Travis McGee 12 - The Long Lavender Look

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

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

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

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

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

“I love you so,” she sighs.

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

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

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

“Darling, you can have the bath now. I laid out some things for you. Be careful of the shower. The knob for hot turns the wrong way.”

Tiny bathroom. Narrow shower stall. Kept whacking my elbows against the tile. Big bar of sweet pink soap. Big soft tiger towel in black and yellow stripes. Tufted yellow bath mat. Mingled pungent odors of perfumes, salves, lotions, sprays, and of natural girl. Yellow curtains across steamed window. Yellow terry cover on the cover to the toilet seat. Glimpsed my tanned, hairy, scarred body in the full-length mirror. Great, knuckly, fibrous hulk, offensively masculine in all this soapy-sweet daintiness. New toothbrush. Mint toothpaste. Scraped beard off using bar soap and a miniature white-and-gold safety razor with a toy blade. Stopped and looked self in the eye in the mirror over the lavatory. Said severely, “Just what the hell are you doing here, McGee?”

Don’t get churlish with me, fella. I got caught up in one of the games Betsy Kapp plays. This one was called the bigger-than-both-of-us game. All right. Sure. I could have walked out at any time. Big man. Sorry, honey, I like brighter, funnier, better-looking women. Sorry. You don’t match up. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Leave your name and address with the receptionist.

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

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

“But? But?”

All right! So call it an unexpected pleasure. “McGee, you kill me. You really do. You go around suffering so much. All this bedroom therapy you dole out must put a hell of a strain on you. How come, boy, you always seem to find broken birds with all these hidden talents? Just lucky?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or… go back in and say I’d changed my mind, and there was no point in going to the motel. Play Betsy’s game for a day and another night, and hope they would come and knock on the door, and then convince them with the totality of our horrid surprise.

Or… bring Betsy into it right now. Look at this little inconvenience, sweetie. Gibbering hysteria, with a lot of flapping and squalling and running around in small circles.

Fact: I had gone out sometime between one-thirty and two and moved the car. Fact: I had stayed, in part, because Betsy had been terrified by the thought of Arnstead skulking about in the night. Fact: I had sought out Betsy because of the letter hidden in Lew’s room, and in the course of events Mister Norm would gather up that letter as evidence. And King would remember he had identified Betsy for me.

Supposition: Had I not been roped into the Baither killing and released with a certain obvious reluctance by Mister Norm, I might be able to carry this situation off and make useful explanations. But it was a little bit too much to expect Mister Norm to swallow.

Uneasy suspicion: Dropping the package on me was just a potentially handy byproduct of the primary necessity to turn off the mouth and the memory of a link between Frank Baither and his executioners.

Forlorn option: Hide the package right here, and fast.

I did not like any of my options.

“Trav?” Betsy said, walking toward me. “Trav, honey, I didn’t hear you drive out and I wondered…”

“Go back in the house!”

“Darling, you’re practically barking at me! I only-”

I moved to stop her, but she had taken that one step that brought her close enough to the convertible to see the dead face, the dried and dusty eyes.

She swayed, eyes going out of focus. She made a gagging sound. I got to her then, caught her by the upper arms. Her color was ghastly. Her teeth chattered, and there were goosebumps on her long pale arms and legs. She looked at him again, and I turned her away and led her over into the sunshine. She turned into my arms. I held her. She hiccuped, sighed, then pushed herself out of my arms and stared up into my face, frowning.

“I’m all right now. But why? My God, how did he get here?”

“It is Arnstead?”

She tilted her head. “Of course! Didn’t you ever see him before?”

“No.”

She tried to smile, a valiant effort. “For one second I thought that maybe he was around here in the night like I thought, and when you went out to move your car… Forgive me, darling. You couldn’t have come back into my house, into my bed, and… it couldn’t have been the way it was for us. But what a filthy thing to do to us, to put his body here.”

“Somebody had to know I was here.”

She walked around me and went into the carport and came out with a ragged bedsheet which had been used as a drop cloth. She marched to the car, snapped the sheet open, floated it down over the body.

“Why don’t you put the top up? You shouldn’t have left it down anyway, dear. It’s all soppy with dew inside.”

I reached in and pushed the toggle. The top ground up out of the well and swung forward and whacked down. The buzzards winged away.

It was comforting to be unable to see him. I said, “You are coming on very staunch, woman.”

She looked mildly surprised. “I feel like screaming my head off. But that wouldn’t do much good, would it? Should we phone now?”

“Let’s see if there’s enough coffee left for two cups, and have a little talk and see whether we should phone.”

She listened, with all the girlish games turned off. I had to start back at the beginning and cover everything that had happened. Not quite everything. I left out her letter and the pictures of her. I went through my options.

When it had all been said, she frowned at me and said, “But suppose Sheriff Hyzer did jump to the wrong conclusion, and he put you back in jail. Wouldn’t that be a lot safer than trying to… do something that might not turn out so good? I mean you would certainly be cleared, because, after all, you are not some kind of a criminal, and you have friends and you are in business.”

“Add one more murder, Betsy, and the Cypress City Call Journal is going to have to stop covering it like a zoning violation. And there will be Miami papers and television coming in here. And it would not matter one damn if I got cleared and released later. I can’t afford that kind of coverage, that much exposure.”

“Why not? Are you… are you wanted for something else?”

“No. And I am in the salvage business, but not like you think. Personal salvage. Suppose some cutie clips an innocent pigeon for a very big score, and the pigeon exhausts all the possible legal ways of getting it back. Somebody might steer him to me, and if I think there’s a fair chance, I’ll gamble my time and expenses against a deal whereby I keep half of any recovery I make. Last resort salvage specialist. A small and useful reputation for recovery. And the methods used aren’t particularly legal. If Hyzer checks me out carefully, he’s going to come up with a lifestyle he’s going to label unsavory. I am a lot more conspicuous and memorable than I would like to be. It’s a handicap in my line of work. If they ever make me on the front pages, with picture and with colorful account of how I make a living, that is the end of the living, honey. I would never get a chance to get in close enough to make a recovery, and I would have the law keeping a beady eye on me from that point on. So no thanks.”

“But you could find some other way to make money, couldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t that be just a different kind of prison?”

She stared into space, then nodded. “I guess having the kind of life you want is worth taking a big chance for.”

“But now you’re taking part of the risk. It isn’t fair to ask you to do that. The smart thing for you to do is make the phone call.”

“Pooh. If I was any good at doing smart things, I’d have started a long time back. Darling, that houseboat you live on, does it have engines and everything, or does it just sit there?”

“It cruises. Very very slowly, but very very comfortably.”

“They’re shutting down the Lodge in June and remodeling the whole main part, the kitchen and dining room and bar. If a person takes a risk, a person ought to make a profit, don’t you think?”

“Okay, honey. The month of June is yours aboard the Busted Flush.”

“I’ll do the cooking and laundry and all that.” No phone call. And considering the various areas of unknown risk, she came up with the best idea. So she changed to a blouse and skirt and went tooling out in her Volks, with a rather shaky wave and a set smile. And I used the time in a careful search for any extra bonus which might have been left with the special gift. I saved the worst until last. He had stiffened up, and it was difficult to go through his pockets. The sun had moved and it heated the inside of the car. The dead deputy was beginning to smell.

Western wallet, cowhide with the hair still on, and L.A. burn-branded into it. Thirty-eight dollars. Scruffy cards of identity and credit. Cracked Kodacolor shot of his black horse. Two snapshots of commercial origin and vivid clinical obscenity.

Plastic vial containing eight of the bicolored spansules. Dull pocket knife full of lint and tobacco crumbs. Squashed pack containing three Viceroy cigarettes. Zippo lighter. Several keys on a worn chain. Twenty-six cents in change.

The jackpot was in the top right-hand breast pocket of the worn ranch jacket. Half a sheet of blue stationery, carelessly torn off. Hasty scrawl. “Lew if you ever come to my place again I swear to almighty God I’ve got a gun and I’ll kill you dead on sight.” Signed with a big B in ballpoint so firmly the downstroke had gouged a little hole in the paper.

Everything back as before, except for the note. No weapon in the car or shrubbery. Body covered with the drop cloth. I was careful how I had handled anything that would take a print.

I had seen Betsy’s handwriting before, on the same blue paper, but in a much longer letter, with the words more carefully formed.

What the hell was keeping the woman?

I went in. Raoul wound around my ankles, making little ingratiating mews. I wondered if the lady did indeed have a gun. There is a pattern to hiding places, and you always save time by starting with the places most frequently used. Suitcases and hat boxes. Then covered bowls and cooking pots in the kitchen cabinets. Next you try the bedroom drawers. So it took perhaps twelve minutes to find the gun. Bottom drawer on the left side of her dressing table. In the front of the drawer was a plastic bag with a drawstring, containing the diaphragm in its pink plastic case, along with the accessory tube. The gun was in the back under a batch of bright scarves, each carefully folded. It, too, was in a plastic drawstring bag, the bag wrapped in a fragrant silk scarf. No obscure little small-caliber ladygun this, no European purse-pistol with mickey mouse action and engraved floral pattern. A deadly, fourteen-ounce Colt.38 Special, trade name “Agent,” drop-forged aluminum frame, full checkered walnut stocks, Colt bluing, equipped with hammer shroud. Six rounds in the cylinder, and a full box of ammo in the plastic bag, with just the six rounds missing therefrom. Almost mint condition. A very hard and heavy close-range punch for a lady to own. If you had an earnest and honest desire to kill somebody, this item would simplify the task and shorten the process.

I put it back exactly as before.

Five minutes later I heard the lawn mower engine of the VW come chattering along the driveway and into the carport. She came hurrying into the house and into my arms, clung for a little while then gave me a tired upslanted smile, quick peck on the corner of the mouth. She wandered over and dropped onto the couch, kicked her sandals off, leaned her head back, forearm across her eyes.

“Gone a long time, Betsy.”

“Well… I wanted to find out anything worth finding out. For what it’s worth, there is absolutely no one watching this place. I went around and around and came up on it from all the directions there are. Nothing.”

“That’s comforting.”

“I went to the White Ibis and went to the desk and asked for you. They tried the phone and said you weren’t in. I located the box for 114, and I couldn’t see any message slips in it.”

“You shouldn’t have gone there.”

“It was the quickest way to find out if anybody was trying to find you, dear. And if they were, and if I came there looking for you, the last place they’d look would be here. What are we going to do?”

“I found this on him,” I said, and handed her the note.

She read it and it brought her bolt upright, astonishment on her face. “But I wrote this last year! Why would he be carrying it around? It isn’t even all here.”

“What was on the top half?”

“Let me think. The date, I guess. And something about how bad he’d hurt me, about how my face looked.”

“You wrote it right after he beat you?”

“The second day. I was too sick to write anything the first day.”

“Did you think he might come back here?”

She leaned back again. “I don’t know. You see… I wanted him to come back. That was the sick part. I wanted him to come back, no matter what. I was afraid that… if he did come back, I’d go to bed with him if that’s what he wanted. I hated him for beating me, but the wanting was stronger than the hate. So I don’t know whether I was trying to keep him away from me until I could stop wanting him, or whether I was trying to… to challenge him so he would come back.”

“Do you even have a gun?”

“Sure. Stay right there. I’ll get it.” She brought it into the living room, took it out of the plastic bag and handed it to me. “It scares me to look at it. Lew gave it to me. He took it away from somebody and didn’t turn it in like he was supposed to. He bought the ammunition for it and loaded it for me and showed me how it works. But I never fired it. Is it a good gun?”

“Very reliable up to thirty feet or so.”

“He said if I ever had to use it, not to try to aim. Just point it like pointing my finger and keep pulling the trigger. I don’t think I could fire a gun right at anybody, no matter what.”

I gave it back to her and she stowed it away. She sat as before and said, “It was just half the note in his pocket so that if somebody found it on his body they’d think he came here.”

“Somebody put the note in a handy pocket after he was dead. They brought the body here. They saw the Buick and dumped him into it. They thought you would be alone.”

“Then they changed their mind. What do you think they were going to do, if I’d been alone?”

“To set it up to look as if you killed him, there’s the little problem of a weapon, something you could reasonably kill him with.”

“I… I didn’t look at him very long. I saw that terrible mushed-in place. What shape would it have to be?”

I demonstrated with my hands. “A piece of pipe about this long and about this big around would do it. You could do that much damage with one full swing.”

She shuddered. “I couldn’t do anything like that.”

“Let’s think this out. He’s too heavy for you to carry. So the encounter had to happen outside the house. You wouldn’t have come out into the night, so it had to look as if it happened earlier. You come home and drive into the carport and get out of the car and go to that side door, right?”

“Yes. It’s a delay switch on the carport light. It gives me time to get inside before it goes out.”

“So he could have been waiting for you in the carport, or in the bushes near the door. Handy places to drop the body. Now then, in one place or the other, there has to be something that you could pick up and swing.”

She sat with elbows on knees, chin on fists, lips pursed. “I can’t think of a dang thing around here that… Oh!”

“Oh what?”

“Maybe it could be the handle for the doohickey for the corner of the house. The estimate was two hundred dollars to put in a new pillar. The old one sort of started sinking into the ground for some reason and Mr. Kaufman down the street said why didn’t I mail-order that thing from Sears for under nine dollars and it would work just as well, and just leave it there.”

“You’ve lost me. You better show me.”

We went out, and she sat on her heels by the rear corner of the house and pointed out the construction jack that was bracing it up. It was the type that uses a pipe handle.

The handle, about thirty inches long, was on the ground under the house, beside the jack. I saw that it was too rusty to take a print. I reached under and picked it up and pulled it out. The far end was clotted with dark-dried blood, some short black hairs, some bits of tissue.

She spun, ran three steps, bent over and threw up. When she was finished she trotted into the house, keeping her face turned away from me. I put the jack handle in the Buick on the floor in back.

I was sitting on the couch when she finally came out of the bathroom. She was wan and subdued. She apologized.

“We have to keep going with it, Betsy. Okay, so I’ll leave him near the corner of the house. You find him in the morning and phone the law. Hyzer is a thorough man. You certainly wouldn’t have looked through Arnstead’s pockets and found that old note.”

“Never!”

“So they reconstruct. Certainly some people know about the affair you had with him.”

“Too many.”

“You can’t explain the note away, and you can’t prove it wasn’t written yesterday or Friday, or prove he hadn’t come here recently. Hyzer gets a warrant. Your story about how you happen to have that gun is a little frail, without Lew around to back it up. So he was waiting when you came back from work alone last night.”

“Thank God I didn’t!”

“You had a quarrel. You edged over to the corner of the house. The delay light went out. You felt around and found that handle and lifted it and hit him in the skull and knocked him down. You didn’t know you’d killed him. You went into the house. When you found the body this morning, you tried to lie your way out of it, bluff your way out of the jam.”

“But nobody would really believe that I could ever…”

“There’s something missing. How did he get here?”

So she went on a casual stroll in the quiet neighborhood. The jeep was four doors away, parked behind the overgrown masses of Cuban laurel in the side yard of a boarded-up house. The guard chain across the drive had been unhooked and rehooked. So I had to go into the dead pocket again, holding my breath, and finger the keys out. She took another stroll and came back and said that one of them fit the ignition, and she had left the keys right there.

The jeep was proof he had arrived alone to visit a woman who had threatened to kill him if he ever came around again. He did. And she did.

“Now what, Travis? Now what do we do? Wait until dark and then take-”

“Dark is too long to wait. Somebody can get impatient. And nervous.”

So we had to take the gamble. Plan it first and then take it. A sickening gamble, because moving the body was prime meat for any prosecuting attorney. No jury would ever understand why we did it.

Eleven

I DROVE her VW out of the driveway and parked on the far side of the street. The big banyans made dark shade. A fat lady in red pants knelt three front yards away, troweling her weeds. A household gas truck on special Sunday delivery went by and turned at the next corner. By then she had time to move the Buick to the mouth of her narrow sheltered driveway, so I beeped the horn twice as prearranged, meaning that there was no pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

I drove east, and looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her come out and turn west. She had won the argument about the cars. She reminded me that I had told her I was conspicuous, all by myself. And in the white convertible I was doubly memorable, and too many people had seen me in it. Certainly, a lot more people knew her by sight, but not in the big floppy broad-brimmed hat she took from the back of her closet, or in the huge mirrored sunglasses she had bought long ago and seldom worn. In the very ordinary-looking VW and with the tweed cap which her second husband had left behind and never came after, I was not likely to be either recognized or remembered. I had asked her three times if she was sure she could handle the constant awareness of the body directly behind her, and she finally said she planned not to think about it.

The place she had described to me was perfect. She had drawn a map, and I had repeated the directions after her until I knew just how to find it. As she was taking the more direct route, she would be there first. Neither of us would make the last turn unless the highway was empty in both directions.

Out Alternate 112 to where it joined 112 proper. North about four miles, and then turn left and go west on County Line Road. You can tell the turn by the deserted gas station on the corner. Grass is growing up through the cracks in the cement near where the pumps were. It was there, as promised, and I made the turn.

Go about five miles, maybe more, and there is a gradual curve to the left. After the road straightens out again, you’ll see a place on the left where there was a house. Now there’s just a chimney and foundation.

There was no traffic in either direction when I got there, so I turned into the overgrown drive and around behind the house site and then, as she had described, I drove on sand tracks through palmetto and scrub pine, past a marsh, and saw, ahead of me, the pond she had described, and caught a glimpse of the white car beyond the saw grass at the far end of the pond.

She was fifty feet from the car, sitting on the trunk of a fallen pine, looking at the pond.

“Any trouble at all?” I asked her.

“None. You?”

“Nothing. You better show me the place first.”

She seemed slack and dispirited. “Sure,” she said, getting to her feet. “It’s over here.”

The place was a hundred feet further. It was an old sinkhole. All this land was once the bottom of the sea. Marl and fossils and limestone. Fresh water runs down through the limestone in great underground rivers. Sometimes the underground chambers will collapse after dry cycles, and the land will sink. This was an old sinkhole, the fractures concealed by coarse brush and sizable trees.

She took me to the place she had described, a marl slope, a sun-pale sculpturing of eroded limestone, a brushy pit five feet deep with a dark irregular hole at the bottom of it, at one end of the pit. The hole was about a yard across. I went down into the pit and knelt and looked down into the hole. There was a smell of coolness and dampness. I picked up a piece of limestone bigger than my fist and dropped it into the hole. I heard it hit the side, and in a second or two heard a smaller sound as it hit again. Then there was an almost inaudible thud a long time later.

“Donny timed it with a stopwatch once.”

“Donny?”

“My husband. The young one that got killed. He used a stopwatch and figured out that per second per second thing. I remembered the figure he told me. Three hundred and six feet. He figured in the time for the sound to come back up. He was a real nut about math. Is it… a good place for what you want?”

“Do many people come here?”

“Nobody, as far as I know. I started going with Donny when we were both sixteen. We wanted a place where we could get away from people. We’d come out here on our bikes and bring picnics. Donny found this hole one time. I came here a lot after he died, before I got married again. I never brought Greg here, or anybody else. I still come here when… when I feel down. It’s so quiet. I don’t think about anything. I just walk around and listen to the quiet, and sit and listen. And I feel better then.”

“Why don’t you go for a walk right now, Betsy. I’ll take care of it.”

“Can’t I help somehow?”

“No. No thanks.”

I had to put the top down on the convertible to get him out. I couldn’t move the car any closer. I wrapped the old sheet around him and stood him against the rear fender, on his crooked legs. I squatted and let him tip forward onto my shoulder, and as I stood up with him, the pressure forced gas through his voice box, a ragged croak that chilled me. Though he folded slightly, there was enough rigor to make him feel like a clumsy log.

The weight made me take short jolting steps, and the effort and the heat of the early afternoon brought out the sweat. It seemed a very long way to the pit. I dropped him on the edge, stood on the nnd of the sheet and rolled him into the small pit.

In the unlikely event he was found, a police lab could make a spectroscopic analysis of the paint on the old sheet and compare it to the paint used somewhere in Betsy’s cottage, and prove it identical.

I went into the pit, straddled him, picked him up by the waist and slid him headfirst into the hole. Listened. Heard the remote, softened thud. Same impact as going off the roof of a thirty-storied building, if the young husband’s math had been accurate.

“I’ll never be able to come back here again,” she said. I looked up and saw her standing up on the rim of the small pit, outlined against blue sky and small white clouds. The big brim of the hat shaded her face, and the big mirrors of the sunglasses were like the eyes of some giant insect.

“You shouldn’t have watched.”

“It wouldn’t be fair not to, somehow. Like not sharing bad things along with the good parts.” We went back to the cars and the pond. I gathered twigs and dry grass and small dead branches and built a small hot fire. I burned the sheet and the map she had drawn and the fragment of the old letter to Arnstead. I took the jack handle out of the Buick, scrubbed it in the wet muck at the edge of the pond, then held the end that had been stained in the fire for a while. I put it in the VW and told her to remember to put it back under the house, just as before.

“Can we stay here for a few minutes, Trav? Can you stay with me for a little while?”

“If you want. I have to clean that back seat off anyway.”

“I forgot. I’ll do it.”

I protested, but she insisted. She got the bottle of strong cleaner she had brought along, and the stiff brush and the roll of paper towels. She scrubbed the few small stains away, scrubbed all of the back seat area and the rug on the floor, making a mingled smell of ammonia and kerosene. There were enough embers left to catch the paper towels ablaze. She put the hat and glasses in the VW and roamed back to the log and sat looking at the pond. I sat near her, in front of the log, leaning back against it. A kingfisher hovered, wings blurred like an oversized hummingbird, then dropped and splashed and lifted away with a small silver fish in his bill.

“There’s breem in the pond. Donny used to catch them. Travis, it’s like we killed Lew.”

“I know.” And I did know exactly how she felt. Plan and execution. Terror and disposal of the body and a slack, sick relief.

“We fixed it so whoever killed him - won’t ever get caught-”

“Maybe not for him. They’ll be nailed for killing Baither.”

“Does it have to be the same people? Or same person?”

“The odds favor it.”

She was quiet for a long time. I tilted my head back and looked up at her, saw for an instant a look of a private anguish which changed at once to a small forced smile.

“Betsy, I think he had gone too far down whatever road he…”

“Not Lew., I… was remembering Donny. I was working waitress when they told me. He was driving back from the construction job he was working on that summer when he got killed. We were saving money. He was going to go to Florida State. They hadn’t wanted him to get married so young, and we ran up to Georgia. We had ten months married, only. I dropped the whole tray of dishes. They had to give me a shot finally. I went sort of crazy, I guess.”

“It can happen.”

“We were such dumb crazy kids, coming out here all the way on the bikes, fooling around and getting each other all worked up, saying we wouldn’t really do it, and getting closer all the time. There’s a song or saying or something. ‘She lost It at the Astor.’ I lost it over there on a blanket under that pine tree, on the bed of soft needles, hanging onto him and crying, not because it hurt but on account of feeling sweet and sad and strange. Getting all over mosquito bites. There was a woodpecker way up the tree over us, and I watched him hopping around and turning his head this way and that way and then rapping and knocking that tree. Going home I felt so weak and sick and dizzy I nearly fell off that dumb blue bike. Then I turned seventeen and my aunt died and I had to go up home, but I wanted Donny so bad I thought I could die of it. And I came back and we got married.”

Her eyes filled, and then she gave herself a little shake, tossed her hair, smiled brilliantly and said, “Well, I guess we shouldn’t be taking the chance of being seen out here, huh?”

We walked toward the cars. She was being someone else, and it took me a few minutes to identify the role. Another one of the games Betsy played. Heroine in a movie of intrigue, suspicion, sudden death. Brave and pert in the face of danger. Ready to help with the schemes and plans.

“I guess we have to worry about that black jeep now, Travis.”

“Not by daylight. It isn’t a clear and present danger, the way it was before.”

“You want me to go right home in my own car.”

“I saw some stores open in that shopping center.”

“Woodsgate.”

“Stop there and do some shopping. Have you got money with you?” She had. She looked puzzled.

I said, “Mrs. Kapp, you left your house at noon or a little before on that Sunday. Please tell the court where you went.”

“Oh. Sure. I see. And I should look around for somebody I know and make sure I say hello and say something they’ll remember, and be… kind of happy and normal and all.”

“Exactly. And I’ll go back to the motel.”

“Travis, darling. Please don’t leave me alone in the house too long. I’ll be okay for a while, but I think I’ll start imagining I hear things. Somebody brought Lew there and killed him there while we were in bed. Somebody knew what they were going to kill him with. It has to be crazy people who hate me for some reason.”

I took hold of her hands. “Listen. Nobody hates you. It’s a part of a pattern. Somebody is hooked on misdirection. They’re blowing smoke, laying false trails. They had that note Lew got from you. So they could quietly take a look around your place while you were working, to see the best way to set it up. I don’t think he was killed there. It would be too clumsy and difficult. I think they took that jack handle away, killed him with it and brought the body and the weapon back. Then they saw my car there. Knew it was the car I was driving. Knew I was mixed up in the whole thing, and I think they were a little nervous about my being with you.”

“Why-?”

“Because of things you might be able to tell me that would make the pattern clearer?”

“What things?”

“We don’t know yet. Maybe you’ve already told me, but it didn’t mean anything to either of us. At least not yet.”

“But… why didn’t they just find someplace to put the body where it wouldn’t be found? Like we did.”

“All I can do is make a guess. I think that if Arnstead disappeared suddenly and for good, the pattern might look a little more distinct to Sheriff Hyzer, and he might go after somebody a hell of a lot more logically suspect than you.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Then what we’ve done will make that happen!”

“It might help, if my guessing is any good lately. And some person or persons unknown are going to wonder just what the hell happened.”

“And come around and try to find out? I don’t want to go back there alone. Please!”

She needed time. There would be a series of delayed reactions, little tremors on the psychic seismograph. Reality was an uncomfortable intruder in her garden of make-believe, and she needed time to transmute death-stink, rigor mortis, and the dusty eyes of the one-time beloved into the product of the special-effects man in a suspense cinema. So I told her to do her shopping and then come to the motel, to drive around to the side, park by the Buick and come to Unit 114. Her relief was evident.

She drove out first. There was a place you could stop and see the road in both directions. From time to time I had heard the distant drone of infrequent traffic. I heard her accelerate, heard the rackety little engine fade into the afternoon silence.

Kingfisher came back. The small fire was dead. I kicked the larger charred pieces into the pond, kicked sand over the ashes. I broke a pine branch off and retraced my steps to the sinkhole and the pit, brushing out those footprints so deep they were obviously those of a man carrying a heavy burden. I checked the edge of the hole and found some tan threads from his jacket caught on the limestone. I balled the threads and dropped them into darkness.

They used you, Lew, baby. And if Lennie Sibelius hadn’t persisted, hadn’t tricked you into revealing the way that envelope of mine could have been planted in the Baither house when you were otherwise occupied in the shed, you might still be one of Hyzer’s faithful. But once you’d been opened up, it was only a question of time until Hyzer would get under your guard and find out the name of the woman who decoyed you. And a man hooked on uppers is too erratic. The original idea of planting that envelope was too fancy Lew, baby. A spur-of-the-moment idea that made more problems than it solved. It turned you into a problem, and now I’ve turned you into another kind of problem for somebody. For Henry Perris, perhaps. And Lilo, and Hutch and Orville, maybe. Patterns emerging.

So you’ve got a nice deep black hole for the long long sleep, down there with your hairy wallet and your dirty pictures, and your fond photo of your neglected horse.

I stopped beside my rented car and decided that there was a reasonable possibility I might get picked up again. So I went through the pockets, just in case. Found what I had forgotten, the Polaroid print of my night-running girl, Lillian Hatch alias Lilo Perris. All that merry sensuality and that tough little jaw. Hair askew, and the hard little mouth recently bed-softened. A flash shot. She stood facing the camera, weight on the right leg, left knee bent, right fist on the right hip, muscular belly sucked in. Hard high conical breasts, the nipples fully erect. Spreading curly black pubic thatch, glossy and vital in the wink of the camera light, with the big pale weight of pudenda faintly visible through the whiskery thicket. I examined the background of the interior shot. It did not reveal much, as it was too shadowed. I could make out a corner of a bed, the edge of a table with a thin line of smoke rising from an ashtray improvised from a Planters Peanuts can. An object on the wall behind her which I couldn’t identify. It was partially obscured by her head. A round thing with radiating spikes, like a child’s drawing of the sun.

I did not want to destroy the picture, and I felt uncomfortable keeping it on me. I finally put the convertible top up and knelt on the rear seat and partially unzipped the rear window. There was a deep enough fold in the dacron canvas to slip the photograph in and zip it back up.

I drove out to the mouth of the sandy curving tracks and after making certain County Line Road was empty I gunned it out and headed for Cypress City. There are a lot of places I never want to go back to.

Twelve

I PARKED IN my motel slot and went into the room. The phone light was blinking. I went out the other door and up the interior walkway past the pool and the small careful rock gardens to the rear entrance to the lobby.

There were two slips in my box. One was the message Betsy had left. The other said to phone Deputy Sheriff Cable. I took the slips back to the room. Some fat children were wallowing and whooping in the pool. Every year there seems to be more fat children, and they seem to be noisier.

I phoned the sheriff’s office. Cable wasn’t in. The dispatcher said he’d relay my message to Cable and he would probably get in touch with me. I said to tell him McGee was at the motel.

I saw the cruiser arrive a few minutes later, so I went to the door and said howdy to him as he got out of the car.

“Care to come in, Billy?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

I had turned the color set on. A golf match had appeared. The players had green faces. Billy Cable went over and fixed the color, turned the sound down.

“Put the little round ball in the little round hole and they give you forty thousand dollars. Jee-zuss! Got me into the wrong line of work, I guess.”

He sat on the bed and leaned back, propping himself on his elbows. A very competent, tough, unreadable, watchful face. He had sunlenses clipped onto his steel-rimmed spectacles, and he reached and tilted them up.

“To what do I owe the honor and all the routine, Billy?”

“Mister Norm got edgy about you when he found out this morning you didn’t sleep here. He wondered if maybe he made some kind of bad mistake about you, McGee.”

“You better ease his mind.”

“I already did, on my way over here. I wasn’t as nervous as he was, though.”

“That’s nice.”

“I did some backtrailing, and I found out from King you were looking for somebody named Betsy that had been close to Lew, and he told you probably Betsy Kapp. So Frank the bartender, told me you ate at the Lodge and you and Betsy took off in your cars at the same time. Well then I went to her place but there was nobody there at all. But I went around and looked in the kitchen window and there were two of everything drying on the sideboard. Cups, saucers, and so on. Very cozy. I hear those tits are genuine. Hardly seems possible.”

“You do good police work Billy, but we can skip the editorial comment. Okay?”

“All right, you had to come up with that name someplace in order to ask King. And Mister Norm has had me looking all over for that damn fool Lew Arnstead. When I went out there his momma said he hadn’t been home for three days and nights, and when I asked her if anybody had been looking for him she said that it was none of my damned business. So I asked if a big fellow named McGee had been looking for him, and she told me that if I knew already, why was I wasting my breath asking. You know, I like that old lady.”

“So do I.”

“Aside from Betsy, how many other names did you come up with? There’d be a pretty long list.”

“I could tell you it’s none of your damned business. But let’s be friends. Clara Willoughbee. That’s all. Maybe his mother didn’t keep a running score.”

“Clara is a nice girl. About to get herself married. To a rich kid from Fort Myers.”

“I didn’t look her up. Betsy came after Clara.”

“But that was over quite awhile back toward the end of last year, I think.”

“I thought she might steer me to somebody more kip to date.”

“Why would you want that?”

“He’s not an officer of the law at the moment. I thought I might locate him and see how much workout I could give him.”

“King thinks maybe you could take him.”

“I thought it might be worth a try. Incidentally, Thanks for pulling him off Meyer.”

“I should have moved faster. That last one came up from the floor. That’s the one that did the big damage. One more like that and he could have killed the man.”

“What was his point?”

Billy Cable sat up and took a half cigar out of the shirt pocket of his uniform and lit it, spat out a wet crumb of tobacco. “At that time it looked to us like you and Meyer gave it to Frank Baither. Frank was a rotten fellow, but nobody should have to die that hard. Both me and Lew saw the body. Lew knew Meyer hadn’t given Mister Norm a thing to go on. Sometimes, in this business, you get to where you want to hit somebody.”

“Do you obey the urge, Billy?”

“Me? Hell, no. But Lew is something else. Especially lately. Like his gears were slipping.”

“Okay, why did you give me the guided tour before you took me to Hyzer?”

“Why not? The damage had been done. I didn’t approve of it, and I knew Hyzer’d be scalded. But you use whatever’s handy. Anything that might make you think twice, and sit up straight and say yes, sir to the sher’f couldn’t hurt anything. But it didn’t work that way.”

“Because we didn’t have anything to do with Baither.”

“It’s begun to look that way.”

“When can I leave this garden spot?”

“That’d be up to Mister Norm. One thing I want to know. Did you find Lew?”

“Not yet.”

“I suppose that if Betsy phoned around and finally found him last night and asked him to come over, he might have come over to her place. That would give you a crack at him.”

“Good idea. I didn’t think to ask her. What made you think of it?”

“A crank call came in about eleven-thirty this morning. I just now put two and two together. No name given. Said he lives on Haydon Street. That’s the street behind Seminole, where Betsy lives. Said that about three in the morning there was a big fuss, men yelling and cursing and a woman screaming, and if we couldn’t keep order in a nice neighborhood, maybe the people ought to elect a sheriff who could.”

“A little Saturday night festivity. Sorry, but I wasn’t at that particular party.”

“Any idea where Betsy is?”

“I’m expecting her to drop by pretty soon. I think she went shopping.”

He got up slowly, stretched, flicked ashes on the motel rug. “So now I got to chase my ass all over the countryside today locating crazy Lew. Glad you didn’t cut out, McGee.”

I went to the doorway with him and let him get about three strides toward his sedan and said, “Billy, I don’t know if it would clue you on where to look for him, but his mother told me she didn’t think he’d have gotten in trouble if he hadn’t started hanging around with trashy people named Perris.”

He had turned and he looked at me for too long a time. Too many thoughts tumbling around in his head. His expression revealed nothing. Then, too casually, he said, “Might as well check that one out, too. Thanks.”

Betsy Kapp arrived ten minutes later, with a big brown paper bag hugged against her. She was pallid and edgy, and eager to get inside and get the door closed.

“I saw the police car, darling, and I went right on by. I went by twice. Who was it? What did they want?”

I gave her the full story, including my final line, and told her how silent Billy Cable became. “Does the name mean anything to you, Betsy? Perris?”

“Somebody told me he was running around with Lilo Perris. She lives down in the south county. She’s young, and she’s pretty, I guess, in a cheap obvious way. But she’s been in trouble with the law over and over. She’s loud and mean and hard as nails.”

“Sounds like a rare jewel. Sounds like somebody who would know something about how Lew got killed.”

“I don’t think so, really. She hasn’t been in that kind of trouble. Mostly fighting and disturbing the peace and public obscenity. She’s just wild and tough, and she doesn’t give a damn what she does or who she does it with.”

“Not the kind an officer of the law should run with.”

“Heavens, no! But she wouldn’t be exactly exclusive property. He’d be more like a dog in a pack trotting after a bitch. Men say she’s so sexy. I just can’t see it. Maybe he’s been down in the south county, back there in one of those shacky places along Shell Ridge Road, down there with the poachers and moonshiners. Travis, what did that phone call mean?”

“If you and I were in the county jail at the time, trying to tell them we didn’t know where Lew’s body came from, how would it sound?”

“Terrible!”

“And what if an autopsy established the time of death at about three in the morning?”

“We’ve been lucky, haven’t we?”

“So far.”

“Are you starving too, dear? Look! Good rye bread and lettuce and Black Diamond cheese and sardines and baloney and cold beer. Do you want me to make your sandwich, or do you want to?”

I told her to go ahead. She used the white formica countertop next to the almost inaudible golf match. I had taken the first bite of my sandwich, not waiting for her to make her own, when Billy Cable knocked at the door.

I let him in. She gave him a bright smile of welcome. “Hi, Billy. Make you a sandwich?”

“Just now ate, Betsy. Thanks. Guess I might go for one of these kosher dills though.” He bit it, nodded approval, and while chomping away at it, “Saw a car that looked like yours, and McGee said you were going to come by so I stopped to make sure.”

“Make sure of what?”

He sat on the bed. “My life is a lot easier if I can do what I know Mister Norm is going to ask me if I did already. So he is going to ask me if I asked you if maybe you give McGee here a line on how to find Lew.”

“I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to find Lew Arnstead, and I can’t imagine ever wanting to.”

“But Mister McGee here seemed anxious to find him?”

“Well… sort of. And I can understand that, can’t you? After all, that man Lew hurt was a very good friend of Travis’s. Wouldn’t you look for somebody who beat up a friend of yours? Of course, maybe you don’t have any friend in particular, Billy.”

I saw the momentary narrowing of his eyes. And then he smiled blandly. “Then McGee was only half anxious to locate Lew?”

“That’s about it.”

“Speaking of my having a friend, Betsy, you’ve got a real talent for friendship, believe you me.”

She turned and leaned her hips on the countertop and bit into her sardine sandwich. “Why, thank you, Billy!”

“I think old Homer ought to write you up in that new brochure he’s doing for the Chamber of Commerce.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t rightly know. Maybe like sort of a natural resource of Cypress County. It isn’t every little city back here in the swamp country that’s got a nice dining room with good food and a hostess with the biggest set of knockers south of Waycross.”

Her lips tightened and she held her sandwich out of the way and looked down at herself. “Now Billy. They’s not so much of a much.” Her accent was turning swampy. “Must be forty fifty women around these parts wear a D-cup, too. Looks like a lot to you on account of the rest of me is on the skimpy side.”

“Well, I guess there’s enough men around here and there who’d testify they’re real enough, Betsy.” This was a strong sexual antagonism coming out into the open.

She colored, then smiled. “Oh, Billy Cable, I know you’re only funnin‘ me, but when you try to kid around, honey, it comes out like dirty talk. You just don’t have the touch. I know you don’t mean anything wrong.”

“It’s nice the way you throw everything into your work Miz Kapp. Obligin‘.”

She made a plausible attempt at merry laughter, and looked over at me and said, “Darlin‘, ol’ Billy here could testify how real they are. Must have been a year and a half ago-”

“Watch it!” Billy said sharply.

“Now you started this, Billy, and Mr. McGee might be amused. I thought some sex maniac had got me. Like to scared me to death. I was walking from the Lodge over to my car on a dark night and got grabbed from behind. A girl friend told me one time the thing to do is go all limp and fall down, never try to fight. Well, I sat down on the parking tot and he let go, and I got a look at him, and what do you know, there was ol‘ Billy weaving and smiling down at me, just couldn’t stop hisself from reaching around me and grabbing away like he was trying to honk those old-timey automobile horns. A girl could get a cancer that way. Well, sir, I was so scared and mad I hopped up and swang my pocketbook and knocked poor Billy’s glasses right off and they busted. And that made him so mad, he took a swing like to slap my head loose, but I ducked back and Billy fell down. Then what was it you were going to do to me, Billy?”

“Knock it off, Betsy.”

“Something about I should take him home with me or I was going to get arrested for every kind of thing he could think of. What did I say Billy?”

“Shut up, Betsy. I forget.”

“I said I’d rather spend five years in a prison laundry than five minutes in bed with you. Billy?” He looked at her and did not answer. She took two steps toward him, thrust her jaw toward him and said in a low voice, “And it’s still exactly the same way Deputy. There’s nothing you could ever do or say that’d make me change my mind.”

He stared at her and then at me. Expressionless masklike face, but the eyes behind the lenses held a cold reptilian venom. He spun and left, slamming the room door, slamming the cruiser door, shrieking rubber halfway to the front exit onto the highway.

She ran to me and I held her in my arms. She was trembling and panting. Aftermath of another of the games Betsy played. But this game was obligatory. And, in its own way, valiant. Nothing but a cap pistol and a cheap whip between her and the tiger.

“I… I’m sorry it had to be in front of you, Travis.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? I can’t ever let him get away with any part of it, anywhere, no matter what. If I ever do… then he’ll take me, and I don’t think I could stand it. It wouldn’t be… nice.”

That was the inevitable stipulation. Nice. “Go eat your sandwich, woman.”

She walked over and took it from the countertop and said, “He’s going to hate you now because you heard it all.”

“So I’m about to faint with pure terror.”

She hoisted herself up and sat on the countertop, thin legs swinging, holding the sandwich in both hands, munching.

“What a crazy day,” she said. “What a weird kind of day!”

“Just wondering something. How did Billy Cable take it when you and Lew Arnstead got together?”

“Not so good. I told Lew about how Billy kept circling me. He thought it was funny. I told him he better not make any smart remarks to Billy about the whole thing. Billy is chief deputy, and there are ways he could make things bad for Lew. They had it out, finally. Lew whipped him, but he didn’t tell me any details.”

Thick sandwiches and cold beer. She yawned deeply, her face softening, and her eyes suddenly heavy, an abrupt change like that of a sleepy child. She slumped onto the bed and slipped her shoes off and yawned again. “Honest, I’ve got to have a nap.”

“You have permission.”

She pulled the pillow out from under the spread and lay back. “We can go home later. I wish I could think. What you said about my knowing something and not knowing what I know. There is something, but I can’t find it in my head.”

“Try again when you wake up.”

“Dear?”

‘What?“

“Don’t try to make love to me, huh? I haven’t got anything with me. And… I might be too willing. That’s sort of nasty, isn’t it? After… what we had to do.”

“It happens that way. The body wants to celebrate being alive when somebody else is dead. Anyway I’m going to leave you alone here for a while, Betsy.”

Sleepy eyes opened wide. “No!”

“I’ll hang the DO-NOT-DISTURB signs on both doors, and I’ll lock you in. You’ll be fine. I ought to be back by five-thirty or six.”

“Where do you have to go?”

“Just an errand. Nothing crucial.”

“Okay, so be careful, lover,” she murmured. She was on her side, fists under her chin, knees pulled up. In moments she was making a small buzzing sound, with slow deep lift and fall of the narrow, overburdened rib cage. I closed the draperies to darken the room, and floated a blanket over her.

The phone made half a ring before I caught it. It did not disturb her.

It was Meyer. “I am free,” he said. “Marked fit for duty. I am an object of awe and curiosity. My once handsome face looks like a psychedelic beach ball. There are two gentle maidens here aboard my humble vessel, taking turns holding my hand and applying cold compresses and fixing me little taste treats. They say to say howdy. Shall I return?”

“Stay where you are. Enjoy.”

And how are things on the frontier?“

“Confusing. A fine young man had the taste to give Miss Agnes a lot of tender loving care, but I have to get a part for her out of Palm Beach before she can move.”

“Would the man let you move?”

“No point in asking him until I get the part installed.”

“What are you doing for excitement?”

“Mighty interesting golf match on television today.”

“McGee, do not make childish attempts to mislead me. My brain was not damaged. When we left, you were down. You wanted no part of that brouhaha over there. Your voice dragged. Now there is a lift, a hint of a pleasurable urgency. You have become involved.”

“Now that you mention it, I guess I have.”

“Have you been able to pay my respects to Deputy Arnstead?”

“Not yet. He seems to be absent. Or shy. But I still have hopes.”

“If the car was roadable, and Sheriff Hyzer said you could leave, would you?”

“Probably not.”

“Have you come across an opportunity for some small salvage contract, perhaps?”

“One might turn up. Meyer, I’m glad you’re okay.”

“I share your gladness.”

After the conversation ended, I looked at the screen. A very somber young man in orange garments was hunched over a putt. A knot of muscle bulged at the corner of his jaw. He stabbed at it, and the ball went by the hole on the high side and stopped inches away. The young man looked at the heavens with an expression of agonized desolation, of classic despair. I punched the set off while he was still on camera. I hung the signs, locked her in, and left.

Thirteen

BUTTERCUP CAME at me, running low and rumbling in anticipation of the clamp of his teeth in the flesh of the stranger. I squatted and held my hand out and said, “Easy, Buttercup. Easy boy.”

He braked to a stop, leaned, and took a delicate sniff, compared it with the memory banks, and looked dejected. Cora Arnstead came out onto the porch and said, “Who is it now? You home, Lew?”

“Sorry. It’s Travis McGee again, Mrs. Arnstead.”

“You got anything to tell me about my boy?”

“Sorry. I wish I could tell you something.”

“That Billy Cable was here today looking for him, too. They fired my boy. No reason why I should fall all over myself helping them. If they want him, they can find him.”

“How is the stock making out? Anything I can do?”

“That’s nice of you to offer. But I’ve got the Silverstaff boy from up the road taking care. He was here most of the morning getting caught up. Come on the porch and set.”

A haze had moved across the sun. She leaned back in the cane chair and widened her nostrils. “Smell that stink, do you?”

“Afraid not.”

“Acidy smell. We get it now most times the breeze comes out of the northwest. Phosphate plants up that way. Wind from the south, and you get the county incinerator smell. Nobody gives a damn, Mr. McGee. They talk about it, but they don’t really care enough to do anything. So one day people are going to grab their throats and fall down dead all over the state of Floryda, and I hope I’m safe dead and gone before it happens. What do you want with me?”

“Sheriff Hyzer is trying to locate Lew. Now if he doesn’t find him pretty soon, he might come out here or send somebody out here to go through his room, looking for a clue.”

“And?”

“He’ll find that hiding place just the way I did. I didn’t exactly give you an inventory of what’s in there.”

“Figured you didn’t. Filthy stuff?”

“Some standard, under-the-counter dirt, and some pretty vivid love notes from some of his women. And a collection of Polaroid pictures he took of a batch of his girl friends, all naked. They could cause some trouble in the wrong hands.”

“Like if Billy Cable got aholt of them?”

“That’s right, Mrs. Arnstead.”

“You said he had a lot of those speed pills in there. Would there be maybe enough so he could get into trouble on that account, too?”

“More than enough. They come under the narcotics legislation.”

She glowered into space for a long ten seconds. “I don’t hold with lying, Mr. McGee. I wouldn’t want anybody to come here and find that place of his and find it empty and ask me if I’d let anybody into that room to take stuff away. And if they asked me if I emptied it out and asked me what was in there, I’d have to tell what I took out. No, sir, I can’t let you go in my boy’s room and take away his personal private stuff and get rid of it any way you see fit. I can’t give you permission. Maybe you’d be so kind, Mr. McGee, as to go on in the house and back to the kitchen and get me a glass of water. Best let it run a long time for coolness.”

While the water was running, I emptied the cache. Pictures and letters inside one of the books. Books and pamphlets tucked into the front of my shirt. Pills in the trouser pocket.

I took her the glass of water. She sipped and thanked me.

“You come back and visit with me sometime, hear? Sorry I couldn’t give you the right to tote off Lew’s things.”

“I understand.”

“Somehow I have this feeling my youngest isn’t going to come back, not ever. I don’t know why. An old woman’s notion. He was a good little boy. He really was. He always liked to play by himself. Not much for running with the pack. It was the Army changed him. He wasn’t the same after that.”

It was uncomfortable booty to carry around. If Hyzer had me picked up for some idiot reason, the list of charges would be fascinating. In the milky fading light of late afternoon I drove north, further out Cattleman’s Road into an area of bigger ranches and grove lands. It had been a sentimental mission. After seeing the scene between Billy and Betsy, there was no mistaking the use he would make of Lew’s artwork, or the amount of leverage possession would give him. There was the second objective of sparing the old lady any additional pain. The final chick was dead. Whether she ever learned that or not, never seeing him again was enough of a hurt.

I came up on an unpaved road, braked and turned right, and found an adequate place a mile from the highway, a small grove of live oaks heavily fringed with Spanish moss, and a place to drive in where fencing had rotted away. I gouged a deep hole in the soft dirt with a stick, dumped the pills in, covered them, and stomped the earth flat.

His meager and unusual little library would not be easy to burn. I crackled my shoulder muscles rolling a log over, scooped a shallow hole and laid the books therein and rolled the log back into the earth-groove it had made when it fell.

I sat on it with the correspondence and the picture gallery. I remembered my previous impression of the many pictures of Betsy Kapp. Lean, anemic blonde with an insipid leer and comedy breasts. So the leer became a troubled and uncertain smile, and the breasts were oddly wistful, vulnerable. I decided that in some eerie way it was like those ubiquitous photographs of small boys holding up big fish they have caught. Too much camera direction makes them look uncertain. They ache to look like heroes and do not know how to manage it. And the long-dead fish has become a dead weight of reality, and there is no way to hold him to make him look alive.

I used one to light the next until all the shots of Betsy were charred. All ten of them. Then the five of the woman who had been so careful to hide her face. Then the extra three of the night-runner who had to be Lilo. I saved the thirteen trophy shots, the head-on singles. I went through the correspondence and burned it all-except Betsy’s long letter of warning about Lilo.

All the photographs and the letter fit nicely into the same pocket in the double thickness of canvas by the rear window. I spread them out so that there was no bulge when I zipped it shut. The thought of how Billy Cable might use the pictures of Betsy gave me the idea of possible leverage, for quite different objectives. I had studied the faces. Lilo and the Unknown Thirteen. The odds were that most or all were in Cypress County on this final Sunday in April. Clerking, waitressing, dating, tending babies, fixing dinner, ironing shirts, dancing, watching television. Lew’s little garden of ladies. There might be a certain amount of gratitude involved were a lady to get her trophy shot back, and be scratched off Lew’s local scorecard. So keep looking at the ladies, McGee. A fellow blundering around in the murk needs the loan of any thirty-nine-cent flashlight available.

The last thread of daylight was about gone as I turned into the parking area of the White Ibis. The little tan VW was gone, and my throat turned sour, and my neck-nape and hands prickled with that million-year-old reflex which tries to lift the coarse animal hair, to make the animal look bigger, more awesome, more difficult to chew. It was sick premonition. Too many old memories of mistake and remorse.

Unlocked the door, flicked the switch, saw the blanket shoved aside, the depression in the bedspread, the shape of the length of her in heavy sleep, the dented pillow.

Her note on the motel paper was on the carpeting, with an ashtray paperweight, in a conspicuous spot.

Lover darling,

I woke up and got thinking about that you-know-what in my car, and getting nervous about it and then not feeding poor Raoul and leaving him alone so long what I decided was put that thing back where it was like you said and feed Raoul and then go find out about that thing I couldn’t remember before, which maybe hasn’t got a thing to do with anything. And I decided while it is still light I can take a quick sneaky look and see if the jeep is still there in that yard behind the bushes but I hope it is gone and we don’t have to think about it at all only about us alone together in my little house with all the world shut out, so what you can do is change your clothes like you never got a chance to and bring your shaving things and all and if you get there before I get back the extra key to the side door is where you go into the carport and reach around in back of the first can of paint on the top shelf the one to your left when you walk in but if my car is in there then you can just knock and if you are lucky I may even decide to let you in and feed you and all that.

Love ya! Yr Betsy.

Very sweet and innocent and diligent, and very stupid, leaving a note with too many things in it to interest, for example, Billy Cable, if he should have taken a turn by the place, seen both cars gone, and decided to take a look. Motels. have master keys, and local law has a conspicuous talent for collecting copies of same, because it is a lot less fuss than court orders and warrants and negotiations with management.

So I confettied it and flushed it down, took my fast shower and changed, whipped out of there with toilet kit and sweaty hands, and drove to her place on Seminole Street, making one wrong turn before I found it, because the only other time I had driven to it had been at night, following her.

When I turned into the narrow, high-hedged drive, I felt a sense of relief at seeing lights on inside the cottage, but the feeling clicked off when my lights swung to the empty carport. I put the white Buick at the side of the carport, this time with the top up, in the same spot as it had been when someone had tumbled the big ugly souvenir into it.

I stood in the night, listening, and felt my nostrils widen. Another atavistic reflex, snuff the air for the drifting taint of the stalking carnivore, long after the noses have lost their sensitivity and cunning. Heart bumping under the stimulus of adrenaline, readying the muscles, blood, brain, for that explosive effort necessary for survival in a jungle of predators.

But it was just a side yard of a very small residential plot in a peaceful neighborhood of a small southern city. A neighborhood of postal clerks, retired military, food store managers, bank tellers, watching the fare that came into their living rooms over the cable, checking the TV Guide during the rerun season to see if there was a “Bonanza” they had missed, or a “Mission Impossible.”

The blood slowed, and I found the carport light switch, found the key in the place she’d described, and had time to get to the house corner and get a glimpse of the handle laying next to the supporting jack before the delay switch clicked the light off. In the darkness I squatted and reached under the house, felt and hefted the pipe handle to make certain. And in the darkness I went out to the sidewalk and kept to the shadows, went to the yard she had described, ducked under the chain and saw the dark, insectile angularity of the jeep parked there, nuzzling into the untended plantings.

I went back and let myself in. One lamp lighted in the living room, lacy shade on a brass post that impaled a shiny black merry-go-round horse. I trod a narrow route between fragilities and knickknacks to the kitchen where the fluorescent light over the stove was on. Some crumbs of cat food in the dish in Raoul’s corner. I bent and touched one. It was moist instead of being dried to the dish, so she had fed Raoul.

Next I went to her bedroom, found the wall switch. The blouse and skirt she had been wearing were on the foot of the bed. Raoul, curled upon the skirt, lifted his head and looked at me with the benign satisfaction of the full stomach and the comfortable place to sleep. There were water droplets on the inside of her shower curtain and the tiled walls. There was the scent of sweet soap and perfume and deodorant and hair spray, a damp towel spread on the rack, one misted corner at the top of the full-length mirror on the inside of the door.

I sat on the bed and rubbed Raoul’s sleepy head and got his gritty, audible engine going. A puzzlement that she should be so full of nervous alarm, so anxious not to be alone, and then go out alone to find out God knows what. I finally realized that it had to be another one of the games that Betsy could play. A new script patterned on the late late movies, suspense, perhaps, with elegant quips and handsome sets, and she was maybe Myrna Loy tracing down one of those fragments of female intuition which would clear up the case which had William Powell baffled. And that, of course, made it all perfectly safe, because if somebody started to really hurt anybody, the Great Director would yell “Cut!” and we would go back to our dressing rooms and wait for the next call.

Eight o’clock. Nine o’clock. Ten o’clock, and that was all I could manage to endure. Locked up and left there and drove down to the complex of county buildings and services and went into the Sheriff’s Department. A pair of strangers behind the high desk cool, disinterested young men in fitted uniforms, busy with forms and routines, busy with the paperwork of booking Sunday drunks, brawlers, DWI’s, a couple of fourteen-year-old burglars. The communications clerk finally sent word that I might find the sheriff over at the Emergency Room at City Memorial, and one of the busy young men told me how to find it.

I parked in the hospital lot and walked back to Emergency. Some bloody, broken, moaning teenagers were being offloaded from a white ambulance with blue dome lights, and wheeled through the double doors into a corridor glare of fluorescence so strong and white it made the blood look black.

I saw a county cruiser parked over at the side, interior lights on, a shadowed figure behind the wheel. So I walked over to ask him if Hyzer was inside the building. But from ten feet I saw that it was Hyzer himself. He looked up from his clipboard and said, “Good evening, Mr. McGee.”

“Sheriff. They told me I might catch you over here.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’d like to have a chance to talk to you. Maybe ask some questions. Can you give me fifteen minutes or so?”

“If you come to my office before nine tomorrow…”

“It would be better right now, I think.”

“What’s it about?”

“Baither, Arnstead, Perris.”

“You were very insistent about not being involved in the Baither matter in any way. Do you want to change your story?”

“No. But things come up which puzzle me, Sheriff. If we talked them out, it might be of some help to you, and you might let me leave that much sooner.”

“I can’t see how you could be of any help to me.”

“When you find Lew Arnstead, if you haven’t already, get him checked for stimulants. He’s a speed freak. When they go over the edge, the condition is called paranoid psychosis, and it would be more comfortable to be around a kid playing with dynamite caps.”

“Result of an amateur investigation, McGee?”

“I wanted to find him and scuff him up, and I turned up a few things while I was looking for him, and I decided there was no point in being emotional about what he did to Meyer-who, incidentally, is all right.”

“I know. I made inquiry.”

“Then I keep wondering how Henry Perris fits into the Baither killing, and what the association was between Perris and Arnstead. And right now Mrs. Betsy Kapp seems to be missing, and my amateur investigator guess says that she’s gotten herself into the middle somehow, where it wouldn’t seem to be a healthy climate.”

The stern hero face looked up at me from under the pale brim of the expensive hat. “Come around the car and get in, Mr. McGee.”

When I was in, he put the clipboard on the seat between us, unhooked his mike, and told his people he was leaving the hospital and would call in from his next stop.

“There’ll be too many interruptions if we go in,” he said. “How about your motel room?”

I drove over in the Buick. He was waiting and as I unlocked the door to 114, he said he had told them where to reach him.

He sat in the armchair, put his hat carefully on the floor beside the chair. I moved over and sat on the countertop where Betsy had sat, eating her sardine sandwich.

“I had a report from Deputy Cable,” he said. “So I know you went and talked to Cora Arnstead. I had a report of your conversation with Deputy Sturnevan. I know you spent the night with Mrs. Kapp at her home on Seminole. I was glad to hear you had not left the county. If you had, you would have regretted it. My responsibility is to enforce the enforceable laws and ordinances. Deputy Cable suggested to me that Mrs. Kapp be picked up and charged with public fornication. There is an old ordinance on the books. I have not been able to understand why Billy would want to waste department time on that sort of thing. He is usually a more reasonable officer. I do not wish to make any moral judgments about Mrs. Kapp. She has always seemed to me to be a pleasant enough woman, and she seems to run that dining room well. She would seem to be… selective and circumspect in her private life.”

“Billy Cable went after her a year and a half ago. He’d had a few drinks. She turned him down flat. Last fall she had an affair with Lew Arnstead.”

“I knew about the Arnstead affair. How could you know about Billy? How do you know it’s true? He has a wife and three children.”

“They had a very rough little scene right here in this room this afternoon. Billy asked for bad news, and she gave it to him.”

“So at five o’clock he makes that stupid suggestion about arresting her. I’ll check it out. I don’t like it. An officer should not use his position for personal vendettas. I’m disappointed in Billy Cable. You say Mrs. Kapp is missing. Tell me about it.”

“She was here most of the afternoon. Then she went in her car back to her house. I was supposed to meet her there. She knew I’d be over about seven. I went over and she wasn’t there. She’d told me where the key was. I let myself in. She left a note telling me she was going out to find out something about this… whole problem which got me into one of your cells, Sheriff.”

“Find out what?”

“She didn’t say. I waited until ten o’clock and then I came looking for you.”

He went over and sat on the bed and looked up her phone number and dialed it. While it was ringing at the other end, I had a closer look at him under the light of the bedside lamp. His dark suit was wrinkled, his shoes unshined. His knuckles and wrists were soiled, and there was an edge of grime around his white cuffs and around the white collar of his shirt. The light slanted on a dark stubble on his chin. It did not match my prior observations of the fastidious officer of the law.

“No answer,” he said as he stood up. He went back to the chair and looked at his watch. “Ten past eleven. Maybe, Mr. McGee, she decided not to see you again. Maybe she went to stay with friends; waiting for you to give up and go away.”

“Not a chance.”

“Where is the note?”

“I threw it away. I assure you it was… affectionate.

“You told Mrs. Kapp all about the reason why you and your friend were suspected of being in on the Baither murder?”

“Sheriff, she lives here and she works here. She knows a lot of people. I told her everything I know, including your theory about the money truck, and Baither using Raiford State Prison as a hideout. And I built a little structure of supposition, based on little hints, guesses, inferences. I haven’t tested it on Betsy yet. I planned to. One way to go at these things is to build a plausible structure, then find facts that won’t fit and tear it down and try again.”

He looked at me through a steeple of soiled fingers. “Let me hear it.”

“Baither put it together. He used two outsiders, pickup talent, possibly from out of state. He had the contacts, apparently. The fourth man was local, and without a record, gainfully employed. Henry Perris, now working as a mechanic down at Al Storey’s station on the Trail. The other two men we know only as Hutch and Orville. Baither needed Henry Perris because Henry had access to a wrecker and knew how to operate it. They also used Perris’s stepdaughter, Lillian. She was the young waitress in the blond wig at the drive-in across from the track.”

“Pure fantasy!”

“May I go ahead? Thanks. After a big score, the people involved watch each other very carefully. I don’t think Frank could have slipped away with the money unless Henry and the girl helped him somehow. This would be the deal. Frank would hide the money and take a fall at Raiford. Henry and the girl would sit tight and wait it out. Frank wouldn’t let Henry know where the money was because he would be afraid of another doublecross. A threeway split, if you count the girl, would be a lot better than five ways.”

“Why Perris?”

“Because Lilo Perris and Lew Arnstead were or are paired off. It started several months back and with Baither up for release, it would be good sense to have a pipeline into your department, Sheriff. She’s apparently a very rough kid. Then you have Henry Perris in a position to pick my envelope out of the trash at the station, and you have Lilo ready and willing to decoy Arnstead into that shack in back of the place. But it was a bad impulse. People get bad, tricky ideas when something has gone wrong. They get nervous and they don’t think things out. Manufactured evidence backfires. So Perris and company was suddenly up against the very dangerous situation of having vital and damaging information lodged in the mind of a speed freak. If you went after the name of the woman who decoyed Arnstead into Baither’s shed, you could probably shake it loose. And to have it be the stepdaughter of the mechanic at the station where I swear I discarded that envelope makes everything a little too tight. Have you located Lew?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a chance, a reasonable chance, that they had brought Lew all the way into the picture. Maybe they needed the kind of help he could give them. Nine hundred thousand is a lot of persuasion. The girl could make certain he wouldn’t be thinking clearly. The girl and the amphetamine, and something a little warped in his mind before he even started downhill. If they did, what’s your chance of finding him alive?”

“Facts will tear down your structure, McGee.”

“If you have them.”

“There were three men working at that station all day Friday. Albert Storey Henry Perris, and Terrance Moon. They submitted to interrogation willingly. There was a period of about two hours and fifteen minutes, starting at the time we drove away with you and your friend, when their actions are important. None of them left the station at that time. No phone calls were made. They were interrogated separately. The customers who stopped during that period were strangers-tourists and commercial traffic on the Tamiami Trail. The men talked about Frank Baither being killed to each other, but not to anyone else. I am left with the remarkable coincidence of someone unknown to those men stopping for gas, seeing that envelope in the trash barrel, picking it out and taking it up to Baither’s house to leave it where we found it later.”

“And you can’t buy that and neither can I.”

“Then you dropped it in Baither’s place.”

“You know I didn’t.”

“What choice do I have, McGee? And, of course, your evaluation of Lillian Perris is total nonsense.” There was a force in his voice, an animation in his face which surprised me. “The girl has a lot of spirit. She should have had a lot more discipline. She’s been in scrapes, but nothing serious. Considering the environmental and social factors, I think she has done remarkably well.”

“I was only-”

“Forget any idea of her having any part of it.”

“Okay. And Henry Perris is a pillar of the community and a lay preacher?”

“All I know is that he has no record.”

“Let’s concentrate on Henry for a minute, Sheriff. Just for the hell of it. Let’s say he was in on the Baither murder, and it went wrong and he was shaky He comes to work late. He gets our names and the reason we’re being picked up from Al Storey. He goes to put something in the barrel and sees the envelope with my name on it and he picks it out when nobody is looking and puts it in his pocket.”

“But I told you that-”

“I know what you told me. He had to leave that station soon after we left.”

“But he didn’t.”

The message on his face was clear: Don’t pursue further.

“What could Betsy Kapp have remembered that got her into trouble?” I asked.

“If she’s in trouble.”

“Are you going to look for her?”

“Missing persons reports have to be filed by the next of kin.”

“I don’t think you always go by the book, Sheriff.” He smiled for the first time. “If I did, I would have you back inside, McGee.”

He phoned Betsy’s house again, with no results. He looked troubled. “I’ll put the word out.”

“Thanks, Sheriff.” I walked him out to the car and asked him if he minded if I looked around. “Inside the county, Mr. McGee.”

“Of course, Sheriff.”

So I began my blind quest, because anything was better than going back to her empty house to sit and wait.

Fourteen

CRUISE THE after-midnight streets of the sleepy city, checking the lots, and driveways, the on-street parking for the distinctive shape of the VW bug. Hard to tell gray from tan under the street lamps. Then remembered the thing she had affixed to her radio antenna, handy way to find the car in the jammed-tin wasteland of the shopping center parking rows-a plastic sunflower, big as a saucer. Easier to eliminate the look-alike VWs.

Stopped once in a while at the bright upright coffin of a pay phone, listened to ten rings, got the same dime back every time. Aware finally of hunger pangs, and I turned back to a place where I had seen the all-night drive-in. No car service after eleven. Very bright inside. Big table of teenagers, whispering and haw-hawing at delicious private nonsense, making a point of excluding the square grown-up world from all of it. A few night-people spaced along the counter. Plastic radio with a burr in the speaker playing muted rock.

The waitress was a plump, pretty girl, hair bleached to a coarse pure white and hanging lifelessly straight. Blue nylon uniform. Dori embossed on the name tag. A smudge of tiredness around her eyes. Mechanical smile, presentation of the grease spotted bill of fare.

Here they called them a MaxiBurger, and they came on a toasted bun with caraway seeds. Very little taste to the hot meat. Bits of gristle. Much better coffee than I expected. Munched the meat, sipped the coffee, wondered why the girl looked so familiar.

Had paid, left, started the motor before I realized why she might look familiar. Got out the Polaroid shots, sorted them under the interior lights, located Dori. Different hair style. Same face. Same plumpness. Startled expression, one hand blurred by movement.

I replaced the other pictures, put hers in my pocket and went back inside. She came over with the mechanical smile and the menu and then realized I looked too familiar.

“Oh, you were just in, werncha?”

“Decided on another cup of coffee.”

“Well, I’ll forget you went out and come back, so you get the seconds free anyways.”

She brought it and I said, “Thank you, Dori. When you’ve got a minute, I want to ask you something.”

“I got a minute right now. Like what?”

I slipped the picture out and held it low so that only she could see it. I watched her face. She swallowed and bit her underlip and looked warily toward the other girl. She leaned toward me and said, “Look, this is some kind of a mixup. Put that away, huh? He must have got confused or something, honest. He was supposed to have tore those up, mister. Go find him and tell him Dori said he should ought to be more careful.”

“He didn’t seem to be confused.”

“What kind of a car you got?”

“White Buick convertible.”

“Look, you drink your coffee and go sit in it and wait, and I got a break coming, and I’ll come out explain. Okay?”

In a little while Dori came walking quickly across the blacktop, the white lights strong behind her, yellow cardigan around her shoulders. Yellow straw purse in her hand. I leaned and swung the door open for her. She tugged it shut, pushed the dash lighter in and got her cigarettes out of her purse.

“It would have to be some kind of foulup, because it was always part of the deal, he checks with me first, for obvious reasons. And he wouldn’t let go of a picture. That’s kind of rotten. And what he always did was tell me where to be and when, instead of sending somebody to where I’m working. Way back we made the deal, and I told him then that okay, so I was in a box, I’d go along with it, but only until my husbin got back from the service and then I couldn’t take any kind of chance like that. So Fred got back seven months ago and I was nervous about if the deal would stand. But it did. Look, mister. Six weeks ago, maybe two months ago, a guy came in by accident and I’d had a date with him over a year ago, and he is a little bit smashed and thinks he can get fixed up right now. He started to get loud and so I got hold of Lew and he came by and took the fella out into the parking lot and bounced him up and down some and he went away. So it looks to me like something is going on I don’t like. Now you tell me how you got that picture and what it is you’ve got in mind.”

“Did you know he was fired?”

“I heard about it. For beating up a prisoner and for goofing off when he was supposed to be watching the house where Frank Baither got killed. I thought maybe he’d come in but he hasn’t.”

“Nobody has seen him, Dori. There’s a pretty good chance he’s dead.”

She sucked the final half inch of cigarette down to the long filter, the red glow illuminating her small frown, her hollowed cheek. “Something was going bad for him. He was getting so jumpy he looked flippy almost. I cry no single tear, baby. That was the meanest son of a bitch I ever knew or ever want to know. When I know Lew is surely dead, I’ll sleep a little better. Anyway… who are you? Some kind of a cop?”

There was new anxiety in her voice. “Not exactly. I was picked up with a good friend of mine, the one Lew pounded. It looked like we knew something about the Baither murder but we didn’t and they let us go, but I have to stay in the county. I let it be known I wanted to find Arnstead and beat on him. Now I’m worried about how I’m going to make out if they find him in a field or behind a warehouse tomorrow, beaten to death.”

“They could make out a long list, mister.”

“You don’t blame me for trying to protect myself?”

“Not if you don’t get me involved.”

“I happen to have a little picture gallery that belonged to Lew. Never mind how or where I got hold of it. You looked familiar so I came out and looked at the pretty pictures and found yours.”

“Just don’t get me involved.”

“Dori, put yourself in my shoes. Suppose he is dead and Hyzer tries to make me for it. The only thing I can do is spread out my picture collection and tell him to check it out. He’ll find out that Lew had this sideline going, and probably as long as he was an officer of the law, nobody wanted to take the chance of putting him out of business. But he lost his immunity with his job. So check out all the husbands and all the boyfriends. Why should I leave you off the list?”

“I swear to God, cross my heart and hope to die, Fred hasn’t any idea at all what went on. I love the guy. It would kill him, it really would. And he might kill me. He’s got a terrible temper. Give me the picture, please. Don’t you have enough without me? How many have you got? I always wondered how many there were of us.”

“Fourteen, counting you.”

“Jesus! I was thinking six or seven. Don’t you have enough to make your point without me in there? I swear, he hasn’t tried to set me up one time since Fred got back, and that’s been seven months. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Travis McGee.”

“Trav, be nice. Please!” She looked toward the restaurant. “I’ve got to get back before Carolyn gets really scalded.”

“When do you get off?”

“I’ve been on since five. I get off at two.”

“Does your husband pick you up?”

“That’s my wheels over there on the back corner.”

“Can you come over to the White Ibis when you get off?”

A snort of disgusted laughter. “Oh, boy. The same old crap. Be nice to me, baby, and I’ll be nice to you. I must lead some kind of charmed life. Every time old Dori gets boxed in.”

“Just talk. I want to get an I.D. on as many of the pictures as I can. I want to know how it operated. Can you do it?”

She looked at me, skepticism in the tilt of the silhouetted head. “I guess. Fred will be asleep on account of he has to get up at six to go to work. I hate this shift every time I pull it. I try to sneak in without waking him up, and he tries to sneak out in the morning without waking me up. Then when he gets off work he comes and eats here and leaves me the wheels and walks home. What’s your room number?” I told her and started to explain where it was. She stopped me. “I know the layout. I’ve been there before. I just didn’t expect to have to go back again.”

She trotted back and went inside. Through the expanse of glass I saw her, sweater off, standing talking to the other girl, shrugging and gesticulating.

I had something better than forty-five minutes to continue the dogged search for the plastic sunflower. I tried her number again. Nobody heard the ringing except Raoul.

As I drove I thought of what I had said to Hyzer, about facts toppling structures built of supposition.

You want facts to simplify and clarify. But this one I had stumbled on merely deepened the murk. What I had thought were trophy shots were in truth a salesman’s sample case. Pick your pleasure, sir.

It is a useful and profitable sideline practiced by venal, underpaid, crooked police officers in every urban area of the nation and the world where police administration leaves enough room for improvisation. A certain number of females are always going to get into trouble with the law. A certain percentage of them are always going to be physically attractive. The investigating officer can make a deal that is mutually advantageous. Play ball or face a conviction, honey. The procurer cop has advantages denied the free-lance pimp. He can more safely strong-arm the unruly customer. He can protect his string from arrest, and at the same time keep them in line with the threat of arrest. If he is careful in his selection, they will never fink on him because they, in turn, have too much to lose by any public exposure of the relationship. And he has a handy source of special favors for politicians and administrators. Tonight, sweetie, you got a date with Judge O’Harran. Here’s the address. He’ll be looking for you about eight o’clock. This one is a freeby.

It was a big-city sickness I had not expected to come across in a small city in the central flatlands of Florida. And it puzzled me that Deputy Arnstead could operate his string right under the cool nose of a man as diligent and professional and subtle as Norman Hyzer. And it bothered me that Betsy Kapp had been in the sample kit. Maybe a very useful talent was fading, my ability to sense what people were after-what made them struggle and what made them give up. That talent had kept me alive a few times when the odds were against it. And I could think of no game Betsy could play which would enable her to turn a little hustling into some kind of romantic dramatics, into a sentimental eccentricity.

I was waiting when Dori parked. When I opened the door for her, she came scuttling in, furtive until the door was closed and she had tugged the center gap in the opaque draperies shut. Then she was at her ease. Saw that all I had was gin and Scotch, said gin and Coke would be fine if I could get some Coke, so I got a bottle out of the machine when I went to get more ice.

She wanted to talk. She was all full of her plump and pretty animation, bouncing around in the chair, gulping at her drink, sucking her cigarettes, brief skirt of the waitress uniform at midthigh, exposing the fine skin texture of her pretty legs. Lots of gestures and animation. She had been aching for a chance to tell somebody about the enormous, heartbreaking tragedy which had befallen poor Mrs. Fred Severiss, and had no idea that it was a drab, tiresome and ordinary little story, because she knew it had happened to her, and she could not feel commonplace, nor can anyone in their unique little time around the track.

She had always been “fantastically stupid” about money, and she had been a salesgirl at Garnor’s Boutique at the Woodsgate Shopping Center, and Fred was far away and she missed him and she had this thing about buying clothes and shoes to cheer herself up, and she had charge cards, and besides she had this “wonderful crazy girlfriend” and they would go whipping over to the east coast and go to the dog tracks, and she was absolutely true to her Fred etc., etc. So she got in a terrible money jam, and the credit people started getting very ugly, and she missed car payments and she didn’t know what she would do if she lost the car, because how would she explain it to Freddie? So she had eighty dollars and she and her girlfriend had gone over to the dog track and she thought that if she could build it into three or four hundred she could get out of the jam, but she lost it all and fifteen dollars more she borrowed from her girlfriend. Then she started clipping the cash sales at the Boutique, saving the halves of the inventory tickets, thinking of it as “just sort of a loan, actually, on account of I was going to live quiet as mice and pay it back before Mrs. Garnor took inventory May first. That was the season before last.” Then Arnstead had showed up at night at her little studio apartment, and it was the first she knew that the thieving had been detected, and Mrs. Garnor had asked the law to find out which of the five clerks was doing it. She had tried to deny it and Arnstead had broken her in about five minutes, and she had, at his direction, written her confession about it being a little over six hundred dollars taken over the seven weeks. Then he said he would take her in and bail would probably be about five hundred, and the least she could expect for grand larceny would be eighteen months in the state prison for women. Blubbering and begging and pleading for mercy had done no good. And when she was in total despair, he had given her the little hint that she was so pretty that maybe he could delay it, see what he could do, and she had lunged at that like a starving bass, taken him into the narrow Bahama bed, telling herself it wasn’t like cheating on Fred actually, because what she was really doing was saving their lives and their marriage from absolute wreckage, and she had vowed “to just be a thing, and go through the motions with my mind a thousand miles away” But the deputy had kept seeing her and he was persistent and she had been alone for months and months, and couldn’t help herself really, and got so she responded to him, and got to “needing him in a crazy way even though I didn’t like him.” Then he wanted her to be nice to a friend, and they had a terrible battle about it, and by then, of course, he had taken some pictures of her, and had the confession which he said was good for seven years, and he could mail a picture and a Xerox of her confession to dear Freddie if that was the way she wanted. it. So she had slept with his friend in a motel over in Everglades City a couple of times, and then there had been others, and Lew would bring her fifty dollars, or twenty, or seventy-five, depending. And once, a year ago last July, he’d sent three of them to Naples and they’d gone cruising for four days on a big company boat with a hired captain and three sort of vice-president-type people, and that time it had been a hundred twenty-five from Lew and fifty that the man she was with had put in her purse like a bonus or something. She knew there were other girls, and she had only run into three of them altogether, the two others on the cruise, and one on a kind of double date right here in this motel.

She counted, frowning, on her fingers and said that it had all lasted maybe fifteen months, and she could not remember the number of affairs, or the amount of money. Maybe twenty or twenty-five dates. Lew promised it would end when Fred came home. She had finally realized that Lew knew he could control her, but Fred was something else. Fred would try to kill him and would surely kill her. She’d been terrified that Lew wouldn’t keep his promise, and she’d been terrified that Fred would somehow be able to tell what she’d been up to, but it had worked out all right.

By then she had worked her way through the second gin and Coke. She was flushed and her articulation was not quite as distinct.

“I’m just damn lucky I got out of it, Trav. I’m just lucky it’s over. I keep telling myself that. But it’s funny… I don’t know. I’m different somehow. I mean I feel I’m sort of faking the happy little wife bit. One time I got to fussing at Lew until he got sore and grabbed my neck and shoved me over to a mirror and hurt my arm and made me look into my eyes and say dirty things about myself. Things like: ‘I’m a whore. I peddle my ass. I bang for a living.’ Things aren’t like what you always think they’re like, I guess. It’s not real different from dates, where if the guy is sweet and fun you have a good time, and if it’s some old fat guy, you just get it over with. I don’t know. Sometimes I think of standing on my feet in that place and how long it takes to make fifty, and how long it took to make fifty on my back. Fred is a great guy, really. I think that maybe somebody will come in and look at me and say let’s go, baby, and I’ll get in his car and never come back.”

She lifted her wrist and peered at her little watch. She shifted in the chair, ran her tongue along her lips, took a deep shuddering breath. In a huskier tone she said, “Like now. If you should want it, honey. Like on the house.”

“Let’s look at the pictures.”

She came out of her sensual glaze. “Oh, sure. Jesus! I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately I really don’t. Yeh, let’s look at them and then I got to get going because Fred could wake up and get worried and wonder what the hell and phone the place and find out I’ve been gone forever.”

I laid the pictures out on the countertop under the lamp, one at a time. She came and stood beside me. Thirteen of them.

“‘That’s Donna Lee something. She was on that cruise. She’s a real fun kid, real lively, and she’s got a real cute body as any fool can plainly see. She works in a real estate office. Up over the bank. Associated Realtors, Inc. No, I don’t know this one at all. I don’t remember ever seeing her around town anyplace. I have seen this girl somewhere. Let me think. I think she works in the courthouse. I’m pretty sure. This one I know. Sort of. Her name is Brenda Dennis? Dennison? Denderson? A name like that She was on the double date with me. She’s sort of quiet and hard to know, and she isn’t built very good, is she? She works at Elian’s Stationery, but I haven’t been in there in so long I don’t know if she’s still there. I’ve seen this girl someplace I think, but I don’t know where. This one is older, huh? I never saw her before as far as I know.”

When I turned the seventh picture she gasped and said, “Holy Maloney! It can’t be! This is Miss Kimmey, for God’s sake. She teaches third grade and sings in the choir at our church. She’s got a real nice soprano voice. The kind of clothes she wears, you’d never guess what a great body she’s got. Now how in the world did Lew ever nail her? Boy, would I like to find out.”

She drew another blank on number eight. But she knew number nine. “That’s Linda Featherman. I nearly dropped my teeth when she turned out to be number three on that cruise. I mean there’s lots of money there. Big ranchlands and grovelands in the northeast part of the county. At first I thought she was going to spoil that cruise by acting as if she was so much better than Donna Lee and me. It was her car we went to Naples in, and she drove and hardly said a word all the way. She took darling cruise clothes along, worth like a fortune. But then she was okay after the first day, a lot more human. Poor gal, I couldn’t believe it when I read about it.”

“About what?”

“She got killed a little while ago. Let me count back. Two weekends ago, I think. The state police said she had to be going at least a hundred miles an hour, heading back out to the ranch at three or four in the morning, about fifteen miles north of here, and they said she probably fell asleep because there weren’t any skid marks. She just went right off a curve in a straight line and right into an enormous pine tree and broke it right off and hit the next one sideways. They say it took hours to identify her for sure.”

Number ten was one Jeanie Dahl, and on seeing the picture she remembered Lew saying that Jeanie was in the club. She and Jeanie had both been in the Miss Cypress City contest when they were in high school, and Jeanie had been second runner-up and Dori had been third runner-up. Jeanie had been married and divorced, and lived with her mother who took care of her little kid while Jeanie worked in the office at Kramer Building Supply. Eleven was an unknown. Twelve was somebody she thought she had seen often around town, but had no idea where.

I had adjusted them to leave Lillian (Lilo) Hatch (Perris) until last. She actually recoiled from the picture, and made a little coughing, gagging sound and turned away.

“What’s the matter?”

“Her name is Lilo Perris. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Why not?”

“Give me a minute. Fix me a drink. That made me go cold all over. That girl is crazy. I mean for real crazy. That girl is a maniac.”

I made her the third drink. She was back in the chair. When she settled down she told me.

“It was about the fourth time Lew sent me to meet somebody. He was a spook. He wanted things I didn’t want to do. So I wouldn’t. He got mad and I got mad and it broke up fast and I went home. I was waiting for Lew to come around so I could tell him not to send me to spooks like that. He sent Lilo to see me. That girl is crazyl She hurt me so bad I fainted, I don’t know how many times. After she went away I kept throwing up. I was so weak I stayed in bed two days. Then Lew came around and said the spook was a very important man in Tallahassee, and I was going to have another date with him. He said if I didn’t want to make the spook happy, he’d have Lilo come to visit me again. I think I would really rather die than have her start doing things to me again, smiling at me and giggling and calling me love names and saying how much fun it would be to really kill me. She’s as strong as a man, and she knows every way there is to hurt a girl. She’s absolutely insane, Trav!”

“How long ago was this?”

“Maybe… a year ago last June. Look at me. Look at the goose bumps on my arms and legs just thinking about her. I used to get nightmares about her and wake up bellering and twitching around.”

“Do you know of anybody else who was in on it, where I don’t have a picture here?”

“Gee, I don’t think so. I can’t think of anybody.”

“Possibly Mrs. Betsy Kapp?”

“In the dining room at the Lodge. The old blonde with the huge boobs. No, and I can tell you why I’m so sure, even.” She started to say something, then closed her mouth and looked guilty.

“What’s the matter.”

“Well… I guess I lied a little. But only about one of the gals.”

The truth came out. She had lied about Jeanie Dahl, about only remembering Lew mentioning Jeanie when she saw the picture. She saw quite a bit of Jeanie, as a matter of fact. Why shouldn’t old friends see each other? As a matter of fact, Jeanie was the crazy friend who’d go with her to the dog tracks, and Jeanie had gotten in as bad a jam about money as she had. And as a matter of fact once she’d started having affairs that Lew lined up, she had some drinks with Jeanie and told her all about it, and how it was, and what the payoff was, and found out Jeanie had been clipping a little bit now and then from petty cash at Kramer Building Supply and was scared of getting caught. So she had asked Jeanie if it was okay if she told Lew that Jeanie might be interested, and at first Jeanie said no, and then she changed her mind. And it was nice to have a friend who knew the whole score, and was in it with you, and you could talk to them the way you couldn’t talk to anybody else in the whole world, and compare notes, and tell about the weird things that happened. So because of Jeanie’s mother and the kid, they had set it up for Lew and Jeanie to meet at Dori’s apartment while Dori was working, and when she got off work Jeanie was still there, alone and asleep, and said she and Lew had made the deal, and sealed it with a lot more than a handshake.

“I kinda sluffed over Jeanie’s picture because… maybe I felt a little weird about getting her into it all, too. But when you’re in a bind, you wish somebody you knew was in it, too. At least I warned her about that Lilo and told her she better not ever get choosy about anything if she got set up with a spook. Since Freddie came home seven months ago, I go have lunch with Jeanie whenever my shift works out right. It’s like… resigning from something and you want gossip about what’s going on since you left. She took a whole week off from work last January and flew to Jamaica free, and her date was there waiting, and it turned out to be… well, never mind who. Anyway an important businessman in this town. She came back with a marvelous tan and brought me some fantastic perfume, and she made five hundred dollars!”

“What about Betsy Kapp?”

“Oh. Lew came by when Jeanie was getting off work one day, last November, I think, and he drove her out into the country someplace and parked and he came all apart. She said he cried like a little boy. She said he cried on her shoulder and she held him, and she said it was funny to feel kind of warm-mother toward him, knowing all the time what a mean son of a bitch he is. He finally told her he had beaten up a woman who’d done him the greatest favor any woman could ever do a man. It was all some kind of crazy’thing about how he fell in love and he all of a sudden couldn’t get it up, and the doctor he went to told him it was a common thing, a guilt thing, feeling unworthy and all that, and gave him shots but they didn’t help. And the same thing happened with other girls then, and then the wonderful woman had helped him and he could again, and then he had beaten her up and he didn’t know why. Jeanie finally found out it was Mrs. Kapp, and so she just naturally asked him if Mrs. Kapp was taking on customers for him, too. Jeanie didn’t mean anything by it at all. But he reared back and gave her such a clout on the side of the head her ear rang day and night for a week, practically. He said Mrs. Kapp was a fine woman, not some cheap little piece of ass like Jeanie. So I guess Mrs. Kapp never had any part of the action. Jeanie said he acted strange, and he had been acting strange, and after that he got more weird. Jumpy acting.”

“When did you see her last?”

“This is Sunday. I mean it’s Monday morning. Let me see. We had lunch a week ago Friday. We talked about Linda Featherman, mostly. And she said she hadn’t heard anything from Lew in three weeks and she was wondering if he was sort of easing off. She said she was getting nervous about keeping up payments on things because she’d figured on the extra money. She said, just joking, that maybe the two of us ought to go over to Miami Beach and see if there was any action. But she was joking. Lew made it awful plain to me and to her, too, that if we did any hustling on the side, he’d find out and we’d be the sickest, sorriest gals in Florida. Anyway, it would be stupid to try to work a place you don’t have any protection. The cops pull in the free-lance gals, because that’s part of the deal they get paid for by the people who have the action all sewed up. If Lew happens to be really dead, like you think it’s going to be rough for Jeanie to make out. It comes to maybe a thousand or twelve hundred a year, according to what I was making and what she was making, without any tax on it. Part time, like moonlighting, but there has to be somebody like Lew to set you up and do the collecting ahead so no bastard can afford to try to cheat you. We used to try to figure out what Lew was making, guessing how many of us were working for him. So it had to be what? Fourteen to sixteen thousand a year? But I guess he had to split that somehow, to keep himself out of trouble.”

She stood up, yawning. “Do I get my picture back?”

I handed it to her. She looked at it and said, “I can just look at a piece of pie and gain a pound.” She tore it into small pieces and took it into the bathroom and closed the door. She came out after a while and said, “You’ve got any of the other pictures of me?”

“No.

“I wish I knew where they were. I’d feel better. It was some sort of game, I thought, the camera on the table and he’d set a little thing that started buzzing and hop back in with me and then the flash would go off. It was one of those he was going to mail to Fred. He cut it so it was him from the chest down, but there I was, clear as a bell, laughing my fool head off. If you come across those?”

“I’ll destroy them and let you know.”

“The wrong clown gets those and he can put me right back in action. I wouldn’t have a choice. Poor Freddie.”

“Can I talk to Jeanie?”

She looked secretly amused. “How could I stop you? Why ask? You are a nice guy, Trav. You really are. I’d like to do you a nice favor for being a nice guy, but if you wanna know the truth, seeing the picture of that Lilo really blew out my fire. Going to be around awhile?”

“I guess so.”

“Maybe we can work something out. You know where to find me. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything. I mean I’m a healthy girl from head to toe. ‘Night now. Take care.”

Fifteen

YES, INDEED. Take care. I finished the notations on the backs of the thirteen photographs. Six names. Courthouse, third grade, building supply, real estate firm, stationery store.

Arnstead’s Irregulars. Sorry little part-time hookers, each one thinking herself such a very special person, able to play the dark and nimble role, yet remain essentially her own true beautiful self.

There are no hookers with hearts of gold. Just lazy greedy, dull-minded girls whose greatest joys are the clothing rack and the mirror and the makeup table. Such a simple little task, to take that ever-familiar tumescent rigidity into the slippery muscular depths, and brace tight, and hip-smack it into its brief leapings and sagging flaccidity. Simple task sometimes pleasurable enough to incite an inner matching clenching, hidden explosion, and sighing release. Then say it was beautiful, tell him he’s special, tell him it hardly ever happens like that for you. Give him the mirror-practiced expressions, and use the familiar ways to ready him again, because the better you work him, the more chance of a tip, and the thirty-dollar blue sandals are on layaway, and they are darling.

So simple a task it soon has no meaning, and then there is no meaning in being a woman, in that sense of being a woman. The only meaning left is in the ever-changing adornment of the body, that thing they buy. It is like the mercenary who sits alone, smiling, and with oil and stone, puts an ever finer edge on the combat knife, hoping that the next sentry will die so quickly there will be that little feeling in the belly of professional satisfaction, and a feeling almost of fondness for the unknown sentry because it had worked so well.

No evil in either hooker or mercenary. Just laziness, a small familiar greed, a mild anticipation of unimportant sensation, and the ever-challenging problem of what kind of pretty to buy with the fee.

Poor Freddie. Why did she leave and where did she go? She’s going, soldier. One day soon. She’ll leave because, no matter what the uniform, the mercenary blade always pierces exactly the same heart, stopping it over and over again. Only the angle changes. Until all hearts become the same target. And the hooker receives from all customers exactly the same plum-taut glans, slaying it in the same rocking lubricious clench of inner muscle ring, clasp of outer labia, pumping it to its small jolting death, welcoming it ever again, affixed to the loins of another stranger, but always the same in its greed for death. Only the duration changes. Until all erection is the same, including the husband one, all equally meaningless except for the chance of pleasure-feeling, and the money.

I thought of Betsy and her silly, touching, romantic conviction that each episode was unique and meaningful and full of glory. Faith and conviction made it so, and a stereo at cost and free tapes were gestures of friendship, and a hard man could understand a little of this, and weep for having beaten her.

It was nearly four-thirty in the morning, and again her phone did not answer. I tried the sheriff. He was not available. I stretched out to think of what to do next, how to fit the parts together, and suddenly it was bright morning outside, the room lights still on, my mouth stale, and my eyes grainy.

The phone rang just as I was reaching to turn on the shower. It was Sheriff Hyzer to tell me they had not located Mrs. Kapp or her car yet, but that they had found Lew Arnstead’s black jeep hidden in the yard of an empty house four doors down Seminole from Mrs. Kapp’s cottage. Maybe I’d like to stop by.

I didn’t ask any questions. I hurried the shower, and it was twenty after eight when I got there. Hyzer’s cruiser was in Betsy’s driveway. He seemed to be alone. Fresh suit, shirt, tie, shoes. He’d nicked himself twice shaving.

We walked up the street. The chain was unhooked. A deputy was dusting it with professional care and deftness, lifting fragments and sections of prints, making notations of location.

“It made me wonder, Mr. McGee, if Arnstead had hidden this here yesterday evening, gone to Mrs. Kapp’s house and taken her away with him in her car.”

“I suppose that could have happened.”

“Not when you see this. Come here.” He took me around to the front, pointed to a brown object fastened to a protected place under the headlamp. “Mud dauber,” he said. “Fresh. They turn pale when they dry. They don’t work at night. This nest is nearly done. You wait a minute you’ll see her come flying in with another mud ball. She had to start yesterday morning to get this far. She had to build it up to a certain point then go find the right kind of spider and paralyze it with her stinger and shove it in there. Soon now she’ll have just a little hole left. She’ll lay her eggs in it and then seal it up, and when the young hatch they’ll have spider meat to live on before they break out.”

“Very interesting.”

“So it was left here Saturday night, probably. You spent the night with her. Hear anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“We had a telephone report of an altercation at three in the morning in this neighborhood.”

“I didn’t hear that, either.”

“It doesn’t make sense, at least not yet, for him to hide his jeep here and walk away from it and not come back.”

“Meaning he couldn’t come back.”

“Or somebody abandoned it here to leave a false trail. Tom, don’t forget to dust that Dr. Pepper bottle on the floor.”

“No sir, Sheriff.”

“Getting anything usable?”

“Too many smudges. A few pretty good partials and right here at the top of the windshield, one real good one of the whole heel of a hand. Could be a woman’s or a child’s from the size.”

“Call Johnny’s to come tow it in when you’re finished, and get those vacuum bags to the Bureau fast as you can.”

As we walked back to Betsy’s drive I said, “You’re a very thorough man, Sheriff.”

“We try.”

“I imagine you must be aware of everything that goes on in Cypress County.”

“All I need to know, I hope. We put through a consolidation a couple of years back, absorbed the city police into the county and put all the law enforcement under the Sheriff’s Department. Cuts duplication and expense.”

“Excuse me, Sheriff. You seem more amiable toward me today.”

“I like to be fair. You said Perris had to leave that station Friday morning. I tried it once more. I phoned Al Storey this morning and asked him if Henry Perris had left the station for any reason whatsoever, business or personal. First he said no, just as he did before, and then he remembered that Perris had finished a brake job on an Oldsmobile and had taken it down the road to the customer, a man named Hummer. It was a combination road test and delivery. Hummer had then driven Perris back to the station. To get to Hummer’s road, Perris had to pass a little roadside park with a public phone booth. Can you fill in the rest of it, Mr. McGee?”

“Make a phone call to someone to pick up the envelope he hid in the phone book.”

“Perhaps. Storey did not think of that in the same sense as actually leaving the station. Leaving involves personal business. A delivery is work time. I told Storey not to talk if Perris was nearby. He said Perris was late again, as usual. I told him not to mention the conversation to Perris.”

“Are you going to pick Perris up?”

“Not yet. I want him to feel safe. I want to have more to go on.”

“Now will you admit the girl is implicated, too?”

His stare was like stone. “If evidence should show at some future date that she is involved, knowingly, in any criminal activity, then she will be arrested and charged.”

End of amiability.

End of conversation.

I drove down to Johnny’s Main Street Service. Miss Agnes had been taken off the line. I found her on blocks in the body shop, with a big sweaty Ron Hatch wielding a rubber mallet and some curved templates with comforting skill.

He came out and said, “Hi, Mr. McGee. Some of it isn’t as bad as I thought. But, Jesus, they used some kind of gauge metal in her.” I borrowed the broken fitting from him and made a call from the office to my mechanic friend in Palm Beach. I told him what it looked like and where it went. He had me measure it, and had me hold the phone. He came back on the line in about two minutes and said he had it and where and how should he send it. I had him ship fastest means direct to Ron Hatch at the garage. The operator came back with the report of charges, and I gave the exact change to the office girl and she put it in the petty cash box just as a man in his late forties came in. He was trim and held himself well, and his hair was a little too thick and dark to be entirely unaided. He had a golfing tan, and an elegant sport shirt, and a gold-and-black wristwatch with three or four dials and a lot of gold buttons to push.

“McGee?” he said. When I said I was, he said he was Johnny Hatch, and invited me back into his office. Small, paneled, cool, windowless, and private. Golfing trophies and trap-shooting trophies, and framed testimonials about his civic services. A color portrait in a silver frame, showing a very lovely young woman smiling out, her arms around a little boy and a little girl. She looked young enough to account for his trimness and his hairpiece and dye job.

“Thanks for treating the kid right on the work he did on that old Rolls truck of yours. It set him up pretty good.”

“He’s a nice kid.”

“Not much you can do with them these days. That Liz Taylor haircut of his makes me want to throw up every time I see it. He won’t go back to school. He’s a car nut. I’ll say this. He’ll do the job right for you. Now I got a second litter coming along, and it makes you wonder what kind of problems they’re going to be.”

“I wasn’t exactly eager to put any more money into your operation, Mr. Hatch. It seemed to me like you took me pretty good.”

He shrugged. “I could show you the books. We don’t get rich on county business. We have to bid it. We lose on some and make out on the others, and hope to end up the year ahead. Don’t tell me a fella who can afford Lennie Sibelius is hurting for a little garage bill.”

“Word gets around.”

“Small town. You know how it is. Everybody hears everything. Trouble is that when they pass it along, they add a little to make it more interesting.”

“Then you know Arnstead is missing?”

“I heard about it.”

“And Betsy Kapp is missing, too.”

He was startled. “The hell you say!”

“She had a seven o’clock date last night and didn’t keep it and hasn’t been seen since.”

“That’s a weird one. That isn’t like old Betsy. I tell you, it would take a lot of pleasure out of having lunch at the Lodge if anything happened to her.”

“I understand she and Arnstead were pretty close. Maybe they took off together.”

“Hell, I can’t buy that. They had something going, I guess. But that was months ago. Funny, she’d fool around with Lew.”

“Maybe it was a business relationship, Johnny.”

He leaned back watchful. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I knew the name was familiar, but I didn’t connect it up right away. I remembered that a year, year and a half ago, somebody told me that if I ever got stuck in this neck of the woods, I should look up a Deputy Lew Arnstead, and he could fix me up with something real choice, that it would cost, but it would be worth it.”

“Do tell.”

“You’re the one who told me it’s a small town. I guess if it was true, you’d have heard about it.”

“I think I heard somewhere that Lew had an extra girlfriend or two he’d hire out.”

“I guess he’d have to be pretty careful about it, working under a man like Hyzer.”

“Mister Norm sees what he wants to see and believes what he wants to believe, just like everybody else.”

“He doesn’t impress you?”

He shrugged. “I vote for him.”

“So it’s a nice quiet place, with a very quiet little newspaper.”

“There’s no point in scaring up trouble by printing a lot of things that agitate people.”

“Was the car Linda Featherman was driving brought in here?”

“What the hell have you got on your mind, McGee! I asked you in here to thank you for the way you played fair with my boy. I didn’t know I was going to get some kind of third degree.”

I smiled, stood up. “I’m just curious about your nice little town, Johnny. No offense. I admit I am a little curious about your first litter. I like Ron. He’s a good one. But from all reports his sister is as rotten a little tramp as you can find anywhere.”

His face turned to a brown mask, and he did not move his lips when he spoke. He spoke so quietly I could barely hear him. “Understand this. Nobody mentions her in my presence. She is absolutely nothing to me, and the sick sow that bred her is nothing to me. I don’t care if they are alive or dead. I don’t care if they roast in hell or find eternal bliss. Now get out of here.”

I got. That much hate is impressive, no matter where you find it. It makes you want to walk on tiptoe and breathe quietly as you get out of range.

I found breakfast and then flipped a coin. Heads was Deputy King Sturnevan. Tails was Mrs. Jeanie Dahl. Had it landed on edge I was going to try Miss Kimmey, in the third grade. It was heads.

King had some reports to finish. He said to wait around. Twenty minutes later he came out and walked over to the Buick. He leaned in and shook his head sadly. “You gotta talent, man. Billy Cable catches you jaywalking, he’ll club your head down between your knees.”

“Get in, and I’ll tell you about it.” I told him. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and witnessed Betsy chop him down.

King nodded. “I knew he wanted to get into that. But I didn’t know he was damn fool enough to go after it that way. If Mister Norm heard he tried to use his badge to get her onto her back, he would be out in the street. Seems like she didn’t fight you off much, McGee. That’s the way she is. She will, but not often, and she has to do the picking.”

“She picked Lew Arnstead.”

“I know. Surprised folks. The Betsy-watchers. Not her type. But you can’t tell.”

“King, how much can we trust each other, you and I?”

He shifted his big belly around and beamed at me and winked a scarred eye. “You can’t trust me one damn bit if it’s something the man ought to know.”

“I have a crazy question which has been growing and growing, and I have to ask. Make it hypothetical. Could and did Lew Arnstead get away with things that Hyzer would have fired anyone else for?”

I watched him make his slow decision. “It bothered me a long time, pal. Tell you the truth, it surprised hell out of me when Hyzer did boot him out and file charges. And I saw Lew’s face when it happened, and I think Lew was as surprised as me.”

“Do you think Hyzer knew Lew was pimping?”

“You get around good. That wouldn’t be easy to come by I guess Lew started four years back, about then. I think maybe Hyzer decided that if a broad was going to peddle it, it’s better to have somebody keeping it under control. He had to hear about it, but as far as I know, he never looked into it. And Lew never turned up rich enough to ask for an investigation of where and how he got it.”

“Could he have been handling it for Hyzer?”

“I am going to forget you said that, pally. Because if I remember it one minute from now, I am going to pull you out of this pretty car and see if I can rupture your spleen with a left.”

“Sorry I asked. I apologize.”

“It just couldn’t be, believe me.”

“Now you know and I know that a cop builds his own string. He doesn’t start off with old hustlers. He starts with girls who’ve gotten out of line and he scares them into making a choice his way. He’s usually smart enough to try it on the ones who will take to it without much fuss, or he isn’t in business long. He breaks them in himself, then puts them to work.”

His broad face was unhappy. “I guess if Mister Norm looked into it and found that was the way it was being done, he would have had to get rid of Lew. So he didn’t look into it. I know the score, pally. I remember there was an immigration officer in Miami who put the heat on for whether girls got a renewal or got shipped back to the crummy villages they came from. Then one of them, as I remember it, wrote her kid sister not to come to the States and told her why, and the kid sister gave it to the old man, and he flew up on the money his daughter had been sending back to Peru, and put a knife into that civil servant. He put it in about forty times, starting just above the knees and working his way up. Somebody could have known about Lew and didn’t make the move until Lew was no longer a law man.”

“I just happened to tell Hyzer about how Billy went after Betsy Kapp a year and a half ago.”

“How can one man make himself so popular so fast? You going to run for mayor?”

“I don’t know. I think of lots of questions and look for answers. Question: Would somebody kill Arnstead in order to take Hyzer off whatever hook he was on?”

King thought it over. “He doesn’t act like anybody with the pressure off. He’s pushing harder than ever. I thought over what you said the other night about Lew. He had to be way out on speed. It fits. So how and why does a speed freak get clobbered? Who knows?”

“King, what was the verdict on Linda Feather-man?”

He snapped his head around, completely puzzled. “Verdict? What do you mean? Accidental death. One-car accident. Excessive speed. Fell asleep, maybe.”

“Insurance company pay off?”

“What the hell are you talking about? Murder? Suicide? What?”

“What if you were absolutely positive she’d been hustling for Lew Arnstead for at least two years?”

“Aw… come on! The Featherman girl? You’re out of your tree, buddy boy. If anybody tried to muscle her, she’d go to Dale Featherman and say, ‘Daddy, somebody is bothering me.’ And daddy would go skin Arnstead and salt down the hide after he scraped it clean, and tack it on one of the stables out there at the ranch. He might saw off the top of Lew’s skull and use it for an ashtray. No, sir. That’s four generations of Florida money, and senators from Washington and bankers from New York come down in a Featherman jet and land on that private strip. You’re way off, my friend. She was a very pretty girl and she drove too damned fast.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

“Three of each, I think. She was somewhere in the middle. Got back from college three years ago, I think. There were plans for a wedding, but it got canceled for some reason. There’s no lever to use on a girl like that. She could buy her way out of trouble, or have the muscle put out of business.”

“Unless the leverage was on somebody else, and that was the only way she could protect them.”

He studied me. “Okay. We’re trusting each other. I just might take your word for it. Are you positive?” They have a badge and they swear an oath. So whether or not something is off the record depends on how much they value that oath. So when you see the cop-glint way back in the eyes you back off, just a little.

“King, let’s say it’s a pretty fair assumption.”

“Then you’re wandering around out in left field, McGee. Let’s say Lew wasn’t all too bright, and let’s say he was running women. He wouldn’t be so dumb he’d try to muscle Miss Linda Featherman into it, pretty as she was.”

“Can you come up with any names?”

“I wouldn’t want to try, because I might name some it would turn out they were only close friends of Lew’s. If he was setting up every woman he’d been out with in the past four years, he’d have to run the operation with IBM cards, and take home the money in a wheelbarrer.”

“Wonder what he was doing with what he was making?”

“Salting it away. Slowest man you ever seen when it came to reaching into his pocket to pay for a beer or a cup of coffee. He bought himself some good guns, and one good horse, but that was about it. Had a pretty fair automobile that he bought half wrecked and had Henry Perris put in good shape, then he was too cheap to pay collision, so it was a total loss when he racked it up. He kept his business affairs, and just about everything else to himself. Close mouth and a close pocket. It isn’t smart for any cop to have a safety-deposit box. I’d guess Lew’d pack it in fruit jars and bury it in the ground.”

“Think he dug it up and left?”

“Not if he could still make more than enough to live on around here. I think he’s dead.”

“Do you think he had guilty knowledge of the Baither killing?”

“Let’s you and me stay friends, pally.” He opened the door, slowly pulled his bulk out, flipped the door shut, mopped his forehead. “It’s going to get way up there before this day is over. See you around, I suppose. Glad to hear your friend is doing fine.”

I arrived at the Kramer Home Building Supply headquarters at eleven-fifteen. It was a mile and a half out of town on the airport road. Big lumber warehouse with truck loading docks, a cement block operation with about two acres of decorative block stacked gleaming in the sun, a retail store with everything for the do-it-yourselfer, and a clerical office at the end of the building which housed the retail outlet. It was a bright brisk operation with that neatness of floor displays which reflects a comforting operating net. Old men were browsing through the hand tools and cupboard latches, spray cans and wallboard just as, in the world of long ago, they had prowled the candy store to find out how best to spend the hoarded dime.

There were two middle-aged women and one young one behind the waist-high fence. The young one was the Jeanie of the picture, looking slimmer in a short fuzzy pink skirt, a white blouse with a fine vertical red stripe, dark auburn hair chopped to urchin length. One of the other women started toward me, but I smiled and pointed at Jeanie, who was running invoices on a big Burroughs accounting machine. The woman shrugged and looked a little less hospitable and spoke to Jeanie. She turned and looked at me, first a green-eyed speculation, and then recognition. She turned her machine off and came over to the fence, angling so that I had to drift over toward the corner, and we ended up at the maximum distance from the other two women.

Delicate little features, face wide across the farset eyes, fat little mouth over the pointed chin. “Your name is McGee, huh?”

The piped music, which always seems to be Montovani in places like that, made our conversation private. I nodded. She made a head gesture and said, “Those old crows got ears that come to points, believe me. Dori said a big tall guy, kind of battered here and there, with a lot of tan and real pale gray eyes. But she didn’t say how tall and how big. I could tell from her voice she’s turned on about you. She called me after Fred was gone, like seven this morning, and she sounded a little plotzed. She was scared I’d be sore she’d told you about me. She said you’re okay, so if it says, that in her book it says it in mine. I like to dropped my teeth when she says fourteen gals. I would have said ten at the most, the very most.” She looked over her shoulder at the wall clock. “I can switch lunch hours with the girl over there on the register. She hates going at eleven-thirty. That’s ten minutes. We can’t talk so good here. I can feel Mr. Frandel looking at me through that glass right now, boring a hole in the back of my head with his eyes. Look you mind buying something? It helps. Then I’ll be coming out that door there into the back parking at eleven-thirty.”

I joined the browsers and came upon something I had been wanting to add to the tools aboard the Flush: a compact, lightweight electric screwdriver, variable speed, reverse, a goodly batch of interchangeable heads, all in a tidy aluminum case for $26.95. No reason why Lennie shouldn’t buy his bird dog a little present for the boat. The only flaw in the rig was that some idiot, through cynicism or indifference, had specified steel pins in the aluminum hinges and a steel latch on the case.

So by the time I paid and got out of there, Mrs. Jeanie Dahl was standing in the shade, leaning against the building, ankles crossed, elbow propped in the palm of her hand, cigarette down by a third. She smiled and pushed herself away from the wall and followed me to the convertible. I turned the air high and, when we turned onto the highway I ran the power windows back up.

“Where do we go?” I asked.

“Right down there where the sign is on the right. Bernie’s. There’s kind of a crazy grove behind it and you can take stuff out there. I’d like a cheeseburger and a vanilla shake.”

I carried our food in a cardboard box out to cement tables and benches in the shade of big Australian pines. We were the only customers in the grove. The other five tables were empty. A pair of Florida jays flew down and landed on the end of the table, hopped cautiously toward us. She held her hand out, arm flat on the table, crumb in her palm. The bolder of the pair, after much inspection, grabbed it and flew to the nearest table to eat it. She continued to feed them as we ate and talked.

“I think he had some kind of protection, sure. But he didn’t say anything real definite, right out like. More like saying to me a couple of times there wasn’t a thing to worry about, because I live with my mother and my kid, and I said to Lew a couple of times that my mother would make my life hell on earth, and my lousy ex still wants the kid and it could be a chance for him to get Davie away from me, I mean if there was some kind of raid or something like that.”

“So if somebody was in with him, it would be logical for that somebody to pick it up where Lew left off, if Lew is dead.”

She wiped her vanilla mustache off on the paper napkin. “McGee, I was thinking I wouldn’t exactly be eager to go along with Lew on anything if he shows up again. I mean having him be a deputy makes it one kind of thing, and having him be out on bail, waiting for a trial in circuit court is something else. You know? Maybe if he lost his protection, they might want to charge him with this other thing, too. And if I got a subpoena, believe me, I think I’d go out of my mind. I guess the best thing to do is sort of keep my fool head down for a while. If nothing happens, maybe in a couple weeks or so I can set up a date with a local man I just so happen to know, and I’ve got the idea it could turn out to be a permanent kind of a thing, and he’s so turned on about me, I ought to be able to get like a regular allowance, if he isn’t too chicken to try to set us up a place right here instead of going way off somewhere. I don’t want to lose the stuff I bought on time, like the color TV. My mother and Davie would be lost if we had to go back to that crummy little black-and-white Sears. Look, what is it you want to know, anyway? She said you’d probably give me back my picture like you did hers. It’s better it shouldn’t be floating around if something happened to Lew.”

“I’m puzzled about how he operated. Certainly he wasn’t contacted out at that ranch, or at the Department. He must have had some other base of operation.”

“Why would he have to? I don’t know how it was when he started it, but by the time I got in, it was on account of one fellow telling another fellow who to get in touch with. Then Lew would meet the fellow someplace, like at the Adventurer bar in the afternoon and size him up and if he looked all right, or there were two or three and they looked okay, he’d tell them the rules, all night only, and no heavy drinking beforehand, and cash on the line in advance. Then they’d pick out who they liked and Lew would phone and say where and when and who to ask for, and if you couldn’t make it, the guy made another pick. He tried to steer away from any gal having any regulars. He said that could turn into trouble. There was some locals, not many, and that was pretty much set up for out of town someplace. The next day or a day later, Lew would get the money to me. It was… easier, I guess, not to have to take the money from your date yourself. And it was more like a date that way, even though you’d know and the guy would know it was paid for ahead. What you were supposed to do was tell Lew if you got any kind of a bad time, like a fellow getting mean and slapping you around, or having a friend show up for a spare piece. Then Lew would take the guy off the list for good. I don’t think I’d want to be set up by anybody else unless they kept it under control like Lew did. But lately he was getting careless, like the guys weren’t such a nice class of people, and he took longer coming around with my share, so twice I had to remind him. And the last time I saw him, a month ago anyway, he called the house about eight at night and told me walk down to the corner and meet him. So I did and he picked me up in a police car and drove out into the country like a maniac and wouldn’t tell me what it was all about. It started to rain and he took me off to some crazy little shacky place at the end of nowhere and took me in there and liked to ruin my clothes yanking me out of them, and he shoved me onto a cruddy old bed and he was so rough it scared me, and it wasn’t ten minutes, I swear, before I was back in that car, sniveling, scared to death of the way he was driving. He let me out at the corner in the rain, and thank God my mother was too hooked on the television to take a look at me when I came in and went to my room.”

“Where was this shack?”

She looked startled. “Hey, that was sort of what you were asking before, wasn’t it?”

“Sort of. Was it locked?”

“With a padlock, yes. It was just one room, a pine shack with a crooked old floor, set up on blocks instead of pilings. It had electricity. I remember I saw at hot plate on some packing cases by the wall. There was a little narrow hall to a back door, with e little room with a john and a sink off one side of it, and a storeroom like off the other side.”

“Where was it?”

“It was dark and raining and I couldn’t find it again in a thousand years. I know we started out C:attleman’s Road because I remember wondering if we were going to his place, but it didn’t seem likely because he said that if I ever called him there ever, he’d spill my teeth all over the floor. And he would, too.”

“You went a long way out Cattleman’s Road?”

“A long way. Miles and miles and at a hundred and something miles an hour. Then he turned left, skidding on the corner like a racing driver. We must have been out of the county, or almost. Then he turned right and the road was so narrow the bushes were rubbing on the sides of the car. It went around a lot of curves and the lights shone on the shack and big trees around it and on the rain falling down hard. I asked him where we were and what he wanted. But he… I was going to say he didn’t tell me anything, but he did say something that didn’t make any sense. I can’t remember.”

“Please try.”

“It was something crazy. He said it was his birthday present. I don’t know whether he meant me or the house. Then he was running me through the rain to the door, pulling me by the wrist, and mud was slopping up on the backs of my legs and my hair was getting soaked, and I had begun to wonder if the crazy bastard had taken me out there to kill me. I think part of my crying all the way home was relief.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No. Oh, when he reached across me and opened the door to let me out on the corner, I started to get out and he grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back. He dug his fingers into my shoulder so hard I had marks for a week. He said I didn’t remember where I’d been, and I didn’t want to tell anybody about being anywhere with him or he’d give me a face that would turn my kid’s stomach. I wanted to laugh. I didn’t know where the hell I had been.”

She looked at her face in her handbag mirror and told me how this year she was going to get a really good tan. She said she had better be getting back to work. She asked where the picture was. She studied it and started to tear it, then instead put it in her purse, snapped the clasp.

I drove her back and before she got out she said, “Dori told me to tell you maybe she’ll be in touch. Look she’s a crazy wonderful kid and she’s bored out of her skull. Fred is a nice guy. It’s been too long since she’s had any kind of fun. You’d be doing her a favor, and you shouldn’t miss out on it anyway, because she’s a really fabulous lay, and she loves it. It isn’t a sales pitch, honey. It’s a freebie, because she likes you a lot.”

“And she’s bored.”

“I told her they should have a kid, but they keep taking tests and nothing happens. Freddie works hard, but, Jesus, if you tell him a joke, you gotta spend a half hour explaining to him where he should have laughed. Anyway, she’s maybe my,best friend, so don’t get turned off because she’s a little on the chubby side, okay?”

“And if you remember anything more about the tdece, call me at-”

“I know where you are. Thanks for the lunch, McGee.”

“You’re most welcome.”

“And the picture. Say, I didn’t get to see the others, damn-it. No time now. Maybe I’d know some she didn’t.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“You do that! Bye now.” Knowing I was watching her, she wagged her little pink skirt all the way to the door, turned as she tugged at it, and blew me a small kiss with her pocketbook hand.

I wrote mental ads as I drove into town: Girls, do you want extra pocket money? Have you ever thought of part-time hustling to supplement your Income? Just a relatively few hours a month in pleasant surroundings. Opportunities to travel. Taxfree income. Must be between twenty and thirty, amiable, reasonably pretty and well built, and able to devote time and effort to your second occupation. Do you like people? Are you truly interested in meeting new people of means? Earn as you learn.

It would not be such a nifty little sideline for Jeanie and Dori and company if one of the syndicate operations moved into Cypress City and took over Arnstead’s list and picked what looked useful enough and moved them out and put them on the circuit, broke them to total obedience. I remembered the time long ago when Miguel and I forced our way into the circus in Juarez one night, thinking to find the Australian with Miguel’s money among the spectators. Four soft paste-white women of indefinite years under the blue spotlights, sweating with the effort of working their circus routines with the black, the dwarf, the burro, and each other. We brought it to a halt when Miguel hit the room lights, knife ready. No Australian among the eight men and three women spectators. As Miguel made his eloquent apologies to the cold-eyed management, easing their indignation with a gift of pesos, one of the performers, a dead-eyed woman with a curved knife scar from forehead to corner of the mouth, which had nicked the eye and turned it milky, padded over to me, her sweat coppery-sharp in the stifling room and said, “Mister, didn’t you used to live in Dayton, Ohio? Weren’t you a young kid selling cars for the Buick agency in Dayton, Ohio?”

I had time to tell her no. Sorry, no, lady. Then the room lights went off and the dwarf stung her across the rear with his little whip and she yelped and leaped and then went tumbling back onto the mattresses under the blue spots, tumbling back into the interrupted performance. We left, and found the Australian a week later.

It has always bothered me that I could just as easily have said yes.

Sixteen

I WENT to the office of the county clerk and put on my most affable and folksy manner and asked if they had any alphabetical list of the taxpayers on the ad-valorem tax roles. They sent me to the assessor’s office, and a girl there sent me to the central records department, where they sent me back to the clerk’s office. Finally I settled for a look at the big book of aerials of the entire county, and by usIng the line drawing on the front as a guide, I was able to find the pages covering the northern half of Cattleman’s Road to the Wagner County line.

I found three places where a northbound car could turn left. Each seemed to have quite a few places where a car could then turn right onto private land. Each photograph had a transparent overlay bound into the book with property owner’s names, and the number of the book of deeds and the page in the book which covered the property. Hullinger, Reiter, Rench, Dowd, Albritton, Eggert, Alderman, Jenkins, Hyatt, McCroan, Featherman. Lots of Featherman land, and lots of Hullinger land. So on the second aerial of the last road, I found on the overlay an irregular oblong, far smaller than the surrounding parcels, and it said: “Arnstead 3.12 acres. Book 23, page 1109.”

I could make out the faint track of entrance drive, and part of the shape of a roof hidden by the pines. I measured the scale and found that the entrance was almost exactly two miles from the turn at Cattleman’s Road.

The spectacled girl showed me where Book 23 was. I found the old quit-claim deed to Lewis B. Arnstead, a minor child, from his father, for the sum of one dollar and other valuable considerations.

Often when you are the most hopeful, nothing works. Then you try a long shot and come up with it.

Before I left I used a pay phone and tried Betsy and got my dime back.

There was no breeze and the sun of early afternoon was hazy and hot. As I passed Cora Arnstead’s place, I saw the black horse standing in the shade near the pond, grazing. The geese were asleep on the grass by the pond, one sentinel sitting with his head high. The stunted cattle were at the far end of the pasture.

I had no trouble finding the turn, nor finding the driveway two miles west of the turn. The brush touched the sides of the white car. An armadillo stared me to a stop, then went trundling off into the thicket.

It was, as Jeanie Dahl had called it, a shack. Old black cypress siding on a hard-pine frame, with a tar-paper roof, gray-white with age, patched here and there with black tar. Holes in the window screens. Curtains yellowed by age. The stout padIock on the door hasp had been broken. I pushed the door open and went into the sickening oven-heat of the interior. It smelled as if lions lived there. An old swaybacked bed was out from the wall, mattress slashed in a half dozen places, soiled old sheets and blankets on the floor. Interior wallboard had been pried loose. Sections of the flooring had been ripped up. Chunks of the Celotex ceiling had been torn down.

Somebody had gone through it with utmost thoroughness, and had given the same attention to the toilet room and the storeroom. I saw some places which I thought at first could have been overlooked. But then I found the hiding place someone else had found first. It was the hearth in the shallow brick fireplace. It was of fire brick resting on a cement slab. Brush the ashes away and take out the fire bricks on the left-hand side, and the top of a mail-order cylindrical safe was exposed. A hole had been chipped and drilled down into the poured concrete, and the safe let down into it and cernented in. The dial had been prybarred off and then the prybar had been inserted in the hole behind the dial, and the cheap hinges had torn loose. The top was in the fireplace. The interior of the safe, about the dimension of two number-ten tins end to end, was empty.

I sat on my heels and looked at the heap of black charred fragments of paper on the right side of the hearth. Photographic paper burns in a distinctive way and leaves a recognizable kind of ash. With a splinter from the torn floor I carefully shifted the pieces of ash. There were some small fragments of a different kind of paper which had not burned completely. They were apparently sheets from a notebook, torn, but then burned in small packets so that the outside sheets were blackened but the inside ones were merely brittle and yellowed. Fragments of names, portions of addresses, dates, amounts. I could not find matching bits from any one page, but found enough to conclude that it was a customer list, with the girl indicated by initials, Dj.A, LF, DS, BD, LP, LF, HA.

The ledger accounts and advertising and probably the insurance documents of a very small business enterprise. Insurance in the form of confessions, photographs, letters. Cottage industry, bankrupt due to unforeseen circumstances. Proprietor found himself in a hole.

Suddenly I had enough of the oppressive heat, the lion-cage stench, dusty cobwebs, dead bugs, and old ashes. I stood up and started out toward the relative coolness of outdoors, and saw on the wall a cheap gaudy electric clock of the type which makes a sudden appearance in cut-rate drugstores at Christmastime. Dangling cord, unplugged. Small gilt face with a radiating array of black metal spikes.

I moved back and found the position of the lens. The peanut can ashtray was on the floor near the corner. Yes, the table had been there, the end of the bed there, Lilo Perris standing there, her head in the way of the clock face.

Confirmation of partnership. The chunky, brawny little sunbrown girl with all the contradictions in her face, who worked as Arnstead’s enforcer, so suited to the occasional chore that even after a year and a half, the photograph of her could turn Mrs. Freddie Severiss cold-pale and sweaty, her throat bunching to swallow the sudden bile.

Then I went out, my shirt sweat-pasted to my back, out of the plundered lion cage into the dusty dooryard, into that midday silence when the birds and insects are still, with no breeze to hiss through the pines, or make rainsounds in the fronds of palmetto.

I walked around the edge of the area, footsteps silenced by the brown cushion of old needles. A track led off to the side, portions of old car tracks in dried mud. I walked twenty feet down that shaded place, and was about to turn back when the angle of the sun made a single bright silvery glint through a line of brush.

So I went further, and saw it, the plastic sunflower growing in alien country. Circled the brush and found the tan VW, sitting there with the brute endearing patience of all small ugly machines. She was not in it.

She was forty feet from it, standing there against the trunk of a tall old pine, her knees slightly bent. When she had tossed the skirt and blouse on the bed and taken her shower, she had put on limecolored slacks and a tailored lemon-gold shirt.

This was another of the games that Betsy played. Add rose to blue and the color can be a strange and memorable lavender. They had taken the ends of the length of galvanized fence wire, and twisted them together on the far side of the big tree, tightened them enough with pliers. She had stood erect then, perhaps. But later as the wire bit ever deeper into her throat, she sagged, the knees bending. Bulging clown-face in a long lavender look, eyes popping, vein-broken and yellowed, fat black tongue thrusting from the lips in permanent grimace. A game. Fright mask to tease the children. Look at me. Do I scare you? Just a little? I really don’t like this game very much, dear. I’ve dirtied my pretty slacks and I’ve begun to smell frightful, and the steak I promised is still in the freezer, the wine cooling. But I was delayed. By a game I don’t like very much.

I found myself over by the little tan car, my eyes smarting, and I saw my fist in slow motion move six inches, jolt against the side window in back, saw the radiating cracks from the point of impact. Looked at my fist, saw how quickly the flesh was puffing. Idiot woman. Silly, sentimental, pushover broad, trading a tumble amid her gift-shoppe decor for the sound of the ancient wornout words-love, fate, kismet, eternity, meaningfulness, affection.

Pull back McGee. You are grown up, you hope. And you spread bad luck where ‘ere you go. Somebody gave her the final game to play, and maybe it was quicker than it looks. And why don’t you look at that shovel and that hole and start thinking logically, and keep yourself from looking at her, and breathe through your mouth when you are near her.

Old long-handled shovel, rusty and with a dull edge. It leaned against the same tree. I saw where the grave had been started too close to the tree, and there had been too many roots. So the shoveler had moved over to the side and had dug out an area five feet long and a yard wide, and about two and a half feet deep at one end and eighteen inches at the other. Not a good shoveler. The dirt removed had not been piled neatly and handily, but had been thrown too far. Hasty, frantic shoveling. Wear yourself out too quickly. Perhaps trying to finish before having to be someplace, or trying to finish in the last of the daylight. Then, perhaps, reconsideration. What’s the big rush? She’s not going anywhere and nobody is coming here. Don’t move the car yet. Come back and tuck her down into the loam and stomp it flat and spread the needles. Then the risk of moving the car is less.

Whatever you remembered, Betsy Kapp, whatever you tried to check out, it was the wrong thing. And there was no director to step in and stop the drama. Did you come here, or did you go to someone who brought you here?

“What a crazy day,” she had said. “What a weird kind of a day!”

I studied the moist bottom of the unfinished grave. A lot of footprints in the deeper end. Size ten probably. Broad. Maybe a D. Small crosswise corrugations, like on the composition soles of work shoes, but worn away in the center, under the ball of the foot. A triangular nick out of the heel of the right shoe, on the outside toward the back, half an inch long.

I walked back to the shack area, back to my car. I fixed the front door precisely as it had been. I reviewed everything I had done. The only evidence that someone had been here was the star cracks in the side window of the VW, and I could not undo that. It might not be noticed or, if noticed, someone might think they had not happened to see it earlier. It went with the scalloped edges of the fenders, the dinged bumpers.

Run breathless to the Man and say, “Sher’f, my God, I found her and she’s stone dead, plain and pure murdered to death.”?

And get patted on the head and reminded I am a civilian, and be told that I would probably find out in due course what happened.

I was going to stop playing it their way. They had this big poker table working, and they had let me take the empty chair, provided I played my cards face up on the table and played by their rules. If I was naughty, they would deal me out of the next hand.

No more earnest efforts to please. No more defensive play. No more letting the house man deal. As of now, it was intensely personal, time to kick over the table, scatter the chips, break out my own deck, deal my own game-without explaining the rules.

The handle they use on you is your wistful need to pick up your life again right where it was interrupted, to be allowed to go in peace. When you decide that you do not give a damn about your own continuity, then you can even win a hand, and sometimes you can break the house.

I went roaring out of there, and on the way south on Cattleman’s Road I found myself bumping the heel of my sore hand against the rim of the wheel, and humming a tuneless hymn of anticipation.

“Sorry to keep calling you up like this, Sheriff, but I tried Betsy’s phone again just now and didn’t get an answer. Have you found out anything?”

“Nothing yet. But we put out an all points hold on the car.”

“I was thinking about her cat. Okay if I go over there and feed it and let it out in that fenced yard awhile?”

“You can get in?”

“Sure. I’ve still got that key I told you about.”

“No objection, Mr. McGee. I heard you were in the courthouse looking up some property. What was that all about?”

“It was just a wild idea that didn’t work out.”

“It might be better if you just have some patience. Our investigations are proceeding.”

“It must be quite a work load, Sheriff.”

“How so?”

“Murder of Frank Baither. Disappearance of Lew Arnstead. Disappearance of Betsy Kapp. I’d heard this was a quiet county.”

“It has been, and it will be again. Incidentally, I questioned my chief deputy about the incident with Mrs. Kapp. His version differs in certain particulars, but there was enough substance for me to give him an additional warning. I wouldn’t want to lose him. He is a very valuable man, and the department is shorthanded.”

“I think I better stay away from Billy.”

“Until he has a chance to calm down. Yes.”

“Well, thanks, Sheriff. I’ll be in touch.”

Had Raoul been a little kid, he would have been standing crosslegged and moaning. When I opened the door he went at a humpbacked lope to a grassy corner, squatted and with a dreamy distant stare, emptied the inflated feline bladder. He came strolling back into the kitchen, stared into his empty dish and said, “Raoul?” I opened the cupboards until I found his canned glop, whined one open on the electric machine, tapped it into his dish. He ate a few hungry gobbles, then looked up and walked out of the kitchen. I followed him into the living room and into the bedroom. He looked in the bathroom and turned around and came out again, saying, “Raoul?”

“Not here, furry friend. And she won’t be.”

He sat down and began to wash. When in doubt, wash. I opened the lower left drawer of the dressing table and took the weapon out. Still loaded. Untouched. In Florida you can have one in the house, or in your car, but not on the person. I thought it would be nice to have it in the Buick. I poked around until I found a small, brightly-colored, rubberized beach bag with a draw string. I dumped a dozen extra rounds into the bag and put the revolver in carefully, making certain that I knew its exact position in the opaque bag. I placed the bag on the passenger seat, toward my side, making it look entirely casual, yet so placed that my hand would fall on the grip naturally and without strain or obvious effort

Before I locked up, I asked the cat what the hell I was going to do with him. He seemed to have an amber-eyed confidence that I was going to make every effort to maintain him in the comfort to which he had become accustomed… and to let him out oftener.

I remembered the Shell Ridge Road turnoff from the long nightwalk I had taken with Meyer. It was not far from the south line of the County, slanting off to the right, southwest.

Rural mailboxes. Small frame houses on fill, with the wet marsh behind them, some cypress and live oak hammocks. All of them were on the right side of the road. The left side was fenced wetlands, posted at the proper legal intervals, the wire and posts new. Hounds and banty chickens and little kids and swamp buggies and campers. White dust behind me off the crushed white shell of the limestone road.

Read the signs on the boxes. Stane. Murrity. Floyd. Garrison. Perris.

Perris was a one-story block house painted a pale, water-stained green, with a roof of white asbestos shingles. There was a gnarled and handsome oak in the front yard. There had been white board fencing, but it was rotting away. There had been river gravel in the drive, but most of it had rain-washed away. Some dead trucks and cars sat out to the side of the house, hip deep in the raw green grasses of spring. There were parts of other dead vehicles strewn around. There was a big frame building behind the house, with both overhead doors up, so that I could see into it as I turned into the drive, see a litter of workbenches and hoists and tools. A dainty little baby blue Opel with a savage little snout was parked under the spreading shade of the live oak out in front, its slanting windshield spattered with the grease of the exploding bugs of high-speed travel. When I parked beside the slab porch and turned the engine off, I could hear the muttering hum of a big airconditioning compressor at the side of the house, and a tinny resonance of the sheet metal housing.

It was three-fifteen when I rang the doorbell. I waited and as I started to ring it again, Lilo Perris pulled it open and looked out through the screen. She wore what I think is called a jump dress, a kind of mini-dress which is shorts rather than a skirt at the bottom. It was a vivid orange, deepening her tan, whitening teeth, bringing out the healthy blue-whites of her eyes. There was a little flicker in those eyes as she looked at me, then glanced beyond me and saw the white convertible out there. No alarm, no surprise. Just a little click of recognition, identification.

At first she was just a girl with a blunt little face, twenty-two or -three. Brawny little chunk of a girl. Then came the extraordinary impact of a total, driving sexuality. I could remember only two other women who had exuded that degree of psychic musk at close range one was a successful film actress who could not act and had no need to, the other a woman who, before her thirtieth year, had married and divorced three fortunes, cutting herself an ample slice of each. It was arrogance and availability. It was posture and look that said, “Here it is, baby, if you’re man enough, and I don’t think you are, because nobody has been man enough yet.” But not that kind of presentation alone. Two other things with it. A total health, the kind of health you see in show dogs and race horses. Glossy pelt, glistening eyes, blood-pink membranes, with pulse and respiration infinitely slow with the body at rest, preparing it for explosive demands. In addition, a perfection of detail, the natural eyelashes like little curved and clipped bits of enameled black wire. No dentist would have defied reality by making teeth that perfect.

“If you were selling something, man, nobody wants to buy if you get the house heated up.” Deeper voice than expected, but without huskiness. A clear, flexible contralto.

“So ask me in, Lilo.”

She came out and yanked the door shut and let the screen slap shut. She went down the single porch step and across the front yard, certain I would follow her. She picked up a sandspur on the tough sole of her bare right foot, and hardly breaking stride, licked her fingertips, brought the knee high and plucked it off. I saw the velvety bunch and flex of muscles in her brown back as she did so. The jump dress had a deep V back.

In the oak shade she turned and braced an orange haunch against the front fender-curve of the Opel and said, “I’m kind of a car freak. I like to fly this thing, but there’s a shimmy up front over eighty and that bastard Henry can’t find it. I told him he finds it or I strap him to the goddam hood and wind it up and let him see for himself.”

And that was the last ingredient, a flavor of total and dangerous unpredictability. One could never feel at ease with her unless she had been welded into a steel collar, and there was a short length of chain fastened to a heavy eyebolt in a strong wall. And even then you’d take care to see that there was nothing within her reach that she could use to hit with or slice with, or throw. It was the same feeling as the time the pretty lady came aboard the Busted Flush with her ocelot, unsnapped his chain, and told him to stay on the yellow couch. He did, and watched every move I made, with pale-green eyes that never blinked, with an occasional ripple of muscles in back and flank. He seemed to smile at me, as if telling me that we both knew he could rip my throat open before I could say “Pretty kitty.” It made us very aware of each other in a feral way. If she wanted to strap Henry to the hood of the Opel, she would do so. And if she wanted to wind it way up and then bang the brakes to see how far ahead of her down the highway she could propel Henry, she would do that, too.

I could not use her unless I could appraise her well enough to find strengths and weaknesses. She was so unlike what I had expected, I had to discard all plans, including the wild one of getting her out somewhere where I could thump her unconscious and let her wake up wired to a tree facing the horror of Betsy Kapp. One cannot make any impression on an ocelot by showing it a dead ocelot.

“Nice little car,” I said.

“The name is McSomething. Somebody told me.”

“McGee.”

“McGee, what you are doing is boring me. Can you think of anything to build this up a little? Maybe you get your kick out of memorizing me or something.”

“It’s like this, Lilo. Hyzer said stay around. So I was killing time until he said leave. But maybe there are some things lying around that could be interesting.”

“Depends on what freaks you, Mac.”

“The lush life, and so it is always a question of financing it, isn’t it?”

“You want to cut yourself in on how I’ve got it made, living here on my big estate, with all the swimming pools and the billiard room and all that?”

“Maybe it’s just that you have talents you’re not getting the maximum return from. You made one hell of an impression on Dori Severiss.”

A sharp look of renewed interest. A meaty, hearty, crinkly laugh. “Now how about you!”

“You could go around drifting and dreaming, girl, and never get loose from this big estate of yours. Lew Arnstead was making a dollar.”

“Maybe your idea of a dollar, not mine, Mac. Lew had a nickle-dime way of thinking. He had some ass on call, and he shook some people down here and there, but it was too big a risk for what he was taking out of it. I told him. I told him forty times, honest. I told him he oughta contact somebody in the big time and wholesale those pigs of his for cash and have somebody come and get them before he got in a mess and Hyzer threw him out.”

“And you’d know all about that?”

“A few years back, Mac, I used to go on trips with a friend. You keep your ears open, you learn how things are.”

Not at all a dull-minded girl. A shrewdness about her that was impressive.

“But didn’t you take on some risk when you helped him straighten out Mrs. Severiss?”

She made a face. “I was stupid. I get bored and I do stupid things and get in trouble. I shouldna. He was telling me his problems and I said let me handle it, and he said go ahead. Just that once with her and once with his schoolteacher, what’s her name. Geraldine Kimmey. She got herself in a bind by groping some little kid, and then after Lew dated her up three or four times, she wanted to bluff her way off the list, so I had her sing me a lot of soprano where nobody could hear the high notes.” A sudden, merry, ingratiating smile. “A shrink could have a picnic checking me out. When I get all edgy and uptight and mean-acting, making somebody scream and sweat works just like a charm. The better they yell, the more warm and friendly I feel toward them. I like to fell in love with Geraldine. It’s like I was helping them get past something, or over something. I wonder sometimes if it’s got anything to do with being so strong.”

“‘You look healthy enough.”

“It’s more than that. I’m some kind of freak. Wanta see?”

“Sure.”

She looked into the blue car and reached in and took out a beach towel and shook the sand out of it. She went to the front bumper and used the towel to avoid the bumper edge cutting into her hands. She braced herself, back to the bumper, torso erect, knees flexed, shifted her grip and her stance, then took a deep breath, let it out, then snatched up the front end of the car, stood with her knees locked, holding it. Under the thin layer of fat beneath the skin, a female attribute, the sculptured muscles bulged in thighs, calves, shoulders, and arms. Thick cords bulged in her throat as her face slowly darkened. She turned her head slowly and smiled at me, a strangely provocative and knowing smile. Then she lowered it quickly. She wiped the sudden sweat from her arms, throat, and face. I had felt an unexpectedly savage surge of absolutely simple and immediate sexual desire for her, a brute impulse to fell her where she stood and mount her. And she knew it, and had deliberately caused it. There is a perverse streak in all of us, an urgency to experience the unusual. She was totally feminine, and sometime, somewhere, she had discovered that a demonstration of the unusual power of her body would provoke the male. Such physical strength is a rarity, a kind of genetic aberration which could be a throwback to prehistory, to a primitive construction of muscle fiber quite dissimilar to our own. It is more common in men than in women, is quite often coupled with a low order of intelligence which leads to the sideshow career of bending horseshoes, driving spikes barehanded, and folding coins with thumb and forefinger.

She tossed the towel into the car and said, “I can put most men down arm-wrassling. Not very girlygirl, huh?”

“You seem to be all girl, Lilo. I had the idea you were probably on Lew’s list.”

“Peddling it? Hell, no. I’m not on anybody’s list. Lew was on my list, you could say. No matter what anybody says, it’s a short list, Mac. With Lew it was sometimes, when he had hung around so long looking like a hound dog it got on my nerves, or when there was something I thought he knew that he wasn’t planning to tell me. He always told me.”

“Past tense.”

“Dead, isn’t he?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because he isn’t hanging around me, Mac. And that’s the only thing that would keep him away. And because he was going bad fast. He was popping those pills like candy and they were scrambling his brains. He was seeing things, hearing voices, forgetting what he did last, and no idea of what he’d do next. So I guess somebody had to kill him before he spoiled somebody else’s fun and games. Somebody tucked him into a swamp. What kind of games are you trying to play with me, Mac?”

“I’ve been interested in you since last Thursday night when I came within an inch and a half of killing you.”

“Me? What the hell are you talking about?”

“The only reason I can come up with why you ran in front of my car was because there was somebody out there in the night you wanted to have see you. But you cut it too close.”

Three seconds of silence, then the jolly grin again, and a wink. “I sure did, friend. What happened, my foot slipped coming up that bank, but I thought I could still make it. Then all those headlights were close enough to touch. I felt the breeze from that fender on my bare tail. I didn’t mean to put you in the canal though. Sorry. Sure, I wanted somebody to see me. I wanted somebody to see that it was a girl not a man, because they were after Frank Baither.”

“Who?”

“Somebody who wanted to kill him and did. Frank was the first and the only real man I ever did know. Some kid stuff before I met him, but after that nobody touched me but Frank, until they jailed him and then sent him up north. He’s the one I went on trips with. We were gone four months when I was sixteen one time, and he made thirty thousand dollars and we spent twenty of it.”

“What did he knock over?”

“He and two other guys took a casino in Biloxi for ninety on a three-way split. No, it was a hundred, because I remember he had to give ten to the cop who set it up for Frank because the casino was shorting the cop on the insurance money they were paying. Then we went out to California because there was a payroll thing Frank wanted to look at. He decided he didn’t like it, and later some other people tried it and one got killed and the other two ended up in Q.”

“Who came to kill Frank last Thursday?”

“Two men who’d been in on something Frank never told me about. He said their names were Hutchason and Orville. He said they thought he’d given them a short count on a split. The way it happened, I was practically living there from the time he got back because he had a lot to catch up on. He heard something outside and woke me up and got his gun and told me to go on home, sneak as far as the road and go like hell. One of them followed me, or both of them. I thought they would think it was Frank and shoot me. So I ran across in front of your car so they’d see me. I went on home. It’s only about three and a half miles from here, about. I went back early in the morning and saw the county cars and found out they’d killed him. I just… just didn’t think anybody could ever kill Frank. You know, I didn’t think you’d have a good enough look at me for long enough to remember me.”

“If the sheriff knew there’d been a girl there with Baither, wouldn’t he know it had been you?”

“He might think on it, but Mister Norm doesn’t fuss with me much.”

A back country silence, standing in shade. She stood against the big trunk of the tree, one knee flexed, bare foot against, the rough gray bark. She idly scratched the rounded top of her brown thigh, and I could hear in the silence the whisper of her nails against the skin. The animal hunger she had awakened with that odd display of strength had not died away. She caught and held my eye and read it, and built it back again with but a slight arching of her back, softening of her mouth.

“Could be,” she whispered. “It just could be.”

“Think so?”

“Like part of whatever game we’re playing. Saying one thing, holding other things back. We can go someplace, try us out. You’d be thinking I’d say more. I’d be thinking you might say more about what you know, or think you know. That would come after the edge was off. I’m not like this often, Mr. Mac. Could be more than you can take on?”

“I manage to totter around.”

She said, “I got to go in a minute, see if that damn Nulia has got the old lady cleaned up right this time. Last time she got through the room still stank, and I had to whop her old black ass and make her do it over right.”

She grinned, shoved herself away from the tree, and thumped me on the biceps with a small hard brown fist, a considerable blow, and ran to the house, fleet as a young boy.

Seventeen

SHE WAS in the house over ten minutes. She came out and beckoned to me and headed toward my car. By the time I got to it she had jacked the driver’s seat forward and turned the key on. I got in the passenger seat and put the rubber beach bag on the floor.

“Easier than giving directions,” she said. “I don’t want to drive mine until Henry gets that shimmy out of it. Okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“Pretty bag belong to a nice lady?” She backed out onto the unpaved road, and headed southwest.

“Friendly lady name of Jeanie Dahl.”

“Mmmm. That’s where you found out about me and Dori Severiss.”

“And Lew’s sideline.”

She was driving more conservatively than I had expected. “Thought you were getting the scoop from ol‘ Betsy Kapp, knowing you wasted no time moving in on those giant titties. Never knew just how much Lew talked to her. Never could figure out how they got together in the first place. He had a funny soft spot for that fool woman. I told him once he ought to sign her onto his little team. Even offered to go convince her, but he told me if I ever went near her, he’d club my head right down between my knees, and I think he meant it.”

I saw the sign indicating we were leaving Cypress County. “Hyzer asked me to stay in his jurisdiction.”

“Right now, mister, does that mean a hell of a lot to you?”

“I wouldn’t say that it does.”

“We aren’t going to be out of it long, honey. Right turn coming up, before we come out onto the Trail, and it swings back into Cypress County. Car rides nice.”

“Seems to. Where are we going?”

“A place a friend of mine lent me when he went in the Navy. It’s real private.”

And it was. It was a fairly new aluminum house trailer of average size, set on a cement-block foundation on a small cypress hammock in marshy grassland. Limestone fill had been trucked in to make a small causeway between an old logging road and the hammock. A flock of white egrets went dipping and winging away through the cypress and hanging gray moss when she parked by the trailer.

She squatted and reached up and behind a place where a block had been left out for ventilation purposes, and pulled out the keys. She went over and unlocked a small cement-block pumphouse and tripped a switch that started a husky gasoline generator.

“Now we’ve got air conditioning and, in a little while, ice cubes, Mac, honey.”

“Can I object to Mac?”

“You can ask for anything your evil heart desires, man.”

“Travis or Trav or McGee.”

“So I settle for McGee.”

“You do that.”

She unlocked the trailer and stepped up into it. “Hey, let’s open this thing up until the air conditioning starts doing something.”

We opened the windows. It was tidy inside. It had the compact flavor of a good cabin cruiser, with ample stowage. She checked to make certain there was water in the ice-cube trays. She turned on a little red radio and prowled the dial until she found some heavy rock and turned it up far enough to drown out the sound of the generator and the whine of the refrigerator and the busy whacketythud of the compressor on the air conditioner.

She reached around herself and undid the few inches of zipper that reached from the V back to the base of her spine, and said, “Can you think of anything special we’re waiting on, McGee?” She shrugged it forward off her shoulders, lowered it and stepped out of it and flipped it aside. I noted with a remote objectivity that her breasts were a slight quarter-tone. lighter than the rest of her, and that the bikini band around her hips was as white as in the photograph.

She was as totally at home in her naked hide as any animal. She moved without either coyness or boldness, walked over to the bunk bed, kneewalked toward the wall, rolled over onto her back.

“As any jackass can plainly we, I am all the way ready. Whyn’t you close the other windows, but let’s leave this here one open the way it is? You’re sure in some terrible rush, huh? Gun shy, McGee?”

I closed the windows with all deliberate speed. It had to be a setup. Though Meyer might try to argue the point, young girls do not make a habit of suddenly propositioning me, driving me off to a hideaway, peeling off their clothes, rolling onto their backs, and breathing hard.

But just how was I being set up? Strong as she was, I couldn’t see her doing much bare-handed damage to me. If there was a weapon, where was it? Down behind the mattress? There were no cupboards she could reach. As I unbuttoned my shirt, I noticed that the two little hooks which held the aluminum screen in the window were undone.

Setup. Phone call from the house. Lots of noise. She had opened that window, so she had unhooked the screen. She had moved over to the far side of the bunk bed, under the window. We were expecting a visitor. Maybe he had arrived and was squatting under the window, awaiting the sounds of festivity. She was certainly powerful enough to hold me or anyone motionless long enough, and perfectly positioned.

She was obviously in a state of sexual excitement, her face slack, eyes blurring. She was rolling her hips slowly from side to side, and her breasts were swollen, nipples thrusting, belly muscles twitching and rippling.

“Come on,” she said in a petulant smothered tone. “Come on!”

So I fumbled with buttons long enough for her to roll up and crawl toward me, reaching to help, and when she was positioned correctly I thought of the way Betsy’s face looked, and I hit Lilo Perris as hard as I have ever hit anyone, and as perfectly. I reached up, as though getting my hands free of the shirt buttons, then I dropped my hand. It traveled about eight inches before it hit her on the left side of the chin, and kept going another foot and a half after it knocked her mouth open. Sensing a reluctance to hit a female, I had told myself to hit through the target and beyond, not hit at it. When you hit at something, you pull it. When you hit someone in the nose, you try to smash an imaginary nose on a person standing directly behind him. That gets the back into it.

She dropped immediately and bonelessly, face down, head hanging over the side of the bed, one arm dangling, legs splayed in frog posture. I put my fingertips against the pulse in her throat and it was fast but strong.

Now, honey, we get ready for visitors. Try the cupboards. Nothing. Nothing. Hmm, an extension cord. Box of Kleenex. Nothing in the next one. There now! Nice fat roll of black plastic electrician’s tape.

Roll you over in the clover. Feel the jaw, shift it about a little. No looseness. No gritty sound of bone edges. Didn’t even chip a pretty tooth. Beginning to puff and darken right there on the button, though. Thumb the mouth full of tissue, and draw a black X with tape across it. Bring your arms in front of you, and hold your elbows so they touch, and wind the tape around and around. A nice binding just above the elbow, another around the forearms, a third around the wrists. Now clasp the loose hands together and… around and around like this. An awkward attitude of prayer, dear girl. Up with the knees, close together. One binding just above the knees, one just below, and one around the ankles. Now, my muscular darling, we roll you up into a ball, into fetal position, and we put the extension cord around your legs under your knees, thread it up between your upper arms and breasts, and we tie it right here, at the nape of your neck, just firmly enough. Comfy? Special treatment for a very strong girl.

Radio blasting away. Sound protection works both ways. Stay down, so you won’t be seen by anybody looking in the windows, McGee. Careful with the door. Bit by bit. Nothing. Step down. Strategic window on the other side. Ease around the end. Nothing. Now up to the last corner, lie flat, stick head around the corner made of block.

And by God, what do you know, there is broad, brown Henry Perris, master mechanic, wife-stealer, and Sunday pronger of the stepdaughter, standing very tense, squatting below the window next to a handy pile of block. What has good old Henry got in his hand? Why, he has what looks like a short section of hoe handle with a short sharp piece of metal sticking out of the end of it. Head bent in attitude of listening. Fingertips against the aluminum love nest. What are you waiting for, Henry? A signal? Why, of course, how logical. In extremis, the lady yells to the unwary chap in the saddle, “Now! Now!” And good old Henry stands on the blocks and lifts the screen out and leans in the window and sticks that sharp piece of metal right into the back of lover boy’s head, right where the base of the skull fastens onto the neck and for a lady who gets her jollies out of hurting people, if her timing is right, that must, indeed, be a memorable thrill. Same thrill as the lady spider devouring the mate while they are still coupled.