Riordan had come up beside them as Jake was speaking. He looked at Noble and then took the cigar from his mouth. “What’s the trouble?” he said. “I heard Jake say he’s quitting.”
“I heard him, too,” Noble said, with a touch of panic in his voice. “But he doesn’t mean it.”
Riordan looked at Jake and said, “Well, how about it? You serious?”
“Yes, I’m quite serious,” Jake said.
“You think we’re licked, eh? Is that it?”
“No, that isn’t it,” Jake said. “I suppose I should explain myself succinctly and graphically. But it seems a big bother.”
“Jake, what’s got into you?” Noble exploded.
“He’s squeamish about working for a thief,” Riordan said, with a hard smile.
Jake met Riordan’s eyes evenly. “You’re putting words in my mouth, but they aren’t bad ones. This job stinks to high heaven. So I’m clearing out. Good luck.”
He picked up his hat and coat and went to the door.
Riordan said, “High moral attitudes are a luxury, you’ll find. Only the very rich can afford them.”
Jake paused with his hand on the knob. “I never noticed you displaying any.”
Riordan laughed good naturedly. “Of course not. That’s how I got rich,” he said.
Jake looked at the three men, Niccolo, Noble, and Riordan, all standing with drinks in their hands and regarding him with varying expressions. And it occurred to him then with sudden clearness that he knew a great deal about who had murdered May Laval and Avery Meed.
He smiled and started to answer Riordan; he decided he didn’t have the time. Opening the door he waved a goodbye to them and walked briskly to the elevators.
Chapter Twelve
Fifteen minutes later Jake was ringing Sheila’s bell. She opened the door and when she saw him she tried to close it; but he put a foot inside and pushed his way into the room.
“Please go away,” she said, and he saw that she had been crying. She turned from him and sat down on the sofa before the fire. “I meant it. I want you to go away,” she said.
“I’ve got a little speech to deliver,” Jake said. “Can I sit down?”
She didn’t answer, and from the set of her shoulders he knew she wouldn’t. He sat on the arm of the sofa and removed his hat.
“It’s just this,” he said. “I know why you divorced me and I know why you’re sick of me now. I’ve changed since we were married. Given a soupçon of encouragement I could be something spectacular in the bastard line. You saw it coming and got out before I reached the stage of dismembering children in a spirit of good clean fun.”
“Can’t you say it without sounding like a night club entertainer?” Sheila said, fumbling for a cigarette.
Jake held his lighter for her, but she pushed his hand away and used matches from the coffee table.
“I’ll try,” Jake said quietly. “When I met you I was no prize, admittedly; but I had certain values and certain ideas that I respected. I took people as they came, regardless of their personal, religious, or ethical idiosyncrasies, and I didn’t want to see anyone get hurt.”
He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit it and inhaled deeply. For a moment he watched Sheila in silence, and then shrugged and continued. “But I changed. I can’t blame the public relations business, or anything else, I suppose. But it hit me this afternoon that I was stirring around in a slimy job, and not particularly minding it.” He shook his head and tossed his cigarette into the fireplace. “I’m not saying this very well. But I’m fed up. I’m through. I’ve told Noble that already.”
He watched Sheila’s still face and the firelight in her hair. He was tired and empty; but it wasn’t a bad feeling.
“That’s the end of the speech,” he said.
“What are you going to do now?” Sheila asked.
“I’m going to tell Martin some things about a couple of murders. After that I’m going to send you a dozen roses and go on relief.”
Sheila raised her head slowly and he saw that she was crying and making no attempt to check the tears.
“Can’t you do something about this middle-class emotion?” he said uncomfortably.
“Give me a hanky.”
He gave her his handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said. Then she shook her head. “No, I’m not. I waited for it two years and it doesn’t matter a damn bit that I’m behaving like a fool.”
Jake sat beside her. “Then, in the traditional phrase, it isn’t too late?”
Sheila put her hand against his cheek. “The time wasn’t important. I just wanted you to wake up, I suppose I’d have waited until I was an old hag for that to happen. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, it’s not good politics. But it’s the way I feel, Jake. I love you, you know.”
Jake had no urge to be flippant. He simply felt very lucky. “Why didn’t you just tell me what you wanted?” he said.
“That wouldn’t have been any good. You had to see it yourself and make your own decision, one way or the other. I thought if I left, you might wake up. Anyway, I couldn’t bear to be around and watch you changing into a person I didn’t know and didn’t like.”
Jake put his hands on her shoulders and pulled her close to him, and for a moment they didn’t do any more talking; then Sheila pushed him away. “That can wait. Right now I want to know what you meant when you said you were going to tell Martin about a couple of murders.”
“I dislike easily distracted women,” Jake said, and then his mood changed and he sighed. “This is hardly the time for the light touch. I’ve stumbled onto a number of things in the past couple of days. They add up to a pretty good guess as to who killed whom. But I can’t fit Niccolo into the picture.”
“Niccolo?” Sheila asked.
“You couldn’t know about that, I guess. Well, here it is: This afternoon Niccolo asked me how to handle the angle that May’s diary had been sent to me. Well, he couldn’t have known that I received the diary unless he sent it to me.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
“Yes. And he had a nice glib story. He said that Toni Ryerson was sitting at her desk when I unwrapped the diary. She recognized it from the newspaper descriptions, and told Niccolo.”
“Well, that’s logical enough.”
“No, it isn’t,” Jake said. “Toni’s desk and mine are not in line, Sheila. Sitting at her desk, she couldn’t see what I was doing at my desk.”
“Are you sure?” Sheila asked.
“Pretty sure,” Jake said. “But I’m not going to guess about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Were going down to the office and check. You see what it means if Niccolo is lying, don’t you?”
“I get it all right,” Sheila said.
She came out of her bedroom five minutes later with fresh makeup on, and her hair tucked under the rim of a small woolen hat.
“I hurried,” she said.
“It doesn’t show. You look perfect.”
“You sound normal again. Cheerful, I mean.” She smiled and took his arm. “It’s a nice change.”
Outside snow was falling and darkness had settled thickly and suddenly. They waited on the curb of Lake Shore Drive for a Loop-bound cab while in the opposite lanes four rows of traffic flowed smoothly away from the city, their headlights cutting clear tunnels into the night.
Jake thought about Sheila’s comment with a slightly cynical smile. Yes, he had made a change of a sort, and he did feel better. The depression that had affected him for the past days was gone, and he guessed that it had stemmed from a subconscious realization that his work for Riordan was hitting a new low in his career with Gary Noble.
Things were not only bleak, they were confusing. It was curious, he thought, that moral rehabilitation should generally be accompanied by the renunciation of money, in one way or another. In fact, it was about the only way of proving the purity of your desire to be a better man. Yet the world respected the making of money as it respected nothing else, in spite of the academic maxims that two could live as cheaply as one, that the best things in life were free, and that the rich were really a collection of miserable neurotics.