The Instant Enemy

by Ross Macdonald

  “Who is he?”

  “A Los Angeles financier. The girl’s father works for one of his companies.”

  “It does sound more complex than a crime for money.”

  “Will you help me?” I said.

  “I don’t have much choice. We’ll take your car, okay?”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Langston.”

  “Please call me Hank, everybody else does.” He got out of the car. “Come into the house for a moment, won’t you? I have to leave a note for my wife.”

  He wrote it on top of the baby grand while I looked over his books. They covered a surprising range including law and history. His psychology and sociology books emphasized the freer spirits in those fields: Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, Edgar Z. Friedenberg.

  He left the note to his wife on the music rack of the piano, with a small light shining on it. I read it on the way out:

  Dearest:

  Just in case you wake up and wonder where I am, I’ve gone for a little spin with Mr. Archer. If anybody comes to the door, don’t answer. Please don’t worry. I love you with all my heart, in case you were wondering. Back soon.

  Love

  H.

  (12:30 a.m.)

  chapter 14

  I DROVE THE CAR, and told Langston he could sleep. He claimed that he wasn’t sleepy, but soon after we got onto the highway he butted his cigarette and dozed off.

  The highway left the sea for a while, looping inland through a mountain pass, and then returned to the sea. The railroad ran between the sea and the mountains, and I caught the gleam of the tracks from time to time.

  There was very little traffic. This northern part of the county was mostly open country. On the ocean side a few oil stations and gas flares broke up the darkness. Inland, the fields sloped up to the rocky flanks of the headless mountains. There were cattle in the fields, as still as stones.

  “No!” Langston said in his sleep.

  “Wake up, Hank.”

  He seemed dazed. “Terrible dream. The three of us were in bed to—” He stopped in mid-sentence, and watched the night rush by.

  “Which three of you?”

  “My wife and I, and Davy. It was a rotten dream.”

  I said after some hesitation: “Are you afraid that Davy might go to your house?”

  “The thought did occur to me,” he admitted. “But he wouldn’t do anything to anyone I love.”

  He was talking against the darkness. Perhaps I should have left him at home, I thought, but it was too late now. Since leaving his house I’d added over fifty miles to the odometer.

  “How much further, Hank?”

  “I can’t say exactly. I’ll know the place when I see it. You have to make a left turn onto a gravel road. It crosses the tracks.” He peered ahead through the windshield.

  “How long is it since you’ve visited the place?”

  “About three years. Deputy Fleischer drove me up.”

  “Why did you go to all the trouble?”

  “I wanted to know exactly what had happened. The people at the Shelter told me Davy was practically autistic when he was admitted—mute and almost unreachable. I wanted to know why. Fleischer hadn’t told them much, if anything.”

  “Did he talk freely to you?”

  “Policemen never do, do they? And I can understand an officer getting quite possessive about a case. At the time he brought me up here, he’d been working on this one for twelve years.”

  “Did he say so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he couldn’t have thought it was an accident.”

  “I don’t know what he thought, really.” Langston thrust his head forward. “Slow down. We’re coming to the place.”

  Several hundred yards ahead in the lights of an approaching truck I could make out a gravel road sloping away to the left. A lonely hitchhiker was at the corner. It was a girl, standing with her back to us and frantically signaling to the truck driver. The truck passed her, and then us, without slackening speed.

  I made a left turn onto the side road and got out. The girl was wearing sunglasses, as if the natural darkness wasn’t deep enough for her. Her body made a jerky movement. I thought she was going to run. But her feet seemed to be stuck fast in the gravel.

  “Sandy?”

  She didn’t answer me, except with a little moan of recognition. I had a vision of myself seen from above, a kind of owl’s-eye view of a man moving in on a frightened girl at a deserted crossroads. Somehow my motives didn’t enter the picture.

  “What happened to the others, Sandy?”

  “I don’t know. I ran away and hid in the trees.” She pointed toward a grove of Monterey pines on the far side of the railroad tracks. I could smell their odor on her. “He laid Mr. Hackett across the railroad tracks, and I got really scared. I thought he was pretending, until then. I didn’t think he really meant to kill him.”

  “Is Hackett unconscious?”

  “No, but he’s all taped up—his hands and feet and mouth. He looked so helpless lying across the rail. He knew where he was, too, I could tell by the noises he made. I couldn’t stand it, so I ran away. When I came back they were gone.”

  Langston moved up beside me. His feet crackled in the gravel. The girl shied away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  “Who are you? Do I know you?”

  “I’m Henry Langston. Davy wanted me to take care of you. It seems to be working out that way after all.”

  “I don’t want to be taken care of. I’m all right. I can get a ride.” She spoke with a kind of mechanical assurance which seemed to be unconnected with her real feelings.

  “Come on,” he said. “Don’t be so stand-offish.”

  “Have you got a cigarette?”

  “I have a whole pack.”

  “I’ll come with you if you give me a cigarette.”

  He brought out his cigarettes and solemnly handed them over. She got a cigarette out of the pack. Her hands were shaking.

  “Give me a light?”

  Langston handed her a book of matches. She lit one and dragged deep. The end of her cigarette was reflected double like little hot red eyes in the lenses of her dark glasses.

  “All right, I’ll get into your car.”

  She sat in the front seat, with Langston and me on either side of her. She gulped her cigarette until it burned her fingers, then dropped it in the ashtray.

  “You didn’t have very good plans,” I said. “Who made your plans?”

  “Davy did, mostly.”

  “What did he have in mind?”

  “He was going to kill Mr. Hackett, like I said. Leave him across the track and let the train cut him up.”

  “And you went along with this?”

  “I didn’t really believe he was going to do it. He didn’t do it, either.”

  “We’d better check on that.”

  I released the emergency brake. The car rolled down the grade toward the crossing, which was marked by an old wooden sign with drooping crosspieces.

  “Where did he put Mr. Hackett?”

  “Right here beside the road.” Sandy indicated the north side of the crossing.

  I got out with my flashlight and looked over the railbed. There were fresh marks in the gravel which could have been gouged by heels. Still it was hard to imagine the scene that the girl had described.

  I went back to the car. “Did Davy tell you why he picked this place?”

  “He thought it would be a good place to kill him, I guess. Then he probably changed his mind when I ran away.”

  “Why did he choose Mr. Hackett as a victim?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I leaned in at the open door. “You must have some idea, Sandy. Mr. Hackett is or was a friend of your family.”

  “He’s not my friend,” she said guardedly.

  “You’ve made that fairly clear. What did Hackett do, if anything?”

  She turned to Langston. “I don’t have to answe
r that, do I? I’m only a juvenile but I’ve got a right to a lawyer.”

  “You’ve not only got a right,” I said. “You’ve got a need for one. But you’re not going to help yourself by keeping quiet. If we don’t head your boyfriend off, you’ll end up going to trial with him for everything he pulls.”

  She appealed again to Langston, the cigarette king. “That isn’t true, is it?”

  “It could happen,” he said.

  “But I’m just a juvenile.”

  I said: “That’s no protection against a capital charge. You already own a piece of a kidnapping. If Hackett gets killed, you’ll be an accomplice in murder.”

  “But I ran away.”

  “That won’t be much help, Sandy.”

  She was shocked. I think she was realizing that the place and the time were real, that this was her life and she was living it, badly.

  I felt a certain empathy with her. The scene was becoming a part of my life, too: the grove of trees standing dark against the darkness, the rails reaching like iron strands of necessity from north to south. A late moon like an afterthought hung in the lower quarter of the sky.

  Away off to the north the beam of a train’s headlight was flung around a curve. It came toward us swinging, cutting the darkness into illegible patterns, pulling a freight train behind it. My own headlights were shining on the rails, and I could see them dip under the weight of the diesels. The overwhelming noise of the train completed the drastic reality of the scene.

  Sandy let out a strangled cry and tried to fight her way past me. I forced her back into the car. She scratched at my face. I slapped her. We were both acting as if the noise had shut us off from the human race.

  Langston said when the train had gone south: “Take it easy, now. There’s no need for violence.”

  “Tell that to Davy Spanner.”

  “I have, many times. Let’s hope it took.” He said to the girl: “Mr. Archer is perfectly right, Sandy. If you can help us, you’ll be helping yourself. You must have some idea where Davy went from here.”

  “He didn’t know himself.” She was breathing hard. “He did a lot of talking, about this place in the hills where he used to live. He didn’t know where it was, though.”

  “Are you sure it existed?”

  “He thought so. I don’t know.”

  I got in behind the wheel. Our brief struggle had warmed her, and I could feel her body glowing beside me. It was too bad, I thought, that her parents hadn’t been able to keep her on the back burner for another year or two. Too bad for her, and too bad for them.

  I asked Sandy some further questions as we drove south. She was reticent about herself, and about her relations with Davy. But her answers established one thing to my own satisfaction: if Davy Spanner was the one who had beaten Laurel Smith, Sandy didn’t know about it. And she had been with Davy right through the day, she said.

  chapter 15

  IT WAS PAST THREE when we got back to Santa Teresa. I asked Langston to come along to the motel. He seemed to have a calming effect on the girl.

  Sebastian heard us coming, and opened the door of his room before I could knock. Light spilled out over his daughter. She stood in it boldly with one round hip out.

  He reached for her with open arms. She moved back abruptly. In a long-drawn-out gesture of contempt she lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his direction.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” he said lamely.

  “I smoke pot when I can get it.”

  We all went into Sebastian’s room, with me bringing up the rear. He turned to me.

  “Where did you find her?” he asked.

  “Up the highway a piece. This is Mr. Langston. He helped to locate her.”

  The two men shook hands. Sebastian said he was very grateful. But he looked at his daughter as if he wondered what he was grateful for. She sat on the edge of the bed with her knees crossed, watching him.

  “We’re still in trouble,” I said. “And I’m going to make a few suggestions. First, take your daughter home and keep her there. If you and your wife can’t control her, hire some help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “A psychiatric nurse, maybe. Ask your doctor.”

  “He thinks I’m crazy,” Sandy said to the room. “He must be crazy.”

  I didn’t look at her. “Do you have a good lawyer, Mr. Sebastian?”

  “I don’t have any lawyer. I’ve never really needed one.”

  “You need one now. Get someone to recommend a criminal lawyer, and give him a chance to talk to Sandy today. She’s in serious trouble, and she’s going to have to cooperate with the law.”

  “But I don’t want her involved with the law.”

  “You don’t have any choice.”

  “Don’t tell me that. Mrs. Marburg told you to keep this whole thing private.”

  “I’m going to talk to Mrs. Marburg, too. The case is too big for me to handle alone.”

  Sandy made a break for the door. Langston caught her before she reached it, with one arm around her waist. She burned his wrist with her cigarette butt. He swung her around, pushed her down on the bed and stood over her panting. I could smell singed hair.

  Somebody rapped on the other side of the wall. “Knock it off, swingers I”

  Sebastian looked at his daughter with pained interest. She had suddenly grown up into a source of trouble. He must have been wondering how large the trouble was going to become.

  “I think we better get out of here,” I said. “Do you want to phone your wife?”

  “I really should, shouldn’t I?”

  He went to the phone and after a good deal of receiver-banging managed to rouse the switchboard. His wife answered right away.

  “I have wonderful news,” he said in a shaky voice. “Sandy is with me. I’m bringing her home.” The words brought mist to his eyes. “Yes, she’s fine. We’ll see you in a couple of hours. Get some sleep now.”

  He hung up and turned to Sandy. “Your mother asked me to give you her love.”

  “Who needs it?”

  “Don’t you care for us at all?”

  She rolled over, face down on the bed, and lay stiff and silent. I went into the adjoining room to make a phone call of my own.

  It was to Willie Mackey, who ran a San Francisco detective agency. His answering service took the call, but shifted it to Willie’s California Street apartment. He answered in a sleep-fogged voice: “Mackey here.”

  “Lew Archer. Are you going to be free today?”

  “I can make myself free.”

  “Good. I have a job on the Peninsula. It’s just a tail job but it could turn out to be important. Got a pencil?”

  “Hold it just a minute.” Willie went away and came back. “Go ahead.”

  “You know the Sandman Motor Hotel in Palo Alto?”

  “Yeah, it’s on Camino Real. I’ve stayed there.”

  “A man named Jack Fleischer, a retired sheriff’s deputy from Santa Teresa, is supposed to be checking in there some time tonight. I want to know why if possible. I want to know where he goes and who he talks to and what about. And I don’t want you to lose him even if you have to spend some money.”

  “How much is some?”

  “Use your own discretion.”

  “Do you want to tell me what it’s all about?”

  “Jack Fleischer may know. I don’t, except that a man’s life is at issue.”

  “Who’s the man?”

  “His name is Hackett. He’s been kidnapped by a nineteen-year-old named Davy Spanner.” I described the two of them, in case they turned up in Willie’s territory. “Hackett is very well-heeled, but this doesn’t seem to be a ransom kidnapping. Spanner’s a sociopath with schizoid tendencies.”

  “They’re always fun. I’ll get right down to Palo Alto, Lew.”

  I went back into Sebastian’s room. The girl was still lying face down on the bed with Langston standing over her.

  “I’ll drop you off at your house,” I
said to him. “I’m sorry I ruined the night for you.”

  “You didn’t. I was glad to help, and that still goes. One thing. I feel I should talk to the local police.”

  “Let me handle that part. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The girl got up when I told her to, and the four of us drove across town. The lights were on in Langston’s house. His wife came running out to greet him, wearing a red Chinese robe.

  “You shouldn’t run,” he told her. “Haven’t you been to bed?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I was scared something would happen to you.” She turned on me. “You promised you wouldn’t keep him up all night.”

  “No I didn’t. Anyway it’s only four.”

  “Only four!”

  “You shouldn’t be standing out here in the cold.” Langston took her into the house, lifting his hand to me before he closed the door.

  It was a dreary ride south to Malibu. The girl sat silent between me and her father. He made a few attempts to talk to her, but she pretended to be deaf.

  One thing was clear. By changing the rules of the game to include outrage, she had gained an advantage over him. He had more to lose than she had. He was losing it, but he hadn’t lost hope of holding on to something. She acted as if she had.

  I dropped them off in the parking lot where Sebastian had left his car. I waited until they were in it, and blue smoke puffed from its exhaust. Sandy made no attempt to run. Perhaps she realized there was no place to run to.

  Below the narrow town a high tide was roaring on the beach. I caught glimpses of the breakers between the buildings, faintly phosphorescent in the beginning light.

  It was too soon for another day to start. I checked into the first motel I came to.

  chapter 16

  I WOKE UP PROMPTLY at eight. It was still too early, but my stomach was groaning. I went out and had a slice of grilled ham, two eggs fried over easy, a pile of toast, a side order of dollar-size pancakes with raspberry syrup, and several cups of black coffee.

  By this time I felt as ready as I would ever feel to talk to Mrs. Marburg. Without phoning her in advance, I drove out to the Hackett place. The gate was standing open. I had a heavy déjà-vu feeling as I drove up past the artificial lake. The ducks had not returned, and the mud hens were still on the far side of the water.