Jealous Woman

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Book: Read Jealous Woman for Free Online
Authors: James M. Cain
Tahoe?”
    “I’d love it.”
    So we had the hotel fix us some lunch and drove up to Tahoe and ate it in the woods, sitting on a rock beside the lake. But before we went I called on Keyes in his room. “News, chum.”
    “... What is it, Ed?”
    “That guy, last night, was her husband.”
    He had flopped back on the bed as soon as he let me in, but now he jumped up and grabbed the phone. When the operator told him that yes, Mr. Richard Sperry was registered, I thought his grin would come together at the back of his neck and take off the top of his head. “Ed, you can’t know what you’ve done for me.”
    “Oh, ye of little faith.”
    “That thoroughbred, and I suspected her!”
    “And the annulment suit’s out.”
    “I bet you’re pleased.”
    “Somewhat.”
    “Pretty day, isn’t it, Ed?”
    “That old Nevada air.”

Part Two:
DISHONORABLE INTENTIONS

5
    O F COURSE IT DIDN’T quite run straight down Hotsy Totsy Drive, not with Keyes around it couldn’t. Next day, when the New York wire cleared everything he called Delavan from my office to tell him it was O.K. Then he began to stall, and then he hung up. And then, after studying the wire some more, he said: “Ed, I think I’m disapproving this risk.”
    “And why, if I may ask?”
    “Concealment.”
    “Of what?”
    “I don’t know. But he was surprised.”
    “At you okaying something?”
    “I told him I’d heard from New York, that his application was approved, and he was surprised. He thought it wouldn’t be, and there’s nothing he’s told me or I’ve told him that should make him think it wouldn’t be. That means there’s something he expected me to find out. I’ve got to know what that is.”
    Now I know why he was surprised. After Jane had told him his application would be disapproved, to be told five days later that it had been passed was enough to surprise anybody. But what I had told her and what she had told him I regarded as completely outside the scope of a company investigation, and if Delavan still wanted to accept his insurance I didn’t mean to be blocked off from my cup on some crazy hunch by a guy trying to find stuff that would make headlines in the newspapers. I just calmly got up and walked into the outer office and told Linda to get Mr. Norton on the telephone. Norton’s president of the company. He’s not quite the man his father was, that founded our company and a couple of other companies and built them up and formulated most of the policies we’ve got, but he’s a nice guy just the same and what I wasn’t forgetting in any way, he was a little fed up with Keyes. I spoke to Linda good and loud, so Keyes heard me. When I came back we just sat there, he smoking his cigar and thinking. I smoking mine and burning.
    “Mr. Norton?”
    “Hello, Horner, what’s on your mind?”
    I gave him enough of it, even if it was a long distance call, for him to get what it was about. “Now, Mr. Norton, I’ve got some cups on my bookcase that say I’m one of the best agents you’ve got. I’ve got my eye on another, maybe you know about that. But here’s something that maybe you don’t know. I’ve got three letters in front of me, three letters as yet unanswered, from other companies, offering me territory, with general agent rank, in cities a lot bigger than Reno, cities that—”
    “Now, Horner!”
    “Could mean, to me—”
    “Will you let me talk? If you’ll meet that afternoon plane, I’ll have somebody aboard that I think can straighten things out. Now just take it easy. Play some golf. And let me talk to Keyes.”
    Keyes hated it, but he had to stand there and say “Yes, sir” every ten seconds, and when he hung up his face was so red it looked like a Technicolor gag. Then he put on his coat and went out.
    I expected H. P. Davis, senior vice-president, or maybe Vic Rose, chief of underwriters, but I almost fell over backwards when Norton himself came down the ladder. Oh yes, he did. An insurance company

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