Jealous Woman (7 page)

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.”

“O.K., pal.”

“And, Ed?”

“Yes?”

“Will you remember what I said. That we both drink—”

“Will you kindly go jump in the river?”

It was sweet, all right, to stay late, and hold her in my arms, and feel her tremble a little, because she was a nice girl and if the guy had once been her husband that’s how a nice girl ought to feel about it. And yet, driving home, it all came back to me how Keyes had sat there and checked it off about the Moving Finger. We hadn’t had an advance copy, but we’d got a whiff of some queer-smelling ink.

T
RACK OF ARRIVALS, AND
next morning I drove out to the Cinnabar Ranch to tackle three shots from New Jersey that had flown out for some shooting in their private plane. Sometimes, after their first introduction to a Western trail horse, they’re not so hard to sell, and I was doing all right. Two of them had no time for me, but the one that was manager of a Newark sheet and tube plant walked over to the stables with me and he didn’t say much, but I had that feeling you get, that he was my onion if I peeled him right. I mean, just keep on talking and first thing you know he’ll cut in with whatever it is that’s on his mind, generally some question about cost. You get out your rate book, and if you’re any good you should book him for his medical right there, and next day have his check. So I did and he did, and then I lost him. How, don’t ask me. I had him and I didn’t have him, and when I got back to the office I knew I wasn’t right. It was eating on me a little more than I had thought, whatever it was I wasn’t buying about the death of Richard Sperry, geologist. And when Jane rang me, around noon, and asked me to step over, as the police had some questions they wanted to ask her, and she didn’t want to be alone with them, Bo-Bo the Butterfly did a couple of fronts in my stomach.

But when they came up to her suite, a patrolman and a sergeant, they treated her fine, and said all they were trying to do was check for their report where he fell from, or jumped from, whatever it was that he did, and they were pretty certain it had to be from this apartment. They hadn’t been able to find anybody that saw him fall, but they had questioned everybody on this tier, and three of them had seen him go by the window. But as one of them was the man in the apartment just below hers, it pretty well let any other apartment out, as hers was on the top deck. The sergeant looked at her, then said: “Not to upset you any more than I can help, ma’am, there’s things people do when they fall that a police officer knows about and not many other people do, and the way these people tell it sounds O.K. to us, and specially it sounds O.K. the way this fellow just below you tells it. It don’t sound to us like stuff he might be making up just to get his name in the paper.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“A man falling, he moans. It’s a pitiful sound.”

“Now I understand.”

“These people, that’s what they noticed.”

“It couldn’t have been this suite.”

“Were you here?”

“No, that’s the point. I was out.”

“Where was you, if you don’t mind saying?”

“At a picture show.”

“Here in town?”

“The Rhythm Parade. At the Granada.”

“You come straight here?”

“I arrived at the hotel around a quarter to twelve, after starting down to Harold’s and changing my mind and coming here. When I got here the ambulance had arrived and the officers were making the crowd stand back, so I had some trouble getting by. I had no idea what had happened, or who it had happened to, until I got up here and the officers rang me, a few minutes later, and then came up and told me.”

“Did this man have a key to your room?”

“Not that I know of.”

“He come here often?”

“Never. I hadn’t seen him in three years.”

“How could he have got in?”

“I don’t know.”

“He in any trouble that you know of?”

“I know nothing of his recent affairs.”

“He sick or anything?”

“He was in good health when he was my husband.”

“Get along with his wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“You got any ideas about this? You understand, ma’am, we’re not charging anybody. It’s nothing like that. But we got to make a report. It’s got to be, the way we figure it, that he went out that window there. The first thing is why, and the next thing is, how.”

“I can’t imagine his doing a thing like that, or any reason he would have for doing it. Or how he could get in here, or why.”

“That window’s high, for one thing.”

“Didn’t he have a window of his own?”

“He had a wife of his own, too. Watching him, maybe.”

“One reason for suicide, no doubt.”

That’s what she said, but she kind of snapped it out and everybody laughed. After a minute she laughed. It was easy to see that the cops had put it together on a suicide basis, with some trouble going on between Sperry and Mrs. Sperry as the reason for it. Then the sergeant said: “Anybody else in the apartment at the time you was out?”

“No. ... Or, wait. I’ll see.”

She went in the bedroom and picked up the telephone. There was some talk and she came back. “I just happened to think that my maid may have been up, putting out my things for the night.”

“Had they been put out when you got in?”

“Yes, of course.”

“She coming?”

“She’s on her way up.”

So that was the third time I saw this Harriet Jenkins that you probably read about, but the first time I really had a good look at her. She was about the sloppiest-looking thing in the way of a woman I ever saw, and cheap, and 100% servant girl from the cap on her head to the shoes on her feet. But if you have some little trouble understanding what came out later, I may as well tell you she was just about as sexy a number as you’re liable to see in a month of looking. She looked maybe twenty-six or -eight, and her face was coarse, her hair ratty red, and her neck that certain color that made you wonder how often she washed. But don’t let anybody tell you that under the ten-cent-store makeup, the cotton stockings, the bombazine uniform there wasn’t looks, shape and a way of handling her gum. There was also a droopy way of handling her eyes.

She came in with her own key and stopped when she saw the cops and shot a look at Jane like she wanted a cue. But Jane just said they wanted to ask her a few questions and told her she could sit down. Sitting down didn’t seem to be something she was very good at, anyway around Jane, but she pulled the chair out from in front of the writing desk, sat on the edge of it, pulled her dress down over her knees, and began looking from one to the other of everybody in the room. That went on for quite some time, because cops, they make a specialty of sitting there looking at you, so you get fidgety wondering what they’re thinking. But the sergeant got enough of it and sounded off: “You knew Mr. Richard Sperry?”

“Oh, yes, sir. ’E was my employer for some years.”

“When’s the last time you seen him?”

She looked away and kind of huddled up like some puppy dog that was getting a bawling out, and then she asked Jane: “Is it important, ma’am?”

“Quite important.”

“’E asked me not to say.”

“I’d tell it, if I were you.”

“’E gave me a tenner not to say.”

“Regardless of what he gave you, it’s desirable that you tell anything you know, and it may have very bad consequences, particularly to
yourself
, if you conceal anything you know. The police officer has asked you when was the last time you saw Mr. Sperry.”

“It was last evening, sir.”

“Where?”

“’Ere.”