The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  “I … I’m sorry it had to be in front of you, Travis.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? I can’t ever let him get away with any part of it, anywhere, no matter what. If I ever do … then he’ll take me, and I don’t think I could stand it. It wouldn’t be … nice.”

  That was the inevitable stipulation. Nice.

  “Go eat your sandwich, woman.”

  She walked over and took it from the countertop and said, “He’s going to hate you now because you heard it all.”

  “So I’m about to faint with pure terror.”

  She hoisted herself up and sat on the countertop, thin legs swinging, holding the sandwich in both hands, munching.

  “What a crazy day,” she said. “What a weird kind of day.”

  “Just wondering something. How did Billy Cable take it when you and Lew Arnstead got together?”

  “Not so good. I told Lew about how Billy kept circling me. He thought it was funny. I told him he better not make any smart remarks to Billy about the whole thing. Billy is chief deputy, and there are ways he could make things bad for Lew. They had it out, finally. Lew whipped him, but he didn’t tell me any details.”

  Thick sandwiches and cold beer. She yawned deeply, her face softening, and her eyes suddenly heavy, an abrupt change like that of a sleepy child. She slumped onto the bed and slipped her shoes off and yawned again. “Honest, I’ve got to have a nap.”

  “You have permission.”

  She pulled the pillow out from under the spread and lay back. “We can go home later. I wish I could think. What you said about my knowing something and not knowing what I know. There is something, but I can’t find it in my head.”

  “Try again when you wake up.”

  “Dear?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t try to make love to me, huh? I haven’t got anything with me. And … I might be too willing. That’s sort of nasty, isn’t it? After … what we had to do.”

  “It happens that way. The body wants to celebrate being alive when somebody else is dead. Anyway I’m going to leave you alone here for a while, Betsy.”

  Sleepy eyes opened wide. “No!”

  “I’ll hang the DO-NOT-DISTURB signs on both doors, and I’ll lock you in. You’ll be fine. I ought to be back by five-thirty or six.”

  “Where do you have to go?”

  “Just an errand. Nothing crucial.”

  “Okay, so be careful, lover,” she murmured. She was on her side, fists under her chin, knees pulled up. In moments she was making a small buzzing sound, with slow deep lift and fall of the narrow, overburdened rib cage. I closed the draperies to darken the room, and floated a blanket over her.

  The phone made half a ring before I caught it. It did not disturb her.

  It was Meyer. “I am free,” he said. “Marked fit for duty. I am an object of awe and curiosity. My once-handsome face looks like a psychedelic beach ball. There are two gentle maidens here aboard my humble vessel, taking turns holding my hand and applying cold compresses and fixing me little taste treats. They say to say howdy. Shall I return?”

  “Stay where you are. Enjoy.”

  “And how are things on the frontier?”

  “Confusing. A fine young man had the taste to give Miss Agnes a lot of tender loving care, but I have to get a part for her out of Palm Beach before she can move.”

  “Would the man let you move?”

  “No point in asking him until I get the part installed.”

  “What are you doing for excitement?”

  “Mighty interesting golf match on television today.”

  “McGee, do not make childish attempts to mislead me. My brain was not damaged. When we left, you were down. You wanted no part of that brouhaha over there. Your voice dragged. Now there is a lift, a hint of a pleasurable urgency. You have become involved.”

  “Now that you mention it, I guess I have.”

  “Have you been able to pay my respects to Deputy Arnstead?”

  “Not yet. He seems to be absent. Or shy. But I still have hopes.”

  “If the car was roadable, and Sheriff Hyzer said you could leave, would you?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Have you come across an opportunity for some small salvage contract, perhaps?”

  “One might turn up. Meyer, I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “I share your gladness.”

  After the conversation ended, I looked at the screen. A very somber young man in orange garments was hunched over a putt. A knot of muscle bulged at the corner of his jaw. He stabbed at it, and the ball went by the hole on the high side and stopped inches away. The young man looked at the heavens with an expression of agonized desolation, of classic despair. I punched the set off while he was still on camera. I hung the signs, locked her in, and left.

  Thirteen

  Buttercup came at me, running low and rumbling in anticipation of the clamp of his teeth in the flesh of the stranger. I squatted and held my hand out and said, “Easy, Buttercup. Easy, boy.”

  He braked to a stop, leaned, and took a delicate sniff, compared it with the memory banks, and looked dejected. Cora Arnstead came out onto the porch and said, “Who is it now? You home, Lew?”

  “Sorry. It’s Travis McGee again, Mrs. Arnstead.”

  “You got anything to tell me about my boy?”

  “Sorry. I wish I could tell you something.”

  “That Billy Cable was here today looking for him, too. They fired my boy. No reason why I should fall all over myself helping them. If they want him, they can find him.”

  “How is the stock making out? Anything I can do?”

  “That’s nice of you to offer. But I’ve got the Silverstaff boy from up the road taking care. He was here most of the morning getting caught up. Come on the porch and set.”

  A haze had moved across the sun. She leaned back in the cane chair and widened her nostrils. “Smell that stink, do you?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Acidy smell. We get it now most times the breeze comes out of the northwest. Phosphate plants up that way. Wind from the south, and you get the county incinerator smell. Nobody gives a damn, Mr. McGee. They talk about it, but they don’t really care enough to do anything. So one day people are going to grab their throats and fall down dead all over the state of Floryda, and I hope I’m safe dead and gone before it happens. What do you want with me?”

  “Sheriff Hyzer is trying to locate Lew. Now if he doesn’t find him pretty soon, he might come out here or send somebody out here to go through his room, looking for a clue.”

  “And?”

  “He’ll find that hiding place just the way I did. I didn’t exactly give you an inventory of what’s in there.”

  “Figured you didn’t. Filthy stuff?”

  “Some standard under-the-counter dirt, and some pretty vivid love notes from some of his women. And a collection of Polaroid pictures he took of a batch of his girlfriends, all naked. They could cause some trouble in the wrong hands.”

  “Like if Billy Cable got aholt of them?”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Arnstead.”

  “You said he had a lot of those speed pills in there. Would there be maybe enough so he could get into trouble on that account, too?”

  “More than enough. They come under the narcotics legislation.”

  She glowered into space for a long ten seconds. “I don’t hold with lying, Mr. McGee. I wouldn’t want anybody to come here and find that place of his and find it empty and ask me if I’d let anybody into that room to take stuff away. And if they asked me if I emptied it out and asked me what was in there, I’d have to tell what I took out. No, sir, I can’t let you go in my boy’s room and take away his personal private stuff and get rid of it any way you see fit. I can’t give you permission. Maybe you’d be so kind, Mr. McGee, as to go on in the house and back to the kitchen and get me a glass of water. Best let it run a long time for coolness.”

  While the water w
as running, I emptied the cache. Pictures and letters inside one of the books. Books and pamphlets tucked into the front of my shirt. Pills in the trouser pocket.

  I took her the glass of water. She sipped and thanked me.

  “You come back and visit with me sometime, hear? Sorry I couldn’t give you the right to tote off Lew’s things.”

  “I understand.”

  “Somehow I have this feeling my youngest isn’t going to come back, not ever. I don’t know why. An old woman’s notion. He was a good little boy. He really was. He always liked to play by himself. Not much for running with the pack. It was the Army changed him. He wasn’t the same after that.”

  It was uncomfortable booty to carry around. If Hyzer had me picked up for some idiot reason, the list of charges would be fascinating. In the milky fading light of late afternoon I drove north, farther out Cattleman’s Road into an area of bigger ranches and grove lands. It had been a sentimental mission. After seeing the scene between Billy and Betsy, there was no mistaking the use he would make of Lew’s artwork, or the amount of leverage possession would give him. There was the second objective of sparing the old lady any additional pain. The final chick was dead. Whether she ever learned that or not, never seeing him again was enough of a hurt.

  I came up on an unpaved road, braked and turned right, and found an adequate place a mile from the highway, a small grove of live oaks heavily fringed with Spanish moss, and a place to drive in where fencing had rotted way. I gouged a deep hole in the soft dirt with a stick, dumped the pills in, covered them, and stomped the earth flat.

  His meager and unusual little library would not be easy to burn. I crackled my shoulder muscles rolling a log over, scooped a shallow hole and laid the books therein and rolled the log back into the earth-groove it had made when it fell.

  I sat on it with the correspondence and the picture gallery. I remembered my previous impression of the many pictures of Betsy Kapp. Lean, anemic blonde with an insipid leer and comedy breasts. So the leer became a troubled and uncertain smile, and the breasts were oddly wistful, vulnerable. I decided that in some eerie way it was like those ubiquitous photographs of small boys holding up big fish they have caught. Too much camera direction makes them look uncertain. They ache to look like heroes and do not know how to manage it. And the long-dead fish has become a dead weight of reality, and there is no way to hold him to make him look alive.

  I used one to light the next until all the shots of Betsy were charred. All ten of them. Then the five of the woman who had been so careful to hide her face. Then the extra three of the night-runner who had to be Lilo. I saved the thirteen trophy shots, the head-on singles. I went through the correspondence and burned it all—except Betsy’s long letter of warning about Lilo.

  All the photographs and the letter fit nicely into the same pocket in the double thickness of canvas by the rear window. I spread them out so that there was no bulge when I zipped it shut. The thought of how Billy Cable might use the pictures of Betsy gave me the idea of possible leverage, for quite different objectives. I had studied the faces. Lilo and the Unknown Thirteen. The odds were that most or all were in Cypress County on this final Sunday in April. Clerking, waitressing, dating, tending babies, fixing dinner, ironing shirts, dancing, watching television. Lew’s little garden of ladies. There might be a certain amount of gratitude involved were a lady to get her trophy shot back, and be scratched off Lew’s local scorecard. So keep looking at the ladies, McGee. A fellow blundering around in the murk needs the loan of any thirty-nine-cent flashlight available.

  The last thread of daylight was about gone as I turned into the parking area of the White Ibis. The little tan VW was gone, and my throat turned sour, and my neck-nape and hands prickled with that million-year-old reflex which tries to lift the coarse animal hair, to make the animal look bigger, more awesome, more difficult to chew. It was sick premonition. Too many old memories of mistake and remorse.

  Unlocked the door, flicked the switch, saw the blanket shoved aside, the depression in the bedspread, the shape of the length of her in heavy sleep, the dented pillow.

  Her note on the motel paper was on the carpeting, with an ashtray paperweight, in a conspicuous spot.

  Lover darling,

  I woke up and got thinking about that you-know-what in my car, and getting nervous about it and then not feeding poor Raoul and leaving him alone so long what I decided was put that thing back where it was like you said and feed Raoul and then go find out about that thing I couldn’t remember before, which maybe hasn’t got a thing to do with anything. And I decided while it is still light I can take a quick sneaky look and see if the jeep is still there in that yard behind the bushes but I hope it is gone and we don’t have to think about it at all only about us alone together in my little house with all the world shut out, so what you can do is change your clothes like you never got a chance to and bring your shaving things and all and if you get there before I get back the extra key to the side door is where you go into the carport and reach around in back of the first can of paint on the top shelf the one to your left when you walk in but if my car is in there then you can just knock and if you are lucky I may even decide to let you in and feed you and all that.

  Love ya!

  Yr Betsy.

  Very sweet and innocent and diligent, and very stupid, leaving a note with too many things in it to interest, for example, Billy Cable, if he should have taken a turn by the place, seen both cars gone, and decided to take a look. Motels have master keys, and local law has a conspicuous talent for collecting copies of same, because it is a lot less fuss than court orders and warrants and negotiations with management.

  So I confettied it and flushed it down, took my fast shower and changed, whipped out of there with toilet kit and sweaty hands, and drove to her place on Seminole Street, making one wrong turn before I found it, because the only other time I had driven to it had been at night, following her.

  When I turned into the narrow, high-hedged drive, I felt a sense of relief at seeing lights on inside the cottage, but the feeling clicked off when my lights swung to the empty carport. I put the white Buick at the side of the carport, this time with the top up, in the same spot as it had been when someone had tumbled the big ugly souvenir into it.

  I stood in the night, listening, and felt my nostrils widen. Another atavistic reflex, snuff the air for the drifting taint of the stalking carnivore, long after the noses have lost their sensitivity and cunning. Heart bumping under the stimulus of adrenalin, readying the muscles, blood, brain, for that explosive effort necessary for survival in a jungle of predators.

  But it was just a side yard of a very small residential plot in a peaceful neighborhood of a small southern city. A neighborhood of postal clerks, retired military, food store managers, bank tellers, watching the fare that came into their living rooms over the cable, checking the TV Guide during the rerun season to see if there was a “Bonanza” they had missed, or a “Mission Impossible.”

  The blood slowed, and I found the carport light switch, found the key in the place she’d described, and had time to get to the house corner and get a glimpse of the handle laying next to the supporting jack before the delay switch clicked the light off. In the darkness I squatted and reached under the house, felt and hefted the pipe handle to make certain. And in the darkness I went out to the sidewalk and kept to the shadows, went to the yard she had described, ducked under the chain and saw the dark, insectile angularity of the jeep parked there, nuzzling into the untended plantings.

  I went back and let myself in. One lamp lighted in the living room, lacy shade on a brass post that impaled a shiny black merry-go-round horse. I trod a narrow route between fragilities and knick-knacks to the kitchen where the fluorescent light over the stove was on. Some crumbs of cat food in the dish in Raoul’s corner. I bent and touched one. It was moist instead of being dried to the dish, so she had fed Raoul.

  Next I went to her bedroom, found the wall switch. The blouse
and skirt she had been wearing were on the foot of the bed. Raoul, curled upon the skirt, lifted his head and looked at me with the benign satisfaction of the full stomach and the comfortable place to sleep. There were water droplets on the inside of her shower curtain and the tiled walls. There was the scent of sweet soap and perfume and deodorant and hair spray, a damp towel spread on the rack, one misted corner at the top of the full-length mirror on the inside of the door.

  I sat on the bed and rubbed Raoul’s sleepy head and got his gritty, audible engine going. A puzzlement that she should be so full of nervous alarm, so anxious not to be alone, and then go out alone to find out God knows what. I finally realized that it had to be another one of the games that Betsy could play. A new script patterned on the late late movies, suspense, perhaps, with elegant quips and handsome sets, and she was maybe Myrna Loy tracing down one of those fragments of female intuition which would clear up the case which had William Powell baffled. And that, of course, made it all perfectly safe, because if somebody started to really hurt anybody, the Great Director would yell “Cut!” and we would go back to our dressing rooms and wait for the next call.

  Eight o’clock. Nine o’clock. Ten o’clock, and that was all I could manage to endure. Locked up and left there and drove down to the complex of county buildings and services and went into the Sheriff’s Department. A pair of strangers behind the high desk, cool, disinterested young men in fitted uniforms, busy with forms and routines, busy with the paperwork of booking Sunday drunks, brawlers, DWI’s, a couple of fourteen-year-old burglars. The communications clerk finally sent word that I might find the sheriff over at the Emergency Room at City Memorial, and one of the busy young men told me how to find it.

  I parked in the hospital lot and walked back to Emergency. Some bloody, broken, moaning teenagers were being offloaded from a white ambulance with blue dome lights, and wheeled through the double doors into a corridor glare of fluorescence so strong and white it made the blood look black.

  I saw a county cruiser parked over at the side, interior lights on, a shadowed figure behind the wheel. So I walked over to ask him if Hyzer was inside the building. But from ten feet I saw that it was Hyzer himself. He looked up from his clipboard and said, “Good evening, Mr. McGee.”