Sleeping Beauty (33 page)

“That was no crime. They can’t do anything to me for sending him a clipping. It seemed to me he had a right to know about her death.” She spoke with a kind of remembered grief, but her grief had long since turned malign. “I used to imagine the look on his face when he opened that envelope with the clipping in it and found out she was dead.”

“Why did you send one to Somerville?”

“She was his girl first. He passed her on to Jack.” She looked at me with loathing. “You men are dirty creatures, all of you. I’m glad all this has come out. I’ve been sick of this filthy pretense of a marriage for years.”

“Why did you push Nelson Bagley over the cliff?”

“He remembered me. He saw me at the woman’s house that night. He was the one who phoned me and told me my husband was with her.”

“And you went there and shot her?”

“I’m not admitting anything,” she said.

But she looked at me with the realization that there was hardly anything left to admit.

“Did Laurel see you push him over the cliff?”

“Yes. She ran away. But she came back last night.”

“Did she speak to you about it?”

“Yes, she did. She said I ought to call the police and make a full confession.”

“Are you willing to do that?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid. What will they do to me? I’ve killed three people.” Her face opened as if she was falling again.

“I can understand why you killed Allie Russo,” I said, “and Nelson Bagley. But why did Tony Lashman have to die?”

“He knew that Nelson Bagley had come here to the house. He tried to get money from me. He wanted a hundred dollars a day for life.”

Her voice was cold and resentful. She had suffered so much that she was immune to anyone else’s suffering. I was growing weary of her, and I asked her to take me to Laurel.

We went to a bedroom at the front of the house. The wall that faced the sea was made of glass, but it was heavily draped against the morning. At one end, a glass door opened onto a railed balcony.

Laurel lay asleep on the bed, a pillow under her dark head and an afghan over her. There was a telephone on the bedside table. Before I used it, I bent over Laurel and touched her warm forehead with my mouth. I could hardly believe that she was alive.

Behind me, the door to the balcony opened and closed. Marian Lennox was climbing awkwardly over the railing.

I moved toward her. “Marian, come back.”

She paid no attention to me. She stepped off into air and fell in silence until the black boulders stopped her. Smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres.

I went back to Laurel. She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive.

I picked up the phone and started to make the necessary calls.

ROSS MACDONALD

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.

Books by Ross Macdonald

Blue City

The Dark Tunnel

Trouble Follows Me

The Three Roads

The Moving Target

The Drowning Pool

The Way Some People Die

The Ivory Grin

Meet Me at the Morgue

Find a Victim

The Name is Archer

The Barbarous Coast

The Doomsters

The Galton Case

The Ferguson Affair

The Wycherly Woman

The Zebra-Striped Hearse

The Chill

Black Money

The Far Side of the Dollar

The Goodbye Look

The Underground Man

Sleeping Beauty

The Blue Hammer

BOOKS BY
R
OSS
M
ACDONALD

THE BARBAROUS COAST

The beautiful, high-diving blonde had Hollywood dreams and stars in her eyes but now she seems to have disappeared without a trace. Hired by her hotheaded husband and her rummy “uncle,” Lew Archer sniffs around Malibu and finds the stink of blackmail, blood money, and murder on every pricey silk shirt. Beset by dirty cops, a bumptious boxer turned silver-screen pretty boy, and a Hollywood mogul with a dark past, Archer discovers the secret of a grisly murder that just won’t stay hidden.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27903-3

THE IVORY GRIN

A hard-faced woman clad in a blue mink stole and dripping with diamonds hires Lew Archer to track down her former maid, who she claims has stolen her jewelry. Archer can tell he’s being fed a line, but curiosity gets the better of him and he accepts the case. He tracks the wayward maid to a ramshackle motel in a seedy, rundown small town, but finds her dead in her tiny room, with her throat slit ear to ear. Archer digs deeper into the case and discovers a web of deceit and intrigue, with crazed number-runners from Detroit, gorgeous triple-crossing molls, and a golden-boy shipping heir who’s mysteriously gone missing.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27899-9

SLEEPING BEAUTY

Lew finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands—including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald’s masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70866-4

THE DOOMSTERS

Hired by Carl Hallman, the desperate-eyed junkie scion of an obscenely wealthy political dynasty, detective Lew Archer investigates the suspicious deaths of Hallman’s parents, Senator Hallman and his wife, Alicia. Arriving in the sleepy town of Purissima, Archer discovers that orange groves may be where the Hallmans made their mint but they’ve been investing heavily in political intimidation and police brutality to shore up their rancid riches. However, after years of dastardly double-crossing and low down dirty dealing, the family seems to be on the receiving end of a karmic death blow. With two already dead and another consigned to the nuthouse, Archer races to crack the secret before another Hallman lands on the slab.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27904-0

THE WAY SOME PEOPLE DIE

In a rundown house in Santa Monica, Mrs. Samuel Lawrence presses fifty crumpled bills into Lew Archer’s hand and asks him to find her wandering daughter, Galatea. Described as ‘crazy for men’ and without discrimination, she was last seen driving off with small-time gangster Joe Tarantine, a hophead hood with a rep for violence. Archer traces the hidden trail from San Francisco slum alleys to the luxury of Palm Springs, traveling through an urban wilderness of drugs and viciousness. As the bodies begin to pile up, he finds that even angel faces can mask the blackest of hearts.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27898-2

THE GOODBYE LOOK

Lew is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, a mysterious hobo. Then a stiff turns up in a car on an empty beach. And Nick turns up with a Colt .45.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7

THE INSTANT ENEMY

At first glance, it’s an open-and-shut missing persons case: a head-strong daughter has run off to be with her hothead juvenile delinquent boyfriend. That is until this bush-league Bonnie and Clyde kidnap Stephen Hackett, a local millionaire industrialist. Now, Archer is offered a cool 100 Gs for his safe return by Hachett’s coquettish heiress mother who has her own mysterious ties to this disturbed duo. But the deeper Archer digs, the more he realizes that nothing is as it seems and everything is questionable. Is the boyfriend a psycho ex-con with murder on the brain or a damaged youngster trying to straighten out his twisted family tree? And is the daughter simply his nympho sex-kitten companion in crime or really a fragile kid, trying to block out horrific memories of bad acid and an unspeakable sex crime.

Crime Fiction/978-0-307-27905-7

ALSO AVAILABLE
:

Black Money
, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Blue Hammer
, 978-0-679-76810-4
The Chill
, 978-0-679-76807-4
The Drowning Pool
, 978-0-679-76806-7
The Far Side of the Dolla
r, 978-0-679-76865-4
Find a Victim
, 978-0-375-70867-1
The Galton Case
, 978-0-679-76864-7
The Wycherly Woman
, 978-0-375-70144-3
The Moving Target
, 978-0-375-70146-7
The Underground Man
, 978-0-679-76808-1
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
, 978-0-375-70145-0

VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
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