Sleeping Beauty

chapter 21

Lennox was lying where he had fallen, unconscious but breathing. A .32 revolver was clenched in his hand, and its muzzle smelled as though it had been recently fired. A bullet had grooved the side of his head and snipped off the upper tip of his left ear. It didn’t look like a fatal wound, but thick worms of blood ran down from it and coiled in the dust.

I tied a handkerchief around his head to staunch the flow of blood. Then I left him where he lay and used the phone in his car to call an ambulance and the Sheriff’s men.

I went back and waited with Lennox. But a funny irrational feeling grew on me that the lookout tower was watching us. I went to the half-open door and looked in. There was nothing inside but a drift of sand marked with footprints. A dilapidated ladder went up to the observation platform.

I didn’t climb the ladder, or even go in. There might be fingerprints on the rungs; the footprints in the sand might be identifiable. Anyway, the feeling of being watched had been dispelled. I leaned in the sun against the outside wall and watched the ducks fly up again when the ambulance and the Sheriff’s radio car arrived together.

They strapped Lennox onto a stretcher and took him away. Two Sheriff’s officers remained with me, and I told them how Lennox had put me out on the road, and what I had seen and heard from the hilltop.

The officers’ names were Dolan and Shantz. Dolan was a straight-backed captain with a clipped gray mustache and probing eyes. Shantz was a heavy-shouldered young sergeant who looked like a football player going to seed.

Captain Dolan picked up Lennox’s revolver and spun the chamber. Only one shot had been fired from it. He let me see that, but made no comment. The three of us walked along a dirt lane toward the eucalyptus grove, avoiding the footprints left by the running man.

Dolan bent over to examine one of the footprints. “He was losing blood. There’s blood in his right footprints, like maybe his shoe filled up with it and slopped over.” He turned to Shantz and me. “Take a look for yourselves.”

We leaned over beside him. There was a paste of blood and sand in the footprint, and more in the footprints farther on.

“You did say you heard two shots, didn’t you?” Dolan looked at me as if there might be some hope for me, after all. “It looks like a double shooting that we have here.”

“I think it was. Each man shot the other.”

Following the bloody footprints, we walked in under the gray-green eucalyptus trees. The pigeons hadn’t come back, but there were warblers busy in the treetops. I caught myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it or ourselves.

A pool of blood stood beside the deep tracks where the car had stood. I described the Falcon, and what I had seen of the man who had driven it away. Sergeant Shantz made some notes.

“Too bad you didn’t get his license number,” Dolan said. “We better get the mobile lab out here and take some casts, and check the tower for prints. You want to call ’em, Shantzie?”

The younger man went back along the lane. Dolan leaned on a peeling eucalyptus trunk and folded his arms. His eyes were bleak and intent, and they looked at me like the eyes of a rifleman getting ready to fire.

“This is an important case, you know,” he said quietly. “A double shooting, for starters. And then it’s got the Lennox name in it. They’ve been all over the newspapers the last few days, and this will blow the headlines even bigger. It could make and break some reputations in this county. Including mine,” he added. “Let’s face it.”

“It’s important, all right.”

“You know it is. You know it better than I do. The question is this, Archer. When are you going to let down your inhibitions and tell me what it’s all about?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Don’t give me that. I wish I knew what you know. This morning you pulled a body out of the water in front of Mrs. William Lennox’s beach house. Six or seven hours later, you turn up here at the scene of another crime. How do you account for that?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

Dolan frowned and bit his mustache. “I want a serious answer. Did you know that this shooting, or these shootings, were going to happen?”

“Certainly not.”

“Okay, what brought you here?”

“Jack Lennox came here on private business. His family asked me to accompany him.”

“Private business with the man who shot him?”

“I think so.”

“What was the nature of the business?”

I would have liked to tell him, but I hesitated. If Laurel was guiltily involved, I had to try to protect her. Even if she was an innocent victim, it wouldn’t do her any good to blow the case wide open at this point.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

“You mean you can’t or you won’t?”

“I’d have to take it up with the Lennox family first.”

“Maybe you better do that as soon as possible.” Dolan looked down at the ground between us. “It wouldn’t be a blackmail payment, by any chance?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with that body you hauled out of the sea this morning?”

“It may. I don’t know what the connection is.”

“Then how do you know there is one?”

“I don’t. But I saw two men together last night at Blanche’s on the wharf. One of them was the little man I pulled out of the water this morning. I think it was probably a coincidence that he was floating off Sylvia Lennox’s beach.”

“That could be,” Dolan said. “He was in the water for eight or ten hours, and there’s a southward current that probably brought him from the direction of town. You say you saw him with another man on the wharf?”

“In Blanche’s Restaurant, last night about seven o’clock. The other man was young, about thirty or so. Medium to tall in height, exceptionally broad shoulders. Dark hair and eyes. Dark turtleneck sweater.”

Dolan stepped away from his tree. “Sounds like the man who drove away in the Falcon – the one with the blood in his shoe.”

“I think it was.”