“He said so, but I have a notion, if the truth were known, that the internal revenue boys might think differently. Chances are, Hugo would never report the theft of it to the police.”
“He wouldn’t need to. He has men of his own to take care of such things.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No, darling. Not for one hundred grand and a bonus. You are much more daring and exciting than I knew, and I can’t imagine how I underestimated you so.”
“In that case, we had better make some plans.”
She had been much more easily persuaded than he had hoped or expected, and they sat on the floor like childish conspirators and made all the arrangements, which were very simple, and her excitement had grown and grown inside her until her eyes were shining with such a bright light that they gave the effect of blindness, and her breath was drawn and released with labor between moist pink lips.
“I’ll get the money early,” he said. “As shortly after eight as possible. The office is locked, but that won’t be any problem. The safe will be a slightly greater problem, but I can manage it all right. It won’t take longer than ten minutes to open it. I’ve always had sensitive fingers. There’s an alarm, of course, but I know where it is and how to shut it off. I will simply take the money and leave the office and walk directly down the back stairs to the alley door. The door is barred on the inside, and that’s where you will have to help me. The only thing you will have to do is wait there to bar the door after me, for if it were discovered unbarred, it might touch off an investigation before we were ready for it.”
“That leaves me on the inside and you on the outside, darling. Where will I meet you later?”
“I don’t think you had better come with me immediately. There is a little town I know about three hundred miles in the direction I want to go. I’ll stop there and take a room in the hotel. You follow tomorrow and take a room, too. You will have to ride a bus, for there’s no train or air service, and we won’t want a second car on our hands. You’d better travel light, but don’t forget your jewels. In the places we are going we may need a little extra money.”
“What is the name of the town?”
He told her the name of the town and the name he would use there instead of his own, and all the plans were simply made and perfectly executed, everything going exactly right, and everything was still going right, according to plan, for the telephone was ringing in his room in the hotel in the small town, and he got up and answered it.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “How’s my bonus boy?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “What room are you in?”
“Never mind. I’ll come to yours. I want to see my base pay, and my bonus together, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. We’re both in room 306, and we’ll be waiting for you. We both sort of missed you.”
“Darling, I’ll be right there.”
While waiting the last two minutes, which were what she took in coming, he went over to the open bag and took a silver flask from it and a large swallow of scotch from the flask. He did not drink much, hardly ever alone, and he wasn’t nervous or afraid, not needing the drink especially, and he took it simply because he was satisfied and excited and felt like having a drink of scotch to what had been committed and done and would be done hereafter. He capped the flask and dropped it into the bag. There was a knock on the door, and he went over and opened it.
She came in quickly, and he could see at once that the excitement was still burning inside her. Its heat was high in her cheeks and in her eyes.
“Darling,” she said, “here we are, aren’t we?”
“Yes. Here we are, and there it is. In the little bag on the floor.”
“One hundred thousand dollars in that little bag? It seems incredible.”
“It’s in big bills.”
“Do you mind if I just look at it and feel it? Darling, it would be such a comfort and give me such pleasure.”
“Comforted and pleased are how I want to keep you. Help yourself.” He handed her the key to the bag, and she went over and lifted it onto the bed and opened it. The brown paper wrapping had been removed, the large bills loose in packets in the bag, and she stood there for more than a minute, caressing a packet with her fingers, her eyes bright and her breathing deep. Then she turned to face him, and she was for the first time standing frilly on his side of discretion, her own position abandoned somewhere behind her and them.
“Will Hugo find us, darling?”
“He never will.”
“Aren’t you afraid at all?”
“Not at all.”
“Neither am I. I’m only terribly excited.” She sat down on the edge of the bed beside the small bag containing the money. “Darling, please come here.”
He went over and sat down beside her, and they were all there on the bed together, he and she and all the beautiful money that made it possible, and in the meanwhile the hot, white light diminished in the street outside, and it grew dark in the room.
“Darling,” she said, “whatever time is it?”
Looking at his wrist watch, he was surprised to see that he couldn’t read it. He got up and lowered the blinds at the windows and turned on a light beside the bed. “It’s almost eight,” he said. “We’d better leave here about nine. It’s a long way to Miami.”
“Is that where we’re going? To Miami?”
“Miami and points south.”
“I suppose I had better go back to my room and get ready.”
“I suppose. My car is parked in the lot beside the hotel. There’s a door leading out at the foot of the stairs. You won’t have to go through the lobby. I’ll meet you at the car at nine. Can you manage your own bags?”
“I can manage. Darling, I hate to leave you, even until nine. It will seem like forever.”
“Forever is what comes after,” he said.
When she was gone, he lit a cigarette and smoked it. Then he went over to the telephone and put through a long distance call, charges reversed, to a number he had been given. The voice that answered, after a while, was flat and hard, committed to speaking directly and being done with it.
“Is that you, Steve? How’s everything?”
“Everything’s fine, Mr. Archer. Going according to plan.”
“Good. I can go home tomorrow.”
“I want to thank you again for giving me this break.”
“Forget it. You’ve done a job for a price, that’s all. The first time I saw her look at you, I knew you were the one to do it. It would have cost twice as much for a divorce and five times as much to keep her on the side. I hope you’re making it realistic.”
“Don’t worry about that. She thinks it’s for real. She’s giving up something in the long run for a bonus now.”
“Have fun. Don’t think that hundred grand is going to last you and Hannah forever, though. It won’t.”
“Well,” Steve said, “it will probably last as long as we will.”
He hung up and looked at his watch again. Eight exactly. One hour to wait. He took a tiny gold penknife from a pocket and began to pare his fingernails.
MRS. DEARLY’S SPECIAL DAY
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1963.
After what had been done last night, it was mostly a day of waiting for something to happen. Waiting, however, can be a great excitement. If one possesses the quality of character to sustain composure, the excitement all inside and growing, waiting can be the most exhilarating experience imaginable.
The day began consciously for Mrs. Dearly at exactly nine o’clock, when she wakened. She had left her windows open and the drapes drawn back before going to bed, and her room was now, at nine o’clock in the morning, full of warm and golden light. It was clearly going to b
e one of those andante days expiring through minutes and hours to slumberous summer sounds.
Mrs. Dearly loved that kind of day, so softly sensuous and replete with drowsy dreams, and she was aware of this one instantly in her flesh and bones. She yawned and stretched, lifting golden arms into the golden light. Looking down the length of her body, its senses astir in a sheer mist of blue nylon, she felt a kind of innocent narcissistic delight. Holding herself in child-like affection, quite uncorrupted by vanity, she was truly grateful for being what she was—so perfectly made for love and lovely things; but her gratitude was unformed and undirected, and she hadn’t the faintest notion to whom it was owed, or how it might be acknowledged.
She lay in bed for perhaps another half hour, absorbing and transforming all the subtle manifestations of the day, and then she stretched again and got up and shed the blue mist on the way to the bathroom. It lay on the floor like something conjured out of her dreams, a giant handful of the bubble bath foam in which she soaked until ten. Returning then to the bedroom, she began to remove the bright enamel from her fingernails, and when this was accomplished she began, with equally meticulous attention, to put on another coat of enamel.
Inasmuch as the new coat was the same color and shade as the old, the effect, when she was finished, was identical with the one it replaced; but in the meanwhile she had measured the heightening of her anticipation and excitement by the precise performance of a small task that occupied her pleasantly and brought her so much closer to where the day was taking her.
It was almost noon when she was finally dressed in a tan sleeveless dress, tan stockings and shoes, and a tiny hat of deeper shade. She inspected herself in her full-length mirror with the same child-like innocence and delight with which she had looked at herself earlier in the blue mist, turning slowly now for the effect from all sides; and then, carrying her purse and a pair of white gloves, she went downstairs prepared to leave the house, going out the back way to a terrace where she expected her husband to be—and there he was, sure enough, reclining in a blue and yellow sling chair.
Mrs. Dearly crossed the terrace and kissed him lightly over one eye, patting his head at the same time with a display of that kind of affection one generally bestows on small boys and dogs.
“Good morning, dear,” she said.
“Morning? In case you don’t realize it, it’s noon.”
The words alone, unqualified by inflection, had a carping connotation; but his voice was, in fact, amused and indulgent—as if it were understood and agreed that she should be immune to the imposition and demands of time, and that it would, really, be rather absurd if she were otherwise.
“Oh, I’ve been up for hours,” she said. “Honestly I have.”
“You’re dressed for the street,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I have some shopping to do downtown. Do you mind?”
“Not in the least. But don’t you want some lunch before you go? I suppose it’s too late for breakfast.”
“I hardly ever eat breakfast, as you know, and I’ll have lunch downtown. What will you do?”
“There’s plenty to do in the flower beds, and I’m going to mow the grass.”
“I knew it. I was looking out at the lawn last evening, and I said to myself that the grass was getting high. Cal will mow the grass tomorrow, I said.”
“You were right. That’s exactly what Cal is going to do.”
“You shouldn’t work so hard at it, dear. Why don’t you hire a gardener to do such things?”
“Because I wouldn’t get any pleasure out of having a gardener do it. I enjoy doing the yard work—you know that perfectly well. All week I look forward to the weekend when I can get my green thumb into the ground. Things grow for me, and the grass somehow looks better when I mow it. I’m a frustrated horticulturist, I guess.”
This was true. He had made several millions in real estate speculations, but he took more pride in his grass, his roses, his flowering and evergreen shrubs. He even had the rough look of a man who lived close to the earth. Now, on the wide terrace behind his costly house, he was wearing a coarse blue shirt tucked into worn jeans, and his shoes were the shoes of a working man, not of a dilettante gardener—thick-soled, hard-toed shoes laced up around his ankles.
Mrs. Dearly, although willing to concede something to his more numerous years—which were twenty more than her own—still felt that the addiction of a rich man to rough pursuits, like digging in the ground and mowing grass, should adhere to more fashionable lines. There was no reason, for example, why Cal couldn’t work just as well in a colorful sports shirt and in presentable trousers and shoes as in the crude outfit he was now wearing. Moreover, to put it candidly, he stank. When she had bent over to kiss him and pat his head, the odor of perspiration had been strong. She could not see that it was made less offensive by being the result of earthly labor.
“Well, you must be careful of the heat,” she said. “You may have a stroke or something if you’re not careful.”
“I’ll be careful, thank you. An old fellow like me has to be, you know.”
“Nonsense. You’re a perennial boy. Will you look after yourself properly while I’m gone? Have a good lunch, I mean, and don’t stay too long in the sun without resting.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I’m strong as a bull.”
Bending to kiss him again, she thought that he not only was as strong as one, he also smelled like one.
“Goodbye, dear,” she said. “I may be just a little late.”
“Shall I back your car out for you?”
“Don’t bother, thanks. I don’t in the least mind doing it myself.”
As a matter of fact, she preferred it. His handling of her beautiful little Jaguar was, she felt, a kind of physical violation only a little less disturbing than that imposed infrequently on herself. Having now evaded the former—as she did, whenever possible, the latter—she drove the ten or twelve miles downtown in a considerably shorter time than obedience to the speed limits would have permitted.
She loved driving fast, could not resist the sense and excitement of high speeds, and it was fortunate that she also drove expertly, with a casual mastery to which the Jaguar submitted as if it were somehow an extension of its driver. Sometimes she really felt this, especially on the highway, that she and the powerful little car were organically joined, and that it experienced in its tempered-steel body the same thrill she experienced in her soft and yielding body. This was nonsense, of course, a private fantasy, but it amused her…
Downtown, she parked in the Municipal Garage two levels underground and walked through a brightly lighted tunnel to an elevator that carried her up into the lobby of a hotel across the street. She was hungry by then, so she had lunch by herself in the hotel, and after eating like a bird she went to several department stores in the area where she bought a great many things, mostly personal and wearable, all of which she left in the stores for delivery. This took quite a while, lunch and shopping requiring about three hours; but the time passed agreeably and almost before she knew it, it was 3:30—which was the time she was supposed to meet Douglas.
She returned to the hotel where she had lunched, going this time to the cocktail lounge instead of the restaurant, and it was cool and seductive there, in an artificial dusk suspended mistily between light and darkness. She paused just inside the door while her eyes adjusted to the shadows, listening to the soft serenade of recorded strings and feeling her happiness and quiet excitement stir and swell inside her with an effect of almost painful pleasure; and all the while she was looking around for Douglas, and there he was, as she had hoped and expected, at a small table in a corner.
There was such a sudden sharp intensification of her pleasurable pain that she almost whimpered, and she thought at the same time, with incongruous detachment, that it was odd that he sh
ould have the capacity to make her feel that way, for he was not an exceptional young man at all. He was, in fact, rather dull at times, and incited her at once to exasperation and tenderness.
Seeing her approach, he started to rise, but she slipped so quickly into the chair across from him that he was no more than half up when she was entirely down. He resumed his seat after remaining a moment half risen, as if he were fighting an impulse to leave at once, and she took one of his hands and held it lightly on the table.
“Darling,” she said, “have you been waiting long?”
“No. Just a few minutes.”
“Have you had a drink?”
“Not yet. I was waiting for you.”
“That was nice of you. You are always so nice. What shall we have? Martinis?”
“I suppose so. We always do, don’t we?”
He gave the order to a girl who was waiting for it, and after the Martinis had been mixed and brought, Mrs. Dearly looked at him fondly—and wondered why she was here looking at him at all. His face in repose, boyishly handsome beneath a falling lock of dark hair that seemed contrived, was like a cheap air-brush portrait by an inferior artist in which all other features were subordinated to a sulky mouth. Douglas was, in fact, an inferior artist himself, an instructor in an art school, and she had met him almost six months ago when she had gone to the school to learn to paint in water colors, for which, as she quickly learned, she had no talent whatever. This knowledge—and Douglas—were all she had acquired from the effort.
Sipping her Martini and speaking over the thin edge of glass, she said, “What have you been doing with yourself?”
“Nothing much. Nothing of consequence.”
“Are you working on something remarkable?”
“I’m not working on anything at all. It’s impossible.”
“Darling, are you still feeling guilty about Cal? If only you could understand what a waste your guilty conscience is. You have done him no harm, and neither have I, and we have done each other a great deal of good.”
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 31