Sleeping Beauty (5 page)

“Not to me.” I told her my name. “Tom Russo called you about me.”

“Of course. Come in, Mr. Archer.”

She led me into her living room. It was filled with heavy old furniture and what looked like the mementos of not very successful trips: a battered conch shell, a polished slab of redwood inscribed with verse, a liter stein bearing the Hofbrau emblem—disconnected memories that failed to add up to a life.

We sat side by side on a black leather settee. My presence continued to make her uncomfortable. She edged away from me and pulled her skirt down over her plump pink knees. “I don’t know what I can do to help. I haven’t seen Laurel for at least a week.”

“I understood that she’d been staying with you.”

“She did for a few days. But last week she went to stay with her grandmother. Have you talked to Sylvia Lennox?”

“Not yet.”

“You should. She’s very fond of Laurel, and she probably knows her better than anybody. Laurel’s her only grandchild.”

“Where does Sylvia Lennox live?”

“On the beach at Pacific Point, not too far from Laurel’s parents.”

“But Laurel chooses to stay with her grandmother?”

“Part of the time, anyway. Laurel isn’t too wildly crazy about her parents. And she’s been quite a headache to
them.”

“I gather you’ve known Laurel a long time.”

“Practically ever since I can remember. We went to the same school together, starting with the first grade.”

“What school was that?”

“River Valley. It’s a private school in El Rancho. That’s where her grandmother Sylvia used to live, before she left her husband.”

“I gathered there was some kind of split-up in the family.”

“There certainly is. Sylvia moved out on her husband, and another woman—a much younger woman—moved in. It’s terribly hard on Laurel to see her grandparents dissolving their marriage. She’s fond of them both, and they’re both fond of her, which puts her very much in the middle. The rest of the family think the old man’s crazy to take up with a younger woman at his age. But they don’t dare to say so, of course.”

“Because he owns the oil company.”

She nodded. “Laurel’s father and mother have spent practically their whole lives waiting to inherit.”

“Has Laurel?”

“Not really. She doesn’t care about the money. She isn’t a self-seeking person. Maybe she’d be better off if she were.”

“What kind of a person is she? That isn’t clear.”

“It depends on who you’re talking to. She was never a very happy girl, and she wasn’t very popular with her teachers. You know how teachers are. They get a down on somebody and after that they blame her for everything that goes wrong.”

“What sort of thing went wrong?”

“Nothing very much, in the early days. Talking in class, refusing to do her work—little things like that. Sometimes she played hooky.”

“What about the later days?”

“Things got worse. I don’t want to talk about it, really. I’d be giving you the wrong impression of Laurel. She had a real
sweetness underneath it all, and she was a serious girl, too, and a good friend. We used to have these long talks; that was really the basis of our friendship. And we used to have some pretty good laughs together.”

“You’re putting all this in the past tense, Miss Hampshire.”

She was slightly appalled. “Am I? I didn’t mean to. But it’s true we haven’t seen so much of each other since we’ve grown up—especially since she married Tom Russo. He seemed to want to keep her pretty much to himself. And of course I have my own affairs.” The word embarrassed her, and she added quickly, “I do a lot of traveling, for example.”

“But Laurel was here with you last week.”

“Part of last week.”

“Did she say why she moved out on Tom?”

She shook her blond head. “Not really. In fact, she intended to go back to him. But first she said she had to get her nerves under control.”

“What was the matter with her nerves?”

“She said it made her nervous living in that house. She said it gave her nightmares. I told her she was probably blaming the house for problems that were caused by other things.”

“What other things?”

“Tom wanted children; she didn’t. She said she didn’t want to bring children into this world.”

“What did she mean?”

“I don’t know. All the violence and cruelty in the world, I guess.” She lifted her hands and made karate chops at the air, like a soft embodiment of the world’s violence. “Laurel used to talk about it all the time.”

“Did Tom Russo treat her badly?”

“Not to my knowledge. He treated her quite well, according to his lights. I’d say he put her on a pedestal.”

“That isn’t always doing a woman a favor.”

“I know that,” she said with a self-referring smile. “They put you on a pedestal and leave you there to gather dust. But that
wasn’t how it was with Laurel. Tom Russo really worshipped her.”

“Then why did Laurel leave him? Because the house made her nervous?”

Joyce stood up and faced me. “I’ll tell you what I really think. I think Laurel left him on account of Laurel. It’s hard for her to stay with anything or anybody. She has no real self-confidence; in fact, she doesn’t like herself very much at all. She seems to consider herself unworthy.”

“Unworthy of Tom?”

“Unworthy of having any kind of a life. She’s a really decent girl, with really deep feelings.” For the first time, Joyce’s own feelings were coming up from their artesian depths, and her impression was no longer blurred. “I think she’s a fine person in spite of everything. But the way she talks about herself, you’d think she was the worst sinner in the world.”

“Is she?”

“She’s made her mistakes. But it isn’t for me to judge her. We all make mistakes.” She looked around her living room as if it was crowded with the ghosts of her own.

“Can you give me an example of Laurel’s mistakes?”

She was embarrassed. “Well, she ran away to Vegas with a boy when she was at River Valley School. The two of them ran out of money, and actually made a ransom demand on Laurel’s parents.”

“A ransom demand?”

“They pretended she had been kidnapped, and asked her parents for a thousand dollars for her return. They collected it, too, I heard, and lost every cent of it on the tables. Then Laurel’s father brought her home.”

“How old was she at the time?”

“About fifteen. She was a junior at River Valley that year.”

“Do you remember who the boy was?”

“I think his last name was Sherry. He was a senior, and I never really knew him. He never came back to the school.
Neither did Laurel. Her parents kept her at home with private tutoring until she was ready to go away to college.”

“No more boy friends?”

“She had boy friends in college and afterward. But none of them stuck with her. Laurel’s difficult, as I said. She needed someone steady and faithful, like Tom.”

“I heard they met in the drugstore.”

“That’s true. I happened to be with her that day. Laurel went in to get a prescription filled. Tom got so excited and nervous when he saw her it must have taken him fifteen minutes to fill it. When we finally got away, he followed Laurel right out through the drugstore to the parking lot. It was really funny, except that he took it so seriously. He was so pale and intense in his white coat, he looked like some kind of medieval fanatic. Laurel told me that after that he called her every day—he had her name and address from the prescription—and they were married just a few months later.”

“Are you certain that was the first time they met?”

“Of course. Laurel didn’t know him at all. And she told me she’d never been in that drugstore before. It was the Save-More in Westwood.”

“What was the prescription she got filled?”

“I think it was sleeping pills—some kind of barbiturates.”

“Does she use a lot of them?”

“Yes, I’m afraid she does. Just last week we had a bit of an argument about it. She was eating Seconals as if they were salted peanuts. And then she’d sleep like the dead.”

“Is she self-destructive, would you say?”

The woman considered the question, her face inert in thought. “I’d say she is, in a way. But I don’t know exactly what you’re getting at.”

“I’ll be specific, since you’re a good friend of hers—”

“I try to be. Sometimes it’s hard. I’m not too happy about some of the things I just told you.”

“I’d say you were doing her a favor. Earlier tonight, Laurel
took a tube of Nembutal capsules from the medicine cabinet in my apartment. I don’t know where she went with them or what she’s likely to do with them.”

The woman’s eyes darkened and enlarged. “Did something happen to upset her?”

“A couple of things. One was the oil spill off Pacific Point. She seemed to take it personally—probably because her family’s involved. She was trying to rescue an oiled bird, and it died on her. She asked me to bring her here—”

“To me?” Joyce said in pleased surprise.

“To her husband. But when she phoned him from my apartment, he wouldn’t pick her up. Apparently he had to go to work, but she took it as a major rebuff. Right after that, she grabbed my pills and took off. And I’m afraid.”

“So am I afraid,” she said quietly.

“Has she ever attempted suicide?”

“No. I don’t think so. She’s talked about it, though.”

“As something she might do?”

“Yes. I believe so.”

“Did she say how?”

“She mentioned pills, I think, but that was some time ago, before she was married. She told me more than once that it would be nice to go to sleep and never wake up again.”

“Did she say why?”

“The way Laurel’s mind worked, she didn’t have to have a good reason. She wasn’t a happy girl.” The woman’s voice deepened. “There was a part of her that always wanted to die.”

“That almost sounds like an epitaph.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” She clenched her fists and made an exaggerated shivering movement as if she was shedding the cold thought. “I’m sure she’s alive. I’m sure she took your sleeping pills just to get a good night’s sleep.”

“They’d give her a very good night’s sleep. Where should I look for her, Joyce?”

“I really don’t know. Does she have much money with her?”

“I doubt it. I thought of trying her uncle’s place in Bel-Air. What’s his name—Somerville?”

“Captain Benjamin Somerville. He’s a retired Navy captain who married her father’s sister. His phone number is unlisted, but I can give you his address.”

She copied it out of an address book and followed me to the door. “Have you known Laurel long?”

“We met on the beach this afternoon.”

She didn’t ask me how, which was just as well. I might have had to tell her that I had followed Laurel, just as Tom Russo had followed her out of the drugstore in his white coat.

The darkness in Bel-Air was almost thick enough to lean on. I drove around in it for a while and eventually found a mailbox with “Capt. Benjamin Somerville USN (ret.)” printed on it in white. There were several bullet holes in the mailbox.

I went up the asphalt driveway. The house and its outbuildings sat on the hilltop under an unobstructed sky. I could see stars overhead, and below them the night fields of the city looking as if they had been fenced with light and seeded with more stars.

There was no visible light in the large one-storied house. I knocked and waited, and after a while knocked again. The hushed sound of feet approached the other side of the door. In the overhang above me and all around the house, lights went on. The door was opened about five inches on a chain.

Dark eyes looked out at me from a dark face. “What is it you want?”

“I’d like to see Captain Somerville.”

“There’s nobody home.” The black man’s voice was flat and toneless.

“You are.”

“That’s true. But I don’t know you.”

And he didn’t particularly want to. I started to give him a fairly detailed account of who I was and how I had happened to come there. He interrupted me and asked to see my license. I showed it to him through the five-inch opening.

Even then he didn’t let me in. He unhooked the chain and stepped outside, closing the door behind him, then testing it to see if it was locked. He had keys in his hand, and he dropped them into his pocket. His other pocket sagged with the weight of what looked like a gun.

He was a big man about my age. His face was unreadable. He had on a faded blue shirt and pants which resembled a uniform. His left arm appeared to be crippled, and I noticed that the hand remained half closed. His voice was low and impersonal.

“Captain Somerville’s niece hasn’t been here tonight. I’ve been here all night, and I can guarantee it. I understand she’s staying with her grandmother in Pacific Point.”

“She left there earlier today. Would she be likely to come here?”

“She used to come here often enough when she was younger. But not so much any more.”

“What about Captain Somerville?”

“This is where he lives, man. He’s lived here nearly thirty years.”

“I mean where is he now?”

“I’m not supposed to say. We’ve had some bad calls in the last couple of days.”

“About the oil spill?”

“That was the idea. The Captain’s the executive vice-president of the company. Naturally he gets the blame, even if he’s clean as the driven snow.”

“I noticed bullet holes in the mailbox.”

“That’s right. Some people just aren’t happy unless they’re shooting up other people’s property.”

“Was that another protest against the oil spill?”

“They didn’t stop to say. They came here on motorcycles. I think they were just trigger-happy, looking for something to shoot at.” He peered down at the road, then turned and gave me a long appraising look. “But you didn’t come out here to talk to me about the motorbike boys.”

“They interest me. When were they here?”

“Last night. They roared up the hill and fired a few rounds and roared away again. Captain Somerville wasn’t here at the time. Fact is, I was in the house watching him on TV when it happened. The Captain and young Mr. Lennox—Laurel’s father—were on the ten o’clock news explaining the oil spill to the people.”