Part 22 (1/2)

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 b.u.t.t with lipstick on it, or a single fingerprint on the whisky bottles or any of the gla.s.ses. 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 n.o.body 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 Butler walking along the curb. I was big, but I wasn't that big. I was a maniac.

They rounded up twenty witnesses and every one of them said there hadn't been anybody there that looked anything at all like Madelon Butler. I pleaded. I raged. I described her.

Eight of them said sure, they'd seen the cupcake in the big hat, and that if I thought she looked anything like Madelon Butler there was no hope for me. Four of them were women, who'd been looking at her clothes. And there was no point in even asking the men what they'd been looking at.

Then those two kids who had seen me throw away the radio told the court that when they took it to a repair man he'd said the only way he could figure it had got in the mess it was in was that somebody had stabbed it with a knife. The repair man repeated it under oath.

Driven mad by guilt, they said. I had stabbed the radio because it kept talking about the woman I had killed. And I had been sleeping out on the beach because I was suffering from a delusion she was there in my apartment. Then I had finally blown my stack downtown in the traffic in broad daylight because I had reached the point where any woman was beginning to look like Madelon Butler to me.

But that still wasn't it. It was the money.