Charles Williams-All The Way 1958(2)

All The Way — 24
Three
When I awoke it was after eight. I groped for a cigarette, lit it,
and turned to look at her. She was sleeping quietly with the
dark hair like spilled ink across the pillow. She had the flat
stomach and narrow hips of a fashion model and rather small
breasts that were spread out and flattened as she lay on her
back. I looked at the slender patrician face with the long
lashes like soot against her skin; it was a willful face, I
thought, and it just escaped being bony, but the bones were
good. She was no pin-up, but she reminded me of something
very thin and expensive that was made before good
workmanship went out of style. I wondered what she wanted.
Her bag was on the dresser; it might tell me something, I
thought. I went over and opened it. A thin folder held eleven
$100 Express checks. I pulled out the wallet and checked her
driver’s license. What little she’d told me about herself
appeared to be the truth. Mrs. Marion Forsyth, it said, 714
Beauregard Drive, Thomaston, La. Hair, black. Eyes, blue, 5’-
7”. 112 pounds. Born 8 November, 1923. She’d be thirty-four
in a few days. This surprised me; I wouldn’t have thought she
was over twenty-nine or thirty. The wallet held about six
hundred dollars. I dropped it back in the bag.

I dressed, and looked out into the corridor. It was clear. I
went back to my room, called down for orange juice and
coffee and the Miami Herald, and had a quick shower and
shave. It was nine twenty-five and I was just finishing the
All The Way — 25
coffee when she called. She was going over to Miami, and
would be back at noon. The message was as clipped and
precise as an inter-office memo.
I killed a couple of hours swimming off the beach and had
just come in and changed when the phone rang. This time her
voice was a little friendlier, and there was a hint of
suppressed excitement in it. “I’ve got something to show
you,” she said.
I knocked lightly on 316, and she opened almost
immediately. Her hair was up in the chignon, of course, softly
clubbed and worn low on the nape of the neck, and while the
dress was just a summer cotton she looked as slender and
smart as a fashion show. I kissed her. She submitted
agreeably enough, but I could sense impatience. Pulling away
from me, she nodded towards the dresser.
There were two things on it that hadn’t been here this
morning. One was a small tape recorder about the size of a
portable typewriter, and the other an old briefcase plastered
all over with labels. It had come air express, and I could see
the return address on one of the labels. It was the same as
that on her driver’s license.
“That’s the mail you were waiting for?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s just come. And the tape recorder is what I
went to Miami for. Have you ever heard your voice on one?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Did you buy the recorder?”
“Yes,” she replied. “Why?”
“I just wondered. I assume it has something to do with that
proposition you mentioned, and it occurred to me I must
represent a sizable investment by this time. Four or five
hundred to have me investigated by those keyhole
astronomers, and now another couple of hundred for the
recorder. You must be very sure of yourself.”
“It’s a calculated risk,” she said.
She unstrapped the briefcase. I could see excitement
growing in her face as she opened it and began removing its
contents. They appeared to me to be largely rubbish. There
were a dozen or more thin pamphlets I recognized as the
annual statements of corporations, some old fire-insurance
policies, and two or three stenographer’s notebooks. She
casually tossed all this into the wastepaper basket.
All The Way — 26
“I didn’t want my housekeeper to know what I was really
after,” she explained. “So I told her to ship the briefcase and
I’d look for the papers I needed. Oh—Here we are.”
There were two of them, flat cardboard boxes about seven
inches square. They were packed with reels of tape. She
selected one and put it on the machine, and stuck an empty
reel on the other spindle. When the tape was connected, she
ran several feet of it on to the empty reel with a control on the
front panel, and pressed the “Play” switch. A man’s voice
issued from the speaker. She adjusted the volume.
“—take a chance and hold the Lukens Steel for another five
points. I think it’ll go, but the minute it does, sell. It’s too
volatile for my blood pressure. How’d Gulf Oil close, Chris?”
“Let’s see—” This was also a man’s voice. “Here we are.
Gulf was up three-quarters. I’d say hang on to it.”
“I intend to. And buy me another hundred shares in the
morning.”
“Right. One hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr.
Chapman?”
“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department
to send me everything they’ve got or can dig up on an outfit
called Trinity Natural Gas? It’s a pipeline company that was
formed about two years ago. The stock sold over the counter
until last month, but now it’s listed on the American
Exchange. Marian has a hunch about it. She went to college
with the man who’s head of it, and says he’s a ball of fire.”
She stopped the machine and glanced at me. “Do you know
what it is?”
I lit a cigarette. “Sounds like a man talking to his broker
over the phone.” I couldn’t see what the excitement was, or
why she wanted me to listen to it.
“Right,” she said. She ran the tape back, watching the
mechanical counter on the panel. “Now listen closely. I’m
going to play that last speech again, and I want you to repeat
it.”
“Okay,” I said.
She pressed the “Play” switch again. Chapman’s voice
began. “Just one more thing. Will you ask the research
department—” I listened, noting at the same time that she
All The Way — 27
was taking it down in shorthand. It was only five or six
sentences.
She stopped the machine at the end of it, and rapidly
transcribed her notes. She handed me the sheet of paper with
the sentences written out in longhand.
“I don’t need it,” I said. “I’ve heard it twice.”
“Read it anyway,” she said. “So you won’t pause or
stumble.” Plugging in the microphone, she handed it to me.
“Hold it about there. Don’t jiggle it, or bump it. When I throw
the machine on “Record” and the tape starts rolling, begin
reading.”
“Don’t you have to erase what’s on there first?”
She shook her head. “It erases and records at the same
time. Ready? Here we go.”
She started it, and I read the speech into the microphone.
She stopped the machine, and ran the tape back, still
watching the counter. I could sense she was keyed-up. I knew
what she was doing by now, of course, but it struck me as
absurd. She put the machine on “Play Back” and sat down
near me on the end of the bed. I started to say something, but
she cut me off with an imperious gesture of her hand. She sat
with her head lowered, listening intently.
She’d gone back pretty far this time, and it was the man
called Chris who was speaking.
“—one hundred Gulf at the market. Anything else, Mr.
Chapman”?”
“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research—”
Chapman’s voice went on through the speech. At the end of
it there was a little whrrp where she’d put it on “Record” and
I’d started speaking.
“Just one more thing. Will you ask the research department
to send me everything they’ve got—”
I sat bolt upright. “Hey—!” She clapped a hand over my
mouth. We both sat perfectly still until it was finished.
She got up and turned the machine off. Then she turned to
me with a faint smile. “Now you know what I was listening to
all the time.”
I stared at her. “It’s incredible. They’re almost exactly the
same.”
All The Way — 28
She nodded. “That’s the reason I wanted to do it this way,
with the two voices end-to-end. As a comparison check, it’s
absolutely conclusive. You see, it’s not only the timbre—plenty
of male voices are down in that low end of the baritone range
—but you both have the same quick, alert, self-assured way of
speaking. Clipped, and rather aggressive. Either of you could
do a perfect imitation of Ralph Bellamy playing one of those
detective roles. In fact, Harris quite often does, at parties.”
“Harris?” I asked.
“Harris Chapman, the man you were just listening to.”
“Do we actually sound that much alike?” I asked. “Or is it
the recording?”
She shook a cigarette from a packet on the dresser, and
leaned down. I held the lighter for her. She sat in the
armchair, facing me with her knees crossed. “I could tell you
apart, in person,” she said thoughtfully. “And on hi-fi
equipment. I might even, in fact, on the telephone—because
I’m aware there are two of you.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked.
She inhaled smoke and regarded me coolly. “It’s obvious,
isn’t it? If you were speaking over the telephone to anybody
who knew Harris Chapman but didn’t know you, you’d be
Chapman.”
“I’m not so sure—”
“Let me explain,” she interrupted. “If you said you were
Harris Chapman, why should he doubt it? Your voices are
almost identical, and they’re not there side-by-side for
comparison. Add to that the way you both speak—which is
almost exactly alike, and very much unlike Southern speech in
general. He lives in Thomaston, Louisiana. You follow me,
don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “In other words, he’s unique—at least, in his
manner of speech. They hear it—it’s Chapman.”
“Exactly. You could fool anybody who knows him.”
“For just about five seconds,” I said.
She smiled. “No. You’re wrong.”
“If you’re speaking of impersonation, it takes one other
thing. Information.”
All The Way — 29
“I was coming to that,” she said. “It happens that I know
more about Harris Chapman than anybody else in the world.”
“What are you driving at?”
“This. In ten days of intensive study, you could become
Harris Chapman—that is, to the extent that Harris Chapman
as a personality or an individual is projected over a telephone
circuit.”
I stood up and crushed out my cigarette. “And why should
I?”
“Would you consider seventy-five thousand dollars a good
reason?”
I paused, still holding the mangled cigarette stub. “You’re
joking.”
“Do I look as if I were?”
“Where would you get that much money?”
“From him, naturally.”
“You mean steal it?”
She nodded coolly. “I suppose you would call it stealing. A
rather unusual type of theft, and one that’s absolutely foolproof
“There is no such animal.”
“In this particular case, there is. It’s unique. I suppose
you’ve heard the expression “perfect crime”. This is the
perfect crime, the one that’ll never be solved.”
I lit another cigarette, still looking at her. She had me badly
confused by now. I sat down on the corner of the bed near
her. “I’ll admit I don’t know nearly as much about girls as I
did when I was nineteen,” I said. “But, even so, your picture
and sound track just don’t match. Perfect crime—Offhand, I’d
say the worst crime you’ve ever committed was taking
advantage of a stuck parking meter.”
She gestured with a slim hand. “I didn’t say I’d ever stolen
anything before.”
“But you’re going to now. Why?”
“We can go into the reasons later. I want to know if you’re
interested.”
“I’m always interested in money.”
“Have you ever stolen anything?”
All The Way — 30
No. But I doubt that’s highly significant. Nobody’s ever
tried me with seventy-five thousand before.”
”Then you could?
“Probably. But it couldn’t be as fool-proof as you say.”
“It is,” she said definitely. “As a matter of fact, nobody will
ever know it was stolen.”
“Why? Money doesn’t evaporate. And just where is it?”
She studied me thoughtfully. “Your stepfather was a broker,
I believe you said. So you know what a trading account is?”
“Sure.”
“All right. Harris Chapman has a trading account with a
New Orleans brokerage firm. The man called Chris you just
heard on the tape is the registered representative who
handles it for him. And at the present moment the stocks and
cash in the account add up to just a little over a hundred and
eighty thousand dollars.”
I whistled. Then I glanced sharply at her. “So?”
“Well, you know how a trading account like that is handled.”
“Sure. The stocks he buys are credited to his account, but
they’re kept there at the brokerage house in the vault, so he
doesn’t have to go through all the rigmarole of endorsing
them and sending them back when he wants to sell. He buys
and sells all the time, just by picking up the phone—” I got it
then, and she was crazy.
“You see?” she said.
“I see nothing,” I replied. “Money in a brokerage account is
just as safe as money in a bank account. It takes a signature
to get it; you ought to know that. Two signatures, as a matter
of fact. You have to sign a receipt for the transaction, and
then endorse the check to cash it.”
She interrupted. “Will you listen just a minute? The idea is
nothing like as simple as that. Of course it wouldn’t work in
any other set of circumstances, but as I told you before, this is
unique. All it’ll require is the most elementary sort of forgery
because nobody”ll ever look at the signatures anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because there’ll never be the slightest doubt but that
Harris Chapman drew the money out himself. I’ll take care of
that—”
All The Way — 31
“You’d better fill me in a little,” I said. “Just who is
Chapman, and what’s your connection with him?”
She leaned over to tap ash off her cigarette. “He’s a
businessman, and for a small town a fairly wealthy one. He
owns Chapman Enterprises, which consists of a newspaper, a
radio station, cotton gin, and a warehouse, among other
things—”
“And you worked for him?”
Her eyes met mine without any expression at all. “I worked
for him. I was his private secretary, mistress, executive
officer, fiancée—you name it. I went to work for him eight
years ago, and for the past six I’ve been a sort of combination
of executive vice-president and full-time wife. Except that I
wasn’t married to him.”
“Why not?”
“For the tired old reason that he already had a wife.”
“You don’t look like the type that’d dangle that long.”
“Shall we drop that part of it for the moment?”
“Sorry,” I said. “But I still don’t see how you think you’re
going to get away with it. What’s Chapman going to be doing
all the time you’re looting his trading account?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Why?”
“He’ll be dead.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m going to kill him.”
* * *
I caught a no-show out of the Miami airport at four-fifteen,
and was at Idlewild a little after eight. I took the limousine
over to town. It was one of those blustery November nights,
not really wet but with scattered shot-charges of rain hurled
on a cold north wind. I didn’t have an overcoat. People looked
at me as if I were crazy as I came out of the terminal and
caught a cab. The small hotel on West 44th Street where I’d
stayed once before was all right, but the room faced an
airwell and was small and cheerless.
I sat down on the bed and counted my money. I had three
hundred and sixty left. Three hundred, I thought, after I buy a
All The Way — 32
coat. No, I had to have a hat, too. This was New York. I
couldn’t go job-hunting along Madison Avenue looking like a
refugee from Muscle Beach. It was going to be tough enough
as it was; the last reference I could give was two years old. I
went up the street to a bar and had a drink, but it only made
me feel worse. After a while I went back to the room and tried
to read, but it was futile. I kept thinking about seventy-five
thousand dollars and blue water and sunlight and a sleek dark
head. I threw the magazine on to the floor and lay on the side
of the bed staring down at it.
What did I care what happened to some man who was
nothing to me but a name? If I were so concerned over his
safety, why didn’t I call him and tell him she was going to kill
him? I knew she was, didn’t I?
That was it. She still was; my walking out on her hadn’t
changed anything. The money he had in that account was only
a collateral issue as far as she was concerned. I remembered
the way she’d lain there in the darkness, rigid and wideawake
and staring, with her hands clenched, and wondered
what he’d done to her. Well, I’d never know; but the chances
were very good he’d never do it to anybody else.
So what had I accomplished by running, apart from doing
myself out of seventy-five thousand dollars? Well, hell, I’d
kept myself from being implicated, hadn’t I? I wasn’t going to
kill anybody, and wind up in the death-house.
But she hadn’t asked me to, had she? All she’d wanted me
to do was get that money for her—from a man who would
already be dead. Still, I’d be an accessory.
What had she meant?
How would I know? I thought. I’d run off before she could
tell me.
The next morning I bought an overcoat and hat and started
out. I answered some ads first, without any luck, and then
started hitting the agencies blind. My feet got tired. I filled in
forms. I left my name and telephone number. The weather
was still blustery and cold, with a lowering gray sky like dirty
metal. If this were the movies I thought, I’d pass a travelagency
window and there’d be a big sun-drenched picture of
a brunette in a bathing suit sitting on the beach in front of a
white hotel with the caption: COME TO MIAMI. She was a
blonde, as it turned out, and the invitation was: COME TO
All The Way — 33
KINGSTON. A man was landing a marlin off the end of a pier.
With a flyrod, as nearly as I could tell. You could see Jamaica
was a fisherman’s paradise. I came back to the bar across the
street from the hotel around two and had a Scotch while I
wondered what she was doing. And how a girl managed to
look elegant in a bathing suit. Not lifted-pinkie elegant, but
18th-century elegant. I went up to my room and lay down on
the bed. It was raining now; I could see it falling into the
airwell. I picked up the phone and asked for Long Distance.
”Miami Beach,” I said. “The Golden Horn Motel. Personal
call to Mrs. Marian Forsyth.” At least I could talk to her.
“Hold the line, please.”
I waited. I could hear the operator.
“Golden Horn,” a girl’s voice said. “Who? Mrs. Forsyth? Just
a moment, please . . . I’m sorry; she’s left.”
I dropped the phone back on the cradle. Well, it wasn’t
everybody who was smart enough to turn down a seventy-fivethousand-
dollar proposition before he’d even heard it. And I’d
never see her again. I lit a cigarette and watched the rain,
and thought of some of the places we could have gone
together—Acapulco, and Bimini, and Nassau. . . .
Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was Miami Beach.
Her voice was exactly as cool, urbane, and pleasant as ever. “I
finally decided you were never going to call, so—“
I suppose I could ask, I thought. But why bother? There was
something inevitable about her; if I’d been holed up in a
Lamasery in Tibet it wouldn’t have made the slightest
difference.
“You win,” I said. “I’ll be there some time tonight.”
“That’s wonderful, Jerry.”
“Where?” I asked.
“You’re sweet. Then you did try to call me?”
“You know damn well I did. Where?”
“Two hundred and six Dover Way,” she replied. “It’s a
wonderful place to work.”
I caught a flight out of Idlewild at five forty-five. The rain
had stopped, but it was colder. As I was going up the loading
ramp of the DC-7, a colored boy from the catering department
All The Way — 34
was coming down. I dropped the overcoat on his arm. “Have a
good Christmas,” I said.
When we were airborne and the NO SMOKING sign went
off, I lit a cigarette. How she’d learned where I was in New
York was routine, actually. She’d known all the time. All her
detectives had to do was notify their New York office what
flight I’d taken out of Miami, and have me picked up at
Idlewild again and tailed to the hotel. The rest of it, however,
was considerably more subtle—waiting me out till I called
first and learned she’d left the motel without a forwarding
address. And then giving me a long half-hour to think about
what I’d thrown away for ever, like an old man remembering
some girl who’d done everything but draw him a diagram
when he was fifteen. That was a nice touch.
We were down at Miami shortly after nine. I waited
impatiently out front for my bag and took a cab. It seemed to
take for ever, through the downtown traffic and across the
MacArthur Causeway. Dover Way was on the Biscayne side,
not far from the bay, a quiet side street only three or four
blocks long. 206 was half of a side-by-side duplex set back off
the street with a hedge in front and shadowy, bougainvilleacovered
walls on both sides. I paid off the cab and went up
the walk. Lights were on beside the door, but the adjoining
apartment appeared to be dark. I pressed the button.
She was wearing a dark skirt and severe white blouse. I
kicked the door shut, dropped the bag, and took her in my
arms. She submitted to being kissed in that same cool way—
quite gracious about it but not particularly eager that it
become a trend. She smiled. “How do you like our place?”
It was small, well-furnished, air-conditioned, and very quiet.
The living room, which seemed to be more than half of it, was
carpeted in gray, and the floor-length curtains at the window
in front and the larger one on the left were dark green. The
sofa and three chairs were Danish modern, and there was a
long coffee table that appeared to be teak and was protected
with plate glass. There were three hassocks covered with
corduroy in explosive colors. Straight opposite, an open
doorway led into the bedroom. Just to the right of it another
opened into a small dining area and kitchen. To the left of the
bedroom doorway were some built-in bookshelves with sliding
glass doors. A radio-phonograph console in limned oak stood
in the corner.
All The Way — 35
The tape recorder she’d bought was set up on one end of
the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran
across the carpet to a wall outlet. There were several boxes of
tape beside it, and some stenographer’s notebooks and
pencils.
“I was working,” she explained. She sat down on one of the
hassocks beside the coffee table and reached for a cigarette. I
lit it for her, and one for myself, and sat cross-legged on the
floor.
I looked round the apartment. “You were pretty sure I’d
come back, weren’t you?”
“Why not?” she asked. “I’ve been studying you for a week.”
“And seventy-five thousand would do it? All it took was a
little time?”
She nodded. “Actually, I don’t think you care a great deal for
money as such, but you have some very expensive tastes. And
you’re quite cynical.”
She was probably right, I thought. I looked at the classic
line of the head and the brilliant coloring and the severe
formality of the blouse that came up to end in a plain band
collar round the softness of her throat and wondered if she’d
considered the possibility I might have come back because of
her. I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Why should I?”
“Because maybe I did, in part.”
“That sounds rather unlikely. At any rate, I wouldn’t have
depended on it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re quite an attractive young man. I doubt you have any
great problem with girls; and the country’s full of them.”
“You’re overdoing the modesty. And why did you call me a
young man?”
Her eyebrows raised. “Twenty-eight?”
“And what’s thirty-four?”
“So you checked my driver’s license?”
“Of course. Not for your age, naturally, but to find out who
you were. Incidentally, you don’t look thirty.”
All The Way — 36
“You’re quite flattering,” she said. “And now if we’re
through assessing my drawing power, why don’t we get down
to business?”
This was beginning to bug me a little. No woman had any
right to be as attractive as she was and at the same time as
contemptuous of the fact and of its effect on somebody else. I
took her hand and pulled her down on the floor beside me and
held her in my arms and kissed her. Instead of objecting,
however, she put her arms around my heck. In a moment her
eyes opened, very large and dreamy, just under mine. I kissed
her again, feeling a tremendous excitement in just touching
her.
After a while I picked her up and carried her into the
bedroom and turned off the light and undressed her very
slowly, and she was as beautifully adept and as pleasant and
as far away and unreachable as ever. Clearly, the simplest way
to rid the agenda of distracting minor issues like sex was to
get them over with.
All The Way — 37
Four
She lay beside me in the darkness. I could see the glowing tip
of her cigarette.
“All right,” I said. “Now tell me the whole thing.”
“Suppose we begin right where we left off? I’m going to
destroy him.”
“Why?”
“Because I hate him.”
“And why do you?”
I thought I heard her sigh. “Why don’t you try a wild guess
as to why a woman might hate a man after she’s wrecked her
own marriage for him and thrown away her reputation and
helped him make a fortune, and lived for him twenty-four
hours a day for six of the last few years she’d ever have to
give anybody—?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m just a bystander. So he left you?”
“Yes.” Then she laughed. It was like glass breaking. “Of
course, while I was running his business for him, I should
have suggested we set up a pension plan for over-age
employees. I’d have nothing to worry about. I could buy a
little cottage, get a cat for companionship, and live the full,
rich life every woman looks forward to—”
“Knock it off,” I protested. “Who is she? And how do you
know it’s permanent?”
All The Way — 38
“Oh, she’s quite pretty. Honey-colored and virginal looking,
with a wide-eyed and appealing sort of defenselessness about
her. Like anthrax, or a striking cobra—”
“Come off it,” I said. “How the hell could you lose out to a
cornball routine like that? She’d never lay a glove on you.”
”It’s a little trick you do with numbers. She’s twenty-three.”
“Well, what of it?”
“Oh, you are a young man, aren’t you? I’d forgotten, men do
go through a phase between their first and second passes at
the jail-bait when they’re actually interested in women— But
never mind. They’re going to be married in January.”
“You’re getting ahead of me,” I said. “He couldn’t marry you
because he already had a wife. What happened to her?”
“What happened to her, besides the fact they haven’t lived
together for the past eight years, is that she died about five
months ago.
“Well, look—I doubt very seriously anybody could hand you
a line six years long, so if he was really serious why didn’t he
get a divorce?”
“He and his wife were both Catholics.”
“I see. And now that he can remarry—”
“Yes,” she said. “You see.”
“And I see something more. You’ll never get away with it.”
“Yes—”
“Look. He took everything you could give him for six years,
and then when he finally could get married he jilted you for
somebody else. If he’s killed, it’ll take the police about twenty
minutes to figure it out.”
“You underestimate me,” she broke in. “I’m going to take a
hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars away from him,
and kill him. And nobody will ever suspect I did it, for the
simple reason they won’t even know it was done at all. Does
that satisfy you?”
“No,” I said. “It can’t be done.”
She sighed. “You’re forgetting something I told you. That I
know more about Harris Chapman than anybody else on
earth. I’m going to destroy him from the inside.”
All The Way — 39
“Hold it a minute,” I said. “If you knew so much about him,
why didn’t you see this fluff-ball moving in on you?”
“See it? Don’t be ridiculous. I saw every stage of it before it
even happened, but what do you suggest I should have done
about it? Compete with a twenty-three-year-old professional
virgin, after he was already tired of me? I saw it, all right; I
had a front-row seat. He hired her as a stenographer, and I
had the honor and privilege of training her. Sometimes I wake
up at night—”
“If it’s that kind of thing,” I said, “why the money angle?”
“Money is important to me. I like success. I poured
everything I had into making him one, thinking I was doing it
for both of us. Do you think I’m going to move aside now and
give it up? Let him hand it all to some simpering and featherbrained
little bitch who can’t even balance a check book?”
“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.
“All right. First, about the apartment. We had to have a
quiet place where we could work without being disturbed and
with no chance of being overheard. The motel simply wouldn’t
do. I was registered there under my right name, of course,
and it’s imperative that no one ever finds out that I even know
you—”
I interrupted her. “What about those detectives you’ve had
following me around?”
“That’s a good point. I used another name, and paid them in
cash. The fact they know your name is of no significance at all
unless you can be traced to me in some way. I’m the one who
knows Harris Chapman.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I rented the apartment on a six months’ lease, under your
name. I’m Mrs. J. L. Forbes, and there’s nothing to connect
me with the Mrs. Forsyth who stayed briefly at the Golden
Horn. There’s no reason for you not to use your right name;
you have nothing to hide, and you can go right on living here
afterwards if you like. No one will notice if you’re gone from
time to time, as you will be. It’s handled by a rental agency.
The people who have the other apartment won’t be here until
some time in December, so we have it all to ourselves and
don’t have to worry about being heard through the walls.
All The Way — 40
“We don’t have much time. Today is the fifth, and he’ll be
here the night of the thirteenth. In addition, I have to go to
Nassau and New York—”
“Why?”
“Simply to prove I’ve been there. When I resigned and left
on this trip, Miami Beach, Nassau, and New York were the
three places I was going. If I changed my plans and spent all
my time here it might look suspicious afterwards, especially
since this is the place Harris Chapman is going to disappear.
So I’ll go to both places long enough to send the usual asinine
postcards and bring back some souvenir gifts. That means I’ll
be gone from here about four days of the eight we have in
which to coach you. However, we’ll use the tape recorder and
you’ll have the tapes to study while I’m gone.”
“You’re sure he’s coming here?”
Yes. I made all the reservations for him. He goes on one biggame
fishing trip every year, for his vacation. For the past two
years he’s gone to Acapulco, but this time he’s coming to
Florida again.”
“And somewhere along the line I’m going to take his place?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
”Just under two weeks. I think it can be done in twelve
days.”
“Describe him,” I said.
“Apart from the fact you’re both about six feet, you don’t
resemble each other at all, if that’s what you mean.”
“What else would I mean? You don’t think he’s going to be
invisible for those twelve days, do you? He may be a voice on
the telephone to the people at home, but down here— But
never mind. Go ahead and describe him.”
“He’s thirty-nine. Six feet. A hundred and ninety-five
pounds. Gray eyes. Somewhat fair complexion, always with a
tan. Brown hair, beginning to gray at the temples except that
he touches it up.”
“That’ll do,” I said. “I’m twenty-eight. The height is the
same within probably an inch, but I’m fifteen pounds lighter.
Blue eyes. Darker complexion. And hair that’s just a shade
from being black. Q.E.D.”
All The Way — 41
“It’s nowhere near that simple,” she cut in impatiently. “In
the first place, any police officer could write a book on the
general unreliability of descriptions. And secondly, if you’ve
had acting experience, you should know what I m driving at.
You’re not merely trying to look like Harris Chapman—you’re
assuming the whole character of Harris Chapman. And
further, this same character projected quite logically into a
strange and finally shattering experience—which is going to
be what the witnesses will remember, and not the color of his
hair. Incidentally, he wears a hat anyway. You’re simply going
to make them remember the wrong things.”
“Such as?”
“Let me give you a brief sketch for a start. He’s quite vain
about his appearance, uses a sun lamp in winter to keep his
tan intact, and wears a thin, pencil-line mustache because he
thinks his upper hp is too long. He has a tendency toward
hypochondria and carries round a miniature drugstore with
him, and worries constantly and probably needlessly about
two things—cancer and mental illness, the latter because he
has an older brother who cracked up in his late teens. When
that smoking and lung cancer thing first started several years
ago, he not only switched over to filter cigarettes, but smoked
them in a filter holder.
“He wears glasses—horn-rims—and is somewhat hard of
hearing in his left ear, the result of a diving accident when he
was sixteen, though he refuses to admit it and claims his
hearing is perfect in both ears. I’m perhaps making him sound
doddering and fatuous, which he isn’t at all; he’s a hellishly
attractive man with a lot of drive, but I’m stressing these
quirks and idiosyncrasies for a reason—”
“Sure,” I said impatiently. “They’re character tags, and
props. But, look—so I do wear horn-rimmed glasses, grow a
mustache, use a long cigarette holder, and go round tossing
pills into my face, what does it buy? I still won’t look like him,
and I wouldn’t fool anybody who’s seen him since he was
fifteen.”
“You won’t have to, obviously. None of the people you’ll be
in contact will ever have seen him at all. And they never will.”
“But you’re forgetting something. As soon as he disappears,
they’re sure as hell going to see photographs of him.”
“No,” she said. “That’ll be taken care of.”
All The Way — 42
“How?” I asked.
To be of any value in tracing him they’d have to be good
likenesses and taken within the past ten years. There aren’t
too many. I have most of them, and I know where the others
are. He had one made for that saccharine little bitch about
two months ago, but we can forget it. It’s one of those gooey
and dramatic things with a ton of glamor and no
resemblance.”
“All right,” I said. “Tell me the rest of it.”
She told me. She talked for twenty minutes, and when she
was through I was glad she didn’t hate me. Chapman didn’t
have a chance. It was brilliant, and it was deadly, and I
couldn’t see a flaw in it anywhere.
* * *
I awoke early the next morning, before seven o’clock, but she
was already up. She stood in the doorway in blue lounging
pajamas, sipping a glass of orange juice.
“The coffee will be ready in about five minutes,” she said.
I lit a cigarette and propped myself on an elbow to look at
her. “If I were a sculptor, I’d capture that head or go crazy
and kill myself.”
She glanced coolly at her watch. “Never mind capturing my
head; you’re supposed to assimilate what’s in it, and we start
in ten minutes. When you shave, don’t forget the mustache.”
She sounded crisp and efficient, and I found out before the
day was over I didn’t know the half of it. She had a genius for
organizing material, and she was a slave-driver. By the time
I’d showered and put on light slacks and a T-shirt, she had my
coffee and orange juice ready on the coffee table in the living
room and was seated with hers on one of the hassocks at the
other end of it. Between us was the tape recorder. The
microphone was mounted on a little stand, facing her, and
beside it were some boxes of tape and two stenographer’s
notebooks.
“I’ll be working from shorthand notes,” she said, “so there’ll
be no lost motion, and when we come to a stop we’ll stop the
tape. But before we start, we’d better break the job down and
analyze it.”
All The Way — 43
”Right,” I said. “How many people do I have to talk to, and
how often?”
“Two,” she said. “Chris Lundgren at the broker’s office in
New Orleans, nearly every day. And to her, every day. Her
name, incidentally, is Coral Blaine.”
I drank some of the coffee, and thought about it. “It’s rough.
Look at it—I’ve got to know everything about Chapman that
these people know, and everything about these people that
Chapman knows, plus a thousand business details and dozens
of other people. It’s damn near impossible.”
She interrupted. “Of course it’s impossible; no mind could
absorb all that in eight days. But you don’t have to.”
“No?”
“Of course not.” She waved a slim hand. “You don’t have to
pass an examination in all this stuff; all you have to do is carry
on two or three short telephone conversations each day
without making a really dangerous mistake. analyze it; what
does it take, actually? A quick mind—which you have—some
ability in bluffing and improvising, a grasp of most of the
salient and obvious facts and a few of the ones that only
Harris Chapman could possibly know, and there you are—the
illusion is complete. And don’t forget, you’re always in control
of the conversation; you’re the boss. When you see you’re
about to get in over your head, change the subject. And in the
end, there’s nothing connecting you but a piece of wire. Break
it. And call back later with the right information. You’ll have a
prompter.”
“You mean the tapes?”
She nodded. “They’ll be numbered, and you’ll know what’s
covered in each one.”
“Good,” I said.
She smiled. “And don’t forget, it’s only the first week you
have to be careful. After that, it doesn’t matter.”
I looked at her. I’d forgotten that, and it was one of the
really brilliant angles of the whole thing. This girl was clever.
And all she wanted out of life was to kill a man. It seemed a
senseless waste. The thought startled me, and I shrugged it
off. It was her life, wasn’t it?
“All right,” I said. “Roll One.”
All The Way — 44
* * *
“Harris Chapman was born in Thomaston April fourteen,
nineteen-eighteen. Father’s name: John W. Chapman. Owned
the Ford agency, and was one of the largest stockholders in
the Thomaston State Bank. His mother’s maiden name was
Mary Burke, and she was the only child of a Thomaston
attorney. John W. sold out and retired in nineteen-forty, and
moved to California. Both still living, in La Jolla.
“Only two children. Keith is two years older than Harris.
The summer he was nineteen, after his freshman year at
Tulane, he hit a twelve-year-old girl with his car. She wasn’t
seriously injured, but shortly afterwards he began to go to
pieces. He quit sleeping, or if he did sleep nobody could
figure out when, and lost weight and became withdrawn. It
was the onset of schizophrenia, of course, and probably the
accident had little or nothing to do with it. At any rate, his
condition became hopeless, and he’s spent more than half the
past twenty-two years in one mental institution or another.
“Harris has always been haunted by this, as I told you,
particularly because there had been a prior case of mental
illness in the family, a great uncle or something. Fear of an
hereditary taint, you see. Foolish, of course, but I told you he
has a tendency toward hypochondria.
“He finished high school in nineteen-thirty-six. His mother
wanted him to go to a Catholic school, so he went to Notre
Dame. He graduated in nineteen-forty-one, and Pearl Harbor
caught him in his first year at Tulane Law School.”
She stopped the tape, and reached for a cigarette. I lit it for
her. “Any questions?” she asked.
“One,” I said. “Bring me up to date on the brother. Where is
he now?”
“La Jolla, with his parents.” She pressed the “Record”
switch and the tape began to roll again. “Harris finished out
the term at Tulane and went in the Navy, and was
commissioned an ensign that summer. He just barely got past
the physical, with that bad ear.”
He’d had a tour of sea duty on an aircraft carrier. She went
on talking. She’d pushed the hassock aside now and was
sitting cross-legged on the rug with the stenographic
notebook between her knees. I leaned back against a chair
All The Way — 45
and watched her, studying the proud and slender face that
could have been downright arrogant except for the saving
loveliness of the eyes. It occurred to me she was the most
striking-looking, and most fascinating, woman I’d ever seen.
She reached over and stopped the tape. “Are you listening?”
she asked crisply.
“Sure,” I said, and repeated the last thing she’d said.
Chapman had been transferred to shore duty in Seattle.”
“Oh,” she said. “The way you were looking at me—”
“Simply because I think you’re beautiful.”
She sighed. Going into the bedroom, she returned with a
pillow. She dropped it beside the coffee table. “Lie down,
facing the other way, and close your eyes. Concentrate.”
I lay down. She went on, pausing now and then to arrange
her notes so there wouldn’t be any blank areas on the tape.
Chapman was a full lieutenant at the end of the war. He went
back to Tulane Law School at the beginning of the spring
term in 1946, and before the end of it he was married to a
New Orleans girl he met at a Mardi Gras ball. Her name was
Grace Trahan. She was a slight, dark girl with a delicate
constitution, very pretty in an ethereal sort of way, and
apparently frigid to the point of phobia.
“He never said much about it,” she went on, “but I gather it
was pretty horrible on their wedding night, and never did get
any better. Psychic trauma of some kind, I suppose; probably
something that happened in her childhood.”
They tried to make a go of it, but there were other factors
besides her aversion to the bed. She thought they should have
more financial help from his parents instead of struggling
along on the GI Bill. And she didn’t want to leave New
Orleans. Less than a year after he’d finished law school and
moved back to Thomaston to open his office, they separated.
She went home to mother. Her health was growing worse.
She was anemic, among other things.
Marian stopped the tape again. I looked at my watch and
saw with surprise it was after ten. “How are you getting it?”
she asked.
“Fine,” I said. I sat up and lit cigarettes, and leaned back
against the chair. “But when do you actually appear on the
scene?”
All The Way — 46
“Very shortly,” she replied. “But I want to finish out this roll
exclusively with Harris. It’ll be easier to refer to later.”
She made some more notes, started the tape, and went on,
describing the town, the small country club, and some of his
friends. We began to near the end of the roll.
“He has a fast, aggressive way of walking. He won’t admit
it, but he can’t carry liquor very well. Becomes argumentative
if he has too much, which is usually anything beyond the third
Martini. Music means nothing to him, and he’s a poor dancer.
For the past two years on these annual fishing trips he’s
picked up girls, probably very young ones. He doesn’t know
that I’m aware of this, but I doubt he’d have bothered to he
about it. After all, we weren’t married.
“Maybe it’s because of the legal training and courtroom
experience, but he’s totally unafraid of scenes and will argue
with anybody, anywhere. Waiters impress him not at all, and
I’ve been through some bad moments when he’s sent the
same dish back three times, or refused to tip a waiter who
gave poor service. I don’t mean he’s loudmouthed or uncouth,
but he is demanding and perhaps rather insensitive. He
always adds up a bill before he pays it. He buys a new
Cadillac every year. He’s a very poor driver, and drives far too
fast. He’s very self-assured with women, the same as you are.
You’ll have no trouble playing him. When they describe you
afterwards, if you learn all this, they’re going to be describing
Harris Chapman to the last gesture.”
She stopped the machine, and stood up. “All right. Re-roll
that tape and start playing it back. I’ll run out and get us
some sandwiches.”
“Incidentally, what about the housekeeping arrangements?
Do we go out for dinner?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It’ll be all right if we go round to
different places so we won’t be remembered. We can fix our
own coffee and orange juice for breakfast, and have
sandwiches for lunch.”
“You turned the car back?”
“Yes. After all, I’m supposed to be in Nassau. You’ll rent
one, of course, before he gets here, but in the meantime we
can use cabs. All right, Jerry; re-roll that tape and get busy.”