The Long Lavender Look (25 page)

Sections of the flooring had been ripped up. Chunks of the Celotex ceiling had been torn down.

Somebody had gone through it with utmost thoroughness, and had given the same attention to the toilet room and the storeroom. I saw some places which I thought at first could have been overlooked. But then I found the hiding place someone else had found first. It was the hearth in the shallow brick fireplace. It was of fire brick resting on a cement slab. Brush the ashes away and take out the fire bricks on the left-hand side, and the top of a mail-order cylindrical safe was exposed. A hole had been chipped and drilled down into the poured concrete, and the safe let down into it and cernented in. The dial had been prybarred off and then the prybar had been inserted in the hole behind the dial, and the cheap hinges had torn loose. The top was in the fireplace. The interior of the safe, about the dimension of two number-ten tins end to end, was empty.

I sat on my heels and looked at the heap of black charred fragments of paper on the right side of the hearth. Photographic paper burns in a distinctive way and leaves a recognizable kind of ash.

With a splinter from the torn floor I carefully shifted the pieces of ash. There were some small fragments of a different kind of paper which had not burned completely. They were apparently sheets from a notebook, torn, but then burned in small packets so that the outside sheets were blackened but the inside ones were merely brittle and yellowed. Fragments of names, portions of addresses, dates, amounts. I could not find matching bits from any one page, but found enough to conclude that it was a customer list, with the girl indicated by initials, Dj.A, LF, DS, BD, LP, LF, HA.

The ledger accounts and advertising and probably the insurance documents of a very small business enterprise. Insurance in the form of confessions, photographs, letters. Cottage industry, bankrupt due to unforeseen circumstances. Proprietor found himself in a hole.

Suddenly I had enough of the oppressive heat, the lion-cage stench, dusty cobwebs, dead bugs, and old ashes. I stood up and started out toward the relative coolness of outdoors, and saw on the wall a cheap gaudy electric clock of the type which makes a sudden appearance in cut-rate drugstores at Christmastime. Dangling cord, unplugged. Small gilt face with a radiating array of black metal spikes.

I moved back and found the position of the lens. The peanut can ashtray was on the floor near the corner. Yes, the table had been there, the end of the bed there, Lilo Perris standing there, her head in the way of the clock face.

Confirmation of partnership. The chunky, brawny little sunbrown girl with all the contradictions in her face, who worked as Arnstead's enforcer, so suited to the occasional chore that even after a year and a half, the photograph of her could turn Mrs. Freddie Severiss cold-pale and sweaty,
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her throat bunching to swallow the sudden bile.

Then I went out, my shirt sweat-pasted to my back, out of the plundered lion cage into the dusty dooryard, into that midday silence when the birds and insects are still, with no breeze to hiss through the pines, or make rainsounds in the fronds of palmetto.

I walked around the edge of the area, footsteps silenced by the brown cushion of old needles. A track led off to the side, portions of old car tracks in dried mud. I walked twenty feet down that shaded place, and was about to turn back when the angle of the sun made a single bright silvery glint through a line of brush.

So I went further, and saw it, the plastic sunflower growing in alien country. Circled the brush and found the tan VW, sitting there with the brute endearing patience of all small ugly machines.

She was not in it.

She was forty feet from it, standing there against the trunk of a tall old pine, her knees slightly bent. When she had tossed the skirt and blouse on the bed and taken her shower, she had put on limecolored slacks and a tailored lemon-gold shirt.

This was another of the games that Betsy played. Add rose to blue and the color can be a strange and memorable lavender. They had taken the ends of the length of galvanized fence wire, and twisted them together on the far side of the big tree, tightened them enough with pliers. She had stood erect then, perhaps. But later as the wire bit ever deeper into her throat, she sagged, the knees bending. Bulging clown-face in a long lavender look, eyes popping, vein-broken and yellowed, fat black tongue thrusting from the lips in permanent grimace. A game. Fright mask to tease the children. Look at me. Do I scare you? Just a little? I really don't like this game very much, dear. I've dirtied my pretty slacks and I've begun to smell frightful, and the steak I promised is still in the freezer, the wine cooling. But I was delayed. By a game I don't like very much.

I found myself over by the little tan car, my eyes smarting, and I saw my fist in slow motion move six inches, jolt against the side window in back, saw the radiating cracks from the point of impact. Looked at my fist, saw how quickly the flesh was puffing. Idiot woman. Silly, sentimental, pushover broad, trading a tumble amid her gift-shoppe decor for the sound of the ancient wornout words-love, fate, kismet, eternity, meaningfulness, affection.

Pull back McGee. You are grown up, you hope. And you spread bad luck where 'ere you go.

Somebody gave her the final game to play, and maybe it was quicker than it looks. And why don't you look at that shovel and that hole and start thinking logically, and keep yourself from looking at her, and breathe through your mouth when you are near her.

Old long-handled shovel, rusty and with a dull edge. It leaned against the same tree. I saw where the grave had been started too close to the tree, and there had been too many roots. So the shoveler had moved over to the side and had dug out an area five feet long and a yard wide, and about two and a half feet deep at one end and eighteen inches at the other. Not a good shoveler.

The dirt removed had not been piled neatly and handily, but had been thrown too far. Hasty, frantic shoveling. Wear yourself out too quickly. Perhaps trying to finish before having to be someplace, or trying to finish in the last of the daylight. Then, perhaps, reconsideration. What's the big rush? She's not going anywhere and nobody is coming here. Don't move the car yet.

Come back and tuck her down into the loam and stomp it flat and spread the needles. Then the risk of moving the car is less.

Whatever you remembered, Betsy Kapp, whatever you tried to check out, it was the wrong thing. And there was no director to step in and stop the drama. Did you come here, or did you go to someone who brought you here?

"What a crazy day," she had said. "What a weird kind of a day!"

I studied the moist bottom of the unfinished grave. A lot of footprints in the deeper end. Size ten probably. Broad. Maybe a D. Small crosswise corrugations, like on the composition soles of work shoes, but worn away in the center, under the ball of the foot. A triangular nick out of the heel of the right shoe, on the outside toward the back, half an inch long.

I walked back to the shack area, back to my car. I fixed the front door precisely as it had been. I reviewed everything I had done. The only evidence that someone had been here was the star cracks in the side window of the VW, and I could not undo that. It might not be noticed or, if noticed, someone might think they had not happened to see it earlier. It went with the scalloped edges of the fenders, the dinged bumpers.

Run breathless to the Man and say, "Sher'f, my God, I found her and she's stone dead, plain and pure murdered to death."?

And get patted on the head and reminded I am a civilian, and be told that I would probably find out in due course what happened.

I was going to stop playing it their way. They had this big poker table working, and they had let me take the empty chair, provided I played my cards face up on the table and played by their rules. If I was naughty, they would deal me out of the next hand.

No more earnest efforts to please. No more defensive play. No more letting the house man deal. As of now, it was intensely personal, time to kick over the table, scatter the chips, break out my own deck, deal my own game-without explaining the rules.

The handle they use on you is your wistful need to pick up your life again right where it was interrupted, to be allowed to go in peace. When you decide that you do not give a damn about your own continuity, then you can even win a hand, and sometimes you can break the house.

I went roaring out of there, and on the way south on Cattleman's Road I found myself bumping the heel of my sore hand against the rim of the wheel, and humming a tuneless hymn of anticipation.

"Sorry to keep calling you up like this, Sheriff, but I tried Betsy's phone again just now and didn't get an answer. Have you found out anything?"

"Nothing yet. But we put out an all points hold on the car."

"I was thinking about her cat. Okay if I go over there and feed it and let it out in that fenced yard awhile?"

"You can get in?"

"Sure. I've still got that key I told you about."

"No objection, Mr. McGee. I heard you were in the courthouse looking up some property.

What was that all about?"

"It was just a wild idea that didn't work out."

"It might be better if you just have some patience. Our investigations are proceeding."

"It must be quite a work load, Sheriff."

"How so?"

"Murder of Frank Baither. Disappearance of Lew Arnstead. Disappearance of Betsy Kapp. I'd heard this was a quiet county."

"It has been, and it will be again. Incidentally, I questioned my chief deputy about the incident with Mrs. Kapp. His version differs in certain particulars, but there was enough substance for me to give him an additional warning. I wouldn't want to lose him. He is a very valuable man, and the department is shorthanded."

"I think I better stay away from Billy."

"Until he has a chance to calm down. Yes."

"Well, thanks, Sheriff. I'll be in touch."

Had Raoul been a little kid, he would have been standing crosslegged and moaning. When I opened the door he went at a humpbacked lope to a grassy corner, squatted and with a dreamy distant stare, emptied the inflated feline bladder. He came strolling back into the kitchen, stared into his empty dish and said, "Raoul?" I opened the cupboards until I found his canned glop, whined one open on the electric machine, tapped it into his dish. He ate a few hungry gobbles, then looked up and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him into the living room and into the bedroom. He looked in the bathroom and turned around and came out again, saying, "Raoul?"

"Not here, furry friend. And she won't be."

He sat down and began to wash. When in doubt, wash. I opened the lower left drawer of the dressing table and took the weapon out. Still loaded. Untouched. In Florida you can have one in the house, or in your car, but not on the person. I thought it would be nice to have it in the Buick. I poked around until I found a small, brightly-colored, rubberized beach bag with a draw string. I dumped a dozen extra rounds into the bag and put the revolver in carefully, making certain that I knew its exact position in the opaque bag. I placed the bag on the passenger seat, toward my side, making it look entirely casual, yet so placed that my hand would fall on the grip naturally and without strain or obvious effort

Before I locked up, I asked the cat what the hell I was going to do with him. He seemed to have an amber-eyed confidence that I was going to make every effort to maintain him in the comfort to which he had become accustomed ... and to let him out oftener.

I remembered the Shell Ridge Road turnoff from the long nightwalk I had taken with Meyer. It was not far from the south line of the County, slanting off to the right, southwest.

Rural mailboxes. Small frame houses on fill, with the wet marsh behind them, some cypress and live oak hammocks. All of them were on the right side of the road. The left side was fenced wetlands, posted at the proper legal intervals, the wire and posts new. Hounds and banty chickens and little kids and swamp buggies and campers. White dust behind me off the crushed white shell of the limestone road.

Read the signs on the boxes. Stane. Murrity. Floyd. Garrison. Perris.

Perris was a one-story block house painted a pale, water-stained green, with a roof of white asbestos shingles. There was a gnarled and handsome oak in the front yard. There had been white board fencing, but it was rotting away. There had been river gravel in the drive, but most of it had rain-washed away. Some dead trucks and cars sat out to the side of the house, hip deep in the raw green grasses of spring. There were parts of other dead vehicles strewn around. There was a big frame building behind the house, with both overhead doors up, so that I could see into it as I turned into the drive, see a litter of workbenches and hoists and tools. A dainty little baby blue Opel with a savage little snout was parked under the spreading shade of the live oak out in front, its slanting windshield spattered with the grease of the exploding bugs of high-speed travel. When I parked beside the slab porch and turned the engine off, I could hear the muttering hum of a big airconditioning compressor at the side of the house, and a tinny resonance of the sheet metal housing.

It was three-fifteen when I rang the doorbell. I waited and as I started to ring it again, Lilo Perris pulled it open and looked out through the screen. She wore what I think is called a jump dress, a kind of mini-dress which is shorts rather than a skirt at the bottom. It was a vivid orange, deepening her tan, whitening teeth, bringing out the healthy blue-whites of her eyes. There was a little flicker in those eyes as she looked at me, then glanced beyond me and saw the white convertible out there. No alarm, no surprise. Just a little click of recognition, identification.

At first she was just a girl with a blunt little face, twenty-two or -three. Brawny little chunk of a girl. Then came the extraordinary impact of a total, driving sexuality. I could remember only two other women who had exuded that degree of psychic musk at close range one was a successful film actress who could not act and had no need to, the other a woman who, before her thirtieth year, had married and divorced three fortunes, cutting herself an ample slice of each. It was arrogance and availability. It was posture and look that said, "Here it is, baby, if you're man enough, and I don't think you are, because nobody has been man enough yet." But not that kind of presentation alone. Two other things with it. A total health, the kind of health you see in show dogs and race horses. Glossy pelt, glistening eyes, blood-pink membranes, with pulse and respiration infinitely slow with the body at rest, preparing it for explosive demands. In addition, a perfection of detail, the natural eyelashes like little curved and clipped bits of enameled black wire. No dentist would have defied reality by making teeth that perfect.