Free The Dreadful Lemon Sky by John D. MacDonald Page A

learn that young Mr. Van Harn is the attorney for Superior Building Supplies, which would account for his doing Carrie's will and being recommended to the sister, and being with Mrs. Omaha."
    "I had the same feeling."
    "What next?"
    "We have a drink with a little more authority, and then we find a place to eat."
    "Please don't give GiI's Kitchen another chance."
    "And you call yourself fair?"
    "You wouldn't!"
    "You are right. I wouldn't. But between the drinking and the eating, let's go see where Carrie was killed."
    By seven o'clock we had found the approximate place where it had happened. County Road 858 was called Avenida de Flores. It was an old concrete road, the slabs cracked and canted. Weeds stood tall on the shoulders. The shoulders slanted down into overgrown drainage ditches. There were a few old frame houses, spaced far apart, on the west side of the road. On the east side was a grove, with high rusty hurricane fencing installed on the other side of the drainage ditch. I went on out past the city limits sign and turned around in the parking area of a large new shopping plaza and came back, driving slowly.
    I pulled off into the weeds of the shoulder, car at a big list to starboard, and stopped.
    "For what?" Meyer asked.
    I nodded toward the house two hundred feet ahead. An old man was riding a little blue power mower back and forth across the big expanse of front yard. "We just get out and start looking up and down the shoulder, and he'll come over and tell us all."
    That is one of the few bonuses when looking into a fatal accident. People do love to talk about it. In a few minutes I heard the mower cough, sputter, and die. Cars whooshed by, whipping the weeds around, blasting the hot wind against us. I looked up and saw the old man fifteen feet away, walking smartly, his face aglow with the terrible delight of someone loaded down with ghastly details.
    "Hey, you wouldn't be looking for the spot where that there Mulligan woman got killed Wednesday night, would you?"
    I straightened up and said, "Milligan. The name was Milligan. Carolyn Dobrovsky Milligan, Fifteen Hundred Seaway Boulevard, Bayside, tag number Twenty-four D, thirteen thirteen. Her name was not Mulligan, it was Milligan."
    I used the voice and manner of the small-bore bureaucrat, petulant, precise, and patronizing. I needed no further identification as far as he was concerned. I was one of Them.
    "Milligan, Mulligan, Malligan. Shoot, you're looking on the wrong side of the road is what you're doing."
    "I doubt that," I said. "I doubt that very much."
    He peered up at me. "Well, by Jesus H. Sufferin' Christ, you are something, you are! You may know her name right, but you don't know the first goddamn thing about the rest of it."
    "I think he might be able to give us a little help," Meyer said, right on cue.
    "Your partner here has got a little bit of sense," the old man said. "My name is Sherman Howe, and I've lived in that house there twelve years now, and you wouldn't believe the number of idiots get smashed up and killed on this straight piece of road in the nighttime. One drunk son of a bitch about six months ago-see over there where that fence by the grove is fixed up new? He come off the road and went through that fence, and he went weaving amongst the trees until he zigged instead of zagged and hit one dead center and mushed his skull on the windshield, dead as a fried mule. I keep my clothes on a chair by my bed and I keep a big flashlight handy, and when I hear that crunching in the night, I dress fast and come see what help I can give because that's the Christian thing to do. If it's bad, I blink the light back at the house here, and Mabel is watching for it, and she phones for the ambulance, and that's exactly what happened Wednesday night, and I was down here before that poor boy had even found the body, so don't tell me what side of the road it was on, mister. I know what side. Come with me. Watch out, now, you don't get yourself killed.