A Touch of Death

  She took a sip of the drink and looked at me across the top of the glass. “Did you ever hear of a man named J. N. Butler?”

  “I don’t think so. Who is he?”

  “Just a minute.”

  She got up and went into the bedroom. When she came back she handed me two newspaper clippings. I looked at the first one. It was datelined here in Sanport, June eighth. That was two months ago.

  SEARCH WIDENS FOR MISSING BANK OFFICIAL

  J. N. Butler, vice-president of the First National Bank of Mount Temple, was the object of a rapidly expanding manhunt today as announcement was made of discovery of a shortage in the bank’s funds estimated at $120,000.

  I looked up at her. She smiled. I read on.

  Butler, prominent in social and civic activities of the town for over twenty years, has been missing since Saturday, at which time, according to Mrs. Butler, he announced his intention of going to Louisiana for a weekend fishing trip. He did not return Sunday night, as scheduled, but it was not until the bank opened for business this morning that the shortage was discovered.

  I read the second one. It was dated three days later, and was a rehash of the previous story, except that the lead paragraph said Butler s car had been found abandoned in Sanport and that police were now looking for him all over the nation.

  I handed them back. “That was two months ago,” I said. “What’s the pitch? Have they found him?” “No,” she said. “And I don’t think they will.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t think he ever left his house in Mount Temple. Not alive, anyway.”

  I put the drink down very slowly and watched her face. You didn’t have to be a genius to see she knew something about it the police didn’t.

  “Why?” I asked. “Interested?” “I might be. Enough to listen, anyway.”

  “All right,” she said. “It’s like this: I’m a nurse. And for about eight months I was on a job in Mount Temple, taking care of a woman who’d suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. Her house was out in the edge of town, across the street from a big place, an enormous old house taking up a whole city block. J. N. Butler’s place.” She stopped.

  “All right,” I said. “Keep going.”

  “Well, his car, the one they found abandoned here—I saw it leave there that Saturday. Only it wasn’t Saturday afternoon, the way she said; it was Saturday night. And

  he wasn’t driving it. She was.”

  “His wife?”

  “His wife.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “You say it was night. How do you

  know who was driving?”

  “I was out on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette before going to bed. Just as the Butler car came out of their drive onto the street, another car went by and caught it in the headlights. It was Mrs. Butler, all right. Alone.”

  “But,” I said, “maybe she was just going to town or something. That doesn’t prove he didn’t leave in the car later.”

  She shook her head. “Mrs. Butler never drove his car. She had her own. He didn’t abandon that car in Sanport.

  She did. I’d swear it.”

  “But why?”

  “Don’t you see the possibilities?” she said impatiently. “He almost has to be dead. There’s no other answer. They’d have found him long ago if he were alive. He was a big, good-looking man, the black-Irish type, easy to see and hard to hide. He was six-three and weighed around two-thirty. You think they couldn’t find him? And another thing. When they run like that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s another woman in it. Suppose Mrs. Butler found out about it, before he got away? He was going to have the money and the other woman, while she held still for the disgrace. What would she do? Help him pack his bag, to be sure he had plenty of handkerchiefs?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What about her?”

  She shrugged and gestured with the cigarette. “Who knows who’s capable of murder? Maybe anybody is, under the right pressure. But I can tell you a little about her. This is probably an odd thing to say, but she’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Brunette, with a magnolia complexion and big, smoky-looking eyes. And a bitch right out of the book. Old-family sort of thing; the house is really hers. She also drinks like a fish.”

  “You didn’t miss much while you were up there.”

  “You mean the drinking? It was one of those hushed-up secrets everybody knows.”

  “Then,” I said, “your idea is she killed Butler? And that

  the money’s still there in the house?”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t the police shake it down?”

  “After a fashion. But why would they make much of a search, when he’d obviously got away to Sanport and then disappeared?”

  “I see what you mean,” I said. “But there’s another angle. You say he was a big guy. If she killed him, how did she dispose of his body? She couldn’t very well call the piano movers.”

  She shook her head. “That I don’t know. I haven’t been able to figure it. But maybe she had a boyfriend. She still had to get back from Sanport, too, after she ditched the car. And, naturally, she couldn’t come on the bus. Somebody’d remember it. A boyfriend fits.”

  “I can see Mrs. Butler rates, in your book,” I said. “So far, she’s only a lush, a murderer, and a tramp. What’d she do? Dig up your flower beds?”

  “Opinions are beside the point. This is for money. What we’re trying to get at is facts!”

  “And all we’ve got is a string of guesses. Anyway, what’s your idea?”

  “That we search the house. Tear it apart, if necessary, until we find the money, or some evidence as to what became of Butler, or something.”

  “With her in it? Think again.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s why it takes two of us. She’s here in town now, attending a meeting of some historical society. I’ll hunt her up, get her plastered, and keep her

  that way. For days, if necessary. You’ll have time to dismantle the house and put it back together before she sobers up enough to go home.”

  “What you’re really looking for,” I said, “is a patsy. If something goes wrong, you’re all right, but I’m a dead duck.”

  “Don’t be silly. The house is in the middle of an estate that’d cover a city block, with big hedges and trees around it. There’s one servant, who goes home as soon as she’s out of sight. You could take an orchestra with you, and nobody’d ever know you were in there. The police may check the place once a night when nobody’s home, but you don’t have to tear off a door and leave it lying on the lawn for them, just to get in. The drapes and curtains will all be drawn. There’ll be food in the kitchen. You could set up housekeeping. How about it?”

  “It sounds safe enough, for the price,” I said. I got up and walked across the room. “But I still don’t see it. All that stuff about her leaving there in the car doesn’t prove anything. Hell, maybe she was in it with him, and was just covering for him by ditching the car while he got out of town some other way.”

  She shook her head. “No. I tell you he’s dead. And she killed him. That money’s still there.”

  “I can’t see why you’re so sure,” I said.

  “Then you don’t believe I’m right?” she said. “You don’t want to tackle it?”

  I thought about the money. A hundred and twenty thousand. You couldn’t get hold of it all at once. It was too big. It had to grow on you.

  I let it grow.

  But, hell. She was crazy. In that whole story of hers there wasn’t one shred of evidence that Butler hadn’t got away with it. A lot of good guesses, maybe, but no concrete evidence. And if you were going to take a chance and start breaking laws like that, you had to have something more definite than a guess to lead you on. I

  couldn’t see it.

  “Well?” she asked. “How about it?”

  “The whole thing’s a pipe dream,” I said.

  “You’re passing up a fortune.”

  I shrugge
d. “I doubt it.”

  I tried another pass but she wasn’t having any, so I said, “See you around,” and shoved off. I punched Winlock’s buzzer on the way downstairs, but he still wasn’t home.

  I got in the car and looked at my watch. It was after five. The whole afternoon was shot. I went home, picking up my mail on the way in through the lobby, and wondering how much longer I’d be able to pay the rent. It was more apartment than I needed, or could afford, in a new building with a lot of glass brick and thick carpets, over on Davy Avenue. I’d moved into it when I first went with Wagner Realty and was going to make a thousand a month selling houses in a subdivision. That was in May, and when they dusted off the old wheeze about a reduction in force three days ago, on the first of August, I was still working on the first month’s thousand. Maybe the demand for ten-thousand-dollar apple crates was falling off, or I was no salesman.

  I sat down in the living room and looked at the mail. It was all bills except one letter on orchid stationery. I tried to recall who the girl was, but finally gave up and looked at the bills. The tailor called my attention very tactfully to $225 that I had apparently overlooked last month and the month before. There was another note due on the car. I shuffled through the others: two department stores, the utilities, and the kennel that boarded Moxie, the English setter. I checked my bank balance. I had $170.

  I went out in the kitchen and tried to convince myself I ought to have a drink. After looking at the bottle, I shoved it back on the shelf, losing interest in it. I never drank much, and I still had the sour taste of those others in my mouth. I thought of her. I thought of her on that towel. The hell with all dizzy women, anyway. The whole afternoon shot, I hadn’t sold the car, and I didn’t even get the consolation prize. No sale, no loving, I thought disgustedly, saying it so it rhymed. The whole afternoon shot to hell. It would probably have been pretty good stuff, too.

  That bank balance couldn’t have been right. A hundred and seventy— I checked it again.

  It was right.

  I thought of Saudi Arabia, of 120-degree heat and sand and the wind blowing for two years, and wondered if I could take it. But before long it wasn’t going to be a question of whether I could stand it or not. I had to do something. I made less money every year.

  You got your brains beat out for four years for seventy dollars a month plus your tuition and having some old grad pounding you on the back to get into the pictures after you’d scored from eight yards out in the last three seconds of play in the Homecoming game, and five years later the son-of-a-bitch couldn’t remember your name when you tried to send it in past the arctic blonde in the outer office.

  I put a cigarette in my mouth, reaching for the lighter, and then let it hang there, forgotten. Half of $120,000...

  I shrugged irritably. Was I going to start that again? Maybe I was going back to believing in Santa Claus. Diana James was just a victim of wishful thinking, trying to build something out of a half-baked theory. But still, she didn’t quite strike me as that kind of featherhead.

  Why was she so sure? That was the thing I couldn’t see. It didn’t match up with the flimsy evidence of her story. And why hadn’t the police found him? Something rang there, too. They should have picked him up long ago, a big, good-looking guy like that with no place to hide. I didn’t know much about police work, but it seemed to me embezzlers should be the easiest of all lamsters to collar; the people who were looking for them knew too much about them. They’d have pictures of him, a complete knowledge of all his habits, everything. His car had been abandoned here in a city of four hundred thousand, and then he had vanished like a wisp of smoke. It could happen. But the odds were very long against it.

  The whole thing was just crazy enough to make you wonder.

  And the amount was too big to get out of your mind.

  I cursed, and went back down to the car. I drove over to the library and asked for the back files of the Sanport Citizen. Beginning with the first of August, I worked back toward June. In the fourth paper I found another story on it. It was datelined Sanport, July 27.

  NO SOLUTION IN BUTLER DISAPPEARANCE

  After nearly two months of a nationwide manhunt, police announced today there has been no new light whatever thrown on the possible whereabouts of the Mount Temple bank official who allegedly absconded with $120,000 of the bank’s funds. Since the discovery on June 11 of Butler’s car, abandoned on a local street near the beach...

  Well, there wasn’t anything new in that, except the fact that they definitely hadn’t found him.

  I sat suddenly upright in the chair. The thing that had been bothering me all the time was just beyond my reach. I looked back at the story: “...Butler’s car, abandoned on a local street near the beach...” That was it.

  That second clipping she had shown me, the one carrying the story about the car, had given the name of the street. It hadn’t sunk in at the time, but it had been bothering my subconscious ever since. I grabbed another bundle of the papers and began flipping hurriedly through them. June 14, June 13, June 11—it should be in this one. I shot my glance up column and down, across the front page. Here it was.

  “The late-model automobile of the missing man was discovered early today abandoned near the beach in the 200 block of Duval Boulevard.”

  I wondered why I had let it slide off the first time I’d read it. It was given right in Winlock’s ad, the thing that had taken me out there in the first place. The address of that apartment house was 220 Duval Boulevard.

  I was beginning to have an idea why she was so sure Butler was dead.

  Chapter Three

  She came down and let me in when I rang the buzzer. Neither of us said anything until we were back up in the living room. She sat down in the same place she’d been before, across the coffee table, and smiled at me, the eyes cool and a little amused.

  “I wondered if you’d be back,” she said. “And how soon.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully at the smoke. “Let’s put it this way: If you didn’t have sense enough to see it, you wouldn’t be smart enough to be of any help. This is no child’s game, you know. And it could be dangerous as hell.”

  “There’s one thing I’m still not too sure of,” I said. “And that’s why you’re so certain she’s the one that killed him and left his car in front of your apartment. Wasn’t there anybody else who could have known he was going to run off with you?”

  “It’s not likely. And nobody but that vindictive bitch would have gone to that much trouble and risk of exposure just for the pleasure of letting me know. I mean, leaving the car right out front here. She would do that.”

  “How about telling me the whole thing?” I said.

  “Suppose you tell me something first,” she said coolly. “Do you want in this, or don’t you?”

  “What do you think? I came back, didn’t I?”

  “Not worried about breaking the law?”

  “Let’s put it this way: Whoever’s got that money is outside the law himself, or herself. So he or she can’t yell cop. And as far as conscience is concerned, you can buy a lot of sleeping pills with sixty thousand dollars.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Who said anything about sixty thousand? I’m offering you a third.”

  “And you know what you can do with your third. It’s half or nothing.”

  “You’ve got a nerve—”

  “What do you mean, nerve? I’m the one that has to go up there and stick his head in the lion’s mouth and search the place. You don’t take any risk.”

  “All right, all right,” she said. “Relax. I just thought I’d try. A half it is.”

  “That’s better. Now, tell me about it.”

  “All right,” she said. “You know now why I’m so certain he’s dead. He has to be, or he’d have shown up here. Butler was no fool. He knew he didn’t have a chance unless he had a place to hide. So he and I worked it out. I got this apartment severa
l months before he pulled it off. When he took the money and made the break he was to come here, hide in this apartment without even going out on the street for at least two months, until some of the uproar had died down and we had changed his appearance as much as possible. Then we were going to get away to the West Coast in a car and trailer, with Butler riding in the trailer. He’d turn up in San Francisco with a whole new identity. It was a fine idea, of course, except that he never did show up here. His car did, but somebody else drove it.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So you believe me now?” she said.

  “Yes. Certainly. That was the thing that made the difference. The other story didn’t make any sense. As soon as it soaked into my head that you were the woman he was running off with— And, of course, if he didn’t show up here, it was because he couldn’t.”

  “So the money’s still right there in the house in Mount Temple,” she said.

  “That I’m not so sure of. Anybody might have killed him, for that much.”

  “No. Nobody else could have known about it. But she did. The last time I saw him he was afraid she’d put detectives on our trail.”

  “How long have you known them?” I asked. “Were you actually a nurse there in Mount Temple?”

  “Yes. But that was last fall and winter. I’d been back here four months when he actually pulled it off.”

  “He was pretty gone on you?”

  “Maybe. In a way,” she said.

  “You after him? Or the money?”

  “Let’s say both. We believed in taking what we needed, and what we needed was each other. What do you want? Tristan and Isolde?”

  “And now that he’s dead, you’ll settle for the money?” Then I changed it. “For half the money.”

  “That’s right. What should I do? Throw myself off a cliff?”

  “We’ll get along,” I said.

  She crushed the cigarette out with a savage slash at the ashtray. “There’s another thing, too. She’s not going to get away with it. The drunken bitch.”

  Well, I thought, I’ll be a sad...

  “Get this through your head,” I said. “Once and for all. This is a business proposition, or I’m out, as of now. There’ll be no wild-haired babes blowing their tops and killing each other in anything I’m mixed up in. I thought you were tough.”