Sleeping Beauty

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.

“You know my daughter Laurel, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know her slightly.”

“And you like her, don’t you?”

“I like her very much.”

“Would you be willing to do Laurel a service? I’m not asking you to do it for me, but for her.”

“I’ve been trying to, as you know. I’ve been looking for her since Wednesday night.”

“You can stop looking. My wife just told me that Laurel came home last night. I found out in the same minute that my daughter was alive and my father was dead.” He spoke with a kind of egocentric sentimentality, as if he saw himself as a figure in a drama.

My heart was beating hard. “Where has she been?”

“Wandering around, I gather. Trying to get up the nerve to turn herself in.”

“What kind of shape is she in?”

“Not too good. Marian had to put her under sedation. Laurel’s still not over the idea of hurting herself.”

There was a silence between us. Lennox lay very still with his arms stretched out at his sides, as if he was trying to share and understand his daughter’s predicament.

“Did Laurel hurt anyone else?” I said.

“Yes. I’m afraid she did.”

“Did she push Nelson Bagley over the cliff?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly. “We have a cliffside patio with a low wall, and Laurel was sitting there trying to clean the oil off some kind of bird. Bagley must have seen her from the road and wandered down there. He took her by surprise, and she pushed him over.”

“Did Harold Sherry see this happen?”

“I don’t think so. He was up the road in his car. Laurel’s mother was the only witness, fortunately. But Sherry figured out what had happened – I couldn’t keep Laurel quiet, and she was yelling and sobbing – and he asked for a hundred thousand to forget it. I had to go along with it. There were other matters involved, going back a good many years.”

“Do you want to tell me about those other matters?”

“No, I don’t. I was willing to pay a hundred thousand to keep the whole thing quiet, and I still am.”

“Who suggested the kidnapping ploy?”

“I did. It fitted in with what the family knew about Sherry. And I couldn’t think of any other way to raise the money.”

“It had another advantage,” I said. “If you had managed to kill Sherry yesterday, nobody would have blamed you.”

He gave me a sharply interested look, but kept his mouth shut. I said:

“I still don’t understand why Laurel pushed Bagley over the cliff.”

“Neither do I, really. My wife thinks Laurel may have remembered him from the time that she was a little girl. Maybe she even saw him shoot Allie Russo.”

“Was Laurel in the Russo house when the shooting occurred?”

“It’s possible that she was. Allie Russo used to baby-sit for Laurel.”

“Did Allie baby-sit for Laurel the night she was killed?”

“I don’t remember.”

“It was the night before you went to sea on the Canaan Sound. You should be able to remember what happened your last night ashore.”

“Maybe I should, but I don’t. I was drinking all day. They practically had to pour me on board the ship.”

“If your daughter was at the Russo house that night, somebody must have taken her there. Did you?”

“I said I don’t remember.”

“Wasn’t Allie Russo your girl at the time?”

“No. She was not.”

“If Allie wasn’t your girl, why did you shoot Nelson Bagley?”

Lennox sat up abruptly. “Has Somerville been talking?”

“It doesn’t matter who’s been talking. The question is why you shot Bagley.”

He grimaced and peered from side to side like a man entrapped in the maze of his own nature. “So it was Somerville. Too bad for Somerville. All right. Allie was my girl for a short time while I was waiting for sea duty. When I went aboard the ship in Long Beach that night, I didn’t know she’d been killed. And I didn’t find out for several weeks, when our first mail came aboard in Asiatic waters. They’d made me the mail officer, so I got to it fast. Somebody sent me a newspaper clipping about Allie’s murder, and it gave a full description of the main suspect.”

“Which fitted Bagley.”

“That’s right. Whoever sent the clipping to me sent one to Somerville, too. It made him so jittery that he accidentally ruptured one of the gas tanks. And I can tell you it did nothing for me. I called Bagley up to the communications shack and got a forty-five out of the safe and held it on him while I asked him some questions. He admitted he was there at her house that night. When I showed him the newspaper clipping, he broke and ran. I followed him, and without really intending to, I squeezed off a shot. It hit him, and the flash set fire to the ship. But the fire was really Somerville’s fault – he was the one that ruptured the gas tank. If Somerville wants to make an issue of it at this late date, he’s the one who has a lot to lose. I’m the head of the company as of this morning.”

But Lennox looked around like a dauphin who had waited too long and was already weary at his coronation. I wondered how long he would exercise the power his father had had, and I thought not long. I said:

“Who sent those clippings to you and Somerville?”

“I don’t know.”

“Were there any messages with them?”

“Not in mine.”

“Any writing on the envelope?”

“No. The address was typed.”

“Fleet Post Office address?”

“That’s right.”

“Why were those clippings sent to you, do you think?”

“To make us suffer,” he said.

“Then whoever sent them must have known that you and Somerville had been close to Allie Russo, isn’t that right?”

“I suppose so.”

“How many people knew you were her lover?”

“Nobody knew.”

“What about the children? Laurel and Tom?”

Lennox leaned toward me, his eyes wide, as if he had been hit by a long shot fired from below the curve of time. “You think that little boy sent the clippings? Or Laurel? She was only three, and the boy wasn’t too much older.”

“They were both old enough to talk.”

Lennox lay back and absorbed the idea. His face became pale and anxious. He gnawed his lips.

“Have you thought of someone they might have talked to?” I said.

“No. There isn’t anyone.” He turned restlessly on the bed. “I asked you before if you’d do a service for my daughter.”

“You haven’t told me what it is.”

“Would you be willing to take care of her for a bit, maybe take her on a little trip?”

“I’d have to think about it.”

“There’s no time to think about it. I’m talking about right now, this morning. I can provide you with a jet and pilot, and I’ll pay you well.”

“Where do you want me to take her?”

“Out of the country. Central America would probably be best – we have connections down there.”

“It isn’t a good idea,” I said. “If Laurel killed Bagley, it’s better for her to stay here and face her day in court. Given the circumstances, and her emotional condition, she isn’t likely to be convicted of murder.”

“What will they do to her?”

“I can’t predict that. With the kind of lawyers and doctors you can afford, you should be able to get the charge reduced, maybe have her put on probation in her husband’s custody.”

“Would her husband take that kind of responsibility?”

“I think he would. He loves her.”

“But wouldn’t everything have to come out in the papers?”

“Everything will anyway. Especially if you try to fly Laurel out of the country.”

Lennox was silent for a long minute. “You’re right, that wouldn’t be a good idea. But there’s still something I want you to do for me. For Laurel. I want you to go and look after her, starting now. I can’t make it myself, and Laurel and Marian aren’t on good terms. They haven’t been since Laurel was a teen-ager and started living a life of her own. Will you take over from Marian for me?”

“I’ll do my best.”

On my way out through the hospital lobby, I met Sylvia Lennox coming in. She looked like the survivor of an almost fatal illness. Her face was carved thin and her eyes were very bright.

“You haven’t found Laurel?”

“Not yet.”

“How is Jack?”

“He seems much stronger,” I said.

“My husband, William Lennox, was killed this morning; did you know that?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too, which rather surprises me. I’ve been full of malice towards him, wishing him dead.”

“He wasn’t killed by a wish.”

“I know that, Mr. Archer. I’m not losing my mind, though I may have given that impression yesterday afternoon.” She drew in her breath. “Yesterday I seemed to have reached the end of my life, the end of my nature. But just now I’ve discovered that I haven’t. I’m sorry about William’s death. I can even feel some compassion for the woman.”

“Why don’t you tell her that?”

“I don’t feel that much compassion,” she said dryly.

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you’re a witness. You saw me at my dead end yesterday. I wanted you to know that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in that state.” She moved closer to me and lowered her voice: “But I can’t get over what happened to Tony Lashman. Why do you think he was killed?”

“To keep him quiet. He was a witness, too. Now if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Lennox, I should be on my way.”

There was one more thing to witness.