Sleep of the Innocent

by Medora Sale

  She didn’t notice. “Yes,” she said, drawing in a ragged breath.

  Which meant that to get any information from Joe, you had to know who he was and where to find him. Which meant that you already knew where you were going. And only Hennessy knew that. Except that Hennessy had told him—but he hadn’t passed it on to anyone. Had he? He had told Patterson he was going to check out her cottage. But hadn’t mentioned where it was, he was sure of that. And otherwise the location had only been spelled out in his report. The report that he had dutifully filed before lunch. And someone who had access to his report had gone up that afternoon. Or had told someone else about it—who had gone up that afternoon. Which would mean that someone who had access to Baldwin’s files was passing information on—probably to the same friends who had found Carl Neilson no longer useful and had disposed of him. “Shit!” he said, and pounded his fist against the steering wheel. The girl behind him stirred and muttered.

  He started the car up again. Now that he had put it all into words, the only surprise was that he hadn’t thought of it before. It was the logical, if unpalatable, solution. Now where to? First of all, Annie needed help. And if he took her to a hospital with a gunshot wound, the incident would be reported, and the report would land on Baldwin’s desk. He had a first-aid kit in the trunk. He wasn’t sure how risky trying to look after her himself was going to be, but he certainly knew how risky it would be to let other people get their hands on her. All he needed now was a quiet motel where no one would pay any attention to them.

  “I’m not being grim,” said Sanders, pushing the candle to one side to get a better look at Harriet’s face. “And I haven’t been glaring at you. In fact, I’m not in a bad mood at all. Just thinking.”

  “Thinking!” said Harriet. “I hate to imagine what you’re thinking about. Strangling someone, I suppose. I can see it in your eyes—they’re narrow and glittering with blood lust.” She pointed an accusing finger across the table and then converted the gesture into a grab for the wine bottle that sat between them.

  “Shut up, will you, Harriet?” He caught her wrist with one hand and extracted the wine bottle from her with the other. “Something to drink, madam?” he added, and poured some into her glass and then into his. “And I wasn’t considering strangling someone—only trying to figure out why Matt Baldwin’s case was dumped in my lap this afternoon. It’s not like Matt to relinquish his hold on anything.”

  “Maybe the man is sick,” said Harriet. “It must happen.”

  Sanders shook his head. “I was specifically told that illness was not the reason. Nor incompetence, no matter how justifiable.”

  “Meow,” said Harriet. “I’m shocked, John. It’s not like you to be catty about someone. Besides me, of course. And you only do that to my face, as far as I know.”

  “Absolutely,” said Sanders. “Pure gallantry once your back is turned, that’s me. But wait until you meet Baldy. He brings cattiness out in the gentlest people. My recurrent nightmare is that Baldy will be promoted over me someday and I’ll have to work for him. When I think of that, I break out in a cold sweat and start making lists of alternate careers.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Harriet.

  Sanders held up his left hand and began counting points off on his fingers. “He’s stupid, a self-satisfied ass, that’s one. He’s a pompous twit or a cringing, ass-licking jerk, depending on who he’s talking to, that’s two. He knows nothing and expects the people working with him to cover for his mistakes and let him take the credit when things work out. That’s three. And he has a foul and irrational temper that makes me look like a cross between a saint and the sunshine fairy.”

  “Which is four,” said Harriet. “I get your drift. You don’t like the man. What case is it, anyway?”

  “Murder that happened while we were away. A guy who owns a lot of property around the city—”

  “Carl Neilson,” said Harriet quietly. “Lydia Neilson’s husband.”

  “My God,” said Sanders. “Do you know her? Baldwin claims he doesn’t want the case because he knows Lydia Neilson. He probably met her once.”

  Harriet got up and walked across the room over to the CD player. She shuffled through a pile of discs in silence until she finally arrived at one and slipped it into the player. The delicate sounds of baroque music played on a classical guitar stirred around the edges of the room. “Yes,” she said. “I know her—or to be more accurate, I used to know her. I haven’t seen her for about four years. She’s probably changed.”

  “Was she married to Neilson then?” asked Sanders.

  Harriet nodded. She walked back to the table and sat down. She picked up her glass, as if to drink, and then put it down again, too hard, and spilled a few drops of wine on the mat. “I didn’t know her before she married Carl Neilson.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” asked Sanders. He imprisoned her hand before she could start fiddling with something else.

  “Wrong with her? Oh, nothing. She’s very nice. Bright and interesting. Knows a lot about music and art. She did—or was doing—art history in university when she married him. That’s how I got to know her. Through, uh—” Harriet stopped dead.

  “Your artist friend without the name,” said Sanders. “You don’t have to avoid any mention of him just because of me. I don’t expect to meet a woman of thirty who has never laid eyes on a man before.”

  Harriet smiled uncertainly. “I realize that. But I have trouble—”

  “Talking about him. Given. But we weren’t. We were talking about Lydia Neilson, who knows a lot about art and music and is very nice and about whom you also have trouble talking.”

  She shook her head. “Only because of what happened. Which was strange and embarrassing. And because of your job. I like Lydia, and—”

  “And five years ago she told you she wanted to murder her husband. To gun him down in his own hotel, preferably on an afternoon in March, which is her favourite month, with such-and-such kind of pistol, and so on. Is that it? Even if she did, she probably wouldn’t have waited five years to do it. As evidence it’s pretty lousy.”

  Harriet had started to giggle alarmingly. “For God’s sake, stop. Before I choke on my wine. No, she never told me she wanted to kill him, honest, Officer. But she did tell me she wanted to leave him. She was having an affair with someone—I don’t know who—and she was planning on taking the child and running off into the sunset. And then, suddenly, I don’t exist. She doesn’t call me for those girlish chats. When I call her, she says she can’t—doesn’t want to—talk to me. She must have decided that leaving him would be too disruptive and was trying to convince herself that the whole episode never happened. And since she had told me she loved this guy, whoever he was, I just reminded her of her folly.”

  “Or maybe she figured it would be too expensive. Leaving Neilson. He was very rich, I gather.”

  “It’s hard to say. Money didn’t seem that important to her. It must have at one time, or she wouldn’t have married him, but not when I knew her. It sounds corny, but I guess she’d figured out there were more important things in life.” She broke off and looked over at him intently. “She was afraid of Neilson, you know. I suppose the bastard was violent. But Lydia’s a very quiet, gentle sort of creature. I doubt if she’d kill anyone. I mean, if he threatened her child, she might pick up an heirloom shotgun and let him have it. Both barrels. She was a fierce mother. But then she would have called the police and explained what she had done and why. You see, she would have felt perfectly justified.”

  Sanders appeared unconcerned with Lydia Neilson’s maternal urges. “Did you get to know Neilson?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Never. Met him once or twice, that’s all. I knew some architects who worked for him. General public opinion seems to be that the man was a son of a bitch. With a genius for cheating people out of what he owed them. Whoever killed him did t
he world a favour.”

  “Could be, but we’re not allowed to work on that premise. Actually, the thing that interests me is not your friend—or erstwhile friend—Lydia and whether she is likely to have done him in. I had really been sitting here looking at that wine and wondering about the champagne in Neilson’s hotel room.”

  “Champagne?” Harriet looked puzzled. “With his money, he could bloody well afford champagne. What’s strange about it?”

  “There was a girl in the room when or just before he was killed. Someone he probably had up to the room fairly often, if I have pieced together what they found at the scene accurately.”

  “So he bought his little piece of fluff a bottle of champagne. It’s a sad but old story, John. You must have heard of men doing that sort of thing. Even if you never do.”

  “Did you want champagne? And does that make you my little piece of fluff?” He ducked the blow. “But that wasn’t it. He used to order up a bottle of house red for the little piece of fluff—”

  “Cheap as well as thieving and vicious.” Harriet shook her head sadly.

  “And besides, Harriet. When do you open bottles of champagne if you are meeting someone for an afternoon of passion? Or sadomasochistic fun and games, if you’re right about him. Before? Or after?”

  “I would have thought before, wouldn’t you? In most cases. A glass or two before, to bring the atmosphere up to party level, and then a glass of flat champagne afterward—in the case of Carl Neilson, to wash away the taste. Aargh. I could never see how Lydia could have married him. He was so slimy looking.”

  “Exactly. And the bottle of cheap red rotgut had been opened. The bed bore unmistakable signs of having been used for an afternoon of—passion, S-M games, whatever. Which means—”

  “The girl was gone, and he was waiting for someone else.”

  Sanders nodded. “Our only problem is we don’t know who.”

  “That’s easy,” said Harriet. Sanders looked up quickly. “He was closing a deal of some sort. That’s the other reason for ordering champagne. I mean, besides weddings and christenings and birthdays and such. Which don’t somehow seem to apply. To validate some sort of business deal or project that just finished or, conversely, is off to a glorious start.”

  “What kind?”

  “I don’t know. That’s your job. Except he probably wasn’t launching a ship.”

  Lucas took another minor road, this one heading northwest. He wanted to put at least a hundred miles between them and that cabin, and headed toward an area just populated enough, he hoped, to have motels open in the off-season. For three hours he drove into the black and starless night, until his exhausted brain began to see menacing visions rise up in his headlights; hydro-poles swayed and danced to the hypnotic music of the road as he approached them. A particularly talented one stepped neatly in front of the car. He swerved back into his lane; his heavy eyes snapped open, and his heart pounded from the shock. He was no longer fit to drive, but if he stopped to grab some sleep, she would never last through the cold spring night once the heater was turned off. He pushed grimly on.

  Over the next hill what he was looking for loomed up on his right—a place that looked cheap, seedy, anonymous, and open for business. A place where the management wouldn’t inquire too closely about its guests. He parked the car away from the office, walked noisily in, and smashed his hand down on the bell on the counter. Nothing. He smashed it down again, and again, and again. A voice muttered in the background, and the door behind the reception area opened wide enough to allow a head to peer around it. “Yeah?” it said, and looked suspiciously at him. The head disappeared, the door opened wider, and the entire man appeared, rumpled and dirty-looking. A thin line of dried spittle had caked on the side of his face, trailing down to his unshaven chin.

  “Hey, buddy,” Lucas asked with a leer, “you gotta room? A double? And not too close to anybody else, if you know what I mean.”

  “Listen, Jack, there are twenty-eight empty rooms out there.” His voice was as unpleasant as his face. “Take your goddamn pick. How far away do you want to be?”

  “Aw, come on,” said Lucas. “Don’t get sore. We just got married, that’s all, and my girl—I mean, my wife—she’s kind of shy, like.”

  “I’ll put you at the end,” he said sourly, reaching for a key. “The wife’s not gonna like it,” he added. “It means farther to walk when she makes up the rooms, and she’ll be pretty damned sore about it, but if that’s what you want . . .” He paused artistically. “It’ll be fifty bucks.”

  The sign outside promised double rooms for forty, but Lucas pulled out some bills and dropped a fifty on the counter.

  “Thanks,” he snarled, grabbing the cash with a scowl. “Sign here.”

  He carried Annie in, half-awake and muttering incoherent protests, set her down carefully on the bed and went back for the first-aid kit. He fetched some clean towels from the bathroom and then stopped to look down at her, uncertain how to begin. She lay with her eyes shut, clutching her swollen wrist. That he could deal with, he thought. Sprained wrists are like sprained ankles. He wrapped an elastic bandage around it and activated a cold pack, which he fastened on clumsily with another towel.

  Next he tried to cut the bloodstained jeans off her body with the tiny scissors from the kit. It didn’t work. He cursed quietly and set about taking them off instead. “You’ll be more comfortable without those jeans,” he said firmly. She paid no attention. He struggled with the stiff button, won, and began easing them, together with her torn and bloodied long underwear, over her hips. She was thin—her hipbones protruded sharply on either side of her concave stomach—and was wearing plain white cotton panties instead of the black lace he was somehow expecting. He quickly covered the mess on her thigh with a thick gauze pad. All the time he was working on her, she remained white-faced, expressionless, immobile. Except for her hand. Her nails bit into the flesh of the palm of her right hand as he went doggedly on.

  The burn took more courage than he possessed. He picked bits of dirt, pine needles, and broken leaves from its edges and then looked to see what was in his kit. There was a tiny container of antibiotic ointment. He looked at the tube and then at that wound. He couldn’t spread anything on that burned and dirty mess, and so he ripped open another gauze pad and squirted most of the gooey substance on it. As he placed the pad gingerly on the wound and wrapped more gauze around her foot, he could feel the shock that went through her body.

  He searched the kit for the codeine pills he knew were there. “Take these,” he said. “And I’m sorry I’m not very good at this sort of thing.” She swallowed them, and let her head fall back on the pillows again. He raised her up, yanked back the blankets, and eased her into bed.

  She fell into an uneasy slumber almost at once.

  The double bed that she was occupying dominated the room. He looked around for some place to stretch out; his aching body screamed for a few hours’ sleep. There was only thin cold carpet laid over the concrete floor. In desperation, he tried lying cautiously beside her, keeping well away from her side of the bed, but she tossed her head restlessly and cried out in her sleep as his weight pulled the blanket down against her injuries. He got up again, dizzy with exhaustion, found an extra blanket, and settled himself into a plastic armchair, with his feet propped up on a corner of the bed.

  Chapter 10

  At 7:00 a.m., Rob Lucas stirred himself out of an uneasy sleep. He struggled awkwardly out of the chair and went to inspect his patient. She was breathing slowly and deeply, lying on her side, her hair spread on the pillow in a mass of tangled curls. If it hadn’t been for the cumbersome bandage on the wrist that was flung up on the pillow beside her face, he would not have believed that any of this had happened. That and his own exhaustion. He had an irrational impulse to wake her up, to throw her out of bed, and make her admit that she felt perfectly healthy. Common sense intervened. He foun
d his razor and toothbrush and headed for the shower.

  Hot water and a sense of being clean again restored him to something closer to equanimity; he pulled the armchair over to the window and sat down to mull over his position. Problem one: in four or five hours, they were going to expect him back with his witness. And two: the woman lying on the bed right behind him should probably be in the hospital. Preferably in the city. But three: to look at it all in an organized way, her life would be in danger if he brought her back. End of discussion. They’d stay out here. He shook his head, baffled. You’re crazy, Robert, he said to himself. You don’t know what you’re doing. Because if you don’t turn up this afternoon, there’s going to be a disciplinary hearing, and there goes your job. Which, on the whole, you like. At least some of the time. But if he turned around, he knew he would see the frail, battered body of little Jennifer Wilson lying on that cold concrete floor. “Screw the job,” he muttered, and rubbed his tired eyes.

  He would temporize, he decided at last. This morning he would call in with some plausible excuse for not returning to the city and for not having found Annie. Something that would keep them happy for a day or so and put off the moment of decision for him.

  He considered her again. She appeared to be sleeping soundly enough for him to go out for food and coffee. As he headed for the truck stop across the highway, he reflected that he was probably the worst person in the world to take charge of an injured person. Healthy himself, he had no patience with the ill. He couldn’t even imagine how she must be feeling. But he was better than someone who was trying to kill her. He could at least keep her quiet, fed, and full of painkillers.

  The restaurant was bright with morning sunshine; its beams lit up the torn leatherette benches and the worn tiled floor with cruel precision. It smelled of coffee, burned bacon, and disinfectant. Only one booth seemed to be occupied—by a couple of men in overalls talking quietly over egg-stained plates—and the room echoed with his footsteps as he crossed it. Eating breakfast in there was not to be thought of. The smell caught unpleasantly in his throat; and he was too restless to sit around and wait. “Give us a coffee, eh,” he said to the sleepy-eyed waitress behind the counter. “And coffee, orange juice, and toast for two, to go.”