The Long Lavender Look (10 page)

It's the last six months he turned into somebody else, somebody I don't hardly know. Broke off with Clara Willoughbee, took up again with a lot of cheap, bright-smelling, loud-voice women.

Got meaner. Got so ugly with his brothers, they don't want to ever see him again. Neglects this place and me to go run with trash like them Perrises. Now he's done something, I don't know what, to get himself fired off his job, and he might even have to go to jail. I just don't know what's going to happen. This place is free and clear and it's in my name, but the little bit of money that comes in won't cover food, electric, taxes, and all that. Jase and Henry, they'd help out, but not with me staying out here this way. They got this idea I live six months with one and six with the other, like some kind of tourist woman all the rest of my days. What was it my boy did to get Mister Norm so upset he fired him? Do you know?"

"Yes. It isn't very pretty."

"It's like I've run out of pretty lately."

"A very pleasant and gentle and friendly man was picked up for questioning. He knew nothing about the matter under investigation. Your son gave him a savage beating for no apparent reason. The man is in the hospital in Fort Lauderdale."

She shook her head slowly. In that light, at that angle, I suddenly saw what she had looked like as a young girl. She had been very lovely.

"That's not Lew," she said. "Not at all. He was always some mean, but not that kind of mean. It isn't drinking, because since my eyes have been going bad my nose has got sharp as a hound's.

It's something gone bad in his head. Acts funny. Sometimes not a word to me. Set at the table and eat half his supper and shove his chair back and go out and bang the door and drive off into the nighttime. And sometimes he'll get to talking. Lord God, he talks to me a mile a minute, words all tumbling to get out, and he keeps laughing and walking around and about, getting me to laughing, too."

"When was he here last, Mrs. Arnstead?"

"Let me think back. Not since noontime on Thursday. I keep fearing he went off for good. It was yesterday toward evening somebody told me on the phone about him getting fired off his job. I was wishing I could see good enough to ... well, to look through his stuff and see if I could find something that'd tell me where he'd be. Hate to ask my other sons to come here. What did
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you say you wanted to talk to him about?"

"I guess I wanted to make sure he was Lew Arnstead, and then I was going to give him the best beating I could manage. That man in the hospital is the best friend I have ever had."

She stared in my direction with those old frosted blue eyes, then laughed well. A husky caw of total amusement. She caught her breath and said, "Mr. McGee, I like you. You don't give me sweet lies and gentle talk. And you wouldn't be a man if you didn't come looking for him. But you got to be a lot of man to take my Lew. When I see your shape against the light, you looked sizable enough. But size isn't enough. You got to have some mean, too."

"Probably enough."

"Well, you want to find him and I want to know where he is, so you could maybe come to his room with me and tell me what you can find."

Work clothes and fancy clothes and uniforms. Barbells and hair oil and a gun rack with two rifles, two shotguns, a carbine, all well cared for. Police manuals and ranch journals and comic books. Desk with a file drawer. Farm accounts. Tax papers. She sat on the bed, head tilted, listening to me scuffle through drawers and file folders. Tried the pockets of the clothing in the closet. Found a note in the side pocket of a pair of slacks, wadded small. Penciled in a corner torn off a sheet of yellow paper, a childish, girlish, illiterate backhand.

"Lover, he taken off Wesday after work drivin to Tampa seen his moma. I will unhook the same screen windo and please be care you don't bunk into nothing waken the baby. I got the hots so awful I go dizy and sick thinken on it."

No signature.

"What'd you find?" the old woman asked.

"Just a love note from a woman. No signature. She wants to know why he hasn't come to see her."

"No help to us with no name on it. Keep looking." I kept looking. There wasn't enough. The man had to have keepsakes of some kind. So he hid them. Probably not with great care. Just enough to keep them out of sight. Easy to get at. But after a dozen bad guesses I was beginning to think that either he had used a lot of care, or threw everything away. Finally I found the hidey-hole. I had previously discovered that the drawer on the bedside stand was a fake. Just a drawer pull and a drawershaped rectangle grooved in the wood. But when I reached under, I found there was enough thickness for a good-sized drawer. I took the lamp and alarm clock off the table. The top had concealed hinges.

Plenty of room for dirty books, and for some vividly clinical love notes from female friends.

Room for a few envelopes of Polaroid prints. Room for three chunky bottles of capsules.

About one hundred per bottle. One was a third empty. All the same. Green and white, and inside the one I pulled open were hundreds of tiny spheres, half of them green and half of them white.

"What did you find now?" she asked.

"The stuff that changed your boy."

"You mean like some kind of drugs? My Lew wouldn't take drugs. Not ever."

"He's got about two hundred and seventy Dexamyl spansules hidden away in here. They're a mix of dexedrine and phenobarb. One of them keeps your motor racing for eight hours. It's what the kids call 'speed.' Super stayawakes. Take two or three for a real good buzz. You can hallucinate on an overdose."

"Speed?" she said. "They said that on the radio way last October. That was the name of some of the stuff they took out of the lockers at the high school. Mister Norm and my Lew and Billy Cable went in with a warrant and went through all the lockers. And that was ... about when he started changing."

"At least we know that if he wasn't coming back, he would have taken this along."

"Thank the Lord for that, at least. Anything else in there?"

"A lot of letters."

"From those women of his I expect."

"That's right."

"Well, don't you be shy about reading them. But you don't need to read them to me. Just see if you can find out where he might be."

No need to tell her I was looking for some clue as to who he had entertained in the shed when he was supposed to be guarding the Baither place.

Few of them were dated. But I came across one with a mid-March date that was more literate and less torrid than the others, and interested me mightily.

Dear Lew,

I ran into Frannie in the Suprex yesterday and she was trying to stick the needle in, like always, and she told me she saw you twice with Lito. Now you can tell me it's none of my business because the thing we had going is over and done, and you know why we had to quit for good.

But this is like old times sake, because for a while before it got sour, I really and truly loved you, and I guess you know that. I have never really forgiven you for beating me up for no reason and I guess I never will, but I couldn't stand for you to get in some kind of stupid trouble. LEAVE

LILO ALONE!!!! She is bad news for one and all. I know all about her because for a while she and a girl I know well were friends. The reason she went with her mother after her the divorce was on account of her father knew he couldn't handle her. He had custody of both kids, but he let Lilo go. Her mother and her stepfather couldn't control her either, and not many people know this, but when she was seventeen, like a year after she dropped high school, she was fooling around with Frank Baither, and he's old enough to be her father, and they say he's getting out soon, and if he wants her back, you better not be in the way. Now I'll tell you something else I happen to know, and I hope it turns your stomach. I'm not making it up because I haven't got the kind of sick mind that can make up something ugly. It happened on a Sunday afternoon last December. Roddy Barramore broke down on Route 112 down by where Shell Ridge Road turns off. A water hose busted, and he decided the best thing to do was walk into Shell Ridge Road to the Perris place, figuring Mr. Perris would have some hose and clamps or at least some tape. It was a warm Sunday and when he got near the house he could hear through the screen in the open windows that Mr. Perris had the football pro game on turned up loud. So he thought instead of ringing the door, he'd go holler in the window, and he had his mouth open to holler and then he saw Lilo and Mr. Perris on the couch, making out like mad, all their clothes in a pile on the floor. Roddy scrunched down quick before they seen him, and walked back and first he told Rhoda there was nobody home, and she said he was quiet for a while and then he told her what really happened. What do you think of a girl who'll make out with her stepfather knowing her own mother is there helpless in the bedroom maybe fifteen feet away, unable to speak or move much since she had the stroke over two years ago which some say was the judgment of God, but I say we aren't to judge because we don't really know what reasons she had for breaking up her own marriage the way she did. Rhoda told me about it, it made me want to throw up. I hope it does the same for you. I don't care that you aren't seeing me anymore, really.

I wish the best for you always, Lew, but you won't have anything but heartache and bad trouble if you run around with Lilo. Always your friend, Betsy

I went through the Polaroid prints. Amateur nude studies. Thirty-two different poses. Many different girls. A lean blonde with an insipid leer and huge meaty breasts figured in ten of them, prone, supine, standing, reaching, kneeling. Five were of a woman with a superb body, a body good enough to overcome the incompetence of the photographer. In each she kept the lens from seeing her face.

Then there were thirteen different females, which I suppose could be thought of as trophy shots,
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all head-on, naked, some taken by flash, rome by available light, some indoors, some outdoors.

Estimated ages, eighteen to thirty-two. A variety of expression, from timorous uncertain smile to dazed glaze of sexuality, from broad grin to startled glance of herself surprised, to theatrical scowl. The sameness of the pose removed all erotic possibility. They became record shots, and could have been taken in the anteroom of the gas chamber after a short ride in a cattle car.

It was the remaining four shots which gave me a prickling sensation on the backs of hands and neck.

Solid, shapely, dark-haired, suntanned chunk of girl. Evenly and deeply tanned everywhere, except for the surprisingly white bikini-band, low slung around the functional swelling of the sturdy hips. One of those pretty, engaging, amusing little toughy faces. An easy-laugher. A face for fun and joy, games and excursions. Not at all complicated unless you looked more closely, carefully. Then you could see something out of focus. A contradiction. There was a harsh sensuality in that face which was at odds with the merry expression. There was a clamp-jawed resolve contradicting that look of amiable readiness for fun and games.

I had seen that face, for a micro-instant, several busy seconds before Miss Agnes squashed into the canal. I felt sure of it. And this chance for a more careful examination confirmed the fleeting feeling that my young volunteer mechanic, Ron Hatch, had to be related to her by blood.

Though his face was long instead of round, doleful rather than merry, the curves of the mouth, the set of the eyes, the breadth and slant of forehead were much alike. "Must be a lot of letters,"

the old woman said.

I put everything back except the most explicit picture of the dark-haired girl, closed the lid, put the lamp and clock back in position.

"Nothing that helps much. But I want to ask some questions, if you don't mind, Mrs. Arnstead."

"Don't mind a bit. Talked too much already, so I might just as soon keep right on. That's what happens when you're old and alone. Talk the ear off anybody that wants to stop by and listen.

But let's go back to the porch. Lew could come roaring in, and he'd get mean about a stranger being in his room."

The sun was down and the porch faced the western sky, faced a band of red so intense it looked as if all the far cities of the world were burning. It will probably look much like that when they do burn.

"Mrs. Arnstead, I remember you said something about your son running around with trash like the Perrises. Is there a Perris girl?"

"There's Lillian, but she's not rightly a Perris. I did hear she's tooken the name, but whether legal in a court, I don't know. Her real name is Hatch. Her daddy is John Hatch, and he has a lot of friends and business interests around Cypress City. He's the kind that's real shrewd about a deal and sort of stupid about women. Anyway he married one that turned out to be trashy for sure.

Wanda. He brought her back here from Miami. Must be ... let me see now ... oh, many years ago. The first baby was Lillian, and then there was Ronnie, then there was one that died. I'd say there was trouble all along between John Hatch and Wanda. Maybe he worked so hard he left her too much time on her hands, and she was built for trouble. They fought terrible, and the way they tell it, Johnny Hatch finally had enough, and so he set out to get grounds to get rid of that woman. About seven years ago, it happened. He had a good mechanic working at his garage name of Henry Perris, and he had the idea Henry was getting to Wanda every chance that came along. So he brought in a fellow and he got the goods on them for sure, tape recordings and pictures and all. She had no chance of child custody or alimony or anything. Soon as the divorce was final, Henry surprised everybody by marrying her. Lillian was fourteen or fifteen then, and wild as any swamp critter, and when she made up her mind she'd rather be with her mother, John Hatch had the good sense not to fight it. They say Ron is a nice boy. John married again a couple years ago and there's a couple babies now. Let me see. Where was I? Wanda and Henry moved into a place way south of town, down there on the edge of the swamps. She took on a lot of weight they say, and I guess she had the high blood, because she was always high-colored. She
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