Sinful Woman Read Free Page B

wants for the sarong trade. Since Phoenix wouldn’t do the right thing by me I did the right thing by it, and picked up a few shares that Dimmy forgot about, enough to give me control. So next week you and Dimmy and me are all out, and Phoenix gets sold to Metro or Warners or whichever company it is that wants to buy it. And all three of us are free, or will be. Isn’t that nice?”
    Vicki looked as though he had been hit with some singularly horrible nagaika. He winced, closed his eyes, breathed deeply. Then: “Sylvia! Why do you thees to me?”
    “Why you do that, and them, and those, to me? ”
    “I do notting to you! Only lahve you!”
    “I think you’ve forgotten that little contract we signed together, with the extra page in that I swear I never saw until later, the one that gave me to Dimmy for seven years, with no way I could get out of it if he kept on paying me the miserable little salary it allowed me. And that gave you a great big salary as producer of my pictures, although the only thing you had ever produced up to then was girls for Dimmy’s parties. Do you remember about that? Do you remember how I begged you for a release from that dreadful contract?”
    “Sylvia, why we no make new dill?”
    “It’s impossible, Vicki.”
    “We ’ave soch fine, big plan for you—”
    “I wouldn’t sign with you and Dimmy if you were the last producers on earth. And just so neither one of you try any tricks with the S-S Corporation, that nice little dummy company you got me to organize, I might as well tell you I haven’t got that stock I bought, not one share of it. It was bought for Hazel, and it’s all in her name, and there’s no way Phoenix can be saved, or you and Dimmy can be saved, or I can be made to work for you!”
    “Sylvia! You brek me ’eart.”
    “However, enough of that. Who’s the bride?”
    “Is girl I met. Nize girl.”
    “She lives here.”
    “Lil while only.”
    “Ah, the divorce question again?”
    “Si and so and sa.”
    “Do I know her?”
    “Shoon be surprise.”
    “ ... I do?”
    “Is Hezzel. Is your seester Hezzel.”

Chapter Three
    S HE HAD BEEN HOLDING her glass up to the light, watching the bubbles drift up the stem, but now set it down. Then she stared at Vicki as if she were trying to realize what he had said, to sort it into its various implications, to grasp what it meant. He, his face momentarily in repose, his eye everywhere but on her, seemed to have changed a little; the glow had left him, and he suggested still another characteristic of the Middle Europe that had produced him: a capacity for slippery schemes, not prosecuted in offices, where Americans cut throats, but in the boudoirs of women and other haunts of the helpless. His dark good looks were quite sinister under her stare, and he merely shrugged when she burst out: “Vicki, you can’t seriously mean what you say?”
    “Min? Sure, I min. Hezzel nize girl.”
    “You must be—gagging or something. You can’t go through with it and face what hell will have waiting for you.”
    “Hell? Can be. Who knows?”
    He was distressed but vague, and she stood up, the tears glittering in her eyes. “I don’t speak of myself. I suppose it was too much to hope for, that I could get rid of you and Dimmy and Phoenix all in one day. But why did you have to pick on Hazel? You know she’s practically an institutional case right now? You know—”
    “Then why you no take her to court?”
    “In other words, if she’s not herself, then I ought to have put her away. And if she is herself, she’s perfectly free to marry you, and the stock is yours, and I’m yours, to make sarong pictures as long as Dimmy tells me to—and then you’ll have her put away.”
    “But, I lahve her, Sylvia! I—”
    One pretty fist caught him in the mouth, and its fluttering throb gave way to a tight pursing, as he touched it with his handkerchief to see if it was cut. She began to stride up and down with a slow, feline glide. As