A Purple Place for Dying by John D. MacDonald

way. She looked down at it and said, "If you please."
    "I do not please. I want to talk to you."
    "There is absolutely nothing to talk about."
    "What if things are not what they seem to be?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "What if he didn't run off with her? What if it's just supposed to look that way?"
    "What is your interest in this affair, Mr. McGee?"
    "I am the only one who is absolutely certain Mona is not with your brother. Everybody else seems to believe it."
    She waited a moment, and then opened the door. "Come in, then."
    She led the way back to the living room. Draperies of a coarse and heavy fabric were drawn across the windows. She had evidently been working at a big mission table. Books and notebooks and file cards were in orderly array under a big bright gooseneck lamp. Music came from a big record player, turned low. It sounded like a small and irritable group of musicians who were trying to tune their instruments but couldn't decide who had the right key. She turned it off, went to the windows and yanked the blinds open to let the sunlight in. She came back to the table and turned the lamp off.
    I watched the way she moved. She wore shabby deerskin moccasins. She moved lithely, with enough hip sway to pull alternating diagonal tensions in the burlap shift. Her arms and legs were very smooth and white and rounded, flexible with health. Her face was a long oval. The flesh around her dark eyes was deeply smudged. It made her look frail and unwell, but I suspected that was a normal condition of those eyes. There are eyes like that, the surrounding flesh permanently darkened. Her mouth was small and plump and without lipstick. Her nose was delicate. Her eyes had long dark lashes. Her hair was parted in the middle, dark and rather lifeless hair which was arranged in two curved wings across her forehead and drawn back and fastened in a loose bun. There was a large electric coffee maker on the mission table. "Coffee?" she said.
    "Thank you. Black, please."
    She went to the kitchen and came back with a clean cup and saucer, poured me a cup, and took hers over to the corner of a corduroy couch by the windows, and pulled her legs up under her, tucking the brief edge of the shift over white knees. I sat at the other end of the long couch, against the bright cushions.
    "You contrived to intrigue me, Mr. McGee. Now you have the problem of continuing to do so. But I do not know your status in this."
    "Mrs. Yeoman contacted me, through a friend. She thought I might be able to help her with a problem. I arrived yesterday noon from Florida. I talked with her about her problem. She wanted her husband to release her. She wanted money from him. She wanted to marry your brother."
    "And you go about trying to make this sort of arrangement? Are you an attorney?"
    "No. I didn't know what the problem was until I got here. And it didn't seem to be anything I would be interested in trying to handle."
    "So she settled for half a loaf."
    "No. Believe me, it was not her intention to take off with your brother, not unless it could be arranged… amiably. And financed."
    "Mr. McGee, if you believed anything she said, you are as big a fool as my brother. And, believe me, he has proven himself a fool."
    "By leaving?"
    "He's finished here. You just can't do what he's done and expect to be taken back when the mad little adventure is over. If he was very popular here, and very political, he might have a chance of mending his fences. But John is neither. The unforgivable thing is that it is all… so obvious and vulgar."
    "In what way?"
    "Do you need an explanation? Gullible dreamy young professor meets oversexed wife of elderly rancher. Romance blooms. Actually, that's too tender a word for it. But it was his rationalization, of course. Real genuine love. That's what they have to call it, to keep some fragment of self-respect, I imagine. But it was and is just a nasty, ordinary compulsion of the flesh. John had never run into a woman like that before. Once