A Touch of Death (15 page)

The morning papers were on the stand. I reached for one, and she jumped right in my face. There was her picture spread over two columns of the front page, looking as beautiful and arrogant as life.

“SOUGHT!” the caption said.

I dropped a nickel in the cup and folded the paper over as if I had to hide her while I hurried into the coffee shop. I sat down alone at the end of the counter and said, “Hotcakes and coffee,” to the waitress without even seeing her.

So she was sought. I knew that. What about that deputy sheriff?

I unfolded the paper and put it on the counter beside me, in such a hurry to read it all that even the headlines blurred. Somebody was saying something.

I looked up. The waitress was still there.
“What?”
“I said did you want your coffee now?”
“Yes.”
She was gone. I looked back at the paper, furiously

scanning the headlines. It was under her picture. “OFFICER’S CONDITION CRITICAL,” it said. He wasn’t dead. But that was hours ago.

Carl L. Madden, 29, deputy sheriff of Vale County, is in serious condition in a Mount Temple hospital following an attack by an unknown assailant last night.

Madden, who has not regained consciousness following the brutal slugging, was on duty at the time as one of the officers maintaining a round-the-clock watch on the home of the late

J. N. Butler at the edge of town. As a result of the sudden eruption of violence and confusion that followed, during which the old Butler mansion burned to the ground, Madden was not discovered until nearly an hour after the attack. Police were first alerted by telephone calls from residents in the vicinity of the Butler place, who reported

having heard gunshots. A patrol car was dispatched to the scene. Upon entering the grounds, the officers

discovered the whole basement area of the house in flames. A hurried call brought firemen to the scene, but the fire had gained too much headway and could not be brought under control.

The absence of Madden was noted shortly by other officers who were aware he had been assigned to keep the home under surveillance against the possible return of Mrs. Butler. This, coupled with the reports of gunshots, led to a horrified belief he might be inside the building, perhaps badly injured. An attempt was made to gain entry and institute a search, but was repulsed almost immediately as mounting walls of flame engulfed the old, tinder-dry house.

As the flames lit up the surrounding area, however, he was discovered unconscious and shackled with his own handcuffs to the base of some oleanders at the rear of the grounds. Taken immediately to a hospital, he was described by physicians as suffering from severe concussion and possible fracture of the skull.

He had apparently been hit from behind with great force with some hard object, such as a piece of pipe or a gun. No weapon was found.

Local officers are inclined to rule out the possibility that Madden could have been slugged by Mrs. Butler herself. They state that from the force of the blow it was almost certainly delivered by a man, and a big and perhaps powerful one, at that. They do believe, however, that Mrs. Butler was involved, and the state-wide search for her has been intensified. She is already wanted in connection with the murder of her husband.

An instant alarm was sounded, and all highways leading out of Mount Temple have been under constant patrol since minutes after the fire was discovered. It is considered extremely improbable that she could have slipped through the police cordon....

I looked up. “What?”
It was the waitress again. “Here’s your coffee.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“They publish those papers ever’ day,” she said, “That

the first one you ever saw?” “I just got back from South America.” “Oh.” She glanced at the paper. “Pretty, isn’t she?” “Who?”

“Mrs. Butler. That’s her picture. She killed her husband and threw him in an old well. What do you suppose made her do it?”

I wished she would go away. “Maybe he snored,” I said.

It was nice. I’d been tied to Mrs. Butler like a Siamese twin for over twenty-four hours, but a waitress in an airport greasy-spoon had to tell me where they’d found her husbands body.

“No,” the waitress went on, answering her own question, “I’ll tell you. He was triflin’ on her. That’s the way it always is. A woman kills her husband, its because he was tomcattin’ around. You men are all triflers.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll shoot myself. But could I have the hotcakes first?”

She went away. Maybe she would break a leg, or forget to come back. I jerked my eyes back to the paper, feverishly looking for the place where I’d been interrupted. I found it. It was at the bottom of the page. “See Butler, page four,” it said.

I flipped the pages, goaded with impatience. I overshot page four and had to back up. Here it was.

No theory has been advanced as to why the house was set afire. A landmark in the county since the early 1890’s, it was totally destroyed. Only a chimney and a portion of one wall remained at an early hour this morning.

Police are also at a loss to explain the shots heard by neighbors. Maddens gun, found nearby, had not been fired. A constant vigil is being maintained at his bedside in the hope that a return to consciousness may clear up some of the deep pall of mystery that hangs over the whole affair. It is hoped he may have seen his assailant before he was slugged.

Mrs. Butler has been sought by police since the discovery of the body of her husband, vice-president of the First National Bank of Mount Temple, in an abandoned well near their summer camp on Crystal Springs Lake, 15 miles east of Mount Temple. Police, acting on a tip by two small boys, discovered the body of the missing banker a little over twenty-four hours ago, ending a nationwide search that began June 8, when he disappeared, allegedly absconding with $120,000 of the bank’s funds.

No trace of the money was found with the body.

I closed the paper. The waitress brought the hot-cakes and said something I didn’t catch. She went away. I forgot the hotcakes.

He was still alive four hours ago. No, it was less than that. The story had said “at an early hour this morning.” He would live. He had to. He was young, wasn’t he? Twenty-nine was young enough to take a thing like a broken skull.

It hadn’t been real before, when I’d heard about it from the filling-station boy. It was only a rumor. But there was something about seeing it in print that made it true.

I tried to sort out how I felt. There wasn’t any feeling about the man himself. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him. If he walked up and sat down beside me at the counter here right now I wouldn’t know him. He was completely faceless, like a thousand other people that died every day. You read about them. They were killed in automobile wrecks and they fell in bathtubs and broke their necks and they died of cancer and they fell off buildings and you read about them and then you turned

the page and read the funnies.

That wasn’t it.

It was that if he died, this wasn’t a game I could quit when I got the money. I’d never be able to quit.

This thing was like a swamp. Every time you moved, you sank into it a little deeper. I remembered how simple it had been at first. All I had to do was search an empty house. If I found the money, I was rich. If I didn’t, I was out two days’ work. That was all. It didn’t cost anything.

“There’ll be no wild-haired babes blowing their tops and killing each other in anything I’m mixed up in,” I had told Diana James. It was a business proposition.

And now Diana James was dead. And a cop was in the hospital with a broken skull. If he died, I had killed him.

I didn’t want the hotcakes now, but I had to eat them. If I walked out and left them, the waitress would notice me some more. She would remember me. “Sure, officer. That’s right. A big guy, blond, kind of a scrambled face. Something was bothering him, he acted funny.” I ate the hotcakes.

A plane had come in and the limousine was leaving for downtown. I went out and got in it. It made a stop at one of the beach hotels, about five blocks from the apartment building. I left it there and went into tbe lobby. A later edition of the morning paper was on the stand. I bought one, but the Butler story was unchanged.

I walked the five blocks. The air was fresh with early morning now and there was a faint tinge of pink in the east as I turned the corner at the building. No one saw me. I walked up instead of taking the elevator.

The lamp was still on in the living room, but she wasn’t there.

The bottle was on the coffee table, empty. Well, there’d been only about three drinks in it. As exhausted as she was, they’d probably knocked her out. The door to the hallway on the left was closed. She had gone to bed.

I stood looking around the living room. Had she gone to bed? You never knew what she’d do. Diana James was dead now because I hadn’t known. Maybe she had left. She had a thousand dollars in her purse and she was tough enough, and disliked me enough, to take a chance on it alone just to keep me from getting my hands on the money in those safe-deposit boxes. She’d do it for spite.

I walked softly across the deep-piled rug and eased the door open. Inside it, on the left, the door to the bathroom was ajar, but the bedroom door at the other end of the short hallway was closed. I put my hand on the knob. It was locked on the inside. She was there.

I went back and sat down on the sofa. I took the wallet out of my pocket and removed the three keys. I placed them in a row on the glass top of the coffee table and just looked at them.

I forgot everything else. They were a wonderful sight.

Here it was. I had it made. Nothing remained except a little waiting. The money was where it was perfectly safe, where no one in the world could get it except her. And I had her. When she woke up I’d take that thousand dollars out of her purse so there’d be nc chance of her skipping out on me. I should have thought of that before. She couldn’t go anywhere without money.

Nobody would ever know I had it. Nobody, that is, except her, and she couldn’t talk. There was nothing to

connect me with it. And I had better sense than to start throwing it around and attracting attention. They’d never trip me that way. I’d be a long way from here before any of it got back into circulation.

But there were still a few angles to be figured out. I thought of them. What was I going to do with it while I was taking her to California? I had to take her—not because I’d promised, but simply because I had to do it to be safe myself. If I left her to shift for herself once I got the money, she’d be picked up by the police sooner or later, because she was too hot in this area. And if they got her, she’d talk.

But what did I do with the money while we were driving out there? If I tried to take it in the car, there’d always be the chance she would get her hands on it and run. It would take at least five days. Any hour, day or night, she might outguess me and take the pot. She was smart. And she was tough, and she might not be too fussy how she got it back. She could pick up a gun in some hock shop and let me have it in the back of the head out on the desert in New Mexico or Arizona.

No, I had to leave it here. The thing to do was get a couple of safe-deposit boxes of my own, transfer the stuff right into them, and leave it until I came back from the Coast. I could sell the car out there and fly back. It would take only a day to pick it up and be on my way.

I was tired. I put the keys back in the wallet and shoved it in my pocket. Switching off the light, I lay back on the sofa. Faint bars of light were beginning to show through the Venetian blinds. It was nearly dawn.

I dropped off to sleep....

I was running down a street that had no end. It was night, but there was a light on every other corner. Far behind me somebody else was running. I could hear his footsteps pounding after me, but I could never see him. The single, empty street stretched away to infinity behind me, and ahead. I ran. And when I slowed I could hear him behind me, running. There was nobody, but I could hear him.

I was covered with sweat, and shaking. It was light in the room and little bars of sunlight slanted in through the partly opened Venetian blinds. She was sitting across from me on an overstuffed chair, dressed in her pajamas and the blue robe.

She was smiling. “You moan a lot in your sleep,” she said.

I rubbed my hands across my face. I sat up. The shaking stopped. It was only a dream. But that endless, empty street was still burned into my mind as if it had been put there with a branding iron.

“What time is it?” I asked.

She looked at her watch. “A little after ten.”

“How long have you been up?”

“About an hour,” she said. “Were you having a

nightmare?”

“No,” I said. I got off the sofa and went into the kitchen. There was a little coffee in a can in one of the cupboards. I filled the percolator with water, put the coffee in, and set it on a burner on the stove. If she’d been awake an hour it was a wonder she hadn’t done something about it herself. But maybe being waited on by servants all your life got to be a habit.

I went back to the living room. “How about taking the coffee off when it’s done?” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Are you going somewhere?” she asked, with faint interest.

“I’m going to take a shower. And shave.”

She looked at me with distaste. “Perhaps it would help.”

I had started for the bathroom, but I stopped now and turned around. She got a little hard to take, and if we were going to be here for a month or longer we really should work out some sort of plan for getting along together.

“We can’t all be beautiful, Your Highness,” I said. “So before we go any further, let’s get a few things straightened out. You’re here because you’re hiding from the cops. If they catch you they’re going to put you away

where you can spend the next forty years scrubbing floors and trying to fight off the Lesbians. This is my apartment. I’m not your servant. I outweigh you by about a hundred pounds. I don’t like you. I’d just as soon slap your supercilious face loose as look at you. You can’t yell for help because you’re not supposed to be in here.