“That’s my money you’re talking about,” he said. “I got that money the hard way.”
“You seem to do everything the hard way, Harold. If I had your percentages, I’d start looking for a little advice.”
“And how much is that going to cost me?”
“Nothing. I already have a client. His name is Tom Russo. But what you’ve done to Russo’s wife may cost you the rest of your life.”
He looked up at me in fear. “I didn’t do anything to her. I haven’t even seen her this week.”
“That’s the truth,” his mother said. “He said the same thing to me.”
“I heard you, Mrs. Sherry. Now could I possibly have a few minutes alone with Harold? The police will be turning up here any time now. The first thing they’ll want to know is where Laurel is. If he can tell them, they may be prepared to forget some things.”
“I don’t know where Laurel is. Isn’t that true, Mother?”
“Yes.” She moved protectively between us. “Harold would never do anything to Laurel. He’s always adored her.”
“That’s right, I’ve always adored her.”
I sensed what was happening. Mother and son were picking up on a dialogue which had probably been going on for fifteen years and become as unreal and powerful as a dream. And I was cast in the third role in this dream play—the punitive father who had gone to live with another woman but returned to haunt them.
chapter 40
I felt like walking out on both of them. Instead I spoke to Mrs. Sherry in a firm unfriendly voice:
“Get out of this room for a few minutes, will you, please? And call Dr. Langdale.”
She was shocked into compliance. I slammed the door behind her. Harold said:
“You don’t have to get violent. Mother isn’t used to that sort of thing.”
I laughed in his face. I would have liked to hit him. But there had to be a difference between the things that he might do and the things that were possible for me. I said:
“Where is she, Harold?”
He gave me a look of crafty innocence. “Who are we talking about?”
“Laurel Russo.”
“Ask her father. He can tell you.”
“Don’t try to con me. Jack Lennox is in the Pacific Point hospital with a hole in the head. Which you put there.”
“He shot me first. I shot him in self-defense.”
“Extortioners have no rights of self-defense. If Jack Lennox dies, you’ll be in the worst hole a man can be in. You already are, with this kidnapping on your hands. If you were as smart as you think you are, you’d make some move to start climbing out of the hole.”
His gaze moved around the room, restless and fearful. The room looked as if it had been kept for him just as it was when he was a boy in his teens. There were college pennants on the walls, faded like whatever dreams he had had. A bookcase full of young people’s classics stood hopefully in one corner.
He tried to speak, licked his dry lips, and tried again. “I didn’t kidnap Laurel, any more than I did the other time.”
“You mean that she’s in on this with you?”
He shook his unkempt head. “I haven’t even seen Laurel.”
“Then why did her father pay you a hundred thousand dollars?”
“That’s between him and me.”
“Not any more, Harold.”
He was silent for some time. “All right. It was hush money.”
“What does that mean?”
“He gave it to me to keep quiet. If you keep quiet, we can split the money.”
His eyes were full of sudden hopefulness. He leaned toward me and almost fell out of bed. I steadied him with my hand against his shoulder.
“What have you got on Jack Lennox?” I said.
“Plenty. If it wasn’t for all the loot his family has, the Navy would have put him in Portsmouth Penitentiary.”
“For something he did during the war?”
“That’s right. He shot a man in the head and set fire to his ship. But when you’ve got the kind of clout the Lennoxes have, you can even hush up a crime like that.”
“How do you know this, Harold?”
“The man he shot lived to tell me about it.”
“Do you mean Nelson Bagley?”
He looked at me in blank surprise. Like other half-smart alienated men, he seemed to find it hard to believe that there was knowledge in the world besides his own. The realization made him angry and insecure.
He said, “If you already know all this, I don’t want to bore you.”
“You’re not. Far from it. Apparently you’ve been doing some detective work.”
“That’s right. You’re not the only one.”
“How did you get on the track of Nelson Bagley?”
“I’ve been doing some research on the Lennox family. I found out from a girl I know about a murder that was done in the spring of 1945. It was her aunt who was murdered. What made it interesting, the aunt had been the girl friend of big-shot Captain Somerville, who married Elizabeth Lennox. I looked the murder up in the old newspaper files, and I found out that Nelson Bagley was the main suspect. He was never brought to trial, supposedly because he was a mental case. But there were other reasons.”
“What were they?”
“People like the Lennoxes own the courts, along with everything else. And they look after their own.”
I didn’t believe it, and I said so. Harold struck the air with his fist:
“I tell you I’m not lying. There’s nothing old man Lennox wouldn’t do for his son Jack. And nothing he hasn’t done, either. He hushed up that Navy fire by bringing Captain Somerville into the family business.”
“How do you know that?”
“I figured it out for myself—I’ve been making a study of these people. And Jack Lennox didn’t deny it when I called him on it the other night. He didn’t deny that he murdered the woman, either.”
“Are you talking about Allie Russo?”
He nodded rapidly several times. “Jack Lennox was with her the night she was killed. I got that from an eyewitness.”
“Nelson Bagley again?”
“That’s right. Nelson was spying on Allie the night she was killed. He saw Jack Lennox in her bedroom with her.”
“I thought Captain Somerville was her lover.”
“He was. But Somerville went to sea. And Jack Lennox came back from the East where he had been going to Navy school, and sort of inherited her. He hired her to do some baby-sitting with Laurel, but she spent more time with Jack.”
“That doesn’t prove Jack killed the woman.”
“No, but it all fits in. Nelson Bagley wasn’t lying to me, and he practically saw it happen.”
“Bagley never was a very good witness,” I said, “and now he’s unavailable.”
“Naturally he is. I’m surprised that Bagley lived as long as he did, knowing what he knew about Jack Lennox. He knew that Lennox shot him and set fire to the ship. He knew that Lennox murdered Allie Russo.”
“Are you sure he knew these things, or did he imagine them?”
“I’m sure, man, I made sure. Last Tuesday night, I set up a controlled experiment. I found out that Lennox and Somerville were going to make a television appearance, so I got Bagley out of the hospital and took him to my friend’s place. Bagley recognized both of them when they came on the tube. He said Lennox was the one he saw in Allie’s bedroom, and Lennox was the one who shot him.”
I wasn’t as sure as Harold was, or as he pretended to be. The facts of Allie’s death and Bagley’s shooting were reaching me filtered by time and probably distorted by the minds of two damaged men, one of whom was now dead himself.
“What happened to Bagley, Harold?”
“I took him to Lennox’s house on the cliff in Pacific Point. I wanted to make absolutely certain of the identification. But I had to stay out of sight because Lennox knew me.”
“He knew Bagley, too.”
“Yeah. He kn
ew him, all right. He took him for a walk out the back of his house and shoved him over the cliff into the surf.”
“Did you actually see this happen?”
“I didn’t have to. Lennox offered me money to keep quiet. He said that he could raise it overnight if we made the whole business look like a kidnapping. I can see now that he was baiting a trap with that money, planning to double-cross me from the beginning. He thought he could shoot me dead and still be a hero. But I beat him to the draw.”
Harold licked his fever-cracked lips. His accusations against Jack Lennox sounded like a sick man’s delusions. But they were beginning to join together in a kind of weird reality. It corresponded at several points with the weird reality I had been living through, and provided an explanation for the double shooting at Sandhill Lake.
But one death hadn’t been explained—the death of Tony Lashman. I said to Harold:
“The night before last, when you visited Jack Lennox’s house on the cliff, did you go there directly from the wharf?”
“No. When I asked for Lennox, the woman at the restaurant gave me the wrong address. She gave me the address of old Mrs. Lennox on Seahorse Lane. But her secretary told me where Jack Lennox lived.”
“The secretary sent you to Jack Lennox?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you know the secretary has been killed?”
Harold appeared to be shaken by the information. But all he said was, “It figures. Lennox would knock anybody off to cover up his tracks.”
It seemed to me that he was repeating himself, ringing changes on a single paranoid theme. I had a sudden strong desire to get away from him and I went out into the hallway.
Mrs. Sherry came toward me with a solemn face. My own face must have changed, because she looked at me with alarm:
“Has something else happened?”
“No. We’ve just been talking. But your son isn’t in very good shape. Did you call the Doctor?”
“I tried to. Mrs. Langdale said he was at the William Lennox house, and she could reach him there. Apparently something has happened to old Mr. Lennox.”
“Did she say what happened?”
“He had a heart attack and fell off a tractor. I don’t know what a man his age was doing on a tractor.”
“That’s all the Lennox family needs,” I said.
Mrs. Sherry’s eyes failed to soften. She had no sympathy for the Lennox family.
I asked her for the money and the gun. Without argument, she brought them out of her bedroom into the hallway. I checked to make sure that the carton of money was full and the gun empty.
“May I use your phone, Mrs. Sherry?”
“You’re going to phone the police?”
I said, on the spur of the moment, “It would be better if you did.”
“Better for Harold?”
“Yes. Call the Sheriff’s office in Pacific Point. Ask for Captain Dolan.”
She nodded once and didn’t raise her head. I followed her into the room where we had talked the day before. The drapes were closed against the morning sun, and shadows lay behind the furniture like vestiges of the night.
She dialed the Sheriff’s number and asked for Dolan. “This is Mrs. Sherry—Harold Sherry’s mother. Mr. Archer suggested I call you. Harold has been shot, and he isn’t armed. He wants to give himself up and turn over the money to you.”
She began to answer questions, and was still on the phone when the front doorbell rang. I let in a heavy white-haired man who said he was Dr. Langdale. I told him that Harold was in his room.
“How is William Lennox doing, Doctor?”
“Mr. Lennox is dead.” His strained blue eyes came up to my face. “He was dead before I got to him. He was driving a bulldozer down the beach, and he had a heart attack.”
“What was he doing on a bulldozer?”
“Trying to get rid of the oil, apparently. Mr. Lennox always hated any kind of pollution on his beach.”
chapter 41
I passed Dolan’s official car on the highway a few miles beyond the entrance to El Rancho. I kept going toward Pacific Point.
It was still fairly early in the morning when I stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the hospital. There was no deputy on duty outside Jack Lennox’s door.
Lennox was sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray in front of him. His face was stippled with beard. His eyes looked jaded under the helmet of bandage. But there was nothing edible left on his tray.
“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Lennox.”
“What’s up now?”
“We’ve taken Harold Sherry and recovered your hundred thousand. He made a rather full statement.”
The air in the room seemed to freeze into solid silence. Outside, the sounds of life went on, the clink of dishes and the other morning noises of the hospital, the intermittent sounds of traffic sixty feet down in the street.
Lennox looked at the window as if he might decide to jump out through it. I moved around to that side of his bed. He averted his face and looked at the blank television set which hung like a scanning device high on the gray wall.
He gathered his strength and his wits together, and faced me. “What did Sherry say?”
“He made some serious allegations against you.”
“He would. Sherry is a psychopathic liar, and he hates me. He hates my entire family. He mistreated Laurel when she was just a child, and I clobbered him for it. Ever since then, he’s been trying to pay me back. What lies has he been telling now?”
“He said that in the spring of 1945 you shot two people. One of them, Allie Russo, died. The other one, Nelson Bagley, was wounded in the head and burned in the ensuing gasoline fire on the Canaan Sound.”
Lennox swung his arm in a wide gesture of dismissal. “That’s a lot of garbage.”
“I wonder. Nelson Bagley identified you himself.”
“How could he? Bagley is dead.”
“He saw you on television Tuesday night. Wednesday night he went to your house with Harold Sherry. According to Sherry’s story, you pushed Bagley over the cliff. Then you set up a meeting with Sherry intending to kill him. Unfortunately for you, he survived.”
“And you buy this nonsense?”
“I wanted to check with you first. But you’re not very responsive.”
“What do you expect? You accuse me of a couple of murders that I had nothing to do with. You expect me to fall over backwards and confess?”
“Three murders,” I said. “I omitted one. Your mother’s secretary, Tony Lashman, was killed because he knew that Harold Sherry and Bagley went to your house Wednesday night.”
Lennox looked really dismayed for the first time. “I didn’t even know Lashman was dead.”
“His body is in the cold room on the ground floor of this hospital. So is Bagley’s. As soon as you’re strong enough, I’ll be glad to take you down and show them to you.”
“You’re helpful, aren’t you? Now why don’t you get out of here?”
“We haven’t finished. I want to hear you tell me how Bagley died, and why. I have a kind of personal interest in him. I was the one who pulled him out of the water.”
“I didn’t put him there.”
“Sherry says you did.”
“That doesn’t make it so. Sherry probably drowned him himself.”
“What was his motive?”
“A psycho like Sherry doesn’t need a motive. But if you have to have one, Sherry probably did it so he could pin it on me.”
“That isn’t very credible.”
“You don’t know Sherry, or how he feels about me.”
“I think I know. I also know he didn’t kill Bagley.”
“But I did?”
“Either that,” I said, “or you’re covering for someone.”
His eyes came back to my face, exerting an almost tangible pressure there, as if he was trying to read what was in my mind.
A nurse’s aide knocked lightly and came in for his tray.
“Did you enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Lennox?”
He was so deep in thought that he didn’t hear her. She gave him a reproachful look and me a questioning one, then rattled out. When the automatic door had closed itself completely, I said to Lennox:
“Who are you covering for?”
There was a second interruption which postponed his having to answer me. The phone beside his bed rang. He picked it up:
“Jack Lennox here.… He’s dead? … Why in God’s name was he driving a tractor? … I see.… Really? Where is she? … I see. Well, take it easy. And don’t let anyone in.”
He hung up and leaned back against his pillows, drawing a series of deep breaths which didn’t appear to be manifestations of grief. Excitement had colored his cheekbones and lit his eyes.
After a while, he sat up tall in bed. “That was my wife. My father was killed this morning. I happen to be his main heir, which means I’ve taken all the crap I’m ever going to take from anybody.”
“Good for you.”
“Don’t mock me, little man.” His gaze roved around the walls, as if the room had become too small to contain him, and came back to my face. “What would you do for a hundred grand?”
I was silent.
“Would you keep quiet about the subject of our conversation this morning?”
“Are you offering me a hundred grand?”
He nodded, watching me the way a cat watches a bird.
“The same hundred grand you offered Harold Sherry?” I said.
“Maybe that could be managed.”
“And do I get a bullet to go with it, the way Harold did?”
He wrinkled up his face and made a dry spitting noise. “To hell with you. You’re not serious.”
“It’s too late to make a deal,” I said. “Harold is talking to the Sheriff’s men now. They’ll be coming to you shortly.” I waited, giving him a chance to absorb this information. “What are you going to tell them?”
He lay back against his pillows and looked at the ceiling. The surge of excitement and power that he had felt when he learned of his father’s death had passed through him and left him quite inert. He spoke in a different voice, a questioning tone that didn’t come naturally or easily from him.
Sleeping Beauty Page 25
