A Touch of Death

I stood facing her, blocking her way. “The hell with

  your face.”

  Her eyebrows rose coolly. “You appear to be in your usual bad mood. Didn’t you sleep well?”

  “I slept fine,” I said. “I asked you a question. Have you got those names straightened out yet?”

  “Would it inconvenience you too much if I had a cup of coffee before you started hounding me about it?”

  She had a cup of coffee in the kitchen, black coffee

  with a slug of whisky in it. I sat down across from her.

  “Are you going to call those banks?” I asked.

  “Only as a last resort. I’ll think about it some more

  first.”

  “Don’t you know that the more you think about it, the more mixed up you’ll get?”

  She shook her head. “No. You see, when I wrote them down, with the names of the banks, I remembered the last names came in alphabetical order— Carstairs, Hatch, and Manning—and what I’m trying to remember now is whether the banks actually came in the order in which I

  went into them. I can almost see the list. It’s so tantalizing—at times I’m positive I visualize it exactly as it was.”

  “Where is the list?” I demanded.

  She shrugged. “It was in the house. I forgot to pick it

  up.”

  “You forgot!”

  “Nobody is perfect.” She smiled. “Even the great Mr.

  Scarborough forgot to bring in the paper he bought.”

  There it was again, that subtle needling. She knew, all right. She was laughing at me.

  I leaned across the table. “Don’t stall me,” I said. “I can’t take much more of you. Are you trying to beat me out of that money?”

  “Why should I?” she asked, wide-eyed. “If you carry out your end of the bargain, I can assure you I’ll carry out

  mine.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right. Quit stalling.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m positive that before the end of

  the month I will have remembered how they go.” I stared at her through a red mist of rage. I wanted to

  smash that hateful face with my hands.

  “Before it’s all over one of you will kill the other.”

  I pushed back from the table, choking.

  “By the way,” she said calmly, “I thought you were

  going to take the radio out and have it repaired.”

  I grabbed up the radio and fled.

  It was like one of those dreams where you discover yourself walking out onto a stage naked before a thousand people. The minute I stepped onto the sidewalk I began to cringe. I was not only naked, I was skinless.

  I forced myself to walk slowly to the car. When I was inside it wasn’t quite so bad. I drove as if the car were held together with paper clips.

  A man was selling papers on a corner. I stopped, hit the horn, and passed him a nickel without looking at him as he handed the paper in. I couldn’t look at it now. I drove on, out the beach. The city began to drop away behind me. It was a bright, sunlit day with a soft breeze blowing in off the Gulf.

  There were few cars now. I pulled out of the tracks and stopped among the dunes. Opening the paper was like digging up an unexploded bomb.

  I looked at it.

  She hadn’t remembered yet. There was no picture.

  But there wouldn’t be, I thought. I’d be in jail before

  they gave the story to the papers.

  “MYSTERY SLAYER SOUGHT,” the headline said.

  There was nothing new. They had just put the story together, with the evidence they had and what Charisse Finley had told them. Mrs. Butler and I had gone back to the house to pick up the money, and as soon as I got it I killed her and set fire to the house in an attempt to cover it up.

  It was airtight. How else could they figure it?

  I looked around. There were no cars in sight. I got out, carrying the radio, and walked through the dunes toward the line of brush and scrubby salt cedars back from the beach. I threw the radio into it.

  “Hey, mister,” a boy’s voice said, “why’d you throw away your radio?”

  I whirled. A boy of ten or twelve had come out of the bushes carrying a .22 rifle. He walked over to the radio and picked it up.

  I looked at him, stupefied. Where had he come from? Then another boy walked out of the tangle of cedar ten yards away. He was carrying a rifle too.

  “Hey, Eddie,” the first one called. “Lookit the radio. This man just threw it away. Can we have it, mister?”

  I tried to think of something. My mouth felt dry. It was

  ridiculous. The whole thing was insane.

  “It’s no good,” I said at last. “It won’t play”

  They stared at each other. “Why didn’t you have it

  fixed?”

  “I tell you, it’s no good!” I suddenly realized I was shouting angrily. I turned and ran back to the car.

  I drove carefully and very slowly through the city, fighting every yard of the way against the almost unbearable longing to slam the accelerator to the floor and get back inside the apartment quicker, to pull the walls in around me and hide.

  And when I got inside and closed the door I was in a trap. I could feel it tightening. This was where they would come to get me.

  And she was there.

  She was deliberately trying to drive me mad. Or kill me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Friday...

  Through the endless hot afternoon I watched her, listening always for the sound of the elevator in the corridor. She lay on the rug in the sun with the sleeves of her pajamas rolled up, and rubbed suntan lotion on her face. After she had tanned for a while she put on the high-heeled shoes and practiced the hip-crawling walk of Susie Mumble. She went up and down the living room before me for hours, working for just the exact amount of slow and tantalizing swing.

  She stopped to light a cigarette. “How’m I doin’?” She asked.

  “All right, all right. You catch on fast.”

  “That was a brilliant idea you had,” she said. “How do you feel, having created Susie Mumble? Like some great director? Or perhaps as Pygmalion must have felt?” Then she stopped and said thoughtfully, as if to herself, “No, I guess not. Hardly as Pygmalion. He fell in love with Galatea, didn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know. They haven’t made a comic book of it yet.”

  “Don’t reproach me with that, please. I was nasty. I’m sorry.”

  So we were having a sweet phase? What was she up to now?

  “I’m beginning to feel the part,” she said. “And the way to feel it is to live it, as Stanislavski says. I’m not acting Susie Mumble. I am Susie Mumble.”

  “All right, all right, all right, for God’s sake, you’re Susie Mumble. But while you’re swinging it, will you please, for the love of God, try to remember how those names go?”

  “Oh, that,” she said airily. “I’m sure it’ll come back to me in time. Or if it doesn’t, in another week or two I’ll call the banks, as you suggested.”

  Another week or two! When she had the steel in you she knew just how to turn it.

  She practiced the walk some more. She didn’t need to. I tried not to look at how she didn’t need to. She could drive you crazy with that alone.

  The hours passed as the hours must pass in hell.

  It was night again.

  I drank coffee and smoked until there was no longer any feeling in my mouth. I turned on all the lights and stood for long periods under the cold shower, slapping myself awake. I listened for the elevator in terror.

  How much longer could I go on? Any hour the police might come. There was no way to tell when they might find out who I was. How much longer could I keep from going to sleep? If I dropped off she’d kill me. I could lock myself in the bathroom and go to sleep on the floor, but that would be telling her.

  Why didn’t I quit? Why didn’t I just pick up the phone and tell the police to
come and get her? I could run. Maybe they wouldn’t even look for me if they had her.

  Then I would think of that money again and know I couldn’t ever quit. She couldn’t whip me. I would stay here and play her war of nerves with her until hell froze over and you could skate across on the ice. No woman ever born was going to cheat me out of that money now, or any part of that money. It was mine. I was going to have it. I’d get it.

  I suddenly realized I was saying it aloud, to an empty room.

  I dozed, sitting up. At the slightest sound I jerked erect, my heart hammering wildly. I would be drenched with sweat.

  Saturday... I sneaked out to the car once and drove around until I

  could buy a paper without getting out.

  They had found Finley’s car at the airport.

  “MYSTERY SLAYER SOUGHT HERE.”

  Charisse Finley still hadn’t remembered my name. They had nothing but a description.

  But they were closing in, narrowing the field. They were driving me forever toward a smaller and smaller corner.

  I began to wonder if I was near the breaking point.

  No! I would beat her. I could still beat her.

  Though none of it showed anywhere on the surface, I knew it had to be working on her just the same as it was on me. She knew the police were looking for me, and if they found me they found her. God knows what went on inside that chromium-plated soul of hers, but no human being ever born could go on taking that kind of pressure forever without breaking. All I had to do was wait her out. All I had to do was keep her from getting a chance to kill me, and keep myself from going berserk and killing her. If I could sweat it out I could make her break and admit she had remembered how those names went. After all, she must want to run, too.

  I watched her for signs of cracking. There were none. There were none at all. She lay with her face and arms in the sunlight and hummed softly to herself. She worked on Susie’s speech and mannerisms like an actress getting ready for opening night. She was sweet. And she wasn’t worried about anything at all.

  The rent on those safe-deposit boxes was paid up for nearly a full year, she said.

  Sometime after she had gone to bed I fell asleep. I didn’t know when, or how long I slept. The last thing I remembered was sitting straight upright straining my ears for the elevator, and then, somehow, I was lying stretched out on the sofa with that awful feeling of having been awakened by some tiny sound. I jerked my head up and looked groggily around the room, not seeing her at first.

  Then I did.

  She was slipping silently out into the hallway from the bedroom. She had on that nylon robe, with nothing under it, and she was carrying the scissors in her hand. She was barefoot. She took another soft step and then she saw me looking at her.

  She smiled. “Oh. I’m sorry I awakened you.” I couldn’t say anything, or move. She saw me staring at the scissors. She put up a hand

  and patted the curls that gleamed softly in the light from the single lamp. “I was doing a little repair work on my hair. And I thought I’d slip out to the kitchen and get a drink.”

  I sat up. I still couldn’t find my voice. Or take my eyes from the long, slender blades of those scissors.

  She came on into the room and sat down on the floor with her back against the big chair across from me. “Now that I have awakened you with my blundering around,” she said sweetly, “why don’t we have a cigarette and just talk?”

  I watched her with horror. She calmly lit a cigarette and leaned back against the chair, doubling her legs under her. She paid no attention to the fact that she had on nothing beneath that flimsy robe.

  “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said quietly.

  So I thought I could make her crack? Somewhere deep inside me I could feel myself beginning to come unstuck. I sat still and clenched my jaws together to keep my teeth from chattering. I was shaking as if with a chill.

  She opened the scissors, playing with them in her hands. She balanced one slender, shining blade on her fingertip, like a child enchanted with some new toy, and looked from it to me and smiled.

  “It’s so peaceful. It makes you want to stay forever. Do you remember ‘The Lotos-Eaters’?”

  Light flickered and gleamed along the blades.

  “There is sweet music here that softer falls

  Than petals from blown roses on the grass,

  Or night-dews on still waters between walls

  Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass.”

  She paused. “How does it go? Something about sleep, isn’t it? Oh, yes.”

  She let her head tilt back and watched me dreamily. Smoke from the cigarette in her hand curled upward around the wicked and tapering steel.

  “Music that gentler on the spirit lies

  Than tir’d eyelids upon tir’d eyes;

  Music that brings sweet sleep down from the

  blissful skies.”

  She smiled. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  I could feel myself beginning to slip over the edge. I fought it.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid of a 125-pound woman with a pair of drugstore scissors in her hand. It was that she wasn’t human. She was invulnerable. She was unbeatable. Nothing could touch her.

  There was a wild, crazy blackness foaming up inside rne, urging me to leap up and run, or to lunge for her and tear the scissors away and take her throat in my hands

  and see if she could be killed.

  I hung poised over empty nothing. I slipped a little.

  She stood up. “I won’t bother you any longer, if you’re

  sleepy,” she said. “I think I’ll go back to bed.” She knew just how much to turn the screw each time.

  Sunday…

  Sunday was the slow thickening of horror.

  It wasn’t a day, beginning at one point and ending at another. There were no days now. Time had melted and run together into one endless and unmarked second of waiting for an explosion when the fuse was always burning and forever a quarter of an inch long.

  Midnight came, and I knew I could no longer stay awake. I had to get out. I walked downstairs and around to the car and drove it slowly out of the city and along the beach. When I was far out I pulled off into the dunes and stopped.

  I got out. It was black, and the breeze was cool coming in off the sea. I walked five steps away from the car and fell forward onto the sloping edge of a dune. Even as I was falling I was losing consciousness, and the last thing before I blacked out I was running alongside the spinning outer edge of a giant carousel loaded with fat bundles of money and red-haired girls with cool, mocking eyes.

  I awoke all at once, like a jungle animal. I turned my head. A car had stopped nearby in the darkness.

  A spotlight burst from it. The hot beam swung just above my head and spattered against the side and the open door of the Pontiac. I lay still, afraid even to breathe.

  It shifted, searching the ground. He had seen there was no one in the car. The light moved again, just above my head. Then it went off abruptly. I heard a car door open and shut. I held rigid. There was no chance to run. But he might miss me in the darkness.

  The beam of a flashlight hit the ground a few feet to my left. He walked forward. He was nearly on top of me now. The beam flipped upward toward the car, and then swung back. It hit me right in the face. I stared into it, blinded.

  “What are you doing here?” a voice growled. “You hurt? Or drunk?” Then I heard the sharp intake of breath. “Hey!”

  I came off the ground, right into the light. He hadn’t had time to pull the gun. I caught part of his uniform, pulling him down to me and clubbing for his face with my fist. We were in the sand together. He kicked backward. I followed, swarming over him, wild now, my breath sobbing in my throat. I located his face at last, and swung. He jerked. I held him by the collar and swung again.

  I snatched up the light, my hands shaking and dropped it. I clawed it up out of the sand again and flashed it in his face. He was out cold. I ran to the
patrol car, jerked the keys out, and threw them far away in the darkness. I heaved the flashlight after them, lunged toward my own car, and fled.

  I’d got away from him, but I was just buying time. And there wasn’t much more to buy. They would know now that I was here in town.

  But even as I gunned the car wildly along the beach in the darkness, I was conscious that my mind was clearing, becoming colder now, and I could think.

  An idea began to take shape. I could still win. I could get that money, all of it. I’d beat her yet.

  And the way to beat her was to let her think she had won.

  It was after five and the sky was reddening in the east when I parked the car a block away from the apartment on a cross street. No one saw me go in. I ran up the stairs. This was the last day. Only a few more hours now and we’d be gone.

  No, I thought. I’d be gone.

  She was in the bedroom. I put on a pot of coffee and went into the bath. I took a shower, as hot as I could stand it and then as cold as it would run, shocking myself awake.

  I went into the kitchen. The coffee was almost done. I poured two quick drinks of the whisky and downed them. They burned through five days’ accumulation of exhaustion and fear and numbness, clearing my mind. I poured a cup of coffee and lit a cigarette.

  I waited. There was no use waking her up. The banks wouldn’t open until ten.

  At a little after seven I heard her in the bath. In a few minutes she came out. She was wearing the blouse and skirt again. It was odd that with that traveling case she hadn’t grabbed up two changes while she was at it.

  “Good morning,” she said sweetly. “Did you sleep well?”

  I walked over in front of her. “Have you got those names figured out yet?”

  She gave me a teasing, half-mocking smile. “I’m not absolutely certain—”

  I caught her by the shoulders and shook her. “Have you?”

  “What is the hurry, dear? We have the rest of the month.”

  I turned away from her without a word and walked over to the stove. I poured her a cup of coffee and another for myself. We sat down.

  I lit her cigarette. “All right,” I said harshly. “You win.

  What do you want?”

  Her eyebrows lifted. “What do you mean?”