I frowned at her. “This is business, Mavis. Don’t go sentimental on me.”
“Would you let me sleep with another man to work a dodge?” she demanded.
“I’d knock your head off if you suggested it,” I growled at her. “It’s not the same thing. And besides, you think I look forward to sleeping with the woman? You’ve seen what she’s like. It’s just business.”
“Monkey business,” she said hotly. “I won’t have it.”
I took a sip of my drink, eyeing her coldly over the edge of my glass. When I lowered it again, I asked ominously, “You’re giving me orders?”
She flushed. “I mean, I don’t want it. I’m asking you, Sam.”
I said bluntly, “You’re a little late. We’ve already been in bed together. In fact we haven’t been much of anywhere else except to the gym last night and to lunch today. When Hannah said in her letter that she was tired of sleeping alone, it was an understatement. She seems determined to make up for each month of widowhood in a day.”
Mavis’s face turned white. She said nothing.
“I had to,” I said roughly. “There was no other way to loosen her up. I’m not going to pass up twenty grand just because you’re jealous. You think I like making love to a fat, middle-aged slob?”
She still said nothing.
“Keep in mind who’s the boss in this family,” I advised her. “I give the orders and you take them. We’ll play this my way, and you’ll like it.”
Mavis gave her head a slow shake. Her face was still dead white. “We’ll play it your way, if you insist, Sam. You’re the boss. But you could beat me till I bled and I wouldn’t like it.”
“When did I ever beat you?” I asked ironically.
“Never physically,” she said in a low voice.
The next day I told Hannah I had decided I wanted to get married. We had our blood tests that same afternoon. This was a Friday, and we set the date for the following Wednesday. Hannah made no objection when I insisted on a quiet ceremony before a J.P. with Mavis as the only witness.
She also made no objection when I suggested Mavis live with us for a short time until she could find work and was able to afford her own apartment.
“It will be nice to have someone look after the house while we’re on a honeymoon, anyway,” Hannah said. “We’re going to take one, aren’t we?”
I told her we would if she liked. Hannah decided she would like a two-week trip to New Orleans.
Once during the few days before the wedding, Hannah inquired if I would like to make a daytime visit to the gymnasium and meet the personnel who would be my employees when I took over its management. I told her there would be plenty of time for that after we returned from the honeymoon, and she didn’t press the matter.
We were married as scheduled, Mavis standing up with us as the witness. As a wedding present I gave Hannah a twenty-five-dollar gold-filled bracelet and earring set. She waited to give me my wedding present until after we had returned to the house. Mavis didn’t see it, as she went directly to her room and left us alone the moment we walked in the house.
Hannah opened the drawer of a writing table in the front room and produced three documents. She handed them to me with a smile.
One was a deed to the house made out jointly to Samuel Plainfield and Mrs. Hannah Plainfield. The second was a deed to the gymnasium made out the same way. The third was a twenty-thousand-dollar paid-up life insurance policy on Hannah with a rider attached to it naming the insured’s husband, Samuel Plainfield, as the beneficiary.
“That was still made out to Gaylord before I had it changed,” she said. “If I’d dropped dead, I guess it would Ve just gone into the estate.”
I gave her a thank-you kiss.
“There’s more,” she said. “I told you everything would be fifty-fifty. Let’s go down to the bank.”
I drove her downtown to her bank. Inside, she led me to the safety-vault room, signed in and we were admitted through the gate to the vault. Checking the card Hannah had signed, the attendant located the proper box and inserted the master key. After inserting her key also, Hannah drew out a long, narrow, lidded box.
I followed as she carried the box to one of the curtained cubbyholes provided for renters of safety-deposit boxes.
Opening the lid, she drew out a stack of government bonds and proudly handed them to me. There were twenty-four of them, each with a maturity value of a thousand dollars. I did some fast mental arithmetic and figured out that their purchase price would have been eighteen thousand. As they were dated only six months previously, their present value wasn’t much more, and they wouldn’t mature for nine and a half more years.
The bulk of the insurance money, I thought, and wondered what she had done with the other two thousand.
She answered the mental question without my having to ask it aloud. “I’ve got two thousand in a checking account too,” she said. “You told me you had a couple of thousand, so you keep that in a checking account under your own name, and well be exactly even. Did you see how the bonds are made out?”
I looked at them again. They were co-owner bonds, made out to Hannah and Samuel Plainfield. Not to Hannah and/or Samuel Plainfield. She had arranged things so that it would take both our signatures to cash them.
I said, “Shouldn’t I have a key to the box?”
“What for?” she asked. “There’s nothing in it but the bonds. And it takes both of us to cash them. We’ll have to be together to cash them when they mature anyway. One key’s enough.”
I said a little faintly, “When they mature? I thought we were going to discuss investing the insurance money in some stocks.”
“Stocks, hell!” she said earthily. “Government bonds are safe. They’re staying right where they are for another nine and a half years.”
She meant it, I realized. She wasn’t nearly the sucker I had imagined. I don’t think she had the slightest suspicion that I was trying to take her. It was just innate good business sense that had caused her to arrange things to make it impossible. Everything was half in my name, but it would take her signature as well as mine to convert any of it into cash. And it was pretty obvious that even my most persuasive talking was never going to get her signature in agreement to sell anything.
It developed that she had made one more legal arrangement to tie everything up nicely. When we got back to the car, she asked me to drive her to her lawyer’s office.
“What for?” I asked.
“I had him draw up a couple of wills, honey. Mine leaves everything to you, yours leaves everything to me.
“That was generous of you,” I said dubiously.
“Just good business,” she said. “What if you dropped dead tomorrow? Your sister might inherit everything I just signed over to you. That wouldn’t be fair.”
I agreed that it wouldn’t. There wasn’t any logical reason I could give for refusing to sign a will, so I drove to her lawyer’s.
He was a relatively young man, and apparently Hannah had told him all about me, because he seemed to know about the plan for me to run the gym. He warmly congratulated me on our marriage and wished Hannah happiness. If he suspected from our difference in ages that I had married her for her money, there was no indication of it in his manner.
He had both wills already drawn up. We each signed, and his office girl signed as a witness.
In bed that night, lying next to the snoring Hannah and thinking of Mavis tying alone, and probably sleepless, just down the hall, I ruefully considered the predicament I had worked myself into. All that tantalizing wealth half in my name, and I couldn’t touch a cent of it.
There was one thing all in my name, though. The insurance policy.
I went to sleep on that thought.