The Long Lavender Look (33 page)

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.

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
Page 120

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.