“Why?”
“She couldn’t stand trouble, any kind of trouble. It always tore her up to hear people fighting or arguing. She couldn’t even stand an ordinary disagreement in the home.”
“Did you have a lot of disagreements?”
“No. I wouldn’t say that.”
A woman with a prescription in her hand came up to the counter beside me. She had on high black boots and a yellow wig. Russo seemed relieved to see her. He took the prescription and started back into his booth.
“So long,” I said.
He came back and leaned toward me, trying to make private what he had to say: “If you do see Laurel, tell her—ask her to come home. No conditions. I just want her home. Tell her I said that.”
The phone in his cubicle started to ring. He picked up the receiver and listened and shook his head.
“I can’t come there, you know that. And I don’t want them coming here. This job is all I’ve got. Wait a minute.”
Russo came back to me, looking quite pale and shaken. “Laurel’s father and mother are at my house. I can’t leave here, and I don’t want them coming to the store. Anyway, I can’t talk to those people. You’d be doing me a big favor, Mr. Archer, if you’d go and talk to them for me. You were the one who saw her last. It isn’t far from here. And I’ll be glad to pay you for your trouble, whatever you think is fair.”
“All right. I’ll take a hundred dollars from you.”
His face lengthened. “Just for talking to them?”
“I expect to do more than that. A hundred is what I charge for a day’s work.”
“I don’t have that much on me.” He looked in his wallet. “I can give you fifty now.”
“All right. I’ll trust you for the rest.”
The woman in the yellow wig said, “Do I get my prescription filled, or are you two going to go on talking all night?”
Russo said he was very sorry. He gave me a quick emphatic nod and returned to the phone.
I went out to my car, feeling slightly more legitimate now that I had Laurel’s husband as a client. For a man of his apparent background, who had probably made his way into the professional class by way of pharmacy school, the transfer of money, even under pressure, was proof of real concern.
I asked myself as I drove across Westwood where my concern for his wife originated. The answer wasn’t clear. She seemed to be one of those people to whom you attached your floating fears, your unexamined sorrows.
Her eyes appeared to be watching me out of the darkness like the ghost of a woman who had already died. Or the ghost of a bird.
chapter 5
It was a declining middle-class block. The flat-roofed stucco houses had been built in the twenties, and faced each other across the street like concrete strong points in a forgotten battlefield. Tom Russo’s house was distinguished from the others by the new black Cadillac standing in front of it.
A big man got out of the driver’s seat. “Are you Archer?”
I said I was.
“I’m Jack Lennox, Laurel’s father.”
“I recognized you.”
“Oh? Have we met before?”
“I saw your picture in the morning paper.”
“Good Lord, was that just this morning? It feels like a week ago.” He wagged his head gloomily. “They say trouble always comes in bunches. Which certainly conforms with my experience.”
Behind his casual complaining talk I could sense a questioning doubt which wasn’t unexpected in Laurel’s father. He moved toward me and spoke in a lower voice.
“I understand my son-in-law”—he pronounced the words with distaste—“doesn’t want to see us. Believe me, the feeling is mutual. It’s good of him to send an emissary. But I don’t quite understand your position in this matter.”
“I’m a private detective.” I added, overstating the case a little: “Tom Russo hired me to look for your daughter.”
“I didn’t know he cared that much.”
“He cares. But he couldn’t leave the drugstore just now. Since I was the last one who saw her, I agreed to come here and talk to you.”
Lennox took hold of my arm. As if he had closed a circuit, I could feel the tension running through him and into me.
“The last one who saw her? What do you mean by that?”
“She took off from my apartment with a vial of Nembutal capsules.” I looked at my watch. “That was a bit over an hour ago.”
“How did she get into your apartment?”
A hectoring note was entering his voice. His grip on my arm was tightening. I shook it off.
“I met her on the beach at Pacific Point. She asked me to give her a lift to West Los Angeles, and I did. Then she wanted to use my phone to call her husband.”
“What happened between Laurel and her husband?”
“Nothing much. He was about to leave for work and couldn’t come for her. He blames himself, of course, but I don’t blame him. Your daughter was upset before she ever left Pacific Point.”
“Upset about what?”
“The oil spill, for one thing. She rescued a bird, and it died on her hands.”
“Don’t give me that. People are blaming the spill for everything that happens. You’d think it was the end of the bloody world.”
“Maybe it was for your daughter. She’s a very sensitive person, and she seems to have been living close to the edge.”
He shook his head. He seemed to be strained close to his own limit, and he didn’t really want me to tell him about his daughter. I said:
“Has she often been suicidal before?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Who would know?”
“You could ask her mother.”
He took me into the house as if he owned it. We were close together for a moment in the lighted hallway, and we exchanged a quick look. He was weathered brown, with impervious blue eyes, and quite a lot of wavy brown hair growing not too high on his forehead. His eyes were a little overconfident, his mouth a little spoiled. And there was a touch of dismay in the eyes and on the mouth, as if he’d felt the first cold draft of age. He had to be at least fifty but looked younger.
His wife was waiting in the living room with Tom’s cousin, the one he had described to me at the drugstore. The two women sat on facing chairs in stiff-necked poses which meant that they had long since run out of things to say to each other.
Tom’s cousin, the younger, had on a light blue pants suit which exaggerated the shape of her body. She looked trapped. But when I gave her a one-sided grin she gave it back to me.
“I’m Gloria,” she said. “Gloria Flaherty.”
The older woman looked the way Laurel might look in twenty years, if she lived. She still had some of her beauty, but there were lines of suffering connecting the wings of her nose and the corners of her mouth, and charcoal marks under her eyes as if she had been through fire. Her hair was streaked with white.
She lifted one of her black-gloved hands and placed it limply in mine. “Mr. Archer? We can’t make any sense of this at all. Can you? Is it true as her husband says that Laurel is suicidal?”
“She may be.”
“But why? Did something happen?”
“I was going to ask you that.”
“But I haven’t really talked to Laurel for several days. She’s been staying at her grandmother’s. She likes to use the tennis court there. She says it’s good therapy for her.”
“Does she need therapy, Mrs. Lennox?”
“I was using the term rather loosely.” She turned and looked quite openly at the cousin, then back at me. “I really prefer not to discuss this matter under the circumstances.”
Gloria got the message and stood up. “I’ll finish cleaning up in the kitchen. Can I get anybody anything?”
Mr. and Mrs. Lennox grimaced and shook their heads. They seemed appalled by the idea of eating or drinking anything in Tom Russo’s house. They were like astronauts artificially sustained on an alien planet, c
areful but contemptuous of the unfriendly environment and its unlikely inhabitants.
The cousin went into the kitchen. Mrs. Lennox got up and moved back and forth in the limited space in front of the fireless fireplace. She was tall and rather gaunt, but she moved with a certain nervous youthfulness. She flapped her gloved hands in front of her face.
“I wonder what perfume she uses. It smells like Midnight in Long Beach.”
“That’s an insult to Long Beach,” her husband said. “Long Beach is a good oil town.”
I supposed that they were trying to be light, but their words fell heavy as lead. Mrs. Lennox turned to me:
“Do you suppose she’s living here with him?”
“I doubt it. Tom says she’s his cousin. What’s more important, he seems to be in love with your daughter.”
“Then why doesn’t he look after her?”
“I gather that she takes some looking after, Mrs. Lennox.”
She went into a thoughtful silence. “That’s true. She always has. Laurel’s been an unpredictable girl. I was hoping that her marriage—”
“Forget about her marriage,” Lennox said. “It’s obviously on the rocks. They haven’t been living together for weeks. Russo says he doesn’t want a divorce; but he’s just holding out in the hope of some moola. I know these types.”
“You may be mistaken about him,” I said. “He seems to care about her just as much as you do.”
“Really? Bear in mind that I’m her father. And I resent being bracketed with that druggist.”
He was in a mood to resent almost anything. His face had flushed up red, and then gone gray. His wife was watching the changes in its color as if they were familiar signals to her. There was a certain distance in her look, but she leaned over him and put both hands on his shoulders.
“Calm down, Jack. It may be a long night.” She turned to me. “My husband suffers from tension. Under the circumstances, you can understand why.”
I said, “I don’t understand exactly why you came here, Mrs. Lennox.”
“We thought Laurel might be here. Her grandmother said she’s been talking about coming back to Tom.”
“You must have been concerned about her.”
“I’ve been concerned about her all my life—all her life.”
“Do you want to tell me why?”
“I wish I could.”
“Does that mean you can’t, or you won’t?”
She looked at her husband again, as if for a further signal. His face had turned a mottled pink. He pulled his hand across it in a wiping motion which left it quite unchanged. But his voice had changed when he spoke.
“Laurel is very important to us, Mr. Archer. She’s an only child, the only child we’ll ever have. If anything happened to her—” He shrugged and slumped in his chair.
“What do you think might happen to her?”
Lennox remained silent. His wife stood looking down at him as if she was trying to read the thoughts in his head. I asked them both:
“Has she attempted suicide before?”
“No,” her father said.
But her mother said, “Yes. She has in a way.”
“With drugs?”
“I don’t know about that. I caught her once with her father’s revolver. She was playing Russian roulette in his room.”
Lennox moved from side to side in his chair as if he was strapped there. “You never told me any of that.”
“There are a number of things I haven’t told you. I never had to, till now.”
“Hold them for the present, will you? This is a hell of a time to open the floodgates.” He stood up, turning his back on me and towering over her. “What if the old man hears about it?”
“What if he does?”
“Dad’s estate is hanging in the balance; you know that. All that woman needs is a good excuse to take it away from us. And we’re not going to give it to her, are we?”
He raised his hand to the level of her face and brought the open palm against her cheek. It wasn’t a blow, exactly, and it wasn’t exactly a love pat. It made a small slapping noise, and it seemed to jar her.
It jarred me. They were one of those couples who couldn’t pull together. The energy of their marriage passed back and forth between them like an alternating current that shocked and paralyzed.
The woman had begun to cry, dry-eyed. Her husband tried to comfort her with little noises and touches of his hands. Her dry sobs continued like hiccups. She said between them:
“I’m sorry. I always do the wrong thing. I spoil your life for you.”
“That’s nonsense. Be quiet.”
He took her out to their car, and then came back to the front door. “Archer?”
I was waiting in the hall. “What do you want?”
“If you have any sense and compunction at all, you won’t spread this around.”
“Spread what around?”
“The trouble with my daughter. I don’t want you talking about it.”
“I have to report to Russo.”
“But you don’t have to tell him everything that was said. Particularly what just passed between us.”
“You mean about your father’s estate?”
“That’s right. I was indiscreet. I’m asking you to be discreet for me.”
I said I would do my best.
chapter 6
I went out to the kitchen. Cousin Gloria was drying dishes at the sink, her black hair tied up on each side with shoelaces. She gave me a quick bright glance over her shoulder. “You shouldn’t come out here. This place is a mess.”
“It looks all right to me. Everything’s clean.”
“I have been working on it,” she admitted. “I’m practicing up for getting married again.”
“Have you picked the lucky man?”
She turned to face me with a plate in one hand and the dishtowel in the other. “As a matter of fact, I have. He’s a beautiful person. I’m the one who’s lucky.”
She was polishing the plate as if it was a symbol of her future. There was something touching about her faith and energy.
“May I offer my congratulations?”
“Sure, and I accept. We’d be married now, but we want to do it right. That’s why I took this little job with Tom on top of my regular job. I’d do it for nothing, but Tom can afford to pay me.”
She was a lively, open girl, and in a mood to talk now that Laurel’s parents were out of hearing.
“Where do you work?” I asked her.
“In the kitchen at the Medical Center. I’m studying to be a dietitian. Harry’s in the food business, too, when he’s working. Right now he isn’t working. We have a dream that someday we’ll open our own little restaurant.”
“I hope you make it, Gloria.”
“We’ll make it. He’s a smart man, and he has a nice touch with people. Even Tom likes him.”
“What do you mean, ‘even’?”
“Tom doesn’t like too many people. He didn’t like Flaherty—that was my first—at all. You could count the people he really likes on the fingers of one hand.” She raised her left hand, with the fingers spread. “Losing his mother the way he did, when he was so terribly young, it made him kind of suspicious of other people. My mother often said that she’s surprised Tom turned out as well as he did, considering the poor start he had. I think old Mr. Russo deserves a good deal of credit. Old Mr. Russo has his limitations, but he’s a good father to Tom, and always has been.”
She heard herself talking perhaps a little too much, and turned back to her dishes. I was content with a little silence while I took in what she’d said. Tom had lost his mother young, and now he was in danger of losing his wife. The two losses together didn’t form a pattern but they suggested the possibility of one. It hung in the bright kitchen like a double shadow caused by a defect in the lighting.
“What happened to Tom’s mother?”
Gloria said after a pause, “Aunt Allie died. It happened so long ago I don’t
remember it. I remember we lived here for a while, all of us together in this house.” She looked around the kitchen nostalgically, possessively. “But everything comes to an end. Mother got an offer of a job, and Mr. Russo thought she ought to take it.”
“Does Mr. Russo live here with Tom?”
“Not any more. Tom took over the house from him when Tom and Laurel got married. Mr. Russo moved into an old people’s home in Inglewood. It was kind of rough on him, but he always wanted Tom to have the house.”
“How did Tom and Laurel happen to meet?”
“She just walked into the drugstore one day, and he fell for her at first sight. When she said she’d marry him, he thought he was the luckiest man in the world.”
“Didn’t you think so?”
She shook her head, and her tied-up hair flopped like vestigial wings. “It’s nothing against Laurel, though God knows she has her problems. But I sometimes think Tom took on too much when he married into that family. They’re so rich, and we work for everything we get. All Tom really has is a job in somebody else’s drugstore. And this old house which he’s buying from his father.”
“And Laurel.”
“If he’s got her.”
“What was the trouble between them, do you know?”
“Tom never discussed it with me. He’s very close-mouthed.”
“But you know both of them. You’ve seen them together.”
“Sure.”
“How did they get along?”
“It’s hard to say. They didn’t talk much to each other. But each of them always knew the other one was there, if you know what I mean. I think they love each other. Harry thinks so, too.”
“Does Harry know them?”
“Sure he does.” Her face was open, ready to say more. Then she seemed to remember something, and fell silent for a while. She added, without apparent connection, “Tom is very jealous of Laurel. I think she’s the only girl he ever looked at.”
“How old is Tom?”
“Thirty-one. He’s four years older than I am.”
Sleeping Beauty Page 3