A Touch of Death (Hard Case Crime Book 17)

It was a strange sight. At first there was an odd feeling about it, as if I had wandered into some kind of religious ceremony. Then I began to get it sorted out. It was a bedroom. The candle was burning on the floor in a little silver dish, and beside it was the record player. Phonograph records were scattered around on the rug, and in the middle of them, alongside a low couch, a girl in a long blue robe sat on the floor and swayed gently back and forth as she listened to the music.

  I saw her in profile with the candlelight softly touching her face and the cloud of dark hair that swirled about it. She was almost unbelievably beautiful, and she was drunk as a lord.

  I remained very still outside the door, thinking coldly of Diana James. Mrs. Butler was like hell in Sanport.

  Chapter Four

  HAD SHE THROWN THAT CURVE deliberately, or had it just been a mix-up? She’d lied right at the beginning, because she didn’t want to tell me any more about the thing than she had to. Maybe she’d lied again.

  But maybe it had just been an accident. Mrs. Butler must have come back from Sanport unexpectedly, without her hearing about it. It made sense that way. We wanted the money. To find it, we had to search the house. So there was nothing she stood to gain by getting me to come up here to try to shake it down with Mrs. Butler in it.

  Was there?

  I couldn’t see anything. But the next time I took anybody’s word … I was still burning.

  Well, we could kiss off any chance of finding it now. The thing I had to do was get out of there as fast as I could, before daylight. If I waited too long, somebody might spot me leaving. Once I got off the grounds I’d be all right. I could walk into town and hang around until there was a bus leaving for Sanport. And when I got back there I’d break the news to Diana James as to what I thought of her and her information.

  I remained standing there, sick with rage at the idea of having to give up. Somehow it seemed I had already come to consider the money as mine, as already found and safe in my pocket, and now that it was snatched away I was wild with a sense of loss, as if somebody had robbed me. Why didn’t I lock her in a closet and goon with the search as soon as it was light?

  No. That would be too dangerous. Discovery was almost certain. The maid would come back. She might have visitors. I’d be caught. I discarded the idea, but I did not leave.

  There was no danger. Not from her. She was too plastered to notice anything, or to do anything about it if she did see me. If I walked in and started talking to her, she’d probably just think I was another form of the jim-jams. I could see the half-empty bottle, and the glass that had fallen over on its side. She wasn’t a noisy drunk, or a sloppy one. It was just the opposite. The thing that tipped you off was the exaggerated dignity, and the slow, deliberate way she moved, as if she were made of eggshells.

  The record ran out to the end and ground to a stop as the machine shut itself off. It was deadly silent with the music gone. She made no attempt to put on another record. She was still swaying a little, and I could see her lips moving as if she were singing to herself or praying, but no sound came out. Then, very slowly, she turned the upper part of her body a little and collapsed against the low divan beside her. Her face was pressed into the covering, the dark hair aswirl, and one arm stretched out across it.

  I started to turn away. It was time to get out of there. Then I stopped suddenly and swung my head around, listening. What I’d heard wasn’t repeated. It didn’t have to be; I knew what it was. It was that step, the same one that had creaked under me. Somebody was coming up the stairs.

  There was another room opening off the hall, but the door was closed. He’d hear me open it. I didn’t have all night to make up my mind. I slid inside, leaned over Mrs. Butler, and blew out the candle. I’d already seen the closet door partly open beyond her.

  When the blackness closed in I kept the picture of the room in my mind long enough to turn ninety degrees to the right, slip past the end of the divan, and grope for the door of the closet. I touched it, eased it open, and stepped inside. Clothes brushed against my back. They smelled faintly of perfume in the hot, dead air.

  There was no sound. But the hallway was carpeted. Whoever it was could be anywhere out there. I waited, keeping an eye to the crack in the door. A beam of light appeared in the doorway of the room and swung around the walls. It hit a mirror and splashed, then swept on. It dipped, catching the pile of phonograph records and the whisky bottle, and came to rest at last on the sprawled figure of the girl. It remained fixed, like a big eye, while whoever was holding the flashlight walked on into the room. It was so still I tried to quiet the sound of my breathing.

  He was squatting down now, and seemed to be changing hands with the light. Then I saw why. Just for a second the gun passed through the beam, steadying up against her temple. The cold-blooded brutality of it made me come out of the closet without even stopping to think.

  I was driving, the way they teach you to get up a head of steam in the first three strides. But I forgot the end of the divan. My legs hit it, and I went the rest of the way in by air. He was under me and trying to turn when I sifted down on him, and from then on it was confused, and rough. When nothing crunched, I knew he was no flyweight himself, and as we rolled across and demolished the record player I could feel the tremendous surge of power in the arm about my neck. The light had gone out when it hit the floor, so we were in absolute darkness, and I didn’t know what had become of the gun.

  The arm was pulling my head off. I broke it up by getting a knee into his belly and starting to move it down to where he didn’t like it. He scuttled away from it and landed a big fist on the side of my face. It rocked me. I could feel it going all the way down to my toes and back up again like a shock wave. I shook my head, trying to clear it, and swung blindly in the dark. I missed. I heard him scrambling away. He was on his feet. He crashed into the doorframe, and then he was gone down the hall.

  I sat up dizzily and dug my own flashlight out of my pocket. He might or might not leave the house, and it made a lot of difference now who had the gun. I held the light out from my side and snapped it on, shooting it around the floor. The gun was lying in a hash of broken phonograph records, and his light was on the floor the other side of what was left of the player. I picked up the gun, checked the safety, and put it in my pocket, conscious of the heavy way I was breathing. It had been short, but it had been rugged.

  I squatted on the floor to get my breath. Whoever he was, he was probably gone by now. I had the gun, so it wasn’t likely he’d tackle me again. I could leave. Provided, of course, I didn’t run into half a dozen more on the way out.

  I thought of Diana James. She was cute. She just needed somebody to search this old vacant house. There was nothing to it. And if the first sucker she sent got killed, she could always find more. Well, she was going to get a sucker’s full report when I got back to Sanport.

  I stood up. I’d better get started. Flicking on the light again, I looked down at the girl. Her shoulders had fallen off the divan and she was lying on the floor beside it with her head on an outstretched arm. She was going to have an awful headache in the morning, I thought, when she tried to figure out how she could have wrecked the room this way. It would be a rough way to wake up.

  I got it then. If I left, she wasn’t going to wake up.

  That guy had come here to kill her. He’d wait around until he saw me shove off, then he’d finish the job I had interrupted. He didn’t need the gun. She was asleep; he could kill her with anything. He was good when they were asleep. You could see that.

  Well, what was I supposed to do? So I didn’t have the stomach to sit there and see her butchered in cold blood; so now I was the protector of the poor? The hell with it. If I hung around here until she sobered up, she’d probably have me arrested for burglary. And I could just tell the cops how it happened, couldn’t I? They didn’t get many laughs in their work. Housebreaker saves woman’s life. Hey, Joe, come listen to this one.

  Then a very chilling thought
caught up with me. Suppose they found her in here murdered, tomorrow or the next day? Maybe nobody on earth knew that other guy was here. But there was one person who knew damn well I’d been here, because she’d brought me here. And if she ever leaked, I’d be in the worst jam I’d ever heard of.

  I had to do something. Time was running out. I squatted there in the dark, thinking swiftly. I began to see it then. It was the answer to everything.

  Here was where I went in business for myself.

  All I’d accomplished in this thing so far was to get shoved around. I’d been played for a sucker by a smooth operator who’d told me about 10 percent of the whole story, but now the program was going to change.

  We were all looking for that money. And the only person that really knew whether or not it was in this house was Mrs. Butler. She was the key to the whole thing. I didn’t believe now that it was here, but she knew where it was, or where it was last seen. So what I wanted was Mrs. Butler. If I left her here she’d be killed, but if I took her with me I’d have the exact thing I needed: information.

  And I knew just where to take her where we wouldn’t be interrupted. I could sober her up, and maybe if I kept asking the right questions long enough, I might find out a little about this. Of course, if she didn’t have anything to do with killing Butler, I was laying myself wide open to arrest for kidnapping, but I could see the way out of that. I tried to visualize the road map in my mind. It couldn’t be much over fifty miles …

  It collapsed on me then. Take her? How? I didn’t have my car. Load her on my shoulder like a sack of oats, and walk through town with her? I cursed under my breath. I was right back where I’d started. But wait. She had a car, didn’t she? She must have come back from Sanport in it.

  I’d have to leave her while I went out to the garage to look. But that joker probably wouldn’t try to ease back until he was sure I was gone. I went out and down the stairs, hurrying. I unlocked the kitchen door leading onto the back porch, cut the light, and went out. It was a few seconds before I could see anything in the dark. It’d be a nice time, I thought, for the gruesome bastard to try to clobber me with an ax.

  When I could make out the squat shadow of the garage off beyond the corner of the house, I groped my way over to it. The big overhead door was locked. I went around to the side. There was a small door there. I tried the knob. It was unlocked. I went in and closed it. When I switched on the flashlight I was standing beside a ’53 Cadillac. I poked the beam in on the dash. The keys weren’t in it. All I had to do now was find them. In a house of about twenty rooms. I looked at my watch. It was four-twenty. Maybe I couldn’t make it now, even if I already had the keys.

  I’d never pretended to be able to think like a woman, but I knew a little about drunks. It paid off. I covered the area between the front door, where she would come in, and the kitchen, where the bottle would be, and I found the purse on a table by the dining room door. Her key case was in it.

  I left it where it was and went back upstairs. I had picked her up and started out of the room when I thought of something else. Putting her down on the divan, I flashed the light around on the floor, looking for the bottle. It had been knocked over during the fight, but it was corked and none of it had spilled. It was a fifth, a little over half full. I shoved it in my coat pocket and picked her up again. She was still out like a hung jury, and I knew she would be for hours. As I went out through the kitchen I grabbed up the purse.

  I put her on the back seat of the car and switched on the flashlight long enough to take a look at the keys. I sorted out a couple that looked promising, cut the light, and went back outside, feeling for the lock of the overhead door. The first key did the trick. I boosted the door up slowly and got back in the car. Picking out the ignition key by feel, I started the Caddy and backed it out onto the driveway. The drive was white gravel and I could see it all right, all the way out to the big gates in front. I swung out onto the street and felt my way very slowly for another hundred yards. Then I switched on the headlights and goosed the two hundred horses.

  Housebreaking, I thought. Auto theft. Abduction. What was next? Blackmail? Extortion? But I had it all figured now, I was still within jumping distance of solid ground in every direction, and I wasn’t in much danger if I played it right. Somebody was going to come home first in that $120,000 sweepstakes, and as of now I looked like the favorite.

  We were headed south, on the highway we’d come in on. I rolled it up to seventy and tried to remember where the turnoff was. It should be somewhere around ten miles beyond that next town. I’d just have to watch for it, because I wasn’t too sure, approaching it from this direction. I’d been there plenty of times, but had always come up from the south.

  The headlights of a car behind us hit the rear-view mirror. I watched them for a minute. It probably didn’t mean anything; there were always a few cars on the road, even at four-thirty in the morning. They continued to hang in about the same place, not gaining or falling back.

  Maybe the joker’d had a car there and was trying to find out where we went. We were dipping down toward that long piece of tangent across the river bottom now. We’ll see, chum, I thought. I flipped the lights on high beam and gunned it.

  I flattened it out at ninety-five and the swamp and timber flashed past and disappeared behind us in the night with just the long sucking sound of the wind. I couldn’t watch him now because I couldn’t take my eyes off the road, but when we came out onto the winding grade at the other end I eased it down and looked. He’d dropped back, but only a little.

  That was dumb, I thought. Suppose it was a highway cop pacing us? But it wasn’t; he made no attempt to haul us down. He was just hanging there. I was still worrying about the turnoff. There was still only a slight chance he was following us, but I didn’t want him to see where we left the highway.

  We blasted through the little town and I began counting off the miles on the speedometer. The road was winding now, and he was out of sight most of the time. But I had to ease it, looking for the place. We’d come nine miles. Ten. Eleven. Had I passed it?

  Then we careened around a long curve and I saw the huddled dark buildings of the country store and filling station. I rode it down and made the turn, throwing gravel as we left the pavement. The county road ran straight ahead through dark walls of pine. I stepped on the brakes again and snapped off the lights as we slid to a stop. In a minute I saw his lights as he went rocketing past on the highway. I sighed with relief. It was probably some guy named Joe, in the wholesale grocery business.

  I cut the lights back on and before we started up I looked at my watch. It was a little after five. We still had about twenty miles to go, and I wanted to get past the last houses on the way before daybreak. We could make it if we kept moving.

  Two miles ahead I turned right and followed a county road going south through scrub pine. I knew the way all right now. I’d been up here a dozen times or more with Bill Livingston, and sometimes alone, or with a girl. It was his camp I was headed for.

  We’d been friends in college. His family had left him a lot of money and five or ten thousand acres of land back in here, including the lake where the camp was and a bunch of sloughs and river bottom. He was in Europe for the summer, but I knew where he left the key to the place.

  I slowed, watching for the wire gate on the left side of the road. We came to it in a few minutes, went through, and I closed it again. It was eight miles of rough private road now, up over a series of sand hills and then dropping down toward the lake. The last time I’d been in they were cutting timber back in here somewhere and logging trucks were using the first three or four miles of the road. I could see the tread marks of their big tires in the ruts now. There was no way to tell whether any other cars had been in or not.

  I pushed it hard. In about ten minutes we came to the fork where the logging trucks swung off to the right. I went left. As soon as we were around the next bend I stopped and got out and looked at the ruts in the headlights. T
here hadn’t been a car through since the last time it had rained, probably weeks ago. We had it all to ourselves.

  Dawn was breaking as we came down the last grade. I caught glimpses of the arm of the lake ahead, dark and oily smooth, like blued steel, with patches of mist rising here and there in the timber. It was intensely quiet, and beautiful. For a minute I wished I were only going fishing. Then I brushed it off.

  We went through the meadow and crossed a wooden culvert at the edge of the trees along the lake shore. I stopped and got out. The key was hanging on a nail just inside one end of the culvert.

  The cabin faced the meadow rather than the lake. It was large for a fishing or duck-hunting camp, more like a deserted old farmhouse backed up among the big trees at the lake’s edge. It was still half dark back in here, and I left the lights on as I stopped by the overhang of the front porch.

  The lock grated in the early-morning hush. I pushed the door open and went in. Striking a match, I located one of the kerosene lamps and lit it. This was the main room, with a wood-burning kitchen stove and some cupboards in the rear and a cot and some chairs and a table up front. The door on the right led into a storeroom that was cluttered with a hundred or so old beat-up duck decoys, parts of outboard motors, some oars, and a welter of fishing tackle.

  The other one, on the left, was closed. I pushed it open and carried the lamp in. It was the bedroom. It held two built-in bunks, one above the other, and a double bed against the front wall. The bed was spread with an Army blanket. I put the lamp down on a small table and went back out to the car.

  I carried her in and put her on the bed. Her face was waxen white in the lamplight and her hair was a dark mist across the pillow. She must have been at least thirty, she was a passed-out drunk, but she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I stood looking down at her for a minute. The whole thing was a lousy mess. Then I shrugged and picked up the lamp. I wasn’t her mother. And it was a rough world, any way you looked at it.