They Call Me Patrice

Chapter Eight

His arm was draped negligently atop the car door, elbow out. The door fell open. He made way for her by shifting leisurely over on the seat, without offering to rise. His indolent ignoring of manners was more insulting than any overt rudeness would have been.

“I’m sorry I had to call. I thought you’d forgotten about our talk. It’s been more than a week now.”

“Forgotten?” she said. “I wish it were that easy.”

“I see you’ve become a depositor of the Standard Trust since our last meeting.”

She shot him an involuntary look of shock, without answering.

“Five thousand dollars.”

She drew a quick breath.

“If you get around enough in the right circles you find out interesting things.” He smiled. “Well?”

“I haven’t any money with me. I haven’t used the account yet. I’ll have to cash a check in the morning and—”

“They give a checkbook with each account, don’t they? And you have that with you, most likely—”

She gave him a look of unfeigned surprise.

“I have a fountain pen right here in my pocket. I’ll turn on the dashboard lights a minute. Let’s get it over and done with. The quickest way’s the best. I’ll tell you what to write. To Stephen Georgesson. Not to Cash or Bearer. Five hundred.”

“Five hundred?” she repeated.

“That’s academic,” he replied.

She didn’t understand what he meant, and was incautious to let him go on past that point without stopping him.

“That’s all. And then your signature. The date, if you want.”

She stopped short. “I can’t do this.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to. I don’t want it any other way. I won’t accept cash.”

“But this passes through the bank with both our names on it, mine as payer, yours as payee.”

“There’s such a flood of checks passing through the bank every month, it’s not even likely to be noticed. It could be a debt of Hugh’s, you know, that you’re settling up for him.”

“Why are you so anxious to have a check?” she asked irresolutely.

A crooked smile looped one corner of his mouth. “Why should you object, if I don’t? It’s to your advantage, isn’t it? I’m playing right into your hands. It comes back into your possession after it clears the bank. After that you’re holding tangible evidence of this — of blackmail — against me if you should ever care to prosecute, which is something you haven’t got so far. Remember, up to this point, it’s just your word against mine. I can deny this whole thing happened. Once this check goes through, you have proof.”

He said, a little more tartly than he’d yet spoken to her, “Shall we get through? You’re anxious to get back. And I’m anxious to pull out of here.”

She handed him the completed check and pen.

He was smiling again now. He waited until she’d stepped out and he’d turned on the ignition. He said above the low throb of the motor, “Your thinking isn’t very clear, nor very quick, is it? This check is evidence against me, that you’re holding, if it clears the bank and returns to you. But if it doesn’t — if it’s kept out, and never comes up for payment at all — then it’s evidence against you, that I’m holding.”

The car glided off and left her standing behind looking after it with shattered consternation.

It seemed months, years of agony before their next meeting. Actually it was only three weeks.

She all but ran toward the car along the night-shaded street, as if fearful it might suddenly glide into motion and escape her. She clung to the top of the door with both hands when she’d reached it, as if for support.

“I can’t stand this! What are you trying to do to me?”

He was smugly facetious. His brows went up. “Do? I haven’t done anything to you. I haven’t seen you in the last three weeks.”

“The check wasn’t debited.”

“Oh, you’ve had your bank statement. That’s right, yesterday was the first of the month I imagine you’ve had a bad twenty-four hours. I must have overlooked it—”

“No,” she said fiercely, “you’re not the kind who would overlook anything like that, you vicious leech! Haven’t you done enough to me? What are you trying to do, drive me completely out of my mind?”

His manner changed abruptly, tightened. “Get in,” he said crisply. “I want to talk to you. I’ll drive you around for a quarter of an hour or so.”

“I can’t ride with you. How can you ask me to do that?”

“We can’t just stand still in this one place, talking it over. That’s far worse. We’ve done that twice already. We can circle the lake drive once or twice, there’s no one on it at this hour and no stops. Turn your collar up across your mouth.”

“Why are you holding the check? What are you meaning to do?”

“Wait until we get there,” he said. Then when they had, he answered her, coldly, dispassionately, as though there had been no interruption.

“I’m not interested in five hundred dollars.”

She was beginning to lose her head. Her inability to fathom his motives was kindling her to panic. “Give the check back to me, then, and I’ll give you more. I’ll give you a thousand. Only, give it back to me.”

“I don’t want to be given more. I don’t want to be given any amount. Don’t you understand? I want the money to belong to me, in my own right.”

Her face was suddenly stricken white. “I don’t understand. What are you trying to say to me?”

“I think you’re beginning to get it, by the look on your face.” He fumbled in his pocket, took out something. An envelope, already sealed and stamped for mailing. “You asked me where the check was. It’s in here. Here, read the address. No, don’t take it out of my hand. Just read it from where you are.”

“No—” She couldn’t articulate, could only shake her head convulsively.

“I’m mailing it to him at his office, where you can’t intercept it.” He returned it to his pocket. “The last mail collection, here in Caulfield, is at nine each night. You may not know that, but I’ve been making a study of those things recently. There’s a mailbox on Pomeroy Street, just a few feet from where I’ve been parking the last few times I’ve met you. It’s dark and inconspicuous around there, and I’ll use that one. It takes the carrier until nine-fifteen to reach it, however. I’ve timed him several nights in a row and taken the average.”

He silenced her with his hand, went on: “Now, if you reach there before the carrier does, this envelope stays out of the chute. If you’re not there yet when he arrives, I drop it in. You have a day’s grace, until nine-fifteen tomorrow night.”

“But what do you want me to be there for—? You said you didn’t want more—”

“We’re going to take a ride out to Hastings — that’s the next town over the state line. I’m taking you to a justice of the peace there, and he’s going to make us man and wife all over again.”

He slowed the car as her head lurched back against the top of the seat for a moment.

“I didn’t think they swooned any more—” he began. Then as he saw her straighten again with an effort he added: “Oh, I see they don’t. They just get a little dizzy, is that it?”

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked in a smothered voice.

“There are several good reasons. It would be a good deal safer, from my point of view, than the basis we’ve been going on so far. There’s no chance of anything backfiring. A wife, the law books say, cannot testify against her husband. That means that any lawyer worth his fee can whisk you off the stand before you can so much as open your mouth. Then there are more practical considerations. The old couple aren’t going to be around forever, you know. The old lady’s life is hanging by a thread. And the old man won’t last any time without her. Old Faithful, I know the type. When they go, you and Bill are due to inherit a sockful of money. Don’t look so horrified: it stands to reason they’d take care of their dead son’s wife and their only grandson. I can wait a year until that happens, or even two or three. The law gives a husband one-third of his wife’s property. Half of — I may be underestimating, but roughly I’d say four hundred thousand, that’s two hundred thousand. And then a third of that again— Don’t cover your ears like that, Patrice. You look like someone out of a Marie Corelli novel.”

He braked the car. “You can get out here, Patrice. This is close enough.” And then he chuckled a little, watching her flounder to the pavement. “Are you sure you’re able to walk? I wouldn’t want to have them think I’d plied you with—”

The last thing he said was, “Make sure your clock isn’t slow, Patrice. Because the United States mail is always on time.”

It seemed hours they’d been driving like this, in silence yet acutely aware of one another. They passed a self-lighted white sign, placed so that it could be read as you came up to it. It said “Welcome to Hastings.”

“That’s across the state line,” he remarked. “Travel broadens one, they say.”

He turned up one of Hastings’ side-streets and stopped in front of a dimly lit house.

“Get out,” he said.

She didn’t move; she didn’t answer.

“We had this all out before, back at Caulfield. Move. Say something, will you?”

“What do you want me to say?”

He gave the door an impatient slap-to again, as if in momentary reprieve. “Get yourself together. I’ll go over and let them know we’re here.”

She watched him go, in a sort of stupor, as though this were happening to someone else.

She wondered. How does he know I won’t suddenly start the car and drive off? She answered that herself. He knows I won’t. He knows it’s too late for that. As I know it. The time for stopping, for drawing back, for dashing off, that was long ago. Long before tonight. That was in the compartment on the train coming here, when the wheels tried to warn me. That was when the first note came. That was when the first phone call came, the first walk down to the drugstore. I am as safely held fast here as though I were manacled to him.

She could hear their voices now. A woman saying, “No, not at all. You made very good time. Come right in.”

Steve was at the car door now, standing there.

“Come on, Patrice,” he said casually.

“I can’t do it. Steve, don’t ask me to do this.”

“Get out.”

“Steve, I’ve never pleaded with you before. In all these months, I’ve taken it without whimpering. Steve, if there’s anything human in you that I can appeal to—”

“I’m only too human. That’s why I like money as much as I do. But your wires are crossed. It’s my very humanness that makes your appeal useless. Come on, Patrice. You’re wasting time.”

She cowered away edgewise along the seat. He drummed his fingers on the top of the door and laughed a little.

“Why this horror of marriage? Let me get to the bottom of your aversion. Maybe I can reassure you. There is no personal appeal involved. You haven’t any charms for me. That went long ago. I’m dumping you on the doorstep of your ever-loving family just as soon as we get back to Caulfield. Our second marriage is going to be a paper marriage, in every sense of the word. But it’s going to stick; it’s going to stick to the bitter end. Now does that take care of your mid-Victorian qualms?”

She raised the back of her hand to her eyes as though a blow had just blinded her.

He wrenched the door open. “They’re waiting for us in there. Come on, you’re only making it worse by stalling.”

He was beginning to harden against her. Her opposition was commencing to inflame him against her. It showed inversely, in a sort of lethal coldness.

“Look, my friend, I’m not going to drag you in there by the hair. The thing isn’t worth it. I’m going inside a minute and call the Hazzard house from here, and tell them the whole story right now. Then I’ll drive you back and they can have you — if they want you any more.” He leaned toward her slightly across the door. “Take a good look at me. Do I look as if I were kidding?”

It might be a threat that he would prefer not to have to carry out, but it wasn’t an idle threat. She could see that in his eyes, in the cold sullenness in them, the dislike of herself she read in them.

He turned and left the car and went up the plank walk again, more forcefully, more swiftly, than before.

“Excuse me, but I wonder if I might use your phone for a minute—” she heard him say as he entered the open doorway. Then the rest was blurred as he went deeper within the room.

She struggled out, clinging to the flexing car door like a woman walking in her sleep. Then she wavered up the plank walk and onto the porch. The ivy rustled for a minute as she brushed against it. Then she went on toward the oblong of light projected by the open doorway, and inside. It was like struggling through knee-deep water.

A middle-aged woman met her in the hallway.

“Good evening. Are you Mrs. Hazzard? He’s in here.”

She took her to a room on the left, parted an old-fashioned pair of sliding doors. He was standing in there, with his back to them, beside an old-fashioned telephone box bracketed to the wall.

“Here’s the young lady. You can both come into the study when you’re ready.”

Patrice drew the doors together behind her again. “Steve,” she said.

He turned around and looked at her, then turned back again.

“Don’t — you’ll kill her,” she pleaded.

“The old all die sooner or later.”

“Has it gone through yet?”

“They’re ringing Caulfield for me now.”

It wasn’t any sleight-of-hand trick. His finger wasn’t anywhere near the receiver hook, holding it shut down. He was in the act of carrying out his threat.

A choking sound broke in her throat.

He looked around again, almost casually. “Have you decided once and for all?”

She didn’t nod, she simply let her eyelids drop for a minute. The ultimate defeat.

“Operator,” he said, “cancel that call. It was a mistake.” He replaced the receiver slowly and smiled at her.

She felt a little sick and dizzy, as when you’ve just looked down from some great height and then drawn back again.

He went over to the sliding doors and opened them vigorously.

“We’re ready,” he called into the study across the hall.

He crooked his arm toward her, backhand, contemptuously tilting up his elbow for her to take, without even looking around at her as he did so.

She came forward and they went toward the study together, her arm linked in his.