A Touch of Death Read Free

me how to do it. You thought about the reward, first; when you got used to that you could let your ideas grow a little. You didn’t have to jump in cold. You waded
    in.
    “Whose money is it?” I asked. “And where is it?”
    “It’s just a long guess,” she said. “I didn’t say I knew
    where it was. I said I think I know. You add up a lot of things to get to it.”
    “Such as?”
    She took a sip of the drink and looked at me across the top of the glass. “Did you ever hear of a man named J. N. Butler?”
    “I don’t think so. Who is he?”
    “Just a minute.”
    She got up and went into the bedroom. When she came back she handed me two newspaper clippings. I looked at the first one. It was datelined here in Sanport, June eighth. That was two months ago.
    SEARCH WIDENS FOR MISSING BANK OFFICIAL
    J. N. Butler, vice-president of the First National Bank of Mount Temple, was the object of a rapidly expanding manhunt today as announcement was made of discovery of a shortage in the bank’s funds estimated at $120,000.
    I looked up at her. She smiled. I read on.
    Butler, prominent in social and civic activities of the town for over twenty years, has been missing since Saturday, at which time, according to Mrs. Butler, he announced his intention of going to Louisiana for a weekend fishing trip. He did not return Sunday night, as scheduled, but it was not until the bank opened for business this morning that the shortage was discovered.
    I read the second one. It was dated three days later, and was a rehash of the previous story, except that the lead paragraph said Butler s car had been found abandoned in Sanport and that police were now looking for him all over the nation.
    I handed them back. “That was two months ago,” I said. “What’s the pitch? Have they found him?” “No,” she said. “And I don’t think they will.” “What do you mean?” “I don’t think he ever left his house in Mount Temple. Not alive, anyway.”
    I put the drink down very slowly and watched her face. You didn’t have to be a genius to see she knew something about it the police didn’t.
    “Why?” I asked .
“Interested?”
“I might be. Enough to listen, anyway.”
    “All right,” she said. “It’s like this: I’m a nurse. And for about eight months I was on a job in Mount Temple, taking care of a woman who’d suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed. Her house was out in the edge of town, across the street from a big place, an enormous old house taking up a whole city block. J. N. Butler’s place.” She stopped.
    “All right,” I said. “Keep going.”
    “Well, his car, the one they found abandoned here—I saw it leave there that Saturday. Only it wasn’t Saturday afternoon, the way she said; it was Saturday night. And
    he wasn’t driving it. She was.”
    “His wife?”
    “His wife.”
    “Hold it,” I said. “You say it was night. How do you
    know who was driving?”
    “I was out on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette before going to bed. Just as the Butler car came out of their drive onto the street, another car went by and caught it in the headlights. It was Mrs. Butler, all right. Alone.”
    “But,” I said, “maybe she was just going to town or something. That doesn’t prove he didn’t leave in the car later.”
    She shook her head. “Mrs. Butler never drove his car. She had her own. He didn’t abandon that car in Sanport.
    She did. I’d swear it.”
    “But why?”
    “Don’t you see the possibilities?” she said impatiently. “He almost has to be dead. There’s no other answer. They’d have found him long ago if he were alive. He was a big, good-looking man, the black-Irish type, easy to see and hard to hide. He was six-three and weighed around two-thirty. You think they couldn’t find him? And another thing. When they run like that, ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s another woman in it. Suppose Mrs. Butler found out about it, before he got away? He was going to have