A Purple Place for Dying (20 page)

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

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

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

"But you did go to Jass's house shortly after noon on the day of his death?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why don't you leave her alone?" Estobar demanded.

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

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

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

"Go ahead."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Long swim," I said.

"Just floating out there, darling. Thinking."

"About what?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Reach any conclusions?"

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

"Wasn't I?"

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

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

"Hush. Can't you be serious?"

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

"I can be honest?"

"Please."

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

"Hmmm."

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

"More practice."

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

"One of these days."

"I will be desolated. I will cry my eyes out. I'll ache for you. But I will know it has to be."

"What are your plans?"

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

"In time of trouble, you know where…"

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

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

"So be it," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How long would they give her?"

"Ten years to life, maybe."

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

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

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

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

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

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