Read A Purple Place for Dying for Free Online Page B

things." As I looked at Yeoman more carefully I realized he was drunk. I had not caught it before. He had the control of the practiced drinker-awareness of limitations and the automatic compensation therefore.
    He shook his head. "But God knows what crap she gets these goddam eastern friends of hers believing about me. That Weaver woman visiting, she looked at me the way I look at an old iguana. You'd think, for God's sake, I forced her into marriage."
    He unhooked his leg from the arm of the chair and leaned forward. "Mister McGee, her daddy and me raised us twenty years of pure hell, and he left her to me. I had no mind to marry anybody all my life. Nine years ago, when I hunted her down in Paris, France she was the nearest thing to ruin you could see. She's a big girl, and she was down to a hundred pounds. She had the screaming fits, son. She didn't know where the hell she was. I'd let her stay loose too long, and when I thought of what Cube would think, it shamed me. I put her in good hands in Switzerland, and I hung around.
    "They built her back up. Then what was I to do? Turn her loose again? She's fanciful. It wouldn't be long before a rough crowd would get hold of her again. So I did what made sense to me. I locked her up the best way I knew how, by marrying her and bringing her back here to her home place. And it worked out better for eight years than you could guess. She can fool you, boy. You look at her and you see a big kind of cool-looking woman, nice talking, sensible acting, and she can make you think day is night if she puts her mind to it. But she is still just a crazy kid underneath, with fool notions. And she's restless this year.
    "I keep her anchored down to a good decent life. I'm too old, son, to be turned into a wild animal by the idea of her humpin' that professor. It saddens me some, and I resent it, but I can make a try at understanding it. And I am free to admit that when I get her back, I'll make steam rise off that cheating tail of hers, but it will ease her because she'll know she's been a naughty girl, and it is always easier on a person to pay for things than walk around with guilt. And it won't hurt my own pride any to get it out of my system.
    "What you don't understand, and what she doesn't understand, is that, way down, she's dependent on me. I want to get her back before she runs herself into the ground again. Now suppose you tell us where they planned to go."
    I did not know how to answer him. I knew he was clever, but I could not believe he was so clever as to know she was dead, and be able to give such a convincing performance. I swirled the ice in my glass.
    Fred Buckelberry said, "Were they going to get their permits and walk over to Juarez, and go down into Mexico from there? Or was that just a feint in the direction of Mexico? Were they going to fly west from there? California?"
    I ignored him. I finished my drink and looked directly at Jasper Yeoman. I said, "I don't know a goddamn thing about your marriage, Mr. Yeoman. I was standing next to your wife at two twenty-five this afternoon. Somebody hit her high in the back with a heavy slug at long range and she was dead before she hit the ground, face down."
    For a moment the very dark eyes wavered and the mouth softened. Then he firmed up again. "I tried to talk man to man to you, son. I tried to get through. Let me tell you something. There is nobody in this wide world with any call to kill Mona. I would come the closest maybe, but it is the last thing I would ever do. You think you've got some obligation to stick to that fool story. You look like you had more sense. You irritate me, boy. I'm going to have Fred here run your ass right out of this county, and I don't want him being gentle about it."
    I shrugged. "Fred is so impressed with being close to such a big taxpayer, Mr. Yeoman, he's forgetting what he knows about being a good cop."
    "What the hell does that mean?" Yeoman said.
    "I'm just an amateur. But I thought of