The eyes looked me over without any particular enthusiasm. She said, “I see. You’re a relative. You hope that some day auntie will kick off and leave you the dough. In the meantime, she wants to play around and use it up. You don’t like that. Is that right?”
“That,” I said, “is not right. I don’t ever want a dime of her money. I just want her to be sure what she’s getting into. If she wants to marry this fellow on her own, that’s all right by me. But apparently he’s blackmailing her. He has something on her. I don’t know what it is. Probably it’s something serious. I think he’s convinced her that she could be called as a witness against him or he could be called as a witness against her on some kind of a criminal action, but I wouldn’t be knowing about it.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Listen in on her telephone tomorrow morning.”
“Nothing doing.”
I said, “You listen in on the switchboard when she talks with this chap. If they’re billing and cooing, that’s quite all right by me. I step out of the picture. But if he’s holding something over her head or talking about a crime, I want to know about it. There’s one hundred bucks in it for you.”
“That,” she admitted, “is different. How do I know there’s a hundred bucks in it for me?”
“Because,” I said, “you get the hundred bucks right now. It’s easier for us to take a chance on you than for you to take a chance on us.”
She said, “It would cost me my job if anyone knew about it.”
“No one,” I said, “will ever know about it.”