“Shall I remember you to her?”
“I think it would please her that I spoke pleasantly of her. But if you mention it, don’t say anything as coming from me.”
“O.K.”
But how I was going to do it at all was what worried me, because to mention it would mean I would have to mention what Keyes had to do with it, and what was he doing here all this time? But I could have saved myself the trouble of thinking about it, because by dinner Jane already had it. “Ed, I ask you once more what that man is doing here.”
“He has business.”
“And what’s he doing with her?”
“Maybe he likes her.”
“What’s she doing with him?”
“Vice versa, maybe.”
“With her, that’s not enough.”
“Then maybe she wants a good time.”
“Ed, have you kept your promise to me?”
I said I never broke my promises, which sounded a little better than it was.
I’m a member of Unity, and next morning, when service was over at the Masonic Temple, I stepped over to the hotel to see how she felt on the subject of lunch. But Keyes was in the lobby, slumped down in his chair, and when he saw me he jumped up and came over almost at a trot. “Ed, I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning, and—I’ve got to talk.”
“O.K.—talk.”
“Not here. I’m not myself.”
We went up to his room and first he sat on the bed, then he lay on it. Then he got an envelope out of his pocket, opened it, took out a paper and said: “Read that.”
It was one of our operative’s reports, and from the first page, where “subject” went to a football game, it was easy to see that who was under surveillance was Mrs. Sperry. “So you got pretty stuck on her, but not so stuck you didn’t have her shadowed.”
“No, Ed, that’s not how it was at all.”
“Looks like it.”
“The whole thing was routine. I put the case in charge of our Department of Investigation, down in Los Angeles. I told them to take the whole thing over. How did I know they’d decide to include her in their check-up? I’d never even heard of her when I left to come up here. But—and the worst of it is the operative doesn’t even know who I am.”
I read it, and right near the end it went something like this:
11:05 P.M. Subject returned to hotel, entered Suite 642 with Robert Keyes.
11:08 P.M. Keyes left subject’s suite.
11:14 P.M. Phone rang in subject’s suite, subject answered, conversation inaudible.
11:15 P.M. Subject admitted man to her room. Identity undiscovered so far. Description:
Age: 30-35.
Height: About six feet.
Weight: Around 160.
Hair: Black, slightly gray.
Good build, well-dressed.
At 12:00 P.M. this man had not come out. I put wedges cut from three paper matches in crack between door and frame, using point of penknife to work them into place in such way they would fall unnoticed if door was opened. Went off duty. Sunday: 9:30 A.M. Wedges still in place.
“Well, Mr. Keyes, she crossed you.”
“But why?”
“Maybe she likes him.”
“I thought she liked me. I—worshipped her.”
“Being married to one guy, playing around with another, carrying on with still another—it’s done every day, except mostly they don’t have a private eye down the hall wearing a porter’s blouse.”
“And I thought she was a lady—a thoroughbred.”
“Oh, ladies play, but they don’t get caught.”
“It’s a horrible shock to me.”
“Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
“Warned? By whom? Who dared warn me?”
“Me. Remember my saying—watch out?”
“That was a gag.”
“Or so you thought.”
“All right, Ed, you warned me.”
When I went to Jane’s suite, she was in a worse state, if that was possible, than Keyes was. “Ed, something horrible has happened.”
“O.K., let’s have it.”
“Dick’s in town.”
“Sperry?”
“He’s here to kill Tom.”
“... You mean bump him off? Like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Nice guy.”
“Oh, yes. Once he tried to kill me.”
“Kind of a Bluebeard type, I’d say.”
“Don’t talk like that. ... Dick has spent too many years of his life in places where human life is very cheap, and where assassination is one of the regular ways to accomplish an end, and the cheapest. I—I tell you, we went swimming, and suddenly I knew I was not coming back.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well—!”
“Oh, later on it was proved. He knew I knew.”
“So?”
“I screamed.”
“Loud?”
“I said my foot had touched something.”
“And?”
“I said it was rough, like sandpaper.”
“Oh, like a shark maybe.”
“And that was something even Mr. Sperry couldn’t face. He tried to pooh-pooh it, but I screamed again, and he cut for shore.”
“Well, there’s no ocean here, or sharks.”
“Ed, please listen to me. I’ve tried to tell Tom if he persisted in this thing, this annulment, that Dick would have to do something about it. I told him what I’ve just told you. I told him Dick was like that, that rather than have this thing happen he would kill him. His answer was to go to you about insurance. To prove he thought it simply silly he looked up an agent in the phone book and went over to your office. Well, thank heaven I warned you in time, and that part is out. That silly gesture he made, to prove I was just dreaming things up, and that even seemed silly to him, when I told him his application would be disapproved. You’re protected, but he’s not. We’ve got to think of some way to block this off.”
“And with him gone I could marry you.”
I guess it was a gag, but before she could answer the phone rang in the bedroom. She dived in there, and when she came back her eyes were shining. “Thank the all-merciful God! That was Tom. He’s given up the annulment action.”
“Well, that just about fixes everything.”
“I hadn’t counted on Dick going to see him.”
“Turned on the heat, hey?”
“At last Tom knew what I had been trying to tell him. Oh, I know how Dick looked when he came for that little chat. You wouldn’t think those quiet, scientific eyes could get that killer look in them, but they can, all right.”
“Then let’s celebrate.”
“Oh, yes!”
“Little trip to Tahoe?”
“I’d love it.”
So we had the hotel fix us some lunch and drove up to Tahoe and ate it in the woods, sitting on a rock beside the lake. But before we went I called on Keyes in his room. “News, chum.”
“... What is it, Ed?”
“That guy, last night, was her husband.”
He had flopped back on the bed as soon as he let me in, but now he jumped up and grabbed the phone. When the operator told him that yes, Mr. Richard Sperry was registered, I thought his grin would come together at the back of his neck and take off the top of his head. “Ed, you can’t know what you’ve done for me.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.”
“That thoroughbred, and I suspected her!”
“And the annulment suit’s out.”
“I bet you’re pleased.”
“Somewhat.”
“Pretty day, isn’t it, Ed?”
“That old Nevada air.”
Part Two:
DISHONORABLE INTENTIONS
5
OF COURSE IT DIDN’T quite run straight down Hotsy Totsy Drive, not with Keyes around it couldn’t. Next day, when the New York
wire cleared everything he called Delavan from my office to tell him it was O.K. Then he began to stall, and then he hung up. And then, after studying the wire some more, he said: “Ed, I think I’m disapproving this risk.”
“And why, if I may ask?”
“Concealment.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. But he was surprised.”
“At you okaying something?”
“I told him I’d heard from New York, that his application was approved, and he was surprised. He thought it wouldn’t be, and there’s nothing he’s told me or I’ve told him that should make him think it wouldn’t be. That means there’s something he expected me to find out. I’ve got to know what that is.”
Now I know why he was surprised. After Jane had told him his application would be disapproved, to be told five days later that it had been passed was enough to surprise anybody. But what I had told her and what she had told him I regarded as completely outside the scope of a company investigation, and if Delavan still wanted to accept his insurance I didn’t mean to be blocked off from my cup on some crazy hunch by a guy trying to find stuff that would make headlines in the newspapers. I just calmly got up and walked into the outer office and told Linda to get Mr. Norton on the telephone. Norton’s president of the company. He’s not quite the man his father was, that founded our company and a couple of other companies and built them up and formulated most of the policies we’ve got, but he’s a nice guy just the same and what I wasn’t forgetting in any way, he was a little fed up with Keyes. I spoke to Linda good and loud, so Keyes heard me. When I came back we just sat there, he smoking his cigar and thinking. I smoking mine and burning.
“Mr. Norton?”
“Hello, Horner, what’s on your mind?”
I gave him enough of it, even if it was a long distance call, for him to get what it was about. “Now, Mr. Norton, I’ve got some cups on my bookcase that say I’m one of the best agents you’ve got. I’ve got my eye on another, maybe you know about that. But here’s something that maybe you don’t know. I’ve got three letters in front of me, three letters as yet unanswered, from other companies, offering me territory, with general agent rank, in cities a lot bigger than Reno, cities that—”
“Now, Horner!”
“Could mean, to me—”
“Will you let me talk? If you’ll meet that afternoon plane, I’ll have somebody aboard that I think can straighten things out. Now just take it easy. Play some golf. And let me talk to Keyes.”
Keyes hated it, but he had to stand there and say “Yes, sir” every ten seconds, and when he hung up his face was so red it looked like a Technicolor gag. Then he put on his coat and went out.
I expected H. P. Davis, senior vice-president, or maybe Vic Rose, chief of underwriters, but I almost fell over backwards when Norton himself came down the ladder. Oh yes, he did. An insurance company puts first things first, and it knows what the first things are. What brings in its business is agents, and when one of them blows his top even the President’s not too proud to jump on a plane. He was just like any other guy as I drove him in, and we went direct to my office, as he was taking the sleeper back and wouldn’t need a room at the hotel. “What do they call you, Horner—Ed?”
“My friends do, yes.”
“And my name is Jason—Jace if you like me.”
“I’d feel funny about that.”
“Oh, this is the West.”
“Yeah, but a corporation president, he ought not to have people getting familiar. J.P., though, I’d like that all right.”
Well, that made him laugh, so by the time we hit town we were getting along fine. Keyes was there when we came in, looking pretty thick, but we went all over it, and then Norton took charge: “Keyes, you knew my father pretty well?”
“Better than you did, perhaps.”
“On insurance, I’m sure you did. But I knew him too, and on questions like this, I’ve heard him say a thousand times: ‘Insurance is the assumption of risk. Pig-iron under water is a perfect risk, but nobody takes out a policy on it. That’s what the underwriter must always bear in mind: if the applicant weren’t in some way uneasy, he’d never buy insurance. The risk must be there for the surety to be sought and the mere presence of risk is not in itself sufficient reason for rejection of the business.’ Do you recall his saying that?”
“No.”
“I do, distinctly.”
“He never said it.”
“He said it forty times a day for forty years.”
“What he said was: ‘Insurance is the assumption of a calculated risk.’ He was, as you probably recall, opposed to conservatism in the acceptance of business. He accepted business that most companies turned down, but it was in no way a gamble with him, except as all of it is a gamble. He brought the calculation of a risk to a science that was way ahead of his time, with a department of investigation that brought in stuff that hadn’t even been heard of then. Yet the ratio of his losses was as sound as any in the business. I’ll recommend no risk I can’t calculate, and in this case there is concealment. There is concealment on the part of the beneficiary, of the assured, and I think on the part of the agent.”
I flared up but Norton cut me off: “Ed, what is this?”
“I’m stuck on the beneficiary, J. P.”
“Mrs. Delavan?”
“I’m going to marry her.”
“Is that the matter that’s been concealed?”
“No, I wouldn’t say so. The main item of concealment is that Mr. Keyes is stuck on the wife of the lady’s first husband, but she’s not going to marry him—and that’s what this is all about, though what romance has got to do with the calculation of risk I don’t exactly see—though I’m willing to be shown.”
I guess it was a dirty crack at Keyes, but I was pretty sore. Norton’s mouth began to twitch and I could see he was having a hard time not to laugh. Keyes talked some more, and the trouble with him was that when he got that look in his eye, and told all the times before that he had been right when he smelled something wrong without even knowing what it was yet, he’d shake you, in spite of yourself. Away down deep in me, if I’d told the truth, he shook me, but I was getting bull-headed by then and nothing could change me. He shook Norton, I could see that, for a while we all three sat there, drumming our fingers on our chairs. I called to Linda to put through my New York call. It was the apartment of a big shot in a company that wanted me bad, and he was standing by, because I’d wired him to. Pretty soon it came through, but it was Norton that picked up the receiver. “He’s changed his mind, Linda. Doesn’t want the New York call.”
I took them to the Palm Room of the Club Fortune, but at eight Norton had to run for his train. He thought it funny Keyes didn’t go with him, and as I put him in his cab he asked if there was a little resentment around. “Romance, J. P. has to say goodbye.”
“Say, who is the dame?”
“A Mrs. Sperry, I believe her name is.”
“Not Constance?”
“You know her?”
“Boy, is that a twenty-minute egg!”
“Well, Keyes is carrying it in his Easter basket.”
“Ed, you don’t know how funny this is. Before she married this Englishman, there were at least six guys that thought they’d grab that fortune, but even they couldn’t take it. And now Keyes, the guy that can’t be fooled, is plunking a guitar under her window—say, that’s a real joke.”
When I got back inside, Keyes had kind of forgotten to be a celebrity for a while, and there seemed to be something on his mind. After a while he said: “Ed, do you think it would be proper for me to call on Mrs. Sperry before I leave, just to say goodbye?”
“Well, why not?”
“You think it would embarrass her?”
“Well, that all depends.”
“On what?”
“On what she’s told the husband.”
“I don’t quite understand you, Ed.”
“Well, on this earth we
got all kinds. Some play around and figure they owe it to themselves on account of how short a time we have here anyhow, and they keep their mouths shut and it sounds wonderful but they’ve got a way of figuring what they owe themselves is nothing compared to what you owe them, so it’s not really quite as wonderful as it sounds. And then there’s others that play around, and they figure it’s right down sinful of them but they can’t help it on account of how wonderful you are, but you better watch them because they’ve got an unfortunate habit of getting remorse and telling friend husband all, just to square everything up and start over again, and I hear it works but going around to say goodbye depends mainly on the husband. Maybe he wants to shake hands, but on the other hand maybe he’s got a Colt automatic and just aching to use it. Personally, if you ask me, I’d kind of give her a ring and see how things stand before I came in range, like you might say.”
He sat there with a spoonful of coffee halfway up to his mouth, staring at me like I must be crazy or something. “But, Ed, you don’t mean you think there’s anything between her and me to tell, do you?”
“You mean you didn’t make passes?”
“I wouldn’t have thought of it.”
“Maybe you missed something.”
“Do you mean to make insinuations about her?”
“Hey, hey, hey, be your age.”
“But Ed—about that woman?”
Well, how do you tell a guy you think his lady friend would go for an insult right on the lipstick? “I was kidding you, Keyes. Just seeing if you could take a rib.”
“I’m glad to know it, Ed.”
But even with all that said between us, he still wanted to talk, and he opened up about how he thinks he got himself more emotionally involved with her than he had realized, and how he’d hate to leave town without going to see her, because he’s pretty sure she feels the same way. Then his face got red again, the way it had in the afternoon, and he kept saying over and over again she was a woman a man could love and not be ashamed of it, and then all of a sudden he was looking over my shoulder at something over near the door. I turned around, and Mrs. Sperry was just coming in with a short, stocky man, and she waved when she saw us. I gave Keyes kind of a kick on his shoe, so he wouldn’t look so glum. “It’s all right to be in love, but why advertise it?”