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
“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
