What`s Better Than Money

by James Hadley Chase

  He put the paper down, took out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, shook one out into his large hand and lit it.

  ‘So you’re in trouble. Wel , I warned you, didn’t I? I told you she’d be a load of grief to you.’

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘Wel ? What are you going to do?’

  ‘I want to get out of here. I want to go home.’

  ‘That’s about the first sensible thing you have said since I’ve known you.’ He put his hand inside his coat and took out a shabby wallet. ‘Here you are: as soon as I heard the state you were in, I raided the till.’

  He offered me five twenty dollar bills.

  ‘I don’t want al that, Rusty.’

  ‘Take it and shut up.’

  ‘No. Al I want is my fare home. It’l be ten bucks. I’m not taking any more.’

  He got to his feet, cramming the bills back into his wallet.

  ‘You’d bet er not travel from L.A. Station. They may have the joint pegged out. I’l drive you to

  ’Frisco. You can get a train from there.’

  ‘If they stop us and find me with you…’

  ‘Forget it! Come on: let’s go.’

  He went to the door and started down the stairs. Picking up my suitcase, I followed him.

  In the lobby, Carrie was waiting.

  ‘I’m going home, Carrie,’ I said.

  Rusty moved on into the street, leaving us together.

  ‘Here.’ I offered her my last two five-dollar bins. ‘I want you to have these…’

  She took one of the bills.

  ‘That’ll take care of the room, Mr. Jeff. You keep the rest. You’l need it. Good luck.’

  ‘I didn’t do it, Carrie. No mat er what they say, I didn’t do it.’

  Her smile was weary as she patted my arm.

  ‘Good luck, Mr. Jeff.’

  I went out into the darkness and got into the Oldsmobile. As I slammed the door, Rusty shot the car away from the kerb.

  II

  We had been driving for ten minutes or so in silence, when I said, ‘It’s a funny thing, Rusty, but al I can think of now is to get home. I’ve learned my lesson. If I get away with this mess, I’m going to start my studies again. I’m through with this kind of life – through with it for good.’

  Rusty grunted.

  ‘It’s about time.’

  ‘You heard her sing. She had a voice in a mil ion. If only she hadn’t been a junky…’

  ‘If she hadn’t been a junky, you would never have met her. That’s the way it is. If you ever see her again, you run for your life.’

  ‘I’ll do that. I hope I’l never see her again.’

  We reached San Francisco around three o’clock in the morning. Rusty parked by the station while I waited in the car, he went to check on the trains.

  When he came back, I could see he was worried.

  ‘There’s a train to Hol and City just after eight: eight ten,’ he said. ‘There are two cops at the booking office. Maybe they aren’t looking for you, but they’re there. You can by-pass them. I bought your ticket.’

  I took the ticket and put it in my wallet.

  ‘Thanks. You leave me now, Rusty. I’l go and sit in a café and wait. I’l pay you back. You’ve been a real pal to me.’

  ‘You go home and settle down to a job of work. I don’t want the money back. You keep clear of Los Angeles from now on. The way to pay me back is to settle down and do a real job of work.’

  We sat side by side in his car, smoking, dozing and talking while the hours crept by.

  A little after seven o’clock, Rusty said, ‘We have time for a coffee, then you can get off.’

  We left the car and walked over to a coffee bar. We had coffee and doughnuts.

  The time came when my train was due. I took Rusty’s hand in mine and squeezed it.

  ‘Thanks.’.

  ‘Forget it. Let me know how you make out.’

  He gave me a slap on my shoulder, then walked fast to his car.

  I walked into the station, holding my handkerchief to my face to hide my scar.

  No one paid any attention to me.

  Long before the train got me home, something happened that made the murder of a film studio guard no news at all: an event that had such a tremendous impact that the hunt for a man with a scar on his face became something of no importance.

  An atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

  Under cover of this momentous news, I got home in safety.

  By the time Japan had surrendered, I was back in college. By the time the world began the tricky business of peace making, I was qualified as a consulting engineer: two years exactly from the first time I had met Rima.

  I wasn’t to meet her again for another eleven years.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ONE

  I

  A lot can happen in eleven years.

  Looking back on those years, I can say now that they were the most exciting and most invigorating of my life.

  The one black spot was when my father died, two years after I had qualified as a consulting engineer.

  He died from a heart attack while working in the bank: the way he would have wanted to die if he had had the choice. He left me five thousand dollars and the house which I sold. With this for capital, plus my qualifications as a trained engineer, I went into partnership with Jack Osborne.

  Jack had been in my battle unit when I had gone to the Philippines. We had landed on the beaches of Okinawa together. He was five years older than I was, and had completed his training as an engineer before he had gone to war. He was thick set, short and tubby with sandy coloured hair, going thin on top and a brick red face, covered with freckles.

  But what a ball of fire! He had a capacity for work that left me standing. He could work twenty hours of the day, snatch four hours’ sleep, and then start again with the same dynamic drive.

  It was my good luck that he came to Holland City to look me up around the time when I had five thousand dollars from my father’s estate.

  Jack had been in town three days before, he called on me, and during that time he had talked to people, summed up the city, and had decided this was the place where a consulting engineer could make a living.

  Then he breezed into my one-room apartment, put out a hard, rough hand and grinned at me.

  ‘Jeff,’ he said, ‘I’ve looked this place over, and this is where I’m set ing up my flag. How about you and me going into partnership?’

  So we set up in business as Osborne and Halliday.

  Halliday was my father’s name. I had taken my mother’s name of Gordon when I had gone to Hollywood as I had been unsure of myself and I had had an instinctive feeling that I might run into something that I wouldn’t like to get back to my father. One of those odd instincts that happen and that pay off.

  For the next three years we didn’t do much except sit around in our one-room office and wait and hope. If we hadn’t had some money behind us we would have starved, but between us we managed to get by, but it was tight living. We shared a room in a rooming-house; we cooked our own meals. We did our own typing. We ran the office without the usual girl help.

  Then, out of the blue, we got an offer to put up a block of apartment houses down by the river. The competition was blue murder, but we went at it like soldiers. We cut the costs to the bone and we got the job. Financially, we didn’t get much out of it, but at least it showed those interested what we could do.

  Slowly we began to get other jobs, not as cut-throat but nearly as bad. It took us two more years to crawl out of the red into the black. Don’t imagine it was easy. It was tooth, claw and no holds barred, but we came out of it, and finally into the open.

  Jack and I worked well as a team. He handled the outside work while I looked after the office. By now we were able to afford help. We hired Clara Collins, a thin, middle-aged spinster who looked on us as a couple of crazy kids, but who ran the office with an efficiency that more than covered her c
ost.

  After we had been in business six years, we began to get a lot of private building: houses, bungalows, petrol stations, and even a small movie house, but we weren’t get ing any civic building and that’s where the big money lay.

  I decided to cultivate the mayor. His name was Henry Mathison. I had met him a couple of times and he seemed pretty easy to get along with. His son had been killed in the Philippines and when he learned Jack and I had fought out there, he was friendly, but he wasn’t friendly enough to throw any business our way.

  Every civic project that came up we sent in estimates, but we never heard further. The established engineers always got the jobs: three firms that had been in Holland City for over twenty years.

  It was while I was trying to find a real point of contact with the mayor that I met Sarita Fleming.

  Sarita was in charge of Holland City’s Public Library. Her people lived in New York. She had taken some kind of degree in Literature and had been offered this job which she had jumped at as her mother and she didn’t get along together. She had been at the library two years before I wandered in, looking for information about Mathison.

  After I had explained to her exactly what I wanted, Sarita couldn’t have been more helpful. She knew quite a lot about the mayor. She told me he was keen on duck shooting, was a good amateur cine operator and he liked classical music. Duck shooting and cine camera work were out of my field, but classical music put me back in the fight. Sarita said he was wildly enthusiastic about Chopin’s piano music.

  She mentioned she had four tickets for a Chopin recital that was being held at the City Hall with Stefan Askenase at the piano, one of the greatest Chopin exponents in the world. She had been selling the tickets in the library and she had kept four of them back just in case. She knew Mathison hadn’t got a ticket and wouldn’t it be an idea for me to ask him to go with me?

  The idea was so sound I looked up and stared at her, and this was the first time I really saw her.

  She was tall and slim with a good figure. She wore a simple grey dress that showed off her figure to advantage. She had nice brown eyes, brown hair, parted in the middle and pulled back to form a coil of silky hair on the nape of her neck.

  She wasn’t pret y, but there was something about her that excited me. Just looking at her, I had a feeling that she was the only possible woman I could live with, wouldn’t grow tired of, and who would make me happy.

  It was an odd feeling. It came to me in a flash, and I knew then that if I was going to continue with my streak of good luck, before very long, she would be my wife.

  I asked her if she would make up the fourth of the party: Mathison, his wife, she and me, and she accepted.

  Jack was enthusiastic when he heard what I was planning.

  ‘Thank the Lord I have a partner with some culture,’ he said. ‘Take the old fel ow to Chopin and impress him. Maybe he’l throw some business our way if he thinks you and he have the same taste.’

  I called up Mathison and asked him if he and his wife would care to join me and a friend for the concert, and he jumped at it.

  As it worked out, it wasn’t Chopin nor I who impressed Mathison, it was Sarita. She made a big hit with him, and not only with him, but his wife as well.

  The evening had been a success.

  As we shook hands before parting, he said, ‘It’s time we saw something of you at the office, young man. Look in tomorrow. I want you to meet Merrill Webb.’

  Webb was the City’s planning officer. He was the guy who handed out the jobs. Without his say-so, you got nowhere. I hadn’t even met him.

  I was feeling on top of the world as I drove Sarita to her apartment. I knew I had her to thank for this opening, and I asked her if she would dine with me the night after next and she said she would.

  The next morning I went to the City Hall and met Webb. He was a lean, dried up, stoop-shouldered man in his late fifties. He talked to me casually, asking about my training and Jack’s training, what we had done so far and stuff like that. He didn’t seem particularly interested. Finally, he shook hands and said that if he had something he thought we could handle he would let me know.

  I was a little damped by this. I had had hopes that he would have given us something to work on right away.

  Jack said he wasn’t surprised.

  ‘You keep after Mathison. He’s the guy who tel s Webb what to do. Keep after Mathison, and sooner or later, we’l land in the gravy.’

  From then on, I saw a lot of Sarita. We went out every other night, and after a couple of weeks I knew I was in love with her and wanted to marry her.

  I was now making a reasonable living; not a great deal, but enough to support a wife. I saw no reason why we should wait, providing she was willing to throw her lot in with me, so I asked her.

  There was no hesitation when she said yes.

  When I told Jack he leaned back in his desk chair and beamed at me.

  ‘Boy! Am I glad! It’s high time one of us became respectable! And what a girl! I’l tell you something: if you hadn’t got there first, I would have grabbed her. The best, Jeff. I’m not kidding. That girl’s solid gold right through. I know a sterling character when I see one: she’s it.’

  Don’t imagine during these years I hadn’t thought of Rima nor of the guard she had murdered. Don’t imagine there weren’t times when I would wake up in the middle of the night from a nightmare when I imagined Rima was in the room, looking at me. But as the years went by, and the thing became something in the dim past, I began to feel confident that it was in the past and would remain that way.

  I had thought a lot about it before I had asked Sarita to be my wife. Finally, I decided it was a risk I could afford to take. No one knew me as Gordon. I had grown up and altered considerably since I was in Los Angeles, although the scar persisted and so did the drooping eyelid. I felt I had seen the last of Rima and the last of my past.

  We were married towards the end of the year. As a wedding present we got the job of building the new wing to the State hospital. It was a nice job and it made us money. That was Mathison’s influence.

  It enabled Jack to move into a three room penthouse and Sarita and I into a four-room, more modest apartment in the better district. It allowed both of us to buy better cars and we entertained more.

  Life seemed pretty good. We felt we had at last arrived. Then one morning the telephone bell rang and Mathison came on the line.

  ‘Come over here right away, Jeff,’ he said. ‘Drop everything. There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

  This abrupt summons left me wondering, but I dropped everything, told Clara I’d be back when she saw me, told her to tell Jack who was out on a construction job where to find me, and hot footed over to City Hall.

  Mathison and Webb were together in Mathison’s office.

  ‘Sit down, boy,’ Mathison said, waving me to a chair. ‘You’ve heard about the Hol and bridge?’

  ‘Why, sure.’

  ‘This morning we have got it fixed. We have the money, and now we’re going to build.’

  This was a project that every construction engineer in the county and a lot outside the county had been waiting for. It was to take the up-town traffic out of Holland City across the river. This was the big job. The estimated cost ran into six million dollars.

  My heart started to thump. Mathison wouldn’t have cal ed me just to tel me this piece of news. I waited, looking at him and then at Webb.

  Mathison grinned at me.

  ‘Do you think you and Osborne could build it?’

  ‘We can build it.’

  ‘I’ve talked it over with Webb. Of course it’l have to go before the committee, but if you come up with the right figures and you can convince the bone heads you can build the bridge within a year, I think I can persuade them to let you go ahead. You’l have all the boys up against you, but I’m going to lean over backwards just a little and if your price isn’t right, I’m going to tell you so before the committee
sees your estimates: that way you should get the job.’

  For the next thirty days I scarcely saw Sarita.

  Jack and I slaved in the office from eight o’clock in the morning until sometimes as late as three o’clock the next morning.

  This was our big chance to break into Big-time and we weren’t taking any chances.

  Finally, the pressure got so tough, I asked Sarita to come into the office to handle the typing so Clara could spend her time on the calculating machine, getting out figures for us.

  The four of us slaved.

  At the end of thirty days we had the estimates and the plan of operation ready.

  I went around to Mathison and handed the document over. He said he would let me know, and that was that.

  We waited three long, nerve-racking months, then he telephoned me and told me to come over.

  ‘It’s okay, boy,’ he said, coming over to shake me by the hand. ‘The job’s yours. I’m not saying I didn’t have a fight to convince some of them, but your figures were right, and you had half the committee on your side to start with. You can go right ahead. Talk to Webb. There’l be another meeting tomorrow. I want you and Osborne to be there.’

  That happened exactly ten years, eleven months and two weeks since last I saw Rima.

  II

  I hadn’t considered what the building of a six mil ion dol ar bridge would mean until Joe Creedy, the City’s Public Relations Officer, breezed into our office and told me.

  We had celebrated of course: just our own private celebration with Sarita, Jack, Clara and myself. We had gone to the best restaurant in Holland City and had had a champagne dinner. As far as I was concerned the celebrations were over and we had now to get down to the business of building the bridge, but Creedy had other ideas.