Sleeping Beauty

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 knew 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.”