The Long Lavender Look (11 page)

had a little stroke about three years ago I guess it was, and then she had a big one and she's been in the bed ever since, helpless as a baby. There's some other Perrises down there, trashy folk, fighting and stealing, running in a pack with the other trash. Lillian is as bad as the worst. Lilo they call her. And my Lew has been messin' with those trashy people."

"You're sure of that?"

"She was calling here, giving me orders, telling me to tell my son Lilo called. I told him to tell her not to call him here. He got ugly about it." She sighed. "He turned from my youngest into a stranger. I guess it was those pills, not really him at all."

"Where does Henry Perris work?"

"He sure doesn't work for Johnny Hatch. He could work anyplace he wants to go, on account of being so good of a mechanic, they say. I heard he works someplace south."

"In a station on the Trail?"

"Could be. I don't rightly know."

"What kind of a car does Lew have?"

"He had a real nice car up till three months back, and then he smashed it all up so bad it was a wonder he wasn't killed. There was something wrong about the insurance, so what he's driving now is the old jeep that was here on the place, fixed up some. It was dirty yellow and he got it painted black, he told me. I've been wondering something."

"Yes?"

"I'm a silly old woman but I'm not foolish. Seems like you have the thought in your mind my Lew might be in some kind of trouble more than from Just beating up your best friend."

"He might be. I don't know."

"Then ... if he is, I hope you find out and I hope you tell Mister Norm. If he is, I want him put away someplace because he's getting so wild he might kill somebody, then he wouldn't have any life left at all. Better he loses a piece of his life and gets over what those pills done to him than lose the whole thing. Unless maybe ... already he killed somebody?" The dread in her voice was touching and unmistakable.

"Are you thinking about Frank Baither?"

"It was on the radio."

"I think he was on duty when that happened."

"Thank the Lord."

She asked me to phone her if I heard anything about Lew. I told her to let me know if he came home. She said she could use the phone by counting the holes in the dial. I gave her the White Ibis number. I started to repeat it and she said not to bather, that her memory seemed to be getting better instead of worse as time went by. But she sure did miss the television. It was just shapes and light that didn't mean anything. She wished the cataracts would hurry and get ripe enough.

As I drove back toward town I was thinking about that ancient and honorable bit of homely psychology, that myth of the ripeness of cataracts. The lens capsule can be removed as soon as it begins to get cloudy. But postoperative vision with corrective lenses is a poor resource at best, compared with normal sight. So the ripeness they speak of is the psychological ripeness of the patient, a time of diminishing vision which lasts long enough, and gets bad enough, so that the postoperative vision is, by comparison, a wonder and a delight. The patient is happy because the basis of comparison has changed.

There are some extraordinarily cruel men in the primitive rural areas of India who travel from village to village curing cataracts for a few rupees. Their surgical tool is a long, very slender, very sharp and hard thorn. They insert it from the side, behind the lens, and puncture the lens capsule.

The cloudy fluid leaks into the eye itself and is replaced, or diluted, by the clear fluid within the eye. Sight is restored. It is a miracle. In sixty to ninety days the patient becomes totally and permanently blind, but by then the magician is a dozen villages away, busy with new miracles.

Perhaps they do not think of themselves as cruel men. In a country where the big city syndicates
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purchase children, and carefully maim and disfigure them in vividly memorable ways, and distribute them by truck throughout the city each morning to sit on busy sidewalks with begging bowls, and collect them at dusk as impersonally as one might empty coin machines, cruelty itself is a philosophical abstraction.

The April night was turning cool, so after I stopped back at the White Ibis and picked up an old blue sailcloth sportcoat, laundered and pressed as a courtesy of the Cypress County taxpayers, I went to a place I had spotted when driving around the town. The Adventurer. A lot of blue neon, tinted glass, an acre of asphalt packed with local cars. Frigid air conditioning, exhaust fans hustling the smoke out, ceiling prisms beaming down narrow areas of glare on the Saturday night faces. Long bar packed deep, and people sitting at small tables, leaning toward each other to shout intimacies over the shattering din of a hundred other people shouting to be heard over the sound of a trio on a high shelf in the corner, three dead-faced whiskery young men boosting by about five hundred watts the sound of an electric guitar, electric bass, and a fellow who stood whapping at a tall snare drum and singing sounds which may or may not have been words into the microphone. The obligatory birdcage girl had her own high shelf. She was meaty and energetic, snapping her hair across her closed eyes, tromping out the big beat with a simple repetitive pattern of bump and grind, belly dance and Tahitian flutter. She was not strictly topless because she had a narrow band of fabric around the busy bouncing boobs. There was a spotlight on her that changed from pink to black to blue to black, and in the black light only her teeth and the two narrow bands of fabric, and her high silver shoes glowed with an eerie luminescence.

As I waited to move in close enough to the bar to got my order in, I looked the crowd over.

High school kids and ranch hands and packing-house workers. Single swingers and young marrieds. Bank clerks and secretaries and young realtors. Carpentors and plumbers, electricians and hard-wall plasterers, along with young dentists and soldiers and sailors home on leave and hospital technicians and nurses and bag boys and store clerks, and a handful of the customary predators, middle-aged men in youthful clothing, watching, appraising, singling out potential prey of either sex, planning their careful, reassuring campaigns: It was half beer and half hard.

The beer was draft, in chilled heavy glass mugs that hold half what they appear to hold.

Waitresses hustled the tables, serving either roast beef sandwiches or bowls of shrimp boiled in beer. So the fun place was a nice money machine, because when the waitress slapped the check on the table you either paid and left, or ordered more. I got hold of a cold mug and got back thirty cents change from my dollar and too much head on the dark beer.

I moved out of the crush and sipped the beer and looked for the controls. When you have a big noisy center-ring act that mixes lions, tigers, bears, sheep, rabbits, weasels, and cobras, you need the men with the whips and kitchen chairs and shiny pistols, or you start losing too many animals, and end up with an empty ring and a legal paper nailed to the door.

A disturbance started at a far corner of the long bar, and two quiet men appeared out of nowhere and moved in before it had a chance to spread. A good pair, swift and professional, and they picked the right one without hesitation. When they took him by me I saw that his mouth was wrenched apart by pain and his eyes were frightened, his face pallid and sweaty. The two men were smiling, joking with him. A painful come-along of some kind, manual or mechanical, is better for business than a half dozen old-fashioned bouncers. They had hit so quickly I knew that the place had to be under observation. So by picking the best spot from which one could watch the whole room, I finally picked out the watch station. A mirrored insert was set high over the bar. From there a man could sit at his ease and watch all of the bar, all of the tables, the small dance floor, the cash registers, the entrance, and the doors to the rest rooms. The two men came back in and took up their position to the right of the main entrance. One of them pressed the switch of an intercom box and spoke into it. I could guess the probable message. "He quieted down nice, Charlie. He's driving home, and he won't be back tonight."

So I stood there, in that absolute and lonely privacy that exists only in the middle of a crush of
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strangers and a deafening din of festive voices and festive rock staring at the hefty fleshy pumping of the tireless blonde, and wondering why I should feel that too many important parts were missing from my equation.

I had been luckier than I deserved, first in finding that lonely, troubled, talkative old woman, secondly in having her relate to me quickly and trustingly, and thirdly in getting my good look at the private hidden life of Lew Arnstead.

A lot of pieces fit beautifully together, but in some way the fit was too good to be true.

I wished Meyer was standing beside me, so I could try it on him. "Frank Baither planned the money-truck job. He used Hutch, Orville, Henry Perris, and Lilo, Perris's stepdaughter. We saw Henry, Meyer. He was the broad brown guy with the white teeth who arrived late for work at Al Storey's station that morning. Driving ... a blue Rambler. So Henry was in on the Baither killing.

It was Lilo Perris (or Hatch) who ran across our bows. Henry set up a little smoke screen. It was too cute because maybe he was too nervous. Grab that envelope and somehow get it to Lilo.

Then she went to the Baither place and faked Lew Arnstead into giving her a chance to plant it in Baither's house. Arnstead is on speed and it has turned him erratic and dangerous. All Mister Norm has to do is trace the envelope, from Henry to Lilo to the Baither house, and bring them in and open them up. Henry and Lew and Lilo. In a hurry, before Lew and Lilo run for it with the money off the truck."

And suddenly I knew Meyer's reaction. I could almost hear his voice. "If our Sheriff Norman Hyzer knows as much about this county as I think he knows, then he certainly knows that Frank Baither's little girl friend, before the money-truck operation, was Lilo Perris. He knows a young girl was involved. He might suspect that Henry Perris was in on it, too, and he would check back and find out where Henry was that weekend. He seemed absolutely convinced we were involved.

As if he had to believe we were. Why?"

"A blind spot, maybe. Maybe he's too close to it to see it. Maybe he's involved in some way. The pieces fit so well, Meyer."

"Do they always?"

"Hardly ever."

"So why do you keep asking these dumb questions?"

Meyer disappeared when big King Sturnevan appeared in front of me, Coke bottle dwarfed by his big malformed fist.

Nine

MCGEE, You didn't come across our buddy now yet, huh?"

"How do you know?"

"I'd put my money on you, like I said, but he'd mark you some. You wouldn't be able to help that. Been asking around. Nobody's seen that sucker." King's civilian garb was a big red sport shirt with white palm trees on it, and a tent-sized pair of wrinkled khaki slacks. He had a small straw hat with a narrow brim perched on the back of his head, and a row of cigars in the sport-shirt pocket.

We had to roar at each other to be heard, and I didn't want to roar what I wanted to say to him.

So ip willingly followed me out into the abrupt silence if the night, and we went and sat in the top-down Buick.

"Would you say that like six months ago Arnstead started to go bad?"

"Maybe that long ago. I wasn't paying attention."

"Before that, he was okay?"

"He was pretty good. He was maybe as good as Billy Cable, and Cable is one hell of a cop, and you can believe it. But ... I don't know. The broads, I guess. A few months back he beat up one of his broads. She filed a complaint and then pulled it. There was something maybe I should
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have reported. I was in my own car. Six, seven weeks ago. He come the other way, alone in our number four cruiser, on 112 and he had it wound right up to the top. We use Fords with heavy duty suspension and the Cobra 428 mill with a three-point-five-0 rear end, so you got an honest hunner twenny-five, and he come by with that needle laying right on the pin. Hell, I turned around and went in, thinking maybe somebody had hit the bank. Nothing going on. I ast him, what the hell, Lew. You could kill yourself on that kind of road. He told me to shove it. Take fighters now. There have been some greats who went right down the chute when the wrong kind of broad started pecking away at them."

"Ever think he might be on anything, King?"

He took his time, glowered at a long cigar ash, tapped it over the side onto the parking lot asphalt. "Now that you bring it up, pally."

"Suppose I say he is? Definitely."

"Then I say two things. I say you shouldn't ought to be poking around enough to find out, because it will make Mister Norm a little on the soreass side. And I say the more I think, the more it fits. Speed, maybe? You take fighters, there isn't maybe one these days doesn't go into a main bout without being stepped up with superpill. It's no good, pal. They go like hell and they don't get tired and they get a little more quick, but they can get hurt bad and not know it and get up and get killed. You spend more than you got, and you sack out for two, three days to get back up to normal. Staying on it is something else. Come to think of it, he hasn't been sleeping much lately, and he's dropped weight. What would get him on it?"

"Like the preacher says. Evil companions."

"Pally, we all got a few of those. All it means is you better not try to find Lew. You better stay the hell away from him."

"And it means his judgment has gone bad. That's why he pounded on Meyer. He could have killed him."

"I stepped out at the wrong time."

"Why didn't Billy Cable stop him?"

"Because Billy and him haven't been getting along so good, and when you see a man bitching himself, why stop him? Anyway Billy finally did stop him or Lew would have killed your friend.

Then when it was your turn with Mister Norm, Billy took the chance of giving you a look at your friend so Mister Norm would get the picture on Lew loud and clear and soon. Poor bastard."