Sleeping Beauty

chapter 5

It was a declining middle-class block. The flat-roofed stucco houses had been built in the twenties, and faced each other across the street like concrete strong points in a forgotten battlefield. Tom Russo’s house was distinguished from the others by the new black Cadillac standing in front of it.

A big man got out of the driver’s seat. “Are you Archer?”

I said I was.

“I’m Jack Lennox, Laurel’s father.”

“I recognized you.”

“Oh? Have we met before?”

“I saw your picture in the morning paper.”

“Good Lord, was that just this morning? It feels like a week ago.” He wagged his head gloomily. “They say trouble always comes in bunches. Which certainly conforms with my experience.”

Behind his casual complaining talk I could sense a questioning doubt which wasn’t unexpected in Laurel’s father. He moved toward me and spoke in a lower voice.

“I understand my son-in-law–” he pronounced the words with distaste “–doesn’t want to see us. Believe me, the feeling is mutual. It’s good of him to send an emissary. But I don’t quite understand your position in this matter.”

“I’m a private detective.” I added, overstating the case a little: “Tom Russo hired me to look for your daughter.”

“I didn’t know he cared that much.”

“He cares. But he couldn’t leave the drugstore just now. Since I was the last one who saw her, I agreed to come here and talk to you.”

Lennox took hold of my arm. As if he had closed a circuit, I could feel the tension running through him and into me.

“The last one who saw her? What do you mean by that?”

“She took off from my apartment with a vial of Nembutal capsules.” I looked at my watch. “That was a bit over an hour ago.”

“How did she get into your apartment?”

A hectoring note was entering his voice. His grip on my arm was tightening. I shook it off.

“I met her on the beach at Pacific Point. She asked me to give her a lift to West Los Angeles, and I did. Then she wanted to use my phone to call her husband.”

“What happened between Laurel and her husband?”

“Nothing much. He was about to leave for work and couldn’t come for her. He blames himself, of course, but I don’t blame him. Your daughter was upset before she ever left Pacific Point.”

“Upset about what?”

“The oil spill, for one thing. She rescued a bird, and it died on her hands.”

“Don’t give me that. People are blaming the spill for everything that happens. You’d think it was the end of the bloody world.”

“Maybe it was for your daughter. She’s a very sensitive person, and she seems to have been living close to the edge.”

He shook his head. He seemed to be strained close to his own limit, and he didn’t really want me to tell him about his daughter. I said:

“Has she often been suicidal before?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Who would know?”

“You could ask her mother.”

He took me into the house as if he owned it. We were close together for a moment in the lighted hallway, and we exchanged a quick look. He was weathered brown, with impervious blue eyes, and quite a lot of wavy brown hair growing not too high on his forehead. His eyes were a little overconfident, his mouth a little spoiled. And there was a touch of dismay in the eyes and on the mouth, as if he’d felt the first cold draft of age. He had to be at least fifty but looked younger.

His wife was waiting in the living room with Tom’s cousin, the one he had described to me at the drugstore. The two women sat on facing chairs in stiff-necked poses which meant that they had long since run out of things to say to each other.

Tom’s cousin, the younger, had on a light blue pants suit which exaggerated the shape of her body. She looked trapped. But when I gave her a one-sided grin she gave it back to me.

“I’m Gloria,” she said. “Gloria Flaherty.”

The older woman looked the way Laurel might look in twenty years, if she lived. She still had some of her beauty, but there were lines of suffering connecting the wings of her nose and the corners of her mouth, and charcoal marks under her eyes as if she had been through fire. Her hair was streaked with white.

She lifted one of her black-gloved hands and placed it limply in mine. “Mr. Archer? We can’t make any sense of this at all. Can you? Is it true as her husband says that Laurel is suicidal?”

“She may be.”

“But why? Did something happen?”

“I was going to ask you that.”

“But I haven’t really talked to Laurel for several days. She’s been staying at her grandmother’s. She likes to use the tennis court there. She says it’s good therapy for her.”

“Does she need therapy, Mrs. Lennox?”

“I was using the term rather loosely.” She turned and looked quite openly at the cousin, then back at me. “I really prefer not to discuss this matter under the circumstances.”

Gloria got the message and stood up. “I’ll finish cleaning up in the kitchen. Can I get anybody anything?”

Mr. and Mrs. Lennox grimaced and shook their heads. They seemed appalled by the idea of eating or drinking anything in Tom Russo’s house. They were like astronauts artificially sustained on an alien planet, careful but contemptuous of the unfriendly environment and its unlikely inhabitants.

The cousin went into the kitchen. Mrs. Lennox got up and moved back and forth in the limited space in front of the fireless fireplace. She was tall and rather gaunt, but she moved with a certain nervous youthfulness. She flapped her gloved hands in front of her face.

“I wonder what perfume she uses. It smells like Midnight in Long Beach.”

“That’s an insult to Long Beach,” her husband said. “Long Beach is a good oil town.”

I supposed that they were trying to be light, but their words fell heavy as lead. Mrs. Lennox turned to me:

“Do you suppose she’s living here with him?”

“I doubt it. Tom says she’s his cousin. What’s more important, he seems to be in love with your daughter.”

“Then why doesn’t he look after her?”

“I gather that she takes some looking after, Mrs. Lennox.”

She went into a thoughtful silence. “That’s true. She always has. Laurel’s been an unpredictable girl. I was hoping that her marriage–”

“Forget about her marriage,” Lennox said. “It’s obviously on the rocks. They haven’t been living together for weeks. Russo says he doesn’t want a divorce; but he’s just holding out in the hope of some moola. I know these types.”

“You may be mistaken about him,” I said. “He seems to care about her just as much as you do.”

“Really? Bear in mind that I’m her father. And I resent being bracketed with that druggist.”

He was in a mood to resent almost anything. His face had flushed up red, and then gone gray. His wife was watching the changes in its color as if they were familiar signals to her. There was a certain distance in her look, but she leaned over him and put both hands on his shoulders.

“Calm down, Jack. It may be a long night.” She turned to me. “My husband suffers from tension. Under the circumstances, you can understand why.”

I said, “I don’t understand exactly why you came here, Mrs. Lennox.”

“We thought Laurel might be here. Her grandmother said she’s been talking about coming back to Tom.”

“You must have been concerned about her.”

“I’ve been concerned about her all my life – all her life.”

“Do you want to tell me why?”

“I wish I could.”

“Does that mean you can’t, or you won’t?”

She looked at her husband again, as if for a further signal. His face had turned a mottled pink. He pulled his hand across it in a wiping motion which left it quite unchanged. But his voice had changed when he spoke.

“Laurel is very important to us, Mr. Archer. She’s an only child, the only child we’ll ever have. If anything happened to her–” He shrugged and slumped in his chair.

“What do you think might happen to her?”

Lennox remained silent. His wife stood looking down at him as if she was trying to read the thoughts in his head. I asked them both:

“Has she attempted suicide before?”

“No,” her father said.

But her mother said, “Yes. She has in a way.”

“With drugs?”

“I don’t know about that. I caught her once with her father’s revolver. She was playing Russian roulette in his room.”

Lennox moved from side to side in his chair as if he was strapped there. “You never told me any of that.”

“There are a number of things I haven’t told you. I never had to, till now.”

“Hold them for the present, will you? This is a hell of a time to open the floodgates.” He stood up, turning his back on me and towering over her. “What if the old man hears about it?”

“What if he does?”

“Dad’s estate is hanging in the balance; you know that. All that woman needs is a good excuse to take it away from us. And we’re not going to give it to her, are we?”

He raised his hand to the level of her face and brought the open palm against her cheek. It wasn’t a blow, exactly, and it wasn’t exactly a love pat. It made a small slapping noise, and it seemed to jar her.

It jarred me. They were one of those couples who couldn’t pull together. The energy of their marriage passed back and forth between them like an alternating current that shocked and paralyzed.

The woman had begun to cry, dry-eyed. Her husband tried to comfort her with little noises and touches of his hands. Her dry sobs continued like hiccups. She said between them:

“I’m sorry. I always do the wrong thing. I spoil your life for you.”

“That’s nonsense. Be quiet.”

He took her out to their car, and then came back to the front door. “Archer?”

I was waiting in the hall. “What do you want?”

“If you have any sense and compunction at all, you won’t spread this around.”

“Spread what around?”

“The trouble with my daughter. I don’t want you talking about it.”

“I have to report to Russo.”

“But you don’t have to tell him everything that was said. Particularly what just passed between us.”

“You mean about your father’s estate?”

“That’s right. I was indiscreet. I’m asking you to be discreet for me.”

I said I would do my best.