Authors: James M. Cain
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?”
“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.”
B
ACK 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.