Kiss and Kill. Richard Deming

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СКАЧАТЬ I controlled the spending of money, had our local bank account in my name and wrote all checks, I took advantage of Mavis’s bookkeeping experience by making her the family accountant. Near the end of June she balanced up my checkbook and announced, “You know we’ve gone through over five thousand dollars in only a month, Sam?”

      “I’m not surprised,” I said. “How do we stand?”

      “About five thousand left. Didn’t you have anything when we met?”

      “About what you did,” I said. “Under two hundred. I hadn’t made a score for some time.”

      Actually Cora Hollingsworth was the first big score I’d ever managed to pull off. My stake before meeting Mavis had never climbed over a couple of thousand. But I didn’t tell her that.

      Mavis was frowning down at the paper containing her computations. “At this rate we’ll be broke in another month, Sam. Shouldn’t we start economizing?”

      “I like to live high,” I told her. “It’s time to go back to work.”

      We started that same evening. I brought out my potential sucker list and went over it.

      My sucker list had been compiled over a number of years from numerous sources. From newspaper reports of top income-tax payers, from inheritance reports, from Who’s Who, from magazine articles on prominent people, from the society pages of major city newspapers and from the bunco-game grapevine, which stretches from coast-to-coast and keeps members of the fraternity informed as to what marks have recently been taken, and how, and constantly adds new prospects to the list. For every large city in the country I had a list of at least a dozen possibles.

      From my St. Louis list I picked a couple of rich widows, a widower and a prominent society matron who was noted as a patroness of struggling young artists.

      “Four possibles,” I said. “Well start weeding them out tomorrow.”

      “How?” Mavis asked.

      “The newspaper morgues. We compile all the background material we can on all four. Then pick the one we figure has the kindest heart.”

      “Are we going to try the same stunt we pulled in Los Angeles?”

      “If any of the possibles have a weakness for sad stories. If not, we’ll dream up some angle to take advantage of whatever weaknesses they have. If none have any that seem promising, we’ll move on to some other city.”

      The next morning I visited the Post Dispatch and Mavis went to the Globe Democrat. The story that we were magazine writers doing research for some personality pieces got us into both morgues without difficulty. At noon we met to compare notes.

      We settled on one of the widows, a Mrs. Sarah Brewster. She gave heavily to charity and did a lot of personal welfare work, such as delivering baskets to the poor at Christmastime. She sounded like a carbon copy of Mrs. Cora Hollingsworth.

      Mrs. Brewster was a permanent resident at the Jefferson Hotel. I moved in there, leaving Mavis at the Chase, and within a week had her lined up for the kill with the same dodge we had used in California. Three days later we blew town with eight thousand dollars of Mrs. Brewster’s money.

      Mrs. Brewster had been just as nice an old lady as Cora Hollingsworth. But if Mavis suffered any conscience pangs this time, she managed to suppress them. The only emotion she exhibited was glee at the ease with which we had extracted the money.

      During the next six months we pulled the same pitch twice again, once in Pittsburgh and once in Seattle. We had a close call in Seattle. As I came out of the bank after cashing the mark’s check, I bought a morning paper. On its front page was a warning against the racket we had just pulled, along with a resume of our scores in Beverly Hills, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.

      I didn’t wait to get out of town before converting the cashier’s check into cash. I cashed it at a bank three blocks from the first, picked up Mavis and we took off fast. Apparently our mark didn’t read the morning paper, for we squeaked through without running into any road blocks.

      We stopped in Salt Lake City long enough to sell the car, and flew from there to Houston, Texas.

      We decided to lay low in Houston for a while. We now had a fifteen-thousand-dollar stake and, even with our taste for high living, could afford a lengthy vacation.

      We spent Christmas at the Shamrock Hotel. Christmas Eve, possibly under the influence of the season, I asked Mavis to marry me.

      We were in the Shamrock’s cocktail lounge having an after-dinner drink when I asked her. She paused with her drink half raised and slowly set it down again. Her green eyes were bright when she looked at me, but there was an odd, waiting expression on her face. She didn’t make any answer. She just continued to stare at me.

      “Didn’t you hear me?” I said. “I asked how you’d like to get married.”

      “I heard you,” she said. “I was just wondering why.”

      “Why I asked you?”

      “Why you want to marry me.”

      I frowned at her. “We’re living as man and wife anyway. We make a perfect business team. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a permanent relationship. Why not make it legal?”

      She smiled a little ruefully. “All perfectly logical reasons.”

      “What’s the matter with you?” I inquired. “Don’t you want to get married?”

      “There isn’t anything I’d like more,” she assured me. “I happen to be in love with you.”

      “Then why all the shilly-shallying?”

      She lifted her shoulders in a resigned shrug. “You reeled off three sensible reasons for wanting to marry me. None of them the one reason every woman wants to hear.”

      I examined her dubiously. Women are such incurable romantics. “You mean I haven’t said I love you?”

      “Not ever,” she informed me. “Not since the day we met. You treat me like you love me, most of the time. You act proud of me in public. You hardly ever fail to tell me how nice I look when we start out. And in bed—well, you don’t act as though I repel you. But not once, ever, have you said those corny little words: I love you.”

      “I’m just not demonstrative,” I said. “Of course I love you. Satisfied?”

      She gave me a wry smile. “What woman wouldn’t be after such a passionate avowal?”

      “Don’t be sarcastic,” I said impatiently. “You want to get married or not?”

      “You’re the boss in this family,” she said. “We do whatever you want to do.”

      We were married on New Year’s Day. We took a six-week honeymoon cruise to South America, then returned to Houston and stretched our honeymoon to another six weeks at the Shamrock.

      Toward the end of March, Mavis announced that we had a little over four thousand dollars left in the bank. It was time to go back to work.

      “We СКАЧАТЬ