Free The Price of Murder by John D. MacDonald

Ethel, the first Mrs. Catton, was almost impossible to endure without some systematic diversion, he had built the camp in great secrecy, a place for private and special entertainment unsuspected by the dread Ethel. It was sixty-three miles from Hancock—sixty on Route 90, then three on a narrow county road. The final half mile was a private gravel road. He had brought in electricity, had an earth dam built to convert a stream into a two-acre lake, and had gone as far afield as Toledo to import anarchitect who seemed to have an instinctive understanding of just what Burt Catton wanted. Local labor from the near-by town of Kemp had constructed the camp. It was on a knoll overlooking the two-acre pond, with a good view of a range of far hills beyond the pond. The roof had the steep pitch and big overhang of structures where the snow load is heavy. The house was a rectangle, with but two huge rooms, the living room and the bedroom. A narrow hallway connected the two rooms, with a tiny kitchen off one side of it and an equally small bath off the other side.
    Many windows in both the living room and the bedroom faced the pond. With its paneled walls, subdued dramatic lighting, deep furniture, startling color contrasts, efficient bar-corner, luxurious music system, low tables, chunky ash trays, the house served Burt Catton’s purposes perfectly. There were obvious clues to what those purposes had been: the vastness of the bed, the curious profusion of mirrors in the bedroom, the lack of provision for guests, the absence of any personal belongings. Dru had told him how she had been brought here by Burt, after Ethel had died but before Burt had married her, how he was known locally as Mr. Johnson, how one big closet in the bedroom was filled with dressing gowns and night gowns of a spectacular sheerness.
    It had served as a refuge for Burt Catton during the final years of Ethel’s vituperative life—a place she did not know about, a place where she could not reach him. He had sometimes come here alone, but more often he was accompanied by a woman.
    When Ethel Catton had died at sixty-one, leaving her husband, one married son and one married daughter, Burton Catton had been fifty-six. He was a heavy, brown, bearlike man, loud, virile, friendly, full of lusty appetites, a man of prominence and position in Hancock. Though it was known that Ethel Catton, who had been a Brice, had been well off when he married her, it was also commonly known that Burt, shrewd, hungry and sometimes ruthless, had done well in his own right. Some said he had more than trebled her money.
    Two years after Ethel’s death, Burt Catton, then fifty-eight,had quietly married Drusilla Downey, twenty-eight-year-old daughter of Calder Downey, an ineffectual man of good family who was slightly affronted at being presented with a son-in-law six years his senior. But he was glad to have Drusilla off his hands. It was her third marriage. The first had occurred when she was seventeen to an inept New Jersey prizefighter called, most incongruously, Panther Rose. It had ended in annulment. Her second marriage at twenty-two to a quiet young man of twenty-six, a promising lawyer in a large Hancock firm, had ended three years later when the young man had taken his own life.
    Calder Downey hoped that Burt Catton could control Drusilla. He sensed the strength in Catton that might make this possible. Calder knew Drusilla was not an evil person. The nearest he could come to a diagnosis was to say that she did not seem to give a damn. She was dark, reckless, full-bodied, hot-blooded, a woman who drank too much, drove too fast, borrowed constantly against her trust fund income, slept with anyone who attracted her, was casual about her dress, yet managed to extract an uncompromising loyalty from her friends. At twenty-eight the marks of the hard and headlong pace were beginning to show.
    Two years after their marriage, two years after the long honeymoon spent in the redecorated