Sleeping Beauty (12 page)

“I remember something else. I don’t know whether I ought to tell you or not. I mean, can you promise it won’t get back to my wife?”

“I can’t promise that. It depends on what it is.”

“You’re really putting me in a bind.”

“I’m sorry, but it isn’t me doing it. The regular police should be here before long. And if you think you can avoid publicity by covering up evidence—it’s the surest way to get your picture in the paper.”

Mungan covered his face with both hands and looked at me between his fingers. “Don’t say that. It would really wreck my marriage.”

“If your marriage is important to you, you better level with your wife
and
me.”

He nodded heavily, and his head stayed down. “Yeah. I know. Sometimes it isn’t so easy.”

“Did you have anything to do with the man’s death?”

“Of course not. Of course I didn’t. What do you think I am?”

“I’ll tell you when I know more about you,” I said.

He dropped his hands, spreading them wide. He was a salesman, or an ex-salesman, who couldn’t bear to be disliked.

“Look,” he said. “Could you and I take a ride around the block? I don’t know what I’ll tell Ethel, but I’ll think of something.”

“Why not tell her the truth?”

“I can’t. You see, there’s something in my life that Ethel doesn’t know about.”

“Isn’t it about time you told her?”

He turned beside the open door of my car and looked at me as if I had just offered to push him down an elevator shaft. “No! It isn’t possible.”

“Get in and tell me about it.”

He climbed in and I slammed the door on him. We were halfway around the block before he spoke:

“I’ve been married before. Ethel doesn’t know about it.”

“I do. Her name was Martha.”

He made a miserable face at me. “Did somebody hire you to investigate me?”

“Somebody will if you go on like this.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s more of a prediction.”

I parked at the curb in front of a house with a mansard roof which had an old black Rolls parked in the driveway.

“Tell me this, Mr. Mungan. What has your former wife got to do with the man I found in the ocean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she can tell you. I’m pretty sure I left the suit in the house when I took off.”

“How long ago?”

“Let’s see, it’ll be four years next month.”

“And where does your ex-wife live?”

“The last I heard, she was managing an apartment house in Hollywood. The Excalibur Arms.” I knew where it was.

“Just keep my name out of it, will you?” Mungan said. “Why is that so important?”

“Because I tell you it is. I’m cooperating with you. You should be willing to cooperate with me.”

“It won’t be easy. It doesn’t matter what I do, your name is on that suit. The police will find it, if they haven’t already. And they’ll be beating a path to your door.”

He slumped in the seat as if I had shot him. “I’m in a bind.”

“Because you’ve been married before? That’s common enough.”

“You don’t know Ethel. She can be very vindictive. So can Martie. If the two of them ever get together, I’m finished.”

“There must be more to this than you’re telling me.”

“Yeah. There is.” He looked apprehensively up and down the street. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Martie did this to me. She’s never forgiven me for leaving her, I know that.”

“You mean she killed a man and put your suit on him just to get back at you?”

“No.” He looked rather sheepish. “I guess even Martie wouldn’t do that.”

“Then what’s the rest of it, Mungan?”

“There is no rest of it.”

“There has to be. What is it?”

He answered a question I hadn’t asked, in a high emotional voice I hadn’t heard before. “A man should be able to change wives without living in hell for the rest of his life. Martie gave me good reason to leave her. She was drunk most of the time towards the end. I had a problem, too, I admit that. But I wanted to quit, and get out of that life.”

And you met an older woman with some money.

Almost as if he had heard me, Mungan went on: “A man has a right to a second chance. I proved that when I quit drinking. And Ethel helped me. We have our troubles like any other couple. But Ethel’s been good for me. She turned my footsteps onto the higher path.” That sounded like a quotation, perhaps from Ethel. “And now you want to drag me back into that rotten life.”

All I really wanted, by this time, was to get away from him. Even if he had quit drinking, he had slightly drunken emotions, with a tremolo of self-pity running through them.

I started the car. He took it as a rejection, and cast about for some way to stop me.

“There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“Tell me now.” I raced the engine a little.

“I got a Mexican divorce from Martie. I’m not absolutely certain that it’s legal.”

“You mean you know darn well it isn’t legal?”

“That’s right. I paid a lawyer in Tijuana two hundred and
fifty dollars, but I found out later that the divorce didn’t take. I was already married to Ethel by that time.”

“So to speak.”

“Yeah, so to speak. But Ethel watches me like a hawk, and it’s tied my hands. So now you know the bind I’m in. All I’m asking you to do is not tell Martie where I’m living and who I’m living with. I got the divorce in good faith. How was I to know that Tijuana lawyer was a crook? And Ethel and I were married by a minister in Vegas. So all I’m really worried about is Martie and
her
vindictiveness.” His fingers scratched lightly at my elbow. “Don’t tell Martie, eh?”

I said I wouldn’t. When I dropped him off at his house, Ethel was waiting for him out in front.

The Excalibur Arms was on a side street off Sunset Boulevard, not very far from my office. It had been there as long as I could remember. Its four-story façade stood in the diluted sunlight like an old woman with a powder-caked face surprised by morning.

I found the manager’s apartment, Number 1 on the ground floor, and rang the bell. A middle-aged man in his shirt sleeves came to the door chewing. The look in his eyes suggested that what he was chewing was bitter.

“We have no vacancies,” he said around his cud.

“Thanks, but I’m looking for Mrs. Mungan.”

He ruminated and swallowed. “She left here a long time ago.”

“Do you have a forwarding address?”

“We might have.” He turned and shouted into his apartment, “Do we have an address for Martha Mungan?”

A woman’s voice answered, “I’ll see.”

The man leaned on the doorframe. “You wouldn’t be a bill collector, would you?”

“No. I simply want to talk to her.”

He looked at me as if he didn’t believe me, hadn’t believed anyone for a number of years. He shouted back into his apartment again:

“What’s the holdup, anyway?”

“Wait a minute, can’t you? It took me a while to find the address book.”

The woman appeared behind him. She had a face matching his, with wary eyes and lines of discontent running down from the sides of her nose.

“The last we heard of Mrs. Mungan, she was managing a place called Topanga Court.” She gave me an address on the Coast Highway. “I can’t swear she’s still there. She drinks, you know.”

“Don’t tell her who told you,” the man added. “We have enough enemies as it is.”

I didn’t go directly to Topanga Court. It was several days since I had been in my office, and time I paid it a visit.

It was on the second floor of a two-story building on Sunset. I parked in my slot behind it and went up the back stairs. Girls were twittering in the modeling agency next door.

The name and occupation on my door, “Lew Archer: Private Investigator,” looked rather strange to me, and I understood how they might look to a client. There was no sign of any. The scattering of mail under the slot in the outer office was mostly advertisements and bills.

I took the mail into the inner office, discarded the advertisements, and mentally added up the bills. The total came to about three hundred dollars, which was the amount of the check in
my pocket. I still had a couple of hundred in my checking account, but that was earmarked for the rent.

I wasn’t anxious, though the traffic below the window seemed to have a slightly anxious sound, as if it couldn’t wait to get where it was going. I told myself I was better off than usual. I was in the middle of a case, dealing with people who had plenty of money.

But I didn’t want to have to depend on those people. I decided to call Tom Russo and see where we stood.

The cousin answered, “This is the Russo residence.”

“Archer speaking.”

She dropped her formal tone. “Hello, Mr. Archer. Are you having any luck?”

“I think I’m making some progress. How are you, Gloria?”

“I’m all right. I guess you want to talk to Tom, don’t you?”

“It’s what I had in mind.”

“I really hate to wake him up. After he got off work last night, he was out on the streets driving around for hours. It was nearly dawn when he got home, and he was in poor shape. He was talking about death and destruction.”

“Exactly what was he saying?”

“I wouldn’t want to repeat it over the phone. You never know who’s listening these days. Anyway, it didn’t make too much sense.”

I decided I still had a client, and it was time I paid him another visit.

Gloria answered the door. Her dark hair was damp and spread to dry on her shoulders, which she had protected with a thick towel.

“You didn’t say you were coming or I wouldn’t have washed my hair.”

“I decided I better talk to Tom in person.”

“He’s still asleep. Do you want me to wake him up?”

“I’ll wake him.” I wanted an intimate look at Tom.

Gloria showed me his room and opened the door for me. The
old wooden Venetian blinds were closed, and Tom was snoring in the gloom. I opened the blinds, and the light sliced in, but it didn’t disturb the sleeper. The back yard outside the window was a jungle of pittosporum dotted with red geraniums which had grown up through it toward the light.

Tom was huddled like a fetus under a light blanket, one fist against his chest, the other under his cheek. The lower part of his face was peppered with beard. The pillow crushed under his head was the only one on the bed, and I couldn’t see any signs of lipstick stains.

I looked around at Gloria. As if she could read my thoughts, she said from the doorway:

“I haven’t been sleeping with him, if that’s what you think.” Her voice was quite matter-of-fact. “Laurel’s the only girl he can see, and anyway I have a boy friend of my own.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“Last night? In the spare room. It was too late to go home. Anyway, my boy friend has the car.”

Tom groaned and turned onto his back, using his fists to shield his eyes from the light. I took him by the wrists and shook him a little. His half-awakened face was full of grief, and there were tears in the hollows of his eyes. He sobbed very loudly and pulled away from me.

“I tried to make her warm again,” he said. “But she was cold. Mummy was cold.”

Gloria said, “He’s having another bad spell. You just have to wait it out.”

“Shut the door, will you please?”

She gave me an insulted look, but she did as I asked her to. I stayed with Tom.

“What made Mummy cold?” I said.

“I pushed her and she fell down.” His voice seemed to mimic the voice of a child. “I didn’t mean to make her fall when I pushed her. I didn’t mean to die her. But the back of her head was all sticky.” He peered at his clean pharmacist’s hands. “And she was cold. I couldn’t warm her up.”

“People don’t turn cold right away when they die, Tom.”

“Mummy did.” He rocked his head from side to side. “She wouldn’t let me get in bed with them. She said I had to stay in the room with the little girl. She got out of bed and said she was going to spank me. The man said don’t, just get him out of here, but she said spank. She spanked me and I pushed her and she fell down on the floor and I couldn’t wake her up even by singing.”

“What did you sing?”

“ ‘Jingle Bells.’ The bed made a noise like Jingle Bells. She called him that sometimes, and then they laughed.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was just a man.”

“Old or young?”

“I don’t know.”

“What kind of clothes was he wearing?”

“I don’t know.” Tom looked at me anxiously, clutching at the bedclothes as if the strata of time were shifting under him and might bury him. “He said he’d come back and fix me if I told on him.”

“He won’t be coming back, Tom. That was a long time ago.”

He heard me, and seemed to understand me. I waited for him to come out of his half-waking dream. New tears formed like protective lenses in his eyes. Gradually they cleared, and he recognized me.

“Archer? Is Laurel dead? I dreamed that she was dead.”

“That doesn’t make it so, Tom. As far as I know she’s alive.”

“Where is she, then?” His voice was still distraught.

“Apparently she’s been kidnapped.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been a ransom demand made on her parents. And they’re prepared to pay it. But there’s some indication that it may be a phony and Laurel may be making a play for the money herself. Do you think that’s possible?”

“But Laurel has plenty of money.”

“Her family has. She doesn’t get on too well with them. And I understand she took them for some money with a fake kidnapping when she was in her teens.”

He regarded me with such loathing that it silenced me. His eyes narrowed down to dark slits, his lower lip pushed out. There were flecks of premature gray in his beard, like the first seeds of age beginning to sprout in him. He was just about young enough to be my son, and just about the age that I had been when I lost my wife.

“I read your letter to Laurel,” I said.

“Which one?”

“The one you sent to her grandmother’s house on Seahorse Lane. Laurel wrote you an answer on the back of it. But I guess she never got around to sending it.”

“What did she say?”