Sleeping Beauty (2 page)

The tide was coming in more strongly now, and I was afraid that the oil would come in with it. It might be on the beaches by tomorrow. I decided to go for a farewell walk southward along the shore. That happened to be the direction the woman with the grebe had taken.

The sunset spilled on the water and flared across the sky.

The sky changed through several colors and became a soft crumbled gray. It was like walking under the roof of an enormous cave where hidden fires burned low.

I came to a kind of natural corner where the shoreline curved out and a cliff rose abruptly from the beach. A few late surfers were waiting on the water for a final big one.

I watched them until a big one rose out of the darkening sea and brought most of them in. A cormorant flew across the water like an urgent afterthought.

I walked on for another half-mile or so. The beach was narrow and getting narrower, encroached on by the waves and crowded by the cliff. The cliff was fifty or sixty feet high at this point. Rough paths and precarious wooden stairways climbed here and there to the houses on its top.

I told myself I couldn’t get caught by the tide. But night was falling now, and the sea was rising to meet it.

A couple of hundred yards ahead of me, a scattering of boulders lay at the foot of the cliff and blocked the beach. I decided to walk that far and then turn back. There was something about the place that worried me. The cliff and the boulders at its base looked in the fading light like something seen for the last time.

A white object was lodged high among the boulders. When I got nearer, I could see that it was a woman and hear between the sounds of the surf that she was crying. She turned her face away from me, but not before I’d recognized her.

As I came near, she sat perfectly still, pretending to be an accidental object caught in a crevice.

“Is there something the matter?”

She stopped crying with a gulp, as though she had swallowed her tears, and turned her face away. “No. There’s nothing the matter.”

“Did the bird die?”

“Yes. It died.” Her voice was high and tight. “Now are you satisfied?”

“It takes a lot to satisfy me. Don’t you think you should find a safer place to sit?”

She didn’t respond at first. Then her head turned slowly. Her wet eyes gleamed at me in the deep twilight.

“I like it here. I hope the tide comes and gets me.”

“Because one grebe died? A lot of diving birds are going to die.”

“Don’t keep talking about death. Please.” She struggled out of her crevice and got to her feet. “Who are you anyway? Did somebody send you here to find me?”

“I came of my own accord.”

“You followed me?”

“Not exactly. I was taking a walk.” A wave came in and splashed against the boulders. I could feel the cold spray on my face. “Don’t you think we better get out of here?”

She looked around in a quick, desperate movement, then up at the cliff where a cantilevered house hung over her head like a threat. “I don’t know where to go.”

“I thought you lived in the neighborhood.”

“No.” She was silent for a moment. “Where do you live?”

“Los Angeles. West Los Angeles.”

Her eyes shifted as if she had made a decision. “So do I.”

I didn’t quite believe in the coincidence, but I was willing to go along with it and see where it led. “Do you have transportation?”

“No.”

“I’ll take you home.”

She came along without any argument. She told me that her name was Laurel Russo, Mrs. Thomas Russo. I said my name was Lew Archer. Something about the situation made me hold back the fact that I was a private detective.

Before we reached the end of the cliff where the beach curved, a high wave came up and soaked our feet and brought in the last surfer. He joined the others, who were squatting around a driftwood fire built under the brow of a natural cave. Their oiled faces and bodies gleamed in the firelight. They
looked as if they had given up on civilization and were ready for anything or nothing.

There were other people on the beach, talking in low tones or waiting in silence. We stood with them for a little while in the semidarkness. The ocean and its shores were never entirely dark: the water gathered light like the mirror of a telescope.

The woman was standing so close to me I could feel her breath on my neck. Still she seemed a long way off, at a telescopic distance from me and the others. She seemed to feel it, too. She took hold of my hand. Her hand was cold.

The wide-shouldered young man in the black turtleneck whom I had seen in Blanche’s Restaurant had appeared on the wharf again. He jumped down onto the sand and came toward us. His movements were rather clumsy and mechanical, as if somebody had activated them by pressing a button.

He stopped and looked at the woman with a kind of menacing excitement. Still holding on to my hand, she turned and pulled me toward the road. Her grip was tight and spasmodic, like a frightened child’s. The young man stood and watched us go.

Under the streetlights, I got a good look at her. Her face seemed frozen, her eyes in deep dark shock. When we got into my car, I could smell her fear.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Honestly.”

“Then why are you afraid of him?”

“I’m just afraid, period. Can’t we leave it at that?”

“It wasn’t Tom Russo, was it? Your husband?”

“Certainly not.”

She was shivering. I kept an old raincoat in the trunk of my car, and I got it out and put it over her shoulders. She didn’t look at me or thank me.

I drove up the ramp onto the freeway. The traffic going north with us wasn’t heavy. But an unbroken stream of headlights poured toward us from Los Angeles, as if the city was leaking light through a hole in its side.

The woman rode in a silence so complete that I hesitated to break it. I glanced at her face from time to time. Her expression seemed to keep changing, from grief and fear and dismay to cold indifference. I wondered what caused the changes, or if my mind had conspired with the lights to half imagine them.

We left the freeway at my West Los Angeles turnoff.

She spoke in a small, tentative voice: “Where do you live, Mr.—?” She had forgotten my name.

“Archer,” I said. “I have an apartment just a few blocks from here.”

“Would you greatly mind if I phoned my husband from your apartment? He isn’t expecting me. I’ve been staying with relatives.”

I should have asked where her husband lived and driven her there. But I took her home to my place.

She stood barefooted in my living room with my old raincoat hanging on her, and looked around as if she was slumming. Her thoughtlessness of manner made me wonder what her background was. There was probably money there, possibly quite new money.

I showed her the phone on the desk and went into the bedroom to unpack my carry-on bag. When I went back into the living room, she was huddled over the phone. The black receiver was pressed to the side of her head like a surgical device which had drained all the blood from her face.

I didn’t realize that the line was dead until she laid the receiver down, very gently. Then she put her face down on her arms. Her hair fell across my desk like a heavy shadow.

I stood and watched her for a while, unwilling to intrude on her feelings, perhaps unwilling to share them. She was full of trouble. But somehow she looked quite natural in my room.

After a while, she lifted her head. Her face was as calm as a mask. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”

“Don’t be sorry.”

“I have something to be sorry about. Tom won’t come and get me. He has a woman with him. She answered the phone.”

“What about the relatives you’ve been staying with?”

“Nothing about them.”

She looked around the room as if her life had suddenly narrowed down.

“You mentioned you had a family. You said they were in the oil business.”

“You must have misunderstood me. And I’m getting tired of being questioned, if you don’t mind.” Her mood was swinging like an erratic pendulum from being hurt to hurting. “You seem to be mortally afraid of getting stuck with me.”

“On the contrary. You can stay here all night if you want to.”

“With you?”

“You can have the bedroom. This chesterfield opens out into a sleeper.”

“And what would it cost me?”

“Nothing.”

“Do I look like an easy mark?”

She stood up, dropping my raincoat from her shoulders. It was an act of rejection. At the same time she was inadvertently showing me her body. It was deep in the breast, where the bird had left its dark stains on her shirt; narrow in the waist, deep in the hips, full-thighed. There was sand on the rug from her dirty elegant feet.

I caught an oblique glimpse of myself as a middle-aged man
on the make. It was true that if she had been old or ugly I wouldn’t have brought her home with me. She was neither. In spite of her discontent and fear, her head had a dark unchanging beauty.

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, asking myself if I was telling her the truth.

“People always want something. Don’t try to fool yourself. I should never have come here with you.” She looked around like a child in a strange place. “I don’t like it here.”

“You’re free to leave, Mrs. Russo.”

She began to cry suddenly. The tears ran down her uncovered face, leaving shiny tracks. Moved by compunction or desire, I reached for her shoulders with my hands. She backed away and stood vibrating.

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

She didn’t believe me. I guessed that she had been badly hurt already, perhaps damaged like the grebe beyond hope of recovery. She touched her grief-smeared face.

“Is there someplace where I can wash?”

I showed her the door to the bathroom. She locked it emphatically behind her. She was in there quite a long time. When she came out, her eyes were brighter and she moved with more confidence, like an alcoholic who has taken a secret drink.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll be on my way.”

“Do you have any money?”

“I don’t need money where I’m going.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

My voice was sharp, and she overreacted to it. “You expect me to pay you for the ride? And here I am breathing your valuable air.”

“You want to pick a fight with someone. Why does it have to be me?”

She chose to take this as a final rejection. She opened the door
abruptly and left the apartment. I had an urge to follow her, but I went no farther than the mailbox. I sat at my desk and began to go through the mail that had piled up during my week’s vacation.

Most of it was bills. There was a three-hundred-dollar check from a man whose son I had found living with five other teenagers in an apartment in Isla Vista. I had gone to Mazatlán on the strength of it. There was a laboriously hand-printed letter from an inmate of a maximum security facility in central California. He said he was innocent and wanted me to prove it. He added in a postscript:

“Even if I am not innocent, why can’t they let me go now? I am an old man, I would not hurt nobody now. What harm can I do if they let me go now?”

Like a long-distance call being placed, my mind made an obscure series of connections. I got up, almost overturning the light chair, and went into the bathroom. The door of the medicine cabinet was partly open. There had been a vial of Nembutal in the cabinet, thirty-five or forty capsules left over from a time when I had forgotten how to sleep, and then had learned again. They weren’t there now.

She had been gone ten or twelve minutes when I went down to the empty street. I got into my car and drove around the block. There were no pedestrians at all, no trace of Laurel Russo.

I drove as far as Wilshire, then realized that I was wasting my time. I went back to my apartment and looked up Thomas Russo in the phone directory. His address was on the border of Westwood, not more than three or four miles from me. I made a note of his address and telephone number.

His phone rang a dozen times, rhythmic and raucous as a death rattle, before the receiver was lifted. “Russo residence, Tom Russo speaking.”

“This is Lew Archer. You don’t know me, but it’s about your wife.”

“Laurel? Has something happened?”

“Not yet. But I’m concerned about her. She took some sleeping pills from my apartment.”

His voice became suspicious. “Are you her boy friend?”

“No, I’m not. You are.”

“What was she doing in your apartment?”

“She wanted to phone you. When you turned her down, she left with my sleeping capsules.”

“What kind of sleeping capsules?”

“Three-quarter-grain Nembutal.”

“How many?”

“At least three dozen. Enough to kill her.”

“I know that,” Russo said. “I’m a pharmacist.”

“Is she likely to take them?”

“I don’t know.” But there was a whisper of fear in his voice.

“Has she attempted suicide before?”

“I don’t know who I’m talking to.” Which meant she probably had. “Are you some kind of policeman?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“I suppose her parents hired you.”

“Nobody hired me. I met your wife on the beach at Pacific Point. Apparently the oil spill upset her, and she asked me to bring her to Los Angeles. When you turned her down—”

“Please don’t keep saying that. I didn’t turn her down. I told her I couldn’t take her back unless she was ready to give it a
good try. I couldn’t stand another patch-up job and then another break. The last one nearly killed me.”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t care about me the way I—Look, I’m telling you my family secrets.”

“Tell me more, Mr. Russo. Who else would she be likely to call, or go to?”

“I’d need time to think about that, and I don’t have the time. I have the night shift at the drugstore. I ought to be there now.”

“Which store?”

“The Save-More, in Westwood.”

“I’ll come by there. Will you make me a list of the people she might try to get in touch with?”