The Price of Murder

by John D. MacDonald

  “Why don’t you put some clothes on?”

  “Do I look disgusting or something?”

  “Stop fencing with me, Lucille. Put some clothes on.”

  She gave him a mocking look. A sexy mocking look, like Grace Kelly had used in that picture where Cary Grant was a jewel thief, and he was being blamed for the way jewels were being stolen because they were using his methods, but he’d given up stealing long ago and he had to prove it wasn’t him. She and Ruthie had practiced that look, and she had got it down just right, Ruthie said. You put your eyelids part way down and looked slantwise and smiled in a way that sort of turned one comer of your mouth down. She leaned over, a long lithe stretching, and caught the sleeve of the beach coat and pulled it to her and slipped into it, and turned the collar up the way it looked the best and said, “Better, darling?” drawling the words out slow.

  “You lied to Keefler,” he said.

  She felt uncertain then. He didn’t look like Lee at all. He didn’t look friendly. He was more like Danny all of a sudden. Her voice was pitched higher. “If that man told you something about me, he was lying!”

  Instead of looking angrier, Lee suddenly looked very tired. “Seel, I don’t expect you to understand this. But I’m going to take a stab at it. We’ve got security. Whether you believe it or not, I’ve got a certain position, and I’m given a certain amount of respect.”

  She caught at the opening for counterattack, an opening too wide to ignore. “Yes, you’ve got everything. You’ve got a big deal. In ten years maybe you’ll be making as much as a good carpenter. I can’t even buy a lipstick without your showing me all the figures about how much it costs to …”

  “Shut up, for God’s sake. And listen. Keefler isn’t normal. There’s something twisted about him. He treated me as if … as if I was some petty thief in a lineup.”

  “Didn’t you explain how you’re a big important man around Brookton Junior College, dear?”

  “That doesn’t work with Keefler,” he said, ignoring her obvious sarcasm. “I never thought it was a mistake coming back here until now. I didn’t plan on a Keefler. If he wants to make trouble for me, he can. He can use Danny as a lever. And he can use … something else that happened a long time ago. He can make it look bad. As long as we stay clean, he won’t bother, I don’t think. But it’s damn important that we stay clean. He’ll pick up Danny, or somebody will, and then Keefler will be off our neck. It’s a bad break for Danny, and I’m damn sorry about it, but it’s his own fault. I sat there, Seel, and I saw you lie to him. I know when you lie. I’ve proved that to you before. You’re a poor liar. A lot of time I don’t bother. It isn’t worth the squabble we have about it. But this time it’s important. Get that through your head. This time it counts. When did you see Danny last?”

  “Just like I told Mr. Keefler. The day after your birthday.”

  “Come off it, Lucille. You’ve seen him since then. And I have to know about it. Right now.”

  She looked at him and she saw the clear purpose in his eyes. She realized, with consternation, that she would have to tell him something. It was unthinkable that she should try to tell him the whole thing. It had to be just enough to satisfy him. And there would have to be enough detail to make it sound right. She felt, for the first time, a really sharp stab of guilt for what she had done with Danny. It was really a terrible thing. It was his own brother. You couldn’t twist it all around like in a movie and make it seem better. It was something she hadn’t done before, and hadn’t planned to do. Ruthie talked about it a lot, but with Ruthie it was all talk. In a way it was Lee’s fault it happened. He seemed to think he could stick her in this crummy little house on Arcadia Street and keep her on a silly budget and have her be happy forever. When you were used to a lot of things going on, a lot of laughs and so on, you couldn’t be expected to adjust to a life where a faculty tea was a big deal.

  “Come on,” Lee said insistently. “Out with it.”

  Her mind moved quickly, sorting, editing, discarding. “Well, I did see him. But I made a promise.”

  Lee sighed. “The whole story. Come on.”

  “Well, it was two weeks ago yesterday. I only saw him that one time. It was in the morning and I was ironing and he came to the back door. He seemed worried about something. I told him you weren’t here and he said he wanted to ask a favor of me. He said he was in some kind of trouble. He wanted me to keep something for him, to hide it here in the house. He said he didn’t want to ask you to do it because you’d have a lot of questions and so on. So I promised him I would.”

  “Did he come back for it, whatever it was?”

  “No. He was just here that one time. I’ve still got it.”

  “Go get it.”

  She stood up, thinking of going to the kitchen, to the canister of flour, and she remembered how insistent Danny had been about not opening it, and his promise about what he would do if she did. So she turned instead toward the closet, pushed the clothes aside, took the envelope of money from the brown purse and, in a sudden rage at her own stupidity in not taking any of the money out, she flung the envelope at Lee. The money spilled in the air and fluttered down around him, on the bed and on the floor, and she wanted to laugh at his dazed expression.

  He picked the money up slowly, counted it and put it back in the envelope. “A thousand dollars,” he said. “What for?”

  She sat on the bench again. “He said he was in trouble and it was getaway money if things didn’t work out right. But if they did, we could keep it. And if he got killed, we could keep it.”

  “He didn’t say what kind of trouble?”

  “You know how he is.”

  “And that was all?”

  “He gave it to me to hide and told me not to tell you about it and then he left.”

  “Did he park his car in front?”

  “No. I don’t know where he left it. He came to the back door. I was in the kitchen ironing. He went out the back door when he left.”

  “Have you told anybody about this? Did you tell your friend Ruthie?”

  “No. I haven’t told anybody.”

  Lee sat, frowning, and he rapped the envelope against the knuckles of his other hand. It was the same gesture Danny had used.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to guess how Keefler would react if I told him what …”

  “But it’s your own brother!”

  “I’m aware of that, Seel. I’m very aware of that, believe me. But I have to be sure Keefler won’t get on the trail of this … incident. I guess we have to take a chance.”

  “Shall I put it back?”

  “I’ll take care of it, thank you. Seel, why couldn’t you have told me about this when it happened.”

  “I promised Danny. I gave my word.”

  “You’re married to me. I don’t like Danny roping you in on something like this.”

  “Where are you going to put it? Suppose he comes after it when you aren’t home?”

  “You tell him to wait and you phone me at the school and I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  “Suppose he’s in a hurry?”

  “That is going to be too damn bad. I want to know what the hell is going on.” He walked toward the bedroom door, turned and said, “I’ve got a meeting at seven.”

  “I don’t know how you expect to use up all the time there is asking me all kinds of questions and then think I can push a magic button and have a meal pop out of the wall or something in two seconds. I was real stupid. I was thinking it was Saturday night and maybe it wouldn’t be too much to expect to get taken out, maybe, and even …”

  “Skip it, skip it,” he said. “I’ll get a sandwich on the way.”

  When he came back into the bedroom she was working on the other foot. He showered quickly and changed. By the time he was ready to leave she had nearly finished shaving her legs.

  “I’ll be back about eight-thirty,” he said.

 
; “Oh, goody,” she said, not looking up.

  “Maybe we could go out to the drive-in.”

  “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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Danny Bronson

  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.