Hard Cash by Max Allan Collins Page A

She wasn’t an annoying drunk to be around at all.
    Unless you were married to her.
    He was standing in his living room, Manhattan in hand, listening to his vice-president at the bank, Shep Jackson, rattle on about local politics. Jackson was a younger version of Rigley: smooth, dark-haired, tan, handsome, and handsomely dressed in a gray tailored suit. Rigley hated him for it. Jackson was the man the board had hand-picked to replace Rigley, and both men knew it and pretended they didn’t.
    And Rigley wasn’t really listening to Jackson, either. He was pretending about that too.
    What he redly was doing was watching his wife circulate through the small crowd (eight couples who all had season tickets for the Broadway Series at the University of Iowa’s Hancher Hall in Iowa City; it was their ritual to gather at the Rigleys’ for a cocktail party in the late afternoon and then drive, two couples to a car, to the play and have a late dinner out afterwards), and he marveled at how good she looked, for as much as she drank.
    Her face, especially, looked good, but maybe that was just the face lift. The smooth skin enhanced the beauty of her large brown eyes and full mouth and small, sculpted nose. She looked something like Julie, as a matter of fact, except in Cora’s case the hair was honey yellow and thickly, if stylishly sprayed. Or he should say it the other way around, shouldn’t he—Julie looked like Cora. He’d picked Julie out because she looked like Cora had when he’d fallen in love with his wife-to-be over twenty-five years before.
    They had gone to high school together. A small, small town in northeastern Iowa. Her father was in the banking business. He was principal stockholder of three banks in various small farming communities in that area, and was a landowner, too; he had three or four farms (he was always selling and buying farms like somebody adding hotels in Monopoly) and lived in the biggest house in the county. Rigley’s father was a schoolteacher. So was his mother. Between the two of them, his parents brought in a good living, and Rigley never wanted for anything; he was definitely a boy born on the “right side of the tracks,” a cliché that rang true in their small town. Anyone born on the wrong side would be considered a social climber if he tried to date Cora Pierce.
    But that’s just what he’d been, secretly—a social climber. He knew no family fortune awaited him. He knew the limited benefits of schoolteaching were not for him. And he knew Cora Pierce had had her eye on him since the seventh grade, and so in high school he’d latched onto her and never let go.
    They went to the same college (Iowa State) and were married after their sophomore year. Cora dropped out at that point and got a job in a bank there in Ames, with her father’s help. Rigley resisted any of his father-in-law’s efforts to pay his way through school, however, knowing that (a) his own parents had saved enough to put him, their only child, through four years of college, and (b) he would want to call on old man Pierce for bigger and better things in the future, after establishing himself in the family eyes as “his own man” and a pillar of integrity.
    And old man Pierce had come through. He’d paid Rigley’s way through graduate school in the East (Wharton) and got him his first job, as installment loan officer in a big downtown Chicago bank. And then a vice-presidency at Port City, and finally the presidency, when he’d barely turned forty. Everything had turned out as he’d hoped.
    Except maybe the marriage itself.
    In the beginning, he had loved Cora. Or anyway he had convinced himself he did. It wasn’t hard to convince yourself you loved the wealthiest and most beautiful girl in the county. And Cora was all of that. She’d been homecoming queen and Representative Senior Girl back in high school. (He’d been Representative Senior Boy and most likely to succeed.) She was also valedictorian, whereas he