The Long Lavender Look Read Online Free PDF Page B

contact between McGee and Meyer."
    I fitted the two parts of the big deputy's name together. King Sturnevan. I looked at him again and made sure. I'd seen him fight years ago at Miami Beach, at about two hundred then. Maybe sixty pounds heavier now. A spoiler, a mawler. Looked slow, but surprisingly hard to hit. Clever on the ropes and in the clinches, ripping those hooks up into the body, snuffing and grunting with the effort. Would have done better in the division except he had a tendency to cut, which put too many TKO's on his record. So the smart way they took him was to put the little twist of the wrist on the end of the jab, hoping to open up his brows before he bombed their innards to pulp.

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    "Sheriff, would you please tell this fat, sloppy, old pug not to try to do me the way he did Meyer? Lennie Sibelius can give you enough trouble without that, too."
    "There were three witnesses to your partner's accident, McGee. He had taken his shower. He was stepping into the issue coveralls when he lost his balance and fell, striking his face on the wooden bench in the shower room."
    "Then I guess if the same thing happened to me, it would look like a strange coincidence."
    He didn't answer. He picked up the phone. Sturnevan beckoned to me and held the door open.
    As we went along the corridor he said, "Hey, you knew me, huh? You seen me in there, ever?"
    His voice was soft, husky, high-pitched.
    "Miami Beach, just once. Eight or nine years ago."
    "That must have been close to the last. Who was I going with?"
    "I can't remember the name. A great big Cuban boy."
    "Sure! That was a ten-round main. Tigre something. Tigre means 'tiger,' and he had a big long last name, and I knocked him out in the ninth, right? You know what? That was the last one.
    Honest to Christ, that boy was, I mean, conditioned! Like an oak tree, the whole middle of him.
    He kept moving the wrong way and giving me perfect shots, and I couldn't even take the grin off his face. Then like twenty seconds into the ninth, he cut me. See this one? He popped it just right by dumb luck and opened it up, and I knew it was bad. All I could do, see, was keep turning to keep the ref from getting too good a look at it and hoping before he did, that boy would tangle his feet and move the wrong way again, so when he did I had to put the right hand right on the shelf. I knew it would bust and it did. But he stayed down. All the time I was in there, what I had was bad managers and bad hands. I had to go for the middle because my hands bust too easy.
    So you saw that one, hey! I was going to go again, all lined up with I forget who, and I bust the hand in the same place on the heavy bag, working out."
    As we went down the stairs, I said, "But you didn't chop Meyer bad enough to hurt your hands?"
    "He fell on the bench, like Mister Norm said."
    "And his head bounced up and down on that bench like a big rubber ball. Must have been interesting to watch."
    "What I can tell you is I didn't work him over. Mister Norm got on me about that, and I swore on my baby daughter's grave I never touched him and didn't see anybody else touch him. I told Mister Norm it didn't make sense after all the times I worked a little on some of the people without marking them, all of a sudden I forget how and start hitting a man in the head? Not me.
    Not the King. Right through here. Hey, Priskie? Fresh fish. Mister Norm says single twelve or fourteen."
    "We can give you twelve, sir. A very nice room. I'm sure you'll be very happy with it. Anything you want, just ring." Priskitt was somewhere between fifty and ninety, spry, bald, and shrunken by the heat of time and fortune. He dug into a bin, selected a tagged bundle, put it in a wire gym basket. "All our guests wear costumes," he said. "Gets you in the spirit of the thing."
    "Priskie, this here fellow saw my last fight, where I chilled the big Cuban kid and busted my hand. I told you about that one, right?"
    "Not over forty times."
    I said, "I