A Purple Place For Dying

“I don’t know.”

“God damn, how I miss that fool woman!”

“They found her car this morning, in that same area, tucked away on a back road. They’ll leave it at your house after they check it out. Nothing else is new.”

“I told Buckelberry we were trying to work this out together.”

“I know.”

“He wasn’t real pleased.”

“I know that too. Jass, one thing bothers me. Everybody in this town seems to know everything that goes on. But nothing’s in the papers.”

He shrugged. “Shouldn’t bother you. Jaimie DeVrees has the paper and the TV and radio. Full of bright young kids. The first thing they learn is to go get just what they are sent to get, no more and no less. Jaimie likes a lot of initiative in handling the news they get, but he sure as hell squats on anybody that goes out and tries to find some. The way he figures it, it’s a waste of money. Why try to dig up things that will be handed to you when people are ready?”

“But if Buckelberry’s people find either body…”

His face twisted with sudden pain. “Then he’ll phone Jaimie and Jaimie’s people will purely cover the hell out of it. I want my girl found. I want her buried right. And whatever son of a bitch did this to me…” He shivered and unclamped his hands and said, “Let’s go down and get us some slabs of good rare roast beef, son.”

He was silent during most of lunch, and over good coffee he said, “I’ve got some detail work. How about along evening you and me go calling on Wally Rupert?”

“Is that the way to do it?”

“That’s my way to do it. I got something to go on. What Charlie found out. I’ll just push on that. I’ll push hard and watch him and see if I can see anything else.”

“What time?”

“You come to the house about eight, say.” He stood up and dropped his napkin on the table.

“I left word out front. You use this place like a charter member long as you’re here.”

“Thank you.”

“Try to burn my money, boy, and you get to go first class.”

Eight

I HAD six free hours before meeting with Jass again. As I walked out of the Kendrick Building into the brightness of the afternoon, I had that small prickling sensation of being watched.

I moved around in appropriate ways, in and out of a drugstore, around a corner and back - and I could not pick anyone up. Everyone seemed to have that introspective innocence of total strangers. Sometimes the alarm bells go off by mistake. I could not understand why I felt vaguely disappointed to learn it was a false alarm.

Then I knew I wanted something to happen. I wanted a new factor added. The whole situation, as it stood, made very limited sense. I belonged in an arroyo, drying out behind the rocks. Jass’s people should be hunting for Mona and John Webb in Mexico.

Why was it important for Jass Yeoman to believe his Mona was alive? Why was it necessary to kill her? Why had I been permitted to stay alive, and mess up all the careful planning? I had no assurance that Jass would level with me. The story would break and soon. It would break when either body was found. And Buckelberry was doing some very earnest searching. For guns and scarred necks, for big blondes-dead and alive.

I do not believe in coincidence. I believe that if you keep moving, you expose yourself to a better chance of accidents happening, some good and some bad. And you have to have an eye for a cronkie. That is a cop word. It means someone who has been in trouble, is presently in trouble, or is about to be in trouble-either as victim or aggressor. A wise cop can pick them out of heavy pedestrian traffic flow, because they don’t quite fit.

Driving back to The Sage, I had to pass the big bus station. I got caught on that corner by a light. I saw the big blonde woman come squinting out into the sun, hesitate, then turn and start doggedly trudging away, her clothes badly rumpled, hair unkempt, her stride uncertain.

Seconds later the clothing registered on me. Pale blue seersucker suit, red sandals with high heels, red purse. She was heading the wrong way for me, and I was in a center lane, so when the light changed I fought my way across the traffic and went around the block. She had made better time than I expected, and so I had to go around another block. I parked short of the corner; got out quickly and went to where I could see her coming toward me, teetering and wobbling along.

She wasn’t aware of me until I stepped out in front of her. Her face looked gray and sweaty. The flesh around her eyes was smudged and puffy. Her hair showed a quarter inch of black root. She looked at me without surprise or indignation or automatic flirtation. She just stared and waited for the gambit.

“You could use a lift?”

“No, I just walk two three miles in the hot sun like this in high heels to keep in shape.”

“Come in on the bus?”

“Yes. I slept hard and some spook clipped every nickel out this here purse, so I could sure use a lift, believe me. They didn’t even leave me a dime to call a friend.”

“My car’s right around the corner.”

When we reached the car and I opened the door for her, she paused and said, “You aren’t trying to be real cute about anything, are you, friend?”

“I’ll take you where you want to go.”

She studied me for a moment, nodded to herself, and got into the car. I went around and got behind the wheel. She gave me directions. In the enclosure of the car she smelled sour and sweaty. The front of her suit was spotted. Her knuckles were soiled.

The directions took me out near my former local address. She was on one of the lateral streets, three blocks off the main highway, in an institutional-looking apartment building that seemed to be half a block long, two stories high and one room deep. She guided me around to the parking area in the rear. Rear stairs led up to a communal deck which extended the length of the building.

She got out of the car and looked at me and sucked her mouth into a bruised rosette and tilted her head. We were on a first name basis. No last names had been exchanged. “Trav, I won’t futz around with you with any games, huh? I’m next door to dead. I’m no good to anybody, right? I got to soak in a hot tub and get some sleep and set the alarm so as I can get to work by nine. They didn’t like giving me two nights off, and I show up too beat, it wouldn’t be so good, you know? But I bounce back pretty good. I was thinking, you come around at six tomorrow, I’ll have a drink waiting, then we could eat someplace, you drop me off at work. Honest, you’ll hardly know me I’ll look so much better.”

“I thought there might be a cold beer up there right now.”

She gave a long sigh, and shrugged and said, “Come on then. But I warn you, I’m awful tired.”

It was a very small studio apartment, with an unmade daybed, characterless rental furniture. She opened me a cold beer. She poured herself a straight gin, put one ice cube in it and waited a few moments and then tossed it down, gagged, made a frightful face. Hot water roared into the small tub built into the bathroom corner at an angle. She trudged around, shedding shoes, suit jacket, pale blouse. She asked me, right on cue, if-on account of her money being taken from her purse-I could loan her a little to tide her over until payday. I said I could. She bit her lip and said, hesitantly, “Thirty, maybe?”

“Thirty is fine,” I said. She took the bills and snapped them into her purse. She took another gin into the bathroom with her. She left the door ajar. When my beer was gone I got a fresh one in the kitchen alcove and pushed the bathroom door open and leaned a shoulder against the frame and drank the beer from the bottle.

She was on her knees in the little tub sitting back on her heels, the water level coming to the white tops of her flexed thighs. With her eyes squinched shut, she was kneading her sudsy head.

I said, “Betty, you know, I was trying to remember something.”

“Hah?”

“I was trying to remember where I’d seen you before.”

“Well, I’ve been in this town three years, ever since I came out from Cleveland. And I’ve been working night trick at the drive-in for almost a year now, honey.”

“I meant just the other day. Tell me if I’m wrong, Betty. Did you take a flight out of Carson on Monday or Tuesday?”

She rocked forward onto hands and knees, dunked her soapy head and rinsed it vigorously. Her big pale body looked coarse structured, muscular, durable, reasonably attractive. She sat back again, groped for a towel, shoved her wet hair back, mopped her eyes dry. Then she uncurled her legs and settled into the murky water in a sitting position.

“It was Tuesday” she said. “I dint notice you, honey.”

“Weren’t you with a tall skinny fellow? Dark?”

“That’s right. His name is Ron. What we did, we flew down to El Paso. Let me tell you, it was a real swing. We got sort of stoned on the airplane. He knows all the cats down there. But it got too weird, you know? They start popping, they don’t care what they do. That’s too rich for me. I mean you have to draw a line, right? A person has to have some kind of privacy sometimes, right?”

I agreed. She yawned against her fist like a sleepy lioness. “Honest, I haven’t had any sleep since Tuesday morning, not counting on the bus when I was robbed. That damned driver wouldn’t do anything about it.”

“Do you fly down there often?” I asked her.

“No. This was some kind of strange deal. I’d never seen that Ron before. What it was, it was a favor for a guy, and what Ron had to do, he had to find a tall blonde to fly down there with him on that flight out of Carson. Using kook names on the ticket. It was some kind of cover up, I guess. Ron met the guy in a bar. What the hell, it was a free vacation with expenses.”

“Ron come back too?”

“No. From there he was going out to the Coast he said. He gave me some of the money he got. Fifty dollars. And I didn’t dip into it at all, and then it got clipped on the bus. I should have spent it to save it. You just never know. Live and learn.”

I decided it wasn’t going to do any good to pry further. Buckelberry could do it with considerably more efficiency and speed.

She said, “Trav, sweetie, whyn’t you just go get comfortable and I’ll be along, okay? You don’t mind my hair being soppy?”

I looked at my watch. “Suppose I stop by tomorrow?”

She yawned again and nodded. “Any way you want to look at it, honey, that’s best, believe me. I’m so tired I could cry-”

I let myself out. I checked the number. Apartment 11. 1010 Fairlea Road. I found the mailboxes below. Elizabeth Kent Alverson, beautifully engraved on a creamy card.

I went back to The Sage and phoned Buckelberry from my room. Fred wasn’t in. I said it was important. They said they would try to get through to him. In ten minutes he phoned me. I gave him the woman’s name and address and told him she was there, and that she had been the one who’d impersonated Mona Yeoman.

“For God’s sake, McGee, will you kindly keep your nose out of…”

“You’d rather do it yourself, Fred. Sure.”

In the ensuing silence I could sense the effort he was making to control himself. At last he said, in a gravelly voice, “I appreciate having this information.”

“You are quite welcome. But I don’t think you’ll be able to make too much of it.”

“I’ll decide that.”

“Certainly, Sheriff. Are there any other breaks in the case?”

“No!”

“Have you taken any steps to protect Jass?” He hung up, very forcefully.

I felt displeased with myself. A smart-ass approach to a better-than-average officer of the law. With some people you start off on the wrong foot and you can’t get back on balance. There was a tomcat tension between us, and I had the feeling that if we could each give and take one good smack in the mouth, we might get along fine from then on. Cop-taunting is a stupid and dangerous habit.

I stripped and showered and thought about Elizabeth Kent Alverson. A crude friendly piece. One of the great legion of the semi-pro. She wanted to ball around, and she kept telling herself you had to draw the line, dint you? But each year she’d draw it a little further.

At least I had learned that the Mona Yeoman killing wasn’t as much of a gang effort as it had seemed. Betty and her Ron were apparently relative innocents. A small investment in a smoke screen. The risk had been, of course, that Ron would pocket the cash and not do the favor. The estimated number of participants was now more manageable. Maybe two could have done it.

It had to be for money. The whole area smelled of money. You could see them joshing each other about it in The Sage lobby. You could see it in the eyes of the girl at the lobby newsstand.

So find the money advantage, and it would lead you to the rifleman-or to whoever hired him. There was frantic money in this town. Maybe they expected the fossil water to run out soon. Grab it quick, and be ready to move along.

I put fresh shorts on and stretched out on the bed just as the phone rang. It was Isobel Webb.

“Travis?”

“How is it going, Isobel?”

Deep sigh. “I don’t know. It’s this waiting. Not knowing what to think. I don’t know what to do with myself. That’s why I drove up here.”

“You’re in town?”

“I’m in the lobby. I borrowed a car. I thought that when… when they find him, it will be somewhere around Esmerelda. Can you come down and talk to me?”

“Five minutes. Wait for me in the cocktail lounge.”

“I’ll sit in the lobby here and wait.”

She stood up like an obedient child when I walked toward her. She had on a mouse-gray blouse, a drab skirt, sensible shoes. She hid behind her big dark glasses. Her smile was nervous and tentative. I took her into a gloomy corner of the cocktail lounge, and she thought she would have a sherry.

“The house is so terribly empty.” she said. “I keep walking back and forth near the telephone. Faculty wives are trying to be nice, but I can’t stand the way they coo at me.”

“They found Mona’s car.”

“I know. Do you mind my coming here?”

“Not at all. But I have to leave here at quarter to eight.”

“Where are you going?”

“To go visit somebody with Jass Yeoman.”

“I guess you don’t want to tell me about it.”

“It’s quite complicated.”

She took the glasses off and sipped her sherry. “Are you working for Jass now?”

“In a way”

“To help them all hush up whatever happened to her and John?”

“No. To find out who did it.”

“What if Jass Yeoman did it, Travis?”

“Then he is the best liar I have ever met in my life.”

“What… what if we never find out anything?” Her voice broke a little. “I don’t think I could stand that. Not ever knowing. I don’t know what would become of me. Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to lose control. Not like yesterday. I dreamed I saw John dead. I woke up and it was still vivid. And he is dead, of course. That’s why I could leave our place. I know he’s never coming back there.”

“Easy, Isobel.”

“I’m all right. I just want to know.”

“We’ll find out.”

“Oh sure. You and Mr. Yeoman and that Sheriff. You’ll find out, won’t you? If you don’t know already.”

“You get these little paranoiac impulses, Isobel. The world is not against you. There are no conspiracies against you.”

“I went through John’s papers today. He had a twenty thousand dollar insurance policy, a group thing through the school. I’m the beneficiary. When they find his body I’ll get the money and give you half to find who did it.”

“That isn’t necessary”

“Do you know what I’m going to do with that money?”

“No.”

“I still have that non-transferable lease. I am going back to the islands. My father changed the name of it to Webb Cay. I can get the house fixed up. I could live there on the income from twenty thousand. Forever. My God, I am sick of people. I’ve had enough to last me the rest of my life. I could be contented there. In this incarnation, I just didn’t make it. I’ll mark time and wait for the next one, Travis.”

I took the drugstore tube out of my jacket pocket and put it in front of her. “Little present. It’s that sun-proofing stuff for your lips.”

She picked it up, peered at the label in the dim light, and then began to cry.

Nine

SHE SAID she was not the least bit hungry. I took her to the grill and she ate a gigantic steak, and said it must have been the sherry. Once fed she began to yawn and her head began to sag. At quarter to eight I gave her my room key and sent her up to sack out while I went off with Jass.

I was a few minutes late. He was pacing around in his driveway. He grunted a surly welcome, and then tried to make a sports car out of his big Chrysler. We burst out of the city, hurtling north toward the bailiwick of the Rupert clan, through a cool blue night, with a faint red still visible along the western horizon.

I had one of those strange moments of unreality, that old what-am-I-doing-here feeling. I did not know this rugged old bastard, had not known his wife, had not planned this much involvement with his life. Somehow, without meaning to, I had forfeited a part of my necessary independence. I was uncomfortable in a crypto-employee role. A very strange gal was sleeping in my rental bed. And somewhere out in the blue night, a big blonde and a professor were sleeping a good deal more soundly. ‘Doesn’t know I’m coming,“ Jass mumbled. ”He never goes out. He’s always there in the evening.“

“What am I supposed to do, Jass?”

“Stand by. Watch him. Listen to him. Later you tell me how much you believe and how much you don’t.”

“You know him better than I do.”

“With Walter Rupert, that ain’t much help.” It was twelve miles out of town, with a big ranch gate that I had to get out and open and close after Jass took the car through. We went about a half mile and came onto a great sprawled complex of ranch houses, barns, bunk rooms, outbuildings. Jass parked by the largest house and we got out. There was a night-flavor, of life and movement. Lights and bits of music, the sounds of children at play, people going to and fro between other houses. Two cars left, going out the way we had come in.

A man came sauntering out of the shadows and put a light on us. “Mr. Yeoman, isn’t it?”

“Want to see Wally”

“You just wait right there a minute, sir.”

It was a good five minutes before he came back. “Mr. Rupert he says take you in the main house and have you wait on him. He finishes up what he’s doing, he’ll be along.”

We followed the man into the main house, into a long room with two stone fireplaces, trophies on the wall, deep leather chairs. The man gestured toward a small bar in the corner of the room, said, “He’p yourself, gentlemen,” and left us alone.

I fixed a drink for Jass and one for myself. As he took it he said slowly, “The thing is never knowing just how far he would go, one way or another. If we’d stayed locked close in a business way he’d have ate me up, slow and sure, on account of he takes pains with every little tiny thing. I had to pry myself loose. We still have a couple of small things together, but the contact on those is all through lawyers, and they’re closing out a little at a time. But by God he should have had the decency to give a man warning. No matter what.”

I asked a question. He didn’t seem to hear it. I gave up. In a little while I heard the heavy sound of a door closing. A big old man paused in the doorway and looked in at us. He was big-shouldered, big-bellied, broad, bandy-legged. He was dressed like a country deacon, in lifeless black with a white shirt, dark tie. He stood with his chin lowered, looking out at us from under gray shaggy brows, the room lights gleaming on his baldness. His nose was hooked, his mouth large and narrow. Anthropoid arms were heavy and long. He had a masculine force about him, a great presence, born of his certainty of his own force. He was a dynastic man. He was the bull-beast and this was his grassland. Three wives and a score of children seemed a perfectly natural result of this controlled energy.

“Hate to interrupt a man when he’s out back someplace bailing up money,” Jass said. Rupert stared at me. He came slowly into the room. He made me feel as if I wanted to apologize for something.

“Meet Travis McGee,” Jass said. “He works for me.”

Rupert stared until he had finished his exhaustive inventory, and then went to the bar and fixed himself a tall glass of soda without ice. As he fixed it, he said, “I was trying to think of the last time you were here, Jasper.” His voice was shocking. Apparently something was wrong with his throat. Each word was spaced, given equal weight and emphasis, as though a machine had been taught to talk.

“When Catherine died.”

“Long time ago,” Rupert said. He sat in one of the leather chairs, his face in shadow.

Jass leaned forward. “I come onto some information, Wally. The government is building a tax case against me. A big one. I find out you’ve been cooperating with them.”

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t you’ve tipped me off?”

“Why?”

“Goddammit, it would have been the decent thing to do.”

Rupert was silent for what seemed to me a long time. “Long ago, Jasper, we helped each other. Not out of love. We did some things. So we could survive. The things we did were dangerous. There is no statute of limitations about fraud. Now it is up to each of us to save ourself, not the other fellow. You wonder if I made a deal. Certainly. What was the deal? I testified under oath to all I could remember. The records are gone. You know that. I agreed not to inform you. I made a settlement with them. Larger than I’d hoped it would be. But I’m in the clear now, Jasper. They won’t smash me or jail me. If they bring criminal charges against you, I will testify. That is part of the deal.”

“You son of a bitch,” Jass whispered.

“Why get emotional? What should I have done? Be a nice fellow and hurt my family to keep from hurting you? You are a silly man, Jasper. If you were careful, you would have known what they were planning and what they were doing, and maybe you could have protected yourself while there was still time. Maybe you could still run, if you plan it carefully, if you don’t attract their attention while you’re turning things into cash.”

“I don’t think I give a damn about all that,” Jass said.

For the first time I sensed that Walter Rupert was very slightly off balance. “What?”

“Suppose you didn’t tell them everything, Wally.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You could have told them the stuff that makes me look the worst, and saved the stuff that makes you look most like a thief. Maybe, with more information, they’d come back on you again.”

“Please try to make sense, Jasper.”

“They were going to talk to Mona.”

“So?”

“Could she have fixed your wagon a little bit? She and that lawyer of hers dug up some stuff.”

“So?”

“They never got to talk to her.”

“But they will. I think you should make sure she keeps her mouth shut. Anything she can say will hurt you more than me.”

“You hear she’d run off with that schoolteacher?”

“Somebody said something, yes.”

“She didn’t. Somebody killed the both of them, and tried to make it look as if they’d run off.”

After a long silence Rupert said, “Now I know why you wasted your time coming here. I don’t have your flaw. I don’t get emotional about these things. The answer is no. If a person was a great danger to me, if there was no other way, I could have them killed. But there would be nothing clumsy about it. If you know she didn’t run off, this thing must have gone wrong for someone. I would have to know nothing would go wrong, or I wouldn’t risk it. No, Jasper. She was no danger to me. You see, when I decided to take my gamble, I decided not to hide anything-even little things that had nothing to do with you and that you never knew about. Because, you see, I know you will fight. The way it is, nothing you can tell them about me will surprise them. I thought it all out. I am not a nice fellow, the way you think of these things. Maybe you’re not one either.”

Jass stood up quickly. He glared down at Walter Rupert. “You don’t scare me, Wally. You scare a lot of people. All these people of yours out here, you got them so scared maybe they could go too far trying to please you. A little hint or something, and they jump the gun. How about that?”

“No, Jasper.”

“How can you be so sure?”

With eyes almost closed, Rupert said, “I know what every one of them is doing at all times. I make it my business to know. Some of my sons are very crafty. I’m sorry your girl is dead. But it has nothing to do with me and mine. Goodnight, Jasper.”

He didn’t stand or speak or even turn his big head when we left the room.

I expected a chilling ride back to the city, but Jass drove very slowly.

“What do you think?” he asked me.

“I don’t know. I believe him, I guess. He… he seems to be an unusual man.”

Jass snorted. “Unusual! One of those is all the world can stand.”

“I guess he’s made things pretty rough for you on this tax thing.”

“It’s going to be bothersome.”

“No more than that?”

“It could sting a little. It could cost me. I got a great big packing case full of old records. I’ll drag it out long as I can, then when it gets real tight, I’ll all of a sudden find those records. A lot of them are correct and a lot of them are part correct and a lot of them have got nothing to do with anything that ever happened. By the time that stuff gets all hashed out they’ll start dickering toward a settlement. If I don’t like it, I just could find two more crates full of old records in a warehouse someplace. I can keep ten CPA’s and ten lawyers going for a long time. Maybe as long as I live. And then who gives a damn?”

“You must have been a great pair, you two. The fox and the weasel.”

“Watch your mouth, son.”

“How did the widows and the orphans make out when you two were operating?”

“They stood in line for it, boy. They always do. Ring the bell and the suckers come on the run. In this world, you either take or you’re tooken. Figures lie and liars figure, and the only thing worth all the trouble is a good bourbon, a good bed and a busy woman. There are a hundred and fifty thousand new folks, net, in the world every day, and the sun will set on all but one or two of them before they can even get to lift their head. So set the hook deep while you got the chance.”

“The Yeoman philosophy.”

“It’s worked so far.”

He turned into his drive and I said, as he parked it, “It’s worked fine, I guess, Jass. You’re in such great shape right now.”

As we walked toward the doorway of his house he said, “But think how good I had it, and how long I had it good.”

“I liked you a little better when you were talking about burying a jackrabbit, Mr. Yeoman.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he said. “I loved that woman.”

He had stopped in his indignation, turning toward me, and in the heavy shadows of the grounds, I saw the dark shape come plunging out of the tall shrubbery toward him, ten feet behind him and off to the side, and I caught the small flicker of reflected light from a narrow blade held low. I was very close to choking up. A knife will do that. It freezes the lower part of the gut. Astoundingly few people have the stomach even to try to use one. I let out the big bellow as I made my dive. It is a psychological weapon, unexpected and often unnerving. My shoulder bounced Jass back off the the path.

I feinted left and fell right, rolling and swinging my feet up at the shadowy figure. I stamped both heels into it solidly, bellowed again as I used the rebound to roll again, up onto tiptoe and fingertips, facing him. He was half down, making a gasping, grunting noise. But he gathered himself and ignored me and sped toward Jass, crouching low, blade out. Jass shot him twice in the face, and stepped aside like a matador. The figure landed heavily, coughed and spasmed once and was still. The knife tinkled along the path.

“God, I hate a knife!” Jass said in a husky whisper.

Lights were coming on. Excited voices were raised in question. Two men came running up across the yard. Floodlights went on, turned on by somebody inside the house. The two men were in uniform.

“Mr. Yeomanl Mr. Yeoman, you all right? My God, what was that terrible bellering?”

“I’m all right. I thought Fred told you to keep an eye on this place.”

“We been watching it, I swear.”

“Let’s find out who we got here.”

They used flashlights to supplement the floodlights. House servants had come out into the yard, staying a cautious distance from the body.

“Whoever he is, he’s sure enough dead,” one of the deputies said. “You shoot him, Mr. Yeoman?”

“Just because you see this here gun in my hand, and you see that knife he was coming at me with? What in the world would make you think I shot him?”

“Well, I was just…”

“Shut up,” Jass said. I moved closer. They had rolled him onto his back. He was young. His elaborate hairdo was in greasy disarray. The ruined face had that pachuco look. It went with the tight pants, the dirty pin-striped button-down shirt under the dark green satin nylon jacket. I had seen him on a hundred corners in a dozen cities, staring at me with a combination of defiance and stupidity, standing with an indolent tomcat grace.

They went through his pockets. He had a hundred dollars, ten tens rolled into a tight cylinder and fastened with a rubber band. He had eighty-eight cents in change. He had a yellow plastic comb. He wore a gold wrist watch that told the time in all the capitals of the world. He wore black suede shoes with thick rubber soles. He wore no socks. He wore a good-luck ring of two pot-metal snakes intertwined.

“Maybe he was out of his head, all that yelling,” a deputy said. “You know him, Carl? I don’t know him. You know him, Mr. Yeo…”

“Nobody knows him,” Jass said. “Get on your radio and get somebody to come haul this garbage out of my yard. This here is Mr. McGee. He saw it all. I’m just over the line so this is county business.”

“Sir, you should come in and…”

“Fred knows exactly where to find me, and Mr. McGee and me are going to be available to answer questions any time. So you tell Fred his first order of business is to find out who this garbage is. Now hop to it! And you folks get back in the house where you belong. Miguel, you hustle some old piece of cloth to throw over this thing. Trav, let’s get on in the house and have us a drink.”

We went in. He slammed the door. The lights were on. A fire was laid. He squatted and lit it. Crouched there with the kindling flames marking his tough face, he grinned up at me in a sidelong way and said, “For anything your size, son, you move very nice. Very quick and tricky. Like to scared me to death, knocking me sidelong and making a sound like an old steamboat.”

“You recover fast.”

“I’m no gunman. You gave me three or four seconds to get ready. I’ve been carrying it the last few days, in this little belly holster that slips down inside my belt.”

He stood up, took the gun out, checked the safety and handed it to me. I pulled my hand back. “Let’s not confuse the lab boys, Jass.”

He put it away. He shook his head. “That yelling.”

“The idea is to make such a hell of a noise people can’t think. They go on instinct then. Sometimes the instinct is to run.”

“You like to kicked him to death.”

“That was the general idea.”

He wandered over and fixed the drinks, handed me mine. “You see if he was real serious about me?”

“He was bringing it up from the ground, and I think he wanted to put it right in the small of your back.”

“You got yourself a bonus coming.”

“Suit yourself.”

There was a rhythmic pulse of red light in the room. He went to the window; pulled a drapery aside. “They’re loading him. They don’t use sirens in this kind of neighborhood.”

He looked at his watch and went over to a radio on a table near the bar and turned it on, saying, “Ten o’clock news. They give the local stuff first.”

The announcer said, “… and has been tentatively identified as Professor John Webb of State Western University at Livingston, missing since last Monday afternoon according to Sheriff Fred Buckelberry. The body was discovered earlier this evening when a county highway crew was removing a rock slide from a private road southeast of the city. The private road leads to a cabin owned by Mr, and Mrs. Jasper Yeoman.

“The clearing work was being done at the special request of the county sheriff, so a lab truck could be taken up to the cabin. Mona Yeoman, the attractive blonde wife of Jasper Yeoman of this city has been missing since Tuesday noon. She was last seen at the Yeoman cabin. Foul play is feared. In a brief statement, Sheriff Buckelberry said that the twin disappearances of Professor Webh and Mrs. Yeoman had been kept quiet so that his department could work on several leads in this case. Further developments are expected momentarily.

“The cause of death in the case of Professor Webb has not yet been determined. And now on the national scene… Excuse me, we have a bulletin here. Just a few minutes ago a prowler was shot and killed in the yard of the Yeoman residence. We have no other information at this time.”

Jass grunted and turned the set off. “No more privacy, boy. Now we live in a store window on main street. Found him under that rock. So it was blown down, it was blown down on him. A hell of a thorough cause of death. Funny place to hide a body.”

You have to assume some kind of logic in these things, I guess. They didn’t knock rocks down on him far kicks. With such a deserted cabin situation, one could assume the road wouldn’t be cleared immediately. But it would be, sooner or later. And the body would be identified.

See, the prof is daid! So he didn’t go away with Mrs. Y. So she is daid also. And, if the lad with the knife had put it where he wanted to put it, it could all be unraveled that the wife had predeceased Jass.

Ten

I FINALLY got away from the Yeoman house at twenty after eleven. Fred Buckelberry had arrived, with deputy and stenographer. He acted very tired. He had made me tell my part of it three times. He made me promise to stop by his office Friday afternoon and sign the statement. It could not have been a more obvious case of self-defense. Had Jass missed him with those two shots, he would have taken the blade in the belly.

No identification on the decedent. They were checking him out through Phoenix. Buckelberry kept saying in a weary way, “Jass, if he was stone broke it could be one of those things. Nice neighborhood. He’s looking for a car, some wallet money. But he had a hundred dollars.”

And Jass kept saying in a kindly way, “Fred, I wish I could help you. But I’m just as puzzled as you are, I swear.”

Just before I left, Buckelberry told me that Miss Webb had phoned him after the professor’s body had been discovered. He said she’d seemed very upset and he had asked her to come in, but she had hung up on him.

So I wasted no time getting to The Sage. Though I was busy with the dangerous mechanics of fast driving in urban traffic, I could not keep my mind from random speculation about the death of John Webb, like a puppy gnawing at the edge of a carpet. When Mona Yeoman and I had clambered over that rock slide, Webb was down under there.

As Jass had said, it seemed a curious place to hide a body. Obviously the road was going to be cleared. And then the body would be found. It made me wonder if it was some sort of grotesque accident. Maybe the entire murder arrangement was like one of those bloody cinema farces the British do so well. Everything goes wrong, and bodies keep falling out of the wrong closets.

If there was a plan, and if the plan was still working, then the only appropriate question was to ask what the situation would be if that knife had let the life out of Jass Yeoman. Who would be ahead? Some old lady in Yuma? The Rupert clan? And was Mona’s body in some other strange and obvious place?

I put the rental car in the hotel lot and stopped at the desk and picked up the other room key. There were no messages. I went up and let myself into the room. Isobel lay on the further of the two three-quarter beds. The desk lamp was on, a weak bulb in an orange shade. She slept atop the spread, dressed except for her shoes, a yellow blanket over her. I could see a note on hotel stationery on the green blotter under the desk lamp. I decided I would let her sleep, even if the note directed me to awaken her. I closed the door soundlessly, and went quietly to the desk.

It was a curious note. No salutation and no signature. “There doesn’t seem to be much point in it any more. I might have more luck the next time around. After everything is settled up, please give what’s left to the scholarship fund at SWU.”

After the moment of horrid comprehension, I reached her in three long strides. Her hands were slack and icy. The heartbeat was very slow, respiration agonizingly slow. I shook her and slapped her and got a faint drugged whine of protest. I got to the phone and asked to have a doctor sent up just as quickly as they could manage it. I asked for a pot of black coffee.

Cursing her, I turned on every light in the room and the bathroom. I picked her up and took her into the bathroom. She was limp as a rag doll. I jounced her and shouted at her. I sat her on the floor in the corner by the tub, then used my shaving bomb to hastily mix a glass of warm soapy water. I knelt by her, clamped her jaws open, tilted her head and poured it into her throat. Some of it spilled down her sweater, but I saw her throat work with a labored slowness as she swallowed. At least she had that reflex left. I was not certain she had enough. I mixed another glass and got about half that down her.

I picked her up and put her, belly down, over the rim of the tub. I knelt beside her and, holding her there, reached around and stuck two fingers down her throat. I prodded at the soft base of her tongue, and as I began to despair, I suddenly felt the musculature there begin to tighten. Then soft heavy spasms began, a dulled heavy gushing of soapy water soured by the stomach contents. When she stopped, I stimulated the spasms again, more readily the second time. I wondered where the hell they kept their doctors.

I hauled her off the tub and turned her, sat her slumped against the tub and stripped her, wasting no time in saving her clothing. I popped straps and tore fabrics. Her bra, pants and half-slip were as unadorned and sensible as her walking shoes. I turned on the cold shower spray to rinse the tub out, drawing the shower curtain partway. Then I picked her up and sat her in the tub, adjusting the tilt and apertures of the shower head so that a good solid gout of cold water smashed her in the face and torso. She rocked her head from side to side and made almost inaudible mewling noises, over the roar of the shower.

When the authoritative knock came at the door, I went to answer it, shoving her note into my pocket as I passed the desk. He was a round pink man with a sad, sagging, weary face. I led him into the bathroom. She had slumped further. I turned the water off. He took a towel and wiped her face roughly as he checked her pulse, thumbed her eyelid up, I told him exactly what I had done.

“What’d she take?”

“I don’t know.”

“See if you can find what it was in.”

I found the plastic bottle in the wastebasket beside the desk. There was no drugstore label on it. I took it to him. There was a little white powder in the bottom of it. He shook it out into the palm of his hand, snuffed at it, moistened a fingertip. tasted the powder. “Barbiturate,” he murmured.

The girl made a snoring sound. He muttered to himself, dug into his open case, found a disposable hypo, a rubbertop vial of amber fluid. He pulled one of the girl’s arms over the side of the tub, alcoholed a place above the elbow, filled his hypo, made a deft injection.

“Better off in a hospital.” he said, getting up off his knees.

“Is it necessary?”

“She your wife?”

“No. Doctor, if she is in danger of dying, of course she should go to a hospital. Listen, this is a very neurotic kid. Her name is Webb. They found her brother’s body this evening.”

He raised one tired eyebrow. “I heard about that.”

“I work for Jasper Yeoman. I’ve gotten acquainted with this girl. I think if a big hospital thing is made of it, she’s going to try to live up to the billing. If it can be passed off, like a casual thing, like a small accident, I think it can work out better for her. That is, if she isn’t in danger.”

He leaned against the sink, frowning. As he was about to speak, the coffee came. I think it turned the trick. He nodded approvingly.

“I gave her a stimulant. Let’s see if we can make her walk.”

We lifted her out. I got my robe on her and belted it. It trailed on the floor behind her. The doctor gave her three brisk slaps in the face. He put his mouth next to her ear and said, “You have to walk! Come on! Walk!” I supported most of her weight. She came along, head lolling, working her spaghetti legs.

“That’s good,” he said. “Keep her moving. Pour coffee into her. Don’t let her drowse off. Use the cold shower again if you have to. Make her talk. Count to a hundred. Alphabet. Anything. What I wonder is, can I depend on you?”

“Yes.”

He studied me, lips pursed. “I’ll come back here at four in the morning. Then, if she looks all right, we’ll let her sleep. By then she should be begging to sleep.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“You did pretty good before I got here. I’ll stop at the desk on the way out. They act uneasy down there. You’re registered as a single.” He permitted himself the first small smile. “I’ll say the magic word. Yeoman. They’ll leave you alone. Here’s my number. If she starts to get away from you, so you can’t get any reaction, call me at once. This is a risk for me, too. No, don’t stop. Keep walking her.” He started toward the door and hesitated, looked uneasily at me. “She’s a very pretty girl.”

“Necrophilia never appealed to me, Doctor.” The precision of the word heartened him. He bobbed his head and left. I walked the girl. I hustled her along, giving her more of her own weight to support, catching her when she started to fall. I slapped her and jounced her. I poured steaming coffee into her. I shoved her under the shower. Her whining became more audible and bitter and abused. She was a lump. A thing. An irritating and tiresome chore. She padded and lurched and grumbled in a voice so slurred I could not make out a word. Her head bobbed loosely. This was the monstrous selfishness of self-destruction. Somebody else has to pick up the pieces.

For a long time, an hour or more, I could be ironically amused by the doctor having called her a pretty girl. She was a doughy, dull, fatly, blue-white, flaccid thing, with her water pasted hair, sagging mouth, slitted empty eyes. I could stand her under the water and she would take it like an obedient sow, flat-footed and streaming. I got pretty good at pouring coffee into her. And I could keep her in her floundering trudge by holding one arm. Suddenly it changed. She had begun to get wobblly again, and I put her under the shower, holding her there by one hand on her shoulder. This time she tautened. Her body seemed to lift for the first time and come alive as the cold water made her arch her back and tighten her muscles. Suddenly I realized that this was a marvelous female body, sleek, rounded, strong, flawless, with hips and breasts and belly of a ripeness that enhanced the narrow lithenes of her waist. I bundled her back into the damp robe a little sooner than I had planned. She shivered for a little while, and I took that as sufficient reason not to try the shower routine again.

But by three in the morning, I had the feeling that I needed to get her past one more obstacle in the road back to awareness. She acted like a drunk. Querulous, mumbling, cross, indignant. But she seemed to have no real grasp of who she was or where she was or who I was. I kept thinking that I ought to be able to think of some way of shocking her back to reality.

I brought her to a halt. She stood there swaying, eyes barely open. I closed the bathroom door. There was a mirror on the back of it. I put her in front of the mirror. I unbelted the robe and slipped it off her shoulders and tossed it aside. She stood looking at herself without comprehension.

We looked odd in the mirror, all the rawboned height of McGee standing next to and slightly behind the pale perfection of the naked girl, so small in her bare feet, her frank breasts revealed, and, nested into the smoothness of her thighs, the sooty-soft-dark cornerstone to the soft and tender arch of hips. Her hair was a clotted tangle, half masking one eye. Smirking at her mirror image I put my lips close to her ear and said, “See the pretty girl? See the pretty pretty girl?”

Her eyes were stubborn slits. She swayed and sighed, then quite suddenly her eyes opened wide. Her body tightened. She bent slightly from the waist, covered her parts with one hand and flattened her other arm across her breasts. Knock-kneed, she turned and backed away from me, making a little hissing sound.

“Pretty girl?” I said.

“What… what are you doing to me?” Her face was chalk white.

I threw the robe at her. “I’m trying to keep you alive.”

She fumbled herself hastily into the robe. “But… but I took all of them!”

“Yes you did, dear girl.”

“John is dead.”

“Keep walking.”

She wouldn’t until I started toward her. And then she began trudging back and forth, eyeing me with grave suspicion.

“I’m very tired Travis.”

“Keep walking.”

“What time is it?”

“After three. Walk faster.”

“Please let me lie down, just for a minute. Please.”

“Keep walking.”

“My God, you’re cruel. I’m sick. I’m terribly sick. I have to lie down. Really!”

“Walk by yourself, or I’ll walk you.”

I sat on the foot of the bed. She kept well out of my reach each time she passed me. When she began to soften again, when her eyes began to blur, I reached out and gave her a brisk clout on the fanny. It energized her.

She wept for mercy. I showed none. She faked a faint, but came out of it with alacrity when I began to peel the robe off her. She cursed me. I did not know she had such an extensive vocabulary. She cursed, whined, cried, faked, begged. But she walked. Yes indeed. She kept on walking.

O she was pitiful indeed, those eyes smudged so dark, huddled small in the robe, hating me, choking the coffee down, calling me a degenerate, demanding to know why she had not been permitted to die. Life was empty. Must she be bullied, shamed, slapped, jounced, beaten, smirked at?

Yes, dear. Keep walking. Just keep walking.

Doctor Kuppler returned at four fifteen. When she realized he was a doctor, she began to recount a long and tearful bill of particulars. He ignored her completely, examined her, grunting with approval. He had her sit on the edge of the bed.

“I demand my rights!” Isobel said. “Get the police!”

Doctor Kuppler smiled sweetly at her, put one pink finger against her shoulder and pushed. She toppled over backwards, sighed once, and then began to emit a small, regular, purring snore. At his suggestion, I picked her up. He opened the bed up. I dropped her in and he covered her over.

“Nice response,” he said. “Attractive young lady. Maybe it all wasn’t necessary, but it’s nice to be on the safe side.”

“What do I owe you?”

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

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

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

“I’m exhausted, Doctor, and she’s already compromised.”

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

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

Eleven

THE ROOM phone woke me at noon, and I got it before it disturbed Isobel. She slept with her back toward me, looking small under the yellow blanket, just the dark crown of her head showing.

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

“What’s on your mind, Jass?”

“You just wake up?”

“I had a busy night.”

“Doing what?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

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

“You thought of somebody?”

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

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

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

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

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

“There could be.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twelve

THERE WAS a jurisdiction problem, the officials of city and county each hoping it belonged to the other one. Careers can be blasted by the mishandling of the smallest details when an important man has died. The county, and Fred Buckelberry, were stuck with it.

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

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

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

“Where are my clothes?”

“How do you feel?”

“Where are my clothes?”

“I threw them away.”

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

“It wasn’t cheap.”

“It’s cheap in a way you couldn’t possibly understand, Travis.”

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

“No.”

“We have to go to Buckelberry’s headquarters.”

“I am not going there. I’m going home.”

“There’s a deputy in the hall to make sure we both go there.”

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

“Jass Yeoman is dead.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“Perhaps nothing. Buckelberry wants to make sure.”

“I don’t understand.”

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

“Poisoned?” she said in a faint voice.

“It wasn’t a very easy way to die.”

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

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

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

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

“Stop hiding and you can have them back.”

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

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

“Are you glad I stopped you?”

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

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

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

“Everything is nifty Iz.”

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

“The colloquial expression is bare-ass.”

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

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

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

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

Out of a long silence I said, “There’ll have to be arrangements about your brother.”

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

“Can I help in any way?”

“Thank you, no.”

“How do you feel?”

“Tired. And empty.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What are you trading?”

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

“I can imagine,” I said, and stood up.

“Where you going?”

“Let’s go see one of those judges.”

“For God’s sake, sit down!”

I sat. “I can’t be pushed that way, Sheriff.”

He studied me. “You’d do the ninety days?” He sighed. “Yes, I guess you would.”

“How did they give it to Jass?”

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

“No.”

“He have any ideas about who was after him?”

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

“Well?” Fred said.

“Jass started wondering about his children, Fred.”

He stared at me. “Don’t get cute. He didn’t have any.”

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

“How about the one he kept track of, the one that couldn’t hate him?”

“He didn’t give me the name. Who would know?”

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

“And he’d be free to go see Jass at any time.”

Buckelberry nodded grimly. “Like about noon today.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t dare come forward now,” I said.

“Why not?”

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

“It’s a starting place anyways,” he said, sighing.

“How about your other starting places?”

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

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

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

“Unless you give me ninety days.”

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

“Raise your right hand and repeat after me.”

“Just like a western?”

“Exactly like a western, McGee. I’m authorized.”

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

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

“What do you want?”

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

“They run buses.”

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

“He must have a vivid imagination, honey.”

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

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

“Cousin?”

“I had to tell the desk something.”

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

“Your Freudian slip is showing.”

“That’s a stale, tiresome, shopworn remark. And you are a boor.”

“Now you’re acting more like yourself, honey.”

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

We waited. I got us some Cokes out of a machine. I bought a paper. Jass had made page one. Reporters discovered us and swooped in, blinking their flash units, asking simultaneous questions, and I hustled Isobel into an alcove off the communications center, where they could not follow. We were Sister of Slain Professor, and Mystery Figure.

At last Buckelberry appeared, a paper cup of coffee in his hand. He leaned against the alcove wall and looked down at us.

“You tell her what we’re checking now?” he asked.

“No.”

“When can he take me home?” Isobel asked.

“Miss Webb, did your brother ever say anything to you about something Mr. Yeoman could have told him? About any illegitimate children Jass Yeoman might have?”

“Certainly not!”

“Don’t get so indignant at every little thing, Miss Webb. He could have told you something like that to justify his relationship with Mrs. Yeoman.”

“I wouldn’t have listened to that kind of specious reasoning.”

“No, I don’t guess you would have, at that.”

He turned away, saving, “McGee, come look at the map a minute.”

I followed him into his office. He put his thumb under the name of a tiny place northeast of Livingston. It was called Burned Wells.

“As long as you’re taking her back down there, you can check this one out. Listen, I’ve gotten more loose talk and rumor than I know what the hell to do with. Tomorrow we can start checking out bank records, hoping Jass didn’t cover the back trail too careful. Fish Kllery says there’s a woman down there Jass was more serious about than most. He says it was probably twenty-five years ago, before Cube died. He says she was seventeen or eighteen then, Mexican with a lot of Indio blood, very fierce sort of proud girl. That would make her forty-two or -three now. He rememers her first name was Amparo. He says Jass nearly lost his head over that one. Took her on trips with him, bought her a lot of stuff, kept her around for maybe a year. It isn’t much to go on, but it’s a very small place.”

“It doesn’t look like much of a road going in there.”

“It’s fifteen miles dead end off State Road 100. What it is, it’s a village of people that do some ranch work on those spreads beyond there, out of my county. Hughes, Robischon, Star B. It’s smaller than it was. The young ones leave. Shacks and a store. Gas pump and adobe church. That Amparo could be long dead, or moved away. Or still be there and not about to tell anybody anything. But it’s worth taking a look.”

“I hope you have better leads than this one.”

“I do. I’ve got men working them. You come back here with whatever you can find out. I’ll still be here.”

Thirteen

AT EIGHT thirty I stopped with Isobel at a motel restaurant at the south edge of town. I told her of the new direction of the investigation, what Jass had said, and what the Sheriff had given me to do. Her response, if any, was very muted.

“Aren’t you interested?” I asked her.

“I guess so. Travis, I’m emotionally exhausted. It’s been such a strange day. All that waiting. Like in an airport when everything is grounded. Yes, I want to know who killed my brother. It seems to me now he died years ago. Or even that I knew he was going to die. He was the innocent bystander, I guess.” She frowned across the table at me, dark glasses laid aside. “There is something strange about trying to kill yourself. You do kill some part of yourself, no matter what. Maybe the ability to feel deeply. I don’t know. I feel like a stranger to myself. I have to find out who I am, who I am going to be. I feel… cut loose from everything, And I have this strange little feeling of… some kind of unholy joy. Every once in a while. An electric sparkle, like knowing you’re soon to go on holiday. I shouldn’t feel like that for no reason. I keep wondering if something is… wrong with my mind.”

“I’ll make an absurd guess. Maybe you’re glad to be alive.”

“Not particularly. But I won’t try to kill myself again.”

On my road map the fifteen miles over to Burned Wells was a faint dotted blue line, heading east off State Road 100 about six or seven miles north of Livingston. I slowed so I could spot the turn, pick up some landmark so I could find it easily on my way back.

“Let me go over there with you,” she said.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s something to do. If you find her, maybe she’d talk to me more readily than to you.”

I took her along. It was a narrow sand and gravel road through burned land under a starry sky so bright I could see the contours of the land on either side of us. We climbed into a coarse jungle of huge tilts of rock, small buttes rising out of sand and cactus, and the road found its windy way through this Martian pasture.

The car thumped and slewed and churned along, with my headlights picking up the infrequent wink of a beer can, the red eyes of a jackrabbit. The road moved down again to a broad valley floor, past solemn stands of pipe organ cactus, and straightened toward a faraway glimmer of small lights against a black hill flank on the far side of the valley.

The village of Burned Wells was one broad unpaved street two blocks long. It had gone to bed for the night. The lights we had seen came from the white hissing glare of gasoline lanterns. One hung from the porch roof of the store, where a small group of men sat on the steps and railing and porch chairs. They were drinking beer.

There was a portable radio on the porch railing, turned to a volume the speaker couldn’t handle, so that the highs buzzed and the bass blared, playing country music. I stopped short of the gas pump and got out of the car. When I was halfway to the porch the music stopped abruptly. There were nine of them, all middle-aged or older. The lantern made brilliant highlights and impenetrable shadows, leaching out all color so that the group, silent and motionless, looked like a black and white print which had been developed for maximum contrast.

I stopped short of the porch and said, “Good evening.”

No response. Unless somebody spitting over the railing is a response.

“Perhaps you can help me.” No response.

“I am trying to find a woman who lived here twenty-five years ago. I do not know her last name. Her first name was Amparo. She used to know Jasper Yeoman.”

Two of them spat. Maybe I was achieving better communication. They were a hardylooking group, rough work clothes, tough weathered faces, bodies thickened by hard labor.

“Jasper Yeoman was killed today.”

That created a stir, a moving, a few secretive mutterings.

“I worked for him,” I said. “On private matters. I think it would be better if I didn’t have to come back here with the county sheriff to help me get information about her.”

A man bent down into the shadows beside his chair. He muttered something. A small boy I had not seen sprang up, went lithely over the railing and went running down the road into the darkness, bare feet slapping the packed dirt.

“is she still here?” I asked.

“You wait,” the oldest one said.

It was not a long wait. The boy was back in about three minutes. He went right to the old man and whispered to him. It seemed a very long message.

“You can see the woman,” the old man said. “Her man gives his permission. The child will take you.”

I got Isobel out of the car, and we followed the boy down the middle of the wide dark street. When my eyes were used to the darkness I could see the small church at the end of the main street. Dogs came running out to bark at the scent of strangers. We turned left at the church. The boy pointed at an adobe house and ran off without a word. The door was open. There was a flicker of orange light inside. The small front garden was guarded by twisted sticks painted white. I rapped on the open door.

A woman appeared and stared at us and backed away and said, “Come in.” Her voice was harsh. It was an order. The room was small and bare. Doorways led to other rooms. “I am Mrs. Sosegado,” she said. “I was with Jass Yeoman a long long time ago. You sit down, please.”

She was a short woman. She looked almost as broad as she was tall, but muscular rather than fat. Her hair was shining black, her face the color of a penny, her features so harsh and strong she looked masculine. Big breasts and hard belly pushed against the flowered fabric of a faded cotton dress.

“How was he killed?” she demanded.

“Poisoned.”

She grimaced. “Who did such a thing?”

“They don’t know. Not yet.”

I sensed movement over by the doorway. I turned in time to see two men come into the room silently, burly young men who moved like big cats. They leaned against the wall inside the door. One of them spoke to her in a fast colloquial Spanish I could not catch even one word of. She answered him with an explosive anger.

“Two of my sons,” she said contemptuously. “You worked for Jass?”

‘Yes.“

“He told you if he died to come to me to give me something?”

“No.”

“It does not matter, I guess. Did I ever ask for anything? No! He gave because it was his wish.” She stopped and tilted her head. “Then why are you here?”

“I am trying to find out who killed his wife and killed him.” I hesitated, then said, “He mentioned you to me once.”

Her face beamed. “Yes? What did he say?”

“That you were a very serious thing to him a long time ago.”

“Oh yes. My God, I was beautiful! Who could know it now? He was a man. He had wildness. You know? And deep feelings for me. I could have made him marry me, I think. Such a mistake.” She sighed, then gave me that intent look again. “Who is this woman with you?”

“This is Miss Webb. My name is McGee. Her brother was killed by perhaps the same people who killed Jass.”

Her face darkened. “So you think I would know something. Would I hurt such a man? He was good to me! Who forced him to give money for the child? No one! He loved her as I do. Did he not take her into his house? She married a good man. Always he gave money for clothes, school, sickness, everything. Even such a big kitchen now, as I have never seen before. He thought of her like a daughter. I have letters from him, saying she is his daughter. He trusted me. I would not hurt…”

The hard flow of Spanish from behind me interrupted her. I have a reasonable gringo grasp of the tongue, but when they do not want you to understand, all you can hope to do is pick up the infrequent and unrelated word. She listened to it, looked dubious and then angry. She responded. The young man spoke again. She answered in a softer tone.

I said, “How did Dolores feel about him?”

“With love,” Amparo said with great dignity. “What else for the father?” She bit her lip, glanced at her son and said to me, “No one knows of you coming to see me?”

It is a question that rings all the bells. It was extraordinarily clumsy, and it was obvious her son had asked her to ask it. But on the other hand, nearly everything thus far had been clumsy. Murder is not a game for amateurs, for an illegitimate house servant and her half brothers. I was so busy fitting pieces together I took too much time. My answer was late. “Sheriff Buckelberry sent me here,” I said. It was late and clumsy and it sounded just as false as her question. Incompetence is contagious.

Isobel sensed what was going on and came in too fast and hearty, saying, “Oh yes, the Sheriff knows we’ve come to see you.”

I heard a movement, looked around and saw that the boys were gone. The back of my neck felt chilly. Amparo looked puzzled. It was obvious to me she had no part in whatever had happened.

“Do your sons live here?” I asked politely.

“Eh? No, not those two. Charlie and Pablo. They come to visit, oh a month ago maybe. Out of work, I guess. They are in Phoenix. Canario. From my first husband. That name we gave to Dolores too. I have three little girls name Sosegado. Senor Canario died. A fine man. Esteban Sosegado my husband now, he is in bed for the rest of his life, in the back room. A tractor fell on him. There is the insurance. We manage. If Jass left anything, it would be easier now. But if he did not…” She shrugged expressively.

“You do have Jass’s letters?”

She drew herself up. “But of course!”

“Could I see one?”

She got up without a word and left the room. Isobel gave me a nervous look. “Is there going to be trouble?”

“I don’t know. Don’t worry about it.” Suddenly we heard her yelling somewhere in the back of the house. Moments later she carne storming back in, rigid with anger, the tears running down her copper face. “Gone!” she said. “Everything. The bah-kus is empty. The letters, the pictures of us smiling and happy. The picture of Jass holding little Dolores in his arms. All gone. Who could do such a thing?”

I could get nothing else from her. She was too upset over the loss of treasures. But she did call goodnight to us as we walked toward the church and the single street of Burned Wells. We walked back to the store. The lantern still hissed, but there was no one around. There was an eerie silence in the still cold air of the night village. I got Isobel into the car and got behind the wheel and turned to her and took hold of her hand.

“There can be some trouble,” I said in a low voice. “I didn’t like the looks of that pair. I didn’t like that question. I am going to leave here in one hell of a hurry, so hang on tight. If I yell to you to get down, get right down onto the floor under the dash.”

“A-All right.”

I started it up, swung it into a skittering U-turn, and aimed it back the way we had come. I reached for the lights and then changed my mind. I could see the pale straight road across the flats by starlight. It was an earnest little car, and I took it right up to the outer edge of control. I expected her to yelp, but she sat braced beside me. I didn’t tell her what bothered me. I could see a faint ground-level haziness off to the right of the road, parallel to it. With almost no wind at all, it could be the dust a previous vehicle had kicked up.

I had to drop it way down when I hit the slope, winding up through the rock maze. I had good night vision by then, good enough to look ahead and see where a heavy duty pickup truck, lights off, blocked the road completely. She saw it too. I heard her gasp. They’d picked a good spot, steep rock on both sides. I hit the brakes, banged it into reverse, stuck my head out the window and went down the winding slope backward at a crazy speed.

There was one hell of a crack, and a sharp peppery stinging on the back of my steering hand and the back of my neck. It startled me enough to put me off. I banged rock and came back onto the road, then went off the other side, pumped the brakes, nearly rocked it over, came back onto the road again and into a curve and missed the curve, slid it backward onto a ridge to a grinding stop, rear wheels lifted clear of the ground.

I clamped down on her wrist and dragged her out my side. The starlight seemed all too bright on that slope. I hustled her directly away from the road toward a towering mass of jumbled rock and deep shadows. She grunted and struggled and lurched along in her high heels. In heavy shadow I pulled her down beside me, and then squatted on my heels and looked back. Just as I had left the car I had glanced at the windshield, seen the hole punched in my side of it, almost dead center. The dazzle of cracks radiating from the punched hole had made the rest of the windshield, except way over on her side, almost opaque. She was fighting for breath. I looked back along the slope and saw the alarming distinctness of the tracks we had made across the spill of windblown sand. We had to move along, and fast, and across rock. I reached and pulled her shoes off, snapped the high heels off them and gave them back to her.

“Try to manage with these. We’ve got to move.”

She was beginning to please me. She was handling herself well. We went back through shadows and in and out of patches of starlight. I heard one of them call and the other one answer. It sounded too damned close. We were working our way around to the back, out of sight of the road and the car. We came to a slope of rock I thought we could manage. I had her grab me by the belt with one hand, and clamber along behind me. I went diagonally up the long slope. Fifty yards of it, I guessed. I clambered over the top edge into a broad pocket of sand perhaps forty feet wide and sixty feet long, roughly oblong, slightly dished, the sand paled by the night light, the reddened rocks of day stained black.

I looked back and saw the wink and swing of a flashlight along the path we had taken. It would end at the rock slope. They would come up. And this was their country, not mine. They had the guns. I had a woman, and she was gasping for breath. Rough slopes of stone rimmed two sides of the basin. They could be climbed. They went up about thirty feet. The third side was a sheer cliff, just as high. There was a cave mouth in the cliff, narrow and tall.

I said to her in a low tone, “Now do exactly as I tell you.”

I had her walk beside me, taking long strides, right to the mouth of the cave. It looked deep. I found a dead branch on the sand and picked it up. We walked backward, in our own footprints in the loose sand, back to the edge of the pitch we had climbed. I looked over the edge and saw that we weren’t going to make it. They were dark shapes coming up the slant too swiftly. I saw a tiny fleck of light on metal. But I had to give it a try. I sent her running to where the loose rocks looked easiest to climb and told her to head on up. I backed along after her, wiping out our tracks with broad strokes of the branch. But at any moment a head would come over the edge and we would be in plain view.

“Hold up!” one of them said sharply. I heard it a little after they did, a distant clatter of a noisy engine.

The voices of the Sosegado boys carried well in the stillness. “Be old Tom coming back from Quintana,” one said. “Goddam pickup right in his way.”

“You stay put. Don’t climb up there. I’ll go move it.”

I blessed old Tom and brushed my way back to the rocky slope. I discarded the branch and climbed up. She was at the top. The stone formation there was as if some giant had picked up a loose double handful of hundred ton dominoes and stacked them there in a jumbled pile. There were a thousand hiding places. I hurried her along to one and told her to stay put.

“What are you going to do?”

“If it doesn’t work out, worm yourself back into the smallest deepest place you can find, and don’t make a sound. Sooner or later Buckelberry will come looking. Stay alive.”

I circled and came back to the top of the cliff overlooking the cave. Using great caution I got a look at the man on the slope. He was crouched there, a red cigarette end against a burly shadow. I moved back until I was directly over the cave. I could see our footprints. They looked convincing. I felt around and located three rocks. A fifteen pound shard about eighteen inches long, and two rough chunks the size of softballs. I had heard the pickup start. He kept it in a low gear. In a little while the sound stopped as he got it off the road. The noisy engine came closer. It stopped straining and went into a rackety idling sound, and I heard voices over the sound of that engine. It started up again and chugged off through the night toward Burned Wells.

I stayed down. The human mind is strange. Scared as I was, I wanted to laugh. A woman, a cave, flight, an arsenal of murderous stones. A hundred thousand years of human progress. I could see a little cartoon of myself dragging Isobel off by her hair. I imagined she would talk about the hostility syndrome.

I did not risk another look down the slope. A silhouette against a starry sky can catch the eye. I heard a clink of metal against rock. Then low talk. They were closer together than before. I could not hear what they were saying. Their basic plan, as I imagined it, seemed sound. How many times can they make you inhale cyanide? So kill the nosy couple, drag them down and dump them into the back of their car. Pull it off the rocks. Knock the blurred windshield out with a stone. Drive it down to the valley floor and across country. Push it into a narrow arroyo, cover it with rocks and brush. And be in bed before the sun comes up.

When one spoke again, the voice was alarmingly close.

“Run right into that cave, Pablo.”

“With a gun, maybe?”

“Had a gun, he’d wait in those rocks below to bushwhack us.”

“Pretty big mean-lookin‘ man, boy.”

“I seen him too. Hey! You in there. You and the girl come on out, nobody gets hurt.” They waited. The silence was intense. “Then I come in shooting.”

“Charlie, maybe it goes right on through.”

“Give me that light. I’m going on in.”

I had wormed back from the edge slightly. I took the big shard in both hands and came up onto my knees near the edge. I raised the stone high above my head, then hurled it down onto the one who was right beneath me, shining his light into the cave, his body crouched and cautious. The other one was about fifteen feet back, and he was very very good. As I was hurling the rock downward, he took a pot shot from the hip. The rock was about even with my chest when the slug hit it and whined away into darkness. I felt the impact in my hands just as I released the rock. I went rolling backwards without delay, wondering if the shot would send my target hopping back out of range. But as I rolled back, I heard a heavy, moist and somewhat hollow sound, as if a ripe pumpkin had been dropped on a cement floor.

I kept flat. He had no way of knowing I had not taken the slug in some small degree. Or even seriously. When the angle is correct, they will ricochet nicely off skull bone.

There was silence. I heard a groan of anguish and heartbreak. Suddenly a wild voice yelled, “You kilt him, you son of a bitch! You smashed my brother’s head, goddam you!”

“Go home, Pablo. This is more than you can handle, boy.”

There was another silence. From further away he yelled, “I’m going to gut-shoot you!” He was moving back to get a better angle at me. I snaked my way to where the stones were plentiful, and with great eagerness and considerable alarm, I kept the air full of stones, arching them high, aiming them where I thought he had to be.

I scuttled ten feet to the side and risked a look. He was heading up the slope we had climbed, the slope above the sandy area. I had a good rock and I took aim. It bounced off his hip and sent him sprawling, but even as he fell he managed to get a shot off. A shot close to the head neither whines nor whistles. It makes one audible little explosive huff, very brief and very persuasive. I rolled away and threw another stone into his area.

Scrambling swiftly, I picked a different place to take a look over the edge. He had come back down the slope of loose rock. He was crossing the sand. He went cat-like down the solid pitch of rock below the sand, after stopping for a moment near the body, out of my line of vision. He went quite a way down, then turned and stopped, partially flattened against the slope.

“You hear me up there?” he called.

“I hear you just fine.”

Sounding much more calm and under control, he said, “I’m not crazy. You get no more chance to chunk me in the head with a stone.”

“So go away”

“You’d like that fine. Come dawn I’m coming up after you. You killed my blood brother. I make you a promise, man. You think about it all night. While you’re gut-shot and dying in the morning, you can watch me with your woman.”

“Your mouth is big, Pablo. Just like your brother’s.”

“You can’t make me sore now, so I come up there and you have a chance of busting me with a rock. I got a place where I can watch this hill, this whole side of it, and you can’t get down the back side of it. I see good in the nighttime, man.”

We had been raising our voices at first, but now they found a natural level in that desert silence.

“Which one of you brave boys killed Mona Yeoman? You, or this cat-meat brother up here?”

“You don’t make me sore, man. I killed her. Good shot, huh? Not this rifle gun. What I was going to do, I was going to move it just a hair, and put the next one into you. Save everybody a lot of trouble. But the round I used on her, the casing split and the shell case stuck in the chamber, and it pulled the catch off the ejector.”

“You boys were real bright. You couldn’t do anything right, could you?”

“It’s going to be all right from now on, man.”

“Is that what your half-sister says? Is that what Dolores keeps telling you?”

“Doe figured it out pretty good.”

“She’s as stupid as you are, Pablo.”

“You think so? What Doe told us, maybe Mona hired you to kill the old man. That’s why Mona had to die first, but he shouldn’t know she was dead, or maybe he’d make out a new will before we could get to him. You think that’s stupid?”

“Killing people is always stupid.”

“Doe isn’t stupid. Look, she found out from Mona the best way we could grab that professor. It had to look like she went off with him, right? And he told us where Mona was going to take you, to that cabin. That made a good place, right? You should hear him, that man with all the big words, making little smiles at us, saying we shouldn’t. But the last three minutes before we blew the rocks down on him, he spent those three minutes screaming.”

“You’ve got a lot of class, Pablo. A lot of brains. Just like your pal Pompa. Just like that trash you sent on that airplane ride to El Paso. You’re as dead as your brother, but you don’t know it yet.”

“Don’t you worry about me. Everything is fine. I kill you both and hide you and go away a couple years. Doe has one smart lawyer, with all the proof about Yeoman being her daddy. I’ll bury you and I’ll bury my brother Charlie. She’ll be rich, man. I can come back in a couple years and get in touch real careful.”

“She won’t be around, Pablo. And she won’t be rich. She took the old man some coffee. Buckelberry’s checking out where she got the strychnine. Probably from you boys. The ranches use it for vermin, don’t they?”

The stars were bright. A dog-thing hollered a hundred miles away. Somebody walked over my grave. “You so smart, man. Who saw Doe? Nobody!” But there was some defiance there, of the kind that comes from uncertainty, perhaps from fear.

I did not understand these people. Did they think themselves involved in some sort of crusade? A man, his wife, her lover, one hired assassin and one of the brothers-all dead. What turns on this kind of a bloody engine? This Pablo wanted to boost the score from five to seven. If the state could be depended upon to exact its own variety of jungle justice, seven would become nine. And for what?

“Pablo?”

“Too bad it won’t be a knife for you.”

“I just wonder about something. Dolores knew he was her father. She worked for them, for Jass and Mona. For years. Then she left and got married. Then all of a sudden… all this starts.”

“You bet your ass, man. It starts good.”

“She got hold of you boys to help her.”

“Help her get rich. Why not?”

“But wasn’t Yeoman good to her?”

There was a chilling cackle of laughter from him. “So good, man. So real good. That’s why, man. How much good can you stand?”

I knew I couldn’t get any further in that direction. He had stopped making sense. “Where’s Mona’s body?”

“They’ll find it. They can’t help finding it.”

“Let me ask you one more thing. It was pretty dark in your mother’s place. I couldn’t get a good look at you and your brother. But I had the feeling I’d seen you before.”

‘’We move around pretty good,“ he said, very casually. ”I saw you good through that scope. Six power. I had those hairs crossed on your belly. No wind at all. Five hundred yards.“

“Were you parked a little way down the street that day I visited your sister?”

“Man, you dream it, don’t you?”

“What difference does it make now, Pablo?” After a long silence he said, “She like to kill us both that day, coming to see her in the daytime. Charlie tells her about how we got Pompa, how good he is with a knife. She cried some. Imagine that? She cried over that old man.”

I had been feeling cautiously around in darkness and found a stone that fit my hand very nicely. It was a little too heavy to throw in normal fashion, but I could heave it stiff-arm like a grenade. It was a very long chance of doing any harm, but any chance was worth taking. The angle was bad. He was perhaps thirty yards away down the slope of rock. I would have to come up a little to do it, risking a momentary silhouette.

I counted to three and came up and threw. An instant after release, as I was already dropping back into cover, I heard the shot and felt a dirty little tug against the fabric right at the point of my shoulder. A tug and a faint impression of heat. He was dishearteningly good. I heard my stone clack against the solid rock and bound on down to the foot of the pitch.

He called to me a few times. I kept silent, hoping to con him into thinking he had hit home, hoping he would come up to take a closer look. He stopped calling. I heard a sound further away. I wormed forward and looked and saw him in the starlight, thirty feet from the bottom of the slope, walking directly away from it. He walked to a knoll about a hundred and fifty yards away, and I lost him as he started up it. He had a good place. We would have to come down into the flats if we left the bigger hill. Unless it clouded over, hardly possible, we’d be bugs on a tabletop for that handy-dandy rifle. It was about all the proof I needed that we couldn’t get down the other side of our fortress.

As I rolled up onto hands and knees and turned away from the edge, I turned directly into an impact of animal warmth that nearly jumped my heart right out of my chest. She had moved like a spook. Silvery highlights on the moist of an eye, wet of underlip, glad warm exhalation of her breath.

“All that shooting and yelling,” she whispered.

“If I can’t trust you to do exactly as I tell you… ”

“Please. I thought maybe I… maybe I could help…” She dropped the sharp stone she held. It clattered between us. I led her back away from the edge and we hunkered down. I didn’t want to be in the way if he tried a blind one just for luck. I told her where he was, and what had happened to the other one. She had worked her way close enough to hear most of my little chat with brother.

“What can we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. We have to think of something. We have to have a surprise for him. When he comes up here at dawn he won’t make any stupid mistakes. He’ll be cold about it.”

“The other one had a gun too.”

“And he took it along. I heard him set it down on the slope. It slid a little and he grabbed it.”

I sent her off to circle around and wait for me at the top of the incline she had climbed previously, the loose stones above the sand bowl where the man lay dead.

I looked down at the darkness of him sprawled against the sand. I lowered myself over the edge, kicked myself away from the sheer wall and dropped, rolled quickly close to the wall, just in case. Charlie had not been a fastidious boy. Even in that cleansing desert air, stronger than the effluvium of death was a lion-cage smell about him, bringing an atavistic prickling to the back of my neck. Scent of the enemy slain.

I was after tools. Close to the cave mouth I saw a small shadow too orderly in outline to be something from nature. I went to it and discovered that it was the flashlight, a cheap one in a black metal case. I backed into the cave mouth and aimed it at Charlie-boy’s head and punched the button. As my stomach took a slow backflip, I heard Isobel’s shallow gagging cough. I shoved the flashlight into my pocket and waited for the slow return of complete night vision. Then, with all the assurance of a housewife trying to pick up a dead garden snake, I went through his tight pockets. The only things that seemed useful were his pocket knife and the broad leather belt that held up his soiled jeans. When I rolled him over to get at the belt buckle; trapped gases bubbled from his throat.

I went blundering up the slope in great haste to get away from him. Isobel was waiting at the top. We went back into the giant tumble of rock and went through and around it to a place where there was so much rock between us and the distant brother, I could slowly unpucker. They use slow motion strobe light camera stuff to show what modern slugs do to flesh. They use gelatin of the right consistency. I remember those pictures too clearly, it seems.

We sat on a rock step leaning back against an armchair back of slanted rock. “How do you feel about… killing him?”

“That’s a goddam fool question.”

“I’m sorry. I just… feel strange with you because you did it.”

“Let’s say mixed emotions, honey. There is a very small hot feeling of satisfaction, because he had a gun and I had a stone, and I tricked hell out of them with a very simple device. Then there is a kind of sadness about the waste. And some irony I guess. Also, a little bit of a sick feeling, like the kid after shooting the sparrow.”

She put her hand on my arm. “I’m glad it’s all those things. I’m glad you try to be so honest.”

“Stay here. I’m going to take a look at this edge of the drop.”

It was a sorry look. We were on a butte-like formation where one side had spilled away, like a footstool with dirt banked against one side of it. A twelve-story footstool, with about an acre of jumbled rock on top of it. I stood near the edge and, looking down, I could make out quite a bit of the curving road. I saw my beetle car down there, backed off the curve, with the pickup truck parked off the road about twenty feet from it. I had the feeling I could spit that far. I got down on my belly and looked over the edge at several places. Not a chance anywhere.

I went back to her. She sat hugging herself. The sun heat was beginning to leach out of the rock, and the night was cold.

I sat close to her and put my arm around her. “We’ve got to trap him somehow, Iz.”

“If we can find a place, maybe, where he can’t use the gun?”

“And can’t smoke us out. And where we can rig a surprise for him.”

We went looking, prowling our huge rocky playpen. She called softly to me. I went over and found her staring dubiously at a triangular opening between two huge stones. It was at ground level, and small. I stretched out and shone the light into it. It looked roomy. I crawled in. After crawling three feet, I found that it opened up nicely. It wasn’t a neat cave. It was just an accidental space in tumbled rock, the floor of it at a thirty degree angle, the inside all corners and angles and cantilevered protrusions. It went back about fifteen feet, and at the back of it, around a little corner, was a place big enough for one person to hide out of sight of the entrance. It was refuge, and also a potential trap.

So we armed it. It took a couple of hours of work. She had some pleasantly bloodthirsty ideas. She held the light while I cut the dead man’s belt into long thin strips. If man is the most dangerous hunter, he is also the most dangerous game. I searched our front yard and found a length of dry tough fibrous wood as big around as my wrist. I whittled it clean and worked it firmly into a crack off to the side of the entrance, just where it widened out. It extended across the entrance. I tied our leather line to the end of it, ran the line up to a jutting finger of stone and made it fast with a temporary slip knot. Then I put her up there on the knot, and I braced myself and bent the tough wood up until it was above the entrance. When the line had been refastened to hold it in that position, I slowly released my pressure on the weathered limb. The leather held, so tight it thrummed if you touched it.

It was a nervous-making thing to crawl under. I went out and cleared signs away from our entrance, but not too carefully. This was a reverse of the other trick. I tore the sleeve of her suit jacket and plucked a pale thread and caught it into the edge of rock at the entrance. He would see it by dawn-light, if he was a careful tracker. I could assume he was.

Though I did not expect him to try to sneak up in darkness, I rigged an alarm. I wedged a stick across the entrance, as I came back in, one he would have to remove, and carried a line back and looped it over a lip of rock. To it I tied the metal parts of the dismantled flashlight, like a wind chime. The slightest movement of the stick made an audible jangle.

After we had assembled some throwing stones of the proper heft and size, there was nothing more we could do. Without the flashlight, the cave was a total blackness. We rehearsed the positions we would take, then we stretched out on the floor on the slope, our feet braced. I held her. The cold was getting to her. The position was awkward and uncomfortable. After a little while I shifted us. I took my jacket off. I lay at the foot of the sloped floor, my back against stone. I pulled her down against me, wrapped my arms around her and worked the jacket over us.

“Better?” I asked her.

“I think so,” she whispered. She was still shuddering with cold. She dug closer to me, face in my neck, arms around my waist. She smelled of vanilla. The treat after the movies in the childhood long ago. After a long time she stopped shivering.

Then it was the catalyst things, of course. All of them. Night, death, fright, closeness, the security of the den. Male and female in the most primitive partnership of all. This was a twisted virgin, frightened by men, sex, pleasure, wanting-thinking it all a conspiracy of evil against her. But now there was a greater fear. There with mingled breath I felt her awareness grow. Her hands held tightly. Slowly her breathing deepened, with a little catch at the peak of each inhalation: Her body heat increased.

I knew that at my slightest aggressive movement, it would all drain out of her. If I could pretend not to be aware, then it could all keep building for her. But clamped there together as we were by the pitch of the floor, aroused by her closeness, I could hardly hope to conceal my increasing physiological awareness of her, and I was afraid that as it became all too evident to her, it would chill her.

I noted the exact moment of her realization. She stopped breathing entirely. Her whole body tightened. And then, as she took a breath, there was an indescribable softening, a slow flowering of her hips, as though her thighs rolled outward. I moved my hand to the small of her back, and she gasped, and there was a strange and almost imperceptible tremor of her hips, a moth-wind flutter, subtle and sensuous as the final stage of Polynesian dance. She gasped. I found her soft mouth, and for long seconds her mouth was as sensuous and welcoming as her body, and then the old fears took her and she stiffened and turned her head away, pushed at me and said, “No. Oh no.”

I released her at once. I sensed that it surprised her. With a wary caution she let the upper half of her body rest against me once more, her hips at a sedate distance. I adjusted the jacket.

I patted her shoulder and said, “Iz, if we get out of this. If I get you out of this. If you’re ever in my arms again. Just one word will do it. Every time. No. That’s all you have to say. No. And it stops. So don’t say it as a nervous habit. Say it when you mean it. No. There’s nothing wrong with my hearing.”

She thought it over. “But I always thought… that men…”

“The ravening beast? Don’t arouse him? Every man a rapist? Baby, that’s just propaganda. There are some dull-witted boys like that, but very few men. Being denied can make me a little irritable. But I don’t have to work it out by being aggressive. Just that little word. No. It works. And you can say it at any point you want, right up to the moment when we are, excuse the expression, coupled. From then on it’s Molly over the windmill.”

She shuddered. “I couldn’t. I really just couldn’t.” She thought for a little while more. “But just this much can be sweet, I guess. I never realized before. But I think it would be… dangerous to experiment, Travis.”

She yawned so widely her jaw creaked. In another few minutes she drifted off to sleep, collapsing slowly against me.

Fourteen

I AWOKE with a jolt that startled her awake. She turned and stared at the visible grey light at our entrance, then scrambled away from me. I crawled to the entrance, checked the triggered club, wormed under it and looked out at the first of day. The sun was not up. The grey of that light and the reddish tone of the huge rocks made of it a purple world. I felt an inexplicable depression. This was the foolish end of all the foolish things, in a purple place for dying. I was too far from the bright water and the bright boats. My luck was gone. When his bullet hit the stone instead of my chest, that was the last of it.

I had not told Isobel the thing I feared most.

I was afraid that he would find our burrow, study it, and then go down to the truck and come back with a few sticks and blasting caps. I dismantled my alarm system. We wouldn’t need it from now on. It was a terrible temptation to go on out, but he could be thirty feet away, ready to blow my head apart. I went back in and turned and put my finger to my lips. In the vagueness of the reflected grey, I saw the terse nod of her head.

Our planning seemed childish. Rabbity. I was stiff and sore from sleeping against rock. Twenty minutes seemed an eternity. The grey light turned slowly to pink, and the pink began to change to gold when I heard a clack of loose stone not far from our entrance. Soon I heard one crunching footstep. I expected him to call out, but he made no other sound. As the light brightened, more of it came in from overhead, two small patches which filled the cave with a muted glow of early light.

Suddenly I heard a scurrying and a scrambling and a muttered curse. It gave me the wonderful feeling that help had arrived in time. Then there was an almost continuous chirring noise. He was throwing stones at something, kicking sand at it. The something came gliding silently into the cave, head high, and stopped just inside the entrance, in the area of brightness there, and coiled. The tail danced and chirred. The forked tongue took flickering samples of the air. Isobel Webb screamed with total terror.

He was a four footer, as big around as the woman’s forearm. There was no need to motion Isobel back. She had gone as far back as she could get, wedging herself around the small corner back there. I snatched up the stick previously wedged in the entrance. The hardware was gone, but the line for the alarm system was still fastened to it.

Rattlesnakes cannot strike beyond their own length. Their eyesight is bad. I had backed my way up off floor level, feeling for footholds in the stone stacked to the side of the entrance, moving up to where the rawhide trigger kept the stout club bent upward over the entrance where the man would have to come through. I quickly fashioned a slip-knot loop in the line fastened to the stick I held, and I bent over and delicately fished for the snake. His head swayed. I got it over his head on the second try.

Just as I yanked it tight, and got the scaly squirming furious length partway off the floor, Sosegado fired four fast shots into the cave. The muzzle blast was so deafening. I knew he had poked the rifle into the entrance and fired it. Slugs whined and clattered around on the walls and ceiling. I saw that Isobel had not been hit. She peered around an edge of rock. I gave her a maniacal grin to reassure her.

As I stepped up and back, moving higher, getting set, bringing the convulsive flapping of the snake with me, I gave a long, hoarse, gargling moan. As she stared at me in terror, I moaned again. Holding the snake off to the side and below me, I opened the pocket knife with one hand, getting ready to lay the blade against the rawhide so I could release the club against his head as he crawled in.

Isobel caught on. “You killed him!” she screamed. “He’s bleeding!”

I could guess Pablo had some basic infantry training. He knew how to come in. He could see that the snake was not in that daylight area just inside the entrance. He could guess there would be room to stand up. He came in good. He came scrabbling and diving in, rifle first, intending perhaps to roll up onto his feet and fire at the first movement he detected, woman, snake or man.

He came through so fast, I sliced the thong too late. Instead of getting him in the head, the club gave him a mighty swat across the tight seat of his jeans. He squalled with pain and indignation and surprise. The released end of the rawhide stung me across the face, and I lost my footing and fell the four feet down to the cave floor, knife, snake, stick and all. Isobel, rising to the situation, flung a rock with all her strength and caught me right on the kneecap.

As I scrambled and stumbled back, trying to brace myself to grab the rifle when he came up with it, I saw the lightning coil of the still tethered snake, the upward strike, saw the big tan triangular head take Pablo just under the chin as he was trying to come up at me. He rocked up onto his knees, his face absolutely blank, reached a slow hand up to touch the snake, then fell heavily onto his side. It took only that long for the venom, carried by the veins and arteries of the throat, to reach his heart and his brain and turn him off forever. Isobel went immediately into violent hysterics.

The snake let go of Pablo. It studied him for a moment or two, as though deciding he was too big to eat, then turned and glided through the slack loop and on out of the cave into the morning sunlight. She came yowling, teetering, tipping into my arms, her face as reddened and wrinkled as the face of an angry child.

There were keys in the pickup truck. Halfway to the state road we met the two county patrol cars heading in toward Burned Wells at high speed. Isobel began to bleat again when she saw what they were. As I stood in the dusty road and pointed at the place where they would find the bodies, I saw that the purple look had faded away. Our hill was a dark silhouette against the morning sun.

It had been a place for dying, but not for us. Not for McGee, not this time. A violent and horrible slapstick-a whack across the pants, sting of the thong, woman’s bad aim with a stone-and then the terrible efficiency of the swift tan snake…

* * *

Late on Sunday afternoon, Dolores Canario Estobar sat in Fred Buckelberrv’s office. She had insisted there was absolutely no need for her to have an attorney. The Sheriff knew it had to be handled very carefully. She was a handsome woman, newly married, pregnant, married to Johnny Estobar who showed promise of eventually becoming a political figure among the Latin American population of Esmerelda County. He had to let her husband be with her. Johnny, bitterly indignant, sat beside his solemn wife and tenderly held her hand. It was a crowded office. Buckelberry, a deputy, a stenographer, the state’s attorney, Jass’s personal attorney, the Estobars and me.

Her calm and her dignity seemed unshakable. “Sheriff, I guess the way things are, I have to believe it, that Pablo and Carlos did these terrible things. It’s so terribly hard on my mother. I was never close to my half-brothers. How many times do I have to tell you all this anyhow? The only thing I can think of, they got in trouble or something in Phoenix and came back here and plotted this crazy plan to make me rich, thinking that if I got Jass’s money they could get a lot of it from me. I’ve always known I was his daughter. Mona never knew it. Yes, I worked in his house, but I didn’t resent him for it. I could have had a lot more education. He would have paid for it. But I quit. He was good to me. I didn’t love him, but I didn’t resent him. He was being fair in his own way. A lot of men would have done a lot less.”

“You knew about the letters your mother had?” Buckelberry asked gently. “And the pictures?”

“Certainly. One of my half-brothers obviously took them. They were wild reckless boys. God knows what they were thinking. Maybe they thought they were helping me. Such a stupid, stupid plan. I know your people have been searching my house, Sheriff. I wouldn’t even know what strychnine looks like.”

“But you did go to Jass’s house shortly after noon on the day of his death?”

“Yes! I’ve told you that. He called me up. He asked me to come over. I went over and he was gone. They can tell you that at his house.”

“Do you have to keep asking her the same things over and over?” her husband demanded.

“I don’t think she wants to refuse to answer,” the Sheriff told him. “Now, Dolores, you see the little problem you leave us. If a person were very clever, they would go over, Yeoman would let them in. They would pour him a cup of coffee-someone who knew his habits well. They would poison him and leave and go a short distance and wait and then go back to the house as though just arriving. That would account for them being seen in the neighborhood, if anybody saw them and remembered.”

“Do I have to prove myself innocent?” Dolores demanded haughtily. “I thought it was the other way around for most people.”

“How do you imagine your brothers learned so much about the affair between Mrs. Yeoman and Mr. Webb?”

“A lot of people knew about that. They weren’t real careful, you know. God, I wish Pablo and Carlos were alive. Then they could give you real answers. All I can do is a lot of guessing. Honest to God, I do not want any of Jass’s money. We’re getting along fine. I’m really happy for the first time in my life.”

“Why don’t you leave her alone?” Estobar demanded.

I could see the hopelessness in Fred Buckelberry’s eyes. Unless he could trap her somehow, she was going to walk away from it. And it was getting easier and easier to believe, even for me, that she’d had no part in it. But something about her did not ring true. She was just too damn controlled.

I remembered how she had been on the porch of her house when she had flown off the handle. Blood and iron, fire and pride. She had to really hate the old man to kill him that way. And I had a glimmer of an idea. It would be very rough on her. But I had to believe Pablo called the truth to me through the night. He had been certain I wouldn’t live to repeat it.

“May I say something?” I asked Fred. They all looked at me.

“Go ahead.”

I cleared my throat and looked upset. “I don’t know. I keep thinking there’s some kind of a mistake here, Fred. While I was working for Jass we got a little stoned together a couple of times. Talked about everything under the sun. I didn’t know him a long time, but he seemed like a pretty good guy. The thing is… I don’t know just how to say this… it’s just hard for me to believe Mrs. Estobar here was Jass’s daughter, because he talked about her as if… well, as if she was another woman in the house, if you know what I’m getting at.”

There was a deadly silence, and then she launched herself at me. She wanted to spoon my eyes out on her thumbnails. Her husband got her, held her wrists, her arms out behind her. She bent toward me, and her face was nothing human.

“Yessss,” she said in a dreadful half whisper. “When she was away. That filthy old man. That father I adored. He was drinking. He made me drink too. I tried to help him to bed. He forced me, that filthy old man. He didn’t know who I was. Drunk! A woman to grab. I had loved him, like a daughter.” She straightened, raising her voice. “He destroyed me! He dirtied me! Oh, I wrote those tax people. They talked to me many times. I told them every damn thing I could remember about every dirty trick I heard him say he did. I told Mona so she would tell him, so he would sweat and squirm and sweat. Those boys would do anything I made them do. They thought it was just for the money. Kill his woman. That was something else gone. I wanted him to live longer, but I couldn’t wait. He drank it down and patted me on the cheek and said thank you my dear girl. Isn’t that wild? Isn’t that hilarious? Doesn’t that kill you?” In a slower voice, looking around at all of us in a dazed way, she said, “Doesn’t that kill you?”

Her husband sobbed and caught her as she went down. And not one of us was able to look anyone else in the eye.

* * *

Ten weeks later, on a Sunday night, under a moon almost full, I was stretched out on a sandy blanket on the small back beach of Webb Cay. It had been the rarest of all perfect days. Hot and clear, with just enough of a breeze to keep the sandflies away. We’d done a little more work on the house that day. I had cleaned the jets on the cranky kerosene refrigerator and gotten it working with less stink.

We’d gone snorkeling and come back with four fine crayfish, boiled them up, ate them with tinned butter and Pauli Girl beer. We had sun-drowsed on the beach, swimming when it got too hot, then gone into the shadowy old house, into relative coolness, into the big bed where her parents had slept, for a long lazy game of love and the deep sweet nap until dusk.

I looked out and saw her swimming in, the moon so bright it almost masked the pale green fire of phosphorescence her slow strong strokes created. She came wading up out of the water, up the shelf of the beach, naked in moonlight, palming her dark sea-soaked hair back with both hands. I had never seen anyone get so dark so quickly. She was like a Carib Indian. In the daylight, with the white goo covering her sensitive lips, she had begun to look like a photographic negative. She was one even perfect color all over, without streak or patch, a primitive honeyed bronze.

She came to the blanket and knelt and rolled back on her half, and made on my left forearm a Japanese pillow for the soaked nape of her neck. She made a small sound of contentment and lay there in a spill of moonlight that turned the water droplets on her body to a mercury gleaming.

“Long swim,” I said.

“Just floating out there, darling. Thinking.”

“About what?”

“Oh, of whatever happened to that silly beast who tried to kill herself. Maybe you remember her. The one that had fastened herself to the adored brother. A symbiotic relationship. Feeding off him.”

“Vaguely remember her. And I remember a girl who kept saying no.”

Warm chuckle. “Oh, her! She was corrupted long ago.”

* * *

After all the hundred details of burial, testimony, insurance, closing her apartment, packing, we had taken off in that sedate old sedan, wandering vaguely east, making few miles in each day’s drive, following the narrowest blue lines on the map. The journey from Livingston to Fort Lauderdale had taken over two weeks. She insisted on a precise division of all expenses.

And in the crickety motel nights, in the woodsy old cabins outside small towns, I let her find her own increments of experimental boldness, right up to where she would say, hoarsely, gaspingly, No. And I obeyed that word immediately and without fail. Had I not done so at any time, it would have set her back to the very beginning. She had to know that it would work, would always work, and that it was her option.

After a time the tops of her sensible little pyjamas could be shucked, and nights later, the bottoms. Some days, in the old car, she would be sensuously humid, sloe eyed, half asleep all day. Other days she would be would taut, jabbering, chattering, laughing, turning her head with quick motions. I offered her no juvenile substitutes, no cheap devices, because I sensed that her timidity was such that she would settle forever for any half measure afforded her.

I was just fine. Just dandy. Aside from a perceptible hand tremor, chronic indigestion, too many cigarettes, a gaunted face, the feeling that my lower belly was full of scrap iron, and a tendency to leap out of my skin at any unexpected sound, I was peachy.

It was her demon and her battle. It was a precipice, and her knowledge that she could stop it at any time gave her the boldness to approach ever closer to the edge. On a sticky night in the X-Cell Motel on the east bank of Mobile Say, the brink crumbled away under her hesitant footstep. With a soft harsh almost supersonic shriek, like a gaffed rabbit, she fell. We stayed there three days and nights. Clothes were clumsy devices you put on to walk down the road to eat. We ate like barracudas. We slept twined in the deep innocence of the slumber you remember from childhood. We could look at each other and start laughing for no reason. Roughhouse could turn to passion, to sweetness, to comedy, to passion again.

“How about this here girl right now?” I asked her. “Do much thinking about her while you were floating out there?”

“I’ve been thinking about her for days,” she said. She rolled toward me, bracing herself on her elbow. The moon was slightly behind her, making a furry silver line that followed the deep cleft at her waist, then rose into the full and astonishing curve of her hip. I traced the line with my fingertips. All essential meaning can exist within that ripe convexity. All importance. Or, with an implicit irony, it can be all of cheapness and abuse. The gift is in the manner of the using.

“Reach any conclusions?”

“I’ve boiled them all down, sort of. Trav, darling, when I was a skinny brown kid racing around this little island, I had a sense of my own rightness. I had a feeling of access to life, as if it would all open up for me, in its own time. God knows how or why it soured, or why I slammed all the doors, why I had such a conviction of evil. Maybe a psychiatrist could track it down. But now it’s like it used to be for me. I’m alive once more. And that is a gift from you, of course. But certainly not because you were being terribly terribly generous about everything.”

“Wasn’t I?”

She snorted. “A very clever and very sneaky seduction, McGee. You let me hang myself with my own rope. Philanthropy, you wretch? Ho! What if the figure was a lot less than Greek, dear? Or the eyes slightly crossed?”

“Well, I did suspect certain hidden qualities, Iz. You know, some people have a natural left hook, and some are born with the ability to throw the fast ball, and others can wiggle their ears. I just had the feeling that if you could ever be…”

“Hush. Can’t you be serious?”

“If you want. It wasn’t all acquisition. It just seemed such a hell of a waste of yourself. And I started to like you.”

“I can be honest?”

“Please.”

“Trav, one very fundamental part of me, the primitive part I guess, the flesh and bones and blood-that part keeps telling me I can’t ever let you go, that I have to have you for always, that I must do anything to keep you near me.”

“Hmmm.”

“Don’t get alarmed, dear. All the rest of me says nonsense. We could never make it work, not on any basis. We are different sorts. I intellectualize things. I am really quite a sober and sedate and earnest woman, present appearances to the contrary. You are a very charming pagan, Mister McGee. And I thank you with all my heart for bringing me into my pagan time. I needed it, to counteract all the other. I needed it to swing me back to some kind of a norm, later on. But this life is more near your norm than it could ever be near mine. I am hooked on duty. Some kind of duty. Some kind of energetic worth. It’s the Puritan twitch, inescapable for me, and perhaps in some much more subtle way, inescapable in a smaller sense for you too. You keep having to deny things in yourself, but you do it more readily than I.”

“More practice.”

“No. It is a more fundamental thing than that. Darling, I relish you. I hunger for you. I can’t have enough of lovemaking, as you possibly have noticed. I’m grateful to you. But I don’t love you. You’re a friend, showing me a strange country. And now I begin to see the little signs that this is going to end. You’ve started to think of leaving. No, don’t tell me exactly when.”

“One of these days.”

“I will be desolated. I will cry my eyes out. I’ll ache for you. But I will know it has to be.”

“What are your plans?”

“I don’t know, darling. I’m beginning to get glimmerings of a few. I have to sort them out. I’m going to stay right here, alone. Jigger will be in from Nassau every Monday with supplies. I don’t mind being alone. It will be a chance for consecutive thought, without all these constant trivial interruptions. I shall end up doing something terribly worthwhile, Trav. But I shall find a man to share that kind of life. Somewhere. Somehow. I think I know what to look for and how to look now. But you will be forever dear to me. You know that.”

“In time of trouble, you know where…”

“Of course, darling.” She stretched and yawned in tawny luxury. “Where’ll we go, sweetie? Your place or mine?”

“I remember you bitching this morning about your only toothbrush being at my place.”

“So be it,” she said.

I took her hand and pulled her up and we walked into the water and swam toward the protected cove where my barge-type houseboat, the Busted Flush, swung on two hooks with plenty of scope. When we had arrived at Bahia Mar, she had gotten pretty edgy about staying with me aboard the boat amid so many people who knew me.

She knew they would accept her at whatever value she wanted to put on herself, but it made her less certain of what was happening to her, so I put in two days of hard labor checking the boat out for a cruise. Fortunately there was a very fine long-range forecast, so I could risk the Stream as soon as the Flush was ready to go. The little twin diesels are reliable, and she can take a lot more sea than any of the pontoon-type houseboats, of course, but you have to look for better weather than if you were operating a cruiser. She didn’t really begin to enjoy the Sybaritic luxury of the craft until we were well on our way toward Bimini.

l shortened my reach and we swam in perfect unison out to the cove, and to the boarding ladder. I started the generator to give us lights and water. We rinsed the salt off by taking a stingily cooperative shower in the huge stall, to conserve my dwindling supply.

As I was placidly admiring her as she was scrubbing her teeth, she frowned at me in the mirror and said, out of green foam, “What will happen to her?”

It was a question which could come at any time. It was almost ritual for us. The same question and the same answer. It was the ghost we lived with and talked about. We did not talk about the other ghosts, the big blonde wife whose body they found in the pretentious mausoleum Jass Yeoman had built for the disinterred bodies of his parents, and for himself and his wife, or about the screaming brother buried under the rolling crush of broken stone, or the old man flapping his life away amid the wire baskets and weekend specials, or the crushed skull, or the oiled deftness of the snake.

“It’s a delicate situation for her. It will be delayed until after the child is born. There could be less heat by then. My guess would be a plea of guilty to murder second. Just for the old man. They don’t have enough to go after her on the other two. I hope it’s a guilty plea. Then I won’t have to go out.”

“How long would they give her?”

“Ten years to life, maybe.”

She sighed and stared at me, then bent back to her scrubbing. These were our sad ghosts, and they made life sweeter somehow by keeping us aware of what a precarious gift it is. And when life seems sweet, love is an exaltation.

After she had sighed and sighed her way down into her cozy little buzzing sound of deepest sleep-her sign that all that there was to give had been entirely taken-I left the master stateroom and clambered up to the sun deck and stretched out naked under a billion stars. Maybe the talk had done it. Tonight the lovemaking had had that first tart sweetness of impending goodby. And there would be a little more of that flavor from now on.

Maybe, before we parted, I would tell her-or try to tell her-how she, in her own way, had mended me. A different fellow had gone out there to Esmerelda, with the bad nerves and the flying twitches and the guilts and remorses and the feeling of being savagely and forever alone. No guilts this time. Not with this one. Remorse is the ultimate in self-abuse.

So under the stars I let myself think of that old man a little bit. That old Jasper Yeoman. There was the truly terrible guilt, that ever present knowledge of the incest the world most heartily despises.

Perhaps he was glad to die, and perhaps he realized his Dolores had killed him. Maybe he was glad dying came so hard, by her hand. Maybe, in his times of lucidity between the terrible spasms of the poison, he kept himself from saying her name and how she had done it.

It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend.

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Table of Contents

Travis McGee #3 A Purple Place For DyingJohn D. MacDonaldA PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING 13TWO