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

out onto the small flagstone terrace. There were red October leaves on the flagstones and on the blue top of the metal table, and on the plastic webbing of the terrace chairs. He walked down the path to the pond, a broad powerful man with a hirsute body. He padded out the length of the dock and dived awkwardly and without hesitation into the chill water. He thrashed out into the middle of the pond, breathing hard, circled and swam back, clambered up onto the dock and walked back up to the camp, shivering. He rubbed himself dry with a big fluffy towel with an ornately embroidered C in the corner. He shaved, dressed in chocolate brown slacks and a white sports shirt and a yellow cashmere cardigan Dru had bought him.
    He carefully prepared an ample breakfast and took it on a tray out into the sun on the terrace. He sat with his cigarettes and his pot of coffee and tried to make himself feel calm all the way through, tried to stop the fluttering that came and went. Verney would play. He had to play. He had no other choice. This was the big one. And it was going to go right, and he was going to go a long way away from here, away from a diligent little man named Keefler.
    This was the sort of deal he had dreamed about. Andhad never believed he would get close, this close. Before his release in May he had done a lot of thinking. It was painful thinking, because it showed him just how little he had done with his life. At thirty-two there wasn’t much to look forward to. He knew that Kennedy would put him on. There were always things Kennedy could use him for. There was always a call for a muscle. It would be a couple of bills a week. But inevitably, inexorably, there would be a fourth fall at the end of it. And the tag of an habitual. And a long long term. He wouldn’t be worth the best protective efforts of Kennedy’s legal talent. He would be discarded, with slight regret.
    He got out and went to work for Grunwalt and, very carefully and politely, he ignored the feelers that Kennedy’s people put out. But as the weeks went by he had the sick feeling that sooner or later he would rejoin the organization. There didn’t seem to be anything else he could do. He dreamed up and discarded dozens of ideas for a solo operation.
    Then, in the last week in June, he attended a party in a big apartment given by a city official whose ties to both Bouchard and Kennedy had been close and profitable. There were many familiar faces there. Kennedy’s people seemed to think it just a matter of time before he came back into the fold. It was at that party he met Drusilla Downey Catton. It was late in the evening. Her escort had passed out and been stowed in one of the bedrooms with the other casualties. By then Danny was tight enough to decide to take over where the previous one had left off. Drusilla was a big handsome vital woman of about thirty, dark-haired and colorful, with a strong face, an air of recklessness, an inexplicable air of importance, and a voice and way of speaking that made him think of Katherine Hepburn.
    They took their drinks out onto a terrace that over-looked the city and the lake, and she hoisted herself up to sit on the wide cement wall sixteen stories above Lake Drive. She talked and he listened, at first with mild interest and then a growing excitement. She had barely known the man who had brought her. Her husband was Burton Catton. Danny knew him as a much older man, a man ofmoney and importance. She said Catton had had a severe heart attack and was so concerned with taking his own pulse that he had no time for her. She said she was perfectly fascinated by the party and by all the types she had met. These people seemed so very much more interesting than her circle of dull friends. Actually they made her friends seem quite bloodless. Was it really true that that one named Al Altamiro had his left arm
shot
off? Danny told her how it had been amputated by a twelve-gauge shotgun during a union jurisdictional dispute, and