“Maybe that’s why he was killed,” I said. “He was learning to talk again.”
Somerville glanced up sharply. “He was learning to talk again?”
“Yes. I spent some time with his doctor earlier this evening. Bagley had been doing considerable talking.”
“About Allie—about Mrs. Russo’s death?”
“The subject came up,” I said. “Did Bagley confess?”
“Some of the things he said could be taken as a confession. I’m not sure that’s what they were, though. He may simply have been a witness to the murder. Or he may have done something to her after she was dead.”
I watched Somerville as I named the possibilities. His face seemed to undergo a process of aging. “Exactly what did he say?”
“That he did something terrible.”
Somerville inclined his head abruptly, his chin chopping down like an axe. “He killed her. His own death last night only confirms it.”
“How does it do that?”
“I think he was killed in revenge by one of the Russos, Allie’s husband or her son. You may not know those hot-blooded types as well as I do—if they have a stain on the family honor, they wash it away with blood.”
The guilt of one of the Russos was a possibility I had considered. But I wasn’t prepared to discuss it with Somerville. I tried to change the subject, unsuccessfully, since the possible guilt of the Captain himself was involved in what I said.
“Nelson Bagley saw your face on television Tuesday night. Did you know that, Captain?”
“I certainly did not. You mean to say that Bagley was watching television?”
“Somebody put him up to it.”
“Somebody?”
“I think it was arranged by Harold Sherry.”
“What was the point?”
“To get something on you and possibly other members of your family. Apparently Harold Sherry took Bagley out of the hospital for that purpose.”
The Captain’s face went through still another aging process which ended in a bitter smile. “Are you suggesting that I’m a suspect in Bagley’s death?”
“The suggestion is yours.”
“The hell it is. Where would I find the time, man? I’ve been working a twenty-hour day. And if there’s anyone more in the public eye than I’ve been this week—” He opened his hands loosely and let them fall.
What he said was true. But he seemed to be an unreal man even when he was saying true things. We sat and looked at each other, the unreality expanding between us until it lay like a pollution over the endless city and across the endless sea, all the way to Okinawa and the war.
chapter 37
Somerville escorted me to the front door, apologized for being very tired, and said good night. His wife didn’t appear.
I sat in my car for a minute, looking out over the city which stretched like a luminous map to the horizon. It was hard to pick up its ever-changing meaning. Its whorls and dots and rectangles of light had to be interpreted, like an abstract painting, in terms of everything that a man remembered. The thought of Laurel, still lost somewhere in that maze, went through me like a pang.
A door opened at the back of the garage, spilling out light. Smith emerged and came toward me, trampling on the heels of his long shadow. I got out and went to meet him.
“I wanted to ask you,” he said, “has Miss Laurel turned up yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve been looking for her.”
“You’re Mr. Archer, isn’t that correct?”
I said I was.
The black man reached into his trousers pocket and brought out a plastic tube or vial between three and four inches long. “Is this yours?”
I took it into the lighted toolroom at the back of the garage. The label on the vial was that of a Pacific Palisades drugstore which I patronized, and had my name clearly typewritten on it.
“Lew Archer,” it said. “Take one at bedtime as needed for sleep—Dr. Larry Drummond. (Nembutal Gr. 3/4 #100).”
After a blank moment, I realized that it was the vial which Laurel had taken from my medicine cabinet. It was empty. Hope and fear collided in my chest.
I turned to the man behind me. “Where did you get this?”
“Right here. It was in the wastebasket in the toolroom bathroom.”
“And it was empty?”
“It sure was. I didn’t take anything out or put anything in. Was there some medicine in it?”
“Sleeping pills,” I said. “The same ones that Laurel took from my bathroom.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“I’m afraid they are. Will you show me where you found this empty tube?”
He opened a painted green door at the end of the toolroom and pulled the chain of a light over his head. The small room contained a toilet and a washbasin with a mirror on the wall above it and a white plastic wastebasket on the floor underneath.
The wastebasket was empty. There was no sign of Laurel anywhere in the room. I found myself peering intensely into the mirror as if her vagrant image might somehow have left its traces on the glass. I caught a glimpse of Smith’s face looming dark and opaque over my shoulder.
“When did you find the vial?”
“Just now, since I got back from the Point. I didn’t think it meant anything, and then I saw your name on it. With what you told me, it means that she’s been here, doesn’t it?”
“I think so. I hope so. Who uses this room?”
“Just me, and sometimes the man who helps with the gardening.”
“Does he live in?”
“No, sir. He’s Mexican. He comes over here from the barrio.”
“When did you last come in here—I mean before you found the vial?”
He thought about the question, chewing at his lips with gold-glinting teeth. “Sometime this morning, early.”
“Did you happen to look in the wastebasket then?”
“No, sir. I can’t say I did. But I might have noticed if that tube had been in it.”
“And you don’t think it was?”
“I couldn’t swear to it one way or the other.”
“When was the last time you can swear the wastebasket was empty?”
“I emptied it yesterday,” he said. “The garbage was collected yesterday.”
“So Laurel could have been here any time since?”
“I wouldn’t say any time. I’ve been around here part of today, between the two trips I made to the Point, this morning and this evening.” He gave me an anxious sidewise look. “I hope you don’t think I did anything wrong.”
“There’s no suggestion of that.”
“I’m glad to hear it.” But he sounded incredulous, and far from glad.
Trailed by Smith, I went back to the front door of the house. He unlocked it for me and let me in. The interior was dark and silent, and it made me feel like a burglar.
Elizabeth appeared at the end of the hall. She was still fully dressed and wide awake.
“Archer? I thought you’d gone long ago.”
“I was on my way, but Smith found something interesting.” I showed her the empty vial and explained its importance. “I don’t want to raise your hopes too much, but this probably means that Laurel’s been here in the last twenty-four hours, possibly even tonight.”
“But it’s empty. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. It worries me.”
Elizabeth’s eyes turned blue-black. “You think she swallowed the capsules?”
“It’s possible.”
“She could be on the property now somewhere. She may be dying.”
I got the flashlight out of the trunk of my car. Smith turned on all the outside lights. The three of us made a search behind the trees, under the wet hedges, and through Laurel’s old hiding places.
The bloody rat was still on the floor of the pool house. The Captain’s picture looked down through cracked glass from the storage-shed wall. It seemed strangely like the memento of a dead man, a man who had d
ied long ago on the far side of the ocean.
Smith came into the shed and found me standing in front of the picture. He stood beside me, and said with some feeling:
“He was the best captain I ever had in the Navy. I don’t know what happened to his career.”
“What caused the gasoline spill on the Canaan Sound? You were there, weren’t you?”
He glanced down at his withered hand. “I was there. But don’t ask me what caused it. Things go wrong for some men. First the gas tank went bad on him, and now it’s happening again with this underwater oil. The Captain does everything by the book, but gas tanks and underwater oil wells don’t know about the book. You have to be lucky dealing with them, and the Captain doesn’t have that kind of luck. He’d be better off doing what he always wanted to do—teaching at Annapolis.”
As we moved back toward the house, empty-handed and anxious, Marian came out of the open front door. Her gray-streaked hair was rumpled and her dress was twisted on her hips, as if she had dressed in the dark and in a hurry. She looked around rather wildly under the lights.
“What’s going on out here?”
“Apparently Laurel paid us a visit today,” Elizabeth said. “But she didn’t stay.”
I told Laurel’s mother what Smith had found, and what I thought it meant. She grasped me by the shoulders. She was surprisingly strong, like a hurt cat, and she shook me:
“You’ve got to find her.”
“It’s all I’m trying to do, Mrs. Lennox.”
“Where do you think she is now?”
“I have no way of knowing. It’s possible she went home.”
“Which home?”
“You’d know better than I would. You’re her mother.”
She rushed into the house. I followed her and found her telephoning in the Captain’s study.
“You’ve got to help us look for her, Mr. Russo,” she was saying. She sounded close to hysteria. I lifted the receiver from her hand and spoke to Tom:
“Have you seen her or heard from her?”
“No, sir, I haven’t. You think I should go out looking?”
“It’s a big city, Tom. You might as well stay home. She may try to contact you.”
“Okay, I’ll stay home.”
“Have you seen Gloria, by the way?”
“Not since I dropped her off in Redondo Beach. That makes two of them missing.”
“At least there’s some hope that Laurel is alive.” I hung up.
Marian was at my elbow. “You told him he should stay home, that she might try to contact him. She might try to do the same to me. After all, I’m her mother.”
“That’s true.”
“But our house is standing empty. What if she goes home and there’s nobody there? I’ve got to go home.”
“You’re tired, dear,” Elizabeth said.
“Not really. I couldn’t possibly sleep, anyway. I seem to have given up sleeping. Will you lend me a car?”
“You shouldn’t drive yourself,” Elizabeth said.
I would have liked to volunteer, but I was so tired I didn’t trust my driving. Smith said he would take her back to Pacific Point.
She promised to let me know if she heard from Laurel.
Turning down the hill toward home, I noticed that the view of the city had changed. It seemed larger, more luminous, and less abstract. It stretched between the mountains and the sea like a living substance with the power to be hurt and to hurt.
I switched off the thinking and feeling part, and drove home on automatic pilot.
chapter 38
My apartment looked as if years had passed in the thirty hours since I had been there with Laurel. There was a drabness in the light, a sourness in the air. It gave me a shock to realize that the change was not in the apartment but in me.
I sat down on the chesterfield and closed my eyes, trying to separate myself from what had happened to the room and the light. Waves of darkness started to come in level with my eyes.
They carried with them a message which was repeated over and over: Laurel was long gone, and very likely dead; the empty vial in Somerville’s garage had probably been left there to mislead us. I tried to explain to myself how this could happen, but I was too tired to think straight. I lay down with a cushion under my head and sank into sleep.
The telephone dredged me up from the black depths. I made my way across the room and picked up the receiver. It was my answering service.
“Mr. Archer? There’s a woman trying to get in touch with you. I told her it was too early, but she insisted—”
“What woman?”
“She wouldn’t leave her name.”
“Did she leave any message at all?”
“She said something about her daughter coming home—the one you wanted to talk to.”
“Did she say her daughter had come home?”
“I think that was the message. It didn’t come through too clear. She talked as if she was slightly looped.”
I thanked the operator, shaved myself and changed my shirt, and went out into the gray early morning. The traffic on Wilshire was sparse. I turned off onto Pico and followed it down toward the sea, then turned north on the highway.
A yellow miasma of smog left over from the day before floated above the coast and out over the water. The morning light that filtered through it was unkind to Topanga Court. With the broken cliff and the earth slide rising behind it, it looked like an abandoned mining settlement, a ghost town dominated by a pile of slag.
Remembering that Harold had a gun and the will to use it, I parked my car a couple of hundred feet up the highway. On the way back, I passed a carful of children parked on the shoulder. They were sitting in an old Cadillac with a Texas license and fenders like crumpled wings.
A sticker on the rear bumper of the Cadillac read, “Honk if you love Jesus.” The children’s dark eyes looked out at me in solemn question. Was this the promised land?
Gloria’s green Falcon was standing under a carport at the rear of Topanga Court. Its license plate, caked with what looked like carefully hand-molded mud, was illegible. I moved around the building to the front. There was a light inside and, stitched among the sounds of highway traffic, I could hear the murmur of voices.
I tried the front door. It was locked. Then there were footsteps, and Mrs. Mungan looked out at me through the glass pane. If the place resembled a ghost town, she looked like a buried miner who had struggled up for one last glimpse of daylight.
She unlocked the door and stepped outside. The bell jangled harshly over her head. I could smell whisky on her, but her eyes were cold sober.
“You got my message, did you?”
“Yes.” I thanked her.
“You took long enough to get here. I’ve had a hard time holding Gloria. She’s scared.”
“She has some reason to be. She’s been involved in a kidnapping.”
“She says not. She claims she hasn’t set eyes on Laurel.”
“May I talk to her directly, Mrs. Mungan?”
“Yes. I want you to. Why do you think I called you?” She peered up at the yellow sky. “I realize we’re in trouble.”
Gloria was waiting in the room behind the archway. She stood up when I came in, raising her clenched hands to the level of her breast, as though I might attack her physically.
“Good morning, Gloria.”
“Good morning,” her dubious mouth said.
She had lost her cheerfulness and her looks together. She was one of those girls who were almost pretty when they were feeling good, and almost ugly when they were depressed. She turned to her mother, scowling with apprehension:
“Martie? Could I please talk to him in private?”
“But you’ve already told me everything.” The older woman looked at her suspiciously. “Or haven’t you?”
“Certainly I have, but that’s not the point. I’m embarrassed.”
Mrs. Mungan retreated, closing a door behind her. Gloria turned to me:
> “My mother means well, but she’s got so many problems of her own, particularly since my father walked out on us. I’ve really been mothering Martie since I was about twelve. Her problems always loomed so large that I never had time to wonder if I had problems, let alone do anything about them.”
This came out in an emotional rush, but the emotion dissipated as she spoke, and the words slowed. I didn’t interrupt her. Every witness has his own way of creeping up on the truth. She said:
“It isn’t easy to grow up with an alcoholic mother. Martie’s been drinking for as long as I can remember—ever since Aunt Allie died. Do you know about Aunt Allie?”
“I know she was murdered. You told me about her yesterday morning, remember?”
“Was that just yesterday morning? It seems like about a year ago. Anyway, I know more about it now. Aunt Allie was shot by one of the men in her life—a man that she rejected.”
“How did you find that out?”
“Harold told me last night, in the motel.”
“In Redondo Beach?”
“No. We went to another motel after that. Harold didn’t trust the Doctor not to turn him in.”
“Is Harold still in the other motel?”
“Not any more,” she said. “Where is he?”
She looked at me in distress. She had given her feelings to Harold and, damaged and disappointed as they were, they were hard for her to withdraw.
“Tell me where he is, Gloria. He’s the key to this whole business.”
“That isn’t true,” she said defensively. “Harold never kidnapped anybody. And he never shot anybody, either.”
“Who told you that?”
“He did, and I know he was telling the truth. He was just trying to bring Aunt Allie’s murderer to justice.”
“Do you mean Nelson Bagley?”
She nodded. “He was the one who did the actual shooting. But there were other people involved—people who covered it up.”
“Who were they, Gloria?”
“Harold made me promise not to tell. He said that he could take care of it himself.”
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