All The Way (10 page)

“Thanks a million.”

“You given any more thought to that piece of frontage we were looking at?”

“Well, yes,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I drove up that way this afternoon, when I came up from the Keys.”

“You’re at the Clive now?”

“That’s right.”

“I’d be glad to drive down and talk it over with you a little more. Unless you’re busy, that is.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not doing anything this evening. I might be in the dining room, but I’ll leave word at the desk.”

“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll see you in about forty-five minutes.”

The dining room was just dim enough. He was one of the people they’d be certain to question afterwards, or at any rate one of the shrewdest. I couldn’t take too many chances with him. The other time I’d been wearing the dark glasses except for the few minutes in his office when I first met him, he wouldn’t get much of a look at me here, and this was the last time I’d see him. I took a table for two along the wall, and was just finishing the soup when he came in. I stood up and we shook hands. “I forgot to ask if you’d had dinner.”

“Yes, thanks, I’ve had mine.”

“Well, have a drink, anyway.” I beckoned the waiter over. He ordered a bourbon and water. When the waiter returned with it, I said, “Would you take this knife away and bring me a new one? It looks dirty.”

“Yes, sir.”

We talked real estate in general for a few minutes. The waiter brought my entree. I’d ordered roast beef. There was gravy on it.

“No, no,” I said. “I don’t want that gravy on it, waiter. Would you change that, please?”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

He departed. “I don’t know why they ruin meat that way,” I said to Fitzpatrick. “All that damned grease to give you indigestion.”

“Yes,” he replied easily. “I know exactly what you mean.”

We’d just resumed our conversation when the waiter came back with the new order of roast beef. I looked at it, and then at him, and shook my head. “We don’t seem to get together at all. I don’t like to create an international incident, but I’m positive I said all outside slices, well-done.”

”Yes, sir.” He was silently raging now, but he took it away again.

I addressed Fitzpatrick. “Sorry to create a fuss, but by God, the prices you pay, the least you can do is get what you order.”

He smiled. “Not at all. If more people had that attitude, service would be a lot better than it is.” Fitzpatrick was a smooth article.

I ate some of the dinner, ordered coffee for myself and another bourbon for Fitzpatrick. While we were waiting for it to come, I took one of Chapman’s pill-bottles from my pocket, shook out a pill, and swallowed it with some water. I had no idea what it was, but it probably wouldn’t hurt me. Then I stuck a cigarette in the holder, and lit it with the butane lighter. Fitzpatrick, I thought, should be able to give them a pretty good description of Chapman.

The drinks came. “All right, let’s get right to the point,” I said. “I want to make an offer on that piece of frontage, but there’s no use wasting your time and mine. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. What do you think?”

He lit a cigarette. “Ethically, of course, I couldn’t say, even if I knew. We represent the seller, and the only price we know anything about is the one he tells us. But let’s put it this way; I’ve been in the business a long time and I never saw anybody get hurt making an offer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I’m on vacation, of course, and all I have with me is traveler’s checks. I can’t give you a check on my bank at home, but I called my broker in New Orleans on Friday and told him to send me some money. It just came.” I took out the Webster & Adcock envelope and dropped it on the table. “As soon as I open that account in the morning, I’ll give you a check for five thousand dollars to submit with the offer. Could you have one of your men pick it up here at the hotel?”

“Of course. We’d be glad to.”

“Good. Tell the owner if he’s really interested in a deal he’d better let me know tomorrow, because if he does accept I’ve got to raise the balance of a hundred and seventy thousand dollars cash to complete the transaction, and nobody’s got that lying around in a banking account. I don’t want to call off my vacation to go home and raise it, but it happens I can swing it by liquidating securities in my account with Webster & Adcock, and I can do that by telephone. It’ll take a few days for my deposits to clear New Orleans, of course, before the bank here will honor any checks on the account, but it’ll still be the simplest way to handle it.”

He nodded. “That would be fine all round.”

I stood up. “Okay, then. You can have somebody pick up my check here at the desk around ten-thirty in the morning. And call me right away when you hear from the owner.”

I went back up to the room. All this jockeying around with offers was a nuisance, and it was going to cost us five thousand dollars, but for purposes of verisimilitude it was absolutely essential. I mentally went over our timetable. We were right on schedule, and doing beautifully. It was time now to start lining up the girl.

I went out and took a cab, and told the driver I was alone in town and wanted to see some of the night life. He had nothing better to offer than a cheap night club. I had a drink, and departed in another cab. The driver of this one had a more sophisticated outlook, or fewer scruples. He looked over my identification. I voiced some preferences. He drove me back to the hotel, and I gave him my room number.

It was around ten-thirty when she knocked on the door.

She wouldn’t do at all; I could see that within the first ten minutes. She was dark and rather pretty, particularly with her clothes off, but she was a good-natured, somewhat unimaginative girl with no particular tensions or any animosity toward anything or anybody. I didn’t like flying in the face of psychiatric dogma by saying there was such a thing as a well-adjusted prostitute, but that was exactly what she was. She was lazy, the hours were good, and she earned considerably more than the average nuclear physicist. And she’d lived around Miami for years, and was crazy about it. She was out.

I completed the transaction with her, more as a gesture of conformity than from any particular interest in her, gave her the fifty dollars she asked for, added ten more for no reason that I could think of, and she left. I’d have to try again tomorrow.

I awoke around seven, went through that first terrible instant of remembering that left me sick and shaking, and then tried to appraise it clinically to see if it was any better or worse than on preceding mornings. It appeared to be about the same. Well, it would go away in time.

I had coffee and orange juice sent up, and put in an hour’s practice on the signature. From now on, it was dangerous. The traveler’s checks didn’t mean anything; nobody ever bothered to look at the signatures unless they’d been reported stolen. But now it was banks, who were notoriously touchy on the subject. Then I reminded myself for the hundredth time that I was being silly. I was overlooking the point of the whole thing, the real beauty of it.

The only thing I was going to forge, aside from a receipt which would be filed without even a glance, was the
endorsement
of a check. And who ever looked at that unless there was some question it was the payee who had cashed it? It was just as she had pointed out to me the first time. As far as anybody in the world knew—except the two of us—I was Harris Chapman. I acknowledged receipt of the check, told the man who’d sent it to me that I’d cashed it, and that was the end of the line. And as for getting the money out of the bank—that was the real honey of the deal; I wouldn’t be trying to copy a signature, because it would be
my own.
Not my name, of course, and it would be only my version of Harris Chapman’s signature, but it would be what was on the signature card, because I’d opened the account. No, if we ended in disaster, it wouldn’t be this forgery thing that tripped us.

It went off without a hitch. I arrived at the bank shortly after it opened, and inquired for Dakin. He was at one of the desks behind a railing at one end of the main lobby, a nervous, self-consciously hearty, and overworked man who couldn’t have described me ten minutes later if I’d been wearing a monocle and a sharpened bone through my nose.

“Oh, yes. Yes. Mr.—” His eyes swept toward the memo pad to verify his old friend’s name. “Mr. Fitzpatrick called. Glad to have you as a depositor, Mr. Chapman. And we know you’ll like Miami.”

I filled in the form, signed two copies of the signature card, endorsed the check, and gave it to him. He carried it off to one of the tellers’ windows and returned with my deposit receipt and a check-book. He assured me it wouldn’t take over three or four days for it to clear New Orleans. I went back to the hotel, wrote out a check for five thousand dollars, borrowed an envelope from the cashier, and left it at the desk to be delivered to anybody from Fitzpatrick Realty.

Up in the room again, I got out the list of securities, opened the
Herald
to yesterday’s closing stock prices, and made a rough outline of what to sell. It would just about clean out the account; there’d be less than twelve thousand dollars left in it. I put through the call to New Orleans.

“Hello, Chris? Chapman—”

“Oh, good morning, Mr. Chapman. I see Warwick opened at two and a half again this morning, so we may not—”

“Never mind that,” I cut in brusquely. “It’s chicken feed. I’m on my way now on that deal I told you about—oh, incidentally, the twenty-five thousand dollars was here when I checked in at the Clive last night. Thanks a million. I opened an account and deposited it this morning. The deal’s going through at my price, beyond any shadow of doubt, and I’m going to need a hundred and fifty thousand dollars within the next few days. You got my list handy, and a pencil?”

“Yes, sir. But you’re not going to—?”

I paid no attention. “Sell the Columbia Gas, the PG &E, that DuPont Preferential, Champion Paper Preferential, and the AT&T— That should be pretty close to a hundred thousand. Now, let’s see—”

“But, Mr. Chapman, those are all good, sound issues. I hate to see you sell them.”

“What?” I asked absently. Then I did a take, and barked into the phone. “Goddammit, Chris, I’m not interested in being on the defensive. There’s no way to stand still in this economy; you keep going ahead, or you’re eaten alive by ducks. Let’s face it. The bull market’s dead, and I’m not interested in making four cents in dividends and giving three of them to the Government. I want to make money, and right now Florida real estate’s the place to make it; not in the stock market. When the market starts to move again, I’ll get back in, but for now I’m going to put that money to work.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He didn’t like it, but there was nothing he could do about it. We went on with the list.

“All right,” I concluded. “The largest block in there is a thousand shares. You can unload it all in an hour without even a ripple. Get the check off to me as early as you can this afternoon, registered airmail, care of the Clive Hotel, so I’ll have it by the time the banks open in the morning. It’s going to take several days to clear. Got it?”

“Yes. I have it all.”

“Fine,” I said. “G’bye.” I hung up, and breathed softly with relief.

That much of it was past now; the Chris phase was complete, and he’d never suspected a thing. It called for a drink, in spite of the hour. I was just pouring it when the phone rang. It was Fitzpatrick.

He was in high spirits. “Well, Mr. Chapman, it looks as if you’ve got yourself a deal. I talked to the owner a few minutes ago, and I think he’s about ready to accept.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m raising the money now.”

A woman’s voice cut in on the line. “Mr. Chapman, I’m sorry to interrupt. This is the hotel switchboard—”

“Yes?” I asked.

“We have a very urgent long-distance call from Thomaston, Louisiana.”

“Oh.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “I mean—put it on.”

“Harris! Thank God they located you.” It was Coral Blaine. “I’ve been trying for over an hour, but I’d forgotten what hotel you said. This whole place is in an uproar—”

“What is it?” I broke in.

“We’ve got to have the combination of that old safe, and you’re the only one who knows it. Barbara says you’ve got it written down somewhere in your office, but we can’t find it.”

I could feel the whole thing caving away beneath us, but I had to try. “Get hold of yourself!” I snapped. “What old safe are you talking about? And what’s happened?”

“Harris! The one that was moved out of here about six months ago when you bought the new one. It was stored in the warehouse, remember? And just before you left you told Mr. Elkins to sell it to the junk yard—”

Someone knocked on the door.

“ . . . Well, yesterday afternoon he and some more men moved it outside on to the loading platform, but the junk man forgot to pick it up. It was unlocked. And this morning about eight-thirty, some first-graders on the way to school—”

I could feel myself growing sick. “Oh, Jesus, not that!”

“No,” she interrupted. “Not one of the children. A dog. Judy Weaver’s miniature poodle—”

My knees bent, and I sat down. “Well, don’t tell me the whole goddamned town—”

There was another knock on the door.

“Harris! will you
please
stop swearing! That silly girl is practically out of her mind. They’ve got her under a sedative now, but when she wakes up she’ll start all over again. The Humane Society is driving me crazy. Mrs. Weaver says they’re going to sue you. Everybody in town is simply
furious,
and people have been calling up here until I’m ready to scream. Some machine shop has drilled a hole in the safe so the stupid dog can breathe, but they can’t get him out. The radio news got hold of it, and now the New Orleans papers are calling up. Barbara says you’ve got the combination—”

Maybe it would help, I thought bitterly, if she told me that again. Whoever it was in the corridor was banging on the door again. I had to get away from that voice and try to think.

“Hold it,” I said. “Somebody’s at the door.”

I put down the phone and answered it. It was a porter. “Telegram, sir,” he said. I handed him a coin of some kind, and took it.

I closed the door and leaned against it. We’d had it. It wasn’t on the tapes; I knew that. I’d been through everything in the wallet. The little address book! I grabbed it out of my pocket and flipped madly through it. Nothing but addresses.

I looked at the phone lying on the desk. This was the way it ended. You learned everything there was to learn, you took care of every contingency, you memorized, you rehearsed, you perfected—and then some kid locked a dog in a safe a thousand miles away and you were done.

I still had the telegram in my hand. Through the little glassine window I could see some figures, and
Brindon, La.
I’d never heard of it.

Louisiana!

I slashed it open and stared at the text.

RIGHT THIRTY-TWO LEFT TWO SLANT NINETEEN RIGHT THREE SLANT SIX REPEAT RIGHT THIRTY-TWO . . . TAPED BENEATH PENCIL DRAWER.

I sighed, and pushed myself off the door on watery knees. Picking up the phone and holding it a little way from my face, I said, “Sit down, and I’ll be right with you, as soon as I deal with this crisis.”

I spoke into it. “Coral? You there? That combination is taped to the bottom of the pencil drawer in my desk. But, hold on, I’ll give it to you. Write it down—” I repeated it off the telegram.

“Thank Heavens—”

I interrupted crisply. “One of you go see Mrs. Weaver right away and see if you can smooth this over. Mrs. English, maybe; she’s good with people. Buy Judy the biggest stuffed toy you can find, one of those thirty-five dollar jobs. And, Coral, I hate to be crabby, honey, but I’m working on a real big deal down here—”

“Darling, I am sorry about it.”

When I’d hung up I went over and lay down on the bed. I could have used a drink, but I doubted I could pour it.

She’d heard about the uproar and driven to some nearby town to send the telegram, probably from a pay phone. I closed my eyes, and I could see her so vividly it hurt. When they made her, I thought, they made only one.

It wasn’t only that she’d saved us this time; she’d put the thing on ice once and for all. I could make mistakes by the dozen from now on and it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Only Chapman could have known that combination.

Her name sounded like something dreamed up by a cheap press-agent. Justine Laray. Not that it mattered. What did matter was that I was sure I’d found what I was looking for.

She knocked on the door around eleven p.m., and when I opened it and she came in, she sized me up, appraised the luggage and the fat wallet lying on the dresser—all in one glance and without even appearing to—and gave me a bright smile that promised unimaginable ecstasies and almost concealed the contempt she felt for any jerk who couldn’t get a woman without buying one.

It would be a hundred dollars, honey. And when I fatuously agreed to this overcharge it merely increased her contempt. I was sweet, and much better-looking than a lot of those fat expense-account creeps—ugh! Not that she’d ever done much of this, of course. She was really in show business. A song stylist.

“That right?” I said heartily. I slapped her on the behind. “We’re going to get along fine, sweetie. I always like people with talent. Never had any myself, except for making money. And women.”

It might have been a little cruder than usual, but she’d heard the tune. “You don’t mind if I get it now, do you?”

“Hell, no,” I waved a hand toward the wallet. “Take it out of there. Why not take two while you’re at it, and stay all night? Christ, if you don’t get it the Government will, and they don’t even kiss me. I’ll mix us a little drink, huh?”

I’d been cashing the traveler’s checks at a steady rate, and the wallet held close to three thousand dollars now. The rest of the checks were lying beside it.

“You know, I just might do that,” she said archly. She took four fifties from the wallet.

She was around twenty-five, a rather slender girl with nice teeth, short dark hair, and eyes that were almost black. There was nothing of the Latin about her, however. Her skin was dead white, and the eyes were cold. I put ice and Scotch in two glasses and set them on the dresser.

“Come on, sweetie, get out of those hot, sticky clothes and into a cold highball. You still got to meet the Credentials Committee.”

We went to bed. I’d had more fun in dentists’ offices. She probably had, too; but at least she was being paid to endure it. If she drank enough, she might talk about herself.

“You’d never think I was thirty-nine years old, would you?” I said. “Come on, you’d have said thirty-two, wouldn’t you? Hit me in the stomach. Hell, go on; hit me. . . .”

I went to Notre Dame. No, I didn’t play football. I didn’t have to; my old man had plenty of money. But don’t think I was one of those pantywaists that had it all given to me. I made it myself. Radio stations, newspapers, real estate. I was going to be around here at least a week, on a real-estate deal. Stick with me, if you can stand the pace, and we’ll have a ball. Feel the muscles in that stomach, Marian. Like the old washboard, huh?

She drank; she had to, to stand me. She began to get a little tight.

Miami, hah! And Miami Beach. Brother, you could have ’em. What a girl had to put up with from those fat expense-account types that think they’re better”n she is, the hairy pigs. Vegas was for her. Or L.A. She could go to work tomorrow. Did I know she was a song stylist? Brother, the crummy breaks she’d had in this crummy place. That agent of hers—Hah! this was an agent? He couldn’t book Crosby. And that room-mate running off with three of her best dresses. Imagine, stealing from another working girl. . . .