“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
She inhaled smoke and regarded me coolly. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? If you were speaking over the telephone to anybody who knew Harris Chapman but didn’t know you, you’d be Chapman.”
“I’m not so sure—”
“Let me explain,” she interrupted. “If you said you were Harris Chapman, why should he doubt it? Your voices are almost identical, and they’re not there side-by-side for comparison. Add to that the way you both speak—which is almost exactly alike, and very much unlike Southern speech in general. He lives in Thomaston, Louisiana. You follow me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “In other words, he’s unique—at least, in his manner of speech. They hear it—it’s Chapman.”
“Exactly. You could fool anybody who knows him.”
“For just about five seconds,” I said.
She smiled. “No. You’re wrong.”
“If you’re speaking of impersonation, it takes one other thing. Information.”
“I was coming to that,” she said. “It happens that I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else in the world.”
“What are you driving at?”
“This. In ten days of intensive study, you could become Harris Chapman—that is, to the extent that Harris Chapman as a personality or an individual is projected over a telephone circuit.”
I stood up and crushed out my cigarette. “And why should I?”
“Would you consider seventy-five thousand dollars a good reason?”
I paused, still holding the mangled cigarette stub. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look as if I were?”
“Where would you get that much money?”
“From him, naturally.”
“You mean steal it?”
She nodded coolly. “I suppose you would call it stealing. A rather unusual type of theft, and one that’s absolutely fool-proof
“There is no such animal.”
“In this particular case, there is. It’s unique. I suppose you’ve heard the expression “perfect crime”. This is the perfect crime, the one that’ll never be solved.”
I lit another cigarette, still looking at her. She had me badly confused by now. I sat down on the corner of the bed near her. “I’ll admit I don’t know nearly as much about girls as I did when I was nineteen,” I said. “But, even so, your picture and sound track just don’t match. Perfect crime—Offhand, I’d say the worst crime you’ve ever committed was taking advantage of a stuck parking meter.”
She gestured with a slim hand. “I didn’t say I’d ever stolen anything before.”
“But you’re going to now. Why?”
“We can go into the reasons later. I want to know if you’re interested.”
“I’m always interested in money.”
“Have you ever stolen anything?”
No. But I doubt that’s highly significant. Nobody’s ever tried me with seventy-five thousand before.”
”Then you could?
“Probably. But it couldn’t be as fool-proof as you say.”
“It is,” she said definitely. “As a matter of fact, nobody will ever know it was stolen.”
“Why? Money doesn’t evaporate. And just where is it?”
She studied me thoughtfully. “Your stepfather was a broker, I believe you said. So you know what a trading account is?”
“Sure.”
“All right. Harris Chapman has a trading account with a New Orleans brokerage firm. The man called Chris you just heard on the tape is the registered representative who handles it for him. And at the present moment the stocks and cash in the account add up to just a little over a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.”
I whistled. Then I glanced sharply at her. “So?”
“Well, you know how a trading account like that is handled.”
“Sure. The stocks he buys are credited to his account, but they’re kept there at the brokerage house in the vault, so he doesn’t have to go through all the rigmarole of endorsing them and sending them back when he wants to sell. He buys and sells all the time, just by picking up the phone—” I got it then, and she was crazy.
“You see?” she said.
“I see nothing,” I replied. “Money in a brokerage account is just as safe as money in a bank account. It takes a signature to get it; you ought to know that. Two signatures, as a matter of fact. You have to sign a receipt for the transaction, and then endorse the check to cash it.”
She interrupted. “Will you listen just a minute? The idea is nothing like as simple as that. Of course it wouldn’t work in any other set of circumstances, but as I told you before, this is unique. All it’ll require is the most elementary sort of forgery because nobody”ll ever look at the signatures anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because there’ll never be the slightest doubt but that Harris Chapman drew the money out himself. I’ll take care of that—”
“You’d better fill me in a little,” I said. “Just who is Chapman, and what’s your connection with him?”
She leaned over to tap ash off her cigarette. “He’s a businessman, and for a small town a fairly wealthy one. He owns Chapman Enterprises, which consists of a newspaper, a radio station, cotton gin, and a warehouse, among other things—”
“And you worked for him?”
Her eyes met mine without any expression at all. “I worked for him. I was his private secretary, mistress, executive officer, fiancée—you name it. I went to work for him eight years ago, and for the past six I’ve been a sort of combination of executive vice-president and full-time wife. Except that I wasn’t married to him.”
“Why not?”
“For the tired old reason that he already had a wife.”
“You don’t look like the type that’d dangle that long.”
“Shall we drop that part of it for the moment?”
“Sorry,” I said. “But I still don’t see how you think you’re going to get away with it. What’s Chapman going to be doing all the time you’re looting his trading account?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Why?”
“He’ll be dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m going to kill him.”
* * *
I caught a no-show out of the Miami airport at four-fifteen, and was at Idlewild a little after eight. I took the limousine over to town. It was one of those blustery November nights, not really wet but with scattered shot-charges of rain hurled on a cold north wind. I didn’t have an overcoat. People looked at me as if I were crazy as I came out of the terminal and caught a cab. The small hotel on West 44th Street where I’d stayed once before was all right, but the room faced an airwell and was small and cheerless.
I sat down on the bed and counted my money. I had three hundred and sixty left. Three hundred, I thought, after I buy a coat. No, I had to have a hat, too. This was New York. I couldn’t go job-hunting along Madison Avenue looking like a refugee from Muscle Beach. It was going to be tough enough as it was; the last reference I could give was two years old. I went up the street to a bar and had a drink, but it only made me feel worse. After a while I went back to the room and tried to read, but it was futile. I kept thinking about seventy-five thousand dollars and blue water and sunlight and a sleek dark head. I threw the magazine on to the floor and lay on the side of the bed staring down at it.
What did I care what happened to some man who was nothing to me but a name? If I were so concerned over his safety, why didn’t I call him and tell him she was going to kill him? I knew she was, didn’t I?
That was it. She still was; my walking out on her hadn’t changed anything. The money he had in that account was only a collateral issue as far as she was concerned. I remembered the way she’d lain there in the darkness, rigid and wide-awake and staring, with her hands clenched, and wondered what he’d done to her. Well, I’d never know; but the chances were very good he’d never do it to anybody else.