The Long Lavender Look (23 page)

trophies, and framed testimonials about his civic services. A color portrait in a silver frame, showing a very lovely young woman smiling out, her arms around a little boy and a little girl. She looked young enough to account for his trimness and his hairpiece and dye job.

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

"He's a nice kid."

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

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

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

"Word gets around."

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

"Then you know Arnstead is missing?"

"I heard about it."

"And Betsy Kapp is missing, too."

He was startled. "The hell you say!"

"She had a seven o'clock date last night and didn't keep it and hasn't been seen since."

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

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

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

"Maybe it was a business relationship, Johnny."

He leaned back watchful. "What's that supposed to mean?"

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

"Do tell."

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

"I think I heard somewhere that Lew had an extra girlfriend or two he'd hire out."

"I guess he'd have to be pretty careful about it, working under a man like Hyzer."

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

"He doesn't impress you?"

He shrugged. "I vote for him."

"So it's a nice quiet place, with a very quiet little newspaper."

"There's no point in scaring up trouble by printing a lot of things that agitate people."

"Was the car Linda Featherman was driving brought in here?"

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

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

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

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

I found breakfast and then flipped a coin. Heads was Deputy King Sturnevan. Tails was Mrs.

Jeanie Dahl. Had it landed on edge I was going to try Miss Kimmey, in the third grade. It was heads.

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

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

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

"She picked Lew Arnstead."

"I know. Surprised folks. The Betsy-watchers. Not her type. But you can't tell."

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

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

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

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

"Do you think Hyzer knew Lew was pimping?"

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

"Could he have been handling it for Hyzer?"

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

"Sorry I asked. I apologize."

"It just couldn't be, believe me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Insurance company pay off?"

"What the hell are you talking about? Murder? Suicide? What?"

"What if you were absolutely positive she'd been hustling for Lew Arnstead for at least two years?"

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

"Brothers or sisters?"

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

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

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

"King, let's say it's a pretty fair assumption."

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

"Can you come up with any names?"

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

"Wonder what he was doing with what he was making?"

"Salting it away. Slowest man you ever seen when it came to reaching into his pocket to pay for a beer or a cup of coffee. He bought himself some good guns, and one good horse, but that was about it. Had a pretty fair automobile that he bought half wrecked and had Henry Perris put in good shape, then he was too cheap to pay collision, so it was a total loss when he racked it up.

He kept his business affairs, and just about everything else to himself. Close mouth and a close pocket. It isn't smart for any cop to have a safety-deposit box. I'd guess Lew'd pack it in fruit jars and bury it in the ground."

"Think he dug it up and left?"

"Not if he could still make more than enough to live on around here. I think he's dead."

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

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

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

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

Delicate little features, face wide across the farset eyes, fat little mouth over the pointed chin.

"Your name is McGee, huh?"

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