A Touch of Death (24 page)

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.

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?