A Purple Place For Dying

A Purple Place For Dying

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #3 A Purple Place For Dying

John D. MacDonald

One

SHE TOOK the corner too fast, and it was definitely not much of a road. She drifted it through the corner on the gravel, with one hell of a drop at our left, and then there was a big rock slide where the road should have been. She stomped hard and the drift turned into a rough sideways skid, and I hunched low expecting the white Alpine to trip and roll. But we skidded all the way to the rock and stopped with inches to spare and a great big three feet between the rear end and the drop-off. The skid had killed the engine.

“What a stinking nuisance!” Mona Yeoman said.

The cooling car made tinkling sounds. A noisy bird laughed at us. A lizard sped through the broken rock.

“End of the line?”

“Goodness, no. We can walk it from here. It’s a half mile, I guess. I haven’t been up here in ever so long.”

“How about my gear?”

“It didn’t seem to me you had very much. I guess you might as well bring it along, Mr. McGee. Perhaps you might be able to roll enough of this rock over the edge so you can get the jeep by. Or I can send some men to do it.

“If we’re going to keep this as quiet as possible, I better give it a try.”

“That makes sense.”

“If I decide to try to help you, Mrs. Yeoman.”

She glanced at me. Her eyes were the beautiful blue of robins’ eggs, and had just about as much expression. “You’ve come this far, haven’t you? I think you will.”

I lifted my suitcase out of the little car, and we climbed over the rock. It was a fresh slide. The broken edges of the rock showed that. I felt just as happy to be out of the car. The road was steep and the curves were very interesting. She had met me at noon at an airport fifty miles away, quite a distance from her home base. She said she had a place I could stay, a very hidden place, and we could do all our talking after we got there. Ever since meeting her I had been trying to figure her out.

She did not seem to fit either the rough country or the type of clothing she was wearing. She was a big ripe-bodied blonde of about thirty. She had a lot of control, and a competent way of handling herself, and a mild invulnerable arrogance. She would have looked far more at home on Park Avenue and Fifty-Something, in the highest of high style on a Sunday afternoon, wearing a fantastic hat and walking a curly little blue dog.

Here she strode up the gravel road in six-stitch boots, twill trousers, a tweed hacking coat, a sand-pale cowgirl hat. Though we were high, there was no wind and the sun made walking very hot work. I stopped and put my suitcase down and took my suit coat off.

“Good idea,” she said, and shed hers and slung it over her shoulder. She went on, with the air that she was destined to walk ahead with most of the world following in single file. Her waist was narrow and she held her back very straight. The pale twill pants, a shade darker than her hat, were almost as tight as her skin. I read female character from sterns. Hers was hefty, shapely, rich and unapproachable. This one, I decided, would consider any gift of her favors a truly earth-shaking event, to be signaled by rare wine, incense and silk sheets. And she had the look of almost being able to live up to her own billing.

She was intent on one thing at a time. Walk now. Talk later.

The road ended at a cabin. It was on a half acre of naturally level ground, a rocky shelf three-quarters of the way up the mountain. The cabin was of silver-gray wood, twenty feet square, old, but honestly made, with a steep roof. There was an open shed beside it containing cords of wood and an ancient jeep still wearing its army paint. There was a shack behind it, against the rock face of the hill. There was a privy built out over one hell of a drop.

I followed her up onto the porch and she pried a key out of the pocket of those tight pants and unlocked the door.

“This is the bunk room and living room. That fireplace heats it beautifully. Kitchen through there. Wood stove. A good stock of staples. There’s a spring up the hill. That’s very rare around here. The water is piped into the kitchen. Cold water only. Excellent water though. I assume you saw the outside plumbing. The battery in the jeep is probably dead, but it should start if you run it downhill. You can take it to a gas station and see what it needs and put the amount on your bill. There are some rough clothes in that closet there. I doubt there’s anything big enough to fit you, Mr. McGee, but I think you can make do.”

“Mrs. Yeoman?”

“There are no sheets but plenty of blankets and… What?”

“I am not buying the place. I am not even renting it. Maybe I’m not even staying. So let’s get to it, shall we?”

She looked at me with disapproval. “But somebody has to help me,” she said. “Why did you come so far if…”

“Like a self-respecting call girl, Mrs. Yeoman, I reserve the right to pick and choose. Once upon a time a lady assumed I’d happily kill somebody for her. That isn’t my line of work.”

“This is nothing like that! Fran Weaver is one of my oldest friends. She said that if anybody in the world could…”

“I know. I know. She wrote me. I got in touch. You sent plane fare. You gambled your money, and I gambled my time. Now we see if we can get together.” I put my suitcase on the bunk and opened it and took out the bottle carrier. “Bourbon with no ice?”

“Please. Some water, half and half. You’ll find the water cold enough.”

It ran rusty at first and cleared quickly, and it was cold enough to numb my fingers. I put drinks in two mismatched glasses and took them in. She sat on a leather cushion on the raised hearth. It was cooler inside. She had put her jacket around her shoulders and laid her hat aside.

I sat in a thong chair nearby,She lifted her glass and said, “To an agreement.”

“Fine.” We drank and I said, “I took this one blind because I’m almost broke, Mrs. Yeoman.”

She looked concerned. “That… isn’t very heartening.”

“Like not being successful? I’m very successful.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I work when the money gets low. Otherwise I enjoy my retirement, Mrs. Yeoman. I’m taking it in installments, while I’m young enough to enjoy it. I am commonly known as a beach bum. I live on a houseboat. I live as well as I want to live, but sometimes I have to go to work. Reluctantly. Do you understand the terms?”

“I… I think so. Fran said…”

“Something has to have been taken from you, something that belongs to you. You have exhausted all ways of getting it back. I’ll make a try at it, if I go for the situation. If I can make a recovery, I keep half the value.”

“It… it couldn’t work that way in my case.”

“Then let’s walk back down that hill.”

“No. Wait a minute. Let me tell you the situation. My father was Cubitt Fox. That doesn’t mean anything to you, I know. But it is still a remembered name around here. I was his only child. My mother died two years after I was born. He tried to raise me like he would a son. He died twenty years ago, when I was twelve. He was forty-four. His dearest and closest friend was Jasper Yeoman. Jass was thirty-eight when daddy died. The will named Jass executor. He took over. He was very kind and generous. I went to good schools in the east, Mr. McGee. After I graduated from Vassar, I went to work in New York, on a magazine. I was on a generous allowance. I was twenty-two. I fell in love with a married man. We ran away together. It was a ghastly and horrible mistake. In Paris he had a change of heart and went scurrying back to his wife. I stayed there, for almost a year. I did too much drinking and I did some very foolish things. Then I got sick. Jass came over. He took me to Switzerland and stayed with me until I was well. I needed emotional stability and security and affection. Jass and I were married aboard ship on the way back, nine years ago. He’s fifty-eight now. Up until a year ago, it was… a comfortable life. Jass is a rich and successful and tough minded man. It was a first marriage for him. We’ve been unable to have children, and it’s my fault, not his. A year ago I fell in love again. I thought Jass would be… reasonable. He hasn’t been. I decided I would leave him. I thought I would get the money my father left me and leave him. I was still getting the allowance which I thought was the interest from the estate held in trust for me. I know there were several trust funds. I had been receiving fifteen hundred dollars a month since I was twenty-one. And spending it. I’ve been a little too damned good at spending it. Jass was the executor, as I told you. I asked for an accounting. He laughed at me. He said that my father’s estate had been used up years ago, and that he had been continuing my allowance out of his own pocket. I demanded to see the figures. He said that they wouldn’t mean anything to me if I saw them. He said daddy had made foolish investments, and the estate money had run out at the time we were married.

“Mr. McGee, my father was successful! At the time he died the papers said that his estate, before taxes, was worth over two million dollars. It couldn’t be gone. I think my husband has… taken all that money somehow.”

“Mrs. Yeoman, I think you need a lawyer and an accountant. I don’t think you need me.”

“Let me tell you a few facts of life. This is Esmerelda County. Eight miles down the valley is the City of Esmerelda. In the city is the Esmerelda Bank and Trust Company. My husband is the county and the city and the bank, and he is a lot of other things. Jass goes on hunting trips with the other men who run this whole state. He plays poker with them. Damn it, I am being treated like a child bride, as if this was some sort of little temper tantrum. I’m supposed to be a good girl and get over it.”

“But did you see a lawyer?”

“I couldn’t find a lawyer in Esmerelda who wanted to touch it. I found a young lawyer in Belasco, over in the next county. He poked around for a month. I can’t remember all he said, but I think I can remember the important parts. My husband had to give an account of his… his stewardship to the probate judge, and file reports with the court, because I was a minor, I guess. He made three reports, five years after daddy died, and ten years after, and fifteen years after. The last was a final report, five years ago, claiming the estate was exhausted. The judge is dead. Four years ago they built the new courthouse. The records are in the dead files and they aren’t even indexed, and there’s no way of telling if the records are there or not. The lawyer Jass used is dead, and nobody knows where his files and records went to. My lawyer said he would have to start from the other end, to get a copy of the tax statement filed with the federal government twenty years ago, and identify the assets, and then trace them through the public records of sales and so forth, and build up a case that some kind of funny business had gone on. Then I would have to bring action against my husband. Even if we got something to go on, he said Jass could stall for three or four years before we could ever get it into court. In the meantime, my allowance has been cut off until I, quote, come to my senses, unquote. He pats me on the head and tells me to forget all this nonsense.”

“Maybe the estate wasn’t as big as you thought it was, Mrs. Yeoman.”

“Oh, come now! Daddy loved land. He had faith in the future of this area. I showed the lawyer, and I can show you, just one of the pieces he owned. Now it’s got the Chem-Del plant on it, and two big shopping centers and about four hundred tract houses. He checked it out in the County Clerk’s office, and it wasn’t sold to pay estate taxes. The records show it was sold three years after he died to something called the Apex Development Corporation. The records in the state capital show that Apex lasted four years and collapsed, with no asset values. Daddy owned this area right here, too. Ten thousand acres. Jass knew I loved this place. He gave me a deed to this part of it, nine hundred acres, for my birthday about seven years ago. He said he bought it back from the people who owned it. Four months ago I looked into the idea of selling it, but Jass is on the deed too, and I can’t.”

“What do you think you want from me?”

“The estate was stolen from me, by my husband. There must be some way of… of making him make restitution. Some way of making him take me seriously. Because I am serious, damn it. I want my money, and I want a divorce, and I want to marry John Webb.”

“The money is necessary. I assume.”

“John hasn’t any, if that’s what you mean. He’s an assistant professor at State Western. The legislature controls the University. Jass has good friends in the legislature. The day I leave him, according to Jass, John Webb gets booted out with damn small chance of getting a job elsewhere. I’ve been reduced to… to being a captive, Mr. McGee.”

12 John D. MacDonald

A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING 13

“A smart woman can make a man feel happy to be rid of her.”

“I have been an absolute bitch for months. He laughs at me. He says I’ll get over it. He’s always been… very ardent. I haven’t let him touch me. That doesn’t seem to bother him either. I think he has somebody else. He is so terribly confident I’ll get over this little tantrum, and be his girl bride again. I had to sell jewelry to pay that lawyer, and I had to sell jewelry to pay for your plane ticket. He says once I prove to him that I want to be a wife again, we can go back to the way things used to be. I told my troubles to Fran when she visited me. And you were the only thing she could suggest.”

“I don’t see how there’s anything which can be done.”

“Mr. McGee, I want to be realistic about this. I’ve scaled my wants way way down. I want him convinced he should let me go, and I want to walk away with fifty thousand dollars. If you can pry me loose somehow, with a hundred thousand, I’ll give you half. If you can manage more, I’ll give you ten percent of everything over a hundred thousand. My only other choice is to sit around and wait for him to die. And he is a very healthy man.”

“Or you could just take off with this Webb.” She made a face. “I threatened that. He said he would never divorce me for desertion. He said he would send people to find me and bring me back. And those people would give John Webb a whipping for wife-stealing. John isn’t very strong, physically. No. He has to want to let me go.”

She stood up and paced restlessly. She had a lot of vitality, a lot of gloss and bounce and directed energy. She didn’t look like the kind you can quell and keep and humble.

“Why would he take your money?”

, “I think I have that figured out. I heard some rumors. When I was about fifteen, beginning about then, he had some very bad years. He’s always been bold, in a business way. I guess he got too bold. He over extended himself in too many directions, so that when things started to go bad for him, he didn’t have enough money to move around. So he had to dig into mine to save himself. Maybe he thought he would pay it back, but he had to take more and more of it, and do a lot of shifty work before he could stem the tide and start to get healthy again. I guess by then it seemed easier to fake a lot of things and close out the estate rather than try to pay it back. And the best way to cover it all up was to marry me. When there was a chance of marrying me, he took it. I don’t think he ever really wanted to be married. He isn’t that sort of a man. It was something he had to do to protect himself. I was in ghastly shape, and I jumped at the chance. During the years when… it seemed pretty good, I never did really have the status of a wife. He didn’t change his way of life at all. Or ever seem to take me seriously.”

“I just don’t see where I have any approach I can use.”

“Mr. McGee, he didn’t pull these tricky things in a complete vacuum, you know. He does make enemies. Somebody must have enough on him to… to be able to put pressure on him. And I don’t think Jass is as casual and confident about this as he would like to have me believe. I’m pretty sure people have been following me. I think I do worry him a little. I suppose it would look bad if the newspapers picked it up-Jass Yeoman’s wife demanding an accounting of what happened to her father’s money. I guess he must have been worried that maybe I had squirreled away some of my allowance.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I had a nice little Mexican maid for five years. She quit six months ago and got married. Two men went to her and questioned her for hours, mostly about my personal finances, how much I spent and on what and so on. They claimed to be some sort of accountants. Afterwards she worried about it for a few days, and then came and told me. That happened just two months ago. I had… an unusual relationship with Dolores. We confided in each other. She was very dear to me.”

“And you think that because your husband might be worried, he might be susceptible to some kind of pressure.”

“If I knew what to do, Mr. McGee, I would have tried to do it myself. I even thought I might blackmail my own husband. I hired a man to find out about other women. I guess he was clumsy. The police threw him in jail for three nights running, for little things like spitting on the sidewalk. He gave up.”

“I just don’t know,” I said.

She asked me to follow her. We went out to the barren edge of the dropoff. The crumpled hills around us were red-brown, with little patches of stubborn green. There was a clump of wind-twisted pines nearby. She pointed west. The range we were on cascaded down and flattened out, and across the semi-desert plain, distorted by heat shimmer, misty in the distance, we could see the city of Esmerelda, pale cubes rising out of a cluttered smear. She pointed out U.S. 87 angling toward the city from the northeast, about four miles away and three or four thousand feet lower than we were. I could make out two big silver transport trucks crawling along amid the swifter beetles of private cars.

She stood bare headed, half facing me. “I’m thirty-two years old, Mr. McGee. There’s been a lot of wasted time and wasted years. I’m grateful to him, in a way. But I want out. I’m the captive princess, and that’s the castle down there. Jass is the king. I can have a little freedom of motion, as long as I ride back to the castle walls at nightfall. Corny I guess. But when you are in love you get some romantic images. And I’m not too ancient to cry myself to sleep. I must have help.”

She stood at my right, half turned to face me, the sun heat of the still day misting her forehead and her upper lip. She wanted the answer. And I frowned in silence, searching for the words to tell her that this was not my sort of thing.

Suddenly she plunged forward, her shoulder brushing me and knocking me back. She went with her head tilted back, and she landed face down on the baked dirt and the edges of stone, and slid at least six inches after she struck, without having lifted her hands to try to break her fall. The noise that started the fall was a curiously ugly noise. It was a dull sound of impact, like the sound of burying a hatchet into a soft and rotten stump. She lay without twitch, without sound, totally soft and flattened. I heard then the distant ringing bark of a heavy rifle, a ka-rang, echoing in the still rock hills of the windless day. There was too much open space between me and the cabin. I ran in a very fast and very random pattern toward the pines fifty feet away, skidded around them and fell, clutching a twisted root, my legs hanging half over the edge of the drop. A dislodged stone clattered and bounced once, then hit long seconds later and far away. I swallowed the gagging lump that was the clear visual memory of the wet hole punched high in her spine, through the silk blouse, dead center, about two inches below where her neck joined her good shoulders. A big caliber. Plenty of impact. Foot pounds of energy is a product of mass and velocity. Good velocity, for the sound to come that much later. A full second? Less. Five hundred yards? I pulled myself forward and peered around the trunk of the tree. An empty jumble of hills over there, a thousand crouching-places.

I had to settle myself down to a rational appraisal of his luck. He had the whole torso to go for. Provided it wasn’t some halfwit potting at a twig. That much slug, in shoulder or hip, would do the job. Even if he’d gotten the thigh or the upper arm, my chance of getting help to her in time would have been slim. He had exploded that big pipe that held all the circuits. Massive hydrostatic pressure on the spinal fluid, blowing the brain dark in a microsecond.

She had died without knowing she was dead.

I looked at her, my eyes at ground level. The top of her head was toward me. Once I had seen a fence-jumping mare killed by a pickup truck. The corner post of the windshield had hit her behind the ear and snapped her neck, and she had gone down in the same utterly final and boneless way.

I watched the crumpled country of that neighbor mountain, saw nothing, heard nothing. In the silence I thought I heard a car start, a long long way off.

The princess wouldn’t be making it back to the castle tonight.

When I got tired of waiting, I scrambled up and ran for the cabin in the way Uncle had taught me once upon a time. I dived into the cool interior, and let my precious treasured flesh unpucker. Her empty glass was on the hearth, pink lipstick on the rim. The leather cushion still bore the imprint of that round behind. I saw battered binoculars hanging on a nail. Eight power. Navy issue. The left lens was knocked out of true. The right was good enough. It showed me the flies with the bright green back-ends scurrying around on her silk shirt.

Her leather purse was on the chair with the jacket and cowgirl hat. I found eighty-nine dollars in it. I took the eighty. I put my bottle back in the suitcase, went to the doorway, took three deep breaths, then went running for the road.

I ran until I was down around the first curve. I watched my fingers shake as I lit a cigarette. And then I went swinging down the road.

TWO

WHEN I clambered over the rock slide, I had the insane feeling I should start turning the rocks over, looking for the little white car. I squatted. The gravel was too loose to take a print, and where there wasn’t gravel, the earth was baked too hard. But I could see where the little car had been backed around and driven away. I had remembered her leaving the keys in it. There had been no reason not to. Two or three miles down the hill was the weathered gate I had opened and then closed again after she had driven the car through.

I wondered if it had been her car I had heard starting up. I had another idea. I left my suitcase on the road and climbed to the top of the slide. It took me about five minutes to find the place-scorched blackened rock and a faint stink of explosive. All somebody had to do was pick a likely crack, wedge a couple of sticks in there, and, tumble a few tons of rock onto the road. Why? To make her leave the car there and walk in? Why? So somebody could take the car? Why?

I ran out of answers, and picked up my suitcase and continued on down the mountain. I thought how curiously merciless it is to kill a provocative woman. They aren’t supposed to be killed. No one is supposed to render useless all that sweet flesh and heat and honeyed membrane.

But dead she was, and dead she would forever be. So I occupied myself with devising and double-checking a reasonable story. After I had let myself out the weathered gate, I was on narrow, pitted concrete, a small road which went nowhere very important, and was in no hurry to get there. I headed back the way we had come. I estimated it another two miles, but it could be further. I had hopes of being picked up. But the four cars that passed me, going my way, went by so quickly I couldn’t even get a decent glance at the people in them.

At last I came to the vaguely-remembered crossroads, to a dusty gas station and lunchroom, surrounded by broken pieces of automobile. A man sat in the shade in a chair tilted against the front of the gas station. I did not disturb his siesta.

I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.

“I just want to use the phone.”

She didn’t answer. She just let herself plump back down into the chair.

“What’s this place called? So I can direct somebody”

“Garry’s at Cotton Corners.”

I got out my dime and looked in the front of the book. Police emergency, dial 119. “Sheriff’s department. Deputy London.”

“I’m at Garry’s place at Cotton Corners. I want to report a shooting and the theft of a motor vehicle.”

“It happen there?”

“No. But I can take you to where it did happen.”

“What’s your name?”

“McGee. Travis McGee.” I was aware of the rigid attention of the girl behind me.

“I can have a car there in about ten minutes. You wait right - there. You got a description of the stolen vehicle?”

“A white Sunbeam Alpine convertible. Local plates.”

“Know the number?”

“No.”

“Driver?”

“I have no idea.”

“Where did it happen?”

“In the hills about five or six miles from here. I walked out. So it happened well over an hour ago, closer to two hours.”

“Who got hurt?”

“A woman named Mrs. Jasper Yeoman. She’s dead.”

“Mrs. Yeoman! Good God almighty! You wait there.”

I hung up. The stocky girl looked adoringly at me. “Wow!” she said. “How about that! Son of a bitch!”

“How about a Coke?”

“Sure. Coming up. Hey, what happened? Who shot her?”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Who doesn’t? She’s bought gas here lots of times. Her old man, he owned half Esmerelda County. She was a stuck-up bitch. Who did it?”

“I better let the police ask the questions.”

“Did you see it happen?”

“Easy on the ice, please.”

She banged the glass down in front of me and went trotting out. I heard her jabbering at the man who’d been asleep. They both came back in. He was younger than I had thought. He was dried brown, like the rock lizards.

He looked at me as if we had just shared some obscene joke. “That big bitch is dead for sure, ha?”

God, the pleasure they take in it, the excited joy in finding out that death can chop down the tall ones too, can fell the money tree. They both looked at me as if I’d brought them candy, and I told them she was dead indeed.

“You not from around here,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “She was old Cube Fox’s daughter. My daddy worked for Cube for a time. Cube didn’t marry until he was past thirty. She was his only legal child, but you can bet your ass there’s anyway 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. He talked the language good. Cube and Jass Yeoman, they used to run together. My daddy said when Jass married Cube’s daughter, he bet Cube was spinning in that grave saying curses to wilt the grass overhead. Who killed her, Mister?”

“I’m a stranger around here.”

A car rolled up and somebody gave the siren one little touch so that it made a low fading growl.

We went out. It was a pale gray sedan with an obscure decal on the door. Two men in crisp faded khaki got out. They wore television hats and gun belts, silver badges. Nothing seems authentic any more. In the retirement villages the old coots from Upper Berth, Ohio, wear Marshal Dillon pants and squint themselves into authentic weather wrinkles in the bake of the sun.

“‘Lo, Arnie,” the bigger one said. “Hi, Homer. Hi. Dave.”

Homer stuck his thumbs in his belt, indicated me with a jerk of his head and said, “You heard him on the phone, didn’t you? You and Sis?”

“Sure did. And if it isn’t the goddamdest…”

“Arnie, you or Sis might get on that phone there and pick up one of them ten or twenty-five dollars awards from the Eagle or from KEAG-TV. Then we’d sure as hell find you are about four feet shy of having the legal set-back here. And you never heard of the sign ordinance. And the county will find out you got a dirty grill and dirty glasses. And all that junk around looks to me like an attractive nuisance.”

“Homer, if you want me and Sis to keep shut about this, all you got to do is say so.”

“Arnie, if you or Sis should run nine miles into the scrub and whisper this to a gopher, I’ll have you working the roads and Sis on laundry, so help me.” He turned his back on them and said, “McGee?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Hardy and this here is Dave Carlyle. We’ll wait far the Sherf. He’ll be right along. He’ll be the one to ask questions. Meanwhile, hold onto the back of your neck with both hands.”

I did as told. The search was quick and professional. Belt, belly, groin, armpits, hip pockets and ankles.

“Got anything with you?”

“Suitcase inside.”

“Bring it out, Dave.”

The smaller and older deputy brought it out. He put it on the hood of the sedan, opened it, pawed through it, closed it up.

“Identification now,” Homer Hardy said. “Don’t give me your wallet. Just a driver’s license, if you have one.”

He put it on the hood of the car, copied information into his notebook, handed it back. “Thank you, Mr. McGee.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Hairy comes,” Dave Carlyle said. A dusty new station wagon came at high speed, slewed in and stopped in a thick cloud of fine dust. Homer turned to the couple and said, “Get on in there, you.”

They went reluctantly. The Sheriff got out of his car. He was younger than his two deputies. He had a massive chest, squared-off jaw, bull neck, the look of the one-time athlete in one of the contact sports. He wore a faded White Sox baseball cap, a blue and white checked sports shirt worn outside his gray slacks. I guessed he was growing a little belly and made it less conspicuous by wearing his shirts outside his pants.

“Well?” he said to Homer.

“This man is Travis D. McGee, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He’s clean, and there’s just clothes and toilet stuff and one opened bottle of bourbon in his bag there. No objection at all to search. I put a lid on Arnie and Sis and it will stick. We haven’t asked this man a thing, so you know as much right now as we do about the rest of it.”

“He’ll come with me and you follow along,” the Sheriff said. Dave put my suitcase in the station wagon. I got in with the Sheriff. He told me his name was Buckelberry… He said it without a smile. I wondered if he had gotten all that neck and shoulders by objecting to any cracks about his name.

“Where do we go?”

“Turn here and go about three miles and there’s a gate…”

“Up at the old cabin, eh? I know the place.” He started up quickly. “Who shot her?”

“I don’t know. It was a sniper. A heavy rifle at long range, Sheriff. It hit her high in the spine, from the rear and killed her instantly. I left her where she fell. I couldn’t see anybody. I couldn’t help her in any way. And I didn’t exactly want to give some nut a chance at me if he was still around.”

“When did it happen?”

“I didn’t think to look at my watch until I would estimate ten minutes had passed. My best guess would be the shot was fired at two twenty-five. I took cover. I waited around for about thirty minutes. Then I came down the road to where we’d left her car.”

“The road goes to the cabin.”

“Not with a rock slide across it. We had to leave the car a half mile down the road and walk. When I got back the car was gone. I remembered noticing she’d left the key in it when we left it there. I walked out. I couldn’t get a ride. I walked all the way to Cotton Corners. There was no way I could get in touch any sooner than I did.”

“Stray shot?”

“It’s a possibility, I suppose.”

“You hear the shot?”

“Yes. The slug knocked her down very quick and hard, and I heard it just as she came to rest, so I would guess it was less than a second later.”

We had come to the gate. The other car stopped behind us. Dave hustled ahead and got the gate and left it open. We headed up the gravel road.

“Now where do you fit in this, Mr. McGee?”

“Through a mutual friend. Fran Weaver. Mrs. Hyde Weaver, a widow, an old friend of Mona Yeoman. She visited Mona a while back. I’ve wanted a place where I could complete a project, and have total privacy, and keep expenses down at the same time. Fran suggested Mona’s cabin. I got in touch and she agreed to Ioan it to me. I flew in at noon today. She met me at Carson and drove me to the cabin. She showed me the place. It was agreeable to both of us. I was to have the use of the Jeep. With a pry bar and a little sweat I could clear that rock slide. We went out to the edge of the drop there. She wanted to show me the view. And all of a sudden the slug knocked her down dead.”

“Why Carson instead of Esmerelda?”

“I have no idea. She suggested it. Maybe she had an errand over there.”

We came to the rock slide. He pulled as far over to the right as he could get, and the other car stopped beside us.

“Call for an ambulance?” Dave asked out his open window.

“Let’s take a look first, boys. What kind of project, Mr. McGee?”

“It’s an operating manual for pleasure boats.”

“Writing one? Damned dry place to come to write about the water.”

“If Mona and I could reach an understanding, I was going to have my stuff shipped here. It’s all crated up.” I sighed. “It would have been a nice quiet place to work.”

We climbed over the loose rock and walked up the road. Buckelberry and I were in the lead. I was getting a little tired of that road. It was nearly five o’clock. I was definitely getting tired of walking. When we came around the last bend, I saw the roof peak of the cabin. We went up the last twenty feet of slope and I said, beginning to point, “She’s right over…” I stopped and stared at the absolutely bare expanse of sun-baked earth and rock. The three of them stared at me. I felt my mouth stretch into a foolish, apologetic smile. “The body was right over there, I swear.”

They shrugged. We walked over. I realized there would be blood. I knew that slug had gone through her, and blown a pretty good hole in front. I knew right where she had gone down. I sat on my heels. There was a place there that looked as if dirt and stone had been scooped out and the area patted flat again, but I couldn’t be certain. I looked at the drop. If anybody had scooped the stained earth out of there and heaved it over the edge, it was gone for good.

I stood up and said heartily, “Well, she left stuff in the cabin.”

We went to the cabin. The door was locked. “When I left, Sheriff, I left this door open.” Three faces stared at me with heavy skepticism. Buckelberry shrugged and began to feel around on the porch joists. After a few minutes he found a key and looked at it, fingered the mat of cobwebs off it. “You opened it with this key, McGee?”

“She had a key with her.”

We went inside. It had the flavor of having been empty for months. Hat, purse and jacket were gone. The glasses were gone. The leather cushion was back on a chair. I remembered snapping a cigarette into the fireplace. Mrs. Yeoman had not smoked. I crouched and looked for my cigarette. That was gone.

“Now what the hell?” Buckelberry said irritably.

I described her car. I described exactly how she was dressed. I told them just where the bullet had hit her, and what it had sounded like.

They stood and stared at me. Buckelberry winked at Homer Hardy.

Homer said, “I see what you meant, Sherf, about not calling for the ambulance.”

“Go on out and rest yourself in the shade, boys,” Buckelberry said.

They went out. I heard Homer laugh. Buckelberry told me to sit down. He sat on the bunk. “This was a damn fool idea, McGee.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why, that fool woman has been threatening to run off with a college teacher for months. She’s been after old Jass for months to turn her loose. Jass has been kidding around town, telling people it’s no worse than a bad case of the trots. She’ll get over it, he says. And Mona knows well enough that she could never get so far Jass couldn’t have her brought back, and give her a good whipping when he gets her back. She’s just got a little passing case of the hot pants, McGee. Now what were we supposed to do? Spend a week crawling all over this up and down country looking for a body that isn’t there? You did good, McGee. You had me almost believing you. You know, this is the sort of thing they tell me her daddy, old Cube Fox, used to pull, only he did it better.”

“You’re not making any sense, Sheriff.”

“I’ll tell you what makes sense. She’s got foolish friends who would try to pry her loose from Jass Yeoman. That little car is stuffed off in the brush someplace. She and her teacher are hightailing it out of here by now. She’s scared of Jass and she wanted to get the best head start she could. If we thought her dead, it might give her another week to get hid good and take the edge off that case of hot pants. But it doesn’t work. Soon as we get down to the car I’ll get hold of Jass. Eight to five he has her right back home tomorrow or the next day. And she’ll be eating off high places for two weeks once he gets through welting that fancy tail of hers. What are you anyhow? Some kind of actor friend from her New York days?”

“Are you a good Sheriff?”

His eyes went small. “It isn’t an elective office in this county.”

“It shouldn’t be an elective office anywhere. Amen to that. So think like a good law man. If that was the scheme, where is the trimming?”

“What?”

“If it was a cute trick, wouldn’t anybody with a grain of sense plant some kind of misleading evidence? Animal blood. Some sign of a struggle. A button off her clothes. Something, for God’s sake, to make it look better.”

Little ripples of muscle ran along the line of that square jaw. “I can play that game too. Maybe no evidence makes it look better because you’d then be able to say what you just said.”

“That’s like the game of guessing which hand the pebble is in. I know one thing, Sheriff. I saw her go down. We can play a lot of guessing games. But I saw her dead.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to be hard on a man trying to do a favor for a friend. I could book you for malicious mischief, I guess. Next time I see Miz Yeoman, I’ll tell her you gave it a good try.”

“Do you have good lab people?”

“Got the use of them, McGee. We got a central CID for the neighboring ten counties.”

“Why don’t you turn them loose around here?”

“Don’t give up, do you? There’s no need for that. We’ll have a line on that pair by midnight. From here they run one of three ways. Vegas, Mexico or New York. Old Jass will reach out a great long arm with a little snap hook on the end of it and he will pull her right back home. Come on. Let’s get out of here.” We went out into the late slant of October sunlight, soon to slide behind the big mountains far beyond Esmerelda.

“The way I see it, it’s Jass’s fault,” he said. “He let her range too far and wide before he brought her back and tried to settle her down. She could have got all the education she ever needed within fifty mile of home, and that’s the way it would have been for her if Cube lived. But I guess Jass wanted her fancied up.”

We all trudged back down to the cars. I heard Homer and Dave muttering to each other, snickering from time to time. Everybody seemed to be so damned certain of everything, I decided not to send them up that rock slide to find the place where somebody had planted the charge to blow it down.

Sheriff Buckelberry sent Homer and Dave back onto patrol. He called in and asked his communications to give him a phone hookup to Jasper Yeoman, then changed his mind. “Too many unauthorized people tuned in on this net,” he explained to me. “No need to start them all laughing.”

“If I had to guess the weapon,” I said, “I would say about a.44 Magnum. If a man had taken a full swing with an eight-pound sledge and hit her right between the shoulders, it would have about the same effect. A smaller caliber would have given more penetration and less impact, Sheriff.”

“For God’s sake, McGee!”

“There can’t be too many people around with that much gun.”

“There aren’t, and the ones that have them don’t go around bagging blonde wives, boy. I’m going into town. That suit you?”

“I guess it has to. I would appreciate it if you could drop me at a motel. Something not too far out of town, clean and cheap if those two things go together around here.”

“You going to stay long?”

“I might ask Mr. Yeoman if I can use that cabin.”

“Don’t try to get any cuter than you are.”

“What does that mean, Sheriff?”

“This is a friendly enough place. We don’t have a hard-nose police routine, county or city. We don’t need it. But if a good citizen like Mr. Yeoman should mention that he isn’t fond of you, we’d have to sharpen your heels and drive you down into hard ground. I guess it’s old-fashioned. The people who pay a hell of a lot of taxes get a hell of a lot of service.”

We came out onto Route 87 and turned left. The sun was gone from the valley floor, but the afterglow made the tall pale buildings of Esmerelda look pink. The divided highway ran arrow straight into the city. He pulled into a place called the Latigo Motel, said it was cheap and clean, told me to stay out of trouble, let me out and drove off.

The motel was built on a narrow plot, and extended at right angles to the highway, trapped between the Idle Hour Lanes and the Baby Giant Soop-R-Mart. In the cool blue dusk they had turned the red floodlights on in their little cactus garden. Across the highway was the Corral Diner-Choice Western Beef, and up the line was the Chunky Burger Drive-in, their juke audible for great distances over the groaning of trucks. A fat and absent-minded young woman with a baby riding her big soft hip, checked me into number seven and took my five dollars plus tax, and came out of her daze when she found out I didn’t have a car. She had difficulty comprehending that. She looked awed. I was a true eccentric.

I went down to seven. There was an extremely small swimming pool beyond the units, with a high redwood fence for privacy. There were a dozen screaming children in the pool. The unit was small, clean and very bare. I shed my jacket and stretched out on the double bed.

When you can keep moving, when you have to keep moving, you can keep a lot of things at arm’s length. But when you stop they come in at you. I had not liked Mona Fox Yeoman. She had seemed artificial, self-important. She had been provocative rather than seductive. A man cannot keep himself from making bedroom speculations. Her manner had given me the feeling that I would like to shake her up, to mat that twenty-five-dollar hairdo, to really get to her and put her to such work she would forget that lady-of-the-manor style of hers. I had not expected to ever be able to, but it was the index of that kind of desire. Some women instigate a good ruffling.

So she was a big creamy bitch standing beside me in her tailored tight pants, and suddenly she was fallen cooling meat, and it was too damned fast. I had seen dead women. I had seen sudden expected death, and sudden unexpected death, but never before the sudden and unexpected death of a handsome woman. It struck deeper than I would have guessed it could. There was more to it than the fact of a horrid waste. I couldn’t identify what there was about it that had rocked me so, and kept rocking me. Somehow it was identified with my own mortality, my own inevitable day to die. She had gone far past childhood, yet when she was down, she was Little Girl smashed, and closer to my heart dead than alive. Emotional necrophilia.

I had thought that I was in fine balance. I had had a very bad time and I had come out of it very slowly and tentatively, with a skull full of wraiths and remorses, with the blood dreams and the flying twitches, and I had come out of it with enough money for a McGee-style therapy-a slow and cautious adjustment to beer and sun, boats and laughs, some little sandy-rumped beach girls, some fish-stalking and beach-walking and moon-watching, some improvised houseboat parties, a little unwinding in St. Thomas and over at Deep Water Cay. And I thought I had crawled back into my own skin, beach-bum McGee, the big chopped-up, loose-jointed, pale-eyed, wire-haired, walnut-hided rebel-unregimented, unprogrammed, unimpressed. I had even believed I had grown another little layer of hide over those places where I could be hurt.

So when I became aware of the imminent necessity to acquire funds-being almost down to that war fund I lay aside for the expenses of operation-I knew I was going to be cold and smart about it this time. No empathy, boy. No tears for anybody who goes down the chute. Pick a ripe one and work it for the cash money and come happily back to houseboat life aboard the Busted Flush, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdamndale.

I had two reasonable prospects lined up, and when the letter from Fran Weaver had come, I had three. And thought to check this one out first.

But suddenly that extra layer of hide was gone.

So forget it, McGee. List the reasons for forgetting it. I had the plane ticket back. No loss. The prospective client was dead. There was no way of making any money out of this one. Nobody to split with when I recovered what had been stolen. Whatever was going on, people were playing for keeps. You didn’t like the woman anyway. Get a night’s sleep. Get out of town.

But you’ll never find out why.

Man, can you afford idle curiosity? Count all the dead cats.

But rigging that rock slide means a lot of careful planning. Then why hide all traces? What does that accomplish?

You idiot, you’ve got a perfectly good little problem to work on, with the old broad in Jacksonville whose stepson lifted her collection of gold coins.

That one will keep. It won’t be expensive to handle. Just bend him until the coins start falling out. Four or five days of work.

There was another thing which made this less attractive by the moment. There was a little cold spot on my spine-between the shoulder blades, and high. I had been with her when it happened. She hadn’t been to the cabin in a long time. Somebody knew she was going there. With me?

If the rifleman had wanted to take both of us, he could have blown my head off first, on the assumption a woman would not react as quickly, would have stood there, frozen in horror, just long enough. Why leave the stranger alive? Confusion factor?

Maybe the small value I had was now over. This could be a very unpleasant area, a dangerous climate. I vowed to take no lonely strolls through the hills, and to watch the hands of strangers, and not to sit with my back to a window.

Maybe it would be very good sense to just leave.

But if you don’t futz with it, friend, maybe somebody will get away clean.

What are you, McGee? Guardian of public morality? People get away with things every hour of every day. Murder isn’t that unique. First thing you know, you’ll be leading parades. It’s police business, and you have met a very competent policeman.

There was just one trouble with the running argument. I knew I had made up my mind. I knew just when and how I had made it up. It was when I had taken the eighty dollars from her purse. I hadn’t taken it for me. I had taken it for her. I was just picking it up the way you pick up ammunition when you anticipate a fight.

Once I was willing to admit it to myself, I felt a little bit easier. But there was still a feeling of strain in my mind which bothered me. I wanted to be stable as all hell, but the world was on a slight tilt. It was like being yanked around an unexpected curve. You lean for a long time.

My friend Meyer, the economist, says that cretins are the only humans who can be absolutely certain of their own sanity. All the rest of us go rocketing along rickety rails over spavined bridges and along the edge of bottomless gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar. The trouble is, you never know exactly what might tip you off those rails. And that memorable chunking sound of heavy lead into her vulnerable back, through her pretty silk blouse, had touched something way below my level of consciousness. It roiled something up down there, something fairly nasty and ancient and invisible.

I went out and found their ice machine and came back and fixed a drink in a tumbler that came in a little wax bag explaining that it had been Steem-Sterilized. It had a little flake of raspberry lipstick on the edge of it. Presumably that had been Steem-Sterilized too. I should report it to the Sheriff.

The usual efficient process is for the room maid to wipe the glasses on the used bath towels of the previous guests and then pop them into those comforting little bags. Next she wipes the john seat with the same towels, then slips the paper ribbon onto it, acclaiming its astonishing sterility. Then, with the bed made, she goes trundling off, pushing her square-wheeled cart, kicking the doors of the sleepers, clearing her throat with a ringing whock-tooey into the shrubbery, screaming her early morning greetings to friends three blocks away.

With drink in hand I lounged against the headboard and resolutely pushed emotional considerations aside and tried to make some cold sense out of what had happened. Somebody had planned to kill her and had killed her. So why have a witness? Somebody had known what her movements would be. It did not seem very likely that she would tell her husband that she was meeting a stranger at Carson Airport at noon and driving him to the cabin. Yet she had the feeling she had been followed lately.

What if when we had come upon the rock slide, she had turned around and found some other place for us to talk? Somebody had known her well enough to know how she would react. She had planned to confer with me at the cabin, so by God, that was where she would take me. If they had known she had planned I would stay there for a time, it was a good guess we would walk in.

By then the sniper would have been in position. We had made it easier by going out to the edge and standing there. But in any event we would probably have stood still for him somewhere in the exposed area, before leaving. One thing was reasonably evident. The one who fired the shot was not the same one who took the car. It would have taken far too long to circle that rugged country.

Once the woman fell, my actions were predictable. I would take cover, and after a while I would retreat to the car. Finding it gone, I would walk out. That would give him or them time to remove the evidence of murder.

Skipping for the moment the possible reasons for taking her away, where had they taken her? In all that baked and tumbled wasteland of chasm and jumbled stone, there were ten thousand hiding places within a mile of the cabin, either downhill or up. She could be wedged into a small place and covered with loose stone. Two days of that oven sun would bake and draw every ounce of moisture out of her tissues, turning her into forty pounds of dry leather and string and bone, shrunken inside the folds of the cowgirl tailoring.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense for somebody to entice her to the cabin alone? Kill at a closer and more certain range? Be assured of no interruption? Why have a witness running around loose, insisting she was dead?

One thing seemed certain. When something has been planned, and makes no sense, some of the facts are missing. I wondered who could supply them. The unnamed lawyer from Belasco? John Webb? Dolores?

My window was open. The room was dark. I could hear the rip and whuffle of traffic on 87, the music from the drive-in, a muffled clatter of pins from the Idle Hour Lanes. Children no longer yelped in the pool. The television next door was turned high. A couple walked by my window, the woman saying, “… nose running all day so you let her swim til she turns blue, for God’s sake, Harry…”

I turned on a light and shut the window and fiddled with the big window unit until I had it adjusted to send a vague panting of warm air into the room, accompanied by such a grinding and rattling and droning that all sounds of the outside world were gone. This is the new privacy, the wall of noise which provides the nerve-nibbling solitude of the machine shop.

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.

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.

State Western was one of those new institutions they keep slapping up to take care of the increasing flood of kids. It was beyond the sleepy-looking town. Hundreds of cars winked in the mid-morning sun on huge parking lots. The university buildings were giant brown shoeboxes in random pattern over substantial acreage. It was ten o’clock and kids were hurrying on their long treks from building to building.

Off to the right was the housing complex of dormitories, and a big garden apartment layout which I imagined housed faculty and administrative personnel. A sign at the entrance drive to the campus buildings read, NO STUDENT CARS. The blind sides of the big buildings held big bright murals made of ceramic tile, in a stodgy treatment of such verities as Industry, Freedom, Peace, etc.

The paths crisscrossed the baked earth. There were some tiny areas of green, lovingly nurtured, but it would be years before it all looked like the architect’s rendering.

The kids hustled to their ten-o’clocks, lithe and young, intent on their obscure purposes. Khakis and jeans, cottons and colors. Vague glances, empty as camera lenses, moved across me as I drove slowly by. I was on the other side of the fence of years. They could relate and react to adults with whom they had a forced personal contact. But strangers were as meaningless to them as were the rocks and scrubby trees.

They were in the vivid tug and flex of life, and we were faded pictures on the corridor walls-drab, ended and slightly spooky. I noticed a goodly sprinkling of Latin blood among them, the tawny cushiony girls and the bullfighter boys. They all seemed to have an urgency about them, that strained harried trimester look. It would cram them through sooner, and feed them out into the corporations and the tract houses, breeding and hurrying, organized for all the time and money budgets, binary systems, recreation funds, taxi transports, group adjustments, tenure, constructive hobbies.

They were being structured to life on the run, and by the time they would become what is now known as senior citizens, they could fit nicely into planned communities where recreation is scheduled on such a tight and competitive basis that they could continue to run, plan, organize, until, falling at last into silence, the grief-therapist would gather them in, rosy their cheeks, close the box and lower them to the only rest they had ever known.

It is all functional, of course. But it is like what we have done to chickens. Forced growth under optimum conditions, so that in eight weeks they are ready for the mechanical picker. The most forlorn and comical statements are the ones made by the grateful young who say Now I can be ready in two years and nine months to go out and earn a living rather than wasting four years in college.

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?

Today the good ones, the ones who want to ask why, find no one around with any interest in answering the question, so they drop out, because theirs is the type of mind which becomes monstrously bored at the trade-school concept. A devoted technician is seldom an educated man. He can be a useful man, a contented man, a busy man. But he has no more sense of the mystery and wonder and paradox of existence than does one of those chickens fattening itself for the mechanical plucking, freezing and packaging.

I found the administration building and parked and went in and stood at the main information desk and asked a gray-haired lady if I could speak to John Webb. It flustered her. She said he was an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities. Was that the John Webb I wanted to see? She was hoping it was some other John Webb. There was a student named John Webb. No relation. She struggled for the right phrase and finally said that Dr. Webb was absent from the college.

“For how long?”

“I am sorry. I do not have that information.”

“Who can tell me when he’ll be back?”

“I really couldn’t say. Perhaps one of the other men in the department could help you.”

“This is a personal matter.”

“Oh. Then perhaps his sister… she might be able to tell you.”

“Where do I find her?”

She thumbed a cardex, and said, “Hardee number three. The faculty residence buildings are in that direction, sir, opposite the large parking lot. You’ll see the names on them. Hardee is the third one back.”

I found it without difficulty. Each building was a complex of about ten or twelve individual residences, each with its own entrance, arranged so as to give maximum personal privacy, yet share a central utilities setup. They had used a lot of stone, adobe brick, walls, courts, covered walkways.

I found the gate for number three, pushed it open, walked to the door ten feet from the gate. I could hear no bell inside, but as I was wondering whether to try knocking, the door opened and a young woman stared out at me. She wore what appeared to be a brown burlap shift, with three big wooden buttons that were not functional.

“Yes?”

“I am looking for Professor Webb. My name is McGee.”

“I can tell you the same thing I told the other gentleman. And the same thing I have told the head of the department. I haven’t the slightest idea where my brother is.”

She had begun to close the door. I put my foot in the way. She looked down at it and said, “If you please.”

“I do not please. I want to talk to you.”

“There is absolutely nothing to talk about.”

“What if things are not what they seem to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if he didn’t run off with her? What if it’s just supposed to look that way?”

“What is your interest in this affair, Mr. McGee?”

“I am the only one who is absolutely certain Mona is not with your brother. Everybody else seems to believe it.”

She waited a moment, and then opened the door. “Come in, then.”

She led the way back to the living room. Draperies of a coarse and heavy fabric were drawn across the windows. She had evidently been working at a big mission table. Books and notebooks and file cards were in orderly array under a big bright gooseneck lamp. Music came from a big record player, turned low. It sounded like a small and irritable group of musicians who were trying to tune their instruments but couldn’t decide who had the right key. She turned it off, went to the windows and yanked the blinds open to let the sunlight in. She came back to the table and turned the lamp off.

I watched the way she moved. She wore shabby deerskin moccasins. She moved lithely, with enough hip sway to pull alternating diagonal tensions in the burlap shift. Her arms and legs were very smooth and white and rounded, flexible with health. Her face was a long oval. The flesh around her dark eyes was deeply smudged. It made her look frail and unwell, but I suspected that was a normal condition of those eyes. There are eyes like that, the surrounding flesh permanently darkened. Her mouth was small and plump and without lipstick. Her nose was delicate. Her eyes had long dark lashes. Her hair was parted in the middle, dark and rather lifeless hair which was arranged in two curved wings across her forehead and drawn back and fastened in a loose bun. There was a large electric coffee maker on the mission table. “Coffee?” she said.

“Thank you. Black, please.”

She went to the kitchen and came back with a clean cup and saucer, poured me a cup, and took hers over to the corner of a corduroy couch by the windows, and pulled her legs up under her, tucking the brief edge of the shift over white knees. I sat at the other end of the long couch, against the bright cushions.

“You contrived to intrigue me, Mr. McGee. Now you have the problem of continuing to do so. But I do not know your status in this.”

“Mrs. Yeoman contacted me, through a friend. She thought I might be able to help her with a problem. I arrived yesterday noon from Florida. I talked with her about her problem. She wanted her husband to release her. She wanted money from him. She wanted to marry your brother.”

“And you go about trying to make this sort of arrangement? Are you an attorney?”

“No. I didn’t know what the problem was until I got here. And it didn’t seem to be anything I would be interested in trying to handle.”

“So she settled for half a loaf.”

“No. Believe me, it was not her intention to take off with your brother, not unless it could be arranged… amiably. And financed.”

“Mr. McGee, if you believed anything she said, you are as big a fool as my brother. And, believe me, he has proven himself a fool.”

“By leaving?”

“He’s finished here. You just can’t do what he’s done and expect to be taken back when the mad little adventure is over. If he was very popular here, and very political, he might have a chance of mending his fences. But John is neither. The unforgivable thing is that it is all… so obvious and vulgar.”

“In what way?”

“Do you need an explanation? Gullible dreamy young professor meets oversexed wife of elderly rancher. Romance blooms. Actually, that’s too tender a word for it. But it was his rationalization, of course. Real genuine love. That’s what they have to call it, to keep some fragment of self-respect, I imagine. But it was and is just a nasty, ordinary compulsion of the flesh. John had never run into a woman like that before. Once she seduced him, he stopped having a rational thought. He was pathetic, believe me. Love? With that big obvious creature? How could a fine man love an animal? He was hypnotized by what was under her skirt. Excuse me for being coarse.”

“These things happen.”

She shrugged. “One expects them to happen, with women like that. But not with men like John. One doesn’t expect a man like my brother to destroy himself for the sake of… access to a big meaty pretentious blonde floozy.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Mr. McGee, everything my brother dreamed of doing or being is dead. Maybe he can make a living in a correspondence school, or a textbook house, but his career is over. And he is a brilliant man. It’s such a damnable waste. I couldn’t make him see what an ass he was being. God knows I tried. We never fought like that before. He doesn’t give a damn what he’s done to me, either. Sacrifices I’ve made apparently mean nothing to him. Pride and devotion. They mean nothing. God, I’ve read about it enough times, how a sensual fixation can destroy a man, but I never thought it could happen to him. And it is all… so utterly meaningless. Some absurd little sexual spasms and releases, and the whole world thrown away just for that! I shall never, never understand it.”

“Did you know he was going to run away with her?”

“I was afraid of it. He’d gotten so restless since the fall term started. Then, I would say about ten days ago, he changed. He seemed to be happy about something. He told me everything was going to work out. Arrangements were being made. He seemed very smug. He’d set up his schedule so that he had Tuesday and Thursday afternoons free every week, and Monday afternoons free every other week. He would leave on those afternoons and meet with her somewhere. And he would come dragging back here about seven or eight at night, dazed and exhausted, wearing that foolish grin. The damned woman was wearing him out with her demands on him. He had the impertinence to suggest that once things were all arranged, the three of us could live here. Can you imagine her as a faculty wife? She is two years older than John, you know. She would start telling the president of the university how to run things.”

“Perhaps she told him that I was going to help her.”

“Possibly. Oh, they were terribly optimistic about everything. They seemed to think that because they were infatuated with each other, the whole world should find them terribly attractive. But everyone knew it as… a distasteful and unpleasant situation.”

She got up and got the coffee pot, unplugged it and brought it over and filled our cups. When she bent over mine I noticed she smelled like vanilla. I wondered if she had been drinking it. It did not seem likely. This was one of the intense ones. She was perhaps four years younger than her brother.

I could imagine her plodding around NYU in black stockings and short tweed skirts, arguing with a coffee-house passion about abstract concepts, trying the painter-loft sex and finding it overrated, trying the knock on the mescaline and finding it made her sick instead of exalted, signing up to picket this and that, sitting for hours of observation in the UN, wearing barbaric jewelry designed by no-talent friends, painting stage sets for amateur production; all in all an intense, humorless, intellectual child, full of heavy dedications and looking for some shelf to put them on.

“Yesterday, Tuesday,” I said, “Mrs. Yeoman picked me up at the Carson Airport at noon. I understand that your brother took off Monday afternoon. That seems a little previous.”

“I imagine they had it all planned. I’ve been taking some courses here. I have a Monday afternoon seminar. Mass Communication and Opinion Leadership. John had two classes Monday morning. Contemporary Philosophy. And Philosophy in Literature. He had Monday afternoon off. I expected he would be with her. When he didn’t get back by nine o’clock, I felt uneasy. But I imagined he had somehow arranged to spend a whole night with her. That seemed to be about the summit of his ambitions lately. I thought he would come in and clean up in the morning. He has a ten o’clock on Tuesday.

“By nine Tuesday morning, I began to be suspicious. I started looking around. His suitcase and some clothing were gone, and his toilet articles. No note for me. Not a word of explanation. He didn’t even have the courtesy to notify the head of the department. He just… left, like a thief. As you probably know, he left the car at the Carson Airport, and they flew from there to El Paso. I’ll have to arrange to get the car, I guess. That’s seventy miles from here, northeast. All of this is very embarrassing to me. It puts me in a very strange position. I had a long talk with Mr. Knowdler, the Dean of Faculty. He was quite sympathetic toward me. This is the beginning of our third year here. I’ll have to give this place up, of course. But I can keep it until November fifteenth, he said. John will come slinking back before then, I imagine. It is just sort of a vacuum. I can’t make any plans. He’ll need help. I don’t know what will become of us.”

“Do you work here too?”

“Oh, yes. Five mornings a week, in the communications lab. Clerical work. But not today, because they are enlarging it this week, tearing out partitions and doing a lot of new wiring. I’m doing research here for one of the enrichment programs. History of the Dramatic Arts.”

She looked wistful. “It was a pretty good life here, Mr. McGee, until that woman came into it, and upset everything. I didn’t mind keeping house for John. If he was alone, he would eat cold things out of cans and his clothes would look like a vagrant’s. And he doesn’t take good care of himself. He’s never been very strong. That woman won’t take good care of him. Why did she have to be attracted to him? Why couldn’t she have found herself some… truck driver or policeman, some muscular cretin who could do a better job of giving her what she so obviously wants?”

“Did you check to see what your brother took with him?”

“He packed and left. Evidently he took what he thought he needed.”

“If I ask you to do something which seems pointless, will you do it?”

“Such as?”

“Would you check and see if he left anything behind that he would logically have taken with him?”

“I don’t think I know what you mean, Mr. McGee.”

“Something which might be overlooked if somebody else did his packing for him. If it was supposed to look as if he packed and left.”

“Isn’t that a… a little melodramatic?” Her soft pale little mouth seemed to identify a bad taste. “A kidnapping?”

“If you don’t mind looking.”

“Not at all.”

The sunlight was strong on the back of my hand. There were bright squares of fabric on the walls, primitive designs. I could hear the woman opening and closing drawers. Then there was a silence.

She appeared suddenly in the doorway, braced as if to dodge an imaginary blow. She held a small black case in her hand, about the size of a small book. She held it out toward me, and her mouth made little fish motions, and then she said, “He… He didn’t…”

I took it from her and opened it. Two hypodermics. Spare needles. Test strips. Vials. Alcohol. I snapped it shut. “Diabetic?”

“Yes. Yes, he would have to have this with him! He has to inject insulin every morning. He is a very absentminded man, but he had to learn the hard way not to be careless about this. He learned by forgetting and going into diabetic coma. Or by giving himself too much and having insulin reaction. I can’t imagine his forgetting…”

She sank into a chair. “But he could forget, of course. But he would have remembered this morning. It is so much a part of his routine. He has prescriptions. He could buy what he needs. Yes, that’s what must have happened.”

“Did anyone see him leave here?”

“What? I don’t know. I don’t imagine so. There aren’t very many people here on Monday afternoons.”

“Where was this kit kept?”

“In the bathroom medicine cabinet.”

“He took his other toilet articles from there?”

“Yes. I… I see what you mean. It is… very strange. It makes me feel… scared.” She frowned up at me. “You said it was supposed to look as if they’d gone away together. Why?”

“I don’t know why.” I saw her sudden change of expression. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. I suddenly remembered something. Something he said last Sunday. We were having… one of those quarrels that didn’t accomplish anything. I said some kind of snotty things about his having a big week coming up, with Monday Tuesday and Thursday free for her. He said he would not see her Tuesday, yesterday. He said she would be busy. If he was planning to leave Monday…”

“He knew she would be busy with me.”

“Then where did he go?”

“Where was he taken?”

“Please. Are you trying to make me more frightened?”

“What is your name?”

“Isobel. Isobel Webb.”

I hooked a stool over with my foot and sat on it, close and facing her. “My name is Travis McGee, Isobel.”

I took her hand. After two yanks she stopped trying to pull it away, and sat uncomfortably rigid, looking past me rather than at me.

“Why are you acting so strangely?” she asked, wetting her mouth with a quick and pointed tongue-tip.

“I don’t want to scare you. I’m going to take a chance on telling you something. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe you’ll fly apart. I don’t want you to. I want you to hold on tight and ride with it. Will you try? Good. Now listen carefully. Mona Yeoman took me to an isolated cabin in the hills. At two twenty-five yesterday afternoon, standing just as close to me as you are right now, she was shot in the back and killed instantly with a high-powered rifle fired at long range. I walked out. When I came back with the Sheriff, her body was gone. All trace of her was gone. They will not believe me. They think I was trying to put up a smoke screen so she could make an easier getaway with your brother.”

She searched my face. Her eyelashes were uncommonly long. “But… they got on an airplane yesterday. At one fifteen. They went to…”

“A big blonde woman and a very tall thin man, both in dark glasses, got on an airplane yesterday at one fifteen. I know damned well that Mona Yeoman was not on that airplane. At one fifteen she and I were in her little car heading for that cabin. We were practically there. The manifest gave the names as Mr. and Mrs. Webber Johnson. John Webb. It was like wearing a sandwich sign. If he was trying to escape notice, would he have picked a name like that? Was he that stupid?”

“No. You… you use the past tense.”

“Was he planning to meet her Monday afternoon?”

“N-No. He had too much work piled up. He was going to come back here and work. He had papers to grade. They were on that table when I got back here. I’ve turned all the class materials over to the department. Other men are taking over his courses, until they can find someone.”

I was watching her closely. She seemed very jumpy, but she seemed to be holding, on pretty well.

“I know Mona is dead, Isobel. And there seems to be a lot of organization behind this. Substitutes took that flight. I know Mona is dead, and the only way the plan could be made to work, to look as if they ran off together, would be to kill your brother too.”

She closed her eyes and her hand clamped hard on mine. A small smooth pale hand, but quite strong. When she opened her eyes, they looked blank and dazed.

“But it is so… so strange! What would be gained?”

“We don’t know. Not yet. But the search would continue, looking for a pair of lovers in hiding, and after a while it would die down. I guess the traditional guess would be that they had made a new life for themselves somewhere else.”

“Would her husband do that?”

“I don’t think so.”

She looked at the black case. I had put it on the table beside the chair. “Then that is sort of evidence, isn’t it?” She stirred as though to stand. “I should tell the police.”

“Now wait a minute, Isobel.”

“Why should I wait a minute? If he was…”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it look as if they’d run away.”

“Then why was she killed where you could see it happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t have any choice. Maybe they had it planned another way, and it didn’t work out and they had to improvise.”

“But if my brother was abducted…”

“Prove it.”

“He left his kit here.”

“An oversight. He picked up another drugstore in El Paso.”

“But…”

“Livingston is in Esmerelda County. Sheriff Fred Buckelberry is conducting the investigation.”

“He and a deputy were here last evening. At about eight o’clock. They told me about the car and the flight they took. Mostly it was to tell me to get in touch with him right away if I got any word from John. They were… lazy and ironic and sarcastic about the whole situation.” She tilted her head to the side, frowning. “It does seem more logical.”

“What do you mean?”

“I didn’t really think he would… ever actually run off with her. I thought he had too much balance for that. I was just trying to make him see that he had to stop seeing that woman. There was too much gossip about it. I couldn’t imagine his arbitrarily destroying himself. But if people came here and… took him away… He hated violence. He… wasn’t a strong man. He never wanted to… to hurt anyone…”

Past tense. I think she suddenly realized she was using the past tense. Her eyes filled and she made a small yowl of heartsick pain and hitched forward in the chair, and slumped against me in the helpless awkward abandon of pain and sorrow. I held her. She rolled her head back and forth against my chest, gulping and whimpering, automatically seeking that small comfort to be had from a physical closeness, even with a stranger.

But suddenly when I patted her shoulder, she tensed and jumped back away from me as if I had been a basket of snakes.

“Excuse me,” she said in a narrow little voice. She seemed to make herself small in the chair. I saw then that her eyes were a very very dark blue, the darkest blue I have ever seen in eyes of man or woman. Lifeless hair, pliant white body, smell of vanilla, and sexual fear. Noble refuge for the unrealized woman-caring for the adored brother.

I realized that she had been uncommonly bitter about the Mona-brother relationship, alluding to the sexual basis of it the way she might discuss a suppurating wound. No wonder she had thought these were two fine years. Her twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth? A good place to wait away the nubile years, hasten the drying of juices, all in the honorable name of dedication. A Mona Yeoman would be repulsive to her, inevitably. Mona walked with too much awareness of her body and its uses.

“You met Mona?” I asked.

“He thought we should get along. That was one of his worst ideas. She patronized me, as if I were some backward child. I just… I just can’t imagine her dead. She was so… blatantly alive, Mr. McGee.”

“Travis. Or Trav.”

“I am not very good at first names. It takes me a long time.”

“It’s a gimmick I don’t particularly care for. I thought it might make you feel more at ease with me, Isobel.”

“I’m almost never at ease with people. I… I guess it was the way we were brought up.”

“How was that?”

“Both my parents were artists. My father was successful and my mother had an inherited income. We lived miles from anyone. The school lessons came by mail. They took turns teaching us. Canada in the summer. A little island in the Bahamas in the winter. John was the one who was always ill. We all fretted about him. I was always so healthy. You learn to… invent games you can play by yourself. They died three years ago. Just two months apart. They were very close. We always felt like outsiders, John and I. And that made us close. And now… What am I going to do! What in God’s name am I going to do!”

She got out of the chair and edged past me and walked to the table. She picked a book up and dropped it and turned, leaning against the table.

“Why would anyone want to kill him? I can’t believe you. You know that, don’t you? I just can’t believe you.”

“About Mona?”

“Y-Yes, I can believe that. She was so… definite. She could make enemies. But John is such a mild man, really. With a wry little sense of fun.”

“How in the world did they meet?”

“They met just about a year ago. Her husband came to a dinner party at the president’s home. We were invited. Mr. Yeoman had given some money to a scholarship fund. John was seated next to Mrs. Yeoman. She pretended to have some interest in contemporary philosophy. They were talking Heidegger, Broad, Ryle, Sartre, Camus. She was one of those clever people who know just what to say about something they know nothing about. And she had met Camus in Paris years ago. John is at his best when the conversation is in his field. He can say very challenging things. She started driving down every week to audit his Friday seminar in the Philosophy of Democracy, paid avid attention, kept a very detailed notebook, did a lot of outside reading. That’s the way it started. It was a vicious smoke screen of course, all that manufactured interest. He was just a new species to her. I told him to be very careful. She didn’t seem to be in any great hurry. She didn’t seduce him until last April. He came blundering in with some fantastic story about her car breaking down. She used to come right here to pick him up. Shamelessly. It was really pathetic. He didn’t stand a chance, of course. She was a very clever and determined woman. And bored, I expect.”

“Do you have anyone to stay with you, Isobel? Or anyone you can stay with?”

“No. I don’t need anything like that.”

“I don’t think you should phone that Sheriff.”

“Because it doesn’t mean enough that his kit should be here?”

“Partly that. But this whole thing has been… organized pretty well. I want to find out as much as I can. Quietly. I think that if I start making any noise, I could end up working on the county roads. Whatever happened to Mona and your brother, it is one factor in something else. There are a lot of things stirring around under the surface.”

“But what if my brother needs help!”

She was close to the edge again. “Isobel, the only way we can force action to get help to him is to prove that they did not take that plane yesterday. People are too damned willing to believe they did, even her husband. I think the Sheriff may be a little opportunistic, but I don’t think he’s corrupt. I’m pressuring him to look further into my story of Mona’s death. If he comes up with something, then it should be evident that neither of them took that feeder flight.”

“But how long will that take you! He could be in some…”

I saw that I wasn’t going to be able to quiet her down. I would have to move her around. “I want to go back to the Carson Airport. I want to poke around a little. You have to get that car, don’t you? Why don’t you come along?”

She hesitated and gave an abrupt nod. “Give me time to change.”

Four

BEFORE SHE locked the house, I had her show me where the car was kept. The carport was in the rear, off the kitchen. The side road passed in back of all the garden apartment layouts. The side walls of the carport were high. If somebody had waited for John Webb, or had entered after he was at home on Monday afternoon, it would have been no trick to pack him up, bundle him out and drive away with him. I did not mention to her that they could have hammered the top of his head in before even putting him into the car. And in this vast empty chopped-up terrain, there were thousands of quiet places to put him.

She locked the place, after checking to be certain she had her set of car keys. She had changed to a gray skirt in a loose weave. It looked a little too big for her. She wore a yellow cotton blouse, and brought a sweater along. She had an old lady purse, dark gray leather, well worn and very sedate. She wore nylons and black shiny moccasins. And she wore big wraparound sun glasses, tinted almost black. With her eyes obscured, her face seemed totally without expression, and smaller than before.

She directed me down into the village and told me where to turn. She sat erect and remote, purse in her lap, hands folded over the clasp. Violence leaves such vulnerable victims.

“Where in the Bahamas?”

“What? Oh, I don’t think you’d know it. It was just about a mile long and about three hundred yards wide. It was near Old Mallet Cay.”

“South of the Joulters. On the banks, a little way in from the Tongue of the Ocean. It’s very tricky water there. Plenty of coral heads.”

“Then you do know it!” Her voice sounded younger.

“If it’s the one I’m thinking of there’s an old gray house there, pretty well storm-battered, near a nice little protected anchorage. Most of the island is volcanic rock. The house faces west.”

“That’s it!”

“Did you sell it?”

“We never owned it. My father got it on a lease from the crown. Ninety-nine years. You can’t sell those leases, you know. They can be passed along to the direct heirs, and when the time is up they revert. John and I have talked about going back one day.”

“Was there no inheritance?”

“Mother’s money was just for her lifetime. And it wasn’t a big income, really. My father was always in total confusion about taxes. And he made fantastic investments. After everything was settled, John and I got a little over nine hundred dollars apiece. You know, I loved that island. There’s a beach and a bar behind it. I can remember how lovely it was in the moonlight. The beach was like snow. We all used to get as brown as Bahamians.”

“You don’t look as if you’d ever been in the sun.”

“I think I got too much of it when I was a child. My lips are allergic now. They puff up and break out in sores. I’d love nothing better than to just… lay in the sun and bake until the world gets far away”

“How long since you’ve tried?”

“Years.”

“They have some new things now. You know, miracles of chemistry. There’s a paste that screens out every kind of ray.”

“Really?”

“Guaranteed.”

“Could you get me some? Would you know what to ask for?”

“Of course.”

“This may sound… perfectly idiotic to you. But… if you are right… if some horrible thing has happened to John, it would be easier for me to bear it if I could just bake myself all loose and weak and far away. It’s like a drug for me. Mr. McGee, when did you last see that house?”

“Two years ago, in the spring.”

“Did you go ashore?”

“No. But I put the glasses on it. It’s all shuttered. It looks sound.”

“I guess it would be a great deal of work to make it livable again, clean out the drains and cisterns and all that. We had a sturdy old boat, a dear thing. Four hours to New Providence, and that was the great event, picking the wind and weather, leaving when it was just bright enough to see.”

Her voice was lighter and more flexible when she talked of that, her posture. more relaxed. I made note of it. It could make her easier to quiet down, knowing that much about her.

I took the long tilted curves of the mountain country, working up, and then through a pass and down the far side to a plateau country, to fenced areas where there was a coarse graygreen grass, to open land of mesquite, sagebrush, cactus. This was State Road 202, less traveled than 100, a little narrower and older.

There were a few towns built in the Spanish pattern. The road curved around them, avoiding the old route of narrow cobbled streets constricted by walls, and on the newer road were the cafes and garages, small pastures of automobiles most brutally slain.

As we neared Carson I could see, far beyond it, the mountains I remembered from the flight in, purpled with distance, streaked with high marks of canyon snow. The airport was on the north side of town. The terminal was new and small, pale fabricated stone and tinted glass panels.

There was free parking in lots on either side of the building. A quarter mile away was a shabby sun-weathered hangar and private service area, where a score of small bright planes were staked out in formal array on the dusty hardpan. There were about forty cars parked in the two lots. A little cream and red plane was shooting landings.

We arrived at quarter after noon.

“I don’t see our car,” she said.

“What is it?”

“It’s a dark red DeSoto. I don’t know what year. It’s quite old. No, it isn’t here anywhere. But the Sheriff said it would be here. I wonder if John could have…”

“Let’s see what we can find out,” I said, and parked. We walked out of sun heat into the airconditioned chill of the terminal. A man stood just inside the door. He had a chauffeur hat, a big belly, a damp cigar end, little gray pebbles for eyes, and an air of petty authority.

I started to walk by him, and then stopped and went back and said, “Pardon me. I was supposed to pick up a car off the lot out there, an old maroon DeSoto. It was left there yesterday or the day before. Would you know anything about it?”

He looked me over and moved the cigar to the other corner of his mouth. “It was took off, mister.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said. They put a hook on it and took it off. Maybe about ten this morning. It was a city rig, so I’d guess it went down to the car pound, like they do for parking wrong, or a recovery of something stole.”

It bothered her. She had more questions than I could answer. I took a dime into a pay booth while she stared at me through the glass, her mouth tight, her eyes invisible behind the dark lenses. The city police switchboard passed me along to one man who transferred the call to another man, who said that the county had requested they pick up the car and hold it.

“I’d say it was a case they want to check it over,” he said, “because the way the request came through, it was to keep our hands off it, so we sent a man along with the city wrecker to put it in gear and so on without messing up anything they maybe are looking for. It ain’t been checked out yet, and you got any questions about releasing it, what you do is check with the Sheriff’s department.”

I folded the door back and left the booth and told Isobel.

“What does it mean?” she asked. “Why would they do that?”

“Maybe they’re willing to admit there could be two versions of what happened. In front of Yeoman last night, this was one of the things I said the Sheriff should be doing. So he’s doing it. But it’s a way out chance. Fingerprints work fine on television. But, on a rough guess, they get a usable print off one out of every hundred guns, one out of every twenty cars. A man adjusts the rear view mirror by hand, he can leave a good imprint on the back of the mirror, if the surface is smooth enough. Sometimes a thumb print on the front of the glove compartment. It is usually more meaningful to find a car wiped clean, steering wheel and door handles. No smudged prints and broken prints. Then that has some significance.”

She peered up at me, dark head tilted. “It’s some kind of a strange logic, isn’t it? If he didn’t go off with her, and you say he couldn’t have, then there would be no point in his bringing the car here.”

“Let’s get some lunch.”

There was a lunch counter in a corner of the terminal. After we had ordered, I left her there on the stool and went and looked at the boards. Westways had the one fifteen to El Paso, with intermediate stops. The flight originated three more stops north. It was due through again today.

At close range the ticket man was too old for his butchcut.

“On your flight two oh three, would that be the same flight crew as yesterday?”

“I wouldn’t know. Why?”

“Could it be?”

“I guess it could be. The rotation system is too complicated for me to follow.”

“Will the flight crew come into the terminal?”

“It’s just five minutes here. They’re on time. They should be in at ten after one.”

I went back to my cooling hamburg. I told her what I had in mind. I told her I wished I’d asked for a picture of her brother. She took a billfold from her gray purse. She took a color snapshot from a compartment in it. She and her brother were standing squinting and smiling in the sunlight, with one of the campus buildings behind them. He wore a pale suit and his necktie was crooked. She said the picture was over a year old. John Webb was tall, narrow, pallid, hollow-chested. He had an untidy shock of black hair. His smile was pleasant. He did not look like the sort of man Mona would have been interested in. He looked vague and anxious to please. But you can never tell. Maybe, after Cube and Jass, she’d had her fill of forceful males.

The two-engine plane came in a few minutes early. There were three or four to get off, three or four to get on. They wheeled the steps up to the door forward of the wing. I followed the passengers up. The smiling stewardess held out her hand for my ticket. The smile was habitual. The uniform was navy blue and pink. She was a taffy blonde, a little too hefty for her skirt, her lip dewed with the sudden perspiration of the heat at ground level.

“I’m not a passenger,” I said. “I just wondered if you had this flight yesterday.”

“Yes sir?”

I showed her the picture. “Do you remember this man? Tall and dark and thin. He was with a sizeable blonde. They both wore sun glasses. They got on here and went to the end of the line.”

“Yes, I remember that couple.”

“This was the man?”

“I don’t know. I thought the man looked… tougher than this man somehow. I remember them because I had… well, not trouble, really. We had a light load. They had a bottle. We’re not supposed to permit that. But you know how it is. There was an old lady in front of them. She complained to me. She said they were talking dirty. I moved her to another seat. They weren’t being particularly loud.” She looked at her watch.

“Do you remember how they were dressed? Or anything else in particular about them?”

“She wore a pale blue seersucker suit and red sandals with high heels, and she had a big red purse. That’s where the bottle was. I don’t remember about him. Dark slacks and a light jacket, I think. He had a long stringy neck and some little scars here, below his ear. Let me see, they were on the port side, so they would be on the right side of his neck. Those operations they do for glands. Sir, I’m sorry but I have to…”

“Thank you very much. What’s your name?”

“Houser. Madeline Houser.”

I went back down the steps. They were pulled away, the door dogged tight. As I walked back to the terminal, they turned to taxi and the air blast pressed against my back, hurrying me along, kicking up spirals of dust and gum wrappers.

Isobel was waiting inside the door. I took her over to the lounge chairs facing the tinted glass and the runways and sat beside her and told her what I had learned from Madeline.

She shook her head sadly, her mouth puckering. “It wasn’t John. Nothing fits. No scars on his neck. He wouldn’t talk that way. Where is he? What happened to him? Will you tell the police what that stewardess said?”

“Let me keep this picture for a while.”

“Certainly. Should I report John as missing? Won’t that stir something up?”

“We should be more certain just what we’re going to stir up.”

She hit the arm of the chair with her fist. “Why are you so hesitant? Certainly this is a police matter now. Maybe I should phone the newspapers. Damn it, we can’t just sit here!”

“It’s better than rushing off in all directions.”

“He could be tied up somewhere, all alone, sick.

“So if you start all the sirens screaming, Isobel, anybody who knows anything about it is going to dig a hole and crawl in and wait it out. We need to know more. We need to get some small idea of who did it, who would benefit, why it was done. All this wasn’t just an impulse. It has to make some kind of sense. I want to talk to the lawyer she retained. He’s from outside the county. Belasco. But I don’t know his name.”

“I know his name. Wait a moment. I’ll remember it. I heard John mention it when he talked to Mona on the phone. It begins with an M. An Italian name. Mazzari. Yes, that’s it.”

“Where’s Belasco?”

“Not too far from here. Another twenty miles east, I think.”

* * *

We drove into Belasco at twenty after two. It looked half the size of Esmerelda, and had the look of having been there a lot longer. It had plazas and defunct fountains, Moorish arches and mission churches, a big riverbed with a tiny stream in the bottom of it, fall tourists with cameras, a spectacular view of the Candelero Range.

Rogan and Mazzari had offices in an old yellow bank building on the central plaza. The girl said that Mr. Michael Mazzari was over at the courthouse and would I care to make an appointment. The courthouse was within walking distance. The corridors were hot, damp and dingy. We found Mazzari in shirt sleeves by a corridor drinking fountain, talking with two other men. The attendant spoke to him and pointed us out. He nodded and in a little while he came over. He was a dark bull-necked little man with a quick white toothy smile. He was just beginning to thin out on top. He appraised Isobel from ankles to the part in her hair with that utter frankness of the confirmed and practiced hunter.

His handshake was hard. “McGee? And Miss Webb. Oh? Miss Webb? John your brother? I see. Or maybe I don’t see. My girl tell you where to find me?”

“I told her it’s an emergency.”

“Is it?”

“It certainly is,” Isobel said forcefully.

He excused himself and went over and spoke to the attendant outside the courtroom doors, then took us to a small room nearby, evidently one of the witness rooms, a putty colored cube with golden oak furniture. We sat at a scarred table and he said, “It’s a civil action in there. Automobile accident. I hate the goddam things. The jury is off trying to figure out how much to give my client. I may be able to spare five minutes or two hours, depending how they get along together. What’s the emergency? I assume it has something to do with Mona Yeoman.”

“She was murdered yesterday afternoon,” I said.

He had the look of a man hard to jolt, and that jolted him. Astonishment gave way to suspicion. “Now wait a minute,” he said. “Even old Jass couldn’t put the lid on anything like that. And I haven’t heard a thing.”

“It was supposed to look as if she’d run off with John Webb. There’s no body. Webb is gone too. A pair of reasonable facsimiles took a plane out of Carson yesterday.”

“Maybe it was Mona and John Webb.” Isobel started to object. I hushed her and told Mazzari the facts-the long-range shot that slammed her down, the insulin kit, the stewardess’s observations, and police pickup of Webb’s car.

He whistled softly. “What a wild situation! Look, without you on the scene, Mr. McGee, it would have worked. Excuse the rude joke, Miss, but those two laid the groundwork for running off together. They had the hots. That’s what made her restless enough to bring me into it, on the money end.”

“Was there any truth in her claim that Jasper Yeoman robbed her?”

He stared at me. “Who am I retained by?”

“Not Mona. She’s dead.”

“Where do you fit into this, Mr. McGee?”

“You couldn’t solve her problem by legal means without taking too much time. And even then it was dubious. She thought I could find some shortcuts. She paid my way out here. But I didn’t like the sound of it.”

“So now I represent you?”

“Either of us who needs it. Provided you… you aren’t in the wrong pocket.”

He looked irritated. “I don’t mind the question. I am not in anybody’s pocket. I could be richer than I am, believe me. I wouldn’t be screwing around with this kind of negligence suit. I am one independent wop, and pretty fierce about it, if that’s what you want. You could be further ahead hiring somebody with clout in this area. Mona came to me because I’ve got the maverick reputation. I spit in the eye of the mighty. I’ll never get elected to public office, thank God.”

“So now we have a lawyer. First question, Mr. Mazzari…”

“Mike.”

“I’m Travis. This is Isobel. Mike, did Jass bleed that estate?”

“Bleed is not the word. He took it out of her pocket and put it in his. But it would take two years and a staff of accountants to nail it down. It wasn’t at all crude or obvious. It was a case of making very plausible but unwise deals on unloading the asset values in the estate, unloading them through dummy setups and eventually picking them up again very cheaply for his own account. With careful management, that estate could have been worth five million by today. But it petered out to nothing some years back.”

“How about the courts?”

“I don’t think you’d ever turn up any evidence of corruption. Jass was a good old boy. He could take you dove hunting. Or quail hunting. Everybody knew that little girl would never lack for a thing. When he puts his attention on it, he can charm birds down out of the trees. He’s known to be very sharp, but honest. Perhaps he told himself he was simplifying, just putting all the marbles where he could watch them better, getting rid of legal restrictions which could cramp his style. Also, this culture has a feudal flavor about it. The wife is the vassal. A flighty woman who could put her hands on her own money might be hard to handle. Forcing it into the courts would be tough. It could be done, with a lot of time and a lot of money. There would be reluctance. Why make a stink when things are fine the way they are? You understand. The fact remains, he gave that estate one damned complete ransacking.”

“He was in trouble?”

“Oh, he was in bad trouble. He had to dip into something, and the estate was handy. He had a lot of things going sour all at the same time. Oil, cattle, plastics, trucking line, little airline. His wells pumped salt water, and his cattle froze, and he got into litigation on a processing license on the plastics operation. Union troubles with the trucking line, and three fast crashes on the airline. His money was fading like snow in a heavy rain.”

“Was he a lone wolf in all those operations?”

“No. A lawyer worked closely with him. He’s dead now. Tom Claymount. A very shifty character. And there is the man who was, and is, Jass Yeoman’s partner in a lot of ventures. Wally Rupert. It is pretty obvious that Wally would have had to know where Jass was getting the money to bail them out.”

“Mike, here is the jackpot question. With all you know about the financial fast-dealing that went on, what would be the effect of Mona’s death, if it was known? If she rolled her car, for example.”

“Interesting. Let me see now. Internal Revenue would have that file, twenty years old. You have to assume they would be on their toes, eager to take another clip at the Fox estate. She was the sole heir. They could move in with some very awkward questions. Where did it all go, fellows? We can assume they would be a sore trial to Jass Yeoman. They have the manpower to do the digging, and they are not as tolerant as the local court would be. Assuming the estate merely held its own, they would be after several hundred thousand dollars. What happened to the estate? Even with the rubber stamp of local court approval, Jass could find that question very embarrassing.”

“All right, what if she disappeared forever?”

“Without a trace? That would hold the feds off for seven years. Then they would take the necessary action to have her declared dead, so they could reach for their share of the estate that isn’t there any more.”

“Somebody wants her to disappear. Jass?”

“I wouldn’t think so. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem likely. Not the way it’s being done. He is ruthless, but not in that way.”

“Could anybody hate her enough to want to kill her? Could she have had somebody else on the string?”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t seem likely. Hard to think of her dead. There wasn’t much malice in that woman. She looked like a complete woman, but she was emotionally immature. She got dreamy about John Webb, like a young girl. It was a lovely romance.”

Isobel snatched her glasses off and said, “How can you say that! She was a cheap, vulgar, vicious sexpot.”

Mazzari looked at her with mild astonishment. “Are we talking about the same gal?”

“Maybe she could fool you and fool my brother, but she didn’t deceive me. I can tell you that. She was in heat. That was her problem.”

“Isobel, honey,” he said gently. “He is your big brother and the only family you have. So naturally you guard the manger. But, believe me, Mona was just a lovesick kid. Jass understood that. And Jass understood that sooner or later she’d get over it, and when she did, she would want things the way they were before, the nice daddy-figure to watch over everything, position in the community. He knew she couldn’t work out anything permanent with your brother. They’re both dreamers. And both pretty nice people, actually, with cases of delayed adolescence. Jass could be more tolerant because he is, after all, twenty-six years older than she was. She was sincere. She wanted her freedom. She wanted some of her money. She wanted to marry your brother.”

“All she wanted was to sleep with him!”

“Which is a very natural by-product of romantic love, honey.”

“Stop Calling me honey!”

“I’ll put it this way to you, Miss Webb. If you can’t comprehend it, stop knocking it.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

His grin was lazy and charming. “People who censor books are usually illiterate.”

She unsderstood instantly and perfectly. She tried to leave in anger, but it looked a little too much like flight. She banged the door shut.

“I lose more clients,” Mazzari said.

“She’ll be all right.”

“It was a sneak punch. I wouldn’t needle a man about being deaf or blind. She looks choice, but by the time you made it, she would be too old to enjoy it. A lifetime project. Too bad. It doesn’t make it any easier for her to face up to her brother being dead. If you haven’t been waltzing me around with these other items, he very probably is.”

“I know.”

“And your Miss Webb isn’t going to take it very well. Neurotics and sexual cripples never do.”

“I think she’s letting herself begin to admit it, an inch at a time. She might be able to take it pretty well. Everybody is an amateur psychologist. Great devotion to the brother. With how much resentment mixed in? But it isn’t my problem. None of this is my problem. I should go back where I came from.”

“But this made you angry?”

“Yes. It made me angry. And those clowns thought I was making it up. Can you brief me on that Buckelberry?”

“Fred is all right. College athlete. Honor student. A very pretty and very ambitious wife. Two kids. Graduate work in police methods and procedures. But he doesn’t want to be Sheriff too much longer.”

“Political bug?”

“No. There’s a lot of money in Esmerelda County. He’s rubbed up against a lot of it. He handles himself well. And he has got the executive touch. He’ll do his job, but he isn’t going to offend any of that money over there that might be important to his future. He’s looking.”

“Do you think Jass Yeoman could be behind this whole thing, Mike? After all, hiring you, trying to hire me, she was trying to damage him.”

“How seriously? She was playing pretend. She had the scene of herself standing up in court, pointing to Jass, denouncing him, riding off into the sunset with a million dollars in hand and loverboy professor beside her. When I was trying to unravel her problems, I used to get the play by play. She would just chew the living hell out of Jass, tear her hair, break things, scream at him. He would ride along with it, and a few days later they would go out to his old ranch and ride and swim, kidding around, playing gin for blood, checking out the riding stock he was breeding out there, and he would jolly her right into bed. She would be so damned mad at herself when she’d come back to town, and swear it wouldn’t happen again, and actually make herself forget it had happened. Mona believed what she wanted to believe but, you see, Jass was her reality. Daddy, friend and lover. And the rest of it was just some game she was trying to play. Jass knew it wouldn’t last. But it made him itchy having to wait it out. He could have chased John Webb a thousand miles, but that would just martyr him and make him more attractive to Mona. I think, if she’d proposed it, Jass would have settled for giving Webb a month or two of her. But Mona and Webb idealized their love. They called it forever. An arrangement like that would have cheapened it. Jass didn’t want to lose her-both for his own sake and for hers. Maybe he didn’t have the right intentions when he married her nine years ago. But it worked into something else, as it often does when the marriage is for other reasons. She talked a lot to me. I saw just how it was. If she had had it in her power to smash Jass she would have done so, because that was part of the daydream, but she would have been heartbroken later.”

“And would she have brought anybody else down with Jass?”

“If she could have done anything?” He shrugged. “Claymount is dead. The old judge is dead. It could have stung Wally Rupert a little, maybe, because any real thorough checking would show he was in on that grab.”

The attendant rapped on the door and opened it. “Coming back in,” he said. “Thanks, Harry. Travis, if you want me along when you talk to Buckelberry, if you want to talk to him again, it can be arranged.”

“Thanks, I’ll manage.”

“Stay in touch,” he said and hastened off, shouldering himself into his suit coat.

Five

I FOUND Isobel standing by a drinking fountain, close to the wall but not leaning against it, her chin up, dark glasses on.

I took a drink and straightened up and wiped my mouth and said, “I like that feisty little man.”

“You damn bastard!” she said. “She paid your way to come here. What were you talking about in there, you damn bastard? Were you eulogizing that whore?”

“Isobel, dear, you shouldn’t try to swear. You don’t do it well. You make me think of a little girl in her Sunday frock, trying to throw mud balls.”

“Don’t be quaint. I had about all the sappy sentimentality I could stand in there. Mazzari is a dirty-mouthed little man. You came here to try to work Mrs. Yeoman for some money, didn’t you? She’s dead now. I think I understand why you’re so reluctant to stir things up about my brother being missing. It would spoil your chance to chisel money out of whoever did it. Did you and, Mazzari figure out some nice safe blackmail scheme?”

“If you’d stayed we’d have had to cut you in, Isobel.”

She stamped her foot. “I insist that we take some official action immediately!”

“Well, if you will start walking, we’ll get into my car and we’ll go to Esmerelda, and we will tell our tale to Sheriff Fred Buckelberry, if that isn’t rushing it too much.”

“But… I thought you…”

“Come along, dear Miss Webb. And learn a few more facts of life.”

“Oh, you know so damned much about everything, don’t you?”

* * *

We arrived at the Sheriff’s wing of the Esmerelda Country Courthouse at five after five. The Sheriff was not in. The desk man said he was expected very shortly. We sat on a corridor bench to await him. He came in about five minutes later, walking swiftly, followed by a meek looking young man in dark glasses and a pale blue denim suit. When Buckelberry saw us, he stopped so abruptly the other man nearly piled into him.

“McGee,” the Sheriff said. “Miss Webb.” He gave a furtive glance up and down the corridor and said, “Come on in.”

We followed him back through overcrowded office space to a corner office. A man tried to spring at him with a sheaf of papers but Buckelberry waved him back. He ushered us in and closed the office door. He had a blue rug, blue draperies, white walls, gray steel furniture.

He went to his desk, pressed an intercom switch and said, “No interruptions.” He released it and said, “Miss Isobel Webb. Mr. Travis McGee. Lieutenant Tompkins. He is with the central CID setup for this area. Sit down, please. I imagine you have something to tell me or ask me, or you wouldn’t be here. I will tell you something first. It may save us some time. We’ve just come from the hospital. The pathology lab. The search crew up at the cabin this afternoon found a dried fragment of tissue stuck against the side of a stone about seven feet from where you said she fell, McGee. The pathologist identified it as lung tissue. Mrs. Yeoman’s blood type was on file at the hospital. We have a match there. In addition, the Webb vehicle was left in the airport parking lot between midnight and two A.M., Monday night. I got a phoned report from the technicians Lieutenant Tampkins sent to Carson to check the car over. It had been wiped clean. No significant stains. They vacuumed it, but I imagine that report won’t mean much when we get it.”

He gave me a long challenging look, and I knew I was not going to get any apology or any thanks.

I turned the other cheek by saying, “Nice work, Sheriff. I’ll give you what we have very briefly. John Webb was a diabetic. He left his insulin kit behind. It was kept in the same cabinet with his toilet articles. They were taken. I talked with the stewardess who had the same flight yesterday. The couple who took that flight drank and used bad language. The male had noticeable scars on the right side of his neck. John Webb had no such scars. They were a rough match for Mrs. Yeoman and Mr. Webb. The woman wore a pale blue seersucker suit, red sandals with high heels and carried a red purse. The man may have been wearing dark slacks and a light sports jacket. The name of the stewardess is Madeline Houser. I am certain you can get an official statement from her.”

“You are inclined to meddle, McGee.”

“Meddle!” Isobel gasped.

“Sheriff, I drove Miss Webb over there to get the car. You told her where it was. It was gone. We had lunch. I realized that same flight was due. I thought that the best thing to do would be to try the stewardess while it was still fresh in her mind, if it was the same one. If you didn’t get to her for three or four days, I doubt she would have remembered much about it, certainly not the details of how the woman was dressed. It was an impulse, Sheriff.”

Tompkins cleared his throat and said hesitantly, “I suppose that any information… regardless of source…”

“I want to know where my brother is!” Isobel said loudly.

“So would I,” Buckelberry said.

“Aren’t you going to look for him?” she demanded.

He dropped his curt official manner. He had proved his point. He was a good cop. Even if I had pressured him into it, through Jass Yeoman, he was still a good cop.

“Miss Webb, be logical now. He left or was taken away Monday afternoon. This is Wednesday. Today you’ve decided he didn’t go away with Mona Yeoman. All day yesterday you were sure he had. Miss Webb, my God, there are better than six thousand seven hundred and fifty square miles in Esmerelda County, and this time of year every last stinking little dirt road is passable. Every decedent we got on hand is identified, and there’s no John Doe in any hospital. I signed away my soul to get the use of a helicopter all day to try to locate Mrs. Yeoman’s little white car, and there’s no word on it yet. I’m working a hundred-man county with a sixty-man outfit. Now just exactly what the hell do you expect me to do?”

She seemed to crouch and aim at him. “Sheriff, I expect you to spread the word. I want this on television and radio and in the newspapers. I want everybody to know that Mona is dead and my brother is missing. I want a posse and… and boy scouts and… the National Guard searching every darned inch of all those square miles.”

He leaned back and made a tent of strong hairy fingers and stared at her. “You force me to be frank with you, Miss Webb.”

“Please do. It would be refreshing.”

“I’m convinced there’s been a murder. I haven’t a damned thing to go on. I haven’t even got a body. I won’t bore you with what I have to do. Coroner’s jury, completed file approved by the state’s attorney, grand jury indictment. Miss Webb, my cop sense tells me that the very best thing I can do is continue a quiet investigation and let whoever did it believe they got away with it, that we believe Mrs. Yeoman and your brother took off for El Paso. If we start beating all the drums, this thing is going to get so muddied up we’ll never get anyplace. And the people we want will hide twice as hard.”

“Then my brother’s safety means nothing compared to your performance.”

“My cop sense tells me your brother is already dead. Alive he could turn into a very awkward loose end. I think he died before the woman died.”

She shrank in the chair and put the back of her hand against her mouth and stared at him. “Even if there was only one chance in a thousand… You can’t stop me from going to the newspaper.”

“Go ahead, Miss Webb. They’ll check with me. That would be automatic. I’ll tell them that Mrs. Yeoman and your brother took off together. That’s the same thing I’m going to tell Jass Yeoman within the hour, that I checked it and it was just the way we thought it was. You can stir up a little gossip, Miss Webb, but you can’t give them anything they’ll print.”

“But if Mr. McGee comes with me and verifies it…”

Buckelberry glanced at me and said, “Ask him.”

She turned and looked at me. I shook my head sadly.

“You damn bastard,” she whispered.

“Isobel, dear, these are the facts of life I was telling you about. I think I know what Sheriff Buckelberry is going to do next. Listen to him.”

“I am going to comb this county for tall dark thin men with scars on the right side of their neck, Miss Webb. And for buxom blondes who own blue seersucker suits and red shoes. And I am going to let some things slide I will catch hell for later, and I am going to check out those people, and I am going to find one or both of them. And I am going to make them sweat and beg for the chance to tell me every little thing they know. If I did it your way, they might never come back into this county. And I would rather have either of them than ten thousand cross-country boy scouts. I am going to be checking out every heavy scope rifle in the area. I am going to send two damn good Indians into those rocks tomorrow, up north of that cabin. I am getting an expert analysis of the explosive used to block that road, and I’m going to find out where it came from.”

“Where is my brother!” she yelled.

He sighed, opened a steel file drawer in his desk, poured a jolt of bourbon into a glass and brought it to her.

“I don’t drink.”

“For God’s sake, girl, this is not a cocktail party. This is medication. Gulp it down!”

She took it, shot a sidelong and unfriendly glance at me, drank it down. She gasped and coughed.

“What can I do?” I asked the Sheriff.

“Try to settle her down.”

“Aside from that?”

“Aside from that, stay out of this.”

“Why aren’t you telling Jass?”

“Because I’d get no help from a crazy man, any more’n I can get from a keyed-up woman.”

Isobel thrust her arms out, fists balled. She screwed her face up and yelled, “FIND MY BROTHER!”

“Oh, dear God,” Buckelberry said. Without a hat his head looked strange. There was so much wide jaw, it made his head look triangular, almost pointed at the top. “What am I going to do?” He looked as if he wanted to put his head down on his desk and cry.

I tried a different approach. “You can’t reason with her, Sheriff,” I said. “This one is a genuine intellectual. She is an emotional basket case. She had an unhealthy symbiotic relationship with the brother. She’s about twenty-six and so she’s supposed to be grown up. But you can see for yourself. Childish frenzy. Limited contact with reality. She is so basically screwed up, a thing like this is going to land her at the funny-farm sooner or later, so the simplest thing is get it over with right now. You are authorized to commit, aren’t you? The lieutenant and I are witnesses to violent and irrational behavior. Frankly Sheriff, I would feel safer if you would kindly stash her away. Somebody thinks this elopement gimmick worked in spite of my seeing her killed. And if it gets out that it didn’t work, they might want to correct mistakes, and maybe leaving me alive was one of them. So if she could be tucked away and given some nice sleepy pills, it might be the best thing for everybody, her brother included.”

He saw my wink. She couldn’t. He said, “Sometimes you make enough sense to astonish me, McGee. Miss Webb, you’ll get the best of care out at Pinon Springs.”

For a few moments I thought we had pushed it too far. Her head swiveled in fast erratic motions as she stared in turn at the three of us, a glint of actual madness in those strange blue eyes. She clamped her hands hard onto the arms of her chair and sat, eyes closed, chin on her chest. She took very deep and audible breaths, her round breasts lifting against the yellow fabric of her blouse. Then her breathing softened and her hands loosened. She seemed to lift her head with an effort. She looked at Buckelberry and said in a quiet and controlled tone, “It is only natural that I should be very concerned about my brother.”

“I understand that, Miss.”

“Obviously you know more about this sort of thing than I do, Sheriff. I present one fact for your consideration. The Yeoman woman is dead. Nothing can be done for her. We do not know that my brother is dead. I think that should be your priority. He was taken from our home. Kidnapping is a federal offense.”

‘We have no proof he was taken. Merely a supposition.“

“If you will give me your word that you will make finding my brother your first consideration, I will promise to… control myself.”

“You have my word.”

She grasped her purse and stood up slowly, timidly, looking as if she was poised to run. “Now if Mr. McGee could take me home?”

“If we have any news, we’ll contact you at once, Miss.”

I went out with her. She stumbled against me, walked uncertainly toward the corridor door, then stopped and leaned against the wall, head down, eyes closed, breathing deeply again.

“It’s all right now,” I said.

With eyes still closed she said, “I suppose it is all in getting used to knowing that you are nothing.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s too cruel, you know, to look directly at things.” She looked solemnly up at me. “‘Then you know that your father was glib and tricky and second-rate, and you know your mother was a very silly woman, and you know that your brother was really not a very good teacher, not much of a man, not much of anything. And you know that you are wasting yourself, running from a thousand things, hiding away at a third-rate institution in a damned wasteland. So why should the Sheriff or anybody care, one way or another? The illusions are so much easier to live with, Travis. The golden parents, the noble brother, the high calling, the devotion. The mysterious princess with the wise sad smile. Oh Christ, Travis, if you live without illusion, what do you have?”

“Come along, Isobel.”

I took her arm and steered her toward the door. “What do they want of me?” she asked. I knew that They wasn’t the police. Parents, perhaps. Or an amalgam of parents and brother and all the people of the world who had said, “My, what a bright strange little girl!”

I took her through the late brass of sunlight and across the open square to where my rental car was parked in a street narrow as an alley, in a deep black of shade. I put her in, and when I went around and got behind the wheel, I realized she was shaking all over. I had the impression that if she unclamped her jaw, her teeth would chatter.

“Isobel?”

She wrenched around to face me, her mouth stretched into ugliness. “And what the hell do you know of relationships? Symbiotic! Limited contact with reality! How could you even pretend to recognize the intellectual position? Oh, you have your lousy little vanity, Mr. McGee. You have a shrewd quick mind, and little tag ends of wry attitudes, and a sort of deliberate irony, served up as if you were holding it on a tray. And you have the nerve to patronize me! You have all your snappy little answers to everything, but when they ask the wrong questions, you always have fists or kicking or fake superior laughter. You are a physical man, and in the best sense of being a man, you are not one tenth the man my brother was.” Her eyes went wide and dazed. “Was,” she repeated softly. She had sunk the barb herself, and chunked it deep, and she writhed on it.

She huddled into her misery, face against her knees, grinding out the little rusty sobs. I pulled at her and gathered her in, against automatic resistance. I got her face tucked into the hollow of throat and shoulder, a hand pressed against the nape of her neck, an arm around the supple arch of her back. She clung. She was a foundering boat in a terrible sea. But she was still clamping down on the sobs, her back knotting. I was encouraging her. It was like getting a sick gagging child to vomit. “Come on. Let go. Let it go, dear.”

It was cool in the deep shade. She squeezed at grief, miserly, choking at it. I could feel a terrible tension building in her, rising, and then it broke at last, in a great yawning loosened yaffling animal sob. All the wires had broken, and she could lose herself in it, throwing herself into each spasm, all softened and steaming and hopeless, freed for a time from that terrible prison of the highly complex personality wherein they are condemned always to observe themselves as though standing a bit to one side, watching themselves.

A clot of young boys came down the alley, stared, sniggered, guffawed, made obscene gestures and went on. She settled into a dull rhythm, and after a long time that began to die. With the slow persistence of the sick or the very drunk she began to push herself away from me, to sort herself out, dogged and weary.

She sat apart from me. She was a mess. Her face was bloated, marked with angry patches of red. She got tissues from her purse. Every few moments a dry sob would shake her like a monstrous hiccup. The neat wings of hair were matted and in disarray. She looked closer to thirty-six than twenty-six. She looked at herself in her mirror, and with a slow and clumsy effort she fixed her hair. From time to time she sighed very deeply. She had made a sodden mare’s nest of my shoulder.

Watching her I was reminded of the way a fighter will get up - one of the good ones. He lands face down in a way that means he can’t make it. But at the count of three he begins to move. He pushes the canvas away. He comes up onto one knee. At nine and a half he is up, tottering and drifting and dreaming, perhaps grinning foolishly, but he is up and moving and his pride brings his gloves up, and he can take a huge frail slow swing at the opponent charging in to knock him down again.

She straightened humbled shoulders and said, “I… I guess there are some uses for the physical man.”

It was that kind of gallantry based on an iron pride.

“The traditional handy shoulder.”

Her glance was swift and sidelong. “Thank you for the shoulder.” She took the dark glasses from her purse and put them on. “Now I feel shy and funny.”

“To have been seen in that condition? Want one of my snappy comments, on a tray?”

She tried to smile. “Please don’t. Why am I so exhausted?”

“You used yourself up. Want some coffee? Food? Drink?”

“I want to be home in my bed.”

The square was in shadow. By the time I left the city the sun was gone behind the hills to the west, and the dusk land was blue. Her head kept drooping, and she would give little starts as she woke up. Finally she sagged over against the door on her side, head awkwardly cocked, hands loose in her lap, palms up, fingers curled.

She awoke when I stopped in front of Hardee Three, but she was as dazed as a tripworn child. I walked her to the door. She said she would be all right. I said I would phone. She nodded absently. I took the key from her fumbling hand and unlocked the door for her. She turned and said, “Good night.”

I patted her shoulder. “Get a good sleep.” She nodded and stood tall for a moment and kissed the corner of my mouth, a child’s automatic kiss, the unconsidered gesture. I do not believe she was at all aware of having done it. She trudged in, turned on a light and closed the door. I guessed that she would be in bed and asleep in ten minutes. It was a little after eight. Twelve hours’ sleep would be the best thing that could happen to her.

Strange little button. Comforted by being held. Great reservoirs of affection. But blocked in every other direction.

I pushed the little car on the way back to Esmerelda. The people at the Latigo Motel were nervous about their money. They were reassured to find out I now had a car. It comforted them. I showered and shaved and changed and went down to The Sage for two huge broiled lamb chops in their Sundowner Grille. A tipsy woman in a paper hat blundered by my table and chided me severely for not wearing my badge. I promised I would do better next time.

Six

THE SOUTHWEST section of the city was the old part, now the center of the Mexican-American community. The far newer and most desirable residential section was to the northwest where there was some contour to the land. I arrived at the Yeoman place at ten thirty. It was in a fold of the land, lushly irrigated, high enough so that when I got out of the car on the broad slick expanse of asphalt drive, I could look out across all the lights to the city in the clear cold night air. The house was low and huge, and something that bloomed in the night had an aromatic fragrance. Most of the house was dark. As I started toward the front a side door opened and Jass Yeoman said, “McGee? Come on in this way, boy.”

I crossed a small terrace and he let me into a comfortable study. A man’s room. Leather and wood, stone and books and bar, cluttered desk, gun rack logs chuckling comfortably in a big deep fireplace. He had a glass in his hand. He told me to fix myself a drink. The expanse of wall behind the bar was dominated by a huge oil portrait of Mona Fox Yeoman. She wore a deep shiny blue, cut low. She sat on a bench and looked out at the room, wearing a small and knowing smile-a woman four or five years younger than the one I had seen die.

Jass wore slippers, a gray flannel shirt, khakis faded almost white. I sat in the leather chair opposite his. He said, “Every Wednesday night of my life I’m down at the Cottonwood Club. Steak dinner and poker. Dealer’s choice, but it’s usually shotgun. Three cards down and bet, get one more down and bet, one more down and bet, then play it like draw poker from there on out. You play poker?”

“Yes. And shotgun. It runs rough.”

“That Wednesday game is worth about three thousand a year to me.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “Cook and the maid and the houseman and the gardener are back there in quarters now, gabbling about it. El Patron is home on a Wednesday night. Or maybe they don’t give a damn. Who knows?”

“Are we playing poker now, Mr. Yeoman?” He studied me. I wondered at the blood heritage. Some Indian I guessed. Way back. I had not noticed his hands before. Thick hands, big-knuckled, with heavy veins. Hard labor, long ago. Nothing else will do it.

“What makes you think you know the rules?” he asked.

“I don’t. I’m guessing at them. Things have a different flavor out here. Power is centralized in a different way. It’s a feudal system. It goes against my grain, but I have the hunch that the solitary knight in his tin armor would take one hell of a thrashing. So I have to sign up, or I can’t play. But I don’t know how much cover I get.”

“It isn’t all as simple as it used to be.”

“Nothing is.”

“This solitary knight you brang up, boy. He rides in and picks a castle and signs up. You could be picking one with a busted moat and the towers falling down, and everybody out to lunch.”

“So the knight is the type who can’t stay on the horse and he’s scared of dragons. Maybe it’s the best deal he can make.”

“You think I made an offer last night?”

“Didn’t you?”

“You wouldn’t have come around unless you had something.”

“Mr. Yeoman, if I give you a card and you play it wrong, I could be…”

“For chrissake, McGee, you’re signed on! Anybody moves against you, the whole castle gets dropped on them.”

I leaned back, turning the glass in my hand. “She wanted to hire me to pry her loose from you, based on half of what I could pressure you to settle on her. She heard about me from a mutual friend. I know you plundered her estate. I know she was your ward. I think I know why you thought it smart business to marry her. I also have the feeling it worked out a lot better than you counted on.”

“You’re in a funny line of work, McGee.”

“I’m a salvage expert. But I didn’t want this job.”

“Why not?”

“Just a feeling I had about her, that actually she was hoping there was nothing I could do. But she felt obligated to go through the motions. I think she was setting herself up for the tragic renunciation scene, Jass. Tears, goodby to the lover, trudge home to the husband. I have the feeling that’s what she wanted next. To moon around here until you were sufficiently impressed with her broken heart, and then settle down. Where she belonged. You look skeptical. Ask Mike Mazzari. He sensed that it was just a romantic game. I think the game was about over, for her at least. But they gave her no time to prove it.”

“They?”

“The ones Buckelberry is looking for. They didn’t clean up the area perfectly Jass. The lab crew found proof today. A fleck of lung tissue and the right blood type. The ones who took the plane were standins. Webb is probably dead too.”

He leaned his head back against the high back of the chair and looked as if he had gone to sleep. A log slipped into a new position, and sparks went up. He finished his drink and got up slowly. He went and stood with his hands jammed into his hip pockets, looking at her picture.

“You know what kind of water we’re pumping from those deep wells, son?”

“What?”

“Fossil water, sweet to the taste, laid down in the times when this was swamp and lakes and giant lizards, ferns like trees. We take it and when it’s gone it’s gone. Tomorrow all them pumps could give one big gassy belch and suck nothing but stale deep air. And this whole county would die.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“They know it. They don’t think about it. It scares the piss out of them to think about it. It’s like a man never thinking he has to die. But the end is there. For this county, and for any man in it. They herd new folks in here and drill more wells and suck it away faster.”

“It seems stupid.”

He turned to the bar, replenished his drink and came slowly back to the chair. “Hell, it is stupid.” He wiped his face, forehead to chin, in a slow gesture. “Waste. Hope. I don’t know. You take a quick look, there you are with the world by the balls. Look again a minute later and you’re an old fart thinking of the ten thousand ways you had it and blew it, every time. One day it turns out to be too much trouble. That’s all. Just too much goddamn trouble. You see, boy I knew it last night. Forty years of poker. I saw it in your eyes. I saw the way it put the hooks into your mouth and changed your mouth. Freddy Buckelberry, for the love of Christ! I got his call tonight, Jass, boy, everything is like we thought. Yup. She took off with the professor, sure enough. What the silly son of a bitch doesn’t know is that last night was the night. Not tonight. I was a little stoned last night. And I shall get a little stoned tonight, son. Last night I took the Chrysler out, way over onto the mesa road. It was a political son of a bitch, from nowhere to nowhere, and I got me a piece of the state money when they put it through. Cold moonlight up there, son, and forty miles of it like an arrow. It was moving up close to a hundred when I turned the lights off, and it went up one hell of a way from there, until that big car was a very tender little dancing thing. Hit a big bull jackrabbit. Hit him on the rise with a crack like a shot and he kept going right up. Damndest thing you ever saw. He was blood and bone too. Maybe his clan saw him go, and they’ll have legends about him. I took my foot off, banged it into neutral, took that long coast back on down, stopped by a runty tree. I set for a time, got out and looked at the front end, rabbit-size welt on top of the curve there, deep, with blood drying there and some hair caught in the edge. I fingered that hair, pale stuff and soft. I walked over by the runty tree and pissed into the sand and stood and looked at the stars. I told myself there would be times I would draw to four hearts and ease the hand open and see that fifth one. I told myself there would be the brandy and the cigar after the good steak, that feeling of ease. I told myself I was still the old he-coon, and I’d have that big warm swing of a knowing woman under me, that time when you know it’s near and nothing in creation is going to be able to stop either one of you. I whistled pieces of tunes and worked the car around and drove back, slow as an old lady, lights on. Long after I thought I would have passed the rabbit I came up on him and stopped with the lights on him, and I got out for some fool reason I will never know. I had exploded him pretty good, but there was clean fur on him, solid meat on him. I felt him and he was warm still. I picked him up and crossed the ditch and got down on my knees and dug like a dog does, dug him a deep hole and put him in and covered him over with my handkerchief before I filled it in. Like, for God’s sake, a kid with a dead bird. I patted the dirt down, and still on my knees I looked up at the stars and asked them what kind of damn fool they were making of me. I knew it wasn’t any good, boy. Poker and brandy, cigars and fresh clean tail. No good.”

He finished the drink, took both our glasses back to the bar and made fresh. I knew it was no time to say anything.

He handed me my drink and sat down. “Know what I keep remembering the most about her?” His grin made him look younger.

“Three years ago. I was in the market for some brood mares and took her on up to Montana with me to look some over. There was good spring grass and flowers where we were. We walked up a hill and down the other side. I liked the mares. She didn’t like the man selling them. My God, we’d start jawing at each other about any small thing sometimes. There wasn’t a soul within two miles of us. The horses were grazing back by a brook. We were in that green bowl of grass and flowers. And there we were, nose to nose, yelling at each other. Suddenly she gave me a crack with her open hand that spun me halfway around. Usually I could guess about when it was coming, but she fooled me that time. I had a sore tooth and it hurt like hell. I gave her back a good one that turned her eyes empty for a half a second. She collected herself and swang again and I took it. I swear to God we must have whammed each other six times, and I saw her mouth twitching just about the same time I was beginning to see how funny it was. Then we were howling with laughter at each other, crying with it, like kids. And just about ninety seconds later we had both pair of riding britches off and we were nested down into that sweet grass and flowers like teenagers. Now isn’t that the damndest thing to keep remembering?” He chuckled. “We both puffed up on the side of the face like ground squirrels taking a nut home.”

He went over and poked the fire up. “Love? What the hell is love, son? I married her because I was nervous about stripping her estate. She married me because she was drowning and I came within reach. This professor thing, I felt exasperated the way you do when you see any good friend being a damn fool about something. She brang that lawyer over from Belasco, and after he snuffed around, he knew it would be uphill all the way, and a damned long trip. She sicked an investigator onto me, and I told the chief of police, and they taught that fellow local manners. Then she got you, whatever the hell you are. Salvage expert?”

“I’m a high-level Robin Hood. I steal from thieves.”

“That wouldn’t be a crowded occupation.”

“Jass, isn’t it pretty damned plain that the shot was really fired at you?”

He heaved up out of the chair and went over to a mounted pair of bull horns. They were on a long plaque that swiveled at one end. He turned them up out of the way. I caught a glimpse of the cylindrical wall safe before he stepped in front of it. I heard the chunking sound when he closed it and spun the dial. He came back to the chair. Without warning he flipped the stack of money at my face. I got my arm up. It bounced off onto the floor. It was paper-taped fifties, with the $5,000 imprint, and the initials of whoever had counted it.

“Let’s not fake what kind of interest you’ve got in this thing, McGee. Now you’re saved the trouble of trying to con me.”

I pushed myself up out of the chair just far enough to aim the kick. I kicked the money at the fire. I was trying to kick it in. It fell short. But it fell close. “Don’t try to tell me what I’m interested in, Jass.”

The top bills had begun to curl and change color. A first little wisp of smoke rose from them.

“You’ve got an interesting way of bargaining, boy”

“Throw me a more important stack, Mr. Yeoman, and I’ll aim a little better next time.”

“Money don’t mean a goddamn thing to you, eh?”

“I am very fond of it. I’m a little particular about the way it’s offered.”

We sat in silence. I couldn’t read his face or those Indian eyes. The corner of the top bill blackened and a little necklace of red sparks began to eat a semicircular hole into it.

“My God, you’re a stiff-necked son of a bitch, McGee.”

“I said that according to local ground rules, apparently I have to join up somewhere. I didn’t say I was for sale.”

After a long time he got up and shuffled over to the hearth. He picked up the money by the cool end and slapped the sparks out against his pants, leaving a black smudge. He walked over to me. “I’ve got your name right? Travis?”

“Trav, usually.”

He placed the money carefully on the leather arm of the chair. “Trav, if you’d like to help out a little, I’d be pleased to have you. Kindly accept this little token of my affection and esteem. If I was twenty years younger, we’d go on out into the side yard and bloody each other up for about forty minutes. That’s the only way to get to be friends with a son of a bitch like you.”

He went back to his chair and picked his glass up.

I put the money into the inside pocket of my jacket after slipping the charred bill out. I tore the charred corner off it and put the bill in my wallet. As though there had been no interruption, I told him all I knew about it thus far. I ended by saying, “Buckelberry didn’t tell you because he thought you’d turn into a crazy man.

“Was it a sane man buried that bull jack under an Irish linen handkerchief?”

“Sane in a sense she might have understood, Jass.”

“If I go crazy it is going to be from wondering who did it and why.”

“She told me she was aware of being followed lately. She thought you were responsible.”

“Me? Hell no!”

“Two men questioned her maid about her, the one who quit to get married.”

“Dolores. Dolores Canario. Let me see. It’s something else now. Estobar. Mrs. Juan Estobar. What the hell would they be after Dolores for?”

“Questions about your wife’s personal finances. Dolores and your wife wondered if you were trying to find out if she had squirreled enough away to run away on.”

“Son, that is a question I would never have to ask. I learned not to let her have any charge accounts. She got her fifteen hundred personal money the first of every month, and there wasn’t a thing she had to use it for, and she was broke by the fifteenth regular.”

“So somebody questioned Dolores.”

“It sounds to me like a tax investigation, asking that kind of question. When they are working up a case against you on a balance sheet basis, they have to figure what you spend to live. Understand?”

“Not very well. I’m sorry”

“Trav, suppose you were worth a hundred thousand dollars ten years ago. Suppose today you’re worth six hundred thousand. Suppose, every year, your net after taxes was fifty thousand. Suppose it cost you thirty thousand to live. Okay, your net worth should be three hundred thousand, not six hundred thousand. So they can build the case and come at you and say that you had three hundred thousand in income you didn’t report. Fraud. There’s no statute of limitations on that, boy. They can go back to 1913, the year the act was passed. God damn it, I thought I was in perpetual audit and all clean. But it sounds like they’re whipping up a little surprise for me. And it can be a surprise, son. They can spend two years working up their case, and you get two months preparing a defense. You know. Funny thing.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to get steamed up and I can’t. I should go right over to that phone and call Charlie Baker and roust him out and have him check his contacts and find out what they’re up to. But I can’t seem to give that much of a damn. A tax mess right now would raise hell with a lot of things. But I can’t get myself agitated.”

“Jass, could they develop a case on that basis?”

He gave me a long slow smile. “They sure as hell could, son. I’ve been half expecting it for years.”

“Could it be based, in whole or in part, on your taking over that estate?”

“Son, the way I picked up the money Cube left scattered here and there, I couldn’t exactly declare it as income, could I?”

“Mazzari told me today that she was in such a romantic condition, she would have hurt you if she could, and been damned sorry later.”

He started to ask me what I meant and then realized what I meant. “By God, if they’d got around to sitting her down and taking a statement, and she’d given them that big detailed gripe about what happened to this and to that her dear daddy left her, I would have been in the sorry-sling for sure.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, but doesn’t that give you a motive?”

He looked at me in a way which made me glad I would never have the job of quieting him down-twenty years ago-or now. He had the look of the long hard bones, the meat tight against them, laid on in the long flat webs of hard muscle, ancient meat of the western rider, sunbaked, fibrous and durable. He had made trouble in a lot of far places and settled it his way, or he wouldn’t have lasted. Cube Fox and Jass Yeoman must have been quite a pair.

“I am misunderstanding you too damn fast,” he said in a deadly whisper.

“So fast you’re not thinking clearly. If it would give you a motive, it would give somebody else a motive, somebody whose welfare is very closely tied to yours, somebody who would go down if they topple you, Jass.”

I saw him work at the anger, pushing it back and down, tucking it away. He frowned. “I go it pretty much alone, son.”

“You said you were like that clown with all the dishes spinning on the end of sticks.”

“Right about now. Yes. Because I’ve been unloading things. You want to sell something, you have to pretty it up some. You have to throw money into it to make it look smart and peppy. Like you take an old house, you want to sell it good, you put in a new kitchen to knock the breath out of a woman so she can’t even hear her husband talking about dry rot in the sills. In about four ventures I’ve been digging deep into working capital to fancy them up. I figured to come out of it in a year maybe, with just the horse ranch which damn near pays out by itself, and this house, and about a six or seven million liquid condition which would give me a borrowing power of that plus five times that amount, and I had it in mind to put all them eggs into one basket by taking over control of a very nice little company which I don’t even whisper out loud to myself, son. They’ve got basic patents in about five different areas of the mining industry, and about twenty million cash reserve and nothing but a short-term debt structure. I’m getting too slow for all the wheeling and dealing and I figured to get me my own personal mint. I’ve got some bright boys working on all the angles of it, but nobody has a piece of the action.”

“Okay. When we talk about power, we talk about power vacuums, too. Who runs things around here? Beside you?”

“I guess it would be the boys around the Wednesday poker table at the Cottonwood Club. Boone Kendrick, Joe Gay, Tom O’Dell, Fish Ellery, Jaimie DeVrees, Paul Tower. And maybe two that don’t play. Wally Rupert and Sonny Madero. Between us we got the whole ball of wax, mining, banks, newspaper, radio and television, cattle, real estate, transportation, construction, housing, power and light. A couple hundred others fight for the scraps left over. I am fixing to stick some of those boys with the items I want to unload.”

“Mazzari said Rupert was a partner of yours.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Son, it’s not that close. He still has small pieces of two things, and when I get those peddled, we’ll be finally unlatched.”

“But it was a lot closer than that?”

“Lord yes! We were in there, sweating and scratching, shoulder to shoulder for a long time.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “We used up half our working time watching each other. We got hooked up together out of desperation, you might say. And when we got well, it was a delicate chore getting unhooked without getting gutted. We’re both loners.”

“Jass, all I can do is talk off the top of my head. Sometimes an outsider can see things in a different way. You can tell me if this question is nonsense. If Mona had given a detailed statement to the Internal Revenue people, and if you were indicted for fraud an that balance sheet basis you talked about, would you have to prove that the stolen money went into joint ventures you and Rupert were operating in order to keep from taking the whole rap?”

He stared at me. He knocked the drink off and got up and moved slowly to the bar. He started to fix his drink, turned and stared at me. “Not Wally, son. Not him. Get that out of your head.”

“Jass, if they are slowly building up a case, would it be logical for them to contact Wally Rupert?”

“I don’t know. They might. They might not.”

“If they did contact him, he would get the idea they were after you, and he should let you know, shouldn’t he?”

“By God, he would!”

“You talked about Charlie somebody, with good contacts. What if Charlie found out Rupert had been contacted, interviewed, and had said nothing to you? Would that mean anything, Jass?”

He finished fixing the drink. “He would be anxious to cover himself. Christ, we’ve got it all buried pretty damned well. It was years ago. A lot of the people involved have died off. Some of it was pretty raw, but what could they prove?”

“Raw?”

He sat down, looking uncomfortable. “As executor, I’d sell a hunk of Cube’s land to the XYZ Corporation for fifty thousand. XYZ would be Wally and me, but not on the records. XYZ would hold it and resell it to ABC later on for forty-five thousand. That would still be Wally and me. Then we’d sell it to somebody who was really hot after it. We’d sell it for say fifty thousand again, having sort of established that price on it, and take fifty thousand over the table, and a hundred thousand underneath.”

“How much did it all amount to, Jass?”

“Understand, son, I was scrambling for my life, and so was Wally. We’d made it from nothing, and we were set to lose it all because we didn’t have the cash to protect ourselves.”

“How much was involved?”

He waited so long I didn’t think he was going to answer. “Call it a million four, boy. I came out with about seven-eight hundred thousand. Wally got maybe four hundred. The rest went for expenses and a little gift money here and there, where it was needed. But you understand we didn’t see it right off. We had to use it to bail with to keep from sinking, and it didn’t really come back to us until we were over the hump. You know, we could have thrown all that in and still gone broke. But once things paid off all right, then we had that much extra.”

“Could Mona have made any statement about Rupert being in on it?”

“She could have got it from Mazzari. There’s a bright boy. Mona, one time when we were screaming at each other a couple months back, seemed to mention something about Rupert and me being a pair of thieves. I needed Rupert. All by myself I couldn’t have put up enough smoke screen. But he had so many things going for him, we could shove papers around until sometimes even we couldn’t figure out how we’d worked it. I want to tell you one thing, Trav.”

“Yes?”

“I played it close and I played it sharp. But that is the one and only damn time in my life I stole. I plain had no other choice. The money was there. And I knew that if Cube knew the whole thing, he would have said go ahead, because he would have known I’d never let Mona want for a thing, no matter what.”

He smiled. It was half grimace. “But I know damned well I’ve got to call Charlie Baker, just to prove we’re wasting our time wondering about Wally.” He stood up. “Come look at my new phone gadget.”

I went to the desk with him. There was an important-looking box affixed to the phone, constructed as a part of it. He fingered through a small file, picked out a plastic card, shoved it into a slot and pressed a button. The phone briskly dialed a ten-digit number.

When the operator inquired, he gave her his number. He gave me a shark grin. “They make it impossible for a man to call a friend long distance, then they lease you a gadget makes it almost as easy as it used to be. Fix a drink and go on over and set, boy.”

He had one of those special mouthpieces on the phone which made it impossible for anyone in the room to hear his end of the conversation. He talked for about five minutes. He came back and said, “Charlie’ll find out. He likes to make it sound impossible. That’s so it’ll look as if he’s earning his money. When he gives me the facts, he’ll sound as if he risked his whole career to do me a favor.”

“What’s Wally Rupert like?”

“He’s sixty now. You talk about feudal. Now there is one feudal son of a bitch, believe me. He don’t have five friends in the world, but he’s sure God got enough family to make up for it. He’s gone deep into the service industries these past few years. Dealerships, laundries, hotels and motels, shopping centers. And the old bull-boar has been breeding his own labor supply. His old spread, eleven miles north of here, it’s got so many houses on it now they call it Rupertville. He married young. Married Helen Holmes and had six kids by her. When she died, he married her kid sister, Catherine. Catherine was widowed and had two of her own. He took her two in, and bred her for five more. Twelve years. ago, after Catherine died-neither of those Holmes girls were strong-Wally married a seventeen-year-old Mexican gal who worked on the place. Rosa. Little round gal, all tits and big shiny black eyes, and he’s had nine young off her at last count. I’d say the oldest boy must be about thirty-nine now, and the youngest maybe three or four months. Twenty of his own, and two step-kids. You take all the wives and husbands and kids and grandkids, Wally must have seventy-five kin out there, and maybe thirty or forty working around the place. And if he gives one little belch, the whole crew leaps into the air and lands looking busy. He’s the he-coon out there. Pillar of the church. He’s a tough, smart old boy, broad as a barn door, belly like a boulder. But he sure God ain’t social. If he speaks to you, it’s like it hurts his mouth. Back in the old days, when Cube and I were ripping and snorting around, Wally was behaving himself and quietly piling up the kids and the money. But like I said, if it hadn’t been for Cube’s estate, we’d have both sunk without a trace back there. No, boy, it couldn’t have been Wally having anything to do with this.”

He kept telling me that. But he kept talking about Wally. And he kept drinking. As he got drunk he spoke with more precision and walked more carefully and steadily to the bar each time.

As he let me out, he said, “You tried to kick that money into the fire?”

“I tried.”

“What if it had gone right on in?”

“It would have been something to remember, I guess.”

He chopped at my shoulder with a weathered fist. “It is anyway, son. It is anyway. We got you signed up. You poke around. So will I.”

Seven

I FOUND the small house of Juan Estobar on a quiet street in the heat of the mid-morning. It was a small frame house, freshly painted pink and white, set close to the uneven sidewalk. Under the shade of big dusty trees, some frail blades of grass struggled up through the packed dirt. There was new aluminum furniture on the screened porch. The houses were set close. There were many small children at play, birds noisy in the trees, many sounds of music and morning television drama.

Dolores Estobar came to the screened door and looked out at me questioningly. She looked at me with frank female appraisal. She was in her middle twenties, dark and slender and very pretty. She wore navy blue bermudas and a roomy pink smock plumped with an obvious pregnancy.

“Did you want something?”

“Are you Dolores Estobar?”

“Yes, why?”

“My name is McGee. I’d like to talk to you about Mona Yeoman.”

“Listen, you people have got to stop bothering me.”

“It isn’t like that this time.”

“Then what is it like?”

“If you want to phone Mr. Yeoman, he’ll ask you, as a favor to him, to talk to me for a little while, if you aren’t too busy right now.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for her.”

“You know she’s gone, then?”

“Well, I guess about everybody knows that by now. About nineteen people have made a real point of telling me about it-that she took off with that Mr. Webb the day before yesterday. Mister, they don’t need any newspapers in this town. I didn’t know she was actually going to do that. I couldn’t tell you a thing.”

“There’s a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about.”

“Well… I was just ironing some. You come on in.”

The furniture was bright and new, the small house extraordinarily neat. The kitchen was unexpectedly huge, and it looked like a demonstration kitchen, crammed with every electric gadget known.

“Some kitchen, huh? It was Mona’s wedding present to me. She worked it out with Johnny, my husband. A surprise. When we got back from the trip, here it was. They had to move the wall there way back to make room. Look at the crazy refrigerator. It’s hotel-size. You’d like a cold beer?”

“Thanks.”

She gave me the beer. I sat with it at a cheery little breakfast bar. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, facing me, ironing white shirts.

“I don’t know what I can tell you.”

“Well, you can tell me if you were surprised when you heard it. And why you were surprised.”

‘’I’ll say I was surprised. I knew she was getting involved with that guy. But what I think she wanted, she wanted her husband to take her seriously. You know what I mean?“

“Not exactly”

“Well, Mr. Yeoman treated her like a kid. And she is a kid in a lot of ways. But him being so much older and all, when she wanted to be real serious, he was kind of laughing. Oh, he likes her a lot. Don’t get me wrong about that. You know, a lot of the time even though I’m six years younger than she is. I felt older.”

She frowned down at the cuffs she was working on. “She gets these ideas about herself. Like she was living in a soap opera. Life isn’t like that. It’s too bad she can’t have kids. Except for not having babies, it’s a pretty good relationship. They have kin together. And old as he is, I can tell you he’s plenty of husband for a girl. But I didn’t think she’d actually take off. Boy, that’s pretty stupid! I thought it was pretty stupid her actually going to bed with that professor. I think if I’d still been working for her. I would have talked her out of that. But I left to get married last April, and after we got back from the honeymoon she was over here practically the next day, crying and carrying on and saying John Webb was the great love of her life and he treated her like a real woman and so on. She said she could never never let Jass know she’d been unfaithful, but I knew darn well the next brawl they had she’d throw it up to him and she did. And the next time she came to see me, she still couldn’t sit down without whining. I’m surprised because I know darn well she didn’t get Jass to finance this trip, and she at least knows herself well enough to know she can’t get along without money and lots of it, and Jass cut her off months ago. I guess they must have quarreled or something and she did it to hurt Jass. But I’ll bet you by now she’s scared and worried.”

“I understand you and Mona had a good friendly relationship.”

“Oh sure. She knew I wouldn’t take advantage. Like being too friendly when anybody was around. But we didn’t have any secrets. We couldn’t really be friends, because I was working for her. You understand. But we talked a lot, and trusted each other. She’ll be back. You tell Mr. Yeoman he can count on that. I guess he knows it already. She’ll be back, and he’ll make her sweat some, but he’ll take her back. He’ll give her one grade A thrashing, which she deserves, and take her back like before. I just don’t know what’s been making her act so silly. Why should she leave a man she gets along with so good? I swear, because I’ve seen it happen, all he ever has to do is lay a hand on her and her knees sag and she starts breathing hard.”

“Maybe she didn’t run off with John Webb.”

“Oh, everybody knows she did.”

“Dolores, there are some people who believe they didn’t run off at all. There’s some reason to believe they were both murdered and the bodies hidden.”

The iron came to rest. She stared at me. Suddenly she snatched the iron up and took a worried look at the shirt. She set the iron on the stand and came over to the little bar. There were stools on both sides. She sat opposite me and stared at me.

“Mr. Yeoman would never never do anything like that!”

“I don’t believe he would.”

She bit her lip. “But who would? It doesn’t make any sense!” She tried to smile. “John Webb’s weird little sister… Mona told me all about her… she wouldn’t have the nerve for anything like that.” She shook her head. “You must be mistaken, Mister McGee, really. Everybody says they went to El Paso together.”

“That was two people who vaguely resembled them.”

She studied me. She was a most attractive woman-golden flesh tones, strong features, splendid dark eyes. “There’d be no point in your telling me a lot of crazy lies, I guess. But I just can’t imagine Mona… dead. She’s so alive!”

“Dolores, I’m sorry I’ve upset you. I thought you might be able to think of something useful.”

“She’s been stopping by to see me and tell me her troubles. Those tax guys worried her. That’s what they were, you know. I’m sure they were just what they said they were. But she thought they were maybe working for Jass. She wanted things to be real dramatic, always. Poor Jass. If it turns out to be true, he’ll be all broken up over it.”

“Why would somebody want to make it look as if Mona had run away?”

She looked blank. “Gee, I don’t know. So they’d have a better chance of getting away with it, I guess.”

She walked out onto the front porch with me. She had a good smile. I said, “Have yourself a prize baby Dolores.”

Her eyes turned surprisingly cool. “Only the Anglos are supposed to wait so long, eh? It better be twins, to catch up. We’re supposed to breed at fifteen.”

“Hey, take it easy”

“Maybe I don’t like being patted on the head.”

“Mrs. EstobarR I did not mean to offend you in any way.”

“Believe me, I am through bending the humble neck, the years I worked for the Yeomans. I say what I damn please to anybody.”

She glowered at me. Fire and iron, blood and pride. Some Indio blood there. I couldn’t help it. I laughed. In a few moments the corners of her mouth twitched and she laughed too. But I was glad there was no knife in her hand before she decided to laugh.

“I’ll try again. Have a happy baby. Okay?”

“Okay. He’ll be happy. I promise.”

But even with good temper restored, she seemed a little bit distracted. She glanced beyond me. She seemed glad to have me leave.

As I walked to the car I saw a heavy-duty pickup truck parked on the other side of the street, about three doors down. It was a dusty pickup, and the two young men who stood behind it-lounging against the tailgate, wearing work clothes-looked big and brown and fit, their Indio-Latino faces broad, watchful, impassive.

As I drove past them I could understand why Mrs. Estobar wanted me to leave. On this street, at this time of day, a strange gringo calling on the pretty housewife was an object of suspicion. Salesman, bill collector, cop or boyfriend? Watch and wait and find out for sure.

There are too many men who feed on the minority groups, and too many ways to take advantage. So they have little ways of taking care of their own. As I turned off her street, I had the feeling that I would not have wanted those two by the truck to misunderstand my little mission.

I looked before I drove away, and she waved from the porch. I drove a half dozen blocks and phoned Yeoman’s home from a drugstore. A man told me I might reach him at the office. He gave me the number. There a woman with a nasal drawling voice told me he had been in early and had left a little while ago. She asked my name and when I told her she said that I might be able to reach him at the Cottonwood Club, the Kendrick Building, the three-hundred block on East Central Avenue, use the private elevator.

It was a new office building. I had noticed it before. Glass and aluminum on stilts with pierced concrete to kill the desert glare. In the lobby was a bigger than life-size statue of a prospector leading a loaded burro, done in silver. The club elevator, labeled in a very small silver script; took me to the fourteenth floor. I walked out of it into a sturdy cage of heavy steel mesh. The attendant left me in the cage while he murmured into a phone. He then pressed a buzzer which opened a door in the cage. A small man led me back through paneled baronial silences to a small elevator and took me to the sixteenth floor. He took me past shower rooms, exercise rooms, game courts, to a small gym and pointed across to where Jass Yeoman in sweat pants, stripped to the waist, was working the weights, breathing hard, sweat rolling down his chest, the tough muscles of his shoulders rolling under the brown hairy hide.

He quit when I walked up, took a towel from a hook and mopped his face. “Sweating the best bourbon, son,” he said. “Waiting for the call from Charlie. How about this layout? We had a fine old club, but it set on land too valuable for it. So we sold it, tore out all the paneling and fixtures, leased these top three floors from one of Boone Kendrick’s companies, and we never had it so good. Best food in a hundred miles. Two hundred. Biggest drinks, too. What have you got on your mind?”

“That it could be a game of doubles, Jass. First Mona and then you. For all the marbles you’ve got. Gimmicking it up made it less evident. Say she’d died in an everyday car crash. You’d start thinking about a new will.”

He swabbed his chest, slowly and thoughtfully. “Even if you’re dead wrong, you just earned your scorched money Trav.”

“Who gets it?”

“In the event of a common disaster, it’s set up to go into a little foundation, provided there’s any left after they get through picking little pieces off it. But this isn’t any common disaster. She’s predeceased me. We put in a lot of miles together in that little airplane of mine. I don’t know if this situation is covered, even. She had absolutely no blood kin. The nearest I got is an old maid first cousin in Yuma. If they say it was intestate, if somebody did knock me off about now, I guess her claim would be honored, if she’d dirty her paws reaching for my money. Then there’s about nine kinds of business insurance. I’d have to check that out. Tell you what. It’s getting on toward lunch, you go up to the roof to the bar there and tell Armando to make you a bourbon sour the way he makes them for me, and I’ll be along soon.”

With a little help I found my way to the roof. The chairs were deep; the drink excellent, the view spectacular. I sipped the drink and wondered if I should have called on the Sheriff and done enough hinting to widen his area of speculation. I had stayed busy. I had moved out of the Latigo Motel and into The Sage. I’d gone to the bank and dropped forty-five hundred into a lock box, paying a $7.70 fee for a year’s rental. I like lock boxes. Before you can get to the money, you have a better chance to change your mind. I had placed a call to Isobel Webb. She had said in a listless voice that she had slept too hard. She said she felt tireder than when she went to bed. It was a strange and aimless conversation, with long pauses where neither of us said a word. I said I would run down and see her if I got a chance, and she said, with no enthusiasm at all, that that would be fine.

I wondered how Buckelberry was doing with the search for the car, the search for a tall skinny man with a scarred neck, the Indian search among the rugged rocks of the mountain next door to the cabin where she had died. I had found absolutely nothing in the morning paper.

Prosperous-looking and healthy-looking men were beginning to drift in for the prelunch drink, alone and in small groups. I asked the waiter where the nearest phone was. He brought one over and plugged it in and brought me a book. I hesitated and then tried Buckelberry.

They caught him as he was leaving for lunch. “Congratulations, McGee.”

“What do you mean?”

“I had a little chat with Jass this morning. I was going to look you up and ask you not to push it too hard.”

“Push?”

“For chrissake, man! That hands-off label is only good under certain conditions, Jass or no Jass. In the city limits you’ve got Chief Kittering to contend with. Out in the county, you’ve got me. If either of us find you making motions like a private investigator, we’ll jam you up pretty good for operating without a state license and without county approval. One more little thing like that stewardess trick and…”

“Stop beating your chest, Sheriff. You’re the law. I recognize that. I wondered how you were doing. And I was going to make a suggestion.”

“I suppose I should be overwhelmed.”

“I thought you might give Jass a little quiet protection.”

“Jass? Why?”

“It’s just a hunch.”

“I have all the problems I need.”

“Had any luck with anything?”

“Why should I tell you what… Well, hell, we located her car about an hour ago. Tompkins is out there now. It was about six miles from the cabin, off in the opposite direction from Cotton Corners. Off a little road under some trees. Tell Jass if you plan to see him. After it’s checked out, I’ll have it left at his place. There’s nothing else new, but you can’t tell when things will break.”

“How long can you sit on this, Sheriff?”

“Until in my considered judgment I have enough proof to show that murder has been done, smart guy.”

“If you want to leave a message for me or anything, I’ve moved to The Sage.”

“Why not? Now that you can afford it.” He banged the phone down. As the waiter carried it away, I saw Jass approaching, his strides swift and his face intent. His dark hair was spikey from his shower. He signaled Armando and dropped into the chair beside me.

“Took me longer than I thought. Charlie finally did what I pay him for.”

“And?”

“One of the special groups of agents down there has been working on it for nearly a year. They’re scheduled to hit me with it next February. Charlie got hold of a list of names. Statements they’ve taken checked off, and the ones they intended to take, left blank. Wally Rupert was checked off. Mona was on there. No check mark. A lot of other names, from way back. Stinking little clerks, son. Little people with no reason to like ol‘ Jass Yeoman. People ready to smear. Charlie says the minute they hit me, they’ll slap papers on everything I’ve got to keep me from moving it out of the country. Bank accounts,a securities, boxes., everything. He says they are working independent of the boys who usually work on my account down there, but with access to all back records on taxes.” His drink came. He sipped it and leaned back and smiled and shook his head. “I tell you, boy I try to stay steamed up, but I can’t quite make it. Know what I dreamed last night? I was up there on the mesa road trying to find the place I buried that rabbit. I’d buried something with him that I had to have. Something important. Couldn’t remember just what it was. Suppose it was my sense of self preservation?”