Chapter X

I met Mavis at the station when she came in from Chicago. We both kept our expressions appropriately sad, but when I gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek for the benefit of station onlookers, deep in her green eyes I could detect the suppressed relief she always felt when we neared the end of a deal.

Even in her ordinary dress Mavis had never been a beautiful woman so much as a desirable one. Except for sensually full lips, her features were too thin for real beauty. Yet properly clothed in the extremely feminine clothes she loved, she could start any man’s pulse hammering.

As she was now, though, no man would have looked at her twice. Her tailored suit gave her a neat appearance, but it effectively hid the soft lines of her body. The prim way in which her sleek black hair was drawn back tightly gave her face a thin, bony appearance entirely missing when she wore it loose. Her stiff walk, lacking even the slightest hip sway, plus a total absence of makeup, completed the illusion that she was an eminently respectable and uninteresting spinster.

I had trained her well. She was no longer the amateur thespian she had been when we met. Now, in any part I set for her, she could put on as convincing a performance as any top actress.

I knew she was dying to ask how things had gone so far, but all she said was, “I’m terribly sorry, Sam.”

The loungers at the station, watching us, nodded sympathetically.

Mavis didn’t even ask any questions when we got back to the house. Even in privacy I insisted on preserving appearances. Once during dinner she did look at me somewhat pleadingly, but when I merely said, “Later,” she let it drop.

In a town of only three thousand, there isn’t much choice of funeral homes. I wouldn’t have picked Jackson’s otherwise, because Lyman Jackson was as curious about other people’s business as an old woman. But he happened to run the only funeral parlor in town.

After dinner I took Mavis with me when I went to keep my appointment with Jackson. The plump, benign-looking funeral director courteously showed us to chairs in his office and seated himself behind a discreetly expensive desk.

“I can’t begin to express my sorrow for your tragic loss, Mr. Henshaw,” he said unctuously, then turned grave eyes on Mavis. “I know your sister by sight, of course, but I don’t believe we’ve ever been formally introduced.”

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. My sister Mavis, Mr. Jackson.”

“How do you do?” Mavis asked politely.

“A pleasure, Miss Henshaw.” His attention reverted to me. “I think first we should discuss the date and time of the funeral. Later, if you feel up to it, I’ll show you our casket display and we’ll talk over the type of funeral you wish. Or, if you prefer, we’ll postpone that business until tomorrow.”

I said, “I’d rather get everything settled tonight. I’d like the funeral as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” Jackson said, benignly placing his palms together. “Let’s see now. This is Wednesday and the paper publishes tomorrow. We can have the notice printed and schedule the funeral as early as Friday, if you wish. Unless you want to allow more time for out-of-town relatives to get here.”

“My folks are too old to travel,” I told him. “And Hazel didn’t have any relatives. Make it Friday.”

We completed arrangements within a half-hour, deciding on a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar package funeral. Funeral arrangements were another thing I was always very careful about. In a small town too cheap a funeral risks local criticism. Too elaborate a one excites comment. I always tried to keep them at an anonymous in-between level which would create little stir and be quickly forgotten.

After our business was completed, we had to go through the trying ordeal of satisfying the undertaker’s curiosity about our future plans.

“Will this affect your negotiations with Mr. Benjamin?” he asked me as he escorted us to the door.

I was tempted to make some noncommittal reply, but then it occurred to me there might be some advantage in making use of Jackson’s tendency to gossip. When Mavis and I pulled up stakes and left Tuscola shortly after the funeral, it might create less comment if the town were prepared in advance.

I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t much heart for going into the hardware business right now, Mr. Jackson. Actually I haven’t given my plans for buying out Mr. Benjamin’s store a thought since this happened. But offhand I doubt that Mr. Benjamin and I will come to terms now. Hazel and I planned on the store together, and I don’t think I could face it alone.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the undertaker said. “Mr. Benjamin will be disappointed. Undoubtedly he’ll be able to find another buyer, though, so it will only temporarily postpone his retirement. I hope the town isn’t going to lose you, Mr. Henshaw.”

“I hadn’t thought of that yet, either. But I wouldn’t be surprised. It was only Mr. Benjamin’s magazine ad which brought Hazel and me here in the first place. If I’m not going into business here, there won’t be anything to hold me.”

“Except sorrowful memories,” Jackson agreed. “And I suppose it’s wisest to flee those when you have no other roots. The town will be sorry to lose you, Mr. Henshaw, but I can’t say I blame you for wanting to leave a community which has brought you such sorrow.”

I hoped his feeling would be reflected by the rest of the community. The biggest single factor in our success was that we always managed to leave behind us a feeling of liking and respect and sympathy whenever we finally departed from a community. In the early days we had often left suspicion behind instead. A good deal of my careful planning was designed merely to leave pleasant memories of us in the townspeople’s minds. Pleasant memories eventually fade and die, whereas suspicion has an unsettling habit of getting into the newspapers and warning future marks.

We finally broke away from Lyman Jackson. Mavis and I didn’t speak until we were safely home and I had checked the house to make sure it was empty, locked the doors and drawn the Venetian blinds. This was safe now though I had refused to allow it before Hazel’s death. The neighbors would expect to see drawn blinds at a home which had just suffered a tragedy.

When we were seated in the front room with drinks, I said, “Okay, you can relax now.”

Mavis let out a deep breath. “Any sign of suspicion?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Chief Stoyle made a routine investigation, but everything was friendly and sympathetic. He doesn’t even want to talk to you. The ticklish part is yet to come, though.”

“You mean the bank and the insurance company? Why should it be ticklish?”

“I’m not worried about the bank,” I said. “Soon as probate court gives the green light, I can withdraw the ten thousand in Hazel’s and my joint account, and the bank won’t have the right even to question it. But ever since Houston, insurance adjusters have always made me nervous.”

“They’ve never yet fussed over the piddling little policies you insist on,” Mavis said. “Five thousand dollars, when we could have cleaned up. We should have done what I wanted and insured her for ten thousand with a double-indemnity clause.”

“Sure,” I said. “If I listened to your advice, we’d be in jail long ago. Can’t I get it through your head that insurance companies are always automatically suspicious of accidental deaths when there’s a double-indemnity clause? The only safe policy to fool with is straight life, and even then it’s dangerous to get greedy.”

“But for fifteen thousand more,” Mavis said wistfully.

“And fifteen times the risk. Remember that insurance investigator in Houston? If they’d check on a policy that’s been in effect twenty years, what do you think they’d do about one that’s been in effect only two months? They’d want to look into my background clear back to birth. And when they found out Sam Henshaw didn’t have any background farther back than two months, we’d be in real trouble.”

“I suppose so,” Mavis said reluctantly.

“Five thousand is about the limit any company will pay off on a new policy without suspicion,” I told her. “We’ve got the five thousand Hazel put up to match mine in the bank account, plus five thousand insurance. What more do you want for two months’ work?”

“Nothing, I guess. I know you’ve got more brains than I have, Sam. But we used to make such big scores. Sometimes for only two weeks’ work.”

“We used to be constantly one jump ahead of the police too, if you’ll remember,” I growled at her. “Now nobody ever gives us a suspicious look.”

Until we turned out the lights and went to bed, we continued to follow my strict rule of keeping in character even when we were sure no one was watching. We had kept our conversation low enough so that no one could have heard it even by listening at a window, and nothing in our actions indicated that we were anything but a brother and sister having a nightcap together before we went to bed. In spite of Mavis’s amusement at what she regarded as my overcarefulness, I didn’t believe in risking even the remote chance that a peeping Tom might peer through the slats of a Venetian blind just at the wrong moment.

On the second floor of a darkened house, even I agreed that such precautions weren’t necessary, however.

Ten minutes after I turned out my light and climbed into bed, the white figure I expected appeared in my bedroom doorway. As she padded toward me on naked feet, the glow of a nearby street lamp which cast its subdued light through the window bathed her in a soft glow.

She had loosened her dark hair so that it tumbled inky-black against the white of her bare shoulders. Her body moved with its natural animal sway instead of with the sedate stiffness she had assumed to go with her tailored clothes, and her full lips curved in a totally unsisterly smile.

As she came into my arms, she whispered, “It’s been so long, Sam. Two full months of pretending to be your sister. And six weeks of lying awake nights thinking of you in here with Hazel.”

“It was just as bad for me,” I said in her ear. “How do you think I felt lying here next to a skinny bag of bones, when I knew my own lusciously-stacked legal wife was sleeping in the next room?”

“Am I lusciously stacked?” she wanted to know.

I didn’t trust my memory. I started checking to make sure.

As Mavis had optimistically prophesied, we didn’t encounter a bit of suspicion from any source. Tom Benjamin was disappointed that I wasn’t going to buy out his hardware business after all, but he was understanding enough about it. He was an amiable old man, but a shrewd businessman nevertheless, and I think he had admired my caution in approaching the deal even though he was anxious to unload the store and retire. Putting off definitely committing myself until I had thoroughly checked the business, and living in Tuscola long enough to make sure Hazel and I would like the place as a permanent residence impressed him only as sound business sense.

Now he accepted at face value my explanation that Tuscola could have only sad memories for me since my wife’s death, and that I wanted to move back to Chicago.

Neither the bank nor the insurance company indicated any suspicion either. Within two weeks of Hazel’s death, I got the insurance check in the mail. Meanwhile I had gotten a court order unfreezing Hazel’s and my joint bank account. When I closed out the account, the only comment Bank President Smathers made was an expression of regret that the town was losing me.

Fifteen days after Hazel’s funeral, Mavis and I drove out of town ten thousand dollars richer than we had entered it.

We still didn’t entirely relax, though. I didn’t believe in upsetting careful planning by getting careless at the last minute. We drove to Chicago, just as we had announced we intended to when we left Tuscola, and I sold the car. After that, if there were ever a belated attempt to track us from Tuscola, the trail would end at a used-car lot. That in itself wouldn’t be suspicious, as there is nothing illegal about selling your car. It would merely prove that we’d returned to Chicago just as we said. But if anyone tried to trace us beyond the lot by attempting to locate the parents we were supposed to have in Chicago, he’d run into a dead end. Mavis and I had carefully avoided anything but the vaguest references to them, and an investigation of the Henshaws in the Chicago phone book would only turn up the information that none of them had ever heard of us.

A week after we left Tuscola we rented a small cottage at Miami Beach under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Howard.

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