Sleeping Beauty

chapter 4

She had been gone ten or twelve minutes when I went down to the empty street. I got into my car and drove around the block. There were no pedestrians at all, no trace of Laurel Russo.

I drove as far as Wilshire, then realized that I was wasting my time. I went back to my apartment and looked up Thomas Russo in the phone directory. His address was on the border of Westwood, not more than three or four miles from me. I made a note of his address and telephone number.

His phone rang a dozen times, rhythmic and raucous as a death rattle, before the receiver was lifted. “Russo residence, Tom Russo speaking.”

“This is Lew Archer. You don’t know me, but it’s about your wife.”

“Laurel? Has something happened?”

“Not yet. But I’m concerned about her. She took some sleeping pills from my apartment.”

His voice became suspicious. “Are you her boy friend?”

“No, I’m not. You are.”

“What was she doing in your apartment?”

“She wanted to phone you. When you turned her down, she left with my sleeping capsules.”

“What kind of sleeping capsules?”

“Three-quarter-grain Nembutal.”

“How many?”

“At least three dozen. Enough to kill her.”

“I know that,” Russo said. “I’m a pharmacist.”

“Is she likely to take them?”

“I don’t know.” But there was a whisper of fear in his voice.

“Has she attempted suicide before?”

“I don’t know who I’m talking to.” Which meant she probably had. “Are you some kind of policeman?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“I suppose her parents hired you.”

“Nobody hired me. I met your wife on the beach at Pacific Point. Apparently the oil spill upset her, and she asked me to bring her to Los Angeles. When you turned her down–”

“Please don’t keep saying that. I didn’t turn her down. I told her I couldn’t take her back unless she was ready to give it a good try. I couldn’t stand another patch-up job and then another break. The last one nearly killed me.”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t care about me the way I – Look, I’m telling you my family secrets.”

“Tell me more, Mr. Russo. Who else would she be likely to call, or go to?”

“I’d need time to think about that, and I don’t have the time. I have the night shift at the drugstore. I ought to be there now.”

“Which store?”

“The Save-More, in Westwood.”

“I’ll come by there. Will you make me a list of the people she might try to get in touch with?”

Russo said he would try to.

I drove up Wilshire in the right-hand lane, looking for Laurel among the people on the sidewalk. I parked in the Save-More lot and went into the drugstore through a turnstile. The fluorescent lighting made the atmosphere seem artificial and remote, like that of a space station.

A dozen or so young people were wandering around among the display shelves, boys with John-the-Baptist heads, girls dressed like Whistler’s mother. The man in the glass-enclosed pharmacist’s booth at the rear of the store was about midway between their age and mine.

His black hair was neither short nor long, and there were glints of premature gray in it. The clean white smock he was wearing had the effect of making his head seem detached from his body, floating free in the white fluorescent light. The flesh on his head was sparse, and I was conscious of the skull it contained, like a fine ancient bronze buried in his flesh.

“Mr. Russo?”

He glanced up sharply, then came to the open space between the glass partition and the cash register. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m Archer. You haven’t heard from your wife again?”

“No, sir, I haven’t. I left word at Hollywood Receiving and the other hospitals, just in case.”

“You do think she’s suicidal, then?”

“She’s done some talking about it, I mean in the past. Laurel’s never been a very happy girl.”

“She said that when she called your house a woman answered the phone.”

He looked at me with dark brown sorrowful eyes, the kind that faithful dogs are supposed to have. “That was my part-time cleaning woman.”

“She comes at night?”

“As a matter of fact, she’s my cousin. She stayed and made me some supper. I get tired of restaurant cooking.”

“How long have you and Laurel been separated?”

“A couple of weeks this time. We’re not separated, though, not legally.”

“Where has she been living?”

“Mostly with friends. And with her father and mother and grandmother in Pacific Point.”

“Did you make me the list I asked you for, of her friends and relatives?”

“Yes, I did.” He handed me a piece of paper, and our eyes met again. His seemed smaller and harder. “You’re really going into this matter, eh?”

“With your permission.”

“May I ask why?”

“Those were my pills she ran off with. I could have stopped her, but I was a little angry.”

“I see,” But his eyes were looking past me. “Do you know Laurel well?”

“Not really. I just met her this afternoon. But I have a strong sense of her, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, everybody does.” He took in a breath, and let it out audibly. “Those names I gave you are mainly relatives. Laurel never told me about her boy friends – I mean before she was married. And she only had the one real girl friend that I know of. Joyce Hampshire. They went to school together someplace down in Orange. A private school.” His eyes came up to my face, defensive and thoughtful. “Joyce was at our wedding. And she was the only one of the bunch who thought Laurel ought to stay married. I mean, to me.”

“How long have you been married?”

“Two years.”

“Why did your wife leave you?”

“I don’t know. She couldn’t even tell me herself. Things broke down on us – the good feeling broke down on us.” His gaze wandered away to the bottles and cartons on the shelves behind the partition, with their infinite variety of medicines.

“Where does Joyce Hampshire live?”

“She has an apartment not so far from here, in a place called Greenfield Manor. It’s in Santa Monica.”

“Will you give her a ring and tell her I may drop in on her?”

“I can do that. Do you think I ought to call the police?”

“It wouldn’t do much good. We don’t have enough to get action. But call them if you want to. And call the Suicide Center while you’re at it.”

While Russo used the phone, I studied his typed list of names:

I tried to memorize the list.

Russo was saying on the phone, “I didn’t have a fight with her. I didn’t see her tonight or today. I had nothing to do with this at all; you can take my word for it.” He set the phone down and came back to me. “You could talk to Joyce from here, I guess, but I’m not supposed to let anyone use this phone.”

“I’d rather talk to her in person, anyway. I take it she hasn’t heard from Laurel?”

Russo shook his head, his eyes staying on my face. “How is it you call her Laurel?”

“That’s what you call her.”

“But you said you didn’t know her hardly at all.” He was upset, in a quiet way.

“I don’t.”

“Then what makes you so interested? I’m not saying you don’t have a right. But I just don’t understand, if you hardly know her.”

“I told you I feel a certain responsibility.”

He hung his dark head. “So do I. I realize I made a mistake when she phoned tonight and wanted to come home. I should have told her to come ahead.”

He was a man whose anger and suspicion easily turned inward on himself. His handsome face had a shut and disappointed look, as if he felt he had foreclosed his youth.

“Has she run out before, Mr. Russo?”

“We’ve been separated before, if that’s what you mean. And she was always the one that did the leaving.”

“Has she had any drug trouble?”

“Nothing serious.”

“What about not so serious?”

“She uses barbiturates quite a bit. She’s always had trouble sleeping, and calming down generally. But she never took an overdose.” He looked at the possibility with half-closed eyes, and couldn’t quite face it. “I think it’s just a bluff. She’s trying to scare me.”

“She succeeded in scaring me. Did she say anything about suicide when she talked to you on the phone?”

Russo didn’t answer right away, but the skull behind his thin-fleshed face became more prominent. “She said something.”

“Can you remember exactly what she said?”

He took in a deep breath. “She said if I ever wanted to see her again in her life that I should let her come home. And be there waiting for her. But I couldn’t do that, I had to get down here and–”

I interrupted him. “In her life?”

“That’s what she said. I didn’t take it too seriously at the time.”

“I do. She’s pretty disturbed. But I still think she wants me to find her.”

His head came up. “What makes you think that?”

“She left the door of my medicine cabinet open. She wasn’t trying very hard to get away with those capsules – at least not all the way.” I picked up his list of names. “What about this family of hers? Bel-Air and El Rancho and Seahorse Lane are pretty expensive addresses.”

Russo nodded solemnly. “They’re rich.” The droop of his shoulders added: And I’m poor.

“Is her father the same Jack Lennox who owns the oil well that’s spilling?”

“Her grandfather owns it. William Lennox. His company owns quite a few oil wells.”

“Do you know him?”

“I met him once. He invited me to a gathering at his home in El Rancho last year. Me and Laurel and the rest of the family. It broke up early, and I never did get to talk to him.”

“Is Laurel close to her grandfather?”

“She used to be, before he got a new woman. Why?”

“I think this oil spill upset her pretty basically. She seems to feel very strongly for the birds.”

“I know. It’s because we have no children.”

“Did she say so?”

“She didn’t have to say so. I wanted children, but she didn’t feel ready for motherhood. It was easier for her to care about the birds. I’m just as glad now that we don’t have children.”

There was a poignancy in his words, perhaps not wholly unconscious. He seemed to realize as we talked that the possibilities of his life were being cut off.

“Do you know Laurel’s parents – Mr. and Mrs. Jack Lennox?”

“I know them. Her father’s picture was on the front page of the Times this morning.”

“I saw it. Would she go home to them, or to her grandmother Sylvia?”

“I don’t know what she’d do. I spent the last couple of years trying to understand Laurel, but I never could predict which way she’d jump.”

“Captain and Mrs. Somerville, in Bel-Air – is Laurel close to them?”

“They’re her aunt and uncle. I guess she was close to them at one time, but not lately. I’m not the best source on this. I don’t really know the family. But there’s been quite a lot of pulling and hauling in the family since the old man changed his domestic arrangements. It caused Laurel a lot of grief.”

“Why?”

“She couldn’t stand trouble, any kind of trouble. It always tore her up to hear people fighting or arguing. She couldn’t even stand an ordinary disagreement in the home.”

“Did you have a lot of disagreements?”

“No. I wouldn’t say that.”

A woman with a prescription in her hand came up to the counter beside me. She had on high black boots and a yellow wig. Russo seemed relieved to see her. He took the prescription and started back into his booth.

“So long,” I said.

He came back and leaned toward me, trying to make private what he had to say: “If you do see Laurel, tell her – ask her to come home. No conditions. I just want her home. Tell her I said that.”

The phone in his cubicle started to ring. He picked up the receiver and listened and shook his head.

“I can’t come there, you know that. And I don’t want them coming here. This job is all I’ve got. Wait a minute.”

Russo came back to me, looking quite pale and shaken. “Laurel’s father and mother are at my house. I can’t leave here, and I don’t want them coming to the store. Anyway, I can’t talk to those people. You’d be doing me a big favor, Mr. Archer, if you’d go and talk to them for me. You were the one who saw her last. It isn’t far from here. And I’ll be glad to pay you for your trouble, whatever you think is fair.”

“All right. I’ll take a hundred dollars from you.”

His face lengthened. “Just for talking to them?”

“I expect to do more than that. A hundred is what I charge for a day’s work.”

“I don’t have that much on me.” He looked in his wallet. “I can give you fifty now.”

“All right. I’ll trust you for the rest.”

The woman in the yellow wig said, “Do I get my prescription filled, or are you two going to go on talking all night?”

Russo said he was very sorry. He gave me a quick emphatic nod and returned to the phone.

I went out to my car, feeling slightly more legitimate now that I had Laurel’s husband as a client. For a man of his apparent background, who had probably made his way into the professional class by way of pharmacy school, the transfer of money, even under pressure, was proof of real concern.

I asked myself as I drove across Westwood where my concern for his wife originated. The answer wasn’t clear. She seemed to be one of those people to whom you attached your floating fears, your unexamined sorrows.

Her eyes appeared to be watching me out of the darkness like the ghost of a woman who had already died. Or the ghost of a bird.