A. Fair - Spill the Jackpot

“We lived together for just about three months. The first two or three weeks I was completely hypnotized. And then, little by little, I began seeing him as he really was. He was a bully, and he was yellow. When he could handle anyone, he was ruthless in handing out punishment. When he couldn’t, he was full of alibis. He got good enough to get almost to the top, and then, as he began to meet the better men — however, that’s getting ahead of my story. At the time I married him, he was just coming up from the preliminary fighters, and beginning to attract attention. It went terribly to his head. He was emotional, intensely jealous. He began to treat me as though I were just so much personal property. I could have stood all that if it hadn’t been for the little things — little places where the veneer scraped off, and I could see what was underneath.”

“You don’t need to go into all that,” I said. “Just tell me what happened after you left him.”

“I’d had some business training in school. I got a job. I kept trying to perfect my secretarial work, and I had the satisfaction of knowing I was succeeding. I kept working up.”

“No divorce?”

“I thought Sid had got a divorce. That was the meanest trick he played on me. I told him I wanted to be free. He said that it would be better to wait for a year and get a divorce on the ground of desertion. He didn’t want to have a lot of allegations of cruelty in the record. He said it would hurt his career.

“We started out to wait for that year to elapse. It was a big year for Sidney. He came a long way up for about seven or eight months of that year, and then he went all the way down in three months. I don’t know all that happened, but his manager came to the conclusion he was yellow. He’d been a terror in the ring with the men he could master, but — oh, I don’t know. It’s a long story, and I think he did some crooked work — sold out his manager and threw a fight or something. I don’t know enough of what happened to talk about it. I just heard rumors, but, anyway, about ten months from the date of our separation, he came to me. He was desperate then. He said that he’d never been able to get a grip on himself after I’d left. He said I’d taken the inspiration out of his life.”

“That was after ten months?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and her voice was bitter. “All the time he was going up, he was very patronizing toward me; but when the bottom fell out, he started begging for sympathy. Well, anyway, he told me that he was the sort of man who needed some woman to be his inspiration, that he knew he could never get me to come back, that he had met another girl, that he could never feel toward her as he felt toward me, but that she was desperately in love with him, and he sort of liked her.” She laughed bitterly. “That was Sidney all over. She loved him desperately, and he sort of liked her.”

“And what did he want?” I asked.

“He wanted to go to Reno and get a divorce.”

“And suggested that you pay for it?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Why didn’t you?”

“I did,” she said. “And he told me the divorce went through.”

“And the girl?”

“He married her. That’s why I didn’t bother to check the divorce records.”

“And he hadn’t got the divorce?”

“No. As it turned out, he’d simply taken the money I’d given him to make an impression on this other girl. He got her to marry him. She had some money saved. Sidney got that.”

“That wasn’t Helen Framley?” I asked.

“No. Her name was Sadie something. I’ve forgotten the last name, but I remember he kept talking about Sadie, and I was curious as to what sort of a girl she was.”

“All right. Then what happened?”

“Absolutely nothing for years. I had entirely lost track of him, and I hardly ever even thought of him. He quit his ring career. I think the Boxing Commission had some evidence on him that made it impossible for him to fight again. I don’t think he wanted to, anyway. He wasn’t the type to stand up under punishment in a ring.”

“And you met Philip?”

“Yes. I’d taken the name of Corla Burke so I could wipe out the past and begin all over. You see, my father—”

“I understand about the name now,” I said. “Let’s go on from there.”

“At first, I—”

“You don’t need to go into that. Just come to the Helen Framley part.”

“I got this very queer letter from Helen Framley. She said that she had read in the paper I was planning to get married almost immediately, that she was friendly with Sidney, and had heard Sidney speak of me, that she wondered if I knew Sidney had never got a divorce. She went on to say that Sidney was very much changed from what he was when I had known him, that he had steadied down a lot and really wanted to make something of himself in the world. She didn’t think he had the money to get a divorce right away, but if I didn’t want to wait, she could fix things up so that I could go ahead with the marriage, and after I had married Philip, Sidney would go ahead and get a divorce. She said he’d had some bad luck, but within a few weeks he’d be in the money again. I could then pretend to my husband there had been some irregularity in stating my age or something of that sort in the license, and get him to marry me all over again, or just keep on living with him and it would be a common-law marriage.”

“ ‘Queer’ is right. How much money did he want?” I asked.

“She didn’t even mention anything like that. Not as coming from me. She simply said that she thought that if he could get enough to set himself up in some business, it would be all he’d want, and I’d never hear from him again.”

“Did you gather the impression that she was writing you at his request?”

“No. She told me that he didn’t know anything about the letter she was writing, that he was intending to write to Philip Whitewell if it appeared that the marriage was going through, that he didn’t want Philip to be placed in the position of making a bigamous marriage.”

“Very considerate about Philip, wasn’t he?”

“Well — oh, it was about what you’d expect of Sidney. This Miss Framley seemed very nice. She looked at it from my viewpoint.”

“How had she found out you were really Sidney’s wife? How had she found you under the name of Corla Burke?”

“She didn’t say — just wrote this brief letter.”

“I see. Now when the proposition was all boiled down, unless you promised Sidney Jannix enough money to start up in business, he was going to prevent your marriage. If you’d promise to take care of him from money you could get from your husband, he was going to sit back and let you become the goose that would lay his golden eggs.”

“Well, if you want to look at it that way.”

“It’s the only way to look at it.”

“Then you think this Helen Framley was—”

“I don’t think Helen Framley ever wrote the letter.”

“But she told me to reply to her.”

“And you did?”

“Yes, of course.”

“And that was the letter that Arthur Whitewell dictated?”

“He didn’t dictate it.”

“But he knew about what was in it?”

“Yes.”

“I want to know about that,” I said.

“Well, I had it coming to me. I deserved everything I got. I don’t suppose I can ever explain it to you. I could never explain it to anyone, not even myself. But — well, I just had crossed those three months when I had been married to Sidney Jannix out of my life. I wrote them off as a bad experience, and—”

“By that you mean you didn’t tell Philip anything about them?”

She nodded.

“And Philip knew nothing whatever about Sidney Jannix or about your having been married?”