The Dreadful Lemon Sky

by John D. MacDonald

  “He had a few over the limit.”

  “A few! He was pig drunk. He never used to get like … well, I shouldn’t burden you with our personal history. Thank you for giving me the time. If there is anything you need we are … always anxious to serve our customers. Oh, and I meant to thank you for not signing a complaint.” Her smile was inverted and bitter. “There are enough of those to go around as it is.”

  “If there’s any way I can help …”

  She blinked rapidly. “Thank you very much. Very much.”

  Meyer was aboard the Busted Flush, dressing after having just gotten back from taking a shoreside shower. I broke open a pair of cold beers and took him one and sat on the guest stateroom bed and watched him put on a fresh white guayabera.

  “Fifteen Hundred Seaway’s one of those bachelor boys and girls places,” Meyer said. “Everybody seems to laugh a lot. It’s very depressing. Eighty small apartments. There’s a kind of … watchful anxiety about those people. It’s as if they’re all in spring training, trying out for the team, all trying to hit the long ball, trying to be a star. And in a sense, they’re all in training. They’re pretty trim and brown. Very mod in the clothes and hair departments. They’re all delighted that there’s a long waiting list for Fifteen Hundred. Pools and saunas and a gym. Four-channel sound systems. Health fads. Copper bracelets. The Joy of Sex on each and every coffee table, I would guess. Water beds, biofeedback machines. There doesn’t seem to be any kind of murky kinky flavor about them. No group perversion scenes. Just a terrible urgency about finding and maintaining an orgasm batting average acceptable to the peer group. Their environment is making terrible demands upon them. I bet their consumption of vitamins and health foods is extraordinary.”

  We went up onto the sun deck and sat in the shade of the big canopy over the topside controls. “It doesn’t sound like the kind of place where Carrie would want to live.”

  “No. It doesn’t. It isn’t. I didn’t say why I was asking about her. I imagine they assumed I’m some kind of relative of hers. There was a coolness toward her. They thought she was standoffish, too much of a private person. She didn’t get into the swing of things. I guess the pun is intentional.”

  “An outcast in Swingleville, eh?”

  “Not exactly. More like a special friend of the management. The management is Walter J. Demos. He owns it and manages it and is sort of a den mother to all. He lives there, in the biggest apartment. He personally approves or disapproves of every applicant. He won’t accept tenants who are too young or too old. He settles quarrels and disputes. He collects the rents, repairs plumbing, plants flowers, and he laughs a lot.”

  “How old a man?”

  “I wouldn’t want to guess. He looks like a broader, browner version of Kojak. He has a deep voice and a huge laugh. He is a very charming and likable man. He is very popular with his tenants. He is Uncle Walter. I think Uncle Walter is a smart businessman. The rents start at three hundred and seventy-five a month, and his occupancy rate is one hundred percent. By the way, he told me about Carrie’s apartment being burglarized the same night she—”

  “I heard about it. Was the door forced?”

  “No. The layout is arranged for maximum privacy. If you go from your apartment to visit somebody, there’s very little chance of your being seen. And it seems to be local custom to have a batch of keys made and hand them out to your friends.”

  “How long had she lived there?”

  “Four months only. I picked up the rumor that Uncle Walter had moved her to the top of the list. They all seemed miffed about it. Jealous, almost. They don’t want Uncle Walter to have a special girl.”

  “Did you get the feeling from him that she was special to him?”

  “He seemed very upset about it, about her being killed. He said all the usual things. She had the best years of her life ahead of her. A pointless tragedy. And so forth.”

  “Seems like high rent for Carrie to pay.”

  “That’s something that kept cropping up in conversation. Those tenants seem to feel they have to give a continual sales talk about the joys of living in Fifteen Hundred. They claim that because they don’t have any urge to go out at night or away for vacations, it really saves money to live there. The little shopping center is so close you can walk over and wheel the stuff home. The ones who work close, some of them at least, have given up cars and use bikes. It’s fascinating, in a way. A village culture. Maybe it’s part of the shape of the world to come, Travis.”

  “Let us hope not.”

  “You seem a bit sour.”

  I stretched and sighed. “Carrie is in an upholstered box at Rucker’s, her face reassembled with wax and invisible stitching. Tonight they will tote her off to the electric furnace and turn her into a very small pile of dry gray powder. So I am depressed.”

  “I don’t think I can add anything of interest. Carrie didn’t make any close friends there.”

  “Pun intended?”

  “Not that time. Maybe you’re not as sour as you act?”

  “I’ll tell you my adventures,” I said. And did.

  When I had finished he said, “I suppose we’ll learn that young Mr. Van Harn is the attorney for Superior Building Supplies, which would account for his doing Carrie’s will and being recommended to the sister, and being with Mrs. Omaha.”

  “I had the same feeling.”

  “What next?”

  “We have a drink with a little more authority, and then we find a place to eat.”

  “Please don’t give Gil’s Kitchen another chance.”

  “And you call yourself fair?”

  “You wouldn’t!”

  “You are right. I wouldn’t. But between the drinking and the eating, let’s go see where Carrie was killed.”

  By seven o’clock we had found the approximate place where it had happened. County Road 858 was called Avenida de Flores. It was an old concrete road, the slabs cracked and canted. Weeds stood tall on the shoulders. The shoulders slanted down into overgrown drainage ditches. There were a few old frame houses, spaced far apart, on the west side of the road. On the east side was a grove, with high rusty hurricane fencing installed on the other side of the drainage ditch. I went on out past the city limits sign and turned around in the parking area of a large new shopping plaza and came back, driving slowly.

  I pulled off into the weeds of the shoulder, car at a big list to starboard, and stopped.

  “For what?” Meyer asked.

  I nodded toward the house two hundred feet ahead. An old man was riding a little blue power mower back and forth across the big expanse of front yard. “We just get out and start looking up and down the shoulder, and he’ll come over and tell us all.”

  That is one of the few bonuses when looking into a fatal accident. People do love to talk about it.

  In a few minutes I heard the mower cough, sputter, and die. Cars whooshed by, whipping the weeds around, blasting the hot wind against us. I looked up and saw the old man fifteen feet away, walking smartly, his face aglow with the terrible delight of someone loaded down with ghastly details.

  “Hey, you wouldn’t be looking for the spot where that there Mulligan woman got killed Wednesday night, would you?”

  I straightened up and said, “Milligan. The name was Milligan. Carolyn Dobrovsky Milligan, Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard, Bayside, tag number Twenty-four D, thirteen thirteen. Her name was not Mulligan, it was Milligan.”

  I used the voice and manner of the small-bore bureaucrat, petulant, precise, and patronizing. I needed no further identification as far as he was concerned. I was one of Them.

  “Milligan, Mulligan, Malligan. Shoot, you’re looking on the wrong side of the road is what you’re doing.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “I doubt that very much.”

  He peered up at me. “Well, by Jesus H. Sufferin’ Christ, you are something, you are! You may know her name right, but you don’t know the first goddamn thing about the rest of it.”
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  “I think he might be able to give us a little help,” Meyer said, right on cue.

  “Your partner here has got a little bit of sense,” the old man said. “My name is Sherman Howe, and I’ve lived in that house there twelve years now, and you wouldn’t believe the number of idiots get smashed up and killed on this straight piece of road in the nighttime. One drunk son of a bitch about six months ago—see over there where that fence by the grove is fixed up new?—he come off the road and went through that fence, and he went weaving amongst the trees until he zigged instead of zagged and hit one dead center and mushed his skull on the windshield, dead as a fried mule. I keep my clothes on a chair by my bed and I keep a big flashlight handy, and when I hear that crunching in the night, I dress fast and come see what help I can give because that’s the Christian thing to do. If it’s bad, I blink the light back at the house here, and Mabel is watching for it, and she phones for the ambulance, and that’s exactly what happened Wednesday night, and I was down here before that poor boy had even found the body, so don’t tell me what side of the road it was on, mister. I know what side. Come with me. Watch out, now, you don’t get yourself killed. Nobody slows down. Nobody gives a shit anymore what happens to anybody else in the world. Let me see now.… Sure. Here’s where her car was. She was heading north, out of town, when she ran out of gas and pulled over onto the shoulder right here. See where she drove in? See the tracks? And the grass is still matted where the wheels set. It happened at twelve minutes after ten by my digital clock on my bed stand, and I’d just turned out the light to go to sleep. Mabel was in the living room watching the teevee. She still likes it, but it’s got to the point where all that slop looks alike to me. I think the dead woman was … wait, follow me and I’ll show you where the body was. I’m the one found it. That Webbel kid didn’t have a flashlight at all. It was right about here I seen her arm kind of laying up against the side of the ditch in the grass, and the grass sort of hid the rest of her. She was right here, down in this dry ditch, her head aimed that way and her feet this way, neat as you please. Would have played hell finding her if that arm hadn’t been up like it was and bare, so it caught the light from my flashlight. Sixty-five feet from the point of impact. I paced it off. Lordy, she was a mess. That whole left side of her face and head.… Anyway, I put the light on her and that boy fainted dead away. He fell like his spine had give way on him. I put my fingers on that girl’s neck and thought I felt something, but I couldn’t be sure. I ran and flashed my light three times at the window where Mabel was waiting, and she phoned it in. Then there was a terrible screeching and nearly another accident on account of that Webbel kid had parked half on the road and half off, being so shocked by hitting her the way he did. His motor was still running, so I run the truck off all the way onto the shoulder and turned it off. He was sitting up by then, moaning to himself. Pretty soon I heard the sirens coming from way off. The cops got here first. Those blue lights tamed traffic down. They took flash pictures of the two cars and the body, and they measured the skid marks, which didn’t start until he was right at or a little past the point where he hit her. Any fool could see it wasn’t the kid’s fault.”

  “Would you care to explain your … theory, Mister Howe?”

  “Theory! Goddammit, it’s fact! Now you look and see that she was parked real close, too close, to the pavement. Maybe it was as far as she could get, running out of gas like that. The car lights were off. That’s supposed to be what you ought to do if you are over on the grass at night, because, you leave taillights on, some dumb stupid drunken son of a bitch is going to aim right for those taillights thinking he’s following you. Now the Webbel boy was driving one of those big Dodge pickups that’s built like a van in the front, where the driver sits high, right over the wheels. You can see that this road is two lane and pretty narrow lanes at that. They talk about widening it, but all they do is talk. I heard them question the boy. There was a car coming the other way. He couldn’t swing out around that girl’s car. No room. He had to cut it pretty close. Now she might have slid across and got out the passenger side so as not to open her car door into traffic. Then she walked around the front of the car and stepped right in front of that farm truck. It sort of dented in the front right corner of that truck. Busted the right headlight, dented the metal, and so on. You could see where the post hit her head. She didn’t realize a car would be so close. He said he saw her out of the corner of his eyes just as he hit her. He said there wasn’t anything he could have done about it, and that kid is absolutely right. He was on his way home, and my guess is she was on her way to that gas station up across from the plaza, that stays open way late. When the ambulance came the medical fellow said she was dead. Massive skull fractures, he said. But he said it would be declared a DOA and the certificate would be made out at the hospital. Let me see. They took her away, no need for sirens. They’d got her ID from her purse in the car. The keys were in the ignition. It wouldn’t start. When the wrecker came, the fellow looked at the gas gauge on the woman’s car, and he had a can of gas on the back of the wrecker. He put some in and it started right up. I forget who drove it away. They took it down to the City Police Station. By that time the television truck was here, but there was nothing to take pictures of. So they just got the facts and used their radio to call them in. There was no cause to hold the Webbel boy. He was too shook to drive, but by then his father and his brother had arrived, and the brother drove the truck on back home. Their place is in the northwest part of the county. I guess that’s all of it. You got any other … theory, mister?”

  “When all the facts are in, all the pertinent facts, Mister Howe, I’ll be able to summarize.”

  He turned toward Meyer. “Summarize, winterize, I feel sorry for you, friend, having to work with this sorry son of a bitch.” He marched away without a backward glance. When I heard the mower start up again, I looked and saw him riding solemnly back and forth in the fading light of day.

  Meyer said, “You couldn’t have gotten any more under hypnotherapy. What are you looking at?”

  I was down on one knee in the weeds, between the matted places where the rear wheels had rested. I pointed to the place where the weeds and grass were withered and blackened. It began at a point midway between the wheels and slightly behind them. There was an area six inches in diameter and a random line half that width leading down the slope into the dry ditch, getting narrower and less evident as it approached the ditch.

  “Gasoline spill will do this,” I said. I dug down into the dirt with thumb and finger and pinched some of it up and sniffed it. It had a faint odor of gasoline. “I think her car fills on the left corner, aft of the wheel. But if it fills there or in the rear center, no matter how clumsy the man was who dumped gas into it, he could hardly manage to spill this much way under here without getting a lot right under where he was pouring.”

  “It soaked in before it got to the ditch,” Meyer said.

  “There had to be a lot of spill for it to run down the slope at all. It’s been dry lately.”

  Meyer nodded. “And so she didn’t stop because she ran out of gas. But it had to look as if she had a good reason for stopping. Is there some kind of drain under there, on the underside of the gas tank?”

  “We’ll be able to check that out. For now let’s say yes.”

  “Am I following your scenario, Travis? X is in the car with Carrie. X is driving, let’s say. He pulls off the road and stops. He picks a place a long way from any house. No street lights. He strikes her on the head with the traditional blunt object. He leans across her and opens the door. He pushes her out. The weeds are tall enough so that she would not be picked up in the lights of any passing car. He wiggles under the car with a wrench and a flashlight and opens the drain valve. When all the gas has run out, he closes the valve. He pulls her around to the front of the car, waits until he gets the right traffic situation and the right kind of oncoming vehicle, then boosts her up and walks her into the front corner of it. Then h
e takes off. Isn’t that a little bit too much to get out of some weeds and grasses killed by gasoline? Isn’t that too much of a dreadful risk?”

  “Maybe it’s too much. If X wears dark clothing, that would diminish the risk. He could stretch out flat beside her just ahead of the front bumper. He could look under the car for oncoming traffic heading the same way.”

  We went to where the front of the Datsun had been and looked at the weeds. It is too easy to let your imagination interpret the patterns.

  “If so,” Meyer said, “he didn’t have much time to get out of sight. Too risky to go across the highway. Over the fence?”

  I studied the fence line. “Under it. Where it’s washed out. I think this was one very cool cat who checked his escape route first.”

  “Would your scenario include some telltale dark threads caught on the wire at the bottom?”

  “There could have been, until you mentioned it.”

  I slid under the fence, on my back. Meyer stayed outside. There were inches to spare. I searched a quarter-acre area and came up with the startling conclusion that it was a very well-maintained grove. Nothing more. He could heave her into the front of the Webbel truck and spin and hit the hole before the truck could stop. Then, in dark clothing, he could melt back into the black shadows of the night and walk parallel to the fence line until it was safe to go over or under the fence.

  Or, I thought as I went back under the fence, another vehicle had stopped there. Maybe a wife got nervous about a can of gas in the trunk of the family car. Dump it out this minute, dearest. Or maybe a can started leaking and somebody abandoned it there, and later somebody picked up the can, thinking it usable. Many false structures have been built from the flawed assumption of the simultaneity of seemingly related events.

  As we got into the rental car, Meyer said, “We have no way of knowing that the gasoline was spilled—”

  “At the same time. I just went through that.”

  “There are certain concepts which offend emotional logic. You have stopped beside a two-lane road at night. Traffic is light but fast. You walk to the front of your car, after sliding out on the passenger side. What are you going to do? Cross the road? Hitchhike? Open the door on the driver’s side? Assume there is a good reason, do you step out, or do you look first?”