Finally he agreed to accept a cheque on her personal account for a hundred and fifty dollars. At the same time she tried to make it clear that Mr. Gilly would be most upset if he knew they had picked up the strands of their acquaintance, even for one afternoon. She was able to get away only after listening to the young man’s assurances that he would make something of himself that she could be proud of, and that he would, of course, return the money with interest just as soon as he earned it.
Mrs. Gilly next saw Anthony Powers three weeks later, as she and Mr. Gilly were having cocktails at a very plush bar. They happened to come out of the hotel just behind Anthony. He was escorting an older woman who, in the light of what he had told Mrs. Gilly about giving up his “profession”, could only have been his mother. He helped her into a taxi in the same obsequious way he had once helped Mrs. Gilly, and he was wearing an obviously new dinner jacket.
That incident should have warned Mrs. Gilly that she had not seen the last of her young friend. Nevertheless, she was alarmed when he turned up at the house one evening. Mr. Gilly was at a meeting at his club that night, but was expected home any minute. She found it necessary to be quite abrupt.
She was very sorry, she told Anthony, but she could not allow him to come to her house again. When he tried to tell her about his bad luck in trying to find respectable work, she was cruel enough to suggest he could always pawn his dinner jacket. When he demanded to know what she meant, she told him about having seen him a few nights before. Just as she had suspected, the older woman had been his mother, or so he said, and he had hired the jacket to impress her.
“Poor Mum would be brokenhearted if she knew I wasn’t a success,” he said.
He was so frank and open, and obviously still in love with her, that it nearly broke Mrs. Gilly’s heart to insist that he not contact her again. When he protested, she simply rang the bell and asked the butler to show him out.
Anthony went, but ten minutes later he called her. He had turned very nasty and was not at all like his old self. He told her she couldn’t brush him off that easily, and he threatened to show her husband a photostat of the cheque she had given him unless she continued to produce funds at certain regular intervals.
Mrs. Gilly went weak at the knees, but she kept her head. At his direction she wrote out another cheque for one hundred and fifty dollars and put in into an envelope that very evening. She needed time to think; she had to have time to recover from her shock at the young man’s duplicity.
During the next few days Mrs. Gilly was particularly conscious of the comfort which surrounded her. From the first waking moment of the morning when her maid brought her breakfast on a silver tray, until she wrapped herself luxuriously in an expensive robe and brushed her hair in the evening, Mrs. Gilly reflected on her good fortune. After his single lapse, her husband had become as attentive as any woman could wish him to be, and his affection for her now seemed especially precious.
It was obvious, too, that he had never forgotten what he obviously thought of as her near brush with infidelity. One morning he made a special point of telling her that he had heard his best friend, Bill carter, threaten to kill the next man who demonstrated affection for his wife, who was quite a different sort of person from Mrs. Gilly. Lucy was beautiful and charming, and had always attracted men like bees to honey. Her latest devotee had been a man much younger than himself, and Bill had threatened to shoot him if he found them together again.
Mrs. Gilly knew there was a special meaning behind her husband’s recitation of this dramatic bit of gossip, and she nodded vigorously to show him she understood.
It was then that Mrs. Gilly decided Anthony Powers would be better off dead.
First, she called Bill Carter at his office. With the assurance of an old friend, she suggested that he leave his office early and, together with Lucy, accompany her and Mr. Gilly to a little restaurant near Central Park where they had dined, the four of them, many times in the past on special occasions.
“And make it a surprise for Lucy,” she urged. “Women of our age don’t have much to surprise us, you know. She’ll enjoy herself more if you just pop home early from the office and tell her where we’re going.”
After that, Mrs. Gilly called her husband. He was surprised at the suggestion, but agreeable, and told her she was very thoughtful to have devised something of that sort just when Bill and Lucy needed the attention of their friends most.
Then Mrs. Gilly had only one more phone call to make. The man at the agency was pleased to hear from an old customer, and he promised to make certain her orders were followed exactly.
Mrs. Gilly spent the rest of the day trying to read. By the time her husband arrived home, however, she was in such a nervous state it was no trouble at all for her to portray shocked disbelief when he told her about the tragedy that had occurred at the Carter apartment that afternoon when Bill had arrived home early from work.
The entire story was in the late editions. Mrs. Gilly had called Lucy Carter at once, of course, to express her sympathy and ask her to come to them during the next gruelling weeks, but Lucy had gone to some hideaway in the country to avoid the newspaper men.
The next months were difficult for both Lucy and Bill. No one realized that better than Mrs. Gilly. But Bill was able to afford a very clever lawyer, who managed to convince a jury that the adulterous threat of Anthony Powers had given his client the perfect right to shoot him in the head.
After it was all over, Mr. and Mrs. Gilly and Bill and Lucy Carter took a little trip together to Bermuda. Lucy was troublesome at first. She insisted on wondering over and over again why the young man had come to her apartment in the first place. But Mrs. Gilly finally convinced her friend that the least said, soonest mended.
For Love
by Elijah Ellis
The man who catches “fishes in other men’s ditches” should be cognizant of the dangers that lurk therein.
The two men entered the sheriff’s private office separately, Levi Eldridge first, then a couple of minutes later, Frank Latham. Both moved with the stiff-legged wariness of dogs approaching a possible enemy and not sure whether to fight or run.
Sheriff Ed Carson didn’t speak. He gestured Eldridge and Latham into chairs, one at each corner of his desk. Then, as the men squirmed and scowled at each other, the sheriff riffled through a stack of papers before him on the battered desk. The tense silence lengthened into an ominous threat.
I was sitting back in a corner of the little office, a cramped cubbyhole that opened off the sheriff’s main office on the ground floor of the courthouse. There were a lot of places I’d rather have been than in that stuffy office.
For one thing, it was the hottest afternoon of the summer, and the windowless office made a very efficient oven. More important, one of those men, Eldridge or Latham, was quite possibly a murderer.
Finally Levi Eldridge burst out, “Alright. Carson. Let’s get on with it, whatever it is you want.”
“You were so eager to have me drive clear into town here, in the middle of the day. So what gives?” Frank Latham rasped.
“I’m a busy man...” Eldridge started.
“Yeah. Busy with that shyster lawyer of yours tryin’ to steal the property my wife left,” Latham broke in bitterly.
Eldridge lunged to his feet. “What do you mean, your wife? You dirty killer!”
“Take it easy, boys,” Sheriff Carson said quietly. His mild blue gaze moved from one man to the other, then back to Eldridge. “Sit down, Levi.”