A Purple Place For Dying

by John D. MacDonald

Why was it important for Jass Yeoman to believe his Mona was alive? Why was it necessary to kill her? Why had I been permitted to stay alive, and mess up all the careful planning? I had no assurance that Jass would level with me. The story would break and soon. It would break when either body was found. And Buckelberry was doing some very earnest searching. For guns and scarred necks, for big blondes-dead and alive.

  I do not believe in coincidence. I believe that if you keep moving, you expose yourself to a better chance of accidents happening, some good and some bad. And you have to have an eye for a cronkie. That is a cop word. It means someone who has been in trouble, is presently in trouble, or is about to be in trouble---either as victim or aggressor. A wise cop can pick them out of heavy pedestrian traffic flow, because they don't quite fit.

  Driving back to The Sage, I had to pass the big bus station. I got caught on that corner by a light. I saw the big blonde woman come squinting out into the sun, hesitate, then turn and start doggedly trudging away, her clothes badly rumpled, hair unkempt, her stride uncertain.

  Seconds later the clothing registered on me. Pale blue seersucker suit, red sandals with high heels, red purse. She was heading the wrong way for me, and I was in a center lane, so when the light changed I fought my way across the traffic and went around the block. She had made better time than I expected, and so I had to go around another block. I parked short of the corner; got out quickly and went to where I could see her coming toward me, teetering and wobbling along.

  She wasn't aware of me until I stepped out in front of her. Her face looked gray and sweaty. The flesh around her eyes was smudged and puffy. Her hair showed a quarter inch of black root. She looked at me without surprise or indignation or automatic flirtation. She just stared and waited for the gambit.

  "You could use a lift?"

  "No, I just walk two three miles in the hot sun like this in high heels to keep in shape."

  "Come in on the bus?"

  "Yes. I slept hard and some spook clipped every nickel out this here purse, so I could sure use a lift, believe me. They didn't even leave me a dime to call a friend."

  "My car's right around the corner."

  When we reached the car and I opened the door for her, she paused and said, "You aren't trying to be real cute about anything, are you, friend?"

  "I'll take you where you want to go."

  She studied me for a moment, nodded to herself, and got into the car. I went around and got behind the wheel. She gave me directions. In the enclosure of the car she smelled sour and sweaty. The front of her suit was spotted. Her knuckles were soiled.

  The directions took me out near my former local address. She was on one of the lateral streets, three blocks off the main highway, in an institutional-looking apartment building that seemed to be half a block long, two stories high and one room deep. She guided me around to the parking area in the rear. Rear stairs led up to a communal deck which extended the length of the building.

  She got out of the car and looked at me and sucked her mouth into a bruised rosette and tilted her head. We were on a first name basis. No last names had been exchanged. "Trav, I won't futz around with you with any games, huh? I'm next door to dead. I'm no good to anybody, right? I got to soak in a hot tub and get some sleep and set the alarm so as I can get to work by nine. They didn't like giving me two nights off, and I show up too beat, it wouldn't be so good, you know? But I bounce back pretty good. I was thinking, you come around at six tomorrow, I'll have a drink waiting, then we could eat someplace, you drop me off at work. Honest, you'll hardly know me I'll look so much better."

  "I thought there might be a cold beer up there right now."

  She gave a long sigh, and shrugged and said, "Come on then. But I warn you, I'm awful tired."

  It was a very small studio apartment, with an unmade daybed, characterless rental furniture. She opened me a cold beer. She poured herself a straight gin, put one ice cube in it and waited a few moments and then tossed it down, gagged, made a frightful face. Hot water roared into the small tub built into the bathroom corner at an angle. She trudged around, shedding shoes, suit jacket, pale blouse. She asked me, right on cue, if-on account of her money being taken from her purse-I could loan her a little to tide her over until payday. I said I could. She bit her lip and said, hesitantly, "Thirty, maybe?"

  "Thirty is fine," I said. She took the bills and snapped them into her purse. She took another gin into the bathroom with her. She left the door ajar. When my beer was gone I got a fresh one in the kitchen alcove and pushed the bathroom door open and leaned a shoulder against the frame and drank the beer from the bottle.

  She was on her knees in the little tub sitting back on her heels, the water level coming to the white tops of her flexed thighs. With her eyes squinched shut, she was kneading her sudsy head.

  I said, "Betty, you know, I was trying to remember something."

  "Hah?"

  "I was trying to remember where I'd seen you before."

  "Well, I've been in this town three years, ever since I came out from Cleveland. And I've been working night trick at the drive-in for almost a year now, honey."

  "I meant just the other day. Tell me if I'm wrong, Betty. Did you take a flight out of Carson on Monday or Tuesday?"

  She rocked forward onto hands and knees, dunked her soapy head and rinsed it vigorously. Her big pale body looked coarse structured, muscular, durable, reasonably attractive. She sat back again, groped for a towel, shoved her wet hair back, mopped her eyes dry. Then she uncurled her legs and settled into the murky water in a sitting position.

  "It was Tuesday" she said. "I dint notice you, honey."

  "Weren't you with a tall skinny fellow? Dark?"

  "That's right. His name is Ron. What we did, we flew down to El Paso. Let me tell you, it was a real swing. We got sort of stoned on the airplane. He knows all the cats down there. But it got too weird, you know? They start popping, they don't care what they do. That's too rich for me. I mean you have to draw a line, right? A person has to have some kind of privacy sometimes, right?"

  I agreed. She yawned against her fist like a sleepy lioness. "Honest, I haven't had any sleep since Tuesday morning, not counting on the bus when I was robbed. That damned driver wouldn't do anything about it."

  "Do you fly down there often?" I asked her.

  "No. This was some kind of strange deal. I'd never seen that Ron before. What it was, it was a favor for a guy, and what Ron had to do, he had to find a tall blonde to fly down there with him on that flight out of Carson. Using kook names on the ticket. It was some kind of cover up, I guess. Ron met the guy in a bar. What the hell, it was a free vacation with expenses."

  "Ron come back too?"

  "No. From there he was going out to the Coast he said. He gave me some of the money he got. Fifty dollars. And I didn't dip into it at all, and then it got clipped on the bus. I should have spent it to save it. You just never know. Live and learn."

  I decided it wasn't going to do any good to pry further. Buckelberry could do it with considerably more efficiency and speed.

  She said, "Trav, sweetie, whyn't you just go get comfortable and I'll be along, okay? You don't mind my hair being soppy?"

  I looked at my watch. "Suppose I stop by tomorrow?"

  She yawned again and nodded. "Any way you want to look at it, honey, that's best, believe me. I'm so tired I could cry-"

  I let myself out. I checked the number. Apartment 11. 1010 Fairlea Road. I found the mailboxes below. Elizabeth Kent Alverson, beautifully engraved on a creamy card.

  I went back to The Sage and phoned Buckelberry from my room. Fred wasn't in. I said it was important. They said they would try to get through to him. In ten minutes he phoned me. I gave him the woman's name and address and told him she was there, and that she had been the one who'd impersonated Mona Yeoman.

  "For God's sake, McGee, will you kindly keep your nose out of..."

  "You'd rather do it yourself, Fred. Sure."

  In
the ensuing silence I could sense the effort he was making to control himself. At last he said, in a gravelly voice, "I appreciate having this information."

  "You are quite welcome. But I don't think you'll be able to make too much of it."

  "I'll decide that."

  "Certainly, Sheriff. Are there any other breaks in the case?"

  "No!"

  "Have you taken any steps to protect Jass?" He hung up, very forcefully.

  I felt displeased with myself. A smart-ass approach to a better-than-average officer of the law. With some people you start off on the wrong foot and you can't get back on balance. There was a tomcat tension between us, and I had the feeling that if we could each give and take one good smack in the mouth, we might get along fine from then on. Cop-taunting is a stupid and dangerous habit.

  I stripped and showered and thought about Elizabeth Kent Alverson. A crude friendly piece. One of the great legion of the semi-pro. She wanted to ball around, and she kept telling herself you had to draw the line, dint you? But each year she'd draw it a little further.

  At least I had learned that the Mona Yeoman killing wasn't as much of a gang effort as it had seemed. Betty and her Ron were apparently relative innocents. A small investment in a smoke screen. The risk had been, of course, that Ron would pocket the cash and not do the favor. The estimated number of participants was now more manageable. Maybe two could have done it.

  It had to be for money. The whole area smelled of money. You could see them joshing each other about it in The Sage lobby. You could see it in the eyes of the girl at the lobby newsstand.

  So find the money advantage, and it would lead you to the rifleman-or to whoever hired him. There was frantic money in this town. Maybe they expected the fossil water to run out soon. Grab it quick, and be ready to move along.

  I put fresh shorts on and stretched out on the bed just as the phone rang. It was Isobel Webb.

  "Travis?"

  "How is it going, Isobel?"

  Deep sigh. "I don't know. It's this waiting. Not knowing what to think. I don't know what to do with myself. That's why I drove up here."

  "You're in town?"

  "I'm in the lobby. I borrowed a car. I thought that when... when they find him, it will be somewhere around Esmerelda. Can you come down and talk to me?"

  "Five minutes. Wait for me in the cocktail lounge."

  "I'll sit in the lobby here and wait."

  She stood up like an obedient child when I walked toward her. She had on a mouse-gray blouse, a drab skirt, sensible shoes. She hid behind her big dark glasses. Her smile was nervous and tentative. I took her into a gloomy corner of the cocktail lounge, and she thought she would have a sherry.

  "The house is so terribly empty." she said. "I keep walking back and forth near the telephone. Faculty wives are trying to be nice, but I can't stand the way they coo at me."

  "They found Mona's car."

  "I know. Do you mind my coming here?"

  "Not at all. But I have to leave here at quarter to eight."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To go visit somebody with Jass Yeoman."

  "I guess you don't want to tell me about it."

  "It's quite complicated."

  She took the glasses off and sipped her sherry. "Are you working for Jass now?"

  "In a way"

  "To help them all hush up whatever happened to her and John?"

  "No. To find out who did it."

  "What if Jass Yeoman did it, Travis?"

  "Then he is the best liar I have ever met in my life."

  "What... what if we never find out anything?" Her voice broke a little. "I don't think I could stand that. Not ever knowing. I don't know what would become of me. Don't look so worried. I'm not going to lose control. Not like yesterday. I dreamed I saw John dead. I woke up and it was still vivid. And he is dead, of course. That's why I could leave our place. I know he's never coming back there."

  "Easy, Isobel."

  "I'm all right. I just want to know."

  "We'll find out."

  "Oh sure. You and Mr. Yeoman and that Sheriff. You'll find out, won't you? If you don't know already."

  "You get these little paranoiac impulses, Isobel. The world is not against you. There are no conspiracies against you."

  "I went through John's papers today. He had a twenty thousand dollar insurance policy, a group thing through the school. I'm the beneficiary. When they find his body I'll get the money and give you half to find who did it."

  "That isn't necessary"

  "Do you know what I'm going to do with that money?"

  "No."

  "I still have that non-transferable lease. I am going back to the islands. My father changed the name of it to Webb Cay. I can get the house fixed up. I could live there on the income from twenty thousand. Forever. My God, I am sick of people. I've had enough to last me the rest of my life. I could be contented there. In this incarnation, I just didn't make it. I'll mark time and wait for the next one, Travis."

  I took the drugstore tube out of my jacket pocket and put it in front of her. "Little present. It's that sun-proofing stuff for your lips."

  She picked it up, peered at the label in the dim light, and then began to cry.

  Nine

  SHE SAID she was not the least bit hungry. I took her to the grill and she ate a gigantic steak, and said it must have been the sherry. Once fed she began to yawn and her head began to sag. At quarter to eight I gave her my room key and sent her up to sack out while I went off with Jass.

  I was a few minutes late. He was pacing around in his driveway. He grunted a surly welcome, and then tried to make a sports car out of his big Chrysler. We burst out of the city, hurtling north toward the bailiwick of the Rupert clan, through a cool blue night, with a faint red still visible along the western horizon.

  I had one of those strange moments of unreality, that old what-am-I-doing-here feeling. I did not know this rugged old bastard, had not known his wife, had not planned this much involvement with his life. Somehow, without meaning to, I had forfeited a part of my necessary independence. I was uncomfortable in a crypto-employee role. A very strange gal was sleeping in my rental bed. And somewhere out in the blue night, a big blonde and a professor were sleeping a good deal more soundly. 'Doesn't know I'm coming," Jass mumbled. "He never goes out. He's always there in the evening."

  "What am I supposed to do, Jass?"

  "Stand by. Watch him. Listen to him. Later you tell me how much you believe and how much you don't."

  "You know him better than I do."

  "With Walter Rupert, that ain't much help." It was twelve miles out of town, with a big ranch gate that I had to get out and open and close after Jass took the car through. We went about a half mile and came onto a great sprawled complex of ranch houses, barns, bunk rooms, outbuildings. Jass parked by the largest house and we got out. There was a night-flavor, of life and movement. Lights and bits of music, the sounds of children at play, people going to and fro between other houses. Two cars left, going out the way we had come in.

  A man came sauntering out of the shadows and put a light on us. "Mr. Yeoman, isn't it?"

  "Want to see Wally"

  "You just wait right there a minute, sir."

  It was a good five minutes before he came back. "Mr. Rupert he says take you in the main house and have you wait on him. He finishes up what he's doing, he'll be along."

  We followed the man into the main house, into a long room with two stone fireplaces, trophies on the wall, deep leather chairs. The man gestured toward a small bar in the corner of the room, said, "He'p yourself, gentlemen," and left us alone.

  I fixed a drink for Jass and one for myself. As he took it he said slowly, "The thing is never knowing just how far he would go, one way or another. If we'd stayed locked close in a business way he'd have ate me up, slow and sure, on account of he takes pains with every little tiny thing. I had to pry myself loose. We still have a couple of small things together, but the
contact on those is all through lawyers, and they're closing out a little at a time. But by God he should have had the decency to give a man warning. No matter what."

  I asked a question. He didn't seem to hear it. I gave up. In a little while I heard the heavy sound of a door closing. A big old man paused in the doorway and looked in at us. He was big-shouldered, big-bellied, broad, bandy-legged. He was dressed like a country deacon, in lifeless black with a white shirt, dark tie. He stood with his chin lowered, looking out at us from under gray shaggy brows, the room lights gleaming on his baldness. His nose was hooked, his mouth large and narrow. Anthropoid arms were heavy and long. He had a masculine force about him, a great presence, born of his certainty of his own force. He was a dynastic man. He was the bull-beast and this was his grassland. Three wives and a score of children seemed a perfectly natural result of this controlled energy.