“I gave him money from time to time,” Eve Griswold said. “No talk of blackmail. Just loans that would never be repaid. Then Bertha Lund got word to me about you. I had kept in touch with her because of my father.”
It was a full minute before she spoke again. “Anyway, I told Stuart about it—there was no one else I could turn to—and he said not to worry, that he’d take care of it.”
She crushed out her cigarette and reached into the bag for the case. I held another match for her, watching the flame burn down and die close to my thumb.
“It’s over now,” she said. “Just another day’s work to you and why don’t I get up and go. The Fremonts will have your letter saying their daughter died eight months ago in a hotel fire and was never identified. It’s going to hurt them, but nothing could hurt them as much as the truth. Still you didn’t have to twist things around this afternoon to save my skin. I can't help wondering about that, Paul.”
“You can stop wondering about it,” I said. “Maybe I believed all the hearts and flowers you gave me about being in love with your husband in spite of his money. Maybe I thought it was time Susan Griswold gave up trying to run you out of the house. Maybe I figured I had no right to prove to Lawrence Griswold that his angel had a brass halo. Or maybe I’m just another ham who couldn’t pass up a chance to play God.”
She didn’t stay long after that. I continued to sit, smoking a cigarette and running a finger along the arm of my chair. I stood up finally and leaned against the window frame and looked down into Jackson Boulevard at the tiny figures of people hurrying along because everybody hurries these days.
“You and God,” I said.
Howard Browne on Howard Browne
Born in Omaha, Nebraska. My mother was a school teacher, my father died four months before I was born. While residing in Lincoln, Nebraska, and after attending high school for three years, it seemed to me that attending school was interfering with my education. So I dropped out altogether.
In those days, for anyone my age, Lincoln offered few opportunities beyond jerking sodas or pumping gas. So, I hitchhiked to Chicago in search of a career. In turn, I was a shipping clerk, a waiter in a tuberculosis sanitarium, a wholesale produce salesman, an installer of Venetian blinds, a machine operator for a wood products plant, a department store skip-tracer, and credit supervisor for a chain of schlock furniture stores. Plus, somewhere along the line, a husband and the father of a son and daughter.
When all this was out of the way, I opted for a writing career.
My first effort was a pair of short stories aimed at the pulp magazine market. Ziff-Davis, a Chicago publisher, bought both stories for their new detective magazine and hired me as the editor. Eventually I became editor of their entire chain of pulps, and served as such till I lit out for Los Angeles to write for motion pictures and television. By that time I had to my credit eight novels and over two hundred stories for the magazines I edited.
Between 1956 and 1976, I wrote four major motion pictures, somewhere around 130 TV scripts, and served as story editor on various TV Series. During those same years I went through a divorce, remarried and adopted a baby girl.
Now I’m back to writing novels, teaching screenwriting at the University of California, San Diego, and doing an occasional play-doctoring job on an ailing TV script.
Finding spare time has always been a problem for me.
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