The Long Lavender Look

The Long Lavender Look

John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee #12 The Long Lavender Look

John D. MacDonald

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her?

- MICHEL EYQUEM DE MONTAIGNE

One

LATE April… Ten o’clock at night. Hustling south on Florida 112 through the eastern section of Cypress County, about twenty miles from the intersection of 112 and the Tamiami Trail.

So maybe I was pushing old Miss Agnes along a little too fast. Narrow macadam. Stars above, and some wisps of ground mist below. But not much of it, and not often.

The big tires of the old blue Rolls pickup rumbled along the roughened surface. Big black drainage canal paralleling the road on the left side. Now and then an old wooden bridge arching across the canal to serve one of the shacky little frame houses tucked back in the swamp and skeeter country. No traffic. And it had been a long long day, and I was anxious to get back to Lauderdale, to Bahia Mar, to the Busted Flush, to a long hot shower and a long cold drink and a long deep sleep.

I had the special one-mile spots turned on. They are bracketed low on the massive front bumper. Essential for fast running through the balmy Florida nights on the straight narrow back roads, because her own headlights are feeble and set too high.

Meyer, beside me, was in a semidoze. We’d been to the wedding of the daughter of an old friend, at the fish camp he owns on Lake Passkokee. It is a very seldom thing to be able to drink champagne, catch a nine-pound bass, and kiss a bride all within the same hour. Meyer had been giving me one of his lectures on the marital condition.

So I was whipping along, but alert for the wildlife. I hate to kill a raccoon. Urban Florida is using the rabies myth to justify wiping them out, with guns, traps, and poison. The average raccoon is more affable, intelligent, and tidy than the average meathead who wants them eliminated, and is usually a lot better looking.

It is both sad and ironic that the areas where the raccoon are obliterated are soon overrun with snakes.

I was alert for any reflection of my headlights in animal eyes in the darkness of the shoulders of the road, for any dark shape moving out into the long reach of the beams.

But I wasn’t prepared for the creature of the night that suddenly appeared out of the blackness, heading from left to right, at a headlong run. At eighty, you are covering about a hundred and twenty feet per second. She was perhaps sixty feet in front of the car when I first saw her. So half of one second later, when I last saw her, she was maybe ten inches from the flare of my front right fender, and that ten inches was the product of the first effect of my reaction time. Ten inches of living space instead of that bone-crunching, flesh-smashing thud which, once heard, lingers forever in the part of the mind where echoes live.

And I became very busy with Miss Agnes. She put her back end onto the left shoulder, and then onto the right shoulder. The swinging headlights showed me the road once in a while. I could not risk touching the brake. This was the desperate game of steering with the skid each time, and feeding her a morsel of gas for traction whenever she was coming back into alignment with the highway. I knew I had it whipped, and knew that each swing was less extreme.

Then a rear tire went and I lost her for good. The back end came around and there was a shriek of rubber, crashing of brush, a bright cracking explosion inside my skull, and I was vaguely aware of being underwater, disoriented, tangled in strange objects, and aware of the fact that it was not a very good place to be. I did not feel any alarm. Just a mild distaste, an irritation with my situation.

Something started grabbing at me and I tried to make it let go. Then I was up in the world of air again, and being dragged up a slope; coughing and gagging, thinking that it was a lot more comfortable back under the water.

“You all right, Trav? Are you all right?”

I couldn’t answer until I could stop retching and coughing. “I don’t know yet.”

Meyer helped me up. I stood, sopping wet, on the gravelly shoulder and flexed all the more useful parts and muscles. There was a strange glow in the black water. I realized Miss Agnes’s lights were still on, and she had to be ten feet under. The light went off abruptly as the water shorted her out.

I found a couple of tender places where I had hit the wheel and the door, and a throbbing lump on my head, dead center, just above the hairline.

“And how are you?” I asked Meyer.

“I’m susceptible to infections of the upper respiratory tract, and I’d like to lose some weight. Otherwise, pretty good.”

“In a little while I think I’m going to start being glad you came along for the ride.”

“Maybe you’d have gotten out by yourself.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I’d rather think so. Excuse me. Otherwise I have to share the responsibility for all your future acts.”

“Do I ever do anything you wouldn’t do, Meyer?”

“I could make a list?”

That was when the reaction hit. A nice little case of the yips and shudders. And a pair of macaroni knees. I sat down gently on the shoulder of the road, wrapped my arms around my legs, and rested my forehead on my wet knees.

“Are you all right, Trav?”

“You keep asking me that. I think I will be very fine and very dandy. Maybe five or ten minutes from now.”

It seemed very very quiet. The bugs were beginning to find us. A night bird yawped way back in the marshland. Vision had adjusted to the very pale wash of starlight on the road and on the black glass surface of the drainage canal.

Miss Agnes was down there, resting on her side, facing in the direction from which we had come, driver’s side down. Sorry, old lady. We gave it a good try, and damned near made it. Except for the tire going, you did your usual best. Staunch, solid, and, in a very dignified way, obedient. Even in extremis, you managed to keep from killing me.

I got up and gagged and tossed up half a cup of swamp water. Before he could ask me again, I told Meyer I felt much improved. But irritable.

“What I would dearly like to do,” I said, “is go back and find that moronic female, raise some angry welts on her rear end, and try to teach her to breathe under water.”

“Female?”

“You didn’t see her?” I asked him.

“I was dreaming that I, personally Meyer, had solved the gold drain dilemma, and I was addressing all the gnomes of Zurich. Then I woke up and we were going sideways. I found the sensation unpleasant.”

“She ran across in front of us. Very close. If I hadn’t had time to begin to react, I’d have boosted her with the right front fender, and she would be a piece of dead meat in a treetop back there on the right side of the road.”

“Please don’t tell me something.”

“Don’t tell you what?”

“Tell me she was a shrunken old crone. Or tell me she looked exactly like Arnold Palmer. Or even tell me you didn’t get a good look at her. Please?”

I closed my eyes and reran the episode on my little home screen inside my head. Replay is always pretty good. It has to be. Lead the kind of life where things happen very quickly and very unexpectedly, and sometimes lethally, and you learn to keep the input wide open. It improves the odds.

“I’d peg her at early to middle twenties. Black or dark brown hair, that would maybe have been shoulder length if she wasn’t running like hell. She had some kind of ribbon or one of those plastic bands on her hair. Not chunky, but solid. Impression of good health. Not very tall. Hmm. Barefoot? I don’t really know. Maybe not, unless she’s got feet like rhino hide. Wearing a short thing, patterned. Flower pattern? Some kind of pattern. Lightweight material. Maybe one of those mini-nightgowns. Open down the front and at the throat, so that it was streaming out behind her, like her dark hair. Naked, I think. Maybe a pair of sheer little briefs, but it could have been just white hide in contrast to the suntanned rest of her. Caught a glint of something on one wrist. Bracelet or watch strap. She was running well, running hard, getting her knees up, getting a good swing of her arms into it. A flavor of being scared, but not in panic. And not winded. Mouth closed. I think she had her jaw clamped. Determination. She was running like hell, but away from something, not after it. If she started a tenth of a second earlier, we’d be rolling east on the Trail by now. A tenth of a second later, and she’d be one dead young lady, and I could have racked Miss Agnes up a little more solidly, and maybe you or I or both of us would be historical figures. Sorry, Meyer. Young and interestingly put together, and perhaps even pretty.”

He sighed. “McGee, have you ever wondered if you don’t emit some sort of subliminal aroma, a veritable dog whistle among scents? I have read about the role that some scent we cannot even detect plays in the reproductive cycle of the moth. The scientists spread some of it on a tree limb miles from nowhere, and within the hour there were hundreds upon hundreds of…”

He stopped as we both saw the faraway, oncoming lights. It seemed a long time before they were close enough for us to hear the drone of the engine. We stepped into the roadway and began waving our arms. The sedan faltered, and then the driver floored it and it slammed on by, accelerating. Ohio license. We did not look like people anybody would want to pick up on a dark night on a very lonely road.

“I was wearing my best smile,” Meyer said sadly. We discussed probabilities and possibilities. Twenty miles of empty road from there to the Tamiami Trail. And, in the other direction, about ten miles back to a crossroads with darkened store, darkened gas station. We walked back and I tried to pinpoint the place where the girl had come busting out into the lights, but it was impossible to read black skid marks on black macadam. No lights from any house on either side. No little wooden bridge. No driveway. Wait for a ride and get chewed bloody. So start the long twenty miles and hit the first place that shows a light. Or maybe get a ride. A remote maybe.

Before we left we marked Miss Agnes’s watery resting place by wedging a long heavy broken limb down into the mud and jamming an aluminum beer can onto it. Miracle metal. Indestructible. Some day the rows of glittering cans will be piled so high beside the roads that they will hide the billboards which advertise the drinkables which come in the aluminum cans.

Just before we left I had the final wrench of nausea and tossed up the final cup of ditchwater. We kept to the middle of the road and found a fair pace. By the time our shoes stopped making sloppy noises, we were swinging along in good style.

“Four miles an hour,” Meyer said. “If we could do it without taking a break, five hours to the Tamiami Trail. By now it must be quarter to eleven. Quarter to four in the morning. But we’ll have to take a few breaks. Add an hour and a half, let’s say. Hmm. Five-fifteen.”

Scuff and clump of shoes on the blacktop. Keening orchestras of tree toads and peepers. Gu-roomp of a bullfrog. Whine song of the hungry mosquito keeping pace, then a whish of the fly whisk improvised from a leafy roadside weed. Jet going over, too high to pick out the lights. Startled caw and panic-flapping of a night bird working the canal for his dinner. And once, the eerie, faraway scream of a Florida panther.

The second car barreled by at very high speed, ignoring us completely, as did an old truck heading north a few minutes later.

But a good old Ford pickup truck came clattering and banging along, making the anguished sounds of fifteen years of bad roads, heavy duty, neglect, and a brave start on its second or third trip around the speedometer. One headlight was winking on and off. It slowed down as if to stop a little beyond us. We were over on the left shoulder. I could see a burly figure at the wheel.

When it was even with us, there was a flamewink at the driver’s window, a great flat unechoing bang, and a pluck of wind an inch or less from my right ear. When you’ve been shot at before, even only once, that distinctive sound which you can hear only when you are right in front of the muzzle, is unmistakable. And if you have heard that sound several times, and you are still alive, it means that your reflexes are in good order. I had hooked Meyer around the waist with my left arm and I was charging like a lineman when I heard the second bang. We tumbled down the weedy slope into the muddy shallows of the canal. The truck went creaking and thumping along, picking up laborious speed, leaving a smell of cordite and hot halfburned oil in the night air.

“Glory be!” said Meyer.

We were half in the water. We pulled ourselves up the slope like clumsy alligators.

“They carry guns and they get smashed and they shoot holes in the road signs,” I said.

“And they scare hitchhikers and laugh like anything?”

“The slug was within an inch of my ear, old friend.”

“How could you know that?”

“They make a little kind of thupping sound, which would come at the same time as the bang, so if it was further away from my ear, I wouldn’t have heard it. If he’d fired from a hundred yards away, you’d have heard it, too. And if it had been a sniper with a rifle from five hundred yards, we’d have heard a whirr and a thup and then the shot.”

“Thank you, Travis, for the information I hope never to need.”

He started to clamber the rest of the way up and I grabbed him and pulled him back. “Rest awhile, Meyer.”

“Reason?”

“If we assume it is sort of a hobby, like jacking deer, he is rattling on out of our lives, singing old drinking songs. If it was a real and serious intent, for reasons unknown, he will be coming back. We couldn’t find where the young lady busted out of the brush, but we didn’t have headlights. He does, and he may be able to see where we busted the weeds. So now we move along the slope here about thirty feet to the south and wait some more.”

We made our move, found a more gradual slope where we didn’t have to keep our feet in the water. Settled down, and heard the truck coming back. Evidently he had to go some distance to find a turnaround place. Heard him slow down. Saw lights against the grasses a couple of feet above our heads. Lights moved on beyond us, the truck slowing down to a walk. Stopped. The engine idled raggedly. I wormed up to where I could part the grasses and look at the rear end of the truck. Feeble light shone on a mud-smeared Florida plate. Couldn’t read any of it. Engine and lights were turned off. Right-hand wheels were on the shoulder. Silence.

I eased back down, mouth close to Meyer’s ear. “He better not, have a flashlight.”

Silence. The bugs and frogs gradually resumed their night singing. I held my breath, straining to hear any sound. Jumped at the sudden rusty bang of the truck door.

I reached cautiously down, fingered up a daub of mud, smeared my face, wormed up the slope again. Could make out the truck, an angular shadow in the starlight, twenty feet away.

“Orville! You hear me, Orville?” A husky shout, yet secretive. A man shouting in a whisper. “You all alone now, boy. I kilt me that big Hutch, right? Dead or close to it, boy. Answer me, Orville, damn you to hell!”

I did not like the idea of announcing that there was nobody here named Orville. Or Hutch.

Long silence. “Orville? We can make a deal. I got to figure you can hear me. You wedge that body down good, hear? Stake it into the mud. Tomorrow you call me on the telephone, hear? We can set up a place we can meet and talk it all out, someplace with enough people nearby neither of us has to feel edgy.”

I heard a distant, oncoming motor sound. The truck door slammed again. Sick slow whine of the starter under the urging of the fading battery. Sudden rough roar, backfire, lights on, and away he went. Could be two of them, one staying behind and waiting, crouched down on the slope, aching to put a hole in old Orville.

I told Meyer to stay put. Just as the northbound sedan went by soon to overtake the truck, I used the noise and wind of passage to cover my sounds as I bounded up and ran north along the shoulder. I had kept my eyes squeezed tightly shut to protect my night vision. If anyone were in wait, I hoped they had not done the same. I dived over the slope just where the truck had been parked, caught myself short of the water. Nobody.

Climbed back up onto the road. Got Meyer up onto the road. Made good time southward, made about three hundred yards, stopping three or four times to listen to see if the truck was easing back with the lights out.

Found a reasonably open place on the west side of the road, across from the canal. Worked into the shadows, pushed through a thicket. Found open space under a big Australian pine. Both of us sat on the springy bed of brown needles, backs against the bole of the big tree. Overhead a mockingbird was sweetly, fluently warning all other mockingbirds to stay the hell away from his turf, his nest, his lady, and his kids.

Meyer stopped breathing as audibly as before and said, “It is very unusual to be shot at on a lonely road. It is very unusual to have a girl run across a lonely road late at night. I would say we’d covered close to four miles from the point where Agnes sleeps. The truck came from that direction. Perfectly reasonable to assume some connection.”

“Don’t upset me with logic.”

“A deal has a commercial implication. The marksman was cruising along looking for Orville and Hutch. He did not want to make a deal with both of them. He knew they were on foot, knew they were heading south. Our sizes must be a rough match. And it is not a pedestrian area.”

“And Hutch,” I added, “was the taller, and the biggest threat, and I moved so fast he thought he’d shot me in the face. And, if he had a good, plausible, logical reason for killing Hutch, he wouldn’t have asked Orville to stuff the body into the canal and stake it down.”

“And,” said Meyer, “were I Orville, I would be a little queasy about making a date with that fellow.”

“Ready to go?”

“We should, I guess, before the mosquitos remove the rest of the blood.”

“And when anything comes from any direction, we flatten out in the brush on this side of the road.”

“I think I will try to enjoy the walk, McGee.”

“But your schedule is way the hell off.”

So we walked. And were euphoric and silly in the jungly night. Being alive is like fine wine, when you have damned near drowned and nearly been shot in the face. Perhaps a change of angle of one degree at the muzzle would have put that slug through the bridge of my nose. So we swung along and told fatuous jokes and old lies and sometimes sang awhile.

Two

AT THE first light of oncoming dawn, just when the trees were beginning to assume shape and identity, we came out at the intersection of Florida 112 and the Tamiami Trail. There was a big service station and garage across the main highway. The night lights were on. The sign over the office door said:

MGR: AL STOREY

Traffic was infrequent, and very fast. I was heartened to see a squat, muscular wrecker with big duals on the rear, and a derrick with a power hoist It was going to take muscle to pluck Miss Agnes out of the canal. The more muscle, the less damage to her.

We looked the place over. Coke machine and a coin dispenser for candy bars and cheese crackers and such. I found a piece of wire and picked the lock on the men’s room. We washed up. There‘ was no other building within sight. Management had thoughtfully provided a round cement table and benches off to one side, with a furled beach umbrella stuck down through the hole in the middle of the table.

As half an orange sun appeared over the flat horizon, off in the direction of Miami, we sat at the table and ate our coin-slot breakfast and spread the contents of the wallets on the cement top to dry. Licenses and money. The mosquitoes had welted us abundantly, but I knew the evidence would disappear quickly. There is a kind of semi-immunity you acquire if you live long enough in mosquito country. The itch is caused by the blood-thinner they inject, so they can suck the mixed fluids up their narrow snouts. But the redbug bites are something else. No immunity there. We both had them from ankles to groin. The itch of the chigger bite lasts so long that the mythology says they lay eggs under the skin. Not so. It is a very savage itch, and the only way to cut the weeks down to a few days is to use any preparation containing a nerve-deadening agent, along with a cortisone spray. The sun warmed us and began to dry the money. More cars and trucks began to barrel through with fading Doppler whine. A flock of ground doves policed the area. I scratched the chigger bites and thought of a big deep bed with clean white sheets.

At twenty of seven an oncoming VW panel delivery slowed and turned in and parked on the other side of the building. Two men in it, both staring at us as they passed out of sight. The money and papers were dry enough. We gathered them up and started toward the front of the place and met one of the men at the corner of the building. A spry wiry fifty. Khakis, baseball cap, with AL embroidered in red over the shirt pocket. I could hear the twang-ing and banging as the other man was sliding the big overhead doors up.

“You broke down someplace?” Al asked. It was complimentary. We did not look as if we could afford to operate a bicycle.

“We went into the canal last night, a ways up 112.”

“Lots of them do,” said Al. “Narrer road with a lot of lumps in it. Lots of them don’t get out of the car neither. Let me get the place opened up, and when my other man comes on we’ll see about getting you out.”

“Hope you don’t mind,” I said. “I slipped the lock on your men’s room so we could clean up.”

He gave me a quick and narrow look and went quickly to the door to the men’s room and inspected the lock. He found the right key in his pocket and tried it. “Long as you didn’t bust nothing, okay. How’d you do it?”

“Piece of wire.”

“That there’s supposed to be a good lock.”

“If it was, I couldn’t get in. It looks good, but it’s builders’ junk. If you’ve got the same junk on your main doors, you better get them changed.”

With a certain suspicion and reluctance he thanked me and hurried off to get his station set up. I wandered around. The place was well run. Tidy and clean, tools in the right places, paperwork apparently under control. The other fellow was big and young. It said TERRY on his pocket. Snug trousers and tapered shirt and big shoulders. Face that could have looked handsome in a rugged way, but the eyes were set too close together, and the chin receded just enough to keep the mouth ajar. So he merely looked tough, coarse, and dumb. They were beginning to get some gas trade and some diesel fuel business.

Then a Highway Patrol sedan stopped at the near island. Al went to take care of it, then called and waved me over. The trooper was older than average, and heavier than average, with a broad red face and very large dark sunglasses.

He asked me if I was the owner and then if I had my license and registration. Then he sighed and dug around for the proper form and we went inside the station and used Al’s desk.

After copying the information off my license, he studied the registration. Miss Agnes’s age apparently upset him. “A Rolls Royce what?”

“Well, a custom pickup. I mean somebody turned it into a pickup truck a long time back.”

“Is it worth all the trouble and the expense to get it out of where it is, McGee?”

“She… uh… it has a certain sentimental value.”

“Pass the inspection? Got the sticker on the windshield?”

“All in order, officer.”

He sighed again. “Okay. Any other vehicle volved?”

“No.”

“Where and when did it happen?”

“About twenty miles north of here on Route 112. A little after ten o’clock last night. I was heading south.”

“How fast?”

“Sixty to sixty-five.”

“In a crock that old?”

“She’s very able, officer.”

“You were driving and your friend there was with you. And you were going sixty-five and no other vehicles were involved and you put it into the canal?”

“Not exactly like that. A woman ran across the road directly in front of me. She came out of nowhere. I had to swerve to keep from hitting her.”

“Sure you didn’t?”

“Absolutely positive. I nearly lost it right there. I was all over the road trying to bring my car out of it. I finally started to make it. Then a rear tire blew and that did it. She went in fairly easy. It’s in about ten feet of water, aiming back the way we came, resting on the left side. We got out of it. Then we came here and waited until Al showed up to open up.”

“Point of departure and destination.”

“We were coming from Lake Passkokee and going home to Lauderdale.”

“Twenty miles north from here would put you in Cypress County. Here. This copy is yours. Al will probably call them on his radio when he’s in range. If Sher’f Norm Hyzer has a car come out to look it over, this is your proof you turned in the accident report. And maybe your insurance will want to take a look at it, too.”

He went out to his car. I saw him talk into the hand mike and knew he was checking in to make sure there was nothing out on the car or the driver. It is standard procedure and seldom forgotten, as nothing makes a cop look sillier than finding out later that the plausible stranger is wanted for a bank job.

He talked for a long time, then reached in and hung the mike up, shoved his hat back a little with one paw, and unholstered the Police Positive with the other. “Okay. Both of you. Face down. Spread it out. Grab the back of your neck.”

Quick, rough, thorough, and very cautious. Officer Nagle was a competent cop.

“What’d they do, Beef?” Al asked.

“I wouldn’t hardly know. All I know is, Norm wants ‘em, and he’ll be coming right along to get them.”

“Isn’t there something about rights?” I asked humbly.

“If I was the arresting officer, I’d read you what it says on the little card, McGee. But all I’m doing is detaining you, a professional favor for the sher’f of Cypress County. Move back there in the shade, and lean against the wall. Move a little further apart from each other, boys. That’s fine.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Meyer said.

He looked owlishly astonished. “Me? How can I be making a mistake doing what the man asks me to do, asks me nice? Any kind of mistake in this is all Norm Hyzer’s, and I hear he doesn’t make too many. Int that right, Al?”

“They seem to keep on electing him up there,” Al said. From the tone I guessed he wasn’t a Hyzer fan. He headed out to the island to take care of a dusty Buick with a noisy fan belt. The big young one named Terry stood and stared at us with vacuous, adenoidal intensity.

A blue Rambler came down Route 112, waited at the stop sign, then came across and parked beside the station. A broad brown man with a white grin got out. It said HENRY over the pocket of his coveralls. “Hey there, Beef. What’s going on?”

“How come you can’t hardly ever get here on time?” Al demanded.

“Now look, honest, I had a bad night, and I clean slept right through that alarm again, and…”

“And Hummer was promised the Olds at ten-thirty and you haven’t even started on the brake job yet, so don’t stand around asking dumb questions. I don’t want Hummer so damn mad he starts yelling in my face again. He sprays spit.”

Time passed. Traffic was picking up, but visibly and audibly slowing at the sight of the patrol car with the distinctive blue roof lights. Meyer started to say something to me, and Beef Nagle said politely that he’d rather we didn’t carry on any conversation.

At last I heard the thin distant scream of an approaching siren. It came down 112, slowed a little at the sign and plunged across, swung and left rubber on the apron in a dramatic smoking stop. Green sedan with a red flasher on the roof. Cypress County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Norman L. Hyzer. The man who climbed out quickly from behind the wheel wore a khaki uniform that said DEPUTY SHERIFF on the shoulder patch. Long lumpy face, sallow complexion, blond-red hair, and glasses with steel rims that did not give him the slightest look of bookish introspection.

So the other one had to be Hyzer. Late forties. Tall and slender and very erect. Black suit, shiny black shoes, crisp white shirt, dark blue necktie, gold wedding ring, white Stetson. He had dark hair and noble-hero face, expressionless. He kept the mouth pinched shut. The eyes were very blue, and his examination of each of us was long, intensive, unrevealing.

Next he examined the pocket-contents Nagle had taken from us, and the accident report Nagle had filled out. The occupations as listed on the Florida driver’s licenses seemed to intrigue him. “Salvage consultant?” he said in a deep, soft voice, barely audible over traffic sounds. “Economist?”

“Unlikely as it may seem at the moment,” said Meyer in his best guest-lecture delivery. It didn’t match the bristled jowls, the mud-stained clothes and the sorry shoes.

“You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to legal counsel. If you cannot employ an attorney, one will be provided for you. If you choose to answer questions, anything you say may be used in evidence against you. Do you understand, McGee? Do you understand, Meyer?”

“We understand,” I said. “We’ll answer anything you want to ask. But it would be nice to know the charge.”

“Suspicion of premeditated murder.” His face showed nothing. Nothing at all regional about his voice. Not your stock Florida sheriff by any means. A lot of ice-cold class. Made me wonder why he was content to be sheriff of Cypress County, a lot of swamp and palmetto and maybe, by straining hard, twenty thousand people. “Get into the cruiser.” His deputy opened the rear door and stepped back.

“I’d like to make arrangements about getting my car pulled out of the canal, Sheriff.”

“We’d arrange that in any case, McGee.”

“Can I show this man where it is?”

“We know where it is.” Al said, with a mocking smile, “And no damn need of my asking for the business, is there, Sher’f?”

“I hardly think so, Mr. Storey.”

“Who got killed?” big Terry asked.

Hyzer hesitated, then said, “Frank Baither.”

“Overdue,” said Al Storey.

We got in. Steel mesh between us and the two in front. Safety glass at the sides, with no cranks and no inside door handles. The deputy picked a hole in the traffic and scatted across, and barreled it on up to ninety. Hyzer sat erect, silent, and motionless. A few miles along the road an egret came out of the brush on the canal side, tried for altitude and didn’t quite make it. It thudded against the high right corner of roof and windshield. I looked back and saw the white feathers falling to the roadbed like strange snow.

We were in a cage that smelled of green disinfectant and last week’s vomit, and was going too fast. Meyer rode with his hands loosely clasped in his lap, eyes closed, half smile on his mouth, swaying and bouncing to the hard movements of the sedan.

Far ahead I saw vehicles and activity. The deputy waited a long time, then braked hard and pulled over. They both got out, banged the doors shut, and walked up to where a big blue-and-white wrecker was working. It was backed close to the edge of the canal. Traffic was blocked in both directions. On the side door of the wrecker was printed JOHNNY’S MAIN STREET SERVICE. The cable stretched down into black water, under tension as the big winch wound it up. There were some shouts and arm-waving. Then I saw the gleaming, stately, angular contours of the front of Miss Agnes appear.

“They’re doing it just right,” I told Meyer. “Stood her up on the back end and the angle brought the wheels right onto the bank.”

“Hooray” he muttered.

“They’ve got the wheels cramped right, so they can bring her up and out in one swing.”

“How marvelous.”

“Usually you enjoy seeing something done well, Meyer.”

“I do not like this, not any part of this.”

Neither did I, and maybe not for the same reasons. The wrecker eased forward and brought Miss Agnes out swiftly, gently, and deftly. Made the turn away from us, and pulled over onto the shoulder. The few cars and trucks that had waited were waved on. Hyzer spent a long time checking over old Miss Agnes. The cruiser was getting up to baking temperature inside, sweat popping out and rolling down.

At last they came back and got in. I asked about damage. Nobody answered. On the way to Cypress City we swung out and passed Miss Agnes. She looked a little crumpled around the corners and there were bright green strings of algae across her windshield and hood. I was happy to see that somebody had been sportsman enough to put the spare on. It would have hurt a little to see her clopping along on the rim.

We couldn’t give answers until they came up with the questions. And then it would be apologies, smiles, handshakes.

Maybe.

Three

IT WAS a little after noon when a fat elderly deputy brought me a cold and greasy cheeseburger wrapped in waxed paper, and a cardboard container of tepid coffee with too much sugar and cream already in it.

“Why the delay?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

“Beats me, friend,” he said, and went out and locked the door behind him. It was a small room with a heavy table bolted to the floor, heavy benches bolted to the plaster walls, wire mesh over the ceiling light and over the single window. The window was on the second floor of the Moorish structure. It looked out across a narrow courtyard at another wing of the U-shaped building. The floor of the room was asphalt tile in a mottled tan and green. The walls were yellow tan. I had opened a shallow drawer in the heavy table and found it full of dead cigar stubs and burned matches. Distant sounds of traffic. Radio rock in the distance, on a cheap set. Bird sounds. The room was too warm. I improvised a pillow by rolling my shoes in my shirt, stretched out on the bench, and dozed off.

“Come on,” said the deputy with the steel glasses. I stretched and yawned, rolled the stiffness out of my shoulders, worked my way into the shirt and shoes.

“You got a name?” I asked him.

“Billy. Billy Cable.”

“From around here?”

“All my life. He’s waiting on us. Come on.”

He directed me ahead of him to different stairs than I had used coming up. “He said to take you the long way around.”

The long way around included a short side trip into the county jail. Billy said this was a brand new part of it, new just three years ago. And these were the maximum security cells. Very bright overhead lights. About five by eight, with a bunk, a sink a toilet. Meyer sat on the low bunk, hunched forward, head bowed, forearms braced on his knees. The thick, slow, half-clotted blood dripped from his mouth to the cement between his bare feet, into a small puddle as big around as a saucer.

I said his name. He looked up slowly, tilting his head to bring the one slit of one eye to bear. The crushed mouth said, “I still don’t like any part of it, McGee.”

As I turned on Billy he moved back swiftly, hand on the holster. “Easy now. Easy.” he said.

“Why, goddammit!”

“You better ask him about that when you see him, McGee.”

Hyzer’s office was austere. Bare walls, bare desktop, blue carpeting. Efficient air conditioning made it very chilly. I was directed to a straight chair placed about six feet back from the edge of Hyzer’s desk, which put me in almost the exact center of the room. A very large deputy sat on another straight chair placed against the wall just inside the door. He looked vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t come up with the association. Big freckled arms folded. Belly sagging over the belt. Broad, soft, drowsy face.

When I was seated, Sheriff Norman Hyzer said, “This session is being recorded on magnetic tape. When it is transcribed some minor editing will be done to eliminate repetitions. If you have any question regarding the accuracy of the transcription, you will be permitted to listen to the pertinent portion of the recording to satisfy yourself.”

“May I make a comment for the record?”

“Go right ahead.”

“My friend Meyer is a reputable economist internationally known in his field. He is a gentle person, without malice or enemies, or police record of any kind. We planned to cooperate with you, Sheriff. Get it settled and be on our way. But now you have bought the whole package, Hyzer. I am going to personally nail you to the wall, if it takes five years. From now on I’m coming at you. I’m bringing it to you.”

The big deputy sighed and belched. Hyzer opened his pocket notebook. “First interrogation of Travis McGee. Fourteen-forty hours. April 24. Pritchard monitoring tape. Sturnevan witnessing interrogation. Now then. From whom did you hear that Frank Baither had been, or was about to be, released from Raiford State Prison, and, to the best of your recollection, tell me the date on which you received this information?”

“The only previous time in my life I ever heard the name Frank Baither was when you said that name this morning in front of Al’s service station, Hyzer.”

“Was there a third man with you last night?”

“You’re playing your game, Hyzer. The officer of the law. The professional. If you were a professional instead of a swamp county ham actor, you’d find out who we are, where we were yesterday, and where we were heading. You’d verify the girl running across the road. You’d make a couple of phone calls. Not you. No, sir. Don’t confuse yourself with logic. Net result is you aren’t going to play sheriff much longer.”

“An unidentified woman ran across the road. We found the place where she crouched in the ditch. Bare footprints in the mud. A place where she braced herself, making an imprint of the knuckles of her right hand. We used the skid marks to locate the area. Sooner or later we’ll locate her body.”

“She’s dead?”

“She almost got across, but you swerved and probably hit her.”

“Now why did I do that, Sheriff?”

“Because she was with Baither and saw you and got away from you and you people had to hunt her down.”

“With an old Rolls, for God’s sake?”

“And you lost control when a tire blew.”

“Hyzer, you are having dreams and visions and fantasies. I will tell you who to phone at Lake Passkokee. I will pay for the call. He is an old friend. We went to the wedding of his eldest daughter. He has a fish camp. We went bass fishing. There were rods in that car of mine. And three fresh-cleaned bass on ice.”

“Deputy Billy Cable says they were fresh enough.”

“Will you phone?”

“This is a small county, McGee. And I am in a small job at small pay. But I am not a fool. Four years ago you people, along with Frank Baither, planned that job down to the last small detail. And there was just as much at stake now as then. More, because this time you had to kill one you knew of, and one you didn’t. First things first. When the time comes to dismantle your alibi, it will fall apart. You know it and I know it. Please stop making speeches. Answer my questions. Was there a third man with you last night?”

“Meyer and I were alone.”

“Did Meyer finish him off with the ice pick or did you?”

“Hyzer, the car went into the ditch, and we got out of it by great good fortune, and we walked all the way down to the Tamiami Trail to that station where you found us.”

“That is most unlikely, McGee. We had an anonymous call at one in the morning. A man, whispering to disguise his voice. He said Frank Baither phoned him every night at midnight, and if some night there was no call, and no one answered at the Baither place, he was to call the law. He went out there and found Baither still taped to that chair. From that time on I had cars on the road all night. You would have been stopped and questioned.”

“There is very damned little traffic on that Route 112 after dark. And when we saw lights coming, we got out of sight.”

“Now why would you do that?” He smiled for the first time. I think it was a smile. The corners of his mouth went up about a sixteenth of an inch.

So I told him about the nut in the old truck who’d tried to pot us from the truck window, and thought he’d gotten one of us, thought he’d scragged somebody named Hutch, then tried to dicker with the survivor, somebody named Orville. I said it happened about one hour and four miles south of where I had put Miss Agnes into the canal.

“Describe the truck.”

“An old Ford pickup, rough, noisy, and beat. I think it was red. A junker. Not worth licensing.”

He slowly turned the pages of his pocket notebook. “So, being the innocent law-abiding citizens you people claim to be, you made no attempt to report somebody trying to kill you, either at the time or this morning to either Officer Nagle or to me.”

“Sheriff, neither of us saw the man. The plate was too dirty and the light too weak to read the number. You know your own county better than I do. There are probably a lot of fine citizens living back in the boonies off that road. And there are some very rough ones too, native-born swamp rats and poachers, and people that came a long way to find a place where they’re not likely to be found. A long time ago I spent one weekend here in Cypress City, and after I saw how Saturday night was shaping up, I went back to the motel room and put my cash money in the Gideon and went back out with one ten-dollar bill and had what you could call a memorable evening. I don’t really much care if your people kill each other, Hyzer. We were just making certain they didn’t kill us and then feel apologetic because the dead bodies didn’t turn out to be Hutch and Orville. There wasn’t any phone booth handy after that clown drove off in his junk truck. I thought of a way I could attract official attention. We could have walked back four miles and I could have dived down and gotten my tow chain out of the tool compartment and heaved it up over the power lines. Then pretcy soon we would have had the use of the CB radio in the Florida Power and Light truck that would show up. I thought of it, and I thought of making a neighborly call at the next house we came to. But I didn’t like either of those ideas, Sheriff.”

“McGee, you had bad luck, didn’t you? When you lost that car in the canal, you went back to Frank Baither’s place and tried to use his old Ford truck, but the battery was too far gone and you couldn’t get it started: Then, while you were walking, you did some thinking. Somebody was going to spot that car sooner or later, and it could be traced to you, and that was a risk you couldn’t accept. So you had to put something together that sounded good, and get Al Storey to hoist it out of the canal and tow it in.”

“Hyzer, you are one dumb, blind, stubborn man.”

“You have a good act, McGee. So does your partner. Aren’t you wondering, a little, why you can’t sell it to me?”

“More than a little.”

“Then there must be a little more bad luck along with what you already know about. Bad luck or judgment. What could you have forgotten? Think about it.”

I thought. “You must have something you like. I don’t know what it could be. I will tell you one thing. Don’t depend on it. Because whatever it is, it isn’t going to prove what you think it proves, no matter how good it looks.”

“You never saw or heard of Frank Baither in your life?”

“No.”

“You were never inside his house?”

“Never.”

“I am going to describe an exhibit to you. It will be a part of the file I am going to turn over to the State’s attorney. It is an empty envelope addressed to you, at Bahia Mar, date-stamped a week ago, April 17. On the back of it, possibly in your hand, are some notes about highway numbers and street names. It had been folded twice, and had been immersed in water. Do you recognize it from the description?”

“I think so. Yes. I don’t know where you’re going with it, though. Jimmy Ames phoned me last Saturday and invited us to Betsy’s wedding. He said that the road I’d normally take was closed, that a bridge was out. He gave me directions. I reached down into the wastebasket near the phone and took an envelope out and wrote down the directions. Get hold of him at Jimmy’s Fish Camp. He’ll verify it.”

“When the call came in about the Baither murder, Deputy Cable phoned me at my home. I got dressed and drove to the Baither place. I supervised the investigation. After the county medical examiner had authorized the removal of the body I posted Deputy Arnstead there to make certain nobody entered the premises before a more thorough daylight search could be made. I was on my way to participate in that search when the call came from Officer Nagle. After he described you and told me about where your car was, and said you had walked all the way to the Trail, I had no choice but to bring you in for questioning. I returned at eleven-fifteen to the Baither place and, with Deputy Arnstead, completed the search of the house and the area. The envelope was found on the floor of the room where Baither died.”

So what do you do? The big soft sleepy deputy shifted in his chair, creaking it. One thing you do is stop thrashing and flapping. You back up a couple of steps, tuck the elbows in, get the jaw out of range.

“Question?” I asked.

“Can you change your mind about your rights? Yes. At any time.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask.”

“What then?”

“I can tell you exactly what I did with that envelope, where, and when. But I don’t know you, Hyzer. It’s planted evidence. You had somebody dance Meyer around. I don’t like the way you think. I don’t like the way you do your job. If I don’t want to answer any more questions, and if you have nothing to do with the plant, then you are going to be that much more convinced you’ve got the right people to make your case. But if I tell you about the envelope, and you are in on building the case against us any way you can, then you can listen to the truth and go plug the holes in your evidence. I don’t even know if this is going onto tape and, if it is, whether you erase the ones you don’t like. I’m boxed because I can’t figure out what you are, so I don’t know which way to go. You talk about some action four years ago, something we are supposed to have planned with this Baither. Check us out. There’s no record of any convictions.”

“Which means only that up until now you haven’t made any serious mistakes, McGee.”

“So why, Sheriff, would I go to all the trouble of faking up this wedding story and having the fishing gear and the bass in the car, just to come sneaking into your county after dark to knock off a recent graduate of Raiford? Where’s the sense to it?”

“About nine hundred thousand dollars worth of sense, which you are quite aware of. And the chance you might have to go through a roadblock on your way out of the area with it. Misdirection, McGee. A car so conspicuous no fool would use it for this kind of purpose. Fresh bass packed in ice. It should have worked, McGee.”

So another shaft of light in the murk. That much money is worth a lot of care and attention. And it could maybe buy a matched set of Hyzers.

“I think I’d better stop right now, Sheriff. I’d like to phone an attorney.”

“A particular attorney?”

“Yes. In Miami. He’ll accept a collect call.”

“May I have his name?”

“Leonard Sibelius.”

I looked for a change of expression. Nothing. He said, “You can make your call at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, McGee.”

“Why not now? Isn’t that a violation of my civil rights?”

“It would be if you’d been booked, and I’d turned your file over to the State’s attorney for indictment by the grand jury. You chose to answer questions. You’ve been in custody for interrogation since eight-forty hours this morning.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday Sheriff.”

“The twenty-fifth. King, have Priskitt put him in a single twelve or fourteen, and move somebody if he has to. I want no contact between McGee and Meyer.”

I fitted the two parts of the big deputy’s name together. King Sturnevan. I looked at him again and made sure. I’d seen him fight years ago at Miami Beach, at about two hundred then. Maybe sixty pounds heavier now. A spoiler, a mawler. Looked slow, but surprisingly hard to hit. Clever on the ropes and in the clinches, ripping those hooks up into the body, snuffing and grunting with the effort. Would have done better in the division except he had a tendency to cut, which put too many TKO’s on his record. So the smart way they took him was to put the little twist of the wrist on the end of the jab, hoping to open up his brows before he bombed their innards to pulp.

“Sheriff, would you please tell this fat, sloppy, old pug not to try to do me the way he did Meyer? Lennie Sibelius can give you enough trouble without that, too.”

“There were three witnesses to your partner’s accident, McGee. He had taken his shower. He was stepping into the issue coveralls when he lost his balance and fell, striking his face on the wooden bench in the shower room.”

“Then I guess if the same thing happened to me, it would look like a strange coincidence.”

He didn’t answer. He picked up the phone. Sturnevan beckoned to me and held the door open. As we went along the corridor he said, “Hey, you knew me, huh? You seen me in there, ever?” His voice was soft, husky, high-pitched.

“Miami Beach, just once. Eight or nine years ago.”

“That must have been close to the last. Who was I going with?”

“I can’t remember the name. A great big Cuban boy.”

“Sure! That was a ten-round main. Tigre something. Tigre means ‘tiger,’ and he had a big long last name, and I knocked him out in the ninth, right? You know what? That was the last one. Honest to Christ, that boy was, I mean, conditioned! Like an oak tree, the whole middle of him. He kept moving the wrong way and giving me perfect shots, and I couldn’t even take the grin off his face. Then like twenty seconds into the ninth, he cut me. See this one? He popped it just right by dumb luck and opened it up, and I knew it was bad. All I could do, see, was keep turning to keep the ref from getting too good a look at it and hoping before he did, that boy would tangle his feet and move the wrong way again, so when he did I had to put the right hand right on the shelf. I knew it would bust and it did. But he stayed down. All the time I was in there, what I had was bad managers and bad hands. I had to go for the middle because my hands bust too easy. So you saw that one, hey! I was going to go again, all lined up with I forget who, and I bust the hand in the same place on the heavy bag, working out.”

As we went down the stairs, I said, “But you didn’t chop Meyer bad enough to hurt your hands?”

“He fell on the bench, like Mister Norm said.”

“And his head bounced up and down on that bench like a big rubber ball. Must have been interesting to watch.”

“What I can tell you is I didn’t work him over. Mister Norm got on me about that, and I swore on my baby daughter’s grave I never touched him and didn’t see anybody else touch him. I told Mister Norm it didn’t make sense after all the times I worked a little on some of the people without marking them, all of a sudden I forget how and start hitting a man in the head? Not me. Not the King. Right through here. Hey, Priskie? Fresh fish. Mister Norm says single twelve or fourteen.”

“We can give you twelve, sir. A very nice room. I’m sure you’ll be very happy with it. Anything you want, just ring.” Priskitt was somewhere between fifty and ninety, spry, bald, and shrunken by the heat of time and fortune. He dug into a bin, selected a tagged bundle, put it in a wire gym basket. “All our guests wear costumes,” he said. “Gets you in the spirit of the thing.”

“Priskie, this here fellow saw my last fight, where I chilled the big Cuban kid and busted my hand. I told you about that one, right?”

“Not over forty times.”

I said, “I don’t want to spoil your comical routine, Priskitt, but how is Professor Meyer making it?”

“I got him some aspirin and some ice to suck on. I wouldn’t say he feels great. But maybe not as bad as he did.”

“I got to look in Nat’s book and find out what the last name was on that Cuban kid,” King said. “I’ll get him showered. Come on, McGee. Tote that basket.”

The cement shower room smelled of mildew, ammonia, and Lysol. There was a sliver of green soap and a drizzle of tepid water from a corroded shower head, and a thin gray towel.

What you need on the inside of any institution whatsoever are friends. “King, I’m a little ashamed of thinking you busted my friend up. I should have known you’ve got more class than that.”

“Aw, what the hell. I mean I can see why.”

“No, really. I saw you fight. You could have been one of the great ones. You know that? A few breaks here and there.”

“Breaks, sure. They woulda helped. But I coulda stood better equipment. I cut too easy and my hands were brittle. But I could always move good, and I could take a punch off anybody.”

“Where are you from originally?”

“New Jersey. Nutley. Fourteen years old, I was in the Golden Gloves. Fleet champion in the Navy, coming in light heavy. Had fourteen years pro, two in the amateurs. Ninety-one bouts. I win sixty-eight, lose seventeen, draw six. It’s all in the record. McGee, what do you go? Maybe around two-oelght?”

“Very close.”

“The clothes on, I would have said one ninety, maybe less. You fooled me. You holding pretty good shape, fella. You ever do any fighting when you were a kid?”

“Nothing serious. Just horsing around.”

“You can keep your own underwear. And put the coveralls and these here straw scuffs on and put your other stuff in the basket.”

I did as directed. The twill coveralls had been washed threadbare, and they were soft as the finest lightweight wool.

“Come at me a little, McGee. I want to see if you know how to move. Good Christ, don’t look at me like that! I’m not making up some kind of way to bust you up.”

So I shrugged and went at him, doing my standard imitation of a big puppet badly manipulated from above, jounce and flap, keeping an assortment of elbows and shoulders and wrists in front of the places I don’t like to have thumped, keeping a wide-focus stare aimed at his broad gut, because that is the only way you can see what the head and hands and feet are doing, all at the same time.

I don’t know how many years older he was. He moved in a slow, skilled, light-footed prance, and the slabbed fat on his body jounced and shook like the pork fat on a circus bear. He held his big paws low and stayed pretty much in the same place. Had it been for real, I would have had as much chance against him as a little kid with a piece of lathe against a member of the Olympic fencing team. Pro is pro. I slapped empty space, sometimes a shoulder. Each effort of mine resulted in a quick little stinging whack of fingertips against jaw, cheekbone, rib cage. Then I decided to try to protect myself. But here is how it is with a pro: You duck under a high left jab, and you see the feet, body, shoulder, head, all moving into the logical right hook, and when you move to defend from that, you are suddenly open for two more quick jabs. You shift to handle that, and there is the right hook you were going to block earlier, so you rush him to get inside, and he isn’t there because he has twisted, tipped you off balance, and stands braced and ready for you to bounce back off the wall. Explosive snort. Grin. Hands raised in signal of peace.

So I gratefully emerged from my ineffective shell and said, “You are real quick, King.”

“Hell, I’m slowed down to nothing. Reflexes all shot. Seems quick to you because I know where you’re going to be by the time I tap you. Listen to me huff and puff. McGee, you would have made it pretty good if you started soon enough. It would be hard to take a good shot at you. I’d have to bomb you downstairs until you couldn’t get your arms up. Then drop you.”

He led me to the single cell, telling me, on the way, of the time he had come the closest to top ranking, when Floyd Patterson had nailed him as they came out for the second, and he had faked rubber legs well enough to bring Patterson in, too eager and careless, and he had pivoted and stuffed his big hand and glove deep into Floyd’s tough middle, just above the belt, turning him gray and sweaty and very tired. Chased him for seven rounds, while Floyd had slowly regained his strength and health despite all King Sturnevan could do in the way of wearing him down. And then Floyd stabbed and chopped and split his way to the technical knockout.

He dogged the door shut, big face still rueful with the memory of not being able to nail down the disabled Patterson. I said, “What’s with this sheriff of yours, King?”

“How do you mean?”

“What kind of an act is it?”

He shifted the wire basket to his other arm. “It’s no act. Mister Norm upholds the law, and the County Commission backs him a hundred percent. We got modern stuff here, McGee. We got a teletype tied into FLEX, and one of the first things he did was see if there was any package on you with the R.C.LC. and then the N.C.LC., and it puzzled him some, maybe, to come up empty on both of you.”

“Real modern methods, King, spoiling Meyer’s face.”

“All you got is my word, but it isn’t like that around here.”

“Then why did Deputy Billy Cable bring me through here to admire Meyer before he took me to Hyzer?”

“Billy got gnawed down to the bare bone on that one. He was off in the MP’s for a while. Sometimes he forgets Mister Norm doesn’t like those little tricks.”

“Now how would you know Hyzer came down on Billy Cable?”

“You learn to read that man’s face. It isn’t easy, but you have to learn. I saw he was upset, and I could guess why. He’d already found out about Meyer, and he was upset about that, too, about it happening at all. By now he’s got Billy all peeled raw.”

“Who did it?”

“I didn’t see a thing.”

Priskitt came to the cell. “I thought this man had probly jumped you and made good his daring escape, champ. You want me to lock you in there with him so you can keep the dialogue going, or do you want to go back to work? As a special favor to Mister Norm.”

“He called for me?”

“He surely did.”

And with a single bulge-eyed look of anxiety, King Sturnevan went off, in a light-footed, fat-jouncing trot.

“The department seems to have a plentitude of deputies, Mr. Priskitt.”

He looked at me happily. “Plentitude! One rarely hears the good words around here, Mr. McGee. I would say that Mister Norm has an adequacy of deputies. Not a superfluity. Whatever Mister Norm feels is necessary for the pursuit of his sworn responsibility, he asks for. And gets. We must chat later.”

He hurried away and I stretched out…

Four

IMMOVABLE BUNK and a thin hard mattress pad. Cement floor with a center drain. Bright bulb countersunk behind heavy wire mesh in the cement ceiling. Iron sink with a single iron faucet and no drain pipe so that water from the sink would run down the pitch of the floor to the drain three feet away. Toilet with no lid or seat. No window. No way to see any other cell through the top half of the door which was of sturdy bars. The lower half was steel plate.

Stretch out on the back, forearm across the eyes. Shove the whole damned mess over into a corner cupboard and kick the door shut. Save it until later, because trying to think about it would only bring the anger back. Angry men do a bad job of thinking.

There had been a lot of waiting-time in my life. Sometimes it was cat-time, watching the mouse hole for all the endless dreary hours. Sometimes it had been mouse-time, waiting all the day through for the darkness and the time for running.

So you learn the special resources of both memory and imagination. You let the mind run through the old valleys, the back hills, and pastures of your long-ago years. You take an object. Roller skate. The kind from way back, that fastened to the shoes instead of coming with shoes attached. Look and feel and design of the skate key. With old worn shoes you turn the key too much and you start to buckle the sole of the shoe. Spin one wheel and listen to the ball-bearinged whir, and feel the gritty texture of the metal abraded by the sidewalks. Remember how slow and strange and awkward it felt to walk again, after all the long Saturday on skates, after going way to the other end of town. Remember the soreness where the strap bit into the top of your ankle. When it got too sore, you could stop and undo the strap and run it through the top laces of your shoe. Thick dark scab on the abraded knee. The sick-making smack of skull against sidewalk. Something about the other end of the skate key… Of course! A hex wrench orifice that fit the out on the bottom of the skate so you could expand it or contract it to fit the shoe. If you didn’t tighten it enough, or if it worked loose, then the skate would stealthily lengthen, the clamps no longer fitting the edge of the shoe sole, and at some startling moment the next thrust would spin the skate around, and you either took a very nasty spill, or ended up coasting on the good skate, holding the other foot with dangling skate up in the air until you came to a place to sit down and get the key out and tighten everything again. Roller skate or sand box or apple tree or cellar door. Playground swing or lumberyard or blackboard or kite string. Because that was when all the input was vivid. All of it is still there. So you find a little door back there, and like Alice, you walk through it into the magic country, where each bright flash of memory illuminates yet another.

It doesn’t work that way for everybody. Once I worked a stakeout for two months with a quiet little man. We were talked out after two days. But he seemed totally patient, totally content. After a month I asked him what he thought about. He said he was a rubber bridge addict. So mentally he would deal himself a random hand, then out of the thirty-nine cards left, deal a random hand to the opponent at his left, then to the other one at his right, and give what was left to his partner. Then he would go through the bidding, the play of the cards, and mark the result on the running scorepad in his head. He said that sometimes when he was a little fatigued, he might forget whether the jack of diamonds had been dealt at his left or his right. Then he would have everybody throw their hands in and he would deal again.

When the people we were covering finally made their move, there was a communication problem. We couldn’t get through to the vehicle parked six blocks away. So the bridge player handled that problem, at a dead run. He got there in time and they closed that door before the quarry tried it. He sat in the back seat, they said, and gasped and laughed, then squeaked and died. I saw him for a couple of moments, and thought of all the bridge games that died inside his head when all the other things stopped.

“McGee?”

I looked up and got up and went over to the door. “Sheriff?”

“I researched that problem you raised, McGee. I do not want to take any chance of reversal of conviction on a very minor point. I think I am right. If tomorrow were a working day, I would take my chances. But running it over into a Saturday might be questionable. It’s a little after four now, but you should be able to reach your Mr. Sibelius, I think.”

The operator left the line open on my person-to-person collect call, and I could hear the girl at the other end being professionally indefinite about where and how Lennie could be located.

“Operator, is that Miss Carmichael?”

“Trav? This is Annie, yes.”

“Are you accepting the collect call, Miss?”

“Well… I guess so. Yes. Travis? Why collect, for goodness’ sake?”

“It seemed simpler, on account of I am here in the county jail in Cypress County on suspicion of killing people.”

No gasps or cooing or joshing or stupid questions. She went to work. She got the phone number. She said that if we were in luck, she could catch Lennie between the apartment and the marina, on his telephone in his car. If he had already taken off, she wouldn’t get him until he monitored the Miami marine broadcast at six o’clock. Then she broke it off.

I told the hero sheriff the call would come back quickly, or not until after six. He looked at his watch. “Wait here for ten minutes. Stand over there against the wall.”

No readable inflection, no emotion in the delivery. So you stand against the wall, in your ratty straw slippers, the pant legs of the coveralls ending about five inches above where pants should end, the top buttons unbuttoned because it is too small across chest and shoulders, the sleeves ending midway between elbow and wrist. So you are a large grotesque unmannerly child, standing and watching an adult busy himself with adult things. Man in a dark business suit, crisp white shirt, dark tie, dark gloss of hair, opening folders, making small marginal notes.

The law, in its every dimension of the control of criminals, is geared to limited, stunted people. Regardless of what social, emotional, or economic factor stunted them, the end product is hate, suspicion, fear, violence, and despair. These are weaknesses, and the system is geared to exploit weaknesses. Mister Norm was a creature outside my experience. There were no labels I could put on him.

He answered the phone, held it out to me. “Hello, Lennie,” I said.

“From this phone booth, Trav, I can see the Witchcraft, all fueled and ready, and my guests carrying the food and booze aboard, and a pair of blond twins slathering oil on each other up on the fly bridge. It was nice to have known you, pal.”

“Likewise. Take off, playboy. Cruise the ocean blue in your funny hat. Kiss the twins for me.”

“So all right! Bad?”

“And cute. And for once in your brief meteoric career, you’d be representing total innocence.”

“Now isn’t that nice! And I can’t get into a front page with it, because if I make you a star, you are going to have to find useful work or starve. Status right now?”

“Held for questioning. I waived my rights, and then all of a sudden a very bad question came along, and after thinking it over, I took it all back.” My mind was racing, trying to figure out some way to clue him into checking out Sheriff Norman Hyzer, because, had I been sure of Hyzer’s integrity-and sanity-I would have explained the envelope he had found.

“Innocence can answer any kind of question that comes up.”

“If everybody is truly interested in the concept, Lennie.”

“Chance of the law there looking for a setup?”

“It’s possible.”

“Annie said something about killing people.”

“At least one, they claim. They haven’t said why. Just hinted about some kind of job long ago netting nine hundred thou.”

“So the area swarms with strobes and notebooks and little tape recorders?”

“Not a one.”

“So they can put a tight lid on and keep it on. Very rare these days, pal. I know they have a lumpy little patch of grass over there because I had to put down on it a year ago when my oil pressure started to look rotten and the mill started to heat on me. Look, I’ll have Wes take this party out and anchor someplace down the bay. I’ll make some phone calls here and there, and… let me see. I want to hit that grass patch by daylight, so let’s say that by six-thirty I’ll be holding your hand.”

“And Meyer’s.”

“I always told him evil companions would lead him astray.”

Hyzer had me taken back down to my private room. I sat on the bunk and felt very very glad not only about knowing Leonard Sibelius, but about having done him a favor he was not likely to forget. Not a tall man, but notable, conspicuously skinny, with a great big head and a great big expressive and heavy-featured face, and a wild mop of rust-gold hair. A big flexible resonant voice that could range from mountaintop oratory to husky, personal, confidential whisper. Fantastic memory, vast vocabulary, capable of making speeches on any subject at any time. A con artist, a conniver, a charmer, a spellbinder, an eccentric. Italian clothes, fast cars and fast planes and fast boats. In spite of the emaciation, which made him look like a chronic invalid, he could work at top speed all day and play all night, week after week. Charging through life, leaving a trail of empty bottles and grateful blondes and thankful clients. Huge fees from those who could afford it, and when they couldn’t afford it, there was always a market for the life story of any man defended by Lennie Sibelius, after the accused had signed over his rights to the fees and royalties therein. Total defense, in the courtroom, the newspapers, and on the television talk shows. Making it big and spending it big, and running all the way. And, somehow, laughing at himself. Ironic laughter. His black jest was that he had lost only one client. “It took that jury two days to bring back a guilty verdict. There were so many errors by the court, I knew it wouldn’t stand up. The route was through the appellate court to the state supreme court to the federal district court to the Supreme Court. And I had just finished a beautiful brief to present to the district court when the silly son of a bitch hung himself in his cell, just two weeks before our book climbed onto the best seller list.”

It felt fine to know he was on the way. This whole thing was making me very edgy. It is one of the penalties of playing one of the roles society wants you to play. No regular hours, no mortgage payments, life insurance, withholding, retirement benefits, savings program. “Okay, where were you, Charlie, at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, the tenth of April, seven years ago?”

“April? Tuesday? Unless I was sick, and that would be on the office records, I was right there at my desk in room fifteen-twenty on the fifteenth floor of the First Prudential Building. I work for Hutzler, Baskowich, and Troon. Mutual Funds. I’m an analyst. I’ve been with the firm eleven years now. Ask anybody.”

So where was McGee on any April Tuesday you want to name? The best I could do would be a plausible guess. Maybe I should keep a diary. Or have a time card and punch clock. Or is it a punch card and a time clock. Something that goes ding.

So you roam the fringes of the structured society, and it is just fine until they hold you up to the light. Then, somehow, in their eyes and yours, too, you begin to look like a cat burglar.

Five

AT FIVE-THIRTY jailer Priskitt came around and said I could take my chances on the American plan dinner, or sign a chit for a take-out meal from a restaurant down the street, said chit to be deducted from my captive funds when they were returned to me. He recommended the special deal. It turned out to be a piece of fried meat, boiled potatoes, overdone turnip greens, battery acid that smelled somewhat like coffee, and a soggy little wedge of apple pie. Four and a quarter, plus seventy-five cents for the trusty who had been sent to get it.

Lennie Sibelius did not appear at six-thirty, nor at seven, nor at seven-thirty, nor at eight. I began to wonder if he had tucked his Apache into a swamp.

At almost eight-thirty Priskitt came and got me and took me to a small locker room at the far end of the lower corridor. It smelled like stale laundry. Lennie was sitting on a battered metal table, custom shoes swinging. Lemon yellow shirt and pale blue slacks.

“Your tailor isn’t doing much for you, pal,” he said.

“So let’s leave and you find me a new one.”

“We’ll leave. Don’t worry about it. But not right now.”

I sat on a bench in front of the lockers. “When did you get in?” He said he’d been around for more than two hours, having some interesting conversations.

“Anything you want to repeat for the tape recorder?”

“My guess would be that this room is clean, Trav. I think he goes by the book. Lawyer and client relationship is confidential stuff. He might stick a shill into a cell with a suspect and bug the conversation to pick up a lead, but I think the rules mean something to him.”

“He is something else entire, Lennie.”

“He makes better sense when you know the whole pattern. Local boy. Hell of a high-school quarterback. Offers from all over the country. Picked one from Michigan. Did well, but not quick unough for the pros. Married a bright girl up there. Both of them became teachers. She taught speech. She worked on his accent, weeded it out. Both of them worked in the public school system in Rochobter, New York. Hyzer’s mother became ill, very ill, and Norman and his wife and baby daughter came down here. Hyzer’s mother died. He was still here trying to get the house cleared out and put it up for sale when a couple of Miami kids in a stolen car knocked over one of those mini-markets on the edge of town in broad daylight, pistol-whipped the clerk, but suddenly had a cop cruiser riding up on them with the flasher going. They came through town at high speed and lost it on a turn and rode the sidewalk and smashed into a concrete power pole. It killed one of them and crippled the other. But they mashed Hyzer’s bride and baby against the front of the post office thirty feet before they got to the pole. Killed them instantly. Hyzer buried them beside his mother and disappeared. Almost a year later he showed up here and announced for sheriff. No party affiliation. Independent. He won big. Sentimental favorite. Two years later he barely squeaked in, because he had done no glad-handing at all. Next time he won big because of his record. Lives for the job. Runs a taut ship. Keeps this county squeaky clean. No outside interests at all. If he is crazy, it is a productive compulsion. The rumor is that he has quietly built up files on every politician in the county, and they would rather not see anybody run against Hyzer. He takes correspondence courses. Law, criminology, ballistics, sociology, crime prevention, rehabilitation, penology.”

“And I’m just another of those people who smash wives and babies against the post office wall?”

“Maybe. But buried deeply enough so you won’t see any outward effect from it.”

“Like Meyer did?”

“That part doesn’t fit. It puzzles me. I am going to make it fit, and somebody is going to be sorrier than they can possibly imagine. But there’s more we have to know before that is going to make any sense.”

“How much did Hyzer tell you?”

“All the questions and all the answers up to the point where you stopped playing his game.”

So I told him about the envelope with the directions I had scribbled on the back. I told him how I could remember clearly what I had done with it. Everything in our wallets had still been sodden by the time we reached Al Storey’s gas station in the early morning. “I took everything out. Every time you have to go through your wallet you find junk you don’t need. I made a pile of that junk on top of that tin table out in the morning sunlight. I know the envelope and instructions were there because I unfolded it to see what it was. And by then, if what Hyzer says is true, this Frank Baither was already dead. After the station opened up, I picked up Meyer’s discards and mine and dropped them into a can by the side of the building, on top of some old newspapers, oil cans, and wiper blades.”

“Means that somebody took it out and carried it twenty miles north and sneaked past the deputy guarding the Baither place, and planted it inside where it would be found. Meaning that Hyzer has to believe it happened just that way.”

“It must have slipped out of my pocket while I was killing Frank Baither.”

“Steady,as she goes, pal. Now here is something that bothers Hyzer also, I think. You were bound for Lauderdale. You left Lake Passkokee. Did you plan any stops on the way?”

“No.”

“Then why come down 112 to the Trail? That’s doing it the hard way.”

“We did it the hard way. I picked a little unmarked road that was supposed to take us right on over to the direct route. But with the roads torn up, everything looked different. After about three miles I knew I had the wrong road. So I kept going, hoping the damned thing would come out on the road we wanted. But it wandered all over hell and gone and finally came out onto 112 about fifteen miles north of the Cypress City cutoff. By then it was obviously shorter and quicker to come down 112 and take the Trail over to Route 27, then cut over to the Parkway on 820.”

“And Hyzer keeps thinking about how you and Meyer match the description.”

“What description, dammit?”

“Remember four years ago the way some people hit the money truck with all the racetrack cash aboard?”

“Just outside Miami? Vaguely I’ve forgotten the gimmick.”

“It was beautiful,” Lerinie said. “Absolutely beautiful. The three clowns who had truck duty stuck to the same routine every time they made the racetrack run. They would get there empty and park in back of a drive-in, and all three would go in, eat, kill some time until the big parking areas emptied and the people in the money room had time to weigh, band, sack, and tally the cash. Then they would go get it, and make a fifty-minute run back to the barn. It was after a very big handle that they were hit. They woke up on a little shell road way back in some undeveloped acreage. The locks had been drilled and the truck and radio disabled. They were too groggy to walk for help right away. They were separated and questioned. And examined. Same story. Each had become very very sleepy about fifteen minutes after they had loaded the money and left the track. Heavy dose of some form of barbiturate. Traces still left in the bloodstream. The driver had pulled over and stopped, thinking he would just take a nice little nap like the guard sitting there beside him, snoring. The police turned up a few people who had seen a big brute of a wrecker put a hook on the armored truck, lift the front end, and trundle it off. They traced it back to the drive-in, a very small place with normally two people working during the daytime, a man in the kitchen and a girl working the counter. At night they’d have a second girl car-hopping. This was the pickup after the big Sunday afternoon race card, with the take including the Friday night and Saturday night meets. The men said the girl on the counter was new. A blonde. They had kidded around with her. By that time they had already had another report which dovetailed. A girl and three men had hit that drive-in a half hour before the money-truck people walked in. They had taped up the waitress and the chef and stashed them in a supply closet. The man had been too frightened and hysterical to pick up anything useful. The girl gave a full report of what she had noticed and remembered. One man was your size, Trav. One description fits Meyer. The third was average height, but very broad and thick in the shoulders and neck. She thought there might be a fourth man on watch outside the rear entrance, but she wasn’t certain. She said the girl was young.”

“You know a lot about it, Lennie.”

“I had a client they were trying to set up for that truck job. And now, all of a sudden, better than three years later, I’ve got two more.”

“This Frank Baither was in on it, then?”

“Sheriff Hyzer didn’t exactly break down and tell me all his problems, pal. We established a relationship of mutual respect. There have been generations of Baithers in this county, some very solid and some very unpredictable, but all of them tough and quick, and a few of them tough, quick, and smart. Like Frank. Lived alone in the old family place along that route. He’d be gone for weeks or months. Tax bills and utility bills and so on went to the Cypress Bank and Trust. He kept money in a special account and the bills were paid out of it. No visible means of support. When he’d move back in, he’d usually have a houseguest. Some pretty dolly in tight pants, visiting for a while. Hyzer is concerned about Cypress County, not about what Frank Baither might be doing elsewhere. Then a funny thing happened. Smart Frank Baither, on a Saturday night, got stumbling drunk and held up a gas station right here in town. Went lurching off, spilling the cash out of the till. Got grabbed and put in a cell. Didn’t make bail. Pleaded guilty, and got hit by the circuit court judge with five for armed robbery. Got transported off to Raiford. Did three and a half at Raiford before they let him out twelve days ago.”

“So?”

“Item. The blood test on the stumbling drunk, taken under protest, showed that he could have had two small beers, maybe three. Item. Discreet investigation showed he had enough in his special account so that he could have made bail during the three months he had to wait here for trial, but he didn’t. Item. For a man so involved with the outdoors, the swamps and the glades, Frank made a happy adjustment to this place and also to Raiford. Item. When Hyzer went out and checked Frank Baither’s place after arrest, he found that Frank had done all those little chores a man living alone will do when he expects to be away for a long long time. Put up the shutters and drained the pipes, disconnected the pumps and greased them. Drained the aerator.”

“Okay. He wanted to be tucked away.”

“Hyzer reasoned that if somebody was out to kill Frank Baither, Baither would have ambushed them rather than hide in jail. Hyzer checked out the big scores made anywhere in the country just before Baither set himself up for a felony conviction. He kept coming back to the money truck in Miami. Baither was medium height with a bull neck and very broad thick shoulders. As a kid he had worked for his uncle who operated a little yard, making cement block, and he had carried enough tons of mix and tons of finished block to give him that muscular overdevelopment. Hyzer reasoned that Frank Baither had somehow tricked his partners, eased out with the track money, hid it well, then set himself up for free room and board for a long time, counting on the odds that the partners on the outside would not last long enough to be waiting when he got out. The hard-case operators have very few productive years, Trav. Then they are tucked away, underground or behind the walls. Frank had about two weeks between the money-truck job and landIng in the Cypress County jail, assuming he was involved. Hyzer wanted more to go on. He arranged to get word from Raiford on Frank’s activities in prison. By the end of the first year he learned that Frank had cultivated a few Latin Americans there. He was diligently studying Spanish. And it looked as If he would become reasonably fluent. The parts fitted together. Get out, pick up the money, and go. And live like a Greek shipowner for the rest of his life, with enough Spanish to learn who to bribe, and enough money to guarantee immunity.”

“He told you a lot, Lennie.”

“Some of it he told me, some of it he hinted at, and some of it is what I came up with to fill in the blanks. That sheriff went over every inch of the Baither place, and came up empty every time. Now here is another part. Somebody gave Frank a good rap on the head and taped him to a chair, and wound his head with tape, leaving a hole over one ear, and a hole over the mouth. Then they worked on him. They spoiled him. He had to know he was done, and so with nothing left to save except a little more agony, he talked. Then they shoved a rusty ice pick into his heart.”

“Assumption?”

“A finality about it. End of interview. From the look of the rest of him, they would have kept going until he died of the special attentions.”

“So Hyzer,” I said wearily, “buys the idiot idea that we teamed with Frank Baither and took the money truck and we kept track of him, knew when he got out of Baiford, and set up this complicated cover story, got to him, tortured him and killed him, left an incriminating envelope behind, lost my old car in the canal, and then… For God’s sake, Lennie! Can’t you straighten him out? Where’s the money?”

“Right where Frank Baither hid it. But now you and Meyer know where it is, and you can take your time picking it up.”

He made me go over the incident we should have reported and didn’t. Lots of questions. Estimates of elapsed time.

He paced in the constricted space, glowering. “The only way to defend a case is to build an alternate possibility up to the stature of reasonable doubt, McGee. There was a girl in the mud beside the canal. Let’s say she was the young girl who played waitress. Let’s say Frank Baither was prowling after her in the night. Hutch is the big one who fits your description. Orville fits Meyer’s description. They came after Frank Baither last night. The girl got away. Baither got in his old truck and went cruising looking for Orville and Hutch. You went in the canal at ten o’clock. The shots were fired a little after eleven. He thought he hit Hutch in the head. He offered to make a deal with Orville. He drove back to his place, off guard because he thought he knew where Hutch and Orville were. He got back and they jumped him. Maybe they had a car hidden away nearby, and maybe the two of them and the girl are five hundred miles gone by now, laughing and singing, with the trunk packed with money. But that damned envelope, Trav. That is physical evidence. You are absolutely positive about what you did with it?”

“Beyond any doubt.”

“Then the deputy he posted at the Baither place has to be lying when he told Hyzer nobody entered the place. Can you remember the deputy’s name?”

“Arnstead, I think. But why would somebody…”

“‘Why’ comes way down the list, client. It comes after ‘how’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘what’. ‘How’ is the big word.”

He opened the door and whistled. Priskitt took me back after Lennie Sibelius wished me a nice night’s sleep, saying he didn’t count on getting much himself.

As Priskitt caged me, I asked him about Meyer. “Feeling much better. Fascinating man. It’s guests like you two who make this almost a civilized occupation, McGee. Nighty night.”

They had the cell lights on a rheostat. At ten o’clock they faded from white glare to yellow glow. You can’t help wondering what it would feel like to be in such a box for the next dozen years, and wonder if you could handle it, and walk out of it still reasonably sane.

I remembered reading a sentence long ago, I know not where or when, or who wrote it. It said, “The only thing that prisons demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.”

Back to the envelope. It had to be an unplanned act on someone’s part. An improvisation. Away to muddy the water. Somebody made the decision after Sheriff Hyzer and Deputy Cable had driven off with us. A customer or an employee. Or the boss. Al Storey, or the big young dull-looking one named Terry. Or the older one who had arrived late in the blue Rambler. Henry… The one with all the white teeth. Or somebody who came on duty later. Al, Terry, and Henry had all heard Hyzer say that Frank Baither had been killed. His attitude made it evident he thought Hyzer and I were involved.

I dug away at my chigger bites. Get me out, Lennie. Get us out of here.

Six

Up UNTIL eleven o’clock it was a very dull morning. Then Priskitt arrived, humming happily, carrying a hanger with freshly cleaned and pressed slacks and shirt thereon. He had my toilet kit in the other hand.

He unlocked the cell door and said, “Priskitt at your service, sir. You will wish to shower? You are free to go right ahead, by yourself.”

“Those clothes were…”

“In your suitcase which was in your car, and so was the toilet kit. Still damp, but not at all bad. Compliments,of Cypress County, Mr. McGee. I’ll be along with shoes and socks and underwear.”

“Where is my friend?”

“Under the shower, one might expect.”

But Meyer was out of the shower, standing at the sink, and carefully, tenderly, shaving the black stubble from his swollen and discolored face. He turned and said, “Don’t make me laugh, please.”

“How bad is it?”

“It will add up to a good dental bill. The thing that worries me is a persistent headache, dizziness, some double vision. And something seems to grate in my cheek. Lennie is going to fly me back to Lauderdale and I’ll go in for observation.”

“Who did it?”

“A large fellow with big cheekbones and small dark eyes and very long sideburns. I wondered why he was putting a leather glove on. You’d mentioned a few useful things one could do under those circumstances. I tried them and they didn’t work very well.”

“Who was there at the time?”

“Deputy Cable. Objecting.”

“Making any physical attempt to stop him?”

“Finally, yes. But at first I would say he was merely whining at the fellow, something about Mister Norm getting upset. He called the sideburned fellow Lew. I discovered the whole name later on. Deputy Lew Arnstead.”

“Where was Sturnevan? The big sloppy one.”

“He had stepped out. Lew didn’t take long. It seemed long. Maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. By then I wasn’t aware of whether Sturnevan came back or not, but I think he was one of the two men who helped me to the cell.”

“Meyer?”

“Mmmm?”

“I’m sorry about this.”

He turned and looked solemnly at me, puffy eyes staring out of the big yellow-blue-green-purple face. “Where is any man’s immunity from the unexpected, McGee? I could deny myself the pleasure of your friendship, and decrease the chance of the unexpected. But there is a case on record of a woman in her own bed being struck on the thigh by a bounding chunk of red hot iron, a meteorite that came whistling in from God only knows what corner of the galaxy. I value that night hike, Travis. And the way the dawn looked, and the feeling of beIng alive after being shot at. I am a grown-up, making choices. And sufficiently grown up to live with the choices I make. My face hurts and my head aches, and I would like to kill that sideburned fellow with anything I could lift. I feel outraged, humiliated, and very very tired. But I’m glad I came along.”

“You do go on.”

“Do us both a favor and get out of that garment.” He was ready and I was almost ready when Sturnevan came to get us. He clucked and turned Meyer toward the light and gave him a close inspection. “And you weren’t very pretty to start with, Professor.”

“King,” I said, “I might get a chance to strike up an acquaintance with Lew Arnstead when he’s off duty.”

“Which is now sort of one hundred percent of the time, I hear. You serious, McGee?”

“Serious enough to ask you how to do it.”

“He’s a strong boy. He likes all the odds his way. With somebody your size, he’d try to fix the odds fast, like a quick kick in the balls. What you do is, you make it look as if he can get away with it. He’s right-handed. He’ll kick with his right leg. Watch for the weight shift, sidestep the kick and get his ankle, and swing it on top. Then if you can hurt him fast anough and bad enough, he’ll be all through.”

“Thanks, King.”

“Mister Norm is waiting on you fellows.”

No guard just inside the door this time. Just Lennie Sibelius and Sheriff Hyzer, and some exhibits on the bare desk top.

Lennie slouched, smiling, in a wooden armchair. Hyzer sat at attention behind his desk. He asked us to sit. He said to Meyer, “I assure you that what happened to you is against the policy of this department.”

“My client accepts that,” Lennie said quickly.

“Arnstead was not officially on duty at the time of the… incident,” Hyzer said. “He had no business being here. His act was without official sanction or official knowledge. He has been dismissed with prejudice, booked for aggravated assault, and released on bond pending trial. Deputy Cable has been fined and reprimanded for permitting it to happen. Please accept my personal apology.”

“I accept it,” Meyer said.

“Mr. Sibelius has suggested that any dental or medical bills be sent here to my attention. They will be taken care of, if not by the county, then by me personally.”

“Do I get one of those, too?” I asked.

Hyzer swiveled slowly and. stared at me. with those frozen eyes. “One what?”

“An apology.”

“He’s making a joke, Sheriff,” Lennie said.

“He is? I have very little sense of humor, Mr. McGee. Your rights… and your person… have been protected. I am releasing you from further questioning because Mr. Sibelius prevailed on me to more carefully investigate your… version… of what happened Thursday night.” There were little hesitations, pauses in which he carefully composed his phrases, making the end product so stilted, so stuffy that it became, in one sense, an armor against the world.

He indicated a.38 automatic pistol, an old one, rust flecked, with the bluing worn away in places. “This handgun was found on the Baither property under a clump of palmetto about fifteen feet from where the pickup truck was parked, and almost in line with the back porch. There were two rounds in the clip. There is a partial print on the side of the clip which matches Baither’s left thumb print, and is in the place where a man would logically hold it while loading the weapon. We can assume it was Baither’s weapon and was lost in the darkness when Baither was overpowered while walking from his truck to his house. There is no way to tell how many shots were fired, as we do not know how many were loaded into the clip. Examination proved it had been fired recently. A wax test on the right hand of the decedent indicates he had fired a gun not long before death.”

He moved along to the next item, three empty brass cartridge cases neatly aligned. “One of these was found on the floor of the truck. The second one was found this morning on the shoulder of the highway three and two-tenth miles south of the point where your car went into the canal. That area was searched carefully after certain marks and footprints were found in the soft earth beside the canal. This plaster cast of the best footprint matches the left shoe you were wearing, Mr. McGee, when you were taken into custody. This third case is a test round fired from this handgun. Alhough we have not arranged a ballistics examination with a comparative microscope, examination through a hand magnifying glass indicates the probability that the indentation made by the firing pin is distinctive enough to allow eventual proof that all three rounds were fired from the same pistol.”

“This is very reassuring to my clients,” Lennie said.

“Taken alone,” Hyzer said, “these indications would not be enough to cause me to release these people. There could be too many alternative explanations. And the fact of the envelope seemed conclusive evidence that one of you or both of you were inside the Baither house. However, Mr. Sibelius suggested a method of… making Arnstead change his report to me about his assignment to guard the Baither house.”

“All Arnstead had to do,” Lennie explained, “was leave one little hole in his story, one period of time when that envelope could have been planted. I could drive trucks through any hole like that. Norman, my friend Meyer is looking rocky, and with your permission I’d like to fly him over to Lauderdale. Trav, I’m assuming you’d like to get that old crock truck of yours dried out and running.”

Hyzer said, “I would prefer to have Mr. McGee remain in Cypress County until I have completed my-”

“But, Norman, you have my personal guarantee, my personal word that I can produce them right here any time you say.”

“I think it would be better if-”

Lennie smiled his best smile. “Hell, Norm, it’s all give and take, after all. Famed economist brutally beaten and held, without charges, in Cypress County jail cell.”

“I refuse to be-”

“Come on, Norm! I like the way you’re thinking. I think you are the first lawman who’s got a decent lead on that racetrack money. I don’t blame you for keeping a tight lid on it because if word got out, somehow, people would be swarming all over you. I wouldn’t want that to happen because I wouldn’t want you to look foolish. I wouldn’t want one of those hard-case types the Miami Herald would send over here asking you, for the record, if you were so sure Baither was in on the money-truck job, why you didn’t have him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. They wouldn’t understand your reasoning, and they might use some rude head such as: HICK SHERIFF BLOWS BIG CASE.” He shrugged and, turning, managed to wink at me-a combination wink and frown.

I caught on and grabbed my cue. “Lennie, look. It isn’t that important I get home. I’m perfectly willing to hang around if Sheriff Hyzer wants me to. But I haven’t even got enough cash to take care of the car. If you could…”

“Any time at all, pal,” Lennie said, and produced the platinum money clip with the emeralds, the one given him in gratitude by the Other Woman after he had secured an acquittal for the heir to a pulp mill and timberlands fortune who had shot and killed what he thought was a prowler, but who had turned out to be his insomniac wife.

Counting off money for me would not have been consistent with Lennie Sibelius’s lifestyle. He slipped the cash out of the clip, took off a couple of fifties for himself, put them back in the clip, and handed me the rest of it.

“I appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee,” Hyzer said. “Let me know where you will be staying.”

Meyer and I collected the rest of our gear. Laundry and dry cleaning courtesy of Cypress County. A form of apology. We put the small amount of luggage into the white Buick convertible Lennie had rented. I could see them off and bring it back into town from the airstrip, and either turn it in or keep it. I sat in the back. It was impossible to talk with the top down and with Lennie pretending he was being challenged for the lead in the Daytona 500. The strip was about five miles east of the city limits. He drove past the hangar and on out onto the hard pan and stopped next to his Apache, all chocked and tied down to eyebolts.

“You can get a very nice room at the White Ibis Motor Inn,” Lennie said. “You go back through town-”

“I saw it when they were taking us in.”

“But don’t eat there. Eat right in town at Mrs. Teffer’s Live Oak Lodge and Dining Room. Exceptional!”

“Now hold it a minute, Lennie. I picked up your cue. But it would be very comforting to know what the hell is going on.”

Meyer said, “Nine hundred thousand dollars is going on.” His voice was slightly blurred by the mouth damage.

“So don’t be in too big a hurry to leave,” Lennie said.

“This is one of my stupid days,” I told them. “Draw me some pictures.”

“I like Norm’s thinking. It all seems to fit together. And I think that sooner or later he’s going to pick somebody up for it.”

“Wouldn’t they be long gone?”

Lennie smiled. “By God, it is one of your stupid days. If they were long gone, there would be very little point in going to the trouble of planting that envelope. One or more of the people involved have to be right here in the area, tied to it in such a way that the act of leaving would blow the whistle. When Norm grabs somebody, they are going to need the best legal talent they can find. And they should be able to afford me.”

“I can have a sandwich sign made and walk back and forth in front of the jail?”

“The Association would frown on that. Hell, they even frown on my little decorations on the airplane and the cruiser.”

He pointed and I stepped up and took a closer look. They were small decals, hardly bigger than a postage stamp. A stylized gallows in black on a white background with a black border, and with an X in red canceling out the gallows. The custom decals were on the cowling under the pilot’s window. Almost three rows. Twenty-eight of them.

“All this trouble to plant a shill in the area?”

“Trav, pal, I had the idea you might stir around a little. A catalytic agent, bringing the brew to a nice simmer. Then Norm might be able to nail somebody sooner than otherwise.”

“He is going to frown on meddling. I will be right back inside his hotel if I try that.”

“If you’re clumsy, sure. But I have a lot of confidence in your discretion, and if you do slip, I’ll be right back to pry you out again. Sibelius never sleeps. Think of it this way. You’ve agreed to help me out on the pretrial investigation.”

“I don’t have a license. I don’t want a license. I’m tired of Cypress County already.”

“Why should you have a license? For what? You’ve gone on my staff payroll as a researcher.”

I took the folded money out of my pants pocket and counted it. “Nine hundred and forty?”

“Let me know when you need more, pal.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Think of it this way. Without Sibelius, you’d still be inside. And so would Meyer. You called and I came over. Am I charging you? Would I charge a friend for a little bit of a favor? What do you think I am? Greedy or something? All you have to do is stir around, talk about Frank Baither, buy a drink here and there, and tell people the truth about me. Don’t overdo it. Just tell them I’m the greatest criminal lawyer around. Is that so hard?”

“You are something else, Sibelius. By the way, how did you get Arnstead to change his story?”

Lennie shrugged. “He had to be lying. If he wasn’t, you were. Last night I came across the interesting information that Lew Arnstead is the number one stud in Cypress County. It’s more obsession than hobby. I straightened out the timetable. You were at the gas station when Storey opened up at twenty to seven. At about seven-thirty you and Meyer left with Hyzer and Cable. Because you stopped while your car was being pulled out, you didn’t get to the jail until about eight-fifteen. Arnstead was turning out to have a very long shift. At eight-thirty he went into the Baither place and used the phone to call in and ask if he was going to be relieved. Hyzer told the communications clerk to tell Lew Arnstead to stay right there and that he would be at the Baither place about eleven o’clock and after it was checked over, he could go off duty. Ask the logical questions, McGee.”

“Let me see now. He was expecting Hyzer earlier. Then Hyzer changed his schedule by coming to take a look at us, and take us in. So he had something lined up, and he wanted to be relieved so he could take care of it. But he found out he had another two hours to wait, plus the time it would take for the daylight search. And he had the use of the phone. Sorry, honey, I can’t make it, so why don’t you come on over here?”

“Inside Baither’s house?”

“I… I wouldn’t think so. Not with Hyzer due to prowl the place.”

“How about a narrow old mattress on the slab floor of the pump house about thirty feet from the back porch?”

“Handy.”

“So Hyzer took my suggestion and had Lew Arnstead brought in, and asked him to explain why he was in the pump house with a woman at nine o’clock Friday morning instead of keeping an eye on the house as ordered. Arnstead tried a lot of footwork but Hyzer pushed until he broke through. Arnstead got very virtuous about refusing to name the woman. He said he was with her about ten minutes, and he could see the entrance road from the pump house. She arrived and left by car. She was an old friend. So while you are churning around, see if you can come up with an I.D. on the Iady, pal. She could have been sent in as a distraction while somebody planted the envelope. A cub scout could unlock that house with a kitchen match.”

“While I’m churning around. Anything for a friend.”

A redheaded boy in greasy khakis came out and brought the gas ticket for Lennie to sign, then untied the aircraft and pulled the chocks away. I handed Meyer’s and Lennie’s duffle up. Lennie cranked it up and trundled off to the end of the marl strip. He warmed it up there, and the boy and I stood and watched him make his run and pluck it off and climb over the cabbage palms and live oaks, heading east over the swamps and pasturelands. Good luck, Meyer. No bleeding inside the head, please. It is too valuable and kindly a head.

So I got into my white Buick with the black plastic leather upholstery and the stereo FM radio, and the power brakes, power windows, power steering, air, and super-something transmission, and took half again as long getting back to town as Lennie had taken coming out.

Smile, McGee. Show your teeth. Honk at the lassies, because here it is nearly one o’clock Saturday afternoon and you don’t know where they keep the action. Not the kind you’ve had so far. The other kind.

Seven

THE WHITE Ibis Motor Inn had a little symbol on the signs and the registration card indicating it was one of the creatures of a subsection of one of the more ubiquitous conglomerates. So they could afford to operate it at a percentage of occupancy that would hustle an independent owner into bankruptcy.

Some precise fellow in some distant city had used the standard software program for site location, and fed into the program the regional data for population movement and growth, planned and probable highway construction, land cost, advalorem tax rates, pay scales, and the IBM 360 had said to build one on Alternate 112 west of Cypress City and operate it at a loss until the increased dernand for the transient beds would put it into the black.

Teletype network for instant reservations, approved cards for instant credit, a woman at the desk with instant, trained, formal politeness, who assigned me to Unit 114 and made a little x on a map of the layout, and drew a little line to show me where to drive so that I would end up in front of the X, in the proper diagonal parking slot. She looked slightly distressed when I said I had no idea how long I would be staying. People should know, so they can keep the records neat.

I closed myself into the silence of Unit 114, unpacked, and took a better shower. Stretched out on the bed. Things to do, but no will to do them. A listlessness. A desire to disassociate, to be uninvolved. The fashion is to call it an identity crisis. I was not doing things very well lately. A juvenile, big-mouth performance for the sheriff, windy threats signifying nothing.

Somebody had made a very cute try to get the two of us involved in a private and violent nastiness, but Lennie’s gifts of persuasion and the thoroughness of Norman Hyzer had collapsed the improvised structure.

All cages are frightening. And sometimes a little time spent in a small cage merely gives you the feeling that you have been let out into a bigger cage, the one you have built for yourself over the years. The delusion of total freedom of will is the worst cage of all. And it gets cold in there. As cold, perhaps, as inside Miss Agnes under ten feet of canal water, if Meyer hadn’t clumsied me out of there. Or cold as the grave would be had Frank Baither hit me in the face with that first shot.

With enormous effort I forced myself to reach the phone book look up the Sheriff’s Department, and phone in my temporary address to the dispatcher. I got dressed and got into the white car and went looking for Johnny’s Main Street Service. I found it down by the produce sheds and the truck depots.

There was diesel fuel, and a half dozen big stalls for truck repair work. There was a paint shop and a body shop, and a side lot piled with cars which had quite evidently slain their masters in a crunch of blood, tin, and glass. I saw the big blue-and-white tow truck There was no shop work going on, the whole area somnolent in the perfect April afternoon. An old man sat in the small office, reading a true-crime magazine. A scrawny girl in jeans and a halter was slowly spreading paste wax on a metallic green MG.

Among a line of cars against a side fence Miss Agnes stood out like a dowager among teenagers. I got out of the Buick and walked over to her. A large young man about nineteen came angling across the hardpan from the shop area. Low-slung jeans and a torn and grease-blackened T-shirt. Thick black glossy hair that fell to his big shoulders.

“You Mr. McGee?” When I nodded, he said, “I’m Ron Hatch. My father is Johnny Hatch. He owns this place. He didn’t want me to fool with that Rolls on account of on an impounded car, we’re stuck with it. But I couldn’t stand having it just sit. So he said it had to be on my own time. I just finished with it maybe an hour ago. I pulled the tank and the head, got it all kerosened out, blew the fuel lines, got the ignition system all dry, coil and all. The battery took a charge. That tire is done, and I guess you’ll have to check around Miami to find a Dunlop that’ll go on that rim.”

“I’m grateful you didn’t let it sit, Ron.”

“Hell, it’s a great old brute. All that hand-lapping and custom machining and fitting. The bushings are like perfect, Mr. McGee. But there’s this problem.” He had the big leathery banana-fingered hand of the born artisan. He pulled a complex fitting out of the pocket of the jeans. “See where this is broke off fresh? It maybe happened when you hit the bank, going down. It’s the fitting out at the end of the steering arm, front left. I put a clamp on there for temporary, just enough to baby it out here to park, but you couldn’t drive it. There’s no machine shop I know of can make one on account of right in here, and here, they’re not standard threads, so they wouldn’t have the taps the right size, and it isn’t something you can cast because it takes a lot of strain.”

“I’ve- got a mechanic friend in Palm Beach at a place where they stock Rolls parts from the year one.”

“Maybe he’ll have to have this to match it up right. Meanwhile… maybe I could do some body and fender work.”

“What do I owe you so far?”

He looked uncomfortable. “The way it works, garages have to bid for the county contract. So it’s seventy-five dollars for towing, and ten dollars a day for it while it was impounded. With the tax that’s a hundred and nine twenty. Once we got word this morning from the sheriff’s office we could release the car to you, then the ten a day stopped.”

“And if they’d kept me in there for ninety days?”

“Then… if people don’t want to pay the storage, like if the car isn’t worth it anyway Dad wholesales them for what he can get. The word around was that you and your friend had surely killed Frank Baither and you got caught, and that’s why my father said it didn’t make any sense working on your car. But… I just couldn’t stand seeing it sit the way it was, machinery like that. I mean I did it on my own and if you figure you don’t want to pay anything over the towing and storage, that’s okay.”

I separated two bills from the packet Lennie had handed me. A fifty and a hundred. “Get me a receipted bill on the towing and storage, please. And put the rest against your hours and we’ll settle up when you’re done.”

“Body work?”

“You wouldn’t use a filler, would you?”

“You better be kidding.” And I knew how he’d do it, banging the dings out with the rubber mallet, sanding, burnishing, smoothing, using a little lead sparingly where it couldn’t be helped, sanding down a couple of coats of primer, then using a top-quality body paint, sanding between coats.

“Do you expect to be able to match that paint, Ron?”

“It’s a terrible paint job anyway. I’d rather do the whole thing. What I’d like to do it is yellow in a lot of coats of a good gold flake lacquer with a lot of rubbing between coats.”

“Sorry, but it has to stay blue. Sentimental reasons.”

He shrugged. “That same shade?”

“Not exact.”

He smiled for the first time. He looked relieved. “I can get it looking fine. Wait and see. I hope you get that fitting soon. I can’t really fine time it unless I can open it up some on the road. On the lift isn’t the same.”

The old man in the office came out and bawled, “Ronnie! Come get the phone!”

The boy took off, big lope, long strides. And the immediate image was superimposed on memory. The determined look of the girl, running in the night, the dark hair flying, bare knees lifting. An elusive similarity, like a family resemblance. No more than that, because the girl had been all girl, and this runner was totally male. I find I have one small hang-up regarding young males with masculine features and shoulderlength locks. When they have a mustache or beard or both to go with the hair, they make a fine romantic image, an echo of a distant gallantry, of the old names like Sumter, The Wilderness, Sherman’s March, Custer. But when, like the Beatles and Ron Hatch, there is no beard or mustache, then I have to get past the mental roadblock of recalling too many Army nurses I have known.

I wondered if Mister Norm had gotten a line on the running girl. It would be too much of a miracle of coincidence for her not to be involved in some way. Involved, possibly, from the beginning. The very young girl playing waitress, in a blond wig, the weekend afternoon when they had mickeyed the money-truck men.

Or maybe she was a decoy, a diversion, setting Frank Baither up so that Orville and Hutch could get at him. Or Baither’s woman, local or import, sweet young flesh after over forty months of doing without. The fairly safe guess was that she was woods-wise, and she thought, rightly or wrongly, that somebody was tracking her down in the night, and she used the rush and rumble of my car to cover the sound as she went crashing through the weeds and brush on the far side of the road. Misjudged the distance. Cut it too close. But why the hell not behind the car?

I was looking inside the car when Ron came back. It had been cleaned out thoroughly, mud, weeds, water, and everything else.

“Oh, I forgot. All your stuff, the fishing gear and tools and so on, they’re locked in a storage room here. I wrote a list of everything. Things disappear. Maybe some stuff is gone already, before I wrote it down. You want to check?”

“Later, I guess.”

“Nobody thought you’d get out. That way it isn’t so much like stealing.”

“People around here think that when Sheriff Hyzer grabs somebody, he’s always right? Is that it?”

His gaze was direct for a moment, and then drifted away. “They say he’s a good sheriff. They say he’s fair.”

“Thanks again for going ahead with my car. I’ll be around on Monday.”

So I drove around and about, getting the feel of the town and the area, had a late lunch in a red plastic national franchise selling the Best Sandwiches Anytime Anywhere, and had a medium bad sandwich and very bad coffee, served in haste by a drab, muttering woman.

On the way in, I had picked up the local morning paper. Eight pages. The Cypress Call Journal. The masthead said it was owned by Jasson Communications. They own a few dozen small-city papers in Florida and South Georgia. Guaranteed circulation of five thousand seven hundred and forty, by the last ABC figures. It had the minimum wire service on national and international, and very exhaustive coverage of service club and social club doings. Typical of the Jasson operation. Cut-rate syndicated columnists, ranging from medium right to far right. Lots of city and county legal notices. Detailed coverage of farm produce prices.

I found myself on the bottom right corner of page two.

HELD FOR QUESTIONING

Two Fort Lauderdale men were taken into custody Friday morning by the County Sheriff’s Department for questioning in connection with the torture murder of Frank Baither at his residence on State Road 72 Thursday night after it was learned that the vehicle in which they were riding had gone into the drainage canal sometime Thursday night not far from the Baither house.

And that was it. Local yellow journalism. Sensationalism. Who, what, why, when, where, and how. Exquisite detail.

So after my late and sorry lunch I went around to the Call Journal. It was printed on the ground floor of a cement-block building on Princeton Street. The editorial and business offices occupied the other two floors.

According to the masthead, the managing editor was one Foster Goss. Enclosed in glass in the far corner of the lazy newsroom. A couple of hefty women pecking vintage typewriters. A crickety octogenarian on the copy desk. A couple of slack young men murmuring into phones, heels on the cheap tin desks. Offstage frantic clackety-whack of the broad tape.

Foster Goss was a fat, fading redhead, with thick lenses, saffroned fingers, blue shirt with wet armpits. He waved at a chair and said, “Minute,” and hunched over the yellow copy paper once again, making his marks with soft black lead. He finished, reached, rapped sharply on the glass with a big gold seal ring. A mini-girl got up and came in and took the yellow sheets, gave me a hooded, speculative glance, and strolled out. Foster Goss watched her rear until the half-glass door swung shut, then creaked back in his chair, picked one cigarette out of the shirt-pocket pack, and lit it.

“Meyer or McGee?” he said.

“McGee. I want to complain about all the invasion of privacy, all the intimate details about my life and times.”

Half smile. “Sure you do.”

“So I came around to give you an exclusive, all about local police brutality and so forth.”

“Gee whiz. Golly and wow.”

“Mr. Goss, you give me the impression that somewhere, sometime, you really did work on a newspaper.”

His smile was gentle and reflective. “On some dandies, fella. I even had a Nieman long ago. But you know how it is. Drift out of the stormy seas into safe haven.”

“Just for the hell of it, Mr. Goss, what would happen if you printed more than Mister Norm would like to have you print?”

“My goodness gracious, man, don’t you realize that it has been the irresponsible press which has created community prejudice against defendants in criminal actions? As there is absolutely no chance of anyone running successfully against Sheriff Hyzer, he doesn’t have to release any information about how good he is. And very damned good he is indeed. So good that County Judge Stan Bowley has a sort of standing order about pretrial publicity. So the sheriff would read the paper and come over and pick me up and take me to Stan and he would give me a sad smile and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Foster, you know better than that,’ and he would fine me five hundred bucks for contempt.”

“Which wouldn’t stand up.”

“I know that! So I go to the Jasson brothers and I say, look, I’ve got this crusade I’ve got to go on, and I know the paper is turning a nice dollar, and I know you nice gentlemen are stashing away Jasson Communications stock in my retirement account every year, but I’ve got to strike a blow for a free press. Then they want to know who I am striking the blow against, and I tell them it is the sheriff, and they ask me if he is corrupt and inefficient, and I say he might be the best sheriff in the state, who took a very very rough county and tamed it without using any extralegal methods.”

“Then what if a hot team comes in here from Miami to do a big feature on this cozy little dictatorship, Mr. Goss?”

He smiled again. “No contempt charges. Maximum cooperation. Guided tours. Official charm. No story.”

“But Meyer got badly beaten.”

“By a deputy who was immediately fired and booked for assault.”

“You keep track, even though you don’t print much.”

“Old habits. Ancient reflexes. Interested me to find that Lennie Sibelius came on the run when you whistled. That’s why we’re getting along so well. I wanted to find out what kind of cat you might be, Mr. McGee. Hence the open door, frank revelation policy.”

“Learn anything?”

“Hired gladiators like Sibelius, Belli, Foreman, Bailey, and so on seldom waste their talents on lowpay representation unless there is some publicity angle that might be useful. None here. I’d guess it was a favor. Maybe you work for him. Investigator, building defense files, or checking out a jury panel. You handle yourself as if you could give good service along those lines.”

“Have you ever thought of going back into journalism?”

“I think about it. And I think about my mortgage, and my seventeen-year-old daughter married to a supermarket bag boy, and I think about my twelve-year-old spastic son. I catch pretty fair bass twelve miles from my house.”

“Do you think about Frank Baither?”

“I try not to. Mister Norm will let me know what I need to know.”

Then we smiled at each other and I said my polite good-by. He was like King Sturnevan, long retired from combat, but he still had the moves. No wind left, but he could give you a very bad time for the first two rounds.

I went out into the late April afternoon, into a spring scent of siesta. Head the Buick back toward the White Ibis, where I could make a phone call and find out how Meyer was making it.

Eight

I PARKED exactly where the motel architect had decided the vehicle for Unit 114 should be. Inside the room the red phone light was blinking. I wrote down the numbers the desk-lady gave me. The Lauderdale call was from a very very British female on Lennie’s staff, relaying the diagnosis on Meyer: a mild concussion, hairline fracture of the cheekbone, and they were keeping him overnight for routine observation.

The other one was a local number. I let it have ten rings, just like it says to do in the phone book. Hung up. Then I called the sheriff. He was there. “Yes, Mr. McGee?”

“I don’t want to do anything I’m not supposed to do. I was thinking of driving down to Al Storey’s station on the Trail. Then I remembered it’s outside the county.”

“What would be the purpose?”

“I would sort of like to know how somebody set me up.”

“That’s under investigation. We don’t need help.”

“Are you getting anywhere with it?”

“I’d rather not comment at this time.”

“It’s your best approach, isn’t it?”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d stay inside my jurisdiction, Mr. McGee.”

“So be it, Sheriff.”

I glowered at the unspottable, unbreakable rug for a time, then looked up Arnstead in the phone book. No Lew, Lou, Louis, or Lewis. There were three of them. J. A., and Henry T. and Cora.

I tried J. A. “Lew around?”

“Not around this house, ever, mister.” Bang. So I tried Henry T. “Lew around?”

“Not very goddam likely, buddy.” Bang.

Started to try Cora, then decided I might as well drive out to the address and see for myself. The book said 3880 Cattleman’s Road. I found Cattleman’s Road a half mile west of the White ibis, heading north off of Alternate 112. Flat lands, and frame bungalows which were further and further apart as I drove north.

A big rural mailbox on the right-hand side with red stick-on letters spelling Arnstead. Sand driveway leading back to a pink cement-block house, a small place with a lot of unkempt Mexican flame vine climbing its walls. Cattle guard at the entrance to the drive. Outbuildings beyond the house, and some fenced pasture with a big pond. A dozen head of runty Angus grazed the green border of the pond. A small flock of Chinese Whites cruised the blue pond, and after I rumbled over the cattle guard and parked near the house and turned the engine off, I heard their goose-alarm, like a chorus of baritone kazoos. In an acre of marsh across the road, tree toads were beginning to tune up for evening. An inventive mockingbird swayed in the top of a punk tree, working some cardinal song into his repertoire.

A leathery little old woman was yanked out of the front door by a crossbreed dog the size of a bull calf, mottled black and brown, hair all ruffed up around his neck and standing erect down his spine. He made a rumbling in his throat, and showed me some very large white fangs. “Buttercup!” she yelled. “Hold! Hold!”

Buttercup stopped, all aquiver with anxiety to taste me. The old woman wore ancient blue jeans, a dark red pullover sweater, and blue canvas shoes. She clung with both hands to the hefty chain fastened to the studded dog collar. She was thin as one of the stick figures children draw.

“Hoped it was Lew,” she said. “Or maybe Jase or Henry coming around finally to see I’m all right. But he’s still growling. Who are you? They can’t do my eyes till the cataracts get ripe, and I can tell you I’m sick and tired of waiting. Who are you?”

“My name is Travis McGee. I was looking for Lew.”

“What for?”

“Just a little talk.”

“You stand right still. I got to tell this here dog everything is all right. Buttercup! Okay! Okay! Hush your noise! Down!”

He sat. The rumbling stopped. Tongue lolled. But the amber eyes looked at me with an obvious skepticism.

“Now you come slow right toward him, Mr. McGee, right up to where he can snuff at you. Don’t come sudden.”

So I made the slow advance. He growled again and she scolded him. He sniffed at a pant leg. She told me to hold my hand out and he sniffed that. Then he stood again and the tail wagged. She said I could scratch behind his ears. He enjoyed it.

“Now he won’t bother you. If you come in here and he was loose, he’d come at you running low and fast and quiet, but stand your ground and he’ll get a snuff of you and he won’t bother you none. I’d get edgy out here alone so much if I didn’t have Buttercup.”

“He must be a comfort to you. Do you know when Lew…”

“Before we get into that, would you kindly do me a favor. I been wondering if I should phone somebody to come help me. That black horse of Lew’s has been bawling off and on since early morning, and I can’t see enough to take care of whatever’s bothering him. It’s the near building, and he’s in a stall that opens on the far side. Know anything about horses?”

“They’re tall, have big teeth, give me a sweat rash, and they all hate me on sight.”

“Well, what I think it is, Lew having so much on his mind, he could have forgot feed and water.”

I walked out behind the house and found the stall, the top halves of the doors open and hooked back. There was a black horse in there, standing with his head hanging. His coat looked dull. The stall had not been cleaned out for too long. Flies buzzed in the heavy stench. Feed bin and water trough were empty. He snatched his head up and rolled wild eyes and tried to rear up, but his hooves slipped in the slime and he nearly went down. From the dried manure on his flanks, he had already been down a couple of times.

I went back to the house and told Mrs. Arnstead the situation and asked her if there was any reason he couldn’t be let out.

“Lew was keeping him in the stall on account of he had a sore on his shoulder he had to put salve on, and it was too much trouble catching him. I guess you best let him out and hope he don’t founder himself sucking the pond dry.”

When I unlatched the bottom halves and swung the doors open and stepped well back to one side, he came out a lot more slowly than I expected. He walked frail, as if he didn’t trust his legs, but slowly quickened his pace all the way across to the pond. He drank for a long time, stopped and drank again, then trudged away from the pond, visibly bigger in the belly, and went slowly down onto his knees and rolled over. I thought he had decided to die. But then he began rolling in the grass, squirming the filth off his black hide.

I looked around, saw rotten sprouting grain in an outdoor bin, saw trash and neglect.

Mrs. Arnstead sat in a cane chair on the shallow screened porch. She invited me in. I sat and Buttercup came over and shoved his big head against my knee, awaiting the scratching.

There was a golden light of dusk, a smell of flowers.

“I just don’t know anymore,” she said. “Shouldn’t heap my burdens on a stranger. Lew is my youngest, the last one left to home. Did just fine in the Army and all. Came back and got took on as a deputy sheriff. Worked this place here and kept it up good, and he was going with the Willoughbee girl. Now being a mother doesn’t mean I can’t see things the way they are. Jason was my first and Henry was my second, and then it was sixteen long years before I had Lew. Lord God, Jason is forty-three now, married twenty-four years, and their first was a girl, and she married off at sixteen, so I’ve got a great-grandson near six years old. I know that Lew was always on the mean side. But he always worked hard and worked good, and cared for the stock. It’s the last six months he turned into somebody else, somebody I don’t hardly know. Broke off with Clara Willoughbee, took up again with a lot of cheap, bright-smelling, loud-voice women. Got meaner. Got so ugly with his brothers, they don’t want to ever see him again. Neglects this place and me to go run with trash like them Perrises. Now he’s done something, I don’t know what, to get himself fired off his job, and he might even have to go to jail. I just don’t know what’s going to happen. This place is free and clear and it’s in my name, but the little bit of money that comes in won’t cover food, electric, taxes, and all that. Jase and Henry, they’d help out, but not with me staying out here this way. They got this idea I live six months with one and six with the other, like some kind of tourist woman all the rest of my days. What was it my boy did to get Mister Norm so upset he fired him? Do you know?”

“Yes. It isn’t very pretty.”

“It’s like I’ve run out of pretty lately.”

“A very pleasant and gentle and friendly man was picked up for questioning. He knew nothing about the matter under investigation. Your son gave him a savage beating for no apparent reason. The man is in the hospital in Fort Lauderdale.”

She shook her head slowly. In that light, at that angle, I suddenly saw what she had looked like as a young girl. She had been very lovely.

“That’s not Lew,” she said. “Not at all. He was always some mean, but not that kind of mean. It isn’t drinking, because since my eyes have been going bad my nose has got sharp as a hound’s. It’s something gone bad in his head. Acts funny. Sometimes not a word to me. Set at the table and eat half his supper and shove his chair back and go out and bang the door and drive off into the nighttime. And sometimes he’ll get to talking. Lord God, he talks to me a mile a minute, words all tumbling to get out, and he keeps laughing and walking around and about, getting me to laughing, too.”

“When was he here last, Mrs. Arnstead?”

“Let me think back. Not since noontime on Thursday. I keep fearing he went off for good. It was yesterday toward evening somebody told me on the phone about him getting fired off his job. I was wishing I could see good enough to… well, to look through his stuff and see if I could find something that’d tell me where he’d be. Hate to ask my other sons to come here. What did you say you wanted to talk to him about?”

“I guess I wanted to make sure he was Lew Arnstead, and then I was going to give him the best beating I could manage. That man in the hospital is the best friend I have ever had.”

She stared in my direction with those old frosted blue eyes, then laughed well. A husky caw of total amusement. She caught her breath and said, “Mr. McGee, I like you. You don’t give me sweet lies and gentle talk. And you wouldn’t be a man if you didn’t come looking for him. But you got to be a lot of man to take my Lew. When I see your shape against the light, you looked sizable enough. But size isn’t enough. You got to have some mean, too.”

“Probably enough.”

“Well, you want to find him and I want to know where he is, so you could maybe come to his room with me and tell me what you can find.”

Work clothes and fancy clothes and uniforms. Barbells and hair oil and a gun rack with two rifles, two shotguns, a carbine, all well cared for. Police manuals and ranch journals and comic books. Desk with a file drawer. Farm accounts. Tax papers. She sat on the bed, head tilted, listening to me scuffle through drawers and file folders. Tried the pockets of the clothing in the closet. Found a note in the side pocket of a pair of slacks, wadded small. Penciled in a corner torn off a sheet of yellow paper, a childish, girlish, illiterate backhand.

“Lover, he taken off Wesday after work drivin to Tampa seen his moma. I will unhook the same screen windo and please be care you don’t bunk into nothing waken the baby. I got the hots so awful I go dizy and sick thinken on it.”

No signature.

“What’d you find?” the old woman asked.

“Just a love note from a woman. No signature. She wants to know why he hasn’t come to see her.”

“No help to us with no name on it. Keep looking.” I kept looking. There wasn’t enough. The man had to have keepsakes of some kind. So he hid them. Probably not with great care. Just enough to keep them out of sight. Easy to get at. But after a dozen bad guesses I was beginning to think that either he had used a lot of care, or threw everything away. Finally I found the hidey-hole. I had previously discovered that the drawer on the bedside stand was a fake. Just a drawer pull and a drawershaped rectangle grooved in the wood. But when I reached under, I found there was enough thickness for a good-sized drawer. I took the lamp and alarm clock off the table. The top had concealed hinges.

Plenty of room for dirty books, and for some vividly clinical love notes from female friends. Room for a few envelopes of Polaroid prints. Room for three chunky bottles of capsules. About one hundred per bottle. One was a third empty. All the same. Green and white, and inside the one I pulled open were hundreds of tiny spheres, half of them green and half of them white.

“What did you find now?” she asked.

“The stuff that changed your boy.”

“You mean like some kind of drugs? My Lew wouldn’t take drugs. Not ever.”

“He’s got about two hundred and seventy Dexamyl spansules hidden away in here. They’re a mix of dexedrine and phenobarb. One of them keeps your motor racing for eight hours. It’s what the kids call ‘speed.’ Super stayawakes. Take two or three for a real good buzz. You can hallucinate on an overdose.”

“Speed?” she said. “They said that on the radio way last October. That was the name of some of the stuff they took out of the lockers at the high school. Mister Norm and my Lew and Billy Cable went in with a warrant and went through all the lockers. And that was… about when he started changing.”

“At least we know that if he wasn’t coming back, he would have taken this along.”

“Thank the Lord for that, at least. Anything else in there?”

“A lot of letters.”

“From those women of his I expect.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, don’t you be shy about reading them. But you don’t need to read them to me. Just see if you can find out where he might be.”

No need to tell her I was looking for some clue as to who he had entertained in the shed when he was supposed to be guarding the Baither place.

Few of them were dated. But I came across one with a mid-March date that was more literate and less torrid than the others, and interested me mightily.

Dear Lew,

I ran into Frannie in the Suprex yesterday and she was trying to stick the needle in, like always, and she told me she saw you twice with Lito. Now you can tell me it’s none of my business because the thing we had going is over and done, and you know why we had to quit for good. But this is like old times sake, because for a while before it got sour, I really and truly loved you, and I guess you know that. I have never really forgiven you for beating me up for no reason and I guess I never will, but I couldn’t stand for you to get in some kind of stupid trouble. LEAVE LILO ALONE!!!! She is bad news for one and all. I know all about her because for a while she and a girl I know well were friends. The reason she went with her mother after her the divorce was on account of her father knew he couldn’t handle her. He had custody of both kids, but he let Lilo go. Her mother and her stepfather couldn’t control her either, and not many people know this, but when she was seventeen, like a year after she dropped high school, she was fooling around with Frank Baither, and he’s old enough to be her father, and they say he’s getting out soon, and if he wants her back, you better not be in the way. Now I’ll tell you something else I happen to know, and I hope it turns your stomach. I’m not making it up because I haven’t got the kind of sick mind that can make up something ugly. It happened on a Sunday afternoon last December. Roddy Barramore broke down on Route 112 down by where Shell Ridge Road turns off. A water hose busted, and he decided the best thing to do was walk into Shell Ridge Road to the Perris place, figuring Mr. Perris would have some hose and clamps or at least some tape. It was a warm Sunday and when he got near the house he could hear through the screen in the open windows that Mr. Perris had the football pro game on turned up loud. So he thought instead of ringing the door, he’d go holler in the window, and he had his mouth open to holler and then he saw Lilo and Mr. Perris on the couch, making out like mad, all their clothes in a pile on the floor. Roddy scrunched down quick before they seen him, and walked back and first he told Rhoda there was nobody home, and she said he was quiet for a while and then he told her what really happened. What do you think of a girl who’ll make out with her stepfather knowing her own mother is there helpless in the bedroom maybe fifteen feet away, unable to speak or move much since she had the stroke over two years ago which some say was the judgment of God, but I say we aren’t to judge because we don’t really know what reasons she had for breaking up her own marriage the way she did. Rhoda told me about it, it made me want to throw up. I hope it does the same for you. I don’t care that you aren’t seeing me anymore, really. I wish the best for you always, Lew, but you won’t have anything but heartache and bad trouble if you run around with Lilo. Always your friend, Betsy

I went through the Polaroid prints. Amateur nude studies. Thirty-two different poses. Many different girls. A lean blonde with an insipid leer and huge meaty breasts figured in ten of them, prone, supine, standing, reaching, kneeling. Five were of a woman with a superb body, a body good enough to overcome the incompetence of the photographer. In each she kept the lens from seeing her face.

Then there were thirteen different females, which I suppose could be thought of as trophy shots, all head-on, naked, some taken by flash, rome by available light, some indoors, some outdoors. Estimated ages, eighteen to thirty-two. A variety of expression, from timorous uncertain smile to dazed glaze of sexuality, from broad grin to startled glance of herself surprised, to theatrical scowl. The sameness of the pose removed all erotic possibility. They became record shots, and could have been taken in the anteroom of the gas chamber after a short ride in a cattle car.

It was the remaining four shots which gave me a prickling sensation on the backs of hands and neck.

Solid, shapely, dark-haired, suntanned chunk of girl. Evenly and deeply tanned everywhere, except for the surprisingly white bikini-band, low slung around the functional swelling of the sturdy hips. One of those pretty, engaging, amusing little toughy faces. An easy-laugher. A face for fun and joy, games and excursions. Not at all complicated unless you looked more closely, carefully. Then you could see something out of focus. A contradiction. There was a harsh sensuality in that face which was at odds with the merry expression. There was a clamp-jawed resolve contradicting that look of amiable readiness for fun and games.

I had seen that face, for a micro-instant, several busy seconds before Miss Agnes squashed into the canal. I felt sure of it. And this chance for a more careful examination confirmed the fleeting feeling that my young volunteer mechanic, Ron Hatch, had to be related to her by blood. Though his face was long instead of round, doleful rather than merry, the curves of the mouth, the set of the eyes, the breadth and slant of forehead were much alike. “Must be a lot of letters,” the old woman said.

I put everything back except the most explicit picture of the dark-haired girl, closed the lid, put the lamp and clock back in position.

“Nothing that helps much. But I want to ask some questions, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Arnstead.”

“Don’t mind a bit. Talked too much already, so I might just as soon keep right on. That’s what happens when you’re old and alone. Talk the ear off anybody that wants to stop by and listen. But let’s go back to the porch. Lew could come roaring in, and he’d get mean about a stranger being in his room.”

The sun was down and the porch faced the western sky, faced a band of red so intense it looked as if all the far cities of the world were burning. It will probably look much like that when they do burn.

“Mrs. Arnstead, I remember you said something about your son running around with trash like the Perrises. Is there a Perris girl?”

“There’s Lillian, but she’s not rightly a Perris. I did hear she’s tooken the name, but whether legal in a court, I don’t know. Her real name is Hatch. Her daddy is John Hatch, and he has a lot of friends and business interests around Cypress City. He’s the kind that’s real shrewd about a deal and sort of stupid about women. Anyway he married one that turned out to be trashy for sure. Wanda. He brought her back here from Miami. Must be… let me see now… oh, many years ago. The first baby was Lillian, and then there was Ronnie, then there was one that died. I’d say there was trouble all along between John Hatch and Wanda. Maybe he worked so hard he left her too much time on her hands, and she was built for trouble. They fought terrible, and the way they tell it, Johnny Hatch finally had enough, and so he set out to get grounds to get rid of that woman. About seven years ago, it happened. He had a good mechanic working at his garage name of Henry Perris, and he had the idea Henry was getting to Wanda every chance that came along. So he brought in a fellow and he got the goods on them for sure, tape recordings and pictures and all. She had no chance of child custody or alimony or anything. Soon as the divorce was final, Henry surprised everybody by marrying her. Lillian was fourteen or fifteen then, and wild as any swamp critter, and when she made up her mind she’d rather be with her mother, John Hatch had the good sense not to fight it. They say Ron is a nice boy. John married again a couple years ago and there’s a couple babies now. Let me see. Where was I? Wanda and Henry moved into a place way south of town, down there on the edge of the swamps. She took on a lot of weight they say, and I guess she had the high blood, because she was always high-colored. She had a little stroke about three years ago I guess it was, and then she had a big one and she’s been in the bed ever since, helpless as a baby. There’s some other Perrises down there, trashy folk, fighting and stealing, running in a pack with the other trash. Lillian is as bad as the worst. Lilo they call her. And my Lew has been messin‘ with those trashy people.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“She was calling here, giving me orders, telling me to tell my son Lilo called. I told him to tell her not to call him here. He got ugly about it.” She sighed. “He turned from my youngest into a stranger. I guess it was those pills, not really him at all.”

“Where does Henry Perris work?”

“He sure doesn’t work for Johnny Hatch. He could work anyplace he wants to go, on account of being so good of a mechanic, they say. I heard he works someplace south.”

“In a station on the Trail?”

“Could be. I don’t rightly know.”

“What kind of a car does Lew have?”

“He had a real nice car up till three months back, and then he smashed it all up so bad it was a wonder he wasn’t killed. There was something wrong about the insurance, so what he’s driving now is the old jeep that was here on the place, fixed up some. It was dirty yellow and he got it painted black, he told me. I’ve been wondering something.”

“Yes?”

“I’m a silly old woman but I’m not foolish. Seems like you have the thought in your mind my Lew might be in some kind of trouble more than from Just beating up your best friend.”

“He might be. I don’t know.”

“Then… if he is, I hope you find out and I hope you tell Mister Norm. If he is, I want him put away someplace because he’s getting so wild he might kill somebody, then he wouldn’t have any life left at all. Better he loses a piece of his life and gets over what those pills done to him than lose the whole thing. Unless maybe… already he killed somebody?” The dread in her voice was touching and unmistakable.

“Are you thinking about Frank Baither?”

“It was on the radio.”

“I think he was on duty when that happened.”

“Thank the Lord.”

She asked me to phone her if I heard anything about Lew. I told her to let me know if he came home. She said she could use the phone by counting the holes in the dial. I gave her the White Ibis number. I started to repeat it and she said not to bather, that her memory seemed to be getting better instead of worse as time went by. But she sure did miss the television. It was just shapes and light that didn’t mean anything. She wished the cataracts would hurry and get ripe enough.

As I drove back toward town I was thinking about that ancient and honorable bit of homely psychology, that myth of the ripeness of cataracts. The lens capsule can be removed as soon as it begins to get cloudy. But postoperative vision with corrective lenses is a poor resource at best, compared with normal sight. So the ripeness they speak of is the psychological ripeness of the patient, a time of diminishing vision which lasts long enough, and gets bad enough, so that the postoperative vision is, by comparison, a wonder and a delight. The patient is happy because the basis of comparison has changed.

There are some extraordinarily cruel men in the primitive rural areas of India who travel from village to village curing cataracts for a few rupees. Their surgical tool is a long, very slender, very sharp and hard thorn. They insert it from the side, behind the lens, and puncture the lens capsule. The cloudy fluid leaks into the eye itself and is replaced, or diluted, by the clear fluid within the eye. Sight is restored. It is a miracle. In sixty to ninety days the patient becomes totally and permanently blind, but by then the magician is a dozen villages away, busy with new miracles. Perhaps they do not think of themselves as cruel men. In a country where the big city syndicates purchase children, and carefully maim and disfigure them in vividly memorable ways, and distribute them by truck throughout the city each morning to sit on busy sidewalks with begging bowls, and collect them at dusk as impersonally as one might empty coin machines, cruelty itself is a philosophical abstraction.

The April night was turning cool, so after I stopped back at the White Ibis and picked up an old blue sailcloth sportcoat, laundered and pressed as a courtesy of the Cypress County taxpayers, I went to a place I had spotted when driving around the town. The Adventurer. A lot of blue neon, tinted glass, an acre of asphalt packed with local cars. Frigid air conditioning, exhaust fans hustling the smoke out, ceiling prisms beaming down narrow areas of glare on the Saturday night faces. Long bar packed deep, and people sitting at small tables, leaning toward each other to shout intimacies over the shattering din of a hundred other people shouting to be heard over the sound of a trio on a high shelf in the corner, three dead-faced whiskery young men boosting by about five hundred watts the sound of an electric guitar, electric bass, and a fellow who stood whapping at a tall snare drum and singing sounds which may or may not have been words into the microphone. The obligatory birdcage girl had her own high shelf. She was meaty and energetic, snapping her hair across her closed eyes, tromping out the big beat with a simple repetitive pattern of bump and grind, belly dance and Tahitian flutter. She was not strictly topless because she had a narrow band of fabric around the busy bouncing boobs. There was a spotlight on her that changed from pink to black to blue to black, and in the black light only her teeth and the two narrow bands of fabric, and her high silver shoes glowed with an eerie luminescence.

As I waited to move in close enough to the bar to got my order in, I looked the crowd over. High school kids and ranch hands and packing-house workers. Single swingers and young marrieds. Bank clerks and secretaries and young realtors. Carpentors and plumbers, electricians and hard-wall plasterers, along with young dentists and soldiers and sailors home on leave and hospital technicians and nurses and bag boys and store clerks, and a handful of the customary predators, middle-aged men in youthful clothing, watching, appraising, singling out potential prey of either sex, planning their careful, reassuring campaigns: It was half beer and half hard. The beer was draft, in chilled heavy glass mugs that hold half what they appear to hold. Waitresses hustled the tables, serving either roast beef sandwiches or bowls of shrimp boiled in beer. So the fun place was a nice money machine, because when the waitress slapped the check on the table you either paid and left, or ordered more. I got hold of a cold mug and got back thirty cents change from my dollar and too much head on the dark beer.

I moved out of the crush and sipped the beer and looked for the controls. When you have a big noisy center-ring act that mixes lions, tigers, bears, sheep, rabbits, weasels, and cobras, you need the men with the whips and kitchen chairs and shiny pistols, or you start losing too many animals, and end up with an empty ring and a legal paper nailed to the door.

A disturbance started at a far corner of the long bar, and two quiet men appeared out of nowhere and moved in before it had a chance to spread. A good pair, swift and professional, and they picked the right one without hesitation. When they took him by me I saw that his mouth was wrenched apart by pain and his eyes were frightened, his face pallid and sweaty. The two men were smiling, joking with him. A painful come-along of some kind, manual or mechanical, is better for business than a half dozen old-fashioned bouncers. They had hit so quickly I knew that the place had to be under observation. So by picking the best spot from which one could watch the whole room, I finally picked out the watch station. A mirrored insert was set high over the bar. From there a man could sit at his ease and watch all of the bar, all of the tables, the small dance floor, the cash registers, the entrance, and the doors to the rest rooms. The two men came back in and took up their position to the right of the main entrance. One of them pressed the switch of an intercom box and spoke into it. I could guess the probable message. “He quieted down nice, Charlie. He’s driving home, and he won’t be back tonight.”

So I stood there, in that absolute and lonely privacy that exists only in the middle of a crush of strangers and a deafening din of festive voices and festive rock staring at the hefty fleshy pumping of the tireless blonde, and wondering why I should feel that too many important parts were missing from my equation.

I had been luckier than I deserved, first in finding that lonely, troubled, talkative old woman, secondly in having her relate to me quickly and trustingly, and thirdly in getting my good look at the private hidden life of Lew Arnstead.

A lot of pieces fit beautifully together, but in some way the fit was too good to be true.

I wished Meyer was standing beside me, so I could try it on him. “Frank Baither planned the money-truck job. He used Hutch, Orville, Henry Perris, and Lilo, Perris’s stepdaughter. We saw Henry, Meyer. He was the broad brown guy with the white teeth who arrived late for work at Al Storey’s station that morning. Driving… a blue Rambler. So Henry was in on the Baither killing. It was Lilo Perris (or Hatch) who ran across our bows. Henry set up a little smoke screen. It was too cute because maybe he was too nervous. Grab that envelope and somehow get it to Lilo. Then she went to the Baither place and faked Lew Arnstead into giving her a chance to plant it in Baither’s house. Arnstead is on speed and it has turned him erratic and dangerous. All Mister Norm has to do is trace the envelope, from Henry to Lilo to the Baither house, and bring them in and open them up. Henry and Lew and Lilo. In a hurry, before Lew and Lilo run for it with the money off the truck.”

And suddenly I knew Meyer’s reaction. I could almost hear his voice. “If our Sheriff Norman Hyzer knows as much about this county as I think he knows, then he certainly knows that Frank Baither’s little girl friend, before the money-truck operation, was Lilo Perris. He knows a young girl was involved. He might suspect that Henry Perris was in on it, too, and he would check back and find out where Henry was that weekend. He seemed absolutely convinced we were involved. As if he had to believe we were. Why?”

“A blind spot, maybe. Maybe he’s too close to it to see it. Maybe he’s involved in some way. The pieces fit so well, Meyer.”

“Do they always?”

“Hardly ever.”

“So why do you keep asking these dumb questions?”

Meyer disappeared when big King Sturnevan appeared in front of me, Coke bottle dwarfed by his big malformed fist.

Nine

MCGEE, You didn’t come across our buddy now yet, huh?“

“How do you know?”

“I’d put my money on you, like I said, but he’d mark you some. You wouldn’t be able to help that. Been asking around. Nobody’s seen that sucker.” King’s civilian garb was a big red sport shirt with white palm trees on it, and a tent-sized pair of wrinkled khaki slacks. He had a small straw hat with a narrow brim perched on the back of his head, and a row of cigars in the sport-shirt pocket.

We had to roar at each other to be heard, and I didn’t want to roar what I wanted to say to him. So ip willingly followed me out into the abrupt silence if the night, and we went and sat in the top-down Buick.

“Would you say that like six months ago Arnstead started to go bad?”

“Maybe that long ago. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Before that, he was okay?”

“He was pretty good. He was maybe as good as Billy Cable, and Cable is one hell of a cop, and you can believe it. But… I don’t know. The broads, I guess. A few months back he beat up one of his broads. She filed a complaint and then pulled it. There was something maybe I should have reported. I was in my own car. Six, seven weeks ago. He come the other way, alone in our number four cruiser, on 112 and he had it wound right up to the top. We use Fords with heavy duty suspension and the Cobra 428 mill with a three-point-five-0 rear end, so you got an honest hunner twenny-five, and he come by with that needle laying right on the pin. Hell, I turned around and went in, thinking maybe somebody had hit the bank. Nothing going on. I ast him, what the hell, Lew. You could kill yourself on that kind of road. He told me to shove it. Take fighters now. There have been some greats who went right down the chute when the wrong kind of broad started pecking away at them.”

“Ever think he might be on anything, King?”

He took his time, glowered at a long cigar ash, tapped it over the side onto the parking lot asphalt. “Now that you bring it up, pally.”

“Suppose I say he is? Definitely.”

“Then I say two things. I say you shouldn’t ought to be poking around enough to find out, because it will make Mister Norm a little on the soreass side. And I say the more I think, the more it fits. Speed, maybe? You take fighters, there isn’t maybe one these days doesn’t go into a main bout without being stepped up with superpill. It’s no good, pal. They go like hell and they don’t get tired and they get a little more quick, but they can get hurt bad and not know it and get up and get killed. You spend more than you got, and you sack out for two, three days to get back up to normal. Staying on it is something else. Come to think of it, he hasn’t been sleeping much lately, and he’s dropped weight. What would get him on it?”

“Like the preacher says. Evil companions.”

“Pally, we all got a few of those. All it means is you better not try to find Lew. You better stay the hell away from him.”

“And it means his judgment has gone bad. That’s why he pounded on Meyer. He could have killed him.”

“I stepped out at the wrong time.”

“Why didn’t Billy Cable stop him?”

“Because Billy and him haven’t been getting along so good, and when you see a man bitching himself, why stop him? Anyway Billy finally did stop him or Lew would have killed your friend. Then when it was your turn with Mister Norm, Billy took the chance of giving you a look at your friend so Mister Norm would get the picture on Lew loud and clear and soon. Poor bastard.”

“King, the woman who signed the complaint and withdrew it against Arnstead, was her first name Betsy?”

“Jesus Q. Christ! You’re supposed to be a stranger In town, McGee. Betsy Kapp. Mrs. Betsy Kapp. She’s a divorced lady, works hostess in the dining room down at the Live Oak Lodge. Mrs. Teffer’s place. Best food in the county.”

Nice to have King confirm Lennie Sibelius’s appraisal of the local cuisine. I went back inside with King, and twenty minutes later drove into the middle of the city. It was a little after nine when I walked into the dining room. There was a family celebration at a long table near the far wall, champagne and toasts by middle-aged males to a freshfaced girl and her blushing husband-to-be. Two quiet couples at small tables, with coffee and dessert by candlelight. Three burly businessmen drawing plot plans on the tablecloth.

As the hostess approached me, menus in the crook of her arm, I knew she had to be Betsy Kapp. She was the lean-bodied blonde who had starred in ten of Lew’s Polaroid shots, the one with the attempt at a sexy leer which didn’t quite come off. She wore a dark blue shift with a little starched white collar, and that mixed look of query and disapproval which told me that it was a little late for dinner.

Before she could turn me away, I said, “My attorney Mr. Sibelius, said that I’d be a fool to eat anywhere else, Mrs. Kapp.”

“Oh?” she said. And then “Oh.” She turned and looked at the foyer clock. “Well, it is a little late, but if you… didn’t want anything too terribly elaborate…”

“Sirloin, baked potato, tossed salad with oil and vinegar, and coffee?”

“I think that would… Sit wherever you want, while I…”

She took off for the kitchen in a slightly knock-kneed jog and I picked a table by the wall as far from the other four parties as I could get. She came back smiling. “They hadn’t turned the broiler off, thank goodness. But no baked. Home fries?”

“Fine.”

“And the steak?”

“Medium rare.”

“I can get you a cocktail from the bar.”

“Plymouth gin, if they have it, on the rocks, straight, with a twist. A double. Booth’s, if they don’t.”

She gave the order, came back with my drink, then went to the register and took care of the departing family party and then the businessmen. I watched her move around. She looked a little younger and prettier than in the amateur nude studies, probably because there was a lively animation in her face and because she moved quickly and stood well. Had I not seen the pictures, I would have wondered if the imposing thrust of bosom might not be a pneumatic artifice, a fabricated symbol of the. culture’s obsession with mammary bounty. But I knew they were real, imposingly, awesomely real.

When she brought my salad she said, “I have to be the waitress, too. Another drink?”

She brought the dinner. It was a splendid piece of meat indeed. When I was half finished, the last of the two couples paid and left, and I had the dining room to myself.

Betsy Kapp said, “Would you like your coffee now?”

I waved at the empty chair across from me. “With two cups?”

She hesitated. “Why not? Thank you. I’ve been on my feet since eleven-thirty this morning.”

She brought the coffee and sat across from me, leaned to the candle flame to light her cigarette. “It was a real pleasure serving Mr. Sibelius. He’s a very charming man.”

And, I thought, he tips very big and tips everybody in sight. I held my hand out. “Travis McGee,” I said. She shook hands, pulled her long-fingered hand away quickly.

“I heard that you… you were in some trouble.”

“Am in some trouble. Had the very bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But I think it’s getting straightened out. I never heard of Mr. Frank Baither until we were picked up for killing him. I guess if the sheriff still thought so, I’d be back inside.”

Somebody rattled the foyer door, then apparently gave up and went away.

“I keep wondering about something,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Mr. Sibelius didn’t know my name. I’m sure of that. But you did.”

I shrugged. “Some people were standing outside talking. I asked if it was too late to eat here, and they said to come in and ask Betsy Kapp. So when you came at me with the menus, it seemed logical to call you Mrs. Kapp. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe I made a mistake. Miss Kapp?”

She grimaced. “No. It’s Mrs. But I’m not working at it.”

“Is this your hometown, Betsy?”

“No. I’m from Winter Haven, originally. But they sent me here to stay with my aunt when I was twelve. She died when I was seventeen and I went back home, but things were terrible there and so I came back here and married the boy I was going with. Then he was killed in a terrible automobile accident, and after I got the insurance settlement I went to Miami and then Atlanta, but I didn’t like it in either place. Then I came back here and married a fellow named Greg Kapp, and we fought like some kind of animals until I couldn’t stand it anymore and divorced him. I don’t know where he went and I don’t care. So here I am, and pretty soon it will be four years I’ve been working here. I get sort of restless, but you know how it is. It’s hard to break loose. I sort of like the work, and you get treated pretty good here. Why should I be telling you my whole life story?”

“Because I’m interested. Good reason?”

“I guess you are. God knows why you should be. Are you married, Travis McGee?”

“No. Never have been.”

“You must have some kind of work that keeps you outdoors and all. You look like you’re in great shape.”

“Salvage work, out of Fort Lauderdale.”

“Like on a ship?”

“No. I’m an independent contractor. I take whatever comes along. I live alone on a houseboat at a marina.”

“Gee, that must be a great way to live. Well, I live alone too, but not on any houseboat. It’s a little cottage that my aunt had, that she left me. The bank had it and rented it until I was twenty-one. Greg was after me all the time to sell it. I’m glad now I didn’t. I moved in after the divorce, when the lease ran out on the people I had renting it.”

“I guess you know Cypress City pretty well then.”

“Well enough.”

“I’d like to be able to ask somebody about it, about the people. Sheriff Hyzer and Frank Baither and so on. But you’ve probably got things to do.”

“Because it’s Saturday night? Hah! The only thing I’ve got to do is total the tape and count the money and give Frank, the bartender, the cash and checks.”

“So? I can wait.”

“It doesn’t take me long, really.” Her smile, as she stood up, was the distillation of several hundred motion pictures, refined in the loneliness of the bathroom mirror, born of a hunger for romance, for magic, for tremulous, yearning love. This was the meet-cute episode, immortalized by all the Doris Days, unexpected treasure for a thirty-summers blonde with something childish-girlish about her mouth, something that would never tighten into maturity. It would always yearn, always hope, always pretend-and it would always be used.

She took one of Lennie’s twenties and brought me my change and went back to the register. It made a delicate little problem. To tip or not to tip. A tip would put a strain on the relationship she was trying, with concealed nervousness, to establish. So I went over to her and put a five on the counter by the register and said, “Save this for the waitress who was in such a rush to leave, Betsy.”

She giggled. “Like turning the other cheek, huh? Helen is a good waitress, but she’s always in a terrible rush to get home to her kids. I’ll see she gets it, and I’ll see you get one of her tables next time.”

We walked out together. I asked her suggestion as to where we could go for a drink. She said that first she ought to take her car home. I followed her. She had one of those little pale tan Volkswagens with the fenders slightly chewed up, some trim missing, some rust streaks. I followed her. She drove headlong, yanking it around the corners. She was silhouetted erect in the oncoming lights. We sped through old residential areas where the people sat in their dimly lighted rooms, watching all the frantic imitations of festivity on the small home screens, watching the hosts and the hostesses who were old, dear, and familiar friends. Long ago their parents had old familiar friends named Alexander Rotts and Scattergood Baines and Tugboat Annie. But reading was a lot harder. You had to make up the pictures in your head. Easier to sit and watch the pictures somebody else planned. And it had a comforting sameness, using up that portion of your head which would start fretting and worrying if it wasn’t kept busy.

“Your mission, Mr. Phelps, if you care to accept it, is to discredit the half brother of the dictator of Kataynzia, recover the nine billion in gold, and give it to the leader of the free democratic underground, and disarm the ICBMs now being installed In the Stammerhorn Mountains. If you or any of your LM. Force are killed or captured…”

“Wait one cotton-pickin‘ minute! Accept it! Accept a dumb-dumb mission like that? Are you some kind of ding-a-ling? We’d never get out of that rotten little country alive.”

“Mr. Phelps!”

“Barney won’t try it. Paris won’t try it. And I won’t try it. Go get somebody else. Go get Cinnamon, even. Come back next week, boss, with something that makes sense.”

And the screens go dark, from the oil-bound coasts of Maine to the oily shores of Southern California. Chief Ironsides retires to a chicken farm. Marshall Dillon shoots himself in the leg, trying to outdraw the hard case from Tombstone. The hatchet bounces back off the tree and cuts down tall Dan’l Boone. The American living room be comes silent. The people look at each other, puzzled, coming out of the sweet, long, hazy years of automated imagination.

Where’d all the heroes go, Andy?

Maybe, honey, they went where all the others went, a long time ago. Way off someplace. Tarzan and Sir Galahad and Robin Hood. Ben Casey and Cap’n Ahab and The Shadow and Peter Rabbit. Went off and joined them.

But what are we going to do, Andy? What are we going to do?

Maybe… talk some. Think about things.

Talk about what? Think about what? I’m scared, Andy.

But there’s no problem, really, because after the screens go dark and silent, all the tapes of the watchers self-destruct in five seconds.

Little mental games often compromise my attention. She braked so hard and unexpectedly I nearly climbed the back slope of the bug. She swung left into a narrow drive between tall thick hedges. I followed, and she drove into a small carport, cut the lights, got out, grinned, and squinted back into my headlight glare, turned on a carport light and pulled the edge of her hand across her throat. So I turned off my lights and engine and got out. April bugs were shrilling in the hedges, under a murky half moon.

“A lot of the meat is broiled,” she said. “They have those exhaust fans and all, but I’m in and out of there enough so when I get home I smell like meat grease. It gets in my hair and my clothes. It won’t take me long to get rid of it, Travis. Come and look at my little nest.”

It was to be admired, even though she had enough furniture and lamps and department store art objects for a cottage twice the size. One careless move, and I felt as if I would belt my leg on a table and spill $19.95 worth of pseudo-Mexican ceramics. l had to admire the cat, which was easier. A big male neuter, part alley and part Persian, patterned in gray and black, a wise, tolerant, secure cat who mentioned, politely enough, that he would like to hear the sound of the electric can opener. She opened a can of something that looked horrid, dumped it onto a paper saucer and put it in his corner. He approached it slowly, making electric motor sounds, then hunched into the serious ceremony of eating.

“He can say his name,” she said. “Raoul. Raoul?” The cat looked up at her, chop-licking, and said, “Raoul,” and bent again to his gluey feast.

“Come see his yard,” she said. “Raoul’s personal piece of outdoors.”

We went through another door off the kitchen into a fenced grassy rectangle about twenty feet by thirty. She clicked on the outdoor floods as we went out. They were amber-colored. The grape-stake fence was about eight feet high, affording total privacy. There were flagstones, planting areas, vines against the grape stake, a little recycling electric fountain in the middle, which she turned on. There was some redwood furniture and a sun cot.

I had the feeling I had been there before, and then I recognized areas of it which had formed the background for the Polaroid poses.

“Raoul and I both love this place,” she said. “Neighborhood dogs roam in packs, and he knows they can’t get at him. And I can stretch out in the sun absolutely stark and just bake myself into a stupor. It’s sort of pointless, really, because I can’t ever get a decent tan. My skin resists it. I go pink and then it turns sort of yellow-sallow and then back to white. But I just love the feel of the sun.”

I made admiring sounds and she led me back in and back into the living room. “Sit in that chair, dear,” she said. “When you put your legs up, it’s fabulously comfortable, really. Do you like Brazilian music? I have this thing about the samba. See, I’ve got it all on these cassettes.”

“I like it.”

“Good!” As she picked out a couple of cassettes, she said, “A gentleman friend got me a wonderful discount on this stereo cassette player. He makes his own tapes off records and off the air and then he makes duplicates and leaves them with me when he comes through town. Travis, while you’re waiting for me, would you like a drink? I’ve got practically anything. Gin, vodka, rum, Scotch, and so on. I don’t drink gin, actually. So I don’t know anything about it. There’s almost a full bottle somebody left of something called Bengal gin. Is that any good?”

“It’s excellent.”

“I thought it might be pretty good. I’ve been meaning to ask Frank, the bartender, but I keep forgetting. I could fix you a drink like you had at the Lodge. Me, I like to come home and make myself a tall tall Scotch and water with lots of ice, and then take a long hot hot sudsy bath and take a sip of the icy drink every little while. It tastes fantastically marvelous then. I’m going to have the drink, dear, but don’t worry about waiting for me to take a long bath. I’ll make it a quick shower. Can I fix you what you…”

“That would be just fine, Betsy.”

So she started the cassette and adjusted the volume. She came smiling back with a gin and ice for me in a giant crystal glass tinted green, with grapes and grapevines etched into it, placed it on a cork coaster on the table beside the tilt chair. The cork coaster had small bright fish painted on it. The paper napkin was pink, imprinted with BETSY in red diagonally across a scalloped corner. Beside the drink she put a little blue pottery rowboat full of salted mixed nuts.

“There!” she said above the music of Mr. Bonfa, and went off to get rid of the occupational odor of burning meat, leaving me in my fabulously comfortable chair, next to a drink that would tranquilize a musk ox, semi-recumbent in a static forest of bric-a-brac, listening to Maria Toledo breathe Portuguese love words at me in reasonably good stereo.

A compulsive strangler would have damned few tactical problems. She had taken my word that Lennie Sibelius was my attorney. She took my word that my semi-arrest was due to bad luck rather than guilt. She went on instinct, and trusted the stranger. But a strangler can look like me. Or thee. The guest could tiptoe in and clamp the sick hand on the soapy throat, and in the moments left to her she could remember an entirely different sequence of motion pictures. Death itself would not be real because it would look like Alfred Hitchcock.

In fifteen minutes she reappeared in the doorway. “Look at me!” she wailed. “Will you just look at me!”

She wore a floor-length terry robe dyed in a big bold psychedelic pattern of red, orange, pink, and lemon. She held it closed, one hand at her throat, the other at her waist. Her hair was sopping wet, pasted flat to the delicate shape of the skull.

“I am so dang stupid about mechanical things,” she complained.

“What happened?”

“I got out of the shower and bent over and turned it so the water comes out of the faucets, and then I was going to close the drain for a minute, to sort of rinse the tub, and I hit the shower thing, dammit. I didn’t want to get my hair wet. It’s very dense and very fine and it takes like forever to dry. I’m terribly sorry, dear. But I can’t go out like this, really. Would you mind terribly? We could talk here, couldn’t we? And there really aren’t that many nice places to go at this time of night. What time is it? My goodness, it’s after eleven-thirty already! I had no idea.”

“I was going to suggest a rain check. Maybe that isn’t the right expression.”

“Is your drink all right? Goodness, you’ve hardly touched the surface. Are you sure you don’t mind if we just stay in? At least it isn’t going to give me any big decisions about what to wear. Back in a jiffy dear.”

She went away. The music stopped. I went over and flipped the cassette and cut the volume back by half, and threaded my way back to the leathery refuge. She was not, I decided, devious enough to shove her hair under the water and go into an act. Nor, having been asked out, could she step out of her own obligatory role and say it would be cozier if we stayed in. Doubtless it had happened just as she described it. But the mistake, though deliberate, was on a subconscious and inaccessible level. It was all part and parcel of the meet-cute. The entry in the locked diary-and it would be inconceivable for her not to keep one-would say, “Actually, probably nothing at all would ever have happened between us if I hadn’t been so stupid and soaked my hair that way. Then again, maybe it would have happened anyway, but not so soon, not on the very first night I met him. There was something inevitable about Travis and me, and I guess somehow I sensed it from the very first minute.”

She came out in about a jiffy and a half. She had wound a coral-colored towel around her wet hair and tucked it in place. Instead of the mini-brief, leggedy outfit I anticipated, she wore an ivory white corduroy jump suit, with a kitchy arrangement of wide gold zippers and small gold padlocks on the four pockets, a gold chain around the waist, and a concealed zipper from larynx to crotch. After she had moved through the room a couple of times, straightening and patting, I found myself reacting to the outfit, and decided that, given her figure, it was more provocative than had she worn what I expected.

She took my drink away and “freshened” it, and made herself another tall pale Scotch. She sat on a blue nubbly couch a yard from my leather lair, pulled her long legs up, and said, “I guess I’m a terrible party pooper, Travis, but I’m just as happy not to go out. I guess my little nest is really why I don’t leave this town. When I’m here, I’m not really in Cypress City. I could be anywhere, I guess. Because if I were anyplace else, I’d build another nest like this one, with all my own things around me. I’m kind of… of… an inward sort of person. I don’t really pay a lot of attention to what goes on… out there. So I don’t know if I can tell you the sort of things you want to know, actually.”

I started her off by telling her I thought Sheriff Norman Hyzer a strange one. So she told me his tragic life story, and how everybody understands why he is so withdrawn and cold and precise. But a fair man, really. Very fair. And they say he is real up-to-date with all the gadgets and advances in police work. He lives for his work and they say he’s got it now so that the job pays so little money, really, that nobody else tries to get elected. He puts all the money into the department, into pay for the deputies, and patrol cars and radios and all that.

“Well, I know some Baithers, because there are a lot of them around the south county, dear. There was one rotten Baither boy in junior high with me. He got killed in Vietnam years ago. His name was Forney Baither. I don’t know what relation he was to Frank Baither. But they were the same kind, I guess. Forney got a choice of going to state prison or enlisting. I’d say that a dead Baither isn’t much of a loss to anybody, and I guess nearly everybody would agree with that.”

I could feel a little Bengal buzz. She wasn’t going to give me anything useful unless I found the right door and blew the hinges off. I looked at her blurred image through green glass.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she said.

“I guess I was thinking about the Great Sheriff, the tragic figure, the miracle of efficiency and public service. Why would he keep an animal on his payroll?”

“What do you mean?”

“A brutal, sadistic, degenerate stud animal like Lew Arnstead?”

She put her fingers to her throat. Her mouth worked and her eyes went wide. “Lew? But he’s just…”

“Just the kindly officer of the law who put my gentle friend of many years in the hospital for no reason at all, and would have killed him with his hands if Billy Cable hadn’t stopped him.”

“That doesn’t sound like…”

“He’s suspended and facing charges, and I hope Hyzer makes sure he’s sent away for a long long time. I’d like to get to him first, for about one full minute.”

“But he isn’t…”

“Isn’t such a rotten kid after all? Come on, Betsy! I’ve been checking him out… while I was looking for him. He’s been running up a big score in the Cypress County female population. Romping them and roughing them up, and entertaining his buddies with his bare-ass Polaroid souvenirs.”

Her eyes went wide-blind, looking at me and through me as she added it up, her long throat working as she swallowed again and again. The cassette had come to the end. There was no automatic turnoff. There was a small humming, grinding sound as the tape drive kept working. This was her sweet nest, all bric-a-brac and make-believe. A talented lady once defined poetry as a make-believe garden containing a real toad. So I had put the toad in Betsy’s garden.

She made a lost, hollow, plaintive cry, sprang to her feet, and ran for shelter. Miraculously, in her pell-mell dash for her bathroom, she did not smash a thing. The door banged. I heard distant kitten-sounds. I got up and ejected the tape and put a new one on.

You are a dandy fellow, T. McGee. All the lonely, wasted, wistful ones of the world have some set of illusions which sustains them, which builds a warm shelter in the wasteland of the heart. It does them no good to see themselves as they really are, once you kick the shelter down. This one was easy bed-game for any traveling man who wanted to indulge her fantasies by playing the role of sentimental romanticism, with a little spice of soap opera drama.

So, while you are digging up whatever might be useful out of the little ruin you have created, at least have the grace to try to put the make-believe garden back in order. If you get the chance.

First step. Go to bathroom door. Knock. “Betsy? Betsy, dear? Are you all right?”

Blurred and miserable answer. Something about being out in a minute. Fix a drink.

Fixed two. They looked the same as before. But hers was real and mine was tap water.

She came out at last, walking sad, shoulders slumping and face puffy, saying something about being sorry, terribly sorry.

Moved over to the couch. Sat beside her. Took her hand. She tried to pull it away, then let it rest in mine. Her eyes met mine, then slid away.

“Betsy, may I make some very personal remarks?” Shrugged, and nodded. “I think you are a fine, generous, warm-hearted woman. People are going to take advantage of those qualities sometimes. But you shouldn’t feel bad, really. When… a human being never takes any emotional risks, then she never gets hurt. But she isn’t really alive, either, is she?”

“I… don’t know. I wish I was dead.”

“When I opened my big mouth, honey I had no idea that you could have been involved with Lew Arnstead.”

“I wouldn’t have been. But he… but he was in trouble and he felt so lost and miserable.”

“Why don’t you tell me about it? That might help.”

“I don’t want to.”

“I think it would be the best thing to do.”

“Well… the background of it… and it took him a long time to trust me enough to tell me… he’d always had girls, before he went in the service and while he was away and after he came back. And he fell in love with Clara Willoughbee. Really in love. And I told him the trouble was probably some kind of guilt about all the other girls, and feeling unworthy or something. But after they had plans to get married and everything, he couldn’t do it with her. He’d want her terribly, and then it would just get… he couldn’t do anything.”

She became more animated and dramatic as she got into the story. He and the Willoughbee girl had broken up. He had tried going back to prior girl friends, but he was still impotent. And one night, off duty, he had gotten drunk at the Lodge, too drunk to drive. She drove him around in the cold night air in her little car. He had cried and cried and said he was going to kill himself. He passed out and he was too heavy for her to manage, so she had to leave him in her carport asleep in her car. In the morning he was gone. He came back to find out what he had told her. Then he would stop by, just to talk to her. Finally he told her what was wrong. That was in October of last year.

“I have… a kind of condition,” she said. “It’s a sluggish thyroid gland, and that gives me low blood pressure, and makes me feel kind of listless and depressed. I used to have to take thyroid extract, but it made me too jittery sometimes, and made my hands ice cold and sweaty. So a couple of years ago Doctor Grinner gave me a renewable prescription for something called an energizer. I take one every morning of my life. I noticed that sometimes if I get mixed up and take a second one on account of forgetting I took the first one, it makes me feel… well, terribly sexy. I might as well say it right out. Anyway… I told Lew how they made me feel, and he came over one Sunday afternoon and I gave him two of them, and about an hour later he thought he could. And so… You understand I was helping him. He was so terribly depressed. Well, it worked. He was so happy and laughing and all. And so grateful to me. And we kept making love after that, and fell in love with each other.”

“He kept taking your pills?”

“Oh no. He didn’t have to, not after the very first time. It was all in his mind, actually. You know. Guilt and fear.”

“Then you broke up? Why?”

Her eyes narrowed. “We were having a little bit of a quarrel. It wasn’t serious at all. Then he slapped me, much too hard. And then he kept right on slapping and hitting me until he knocked me unconscious. I woke up right over there on that little white rug, and he was gone. I was all cut inside my mouth and my face was terrible. The next morning I was sore in a hundred places, and I could hardly get out of bed. I was off work for four days. I reported him, then withdrew the complaint. I told them I fell off a ladder, hanging a picture. And I had to wear dark glasses for a week until my black eyes didn’t show anymore.”

“How did he act when he was beating you up?”

“He didn’t seem mad at me or anything. I was screaming and begging and trying to get away from him, but he didn’t hear me, sort of. He looked… calm. Sometimes I have bad dreams about it.”

“And you’ve never seen him again?”

“On the street and in the dining room. But not like before. Not that way. I wouldn’t! He could come begging and I wouldn’t ever let him touch me. I wrote him never to come here.”

“Are you in his Polaroid collection?”

“Of course not!” Too emphatic. Quick sidelong glance to see if I believed her.

“He could have tricked you somehow.”

“Wall… one Sunday afternoon, we had a lot of bloody Marys and we got kind of wild and silly and he had that camera and got it out of his car. They use it for accident investigations, and I sort of remember him taking pictures of me out in the back in Raoul’s yard. But I tore them up.” She was frowningly thoughtful. “At least I think I tore them all up. He took lots and lots. I certainly wouldn’t willingly let Lew or anybody walk away with… pictures of me like that in his pocket, would I?”

“Of course not!”

She looked grateful for my indignant emphasis. She took her tall drink down several inches. She smiled sadly. “Why anybody should want nude pictures of me is something else again. I’m built kind of weird, practically enormous up here and skinny everywhere else, like I’m thirty-nine-twenty-four-thirty-two. Well, now you know what kind of an idiot I can be, dear.”

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

“Lew didn’t seem like a crazy person.”

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

“Like he could be… put away?”

“The odds are better that he’ll kill somebody, and get put away for that.”

“You’ve been looking for him?”

“Yes. I talked to his mother. He hasn’t been home since Thursday noon. Got any ideas?”

“I suppose he could be with some woman someplace.”

“Who has he been running with lately? Got any idea?”

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

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

Ten

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

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

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

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