Sleeping Beauty (21 page)

I walked down that way. To the left were the space-age buildings of the Convention Center, high-rise apartments pierced with lights, parking lots where the beaches used to be. Off to the right was an indeterminate area, a kind of skid row for people with money in their pockets. Beyond it, harbor water glinted.

Sailors prowled the semidarkness. A drunk in a well-cut dark suit was sitting on the curb outside of Tom and Jerry’s reciting poetry which sounded as if he was making it up as he went along. The smiling hard-faced little man behind the counter in the liquor store looked ready to shoot me or serve me, depending on what I said to him.

“Do you know a girl called Ramona?”

“I know a Ramona. I wouldn’t call her a girl. I suppose you want to know how much of her income goes for liquor.”

“I’m not a welfare investigator,” I said. “I’m looking for a friend of hers, is all.”

“Harold?”

“That’s right.”

“I haven’t seen Harold lately.”

“Where does Ramona live?”

“Next street up on your right.” He pointed inland. “It’s the first three-story building past the corner. She’s on the second floor, in Apartment D. If you want a friendly welcome, bring her a six-pack.”

I took his advice. In the lobby of the building, a boy in naval uniform was leaning with a woman against the wall. I climbed the stairs, sliding my hand up the alligatored banister, and knocked on the door of Apartment D.

A woman opened the door, looked me over swiftly, and said, “Hello, there.”

She had a broad handsome face, jet-black eyes, tar-black hair. Her body looked swollen in its tight black dress but, like her face, it had a heavy beauty.

“Hello, Ramona.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m just a friend of a friend,” I said.

“Who’s your friend?”

“Harold Sherry.”

“He didn’t mention you.”

“Does Harold live here?”

“Not any more he doesn’t.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

“He did not.” She leaned toward me in the doorway. Her shoulders were massive and magnificent. “Is there a beef out on Harold?”

“No,” I lied. “He owes me some money.”

“Me, too. We should get together. Come in, why don’t you?”

She moved out of the doorway, making room for me to enter. The room was cramped and ancient as a cave. An open day bed took up about a third of its space. A pair of worn armchairs faced each other across a table on which a quart bottle of beer stood empty.

“I was just having a beer,” she said.

“I brought some more.”

“That’s nice. Harold must have said I liked beer, eh?”

I wondered what her background was. She spoke without an accent but with a touch of angry mimicry, as if to suggest that the language wasn’t exactly hers by choice. She flipped off the top of a can of beer, handed me the can, and opened one for herself.

“Sit down. Here’s
to
you. And here’s to Harold and his new girl.”

“He has one, has he?”

She nodded. “He has one. She came with him when he stopped to pick up his things the other day.”

“Did you see her?”

“Not really. I looked out the window, but she stayed in the car. You know her?”

“I might. What kind of a car was she driving?”

“A little green car, not new.”

“A Falcon?”

“I guess that’s what it was. A little green sporty model. You do know her, eh?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I wanted to go down and meet her. Harold wouldn’t let me. He didn’t want me to see her. All I saw was the top of her head. She’s a brunette, like me.”

“Why didn’t he want you to meet her?”

“Because I’m half Indian. For a boy who’s been over the jumps like Harold, he’s got some very old-fashioned prejudices. Also, he thinks I’m too fat.” She nodded her head in agreement. “I
am
too fat. Do you want to guess how old I am?”

“Thirty-five.”

I thought I was flattering her, but she shook her head. “Twenty-nine. If you were me, how would you get rid of some of this weight?”

“Give up beer.”

“Besides that, I mean. I’ve got to have something in my life besides sitting and waiting.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“Something good to happen. Like winning the daily double.” Her voice was shallow, mocking her own emptiness or the emptiness of the place where she was living.

“Don’t you want something better than that?”

“You mean marriage and children, or a job? I’ve tried those things. I’ve held good jobs. And I’ve got a husband and three children. Only he kicked me out. And I’m not allowed to see my children.” She looked down at her lap. “They live in Rolling Hills. Sometimes I go down and look across the water and pretend I can see them.” She lifted her head. Her face was like a
moon rising over the hill of her body. “Are you married?”

“I have been. I’m divorced.”

“Just like me, eh? What happened to your wife?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her recently.”

“Then worry about your wife. Don’t worry about me.” She drank up the rest of her can of beer. “Incidentally, my name isn’t Ramona. People just call me that; it started as a joke.”

“What is your name?”

“I don’t tell strangers.” She rapped her can down on the table. “You haven’t told me
your
name.”

“Archer.”

“Where’s your bow and arrow, Archer?”

“Out in the back of the Pontiac.”

She laughed suddenly. “You’re kidding me. Does Harold really owe you money?”

“A little money.”

“You can kiss it goodbye.”

She opened another can and offered it to me. When I refused, she drank from it herself. The lonely, irregular rhythm of her life was beginning to get to me. Under it I could sense her leashed anger.

“Try his mother,” she said. “I’m betting he’ll go back to his mother. He’s the type that always does—in the end they always settle for clean sheets. Clean sheets and dirty minds,” she added in a meditative growl. “What kind of a girl has he got now?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I thought you said you knew her.”

“I was wrong. I was thinking about another girl.”

“But you knew about the green car.”

“I saw Harold driving it today.”

“It figures,” she said. “I think he went with her because he needed a car. He wanted me to buy him one, but I don’t have that kind of money—not any more.”

“What did he want a car for?”

“He had a plan, if you can call it that. He didn’t spell it out
to me, but he said it would make a fortune and at the same time get back at the people that wrecked his life.” Her gaze moved on my face like a dark ray. “Is Harold in trouble?”

“He could be. Who were the people he wanted to get back at?”

“His father was one of them. Harold got into some really bad trouble at one time. His father walked out on him and let him take the rap. He never forgave his father for letting him go to jail. Or the other people.”

“Who were they?”

“I don’t remember the name of the family, but they’re in the oil business. When Harold got high, he used to talk about blowing up their oil tanks and stuff like that.”

“Would he know how to go about it?”

“He might. His father was an oil engineer—he started here in Long Beach—and Harold told me his father trained him to follow in his footsteps. That was before the big break in the family.”

“Did he ever tell you what caused the break?”

“He never did. But he blamed it all on his father. He was getting pretty paranoid on the subject—you know what I mean? It’s one reason I wasn’t too sorry to see him go.”

“Where did he go?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. Of course he had something worked out with that girl. He probably moved into her apartment.”

She looked around the narrow horizons of her own apartment. As the conversation and the evening wore on, she seemed to grow older and more melancholy. The gleam of beauty I had noticed on her at first had been absorbed by her body, like something swallowed by a grieving monster.

She lived in twilight, I thought, just as Harold’s mother did. I wondered if Harold’s new girl was another twilight woman.

“Can you tell me the girl’s name?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It wasn’t Laurel?”

She thought about the question. “He knew a Laurel, I think. The name came up, anyway. But I don’t believe this was the one.”

“What was this one’s name?”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders and put out her hands like a woman expecting rain.

Down in the dark street, sailors were standing around in disconnected attitudes, like dim purgatorial souls waiting for orders.

I walked uphill to my car. The area was almost deserted, as if when the sun had dropped into the sea it had sucked the people along with it.

There was a single light in Dr. Brokaw’s building, on the second floor at the corner. I went up in the laboring elevator and tried the outer door of his office. It was locked.

A man’s voice on the other side of the door said, “Who is that?”

“Lew Archer. I talked to you on the phone, about Harold Sherry.”

“I
see.”

He was still and silent for a moment. Then his keys clinked, and one of them turned harshly in the lock. The door opened inward, slowly, as if against pressure. Silhouetted by the light from the waiting room, Dr. Brokaw was a man of medium height with an enormous head.

I saw when he stepped back to let me enter that his macrocephalic head was mostly hair and beard. Between them, his eyes looked out like a forest animal’s, dark and sensitive and vaguely alarmed.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you earlier. I really didn’t expect you to wait. But now that you’re here, come in.”

I followed him across the waiting room into his private office. He shut the door and leaned on it, looking at me with something like repugnance. His beard was shot through with gray, but his eyes were young. They seemed to soften as they looked at me.

“You’re very tired, aren’t you?”

It sounded more like an expression of sympathy than a medical opinion. But it made me aware of my tiredness, which seemed to rise in waves up through my body to my head.

“I’ve covered a lot of territory in the last twenty-four hours. And been getting nowhere.”

“This
is
nowhere, isn’t it?” His teeth flashed in his beard. “Sit down, Mr. Archer. Rest your feet.”

I waited until he had closed the door and moved to the other side of the desk. His black medical bag was on the desk beside a photograph of a woman whose eyes resembled Brokaw’s. He reached out and turned the picture face down, as if he didn’t want our conversation to be witnessed. I said:

“The emergency patient you went to see just now—was it Harold Sherry?”

“I prefer not to discuss it.”

“That means it was Harold.”

“You’re jumping to an unwarranted conclusion.”

“Then tell me who it was.”

He leaned forward across his desk, and spoke with surprising force. “My patients are my own responsibility. You have no right to cross-question me about them.”

“If you think this is cross-questioning—”

He raised his voice. “Don’t threaten me, Mr. Archer. Attempts have been made to threaten me before now, and I can assure you they were counter-productive.”

“I wasn’t threatening you, or even trying to. I think you’re involved in a situation you don’t understand.”

His mood, or what he chose to show me of it, went through a quicksilver change. “That would be nothing new. It’s the story of my life.”

“I don’t pretend to understand it, either. I do know there’s been a major crime, possibly several. A young married woman named Laurel Russo disappeared last night. This afternoon, Harold Sherry collected a hundred thousand dollars’ ransom money. At the same time, he shot Laurel’s father, who shot back. Both men were wounded, and the woman is still missing.”

As I told him what had happened, his face changed as if it was being exposed to the events themselves. Brokaw seemed to be a very sensitive man, almost too sensitive to be a doctor. I wondered if he wore his beard as a mask.

“Did you see Harold this evening, Doctor? You can understand why the question is important.”

“I can understand why it’s important to you. You call yourself a private detective, but you’re still what my patients call fuzz. You’re the willing representative of a punitive society, and all you really want to do is arrest people and put them behind bars.”

“Is that all I really want to do?”

“I suspect it is.”

The quiet accusation stung. I tried to move like a neutral in the no man’s land between the lawless and the law. But when the shooting started I generally knew which side I belonged on. Polarized by Brokaw, as perhaps Brokaw was polarized by me, I felt very little different from the man in harness I had been twenty years before when I resigned from the Long Beach police force.

“What do you want to do with criminals, Doctor?”

“Treat them. But your word ‘criminals’ begs the question. I want to treat them before they become criminals. It’s one reason I came back here and opened this office.”

“Are you a Long Beach boy?”

“For my sins, I am.”

“Me, too.” I was glad to find some common ground with him. “It was a good place to grow up in.” My words sounded rather hollow in my ears.

“It isn’t so good any more. Half the diseases I treat are drug-related. A large percentage are venereal. Another large percentage are emotional.”

“Have you been treating Harold for emotional trouble?”

He gave me a quick darting look. “How did you guess that?”

“I know something about his background. I talked to his mother this afternoon.”

“I haven’t had that privilege. In fact I’ve had very little time with Harold himself. I’ve only seen him four or five times. Five times.”

“Including this evening?”

“You’re very persistent. But I’m standing on my right to remain silent.”

“I don’t know where you get that right.”

“Harold Sherry is my patient.”

“I can understand your concern for him,” I said. “What I don’t understand is your lack of concern for the young woman he kidnapped.”