The operator left the line open on my person-to-person collect call, and I could hear the girl at the other end being professionally indefinite about where and how Lennie could be located.
“Operator, is that Miss Carmichael.”
“Trav? This is Annie, yes.”
“Are you accepting the collect call, Miss?”
“Well … I guess so. Yes. Travis? Why collect, for goodness’ sake?”
“It seemed simpler, on account of I am here in the county jail in Cypress County on suspicion of killing people.”
No gasps or cooing or joshing or stupid questions. She went to work. She got the phone number. She said that if we were in luck, she could catch Lennie between the apartment and the marina, on his telephone in his car. If he had already taken off, she wouldn’t get him until he monitored the Miami marine broadcast at six o’clock. Then she broke it off.
I told the hero sheriff the call would come back quickly, or not until after six. He looked at his watch. “Wait here for ten minutes. Stand over there against the wall.”
No readable inflection, no emotion in the delivery. So you stand against the wall, in your ratty straw slippers, the pant legs of the coveralls ending about five inches above where pants should end, the top buttons unbuttoned because it is too small across chest and shoulders, the sleeves ending midway between elbow and wrist. So you are a large grotesque unmannerly child, standing and watching an adult busy himself with adult things. Man in a dark business suit, crisp white shirt, dark tie, dark gloss of hair, opening folders, making small marginal notes.
The law, in its every dimension of the control of criminals, is geared to limited, stunted people. Regardless of what social, emotional, or economic factor stunted them, the end product is hate, suspicion, fear, violence, and despair. These are weaknesses, and the system is geared to exploit weaknesses. Mister Norm was a creature outside my experience. There were no labels I could put on him.
He answered the phone, held it out to me.
“Hello, Lennie,” I said.
“From this phone booth, Trav, I can see the Witchcraft, all fueled and ready, and my guests carrying the food and booze aboard, and a pair of blond twins slathering oil on each other up on the fly bridge. It was nice to have known you, pal.”
“Likewise. Take off, playboy. Cruise the ocean blue in your funny hat. Kiss the twins for me.”
“So all right! Bad?”
“And cute. And for once in your brief meteoric career, you’d be representing total innocence.”
“Now isn’t that nice! And I can’t get into a front page with it, because if I make you a star, you are going to have to find useful work or starve. Status right now?”
“Held for questioning. I waived my rights, and then all of a sudden a very bad question came along, and after thinking it over, I took it all back.” My mind was racing, trying to figure out some way to clue him into checking out Sheriff Norman Hyzer, because, had I been sure of Hyzer’s integrity—and sanity—I would have explained the envelope he had found.
“Innocence can answer any kind of question that comes up.”
“If everybody is truly interested in the concept, Lennie.”
“Chance of the law there looking for a setup?”
“It’s possible.”
“Annie said something about killing people.”
“At least one, they claim. They haven’t said why. Just hinted about some kind of a job long ago netting nine hundred thou.”
“So the area swarms with strobes and notebooks and little tape recorders?”
“Not a one.”
“So they can put a tight lid on and keep it on. Very rare these days, pal. I know they have a lumpy little patch of grass over there because I had to put down on it a year ago when my oil pressure started to look rotten and the mill started to heat on me. Look, I’ll have Wes take this party out and anchor someplace down the bay. I’ll make some phone calls here and there, and … let me see. I want to hit that grass patch by daylight, so let’s say that by six-thirty I’ll be holding your hand.”
“And Meyer’s.”
“I always told him evil companions would lead him astray.”
Hyzer had me taken back down to my private room. I sat on the bunk and felt very very glad not only about knowing Leonard Sibelius, but about having done him a favor he was not likely to forget. Not a tall man, but notable, conspicuously skinny, with a great big head and a great big expressive and heavy-featured face, and a wild mop of rust-gold hair. A big flexible resonant voice that could range from mountaintop oratory to husky, personal, confidential whisper. Fantastic memory, vast vocabulary, capable of making speeches on any subject at any time. A con artist, a conniver, a charmer, a spellbinder, an eccentric. Italian clothes, fast cars and fast planes and fast boats. In spite of the emaciation, which made him look like a chronic invalid, he could work at top speed all day and play all night, week after week. Charging through life, leaving a trail of empty bottles and grateful blondes and thankful clients. Huge fees from those who could afford it, and when they couldn’t afford it, there was always a market for the life story of any man defended by Lennie Sibelius, after the accused had signed over his rights to the fees and royalties therein. Total defense, in the courtroom, the newspapers, and on the television talk shows. Making it big and spending it big, and running all the way. And, somehow, laughing at himself. Ironic laughter. His black jest was that he had lost only one client. “It took that jury two days to bring back a guilty verdict. There were so many errors by the court, I knew it wouldn’t stand up. The route was through the appellate court to the state supreme court to the federal district court to the Supreme Court. And I had just finished a beautiful brief to present to the district court when the silly son of a bitch hung himself in his cell, just two weeks before our book climbed onto the bestseller list.”
It felt fine to know he was on the way. This whole thing was making me very edgy. It is one of the penalties of playing one of the roles society wants you to play. No regular hours, no mortgage payments, life insurance, withholding, retirement benefits, savings program. “Okay, where were you, Charlie, at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the tenth of April, seven years ago?”
“April? Tuesday? Unless I was sick, and that would be on the office records, I was right there at my desk in room fifteen-twenty on the fifteenth floor of the First Prudential Building. I work for Hutzler, Baskowich, and Troon. Mutual Funds. I’m an analyst. I’ve been with the firm eleven years now. Ask anybody.”
So where was McGee on any April Tuesday you want to name? The best I could do would be a plausible guess. Maybe I should keep a diary. Or have a time card and punch clock. Or is it a punch card and a time clock. Something that goes ding.
So you roam the fringes of the structured society, and it is just fine until they hold you up to the light. Then, somehow, in their eyes and yours, too, you begin to look like a cat burglar.
Five
At five-thirty jailer Priskitt came around and said I could take my chances on the American plan dinner, or sign a chit for a take-out meal from a restaurant down the street, said chit to be deducted from my captive funds when they were returned to me. He recommended the special deal. It turned out to be a piece of fried meat, boiled potatoes, overdone turnip greens, battery acid that smelled somewhat like coffee, and a soggy little wedge of apple pie. Four and a quarter, plus seventy-five cents for the trusty who had been sent to get it.
Lennie Sibelius did not appear at six-thirty, nor at seven, nor at seven-thirty, nor at eight. I began to wonder if he had tucked his Apache into a swamp.
At almost eight-thirty Priskitt came and got me and took me to a small locker room at the far end of the lower corridor. It smelled like stale laundry. Lennie was sitting on a battered metal table, custom shoes swinging. Lemon-yellow shirt and pale blue slacks.
“Your tailor isn’t doing much for you, pal,” he said.
“So let’s leave and you find me a new one.”
/> “We’ll leave. Don’t worry about it. But not right now.”
I sat on a bench in front of the lockers. “When did you get in?” He said he’d been around for more than two hours, having some interesting conversations.
“Anything you want to repeat for the tape recorder?”
“My guess would be that this room is clean, Trav. I think he goes by the book. Lawyer and client relationship is confidential stuff. He might stick a shill into a cell with a suspect and bug the conversation to pick up a lead, but I think the rules mean something to him.”
“He is something else entire, Lennie.”
“He makes better sense when you know the whole pattern. Local boy. Hell of a high-school quarterback. Offers from all over the country. Picked one from Michigan. Did well, but not quick enough for the pros. Married a bright girl up there. Both of them became teachers. She taught speech. She worked on his accent, weeded it out. Both of them worked in the public school system in Rochester, New York. Hyzer’s mother became ill, very ill, and Norman and his wife and baby daughter came down here. Hyzer’s mother died. He was still here trying to get the house cleared out and put it up for sale when a couple of Miami kids in a stolen car knocked over one of those mini-markets on the edge of town in broad daylight, pistol-whipped the clerk, but suddenly had a cop cruiser riding up on them with the flasher going. They came through town at high speed and lost it on a turn and rode the sidewalk and smashed into a concrete power pole. It killed one of them and crippled the other. But they mashed Hyzer’s bride and baby against the front of the post office thirty feet before they got to the pole. Killed them instantly. Hyzer buried them beside his mother and disappeared. Almost a year later he showed up here and announced for sheriff. No party affiliation. Independent. He won big. Sentimental favorite. Two years later he barely squeaked in, because he had done no glad-handing at all. Next time he won big because of his record. Lives for the job. Runs a taut ship. Keeps this county squeaky clean. No outside interests at all. If he is crazy, it is a productive compulsion. The rumor is that he has quietly built up files on every politician in the county, and they would rather not see anybody run against Hyzer. He takes correspondence courses. Law, criminology, ballistics, sociology, crime prevention, rehabilitation, penology.”
“And I’m just another of those people who smash wives and babies against the post office wall?”
“Maybe. But buried deeply enough so you won’t see any outward effect from it.”
“Like Meyer did?”
“That part doesn’t fit. It puzzles me. I am going to make it fit, and somebody is going to be sorrier than they can possibly imagine. But there’s more we have to know before that is going to make any sense.”
“How much did Hyzer tell you?”
“All the questions and all the answers up to the point where you stopped playing his game.”
So I told him about the envelope with the directions I had scribbled on the back. I told him how I could remember clearly what I had done with it. Everything in our wallets had still been sodden by the time we reached Al Storey’s gas station in the early morning. “I took everything out. Every time you have to go through your wallet you find junk you don’t need. I made a pile of that junk on top of that tin table out in the morning sunlight. I know the envelope and instructions were there because I unfolded it to see what it was. And by then, if what Hyzer says is true, this Frank Baither was already dead. After the station opened up, I picked up Meyer’s discards and mine and dropped them into a can by the side of the building, on top of some old newspapers, oil cans, and wiper blades.”
“Meaning that somebody took it out and carried it twenty miles north and sneaked past the deputy guarding the Baither place, and planted it inside where it would be found. Meaning that Hyzer has to believe it happened just that way.”
“It must have slipped out of my pocket while I was killing Frank Baither.”
“Steady as she goes, pal. Now here is something that bothers Hyzer also, I think. You were bound for Lauderdale. You left Lake Passkokee. Did you plan any stops on the way?”
“No.”
“Then why come down 112 to the Trail? That’s doing it the hard way.”
“We did it the hard way. I picked a little unmarked road that was supposed to take us right on over to the direct route. But with the roads torn up, everything looked different. After about three miles I knew I had the wrong road. So I kept going, hoping the damned thing would come out on the road we wanted. But it wandered all over hell and gone and finally came out onto 112 about fifteen miles north of the Cypress City cutoff. By then it was obviously shorter and quicker to come down 112 and take the Trail over to Route 27, then cut over to the Parkway on 820.”
“And Hyzer keeps thinking about how you and Meyer match the description.”
“What description, dammit?”
“Remember four years ago the way some people hit the money truck with all the racetrack cash aboard?”
“Just outside Miami? Vaguely. I’ve forgotten the gimmick.”
“It was beautiful,” Lennie said. “Absolutely beautiful. The three clowns who had truck duty stuck to the same routine every time they made the racetrack run. They would get there empty and park in back of a drive-in, and all three would go in, eat, kill some time until the big parking areas emptied and the people in the money room had time to weigh, band, sack, and tally the cash. Then they would go get it, and make a fifty-minute run back to the barn. It was after a very big handle that they were hit. They woke up on a little shell road way back in some undeveloped acreage. The locks had been drilled and the truck and radio disabled. They were too groggy to walk for help right away. They were separated and questioned. And examined. Same story. Each had become very very sleepy about fifteen minutes after they had loaded the money and left the track. Heavy dose of some form of barbiturate. Traces still left in the bloodstream. The driver had pulled over and stopped, thinking he would just take a nice little nap like the guard sitting there beside him, snoring. The police turned up a few people who had seen a bit brute of a wrecker put a hook on the armored truck, lift the front end, and trundle it off. They traced it back to the drive-in, a very small place with normally two people working during the daytime, a man in the kitchen and a girl working the counter. At night they’d have a second girl car-hopping. This was the pickup after the big Sunday afternoon race card, with the take including the Friday night and Saturday night meets. The men said the girl on the counter was new. A blonde. They had kidded around with her. By that time they had already had another report which dovetailed. A girl and three men had hit that drive-in a half hour before the money-truck people walked in. They had taped up the waitress and the chef and stashed them in a supply closet. The man had been too frightened and hysterical to pick up anything useful. The girl gave a full report of what she had noticed and remembered. One man was your size, Trav. One description fits Meyer. The third was average height, but very broad and thick in the shoulders and neck. She thought there might be a fourth man on watch outside the rear entrance, but she wasn’t certain. She said the girl was young.”
“You know a lot about it, Lennie.”
“I had a client they were trying to set up for that truck job. And now, all of a sudden, better than three years later, I’ve got two more.”
“This Frank Baither was in on it, then?”
“Sheriff Hyzer didn’t exactly break down and tell me all his problems, pal. We established a relationship of mutual respect. There have been generations of Baithers in this county, some very solid and some very unpredictable, but all of them tough and quick, and a few of them tough, quick, and smart. Like Frank. Lived alone in the old family place along that route. He’d be gone for weeks or months. Tax bills and utility bills and so on went to the Cypress Bank and Trust. He kept money in a special account and the bills were paid out of it. No visible means of support. When he’d move back in, he’d usually have a houseguest. Some pretty dolly in tight pants, visit
ing for a while. Hyzer is concerned about Cypress County, not about what Frank Baither might be doing elsewhere. Then a funny thing happened. Smart Frank Baither, on a Saturday night, got stumbling drunk and held up a gas station right here in town. Went lurching off, spilling the cash out of the till. Got grabbed and put in a cell. Didn’t make bail. Pleaded guilty, and got hit by the circuit court judge with five for armed robbery. Got transported off to Raiford. Did three and a half at Raiford before they let him out twelve days ago.”
“So?”
“Item. The blood test on the stumbling drunk, taken under protest, showed that he could have had two small beers, maybe three. Item. Discreet investigation showed he had enough in his special account so that he could have made bail during the three months he had to wait here for trial, but he didn’t. Item. For a man so involved with the outdoors, the swamps and the glades, Frank made a happy adjustment to this place and also to Raiford. Item. When Hyzer went out and checked Frank Baither’s place after arrest, he found that Frank had done all those little chores a man living alone will do when he expects to be away for a long long time. Put up the shutters and drained the pipes, disconnected the pumps and greased them. Drained the aerator.”
“Okay. He wanted to be tucked away.”
“Hyzer reasoned that if somebody was out to kill Frank Baither, Baither would have ambushed them rather than hide in jail. Hyzer checked out the big scores made anywhere in the country just before Baither set himself up for a felony conviction. He kept coming back to the money truck in Miami. Baither was medium height with a bull neck and very broad thick shoulders. As a kid he had worked for his uncle who operated a little yard, making cement block, and he had carried enough tons of mix and tons of finished block to give him that muscular overdevelopment. Hyzer reasoned that Frank Baither had somehow tricked his partners, eased out with the track money, hid it well, then set himself up for free room and board for a long time, counting on the odds that the partners on the outside would not last long enough to be waiting when he got out. The hard-case operators have very few productive years, Trav. Then they are tucked away, underground or behind the walls. Frank had about two weeks between the money-truck job and landing in the Cypress County jail, assuming he was involved. Hyzer wanted more to go on. He arranged to get word from Raiford on Frank’s activities in prison. By the end of the first year he learned that Frank had cultivated a few Latin Americans there. He was diligently studying Spanish. And it looked as if he would become reasonably fluent. The parts fitted together. Get out, pick up the money, and go. And live like a Greek shipowner for the rest of his life, with enough Spanish to learn who to bribe, and enough money to guarantee immunity.”
The Long Lavender Look Page 5