Kiss and Kill

Chapter XI

During the next three months Mavis and I lived life as it should be lived. Daytimes we swam and fished or just lazed on our private beach until we were both brown as nuts. Evenings we toured Miami’s night spots.

Once she dropped her spinster-sister role, Mavis was almost unrecognizable as the same woman. In evening gowns designed to accentuate her ripe figure instead of hide it as the rigidly-cut suits had, and with her coal-black hair hanging free instead of being pulled back in a tight bun, she caught every male eye whenever we entered a place.

In place of the staid and rather quiet spinster Tuscola had known, she became her true self. And her true self was a woman whose every movement and gesture was a proud flaunting of her sex.

Mavis had matured in five years. She was now thirty years old, and while she had changed little physically, she had undergone a profound psychological change. In place of the naïve young girl who had once picked me as a mark, there was a grown woman, with all the poise and self-confidence of mature experience. She had lost something in the process. The fresh air of innocence which had originally attracted me was gone forever. But she had gained something even more interesting to men in its place. She had become the embodiment of sex. Her walk had the languorous motion of a sleepy cat; in her smile was enough promise to make even an octogenarian breathe heavily; and in her green eyes there was a constant invitation.

Mavis would have driven a jealous male crazy, for men had a way of looking at her with open hunger. Fortunately I wasn’t a jealous man and, even after all these years, I was still unquestioned head of the family. She might flirt mildly with other men for the sake of gratifying her ego, but she wouldn’t have dared to push it to the point of really making me jealous. She might also tease me a bit about unimportant things such as my elaborate carefulness, but she knew better than to belittle me in any way.

In some ways our relationship had an old-world flavor. Her role was to please her man, and deliberately making herself as alluringly feminine as she could was one of her marital responsibilities.

The careful habits I had developed in business had to some extent influenced our normal living habits too. When I wasn’t playing the role of the lonely and frugal bachelor for the benefit of some equally lonely and frugal woman, I still tended to be pretty fast with a checkbook. But I wasn’t the reckless spendthrift I had been in the early days. Perhaps this was partly because I was maturing too, and the pleasure I had once gotten from merely throwing money away had begun to wane. We still lived high, but where a few years ago we wouldn’t have missed a night on the town until our money began to run short, we now often spent a quiet evening at home.

The result was that our money stretched much farther. Five years earlier we could have spent ten thousand dollars in six weeks. But our profit from the Tuscola job lasted three full months. Mavis gave me the news that our idyllic life was about to end one Friday afternoon. When I came in from a pre-cocktail swim, I found her pensively studying the bank statement which had come that morning.

“Do you know that we’ve gone through almost everything we made on the Tuscola job?” she greeted me.

I hadn’t known, but it didn’t particularly surprise me. Between jobs I let Mavis do all the worrying about our financial status, deliberately paying no attention to it myself. But I had been expecting the bad news at any time now.

I mixed a couple of drinks, handed Mavis one and spread my towel on the seat of one of the rattan chairs so that my swim trunks wouldn’t get it wet.

“I suppose that means that it’s back to work,” I said. “Any prospects?”

During what you might call our vacations, it had become Mavis’s job to line up potential clients. She did this by answering lonely-hearts advertisements in my name, whatever that happened to be at the moment, and building up a running correspondence with any women who sounded promising. Since I insisted on the women having rather strict attributes, sometimes it was rather difficult to locate just the right one. When she hit a snag, Mavis would run lonely-hearts advertisements in my name herself, which usually turned up somebody to satisfy my exacting requirements.

In line with my insistence on safety all along the way, the requirements I demanded were based on caution. The most important, a hangover from our close call in Bismarck, Indiana some years back, was that the woman have no near relatives she’d have to leave behind, so that the chance of anyone getting curious about her disappearance was lessened. If she had children or parents who lived with her and planned to continue making their home with her after she was married, it was acceptable. As long as whatever relatives she had were on the scene, they could be quietly disposed of between the time of the funeral and the time I collected, and a simple announcement that they’d gone back to their original home town would explain their sudden absence. It was surviving relatives, who didn’t live with the mark, who might develop curiosity, that I tried to avoid.

Another thing I insisted on was that my potential wives didn’t have too much money. Nobody is likely to pay much attention to the movements of a lonely spinster or widow who’s worth only five or ten thousand dollars. But pick a woman in the hundred-thousand-dollar bracket, and her fellow townspeople are all going to be curious about who she’s marrying, how she met the man, and where she intends to live.

The third attribute I insisted on was that she be at least fairly presentable, and not more than five years older than me. I didn’t insist she be a raving beauty, because if she had been she wouldn’t also be a lonely-heart, but I didn’t want the citizens of whatever town we settled in to start wondering why a passably personable guy like me had ever married a revolting old bag.

Mavis took a sip of her drink before answering my question. Then she said in a wistful voice, “Sam, you know just a few years ago we once had nearly seventy-thousand dollars in our hands all at once?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The first one. Hannah.”

“Now we’ve got our five thousand bait money, plus about three thousand more. It doesn’t sound like much progress.”

“We’ve got five years of handsome living behind us.”

Mavis took a deep breath and said rapidly, “Why don’t we really do what you’re always pretending to do when you line up a new wife, Sam? Use the eight thousand we have as a down payment on some small business.”

“Oh, cut it out,” I said irritably. “I don’t want to listen to that crap again. We’ve got a safe racket that pays thirty thousand a year, tax free, for four to five months’ work. I’m not breaking my back for peanuts in some two-bit retail store. What’ve you got in the way of prospects?”

With a little sigh she rose and went into the bedroom. She returned with the accordion folder in which she kept all her business correspondence.

“I had to run an ad this time,” she said. “I couldn’t find a single one to meet your lordship’s tastes through the lonely-hearts clubs or by answering individual advertisements.”

From the folder she drew a clipping of a small ad she had run in the personal column of a national confession magazine. It read:

Grunting, I handed the clipping back to Mavis and she carefully filed it back in the folder.

“I got forty-seven answers,” Mavis said. “Most of them from crackpots, as usual. Six sounded promising, but after a couple of exchanges of letters, I cut it down to two. I sent both of them your snapshot — that fuzzy one where you’re far enough back so that it shows your handsome build and they can make out that you’re not exactly repulsive, but your face isn’t clear enough to be of much use as identification. Here’s all the correspondence on them.”

She handed me two piles of letters, about a dozen pieces in each. It took me twenty minutes to go through the lot, and meantime Mavis started dinner.

One of the women was a thirty-seven-year-old librarian in a small Arkansas town. She had five thousand dollars in the bank, she was a spinster and lived with her widowed mother. Her only other living relative was an uncle in Canada. Her photograph showed a plump, round-faced woman with a timid smile, who looked as though she probably didn’t smoke, drink or use swear words stronger than Gosh.

The other was a thirty-two-year-old woman whose parents had died six months before and left the farm to her with the provision that she look after her younger brother. This wasn’t much of a responsibility, she explained, as he was only ten years younger than she was, and perfectly capable of earning his own living. However, until he got married and set up his own home, he expected to make his home with her.

She said she had sold the farm for eight thousand dollars, five of which she was willing to invest in some suitable business if we managed to come to terms. Currently she and her brother were living in a rooming house in St. Joseph, Missouri. She had no other relatives, and added rather wistfully that she didn’t even have any close friends. It seemed that during her folks’ lifetime, both she and her younger brother had been too isolated by farm life to develop any friends.

The picture she sent was a miniature portrait photograph showing only her head and shoulders and giving no indication of what kind of figure she had. She had light hair, parted in the middle and hanging lifelessly on both sides of her face with no sign of wave in it. Her features were regular enough, but what looked like steel-rimmed glasses did nothing for them. Nevertheless, I judged that with a little help from Mavis she might be made passably presentable from the neck up.

I went back to her letters to see if I could get some idea of what her figure was like from a physical description I remembered seeing and skimming over. When I located it, I learned she was five-feet-four and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. At least she wasn’t fat.

She also said her hair was ash blonde and her eyes gray, then added the interesting information that she still had all of her own teeth. On second reading I discovered that the picture was three years old, but she assured me she hadn’t changed appreciably in the interim.

Mavis called, “Dinner in ten minutes,” and I put the letters aside to go shower and dress.

We stayed home that evening. After dinner Mavis and I sat on the cottage’s screened porch and discussed business.

“I like the sound of this farm-bred woman best,” I said. “What’s her name again?”

“Helen Larson. A Swede, I guess.”

“You been following the ads of small-town businesses up for sale?”

“Just the last couple of weeks. There isn’t any point in keeping a record of old out-of-date ads for places which would probably be sold when we got around to inquiring about them. There’s a small dairy in Benton, Illinois, with an asking price of thirty thousand, with a third down.”

“Too close to Tuscola,” I objected. “We’ll stay away from that section of the country this trip.”

“Well, there’s a tavern for sale in Rome, New York.”

I gave her a disgusted look. “Without me you’d last about five minutes in this business. A tavern means a liquor license, and the New York State ABC board checks license applicants clear back to their birth.”

“You wouldn’t have to apply for the license until after you bought the place,” Mavis said defensively. “And since you’d never actually buy it—”

I cut her off by asking, “What else?”

“A farm appliance store in Westfield, New York. That’s way over in the west end of the state. Twenty-five thousand cash.”

“That’s our baby,” I said. “Where’s the ad?”

The ad had been cut from the current issue of a national farm journal, Mavis told me. It read:

The advertiser was a man named Herman Gwynn with a Main Street address in Westfield.

“A farm appliance store ought to appeal to a gal who was raised on a farm,” I said. “Take a couple of letters.”