A Touch of Death

  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.

  “Then I happened to learn that he had let all his life-insurance policies lapse and had borrowed all he could

  on them. I had a rather good idea by that time as to what they were planning.

  “I began, also, to notice a change in Jack Finley. There was something just a little hollow creeping into those tragic protestations that my husband had ruined his life, and mine, and was ruining Cynthia’s. He gave me an odd impression of a man who was torn by an insane jealousy, but a jealousy that was under perfect control and was waiting for something.

  “Two months of this went by, and I began to suspect what it was. He had told his sister, Charisse. She was slightly more intelligent, and she had guessed why Cynthia Cannon had changed her name. And she hated my husband. I think I have already told you that she had been another of his sordid affairs.

  “She also worked in the bank. This was important.”

  She broke off and glanced across at me. “You see it

  now, don’t you?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Yes. I think I do.”

  She nodded and went on. “I let myself be persuaded. Our lives were ruined. What more did we have to live for, except revenge? Jack continued to rave about not being able to stand it any longer each time my husband disappeared for the weekend on some pretext or other, but he went on waiting.

  “Well, that Saturday noon my husband came home from the bank a few minutes late, and said he was going on another fishing trip. He packed his camping equipment and went upstairs to shower and change clothes. I slipped out, as usual, and searched the car.

  “This was the day. I found it.

  “It was in a briefcase, rolled up in his bedding. During all those months, while I had been suspecting it and watching, I had often wondered if I would actually go through with it if I ever found the proof and knew, but the moment I opened that briefcase and saw the money there was no longer any doubt or hesitation.

  “There wasn’t much time. I slipped it out of the car and hid it in the basement, knowing about how long it would take Jack to get there after Charisse had phoned him my husband had been the last to leave the bank and that he was carrying a briefcase.

  “He arrived approximately on schedule, coming in the back way on foot. He was quite convincing. His face was white, and his eyes stared like a madman’s. He demanded to know if my husband had said he was going fishing again. I told him yes, and perhaps I was just a bit hammy myself. He said we couldn’t go on. We couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “He was still inciting me with this theatrical harangue when I heard my husband coming down the stairs. I took Jack’s gun from his pocket and shot him as he came through the door.”

  She stopped. For a moment she sat staring over my head. Her face showed no emotion whatever.

  “All right,” I said. “So then of course he took charge of getting rid of the body and the car?”

  She nodded. “Yes. He was remarkably efficient and calm. It was almost as if he had planned all the details beforehand. And it really wasn’t difficult. The cook wasn’t there, as I had been giving her Saturdays off. We merely had to wait until
it was dark.”

  “And what did they do when they found out it wasn’t in the car?”

  “They both came, Sunday night. And of course I didn’t even know what they were talking about. There was no announcement by the bank until Monday morning, you will remember. And certainly they had never said anything about money before. I was sure Mr. Butler hadn’t had any such sum with him.

  “They threatened me with everything. But what could they do? If they actually killed me they’d never find it. And obviously they couldn’t threaten me with the police because they were equally guilty. It was somewhat in the nature of an impasse.

  “It was buried in a flower bed until the police grew tired of searching the house and watching me. Then I brought it down here and put it in those three safe-deposit boxes.”

  “And so Finley was actually the one that abandoned the car in front of Diana James’s apartment. She swore it was you.”

  She smiled faintly. “Cynthia, perhaps, wasn’t the most intelligent of women, but even she should have known I’d never be guilty of such an adolescent gesture as that.”

  I sat there for a minute thinking about it. It was beautiful, any way you looked at it. She had outguessed them all.

  Except me, I thought.

  I grinned. I was the only one that had won. They had murdered and double-crossed each other for all that time, and in the end the whole thing was three safe-deposit keys worth forty thousand dollars apiece, and I had all three of them in my pocket.

  “Baby,” I said, “you’re a smart cookie. You were almost smart enough to take the pot.”

  I went downstairs and around the corner. The morning

  papers were out now. I bought one.

  I opened it.

  “MRS. BUTLER DEAD,” the headline said

  “COMPANION SOUGHT.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I stood there on the corner under a street light just holding the paper in my hand while the pieces fell all around me. It was too much. You could get only part of it at a time.

  Somebody was saying something.

  “What?” I said. I folded the paper and put it under my arm. There were a half-million other copies covering the whole state like a heavy snowfall, but I had to hide this one. Companion sought. I started away. You didn’t run. You didn’t ever run. You walked, slowly.

  “Hey, here’s your change. Don’t you want your change, mister?” It was the newsboy. Why did they call a man who was seventy years old a newsboy?

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh—thanks. Thanks.” I put it in my

  pocket.

  I couldn’t stand here under the light.

  As fast as I got a piece of it sorted out, something else would fall on me. I couldn’t stay here. I knew that. The man already thought I was crazy or blind drunk. He was watching me.

  But I couldn’t go back to the apartment with this paper. If she read it I was through.

  I could hear her laughing. I was hiding her from the police for $120,000, but the police weren’t looking for her. She was dead. They were looking for me.

  I had to do something. Throw it away? With the man standing there watching me and already thinking I was nuts? I looked wildly around for the car. It was parked just ahead of me. I got in and pulled out into the traffic, having no idea where I was going.

  I turned right at the corner and went out toward the beach. In a minute I saw a parking place in front of a drugstore and pulled into it. There was light here. I could read the paper sitting in the car.

  But even as I spread it open I knew I didn’t have to read it. I could have written it. The whole thing would fall into place like the pieces in a chess game in which you had been outclassed before you’d even started to play.

  I read it anyway.

  It was even worse.

  I was right as far as I had guessed, but I hadn’t guessed far enough. They had found the body of Diana James, all right. And the deputy sheriff had regained consciousness at last. “Sure it was Mrs. Butler,” he said. “I threw the light right in her face. Then this guy slugged me from behind.”

  Of course they hadn’t looked much alike. But they were of the same height and general build, and the same age, and they were both brunettes. There probably wasn’t even any dental work to go on, if they called in her dentist. And who was going to?

  Nobody was.

  Why should they? The deputy sheriff had seen her there, hadn’t he? And she had to be on her way into the building instead of out, because he had been watching it and nobody had gone in before. Then there were the shots, after he was slugged. Diana James had come through the back yard while he was unconscious. Nobody knew anything about her, anyway. She’d been gone for six months.

  But I had already guessed all that. It had hit me right in the face the instant I saw the headline.

  The thing I hadn’t guessed was worse. It was the

  clincher. It was that cop at the filling station.

  I read it.

  “It was the same guy, all right,” Sgt. Kennedy said

  flatly. “He fitted the description perfectly. And it was Finley’s car. If we’d only known then.

  “Sure he was alone, I looked in the car because it had Vale County license tags. There was nobody else.”

  That was it: “...he was alone.”

  I had done a beautiful job. I had done such a wonderful job that if she got away and they picked me up they could hang me.

  And all she had to do was walk out the door. She was free.

  I could feel the greasy sweat on the palms of my hands and the emptiness inside me as I forced myself to read it all. They repeated my description. It was good. That blonde hellcat had an eye for detail. She hadn’t missed a thing. My eyes caught the last paragraph.

  “There was something about his face that seemed familiar,” Charisse Finley said. “I keep thinking I’ve seen him somewhere before. Or a picture of him.”

  I to0k a cigarette out of my pocket and lit it with shaking fingers. That added the finishing touch. Any hour, day or night, it might come back to her. And I’d never know until they knocked on the door.

  That was one I wouldn’t read in the papers first.

  I tried to get hold of myself. Maybe I could still save it She might not remember. She hadn’t been able to yet; and the longer she puzzled over it, the less certain she’d be. It had been five years at least since the sports pages had carried a picture of me. A thousand—ten thousand— football players had marched across them since then.

  I could wait it out. I had to. I couldn’t quit. I just couldn’t. Hell, the money was almost in my hand. The thought of losing it now made my insides twist up into knots. It would take only a few more days. They weren’t even looking for her now; all we had to do was buy her some clothes and have that job on her hair patched up a little. I could give her some story, some excuse for hurrying it. But I had to keep her from seeing a paper for

  the next two or three days, until she was out of the news.

  I sat straight upright. What about the radio?

  It might come over the air any minute. Why hadn’t I thought of that? But, God, you couldn’t remember everything. I hit the starter and shot out of the parking place. When I was around the corner I dropped the paper out in the street. I swung fast at another corner and was headed back to the apartment house.

  But maybe she had already heard it. It might even have come over the radio this afternoon while I was gone. How would I know? Did I think she would tell me?

  Well, yes, I thought she would tell me. I still had those three keys and that bankroll in my pocket. She wanted those before she left. And there was another thing.

  I was the only person left in the world that knew she was still alive.

  Maybe she had plans for me. One more wouldn’t bother her.

  I found a place to park not more than half a block away. I didn’t run until I was on the stairs. She wasn’t in the living room. The radio was turned off. I closed the door behind me and breat
hed again with relief. The silence was the most beautiful silence in the world.

  I looked quickly around, wondering where she was. I had to do it now; it wouldn’t be safe to wait until she had gone to bed. But I had to be sure she wouldn’t come in and catch me at it. Then I heard her in the bathroom.

  I walked over to the hallway door. It was open, and the bathroom door was open, a few inches. I could hear her humming softly to herself.

  “You dressed?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she called. “Why?” The bathroom door opened wider and she stood looking out at me. She had a towel pinned across her shoulders and was fastening strands of her hair up in little rolls. I could see the difference in

  shade now. It was definitely lighter, a rich, coppery red.

  “I just wondered if you’d heard the news,” I said.

  Nothing showed in her face. You couldn’t read it. She

  shook her head. “What was it?”

  “That deputy sheriff finally came around.” I struck a match with my thumbnail and lit the cigarette in my

  mouth. “And they found Diana James.”

  “Oh? Well, naturally they would, sooner or later.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And it was funny. At first they thought

  it was you

  “They did?” she asked curiously. “But we didn’t look anything alike. She—” She stopped and did another take on it. “I see what you mean. The fire.”

  I had to admire it. If she was acting, she was magnificent.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You see, that deputy recognized you. And somebody heard the shots. So when they found the body there, they naturally thought it was you. But then they found her name engraved inside her wristwatch.”

  “Oh,” she said. You could write your own interpretation. It could mean she believed it, or it could mean she’d already heard the actual news on the radio and was laughing herself sick inside. That was what made it terrible. You might never know for sure until you woke up with a kitchen knife in your throat.