Brett Halliday - Mike Shayne's Torrid Twelve

Richard was mildly amused, but still more moved. The offered price had been quite good, certainly, but by no means high enough to justify the nuisance of finding or building another place, then moving and getting established.

“No,” he said firmly. “I’m quite happy here, and we won’t think of selling, unless you’ve changed your own mind, and that’s what you want yourself.” With large and patient generosity, he emphasized the point. “Since I have to be away so much, on business, I’ve always felt any decision about the house should be mainly up to you. That’s why I insisted, from the first, that title to the property should be in both our names.”

He did not add, though he privately noted the fact and gave himself a good mark for it, that this was one of his fixed rules for lasting success in marriage on a mass basis. Never play the domestic tyrant, he often told himself. Let the little woman — whichever one it was, though Lucille and Helen were hardly little — make most of the household decisions, or at least imagine she made them. It kept her happy and, whenever he had to make an important move, made her all the more amiable in deferring to him.

Sometimes, at moments like this, Richard wished he had some friendly, professional colleague with whom he could talk over the finer problems of, say, quadruple and concurrent matrimony. But this could never be. Richard did not doubt that superior operators, like himself, were in existence. But they were not readily to be found — any more than he himself was.

There were only two types of repeaters the public ever heard about, and Richard disdained them both. On the one hand, he was no idiot Romeo who married seven or eight pretty but penniless young things, usually in the same region if not the same city, and inevitably came to grief on some absurd but mathematically predictable mischance. Love was the key-word to describe this type, love and carelessness.

Then there was the other well publicized practitioner, the sinister Bluebeard who, having married for money alone, then proceeded to do away with… No, this gruesome technique so revolted Richard he shrank even from thinking about it.

Marriage should be undertaken only for money and love. Richard imagined himself giving this sage advice to some earnest young man who might appeal to him for guidance, before choosing this specialized vocation as his own lifework. Marry for money and love, and never relax one’s careful attention in fostering each, that was what Richard would tell the acolyte.

Quite carried away by the thought, Richard crumpled his napkin and slapped it down beside his breakfast plate in brisk, executive encouragement. Of course, there were hundreds of other facets to such a career, minor perhaps, but highly important. There was the choice of employment one should pretend to have, for instance, the changes of identification that would never overlap, and… Richard sighed, abandoning these thoughts as idle. After all, there was no young man seeking his counsel. In the nature of things, as long as he remained successful, there never would be.

“Richard? Don’t you want to look at it? Just to be sure before they install it and lay the cement?”

He realized that Marion had again been talking for some time, unnoticed. It irritated and vaguely frightened him that he was not observing his own precept to pay careful attention. “Of course, dear.” He groped, but expertly. “Why, aren’t you satisfied?”

“Oh, I suppose the furnace people ought to know the best place for it. They must install hundreds of auxiliary fuel tanks. But if you’d just look, to make sure. Maybe you’ll think it ought to be somewhere else.”

He remembered now. It was a domestic trifle, an improvement in the heating system. He nodded, glanced up at his wristwatch and stood up. “I’ll do it right now. Then I’m afraid I’ve got to be going.”

“Do you have a lot of calls to make today, Richard?”

“Lots,” he said, cheerfully, and proceeded to overwhelm wife number three with a torrent of details. “Elite, Paragon, Acme, three or four Eat-Rites, two Welcome Inns. That’s just between here and Trenton. I hope I’ll reach there by evening. But with the list of restaurants I’ve got to see — about twenty-five to thirty a day — I’m not sure just where I’ll be tonight. Or, for that matter, in the next ten or twelve days. Eleven days, to be exact,” he added thoughtfully. “Now, let’s see the tank.”

On the way to the basement, Richard collected his hat, overcoat and suitcase. He set the suitcase down in the kitchen, then followed Marion through the door that led downward. At least, he went two-thirds of the way down the wooden steps, intending, from that barest possible display of interest, to give full approval to her arrangements.

Standing on the lower part of the stairway, he could see most of Marion’s basement. This basement belonged to Marion, because all of its appointments were hers, whereas the Hartford basement had a bar, which made it both his and Lucille’s. Besides the assorted laundry machines, and the door of the small partition that formed Marion’s photographic dark-room — her one hobby — he saw that a slit-trench affair had been drilled through the cement floor and dug out of the dank earth beneath. Beside it stood the new tank, not yet lowered into place, and a bulky, unopened sack of some ready-mixed cement.

Richard had now seen enough to give either his approval or criticism, if any, with suggestions. He still inclined toward approval, as easier and quicker.

“It looks all right to me,” he said.

Marion peered up at him, anxious and pathetically helpless. “Are you sure?” she asked.

Richard’s reply was a little short. As a matter of fact, there was a hazy something he did not like at all, seeing Marion like that, innocent and graying, a little too trusting, standing beside that gaping hole.

“Quite sure. It’s just where I would have—” He broke off, acutely disturbed by the phrase he seemed to be using, and without knowing why. He changed it to, “It couldn’t be better if I’d chosen the place myself.”

He turned quickly and went back up the stairs, with Marion following. Somebody, Richard darkly felt, was being in rather poor taste. But who? That mound of loose dirt, and the bag of cement besides. There was something about the scene that was not only vulgar, but oppressive.

He had placed his suitcase down beside the kitchen’s outside door when Marion reappeared. She smiled brightly, but his spirits did not lift. Unaccountably, he had another obscure association of ideas. For some reason — for no logical reason — his mind turned to a certain crude, lurid, seamier side that less successful members of his calling undeniably used, to the shadowy half-world of Lonely Hearts clubs, matrimonial bureaus, and throbbing exchanges. Let there be a particularly messy explosion in the realm of matrimony, and the odds were even that one of those Lonely Heart clubmen, or clubwomen, was in back of it.

Richard held such strong views against agencies of this type that he couldn’t abide mention of them, not even in jocular vein. It was one of few subjects upon which he had, at one time or another, quarreled with several of his wives. With all of them, in fact. About divorce, too, he was quite strict. It could easily undermine his career.

“Have you got your sample case, Richard?” Marion asked.

“It’s in the trunk of the car,” he told her. “I’ve got everything. You don’t need to come out.”

“Well…?”

“This is the fifth,” he reminded her. “I’ll be back for dinner on the evening of the sixteenth. Meanwhile, I’ll phone you from time to time and, if anything comes up, you can reach me through the New York answering service.”