Sleeping Beauty (17 page)

His speech was sibilant and a little slurred, and his voice hurried as though he wanted to get it all out before he forgot what he intended to say. I wondered if it was the tranquilizer he had taken, or if there had been some deep internal change in him.

“Let’s get started,” he said. “I don’t have bloody all day. I want to see my son. Is he badly hurt?”

“I don’t believe so, Mr. Lennox. But he probably won’t be needing any visitors. You better stay here with Mrs. Hapgood.”

“But there are decisions to make.”

“You can make them here.”

His face reddened. “If you won’t drive me, I’ll drive myself. This is my son’s car.”

“It wouldn’t be a good idea for you to drive.”

He took off his homburg and punched it with his frail bony fist. “Dammit, don’t tell me what to do. I don’t allow it. Get out and I’ll drive myself.”

His words were bold and angry, but his voice was uncertain. His white hair clung like smoke to his spotted scalp. His eyes kept moving, like water under wind. He seemed to be caught in an old man’s uncertainty, too weak to go but not content to stay.

He looked both angry and grateful when Connie approached the car and spoke to him:

“Mr. Archer isn’t going into town. He has some investigative work to do out here. Anyway, you need a rest now.”

“Who needs a rest?”

“You need a rest. So do I. We both do. Come on, William, or I’ll get Dr. Langdale after you.”

Her voice was maternal and seductive. He got out of the car and put his crumpled homburg on his head. She laughed at him and pushed it down so that his ears stuck out. He laughed, too, pleased and flattered by her horseplay. They walked back toward the house together, a pair of ill-matched comedians making the best of it.

I thought as I drove downhill across the valley that there was something real there after all. No doubt they had made a kind of bargain: that she would stay with him and look after him until he died; then his money would look after her until she died.

The pink house on Lorenzo Drive had a slightly abandoned look. The shrubs and flowers around it were either overgrown or dying, and when I turned off the Cadillac’s engine there was a waiting stillness in the air.

I went around to the back of the house and looked inside the garage. It contained an aging gray Mercedes, a woman’s bicycle, and a lot of gardening equipment. No green Falcon. No bloody footprints.

I went around to the front again and knocked on the door. Mrs. Sherry was a long time answering. Eventually I heard her soft movements inside. A key turned over in the lock and the door opened on a chain.

She was a faded woman who shaded her eyes from the light as if she had spent the day immured in darkness. “What do you want?”

“A chance to talk to you for a few minutes.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a private detective.” I told her my name.

“Is it about Harold?”

“I’m afraid it is. May I come in, Mrs. Sherry?”

“I don’t see much point in it. He doesn’t live at home any more. My son and I decided some time ago to go our separate ways.” She sounded like a woman who had broken off an unhappy love affair, or barely survived an illness.

“But you jumped to the conclusion that I came here on his account.”

“I did?” She sounded genuinely puzzled. “You must be mistaken. I had and have no idea why you came here.”

“I’d like to discuss it with you, though. May I come in, Mrs. Sherry?”

She hesitated. The skin tightened around her mouth and eyes. She seemed to be winding up her nerve to shut the door on me.

“Harold’s been wounded, I think.”

Shock struck her face a glancing blow. I guessed that she had been struck in that way many times before, and had learned the tricks of moral evasion. If you withdrew your spirit deep into yourself and out of sight, it couldn’t be completely destroyed. But it might go blind in the internal darkness.

She unhooked the chain clumsily and opened the door. “Come in and tell me about it.” She held back her crucial question until we were seated facing each other in her dim formal living room: “Is Harold going to die?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know that. I saw a young man who looked like him at Sandhill Lake this afternoon. He drove away in a green Falcon.”

“It must have been someone else. My son doesn’t have a car like that. He doesn’t have any car.”

“How do you know if you’re not in touch with him?”

“I didn’t say that. I still hear from Harold.” She added with unexpected rigor, “When he wants something from me.”

“Have you heard from him today?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did he want?”

“To borrow my car. I refused.” She looked at me with a certain desperate hopefulness, as if her refusal might make her immune to any further pain.

“Why did he want your car?”

“He didn’t say. But I knew something was afoot.”

“How did you know that?”

“I know my son. He sounded excited, as if he’d had another one of his grand ideas.”

Another phony kidnapping? I almost said it out loud to her, but I held back. The world and I had been pressing her rather hard. I didn’t want to hurt her deeply, and I didn’t want to lose her. There was the further problem of identity, and the possibility that I had the wrong man and the wrong mother.

She had recovered enough of her nerve to ask, “What happened at Sandhill Lake? My husband—Harold’s father used to go shooting at the lake.”

“There was some more shooting there today. A double shooting.”

Her hand went to her throat as if to hold back the question, but it came out: “Harold shot somebody else, too?”

“I think so. But before we go any further, I’d like to see a picture of Harold.”

She brightened. “You mean you’re not sure that Harold is involved?”

“Not absolutely sure. Do you have a recent picture?”

“I have one from a couple of years ago. It’s in my bedroom.”

She brought it to me in hopeful trepidation, carrying it as if it was a bomb that needed defusing: a small photograph of a worried-looking young man who had lost some weight and gained some years since his picture was taken for the River Valley yearbook. It was certainly the man I’d seen at Blanche’s, and almost certainly the one who had ambushed Jack Lennox in the tower at Sandhill Lake.

“I’m afraid he’s the one.” I put the picture down on a coffee table.

“Who did he shoot?”

“Jack Lennox.”

The life retreated from her face, leaving it vacant. She fell into her chair, turning sideways and covering her head with her hands.

She said:

“It’s starting all over again, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“That terrible trouble with the Lennox family. Harold was only a boy when it started. He wasn’t the criminal they made him out to be. He was physically too mature for his years; that was the main trouble with him. He wanted to marry Laurel. That’s why they went to Las Vegas—they thought they could get a preacher to marry them. But they ran out of money, and Laurel had the bright idea of pretending to her parents she’d been kidnapped. It was Laurel’s idea, but Harold was the one who got the blame. Her father went to Las Vegas and searched them out and gave my son a terrible beating and threw him in jail. Harold was only eighteen, and he never recovered from the trauma. I’ve got doctors who will swear to that in court. My family and his father’s family were all college graduates, but Harold never went back to school.” She sat up blinking, as if she had talked her way by a subterranean route back to the present. “Where is Harold now?”

“I wish I knew.”

“But you said that he’d been shot.”

“He got away from the lake under his own power. Jack Lennox went in an ambulance.”

“Is Mr. Lennox hurt badly?”

“I don’t know. He has a head wound. It looked fairly superficial to me, but I’m not a doctor.”

“Is Laurel involved in this, too?”

“I’m afraid she is, Mrs. Sherry. Laurel’s been kidnapped again. Your son met her father at the lake to collect the ransom for her return. The ante has gone up since the other time in Las Vegas. This time it’s a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Harold is asking the Lennox family for that much money?”

“He’s done more than ask for it. He’s already collected it, as I said. The delivery was made to him at Sandhill Lake earlier this afternoon, by Jack Lennox. Your son and Jack Lennox evidently shot each other.”

She shook her head in a flurry of rejection. “I wish I had never given birth to a son.” But when she heard herself, she couldn’t stand the chill of loneliness. “Laurel put him up to it. Remember it was her idea the first time.”

“Maybe it was. But that was a long time ago, and people change. This time it could be real.”

“You think he kidnapped Laurel?”

“He claimed he did. He took money from her father.”

“Is that what you want? To get the money back?”

“I want Laurel back. I don’t really care about the money. Nobody does. If you can get that message to Harold, it might help.”

“I wouldn’t know how to get in touch with him.” But she looked at me as an agent might look, willing to barter and trade with what knowledge she had.

“You said he phoned you yesterday.”

“Yes. He wanted my car.”

“Where was he phoning from?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Was it a long-distance call?”

“I don’t really know. It only lasted a minute. When I refused to lend him my car, he got angry and hung up on me.” A flicker of pain crossed her face, as if the receiver had crashed in her ear again. “But I’m glad I didn’t let him have it.”

“You knew something was afoot, you said.”

“I didn’t actually
know
anything. But he sounded excited—the kind of excitement I’ve learned not to trust. My son is young for his years, and terribly excitable.”

“Harold is at least thirty, isn’t he?”

She looked at me in some surprise, as if the last ten or fifteen
years had somehow passed unnoticed. Her lips moved in calculation. “He’s thirty-three.”

“That means he isn’t a child. What does he live on?”

“I help him out. And of course he’s held a number of jobs. One thing you can say for Harold, he isn’t lazy.”

“What kind of jobs?”

“He’s been a busboy recently, while he’s looking for something better.”

“Where does he live, Mrs. Sherry?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere on the beach.”

“It’s a long beach,” I said, “from San Diego to Isla Vista.”

“He
was
in Isla Vista at one time. But he came back to Los Angeles. I don’t know where he’s living now; he hasn’t told me. Except when he wants something from me, he treats me as if I were his enemy.”

“Does he have girl friends?”

“He has a girl friend, yes. He mentioned her the last time we talked. But I’ve never seen her. I think Harold is ashamed of her.”

“Why do you think that?”

“He refused to answer any personal questions about her. She may be a married woman.”

“Laurel is married. Has Harold been seeing Laurel?”

She didn’t answer me right away.

“Has Harold seen Laurel recently?” I said.

“Yes, he has. Apparently he met her in Los Angeles, and she invited him to her house. I warned him not to go on seeing her. She’s always been a terrible influence on him.”

“How do you know she invited him to her house?”

“He told me so.”

“Yesterday?”

“A week or two ago.”

“So you’ve been in fairly continuous contact with him?”

“He comes to me for money. But I haven’t been able to give him much lately. What little money I have is tied up in a trust, and the income doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

“When he mentioned Laurel, what was his attitude?”

“He was grateful,” she said with some scorn. “Grateful to her for inviting him to dinner. I told him he should have more pride, after what her family did to him. I told Harold he was demeaning himself by accepting anything from Laurel Lennox.”

“What was his reaction?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t answer me directly. But I knew I’d given him something to think about.”

She sat in silence, trying to understand her life. Her body moved as if it was wrung by pain. I got the impression that there was an almost physical connection between her and her son, stretching like an umbilical cord from where she sat to where he was laying down his bloody footprints.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said.

“Neither do I. I’d like to think that the worst has already happened.”

She took this as an optimistic remark. “Yes. I’m sure it has. And I’m sure that he hasn’t—that nothing has happened to Laurel.”

“I’ve got to find her before something does. Where do I look, Mrs. Sherry?”

“I have no idea.”

“Didn’t he give you an address, or a phone number?”

“Yes. But he’s always kept moving on. I believe he’s moved again in the last week or so.”

“Since he went to Laurel’s house for dinner?”

She considered the question. “Yes.”

“What was his last previous address?”

“He was living someplace in Long Beach—I never actually knew where. I think he was living with a woman.”

“How do you know?”

“His attitude toward me changes,” she said. “He always becomes so much more independent. But then it never lasts.”

“Did he ever talk about the woman?”

“No.”

“Where would he go to have his wound looked after?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Does he have a personal doctor?”

“He did have. I directed him to send his bills to me. They were very reasonable. His name was Dr. Lawrence Brokaw.” She stood up in sudden decision. “I’ll see if I can find his address for you.”

Mrs. Sherry came back after a while carrying a sheet of notepaper, blue and deckle-edged, on which she had written Dr. Lawrence Brokaw’s office address in Long Beach.

Her handwriting was small and elegant. She stood nervously beside me as I read it.

“You won’t have to tell Dr. Brokaw about this?”

“About what?”

“The kidnapping—the supposed kidnapping. After all, I’m sure it was Laurel’s idea. There’s no reason why my son’s name should be dragged in the dirt again.”