A Purple Place for Dying Read Online Free PDF Page B

gorges. The man who believes himself free of any taint of madness is a damned liar. The trouble is, you never know exactly what might tip you off those rails. And that memorable chunking sound of heavy lead into her vulnerable back, through her pretty silk blouse, had touched something way below my level of consciousness. It roiled something up down there, something fairly nasty and ancient and invisible.
    I went out and found their ice machine and came back and fixed a drink in a tumbler that came in a little wax bag explaining that it had been Steem-Sterilized. It had a little flake of raspberry lipstick on the edge of it. Presumably that had been Steem-Sterilized too. I should report it to the Sheriff.
    The usual efficient process is for the room maid to wipe the glasses on the used bath towels of the previous guests and then pop them into those comforting little bags. Next she wipes the john seat with the same towels, then slips the paper ribbon onto it, acclaiming its astonishing sterility. Then, with the bed made, she goes trundling off, pushing her square-wheeled cart, kicking the doors of the sleepers, clearing her throat with a ringing whock-tooey into the shrubbery, screaming her early morning greetings to friends three blocks away.
    With drink in hand I lounged against the headboard and resolutely pushed emotional considerations aside and tried to make some cold sense out of what had happened. Somebody had planned to kill her and had killed her. So why have a witness? Somebody had known what her movements would be. It did not seem very likely that she would tell her husband that she was meeting a stranger at Carson Airport at noon and driving him to the cabin. Yet she had the feeling she had been followed lately.
    What if when we had come upon the rock slide, she had turned around and found some other place for us to talk? Somebody had known her well enough to know how she would react. She had planned to confer with me at the cabin, so by God, that was where she would take me. If they had known she had planned I would stay there for a time, it was a good guess we would walk in.
    By then the sniper would have been in position. We had made it easier by going out to the edge and standing there. But in any event we would probably have stood still for him somewhere in the exposed area, before leaving. One thing was reasonably evident. The one who fired the shot was not the same one who took the car. It would have taken far too long to circle that rugged country.
    Once the woman fell, my actions were predictable. I would take cover, and after a while I would retreat to the car. Finding it gone, I would walk out. That would give him or them time to remove the evidence of murder.
    Skipping for the moment the possible reasons for taking her away, where had they taken her? In all that baked and tumbled wasteland of chasm and jumbled stone, there were ten thousand hiding places within a mile of the cabin, either downhill or up. She could be wedged into a small place and covered with loose stone. Two days of that oven sun would bake and draw every ounce of moisture out of her tissues, turning her into forty pounds of dry leather and string and bone, shrunken inside the folds of the cowgirl tailoring.
    Wouldn't it have made more sense for somebody to entice her to the cabin alone? Kill at a closer and more certain range? Be assured of no interruption? Why have a witness running around loose, insisting she was dead?
    One thing seemed certain. When something has been planned, and makes no sense, some of the facts are missing. I wondered who could supply them. The unnamed lawyer from Belasco? John Webb? Dolores?
    My window was open. The room was dark. I could hear the rip and whuffle of traffic on 87, the music from the drive-in, a muffled clatter of pins from the Idle Hour Lanes. Children no longer yelped in the pool. The television next door was turned high. A couple walked by my window, the woman saying, "… nose running all