"I don"t believe it!"
"Unfortunately, it"s true."
"Then," she said, "under the circ.u.mstances, don"t you think you"re just wasting your time talking to me? Apparently this James person is the only one who really knows anything about my husband."
"No," I said. "It"s not quite as simple as that. You see, he never did get to her apartment. And the only answer to that is a very ugly one."
She was watching me narrowly. "What?"
"I"m sorry, Mrs. Butler. But he"s dead, and has been ever since that Sat.u.r.day."
She tried to get up from the chair, but her legs wouldn"t hold her and she slumped onto the table. I carried her into the other room and put her on the bed. In a moment her eyes opened. She just lay there looking up at the rafters. She didn"t cry.
I went out to the other room and got the bottle. It had gone all right so far. She knew now that at least one outfit was wise to the fact that Butler had never reached the James girl"s apartment, and had guessed why he hadn"t. Maybe not the police, but the insurance company was working with them, wasn"t it?
"I"m sorry," I said. I held out the drink. "This will make you feel better."
She sat up and brushed the dark hair back from her face with her hand. She drank the whisky and shuddered.
"You must have suspected it," I said. "After all, it"s been over two months, with the police in twenty states looking for him."
"I suppose so," she said. "Maybe I just didn"t want to admit it."
I sat down in the chair and lit her a cigarette. She took it between listless fingers and forgot it.
"You see how that changes the picture, don"t you?" I said. "We"re not looking for your husband any more. We"re looking for whoever killed him. That is, the police are, or will be as soon as they get the word about the James girl. What I"m looking for is the money. And that brings us to why I wanted to talk to you. You might be able to add something."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you might think of something that didn"t seem important before, but that might be significant now in view of this. Was there somebody who could have found out he was going to do it? Was there somebody who knew about Diana James? You see the jealousy angle, don"t you? I mean-he had one girlfriend that we know of, so there might have been another."
"I understand he was also married," she said. "But go on."
"Believe me, Mrs. Butler, I don"t enjoy this either.
But my orders are to find that money. The police are going to have their hands full trying to find a murderer, and building a case that"ll stand up in court." I paused just a second; then I added, "I"m not interested in that angle of it."
"You"re not?"
"No. Let"s look at it objectively. Up to the point of recovering the money and prosecuting the man who stole it, our jobs overlap. But if the man is dead, he"s beyond the reach of prosecution, so when we get the money back we"re out of it. That may sound callous to you, but it"s only sound business. The police are paid to solve murders; we"re not."
I stopped. It was very quiet in the room.
"You see what I mean, don"t you?" I said.
She nodded slowly. "Yes. I understand perfectly." She paused, and then added, "They must pay you well."
"Well enough. But, again, it"s strictly business, if you look at it in the right way. I don"t think your husband was killed for that money. The motive was jealousy, and the money didn"t have anything to do with it. That being the case, we"re not involved. We get back what belongs to us. We drop it. You see?"
"And if you don"t get it back?"
"Then it"s a different story. People"s emotional explosions don"t interest us until they start costing us a hundred and twenty thousand dollars an explosion. Then we"re in it up to the neck, and we get rough about it."
She nodded again. "Yes. I can see you would feel quite unclean if you ever became contaminated with an emotion."
"It"s a job. Like pumping gas, or being vice-president of a bank. If I want to be emotional, I do it on my own time."
She said nothing. She just continued to watch me.
I leaned forward a little and tapped her on the wrist, "But let"s get back to what we were talking about. Catching your husband would have been easy, if somebody hadn"t killed him. We"d have had that money back by now except that a clear-cut case of embezzlement got loused up with some jealous woman blowing her stack. She"s just making it tough for me-and for no reason at all, because she didn"t want the money in the first place. And when I find out who she is I can make it tough for her. Or she can get off the hook by being sensible. You see how simple it is?"
"Yes," she said. "It is very simple. Isn"t it?"
She smiled. And then she hit me as hard as she could across the mouth.
Six
"Now that I"ve answered your question," she said coolly, "perhaps you"ll answer one for me. What were you doing in my house?"
It had been too sudden. Even without having your mouth bounced off your teeth, it was a little hard to keep up. "I just told you."
The big smoke-blue eyes were perfectly self-possessed now. "I know. You said I was wandering around on the lawn with a phonograph record in my hand, which isn"t a bad extension of the actual truth. So you must have been up there in my room when I was listening to the phonograph."
"You don"t believe me?"
"Certainly not. I know what I did. I went to sleep. And just in case you think I"m bluffing, I can even tell you the last recording I played before I dropped off. It was Handel"s Water Music Suite Water Music Suite. Wasn"t it?"
"How would I know?" I said.
"You probably wouldn"t, at that. But just who are you? And what is your business, besides extortion?"
I was catching up a little. "Don"t throw your weight around too much," I said. "Suppose the police started wondering just why his car showed up right in front of Diana James"s apartment."
"Did it?" she asked.
"You know d.a.m.ned well it did."
She shook her head. "No. But it does have a certain element of poetic justice, doesn"t it?"
It was odd, but I believed her. About that part of it, anyway.
"I"m beginning to understand now," she said, studying me thoughtfully through the cigarette smoke. "How is the accessible Miss James? As bountiful as ever, I hope?"
"She likes you too," I said.
She smiled. "We adore each other. But I do wish she would stop sending people up here to tear my house apart."
I remembered the slashed cushions. "So that"s who-"
"You didn"t think there was anything original about it, did you? I can a.s.sure you that in almost nothing connected with Miss James are you likely to be the first."
I said nothing. I was busy with a lot of things. She knew the house had been searched before, but still she hadn"t reported it to the police. That meant she couldn"t, and that I was still right. She was in whatever it was right up to her neck. She couldn"t report me either.
Her eyes were slightly mocking. "But I see you admit you had started to search the place. What changed your mind? I was asleep and wouldn"t bother you."
"It got a little crowded," I said. "With three of us."
"Three?"
"The other one was the man who tried to kill you."
"Oh, we"re going back to that again?"
"Listen," I said. I told her what had happened.
"You don"t expect me to believe that?" she asked when I had finished.
"When you go back to the house, take a look at what"s left of your records and the player. We rolled on "em. The other guy was a heavyweight, too."
"He was?" she asked. She was thinking about it. Then she shrugged it off. "I don"t believe you."
"Suit yourself," I said.
Then I stopped. We had both heard it. It was a car crossing that wooden culvert at the edge of the meadow. It came on, and pulled to a stop right in front of the porch. I could hear the brakes squeak.
I shook my head savagely and motioned for her to stay where she was. She couldn"t be seen through the front window. I stepped out into the other room. The coat, with the gun in it, was on the back of a chair against the other wall. As I started across I could look out the front door and see the car. There was only one person in it, and it was a girl. I could hear the radio, crooning softly.
I went out and walked around the car to the driver"s side. She smiled. She was an ash blonde with an angelic face and a cool pair of eyes, and you knew she could turn on the honey-chile like throwing a switch at Boulder Dam. She turned it on.
"Good moarornin"," she said. It came out slowly and kept falling on you like honey dripping out of a spoon. "It"s absolutely the silliest thing, but I think I"m lost."
"Yes?" I said. She was eight miles from a county road and twenty from the highway. And she didn"t look much like a bird watcher. "What are you looking for?"
She poured another jug of it over me. "A farmhouse. It"s a man named Mr. Gillespie. They said to go out this road, and take that road, and turn over here, and go down that way, you know how people tell you to go somewhere, they just get you all mixed up, it"s the silliest thing. Actually. All these roads with no names on them, how do you know which one they mean?"
Maybe I imagined it, but the patter and the eyes didn"t seem to match. And the eyes were looking around.
The radio had quit crooning and was talking. I didn"t pay any attention to it. Not then.
"Did they tell you to go through a gate?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, definitely a gate. Mr. Cramer, he"s the manager of the store, he was the one that found out Mr. Gillespie had forgotten to sign one of the time-payment papers when he bought the cookstove and took it home in his truck. Anyway, he definitely said a gate, and then about a mile after the gate you turn- I know you"re not Mr. Gillespie, are you? You don"t look a bit like him."
"No," I said. "My name"s Graves. I"m on a fishing trip."
"My," she said admiringly, looking at the white shirt and the tie, "you go fishing all dressed up, don"t you? My brother, when he goes fishing, he"s the messiest thing, actually, you should see him."
"I just got here," I said. "A few minutes ago."
Her story was plausible enough. She might be looking for somebody named Gillespie. G.o.d knows, she sounded as if she could get lost. She could get lost in a telephone booth, or a double bed. But still. . .
An icicle walked slowly up my spine and sat down between my shoulder blades.
It was the radio. It was what the radio was saying.
". . .Butler. . ."
"Are you fishing all alone?" Dreamboat asked.
All I had to do was stand there in the sunlight beside the car and try to hear what the radio was saying, and remember it, and listen to this pink-and-silver idiot, and answer in the right places, and at the same time try to figure out whether she was an idiot or not and what she was really up to, and keep her from noticing I was paying any attention to the radio.
"Mrs. Madelon Butler, thirty-three, lovely brunette widow of the missing bank official sought since last June eighth. . ."
Widow. So they"d found his body.
"Mrs. Butler is believed to have fled in a blue 1953 Cadillac."
"I don"t see any car," she said, looking around. "How did you get here?"
". . .sought in connection with the murder. Police in neighboring states have been alerted, and a description of Mrs. Butler and the license number of the car. . ."
"Pickup truck," I said. "Its in the shed."
". . .since the discovery of the body late yesterday, but no trace of the missing money has been found. Police are positive, however, that the apprehension of Mrs. Butler will clear up. . ."
The man had known the body"d been found, and that they were going to arrest her. He didn"t want her arrested. He still didn"t. Maybe this lost blonde wasn"t lost.
"Malenkov," the radio said.
But she was going to get lost, and d.a.m.ned fast.
"-drink of water," she was saying. She was smiling at me. She wanted to come into the house. She wanted to look around.
I smiled at her. "Sure, baby. But water? Look, I got bourbon."
I was leaning in the window a little. I slid her skirt up.
"Thought I saw an ant on your stocking," I said. I patted a handful of bare, pink-candy thigh. "Come on in, Blondie."
The "You-" was as cold and deadly as a rifle shot. Then she got back into character. "Well! I must say!"