The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  “Why?”

  “Because of things you might be able to tell me that would make the pattern clearer?”

  “What things?”

  “We don’t know yet. Maybe you’ve already told me, but it didn’t mean anything to either of us. At least not yet.”

  “But … why didn’t they just find someplace to put the body where it wouldn’t be found? Like we did.”

  “All I can do is make a guess. I think that if Arnstead disappeared suddenly and for good, the pattern might look a little more distinct to Sheriff Hyzer, and he might go after somebody a hell of a lot more logically suspect than you.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Then what we’ve done will make that happen!”

  “It might help, if my guessing is any good lately. And some person or persons unknown are going to wonder just what the hell happened.”

  “And come around and try to find out? I don’t want to go back there alone. Please!”

  She needed time. There would be a series of delayed reactions, little tremors on the psychic seismograph. Reality was an uncomfortable intruder in her garden of make-believe, and she needed time to transmute death-stink, rigor mortis, and the dusty eyes of the one-time beloved into the product of the special-effects man in a suspense cinema. So I told her to do her shopping and then come to the motel, to drive around to the side, park by the Buick and come to Unit 114. Her relief was evident.

  She drove out first. There was a place you could stop and see the road in both directions. From time to time I had heard the distant drone of infrequent traffic. I heard her accelerate, heard the rackety little engine fade into the afternoon silence.

  Kingfisher came back. The small fire was dead. I kicked the larger charred pieces into the pond, kicked sand over the ashes. I broke a pine branch off and retraced my steps to the sinkhole and the pit, brushing out those footprints so deep they were obviously those of a man carrying a heavy burden. I checked the edge of the hole and found some tan threads from his jacket caught on the limestone. I balled the threads and dropped them into darkness.

  They used you, Lew, baby. And if Lennie Sibelius hadn’t persisted, hadn’t tricked you into revealing the way that envelope of mine could have been planted in the Baither house when you were otherwise occupied in the shed, you might still be one of Hyzer’s faithful. But once you’d been opened up, it was only a question of time until Hyzer would get under your guard and find out the name of the woman who decoyed you. And a man hooked on uppers is too erratic. The original idea of planting that envelope was too fancy, Lew, baby. A spur-of-the-moment idea that made more problems than it solved. It turned you into a problem, and now I’ve turned you into another kind of problem for somebody. For Henry Perris, perhaps. And Lilo, and Hutch and Orville, maybe. Patterns emerging.

  So you’ve got a nice deep black hole for the long long sleep, down there with your hairy wallet and your dirty pictures, and your fond photo of your neglected horse.

  I stopped beside my rented car and decided that there was a reasonable possibility I might get picked up again. So I went through the pockets, just in case. Found what I had forgotten, the Polaroid print of my night-running girl, Lillian Hatch alias Lilo Perris. All that merry sensuality and that tough little jaw. Hair askew, and the hard little mouth recently bed-softened. A flash shot. She stood facing the camera, weight on the right leg, left knee bent, right fist on the right hip, muscular belly sucked in. Hard high conical breasts, the nipples fully erect. Spreading curly black pubic thatch, glossy and vital in the wink of the camera light, with the big pale weight of pudenda faintly visible through the whiskery thicket. I examined the background of the interior shot. It did not reveal much, as it was too shadowed. I could make out a corner of a bed, the edge of a table with a thin line of smoke rising from an ashtray improvised from a Planters Peanuts can. An object on the wall behind her which I couldn’t identify. It was partially obscured by her head. A round thing with radiating spikes, like a child’s drawing of the sun.

  I did not want to destroy the picture, and I felt uncomfortable keeping it on me. I finally put the convertible top up and knelt on the rear seat and partially unzipped the rear window. There was a deep enough fold in the Dacron canvas to slip the photograph in and zip it back up.

  I drove out to the mouth of the sandy curving tracks and after making certain County Line Road was empty, I gunned it out and headed for Cypress City. There are a lot of places I never want to go back to.

  Twelve

  I parked in my motel slot and went into the room. The phone light was blinking. I went out the other door and up the interior walkway past the pool and the small careful rock gardens to the rear entrance to the lobby.

  There were two slips in my box. One was the message Betsy had left. The other said to phone Deputy Sheriff Cable. I took the slips back to the room. Some fat children were wallowing and whooping in the pool. Every year there seems to be more fat children, and they seem to be noisier.

  I phoned the sheriff’s office. Cable wasn’t in. The dispatcher said he’d relay my message to Cable and he would probably get in touch with me. I said to tell him McGee was at the motel.

  I saw the cruiser arrive a few minutes later, so I went to the door and said howdy to him as he got out of the car.

  “Care to come in, Billy?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  I had turned the color set on. A golf match had appeared. The players had green faces. Billy Cable went over and fixed the color, turned the sound down.

  “Put the little round ball in the little round hole and they give you forty thousand dollars. Jee-zuss! Got me into the wrong line of work, I guess.”

  He sat on the bed and leaned back, propping himself on his elbows. A very competent, tough, unreadable, watchful face. He had sunlenses clipped onto his steel-rimmed spectacles, and he reached and tilted them up.

  “To what do I owe the honor and all the routine, Billy?”

  “Mister Norm got edgy about you when he found out this morning you didn’t sleep here. He wondered if maybe he made some kind of bad mistake about you, McGee.”

  “You better ease his mind.”

  “I already did, on my way over here. I wasn’t as nervous as he was, though.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I did some backtrailing, and I found out from King you were looking for somebody named Betsy that had been close to Lew, and he told you probably Betsy Kapp. So Frank, the bartender, told me you ate at the Lodge and you and Betsy took off in your cars at the same time. Well then I went to her place but there was nobody there at all. But I went around and looked in the kitchen window and there were two of everything drying on the sideboard. Cups, saucers, and so on. Very cozy. I hear those tits are genuine. Hardly seems possible.”

  “You do good police work, Billy, but we can skip the editorial comment. Okay?”

  “All right, you had to come up with that name someplace in order to ask King. And Mister Norm has had me looking all over for that damn fool Lew Arnstead. When I went out there his momma said he hadn’t been home for three days and nights, and when I asked her if anybody had been looking for him she said that it was none of my damned business. So I asked if a big fellow named McGee had been looking for him, and she told me that if I knew already, why was I wasting my breath asking. You know, I like that old lady.”

  “So do I.”

  “Aside from Betsy, how many other names did you come up with? There’d be a pretty long list.”

  “I could tell you it’s none of your damned business. But let’s be friends. Clara Willoughbee. That’s all. Maybe his mother didn’t keep a running score.”

  “Clara is a nice girl. About to get herself married. To a rich kid from Fort Myers.”

  “I didn’t look her up. Betsy came after Clara.”

  “But that was over quite awhile back, toward the end of last year, I think.”

  “I thought she might steer me to somebody more up to date.”

  “Why wo
uld you want that?”

  “He’s not an officer of the law at the moment. I thought I might locate him and see how much workout I could give him.”

  “King thinks maybe you could take him.”

  “I thought it might be worth a try. Incidentally, thanks for pulling him off Meyer.”

  “I should have moved faster. That last one came up from the floor. That’s the one that did the big damage. One more like that and he could have killed the man.”

  “What was his point?”

  Billy Cable sat up and took a half cigar out of the shirt pocket of his uniform and lit it, spat out a wet crumb of tobacco. “At that time it looked to us like you and Meyer gave it to Frank Baither. Frank was a rotten fellow, but nobody should have to die that hard. Both me and Lew saw the body. Lew knew Meyer hadn’t given Mister Norm a thing to go on. Sometimes, in this business, you get to where you want to hit somebody.”

  “Do you obey the urge, Billy?”

  “Me? Hell, no. But Lew is something else. Especially lately. Like his gears were slipping.”

  “Okay, why did you give me the guided tour before you took me to Hyzer?”

  “Why not? The damage had been done. I didn’t approve of it, and I knew Hyzer’d be scalded. But you use whatever’s handy. Anything that might make you think twice, and sit up straight and say yes, sir to the sher’f couldn’t hurt anything. But it didn’t work that way.”

  “Because we didn’t have anything to do with Baither.”

  “It’s begun to look that way.”

  “When can I leave this garden spot?”

  “That’d be up to Mister Norm. One thing I want to know. Did you find Lew?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I suppose that if Betsy phoned around and finally found him last night and asked him to come over, he might have come over to her place. That would give you a crack at him.”

  “Good idea. I didn’t think to ask her. What made you think of it?”

  “A crank call came in about eleven-thirty this morning. I just now put two and two together. No name given. Said he lives on Haydon Street. That’s the street behind Seminole, where Betsy lives. Said that about three in the morning there was a big fuss, men yelling and cursing and a woman screaming, and if we couldn’t keep order in a nice neighborhood, maybe the people ought to elect a sheriff who could.”

  “A little Saturday night festivity. Sorry, but I wasn’t at that particular party.”

  “Any idea where Betsy is?”

  “I’m expecting her to drop by pretty soon. I think she went shopping.”

  He got up slowly, stretched, flicked ashes on the motel rug. “So now I got to chase my ass all over the countryside today locating crazy Lew. Glad you didn’t cut out, McGee.”

  I went to the doorway with him and let him get about three strides toward his sedan and said, “Billy, I don’t know if it would clue you on where to look for him, but his mother told me she didn’t think he’d have gotten in trouble if he hadn’t started hanging around with trashy people named Perris.”

  He had turned and he looked at me for too long a time. Too many thoughts tumbling around in his head. His expression revealed nothing. Then, too casually, he said, “Might as well check that one out, too. Thanks.”

  Betsy Kapp arrived ten minutes later, with a big brown paper bag hugged against her. She was pallid and edgy, and eager to get inside and get the door closed.

  “I saw the police car, darling, and I went right on by. I went by twice. Who was it? What did they want?”

  I gave her the full story, including my final line, and told her how silent Billy Cable became. “Does the name mean anything to you, Betsy? Perris?”

  “Somebody told me he was running around with Lilo Perris. She lives down in the south county. She’s young, and she’s pretty, I guess, in a cheap obvious way. But she’s been in trouble with the law over and over. She’s loud and mean and hard as nails.”

  “Sounds like a rare jewel. Sounds like somebody who would know something about how Lew got killed.”

  “I don’t think so, really. She hasn’t been in that kind of trouble. Mostly fighting and disturbing the peace and public obscenity. She’s just wild and tough, and she doesn’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with.”

  “Not the kind an officer of the law should run with.”

  “Heavens, no! But she wouldn’t be exactly exclusive property. He’d be more like a dog in a pack trotting after a bitch. Men say she’s so sexy. I just can’t see it. Maybe he’s been down in the south county, back there in one of those shacky places along Shell Ridge Road, down there with the poachers and moonshiners. Travis, what did that phone call mean?”

  “If you and I were in the county jail at the time, trying to tell them we didn’t know where Lew’s body came from, how would it sound?”

  “Terrible!”

  “And what if an autopsy established the time of death at about three in the morning?”

  “We’ve been lucky, haven’t we?”

  “So far.”

  “Are you starving too, dear? Look! Good rye bread and lettuce and Black Diamond cheese and sardines and baloney and cold beer. Do you want me to make your sandwich, or do you want to?”

  I told her to go ahead. She used the white formica countertop next to the almost inaudible golf match. I had taken the first bite of my sandwich, not waiting for her to make her own, when Billy Cable knocked at the door.

  I let him in. She gave him a bright smile of welcome. “Hi, Billy. Make you a sandwich?”

  “Just now ate, Betsy. Thanks. Guess I might go for one of these kosher dills though.” He bit it, nodded approval, and while chomping away at it, “Saw a car that looked like yours, and McGee said you were going to come by, so I stopped to make sure.”

  “Make sure of what?”

  He sat on the bed. “My life is a lot easier if I can do what I know Mister Norm is going to ask me if I did already. So he is going to ask me if I asked you if maybe you give McGee here a line on how to find Lew.”

  “I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to find Lew Arnstead, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to.”

  “But Mister McGee here seemed anxious to find him?”

  “Well … sort of. And I can understand that, can’t you? After all, that man Lew hurt was a very good friend of Travis’s. Wouldn’t you look for somebody who beat up a friend of yours? Of course, maybe you don’t have any friend in particular, Billy.”

  I saw the momentary narrowing of his eyes. And then he smiled blandly. “Then McGee was only half anxious to locate Lew?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Speaking of my having a friend, Betsy, you’ve got a real talent for friendship, believe you me.”

  She turned and leaned her hips on the countertop and bit into her sardine sandwich. “Why, thank you, Billy!”

  “I think old Homer ought to write you up in that new brochure he’s doing for the Chamber of Commerce.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t rightly know. Maybe like sort of a natural resource of Cypress County. It isn’t every little city back here in the swamp country that’s got a nice dining room with good food and a hostess with the biggest set of knockers south of Waycross.”

  Her lips tightened and she held her sandwich out of the way and looked down at herself. “Now Billy. They’s not so much of a much.” Her accent was turning swampy. “Must be forty, fifty women around these parts wear a D-cup, too. Looks like a lot to you on account of the rest of me is on the skimpy side.”

  “Well, I guess there’s enough men around here and there who’d testify they’re real enough, Betsy.”

  This was a strong sexual antagonism coming out into the open. She colored, then smiled. “Oh, Billy Cable, I know you’re only funnin’ me, but when you try to kid around, honey, it comes out like dirty talk. You just don’t have the touch. I know you don’t mean anything wrong.”

  “It’s nice the way you throw everything into
your work, Miz Kapp. Obligin’.”

  She made a plausible attempt at merry laughter, and looked over at me and said, “Darlin’, ol’ Billy here could testify how real they are. Must have been a year and a half ago—”

  “Watch it!” Billy said sharply.

  “Now you started this, Billy, and Mr. McGee might be amused. I thought some sex maniac had got me. Like to scared me to death. I was walking from the Lodge over to my car on a dark night and got grabbed from behind. A girl friend told me one time the thing to do is go all limp and fall down, never try to fight. Well, I sat down on the parking lot and he let go, and I got a look at him, and what do you know, there was ol’ Billy weaving and smiling down at me, just couldn’t stop hisself from reaching around me and grabbing away like he was trying to honk those old-timey automobile horns. A girl could get a cancer that way. Well, sir, I was so scared and mad I hopped up and swang my pocketbook and knocked poor Billy’s glasses right off and they busted. And that made him so mad, he took a swing like to slap my head loose, but I ducked back and Billy fell down. Then what was it you were going to do to me, Billy?”

  “Knock it off, Betsy.”

  “Something about I should take him home with me or I was going to get arrested for every kind of thing he could think of. What did I say, Billy?”

  “Shut up, Betsy. I forget.”

  “I said I’d rather spend five years in a prison laundry than five minutes in bed with you. Billy?”

  He looked at her and did not answer. She took two steps toward him, thrust her jaw toward him and said in a low voice, “And it’s still exactly the same way, Deputy. There’s nothing you could ever do or say that’d make me change my mind.”

  He stared at her and then at me. Expressionless mask-like face, but the eyes behind the lenses held a cold reptilian venom. He spun and left, slamming the room door, slamming the cruiser door, shrieking rubber halfway to the front exit onto the highway.

  She ran to me and I held her in my arms. She was trembling and panting. Aftermath of another of the games Betsy played. But this game was obligatory. And, in its own way, valiant. Nothing but a cap pistol and a cheap whip between her and the tiger.