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.