Lullaby of Murder Read Free Page B

the carpenters tore away the boards. People formed a line outside, to apply for employment, Julie supposed. There were a table and a few folding chairs in the lobby. A haze of dust made the harsh work lights within the building softer. She inquired where the office was, and then the name of the person in charge.
    “I guarantee you’ll never forget it, Miss: Mr. Morton Butts.”
    She found Mr. Butts behind a cluttered desk. On top of the clutter were what looked like two sets of blueprints held open by a hammer and a pair of pliers, a Pepsi bottle and a bible. He slipped one of the prints over the other and let them roll up together as Julie approached. He introduced himself and dusted a chair for her with his breast pocket handkerchief.
    “Why a dance marathon?” he repeated her first question and took off. “What you got to understand about me, Miss, I’m a student of history. That way when something everybody else thinks is new comes along I know when and where it showed up the last time and what made it click then. If it didn’t click it didn’t make history. See what I mean?”
    Julie nodded.
    “And there’s always room for improvement. But you got to do everything with heart. You got to believe in it. And in yourself.” He thumped his chest with a chubby fist. “I’ve been working almost a year on this project, and two weeks from now the lights go on. Let me tell you how it works. Ten thousand dollars at the top, winner take all. No second, third, no consolation prize: it’s do or die.” Mr. Butts’ face was ruddy and his thick short greying hair stood up on his head like a scrub brush. Round and plump, he was very little taller than Julie. He had to be about sixty or so. His eyes, with the glint of a zealot in them, were as busy as lightning bugs, and the spittle flew from his mouth with his enthusiasm. Every now and then he would get up from the desk and go to the window, taking the blueprints with him, tapping them in the palm of his hand as he stood on tiptoe to see the lineup below. They were would-be contestants, he explained, who were paying twenty dollars a head for the privilege. Their registration fee would also buy them a good physical examination.
    “There’s something about the dance marathon you wouldn’t understand if you didn’t know your history: it was one of the important ways the American people pulled themselves out of the Great Depression in the nineteen-thirties. Most of the schoolbooks teach you it was Franklin D. Roosevelt that saved the country with his alphabet soup, the AAA and the WPA, and the NRA…. Don’t you believe it. What saved this country was the people with their natural grit and determination to do things for themselves. The dance marathon was a test of that grit.”
    “My boss got varicose veins from the one he was in,” Julie said.
    “And he’s proud of them now, isn’t he?”
    “I guess so,” Julie said, “or I wouldn’t be here.”
    Mr. Butts tucked the blueprints into an already stuffed desk drawer and bounced toward the door. “Let me show you through the plant. We have a few days’ work to do yet, but you’ll get the idea.”
    He smelled of soap, the scouring kind, or else something he used to try to flatten his hair. Taking Julie by the arm, he propelled her into what had been the main ballroom; good hardwood floors, as he pointed out. You couldn’t buy lumber like that anymore even if you could afford it. Workmen were putting up railings, creating what looked like a miniature race course. “We’ll gradually bring down the number of times per day a couple has to circle the track to stay in competition, but the winners have got to make at least one entire go-round the day the dance ends.”
    “And if they can’t?” Julie asked, remembering Mrs. Ryan’s description of “the poor creatures.”
    “No such word, Mrs. Hayes. If they don’t, the prize doubles in a new contest.”
    “I see,” she murmured.
    He took her arm again and