The Long Lavender Look (19 page)

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

All the photographs and the letter fit nicely into the same pocket in the double thickness of canvas by the rear window. I spread them out so that there was no bulge when I zipped it shut.

The thought of how Billy Cable might use the pictures of Betsy gave me the idea of possible leverage, for quite different objectives. I had studied the faces. Lilo and the Unknown Thirteen.

The odds were that most or all were in Cypress County on this final Sunday in April. Clerking, waitressing, dating, tending babies, fixing dinner, ironing shirts, dancing, watching television.

Lew's little garden of ladies. There might be a certain amount of gratitude involved were a lady to get her trophy shot back, and be scratched off Lew's local scorecard. So keep looking at the ladies, McGee. A fellow blundering around in the murk needs the loan of any thirty-nine-cent flashlight available.

The last thread of daylight was about gone as I turned into the parking area of the White Ibis.

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

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

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

Lover darling,

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

Love ya! Yr Betsy.

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

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

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

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

But it was just a side yard of a very small residential plot in a peaceful neighborhood of a small southern city. A neighborhood of postal clerks, retired military, food store managers, bank tellers, watching the fare that came into their living rooms over the cable, checking the TV

Guide during the rerun season to see if there was a "Bonanza" they had missed, or a "Mission Impossible."

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

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

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

I sat on the bed and rubbed Raoul's sleepy head and got his gritty, audible engine going. A puzzlement that she should be so full of nervous alarm, so anxious not to be alone, and then go out alone to find out God knows what. I finally realized that it had to be another one of the games that Betsy could play. A new script patterned on the late late movies, suspense, perhaps, with elegant quips and handsome sets, and she was maybe Myrna Loy tracing down one of those fragments of female intuition which would clear up the case which had William Powell baffled.

And that, of course, made it all perfectly safe, because if somebody started to really hurt anybody, the Great Director would yell "Cut!" and we would go back to our dressing rooms and wait for the next call.

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

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

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

"Sheriff. They told me I might catch you over here."

"What can I do for you?"

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

"If you come to my office before nine tomorrow . . ."

"It would be better right now, I think."

"What's it about?"

"Baither, Arnstead, Perris."

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

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

"I can't see how you could be of any help to me."

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

"Result of an amateur investigation, McGee?"

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

"I know. I made inquiry."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I had a report from Deputy Cable," he said. "So I know you went and talked to Cora Arnstead.

I had a report of your conversation with Deputy Sturnevan. I know you spent the night with Mrs.

Kapp at her home on Seminole. I was glad to hear you had not left the county. If you had, you would have regretted it. My responsibility is to enforce the enforceable laws and ordinances.

Deputy Cable suggested to me that Mrs. Kapp be picked up and charged with public fornication. There is an old ordinance on the books. I have not been able to understand why Billy would want to waste department time on that sort of thing. He is usually a more reasonable officer. I do not wish to make any moral judgments about Mrs. Kapp. She has always seemed to me to be a pleasant enough woman, and she seems to run that dining room well. She would seem to be ... selective and circumspect in her private life."

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

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

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

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

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

"Find out what?"

"She didn't say. I waited until ten o'clock and then I came looking for you."

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

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

"Not a chance."

"Where is the note?"

"I threw it away. I assure you it was ... affectionate.

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

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

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

"Baither put it together. He used two outsiders, pickup talent, possibly from out of state. He had the contacts, apparently. The fourth man was local, and without a record, gainfully employed. Henry Perris, now working as a mechanic down at Al Storey's station on the Trail.