The Long Lavender Look Page 7

“He is going to frown on meddling. I will be right back inside his hotel if I try that.”

  “If you’re clumsy, sure. But I have a lot of confidence in your discretion, and if you do slip, I’ll be right back to pry you out again. Sibelius never sleeps. Think of it this way. You’ve agreed to help me out on the pretrial investigation.”

  “I don’t have a license. I don’t want a license. I’m tired of Cypress County already.”

  “Why should you have a license? For what? You’ve gone on my staff payroll as a researcher.”

  I took the folded money out of my pants pocket and counted it. “Nine hundred and forty?”

  “Let me know when you need more, pal.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Think of it this way. Without Sibelius, you’d still be inside. And so would Meyer. You called and I came over. Am I charging you? Would I charge a friend for a little bit of a favor? What do you think I am? Greedy or something? All you have to do is stir around, talk about Frank Baither, buy a drink here and there, and tell people the truth about me. Don’t overdo it. Just tell them I’m the greatest criminal lawyer around. Is that so hard?”

  “You are something else, Sibelius. By the way, how did you get Arnstead to change his story?”

  Lennie shrugged. “He had to be lying. If he wasn’t, you were. Last night I came across the interesting information that Lew Arnstead is the number one stud in Cypress County. It’s more obsession than hobby. I straightened out the timetable. You were at the gas station when Storey opened up at twenty to seven. At about seven-thirty you and Meyer left with Hyzer and Cable. Because you stopped while your car was being pulled out, you didn’t get to the jail until about eight-fifteen. Arnstead was turning out to have a very long shift. At eight-thirty he went into the Baither place and used the phone to call in and ask if he was going to be relieved. Hyzer told the communications clerk to tell Lew Arnstead to stay right there and that he would be at the Baither place about eleven o’clock, and after it was checked over, he could go off duty. Ask the logical questions, McGee.”

  “Let me see now. He was expecting Hyzer earlier. Then Hyzer changed his schedule by coming to take a look at us, and take us in. So he had something lined up, and he wanted to be relieved so he could take care of it. But he found out he had another two hours to wait, plus the time it would take for the daylight search. And he had the use of the phone. Sorry, honey, I can’t make it, so why don’t you come on over here?”

  “Inside Baither’s house?”

  “I … I wouldn’t think so. Not with Hyzer due to prowl the place.”

  “How about a narrow old mattress on the slab floor of the pump house about thirty feet from the back porch?”

  “Handy.”

  “So Hyzer took my suggestion and had Lew Arnstead brought in, and asked him to explain why he was in the pump house with a woman at nine o’clock Friday morning instead of keeping an eye on the house as ordered. Arnstead tried a lot of footwork but Hyzer pushed until he broke through. Arnstead got very virtuous about refusing to name the woman. He said he was with her about ten minutes, and he could see the entrance road from the pump house. She arrived and left by car. She was an old friend. So while you are churning around, see if you can come up with an I.D. on the lady, pal. She could have been sent in as a distraction while somebody planted the envelope. A cub scout could unlock that house with a kitchen match.”

  “While I’m churning around. Anything for a friend.”

  A redheaded boy in greasy khakis came out and brought the gas ticket for Lennie to sign, then untied the aircraft and pulled the chocks away. I handed Meyer’s and Lennie’s duffle up. Lennie cranked it up and trundled off to the end of the marl strip. He warmed it up there, and the boy and I stood and watched him make his run and pluck it off and climb over the cabbage palms and live oaks, heading east over the swamps and pasturelands. Good luck, Meyer. No bleeding inside the head, please. It is too valuable and kindly a head.

  So I got into my white Buick with the black plastic leather upholstery and the stereo FM radio, and the power brakes, power windows, power steering, air, and super-something transmission, and took half again as long getting back to town as Lennie had taken coming out.

  Smile, McGee. Show your teeth. Honk at the lassies, because here it is nearly one o’clock Saturday afternoon and you don’t know where they keep the action. Not the kind you’ve had so far. The other kind.

  Seven

  The White Ibis Motor Inn had a little symbol on the signs and the registration card indicating it was one of the creatures of a subsection of one of the more ubiquitous conglomerates. So they could afford to operate it at a percentage of occupancy that would hustle an independent owner into bankruptcy.

  Some precise fellow in some distant city had used the standard software program for site location, and fed into the program the regional data for population movement and growth, planned and probable highway construction, land cost, ad-valorem tax rates, pay scales, and the IBM 360 had said to build one on Alternate 112 west of Cypress City and operate it at a loss until the increased demand for the transient beds would put it into the black.

  Teletype network for instant reservations, approved cards for instant credit, a woman at the desk with instant, trained, formal politeness, who assigned me to Unit 114 and made a little x on a map of the layout, and drew a little line to show me where to drive so that I would end up in front of the x, in the proper diagonal parking slot. She looked slightly distressed when I said I had no idea how long I would be staying. People should know, so they can keep the records neat.

  I closed myself into the silence of Unit 114, unpacked, and took a better shower. Stretched out on the bed. Things to do, but no will to do them. A listlessness. A desire to disassociate, to be uninvolved. The fashion is to call it an identity crisis. I was not doing things very well lately. A juvenile, big-mouth performance for the sheriff, windy threats signifying nothing.

  Somebody had made a very cute try to get the two of us involved in a private and violent nastiness, but Lennie’s gifts of persuasion and the thoroughness of Norman Hyzer had collapsed the improvised structure.

  All cages are frightening. And sometimes a little time spent in a small cage merely gives you the feeling that you have been let out into a bigger cage, the one you have built for yourself over the years. The delusion of total freedom of will is the worst cage of all. And it gets cold in there. As cold, perhaps, as inside Miss Agnes under ten feet of canal water, if Meyer hadn’t clumsied me out of there. Or cold as the grave would be had Frank Baither hit me in the face with that first shot.

  With enormous effort I forced myself to reach the phone book, look up the Sheriff’s Department, and phone in my temporary address to the dispatcher. I got dressed and got into the white car and went looking for Johnny’s Main Street Service. I found it down by the produce sheds and the truck depots.

  There was diesel fuel, and a half dozen big stalls for truck repair work. There was a paint shop and a body shop, and a side lot piled with cars which had quite evidently slain their masters in a crunch of blood, tin, and glass. I saw the big blue-and-white tow truck. There was no shop work going on, the whole area somnolent in the perfect April afternoon. An old man sat in the small office, reading a true-crime magazine. A scrawny girl in jeans and a halter was slowly spreading paste wax on a metallic green MG.

  Among a line of cars against a side fence Miss Agnes stood out like a dowager among teenagers. I got out of the Buick and walked over to her. A large young man about nineteen came angling across the hardpan from the shop area. Low-slung jeans and a torn and grease-blackened T-shirt. Thick black glossy hair that fell to his big shoulders.

  “You Mr. McGee?” When I nodded, he said, “I’m Ron Hatch. My father is Johnny Hatch. He owns this place. He didn’t want me to fool with that Rolls on account of on an impounded car, we’re stuck with it. But I couldn’t stand having it just sit. So he said it had to be on my own time. I just finished with it maybe an hour ago. I pulled the tank
and the head, got it all kerosened out, blew the fuel lines, got the ignition system all dry, coil and all. The battery took a charge. That tire is done, and I guess you’ll have to check around Miami to find a Dunlop that’ll go on that rim.”

  “I’m grateful you didn’t let it sit, Ron.”

  “Hell, it’s a great old brute. All that hand-lapping and custom machining and fitting. The bushings are like perfect, Mr. McGee. But there’s this problem.” He had the big leathery banana-fingered hand of the born artisan. He pulled a complex fitting out of the pocket of the jeans. “See where this is broke off fresh? It maybe happened when you hit the bank, going down. It’s the fitting out at the end of the steering arm, front left. I put a clamp on there for temporary, just enough to baby it out here to park, but you couldn’t drive it. There’s no machine shop I know of can make one on account of right in here, and here, they’re not standard threads, so they wouldn’t have the taps the right size, and it isn’t something you can cast because it takes a lot of strain.”

  “I’ve got a mechanic friend in Palm Beach at a place where they stock Rolls parts from the year one.”

  “Maybe he’ll have to have this to match it up right. Meanwhile … maybe I could do some body and fender work.”

  “What do I owe you so far?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “The way it works, garages have to bid for the county contract. So it’s seventy-five dollars for towing, and ten dollars a day for it while it was impounded. With the tax that’s a hundred and nine twenty. Once we got word this morning from the sheriff’s office we could release the car to you, then the ten a day stopped.”

  “And if they’d kept me in there for ninety days?”

  “Then … if people don’t want to pay the storage, like if the car isn’t worth it anyway, Dad wholesales them for what he can get. The word around was that you and your friend had surely killed Frank Baither and you got caught, and that’s why my father said it didn’t make any sense working on your car. But … I just couldn’t stand seeing it sit the way it was, machinery like that. I mean I did it on my own and if you figure you don’t want to pay anything over the towing and storage, that’s okay.”

  I separated two bills from the packet Lennie had handed me. A fifty and a hundred. “Get me a receipted bill on the towing and storage, please. And put the rest against your hours and we’ll settle up when you’re done.”

  “Body work?”

  “You wouldn’t use a filler, would you?”

  “You better be kidding.” And I knew how he’d do it, banging the dings out with the rubber mallet, sanding, burnishing, smoothing, using a little lead sparingly where it couldn’t be helped, sandling down a couple of coats of primer, then using a top-quality body paint, sanding between coats.

  “Do you expect to be able to match that paint, Ron?”

  “It’s a terrible paint job anyway. I’d rather do the whole thing. What I’d like to do it is yellow in a lot of coats of a good gold flake lacquer with a lot of rubbing between coats.”

  “Sorry, but it has to stay blue. Sentimental reasons.”

  He shrugged. “That same shade?”

  “Not exact.”

  He smiled for the first time. He looked relieved. “I can get it looking fine. Wait and see. I hope you get that fitting soon. I can’t really fine tune it unless I can open it up some on the road. On the lift isn’t the same.”

  The old man in the office came out and bawled, “Ronnie! Come get the phone!”

  The boy took off, big lope, long strides. And the immediate image was superimposed on memory. The determined look of the girl, running in the night, the dark hair flying, bare knees lifting. An elusive similarity, like a family resemblance. No more than that, because the girl had been all girl, and this runner was totally male. I find I have one small hang-up regarding young males with masculine features and shoulder-length locks. When they have a mustache or beard or both to go with the hair, they make a fine romantic image, an echo of a distant gallantry, of the old names like Sumter, The Wilderness, Sherman’s March, Custer. But when, like the Beatles and Ron Hatch, there is no beard or mustache, then I have to get past the mental roadblock of recalling too many Army nurses I have known.

  I wondered if Mister Norm had gotten a line on the running girl. It would be too much of a miracle of coincidence for her not to be involved in some way. Involved, possibly, from the beginning. The very young girl playing waitress, in a blond wig, the weekend afternoon when they had mickeyed the money-truck men.

  Or maybe she was a decoy, a diversion, setting Frank Baither up so that Orville and Hutch could get at him. Or Baither’s woman, local or import, sweet young flesh after over forty months of doing without. The fairly safe guess was that she was woods-wise, and she thought, rightly or wrongly, that somebody was tracking her down in the night, and she used the rush and rumble of my car to cover the sound as she went crashing through the weeds and brush on the far side of the road. Misjudged the distance. Cut it too close. But why the hell not behind the car?

  I was looking inside the car when Ron came back. It had been cleaned out thoroughly, mud, weeds, water, and everything else.

  “Oh, I forgot. All your stuff, the fishing gear and tools and so on, they’re locked in a storage room here. I wrote a list of everything. Things disappear. Maybe some stuff is gone already, before I wrote it down. You want to check?”

  “Later, I guess.”

  “Nobody thought you’d get out. That way it isn’t so much like stealing.”

  “People around here think that when Sheriff Hyzer grabs somebody, he’s always right? Is that it?”

  His gaze was direct for a moment, and then drifted away. “They say he’s a good sheriff. They say he’s fair.”

  “Thanks again for going ahead with my car. I’ll be around on Monday.”

  So I drove around and about, getting the feel of the town and the area, had a late lunch in a red plastic national franchise selling the Best Sandwiches Anytime Anywhere, and had a medium bad sandwich and very bad coffee, served in haste by a drab, muttering woman.

  On the way in, I had picked up the local morning paper. Eight pages. The Cypress Call & Journal. The masthead said it was owned by Jasson Communications. They own a few dozen small-city papers in Florida and South Georgia. Guaranteed circulation of five thousand seven hundred and forty, by the last ABC figures. It had the minimum wire service on national and international, and very exhaustive coverage of service club and social club doings. Typical of the Jasson operation. Cut-rate syndicated columnists, ranging from medium right to far right. Lots of city and county legal notices. Detailed coverage of farm produce prices.

  I found myself on the bottom right corner of page two.

  HELD FOR QUESTIONING

  Two Fort Lauderdale men were taken into custody Friday morning by the County Sheriff’s Department for questioning in connection with the torture murder of Frank Baither at his residence on State Road 72 Thursday night after it was learned that the vehicle in which they were riding had gone into the drainage canal sometime Thursday night not far from the Baither house.

  And that was it. Local yellow journalism. Sensationalism. Who, what, why, when, where, and how. Exquisite detail.

  So after my late and sorry lunch I went around to the Call & Journal. It was printed on the ground floor of a cement-block building on Princeton Street. The editorial and business offices occupied the other two floors.

  According to the masthead, the managing editor was one Foster Goss. Enclosed in glass in the far corner of the lazy newsroom. A couple of hefty women pecking vintage typewriters. A crickety octogenarian on the copy desk. A couple of slack young men murmuring into phones, heels on the cheap tin desks. Offstage frantic clackety-whack of the broad tape.

  Foster Goss was a fat, fading redhead, with thick lenses, saffroned fingers, blue shirt with wet armpits. He waved at a chair and said, “Minute,” and hunched over the yellow copy paper once again, making his marks with soft black lead. H
e finished, reached, rapped sharply on the glass with a big gold seal ring. A mini-girl got up and came in and took the yellow sheets, gave me a hooded, speculative glance, and strolled out. Foster Goss watched her rear until the half-glass door swung shut, then creaked back in his chair, picked one cigarette out of the shirt-pocket pack, and lit it.

  “Meyer or McGee?” he said.

  “McGee. I want to complain about all the invasion of privacy, all the intimate details about my life and times.”

  Half smile. “Sure you do.”

  “So I came around to give you an exclusive, all about local police brutality and so forth.”

  “Gee whiz. Golly and wow.”

  “Mr. Goss, you give me the impression that somewhere, sometime, you really did work on a newspaper.”

  His smile was gentle and reflective. “On some dandies, fella. I even had a Nieman long ago. But you know how it is. Drift out of the stormy seas into safe haven.”

  “Just for the hell of it, Mr. Goss, what would happen if you printed more than Mister Norm would like to have you print?”

  “My goodness gracious, man, don’t you realize that it has been the irresponsible press which has created community prejudice against defendants in criminal actions? As there is absolutely no chance of anyone running successfully against Sheriff Hyzer, he doesn’t have to release any information about how good he is. And very damned good he is indeed. So good that County Judge Stan Bowley has a sort of standing order about pretrial publicity. So the sheriff would read the paper and come over and pick me up and take me to Stan and he would give me a sad smile and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Foster, you know better than that,’ and he would fine me five hundred bucks for contempt.”

  “Which wouldn’t stand up.”

  “I know that! So I go to the Jasson brothers and I say, look, I’ve got this crusade I’ve got to go on, and I know the paper is turning a nice dollar, and I know you nice gentlemen are stashing away Jasson Communications stock in my retirement account every year, but I’ve got to strike a blow for a free press. Then they want to know who I am striking the blow against, and I tell them it is the sheriff, and they ask me if he is corrupt and inefficient, and I say he might be the best sheriff in the state, who took a very very rough county and tamed it without using any extralegal methods.”