All The Way (4 page)

“Nothing,” she said.

“Why?”

“He’ll be dead.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m going to kill him.”

I caught a no-show out of the Miami airport at four-fifteen, and was at Idlewild a little after eight. I took the limousine over to town. It was one of those blustery November nights, not really wet but with scattered shot-charges of rain hurled on a cold north wind. I didn’t have an overcoat. People looked at me as if I were crazy as I came out of the terminal and caught a cab. The small hotel on West 44th Street where I’d stayed once before was all right, but the room faced an airwell and was small and cheerless.

I sat down on the bed and counted my money. I had three hundred and sixty left. Three hundred, I thought, after I buy a coat. No, I had to have a hat, too. This was New York. I couldn’t go job-hunting along Madison Avenue looking like a refugee from Muscle Beach. It was going to be tough enough as it was; the last reference I could give was two years old. I went up the street to a bar and had a drink, but it only made me feel worse. After a while I went back to the room and tried to read, but it was futile. I kept thinking about seventy-five thousand dollars and blue water and sunlight and a sleek dark head. I threw the magazine on to the floor and lay on the side of the bed staring down at it.

What did I care what happened to some man who was nothing to me but a name? If I were so concerned over his safety, why didn’t I call him and tell him she was going to kill him? I knew she was, didn’t I?

That was it. She still was; my walking out on her hadn’t changed anything. The money he had in that account was only a collateral issue as far as she was concerned. I remembered the way she’d lain there in the darkness, rigid and wide-awake and staring, with her hands clenched, and wondered what he’d done to her. Well, I’d never know; but the chances were very good he’d never do it to anybody else.

So what had I accomplished by running, apart from doing myself out of seventy-five thousand dollars? Well, hell, I’d kept myself from being implicated, hadn’t I? I wasn’t going to kill anybody, and wind up in the death-house.

But she hadn’t asked me to, had she? All she’d wanted me to do was get that money for her—from a man who would already be dead. Still, I’d be an accessory.

What
had
she meant?

How would I know? I thought. I’d run off before she could tell me.

The next morning I bought an overcoat and hat and started out. I answered some ads first, without any luck, and then started hitting the agencies blind. My feet got tired. I filled in forms. I left my name and telephone number. The weather was still blustery and cold, with a lowering gray sky like dirty metal. If this were the movies I thought, I’d pass a travel-agency window and there’d be a big sun-drenched picture of a brunette in a bathing suit sitting on the beach in front of a white hotel with the caption: COME TO MIAMI. She was a blonde, as it turned out, and the invitation was: COME TO KINGSTON. A man was landing a marlin off the end of a pier. With a flyrod, as nearly as I could tell. You could see Jamaica was a fisherman’s paradise. I came back to the bar across the street from the hotel around two and had a Scotch while I wondered what she was doing. And how a girl managed to look elegant in a bathing suit. Not lifted-pinkie elegant, but 18th-century elegant. I went up to my room and lay down on the bed. It was raining now; I could see it falling into the airwell. I picked up the phone and asked for Long Distance.

”Miami Beach,” I said. “The Golden Horn Motel. Personal call to Mrs. Marian Forsyth.” At least I could talk to her.

“Hold the line, please.”

I waited. I could hear the operator.

“Golden Horn,” a girl’s voice said. “Who? Mrs. Forsyth? Just a moment, please . . . I’m sorry; she’s left.”

I dropped the phone back on the cradle. Well, it wasn’t everybody who was smart enough to turn down a seventy-five-thousand-dollar proposition before he’d even heard it. And I’d never see her again. I lit a cigarette and watched the rain, and thought of some of the places we could have gone together—Acapulco, and Bimini, and Nassau. . . .

Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was Miami Beach. Her voice was exactly as cool, urbane, and pleasant as ever. “I finally decided you were never going to call, so—“

I suppose I could ask, I thought. But why bother? There was something inevitable about her; if I’d been holed up in a Lamasery in Tibet it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.

“You win,” I said. “I’ll be there some time tonight.”

“That’s wonderful, Jerry.”

“Where?” I asked.

“You’re sweet. Then you did try to call me?”

“You know damn well I did. Where?”

“Two hundred and six Dover Way,” she replied. “It’s a wonderful place to work.”

I caught a flight out of Idlewild at five forty-five. The rain had stopped, but it was colder. As I was going up the loading ramp of the DC-7, a colored boy from the catering department was coming down. I dropped the overcoat on his arm. “Have a good Christmas,” I said.

When we were airborne and the NO SMOKING sign went off, I lit a cigarette. How she’d learned where I was in New York was routine, actually. She’d known all the time. All her detectives had to do was notify their New York office what flight I’d taken out of Miami, and have me picked up at Idlewild again and tailed to the hotel. The rest of it, however, was considerably more subtle—waiting me out till I called first and learned she’d left the motel without a forwarding address. And then giving me a long half-hour to think about what I’d thrown away for ever, like an old man remembering some girl who’d done everything but draw him a diagram when he was fifteen. That was a nice touch.

We were down at Miami shortly after nine. I waited impatiently out front for my bag and took a cab. It seemed to take for ever, through the downtown traffic and across the MacArthur Causeway. Dover Way was on the Biscayne side, not far from the bay, a quiet side street only three or four blocks long. 206 was half of a side-by-side duplex set back off the street with a hedge in front and shadowy, bougainvillea-covered walls on both sides. I paid off the cab and went up the walk. Lights were on beside the door, but the adjoining apartment appeared to be dark. I pressed the button.

She was wearing a dark skirt and severe white blouse. I kicked the door shut, dropped the bag, and took her in my arms. She submitted to being kissed in that same cool way—quite gracious about it but not particularly eager that it become a trend. She smiled. “How do you like our place?”

It was small, well-furnished, air-conditioned, and very quiet. The living room, which seemed to be more than half of it, was carpeted in gray, and the floor-length curtains at the window in front and the larger one on the left were dark green. The sofa and three chairs were Danish modern, and there was a long coffee table that appeared to be teak and was protected with plate glass. There were three hassocks covered with corduroy in explosive colors. Straight opposite, an open doorway led into the bedroom. Just to the right of it another opened into a small dining area and kitchen. To the left of the bedroom doorway were some built-in bookshelves with sliding glass doors. A radio-phonograph console in limned oak stood in the corner.

The tape recorder she’d bought was set up on one end of the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran across the carpet to a wall outlet. There were several boxes of tape beside it, and some stenographer’s notebooks and pencils.

“I was working,” she explained. She sat down on one of the hassocks beside the coffee table and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for her, and one for myself, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

I looked round the apartment. “You were pretty sure I’d come back, weren’t you?”

“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve been studying you for a week.”

“And seventy-five thousand would do it? All it took was a little time?”

She nodded. “Actually, I don’t think you care a great deal for money as such, but you have some very expensive tastes. And you’re quite cynical.”

She was probably right, I thought. I looked at the classic line of the head and the brilliant coloring and the severe formality of the blouse that came up to end in a plain band collar round the softness of her throat and wondered if she’d considered the possibility I might have come back because of her. I asked her.

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

“Because maybe I did, in part.”

“That sounds rather unlikely. At any rate, I wouldn’t have depended on it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You’re quite an attractive young man. I doubt you have any great problem with girls; and the country’s full of them.”

“You’re overdoing the modesty. And why did you call me a young man?”

Her eyebrows raised. “Twenty-eight?”

“And what’s thirty-four?”

“So you checked my driver’s license?”

“Of course. Not for your age, naturally, but to find out who you were. Incidentally, you don’t look thirty.”

“You’re quite flattering,” she said. “And now if we’re through assessing my drawing power, why don’t we get down to business?”

This was beginning to bug me a little. No woman had any right to be as attractive as she was and at the same time as contemptuous of the fact and of its effect on somebody else. I took her hand and pulled her down on the floor beside me and held her in my arms and kissed her. Instead of objecting, however, she put her arms around my heck. In a moment her eyes opened, very large and dreamy, just under mine. I kissed her again, feeling a tremendous excitement in just touching her.

After a while I picked her up and carried her into the bedroom and turned off the light and undressed her very slowly, and she was as beautifully adept and as pleasant and as far away and unreachable as ever. Clearly, the simplest way to rid the agenda of distracting minor issues like sex was to get them over with.

She lay beside me in the darkness. I could see the glowing tip of her cigarette.

“All right,” I said. “Now tell me the whole thing.”

“Suppose we begin right where we left off? I’m going to destroy him.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate him.”

“And why do you?”

I thought I heard her sigh. “Why don’t you try a wild guess as to why a woman might hate a man after she’s wrecked her own marriage for him and thrown away her reputation and helped him make a fortune, and lived for him twenty-four hours a day for six of the last few years she’d ever have to give anybody—?”

“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m just a bystander. So he left you?”

“Yes.” Then she laughed. It was like glass breaking. “Of course, while I was running his business for him, I should have suggested we set up a pension plan for over-age employees. I’d have nothing to worry about. I could buy a little cottage, get a cat for companionship, and live the full, rich life every woman looks forward to—”

“Knock it off,” I protested. “Who is she? And how do you know it’s permanent?”

“Oh, she’s quite pretty. Honey-colored and virginal looking, with a wide-eyed and appealing sort of defenselessness about her. Like anthrax, or a striking cobra—”

“Come off it,” I said. “How the hell could you lose out to a cornball routine like that? She’d never lay a glove on you.”

”It’s a little trick you do with numbers. She’s twenty-three.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Oh, you
are
a young man, aren’t you? I’d forgotten, men do go through a phase between their first and second passes at the jail-bait when they’re actually interested in women— But never mind. They’re going to be married in January.”

“You’re getting ahead of me,” I said. “He couldn’t marry you because he already had a wife. What happened to her?”

“What happened to her, besides the fact they haven’t lived together for the past eight years, is that she died about five months ago.

“Well, look—I doubt very seriously anybody could hand you a line six years long, so if he was really serious why didn’t he get a divorce?”

“He and his wife were both Catholics.”

“I see. And now that he
can remarry—”

“Yes,” she said. “You see.”

“And I see something more. You’ll never get away with it.”

“Yes—”

“Look. He took everything you could give him for six years, and then when he finally could get married he jilted you for somebody else. If he’s killed, it’ll take the police about twenty minutes to figure it out.”

“You underestimate me,” she broke in. “I’m going to take a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars away from him, and kill him. And nobody will ever suspect I did it, for the simple reason they won’t even know it was done at all. Does that satisfy you?”

“No,” I said. “It can’t be done.”

She sighed. “You’re forgetting something I told you. That I know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else on earth. I’m going to destroy him from the inside.”

“Hold it a minute,” I said. “If you knew so much about him, why didn’t you see this fluff-ball moving in on you?”

“See it? Don’t be ridiculous. I saw every stage of it before it even happened, but what do you suggest I should have done about it? Compete with a twenty-three-year-old professional virgin, after he was already tired of me? I saw it, all right; I had a front-row seat. He hired her as a stenographer, and I had the honor and privilege of training her. Sometimes I wake up at night—”

“If it’s that kind of thing,” I said, “why the money angle?”

“Money is important to me. I like success. I poured everything I had into making him one, thinking I was doing it for both of us. Do you think I’m going to move aside now and give it up? Let him hand it all to some simpering and feather-brained little bitch who can’t even balance a check book?”

“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.

“All right. First, about the apartment. We had to have a quiet place where we could work without being disturbed and with no chance of being overheard. The motel simply wouldn’t do. I was registered there under my right name, of course, and it’s imperative that no one ever finds out that I even know you—”

I interrupted her. “What about those detectives you’ve had following me around?”

“That’s a good point. I used another name, and paid them in cash. The fact they know your name is of no significance at all unless you can be traced to me in some way. I’m the one who knows Harris Chapman.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I rented the apartment on a six months’ lease, under your name. I’m Mrs. J. L. Forbes, and there’s nothing to connect me with the Mrs. Forsyth who stayed briefly at the Golden Horn. There’s no reason for you not to use your right name; you have nothing to hide, and you can go right on living here afterwards if you like. No one will notice if you’re gone from time to time, as you will be. It’s handled by a rental agency. The people who have the other apartment won’t be here until some time in December, so we have it all to ourselves and don’t have to worry about being heard through the walls.

“We don’t have much time. Today is the fifth, and he’ll be here the night of the thirteenth. In addition, I have to go to Nassau and New York—”

“Why?”

“Simply to prove I’ve been there. When I resigned and left on this trip, Miami Beach, Nassau, and New York were the three places I was going. If I changed my plans and spent all my time here it might look suspicious afterwards, especially since this is the place Harris Chapman is going to disappear. So I’ll go to both places long enough to send the usual asinine postcards and bring back some souvenir gifts. That means I’ll be gone from here about four days of the eight we have in which to coach you. However, we’ll use the tape recorder and you’ll have the tapes to study while I’m gone.”

“You’re sure he’s coming here?”

Yes. I made all the reservations for him. He goes on one big-game fishing trip every year, for his vacation. For the past two years he’s gone to Acapulco, but this time he’s coming to Florida again.”

“And somewhere along the line I’m going to take his place?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

”Just under two weeks. I think it can be done in twelve days.”

“Describe him,” I said.

“Apart from the fact you’re both about six feet, you don’t resemble each other at all, if that’s what you mean.”

“What else would I mean? You don’t think he’s going to be invisible for those twelve days, do you? He may be a voice on the telephone to the people at home, but down here— But never mind. Go ahead and describe him.”

“He’s thirty-nine. Six feet. A hundred and ninety-five pounds. Gray eyes. Somewhat fair complexion, always with a tan. Brown hair, beginning to gray at the temples except that he touches it up.”

“That’ll do,” I said. “I’m twenty-eight. The height is the same within probably an inch, but I’m fifteen pounds lighter. Blue eyes. Darker complexion. And hair that’s just a shade from being black. Q.E.D.”

“It’s nowhere near that simple,” she cut in impatiently. “In the first place, any police officer could write a book on the general unreliability of descriptions. And secondly, if you’ve had acting experience, you should know what I m driving at. You’re not merely trying to
look like
Harris Chapman—you’re assuming the whole character of Harris Chapman. And further, this same character projected quite logically into a strange and finally shattering experience—which is going to be what the witnesses will remember, and not the color of his hair. Incidentally, he wears a hat anyway. You’re simply going to make them remember the wrong things.”

“Such as?”

“Let me give you a brief sketch for a start. He’s quite vain about his appearance, uses a sun lamp in winter to keep his tan intact, and wears a thin, pencil-line mustache because he thinks his upper hp is too long. He has a tendency toward hypochondria and carries round a miniature drugstore with him, and worries constantly and probably needlessly about two things—cancer and mental illness, the latter because he has an older brother who cracked up in his late teens. When that smoking and lung cancer thing first started several years ago, he not only switched over to filter cigarettes, but smoked them in a filter holder.

“He wears glasses—horn-rims—and is somewhat hard of hearing in his left ear, the result of a diving accident when he was sixteen, though he refuses to admit it and claims his hearing is perfect in both ears. I’m perhaps making him sound doddering and fatuous, which he isn’t at all; he’s a hellishly attractive man with a lot of drive, but I’m stressing these quirks and idiosyncrasies for a reason—”

“Sure,” I said impatiently. “They’re character tags, and props. But, look—so I do wear horn-rimmed glasses, grow a mustache, use a long cigarette holder, and go round tossing pills into my face, what does it buy? I still won’t look like him, and I wouldn’t fool anybody who’s seen him since he was fifteen.”

“You won’t have to, obviously. None of the people you’ll be in contact will ever have seen him at all. And they never will.”

“But you’re forgetting something. As soon as he disappears, they’re sure as hell going to see photographs of him.”

“No,” she said. “That’ll be taken care of.”

“How?” I asked.

To be of any value in tracing him they’d have to be good likenesses and taken within the past ten years. There aren’t too many. I have most of them, and I know where the others are. He had one made for that saccharine little bitch about two months ago, but we can forget it. It’s one of those gooey and dramatic things with a ton of glamor and no resemblance.”

“All right,” I said. “Tell me the rest of it.”

She told me. She talked for twenty minutes, and when she was through I was glad she didn’t hate me. Chapman didn’t have a chance. It was brilliant, and it was deadly, and I couldn’t see a flaw in it anywhere.

I awoke early the next morning, before seven o’clock, but she was already up. She stood in the doorway in blue lounging pajamas, sipping a glass of orange juice.

“The coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she said.

I lit a cigarette and propped myself on an elbow to look at her. “If I were a sculptor, I’d capture that head or go crazy and kill myself.”

She glanced coolly at her watch. “Never mind capturing my head; you’re supposed to assimilate what’s in it, and we start in ten minutes. When you shave, don’t forget the mustache.”

She sounded crisp and efficient, and I found out before the day was over I didn’t know the half of it. She had a genius for organizing material, and she was a slave-driver. By the time I’d showered and put on light slacks and a T-shirt, she had my coffee and orange juice ready on the coffee table in the living room and was seated with hers on one of the hassocks at the other end of it. Between us was the tape recorder. The microphone was mounted on a little stand, facing her, and beside it were some boxes of tape and two stenographer’s notebooks.

“I’ll be working from shorthand notes,” she said, “so there’ll be no lost motion, and when we come to a stop we’ll stop the tape. But before we start, we’d better break the job down and analyze it.”

”Right,” I said. “How many people do I have to talk to, and how often?”

“Two,” she said. “Chris Lundgren at the broker’s office in New Orleans, nearly every day. And to her, every day. Her name, incidentally, is Coral Blaine.”

I drank some of the coffee, and thought about it. “It’s rough. Look at it—I’ve got to know everything about Chapman that these people know, and everything about these people that Chapman knows, plus a thousand business details and dozens of other people. It’s damn near impossible.”

She interrupted. “Of course it’s impossible; no mind could absorb all that in eight days. But you don’t have to.”

“No?”

“Of course not.” She waved a slim hand. “You don’t have to pass an examination in all this stuff; all you have to do is carry on two or three short telephone conversations each day without making a really dangerous mistake. analyze it; what does it take, actually? A quick mind—which you have—some ability in bluffing and improvising, a grasp of most of the salient and obvious facts and a few of the ones that
only Harris Chapman could possibly know,
and there you are—the illusion is complete. And don’t forget, you’re always in control of the conversation; you’re the boss. When you see you’re about to get in over your head, change the subject. And in the end, there’s nothing connecting you but a piece of wire. Break it. And call back later with the right information. You’ll have a prompter.”

“You mean the tapes?”

She nodded. “They’ll be numbered, and you’ll know what’s covered in each one.”

“Good,” I said.

She smiled. “And don’t forget, it’s only the first week you have to be careful. After that, it doesn’t matter.”

I looked at her. I’d forgotten that, and it was one of the really brilliant angles of the whole thing. This girl was clever. And all she wanted out of life was to kill a man. It seemed a senseless waste. The thought startled me, and I shrugged it off. It was her life, wasn’t it?

“All right,” I said. “Roll One.”

“Harris Chapman was born in Thomaston April fourteen, nineteen-eighteen. Father’s name: John W. Chapman. Owned the Ford agency, and was one of the largest stockholders in the Thomaston State Bank. His mother’s maiden name was Mary Burke, and she was the only child of a Thomaston attorney. John W. sold out and retired in nineteen-forty, and moved to California. Both still living, in La Jolla.

“Only two children. Keith is two years older than Harris. The summer he was nineteen, after his freshman year at Tulane, he hit a twelve-year-old girl with his car. She wasn’t seriously injured, but shortly afterwards he began to go to pieces. He quit sleeping, or if he did sleep nobody could figure out when, and lost weight and became withdrawn. It was the onset of schizophrenia, of course, and probably the accident had little or nothing to do with it. At any rate, his condition became hopeless, and he’s spent more than half the past twenty-two years in one mental institution or another.