Hard Cash

by Collins, Max Allan

  She’d given him a coy smile and said, “New at what? Forgive you if what shows?”

  “What I’m saying is it’s been a long time since I’ve tried to make conversation with a pretty girl.”

  “Don’t you mean it’s been a long time since you tried to make a pretty girl, period?”

  And he’d grinned. An honest and shy sort of grin that had been her first peek behind his executive mask. Her first peek at the insecure child lurking behind his plastic, practiced pose. And a child needs a mother. And a mother can manipulate a child into doing most anything, if a mother is ballsy enough. . . .

  So she had listened patiently to the story of Rigley and his wife, and of his recently dissolved affair with a friend’s wife (though she guessed there’d been several of those over the years) and of the unhappiness he was experiencing as he sank deeper into middle age, most of it because of a marriage that had been a good one once but now was stagnant, without even the usual children to hold it together. It wasn’t a new story, or even a very interesting one, but she wasn’t looking for a new and interesting story—just one with money in it.

  And money had come her way during her three years plus as George’s secret little girl friend. He provided the cottage (which was, of course, more a house than cottage), and though on paper she paid him rent it was more the other way around. She continued to work with Claire at the beauty shop in nearby West Liberty but only to keep appearances up, only until she could step completely into the wife’s role and trade in the cottage, nice as it was, for a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar home the likes of the one the present Mrs. Rigley was using to do her drinking in.

  Julie would have it all, if George held up through the strain of the days ahead.

  Well, she thought, rinsing her hair tinder the cold rush of water from the tub’s faucet, I’ll just have to see to it he does.

  Because she was not about to spend her life a damn kitchen slave like her mother, or as a lousy shitty working girl slaving her ass off over fat old ladies and their thin gray hair, no goddamn way in hell. She’d have a life worth the living or not at all. A life with money in it. A life that would be one long, luxurious bath.

  She stepped out of the tub, then stroked her body dry with a crushed-cotton towel and wrapped another towel, turbanlike, around her damp hair.

  The bedroom was dark.

  She slipped under the sheets.

  She touched the side of his face and said, “Do it to me, honey.”

  And let him.

  And afterward she cradled him in her arms, patted him, soothed him. He was trembling. The sex hadn’t taken care of his trembling.

  “It’ll be over soon, honey,” she said. “We’ll be together and there’ll be no sneaking around and no worries. Just you and me and all that money.”

  “Is that . . . that all I am to you? Money?”

  There was no bitterness in his voice; more like fear.

  “How can you even think that?”

  “Would you . . . nothing.”

  “Would I what?”

  “Would you want me, even if I didn’t have the money?”

  “You don’t have the money, George.”

  “I’m going to. We’re going to. But would you? Love me? Without money?”

  Would you love me without my tits, you silly ass?

  “Of course I would,” she said.

  10

  GEORGE RIGLEY’S HOME was two miles outside the city limits, on a bluff overlooking the winding blacktop road that a mile later connected with the highway to Iowa City. Rigley’s was one of a handful of homes on the three-mile stretch of blacktop, which was a thickly wooded, exclusive area whose beauty was matched only by its real estate value. A gravel drive ascended the bluff to the sprawling wood and brick ranch-style home, with its private tennis court, swimming pool, and separate garage the size of an average house.

  Space and privacy. All the space and privacy you could ever want. The nearest neighbor a quarter mile away. Enough rooms to sleep a small army: three bedrooms, a den, a game room, huge living room, kitchen, dining room, TV room, assorted bathrooms. What sane person could want more?

  And that was the problem. What sane person could want this much? Certainly not Rigley himself: he preferred the cozy, rustic (rustic compared to this, anyway) cottage. No. It took somebody crazy to want a secluded expanse of loneliness like this. Somebody crazy like Cora. His wife.

  What else would you call it besides crazy, to want all this space when there was just the two of them. They had no children—hadn’t been able to—and the bloated house was designed mainly to satisfy Cora’s need for entertaining (but partially, he’d have to admit, to fulfill his own need for status), and if it wasn’t a cocktail or dinner party going on, it was relatives. Relatives meant a lot to Cora. He’d hate to think how many weeks out of an average year they shared with visiting relatives of hers. Rut then, he was in no position to complain, considering what Cora’s family had meant to his career.

  Of course it’d been different, these last few years, with her parents dead (killed in a light plane crash, with Cora’s only sister). And with her beloved cousins and uncles and aunts snubbing Cora since her parents had snubbed them in their will. The flow of relatives had subsided somewhat.

  But the flow of liquor hadn’t.

  That flow had increased.

  His wife had always been a drinker, but never a drunk really, not till the death of her parents and sister. She was not a loud drunk. Never a conspicuous drunk at all. Socially, her drunkenness didn’t cause any harm; at a party she just flirted with the men and flattered the women, in a playful sort of way that just seemed to make everyone like her all the more—everyone except Rigley himself, of course. And her drunkenness at home just meant she was asleep most of the time. On the couch in the TV room, usually. Sometimes in bed. He had to have a woman in to do the cleaning for her, but they could afford it. And he’d often come home and find no dinner ready, but they (or he, if she was especially tight) would go out to eat; they could afford that too. And if friends called, Cora would come around, shake off her drowsy drunkenness, and be her charming, if a bit blurry, self. She wasn’t an annoying drunk to be around at all.

  Unless you were married to her.

  He was standing in his living room, Manhattan in hand, listening to his vice-president at the bank, Shep Jackson, rattle on about local politics. Jackson was a younger version of Rigley: smooth, dark-haired, tan, handsome, and handsomely dressed in a gray tailored suit. Rigley hated him for it. Jackson was the man the board had hand-picked to replace Rigley, and both men knew it and pretended they didn’t.

  And Rigley wasn’t really listening to Jackson, either. He was pretending about that too.

  What he redly was doing was watching his wife circulate through the small crowd (eight couples who all had season tickets for the Broadway Series at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Hall in Iowa City; it was their ritual to gather at the Rigleys’ for a cocktail party in the late afternoon and then drive, two couples to a car, to the play and have a late dinner out afterwards), and he marveled at how good she looked, for as much as she drank.

  Her face, especially, looked good, but maybe that was just the face lift. The smooth skin enhanced the beauty of her large brown eyes and full mouth and small, sculpted nose. She looked something like Julie, as a matter of fact, except in Cora’s case the hair was honey yellow and thickly, if stylishly sprayed. Or he should say it the other way around, shouldn’t he—Julie looked like Cora. He’d picked Julie out because she looked like Cora had when he’d fallen in love with his wife-to-be over twenty-five years before.

  They had gone to high school together. A small, small town in northeastern Iowa. Her father was in the banking business. He was principal stockholder of three banks in various small farming communities in that area, and was a landowner, too; he had three or four farms (he was always selling and buying farms like somebody adding hotels in Monopoly) and lived in the biggest house in th
e county. Rigley’s father was a schoolteacher. So was his mother. Between the two of them, his parents brought in a good living, and Rigley never wanted for anything; he was definitely a boy born on the “right side of the tracks,” a cliché that rang true in their small town. Anyone born on the wrong side would be considered a social climber if he tried to date Cora Pierce.

  But that’s just what he’d been, secretly—a social climber. He knew no family fortune awaited him. He knew the limited benefits of schoolteaching were not for him. And he knew Cora Pierce had had her eye on him since the seventh grade, and so in high school he’d latched onto her and never let go.

  They went to the same college (Iowa State) and were married after their sophomore year. Cora dropped out at that point and got a job in a bank there in Ames, with her father’s help. Rigley resisted any of his father-in-law’s efforts to pay his way through school, however, knowing that (a) his own parents had saved enough to put him, their only child, through four years of college, and (b) he would want to call on old man Pierce for bigger and better things in the future, after establishing himself in the family eyes as “his own man” and a pillar of integrity.

  And old man Pierce had come through. He’d paid Rigley’s way through graduate school in the East (Wharton) and got him his first job, as installment loan officer in a big downtown Chicago bank. And then a vice-presidency at Port City, and finally the presidency, when he’d barely turned forty. Everything had turned out as he’d hoped.

  Except maybe the marriage itself.

  In the beginning, he had loved Cora. Or anyway he had convinced himself he did. It wasn’t hard to convince yourself you loved the wealthiest and most beautiful girl in the county. And Cora was all of that. She’d been homecoming queen and Representative Senior Girl back in high school. (He’d been Representative Senior Boy and most likely to succeed.) She was also valedictorian, whereas he was barely in the top ten percent of their small class. And to this day she was, in her way, the smarter of the two of them. The brains of the family, and the boss too, never letting him forget where the money came from. Never letting him forget that Daddy had pulled the strings to put George where he was today.

  Still, Cora wasn’t the loud-mouth, obnoxious woman most bossy women are. She was dominant, yes, but quietly so. Not a bitch, not even a nag; just a decision-maker. And he didn’t mind being dominated at home; after all, he was dominant at work, wasn’t he? He didn’t mind being second in Cora’s heart to Daddy (no, make that third—her mother came second), and he didn’t mind the way she planned his life for him: parties, vacations, and all. He was too busy at work, making the bank go, to have to worry about anything else in his life; let Cora handle it.

  Cora was easy to put up with, as long as the sex was good. And it was good for a long time.

  Until they found out, definitely, that they could have no children.

  Until she had her “female trouble” and the possibility of having a child (which had always been slim, because of his near-sterility, but still had been at least a possibility) became non-existent. After her “female trouble” (Cora never could bring herself to say “hysterectomy,” just as she always said “poop” instead of “shit,” never having outgrown her goddamned sheltered small-town conservative Iowa upbringing; thank God his parents had been liberals) sex gradually became something that happened only on special occasions, and then wasn’t particularly special for either one of them. Separate bedrooms came about for the stated reason that Rigley liked to read at night and Cora wanted the lights off, and the marriage became as sexually dead as their reproductive possibilities.

  Even so, the marriage still seemed okay, superficially. Cora seemed comfortable with him. She liked the security of their life, and now that her parents were gone, she seemed desperately inclined to cling to what remained, which was Rigley and their stagnant marriage together. She surely must have realized just how desperate a deadend it was they were both heading down, and that probably helped explain the drunkenness.

  But the possibility of divorce had never occurred to Cora, as far as Rigley knew. And he was glad. Divorce meant disaster to Rigley. He doggedly continued being nice to her. Complimenting the way she looked. Ignoring her drinking, as much as possible. Kissing her cheek goodbye in the moming and hello coming home at night And never, ever arguing with her.

  Maybe theirs had always been a superficial marriage. Maybe even before these sexually barren last five years, they had had an empty marriage. Who could tell? Rigly figured he certainly wasn’t the only guy who, with a wife who shared his marital apathy, went through the paces of marriage, putting in time like somebody who keeps at a job he hates in hopes of eventual retirement. He wasn’t the only guy who enjoyed brief, relatively meaningless affairs with the wives of friends. Surely a marriage like this one wasn’t anything out of the ordinary these days.

  In fact, the only thing he imagined was out of the ordinary where their marriage was concerned was the lack of arguments.

  They almost never argued.

  Because Rigley felt he couldn’t risk arguing with Cora.

  Divorce was something he did not want to even think about

  Not with a wife who was worth well over half a million dollars.

  Rigley excused himself with Jackson and walked over to the serving table and nibbled at some chip and dip and made himself a Manhattan.

  “You should be playing bartender, honey,” Cora said, coming up behind him.

  He turned and looked at her. Her large brown eyes were droopy with drink, but they were still attractive. Her lips were perfectly formed, lovely. The facial skin was smooth, and her low-cut hostess gown gave hints of a body that was still something to see as she lolled around that pool outside all through the summer. Too bad she screwed like a faggot shakes hands.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” he said, touching her cheek with Manhattan in hand. “Jackson cornered me and started babbling about the local elections.”

  She turned and smiled at Jackson, who was well out of earshot, and said, “He’s such a poop. Why the board hired him is beyond me. If Daddy were alive . . .”

  “If Daddy were alive, he’d be proud to see how pretty his baby looks this evening.”

  “Thank you, dear. Hey . . . what’s the matter? Are you still acting sick? You’re not going to get out of going to this play just by playing sick.”

  “I’m not playing sick. I’ve felt lousy all day—you know that.” He had told her earlier that he thought he was getting the flu.

  “Now listen to me,” she said, smiling much as she had to Jackson and speaking in the same only-you-can-hear-me-George undertone. “You are not going to spoil tonight for me. You are going to the damn play and that is that.”

  And she smiled some more and patted his cheek and threaded her way through the room, talking momentarily with everyone.

  At seven people began filing into the den, where they’d left their coats. There was an eight o’clock curtain at Hancher and a forty-five-minute drive, not counting the madhouse of the Hancher parking lot, and the cocktail party was over.

  And finally only the Harrisons, the couple the Rigleys were riding with, their oldest and dearest friends in Port City, remained.

  Ray Harrison was a lanky bald man who looked like Ray Milland and sounded like Ernest Borgnine; his wife was a vapid, pretty little aging blonde lady who didn’t speak often enough to sound like anyone. Rigley gathered the Harrisons and Cora by the door, everyone having climbed in their coats but him, and said, “I’m going to have to cop out on you tonight, I’m afraid.”

  Cora said, “George,” the way a razor slices across a wrist.

  “Baby,” he said, “I’m just not up to it. And I’m not going to let myself ruin the night for you by going along and complaining constantly. You go on with the Harrisons. I insist. You’ll have a fine time without me. I’ll just be a party-pooper tonight, and you know it.”

  “Well,” Cora said, softening slightly, but still with an edge, “I’m not a
bout to stay home. I’m not going to miss this play. It’s supposed to be one of Neil Simon’s best.”

  Ray Harrison said, “I just don’t understand why we should have to drive all the way to Iowa City for a little culture.” He obviously would have liked to stay home himself, but was being bullied into it by his publicly silent but apparently privately vocal wife. He made a plea to Rigley. “This restaurant we’re going to try ought to be worth the trip, George. The Pier. Ever tried it before?”

  “Uh, no,” Rigley stuttered. “Never have.”

  “Say,” Ray said, “you do look sorta sick at that.”

  And then Cora finally gave in, as there wasn’t that much time to waste arguing, with an eight o’clock curtain to make. And, too, she’d buckled under the element of surprise, as she always did when they argued. They fought so seldom that when Rigley did stand up for his rights, he almost invariably won just on the sheer novelty of it. He’d been counting on that.

  He was alone in the house now, with the aftermath of the cocktail party: the discarded glasses and napkins and half-eaten sandwiches and the general disgusting mess well-to-do people leave behind them after such affairs. He wandered aimlessly through the rambling house, sipping his Manhattan, thinking about his wife, his life, his situation. He ended up in Cora’s bedroom. Their bedroom, before he started sleeping across the hall. Blue wallpaper with open-beam wooden ceiling. Cream-color satiny spread on the queen-size bed. Nightstand by the bed. Their wedding picture was on it He went to the nightstand and opened its single drawer. Amidst the jewelry boxes was the gun. The .32.

  He didn’t touch it He just looked at it, pearl-handled silver .32 automatic there with the jewelry in the drawer, and thought about his wife.

  And suddenly he was sick.

  Sick with fear and self-hatred and God knows what other wretched emotions, and the emotional sickness brought with it physical sickness as well, and he rushed to his wife’s private bath and heaved into the stool, heaved out all the cocktail-party booze and chip-dip and crust-trimmed sandwiches, heaved till there was nothing left to heave and then heaved some more.