The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-82673-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Twelve

I parked in my motel slot and went into the room. The phone light was blinking. I went out the other door and up the interior walkway past the pool and the small careful rock gardens to the rear entrance to the lobby.

There were two slips in my box. One was the message Betsy had left. The other said to phone Deputy Sheriff Cable. I took the slips back to the room. Some fat children were wallowing and whooping in the pool. Every year there seems to be more fat children, and they seem to be noisier.

I phoned the sheriff’s office. Cable wasn’t in. The dispatcher said he’d relay my message to Cable and he would probably get in touch with me. I said to tell him McGee was at the motel.

I saw the cruiser arrive a few minutes later, so I went to the door and said howdy to him as he got out of the car.

“Care to come in, Billy?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

I had turned the color set on. A golf match had appeared. The players had green faces. Billy Cable went over and fixed the color, turned the sound down.

“Put the little round ball in the little round hole and they give you forty thousand dollars. Jee-zuss! Got me into the wrong line of work, I guess.”

He sat on the bed and leaned back, propping himself on his elbows. A very competent, tough, unreadable, watchful face. He had sunlenses clipped onto his steel-rimmed spectacles, and he reached and tilted them up.

“To what do I owe the honor and all the routine, Billy?”

“Mister Norm got edgy about you when he found out this morning you didn’t sleep here. He wondered if maybe he made some kind of bad mistake about you, McGee.”

“You better ease his mind.”

“I already did, on my way over here. I wasn’t as nervous as he was, though.”

“That’s nice.”

“I did some backtrailing, and I found out from King you were looking for somebody named Betsy that had been close to Lew, and he told you probably Betsy Kapp. So Frank, the bartender, told me you ate at the Lodge and you and Betsy took off in your cars at the same time. Well then I went to her place but there was nobody there at all. But I went around and looked in the kitchen window and there were two of everything drying on the sideboard. Cups, saucers, and so on. Very cozy. I hear those tits are genuine. Hardly seems possible.”

“You do good police work, Billy, but we can skip the editorial comment. Okay?”

“All right, you had to come up with that name someplace in order to ask King. And Mister Norm has had me looking all over for that damn fool Lew Arnstead. When I went out there his momma said he hadn’t been home for three days and nights, and when I asked her if anybody had been looking for him she said that it was none of my damned business.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.