When we entered the war she enrolled in a business college for a quick course in shorthand and typing, and went to work in a defense plant. And she liked it, from the first. She was alert, interested, and highly competitive, and in less than a year she was the private secretary to one of the top brass of the firm. In the spring of 1944 she met and married Kenneth Forsyth. He was a flier sent home for reassignment as an instructor at an air base near San Antonio, Texas.
They were happy enough, but she couldn’t stand the boredom of having nothing to do but police a one-room apartment, so she went back to work, this time for the local office of one of the big nationwide brokerage outfits. She immediately fell in love with the stock market as if she’d invented it. Here was something you could get your teeth into; this was the whole world of business and industry, distilled. She studied it with the passionate intensity of another Baruch, trying to learn everything there was to learn about it. Forsyth remained in the service after the end of the war, but was transferred to another field near Dallas. Keeping house still bored her, so she went to work for the Dallas office of the same brokerage house.
Then in 1949 Forsyth was transferred to the air field at Thomaston, Louisiana, and she was out of a job. She found it unbearably dull. She didn’t like small towns and their clique-ridden social life, and for a woman with ambition and a restless mind it was stifling. Then she met Chapman. That changed everything.
He’d just opened his law office, and while he wasn’t very busy he did need somebody once in a while to type briefs and answer the phone. She offered to do it, partly out of boredom and partly because he interested her. And before long he interested her even more. Here was a man with drive, business ability, and daring, and he was wasting himself on a piddling law practice. They were attracted to each other from the beginning.
His first venture, in the process of becoming a millionaire in eight years, was a laundromat, and it was she who prodded him into it.
“He defended the owner of the laundromat in a minor damage suit,” she went on. “And got him off with a minimum judgment, but the man was in financial trouble and couldn’t even pay the legal fee in full. I had an idea and went out and surveyed his place. His trouble was location; he was in the wrong end of town, where most of the families had washing machines of their own, and he had a bad parking problem. To the south of town there was a large colored section swarming with children. I located a building that could be leased, and told Harris about it. Because of his father’s connection with the bank, he had no trouble borrowing the money. He bought the man’s machines at a terrific bargain, and moved them. We got a deacon of one of the colored churches to run it, and I kept the books. Eight months later he sold it for a net profit of six thousand dollars.”
They were on their way. Next came a couple of real-estate speculations that paid off to the tune of better than fourteen thousand. By late 1950 she was working for him full time, and the law practice was only a small part of his operations. He was far over-extended and in debt to his ears, but he was growing, right along with the big business boom of the early 1950’s. Chapman’s wife had left him now, and Marian Forsyth and her husband had had several painful and increasingly bitter arguments about her working for him. People were beginning to talk. She refused to quit. The showdown came in less than six months. Forsyth was transferred again.
The choice was hers, and she made it. She told Forsyth she wanted a divorce, and stayed in Thomaston. She was in love with Chapman.
She had no illusions as to what she was letting herself in for. He couldn’t marry her, as long as his wife was alive, and in a small town no matter how discreet they were with the affair everybody was going to know. I thought of the snubs, and frozen stares. They probably didn’t bother her a great deal, I thought—not during the six busy years while she had Chapman and the fascination of the job. But when he jilted her and left her standing alone and naked in the middle of town— That must have been a long, long mile to the city limits.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “A point’s just occurred to me. You’ve got to have a legitimate excuse for going back, or it won’t look right.”
She stopped the tape. “Of course. But I still own my house there. It will take two weeks at least to sell it and put my furnishings in storage in New Orleans. And don’t forget, I won’t arrive there until he’s left for his vacation, which will give it exactly the right touch.”
She was right, of course. It all fitted perfectly, like the stones in an Inca wall. If sheer deadliness could be beautiful, this operation of hers was a masterpiece.
We went on. We finished that roll of tape with a detailed account of how Chapman acquired the rest of his holdings in the next five years and how she’d led him a little at a time into growth stocks in the big bull market from 1950 to 1955, into IBM and Dow Chemical, and Phillips Petroleum, and United Aircraft, and DuPont.
”Always for capital gains,” she went on. “Income wasn’t any good to him any more, not in the tax bracket he was in, or approaching. All those years I’d been studying stocks and the stock market paid off for him. He rode it up all the way. And last summer, when the market showed signs of running out of steam, we began switching to defense holdings—utilities, high-grade preferreds, and bonds. And cash. It’s safe—except from me.”
It was three-thirty when we came to the end of the roll. “Play it back,” she said, already making notes for the next session. I ran it. She fired questions at me until I was dizzy. She put on one of the rolls of recorded conversation between him and Chris Lundgren, and played it through. I listened, studying his speech, while she went out in the kitchen and mixed us two Martinis.
She ht a cigarette, took a sip of her drink, and stopped the machine. “Tell me what you heard.”
“He’s abrupt on the phone,” I said, “at least in business matters. No asking how the other party is, or about families. He says G’bye just once and hangs up. Your name comes out almost Mer’n. He hits the first syllable of DuPont, and the u is iu. Dew-Pont. He slurs hundred a little more than most people. Hunrd. He still uses Roger once in a while, left over from his service days.”
She nodded approvingly. “Good ear. Keep it up.”
We knocked off at seven, changed, and took a cab over to Miami to have dinner at the Top O’ the Columbus. She was a knockout in a dark dress, so very tall and beautifully groomed and poised. It made me feel good to see men—and women—turn to look at her. We sat by one of the big windows looking out over Biscayne Bay and its perimeter of blazing lights.
You make all these other women look like peasants,” I said.
She. smiled. “Honing the old technique, Jerry? Why waste it on me?”
“No. I mean it.”
“Of course, dear. Conditioned reflexes are like that.” Then she went on. “Now here’s a point we have to consider. Lundgren’s voice, of course, you’ll recognize, but you’ve never heard hers.”
I sighed. “That’s easy. Until she identifies herself and I’m sure, I can say we have a bad connection and I can’t hear very well.”
On the way back we ran a test. I got out of the cab at a drugstore not too far away, gave her time to reach the apartment, and called her from the phone booth. She read Lundgren.