Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  “Joe?”

  “Wait a minute. It was Larry Joe. That’s right. Larry Joe Harris.”

  “Is Mrs. Larker still in the area?”

  “Last I heard. Hume had a stroke about three years ago and it was a bad one. Sixty-eight, I think he was. He lasted about three months. She sold the place to a family named Echeverría. She moved into Encinal, and I think she stays with her mother and takes care of her. The old lady is about eighty and got bad arthritis. You ask around Encinal for Betsy Ann Larker, somebody is bound to know her. Big tall pale woman.”

  “Is Walker Garvey still living?”

  “He’s been dead years. I can’t even remember what he died of. He wasn’t much loss to anybody.”

  “Where was his place?”

  “Up near Cotulla. I think it’s still in the family, one or the other of those daughters of his living there, but I don’t know the name. I can tell you how to find it. The quickest way is take State Forty-four west to Encinal, get onto I-Thirty-five, and it’s nearly thirty miles up to Cotulla. Get off the interstate there and take County Road Four Sixty-eight back southeast. It runs along parallel to the Nueces River. Four or five miles down that road you’ll see a couple of houses and some sheds and so on set well back, on your right-hand side. They still call it the Garvey place, I think. Pretty good land there, a couple miles from the river.

  “Gentlemen, a pleasure talking to you. Hope I’ve been of some help. It’s coming upon closing time, and I don’t stay around here one minute more than I need to.”

  We walked to the van. It was no longer in the shade, and hot enough inside to melt belt buckles. We talked it over and decided that the motel at Robstown had been comfortable enough and only about sixty miles away, so we decided to call it a day, but halfway there we came upon a motel in Alice that looked just about as good, and they had plenty of room, so we took a pair of singles out in the back wing of the place. The shower was a rusty trickle. The window air conditioners made a thumping roaring rattling sound, and the meat across the street was fried, but otherwise it was adequate. Good beds. Fresh clean linen.

  Over a big country breakfast, Meyer said, “Larry Joe Harris. Same man?”

  “Unless there’s been a lot of people crisscrossing this part of Texas eighteen years ago, selling Japanese stone lanterns.”

  “That’s sarcasm, I assume.”

  “I just think it’s him. I have that gut feeling. The womanizing fits. And Guffey is close to Garvey. He tried to be too entertaining that night aboard the Flush. Told us too much, and gave us a good lead. What if he said he’d been selling lightning rods or weather vanes? We could have gone in circles without finding anything. We’re narrowing it down.”

  “It might narrow down to the point where it disappears for good.”

  “You woke up cheery.”

  “Norma has been dead for twenty-three days. Did you wake up especially jovial?”

  “I woke up trying to grab hold of a dream I had just had about Annie. She was on some sort of platform that was pulling away from me, and I was running, but the harder I ran, the farther away it got. She was waving and smiling. No, I am not especially jovial, and you are not particularly cheery. I feel as if my ordered life has suddenly turned random on me. The ground under my feet has shifted. I want everything to be as it was. But it won’t be. Not ever again. Which do you like best, sincerity or sarcasm?”

  He gave me a slow smile and the little blue eyes glinted. “On the whole, sarcasm is more becoming. Will we find Betsy Ann?”

  “And we will show her the photograph.”

  We made the eighty miles to Encinal in an hour and a half. I was growing fond of the rugged old blue van. When it got up to speed, it was steady as the Orange Bowl.

  I made my inquiries at a gas station just off the interchange. The attendant was a fat bald man in high-heeled boots. As he filled the tank he said, “Well, sure. I guess nearly everybody in town knows Betsy Ann.” He looked at his watch. “She’ll be going to work pretty soon now. She comes on at eleven and works lunch. You go down that street there, and turn right at the corner, and you’ll see it on the right, with parking in front. Arturo’s Restaurant. You should want to eat there, it’s okay. But don’t get the tacos. Get the chicken enchiladas. And they got draft beer.”

  We parked in front. There was only one other vehicle there, a dusty Datsun. There were beer signs in the windows, a rickety screen door, and three overhead fans down the narrow room. Booths on the right, counter on the left, tables in the back.

  A tall woman in a waitress uniform was carrying a cup of coffee to a booth. She gave us a mechanical smile of welcome. She looked to be about fifty. She had long hair tinted an unnatural strawberry-blond shade and combed straight down in a young-girl style which emphasized rather than diminished the effect of the age lines in her pallid face. Under the blue uniform with its white cuffs on short sleeves, white collar, white trim on the pockets, her figure looked slim and attractive.

  We took a table in the farthest corner. We had agreed that it would be best to get it over with before the restaurant filled up. She came back with menus. “The lunch special isn’t ready yet, but he says it will be in another fifteen minutes. So if you want to have coffee while you wait.… The lunch special is a Spanish beef stew.”

  Meyer by preagreement took over. He is better than I am at this sort of thing. “May we ask you a personal question, Betsy Ann?”

  She frowned. “Do I know you? How do you know my name?”

  “Believe me, we do not want to cause you any grief or any alarm. We want to be your friends.”

  “I don’t understand. What do you want of me?”

  “As I said, we want to ask you a personal question. We have to ask it, unfortunately.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Meyer. This is my friend, Travis McGee. We’re from Florida. A man killed my niece three weeks ago. We have very little information about him. We’re trying to find him by looking into his past.”

  She looked bewildered. “I don’t know anybody killed anybody, mister. You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Just tell us if this is the man you once knew as Larry Joe Harris.”

  He slid the color print out of the folder as he spoke.

  She stared at it and made a strange, loud, moaning cry and bent forward from the waist as though she had been struck in the stomach. She put her hand against her mouth.

  A man in a white chef’s hat came bursting through the swinging door out of the kitchen, a ten-inch knife in his hand.

  “¡Que pasa!” he said. “Whassa matta, Betsy Ann?”

  “Nothing. It’s okay, Arturo.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “Everything is okay, really.”

  He looked at her and at us with suspicion and went back to the kitchen. A young man with a beard was leaning out of a booth to look at us.

  She tottered, then sat quickly in one of the other chairs at the table, eyes closed, and said, “Sorry. Sorry.”

  Meyer covered her hand with his. “I’m really sorry.”

  She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “Where’s the picture? I want to see it again. Thanks.” She leaned over it and studied it. “He’s kind of better-looking than when he was young. I’ve told myself he died, or he would have got in touch somehow. But he didn’t. I knew he never would. Sure, that’s Larry Joe Harris. Is that all you want from me?”

  “Yes. And we’re grateful.”

  “He killed your niece?”

  “It seems probable.”

  “It was eighteen years ago. How did you know about him and me?”

  “We talked to some people over in Freer.”

  “Sure. That’s where Hume’s damn sister lives. That’s the worst thing he ever did to me, telling his sister what happened with me and Larry Joe, telling her he looked through the window. I suppose you could say I did something bad to him, too. All right. But telling his sister was like putting it on a billboard
in living color in the middle of town. I just wasn’t that kind of a person. I was twenty-three when I married Hume Larker and he was forty-three. I loved that man. You don’t want to listen to all this dirty laundry.”

  “Betsy Ann, we want to learn as much as we can about Larry Joe Harris.”

  “He came by with those Japanese lanterns, and I thought they were just lovely. I got Hume to buy me one for the garden. I thought the salesman was a nice boy. I guessed he was twenty-two or twenty-three. He had a nice smile and he was polite. One morning around eleven o’clock, about a month later, he came by and asked me how I liked the lantern. I said I liked it fine. He said he sold lanterns and he read palms. I said that was nice, but I didn’t have any money for palm reading. He said he would read mine free, right there in the doorway. So I held it out and he took me by the wrist and studied it and then smiled into my eyes and he said that he could read in my palm that I was soon to have a love affair. I said I was married. And he said it was going to happen very very soon. He just hung on to my wrist and smiled at me, and he walked me right back through my own house. And … it happened. I was like a person in a dream. You know those dreams where something is happening and you can’t stop it? I wasn’t that kind of a woman. He should have known that. But I guess he knew something else about me that I’d never known. He came back to the house eight more times while Hume was off working. I know the number because I counted. And we hardly ever had anything to say to each other. It was always just like the first time. I would say to myself I was going to tell him off next time he came by, and when that old pickup came banging into the drive I would get all pumped up to tell him no, I wouldn’t, we shouldn’t, but he would take my hand and I would go right along with him like some dumb kid. And I must have been years older than him then. He had power over me. I don’t know what it was. When Hume went out to find him and kill him, I hoped he would, because Larry Joe had ruined my marriage. But Larry Joe had already took off with lzzy Garvey. Just a dumb little school kid, and she ran off with him, taking all the money Walker Garvey had hid in the house and just about everything else wasn’t nailed down. Where is Larry Joe?”

  “We don’t know. Where did he come from originally?”

  “Like I said, we hardly said a word to each other. All the rest of the time we lived there, people stared at me and whispered. That damned sister of Hume’s. You’re a nice man, Mr. Meyer. I’d tell you anything I know that would help. But I don’t know anything. Every time I think about it, I feel so damn dumb. I could live a million years and still never know how that could happen to me that way. And the hell of it is, Mr. Meyer, if he came in right now and smiled at me and took me by the hand, I think he could lead me right off wherever he wanted.”

  “I do appreciate your being so open and honest with us.”

  “I hope you find him. You should do with him like they do with witches and vampires. Pound a stake right through his black heart.”

  “You have no idea where he went when he left?”

  “No, and neither did the law. Walker Garvey called them in on it first thing. They left with over two thousand dollars from under a loose board in the floor of his closet, some watches and some guns, and some sterling silver flatware that had come down from Izzy’s grandmother on her mother’s side. And of course, the pickup truck, which was found, I heard, in Abilene weeks and weeks later.”

  “And the girl never came home?”

  “Never even wrote.”

  A group of men came into the restaurant, talking loudly and laughing. She got up quickly.

  “I don’t know anything that would help you. Really. And I’d just as soon not talk about it any more.”

  “Thank you for everything you told us,” Meyer said. “I know how hard it must have been for you, remembering it.”

  Her face softened. “It was a long long time ago.” She hurried off to take orders from the new arrivals. When she came back toward the kitchen, we signaled to her and ordered the Spanish beef stew. When she waited on us she was polite but remote. It was as though the conversation never had happened.

  Fifteen

  It was a quick twenty-eight miles to the Cotulla exit. In Cotulla—which looked to be twice the size of Freer—State Road 97 went straight, and we turned off on little old 468, narrow and lumpy.

  We stopped twice to ask about the old Garvey place, and at the second stop we got explicit directions and were told to look for the name Statzer on the rural mailbox. That was one of old Garvey’s daughters, they said. Christine.

  The Statzer drive was about four hundred yards long, and the buildings were spread out on a long knoll. Kids and dogs came swarming out of the bushes. The dogs looked big and dangerous, but the little kids whapped them across the side of the nose and chased them back out of the way.

  A chubby blond woman came out on the porch, shaded her eyes, and shouted, “Who you looking for?” She wore jeans and a T-shirt advertising Knotts Berry Farm.

  “Christine Statzer?”

  “That’s me. What’s it about?”

  “Isobelle Garvey.”

  “Izzy?” She plunged down the three steps and came trotting to the car as we were getting out. “Is she alive? Where is she?” All the little kids were standing around, wide-eyed.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Meyer said. “We came to ask about her.”

  The animation went out of her face. “So who is asking?”

  “My name is Meyer. This is my associate, Mr. McGee. He is helping me look for the man we think married and then killed my niece. When he was using the name Larry Joe Harris, the same man is reported to have robbed your father and run away with your sister.”

  She tilted her head to the side and frowned. “Friend, that was eighteen damn years ago! That ain’t exactly a red-hot trail you’re following.”

  “The more we can learn about him, the better chance we have of finding him. We thought you might be willing to give us what help you can.”

  She shooed the children away and led us up onto the long deep porch. “They aren’t all mine,” she said. “Summertime, two of my sisters bring their kids up from Laredo for me to look after. It all evens out sooner or later. Set.”

  Meyer sat in a rocker. She sat on a bench and I sat on the porch railing. There was a mother cat with a basket of kittens under the bench. Three geese walked across the side yard, angling their heads to peer up at us.

  “Papa didn’t know a thing about Larry Joe. The way he found him, Papa went over there to Galveston when they wired him about those damn Jap lanterns coming in on a freighter. Do you know about the lanterns?”

  “Your father got mad at a garden-supply dealer?” I said.

  “Right. He got mad easy and often. He tried to import a dozen and then fifty, but thirty tons was the least he could take. He got the license and went ahead with it, and by the time they came in, he had almost forgot about them. So he went over and arranged for them to be trucked right here to the farm. On the way back, Papa picked up Larry Joe, hitchhiking, and got onto the problem of the thirteen hundred garden lanterns, all of them in three pieces, and this Larry Joe told him he could sell anything to anybody anywhere, and they struck a deal. I must say that everybody liked him. When I met him, I liked him fine. At that time I’d been married almost a year, and my first baby was beginning to show. You see, Izzy and me, we were the two youngest of the seven. And when I left the place to move in with Burt and his folks, just Izzy and Papa were left here.”

  Meyer slid the photograph out of his folder and handed it over to her. She studied it. “Must be real recent. He’s forty here if he’s a day. Fine-looking man. Who’s that beyond him?”

  “Norma. My niece.”

  “She’s blurred but she looks pretty. Anyway, it looked like Papa had made a good choice, because Larry Joe surely unloaded those weird lanterns. He must have put ten thousand miles on that old pickup. The people that bought them made a real good buy, if you like that kind of thing. He got rid of all but about a doz
en. They’re still out there in one of the sheds, I think. I remember seeing them a couple of years back. Maybe Burt moved them, I don’t know. Papa sicced the cops onto Larry Joe. I guess the trouble was that Papa always had too many deals going. He was always taking off to check out something he owned some kind of a piece of. And that meant that Izzy and Larry Joe were here alone probably once too often. We all really loved Izzy, all us sisters. She was the best of the lot, believe me. She was cute and warm and funny and loving. And just a kid. You know? Sixteen. Too young to really know what kind of man he was. After they’d been gone some time we heard of two situations where he was getting an extra bonus along with the pay for those lanterns. Some woman down near Encinal, and another one above Catarina. And if it came out there was two of them, you can be pretty sure there must have been ten more being so careful it never came out.”

  “Your father must have been very upset.”

  “He was like a crazy person. He never could figure out how Larry Joe knew about the money under the floor, because he’d never let on to any of us he kept that kind of cash money in the house. They took two gold watches out of Papa’s desk, and they took the sterling silver flatware that came down from my grandma. And the pickup truck, which turned up in a used-car lot in Abilene weeks later. It turned Papa meaner than a snake. Not that he was exactly cheerful beforehand. He stayed sour until the day he died. Mom died when Izzy was three, wore down from having all us girls. Look, I’m telling you things. Tell me more about Larry Joe Harris.”

  “When he married my niece earlier this year, his name was Evan Lawrence. Five years ago, when he ran away with the sister of a real-estate broker in Dallas, his name was Jerry Tobin. She was killed in an accident near Ingram, when the car hit a tree and burned and he was thrown free. We don’t know who he really is yet. We’re trying to find out.”