Free All The Way by Charles Williams Page B

able to prove it, but that she’d actually helped prove it couldn’t have been Marian.
    ”If she’s only twenty-three,” I said, “she has a long and interesting life ahead of her, trying to figure that one out.”
    “Yes, doesn’t she?”
    We went back to work. While she was gone to get the sandwiches at noon I suddenly remembered what day it was. This was the eighth. I looked up florists in the phone book, called one, and ordered two dozen roses. It was around four o’clock and we were still busy with Coral Blaine when the doorbell rang. I beat her to it, paid the delivery boy, and brought them in.
    She glanced up as I put the long carton on the coffee table before her. “Flowers? Why?”
    “Happy birthday,” I said.
    She shook her head chidingly. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Then she opened the box, and exclaimed, “They’re beautiful, Jerry. But how did you know it was my birthday?”
    “Your driver’s license,” I replied.
    “Snoopy.” She filled a vase with water and put them on the phonograph console at the other end of the room. She admired them for a moment, and then came over and put her arms about my neck.
    She smiled. “Dear Jerry, the indefatigable chaser of old streetcars he’s already caught.”
    It was no use, I thought. She was impervious; nothing could get through to her, no gesture of any kind. She’d had it. Then I wondered if I even knew myself what I was trying to tell her. It seemed to be all mixed up.
    We went back to work.

Six
    She did some shopping the next morning, and left for Nassau around eleven. The minute she closed the door behind her, the apartment became almost achingly empty.
    I assembled everything on the coffee table, and looked at it. Except for his identification, his clothes, and his car, here was Harris Chapman—seven rolls of tape, boxed, numbered, and indexed; horn-rim glasses; cigarette holder; the insipid filter cigarettes he smoked; the map of Thomaston she’d drawn with street names, locations of his businesses and his office, and an appended list of some twenty telephone numbers; three documents containing specimens of his signature, which had come from the old briefcase; and the bottle of gunk for lightening the dark shade of my hair and the sprouting mustache.
    This latter wasn’t really dye, she said, and if I didn’t use too much of it there wouldn’t be any noticeable artificial effect, but rather like that of brown hair bleached down a few shades by the sun. I went into the bathroom, combed in a light application of it, and started practicing the signature. When my wrist was tired, I loaded the recorder with the first roll of tape, and turned it on. Her voice issued from the loudspeaker, and when I closed my eyes she seemed to be there in the room. I forced myself to concentrate.
    When my brain was numb from memorizing, I went back to the signature again. I found I didn’t have as much talent for forgery as I did for mimicry, but after several hundred attempts I could see definite improvement. I kept at it. After a while I tried breaking it down into individual letters and writing each one hundreds of times to correct my errors. Around seven I walked over three or four blocks to a restaurant for dinner, and came back and worked until midnight. When I turned out the light, she was all around me in the darkness.
    The next day was Sunday. I worked from seven a.m. till midnight with only brief periods out for food, attacking the job with intense concentration to keep her out of my mind. I was closing in on him. Whole sections of those five hours of recorded data were stamped into my mind intact. I could see him now, and feel him, and there was no longer even any need to practice his speech. The signature was improving. I went on writing it, hour after hour, and listening to the tapes. It was harder than I had ever worked at anything in my life. When I went to bed I was dizzy with fatigue.
    She had left me five hundred dollars in cash. On Monday