“They shouldn’t do that.”
My agreement pleased Blevins. He opened the door wider and beckoned me into the room. It was a ten-foot cube containing a chair, a table, and a bed. The iron fire escape slanted across the single window like a cancellation mark.
There was a faint sour odor of time in the room. So far as Icould tell, it came from the leatherette suitcase which lay open across the bed. Some of its contents were on the table, as if Blevins had been sorting through his memories and laying them out for sale.
I could recognize some of the things on sight: a broad-bladed fisherman’s knife to which a few old fish scales were clinging like dry tears, a marriage certificate with deep fold-marks cutting across it, a bundle of letters tied together with a brown shoestring, some rifle bullets and a silver dollar in a net sack, a small miner’s pick, a couple of ancient pipes, an ineffectual-looking rabbit’s foot, some clean folded underwear and socks, a glass ball that filled itself with a miniature snowstorm when you shook it, a peacock feather watching us with its eye, and an eagle’s claw.
I sat at the table and picked up the marriage certificate. It was signed by a civil registrar, and stated that Albert D. Blevins had married Henrietta R. Krug in San Francisco on March 3, 1927. Henrietta was seventeen at the time; Albert was twenty; which made him just over sixty now.
“You want to buy my marriage paper?”
“I might.”
“The other fellow gave me fifty for the birth certificate. I’ll let this one go for twenty-five.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s of no great value to me. Marrying her was the big mistake of my life. I never should of married any woman. She told me that herself a hundred times, after we got hitched. But what’s a man to do when a girl comes to him and tells him he got her pregnant?” He spread his hands out incompletely on his faded denim knees. His painfully uncurling fingers reminded me of starfish torn from their moorings.
“I shouldn’t complain,” he said. “Her parents treated us right. They gave us their farm and moved into town. It wasn’t Mr. Krug’s fault that we had three straight years of drought and I couldn’t afford to bring in water and feed and the cattle died. I don’t even blame Etta for leaving me, not any more. It was a miserable life on that dry farm. All we had between us was going to bed together, and that dried up before the baby was born. I delivered him myself, and I guess it hurt her pretty bad. Etta never let me come near her again.”
He was talking like a man who hadn’t had a chance to reveal himself for years, if ever. He rose and paced the room, four steps each way.
“It made me mean,” he said, “living with a pretty girl and not being able to touch her. I treated her mean, and I treated the boy even worse. I used to beat the living bejesus out of him. I blamed him, see, for cutting off my nooky by being born. Sometimes I beat him until the blood would flow. Etta would try to stop me, and then I’d beat her, too.”
His calm blue eyes looked down into mine. I could feel the coldness of his innocence.
“One night I beat her once too often. She picked up the kitchen lamp and threw it at my head. I ducked, but the kerosene splashed on the hot stove and set fire to the kitchen. Before I got the fire out, most of the house was gone, and so was Etta.”
“You mean she burned to death?”
“No, I don’t mean that.” He was impatient with me for failing to divine his thoughts. “She ran away. I never saw hide nor hair of her again.”
“What happened to your son?”
“Jasper? He stayed with me for a while. This was right at the beginning of the depression. I got a government job working on the roads, and I found some boards and bought some tarpaper and roofed over what was left of the house. We lived there for a couple more years, little Jasper and me. I was treating him better, but he didn’t like me much. He was always scared of me, I can’t say I blame him. When he was four he started to run away. I tried tying him up, but he got pretty good at untying knots. What could I do? I took him to his grandparents in L.A. Mr. Krug had a watchman job with one of the oil companies and they agreed to take him off my hands.
“I went down to see Jasper a few times after that, but he always got upset. He used to run at me and hit me with his fists. So I just stopped going. I left the state. I mined silver in Colorado. I fished for salmon out of Anchorage. One day my boat turned over and I made it to shore all right but then I came down with double pneumonia. After that I lost my poop and I came back to California. That’s my sad story. I been here going on ten years.”
He sat down again. He was neither sad nor smiling. Breathing slowly and deeply, he regarded me with a certain satisfaction. He had lifted the weight of his life and set it down again in the same place.
I asked him: “Do you know what happened to Jasper?” The question made me conscious of its overtones. I was fairly sure by now that Jasper Blevins had died under a train fifteen years ago.
“He grew up and got married. Etta’s parents sent me a wedding announcement, and then about seven months after that they sent me a letter that I had a grandson. That was close to twenty years ago, when I was in Colorado, but that seven months stuck in my mind. It meant that Jasper had to get married, just the same as I did in my time.
“History repeating itself,” he said. “But there was one way I didn’t let it repeat. I kept away from my grandson. I wasn’t going to make him a-scared of me. And I didn’t want to get to know him and then get cut off from seeing him either. I’d rather stay alone right on through.”
“You wouldn’t have that letter, would you?”
“I might. I think I have.”
He untied the brown shoelace that held his bundle of letters together. His awkward fingers sorted them and picked out a blue envelope. He took the letter out of the envelope, read it slowly with moving lips, and handed it to me.
The letter was written in faded blue ink on blue notepaper with a deckled edge:
Mrs. Joseph L. Krug
209 West Capo Street
Santa Monica, California
December 14, 1948
Mr. Albert D. Blevins
Box 49, Silver Creek, Colorado
Dear Albert:
It’s a long time since we heard from you. Here’s hoping this finds you at the same address. You never did let us know if you got the wedding announcement. In case you did not, Jasper married a lovely girl who has been staying with us, nee Laurel Dudney. She’s only seventeen but very mature, these Texas girls grow up fast. Anyway they got married and now they have a darling baby boy, born the day before yesterday, they called him David which is a biblical name as you know.
So now you have a grandson, anyway. Come and see him if you can, you really should, we’ll all let bygones be bygones. Jasper and Laurel and the babe will be staying at our house for a while, then Jasper wants to have a try at ranching. We hope you are taking care of yourself, Albert, in those mines. Your loving mother-in-law,
Alma R. Krug,
P.S. We never hear from Etta.
A.R.K.
“Do you have the wedding announcement?” I asked Blevins.
“I had, but I gave it to the other fellow. I threw it in along with the birth certificate.”
“Whose birth certificate?”
“Jasper’s. Jasper is the one he’s interested in.”
“Did he say why?”
“No. This Fleischer fellow plays his cards very close to his vest. Is he really a policeman?”
“An ex-policeman.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know what’s in it for you,” Blevins said. “You didn’t come here to listen to the story of my life.”
“I sort of have, though, haven’t I?”
“I guess you have.” He smiled, so widely I could count his six upper teeth. “This business of Jasper churned up a lot of memories. Why is everybody so interested in Jasper? Why are you fellows willing to pay me money? Or are you?”
Instead o
f answering his questions, I took three twenties from my wallet and spread them out on a bare part of the table. Blevins opened the front of his shirt and pulled out an oilskin pouch which hung around his neck on a piece of soiled rawhide. He folded the twenties small and put them in the pouch, replacing it against the sparse gray fur of his chest.
“That’s twenty-five for the marriage certificate,” I said, “twenty-five for the letter, and ten for the autobiography.”
“Come again?”
“The life story,” I said.
“Oh. Thank you very much. I been needing some warm clothes. Sixty dollars goes a long way at the rummage stores.”
I felt a little cheap when he handed me the letter and marriage certificate. I put them in my inside breast pocket. My hand came in contact with the picture Mrs. Fleischer had given me. I showed it to Albert Blevins, remembering with a pang that Laurel was newly dead.
“Do you recognize her, Mr. Blevins?”
“No.”
“It’s the girl Jasper married.”
“I never met her.”
Our hands touched as he gave the picture back to me. I felt a kind of short-circuit, a buzzing and burning, as if I had grounded the present in the actual flesh of the past.
Time blurred like tears for an instant. Davy’s father had died a violent death. His mother had died in violence. Davy the child of violence was roaring down the trail which led back to Albert Blevins. In the buzzing and the burning and the blur I got my first real feeling of what it was like to be Davy, and it jolted me.
“No,” Blevins said, “I never saw Jasper’s wife. She’s a handsome filly.”
“She was.”
I took the picture and left before either of us could ask the other more questions.
chapter 18
I TOOK A CAB back to Willie Mackey’s office, buying a paper on the way. Stephen Hackett’s disappearance had made the headlines. The story underneath was weak in detail. I did learn from it, though, that Hackett was alleged to be one of the richest men in California.
From Willie Mackey I learned that Jack Fleischer had checked out of the Sandman Motor Hotel and headed south. Willie’s operative had lost Fleischer on the highway above San José.
I talked to the operative when he came in. He was an earnest crew-cut young man named Bob Levine, and he was deeply frustrated. Not only had Fleischer eluded him; Fleischer’s car was faster than his. He looked ready to kick Willie’s ornate red-upholstered office furniture.
“Don’t take it so hard,” I told Levine. “I know where Fleischer lives, I can pick him up down south. It would have been a wasted trip for you.”
“Really?”
“Really. During the time you tailed him, did Fleischer visit anyone besides Albert Blevins?”
“Not unless you count the Acme copying shop. I haven’t had a chance to check back on them.”
“I have. You might try the man again. He may have been holding back on me. He may have copies of the newspaper page and the birth certificate that Fleischer took in to him.”
“If he had I’ll get them,” Levine said. “Now is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Drive me to the airport.” I looked at my watch. “We’ve got time to stop at the Sandman Motor Hotel on the way.”
It was worth making the detour to Camino Real. The maid was cleaning out Fleischer’s room at the Sandman. The only thing he had left behind in the wastebasket was a copy of the same paper I had bought. The Hackett story had been torn out of it.
Whatever Fleischer’s interests were, they were steadily converging with mine. At the moment he was a step ahead of me, and I calculated how much time I would have in Los Angeles before Fleischer could possibly get there by car. Three hours, anyway.
I used up nearly all of the first hour driving in slow traffic from Los Angeles International Airport to the Sebastian house in Woodland Hills. I hadn’t phoned ahead because I didn’t want to be told by Sebastian that I couldn’t talk to his daughter. It was daylight when I left the airport, and full night when my overheated engine toiled up Sebastian’s hill.
A Los Angeles County sheriff’s car was parked in front of Sebastian’s house. Its radio was talking brokenly, as if the car itself had developed a voice and begun to complain about the state of the world. When I rang Sebastian’s doorbell, it was a grim-looking sheriff’s deputy who answered the door.
“Yes sir?”
“I’d like to talk to Mr. Sebastian.”
“Mr. Sebastian is busy right now. You the lawyer?”
“No.” I told him who I was. “Mr. Sebastian will want to see me.”
“I’ll ask him.”
The deputy closed the door until it clicked. I waited for a couple of minutes, listening to the mutterings of the patrol car. Sebastian opened the door. He kept changing, like a fighter undergoing a fifteen-round beating. The clump of hair on his forehead needed combing. His face was pale. His eyes were hopeless. The deputy stood behind him formally, like a keeper.
“They’re taking her away,” Sebastian said. “They’re going to put her in prison.”
“It isn’t a prison,” the deputy said. “It’s a home.”
I asked Sebastian: “Can’t you get bail?”
“Yes, but I can’t raise twenty thousand dollars.”
“That’s high.”
“Assault with intent is a very serious charge,” the deputy said. “And then there’s the kidnapping charge—”
“It’s still high.”
“The judge didn’t think so,” the deputy said.
I said: “Would you go away, please? I want to talk to Mr. Sebastian in private.”
“You said you weren’t a lawyer. You got no right to give him legal advice.”
“Neither have you. Give us a little leeway, officer.”
He retreated out of sight if not out of hearing. I asked Sebastian: “Who is your lawyer?”
“I called a man in Van Nuys. Arnold Bendix. He said he’d come out tonight.”
“This is tonight. What have you been doing all day?”
“I hardly know.” He looked back into the house as if the day was still there waiting for him like a maze or a puzzle. “The D.A. sent two men out. Then we did a lot of talking to Sandy, of course, trying to make sense of this whole terrible mess.”
“You won’t do that by sitting around talking. Get your lawyer out here. And a doctor. You should be able to persuade the law to let you keep your daughter overnight. That will give your lawyer time to get back to the court and see if he can get the bail reduced. You can swing ten thousand bail. A bondsman will let you have it for one thousand.”
He was appalled by the amount. “How can I possibly raise a thousand dollars? I’m sure to be fired from my job.”
“Go to a loan shark. This is what they’re for.”
“And how much will that cost me?” he said wretchedly.
“A hundred or two more, perhaps. But we’re not talking about money. We’re talking about keeping your daughter out of jail.”
He got the message, dimly at first, as if it had reached him by way of a communications satellite: he was at the crux of his life. The realization entered his eyes and took the place of hopelessness. There were still things he could do.
He went to the telephone and called his family doctor, a Dr. Jeffrey in Canoga Park. Dr. Jeffrey didn’t want to come out to the house. Sebastian told him he had to. Then he called the lawyer and told him the same thing.
We went into the living room, accompanied by the deputy sheriff, who seemed to suspect that all of us might be planning a mass getaway. Bernice Sebastian was there, looking strained and gaunt and exceedingly well-groomed in a black sheath. With her was a pert blonde about my age who wore a blue suit that resembled a uniform.
She introduced herself as Mrs. Sherrill from the probation office. I told her I knew Jake Belsize.
“I was talking to him this afternoon,” she said. “He’s very upset about this whole affair. He bla
mes himself for not keeping closer tabs on Spanner.”
“He should blame himself,” Mrs. Sebastian said.
“That’s water under the bridge,” I said to both of them; and to Mrs. Sherrill: “Does Belsize have any suggestions?”
“My being here was his suggestion. The girl won’t talk to me, unfortunately. I tried to explain to her parents that if Sandy would give some sign of cooperation, it would be a lot easier for her.”
Sebastian spoke up: “Sandy’s in no condition to be questioned. She’s in bed under sedation. Dr. Jeffrey’s on his way over. So is my lawyer, Arnold Bendix.”
“We can’t wait around all night,” the deputy said. “We’ve got a warrant, and it’s our duty to take her in.”
“No, we better wait, Tom,” Mrs. Sherrill said. “See what the doctor has to say.”
The deputy sat down in a corner by himself. A heavy silence settled over the room. It was like a funeral, or a deathbed scene. By getting into trouble Sandy had converted herself into an unforgettable presence, a kind of presiding deity of the household. I wondered if that had been her real intention.
Dr. Jeffrey arrived, a young man in a hurry. He went into Sandy’s bedroom with her mother. The lawyer came close on the doctor’s heels. Between the two of them, they persuaded the deputy and Mrs. Sherrill to let the whole thing lie over until morning.
The doctor was the first to leave: his time was the most expensive. I followed him out to his Rover, and he gave me a reluctant couple of minutes.
“What’s Sandy’s mental condition?”
“She’s frightened and confused, naturally. A bit hysterical, and very tired.”
“Is it all right for me to question her, doctor?”
“Is it necessary?”
“A man’s life may depend on it. You may not know what’s going on—”
“It’s in tonight’s paper. But it sounds pretty farfetched to me. How could a girl like that be involved in a kidnapping?”
“There’s no doubt she is. Can I talk to her?”
“For five minutes, no longer. She needs rest.”
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