A Purple Place for Dying (16 page)

"Considering everything, I think a hundred dollars would be just about right."

I gave it to him and asked him how long she should sleep.

"As long as she can," he said. "If she sleeps well into this afternoon, fine. Are you going to stay here too?"

"I'm exhausted, Doctor, and she's already compromised."

As the windows were beginning to get that pale look I put the chain on the door, brushed my teeth and kissed her on the forehead and went to bed. I was no longer irritated with her. I felt proud and pleased about her. Samaritan McGee, savior of doomed womanhood. I had a curious feeling of ownership.

Now you belong to me, dear girl, and damn foolishness will not be countenanced in the future. You hear?

It was Jass on the phone. I told him to hold it a minute. She seemed to be too motionless. I went around her bed and bent over her. She was sleeping sweetly. I went back to the phone.

"What's on your mind, Jass?"

"You just wake up?"

"I had a busy night."

"Doing what?"

"I'll tell you later."

"Well… the thing I called about… I don't know. A man gets to thinking, after somebody nearly gets him with a knife. Should anybody hate me that much? I lay wondering in the night. Making lists. The funny thing about hate, maybe the ones you think have no call to hate you so much, the ones you've done things for, maybe that's where the hate is strongest, Trav. "

"You thought of somebody?"

"Cube Fox and I used to raise particular hell up and down this country. I always figured myself for a man who'd take his fun and pay the bills for it as they come along."

Quite suddenly I remembered that pair at the gas station when I had, walked out after seeing Mona slain. I remembered the man saying, "There's maybe forty grownup people running around this end of the state with Cube's blue eyes and the rest of them Mex. Cube was plain death on Mex gals."

Jass said, "I wasn't rightly in Cube's league. But you take those warm nights, and some of those country dances, and the smell of cedar scrub burning, and some belts of mescal, and the big open cars we'd run around in, and all the little warm brown gals, giggling and cuddly, and Cube and. me speaking the language and all… " His voice trailed off.

"Do you have any particular bastard child in mind?" I asked him.

"No. No. I didn't keep track. Last night I was trying to recall. There was five or six times when I got called on to help out. I suppose there were others got theyselves married off fast, soon as they had a suspicion. And others too proud to ask. They asked and I helped out. I'd set it up quiet for them, so they could get money right from the bank. Three times it was that way, instead of just a piece of money paid out and that being the end of it. Fifty a month. Forty. To help out with the kid. It was a long time ago. I guess I could track the records down. Sanchez. Fuegos. Those are the only two names come to mind. Boy babies. They should be near thirty years old now. I don't know, son. It was something I was thinking on in the nighttime. I guess there could be some hate."

"There could be."

"Then there's the one I kept track of, but I wouldn't want to say the name over the telephone, and anyway, there wouldn't be any hate there, nothing like that. What you do, boy, you come over to the Cottonwood Club, say in an hour. I've been sloppin' around the house here, thinking of old times, missing my girl bad. I'll get dressed and see you there."

As soon as I hung up, it rang again. Isobel stirred and made a little growly sound in her sleep. It was Buckelberry. He told me the Webb girl had disappeared. He wanted to know if I had any idea where she might be. I hesitated and told him she was staying at The Sage. He wanted to talk to her. I told him she was under sedation. I told him I'd have her get in touch. He accepted it, with a certain reluctance. I told him I'd be in to sign the statement about the fellow with the knife later on. He said they had an almost positive identification on him from Phoenix. Francisco Pompa, age nineteen, delinquent, pimp and addict, and they had raised his prints on a stolen car found parked a quarter mile from Jass's house.

Isobel slept on. After I was shaved and dressed, I picked her clothing up, all of it, including her sensible shoes, and bundled it in her stale sweater. I noted the shoe size imprinted inside a shoe. 5 B. I found a maid working in a nearby room. I told her not to disturb the girl in my room. I gave her the clothing, saying that once it was cleaned up and repaired, she might know somebody who would have some use for it. She was delighted.

I had a quick breakfast, then went to the desk and checked her in, officially. Cousin Isobel. The clerk was supercilious. I smiled at him. I made it a very sleepy smile. It was not long before he became a little bit jumpy and nervous. When he was sufficiently polite, I turned away.

As I had time to spare, I went to the shops on the lower level. I found a freckled little clerk with a sincere desire to please. She decided a size ten would be about right. We picked out a frivolous little orlon suit, and some very ornate and sexy yellow underthings, and a sunback blouse that would go well with the suit. She ducked next door with me and picked out some tall-heeled pumps that would go with the suit. I left the packages in the room, with a note telling her I would be back by three thirty, and if she woke up before then, order up some food and phone Buckelberry. I said I hoped the stuff in the boxes would fit.

While I was engaged in such frivolities and pseudo-sex-play in the perfumed world of woman's wear, Jasper Yeoman was busily engaged in what is sometimes termed shuffling the mortal coil. He made hard work of it. From what I learned later, I was able to reconstruct it. While driving his big car from his home to the Cottonwood Club, he began to have a feeling of suffocation, a difficulty in breathing. Alarmed, he turned into the parking lot of a huge glossy shopping center, aiming toward a gleaming drugstore as the nearest possible source of help. He parked very badly, and scrambled out of the car. By then he had be gun to have uncontrollable muscle twitches Probably the housewives, trucking foodstuffs to their cars, thought they were seeing a midday drunk; this big spare leathery fellow lurching and hopping and skittering, mouth wide to suck air.

On the broad walk in front of the drugstore the first of the titanic convulsions took him. He bounced and jarred, jackknifed and fell, like a puppet dangled by a cross child. On the grey cement, amid the gum wrappers and filter tips, the body arched backward, the head jerked, the neck became stiff. He rested on head and heels, face congested, countenance anxious, eyes staring, lips retracted and livid, jaws clenched.

They gathered at a safe distance and stared blankly at his agony. A clerk ran out and ran back in and called an ambulance. The convulsion ended and he slackened, rested a moment, and then asked in a weak and lucid voice if someone would help him get up. They got him up and walked him into the drugstore. Several minutes later the next convulsion took him, and he ripped himself out of their grasp and smacked and bucked against the patterned plastic tile of the retail floor.

Again he was lucid, but weaker. He went to a third one as they were loading him into ambulance. He had the rest of them at regular intervals in the hospital emergency room, the convulsions seeming to grow stronger as he became weaker. After forty minutes, despite all attentions they could give him, he died of a combination of asphyxia and exhaustion. By then the toxicologist was quite certain of what he would find. After autopsy procedures, with Intestinal contents, stomach contents, brain, liver, blood, urine, hair packed in clean glass containers for laboratory analysis, it was found that he had ingested an estimated.2 grams of strychnine, double the fatal dosage, had probably swallowed the poison within thirty minutes of the first convulsion, and had taken it in something that probably masked the very bitter taste, possibly some very strong black coffee.

But I pieced this all together later. I went to the club and waited for him. Then in some mysterious way everyone there knew he had been taken sick, knew he was at the hospital. He died ten minutes before I got there.

He intercepted me in the hospital parking lot. He looked at me with what could have been interpreted as fond approval. I knew better. With Yeoman dead I had no clout left. He looked at me the way a cat might look at a fresh fish. He attached Deputy Homer Hardy to me, with instructions to go with me to the hotel, collect the Webb girl, take us both to the county courthouse, hold us there-voluntarily of course-awaiting Buckelberry's convenience.

We were at The Sage by ten of three. Hardy had no intention of waiting in the lobby. He waited in the corridor, outside the room door. The boxes were empty. The bathroom door was closed. I could hear water running. I tapped on the door. She said just a minute.

In five minutes she came out. Everything seemed to fit. From the neck down she was first class girl, the little suit and blouse showcasing what she had a tendency to hide. The drab wings of hair concealed her forehead. She had put on her big dark glasses. Her lips were without color, her face slightly puffy. The impenetrable lenses stared at me.

"Where are my clothes?"

"How do you feel?"

"Where are my clothes?"

"I threw them away."

"And bought me this cheap, vulgar, obvious outfit. Thank you so much."

"It wasn't cheap."

"It's cheap in a way you couldn't possibly understand, Travis."

"Honey, if you don't care whether you live or die, what difference does it make what you wear? Did you get anything to eat?"

"No."

"We have to go to Buckelberry's headquarters."

"I am not going there. I'm going home."

"There's a deputy in the hall to make sure we both go there."

She was looking at herself in the mirror, hitching at the skirt. She stopped and stared toward me. "Why?"

"Jass Yeoman is dead."

"What has that got to do with me?"

"Perhaps nothing. Buckelberry wants to make sure."

"I don't understand."

"Somebody's hired-hand tried to get him with a knife last night. They missed. So somebody poisoned him this noon."

"Poisoned?" she said in a faint voice.

"It wasn't a very easy way to die."

She put her fingertips to her throat. "I'm sorry about that. I… I hated him for not having the pride and decency to keep his wife away from my brother. But… poison is so ugly."

We went down in the elevator with the deputy. I told him we had to eat. He thought it a very dubious idea. Isobel told him that if she couldn't eat, she was going to lie down in the lobby and he could carry her to the courthouse.

We went to the grill. He sat with us. I asked him to go get his own table. He was very gloomy and hurt about that. He took one by the door. I ordered a steak sandwich. She ordered a large orange juice, two broiled hamburgers with everything, a side order of home fried potatoes and a pot of coffee.

I watched her as she began to eat her way steadily through the order. The silence between us seemed to get more obvious by the moment. I reached quickly and took the dark glasses off. She tried to snatch them back. "Please," she said. Her eyes looked naked, shifty, shy.

"Stop hiding and you can have them back."

"Hiding? What can I say? I haven't even thought it out yet. I can't. Believe me, I try to think about it and my mind just sort of… veers away from it."

"Do you still want to kill yourself?" She looked around hastily and said, "Ssh! I… no, I don't think so. I don't know."

"Are you glad I stopped you?"

"I guess so. Thanks. Stupid word to say, thanks. I just thought… take the capsules and just… go off to sleep and that's the end of it. But I suppose that even if you understood, if you found me in time, you couldn't let it hap pen. I mean I don't resent it, because you'd have to try. Anyone would."

Suddenly I did not want her understanding. A man who had wanted to live was dead. She had wanted to die, and she sat there chomping hamburg. I suppose I should not blame her for a self-involvement that, in contrast, seemed the ultimate silliness. But, all moral judgments aside, Jasper Yeoman had been one hell of a fellow. He had been a whole man, and this was just about half of a girl.

She was sensitive to the nuance, to a flavor of disapproval, and her head tilted slightly, one eyebrow arching. "Something is wrong?"

"Everything is nifty Iz."

"I hate that nickname. I… I can't remember everything very clearly." I saw pink suffuse her face. "But… I was nude?"

"The colloquial expression is bare-ass."

Pink turned to angry red. "How can you be so crude and indifferent?"

I looked away from her, shrugged one shoulder. "Eat your starch, honey. The deputy is getting restless. About the side show, I was trying to shock you awake. It worked. Just don't assume it was such a tremendous deal for me. You've got the standard equipment in the standard places. Nothing gaudy happened. I was saving your life. All that blundering and gagging and whoopsing around didn't make me feel particularly romantic."

She sat scrunched and pallid, eyes downcast. It was a cheap little victory, as most of the easy ones are. So I gave her back her glasses, but her appetite was gone. She walked out with me as if she was trying to hold a coin in place between her knees. Homer Hardy took us to a small room off the courthouse corridor. He told us to bang on the door if we needed anything. He closed it and left us there.

There wasn't much left for us to say to each other. Time went by very slowly. There was a lot of traffic in the corridor, a lot of voices.

Out of a long silence I said, "There'll have to be arrangements about your brother."

"I've been thinking about that. Our parents were cremated. John would want that too. There's an old family plot in Weston, New Hampshire. A simple memorial service in the university chapel, I think. There's a man in Livingston-I guess I just arrange for the authorities to release the body to him, and tell him what I want. But I don't know how they get the urn from here to Weston, how that's done. I guess the man can tell me. Then, there's the insurance too."

"Can I help in any way?"

"Thank you, no."

"How do you feel?"

"Tired. And empty."

A room without windows seems to slow the passage of time. Overhead fluorescence in an eggcrate housing. Green tin chairs, raggedy old magazines, an almost sickening sweetness of some spearmint deodorant which masked all the lesser stinks of authority. She sat behind her big dark lenses, her white knees and white ankles pressed neatly together, hands folded on her purse.

It was five of six by my watch when Hardy came in and took her off to talk to Buckelberry. Half an hour later he sent for me. I was astonished to find him alone. The statements were ready. I read one over and signed the three copies necessary.

He took his time lighting a pipe, tamping it, relighting it, making um-pah sounds as he got it going to his satisfaction.

"They're all screaming for blood," he said. "Kendrick, Gay, O'Dell, DeVrees, Madero… all of them. Jass was one of theirs."

"And it would scramble your future, Fred, if you came up empty?"

His glance was sharp and unfriendly. "I'm not too worried about that. It all got too messy. The question is how to come up soon. Anything so complicated has to fall apart. But I want to look good, McGee. I want to look very very good."

"What are you trading?"

"I've got a very wide open vagrancy ordinance, and some understanding judges. You can swing a brush hook in the hot sun for ninety days. I like that ordinance. It makes the job easier."

"I can imagine," I said, and stood up.

"Where you going?"

"Let's go see one of those judges."

"For God's sake, sit down!"

I sat. "I can't be pushed that way, Sheriff."

He studied me. "You'd do the ninety days?" He sighed. "Yes, I guess you would."

"How did they give it to Jass?"

"In strong coffee. He liked it boiled, black and bitter. They'd make a thermos of it so it would stay hot on him while he pooted around showering and shaving and so on in the morning. The little bit left was loaded with strychnine. The cook made it and took it in to him. She's cleared. You know how that place is built. He had private dealings. Some people didn't want to be seen going there or leaving. That side door to the study. He carried the coffee down there, phoned you from there. He say anybody was with him?'

"No."

"He have any ideas about who was after him?"

I'd a long silent time in a small room to think about it. I had no reason to get mysterious with Buckelberry. But I had so little to go on, such a vague little hunch.

"Well?" Fred said.

"Jass started wondering about his children, Fred."

He stared at me. "Don't get cute. He didn't have any."

"Not officially." I told him what Jass had told me of the old days. Buckelberry listened intently. And with a cop instinct he jumped on the same idea I'd had.

"How about the one he kept track of, the one that couldn't hate him?"

"He didn't give me the name. Who would know?"

Buckelberry didn't answer me. He stared into space and then he banged his hard fist on his desk. "Suppose," he said softly, "just suppose we come on Mona dead a long time. Then we bury the two of them, Jass and Mona. And the will comes to probate and some son of a bitch steps forward with proof, with absolute proof he's Jass's illegitimate kid. Could he inherit? I don't know the law on that. What if he had letters from Jass? He'd be the closest blood relative for sure."

"And he'd be free to go see Jass at any time."

Buckelberry nodded grimly. "Like about noon today."

"Maybe he wouldn't dare come forward now," I said.

"Why not?"

"This whole plan just got too screwed up, Fred. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Maybe all that was left was the hate."

"It's a starting place anyways," he said, sighing.

"How about your other starting places?"

He shook his head. "Can't find that Ron. Can't find the other body. Can't get a line on the rifle. The Alverson woman was a dead end. Webb's body gave us no leads." He stretched and rubbed his face and reached for the phone. "Now let's see if any of those eager old pals of his knows anything." He paused and said, "Set outside for a while, McGee."

"I'll help out in any way I can. He paid me some money. I haven't earned it yet. I'd like a chance to."

He pulled his hand back from the phone and studied me. "Some people have a knack. Wherever you go, damn you, something seems to happen. You're going to meddle anyways, aren't you?"

"Unless you give me ninety days."

He opened a bottom drawer, fished and clanked around in it, came up with a shiny something and flipped it at my face. I got my hand up in time and the chrome badge

"Raise your right hand and repeat after me."

"Just like a western?"

"Exactly like a western, McGee. I'm authorized."

I swore. I was official. I put the badge in my pocket. Temporary Deputy Travis McGee. I could officially get myself killed in the line of duty and receive certain death benefits as provided by Esmerelda County, and until relieved by the Sheriff of said county, I would receive pay of five dollars per month or fraction thereof. I signed the official register. And went out to wait outside.

As I went out, Isobel stood up from the corridor bench with a humble and obedient manner.

"What do you want?"

She drew me aside. "Travis… I thought you might drive me back to the university, if it wouldn't be too much trouble."

"They run buses."

"Please. If you don't, it would… look strange. I told the Sheriff you would. I… didn't tell him anything about what I did." The blush came oozing up from the neck of her new blouse. "So he thinks I… we… it was… He thinks it…"

"He must have a vivid imagination, honey."

"Please don't be cruel. I… made the arrangements, some of them, about John. And I just don't want…" She dropped the humble manner, stepped back, lifted her chin and said, "Damn you, I'd rather not be alone. If you can't understand why…"

"Okay, okay, okay. But I have to hang around for a while. I'll drive you down. Or you can come back to the hotel. You're registered, cousin."

"Cousin?"

"I had to tell the desk something."

She walked to the bench and sat abruptly and said, "I can never go back there as long as I love… liver"

"Your Freudian slip is showing."

"That's a stale, tiresome, shopworn remark. And you are a boor."

"Now you're acting more like yourself, honey."

She asked me if I was under detention or arrest. I showed her my new badge. She shook her head as if the world had gone mad.