"She may have foolishly placed herself in a position where-"
"Sheriff! Here is a letter I have been carrying around with me. I had it hidden in the car. Betsy Kapp wrote it a few months ago to Lew Arnstead. As a practicing student of human nature, I think you will agree that it has that perfect ring of truth. It illustrates one of those... positions she foolishly placed herself in." I leaned and flipped it onto the desk, saying, "I suppose you could bring in Roddy Barramore and get a confirmation."
He read it to himself, and it made the skull-shape show through the flesh and skin. His face seemed to shrink and dwindle. He cleared his throat and, in a flat voice, read it into the record. I could see that it cost him, but I could not understand why.
He said, "When Mrs. Kapp is located, I will want to get further confirmation from her that she wrote this letter."
"Mrs. Kapp was wired to a tree sometime Sunday evening. The wire was around her throat, and she is very very dead."
Hyzer picked his hat up and stood up. "You'll take us there right now."
"When I'm through. A little delay won't make a damned bit of difference to her."
After a long hesitation he sat down. "Where did you get this letter?"
"I found one of Lew's little hidey-holes." I reached into the front of my shirt and heard Billy's hand slap at his holster, and I quickly pulled out the packet of pictures. I tossed them onto the desk. "Arnstead's sample case. Arnstead's Rent-a-Broad. I know who some of them are. Lilo Perris, for example. Geraldine Kimmey. Linda Featherman."
Billy hitched his chair closer, leaning to peer at the photographs as Hyzer examined them.
"Jesus H. Christ!" Billy said.
I said, "Don't act as if you never knew he was in the business, Billy."
"Hell, I knew he had some hustlers working. But Miss Kimmey! And the Featherman girl? Hell, no!"
"Sheriff, Betsy Kapp's body is not far from the place where Lew Arnstead had his number-one storage place. Somebody tore the place up and found his barrel safe under the fire brick on the hearth and tore it open and had a bonfire. I think that's where he hid the items that gave him the most leverage over the women. Special pictures, written confessions, assignment lists, date, time, price, and place. So somebody very interested in removing all evidence regarding some specific girl could have gone there and burned the records on all of them, and taken the money he kept there. They could have known or suspected Lew was dead, and wanted to keep somebody else from picking up where he left off. Or they could have thought he was still living, and wanted to put him out of business, or get one specific girl off the hook. Or maybe they didn't want anybody to ever be able to prove that one of Mister Norm's deputies had been running a string of women."
"Lots of possibilities, Mr. MCGee."
"Try another one, too. Lew and Betsy Kapp had a special relationship that was different from the setup he had with his other women. He could have told her about that place, and she could have gone there at the wrong time, when somebody was cleaning it out."
"Shall we go now?"
"After some more possibilities and some things I know are true, Sheriff. Five people on the truck job. Baither, Perris, Hutch, Orville, and Lilo. Hutch and Orville came into the area, probably quite a while back. I think I know where you should look for the bodies. About that envelope. Lilo got into the Baither house before she let Lew take her into the pump house. The previous night she worked on Baither until he told her where to find the money. Henry was there. But it had made him sick and he had walked away from it and didn't hear it. So she put the ice pick into Baither so he wouldn't tell it twice."
Hyzer folded his hands and rested them on the edge of the desk and sat with his eyes closed. The phone rang. He picked it up. "Sheriff Hyzer. Yes, King. Go ahead. What! All right. Go back there and stay there. We'll be along."
He hung up and pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, scowling. At last he looked at me and said, "McGee, as long as we're putting the cards face up, I'll tell you that Sturnevan wasn't off duty. I got permission to let him work in the county to the south of us. I'm the only one who knows that. The call I made to his home was just some misdirection. I had him put a beeper on Henry Perris's Rambler and hook up the directional equipment in his own private car. He just phoned in to say Perris got away from him, and he had to spend a lot of time cruising back roads until he found the one that would finally take him in the right direction to locate the car. He found Perris and the girl. They're dead."
I hadn't worried about the fingerprints, or the tire prints of the Buick. And Nulia would talk about her fifty dollars. "The girl was all right when I left the trailer," I said. "But Henry wasn't. He was dead. I killed him. I came here from there."
Cop eyes. Suddenly you are on the other side of an invisible fence, and they stare across the fence at you, like a rancher would stare at a sick steer.
"I left the gun under him. He fell on it. Henry was very determined to kill me. I threw an oyster knife into him. I'll reenact it at the scene."
Hyzer stood up and said to Billy, "Make sure he's clean and we'll bring him along. Have Wallace and Townsend follow with their gear. Make sure they bring the floodlights. I'll radio Doc on our way down there."
Back over the same roads, riding in the same cage where I had ridden with Meyer, in the same faint stink of illness and despair. The second car was close behind us when we pulled up to the trailer. There was a big sunset beginning to take shape, tinting the aluminum trailer a golden orange.
They got out and left me in the cage. King was standing by an old green-and-white Dodge sedan, in much the same off-duty uniform he had worn when I met him at the Adventurer, cigar in the corner of his mouth. They talked for a little while and then Billy came back and let me out.
"From the beginning," Hyzer snapped. "A short version. No oratory. We can fill in the details later." So I gave them the bones of it, including where the gun came from, how he had nearly gotten me out by my car, how I had gone inside and gotten out again, and where I had stood, and the condition of the girl when I left her.
They took me in for a look at her. She was still trussed up. She was on her side on the rug beside the bunk bed. The rug was soaked. There was a blue plastic bucket on its side on the rug near her head. The tape had been pulled off her mouth. Her hair was soaked. Her face was dark under the tan, a strange color. The light was going fast. Eyes half open. Foam caked in the corner of her mouth.
"Somebody held her head in that bucket," Billy said, "pulling it out to give her a chance to talk and shoving it in again when she wouldn't. So finally she did and McGee shoved her head back into the bucket and held it there until she drowned for sure, then let go of her. She fell over on her side just like that and he walked out."
"Billy," I said, "you are a hundred-and-ten-percent jackass."
"Sher'f," he said, "you think he would have said anything at all about this if King hadn't called in when he did? You know damn well he wouldn't."
Hyzer did not answer. He kept staring at the body of the girl.
King said, "You don't make good sense, Billy. Why would he come in at all? No, sir, I say somebody come here after he left and before I could find my way to where that damn needle kept pointing." There were too many big men in that trailer. It was overcrowded. The girl lay dead at our feet. I felt faint.
Hyzer pushed by us and we followed him out. The doctor arrived, the ambulance following him in. By then they had to hold lights on the bodies, but they were short examinations. No enigma as to the cause of death.
"On the man," he said, "it got just deep enough to slit the arch of the aorta, I'd say. Death in eight to ten seconds. Visible petechial hemorrhages in the girl's eyes and characteristic darkening of the skin. Death by drowning or suffocation. Need the time pinned down? I took the temperatures. At least one hour, possibly two."
"There's another one for you," Hyzer said.
"Another one, What the hell is going on?"
"I'll get in touch
later."
They had taken the pictures for the record. I watched them slide the two meat baskets into the ambulance and take off into the dusk at leisurely pace. No hurry anymore.
I walked over to where Hyzer stood and said, "On my way back I stopped at the Perris place and gave the woman there some money to stay with Mrs. Perris. I told her the girl and Mr. Perris wouldn't be back tonight. I thought the girl would be in custody. I didn't know she'd be dead."
He looked at me. "What?"
"I said I stopped and gave..."
"Yes. Yes, I heard you. Cable, Sturnevan, stay here and help them finish up. Billy, you ride back in with King. No. Have King show you where Perris's car is and you bring that in. I'll take McGee back with me. Come on." As we approached the car, he said, "You can ride in the front."
"Thank you."
He drove badly. The car wandered and he would slow down and speed up for no reason.
I saw in the reach of headlights the blue Opel under the big tree, and then he swung into the driveway and stopped.
"Come on," he said and I followed him to the doorway of the lighted house.
Nulia opened it and said, with a pleasure that surprised me, "Evenin', Sher'f Hyzer. Evenin'! Y'all keer to come in the house?"
I followed him in. "How is she tonight, Nulia?"
"Well, you know. Nothing much changes."
"I think the best thing to do is tell her right away. They're both dead, Nulia. Henry and Lillian."
She held her clenched hands against her chest and bowed her head, closed her eyes, lips moving silently. "Amen," she said. "Best she should know. What in the world will happen to her now?"
"I'll see that she gets care. McGee, you wait here." He went through the living room with assured step and into a hallway.
Nulia said, "Sher'f comes to see Miz Wanda sometimes. Calls me to my own place, asks me to call him when I'm sure they's both out for a spell. She like a ball of soft bread dough. Cain't move one finger. Sure needs a heap of keer. For talking, she blink her eye. One time for yes, two times for no. Closes them entire when she don't want to talk no more."
He was in there fifteen minutes. His face looked weary when he came out. "She taken it okay you think, Sher'f?"
"I guess so."
"Shouldn't want to cry no eyes out for them two, her or anybody else. I'm all fixed to stay here the night. My eldest brang me what I need."
I went out and got in with him and he drove better. He slowed down and put a spotlight on the side of the road, then made a careful turn over a short private bridge over the drainage canal and drove into a yard.
"Baither place?" I asked.
He said it was, turned off the lights and motor and got out. He leaned against the door on the driver's side as if suddenly taken ill.
"You all right, Norman?"
"He had two weeks before he set himself up for my jail and his guilty plea and Raiford. He could reasonably figure on two, three, or four years, because he was going to go after a perfect record up there. He did all the little maintenance chores necessary when you are going to leave a house vacant in this climate through the hot seasons, through the chance of hurricane. I used to come out here and try to think like Frank Baither. I think he set up a meet to make the split, set it up far enough from here so he bought the time to tuck it all away. It was bulky, you know. I got the track deposit list. Twenty-three thousand in ones, for example. They're counted by weight. Ninety-nine bills on the scale or a hundred and one, and the pointer swings way off center. Automatic banding. A hundred and one five in fives. Three hundred seventy-three eight in tens. One hundred eighty-eight three in twenties. Ninety-six thousand in fifties. Eighty-eight thousand in hundreds. Nine hundred and twenty thousand six hundred dollars. Take just the tens. Over thirty-seven thousand pieces of paper. Two hundred and forty pounds or so. The whole thing could go into six heavy suitcases."
"How did they get it back here?"
"Just a guess. Al Storey remembers that about that time Henry Perris found some winch trouble on the big wrecker, and drove it to his place to work on it over the weekend. So he would have covered the name on the cab doors with a fake name, changed the plates. When the money-truck crew passed out, he put the hook on it and took it to the rendezvous point where the other car or cars were waiting. After they broke it open, they probably offloaded the money into Baither's car, and he and Lillian drove back here with it, taking a different route than Henry did, bringing the truck back. They could have talked the other two into moving out quickly, into going into Miami and setting up an alibi. We'll meet at the X motel at Jacksonville or wherever. The two pickup specialists would buy it, because Baither had the reputation for never crossing anyone, and for good planning. But he never had one that big before, one big enough to set him up for life. No more risk. So he crossed them, and left Henry and Lillian to take care of the other two when they came around. Frank Baither was making a business investment in setting himself up for Raiford. It took suspicion off him, if anybody ever decided the money-truck job looked like his handiwork. And his insurance was that he was the only one who knew where he hid it. I don't think it mattered to him who killed off who. I think the money is here somewhere. Clean and safe and dry. But I haven't been able to find it."
I whacked at the mosquitoes humming around my ears, and scratched the chigger bites on my thighs that I'd picked up on the night walk with Meyer.
Silence. "But I guess it doesn't matter. It's all over for me here. I'll wind it up. Billy can operate it until they appoint somebody to take over until election."
"Why?"
"It's all turning sour in some strange way. I don't mean in a personal way. I knew in the back of my mind that I was wrong. I kept my eyes shut about... a personal matter, and told myself I would do such a total and dedicated job in every other way that it wouldn't matter. But it doesn't work that way. The scales don't measure the way they should. One little thing in one side weighs more than... everything else in the other side."
A fractional moon rode above the dark line of treetops. I could not risk saying anything. He was talking to himself. Yet he was at the same time making a rare offer of friendship. He was asking for help of some kind. A man proud, thoughtful, and troubled.
"It isn't just that I slaved over that tape playback and weeded out almost every trace of the accent of the people I grew up with. And it isn't that I realized and accepted the fact that I have a better mind than I thought I had when I was the high-school muscle man. Those things can isolate a man from his beginnings. But there is something else in the air. The faces of the young ones and the look in the eyes of the old ones. The guidelines are blurred. Are cops pigs? If I operate within a system where juvenile court cannot touch rich kids, where the innocent meaning those presumed innocent because they have not yet been tried-are jailed with the guilty when they can't raise bail, where judicial wisdom is conditioned by friendship and influence, where there are two kinds of law, one for blacks and one for whites; then if I go by the book, I am a kind of Judas goat, and if I bend the rules to improve--on my terms-the structure of local law, I am running my own little police state. I'd better get out of it because I can't live with either solution."
"Not with a little rule-bending here and there?"
"Like I bent rules for Lilo Perris? And Lew Arnstead?"
"That gravitational influence I was talking about?"
"Do you know what it is? You go around making guesses."
"She was your daughter. She knew it and Lew knew it."
"Is it that damned obvious!" he said, his voice breaking.
"Only to a man who mentioned her name to Johnny Hatch, and who was told by Nulia you visit Wanda from time to time."
It was a shabby, ordinary little story, and he felt compelled to tell it in detail, a way of punishing himself. Wanda had been married to Johnny Hatch over a year. She was bored and restless and full of vitality. Norman Hyzer had come home for Easter vacation from college, engaged but not yet married
. The Hyzer backyard and the Hatch backyard had a common rear property line, though they were on different streets. She'd asked him to help her dig up a small tree and move it, asked him into her house to clean up afterward, kidded him, teased him, challenged him, and seduced him. Though aching with guilt, he had found himself unable to stay away from her during the brief vacation. Later he could take a more objective view of it, and see how easily she had engineered it, and how little it had meant to her.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look Page 24
