The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

  “I’ll get back to you.”

  “You do that! Bye now.” Knowing I was watching her, she wagged her little pink skirt all the way to the door, turned as she tugged at it, and blew me a small kiss with her pocketbook hand.

  I wrote mental ads as I drove into town: Girls, do you want extra pocket money? Have you ever thought of part-time hustling to supplement your income? Just a relatively few hours a month in pleasant surroundings. Opportunities to travel. Tax-free income. Must be between twenty and thirty, amiable, reasonably pretty and well built, and able to devote time and effort to your second occupation. Do you like people? Are you truly interested in meeting new people of means? Earn as you learn.

  It would not be such a nifty little sideline for Jeanie and Dori and company if one of the syndicate operations moved into Cypress City and took over Arnstead’s list and picked what looked useful enough and moved them out and put them on the circuit, broke them to total obedience. I remembered the time long ago when Miguel and I forced our way into the circus in Juarez one night, thinking to find the Australian with Miguel’s money among the spectators. Four soft paste-white women of indefinite years under the blue spotlights, sweating with the effort of working their circus routines with the black, the dwarf, the burro, and each other. We brought it to a halt when Miguel hit the room lights, knife ready. No Australian among the eight men and three women spectators. As Miguel made his eloquent apologies to the cold-eyed management, easing their indignation with a gift of pesos, one of the performers, a dead-eyed woman with a curved knife scar from forehead to corner of the mouth, which had nicked the eye and turned it milky, padded over to me, her sweat coppery-sharp in the stifling room and said, “Mister, didn’t you used to live in Dayton, Ohio? Weren’t you a young kid selling cars for the Buick agency in Dayton, Ohio?”

  I had time to tell her no. Sorry, no, lady. Then the room lights went off and the dwarf stung her across the rear with his little whip and she yelped and leaped and then went tumbling back onto the mattresses under the blue spots, tumbling back into the interrupted performance. We left, and found the Australian a week later.

  It has always bothered me that I could just as easily have said yes.

  Sixteen

  I went to the office of the county clerk and put on my most affable and folksy manner and asked if they had any alphabetical list of the taxpayers on the ad-valorem tax roles. They sent me to the assessor’s office, and a girl there sent me to the central records department, where they sent me back to the clerk’s office. Finally I settled for a look at the big book of aerials of the entire county, and by using the line drawing on the front as a guide, I was able to find the pages covering the northern half of Cattleman’s Road to the Wagner County line.

  I found three places where a northbound car could turn left. Each seemed to have quite a few places where a car could then turn right onto private land. Each photograph had a transparent overlay bound into the book with property owner’s names, and the number of the book of deeds and the page in the book which covered the property.

  Hullinger, Reiter, Rench, Dowd, Albritton, Eggert, Alderman, Jenkins, Hyatt, McCroan, Featherman. Lots of Featherman land, and lots of Hullinger land.

  So on the second aerial of the last road, I found on the overlay an irregular oblong, far smaller than the surrounding parcels, and it said: “Arnstead—3.12 acres. Book 23, page 1109.”

  I could make out the faint track of entrance drive, and part of the shape of a roof hidden by the pines. I measured the scale and found that the entrance was almost exactly two miles from the turn at Cattleman’s Road.

  The spectacled girl showed me where Book 23 was. I found the old quit-claim deed to Lewis B. Arnstead, a minor child, from his father, for the sum of one dollar and other valuable considerations.

  Often when you are the most hopeful, nothing works. Then you try a long shot and come up with it.

  Before I left I used a pay phone and tried Betsy and got my dime back.

  There was no breeze and the sun of early afternoon was hazy and hot. As I passed Cora Arnstead’s place, I saw the black horse standing in the shade near the pond, grazing. The geese were asleep on the grass by the pond, one sentinel sitting with his head high. The stunted cattle were at the far end of the pasture.

  I had no trouble finding the turn, nor finding the driveway two miles west of the turn. The brush touched the sides of the white car. An armadillo stared me to a stop, then went trundling off into the thicket.

  It was, as Jeanie Dahl had called it, a shack. Old black cypress siding on a hard-pine frame, with a tar-paper roof, gray-white with age, patched here and there with black tar. Holes in the window screens. Curtains yellowed by age. The stout padlock on the door hasp had been broken. I pushed the door open and went into the sickening oven-heat of the interior. It smelled as if lions lived there. The old swaybacked bed was out from the wall, mattress slashed in a half dozen places, soiled old sheets and blankets on the floor. Interior wallboard had been pried loose. Sections of the flooring had been ripped up. Chunks of the celotex ceiling had been torn down.

  Somebody had gone through it with utmost thoroughness, and had given the same attention to the toilet room and the storeroom. I saw some places which I thought at first could have been overlooked. But then I found the hiding place someone else had found first. It was the hearth in the shallow brick fireplace. It was of fire brick resting on a cement slab. Brush the ashes away and take out the fire bricks on the left-hand side, and the top of a mail-order cylindrical safe was exposed. A hole had been chipped and drilled down into the poured concrete, and the safe let down into it and cemented in. The dial had been prybarred off and then the prybar had been inserted in the hole behind the dial, and the cheap hinges had torn loose. The top was in the fireplace. The interior of the safe, about the dimension of two number-ten tins end to end, was empty.

  I sat on my heels and looked at the heap of black charred fragments of paper on the right side of the hearth. Photographic paper burns in a distinctive way and leaves a recognizable kind of ash. With a splinter from the torn floor I carefully shifted the pieces of ash. There were some small fragments of a different kind of paper which had not burned completely. They were apparently sheets from a notebook, torn, but then burned in small packets so that the outside sheets were blackened but the inside ones were merely brittle and yellowed. Fragments of names, portions of addresses, dates, amounts. I could not find matching bits from any one page, but found enough to conclude that it was a customer list, with the girl indicated by initials. DLA, LF, DS, BD, LP, LF, HA.

  The ledger accounts and advertising and probably the insurance documents of a very small business enterprise. Insurance in the form of confessions, photographs, letters. Cottage industry, bankrupt due to unforseen circumstances. Proprietor found himself in a hole.

  Suddenly I had enough of the oppressive heat, the lion-cage stench, dusty cobwebs, dead bugs, and old ashes. I stood up and started out toward the relative coolness of outdoors, and saw on the wall a cheap gaudy electric clock of the type which makes a sudden appearance in cut-rate drugstores at Christmastime. Dangling cord, unplugged. Small gilt face with a radiating array of black metal spikes.

  I moved back and found the position of the lens. The peanut can ashtray was on the floor near the corner. Yes, the table had been there, the end of the bed there, Lilo Perris standing there, her head in the way of the clock face.

  Confirmation of partnership. The chunky, brawny little sunbrown girl with all the contradictions in her face, who worked as Arnstead’s enforcer, so suited to the occasional chore that even after a year and a half, the photograph of her could turn Mrs. Freddie Severiss cold-pale and sweaty, her throat bunching to swallow the sudden bile.

  Then I went out, my shirt sweat-pasted to my back, out of the plundered lion cage into the dusty dooryard, into that midday silence when the birds and insects are still, with no breeze to hiss through the pines, or make rain-sounds in the fronds of palmetto. />
  I walked around the edge of the area, footsteps silenced by the brown cushion of old needles. A track led off to the side, portions of old car tracks in dried mud. I walked twenty feet down that shaded place, and was about to turn back when the angle of the sun made a single bright silvery glint through a line of brush.

  So I went farther, and saw it, the plastic sunflower growing in alien country. Circled the brush and found the tan VW, sitting there with the brute endearing patience of all small ugly machines. She was not in it.

  She was forty feet from it, standing there against the trunk of a tall old pine, her knees slightly bent. When she had tossed the skirt and blouse on the bed and taken her shower, she had put on lime-colored slacks and a tailored lemon-gold shirt.

  This was another of the games that Betsy played. Add rose to blue and the color can be a strange and memorable lavender. They had taken the ends of the length of galvanized fence wire, and twisted them together on the far side of the big tree, tightened them enough with pliers. She had stood erect then, perhaps. But later as the wire bit ever deeper into her throat, she sagged, the knees bending. Bulging clown-face in a long lavender look, eyes popping, vein-broken and yellowed, fat black tongue thrusting from the lips in permanent grimace. A game. Fright mask to tease the children. Look at me. Do I scare you? Just a little? I really don’t like this game very much, dear. I’ve dirtied my pretty slacks and I’ve begun to smell frightful, and the steak I promised is still in the freezer, the wine cooling. But I was delayed. By a game I don’t like very much.

  I found myself over by the little tan car, my eyes smarting, and I saw my fist in slow motion move six inches, jolt against the side window in back, saw the radiating cracks from the point of impact. Looked at my fist, saw how quickly the flesh was puffing. Idiot woman. Silly, sentimental, pushover broad, trading a tumble amid her gift-shoppe decor for the sound of the ancient worn-out words—love, fate, kismet, eternity, meaningfulness, affection.

  Pull back, McGee. You are grown up, you hope. And you spread bad luck where ’ere you go. Somebody gave her the final game to play, and maybe it was quicker than it looks. And why don’t you look at that shovel and that hole and start thinking logically, and keep yourself from looking at her, and breathe through your mouth when you are near her.

  Old long-handled shovel, rusty and with a dull edge. It leaned against the same tree. I saw where the grave had been started too close to the tree, and there had been too many roots. So the shoveler had moved over to the side and had dug out an area five feet long and a yard wide, and about two and a half feet deep at one end and eighteen inches at the other. Not a good shoveler. The dirt removed had not been piled neatly and handily, but had been thrown too far. Hasty, frantic shoveling. Wear yourself out too quickly. Perhaps trying to finish before having to be someplace, or trying to finish in the last of the daylight. Then, perhaps, reconsideration. What’s the big rush? She’s not going anywhere and nobody is coming here. Don’t move the car yet. Come back and tuck her down into the loam and stomp it flat and spread the needles. Then the risk of moving the car is less.

  Whatever you remembered, Betsy Kapp, whatever you tried to check out, it was the wrong thing. And there was no director to step in and stop the drama. Did you come here, or did you go to someone who brought you here?

  “What a crazy day,” she had said. “What a weird kind of a day?”

  I studied the moist bottom of the unfinished grave. A lot of footprints in the deeper end. Size ten probably. Broad. Maybe a D. Small crosswise corrugations, like on the composition soles of work shoes, but worn away in the center, under the ball of the foot. A triangular nick out of the heel of the right shoe, on the outside toward the back, half an inch long.

  I walked back to the shack area, back to my car. I fixed the front door precisely as it had been. I reviewed everything I had done. The only evidence that someone had been here was the star cracks in the side window of the VW, and I could not undo that. It might not be noticed or, if noticed, someone might think they had not happened to see it earlier. It went with the scalloped edges of the fenders, the dinged bumpers.

  Run breathless to the Man and say, “Sher’f, my God, I found her and she’s stone dead, plain and pure murdered to death”?

  And get patted on the head and reminded I am a civilian, and be told that I would probably find out in due course what happened.

  I was going to stop playing it their way. They had this big poker table working, and they had let me take the empty chair, provided I played my cards face up on the table and played by their rules. If I was naughty, they would deal me out of the next hand.

  No more earnest efforts to please. No more defensive play. No more letting the house man deal. As of now, it was intensely personal, time to kick over the table, scatter the chips, break out my own deck, deal my own game—without explaining the rules.

  The handle they use on you is your wistful need to pick up your life again right where it was interrupted, to be allowed to go in peace. When you decide that you do not give a damn about your own continuity, then you can even win a hand, and sometimes you can break the house.

  I went roaring out of there, and on the way south on Cattleman’s Road I found myself bumping the heel of my sore hand against the rim of the wheel, and humming a tuneless hymn of anticipation.

  “Sorry to keep calling you up like this, Sheriff, but I tried Betsy’s phone again just now and didn’t get an answer. Have you found out anything?”

  “Nothing yet. But we put out an all points hold on the car.”

  “I was thinking about her cat. Okay if I go over there and feed it and let it out in that fenced yard awhile?”

  “You can get in?”

  “Sure. I’ve still got that key I told you about.”

  “No objection, Mr. McGee. I heard you were in the courthouse looking up some property. What was that all about?”

  “It was just a wild idea that didn’t work out.”

  “It might be better if you just have some patience. Our investigations are proceeding.”

  “It must be quite a work load, Sheriff.”

  “How so?”

  “Murder of Frank Baither. Disappearance of Lew Arnstead. Disappearance of Betsy Kapp. I’d heard this was a quiet county.”

  “It has been, and it will be again. Incidentally, I questioned my chief deputy about the incident with Mrs. Kapp. His version differs in certain particulars, but there was enough substance for me to give him an additional warning. I wouldn’t want to lose him. He is a very valuable man, and the department is shorthanded.”

  “I think I better stay away from Billy.”

  “Until he has a chance to calm down. Yes.”

  “Well, thanks, Sheriff. I’ll be in touch.”

  Had Raoul been a little kid, he would have been standing crosslegged and moaning. When I opened the door he went at a humpbacked lope to a grassy corner, squatted and with a dreamy distant stare, emptied the inflated feline bladder. He came strolling back into the kitchen, stared into his empty dish and said, “Raoul?” I opened the cupboards until I found his canned glop, whined one open on the electric machine, tapped it into his dish. He ate a few hungry gobbles, then looked up and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him into the living room and into the bedroom. He looked in the bathroom and turned around and came out again, saying, “Raoul?”

  “Not here, furry friend. And she won’t be.”

  He sat down and began to wash. When in doubt, wash. I opened the lower left drawer of the dressing table and took the weapon out. Still loaded. Untouched. In Florida you can have one in the house, or in your car, but not on the person. I thought it would be nice to have it in the Buick. I poked around until I found a small, brightly-colored, rubberized beach bag with a drawstring. I dumped a dozen extra rounds into the bag and put the revolver in carefully, making certain that I knew its exact position in the opaque bag. I placed the bag on the passenger seat, toward my side, making it look entirely casual, yet so p
laced that my hand would fall on the grip naturally and without strain or obvious effort.

  Before I locked up, I asked the cat what the hell I was going to do with him. He seemed to have an amber-eyed confidence that I was going to make every effort to maintain him in the comfort to which he had become accustomed … and to let him out oftener.

  I remembered the Shell Ridge Road turnoff from the long nightwalk I had taken with Meyer. It was not far from the south line of the County, slanting off to the right, southwest.

  Rural mailboxes. Small frame houses on fill, with the wet marsh behind them, some cypress and live oak hammocks. All of them were on the right side of the road. The left side was fenced wetlands, posted at the proper legal intervals, the wire and posts new. Hounds and banty chickens and little kids and swamp buggies and campers. White dust behind me off the crushed white shell of the limestone road.

  Read the signs on the boxes. Stane. Murrity. Floyd. Garrison. Perris.

  Perris was a one-story block house painted a pale, water-stained green, with a roof of white asbestos shingles. There was a gnarled and handsome oak in the front yard. There had been white board fencing, but it was rotting away. There had been river gravel in the drive, but most of it had rain-washed away. Some dead trucks and cars sat out to the side of the house, hip deep in the raw green grasses of spring. There were parts of other dead vehicles strewn around. There was a big frame building behind the house, with both overhead doors up, so that I could see into it as I turned into the drive, see a little of work-benches and hoists and tools. A dainty little baby blue Opel with a savage little snout was parked under the spreading shade of the live oak out in front, its slanting windshield spattered with the grease of the exploding bugs of high-speed travel. When I parked beside the slab porch and turned the engine off, I could hear the muttering hum of a big air-conditioning compressor at the side of the house, and a tinny resonance of the sheet metal housing.