The Devil To Pay Read Online Free

did you let me run this party today?” she cried. “All that money going to waste!”
    “I never thought I’d live to see the day,” said Pink lightly, “when Val Jardin would start squeezing the buffalo.”
    “Do we have to give up the Malibu place, the house in Santa Monica?” asked Val with difficulty.
    “Now don’t worry, puss—”
    “This—this house, too?”
    “You never liked it, anyway.”
    Val cradled her father’s head in her arms. “Darling, you’ll have to give up your yachting and golf clubs and things and go to work. How will you like that?”
    The big man made a face. “We can realize a lot of money from the real estate and the furnishings—”
    “And we’ll get rid of Mrs. Thomson and the housemaids and Roxie—”
    “No, Val!”
    “Yes. And of course Pink will have to go—”
    “Nuts,” said Pink again.
    Val became quiet and sat back in the swing, sucking her lower lip. After a while Walter said uncomfortably: “I know my anti-holding-company cartoons didn’t help Ohippi, Mr. Jardin. But you understand—Newspapermen can’t—”
    Jardin laughed. “If I listened to your advice rather than your father’s we’d all be a lot better off.”
    “The lousy part of it is,” grunted Pink, “that your old man could still save Ohippi. Only he won’t. There ought to be a law!”
    “What do you mean?” asked Walter slowly.
    Pink waved his arms. “Well, he cleaned up, didn’t he? Why shouldn’t he—”
    “My father cleaned up?”
    “Keep quiet, Pink,” said Rhys.
    “Just a moment. I’ve a right to know!”
    “It’s not important any more, Walter,” said Rhys mildly. “Forget it.”
    “Forget your grandmother!” yelled Pink. “Go on, tell him about that cat-fight you had with Spaeth this morning!”
    Jardin shrugged. “You know, your father and I were equal partners. Whenever he arranged to form a new holding company—he created seven before the government stepped in—the corporation would retain control of the common stock and put the remaining forty-nine percent on the market. The preferred stock we held back, splitting share and share alike.”
    “Yes?” said Walter.
    “Pop. Don’t,” said Val, looking at Walter’s face.
    “Go on, Mr. Jardin.”
    “Knowing nothing about these things, I trusted your father and Ruhig completely. Ruhig advised me to hold on to my preferred—it did seem wise, because the basic Ohippi plants were perfectly sound. Secretly, however, through agents, your father sold his preferred as the companies were created. And now, with all the stockholders caught, he’s sitting back there with a fortune.”
    “I see,” said Walter; he was pale. “And he led me to believe—”
    “With the dough he’s made,” raved Pink, “he could rebuild those power plants and put ’em on their feet again. We got some rights, ain’t we? We—”
    “You lost money, too?”
    Rhys Jardin winced. “I’m afraid I sucked in a lot of my friends—in my early innocence.”
    “Excuse me,” said Walter, and he rose and went down the terrace steps into the rain.
    “Walter!” cried Val, flying after him. “Please!”
    “You go on back,” said Walter, without stopping.
    “No!”
    “This is my business. Go back.”
    “Just the same,” said Val breathlessly, “I’m coming.”
    She clung to his arm all the way around the pool and up the rocky slope to the Spaeth house.
    Val remained nervously on the Spaeth terrace. “Walter, please don’t do anything that—” But it was half a whisper, and Walter was already stalking through the glass doors into his father’s study.
    Mr. Solomon Spaeth sat at his oval desk, the picture of baronial gravity, shaking his head a little at the rapid-fire questions of a crowd of newspapermen. His reading glasses rested on the middle of his fat nose, and with his paunch and thin gray hair and sober air he did not remotely resemble the devil and worse that the stockholders at the gate were calling him.
    “Gentlemen,