The Long Lavender Look Read online

  A blue Rambler came down Route 112, waited at the stop sign, then came across and parked beside the station. A broad brown man with a white grin got out. It said HENRY over the pocket of his coveralls. “Hey there, Beef. What’s going on?”

  “How come you can’t hardly ever get here on time?” Al demanded.

  “Now look, honest, I had a bad night, and I clean slept right through that alarm again, and …”

  “And Hummer was promised the Olds at ten-thirty and you haven’t even started on the brake job yet, so don’t stand around asking dumb questions. I don’t want Hummer so damn mad he starts yelling in my face again. He sprays spit.”

  Time passed. Traffic was picking up, but visibly and audibly slowing at the sight of the patrol car with the distinctive blue roof lights. Meyer started to say something to me, and Beef Nagle said politely that he’d rather we didn’t carry on any conversation.

  At last I heard the thin distant scream of an approaching siren. It came down 112, slowed a little at the sign and plunged across, swung and left rubber on the apron in a dramatic smoking stop. Green sedan with a red flasher on the roof. Cypress County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Norman L. Hyzer. The man who climbed out quickly from behind the wheel wore a khaki uniform that said DEPUTY SHERIFF on the shoulder patch. Long lumpy face, sallow complexion, blond-red hair, and glasses with steel rims that did not give him the slightest look of bookish introspection.

  So the other one had to be Hyzer. Late forties. Tall and slender and very erect. Black suit, shiny black shoes, crisp white shirt, dark blue necktie, gold wedding ring, white Stetson. He had dark hair and noble-hero face, expressionless. He kept the mouth pinched shut. The eyes were very blue, and his examination of each of us was long, intensive, unrevealing.

  Next he examined the pocket-contents Nagle had taken from us, and the accident report Nagle had filled out. The occupations as listed on the Florida driver’s licenses seemed to intrigue him.

  “Salvage consultant?” he said in a deep, soft voice, barely audible over traffic sounds. “Economist?”

  “Unlikely as it may seem at the moment,” said Meyer in his best guest-lecturer delivery. It didn’t match the bristled jowls, the mud-stained clothes and the sorry shoes.

  “You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to legal counsel. If you cannot employ an attorney, one will be provided for you. If you choose to answer questions, anything you say may be used in evidence against you. Do you understand, McGee? Do you understand, Meyer?”

  “We understand,” I said. “We’ll answer anything you want to ask. But it would be nice to know the charge.”

  “Suspicion of premeditated murder.” His face showed nothing. Nothing at all regional about his voice. Not your stock Florida sheriff by any means. A lot of ice-cold class. Made me wonder why he was content to be sheriff of Cypress County, a lot of swamp and palmetto and maybe, by straining hard, twenty thousand people. “Get into the cruiser.” His deputy opened the rear door and stepped back.

  “I’d like to make arrangements about getting my car pulled out of the canal, Sheriff.”

  “We’d arrange that in any case, McGee.”

  “Can I show this man where it is?”

  “We know where it is.”

  Al said, with a mocking smile, “And no damn need of my asking for the business, is there, Sher’f?”

  “I hardly think so, Mr. Storey.”

  “Who got killed?” big Terry asked.

  Hyzer hesitated, then said, “Frank Baither.”

  “Overdue,” said Al Storey.

  We got in. Steel mesh between us and the two in front. Safety glass at the sides, with no cranks and no inside door handles. The deputy picked a hole in the traffic and scatted across, and barreled it on up to ninety. Hyzer sat erect, silent, and motionless. A few miles along the road an egret came out of the brush on the canal side, tried for altitude and didn’t quite make it. It thudded against the high right corner of roof and windshield. I looked back and saw the white feathers falling to the roadbed like strange snow.

  We were in a cage that smelled of green disinfectant and last week’s vomit, and was going too fast. Meyer rode with his hands loosely clasped in his lap, eyes closed, half smile on his mouth, swaying and bouncing to the hard movements of the sedan.

  Far ahead I saw vehicles and activity. The deputy waited a long time, then braked hard and pulled over. They both got out, banged the doors shut, and walked up to where a big blue-and-white wrecker was working. It was backed close to the edge of the canal. Traffic was blocked in both directions. On the side door of the wrecker was printed JOHNNY’S MAIN STREET SERVICE. The cable stretched down into black water, under tension as the big winch wound it up. There were some shouts and arm-waving. Then I saw the gleaming, stately, angular contours of the front of Miss Agnes appear.

  “They’re doing it just right,” I told Meyer. “Stood her up on the back end and the angle brought the wheels right onto the bank.”

  “Hooray,” he muttered.

  “They’ve got the wheels cramped right, so they can bring her up and out in one swing.”

  “How marvelous.”

  “Usually you enjoy seeing something done well, Meyer.”

  “I do not like this, not any part of this.”

  Neither did I, and maybe not for the same reasons. The wrecker eased forward and brought Miss Agnes out swiftly, gently, and deftly. Made the turn away from us, and pulled over onto the shoulder. The few cars and trucks that had waited were waved on. Hyzer spent a long time checking over old Miss Agnes. The cruiser was getting up to baking temperature inside, sweat popping out and rolling down.

  At last they came back and got in. I asked about damage. Nobody answered. On the way to Cypress City we swung out and passed Miss Agnes. She looked a little crumpled around the corners, and there were bright green strings of algae across her windshield and hood. I was happy to see that somebody had been sportsman enough to put the spare on. It would have hurt a little to see her clopping along on the rim.

  We couldn’t give answers until they came up with the questions. And then it would be apologies, smiles, handshakes.

  Maybe.

  Three

  It was a little after noon when a fat elderly deputy brought me a cold and greasy cheeseburger wrapped in waxed paper, and a cardboard container of tepid coffee with too much sugar and cream already in it.

  “Why the delay?” I asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Beats me, friend,” he said, and went out and locked the door behind him. It was a small room with a heavy table bolted to the floor, heavy benches bolted to the plaster walls, wire mesh over the ceiling light and over the single window. The window was on the second floor of the Moorish structure. It looked out across a narrow courtyard at another wing of the U-shaped building. The floor of the room was asphalt tile in a mottled tan and green. The walls were yellow tan. I had opened a shallow drawer in the heavy table and found it full of dead cigar stubs and burned matches. Distant sounds of traffic. Radio rock in the distance, on a cheap set. Bird sounds. The room was too warm. I improvised a pillow by rolling my shoes in my shirt, stretched out on the bench, and dozed off.

  “Come on,” said the deputy with the steel glasses. I stretched and yawned, rolled the stiffness out of my shoulders, worked my way into the shirt and shoes.

  “You got a name?” I asked him.

  “Billy. Billy Cable.”

  “From around here?”

  “All my life. He’s waiting on us. Come on.”

  He directed me ahead of him to different stairs than I had used coming up. “He said to take you the long way around.”

  The long way around included a short side trip into the county jail. Billy said this was a brand-new part of it, new just three years ago. And these were the maximum security cells. Very bright overhead lights. About five by eight, with a bunk, a sink, a toilet. Meyer sat on the low bunk, hunched forward, head bowed, forearms braced on his knees. The thick,
slow, half-clotted blood dripped from his mouth to the cement between his bare feet, into a small puddle as big around as a saucer.

  I said his name. He looked up slowly, tilting his head to bring the one slit of one eye to bear. The crushed mouth said, “I still don’t like any part of it, McGee.”

  As I turned on Billy he moved back swiftly, hand on the holster. “Easy now. Easy,” he said.

  “Why, goddammit!”

  “You better ask him about that when you see him, McGee.”

  Hyzer’s office was austere. Bare walls, bare desktop, blue carpeting. Efficient air conditioning made it very chilly. I was directed to a straight chair placed about six feet back from the edge of Hyzer’s desk, which put me in almost the exact center of the room. A very large deputy sat on another straight chair placed against the wall just inside the door. He looked vaguely familiar to me, but I couldn’t come up with the association. Big freckled arms folded. Belly sagging over the belt. Broad, soft, drowsy face.

  When I was seated, Sheriff Norman Hyzer said, “This session is being recorded on magnetic tape. When it is transcribed some minor editing will be done to eliminate repetitions. If you have any question regarding the accuracy of the transcription, you will be permitted to listen to the pertinent portion of the recording to satisfy yourself.”

  “May I make a comment for the record?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “My friend Meyer is a reputable economist internationally known in his field. He is a gentle person, without malice or enemies, or police record of any kind. We planned to cooperate with you, Sheriff. Get it settled and be on our way. But now you have bought the whole package, Hyzer. I am going to personally nail you to the wall, if it takes five years. From now on I’m coming at you. I’m bringing it to you.”

  The big deputy sighed and belched. Hyzer opened his pocket notebook. “First interrogation of Travis McGee. Fourteen-forty hours. April 24. Pritchard monitoring tape. Sturnevan witnessing interrogation. Now then. From whom did you hear that Frank Baither had been, or was about to be, released from Raiford State Prison, and, to the best of your recollection, tell me the date on which you received this information?”

  “The only previous time in my life I ever heard the name Frank Baither was when you said that name this morning in front of Al’s service station, Hyzer.”

  “Was there a third man with you last night?”

  “You’re playing your game, Hyzer. The officer of the law. The professional. If you were a professional instead of a swamp county ham actor, you’d find out who we are, where we were yesterday, and where we were heading. You’d verify the girl running across the road. You’d make a couple of phone calls. Not you. No, sir. Don’t confuse yourself with logic. Net result is you aren’t going to play sheriff much longer.”

  “An unidentified woman ran across the road. We found the place where she crouched in the ditch. Bare footprints in the mud. A place where she braced herself, making an imprint of the knuckles of her right hand. We used the skid marks to locate the area. Sooner or later we’ll locate her body.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “She almost got across, but you swerved and probably hit her.”

  “Now why did I do that, Sheriff?”

  “Because she was with Baither and saw you and got away from you and you people had to hunt her down.”

  “With an old Rolls, for God’s sake?”

  “And you lost control when a tire blew.”

  “Hyzer, you are having dreams and visions and fantasies. I will tell you who to phone at Lake Passkokee. I will pay for the call. He is an old friend. We went to the wedding of his eldest daughter. He has a fish camp. We went bass fishing. There were rods in that car of mine. And three fresh-cleaned bass on ice.”

  “Deputy Billy Cable says they were fresh enough.”

  “Will you phone?”

  “This is a small county, McGee. And I am in a small job at small pay. But I am not a fool. Four years ago you people, along with Frank Baither, planned that job down to the last small detail. And there was just as much at stake now as then. More, because this time you had to kill one you knew of, and one you didn’t. First things first. When the time comes to dismantle your alibi, it will fall apart. You know it and I know it. Please stop making speeches. Answer my questions. Was there a third man with you last night?”

  “Meyer and I were alone.”

  “Did Meyer finish him off with the ice pick or did you?”

  “Hyzer, the car went into the ditch, and we got out of it by great good fortune, and we walked all the way down to the Tamiami Trail to that station where you found us.”

  “That is most unlikely, McGee. We had an anonymous call at one in the morning. A man, whispering to disguise his voice. He said Frank Baither phoned him every night at midnight, and if some night there was no call, and no one answered at the Baither place, he was to call the law. He went out there and found Baither still taped to that chair. From that time on I had cars on the road all night. You would have been stopped and questioned.”

  “There is very damned little traffic on that Route 112 after dark. And when we saw lights coming, we got out of sight.”

  “Now why would you do that?” He smiled for the first time. I think it was a smile. The corners of his mouth went up about a sixteenth of an inch.

  So I told him about the nut in the old truck who’d tried to pot us from the truck window, and thought he’d gotten one of us, thought he’d scragged somebody named Hutch, then tried to dicker with the survivor, somebody named Orville. I said it happened about one hour and four miles south of where I had put Miss Agnes into the canal.

  “Describe the truck.”

  “An old Ford pickup, rough, noisy, and beat. I think it was red. A junker. Not worth licensing.”

  He slowly turned the pages of his pocket notebook. “So, being the innocent law-abiding citizens you people claim to be, you made no attempt to report somebody trying to kill you, either at the time or this morning to either Officer Nagle or to me.”

  “Sheriff, neither of us saw the man. The plate was too dirty and the light too weak to read the number. You know your own county better than I do. There are probably a lot of fine citizens living back in the boonies off that road. And there are some very rough ones too, native-born swamp rats and poachers, and people that came a long way to find a place where they’re not likely to be found. A long time ago I spent one weekend here in Cypress City, and after I saw how Saturday night was shaping up, I went back to the motel room and put my cash money in the Gideon and went back out with one ten-dollar bill and had what you could call a memorable evening. I don’t really much care if your people kill each other, Hyzer. We were just making certain they didn’t kill us and then feel apologetic because the dead bodies didn’t turn out to be Hutch and Orville. There wasn’t any phone booth handy after that clown drove off in his junk truck. I thought of a way I could attract official attention. We could have walked back four miles and I could have dived down and gotten my tow chain out of the tool compartment and heaved it up over the power lines. Then pretty soon we would have had the use of the CB radio in the Florida Power and Light truck that would show up. I thought of it, and I thought of making a neighborly call at the next house we came to. But I didn’t like either of those ideas, Sheriff.”

  “McGee, you had bad luck, didn’t you? When you lost that car in the canal, you went back to Frank Baither’s place and tried to use his old Ford truck, but the battery was too far gone and you couldn’t get it started. Then, while you were walking, you did some thinking. Somebody was going to spot that car sooner or later, and it could be traced to you, and that was a risk you couldn’t accept. So you had to put something together that sounded good, and get Al Storey to hoist it out of the canal and tow it in.”

  “Hyzer, you are one dumb, blind, stubborn man.”

  “You have a good act, McGee. So does your partner. Aren’t you wondering, a little, why you can’t sell it to me?”r />
  “More than a little.”

  “Then there must be a little more bad luck along with what you already know about. Bad luck or judgment. What could you have forgotten? Think about it.”

  I thought. “You must have something you like. I don’t know what it could be. I will tell you one thing. Don’t depend on it. Because whatever it is, it isn’t going to prove what you think it proves, no matter how good it looks.”

  “You never saw or heard of Frank Baither in your life?”

  “No.”

  “You were never inside his house?”

  “Never.”

  “I am going to describe an exhibit to you. It will be a part of the file I am going to turn over to the State’s attorney. It is an empty envelope addressed to you, at Bahia Mar, date-stamped a week ago, April 17. On the back of it, possibly in your hand, are some notes about highway numbers and street names. It had been folded twice, and had been immersed in water. Do you recognize it from the description?”

  “I think so. Yes. I don’t know where you’re going with it, though. Jimmy Ames phoned me last Saturday and invited us to Betsy’s wedding. He said that the road I’d normally take was closed, that a bridge was out. He gave me directions. I reached down into the wastebasket near the phone and took an envelope out and wrote down the directions. Get hold of him at Jimmy’s Fish Camp. He’ll verify it.”

  “When the call came in about the Baither murder, Deputy Cable phoned me at my home. I got dressed and drove to the Baither place. I supervised the investigation. After the county medical examiner had authorized the removal of the body, I posted Deputy Arnstead there to make certain nobody entered the premises before a more thorough daylight search could be made. I was on my way to participate in that search when the call came from Officer Nagle. After he described you and told me about where your car was, and said you had walked all the way to the Trail, I had no choice but to bring you in for questioning. I returned at eleven-fifteen to the Baither place and, with Deputy Arnstead, completed the search of the house and the area. The envelope was found on the floor of the room where Baither died.”