Ричард Деминг: Hit and Run

Cushman picked up the card and studied it. “Bernard Calhoun. What did he want?”

“He said he was sitting in his car on Court Street only a few yards from the accident. He knows I was driving and you were with me. He knows the names of the injured man and the owners of the two damaged cars. That old man wasn’t seriously hurt, incidentally.”

The last sentence didn’t seem to relieve Harry Cushman any. “Blackmail?” he asked on a high note.

She shook her head. “He offered to help us. To make secret settlements with all the injured parties and to get the car repaired safely.”

Cushman asked suspiciously, “For how much?”

“Five thousand dollars,” she said casually. “Plus whatever arrangements cost.”

“Five thousand dollars!” he squeaked. “It is blackmail!”

She shook her head again. “I doubt that you could call Mr. Calhoun a legitimate businessman, but he is not a blackmailer. He is simply offering a rather illegal service for a quite legitimate price. He impressed me as not honest, but probably trustworthy.”

“How can you judge that?” Cushman asked querulously. “You don’t know a thing about him.”

“Simple logic, Harry. If he were merely a blackmailer, he would just have asked for money to keep quiet. He impressed me as the sort of man whose ethics are rather loose but who has to justify what he does to himself. By rendering us a service for pay, he can convince himself he is not taking advantage of our misfortune, but helping us over it.”

“You’re banking on your supposed ability to judge character again,” Cushman accused. “You always think you can pigeonhole people at first meeting.”

“I usually can,” she said serenely.

“Suppose you’re wrong? Suppose he decides to bleed us dry?”

“He won’t,” she assured him. “He’ll perform exactly the service he offered for exactly the fee he stated. I let him believe I considered the fee exorbitant, but actually I think it’s quite reasonable. Without Mr. Calhoun’s help, just how do you suggest we get out of this jam?”

Nervously fingering his small mustache, Cushman paced across the sun porch, thinking deeply. Then, realizing he was carrying the scarf dangerously far from its owner, in the event of a sudden emergency, he returned to hover over the deck chair.

“I can’t get any money from Lawrence, of course,” Helena said without expression. “He’d insist on knowing what it was for. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear the full expense.”

Cushman made an impatient gesture. “The money’s nothing. If it’s sure to stop there. I just don’t want to set myself up for permanent blackmail. Maybe we’d be smarter to turn ourselves in to the police and face the music.”

She said coolly, “You know how Lawrence feels about infidelity, Harry. He’d divorce me without alimony. And name you as corespondent.”

“Even that might be cheaper in the long run,” he muttered. “As my wife you wouldn’t need alimony.”

“I like the status quo,” she said. “You’re a much more satisfactory lover than you would be husband. As long as other men’s wives attract you so much, I prefer to stay another man’s wife.”

Stretching her arms over her head, she gave a kittenish yawn. The movement arched her full but firm breasts upward, drawing the skin so tight that their pink tips jutted out like a teen-ager’s. Cushman stared down at her, his tongue flicking out to caress the bottom edge of his mustache.

Glancing fearfully over his shoulder at the door to the dining room, he said weakly, “Don’t do that. I’m not made of iron.”

Maintaining the stretched-out position, she looked up at him without expression. “Mr. Calhoun will be here again at two P.M. tomorrow. You’ll bring the money in the morning?”

Gazing down at her again, he lifted his shoulders in a shrug of acquiescence. “We’ll try it this way,” he said. “And hope your character analysis is correct.”

The next day was Thursday. At noon Barney Calhoun phoned Emergency Hospital and learned John Lischer’s condition was charted as unchanged. Two hours later the colored maid Alice again let him into the foyer of the Powers home.

This time, instead of making him wait while she checked with her mistress, she merely said, “Mrs. Powers is expecting you, sir,” walked off, and let him find his own way to the sun porch.

Though the living room was thickly carpeted, the dining-room floor was inlaid tile. Calhoun’s summer loafers were crepe-soled, and made no noise on the hard floor. He stopped in the open doorway to the sun porch.

If Mrs. Powers was expecting him, as the maid had said, apparently she was also expecting the maid to announce his arrival, because she wasn’t dressed for company. Like yesterday she was stretched out in one of the deck chairs with sun flooding her body. Her eyes were closed, though she didn’t seem to be asleep, and she wore nothing but a pair of yellow shorts as brief as the red ones she had worn the day before.

Calhoun stood for some time just looking. Presently, as though sensing another presence, she slowly opened her eyes and turned her head in his direction. She looked at him for a long moment, neither surprise nor embarrassment on her face. It bemused him that she didn’t make the instinctive feminine gesture of covering her bare bosom with her arms.

“It’s obvious that you’ve never had any children,” he said a little huskily.

Without hurry she rose from the deck chair and lifted a scarf the same color as her yellow shorts from an end table. Silently she turned her back, folded the scarf across her breasts, and held the two ends beneath her arms for him to tie. Equally in silence he crossed them and tied a square knot.

“You pulled it too tight yesterday,” she said in her curiously flat voice. “Please leave it so that I can undo it without help.”

He loosened the knot a little. He was sweating when he finished.

She turned around, just as she had yesterday, without first moving an inch away. Again he found himself looking down into her upturned face at uncomfortably close range.

“Why is it obvious I’ve never had any children?” she asked. “Pregnancy doesn’t necessarily make a woman sag.”

“No,” he said in a voice even huskier. “But it turns the pink to brown. You still have a little-girl body.”

“Thank you,” she said without expression.

A man can stand only so much temptation. When she merely continued to look up at him, making no attempt to move away, he dropped a hand on each of her smooth shoulders, pulled her against his chest, and kissed her.

She made no resistance, but she made no response, either. She just stood there, her lips soft but unmoving, and her eyes wide open. After a moment he pushed her away.

“Was your mother frightened by an ice cube?” he growled at her.

She turned, then padded across the screened-in porch on bare feet to a small table against the inner wall. “Maybe you’re just not the man to melt the ice, Mr. Calhoun,” she said over her shoulder.

A brightly colored straw bag lay on the table, and she removed a banded sheaf of currency from it.

“Your fee,” she said, returning and handing him the money. “One hundred fifties.”

“How about the settlements?”

“We don’t know what they’re going to amount to, do we?” she said. “Harry wants to see the agreements releasing me from further claims in writing before he pays any more money. When you bring me those, I’ll see that you get whatever money the agreements call for.”

“Harry is smarter than I thought he was,” Calhoun remarked.

He riffled through the bills enough to make sure they were all fifties, then stuffed them into a pocket without counting them. “I’ll pay my personal expenses and the car repairs out of this, and you can pay me back when it’s all over.”