The Long Lavender Look

by John D. MacDonald

It was three-fifteen when I rang the doorbell. I waited and as I started to ring it again, Lilo Perris pulled it open and looked out through the screen. She wore what I think is called a jump dress, a kind of mini-dress which is shorts rather than a skirt at the bottom. It was a vivid orange, deepening her tan, whitening teeth, bringing out the healthy blue-whites of her eyes. There was a little flicker in those eyes as she looked at me, then glanced beyond me and saw the white convertible out there. No alarm, no surprise. Just a little click of recognition, identification.

  At first she was just a girl with a blunt little face, twenty-two or -three. Brawny little chunk of a girl. Then came the extraordinary impact of a total, driving sexuality. I could remember only two other women who had exuded that degree of psychic musk at close range—one was a successful film actress who could not act and had no need to, the other a woman who, before her thirtieth year had married and divorced three fortunes, cutting herself an ample slice of each. It was arrogance and availability. It was posture and look that said, “Here it is, baby, if you’re man enough, and I don’t think you are, because nobody has been man enough yet.” But not that kind of presentation alone. Two other things with it. A total health, the kind of health you see in show dogs and racehorses. Glossy pelt, glistening eyes, blood-pink membranes, with pulse and respiration infinitely slow with the body at rest, preparing it for explosive demands. In addition, a perfection of detail, the natural eyelashes like little curved and clipped bits of enameled black wire. No dentist would have defied reality by making teeth that perfect.

  “If you were selling something, man, nobody wants to buy if you get the house heated up.” Deeper voice than expected, but without huskiness. A clear, flexible contralto.

  “So ask me in, Lilo.”

  She came out and yanked the door shut and let the screen slap shut. She went down the single porch step and across the front yard, certain I would follow her. She picked up a sandspur on the tough sole of her bare right foot, and hardly breaking stride, licked her fingertips, brought the knee high and plucked it off. I saw the velvety bunch and flex of muscles in her brown back as she did so. The jump dress had a deep V back.

  In the oak shade she turned and braced an orange haunch against the front fender-curve of the Opel and said, “I’m kind of a car freak. I like to fly this thing, but there’s a shimmy up front over eighty and that bastard Henry can’t find it. I told him he finds it or I strap him to the goddam hood and wind it up and let him see for himself.”

  And that was the last ingredient, a flavor of total and dangerous unpredictability. One could never feel at ease with her unless she had been welded into a steel collar, and there was a short length of chain fastened to a heavy eyebolt in a strong wall. And even then you’d take care to see that there was nothing within her reach that she could use to hit with or slice with, or throw. It was the same feeling as the time the pretty lady came aboard The Busted Flush with her ocelot, unsnapped his chain, and told him to stay on the yellow couch. He did, and watched every move I made, with pale-green eyes that never blinked, with an occasional ripple of muscles in back and flank. He seemed to smile at me, as if telling me that we both knew he could rip my throat open before I could say “Pretty kitty.” It made us very aware of each other in a feral way. If she wanted to strap Henry to the hood of the Opel, she would do so. And if she wanted to wind it way up and then bang the brakes to see how far ahead of her down the highway she could propel Henry, she would do that, too.

  I could not use her unless I could appraise her well enough to find strengths and weaknesses. She was so unlike what I had expected, I had to discard all plans, including the wild one of getting her out somewhere where I could thump her unconscious and let her wake up wired to a tree facing the horror of Betsy Kapp. One cannot make any impression on an ocelot by showing it a dead ocelot.

  “Nice little car,” I said.

  “The name is McSomething. Somebody told me.”

  “McGee.”

  “McGee, what you are doing is boring me. Can you think of anything to build this up a little? Maybe you get your kick out of memorizing me or something.”

  “It’s like this, Lilo. Hyzer said stay around. So I was killing time until he said leave. But maybe there are some things lying around that could be interesting.”

  “Depends on what freaks you, Mac.”

  “The lush life, and so it is always a question of financing it, isn’t it?”

  “You want to cut yourself in on how I’ve got it made, living here on my big estate, with all the swimming pools and the billiard room and all that?”

  “Maybe it’s just that you have talents you’re not getting the maximum return from. You made one hell of an impression on Dori Severiss.”

  A sharp look of renewed interest. A merry, hearty, crinkly laugh. “Now how about you!”

  “You could go around drifting and dreaming, girl, and never get loose from this big estate of yours. Lew Arnstead was making a dollar.”

  “Maybe your idea of a dollar, not mine, Mac. Lew had a nickle-dime way of thinking. He had some ass on call, and he shook some people down here and there, but it was too big a risk for what he was taking out of it. I told him. I told him forty times, honest. I told him he oughta contact somebody in the big time and wholesale those pigs of his for cash and have somebody come and get them before he got in a mess and Hyzer threw him out.”

  “And you’d know all about that?”

  “A few years back, Mac, I used to go on trips with a friend. You keep your ears open, you learn how things are.”

  Not at all a dull-minded girl. A shrewdness about her that was impressive.

  “But didn’t you take on some risk when you helped him straighten out Mrs. Severiss?”

  She made a face. “I was stupid. I get bored and I do stupid things and get in trouble. I shouldna. He was telling me his problems and I said let me handle it, and he said go ahead. Just that, once with her and once with his schoolteacher, what’s her name. Geraldine Kimmey. She got herself in a bind by groping some little kid, and then after Lew dated her up three or four times, she wanted to bluff her way off the list, so I had her sing me a lot of soprano where nobody could hear the high notes.” A sudden, merry, ingratiating smile. “A shrink could have a picnic checking me out. When I get all edgy and uptight and mean-acting, making somebody scream and sweat works just like a charm. The better they yell, the more warm and friendly I feel toward them. I like to fell in love with Geraldine. It’s like I was helping them get past something, or over something. I wonder sometimes if it’s got anything to do with being so strong.”

  “You look healthy enough.”

  “It’s more than that. I’m some kind of freak. Wanta see?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked into the blue car and reached in and took out a beach towel and shook the sand out of it. She went to the front bumper and used the towel to avoid the bumper edge cutting into her hands. She braced herself, back to the bumper, torso erect, knees flexed, shifted her grip and her stance, then took a deep breath, let it out, then snatched up the front end of the car, stood with her knees locked, holding it. Under the thin layer of fat beneath the skin, a female attribute, the sculptured muscles bulged in thighs, calves, shoulders, and arms. Thick cords bulged in her throat as her face slowly darkened. She turned her head slowly and smiled at me, a strangely provocative and knowing smile. Then she lowered it quickly. She wiped the sudden sweat from her arms, throat, and face. I had felt an unexpectedly savage surge of absolutely simple and immediate sexual desire for her, a brute impulse to fell her where she stood and mount her. And she knew it, and had deliberately caused it. There is a perverse streak in all of us, an urgency to experience the unusual. She was totally feminine, and sometime, somewhere, she had discovered that a demonstration of the unusual power of her body would provoke the male. Such physical strength is a rarity, a kind of genetic aberration which could be a throwback to prehistory, to a primitive construction of muscle fiber quite
dissimilar to our own. It is more common in men than in women, is quite often coupled with a low order of intelligence which leads to the sideshow career of bending horseshoes, driving spikes barehanded, and folding coins with thumb and forefinger.

  She tossed the towel into the car and said, “I can put most men down arm-wrassling. Not very girly-girl, huh?”

  “You seem to be all girl, Lilo. I had the idea you were probably on Lew’s list.”

  “Peddling it? Hell, no. I’m not on anybody’s list. Lew was on my list, you could say. No matter what anybody says, it’s a short list, Mac. With Lew it was sometimes, when he had hung around so long looking like a hound dog it got on my nerves, or when there was something I thought he knew that he wasn’t planning to tell me. He always told me.”

  “Past tense.”

  “Dead, isn’t he?”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because he isn’t hanging around me, Mac. And that’s the only thing that would keep him away. And because he was going bad fast. He was popping those pills like candy and they were scrambling his brains. He was seeing things, hearing voices, forgetting what he did last, and no idea of what he’d do next. So I guess somebody had to kill him before he spoiled somebody else’s fun and games. Somebody tucked him into a swamp. What kind of games are you trying to play with me, Mac?”

  “I’ve been interested in you since last Thursday night when I came within an inch and a half of killing you.”

  “Me? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The only reason I can come up with why you ran in front of my car was because there was somebody out there in the night you wanted to have see you. But you cut it too close.”

  Three seconds of silence, then the jolly grin again, and a wink. “I sure did, friend. What happened, my foot slipped coming up that bank, but I thought I could still make it. Then all those headlights were close enough to touch. I felt the breeze from that fender on my bare tail. I didn’t mean to put you in the canal though. Sorry. Sure, I wanted somebody to see me. I wanted somebody to see that it was a girl not a man, because they were after Frank Baither.”

  “Who?”

  “Somebody who wanted to kill him and did. Frank was the first and the only real man I ever did know. Some kid stuff before I met him, but after that nobody touched me but Frank, until they jailed him and then sent him up north. He’s the one I went on trips with. We were gone four months when I was sixteen one time, and he made thirty thousand dollars and we spent twenty of it.”

  “What did he knock over?”

  “He and two other guys took a casino in Biloxi for ninety on a three-way split. No, it was a hundred, because I remember he had to give ten to the cop who set it up for Frank because the casino was shorting the cop on the insurance money they were paying. Then we went out to California because there was a payroll thing Frank wanted to look at. He decided he didn’t like it, and later some other people tried it and one got killed and the other two ended up in Q.”

  “Who came to kill Frank last Thursday?”

  “Two men who’d been in on something Frank never told me about. He said their names were Hutchason and Orville. He said they thought he’d given them a short count on a split. The way it happened, I was practically living there from the time he got back, because he had a lot to catch up on. He heard something outside and woke me up and got his gun and told me to go on home, sneak as far as the road and go like hell. One of them followed me, or both of them. I thought they would think it was Frank and shoot me. So I ran across in front of your car so they’d see me. I went on home. It’s only about three and a half miles from here, about. I went back early in the morning and saw the county cars and found out they’d killed him. I just … just didn’t think anybody could ever kill Frank. You know, I didn’t think you’d have a good enough look at me for long enough to remember me.”

  “If the sheriff knew there’d been a girl there with Baither, wouldn’t he know it had been you?”

  “He might think on it, but Mister Norm doesn’t fuss with me much.”

  A back country silence, standing in shade. She stood against the big trunk of the tree, one knee flexed, bare foot against the rough gray bark. She idly scratched the rounded top of her brown thigh, and I could hear in the silence the whisper of her nails against the skin. The animal hunger she had awakened with that odd display of strength had not died away. She caught and held my eye and read it, and built it back again with but a slight arching of her back, softening of her mouth.

  “Could be,” she whispered. “It just could be.”

  “Think so?”

  “Like part of whatever game we’re playing. Saying one thing, holding other things back. We can go someplace, try us out. You’d be thinking I’d say more. I’d be thinking you might say more about what you know, or think you know. That would come after the edge was off. I’m not like this often, Mr. Mac. Could be more than you can take on?”

  “I manage to totter around.”

  She said, “I got to go in a minute, see if that damn Nulia has got the old lady cleaned up right this time. Last time she got through the room still stank, and I had to whop her old black ass and make her do it over right.”

  She grinned, shoved herself away from the tree, and thumped me on the biceps with a small hard brown fist, a considerable blow, and ran to the house, fleet as a young boy.

  Seventeen

  She was in the house over ten minutes. She came out and beckoned to me and headed toward my car. By the time I got to it she had jacked the driver’s seat forward and turned the key on. I got in the passenger seat and put the rubber beach bag on the floor.

  “Easier than giving directions,” she said. “I don’t want to drive mine until Henry gets that shimmy out of it. Okay with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Pretty bag belong to a nice lady?” She backed out onto the unpaved road, and headed southwest.

  “Friendly lady name of Jeanie Dahl.”

  “Mmmm. That’s where you found out about me and Dori Severiss.”

  “And Lew’s sideline.”

  She was driving more conservatively than I had expected. “Thought you were getting the scoop from ol’ Betsy Kapp, knowing you wasted no time moving in on those giant titties. Never knew just how much Lew talked to her. Never could figure out how they got together in the first place. He had a funny soft spot for that fool woman. I told him once he ought to sign her onto his little team. Even offered to go convince her, but he told me if I ever went near her, he’d club my head right down between my knees, and I think he meant it.”

  I saw the sign indicating we were leaving Cypress County. “Hyzer asked me to stay in his jurisdiction.”

  “Right now, mister, does that mean a hell of a lot to you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that it does.”

  “We aren’t going to be out of it long, honey. Right turn coming up, before we come out onto the Trail, and it swings back into Cypress County. Car rides nice.”

  “Seems to. Where are we going?”

  “A place a friend of mine lent me when he went in the Navy. It’s real private.”

  And it was. It was a fairly new aluminum house trailer of average size, set on a cement-block foundation on a small cypress hammock in marshy grassland. Limestone fill had been trucked in to make a small causeway between an old logging road and the hammock. A flock of white egrets went dipping and winging away through the cypress and hanging gray moss when she parked by the trailer.

  She squatted and reached up and behind a place where a block had been left out for ventilation purposes, and pulled out the keys. She went over and unlocked a small cement-block pumphouse and tripped a switch that started a husky gasoline generator.

  “Now we’ve got air conditioning and, in a little while, ice cubes. Mac, honey.”

  “Can I object to Mac?”

  “You can ask for anything your evil heart desires, man.”

  “Travis or Trav or McGee.”

>   “So I settle for McGee.”

  “You do that.”

  She unlocked the trailer and stepped up into it. “Hey, let’s open this thing up until the air conditioning starts doing something.”

  We opened the windows. It was tidy inside. It had the compact flavor of a good cabin cruiser, with ample stowage. She checked to make certain there was water in the ice-cube trays. She turned on a little red radio and prowled the dial until she found some heavy rock and turned it up far enough to drown out the sound of the generator and the whine of the refrigerator and the busy whackety-thud of the compressor on the air conditioner.

  She reached around herself and undid the few inches of zipper that reached from the V back to the base of her spine, and said, “Can you think of anything special we’re waiting on, McGee?” She shrugged it forward off her shoulders, lowered it and stepped out of it and flipped it aside. I noted with a remote objectivity that her breasts were a slight quarter-tone lighter than the rest of her, and that the bikini band around her hips was as white as in the photograph.

  She was as totally at home in her naked hide as any animal. She moved without either coyness or boldness, walked over to the bunk bed, knee-walked toward the wall, rolled over onto her back. “As any jackass can plainly see, I am all the way ready. Whyn’t you close the other windows, but let’s leave this here one open the way it is? You’re sure in some terrible rush, huh? Gun shy, McGee?”

  I closed the windows with all deliberate speed. It had to be a setup. Though Meyer might try to argue the point, young girls do not make a habit of suddenly propositioning me, driving me off to a hideaway, peeling off their clothes, rolling onto their backs, and breathing hard.

  But just how was I being set up? Strong as she was, I couldn’t see her doing much bare-handed damage to me. If there was a weapon, where was it? Down behind the mattress? There were no cupboards she could reach. As I unbuttoned my shirt, I noticed that the two little hooks which held the aluminum screen in the window were undone.

  Setup. Phone call from the house. Lots of noise. She had opened that window, so she had unhooked the screen. She had moved over to the far side of the bunk bed, under the window. We were expecting a visitor. Maybe he had arrived and was squatting under the window, awaiting the sounds of festivity. She was certainly powerful enough to hold me or anyone motionless long enough, and perfectly positioned.