Blocking the doorway with his body, he turned and called to the girl: “Sandy? Come here a minute.”
She came to the doorway wearing dark glasses which robbed her face of meaning. Like Davy, she had on a black sweatshirt. Her body thrust itself forward and leaned on Davy’s with the kind of heartbroken lewdness that only very young girls are capable of. Her face was set and pale, and her mouth hardly moved when she spoke.
“I don’t know you, do I?”
“Your mother sent me.”
“To drag me back home again?”
“Your parents are naturally interested in your plans. If any.”
“Tell them they’ll find out soon enough.” She didn’t sound angry in the usual sense. Her voice was dull and even. Behind the dark glasses she seemed to be looking at Davy instead of me.
There was some kind of passion between them. It gave off a faint wrong smoky odor, like something burning where it shouldn’t be, arson committed by children playing with matches.
I didn’t know how to talk to them. “Your mother’s pretty sick about this, Miss Sebastian.”
“She’ll be sicker.”
“That sounds like a threat.”
“It is. I guarantee that she’ll be sicker.”
Davy shook his head at her. “Don’t say anything more. Anyway his minute is up.” He made an elaborate show of checking his wrist watch, and I caught a glimpse of what went on in his head: large plans and intricate hostilities and a complicated schedule which didn’t always jibe with reality. “You’ve had your minute. Good-bye.”
“Hello again. I need another minute, or maybe two.” I wasn’t deliberately crossing the boy, but I wasn’t avoiding it, either. It was important to know how wild he really was. “Do me a favor, Miss Sebastian. Take off your glasses so I can see you.”
She reached for her glasses with both hands, and lifted them from her face. Her eyes were hot and lost.
“Put them back on,” Davy said.
She obeyed him.
“You take orders from me, bird. From nobody else.” He turned on me. “As for you, I want you to be out of sight in one minute. That’s an order.”
“You’re not old enough to be giving orders to anybody. When I leave, Miss Sebastian goes along.”
“You think so?” He pushed her inside and shut the door. “She’s never going back to that dungeon.”
“It’s better than shacking up with a psycho.”
“I’m not a psycho!”
To prove it he swung his right fist at my head. I leaned back and let it go by. But his left followed very quickly, catching me on the side of the neck. I staggered backward into the garden, balancing the wobbling sky on my chin. My heel caught on the edge of the concrete deck around the pool. The back of my head rapped the concrete.
Davy came between me and the sky. I rolled sideways. He kicked me twice in the back. I got up somehow and closed with him. It was like trying to wrestle with a bear. He lifted me clear off my feet.
Mrs. Smith said: “Stop it!” She spoke as if he really was some half-tamed animal. “Do you want to go back to jail?”
He paused, still holding me in a bear hug that inhibited my breathing. The redheaded woman went to a tap and started a hose running. She turned it full on Davy. Some of the water splashed on me.
“Drop him.”
Davy dropped me. The woman kept the hose on him, aiming at the middle of his body. He didn’t try to take it away from her. He was watching me. I was watching a Jerusalem cricket which was crawling across the deck through the spilled water, like a tiny clumsy travesty of a man.
The woman spoke to me over her shoulder: “You better get the hell out of here, troublemaker.”
She was adding insult to injury, but I went. Not very far: around the corner where my car was parked. I drove around the block and parked it again on the slanting street above the Laurel Apartments. I couldn’t see the inner court or the doors that opened onto it. But the entrance to the garage was clearly visible.
I sat and watched it for half an hour. My hot and wounded feelings gradually simmered down. The kick-bruise in my back went right on hurting.
I hadn’t expected to be taken. The fact that I had been meant I was getting old, or else that Davy was pretty tough. It didn’t take me half an hour to decide that both of these things were probably true.
The name of the street I was parked on was Los Baños Street. It was a fairly good street, with new ranch houses sitting on pads cut one above another in the hillside. Each house was carefully different. The one across the street from me, for example, the one with the closed drapes, had a ten- foot slab of volcanic rock set into the front. The car in the driveway was a new Cougar.
A man in a soft leather jacket came out of the house, opened the trunk of the car, and got out a small flat disk which interested me. It looked like a roll of recording tape. The man noticed my interest in it and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
Then he decided to make something more of it. He crossed the street to my side, walking with swaggering authority. He was a large heavy man with a freckled bald head. In his big slack smiling face the sharp hard eyes came as a bit of a shock, like gravel in custard.
“You live around here, my friend?” he said to me.
“I’m just reconnoitering. You call it living around here?”
“We don’t like strangers snooping. So how would you like to move along?”
I didn’t want to attract attention. I moved along. With me I took the license number of the Cougar and the number of the house, 702 Los Baños Street.
I have a good sense of timing, or timing has a good sense of me. My car had just begun to move when a light-green compact backed out of the garage of the Laurel Apartments. As it turned downhill toward the coastal highway, I could see that Sandy was driving and Davy was with her in the front seat. I followed them. They turned right on the highway, went through a yellow light at the foot of Sunset, and left me gritting my teeth behind a red light.
I drove all the way to Malibu trying to pick them up again, but I had no luck. I went back to the Laurel Apartments on Elder Street.
chapter 5
THE CARD ON THE DOOR of Apartment One said: “Mrs. Laurel Smith.” She opened the door on a chain and growled at me:
“You drove him away. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“You mean they’re gone for good?”
“I’m not talking to you.”
“I think you’d better. I’m not a troublemaker by choice, but trouble can be made. If Davy Spanner’s on probation, he broke it when he swung on me.”
“You were asking for it.”
“That depends on which side you’re on. You’re obviously on Davy’s side. In which case you better cooperate with me.”
She thought about this. “Cooperate how?”
“I want the girl. If I get her back in reasonable shape, in a reasonable period of time—like today—I won’t bear down hard on Davy. Otherwise I will.”
She unhooked the chain. “Okay, Mr. God. Come in. The place is a mess but then so are you.”
She smiled with one side of her mouth and one eye. I think she wanted to be angry with me, but so many things had happened in her life that she couldn’t stay angry. One of the things that had happened to her, I could tell by her breath, was alcohol.
The clock on her mantel said it was half past ten. The clock was under a bell jar, as if to shield Laurel Smith from the passage of time. The other things in the living room, the overstuffed furniture and the gewgaws and the litter of magazines, had an unlived-with feeling. It was like a waiting room where you couldn’t relax, for fear that the dentist would call you in any minute. Or the psychiatrist.
The small television set in one corner of the room was on, with the sound turned off. Laurel Smith said apologetically:
“I never used to watch TV. But I won this thing in a contest a couple of weeks ago.”
“What kind of a contest?”
“
One of those telephone contests. They called me up and asked me what was the capital of California. I said Sacramento, and they told me I’d won a portable TV set, just like that. I thought it was a gag, but within the hour they turned up here with the set.”
She switched it off. We sat facing each other at opposite ends of the chesterfield.
There was a cloudy glass on the coffee table between us. The picture window behind us was full of blue sky and blue sea.
“Tell me about Davy.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I took him on a couple of months ago.”
“In what sense took him on?”
“To do the clean-up work around the place. He needed a part-time job, he’s planning to start at junior college the first of the year. You wouldn’t know it the way he acted this morning, but he’s an ambitious young man.”
“Did you know he’d been in jail when you hired him?”
“Naturally I did. That’s what got me interested in his case. I’ve had my own share of troubles—”
“Troubles with the law?”
“I didn’t say that. And let’s not talk about me, eh? I’ve had a little luck in real estate, and I like to spread the luck around a little. So I gave Davy a job.”
“Have you talked to him at any length?”
She let out a short laugh. “Til say I have. That boy will talk your arm off.”
“What about?”
“Any subject. His main subject is how the country is going to the dogs. He may be right at that. He says his time in jail gave him a worm’s-eye view of the whole business.”
“He sounds like a poolroom lawyer to me.”
“Davy’s more than that,” she said defensively. “He’s more than just a talker. And he isn’t the poolroom type. He’s a serious boy.”
“What’s he serious about?”
“He wants to grow up and be a real man and do something useful.”
“I think he’s conning you, Mrs. Smith.”
“No.” She shook her artificial head. “He isn’t conning me. He may be conning himself a little. God knows he’s got his problems. I’ve talked to his probation officer—” She hesitated.
“Who is his probation officer?”
“I forget his name.” She went to the telephone directory in the hall and consulted the front of it. “Mr. Belsize. Do you know him?”
“We’ve met. He’s a good man.”
Laurel Smith sat down nearer me. She seemed to be warming up slightly, but her eyes were still watchful. “Mr. Belsize admitted to me that he was taking a chance on Davy. Recommending him for probation, I mean. He said Davy might make it and then again he might not. I said I was willing to take my chances, too.”
“Why?”
“You can’t just live for yourself. I found that out.” A sudden smile lit her face. “I sure picked a hot potato, didn’t I?”
“You sure did. Did Belsize say what was the matter with him?”
“He has emotional trouble. When he gets mad he thinks we’re all his enemies. Even me. He never lifted his hand against me, though. Or anybody else until this morning.”
“That you know of.”
“I know he’s been in trouble in the past,” she said. “But I’m willing to give him the benefit. You don’t know what that boy’s been through—orphanages and foster homes and getting kicked around. He never had a home of his own, he never had a father or a mother.”
“He still has to learn to handle himself.”
“I know that. I thought you were beginning to sympathize.”
“I do sympathize, but that won’t help Davy. He’s playing house and other games with a young girl. He’s got to bring her back. Her parents could hang a rap on him that would put him away until he’s middle-aged.”
She pressed her hand against her breast. “We can’t let that happen.”
“Where would he have taken her, Mrs. Smith?”
“I don’t know.”
She raked her dyed head with her fingers, then rose and went to the picture window. With her back to me, her body was simply an object, an odalisque shape against the light. Framed in dark-red curtains, the sea looked old as the Mediterranean, old as sin.
“Has he brought her here before?” I said to her black-and-orange back.
“He brought her to introduce her to me last week—week before last.”
“Were they planning to get married?”
“I don’t think so. They’re too young. I’m sure Davy has other plans.”
“What are his plans?”
“I told you, about going to school and all. He wants to be a doctor or a lawyer.”
“He’ll be lucky if he just stays out of jail.”
She turned to me, clutching and pulling at her hands. Their friction made a dry anxious sound. “What can I do?”
“Let me search his apartment.”
She was silent for a minute, looking at me as if she found it hard to trust a man.
“I guess that is a good idea.”
She got her keys, a heavy clinking loop like an overgrown charm bracelet. The card with “David Spanner” written on it was missing from his door. That seemed to imply that he wasn’t coming back.
The apartment was a single room with two convertible beds at right angles in a corner. Both beds had been slept in and left unmade. Mrs. Smith pulled back the covers and examined the sheets.
“I can’t tell if they were sleeping together,” she said.
“I assume they were.”
She gave me a worried look. “The girl isn’t Quentin quail, is she?”
“No. But if he takes her someplace against her will—or if she wants out and he uses force—”
“I know, that’s kidnapping. But Davy wouldn’t do that to her. He likes her.”
I opened the closet. It was empty.
“He didn’t have much in the way of clothes,” she said. “He didn’t care about clothes and things like that.”
“What did he care about?”
“Cars. But on probation he isn’t allowed to drive. I think that’s one reason he took up with the girl. She has a car.”
“And her father had a shotgun. Davy has it now.”
She turned so quickly that the skirt of her housecoat flared out. “You didn’t tell me that before.”
“What makes it so important?”
“He might shoot somebody.”
“Anyone in particular?”
“He doesn’t know anybody,” she said foolishly.
“That’s good.”
I went through the rest of the place. There were sliced ham and cheese and milk in the little refrigerator in the kitchenette. I found a few books on the desk by the window: The Prophet, and a book about Clarence Darrow, and one about an American doctor who had built a hospital in Burma. Meager wings to fly on.
Tacked up over the desk was a list of ten “Don’ts.” They were written out in the precise hand I recognized as Davy’s:
Don’t drive cars.
Don’t drink alcoholic beverages.
Don’t stay up too late—the night is the bad time.
Don’t frequent crummy joints.
Don’t make friends without careful investigation.
Don’t use dirty language.
Don’t use ‘ain’t’ and other vulgarisms.
Don’t sit around and brood about the past.
Don’t hit people.
Don’t get mad and be an instant enemy.
“You see what kind of a boy he is?” Laurel said at my shoulder. “A real trier.”
“You’re fond of him, aren’t you?”
She didn’t answer directly. “You’d like him, too, if you only got to know him.”
“Maybe.” Davy’s list of self-regulations was kind of touching, but I read it with a different eye from Laurel’s. The boy was beginning to know himself, and didn’t like what he saw.
I went through the desk. It was empty except for a sheet of paper jammed into the back of the bottom drawe
r. I spread it out on the desk top. It was covered with a map, crudely drawn in ink, of a ranch or large estate. Its various features were labeled in a girlish unformed hand: “main house,” “garage with L.’s apt.,” “artificial lake and dam,” “road from highway” passing through a “locked gate.”
I showed the map to Laurel Smith. “Does this mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing.” But her eyes had grown small and intent. “Should it?”
“It looks as if they’ve been casing some joint.”
“More likely they were just doodling.”
“Some doodle.” I folded the map and put it in my inside pocket.
“What are you going to do with that?” she said.
“Find the place. If you know where it is you could save me a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t,” she said abruptly. “Now if you’re finished in here, I’ve got other things to do.”
She stood by the door till I went out. I thanked her. She shook her head gloomily; “You’re not welcome. Listen, how much would you take to lay off Davy? Lay off the whole damn business?”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can. I’ll give you five hundred.”
“No.”
“A thousand? A thousand cash, no taxes to pay.”
“Forget it.”
“A thousand cash and me. I look better without my clothes on.” She nudged my arm with her breast. All it did was make my kidneys hurt.
“It’s a handsome offer but I can’t take it. You’re forgetting about the girl. I can’t afford to.”
“To hell with her and to hell with you.” She walked away to her apartment, swinging her keys.
I went into the garage. Against the dim rear wall was a workbench littered with tools: hammer, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, a hacksaw. A small vise was attached to the bench. Under it and around it, bright new iron filings mixed with sawdust were scattered on the concrete floor.
The filings suggested a queer idea to my mind. I made a further search, which ended up in the rafters of the garage. Wrapped in a dirty beach towel and a rolled-up carpet remnant I found the two barrels and the stock which Davy had sawed off the shotgun. They gave me an ugly moment: they were like the leavings of a major amputation.
The Instant Enemy Page 3
