John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 03 - A Purple Place For Dying

by A Purple Place For Dying(lit)

  I napped and awoke with stale mouth and grainy eyes to find it was almost nine o'clock. I had expected sleep to be a buffer, making the dead woman less vivid, but in my mind she plunged and fell, plunged and fell, undiminished. After I had snorted into handfuls of cold water and had brushed my teeth, I walked over to the Corral Diner.

  I bought the evening Esmerelda Eagle. I read it as I awaited my steak, sitting in one of the booths opposite the long counter. It was a booster sheet. Progress is wonderful. Esmerelda is wonderful. Housing booms. Second phase of slum clearance program approved. Kalko Products to be first to start construction in new industrial park. Northeast arterial will bring airport fifteen minutes closer to Downtown. Expert predicts double population in next nine years. Esmerelda coach predicts unbeaten season, biggest ground-gaining average in six county conference. School bond issue to pass by overwhelming margin.

  With the rush over, the diner was quiet. Five young women came trooping in. A bowling team. They wore little white stretch shirts and short white pleated tennis skirts, and carried bright plastic bags of gear. In an arc across each back was embroidered PURITY. Over their hearts were embroidered their names. Dot, Connie, Beth, Margo and Janice. They stacked their jackets and gear in one booth and squeezed into another.

  I could not determine if they were secretarial types or young housewives. Often they are both. Two of them looked meaty enough to be competent at the game. They got coffee first, and huddled with a great deal of snickering and gasping, muttering and laughter. They acted conspiratorial, and I heard a few clinks of glass against the edges of the heavy coffee cups and knew the gals were belting a few. It seemed they had won. They became aware of me.

  They whispered and sniggered, and the ones with their backs to me managed to turn to look beyond me with a vast innocence, then take the quick sharp look and turn back to lean heads together and make their jokes. Man alone, worth appraising. Brown-faced stranger, with shoulders big enough to interest them. I could tell by the shrill and almost hysterical quality of their whoops of laughter that the muttered comments were getting ever more bawdy. Then one of the chunky ones whispered for a long time and her audience dissolved into helpless laughter when she was done.

  Suddenly I realized that the world is upside down in more ways than one. They were the hard-eyed group, the appraisers, the potential aggressors, the bunch of guys making the half-obvious pitch at the interesting stranger. They made me feel almost girlish. I realized there had been something of the same flavor in Mona's arrogance-the unconscious usurpation of the male tradition of aggression. Touch me on my terms, buddy.

  The steak was fried, rubbery and without flavor. The potatoes were soggy. The lettuce was warm and wilted, and the coffee was sharp and rancid. I walked past the Purity girls and out into the night. One of them stared at me through the greasy window and made an exaggerated kissing face and waved, and I saw the others laugh.

  I waited for a hole in the traffic to come along, then sauntered back to my noisy nest. I put the key in the door and opened it to smoke and light. Buckelberry sat on my bed. A stranger sat in the plastic chair.

  'Make yourself right at home," I said.

  "McGee, this is Mr. Yeoman."

  There was going to be no handshaking. He held his glass up and said, "This we brought in, son. Exactly the same brand as yours. You got a nice taste in bourbon."

  They seemed relaxed, watchful, reasonably friendly. I made myself a drink and took it over to the bed and sat beside Buckelberry. He had tucked his shirt in and wore a red-brown corduroy jacket with lots of pockets, all with flaps and buttons.

  Jasper Yeoman was an astonishingly youthful fifty-eight. He had black hair combed back, just a little grey over his ears. He wore a dark business suit. He was a lean, long-limbed man. He had a long narrow brown face, deeply seamed, Indian-dark eyes, ears that stuck out far enough to give him a countrified look. He had horse teeth and a thin-lipped mouth with a small twisted and sardonic smile which looked habitual.

  He had great assurance, a steady stare, and he was the sort of man who would disconcert you by seeming to be amused by some joke you did not understand.

  He sat slouched with one limber leg hooked over the arm of the chair. They were waiting for me to make the move, and I damned well wasn't going to.

  Finally Buckelberry sighed and said, "Jass here was curious about you, McGee."

  "I can imagine he might be."

  "Just to set your mind at rest," the Sheriff said, "we've got a pretty good line on that pair. The professor took off from home yesterday afternoon. His junk car is over to the Carson Airport. The manifest says a Mr. and Mrs. Webber Johnson caught the one-fifteen flight to El Paso this afternoon. The ticket man says a big blonde woman and a great old tall skinny boy, both of them in big dark glasses."

  "Near as we can find out," Yeoman said lazily, "Mona left the house about ten this morning. Two suitcases gone. Clothes and jewelry. The way it figures, you were at the Carson Airport to drive her car away for her. You could tuck it off in any one of those little roads off there behind Cotton Corners, after you'd taken it up to take a look around the cabin. There's only one thing makes any kind of damn fool sense to me. That's that Mona must figure she'd got one hell of a good hidey-hole planned out for her and the professor, and when we can't turn her up, we'll come back to paying more mind to that damn fool story of yours."

  "What good would that do?" I asked.

  "You look like a steady enough man," Yeoman said. "How come you sucked into this kind of foolishness? She convince you I stole her daddy's money and treat her cruel? Son, Mona has just come into her restless time, and the thing to do is just wait it out. She's gone romantic as a young girl. Let me tell you something. She isn't real steady. She like to tore herself up beyond fixing before I married her. She needs a firm rein. She needs a man half husband and half daddy to keep her settled down. She's got that poor professor in a condition where he don't know which leg to put in his pants first. Having a husband old as me, she's got a fool notion life is passing her by. If she'd been fertile it would have worked out better for her, I guess. But she hasn't wanted none for servicing, and until she got the romances, it seemed to please her just fine. She'll outlive me, and when I'm gone I'll leave things tied up so she can have an income that'll give her a chance to be a damn fool in every city of the wide world, if that's what she wants. But as of now I'm her husband, and I know better what's good for her than she does. I've whipped her when she was ripe for it, and it has settled her down nice and grateful for it. And I've bought her about every damn thing she set her mind on. I'm not begging and I'm not pleading. It's just that if you know where it is they plan to hold up, it'll save everybody a lot of trouble and nuisance. I'll even go this far, son. Once they're bird-dogged, I'll even hold off a week, ten days, before busting it up. Then she might settle down faster when she's back, having got herself at least some of what it is she thinks she's got to have."

  "Now Jass," Buckelberry said in a very gentle voice.

  "All right, Fred," Yeoman said. "I talk too much about private things." As I looked at Yeoman more carefully I realized he was drunk. I had not caught it before. He had the control of the practiced drinker-awareness of limitations and the automatic compensation therefore.

  He shook his head. "But God knows what crap she gets these goddam eastern friends of hers believing about me. That Weaver woman visiting, she looked at me the way I look at an old iguana. You'd think, for God's sake, I forced her into marriage."

  He unhooked his leg from the arm of the chair and leaned forward. "Mister McGee, her daddy and me raised us twenty years of pure hell, and he left her to me. I had no mind to marry anybody all my life. Nine years ago, when I hunted her down in Paris, France she was the nearest thing to ruin you could see. She's a big girl, and she was down to a hundred pounds. She had the screaming fits, son. She didn't know where the hell she was. I'd let her stay loose too long, and when I thought of what Cube would think, it shamed me. I
put her in good hands in Switzerland, and I hung around.

  "They built her back up. Then what was I to do? Turn her loose again? She's fanciful. It wouldn't be long before a rough crowd would get hold of her again. So I did what made sense to me. I locked her up the best way I knew how, by marrying her and bringing her back here to her home place. And it worked out better for eight years than you could guess. She can fool you, boy. You look at her and you see a big kind of cool-looking woman, nice talking, sensible acting, and she can make you think day is night if she puts her mind to it. But she is still just a crazy kid underneath, with fool notions. And she's restless this year.

  "I keep her anchored down to a good decent life. I'm too old, son, to be turned into a wild animal by the idea of her humpin' that professor. It saddens me some, and I resent it, but I can make a try at understanding it. And I am free to admit that when I get her back, I'll make steam rise off that cheating tail of hers, but it will ease her because she'll know she's been a naughty girl, and it is always easier on a person to pay for things than walk around with guilt. And it won't hurt my own pride any to get it out of my system.

  "What you don't understand, and what she doesn't understand, is that, way down, she's dependent on me. I want to get her back before she runs herself into the ground again. Now suppose you tell us where they planned to go."

  I did not know how to answer him. I knew he was clever, but I could not believe he was so clever as to know she was dead, and be able to give such a convincing performance. I swirled the ice in my glass.

  Fred Buckelberry said, "Were they going to get their permits and walk over to Juarez, and go down into Mexico from there? Or was that just a feint in the direction of Mexico? Were they going to fly west from there? California?"

  I ignored him. I finished my drink and looked directly at Jasper Yeoman. I said, "I don't know a goddamn thing about your marriage, Mr. Yeoman. I was standing next to your wife at two twenty-five this afternoon. Somebody hit her high in the back with a heavy slug at long range and she was dead before she hit the ground, face down."

  For a moment the very dark eyes wavered and the mouth softened. Then he firmed up again. "I tried to talk man to man to you, son. I tried to get through. Let me tell you something. There is nobody in this wide world with any call to kill Mona. I would come the closest maybe, but it is the last thing I would ever do. You think you've got some obligation to stick to that fool story. You look like you had more sense. You irritate me, boy. I'm going to have Fred here run your ass right out of this county, and I don't want him being gentle about it."

  I shrugged. "Fred is so impressed with being close to such a big taxpayer, Mr. Yeoman, he's forgetting what he knows about being a good cop."

  "What the hell does that mean?" Yeoman said.

  "I'm just an amateur. But I thought of wondering if that rock slide blocking the road was all accident. So I climbed up there and found that somebody had blasted that rock down. They wanted Mona to walk to the cabin. Why? I don't have any idea. If she had somebody with her, it gave somebody else a chance to run off with the car, so there would be a lot of time before it could be reported. They'd need time to clean up the area and lug the body away."

  "He didn't say anything about that before, Jass," Buckelberry said.

  "I can think of a lot of things a good cop would do," I said. "We were conspicuous in that little white car with the top down. Somebody would have had to see us and remember us between Carson and the cabin. And I think it wouldn't hurt to get a lab crew up to that cabin. I think that slug must have made a hole as big as your fist in her wishbone on the way out. All they would need is one little bit of blood or tissue that was overlooked."

  I stood up. "I get pretty goddam tired of this routine. I saw a woman killed. I knew her about two and a half hours. I didn't like her particularly. You can sit around and dream up your little fairy stories about where she is now, but she is damned well dead, and somebody wanted a lot of confusion about this, and I have the hunch John Webb is dead too. Was his old car checked for prints? You can chase me out of the county. I think it would be a favor. Because if I stay around here, I'll be sticking my nose in where it doesn't belong. Maybe that lab crew has a good polygraph operator. Why not check my story out? Hell, that would be too easy."

  The fried-meat muscles bunched at the corners of Buckelberry's jaw. He had good control. He waited it out and looked at Yeoman and said, "I can do a little more checking, Jass."

  "You do that."

  "How about this fellow?"

  Yeoman stood up and moved toward me and looked me up and down. "Hooo-eee," he said. "Now isn't he a big one. Fred, why don't you keep him around a spell?"

  "Locked up?"

  "Maybe he'll stay anyways."

  "I plan to stay, Mr. Yeoman."

  Without taking his eyes from me, Yeoman said, "Fred, pick up the jug and get on out to your car and wait there a minute. I want a word with you before I drive on home."

  The Sheriff hesitated, picked up the bottle and left.

  As the door closed, Yeoman said, "Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is figuring out mean tricks to play on Jass Yeoman. You stand on top of the little hill, they can see you from all sides. Fast as you spin, your back has to be toward somebody. They could not care about her one way or another, but they could try to use her to gut me. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

  "I think so."

  "Give an old dog too many hot trails, he might just set and howl instead of moving out. You ever see one of those clowns that has all the dishes spinning on top of the sticks, and he has to run like hell, from one end of the line to the other, keeping them spinning?"

  "Yes."

  "I've got a lot of crockery up in the air right now, son. Running back and forth so fast, anybody puts a stick between my legs, by the time I could scramble up there could be money spilled all over the place. And someone there to catch it. Some might even slop over onto Fred, just incidentally like."

  "So?"

  "I like a man first thing, or I don't like him and never will. I don't know where you stand. You look like you could turn mean as a soretooth snake. If you come up with anything you think worth selling to me, I'll buy it."

  "Such as?"

  "If you can't figure that out, you won't ever have anything worth selling."

  He winked and ambled to the door, winked again and went out into the night. Drunk or sober, he was a man who would make sense as long as he was conscious. But he had lost me. He gave the impression of being aware of conspiracy. It had occurred to him I might be playing some more devious role in this matter, whatever it was.

  I gave up. When I knew more, maybe I would understand it. So I went to bed. He still didn't believe his wife was dead. Somehow he gave the impression of not being able to afford that knowledge.

  Though I tried to put it out of my mind, I fumbled at it as I slid toward sleep, like trying to untie knots while wearing mittens.

  And I did like him better than I had liked his young wife.

  Three

  I WALKED a morning-mile into the middle of town and had breakfast at a convention hotel, The Sage, amid people wearing badges and bragging about their hangovers. There was a car-rental desk in the hotel lobby, and when the uniformed girl found I was not a guest of the hotel, she very carefully checked their dead-beat list of credit card numbers before, with manufactured joy, honoring mine. I wanted a cheap one, and while I was waiting for it to be brought around from the garage, I bought an area map at the newsstand.

  The man brought a sand-colored Falcon around. I walked around it and found the deep dent in the back right fender. It was not noted on my sheet. I got the girl and we all stood and stared at it, and then she marked it on both copies of the sheet. One can never blame them for trying. The ones who bang them up run past the desk, toss the keys in, and go get on an airplane. I inspect cars I rent. I add up the tabs waiters hand me. I read the fine print on contracts. In these matters, I am a little old lady.<
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  State Western University was in the town of Livingston, 44 miles due south of Esmerelda on State Road 100. There is an unreality about urban places in barren lands. I guess it is because the land was never put to any other use. It did not grow up where farms used to be. Three miles south of Esmerelda, its mere existence behind me seemed dubious and improbable. I drove through a land of rock and scrub, sand and brush, lizards and the sun-wink of unrusted beer cans.

  The huge flats of the broad valley had once been, I could imagine, the floor of some ancient lake. Esmerelda, according to the daily Eagle, had an unlimited supply of pure water from deep wells. This water accounted for its improbable location in the eerie silence of windy flats and sandbrown mountains.

  Thirty miles of SR 100 were utterly flat, and then the road began to climb and wind in long curves past hill slopes and harsh outcroppings of stone. Green patches were more frequent and evident. When I finally topped a ridge, I saw the town in the distance, perhaps a thousand feet higher than Esmerelda, and tucked against the flank of a long mountain that looked, in a trick of light, like a brown dog curled sleeping.