John D. MacDonald
The Price of Murder
Prologue
“If I could have the attention of the other members of the Commission for a moment, please. Let me reconstruct for you the actual physical details of the first murder.
“He was roughly ten feet from her. We know she turned and snatched open the knife drawer. But he was on her before she could grasp one of the knives. He held her with his right hand at the nape of her neck. We are not certain of the position of his left arm. It may have been around her waist, but more probably, he grasped the rear of her... ah... garment in the vicinity of the waist. Then, gentlemen, he lifted her bodily and, with terrible force, brought her face and head down against the edge of the sink.
“I present three cranial X-rays and two photographs of the body which show the extent of the damage inflicted. By a careful examination of the fractures and other facial damage we can be certain that he lifted her and slammed her down no less than fifteen times, and it could possibly have been twice that. After the first impact she was certainly unconscious, perhaps dying. She presented a dead weight then of one hundred and fifteen pounds. Assuming a two-second cycle for each impact, he spent a full minute blindly smashing that lifeless body against the edge of the sink. Is that not the action of a sick mind?
“I now ask for a full minute of silence. During this minute please try to visualize that scene of murder. Go!”
Chapter One
Lee Bronson
The parole officer came to the house on a hot Saturday afternoon in October. Lee Bronson had set up a card table on the small screened porch of his rented house at 1024 Arcadia Street, where he sat reading and marking the English themes turned in on Friday by his English Composition 2A class of forty-one students at Brookton Junior College.
He sat in a wicker chair and wore a T-shirt with a torn shoulder, faded khakis, and old tennis shoes. The porch was on the front of the house, with a heavy screen of plantings that nearly concealed it from the pedestrians on the walk beyond the shallow front yard. Big elms grew on Arcadia Street, and their roots had buckled and cracked the old sidewalk. High branches touched over the middle of the street, and in the summer the dense shade lay heavily on the shallow front lawns of the frame houses.
When he looked up from his work he could see a segment of sidewalk and street. He could hear the sounds of the street. Motors of delivery trucks, whirring clack of roller skates, the nasal sputter of a small, familiar, and excessively noisy power mower several houses down on the other side of the street.
He was twenty-nine, a big man with wide hard shoulders, sculptured chest, wide bands of muscle linking neck and shoulders — narrow through waist and flank. He held himself trimly and moved lightly and with a quickness. His hair was brown and cut short, his eyes gray, quiet, slightly myopic. Though his face was bony, forthright, his habitual expression was one of mild patience, tinged by sadness, and when he was amused there was a wryness in the way his mouth turned down at the corners. With his black-framed reading glasses on he looked properly scholarly. This was his third year at Brookton. His contract called for instruction in English and Physical Education. He acted as an assistant coach in the school athletic program, and worked at it hard enough to keep himself in trim.
He liked working with the kids. It gave him a sense of purpose. He liked to watch them grow and change, and feel that he had something to do with that growth. Yet it was only during his rare moods of complete depression that he was willing to admit to himself that without this joy in his work, his life would be unendurable. During those times he could clearly see the dimensions of the trap into which he had so blindly wandered. A perfumed trap. A silky and membranous and pneumatic little trap. A trap named Lucille.
He picked up the next composition. This was a new class. He had just begun to associate faces with the names. Jill Grossman. A strange and terrified little mouse, almost an albino, with a pinched little face and glasses with a blue tint. But her work had talent. He decided he would like to ask her to join his unofficial seminar, the kids he invited over to the house in the evenings.
But Lucille was being even more difficult about such get-togethers this year than last. She could not see any reason for doing anything you were not paid to do. Lucille flounced off to the movies on those evenings.
After he had marked Jill’s paper, and made marginal notes cautioning her about being too florid and precious, he looked at his watch. A little after four. He hoped Lucille would remember to bring back the cold six-pack of beer he’d asked for. But it wasn’t likely. But he was certain of one thing she would bring back — her standard comments about how grim it was to have to use the public pool to go swim with Ruthie, her best girl friend, when, it they could belong to Crown Ridge Club which was so cheap really, and they could get in easy, the pool was really lovely with lights under the water at night, and she could take Ruthie there, and all winter they had the dances. And of course they didn’t belong to the Crown Ridge Club because he didn’t love her. It was the only possible answer. He was taking her for granted. It was impossible to explain family finances to Lucille. Figures bored her.
And any serious attempt to make her understand the budget always gave her a new opening.
“So if we’re so poor we can’t join just one cheap little club, why don’t you write another book and make some money? You wrote a book, didn’t you? So you could write for the television and the movies and the big magazines, couldn’t you? Instead of having those weird kids coming over here all the time, you could be writing and making some money so we could live nicer. You don’t want me to have nice things. That’s it, isn’t it? You just don’t care any more.”
And it was useless to try to explain to her that his single book had used up a whole year of creative energy, that it had earned a big two hundred and fifty dollar advance and a magnificent one hundred and eighteen dollars and thirty-three cents in additional royalties. No use to try to tell her that his talent was small, and that it certainly could not accomplish anything in the environment she had helped create. The kids were his creative outlet. But he had displayed the “author” tag far too prominently during their brief courtship. It gave her a weapon she could never resist wielding.
Just as he picked up the final composition in the pile he had brought home, somebody banged on the screen door, banged with unnecessary loudness, with a flavor of irritation and arrogance. From where Lee sat he could see baggy knees of gray pants, a slice of white shirt.
He pushed his chair back and started to get up. The screen door was pulled open and a man walked in. He was a thickset man, heavy around the middle, with a lean hollow-cheeked face that did not match his puffy build. A tan felt hat with a sweat-stained band was pushed back off his forehead. His nose was bulbous at the tip, and patterned with small broken red veins, prominent against the uniform pallid gray of his face. His eyes were small and blue and the flesh around them was dark-stained and puffy. He carried his gray suit coat over his left arm. The left hand, in a soiled white glove that fit too tightly, was obviously artificial. His hard black shoes were dusty and he walked toward Lee as though his feet were tender.
He could have been an aggressive and seldom successful door to door salesman. Or the man who always stands in the neighborhood bar, propounding noxious and illogical argument. But the warning bells of Lee’s childhood were still efficient. He concealed his irritation and said evenly, “Is there something I can do for you?”