I also had to dream up some plausible story for Esther in order to explain why I had been following Mathews, but now was giving up my supposed plan to help straighten him out. I took her to Tony Vincinti’s for lunch to do the explaining.
I waited until we had finished eating and our coffee had been served before saying, “I guess you can stop keeping score on Mathews’ office conferences with Gertie Drake now, Esther—and phoning me every time he leaves the plant.”
“Oh?” she said. “Why?”
“My plan didn’t work out.”
She looked concerned. “He didn’t catch you following him, did he?”
I gave her a smiling headshake. “Nothing as serious as that. The plan just blew up. I’m washing my hands of the whole thing. If he gets caught by his wife and kicked out of his job, we’ll just have to take a chance on the next company president.”
“What was your plan?” she asked. “You can tell me now, can’t you?”
“I could have told you all along, but I was afraid you wouldn’t co-operate if you knew Gertie was an old girl friend of mine.”
“She was?” Esther said indignantly.
“Only for a short time. It wasn’t anything serious. She had a truck-driver boyfriend, too, who was inclined to be jealous.”
Esther continued to frown at me, waiting for me to go on.
I said, “He waylaid me in a bar one night and described how he’d change my appearance if I didn’t leave Gertie alone. If she’d meant anything to me, I’d have slugged it out with him. But it didn’t seem worth the bother. So I dropped her.”
Her frown turned to a look of surprise. “He must have been pretty big and tough to make you back down. You’re not exactly a ninety-seven-pound weakling.”
It was my turn to frown. “It wasn’t a backdown. If it was you he’d warned me away from, I’d have clobbered him between the horns. I didn’t care one way or the other about Gertie.”
Esther looked pleased. “You’d fight over me, Tom?”
“Anybody who tried to come between us,” I assured her. “Anyway, my plan was to carry evidence of Gertie’s cheating with Mathews to this truck driver. I figured he’d brace Mathews about it and scare his pants off. The guy’s about six feet six and goes about two hundred and forty pounds.”
A shocked expression formed on her face. “Suppose he had beat Mr. Mathews up?”
“I was pretty sure he wouldn’t do that,” I said. “All he did was warn me, so why should he do more to Mathews? But I think Mathews would have backed away from Gertie in a hurry. Even if he wasn’t physically afraid of a beating, he couldn’t afford a thing like that to break in the papers, as it inevitably would.”
“Umm,” she said doubtfully. “What made you abandon the plan?”
“Last night I looked this truck driver up. A little while ago he married another girl.”
Esther stared at me for a minute, then burst out laughing. When she could control herself, she said, “And you wasted all that time following them around!”
I didn’t mind being laughed at. It meant that she had accepted the story, as full of holes as it was.
On the way back to the plant, she said, “As long as you won’t be tied up nights any more, why can’t we get together this evening?”
“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll pick you up for dinner about seven.”
Later on I had to change plans, though. Mrs. Mathews phoned me just before five P.M.
“I’d like to see you tonight,” she said peremptorily. “Somewhere we can be alone. But not here.”
“How about my place?”
She said that would be fine and I gave her the address.
“Expect me about eight thirty,” she said, and hung up.
I phoned Esther’s desk and told her I wouldn’t be able to make it that evening after all.
“Why not?” she inquired.
“Something just came up,” I said. “I can’t possibly get out of it.”
“What?” she wanted to know.
“You’re asking questions again,” I growled. “I said it’s off for tonight. That’s all there is to it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I hung up.
My apartment had only three rooms, but the combination living room and dining room was large and comfortable, with a brick fireplace, smart modern furniture and a thick pile rug.
The first time I had brought Esther home, I had made no attempt at housecleaning, or even at straightening. As I remember, the bed hadn’t been made and there was a pair of dirty socks lying on the bathroom floor. But for Helen Mathews I gave it a brisk going-over, even dusting all the flat surfaces and running a vacuum cleaner over the front-room rug. When I had the whole apartment in presentable shape, I checked my liquor supply, then showered and dressed as carefully as a high school student getting ready for his first dance.
It wasn’t until all these preparations were finished that it occurred to me I was behaving exactly as though I expected an evening of drinking and romance.
Which seemed unlikely.
At eight fifteen the phone rang.
When I answered it, Esther’s voice said on a note of surprise, “I thought you were going out.”
I said a little roughly, “If you didn’t expect me to be home, why the hell did you call?”
“Don’t be so mean to me,” she said in a petulant tone. “I just took a chance on catching you before you left.”
“What do you want?”
“Just to hear your voice for a minute. So I can sleep better.”
“God dammit,” I said. “I told you if I wanted to talk to you, I’d phone you. Quit this checking on me all the time.”
“You don’t have to shout,” she said in a hurt voice. “I’m not checking. I just wanted to talk.”
“I don’t,” I said, and hung up on her for the second time that day.
Helen Mathews arrived exactly at eight thirty. I was surprised to discover she had dressed in line with my subconscious thoughts. Except for the sundress she had worn on Saturday afternoon, I had never seen her in anything but simple street dresses. And all of them, including the sundress, had been high-necked. Tonight she wore an extremely low-cut formal gown that veed downward so sharply in front, the tips of her breasts were barely hidden and the deep cleft between them was fully exposed. The gown clung to her slim body like wet tissue paper, outlining every curve.
She turned her back to me as I took her light cape, then pivoted to face me again with such a graceful movement, it was almost as though she were performing a ballet step. With effort I kept my gaze from her half-exposed bosom.
Dropping the cape over the back of a chair, I said, “It’s a long time since so much beauty has graced this hovel.”
The words sounded so corny to my own ears, I almost blushed. But she seemed to accept them as a conventional compliment. She smiled a little strainedly and moved into the center of the room. As she looked about in womanly curiosity, I got the impression she was so tense that she was preventing herself from trembling only by supreme effort.
“Would you like a drink?” I asked.
She gave me a grateful smile. “Please.”
I mixed her a double bourbon. Then, because I was a little nervous myself, I made my own double, too.
I seemed to have guessed correctly about her taut nerves, for she worked through her highball before a quarter of mine was gone. As a matter of fact, on every occasion that I had seen her drink, she seemed to put it away a lot faster than I did. Of course she had been under a strain every time.
By the time she got down a second double bourbon, she began to relax.
Up to that point we had merely marked time with polite and meaningless conversation. But as I handed her the third drink, I asked, “What did you want to see me about, Mrs. Mathews?”
She turned a trifle pink. “Nothing, really. I just couldn’t stand to be in the house alone another night. He didn’t come home for dinner again, as usual. He phoned me around three p.
m. that he had another meeting. The Industrial Division of the fund drive this time. After moping around the house for a couple of hours, I decided to phone you.”
So this was entirely a social visit. I was a little incredulous, but I was also pleased.
She said, “I—I suppose when I phoned you thought I wanted to talk about this horrible plot of George’s. But that was just a mental excuse. I really don’t want to talk about anything.”
“You can’t just brush it from your mind,” I said. “He means to kill you.”
“I can brush it from my mind tonight. I thought of nothing else all last night. Or all day today. I have to forget it at least for a time, or I’ll go crazy. Tell me about your friend Gertie Drake.”
I looked at her blankly for a moment before I remembered she thought one of my motives in coming to her about her husband was that I was romantically interested in Gertie.
I said, “That’s all over. You can’t stay in love with a woman when you know she’s in love with another man. At least I can’t.”
She smiled wryly. “We’re somewhat in the same boat, aren’t we, Tom?”
It was the first time she ever called me by my first name. If she wanted our relationship to be less formal, I was willing to go along.
“Not quite, Helen. Nobody wants to kill me.”
She flinched slightly. “We weren’t going to talk about that. She’s an awfully attractive girl, Tom.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You remember her from the day we walked out of your husband’s office together?”
Her smooth brow creased. “Was that Gertie Drake? I hardly noticed the girl. I remember seeing you.”
“Then how do you know what she looks like?”
She turned pink again. “Do you imagine you could tell any woman she had a rival without her immediately wanting to see what the other woman looked like? I looked up her address in the phone book. And the afternoon after you came to my home, I parked across the street from her rooming house at five. About twenty after five I saw her walk from the corner bus stop and enter the rooming house. As I said, she’s extremely attractive.”
“She’s pretty,” I conceded. “You’re beautiful. Your husband is a damned fool.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “She has a quality I can’t compete with, though. Youth.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “You poor old broken-down grandma.”
She smiled. “I’m thirty, Tom. Seven years older than she is.”
“You’ve obviously used the seven years to grow more beautiful every day,” I said gallantly.
“You’ll turn my head, Tom. I haven’t been used to male flattery for some time.” Her smile faded. “I haven’t had any sort of male attention for some time. All that’s been holding me together has been my love for George. And now that’s gone.”
“His is gone for you, you mean.”
“Mine is gone, too,” she said without emotion. “I hate him. Every bit of love I ever felt for him has turned to hate. I want to hurt him in any way I can.”
I considered this and finally asked, “And how do you plan to hurt him?”
She gave me a slow smile, all her nervousness now gone and replaced by a slightly alcoholic sleepiness. “What’s the best way a woman can hurt a man? And enjoy herself at the same time? Now that the formalities are out of the way, I may as well confess the real reason I’m here is to have my revenge on George.”
I felt my heart pump a little faster. If I interpreted her correctly, my instinctive preparations for the evening had been right after all. Before I could think of anything to say, she rose and said, “You have a bathroom, I suppose.”
“Sure,” I said.
I led her into the bedroom, switched on the light, led her through it to the bathroom and switched on the light for her there. Returning to the front room, I lit a cigarette with slightly trembling hands and mixed myself another drink.
The cigarette and the drink were both half gone when her voice softly asked from the bedroom doorway, “Are you going to help me have my revenge, Tom?”
I turned, and my eyes nearly bugged out of my head. She stood regally erect in the doorway without a stitch of clothing on.
She was one of those rare women who are truly beautiful naked. A bare female body will excite any man more than a clothed one, of course, but from a purely esthetic point of view most women, even the shapeliest, look better clothed than bare. Dressed, Helen was a knockout. Naked, she was so beautiful she took my breath away. If she had modeled for a statue, there wasn’t a line or contour of her body that a master sculptor could have improved upon.
When I got my eyes tucked back in their sockets, I set down my drink, dropped my cigarette into an ash tray and walked toward her like a zombie. She stood unmoving until I halted inches in front of her. Then she calmly placed her arms about my neck and pulled my lips down to hers.
My guess that George Mathews’ straying might be due to his wife’s frigidity turned out to be one of the poorest guesses I ever made. I couldn’t imagine what Mathews was looking for in other women when he had such a human bonfire at home.
Weeks later, in looking back at that first night, I realized there were factors other than mere physical passion that made her so sensually wild. First, alcohol had completely drowned her inhibitions. But there was also a sort of gloating quality, as though even at the height of our love-making she was never unaware that more than just making love, she was committing adultery. I think at least part of her pleasure was in the thought that she was avenging herself for her husband’s adultery.
But that night I was in no mood to analyze her motives. I accepted things at face value, having no desire to look a gift horse in the mouth.
At midnight Helen decided she had better leave, since Mathews customarily rolled in about one A.M. after a night out with Gertie Drake. She told me she had parked her car on the next street back from my apartment because she thought it might not be wise to park right in front of my place. She had walked clear around the block to come in the front way.
“I’ll walk you back by a shorter route,” I said. “We’ll duck out the back way and cut through the yard of the house right behind me.”
As I held the rear door off the kitchen open for her, she suddenly cupped my face in her palms and gave me a tender kiss completely lacking in passion.
“Was this just an interlude, Tom?” she asked. “Or does it have any meaning?”
“It does for me,” I said. “My head is spinning like a top.”
“My heart is spinning the same way.”
I looked down at her, started to open my mouth, but she pressed her fingers against it.
“Don’t say anything. I don’t want to hear a bachelor evasion, and I wouldn’t believe you if you said you loved me. Let’s let it rest.”
“I wasn’t going to give you a bachelor evasion,” I protested.
“I still don’t want to hear it tonight. Let’s sleep on the whole subject.”
I shrugged. “All right, if that’s the way you want it.”
When I returned from taking her to her car, I found I had left the spring lock set on the back door. It wasn’t until I had pulled out my key chain and discovered I had no key to the back door that I remembered I had never gotten my key back from Esther the night I let her have it. I had to walk back down the stairs and around the building to the front.
14
DESPITE HELEN’S SUGGESTION THAT WE SLEEP ON THE subject of how we felt about each other, I didn’t wait until morning to make up my mind. I lay awake most of the night visualizing the future prospects the evening had opened.
I didn’t try to fool myself into thinking I was in love with the woman on such short acquaintance. But I could be if I put my mind to it. What more could a man want in a woman? Beauty, passion, money. Particularly money. It was enough to make even a confirmed bachelor like myself consider marriage.
It would be nice to be president of the Schyler Tool Company, work about three hours a
day and spend the rest of the time fishing from that lovely boat of George Mathews.
I felt a tinge of regret for little Esther Simmons. I wouldn’t make the same mistake George Mathews had by doing anything to disrupt my marriage. I’d have to fire Esther.
My mind was still dwelling on these thoughts the next morning when I walked by Esther’s desk on the way to my office. I gave her a preoccupied nod and was going on by when she said, “Tom.”
Halting, I summoned a smile. “Morning, little one.”
“You look as though you had a hard night,” she said.
“Just a touch of insomnia,” I said. “I was in bed shortly after midnight.”
“I didn’t sleep very well, either,” she said in a low tone. “You weren’t very nice to me.”
Studying her face, I saw it was a little drawn, as though she might have done some crying the night before. With a sense of shock I suddenly realized the girl was falling in love with me. It didn’t make me any happier at the prospect of possibly having to fire her in the not-too-distant future.
I said in a temporizing voice, “Sorry I upset you, honey, but you know how I feel about things. I prefer to be the aggressor in romance.”
“I won’t phone you again,” she said with an aggrieved air. “You can be sure of that.”
I gave her a sunny smile. “Fine. Then we should get along beautifully in the future.”
Putting her nose in the air, she ignored me. With a shrug I walked on.
She did phone me again, though. She called my office at four P.M.
“Am I going to see you tonight?” she asked.
Fortunately I was alone in my office at the time, so I didn’t have to pull punches. I had an idea I would hear from Helen before five, and I didn’t want any other commitments.
I said curtly, “I thought you weren’t going to phone me anymore.”
“I meant at home,” she said. “Can’t I even call you here?”
I realized I was being a little rough. “I’m touchy today, I guess. I told you I didn’t have much sleep last night. No, I don’t feel up to a date tonight.”
“Oh. When will I see you again?”
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