She turned to face me. “It’s history now, Mike. We’ve got other things to think about.”
She was always one jump ahead of me. “Such as?” I asked.
“Lachlan. The big one.”
“Oh,” I said. “But not right now.”
“Why?”
“Right at the moment I’m too happy to hate even Lachlan. Wait here a minute.” I got out of the car. In the bar that’s never more than two doors from anywhere in Reno I bought a bottle of champagne and talked the barman out of two glasses. Somehow it seemed quite logical, just the thing you always did at six o’clock in the morning.
I slid in behind the wheel and drove, while she leaned against me with her head on my shoulder. We went out the Carson highway and turned off on the road to Mount Rose. It hadn’t been plowed yet, but there were chains on the car and we made it as far as I wanted to go. It was a lookout point where you could pull off the road and look down across the valley. I got out and shoved the champagne and the two glasses into the waist-high barricade of snow left by the plows after an earlier snowfall.
When the champagne was cold it was growing light. I lifted her out of the car, because she couldn’t walk in the snow in shoes that were only high heels and straps, and put her on the hood where she could see. It made her catch her breath. The valley was spread out below us, luminous and ghostly in the dawn, with nothing moving anywhere in all the white. I opened the champagne, the pop as the cork came out sounding strange and out of place in the frozen hush of early morning. We drank it all and then very gravely threw the glasses into the snowy pines below the road.
“Mike,” she said suddenly, staring at me with a startled expression, “what makes your clothes so lumpy?”
“Oh.” I’d forgotten all about the crap game. “Money.”
She started laughing and slid down off the hood. I caught her and held her up. She was shrieking, and in a minute it struck me as funny and I began, too. We leaned on each other and howled.
Donnelly was very far away then—Donnelly and Bolton and Charlie. And even Lachlan. But it didn’t last long.
She said a strange thing as we got into the elevator to go up to the room I’d got at the hotel. I only half noticed it at the time, but I remembered it later. We were standing in the rear of the car, and I wasn’t paying any attention to anyone except her.
“Darling,” she asked quietly, “will there be another one at Hialeah?”
I turned and stared at her. “Another what?”
She looked confused and changed suddenly to Spanish. “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “I’m so sorry. I just forget.”
We were on our way up to our room, and I didn’t think any more about it then.
Who would?
Ten
We had fought a lot when we were married, and the thing we had fought about more than anything else was Lachlan. I could forget him once in a while, but she never could. She’d flare up and accuse me of being easy-going, lazy, and aimless. I wasn’t dedicated.
I took the attitude that since we hadn’t found him yet, there was no use staying in a perpetual uproar about him. He might even be dead, as far as we knew, and I didn’t see any future in devoting our lives to anything as frustrating as trying to get even with a dead man. She couldn’t see it that way, though. Weren’t we still looking for him? We had to be ready to move in on him if we ever picked up his trail.
We watched the airline and steamship passenger lists in the New York, Miami, and New Orleans papers for all travel to and from Latin America. For a long time we had a detective agency working on it. We wrote endless letters to consuls in Central and South American cities. We picked up his trail in half a dozen cities, but it was always an old trail and he was gone. He’d disposed of his interest in the old firm of Dunbar & Belen long ago, and had moved out of the country when a new regime came into power. He’d been mixed up in oil in Venezuela, an airline in Colombia, and a land-development swindle of some kind in Panama. He made a lot of money, one way or another. But so far as we could learn, he still hadn’t come back to the States.
All this effort had been to find Lachlan himself. We’d never bothered much with Goodwin; that is, until Cathy had heard of him from her friend Elaine Holman. She said she’d learned from a few things the Holman girl had let drop that her uncle, whose name was Goodwin, had spent some time in Central America during his younger days. This and the name had started her wondering, so she had made a trip to Wyecross to find out. This had still been a more or less side-line issue, however; Lachlan was always the one we were after.
But it hadn’t been the search that caused all the fights. The thing I could never go along with was her preoccupation with confidence games. She collected them. She studied them the way some people study chess, or Lee’s campaigns in the Civil War. She read everything she could find about them, and devised endless ones of her own, and always she’d lose patience with me because I couldn’t keep up any steady interest in them. It wasn’t surprising that she knew people like Charlie and Bolton, because bunco artists had always fascinated her. It was part of getting ready to cut Lachlan down, because we were going to find him someday, weren’t we?
And now we had. But I didn’t know the half of it yet.
It was early afternoon. I lay on the bed and watched her. She was sitting at the writing desk, dressed in a blue robe and mules, and the red hair was all in a jumble from running her hand through it. She was chewing a pencil and writing something.
“This would be a fine day to be married,” I said. “If you’d comb your hair.”
She frowned at the paper. “You can make an honest woman of me sometime when we’re not busy.”
“Are we busy?”
“Well, I am,” she said pointedly.
I lit a cigarette. “Well, let me know when you can work me into your schedule.”
“You’re already in it, amigo. Do you know how much money you won?”
“No,” I said.
“Guess.”
“Four pocketsful. Or is pocketfuls?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mike, you’re hopeless. You won nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars.”
“Well, it’s better than a kick in the backside with a frozen boot. What are you driving at? Besides going through my pockets while I’m asleep?”
“I’m adding up how much money we have altogether. With the sixty-five thousand—”
“You realize, of course,” I said, “that you’re going to get a bill from Charlie and Bolton for half of that, sooner or later.” I was still kidding on the outside, but I was serious.
She smiled, a little coldly. “I have no objection to their trying, I’m sure. If they didn’t learn last time—”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll try. Incidentally, do you suppose they’re wise to it yet?”
“Oh, certainly. They weren’t fooled for any longer than it took them to discover that wasn’t a police car. It was a U-Drive-It.”
I don’t know what made me think of it just then, but I suddenly remembered the strange thing she’d said in the elevator. I tried to remember it.
“Say, what was that crazy remark you made in the elevator?” I asked.
“When?”
“This morning. Something about Hialeah.”
“Oh.” She frowned and pushed her paper work aside and put a cigarette in her mouth. “That was it, darling. The opening gun of what we’ve waited sixteen years for.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“Do you remember the man who was standing on your left? Big man with a deep tan?”
“Vaguely. Why?”
She struck a match and stared at me through cigarette smoke. “That,” she said, “was Martin Lachlan.”
“What!” I rolled over and sat up. I stared back at her.
“Mr. Martin Lachlan, swindler, oil man, playboy, big-game fisherman, lecher, and soon-to-be-sucker.”
“Wait a minute. You knew he was in Reno?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“So that explains it. I see it now. I’ve been wondering how you knew I was here. You didn’t, did you? It was Lachlan that brought you.”
“Mike, stop yelling. I didn’t come here to see Lachlan. We’re going to see him in San Francisco. I came here because I had to find you. And the way I knew you were here is really quite simple. I couldn’t find you in Las Vegas. I knew you’d be in one or the other.”
I calmed down a little. “All right. But how did you find out he was here?”
“The detective agency. The one I’ve had working on it for the past year. I got a report from them just before I left San Antonio. Lachlan’s here because he’s trying to reach a property settlement with his third wife. She’s staying at a dude ranch here, to divorce him.”
“But how’d you recognize him? You don’t remember what he looked like any more than I do.”
Without a word she opened her purse, which was lying on the desk. She took out something and sailed it across to me on the bed. I picked it up. It was a snapshot. “From the detective agency,” she said.
He was a powerfully built man who’d probably be in his late forties. It was a bold, self-assured face, and there was something about the way he held himself that gave you the idea he was one of those overbearing blowhards who’s always telling and showing you he’s just as good a man as he was twenty years ago. There wasn’t anything of the simpleton about him, though. The eyes told you better than that. They looked sharp and tough.
“A hard nut to crack,” I said, and sailed it back.
She smiled. “Not too hard.”
“He’s no fool. His record tells you that.”
“I know,” she said. “But that just makes it interesting.” Her eyes were shining. She was in love with the idea.
“All right,” I said. “But you still haven’t explained that screwball remark in the elevator.”
She smiled again. “It’s really quite simple, Mike. It was a plant.”
“A what?”
“Something that will stick in his mind. He heard it, because I saw him look around. It’ll puzzle him for a while, and then he’ll forget it. But the next time he sees us he’ll remember it. And he’ll be curious.”
“He won’t be half as curious as I am,” I said.
She got up and began pacing the floor. She ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s just what I’ve been telling you all these years, Mike, you Latin bird brain. We’ve found Lachlan, and you’ve got no plan of operation.”
“No,” I said. “But that’s what we’re going to do now. We’re going to figure one out.”
“It won’t be necessary, I assure you. I took care of that long ago. It’s all set. With just a little help from us, Mr. Lachlan is going to dig his own pit, walk into it, skin himself, and pass us the pelt. Now, do you want to know how it’s done?”
“How? What kind of flimflam is it?”
“The fixed race.”
“Cut it out, Cathy,” I said impatiently. “This is no time for joking.”
“I’m not joking. That’s the way we do it.”
“Don’t be a sap,” I said. “Didn’t you look at that picture? Don’t you remember his record? He’s no idiot. He’ll never go for anything as corny as that.”
She blew a smoke ring and looked at it. “You think not?” she asked smugly.
“Of course not. You tell any six-year-old kid you’re going to let him in on a fixed race and he’ll laugh in your face.”
“Yes. I know. That’s the reason I’m going to use it. I want to make it as humiliating as possible. I want to rub his face in it.”
“But it won’t work, I tell you,” I said angrily.
“Mike, you’re being a little naive. In the first place, you have no conception at all of the depths of human credulity. And in the second place, you don’t tell him you can fix a race. You convince him you can by telling him you can’t.”
“Now, that makes sense,” I said sarcastically.
“It makes a lot of sense when you understand what I mean.”
“If I ever do,” I said. “Suppose you go back to that crazy thing in the elevator and start filling me in from there.”
“All right,” she said. She sat down on the side of the bed. “To begin with, one of the angles of the thing is the fact that we both speak Spanish.”
“So does Lachlan.”
She smiled. “Exactly. If he didn’t, it would be utterly pointless. But he does, and he doesn’t have any idea at all that we know it. And when we meet again, if he’s curious about us, he’ll never let us know he does understand it, and that’s very important.
“Now, remember what I said. I mean, the way it would sound to somebody who understands both languages. I asked if there was going to be another ‘one’ at Hialeah. Hialeah, of course, is obviously a race track to anybody. And then, as I knew you would, you asked, ‘One what?’ Now, that could mean, of course, that you didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, but since there were other people present it could also mean, ‘Shut up, you damn fool.’ So I apologized, very contritely, in another language, which I obviously hoped nobody listening would understand. You see how simple it is?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You sound like Charlie.”
“Oh,” she said, “all that’s elementary. The really dirty work is yet to come.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “But, Cathy, it looks to me as if we’re both off the track in one thing, right at the beginning. And that is, we’ve never thought of any reason why Lachlan should go for any kind of flimflam. They all work on the sucker’s desire to make a few fast bucks. And if Lachlan is already loaded, how can we interest him?”
“Because,” she explained patiently, “nobody has plenty of it, and nobody ever will. And on top of that he’s paying big chunks of alimony to two wives already, and number three is getting ready to push up to the trough. And don’t forget the little matter of income tax. Who couldn’t use a few hundred thousand that didn’t have to show up on March fifteenth?”
“O.K.,” I shrugged. “But I still say this race thing is crazy. So we go to him and whisper in his ear that we’ve got a sure thing in the second at Belmont Park. So then he calls the cops.”
“Dear old Mike,” she said exasperatedly. “We don’t whisper anything in his ear, now or ever. We try our best to avoid him. We don’t know anything about races, fixed or otherwise. And when he comes around pestering you about it, you assure him, quite honestly, that to the best of your knowledge there is no such thing as a fixed race.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You will,” she said.
Eleven
If the world had lost a great actor when Charlie became a crook, it lost a brilliant general when Cathy was born a girl. The next week was one of the busiest I’d ever put in in my life. When you looked at the thing at close range and out of context, it didn’t make, much sense; all we seemed to be doing was spending money in one mad shopping spree. But when you saw it in perspective and as part of the whole plan, it was all as carefully thought out as the Normandy invasion. We drove to San Francisco and registered at the St. Francis as Dr. and Mrs. Michael Rogers.
I went to a tailor and ordered five new suits and assorted tweed sports coats and slacks and went to a shirtmaker for a couple of dozen new shirts. She began looting the San Francisco shops. She’d always had wonderful taste in clothes, and for once in her life she didn’t seem to care in the slightest what anything cost, so before long she began to stand out as a clothes horse, even in San Francisco. I’d meet her to take her to lunch and when I’d see her coming along the street in the spring sunshine she looked like an angel with charge accounts.
“Could I buy you this flower stand?” I asked.
“Silly, why?”
“We could throw flowers in front of the cable cars.”
“You’re nice, Mike, but impractical.”
“What do we have to do now?”
“The Rotunda of the City of Paris. We’re still looking for pictures for the apartment. Remember?”
“We haven’t got an apartment. Remember?”
“We will have.”
And we did. We got just the one we wanted in the Montlake, the big apartment hotel where Lachlan lived. It was six rooms besides the servants’ quarters, with a view of the bay all the way from the Golden Gate to Alcatraz and a doorman who looked a little like Admiral Drake except that he dressed better. When I learned the rent I managed to keep from wincing.
“We’ll be ready to move in in a day or two, Mike,” she said excitedly that night in the room at the St. Francis. We had gone up to get cleaned up for dinner. A boy had brought up a bottle of Scotch and some ice, and I fixed us a drink. She had on a new robe about the color of moonlit fog and probably less than half as dense. She was something to see.
“You’re something to see,” I said.
“So I noticed, you Latin goat. Just hold some ice cubes on your wrist for a moment, or think of me as your ex-wife. We have to talk business.”
“What now?”
“How would you like a Jaguar?”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I used to be married to one.”
“Idiot! I mean the car.”
“Why?” I asked. “Are you turning in the Cadillac?”
“No. The Jaguar is for you.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “That’s just what we need. Two cars, I mean. Nobody’s found space enough to park one around here since the Coolidge administration, so now we’re going to circle the block with two.”
She lit a cigarette and sat down in a big chair. “We need it,” she informed me. “It’s more window dressing.”
“That brings up a point,” I said. “Aren’t we overdoing it a little?”
“No,” she said definitely. “Not for Lachlan. He’s the type of nouveau riche who thinks money’s for show. You have to club people with it if you have it. I know all this is a little thick, but subtlety’d be lost on him.”