Sleeping Beauty

by Ross Macdonald

  “Not her own?”

  “Jack and Marian don’t have much money in the here and now. The company pays him a good salary, of course, but they live right up to it, and beyond. I don’t mean that they couldn’t or wouldn’t raise money for Laurel if they had to.”

  “Money isn’t always the main thing in these extortion attempts. The extortioner may think it is. But what he’s really after is some kind of emotional satisfaction. Some kind of revenge on life. Would Laurel do something like that to her parents?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve certainly had a lot of trouble with her. And she with them,” Elizabeth added carefully. “Jack and Marian have had a troubled marriage. But all three of them really care about each other. I suppose it’s what they call a love-hate relationship. Odi et amo. Excrucior.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “ ‘I hate you and I love you. And it hurts.’ That’s my own translation from Catullus. They printed it in the annual at River Valley School.”

  “The same school Laurel went to.”

  “Yes. You know quite a lot about her.”

  “Not nearly enough. I didn’t have much of a chance to question her husband. He was at work.”

  “He wouldn’t be able to tell you much, anyway,” she said with faint contempt.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He doesn’t really know Laurel. How could he, with his background? I’ve spent some time with them, and if ever I saw an unreal marriage—”

  “Tom seems to be in love with her.”

  “Whatever that means,” she said. “As far as Tom is concerned, she’s a creature of romantic fantasy. He treats her as if she were a fairy princess. Laurel really deserved something better than that.”

  Her voice was surprisingly bitter. I wondered if she was talking about her own marriage as well as Laurel’s.

  “How did—how does Laurel feel about him?” And how do you feel about your husband, Mrs. Somerville?

  “I think she loved him, in a way, and she was grateful to him. It isn’t easy for Laurel to be intimate with anyone, certainly not with a man. But she really should have had something more than Tom Russo. She’s a remarkable young woman. If she had met her match in life, this dreadful thing wouldn’t have happened.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head. Her hair fluffed out, and caught the light of a car coming up behind us. “After what you said about her possible complicity, I don’t think I ought to speculate about it.”

  “I was speculating.”

  “You certainly were.”

  “But I thought the question ought to be raised. I’m not suggesting that Laurel originated the idea. At worst, she simply went along with it.”

  “Why would she?”

  “She wanted out, and she was so desperate that any out would do. Assume she did go with someone, and that someone made the extortion call to her parents, with or without her knowledge—it doesn’t follow that Laurel is out of danger. In fact, it works the other way around.”

  “You mean if she knows who she’s with, he’s just as likely to kill her?”

  “That’s what I mean. He or they.”

  “But you’re simply imagining all this,” she said with synthetic scorn.

  “What else can I do? I said I wasn’t offering you a theory, just some possibilities. You seem to take them seriously. So do I. Remember, I spent some time with Laurel just before she took off. She was wide open to possibility, ready for anything to happen. And if she ran into someone else in the same condition—”

  “The nuclear components would come together?”

  Her voice was sober. We climbed the ramp onto the midnight freeway. I was keenly aware that I’d brought Laurel this way a few hours before.

  “Speaking of nuclear bombs,” Elizabeth said, in the tone of someone hoping to change the subject, “this isn’t the first time tonight that they’ve come up. My husband was talking about bombing earlier this evening, before I persuaded him to go to bed. I know men aren’t supposed to have hysterics, but he was pretty close to it. Of course, he’s been through a lot more than I have, particularly in the last couple of days. I have to make allowances for that, and for the fact that he’s older.”

  She seemed to be having a quiet debate with herself on the subject of her husband’s manhood.

  “What did he have to tell you about bombing?”

  “Nothing worth hearing, really. If anyone but Ben had said it, I would have laughed in his face. He had the wild idea that perhaps our oil well started leaking because some enemy had planted a small nuclear device in the sea floor. Of course, he was very tired, and he can’t drink—”

  “Some enemy of the United States?”

  “He didn’t go quite that far. Some personal enemy, or enemy of the company. Or someone trying to make the oil industry look bad.”

  “It isn’t possible, is it?”

  “No.” Her voice was definite. “I think my husband may be getting a bit paranoid. It’s understandable. He’s a sensitive man, and I know he feels terribly guilty. He told me once himself that he was too emotional to be a naval combat officer. He said he realized it when he saw the official photographs of the fire-bombing of Tokyo. He was appalled by them.”

  “Did he have something to do with the Tokyo bombings?”

  “No. I didn’t mean that. But this oil thing isn’t his first disaster. It’s the second one that he—that he was made to feel responsible for. His ship the Canaan Sound was disabled by fire at Okinawa, and some of his men were lost.”

  “Was it his fault?”

  “He was the Captain. He naturally assumed responsibility. But Ben has never talked about it. Neither has Jack. I don’t think either of them knows how the fire started.”

  “Was your brother Jack aboard the Canaan Sound?”

  “Yes. Jack was a young officer just out of Communications School. Ben arranged to take him aboard, so Jack would be under his wing. It wasn’t a very protective wing, I’m afraid. Jack wasn’t on the carrier for more than a week or two when it was ordered to Okinawa, and then burned. That was the end of Jack’s sea duty, and the end of my husband’s naval career.”

  “You mean they fired him out of the Navy?”

  “Not exactly. They gave him shore duty at Great Lakes. Ben hated it. So did I. But it was much harder on him than it was on me. When I married him, he was terribly ambitious. He used to talk about someday becoming CINPAC. The job at Great Lakes led nowhere, and wasn’t intended to. As soon as the war was over, Ben resigned from the Navy. Fortunately he was married to me, and my father took him into the company.”

  Her voice had dropped into the half-conscious rhythm of memory. She was aware of my presence, which made speech possible, but she wasn’t just talking to me. She was telling herself about her life, and finding out how it sounded.

  “Is this the end of your husband’s career in the oil business?”

  “I don’t know. It feels like the end of a lot of things to me.” Her voice dropped out of hearing, but I sensed its quiet rhythms continuing in her mind. Then it was audible again: “I’m afraid my father has turned his back on us. We disappointed him by having no children. Now he’s got himself a woman named Connie Hapgood. She used to be a teacher at River Valley School, and she’s actually younger than I am. Younger than I ever was,” she added in a flash of wry and angry wit. “Father is in his seventies, but he plans to marry her as soon as his marriage to Mother is dissolved. He’s even talking about having another family.”

  “Talking will do no harm.”

  “He means it, though. He’s got himself persuaded, with that woman’s help, that he can have a second life. And of course she’ll do her best to get Ben fired and put her own people in. There were rumors of it even before the blowout, and now that it’s happened I’m afraid Ben’s finished.”

  “But the blowout was pure accident, wasn’t it?”

  “It must have been. Of course.
But Father will blame Ben. Father has always had to have someone to blame.” The sentence came out heavy and cold, like a capsule history of her early life. After a while, she added:

  “One of the planets—I forget which one—takes something like a hundred and sixty-five years to revolve around the sun. It makes for a long long year. And that’s the kind of a year our family seems to be having.”

  “Neptune?”

  “It may be Neptune. He’s the god of the sea, isn’t he? Maybe he got mad and blew up our oil well. But please don’t suggest that possibility to my husband. He’d be only too willing to believe it.”

  chapter 11

  We rode in silence, like companions on a journey to inner space, until we left the freeway at Pacific Point. Elizabeth told me how to find her brother’s house, just south of the city limits in the suburb of Montevista.

  As we turned down the driveway, the night sky was blacked out by overarching trees. Then it opened out ahead of us, flooded by moonlight, floored by the glittering sea. In that perspective, the house which clung to the edge of the cliff looked small and low. All its windows were lit.

  I parked by a masonry wall on the left side of the driveway.

  “Let me do the talking,” Elizabeth said.

  “All right. But I want to come in.”

  She looked into my face. “Why? It will be easier for me to talk to Jack and Marian alone.”

  “We didn’t come here to make it easier for you. And I didn’t come along for the ride.”

  “Very well. Come in if you like.”

  “I don’t like. I’d rather be home in bed. But I will if you insist.”

  She drew in her breath in a little gasp of irritation, which she controlled. Her gloved hand pressed my arm.

  “Don’t get angry, Mr. Archer. Jack is about all I can handle at any one time.”

  As if to demonstrate the truth of this, Jack Lennox came out through a gateway in the stone wall. He carried a rifle with a telescopic sight, and before I guessed his intention he was beside the car and pointing it at my head.

  I froze, half out of the car. The fear of death thrilled through me. I said carefully:

  “Put it down, Mr. Lennox. Don’t you recognize me?”

  He glared along the barrel for an instant. He didn’t seem to care who I was. Then he raised the gun so that it was no longer pointed at me. I straightened up.

  Cold fear and anger boiled up in my head like liquid air. I wanted to take the rifle out of his hands and throw it cartwheeling over his house, far out over the cliff, into the sea.

  His sister felt the violent possibility of the scene. She hurried around the car and came between us, speaking to him in a voice that adults use on children.

  “Give me that, Jack. You don’t need it. Mr. Archer came here to help you.”

  “I don’t want his bloody help.” His voice was thick with alcohol and passion.

  “Come on, Jack. Straighten up now. I know you’re under bad strain but the rifle just makes it worse.”

  He was holding it pointed approximately at the moon, which floated low like a target balloon. The woman reached for the gun. They wrestled for a second, more with their wills than their muscles. Her will won. She lifted the gun away from him, and he let her.

  Without it he looked strangely empty-handed. He was one of those men who need a gun to complete themselves.

  The three of us moved awkwardly to the house.

  Marian Lennox was waiting just inside the front door, as if she had been afraid to come out.

  “I told you it was Elizabeth,” she said to her husband.

  Her voice was monotonous and her movements limp, as if her nerves had been strained too far and gone slack. But she took the rifle from her sister-in-law and stood it in a corner of the hallway. Jack Lennox scowled at the two women, and turned the same face on me:

  “You had no right to come here. You’ll ruin everything.”

  He was full of grief and anger, and spoiling for a fight. I wasn’t. I said: “Your sister asked me to come. I think it was a good idea. People shouldn’t try to handle these things by themselves.”

  “We’re doing all right,” he said without conviction.

  “Have you had a second call yet from the kidnappers?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly what was said in the first call?”

  He looked at me with suspicion. “What do you want to know for?”

  “I’d like to get some idea of who we’re dealing with—whether they’re amateur or pro—”

  “You’re not doing the dealing. We are.”

  “I understand that. I’m not trying to interfere.”

  “Of course you’re trying to interfere. You walked into my house uninvited and unwanted. You don’t give a damn about us, or about what happens to my daughter.”

  “I do, though. That’s why I’m here.”

  He shook his head. “You’re spying for Tom Russo, aren’t you? How do I know he isn’t involved in this? And maybe you are, too, for all I know.”

  He had worked himself up into another rage and was letting it talk for him. I didn’t know how seriously to take him. The gun was still resting upright in the corner. The two women were standing, as if by design, between the gun and him.

  It seemed to me that I had already spent a long time in the hallway with Jack Lennox and his sister and his wife and his bloody gun. It was an ugly cold dark room without any furniture, like a holding cell for prisoners waiting for paroles that never came.

  His wife approached him with one hand stretched out. She was pale and enormous-eyed and awkward in her movements, as if she had been in solitary for years. Her hand paused in the air before it touched him.

  “You mustn’t get so excited, Jack. You said that yourself. We’ve got to keep a clear head or the family will never get through this alive. He’s liable to phone now any time.”

  “Has he threatened to kill your daughter?” I said, unwisely.

  Lennox turned on me with clenched fists. His wife took hold of his raised right arm. He flung her away from him, and she almost fell.

  “For God’s sake, Jack,” Elizabeth said, “calm down.”

  “Then take this spying bastard out of here.”

  She moved past him to the door and opened it. “Out, Mr. Archer, please.”

  The heavy door clicked shut behind me. The air was cool on my face. The moon soared above the sea. In the middle distance, a screech owl made small weird grouchy noises like nature talking back to the world of men.

  But I wasn’t interested. I wanted to be inside the house, in the cell with the prisoners, waiting for the second telephone call.

  I waited for nearly an hour. It seemed to stretch out like time on the planet Neptune. The screech owl spoke occasionally. I had nothing to say in return.

  Then the telephone rang in the house, once. It required an effort of will to stay in the car. I felt partly responsible for the danger Laurel was in, and I didn’t trust her father to get her out of it.

  I reached for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in several years, but I felt defrauded when I couldn’t find one. I sat and bit my lips and listened to the slow ponderous clock of the waves at the foot of the cliff.

  Elizabeth came out alone. She walked very slowly toward my car, as if the house behind her exerted a magnetic influence. I got out and opened the car door for her. In the light of the moon, she looked pale and subdued.

  “Did the kidnappers phone again?”

  “Yes. Jack talked to one of them. A man.”

  “What did the man say?”

  “Jack asked me not to discuss it with you. He wants to handle it alone. That’s his way, especially where Laurel is concerned.”

  “He’s making a mistake.”

  “I told him that. But I might as well have been talking to that wall.” She pointed toward the stone wall that enclosed the house. “I’m afraid he doesn’t trust you. He doesn’t trust anyone, not even me.”

  “Ha
s he always been like that?”

  “Not really. I think he’s breaking down under the strain.” She was silent for a moment; then she shook her head in denial. “That’s really unfair to Jack. He’s terribly eager to do the right thing and do it all by himself. He hasn’t been the best and most understanding father in the world, and there’s been a lot of trouble between him and Laurel. I’m sure he feels that if he can save her now, and show her how much he loves her—” Her voice dropped again, as if she couldn’t imagine the sequel to this.

  “It’s a poor time for grandstanding. Her life is in danger. She may be dead now. What assurance has he been given that she isn’t?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he ask to talk to her?”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “He took the call in his study, and kept the door closed. He promised to deliver the hundred thousand tomorrow. That was all he told me about the conversation.”

  “When tomorrow?”

  “Early in the afternoon, I gather. Jack said he’d need the money around noon.”

  “Would there be any point in trying to talk to him now?”

  “For you to try?”

  “Either of us. Or both.”

  She considered the idea. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Archer. It’s better not to press Jack when he’s feeling like this. Perhaps tomorrow—”

  I turned the key and started the car. As I was backing away from the wall, the front door opened. Marian Lennox came toward us, stumbling on the flagstone walk and waving. She looked like a disoriented bird blundering into the headlights.

  We both got out to meet her. Elizabeth said in a slightly bedside manner:

  “What is it, Marian?”

  “Jack had a dizzy spell. I got him to lie down.”

  “He hasn’t had a heart attack?”

  “No. He’ll be all right.”

  “Do you think we should call a doctor?”

  “I’m afraid that would only upset him.”

  Elizabeth put her arm around the other woman’s shoulders. “I’ll stay with you if you like.”

  “No. You’re awfully kind. But Jack and I have to do this by ourselves. It’s the way Jack wants it.”