The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  “Sheriff. They told me I might catch you over here.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to have a chance to talk to you. Maybe ask some questions. Can you give me fifteen minutes or so?”

  “If you come to my office before nine tomorrow …”

  “It would be better right now, I think.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Baither, Arnstead, Perris.”

  “You were very insistent about not being involved in the Baither matter in any way. Do you want to change your story?”

  “No. But things come up which puzzle me, Sheriff. If we talked them out, it might be of some help to you, and you might let me leave that much sooner.”

  “I can’t see how you could be of any help to me.”

  “When you find Lew Arnstead, if you haven’t already, get him checked for stimulants. He’s a speed freak. When they go over the edge, the condition is called paranoid psychosis, and it would be more comfortable to be around a kid playing with dynamite caps.”

  “Result of an amateur investigation, McGee?”

  “I wanted to find him and scuff him up, and I turned up a few things while I was looking for him, and I decided there was no point in being emotional about what he did to Meyer—who, incidentally, is all right.”

  “I know. I made inquiry.”

  “Then I keep wondering how Henry Perris fits into the Baither killing, and what the association was between Perris and Arnstead. And right now Mrs. Betsy Kapp seems to be missing, and my amateur investigator guess says that she’s gotten herself into the middle somehow, where it wouldn’t seem to be a healthy climate.”

  The stern hero face looked up at me from under the pale brim of the expensive hat. “Come around the car and get in, Mr. McGee.”

  When I was in, he put the clipboard on the seat between us, unhooked his mike, and told his people he was leaving the hospital and would call in from his next stop.

  “There’ll be too many interruptions if we go in,” he said. “How about your motel room?”

  I drove over in the Buick. He was waiting and as I unlocked the door to 114, he said he had told them where to reach him.

  He sat in the armchair, put his hat carefully on the floor beside the chair. I moved over and sat on the countertop where Betsy had sat, eating her sardine sandwich.

  “I had a report from Deputy Cable,” he said. “So I know you went and talked to Cora Arnstead. I had a report of your conversation with Deputy Sturnevan. I know you spent the night with Mrs. Kapp at her home on Seminole. I was glad to hear you had not left the county. If you had, you would have regretted it. My responsibility is to enforce the enforceable laws and ordinances. Deputy Cable suggested to me that Mrs. Kapp be picked up and charged with public fornication. There is an old ordinance on the books. I have not been able to understand why Billy would want to waste department time on that sort of thing. He is usually a more reasonable officer. I do not wish to make any moral judgments about Mrs. Kapp. She has always seemed to me to be a pleasant enough woman, and she seems to run that dining room well. She would seem to be … selective and circumspect in her private life.”

  “Billy Cable went after her a year and a half ago. He’d had a few drinks. She turned him down flat. Last fall she had an affair with Lew Arnstead.”

  “I knew about the Arnstead affair. How could you know about Billy? How do you know it’s true? He has a wife and three children.”

  “They had a very rough little scene right here in this room this afternoon. Billy asked for bad news, and she gave it to him.”

  “So at five o’clock he makes that stupid suggestion about arresting her. I’ll check it out. I don’t like it. An officer should not use his position for personal vendettas. I’m disappointed in Billy Cable. You say Mrs. Kapp is missing. Tell me about it.”

  “She was here most of the afternoon. Then she went in her car back to her house. I was supposed to meet her there. She knew I’d be over about seven. I went over and she wasn’t there. She’d told me where the key was. I let myself in. She left a note telling me she was going out to find out something about this … whole problem which got me into one of your cells, Sheriff.”

  “Find out what?”

  “She didn’t say. I waited until ten o’clock and then I came looking for you.”

  He went over and sat on the bed and looked up her phone number and dialed it. While it was ringing at the other end, I had a closer look at him under the light of the bedside lamp. His dark suit was wrinkled, his shoes unshined. His knuckles and wrists were soiled, and there was an edge of grime around his white cuffs and around the white collar of his shirt. The light slanted on a dark stubble on his chin. It did not match my prior observations of the fastidious officer of the law.

  “No answer,” he said as he stood up. He went back to the chair and looked at his watch. “Ten past eleven. Maybe, Mr. McGee, she decided not to see you again. Maybe she went to stay with friends, waiting for you to give up and go away.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Where is the note?”

  “I threw it away. I assure you it was … affectionate.”

  “You told Mrs. Kapp all about the reason why you and your friend were suspected of being in on the Baither murder?”

  “Sheriff, she lives here and she works here. She knows a lot of people. I told her everything I know, including your theory about the money truck, and Baither using Raiford State Prison as a hideout. And I built a little structure of supposition, based on little hints, guesses, inferences. I haven’t tested it on Betsy yet. I planned to. One way to go at these things is to build a plausible structure, then find facts that won’t fit and tear it down and try again.”

  He looked at me through a steeple of soiled fingers. “Let me hear it.”

  “Baither put it together. He used two outsiders, pickup talent, possibly from out of state. He had the contacts, apparently. The fourth man was local, and without a record, gainfully employed. Henry Perris, now working as a mechanic down at Al Storey’s station on the Trail. The other two men we know only as Hutch and Orville. Baither needed Henry Perris because Henry had access to a wrecker and knew how to operate it. They also used Perris’s stepdaughter, Lillian. She was the young waitress in the blond wig at the drive-in across from the track.”

  “Pure fantasy!”

  “May I go ahead? Thanks. After a big score, the people involved watch each other very carefully. I don’t think Frank could have slipped away with the money unless Henry and the girl helped him somehow. This would be the deal. Frank would hide the money and take a fall at Raiford. Henry and the girl would sit tight and wait it out. Frank wouldn’t let Henry know where the money was because he would be afraid of another doublecross. A three-way split, if you count the girl, would be a lot better than five ways.”

  “Why Perris?”

  “Because Lilo Perris and Lew Arnstead were or are paired off. It started several months back, and with Baither up for release, it would be good sense to have a pipeline into your department, Sheriff. She’s apparently a very rough kid. Then you have Henry Perris in a position to pick my envelope out of the trash at the station, and you have Lilo ready and willing to decoy Arnstead into that shack in back of the place. But it was a bad impulse. People get bad, tricky ideas when something has gone wrong. They get nervous and they don’t think things out. Manufactured evidence backfires. So Perris and company was suddenly up against the very dangerous situation of having vital and damaging information lodged in the mind of a speed freak. If you went after the name of the woman who decoyed Arnstead into Baither’s shed, you could probably shake it loose. And to have it be the stepdaughter of the mechanic at the station where I swear I discarded that envelope makes everything a little too tight. Have you located Lew?”

  “Not yet.”

  “There’s a chance, a reasonable chance, that they had brought Lew all the way into the picture. Maybe they needed the kind of help he could give them.
Nine hundred thousand is a lot of persuasion. The girl could make certain he wouldn’t be thinking clearly. The girl and the amphetamine, and something a little warped in his mind before he even started downhill. If they did, what’s your chance of finding him alive?”

  “Facts will tear down your structure, McGee.”

  “If you have them.”

  “There were three men working at that station all day Friday. Albert Storey, Henry Perris, and Terrance Moon. They submitted to interrogation willingly. There was a period of about two hours and fifteen minutes, starting at the time we drove away with you and your friend, when their actions are important. None of them left the station at that time. No phone calls were made. They were interrogated separately. The customers who stopped during that period were strangers—tourists and commercial traffic on the Tamiami Trail. The men talked about Frank Baither being killed to each other, but not to anyone else. I am left with the remarkable coincidence of someone unknown to those men stopping for gas, seeing that envelope in the trash barrel, picking it out and taking it up to Baither’s house to leave it where we found it later.”

  “And you can’t buy that and neither can I.”

  “Then you dropped it in Baither’s place.”

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “What choice do I have, McGee? And, of course, your evaluation of Lillian Perris is total nonsense.” There was a force in his voice, an animation in his face which surprised me. “The girl has a lot of spirit. She should have had a lot more discipline. She’s been in scrapes, but nothing serious. Considering the environmental and social factors, I think she has done remarkably well.”

  “I was only—”

  “Forget any idea of her having any part of it.”

  “Okay. And Henry Perris is a pillar of the community and a lay preacher?”

  “All I know is that he has no record.”

  “Let’s concentrate on Henry for a minute, Sheriff. Just for the hell of it. Let’s say he was in on the Baither murder, and it went wrong and he was shaky. He comes to work late. He gets our names and the reason we’re being picked up from Al Storey. He goes to put something in the barrel and sees the envelope with my name on it and he picks it out when nobody is looking and puts it in his pocket.”

  “But I told you that—”

  “I know what you told me. He had to leave that station soon after we left.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  The message on his face was clear: Don’t pursue further.

  “What could Betsy Kapp have remembered that got her into trouble?” I asked.

  “If she’s in trouble.”

  “Are you going to look for her?”

  “Missing persons reports have to be filed by the next of kin.”

  “I don’t think you always go by the book, Sheriff.”

  He smiled for the first time. “If I did, I would have you back inside, McGee.”

  He phoned Betsy’s house again, with no results. He looked troubled. “I’ll put the word out.”

  “Thanks, Sheriff.” I walked him out to the car and asked him if he minded if I looked around.

  “Inside the county, Mr. McGee.”

  “Of course, Sheriff.”

  So I began my blind quest, because anything was better than going back to her empty house to sit and wait.

  Fourteen

  Cruise the after-midnight streets of the sleepy city, checking the lots, and driveways, the on-street parking for the distinctive shape of the VW bug. Hard to tell gray from tan under the street lamps. Then remembered the thing she had affixed to her radio antenna, handy way to find the car in the jammed-tin wasteland of the shopping center parking rows—a plastic sunflower, big as a saucer. Easier to eliminate the look-alike VWs.

  Stopped once in a while at the bright upright coffin of a pay phone, listened to ten rings, got the same dime back every time. Aware finally of hunger pangs, and I turned back to a place where I had seen the all-night drive-in. No car service after eleven. Very bright inside. Big table of teenagers, whispering and haw-hawing at delicious private nonsense, making a point of excluding the square grown-up world from all of it. A few night-people spaced along the counter. Plastic radio with a burr in the speaker playing muted rock.

  The waitress was a plump, pretty girl, hair bleached to a coarse pure white and hanging lifelessly straight. Blue nylon uniform. DORI embossed on the name tag. A smudge of tiredness around her eyes. Mechanical smile, presentation of the grease-spotted bill of fare.

  Here they called them a MaxiBurger, and they came on a toasted bun with caraway seeds. Very little taste to the hot meat. Bits of gristle. Much better coffee than I expected. Munched the meat, sipped the coffee, wondered why the girl looked so familiar.

  Had paid, left, started the motor before I realized why she might look familiar. Got out the Polaroid shots, sorted them under the interior lights, located Dori. Different hairstyle. Same face. Same plumpness. Startled expression, one hand blurred by movement.

  I replaced the other pictures, put hers in my pocket and went back inside. She came over with the mechanical smile and the menu and then realized I looked too familiar.

  “Oh, you were just in, werncha?”

  “Decided on another cup of coffee.”

  “Well, I’ll forget you went out and come back, so you get the seconds free anyways.”

  She brought it and I said, “Thank you, Dori. When you’ve got a minute, I want to ask you something.”

  “I got a minute right now. Like what?”

  I slipped the picture out and held it low so that only she could see it. I watched her face. She swallowed and bit her underlip and looked warily toward the other girl. She leaned toward me and said, “Look, this is some kind of a mixup. Put that away, huh? He must have got confused or something, honest. He was supposed to have tore those up, mister. Go find him and tell him Dori said he should ought to be more careful.”

  “He didn’t seem to be confused.”

  “What kind of a car you got?”

  “White Buick convertible.”

  “Look, you drink your coffee and go sit in it and wait, and I got a break coming, I’ll come out and explain. Okay?”

  In a little while Dori came walking quickly across the blacktop, the white lights strong behind her, yellow cardigan around her shoulders. Yellow straw purse in her hand. I leaned and swung the door open for her. She tugged it shut, pushed the dash lighter in and got her cigarettes out of her purse.

  “It would have to be some kind of foul-up, because it was always part of the deal he checks with me first, for obvious reasons. And he wouldn’t let go of a picture. That’s kind of rotten. And what he always did was tell me where to be and when, instead of sending somebody to where I’m working. Way back we made the deal, and I told him then that okay, so I was in a box, I’d go along with it, but only until my husbin got back from the service and then I couldn’t take any kind of chance like that. So Fred got back seven months ago and I was nervous about if the deal would stand. But it did. Look, mister. Six weeks ago, maybe two months ago, a guy came in by accident and I’d had a date with him over a year ago, and he is a little bit smashed and thinks he can get fixed up right now. He started to get loud and so I got hold of Lew and he came by and took the fella out into the parking lot and bounced him up and down some and he went away. So it looks to me like something is going on I don’t like. Now you tell me how you got that picture and what it is you’ve got in mind.”

  “Did you know he was fired?”

  “I heard about it. For beating up a prisoner and for goofing off when he was supposed to be watching the house where Frank Baither got killed. I thought maybe he’d come in but he hasn’t.”

  “Nobody has seen him, Dori. There’s a pretty good chance he’s dead.”

  She sucked the final half inch of cigarette down to the long filter, the red glow illuminating her small frown, her hollowed cheek. “Something was going bad for him. He was getting so jumpy he looked flippy a
lmost. I cry no single tear, baby. That was the meanest son of a bitch I ever knew or ever want to know. When I know Lew is surely dead, I’ll sleep a little better. Anyway … who are you? Some kind of a cop?”

  There was new anxiety in her voice. “Not exactly. I was picked up with a good friend of mine, the one Lew pounded. It looked like we knew something about the Baither murder but we didn’t and they let us go, but I have to stay in the county. I let it be known I wanted to find Arnstead and beat on him. Now I’m worried about how I’m going to make out if they find him in a field or behind a warehouse tomorrow, beaten to death.”

  “They could make out a long list, mister.”

  “You don’t blame me for trying to protect myself?”

  “Not if you don’t get me involved.”

  “I happen to have a little picture gallery that belonged to Lew. Never mind how or where I got hold of it. You looked familiar so I came out and looked at the pretty pictures and found yours.”

  “Just don’t get me involved.”

  “Dori, put yourself in my shoes. Suppose he is dead and Hyzer tries to make me for it. The only thing I can do is spread out my picture collection and tell him to check it out. He’ll find out that Lew had this sideline going, and probably as long as he was an officer of the law, nobody wanted to take the chance of putting him out of business. But he lost his immunity with his job. So check out all the husbands and all the boyfriends. Why should I leave you off the list?”

  “I swear to God, cross my heart and hope to die, Fred hasn’t any idea at all what went on. I love the guy. It would kill him, it really would. And he might kill me. He’s got a terrible temper. Give me the picture, please. Don’t you have enough without me? How many have you got? I always wondered how many there were of us.”

  “Fourteen, counting you.”

  “Jesus! I was thinking six or seven. Don’t you have enough to make your point without me in there? I swear, he hasn’t tried to set me up one time since Fred got back, and that’s been seven months. What’s your name, anyway?”