“You mean the bank and the insurance company? Why should it be ticklish?”
“I’m not worried about the bank,” I said. “Soon as probate court gives the green light, I can withdraw the ten thousand in Hazel’s and my joint account, and the bank won’t have the right even to question it. But ever since Houston, insurance adjusters have always made me nervous.”
“They’ve never yet fussed over the piddling little policies you insist on,” Mavis said. “Five thousand dollars, when we could have cleaned up. We should have done what I wanted and insured her for ten thousand with a double-indemnity clause.”
“Sure,” I said. “If I listened to your advice, we’d be in jail long ago. Can’t I get it through your head that insurance companies are always automatically suspicious of accidental deaths when there’s a double-indemnity clause? The only safe policy to fool with is straight life, and even then it’s dangerous to get greedy.”
“But for fifteen thousand more,” Mavis said wistfully.
“And fifteen times the risk. Remember that insurance investigator in Houston? If they’d check on a policy that’s been in effect twenty years, what do you think they’d do about one that’s been in effect only two months? They’d want to look into my background clear back to birth. And when they found out Sam Henshaw didn’t have any background farther back than two months, we’d be in real trouble.”
“I suppose so,” Mavis said reluctantly.
“Five thousand is about the limit any company will pay off on a new policy without suspicion,” I told her. “We’ve got the five thousand Hazel put up to match mine in the bank account, plus five thousand insurance. What more do you want for two months’ work?”
“Nothing, I guess. I know you’ve got more brains than I have, Sam. But we used to make such big scores. Sometimes for only two weeks’ work.”
“We used to be constantly one jump ahead of the police too, if you’ll remember,” I growled at her. “Now nobody ever gives us a suspicious look.”
Until we turned out the lights and went to bed, we continued to follow my strict rule of keeping in character even when we were sure no one was watching. We had kept our conversation low enough so that no one could have heard it even by listening at a window, and nothing in our actions indicated that we were anything but a brother and sister having a nightcap together before we went to bed. In spite of Mavis’s amusement at what she regarded as my overcarefulness, I didn’t believe in risking even the remote chance that a peeping Tom might peer through the slats of a Venetian blind just at the wrong moment.
On the second floor of a darkened house, even I agreed that such precautions weren’t necessary, however.
Ten minutes after I turned out my light and climbed into bed, the white figure I expected appeared in my bedroom doorway. As she padded toward me on naked feet, the glow of a nearby street lamp which cast its subdued light through the window bathed her in a soft glow.
She had loosened her dark hair so that it tumbled inky-black against the white of her bare shoulders. Her body moved with its natural animal sway instead of with the sedate stiffness she had assumed to go with her tailored clothes, and her full lips curved in a totally unsisterly smile.
As she came into my arms, she whispered, “It’s been so long, Sam. Two full months of pretending to be your sister. And six weeks of lying awake nights thinking of you in here with Hazel.”
“It was just as bad for me,” I said in her ear. “How do you think I felt lying here next to a skinny bag of bones, when I knew my own lusciously-stacked legal wife was sleeping in the next room?”
“Am I lusciously stacked?” she wanted to know.
I didn’t trust my memory. I started checking to make sure.
As Mavis had optimistically prophesied, we didn’t encounter a bit of suspicion from any source. Tom Benjamin was disappointed that I wasn’t going to buy out his hardware business after all, but he was understanding enough about it. He was an amiable old man, but a shrewd businessman nevertheless, and I think he had admired my caution in approaching the deal even though he was anxious to unload the store and retire. Putting off definitely committing myself until I had thoroughly checked the business, and living in Tuscola long enough to make sure Hazel and I would like the place as a permanent residence impressed him only as sound business sense.
Now he accepted at face value my explanation that Tuscola could have only sad memories for me since my wife’s death, and that I wanted to move back to Chicago.
Neither the bank nor the insurance company indicated any suspicion either. Within two weeks of Hazel’s death, I got the insurance check in the mail. Meanwhile I had gotten a court order unfreezing Hazel’s and my joint bank account. When I closed out the account, the only comment Bank President Smathers made was an expression of regret that the town was losing me.
Fifteen days after Hazel’s funeral, Mavis and I drove out of town ten thousand dollars richer than we had entered it.
We still didn’t entirely relax, though. I didn’t believe in upsetting careful planning by getting careless at the last minute. We drove to Chicago, just as we had announced we intended to when we left Tuscola, and I sold the car. After that, if there were ever a belated attempt to track us from Tuscola, the trail would end at a used-car lot. That in itself wouldn’t be suspicious, as there is nothing illegal about selling your car. It would merely prove that we’d returned to Chicago just as we said. But if anyone tried to trace us beyond the lot by attempting to locate the parents we were supposed to have in Chicago, he’d run into a dead end. Mavis and I had carefully avoided anything but the vaguest references to them, and an investigation of the Henshaws in the Chicago phone book would only turn up the information that none of them had ever heard of us.
A week after we left Tuscola we rented a small cottage at Miami Beach under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Sam Howard.
Chapter XI
During the next three months Mavis and I lived life as it should be lived. Daytimes we swam and fished or just lazed on our private beach until we were both brown as nuts. Evenings we toured Miami’s night spots.
Once she dropped her spinster-sister role, Mavis was almost unrecognizable as the same woman. In evening gowns designed to accentuate her ripe figure instead of hide it as the rigidly-cut suits had, and with her coal-black hair hanging free instead of being pulled back in a tight bun, she caught every male eye whenever we entered a place.
In place of the staid and rather quiet spinster Tuscola had known, she became her true self. And her true self was a woman whose every movement and gesture was a proud flaunting of her sex.
Mavis had matured in five years. She was now thirty years old, and while she had changed little physically, she had undergone a profound psychological change. In place of the naïve young girl who had once picked me as a mark, there was a grown woman, with all the poise and self-confidence of mature experience. She had lost something in the process. The fresh air of innocence which had originally attracted me was gone forever. But she had gained something even more interesting to men in its place. She had become the embodiment of sex. Her walk had the languorous motion of a sleepy cat; in her smile was enough promise to make even an octogenarian breathe heavily; and in her green eyes there was a constant invitation.
Mavis would have driven a jealous male crazy, for men had a way of looking at her with open hunger. Fortunately I wasn’t a jealous man and, even after all these years, I was still unquestioned head of the family. She might flirt mildly with other men for the sake of gratifying her ego, but she wouldn’t have dared to push it to the point of really making me jealous. She might also tease me a bit about unimportant things such as my elaborate carefulness, but she knew better than to belittle me in any way.