A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

Somehow he gave the impression of not being able to afford that knowledge.
    Though I tried to put it out of my mind, I fumbled at it as I slid toward sleep, like trying to untie knots while wearing mittens.
    And I did like him better than I had liked his young wife.

Three
    I WALKED a morning-mile into the middle of town and had breakfast at a convention hotel, The Sage, amid people wearing badges and bragging about their hangovers. There was a car-rental desk in the hotel lobby, and when the uniformed girl found I was not a guest of the hotel, she very carefully checked their dead-beat list of credit card numbers before, with manufactured joy, honoring mine. I wanted a cheap one, and while I was waiting for it to be brought around from the garage, I bought an area map at the newsstand.
    The man brought a sand-colored Falcon around. I walked around it and found the deep dent in the back right fender. It was not noted on my sheet. I got the girl and we all stood and stared at it, and then she marked it on both copies of the sheet. One can never blame them for trying. The ones who bang them up run past the desk, toss the keys in, and go get on an airplane. I inspect cars I rent. I add up the tabs waiters hand me. I read the fine print on contracts. In these matters, I am a little old lady.
    State Western University was in the town of Livingston, 44 miles due south of Esmerelda on State Road 100. There is an unreality about urban places in barren lands. I guess it is because the land was never put to any other use. It did not grow up where farms used to be. Three miles south of Esmerelda, its mere existence behind me seemed dubious and improbable. I drove through a land of rock and scrub, sand and brush, lizards and the sun-wink of unrusted beer cans.
    The huge flats of the broad valley had once been, I could imagine, the floor of some ancient lake. Esmerelda, according to the daily Eagle, had an unlimited supply of pure water from deep wells. This water accounted for its improbable location in the eerie silence of windy flats and sandbrown mountains.
    Thirty miles of SR 100 were utterly flat, and then the road began to climb and wind in long curves past hill slopes and harsh outcroppings of stone. Green patches were more frequent and evident. When I finally topped a ridge, I saw the town in the distance, perhaps a thousand feet higher than Esmerelda, and tucked against the flank of a long mountain that looked, in a trick of light, like a brown dog curled sleeping.
    State Western was one of those new institutions they keep slapping up to take care of the increasing flood of kids. It was beyond the sleepy-looking town. Hundreds of cars winked in the mid-morning sun on huge parking lots. The university buildings were giant brown shoeboxes in random pattern over substantial acreage. It was ten o'clock and kids were hurrying on their long treks from building to building.
    Off to the right was the housing complex of dormitories, and a big garden apartment layout which I imagined housed faculty and administrative personnel. A sign at the entrance drive to the campus buildings read, NO STUDENT CARS. The blind sides of the big buildings held big bright murals made of ceramic tile, in a stodgy treatment of such verities as Industry, Freedom, Peace, etc.
    The paths crisscrossed the baked earth. There were some tiny areas of green, lovingly nurtured, but it would be years before it all looked like the architect's rendering.
    The kids hustled to their ten-o'clocks, lithe and young, intent on their obscure purposes. Khakis and jeans, cottons and colors. Vague glances, empty as camera lenses, moved across me as I drove slowly by. I was on the other side of the fence of years. They could relate and react to adults with whom they had a forced personal contact. But strangers were as meaningless to them as were the rocks and scrubby trees.
    They were in the vivid tug and flex of life, and we were faded pictures on the corridor walls-drab, ended