stopped on the sidewalk in the crowd waiting for the light. I beeped the horn, hesitantly, timidly. It roared.
She turned her face slowly and glanced in my direction, cool and imperturbable and utterly serene. I formed the words with my mouth: Please, please, please... Her gaze swept on.
The light changed. She stepped off the curb. I started across the intersection. Then she stepped back on the sidewalk, and turned right, down the cross street. I had gone too far into the intersection to turn. I turned anyway.
I was being engulfed in madness. Everything was distorted, and dark, and wild, and I had the sensation of being caught and buffeted by some howling wind. My left fender raked the fender of a car stopped at the crosswalk for the light. A whistle shrilled. I swung on around. I crashed against the side of the car that had made the right turn inside me.
Whistles were blowing everywhere. I saw a cop running toward me from the opposite corner. I slammed ahead, tearing a fender from the car on my right. Both lanes were blocked by cars stopped for the light at the next corner. I saw her walking coolly along the sidewalk.
I slammed on the brakes and lunged for the door. I was out in the street. Two cops in uniform were coming down on me. Men jumped from both the cars I had hit. The whistles were blowing again. I lunged toward the curb. Running men were crashing into me, trying to hold me. But now it all faded away, and I could see nothing except her. There was nothing else in the world except a foaming, dark madness, and Madelon Butler walking serenely along the street, going away. She had the money. And if she got away they’d hang me. I was shouting. I was trying to point. I was raging.
“Madelon Butler! That’s Madelon Butler!”
Nobody listened. Nobody paid any attention.
Couldn’t they see her?
Hands were grabbing me. Arms tightened about my neck and around my legs. I felt the weight of bodies. Everybody was yelling. A siren wailed shortly and ground to a stop somewhere behind me. Half-seen faces bobbed in front of me and I swung my fists and they disappeared, to be replaced by even more. I plowed on. I went on toward the curb, taking them with me. She was nearly abreast. I could see the coppery curls glinting in the sunlight and the slow, seductive roll of her hips and thighs the way she had practiced it, and the small overnight bag with $ 120,000 in it swinging gently in her other hand.
Something landed on my head and knocked me to my knees. I got off the pavement and went between two parked cars and up onto the curb, peeling them off behind me like a bunch of grapes pulled through the slats of a Venetian blind.
“Stop her! Stop her! Stop Madelon Butler stop madelon butler madelonbutler—”
They went around and over and piled onto me again. Nobody could shoot. Saps were swinging and I could feel them just faintly, like rain falling on my head and shoulders as I fought, and fell, and crawled toward her.
She sauntered past just as we got up onto the sidewalk, swinging wide to avoid the seething whirlpool of us, and just after she had gone by she turned her face and looked around, right into mine, her eyes cool and patrician and just faintly curious. Then she picked up the lazy beat of Susie again and went on.
Saliva ran out of my mouth. I was screaming. I could hear myself. Somewhere above the sound of the blows and the cursing and the mad scraping of shoes against pavement and the gasp of labored breathing and the crash of splintering glass as somebody sailed into a store window I could hear myself screaming.
Blood was running down into my face. Just before I went down for the last time under the sea of bodies I saw her again.
She was at the corner. With one last swing of her hips she went around it and she was gone.
Chapter Twenty-one
I’m not crazy. I tell you I’m as sane as you are.
Listen.
I tell you Madelon Butler is still alive. Alive, you
understand? Alive. She’s out there somewhere. She’s laughing. She’s free.
And she’s got $120,000.
Why do I think she’s got it? Why? Look. When hell freezes over and you can skate across the Styx she’ll still have it. Five people tried to take it away from her, and now two of us are dead and two are in the state prison and I’m in here with these people. That’s why she’s got it.
They could find her if they’d look and quit just shaking their heads when I try to tell them she’s still alive. She’s a redhead now, and God knows what her name is, and she looks like something on a barbershop calendar and walks and talks like all the itch since Eve, but she’s Madelon Butler.
They sweated me for twenty-four hours after they brought me in while I sat under a big light and they walked around in the dark outside it asking questions, questions, questions, one after the other, hour after hour, sometimes one man, sometimes two, and sometimes three of them at once asking me what I had done with the money until I finally quit begging and pleading and yelling for them to block the airport and the railroad stations and the bus depot so they could catch her before she got away, until I finally just gave up and went to sleep with them barking at me. I went to sleep sitting under a big white light on a stool.
I knew she was gone by then. But I could still prove I hadn’t killed her.
Sure I could.
They finally got a lawyer for me and I told him so many times he began to believe me. He got the police to send some men out to the apartment so they could see for themselves she had been there. The lawyer went along and they took a photographer and a fingerprint man from the lab.
Her robe and the pajamas and those fur-trimmed slippers weren’t cheap stuff. They could be traced back to the store where she had bought them. That would convince the knuckleheads that the girl who’d been there in the apartment wasn’t just any girl, but Madelon Butler herself.
The only trouble was there wasn’t anything there.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The pajamas and the robe and the slippers were gone. The boxes her other clothes had come in were gone. There wasn’t a cigarette butt with’lipstick on it, or a single fingerprint on the whisky bottles or any of the glasses. There wasn’t a trace of lipstick on a towel or a pillow, nothing left of the permanent wave outfit, or even the bottle of bleach.
It went into the court record just the way they said it when they came back.
There hadn’t been any girl in that apartment.
I began to see it.
She couldn’t have gone back there after she had ditched me, because she had no key to get in. She had done it before we came downtown, while I was shaving. She had cleaned up, and she had thrown all her clothes down the garbage chute.
Well, that was what I was going to do, but she just beat me to it.
They found the letter in my coat, the one I’d never had a chance to mail. They asked me if that was right, that I was hiding Madelon Butler in my apartment to keep the police from finding her but that I’d written them a letter telling them where she was.
I tried to explain it. But the deal about the money loused up everything.
That was the reason they wouldn’t go for a court order to exhume the body of Diana James for identification. The thing about the money had already convinced them I was mad.
That and a few other things.
The trouble was that nobody had ever seen Madelon Butler again after that instant the cop had flashed his light on her face on the lawn behind the house, just before I slugged him. Charisse Finley testified that Madelon Butler and I had left the fishing camp together and that it was a foregone conclusion, with two such people as us after the same thing, that one would kill the other before the day was over. The other cop and the kid in the filling station testified that I’d been alone when I came through that little town four hours after the fire. So
there it was.
But that wasn’t even half of it.
The cop who had jumped me out on the beach testified he had found me sleeping on a sand dune at five o’clock in the morning.
Two traffic cops, two patrol-car crews, and three plainclothes men testified it took the seven of them plus the drivers of the two cars I’d hit to subdue me after I’d gone berserk in traffic under the delusion I had seen Madelon
