A Purple Place For Dying

by John D. MacDonald

  I started to walk by him, and then stopped and went back and said, "Pardon me. I was supposed to pick up a car off the lot out there, an old maroon DeSoto. It was left there yesterday or the day before. Would you know anything about it?"

  He looked me over and moved the cigar to the other corner of his mouth. "It was took off, mister."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What I said. They put a hook on it and took it off. Maybe about ten this morning. It was a city rig, so I'd guess it went down to the car pound, like they do for parking wrong, or a recovery of something stole."

  It bothered her. She had more questions than I could answer. I took a dime into a pay booth while she stared at me through the glass, her mouth tight, her eyes invisible behind the dark lenses. The city police switchboard passed me along to one man who transferred the call to another man, who said that the county had requested they pick up the car and hold it.

  "I'd say it was a case they want to check it over," he said, "because the way the request came through, it was to keep our hands off it, so we sent a man along with the city wrecker to put it in gear and so on without messing up anything they maybe are looking for. It ain't been checked out yet, and you got any questions about releasing it, what you do is check with the Sheriff's department."

  I folded the door back and left the booth and told Isobel.

  "What does it mean?" she asked. "Why would they do that?"

  "Maybe they're willing to admit there could be two versions of what happened. In front of Yeoman last night, this was one of the things I said the Sheriff should be doing. So he's doing it. But it's a way out chance. Fingerprints work fine on television. But, on a rough guess, they get a usable print off one out of every hundred guns, one out of every twenty cars. A man adjusts the rear view mirror by hand, he can leave a good imprint on the back of the mirror, if the surface is smooth enough. Sometimes a thumb print on the front of the glove compartment. It is usually more meaningful to find a car wiped clean, steering wheel and door handles. No smudged prints and broken prints. Then that has some significance."

  She peered up at me, dark head tilted. "It's some kind of a strange logic, isn't it? If he didn't go off with her, and you say he couldn't have, then there would be no point in his bringing the car here."

  "Let's get some lunch."

  There was a lunch counter in a corner of the terminal. After we had ordered, I left her there on the stool and went and looked at the boards. Westways had the one fifteen to El Paso, with intermediate stops. The flight originated three more stops north. It was due through again today.

  At close range the ticket man was too old for his butchcut.

  "On your flight two oh three, would that be the same flight crew as yesterday?"

  "I wouldn't know. Why?"

  "Could it be?"

  "I guess it could be. The rotation system is too complicated for me to follow."

  "Will the flight crew come into the terminal?"

  "It's just five minutes here. They're on time. They should be in at ten after one."

  I went back to my cooling hamburg. I told her what I had in mind. I told her I wished I'd asked for a picture of her brother. She took a billfold from her gray purse. She took a color snapshot from a compartment in it. She and her brother were standing squinting and smiling in the sunlight, with one of the campus buildings behind them. He wore a pale suit and his necktie was crooked. She said the picture was over a year old. John Webb was tall, narrow, pallid, hollow-chested. He had an untidy shock of black hair. His smile was pleasant. He did not look like the sort of man Mona would have been interested in. He looked vague and anxious to please. But you can never tell. Maybe, after Cube and Jass, she'd had her fill of forceful males.

  The two-engine plane came in a few minutes early. There were three or four to get off, three or four to get on. They wheeled the steps up to the door forward of the wing. I followed the passengers up. The smiling stewardess held out her hand for my ticket. The smile was habitual. The uniform was navy blue and pink. She was a taffy blonde, a little too hefty for her skirt, her lip dewed with the sudden perspiration of the heat at ground level.

  "I'm not a passenger," I said. "I just wondered if you had this flight yesterday."

  "Yes sir?"

  I showed her the picture. "Do you remember this man? Tall and dark and thin. He was with a sizeable blonde. They both wore sun glasses. They got on here and went to the end of the line."

  "Yes, I remember that couple."

  "This was the man?"

  "I don't know. I thought the man looked... tougher than this man somehow. I remember them because I had... well, not trouble, really. We had a light load. They had a bottle. We're not supposed to permit that. But you know how it is. There was an old lady in front of them. She complained to me. She said they were talking dirty. I moved her to another seat. They weren't being particularly loud." She looked at her watch.

  "Do you remember how they were dressed? Or anything else in particular about them?"

  "She wore a pale blue seersucker suit and red sandals with high heels, and she had a big red purse. That's where the bottle was. I don't remember about him. Dark slacks and a light jacket, I think. He had a long stringy neck and some little scars here, below his ear. Let me see, they were on the port side, so they would be on the right side of his neck. Those operations they do for glands. Sir, I'm sorry but I have to..."

  "Thank you very much. What's your name?"

  "Houser. Madeline Houser."

  I went back down the steps. They were pulled away, the door dogged tight. As I walked back to the terminal, they turned to taxi and the air blast pressed against my back, hurrying me along, kicking up spirals of dust and gum wrappers.

  Isobel was waiting inside the door. I took her over to the lounge chairs facing the tinted glass and the runways and sat beside her and told her what I had learned from Madeline.

  She shook her head sadly, her mouth puckering. "It wasn't John. Nothing fits. No scars on his neck. He wouldn't talk that way. Where is he? What happened to him? Will you tell the police what that stewardess said?"

  "Let me keep this picture for a while."

  "Certainly. Should I report John as missing? Won't that stir something up?"

  "We should be more certain just what we're going to stir up."

  She hit the arm of the chair with her fist. "Why are you so hesitant? Certainly this is a police matter now. Maybe I should phone the newspapers. Damn it, we can't just sit here!"

  "It's better than rushing off in all directions."

  "He could be tied up somewhere, all alone, sick.

  "So if you start all the sirens screaming, Isobel, anybody who knows anything about it is going to dig a hole and crawl in and wait it out. We need to know more. We need to get some small idea of who did it, who would benefit, why it was done. All this wasn't just an impulse. It has to make some kind of sense. I want to talk to the lawyer she retained. He's from outside the county. Belasco. But I don't know his name."

  "I know his name. Wait a moment. I'll remember it. I heard John mention it when he talked to Mona on the phone. It begins with an M. An Italian name. Mazzari. Yes, that's it."

  "Where's Belasco?"

  "Not too far from here. Another twenty miles east, I think."

  * * *

  We drove into Belasco at twenty after two. It looked half the size of Esmerelda, and had the look of having been there a lot longer. It had plazas and defunct fountains, Moorish arches and mission churches, a big riverbed with a tiny stream in the bottom of it, fall tourists with cameras, a spectacular view of the Candelero Range.

  Rogan and Mazzari had offices in an old yellow bank building on the central plaza. The girl said that Mr. Michael Mazzari was over at the courthouse and would I care to make an appointment. The courthouse was within walking distance. The corridors were hot, damp and dingy. We found Mazzari in shirt sleeves by a corridor drinking fountain, talking with two other men. The attendant spoke to him and point
ed us out. He nodded and in a little while he came over. He was a dark bull-necked little man with a quick white toothy smile. He was just beginning to thin out on top. He appraised Isobel from ankles to the part in her hair with that utter frankness of the confirmed and practiced hunter.

  His handshake was hard. "McGee? And Miss Webb. Oh? Miss Webb? John your brother? I see. Or maybe I don't see. My girl tell you where to find me?"

  "I told her it's an emergency."

  "Is it?"

  "It certainly is," Isobel said forcefully.

  He excused himself and went over and spoke to the attendant outside the courtroom doors, then took us to a small room nearby, evidently one of the witness rooms, a putty colored cube with golden oak furniture. We sat at a scarred table and he said, "It's a civil action in there. Automobile accident. I hate the goddam things. The jury is off trying to figure out how much to give my client. I may be able to spare five minutes or two hours, depending how they get along together. What's the emergency? I assume it has something to do with Mona Yeoman."

  "She was murdered yesterday afternoon," I said.

  He had the look of a man hard to jolt, and that jolted him. Astonishment gave way to suspicion. "Now wait a minute," he said. "Even old Jass couldn't put the lid on anything like that. And I haven't heard a thing."

  "It was supposed to look as if she'd run off with John Webb. There's no body. Webb is gone too. A pair of reasonable facsimiles took a plane out of Carson yesterday."

  "Maybe it was Mona and John Webb." Isobel started to object. I hushed her and told Mazzari the facts-the long-range shot that slammed her down, the insulin kit, the stewardess's observations, and police pickup of Webb's car.

  He whistled softly. "What a wild situation! Look, without you on the scene, Mr. McGee, it would have worked. Excuse the rude joke, Miss, but those two laid the groundwork for running off together. They had the hots. That's what made her restless enough to bring me into it, on the money end."

  "Was there any truth in her claim that Jasper Yeoman robbed her?"

  He stared at me. "Who am I retained by?"

  "Not Mona. She's dead."

  "Where do you fit into this, Mr. McGee?"

  "You couldn't solve her problem by legal means without taking too much time. And even then it was dubious. She thought I could find some shortcuts. She paid my way out here. But I didn't like the sound of it."

  "So now I represent you?"

  "Either of us who needs it. Provided you... you aren't in the wrong pocket."

  He looked irritated. "I don't mind the question. I am not in anybody's pocket. I could be richer than I am, believe me. I wouldn't be screwing around with this kind of negligence suit. I am one independent wop, and pretty fierce about it, if that's what you want. You could be further ahead hiring somebody with clout in this area. Mona came to me because I've got the maverick reputation. I spit in the eye of the mighty. I'll never get elected to public office, thank God."

  "So now we have a lawyer. First question, Mr. Mazzari..."

  "Mike."

  "I'm Travis. This is Isobel. Mike, did Jass bleed that estate?"

  "Bleed is not the word. He took it out of her pocket and put it in his. But it would take two years and a staff of accountants to nail it down. It wasn't at all crude or obvious. It was a case of making very plausible but unwise deals on unloading the asset values in the estate, unloading them through dummy setups and eventually picking them up again very cheaply for his own account. With careful management, that estate could have been worth five million by today. But it petered out to nothing some years back."

  "How about the courts?"

  "I don't think you'd ever turn up any evidence of corruption. Jass was a good old boy. He could take you dove hunting. Or quail hunting. Everybody knew that little girl would never lack for a thing. When he puts his attention on it, he can charm birds down out of the trees. He's known to be very sharp, but honest. Perhaps he told himself he was simplifying, just putting all the marbles where he could watch them better, getting rid of legal restrictions which could cramp his style. Also, this culture has a feudal flavor about it. The wife is the vassal. A flighty woman who could put her hands on her own money might be hard to handle. Forcing it into the courts would be tough. It could be done, with a lot of time and a lot of money. There would be reluctance. Why make a stink when things are fine the way they are? You understand. The fact remains, he gave that estate one damned complete ransacking."

  "He was in trouble?"

  "Oh, he was in bad trouble. He had to dip into something, and the estate was handy. He had a lot of things going sour all at the same time. Oil, cattle, plastics, trucking line, little airline. His wells pumped salt water, and his cattle froze, and he got into litigation on a processing license on the plastics operation. Union troubles with the trucking line, and three fast crashes on the airline. His money was fading like snow in a heavy rain."

  "Was he a lone wolf in all those operations?"

  "No. A lawyer worked closely with him. He's dead now. Tom Claymount. A very shifty character. And there is the man who was, and is, Jass Yeoman's partner in a lot of ventures. Wally Rupert. It is pretty obvious that Wally would have had to know where Jass was getting the money to bail them out."

  "Mike, here is the jackpot question. With all you know about the financial fast-dealing that went on, what would be the effect of Mona's death, if it was known? If she rolled her car, for example."

  "Interesting. Let me see now. Internal Revenue would have that file, twenty years old. You have to assume they would be on their toes, eager to take another clip at the Fox estate. She was the sole heir. They could move in with some very awkward questions. Where did it all go, fellows? We can assume they would be a sore trial to Jass Yeoman. They have the manpower to do the digging, and they are not as tolerant as the local court would be. Assuming the estate merely held its own, they would be after several hundred thousand dollars. What happened to the estate? Even with the rubber stamp of local court approval, Jass could find that question very embarrassing."

  "All right, what if she disappeared forever?"

  "Without a trace? That would hold the feds off for seven years. Then they would take the necessary action to have her declared dead, so they could reach for their share of the estate that isn't there any more."

  "Somebody wants her to disappear. Jass?"

  "I wouldn't think so. I don't know. It doesn't seem likely. Not the way it's being done. He is ruthless, but not in that way."

  "Could anybody hate her enough to want to kill her? Could she have had somebody else on the string?"

  He shook his head. "That doesn't seem likely. Hard to think of her dead. There wasn't much malice in that woman. She looked like a complete woman, but she was emotionally immature. She got dreamy about John Webb, like a young girl. It was a lovely romance."

  Isobel snatched her glasses off and said, "How can you say that! She was a cheap, vulgar, vicious sexpot."

  Mazzari looked at her with mild astonishment. "Are we talking about the same gal?"

  "Maybe she could fool you and fool my brother, but she didn't deceive me. I can tell you that. She was in heat. That was her problem."

  "Isobel, honey," he said gently. "He is your big brother and the only family you have. So naturally you guard the manger. But, believe me, Mona was just a lovesick kid. Jass understood that. And Jass understood that sooner or later she'd get over it, and when she did, she would want things the way they were before, the nice daddy-figure to watch over everything, position in the community. He knew she couldn't work out anything permanent with your brother. They're both dreamers. And both pretty nice people, actually, with cases of delayed adolescence. Jass could be more tolerant because he is, after all, twenty-six years older than she was. She was sincere. She wanted her freedom. She wanted some of her money. She wanted to marry your brother."

  "All she wanted was to sleep with him!"

  "Which is a very natural by-product of romantic love
, honey."

  "Stop Calling me honey!"

  "I'll put it this way to you, Miss Webb. If you can't comprehend it, stop knocking it."

  "What is that supposed to mean?"

  His grin was lazy and charming. "People who censor books are usually illiterate."

  She unsderstood instantly and perfectly. She tried to leave in anger, but it looked a little too much like flight. She banged the door shut.

  "I lose more clients," Mazzari said.

  "She'll be all right."

  "It was a sneak punch. I wouldn't needle a man about being deaf or blind. She looks choice, but by the time you made it, she would be too old to enjoy it. A lifetime project. Too bad. It doesn't make it any easier for her to face up to her brother being dead. If you haven't been waltzing me around with these other items, he very probably is."