Part 13 (1/2)
”I had a report from Deputy Cable,” he said. ”So I know you went and talked to Cora Arnstead. I had a report of your conversation with Deputy Sturnevan. I know you spent the night with Mrs. Kapp at her home on Seminole. I was glad to hear you had not left the county. If you had, you would have regretted it. My responsibility is to enforce the enforceable laws and ordinances. Deputy Cable suggested to me that Mrs. Kapp be picked up and charged with public fornication. There is an old ordinance on the books. I have not been able to understand why Billy would want to waste department time on that sort of thing. He is usually a more reasonable officer. I do not wish to make any moral judgments about Mrs. Kapp. She has always seemed to me to be a pleasant enough woman, and she seems to run that dining room well. She would seem to be... selective and circ.u.mspect in her private life.”
”Billy Cable went after her a year and a half ago. He'd had a few drinks. She turned him down flat. Last fall she had an affair with Lew Arnstead.”
”I knew about the Arnstead affair. How could you know about Billy? How do you know it's true? He has a wife and three children.”
”They had a very rough little scene right here in this room this afternoon. Billy asked for bad news, and she gave it to him.”
”So at five o'clock he makes that stupid suggestion about arresting her. I'll check it out. I don't like it. An officer should not use his position for personal vendettas. I'm disappointed in Billy Cable. You say Mrs. Kapp is missing. Tell me about it.”
”She was here most of the afternoon. Then she went in her car back to her house. I was supposed to meet her there. She knew I'd be over about seven. I went over and she wasn't there. She'd told me where the key was. I let myself in. She left a note telling me she was going out to find out something about this... whole problem which got me into one of your cells, Sheriff.”
”Find out what?”
”She didn't say. I waited until ten o'clock and then I came looking for you.”
He went over and sat on the bed and looked up her phone number and dialed it. While it was ringing at the other end, I had a closer look at him under the light of the bedside lamp. His dark suit was wrinkled, his shoes uns.h.i.+ned. His knuckles and wrists were soiled, and there was an edge of grime around his white cuffs and around the white collar of his s.h.i.+rt. The light slanted on a dark stubble on his chin. It did not match my prior observations of the fastidious officer of the law.
”No answer,” he said as he stood up. He went back to the chair and looked at his watch. ”Ten past eleven. Maybe, Mr. McGee, she decided not to see you again. Maybe she went to stay with friends; waiting for you to give up and go away.”
”Not a chance.”
”Where is the note?”
”I threw it away. I a.s.sure you it was... affectionate.
”You told Mrs. Kapp all about the reason why you and your friend were suspected of being in on the Baither murder?”
”Sheriff, she lives here and she works here. She knows a lot of people. I told her everything I know, including your theory about the money truck, and Baither using Raiford State Prison as a hideout. And I built a little structure of supposition, based on little hints, guesses, inferences. I haven't tested it on Betsy yet. I planned to. One way to go at these things is to build a plausible structure, then find facts that won't fit and tear it down and try again.”
He looked at me through a steeple of soiled fingers. ”Let me hear it.”
”Baither put it together. He used two outsiders, pickup talent, possibly from out of state. He had the contacts, apparently. The fourth man was local, and without a record, gainfully employed. Henry Perris, now working as a mechanic down at Al Storey's station on the Trail. The other two men we know only as Hutch and Orville. Baither needed Henry Perris because Henry had access to a wrecker and knew how to operate it. They also used Perris's stepdaughter, Lillian. She was the young waitress in the blond wig at the drive-in across from the track.”
”Pure fantasy!”
”May I go ahead? Thanks. After a big score, the people involved watch each other very carefully. I don't think Frank could have slipped away with the money unless Henry and the girl helped him somehow. This would be the deal. Frank would hide the money and take a fall at Raiford. Henry and the girl would sit tight and wait it out. Frank wouldn't let Henry know where the money was because he would be afraid of another doublecross. A threeway split, if you count the girl, would be a lot better than five ways.”
”Why Perris?”
”Because Lilo Perris and Lew Arnstead were or are paired off. It started several months back and with Baither up for release, it would be good sense to have a pipeline into your department, Sheriff. She's apparently a very rough kid. Then you have Henry Perris in a position to pick my envelope out of the trash at the station, and you have Lilo ready and willing to decoy Arnstead into that shack in back of the place. But it was a bad impulse. People get bad, tricky ideas when something has gone wrong. They get nervous and they don't think things out. Manufactured evidence backfires. So Perris and company was suddenly up against the very dangerous situation of having vital and damaging information lodged in the mind of a speed freak. If you went after the name of the woman who decoyed Arnstead into Baither's shed, you could probably shake it loose. And to have it be the stepdaughter of the mechanic at the station where I swear I discarded that envelope makes everything a little too tight. Have you located Lew?”
”Not yet.”
”There's a chance, a reasonable chance, that they had brought Lew all the way into the picture. Maybe they needed the kind of help he could give them. Nine hundred thousand is a lot of persuasion. The girl could make certain he wouldn't be thinking clearly. The girl and the amphetamine, and something a little warped in his mind before he even started downhill. If they did, what's your chance of finding him alive?”
”Facts will tear down your structure, McGee.”
”If you have them.”
”There were three men working at that station all day Friday. Albert Storey Henry Perris, and Terrance Moon. They submitted to interrogation willingly. There was a period of about two hours and fifteen minutes, starting at the time we drove away with you and your friend, when their actions are important. None of them left the station at that time. No phone calls were made. They were interrogated separately. The customers who stopped during that period were strangers-tourists and commercial traffic on the Tamiami Trail. The men talked about Frank Baither being killed to each other, but not to anyone else. I am left with the remarkable coincidence of someone unknown to those men stopping for gas, seeing that envelope in the trash barrel, picking it out and taking it up to Baither's house to leave it where we found it later.”
”And you can't buy that and neither can I.”
”Then you dropped it in Baither's place.”
”You know I didn't.”
”What choice do I have, McGee? And, of course, your evaluation of Lillian Perris is total nonsense.” There was a force in his voice, an animation in his face which surprised me. ”The girl has a lot of spirit. She should have had a lot more discipline. She's been in sc.r.a.pes, but nothing serious. Considering the environmental and social factors, I think she has done remarkably well.”
”I was only-”
”Forget any idea of her having any part of it.”
”Okay. And Henry Perris is a pillar of the community and a lay preacher?”
”All I know is that he has no record.”
”Let's concentrate on Henry for a minute, Sheriff. Just for the h.e.l.l of it. Let's say he was in on the Baither murder, and it went wrong and he was shaky He comes to work late. He gets our names and the reason we're being picked up from Al Storey. He goes to put something in the barrel and sees the envelope with my name on it and he picks it out when n.o.body is looking and puts it in his pocket.”
”But I told you that-”
”I know what you told me. He had to leave that station soon after we left.”
”But he didn't.”
The message on his face was clear: Don't pursue further.
”What could Betsy Kapp have remembered that got her into trouble?” I asked.
”If she's in trouble.”
”Are you going to look for her?”
”Missing persons reports have to be filed by the next of kin.”
”I don't think you always go by the book, Sheriff.” He smiled for the first time. ”If I did, I would have you back inside, McGee.”
He phoned Betsy's house again, with no results. He looked troubled. ”I'll put the word out.”
”Thanks, Sheriff.” I walked him out to the car and asked him if he minded if I looked around. ”Inside the county, Mr. McGee.”
”Of course, Sheriff.”
So I began my blind quest, because anything was better than going back to her empty house to sit and wait.
Fourteen.