I felt that was pretty good for one afternoon. I got back in time to ditch her and duck around the corner to where Bertha Cool was waiting. She took me up to the Jap. Hashita showed me a few more grips and holds, and made me do a lot more practicing. By the time I got done with him, the walk, the exercise of the day before, and the tumbles I’d taken made me feel as though I’d just lost a ten-round bout to a steam roller.
I explained to Bertha that Ashbury was wise, so it wasn’t going to be necessary to keep up the jujitsu lessons. Bertha said she’d paid for them, and I’d take them or she’d know the reason why. I warned her about continuing to take me back and forth to the house, and told her since Ashbury was paying for it, I’d better get a cab. She told me she was fully capable of running the business end of things, and got me back in time for dinner.
It was a lousy dinner. The food was good, but there was too much service. I had to sit straight as a ramrod and pretend to be interested in a lot of things Mrs. Ashbury was saying. Robert Tindle posed as the tired businessman. Henry Ashbury shoved in grub with the preoccupied manner of one who hadn’t the slightest idea of what he’s eating.
Alta Ashbury was going out to a dance about ten o’clock.
She took an hour after dinner to sit out on a glassed-in sunporch and talk.
There was a half-moon. The air was warm and balmy, and something was worrying her. She didn’t say what it was, but I could see she wanted companionship.
I didn’t want to talk. So I just sat there and kept quiet. Once when I saw her hand tighten into a little fist, and she seemed all tense and nervous, I reached my hand out, put it over hers, gave it a little squeeze, said, “Take it easy,” and then, as she relaxed, took my hand away.
She looked up at me quickly, as though she weren’t accustomed to having men remove their hands from hers.
I didn’t say anything more.
A little before ten she went up to dress for the dance. I’d found out that she liked tennis and horseback riding, that she didn’t care for badminton, that she liked swimming, that if it weren’t for good old dad she’d pull out and leave the house flat on its foundations, that she thought her stepmother was poisoning her father’s disposition, and that someone should give her stepbrother back to the Indians. I hadn’t said anything one way or another.
The next morning Ashbury started to lift weights, found his muscles were sore, said there was no use going at the thing too damn fast, put on his big lap robe, came over and sat down beside me on the canvas mat, and smoked a cigar. He wanted to know what I’d found out.
I told him nothing. He said, “Alta’s fallen for you. You’re good.”
We had breakfast, and about eleven o’clock Alta Ashbury showed up. Mrs. Ashbury always had breakfast in bed.
When we took our walk that afternoon, Alta told me more about her stepmother. Mrs. Ashbury had high blood pressure, and the doctor said she mustn’t be excited. The doctor was standing in with her, gave in to her, wheedled her and petted her. She thought her dad should kick Bernard Carter out of the house. She didn’t know what there was about me that made her talk so much, unless it was because I was so understanding, and because she was so worried about her dad she could cry.
She warned me that if Mrs. Ashbury ever wanted anything, no matter how unreasonable, I wasn’t to cross her at all, because, as surely as I did, the doctor would make an examination, find her blood pressure had gone up, blame the whole thing on me, and I’d go out on my ear. I gathered she didn’t want me to go out on my ear.
I felt like a heel.
At two o’clock Bertha Cool picked me up, and the Jap kneaded me as though I’d been a batch of bread dough. When I got away from those stubby fingers I felt like a shirt that had been put through a washing machine, run through a wringer, and dried on a mangle.
I staggered in to supper. It was the same as the previous night, only Alta looked as though she’d been crying. She hardly spoke to me. After dinner I hung around, giving her a chance to talk with me in case there was anything she wanted to confide.
Alta didn’t make any secret about how she felt about Bernard Carter. She said he was supposed to be working on a business deal with her stepmother. She didn’t know just what it was. No one seemed to know just what it was. Alta said both of them hated her, that she thought her stepmother was afraid of some woman whom Carter knew, that one time she’d walked into the library just as her stepmother was saying, “Go ahead and get some action. I’m tired of all this dillydallying. You can imagine how much mercy she’d show me if our positions were reversed. I want you to—” Carter had noticed she’d come into the room and had coughed significantly. Mrs. Ashbury had looked up, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and started talking about something else with the swift garrulity of one who is trying to cover up.
Alta was silent for a while after she told me that, and then said moodily she supposed she was telling me things she had no right to, but for some reason or other I inspired confidence, that she felt I was loyal to her father, and that if I was going in business with him, I’d have to watch her stepmother, Bob, and Bernard Carter. Then she added a few words about Dr. Parkerdale. He was, it seemed, one of the fashionable boys with a good bedside manner. Every time Mrs. Ashbury had a dizzy spell from eating too much, Dr. Parkerdale became as gravely concerned as though it were the first symptom of a world-wide epidemic of infantile paralysis.
She told me that much, then clamped her lips shut lightly.
I said, “Go ahead.”
“With what?” she asked.
“The rest of it.”
“The rest of what?”
“The rest of the things I should know.”
“I’ve told you too much already.”
“Not enough,” I said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m going in business with your father. He’s going to invest a bunch of money. I’ve got to see that he gets a fair return on his investment. I’ve got to get along with Mrs. Ashbury. I want to know how to do it.”
She said hastily, “You leave her alone. Keep out of her way, and listen. Don’t—don’t ever—”
“Don’t ever what?” I asked.
“Don’t ever trust yourself alone with her,” she said. “If she wants to take exercise in the gymnasium, be sure to have someone else there all the time she’s there.”
I made the mistake of laughing and said, “Oh, surely she wouldn’t—”
She turned on me furiously. “I tell you,” she said, “I know her. She’s a creature of physical appetites and animal cunning. She simply can’t control herself. All this high — blood — pressure business is simply the result of overeating and overindulgence. She’s put on twenty pounds since Dad married her.”
“Your father,” I said, “is nobody’s fool.”
“Of course he isn’t, but she’s worked out a technique that no man can fight against. Whenever she wants anything and anyone balks her, she starts working herself up to a high pitch of excitement, then she telephones for Doctor Parkerdale. He comes rushing out as though it were a matter of life and death, takes her blood pressure, and starts tiptoeing around the house until he’s created the proper impression. Then he takes whoever is responsible off to one side and says very gently and with his best professional manner that Mrs. Ashbury really isn’t herself, that she simply mustn’t become excited, that if he can only keep her perfectly calm for a period of several months, he can cure her blood pressure, that then she can start taking exercise and reduce her weight and be her normal self, but that whenever there’s an argument and she becomes excited, all the good that he’s done is wiped out, and he has to go back and begin all over again.”
I laughed and said, “That seems to be a hard game to beat.”
She was furious at me because I’d laughed. “Of course it’s a hard game to beat,” she said. “You can’t beat it. Doctor Parkerdale says that it doesn’t make any difference whether she’s right or wrong, that one mustn’t ar
gue with her. That means you have to give in to her all the time. That means she’s becoming more selfish and spoiled every minute of the time. Her temper is getting more ungovernable. She’s getting more selfish, more—”
“How about Bernard Carter?” I asked. “Does he get along with her?”
“Bernard Carter,” she snorted. “Bernard Carter and his business deal! He’s the man who comes around when Father goes away. She may fool Dad with that business talk, but she doesn’t fool me a darn bit. I—I hate her.”
I observed that I thought Henry Ashbury was quite capable of handling the situation.
“He isn’t,” Alta said. “No man is. She has him hamstrung and hogtied before he starts. If he accuses her of anything, she’ll throw one of her fits and Doctor Parkerdale will come rushing out with the rubber tube he puts around her arm and take her blood pressure— Oh, can’t you see what she’s doing is simply laying the foundation for filing a suit for divorce on the ground of mental cruelty, claiming that Father was so unreasonable and unjust with her that it ran up her blood pressure and ruined her health and kept Doctor Parkerdale from curing her. And she has the doctor all primed to give his testimony. The only thing Father can do is efface himself as much as possible and wait for something to break. That means he has to give in to her. Look here, Donald. Are you pumping me or am I just making a fool out of myself talking too damn much?”
I felt like a heel again, only worse.
She didn’t talk much after that.
Someone called her on the telephone, and she didn’t like the conversation. I could see that much from the expression on her face. After her party had hung up, she telephoned and broke a date.
I went out finally and sat on the sunporch. I felt more like a heel than ever.
After a while she came out and stood looking down at me. I could feel her scorn, even though it was too dark to see the expression in her eyes. “So,” she said, “that’s it, is it?”
“What?” I asked.
She said, “Don’t think I’m entirely a nitwit. You, a physical director. I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you I’d take the license number of the car that calls for you every afternoon, and look up the registration. B. Cool, Confidential Investigations. I suppose your real name is Cool.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “It’s Donald Lam.”
“Well, the next time Dad tries to get a detective who’s going to pose as a physical director, tell him to get someone who looks the part.”
She stormed out of the room.
There was an extension phone down in the basement. I went down and called Bertha Cool. “All right,” I said, “you’ve spilled the beans.”
“What do you mean, I’ve spilled the beans?’’
“She wondered who was calling for me afternoons, waited around the corner, got the license number of your car, and looked it up. It’s registered in the name of the agency, you know.”
I could hear Bertha Cool’s gasp over the telephone.
“A hundred bucks a day thrown out of the window just so you could chisel a taxi fare,” I said.
“Now listen, lover,” she implored, “you’ve got to find some way out of this. You can do it, if you’ll put your mind on it. That’s what Bertha has you for, to think for her.”
I said, “Nuts.”
“Donald, you must. We simply can’t afford to lose that money.”
“You’ve already lost it.”
“Isn’t there something you can do?”
I said, “I don’t know. Drive the agency car out here, park it at the place where you usually meet me, and wait.”
Chapter Four
ALTA went out about quarter to ten. The butler opened the garage doors, and while he was doing that, I was streaking down the street. That’s one thing I’m good at sprinting.
Bertha Cool was waiting in the car. I climbed in beside her, and said, “Get that motor going. When a twelve-cylinder car streaks past us, give it everything you’ve got and keep the lights turned off.”
“You’d better drive, Donald.”
“There isn’t time. Get started.”
She started the motor and eased away from the curb. Alta Ashbury went past us like a flash. I said to Bertha, “Go ahead. Give it the gun.” I reached over and switched out the headlights.
Bertha started groping for the headlight switch. I jerked her hand away, grabbed hold of the hand throttle, and pulled it out all the way. We started going places. Bertha got jittery, and I leaned over to put a hand on the wheel. After a while, Alta came to a cross street just as the light changed. It gave us a chance to catch up and for me to run around the back of the car and let Bertha slide over.
When the light changed, Alta shot ahead as though she’d been fired from a gun. The agency bus rattled on across the street, gathering headway. Somebody yelled at me to put my lights on, but I kept running dark, hoping we’d get into a snarl of traffic. After a while we did. I switched the lights on and started jockeying for position, trying to keep just a little on the left and behind.
Bertha was full of apologies. “I should have listened to you, lover. You’re always right. Oh, why didn’t you make me listen to you?”
I had a job to do driving the car, so I didn’t say anything.
Bertha kept right on talking. She said, “Donald, I don’t suppose I can ever make you understand me. For years I had to fight my way. Every nickel counted. There were lots of times when I only allowed myself fifteen cents a day for eating money. Do you know, Donald, the hardest job I ever had was trying to learn how to spend money again after I began to make a little.
“I’d draw a hundred dollars every month from my bank account and make up my mind I was going to spend it on myself, and I just couldn’t do it. I’d find myself at the end of the month with seventy or eighty dollars I hadn’t spent. When you’ve once been right up against it where money means so damn much to you, it does something to your morale. You never get over it.”
“I’ve been broke,” I said.
“I know, lover, but you’re young, and you have brains. Bertha didn’t have brains, not the kind you have. Bertha just had to stay in there and pitch, and it was tough sledding. You have something I’ll never have, Donald. You’re resilient. Put pressure on you, and you bend. Then as soon as the pressure is removed, you spring back. I’m different. Put pressure on me, and I put pressure back. If anything happens, and I can’t put any pressure back sometime, I won’t bend, I’ll simply break.”
I said, “All right, forget it.”
“Where’s she going, lover?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s she going to do?”
“I don’t know even that. We’ve kicked ourselves out of a hundred — dollar — a — day job. There’s everything to gain, and nothing to lose. We may as well shoot the works.”
“Donald, you’ve never failed me before. You’ve always worked out some scheme that let us wriggle through.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m trying to do it now.”
It was a tough job following her in traffic. All she needed to do was press her foot on the throttle. The motor would whisper a song of smooth power, and the car would whisk through an opening which would close up behind her. I had to keep my foot on the throttle of the agency car and hold it in second gear a good part of the time so I had the pickup I needed for traffic.
She drove into a parking station. I didn’t dare go into the same station. The only open parking space was in front of a fire plug. I said, “All right, Bertha, we park in front of the fire plug. If you get pinched, you can charge it to Ashbury for taxi expenses. You go down toward Seventh Street. I’ll go up toward Eighth. Wait on the corner. When she leaves that parking lot, she’ll either turn toward you or toward me. If she comes toward me, don’t try to follow her. If she goes toward you, I won’t try to follow. Whichever one isn’t elected will come back and move the car.”
Bertha was meek as a lamb. “Yes, lover,” she said.
&nbs
p; It was a job for Bertha to get in and out of the car. She had to twist around and squirm her way out. I didn’t wait for her, and I didn’t try to help her. I opened the door and walked down the street fast.
Bertha hadn’t gone more than twenty yards from the car, when Alta came out of the parking lot. She turned toward me. I ducked in a doorway and waited.
She was considering the possibility of being followed all right. She kept looking behind her as she walked, but after she’d turned the corner, she evidently figured the road was clear. I picked up her trail. There was a cheap hotel midway in the block. She went in there. I didn’t dare follow until after she’d got out of the lobby, then I walked in and over to the cigar counter. There was an automatic indicator over the elevator. I watched the hand. It had stopped at the fourth floor.
The girl behind the cigar counter was blond with stiff, wavy hair. I remembered one time when I’d seen a strand cut from the rope used by a hangman in San Quentin. A traveling salesman had it, and he had combed the strands all out. That girl’s hair was about the same color, had about the same wave, and looked to be just about as stiff. She had light eyebrows, and big green eyes. She’d managed to get the expression on her face that one associated with virginal innocence back in nineteen hundred and six; mouth puckered up, eyebrows raised, lashes long and curly. It was the expression of a kitten just venturing out of the back closet into the living-room.
I said, “Listen, sister, I’m a traveling salesman. I’ve got a bill of goods I can sell the Atlee Amusement Corporation, but I have to have an inside track. There’s a gambler here in the hotel who can give it to me. I don’t know his name.” Her voice was as hoarse and harsh as that of a politician the morning after election. She said, “What the hell do you take me for?”
Gold Comes in Bricks Page 3