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.
"If you were selling something, man, nobody wants to buy if you get the house heated up." Deeper voice than expected, but without huskiness. A clear, flexible contralto.
"So ask me in, Lilo."
She came out and yanked the door shut and let the screen slap shut. She went down the single porch step and across the front yard, certain I would follow her. She picked up a sandspur on the tough sole of her bare right foot, and hardly breaking stride, licked her fingertips, brought the knee high and plucked it off. I saw the velvety bunch and flex of muscles in her brown back as she did so. The jump dress had a deep V back.
In the oak shade she turned and braced an orange haunch against the front fender-curve of the Opel and said, "I'm kind of a car freak. I like to fly this thing, but there's a shimmy up front over eighty and that bastard Henry can't find it. I told him he finds it or I strap him to the goddam hood and wind it up and let him see for himself."
And that was the last ingredient, a flavor of total and dangerous unpredictability. One could never feel at ease with her unless she had been welded into a steel collar, and there was a short length of chain fastened to a heavy eyebolt in a strong wall. And even then you'd take care to see that there was nothing within her reach that she could use to hit with or slice with, or throw. It was the same feeling as the time the pretty lady came aboard the Busted Flush with her ocelot, unsnapped his chain, and told him to stay on the yellow couch. He did, and watched every move I made, wit
h pale-green eyes that never blinked, with an occasional ripple of muscles in back and flank. He seemed to smile at me, as if telling me that we both knew he could rip my throat open before I could say "Pretty kitty." It made us very aware of each other in a feral way. If she wanted to strap Henry to the hood of the Opel, she would do so. And if she wanted to wind it way up and then bang the brakes to see how far ahead of her down the highway she could propel Henry, she would do that, too.
I could not use her unless I could appraise her well enough to find strengths and weaknesses. She was so unlike what I had expected, I had to discard all plans, including the wild one of getting her out somewhere where I could thump her unconscious and let her wake up wired to a tree facing the horror of Betsy Kapp. One cannot make any impression on an ocelot by showing it a dead ocelot.
"Nice little car," I said.
"The name is McSomething. Somebody told me."
"McGee."
"McGee, what you are doing is boring me. Can you think of anything to build this up a little? Maybe you get your kick out of memorizing me or something."
"It's like this, Lilo. Hyzer said stay around. So I was killing time until he said leave. But maybe there are some things lying around that could be interesting."
"Depends on what freaks you, Mac."
"The lush life, and so it is always a question of financing it, isn't it?"
"You want to cut yourself in on how I've got it made, living here on my big estate, with all the swimming pools and the billiard room and all that?"
"Maybe it's just that you have talents you're not getting the maximum return from. You made one hell of an impression on Dori Severiss."
A sharp look of renewed interest. A meaty, hearty, crinkly laugh. "Now how about you!"
"You could go around drifting and dreaming, girl, and never get loose from this big estate of yours. Lew Arnstead was making a dollar."
"Maybe your idea of a dollar, not mine, Mac. Lew had a nickle-dime way of thinking. He had some ass on call, and he shook some people down here and there, but it was too big a risk for what he was taking out of it. I told him. I told him forty times, honest. I told him he oughta contact somebody in the big time and wholesale those pigs of his for cash and have somebody come and get them before he got in a mess and Hyzer threw him out."
"And you'd know all about that?"
"A few years back, Mac, I used to go on trips with a friend. You keep your ears open, you learn how things are."
Not at all a dull-minded girl. A shrewdness about her that was impressive.
"But didn't you take on some risk when you helped him straighten out Mrs. Severiss?"
She made a face. "I was stupid. I get bored and I do stupid things and get in trouble. I shouldna. He was telling me his problems and I said let me handle it, and he said go ahead. Just that once with her and once with his schoolteacher, what's her name. Geraldine Kimmey. She got herself in a bind by groping some little kid, and then after Lew dated her up three or four times, she wanted to bluff her way off the list, so I had her sing me a lot of soprano where nobody could hear the high notes." A sudden, merry, ingratiating smile. "A shrink could have a picnic checking me out. When I get all edgy and uptight and mean-acting, making somebody scream and sweat works just like a charm. The better they yell, the more warm and friendly I feel toward them. I like to fell in love with Geraldine. It's like I was helping them get past something, or over something. I wonder sometimes if it's got anything to do with being so strong."
"'You look healthy enough."
"It's more than that. I'm some kind of freak. Wanta see?"
"Sure."
She looked into the blue car and reached in and took out a beach towel and shook the sand out of it. She went to the front bumper and used the towel to avoid the bumper edge cutting into her hands. She braced herself, back to the bumper, torso erect, knees flexed, shifted her grip and her stance, then took a deep breath, let it out, then snatched up the front end of the car, stood with her knees locked, holding it. Under the thin layer of fat beneath the skin, a female attribute, the sculptured muscles bulged in thighs, calves, shoulders, and arms. Thick cords bulged in her throat as her face slowly darkened. She turned her head slowly and smiled at me, a strangely provocative and knowing smile. Then she lowered it quickly. She wiped the sudden sweat from her arms, throat, and face. I had felt an unexpectedly savage surge of absolutely simple and immediate sexual desire for her, a brute impulse to fell her where she stood and mount her. And she knew it, and had deliberately caused it. There is a perverse streak in all of us, an urgency to experience the unusual. She was totally feminine, and sometime, somewhere, she had discovered that a demonstration of the unusual power of her body would provoke the male. Such physical strength is a rarity, a kind of genetic aberration which could be a throwback to prehistory, to a primitive construction of muscle fiber quite dissimilar to our own. It is more common in men than in women, is quite often coupled with a low order of intelligence which leads to the sideshow career of bending horseshoes, driving spikes barehanded, and folding coins with thumb and forefinger.
She tossed the towel into the car and said, "I can put most men down arm-wrassling. Not very girlygirl, huh?"
"You seem to be all girl, Lilo. I had the idea you were probably on Lew's list."
"Peddling it? Hell, no. I'm not on anybody's list. Lew was on my list, you could say. No matter what anybody says, it's a short list, Mac. With Lew it was sometimes, when he had hung around so long looking like a hound dog it got on my nerves, or when there was something I thought he knew that he wasn't planning to tell me. He always told me."
"Past tense."
"Dead, isn't he?"
"What makes you think so?"
"Because he isn't hanging around me, Mac. And that's the only thing that would keep him away. And because he was going bad fast. He was popping those pills like candy and they were scrambling his brains. He was seeing things, hearing voices, forgetting what he did last, and no idea of what he'd do next. So I guess somebody had to kill him before he spoiled somebody else's fun and games. Somebody tucked him into a swamp. What kind of games are you trying to play with me, Mac?"
"I've been interested in you since last Thursday night when I came within an inch and a half of killing you."
"Me? What the hell are you talking about?"
"The only reason I can come up with why you ran in front of my car was because there was somebody out there in the night you wanted to have see you. But you cut it too close."
Three seconds of silence, then the jolly grin again, and a wink. "I sure did, friend. What happened, my foot slipped coming up that bank, but I thought I could still make it. Then all those headlights were close enough to touch. I felt the breeze from that fender on my bare tail. I didn't mean to put you in the canal though. Sorry. Sure, I wanted somebody to see me. I wanted somebody to see that it was a girl not a man, because they were after Frank Baither."
"Who?"
"Somebody who wanted to kill him and did. Frank was the first and the only real man I ever did know. Some kid stuff before I met him, but after that nobody touched me but Frank, until they jailed him and then sent him up north. He's the one I went on trips with. We were gone four months when I was sixteen one time, and he made thirty thousand dollars and we spent twenty of it."
"What did he knock over?"
"He and two other guys took a casino in Biloxi for ninety on a three-way split. No, it was a hundred, because I remember he had to give ten to the cop who set it up for Frank because the casino was shorting the cop on the insurance money they were paying. Then we went out to California because there was a payroll thing Frank wanted to look at. He decided he didn't like it, and later some other people tried it and one got killed and the other two ended up in Q."
"Who came to kill Frank last Thursday?"
"Two men who'd been in on something Frank never told me about. He said their names were Hutchason and Orville. He said they thought he'd given them a short
count on a split. The way it happened, I was practically living there from the time he got back because he had a lot to catch up on. He heard something outside and woke me up and got his gun and told me to go on home, sneak as far as the road and go like hell. One of them followed me, or both of them. I thought they would think it was Frank and shoot me. So I ran across in front of your car so they'd see me. I went on home. It's only about three and a half miles from here, about. I went back early in the morning and saw the county cars and found out they'd killed him. I just... just didn't think anybody could ever kill Frank. You know, I didn't think you'd have a good enough look at me for long enough to remember me."
"If the sheriff knew there'd been a girl there with Baither, wouldn't he know it had been you?"
"He might think on it, but Mister Norm doesn't fuss with me much."
A back country silence, standing in shade. She stood against the big trunk of the tree, one knee flexed, bare foot against, the rough gray bark. She idly scratched the rounded top of her brown thigh, and I could hear in the silence the whisper of her nails against the skin. The animal hunger she had awakened with that odd display of strength had not died away. She caught and held my eye and read it, and built it back again with but a slight arching of her back, softening of her mouth.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look Page 21
