Read Online Gold Comes in Bricks by A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) - Free Book Online Page B

that.”
    “What?”
    “Leave me.”
    “Come down to earth, then.”
    She drew up her feet and hugged her knees, her heels resting on the edge of the cushion. “Donald,” she said, “tell me what you’ve been doing, how you found out about well, you know.”
    I shook my head. “You don’t want to know anything about me.”
    “Why?”
    “It wouldn’t be healthy.”
    “Then why do you want to know about me?”
    “So I can help you.”
    “You’ve done enough already.”
    “I haven’t even started yet.”
    “Donald, there’s nothing you can do.”
    “What did Ringold have on you?”
    “Nothing, I tell you.”
    I kept my eyes on her. She fidgeted uneasily. After a while, I said, “Somehow you never impressed me as being the sort who would lie. Somehow I gathered the impression that you hated liars.”
    “I do,” she said.
    I kept quiet.
    “It’s none of your business,” she went on after a while.
    I said, “Some day the cops are going to ask me questions. If I know what not to tell them, I won’t give anything away, but if I don’t know what not to tell them, I may say the wrong thing. Then they’ll start in on you.”
    She sat silent for several seconds, then she said, “I got in an awful scrape.”
    “Tell me about it.”
    “It probably isn’t what you think it is.”
    “I’m not even thinking.”
    She said, “I took a cruise last summer down to the South Seas. There was a man on the boat. I liked him very much, and— Well, you know how it is.”
    I said, “Lots of young women have taken cruises to the South Seas, found lots of men whom they liked very much, and still didn’t pay thirty thousand dollars after they got home.”
    “This man was married.”
    “What did his wife say?”
    “I didn’t ever know her. He wrote me. His letters were —they were love letters.”
    I said, “I don’t know how much time we have. The more you waste, the less we have left.”
    “I wasn’t really in love with him. It was a cruise flirtation. The moonlight got me, I guess.”
    “Your first one?”
    “Of course not. I’ve taken cruises. That’s why girls sail on cruises. Sometimes you meet a man whom you really love— That is, I suppose you do. Girls have. They’ve married and lived happily ever after.”
    “But you haven’t?”
    “No.”
    “But you played around?”
    “Well, you try to show yourself a good time. You can tell after the first two or three days if there’s anyone on hoard for whom you’re apt to care a lot. Usually you find someone who’s attractive enough for a flirtation. But you’re not flirting with him. You’re flirting with romance.”
    “This man was married?”
    “Yes.”
    “And he’s separated from his wife?”
    “No. He told me later he was taking a matrimonial vacation while she was taking one of her own.”
    “What was hers?”
    “I have my doubts about that, too. She was working for a big oil company which had interests in China. She had to go over to wind up the books when they were closing the Shanghai branch.”
    “Why the suspicions?”
    “The big boss also went over. He was on the same boat. She was sweet on him.”
    “Then what?”
    She said, “Honestly, Donald, there were some things about him I didn’t like—definitely. And there were other things that appealed to me very much. He enjoyed himself so much. He was—fun.”
    “You came back. You still didn’t know he was married.”
    “That’s right.”
    “He told you he was single?”
    “Yes, definitely.”
    “Then what?”
    “Then he wrote me letters.”
    “You answered them?”
    “No. I’d found out he was married then.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “I’m coming to that in a minute.”
    “Why not tell me now?”
    “No. You’ll have to get the rest of the picture first.”
    “Was this man Ringold?”
    “Good Lord, no!”
    “All right.”
    “I wouldn’t answer his letters because I knew he was married, but I liked getting them. They were love letters —I told you