Sleeping Beauty

by Ross Macdonald

  FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, DECEMBER 2000

  Copyright © 1973 by Ross Macdonald

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1973.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Macdonald, Ross.

  Sleeping beauty.

  I. Title.

  PZ3.M59943S1 [PS3525.I486] 813′.5′

  72-11037

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77263-3

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Eudora Welty

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  chapter 1

  I flew home from Mazatlán on a Wednesday afternoon. As we approached Los Angeles, the Mexicana plane dropped low over the sea and I caught my first glimpse of the oil spill.

  It lay on the blue water off Pacific Point in a free-form slick that seemed miles wide and many miles long. An offshore oil platform stood up out of its windward end like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood.

  The flight steward came along the aisle, making sure that we were ready to land. I asked him what had happened to the ocean. His hands and shoulders made a south-of-the-border gesture which alluded to the carelessness of Anglos.

  “She blew out Monday.” He leaned across me and looked down past the wing. “She’s worse today than she was yesterday. Fasten your seat belt, Señor. We’ll be landing in five minutes.”

  I bought a paper at International Airport. The oil spill was front-page news. A vice-president of the oil company that owned the offshore platform, a man named Jack Lennox, predicted that the spill would be controlled within twenty-four hours. Jack Lennox was a good-looking man, if you could judge by his picture, but there was no way to know whether he was telling the truth.

  Pacific Point was one of my favorite places on the coast. As I made my way out to the airport parking lot, the oil spill threatening the city’s beaches floated like a depression just over the horizon of my mind.

  Instead of driving home to West Los Angeles, I turned south along the coast to Pacific Point. The sun was low when I got there. From the hill above the harbor, I could see the enormous slick spreading like premature night across the sea.

  At its nearest it was perhaps a thousand yards out, well beyond the dark brown kelp beds which formed a natural barrier offshore. Workboats were moving back and forth, spraying the edges of the spill with chemicals. They were the only boats I could see on the water. A white plastic boom was strung across the harbor entrance, and gulls that looked like white plastic whirled above it.

  I made my way down to the public beach and along it to the sandy point which partly enclosed the harbor. A few people, mostly women and girls, were standing at the edge of the water, facing out to sea. They looked as if they were waiting for the end of the world, or as if the end had come and they would never move again.

  The surf was rising sluggishly. A black bird with a sharp beak was struggling in it. The bird had orange-red eyes, which seemed to be burning with anger, but it was so fouled with oil that at first I didn’t recognize it as a western grebe.

  A woman in a white shirt and slacks waded in thigh-deep and picked it up, holding its head so that it wouldn’t peck her. I could see as she came back toward me that she was a handsome young woman with dark eyes as angry as the bird’s. Her narrow feet left beautifully shaped prints in the wet sand.

  I asked her what she was going to do with the grebe.

  “Take it home and clean it.”

  “It probably won’t survive, I’m afraid.”

  “No, but maybe I will.”

  She walked away, holding the black struggling thing against her white shirt. I walked along behind in her elegant footprints. She became aware of this, and turned to face me.

  “What do you want?”

  “I should apologize. I didn’t mean to be discouraging.”

  “Forget it,” she said. “It’s true not many live once they’ve been oiled. But I saved some in the Santa Barbara spill.”

  “You must be quite a bird expert.”

  “I’m getting to be one in self-defense. My family is in the oil business.”

  She gestured with her head toward the offshore platform. Then she turned and left me abruptly. I stood and watched her hurrying southward along the beach, holding the damaged grebe as if it were her child.

  I followed her as far as the wharf which formed the southern boundary of the harbor. One of the workboats had opened the boom and let the other boats in. They were coming alongside the wharf and tying up.

  The wind had changed, and I began to smell the floating oil. It smelled like something that had died but would never go away.

  There was a restaurant on the wharf, displaying on its roof a neon sign which spelled out “Blanche’s Seafood.” I was hungry, and went that way. On the far side of the sprawling restaurant building, the wharf was covered with chemical drums, machinery, stacks of oil-well casings. Men were debarking from the workboats at a landing stage.

  I went up to an aging roustabout with a sun-cracked face under a red hard hat. I asked him what the situation was.

  “We ain’t supposed to talk about it. The company does the talking.”

  “Lennox?”

  “I guess that’s their name.”

  A burly straw boss intervened. He had black oil on his clothes, and his high-heeled Western boots were soaked with it.

  “You from a media?”

  “No. I’m just a citizen.”

  He looked me over suspiciously. “Local?”

  “L.A.”

  “You’re not supposed to be out here.”

  He nudged me with his belly. The men around him became suddenly still. They looked rough and tired and disappointed, ready to take their revenge on anything that moved.

  I went back toward the restaurant. A man who looked like a fisherman was waiting just around the corner of the building. Under his ribbed wool cap, his face was young-eyed and hairy.

  “Don’t mess with them,” he said.

  “I wasn’t
planning to.”

  “Half of them came from Texas, inland Texas. They think water is a nuisance because they can’t sell it for two or three dollars a barrel. All they care about is the oil they’re losing. They don’t give a damn about the things that live in the sea or the people that live in the town.”

  “Is the oil still running?”

  “Sure it is. They thought they had it closed down Monday, the day she blew. Before that she was roaring wild, with drilling mud and hydrocarbon mist shooting a hundred feet in the air. They dropped the string in the hole and closed the blind rams over her, and they thought she was shut down. The main hole was. But then she started to boil up through the water, gas and oil emulsion all around the platform.”

  “You sound like an eyewitness.”

  The young man blinked and nodded. “That I was. I took a reporter out there in my boat—man from the local paper named Wilbur Cox. They were evacuating the platform when we got there, the fire hazard was so bad.”

  “Any lives lost?”

  “No, sir. That’s the one good thing about it.” He squinted at me through his hair. “Would you be a reporter?”

  “No. I’m just interested. What caused the blowout, do you know?”

  He pointed with his thumb at the sky, then down at the sea.

  “There’s quite a few different stories floating around. Inadequate casing is one of them. But there’s something the matter with the structures down there. They’re all broken up. It’s like trying to make a clean hole in a piece of cake and hold water in it. They should never have tried to drill out there.”

  The oil men from the workboats went by, straggling like the remnants of a defeated army. The fisherman gave them an ironic salute, his teeth gleaming in his beard. They returned pitying looks, as if he was a madman who didn’t understand what was important.

  I went into the restaurant. There were voices in the bar, at the same time boisterous and lugubrious, but the dining room was almost deserted. It was done in a kind of landbound nautical style, with portholes instead of windows. Two men were waiting to pay at the cashier’s desk.

  I noticed them because they made a strange pair. One of them was young, the other was old and shaky. But they didn’t give the impression of being father and son. They didn’t even look as if they had come from the same world.

  The old man was almost hairless, with livid head scars which ran down the side of his face and puckered it. He had on an old gray tweed suit which looked tailor-made. But his slight body was almost lost in it. I guessed that the suit had been made for another man, or perhaps for himself when he was younger and larger. He moved like a man lost in the world, lost in time.

  The younger man wore Levis and a black turtleneck sweater which emphasized the breadth of his shoulders. They were so wide that they made his head seem small. He noticed that I was looking at him, and returned the look. His eyes reminded me of certain losers I had known. They peered out at the world through reinforced windows which kept them in and other people out.

  A heavy blonde woman in an orange dress took their money and rang it up on the cash register. The young man paid, and picked up the change. The man in the tweed suit took hold of his arm, in the manner of a blind man or an invalid with his nurse.

  The blonde woman opened the door for them and, as if in answer to a question, pointed south along the beach.

  When she brought me a menu, I asked her who they were.

  “Never saw them before in my life. They must be tourists—they don’t know their way around the Point at all. We’re getting a lot of sightseers the last couple of days.” She gave me a sharp look. “You’re new here yourself. You wouldn’t be one of these troubleshooters they’re bringing in for the oil?”

  “No. I’m just another tourist.”

  “Well, you came to the right place.” She looked around the room possessively. “I’m Blanche, in case you were wondering. Something to drink? I always serve doubles; that’s the secret of my success.”

  I ordered bourbon on the rocks. Then I made the mistake of ordering fish. It seemed to taste of oil. I left my dinner half eaten and went outside.

  chapter 2

  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 curve
d, 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?”