Margaret Millar - The Devil Loves Me

He said finally, “What are you crying about? Are you sorry for Sammy or sorry for yourself? In either case there’s nothing I can do. Do you mind if I go now?”

She opened her eyes and blew her nose. Prye went over and sat down beside the bed. “While you’re crying, you might toss in a gallon or so for Revel too. He’s still in love with you. He’s practically pushed himself into the penitentiary to prove it.”

She blew her nose again and said, “How?”

“He told me what Duncan brought to this house, what he was killed for. He wants to get the mystery cleared up so that you can go away from this house and be happy. I told him it was a lost cause, that you’d never be happy.”

“You think that’s true?”

“Certainly.”

“Why can’t I be? Why won’t I be?”

“Because you don’t know what happiness is. You think it’s living on an exalted plane all the time, a constant ecstasy. You want to swoon with bliss twenty-four hours a day.”

“I don’t!” she cried shrilly.

“You want to sink up to your eyes in an oozy mixture of sweetness and light, a sluggish syrup that will paralyze you. You’re a nihilist. You believe in nothing really, because you believe that happiness is unconsciousness, unawareness of unhappiness. You’re in love with death. There are thousands of neurotics like you, many of them alcoholics, drinking themselves into a stupor, groping always toward extinction, the bliss of unconsciousness.”

“But why? If I am like this there is a reason. I want to know.”

“I am hampered by my lack of knowledge of you and your family. But I would guess that you experienced a great deal of illness, perhaps a death, when you were a child.”

“Yes.”

“Freud would trace it back to some unpleasant sex experience which has been repressed. I don’t always agree with Freud but I think such a repression, added to your painful memories of illness and death, has made you what you are. I think you’re a passionate woman who has never known fulfillment.”

She was very white. She said, “No, no, I haven’t.”

“I believe your marriage was a constant struggle not between you and Revel as you thought, but between you and you, between the instinctive sex-hungry Dinah and the Dinah who hates her own body and takes off her clothes in the dark. To you the natural functions of the body are depraved. But that’s a stiff dose for your mind to take, so your mind didn’t take it. It indulged in some dexterous hocus-pocus, with the result that the depravity applies to everything male. Your hate for your own body has been directed into a hate for all men. Me, even.”

“You,” she said grimly. “I’d hate you anyway for knowing so much about me.”

“That’s often the case,” he said in a mild voice. “Neurotics seldom want to be understood. Hospitals are full of them — little whining cats that rub up against you for sympathy, showing their wounds but not letting you touch them. They’ve got to keep their wounds open, you see; they’re what make them different from other people. Their wounds are their excuse in the eyes of the world, their justification.”

She sat up straight in the bed. “I’m not like that! I’m not asking for sympathy.”

“I’m just telling you what I think. You don’t have to believe me. I’ll also tell you what I’d do if I were you.”

“All right.” Her voice was tired.

“It won’t be easy. In your case I don’t recommend psychoanalysis. It has cured some neurotics, but in others it has merely intensified their egocentricity and magnified their ills. I’d advise you to try switching the emphasis of your life and quit moping over the inadequacy of your sex life.”

“I don’t—”

“Then I’d take some of my money, if I were you, and spend it. Very few people are civilized enough to enjoy a lot of money by spending it on themselves. You might try some social-service work. Go to a baby clinic and change a few diapers. There’s something very earthy about changing diapers. After that you might try having a few babies of your own, say three or four, for instance.”

“Four!” She looked horrified. “Whose babies?”

“George will do,” Prye said easily. “Providing he’s not in jail. And if I know George he won’t be. Yes, a few babies by all means. Instead of worrying about yourself you’ll be worrying about Junior refusing his spinach and whether little Mary’s hair will be curly.”

“But... heredity?”

“George isn’t a born crook,” Prye said. “Besides, that type of heredity is important only when it’s aided by environment.”

“What did George do exactly?”

Prye looked down at her thoughtfully. “Really want to know? George didn’t tell me. He merely gave me the clues. My subconscious did the rest by making me whistle ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”

“Oh, don’t be mysterious,” she said impatiently.

He got up and went to the door. “Dennis and Duncan were killed because they had fifty thousand dollars and somebody else wanted it.”

“Money?” Dinah said. “Just money?”

“Money is enough,” Prye said.

He closed the door behind him, stood for a minute in the hall, and went downstairs. Sands was just coming in the front door. He looked calm, almost indifferent, though his face was a shade grayer.

“I’ve figured something out for you,” Prye said.

Sands leaned against the wall, as if he were too tired to stand alone. “Have you?”

“Yes. I know what a brunette is.”

Sands said, faintly ironic, “You know?”

“It’s a thousand dollars. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Oh.” Sands shot him a quick glance. “Revel break down and confess?”

“I did some drinking,” Prye said smoothly. “How much did Stevens withdraw from his account this past month?”

“Forty-two thousand dollars.”

“In American money. And how much would that be worth in Canadian money?”

“At the present exchange rate, 10 per cent, about forty-six thousand dollars.”

“That’s the official exchange rate,” Prye said. “But if you know where to go, and as a broker Duncan would know, you can buy a Canadian dollar in the United States for eighty American cents. So with his forty-two thousand dollars Duncan could buy more than fifty thousand dollars in Canadian money. If that could be smuggled across the border into Canada, as in fact it was, it could be used to buy forty-six thousand American dollars, at the regular exchange rate. That would make a clear profit of four thousand dollars.

“Stevens would get half for his part, buying up Canadian money cheaply in the United States and bringing it across the border. Revel would get the other half for buying up American securities in Canada and then turning them over to Stevens.”

“A conspiracy to evade the regulations of the Foreign Exchange Control Board,” Sands said. “It’s been done before. I didn’t think of it in connection with this case. The profit seems so disproportionately small compared to the risk. Two thousand dollars for each of them.”

Prye said dryly, “But fifty thousand dollars for someone else.”

“Or for Revel,” Sands said. “If the deal went through he would have received two thousand. But if he didn’t have to return American securities to Stevens, his profit is fifty thousand, the same as a hijacker’s would be.”

“Revel doesn’t need the money.”

Sands smiled cynically. “Everybody needs fifty thousand dollars, even as you and I. How is the money done up?”

“I’m not that psychic,” Prye said. “I suppose it’s wrapped and that the parcel is fairly bulky and that it’s hidden somewhere in the house.”

“My men were over the house thoroughly yesterday. Nothing was found.”