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Rat Race

<h2>CHAPTER 8</h2> "And so, Arthurjean," I concluded, "my guess is that for some crazy reason it's up to me to take up where Winnie left off and try to do a good job with the hand he's dealt himself." She remained silent, hunched on the floor beside me, with her maroon pyjamas straining visibly and a pile of cigarette butts in the ash-tray at her side. "Give me a break," I pleaded. "When I tried to tell my wife—Winnie's wife—Mrs. Tompkins, that is—all she could think of was to send me off to a plush-lined booby-hatch until I was sane again. The others—at least Virginia Rutherford—are beginning to suspect that something is wrong and that damned dog knows it. So be original and pretend that I might be telling the truth." She didn't answer. Instead, she stood up, stretched, strolled over to the kitchenette and mixed us both two good stiff drinks. "Mud in your eye!" she said. "Glad to see you on board!" "I don't see why not," she observed conversationally. "I don't pretend to be smart and I know that the other girls in the office think I'm nothing but a tramp because I don't pretend I don't like men, but I'm damned if I think that Winnie, who is one of God's sweetest dumb-bells, could have dreamed up anything as screwy as this." "As I remember him, he wasn't any too bright," I said. "Skip it! He wasn't dumb in business. He picked up a couple of million bucks and gave them a good home in his safe-deposit box. He wasn't so hot on music and books and art—except for his damned ducks—but he was a lot of fun. He liked a good time and he liked a girl to have a good time. He should have been born in one of those Latin countries where the women do all the work and the men play guitars, drink and make love." I drew a deep breath. I had won my first convert. I knew what Paul of Tarsus felt when he met up with Timothy. I thought of Mahomet and Fatima, Karl Marx and Bakunin, Hitler and Hess. Crazy though the whole world would consider me, here was one human being who could listen to my story without phoning for an ambulance. "Tell me about this Frank Jacklin," Arthurjean remarked. "I don't get all the angles about him and this Dorothy. Seems to me you—Winnie, that is—told me he was the guy she'd had a sort of crush on at school. Winnie was still sort of sore about it twenty years later." "It's hard for me to be fair," I admitted. "Jacklin was a big shot at school and may have had a swelled head. Winnie wasn't so hot then—nice but with too much money. Jacklin's people were poor, by comparison that is. He got through Yale, slid out into the newspaper game, held his job, married a girl, had a bust-up with his wife and joined the Navy as a reserve officer after she walked out on him. The Navy assigned him to P.R.O. work and sent him to the Pacific." "He sounds like a heel," she observed, "leaving his wife like that. Tell me more about her. Is she pretty?" I thought a long time. "I don't quite know," I said finally. "I never knew. She was necessary to me, long after I was necessary to her. She had a mole on her left hip and a gruff way of talking when she was really fond of me. I guess she got tired of living in Hartford and took it out on me." "Any kids?" I shook my head vigorously. "Cost too much on a newspaper salary. She said she didn't want any until we could afford them. I was fool enough to believe her. Then when we could afford them she didn't want them. Can't say I blame her." "Did she make you happy?" "Of course not! Who wants to be happy? She made me miserable, but it was exciting to be around her. I never knew what I'd find when I got home—a knockdown drag-out fight over nothing at all or hearts-and-flowers equally over nothing." Arthurjean yawned. "That part's convincing," she agreed. "I'll play this one straight. You're Frank Jacklin and Winnie Tompkins rolled into one. The point is, where do we go from here? Let's see you sign Jacklin's name." I pulled out Winnie's gold, life-time fountain pen and wrote "Frank E. Jacklin" over and over again on the back of an envelope. She studied it carefully. "That's no phony," she agreed, "and it's nothing like Winnie's handwriting. Think I could get a check cashed on it?" "Let's try," I suggested. "Tomorrow when I get to the office I'll pre-date a check on the Riggs Bank at Washington. You mail it in for collection and we'll see if it clears." She shook her head. "No dice! If I tried that, first thing we know we'd have the A.B.A. dicks after you for forgery. Can you think of anything else?" "Not unless you go to Washington and see Dorothy in O.S.S. and ask her to verify my handwriting. Or, wait. You can go and talk to her and notice whether she wriggles her nose to keep her spectacles up. You can find out whether she's still nuts about Prokofiev. You can ask if she still thinks that Ernest Hemingway is a worse writer than Charles Dickens, and whether she still uses Chanel's Gardenia perfume." "That's enough," she interrupted. "But how'm I going to get to Washington and do all these things?" "Next week," I said, "you and I can fly down on a business trip—war-contracts, cut-backs, something official—and while I'm being whip-sawed by the desk-heroes you can check on Dorothy. See if I'm not right." She nodded. "That's one way. What can we cook up? The office is tied up in estate work and that leaves no chance for Uncle Sam. You get what he leaves the heirs and they tell me that the inheritance tax is here to stay." I considered the problem. "Tell you what, Arthurjean," I replied. "I've been thinking this over. The war's going to end this summer. What I saw on the Alaska means that nobody can hold out against us. The Germans are on their last legs, but most of the wise guys are saying that it will take from eighteen months to two years to clean up Japan—a million casualties, billions of dollars. This thorium bomb will do the trick and the war will be over by Labor Day. There's a chance for Winnie Tompkins to make another two or three millions." She laughed sardonically. "How?" "There's uranium stocks," I suggested. "All sewed up by the insiders. Last year you—or Winnie—got a query on uranium and found that there wasn't any to be had." "There's wheat and sugar," I argued. "The world's going to be hungry. There's a famine coming sure as hell. Buy futures and we'll be set." "Sure," she agreed, "if you want to buy Black and can get funds into Cuba or the Argentine. But there are inter-allied pools operating in sugar and wheat and you can't break into the game without connections at Washington." "How about peace-babies?" I demanded. "We can sell our war bonds and invest in something solid for post-war reconstruction. Say General Motors or U.S. Steel." Arthurjean crossed the room and rumpled my head affectionately. "Baby," she observed, "it's damn lucky for you and Winnie's dough I know my way around the Street. Lay off heavy industrials until the labor business gets straightened out. It's all set for a big strike-wave when the shooting stops and a lot of investors are going to be burned. You can sell short of course but you'll have to wait for that. If you must go in for gambling, try the race-track or the slot-machines. Uncle Sam has it fixed so that the only way you can make money out of the peace is to be a Swiss or a Swede." "But that doesn't make sense," I objected. "In any place and at any time, advance knowledge on what is going to happen is worth a fortune. How about selling some of the war industries short?" She shook her head. "You wait till you've been to Washington. Some of the smart guys down there may know the answers. Perhaps it will be real-estate, if they can only get rid of rent-control. Probably it will be surplus war-stocks but that's going to be a political racket. Anyhow the tax-collector will be waiting for you, so why worry?" "Speaking of cashing checks," I reminded her, "how in hell am I going to get some dough? How does Winnie sign himself at the City Farmers anyhow?" She laughed. "He has three or four separate accounts. The one he uses for purely personal hell-raising is just signed 'W. S. Tompkins.' Let's see you try to write that. Remember he loops all his letters and draws a little circle instead of a dot over the 'i'." I tried that a few times until she shook her head. "There isn't a bank-clerk in New York who wouldn't stop a check with that on it. Let's see, he signed his name to something around here. See if you can't copy it." She fumbled under a pile of magazines and finally came up with a copy of "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant. "Winnie thought this would be good for me," she explained. "Here it is: 'For Miss Arthurjean Briggs, with the compliments of W. S. Tompkins.' He was like that—sort of formal—it gave him a kick. He bought that for me second-hand after we'd been drinking Atlantic City dry at an investment bankers convention. Try it." I tried the signature again but the effort was even worse than my free-hand efforts. This time it looked like what it was—a clumsy forgery. "Hell," I exclaimed, "I've simply got to do better than that. How about my tracing it?" "You'd be surprised," she told me, "how easy it is to spot a signature that's been traced. It's something about the flow of the ink and the angle of the pen. No two signatures are exactly alike and that's why a tracing gives itself away. They got machines which spot it." "Well, how'm I going to get some dough?" I demanded. "I can't draw on Jacklin's Washington account—and the chances are there isn't much there anyhow. And if I try to draw on Tompkins' account I'll find myself in the hoosegow." She got up and mixed us another pair of drinks. "I got it," she announced. "It won't be too nice for you but it's better than starving." "You mean you'll lend me some?" "Hell, baby, I got no money—twenty-five or thirty in the account and a few hundreds in war-bonds. No, this is better. Just hold out your hand and shut your eyes." It sounded like jewels. I leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes and extended my right hand in front of me, palm upward. I heard her pad into the bathroom. When she came back, her voice sounded strained as she whispered: "This is it, baby. Keep those eyes shut!" There was a smooth, tingling sensation across the tips of my fingers, then my right hand was suddenly warm and wet. I opened my eyes to see Arthurjean holding a stained safety-razor blade in her hand and staring at me, white-faced, as the blood trickled from my finger-tips. "Winnie—" she faltered, and slumped down in the divan. I hastily grabbed the handkerchief from my breast-pocket and wrapped it around my throbbing fingers. "Ouch! Damn you!" I exclaimed. "I'm sorry, baby," she whispered. "I didn't want to hurt you. It seemed the only way—" "You damned fool," I almost shouted at her. "Do you realize you flopped with that blade in your hand and might have cut an artery?" "No, did I?" She scrambled up hastily and looked around. "Gee, I feel lousy. Does it hurt much?" "Not yet. What's the big idea?" "Now you sound like Winnie," she replied. "He never got ideas easy. Listen, you big slob, if you've cut your fingers you got to have a bandage and if you got a bandage on your right hand, your signature's going to be screwy. All you need do is fumble it and I or one of the girls will witness it and the bank will clear it and you'll get the dough." I thought that one over. "You've got something in your head besides those big blue eyes," I admitted. "Now if you only have some iodine and bandages we'll see if I can stave off lock-jaw." She giggled. "Lock-jaw's the last thing you'll get," she said. "There ought to be something in the medicine cabinet. Gee," she added. "I suppose I'll have to get you undressed and dress you in the morning just like a baby. Ain't that something?" "How about some food?" I demanded. "You said something about a steak back at the office and all you've given me is Scotch and razor-blades. You get on with your cooking and let me try to fix my hand." I went into the bathroom, located some mercurochrome and a box of band aids. Once the flow of blood had slacked, I managed to incapacitate myself sufficiently for the purpose of forging Winnie Tompkins' signature. "Say, Winnie!" Arthurjean suddenly appeared at the bathroom door, with an aroma of steak behind her. "I've just figured out something. If you aren't Winnie but a ringer from the Aleutians, it's not decent for you to see me in my pyjamas. We're strangers!" "Oh, keep 'em on till after dinner," I said. "I won't stand on ceremony. I'm hungry." She laughed. "You sure can make like Winnie," she admired. "Jesus, the steak's burning!" <hr class="chap" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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