Sleeping Beauty

by Ross Macdonald

  “Are we talking about Captain Somerville?” I said.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But wasn’t that the point of bringing Bagley here, to catch Somerville on television?”

  She turned and looked at the television set as if it might be able to answer for her. But it was dark and silent.

  “If you know so much,” Gloria said, “why ask me about it?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. Somerville was your aunt’s lover. Bagley either had been or wanted to be. She rejected Bagley, and I think she took another lover. Bagley shot her. Somerville used his influence to keep the whole thing quiet, probably because he was afraid of being connected with it. But Harold Sherry’s been digging it up again. Is that the general picture?”

  “You know more about it than I do.”

  “But you spent considerable time with Harold last night. Didn’t he tell you anything? Didn’t he even explain how he got shot?”

  “Laurel’s father tried to kill him, he said.”

  “Why?”

  “He said that Laurel’s family always hated him.”

  “Did he tell you the reason?”

  “No.”

  “Or mention that he tried to kill Laurel’s father?”

  “No.” But her eyes were wide and thoughtful, scanning the night she had just gone through with Harold and watching all its meanings change their shape.

  “How did Harold explain the box of money?”

  “He said he cashed in his securities. His father left him all those securities, stocks and bonds. He was planning to leave the country and take me along.”

  I was getting tired of Harold’s lies and her reluctance to let go of them. “Look, Gloria. You called me and I came here on the supposition that you wanted to talk. There’s not much use in your holding back now.”

  “I didn’t call you. My mother called you.”

  “Anyway, here we are. And you’re not talking.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Tell me where Harold is.”

  “I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care.”

  “Where did you leave him?”

  “I didn’t leave him. He left me.”

  “How could he do that? Did somebody come and pick him up?”

  “That’s one thing I’m not going to tell you.”

  But something in her voice told me, and something in the angle at which she held her head, as if she had been struck by a human hand, or was about to be.

  “Was it another woman, Gloria?”

  After a long silence, she said, “Yes. It was an older woman. Harold made me promise not to look, but I peeked out the motel window and saw her.”

  “How old?”

  “At least Martie’s age. She was driving a big Mercedes. Harold crawled into the trunk and rode that way.”

  “With the money?”

  “Yeah, he took the money with him.”

  “And the gun?”

  She nodded dismally. “What’s the matter with me?” she said. “Why do I always have to get the wrong ones?” She sat hunched over like a woman trying to give birth to a new life. “My cousin Tom was the one I really wanted. But the one he wanted was Laurel—ever since he was a little boy.”

  After a moment’s delay, I was struck by the implications of what she said. “Since he was a little boy?”

  “That’s right.”

  I sat up straight. “Has Tom known Laurel that long?”

  “Almost all his life,” Gloria said. “They used to play together when he was four or so, and she was three. After his mother died, he lost track of Laurel, and he didn’t see her again until a couple of years ago. Then she walked into the drugstore in Westwood one day and asked him to fill a prescription for her. Her name was on the prescription. It was a name that he had never forgotten and he sort of recognized her, too, from her baby days. But she was out of the store before he believed that she could actually be the same Laurel Lennox. Then he ran after her into the parking lot and told her who he was, and she remembered. It wasn’t more than two months before they were married.”

  I had heard the end of the story before. “Who told you this, Gloria?”

  “Tom did. Many times,” she added with a hint of bitterness. But the bitterness was mixed with more positive feelings, including a touch of bridesmaid’s sentimentality. The coming together of Laurel and her cousin was probably the main romantic event in her family’s history.

  But I was interested in its unromantic aspects. “I wonder how Tom and Laurel happened to be playmates when they were children?”

  “I don’t really know. I never thought about it. Maybe Martie will know.”

  Gloria opened a door into the back passageway and called her mother, who came out walking in a mist of alcohol. Her long day’s drinking had already begun. But the eyes with which she searched her daughter’s face were as sharp as a fortune-teller’s.

  “Is he taking you in?” She turned to me. “Do you have to take her in?”

  “I don’t think so. But it would be a good idea if Gloria went to the police on her own and gave them a full account. Do you have any friends in the Sheriff’s department?”

  The two women exchanged glances. “There’s Deputy Stillson,” the older one said. “He always liked you.”

  “Will you go and talk to Deputy Stillson, Gloria?” I said.

  She clenched her fists and shook them, sending a tremor through her entire body. “I don’t know what to say to him.”

  “Just tell the truth—what you told me—and ask him to pass the word to Captain Dolan in Pacific Point. Dolan is in the Sheriff’s office there.”

  Tears sprang into her eyes, as if her head had been subjected to sudden pressure. “I don’t want to tell on Harold.”

  “You have to, Gloria. And you better do it before I bring him in.”

  “You’re going to bring him in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “I think so.”

  “Where?” She stepped toward me eagerly.

  “I can’t tell you.” I turned away from her and spoke to her mother: “Gloria’s just been saying that your nephew Tom used to play with Laurel Lennox when they were children. Do you know anything about that, Mrs. Mungan?”

  “I have a vague memory of it. Why?”

  “Do you know how the connection came about?”

  “I can’t say I do.” She spoke brusquely to Gloria, “If you’re going to go and talk to a deputy sheriff, you better wash your face and change your clothes.”

  Gloria gave her mother a defiant look, but turned submissively and left the room.

  “I didn’t want her to hear this,” Mrs. Mungan said. “I don’t recall if I told you last night about my sister and Captain Benjamin Somerville.”

  “No, I don’t think you did. What about Somerville, Mrs. Mungan?”

  “He was the one that Allie fell for when she was in Bremerton. She thought for a while he was going to help her get a divorce and marry her. But then he turned around and married a girl half his age—a girl with high connections in the oil business. That girl was Elizabeth Lennox, Laurel’s aunt.”

  She gave me a look of satisfaction, like a mathematician who had solved an equation. Then her face darkened, as if the product of the equation had saddened or frightened her.

  “It all comes back to me now,” she said. “Allie was hard up for money after she left her husband in Bremerton and came back here with Tom. Mungan and I helped her out as much as we could. But she was having a hard time holding on to the house and living from day to day. So I suggested she should go to Somerville and get something from him. After all, he was the one who broke up her marriage. And, being in real estate, we knew that he’d just paid fifty thou for a big new house in Bel-Air. That was a lot of money in those days, back in the spring of 1945.

  “Allie told me she went to his house, but he wasn’t there. He was at sea. His new little wife was at home, t
hough, and Allie got some money from her, enough to carry her for a few weeks. Then she ran out again.

  “Mungan and I couldn’t help her. In those late war years, we were just about losing our real-estate business, which we eventually did. So she went back to Somerville’s place again. This time his new wife wasn’t there, but her brother was—the same man we saw with Captain Somerville on TV Tuesday night. The brother and his wife hired her to do some babysitting for them, which Allie did right up to the day she died. That was how Tom and their little girl got together.”

  She stood in silence, swaying a little, listening to the flat echoes of her story. But her eyes remained uncomprehending. She wasn’t a mathematician after all: more like an idiot savant who remembered all the details of her own and her sister’s life but couldn’t detect any over-all meaning in them.

  chapter 39

  I took the freeway south to Pacific Point, then switched to the old highway. Where it veered close to the ocean, I could see oil lying thin and rainbowed on the water, thick and black on the beaches.

  Sandhill Lake was once again deserted. I could see no official cars and no Sheriff’s men around the hunting club. But I remembered something I had forgotten. There was an armed guard and a barrier at the entrance to El Rancho; and I couldn’t ask Harold’s mother to pass me in.

  I asked the guard to call William Lennox’s house. A servant brought Connie Hapgood to the phone:

  “Mr. Archer? I’ve been thinking about getting in touch with you. William appears to be missing.”

  “For how long?”

  “At least an hour. His bed was empty when I went to wake him with his Postum. All of the cars are here, which means that someone took him, doesn’t it?” Her voice rose high and cracked on the question.

  “What do you mean took him?”

  “I don’t know exactly what I mean. But I’m frightened, and I don’t frighten easily. Somehow this place seems terribly empty and dead.”

  “He could have left under his own power. He almost did yesterday.”

  “That worries me, too,” she said. “We have a very large acreage here. Some of it is rough country. His heart isn’t in very good shape, and he tends to overdo, and if he wandered off by himself—” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can. That won’t be immediately, though.”

  “Where are you going first?” Her voice was sharp with a kind of jealousy.

  “I’m on the track of Laurel.”

  I hung up before she could question me further. The guard lifted the barrier and waved me through.

  I parked on Lorenzo Drive below Mrs. Sherry’s hedge and walked up her driveway. It wasn’t very steep, but it felt that way to the muscles of my legs and to my will. Harold had a gun and was probably in good enough shape to fire it.

  I studied the windows for any gleam of metal or movement. But the only movements around the house were those of a pair of hummingbirds making aerobatic love.

  I walked around to the back, as I had done the day before, and inspected the contents of the open garage. Very little seemed to have changed. The aging gray Mercedes was there, but this time the lid of the trunk was up and when I looked inside I found dried blood on the floor.

  The back door of the house creaked. Mrs. Sherry appeared, moving rather stealthily toward the garage. She started when she saw me. But she had enough presence of mind to come up close to me before she spoke, and then to speak in a whisper.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to Harold.”

  “Harold isn’t here. I told you that yesterday.”

  “Then why are we whispering?”

  She touched her mouth with her hand as if it had given her away. But she couldn’t bring herself to raise her voice.

  “I’ve always had a very low voice,” she whispered.

  She moved past me in an elaborately casual way and shut the lid of the trunk as noiselessly as possible. Her movements were tense and awkward, and interrupted by glances in my direction. Her eyes had grown deeper and brighter in the course of the night.

  “Where is he, Mrs. Sherry?”

  “I don’t know. We went into that subject yesterday, I believe. I gave you all the information I had—all there was.” She spread her hands to show me how clean they were, and how empty.

  “But this isn’t yesterday. Harold is here with you, isn’t he?”

  Her deep bright eyes made the rest of her look even more faded and forlorn. She didn’t answer my question directly:

  “Some German philosopher—I think it was Nietzsche—said that history just goes on repeating itself—the same old story, like a worn-out record endlessly repeating itself. When I first heard that in college, it didn’t make sense to me. But now I think he was right. It’s the story of my own life.”

  “Can you tell me what the story is?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what it is. That’s the strangest part of it. It seems to be repeating itself, and yet it always takes me by surprise.”

  “It’s true of all of us, Mrs. Sherry. But not all of us have sons.”

  “I wish I didn’t.” But then she rebuked her mouth with her stern fingers. “No, that isn’t true. I don’t wish Harold dead, or unborn. I know if I didn’t have him, I’d be even less of a person than I am.”

  “How is he, Mrs. Sherry?”

  “He seems feverish. I’ve been making up my mind to call a doctor. Do you think Dr. Brokaw would come out here from Long Beach?”

  “You could ask him. But I think you’d do just as well to call a local doctor.”

  Her face crumpled. “I can’t. The whole thing would be common knowledge in no time.”

  “It’s going to become common knowledge anyway. It already is, except for the names and the places. The one positive thing you can do for Harold is to get him to talk before he’s forced to. If he’ll tell us where Laurel Russo is, it should count for something with the law.”

  Mrs. Sherry’s face lengthened as if of its own weight, like dough. “He doesn’t know where she is. I’ve asked him.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “That’s correct. He says he hasn’t seen her for several days.”

  “Then he’s lying.”

  “He may be.” The admission came hard to her. “I don’t always know when Harold is lying.”

  “Where is he?” I repeated.

  “In the house. In his own room.”

  “Is he armed?”

  “He was,” she said. “But I took it away from him. He got quite excited in the course of the night—I think it was the fever. He was calling me names and cursing and waving the gun at me. So I took it away from him.” She sounded ashamed, as if in some way she had defrauded Harold of his manhood.

  “What did you do with the gun?”

  “I unloaded it and put it away in my closet. I put the shells in another place, in the laundry hamper in my bathroom.”

  “You acted wisely. Now will you let me talk to him?”

  The shadow of imminent loss fell across her face, dulling her eyes. “Harold will never forgive me.”

  “Worse things could happen. There’s no future in the present situation, Mrs. Sherry. I’m surprised the county police aren’t here now. And when they do get here you’re going to be in trouble yourself, for harboring a fugitive.”

  “But I’m his mother.”

  “Then let me talk to him. And while I’m doing that you better call your doctor. Don’t you have one in the neighborhood?”

  “There’s Dr. Langdale. He lives in El Rancho.”

  She took me to the back door and let me into the kitchen. A pan of burned bacon was smoking on the electric stove. She lifted it and burned her hand and dropped it. It was a day when nothing was going right for Mrs. Sherry.

  While she was running cold water on her hand, her son called from somewhere in the house:

  “What’s going on out there? Mother?” He sounded angry and frighten
ed.

  “I’m coming,” she said in a voice that was probably too low to be heard by him.

  She led me quietly through the house to the door of his room, made a sign for me to wait, and went in.

  “What is this?” I heard him say. “I thought you were making breakfast.”

  “I was. I burned my hand.”

  “Is that what it was? I thought I heard you talking to somebody.”

  There was a silence in the room. I could hear one of them breathing.

  “There is someone here,” she said at last. “A man in the hall wants to talk to you.”

  “What are you trying to do to me?”

  He hopped on one foot to the door, swung it wide, and saw me. There was a bloody bandage on his leg, with the pajama leg cut off above it. His hair hung down in his hot eyes.

  “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

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

  “What do you want?”

  “I want Laurel.”

  He turned on his mother once again, as if she was the source of his whole troubled life. “Was this your idea, you rotten old fool?”

  She bowed her head as if she was accustomed to such epithets. “You mustn’t talk to me like that, Harold. I’m your mother.”

  “Then why don’t you act like it?”

  I put my hand on his chest—his heart was beating wildly—and I pushed him backward into the room. He sat down suddenly on the edge of the bed.

  “Harold and I have things to discuss,” I said to Mrs. Sherry. “It’ll be easier for you if you don’t listen in. Easier for all of us.”

  She gave Harold her look of unbearable loss and moved past me toward the door.

  “One thing before you go,” I said to her. “Where’s the box of money?”

  “I put it in my closet.” She added in a flustered voice, “I wasn’t intending to keep it, you understand. Do you want me to get it?”

  “Leave it where it is for now. It might give you a little something to bargain with.”

  She looked at me without comprehension. There had been too many demands on her understanding. Harold was watching us like a spectator at a ping-pong match on which he had bet heavily and was losing.