The Long Lavender Look (14 page)

"I think you ran into a crazy, Betsy." There was no point in telling her that she had, by curing Arnstead's temporary impotence with a strong stimulant, put him well on the road to hooking himself or, more accurately, habituating himself. He matched the classic pattern of the amphetamine user. Mercurial moods, hilarity and depression, little sleep, weight loss, enhanced sexuality, inability to consistently carry out responsibilities, recklessness, increasing tendency toward violence and brutality.

"Lew didn't seem like a crazy person."

"The world would be a safer place if you could pick them out at first glance, Betsy."

"Like he could be ... put away?"

"The odds are better that he'll kill somebody, and get put away for that."

"You've been looking for him?"

"Yes. I talked to his mother. He hasn't been home since Thursday noon. Got any ideas?"

"I suppose he could be with some woman someplace."

"Who has he been running with lately? Got any idea?"

She turned and held my hand with both of hers. "Oh God, Travis, he could be out there in the night right now! We don't know what could be going on in his mind. He might even blame me for all his trouble. He could be ... waiting for you to go. Please don't leave me. Please!"

Mousetrapped. A device just as real-unreal as the soaked hair episode. Contrived, yet not contrived. Sincere, yet insincere on some level of mind and emotion she had no access to. We were trapped in her garden of make-believe. I told her she would be all right, that there was no cause to worry, but tears stood in her tragic eyes, and she said I could not leave her.

Ten

WHEN I awakened the first time on Sunday morning, I was able to give myself a long period of ironic amusement by reviewing the long chain of coincidence, episode, mousetraps, or delusions which had levered me into Betsy's bed at about two-fifteen in the morning. She had Doris-Dayed our coupling far out of the range of any casual accessibility. She had woven such a fabric of myth that I could have torn myself loose only by tearing away her illusions about herself. Sometimes there is an obligation to play the role that is forced upon you. She had indulged in a considerable drama. Tears and protestations. Retreats which made the reactive approaches obligatory.

She wrapped us in her compensatory aromas of fate, tragic romance, inevitable loneliness of human beings. She wept real tears for a variety of reasons. She made us both special people in a world of clods, because otherwise she would have been merely a dining room hostess who had brought the tall stranger back home for what the British sometimes call a bit of slap and tickle. I had, in short, so won her reluctant heart that she could not help herself. And we had to live forever with our sense of guilt and human weakness. It happened, of course, because it was written in the stars that it had to happen.

And, all dramatics aside, when it had begun, when it was an unmistakable reality superimposed on all the devices of any daytime serial, blanking out those devices in sensual energies, she was a steady, hearty workman, strong and limber and so readable that she was easily predicted and easily paced, so obviously relishing it, that I was fatuously gratified by the implied compliment, the implied flattery. So for me, too, it was charade, but I was far more conscious of it as charade than was she. Roleplaying, under an inevitable canopy over the double bed, by the small night light of a dressing table lamp with a rose-colored shade. The he-she game amid yellow sheets with blue flowers printed on them, after a welter of stuffed animals had been exiled to a white wicker divan with cantaloupe cushions which matched the overhead gauze.

Morning irony, flat on my back, feeling the roundness of her forehead against the corner of my shoulder, her deep, regular, warm exhalations against my arm. Could feel the thin slack weight of her left arm across my lower chest, sleeping pressure of a round knee against the outside of left thigh. Turned my head slowly and looked slanting downward, saw disorderly mop of the fine blond hair hiding the face. Could see tip of one ear, half of the open mouth, edge of a pink tongue, two lower teeth. Fanciful sheet down to her waist. The arm across me cut off the vision of one half of the great round whiteness of the left breast. Small veins. blue against the white.

Slow, perceptible lift and fall as she breathed.

She sighed audibly and the breathing changed. Then there was a little sound in her throat as she caught and held her breath. Left arm moved, and the hair was thumbed back. Blue-gray eyes looked solemnly up at me as the face turned pink.

"Darling, darling, darling," she whispered, then lunged and hugged herself into my throat, arms winding tight. "Don't look at me. I must look like a witch."

"You look lovely." The lines are effortless, because the role has been played a thousand times in daytime soap.

"I don't know what you must think of me," she whispers. "I'm not like this at all. I don't know what got into me."

An effort to stop the crude and obvious answer. But easy to read the words of the shopworn script. "We just couldn't help ourselves, honey."

"I love you so," she sighs.

Turn the page. Read the next line. "And I love you, too." How reprehensible is it? To love something is, in some simple sense, to be unwilling to hurt it needlessly. And it was not said to induce the lady to spread her satin thighs, because it had been said the first time after the deed was done, to make her fantasy more real to her.

Stroke the slow length of the white back, down to the uptilt of the buttocks. Slowly, slowly, following the instructions in the script, the part in brackets. Until her breath shallows and quickens, her body softens, opens, and she makes a small gritty groaning sound, brings her mouth up to mine, and the engine in her hips begins a small, almost imperceptible pulsation.

When I awakened the second time on that Sunday morning, it was when she stood beside the bed and gave me a quick little pat on the shoulder. Hair tied back with yellow yarn. Little white sunsuit. Eye makeup and lipstick most carefully applied.

"Darling, you can have the bath now. I laid out some things for you. Be careful of the shower.

The knob for hot turns the wrong way."

Tiny bathroom. Narrow shower stall. Kept whacking my elbows against the tile. Big bar of sweet pink soap. Big soft tiger towel in black and yellow stripes. Tufted yellow bath mat.

Mingled pungent odors of perfumes, salves, lotions, sprays, and of natural girl. Yellow curtains across steamed window. Yellow terry cover on the cover to the toilet seat. Glimpsed my tanned, hairy, scarred body in the full-length mirror. Great, knuckly, fibrous hulk, offensively masculine in all this soapy-sweet daintiness. New toothbrush. Mint toothpaste. Scraped beard off using bar soap and a miniature white-and-gold safety razor with a toy blade. Stopped and looked self in the eye in the mirror over the lavatory. Said severely, "Just what the hell are you doing here, McGee?"

Don't get churlish with me, fella. I got caught up in one of the games Betsy Kapp plays. This one was called the bigger-than-both-of-us game. All right. Sure. I could have walked out at any time.

Big man. Sorry, honey, I like brighter, funnier, better-looking women. Sorry. You don't match up. Don't call us, we'll call you. Leave your name and address with the receptionist.

"McGee, don't try to kid me and don't try to kid yourself. I'm not interested in your rationalizations. It was handy and you jumped it. Right?"

If you want to be crude. But what you are leaving out is that I had every expectation that she would be a very tiresome item in the sack. Once I was committed, I was going to go manfully ahead with it. I expected a lot of elfin fluttering, and maybe a little bit of clumsy earnest effort, right out of the happy-marriage textbook, and some dialogue out of every bad play I can remember.

"But? But?"

All right! So call it an unexpected pleasure. "McGee, you kill me. You really do. You go around suffering so much. All this bedroom therapy you dole out must put a hell of a strain on you.

How come, boy, you always seem to find broken birds with all these hidden talents? Just lucky?"

I couldn't answer him. I told him to go away. I got dressed and went looking for her. She had breakfast all ready on the redwood table in a shady corner of Raoul's private garden. Iced juice, a tureen of scrambled eggs, buttered toast stacked under a white napkin, crisp bacon, and a giant pot of steaming black coffee.

She was pleasured to watch a large man eat like a timber wolf. Ah, she was saucy. She was flirty
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and fancy, chortly and giggly, cooing up and down a two-octave range. She was busting with joy and jollity and high spirits, slanting her eyes at me, blushing now and again, guffawing at the mildest quip, hovering over my needs and my comforts. I was aware of an old and familiar phenomenon. I was no longer able to see her objectively, see her on any comparative basis, rate her on any kind of scale regarding face and figure. The act of complete knowing turns the lass into a familiarity, and she had become Betsy, a person entirely herself. I could see detail that I had not seen before, the extreme slenderness of her long-fingered hands, and the plumpness of the pads at the base of her fingers, a discolored eye tooth-dead perhaps. Two small pock marks on her left cheek, the little squint-lines of the mildly myopic, a puckered line of scar tissue on the side of her throat, less than an inch long. Detail that I could not evaluate as good or bad, tasteful or distasteful, could only observe as being part of this Betsy woman. She pranced and posed, patted and beamed, sighed and chuckled, and I was the great old fatuous toad-king in her garden of celebration, served and feted and extravagantly admired. It was all part of the script, obligatory sauciness of the Doris-Dayism the bright morning after the reluctant-eager surrender of the Most Precious Possession.

I found that she had to work alternate Sundays, and this was her Sunday off. Without any direct dialogue about what we would do with the day, she had begun indirectly to establish the shape of it, some sun-time in the garden, and a marvelous nap, and later on some bloody Marys and the marvelous steaks she had been hoarding in the, freezer for a special occasion, along with some wine a friend tiad given her, and he said it was a marvelous wine, chateau something or other, but she didn't really know very much about wine. There were these outdoor speakers a friend had given her and they were still in the shipping carton in the carport, and waybe I could help put them up out here because some of her favorite tapes would sound marvelous in the garden, and there was speaker wire and everything, but she didn't know what gizmo plugged into where. And we wouldn't think or talk about ugly things all day, not even once.

So I said that it seemed like good planning, but I would like to go back to the White Ibis and check for any messages and change into fresh clothes. So she said that made sense, and she leaned into me at the doorway for a kiss so long and intense it dizzied her into a little sagging lurch to one side.

I went out and stared at the empty driveway and thought for a moment somebody had stolen the white Buick, then remembered her asking me, after it had become evident I would stay the night, if I would go out and drive it back and over to the side of the carport. That way the neighbors couldn't see it, and it couldn't be seen from the street. No point in letting idle tongues wag, she had said.

So I walked toward the carport. I glanced up at blue sky and saw a large black Florida buzzard sitting in dusty, silent patience on top of a power pole at the rear of the lot line. Symbol of a Sunday funeral of some small creature. I glanced back at the house as I neared the car and saw the buzzard's brother standing on the ridge line of the cottage, at the rear corner.

And the next step brought me into view of what had engaged their hungry interest.

I had left the top down. He had been tumbled casually into the shallow rear seat of the convertible. One foot on the floor, the other caught on the seat, bending the knee at a sharp angle. A large tough muscular young man with black hair, high hard cheekbones. Long sideburns. Meyer had said that Lew Arnstead had small dark eyes. These were small dark eyes, one open wider than the other. He wore a stained ranch jacket and dirty white jeans. His head was cocked at an angle, exposing the crushed temple area, above and forward of his right ear. It was smashed inward in a pattern that looked as if it could have been done with a length of pipe about an inch in diameter. There was a little blood, and a dozen shiny flies were pacing the area.

In all such moments you do absolutely nothing. You stand and concentrate on breathing deeply and fast. Hyperventilation improves the thinking. You start looking at your options.

"Sheriff, I just spent the night here with Mrs. Betsy Kapp and when I went out to get in my car a couple of minutes ago, I found a dead man in there who might be your ex-deputy. Come over
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any time. I'll be right here."

So the old lady knows you came looking for her son. King Sturnevan gave you a little course in how to whip Arnstead when you caught up with him. Arnstead broke the face of your old and true friend. Hmmm. Betsy Kapp would be questioned. Her relationship with Lew was probably known. "Mr. McGee was with me. He couldn't possibly have killed that rotten crazy person who beat me up."

Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to leave me this little token. Somebody had taken some risk. Reasonable to assume they had added a few other little touches to sew me more tightly into the bag. Such as a weapon. The piece of pipe under the front seat, or in the glove compartment or in the nearby shrubbery.

I don't call Hyzer, then. I have to take the calcuIated risk of not calling Hyzer, which might make things a lot worse later on. Maybe Hyzer is already on his way, with Billy Cable at the wheel.

Option. I put the top up and drive away and put him somewhere. They could know it already, and be staked out waiting for me to drive out with the package. That would be a very unhappy scene indeed. The ultimate version of egg-on-the-face.