Richard was mildly amused, but still more moved. The offered price had been quite good, certainly, but by no means high enough to justify the nuisance of finding or building another place, then moving and getting established.
“No,” he said firmly. “I’m quite happy here, and we won’t think of selling, unless you’ve changed your own mind, and that’s what you want yourself.” With large and patient generosity, he emphasized the point. “Since I have to be away so much, on business, I’ve always felt any decision about the house should be mainly up to you. That’s why I insisted, from the first, that title to the property should be in both our names.”
He did not add, though he privately noted the fact and gave himself a good mark for it, that this was one of his fixed rules for lasting success in marriage on a mass basis. Never play the domestic tyrant, he often told himself. Let the little woman—whichever one it was, though Lucille and Helen were hardly little—make most of the household decisions, or at least imagine she made them. It kept her happy and, whenever he had to make an important move, made her all the more amiable in deferring to him.
Sometimes, at moments like this, Richard wished he had some friendly, professional colleague with whom he could talk over the finer problems of, say, quadruple and concurrent matrimony. But this could never be. Richard did not doubt that superior operators, like himself, were in existence. But they were not readily to be found—any more than he himself was.
There were only two types of repeaters the public ever heard about, and Richard disdained them both. On the one hand, he was no idiot Romeo who married seven or eight pretty but penniless young things, usually in the same region if not the same city, and inevitably came to grief on some absurd but mathematically predictable mischance. Love was the key-word to describe this type, love and carelessness.
Then there was the other well publicized practitioner, the sinister Bluebeard who, having married for money alone, then proceeded to do away with… No, this gruesome technique so revolted Richard he shrank even from thinking about it.
Marriage should be undertaken only for money and love. Richard imagined himself giving this sage advice to some earnest young man who might appeal to him for guidance, before choosing this specialized vocation as his own lifework. Marry for money and love, and never relax one’s careful attention in fostering each, that was what Richard would tell the acolyte.
Quite carried away by the thought, Richard crumpled his napkin and slapped it down beside his breakfast plate in brisk, executive encouragement. Of course, there were hundreds of other facets to such a career, minor perhaps, but highly important. There was the choice of employment one should pretend to have, for instance, the changes of identification that would never overlap, and… Richard sighed, abandoning these thoughts as idle. After all, there was no young man seeking his counsel. In the nature of things, as long as he remained successful, there never would be.
“Richard? Don’t you want to look at it? Just to be sure before they install it and lay the cement?”
He realized that Marion had again been talking for some time, unnoticed. It irritated and vaguely frightened him that he was not observing his own precept to pay careful attention. “Of course, dear.” He groped, but expertly. “Why, aren’t you satisfied?”
“Oh, I suppose the furnace people ought to know the best place for it. They must install hundreds of auxiliary fuel tanks. But if you’d just look, to make sure. Maybe you’ll think it ought to be somewhere else.”
He remembered now. It was a domestic trifle, an improvement in the heating system. He nodded, glanced up at his wristwatch and stood up. “I’ll do it right now. Then I’m afraid I’ve got to be going.”
“Do you have a lot of calls to make today, Richard?”
“Lots,” he said, cheerfully, and proceeded to overwhelm wife number three with a torrent of details. “Elite, Paragon, Acme, three or four Eat-Rites, two Welcome Inns. That’s just between here and Trenton. I hope I’ll reach there by evening. But with the list of restaurants I’ve got to see—about twenty-five to thirty a day—I’m not sure just where I’ll be tonight. Or, for that matter, in the next ten or twelve days. Eleven days, to be exact,” he added thoughtfully. “Now, let’s see the tank.”
On the way to the basement, Richard collected his hat, overcoat and suitcase. He set the suitcase down in the kitchen, then followed Marion through the door that led downward. At least, he went two-thirds of the way down the wooden steps, intending, from that barest possible display of interest, to give full approval to her arrangements.
Standing on the lower part of the stairway, he could see most of Marion’s basement. This basement belonged to Marion, because all of its appointments were hers, whereas the Hartford basement had a bar, which made it both his and Lucille’s. Besides the assorted laundry machines, and the door of the small partition that formed Marion’s photographic dark-room—her one hobby—he saw that a slit-trench affair had been drilled through the cement floor and dug out of the dank earth beneath. Beside it stood the new tank, not yet lowered into place, and a bulky, unopened sack of some ready-mixed cement.
Richard had now seen enough to give either his approval or criticism, if any, with suggestions. He still inclined toward approval, as easier and quicker.
“It looks all right to me,” he said.
Marion peered up at him, anxious and pathetically helpless. “Are you sure?” she asked.
Richard’s reply was a little short. As a matter of fact, there was a hazy something he did not like at all, seeing Marion like that, innocent and graying, a little too trusting, standing beside that gaping hole.
“Quite sure. It’s just where I would have—” He broke off, acutely disturbed by the phrase he seemed to be using, and without knowing why. He changed it to, “It couldn’t be better if I’d chosen the place myself.”
He turned quickly and went back up the stairs, with Marion following. Somebody, Richard darkly felt, was being in rather poor taste. But who? That mound of loose dirt, and the bag of cement besides. There was something about the scene that was not only vulgar, but oppressive.
He had placed his suitcase down beside the kitchen’s outside door when Marion reappeared. She smiled brightly, but his spirits did not lift. Unaccountably, he had another obscure association of ideas. For some reason—for no logical reason—his mind turned to a certain crude, lurid, seamier side that less successful members of his calling undeniably used, to the shadowy half-world of Lonely Hearts clubs, matrimonial bureaus, and throbbing exchanges. Let there be a particularly messy explosion in the realm of matrimony, and the odds were even that one of those Lonely Heart clubmen, or clubwomen, was in back of it.
Richard held such strong views against agencies of this type that he couldn’t abide mention of them, not even in jocular vein. It was one of few subjects upon which he had, at one time or another, quarreled with several of his wives. With all of them, in fact. About divorce, too, he was quite strict. It could easily undermine his career.
“Have you got your sample case, Richard?” Marion asked.
“It’s in the trunk of the car,” he told her. “I’ve got everything. You don’t need to come out.”
“Well…?”
“This is the fifth,” he reminded her. “I’ll be back for dinner on the evening of the sixteenth. Meanwhile, I’ll phone you from time to time and, if anything comes up, you can reach me through the New York answering service.”
“All right, Richard. Have a good trip.”
“Thank you, dear. Take care of yourself and, above all, don’t worry that beautiful head of yours about trifles. Just relax. Let me do all the worrying.”
They kissed, warmly. Then he picked up his suitcase and went down the driveway to the garage. It was a fact, he reflected, that all the worrying was left to him. Marion probably did not appreciate just how much worry there was.
Neither did Bernice, nor Lucille, nor Helen—none of them. But, under the circumstances, he couldn’t ask, h
e couldn’t even hint, at the credit he really deserved for the many detailed responsibilities he bore.
However, these added cares were not too heavy—they were hazards of his career. Backing his coupé down the driveway, Richard’s moodiness was already gone. In front of the house, he looked up and waved to Marion, now standing in the open doorway, her striking figure undimmed by a simple house-dress. She waved affectionately in return.
His was a full, engrossing life, he decided as he drove along. Some people might even think it fascinating, if not too much so, imagining it filled with dreadful risks. There was a small element of danger, of course. But this only added zest. It offered the faint, tang-laden pinch of adventure, without which, really, his regulated life would be unbearably placid. It was long since far too well rehearsed.
2
Three hours later, shortly before noon, Richard C. Brown passed temporarily out of existence.
The loss of identity required less than a minute. It took place in a busy railroad checkroom in Philadelphia. It required only the time to check in his salesman’s sample-case and order-book—Speedie Sandwich Co., Automatic Cutters, Precision Knives. Then all that was needed was to take out a similar sample-case and order-book for his next incarnation, as a salesman of cosmetic novelties.
He had entered the checkroom in the name of Richard C. Brown. Under that name, he had actually made three lackadaisical stops at three widely separated restaurants that morning. At one of them, he had actually been forced to make a sale, as his order-book showed.
When he came out of the checkroom, he was Robert D. Brown. In that identity, he would make two or three torpid calls at drugstores during the afternoon, plus a few more during the next three days. That was part of the schedule—the most tiresome part, of course. It was a waste of time. But it was time indispensably given up, he felt, to protect his best interests in so many roles.
The business concerns for which he sold—or, at any rate, with whose products he traveled—were small and specialized. No high-pressure salesmen competed for their exclusive territorial rights. The owners of these companies might wonder what type of paralysis afflicted the slow-motion Brown, but, from their standpoint, paying him only on a commission basis, even a few sales were better than none.
As for Mr. Brown, he had other fish to fry. Far more important matters demanded his time and intelligence.
As always, when he made the change from one identity to another, he paused before the first mirror that caught his eye. The hesitation was brief, hardly more than a flicker—it was as though he half expected to find revealed, literally, a new and totally different man. It was as if he expected to see features even more forceful and magnetic, if that were possible, than they had been before.
This time, the mirror was a rectangle in a vending machine. Robert was a little disappointed that the reflection showed no marked change. His face, in spite of its forcefulness, was smooth, oval, a little asymmetrical, just as Richard’s had been. The magnetic eyes that peered back at him from beneath wisps of sandy eyebrows were still pale-blue and gray, much like those of an alert rooster. Even the hair—he removed his hat to make sure—was a downy pink, and still scarce.
Robert D. looked like Richard C. He also looked like Raymond A. Brown of Hartford, and Reynold B. Brown of Boston. In any identity, for that matter, he knew that he resembled a great many men people find it hard to remember.
Then what made him so irresistible to women?
Robert shrugged, puzzled but complacent, and moved away. Probably, he decided, when he stared hard at himself in the mirror, his inner personality simply went into aloof, sensitive retirement.
It was convenient, of course, that his appearance was not too remarkable. It was much, much safer, to be inconspicuous. He looked like any respectable, married, thirty-nine-year-old businessman, hard-working and moderately successful—and why shouldn’t he? The description was true.
There was only one detail in this picture of himself that did not quite satisfy him. His success, in a highly speculative investment field, was far too moderate. At least, it had been thus far, in the fifteen years since his first marriage, when Lucille’s financial assets gave him the means to begin dealing on a large scale in his favorite securities.
The securities he bought were betting slips, in the horse-racing market. Brown—all four of him—did not exactly play the horses. It had long ceased to be play. He studied, he computed, he doped according to the rules of his system, and then made shrewd investments. It was full-time employment, too. No system is so perfect it can’t be improved, he often told himself, after which, he set about computing and doping some more, seeking to plug up all possible leaks, leaks that stubbornly reappeared in his formulae.
On his way to lunch, the real start of his business day, he bought every form-sheet and newspaper with information about the fluctuations that would take place that afternoon, as soon as the tracks opened. In the quiet restaurant where he dined, he was a familiar figure, with his charts, his notes, his record-books.
The waitress who set his place asked him, “Feeling lucky today, Mr. Brown? I could certainly use a long shot, myself, if you’ve got something sure.”
Questions like this made him wince, inwardly, as hopelessly amateurish. How could anyone speak of luck, a long shot and a sure thing, all in the same breath? But he smiled amiably and tried not to sound condescending.
“Maybe. If I find something really hot, I’ll let you know.”
But the waitress scarcely heard him, her mind skipping ahead on a more facetious tangent. “What I wonder about customers doping the horses. Well, maybe you can. But I’d like to see you try something tough, like making book on people. Be honest, Mr. Brown, sometimes you can’t even figure your own wife.”
Brown began a firm reply. “On the contrary,” he said, and then just as firmly stopped.
Without even asking, or caring, which wife the waitress had in mind, the subject was taboo. It was a sore point, besides. He had been about to state that just the opposite was true. His wives ran true to form, he had found, and he only wished—how deeply and painfully he wished!—he could say the same for horses.
But the subject was too distressing to talk about. It would be unwise to speak with too much authority. By this time, the waitress had given him a menu, and gone.
It was a fact, though—and a sad one—that, as Raymond A. Brown, he had suffered reverses in his first two years of marriage with Lucille, and they had cost him nearly all of the $27,000 with which she had opened their joint bank account. Joint bank accounts, like joint ownership of property, Brown regarded surely among man’s finest inventions. There had been a dark period when, if Lucille had thoughtlessly written a check, it was quite possible that their marriage might actually have exploded.
Fortunately, he had grown very fond of a new and recently widowed acquaintance, a lady well worthy of becoming his wife. This was Helen, and she had brought a comfortable $40,000 to her joint bank account with Reynold B. Brown. The name, like the initial, was chosen as an orderly help to Brown’s memory—at that time, he had had no intention of working his way through the alphabet. So, with Helen’s unconscious but timely backing, he had recapitalized and refinanced all around. Naturally, of course, he had devoted his own added insight toward a few final, vitally necessary improvements in the system.
These improvements had helped—but not enough.
His losses had been considerably slowed down. Investments that showed splendid results almost equaled those that failed. There was one year, indeed, when his accounts showed that he had broken practically even.
All the same, his resources were again depleted when he met Marion, and she, too, was welcomed into the firm—though not in those exact words. Her $18,000 contribution to a joint bank account with Richard C. Brown had been modest, but timely and, for a while, it seemed as though the tide had finally turned.
But it hadn’t turned enough—not quite. He met the gay, ornamental, chaotic Bern
ice, and there came a day—the day he learned she had recently inherited $20,000—when he asked her, too, if she would like to be his helpmate. This was how he became Robert D. Brown, sitting among the financial guides and investment paraphernalia spread out on the table of a quiet Philadelphia restaurant.
This was why he regretted that his success, thus far, had been so moderate. The tide had now, at last, definitely turned. But there were still precarious days, uncertain weeks, ahead.
This was why, while he concentrated on his chops and salad and coffee, he also pondered the mysteries of the alphabet. Would there ever be a Rudolf E. Brown? If so, what would the fellow’s wife be like? He couldn’t help wondering.
He finished lunch and, afterward, went on with his calculations, making the serious decisions of the day. When he had them, as he paid the bill and tipped the waitress, he remembered something.
“Bold Magician in the sixth at Bowie,” he told her. “That’s today’s best.”
“What?”
It was apparent she had forgotten their earlier talk. Brown merely repeated the name of the horse, smiling with professional reserve.
He had a lot to do that afternoon. Place his bets—collect on yesterday’s single winner—call on three or four drugstores with those tiresome cosmetics. This last he considered a waste of time, save for use as an alibi he hoped he would never need.
3
It was seven o’clock that evening when Brown arrived at the big, solid apartment building in Newark, where he and Bernice had established residence. He did not like it, though he felt no fear at sight of a police prowl-car, an ambulance and other official cars, drawn up before the entrance, with a knot of spectators gathered in solemn curiosity on the walk outside.
Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve Page 19