The Instant Enemy

by Ross Macdonald

  “Was Laurel related to you, too?”

  “No. She came from Texas. A very wealthy man was interested in Laurel. He sent her to us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not supposed to. I won’t tell on Laurel. She wasn’t my daughter or granddaughter, but I liked her better than any of them.”

  She was whispering. The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers. I got up to leave.

  Alma Krug gave me her knobbed, delicate hand. “Turn up the sound on your way out, please. I’d rather listen to other people talk.”

  I turned up the sound and closed her door after me. Behind another door, halfway down the corridor, a quavering old man’s voice rose: “Please don’t cut me.”

  The old man pulled the door open and came out into the corridor. His naked body was the shape of an elongated egg. He flung his arms around me, and pressed his almost hairless head into my solar plexus.

  “Don’t let them cut me to pieces. Tell them not to, Momma.”

  Though there was nobody else there, I told them not to. The little old man let go of me and went back into his room and closed the door.

  chapter 20

  IN THE RECEPTION HALL, the refugees from the war of the generations had dwindled to half a dozen. A middle-aged male orderly was quietly herding them back to their rooms.

  “It’s bedtime, folks,” he said.

  Jack Fleischer came in the front door. His eyes, his entire face, were glazed with weariness and alcohol.

  “I’d like to see Mrs. Krug,” he said to the orderly.

  “I’m sorry, sir. Visiting hours are over.”

  “This is important.”

  “I can’t help that, sir. I don’t make the decisions around here. The manager’s in Chicago at a convention.”

  “Don’t tell me that. I’m a law-enforcement officer.”

  Fleischer’s voice was rising. His face was swelling with blood. He fumbled in his pockets and found a badge which he showed to the orderly.

  “That makes no difference, sir. I have my orders.”

  Without warning, Fleischer hit the orderly with his open hand. The man fell down and got up. Half of his face was red, the other half white. The old people watched in silence. Like actual refugees, they were more afraid of physical force than anything.

  I moved up behind Fleischer and put an armlock on him. He was heavy and powerful. It was all I could do to hold him.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” the orderly asked me.

  “No.”

  But in a sense Fleischer belonged to me. I walked him outside and released him. He pulled out an automatic pistol.

  “You’re under arrest,” he told me.

  “What for? Preventing a riot?”

  “Resisting an officer in the performance of his duty.”

  He was glaring and sputtering. The gun in his hand looked like a .38, big enough to knock me down for good.

  “Come off it, Jack, and put the gun away. You’re out of your county, and there are witnesses.”

  The orderly and his charges were watching from the front steps. Jack Fleischer turned his head to look at them. I knocked the gun from his hand and picked it up as he dove for it. On his hands and knees, like a man changing into a dog, he barked at me: “I put you away for this. I’m an officer.”

  “Act like one.”

  The orderly came toward us. He was just a whitish movement in the corner of my vision. I was watching Fleischer as he got up.

  The orderly said to me: “We don’t want trouble. I better call the police, eh?”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary. How about it, Fleischer?”

  “Hell, I am the police.”

  “Not in this bailiwick you’re not. Anyway, I heard that you were retired.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Fleischer squinted at me. His eyes gleamed like yellowish quartz in the half light.

  “I’m a licensed private detective. My name is Archer.”

  “If you want to stay licensed, give me back my gun.” He held out his thick red hand for it.

  “We better have a talk first, Jack. And you better apologize to the man you hit.”

  Fleischer lifted one corner of his mouth in a snarl of pain. For a spoiled old cop, having to apologize was cruel and unusual punishment.

  “Sorry,” he said without looking at the man.

  “All right,” the orderly said.

  He turned and walked away with formal dignity. The old people on the steps followed him into the building. The door sucked shut behind them.

  Fleischer and I moved toward our cars. We faced each other in the space between them, each with his back to his own car.

  “My gun,” he reminded me. It was in my pocket.

  “First we talk. What are you after, Jack?”

  “I’m working on an old case, a fatal accident which happened years ago.”

  “If you know it was an accident, why did you open it up again?”

  “I never closed it. I don’t like unfinished business.”

  He was fencing, talking in generalities. I tried to jolt him. “Did you know Jasper Blevins?”

  “No. I never met him,” he said levelly.

  “But you knew his wife Laurel.”

  “Maybe I did. Not as well as some people think.”

  “Why didn’t you get her to identify her husband’s body?”

  He didn’t answer for quite a while. Finally he said: “Are you recording this?”

  “No.”

  “Come away from your car, eh, pal?”

  We walked down the driveway. The overarching stone pines were like a darker sky narrowing down on us. Fleischer was more voluble in the almost total darkness.

  “I admit I made a mistake fifteen years ago. That’s the only thing I’m going to admit. I’m not going to dig up the garbage and spread it all over my own front porch.”

  “What was the mistake, Jack?”

  “I trusted that broad.”

  “Did Laurel say it wasn’t her husband who died under the train?”

  “She said a lot of things. Most of them were lies. She conned me good.”

  “You can’t blame her for everything. It was your job to get the body identified.”

  “Don’t tell me what my job was. In the thirty years I worked for the sheriff’s department, close to a hundred hoboes died under trains in our county. Some had identification on them, and some didn’t. This one didn’t. How was I to know it was different from the others?”

  “What makes it so different, Jack?”

  “You know damn well what makes it different.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve told you all I’m going to. I thought we could have a meeting of the minds. But you’re all take and no give.”

  “You haven’t given me anything I can use.”

  “You haven’t given me anything, period,” he said. “What’s your angle?”

  “No angle. I’m working on the Stephen Hackett snatch.”

  “The what?” He was stalling.

  “Don’t kid me, you know about Hackett. You read about it in the San Francisco paper.”

  He made a quarter-turn and faced me in the darkness. “So you’re the one that had me tailed in Frisco. What in hell are you trying to do to me?”

  “Nothing personal. Your case and mine are connected. Jasper Blevins’s little boy Davy, the one who got lost in the shuffle, has grown up into a big boy. He took Hackett yesterday.”

  I could hear Fleischer draw in his breath quickly, then let it out slowly. “The paper said this Hackett is really loaded.” It was a question.

  “He’s loaded all right.”

  “And Jasper Blevins’ boy is holding him for ransom?”

  “There hasn’t been any talk of ransom, that I know of. I think he’s planning to kill Hackett, if he hasn’t already.”

  “Christ! He can’t do that!” Fleischer sounded as if his own life had been threatened.

  I said: “Do you
know Hackett?”

  “I never saw him in my life. But there’s money in it, pal. We should throw in together, you and me.”

  I didn’t want Fleischer as a partner. I didn’t trust him. On the other hand, he knew things about the case that were unknown to anyone else alive. And he knew Santa Teresa County.

  “Do you remember the Krug ranch, near Centerville?”

  “Yeah, I know where it is.”

  “Davy Blevins may be holding Stephen Hackett on the ranch.”

  “Then let’s get up there,” Fleischer said. “What are we waiting for?”

  We went back to our cars. I handed Fleischer his gun. Facing him in the semi-darkness. I had the feeling that I was looking at myself in a bleared distorting mirror.

  Neither of us had mentioned the death of Laurel Smith.

  chapter 21

  WE AGREED TO DOUBLE UP in Fleischer’s car, which was new and fast. I left mine at an all-night station in Canoga Park, not too far from Keith Sebastian’s house. Whatever happened, I’d be coming back there.

  I drove while Fleischer dozed in the front seat beside me. Up the San Fernando Valley, over the main pass, back by way of Camarillo to the dark sea. When we crossed the Santa Teresa County line, Fleischer woke up as if he could smell home territory.

  A few miles south of Santa Teresa, as we were traversing a lonely stretch of highway, Fleischer told me to stop by a eucalyptus grove. I assumed it was a call of nature. He didn’t get out of the car, though, when I pulled off on the shoulder.

  He twisted toward me in the seat and chopped at my head with the loaded butt of his gun. I went out, all the way. After a while the darkness where I lay was invaded by dreams. Huge turning wheels, like the interlocking wheels of eternity and necessity, resolved themselves into a diesel locomotive. I was lying limp across the tracks and the train was coming, swinging its Cyclops eye.

  It honked its horn at me. It wasn’t a train sound, though, and I wasn’t lying on a track, and it was no dream. I sat up in the middle of the northbound lane of the highway. A truck lit up like a Christmas tree was bearing down on me, honking repeatedly.

  Its brakes were shrieking, too, but it wasn’t going to be able to stop before it got to me. I lay down and watched it blot out the stars. Then I could see the stars again, and feel the blood pounding all through my body.

  More traffic was coming up from the south. I crawled off the road, feeling small and awkward as a Jerusalem cricket. The eucalyptus trees muttered and sighed in the wind like witnesses. I felt for my gun. It was missing.

  Fleischer’s treachery had touched a paranoid nerve which twanged and jangled in my injured head. I reminded it and myself that I had been ready to turn on Fleischer when it suited me to. His timing had been a little faster than mine.

  By now the driver of the truck had pulled his rig off the road and set out a flare. He ran toward me with a flashlight.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  “I think so.” I stood up, balancing the angry weight of my head.

  He shone the flashlight in my face. I closed my eyes and almost fell under the slap of light.

  “Hey, there’s blood on your face. Did I hit you?”

  “You missed me. A friend of mine knocked me out and left me on the highway.”

  “I better call the police, eh? You need an ambulance?”

  “I don’t need anything if you’ll give me a lift to Santa Teresa.”

  He hesitated, his face torn between sympathy and suspicion. The blood on my face cut two ways. Nice people didn’t get hurt and left on the highway.

  “Okay,” he said without enthusiasm. “I can do that much for you.”

  He drove me to the outskirts of Santa Teresa. The Power Plus station was still lit up, and I asked the driver to let me off there.

  Fred Cram, the attendant with the special boot, was on duty. He didn’t seem to recognize me. I went into the men’s room and washed my face. There was a swollen cut above my temple, but it had stopped bleeding.

  Someone had printed on the wall: MAKE SENSE NOT WAR. I laughed. It hurt my head.

  I went outside and asked Fred Cram for permission to use the phone. He recognized me now.

  “Did you find the girl?”

  “I found her. Thanks very much.”

  “You’re welcome. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Just let me use the phone, for a local call.”

  The electric clock in the office had its hands straight up on midnight. Midnight was my time for calling the Längstens. I looked up their number in the directory, and dialed it. Henry Langston answered, in a muffled voice:

  “Langston residence.”

  “Archer. You’re going to hate me.”

  His voice brightened. “I’ve been wondering about you. Davy is all over the local paper.”

  “I think I know where he is, Hank. So does Fleischer—he’s on his way there now. Do you feel like another midnight drive?”

  “Where to?”

  “A ranch near Centerville in the northern part of the county.”

  “And Davy’s there with Hackett?”

  “I’d say there’s a fifty per cent chance of it. Bring a gun.”

  “All I have is a .32 target pistol.”

  “Bring it. And bring a flashlight.”

  I told him where I was. While I was waiting outside the office, Fred Cram locked the pumps and turned out the overhead lights.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to me. “It’s time to close.”

  “Go right ahead. I expect to be picked up in a few minutes.”

  But the young man lingered, eying my head wound. “Did Davy Spanner do that to you?”

  “No. I’m still looking for him”

  “That was him with the girl last night. I didn’t know him at first, he’s changed so much. But when I read about him in the paper—he really did have somebody in the trunk.”

  “He really did. Do you know Davy?”

  “I knew him in high school one year. He was a freshman and I was a senior. He wasn’t a delinquent back in those days. He was real little and small, before he got his growth, which is why I didn’t recognize him last night.”

  “If you see him again let me know, Fred.” I gave him my card. “You can call my answering service any time, collect.”

  He took the card, but the look on his face rejected it. “That isn’t really what I had in mind.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “The way things turn out in life. I mean, here I am pumping gas for a living and Davy’s turned into a criminal.”

  Having put himself on record, he turned out the office lights and locked the door. He stayed around, politely, until Langston’s station wagon came in off the highway and pulled up beside his jalopy.

  I said good night to Fred and climbed into the wagon. Langston’s sensitive eyes took in my face and head.

  “You’ve been hurt. Do you need a doctor?”

  “Not now. I’m at least half an hour behind Fleischer already.”

  “How did he get into this?”

  “He’s been in it from the beginning. You know that. I made the mistake of trying to work with him. That lasted about an hour. He knocked me out and left me on the highway.”

  Hank whistled. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

  “Then we’d never get away. Did you bring your flashlight and pistol?”

  “In the dash compartment. I feel like a crimebuster’s apprentice.”

  His humor sounded a little forced, but I went along with it. “Let’s go, apprentice.”

  Langston turned onto the highway and headed north. He’d caught a few hours’ sleep before I called, and was full of energy and curiosity. He wanted to talk at length about Davy and his psychological problems. I was weary of such palaver. My answers got shorter and shorter. After a while I crawled into the back seat and tried to sleep. But every time a truck went by I woke up with a start.

  Where the highway looped inland, we ran
into a spatter of rain. Above the mountains to the north, the sky was very black, lit by occasional stabs of lightning. The highway brought us back to the coast. Here the night sky was still clear, and the moon’s white eye peered over the rim of the sea. I recognized the crossroads where we had picked up Sandy the night before.

  The thought of the girl was heavy on my mind. She was swinging through all the changes of the moon. The moon was white and shining, the very symbol of purity, but it had its dark side, too, pocked and cold and desolate and hidden. The girl could tum either way, depending on the outcome of our journey.

  If we could bring Hackett out alive, she’d have a chance for probation. If Hackett died, her future died with him.

  chapter 22

  IT WAS AFTER ONE when we got to Rodeo City. It was a seaside motel town strung out between the highway and the shore. We went down a ramp to the main street, which ran parallel to the highway and just below it. Three motorcyclists in bowler hats roared past us down the middle of the street. Girls with blowing hair clung to their backs like succubi.

  We found the turning and the sign: CENTERVILLE 20 MIS., and we turned inland. The blacktop road passed rodeo stands which loomed like an ancient amphitheater in the darkness. Gradually it looped up through the foothills, then more abruptly into a mountain pass. Before we reached the summit of the pass we were in a dense cloud. It gathered like rain on the windshield, and slowed us to a crawl.

  On the far side of the summit actual rain began to pound on the roof. The windshield and the windows fogged up. I climbed into the front seat and wiped them every few minutes, but it was slow going.

  It rained all the way to Centerville. Every now and then a flash of lightning would show the timbered walls of the valley slanting up above us.

  Centerville was one of those Western hamlets that hadn’t changed much in two generations. It was a street of poor frame houses, a general store with a gas pump, closed for the night, a schoolhouse with a bell housing on the roof-peak, and a small white steepled church shining wetly in our headlights.