“Chris? Chapman,” I said. I asked how the market had closed, discussed some stock or another, and gave an order or two, and then stepped out of character to ask, “What do you think?”
“Good,” she said. “Very good.”
I walked back to the apartment in the warm and ocean-scented darkness, thinking of seventy-five thousand dollars. When I let myself in she was just coming out of the bedroom. She’d taken off the dress and slip and was pulling the blue robe about herself.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Maybe just a shade less abrupt. But it’s a fine point—”
“Stop worrying,” I said. “I can do it.” I took hold of her arms. Then I was holding her tightly in mine and kissing her as if women were going to be transferred to some other planet in the morning.
When she could get her mouth free at last, she murmured, “But I thought we’d work for another hour or two.” Then she relented. “All right, Jerry—”
Enlightened management, I thought, never forgets the importance of employee recreation. If the seal balks, toss him another herring. I started to say something angry and sarcastic, but choked it off. I wanted her so badly I’d take her on any terms at all.
Afterwards, of course, we did go back to work.
* * *
The next day was a repetition of the first. She was relentless. Chapman and Chapman Enterprises and Thomaston ran into my brain until they overflowed. We filled two tapes. I played them back. She questioned me. I played them again. And all the while I was conscious that she herself was taking more and more of my attention. I was thinking about her when I should have been concentrating. I didn’t like it, but there it was.
We went out again for dinner, and came back and worked until eleven. I made love to her. She was as gracious about it, and as accomplished, and as completely unreachable as ever. I lay in the darkness thinking about her. It wasn’t that she was cold, or that she merely endured it. It was worse. It was so unimportant she had trouble even noticing it.
Chapman, I thought, might not be the dirtiest bastard who ever lived, but he was the stupidest. I tried to imagine what she was like before she became numb to everything except remembered humiliation and hatred. The next morning, just at dawn, I awoke to find her struggling in my arms, trying to break free.
“Jerry,” she snapped, “for heaven’s sake, what are you trying to do? Break me in two?”
Oh,” I said stupidly, looking round the room. “I must have been having a bad dream.”
It started to come back to me then. I could see it all with a horrible clarity. I’d been running after her across the Golden Gate bridge, and I’d caught her just before she could leap. I was trying to hold her back.
That day we filled the last roll of tape. She told me everything she knew about Coral Blaine, and she knew a lot—including the fact her name wasn’t Coral at all, but Edna Mae. Apparently she was a believer in the old maxim of military science that you never stop studying the enemy. She described her, psycho-analyzed her, and gave me a complete rundown on the affair from the time Chapman first gave her a job until the engagement was announced.
“I was scared the first time I saw her,” she said. “For years I’d done all the hiring and firing of office personnel. He never interfered, hired anybody himself, or cared. I’ll admit to being quite unfair a couple of times when I fired girls for no other reason than that they had their eyes on him— But never mind. At any rate, when I saw this Blaine number, I had a premonition. Flawless natural blonde, about five-foot-three, and of course only twenty-three years old, but it was that dewy and virginal look that frightened me. He’s forty—or will be next month.
“He saw the dew, all right; and I could see the cutlass between her teeth as she came over the rail. She was the daughter of an old friend of his, he said; she’d just graduated from some co-educational football factory in Texas and he’d promised her a job. I felt my way very slowly, and I hit resistance right away. I wasn’t going to be able to fire this one. Nothing overt on either side, of course, but the resistance was there, and it was firm. So I moved her up to a better job I knew she couldn’t handle. And all I accomplished was that I had to do her work myself. She came to work, incidentally, about three weeks after Mrs. Chapman died.”
It must have been bloody, I thought. And lonely as hell. A wife in the same position had status and the solid weight of community opinion going for her, but she had nothing. She knew she’d lost, of course, long before the blow actually fell, and in the end Chapman didn’t even have the decency to tell her himself. I gathered it wasn’t that he was ashamed to, or reluctant to face her; he just didn’t bother. Some business came up that was more important.
You’re not coloring this a little?” I asked.
She sighed. “I assure you I couldn’t be that stupid. I’m telling you exactly what happened, because I have to. God knows I don’t enjoy it; I’m no masochist. But obviously you have to know the truth, and not some dramatized version. I was informed of the engagement by Coral Blaine herself, in the office, on Monday morning, and if you have any doubts she knew exactly how to do it for the most exquisite effect, forget them. That was quite a day.”
Seven thousand years, I thought, from nine to five. With all those eyes watching, and nothing to crawl under and hide. An outstanding day, any way you looked at it. Then a sudden thought occurred to me, something I’d missed completely until now. It was what she had in mind for Coral Blaine.
“Do you think she’ll know?” I asked.
She nodded coolly. “Yes. I should think she’d be pretty sure I did it—somehow.”
As a study in the subtler forms of revenge, I thought, that would be hard to match. Coral Blaine was having a husband and a million dollars snatched out of her reachy little hands, and she was going to know it was Marian who’d done it to her. And that she not only would never be able to prove it, but that she’d actually helped prove it couldn’t have been Marian.
”If she’s only twenty-three,” I said, “she has a long and interesting life ahead of her, trying to figure that one out.”
“Yes, doesn’t she?”
We went back to work. While she was gone to get the sandwiches at noon I suddenly remembered what day it was. This was the eighth. I looked up florists in the phone book, called one, and ordered two dozen roses. It was around four o’clock and we were still busy with Coral Blaine when the doorbell rang. I beat her to it, paid the delivery boy, and brought them in.
She glanced up as I put the long carton on the coffee table before her. “Flowers? Why?”
“Happy birthday,” I said.
She shook her head chidingly. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Then she opened the box, and exclaimed, “They’re beautiful, Jerry. But how did you know it was my birthday?”
“Your driver’s license,” I replied.
“Snoopy.” She filled a vase with water and put them on the phonograph console at the other end of the room. She admired them for a moment, and then came over and put her arms about my neck.
She smiled. “Dear Jerry, the indefatigable chaser of old streetcars he’s already caught.”
It was no use, I thought. She was impervious; nothing could get through to her, no gesture of any kind. She’d had it. Then I wondered if I even knew myself what I was trying to tell her. It seemed to be all mixed up.
We went back to work.
Six
She did some shopping the next morning, and left for Nassau around eleven. The minute she closed the door behind her, the apartment became almost achingly empty.
I assembled everything on the coffee table, and looked at it. Except for his identification, his clothes, and his car, here was Harris Chapman—seven rolls of tape, boxed, numbered, and indexed; horn-rim glasses; cigarette holder; the insipid filter cigarettes he smoked; the map of Thomaston she’d drawn with street names, locations of his businesses and his office, and an appended list of some twenty telephone numbers; three documents containing specimens of his signature, which had come from the old briefcase; and the bottle of gunk for lightening the dark shade of my hair and the sprouting mustache.