The Instant Enemy

by Ross Macdonald

  “I know they’re dangerous. I saw them. The two of them came right into the living room and marched Stephen out to their car. In their dark glasses they looked like creatures from another planet.”

  “Did you recognize either of them?”

  “Gerda recognized the girl right away. She’s been a guest here more than once. Her name is Alexandria Sebastian.”

  She turned and looked at me in surmise. I was glad the secret was coming out.

  “Keith Sebastian is my client.”

  “And he knew about this?”

  “He knew his daughter had run away. Then he knew what I told him, which wasn’t much. Let’s not get involved in recriminations. The important thing is to get your son back.”

  “I agree. My offer stands. A hundred thousand if Stephen comes home safe.”

  “The police do this work for free.”

  She pushed the idea away with her hand. “I don’t want them. So often they solve the case and lose the victim. I want my son back alive.”

  “I can’t guarantee it.”

  “I know that,” she said impatiently. “Will you try?” She pressed both hands to her breast, then offered them to me, empty. Her emotion was both theatrical and real.

  “I’ll try,” I said. “I think you’re making a mistake, though. You should use the police.”

  “I’ve already said I wouldn’t. I don’t trust them.”

  “But you trust me?”

  “Shouldn’t I? Yes, I do, up to a point.”

  “So does Keith Sebastian. I’m going to have to check with him on this.”

  “I don’t see why. He’s one of our employees.”

  “Not when he’s on his own time. His daughter is missing, remember. He feels about her just as strongly as you do about your son.” Not quite, perhaps, but I gave Sebastian the benefit of the doubt.

  “We’ll get him out here.” Abruptly she reached for the phone. “What’s his number?”

  “We’re wasting time.”

  “I asked you for his number.”

  I looked it up in my black book. She dialed, and got Sebastian on the first ring. He must have been sitting beside the telephone.

  “Mr. Sebastian? This is Ruth Marburg. Stephen Hackett’s mother. I’m at his Malibu place now, and I’d very much like to see you & Yes, tonight. Immediately, in fact. How soon can you get here? & Very well, I’ll look for you in half an hour. You won’t disappoint me, will you?”

  She hung up and looked at me quietly, almost sweetly. Her hand was still on the phone, as if she was taking Sebastian’s pulse by remote control.

  “He wouldn’t be in on this with his daughter, would he? I know that Stephen isn’t always popular with the hired help.”

  “Is that what we are, Mrs. Marburg?”

  “Don’t change the subject. I asked you a straight question.”

  “The answer is no. Sebastian doesn’t have that kind of guts. Anyway he practically worships your son.”

  “Why?” she asked me bluntly.

  “Money. He has a passion for the stuff.”

  “Are you sure he didn’t put the girl up to this?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Then what in hell does she think she’s doing?”

  “She seems to be in revolt, against everyone over thirty. Your son was the biggest target within reach. I doubt that she picked the target, though. Davy Spanner’s probably the main instigator.”

  “What does he want? Money?”

  “I haven’t figured out what he wants. Do you know of any connection between him and your son? This could be a personal thing.”

  She shook her head. “Maybe if you tell me what you know about him.”

  I gave her a quick rundown on Davy Spanner, son of a migrant laborer, orphaned at three or four and institutionalized, then taken by foster parents; a violent dropout from high school, a wandering teen-ager, car thief, jail graduate, candidate for more advanced felonies, possibly somewhat crazy in the head.

  Ruth Marburg listened to me with a suspicious ear. “You sound almost sympathetic.”

  “I almost am,” I said, though my kidneys were still sore. “Davy Spanner didn’t make himself.”

  She answered me with deliberate roughness: “Don’t give me that crap. I know these psychopaths. They’re like dogs biting the hands that feed them.”

  “Has Spanner had previous contact with your family?”

  “No. Not that I know of.”

  “But the girl has.”

  “Not with me. With Gerda, Stephen’s wife. The girl was interested in languages, or pretended to be. Gerda took her under her wing last summer. She’ll know better next time, if the family survives this.”

  I was getting impatient with the conversation. We seemed to have been sitting in the room for a long time. Book-lined, with the windows heavily draped, it was like an underground bunker cut off from the world of life.

  Ruth Marburg must have sensed or shared my feeling. She went to one of the windows and pulled back the drapes. We looked out at the broken necklace of lights along the shore.

  “I still can’t believe it happened,” she said. “Stephen has always been so careful. It’s one reason they don’t have servants.”

  “What’s Lupe?”

  “We hardly think of him as a servant. He’s really the manager of the estate.”

  “A friend of yours?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. We get along.” Her half-smile, and the way she held her body, gave the words a sexual connotation.

  “May I talk to Lupe?”

  “Not now. He’s a pretty sick man.”

  “Should he have a doctor?”

  “I’m going to get him one.” She turned and faced me, visibly shaken by her own angry force. “You needn’t take responsibility for things you’re not responsible for. I’m hiring you to get my son back alive.”

  “You haven’t hired me yet.”

  “And I may not.” She turned back to the window. “What’s keeping him?” She clenched her hands and rapped the knuckles together, making a noise which reminded me that she contained a skeleton.

  As if he’d heard it, or felt her impatient will, Sebastian turned up almost immediately. His big car threw its lights up over the pass, came around the dark lake, and stopped under the floodlights.

  “You took your time,” Mrs. Marburg said at the door.

  “I’m sorry. I had a phone call as I was leaving. I had to take it.”

  Sebastian seemed tremendously excited. He was pale and brilliant-eyed. He looked from the woman to me.

  “What’s up?”

  Ruth Marburg answered grimly: “Come in, I’ll tell you what’s up.” She led us into the library and closed the door emphatically, like a warder. “Your precious daughter has stolen my son.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She drove in here with her bully-boy hidden in the trunk of her car. Knocked out our manager with a tire iron. Walked into the house with bully-boy and marched Stephen out to their car and took him away.”

  “But that’s insane.”

  “It happened.”

  “When?”

  “Just before sundown. That was about five thirty. It’s after eight now. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Anything. I’ll do anything.”

  A delayed rush of tears almost blinded him. He wiped them with his fingers, stood swaying in the light with his hands covering his eyes.

  “You’re sure it was Sandy?”

  “Yes. My daughter-in-law knows her well. Mr. Archer here virtually predicted it was going to happen. Which brings me to the reason why you’re here. I want Mr. Archer to get my son back for me.”

  “This means,” I told him, “that you and I may be on opposite sides. Your daughter has helped to commit a major crime. I’m afraid I can’t protect her from the consequences.”

  “But I’ll expect you to cooperate with Archer,” Mrs. Marburg told him. “If you hear from your da
ughter, for example, you’ve got to let him know.”

  “Yes.” He nodded several times. “I promise I’ll cooperate. Thank you for—thank you for telling me.”

  She waved him away, out of her sight.

  “Well,” she said to me when he had left the room, “do you think he put her up to it?”

  “You know he didn’t.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know. People are capable of anything. Even the nicest people, and he’s not one of them.” She added: “Neither am I, in case you were in doubt.”

  “We’re wasting time.”

  She had the last word: “You’re on my time. On your way out, will you tell my husband to bring me a double Scotch. I’m as tired as death.”

  She slumped into her chair and let her face and body droop like Plasticine. Her husband was in the lighted gallery looking at the pictures. I delivered her message to him.

  “Thanks, old fellow. Don’t work too hard on this assignment, will you? If Stephen doesn’t come back, all this comes to Ruth and me. I love good paintings.”

  Marburg was half-serious, which was all he’d ever be. I went outside where Sebastian was waiting in my car. He was gnawing at a thumbnail. It was bleeding.

  I got in behind the wheel. “Do you have something to tell me?”

  “Yes. I was afraid to say it in front of her. That telephone call just before I left my house—it was from Sandy. She wanted me to come and get her.”

  “Where?”

  “Santa Teresa. She was cut off before she could give me directions.”

  “Did she say where she was calling from?”

  “No, but it was a collect call and the operator was able to trace it for me. Sandy used the office phone in the Power Plus station on this side of Santa Teresa. We’ve often driven up weekends, and stopped at that very station.”

  “I’d better get up there now.”

  “Take me along,” he said. “Please.”

  I turned and looked into his face. I didn’t like him much, or trust him very far. But I was liking him better as time passed.

  “How well do you drive?”

  “I don’t have accidents, and I haven’t been drinking.”

  “Okay, we’ll take my car.”

  Sebastian left his in a Malibu parking lot next door to a drive-in. I had a quick sandwich, which tasted of highway fumes, while he phoned his wife. Then he phoned the Power Plus station in Santa Teresa.

  “They’re open till midnight,” he told me. “And the man remembered Sandy.”

  My watch said nine fifteen. It had been a long day, and I expected to be up most of the night. I climbed into the back seat and went to sleep.

  chapter 12

  THE TURNING OFF of the engine woke me from dreams of supersonic flight. My car was standing beside the pumps in the hard white glare of the Power Plus station. A young man in coveralls came out of the office. He had one thin leg and wore a special boot. He moved with great rapidity, though it was late and his face was drawn.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked Sebastian.

  “I called you earlier. About my daughter.” His voice was low and uncertain, like a beggar’s.

  “I see.” The pain and fatigue in the attendant’s face turned into sympathy, and altered the quality of the transaction. “Is she a runaway, something like that?”

  “Something like that.” I got out of the car to talk to him. “Was she driving a green compact?”

  “Yeah. She stopped it right where your car is standing, asked me to fill the tank. It was nearly empty, it took over nineteen gallons.”

  “Did you see the others?”

  “There was only the one other, the big fellow with the crew cut. He stayed in the car until he saw her phoning. She said she wanted to go to the ladies’ room. I left the pump running and went to the office to get the key for her. Then she asked me if she could use the phone for a distance call. I said, if she made it collect, which she did. I stayed there to monitor her, like. Then the other one came charging in and made her quit.”

  “Did he use force?”

  “He didn’t hit her. He put his arms around her, more like a hug. Then she broke down and cried, and he took her back to the car. She paid for the gas and drove away herself, in the direction of town.” He gestured toward Santa Teresa.

  “You didn’t see a gun?”

  “No. She acted afraid of him, though.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Just when he came charging into the office. He said she was crazy to call her folks, that they were her worst enemies.”

  Sebastian muttered something inarticulate.

  “Hers, or his?” I said.

  “Both of them. I think he said ‘their worst enemies.’ ”

  “You’re a good witness. What’s your name?”

  “Fred Cram.”

  I offered him a dollar.

  “You don’t have to pay me.” He spoke with gentle force. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. Maybe I should have tried to stop them, or called the police or something. Only I didn’t think I had the right.”

  An old Chevrolet painted with brown undercoat rolled in from the street and stopped beside the pumps. A couple of teen-age boys occupied the front seat. The bare feet of two others projected from the rear window. The driver honked for service.

  I asked Fred Cram again: “Are you sure there wasn’t a third person in the car?”

  He pondered the question. “Not unless you count the dog.”

  “What kind of a dog?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded like a big one.”

  “You didn’t see it?”

  “It was in the trunk. I could hear it breathing and kind of whining.”

  “How do you know it was a dog?”

  “She said so.”

  Sebastian groaned.

  “You mean it was a human being in there?” the young man said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Fred Cram gave me a long questioning look. His face saddened as he realized the depth of the trouble he had dipped into. Then the teen-ager honked again, imperiously, and he swung away on his mismatched legs.

  “Jesus,” Sebastian said in the car. “It really happened. We’ve got to get her back, Archer.”

  “We will.” I didn’t let him hear my doubts, the doubt that we could find her, the graver doubt that the law would let him keep her if we did. “The best contribution you can make is to get in touch with your wife and stay by a telephone. Sandy phoned home once, she may again.”

  “If he lets her.”

  But he accepted my suggestion. We checked into adjoining rooms in a beach motel near the center of Santa Teresa. It was the depth of the winter season, and the place was almost deserted. The yacht harbor under my window hung in the starlight like a dim white fantasy of summer.

  The keyboy opened the door between our two rooms. I listened to Sebastian talking to his wife on the telephone. He told her with brisk cheerfulness that the case was progressing rapidly and she had nothing to worry about at all. The fine front he was putting on reminded me somehow of the young man with the thin leg, limping faster than other men could walk.

  “I love you, too,” Sebastian said, and hung up.

  I went to the doorway. “How is your wife taking this?”

  “Terrific. She’s terrific.”

  But his gaze wandered around the room, taking in the details of his catastrophe: the lonely bed, the homeless walls, and my face watching him.

  I tried to smile. “I’m going out for a bit. I’ll check back with you later.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Pay a couple of visits to people in town.”

  “It’s late for visiting.”

  “All the better. They’re more likely to be home.”

  I went back into my room, got the directory out of the drawer in the telephone table, and looked up Henry Langston, the counsellor who had had a run-in with Davy Spanner. A young girl answered Langston’s phone, a
nd for a moment I thought by some remarkable coincidence it was Sandy.

  “Who is that?” I asked her.

  “Elaine, I’m just the baby-sitter. Mr. and Mrs. Langston are out for the evening.”

  “When do you expect them back?”

  “They promised by midnight. You want to leave a message?”

  “No thanks.”

  Coincidences seldom happen in my work. If you dig deep enough, you can nearly always find their single bifurcating roots. It was probably no coincidence that Jack Fleischer had taken off, presumably for his home in Santa Teresa, immediately after Laurel Smith was beaten. I looked him up in the directory and found his address: 33 Pine Street.

  It was a street of older middle-class houses, appropriately pine-shaded, within walking distance of the courthouse. Most of the houses in the block were dark. I parked at the corner in front of an old church, and walked along the street looking for Fleischer’s number with my flashlight.

  I found two rusty metal three’s attached to the porch of a two-story white frame house. There was light in the house, dim yellow behind drawn blinds. I knocked on the front door.

  Uncertain footsteps approached the door and a woman’s voice spoke through it: “What do you want?”

  “Is Mr. Fleischer home?”

  “No.”

  But she opened the door in order to peer out at me. She was a middle-aged blond woman whose face had been carefully made up at some point earlier in the day. Erosion had set in. In the midst of it her eyes regarded me with that steady look of hurt suspicion which takes years to develop.

  There was gin on her breath, and it triggered an association in my mind. She looked enough like Laurel Smith to be her older sister.

  “Mrs. Fleischer?”

  She nodded grimly. “I don’t know you, do I?”

  “I’m better acquainted with your husband. Do you know where I can find him?”

  She spread her hands. Under her quilted pink housecoat her body was sullen. “Search me.”

  “It’s pretty important. I’ve come all the way from Los Angeles.”

  Her hand came out and clenched on my arm. I felt like a stand-in for Fleischer. “What’s Jack been doing down there?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

  “You can tell me. I’m his wife.” She jerked at my arm. “Come in, I’ll give you a drink. Any friend of Jack’s—”