Free The Price of Murder by John D. MacDonald Page A

camp, Burt Catton had a serious coronary. Four months later he was able to get around again. He was forty pounds lighter, gray rather than brown, withered, trembly, too scared to bend over and pick up his hat if he dropped it. That was the only year of their lives when Dru would be precisely half his age. The attack had changed Burt Catton into an old man who thought a great deal about death and could find no strength within himself to adjust to its inevitability. For a man of his intelligence he had managed to live an astoundingly long time with an inner conviction of immortality. During his enforced rest, his always tangled affairs had gotten into a dangerous condition. He had always had more than enough energy to control many ventures simultaneously. During the weeks he lay in bed, several important and promising things went sour. He could notthink of specific instructions to give his lawyers. And so nothing was done. Before his attack, a tax decision altered a previous capital gains profit to income, and it was necessary to liquidate certain property holdings to pay even part of the assessment.
    He came slowly up from his closeness to death, and found himself with a wife who had been the beloved of the man he had once been. But this smaller, slow-moving, apprehensive man could feel no closeness to her. He felt no need to impose his will on her. He knew she was drinking too heavily, that she was bored and restless and looking for trouble. It seemed incredible to him that less than a year ago when she had annoyed him, he had yanked her, kicking and screaming and cursing him, down across his lap, had flipped up her skirt, ripped off the wisp of nylon panties and, with laughing gusto and sensual pleasure, applied the hard palm of his hand to the rounded ripeness of creamy buttocks until pain leached the fury out of her, until she wept with all the limp, deep satisfaction of the child who knows punishment was merited. She had eased herself gingerly down into chairs for the next few days, and she had been very meek and dutiful, and very affectionate. He wished he had known enough to apply the same wisdom and the same vigorous chastening measure to Ethel long long ago.
    But after he was up and around again, moving with the brittle caution of the elderly and the frightened, it did not seem possible to him that he could have ever cowed Dru in such a way. She looked bigger and sturdier, and her voice seemed louder. He bowed to her fits of temper and tried not to hear her, and wished she would leave him alone. She was neither important nor necessary. It was important to think about the money, to think about it calmly and logically and effectively, or else be plucked clean.
    He spent a lot of time with Paul Verney. Paul had taken some chilling losses too. And it became clear to them that they needed a coup, a coup of a specific nature. It had to result in a large dollar profit in a very short time, and the profit had to be in cash, and it would have to be a profit that need not be declared.
    Any other venture was purposeless.
    Paul found the method, made the contacts. Burt Catton was frightened by the risk. But he was more frightened by what his heart might do under the constant strain of worry. He had never touched anything so dangerously illegal. But he agreed. Paul went ahead. And, one night, very depressed, apprehensive, looking for both understanding and reassurance, he told Drusilla the whole story.
    And two weeks later Drusilla told Danny. She told him just a little bit. Enough, she thought, to intrigue him. Just a delicate hint. She had no intention of telling him all of it. But she did tell him, stammering in her eagerness to get all the words out, pain bleaching her lips.
    Danny butted his cigarette and got up out of the oversized bed. He walked to the window and looked at the thermometer fastened outside. Sixty-three. And the water would be colder. He went through to the living room and opened the door and walked, naked,