The jury was out for an hour.
I walked out of the courtroom a free and rich man.
Doreen and I sold out a few weeks later. She was restless, and I had no real desire to live in Mulberry longer.
We toured Florida and decided on the Coquina Beach place. For awhile it appeared life might settle to normal, but when we were through the decorating, the hundred and one things in establishing a new residence that kept us busy, Doreen became restless again.
I tried everything. Cocktail parties — they were too vapid. Another hunting trip — but a bleeding animal held no more interest for her.
Doreen hired a yard man last week and fixed up quarters over the garage for him. But we don’t really need a full-time yard man. I looked into his background. A bum. From the downtown waterfront and wino jungles. Comes from nowhere.
But I suspect where he is going. It’s been building in Doreen for quite awhile now. And I don’t know what to do. If I warned the yard man, somebody else would be marked.
Somebody’s going to die — to provide a thrill for Doreen. Nothing less will calm that mounting restlessness.
I certainly am afraid to go home tonight.
His Own Jailor
by Bryce Walton
He carried a case containing a fortune in gems and he’d never been robbed. Then Morten found the Jewel of Nakedness...
This time, she got Morten so fearfully worked up that he ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.
“Hurry up, Morty,” she said. “You’ll have to be leaving soon.”
He looked at his flat characterless face in the mirror on which toothbrush splatters had accumulated. The specks gave his face an oddly diseased look. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He felt some of the pain, from having clamped his teeth too hard, leaving his jaws. His normal composure, his calmness, the expressionless surface returned. He was himself.
Rose, he knew, was still lying out there on the bed. She was wearing that blue transparent negligee and nothing else. She was carelessly and incredibly exposing the living jewel of her nakedness. Morton thought of her in this way, because he was always thinking in terms of his trade.
When he arrived at her apartment that evening, she had been wearing nothing but a pair of spike-heeled black pumps, and a wispy black lace gown. He had stood looking, listening to the secret sounds of her body moving under the silk. The fever started then, as it started every evening the same way, but this time it had reached a frightening pitch. That choking elation of feeling was getting beyond control. Such a possibility scared Morten until he felt sick. What if he got too impatient, made her mad at him, made her call off the whole thing? The thought made the bathroom floor go soft under him. Something happened momentarily to the familiar angular pattern of the walls.
Morten hurried out of the bathroom, hesitated in the hall before moving toward the bizarre room where she waited. African masks were in it, weird mobiles, striped walls, a big, burlap-covered Hollywood bed under a wine-colored lamp, shaped like a bottle and suspended from the ceiling.
He had paid the rent for this place a month ago, when he and Rose had started their relationship. He had paid for all this peculiar furnishing. He sympathized with her uncommon taste, but he still did not feel exactly at home here. “This is for you, honey,” Rose had said, “whether you look the part or not. You’ve got an avant-gard soul. One thing we’re not, honey. We’re not common.”
“No,” Morty had agreed. “We’re not common.”
She hated the common things worse than he did. She would tell him about her childhood on the farm, her stint as a car-hop and in a pencil tablet factory. Sometimes she stood naked by the window and made nasty remarks about the common jerks down below.
Joe Pollak had introduced her to Morten. Joe had brought her as a date to the meeting of the Southern California Guild, American Gem Society, at the Biltmore. But Morten had taken her home. Morten still couldn’t quite believe that Rose preferred him to the handsome Joe Pollak, even though Joe was wild, dissipated and chronically unemployed these days.
Later Joe told Morten. “She’s a mad chick. You see her kind hanging around jewelry exhibits all the time, picking up with salesmen, and loitering around jewelry auctions. They’ve got a bug about stones. And let me tell you something — with them it’s like getting loved up good. They’re crazy. They can hypnotize themselves, drive themselves nuts, looking into a ruby. It’s like dope. But she’s an interesting chick to play around with. And she goes for you. Those crazy gone stories of yours, man.”
He could understand her, he thought, because ordinary little man in a gray suit that he was on the outside, inside he knew what it meant to look into the blazing heart of a precious stone.
He stepped carefully toward the bed. She frowned up at him. She put the wine bottle on the floor, started playing with that lump of uncut diamond he had carried with him for good luck for at least fifteen years.
“Sit down, honey,” she said, and patted the bed. He sat rigidly on the edge, gripping his wet hands together.
“You want to kiss me again, honey?” she asked. Only she was looking at the uncut diamond. Her eyes were getting that glazed, distant look.
“Yes, may I?” he said, leaning over her.
“First, tell me another story.”
His mouth felt dry. She shifted her long warm thigh against him. His eyes blurred. She was working on him again, working him up to such a pitch that he had trouble speaking, afraid that when he spoke his voice would quiver, or explode in a shout.
“Well,” he began carefully. She was playing suggestively with his hand, caressing each finger.
“You can hold my hand if you want,” she said.
He thanked her with his eyes as he began to tell her a story. “Well, there was this Mogul Emperor Jehangir. He had his name carved on a noble ruby. He was secure in his belief that he would thereby be remembered to posterity. He believed he would be remembered for a longer time than if he had monuments built of stone, or if historians wrote about him. And one day...”
It wasn’t a long story. But he made it longer because he was sitting beside her and holding her hand. And the longer he told the story, the more her lips parted, the more her eyes got that dark dreamy look, and she began to work her hand in his in a suggestive way that kept him talking on and on in a kind of stupefied ecstasy, improvising as he went along, bringing in the exotic names of jewels and emperors and queens from other stories he hadn’t told her yet.
That first night when she brought him to her apartment after Joe introduced them, they sat close together on the bed, and held hands, and he had told her one of his stories.
He told her, that first night, about the famous Kaianian crown, shaped like a fez, and topped by an uncut ruby that came from Siam and was as large as a hen’s egg. And he also told her about the fabulous Kaianian belt, a foot wide, weighing eighteen pounds, and one complete mass of diamonds, emeralds, pearls and rubies.
She allowed him to kiss her then. The effect of that kiss was like a deep shock. Nothing like it had ever happened to Morten before. His life had altered at once.
All those years before Rose came along, Morten had sat alone in hotel rooms looking at his jewels, and dreaming up stories, and reading books about the fabulous histories of precious stones. He had been a bachelor all his life, and the only women he had known were those anonymous ones you are introduced to by bell-hops and taxi drivers.
But sooner or later he always, as now, ran out of words.
For ten minutes after he stopped talking this time, Rose lay with her eyes closed, her lips parted, the uncut diamond with its odd slivery edge harder than a knife blade shining in the wine-colored light as it glittered in her cupped hand.