But when he came back with his wife and baby daughter after his people were dead, to clean out the house of personal things and ready it for sale, she had come casually in through the back of the house to tell him that he had a very pretty little three-yearold daughter by her, named Lillian. She told him the date of birth and asked him to figure it out for himself. There was a baby boy Ronnie, she said, definitely Johnny's. But Lillian was his seed.
And they had made love that afternoon on a mattress on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and again the next morning, and had either still been making love or had finished at about the same time his wife and daughter were crushed to death by the fleeing car.
It was classic Biblical guilt and retribution, sin and punishment He had come back and had become sheriff. He learned one aspect of Johnny and Wanda's divorce that was not public knowledge. Johnny's attorney showed the judge, in chambers, medical evidence that a man of Johnny's blood type could not have fathered a child with Lillian's blood type when the mother had Wanda's blood type. But there was enough evidence against her without that.
"She was the only person in the world of my blood," Hyzer said. "She was... maybe a symbol of the little girl who died. It's easy to close your eyes and ears, to say she could not be warped and rotten. Wicked, in the classical meaning of the word. Bend the rules. Let her off with a reprimand. Because she would have that mocking look her mother had. She knew, and knew I wouldn't acknowledge her. Arnstead found out four years ago. He picked Wanda up for drunk, and out of all the babbling and mumbling and weeping he heard something and got her sobered up enough to tell the rest of it, and got her to write it down before she was sober enough to realize he was using her."
Arnstead let him know what he knew, not in a confrontation, but in little hints. Wanda had become fat and coarse and loud, and Hyzer had already let the girl off too easily too many times. A sheriff who is snickered at, loses authority, and elections.
"Balancing it out doesn't work," he said. "Lew didn't push it too hard or too obviously, so I told myself he wasn't doing any actual harm, maybe even some good. I told myself that his girls would be hustling anyway, so it was better to have them kept in line."
"Then he went too far?"
"Beating a prisoner. Neglect of duty. Culmination of months of little things. So I had to. It was go down one way or go down the other way, and in the end you make a choice."
"Now I know why you were so anxious to nail us for the Baither thing."
He thought it over. "Yes. A suspicion in the back of my, mind I couldn't consciously admit to myself, and you and Meyer were the way out. That's proof enough I better close it out and move along. Bend the rules and you start bending your own judgment, too."
"Without finding out who killed Lilo?"
"That's part of closing it out. After Wanda had the first stroke, when she could get around, she came to see me. The left side of her face looked dead. She made me promise to look after Lillian, keep her out of trouble. I promised. That was part of it, too, I guess. Then, a little while ago, after I told her, I wanted to know how she felt. Brutal damned question. I asked her if she was sorry Lilo was dead. She blinked her eyes twice. Same answer for Henry. That letter you showed me... Even motherlove couldn't live through that."
I had to make the guess that he wanted some kind of an answer. "You have a couple of incurable hang-ups, Norman. One is an old-timey hang-up on decency. The other hang-up is thinking too much, trying to separate cause and effect and locate where the guilt is. You are not with the scene, man. Guilt only happens to people who get caught. Sex is a handshake. Man has poisoned himself and he's on the way out, so pick up all the bread you can in any way you can. Enjoy."
"Sure, McGee. Sell yourself first."
"I keep trying, but I haven't been able to get into the spirit of the thing somehow. I keep going back to this role-playing of mine, you know, with the white horse and the maiden fair and the grail and the dragons and all that crap."
One flat and mirthless grunt of laughter from Sheriff Hyzer.
I said, "I do not want to be sickly sentimental, and I know that it is pagan barbarism to venerate the empty flesh when the spirit is long gone, but I think of Betsy out there in the night wired to that goddam tree, and how her face looks, and I keep thinking of how careful she was to look... nice. That's the only word. Nice."
He opened the car door. "Show me. I can call the people in from there."
Nineteen
HE HAD a big bright camp-light in the trunk of the cruiser. We walked slowly, and he kept the light on the ground so that we could avoid destroying any foot tracks or tire tracks.
I had trouble orienting myself at night. The tan Volkswagen would have been a big help had it been there. But it was gone. And Betsy was gone and the shovel was gone. In the grove we could walk around freely because the soft springy mat of brown needles of many seasons would not hold a print.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"That's the third time. I am very damned sure, yes. Please stop asking. All right. One of these trees in this area, and it was about the same size around the trunk as that one."
It was Hyzer who spotted a silky lemon-gold thread clinging to the bark of a tree of the proper size, about four feet off the ground. Then in close inspection under the bright beam, I found a couple of blond hairs caught in the bark. That gave me enough orientation to show him where the half-dug grave had been.
I knelt near him and held the light while he carefully brushed away the blanket of pine needles, brushed down to the ground where it had been freshly, moistly stamped flat, leaving the same sole marks I had seen in the dirt in the half grave.
He grunted and began, just as carefully, to brush the needles back over it. "What are you doing?" I asked.
"I'll take the risk of assuming Mrs. Kapp is buried right here. Will your... sentimentality get in the way of leaving her here for a while?"
"No. It was the tree part that got to me. This is endurable. What do you have in mind?"
"Knowing something that somebody doesn't know you know is a useful thing in this line of work. Sometimes you don't know in advance how you'll use it. I'll come out alone tomorrow and take a cast of the shoe prints and any tire prints I can find. Let's take a look inside that shack now."
Whoever had come back to the unfinished business of burying her, had done a halfway job of tidying the shack. He had scattered the ashes, put the broken lid back on the barrel safe and covered it with the fire brick. I showed Hyzer the safe.
On the way back into town I told him, without telling him too much, exactly how eager I was for all kinds of publicity and press coverage.
Deputy Billy Cable had drafted an official release and he was holding it for Hyzer's approval. Hyzer sat at his desk and read it and said, "Billy, go and make certain every mouth is closed and stays closed, and then come back here."
Billy was back before Hyzer finished changing the release. Finally Hyzer handed it to him, saying, "Get it typed up again and get somebody to take it on over to Mr. Goss."
Billy read it and looked dismayed. "But..."
"What's wrong?"
"You've got it person or persons unknown, and this son of bitch McGee confessed he kilt Henry Perris."
"He thought he did, Billy," Hyzer said soothingly. "It was an honest mistake. Could you really believe a man could throw an oyster knife that deep into Henry's armpit from almost twenty feet away?"
"Well, I heard him tell how..."
"The way I reconstruct it, it is a heavy piece of metal and it struck Perris on the skull and knocked him out. After McGee left to come here and report it, the next person along saw the opportunity and picked up the knife and thrust it into the unconscious man."
"If that's the way you want it."
"That's the way I want it."
"And you took out the part about Mrs. Kapp."
"Mr. McGee took me to the place where he thought he saw her, but he was apparently mistaken."
"I do
n't want to upset you, Sher'f, but shouldn't your chief deputy know what the hell is-"
"Come back here after you send that off and I'll tell you."
When the door shut, I said, "Many thanks."
"I'll try to stick with that, McGee. But if somebody goes on trial for killing Lillian, I'm not going to turn over a doctored file to the State's attorney for grand jury indictment. You'll have to go back into the picture, and with that weapon he had to stab you with, and with the photographs of the holes in the trailer, you should be able to satisfy the court that it was self-defense. I will testify that you made immediate confession, but that I kept it quiet for the sake of not giving the killer too much free information. Raise your right hand."
It had a lot of golden ornamentation and an eagle and three shades of colored enamel, red, white, and blue. It said that I had finally finked out all the way, and was a sworn deputy sheriff of Cypress County Florida, with all the rights and privileges pertaining there-to. There was a wallet card with the sheriff's signature and mine. And I pinned the badge inside the wallet, and practiced flipping it open a few times, thinking of how Meyer would laugh himself into hiccups.
Billy Cable came in as I made the final practice flip, and tucked the wallet away. His eyes bulged. "Norm!" he wailed. "I mean, Sheriff. Him? After all!"
The whip cracked, and Cable came to sudden attention. Hyzer said, "You are the best officer I have, Cable. And in ninety-five percent of your duty assignments you are superior. In the remaining five percent you turn into a vain, stupid, inept man, causing me more trouble than you are worth. Do you know what this flaw is?"
"I... ah... no, sir!"
"I request you to make a guess, then."
"I guess... well, sometimes I maybe let my own personal feelings... Sir, a man can't be a machine!"
"Cable, off duty you will let your feelings and your emotions and your prejudices slop all over your personal landscape. You can roll and wallow in them. On duty, on my time, you will be a machine. Is that absolutely clear?"
"Yes, sir." It was a very small "yes, sir." Cable was swaying. Only the most effective chewing can make a grown man sway.
"Temporary Deputy McGee will be privately assigned by me, and will not be subject to your authority or control in any way, nor will you make any mention of his status. Now go and shake his hand and welcome him to this department."
Cable came over. His eyes looked slightly glassy and his palm was damp. "Deputy... glad to... hope you enjoy your..."
"Thanks, Billy. The name is Trav."
"Now you can both sit down," Hyzer said. "We will discuss McGee's theory of gravitation, and the identification of unknown influences. Billy, I made out a schedule of... recent events. I checked out the duty cards and duty reports, and I have placed your approximate location and activities in the righthand column. I see no chance of your having been involved directly in any way."
"For God's sake, Sheriff! If you think I-"
"Didn't we just have a little discussion about emotion?"
"... Sorry, sir."
"This is a guide, merely to show you how I want a special project handled. You are the sample. I want you to run these six deputies through the same thing, without letting anyone know what you are checking out. I want you to make certain that the deputy cards and duty reports are correct as to the hours involved."
"Somebody in the family?" Billy asked.
"McGee thought it had to be either you or me. It isn't either of us. So let's be certain it isn't any of us."
For one precarious moment, full of fellowship and conscious of the ornate badge of authority, I wanted to give them the full report on Lew Arnstead, so it could be added to Hyzer's list of unusual events. Sure, and good old Betsy would swear to every word of it as being the truth. I would bounce about three times right on the place where now the badge rested, and hear the steel door clang.
Hyzer stared with raised eyebrows at Cable until suddenly Cable came to with a start and hopped up and hurried out of the office.
"And that leaves us," said Mister Norm, "with two more places to go. Or three. Lew Arnstead. Mrs. Kapp could have guessed where he would be, could have known about that hideaway shack gone out there, and found him closing the store, picking up the money, getting ready to move."
"And forgot where the safe was?"
"Or tore the place up after he killed Mrs. Kapp to make it look like a stranger. Relocked the safe and tore the door off."
"Was he that subtle?"
"Any police officer learns what other police officers look for and how they make their judgments. Acquired subtlety, call it. He knew that Lillian had tricked him and left that envelope of yours in the Baither place. So he goes after her. And he finds her."
"You said three possibilities?"
"Somebody trying to either get a woman free and clear of Arnstead for good, or get even for what happened to the woman."
"Featherman?"
"A possibility. Maybe Mrs. Kapp arrived and found someone there, and Arnstead was there, dead. He could be under those pine needles too."
"The black jeep hidden on Betsy's street doesn't fit that one."
"Or the first one, either. Unless we get too fancy, and jam pieces into the puzzle whether they fit or not. Lew abandoned the jeep there to cause confusion. Or somebody picked him up right there and took him out to his shack."
"Or, Sheriff, Henry and Lillian killed him because they couldn't risk you finding out who engineered leaving that envelope. Maybe Henry and Lillian knew about that shack and they had to make sure Arnstead hadn't hidden anything out there that could tie them into Baither's death. And Betsy walked into that scene."
"That was my third guess," he said. "Save the best until last."
"Lillian knew about the shack. That photograph of her in that batch in your desk drawer was taken out there. Remember that clock on the wall?"
He took them out, found hers and studied it. "Very good, Deputy. Observant."
"When you find yourself in a sling, it's time to start thinking clearly or start running."
He put the pictures back, slammed the drawer hard. "Around and around and around," he said. "The mythological animal that grabs its own tail and starts eating and disappears down its own throat."
"A fifth man in on the money-truck job? Or maybe Henry and Lillian nailed either Hutch or Orville, but not both."
"We're going further and further into the mist," he said. "So we haul it back to specifics. Mrs. Kapp's car might tell us something. There are hundreds of little tracks across that scrubland up there. Tomorrow I call in a chopper for an air search. The biggest specific is the plausible assumption Lillian told someone what she learned from Frank Baither. That bucket technique is efficient. She would probably try some lies. So the technique is to keep at it until you get the same answer time and again."
"Do you have any idea how powerful she was?"
"Yes. I saw one demonstration. I see your point. Either one strong person or two people to handle her like that, even taped up."
"I'd buy two."
Then he told me my assignment. We checked the inventory of confiscated weapons, and I settled for a Ruger standard carbine in.44 Magnum, with a five-round capacity, four in a front tube and one in the chamber. I'd had one aboard the Busted Flush for a time and had used it on shark coming after the hooked billfish, until one day I had decided that the shark was doing his thing, and it was bloody and disrespectful to kill an honest scavenger just because he happened to come into the ball park when you are trying to win. From that day on, the rule when fishing from the Munequita, after towing it to billfish country behind the Flush, was that the lookout would yell out when he saw the first fin, and you would release the billfish then and there instead of later, at the side of the boat. We do not bring dead meat home and hang it high for the tourists to say Aaah over. We take a picture of the good ones as somebody leans down to clip off the leader wire. The stainless hook corrodes out of the marlin, tuna, or sailfish jaw in da
ys, leaving him free to go take the dangling bait of the commercial long-liners, fight his heart away against the resistance of the buoys, and, after the shark have browsed this free lunch, leave his jaw or his whole head on the hook for the deckhands to haul up and toss away on the pickup round.
So I knew it would fire five 240-grain slugs as fast as I could pull the trigger, bust each one right through a seven-inch pine tree, and had a reasonable accuracy for a weapon a yard long overall, weighing less than six pounds.
They had grabbed it off a poacher. Norm Hyzer approved of the choice and gave me a handful of jacketed factory loads. After he explained what I was to do, I asked if I could have another few pieces of equipment. So he drove me to the shopping center and pointed out the hardware store that stayed open late. I bought my junk, and then hit the supermarket and provisioned myself for a forty-eight-hour vigil. Hyzer said he would check me out of the White Ibis after he dropped me off, and put my gear in the rental car and shut it up in his own garage, well out of sight.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look Page 25