The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

the book. Lawyer and client relationship is confidential stuff. He might stick a shill into a cell with a suspect and bug the conversation to pick up a lead, but I think the rules mean something to him."
    "He is something else entire, Lennie."

Page 19
    "He makes better sense when you know the whole pattern. Local boy. Hell of a high-school quarterback. Offers from all over the country. Picked one from Michigan. Did well, but not quick unough for the pros. Married a bright girl up there. Both of them became teachers. She taught speech. She worked on his accent, weeded it out. Both of them worked in the public school system in Rochobter, New York. Hyzer's mother became ill, very ill, and Norman and his wife and baby daughter came down here. Hyzer's mother died. He was still here trying to get the house cleared out and put it up for sale when a couple of Miami kids in a stolen car knocked over one of those mini-markets on the edge of town in broad daylight, pistol-whipped the clerk, but suddenly had a cop cruiser riding up on them with the flasher going. They came through town at high speed and lost it on a turn and rode the sidewalk and smashed into a concrete power pole. It killed one of them and crippled the other. But they mashed Hyzer's bride and baby against the front of the post office thirty feet before they got to the pole. Killed them instantly. Hyzer buried them beside his mother and disappeared. Almost a year later he showed up here and announced for sheriff. No party affiliation. Independent. He won big. Sentimental favorite. Two years later he barely squeaked in, because he had done no glad-handing at all. Next time he won big because of his record. Lives for the job. Runs a taut ship. Keeps this county squeaky clean. No outside interests at all. If he is crazy, it is a productive compulsion. The rumor is that he has quietly built up files on every politician in the county, and they would rather not see anybody run against Hyzer. He takes correspondence courses. Law, criminology, ballistics, sociology, crime prevention, rehabilitation, penology."
    "And I'm just another of those people who smash wives and babies against the post office wall?"
    "Maybe. But buried deeply enough so you won't see any outward effect from it."
    "Like Meyer did?"
    "That part doesn't fit. It puzzles me. I am going to make it fit, and somebody is going to be sorrier than they can possibly imagine. But there's more we have to know before that is going to make any sense."
    "How much did Hyzer tell you?"
    "All the questions and all the answers up to the point where you stopped playing his game."
    So I told him about the envelope with the directions I had scribbled on the back. I told him how I could remember clearly what I had done with it. Everything in our wallets had still been sodden by the time we reached Al Storey's gas station in the early morning. "I took everything out.
    Every time you have to go through your wallet you find junk you don't need. I made a pile of that junk on top of that tin table out in the morning sunlight. I know the envelope and instructions were there because I unfolded it to see what it was. And by then, if what Hyzer says is true, this Frank Baither was already dead. After the station opened up, I picked up Meyer's discards and mine and dropped them into a can by the side of the building, on top of some old newspapers, oil cans, and wiper blades."
    "Means that somebody took it out and carried it twenty miles north and sneaked past the deputy guarding the Baither place, and planted it inside where it would be found. Meaning that Hyzer has to believe it happened just that way."
    "It must have slipped out of my pocket while I was killing Frank Baither."
    "Steady,as she goes, pal. Now here is something that bothers Hyzer also, I think. You were bound for Lauderdale. You left Lake Passkokee. Did you plan any stops on the way?"
    "No."
    "Then why come down 112 to the Trail? That's doing it the hard way."
    "We did it the