False to Any Man. Leslie Ford

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      He tossed his hat on the chair by the door. “Where’s Jerry, Grace?” he demanded abruptly.

      If my heart hadn’t already been exhausted from its various sinking spells, it would have gone down to my boots with one look at his red-headed ugly face. “It’s not handsome, Mrs. Latham, but it’s the kind any girl’s mother will trust,” he’d grinned the first time I ever saw him, and I know that in five minutes I would have trusted him anywhere—even behind the wheel of a car, which was little short of suicide from everything one heard.

      Now, standing in the middle of the room, his brown eyes anxious, his long lank ungainly figure lurched forward, he was even uglier and oddly enough even more comforting than I’d ever thought him.

      “Where is she, Grace?” he repeated urgently.

      “She left here for the office at half-past eight,” I said. “Have you tried there?”

      “She hasn’t been there all day. They said she called up from a pay station first thing this morning. Said she wasn’t feeling very well, but she’d be in after lunch. She didn’t come in, and didn’t phone.”

      He started to stick his hand in his pocket, and reached down instead to the silver box on the mantel for a cigarette. I noticed that the knuckles of his big red hairy hands were crisscrossed with fresh clean adhesive tape. I took a deep breath and counted ten. After all, Jerry was a pretty intelligent young person and there was no sense getting alarmed. There are lots of times, I told myself, when one wants to get off alone. But I could have counted ten hundred without stilling the sickening dread in the pit of my stomach. Jerry might be intelligent, but she certainly wasn’t herself, and one look at Sandy and no one would have called him an alarmist—especially about his own sister.

      “If she’s out driving around the country in that collapsible crate she’s probably lying in a ditch somewhere,” he groaned. “The roads are like glass, and those tires of hers should have been boiled down for erasers fifteen thousand miles ago.”

      “There are worse places than ditches,” I said. “Especially nice snow-filled ones.”

      He threw the half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “Look, Grace—did she say whether she was going to show up for Karen’s party?”

      “So that’s what you’re chucking your weight about for?” I asked. I was a little annoyed that it was Karen he was thinking about, not Jerry at all.

      “And it’s plenty,” he said shortly.

      “I suppose what really matters is her getting home in time to sign the papers your father’s——” I remarked, and stopped as Sandy jerked up as if I’d struck him full in his ungainly face. “Oh, Lord,” I thought; “you complete idiot!”

      “You mean, he’s——”

      He picked up another cigarette, turned his back to me and lighted it. “So that’s it,” he said after a moment. “The poor little devil.”

      “Look,” I said. “I don’t know what all this is about, and very likely it’s none of my business. But why is it Jerry that’s on this spot?”

      “Because she was twenty-one three weeks ago,” he said. His big elastic mouth twitched ironically. “Up to that time she wouldn’t have mattered. Dad and Mr. Doyle could have done it instead.”

      It still didn’t make sense to me.

      “Does she have to give Karen this stock everybody’s jittering about?”

      Sandy bit his lips. “I guess she does. Unless she wants to sink the ship with all hands aboard.”

      “Legally?”

      “Not legally.”

      “Morally?”

      “Nor morally either.”

      “Then why——” I began.

      “To keep Dad’s name out of the headlines, in case this . . . business in Washington goes through,” he answered quietly. “That’s why. Don’t try to make it make sense. It doesn’t, and it didn’t, and it never will.”

      “Sandy—do you want her to give it back?” I asked.

      “I didn’t, this noon.” He looked down rather grimly at his plastered knuckles. “My guess now is it’ll be the . . . well, the easy way out.”

      I nodded at his hand. “What happened?”

      He shrugged his big angular shoulders.

      “I don’t exactly know. A cop was picking the rat up out of the gutter in front of the Treasury Building, the last I saw. I was running like hell.”

      “To keep ‘Judge’s Son Arrested in Street Brawl’ out of the headlines?”

      “Something of the sort. The guy collared me as I was coming out of the office. Said he was an attorney looking into the management of Miss Lunt’s estate, and we’d better do something about a certain stock, or else. I didn’t catch the rest of it—a fireman’s parade was going by.”

      My hand against my cheek was as cold as ice. Sandy looked at me.

      “What’s the matter, Grace?”

      His brown eyes—all brown, not flecked with sun like his sister’s—tightened apprehensively.

      “Just that I’m wondering if that’s the man who’s been calling here for Jerry all day—sort of oily-voiced.”

      His face went a shade grimmer. “The dirty bastard,” he said softly. He got up. Somehow I had the idea that it would take more than a telephone pole to stop him when he got going. He picked up his hat from the chair. “I’ll see you at Karen’s,” he said.

      I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

      “You’ve got to,” he said quietly. “The family may need a friend.”

      5

      I don’t think Lever dressed for a party with less enthusiasm. I put my hair up and put a bunch of flowers in it, and promptly took them out and put it down again. There was no use adding an extra hurdle to the evening. The same was true of driving the eight icy miles to Alexandria. I called a taxi, and was glad I had. The roads were foul, but they were the driver’s problem, not mine, and at that he made it faster than I’d have believed possible. It wasn’t quite half-past seven as he skidded to a stop in the cobblestoned gutter in Chatham Street and said immediately, “Jeez, I guess it’s that little white house all lighted up like a Christmas tree you want to go to, not this graveyard.”

      I looked out. He’d stopped in front of the Candlers’. The two yellow gas jets burned feebly in their delicate standards on the high stoop railing. The fanlight glowed dimly over the door. Otherwise the house was dark as pitch.

      “No, this is fine,” I said.

      He got out and opened the door. “Okay, Miss. Don’t slip in them fancy heels.”

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