there was a hint of suppressed excitement in it. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said.

I knocked lightly on 316, and she opened almost immediately. Her hair was up in the chignon, of course, softly clubbed and worn low on the nape of the neck, and while the dress was just a summer cotton she looked as slender and smart as a fashion show. I kissed her. She submitted agreeably enough, but I could sense impatience. Pulling away from me, she nodded towards the dresser.

There were two things on it that hadn’t been here this morning. One was a small tape recorder about the size of a portable typewriter, and the other an old briefcase plastered all over with labels. It had come air express, and I could see the return address on one of the labels. It was the same as that on her driver’s license.

“That’s the mail you were waiting for?” I asked.

She nodded. “It’s just come. And the tape recorder is what I went to Miami for. Have you ever heard your voice on one?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Did you buy the recorder?”

“Yes,” she replied. “Why?”

“I just wondered. I assume it has something to do with that proposition you mentioned, and it occurred to me I must represent a sizable investment by this time. Four or five hundred to have me investigated by those keyhole astronomers, and now another couple of hundred for the recorder. You must be very sure of yourself.”

“It’s a calculated risk,” she said.

She unstrapped the briefcase. I could see excitement growing in her face as she opened it and began removing its contents. They appeared to me to be largely rubbish. There were a dozen or more thin pamphlets I recognized as the annual statements of corporations, some old fire-insurance policies, and two or three stenographer’s notebooks. She casually tossed all this into the wastepaper basket.

“I didn’t want my housekeeper to know what I was really after,” she explained. “So I told her to ship the briefcase and I’d look for the papers I needed. Oh—Here we are.”

There were two of them, flat cardboard boxes about seven inches square. They were packed with reels of tape. She selected one and put it on the machine, and stuck an empty reel on the other spindle. When the tape was connected, she ran several feet of it on to the empty reel with a control on the front panel, and pressed the “Play” switch. A man’s voice issued from the speaker. She adjusted the volume.

“—take a chance and hold the Lukens Steel for another five points. I think it’ll go, but the minute it does, sell. It’s too volatile for my blood pressure. How’d Gulf Oil close, Chris?”

“Let’s see—” This was also a man’s voice. “Here we are. Gulf was up three-quarters. I’d say hang on to it.”

“I intend to. And buy me another hundred shares in the morning.”

“Right. One hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr. Chapman?”

“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department to send me everything they’ve got or can dig up on an outfit called Trinity Natural Gas? It’s a pipeline company that was formed about two years ago. The stock sold over the counter until last month, but now it’s listed on the American Exchange. Marian has a hunch about it. She went to college with the man who’s head of it, and says he’s a ball of fire.”

She stopped the machine and glanced at me. “Do you know what it is?”

I lit a cigarette. “Sounds like a man talking to his broker over the phone.” I couldn’t see what the excitement was, or why she wanted me to listen to it.

“Right,” she said. She ran the tape back, watching the mechanical counter on the panel. “Now listen closely. I’m going to play that last speech again, and I want you to repeat it.”

“Okay,” I said.

She pressed the “Play” switch again. Chapman’s voice began. “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department—” I listened, noting at the same time that she was taking it down in shorthand. It was only five or six sentences.

She stopped the machine at the end of it, and rapidly transcribed her notes. She handed me the sheet of paper with the sentences written out in longhand.

“I don’t need it,” I said. “I’ve heard it twice.”

“Read it anyway,” she said. “So you won’t pause or stumble.” Plugging in the microphone, she handed it to me. “Hold it about there. Don’t jiggle it, or bump it. When I throw the machine on “Record” and the tape starts rolling, begin reading.”

“Don’t you have to erase what’s on there first?”

She shook her head. “It erases and records at the same time. Ready? Here we go.”

She started it, and I read the speech into the microphone. She stopped the machine, and ran the tape back, still watching the counter. I could sense she was keyed-up. I knew what she was doing by now, of course, but it struck me as absurd. She put the machine on “Play Back” and sat down near me on the end of the bed. I started to say something, but she cut me off with an imperious gesture of her hand. She sat with her head lowered, listening intently.

She’d gone back pretty far this time, and it was the man called Chris who was speaking.

“—one hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr. Chapman”?”

“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research—”

Chapman’s voice went on through the speech. At the end of it there was a little whrrp where she’d put it on “Record” and I’d started speaking.

“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department to send me everything they’ve got—”

I sat bolt upright. “Hey—!” She clapped a hand over my mouth. We both sat perfectly still until it was finished.

She got up and turned the machine off. Then she turned to me with a faint smile. “Now you know what I was listening to all the time.”

I stared at her. “It’s incredible. They’re almost exactly the same.”

She nodded. “That’s the reason I wanted to do it this way, with the two voices end-to-end. As a comparison check, it’s absolutely conclusive. You see, it’s not only the timbre—plenty of male voices are down in that low end of the baritone range—but you both have the same quick, alert, self-assured way of speaking. Clipped, and rather aggressive. Either of you could do a perfect imitation of Ralph Bellamy playing one of those detective roles. In fact, Harris quite often does, at parties.”

“Harris?” I asked.

“Harris Chapman, the man you were just listening to.”

“Do we actually sound that much alike?” I asked. “Or is it the recording?”

She shook a cigarette from a packet on the dresser, and leaned down. I held the lighter for her. She sat in the armchair, facing me with her knees crossed. “I could tell you apart, in person,” she said thoughtfully. “And on hi-fi equipment. I might even, in fact, on the telephone—because I’m aware there are two of you.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

She inhaled smoke and regarded me coolly. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you were speaking over the telephone to anybody who knew Harris Chapman but didn’t know you, you’d be Chapman.”

“I’m not so sure—”

“Let me explain,” she interrupted. “If you said you were Harris Chapman, why should he doubt it? Your voices are almost identical, and they’re not there side-by-side for comparison. Add to that the way you both speak—which is almost exactly alike, and very much unlike Southern speech in general. He lives in Thomaston, Louisiana. You follow me, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “In other words, he’s unique—at least, in his manner of speech. They hear it—it’s Chapman.”

“Exactly. You could fool anybody who knows him.”

“For just about five seconds,” I said.

She smiled. “No. You’re wrong.”

“If you’re speaking of impersonation, it takes one other thing. Information.”

“I was coming to that,” she said. “It happens that I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else in the world.”

“What are you driving at?”

“This. In ten days of intensive study, you could become Harris Chapman—that is, to the extent that Harris Chapman as a personality or an individual is projected over a telephone circuit.”

I stood up and crushed out my cigarette. “And why should I?”

“Would you consider seventy-five thousand dollars a good reason?”

I paused, still holding the mangled cigarette stub. “You’re joking.”

“Do I look as if I were?”

“Where would you get that much money?”

“From him, naturally.”

“You mean steal it?”

She nodded coolly. “I suppose you would call it stealing. A rather unusual type of theft, and one that’s absolutely fool-proof

“There is no such animal.”

“In this particular case, there is. It’s unique. I suppose you’ve heard the expression “perfect crime”. This is the perfect crime, the one that’ll never be solved.”

I lit another cigarette, still looking at her. She had me badly confused by now. I sat down on the corner of the bed near her. “I’ll admit I don’t know nearly as much about girls as I did when I was nineteen,” I said. “But, even so, your picture and sound track just don’t match. Perfect crime—Offhand, I’d say the worst crime you’ve ever committed was taking advantage of a stuck parking meter.”

She gestured with a slim hand. “I didn’t say I’d ever stolen anything before.”

“But you’re going to now. Why?”

“We can go into the reasons later. I want to know if you’re interested.”

“I’m always interested in money.”

“Have you ever stolen anything?”

No. But I doubt that’s highly significant. Nobody’s ever tried me with seventy-five thousand before.”

”Then you could?

“Probably. But it couldn’t be as fool-proof as you say.”

“It is,” she said definitely. “As a matter of fact, nobody will ever know it was stolen.”

“Why? Money doesn’t evaporate. And just where is it?”

She studied me thoughtfully. “Your stepfather was a broker, I believe you said. So you know what a trading account is?”

“Sure.”

“All right. Harris Chapman has a trading account with a New Orleans brokerage firm. The man called Chris you just heard on the tape is the registered representative who handles it for him. And at the present moment the stocks and cash in the account add up to just a little over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”

I whistled. Then I glanced sharply at her. “So?”

“Well, you know how a trading account like that is handled.”

“Sure. The stocks he buys are credited to his account, but they’re kept there at the brokerage house in the vault, so he doesn’t have to go through all the rigmarole of endorsing them and sending them back when he wants to sell. He buys and sells all the time, just by picking up the phone—” I got it then, and she was crazy.

“You see?” she said.

“I see nothing,” I replied. “Money in a brokerage account is just as safe as money in a bank account. It takes a signature to get it; you ought to know that. Two signatures, as a matter of fact. You have to sign a receipt for the transaction, and then endorse the check to cash it.”

She interrupted. “Will you listen just a minute? The idea is nothing like as simple as that. Of course it wouldn’t work in any other set of circumstances, but as I told you before, this is unique. All it’ll require is the most elementary sort of forgery because nobody”ll ever look at the signatures anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because there’ll never be the slightest doubt but that Harris Chapman drew the money out himself. I’ll take care of that—”

“You’d better fill me in a little,” I said. “Just who is Chapman, and what’s your connection with him?”

She leaned over to tap ash off her cigarette. “He’s a businessman, and for a small town a fairly wealthy one. He owns Chapman Enterprises, which consists of a newspaper, a radio station, cotton gin, and a warehouse, among other things—”

“And you worked for him?”

Her eyes met mine without any expression at all. “I worked for him. I was his private secretary, mistress, executive officer, fiancée—you name it. I went to work for him eight years ago, and for the past six I’ve been a sort of combination of executive vice-president and full-time wife. Except that I wasn’t married to him.”

“Why not?”

“For the tired old reason that he already had a wife.”

“You don’t look like the type that’d dangle that long.”

“Shall we drop that part of it for the moment?”

“Sorry,” I said. “But I still don’t see how you think you’re going to get away with it. What’s Chapman going to be doing all the time you’re looting his trading account?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Why?”

“He’ll be dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m going to kill him.”

* * *

I caught a no-show out of the Miami airport at four-fifteen, and was at Idlewild a little after eight. I took the limousine over to town. It was one of those blustery November nights, not really wet but with scattered shot-charges of rain hurled on a cold north wind. I didn’t have an overcoat. People looked at me as if I were crazy as I came out of the terminal and caught a cab. The small hotel on West 44th Street where I’d stayed once before was all right, but the room faced an airwell and was small and cheerless.

I sat down on the bed and counted my money. I had three hundred and sixty left. Three hundred, I thought, after I buy a coat. No, I had to have a hat, too. This was New York. I couldn’t go job-hunting along Madison Avenue looking like a refugee from Muscle Beach. It was going to be tough enough as it was; the last reference I could give was two years old. I went up the street to a bar and had a drink, but it only made me feel worse. After a while I went back to the room and tried to read, but it was futile. I kept thinking about seventy-five thousand dollars and blue water and sunlight and a sleek dark head. I threw the magazine on to the floor and lay on the side of the bed staring down at it.

What did I care what happened to some man who was nothing to me but a name? If I were so concerned over his safety, why didn’t I call him and tell him she was going to kill him? I knew she was, didn’t I?

That was it. She still was; my walking out on her hadn’t changed anything. The money he had in that account was only a collateral issue as far as she was concerned. I remembered the way she’d lain there in the darkness, rigid and wide-awake and staring, with her hands clenched, and wondered what he’d done to her. Well, I’d never know; but the chances were very good he’d never do it to anybody else.

So what had I accomplished by running, apart from doing myself out of seventy-five thousand dollars? Well, hell, I’d kept myself from being implicated, hadn’t I? I wasn’t going to kill anybody, and wind up in the death-house.

But she hadn’t asked me to, had she? All she’d wanted me to do was get that money for her—from a man who would already be dead. Still, I’d be an accessory.

What had she meant?

How would I know? I thought. I’d run off before she could tell me.

The next morning I bought an overcoat and hat and started out. I answered some ads first, without any luck, and then started hitting the agencies blind. My feet got tired. I filled in forms. I left my name and telephone number. The weather was still blustery and cold, with a lowering gray sky like dirty metal. If this were the movies I thought, I’d pass a travel-agency window and there’d be a big sun-drenched picture of a brunette in a bathing suit sitting on the beach in front of a white hotel with the caption: COME TO MIAMI. She was a blonde, as it turned out, and the invitation was: COME TO KINGSTON. A man was landing a marlin off the end of a pier. With a flyrod, as nearly as I could tell. You could see Jamaica was a fisherman’s paradise. I came back to the bar across the street from the hotel around two and had a Scotch while I wondered what she was doing. And how a girl managed to look elegant in a bathing suit. Not lifted-pinkie elegant, but 18th-century elegant. I went up to my room and lay down on the bed. It was raining now; I could see it falling into the airwell. I picked up the phone and asked for Long Distance.

”Miami Beach,” I said. “The Golden Horn Motel. Personal call to Mrs. Marian Forsyth.” At least I could talk to her.

“Hold the line, please.”

I waited. I could hear the operator.

“Golden Horn,” a girl’s voice said. “Who? Mrs. Forsyth? Just a moment, please . . . I’m sorry; she’s left.”

I dropped the phone back on the cradle. Well, it wasn’t everybody who was smart enough to turn down a seventy-five-thousand-dollar proposition before he’d even heard it. And I’d never see her again. I lit a cigarette and watched the rain, and thought of some of the places we could have gone together—Acapulco, and Bimini, and Nassau. . . .

Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was Miami Beach. Her voice was exactly as cool, urbane, and pleasant as ever. “I finally decided you were never going to call, so—“

I suppose I could ask, I thought. But why bother? There was something inevitable about her; if I’d been holed up in a Lamasery in Tibet it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

“You win,” I said. “I’ll be there some time tonight.”

“That’s wonderful, Jerry.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You’re sweet. Then you did try to call me?”

“You know damn well I did. Where?”

“Two hundred and six Dover Way,” she replied. “It’s a wonderful place to work.”

I caught a flight out of Idlewild at five forty-five. The rain had stopped, but it was colder. As I was going up the loading ramp of the DC-7, a colored boy from the catering department was coming down. I dropped the overcoat on his arm. “Have a good Christmas,” I said.

When we were airborne and the NO SMOKING sign went off, I lit a cigarette. How she’d learned where I was in New York was routine, actually. She’d known all the time. All her detectives had to do was notify their New York office what flight I’d taken out of Miami, and have me picked up at Idlewild again and tailed to the hotel. The rest of it, however, was considerably more subtle—waiting me out till I called first and learned she’d left the motel without a forwarding address. And then giving me a long half-hour to think about what I’d thrown away for ever, like an old man remembering some girl who’d done everything but draw him a diagram when he was fifteen. That was a nice touch.

We were down at Miami shortly after nine. I waited impatiently out front for my bag and took a cab. It seemed to take for ever, through the downtown traffic and across the MacArthur Causeway. Dover Way was on the Biscayne side, not far from the bay, a quiet side street only three or four blocks long. 206 was half of a side-by-side duplex set back off the street with a hedge in front and shadowy, bougainvillea-covered walls on both sides. I paid off the cab and went up the walk. Lights were on beside the door, but the adjoining apartment appeared to be dark. I pressed the button.

She was wearing a dark skirt and severe white blouse. I kicked the door shut, dropped the bag, and took her in my arms. She submitted to being kissed in that same cool way—quite gracious about it but not particularly eager that it become a trend. She smiled. “How do you like our place?”

It was small, well-furnished, air-conditioned, and very quiet. The living room, which seemed to be more than half of it, was carpeted in gray, and the floor-length curtains at the window in front and the larger one on the left were dark green. The sofa and three chairs were Danish modern, and there was a long coffee table that appeared to be teak and was protected with plate glass. There were three hassocks covered with corduroy in explosive colors. Straight opposite, an open doorway led into the bedroom. Just to the right of it another opened into a small dining area and kitchen. To the left of the bedroom doorway were some built-in bookshelves with sliding glass doors. A radio-phonograph console in limned oak stood in the corner.

The tape recorder she’d bought was set up on one end of the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran across the carpet to a wall outlet. There were several boxes of tape beside it, and some stenographer’s notebooks and pencils.

“I was working,” she explained. She sat down on one of the hassocks beside the coffee table and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for her, and one for myself, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

I looked round the apartment. “You were pretty sure I’d come back, weren’t you?”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve been studying you for a week.”

“And seventy-five thousand would do it? All it took was a little time?”

She nodded. “Actually, I don’t think you care a great deal for money as such, but you have some very expensive tastes. And you’re quite cynical.”

She was probably right, I thought. I looked at the classic line of the head and the brilliant coloring and the severe formality of the blouse that came up to end in a plain band collar round the softness of her throat and wondered if she’d considered the possibility I might have come back because of her. I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

“Because maybe I did, in part.”

“That sounds rather unlikely. At any rate, I wouldn’t have depended on it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re quite an attractive young man. I doubt you have any great problem with girls; and the country’s full of them.”

“You’re overdoing the modesty. And why did you call me a young man?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Twenty-eight?”

“And what’s thirty-four?”

“So you checked my driver’s license?”

“Of course. Not for your age, naturally, but to find out who you were. Incidentally, you don’t look thirty.”

“You’re quite flattering,” she said. “And now if we’re through assessing my drawing power, why don’t we get down to business?”

This was beginning to bug me a little. No woman had any right to be as attractive as she was and at the same time as contemptuous of the fact and of its effect on somebody else. I took her hand and pulled her down on the floor beside me and held her in my arms and kissed her. Instead of objecting, however, she put her arms around my heck. In a moment her eyes opened, very large and dreamy, just under mine. I kissed her again, feeling a tremendous excitement in just touching her.

After a while I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom and turned off the light and undressed her very slowly, and she was as beautifully adept and as pleasant and as far away and unreachable as ever. Clearly, the simplest way to rid the agenda of distracting minor issues like sex was to get them over with.

Four

She lay beside me in the darkness. I could see the glowing tip of her cigarette.

“All right,” I said. “Now tell me the whole thing.”

“Suppose we begin right where we left off? I’m going to destroy him.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate him.”

“And why do you?”

I thought I heard her sigh. “Why don’t you try a wild guess as to why a woman might hate a man after she’s wrecked her own marriage for him and thrown away her reputation and helped him make a fortune, and lived for him twenty-four hours a day for six of the last few years she’d ever have to give anybody—?”

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m just a bystander. So he left you?”

“Yes.” Then she laughed. It was like glass breaking. “Of course, while I was running his business for him, I should have suggested we set up a pension plan for over-age employees. I’d have nothing to worry about. I could buy a little cottage, get a cat for companionship, and live the full, rich life every woman looks forward to—”

“Knock it off,” I protested. “Who is she? And how do you know it’s permanent?”

“Oh, she’s quite pretty. Honey-colored and virginal looking, with a wide-eyed and appealing sort of defenselessness about her. Like anthrax, or a striking cobra—”

“Come off it,” I said. “How the hell could you lose out to a cornball routine like that? She’d never lay a glove on you.”

”It’s a little trick you do with numbers. She’s twenty-three.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Oh, you are a young man, aren’t you? I’d forgotten, men do go through a phase between their first and second passes at the jail-bait when they’re actually interested in women— But never mind. They’re going to be married in January.”

“You’re getting ahead of me,” I said. “He couldn’t marry you because he already had a wife. What happened to her?”

“What happened to her, besides the fact they haven’t lived together for the past eight years, is that she died about five months ago.

“Well, look—I doubt very seriously anybody could hand you a line six years long, so if he was really serious why didn’t he get a divorce?”

“He and his wife were both Catholics.”

“I see. And now that he can remarry—”

“Yes,” she said. “You see.”

“And I see something more. You’ll never get away with it.”

“Yes—”

“Look. He took everything you could give him for six years, and then when he finally could get married he jilted you for somebody else. If he’s killed, it’ll take the police about twenty minutes to figure it out.”

“You underestimate me,” she broke in. “I’m going to take a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars away from him, and kill him. And nobody will ever suspect I did it, for the simple reason they won’t even know it was done at all. Does that satisfy you?”

“No,” I said. “It can’t be done.”

She sighed. “You’re forgetting something I told you. That I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else on earth. I’m going to destroy him from the inside.”

“Hold it a minute,” I said. “If you knew so much about him, why didn’t you see this fluff-ball moving in on you?”

“See it? Don’t be ridiculous. I saw every stage of it before it even happened, but what do you suggest I should have done about it? Compete with a twenty-three-year-old professional virgin, after he was already tired of me? I saw it, all right; I had a front-row seat. He hired her as a stenographer, and I had the honor and privilege of training her. Sometimes I wake up at night—”

“If it’s that kind of thing,” I said, “why the money angle?”

“Money is important to me. I like success. I poured everything I had into making him one, thinking I was doing it for both of us. Do you think I’m going to move aside now and give it up? Let him hand it all to some simpering and feather-brained little bitch who can’t even balance a check book?”

“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.

“All right. First, about the apartment. We had to have a quiet place where we could work without being disturbed and with no chance of being overheard. The motel simply wouldn’t do. I was registered there under my right name, of course, and it’s imperative that no one ever finds out that I even know you—”

I interrupted her. “What about those detectives you’ve had following me around?”

“That’s a good point. I used another name, and paid them in cash. The fact they know your name is of no significance at all unless you can be traced to me in some way. I’m the one who knows Harris Chapman.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I rented the apartment on a six months’ lease, under your name. I’m Mrs. J. L. Forbes, and there’s nothing to connect me with the Mrs. Forsyth who stayed briefly at the Golden Horn. There’s no reason for you not to use your right name; you have nothing to hide, and you can go right on living here afterwards if you like. No one will notice if you’re gone from time to time, as you will be. It’s handled by a rental agency. The people who have the other apartment won’t be here until some time in December, so we have it all to ourselves and don’t have to worry about being heard through the walls.

“We don’t have much time. Today is the fifth, and he’ll be here the night of the thirteenth. In addition, I have to go to Nassau and New York—”

“Why?”

“Simply to prove I’ve been there. When I resigned and left on this trip, Miami Beach, Nassau, and New York were the three places I was going. If I changed my plans and spent all my time here it might look suspicious afterwards, especially since this is the place Harris Chapman is going to disappear. So I’ll go to both places long enough to send the usual asinine postcards and bring back some souvenir gifts. That means I’ll be gone from here about four days of the eight we have in which to coach you. However, we’ll use the tape recorder and you’ll have the tapes to study while I’m gone.”

“You’re sure he’s coming here?”

Yes. I made all the reservations for him. He goes on one big-game fishing trip every year, for his vacation. For the past two years he’s gone to Acapulco, but this time he’s coming to Florida again.”

“And somewhere along the line I’m going to take his place?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

”Just under two weeks. I think it can be done in twelve days.”

“Describe him,” I said.

“Apart from the fact you’re both about six feet, you don’t resemble each other at all, if that’s what you mean.”

“What else would I mean? You don’t think he’s going to be invisible for those twelve days, do you? He may be a voice on the telephone to the people at home, but down here— But never mind. Go ahead and describe him.”

“He’s thirty-nine. Six feet. A hundred and ninety-five pounds. Gray eyes. Somewhat fair complexion, always with a tan. Brown hair, beginning to gray at the temples except that he touches it up.”

“That’ll do,” I said. “I’m twenty-eight. The height is the same within probably an inch, but I’m fifteen pounds lighter. Blue eyes. Darker complexion. And hair that’s just a shade from being black. Q.E.D.”

“It’s nowhere near that simple,” she cut in impatiently. “In the first place, any police officer could write a book on the general unreliability of descriptions. And secondly, if you’ve had acting experience, you should know what I m driving at. You’re not merely trying to look like Harris Chapman—you’re assuming the whole character of Harris Chapman. And further, this same character projected quite logically into a strange and finally shattering experience—which is going to be what the witnesses will remember, and not the color of his hair. Incidentally, he wears a hat anyway. You’re simply going to make them remember the wrong things.”

“Such as?”

“Let me give you a brief sketch for a start. He’s quite vain about his appearance, uses a sun lamp in winter to keep his tan intact, and wears a thin, pencil-line mustache because he thinks his upper hp is too long. He has a tendency toward hypochondria and carries round a miniature drugstore with him, and worries constantly and probably needlessly about two things—cancer and mental illness, the latter because he has an older brother who cracked up in his late teens. When that smoking and lung cancer thing first started several years ago, he not only switched over to filter cigarettes, but smoked them in a filter holder.

“He wears glasses—horn-rims—and is somewhat hard of hearing in his left ear, the result of a diving accident when he was sixteen, though he refuses to admit it and claims his hearing is perfect in both ears. I’m perhaps making him sound doddering and fatuous, which he isn’t at all; he’s a hellishly attractive man with a lot of drive, but I’m stressing these quirks and idiosyncrasies for a reason—”

“Sure,” I said impatiently. “They’re character tags, and props. But, look—so I do wear horn-rimmed glasses, grow a mustache, use a long cigarette holder, and go round tossing pills into my face, what does it buy? I still won’t look like him, and I wouldn’t fool anybody who’s seen him since he was fifteen.”

“You won’t have to, obviously. None of the people you’ll be in contact will ever have seen him at all. And they never will.”

“But you’re forgetting something. As soon as he disappears, they’re sure as hell going to see photographs of him.”

“No,” she said. “That’ll be taken care of.”

“How?” I asked.

To be of any value in tracing him they’d have to be good likenesses and taken within the past ten years. There aren’t too many. I have most of them, and I know where the others are. He had one made for that saccharine little bitch about two months ago, but we can forget it. It’s one of those gooey and dramatic things with a ton of glamor and no resemblance.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell me the rest of it.”

She told me. She talked for twenty minutes, and when she was through I was glad she didn’t hate me. Chapman didn’t have a chance. It was brilliant, and it was deadly, and I couldn’t see a flaw in it anywhere.

* * *

I awoke early the next morning, before seven o’clock, but she was already up. She stood in the doorway in blue lounging pajamas, sipping a glass of orange juice.

“The coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she said.

I lit a cigarette and propped myself on an elbow to look at her. “If I were a sculptor, I’d capture that head or go crazy and kill myself.”

She glanced coolly at her watch. “Never mind capturing my head; you’re supposed to assimilate what’s in it, and we start in ten minutes. When you shave, don’t forget the mustache.”

She sounded crisp and efficient, and I found out before the day was over I didn’t know the half of it. She had a genius for organizing material, and she was a slave-driver. By the time I’d showered and put on light slacks and a T-shirt, she had my coffee and orange juice ready on the coffee table in the living room and was seated with hers on one of the hassocks at the other end of it. Between us was the tape recorder. The microphone was mounted on a little stand, facing her, and beside it were some boxes of tape and two stenographer’s notebooks.

“I’ll be working from shorthand notes,” she said, “so there’ll be no lost motion, and when we come to a stop we’ll stop the tape. But before we start, we’d better break the job down and analyze it.”

”Right,” I said. “How many people do I have to talk to, and how often?”

“Two,” she said. “Chris Lundgren at the broker’s office in New Orleans, nearly every day. And to her, every day. Her name, incidentally, is Coral Blaine.”

I drank some of the coffee, and thought about it. “It’s rough. Look at it—I’ve got to know everything about Chapman that these people know, and everything about these people that Chapman knows, plus a thousand business details and dozens of other people. It’s damn near impossible.”

She interrupted. “Of course it’s impossible; no mind could absorb all that in eight days. But you don’t have to.”

“No?”

“Of course not.” She waved a slim hand. “You don’t have to pass an examination in all this stuff; all you have to do is carry on two or three short telephone conversations each day without making a really dangerous mistake. analyze it; what does it take, actually? A quick mind—which you have—some ability in bluffing and improvising, a grasp of most of the salient and obvious facts and a few of the ones that only Harris Chapman could possibly know, and there you are—the illusion is complete. And don’t forget, you’re always in control of the conversation; you’re the boss. When you see you’re about to get in over your head, change the subject. And in the end, there’s nothing connecting you but a piece of wire. Break it. And call back later with the right information. You’ll have a prompter.”

“You mean the tapes?”

She nodded. “They’ll be numbered, and you’ll know what’s covered in each one.”

“Good,” I said.

She smiled. “And don’t forget, it’s only the first week you have to be careful. After that, it doesn’t matter.”

I looked at her. I’d forgotten that, and it was one of the really brilliant angles of the whole thing. This girl was clever. And all she wanted out of life was to kill a man. It seemed a senseless waste. The thought startled me, and I shrugged it off. It was her life, wasn’t it?

“All right,” I said. “Roll One.”

* * *

“Harris Chapman was born in Thomaston April fourteen, nineteen-eighteen. Father’s name: John W. Chapman. Owned the Ford agency, and was one of the largest stockholders in the Thomaston State Bank. His mother’s maiden name was Mary Burke, and she was the only child of a Thomaston attorney. John W. sold out and retired in nineteen-forty, and moved to California. Both still living, in La Jolla.

“Only two children. Keith is two years older than Harris. The summer he was nineteen, after his freshman year at Tulane, he hit a twelve-year-old girl with his car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but shortly afterwards he began to go to pieces. He quit sleeping, or if he did sleep nobody could figure out when, and lost weight and became withdrawn. It was the onset of schizophrenia, of course, and probably the accident had little or nothing to do with it. At any rate, his condition became hopeless, and he’s spent more than half the past twenty-two years in one mental institution or another.

“Harris has always been haunted by this, as I told you, particularly because there had been a prior case of mental illness in the family, a great uncle or something. Fear of an hereditary taint, you see. Foolish, of course, but I told you he has a tendency toward hypochondria.

“He finished high school in nineteen-thirty-six. His mother wanted him to go to a Catholic school, so he went to Notre Dame. He graduated in nineteen-forty-one, and Pearl Harbor caught him in his first year at Tulane Law School.”

She stopped the tape, and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for her. “Any questions?” she asked.

“One,” I said. “Bring me up to date on the brother. Where is he now?”

“La Jolla, with his parents.” She pressed the “Record” switch and the tape began to roll again. “Harris finished out the term at Tulane and went in the Navy, and was commissioned an ensign that summer. He just barely got past the physical, with that bad ear.”

He’d had a tour of sea duty on an aircraft carrier. She went on talking. She’d pushed the hassock aside now and was sitting cross-legged on the rug with the stenographic notebook between her knees. I leaned back against a chair and watched her, studying the proud and slender face that could have been downright arrogant except for the saving loveliness of the eyes. It occurred to me she was the most striking-looking, and most fascinating, woman I’d ever seen.

She reached over and stopped the tape. “Are you listening?” she asked crisply.

“Sure,” I said, and repeated the last thing she’d said. Chapman had been transferred to shore duty in Seattle.”

“Oh,” she said. “The way you were looking at me—”

“Simply because I think you’re beautiful.”

She sighed. Going into the bedroom, she returned with a pillow. She dropped it beside the coffee table. “Lie down, facing the other way, and close your eyes. Concentrate.”

I lay down. She went on, pausing now and then to arrange her notes so there wouldn’t be any blank areas on the tape. Chapman was a full lieutenant at the end of the war. He went back to Tulane Law School at the beginning of the spring term in 1946, and before the end of it he was married to a New Orleans girl he met at a Mardi Gras ball. Her name was Grace Trahan. She was a slight, dark girl with a delicate constitution, very pretty in an ethereal sort of way, and apparently frigid to the point of phobia.

“He never said much about it,” she went on, “but I gather it was pretty horrible on their wedding night, and never did get any better. Psychic trauma of some kind, I suppose; probably something that happened in her childhood.”

They tried to make a go of it, but there were other factors besides her aversion to the bed. She thought they should have more financial help from his parents instead of struggling along on the GI Bill. And she didn’t want to leave New Orleans. Less than a year after he’d finished law school and moved back to Thomaston to open his office, they separated. She went home to mother. Her health was growing worse. She was anemic, among other things.

Marian stopped the tape again. I looked at my watch and saw with surprise it was after ten. “How are you getting it?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said. I sat up and lit cigarettes, and leaned back against the chair. “But when do you actually appear on the scene?”

“Very shortly,” she replied. “But I want to finish out this roll exclusively with Harris. It’ll be easier to refer to later.”

She made some more notes, started the tape, and went on, describing the town, the small country club, and some of his friends. We began to near the end of the roll.

“He has a fast, aggressive way of walking. He won’t admit it, but he can’t carry liquor very well. Becomes argumentative if he has too much, which is usually anything beyond the third Martini. Music means nothing to him, and he’s a poor dancer. For the past two years on these annual fishing trips he’s picked up girls, probably very young ones. He doesn’t know that I’m aware of this, but I doubt he’d have bothered to he about it. After all, we weren’t married.

“Maybe it’s because of the legal training and courtroom experience, but he’s totally unafraid of scenes and will argue with anybody, anywhere. Waiters impress him not at all, and I’ve been through some bad moments when he’s sent the same dish back three times, or refused to tip a waiter who gave poor service. I don’t mean he’s loudmouthed or uncouth, but he is demanding and perhaps rather insensitive. He always adds up a bill before he pays it. He buys a new Cadillac every year. He’s a very poor driver, and drives far too fast. He’s very self-assured with women, the same as you are. You’ll have no trouble playing him. When they describe you afterwards, if you learn all this, they’re going to be describing Harris Chapman to the last gesture.”

She stopped the machine, and stood up. “All right. Re-roll that tape and start playing it back. I’ll run out and get us some sandwiches.”

“Incidentally, what about the housekeeping arrangements? Do we go out for dinner?”

“Yes,” she replied. “It’ll be all right if we go round to different places so we won’t be remembered. We can fix our own coffee and orange juice for breakfast, and have sandwiches for lunch.”

“You turned the car back?”

“Yes. After all, I’m supposed to be in Nassau. You’ll rent one, of course, before he gets here, but in the meantime we can use cabs. All right, Jerry; re-roll that tape and get busy.”

She went into the bedroom. I started the tape, turned up the volume, and walked up and down as I listened to it. The bedroom door was open. I stepped inside. The blue pajamas were tossed casually on the bed and she was beyond it with her back turned, wearing only bra and pants as she stood before the clothes closet. I looked at the long and exquisitely slender legs, ever so faintly tanned below the line of her swim suit and pure ivory above as they flowed into the triangular wisp of undergarment about her hips.

She turned then. I must have taken a step towards her, for she said crisply, “No, you don’t! Outside!” She meant it. She took a slip from a drawer, and slid it over her head.

“I’m sorry, Teacher. But you’re a very exciting girl.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” She tugged the slip down. “I’m irresistible to twenty-eight-year-old wolves. I’m female, breathing, and within reach.”

“Thanks a million,” I said. “From both of us.”

“You’re welcome. Now get out there and get busy. And start the tape over; you’ve missed part of it.”

“So you will give yourself that much?”

She waved a slender hand. “Out, Cyrano.”

Five

I shrugged, and went back to my study of Harris Chapman. She came out after a while and left to get the sandwiches. I looked after her. She could disturb a room by walking through it, and leave it empty by walking out of it. I forced my attention back to the tape. What was the matter with me, anyway?

When she returned, we didn’t even stop while we ate. She asked questions about the things we’d covered so far, and tried to catch me in errors. “Who is Robert Wingard?”

“Robin Wingard,” I said. “He’s manager of the radio station.”

“Good. And Bill McEwen? What does he do?”

“Bill McEwen is a girl.”

She shot me an approving glance. “Very good.”

“Her real name is Billy Jean, she’s twenty-seven years old, unmarried, and she’s half the editorial staff of the paper, and sells advertising.”

“Correct,” she said. “But don’t get too cocky. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface.” She finished half her sandwich, threw the rest of it in the kitchen garbage can, and started a fresh roll of tape on the recorder.

“I was born in Cleveland,” she began. “And went to school at Stanford. My mother died when I was in my early teens, and my father never remarried. He was a physician. A gynecologist, and a good one. In about thirty-five years of practice he must have made considerably over a million dollars, and when he died a few years ago he left an estate of less than twenty thousand. Bad investments. Some day, maybe, somebody will write a book about the investment habits of doctors— But never mind. It was his money. The point I’m trying to make is that it was probably his horrible example that first interested me in business and investment.

When we entered the war she enrolled in a business college for a quick course in shorthand and typing, and went to work in a defense plant. And she liked it, from the first. She was alert, interested, and highly competitive, and in less than a year she was the private secretary to one of the top brass of the firm. In the spring of 1944 she met and married Kenneth Forsyth. He was a flier sent home for reassignment as an instructor at an air base near San Antonio, Texas.

They were happy enough, but she couldn’t stand the boredom of having nothing to do but police a one-room apartment, so she went back to work, this time for the local office of one of the big nationwide brokerage outfits. She immediately fell in love with the stock market as if she’d invented it. Here was something you could get your teeth into; this was the whole world of business and industry, distilled. She studied it with the passionate intensity of another Baruch, trying to learn everything there was to learn about it. Forsyth remained in the service after the end of the war, but was transferred to another field near Dallas. Keeping house still bored her, so she went to work for the Dallas office of the same brokerage house.

Then in 1949 Forsyth was transferred to the air field at Thomaston, Louisiana, and she was out of a job. She found it unbearably dull. She didn’t like small towns and their clique-ridden social life, and for a woman with ambition and a restless mind it was stifling. Then she met Chapman. That changed everything.

He’d just opened his law office, and while he wasn’t very busy he did need somebody once in a while to type briefs and answer the phone. She offered to do it, partly out of boredom and partly because he interested her. And before long he interested her even more. Here was a man with drive, business ability, and daring, and he was wasting himself on a piddling law practice. They were attracted to each other from the beginning.

His first venture, in the process of becoming a millionaire in eight years, was a laundromat, and it was she who prodded him into it.

“He defended the owner of the laundromat in a minor damage suit,” she went on. “And got him off with a minimum judgment, but the man was in financial trouble and couldn’t even pay the legal fee in full. I had an idea and went out and surveyed his place. His trouble was location; he was in the wrong end of town, where most of the families had washing machines of their own, and he had a bad parking problem. To the south of town there was a large colored section swarming with children. I located a building that could be leased, and told Harris about it. Because of his father’s connection with the bank, he had no trouble borrowing the money. He bought the man’s machines at a terrific bargain, and moved them. We got a deacon of one of the colored churches to run it, and I kept the books. Eight months later he sold it for a net profit of six thousand dollars.”

They were on their way. Next came a couple of real-estate speculations that paid off to the tune of better than fourteen thousand. By late 1950 she was working for him full time, and the law practice was only a small part of his operations. He was far over-extended and in debt to his ears, but he was growing, right along with the big business boom of the early 1950’s. Chapman’s wife had left him now, and Marian Forsyth and her husband had had several painful and increasingly bitter arguments about her working for him. People were beginning to talk. She refused to quit. The showdown came in less than six months. Forsyth was transferred again.

The choice was hers, and she made it. She told Forsyth she wanted a divorce, and stayed in Thomaston. She was in love with Chapman.

She had no illusions as to what she was letting herself in for. He couldn’t marry her, as long as his wife was alive, and in a small town no matter how discreet they were with the affair everybody was going to know. I thought of the snubs, and frozen stares. They probably didn’t bother her a great deal, I thought—not during the six busy years while she had Chapman and the fascination of the job. But when he jilted her and left her standing alone and naked in the middle of town— That must have been a long, long mile to the city limits.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “A point’s just occurred to me. You’ve got to have a legitimate excuse for going back, or it won’t look right.”

She stopped the tape. “Of course. But I still own my house there. It will take two weeks at least to sell it and put my furnishings in storage in New Orleans. And don’t forget, I won’t arrive there until he’s left for his vacation, which will give it exactly the right touch.”

She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.

We went on. We finished that roll of tape with a detailed account of how Chapman acquired the rest of his holdings in the next five years and how she’d led him a little at a time into growth stocks in the big bull market from 1950 to 1955, into IBM and Dow Chemical, and Phillips Petroleum, and United Aircraft, and DuPont.

”Always for capital gains,” she went on. “Income wasn’t any good to him any more, not in the tax bracket he was in, or approaching. All those years I’d been studying stocks and the stock market paid off for him. He rode it up all the way. And last summer, when the market showed signs of running out of steam, we began switching to defense holdings—utilities, high-grade preferreds, and bonds. And cash. It’s safe—except from me.”

It was three-thirty when we came to the end of the roll. “Play it back,” she said, already making notes for the next session. I ran it. She fired questions at me until I was dizzy. She put on one of the rolls of recorded conversation between him and Chris Lundgren, and played it through. I listened, studying his speech, while she went out in the kitchen and mixed us two Martinis.

She ht a cigarette, took a sip of her drink, and stopped the machine. “Tell me what you heard.”

“He’s abrupt on the phone,” I said, “at least in business matters. No asking how the other party is, or about families. He says G’bye just once and hangs up. Your name comes out almost Mer’n. He hits the first syllable of DuPont, and the u is iu. Dew-Pont. He slurs hundred a little more than most people. Hunrd. He still uses Roger once in a while, left over from his service days.”

She nodded approvingly. “Good ear. Keep it up.”

We knocked off at seven, changed, and took a cab over to Miami to have dinner at the Top O’ the Columbus. She was a knockout in a dark dress, so very tall and beautifully groomed and poised. It made me feel good to see men—and women—turn to look at her. We sat by one of the big windows looking out over Biscayne Bay and its perimeter of blazing lights.

You make all these other women look like peasants,” I said.

She. smiled. “Honing the old technique, Jerry? Why waste it on me?”

“No. I mean it.”

“Of course, dear. Conditioned reflexes are like that.” Then she went on. “Now here’s a point we have to consider. Lundgren’s voice, of course, you’ll recognize, but you’ve never heard hers.”

I sighed. “That’s easy. Until she identifies herself and I’m sure, I can say we have a bad connection and I can’t hear very well.”

On the way back we ran a test. I got out of the cab at a drugstore not too far away, gave her time to reach the apartment, and called her from the phone booth. She read Lundgren.

“Chris? Chapman,” I said. I asked how the market had closed, discussed some stock or another, and gave an order or two, and then stepped out of character to ask, “What do you think?”

“Good,” she said. “Very good.”

I walked back to the apartment in the warm and ocean-scented darkness, thinking of seventy-five thousand dollars. When I let myself in she was just coming out of the bedroom. She’d taken off the dress and slip and was pulling the blue robe about herself.

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe just a shade less abrupt. But it’s a fine point—”

“Stop worrying,” I said. “I can do it.” I took hold of her arms. Then I was holding her tightly in mine and kissing her as if women were going to be transferred to some other planet in the morning.

When she could get her mouth free at last, she murmured, “But I thought we’d work for another hour or two.” Then she relented. “All right, Jerry—”

Enlightened management, I thought, never forgets the importance of employee recreation. If the seal balks, toss him another herring. I started to say something angry and sarcastic, but choked it off. I wanted her so badly I’d take her on any terms at all.

Afterwards, of course, we did go back to work.

* * *

The next day was a repetition of the first. She was relentless. Chapman and Chapman Enterprises and Thomaston ran into my brain until they overflowed. We filled two tapes. I played them back. She questioned me. I played them again. And all the while I was conscious that she herself was taking more and more of my attention. I was thinking about her when I should have been concentrating. I didn’t like it, but there it was.

We went out again for dinner, and came back and worked until eleven. I made love to her. She was as gracious about it, and as accomplished, and as completely unreachable as ever. I lay in the darkness thinking about her. It wasn’t that she was cold, or that she merely endured it. It was worse. It was so unimportant she had trouble even noticing it.

Chapman, I thought, might not be the dirtiest bastard who ever lived, but he was the stupidest. I tried to imagine what she was like before she became numb to everything except remembered humiliation and hatred. The next morning, just at dawn, I awoke to find her struggling in my arms, trying to break free.

“Jerry,” she snapped, “for heaven’s sake, what are you trying to do? Break me in two?”

Oh,” I said stupidly, looking round the room. “I must have been having a bad dream.”

It started to come back to me then. I could see it all with a horrible clarity. I’d been running after her across the Golden Gate bridge, and I’d caught her just before she could leap. I was trying to hold her back.

That day we filled the last roll of tape. She told me everything she knew about Coral Blaine, and she knew a lot—including the fact her name wasn’t Coral at all, but Edna Mae. Apparently she was a believer in the old maxim of military science that you never stop studying the enemy. She described her, psycho-analyzed her, and gave me a complete rundown on the affair from the time Chapman first gave her a job until the engagement was announced.

“I was scared the first time I saw her,” she said. “For years I’d done all the hiring and firing of office personnel. He never interfered, hired anybody himself, or cared. I’ll admit to being quite unfair a couple of times when I fired girls for no other reason than that they had their eyes on him— But never mind. At any rate, when I saw this Blaine number, I had a premonition. Flawless natural blonde, about five-foot-three, and of course only twenty-three years old, but it was that dewy and virginal look that frightened me. He’s forty—or will be next month.

“He saw the dew, all right; and I could see the cutlass between her teeth as she came over the rail. She was the daughter of an old friend of his, he said; she’d just graduated from some co-educational football factory in Texas and he’d promised her a job. I felt my way very slowly, and I hit resistance right away. I wasn’t going to be able to fire this one. Nothing overt on either side, of course, but the resistance was there, and it was firm. So I moved her up to a better job I knew she couldn’t handle. And all I accomplished was that I had to do her work myself. She came to work, incidentally, about three weeks after Mrs. Chapman died.”

It must have been bloody, I thought. And lonely as hell. A wife in the same position had status and the solid weight of community opinion going for her, but she had nothing. She knew she’d lost, of course, long before the blow actually fell, and in the end Chapman didn’t even have the decency to tell her himself. I gathered it wasn’t that he was ashamed to, or reluctant to face her; he just didn’t bother. Some business came up that was more important.

You’re not coloring this a little?” I asked.

She sighed. “I assure you I couldn’t be that stupid. I’m telling you exactly what happened, because I have to. God knows I don’t enjoy it; I’m no masochist. But obviously you have to know the truth, and not some dramatized version. I was informed of the engagement by Coral Blaine herself, in the office, on Monday morning, and if you have any doubts she knew exactly how to do it for the most exquisite effect, forget them. That was quite a day.”

Seven thousand years, I thought, from nine to five. With all those eyes watching, and nothing to crawl under and hide. An outstanding day, any way you looked at it. Then a sudden thought occurred to me, something I’d missed completely until now. It was what she had in mind for Coral Blaine.

“Do you think she’ll know?” I asked.

She nodded coolly. “Yes. I should think she’d be pretty sure I did it—somehow.”

As a study in the subtler forms of revenge, I thought, that would be hard to match. Coral Blaine was having a husband and a million dollars snatched out of her reachy little hands, and she was going to know it was Marian who’d done it to her. And that she not only would never be able to prove it, but that she’d actually helped prove it couldn’t have been Marian.

”If she’s only twenty-three,” I said, “she has a long and interesting life ahead of her, trying to figure that one out.”

“Yes, doesn’t she?”

We went back to work. While she was gone to get the sandwiches at noon I suddenly remembered what day it was. This was the eighth. I looked up florists in the phone book, called one, and ordered two dozen roses. It was around four o’clock and we were still busy with Coral Blaine when the doorbell rang. I beat her to it, paid the delivery boy, and brought them in.

She glanced up as I put the long carton on the coffee table before her. “Flowers? Why?”

“Happy birthday,” I said.

She shook her head chidingly. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Then she opened the box, and exclaimed, “They’re beautiful, Jerry. But how did you know it was my birthday?”

“Your driver’s license,” I replied.

“Snoopy.” She filled a vase with water and put them on the phonograph console at the other end of the room. She admired them for a moment, and then came over and put her arms about my neck.

She smiled. “Dear Jerry, the indefatigable chaser of old streetcars he’s already caught.”

It was no use, I thought. She was impervious; nothing could get through to her, no gesture of any kind. She’d had it. Then I wondered if I even knew myself what I was trying to tell her. It seemed to be all mixed up.

We went back to work.

Six

She did some shopping the next morning, and left for Nassau around eleven. The minute she closed the door behind her, the apartment became almost achingly empty.

I assembled everything on the coffee table, and looked at it. Except for his identification, his clothes, and his car, here was Harris Chapman—seven rolls of tape, boxed, numbered, and indexed; horn-rim glasses; cigarette holder; the insipid filter cigarettes he smoked; the map of Thomaston she’d drawn with street names, locations of his businesses and his office, and an appended list of some twenty telephone numbers; three documents containing specimens of his signature, which had come from the old briefcase; and the bottle of gunk for lightening the dark shade of my hair and the sprouting mustache.

This latter wasn’t really dye, she said, and if I didn’t use too much of it there wouldn’t be any noticeable artificial effect, but rather like that of brown hair bleached down a few shades by the sun. I went into the bathroom, combed in a light application of it, and started practicing the signature. When my wrist was tired, I loaded the recorder with the first roll of tape, and turned it on. Her voice issued from the loudspeaker, and when I closed my eyes she seemed to be there in the room. I forced myself to concentrate.

When my brain was numb from memorizing, I went back to the signature again. I found I didn’t have as much talent for forgery as I did for mimicry, but after several hundred attempts I could see definite improvement. I kept at it. After a while I tried breaking it down into individual letters and writing each one hundreds of times to correct my errors. Around seven I walked over three or four blocks to a restaurant for dinner, and came back and worked until midnight. When I turned out the light, she was all around me in the darkness.

The next day was Sunday. I worked from seven a.m. till midnight with only brief periods out for food, attacking the job with intense concentration to keep her out of my mind. I was closing in on him. Whole sections of those five hours of recorded data were stamped into my mind intact. I could see him now, and feel him, and there was no longer even any need to practice his speech. The signature was improving. I went on writing it, hour after hour, and listening to the tapes. It was harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life. When I went to bed I was dizzy with fatigue.

She had left me five hundred dollars in cash. On Monday morning I went over to Miami and picked up a rental car, one with a trailer hitch. I drove out US 1 to a sporting goods place that rented boats and motors. Using my right name and my California driver’s license, plus the local address on Dover Way, I rented a complete outfit—sixteen-foot fiberglass boat, twenty-five-horse Johnson outboard, and a trailer with a winch. I put up a deposit against the week’s rental, bought a spinning rod and some lures, asked the man about bonefishing flats in the Keys, and headed south on the highway.

In a little over an hour I was on Key Largo. I checked my highway map, noted the speedometer reading, and turned off US 1 into the dead-end road going towards the upper end of the Key, watching for launching sites. I found one, made a notation of the mileage, and went on. In a little over a mile there was another, and I noted the speedometer reading at this one also. I needed at least two I could find fast and in the dark, so I’d have an alternate in case the first one was being used or someone was camped near it. There was nobody in sight at either of them now. I practiced maneuvering the car with the trailer behind it. It was awkward at first, but after about fifteen minutes I became fairly adept.

I backed down to the water once more, put on the fishing clothes I’d brought, and launched the boat. There was a moderate south-east breeze, but the water over the flats inside the line of the reefs was smooth. It took about fifteen minutes to run out over the reefs to the edge of the Stream. The boat handled nicely in the moderate sea and ground-swell off-shore, and would do all right provided the weather was no worse than it was now. I ran back, winched the boat on to the trailer, and drove back to Miami Beach.

There was a driveway along the side of the apartment and a garage in the rear. I backed into it, uncoupled the trailer and locked it in the garage, and left the car in the drive. When I let myself in the front of the apartment, there was a card from her in the letter-box.

It had been mailed Sunday afternoon in Nassau, and said she was flying to New York Monday night. It was printed in block letters, and was unsigned. “I miss you,” she said. I wondered if she did. For a moment she was all around me in the apartment, the remembered gesture of a hand, the swing of a silken ankle, and the smooth dark head it was a joy forever to watch.

I showered, and shaved, using a safety razor to get around the mustache. The latter was beginning to show, and surprisingly it made me look a little older, which was fine. I went to work, practicing the signature. I could forge it well enough now to fool myself at times, but I had to learn to do it faster and more naturally. The next morning I drove over to Miami to a salvage store and bought a second-hand tarpaulin, about eight by eight. On the way back I stopped at a building supply place and bought four concrete blocks, saying I wanted them to patch a wall. At a dime store I picked up a roll of wire and a cheap pair of pliers. I put everything in the trunk, and locked it. I went back to the apartment and worked with furious concentration until midnight.

When I awoke in the morning and realized what day it was, there was a fluttery, sick feeling in my stomach. This was the thirteenth. He was supposed to be here tonight. I was scared. It was easy to say something was fool-proof—but was it, ever? A million things could go wrong. I tried to work some more, but had trouble concentrating. I didn’t need any more preparation, anyway; I either had it pat now, or I never would. The only thing it took from here on was nerve. I wasn’t at all sure I had that.

The morning passed with no word from her. Maybe he wasn’t coming. I began to hope something had happened so he couldn’t get away. Then at five-thirty in the afternoon the phone rang. It was a call from Mrs. Forbes, in New York, the operator said. Would I accept the charge? I said yes. She came on the line.

“Jerry? Listen, dear, I’m calling from a phone-booth because I didn’t want this call on my hotel bill. He’s on his way.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Yes. I just talked to a friend at home. He left late yesterday afternoon, intending to stay in Mobile last night. He should be there between midnight and two a.m. I’m leaving right away, and I’ll be in Miami shortly before nine. Don’t come to the airport.”

“Right,” I said.

“Is everything all right there?”

”Yes. Except that I wish you were here.”

“I will be, very shortly. Good-bye, dear.”

The afternoon was interminable; I paced the living room, chain-smoking cigarettes while I thought of a Cadillac and a DC-7 converging on Miami in a sort of cataclysmic and irrevocable vector. I wanted her here worse than I’d ever wanted anything, and I hoped he’d never arrive. He was a fast and reckless driver; maybe he’d have a wreck and kill himself. I went out and tried to eat dinner, and didn’t know afterwards whether I had or not.

It was nine-thirty when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I opened the front door. She was coming up the walk with the cab driver behind her carrying the small overnight case. The rest of her luggage would still be in New York, in her hotel room. A very smart-looking hat was slanted across the side of her head, and she wore gloves and carried a light coat on her arm.

She smiled, brushed my lips lightly with hers, and started to fumble at her bag. I gave the driver some money. I didn’t know how much, but it appeared to satisfy him. He turned and went down the walk. Then we were inside, and I pushed the door shut with my shoulder, and put down the bag.

She broke it up, finally, and gasped. “Jerry! After all—”

“Let me look at you,” I said. I held her at arm’s length. I’d smeared her lipstick quite badly and tilted the hat a little out of position, but there was no doubt of it. She was the smartest-looking and the loveliest woman on earth.

I told her so. Or started to. “Are you drunk?” she asked.

No, I said. “I haven’t even had a drink. God, how I’ve missed you. I can’t keep my hands off you.”

She smiled. “You must have been working long hours. No girls at all?”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not getting through to you. It’s not girls. It’s you—”

“Jerry, you’re talking gibberish,” she said. “And could we sit down?”

I’m sorry,” I said. I led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her. I took her in my arms again. She tried to fend me off, shaking her head protestingly. “I think I must be getting too old to cope with the under-thirty type of wolf.”

“Listen, Marian,” I said. “Damn it, will you listen to me?” I removed the hat and dropped it on the coffee table, and put my hand against her cheek, turning her face and looking at the smooth dark line of her hair and the incredible blue eyes. I was overcome again with that crazy yearning to imprison and possess every last bit of her. I kissed her again, and it was the wildest and most wonderful thing I’d ever known.

She stirred. “Jerry, what on earth is the matter with you?”

“I love you,” I said. “I should think that would be obvious to a fourteen-year-old girl—”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She tried to pull back. I held her more tightly. “Jerry,” she protested, “this is hardly the time—”

“Will you, for the love of God, listen to me a minute?” I said. “And try not to kick my teeth out, for once? I’m in love with you. I’m absolutely crazy about you. God knows I missed you while you were gone, but I didn’t realize until I saw you coming up that walk just how much you did mean to me—“

She tried to break in.

“Don’t interrupt,” I said. “I’m going to get through to you some way, if it takes the rest of the night. I’ve tried to tell you before how wonderful I think you are, but you seem to think it’s just some sort of conditioned reflex because I noticed you weren’t wearing a beard. There must be some way I can make you understand. Listen. You’re what I came back for, when I ran off to New York. I know that now. All I want out of this business is you, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for the police—”

She stiffened in my arms. “What are you saying?”

“That we’re going to call this thing off. It’s too dangerous. And it’s crazy. I want you, and I don’t want to be running and hiding all the time like an animal. I realize I’m not one of the solider types of prospect for the vine-covered mortgage and the lawn mower, but I can hold a job when I want to. I want to marry you—”

She broke free and pushed away from me. She laughed, but the sound of it was more like that of a bad skiing accident. “You want us to go steady, is that it? Oh, my God. I wonder how I’d look in crinoline petticoats and bobby socks. Or maybe you could just introduce me as your mother—“

I grabbed her arm and shook her. “Marian! Stop it! For Christ’s sake, I never heard of anybody who could make such a Federal case out of being thirty-four years old. You don’t look twenty-eight.”

Her face was distorted with contempt or bitterness; I wasn’t sure which. “You fool! Don’t you even know yet? Didn’t you hear me say I’d already graduated from college when we got into the war? I’m referring to the Second World War. Or didn’t you study that one in school? Do you have any idea how long ago that was? I’m not thirty-four. I’m thirty-eight years old.”

She began, to laugh again. I caught her, but she turned her face away and went on laughing. “I had one last little shred of dignity left, and you want me to throw that away and start cradle-robbing—”

I caught the turning and twisting face between my hands and held it still so she had to look at me. “I don’t give a damn if you’re thirty-eight,” I said savagely. “Or fifty-eight, or ninety-eight. All I know is what I see and feel. You’re the loveliest woman, probably, that I’ve ever known, and the smoothest, and there’s a grace about you that makes me catch my breath when I look at you. I think you begin being feminine where all other women leave off. When you go out of a room, you leave it empty and when you come back you re-decorate it—”

“Will you stop it?” she lashed at me. “Even if I were capable of ever loving anybody again, do you think I’d marry a man ten years younger than I am, and as attractive as you are, and cringe every time people looked at us and wondered what I’d used to buy you with? I’ll assure you, laddie boy, I don’t look twenty-eight to women. And I can’t compete in that division any more. I’ve just had that demonstrated to me, quite publicly and convincingly.”

“Forget that meat-headed Chapman for a minute,” I said, “if he’s too stupid to know what he had, that’s his hard luck, and he’ll find it out soon enough—”

“Precisely. In about four hours.”

“No! Dammit, no! It’s dangerous, and I don’t want you to do it. Chapman hasn’t got anything you need, or even want—”

She broke in coldly. “I beg to differ with you. He has something I want, and intend to have—a lot of money I helped him make for both of us. That’s the only thing left now. I suppose it’s utterly impossible for you to understand, being a man and a very young one, but I’m through. Finished. I’m all over. I’m something that’s already happened. If I started now and worked at it night and day, by the time I could feel like a woman again, I won’t even be one. Not an operating model, anyway, or one that anybody but the utterly desperate would have. I poured the last six years of my life into an aging adolescent, and all I’ve got left to show for it is humiliation. There are probably women more philosophical than I am who could adjust to that and absorb it and come out of it healthy again. But I can’t. Maybe it’s unfortunate but I don’t even intend to try. I have nothing more to lose, and I’m not going to stand in the wreckage of my own life like some placid and uncomprehending cow and see them get away with it.”

I’m not going to let you do it—”

“Don’t be an idiot!” she said furiously. “There’s no risk at all. And doesn’t the money mean anything to you?”

“Yes. It does. It means plenty. But I’ve just discovered you mean more. And if that sounds like something out of a shampoo ad, I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“And this is Jerome Langston Forbes?” she asked pityingly.

I sighed. “All right, rub it in. This is Jerry Forbes, the angle boy. The guy who discovered before he was twenty that this place is just a nut-hatch for the rest of the universe. And maybe when you stop to think about it, it still is. After all these years I finally go overboard completely for a girl, and I have to pick the one who’s decided to throw away her union card in the female sex.” I lit a cigarette, and stood up.

“Then you won’t help me?” she asked.

“No,” I said. I went in and sat down on the bed. I felt like hell. I stretched out, with the ashtray on my chest, and looked up at the ceiling. There didn’t seem to be any answer.

I was still lying there ten minutes later when I heard her come into the room. She lay down across the bed with her face very near mine. “I’m sorry, Jerry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t really grasp what you were saying. When you have nothing left inside but bitterness, a lot of things don’t come through very well.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

Her eyes looked into mine from a distance of a few inches. “What if I would go away with you afterwards?”

“You would?”

“Yes. God knows why you’d want me, but if you still do, I’ll go.”

I thought about it for a minute, wavering. “It still scares me. You know what we’re fooling with.”

“Yes. And you know how we’re going to do it. Nothing can go wrong.” She smiled faintly, and touched my lips with a finger. “You understand it’ll have to be a long time afterwards? Maybe a year. And that it’ll have to be somewhere a long way off, where there’s no chance that anybody who knew him will ever hear your voice.”

“Of course.”

“All right. I have a little money, too. We’ll have well over two hundred thousand. Somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, or the Aegean. Or if you want to fish, somewhere in the tropics. Ceylon, perhaps. Just the two of us. And no strings attached. When you get tired of me—“

I drew a finger along her check. “I’d never get tired of you.”

“You will, when you get old enough to need younger women.”

“But I wouldn’t have to wait a full year?” I asked. “I mean, before I can even see you again?”

”No. We can meet somewhere after I’m sure I’m not being watched, in a month or so. will you do it, Jerry?”

I thought of that dream I’d had when she was trying to jump off the bridge, and felt cold in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it was a warning that something could go wrong. But I knew I was whipped. By this time I was conditioned to taking her on any terms I could get her.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

Seven

I looked at my watch for the hundredth time, conscious of the increasing tightness of my nerves. The waiting was bad; there was too much time to think. It was forty-five minutes past midnight. I was in the rental car, parked on Collins Avenue across from the entrance to the Dauphine. This was another of those glorified motor hotels of the Gold Coast Strip, about two blocks from the Golden Horn. He had a reservation. She’d made it for him, along with his fishing reservations at Marathon, in the Keys.

I lit another cigarette, and went on watching the oncoming traffic, which was definitely thinning now. I’d already checked the area for phone booths, to be sure I could get to one when I wanted it. I nervously looked at the time again. I’d been here an hour and a half. Maybe he wouldn’t drive all the way through from Mobile in one day. His plans could have changed in the two weeks since their bitter fight and her resignation, and he might be going somewhere else. He could have been in a wreck—I came alert. It was another Cadillac.

Well, I’d seen at least a hundred so far; there was no shortage of them in Miami Beach. But this was one of the big ones, and it was a light gray hardtop. Out-of-state license plate. Then I could see the pelican on it. The car was turning into the driveway of the Dauphine. It was Chapman, all right. And he was alone. I exhaled softly. That was the thing we had to know for sure. If he was going to live it up this trip, he hadn’t picked up a girl so far.

The Cadillac stopped in the circular drive before the glass front wall of the lobby, partially screened from the street by the boxes of tropical vegetation bearing colored lights. I got out and crossed the street.

Chapman had already gone inside, and a porter with a luggage barrow was removing three large expensive-looking bags from the trunk of the car. I went into the lobby and turned towards the two telephone booths at the left rear, beside the archway that opened into the dining room. Nobody paid any attention to me. Chapman was standing at the desk. He was just as she had described him. We looked nothing alike except that we were the same height and—within the limits of the average description— the same build. He wore a lightweight gabardine suit and a cocoa straw hat, white shirt, and a conservatively striped tie. And the glasses, of course.

“Reservation for Harris Chapman,” he said brusquely. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement of fact.

I didn’t hear the clerk’s reply, but he turned away to check. I had reached the telephone now. I went through the motions of looking up a number, and just before I stepped inside I glanced toward the desk again. The clerk had returned. He was smiling as he pushed across the registry card. Then he handed Chapman an envelope. So far, so good. But I had to see what he did with it. If he shoved it in a pocket, he might forget it. He glanced at it curiously, and then set it on the desk while he registered. He’d recognized the handwriting by this time, I thought. It was from Marian. She had written it just before she left for Nassau. I closed the door of the booth and quickly dialed the apartment. She answered on the first ring.

“He’s here,” I said quietly. “And he got the letter.”

“What did he do with it?”

“Nothing, yet. “Wait.” I turned and glanced toward the desk again. “He’s opened it.”

”Good,” she said. “He’ll call when he gets up to the room.”

I wasn’t so sure. He’d just driven over seven hundred miles, and would be ready to fall in bed. But she knew him inside out, and should be able to guess bis reaction pretty well. The letter was an implied but very arrogantly worded blackmail threat. She had something to discuss with him relative to his 1955 income-tax return, and would be waiting for him to call, not later than tonight.

“He failed to report fifty-five thousand dollars,” she’d explained. “It’s pretty well covered, but he knows how they dig once they’re tipped off. And that informers are paid.”

I glanced around again. Chapman had shoved the letter in his coat pocket and was striding toward the booths. “Hang up,” I said quickly. “He’s going to call right now.”

The phone clicked and went dead. He stalked into the other booth and banged the door shut. I went on talking, ad libbing a conversation with an imaginary girl. He was dialing.

“Hello, Marian? Harris.” I could hear him perfectly. “I thought they said you were in New York. What the hell’s this let—? Yeah, I just checked in. Look, if this is some kind of gag to get me to come out to your apartment, I thought we’d agreed that was all over. It wouldn’t change anything, and I don’t see why we have to embarrass ourselves. . . . What? . . . What’s that?”

There was a longer pause.

“Oh, so that’s the way it is?” he said curtly. “By God, I didn’t think you’d stoop to a thing like this. I guess Coral was right. . . . You know damn well that return’s been checked and double-checked, and they’ve never found a thing wrong with it. . . . Never mind what you think . . . If you need money, why didn’t you take that six months’ pay I offered you? . . . No, I’m not coming out there. I’m tired. I’ve been driving all day. . . . What proof? . . . You haven’t got any proof, and you know it.”

I heard him hang up and slam out of the booth. I pulled down the hook, dropped in another dime, and dialed her again.

“What do you think?” I asked softly, when she answered.

“He’ll come, as soon as he thinks it over. Let me know.”

“Right,” I said.

When I came out of the booth, Chapman was entering the corridor at the other side of the lobby, followed by the porter with his bags. I went back to the car, and lit a cigarette. The Cadillac had been parked in the area off to the left of the main building. Ten minutes went by. Maybe she was wrong. Then an empty cab turned into the driveway. In a minute or two it came out the exit, crossed the traffic to this side of the street, and started south, the way it had come. There was a man in it, wearing a hat. It was Chapman.

I looked at my watch. It had taken me fifteen minutes to drive up, but the traffic had lessened considerably by now. Call it ten. I got out and crossed the street again, and walked down about half a block to the bar I’d noted before. It had a booth, and I didn’t want to go back to the lobby again unless I had to.

There were only three or four customers in the place, and the booth was empty. I was tight as a violin string now, and couldn’t seem to take a deep breath. I ordered a shot of straight whisky, downed it, and went back to the phone. I closed the door, and dialed. She answered immediately.

”He left here five minutes ago, in a cab,” I said.

“Good,” she replied. “Remember, wait two minutes from the time I hang up. I’ll be in the kitchen, getting out the ice cubes.”

“Right,” I said. The drink had loosened me a little now, but it was very hot in the booth and I was sweating. She went on talking. She seemed perfectly calm. The minutes dragged by.

“I think I hear the cab,” she said.

I waited. Then I heard the doorbell, very faintly. The line went dead. Chapman was at the front door.

I checked the time, pulled down the hook, and dropped in another dime to get the dial tone. I looked back out at the bar. No one was near enough to hear any of it through the door. Just before the two minutes were up, I started dialing. It rang twice.

“Hello.” It was Chapman, all right. She’d got him to answer.

“Mrs. Marian Forsyth,” I said brusquely. “Is she there?”

“Just a minute.”

I heard him call her, but not her reply. Then he came on again. “She’s busy at the moment. Who’s calling?”

“Chapman,” I said. “Harris Chapman—”

“What?”

Most people, of course, have no idea how their voices and their speech sound to others, but he did. He was accustomed to using dictating devices and recorders.

“Harris Chapman,” I repeated with the same curt impatience. “From Thomaston, Louisiana. She knows me—”

“Are you crazy?”

I cut in on him. “Will you please call Mrs. Forsyth to the phone? I haven’t got all night.”

”So you’re Chapman, are you? Where are you calling from?”

“What the hell is this?” I barked into the phone. “I’m calling from the Dauphine. I just checked in here. I’ve driven seven hundred and thirty miles today, and I m tired, and I don’t feel like playing games. Maybe you want to talk to me about my nineteen-fifty-five income-tax return, is that it? Well, it just happens I’m an attorney, my friend, and I know a little about the law, and about shakedowns. Now, put her on, or I’ll turn this letter of hers over to the police right now.”

“What in the name of God? Marian—”

I heard the phonograph come up in the background then, softly at first, and then louder. It was a song that had come out the summer Keith had gone mad—The Music Goes Round and Round. Shortly before they’d given up and had him committed for treatment, he’d locked himself in his room one day and played the record for nineteen hours without stopping.

“Listen!” I snapped. “What are you people up to? What’s that music—?”

He was still there. I heard him gasp.

Oh, the music goes round and round . . . and it comes out here. . . .

“Turn that off!” I said harshly. “Who told you about Keith? She’s been coaching you. You even sound like me. What’s that woman trying to do to me? I offered her six months’ pay. . . .”

“Marian,” he shouted, “for the love of Christ, who is this man?”

I couldn’t hear her reply, of course, but I knew what it was, and the way she said it. “Why, Harris Chapman, obviously.”

The shots weren’t too loud, mere exclamation points above the level of the music. There were two very close together, and then one more. The phone made a crashing noise, as if it had struck the edge of the table, and I heard him fall.

Oh, you press the middle valve down. . . .

Something else fell. And then there was nothing but the music, and a rhythmic tapping sound, as if the telephone receiver was swinging gently back and forth, bumping the leg of the table.

Bump . . . bump . . .

. . . and the music goes round and round . . . yoo-oo-ohoo. . . .

* * *

I made it in a little over ten minutes. As soon as I’d got out in the fresh air I was all right. She’d probably fainted, but she’d come around. I parked a block away. The front door was unlocked. I slipped inside and closed it.

One bridge lamp was burning in a corner, and the lights were on in the kitchen. She wasn’t in here. I sighed with relief. The phonograph had been shut off, and the phone was back on its cradle. The apartment was completely silent except for the humming of the air-conditioner. He was lying face down beside the table which held the telephone. I hurried through to the bedroom. She was in the bathroom, standing with her hands braced on the sides of the wash basin, looking at her face in the mirror. Apparently she’d started to brush her teeth, for some reason, for the toothbrush was lying in the basin where she’d dropped it. She was very pale. I took her arm. She turned, stared at me blankly, and then rubbed a hand across her face. Comprehension returned to her eyes. “I’m all right,” she said. There was no tremor in her voice.

I led her out and sat her on the bed, and knelt beside her. “Just hold on for a few minutes, and we’ll be out of here. You sit right there. Would you like a drink?”

“No,” she said. “I’d rather not.” She spoke precisely without raising her voice. I had an impression it was nothing but iron self-control, and that she was walking very carefully along the edge of screaming. That part of it, however, I couldn’t help her with.

The tarpaulin I’d bought was in a broom closet in the kitchen. I carried it into the living room, spread it on the rug, and rolled him on to it. I didn’t like looking at his face, so I threw a fold of the canvas over it. There was blood on his shirt, and some on the rug where he’d lain. I went through his pockets, taking everything out— wallet, traveler checks, car keys, room key from the Dauphine, small address book, the letter from Marian, cigarette holder, lighter, cigarettes, and a small plastic vial of some kind of pills. I tore up the letter and shoved it back in his coat pocket, along with the pills and the cigarette holder. His glasses had fallen off. I put them in his pocket also. All the other items I placed on the coffee table. He wore no rings. I left his watch on his wrist. The gun, a small .32, was on the rug near the phonograph. I put it in another coat pocket.

I rolled him in the tarpaulin and pulled him out into the kitchen, beside the back door. I cut two strips off the canvas to use for ropes, doubled him into the fetal position, and bound him. I was shaking badly now, and my stomach was acting up again. I leaned against the sink, poured a drink of whisky from the bottle in a cupboard, and downed it. In a minute I felt a little better.

I filled a pan with water, located a sponge, and scrubbed at the blood stain on the living-room rug. It took nearly ten minutes and four pans of water. I knew a lot of it had gone through to the pad beneath, and that the rug would show a water stain when it dried, but I could take care of that later. I’d have the whole rug shampooed. I washed the pan, and the sink, and turned out the kitchen light. It was a relief to get away from him.

She was just getting up from the bed. I took her in my arms. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I’m sorry I broke up that way.”

“Everything’s under control,” I told her. “He had the room key. That was the only thing I was worried about. What time is your flight?”

“I’m wait-listed at five-fifteen, and confirmed at six-thirty.”

I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to two. She’d have a long wait, alone, at the airport, but it couldn’t be helped. She couldn’t stay here. She seemed to be in full control of herself, and rational. She put on some lipstick, and her hat, and I closed the overnight case and found her coat, gloves, and purse. I dropped the Dauphine room key in my pocket. There was horror in her eyes just for an instant as we went out through the living room.

“The car’s about a block away,” I said. “I didn’t want any more traffic in and out of here than we had to have.”

She made no reply. I turned out the lights and locked the door. When we got to the car, I lit her a cigarette. She remained silent all the way up Collins Avenue. I reached over once and took her hand. It was like ice, even through the mesh of the glove.

I parked about a block from the Dauphine. Turning to her, I took her face between my hands, and asked, “I’ll be about ten minutes; are you sure you’ll be all right?”

“Yes, of course,” she replied, in that same quiet, beautifully controlled sort of way.

I walked up past the Dauphine and entered the driveway at the exit end. There was an extensive parking area here, going back along the side of this wing of the building. About two-thirds of the way back there was a doorway. I entered it, and was in one of the ground-floor corridors. I took the key from my pocket. It was No. 226. At the end of the corridor there was a self-service elevator and a stairway. I took the stairway. In the corridor above, I began checking the numbers—216—214—I was going the wrong way. I went back around the corner. A waiter came past, carrying a tray. I swung the key absently, and nodded. He smiled, and went on. 222—224—Here it was. The corridor was empty now. I unlocked the door, slipped inside, and closed it.

The curtains were drawn over the window at the other end of the room. A light was burning on the night table beside the bed, and the bathroom lights were on. One of the three matching fiberglass suitcases was on the luggage stand, unopened, and the others were on the floor beside it. I didn’t like the look of that. He’d been up here approximately ten minutes without unpacking anything, so maybe he’d been on the phone. He might have called Coral Blaine to tell her he’d arrived. We hadn’t believed he would, because of the late hour. But if he had, had he mentioned the letter from Marian?

Well, there was nothing I could do about it at the moment, and I had plenty of other armed hand grenades to juggle without worrying about that one. I rumpled the bed, and reached for the phone. The front office should know he’d been out; they’d probably called the cab for him. Play it that way.

The operator answered.

“Desk, please,” I said.

“Yes, sir.” Then she added quickly. “Oh, Mr. Chapman, would you like me to try that Thomaston call again

I breathed softly in relief. “No. Just cancel. I’ll call in the morning.”

“Yes, sir.”

The night clerk came on. “Desk.”

“Chapman,” I said, “in two-two-six. There haven’t been any messages for me?”

“Uuuuh—let’s see. No, sir, not a thing.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t want to be disturbed until about noon. Would you notify the switchboard not to put any calls through?”

“Yes, sir. And just hang the sign on the doorknob. The maids won’t come in.”

“Thank you,” I said. I got the DO NOT DISTURB sign off the dresser, switched off the lights, and peered out. The corridor was clear. I draped the sign on the knob, made sure the door was locked, and walked along to the stairs. I met no one. When I was on the sidewalk in front I breathed freely again. One more hurdle was past.

I swung the car around, went back down Collins Avenue, and took the North Bay Causeway, headed for the airport. She sat perfectly erect and composed beside me, but she spoke only once during the whole trip.

“I took advantage of you,” she said musingly. “God forgive me for that. I’m sorry, Jerry.”

“What?” I asked. “What do you mean, you took advantage of me?”

She made no reply.

Just before we reached the terminal, I pulled to the curb and parked. It was ten minutes to three.

“What day is this?” I asked quickly.

“Thursday, November fourteen. That isn’t necessary; I tell you I’m perfectly all right.”

I had to be sure. She was on her own from here on. “Tell me your schedule.”

”I leave here at five-fifteen or six-thirty. Either way, I’ll be back in my room in New York before noon. I check out of the hotel tomorrow at one p.m. and fly to New Orleans. I’ll be in Thomaston Saturday morning. From then on, it’s exactly as we have it written down.”

“Right,” I said.

“You’ll make certain about the tapes, won’t you? And under no circumstances are you to try to call me.”

“Don’t worry about the tapes. Or about anything. I can handle it. We’ll say good-bye here. Then I’ll swing in, drop you at the terminal, and run. Okay?”

“Yes.” She turned, her face lifted to mine.

I kissed her, holding her very tightly for a moment, and whispered against her cheek. “I’ll just be going through the motions until I’m with you again. That’s all I’m going to say now. Break. And let’s go.”

I swung in, stopped in front of the terminal, and helped her out. She lifted a hand, turned, and went inside.

* * *

It was three-thirty-five when I backed into the driveway beside the apartment. The house beyond the high and shadowy wall was dark, and the streets were deserted. I stopped short of the garage doors, cut the ignition and lights, and got out. I unlocked the trunk, and eased it open. Letting myself in at the front, I went through to the bedroom, and changed into fishing clothes. I went out into the kitchen, without turning on the lights, and poured another drink. I dreaded this part of it.

I wasn’t even sure I could do it, except for one thing— I had to. I weighed a hundred and eighty and he a hundred and ninety-five. But I was in fairly good condition. I eased the kitchen door open, pulled him through it to the edge of the concrete slab, and bent my knees to get my arms round him. Three minutes later the trunk was closed again and I was draped across it, trembling and sweaty and sick at my stomach. They say madmen don’t know their own strength. Neither do desperate ones.

I slipped back into the kitchen, closed and locked the door, turned out the light in the bedroom, and went out the front. I opened the garage door, backed out, and coupled on the trailer. By this time I’d probably wakened the people in the house beyond the wall, but it was all right. Florida was full of fishermen waking their neighbors at four in the morning. I drove out into the street.

I wanted to stop for some coffee, but didn’t dare. I didn’t know how soon after five it would start growing light. When I was beyond Homestead and Florida City on the open highway I opened the car up to seventy. It was five-ten and still dark when I crossed on to Key Largo. I checked my speedometer at the junction of the two roads, and swung left. In a few minutes I came to the first launching site. I swung my headlights to get a look at it, pulled up, and backed down to the water’s edge. I had to get out once to judge the distance.

In a moment I had the boat off. I pulled it around and beached it, and turned off the car’s lights. The east was gray now, and I noticed for the first time that it was almost calm. That was good; I could go far out, off soundings. Mosquitoes buzzed around my face. I steeled myself, unlocked the trunk, and was just raising the lid, when I tensed up, listening. A car was coming. I slammed it. Headlights swept over me. The car came on, slowed almost to a stop, and then went on. It was towing a boat.

The sound of it died away. I yanked open the trunk, and pawed blindly at the canvas. Somehow, the hated and brutal weight was in my arms again, and I staggered to the side of the boat. I ran back and brought the concrete blocks, two at a time, and frantically felt round for the wire and the pliers. I drove the car out until the trailer was clear of the launching area, and parked it near the road. I was locking it when headlights burst over me again.

The car stopped. It was towing a boat too. A man got out, said, “Good morning,” and switched on a flashlight.

My mouth was dry with fear. I forced it open at last, made some kind of reply, and started in motion towards the boat. He was directing the driver of the car, throwing the flashlight beam toward the water. It swept over the boat.

“Nice looking outfit you got there,” he said. “Get in the stern, and I’ll push you off.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “Thanks just the same.”

He was still coming towards me with the flashlight. I caught the bow of the boat, and heaved. It shot out. I clambered aboard, getting my feet wet. I stayed in the bow, between him and Chapman’s body, while I picked up an oar and hurriedly poled my way out another fifty feet. He had turned away now and was directing the driver of the car. I sat down in the stern, shaking all over, and started the motor.

The east was light now, but the visibility was still poor. I headed seawards, running at idling speed and watching for obstructions. Off to my left a light flashed. A westbound tanker went past inside the Stream, still two or three miles ahead of me. It was full daylight by the time I was past the line of reefs. The boat pitched lazily on the long ground-swell rolling up from the south-east. I went on. The tanker was far to the westward, and I could see nothing of the other two boats. I was in the Stream now, completely alone, and probably near the hundred-fathom curve. Key Largo was down on the horizon, and visible only when I crested a swell. I cut the motor and reached for the wire and the concrete blocks.

The boat heaved upward on the greasy swell, and shipped some water as he went over. The sun was just coming up.

Eight

I stopped to turn back the boat and trailer on the way into town, and it was nine-fifteen when I got back to the apartment. I had one more drink, made a pot of coffee, and showered and shaved.

I couldn’t remember when I’d had anything to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I was running on nerve now, but I was too tense and keyed up to be tired. The real test was yet to come. I had to call Coral Blaine in about two hours, and if I failed to pass, Marian Forsyth and I were dead. I wondered how she was feeling at the moment, knowing it all depended on me and that we couldn’t even communicate any more.

I dressed in a lightweight flannel suit, white shirt, and a conservative tie on the order of the one Chapman had worn. I put my horn-rim glasses in a coat pocket, and then stowed away a packet of the filter cigarettes, the cigarette holder, and Chapman’s lighter, which was one of the butane jobs. Then his wallet, the folder of traveler’s checks, the little address book, his car keys, and the Dauphine room key. But I had one more act to perform as Jerry Forbes. I had to return the car. I removed the rental deposit slip from my own wallet and put it in a pocket.

The straw hat was slightly too large, so I cut a strip of newspaper and folded it inside the sweat band. I put the seven rolls of tape and the other information in the briefcase she’d bought before leaving for Nassau, closed the recorder, turned off the air-conditioner, and took one last look round. I drove over to Miami, turned in the car, walked up a block, caught a cab, and gave an address on Collins Avenue near the Dauphine.

I got out a block away, and walked back, carrying the recorder and the briefcase. Entering the driveway at the exit end, I went up through the parking area and entered the side door as I had last night. There were a few guests in the corridors now, and I passed one of the maids, and a waiter pushing a room-service trolley, but no one paid any attention to me. The corridor before No. 226 was empty except for a furry fat man in bathing trunks. I unlocked the door and slipped inside, removing the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the knob.

It was eleven-ten, and I was now Harris Chapman. I was up there on the tight rope I had to walk for twelve days—provided I got past the first step.

I removed my jacket, shirt, and tie, and hung them in the closet, took off my shoes, and picked up the phone and called Room Service. I ordered a pot of coffee, orange juice, and a Miami Herald.

I rumpled the bed some more, went into the bathroom, washed my face, turned the shower on very hot for a minute or two until the room began to get steamy, rubbed one of the fresh bath towels over the wet tiles until it was damp, and draped it carelessly back on the rack. I got the glasses out of my jacket and put them on. They were mildly corrective reading glasses she’d convinced an optometrist she needed because of headaches, and weren’t too hard to put up with. They and the mustache changed my appearance amazingly. I looked some five years older.

I opened the bag that was on the luggage rack. It was the companion bag to a two-suiter, filled with shirts, underwear, socks, handkerchiefs, and so on. I pulled out a pair of pajamas, wadded them, and tossed them across the bed. A full bottle of Scotch was nestled among the clothes. I thought of what Marian had called him—an aging adolescent. It seemed incredible she’d been in love with him, but maybe he’d been different before he looked up and saw middle age and panicked.

There were some papers in the top flap. I pulled them out, and one envelope was exactly what I was looking for. It was a statement from Webster & Adcock, his brokerage firm in New Orleans, itemizing the status of his account as of November first. I ran my eye down it, and whistled. She hadn’t been exaggerating. 1000 shares Columbia Gas . . . 500 shares DuPont 450 Preferential . . . 100 AT&T bonds . . . 500 shares PG&E common . . . It went on. The last item was $22,376.50 in cash. There were three more of the same envelopes containing verifications of later transactions. I shoved them all back in the bag. Checking it over in detail could wait. Coral Blaine was the pitfall I had to get past now.

The other envelope was postmarked Marathon, Florida, over a month ago, and contained a letter from Captain Wilder of the charter-boat Blue Water III, confirming Chapman’s reservations on November 15, 16, 17, and again on 21, 22, and 23.

Remembering I was in character now, I went over and picked up the phone and asked for Room Service again.

“Hello? Room Service? Chapman, in two-two-six,” I said irritably. “That boy hasn’t shown up with my order—Oh? Okay. Thanks.”

He knocked on the door almost by the time I’d hung up. I let him in with the trolley, carefully added up the bill, added a tip, and signed it. He departed. I poured a cup of coffee, and went on with my investigation. The second suitcase held two lightweight suits, a sports jacket, several pairs of trousers, and some other miscellaneous items of clothing, a half-dozen bottles of different kinds of pills, and a small leather kit containing all his toilet articles. The third was mostly fishing clothes. It also contained a camera, and a gift of some kind, still wrapped.

It felt like a book. I tore it open. It was a volume on salt-water fishing by Kip Farrington, and the flyleaf was inscribed, “With all my love, Coral.” I started to drop it back in the bag. Something fell out of it. It was a plain piece of white paper on which was written the single word, “Isle”. It puzzled me. Apparently she’d stuck it in there between the pages. I held the book up and shook it. Two more slips fed out, along with a four by six photograph of a young blonde girl in a bathing suit, standing on tiptoes. She was very pretty, but as standardized—pose and all—as an interchangeable part. She made me think of a composite picture. I looked at the other two slips of paper. Each had one word written on it. “View” and “Of.” I frowned. Then they rearranged themselves in my mind, and I shook my head. “Isle of View.” For this he’d jilted Marian Forsyth. That forty country must be rough.

His wallet held a little over seven hundred dollars, two more photographs of Coral Blaine, driver’s license, eight or ten credit cards of various kinds, and his Chapman Enterprises business cards, but nothing with a picture of him. I unsnapped the folder of traveler’s checks. There were forty-eight of them, all hundreds. He didn’t exactly go around barefoot, for a two weeks” vacation. Well, he was a millionaire, it was probably all deductible if he had an imaginative tax man, and big-game fishing came high. To say nothing of nineteen-year-old call girls.

I was stalling now, and I knew it. I’d been through all his things, and if I kept inventing reasons for putting it off I’d start to lose my nerve, and then I would flub it. I broke the seal on the bottle of Scotch, had one fair-sized drink, and reached for the phone. I was tight across the chest.

The operator answered.“Long Distance,” I said. ”Thomaston, Louisiana. The number is six-two-five-two-five. Personal call to Miss Coral Blaine.”

“Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

I waited. Remember, two pet names. Remember, she has a very Southern accent. No, that didn’t matter. This was personal, I didn’t have to worry about “recognizing” the wrong girl’s voice. Remember, just got up. Groggy. Hard drive.

Far off, a feminine voice said, “Chapman Enterprises.”

Receptionist. Mrs. English. Widow. 36. Brown hair. Pleasant. Son in high school. Wendell. . . .

“Miss Coral Blaine,” an operator said. “Miami Beach is calling.”

“One moment, please.”

Hates Marian. “Adores” things. Chides me for swearing. Argument about scope and magnitude of wedding, settled now, her favor. Honeymoon definitely Palm Springs, Acapulco out, loathes fishing. Get her talking about bridal parties. Gown. Attendants. . . .

“Go ahead, please.”

“Harris, darling—”

“Angel, how are you?” I said.

“Just fine, darling, but I’ve been so worried. You didn’t call last night, and here I’ve been imaginin’ wrecks and hurricanes and deadly females carryin’ you off—”

“I tried to call you. When I checked in here at Miami Beach. At one a.m.—that’d be midnight your time. But there was no answer.”

“I just knew it! I kept trying to tell that crazy Bonnie Sue Wentworth that Miami was ahead of us—”

Bonnie Sue clicked in my mind.

“—Henry’s in Chicago, you know, at that engineers” convention or whatever it is, so after the movie we went out to the club, and I kept telling her I had to get back because you’d call, but she said Miami was behind us—”

“Bonnie Sue’s having a good day when she can tell whether it’s daylight or dark,” I said. “And I wish you wouldn’t ride with her. Any husband that would let a featherweight like that drive a Thunderbird has got a grudge against her, or the human race—”

“Harris, she wasn’t drivin’ the Bird. Heavens, they traded that in, remember?” So. Don’t get too cocky.

“Well, the hell with Bonnie Sue. I want to know how you—”

“Harris! The very idea!”

“I’m sorry, angel,” I said. “But how are you? And how’s everything at the office?”

“Just fine. And, remember, I said I wasn’t going to bother you with old office details on your vacation. The only thing that’s come up important is a letter from those lawyers in Washington about the radio station. There’s some more forms to fill in.”

“Yes. That’s the application for an increase in power,” I said. “Shoot ’em over to Wingard. If he has any questions, I’ll get in touch with him later. But, look, angel, suppose I call you tonight? I just woke up and haven’t even dressed yet. And before I drive on down to Marathon there’s a real estate man I want to see.”

“That’d be wonderful, darling. I’ll be waiting.”

“Say about eight, your time. And thanks a million for the book. It’s a good one.”

“You fibber. I bet you haven’t even looked at it.”

“I’ll just take that bet.” I winced. “Isle of View, too.”

“Why, you precious. You did open it.”

When I’d hung up, I poured one more small drink of the Scotch, and sighed. How could I have been worried about that? Then a very cold hand closed around my insides, and I cursed myself. Don’t get careless. So she’s an idiot. But don’t forget, they were engaged; there’s a whole area of shared experience nobody could brief you on, not even Marian Forsyth. And just one little slip, one wrong word, can do it.

I looked at my watch. It was still only a few minutes past twelve. It would be better not to check out until at least one; that would be exactly twelve hours from the time he’d checked in, and there’d be no chance at all any of the same staff would be on duty. The whole switch depended on that. Now would be a good time to hit Chris.

I poured some more coffee, and dug the Webster & Adcock envelopes out of the bag. Spreading out the itemized end-of-the-month statement, I corrected it and brought it up to date with the slips verifying subsequent transactions. Since the first of the month—and that would be about the time Marian had left him—he had sold five hundred shares of Consolidated Edison, and in three separate transactions had bought a total of ten thousand shares of some cheap stock called Warwick Petroleum. This was listed on the American Exchange, and had been bought at prices ranging from 3½ to 3 1/8. I just had a hunch Chris had been unhappy about that. Marian had got him to switch over to high grade preferential and good solid utilities before prices had started to sag, and here he was plunging to the tune of better than thirty thousand dollars on some cheap speculation before she’d hardly got out of sight.

I crossed off the Consolidated Edison, added the Warwick, and adjusted the cash. The latter was now $12.741.50. Opening the Miami Herald to the financial page, I went down the list, checking it off against yesterday’s closing prices on the Stock Exchange. I added it all up. It came to roughly a hundred and eighty-seven thousand. I whistled softly. A hundred and seventy-five thousand of that was ours.

I thought of the places we’d go. Athens, Istanbul, Mallorca. And the fishing places—New Zealand, and Cabo Blanco. Passports would be no problem; we wouldn’t be fugitives. But it really didn’t matter where we went, as long as I was with her.

I snapped out of it. It would be at least a month before I could see her again, and I was in no position to be goofing off, dreaming about her. I reached for the phone.

“Operator, I’d like to make another long-distance call. This one’s to New Orleans—”

“Yes, sir. And the number?”

I gave it to her, and added, “Personal call to Mr. Chris Lundgren.”

“Thank you. One moment, please.”

I heard the operator at Webster & Adcock, and then Lundgren’s voice.

“Chris?” I said. “Chapman. How’s Warwick doing this morning?”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Chapman. The girl said you’re in Miami Beach already—”

“That’s right,” I said shortly. “But has there been any sign of a rally in Warwick? I see it closed yesterday at two seven-eighths.”

“No-o—” He sounded far from enthusiastic. “It’s about the same, but there’s very little activity in it. To tell you the truth, Mr. Chapman, I still can’t quite go along with you on it. It carries a lot of risk—”

So I was right. I cut in brusquely. “But, goddammit, Chris, there’s risk in anything there’s profit in. I got where I am now by taking risks. I’m not some old woman using the dividends from a few shares of AT &T to buy food for her cat. Christ, with the tax set-up we’ve got, what good is income to me? I need capital gains.”

“Of course, Mr. Chapman. But I just don’t see Warwick Petroleum. In a healthy market it might pay off as a speculation, though I’d prefer to see you in a sounder growth situation with better management. But right now the market’s going through a period of uncertainty and readjustment, and we ought to give some thought to safety. You’re in a very strong defensive position in everything except the Warwick, and I have to agree with Mrs. Forsyth—”

“Mrs. Forsyth’s not the only person who’s ever heard of the stock market,” I said irritably. “And since she’s walked out on me, I don’t see where she enters into it. But I’ll tell you what; I don’t believe in nursing losses any more than you do. Let’s get rid of it. Get seven-eighths if you can, and go as low as three-quarters if you have to.”

“Good.” He was pleased. “I think that’s wise. Mrs. Forsyth—”

“Goddammit, never mind Mrs. Forsyth!” I barked. Then I relented. “Sorry, Chris. What was it you started to say?”

“Oh—I was going to ask if you wanted to put the proceeds from the Warwick in some sound utility, just for the moment?”

“No,” I said. “Leave it in cash. As a matter of fact, while I’m over here I’m taking a good look at real estate. This place is booming—But never mind that. Just unload the Warwick. G’bye.”

I hung up, elated. It was perfect. Neither of them had suspected a thing, and I was already laying the groundwork.

I nipped through the paper to the classified section. Real estate. Here we were. Acreage. There were several big listings, some ocean front, and some highway frontage. I tore the section out, and looked at my watch. It was a little after one now. I dressed, closed the bags, put on the straw hat, and called the desk.

“Would you get my bill ready, please? And send a boy up to two-two-six for the bags.”

“Yes, sir. Right away.”

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. I was tired; dead tired. But the exhaustion merely made me look a little older. Marian had been right all the time. Chapman and I might not look anything alike actually, but within the limits of the average description we were indistinguishable.

Pretty big man. Above average size, anyway. Six feet, like that. 180, 190. Not old, not young. Thirties, I’d say. Brown hair. Dark, light, reddish? Well, uh, brown, you know. Blue eyes. Gray eyes. Green eyes.

Add the mustache, horn-rim glasses, cigarette holder. Add his car, his clothes, his identification. Add the personality traits. Throw in a week or ten days between observation and description. And finally throw in the fact that from beginning to end there was never any reason to doubt that Chapman was Chapman, and what did you have? Chapman.

But only if nobody had ever seen us both. That was vital.

I followed the boy with the luggage down to the desk. They were all different—porter, clerk, cashier. I’d noted them carefully last night while he was checking in.

I scrutinized all the items on the bill, and took out the traveler’s checks. “Would you cash an extra one for me?” I asked. “I need some change.”

“Yes, sir. We’d be glad to.”

I signed them, and as they lay on the desk I compared the signatures with the originals. Good. Very good. I put the change in the wallet, tossed the car keys to the porter, and said. “Gray Cadillac, Louisiana plates.” I stuck one of the filter cigarettes in the holder, lit it, and followed him. Chapman had come in here, and I had gone out. There was nothing to it.

He stowed the bags and the recorder and briefcase in the trunk. I gave him a dollar, and got in. The car was almost new, and was upholstered in pale blue leather. It was unbearably hot, and I hit the buttons to roll the windows down. I rummaged in the glove compartment for a Florida highway map, and found one, and also came up with a pair of clip-on sun-glasses. Fastening them on my frames, I looked at myself in the mirror. It was better all the time. I could be Chapman. Then I shuddered. Except that Chapman was lying on the bottom in six hundred feet of water, in the gloom and the everlasting silence, with his chest crushed by pressure. I shook it off.

I took out the classified real-estate ads I’d torn from the Herald, and checked some of the listings against the highway map. Several looked promising. One was a block of highway frontage on US 1 between Hollywood and North Miami, listed with the Fitzpatrick Realty Co. of Hollywood at an asking price of three hundred and seventy-five thousand.

I drove up and cruised around the town for about half an hour, looking it over. It appeared to be just about right. There were several motels of the type I was looking for, and it wasn’t too far from Miami. It was overflowing with real-estate outfits, of course, and I dropped in at three of them, introduced myself, and explained I was just looking over the local real-estate picture.

It was a little after two-thirty when I looked in on Fitzpatrick. He had a rather small place in a good location on one of the principal streets. Two salesmen and a girl were at work at desks out front. I bypassed the salesmen, gave the girl one of Chapman’s business cards, and said I’d like to talk to Fitzpatrick if he was in. She disappeared into the inner office. I slipped one of the cigarettes into the holder and was lighting it when she came back out and nodded.

He was a heavy-set and balding man in his fifties with the easy manner of a born salesman and a big nose crisscrossed with tiny purple veins. It was a nose that showed years of loving care, and I reflected that his liver probably looked like a hob-nailed boot. We shook hands. I sat down, unclipped the sun-glasses, and dropped them in my pocket. It wouldn’t do to have people remembering that I had worn them inside.

He leaned back in his chair, glanced at the card, and asked, “What line of business are you in, Mr. Chapman?”

“Oh, several,” I said. “Cotton gin, radio station, newspaper—Actually, I’m down here on vacation, for a little fishing. In the Keys, and maybe over at Bimini for a few days. It’s been about three years since I was in the Miami area, and I was just wondering what was happening in real-estate values.”

“I’d tell you,” he said, “but since you’re a businessman yourself you’d call me a liar.”

He then proceeded to tell me. He did a convincing job. In Florida real estate all the women were beautiful and all the men were brave, he believed it himself, and he possessed the lyricism of the Irish. Fortunes were made right under his nose every day. We decried a tax set-up under which is was impossible to make money and keep any of it except in capital gains or oil. He suggested we take a ride around and he’d show me a few of the listings they had. His car was just up the street in a parking lot. Why didn’t we take mine? I asked. It was parked out front.

“Nice cars, these Caddies,” he remarked, as we got in.

I clipped on the glasses. “I’m not much of a car fan. But, hell, when you can charge them off at least you got something out of the deal. What do you think of highway frontage along US 1 here? Has it priced itself out of the market yet?”

“Turn right,” he said, “and I’ll show you a block of it that’ll double in price in the next two years. Let me tell you what motel sites are bringing—per front foot—right now, within two miles of it—”

We drove out and looked at it. I asked a few questions about the taxes, total acreage, highway frontage, and how firm he thought the price was, but remained noncommittal. We stopped at a bar on the way back and had a drink. He wanted to know where I’d be staying the next few days, and I gave him the name of the motel in Marathon. Fitzpatrick was interested. He’d been in the business long enough to know when he smelled a sale.

I dropped him at his office, and headed south. On the way through Miami I stopped at a florist and wired two dozen yellow roses to Coral Blaine at her home address. They were her favorite flower.

He sometimes sent all the girls in the office inexpensive gifts when he was away on vacation, and I had an idea now. I could accomplish two things at once. On the way out of town, going south towards the Keys, I began watching for one of those roadside curio places that sold concrete flamingos. I finally located one, and pulled off.

It was the usual tourist-stopper seen along the highways all over south Florida, cluttered with four-foot clam shells from the Great Barrier Reef, cypress knees, alligator skins, coconut monkey heads, boxed fruit, and postcards. It was run by a cold-eyed man with a Georgia accent and a brow-beaten woman I took to be his wife. I poked disdainfully around in the junk for a while and finally settled on the gift boxes of exotic jellies, GUAVA, SEA GRAPE, TANGERINE MARMALADE—WE PACK AND SHIP.

“How much off for four?” I asked.

His bleak eyes shifted from me to the seven thousand dollars’ worth of car out front, and back again. “Same price, mister, one or a hundred.”

“I can see you’re a born merchandiser,” I said. I opened the briefcase, dug out the list Marian had given me, and wrote down the names and home addresses of the four girls: Bill McEwen at the paper, and Mrs. English, Jean Sessions, and Barbara Cullen at the office.

“One box to each address,” I said. I paid him, and added, “Give me a receipt. I’ve been stung on these deals before.”

He gave me one. I carefully stowed it in my wallet, and went out. The concrete flamingos were lined up along the fence at the right of the building. “What the devil are those things?” I asked. “I’ve been seeing them all along the road.”

“Ornamental flamingos,” he replied.

“What are they made of?” I asked. “And what good are they?”

“Plaster,” he said. “Concrete. These ones are concrete. You stick ’em up on lawns, or in the shrubbery. The ones with bases you set in paddlin’ pools.”

I shook my head. “God, the things you people sell to tourists.” He watched coldly as I got back in the car and drove off.

Nine

I arrived at Marathon and checked into the motel with almost an hour to spare before I was supposed to call Coral Blaine. I was practically out on my feet. After a shower and a harsh rubdown, I set up the tape recorder, put on the No. 5 roll, which was devoted almost altogether to her, and listened with the volume turned down. I found I didn’t need it any more. My mind ran ahead of the tape. There were tens of thousands of things I didn’t know about her and about Chapman, but everything on those five hours of tape was stamped into my brain.

I called her at exactly nine, and again it was easy. She’d got the roses; that helped. She was going to somebody’s house to play bridge. Two of the names she mentioned were familiar, so I made some appropriate comment. I was excited about tomorrow’s fishing, and I was getting burned up with Chris Lundgren. If he didn’t stop throwing Marian Forsyth’s advice at me I was going to switch my account to Merrill Lynch or somebody. Any time I needed that woman’s advice about anything—

She sniffed, and agreed with me. It was just too bad about poor Marian, but she guessed when women reached that age they got sort of—well, you know, frustrated and embittered.

“She’s in New York, you know. She called Bill McEwen today—”

“What’d she call her for?” I demanded suspiciously. “Bill, I mean.”

She gave her an ad to run in the paper. She’s selling her house. Bill said she told her she’d be back here Saturday.”

”Yeah. And I suppose she’d be talking about me behind my back to everybody in town. After I offered her six months’ pay, when she blew up and quit.”

“Well, I certainly wouldn’t worry about her talking about somebody—”

We exchanged the usual I-love-you’s and the I-miss-you’s, and hung up. It was beautiful, I thought. And I was becoming about as fond of the catty little witch as Marian was.

I called Captain Wilder of the Blue Water III, and told him I was in town and would be on the dock at eight a.m. He told me how to get there. I left a call for seven, took off my clothes, and fell into bed. The moment the light was out, I thought of Marian, and was so lonely for her I ached. I didn’t even have a photograph. Then twenty-four hours of tension uncoiled inside me like a breaking spring, and I dropped into blackness. . . .

She was running ahead of me along a sidewalk supported by giant cables in catenary curves, with only emptiness and fog beneath us. She was drawing away, and she ran into the fog and I lost her, and there was nothing but the sound of her footsteps dying away. I awoke and was tangled in the sheet and the phone was ringing.

It all came back, and for a moment I was sick with terror. Then it was gone. I’d expected it, of course; at the precise moment of waking you’re defenseless. It was nothing, and would wear off in a few days. I picked up the phone. It was seven o’clock.

Captain Wilder was a chubby and jovial man with an unending supply of chatter and dirty stories, and his mate was a Cuban boy with limited English. To both I was merely another faceless possessor of traveler’s checks, to be fished successfully and made happy. I wore the dark glasses, of course, and a long-vizored fishing cap. I used Chapman’s few words of Spanish on the Cuban boy, and talked a little about fishing at Acapulco.

There was no enjoyment in it. I kept thinking of his body lying down there somewhere crushed under the tons of water. We didn’t catch anything to speak of, which was good. I wouldn’t have to fight off the photographers. I explained we’d have to cut the first day short because I had an important business call to make, and we were back at the dock at three.

That was two p.m., New Orleans time. I called from the motel.

“Chris? Chapman. How are you making out with that Warwick?”

“Oh, hello, Mr. Chapman,” he replied. “The fishing all right?”

“Lousy,” I said shortly. “But about that oil stock—?”

“Hmmm. Let’s see. We unloaded six thousand shares of it yesterday, at two seven-eighths. It went to three-quarters, and we disposed of two more at that price. It sold off to five-eighths at closing, and has been hanging there and at a half all day. So we still have two thousand.”

“Right,” I said briskly. “Just let it ride until we can get three-quarters.” I made a rough calculation. “Now, look. My cash position must be around thirty thousand at the moment, or a little better? That right?”

“Ye-es—I think so. I haven’t got the exact figures, but it should be in the neighborhood of thirty-four thousand.”

“Fine. Now here’s what I want you to do. I came in from fishing early so I’d catch you in time, since tomorrow’s Saturday. Send me a check for twenty-five thousand, airmail Special Delivery, care the Clive Hotel, Miami. That’s C-l-i-v-e, Clive. Get it off this afternoon, without fail. I’ve run into something here that’s beginning to look terrific, if I can get it at my price, and I think I can. But I’m going to need some cash to hit ’em with, either for an option or as earnest money when I make the offer.”

“Real estate?” he asked. I could sense disapproval. The securities men and the land dealers shared a deep mutual distrust of each other’s “investments”. Then I realized it ran deeper than that; he didn’t have a great deal of faith in my judgment. I’d got where I was in the stock market by riding on Marian Forsyth’s back, and now that I’d ditched her there was no telling what would happen. That was fine. What I was doing was right in character. “Excuse me,” he went on. “None of my business, of course. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Not at all,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it is real estate. Highway frontage on US 1. And it’s big. If I can get it, I could net a quarter million, after taxes in eighteen months. It’s going to take a sizable chunk of cash, but I’d worry about that after I hit ’em with the offer. And you’d shoot that check out to me right away, huh?”

“Yes, sir. It’d be in the mail tonight. Airmail Special.”

“Thanks,” I said. “G’bye.”

I hung up, breathed a quiet sigh, and poured a drink of the Scotch. We were rolling.

Next I called the reservations desk at the Clive and asked for a room Sunday night, and added, “I’m expecting a very important letter that’ll probably get there before I do. Be sure to hang on to it.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Chapman. We’ll hold it.”

I took out some stationery and a pen and practiced writing the signature for a solid hour, striving for perfection and at the same time trying to condition myself to signing Harris Chapman so it would be automatic and I couldn’t slip and sign Jerry Forbes some time when I was thinking of something else. It occurred to me that in the short time I’d been in Florida I had been three different people—George Hamilton, Jerry Forbes, and now Chapman, and that in another ten days I’d go back to being Forbes again. A little more of this and I wouldn’t really know who I was.

I compared the results of the practice with the originals on the traveler’s checks. To my eye, they were indistinguishable; presumably an expert could tell them apart, but there was no reason the question should ever arise. I tore up the sheets and flushed them down the John.

Around six I showered and shaved, and dressed in one of Chapman’s suits. The trousers were about two inches too large in the waist, but it didn’t show with the jacket buttoned. Wearing his clothes made me feel queasy, but it had to be done. I found a surprisingly good restaurant and had dinner, after two Martinis at the bar, but it was necessary, for strategic purposes, to ruin the steak beyond the semblance of flavor. Chapman always ate them incinerated, so I ordered it well-done. When the waiter brought it out, I cut into it just once, beckoned peremptorily, and told him to take it back and tell the chef to cook it.

He returned with it a few minutes later. I cut into it, scrutinized it carefully, and gave him a glacial stare.

Tm sorry,” I said, “but this steak is still raw. Maybe if I wrote the chef a note—”

The place was crowded, and people at nearby tables were turning to stare. I stared back at them, completely unperturbed. The waiter would have liked nothing better than to poison me, but he removed it once more. This time I ate it when he brought it back. It was like charcoal.

I paid with one of the traveler’s checks. The cashier glanced at the signature, and as she counted out my change she said, “I’m sorry about the difficulty with your steak Mr. Chapman. We’ll do better next time.”

It had been quite successful.

I called Coral Blaine around eight, and it went off beautifully. I was discovering again how right Marian had been. She’d said I wouldn’t have much trouble with her. She was such a featherbrained chatterer she’d probably never pay any great attention to anything I said. I got her started on some of her upcoming “parties” and let her rattle. It was only towards the end that I mentioned the real-estate deal and said I’d probably be going back to Miami in another day or so.

The next day I raised and landed a sail, but told Wilder to release it. It was Saturday, of course, so I didn’t have to talk to Chris. I called Coral. It was becoming routine by now. When there was a pause in the flow of her gossip, I asked, “How would you like to live in Florida, angel?”

“Heavens, darling, what are you talking about?”

“Just an idea,” I said. “We might move down here some day. Not for a few years, of course, but it’s worth thinking about. This is a big-time country, and there’s real money to be made here. I’m feeling out a deal right now that could put a quarter of a million in our pocket. That’s a lot of mink stoles, angel.”

“Gracious, Harris, anybody would think I was marrying you for mink. But about moving to Florida—I’d have to think about that. With all the dear friends we have here.”

Well, she had one more dear friend there than she’d had yesterday. Marian Forsyth would have arrived in Thomaston this morning.

I’d hardly hung up when the phone rang. It was Fitzpatrick at last. “Well, Mr. Chapman, how’s the fishing been?”

“Not too bad,” I said. “I released a six-foot sail today.”

“Fine, I’m glad to hear it. But you want to come down in January some time and hit ’em off Palm Beach when they’re schooled up. Magnificent fishing.”

I smiled. Fitzpatrick was one of the good ones. He’d probably never fished in his life, but he’d talked to a fisherman before he’d called me.

“But I’ll get right to what I called you for,” he went on easily. “The owner of that piece of highway frontage dropped by today and we talked about it a little. Now he didn’t say so in so many words, but I’ve just got a hunch he might be open to an offer.”

“Hmmm,” I said thoughtfully. “It’d take a lot of cash to swing a deal like that— What kind of financing did you say it had on it now?”

“One of the Miami banks has a first mortgage for a hundred and fifty thousand. But I could almost guarantee that if you wanted to refinance, you could get two.”

“And he’s asking three seventy-five?”

“That’s right. But as I say, you can always try with an offer.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’m coming back to Miami tomorrow for a few days, and I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Good. Ah, where’ll you be staying, Mr. Chapman?”

“Clive Hotel,” I said.

* * *

We fished with indifferent success until shortly after noon the next day, and came in. I checked out of the motel around two-thirty and drove to Miami. The Clive was a large hotel on Biscayne Boulevard and very convenient to everything downtown. The doorman called the garage to send a man after the car. I followed the boy in to the desk, and when I asked for my reservation the airmail Special from Webster & Adcock was waiting for me. I slit it open and looked at the check for twenty-five thousand dollars. This was just the first trickle, to break the dike.

After I’d registered, I stepped over to the cashier’s window and cashed three more of the traveler’s checks. There was no use letting them go to waste, and I was going to need plenty of cash before I was through. We went up to the room. It was one of the expensive ones, looking out over the waterfront park and the bay. As soon as the boy was gone, I put through the call to Coral Blaine. I was always jittery while that was hanging over my head. And it was time, too, to give her the first little nudge.

“I’m back in Miami, angel,” I said. “At the Clive Hotel, if you have to reach me for anything the next few days.”

She was in a kittenish mood tonight. “I just hope you’re behavin’ yourself

“I am,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m working. That real-estate deal with Fitzpatrick.”

“Darling, you’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“I’m never on vacation when there’s money to be made. You know that, honey. Oh, say, I saw Marian Forsyth on the street this afternoon. Did you know she was in Miami?”

“You couldn’t have. Dear, she’s right here in Thomaston. Don’t you remember, I told you—”

“Sure. I know you said she’d told Bill she was coming back Saturday. But I could have sworn this was her. She went past in a car.”

She became considerably cooler. “Maybe you just miss her, Harris. Or you’re thinking about her.”

“Cut it out, Coral. You know better than that. The only thing I’m thinking about her is that I don’t trust her. But you’re sure she’s there?”

“Of course, dear. I saw her myself, just this morning.”

”Well, you watch out for her. She’s probably spreading lies behind my back. By God, what does she want, didn’t I offer her half a year’s pay?”

“Darling,” she said wearily, “you’ve been more than fair with her. But do we have to talk about Mrs. Forsyth?”

“Of course not, honey. And I’m sorry. It was just somebody that looked like her. Let’s talk about the future Mrs. Chapman.”

When we’d hung up, I got Fitzpatrick’s card out of the wallet and called him at his home. I caught him in. “Chapman,” I said. “You remember—?”