“That’s sarcasm, I assume.”
“I just think it’s him. I have that gut feeling. The womanizing fits. And Guffey is close to Garvey. He tried to be too entertaining that night aboard the Flush. Told us too much, and gave us a good lead. What if he said he’d been selling lightning rods or weathervanes? We could have gone in circles without finding anything. We’re narrowing it down.”
“It might narrow down to the point where it disappears for good.”
“You woke up cheery.”
“Norma has been dead for twenty-three days. Did you wake up especially jovial?”
“I woke up trying to grab hold of a dream I had just had about Annie. She was on some sort of platform that was pulling away from me, and I was running, but the harder I ran, the farther away it got. She was waving and smiling. No, I am not especially jovial, and you are not particularly cheery. I feel as if my ordered life had suddenly turned random on me. The ground under my feet has shifted. I want everything to be as it was. But it won’t be. Not ever again. Which do you like best, sincerity or sarcasm?”
He gave me a slow smile and the little blue eyes glinted. “On the whole, sarcasm is more becoming. Will we find Betsy Ann?”
“And we will show her the photograph.”
We made the eighty miles to Encinal in an hour and a half. I was growing fond of the rugged old blue van. When it got up to speed, it was steady as the Orange Bowl.
I made my inquiries at a gas station just off the interchange. The attendant was a fat bald man in high-heeled boots. As he filled the tank he said, “Well, sure. I guess nearly everybody in town knows Betsy Ann.” He looked at his watch. “She’ll be going to work pretty soon now. She comes on at eleven and works lunch. You go down that street there, and turn right at the corner, and you’ll see it on the right, with parking in front. Arturo’s Restaurant. You should want to eat there, it’s okay. But don’t get the tacos. Get the chicken enchiladas. And they got draft beer.”
We parked in front. There was only one other vehicle there, a dusty Datsun. There were beer signs in the windows, a rickety screen door, and three overhead fans down the narrow room. Booths on the right, counter on the left, tables in the back.
A tall woman in a waitress uniform was carrying a cup of coffee to a booth. She gave us a mechanical smile of welcome. She looked to be about fifty. She had long hair tinted an unnatural strawberry-blond shade and combed straight down in a young-girl style which emphasized rather than diminished the effect of the age lines in her pallid face. Under the blue uniform with its white cuffs on short sleeves, white collar, white trim on the pockets, her figure looked slim and attractive.
We took a table in the farthest corner. We had agreed that it would be best to get it over with before the restaurant filled up. She came back with menus. “The lunch special isn’t ready yet, but he says it will be in another fifteen minutes. So if you want to have coffee while you wait… The lunch special is a Spanish beef stew.”
Meyer by pre-agreement took over. He is better than I am at this sort of thing. “May we ask you a personal question, Betsy Ann?”
She frowned. “Do I know you? How do you know my name?”
“Believe me, we do not want to cause you any grief or any alarm. We want to be your friends.”
“I don’t understand. What do you want of me?”
“As I said, we want to ask you a personal question. We have to ask it, unfortunately.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Meyer. This is my friend, Travis McGee. We’re from Florida. A man killed my niece three weeks ago. We have very little information about him. We’re trying to find him by looking into his past.”
She looked bewildered. “I don’t know anybody killed anybody, mister. You’ve got the wrong person.”
“Just tell us if this is the man you once knew as Larry Joe Harris.”
He slid the color print out of the folder as he spoke.
She stared at it and made a strange, loud, moaning cry and bent forward from the waist as though she had been struck in the stomach. She put her hand against her mouth.
A man in a white chef’s hat came bursting through the swinging door out of the kitchen, a ten-inch knife in his hand.
“iQue pasa!” he said. “Whassa matta, Betsy Ann?”
“Nothing. It’s okay Arturo.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Everything is okay, really.”
He looked at her and at us with suspicion and went back to the kitchen. A young man with a beard was leaning out of a booth to look at us.
She tottered, then sat quickly in one of the other chairs at the table, eyes closed, and said, “Sorry. Sorry.”
Meyer covered her hand with his. “I’m really sorry.”
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “Where’s the picture? I want to see it again. Thanks.” She leaned over it and studied it. “He’s kind of better looking than when he was young. I’ve told myself he died, or he would have got in touch somehow. But he didn’t. I knew he never would. Sure, that’s Larry Joe Harris. Is that all you want from me?”
“Yes. And we’re grateful.”
“He killed your niece?”
“It seems probable.”
“It was eighteen years ago. How did you know about him and me?”
“We talked to some people over in Freer.”
“Sure. That’s where Hume’s damn sister lives. That’s the worst thing he ever did to me, telling his sister what happened with me and Larry Joe, telling her he looked through the window. I suppose you could say I did something bad to him, too. All right. But telling his sister was like putting it on a billboard in living color in the middle of town. I just wasn’t that kind of a person. I was twenty-three when I married Hume Larker and he was forty-three. I loved that man. You don’t want to listen to all this dirty laundry.”
“Betsy Ann, we want to learn as much as we can about Larry Joe Harris.”
“He came by with those Japanese lanterns, and I thought they were just lovely. I got Hume to buy me one for the garden. I thought the salesman was a nice boy. I guessed he was twenty-two or twenty-three. He had a nice smile and he was polite. One morning around eleven o’clock, about a month later, he came by and asked me how I liked the lantern. I said I liked it fine. He said he sold lanterns and he read palms. I said that was nice, but I didn’t have any money for palm reading. He said he would read mine free, right there in the doorway. So I held it out and he took me by the wrist and studied it, and then smiled into my eyes and he said that he could read in my palm that I was soon to have a love affair. I said I was married. And he said it was going to happen very very soon. He just hung onto my wrist and smiled at me, and he walked me right back through my own house. And… it happened. I was like a person in a dream. You know those dreams where something is happening and you can’t stop it? I wasn’t that kind of a woman. He should have known that. But I guess he knew something else about me that I’d never known. He came back to the house eight more times while Hume was off working. I know the number because I counted. And we hardly ever had anything to say to each other. It was always just like the first time. I would say to myself I was going to tell him off next time he came by, and when that old pickup came banging into the drive I would get all pumped up to tell him no, I wouldn’t, we shouldn’t, but he would take my hand and I would go right along with him like some dumb kid. And I must have been years older than him then. He had power over me. I don’t know what it was. When Hume went out to find him and kill him, I hoped he would, because Larry Joe had ruined my marriage. But Larry Joe had already took off with Izzy Garvey. Just a dumb little school kid, and she ran off with him, taking all the money Walker Garvey had hid in the house and just about everything else wasn’t nailed down. Where is Larry Joe?”