The Scandal - Murder Mysteries Boxed Set. Mary Roberts Rinehart
and it's mine, Mr. Forsythe."
"What sort of property?"
"Money. Quite a lot of it." And seeing his puzzled face, she went on. "The trouble is, it's not deposited in my own name. I've used my pen name. Now I don't know what to do."
He smiled.
"That's not indispensable. Certainly, it's hardly frightening. Who were you escaping when you ducked in here?"
"My husband," she said defiantly. "If you think that's funny, it just isn't. I thought I had lost him, but I hadn't. He wasn't far behind me as I got into the elevator."
She meant it. He saw that. Moreover, she had commenced to tremble again. She clenched her hands together to steady them.
"Maybe you'd better explain," he said mildly. "You've written something under a pseudonym, and it has made you some money. Where does your husband come in? Does he want the cash, or what?"
"He doesn't know about it, or at least he didn't until a few days ago. Now I don't know. He's suspicious. Perhaps someone in our apartment building heard me typing and mentioned it to him. Or he may have followed me to Central Park."
He looked slightly puzzled.
"Central Park? What about it?"
She did not answer him directly.
"I don't suppose you listen to the radio much," she said. "I've had an afternoon program running almost ever since the war. You know, a soap opera about a family. The sponsors call it Monica's Marriage, and they pay well, especially if the stuff is popular. I began it after my husband came home from France. Only I didn't use his name. I didn't tell him about it at all."
She looked at him still rather defiantly.
"Why not? You weren't ashamed of it, were you?"
"I suppose it's all right. I'm dreadfully tired of it, of course."
"And your husband?" he insisted.
"I wanted him to be a man, if you know what I mean; to get work and settle down. If he knew I was earning, it would be bad for him. Even as things were he didn't try to get anything to do for a long time. He drank a lot, and I think he gambled. But we got along. I have an aunt in Connecticut, and he thought she was keeping us. I was having a baby too. He didn't want it."
He felt a certain admiration for her, for her determination to make something of a worthless husband. And something else was tugging at his mind, a feeling of familiarity, as though sometime in his life he had known her.
"He works now, I suppose?"
"He sells secondhand cars. We live on what he makes, but sometimes I wonder—" She did not finish that. "I don't blame him entirely," she said. "You were in the war yourself. It changed a lot of men. And after my baby came I wanted to keep the money for him."
"Where is it? Where do you keep it?"
"In a bank downtown. My agent takes her ten per cent, and after that she deposits the rest to my account under my other name. I call myself Jessica Blake."
"And suppose your husband finds the bank's deposit receipts?"
"They're in my agent's files. It's the Gotham Trust Company."
He sat back, thinking hard. He knew little or nothing about radio programs, but he thought they paid very well. Great Scott, he thought, after seven years this girl might have a considerable fortune. His eyes fell on the book on the desk in front of him.
"What about taxes?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said vaguely. "I suppose my agent pays them."
"If she doesn't, God help her," he warned her. "Someday the Government will catch up with you, and all hell will break loose." And when she made no comment: "You say you want it to go to your son?"
"In trust. He's only six now. And I've sent him to my aunt. It seemed better, the way things are."
Things must be pretty bad, he thought, to make her do that. He felt uneasy. There might be real trouble in the making. The husband was evidently a bad egg. Suppose he learned about the money and decided to do away with her. It would be easy, a push under a bus or taxi or beneath a subway train. But of course that was ridiculous. He was building something out of nothing, and since she seemed determined to move the Jessica Blake account to her own name, he told her that she and the agent—and himself, if she wanted him—could do it easily whenever she cared to do so. It was a simple matter of identification.
"Which reminds me," he said. "You haven't yet told me your name. I may want to call you, you know."
She looked frightened again.
"Please don't," she said. "I'll call you. But I want a simple will. As little as possible to my husband, although I expect he would have to have a third. The rest is to go to Billy, my boy."
"Billy who? What's his full name?"
"William Blake Collier. I think you knew my husband in France. He's Wilfred Collier, if you remember him."
Forsythe felt a cold chill down his spine. Fred Collier had been a sergeant in his company when he first joined it as a green young lieutenant. And Fred had been the typical sergeant of fiction, hard, unscrupulous, and even murderous when drinking. He had a wild inclination to tell this girl not to go back to her husband. If he ever learned that she had been holding out on him—
"I remember him, yes, Mrs. Collier. He's no man to fool with. If you're worried, how about going to this aunt in Connecticut? He might not bother you there."
She was not listening. A man was walking along the hall outside, and evidently she recognized the heavy footsteps. She did not move, but all her color was gone again, and the fingers gripping the bag were white with tension. A moment later they heard a man's voice raised in the outer office.
"I want to see Forsythe," he said arrogantly. "And if my wife's with him I want to see her too."
"Your wife's not here," Miss Potter snapped. "There's no woman here except the two of us. And Mr. Forsythe is out."
"I think you're lying, sister."
"I wouldn't bother," she said contemptuously. "Go and hunt you wife somewhere else. This is a law office and if you want trouble we have quite a few husky young members of the bar around on this floor to give it to you."
"I've handled young punks before this. I don't scare easy."
In spite of this, however, a moment or two later the outer door slammed and Collier started back along the hall. At the door marked "Private" he stopped and tried the knob, then finding the door locked and hearing no sounds within he went on. Neither the girl nor Forsythe spoke until they heard the elevator stop to pick him up.
"I guess that's that," Forsythe said. "I don't like the idea of your going home to him, Mrs. Collier."
"I'll be all right," she told him. "I don't think he's sure yet, and until he is—I only hope I haven't got you into trouble. May I stay a few minutes, if I'm not disturbing you?"
He glanced at his desk. In front of him was his morning's work, still barely started. He shoved it aside.
"Stay as long as you like," he said. "Just try to relax. Want another brandy?"
"I'm all right, thanks."
"You know," he said conversationally, "your boy's name—William Blake. I knew a Bill Blake at college. And I have an idea I've seen you somewhere before. You look vaguely familiar."
It was the right note. She even managed a faint smile.
"I didn't think you could possibly remember," she said. "It's years ago. I went to a prom at Yale, when you were going to law school. You'd played football, of course, and I almost died with excitement when you asked me to dance. I always thought Bill asked you to."
He remembered her then. Queer, too, with all the girls he had danced with that night, and innumerable nights since; a scared, very young girl with amazingly