A Touch of Death (18 page)

He still hadn’t regained consciousness.

The rest of the story was the usual rehash, another description of Madelon Butler and the car, and more speculation as to what had become of the money Butler

stole. They didn’t believe she could have got out of the area with all the roads covered; she must be holed up somewhere inside the ring. They would get her. She was too eye-arresting to escape detection anywhere. And there was the Cadillac. I thought of the Cadillac, and grinned coldly as I sipped the coffee.

There was still no mention of Diana James, but that was understandable. Her body was in the basement, and the whole house had burned down on top of her. It had been only last night. They wouldn’t be poking around in the ruins yet. I didn’t like to think about it.

I went out. The streets were hot and the air was heavy and breathless, as if a storm were coming up. I could hear the rumble of thunder now and then above the sound of traffic. I didn’t have any idea where I was going until I found myself standing on the corner outside the marble-columned entrance. It was the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company.

There was a terrible fascination about it. I stood on the corner while the traffic light changed and a river of people flowed past and around me. It was inside there; it was safe, just waiting to be picked up. In my mind I could see the massive and circular underground door of the vault and the narrow passageways between rows of shiny metal honeycomb made up of thousands of boxes stacked and numbered from floor to ceiling. One of them was bulging with fat bundles of banknotes fastened around the middle with paper bands. And the key to the box was in my pocket.

Two blocks up, on the other side of the street, was the Third National. I could see it from here. Left at the next corner and three blocks south was the Merchants Trust Company. It wouldn’t take twenty minutes to cover the three of them. All she had to do was go down the stairs to the vault, sign the card, give her key to the attendant.

People were jostling me. Everybody was hurrying. Two teenage girls tried to shove past me. They looked at each other. One gave me a dirty look and said, “Maybe it’s something they started to build here.” They went on. I awoke then. It was raining.

I ran across the street and stood under an awning.

Water splashed down in sheets. There was no chance of getting back to the car without being soaked. I looked

around. The awning I was under was the front of a movie. I bought a ticket and went in without even looking to see what the picture was.

When I came out I still didn’t know, but the rain had stopped and it was dusk. Lights glistened on shiny black pavement and tires hissed in the street.

Newsboys were calling the late editions. I bought one and opened it.

The headline exploded in my face:

“YOUTH CONFESSES IN BUTLER SLAYING.”

It was four blocks back to the car, four blocks of feeling naked and trying not to run.

Youth confesses. What about Madelon Butler? But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t the big news. If they had

caught that blonde and her brother, they had a description of me.

I took the steps three at a time and let myself into the apartment. A light was on in the living room, but I didn’t see her anywhere. Then I heard her splashing in the bathroom. I dropped on the sofa and spread the paper open.

I put a cigarette in my mouth but forgot to light it.

Mount Temple. Aug. 6—A startling break in the investigation of the death of J. N. Butler came shortly after 2 P.M. today with the police announcement that Jack D. Finley, 22, of Mount Temple, had broken under questioning and admitted implication in the two-month-old slaying of the missing bank official, whose body was discovered Tuesday afternoon.

Finley, ashen-faced and sobbing, named Mrs. Madelon Butler, the victim’s attractive widow, as the mastermind behind the sordid crime.

I stopped and lit the cigarette. It was about the way I’d had it figured. Finley was the fall guy. I went on, reading fast.

Finley, who was taken into custody early this morning on a country road some 50 miles southeast of here by officers investigating a tip that a car answering the description of Mrs. Butler’s had been seen in the vicinity, at first maintained his innocence, despite his inability to explain what he and his sister, Charisse, 27, were doing in the area. Both had tried to flee at sight of the officers’ car.

Later, however, when confronted with the fact that other members of the posse had found Mrs. Butler’s Cadillac abandoned at a fishing camp at the end of the road on which they were walking, Finley broke and admitted being an accessory to the slaying.

Mrs. Butler and an unidentified male companion had taken his car at gunpoint and fled early the night before, he said. Police have broadcast a complete description of the stranger.

Well, there it was. I dropped the paper in my lap and sat staring across the room. But it wasn’t hopeless. They still didn’t have anything but a description. The only person who knew who I was was Diana James, and she was dead.

I started to pick up the paper again. Madelon Butler came in. She was dressed in the skirt and blouse she’d had on last night, and was wearing nylons and bedroom slippers. She switched on the radio and sat down.

Glancing at the paper in my lap, she asked, “Is there anything interesting in the news?” “You might call it interesting,” I said. “Take a look.” I tossed it to her. She raised it and looked at the glaring headline. “Oh?” “Look,” I said, “they just captured your boyfriend. Is that all you’ve got to say? Just oh?”

She shrugged. “Don’t you think I might be pardoned for a slight lack of concern? After all, he tried to kill me. And he wasn’t my boyfriend, anyway.”

“He wasn’t? Then how in hell did he get mixed up in it?” “He was in love with Cynthia Cannon. Or Diana James, as you call her.” “In love with Diana James? But I don’t see—” She smiled. “It does seem incredible, doesn’t, it? But I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes.”

“Cut it out!” I said. I felt as if my head were about to fly off. “Will you answer my question? Or hand me back that paper? I’d like to know at least as much about this as several million other people do by now.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” The radio came on then, blaring jazz. She shuddered and reached for the knob. “Excuse me.”

She turned the dial and some long-hair music came on. She adjusted the volume, kicked off her mules, and curled her legs up under her in the chair. Lighting a cigarette, she leaned back contentedly.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? Don’t you love Debussy at this time of day?”

“No,” I said. “Which one of you killed Butler?”

Her eyes had a faraway look in them as she listened to the music. “I did,” she said.

She was utterly calm. There was no remorse in it, or anger, or anything else. Butler was dead. She had killed him. Like that.

“Why?” I asked. “For the money?”

“No. Because I hated him. And I hated Cynthia Cannon. You don’t mind if I refer to her by her right name, do you?”

I was just getting more mixed up all the time. “Then you mean the money didn’t have anything to do with it? But still you’ve got it?”

She smiled a little coldly. “You still attach too much importance to money. I didn’t say it didn’t have anything to do with it. It had some significance. I killed both of them because I hated them, and the money was one of the reasons I did hate them. You see, actually, he wasn’t

stealing it from the bank. He was stealing it from me.”

I stared. “From you!”

“That’s right. Both of them were quite clever. He was going to use my money to support himself and his trollop. I was to subsidize them. Ingenious, wasn’t it?”

I shook my head. “You’ve lost me. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You say this Finley kid was in love with Diana James, and that Butler was stealing the money from you. Are you crazy, or am I? The papers said he stole it from the bank.”

She took a long drag on the cigarette, exhaled the smoke, and looked at the glowing tip. “The newspaper stories were quite correct. But I’ll try to explain. The bank referred to was founded by my great-grandfather.”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it now. You owned it.”

She smiled. “No. I said it was founded by my great-grandfather. But there were several intervening generations more talented in spending money than in making it. The bank has long since passed into other hands, but at the time my father died he still owned a little over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of its stock. As the sole surviving member of the family, I inherited it.

“Now do you understand? My husband owned nothing of his own, except charm. He was vice president of the bank by virtue of the block of bank stock we owned jointly under the state community property laws. But when he decided to leave me for Cynthia Cannon, he wanted to take the money with him. There was no way he could, legally, of course; but there was another way.

“He merely stole it from the bank. And the bank, after all efforts to capture him and recover the money had failed, would only have to take over the stock to recover the loss. The search would stop. He would be forgotten. No one would lose anything except me.’ She stopped. Then she smiled coldly and went on: “And I didn’t matter, of course.”

I had forgotten the cigarette between my fingers. It was burning my hand. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Aren’t we all?”

“But,” I said, “if you knew beforehand that he was going to do it—and apparently you did, some way— couldn’t you have just called the police that afternoon and had them come out and get the money back and arrest him?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “But I resent being taken for a fool —And my patience has a limit. Cynthia Cannon wasn’t the first. She merely happened, with my assistance, to be the last. Before her it was Charisse Finley, who worked in the bank, and before that it was someone else.

“I had borne his other infidelities, but when he calmly decided that I was going to support him and his paramour for the rest of their lives, I just as calmly decided he was going to die. After all, when you have nothing further to lose, you no longer have anything to fear.”

“But,” I said, “I still don’t understand what that Finley kid had to do with it.”

“That was a little more complex,” she said. “He came very near to being a tragic figure, but wound up by being only a fool. He probably regards himself as having been betrayed by two women, both older than he, but the thing that really betrayed him was that money.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I said.

She smiled. “Forgive me,” she said. “I keep forgetting I’m talking to a man to whom there is never any motive except money.

“Cynthia Cannon,” she went on, “perhaps told you that she was a nurse and that she was in Mount Temple for some seven or eight months taking care of an invalid. The woman she was caring for was the mother of Jack and Charisse Finley.

“That was when Jack Finley began to get this fantastic obsession for her. I don’t know whether she encouraged him at first, but at any rate she was nearly ten years older than he was and hardly the type to remain interested very long in being worshiped with such an intense and adolescent passion. I can imagine he was rather sickening, at least to a veteran with Cynthia Cannon’s flair for casual bitchiness.

“Anyway, she apparently dropped him rather thoroughly as soon as she began having an affair with my husband. He was older, you see, and less like a moonstruck calf, and she thought he had more money.

“I didn’t know any of this until nearly a month after dear Cynthia had left her job in Mount Temple and come back here to Sanport. Then, one Saturday night when my husband was presumably on another fishing trip, Jack Finley came to see me. He was nearly out of his mind. I really don’t know what his idea was in telling me, unless it was some absurd notion that possibly I would speak to my husband about it and ask him to leave Cynthia alone. He was actually that wild.

“I began to see very shortly, however, that he was in a really dangerous condition. He had been following my

husband down here on weekends, and spying on them, and once had come very close to murdering them both in a hotel room. He had gone up there with a gun, but just before he knocked on the door some returning glimmer of sanity made him turn away and run out.

“I felt sorry for him and tried to show him the stupidity of ruining his life over a casual trollop like Cynthia Cannon, but there is nothing more futile than trying to reason with someone caught up in an obsession like that. He was going to kill my husband.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” I said. “You had a sucker just made to order. All you had to do was needle him a little.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, a little coldly. “I have just told you I tried to talk him out of his idiocy. It was only when the picture changed and I began to see that it was he and his charming sister that were trying to needle me, as you put it—”

“You’re losing me again,” I said. “Back up.”

She lit another cigarette, chain fashion, and crushed the stub of the first out in the tray. The music went on. The whole thing was crazy. She was perfectly relaxed and at ease and wrapped up in the spell of the music, and the thing she was telling me about was murder.

“All right,” she said. “I told you it was somewhat complex. At first it was just a rather stupid young man in the grip of an insane jealousy. It changed later, but he was the one that changed it—he and his sister.

“It was something he let fall that started me thinking. In the course of his spying on them he had discovered that Cynthia Cannon had changed her name. He apparently wondered about it, but didn’t attach much importance to it in the overwrought state he was in.

“I did, however, and I arranged a little investigation of my own. She’d changed her name, all right, but I learned several other things that were even more significant. My husband never went near her place when he was meeting her here in Sanport. And on several occasions he bought a considerable amount of clothing for himself, which she took back to her apartment.