waitress again. “Here’s your coffee.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”
“They publish those papers ever’ day,” she said, “That the first one you ever saw?”
“I just got back from South America.”
“Oh.” She glanced at the paper. “Pretty, isn’t she?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Butler. That’s her picture. She killed her husband and threw him in an old well. What do you suppose made her do it?”
I wished she would go away. “Maybe he snored,” I said.
It was nice. I’d been tied to Mrs. Butler like a Siamese twin for over twenty-four hours, but a waitress in an airport greasy-spoon had to tell me where they’d found her husbands body.
“No,” the waitress went on, answering her own question, “I’ll tell you. He was triflin’ on her. That’s the way it always is. A woman kills her husband, its because he was tomcattin’ around. You men are all triflers.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll shoot myself. But could I have the hotcakes first?”
She went away. Maybe she would break a leg, or forget to come back. I jerked my eyes back to the paper, feverishly looking for the place where I’d been interrupted. I found it. It was at the bottom of the page. “See Butler, page four,” it said.
I flipped the pages, goaded with impatience. I overshot page four and had to back up. Here it was.
No theory has been advanced as to why the house was set afire. A landmark in the county since the early 1890’s, it was totally destroyed. Only a chimney and a portion of one wall remained at an early hour this morning.
Police are also at a loss to explain the shots heard by neighbors. Maddens gun, found nearby, had not been fired. A constant vigil is being maintained at his bedside in the hope that a return to consciousness may clear up some of the deep pall of mystery that hangs over the whole affair. It is hoped he may have seen his assailant before he was slugged.
Mrs. Butler has been sought by police since the discovery of the body of her husband, vice-president of the First National Bank of Mount Temple, in an abandoned well near their summer camp on Crystal Springs Lake, 15 miles east of Mount Temple. Police, acting on a tip by two small boys, discovered the body of the missing banker a little over twenty-four hours ago, ending a nationwide search that began June 8, when he disappeared, allegedly absconding with $120,000 of the bank’s funds.
No trace of the money was found with the body.
I closed the paper. The waitress brought the hot-cakes and said something I didn’t catch. She went away. I forgot the hotcakes.
He was still alive four hours ago. No, it was less than that. The story had said “at an early hour this morning.” He would live. He had to. He was young, wasn’t he? Twenty-nine was young enough to take a thing like a broken skull.
It hadn’t been real before, when I’d heard about it from the filling-station boy. It was only a rumor. But there was something about seeing it in print that made it true.
I tried to sort out how I felt. There wasn’t any feeling about the man himself. I didn’t know him. I’d never seen him. If he walked up and sat down beside me at the counter here right now I wouldn’t know him. He was completely faceless, like a thousand other people that died every day. You read about them. They were killed in automobile wrecks and they fell in bathtubs and broke their necks and they died of cancer and they fell off buildings and you read about them and then you turned the page and read the funnies.
That wasn’t it.
It was that if he died, this wasn’t a game I could quit when I got the money. I’d never be able to quit.
This thing was like a swamp. Every time you moved, you sank into it a little deeper. I remembered how simple it had been at first. All I had to do was search an empty house. If I found the money, I was rich. If I didn’t, I was out two days’ work. That was all. It didn’t cost anything.
“There’ll be no wild-haired babes blowing their tops and killing each other in anything I’m mixed up in,” I had told Diana James. It was a business proposition.
And now Diana James was dead. And a cop was in the hospital with a broken skull. If he died, I had killed him.
I didn’t want the