Kiss and Kill

Chapter XII

While I always let Mavis handle the correspondence with women without paying much attention to what she was writing, she didn’t know enough about business matters to handle that end. I had to do this myself.

The first letter I dictated was to Herman Gwynn, merely expressed interest in his ad and asked for further details. The second was to the Westfield, New York Chamber of Commerce. It went:

“Now,” I said to Mavis, “just exactly what have you written to this Helen Larson?”

Mavis’s letters to the woman had followed their usual pattern. My wife wasn’t very imaginative, which was the reason I could let her handle the love correspondence without supervision. She always told women approximately the same thing, varying only such items as place of birth and my work background to conform geographically to whatever part of the country we happened to live in at the moment.

This time she had me born on a farm in central Florida, as usual gave me only a high school diploma and had me the hired manager of a beach concession which sold sports equipment in order to explain our exclusive address. I discovered I had confessed to a steady income of forty-eight hundred a year, out of which I had managed to save slightly more than a seven-thousand-dollar nest egg.

Mavis had mentioned herself as my younger sister who lived with me and held a minor stenographic position. And as usual she had carefully inserted the information that I expected my sister to continue to live with me in the event I married.

Aside from that, the only real information she had given out was that we had no relatives, having decided to dispense with a pair of aged parents on this trip. She had been purposely vague concerning the business-partnership angle mentioned in my ad, merely saying that I was investigating several alternatives.

When Mavis finished briefing me on what had passed between me and Helen Larson, I got out the Atlas and located St. Joseph, Missouri.

“About fifty miles from Kansas City,” I said after studying the map for a few moments. “If she doesn’t know anybody, that ought to be far enough away to meet her. Write her a letter and mention that I plan to be in K. C. soon. Don’t pin it down to a definite date, but ask if she’d be interested in meeting me and talking things over in person.”

“All right,” Mavis said.

She got out her portable typewriter, and for the rest of the evening I watched television while she typed.

We got an answer from Herman Gwynn four days later, which led me to believe he was anxious to unload the store. In his letter Gwynn explained that his reason for wanting to sell out was that his wife’s health required movement to a warmer and drier climate. He gave additional details about the business, including that the building was located on Main Street in the heart of West-field’s shopping district and that there were still six years to run on its ten-year lease, with an option to renew when the lease expired. He employed one male clerk and one female combination bookkeeper-clerk, both of which I could either keep or replace as I desired, as neither was under contract and could be discharged on fifteen days’ notice.

Gwynn also enclosed a financial statement showing that the business was unencumbered and that its net profit for the past two years had run $5,412.13 and $4,928.17 respectively.

Noting that the financial statement listed the bookkeeper-clerk’s salary as $2,500, it occurred to me that if Mavis and I hadn’t been interested in the store merely as a decoy, it actually might make a pretty good legitimate business enterprise.

I said to Mavis, “I think we’d better sink our hooks into this thing fast before somebody really looking for a business makes him an offer. If Gwynn hasn’t doctored his figures, a man and wife operating the place together and letting one employee go could net seventy-five hundred a year.”

Just to satisfy my curiosity I got out a paper and pencil and figured out how long it would take to retire a fifteen-thousand-dollar mortgage at four percent interest if the principal was paid off at the rate of twenty-five hundred a year. It worked out to six years, with the first year’s payment being thirty-one hundred and reducing at the rate of one hundred dollars a year, so that the final payment would be only twenty-six hundred.

Mavis had been watching me as I figured. I looked up at her and said, “If a couple with ten thousand dollars to put down could squeeze by on forty-four hundred the first year, and an increase of a hundred dollars a year for the next five years, they’d end up with a clear business bringing in about seventy-five hundred a year.”

Her eyes turned bright. “Why don’t we take it, Sam? I mean really.”

I scowled at her and the brightness in her eyes faded. “In the first place we haven’t got ten thousand dollars. In the second place, I’m not sweating away six years of my life for the privilege of spending the rest of it in a one-horse town. Not while this racket continues to pay what it does.”

“What good does it do us?” she asked quietly. “After five and a half years we’ve got two thousand dollars less than we had after pulling our first job together in Los Angeles.”

I crumpled up the paper I had been figuring on and dropped it in an ashtray. “The good it does us is that we work less than six months a year, and not very hard even then. And live in luxury the rest of the time.”

Mavis didn’t say any more about it.

The reply from Helen Larson came the day after we heard from Herman Gwynn. She said she’d be delighted to meet me in Kansas City to talk things over, and wanted to know just when I planned to be there.

Three days afterward a letter came from the West-field Chamber of Commerce which read:

I put in a long-distance call to Herman Gwynn. When I got him on the phone, I said, “This is Sam Howard, Mr. Gwynn. The man who wrote you about your store, you know. I’m phoning from Florida.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “How are you, sir?” He had a rather pleasant voice, just beginning to turn high with age.

“Fine, Mr. Gwynn. I’m very interested in your proposition, and would like to come to Westfield to discuss it further. But I don’t want to make that long a trip and have it turn out to be a wild goose chase. Is there any chance of your closing a deal with someone else within the next couple of weeks?”

“Well, a couple of other fellows have inquired about it,” he said cautiously. “I couldn’t rightly guarantee not to sell out if I got the right offer.”

“Naturally not,” I said. “That’s why I called. To make you an offer which will protect us both. I’m willing to send you a check for two hundred dollars as a guarantee of good faith providing you’ll guarantee me first crack at the store. The agreement won’t bind either of us to any particular price, but will merely give me the privilege of meeting any offer you get from any other source before you close the deal.”

He thought this over a minute before he said slowly, “How soon you planning to come up here, Mr. Howard?”

“I can’t make it in less than about two weeks.”

“That’s hardly no time at all,” he said. “You don’t need to send any check, Mr. Howard. You sound like an honest man to me. And in these parts a man’s word is as good as his signature. I won’t guarantee not to bargain with no one else, but I’m willing to guarantee not to close any deal within the next two weeks, so you can get up here, look the business over and make an offer.”

“Fine,” I said. “You sound to me like an honest man too.”

He asked me to let him know when I expected to arrive, and he’d meet me at the railroad station.

I said, “I may arrive by car. And I’m not sure, but I may be on my honeymoon. I’ll phone you when I get there.”

He sounded pleased that I was getting married. “I’ll look forward to meeting you and your bride then,” he said.

All that was left then was to check train schedules and wire Helen Larson the date I expected to arrive in Kansas City. It was then Friday, the thirteenth of November, and I actually planned to arrive in K.C. on the seventeenth. But I gave myself a day’s leeway and asked her to meet me at the Croissant Hotel on Wednesday, the eighteenth.

When Mavis and I took the train from Miami we were still the rich and well-dressed Howards. We didn’t change clothes and character until we got to Memphis, which was at the end of our train ride.

In Memphis we put into storage all of my tailored clothes and Mavis’s evening gowns, expensive dresses and furs. I switched to the good grade but slightly ill-fitting suit which made me look like an honest but not-too-well-off clerk of some kind. Mavis returned to her staid ready-made suits, her prim hairdo and the sedate manner of an inhibited spinster.

I bought a secondhand Ford in Memphis and drove the last four hundred and seventy miles.

Mavis and I checked into adjoining rooms at the Croissant at six P.M. on November seventeenth. The Croissant was a good second-class hotel, fully respectable enough to match our supposed middle-class respectability, yet with rates within the means of the frugal characters we were supposed to be.

That night when Mavis slipped into my room through the connecting bath and crept into my arms, she said, “Oh, Sam. I can’t bear to think of the next two months, watching you with another woman again. Couldn’t we at least talk to this Gwynn man with the eight thousand we have?”

“No,” I said. “And I don’t want to hear you mention it again.”