Jealous Woman

by James M. Cain

  “Is he her husband?”

  I had the captain do some sleuthing and he came back and said the gentleman was Mr. Richard Sperry. Keyes got glummer, then said: “Look at this.”

  It was the same old report from the fellow assigned to keep track of her, and he read it again, the description of the man that went into her room and didn’t come out: “‘Age, 30–35, height around six feet, weight around 160, hair black with some gray.’ Ed, that man’s job depends on getting it right. Sperry over there is at least fifty, he’s not an inch over five feet eight, he can’t weigh over 140, and his hair is light red.”

  “Probably some simple explanation.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  I rang Jane and told her I was hooked for the evening, but if I could make it later I’d call her. He and I went over to the hotel, and he said he’d be right down and went upstairs. He was gone quite a while, brushing himself up, he said, and then wanted me to drive him around, so he could think. I took him over into California on the road to Sacramento, and it goes over the Sierras but if it slammed him around a little I didn’t really mind. He lit a cigar, then threw it out the window, right in a fire zone. Then he pulled his legs up under him and sat with his heels kind of jammed over against me. So of course that made it nice, trying to drive. He wound down his window, stuck his elbow out, and leaned his chin on it. So of course that made it still better, with a draft blowing down my neck. Then he began clenching and unclenching his left hand, so it rubbed my brake leg. “Cut it out, will you, Keyes? How can I drive with—”

  “Quit bothering me.”

  “Then suppose it wasn’t her husband last night?”

  ”Ed, I’m trying to think.”

  Sore as I was, the way he rapped it out I didn’t have much more to say. I took a peep at him, and something in the way he was staring at those tall trees going by let me see it, just once, whatever it was he had in him that made him the greatest wolf on a phony claim west of the Mississippi River, and maybe the greatest in the business. He wasn’t sore, or squint-eyed, or whatever you’d think he would be, trying to dope this out. He was just like a child that asked his mother why something made a noise like it did, and when he got an answer that didn’t make sense, he was trying to fit it together. That hurt little frown, with 1,000,000 watts of concentration back of it, was something I’ve often thought of since. After a while he put down his feet, wound up his window, and said: “Well, I’ve thought of one angle anyway. Thank God you haven’t delivered that policy.”

  “How do you know what I’ve done?”

  “Don’t tell me she’s got it?”

  “While you were taking your own sweet time brushing up, and considering that when Norton left this was supposed to be signed, sealed and settled, it’s highly possible I slipped upstairs on the elevator and handed it to her, just to cheer her up. That could be. A lot of things could be. It would help a lot if you’d disconnect that assumer of yours and stop taking for granted what I do. I’m not under your orders, remember that.”

  I was pretty disagreeable, and he raved and tore his hair and hooked it up big. I let him run on, maybe encouraged him a little. Of course, I hadn’t delivered any policy. I hadn’t had a chance for one thing, and I had to figure on it for another thing, what I’d say to her about it. Before the three of us had left the office Norton had O.K.’d it for Linda to deposit Delavan’s check, and she’d mailed it out with two or three others, her final job every night, or most nights anyway, as there weren’t many days we didn’t handle payments. Once we took the money, the policy was legally in force, which was one thing that gave me a pain in the neck about all this delivery stuff Keyes was handing out, because short of a trip to the post office in the middle of the night, and another at daybreak to get the check back, there was no way to stop the thing now. That all-night run-around I wasn’t for one second going to start, because all this needed was one more hang-up, and it could land in the soup. At that time, I have to admit, that while I thought I was doing Jane a favor, as I’ve said, the real thing on my mind was the cup and that $100,000 tilt on my company score. It may have been childish, but in my experience the more childish something is the stubborner you get about it. All this so you get it straight about that policy, and the sweats I went through over it later. I’ll try to make clear why I handled it like I did, and I think I’ll make sense, but how it stood then, on that ride back from the mountains, was like this: I had it, right in my office safe. It was paid for, and legally we were on the hook. But Keyes supposed, maybe because I deliberately misled him a little, that Jane had it.

  He sulked then, and I turned around, and we started back. As we were coming in to Truckee he started up again. “Here, we’ve got a question of identity. What confused this, from the beginning, was that it was Delavan himself who applied for the policy, or appeared to. That made it O.K., even if his reasons were a little screwy, but we’re in that kind of business, and if we ever saw a perfect risk, they wouldn’t be wanting insurance—old man Norton’s pig-iron again. It won’t burn down, or fall on somebody, or steal the payroll, or collide with a truck, or blow away, or get hit by lightning, but who wants a policy on it? So all right. But there was one fishy thing about it? She opposed the idea. Ed, did you ever see a beneficiary, especially a wife, oppose insurance to mean it? I’m not talking about a little act she puts on. I’m not talking about when she says she can’t even bear to think about it, all that stuff. That looks good to the husband, but did she ever turn down a check when the agent takes it around? Not her, my young friend. Once she hears those words, ‘Till death do us part,’ she’s a solid prospect, and when she really goes to town on the other side of the fence, like this girl did, something cooks.”

  “It does, and I told you what it was.”

  “Ed, who says that was Delavan?”

  What I said to him was nothing, because I’d had hunches about this thing too, as I think I told you. But he didn’t wait long. He went right on: “Ask that one question, and it all makes sense. Delavan’s in town, I’ve no doubt of that. He’s here, and any question of where he’s staying and all the rest of it’s all taken care of. He’s here for an annulment, and she’s in the soup, and he’s going to get killed, and all papers on the corpse are going to check up, because it’s really going to be Delavan that gets it. But how are we going to prove Delavan’s not the man that bought the policy?”

  “Can’t we appear at the inquest, have a look at the corpse, and testify that he’s not?”

  “What’ll that corpse look like?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “But I’m asking you—after, say, an auto accident?”

  “Like hamburger, I guess.”

  “They’ll laugh at us, testifying whether it’s the guy that bought the policy or who it is. It’s six-figure dough to us, and well they know it, and how much our testimony will be worth is exactly nothing at all, especially since even his own mother wouldn’t know him.”

  “However, he’s not dead yet.”

  “He will be. You remember Mrs. Peete?”

  “Who?”

  “California case. Killed a couple of people.”

  “Oh, I remember. Kind of got the habit.”

  “And when she was sentenced to die, she said a peculiar thing to the reporters. She said: ‘It is given to all to know the day they were born, but to very few the day they’re going to die.’ Funny idea, that was, Ed. Kind of reminds you how seldom that moving finger gives out an advance copy of what it’s going to write. Well, we’ve got one. Here we are, two guys in a car, and we know a man named Delavan is due to get it, that a woman is due to collect $100,000 insurance off us, that then she’s going to run off with a guy that’s been pretending to be the husband, and that we’ll have one sweet time finding.”

  “Listen, Keyes, if your sweetie’s been two-timing you that’s unfortunate, but don’t take it out on me. Or on Delavan. Or on Mrs. Delavan. And don’t pull any more of that moving
finger stuff. I’m just a little fed up.”

  “Something funny is going on here.”

  6

  BACK IN RENO WE headed for the Club Fortune, where he had forgotten to uncheck his briefcase, on account of being slightly upset when we left there. But we didn’t get to the Club Fortune. Because when we started past the hotel there was a terrific jam, with police swinging flashlights and an ambulance parked up Second Street, and I stopped to ask a cop that I knew what had happened. “We don’t exactly know yet, Mr. Horner, as we’ve been trying to save the guy that was standing under the accident when it fell on him—anyway whatever it was that fell on him. A fellow jumped, fell, or div out of one of the hotel rooms, and he landed on a taxi driver that had just set down a fare, and when the ambulance come we let the first guy lay and had them take him, the driver, I mean, but now they’ve come back I guess we’ll be sending the dead one to the morgue and maybe his papers’ll show more about it. Them suicides have generally got a note on them, pinned to their coat or somewhere.”

  Keyes had been sitting there paying no attention, but now he sat up and began to look at the hotel and the ambulance and the crowd, where it was gathered around something on the pavement, and soon as the cop moved off he began to cuss at me in a mean, spiteful way, which was plenty unusual with him, because he was generally polite enough, even when he was setting you crazy with his foolishness. I said: “Well, for the love of Pete and Pete’s crazy brother-in-law, Keyes, what is it now?”

  “You know what it is, Horner. That’s the deluxe tier they’re all standing under, the one you tried to get me into, and couldn’t, the one she’s in. Your little pal. Mrs. Delavan, that moved fast, once she got that policy. ‘Jumped, fell, div’—or was pushed. And here I’ve got another one of those things on my hands, where whodunit is nothing and what-was-it is the whole thing and even when you know it how-can-you-prove-it will lick you, and all because you’re in love with a no-good trollop I warned you about from the beginning.” He looked me in the eye, then, and came out with some stuff I never thought I’d take from any man, and then he opened the door and got out.

  At the office I sat staring at the four cups, where they were shining in the light of the desk lamp, trying to figure what I was going to do about that policy, if anything, and what I was going to do about Delavan’s check, which was in the mail, on the way to the bank. I could get it, as I’ve said, by taking one of our office envelopes up to the night window, signing a stop slip, and then in the early morning taking another trip there to claim it. I mean, they require a piece of stationery identical with the piece of mail wanted, and while it was a lot of trouble, it was possible. And I thought a long time. And it kept beating in my head I wasn’t going to be cheated out of what I had my mind set on, by Keyes or anybody, just on account of some brainstorm he’d had, even if it all turned out exactly the way he figured it. If there’d been fraud, O.K., it wasn’t the first time it had happened, and let him prove fraud. That was his job, and if he was so slick at it, he could put us in the clear and get his name in the paper. I might as well put this part right on the line: Somewhere in that cogitation was a guy that made up his mind he was going to take a chance. I wish I could say, that had made up his mind he was going to do what was right come hell or high water. Maybe it was right, I don’t know. I’ve tried to tell myself it was right plenty of times. But why I did it was: I wanted what I wanted, and I was willing to take a chance. Right there was where I skated out where the ice was thin, and it was quite a while before it got thicker, and in between, it got quite a lot thinner.

  What I actually did do was put in a call for Jackie, at the

  Scout ranch, and tell her I was mailing myself a legal paper there, and to hold it for me until I called for it. She was a little short at being waked up, but an important customer was an important customer, so she said O.K. she’d receive it, and put it in a safe place. Then I put the policy in an envelope, stamped it, went over to the post office, and mailed it.

  When I rang Jane on the house phone, she sounded nervous and said some police officers were there in connection with something that had been found on the body, and could I call a little later. I sat in the lobby a half hour, and when a couple of cops came out of the elevator I rang her again and she said come up. I was hardly in the room before she was in my arms, holding onto me, not like we’d done before, with romance in it, but like a scared child does when its father comes around. “It did things to me, to hear your voice. The first I heard of it was from the officers, and I felt as though my face and hands had turned to splinters. And then all of a sudden there you were on the line, my big, solid, dependable Ed.”

  “Thought you might need me.”

  “After all—he was my husband.”

  “You can’t laugh that off.”

  “You want a drink, Ed?”

  “I could stand one, if coaxed.”

  “I need something.”

  She went into the dinette and made a couple of highballs and after we both had a sip she sat down beside me on the sofa and kept holding onto my hand. “They were awfully nice. The officers, I mean. They hadn’t wanted to bother me at all, but there was an unmailed letter in his pocket, addressed to me, and they wanted my permission to read it. It seemed they could have anyway, but in that case it would have come out in the papers, and they didn’t want me to see it first that way. It was terribly sweet.”

  “And said?”

  “Nothing. Only what had been said before. Over the telephone. About the divorce. But it was friendly. And it shook me up.”

  It didn’t make sense. Because, remember all that Keyes had said was on the assumption that she had the policy. She didn’t. It was safely in the U.S. post office, and would be until it was delivered at the Scout the next day, though it was technically in force, if some lawyer told her. And yet there was the dead man, that landed right under her window. And here she was, shaking like a leaf. And here were her hands that felt like ice. I may as well admit it. I never loved her more than I loved her that minute, and never suspicioned her more, either. And the rest of what I’ve got to tell you, just so you get it all straight and not fall for some fancy stuff I may put in here and there, to make myself look better, is simply about a guy that kept suspicioning a woman, and getting rid of his hex and then suspicioning her some more, and every time he’d suspicion her he’d fall for her again, until finally he admitted to himself he would go for her no matter what she did, and no matter how much of a heel he had to make of himself to help her do it.

  I sat there, trying to square it all up with what Keyes had said, and specially about what he had said about the fellow that told us he was Delavan being nothing but a fake to cover being her lover, when the buzzer rang and when she opened the door that guy, the one I knew as Delavan, walked in. For one second I could feel this throb in the back of my throat, and I wanted to go over and kill them both. But she acted natural, and he said hello to me, and then half took her in his arms. “I’m sorry, Jane. Is there anything I can do?”

  “Nothing I can think of.”

  “You haven’t heard anything?”

  “About what, Tom?”

  “... Why he did it?”

  “He did it?”

  “Well—I would suppose so.”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  “I’m sorry. I just—supposed—”

  “That’s what the officers meant, wasn’t it?”

  “They’ve been here?”

  “With his letter he wrote me. But there was nothing in it that remotely suggested anything like that. Just a friendly letter. Just—”

  “But they—think so too?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I’m sorry I said anything, Jane.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Well—if I can do anything.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He went and we sat down again and she lay in my arms with her eyes closed. “That hadn’t even once occurred to
me. Ed, do you think he did do it? Kill himself, I mean?”

  What I said to that I don’t know. I held her close, but things were spinning until Keyes rang up. I went in to talk to him and he began apologizing for what he had said. “O.K., Keyes, but what’s it all about?”

  “It wasn’t Delavan that got it.”

  “... What?”

  “It was Sperry.”

  “Hold on while I drop dead, will you?”

  “Amazing, isn’t it, Ed?”

  “Well, Keyes, we all make mistakes.”

  “Now, Ed, I’m really going to surprise you.”

  “What, again?”

  “I don’t feel I’ve made a mistake.”

  “O.K., but I’ve seen Delavan.”

  “Do you fool with mathematics, Ed?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “I do a little. And sometimes, when you’ve made a gigantic calculation, and you know you’ve got hold of something that means a lot, you come out with infinity equaling zero, or something like that. Well, so you’re crazy, aren’t you? Not as a rule you’re not. You go back and you check your transformations and you find you came in with a minus px instead of plus, and you make your changes, and all of a sudden there it is, just the way you knew it should be. Ed, I only wish I had something to do with it, beyond the group policy we wrote for the taxi company which I’ll have to look into. There’s something funny here, and I may say Mrs. Sperry agrees with me.”

  “Oh, you’ve seen her?”

  “Well, Ed, naturally.”

  “Well hey, hey, this changes things. She’s a marriageable widow now.”

  “Ed, don’t be silly!”

  “I’m not being silly.”

  “You’re being pretty silly.”

  “Except, of course, there’s the midnight Romeo.”

  “That’s been cleared up. He was a drunken valet of Sperry’s. When he came to her with a message, she saw the condition he was in and locked the door to report him to Sperry, who had taken the suite down the hall until the hotel could open up the single in between so they could have the big five-room suite that they wanted. While she was at the phone the valet slipped out on the ledge that runs around the building and popped in one of the corridor windows and out to a gambling place before she could stop him. And I’d like no more references to it.”