“It wasn’t Tom Russo, was it? Your husband?”
“Certainly not.”
She was shivering. I kept an old raincoat in the trunk of my car, and I got it out and put it over her shoulders. She didn’t look at me or thank me.
I drove up the ramp onto the freeway. The traffic going north with us wasn’t heavy. But an unbroken stream of headlights poured toward us from Los Angeles, as if the city was leaking light through a hole in its side.
chapter 3
The woman rode in a silence so complete that I hesitated to break it. I glanced at her face from time to time. Her expression seemed to keep changing, from grief and fear and dismay to cold indifference. I wondered what caused the changes, or if my mind had conspired with the lights to half imagine them.
We left the freeway at my West Los Angeles turnoff.
She spoke in a small, tentative voice: “Where do you live, Mr.—?” She had forgotten my name.
“Archer,” I said. “I have an apartment just a few blocks from here.”
“Would you greatly mind if I phoned my husband from your apartment? He isn’t expecting me. I’ve been staying with relatives.”
I should have asked where her husband lived and driven her there. But I took her home to my place.
She stood barefooted in my living room with my old raincoat hanging on her, and looked around as if she was slumming. Her thoughtlessness of manner made me wonder what her background was. There was probably money there, possibly quite new money.
I showed her the phone on the desk and went into the bedroom to unpack my carry-on bag. When I went back into the living room, she was huddled over the phone. The black receiver was pressed to the side of her head like a surgical device which had drained all the blood from her face.
I didn’t realize that the line was dead until she laid the receiver down, very gently. Then she put her face down on her arms. Her hair fell across my desk like a heavy shadow.
I stood and watched her for a while, unwilling to intrude on her feelings, perhaps unwilling to share them. She was full of trouble. But somehow she looked quite natural in my room.
After a while, she lifted her head. Her face was as calm as a mask. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were there.”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“I have something to be sorry about. Tom won’t come and get me. He has a woman with him. She answered the phone.”
“What about the relatives you’ve been staying with?”
“Nothing about them.”
She looked around the room as if her life had suddenly narrowed down.
“You mentioned you had a family. You said they were in the oil business.”
“You must have misunderstood me. And I’m getting tired of being questioned, if you don’t mind.” Her mood was swinging like an erratic pendulum from being hurt to hurting. “You seem to be mortally afraid of getting stuck with me.”
“On the contrary. You can stay here all night if you want to.”
“With you?”
“You can have the bedroom. This chesterfield opens out into a sleeper.”
“And what would it cost me?”
“Nothing.”
“Do I look like an easy mark?”
She stood up, dropping my raincoat from her shoulders. It was an act of rejection. At the same time she was inadvertently showing me her body. It was deep in the breast, where the bird had left its dark stains on her shirt; narrow in the waist, deep in the hips, full-thighed. There was sand on the rug from her dirty elegant feet.
I caught an oblique glimpse of myself as a middle-aged man on the make. It was true that if she had been old or ugly I wouldn’t have brought her home with me. She was neither. In spite of her discontent and fear, her head had a dark unchanging beauty.
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, asking myself if I was telling her the truth.
“People always want something. Don’t try to fool yourself. I should never have come here with you.” She looked around like a child in a strange place. “I don’t like it here.”
“You’re free to leave, Mrs. Russo.”
She began to cry suddenly. The tears ran down her uncovered face, leaving shiny tracks. Moved by compunction or desire, I reached for her shoulders with my hands. She backed away and stood vibrating.
“Sit down,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”
She didn’t believe me. I guessed that she had been badly hurt already, perhaps damaged like the grebe beyond hope of recovery. She touched her grief-smeared face.
“Is there someplace where I can wash?”
I showed her the door to the bathroom. She locked it emphatically behind her. She was in there quite a long time. When she came out, her eyes were brighter and she moved with more confidence, like an alcoholic who has taken a secret drink.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll be on my way.”
“Do you have any money?”
“I don’t need money where I’m going.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
My voice was sharp, and she overreacted to it. “You expect me to pay you for the ride? And here I am breathing your valuable air.”
“You want to pick a fight with someone. Why does it have to be me?”
She chose to take this as a final rejection. She opened the door abruptly and left the apartment. I had an urge to follow her, but I went no farther than the mailbox. I sat at my desk and began to go through the mail that had piled up during my week’s vacation.
Most of it was bills. There was a three-hundred-dollar check from a man whose son I had found living with five other teenagers in an apartment in Isla Vista. I had gone to Mazatlán on the strength of it. There was a laboriously hand-printed letter from an inmate of a maximum security facility in central California. He said he was innocent and wanted me to prove it. He added in a postscript:
“Even if I am not innocent, why can’t they let me go now? I am an old man, I would not hurt nobody now. What harm can I do if they let me go now?”
Like a long-distance call being placed, my mind made an obscure series of connections. I got up, almost overturning the light chair, and went into the bathroom. The door of the medicine cabinet was partly open. There had been a vial of Nembutal in the cabinet, thirty-five or forty capsules left over from a time when I had forgotten how to sleep, and then had learned again. They weren’t there now.
chapter 4
She had been gone ten or twelve minutes when I went down to the empty street. I got into my car and drove around the block. There were no pedestrians at all, no trace of Laurel Russo.
I drove as far as Wilshire, then realized that I was wasting my time. I went back to my apartment and looked up Thomas Russo in the phone directory. His address was on the border of Westwood, not more than three or four miles from me. I made a note of his address and telephone number.
His phone rang a dozen times, rhythmic and raucous as a death rattle, before the receiver was lifted. “Russo residence, Tom Russo speaking.”
“This is Lew Archer. You don’t know me, but it’s about your wife.”
“Laurel? Has something happened?”
“Not yet. But I’m concerned about her. She took some sleeping pills from my apartment.”
His voice became suspicious. “Are you her boy friend?”
“No, I’m not. You are.”
“What was she doing in your apartment?”
“She wanted to phone you. When you turned her down, she left with my sleeping capsules.”
“What kind of sleeping capsules?”
“Three-quarter-grain Nembutal.”
“How many?”
“At least three dozen. Enough to kill her.”
“I know that,” Russo said. “I’m a pharmacist.”
“Is she likely to take them?”
“I don’t know.” But there was a whisper of fear in his voice.
“Has she attempted suicide before?�
��
“I don’t know who I’m talking to.” Which meant she probably had. “Are you some kind of policeman?”
“I’m a private detective.”
“I suppose her parents hired you.”
“Nobody hired me. I met your wife on the beach at Pacific Point. Apparently the oil spill upset her, and she asked me to bring her to Los Angeles. When you turned her down—”
“Please don’t keep saying that. I didn’t turn her down. I told her I couldn’t take her back unless she was ready to give it a good try. I couldn’t stand another patch-up job and then another break. The last one nearly killed me.”
“What about her?”
“She doesn’t care about me the way I—Look, I’m telling you my family secrets.”
“Tell me more, Mr. Russo. Who else would she be likely to call, or go to?”
“I’d need time to think about that, and I don’t have the time. I have the night shift at the drugstore. I ought to be there now.”
“Which store?”
“The Save-More, in Westwood.”
“I’ll come by there. Will you make me a list of the people she might try to get in touch with?”
Russo said he would try to.
I drove up Wilshire in the right-hand lane, looking for Laurel among the people on the sidewalk. I parked in the Save-More lot and went into the drugstore through a turnstile. The fluorescent lighting made the atmosphere seem artificial and remote, like that of a space station.
A dozen or so young people were wandering around among the display shelves, boys with John-the-Baptist heads, girls dressed like Whistler’s mother. The man in the glass-enclosed pharmacist’s booth at the rear of the store was about midway between their age and mine.
His black hair was neither short nor long, and there were glints of premature gray in it. The clean white smock he was wearing had the effect of making his head seem detached from his body, floating free in the white fluorescent light. The flesh on his head was sparse, and I was conscious of the skull it contained, like a fine ancient bronze buried in his flesh.
“Mr. Russo?”
He glanced up sharply, then came to the open space between the glass partition and the cash register. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m Archer. You haven’t heard from your wife again?”
“No, sir, I haven’t. I left word at Hollywood Receiving and the other hospitals, just in case.”
“You do think she’s suicidal, then?”
“She’s done some talking about it, I mean in the past. Laurel’s never been a very happy girl.”
“She said that when she called your house a woman answered the phone.”
He looked at me with dark brown sorrowful eyes, the kind that faithful dogs are supposed to have. “That was my part-time cleaning woman.”
“She comes at night?”
“As a matter of fact, she’s my cousin. She stayed and made me some supper. I get tired of restaurant cooking.”
“How long have you and Laurel been separated?”
“A couple of weeks this time. We’re not separated, though, not legally.”
“Where has she been living?”
“Mostly with friends. And with her father and mother and grandmother in Pacific Point.”
“Did you make me the list I asked you for, of her friends and relatives?”
“Yes, I did.” He handed me a piece of paper, and our eyes met again. His seemed smaller and harder. “You’re really going into this matter, eh?”
“With your permission.”
“May I ask why?”
“Those were my pills she ran off with. I could have stopped her, but I was a little angry.”
“I see,” But his eyes were looking past me. “Do you know Laurel well?”
“Not really. I just met her this afternoon. But I have a strong sense of her, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, everybody does.” He took in a breath, and let it out audibly. “Those names I gave you are mainly relatives. Laurel never told me about her boy friends—I mean before she was married. And she only had the one real girl friend that I know of. Joyce Hampshire. They went to school together someplace down in Orange. A private school.” His eyes came up to my face, defensive and thoughtful. “Joyce was at our wedding. And she was the only one of the bunch who thought Laurel ought to stay married. I mean, to me.”
“How long have you been married?”
“Two years.”
“Why did your wife leave you?”
“I don’t know. She couldn’t even tell me herself. Things broke down on us—the good feeling broke down on us.” His gaze wandered away to the bottles and cartons on the shelves behind the partition, with their infinite variety of medicines.
“Where does Joyce Hampshire live?”
“She has an apartment not so far from here, in a place called Greenfield Manor. It’s in Santa Monica.”
“Will you give her a ring and tell her I may drop in on her?”
“I can do that. Do you think I ought to call the police?”
“It wouldn’t do much good. We don’t have enough to get action. But call them if you want to. And call the Suicide Center while you’re at it.”
While Russo used the phone, I studied his typed list of names:
Joyce Hampshire, Greenfield Manor.
William Lennox, El Rancho (grandfather).
Mrs. Sylvia Lennox, Seahorse Lane, Pacific Point (grandmother). Mr. and Mrs. Jack Lennox, Cliffside, Pacific Point (Laurel’s father and mother).
Captain and Mrs. Benjamin Somerville, Bel-Air (her aunt and uncle).
I tried to memorize the list.
Russo was saying on the phone, “I didn’t have a fight with her. I didn’t see her tonight or today. I had nothing to do with this at all; you can take my word for it.” He set the phone down and came back to me. “You could talk to Joyce from here, I guess, but I’m not supposed to let anyone use this phone.”
“I’d rather talk to her in person, anyway. I take it she hasn’t heard from Laurel?”
Russo shook his head, his eyes staying on my face. “How is it you call her Laurel?”
“That’s what you call her.”
“But you said you didn’t know her hardly at all.” He was upset, in a quiet way.
“I don’t.”
“Then what makes you so interested? I’m not saying you don’t have a right. But I just don’t understand, if you hardly know her.”
“I told you I feel a certain responsibility.”
He hung his dark head. “So do I. I realize I made a mistake when she phoned tonight and wanted to come home. I should have told her to come ahead.”
He was a man whose anger and suspicion easily turned inward on himself. His handsome face had a shut and disappointed look, as if he felt he had foreclosed his youth.
“Has she run out before, Mr. Russo?”
“We’ve been separated before, if that’s what you mean. And she was always the one that did the leaving.”
“Has she had any drug trouble?”
“Nothing serious.”
“What about not so serious?”
“She uses barbiturates quite a bit. She’s always had trouble sleeping, and calming down generally. But she never took an overdose.” He looked at the possibility with half-closed eyes, and couldn’t quite face it. “I think it’s just a bluff. She’s trying to scare me.”
“She succeeded in scaring me. Did she say anything about suicide when she talked to you on the phone?”
Russo didn’t answer right away, but the skull behind his thin-fleshed face became more prominent. “She said something.”
“Can you remember exactly what she said?”
He took in a deep breath. “She said if I ever wanted to see her again in her life that I should let her come home. And be there waiting for her. But I couldn’t do that, I had to get down here and—”
I interrupted him. “In her life?”
“That’s what she said
. I didn’t take it too seriously at the time.”
“I do. She’s pretty disturbed. But I still think she wants me to find her.”
His head came up. “What makes you think that?”
“She left the door of my medicine cabinet open. She wasn’t trying very hard to get away with those capsules—at least not all the way.” I picked up his list of names. “What about this family of hers? Bel-Air and El Rancho and Seahorse Lane are pretty expensive addresses.”
Russo nodded solemnly. “They’re rich.” The droop of his shoulders added: And I’m poor.
“Is her father the same Jack Lennox who owns the oil well that’s spilling?”
“Her grandfather owns it. William Lennox. His company owns quite a few oil wells.”
“Do you know him?”
“I met him once. He invited me to a gathering at his home in El Rancho last year. Me and Laurel and the rest of the family. It broke up early, and I never did get to talk to him.”
“Is Laurel close to her grandfather?”
“She used to be, before he got a new woman. Why?”
“I think this oil spill upset her pretty basically. She seems to feel very strongly for the birds.”
“I know. It’s because we have no children.”
“Did she say so?”
“She didn’t have to say so. I wanted children, but she didn’t feel ready for motherhood. It was easier for her to care about the birds. I’m just as glad now that we don’t have children.”
There was a poignancy in his words, perhaps not wholly unconscious. He seemed to realize as we talked that the possibilities of his life were being cut off.
“Do you know Laurel’s parents—Mr. and Mrs. Jack Lennox?”
“I know them. Her father’s picture was on the front page of the Times this morning.”
“I saw it. Would she go home to them, or to her grandmother Sylvia?”
“I don’t know what she’d do. I spent the last couple of years trying to understand Laurel, but I never could predict which way she’d jump.”
“Captain and Mrs. Somerville, in Bel-Air—is Laurel close to them?”
“They’re her aunt and uncle. I guess she was close to them at one time, but not lately. I’m not the best source on this. I don’t really know the family. But there’s been quite a lot of pulling and hauling in the family since the old man changed his domestic arrangements. It caused Laurel a lot of grief.”
Sleeping Beauty Page 2