Then, in the last week in June, he attended a party in a big apartment given by a city official whose ties to both Bouchard and Kennedy had been close and profitable. There were many familiar faces there. Kennedy’s people seemed to think it just a matter of time before he came back into the fold. It was at that party he met Drusilla Downey Catton. It was late in the evening. Her escort had passed out and been stowed in one of the bedrooms with the other casualties. By then Danny was tight enough to decide to take over where the previous one had left off. Drusilla was a big handsome vital woman of about thirty, dark-haired and colorful, with a strong face, an air of recklessness, an inexplicable air of importance, and a voice and way of speaking that made him think of Katherine Hepburn.
They took their drinks out onto a terrace that over-looked the city and the lake, and she hoisted herself up to sit on the wide cement wall sixteen stories above Lake Drive. She talked and he listened, at first with mild interest and then a growing excitement. She had barely known the man who had brought her. Her husband was Burton Catton. Danny knew him as a much older man, a man of money and importance. She said Catton had had a severe heart attack and was so concerned with taking his own pulse that he had no time for her. She said she was perfectly fascinated by the party and by all the types she had met. These people seemed so very much more interesting than her circle of dull friends. Actually they made her friends seem quite bloodless. Was it really true that that one named Al Altamiro had his left arm shot off? Danny told her how it had been amputated by a twelve-gauge shotgun during a union jurisdictional dispute, and she was delighted to know the details, and she quivered deliciously. He sensed that she was bored, reckless, restless — that she lived for excitement and sensation. And he knew there was money behind her.
Consequently, when she began to ask about him, he did not conceal the truth as he would have with a different sort of woman. He told the truth and embellished it. He gave himself a bloodier background than was reasonable. In actual fact he had committed but one murder, and that had been unintentional. He’d been ordered by Bouchard to discipline a runner who had been holding out on his numbers take. The dim light of the room where he had beaten the man had put his aim off, and a blow to the mouth had crushed the throat and the runner had strangled to death. After the embarrassing problem had been solved by slinging the body under a slow-moving freight, Bouchard had been annoyed with Danny until he became aware that the end result had been a remarkable increase in the efficiency of the other runners. And one time, because of his driving skill and his knowledge of the city, he had driven for two specialists who had been imported to take care of a gambler named Berman. Berman had learned he had an incurable cancer, and in addition to making his peace with his God, a move to which Nick could not object, Berman also wanted to cleanse himself with the Grand Jury, a procedure which could not be permitted. The more important of the two imported trigger men was a sulky, sleepy little man who, due to his fondness for and accuracy with a Colt .22 Woodsman fitted with a German silencer, was known as Peashooter. Danny, at the wheel, heard the husky sound, hardly louder than a snapping of the fingers, and learned an hour later, after he had garaged the car, that Berman, drinking coffee in his kitchen, had taken the slug directly in the orifice of the right ear — which, considering his condition, might be counted as a favor.
But, with Drusilla Downey Catton, he dwelt on his three prison terms, hinted at the direness of his deeds, and dredged up convincing detail from the welter of shop talk he had been hearing all his life. And he was not unaware that the more dangerous he made himself, the more delight Dru took in her delicious shudderings, and the more insistent became the pressure of her round warm leg against his hip as they talked there on the terrace. This was a phenomenon he had heard about, but had never experienced, the fascination of the wellborn woman with a pronounced sexual drive for the fighter, the thug, the jockey.
He took her for the first time that same night, on a woolly blanket spread beside her convertible, some fifteen miles from the city. He was as rough with her as he expected she desired him to be. And he learned she was a great deal of woman.
They spent the following evenings together, and at the end of the week he quit his job, gave up his room, and, on the first day of July, was installed out at the camp. The heart attack had made it most unlikely that Burt Catton would ever go near the camp again. In essence Danny knew that he was simply at stud. It was all that was expected of him, but in the case of Drusilla Downey Catton, that was a requirement almost heroic. On the first of July she had received the semiannual installment from her trust fund. After paying off her debts there was enough left for her to buy him an almost new car, more clothes than he had ever owned before, stock the camp with ample liquor and great boxes of food, provide him with pocket money. He had never lived better or been lonelier. This was not the deal he had planned for himself, but it was much more pleasant than working for Grunwalt.
In order for the relationship to be palatable to both of them, it was necessary that certain fictions be devised. He told her that, due to the long memories of certain enemies, it was healthier for him to be in such an isolated place. Also it gave him a chance to plan some big operation. She was providing the place for him because it wasn’t being used anyway. She was a woman of frightful energies. She could slip out of the great bed at one in the morning and be back, fresh, eager, glowing with health, demanding his immediate attentions, at eight the next morning. Her eyes had the slight bulge, her throat the faint tell-tale fullness of the hyperthyroid. After a time Danny Bronson began to wonder how long he could last.
And then he found the big chance had been right in his lap. She had questioned him about the big job he was supposed to be planning. She never tired of listening to his shop talk. Then she said, “It isn’t fair, really, you know. Because I mean they’ll look for someone like you, won’t they? But respectable men, like Burt and Paul Verney, they can get away with a dreadful thing without anybody knowing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, it’s something they’re doing. It depends on getting rid of some money. Quite a lot of money.”
He had tried to question her, but she turned arch and mysterious. Lately she had been slowly achieving a position of dominance over him. She had begun to give orders and expect them to be obeyed. He had been the dominant one in the beginning. He had roughed her up from time to time. Not seriously. Never marking her. She seemed to enjoy it and expect it. But this was different.
It did not take him very long. Nerve centers and pressure points are much the same for a woman as for a man. With the flood of genuine agonizing pain came a fear that oiled her face and turned it gray. He had her in a corner and he made the words tumble out of her, a gasping torrent. Then, holding her arm, he walked her gently to the big bed. She walked with the feeble fragility of a very old woman. When the pain had faded, he made her tell him again, and asked her questions until he was certain he knew all she knew. The harsh discipline had shocked her. It made her very meek and highly affectionate. It restored him to the place of dominance.
His original plan had been to move slowly, and, using the startling information Dru had given him, milk Verney and Catton with restraint so as not to alarm them too much. He made his required phone calls to Richardson.
But then Keefler came into the picture. And suddenly, unexpectedly, he became a parole violator, a wanted man, a man owing the state over seven years. He would be forty upon release. If there was a single truth in all the world, it was this: They would never take him back.