Sleeping Beauty

chapter 16

Ralph Mungan lived in a handsome Spanish house dating from prewar days. The lawn in front of it was green and smooth. There were waxwings on the pyracantha bushes like beige-and-yellow ornaments fastened among the red berries they were eating.

I knocked on the front door and waited. I could see the tower of the city hall standing feudally against the sky.

Mungan came to the door with his wife behind him. His fine dark head of hair was turning gray. He was short and heavy – so heavy that it was hard to imagine him wearing the same suit as the floating man.

Mrs. Mungan had a face like ivory, smooth and hard, and a coil of black hair that probably wasn’t her own. The figure under her pink morning gown wasn’t all her own, either. In spite, or because, of these artifices, she looked a few years older than her husband.

But her eyes were bright and interested. She led us into a sitting room where the three of us sat equidistant from each other on formal chairs.

I could feel the lines of tension stretching like taut wires across the room. Without moving, Mungan gave the impression of squirming.

“Well,” Mrs. Mungan said to me, “what’s the excitement about?”

I told them about the man in the water.

She leaned toward me, baring part of her rib cage. “And it’s your theory, is it, that he was wearing Ralph’s suit?”

“It isn’t my suit,” he said. “There’s some mistake. I never had a suit like that and I don’t know any man like that.”

“Sperling the tailor said he made it for you.”

His face swelled and darkened like a ripening plum. His wife looked at him, smiling rather intensely, and said in mock raillery:

“What deep dark secret are you trying to cover up, dear?”

Mungan didn’t respond right away. His gaze was inward, looking down the tunnel of the past. He made an effort which shook him to his foundations, and answered her smile with an equally ghastly one.

“Okay, I confess. I murdered him myself. Now are you satisfied?”

“What was your motive, dear?”

“Jealousy,” he said. “What else? He threatened to take you away from me, so I took him down and drowned him in the ocean.”

Mrs. Mungan made a show of laughter, but she wasn’t happy with his answer. She gave him a quick insulted look, as if he had expressed a wish that she should be taken away from him, or drowned. She said:

“We can’t very well go to Palm Springs with this hanging over your head. Can we, Ralph?”

“There’s nothing hanging over my head. I was only kidding.” He grinned widely, toothlessly, mirthlessly. “I want to go to Palm Springs. I’ve got golfing dates and business commitments.”

“What business commitments?”

“We have an offer for the Palm Springs building, don’t forget.”

“I’ve decided I don’t want to sell it. And I don’t want to go to Palm Springs. Go by yourself.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I wouldn’t enjoy it.”

“I would. Sometimes I think we see too much of each other.”

He seemed appalled by the idea, as if she had suddenly proposed a divorce. “Okay, we’ll give up the Palm Springs idea. I can call off my golf dates. As for the building, it’s bound to appreciate anyway.”

“That doesn’t mean you can’t go to Palm Springs. Go ahead. Don’t let me stop you.”

“I don’t want to go to Palm Springs. I’d be lonely. Lonely for you.”

He gave her a lonely look which was still on his face when he turned in my direction. But he wasn’t lonely for either of us.

I was getting impatient. “Didn’t you own a real-estate office in Santa Monica?”

“I didn’t own it. I rented the building.”

“And Joseph Sperling had a tailor shop next door?”

“Yeah, I remember Joe.” His face went through the motions of remembering, eyes widening and brightening with false pleasure. “Come to think of it, he did make me a suit at one time. That was way back in the fifties.”

“A gray tweed suit?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened to it?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t the foggiest. I think I gave it to the Salvation Army.”

“When?”

“Just before we got married last year. I put on weight since that suit was made, and I realized I’d never be able to wear it again. So I gave it to the Salvation Army.”

I didn’t believe him. Neither did his wife. She said gaily, “Are you sure you didn’t drown the man, after all?”

“How could I? I was home in bed with you.”

Her eyes narrowed, as if he had offered her a further insult or threat. It wasn’t a happy marriage, even from where I sat on the outside.

I stood up. “If you remember anything else, let me know. I’ll leave you a number to call.”

“All right.”

I gave Mungan the number of my answering service. He wrote it down. Then he followed me to the door, and stepped outside. As soon as the door closed, he looked once behind him and moved along beside me, talking in a changed low anxious voice.

“I remember something else. I don’t know whether I ought to tell you or not. I mean, can you promise it won’t get back to my wife?”

“I can’t promise that. It depends on what it is.”

“You’re really putting me in a bind.”

“I’m sorry, but it isn’t me doing it. The regular police should be here before long. And if you think you can avoid publicity by covering up evidence – it’s the surest way to get your picture in the paper.”

Mungan covered his face with both hands and looked at me between his fingers. “Don’t say that. It would really wreck my marriage.”

“If your marriage is important to you, you better level with your wife and me.”

He nodded heavily, and his head stayed down. “Yeah. I know. Sometimes it isn’t so easy.”

“Did you have anything to do with the man’s death?”

“Of course not. Of course I didn’t. What do you think I am?”

“I’ll tell you when I know more about you,” I said.

He dropped his hands, spreading them wide. He was a salesman, or an ex-salesman, who couldn’t bear to be disliked.

“Look,” he said. “Could you and I take a ride around the block? I don’t know what I’ll tell Ethel, but I’ll think of something.”

“Why not tell her the truth?”

“I can’t. You see, there’s something in my life that Ethel doesn’t know about.”

“Isn’t it about time you told her?”

He turned beside the open door of my car and looked at me as if I had just offered to push him down an elevator shaft. “No! It isn’t possible.”

“Get in and tell me about it.”

He climbed in and I slammed the door on him. We were halfway around the block before he spoke:

“I’ve been married before. Ethel doesn’t know about it.”

“I do. Her name was Martha.”

He made a miserable face at me. “Did somebody hire you to investigate me?”

“Somebody will if you go on like this.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“It’s more of a prediction.”

I parked at the curb in front of a house with a mansard roof which had an old black Rolls parked in the driveway.

“Tell me this, Mr. Mungan. What has your former wife got to do with the man I found in the ocean?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she can tell you. I’m pretty sure I left the suit in the house when I took off.”

“How long ago?”

“Let’s see, it’ll be four years next month.”

“And where does your ex-wife live?”

“The last I heard, she was managing an apartment house in Hollywood. The Excalibur Arms.” I knew where it was.

“Just keep my name out of it, will you?” Mungan said.

“Why is that so important?”

“Because I tell you it is. I’m cooperating with you. You should be willing to cooperate with me.”

“It won’t be easy. It doesn’t matter what I do, your name is on that suit. The police will find it, if they haven’t already. And they’ll be beating a path to your door.”

He slumped in the seat as if I had shot him. “I’m in a bind.”

“Because you’ve been married before? That’s common enough.”

“You don’t know Ethel. She can be very vindictive. So can Martie. If the two of them ever get together, I’m finished.”

“There must be more to this than you’re telling me.”

“Yeah. There is.” He looked apprehensively up and down the street. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Martie did this to me. She’s never forgiven me for leaving her, I know that.”

“You mean she killed a man and put your suit on him just to get back at you?”

“No.” He looked rather sheepish. “I guess even Martie wouldn’t do that.”

“Then what’s the rest of it, Mungan?”

“There is no rest of it.”

“There has to be. What is it?”

He answered a question I hadn’t asked, in a high emotional voice I hadn’t heard before. “A man should be able to change wives without living in hell for the rest of his life. Martie gave me good reason to leave her. She was drunk most of the time towards the end. I had a problem, too, I admit that. But I wanted to quit, and get out of that life.”

And you met an older woman with some money.

Almost as if he had heard me, Mungan went on: “A man has a right to a second chance. I proved that when I quit drinking. And Ethel helped me. We have our troubles like any other couple. But Ethel’s been good for me. She turned my footsteps onto the higher path.” That sounded like a quotation, perhaps from Ethel. “And now you want to drag me back into that rotten life.”

All I really wanted, by this time, was to get away from him. Even if he had quit drinking, he had slightly drunken emotions, with a tremolo of self-pity running through them.

I started the car. He took it as a rejection, and cast about for some way to stop me.

“There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“Tell me now.” I raced the engine a little.

“I got a Mexican divorce from Martie. I’m not absolutely certain that it’s legal.”

“You mean you know darn well it isn’t legal?”

“That’s right. I paid a lawyer in Tijuana two hundred and fifty dollars, but I found out later that the divorce didn’t take. I was already married to Ethel by that time.”

“So to speak.”

“Yeah, so to speak. But Ethel watches me like a hawk, and it’s tied my hands. So now you know the bind I’m in. All I’m asking you to do is not tell Martie where I’m living and who I’m living with. I got the divorce in good faith. How was I to know that Tijuana lawyer was a crook? And Ethel and I were married by a minister in Vegas. So all I’m really worried about is Martie and her vindictiveness.” His fingers scratched lightly at my elbow. “Don’t tell Martie, eh?”

I said I wouldn’t. When I dropped him off at his house, Ethel was waiting for him out in front.