that this is serious. Can’t you see what I’m trying to do? You’re going to come out a dish, no matter how we slice you, so what we’ve got to do is make you an entirely different kind of dish. A cheap one. Flashy. If you’re not already wearing padding up there, you’re going to, and plenty of it. Change your way of walking. Get dresses tight across the hips, leave off the girdle, and let it roll. Cops are men. Who’s going to keep his mind on the job and look for the patrician Mrs. Butler with all that going on?”

She shook her head. “You have the most amazing genius for vulgarity I have ever encountered.”

“Oh, knock it off,” I said. “If you don’t like the idea, let’s see you come up with a better one.”

“You misunderstand me. I wasn’t criticizing the idea. It’s very good. In fact, it’s remarkably ingenious. I was merely objecting to your crude way of expressing yourself, and marveling that someone without even the faintest glimmerings of taste or discrimination could have figured it out.”

“Save it, save it.” I waved her off. “You can make a speech some other time. Now, if we’ve agreed on the idea, let’s work out the details. We’ve got to do something about your complexion. Do you tan all right?”

‘Yes. Except that I avoid it.”

“Not any more. Now, let’s see. I could get a sun lamp, except that anybody asking for one at a store here on the Gulf Coast in summer might be locked up for a maniac, so we’ll get along without it. This living-room window faces west, and in the afternoon the sun comes in if we raise the Venetian blind. There’s no building across the avenue high enough for anybody to see you if you’re lying on the floor. Item one, suntan oil.”

I got up and found some paper and a pencil and wrote it down.

“Now, what else?”

“Do you have any scissors?”

“No,” I said. I wrote that down, and went on: “Home-permanent outfit. Sunglasses. Now, what do I get to bleach your hair with?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she said.

“You’re a big help,” I said. “But never mind. I’ll get it. Now, can you think of anything else?”

“Only cigarettes. And a bottle of bourbon.”

“You won’t get tanked up?”

“I never get tanked up, as you put it.”

“All right.” I stood up. As I started toward the door I stopped and turned. “What banks are those safe-deposit boxes in?”

She answered without hesitation. “The Merchants Trust Company, the Third National, and the Seaboard Bank and Trust Company.”

“What name did you use?”

“Names,” she said easily. “Each box is under a different one.”

“What are they?”

She leaned back in the chair and smiled. “A little late to be checking up now, aren’t you? I doubt if they’d answer your questions, anyway.”

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of calling them. I’m still going under the assumption you had better sense than to try to lie about it, under the circumstances.”

“I wasn’t lying. The money’s in those three banks.”

“And the names?”

“Mrs. James R. Hatch, Mrs. Lucille Manning, and Mrs. Henry L. Carstairs.” She named the names off easily, but stopped abruptly at the end and sat there staring at her cigarette, frowning a little. “What is it?” I asked.

She glanced up at me. “I beg your pardon?”

“I thought you started to say something else.”

“No,” she said, still frowning as if she were trying to think of something. “That was all. Those are the names.”

“O.K.,” I said. “I’ll be back in a little while.” As I went down in the elevator I tried to figure out what was bothering me. The whole thing was easy now, wasn’t it? Even if that deputy sheriff died, they couldn’t catch us. She was the only lead they had, and she was too well hidden. The money was there, waiting for me. Then what was it?

It wasn’t anything you could put a finger on. It was just a feeling she was a little unconcerned about giving up all that money. She didn’t seem to mind.

Fifteen

I took a bus across town and got my car out of the storage garage. Both the afternoon papers were out now, but there was nothing new. The deputy sheriff was still unconscious, his condition unchanged. They were tearing the state apart for Madelon Butler.

I found a place to park near a drugstore. Buying a couple of women’s magazines, I took them back to the car and began flipping hurriedly through the ads. I