In the lobby, when the production job was done, so he shone and squeaked and smelled, he propositioned me about my car. “As there’s absolutely nothing I can do until I hear from New York, I’d kind of like to drive Mrs. Sperry around, and if you could accommodate me—”
“It’s yours. Here’s the key.”
“But if you need it I can rent one.”
“You? In a U-Drive jalopy?”
“Oh, I drive.”
“But you’re so valuable to the company.”
“I guess that’s right.”
He was pretty solemn about it, and I dead-panned, though I kind of liked the gag, and I filed it away so in case I had to make a speech at a company banquet I’d have something to tell the boys. Pretty soon he said: “She knows the country and is going to show me a lot of things, like the old mines in Goldfield and Tonopah and Virginia City — those are ghost towns, aren’t they?”
“They were, till fires burned the ghostly garments up.”
“Extraordinary woman, Ed. Wonderful mind. I was telling her about this problem of ours.”
“Yeah? I’m a little surprised.”
“Oh, I mentioned no names.”
“Then of course that makes it different.”
“She thinks, as I do, that on big things, you instinctively know what you think, with no evidential substantiation. Beautiful phrase, Ed.”
“Here we call it playing a hunch.”
“Her mind constantly parallels mine.”
“Or yesses it.”
“...What did you say?”
“I said what does she think of our problem?”
“Just what we think. She was wondering if she had any capacity for this clairvoyance of mine, as she calls it, and I laid it all out for her. She said, ‘Well, it would be terribly exciting if I could feel something steal up and touch me on the shoulder, but I don’t. All I see is a somewhat pathetic boy trying to make himself look big in a cheap, silly way.’”
“That makes three of us.”
“Got to run, Ed. Mrs. Sperry is waiting.”
“To say nothing of the former Mrs. Sperry.”
“Who?”
“Jane, waiting for me.”
“Mrs. Delavan was the former Mrs. Sperry?”
“Now you got it.”
He sat there a long time, sometimes asking me questions about who these people were, and I could see his mind racing up one part of it and down the other, putting everything together, checking what he had said to La Sperry, what she had said to him, and so on. Then he said: “It’s none of my business what she’s here for, is it, Ed?”
“That I couldn’t say.”
“And none of hers, what I’m here for.”
“That I couldn’t say either.”
“You know how I dope it out?”
“No, but I’d like to.”
“She had no idea what I was telling her.”
“What do you mean, telling her?”
“About Delavan’s policy.”
“Had no idea who you were talking about?”
“I never reject a simple explanation. Ed.”
“That explanation, I’d say, verges on the simple-minded. If you think, after what you told her, she had no idea who you were talking about — that is, if you told her all about the coal company, the—”
“Ouch, I forgot that.”
“It’s not possible she didn’t guess... Mr. Keyes, if you told her about it, as you say, it wasn’t up to her to tip it she knew who you were talking about if she didn’t want to. Maybe she’s a well-mannered dame that doesn’t tip things because she was brought up not to. But that’s not all. You didn’t only tell her. She pumped it out of you. She—”
“No, no, Ed. Nobody could. Not out of me.”
“O.K. You’re a clam.”
He sat another ten minutes thinking. “But what interest could she have? What could it mean to her whether Delavan gets his insurance or didn’t? She hasn’t tried to influence me in any way.”
“She’s here to block that annulment.”
“O.K., now we’re getting somewhere.”
“Just where?”
“If she’s here to block the annulment, by whatever suasion she cares to use—”
“On checks.”
“You mean she’ll bribe Delavan?”
“Why, Mr. Keyes, such language!”
“It’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
“You think he’s too refined to accept?”
I took him out to where the car was parked, and he stood beside it, thinking some more. “I think we’ve got it, Ed. Mrs. Delavan got that thing they use all over the British Empire, one of those cut-and-dried, found-him-with-an-unknown-woman, in-and-out-in-ten-minutes divorces, and they’re perfectly good — so long as everybody plays ball. But God help you if somebody kicks the beans in the fire. An English court will reopen the case sure as God made little apples, and remember, if they wanted to call it on them, this would involve perjury, contempt of court, manufacture of evidence, collusion, everything that mocks the dignity of the court, and that it can’t have publicly proved. Delavan thinks he’ll kick over the beans. Mrs. Sperry has other ideas, because she doesn’t propose to have her marriage ruined by a playboy’s caprice. So far as I’m concerned, that accounts for everything, her trip here, all of it.”
I made sure he knew where the starter was and went off and left him. Why I had talked so tough I don’t know, as the hand as it was dealt said I ought to have talked the other way. But somehow, even if it is against your own interest, you can blow your top a little when you see a guy kidding himself and shutting his eyes to what he ought to be seeing. Because, tough talk or not, ramming the probe in, pretending to go into it from the company angle or however I played it, there was stuff going on here I didn’t understand, and my stomach was telling me it was no good.
Going into the week-end it was high, wide and handsome, with Jane and me out with the horses most of the time, and he running the roads with Mrs. Sperry. But when he brought her in Saturday morning, to pick up tickets for the football game over at the University, I didn’t exactly like her, but I could see what he’d fallen for. She was a little older than Jane, maybe a little under thirty, small and stocky, but not fat. But in the blue dress with white spots on it that she was wearing, with tan shoes, hat and bag and fur coat, you could hardly miss that trim, pretty shape, with nice legs that reminded you somehow of a cat. Or maybe it was her eyes that did that. Her face was round, with puffy, dimpled cheeks, rosebud mouth and small, perky nose and light hair; but her eyes were the diamond shape you see in a leopard, and light gray.
But she didn’t look like anybody else, you had to say that for her, and when she smiled at me and clucked over the cups and made herself friendly with Linda, you couldn’t exactly kick her in the teeth. She made my skin prickle a little, and yet I’m human and it wasn’t just to be nice to Keyes that I put myself out for her. After some talk about the football game she said: “I hear you see little Jane Delavan.”
“Yes, we ride a little.”
“Lovely girl.”
“...You know her?”
“Well — that would be a little complicated. But I’ve seen her and heard a lot about her — and I know a lot of people that she knows.”