Jealous Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

constantly parallels mine.”
    “Or yesses it.”
    “... What did you say?”
    “I said what does she think of our problem?”
    “Just what we think. She was wondering if she had any capacity for this clairvoyance of mine, as she calls it, and I laid it all out for her. She said, ‘Well, it would be terribly exciting if I could feel something steal up and touch me on the shoulder, but I don’t. All I see is a somewhat pathetic boy trying to make himself look big in a cheap, silly way.’”
    “That makes three of us.”
    “Got to run, Ed. Mrs. Sperry is waiting.”
    “To say nothing of the former Mrs. Sperry.”
    “Who?”
    “Jane, waiting for me.”
    “Mrs. Delavan was the former Mrs. Sperry?”
    “Now you got it.”
    He sat there a long time, sometimes asking me questions about who these people were, and I could see his mind racing up one part of it and down the other, putting everything together, checking what he had said to La Sperry, what she had said to him, and so on. Then he said: “It’s none of my business what she’s here for, is it, Ed?”
    “That I couldn’t say.”
    “And none of hers, what I’m here for.”
    “That I couldn’t say either.”
    “You know how I dope it out?”
    “No, but I’d like to.”
    “She had no idea what I was telling her.”
    “What do you mean, telling her?”
    “About Delavan’s policy.”
    “Had no idea who you were talking about?”
    “I never reject a simple explanation. Ed.”
    “That explanation, I’d say, verges on the simple-minded. If you think, after what you told her, she had no idea who you were talking about—that is, if you told her all about the coal company, the—”
    “Ouch, I forgot that.”
    “It’s not possible she didn’t guess. ... Mr. Keyes, if you told her about it, as you say, it wasn’t up to her to tip it she knew who you were talking about if she didn’t want to. Maybe she’s a well-mannered dame that doesn’t tip things because she was brought up not to. But that’s not all. You didn’t only tell her. She pumped it out of you. She—”
    “No, no, Ed. Nobody could. Not out of me.”
    “O.K. You’re a clam.”
    He sat another ten minutes thinking. “But what interest could she have? What could it mean to her whether Delavan gets his insurance or didn’t? She hasn’t tried to influence me in any way.”
    “She’s here to block that annulment.”
    “O.K., now we’re getting somewhere.”
    “Just where?”
    “If she’s here to block the annulment, by whatever suasion she cares to use—”
    “On checks.”
    “You mean she’ll bribe Delavan?”
    “Why, Mr. Keyes, such language!”
    “It’s what you mean, isn’t it?”
    “You think he’s too refined to accept?”
    I took him out to where the car was parked, and he stood beside it, thinking some more. “I think we’ve got it, Ed. Mrs. Delavan got that thing they use all over the British Empire, one of those cut-and-dried, found-him-with-an-unknown-woman, in-and-out-in-ten-minutes divorces, and they’re perfectly good—so long as everybody plays ball. But God help you if somebody kicks the beans in the fire. An English court will reopen the case sure as God made little apples, and remember, if they wanted to call it on them, this would involve perjury, contempt of court, manufacture of evidence, collusion, everything that mocks the dignity of the court, and that it can’t have publicly proved. Delavan thinks he’ll kick over the beans. Mrs. Sperry has other ideas, because she doesn’t propose to have her marriage ruined by a playboy’s caprice. So far as I’m concerned, that accounts for everything, her trip here, all of it.”
    I made sure he knew where the starter was and went off and left him. Why I had talked so tough I don’t know, as the hand as it was dealt said I ought to have talked the other way. But somehow, even if it is against your own interest, you can blow your top a little when you see a guy kidding himself and shutting his