The Long Lavender Look (29 page)

Twenty after five by the bank clock when I got to the center of town. Temperature: ninety-two degrees.

Parked beyond the patrol cars. Went inside. Business as usual. One of the brisk ones behind the high counter said that the sheriff was busy. I said I wanted to see him right now. It did not sound like my own voice. He looked at me and read something in my face that made him go into a
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point like a good bird dog.

A few minutes later he took me to Hyzer's office and stood behind me. I said, "I want to tell you some things. You ought to have your tape rolling. I would like to have King Sturnevan here to listen to it."

"He's off duty."

"Can you call him in?"

Hyzer found a number on a list under the glass on his desk, dialed it, and in the silence I could hear the burr of the rings at the other end. He hung up after the eighth. "Will Billy Cable do?"

I thought it over. It had to be one or the other of them. It couldn't be both. I nodded. Hyzer told the desk man to tell communications to call Billy in.

I sat in a chair six feet from the desk and waited. Sheriff Norman Hyzer continued with his desk work in faultless concentration. In seven minutes by the wall clock, Billy Cable knocked and came in. He looked at me with hard-faced antagonism.

"Can you have him sit over there beside the desk, so I can watch his face, Sheriff?"

"What kind of shit is this?" Billy said.

"Sit over here, Cable," Hyzer ordered. "The tape is on, McGee."

"Sheriff, did you ever hear how one of the planets, one way way out from the sun, was discovered? Nobody had ever seen it because not enough light hit it, and they didn't know it was there and didn't know where to look."

"You called me in off patrol to listen to-?"

"Keep your mouth shut, Billy."

"They measured the pattern of orbit of all the other planets, and they found out that the pattern wasn't quite right, that there had to be some gravitational attraction they hadn't found yet. So they worked up the math and figured out where to look and found it. I know the patterns aren't right. I can't make them fit. So somebody else has to be in this. Somebody has exerted force and pressure to distort the patterns, Sheriff."

"What sort of things have impressed you as being ... a divergence from the norm, Mr. McGee."

"You diverge a little, Sheriff. You have this great air of efficiency and high moral rectitude.

People seem to believe that you know everything that goes on in your county. Yet you let one of your deputies run a call-girl operation right under your nose, using his badge to muscle them into the operation."

"Sherf, do you want me to-"

"You are going to listen to this with your mouth shut, Cable, if I have to have you bound and gagged."

"Yes, sir."

Hyzer was looking at me attentively. I said, "You also took the risk of demoralizing your own troops, Sheriff, by letting Arnstead get away with acts which would have gotten another deputy tossed out. When you finally did bring charges against him and threw him out, it surprised him."

"Go on, please."

"And I cannot understand your appraisal of Lilo Perris. There are enough people in this county who know that she is a sick, vicious, twisted, dangerous, rotten animal so that somehow some of the information should have filtered back to you. You did a nice job of reconstructing the money-truck job as being Baither's project. You must have known the previous relationship between Baither and the Perris girl. She would be the logical one to have played the part of the young waitress in a blond wig. But you either have a blind spot, or you want to sell others that blind spot by calling her just a healthy, high-spirited young lady. So that either puts you into the middle of the scene, Sheriff, or it means that somebody has a kind of leverage they can use on you which can prevent you from doing the kind of job you pretend to do."

"She may have foolishly placed herself in a position where-"

"Sheriff! Here is a letter I have been carrying around with me. I had it hidden in the car. Betsy Kapp wrote it a few months ago to Lew Arnstead. As a practicing student of human nature, I
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think you will agree that it has that perfect ring of truth. It illustrates one of those ... positions she foolishly placed herself in." I leaned and flipped it onto the desk, saying, "I suppose you could bring in Roddy Barramore and get a confirmation."

He read it to himself, and it made the skull-shape show through the flesh and skin. His face seemed to shrink and dwindle. He cleared his throat and, in a flat voice, read it into the record. I could see that it cost him, but I could not understand why.

He said, "When Mrs. Kapp is located, I will want to get further confirmation from her that she wrote this letter."

"Mrs. Kapp was wired to a tree sometime Sunday evening. The wire was around her throat, and she is very very dead."

Hyzer picked his hat up and stood up. "You'll take us there right now."

"When I'm through. A little delay won't make a damned bit of difference to her."

After a long hesitation he sat down. "Where did you get this letter?"

"I found one of Lew's little hidey-holes." I reached into the front of my shirt and heard Billy's hand slap at his holster, and I quickly pulled out the packet of pictures. I tossed them onto the desk. "Arnstead's sample case. Arnstead's Rent-a-Broad. I know who some of them are. Lilo Perris, for example. Geraldine Kimmey. Linda Featherman."

Billy hitched his chair closer, leaning to peer at the photographs as Hyzer examined them.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Billy said.

I said, "Don't act as if you never knew he was in the business, Billy."

"Hell, I knew he had some hustlers working. But Miss Kimmey! And the Featherman girl? Hell, no!"

"Sheriff, Betsy Kapp's body is not far from the place where Lew Arnstead had his number-one storage place. Somebody tore the place up and found his barrel safe under the fire brick on the hearth and tore it open and had a bonfire. I think that's where he hid the items that gave him the most leverage over the women. Special pictures, written confessions, assignment lists, date, time, price, and place. So somebody very interested in removing all evidence regarding some specific girl could have gone there and burned the records on all of them, and taken the money he kept there. They could have known or suspected Lew was dead, and wanted to keep somebody else from picking up where he left off. Or they could have thought he was still living, and wanted to put him out of business, or get one specific girl off the hook. Or maybe they didn't want anybody to ever be able to prove that one of Mister Norm's deputies had been running a string of women."

"Lots of possibilities, Mr. MCGee."

"Try another one, too. Lew and Betsy Kapp had a special relationship that was different from the setup he had with his other women. He could have told her about that place, and she could have gone there at the wrong time, when somebody was cleaning it out."

"Shall we go now?"

"After some more possibilities and some things I know are true, Sheriff. Five people on the truck job. Baither, Perris, Hutch, Orville, and Lilo. Hutch and Orville came into the area, probably quite a while back. I think I know where you should look for the bodies. About that envelope. Lilo got into the Baither house before she let Lew take her into the pump house. The previous night she worked on Baither until he told her where to find the money. Henry was there. But it had made him sick and he had walked away from it and didn't hear it. So she put the ice pick into Baither so he wouldn't tell it twice."

Hyzer folded his hands and rested them on the edge of the desk and sat with his eyes closed. The phone rang. He picked it up. "Sheriff Hyzer. Yes, King. Go ahead. What! All right. Go back there and stay there. We'll be along."

He hung up and pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closed, scowling. At last he looked at me and said, "McGee, as long as we're putting the cards face up, I'll tell you that Sturnevan wasn't off duty. I got permission to let him work in the county to the south of us. I'm the only one who
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knows that. The call I made to his home was just some misdirection. I had him put a beeper on Henry Perris's Rambler and hook up the directional equipment in his own private car. He just phoned in to say Perris got away from him, and he had to spend a lot of time cruising back roads until he found the one that would finally take him in the right direction to locate the car.

He found Perris and the girl. They're dead."

I hadn't worried about the fingerprints, or the tire prints of the Buick. And Nulia would talk about her fifty dollars. "The girl was all right when I left the trailer," I said. "But Henry wasn't.

He was dead. I killed him. I came here from there."

Cop eyes. Suddenly you are on the other side of an invisible fence, and they stare across the fence at you, like a rancher would stare at a sick steer.

"I left the gun under him. He fell on it. Henry was very determined to kill me. I threw an oyster knife into him. I'll reenact it at the scene."

Hyzer stood up and said to Billy, "Make sure he's clean and we'll bring him along. Have Wallace and Townsend follow with their gear. Make sure they bring the floodlights. I'll radio Doc on our way down there."

Back over the same roads, riding in the same cage where I had ridden with Meyer, in the same faint stink of illness and despair. The second car was close behind us when we pulled up to the trailer. There was a big sunset beginning to take shape, tinting the aluminum trailer a golden orange.

They got out and left me in the cage. King was standing by an old green-and-white Dodge sedan, in much the same off-duty uniform he had worn when I met him at the Adventurer, cigar in the corner of his mouth. They talked for a little while and then Billy came back and let me out.

"From the beginning," Hyzer snapped. "A short version. No oratory. We can fill in the details later." So I gave them the bones of it, including where the gun came from, how he had nearly gotten me out by my car, how I had gone inside and gotten out again, and where I had stood, and the condition of the girl when I left her.

They took me in for a look at her. She was still trussed up. She was on her side on the rug beside the bunk bed. The rug was soaked. There was a blue plastic bucket on its side on the rug near her head. The tape had been pulled off her mouth. Her hair was soaked. Her face was dark under the tan, a strange color. The light was going fast. Eyes half open. Foam caked in the corner of her mouth.

"Somebody held her head in that bucket," Billy said, "pulling it out to give her a chance to talk and shoving it in again when she wouldn't. So finally she did and McGee shoved her head back into the bucket and held it there until she drowned for sure, then let go of her. She fell over on her side just like that and he walked out."

"Billy," I said, "you are a hundred-and-ten-percent jackass."

"Sher'f," he said, "you think he would have said anything at all about this if King hadn't called in when he did? You know damn well he wouldn't."

Hyzer did not answer. He kept staring at the body of the girl.

King said, "You don't make good sense, Billy. Why would he come in at all? No, sir, I say somebody come here after he left and before I could find my way to where that damn needle kept pointing." There were too many big men in that trailer. It was overcrowded. The girl lay dead at our feet. I felt faint.

Hyzer pushed by us and we followed him out. The doctor arrived, the ambulance following him in. By then they had to hold lights on the bodies, but they were short examinations. No enigma as to the cause of death.

"On the man," he said, "it got just deep enough to slit the arch of the aorta, I'd say. Death in eight to ten seconds. Visible petechial hemorrhages in the girl's eyes and characteristic darkening of the skin. Death by drowning or suffocation. Need the time pinned down? I took the temperatures. At least one hour, possibly two."

"There's another one for you," Hyzer said.

"Another one, What the hell is going on?"

"I'll get in touch later."

They had taken the pictures for the record. I watched them slide the two meat baskets into the ambulance and take off into the dusk at leisurely pace. No hurry anymore.

I walked over to where Hyzer stood and said, "On my way back I stopped at the Perris place and gave the woman there some money to stay with Mrs. Perris. I told her the girl and Mr.

Perris wouldn't be back tonight. I thought the girl would be in custody. I didn't know she'd be dead."

He looked at me. "What?"

"I said I stopped and gave..."

"Yes. Yes, I heard you. Cable, Sturnevan, stay here and help them finish up. Billy, you ride back in with King. No. Have King show you where Perris's car is and you bring that in. I'll take McGee back with me. Come on." As we approached the car, he said, "You can ride in the front."

"Thank you."

He drove badly. The car wandered and he would slow down and speed up for no reason.

I saw in the reach of headlights the blue Opel under the big tree, and then he swung into the driveway and stopped.

"Come on," he said and I followed him to the doorway of the lighted house.

Nulia opened it and said, with a pleasure that surprised me, "Evenin', Sher'f Hyzer. Evenin'! Y'all keer to come in the house?"

I followed him in. "How is she tonight, Nulia?"

"Well, you know. Nothing much changes."

"I think the best thing to do is tell her right away. They're both dead, Nulia. Henry and Lillian."

She held her clenched hands against her chest and bowed her head, closed her eyes, lips moving silently. "Amen," she said. "Best she should know. What in the world will happen to her now?"

"I'll see that she gets care. McGee, you wait here." He went through the living room with assured step and into a hallway.

Nulia said, "Sher'f comes to see Miz Wanda sometimes. Calls me to my own place, asks me to call him when I'm sure they's both out for a spell. She like a ball of soft bread dough. Cain't move one finger. Sure needs a heap of keer. For talking, she blink her eye. One time for yes, two times for no. Closes them entire when she don't want to talk no more."