"It doesn't look like much of a road going in there."
"It's fifteen miles dead end off State Road 100. What it is, it's a village of people that do some ranch work on those spreads beyond there, out of my county. Hughes, Robischon, Star B. It's smaller than it was. The young ones leave. Shacks and a store. Gas pump and adobe church. That Amparo could be long dead, or moved away. Or still be there and not about to tell anybody anything. But it's worth taking a look."
"I hope you have better leads than this one."
"I do. I've got men working them. You come back here with whatever you can find out. I'll still be here."
Thirteen
AT EIGHT thirty I stopped with Isobel at a motel restaurant at the south edge of town. I told her of the new direction of the investigation, what Jass had said, and what the Sheriff had given me to do. Her response, if any, was very muted.
"Aren't you interested?" I asked her.
"I guess so. Travis, I'm emotionally exhausted. It's been such a strange day. All that waiting. Like in an airport when everything is grounded. Yes, I want to know who killed my brother. It seems to me now he died years ago. Or even that I knew he was going to die. He was the innocent bystander, I guess." She frowned across the table at me, dark glasses laid aside. "There is something strange about trying to kill yourself. You do kill some part of yourself, no matter what. Maybe the ability to feel deeply. I don't know. I feel like a stranger to myself. I have to find out who I am, who I am going to be. I feel... cut loose from everything, And I have this strange little feeling of... some kind of unholy joy. Every once in a while. An electric sparkle, like knowing you're soon to go on holiday. I shouldn't feel like that for no reason. I keep wondering if something is... wrong with my mind."
"I'll make an absurd guess. Maybe you're glad to be alive."
"Not particularly. But I won't try to kill myself again."
On my road map the fifteen miles over to Burned Wells was a faint dotted blue line, heading east off State Road 100 about six or seven miles north of Livingston. I slowed so I could spot the turn, pick up some landmark so I could find it easily on my way back.
"Let me go over there with you," she said.
"Why?"
"I don't know. It's something to do. If you find her, maybe she'd talk to me more readily than to you."
I took her along. It was a narrow sand and gravel road through burned land under a starry sky so bright I could see the contours of the land on either side of us. We climbed into a coarse jungle of huge tilts of rock, small buttes rising out of sand and cactus, and the road found its windy way through this Martian pasture.
The car thumped and slewed and churned along, with my headlights picking up the infrequent wink of a beer can, the red eyes of a jackrabbit. The road moved down again to a broad valley floor, past solemn stands of pipe organ cactus, and straightened toward a faraway glimmer of small lights against a black hill flank on the far side of the valley.
The village of Burned Wells was one broad unpaved street two blocks long. It had gone to bed for the night. The lights we had seen came from the white hissing glare of gasoline lanterns. One hung from the porch roof of the store, where a small group of men sat on the steps and railing and porch chairs. They were drinking beer.
There was a portable radio on the porch railing, turned to a volume the speaker couldn't handle, so that the highs buzzed and the bass blared, playing country music. I stopped short of the gas pump and got out of the car. When I was halfway to the porch the music stopped abruptly. There were nine of them, all middle-aged or older. The lantern made brilliant highlights and impenetrable shadows, leaching out all color so that the group, silent and motionless, looked like a black and white print which had been developed for maximum contrast.
I stopped short of the porch and said, "Good evening."
No response. Unless somebody spitting over the railing is a response.
"Perhaps you can help me." No response.
"I am trying to find a woman who lived here twenty-five years ago. I do not know her last name. Her first name was Amparo. She used to know Jasper Yeoman."
Two of them spat. Maybe I was achieving better communication. They were a hardylooking group, rough work clothes, tough weathered faces, bodies thickened by hard labor.
"Jasper Yeoman was killed today."
That created a stir, a moving, a few secretive mutterings.
"I worked for him," I said. "On private matters. I think it would be better if I didn't have to come back here with the county sheriff to help me get information about her."
A man bent down into the shadows beside his chair. He muttered something. A small boy I had not seen sprang up, went lithely over the railing and went running down the road into the darkness, bare feet slapping the packed dirt.
"is she still here?" I asked.
"You wait," the oldest one said.
It was not a long wait. The boy was back in about three minutes. He went right to the old man and whispered to him. It seemed a very long message.
"You can see the woman," the old man said. "Her man gives his permission. The child will take you."
I got Isobel out of the car, and we followed the boy down the middle of the wide dark street. When my eyes were used to the darkness I could see the small church at the end of the main street. Dogs came running out to bark at the scent of strangers. We turned left at the church. The boy pointed at an adobe house and ran off without a word. The door was open. There was a flicker of orange light inside. The small front garden was guarded by twisted sticks painted white. I rapped on the open door.
A woman appeared and stared at us and backed away and said, "Come in." Her voice was harsh. It was an order. The room was small and bare. Doorways led to other rooms. "I am Mrs. Sosegado," she said. "I was with Jass Yeoman a long long time ago. You sit down, please."
She was a short woman. She looked almost as broad as she was tall, but muscular rather than fat. Her hair was shining black, her face the color of a penny, her features so harsh and strong she looked masculine. Big breasts and hard belly pushed against the flowered fabric of a faded cotton dress.
"How was he killed?" she demanded.
"Poisoned."
She grimaced. "Who did such a thing?"
"They don't know. Not yet."
I sensed movement over by the doorway. I turned in time to see two men come into the room silently, burly young men who moved like big cats. They leaned against the wall inside the door. One of them spoke to her in a fast colloquial Spanish I could not catch even one word of. She answered him with an explosive anger.
"Two of my sons," she said contemptuously. "You worked for Jass?"
'Yes."
"He told you if he died to come to me to give me something?"
"No."
"It does not matter, I guess. Did I ever ask for anything? No! He gave because it was his wish." She stopped and tilted her head. "Then why are you here?"
"I am trying to find out who killed his wife and killed him." I hesitated, then said, "He mentioned you to me once."
Her face beamed. "Yes? What did he say?"
"That you were a very serious thing to him a long time ago."
"Oh yes. My God, I was beautiful! Who could know it now? He was a man. He had wildness. You know? And deep feelings for me. I could have made him marry me, I think. Such a mistake." She sighed, then gave me that intent look again. "Who is this woman with you?"
"This is Miss Webb. My name is McGee. Her brother was killed by perhaps the same people who killed Jass."
Her face darkened. "So you think I would know something. Would I hurt such a man? He was good to me! Who forced him to give money for the child? No one! He loved her as I do. Did he not take her into his house? She married a good man. Always he gave money for clothes, school, sickness, everything. Even such a big kitchen now, as I have never seen before. He thought of her like a daughter. I have letters from him, saying she is his daughter. He trusted me. I would not hurt..."
The hard flow of Spanish from behind me interrupted her. I have a reasonable gringo grasp of the tongue, but when they do not want you to understand, all you can hope to do is pick up the infrequent and unrelated word. She listened to it, looked dubious and then angry. She responded. The young man spoke again. She answered in a softer tone.
I said, "How did Dolores feel about him?"
"With love," Amparo said with great dignity. "What else for the father?" She bit her lip, glanced at her son and said to me, "No one knows of you coming to see me?"
It is a question that rings all the bells. It was extraordinarily clumsy, and it was obvious her son had asked her to ask it. But on the other hand, nearly everything thus far had been clumsy. Murder is not a game for amateurs, for an illegitimate house servant and her half brothers. I was so busy fitting pieces together I took too much time. My answer was late. "Sheriff Buckelberry sent me here," I said. It was late and clumsy and it sounded just as false as her question. Incompetence is contagious.
Isobel sensed what was going on and came in too fast and hearty, saying, "Oh yes, the Sheriff knows we've come to see you."
I heard a movement, looked around and saw that the boys were gone. The back of my neck felt chilly. Amparo looked puzzled. It was obvious to me she had no part in whatever had happened.
"Do your sons live here?" I asked politely.
"Eh? No, not those two. Charlie and Pablo. They come to visit, oh a month ago maybe. Out of work, I guess. They are in Phoenix. Canario. From my first husband. That name we gave to Dolores too. I have three little girls name Sosegado. Senor Canario died. A fine man. Esteban Sosegado my husband now, he is in bed for the rest of his life, in the back room. A tractor fell on him. There is the insurance. We manage. If Jass left anything, it would be easier now. But if he did not..." She shrugged expressively.
"You do have Jass's letters?"
She drew herself up. "But of course!"
"Could I see one?"
She got up without a word and left the room. Isobel gave me a nervous look. "Is there going to be trouble?"
"I don't know. Don't worry about it." Suddenly we heard her yelling somewhere in the back of the house. Moments later she carne storming back in, rigid with anger, the tears running down her copper face. "Gone!" she said. "Everything. The bah-kus is empty. The letters, the pictures of us smiling and happy. The picture of Jass holding little Dolores in his arms. All gone. Who could do such a thing?"
I could get nothing else from her. She was too upset over the loss of treasures. But she did call goodnight to us as we walked toward the church and the single street of Burned Wells. We walked back to the store. The lantern still hissed, but there was no one around. There was an eerie silence in the still cold air of the night village. I got Isobel into the car and got behind the wheel and turned to her and took hold of her hand.
"There can be some trouble," I said in a low voice. "I didn't like the looks of that pair. I didn't like that question. I am going to leave here in one hell of a hurry, so hang on tight. If I yell to you to get down, get right down onto the floor under the dash."
"A-All right."
I started it up, swung it into a skittering U-turn, and aimed it back the way we had come. I reached for the lights and then changed my mind. I could see the pale straight road across the flats by starlight. It was an earnest little car, and I took it right up to the outer edge of control. I expected her to yelp, but she sat braced beside me. I didn't tell her what bothered me. I could see a faint ground-level haziness off to the right of the road, parallel to it. With almost no wind at all, it could be the dust a previous vehicle had kicked up.
I had to drop it way down when I hit the slope, winding up through the rock maze. I had good night vision by then, good enough to look ahead and see where a heavy duty pickup truck, lights off, blocked the road completely. She saw it too. I heard her gasp. They'd picked a good spot, steep rock on both sides. I hit the brakes, banged it into reverse, stuck my head out the window and went down the winding slope backward at a crazy speed.
There was one hell of a crack, and a sharp peppery stinging on the back of my steering hand and the back of my neck. It startled me enough to put me off. I banged rock and came back onto the road, then went off the other side, pumped the brakes, nearly rocked it over, came back onto the road again and into a curve and missed the curve, slid it backward onto a ridge to a grinding stop, rear wheels lifted clear of the ground.
I clamped down on her wrist and dragged her out my side. The starlight seemed all too bright on that slope. I hustled her directly away from the road toward a towering mass of jumbled rock and deep shadows. She grunted and struggled and lurched along in her high heels. In heavy shadow I pulled her down beside me, and then squatted on my heels and looked back. Just as I had left the car I had glanced at the windshield, seen the hole punched in my side of it, almost dead center. The dazzle of cracks radiating from the punched hole had made the rest of the windshield, except way over on her side, almost opaque. She was fighting for breath. I looked back along the slope and saw the alarming distinctness of the tracks we had made across the spill of windblown sand. We had to move along, and fast, and across rock. I reached and pulled her shoes off, snapped the high heels off them and gave them back to her.
"Try to manage with these. We've got to move."
She was beginning to please me. She was handling herself well. We went back through shadows and in and out of patches of starlight. I heard one of them call and the other one answer. It sounded too damned close. We were working our way around to the back, out of sight of the road and the car. We came to a slope of rock I thought we could manage. I had her grab me by the belt with one hand, and clamber along behind me. I went diagonally up the long slope. Fifty yards of it, I guessed. I clambered over the top edge into a broad pocket of sand perhaps forty feet wide and sixty feet long, roughly oblong, slightly dished, the sand paled by the night light, the reddened rocks of day stained black.
I looked back and saw the wink and swing of a flashlight along the path we had taken. It would end at the rock slope. They would come up. And this was their country, not mine. They had the guns. I had a woman, and she was gasping for breath. Rough slopes of stone rimmed two sides of the basin. They could be climbed. They went up about thirty feet. The third side was a sheer cliff, just as high. There was a cave mouth in the cliff, narrow and tall.
I said to her in a low tone, "Now do exactly as I tell you."
I had her walk beside me, taking long strides, right to the mouth of the cave. It looked deep. I found a dead branch on the sand and picked it up. We walked backward, in our own footprints in the loose sand, back to the edge of the pitch we had climbed. I looked over the edge and saw that we weren't going to make it. They were dark shapes coming up the slant too swiftly. I saw a tiny fleck of light on metal. But I had to give it a try. I sent her running to where the loose rocks looked easiest to climb and told her to head on up. I backed along after her, wiping out our tracks with broad strokes of the branch. But at any moment a head would come over the edge and we would be in plain view.
"Hold up!" one of them said sharply. I heard it a little after they did, a distant clatter of a noisy engine.
The voices of the Sosegado boys carried well in the stillness. "Be old Tom coming back from Quintana," one said. "Goddam pickup right in his way."
"You stay put. Don't climb up there. I'll go move it."
I blessed old Tom and brushed my way back to the rocky slope. I discarded the branch and climbed up. She was at the top. The stone formation there was as if some giant had picked up a loose double handful of hundred ton dominoes and stacked them there in a jumbled pile. There were a thousand hiding places. I hurried her along to one and told her to stay put.
"What are you going to do?"
"If it doesn't work out, worm yourself back into the smallest deepest place you can find, and don't make a sound. Sooner or later Buckelberry will come looking. Stay alive."
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 03 - A Purple Place For Dying Page 16
