Sinful Woman

by James M. Cain

  As they turned in at the gate, Sylvia pointed to a green car out front, and he drove around back. They entered through a side door that led into Tony’s office, which was exactly like the one in town except that it had green leather chairs instead of red. In the door at the other end of the room was a little metal slot, the kind that speakeasies used to have. Tony opened it, peeped out. Sylvia peeped, and her face hardened as she spotted a lone player at one of the blackjack tables, who handled his cards with nonchalance and chatted flirtatiously with the pretty dealer. Tony looked incredulously at Sylvia. “Not that guy?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “He’s been in every night for a week.”

  “Here? At the Galloping Domino?”

  “He’s a regular.”

  The bartender went by with bottles. Opening the door, Tony called him, and he came in. “Jake, that guy over there, the one playing blackjack with Ethel—you know anything about him?”

  Jake looked and said: “Sure, he comes in.”

  “What names does he go by?”

  “Search me. He’s some kind of a foreigner. He said call him Vic, so that’s how we left it.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Fishes most of the time, I think. Took a shack by the river, couple miles up the line. He’s got plenty of dough.”

  “Send him in, Tony.”

  Jake and Tony went into the casino and Sylvia sat on the edge of the big desk, her face set, her eyes narrow. In a moment a burst of waltz music entered the room, transformed itself into a man, took her hand as though it were a water lily, brushed a kiss upon it, wafted it gently to her knee again, and stood murmuring her name, as though such a vision of loveliness were more than human fortitude could endure. He was a rather large man, but made with such grace that he almost seemed small. About his lean hardness there was something of the cavalry officer; about his small hands and feet something of the ballet master; and about his bright black eyes something of the pimp. But his mouth was poetic, and it throbbed now, like the throat of a robin, as he kept repeating “Sylvia-Sylvia-Sylvia” in a soft, sibilant whisper.

  She looked at him for a time, then lit a cigarette and crossed to one of the leather chairs, sinking back in it and hooking a reflective knee over one arm. Then she said: “Believe it or not, Vicki, I’m a little glad to see you. And my hand has a little tingle spot on it, where it was kissed. Even when I know the whole routine frontwards and backwards, it still does things to me.”

  “But it is no ruttine! Is from ’ere. Is from ’eart.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To see you, Sylvia! No odder t’ing. To sing one song, to break one glass, to blow one kees, before comes a end!”

  “The worst of it is, it could be true.”

  “Of course is true! I say myself, Vicki, what you do? You sit ’ere! You let time go by. You act like damn full! Tomorrow you lose Sylvia, you no do one t’ing! I jump in car, Sylvia! I drive in one night! I swear you, I live ’Ollywood last night, no stop even buy gas! I see thees place, I coon wet! I coon wet, had to see you Sylvia. I jump out! I stop car ’ere thees place, I jump out, I phone huttel, I—”

  “You lying Lithuanian heel, what do you want?”

  “O. K., Sylvia, I tell you.”

  “And not so loud. And not so funny.”

  “Is all true! I most see you! ... But why I call up? Was afred! Was afred you live thees place before I find you! I say to myself, I most ’ave thees t’ing—”

  “Have what?”

  “Thees ring!”

  She looked down at the ring that was still on her finger, a plain gold band with steel oval on which was cut a coronet. Without a word she slipped it off and handed it to him. When he had kissed her hand passionately again, she said: “I would have sent it to you. I don’t know why I haven’t already, except it’s one of those things you just don’t have a box to fit. But why the phone call, and the fuss, and—”

  “I get marrit again, Sylvia.”

  “You—what?”

  “Yes. I get marrit today.”

  She got up, lifted the phone, asked that Tony be paged for her. When he came in she said: “Tony, a bottle of champagne.”

  “Yes, Miss Shoreham.”

  “No, Sylvia, I coon permit—”

  “Tony, champagne. And be sure it’s very expensive champagne. Champagne in every way fit for a bridegroom-elect—”

  “Miss Shoreham, don’t tell me—”

  “Not I, Tony. My husband.”

  “Ah yes, champagne.”

  With a deferential bow to Vicki, Tony left the room. Sylvia said: “Does she live here, Vicki? Is that why you took the shack?”

  For a long, worried moment he stared at her. She laughed. “You didn’t expect to get away with that midnight drive from Hollywood, did you?”

  “Who tell you about shock?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes, plizze.”

  “The bartender.”

  “Jeck?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Just now.”

  “Nobbudy else?”

  She laughed again. “No, Vicki, nobody else. So if delicious naughtiness has been enjoyed by all, I don’t know a thing and you’re perfectly safe.”

  Tony came in presently, with an icebucket, a bottle with gold foil on it, and two glasses. When the bottle had been well-twirled in the ice, he cut the wire, winked as the cork popped, and poured. At the toast to happy days he backed out, and Sylvia said: “Do you know what I thought, Vicki?”

  “Ah, Sylvia! I frigh’n you, yes?”

  “I thought it was Phoenix Pictures.”

  “You mean I—pull treek?”

  “Yes you, lovely you.”

  “Sylvia! Coon do soch t’ing you.”

  “But, I was ready for you. And that reminds me, Vicki, I’m afraid I have just the teentsy-weentsiest bit of bad news for you.”

  “Bad news for me?”

  “I’m afraid you won’t be a producer for Phoenix much longer, marrying actresses Dimmy Spiro wants for the sarong trade. Since Phoenix wouldn’t do the right thing by me I did the right thing by it, and picked up a few shares that Dimmy forgot about, enough to give me control. So next week you and Dimmy and me are all out, and Phoenix gets sold to Metro or Warners or whichever company it is that wants to buy it. And all three of us are free, or will be. Isn’t that nice?”

  Vicki looked as though he had been hit with some singularly horrible nagaika. He winced, closed his eyes, breathed deeply. Then: “Sylvia! Why do you thees to me?”

  “Why you do that, and them, and those, to me?”

  “I do notting to you! Only lahve you!”

  “I think you’ve forgotten that little contract we signed together, with the extra page in that I swear I never saw until later, the one that gave me to Dimmy for seven years, with no way I could get out of it if he kept on paying me the miserable little salary it allowed me. And that gave you a great big salary as producer of my pictures, although the only thing you had ever produced up to then was girls for Dimmy’s parties. Do you remember about that? Do you remember how I begged you for a release from that dreadful contract?”

  “Sylvia, why we no make new dill?”

  “It’s impossible, Vicki.”

  “We ’ave soch fine, big plan for you—”

  “I wouldn’t sign with you and Dimmy if you were the last producers on earth. And just so neither one of you try any tricks with the S-S Corporation, that nice little dummy company you got me to organize, I might as well tell you I haven’t got that stock I bought, not one share of it. It was bought for Hazel, and it’s all in her name, and there’s no way Phoenix can be saved, or you and Dimmy can be saved, or I can be made to work for you!”

  “Sylvia! You brek me ’eart.”

  “However, enough of that. Who’s the bride?”

  “Is girl I met. Nize girl.”

  “She lives here.”

  “Li
l while only.”

  “Ah, the divorce question again?”

  “Si and so and sa.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “Shoon be surprise.”

  “ ... I do?”

  “Is Hezzel. Is your seester Hezzel.”

  Chapter Three

  SHE HAD BEEN HOLDING her glass up to the light, watching the bubbles drift up the stem, but now set it down. Then she stared at Vicki as if she were trying to realize what he had said, to sort it into its various implications, to grasp what it meant. He, his face momentarily in repose, his eye everywhere but on her, seemed to have changed a little; the glow had left him, and he suggested still another characteristic of the Middle Europe that had produced him: a capacity for slippery schemes, not prosecuted in offices, where Americans cut throats, but in the boudoirs of women and other haunts of the helpless. His dark good looks were quite sinister under her stare, and he merely shrugged when she burst out: “Vicki, you can’t seriously mean what you say?”

  “Min? Sure, I min. Hezzel nize girl.”

  “You must be—gagging or something. You can’t go through with it and face what hell will have waiting for you.”

  “Hell? Can be. Who knows?”

  He was distressed but vague, and she stood up, the tears glittering in her eyes. “I don’t speak of myself. I suppose it was too much to hope for, that I could get rid of you and Dimmy and Phoenix all in one day. But why did you have to pick on Hazel? You know she’s practically an institutional case right now? You know—”

  “Then why you no take her to court?”

  “In other words, if she’s not herself, then I ought to have put her away. And if she is herself, she’s perfectly free to marry you, and the stock is yours, and I’m yours, to make sarong pictures as long as Dimmy tells me to—and then you’ll have her put away.”

  “But, I lahve her, Sylvia! I—”

  One pretty fist caught him in the mouth, and its fluttering throb gave way to a tight pursing, as he touched it with his handkerchief to see if it was cut. She began to stride up and down with a slow, feline glide. As she talked, her breath came in deep inhalations and her fingers laced and unlaced: she wasn’t a woman giving way to emotion, but like one trying to repress it, and the agony of this effort gave a measure of what she felt. “You—bird of prey. You’re no more capable of loving her than of loving me or any woman in your life. To you, none of us mean anything except what you can get out of us, and once you had your big reunion with Dimmy and he showed you how to cash in on the handkissing and the dancing and the title, that was our bad day. And especially a bad day for any girl named Shoreham. I think I’m going back to my trade, Vicki. Waiting on the table is a lot more respectable than working for you and Dimmy.”

  “Yes is ver’ nize work.”

  “So that’s where she’s been going.”

  “You gambol so moch, Sylvia.”

  “Yes, I’ve gambled a lot. After I got her out of California, away from the chartreuse and the B-and-B and cointreau you kept filling her up with, she had a crackup and I had quite a time with her. And then when she wanted to drive up in the mountains, because they made her feel good and helped her get back to normal, I was only too glad to let her do it. I couldn’t go with her. They made me feel giddy and light-headed and sick. So, I let her go alone, and to have something to do while I was hanging around here, I gambled. I gambled $100 a day, quite a lot, but nothing to what you and Dimmy cheated me out of these two years. And all that time she wasn’t driving in the mountains at all. She was meeting you—”

  “Sylvia! I see her two-three-four time.”

  “You’ve been coming to this place a week, and what places did you go to before that? I know, now, that it was liquor I smelled on her breath, and not cactus candy as she said. Thanks for that, Vicki. You know it’s the worst thing in the world for her, but you didn’t stop at it, did you? Not if that was the way to keep her coming to that lovely shack of yours.”

  She continued her restless pacing, seemed to get older as her face took on a desperate, haggard look. He remained motionless, perched on the edge of the big desk, staring unwinkingly at nothing. With wolfhounds at his feet, peasant girls behind him, a banker at one side, trying to collect his money, a dead deer on the other, head hanging limply down, a falcon on his finger and a feather in his cap, he would have made an excellent oil painting of Europe and How She Got That Way. He barely moved when she stopped suddenly and said: “This isn’t your think-up, Vicki. It’s too good and you haven’t got the brains. I see Dimmy’s fine Hungarian hand in it. Is he here?”

  “Dimmy? Can be. I—”

  But as though in answer to her question, the door opened and three men entered. One was short, fat, and pale, and looked oddly like an obese penguin. One was small, thin, and freckled, with unnaturally blond hair and light shifty eyes with no lashes on them. He looked like an albino rat. And one was tall, lithe, and sunburned, with delicately-carved features and luminous eyes, so luminous they suggested the moon-agates that marble players use as shooters. He looked like a horse who aspired to lofty things, such as popcorn instead of oats. All three advanced on Sylvia at a noisy run, their arms outstretched, their mouths forming big grins. She backed off with a snarl. With no apparent sense of embarrassment, the tall man and the freckled reduced speed to a walk, then strolled over to a framed photograph of the Johnson-Jeffries fight, and stood studying it. The third man, the short fat one who looked like a penguin, came to a full stop, and stood looking at Sylvia as though she had cut his heart out and he wished she would give it back. Then he said: “Sylwia! Is me! Is Dimmy!”

  “You think I’m blind?”

  “But, Sylwia! This is no way to act! Here we come! Make a big surprise for you! Bring fine script! Queen of the Big House—ah Sylwia, you’ll love this little B-Girl that goes to prison to save the fellow she loves.”

  “I can see her now.”

  “And we have another surprise! Tell, Vicki!”

  Vicki, however, kept silent, and in a moment Sylvia sat down, covered her face with her hands. After a while she went outside, stumbled aimlessly around, spied Tony’s car, got in it. There, in a moment, tiptoeing up to the window, Tony joined her. “Bad, hey?”

  “Worse than I could have dreamed.”

  “Who are these others?”

  “The one in the beret is Dimmy Spiro, head of Phoenix Pictures. The tall one is La Bouche, his production manager. The little one has a last name, I guess, but I don’t know what it is. He’s called Benny the Nib. He’s a check forger that Dimmy brought in as a writer, to do a story for me called Queen of the Big House. And they’re up here to—”

  She broke off, thought a minute, as though to decide how much she wanted to tell this man anyway, then told him what was brewing in short, jerky sentences. When she mentioned Hazel he whistled, evidently having long since guessed the girl’s mental condition. Then he said: “Then it all checks up.”

  “What checks up?”

  “Jake heard a little more. They got in last night, and stayed with your husband in his shack. The idea was, they were to lay low until your divorce was granted, then the girl your husband is to marry—Hazel—would come out and they’d be married. But your husband, he wanted some sort of ring he’d given you, so Hazel could be married with it. He wanted to catch you before you left town, but he hadn’t had a phone put in the shack, so he came here. They’re pretty sore. They didn’t want you to know until it was all over, and they thought the ring could wait.”

  “Not a Baltic baron’s ring. It’s his soul.”

  “They’re a funny bunch.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  Mr. La Bouche appeared at the back door and asked Tony if he had a shine boy. Tony called, and a Mexican youth came out of the garage at rear. Mr. La Bouche told him to go inside, and step on it. Benny came out and announced that if he had no saddle soap, he needn’t come in at all. Mr. Spiro came out, flicking a handkerchief against his soft leather boots,
and inspected the can the boy had by now taken out of his box. It was at this point that Vicki came out, leaned close, and whispered something to Mr. Spiro. When Mr. Spiro nodded, Vicki started around the club, first stopping to lift Sylvia’s hand out of the car, press a kiss on it, and put it tenderly back. When he had gone, Sylvia said: “Tony, will you lend me the car?”

  “You mean now?”

  “I’m going to follow him in. I’m going to follow him straight to wherever he’s meeting her. I’m going to stop this horrible thing if it’s the last thing I do on earth.”

  “Well—I guess so.”

  “Give me the key, quick.”

  Following the Baron, however, wasn’t quite as simple as it looked. She was only a few yards behind him as he turned out the gate, and for a few hundred yards up the road she held him in view. But then, as she matched his rapidly mounting speed, the needle leaped to 60, to 70, to 80. At 82 she missed a truck, lost her nerve, and pulled back to a sane rate. The green car disappeared around a curve, then vanished altogether. She drove a few moments uncertainly, then leaned forward with evident purpose. Back in town, she drove to a small office building. When she hurried into a lawyer’s office on the second floor, and asked for Mr. Daly, the girl at the switchboard seemed mildly annoyed. “Well, he’s been expecting you all morning, Miss Shoreham. He’s had to break two engagements outside, and I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  Mr. Daly, a tall, thin man with sandy hair, was amiable enough about her tardiness, but when she blurted out that she wanted the divorce stopped he frowned, announced frostily that this was a most unseemly time. Briefly, leaving out psychopathic details, she explained what was afoot. He interrupted disagreeably: “I can’t impress on you too strongly the thought that it will be practically impossible to straighten out your affairs, particularly your professional contracts, until you get this divorce. Under the community property laws of California, your husband can—”

  “I want this marriage blocked!”

  “Why shouldn’t he marry your sister?”