said, “then there isn’t anything Sutton can do. The whole thing was an accident—“
She shook her head wearily. “You don’t know Sutton, Harry. He came back a week later and got two hundred dollars more. Don’t you see? He knew it wasn’t my money I’d given him the first time, so now he had me there too.
And he was sure I was coward enough to keep on paying him to keep that ugly story from coming out. Don’t you see the suspicion there’d always be if people knew? Maybe it was an accident. And maybe it wasn’t.”
She was right. It was sweet, and it was murder. Sutton had it figured from start to finish. And now he’d gouged her for over fifteen hundred dollars, adding a little at a time, so she could never get it all paid back. The only way she could cover it up was with phony loans which called for interest, so trying to whittle down the actual shortage, with this interest and Sutton’s continued bites, was like trying to swim upstream over Niagara.
I gathered her up and kissed her. “All right, you can quit worrying about it. There won’t be any more ‘loans’ to Sutton. And between the two of us we can put every nickel of it back and have the books straight in less than three months.”
I wasn’t as optimistic about it as I sounded, but I wanted to get the load off her mind right then, so she could get some rest.
“But, Harry, I’ve got to go to Mr. Harshaw—“
“No, honey,” I said. “You can’t. Don’t you see, with his heart in the shape it’s in, you can’t tell him anything like that now? When it’s all over and we’re square with the world you can tell him if you want, but I don’t see any sense in it. Actually, he’ll have been making money on it at around three per cent per month for a year, so he should kick.”
“But—“ she protested, “there isn’t any reason for you to get mixed up in it—paying it back, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can think of one. Maybe I mentioned it before. I’m in love with you.”
For the first time, she smiled. It wasn’t much, and she had to work at it awfully hard, but it was there and to me it looked like the sun coming up.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s look for tear stains. I’m going to take you home, and I don’t want your sister to think I’ve been beating you.”
I switched on the light, and she repaired the damage.
While she was poking around in her purse, something fell out of it, bounced once on the seat, and fell on to the floor mat. I groped around for it and found it for her. It was a money clasp, apparently of sterling silver and made in the shape of a dollar sign.
“Say that’s a pretty thing,” I said.
“My mother gave it to me when I graduated from high school.”
I handed it back to her and she dropped it into her purse. “We can be married any time,” I said. “We’ve already got our silver started.”
She laughed, and finished rubbing out the tear stains. She felt a lot better, and I kept on clowning so she wouldn’t know the way I was raging inside.
* * *
When I left her at the gate it was like pulling off an arm to let her go, but I was anxious to get started before she thought to ask me what I was going to do. I didn’t want to lie to her any more than I had to, and I knew she’d be frantic and try to make me promise if she got an inkling of what was going on in my mind.
When I got over on Main I stopped under a street light and got out and opened the trunk. I found what I was looking for, and threw them in the front seat. They were a pair of leather gloves I’d won on a punchboard one time and kept in the car for changing tires. They were leather all over, very thick and tough. For a job like this they’d save your hands almost as well as having them taped.
I was doing seventy by the time I got out of town. I’d forgotten about Tate and the Sheriff and the fact that they were still keeping an eye on me. If they tried to follow me, they got lost. I had to