Sleeping Beauty

chapter 14

I dreamed I was sleeping with Laurel, and woke up guilty and sweating in her bed. Dawn was at the window, and so was Beth. Leaning into the cold marine morning, her unclothed body looked like a carved figurehead.

I threw off the blanket she had covered me with. She turned with a start, her breasts swinging.

“There’s a man out there.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Floating in the water.”

I knotted a bath towel around my waist and went out. The man was spread-eagled on the surface beyond the place where the waves were breaking. He lay face down as if he was studying the bottom, and moved as the waves moved under him. I waded in through the surf. It rose like liquid pain around my body. It was bitterly cold and tinged with brown. Farther out, the oil lay on the water like a blotched undulating skin.

I swam with my head and face held out of the water. When I got close to the floating man, I seemed to enter a special zone of cold. I tried to grasp him by the hair, but my hand slid off his scalp. It was dark with oil and almost hairless.

Facing him and kicking hard, I took hold of him by the arms and turned him over. One of his arms flopped like a broken wing. His face was damaged – I couldn’t tell how badly, because he was in blackface from the oil.

I got hold of him by the shirt collar and towed him in toward shore. A wave broke over us and sucked him out of my grasp. He slid away from me in the brown surf, turned as he struck the sand, and rolled over and over.

Beth was waiting for him just above the farthest reach of the waves, fully clothed except for her bare feet. She ran and held the dead man until I could reach him. Each of us took an arm, and we dragged him up the beach onto dry sand, as if either water or oil could do any further damage to him or his soaked tweed suit.

I wiped his face with a corner of my towel. It was badly damaged: one eye socket was caved in. There were crinkled marks that looked like burn scars on one side of his face and on his scalp. The scars were not recent.

“What do you suppose happened to him?” Beth said. “Could he have fallen off the oil platform?”

“It’s possible. But the platform’s quite a long way out – three or four miles. I don’t think he’s been in the water that long. And he isn’t wearing working clothes. He may have fallen off a boat, or been caught and rolled by a high wave on the beach. He looks pretty frail.”

As I said that, I remembered him in life. He was the bald uncertain little man I’d seen with the younger man in Blanche’s Seafood Restaurant on the wharf.

“Do you know him, Beth?”

She leaned over to look at him. “No. I never saw him before. He has nothing to do with us.”

She straightened up, and turned. Her mother had come out of the house and started down the steps to the beach. Beth said to me in a low monotone, “Don’t call me Beth in front of Mother, please. Nobody calls me Beth.”

“Okay, Liz.”

“Not that, either. Please. Call me Mrs. Somerville if you have to call me anything.”

Sylvia came up beside us, wrapped in a heavy wool robe which made her look androgynous and monklike. “Where did he come from?”

“Mr. Archer was in the guesthouse. He saw the man in the water and swam out and brought him in.”

Sylvia looked from her daughter to me, her eyes bright and dubious in her wrinkled boy’s face. “What do you suggest we do with him?”

“We’d better call the police,” I said.

“I really hate to do that, unless we know who he is, and what killed him. You know what the press and the news programs will make of this. Look at the fuss they’ve been making about a few dead birds.”

She bent over, her hands on her knees, and looked down at the ruined man as if he was a harbinger of her own fate. She glanced up with the image of death in her eyes.

“Look. He’s got oil in his nostrils, oil in his mouth. That’s all they’ll need to ruin us.”

“We can’t just leave him lying here,” I said.

“No. We’ll take him inside, into the guesthouse.”

“Then you’ll really have trouble. It isn’t a good idea, Mrs. Lennox.”

She gave me a sharp look. “I didn’t ask you for your opinion.”

“But you’re getting it. Call the police.”

“I think we’d better, Mother. I’ll do it if you like.”

They went toward the main house, the older woman’s feet dragging in the sand. There was a fresh morning wind blowing across the beach, and I was shivering so hard that I couldn’t see straight. The wet towel hung like a cold lead apron around my loins. I was lobster red in the trunk, fish blue in the extremities, and not thinking too clearly.

I searched the dead man’s clothes. The pockets of his tweed suit were empty. But inside the right breast pocket of the jacket, a label had been sewn by the tailor who made it:

Tony Lashman came out of the house and crossed the slanting beach. He was fully dressed but his hair was uncombed and he was blinking in the morning light.

He stopped blinking when he saw the dead man. Approaching with a kind of unwilling fascination, he leaned above him and studied his damaged face.

“Do you know him?” I said.

Lashman seemed to be startled by my question. He straightened up as if I’d caught him in a compromising position:

“No, I never saw him before. Who is he, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I just pulled him out of the water.”

“What happened to his face?” Lashman touched his own face, as if he suspected that it could happen to him.

“He may have been struck with a blunt instrument. Or he may have gotten banged up on the rocks.”

“You think he was murdered?”

“It’s a strong possibility. Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

He backed away from the body as if death was a contagion. But he lingered not far away, and after a little time he spoke again.

“You’re a private detective, isn’t that right?”

“I work at it.”

“What kind of money do you make?”

“A hundred a day and expenses. Why? Does Mrs. Lennox want to know?”

“I was asking on my own account. I’ve sometimes thought of going into the detective business myself. But I understood there was more money in it.”

“There is for a few. But it’s not a way to get rich quick, if that’s what you’re looking for. Besides, you need some background.”

“What kind of background?”

“Most private detectives come out of police work. I used to be on the Long Beach force myself.”

“I see.” He gave me a discouraged look, and went back into the house.

I stayed with the man’s body until the Sheriff’s deputies arrived. I told them I had seen him alive in Blanche’s Restaurant, but I didn’t mention the tailor’s label sewn into the pocket of his suit. They could find it themselves if they looked.

I went back into the guesthouse and took a hot shower. It failed to free me of the smell of oil or the chill that the dead man had left on me.

I had more than one reason to take his death personally. I had pulled him out of the water; and he was connected with the young man in the turtleneck who had frightened Laurel off the beach.