Brett Halliday - Guilty as Hell

Coming out of his office, Jose Despard found his secretary, Miss Mainwaring, bending over a file drawer. Viewed from the front, Miss Mainwaring was tight-lipped and flat-chested, the everlasting spinster. But from this angle, her personality seemed to offer certain possibilities. What if Despard should favor her with a small, innocent tweak, purely as a sporting proposition? She would be startled at first. She would straighten so abruptly that she would give her pelvis a painful knock against the file. But after that, who could tell? Perhaps she would turn slowly, remove her glasses and remark in that sultry tone that had aroused Mrs. Despard’s suspicions the first time she heard it on the phone, “I never knew you thought of me in that light, Mr. Despard.”

He thrust both hands deep in his pockets to keep them out of harm’s way. “Going to lunch. Don’t forget to call the gun shop. Tell them I’ll pick up the gun before five.”

Straightening, Miss Mainwaring turned her spinsterish side in his direction. It became safe to take his hands out of his pockets. Imagine pinching the rear of anybody with a face like that!

“And if Mrs. Despard calls,” he added, “tell her I’ll be going straight to the airport from here. I’ll phone her the minute we get in.”

He went out, hatless. He was tall, very thin, and always seemed to be in a hurry, having important business to transact when he got where he was going. He wore his hair long over his ears. It was touched with gray; he was fifty-three. He sometimes managed to forget his age for as long as three or four days at a time.

He picked up a red Thunderbird convertible in the executive parking lot. Walter Langhorne, head of the design department, was backing a new Chrysler out of the next slot. The two men waved and left the lot by opposite exits. Another early lunch for Walt, Despard noted, and the lucky son of a bitch could stay out as long as he liked, with no fear that some clacking idiot would see him and pass the news along to his wife. Because he had no wife. Despard cocked an eyebrow, a wry expression which he had practiced so long it had become habitual. He believed it made him look English.

E. J. Despard, a family-operated chemical company with an antiquated plant in a small town in southern Georgia, had moved into plastics and synthetic fibers after the second world war and now had manufacturing facilities all over the country as well as in Europe. Largely through Jose Despard’s efforts, the head office, as well as Research and Development, his own baby, had been transferred from Georgia to a new industrial park on undeveloped land between Miami and North Miami. The climate was better, the ocean was nearby, and there was a certain amount of extracurricular action if you knew how to go about locating it.

Despard drove east to the Expressway, picking it up at 103rd Street, and zoomed south toward Miami at a rate of speed that fitted the way he was feeling. He left the Expressway at the 54th Street exit. A block or so later, he stopped at an outside phone booth. Returning to his car, he pressed a button which brought the top up out of the boot. He seldom used the Thunderbird’s top, and it felt like a disguise.

He cruised north into Edison Center.

He felt absently for a stick of gum and chewed it down to manageable size. This was another effort at camouflage. The head of one of the oldest and finest families in Georgia naturally was seldom seen with gum in his mouth.

He turned left at Edison Park, and his heart gave a thump. A girl got up off a bench and slanted across the street toward him. He pulled up and waited. She gave a quick look around, yanked open the door and bolted inside.

She wasn’t quite young enough to be his granddaughter. She was wearing a black turtleneck, a short skirt and sandals. She, too, was chewing gum, as rapidly and nervously as Despard himself. She had long black hair which never satisfied her, and every time she changed to a new hair style, she changed her personality to go with it. Today, partly because he had given her so little warning, it hung down lankly to her thin shoulders. She had a pointed face, bright restless eyes, too much lipstick. He had never seen her eat anything except French fries and hamburgers, and she was much too skinny. But in the black turtleneck her small breasts, he thought, were charming. At times she looked apathetic, but at other times she had all the energy of a broken high-tension wire.

“Honey,” she complained as he drove off, “you said you wouldn’t do that. What if Dad was home sick and picked up the phone?”

“Simple. I’d ask if this was Schwartz’s delicatessen.”

She sighed and settled deeper into the upholstery. “God, do I like these bucket seats.”

“That’s why I got them.”

“Know what I’d like to do some day? Ride up Collins Avenue with the top down in a bikini.”

“All right, you shall.”

“Yeah, I bet! I saw it once, a blonde in a suit about the size of a postage stamp, and if you just sort of glanced, you’d think she was naked. In a Bird with red-leather buckets. The man, though! Jesus. A real creep with a cigar. Where are we supposed to be going?”

He leered, twirling imaginary mustaches. “Don’t you know?”

“Jose, do you think we ought to?” she wailed. “In the daytime? Remember last week, you didn’t get back to the office and you missed some dumb conference. I don’t mind about me. I’ll just tell Dad I went to a double feature, and who cares, anyway? I kind of had Sunday saved.”

Despard signaled for a right turn. “Sunday’s out, that’s the trouble.”

“Hell! Why?”

“I have to go on that damn company weekend,” he said with disgust. “Shooting ducks-I haven’t shot a duck for twenty years. Any time I want to eat duck, I’ll go to a restaurant and order a tame one. But the word has come down from Mt. Olympus-be there. Apparently we’re after something bigger than duck, wearing pants.”

“Come on, Jose. Pants?”

“It’s too complicated to explain. And to make it look good, I have to get up before dawn and stand out in the mud. I know that marsh. I know it well. The mosquitoes are twice as big as the ducks.”

“I don’t get it! What’s the good of being the brother-in-law of the head of a company if you can’t make any plans? You already gave him forty hours this week.”

“I know, sweetie, it’s rough. But this is top priority and I can’t do a thing about it.”

“You don’t have to give me a big story. You wouldn’t have another girl on the string, would you?”

He smiled. “Funny face.”

“I had a chance to go somewhere else Sunday, that’s all,” she said discontentedly. “I said I was going to be busy.”

He took a small package out of his side pocket and passed it to her.

“A present?” she cried, with one of her fast personality switches.

She was now a little girl on Christmas morning. She broke the string and unwrapped a small perfume box. Despard was attending to the traffic, but he could tell she was disappointed. Then she opened the box and read the label, and her jaws stopped moving.

“Jose, this stuff sells for fifty bucks an ounce, and this is an ounce!”

He twirled his imaginary mustache again. “I expect to get my money’s worth.”

“Don’t worry about that. I never heard you complain yet.” She put a hand on his nearest leg. “I don’t like that about Sunday, but I’ll just have to stand it. I’ll ask my girl friend to come over and give me a permanent. But I’ll have to pour this perfume in another bottle or change the label, one. If she sees it, she’s going to want to know what’s going on. The way she pokes and pries and picks, I just know I’ll tell her the whole thing.”