James, as you call her.” “In love with Diana James? But I don’t see—” She smiled. “It does seem incredible, doesn’t, it? But I suppose there’s no accounting for tastes.”
“Cut it out!” I said. I felt as if my head were about to fly off. “Will you answer my question? Or hand me back that paper? I’d like to know at least as much about this as several million other people do by now.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” The radio came on then, blaring jazz. She shuddered and reached for the knob. “Excuse me.”
She turned the dial and some long-hair music came on. She adjusted the volume, kicked off her mules, and curled her legs up under her in the chair. Lighting a cigarette, she leaned back contentedly.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? Don’t you love Debussy at this time of day?”
“No,” I said. “Which one of you killed Butler?”
Her eyes had a faraway look in them as she listened to the music. “I did,” she said.
She was utterly calm. There was no remorse in it, or anger, or anything else. Butler was dead. She had killed him. Like that.
“Why?” I asked. “For the money?”
“No. Because I hated him. And I hated Cynthia Cannon. You don’t mind if I refer to her by her right name, do you?”
I was just getting more mixed up all the time. “Then you mean the money didn’t have anything to do with it? But still you’ve got it?”
She smiled a little coldly. “You still attach too much importance to money. I didn’t say it didn’t have anything to do with it. It had some significance. I killed both of them because I hated them, and the money was one of the reasons I did hate them. You see, actually, he wasn’t
stealing it from the bank. He was stealing it from me.”
I stared. “From you!”
“That’s right. Both of them were quite clever. He was going to use my money to support himself and his trollop. I was to subsidize them. Ingenious, wasn’t it?”
I shook my head. “You’ve lost me. I don’t even know what you’re talking about. You say this Finley kid was in love with Diana James, and that Butler was stealing the money from you. Are you crazy, or am I? The papers said he stole it from the bank.”
She took a long drag on the cigarette, exhaled the smoke, and looked at the glowing tip. “The newspaper stories were quite correct. But I’ll try to explain. The bank referred to was founded by my great-grandfather.”
“Oh,” I said. “I get it now. You owned it.”
She smiled. “No. I said it was founded by my great-grandfather. But there were several intervening generations more talented in spending money than in making it. The bank has long since passed into other hands, but at the time my father died he still owned a little over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of its stock. As the sole surviving member of the family, I inherited it.
“Now do you understand? My husband owned nothing of his own, except charm. He was vice president of the bank by virtue of the block of bank stock we owned jointly under the state community property laws. But when he decided to leave me for Cynthia Cannon, he wanted to take the money with him. There was no way he could, legally, of course; but there was another way.
“He merely stole it from the bank. And the bank, after all efforts to capture him and recover the money had failed, would only have to take over the stock to recover the loss. The search would stop. He would be forgotten. No one would lose anything except me.’ She stopped. Then she smiled coldly and went on: “And I didn’t matter, of course.”
I had forgotten the cigarette between my fingers. It was burning my hand. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Aren’t we all?”
“But,” I said, “if you knew beforehand that he was going to do it—and apparently you did, some way— couldn’t you have just called the police that afternoon and had them come out and get the money back and arrest him?”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But I resent being taken for a fool —And my patience has a limit. Cynthia Cannon wasn’t the first. She merely happened, with my assistance, to be the last. Before her it was Charisse Finley, who worked in the bank, and before that it was someone else.
“I had borne his other infidelities, but when he calmly decided that I was going to support him and his paramour for the rest of their lives, I just as calmly decided he was going to die. After all, when you have nothing further to lose, you no longer have anything to fear.”
“But,” I said, “I still don’t understand what that Finley kid had to do with it.”
“That was a little more complex,” she said. “He came very near to being a tragic figure, but wound up by being only a fool. He probably regards himself as having been betrayed by two women, both older than he, but the thing that really betrayed him was that money.”
“You’re not making any sense,” I said.
She smiled. “Forgive me,” she said. “I keep forgetting I’m talking to a man to whom there is never any motive except money.
“Cynthia Cannon,” she went on, “perhaps told you that she was a nurse and that she was in Mount Temple for some seven or eight months taking care of an invalid. The woman she was caring for was the mother of Jack and Charisse Finley.
“That was when Jack Finley began to get this fantastic obsession for her. I don’t know whether she encouraged him at first, but at any rate she was nearly ten years older than he was and hardly the type to remain interested very long in being worshiped with such an intense and adolescent passion. I can imagine he was rather sickening, at least to a veteran with Cynthia Cannon’s flair for casual bitchiness.
“Anyway, she apparently dropped him rather thoroughly as soon as she began having an affair with my husband. He was older, you see, and less like a moonstruck calf, and she thought he had more money.
“I didn’t know any of this until nearly a month after dear Cynthia had left her job in Mount Temple and come back here to Sanport. Then, one Saturday night when my husband was presumably on another fishing trip, Jack Finley came to see me. He was nearly out of his mind. I really don’t know what his idea was in telling me, unless it was some absurd notion that possibly I would speak to my husband about it and ask him to leave Cynthia alone. He was actually that wild.
“I began to see very shortly, however, that he was in a really dangerous condition. He had been following my
husband down here on weekends, and spying on them, and once had come very close to murdering them both in a hotel room. He had gone up there with a gun, but just before he knocked on the door some returning glimmer of sanity made him turn away and run out.
“I felt sorry for him and tried to show him the stupidity of ruining his life over a casual trollop like Cynthia Cannon, but there is nothing more futile than trying to reason with someone caught up in an obsession like that. He was going to kill my husband.”
“I’m beginning to get it,” I said. “You had a sucker just made to order. All you had to do was needle him a little.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, a little coldly. “I have just told you I tried to talk him out of his idiocy. It was only when the picture changed and I began to see that it was he and his charming sister that were trying to needle me, as you put it—”
“You’re losing me again,” I said. “Back up.”
She lit another cigarette, chain fashion, and crushed the stub of the first out in the tray. The music went on. The whole thing was crazy. She was perfectly relaxed and at ease and wrapped up in the spell of the music, and the thing she was telling me about was murder.
“All right,” she said. “I told you it was somewhat complex. At first it was just a rather stupid young man in the grip of an insane jealousy. It changed later, but he was the one that changed it—he and his sister.
“It was something he let fall that started me thinking. In the course of his spying on them he had discovered that Cynthia Cannon had changed her name. He apparently wondered about it, but didn’t attach much importance to it in the overwrought state he was in.
“I did, however, and I arranged a little investigation of my own. She’d changed her name, all right, but I learned several other things that were even more significant. My husband never went near her place when he was
