A Touch of Death (17 page)

I threw the magazines in the back seat and found another drugstore. It would be dangerous to keep haunting the same one all the time. I went to the cosmetic counter.

“Could I help you?” the girl asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I want one of those home-permanent outfits. And there was something else my wife told me to get but I can’t remember the name of it, some kind of goo

she uses to lighten the color of her hair.”

“A rinse?”

“I don’t know what you call it. Anyway, her hair’, dark brown to begin with, and with this stuff she gets a little past midfield into blonde territory a sort of coppery color.”

She named three or four.

“That’s it,” I said on the third one. “I remember now it was Something-Tint. Give me a slip on it, though, just in case I’m wrong and have to bring it back.”

I took it back to the car, along with the permanent-wave outfit, and read the instructions. We had to have some cotton pads to put it on with and shampoo to get rid of it after it had been on long enough. I hunted up still another drugstore for these, and while I was there I bought the sunglasses, suntan lotion, and scissors.

That was everything except the whisky and cigarettes. When I stopped for these I saw a delicatessen next to the liquor store and picked up a roast chicken and a bottle of milk, and bought a shopping bag that would hold all of it.

It was one-thirty when I got back to the apartment. The Venetian blind was raised and she was lying on the rug with her face and arms in the sun. She had taken off the robe and rolled the sleeves of Her pajamas up to her shoulders. Maybe she had decided to take some interest in the proceedings at last.

“Here.” I dug around in the shopping bag and found the suntan lotion. “Smear some of this on.”

She sat up and made a face. “I hate being tanned.”

“Cheer up,” I said. “It’s better than prison pallor.”

“Yes. Isn’t it.” She opened the bottle and rubbed some on her face and arms. “Did you get the whisky?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Go ahead with your tan. I’ll bring a drink.”

“Thank you.” She lay down again and closed her eyes. The rug was gray, and the long hair was very dark against it.

I unpacked the shopping bag and opened one of the bottles, hiding the other in the back of the broom closet. Since she seemed to be able to handle it without getting noisy, I poured her a heavy one, half a water tumbler with only a little water in it. After all, she was buying it.

I went back into the living room. “How long have you been in the sun now?”

“About fifteen minutes.”

“You’d better knock off, then. If you blister and peel, you’ll just have to start over.”

“Yes.” She sat up. I handed her the glass and lowered the Venetian blind.

She took a sip of the drink, still sitting on the floor, and looked at me and smiled. “Hmmm,” she said. “You’re an excellent bartender. Where’s yours?”

“I didn’t want any,” I said.

“Don’t you drink at all?”

“Very little.”

She held up the glass. “Well, here’s to the admirable

Mr. Scarborough. His strength is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure.”

“You seem to feel better.”

“I do,” she said. “Lots better.” She slid over a little so she could lean back against the chair. “I’ve been thinking about your brilliant idea ever since you left and the more I think about it, the better I like it. It can’t fail. How can they catch Madelon Butler if she has changed completely into someone else?”

“Remember, it’s not easy.”

“I know. But we can do it. When do we begin?”

“Right now,” I said. “Unless you want to finish your

drink first.” “I can work on it while you’re hacking up my hair.” She

laughed. “It’ll give me courage.”

“You’ll probably need it,” I said.

I spread a bunch of newspapers on the floor and set one of the dining-room chairs in the middle of them. “Sit here,” I said. She sat down, looking quite pleased and happy.

The radio was turned on, playing music. “Was there any news while I was gone?” I asked.

She glanced up at me. “Oh, yes. Wasn’t it in the papers?”

“What?” I demanded. “For God’s sake, what?”

“That deputy sheriff’s condition is improving, and they say he’ll probably recover.”

I sat down weakly and lit a cigarette, the haircutting forgotten. I hadn’t realized how bad the pressure had really been until now that it was gone. I hadn’t killed any cop. The heat was off me. Even if they caught us, they could only get me for rapping him on the head. Of course, there was still the matter of Diana James, but that was different, somehow. I hadn’t actually done that. She had. And Diana James wasn’t a cop.

“Has he recovered consciousness yet?” I asked.

“No, but they expect him to any time.”

“There’s one thing, though,” I said. “He recognized

you, remember?”

“Yes,” she said carelessly. “I know.”

“That part won’t help,” I said, wondering why she was

so unconcerned about it.

“Oh, well, they seem to be certain enough that I was there anyway,” she said. “His identification won’t change anything.”

I should have begun to catch on then, but I fumbled it. The roof had to fall in on me before I realized why the news about that deputy sheriff made her so happy.

“Well, Pygmalion,” she said, “shall we commence? I’m quite eager to begin life as Susie Mumble.”

I was digging through the pile of women’s magazines. “There’s more to it than a haircut,” I said. “You have to

learn to talk like Susie.”

“I know. Just don’t rush me, honey.”

I jerked my face around and stared at her. She was

smiling.

“You catch on fast,” I said.

“Thanks, honey. I’m tryin’ all the time.” She had even dropped her voice down a little, into a kind of throaty contralto purr. I was conscious of thinking that her husband and Diana James and even the police force had been outnumbered from the first in trying to outguess her.

I found the magazine I was looking for, the one that had several pages of pictures of hair styles. Some of them were short-cropped and careless, and they looked easy. I had a hunch, though, that they weren’t that easy.

She was sitting upright in the chair, waiting. I folded the magazine open at one of the pictures and put it on the coffee table where I could see it and use it for a guide. I looked from it to Madelon Butler. The long dark hair just brushed her shoulders.

She glanced down at the picture and then at me with amusement. “You won’t find it that simple,” she said. “Carelessness is very carefully planned and executed.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. I took the scissors out of the bag and went into the bathroom for a towel and comb. I put the towel around her shoulders, under the cascade of hair. “Hold it there,” I said.

She caught it in front, at her throat. “You’ll make an awful mess of it,” she said. “But remember, it doesn’t matter. The principal thing is to get started, to get it cut, bleached, and waved. Then as soon as my face is tanned I can go to a beauty shop and have it repaired. I’ll just say I’ve been in Central America, and cry a little on their shoulders about the atrocious beauty shops down there.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. I pulled the comb through her hair, sighted at it, and started snipping. I cut around one side and then stood off and looked at it.

It was awful.

It looked as if she’d got caught in a machine.

“Let me see,” she said. She got up and went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I went with her. She didn’t explode, though. She merely sighed and shook her head.

“If you were thinking of hair dressing as a career—”

“So it doesn’t look so hot. I’m not finished yet.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. Don’t cut straight across as if you were sawing a plank in two. Hold the comb at an angle and taper it. And let each bunch of hair slide a little between the blades of the scissors so it won’t be chopped off square.”

We went back and I tried again. I’d left it plenty long intentionally so the first two or three runs at it would just be practice. I cut the other side and evened it up.

This time I got away from that square, chopped-off effect, but it was ragged. It was full of notches up the side of her head. She looked at it again.

“That’s better,” she said. “And now when you’re trying to smooth out those chopped places, the way to do it is to keep the comb and scissors both moving while you cut. Let the hair run through the comb. That way they’re not all the same length.”

I tried it again. I got the hang of it a little better and managed to erase some of the notches. Then I combed it again and went around the bottom once more, straightening out the jagged ends. We went into the bathroom and took another look at it in the mirror. I stood behind her. Our eyes met.

“It’s pretty bad,” I said. “But there’s one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You sure as hell don’t look like the pictures of Mrs.

Butler.”

“Remember, darling?” she said in that throaty voice. “I’m not Mrs. Butler.”

“It’s a start,” I said. I went out and got the bottle of bleach. I handed it to her. “Mix yourself a redhead.”

While she was working on it I cleaned up the rug. I rolled the cut-off hair in the newspapers and threw the

whole works down the garbage chute.

We were erasing Madelon Butler.

No, I thought; she was erasing Madelon Butler. I had suggested it and started the job, but she was the one who knew how to do it. I could see her already getting the feel of it. She was brilliant; and she was an actress all the way in and out. When she finished the job they’d never find her. The person they were looking for would have ceased to exist. The coolly beautiful aristocrat would be a sexy cupcake talking slang.

It was two-thirty. I tuned the radio across all the stations and found a news program. There was no mention of her or of the deputy sheriff. I wondered if she had been lying. Well, it would be in the late editions.

She came out of the bathroom. She had finished shampooing her hair and was rubbing it with a towel. It was wild and tousled, and she looked like a chrysanthemum. I couldn’t see any change in the color.

“It looks as dark as ever,” I said.

“That’s because it’s still wet. As soon as it’s dry we can tell.”

She raised the Venetian blind again and sat down on the rug before the window, still rubbing her head with the towel. In a few minutes she threw the towel to one side and just ran her fingers through her hair, riffling it in the sunlight.

“I could use another drink,” she murmured, glancing around sidewise at me.

“You live on the stuff, don’t you?”

“Well,” she said, “it’s one way.”

I went out to the kitchen and poured her another. When I handed it to her she gave me that up-through-the
eyelashes glance and said, “Thank you, honey.”

She looked like a chrysanthemum, all right, but a damn beautiful one. And the pajamas didn’t do her any harm.

“Practicing Susie again?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “How’m I doin’P”

“Not bad, considering you’re riding on a pass.”

She looked up at me, wide-eyed. “What do you mean?”

I squatted down in front of her and ran my fingers up into the tousled hair at the back of her neck. “You’re trying to get in free. From what I hear of Susie, she talked like the rustle of new-mown hay because she’d been there and she liked it. But I’d be glad to help you out.”

The eyes turned cold. “Aren’t you expecting a little too much?”

“How’s that?”

“Not even Susie could match your abysmal vulgarity.”

“Well, don’t get in an uproar. I just asked.”

“So you did, in your inimitable fashion. And now if you feel you have received an answer that is intelligible even to you, perhaps you’ll take your hand off me.”

“This is Susie talking?” I didn’t take the hand away. I moved it. It wasn’t padding.

“No,” she said. She put the drink down on the rug. “This is Susie.”

She hit me across the face.

I caught both her wrists and held them in my left hand. “Don’t make a habit of that,” I said. “It could get you into trouble.”

The eyes were completely unafraid. They seemed to be merely thoughtful. “I doubt that I’ll ever understand you,” she said. “At times you seem to have what passes for intelligence, and yet you deliberately go out of your way to wallow in that revolting crudity.”

“Let’s don’t make a Supreme Court case out of it,” I said, turning her arms loose. “It’s not that important. If you don’t want to put out a little smooching on the side, I’ll still live. That you can get anywhere. The geetus is the main issue, remember?”

“You are a sentimental soul, aren’t you?”

I stood up. “Baby, where I grew up you could buy a lot more with a hundred and twenty thousand dollars than you could with sentiment.”

She said nothing. I started toward the door. As I picked up the car keys off the table, I said, “And, besides, look

who’s talking.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re the one who’s killed two people. Not me.”

She stared at me. “Yes,” she said. “But even hate is an

emotion.”

“I guess so,” I said. “But there’s not much money in it.”

I went out and got in the car and drove downtown. I didn’t have anything in mind except that I didn’t want to get rock-happy sitting around the apartment listening to her yakking. Why didn’t she get wise to herself? We were going to be there for a month together; it wouldn’t cost anything extra to relax and have a little fun out of it on the side.

But maybe it was just as well, when you thought about it. No woman could ever do anything as simple as going to bed without trying to louse it up witb a lot of complicated ground rules and romantic double talk and then wanting a mortgage on your soul. As long as we were mixed up in a business deal and tied to each other for a whole month, we’d probably be better off to go on barking at each other.

I bought an afternoon paper and went into a restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. “DEPUTY IMPROVED,” the headline said. Doctors expected him to recover.