The Long Lavender Look

One might, in fact, suspect that Hutchason and Orville both met this same fate in this same place at these same hands, because there was no time to set up anything so complex in the time she had on the phone.

I eased back and stood up. Insight is perhaps what pops to the surface of the mind after subterranean processes of logic have taken place. If Perris and Lilo were two of the team of five who took the money truck, then Frank Baither went to Raiford knowing they would stay right in the area, waiting for the division after he got out. And if Hutch or Orville showed up, they could not make Henry or Lilo tell them something they did not know. And it would be the assigned chore of Henry or Lilo to quietly take them out of the scene. Baither would certainly know that Lilo was, by inclination, a competent executioner. Unless Frank were out of reach, she could have no chance to get them off guard, to get close enough. And then, of course, the lie to Frank when he came back. They never showed up. Maybe something happened to them. They never showed up, Frank.

Then the dead men had been used to decoy Frank Baither. To send him clattering around in the night in the old pickup, so that they were in position for him when he came back.

Out of the delusion of their own irresistible male charm, Hutch and Orville, one at a time, had clambered so eagerly onto the deathbed, coupled with the strong brown spider. I realized that had I not found Betsy’s letter to Lew, had I not seen the sweat and pallor on Dori Severiss’s face when she told me of Lilo, I could have been less on guard. I could have bought her rationalization about it.

“You’d be thinking I’d say more.”

No problem to phone Henry at the station. And he could scoot west on the Trail, turn onto the far end of Shell Ridge Road, be there before we got there. She had driven slowly. He could drive beyond the little causeway to the hammock, tuck his car away, come back under the cover of the noise of generator and rock radio.

I had revealed too much to her. But maybe it did not have to be very much, if she was that twisted. “It’s like I was helping them get past something or over something.” Helping them get over the problem of living, of breathing. And Dori saying, “… smiling at me and giggling and calling me love names and saying how much fun it would be to really kill me.”

Thoughts roaring through the mind like a train racketing through a tunnel, while another part of my mind flipped through the possible ways of taking Henry Perris. I did not know how well he would move. I knew he could be as powerful as he looked. And I knew he had a useful weapon in his hand.

Estimate the triangle. Henry was fifteen feet from me. The white convertible was parked twenty feet in back of Henry, and perhaps thirty feet from me. Burst out in a full run and I could almost be at the car before he could react. She had turned it around and parked it heading out. Driver door was on this side. Beach bag on the floor on the far side.

So run around the hood, yank door open, pick up bag, find shape of gun through the fabric, and come up with it with a very good chance of taking one step to the side and firing across the hood through the fabric. If he was too close, there’d be no time for shoulder or thigh. If he was far enough away, one into the ground at his feet might do it.

One and a two and a three and go, McGee. Don’t lose your stride by looking at him. Not until you round the hood. Now look. And he is down off the blocks, and he is yanking the bright rubberized beach bag open in fumbling haste, and you should think a little better, McGee. Your thinking is spotty. You work one thing out and get overcome with your goddamn brilliance, and forget that she parked the car in a blind spot, where it could not be seen from any window of the trailer, and so he had to use that angle as his approach, and it would be natural to check the car, heft the bag, finger the distinctive shape, bring it along.

All the shots are going to do out here is startle the egrets and puzzle the brown girl, if she is awake yet. And unless you get smart very fast, they are going to make some very final and very ugly holes in a fellow you have often felt kindly toward over the years.

Fact: It is not accurate at any long range. Take a quick look into the car. Fact: The keys are gone. Fact: He has the gun out of the bag. Fact: It is too damned long a run for cover, if you want to get into that cypress. Probability: If you stay by the car, he will angle out to the front or rear, stay fifteen feet from it, and pot you in perfect safety.

I dropped and looked under the car. Coming at the predicted angle toward the rear end of the car. Not running. Better if he was running. Plodding along. Patience and good nerves.

Find place with best clearance under the thing. Okay. Onto the back. Pull yourself along under it like a cat playing under a sofa. Out the other side, roll up onto the feet and into full speed for the first few steps, then sacrifice speed for that crouching zigzag, like long ago, when they’d put the old tires on the practice field. Absolutely ice-cold target area in the middle of the spine. Corner of the trailer apparently receding into the distance. Not coming close very fast. Barn. No impact. That thing would hit you like a small sledge. Barn. And you are around the corner, skittering; skidding, the comedy runner, sliding to a bulge-eyed frantic stop, yanking the door open, plunging into the trailer, falling to hands and knees, spinning, yanking the door shut, taking the wheezing breaths, feeling the tremble in the knees.

The red radio is hollering about “a little help from my friends.” Sidle to a window and try to spot him. Sudden silence. Music chopped off. Dying wheeze of the air conditioning, fading whir of fan. Methodical fellow. Taking his time and thinking it out. Avoiding mistakes:

I crept to the galley area, opened logical drawers, found a flimsy carving knife, a dull paring knife, four rust-flecked oyster knives, steel blade and handle, rounded tip. Tried one. It balanced precisely at the juncture of handle and blade. Each was forged out of a single piece of mediocre steel. One in the right hand, handle outward, blade flat against the underside of the thumb and the heel of the thumb. Provided a little amusement that time I spent holed up with Miguel in the Sierras. He had the single throwing knife. Tree target. Basic lessons. Always the same motion, a long forearm snap. Always the same force. Let it slide away from the thumb, nat urally. Useful only at reasonably exact distances.

Make a half turn and chunks home at fifteen feet. Hold the handle end and get a full turn at thirty feet. Hold the blade and get a turn and a half at forty-five. Got arm-weary throwing it and footweary trudging up to yank it out of the tree and going back to the mark. I held the other three oyster knives by the handle in my left hand. Miguel said a man who tries for the target at thirty feet, when it is an important target, is frivolous: Fifteen feet is so much more certain. At the slow rate of spin, it will be blade first from twelve to eighteen feet, enough to slash at the outer limits of the range. At ten feet or twenty it will strike flat. Do not try to adjust. Throw always for the right-angle impact at fifteen feet.

A rattle of small stones under the nearby footstep, beyond the aluminum. “McGee?” Hoarse voice. No urgency. Calm and reasonable. “Want to do some dickerin‘, McGee?”

I backed away from the side of the window, then leaned a little forward, cupped my hand to confuse the point of origin of my voice. “What are you selling, Henry?”

He was selling gunshot wounds. Not bam this time. More like braing. Hole at chest height a foot in from the window edge and an exit hole high on the far side. I thudded both feet on the carpeted flooring and moaned and backed away.

“No good, you tricky bastard. I heard it go whining off, tumbling. Couldn’t have touched you. What did you do to her?”

Lilo answered. She squalled behind the packed wad of tissue, a sound of pure animal anger, muffled, like a cat in the bottom of a laundry hamper. “Tied and gagged, eh?” Henry said. “That would take some doing. That I would like to see. I really would. Getting warm enough for you in there?” No point in answering him.

“I’ve figured out something, McGee. I think what I’ll do is go around and turn off the bottle gas for the stove at the tank and cut the tubing and shove the end back into the hole and turn the gas on again. Good idea?”

Yes, it was a splendid idea. Simple and effective. After a while he could figure some way of igniting it, if I didn’t come choking and stumbling out. It was such a good idea, that it did not seem logical that he would stand around and chat about it. He would go do it. So there was a factor that kept him from doing it. And that was most probably the serious effect it would have on the health of Miss Perris.

I moved back to the galley, put the knives down, and in one surge slid the small refrigerator out into the middle of the work space and crouched behind it.

“Henry, at the very first whiff of propane, I am going to take one of these dull kitchen knives and saw that throat open on your little pal. You had better believe it.”

“Now why should that make any difference to me?”

“I wouldn’t know. The abiding love of a stepfather for a high-spirited girl, maybe. It’s the only thing you left open that I could try, Henry.”

“Go ahead and cut away.” Just a little too much indifference.

“Henry, you could try to smoke me out. Or you could get a piece of rope, or cable and fasten it low on one side of this thing, throw it across the roof, hook it to the Buick and roll this thing over. Let’s see now. You’ve got a car here. You could swing the Buick around and get a good start and just run the hell into this hunk of aluminum. But if I smell smoke, Henry. Or feel movement. Or hear the Buick. Or hear anything else I can’t understand, I am going to start sawing.”

In the long silence Lillian made muted bleating noises, and even tethered as she was, managed to snap and flex enough muscles to bounce herself around on the bunk bed.

“She tied up good? Can’t get loose?”

“Guaranteed,” I said. I moved as quietly as I could, over to the bunk bed and sat close to her, and put the oyster knives on a shelf above the foot of the bed, blades outward. “Matter of fact, Henry, I’m sitting so close to her that if you try any more trick shooting, you can just as easily get her as me.” I looked down at her. She was on her left side in her curled position, her feet toward me. She looked at me with a ferocity that was an almost physical impact. Then her muscles bulged and her eyes closed as she strained to stretch or break the tough tape. I could hear little poppings and cracklings of joints and sinews. Then she let her breath out and relaxed, snuffling hard. I reached and gave her a friendly caress along the flank, a little pat on the brown haunch. She snapped into the air like a shrimp on a dock eyes maniacal.

“We can work this out, McGee,” he called.

“Now just how do we do that, Henry?”

“The thing you want to do most is stay alive.”

“I guess I’d give that the number one priority.”

“I could trade some time, maybe. I don’t know how much time I’d need with her, or how much time I’d need after I get through with her. If I back off, far enough, and get the car keys to you, you could get away from here. But there’d be the problem of you going straight to a phone and messing me up.”

“And you can’t take my word.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“And I can’t take yours, Henry. Stalemate.”

“What?”

“It’s a chess term. Neither player has any way to win.”

“Oh. By God, I sure messed up when I tried the idea of using that envelope. I guess I was edgy. I thought you were some dumb-dumb who’d look good to Mister Norm. Lilo told me it was a bad idea, but I told her to do it anyway.”

“You left the envelope in the phone book in the booth when you went to deliver the Olds, eh? Then she picked it up and took it to Baither’s place.”

“I guess you just fixed it so there’s no way I can leave you go now, McGee. Sure. Lew let her into Frank’s house to see where it happened. Gave her a chance to drop the envelope when Lew wasn’t looking. All she had to do was promise Lew a quick piece. Lew was so hooked on it, he’d have chopped up his old mother and sold her for cat food for a chance to get into Lilo’s pants. She kept that boy on short rations.”

Lilo was trying to tell me something with her eyes. Pleading. Working her mouth around. I leaned and got an edge of the tape with my thumbnail and ripped the X off her mouth. She tongued the spitty mass of Kleenex out and swallowed several times.

She said in a low voice, “I know where a lot of money is. He wants to make me tell him. If you kill him, I’ll tell you. We can take it all and go away.”

“Killing is something I charge high for.”

“Your end would be four hundred and fifty thousand. Right down the middle. No tricks. I wanted to leave him out because he’s stupid. You’re not. I need somebody like you to help me with it.”

“No tricks.”

She smiled her happy smile, her pretty and disarming urchin grin. “No tricks, honey. Ever.”

“So tell me right now where it is. You know. Give me a motivation.”

“Afterward. I promise. Get this tape off, huh?”

Henry shouted from a new position outside the trailer, “Having a little talk, are you? She trying to sell you something, McGee?”

“She’s trying to sell me you, Henry.”

I saw her face contort, and I put my fingers to my lips before she could join the conversation. I reached and heeled her jaw shut and put the old X of tape back on, tore some more strips and sealed her off, and once again she tried the bonds, in a convulsion so violent it seemed possible she might break bones in the effort.

“You know what she is?” Henry called.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”

“What she was doing to Frank kept making me sick to my stomach, McGee. I was over at the window, gagging, when he finally told her, his voice so weak I couldn’t hear it. She had that ice pick into his heart before I could take half a step. She wanted to make sure he wouldn’t say it twice. You want to trust her?”

“I don’t want to trust either one of you.”

Again he had changed his position. He was moving quietly. “It’s that word you said before. Stalemate?”

He was back near the pile of block under the window above the bunk bed. I could guess the chance he was thinking of taking. Crouch on the block then come erect and fire through the screen. The window was three feet square, and the bottom sill was about twenty inches above the level of the bed. I debated the idea of backing off and then taking a dive out the window. The unhooked screen would swing out. But I would have to hit it hard enough to carry all the way through, to get my legs high enough to clear the sill. I would overshoot him and land sprawling and rolling away from him, giving him the perfect shot, because he would have time to recover from surprise before I could reverse direction and get back to him. If I waited until his silhouette popped up in the window, I’d give him a wing shot.

The last thing he would expect would be for me to come back outside where he had the considerable edge. I slipped my shoes off and leaned closer to the window. “Henry, if you are thinking of taking a pot shot through the window, I’ve got her right in front of me. Think it over.”

I gathered my four oyster knives and went toward the door as quickly and as quietly as I could. He would think it over for a few seconds, and realize his best move would be to suddenly yank the screen off and stand up and cover me and the girl at close range. He could come in over the sill and have it all his own way, because he could get so close I couldn’t use her for cover. She was too small.

Out the door and down, and quickly around the front of the thing. Heard the tinny clatter of the falling screen as I rounded the last corner. Henry leaning in the window, fifteen feet away. Miguel’s voice from long ago, speaking inside my head. “The elbow, amigo, should point toward the target, and it should not move until after the release. At the release the arm is straight, then it moves down so the hand ends up to the rear of the right calf of the leg. Throw strong, but never hurry it. The left foot is ahead of the right, both knees bent. The knife is close to the right ear before the throw. The wrist, it is locked. It does not move. The aim is to the center of the body. If it is an armed man, finish the throw with a dive to the ground, and then roll to the right, if it is a right-handed man, because he must then swing the gun to fire across his body, which is more difficult, no?”

So, squinting in the dazzle of sunlight against bright aluminum, I threw strong, and plucked the second blade from my left hand and threw strong again, and dived forward and rolled hard to the right, found the third blade as I came up, heard the close-range shot, felt the sting of gravel against my thigh, knew as I released the third that I had hurried it too much and was off target. Nearly dropped the fourth, fumbling for it, snapped it back into position, and held it there as Henry in a crooked crouch showed me his white grin, fired directly down into the ground, and tumbled off the block lifting his arms to break the fall. He rolled onto his back and over onto his face, an arm pinned under him. Both legs quivered and kicked and leaped about, like a dog asleep in a dream of running. Then he flattened against the packed earth in that unmistakable stillness, that death-look which changes the clothes into something stuffed with cold ground meat.

I had a sudden chill which chattered my teeth. I approached him. His left arm was flexed, hand over his head. Right hand and gun were somewhere under him. The first one had to be the one socketed into the left armpit, hitting when he was still leaning in the window. Another lay on the ground by the blocks, unstained. A third was hanging by the tip from a long groove it had sliced in the aluminum side, under the window. There wasn’t much blood on the coveralls near the protruding steel handle. It had to have done a mortal damage in there, in the arteries above the heart.

“So a knife is ogly Travees? I know. And a gun is ogly and death is ogly. Sometimes there is only a knife to use. And the difference is the knowing how to do it. We are here for a time. So? Why not learn from one who knows, to pass the time?”

Thank you, Miguel. Thanks for the lessons. Without them both of us would be dead, instead of only you. Sleep well.

Eighteen

I WENT BACK into the increasing oven temperature of the trailer. She had wormed herself around so she could watch the door, sweating so heavily in the heat she looked oiled. I could see the momentary astonishment in the lift of black brows. She had no reason to believe the shots had not gone into me.

And if I could walk in, the stepdaddy had to be dead. The upper half of her face changed, showing that she was trying to smile under the black tape. If I took it off, she would tell me that all is well, lover. We bury Henry in the marsh. Half the money is yours. We’ll be a great team.

I sat on the corner of the bed and looked at her. Making someone dead is a game for the unimaginative, for someone who cannot ever really believe they, too, can die. The curse of empathy is to see yourself in every death, and to see the child hidden in the body of every corpse. The local box score was sick-making. Hutch, Orville, Baither, Lew Arnstead, Betsy Kapp, Henry Perris. Might as well add Linda Featherman. Meyer came close to being on the list.

I don’t know what she read in my face, but it took the smile-try away. Her eyes turned watchful. Glossy black hair was sweat-matted, and droplets slid down her cheeks, her ribs and breasts and belly, darkening the faded blue spread.

I got up and opened the other windows so some breeze could come through. Her eyes followed me. I stopped by the bed and said, “Somebody will come after you, Lillian.”

Violent negative shake of the head. Grunting attempts at speech. She doubled further, grinding her mouth against her round knees, trying to wipe the tape off.

I took a last long look at her. “I wouldn’t want to hear anything you could say. I wouldn’t want the whole score, if you were part of the deal. Or double the score.”

I put the screen back on and went inside and hooked it. I made sure the other screens were all hooked. I locked the trailer and put the keys in my pocket, sat on the low step outside and tied my shoes. I had to touch Henry’s body to get the keys to the Buick.

After a quarter mile I rolled the windows up and turned the air on full, aiming the outlets at me. My shirt was unbuttoned, and the chill air dried my sweaty chest. I found my way out to Shell Ridge Road, and turned back on it, heading northeast.

When I came to the Perris place, I turned in and went to the door. An elderly woman, tall and stringy, opened the door and looked at me without expression. She was saffron-brown, the racial mix of Seminole and black in her face.

“Are you Nulia?”

“Yem.”

“Miss Perris asked me to stop and tell you that she won’t be back tonight, and neither will Mr. Perris.”

“Fixing to go on home now, back to keer for my own. No way I can stay on. She know that.”

I found one of Lennie Sibelius’s fifty-dollar bills, damp with my exertions. I handed it to her and said, “Please stay on and look after Mrs. Perris, Nulia.”

She looked at it and would not let herself be impressed. “Some bad thing going on, cap’n?”

“You could say that.”

“I pray to the Lord ever living day of my lifetime for the devil to come a-crawlin‘ up out of hell, huffin’ fire and stompin‘ his clove hoofsies, and claim his own, and snatch her back down to the black pit and the eternal fire.” She put the fifty in her apron pocket. “I’ll stay take keer, but working for you, cap’n, not her, til you come tell me stop. Much obliged.”

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

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

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

“He’s off duty.”

“Can you call him in?”

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

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

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

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

“What kind of shit is this?” Billy said.

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

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

“You called me in off patrol to listen to-?”

“Keep your mouth shut, Billy.”

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

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

“You diverge a little, Sheriff. You have this great air of efficiency and high moral rectitude. People seem to believe that you know everything that goes on in your county. Yet you let one of your deputies run a call-girl operation right under your nose, using his badge to muscle them into the operation.”

“Sherf, do you want me to-”

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

“Yes, sir.”

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

“Go on, please.”

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

“She may have foolishly placed herself in a position where-”

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

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

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

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

Hyzer picked his hat up and stood up. “You’ll take us there right now.”

“When I’m through. A little delay won’t make a damned bit of difference to her.”

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

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

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

“Jesus H. Christ!” Billy said.

I said, “Don’t act as if you never knew he was in the business, Billy.”

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

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

“Lots of possibilities, Mr. MCGee.”

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

“Shall we go now?”

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

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

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

I hadn’t worried about the fingerprints, or the tire prints of the Buick. And Nulia would talk about her fifty dollars. “The girl was all right when I left the trailer,” I said. “But Henry wasn’t. He was dead. I killed him. I came here from there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There’s another one for you,” Hyzer said.

“Another one, What the hell is going on?”

“I’ll get in touch later.”

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

I walked over to where Hyzer stood and said, “On my way back I stopped at the Perris place and gave the woman there some money to stay with Mrs. Perris. I told her the girl and Mr. Perris wouldn’t be back tonight. I thought the girl would be in custody. I didn’t know she’d be dead.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“I said I stopped and gave…”

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, you know. Nothing much changes.”

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

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

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

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

He was in there fifteen minutes. His face looked weary when he came out. “She taken it okay you think, Sher’f?”

“I guess so.”

“Shouldn’t want to cry no eyes out for them two, her or anybody else. I’m all fixed to stay here the night. My eldest brang me what I need.”

I went out and got in with him and he drove better. He slowed down and put a spotlight on the side of the road, then made a careful turn over a short private bridge over the drainage canal and drove into a yard.

“Baither place?” I asked.

He said it was, turned off the lights and motor and got out. He leaned against the door on the driver’s side as if suddenly taken ill.

“You all right, Norman?”

“He had two weeks before he set himself up for my jail and his guilty plea and Raiford. He could reasonably figure on two, three, or four years, because he was going to go after a perfect record up there. He did all the little maintenance chores necessary when you are going to leave a house vacant in this climate through the hot seasons, through the chance of hurricane. I used to come out here and try to think like Frank Baither. I think he set up a meet to make the split, set it up far enough from here so he bought the time to tuck it all away. It was bulky, you know. I got the track deposit list. Twenty-three thousand in ones, for example. They’re counted by weight. Ninety-nine bills on the scale or a hundred and one, and the pointer swings way off center. Automatic banding. A hundred and one five in fives. Three hundred seventy-three eight in tens. One hundred eighty-eight three in twenties. Ninety-six thousand in fifties. Eighty-eight thousand in hundreds. Nine hundred and twenty thousand six hundred dollars. Take just the tens. Over thirty-seven thousand pieces of paper. Two hundred and forty pounds or so. The whole thing could go into six heavy suitcases.”

“How did they get it back here?”

“Just a guess. Al Storey remembers that about that time Henry Perris found some winch trouble on the big wrecker, and drove it to his place to work on it over the weekend. So he would have covered the name on the cab doors with a fake name, changed the plates. When the money-truck crew passed out, he put the hook on it and took it to the rendezvous point where the other car or cars were waiting. After they broke it open, they probably offloaded the money into Baither’s car, and he and Lillian drove back here with it, taking a different route than Henry did, bringing the truck back. They could have talked the other two into moving out quickly, into going into Miami and setting up an alibi. We’ll meet at the X motel at Jacksonville or wherever. The two pickup specialists would buy it, because Baither had the reputation for never crossing anyone, and for good planning. But he never had one that big before, one big enough to set him up for life. No more risk. So he crossed them, and left Henry and Lillian to take care of the other two when they came around. Frank Baither was making a business investment in setting himself up for Raiford. It took suspicion off him, if anybody ever decided the money-truck job looked like his handiwork. And his insurance was that he was the only one who knew where he hid it. I don’t think it mattered to him who killed off who. I think the money is here somewhere. Clean and safe and dry. But I haven’t been able to find it.”

I whacked at the mosquitoes humming around my ears, and scratched the chigger bites on my thighs that I’d picked up on the night walk with Meyer.

Silence. “But I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s all over for me here. I’ll wind it up. Billy can operate it until they appoint somebody to take over until election.”

“Why?”

“It’s all turning sour in some strange way. I don’t mean in a personal way. I knew in the back of my mind that I was wrong. I kept my eyes shut about… a personal matter, and told myself I would do such a total and dedicated job in every other way that it wouldn’t matter. But it doesn’t work that way. The scales don’t measure the way they should. One little thing in one side weighs more than… everything else in the other side.”

A fractional moon rode above the dark line of treetops. I could not risk saying anything. He was talking to himself. Yet he was at the same time making a rare offer of friendship. He was asking for help of some kind. A man proud, thoughtful, and troubled.

“It isn’t just that I slaved over that tape playback and weeded out almost every trace of the accent of the people I grew up with. And it isn’t that I realized and accepted the fact that I have a better mind than I thought I had when I was the high-school muscle man. Those things can isolate a man from his beginnings. But there is something else in the air. The faces of the young ones and the look in the eyes of the old ones. The guidelines are blurred. Are cops pigs? If I operate within a system where juvenile court cannot touch rich kids, where the innocent meaning those presumed innocent because they have not yet been tried-are jailed with the guilty when they can’t raise bail, where judicial wisdom is conditioned by friendship and influence, where there are two kinds of law, one for blacks and one for whites; then if I go by the book, I am a kind of Judas goat, and if I bend the rules to improve-on my terms-the structure of local law, I am running my own little police state. I’d better get out of it because I can’t live with either solution.”

“Not with a little rule-bending here and there?”

“Like I bent rules for Lilo Perris? And Lew Arnstead?”

“That gravitational influence I was talking about?”

“Do you know what it is? You go around making guesses.”

“She was your daughter. She knew it and Lew knew it.”

“Is it that damned obvious!” he said, his voice breaking.

“Only to a man who mentioned her name to Johnny Hatch, and who was told by Nulia you visit Wanda from time to time.”

It was a shabby, ordinary little story, and he felt compelled to tell it in detail, a way of punishing himself. Wanda had been married to Johnny Hatch over a year. She was bored and restless and full of vitality. Norman Hyzer had come home for Easter vacation from college, engaged but not yet married. The Hyzer backyard and the Hatch backyard had a common rear property line, though they were on different streets. She’d asked him to help her dig up a small tree and move it, asked him into her house to clean up afterward, kidded him, teased him, challenged him, and seduced him. Though aching with guilt, he had found himself unable to stay away from her during the brief vacation. Later he could take a more objective view of it, and see how easily she had engineered it, and how little it had meant to her.

But when he came back with his wife and baby daughter after his people were dead, to clean out the house of personal things and ready it for sale, she had come casually in through the back of the house to tell him that he had a very pretty little three-yearold daughter by her, named Lillian. She told him the date of birth and asked him to figure it out for himself. There was a baby boy Ronnie, she said, definitely Johnny’s. But Lillian was his seed.

And they had made love that afternoon on a mattress on the floor in the upstairs hallway, and again the next morning, and had either still been making love or had finished at about the same time his wife and daughter were crushed to death by the fleeing car.

It was classic Biblical guilt and retribution, sin and punishment He had come back and had become sheriff. He learned one aspect of Johnny and Wanda’s divorce that was not public knowledge. Johnny’s attorney showed the judge, in chambers, medical evidence that a man of Johnny’s blood type could not have fathered a child with Lillian’s blood type when the mother had Wanda’s blood type. But there was enough evidence against her without that.

“She was the only person in the world of my blood,” Hyzer said. “She was… maybe a symbol of the little girl who died. It’s easy to close your eyes and ears, to say she could not be warped and rotten. Wicked, in the classical meaning of the word. Bend the rules. Let her off with a reprimand. Because she would have that mocking look her mother had. She knew, and knew I wouldn’t acknowledge her. Arnstead found out four years ago. He picked Wanda up for drunk, and out of all the babbling and mumbling and weeping he heard something and got her sobered up enough to tell the rest of it, and got her to write it down before she was sober enough to realize he was using her.”

Arnstead let him know what he knew, not in a confrontation, but in little hints. Wanda had become fat and coarse and loud, and Hyzer had already let the girl off too easily too many times. A sheriff who is snickered at, loses authority, and elections.

“Balancing it out doesn’t work,” he said. “Lew didn’t push it too hard or too obviously, so I told myself he wasn’t doing any actual harm, maybe even some good. I told myself that his girls would be hustling anyway, so it was better to have them kept in line.”

“Then he went too far?”

“Beating a prisoner. Neglect of duty. Culmination of months of little things. So I had to. It was go down one way or go down the other way, and in the end you make a choice.”

“Now I know why you were so anxious to nail us for the Baither thing.”

He thought it over. “Yes. A suspicion in the back of my, mind I couldn’t consciously admit to myself, and you and Meyer were the way out. That’s proof enough I better close it out and move along. Bend the rules and you start bending your own judgment, too.”

“Without finding out who killed Lilo?”

“That’s part of closing it out. After Wanda had the first stroke, when she could get around, she came to see me. The left side of her face looked dead. She made me promise to look after Lillian, keep her out of trouble. I promised. That was part of it, too, I guess. Then, a little while ago, after I told her, I wanted to know how she felt. Brutal damned question. I asked her if she was sorry Lilo was dead. She blinked her eyes twice. Same answer for Henry. That letter you showed me… Even motherlove couldn’t live through that.”

I had to make the guess that he wanted some kind of an answer. “You have a couple of incurable hang-ups, Norman. One is an old-timey hang-up on decency. The other hang-up is thinking too much, trying to separate cause and effect and locate where the guilt is. You are not with the scene, man. Guilt only happens to people who get caught. Sex is a handshake. Man has poisoned himself and he’s on the way out, so pick up all the bread you can in any way you can. Enjoy.”

“Sure, McGee. Sell yourself first.”

“I keep trying, but I haven’t been able to get into the spirit of the thing somehow. I keep going back to this role-playing of mine, you know, with the white horse and the maiden fair and the grail and the dragons and all that crap.”

One flat and mirthless grunt of laughter from Sheriff Hyzer.

I said, “I do not want to be sickly sentimental, and I know that it is pagan barbarism to venerate the empty flesh when the spirit is long gone, but I think of Betsy out there in the night wired to that goddam tree, and how her face looks, and I keep thinking of how careful she was to look… nice. That’s the only word. Nice.”

He opened the car door. “Show me. I can call the people in from there.”

Nineteen

HE HAD a big bright camp-light in the trunk of the cruiser. We walked slowly, and he kept the light on the ground so that we could avoid destroying any foot tracks or tire tracks.

I had trouble orienting myself at night. The tan Volkswagen would have been a big help had it been there. But it was gone. And Betsy was gone and the shovel was gone. In the grove we could walk around freely because the soft springy mat of brown needles of many seasons would not hold a print.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“That’s the third time. I am very damned sure, yes. Please stop asking. All right. One of these trees in this area, and it was about the same size around the trunk as that one.”

It was Hyzer who spotted a silky lemon-gold thread clinging to the bark of a tree of the proper size, about four feet off the ground. Then in close inspection under the bright beam, I found a couple of blond hairs caught in the bark. That gave me enough orientation to show him where the half-dug grave had been.

I knelt near him and held the light while he carefully brushed away the blanket of pine needles, brushed down to the ground where it had been freshly, moistly stamped flat, leaving the same sole marks I had seen in the dirt in the half grave.

He grunted and began, just as carefully, to brush the needles back over it. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’ll take the risk of assuming Mrs. Kapp is buried right here. Will your… sentimentality get in the way of leaving her here for a while?”

“No. It was the tree part that got to me. This is endurable. What do you have in mind?”

“Knowing something that somebody doesn’t know you know is a useful thing in this line of work. Sometimes you don’t know in advance how you’ll use it. I’ll come out alone tomorrow and take a cast of the shoe prints and any tire prints I can find. Let’s take a look inside that shack now.”

Whoever had come back to the unfinished business of burying her, had done a halfway job of tidying the shack. He had scattered the ashes, put the broken lid back on the barrel safe and covered it with the fire brick. I showed Hyzer the safe.

On the way back into town I told him, without telling him too much, exactly how eager I was for all kinds of publicity and press coverage.

Deputy Billy Cable had drafted an official release and he was holding it for Hyzer’s approval. Hyzer sat at his desk and read it and said, “Billy, go and make certain every mouth is closed and stays closed, and then come back here.”

Billy was back before Hyzer finished changing the release. Finally Hyzer handed it to him, saying, “Get it typed up again and get somebody to take it on over to Mr. Goss.”

Billy read it and looked dismayed. “But…”

“What’s wrong?”

“You’ve got it person or persons unknown, and this son of bitch McGee confessed he kilt Henry Perris.”

“He thought he did, Billy,” Hyzer said soothingly. “It was an honest mistake. Could you really believe a man could throw an oyster knife that deep into Henry’s armpit from almost twenty feet away?”

“Well, I heard him tell how…”

“The way I reconstruct it, it is a heavy piece of metal and it struck Perris on the skull and knocked him out. After McGee left to come here and report it, the next person along saw the opportunity and picked up the knife and thrust it into the unconscious man.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way I want it.”

“And you took out the part about Mrs. Kapp.”

“Mr. McGee took me to the place where he thought he saw her, but he was apparently mistaken.”

“I don’t want to upset you, Sher’f, but shouldn’t your chief deputy know what the hell is-”

“Come back here after you send that off and I’ll tell you.”

When the door shut, I said, “Many thanks.”

“I’ll try to stick with that, McGee. But if somebody goes on trial for killing Lillian, I’m not going to turn over a doctored file to the State’s attorney for grand jury indictment. You’ll have to go back into the picture, and with that weapon he had to stab you with, and with the photographs of the holes in the trailer, you should be able to satisfy the court that it was self-defense. I will testify that you made immediate confession, but that I kept it quiet for the sake of not giving the killer too much free information. Raise your right hand.”

It had a lot of golden ornamentation and an eagle and three shades of colored enamel, red, white, and blue. It said that I had finally finked out all the way, and was a sworn deputy sheriff of Cypress County Florida, with all the rights and privileges pertaining there-to. There was a wallet card with the sheriff’s signature and mine. And I pinned the badge inside the wallet, and practiced flipping it open a few times, thinking of how Meyer would laugh himself into hiccups.

Billy Cable came in as I made the final practice flip, and tucked the wallet away. His eyes bulged. “Norm!” he wailed. “I mean, Sheriff. Him? After all!”

The whip cracked, and Cable came to sudden attention. Hyzer said, “You are the best officer I have, Cable. And in ninety-five percent of your duty assignments you are superior. In the remaining five percent you turn into a vain, stupid, inept man, causing me more trouble than you are worth. Do you know what this flaw is?”

“I… ah… no, sir!”

“I request you to make a guess, then.”

“I guess… well, sometimes I maybe let my own personal feelings… Sir, a man can’t be a machine!”

“Cable, off duty you will let your feelings and your emotions and your prejudices slop all over your personal landscape. You can roll and wallow in them. On duty, on my time, you will be a machine. Is that absolutely clear?”

“Yes, sir.” It was a very small “yes, sir.” Cable was swaying. Only the most effective chewing can make a grown man sway.

“Temporary Deputy McGee will be privately assigned by me, and will not be subject to your authority or control in any way, nor will you make any mention of his status. Now go and shake his hand and welcome him to this department.”

Cable came over. His eyes looked slightly glassy and his palm was damp. “Deputy… glad to… hope you enjoy your…”

“Thanks, Billy. The name is Trav.”

“Now you can both sit down,” Hyzer said. “We will discuss McGee’s theory of gravitation, and the identification of unknown influences. Billy, I made out a schedule of… recent events. I checked out the duty cards and duty reports, and I have placed your approximate location and activities in the righthand column. I see no chance of your having been involved directly in any way.”

“For God’s sake, Sheriff! If you think I-”

“Didn’t we just have a little discussion about emotion?”

“… Sorry, sir.”

“This is a guide, merely to show you how I want a special project handled. You are the sample. I want you to run these six deputies through the same thing, without letting anyone know what you are checking out. I want you to make certain that the deputy cards and duty reports are correct as to the hours involved.”

“Somebody in the family?” Billy asked.

“McGee thought it had to be either you or me. It isn’t either of us. So let’s be certain it isn’t any of us.”

For one precarious moment, full of fellowship and conscious of the ornate badge of authority, I wanted to give them the full report on Lew Arnstead, so it could be added to Hyzer’s list of unusual events. Sure, and good old Betsy would swear to every word of it as being the truth. I would bounce about three times right on the place where now the badge rested, and hear the steel door clang.

Hyzer stared with raised eyebrows at Cable until suddenly Cable came to with a start and hopped up and hurried out of the office.

“And that leaves us,” said Mister Norm, “with two more places to go. Or three. Lew Arnstead. Mrs. Kapp could have guessed where he would be, could have known about that hideaway shack gone out there, and found him closing the store, picking up the money, getting ready to move.”

“And forgot where the safe was?”

“Or tore the place up after he killed Mrs. Kapp to make it look like a stranger. Relocked the safe and tore the door off.”

“Was he that subtle?”

“Any police officer learns what other police officers look for and how they make their judgments. Acquired subtlety, call it. He knew that Lillian had tricked him and left that envelope of yours in the Baither place. So he goes after her. And he finds her.”

“You said three possibilities?”

“Somebody trying to either get a woman free and clear of Arnstead for good, or get even for what happened to the woman.”

“Featherman?”

“A possibility. Maybe Mrs. Kapp arrived and found someone there, and Arnstead was there, dead. He could be under those pine needles too.”

“The black jeep hidden on Betsy’s street doesn’t fit that one.”

“Or the first one, either. Unless we get too fancy, and jam pieces into the puzzle whether they fit or not. Lew abandoned the jeep there to cause confusion. Or somebody picked him up right there and took him out to his shack.”

“Or, Sheriff, Henry and Lillian killed him because they couldn’t risk you finding out who engineered leaving that envelope. Maybe Henry and Lillian knew about that shack and they had to make sure Arnstead hadn’t hidden anything out there that could tie them into Baither’s death. And Betsy walked into that scene.”

“That was my third guess,” he said. “Save the best until last.”

“Lillian knew about the shack. That photograph of her in that batch in your desk drawer was taken out there. Remember that clock on the wall?”

He took them out, found hers and studied it. “Very good, Deputy. Observant.”

“When you find yourself in a sling, it’s time to start thinking clearly or start running.”

He put the pictures back, slammed the drawer hard. “Around and around and around,” he said. “The mythological animal that grabs its own tail and starts eating and disappears down its own throat.”

“A fifth man in on the money-truck job? Or maybe Henry and Lillian nailed either Hutch or Orville, but not both.”

“We’re going further and further into the mist,” he said. “So we haul it back to specifics. Mrs. Kapp’s car might tell us something. There are hundreds of little tracks across that scrubland up there. Tomorrow I call in a chopper for an air search. The biggest specific is the plausible assumption Lillian told someone what she learned from Frank Baither. That bucket technique is efficient. She would probably try some lies. So the technique is to keep at it until you get the same answer time and again.”

“Do you have any idea how powerful she was?”

“Yes. I saw one demonstration. I see your point. Either one strong person or two people to handle her like that, even taped up.”

“I’d buy two.”

Then he told me my assignment. We checked the inventory of confiscated weapons, and I settled for a Ruger standard carbine in.44 Magnum, with a five-round capacity, four in a front tube and one in the chamber. I’d had one aboard the Busted Flush for a time and had used it on shark coming after the hooked billfish, until one day I had decided that the shark was doing his thing, and it was bloody and disrespectful to kill an honest scavenger just because he happened to come into the ball park when you are trying to win. From that day on, the rule when fishing from the Munequita, after towing it to billfish country behind the Flush, was that the lookout would yell out when he saw the first fin, and you would release the billfish then and there instead of later, at the side of the boat. We do not bring dead meat home and hang it high for the tourists to say Aaah over. We take a picture of the good ones as somebody leans down to clip off the leader wire. The stainless hook corrodes out of the marlin, tuna, or sailfish jaw in days, leaving him free to go take the dangling bait of the commercial long-liners, fight his heart away against the resistance of the buoys, and, after the shark have browsed this free lunch, leave his jaw or his whole head on the hook for the deckhands to haul up and toss away on the pickup round.

So I knew it would fire five 240-grain slugs as fast as I could pull the trigger, bust each one right through a seven-inch pine tree, and had a reasonable accuracy for a weapon a yard long overall, weighing less than six pounds.

They had grabbed it off a poacher. Norm Hyzer approved of the choice and gave me a handful of jacketed factory loads. After he explained what I was to do, I asked if I could have another few pieces of equipment. So he drove me to the shopping center and pointed out the hardware store that stayed open late. I bought my junk, and then hit the supermarket and provisioned myself for a forty-eight-hour vigil. Hyzer said he would check me out of the White Ibis after he dropped me off, and put my gear in the rental car and shut it up in his own garage, well out of sight.

It was ten-thirty when he dropped me off at the Baither place, wished me luck, and drove off.

It took longer than usual for my vision to adjust to the night. Priority one was slathering myself with repellent before a couple dozen of the more muscular hummers got together and lifted me up and wedged me into a tree to consume at their leisure. I checked out the pump house by leaving the flashlight on inside, closing the door, and waiting again for night vision to see how much light came out. It was pretty good. A narrow crack above the knob, and a wider gap at the bottom. I could fix those on the inside by cutting some strips from one of the old blankets inside.

It took over an hour to set it up the way I wanted it. I had bought enough wire so I could take the long way through the brush from the pump house to the old wooden bridge. I turned out my flashlight each time I heard a car coming. In time I located an old gray warped plank with the right gap underneath and enough give to it. I taped my little brass terminals from a dismembered flashlight to the warped underside and to the supporting timber. I brought the buzzer along the road and put it down close enough to hear it from the bridge. There was no way to walk across or drive across without closing the circuit.

For somebody who, for some reason, wanted to come in from another direction, I used the primitive old black thread and rattle-can device. Closed the pump house door, turned on the flashlight, covered the cracks, made and wolfed a pair of thick sandwiches, drank a quart of the almost-cool water. Stretched out on the narrow cot to find the place to prop the weapon where my hand would find it with no fumbling, no loss of time.

Turned the light out, opened the door, stretched out on the cot again. I invited sleep by willing the relaxation of neck and shoulders. Deputy McGee on duty. It is to laugh. Or cry.

And I let myself down into that dark turbulence knowing I would find there the dusty-looking eyes of Arnstead, and Betsy playing her lavender game with stomach-turning grimace, and a flat steel handle sticking straight out of a twill armpit, and the foam caked into the corner of the dead mouth of the mad young girl.

Twenty

AT FIRST light I got up and checked my warning system, took my thread and tin cans down and stowed them under the cot. Later, at sunup, I prowled the area, locating logical access so I could do a better job of hooking up the dangle-cans at nightfall.

I found a way of wedging the pump house door so it would appear to be locked if anybody tried it. Hyzer did not want the seals broken on the doors to the Baither house. I found a window catch I could slip, and climbed in over the sill. The wide white tape still dangled from the armchair where Baither had died, and under the chair and in front of it were the crusted black places on the brown rush rug where his blood had dried.

I found a shady thicket with a good view of the terrain and settled in, carbine beside me. There was a nostalgia about it. Not the warm kind, with the misted eye and the sad smile. The other kind, that sucks the belly muscles in, and gives you access to the old automatic habits of survival, such as holding half a breath from time to time while you listen to bird sounds and bug sounds, waiting for them to stop in some unseen area. Listening for some little clink or jingle of equipment, or oiled snick of weaponry being readied. Nostrils widen and you snuff the faint movement of the breeze, for taint of alien sweat. You move a little bit from time to time because if you remain still, muscles can lock and when you must move, it might be necessary to move quick as a lizard, or take the hammer blow of unexpected automatic weapon.

At eleven the bridge boards rattled and an old white Mustang came in, packed with kids: two bleached boys in the bucket seats, three limber, noisy, bikinied young girls sitting high on the downfolded top. The driver swung it around the old red pickup so spiritedly, one of the girls nearly fell off. The girl in the middle grabbed her. They stopped and I could hear them clearly from my sundappled thicket.

“Tommy! You bassar, you like to kee-yul me, doon that crazy kind of drivin‘.”

“Not ef you land on your haid, Bunny Lee.” They piled out and went to the house and circled it, peering in every window. I heard the girls saying how spooky it was. They were all telling each other what happened to Frank Baither.

“Let’s bust in and get a good look,” one of the boys said.

“Hell with that,” the other said. “Ol Hyzer has got it sealed. You maybe want him on your ass? Not me.”

“Come on,” the first one said. “Look at old Norma Jean here. She’s dead set on getting in there and making out with me in old Baither’s sack.”

“That’s grass talking, goddam you Tommy!” a girl said.

The girls were slapping at their bare legs and shoulders. One of them said, “Get me out of here, you guys. I’m about to get et up. There’s nothing here. Let’s go bug old Dolores.”

They ran for the car, piled in and charged out, shrilling the tires when they hit the paved road.

I took another tour. There was a crude patio off the other side of Baither’s house, about twelve feet square, three steps down from a sealed door to the living room. It had a low wall around it of block painted pale blue. There were some planting pots with dead sticks coming out of the baked dirt inside. The patio area was paved with solid cement block a little larger than shoeboxes. They had been laid on tamped earth with sand poured between the cracks and watered down. It had been a sloppy job. The rainy season had washed the foundation uneven. Weeds grew out of the cracks. An old redwood chair, bleached gray, with a broken arm, crouched in a corner. Some blocks were missing.

I sat for a little while on the low wall, being scolded by a blue jay. I was thinking of Betsy Kapp in her grave up near the other end of Cypress County. And something in the back of my mind was looking at more immediate things, and finally sent the message upstairs that it seemed odd that some of the blocks looked paler and newer than others.

So I squatted and lifted one out and turned it over and replaced it and had the answer. Hyzer had directed a thorough search. So the blocks had been taken up and they had done some digging, or some probing with sharpened reinforcing rod, and had then replaced the patio floor. They had not taken the time or trouble to replace them all the same side up as they had been before. So the ones which went back in upside down looked a little newer. They had not had as much time to weather.

In fact, they had not even taken the trouble to put them all back. Four were missing from the far corner.

Everyone has their own fund of small idiotic compulsions. There are people who have to have their papers perfectly aligned with the edge of the desk. There are picture straighteners, and compulsive cleaners of ashtrays. I am a jigsaw freak. If I find myself in a room where there is a partially completed jigsaw puzzle, I find myself circling, then hovering, then finding the piece that goes here and the piece that goes there. Small triumphs. I cannot stand the sight of a fishrod rack that will hold five rods and has only four rods in the clips. I go through life fitting objects into their obvious and proper places.

So while thoughts moved away from the scene, back to the trailer this time, Henry circling it, I went scuffing through the rank grass and weeds, back and forth, around and around the three sides of the patio, moving further away from it, hunting for the block that would satisfy my moronic sense of order and fitness.

I woke up about forty feet out from the patio. No block. Irritation. What the hell did they do with it? Pause for thought. Okay. So they searched the patio. Took up all the block. Piled it out to the side, probably, but close. No need to tote it an inch further than necessary. Very probably they had piled it on the broad low wall.

So maybe there hadn’t been quite enough block to pave the patio in the first place, and I was looking for something that didn’t exist.

I went over to the corner and gave it close inspection. No, dammit. You could see the oblong depressions in the dirt underneath. And here was where one of the vine weeds had been torn when they had been lifted out. Green at the root end, and brown beyond the tear.

I straightened up and stood with my mouth hanging open. I stood in a comic strip, with a big light bulb suspended in space over my head.

I heard Lennie Sibelius, in that resonant and flexible voice, “… medium height with a bull neck and very broad thick shoulders. As a kid he had worked for his uncle who operated a little yard making cement block, and he had carried enough tons of mix and tons of finished block to give him that muscular overdevelopment.”

My light bulb faded and dimmed. Hold it a minute, temporary deputy. Wouldn’t a brand new patio completed during Frank’s two weeks before he went to jail stand out like one very large and very inflamed thumb? And this block looks old. Maybe twenty years old.

But Baither had that old truck and he could take the original block far away and dump it. And he could add stain and dirt to the next mix. I yanked a block out and put it on its side on top of the wall. I yanked a second block out and slammed it down on the first one. It bounced off and nearly landed on my instep. The second smash broke a corner off. The third blow broke it open like a walnut. The meat inside the shell was the right size and shape. It had to be skinned. I got down to two banded packets of ten-dollar bills. Two thousand racetrack dollars. It had been wrapped in heavy plastic, tightly taped, then dipped in paraffin. From then on the process could be easily guessed. Pour a layer in the bottom of the greased wooden mold. When it started to set up, put the package on it, well centered, and finish the pour.

One hell of a lot of work, Mr. Baither. Two weeks of it. Off somewhere, probably, where you wouldn’t be disturbed. Truck it in and lay it down, trying to make it look as beat as the original block, chipping it, scarring it. You could have added a little rock salt to the mix to get the right pitted effect. You must have been tired, fellow, when you finally got shoved into a cell.

I never would have found it or thought of it had not those four been missing, and had I not seen from the broken weed that they had been taken recently. Somebody would have been in a sweat to make certain that the water treatment had gotten the truth out of Lilo Perris. So they had nipped in and grabbed samples last evening, before Hyzer posted me here.

Dilemma. Turn the whole thing over to Hyzer right now. He had said, “Unless you get a visitor, don’t call me and blow the cover. I’ll get in touch with you.”

Explicit. Follow orders. But first take certain steps which are part precaution, part ugly surprise.

I found a rusty old pickax behind the pump house. I soon learned the force required to pop the blocks open without gouging the cash. I stacked the waxed oblongs on the broad wall. There were one astonishing number of blocks in a twelve-by-twelve space, and I found only seven which were solid all the way through.

I improvised a Santa sack out of a frayed old army blanket from the pump house. I made it in five heavy loads, and I didn’t finish the job until four-thirty. I crawled into my thicket, aching and winded and incomparably smug. Some very sneaky thoughts came sidling into my mind. With a little applied intelligence a man ought to be able to tie himself up impressively, and give himself a good thump on the head… “My God, Sheriff, he must have gotten behind me somehow. I never got a look at him.”

It would figure out to about twenty years of splendid living. Untraceable. Spendable. With nobody with an ugly disposition coming looking for it, and you. Maybe.

I remembered Meyer telling me that if I ever scored very very big, I had the natural tendency to turn into a one-hundred-percent bum. “And when you lose that last one percent,” he said, “I might find you dreary. Sporadic monetary anxiety becomes you. It keeps you polite.”

When the sun was very low, I began to make my preparations for the night. I was near the pump house when the buzzer sounded, and as a wind had come up I could not tell whether it had been a vehicle or a footstep which had done it. I ducked around behind the pump house, and heard the car, looked around and saw the green sedan with the blue flashers on the roof.

So I came out, carbine in hand, a tired and honest man ready and willing to make his honest report to his honest temporary boss man. But it was King Sturnevan who pulled his bulk out from behind the wheel and watched me approach, his back to the round golden sun.

“King,” I said, “I hope you’re delivering groceries and a cold beer.”

“If I’d thought of it, pally I’d of done just that.”

“Then suppose you go tell Mister Norm it would be very nice if he would bring one hot sandwich and one cold beer to the recruit.”

“Tell him and duck?”

“Seriously, I have to see him. I want him to get on out here as soon as he can. Would you call in, please?”

“Sure thing.” He got into the car again. He fiddled with the transmitter, spoke into the hand mike. “Nine to CCSD, come in. Nine calling CCSD, come in.” Nothing. He tried a couple more times, then got out, saying, “I told Red this damned set has got something loose on it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s like dead.”

“There’s a window I can slip, and I think the phone in there is working. I’m not supposed to call in. Why don’t you use it and just say to him that… you want to show him something at the Baither place.”

“You got something to show him? You find something, McGee?”

“Yes and no. Look King. I’m reporting direct. You know how it is.”

“Hell, I know you’re reporting direct. He just said I could stop by and see how you’re making out. So whyn’t you tell me and I can run back in and give him a direct report, and keep it off the air and off the phone?”

I wanted to think it over, and I eased over to lean against the side of the car. But he got in the way, a little clumsy on his feet. But he had moved very well in his little shower room demonstration.

So I said, “Okay, King. That’s probably the best way. I’ll tell you the whole thing. But let’s sit in the car. Okay?”

“It’s too hard for me to get in and out of that little tin bucket. They make cars too small for guys my size.”

“Okay. You stand outside and I’ll get in the car.” And when he was still in the way, I knew. And I jumped back a good ten feet from him and put the muzzle of the carbine in direct line with his belly.

“What’s with you, buddy boy? You some kind of flip?”

“Put the right hand on top of the head, slowly. Now!”

“Dammit, you’re acting like…”

The holstered weapon was on the belt threaded through his pant loops. “Now undo the belt buckle with the left hand. Now the top button. Unzip and let them fall.”

“But… ”

“King, you better believe me, I will blow a hole right through the middle of you.”

He let the pants drop, and I had him pull them off and move away from them, away from the car, so I could circle and, holding the gun on him, look into the car. I didn’t see it at first, and if he had been more casual, maybe I never would have noticed it. He had pulled the mike jack out of the radio panel. The mike was on the dash hook, the connector cord hanging straight down.

“I nearly handed it to you,” I said.

“You better start making sense soon. This is King. This is the guy on your side, pally.” He really looked upset and distressed. He wore blue boxer shorts. His legs were massive and white and hairless. It made me think of something else. I had him unlace a shoe, take it off, and back away from it. I advanced as he backed up. I picked it up and held it toward the light and saw the serrations across the bottom, the place at the ball of the foot worn smooth.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and took the slight tension off the trigger. “You nearly had it right then, King. It was close.”

“Somebody better lock you up before you hurt somebody, boy.”

“How are you at grave-digging?”

“Now you wouldn’t ask a fella big as me to dig his own hole.”

“You don’t work very hard, King. Got any fresh blisters?”

He looked involuntarily at his right hand, and, like a little kid, put it behind him. “Worked in my garden lately.”

“What did you plant in your garden? A dead lady?”

“For God’s sake, McGee!”

“And spread the pine needles back neat. But we brushed them away very carefully, and this shoe is going to match the mold Hyzer took. You didn’t have any trouble following Henry’s car. You hung back and saw me leave and went right in. Held her head in the bucket. You’re big enough and strong enough.”

“You shove it under the skin, or take it right in a vein?”

“King, I am not going to risk messing around with you. You are too good. Now turn around very slowly. I am going to wrap you up, and when your place is searched, they are going to come up with some chunks of broken cement and some wax and some plastic and some cash money.”

It was my intent to get close enough to chunk him in the back of the skull with the butt of the carbine, then cuff him to his own steering post, once I drove the car close enough.

He didn’t turn around. “You want to be a boy scout, McGee, go ahead and put one right through the middle. You were close before, you said. Go ahead.”

“Why Betsy?”

“Good question. Why not?”

Again I had to consciously ease back on the trigger finger so that it rested lightly.

He said, “She came to check Lew’s place about the time I was getting the lid off that cheap safe. She decided I’d killed Lew. She didn’t say it. But she showed it. I thought I’d set the two of you up nice. I wanted to know what happened to Lew’s body, and after I started digging the hole, she told me. So I twisted the wire tight and I had to leave then to go on duty.”

“Why Lew?”

“I thought maybe he found out from Lilo where Frank hid the money. I knew he had some money stashed. I had a good idea where. It was peanuts. Eleven thousand. And a bunch of rotten things. Rotten letters and rotten dirty pictures. I had to burn those. They weren’t decent. Linda Featherman treated me right. She spoke to me like a human being, not a fat old boxfighter turned cop. Lew gave me the wink after she was dead, and I knew he meant she was one of his women, and I decided to kill him. I investigated an accident she was in. She treated me fine. Just fine.”

“You’ve been lucky, King. Because basically you are one very dumb guy.”

“Do you know how much money I shoulda had? Do you know the kind of payoff I would have had if I hadn’t had bad hands and bad managers, and didn’t cut easy. I had everything else going for me. I would have had one million bucks anyway, pally. Right now. I had everything else. Speed, punch, instinct.”

“So the money is yours by rights.”

“I would have had more even.”

I realized he had somehow managed to get too close. As I started to move back, he bounded in low, banging the barrel aside with a forearm, and swinging a big left into my ribs, low on the right side. I felt them go, felt myself float back and down and heels over head, light as thistledown. Felt myself plucked up and saw him in the red glow, bounding and shuffling, moving in. Saw a fist come afloating, and felt my stomach being smashed loose, saw the sky spin, fell again, and felt cold metal under my lips.

“Come on, pally,” he said in a wheedling tone, far away. “Upsy-daisy. Dance with the old King a little.” Hand found the metal. It was too much fun for him his way than any other way. Finger found the trigger guard. I had been broken in half in the middle and the two halves were at least a yard apart. I rocked the right half onto its back, bringing the carbine up, and pulled the trigger as fast as I could, but the little joltings of the weapon came at least five minutes apart. A shark sank in a red-sun-sea, and the red rolled over me, and the further I sank, the darker it got.

Twenty-One

ON A very fine day in May, Meyer brought Miss Agnes around to the door of the Lauderdale hospital, and the cheery Gray Lady wheelchaired me down the short ramp and out to the curb. Meyer came around and I pulled myself up, stepped on that obsolete convenience known as a running board, and sat on the seat and swung my legs in.

I thanked the lady and she told me not to hurry back. Miss Agnes looked better than I had ever seen her. Ron had hand-rubbed so many coats of blue that you could see down into the surface.

“She running good?” I asked Meyer.

“Aside from driving like an armored lorry, fine.” The whole world looked bright and new and far too brilliant in every color and outline. A couple of weeks inside can do it. My clothes felt strange. And they were a little large for me.

“Nice to be out,” I said.

“For a while there, nobody thought you would be.”

I knew that. I had lost quite a few days in there somewhere. The doctor absolutely refused to believe that that damage had been done by two blows from the human fist. He said the muscle cover was tough and hard enough to withstand a blow like that. He said I shouldn’t have had three crushed ribs, a rupture of the external oblique muscle, liver hemorrhages, and a perforation from a piece of rib bone in the bottom of the left lung. That’s what brought on the pneumonia that they couldn’t seem to find the right antibiotic for. I had been in shape, but not in shape for the ring.

“Forget about the trial,” Meyer said.

“What do you mean? What happened?”

“Sturnevan died this morning. He was coming along fine. The smashed hip was all wired together and seemed to be healing in good shape. Hyzer phoned me. Said to tell you. He said they told him it was a massive coronary occlusion.”

“We should both have died, lain there on the ground eight feet apart and quietly bled to death. But those kids came back to break into the house. Meyer, my friend, our luck doesn’t run so good in Cypress County.”

“I have no pressing need to return. Oh, and Hyzer said your check will be coming through in another few days. Two and a half percent of the total amount recovered. Something under twenty-two thousand.”

“Nobody’s luck ran very good in Cypress County.”

“Nine hundred and twenty thousand is maybe an unlucky number. Your hands get sweaty and you become accident prone.”

“Meyer, did they locate any bodies near that trailer?”

“I told you they did. Ten days ago I told you. You looked like you were listening.”

“Who?”

“They don’t know. They’d been there too long. A tall body and a shorter body, both male, both with a round puncture hole in the base of the skull. I told you that, too.”

“Don’t get surly about it. Does it hurt to tell me twice?”

“I’m thinking of the other things I told you I’ll have to tell you twice.”

“There’ll be time enough. We aren’t going anywhere. Did I happen to do any talking when I wasn’t tracking very well?”

“A certain amount.”

“Anything interesting?”

“It was all very dull stuff. You know, the usual run of delirium. Sex and violence. Nothing original.”

“Thanks. That light is red.”

“Even if I hadn’t seen it, I would have seen it when you sucked air through your teeth, McGee. Telling me out loud also is superfluous. I might get angry and run into somebody.”

“You’re driving. So drive. I’ll leave you alone.”

“A blessing!”

“Did you get anybody for the job, Meyer?”

“If I didn’t, wouldn’t I get stuck with it myself? Yes, I found a woman to cook and clean. An ugly one. A little bit hard of hearing. In your condition I did you a favor and found an ugly one that reads little books of inspirational poems in her spare time.”

“You’re too good to me, Meyer.”

“‘Wrong preposition. For.”

“The light is green, Meyer.”

“Do I do this to you when you’re driving? Do I complain when you go running into canals?”

“No. But you keep bringing it up.”

So soon we went under the pedestrian bridge and turned left and Meyer eased Miss Agnes into a slot reasonably near the entrance to F dock.

“You want to ride on one of the delivery carts?”

“Let’s walk. Slow.”

So we walked along to F-18, and there were yelps from far boats; and sounds of welcome from nearby ones. And unkind comment. Are you McGee’s father, mister? Meyer, who’s the clean skinny old man? McGee, where’s your tan? Fall into the oatmeal? Let me give you the address of my ex-husband’s tailor, darling.

Have fun, people. All I want to do is get aboard and lie down.

So as I tottered across my little boarding ramp, holding carefully onto the safety cable, I noticed that my houseboat looked almost as good as my ancient Rolls pickup. It gleamed and glistened. It looked so good, it embarrassed me. Why couldn’t I maintain it like that?

“Meyer, who is the compulsive polisher?”

“That deaf woman has a lot of extra energy. She asks me what next, and one day I said she could clean the outside of the boat, too.”

Meyer helped me into the lounge and down the corridor past the galley into the master stateroom. The bed was crisply made up and turned down. I undressed and got in, and Meyer said I would probably feel better if I had my usual, a nice knock of the Plymouth over ice, and I told him he was a nice man. I heard him tinkling around out there. The tinkling approached and I put my hand out and opened my eyes, saying, “Meyer, where is…” And Heidi Geis Trumbill put the drink in my hand and laughed aloud in her pleasure at my surprise. She was still the most elegantly textured pussycat of them all, a little older now, not a pound heavier, with more of the awareness of living in her eyes, more of the taste of times and places in the look of her mouth. Elegance, freshly tanned, leaning her perfume close to kiss me quickly and softly on the lips, and then sitting down on the side of the bed, looking at me misty-eyed.

“McGee, you idiot, are you crying?”

“It’s weakness, love. This water runs from the eye. Means little. Or a lot. Take your pick. But how! The last time I saw you was…”

“When I got in the car with the luggage and left you standing there, dear. St. Croix. I looked back. You looked so dejected. And my heart was breaking and breaking.”

“You went to find your own life, find that right guy, have fat babies I think you said. Well?”

“I found him, but somebody else had found him first. It was a long bad scene, dear, and I cut away from it six months ago. I’ve been painting like a madwoman. My show sold out.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Don’t you know? I’m ugly and hard of hearing and I will read inspirational poems aloud to you.”

“Did you clean up this crock boat?”

“Look at my poor hands, dear. Look at my nails!”

“Seriously, how come…”

“Travis, darling, a long time ago-maybe not so awfully long ago really, but it does seem way way back-I told Meyer that you had picked up all the pieces of me and put me together, and that if you were ever in need of the same he was to find me through my gallery, and let me know and if I did not happen to have any compound fractures, I would come to you on a dead run. I got here a week ago yesterday.”

“So that’s why Meyer has looked so bland and smug and mysterious. Why didn’t you come to the hospital?”

“Hate them, darling. Sorry. Wasn’t this better?”

“This is as good as anything can get. My God, you look lovely. You are something way out else, Heidi.”

“Do you need putting together?”

“Haven’t you noticed me?”

“Oh hell, I don’t mean looking like sudden death. That’s a body thing. I mean putting together.”

I looked at her and knew that I did. “Something was going wrong and it went further wrong. I don’t know. I lost it, somehow, without knowing what I lost. Some kind of… sense of light and motion and purpose. I went ragged around the edges and bleak in the middle. The world seems to be coarsening, and me with it. Everything that happens takes away, and less flows back. And I respond less, and in the wrong way. I still amuse myself but there’s some contempt in it now. I don’t know… I don’t know…”

“Darling, there’s that water from the eye syndrome again.”

“Sorry.”

“There’s nothing so really wrong with you, you know. It’s second adolescence.”

“Is that it?”

“Of course, Travis, darling. I had delayed adolescence. Remember your absolutely dreadful analogy of comparing me to that old yellow Packard you bought when you were a child, and finally got running so beautifully?”

“Indeed I do.”

“In your ravings you let Meyer know you had promised the cruising month of June aboard this fine houseboat to a lady who, for reasons he wouldn’t tell me, won’t be able to make it. You may tell me or not, as you wish. But I am substituting.”

“That is very good thinking, Heidi.”

“The cure for my delayed adolescence was a grown-up man. And I think a grown-up woman can cure a recurrence of adolescence, don’t you?”

“Shock treatment, eh?”

“McGee, I am a very grown-up woman, far more so than that grim day we said good-by on that lovely island.”

“I think you are. Yes. I would say so.”

She looked at me and I suddenly knew exactly what Mona Lisa was thinking about. It was exactly the same smile, though on a face far more to my liking.

“I think, dear, that it is going to be absolutely essential for the health of both of us, and the sanity too, if you will kindly get a lot of lovely sleep, and eat the rich marvelous foods I am going to cook for you, and exercise a little more each day, and take the sun and…”

“I guess it’s pretty essential. Yes, indeedy.”

“Because we are going to further places on our cruise, darling, than anybody has ever reached before on a boat this slow in one single lovely month.”

I finished the drink. She took the glass. She told me later that I fell asleep smiling, and that Raoul, the cat, joined me later, curling into a warm nest against my waist.

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Table of Contents

Travis McGee #12 The Long Lavender LookJohn D. MacDonaldMGR: AL STOREYHELD FOR QUESTIONING