The Price of Murder (8 page)

“Double goody.”

“Think it over,” he said. He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned a sullen face up for his kiss, turning her lips aside so that his mouth brushed her cheek. He started to say something else, then turned and left the room. She heard the thin slap of the screen door, the whine of the feeble starter, the fading sound of the noisy motor. The room was turning gray-blue with dusk. She went out and phoned Ruthie, but there was no
answer. She went sulkily into the kitchen, made herself a peanut butter sandwich and ate it standing at the sink. The kids next door were having a screaming contest. After she drank a glass of milk she began to look for the money. It took her half an hour to decide it was in his desk drawer, the middle drawer, and it was locked. She worked at the lock with a bent paperclip for a long time, and gave up in disgust.

She turned on the television, checked the six available channels, turned it off. She looked in her purse and found she had two dollars and a quarter. The evening was beginning to get cool. She put on her powder blue suit and walked down to the bus stop. She left the house unlocked, left no note. Let him sweat. Let him go to the drive-in by himself. She saw the bus coming, and she felt as though she wanted to cry. The night was full of people having fun. And there wasn’t any fun left over for Lucille.

Danny woke up at eleven on Sunday morning, the fourteenth of October. He had had another prison dream, full of stone and bars and naked lights and night noises. He brought it out of sleep with him, and it took him long seconds to reorient himself in time and place, to identify the slant of beamed ceiling above him. He raised up on one elbow and looked at the clock and lighted the first cigarette of the day.

It was an enormous and comfortable bed with a trick headboard with radio, bookshelves, light switches. He exhaled, lay back, and felt the dull pulsation of a mild hangover. Too much liquor, too many cigarettes, and maybe a little bit more than enough of the big brunette, Mrs. Drusilla Catton, who had installed him in this remote and luxurious private lodge and expected frequent and earthy attentions in return.

Drusilla had explained to Danny why the camp was so luxurious and so isolated. Drusilla was the thirty-year-old second wife of Burt Catton, aged sixty. Burt had built the camp long ago when the first Mrs. Catton had been alive. Burt had originally picked up the sixteen hundred acres of forest land with the idea of subdividing it. But, because Ethel, the first Mrs. Catton, was almost impossible to endure without some systematic diversion, he had built the camp in great secrecy, a place for private and special entertainment unsuspected by the dread Ethel. It was sixty-three miles from Hancock—sixty on Route 90, then three on a narrow county road. The final half mile was a private gravel road. He had brought in electricity, had an earth dam built to convert a stream into a two-acre lake, and had gone as far afield as Toledo to import an
architect who seemed to have an instinctive understanding of just what Burt Catton wanted. Local labor from the near-by town of Kemp had constructed the camp. It was on a knoll overlooking the two-acre pond, with a good view of a range of far hills beyond the pond. The roof had the steep pitch and big overhang of structures where the snow load is heavy. The house was a rectangle, with but two huge rooms, the living room and the bedroom. A narrow hallway connected the two rooms, with a tiny kitchen off one side of it and an equally small bath off the other side.

Many windows in both the living room and the bedroom faced the pond. With its paneled walls, subdued dramatic lighting, deep furniture, startling color contrasts, efficient bar-corner, luxurious music system, low tables, chunky ash trays, the house served Burt Catton’s purposes perfectly. There were obvious clues to what those purposes had been: the vastness of the bed, the curious profusion of mirrors in the bedroom, the lack of provision for guests, the absence of any personal belongings. Dru had told him how she had been brought here by Burt, after Ethel had died but before Burt had married her, how he was known locally as Mr. Johnson, how one big closet in the bedroom was filled with dressing gowns and night gowns of a spectacular sheerness.

It had served as a refuge for Burt Catton during the final years of Ethel’s vituperative life—a place she did not know about, a place where she could not reach him. He had sometimes come here alone, but more often he was accompanied by a woman.

When Ethel Catton had died at sixty-one, leaving her husband, one married son and one married daughter, Burton Catton had been fifty-six. He was a heavy, brown, bearlike man, loud, virile, friendly, full of lusty appetites, a man of prominence and position in Hancock. Though it was known that Ethel Catton, who had been a Brice, had been well off when he married her, it was also commonly known that Burt, shrewd, hungry and sometimes ruthless, had done well in his own right. Some said he had more than trebled her money.

Two years after Ethel’s death, Burt Catton, then fifty-eight,
had quietly married Drusilla Downey, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Calder Downey, an ineffectual man of good family who was slightly affronted at being presented with a son-in-law six years his senior. But he was glad to have Drusilla off his hands. It was her third marriage. The first had occurred when she was seventeen to an inept New Jersey prizefighter called, most incongruously, Panther Rose. It had ended in annulment. Her second marriage at twenty-two to a quiet young man of twenty-six, a promising lawyer in a large Hancock firm, had ended three years later when the young man had taken his own life.

Calder Downey hoped that Burt Catton could control Drusilla. He sensed the strength in Catton that might make this possible. Calder knew Drusilla was not an evil person. The nearest he could come to a diagnosis was to say that she did not seem to give a damn. She was dark, reckless, full-bodied, hot-blooded, a woman who drank too much, drove too fast, borrowed constantly against her trust fund income, slept with anyone who attracted her, was casual about her dress, yet managed to extract an uncompromising loyalty from her friends. At twenty-eight the marks of the hard and headlong pace were beginning to show.

Two years after their marriage, two years after the long honeymoon spent in the redecorated camp, Burt Catton had a serious coronary. Four months later he was able to get around again. He was forty pounds lighter, gray rather than brown, withered, trembly, too scared to bend over and pick up his hat if he dropped it. That was the only year of their lives when Dru would be precisely half his age. The attack had changed Burt Catton into an old man who thought a great deal about death and could find no strength within himself to adjust to its inevitability. For a man of his intelligence he had managed to live an astoundingly long time with an inner conviction of immortality. During his enforced rest, his always tangled affairs had gotten into a dangerous condition. He had always had more than enough energy to control many ventures simultaneously. During the weeks he lay in bed, several important and promising things went sour. He could not
think of specific instructions to give his lawyers. And so nothing was done. Before his attack, a tax decision altered a previous capital gains profit to income, and it was necessary to liquidate certain property holdings to pay even part of the assessment.

He came slowly up from his closeness to death, and found himself with a wife who had been the beloved of the man he had once been. But this smaller, slow-moving, apprehensive man could feel no closeness to her. He felt no need to impose his will on her. He knew she was drinking too heavily, that she was bored and restless and looking for trouble. It seemed incredible to him that less than a year ago when she had annoyed him, he had yanked her, kicking and screaming and cursing him, down across his lap, had flipped up her skirt, ripped off the wisp of nylon panties and, with laughing gusto and sensual pleasure, applied the hard palm of his hand to the rounded ripeness of creamy buttocks until pain leached the fury out of her, until she wept with all the limp, deep satisfaction of the child who knows punishment was merited. She had eased herself gingerly down into chairs for the next few days, and she had been very meek and dutiful, and very affectionate. He wished he had known enough to apply the same wisdom and the same vigorous chastening measure to Ethel long long ago.

But after he was up and around again, moving with the brittle caution of the elderly and the frightened, it did not seem possible to him that he could have ever cowed Dru in such a way. She looked bigger and sturdier, and her voice seemed louder. He bowed to her fits of temper and tried not to hear her, and wished she would leave him alone. She was neither important nor necessary. It was important to think about the money, to think about it calmly and logically and effectively, or else be plucked clean.

He spent a lot of time with Paul Verney. Paul had taken some chilling losses too. And it became clear to them that they needed a coup, a coup of a specific nature. It had to result in a large dollar profit in a very short time, and the profit had to be in cash, and it would have to be a profit that need not be declared.

Any other venture was purposeless.

Paul found the method, made the contacts. Burt Catton was frightened by the risk. But he was more frightened by what his heart might do under the constant strain of worry. He had never touched anything so dangerously illegal. But he agreed. Paul went ahead. And, one night, very depressed, apprehensive, looking for both understanding and reassurance, he told Drusilla the whole story.

And two weeks later Drusilla told Danny. She told him just a little bit. Enough, she thought, to intrigue him. Just a delicate hint. She had no intention of telling him all of it. But she did tell him, stammering in her eagerness to get all the words out, pain bleaching her lips.

Danny butted his cigarette and got up out of the oversized bed. He walked to the window and looked at the thermometer fastened outside. Sixty-three. And the water would be colder. He went through to the living room and opened the door and walked, naked, out onto the small flagstone terrace. There were red October leaves on the flagstones and on the blue top of the metal table, and on the plastic webbing of the terrace chairs. He walked down the path to the pond, a broad powerful man with a hirsute body. He padded out the length of the dock and dived awkwardly and without hesitation into the chill water. He thrashed out into the middle of the pond, breathing hard, circled and swam back, clambered up onto the dock and walked back up to the camp, shivering. He rubbed himself dry with a big fluffy towel with an ornately embroidered C in the corner. He shaved, dressed in chocolate brown slacks and a white sports shirt and a yellow cashmere cardigan Dru had bought him.

He carefully prepared an ample breakfast and took it on a tray out into the sun on the terrace. He sat with his cigarettes and his pot of coffee and tried to make himself feel calm all the way through, tried to stop the fluttering that came and went. Verney would play. He had to play. He had no other choice. This was the big one. And it was going to go right, and he was going to go a long way away from here, away from a diligent little man named Keefler.

This was the sort of deal he had dreamed about. And
had never believed he would get close, this close. Before his release in May he had done a lot of thinking. It was painful thinking, because it showed him just how little he had done with his life. At thirty-two there wasn’t much to look forward to. He knew that Kennedy would put him on. There were always things Kennedy could use him for. There was always a call for a muscle. It would be a couple of bills a week. But inevitably, inexorably, there would be a fourth fall at the end of it. And the tag of an habitual. And a long long term. He wouldn’t be worth the best protective efforts of Kennedy’s legal talent. He would be discarded, with slight regret.

He got out and went to work for Grunwalt and, very carefully and politely, he ignored the feelers that Kennedy’s people put out. But as the weeks went by he had the sick feeling that sooner or later he would rejoin the organization. There didn’t seem to be anything else he could do. He dreamed up and discarded dozens of ideas for a solo operation.

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.