A Purple Place for Dying (2 page)

"Or you could just take off with this Webb." She made a face. "I threatened that. He said

he would never divorce me for desertion. He said he would send people to find me and bring me back. And those people would give John Webb a whipping for wife-stealing. John isn't very strong, physically. No. He has to want to let me go."

She stood up and paced restlessly. She had a lot of vitality, a lot of gloss and bounce and directed energy. She didn't look like the kind you can quell and keep and humble.

"Why would he take your money?"

, "I think I have that figured out. I heard some rumors. When I was about fifteen, beginning about then, he had some very bad years. He's always been bold, in a business way. I guess he got too bold. He over extended himself in too many directions, so that when things started to go bad for him, he didn't have enough money to move around. So he had to dig into mine to save himself. Maybe he thought he would pay it back, but he had to take more and more of it, and do a lot of shifty work before he could stem the tide and start to get healthy again. I guess by then it seemed easier to fake a lot of things and close out the estate rather than try to pay it back. And the best way to cover it all up was to marry me. When there was a chance of marrying me, he took it. I don't think he ever really wanted to be married. He isn't that sort of a man. It was something he had to do to protect himself. I was in ghastly shape, and I jumped at the chance. During the years when… it seemed pretty good, I never did really have the status of a wife. He didn't change his way of life at all. Or ever seem to take me seriously."

"I just don't see where I have any approach I can use."

"Mr. McGee, he didn't pull these tricky things in a complete vacuum, you know. He does make enemies. Somebody must have enough on him to… to be able to put pressure on him. And I don't think Jass is as casual and confident about this as he would like to have me believe. I'm pretty sure people have been following me. I think I do worry him a little. I suppose it would look bad if the newspapers picked it up-Jass Yeoman's wife demanding an accounting of what happened to her father's money. I guess he must have been worried that maybe I had squirreled away some of my allowance."

"What makes you think that?"

"I had a nice little Mexican maid for five years. She quit six months ago and got married. Two men went to her and questioned her for hours, mostly about my personal finances, how much I spent and on what and so on. They claimed to be some sort of accountants. Afterwards she worried about it for a few days, and then came and told me. That happened just two months ago. I had… an unusual relationship with Dolores. We confided in each other. She was very dear to me."

"And you think that because your husband might be worried, he might be susceptible to some kind of pressure."

"If I knew what to do, Mr. McGee, I would have tried to do it myself. I even thought I might blackmail my own husband. I hired a man to find out about other women. I guess he was clumsy. The police threw him in jail for three nights running, for little things like spitting on the sidewalk. He gave up."

"I just don't know," I said.

She asked me to follow her. We went out to the barren edge of the dropoff. The crumpled hills around us were red-brown, with little patches of stubborn green. There was a clump of wind-twisted pines nearby. She pointed west. The range we were on cascaded down and flattened out, and across the semi-desert plain, distorted by heat shimmer, misty in the distance, we could see the city of Esmerelda, pale cubes rising out of a cluttered smear. She pointed out U.S. 87 angling toward the city from the northeast, about four miles away and three or four thousand feet lower than we were. I could make out two big silver transport trucks crawling along amid the swifter beetles of private cars.

She stood bare headed, half facing me. "I'm thirty-two years old, Mr. McGee. There's been a lot of wasted time and wasted years. I'm grateful to him, in a way. But I want out. I'm the captive princess, and that's the castle down there. Jass is the king. I can have a little freedom of motion, as long as I ride back to the castle walls at nightfall. Corny I guess. But when you are in love you get some romantic images. And I'm not too ancient to cry myself to sleep. I must have help."

She stood at my right, half turned to face me, the sun heat of the still day misting her forehead and her upper lip. She wanted the answer. And I frowned in silence, searching for the words to tell her that this was not my sort of thing.

Suddenly she plunged forward, her shoulder brushing me and knocking me back. She went with her head tilted back, and she landed face down on the baked dirt and the edges of stone, and slid at least six inches after she struck, without having lifted her hands to try to break her fall. The noise that started the fall was a curiously ugly noise. It was a dull sound of impact, like the sound of burying a hatchet into a soft and rotten stump. She lay without twitch, without sound, totally soft and flattened. I heard then the distant ringing bark of a heavy rifle, a ka-rang, echoing in the still rock hills of the windless day. There was too much open space between me and the cabin. I ran in a very fast and very random pattern toward the pines fifty feet away, skidded around them and fell, clutching a twisted root, my legs hanging half over the edge of the drop. A dislodged stone clattered and bounced once, then hit long seconds later and far away. I swallowed the gagging lump that was the clear visual memory of the wet hole punched high in her spine, through the silk blouse, dead center, about two inches below where her neck joined her good shoulders. A big caliber. Plenty of impact. Foot pounds of energy is a product of mass and velocity. Good velocity, for the sound to come that much later. A full second? Less. Five hundred yards? I pulled myself forward and peered around the trunk of the tree. An empty jumble of hills over there, a thousand crouching-places.

I had to settle myself down to a rational appraisal of his luck. He had the whole torso to go for. Provided it wasn't some halfwit potting at a twig. That much slug, in shoulder or hip, would do the job. Even if he'd gotten the thigh or the upper arm, my chance of getting help to her in time would have been slim. He had exploded that big pipe that held all the circuits. Massive hydrostatic pressure on the spinal fluid, blowing the brain dark in a microsecond.

She had died without knowing she was dead.

I looked at her, my eyes at ground level. The top of her head was toward me. Once I had seen a fence-jumping mare killed by a pickup truck. The corner post of the windshield had hit her behind the ear and snapped her neck, and she had gone down in the same utterly final and boneless way.

I watched the crumpled country of that neighbor mountain, saw nothing, heard nothing. In the silence I thought I heard a car start, a long long way off.

The princess wouldn't be making it back to the castle tonight.

When I got tired of waiting, I scrambled up and ran for the cabin in the way Uncle had taught me once upon a time. I dived into the cool interior, and let my precious treasured flesh unpucker. Her empty glass was on the hearth, pink lipstick on the rim. The leather cushion still bore the imprint of that round behind. I saw battered binoculars hanging on a nail. Eight power. Navy issue. The left lens was knocked out of true. The right was good enough. It showed me the flies with the bright green back-ends scurrying around on her silk shirt.

Her leather purse was on the chair with the jacket and cowgirl hat. I found eighty-nine dollars in it. I took the eighty. I put my bottle back in the suitcase, went to the doorway, took three deep breaths, then went running for the road.

I ran until I was down around the first curve. I watched my fingers shake as I lit a cigarette. And then I went swinging down the road.

I wondered if it had been her car I had heard starting up. I had another idea. I left my suitcase on the road and climbed to the top of the slide. It took me about five minutes to find the place-scorched blackened rock and a faint stink of explosive. All somebody had to do was pick a likely crack, wedge a couple of sticks in there, and, tumble a few tons of rock onto the road. Why? To make her leave the car there and walk in? Why? So somebody could take the car? Why?

I ran out of answers, and picked up my suitcase and continued on down the mountain. I thought how curiously merciless it is to kill a provocative woman. They aren't supposed to be killed. No one is supposed to render useless all that sweet flesh and heat and honeyed membrane.

But dead she was, and dead she would forever be. So I occupied myself with devising and double-checking a reasonable story. After I had let myself out the weathered gate, I was on narrow, pitted concrete, a small road which went nowhere very important, and was in no hurry to get there. I headed back the way we had come. I estimated it another two miles, but it could be further. I had hopes of being picked up. But the four cars that passed me, going my way, went by so quickly I couldn't even get a decent glance at the people in them.

At last I came to the vaguely-remembered crossroads, to a dusty gas station and lunchroom, surrounded by broken pieces of automobile. A man sat in the shade in a chair tilted against the front of the gas station. I did not disturb his siesta.

I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.

"I just want to use the phone."

She didn't answer. She just let herself plump back down into the chair.

"What's this place called? So I can direct somebody"

"Garry's at Cotton Corners."

I got out my dime and looked in the front of the book. Police emergency, dial 119. "Sheriff's department. Deputy London."

"I'm at Garry's place at Cotton Corners. I want to report a shooting and the theft of a motor vehicle."

"It happen there?"

"No. But I can take you to where it did happen."

"What's your name?"

"McGee. Travis McGee." I was aware of the rigid attention of the girl behind me.

"I can have a car there in about ten minutes. You wait right – there. You got a description of the stolen vehicle?"

"A white Sunbeam Alpine convertible. Local plates."

"Know the number?"

"No."

"Driver?"

"I have no idea."

"Where did it happen?"

"In the hills about five or six miles from here. I walked out. So it happened well over an hour ago, closer to two hours."

"Who got hurt?"

"A woman named Mrs. Jasper Yeoman. She's dead."

"Mrs. Yeoman! Good God almighty! You wait there."

I hung up. The stocky girl looked adoringly at me. "Wow!" she said. "How about that! Son of a bitch!"

"How about a Coke?"

"Sure. Coming up. Hey, what happened? Who shot her?"

"Do you know who she is?"

"Who doesn't? She's bought gas here lots of times. Her old man, he owned half Esmerelda County. She was a stuck-up bitch. Who did it?"

"I better let the police ask the questions."

"Did you see it happen?"

"Easy on the ice, please."

She banged the glass down in front of me and went trotting out. I heard her jabbering at the man who'd been asleep. They both came back in. He was younger than I had thought. He was dried brown, like the rock lizards.

He looked at me as if we had just shared some obscene joke. "That big bitch is dead for sure, ha?"

God, the pleasure they take in it, the excited joy in finding out that death can chop down the tall ones too, can fell the money tree. They both looked at me as if I'd brought them candy, and I told them she was dead indeed.

"You not from around here," he said. It wasn't a question. "She was old Cube Fox's daughter. My daddy worked for Cube for a time. Cube didn't marry until he was past thirty. She was his only legal child, but you can bet your ass there's anyway forty grownup people running around this end of the state with Cube's blue eyes, and the rest of them Mex. Cube was plain death on Mex gals. He talked the language good. Cube and Jass Yeoman, they used to run together. My daddy said when Jass married Cube's daughter, he bet Cube was spinning in that grave saying curses to wilt the grass overhead. Who killed her, Mister?"

"I'm a stranger around here."

A car rolled up and somebody gave the siren one little touch so that it made a low fading growl.

We went out. It was a pale gray sedan with an obscure decal on the door. Two men in crisp faded khaki got out. They wore television hats and gun belts, silver badges. Nothing seems authentic any more. In the retirement villages the old coots from Upper Berth, Ohio, wear Marshal Dillon pants and squint themselves into authentic weather wrinkles in the bake of the sun.

"'Lo, Arnie," the bigger one said. "Hi, Homer. Hi. Dave."

Homer stuck his thumbs in his belt, indicated me with a jerk of his head and said, "You heard him on the phone, didn't you? You and Sis?"

"Sure did. And if it isn't the goddamdest…"

"Arnie, you or Sis might get on that phone there and pick up one of them ten or twenty-five dollars awards from the Eagle or from KEAG-TV. Then we'd sure as hell find you are about four feet shy of having the legal set-back here. And you never heard of the sign ordinance. And the county will find out you got a dirty grill and dirty glasses. And all that junk around looks to me like an attractive nuisance."

"Homer, if you want me and Sis to keep shut about this, all you got to do is say so."

"Arnie, if you or Sis should run nine miles into the scrub and whisper this to a gopher, I'll have you working the roads and Sis on laundry, so help me." He turned his back on them and said, "McGee?"

"That's right."

"I'm Hardy and this here is Dave Carlyle. We'll wait far the Sherf. He'll be right along. He'll be the one to ask questions. Meanwhile, hold onto the back of your neck with both hands."

I did as told. The search was quick and professional. Belt, belly, groin, armpits, hip pockets and ankles.

"Got anything with you?"

"Suitcase inside."

"Bring it out, Dave."

The smaller and older deputy brought it out. He put it on the hood of the sedan, opened it, pawed through it, closed it up.

"Identification now," Homer Hardy said. "Don't give me your wallet. Just a driver's license, if you have one."

He put it on the hood of the car, copied information into his notebook, handed it back. "Thank you, Mr. McGee."

"You're welcome."

"Hairy comes," Dave Carlyle said. A dusty new station wagon came at high speed, slewed in and stopped in a thick cloud of fine dust. Homer turned to the couple and said, "Get on in there, you."

They went reluctantly. The Sheriff got out of his car. He was younger than his two deputies. He had a massive chest, squared-off jaw, bull neck, the look of the one-time athlete in one of the contact sports. He wore a faded White Sox baseball cap, a blue and white checked sports shirt worn outside his gray slacks. I guessed he was growing a little belly and made it less conspicuous by wearing his shirts outside his pants.

"Well?" he said to Homer.

"This man is Travis D. McGee, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He's clean, and there's just clothes and toilet stuff and one opened bottle of bourbon in his bag there. No objection at all to search. I put a lid on Arnie and Sis and it will stick. We haven't asked this man a thing, so you know as much right now as we do about the rest of it."

"He'll come with me and you follow along," the Sheriff said. Dave put my suitcase in the station wagon. I got in with the Sheriff. He told me his name was Buckelberry… He said it without a smile. I wondered if he had gotten all that neck and shoulders by objecting to any cracks about his name.

"Where do we go?"

"Turn here and go about three miles and there's a gate…"

"Up at the old cabin, eh? I know the place." He started up quickly. "Who shot her?"

"I don't know. It was a sniper. A heavy rifle at long range, Sheriff. It hit her high in the spine, from the rear and killed her instantly. I left her where she fell. I couldn't see anybody. I couldn't help her in any way. And I didn't exactly want to give some nut a chance at me if he was still around."

"When did it happen?"

"I didn't think to look at my watch until I would estimate ten minutes had passed. My best guess would be the shot was fired at two twenty-five. I took cover. I waited around for about thirty minutes. Then I came down the road to where we'd left her car."

"The road goes to the cabin."

"Not with a rock slide across it. We had to leave the car a half mile down the road and walk. When I got back the car was gone. I remembered noticing she'd left the key in it when we left it there. I walked out. I couldn't get a ride. I walked all the way to Cotton Corners. There was no way I could get in touch any sooner than I did."

"Stray shot?"

"It's a possibility, I suppose."

"You hear the shot?"

"Yes. The slug knocked her down very quick and hard, and I heard it just as she came to rest, so I would guess it was less than a second later."

We had come to the gate. The other car stopped behind us. Dave hustled ahead and got the gate and left it open. We headed up the gravel road.

"Now where do you fit in this, Mr. McGee?"

"Through a mutual friend. Fran Weaver. Mrs. Hyde Weaver, a widow, an old friend of Mona Yeoman. She visited Mona a while back. I've wanted a place where I could complete a project, and have total privacy, and keep expenses down at the same time. Fran suggested Mona's cabin. I got in touch and she agreed to Ioan it to me. I flew in at noon today. She met me at Carson and drove me to the cabin. She showed me the place. It was agreeable to both of us. I was to have the use of the Jeep. With a pry bar and a little sweat I could clear that rock slide. We went out to the edge of the drop

there. She wanted to show me the view. And all of a sudden the slug knocked her down dead."

"Why Carson instead of Esmerelda?"

"I have no idea. She suggested it. Maybe she had an errand over there."

We came to the rock slide. He pulled as far over to the right as he could get, and the other car stopped beside us.

"Call for an ambulance?" Dave asked out his open window.

"Let's take a look first, boys. What kind of project, Mr. McGee?"

"It's an operating manual for pleasure boats."

"Writing one? Damned dry place to come to write about the water."

"If Mona and I could reach an understanding, I was going to have my stuff shipped here. It's all crated up." I sighed. "It would have been a nice quiet place to work."

We climbed over the loose rock and walked up the road. Buckelberry and I were in the lead. I was getting a little tired of that road. It was nearly five o'clock. I was definitely getting tired of walking. When we came around the last bend, I saw the roof peak of the cabin. We went up the last twenty feet of slope and I said, beginning to point, "She's right over…" I stopped and stared at the absolutely bare expanse of sun-baked earth and rock. The three of them stared at me. I felt my mouth stretch into a foolish, apologetic smile. "The body was right over there, I swear."

They shrugged. We walked over. I realized there would be blood. I knew that slug had gone through her, and blown a pretty good hole in front. I knew right where she had gone down. I sat on my heels. There was a place there that looked as if dirt and stone had been scooped out and the area patted flat again, but I couldn't be certain. I looked at the drop. If anybody had scooped the stained earth out of there and heaved it over the edge, it was gone for good.

I stood up and said heartily, "Well, she left stuff in the cabin."

We went to the cabin. The door was locked. "When I left, Sheriff, I left this door open." Three faces stared at me with heavy skepticism. Buckelberry shrugged and began to feel around on the porch joists. After a few minutes he found a key and looked at it, fingered the mat of cobwebs off it. "You opened it with this key, McGee?"

"She had a key with her."

We went inside. It had the flavor of having been empty for months. Hat, purse and jacket were gone. The glasses were gone. The leather cushion was back on a chair. I remembered snapping a cigarette into the fireplace. Mrs. Yeoman had not smoked. I crouched and looked for my cigarette. That was gone.