John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look

by The Long Lavender Look(lit)

  Teletype network for instant reservations, approved cards for instant credit, a woman at the desk with instant, trained, formal politeness, who assigned me to Unit 114 and made a little x on a map of the layout, and drew a little line to show me where to drive so that I would end up in front of the X, in the proper diagonal parking slot. She looked slightly distressed when I said I had no idea how long I would be staying. People should know, so they can keep the records neat.

  I closed myself into the silence of Unit 114, unpacked, and took a better shower. Stretched out on the bed. Things to do, but no will to do them. A listlessness. A desire to disassociate, to be uninvolved. The fashion is to call it an identity crisis. I was not doing things very well lately. A juvenile, big-mouth performance for the sheriff, windy threats signifying nothing.

  Somebody had made a very cute try to get the two of us involved in a private and violent nastiness, but Lennie's gifts of persuasion and the thoroughness of Norman Hyzer had collapsed the improvised structure.

  All cages are frightening. And sometimes a little time spent in a small cage merely gives you the feeling that you have been let out into a bigger cage, the one you have built for yourself over the years. The delusion of total freedom of will is the worst cage of all. And it gets cold in there. As cold, perhaps, as inside Miss Agnes under ten feet of canal water, if Meyer hadn't clumsied me out of there. Or cold as the grave would be had Frank Baither hit me in the face with that first shot.

  With enormous effort I forced myself to reach the phone book look up the Sheriff's Department, and phone in my temporary address to the dispatcher. I got dressed and got into the white car and went looking for Johnny's Main Street Service. I found it down by the produce sheds and the truck depots.

  There was diesel fuel, and a half dozen big stalls for truck repair work. There was a paint shop and a body shop, and a side lot piled with cars which had quite evidently slain their masters in a crunch of blood, tin, and glass. I saw the big blue-and-white tow truck There was no shop work going on, the whole area somnolent in the perfect April afternoon. An old man sat in the small office, reading a true-crime magazine. A scrawny girl in jeans and a halter was slowly spreading paste wax on a metallic green MG.

  Among a line of cars against a side fence Miss Agnes stood out like a dowager among teenagers. I got out of the Buick and walked over to her. A large young man about nineteen came angling across the hardpan from the shop area. Low-slung jeans and a torn and grease-blackened T-shirt. Thick black glossy hair that fell to his big shoulders.

  "You Mr. McGee?" When I nodded, he said, "I'm Ron Hatch. My father is Johnny Hatch. He owns this place. He didn't want me to fool with that Rolls on account of on an impounded car, we're stuck with it. But I couldn't stand having it just sit. So he said it had to be on my own time. I just finished with it maybe an hour ago. I pulled the tank and the head, got it all kerosened out, blew the fuel lines, got the ignition system all dry, coil and all. The battery took a charge. That tire is done, and I guess you'll have to check around Miami to find a Dunlop that'll go on that rim."

  "I'm grateful you didn't let it sit, Ron."

  "Hell, it's a great old brute. All that hand-lapping and custom machining and fitting. The bushings are like perfect, Mr. McGee. But there's this problem." He had the big leathery banana-fingered hand of the born artisan. He pulled a complex fitting out of the pocket of the jeans. "See where this is broke off fresh? It maybe happened when you hit the bank, going down. It's the fitting out at the end of the steering arm, front left. I put a clamp on there for temporary, just enough to baby it out here to park, but you couldn't drive it. There's no machine shop I know of can make one on account of right in here, and here, they're not standard threads, so they wouldn't have the taps the right size, and it isn't something you can cast because it takes a lot of strain."

  "I've- got a mechanic friend in Palm Beach at a place where they stock Rolls parts from the year one."

  "Maybe he'll have to have this to match it up right. Meanwhile... maybe I could do some body and fender work."

  "What do I owe you so far?"

  He looked uncomfortable. "The way it works, garages have to bid for the county contract. So it's seventy-five dollars for towing, and ten dollars a day for it while it was impounded. With the tax that's a hundred and nine twenty. Once we got word this morning from the sheriff's office we could release the car to you, then the ten a day stopped."

  "And if they'd kept me in there for ninety days?"

  "Then... if people don't want to pay the storage, like if the car isn't worth it anyway Dad wholesales them for what he can get. The word around was that you and your friend had surely killed Frank Baither and you got caught, and that's why my father said it didn't make any sense working on your car. But... I just couldn't stand seeing it sit the way it was, machinery like that. I mean I did it on my own and if you figure you don't want to pay anything over the towing and storage, that's okay."

  I separated two bills from the packet Lennie had handed me. A fifty and a hundred. "Get me a receipted bill on the towing and storage, please. And put the rest against your hours and we'll settle up when you're done."

  "Body work?"

  "You wouldn't use a filler, would you?"

  "You better be kidding." And I knew how he'd do it, banging the dings out with the rubber mallet, sanding, burnishing, smoothing, using a little lead sparingly where it couldn't be helped, sanding down a couple of coats of primer, then using a top-quality body paint, sanding between coats.

  "Do you expect to be able to match that paint, Ron?"

  "It's a terrible paint job anyway. I'd rather do the whole thing. What I'd like to do it is yellow in a lot of coats of a good gold flake lacquer with a lot of rubbing between coats."

  "Sorry, but it has to stay blue. Sentimental reasons."

  He shrugged. "That same shade?"

  "Not exact."

  He smiled for the first time. He looked relieved. "I can get it looking fine. Wait and see. I hope you get that fitting soon. I can't really fine time it unless I can open it up some on the road. On the lift isn't the same."

  The old man in the office came out and bawled, "Ronnie! Come get the phone!"

  The boy took off, big lope, long strides. And the immediate image was superimposed on memory. The determined look of the girl, running in the night, the dark hair flying, bare knees lifting. An elusive similarity, like a family resemblance. No more than that, because the girl had been all girl, and this runner was totally male. I find I have one small hang-up regarding young males with masculine features and shoulderlength locks. When they have a mustache or beard or both to go with the hair, they make a fine romantic image, an echo of a distant gallantry, of the old names like Sumter, The Wilderness, Sherman's March, Custer. But when, like the Beatles and Ron Hatch, there is no beard or mustache, then I have to get past the mental roadblock of recalling too many Army nurses I have known.

  I wondered if Mister Norm had gotten a line on the running girl. It would be too much of a miracle of coincidence for her not to be involved in some way. Involved, possibly, from the beginning. The very young girl playing waitress, in a blond wig, the weekend afternoon when they had mickeyed the money-truck men.

  Or maybe she was a decoy, a diversion, setting Frank Baither up so that Orville and Hutch could get at him. Or Baither's woman, local or import, sweet young flesh after over forty months of doing without. The fairly safe guess was that she was woods-wise, and she thought, rightly or wrongly, that somebody was tracking her down in the night, and she used the rush and rumble of my car to cover the sound as she went crashing through the weeds and brush on the far side of the road. Misjudged the distance. Cut it too close. But why the hell not behind the car?

  I was looking inside the car when Ron came back. It had been cleaned out thoroughly, mud, weeds, water, and everything else.

  "Oh, I forgot. All your stuff, the fishing gear and tools and so on, they're locked in a storage room here. I wrote a list
of everything. Things disappear. Maybe some stuff is gone already, before I wrote it down. You want to check?"

  "Later, I guess."

  "Nobody thought you'd get out. That way it isn't so much like stealing."

  "People around here think that when Sheriff Hyzer grabs somebody, he's always right? Is that it?"

  His gaze was direct for a moment, and then drifted away. "They say he's a good sheriff. They say he's fair."

  "Thanks again for going ahead with my car. I'll be around on Monday."

  So I drove around and about, getting the feel of the town and the area, had a late lunch in a red plastic national franchise selling the Best Sandwiches Anytime Anywhere, and had a medium bad sandwich and very bad coffee, served in haste by a drab, muttering woman.

  On the way in, I had picked up the local morning paper. Eight pages. The Cypress Call & Journal. The masthead said it was owned by Jasson Communications. They own a few dozen small-city papers in Florida and South Georgia. Guaranteed circulation of five thousand seven hundred and forty, by the last ABC figures. It had the minimum wire service on national and international, and very exhaustive coverage of service club and social club doings. Typical of the Jasson operation. Cut-rate syndicated columnists, ranging from medium right to far right. Lots of city and county legal notices. Detailed coverage of farm produce prices.

  I found myself on the bottom right corner of page two.

  HELD FOR QUESTIONING

  Two Fort Lauderdale men were taken into custody Friday morning by the County Sheriff's Department for questioning in connection with the torture murder of Frank Baither at his residence on State Road 72 Thursday night after it was learned that the vehicle in which they were riding had gone into the drainage canal sometime Thursday night not far from the Baither house.

  And that was it. Local yellow journalism. Sensationalism. Who, what, why, when, where, and how. Exquisite detail.

  So after my late and sorry lunch I went around to the Call & Journal. It was printed on the ground floor of a cement-block building on Princeton Street. The editorial and business offices occupied the other two floors.

  According to the masthead, the managing editor was one Foster Goss. Enclosed in glass in the far corner of the lazy newsroom. A couple of hefty women pecking vintage typewriters. A crickety octogenarian on the copy desk. A couple of slack young men murmuring into phones, heels on the cheap tin desks. Offstage frantic clackety-whack of the broad tape.

  Foster Goss was a fat, fading redhead, with thick lenses, saffroned fingers, blue shirt with wet armpits. He waved at a chair and said, "Minute," and hunched over the yellow copy paper once again, making his marks with soft black lead. He finished, reached, rapped sharply on the glass with a big gold seal ring. A mini-girl got up and came in and took the yellow sheets, gave me a hooded, speculative glance, and strolled out. Foster Goss watched her rear until the half-glass door swung shut, then creaked back in his chair, picked one cigarette out of the shirt-pocket pack, and lit it.

  "Meyer or McGee?" he said.

  "McGee. I want to complain about all the invasion of privacy, all the intimate details about my life and times."

  Half smile. "Sure you do."

  "So I came around to give you an exclusive, all about local police brutality and so forth."

  "Gee whiz. Golly and wow."

  "Mr. Goss, you give me the impression that somewhere, sometime, you really did work on a newspaper."

  His smile was gentle and reflective. "On some dandies, fella. I even had a Nieman long ago. But you know how it is. Drift out of the stormy seas into safe haven."

  "Just for the hell of it, Mr. Goss, what would happen if you printed more than Mister Norm would like to have you print?"

  "My goodness gracious, man, don't you realize that it has been the irresponsible press which has created community prejudice against defendants in criminal actions? As there is absolutely no chance of anyone running successfully against Sheriff Hyzer, he doesn't have to release any information about how good he is. And very damned good he is indeed. So good that County Judge Stan Bowley has a sort of standing order about pretrial publicity. So the sheriff would read the paper and come over and pick me up and take me to Stan and he would give me a sad smile and say, 'Jesus Christ, Foster, you know better than that,' and he would fine me five hundred bucks for contempt."

  "Which wouldn't stand up."

  "I know that! So I go to the Jasson brothers and I say, look, I've got this crusade I've got to go on, and I know the paper is turning a nice dollar, and I know you nice gentlemen are stashing away Jasson Communications stock in my retirement account every year, but I've got to strike a blow for a free press. Then they want to know who I am striking the blow against, and I tell them it is the sheriff, and they ask me if he is corrupt and inefficient, and I say he might be the best sheriff in the state, who took a very very rough county and tamed it without using any extralegal methods."

  "Then what if a hot team comes in here from Miami to do a big feature on this cozy little dictatorship, Mr. Goss?"

  He smiled again. "No contempt charges. Maximum cooperation. Guided tours. Official charm. No story."

  "But Meyer got badly beaten."

  "By a deputy who was immediately fired and booked for assault."

  "You keep track, even though you don't print much."

  "Old habits. Ancient reflexes. Interested me to find that Lennie Sibelius came on the run when you whistled. That's why we're getting along so well. I wanted to find out what kind of cat you might be, Mr. McGee. Hence the open door, frank revelation policy."

  "Learn anything?"

  "Hired gladiators like Sibelius, Belli, Foreman, Bailey, and so on seldom waste their talents on lowpay representation unless there is some publicity angle that might be useful. None here. I'd guess it was a favor. Maybe you work for him. Investigator, building defense files, or checking out a jury panel. You handle yourself as if you could give good service along those lines."

  "Have you ever thought of going back into journalism?"

  "I think about it. And I think about my mortgage, and my seventeen-year-old daughter married to a supermarket bag boy, and I think about my twelve-year-old spastic son. I catch pretty fair bass twelve miles from my house."

  "Do you think about Frank Baither?"

  "I try not to. Mister Norm will let me know what I need to know."

  Then we smiled at each other and I said my polite good-by. He was like King Sturnevan, long retired from combat, but he still had the moves. No wind left, but he could give you a very bad time for the first two rounds.

  I went out into the late April afternoon, into a spring scent of siesta. Head the Buick back toward the White Ibis, where I could make a phone call and find out how Meyer was making it.

  Eight

  I PARKED exactly where the motel architect had decided the vehicle for Unit 114 should be. Inside the room the red phone light was blinking. I wrote down the numbers the desk-lady gave me. The Lauderdale call was from a very very British female on Lennie's staff, relaying the diagnosis on Meyer: a mild concussion, hairline fracture of the cheekbone, and they were keeping him overnight for routine observation.

  The other one was a local number. I let it have ten rings, just like it says to do in the phone book. Hung up. Then I called the sheriff. He was there. "Yes, Mr. McGee?"

  "I don't want to do anything I'm not supposed to do. I was thinking of driving down to Al Storey's station on the Trail. Then I remembered it's outside the county."

  "What would be the purpose?"

  "I would sort of like to know how somebody set me up."

  "That's under investigation. We don't need help."

  "Are you getting anywhere with it?"

  "I'd rather not comment at this time."

  "It's your best approach, isn't it?"

  "I'd appreciate it if you'd stay inside my jurisdiction, Mr. McGee."

  "So be it, Sheriff."

  I glowered at the unspottable, unbreakable rug
for a time, then looked up Arnstead in the phone book. No Lew, Lou, Louis, or Lewis. There were three of them. J. A., and Henry T. and Cora.

  I tried J. A. "Lew around?"

  "Not around this house, ever, mister." Bang. So I tried Henry T. "Lew around?"

  "Not very goddam likely, buddy." Bang.

  Started to try Cora, then decided I might as well drive out to the address and see for myself. The book said 3880 Cattleman's Road. I found Cattleman's Road a half mile west of the White ibis, heading north off of Alternate 112. Flat lands, and frame bungalows which were further and further apart as I drove north.