All the way

by Charles Williams

  ”What do you want?” I asked.

  “Primarily, to know quite a bit more about you. What are your plans?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If your information’s accurate, I suppose I can go back to my right name and start looking for a job. Probably in New York.”

  “How much money do you have?”

  “Little over four hundred.”

  “That’s not much. And good jobs aren’t easy to find at twenty-eight with your record of moving around. Let me make you an offer.”

  “Go ahead.

  “Put it off for a few days. I have a proposition in mind, but I can’t tell you what it is until I’m sure of several things. You don’t stand to lose anything; if nothing comes of it, you’ll still have your four hundred dollars. I’ll make up anything you’ve spent.”

  “What kind of proposition?” I asked.

  “I’d rather not say yet. But how would you like to go back to Miami Beach?”

  “When?” I asked.

  She stood up. “Right now. I’m expecting some very important mail, and I have to do some shopping in the morning, so I thought we’d drive up tonight.”

  I rose. “Sounds fine to me.” Then I took hold of her arms, and said, “In fact, I’ve just had a wonderful idea—”

  The blue eyes were coolly satirical. “That I don’t doubt in the slightest. No.”

  “But you haven’t even heard it—”

  “I don’t have to. But it just happens I still have my room at the Golden Horn, and that I’m expecting the mail there, under my own name. I’d suggest you re-register as George Hamilton; after all, they’ll probably remember you.”

  ”But—”

  “I’ll drop you in downtown Miami Beach, and you can take a cab. I’d rather no one knew of our relationship.”

  “Relationship,” I said. “Hah!” She smiled, but said nothing.

  * * *

  “We’d stopped for dinner in Marathon, so it was shortly after eleven when she let me off in Miami Beach. “I’ll see you in the morning,” she said. “Call me in room three-one-six.”

  “Sure,” I replied. I carried the bag into a bar and killed about ten minutes over a drink before I called a cab and went out to the Golden Horn. It’s still slow in the Miami area in November, so I wasn’t worried about getting a room. It turned out I could have one fronting the ocean if I wanted. “Third floor, if possible,” I said.

  I signed the registry card and followed the boy across the corner of the patio court, past the illuminated pool and palms bearing clusters of colored lights. We entered a corridor in the left wing and took an elevator to the third floor.

  312 was round the comer from her room. It was like the one I’d had before, with turquoise walls and beige carpet and an oversized bed. The bedspread was persimmon, as were the floor-to-ceiling curtains covering the bay window at the far end. The bath had a tub and stall shower and was finished in persimmon tile. The boy put the bag on the luggage stand beside the dresser over on the right, adjusted the air-conditioner thermostat, thanked me for the tip, and left. I waited three minutes before I stepped down the corridor and knocked on 316. The door opened slightly and she looked out round the edge of it.

  “I might have known,” she said.

  “I just thought of several more things I should tell you about myself,” I replied. “It was in Panama I first became interested in big-game fishing-”

  “I see. And you’re afraid you might forget them before morning?”

  “They might be lost for ever. But I don’t have to come in; I can tell you from out here in the corridor. Or through the door.”

  She sighed. I couldn’t tell whether she was really angry or not. “Just a moment.” She disappeared. I heard a rustling sound, and then she pulled the door open and I stepped inside. She closed it. Her room was the same layout and color scheme. She’d scrubbed off what makeup she’d been wearing, even the lipstick, and had on a rather conservative nightgown under the négligé she was struggling with, but she was unbelievably exciting. I didn’t know why.

  “Mostly trivial,” I said. “But revealing. For instance, when I was a kid, all the other slobs put their money in the Christmas Club, but I kept mine in a regular account. Got two per cent.”

  “You don’t have to hit me over the head,” she replied. I kissed her. This was even more exciting, in spite of the fact she obviously didn’t care whether it was or not. She finally broke it up, but she said, “All right.” It was rather the way you’d buy a potato peeler from a salesman to get rid of him, but by this time I didn’t even care what the terms were.

  * * *

  She was smooth, deft, experienced, and agreeably cooperative about the whole thing. I lay there afterwards in the annealed and quiescent dark trying to pin down her exact attitude, and decided the word I was looking for was pleasant. That was it. She was quite pleasant about it—the perfect hostess, in fact.

  She said something, but I missed it. I was still thinking about her, trying to remember exactly what she looked like—”

  “You’re not even listening,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Speech. It may have escaped your attention, but for a long time now people have been able to communicate—”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. What was it?”

  “You mentioned acting. Was that by any chance the truth?”

  “Yes. But just amateur. In school. I never did try to turn pro; not enough talent.”

  “Were you a fast study?”

  “Fairly so,” I said. “I usually knew my lines by the time we finished the first rehearsal. For some reason I learn fast, or easily. Just luck, I suppose.”

  “Tell me about your family.”

  “I’m it, except for my step-father. My mother and father were divorced when I was about five. He was a geologist; spent most of his time in South America, usually at high altitudes. My mother wouldn’t live up there. He was killed the next summer; a station wagon he was riding in went off the road into a gorge. My mother remarried a couple of years afterwards. Widower several years older than she was, partner in a Houston brokerage firm. He’s retired now, lives on a big place near Huntsville and raises Black Angus cattle. My mother died while I was at sea, during the Korean thing. She left me a little money; that’s when I bought the bar in Panama.”

  “What happened to the bar?”

  “It was put out-of-bounds for military personnel because of a couple of bad fights, so I sold it.”

  ”At a loss?”

  “No. I was lucky. This live one was fresh from the States and didn’t know what out-of-bounds meant down there. I think he wanted to make it a fag hangout, anyway.”

  “What did you do with the money when you got back to the States?”

  “Lost most of it in Las Vegas.”

  “Tell me about the tout business.”

  I reached over and turned on the reading lamp on the night table. She looked at me questioningly. “What’s that for?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just got tired of talking to you in the dark. I wanted to look at you.”

  “Why?”

  “Tell me,” I said. I raised myself on an elbow and ran a finger-tip along the line of her cheek. “You’re beautiful. Is that it?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I was never less silly. How about striking? Exciting? It’s a quality of some kind—fragile, elegant, cool, hard-boiled, and sexy—all at the same time. There’s no such combination? I was afraid not.”

  She shook her head with exasperation, but she did smile. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. And I had some weird idea I was going to talk to you—”

  “I am talking.”

  “Like an idiot. Why the campaign; you’re already here, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t be so cynical.”

  “Turn out the light.”

  I turned it out, and took her in my arms and kissed her. She came to me readily, and was as deftly and pleasantly co-operative as before. If
that was the only way to achieve a calm and rational conversation, by God she was willing.

  “What about the tout business?” she asked after a while.

  “It was nothing,” I said. “You know how they operate. You’ve seen ’em by the dozens passing out their sheets at the entrance to racetracks—Clocker Joe, Stablehand Maguire, Exercise Boy—no imagination, competing with each other, and working for buttons. So I made a deal with this one; I’d put him in the big time for half the take. We set it up as a telegraphic service and I bought time on a Tijuana radio station to sell him—a real saturation build-up about the time Santa Anita was opening. Lot of spot announcements and a quarter-hour of hillbilly junk with a plug every minute or two. That’s about all there was to it, besides convincing him he had to raise his prices. Obviously, nobody has any confidence in a cheap tip on a horse race; you’ve got to charge plenty to be good. We were splitting two thousand a week for a while.”

  “What happened?”

  “He couldn’t stand prosperity; turned out to be a lush. Kept getting his records all fouled up so he couldn’t remember who got the winners yesterday. And you’re dead without records, obviously.”

  “I see,” she said thoughtfully.

  I woke once during the night. She was lying quite still beside me, but after a while I began to suspect she was awake. I put my hand on her thigh. It was tense and rigid. Her arms felt the same way, and when I slid my hand down to hers, lying at her side, I found it was clenched into a fist.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She made no reply. I asked again. She still said nothing. I gave up, and after a while I went back to sleep.

  Three

  When I awoke it was after eight. I groped for a cigarette, lit it, and turned to look at her. She was sleeping quietly with the dark hair like spilled ink across the pillow. She had the flat stomach and narrow hips of a fashion model and rather small breasts that were spread out and flattened as she lay on her back. I looked at the slender patrician face with the long lashes like soot against her skin; it was a willful face, I thought, and it just escaped being bony, but the bones were good. She was no pin-up, but she reminded me of something very thin and expensive that was made before good workmanship went out of style. I wondered what she wanted.

  Her bag was on the dresser; it might tell me something, I thought. I went over and opened it. A thin folder held eleven $100 Express checks. I pulled out the wallet and checked her driver’s license. What little she’d told me about herself appeared to be the truth. Mrs. Marion Forsyth, it said, 714 Beauregard Drive, Thomaston, La. Hair, black. Eyes, blue, 5’-7”. 112 pounds. Born 8 November, 1923. She’d be thirty-four in a few days. This surprised me; I wouldn’t have thought she was over twenty-nine or thirty. The wallet held about six hundred dollars. I dropped it back in the bag.

  I dressed, and looked out into the corridor. It was clear. I went back to my room, called down for orange juice and coffee and the Miami Herald, and had a quick shower and shave. It was nine twenty-five and I was just finishing the coffee when she called. She was going over to Miami, and would be back at noon. The message was as clipped and precise as an inter-office memo.

  I killed a couple of hours swimming off the beach and had just come in and changed when the phone rang. This time her voice was a little friendlier, and there was a hint of suppressed excitement in it. “I’ve got something to show you,” she said.

  I knocked lightly on 316, and she opened almost immediately. Her hair was up in the chignon, of course, softly clubbed and worn low on the nape of the neck, and while the dress was just a summer cotton she looked as slender and smart as a fashion show. I kissed her. She submitted agreeably enough, but I could sense impatience. Pulling away from me, she nodded towards the dresser.

  There were two things on it that hadn’t been here this morning. One was a small tape recorder about the size of a portable typewriter, and the other an old briefcase plastered all over with labels. It had come air express, and I could see the return address on one of the labels. It was the same as that on her driver’s license.

  “That’s the mail you were waiting for?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s just come. And the tape recorder is what I went to Miami for. Have you ever heard your voice on one?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Did you buy the recorder?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Why?”

  “I just wondered. I assume it has something to do with that proposition you mentioned, and it occurred to me I must represent a sizable investment by this time. Four or five hundred to have me investigated by those keyhole astronomers, and now another couple of hundred for the recorder. You must be very sure of yourself.”

  “It’s a calculated risk,” she said.

  She unstrapped the briefcase. I could see excitement growing in her face as she opened it and began removing its contents. They appeared to me to be largely rubbish. There were a dozen or more thin pamphlets I recognized as the annual statements of corporations, some old fire-insurance policies, and two or three stenographer’s notebooks. She casually tossed all this into the wastepaper basket.

  “I didn’t want my housekeeper to know what I was really after,” she explained. “So I told her to ship the briefcase and I’d look for the papers I needed. Oh—Here we are.”

  There were two of them, flat cardboard boxes about seven inches square. They were packed with reels of tape. She selected one and put it on the machine, and stuck an empty reel on the other spindle. When the tape was connected, she ran several feet of it on to the empty reel with a control on the front panel, and pressed the “Play” switch. A man’s voice issued from the speaker. She adjusted the volume.

  “—take a chance and hold the Lukens Steel for another five points. I think it’ll go, but the minute it does, sell. It’s too volatile for my blood pressure. How’d Gulf Oil close, Chris?”

  “Let’s see—” This was also a man’s voice. “Here we are. Gulf was up three-quarters. I’d say hang on to it.”

  “I intend to. And buy me another hundred shares in the morning.”

  “Right. One hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr. Chapman?”

  “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department to send me everything they’ve got or can dig up on an outfit called Trinity Natural Gas? It’s a pipeline company that was formed about two years ago. The stock sold over the counter until last month, but now it’s listed on the American Exchange. Marian has a hunch about it. She went to college with the man who’s head of it, and says he’s a ball of fire.”

  She stopped the machine and glanced at me. “Do you know what it is?”

  I lit a cigarette. “Sounds like a man talking to his broker over the phone.” I couldn’t see what the excitement was, or why she wanted me to listen to it.

  “Right,” she said. She ran the tape back, watching the mechanical counter on the panel. “Now listen closely. I’m going to play that last speech again, and I want you to repeat it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  She pressed the “Play” switch again. Chapman’s voice began. “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department—” I listened, noting at the same time that she was taking it down in shorthand. It was only five or six sentences.

  She stopped the machine at the end of it, and rapidly transcribed her notes. She handed me the sheet of paper with the sentences written out in longhand.

  “I don’t need it,” I said. “I’ve heard it twice.”

  “Read it anyway,” she said. “So you won’t pause or stumble.” Plugging in the microphone, she handed it to me. “Hold it about there. Don’t jiggle it, or bump it. When I throw the machine on “Record” and the tape starts rolling, begin reading.”

  “Don’t you have to erase what’s on there first?”

  She shook her head. “It erases and records at the same time. Ready? Here we go.”

  She started it, and I read the speech into the microphone. She stop
ped the machine, and ran the tape back, still watching the counter. I could sense she was keyed-up. I knew what she was doing by now, of course, but it struck me as absurd. She put the machine on “Play Back” and sat down near me on the end of the bed. I started to say something, but she cut me off with an imperious gesture of her hand. She sat with her head lowered, listening intently.

  She’d gone back pretty far this time, and it was the man called Chris who was speaking.

  “—one hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr. Chapman”?”

  “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research—”

  Chapman’s voice went on through the speech. At the end of it there was a little whrrp where she’d put it on “Record” and I’d started speaking.

  “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department to send me everything they’ve got—”

  I sat bolt upright. “Hey—!” She clapped a hand over my mouth. We both sat perfectly still until it was finished.

  She got up and turned the machine off. Then she turned to me with a faint smile. “Now you know what I was listening to all the time.”

  I stared at her. “It’s incredible. They’re almost exactly the same.”

  She nodded. “That’s the reason I wanted to do it this way, with the two voices end-to-end. As a comparison check, it’s absolutely conclusive. You see, it’s not only the timbre—plenty of male voices are down in that low end of the baritone range—but you both have the same quick, alert, self-assured way of speaking. Clipped, and rather aggressive. Either of you could do a perfect imitation of Ralph Bellamy playing one of those detective roles. In fact, Harris quite often does, at parties.”

  “Harris?” I asked.

  “Harris Chapman, the man you were just listening to.”

  “Do we actually sound that much alike?” I asked. “Or is it the recording?”

  She shook a cigarette from a packet on the dresser, and leaned down. I held the lighter for her. She sat in the armchair, facing me with her knees crossed. “I could tell you apart, in person,” she said thoughtfully. “And on hi-fi equipment. I might even, in fact, on the telephone—because I’m aware there are two of you.”