A Touch of Death

He grinned. “You might say on the radio.” He jerked his head toward the office. “Police bands. Not supposed to have it, but back here off the highway they don’t say anything. Boy, the air’s really burnin’ tonight.”

“You say there’s a man with her?” I asked.

“Almost has to be, the way they figure it. Somebody slugged that deputy so hard he may not live. Broken skull. He’s still unconscious.”

I turned my face away in the pool of light and cupped my hands as I lit a cigarette. “That’s too bad,” I said.

“Yeah. They’re just hoping he comes out of it. Maybe he’ll be able to tell ‘em what happened. Somebody said they heard shots, too.”

“Sounds like a wild night,” I said.

“They’ll catch ‘em. They’re stopping everything on the highways. Roadblocks. Course, they don’t know what the man looks like, but they got a good description of her. They say she’s a dish. A real pin-up. You ever see her?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

“I thought maybe, being from the same county—”

If he said that once more, my head would blow up like a hand grenade. “I don’t belong to the country club set,” I said. “I run a one-lung sawmill, and the only time I ever see any bankers is when they tell me my notes are overdue. How much I owe you?”

“Four-sixty,” he said.

I took a five out of my wallet, feeling the wonderful, hard outlines of the three keys through the leather. They were something you could touch. They were no dream you were chasing; you had them in your hand and could feel them.

A man lying unconscious somewhere with a broken skull—a man you didn’t know and had never seen except as a block of shadow a little darker than the night—didn’t really exist as long as you didn’t think about him. I felt the keys through the limp leather.

I thought of the cafe up the street. I hadn’t eaten anything for thirty-six hours; I was dead on my feet and needed coffee to keep going. I heard the cash register ring in the office, and then the radio cut in again with some coded signal that was like a finger pointing. There he is, it seemed to say.

He’s standing there in the night. We’re in the dark, watching him.

Eat?

Run. Keep going.

Nobody could eat with them looking at his back. When

we were safe in the apartment, that feeling of always being watched from behind would go away. Wouldn’t it?

Sure it would.

A car rolled in off the street and stopped on the other side of the pumps, and when I turned and looked at it I saw the state seal on the front door of a black Ford sedan and a man getting out dressed in gray whipcord with a Sam Browne belt and a gun holster with a flap on it. I looked at him and then slowly turned my head and stared out into the street, feeling exposed and skinless in the hot pool of light.

“Hey, Sammy,” he said, “how about a little service?”

Sammy came out of the office with my change. He grinned at the cop and said, “Boom-de-boom-boom. Keep your shirt on, Sergeant Friday.”

He handed me the change, and I had to turn to take it. I saw the cop come between the pumps and stand in front of the car, the impersonal face and the gray impersonal eyes turned toward me and toward it, gathering us up in that efficient, remorseless, and completely automatic glance that knew instantly and without conscious thought all there was to know about the outside of both of us, sifting the information, cataloguing it, and storing it away in the precise pigeonholes of his mind, all of this in one instant and without ever breaking off his good-natured kidding of Sammy.

He knew the car was from Madelon Butler’s county. The license plates would tell him that automatically. I saw him walk down the side of the car, still talking to Sammy, and glance carelessly in the windows, front and back. It was all right. He wouldn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything in the car except that small bag, which could be mine.

I remembered then, but there was nothing I could do except stand there and wait in an agony of suspense.

She had changed clothes in the car. What had she done with the pajamas and the robe? They were either in the bag or on the back seat in plain sight. I didn’t know. And I couldn’t see in from here.

He came on past the car, glanced idly at me once more, and went over to the Coke machine by the door.

I walked on rubbery legs around to the other side of the car, and as I got in I managed to shoot a glance into the back. There was nothing in sight. She had put them

in the bag. I was weak with relief.

“Come back again,” Sammy said.

“You bet.”

I drove off, feeling him there behind me. It was as if I

had eyes in the middle of my back.

I held the speed down while the lights faded behind me. They disappeared as I swung around the curve. I could see the bridge coming up. There were no other cars in sight, ahead or behind. I flipped the lights up on high beam and then down, and hit the brakes.

She came up quickly out of the shadows and climbed in. I shot the car ahead while she was closing the door. The speedometer climbed. We were away. Maybe we would make it. We were only a little over a hundred miles from Sanport now and steadily slipping farther through their fingers.

But behind us Diana James was dead. And if that deputy sheriff died of his fractured skull, I was a cop killer. Maybe you never could get far enough away from that. There might not be that much distance in the world.

We were almost there. Traffic lights were flashing amber along the boulevard. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter of three. I turned right on a crosstown artery before we got into the business district and went out toward the beach. It was hot and still, and I could feel the stickiness of high humidity. There were few cars on the streets. Newspaper trucks rumbled past, dropping piles of papers on corners.

There wasn’t time to pick one up now. The thing I had to do first was get her out of sight once and for all and ditch this car. Then I could relax.

“It’s only a few blocks more,” I said.

“That’s good,” she replied. “I’m tired. And I need a

drink. You do have something there, I hope?”

“Yes. But remember what I told you about the juice.”

“Oh,” she said impatiently, “don’t be an idiot.”

I turned left into a wide, palm-lined avenue. The apartment building was two blocks up. I slowed as we neared it, looking in through the wide glass doors. The foyer was deserted. There was slight chance we would meet anyone at this time in the morning.

I had to go on nearly another block to find a place to park. We got out. The street was quiet. I took the bag.

“If we meet anybody,” I said, “just don’t let him get a good look at your face. Be looking in your purse or something. There are a hundred apartments in the

building. Nobody knows more than half a dozen of the other people. Just act natural.”

“Of course,” she said. She was completely unconcerned.

We walked down to the doors, our heels clicking on the pavement. The foyer was empty, the doors of the self-service elevator open. We stepped in and I punched the button. When we got out on the third floor the corridor was deserted and silent. Our feet made no sound on the carpet. Number 303 was the second door. I took the key out of my pocket. The door opened silently and we went in.

I closed it very gently, and when it latched I could feel the tension draining out of me. We were safe now. We were invisible. That snarling and deadly hornet swarm of police was locked away on the other side of the door.

I flicked the wall switch. A shaded table lamp came on. The Venetian blinds were tightly closed. She looked around the living room as casually as visiting royalty inspecting the accommodations and then turned to me and smiled.

“Sanctuary,” she said, “in Grand Rapids modern. And now could I have a drink?”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

She shrugged. “If you insist. I’m very glad we got here. You were quite effective, Mr. Scarborough. Expensive, but effective.”

“Thank you, Your Highness. Don’t you ever worry about your neck at all?”

She stopped her inspection of the room to look at me, the large eyes devoid of any expression whatever. “Not publicly,” she said. Then she added, “I’ll take bourbon and plain water.”

If she wanted ice water, I thought, all she had to do was open a vein.

I nodded my head toward the doorway at the left of the living room. “Bath is in that hallway,” I said. “The bedroom is just beyond. Dining room and kitchen to the right.”

She raised her eyebrows. “The bedroom? Where are you going to sleep?”

She was running true to form, all right. I’d intended to turn the bedroom over to her, but she had already taken it for granted. The help could rustle up its own quarters.

“Oh,” I said, “I’ll just bed down on an old sweater outside your door and bark if I hear burglars.”

“You are clever,” she murmured. “You don’t mind, do you? I just wanted the situation clarified.”

“It is clarified. I won’t bother you. This is strictly business with me. You’re probably frigid, anyway. Aren’t you?”

The eyes were completely blank. “No ice,” she said.

“What?”

“The drink, dear. Remember?”

I went into the kitchen and got the bottle out of the cupboard. I mixed two drinks, making mine very short and weak. While I was out there I looked in the refrigerator to see if there was anything to eat. There was only an old piece of cheese. I could get something at the airport. But what about her?

The hell with her.

I took the drinks in. She was sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed and the dark skirt pulled down over her knees. She had long, lovely legs.

I took a sip of my drink and looked at my watch. I’d have to hurry and ditch that car so I could get back here before people were astir.

Something had been puzzling me, however, and I thought about it now. “Why do you suppose Diana James went up there?” I asked.

“It’s fairly obvious,” she said. “She had all your rapacious greediness for money. She read—or heard over the radio—that I had fled the country, and she was just hoping I hadn’t had time to pick it up when I ran. A sort of desperation try, you might call it.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “But why did you shoot her? Or do you ever need any particular reason?”

“I shot her because she set foot in my house,” she said simply. “She knew I would, of course, but she thought I was gone.”

I remembered the awful horror in her eyes when that light burst on her and she heard Madelon Butler call her Cynthia. She had known she was dead when she heard it.

“Why did you start that fire?”

“The house was mine,” she said coldly. “It belonged to my grandfather and my father, and I’m the only one of the family left alive. I’m sure no one can question my

right to burn it.”

“Except the insurance company.”

“Why?” she asked calmly. “They’ll never have to pay.

There is no one to pay it to.”

I thought of that. She was right. She no longer existed as Madelon Butler.

I was right, too; but I didn’t know the half of it.

Chapter Thirteen

It was fifteen miles out to the airport. The drink propped me up for a few minutes, but when it wore off I was more dead on my feet than ever. I wondered if I had ever slept. There was no traffic, however, and it didn’t take long.

I drove into the parking area. It was dark and no one was around. Before I got out I rubbed my handkerchief over the steering wheel and dash and the cigarette lighter. I left the keys in the ignition, and as I got out I smeared the door handle with the palm of my hand.

It would do. There was very little chance they’d ever connect us with this car. That blonde and her brother were in no position to report it. They’d keep their mouths shut. The car might eventually be stolen, with the keys left in it, and God knew where it would wind up. And even if the police did get on the trail of it and find it out here, they’d never know for sure whether we’d left it here as a blind or whether we’d actually taken a plane.

I walked back down the rows of cars and went into the main building. A few people waited for planes. The loudspeaker system was calling somebody’s name: Please come to the American Airlines desk. I looked at the clock. It was five minutes of four. I had plenty of time.

The morning papers were on the stand. I reached for one, and she jumped right in my face. There was her picture spread over two columns of the front page, looking as beautiful and arrogant as life.

“SOUGHT!” the caption said.

I dropped a nickel in the cup and folded the paper over as if I had to hide her while I hurried into the coffee shop. I sat down alone at the end of the counter and said, “Hotcakes and coffee,” to the waitress without even seeing her.

So she was sought. I knew that. What about that deputy sheriff?

I unfolded the paper and put it on the counter beside me, in such a hurry to read it all that even the headlines blurred. Somebody was saying something.

I looked up. The waitress was still there. “What?” “I said did you want your coffee now?” “Yes.” She was gone. I looked back at the paper, furiously

scanning the headlines. It was under her picture. “OFFICER’S CONDITION CRITICAL,” it said. He wasn’t dead. But that was hours ago.

Carl L. Madden, 29, deputy sheriff of Vale County, is in serious condition in a Mount Temple hospital following an attack by an unknown assailant last night.

Madden, who has not regained consciousness following the brutal slugging, was on duty at the time as one of the officers maintaining a round-the-clock watch on the home of the late

J. N. Butler at the edge of town. As a result of the sudden eruption of violence and confusion that followed, during which the old Butler mansion burned to the ground, Madden was not discovered until nearly an hour after the attack. Police were first alerted by telephone calls from residents in the vicinity of the Butler place, who reported

having heard gunshots. A patrol car was dispatched to the scene. Upon entering the grounds, the officers

discovered the whole basement area of the house in flames. A hurried call brought firemen to the scene, but the fire had gained too much headway and could not be brought under control.

The absence of Madden was noted shortly by other officers who were aware he had been assigned to keep the home under surveillance against the possible return of Mrs. Butler. This, coupled with the reports of gunshots, led to a horrified belief he might be inside the building, perhaps badly injured. An attempt was made to gain entry and institute a search, but was repulsed almost immediately as mounting walls of flame engulfed the old, tinder-dry house.

As the flames lit up the surrounding area, however, he was discovered unconscious and shackled with his own handcuffs to the base of some oleanders at the rear of the grounds. Taken immediately to a hospital, he was described by physicians as suffering from severe concussion and possible fracture of the skull.

He had apparently been hit from behind with great force with some hard object, such as a piece of pipe or a gun. No weapon was found.

Local officers are inclined to rule out the possibility that Madden could have been slugged by Mrs. Butler herself. They state that from the force of the blow it was almost certainly delivered by a man, and a big and perhaps powerful one, at that. They do believe, however, that Mrs. Butler was involved, and the state-wide search for her has been intensified. She is already wanted in connection with the murder of her husband.

An instant alarm was sounded, and all highways leading out of Mount Temple have been under constant patrol since minutes after the fire was discovered. It is considered extremely improbable that she could have slipped through the police cordon....

I looked up. “What?” It was the waitress again. “Here’s your coffee.” “Oh,” I said. “Thanks.” “They publish those papers ever’ day,” she said, “That

the first one you ever saw?” “I just got back from South America.” “Oh.” She glanced at the paper. “Pretty, isn’t she?” “Who?”

“Mrs. Butler. That’s her picture. She killed her husband and threw him in an old well. What do you suppose made her do it?”

I wished she would go away. “Maybe he snored,” I said.

It was nice. I’d been tied to Mrs. Butler like a Siamese twin for over twenty-four hours, but a waitress in an airport greasy-spoon had to tell me where they’d found her husbands body.

“No,” the waitress went on, answering her own question, “I’ll tell you. He was triflin’ on her. That’s the way it always is. A woman kills her husband, its because he was tomcattin’ around. You men are all triflers.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll shoot myself. But could I have the hotcakes first?”

She went away. Maybe she would break a leg, or forget to come back. I jerked my eyes back to the paper, feverishly looking for the place where I’d been interrupted. I found it. It was at the bottom of the page. “See Butler, page four,” it said.

I flipped the pages, goaded with impatience. I overshot page four and had to back up. Here it was.

No theory has been advanced as to why the house was set afire. A landmark in the county since the early 1890’s, it was totally destroyed. Only a chimney and a portion of one wall remained at an early hour this morning.

Police are also at a loss to explain the shots heard by neighbors. Maddens gun, found nearby, had not been fired. A constant vigil is being maintained at his bedside in the hope that a return to consciousness may clear up some of the deep pall of mystery that hangs over the whole affair. It is hoped he may have seen his assailant before he was slugged.

Mrs. Butler has been sought by police since the discovery of the body of her husband, vice-president of the First National Bank of Mount Temple, in an abandoned well near their summer camp on Crystal Springs Lake, 15 miles east of Mount Temple. Police, acting on a tip by two small boys, discovered the body of the missing banker a little over twenty-four hours ago, ending a nationwide search that began June 8, when he disappeared, allegedly absconding with $120,000 of the bank’s funds.

No trace of the money was found with the body.

I closed the paper. The waitress brought the hot-cakes and said something I didn’t catch. She went away. I forgot the hotcakes.

He was still alive four hours ago. No, it was less than that. The story had said “at an early hour this morning.” He would live. He had to. He was young, wasn’t he? Twenty-nine was young enough to take a thing like a broken skull.

It hadn’t been real before, when I’d heard about it from the filling-station boy. It was only a rumor. But there was something about seeing it in print that made it true.

I tried to sort out how I felt. There wasn’t any feeling about the man himself. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him. If he walked up and sat down beside me at the counter here right now I wouldn’t know him. He was completely faceless, like a thousand other people that died every day. You read about them. They were killed in automobile wrecks and they fell in bathtubs and broke their necks and they died of cancer and they fell off buildings and you read about them and then you turned

the page and read the funnies.

That wasn’t it.

It was that if he died, this wasn’t a game I could quit when I got the money. I’d never be able to quit.

This thing was like a swamp. Every time you moved, you sank into it a little deeper. I remembered how simple it had been at first. All I had to do was search an empty house. If I found the money, I was rich. If I didn’t, I was out two days’ work. That was all. It didn’t cost anything.

“There’ll be no wild-haired babes blowing their tops and killing each other in anything I’m mixed up in,” I had told Diana James. It was a business proposition.

And now Diana James was dead. And a cop was in the hospital with a broken skull. If he died, I had killed him.

I didn’t want the hotcakes now, but I had to eat them. If I walked out and left them, the waitress would notice me some more. She would remember me. “Sure, officer. That’s right. A big guy, blond, kind of a scrambled face. Something was bothering him, he acted funny.” I ate the hotcakes.

A plane had come in and the limousine was leaving for downtown. I went out and got in it. It made a stop at one of the beach hotels, about five blocks from the apartment building. I left it there and went into tbe lobby. A later edition of the morning paper was on the stand. I bought one, but the Butler story was unchanged.

I walked the five blocks. The air was fresh with early morning now and there was a faint tinge of pink in the east as I turned the corner at the building. No one saw me. I walked up instead of taking the elevator.

The lamp was still on in the living room, but she wasn’t there.

The bottle was on the coffee table, empty. Well, there’d been only about three drinks in it. As exhausted as she was, they’d probably knocked her out. The door to the hallway on the left was closed. She had gone to bed.

I stood looking around the living room. Had she gone to bed? You never knew what she’d do. Diana James was dead now because I hadn’t known. Maybe she had left. She had a thousand dollars in her purse and she was tough enough, and disliked me enough, to take a chance on it alone just to keep me from getting my hands on the money in those safe-deposit boxes. She’d do it for spite.

I walked softly across the deep-piled rug and eased the door open. Inside it, on the left, the door to the bathroom was ajar, but the bedroom door at the other end of the short hallway was closed. I put my hand on the knob. It was locked on the inside. She was there.

I went back and sat down on the sofa. I took the wallet out of my pocket and removed the three keys. I placed them in a row on the glass top of the coffee table and just looked at them.

I forgot everything else. They were a wonderful sight.

Here it was. I had it made. Nothing remained except a little waiting. The money was where it was perfectly safe, where no one in the world could get it except her. And I had her. When she woke up I’d take that thousand dollars out of her purse so there’d be nc chance of her skipping out on me. I should have thought of that before. She couldn’t go anywhere without money.

Nobody would ever know I had it. Nobody, that is, except her, and she couldn’t talk. There was nothing to

connect me with it. And I had better sense than to start throwing it around and attracting attention. They’d never trip me that way. I’d be a long way from here before any of it got back into circulation.

But there were still a few angles to be figured out. I thought of them. What was I going to do with it while I was taking her to California? I had to take her—not because I’d promised, but simply because I had to do it to be safe myself. If I left her to shift for herself once I got the money, she’d be picked up by the police sooner or later, because she was too hot in this area. And if they got her, she’d talk.

But what did I do with the money while we were driving out there? If I tried to take it in the car, there’d always be the chance she would get her hands on it and run. It would take at least five days. Any hour, day or night, she might outguess me and take the pot. She was smart. And she was tough, and she might not be too fussy how she got it back. She could pick up a gun in some hock shop and let me have it in the back of the head out on the desert in New Mexico or Arizona.

No, I had to leave it here. The thing to do was get a couple of safe-deposit boxes of my own, transfer the stuff right into them, and leave it until I came back from the Coast. I could sell the car out there and fly back. It would take only a day to pick it up and be on my way.

I was tired. I put the keys back in the wallet and shoved it in my pocket. Switching off the light, I lay back on the sofa. Faint bars of light were beginning to show through the Venetian blinds. It was nearly dawn.

I dropped off to sleep....

I was running down a street that had no end. It was night, but there was a light on every other corner. Far behind me somebody else was running. I could hear his footsteps pounding after me, but I could never see him. The single, empty street stretched away to infinity behind me, and ahead. I ran. And when I slowed I could hear him behind me, running. There was nobody, but I could hear him.

I was covered with sweat, and shaking. It was light in the room and little bars of sunlight slanted in through the partly opened Venetian blinds. She was sitting across from me on an overstuffed chair, dressed in her pajamas and the blue robe.

She was smiling. “You moan a lot in your sleep,” she said.

Chapter Fourteen

I rubbed my hands across my face. I sat up. The shaking stopped. It was only a dream. But that endless, empty street was still burned into my mind as if it had been put there with a branding iron.

“What time is it?” I asked.

She looked at her watch. “A little after ten.”

“How long have you been up?”

“About an hour,” she said. “Were you having a

nightmare?”

“No,” I said. I got off the sofa and went into the kitchen. There was a little coffee in a can in one of the cupboards. I filled the percolator with water, put the coffee in, and set it on a burner on the stove. If she’d been awake an hour it was a wonder she hadn’t done something about it herself. But maybe being waited on by servants all your life got to be a habit.

I went back to the living room. “How about taking the coffee off when it’s done?” I said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Are you going somewhere?” she asked, with faint interest.

“I’m going to take a shower. And shave.”

She looked at me with distaste. “Perhaps it would help.”

I had started for the bathroom, but I stopped now and turned around. She got a little hard to take, and if we were going to be here for a month or longer we really should work out some sort of plan for getting along together.

“We can’t all be beautiful, Your Highness,” I said. “So before we go any further, let’s get a few things straightened out. You’re here because you’re hiding from the cops. If they catch you they’re going to put you away

where you can spend the next forty years scrubbing floors and trying to fight off the Lesbians. This is my apartment. I’m not your servant. I outweigh you by about a hundred pounds. I don’t like you. I’d just as soon slap your supercilious face loose as look at you. You can’t yell for help because you’re not supposed to be in here.

“I may be a little dense, but I just somehow don’t see where you’re in any position to be pulling that Catherine the Great around here. However, if you do, don’t let me stop you. Just keep right on with your snotty arrogance and see what it gets you. Maybe a fat lip would be good for you. How about it?”

She looked up at me with perfect composure. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

“No. I’m just telling you. Get wise to yourself.”

She smiled. “But, I mean—you wouldn’t try to frighten me, would you?”

I reached down for her. I caught the front of the robe and hauled her erect. We stood touching each other, her face just under mine.

“Maybe you’d like to stand under the shower yourself,” I said. “For a half hour or so, in your cute pajamas.”

The big eyes were only amused and slightly mocking.

“All right,” she said. “But before we do, wouldn’t you like to hear the news I heard on the radio?”

“The radio?” I jerked my head around. She couldn’t have been listening to it while I was asleep. It was on a table at the end of the sofa I was sleeping on. But it wasn’t. It was gone.

“I took it into the bedroom so I wouldn’t wake you,” she said.

“What news?”

“You’re sure you would like to hear it?”

I shook her roughly. “What news?”

“That deputy sheriff you hit with the gun isn’t expected to live. Who did you say was hiding whom from the police?”

Because I was at least partly prepared for it, it didn’t hit me as hard as it would have cold. I managed to keep my face expressionless, and I didn’t relax the grip on her robe.

“So what about it?” I said. “In the first place, he’s not dead. And it doesn’t change anything, anyway. You’re still the one they’re looking for.”

“No, dear,” she said. “They’re looking for two of us. Your position isn’t quite as strong as it was, so don’t you think it might be wise to stop trying to threaten me?”

I pushed her back in the chair. “All right. But listen. You’re right about one thing: We’re in this together. They get one of us, they’ll get us both. So you do what I tell you, and don’t give me any static. Do we understand each other?”

“We understand each other perfectly,” she said.

I took a shower and shaved. I went into the bedroom in my shorts and found a pair of flannel slacks and a sports shirt in the closet. I transferred the wallet into the slacks.

She hadn’t made up the bed. Well, that was all right. She was the one who was sleeping in it, and if she liked it that way... Her purse was on the dresser. I opened it and took out the billfold. They were all fifties, and there were twenty-one of them. I took the whole thing out into the living room. She was drinking a cup of coffee.

“Just so you don’t decide to run away and join the Brownies,” I said, “I’m taking charge of the roll.”

Her eyes had that dead, expressionless look in them again. “So you’re going to take that too? And leave me without a cent?”

“Relax,” I said. “I’m just handling it. For expenses. And to keep you from running out on me. You’ll get it back, or

what’s left of it, when we get to the Coast.”

“You’re too generous,” she said.

“Well, that’s the kind of good-time Charlie I am. After

all, it’s only money.”

She shrugged and went back to her coffee.

“I’ll be back in a minute with something to eat,” I said.

I went downstairs and around the corner to a small grocery. I picked up some cinnamon rolls and a dozen eggs and some bacon, and remembered another pound of coffee. The afternoon papers weren’t on the street yet. There was nothing to do but go on waiting. The brassy glare of the sun hurt my eyes. I felt light-headed, and everything was slightly unreal. A police car pulled up at the boulevard stop beside me. I fought a blind impulse to turn my face away and hum around the corner.

Forty-eight hours ago they wrote traffic tickets, and you said, “Heh, heh, I’m sorry, officer, I didn’t realize... No, it won’t happen again.” Now they followed you through the jungle with their radios whispering, stalking you, and waiting.

When I got back to the apartment she had brought the radio into the living room and was sitting on the floor listening to a program of long-hair music. With a sudden sense of shock I realized this was exactly the same way I’d walked in on her the first time I had ever seen her, and that it had been only two nights ago.

Not years ago, I thought; it had just been days. And we had a month to go.

The recording stopped. She glanced briefly up at me and said, “The tone quality of your radio is atrocious.”

“Well, turn it off,” I said. “You want something to eat?”

“What do we have?”

“Cinnamon rolls.”

“All right,” she said indifferently.

I warmed the rolls in the oven and poured some more coffee. We sat down at the table in the kitchen and ate, and then went back into the living room. The radio was still turned on. I went across the dial, looking for news. There was none. It was nearly eleven, however. The afternoon papers should be on the street now.

Then I remembered that the news in them wouldn’t be as late as what she’d heard on the radio at ten.

She sat down in the big chair and lit a cigarette. She leaned back and said, “Pacing the floor isn’t going to help

— Incidentally, how soundproof are these walls and floors?”

I tried to make myself sit still. “They’re all right,” I said. “I’ve never heard any of the other tenants. Just be sure you wear those slippers, and don’t play the radio too loud.”

“Is there anyone who comes in and cleans up? Or has to read the meters, or anything?” “No,” I said. “I had a woman who cleaned up the place once a week, but she quit a month or so ago. And all the

gas and electric meters are down in the basement. There’s no occasion for anyone to come in here unless we have something delivered, in which case I’ll be here to take it. Never answer the door, of course, or the telephone. Nobody’ll ever know you’re here.”

She smiled faintly. “I really have to give you credit. I believe it will work. How long do you think it will be before I can go out?”

“It depends on whether that guy dies or not,” I said. “Of course, they’re never going to quit looking for you, but normally some of the heat would die down after a while and every cop in the state wouldn’t have your picture in front of his eyes all the time. However, that deputy sheriff is going to make it rough. If he dies, they’re looking for two people who killed a cop.”

“If he dies,” she said coolly, “you killed him. I didn’t.”

“That hasn’t got anything to do with it. Nobody knew I was there. They have no description of me. Actually, they don’t even know I exist. So they have to get you, to get me. They have descriptions of you, and pictures. You’re real. You exist. They know who they’re looking for. Which brings us right up against the problem. We might as well

get started on it. Stand up.”

She looked at me questioningly.

“Stand up,” I repeated irritably. “Turn around, very

slowly. Lets get an idea of the job.”

She shrugged, but did as I said.

“All right.” I lit a cigarette. It wasn’t going to be easy. It was all right to talk about, but just where did you start? A man could grow a mustache, or shave it off, or break his nose....

What did you do to camouflage a dish like this?

“A little over average height,” I said, more to myself than to her. “But that part’s all right. There are lots of

tall women. But damn few of them as beautiful.”

She smiled sardonically. “Thank you.”

“I’m not complimenting you,” I said, “so don’t rupture

yourself. This is no game. You’re not going to be easy to hide, and if we don’t do a good job, we’re dead.”

“Well, you took the job.”

“Keep your shirt on. Let’s break it down. There are things we can change, and things we can’t. We can change the color of your hair and the way you do it, but that alone isn’t enough. We can’t do anything about those eyes. Or the bone structure and general shape of your face.

“You can wear glasses, but that’s pretty obvious. And you can splash on more make-up and widen your mouth with lipstick, but that still isn’t going to do the job.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking about it. She started to say something, but I broke in on her.

“Just a minute and then we’ll get your ideas. Here are mine. We can’t make you plain and drab enough to blend into the scenery because you’re too much whistle bait to start with and there are too many things we can’t change, so we have to make you a different kind of dish.

“Here’s the angle. All the people who are looking for you are men. And since we can’t keep ‘em from noticing you, we’ll make ‘em notice the wrong things. We’ll start by bleaching your hair up three or four shades. I think we can make it as far as red, or reddish brown. We cut it. You put it up close to your head in tight curls. We may butch it up somewhat, but after we get the groundwork done it’ll be safe enough for you to go to a beauty shop and have it patched. You splash on the make-up. Pluck your eyebrows. Over-paint your mouth. So far, so good. Now. Do you wear a girdle?”

She stared coldly. “Really.”

“I asked you a question. Do you wear a girdle?”

“When I’m going out, and dressed.”

“All right. And how about falsies? How much of all that

is yours?”

“Of all the utterly revolting—”

“Shut up,” I said. “Maybe there just isn’t any way I can get it through your thick head that this is serious. Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? You’re going to come out a dish, no matter how we slice you, so what we’ve got to do is make you an entirely different kind of dish. A cheap one. Flashy. If you’re not already wearing padding up there, you’re going to, and plenty of it. Change your way of walking. Get dresses tight across the hips, leave off the girdle, and let it roll. Cops are men. Who’s going to keep

his mind on the job and look for the patrician Mrs. Butler with all that going on?”

She shook her head. “You have the most amazing genius for vulgarity I have ever encountered.”

“Oh, knock it off,” I said. “If you don’t like the idea, let’s see you come up with a better one.”

“You misunderstand me. I wasn’t criticizing the idea. It’s very good. In fact, it’s remarkably ingenious. I was merely objecting to your crude way of expressing yourself, and marveling that someone without even the faintest glimmerings of taste or discrimination could have figured it out.”

“Save it, save it.” I waved her off. “You can make a speech some other time. Now, if we’ve agreed on the idea, let’s work out the details. We’ve got to do something about your complexion. Do you tan all right?”

‘Yes. Except that I avoid it.”

“Not any more. Now, let’s see. I could get a sun lamp, except that anybody asking for one at a store here on the Gulf Coast in summer might be locked up for a maniac, so we’ll get along without it. This living-room window faces west, and in the afternoon the sun comes in if we raise the Venetian blind. There’s no building across the avenue high enough for anybody to see you if you’re lying on the floor. Item one, suntan oil.”

I got up and found some paper and a pencil and wrote it down.

“Now, what else?”

“Do you have any scissors?”

“No,” I said. I wrote that down, and went on: “Home

permanent outfit. Sunglasses. Now, what do I get to bleach your hair with?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said.

“You’re a big help,” I said. “But never mind. I’ll get it. Now, can you think of anything else?”

“Only cigarettes. And a bottle of bourbon.”

“You won’t get tanked up?”

“I never get tanked up, as you put it.”

“All right.” I stood up. As I started toward the door I stopped and turned. “What banks are those safe-deposit boxes in?”

She answered without hesitation. “The Merchants Trust Company, the Third National, and the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company.”

“What name did you use?”

“Names,” she said easily. “Each box is under a different

one.”

“What are they?”

She leaned back in the chair and smiled. “A little late to be checking up now, aren’t you? I doubt if they’d answer your questions, anyway.”

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of calling them. I’m still going under the assumption you had better sense than to try to lie about it, under the circumstances.”

“I wasn’t lying. The money’s in those three banks.”

“And the names?”

“Mrs. James R. Hatch, Mrs. Lucille Manning, and Mrs. Henry L. Carstairs.” She named the names off easily, but stopped abruptly at the end and sat there staring at her cigarette, frowning a little. “What is it?” I asked.

She glanced up at me. “I beg your pardon?”

“I thought you started to say something else.”

“No,” she said, still frowning as if she were trying to think of something. “That was all. Those are the names.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll be back in a little while.” As I went down in the elevator I tried to figure out what was bothering me. The whole thing was easy now, wasn’t it? Even if that deputy sheriff died, they couldn’t catch us. She was the only lead they had, and she was too well hidden. The money was there, waiting for me. Then what was it?

It wasn’t anything you could put a finger on. It was just a feeling she was a little unconcerned about giving up all that money. She didn’t seem to mind.

Chapter Fifteen

I took a bus across town and got my car out of the storage garage. Both the afternoon papers were out now, but there was nothing new. The deputy sheriff was still unconscious, his condition unchanged. They were tearing the state apart for Madelon Butler.

I found a place to park near a drugstore. Buying a couple of women’s magazines, I took them back to the car and began flipping hurriedly through the ads. I didn’t find what I wanted. These were the wrong ones, full of cooking recipes and articles on how to refurnish your living room for $64.50. I went back and picked up some more, the glamour type.

There were dozens of ads for different lands of hair concoctions, but most of them were pretty coy. “You can regain your golden loveliness,” they promised, but they didn’t say how the hell you got there in the first place.

I threw the magazines in the back seat and found another drugstore. It would be dangerous to keep haunting the same one all the time. I went to the cosmetic counter.

“Could I help you?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I want one of those home-permanent outfits. And there was something else my wife told me to get but I can’t remember the name of it, some kind of goo

she uses to lighten the color of her hair.”

“A rinse?”

“I don’t know what you call it. Anyway, her hair’, dark brown to begin with, and with this stuff she gets a little past midfield into blonde territory a sort of coppery color.”

She named three or four.

“That’s it,” I said on the third one. “I remember now it was Something-Tint. Give me a slip on it, though, just in case I’m wrong and have to bring it back.”

I took it back to the car, along with the permanent-wave outfit, and read the instructions. We had to have some cotton pads to put it on with and shampoo to get rid of it after it had been on long enough. I hunted up still another drugstore for these, and while I was there I bought the sunglasses, suntan lotion, and scissors.

That was everything except the whisky and cigarettes. When I stopped for these I saw a delicatessen next to the liquor store and picked up a roast chicken and a bottle of milk, and bought a shopping bag that would hold all of it.

It was one-thirty when I got back to the apartment. The Venetian blind was raised and she was lying on the rug with her face and arms in the sun. She had taken off the robe and rolled the sleeves of Her pajamas up to her shoulders. Maybe she had decided to take some interest in the proceedings at last.

“Here.” I dug around in the shopping bag and found the suntan lotion. “Smear some of this on.”

She sat up and made a face. “I hate being tanned.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “It’s better than prison pallor.”

“Yes. Isn’t it.” She opened the bottle and rubbed some on her face and arms. “Did you get the whisky?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead with your tan. I’ll bring a drink.”

“Thank you.” She lay down again and closed her eyes. The rug was gray, and the long hair was very dark against it.

I unpacked the shopping bag and opened one of the bottles, hiding the other in the back of the broom closet. Since she seemed to be able to handle it without getting noisy, I poured her a heavy one, half a water tumbler with only a little water in it. After all, she was buying it.

I went back into the living room. “How long have you been in the sun now?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“You’d better knock off, then. If you blister and peel, you’ll just have to start over.”

“Yes.” She sat up. I handed her the glass and lowered the Venetian blind.

She took a sip of the drink, still sitting on the floor, and looked at me and smiled. “Hmmm,” she said. “You’re an excellent bartender. Where’s yours?”

“I didn’t want any,” I said.

“Don’t you drink at all?”

“Very little.”

She held up the glass. “Well, here’s to the admirable

Mr. Scarborough. His strength is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure.”

“You seem to feel better.”

“I do,” she said. “Lots better.” She slid over a little so she could lean back against the chair. “I’ve been thinking about your brilliant idea ever since you left and the more I think about it, the better I like it. It can’t fail. How can they catch Madelon Butler if she has changed completely into someone else?”

“Remember, it’s not easy.”

“I know. But we can do it. When do we begin?”

“Right now,” I said. “Unless you want to finish your

drink first.” “I can work on it while you’re hacking up my hair.” She

laughed. “It’ll give me courage.”

“You’ll probably need it,” I said.

I spread a bunch of newspapers on the floor and set one of the dining-room chairs in the middle of them. “Sit here,” I said. She sat down, looking quite pleased and happy.

The radio was turned on, playing music. “Was there any news while I was gone?” I asked.

She glanced up at me. “Oh, yes. Wasn’t it in the papers?”

“What?” I demanded. “For God’s sake, what?”

“That deputy sheriff’s condition is improving, and they say he’ll probably recover.”

I sat down weakly and lit a cigarette, the haircutting forgotten. I hadn’t realized how bad the pressure had really been until now that it was gone. I hadn’t killed any cop. The heat was off me. Even if they caught us, they could only get me for rapping him on the head. Of course, there was still the matter of Diana James, but that was different, somehow. I hadn’t actually done that. She had. And Diana James wasn’t a cop.

“Has he recovered consciousness yet?” I asked.

“No, but they expect him to any time.”

“There’s one thing, though,” I said. “He recognized

you, remember?”

“Yes,” she said carelessly. “I know.”

“That part won’t help,” I said, wondering why she was

so unconcerned about it.

“Oh, well, they seem to be certain enough that I was there anyway,” she said. “His identification won’t change anything.”

I should have begun to catch on then, but I fumbled it. The roof had to fall in on me before I realized why the news about that deputy sheriff made her so happy.

“Well, Pygmalion,” she said, “shall we commence? I’m quite eager to begin life as Susie Mumble.”

I was digging through the pile of women’s magazines. “There’s more to it than a haircut,” I said. “You have to

learn to talk like Susie.”

“I know. Just don’t rush me, honey.”

I jerked my face around and stared at her. She was

smiling.

“You catch on fast,” I said.

“Thanks, honey. I’m tryin’ all the time.” She had even dropped her voice down a little, into a kind of throaty contralto purr. I was conscious of thinking that her husband and Diana James and even the police force had been outnumbered from the first in trying to outguess her.

I found the magazine I was looking for, the one that had several pages of pictures of hair styles. Some of them were short-cropped and careless, and they looked easy. I had a hunch, though, that they weren’t that easy.

She was sitting upright in the chair, waiting. I folded the magazine open at one of the pictures and put it on the coffee table where I could see it and use it for a guide. I looked from it to Madelon Butler. The long dark hair just brushed her shoulders.

She glanced down at the picture and then at me with amusement. “You won’t find it that simple,” she said. “Carelessness is very carefully planned and executed.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I took the scissors out of the bag and went into the bathroom for a towel and comb. I put the towel around her shoulders, under the cascade of hair. “Hold it there,” I said.

She caught it in front, at her throat. “You’ll make an awful mess of it,” she said. “But remember, it doesn’t matter. The principal thing is to get started, to get it cut, bleached, and waved. Then as soon as my face is tanned I can go to a beauty shop and have it repaired. I’ll just say I’ve been in Central America, and cry a little on their shoulders about the atrocious beauty shops down there.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. I pulled the comb through her hair, sighted at it, and started snipping. I cut around one side and then stood off and looked at it.

It was awful.

It looked as if she’d got caught in a machine.

“Let me see,” she said. She got up and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I went with her. She didn’t explode, though. She merely sighed and shook her head.

“If you were thinking of hair dressing as a career—”

“So it doesn’t look so hot. I’m not finished yet.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. Don’t cut straight across as if you were sawing a plank in two. Hold the comb at an angle and taper it. And let each bunch of hair slide a little between the blades of the scissors so it won’t be chopped off square.”

We went back and I tried again. I’d left it plenty long intentionally so the first two or three runs at it would just be practice. I cut the other side and evened it up.

This time I got away from that square, chopped-off effect, but it was ragged. It was full of notches up the side of her head. She looked at it again.

“That’s better,” she said. “And now when you’re trying to smooth out those chopped places, the way to do it is to keep the comb and scissors both moving while you cut. Let the hair run through the comb. That way they’re not all the same length.”

I tried it again. I got the hang of it a little better and managed to erase some of the notches. Then I combed it again and went around the bottom once more, straightening out the jagged ends. We went into the bathroom and took another look at it in the mirror. I stood behind her. Our eyes met.

“It’s pretty bad,” I said. “But there’s one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You sure as hell don’t look like the pictures of Mrs.

Butler.”

“Remember, darling?” she said in that throaty voice. “I’m not Mrs. Butler.”

“It’s a start,” I said. I went out and got the bottle of bleach. I handed it to her. “Mix yourself a redhead.”

While she was working on it I cleaned up the rug. I rolled the cut-off hair in the newspapers and threw the

whole works down the garbage chute.

We were erasing Madelon Butler.

No, I thought; she was erasing Madelon Butler. I had suggested it and started the job, but she was the one who knew how to do it. I could see her already getting the feel of it. She was brilliant; and she was an actress all the way in and out. When she finished the job they’d never find her. The person they were looking for would have ceased to exist. The coolly beautiful aristocrat would be a sexy cupcake talking slang.

It was two-thirty. I tuned the radio across all the stations and found a news program. There was no mention of her or of the deputy sheriff. I wondered if she had been lying. Well, it would be in the late editions.

She came out of the bathroom. She had finished shampooing her hair and was rubbing it with a towel. It was wild and tousled, and she looked like a chrysanthemum. I couldn’t see any change in the color.

“It looks as dark as ever,” I said.

“That’s because it’s still wet. As soon as it’s dry we can tell.”

She raised the Venetian blind again and sat down on the rug before the window, still rubbing her head with the towel. In a few minutes she threw the towel to one side and just ran her fingers through her hair, riffling it in the sunlight.

“I could use another drink,” she murmured, glancing around sidewise at me.

“You live on the stuff, don’t you?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s one way.”

I went out to the kitchen and poured her another. When I handed it to her she gave me that up-through-theeyelashes glance and said, “Thank you, honey.”

She looked like a chrysanthemum, all right, but a damn beautiful one. And the pajamas didn’t do her any harm.

“Practicing Susie again?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “How’m I doin’P”

“Not bad, considering you’re riding on a pass.”

She looked up at me, wide-eyed. “What do you mean?”

I squatted down in front of her and ran my fingers up into the tousled hair at the back of her neck. “You’re trying to get in free. From what I hear of Susie, she talked like the rustle of new-mown hay because she’d been there and she liked it. But I’d be glad to help you out.”

The eyes turned cold. “Aren’t you expecting a little too much?”

“How’s that?”

“Not even Susie could match your abysmal vulgarity.”

“Well, don’t get in an uproar. I just asked.”

“So you did, in your inimitable fashion. And now if you feel you have received an answer that is intelligible even to you, perhaps you’ll take your hand off me.”

“This is Susie talking?” I didn’t take the hand away. I moved it. It wasn’t padding.

“No,” she said. She put the drink down on the rug. “This is Susie.”

She hit me across the face.

I caught both her wrists and held them in my left hand. “Don’t make a habit of that,” I said. “It could get you into trouble.”

The eyes were completely unafraid. They seemed to be merely thoughtful. “I doubt that I’ll ever understand you,” she said. “At times you seem to have what passes for intelligence, and yet you deliberately go out of your way to wallow in that revolting crudity.”

“Let’s don’t make a Supreme Court case out of it,” I said, turning her arms loose. “It’s not that important. If you don’t want to put out a little smooching on the side, I’ll still live. That you can get anywhere. The geetus is the main issue, remember?”

“You are a sentimental soul, aren’t you?”

I stood up. “Baby, where I grew up you could buy a lot more with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars than you could with sentiment.”

She said nothing. I started toward the door. As I picked up the car keys off the table, I said, “And, besides, look

who’s talking.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re the one who’s killed two people. Not me.”

She stared at me. “Yes,” she said. “But even hate is an

emotion.”

“I guess so,” I said. “But there’s not much money in it.”

I went out and got in the car and drove downtown. I didn’t have anything in mind except that I didn’t want to get rock-happy sitting around the apartment listening to her yakking. Why didn’t she get wise to herself? We were going to be there for a month together; it wouldn’t cost anything extra to relax and have a little fun out of it on the side.

But maybe it was just as well, when you thought about it. No woman could ever do anything as simple as going to bed without trying to louse it up witb a lot of complicated ground rules and romantic double talk and then wanting a mortgage on your soul. As long as we were mixed up in a business deal and tied to each other for a whole month, we’d probably be better off to go on barking at each other.

I bought an afternoon paper and went into a restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. “DEPUTY IMPROVED,” the headline said. Doctors expected him to recover.

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.

Chapter Sixteen

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.

“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 breathed 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.

“Well, save the paper,” she said carelessly. “I’ll read it when I’m through here.”

“Oh, damn,” I said. “I forgot it. I went off and left it in the lunchroom. But that’s all there was.”

She shrugged and went back into the bathroom.

She’d be busy there for a few minutes, at least. This was the chance I needed. I went into the kitchen and got a butcher knife out of the drawer. While I was at it, I counted them. There were two of the long ones, one short paring knife, and an ice pick. And the scissors, I thought. Any time I didn’t know where all those things were, I’d better start watching behind me.

I shot a glance back into the living room. She was still in the bathroom. I slipped in and picked up the radio off the table. I pulled the cord from the receptacle in the wall. Hurriedly loosening the two screws in back on the underside, I pried up the rear of the chassis enough to get the blade of the knife in under it I shoved and sliced, feeling wires and parts give way. Then I retightened the screws and plugged it back in. I set it right where it had been before, and took the knife back to the kitchen.

It was about ten minutes before she came out of the bathroom. She had a towel wrapped around her head. She lit a cigarette and stood watching me.

“I don’t think my hair will look nearly so ragged as soon as it sets,” she said. “And the color came out nicely. Did you notice?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s odd what a change of exterior will do. I feel like an entirely different person. As if I were somebody else, and Madelon Butler were dead.”

There was no way to tell how she meant it. It might be perfectly innocent, or she might be very subtly tightening the screws on me. The only thing I knew for sure was that mind of hers was dangerous. I’d seen enough of its work by now.

“Well, that was the general idea,” I said.

She sat down, switched on the radio, and leaned back. “Let’s see if there’s any news.”

The radio started to warm up. Then smoke began to

pour out of the cabinet.

“Hey,” I said, “turn it off! The damn things burning up”

She switched it off and looked innocently across at me.

“Isn’t that odd?” she said. “It was all right a little while ago.”

“Must have a short in it,” I said. “I’ll take it to a shop in the morning and have it fixed.”

“Do you think it’ll take long?”

“No,” I said. “Probably get it back in two or three days.”

“That long? Perhaps you could rent one while it’s being repaired. Or buy a new one.”

“Why?” I asked. “You afraid you’ll miss the soap operas?”

“No. I just feel so isolated without it.” She smiled. “Cut off from the world, you know, as if I didn’t know what was going on.”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on. And you can read the papers.”

She’d like hell read the papers.

Again I tried to guess how much she knew. There was just no way to tell. I began to hate that lovely, imperturbable face. Everywhere I looked it was mocking me. It showed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Inside she could be laughing, just waiting for a chance to kill me.

If she knew, all she had to do was wait for me to go to sleep and let me have it. She would have committed the perfect crime. In my pocket were the three keys to all that money, and I was the only remaining person on earth who knew she was still alive. She could walk out, take the money from the boxes, and leisurely board a plane to anywhere she wanted to go.

It could drive you crazy just thinking about it.

I was wanted by the police for killing her, but she could kill me and walk off with $120,000, and nobody would

even look for her.

Not for Madelon Butler, because she was dead.

Not for Susie Mumble, because she had been born here

in this room and nobody else knew she existed.

It was insane. But there it was.

But did she know?

She had probably planned the whole thing the exact instant Diana James had dropped her flashlight there in the basement and we had seen her face as she reached to pick it up. She’d put it all together in that short fraction of a second—the deputy’s recognizing her, what would happen if the house burned, all of it.

But, still, could she be sure it had worked? Diana James might have been wearing a watch with her name inside it, as I had said. How could she tell? But I knew by now what kind of mind I was dealing with. For one thing, she could be carefully adding up all these little things: my forgetting to bring in the paper, the strange way the radio had conked out so conveniently.

And, of course, there was always the chance that she had heard the whole thing on the radio during the afternoon. If she had, she was laughing.

I started around the circle again. If she did know, I didn’t dare go to sleep. If she didn’t know, I had to keep her from learning. That meant she had to stay in here where she couldn’t see a paper until she was out of the news, two or three days, or maybe longer.

That, in turn, meant waiting to get at the money, not being able to run. And how much waiting did I think I could take, never knowing from one hour to the next when Charisse Finley might remember who I was?

I could feel the skin along my spine contract with chill at the thought. I couldn’t take it. I’d go raving mad sitting here hour after hour just waiting for them to knock on the door. I was even in the phone book. All they’d have to do was drive out here and walk in.

And all the time they’d be hammering at Charisse Finley. Where did you see him? Or his picture? Try to remember. Think. Maybe he was in the papers. About how long ago? Try to guess. A big guy who looked like he’d slept in his face? Maybe he was a pug. Try some pictures of fighters, Joe. How about football players?

We couldn’t wait. I had to get out of here. I’d take her down to the banks as soon as they opened in the morning. I’d wear dark glasses and stay in the car, parking as close to each one as possible, making her go right in and out again. She wouldn’t have a chance to get at a paper. Not until after we’d got the money, anyway; and afterward it wouldn’t matter. Just let her try to hold out any of it or get it back.

I couldn’t sit still any longer. I could feel pressure building up inside me as if I were going to explode. I went into the kitchen and mixed two drinks. I’d tell her the plans were changed. But I had to make it sound reasonable, not let her know what I was afraid of.

I brought the drinks in and gave her one.

Then, before I could think of how to start, she glanced thoughtfully at me, frowning a little, and said, “Do you remember asking me about the names those boxes were rented under?”

I had started to taste the drink. Something about the way she said it made me stop. “Yes,” I said. “Why?”

She hesitated just slightly. “Well, I... I mean, something has been bothering me, and the more I puzzle about it, the more confused I become. You see, I had it all written

down.”

“Confused about what?” I demanded.

“The names. I—”

“Look,” I snapped at her, “don’t try to tell me you’ve

forgotten ‘em. You knew ‘em this afternoon.”

She shook her head. “No. It’s not that. I remember them perfectly. But, you see, there are three banks and three names, and now I’m not certain which goes with which.”

It was just as if she had read my mind. I held the glass in my hand and stared at her.

Chapter Eighteen

What was she trying to do?

That was what made it awful. You didn’t know. There was no way you could know.

Maybe she had heard the news and was trying to break my nerve and make me run. But why? If I ran, and took the keys with me, she’d never get the money. That couldn’t be it.

Maybe she was stalling so we’d be here long enough for me to break down from sheer exhaustion and finally go to sleep, so she could kill me. But in that case, didn’t she know that if we waited too long and the police did get here they’d find her too? Waiting was just as dangerous for her as it was for me. No, it was more so, because if they found her here alive I’d no longer be charged with murder, but she would.

Maybe she did know it but was still cold-nerved enough to play out a bluff like that until everybody else had quit. Maybe she was going to let it work on me, the fear and the suspense and the waiting, until I was actually afraid to go out on the street where the cops were looking for me. Maybe I’d crack wide open, give the keys to her, and ask her to get the stuff out of the boxes and be stupid enough to expect her to come back here with it.

Or maybe she was just sweating me a little before reviewing our contract. Perhaps she wanted to renegotiate the terms, using a little pressure here and there.

There were just two things I was sure of. One was that she wasn’t mixed up about those names. Not with a mind like hers. And the other was that I couldn’t let her know she had me worried.

I took a sip of the drink. “Well, I’ll tell you,” I said. “That looks like something that comes under the heading of your problem. You remember what I told you? If there was any monkey business about that money, hell wouldn’t hold you. So what are you doing about it?”

“What do you think I’m doing?” she asked coldly. “I’m trying to remember. I’ve been racking my brains all afternoon.”

“And just how long do you think you’ll have to rack ‘em before you come up with the answer?”

“How do I know?”

I lit a cigarette. “Well, there are two very simple solutions to it,” I said. “The first one is known as the Blue Method. I just take your throat between my hands and squeeze it until your face turns the color of a ripe grape. When you’re able to breathe again, everything comes back to you. It’s a great memory aid. Something scientific about fresh oxygen in the brain.

“The second one is even simpler. As soon as the banks open in the morning you just pick up the phone and ask ‘em. It’s easier on the neck too.”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she said icily. “Just give the bank a list of names, and ask if any of those people had a safe-deposit box there? You know they don’t give out information like that.”

I shook my head. “You don’t ask that way. You know how to do it as well as I do, but just to give you an out so we don’t have to use the hard way, I’ll tell you. Call the Third National. You’re Mrs. Henry L. Carstairs. You can’t remember whether or not you received a notice that your box rent was due. Would they please look it up? Either they’ll say it’s paid up until next July, or they’ll say they can’t find any record of your having a box there. In which case you say you’re so sorry, you keep forgetting your husband transferred it to another bank.

“Then you call the Merchant’s Trust, and try again.”

She nodded coolly. “Precisely. And if Mrs. Carstairs is lucky, she finds it there. Then one more call to the third bank, using either Mrs. Hatch’s name or Mrs. Manning’s, will have established all three of them with one call to each bank, no matter which way the last one answers. I know all that. It’s elementary.

“But suppose I’m not lucky, and they still say no to Mrs. Carstairs at the Merchant’s Trust? We know, of course, by the process of elimination, that she has to be at the

Seaboard Bank and Trust. But that still leaves the first two blank, with two names, which means starting around again. One more call, to either of them, will do it, but that may be just one call too many.

“Don’t forget that all those boxes are rented under fictitious names, I have no identification at all, my appearance has changed, and I am a fugitive from justice with my picture on the front pages. Anything that makes them take a second look at me when I go in there is dangerous.”

She had the answers, all right. She always had the answers. And she knew I wouldn’t tell her she was no longer a fugitive.

“That’s right,” I said. “But look at it this way. The chances are exactly two to one that you’ll find Mrs. Carstairs on the first two calls. Isn’t that better than telling me you can’t get that money? That way, you haven’t got any chance at all.”

“You will persist in trying to frighten me, won’t you?”

I got up from the sofa and walked across to her. She sat looking up. Our eyes met.

“I’ve come a long way after that money,” I said. “I’ve taken a lot of chances. I want it. So don’t get in my way. I’m not playing any more.”

I reached down and caught her by the throat. She didn’t fight. She knew the futility of that. The eyes stared at me with their cool disdain.

I intended only to frighten her. But it began to get out of control. I tightened the hands. She’d try to cheat me out of it, would she, the mocking, arrogant, double-crossing little witch?

The room swam around me. She was beating at my arms, trying to reach my face. Make a fool of me, would she? I hated her. I wanted to kill her. My arms trembled; I could hear the roaring of wind in my throat.

Something snapped me out of it just in time. Some glimmer of sanity far back in my mind screamed at me to stop and made me let go of her throat before it was too late. I stood up, trying to control the wild trembling of my hands.

Good God, what had happened? I’d started to go crazy. I’d nearly killed her. And the only thing on earth that

could save me if the police did catch me was the fact that she was still alive. And if I killed her I’d never get that money.

But I couldn’t let her know how it had scared me. I turned away and lit another cigarette. When I looked around again she was sitting up, struggling to get her breath.

I was all right now. “That give you an idea?” I asked.

She said nothing until she had recovered and completely regained her composure. She straightened her clothing.

“That’s the only language you speak, isn’t it?” she said at last.

“It’s one we both understand,” I said. “Think it over. Maybe you can remember how those names go.”

“I’ll probably get them straight, in time. But what’s the hurry? We have a whole month, don’t we?”

“I’ve changed my mind. This is too close to all those damned cops looking for you. I want to get farther away.”

“So you want me to go out on the street while my picture is still on the front pages? Considerate, aren’t

you?”

“I tell you, we’ve got to get out of here!”

“And,” she went on calmly, “might I remind you of the terms of our agreement, Mr. Scarborough? You were to keep me hidden here for at least a month before I had to go out.”

“Listen,” I said, my voice beginning to grow loud. “I tell you—” Tell her what? That I was the one the police were looking for?

Maybe she was deliberately trying to drive me crazy.

Suddenly, from nowhere at all, I remembered what that blonde had said. “You’ll never get that money. You don’t know who you’re dealing with. Before it’s all over, one of you will kill the other.”

I wanted to jump up and run out in the street to get away from her before I went out of my mind and killed her.

Go out in the street? Where every cop in the state was looking for me and had my description?

Sit here, then, with those cool, inscrutable eyes watching me squirm, mocking me? Sit here, waiting hour after hour for the knock on the door that would be the first warning I’d ever have that Charisse Finley had remembered who I was at last?

Sit here and go slowly mad thinking of three safe-deposit boxes stuffed with fat bundles of money being held just out of my reach by this maddening witch?

How long before you broke?

After a while she went to bed.

I made a pot of coffee and watched the hours crawl around the face of the electric clock on the bookshelf. I began to imagine I could hear it. It made a tiny snoring sound. The ashtray filled up with butts. The room was blue with drifting layers of smoke.

I would sit still until my nerves were screaming; then I would walk the floor. Three or four times I heard sirens crying somewhere in the city and each time the breath would stop in my throat in spite of the fact that I knew if they came they wouldn’t be using sirens. On a thing like this they came quietly, covered the front and rear exits, and two of them came up and knocked on the door.

It was the elevator that was terrible. The apartment was only two doors away from it and I could hear it, very faintly, if it stopped on this floor and the doors opened. I began to catch myself listening for it. I held my breath listening for it. I imagined I heard it.

Then I would hear it, really hear it, the doors opening softly as it stopped. I waited for the footsteps.

There were never any footsteps because the hall was deeply carpeted. The elevator doors opened and then there was only silence, silence that went up and up,

increasing, like a scream.

Which way had they gone?

I waited, counting.

Was it twelve steps? Fifteen? I waited, not even able to breathe now with the pressure building up in my chest, my nerves pulling tighter and tighter, waiting for the knock on the door.

Ten...eleven...fourteen...seventeen...twenty...

They had gone the other way. Or gone on by. I would be weak and drenched with sweat, a cigarette

burning my fingers.

I would relax a little.

Then I would begin listening for the elevator to stop

again.

It was morning.

It was Friday morning. This was our last chance until Monday. The banks here were closed all day Saturday in summer.

She came down the hall from the bedroom. She was wearing the blouse and skirt again, and her hair was out of the curlers. It was red, all right, a rich shade of red, in tight, burnished ringlets close to her head, as if the whole thing had been sculptured from one ingot of pure

copper.

She smiled. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said, “very pretty. How about those names?”

“My face is a little tanned already, too. Did you notice?”

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?”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “You wore me out. I

can’t take it any longer. We’ve got to get out. They’re closing in on me.” I lit my own cigarette and dropped the match in the tray. Then I looked back at her face. “You know they’re looking for me instead of you, don’t you?”

She nodded. “I suspected it.”

“All right. I thought I could wait you out. But I can’t. I’ve taken the heat for four days but I can’t take it any longer. One of ‘em almost got me out there on the beach two hours ago, and I’ve had it. We’ve got to get out.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. Then she added, “But excuse me for interrupting you. I believe you had something else to say, didn’t you?”

“All right,” I said savagely. “I did. How much do you want? Half? Don’t go any higher than that, because I’ve still got one thing in my favor. I’ve got the keys, and if I don’t get half nobody gets anything.”

She leaned back a little in the chair and smiled. “That sounds eminently fair to me. But did it ever occur to you that possibly there was another facet to it, aside from the

money? Remember? It was something I told you.”

“What?”

“That I have a deep-seated aversion to being played for

a fool. You could have saved yourself all this if you’d told me the news to begin with.”

Everybody who wanted to believe that could line up on the right. But I went along with her.

“Well, I’m sorry,” I said. “But that’s all past now. So the fifty-fifty split is O.K. with you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. She was looking thoughtfully down at her coffee cup. Then she said, “Yes. If we still feel we want to separate when we get to the West Coast, that sounds quite fair to me.” I glanced quickly at her. “What do you mean?” She raised her eyes then. There was more Susie than Madelon Butler in them. “You don’t make it very easy for me to say, do you? But I meant just that. Maybe we won’t want to separate by the time we get there.”

“It’s funny,” I said slowly. “I had thought of that too.” There was a faint, tantalizing smile about her lips. “Changing into someone else isn’t a thing that happens only from the skin out. I told you I wasn’t acting Susie Mumble. I am Susie. And I’m becoming fascinated with her. For the past few days I’ve been increasingly conscious of unsuspected possibilities in Susie, and I was rather hoping you were too.”

Chapter Twenty

I started to get up.

She shook her head, smiling. “No, Lee. Don’t rush me. Remember, Susie is something so foreign to my entire life up to this time that I can’t hurry her. She has to do her own developing, in her own way. You understand, don’t you?”

She stopped abruptly, and before I could say anything, she added, “But enough of this. We’ve got work to do.”

We went in and sat down on the sofa. She was excited now. I put the three keys on the glass top of the coffee table. She separated them, pushing them out one at a time.

“Third National,” she murmured happily, “Mrs. Henry

L. Carstairs. Merchants Trust, Mrs. James R. Hatch. Seaboard Bank and Trust, Mrs. Lucille Manning.” It was easy now that she had won. Well, almost won. I put the keys back in my wallet.

She looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter of eight. The banks won’t open until ten. I’ve got to go to the beauty shop first, and buy some clothes.”

I exploded. “Hold it! Don’t you realize we haven’t got time for that? They know I’m here in town. Every minute of delay is dangerous.”

She broke in on me. “Not while you’re here in the apartment. And I can’t go into those banks like this. My hair may look all right to you, but to another woman it’s as ragged as if it had been chewed off. And these clothes are terrible. I look like a ragpicker. People would notice, and that’s the one thing we can’t risk. I have to look like someone who conceivably might have a safe-deposit box.”

In the end I gave in. I had to. As she pointed out, she’d be back by twelve, which was a delay of only two hours. And I didn’t want to queer it by starting a fight now.

She called a number of beauty shops until she found one that would take her right away. I gave her two hundred dollars of the bankroll. She called a cab and left.

Just before she opened the door to go out she turned and faced me. That same tantalizing smile was on her face.

“I just happened to think,” she said. “When I came in this door I was Madelon Butler. And now I’m going out for the first time as Susie Mumble. Would you like to help me set the mood?”

I helped her. Not that she needed much. The way Susie’s mouth felt on mine, they could pour her into the mold any time now. She was a finished product.

She clung to me for a moment. “It won’t be long now, will it?”

“No,” I said.

It certainly wouldn’t.

But it would be long enough.

I walked the floor. I smoked chain fashion. I listened for the elevator, going through that same old hell of waiting every time it stopped. This would be the time they would come, right at the end when I had it won. In the last four hours.

In the last three hours....

In the last two....

And now, on top of that, I was tightening up just thinking of that trip downtown. That was going to be rugged. The city would be swarming with cops looking for me.

I’d be in the car all the time, though, and that would help. Of course, they had an idea now of what the car looked like, but there were thousands of the same kind and the cop had no chance to see the license plates. The main thing in my favor was the fact that it’s hard to tell the size of a man sitting down in a car. And it was my size they were depending on to spot me.

I set the last of it in my mind. I’d tell her we were going to go right on out the highway the minute she came out of the last bank. That would ease her mind as to why I insisted on going along instead of letting her do it alone now that we were all lovey-dovey. But then, at the last minute, I’d think of some reason we had to come back here before we shoved. And when I left here I’d be alone. I wondered if she really thought I was stupid enough to go for that Susie Mumble act. When we had all the money out of the banks, together in one bundle in a suitcase, and I was the last person on earth who knew she was still alive?

The first time my eyes closed I’d grow a pair of scissors out of my throat.

But I had her stopped now.

I went to the desk and wrote out the note to the police. I put the note inside an envelope, addressed and stamped it, and slipped it into the inside pocket of the coat I was going to wear. I’d mail it at some outlying box on my way out of town to be sure it wasn’t delivered for at least twelve hours. That would be better than mailing it a day or so later from some other city. That way, they’d know which direction I’d gone.

Twelve hours would do.

If you had $120,000 in your pocket and were no longer being sought for murder, twelve hours’ start was fair enough.

When we came back to the apartment all I had to do was take all her clothes, including the ones she had on, and throw them down the garbage chute, and leave her. She wouldn’t be likely to go anywhere naked. She’d still be here when the police showed up to collect her.

Of course she would scream her head off and give them, a good description and tell them who I was, but they had practically all that already. And the big heat would be off. Even if they caught me, they couldn’t lean very hard. Not like murder.

My nerves were so tight now they were singing. I couldn’t sit still at all. It was eleven. It was eleven-fifteen. I had to fight myself to get my eyes off the clock long enough to give it a chance to move. Every time I heard the elevator stop I would stand there for an eternity, waiting for the knock on the door.

Then I remembered that when she came back she would have to knock on the door to get in. I wondered if I would be able to open it.

She came. It was ten minutes of twelve, and somehow I got the door open.

They’d done a job on her hair. It was like polished copper rings. She was excited and gurgling, carrying a big hatbox and three other bundles.

“Wait till you see me dressed up,” she said.

“Hurry it up. For God’s sake, hurry.”

She disappeared into the bedroom. I waited, feeling my insides tie up in knots. Being so near the end of it made it terrible.

Ten minutes later she came out, walked past me into the center of the room without saying a word, and turned slowly, like a model.

She was Susie, all right. And Susie was a confection, with frosting.

The big floppy picture hat was perched on the side of her head as if it had been nailed to the shining curls. She had on just a shade too much lipstick across a mouth just a shade too wide. The flowery summer dress was short-sleeved and it snuggled lovingly against Susie’s natural resources and scenic high points as if it couldn’t bear to be torn away. The white shoes were only straps and three-inch heels, and the nylons were ultrasheer with elaborate clocks. She was wearing long white gloves, which showed up the tan of her arms.

Susie was right off the barracks wall.

“Well,” she asked coyly, “how do you like your creation?”

“Brother!” I said. Then time came running back and fell in on me again. “Look, I can drool later. Let’s get going.”

“All right,” she said. Then she glanced quickly at my face. “Lee! You haven’t shaved.”

I’d forgotten that. I’d meant to after that shower, but it had slipped my mind. That was what pressure could do. “Well, the hell with it. We haven’t got time.”

Then I put a hand up to my face, remembering. I not only hadn’t shaved. I hadn’t shaved for three days.

I cursed. But there was no use just asking people to stare at me. I ran into the bathroom, yanking off the shirt and tie. While I lathered and scraped I heard her rustling around in the bedroom.

I came out. She was waiting.

“I’ll need something to put the money in,” she said. “There’s a lot of it. Physically, I mean.”

“We’ll stop somewhere and buy a briefcase,” I said impatiently. “No, wait. How about that overnight bag of yours?”

“Certainly. I hadn’t thought of that. It’ll do nicely, and I’m not taking the old clothes anyway.” She went into the bedroom and came out carrying the bag.

I put on the coat, which had been hanging on the back

of a chair.

We were ready.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”

When we stepped out onto the street I could feel the skin along my back draw up hard and tight with chill. But by the time we had casually walked the block to the car and got in, it wasn’t so bad. I took the sunglasses out of the glove compartment and put them on.

I drove slowly. Traffic was heavy. It was a hot, still day, and I could feel myself sweating beneath the coat.

I watched the traffic lights. I watched the other cars. If we had an accident now...

But we didn’t. Nothing happened. Once a squad car pulled up alongside us in the other lane and I could feel my nerves knot up, but the two cops paid no attention to us. They went on past and turned the corner.

We were downtown now, in the thick of traffic. I couldn’t turn left into Avalon, where the Seaboard Bank and Trust and the Third National were, so I had to go around the block.

The first time through there wasn’t a parking place anywhere in the two blocks between the banks. Next time our luck was better. I found one just a half block beyond the Seaboard. There was a half hour on the meter.

I took out the first two keys and handed them to her. “I’ll wait right here while you make both of them. After you come out of the Seaboard, walk on down to the Third National. When you’re finished there, walk back this way and stand diagonally across on the corner up there. I’ll see you. I can turn left there, so I’ll pick you up and we’ll be headed for the Merchants Trust.”

She smiled, crinkling up her eyes. “Watch Susie’s walk,” she said. She was as cool as a mint bed.

She got out, carrying the little suitcase.

I watched her. I saw her cross the street behind me. She went up the steps into the bank.

I waited.

My nerves crawled. It was almost physically impossible to sit still. I lit cigarettes. I threw them out after two puffs. I pretended to be looking for something in the glove compartment, to keep my face down. Another patrol car went slowly past in the traffic. It was a black shark, cruising, deadly, not quite noticing, easing past, gone. I unclenched my hands.

It was hot. I became aware that I was counting. I didn’t know what I was counting; I was just saying numbers. I tried to follow her in my mind. Where was she now? She had to go through the bank to the rear, down the steps, through the massive doorway. She signed the card, she gave her key to an attendant in the shiny corridors between walls of steel honeycomb. Now she was going into one of the booths, closing the door, sliding the lid off the box, transferring the money to the overnight bag, coming out....

Up the steps, through the bank, out the doorway, down the steps outside....

I stared into the rear-view mirror.

There she was.

She came out. She flowed down the steps with the sexy indolence of Susie and sauntered across the street behind me. She came up the sidewalk, and as she passed the car she turned her face and smiled. One eye closed ever so slightly in a wink.

One away.

I waited again. I was watching the parking meter now. It was getting close. I wished I had asked her to put a nickel in it. If the flag dropped I had to get out and do it. I didn’t want to get out. I felt in my pocket.

I didn’t have a nickel. I watched the meter. Sweat ran slowly down my face. It had three minutes left on it when I saw her cross the

street ahead of me and stand on the corner, waiting.

I picked her up. My shirt was wet. My hands trembled. I couldn’t wait for her to get the door closed. “Did you get it?” I demanded. “Was it all right? Did you have any trouble?”

She laughed softly. “Not a bit. Take it slowly, so you’ll miss that next light. I want to show you something.”

The light caught us. I stopped. “Open it,” I whispered. I felt as if I were being strangled. “Open it!”

She had the overnight bag in her lap. She unsnapped the two latches, smiling at me out of the corners of her eyes. “Look.”

She raised the lid just a couple of inches. I looked in. I forgot everything else. It was worth it. It was worth everything I had gone through. It was beautiful. I saw twenties, fifties, hundreds, in bundles. In fat bundles

girdled with paper bands.

I wanted to plunge my hands into it.

“Watch,” she whispered. She slid a white-gloved hand in under the lid and broke one of the bands and stirred the loosened bundle with a caressing slowness that was almost sexual. I watched, gripping the wheel until my fingers hurt.

She snapped the lid shut. I took the other key out of my wallet and gave it to her. We were still waiting for the light. When she had put the key in her purse I reached over and took her hand. I squeezed it. She squeezed back.

“Look,” I whispered, “after we’ve finished this last one, let’s go back to the apartment. Just for a few minutes, before we start. Susie wouldn’t mind, would she?”

She gave me a sidelong glance and said, “I don’t think she would. Not for just a few minutes.”

She had slid the bag back a little in her lap and she was straightening the seams of her stockings, doing it deliberately and very slowly, one long lovely leg at a time. She turned her face just slightly so her eyes were smiling obliquely up at me from under the curving lashes.

“After all,” she said softly, “it was Venus, wasn’t it, who breathed life into Galatea?”

It was wonderful. Oh, Lord, it was wonderful.

I could hardly hear her now. The whisper was tremulous, catching in her throat. “This is shameless, isn’t it? In brilliant sunlight, in the middle of town. I— I think Susie is going to be a revelation to both of us. Oh, won’t that light ever change?”

If she didn’t shut up and stop it I’d go crazy right there in the street. I had to look away from her.

It was terrific. If you lived twenty consecutive life times you’d never run across anything quite like it. I almost missed the light, just thinking of the beauty of it.

She had outguessed them all, and she thought she had outguessed me. And now we were going back to the apartment, we were going to launch the tremulous and smoldering Susie, and I was going to walk out when it was done with $120,000 I’d never have to divide with anybody. And not only that. The thing that made it an absolute masterpiece was the fact that now I wouldn’t even have any battle to get those clothes so I could throw them down the garbage chute. She’d help me. She’d help me all the way.

You would never beat it. You would never approach it again.

Horns were blasting behind us. I snapped out of it.

The street the Merchants Trust was on was one of the main drags, and I couldn’t turn left into it either. I had to go around the block again.

We were shot with luck. A man pulled out of a parking place less than fifty feet beyond the ornate, marble-columned entrance. I slid into it. She patted my hand and got out.

I turned my head and watched her. I watched the slow, seductive tempo of Susie’s walk. She went along the sidewalk in the sun looking like something the censors had cut out of a sailor’s dream. She went into the bank.

It was only a few minutes more.

I tried to light a cigarette. My hands shook. A cop came by on a motor tricycle, looking at meters. My whole back turned to ice. He went on, not even looking at me. I breathed again.

I set the rear-view mirror so I could watch the entrance without craning my neck. I put my hands down on the seat and clenched them tightly to stop the trembling. It was being so near that made it awful. I thought of the money. I thought of the apartment bedroom, the Venetian blinds drawn, and Susie. I tried to quit thinking of both, before I exploded.

It had to be less than five minutes now. She’d been gone—how long? I didn’t know. Time had lost all meaning. The whole world was holding its breath.

Then I saw her.

She came out of the bank. She walked down the steps and diagonally across the sidewalk toward the car. I could feel the sigh coming right up from the bottom of my lungs.

It was made now. There was only that short drive back to the apartment. I started the motor and reached out a hand to open the door for her. She saw me watching her,

and smiled.

But she didn’t stop.

She went right on by. The white-gloved left hand, which was carrying the purse down beside her thigh, made a little gesture as she went by the window. Three of the fingers waved.

Good-by!

I lunged for the door handle. Then I stopped, the absolute horror of it beginning to break over me. I was sick. I couldn’t move. I was empty inside, and cold, and somewhere far back in the recesses of my mind I thought I could hear myself screaming. But there was no sound except the traffic and the shuffle of feet along the

sidewalk.

She went slowly on down the street, her hips swaying.

I didn’t know what I was doing now. I yanked the wheel and lurched out of the parking place. A car behind almost hit me. The driver slammed on his brakes and leaned out to curse me. I was out in traffic. Everything was unreal, like a bad dream. I was abreast of her. I hit the horn. She strolled casually on. Somebody else turned and looked. I cringed. I wanted to hide.

I crawled ahead. Cars behind me were honking. I came to the corner. The light was red. I stopped. She stopped on the sidewalk in the crowd waiting for the light. I beeped the horn, hesitantly, timidly. It roared.

She turned her face slowly and glanced in my direction, cool and imperturbable and utterly serene. I formed the words with my mouth: Please, please, please... Her gaze swept on.

The light changed. She stepped off the curb. I started across the intersection. Then she stepped back on the sidewalk, and turned right, down the cross street. I had gone too far into the intersection to turn. I turned anyway.

I was being engulfed in madness. Everything was distorted, and dark, and wild, and I had the sensation of being caught and buffeted by some howling wind. My left fender raked the fender of a car stopped at the crosswalk for the light. A whistle shrilled. I swung on around. I crashed against the side of the car that had made the right turn inside me.

Whistles were blowing everywhere. I saw a cop running toward me from the opposite corner. I slammed ahead, tearing a fender from the car on my right. Both lanes were blocked by cars stopped for the light at the next corner. I saw her walking coolly along the sidewalk.

I slammed on the brakes and lunged for the door. I was out in the street. Two cops in uniform were coming down on me. Men jumped from both the cars I had hit. The whistles were blowing again. I lunged toward the curb. Running men were crashing into me, trying to hold me. But now it all faded away, and I could see nothing except her. There was nothing else in the world except a foaming, dark madness, and Madelon Butler walking serenely along the street, going away. She had the money. And if she got away they’d hang me. I was shouting. I was trying to point. I was raging.

“Madelon Butler! That’s Madelon Butler!”

Nobody listened. Nobody paid any attention.

Couldn’t they see her?

Hands were grabbing me. Arms tightened about my neck and around my legs. I felt the weight of bodies. Everybody was yelling. A siren wailed shortly and ground to a stop somewhere behind me. Half-seen faces bobbed in front of me and I swung my fists and they disappeared, to be replaced by even more. I plowed on. I went on toward the curb, taking them with me. She was nearly abreast. I could see the coppery curls glinting in the sunlight and the slow, seductive roll of her hips and thighs the way she had practiced it, and the small overnight bag with $ 120,000 in it swinging gently in her other hand.

Something landed on my head and knocked me to my knees. I got off the pavement and went between two parked cars and up onto the curb, peeling them off behind me like a bunch of grapes pulled through the slats of a Venetian blind.

“Stop her! Stop her! Stop Madelon Butler stop madelon butler madelonbutler—”

They went around and over and piled onto me again. Nobody could shoot. Saps were swinging and I could feel them just faintly, like rain falling on my head and shoulders as I fought, and fell, and crawled toward her.

She sauntered past just as we got up onto the sidewalk, swinging wide to avoid the seething whirlpool of us, and just after she had gone by she turned her face and looked around, right into mine, her eyes cool and patrician and just faintly curious. Then she picked up the lazy beat of Susie again and went on.

Saliva ran out of my mouth. I was screaming. I could hear myself. Somewhere above the sound of the blows and the cursing and the mad scraping of shoes against pavement and the gasp of labored breathing and the crash of splintering glass as somebody sailed into a store window I could hear myself screaming.

Blood was running down into my face. Just before I went down for the last time under the sea of bodies I saw her again.

She was at the corner. With one last swing of her hips she went around it and she was gone.

Chapter Twenty-one

I’m not crazy. I tell you I’m as sane as you are.

Listen.

I tell you Madelon Butler is still alive. Alive, you

understand? Alive. She’s out there somewhere. She’s laughing. She’s free.

And she’s got $120,000.

Why do I think she’s got it? Why? Look. When hell freezes over and you can skate across the Styx she’ll still have it. Five people tried to take it away from her, and now two of us are dead and two are in the state prison and I’m in here with these people. That’s why she’s got it.

They could find her if they’d look and quit just shaking their heads when I try to tell them she’s still alive. She’s a redhead now, and God knows what her name is, and she looks like something on a barbershop calendar and walks and talks like all the itch since Eve, but she’s Madelon Butler.

They sweated me for twenty-four hours after they brought me in while I sat under a big light and they walked around in the dark outside it asking questions, questions, questions, one after the other, hour after hour, sometimes one man, sometimes two, and sometimes three of them at once asking me what I had done with the money until I finally quit begging and pleading and yelling for them to block the airport and the railroad stations and the bus depot so they could catch her before she got away, until I finally just gave up and went to sleep with them barking at me. I went to sleep sitting under a big white light on a stool.

I knew she was gone by then. But I could still prove I hadn’t killed her.

Sure I could.

They finally got a lawyer for me and I told him so many times he began to believe me. He got the police to send some men out to the apartment so they could see for themselves she had been there. The lawyer went along and they took a photographer and a fingerprint man from the lab.

Her robe and the pajamas and those fur-trimmed slippers weren’t cheap stuff. They could be traced back to the store where she had bought them. That would convince the knuckleheads that the girl who’d been there in the apartment wasn’t just any girl, but Madelon Butler herself.

The only trouble was there wasn’t anything there.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The pajamas and the robe and the slippers were gone. The boxes her other clothes had come in were gone. There wasn’t a cigarette butt with’lipstick on it, or a single fingerprint on the whisky bottles or any of the glasses. There wasn’t a trace of lipstick on a towel or a pillow, nothing left of the permanent wave outfit, or even the bottle of bleach.

It went into the court record just the way they said it when they came back.

There hadn’t been any girl in that apartment.

I began to see it.

She couldn’t have gone back there after she had ditched me, because she had no key to get in. She had done it before we came downtown, while I was shaving. She had cleaned up, and she had thrown all her clothes down the garbage chute.

Well, that was what I was going to do, but she just beat me to it.

They found the letter in my coat, the one I’d never had a chance to mail. They asked me if that was right, that I was hiding Madelon Butler in my apartment to keep the police from finding her but that I’d written them a letter telling them where she was.

I tried to explain it. But the deal about the money loused up everything.

That was the reason they wouldn’t go for a court order to exhume the body of Diana James for identification. The thing about the money had already convinced them I was mad.

That and a few other things.

The trouble was that nobody had ever seen Madelon Butler again after that instant the cop had flashed his light on her face on the lawn behind the house, just before I slugged him. Charisse Finley testified that Madelon Butler and I had left the fishing camp together and that it was a foregone conclusion, with two such people as us after the same thing, that one would kill the other before the day was over. The other cop and the kid in the filling station testified that I’d been alone when I came through that little town four hours after the fire. So

there it was.

But that wasn’t even half of it.

The cop who had jumped me out on the beach testified he had found me sleeping on a sand dune at five o’clock in the morning.

Two traffic cops, two patrol-car crews, and three plainclothes men testified it took the seven of them plus the drivers of the two cars I’d hit to subdue me after I’d gone berserk in traffic under the delusion I had seen Madelon Butler walking along the curb. I was big, but I wasn’t that big. I was a maniac.

They rounded up twenty witnesses and every one of them said there hadn’t been anybody there that looked anything at all like Madelon Butler. I pleaded. I raged. I described her.

Eight of them said sure, they’d seen the cupcake in the big hat, and that if I thought she looked anything like Madelon Butler there was no hope for me. Four of them were women, who’d been looking at her clothes. And there was no point in even asking the men what they’d been looking at.

Then those two kids who had seen me throw away the radio told the court that when they took it to a repair man he’d said the only way he could figure it had got in the mess it was in was that somebody had stabbed it with a knife. The repair man repeated it under oath.

Driven mad by guilt, they said. I had stabbed the radio because it kept talking about the woman I had killed. And I had been sleeping out on the beach because I was suffering from a delusion she was there in my apartment. Then I had finally blown my stack downtown in the traffic in broad daylight because I had reached the point where

any woman was beginning to look like Madelon Butler to me.

But that still wasn’t it. It was the money.

This was after they had come back from that trip to the apartment, and they were already beginning to shake their heads while they listened to my raving, if they listened at all. But when I told them for the fiftieth time what I was doing downtown, and about the banks, and how she’d run out on me after getting the money out of the last one, they said they’d check it out.

And they said this was going to be the last, if it was as crazy as the rest. They were getting tired of it. But that was all right. I knew I had them this time.

They investigated. They got sworn testimony from all the vault employees in all three banks.

No boxes had ever been rented to Mrs. Henry L. Carstairs, Mrs. James R. Hatch, or Mrs. Lucille Manning. They had never even heard of the names. And no woman even remotely answering the description I gave them had ever come into any of the vaults that day.

But, they said, Mrs. Madelon Butler herself, as president of the historical society she had founded, had had a box in each of the banks for years for the storage of documents and family papers.

When they came back and told me that, they had to call the guards.

And sometimes even now I can feel it boiling around there inside me, that yell or scream or laugh or whatever it is, when I think that for four days and nights that $120,000 was there in the bedroom of my apartment, either in that little overnight bag or under the mattress of the bed.

She’d had it all the time. But she really hadn’t heard the news over the radio before I butched it up, and she wasn’t completely sure she was off the hook until I told her. She had a good idea she was, but she wanted to be certain, and she wanted to finish the job on Susie Mumble before she scrammed.

And maybe...

But that’s why I wake up screaming.

Maybe she was on the level with that Susie Mumble

play for me. It would add up that way, too. Maybe she did want the two of us to go away together, but she didn’t want me to know she had been lying about the banks and had to go through with the act of getting it out.

That’s it, you see. I’ll never know. There’s no way I can ever know. Because she could very easily have seen that letter addressed to the police in the pocket of my coat while I was shaving.

It figures, all right. It checks out with the way she did it there at the end. That first bank, the Seaboard Trust, is on a corner, and she could merely have gone on out a side door and left me waiting there in the car forever. It would have been easier that way, and less dangerous. But if she had seen that letter to the police? She wanted me to have a good look at that money and one last, lingering glimpse of the potentialities of Susie Mumble, so I’d have something to remember in case I ever find it dull around this place.

You see why I wake up that way? It’s a dream I have.

I’m sitting there in the car watching her come out of that last bank and swing toward me across the sidewalk in the sun with the coppery hair shining and that tantalizing smile of Susie’s on her face and all that unhampered Susie running loose inside that summer dress, seeing her and thinking that in only a few minutes we’ll be in the apartment with the blinds drawn, in the semigloom, with a small overnight bag open on the floor beside the bed with $120,000 in fat bundles of currency inside it and maybe one nylon stocking, a sheer nylon with clocks, draped carelessly across one corner, as if it had been dropped hurriedly by someone who didn’t care where it fell....

And then in this dream she waves three fingers of her left hand and saunters on down the street, past me, and she’s gone, and I’m trapped in a car in traffic at high noon in the middle of a city of 400,000, where two hundred cops are just waiting for me to step out on the street so they can spot me. I wake up.

Scream?

Who wouldn’t?