Free 1953 - The Sucker Punch by James Hadley Chase Page B

me."
    I certainly would leave it to her so long as she didn't put her seventy million dollars in a big sack and sink it in the ocean.
    "Well, all right, I'll come and see you tomorrow," I said, shrugging. "I'll come because I can't keep away from you. But let's forget about it, Vestal; at least we can be friends."
    The big ham on the radio had said that too.
    "You must leave this to me, Chad," she said and leaned towards me. "Kiss me, darling."
    Ugh!
    By the following afternoon the thing was settled.
    Vestal wasn't taking any chances. She had the whole thing cut and dried when I called on her just before lunch.
    I'm not going to say I was completely successful, but without raising her suspicions, I couldn't press for more.
    If it hadn't been for the fact that I was now obsessed with the idea of getting complete control of those seventy million dollars, I should have considered I had done pretty well for myself. As it was I drove back to my apartment, slightly dissatisfied and feeling I hadn't played my cards as well as I might.
    I stretched out on my bed and thought it over.
    She must have been damned eager to marry me. Knowing her reputation for meanness, her offer was really handsome, and as I have already said, if it hadn't been for those seventy million dollars that were haunting me, I should have been completely set back on my heels by her generosity.
    She proposed to give me complete control of the quarter of a million she had already agreed to put at my disposal for investment purposes. She realized, she went on, that I wouldn't want to accept the money as a gift, and to get around that difficulty she proposed to regard it as a loan. To make me easy in mind (those were her words, not mine) I should pay her the usual bank interest on the loan, but any profit I might make investing the money should go to me instead of to her.
    That was fair enough. It was a bit of a letdown that she imagined I was so high minded that I wouldn't have accepted a loan without paying interest, but there it was.
    A quarter of a million wasn't bad for a start. She then proposed that I should open offices and take over the whole of her affairs. She didn't want me to work office hours or anything like that. I was to engage a competent staff and I should just keep check on them; a couple of hours a day or something like that. The rest of the time (heaven help me!) I was to spend with her.
    Having control of her estate meant that I should be able to make a nice income on the side for myself. It also meant that although I wouldn't have complete control of those seventy millions it would be possible to use them as stock and long term as securities against loans.
    With Blakestone to help me, I should be making money far before long.
    As a start it wasn't bad.
    Vestal was in a tearing hurry to get married. Maybe she imagined I would change my mind. She fixed the date for the ceremony to take place in fourteen days’ time.
    I wanted a quiet wedding, but she wouldn't hear of it. This was her moment, and she wasn't going to be cheated out of it. She was determined to show the world that she had landed a fine handsome young husband, and the wedding was planned on fantastically lavish scale.
    There were to be more than a thousand guests. Where she had dug up all the names from I'll never know. There were to be; fancy dress ball, four bands, a ballet on the lawn and fireworks and decorations that ran into thousands of dollars, and the honeymoon (heaven help me!), was to be on her luxury motor cruise in Venice.
    The cruiser was sent off to Italy right away, and we were travel by air after the reception, picking up the cruiser at Naples and then going on to Venice.
    The thought of spending six weeks with Vestal on a motor cruiser was something that haunted me, but I couldn't see any way of dodging it.
    Luckily for me Vestal was so busy arranging the wedding, didn't see too much of her during the next fourteen days.
    If she had a lot to do, so had I.
    I found