A Purple Place for Dying by John D MacDonald

Author:John D MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307827272
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-09T08:00:00+00:00

Seven

I found the small house of Juan Estobar on a quiet street in the heat of the mid-morning. It was a small frame house, freshly painted pink and white, set close to the uneven sidewalk. Under the shade of big dusty trees, some frail blades of grass struggled up through the packed dirt. There was new aluminum furniture on the screened porch. The houses were set close. There were many small children at play, birds noisy in the trees, many sounds of music, and morning television drama.

Dolores Estobar came to the screened door and looked out at me questioningly. She looked at me with frank female appraisal. She was in her middle twenties, dark and slender and very pretty. She wore navy blue bermudas and a roomy pink smock plumped with an obvious pregnancy.

“Did you want something?”

“Are you Dolores Estobar?”

“Yes, why?”

“My name is McGee. I’d like to talk to you about Mona Yeoman.”

“Listen, you people have got to stop bothering me.”

“It isn’t like that this time.”

“Then what is it like?”

“If you want to phone Mr. Yeoman, he’ll ask you, as a favor to him, to talk to me for a little while, if you aren’t too busy right now.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin to look for her.”

“You know she’s gone, then?”

“Well, I guess about everybody knows that by now. About nineteen people have made a real point of telling me about it—that she took off with that Mr. Webb the day before yesterday. Mister, they don’t need any newspapers in this town. I didn’t know she was actually going to do that. I couldn’t tell you a thing.”

“There’s a couple of other things I wanted to ask you about.”

“Well … I was just ironing some. You come on in.”

The furniture was bright and new, the small house extraordinarily neat. The kitchen was unexpectedly huge, and it looked like a demonstration kitchen, crammed with every electric gadget known.

“Some kitchen, huh? It was Mona’s wedding present to me. She worked it out with Johnny, my husband. A surprise. When we got back from the trip, here it was. They had to move the wall there way back to make room. Look at the crazy refrigerator. It’s hotel-size. You’d like a cold beer?”

“Thanks.”

She gave me the beer. I sat with it at a cheery little breakfast bar. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, facing me, ironing white shirts.

“I don’t know what I can tell you.”

“Well, you can tell me if you were surprised when you heard it. And why you were surprised.”

“I’ll say I was surprised. I knew she was getting involved with that guy. But what I think she wanted, she wanted her husband to take her seriously. You know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well, Mr. Yeoman treated her like a kid. And she is a kid in a lot of ways. But him being so much older and all, when she wanted to be real serious, he was kind of laughing. Oh, he likes her a lot. Don’t get me wrong about that.

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