The Devil To Pay Read Free Page A

bungalow-villa on the Santa Monica Palisades always seethed with people, so Sans Souci ’s promise of privacy attracted her.
    The second house was occupied by a male star with a passion for Dandie Dinmonts, whose barking made life a continuous agony until their owner suddenly married an English peeress who carried him and his beasts off to dazzle the British cinema public, leaving the house happily unoccupied except for brief annual visits.
    The third house was tenanted for a time by a foreign motion picture director who promptly had an attack of delirium tremens at the edge of the pool; so that worked out beautifully, because he was whisked off to a sanitarium and never returned.
    The fourth house had never been occupied at all. That is, until Solly Spaeth bought it from the bank “to be nearer my associate,” as he beamingly told Valerie, “your worthy and charming father.” And when the insufferable Solly moved in, Walter moved in, too.
    There was the rub. Walter moved in. The creature was so inconsistent . He didn’t have to live there. In fact, he had been living alone in a furnished room in Los Angeles until his father took the Sans Souci estate. The Spaeths didn’t get along—small wonder, considering Walter’s ideas! But suddenly it was peaches and cream between them—for a whole week, anyway—with Solly bestowing his oleaginous benediction and Walter accepting it glumly and moving right in, drawing board, economic theories, and all. And there he was, only yards away at any given hour of the day or night, making life miserable… preaching, criticizing her charge accounts and décolletage and the cut of her bathing suits, fighting with his father like an alley cat, drawing inflammatory cartoons for the Independent under the unpleasant nom de guerre of W ASP , heatedly lecturing Rhys Jardin for his newly assumed “utilities overlordship,” whatever that meant, scowling at poor Pink and insulting Tommy and Dwight and Joey and all the other nice boys who kept hopefully bouncing back to Sans Souci … until she was so angry she almost didn’t want to return his kisses— when he kissed her, which wasn’t often; and then only, as he hatefully expressed it, “in a moment of animal weakness.”
    And when Winni Moon came to live at the Spaeth house as Solly’s “protégée,” with her beastly beribboned chimp and a rawboned Swedish chaperon who was supposed to be her aunt—you would have thought a self-respecting moralist would move out then . But no, Walter hung on; and Valerie even suspected the impossible Winni of having designs on her benefactor’s son, from certain signs invisible to the Spaeths but quite clear to the unprejudiced female eye.
    Sometimes, in the sacred privacy of her own rooms, Valerie would confide in little Roxie, her Chinese maid. “Do you know what?” she would say furiously.
    “Yisss,” Roxie would say, combing out Val’s hair.
    “It’s fantastic . I’m in love with the beast, damn him!”
    Walter leaned on his horn until Frank, the day man, unlocked the gate. The crowd in the road was silent with a rather unpleasant silence. Five State troopers stood beside their motorcycles before Sans Souci , looking unhappy. One little man with the aura of a tradesman leaned glassy-eyed on the shaft of a homemade sign which said: “Pity The small Invester.” The crowd was composed of tradespeople, white-collar workers, laborers, small-business men. That, thought Walter grimly, accounted for the inactivity of the troopers; these solid citizens weren’t the usual agitating mob. Walter wondered how many of the five troopers had also lost money in Ohippi.
    Driving through the gate and hearing Frank quickly clang it shut, Walter felt a little sick. These people knew him by now, and the name he bore. He did not blame them for glaring at him. He would not have blamed them if they had tossed the troopers aside and broken down the fence. He ran his six-cylinder coupé around to the Jardin