The Price of Murder

by John D. MacDonald

  Keefler stared at him for long seconds. Then he chuckled and said, “Now if you aren’t the one!”

  “Ask your questions.”

  “Sure, but first I’ll make my little speech. They keep telling me it’s a free country. It don’t mean a thing to me if you wave your education in my face. Not a thing. There’s a fence, see? Right across the middle of the world. I’m on one side. And the Bronson boys are on the other. You both got records. You’re both in the files. He’s got a thicker file. I’ll talk to you just the same way I talk to anybody on the other side of that fence. I got a right to talk to anybody I want to. And you are going to play it my way. If you don’t like my way, and if I think maybe you’re hiding something, I go over to that school you work at, and I got my hat in my hand and I ask them a hell of a lot of polite questions about you, and if when I’m through there’s anybody left over there that doesn’t know you got a brother who’s a three-time loser who put you through school on stolen money, it’s going to surprise both of us. And they’ll know your brother has busted his parole and he’s on the loose and he gives you fancy presents. And they’ll know you got picked up on an assault charge and it got squashed because the guy who showed up to squash it was the smart shyster who worked for Nick Bouchard. If they still love you over there, I’ll see you get pulled in for questioning, and I’ll see it happens often, and I’ll make sure it comes when you should be teaching like they are paying you for. Now if you think they’ll still keep paying you for teaching after all that, you can pop off some more about my mouth and my manners. To Johnny Keefler, you are one of the Bronson boys, and both the Bronson boys stink. End of speech.”

  Anger had suddenly become much too expensive. A luxury. He straightened the papers on the card table and he was annoyed with himself to see that his hand was shaking. He saw the factor he had missed in Keefler’s personality. The man was not entirely sane. He was perfectly capable of doing exactly what he threatened. He would do it knowing well that he would gain nothing but the satisfaction of smashing the orderly life of Lee Bronson. Perhaps, before the loss of the hand, he had been merely a tough cop with a streak of sadism. Lee knew he had no important contacts, no place he could go and ask that Keefler be pulled off him. He knew that the only thing he could do was crawl. And it was humiliating even with the rationalization that it was but to placate a madman.

  He looked down at the stack of themes, and spoke in an expressionless voice. “He came here on the afternoon of July twenty-fifth. He was too well dressed to be still working for Grunwalt. He was driving a gray two-door, a recent model. Maybe a Dodge or a Plymouth. He stayed from about three-thirty to five-thirty. We had some drinks. I wondered what he was doing. He wouldn’t tell me. He admitted he wasn’t at Grunwalt’s. I asked if Rich knew about that. He said it was all fixed. I asked him if he’d gone back with Kennedy and he said no.”

  “Now you’re being a good boy, but it’s a lot of crap you’re handing me. He’s your brother. If he was onto something, he’d tell you.”

  “I can only give you my word that he didn’t. My wife was with us all the time. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

  “Where’s your wife?”

  “She’s due back any minute. In fact, she’s a little late.”

  “I got the time.”

  “Don’t lean on her, Mr. Keefler. She’s not used to …”

  “You forget easy. I’m doing this my way, Bronson. Where is Danny now?”

  “I haven’t any idea.”

  “You act like you want to make it hard for yourself. We’ll get him anyway. He broke parole. So he owes the state seven years and seven months. There’s no way in the world he can get out of that.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing. It doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sound like him. He’s smarter than that.”

  Keefler gave a snort of contempt. “That clown isn’t smart. No three-time loser has brains, professor. Here’s how smart I am. Rich and those other guys were carrying too big a load. So they’re told to turn over so many files apiece to me, and make it the rough ones. From Rich I get your brother and a few others. He briefs me on them. They’re all doing fine, he says. Danny Bronson is checking in like he should. No trouble with Danny. No trouble at all. He gives me the big words. Fine adjustment. Social conscience. Crap! I ask when he’s due in, and Rich says he phones in. I ask if he ever stops over to see him on the job and Rich says it might embarrass the men to go drop in on them. First I go check on where he’s living. I find he moved out of that flea bag room early in July. There’s a violation right there. Change of address without notification or authorization. No forwarding address. Then I go to Grunwalt. Bronson, sure. Worked here for six weeks. Quit the end of June. As far as Rich knew, he was still working there. Solfes a wise guy, and I’ve decided he’s had too much fresh air and he’s due back inside to think it over. So I drift around town, asking who’s seen him. Nobody. While I’m looking he phones Rich on schedule, a local call. By then I’ve told Rich off, told him how the wise punk was kidding him. Maybe over the phone Rich breaks into tears or something, telling the poor fella how he’s let his friends down. That call came in last Monday. I’m still looking. He’s on the tape now, with a pick-up order out for him. I got the rest of my punks hacked into line. They jump up and say sir. Rich and those other clowns are too soft. I’m going to get Danny and he’s going to go down on his knees and he’s going to beg and he’s going to blubber, and then he’s going back to Alton for violation of parole, and by God, he’s going to stay there. Your smart brother wasn’t a damn bit smart, Bronson.”

  “All I can tell you is I honestly don’t know where he is, Keefler.”

  “Mister Keefler.”

  “Mister Keefler.”

  “Try it again, with a little more snap, professor.”

  “Mister Keefler.”

  “That’s better. You saw him last on the twenty-fifth of July?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Try it again, with a sir.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “You’re coming along nice, professor. You’re certain you haven’t seen him since?”

  “I’m positive … sir.”

  “What are all those papers, Bronson?”

  “Class work, sir. English themes.”

  Keefler stood up, reached over and took the top paper. Jill Grossman’s work. He read it, frowning, his lips moving, for about twenty seconds. Then he tossed it contemptuously on the desk. “Good god, is that what you teach them? What the hell is it about?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “Different people don’t understand different things. Think the parents of those kids would understand about you? About your old lady, maybe? The record says she was a lush, a part-time waitress and a part-time whore that got herself froze to death in an alley in the Sink.”

  Lee’s hand was on his knee, hidden by the table top. He looked up at Keefler’s smile and, keeping his face blank, he closed his hand into a hard fist. He could hear the sound it would make against that slack smile, and he could feel how it would jolt all the way up to his shoulder. He had the feeling that Keefler knew exactly what was coming, and had known just how to push him over the edge. But at that crucial moment he heard the muted yelp of tires and the bang of springs and shocks as Lucille drove the old Plymouth into their driveway in her normal frantic fashion.

  “This your wife now?” Keefler asked. Lee nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. Keefler sat down. Lee felt weak and sick with reaction. Keefler said, “You stay put, professor. She’ll come on out here by herself, won’t she?”

  “Yes. She’ll come out here.”

  “What else? Come on, get it up.”

  “Sir.”

  He heard Lucille coming through the house, heard the clack of her clogs on the hardwood in the hallway, the softer sound of her steps on the rug. She came out onto the porch, saying, in a whining voice, “Honey, you just gotta do something about the car. When I
stopped to let Ruthie off, it stalled and I …” She stopped as she saw Keefler. Lee saw her quick and expert appraisal of him, saw her arrive at the immediate conclusion that Keefler could be of no interest to her, saw her face change into the look of hauteur and indifference she reserved for everybody she considered the least bit inferior.

  “Lucille, this is Mr. Keefler. He’s Danny’s parole officer.”

  And the look of indifference was gone, and Lee saw a curious alertness about her. “How do you do,” she said, very politely.

  “Hi, Lucille,” Keefler said, remaining stolidly in his chair. Lee had screened the porch a year and a half ago, and he had left the original railings. The screen was about eight inches beyond the railing. Lucille moved over and sat on the railing, long round legs straight, crossed at the ankles. She wore her dark blue swim suit, a short pale blue beach coat of thick terrycloth over it, and wooden clogs with white straps. Her hands were shoved deeply into the big pockets of the short beach coat, and the collar was turned up. Her hair was the coppery dark of old pennies, and coiled tightly, the coils no larger than coins, hair fitting her head closely with a look of spirit and bravery like a Roman youth. She was, Lee thought, almost unchanged by three years of marriage. Her perfect face had babyish blandness, large blue eyes set very wide, elfin snub of a nose, lips wide and heavy, teeth a bit too small and of a perfect white. She was now, as she had been three years before, one of the most provocative looking women he had ever seen. The life of her seemed so very close to the sensitive and unflawed satin of her skin. It was visibly warm in the pulse of her throat, in the lucent blue of veins at temple, wrist and ankle. Her long legs seemed to have extra curvatures, tender hollows, velvety paddings which, in other women, were but the hints of what here, in her, was almost too graphically expressed.

  She usually kept her hands out of sight. They were small hands, but thick through the palms, with very short fingers. The nails were deeply nibbled and ugly.

  Now she had her perfect summer tan, a honeyed luminescence that seemed more a glow of gold from beneath the skin than a deepening of color of the skin itself. The whites of her eyes were blued with her perfect health. There had been a little change. Her waist did not nip in above the sweet abundance of hips with quite such a startling contrast; there was a tiny roll of fat around her middle. There was a fullness under her chin, a small pad that unfortunately made it slightly apparent that there was not a great deal of chin in the first place. Her round high breasts were larger, the tissues less firm. And there were two tiny brackets of discontent around her mouth.

  He remembered a time last May when she had been at the school to meet him and had somehow missed him, and he had been hurrying to catch up with her when he spotted her a half block ahead, walking toward home, walking with her short quick steps, hips swinging in wine linen slacks. As he had come up behind two boys who were following her, keeping pace with her, he heard one of them say, with thick-throated fervor, “Damn! She’s really built for it.”

  That phrase had remained in his mind because it had been, in a curious way, an index of his self-betrayal. In the very beginning she had been the perfect delusion. Blinded by that magical face and body, he had read into her all the things he wanted to find. Her wide-eyed look was honesty. Her farm background and the office job in Battle Creek denoted energy and integrity. He detected an undertone of seeming cleverness in her most banal remark. Her automatic sexual hunger could not be anything but love.

  He could not believe that a face and body of such perfections could contain a third-class mind. He told himself that her environment had not given her a chance to grow. When he talked she looked at him with shining eyes and rapt attention that could only come from a superior intelligence and from a sensitivity that had never been given a chance to develop. He would develop it. He would take delight in her growth.

  He had been stubborn, and it had taken a year before he could see her clearly and know how poor had been the bargain he had struck. As the first child and only daughter of the Detterichs she had been grievously spoiled. She had been that rarity—a beautiful baby, a beautiful child, a beautiful adolescent. In a world where beauty was so highly prized, it was only necessary to be looked at and admired. She had learned that she was a great prize, and that it was inevitable that she would be given all the good things of the world. By someone. Her parents gave all they could. She was never given chores. She never made her own bed, or cleaned her room. In school she had been an indifferent scholar, a bland dreamer without intellectual resource. In her dreams she was a famous actress, or singer, or movie star. But never was there any effort to implement these dreams.

  Even the job, he learned, had been a phony. She had dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year, and for the next two years had done absolutely nothing, rising at noon, washing her hair, lounging around the farmhouse, waiting only for dusk and the inevitable car in the drive, the peremptory honk, the long evening date. Boredom had finally driven her to Battle Creek. After a six weeks’ course at a business school, during which she had learned very little, she had gone to work for her uncle, her mother’s brother, a general agent. Lee remembered the way Uncle Rog had said, “Seel dressed up the office pretty good.” And chuckled. “Hard to keep the boys out working on prospects. Used to be if you wanted to lose anything for good, have Seel file it.”

  The last illusion to go was the one of love. Unlike the norm of most beautiful women, she was strongly, hungrily sexed. But her only interest was her own gratification. He existed as an available instrument of her completion, not as a person. She would say the expected words of love, but as a short lesson learned by rote.

  He knew that, as a person, he did not exist for her. Nor did anyone else in the world really exist. She lived entirely for herself, and anyone who entered her life in any way existed only as a part of the frame around her. Should they fit her preconceived notion of herself, they were acceptable. If they did not fit, they were ignored.

  She was an indifferent housekeeper, a dull, lazy and unimaginative cook. In his final knowledge he admitted to himself that she was stupid, lazy, insensitive, greedy, superficial and curiously coarse. He had thought a child might change her, but after he became convinced they could not conceive, he felt a guilty relief. He took the joyless use of her that she took of him. And he intoned the expected words with her own lack of conviction. He felt responsibility toward her. He did not feel that he could leave her. And when he thought of how she would be in twenty years, soft, fat, querulous, whining, his heart seemed to hang sick and heavy in his breast. He knew she would hurt him in his profession. At the moment it was not too important. At faculty affairs she was decorative, and when she opened her mouth and the emptinesses came out, it was thought cute. Lucille, the doll-wife.

  The one factor he most resented was the way she managed to stifle his ability to do a second novel. He tried. He could not work. There was always the knowledge of her in the house. Her listless boredom, her sighing discontent. She felt he had cheated her somehow. This life was too meager. She didn’t understand money, or how to handle it. She merely knew that she had to have a great deal more than she had. Her desires were infantile. She wanted a glossy convertible, country club membership, a mink, travel, matched luggage, a fulltime maid, and one really good square-cut emerald. Lee obviously couldn’t acquire those things and never would. So Lee had cheated her. And her family felt Lee had cheated her.

  As he was unable to work at what he wanted most to do, he had filled his time as completely as he could with extra work. Any obligation was preferable to the endless evenings after eating one of those frozen horrors she purchased called “television dinners,” trying to read in the small living room while she lived the spurious life of the picture tube.

  The marriage had become a curious armed truce. In a small and very guilty corner of his soul he hoped that out of her ignorance and her boredom she would commit some act so monstrous that it would cancel his obligation to her and he w
ould be free of her. Though he had the dark suspicion that there had been very few personable men in her home neighborhood who had not managed to trigger her quick physical responses, she seemed now to be utterly faithful. She spent a great deal of time with Ruthie Loftis, the plump brunette wife of a car salesman who lived three blocks down Arcadia Street. Ruthie was cut from the same pattern. When he was forced to over-hear fifteen minutes of any Lucille-Ruthie conversation, he felt like throwing his head back and roaring like a gut-shot bear.

  He glanced at Keefler and saw that the man was looking at Lucille with cold avidity and an overtone of astonishment.

  “Seems like your brother-in-law Danny has come up missing,” Keefler said easily. “When was the the last time you saw him? Now don’t look at him, honey. You look at me and tell me.”

  “Gee, I got to think. It was a long time ago. Lee, wasn’t it about your birthday?”

  “I told you not to look at him.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s like a game, sort of, huh? He was here the day after Lee’s birthday, when he was twenty-nine. I’m twenty-four. Let me see. He brought you something. I can’t remem … oh, that stuff for your desk. I don’t know why he had to bring junk like that.”

  “Have you seen him since?”

  Lucille’s eyes looked wider. She shook her head from side to side, with the slow solemnity of a child. “No, Mr. Keefler. We haven’t seen him at all.”

  Lee felt the tension at the nape of his neck. Lucille was a congenital liar, and a poor one. There were always reasons for her lies. Where did the change go? Gee, honey, it must have fallen out of my pocket. Those are new shoes, aren’t they? Are you crazy! I’ve had these for ages. Why didn’t you tell me Dr. Ewing called? But he didn’t, honest. Always with the same extra width of eye, the same slow shake of her lovely head, the slight abused pout of her heavy lips. He had seen it so many times that he knew beyond any doubt that Lucille was lying to Keefler. He looked narrowly at Keefler, who took out a cigarette and lit the match one-handed. Keefler stood up. “Well, you back up what your husband told me, Mrs. Bronson. I guess you folks are in the clear.”