“Like the preacher says. Evil companions.”
“Pally, we all got a few of those. All it means is you better not try to find Lew. You better stay the hell away from him.”
“And it means his judgment has gone bad. That’s why he pounded on Meyer. He could have killed him.”
“I stepped out at the wrong time.”
“Why didn’t Billy Cable stop him?”
“Because Billy and him haven’t been getting along so good, and when you see a man bitching himself, why stop him? Anyway, Billy finally did stop him or Lew would have killed your friend. Then when it was your turn with Mister Norm, Billy took the chance of giving you a look at your friend so Mister Norm would get the picture on Lew loud and clear and soon. Poor bastard.”
“King, the woman who signed the complaint and withdrew it against Arnstead, was her first name Betsy?”
“Jesus Q. Christ! You’re supposed to be a stranger in town, McGee. Betsy Kapp. Mrs. Betsy Kapp. She’s a divorced lady, works hostess in the dining room down at the Live Oak Lodge. Mrs. Teffer’s place. Best food in the county.”
Nice to have King confirm Lennie Sibelius’s appraisal of the local cuisine. I went back inside with King, and twenty minutes later drove into the middle of the city. It was a little after nine when I walked into the dining room. There was a family celebration at a long table near the far wall, champagne and toasts by middle-aged males to a fresh-faced girl and her blushing husband-to-be. Two quiet couples at small tables, with coffee and dessert by candlelight. Three burly businessmen drawing plot plans on the tablecloth.
As the hostess approached me, menus in the crook of her arm, I knew she had to be Betsy Kapp. She was the lean-bodied blonde who had starred in ten of Lew’s Polaroid shots, the one with the attempt at a sexy leer which didn’t quite come off. She wore a dark blue shift with a little starched white collar, and that mixed look of query and disapproval which told me that it was a little late for dinner.
Before she could turn me away, I said, “My attorney, Mr. Sibelius, said that I’d be a fool to eat anywhere else, Mrs. Kapp.”
“Oh?” she said. And then “Oh.” She turned and looked at the foyer clock. “Well, it is a little late, but if you … didn’t want anything too terribly elaborate …”
“Sirloin, baked potato, tossed salad with oil and vinegar, and coffee?”
“I think that would … Sit wherever you want, while I …”
She took off for the kitchen in a slightly knock-kneed jog and I picked a table by the wall as far from the other four parties as I could get. She came back smiling. “They hadn’t turned the broiler off, thank goodness. But no baked. Home fries?”
“Fine.”
“And the steak?”
“Medium rare.”
“I can get you a cocktail from the bar.”
“Plymouth gin, if they have it, on the rocks, straight, with a twist. A double. Booth’s, if they don’t.”
She gave the order, came back with my drink, then went to the register and took care of the departing family party and then the businessmen. I watched her move around. She looked a little younger and prettier than in the amateur nude studies, probably because there was a lively animation in her face and because she moved quickly and stood well. Had I not seen the pictures, I would have wondered if the imposing thrust of bosom might not be a pneumatic artifice, a fabricated symbol of the culture’s obsession with mammary bounty. But I knew they were real, imposingly, awesomely real.
When she brought my salad she said, “I have to be the waitress, too. Another drink?”
She brought the dinner. It was a splendid piece of meat indeed. When I was half finished, the last of the two couples paid and left, and I had the dining room to myself.
Betsy Kapp said, “Would you like your coffee now?”
I waved at the empty chair across from me. “With two cups?”
She hesitated. “Why not? Thank you. I’ve been on my feet since eleven-thirty this morning.”
She brought the coffee and sat across from me, leaned to the candle flame to light her cigarette. “It was a real pleasure serving Mr. Sibelius. He’s a very charming man.”
And, I thought, he tips very big and tips everybody in sight. I held my hand out. “Travis McGee,” I said. She shook hands, pulled her long-fingered hand away quickly.
“I heard that you … you were in some trouble.”
“Am in some trouble. Had the very bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I think it’s getting straightened out. I never heard of Mr. Frank Baither until we were picked up for killing him. I guess if the sheriff still thought so, I’d be back inside.”
Somebody rattled the foyer door, then apparently gave up and went away.
“I keep wondering about something,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Mr. Sibelius didn’t know my name. I’m sure of that. But you did.”
I shrugged. “Some people were standing outside talking. I asked if it was too late to eat here, and they said to come in and ask Betsy Kapp. So when you came at me with the menus, it seemed logical to call you Mrs. Kapp. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I made a mistake. Miss Kapp?”
She grimaced. “No. It’s Mrs. But I’m not working at it.”
“Is this your hometown, Betsy?”
“No. I’m from Winter Haven, originally. But they sent me here to stay with my aunt when I was twelve. She died when I was seventeen and I went back home, but things were terrible there and so I came back here and married the boy I was going with. Then he was killed in a terrible automobile accident, and after I got the insurance settlement I went to Miami and then Atlanta, but I didn’t like it in either place. Then I came back here and married a fellow named Greg Kapp, and we fought like some kind of animals until I couldn’t stand it anymore and divorced him. I don’t know where he went and I don’t care. So here I am, and pretty soon it will be four years I’ve been working here. I get sort of restless, but you know how it is. It’s hard to break loose. I sort of like the work, and you get treated pretty good here. Why should I be telling you my whole life story?”
“Because I’m interested. Good reason?”
“I guess you are. God knows why you should be. Are you married, Travis McGee?”
“No. Never have been.”
“You must have some kind of work that keeps you outdoors and all. You look like you’re in great shape.”
“Salvage work, out of Fort Lauderdale.”
“Like on a ship?”
“No. I’m an independent contractor. I take whatever comes along. I live alone on a houseboat at a marina.”
“Gee, that must be a great way to live. Well, I live alone too, but not on any houseboat. It’s a little cottage that my aunt had, that she left me. The bank had it and rented it until I was twenty-one. Greg was after me all the time to sell it. I’m glad now I didn’t. I moved in after the divorce, when the lease ran out on the people I had renting it.”
“I guess you know Cypress City pretty well then.”
“Well enough.”
“I’d like to be able to ask somebody about it, about the people. Sheriff Hyzer and Frank Baither and so on. But you’ve probably got things to do.”
“Because it’s Saturday night? Hah! The only thing I’ve got to do is total the tape and count the money and give Frank, the bartender, the cash and checks.”
“So I can wait.”
“It doesn’t take me long, really.” Her smile, as she stood up, was the distillation of several hundred motion pictures, refined in the loneliness of the bathroom mirror, born of a hunger for romance, for magic, for tremulous, yearning love. This was the meet-cute episode, immortalized by all the Doris Days, unexpected treasure for a thirty-summers blonde with something childish-girlish about her mouth, something that would never tighten into maturity. It would always yearn, always hope, always pretend—and it would always be used.
She took one of Lennie’s twenties and brought me my c
hange and went back to the register. It made a delicate little problem. To tip or not to tip. A tip would put a strain on the relationship she was trying, with concealed nervousness, to establish. So I went over to her and put a five on the counter by the register and said, “Save this for the waitress who was in such a rush to leave, Betsy.”
She giggled. “Like turning the other cheek, huh? Helen is a good waitress, but she’s always in a terrible rush to get home to her kids. I’ll see she gets it, and I’ll see you get one of her tables next time.”
We walked out together. I asked her suggestion as to where we could go for a drink. She said that first she ought to take her car home. I followed her. She had one of those little pale tan Volkswagens with the fenders slightly chewed up, some trim missing, some rust streaks. I followed her. She drove headlong, yanking it around the corners. She was silhouetted erect in the oncoming lights. We sped through old residential areas where the people sat in their dimly lighted rooms, watching all the frantic imitations of festivity on the small home screens, watching the hosts and the hostesses who were old, dear, and familiar friends. Long ago their parents had old familiar friends named Alexander Botts and Scattergood Baines and Tugboat Annie. But reading was a lot harder. You had to make up the pictures in your head. Easier to sit and watch the pictures somebody else planned. And it had a comforting sameness, using up that portion of your head which would start fretting and worrying if it wasn’t kept busy.
“Your mission, Mr. Phelps, if you care to accept it, is to discredit the half brother of the dictator of Kataynzia, recover the nine billion in gold, and give it to the leader of the free democratic underground, and disarm the ICBMs now being installed in the Stammerhorn Mountains. If you or any of your I.M. Force are killed or captured …”
“Wait one cotton-pickin’ minute! Accept it! Accept a dumb-dumb mission like that? Are you some kind of ding-a-ling? We’d never get out of that rotten little country alive.”
“Mr. Phelps!”
“Barney won’t try it. Paris won’t try it. And I won’t try it. Go get somebody else. Go get Cinnamon, even. Come back next week, boss, with something that makes sense.”
And the screens go dark, from the oil-bound coasts of Maine to the oily shores of Southern California. Chief Ironsides retires to a chicken farm. Marshall Dillon shoots himself in the leg, trying to outdraw the hard case from Tombstone. The hatchet bounces back off the tree and cuts down tall Dan’l Boone. The American living room becomes silent. The people look at each other, puzzled, coming out of the sweet, long, hazy years of automated imagination.
Where’d all the heroes go, Andy?
Maybe, honey, they went where all the others went, a long time ago. Way off someplace. Tarzan and Sir Galahad and Robin Hood. Ben Casey and Cap’n Ahab and The Shadow and Peter Rabbit. Went off and joined them.
But what are we going to do, Andy? What are we going to do?
Maybe … talk some. Think about things.
Talk about what? Think about what? I’m scared, Andy.
But there’s no problem, really, because after the screens go dark and silent, all the tapes of the watchers self-destruct in five seconds.
Little mental games often compromise my attention. She braked so hard and unexpectedly I nearly climbed the back slope of the bug. She swung left into a narrow drive between tall thick hedges. I followed, and she drove into a small carport, cut the lights, got out, grinned, and squinted back into my headlight glare, turned on a carport light and pulled the edge of her hand across her throat. So I turned off my lights and engine and got out. April bugs were shrilling in the hedges, under a murky half moon.
“A lot of the meat is broiled,” she said. “They have those exhaust fans and all, but I’m in and out of there enough so when I get home I smell like meat grease. It gets in my hair and my clothes. It won’t take me long to get rid of it, Travis. Come and look at my little nest.”
It was to be admired, even though she had enough furniture and lamps and department store art objects for a cottage twice the size. One careless move, and I felt as if I would welt my leg on a table and spill $19.95 worth of pseudo-Mexican ceramics. I had to admire the cat, which was easier. A big male neuter, part alley and part Persian, patterned in gray and black, a wise, tolerant, secure cat who mentioned, politely enough, that he would like to hear the sound of the electric can opener. She opened a can of something that looked horrid, dumped it onto a paper saucer and put it in his corner. He approached it slowly, making electric motor sounds, then hunched into the serious ceremony of eating.
“He can say his name,” she said. “Raoul. Raoul?”
The cat looked up at her, chop-licking, and said, “Raoul,” and bent again to his gluey feast.
“Come see his yard,” she said. “Raoul’s personal piece of outdoors.”
We went through another door off the kitchen into a fenced grassy rectangle about twenty feet by thirty. She clicked on the outdoor floods as we went out. They were amber-colored. The grape-stake fence was about eight feet high, affording total privacy. There were flagstones, planting areas, vines against the grape stake, a little recycling electric fountain in the middle, which she turned on. There was some redwood furniture and a sun cot.
I had the feeling I had been there before, and then I recognized areas of it which had formed the background for the Polaroid poses.
“Raoul and I both love this place,” she said. “Neighborhood dogs roam in packs, and he knows they can’t get at him. And I can stretch out in the sun absolutely stark and just bake myself into a stupor. It’s sort of pointless, really, because I can’t ever get a decent tan. My skin resists it. I go pink and then it turns sort of yellow-sallow and then back to white. But I just love the feel of the sun.”
I made admiring sounds and she led me back in and back into the living room. “Sit in that chair, dear,” she said. “When you put your legs up, it’s fabulously comfortable, really. Do you like Brazilian music? I have this thing about the samba. See, I’ve got it all on these cassettes.”
“I like it.”
“Good!” As she picked out a couple of cassettes, she said, “A gentleman friend got me a wonderful discount on this stereo cassette player. He makes his own tapes off records and off the air and then he makes duplicates and leaves them with me when he comes through town. Travis, while you’re waiting for me, would you like a drink? I’ve got practically anything. Gin, vodka, rum, Scotch, and so on. I don’t drink gin, actually. So I don’t know anything about it. There’s almost a full bottle somebody left of something called Bengal gin. Is that any good?”
“It’s excellent.”
“I thought it might be pretty good. I’ve been meaning to ask Frank, the bartender, but I keep forgetting. I could fix you a drink like you had at the Lodge. Me, I like to come home and make myself a tall tall Scotch and water with lots of ice, and then take a long hot hot sudsy bath and take a sip of the icy drink every little while. It tastes fantastically marvelous then. I’m going to have the drink, dear, but don’t worry about waiting for me to take a long bath. I’ll make it a quick shower. Can I fix you what you …”
“That would be just fine, Betsy.”
So she started the cassette and adjusted the volume. She came smiling back with a gin and ice for me in a giant crystal glass tinted green, with grapes and grapevines etched into it, placed it on a cork coaster on the table beside the tilt chair. The cork coaster had small bright fish painted on it. The paper napkin was pink, imprinted with BETSY in red diagonally across a scalloped corner. Beside the drink she put a little blue pottery rowboat full of salted mixed nuts.
“There!” she said above the music of Mr. Bonfa, and went off to get rid of the occupational odor of burning meat, leaving me in my fabulously comfortable chair, next to a drink that would tranquilize a musk ox, semirecumbent in a static forest of bric-a-brac, listening to Maria Toledo breathe Portuguese love words at me in reasonably good stereo.
A compulsive strangler would have damned
few tactical problems. She had taken my word that Lennie Sibelius was my attorney. She took my word that my semiarrest was due to bad luck rather than guilt. She went on instinct, and trusted the stranger. But a strangler can look like me. Or thee. The guest could tiptoe in and clamp the sick hand on the soapy throat, and in the moments left to her she could remember an entirely different sequence of motion pictures. Death itself would not be real because it would look like Alfred Hitchcock.
In fifteen minutes she reappeared in the doorway. “Look at me!” she wailed. “Will you just look at me!”
She wore a floor-length terry robe dyed in a big bold psychedelic pattern of red, orange, pink, and lemon. She held it closed, one hand at her throat, the other at her waist. Her hair was sopping wet, pasted flat to the delicate shape of the skull.
“I am so dang stupid about mechanical things,” she complained.
“What happened?”
“I got out of the shower and bent over and turned it so the water comes out of the faucets, and then I was going to close the drain for a minute, to sort of rinse the tub, and I hit the shower thing, dammit. I didn’t want to get my hair wet. It’s very dense and very fine and it takes like forever to dry. I’m terribly sorry, dear. But I can’t go out like this, really. Would you mind terribly? We could talk here, couldn’t we? And there really aren’t that many nice places to go at this time of night. What time is it? My goodness, it’s after eleven-thirty already! I had no idea.”
“I was going to suggest a rain check. Maybe that isn’t the right expression.”
The Long Lavender Look Page 10