Sleeping Beauty

chapter 8

The darkness in Bel-Air was almost thick enough to lean on. I drove around in it for a while and eventually found a mailbox with “Capt. Benjamin Somerville USN (ret.)” printed on it in white. There were several bullet holes in the mailbox.

I went up the asphalt driveway. The house and its outbuildings sat on the hilltop under an unobstructed sky. I could see stars overhead, and below them the night fields of the city looking as if they had been fenced with light and seeded with more stars.

There was no visible light in the large one-storied house. I knocked and waited, and after a while knocked again. The hushed sound of feet approached the other side of the door. In the overhang above me and all around the house, lights went on. The door was opened about five inches on a chain.

Dark eyes looked out at me from a dark face. “What is it you want?”

“I’d like to see Captain Somerville.”

“There’s nobody home.” The black man’s voice was flat and toneless.

“You are.”

“That’s true. But I don’t know you.”

And he didn’t particularly want to. I started to give him a fairly detailed account of who I was and how I had happened to come there. He interrupted me and asked to see my license. I showed it to him through the five-inch opening.

Even then he didn’t let me in. He unhooked the chain and stepped outside, closing the door behind him, then testing it to see if it was locked. He had keys in his hand, and he dropped them into his pocket. His other pocket sagged with the weight of what looked like a gun.

He was a big man about my age. His face was unreadable. He had on a faded blue shirt and pants which resembled a uniform. His left arm appeared to be crippled, and I noticed that the hand remained half closed. His voice was low and impersonal.

“Captain Somerville’s niece hasn’t been here tonight. I’ve been here all night, and I can guarantee it. I understand she’s staying with her grandmother in Pacific Point.”

“She left there earlier today. Would she be likely to come here?”

“She used to come here often enough when she was younger. But not so much any more.”

“What about Captain Somerville?”

“This is where he lives, man. He’s lived here nearly thirty years.”

“I mean where is he now?”

“I’m not supposed to say. We’ve had some bad calls in the last couple of days.”

“About the oil spill?”

“That was the idea. The Captain’s the executive vice-president of the company. Naturally he gets the blame, even if he’s clean as the driven snow.”

“I noticed bullet holes in the mailbox.”

“That’s right. Some people just aren’t happy unless they’re shooting up other people’s property.”

“Was that another protest against the oil spill?”

“They didn’t stop to say. They came here on motorcycles. I think they were just trigger-happy, looking for something to shoot at.” He peered down at the road, then turned and gave me a long appraising look. “But you didn’t come out here to talk to me about the motorbike boys.”

“They interest me. When were they here?”

“Last night. They roared up the hill and fired a few rounds and roared away again. Captain Somerville wasn’t here at the time. Fact is, I was in the house watching him on TV when it happened. The Captain and young Mr. Lennox – Laurel’s father – were on the ten o’clock news explaining the oil spill to the people.”

“How did they explain it?”

“They said it was an act of God, mainly.” There may have been some irony in his voice but I could detect no trace of it in his face. “They said that every now and then nature lets them down and all they can do is clean up after her.”

“Isn’t that a little rough on nature?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” He took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling night air. “I look after the Captain’s place for him and that’s about all I know.”

He looked and talked like a man who knew a good deal more.

“Have you worked here long, Mr.–?”

“Smith. My name is Smith. I’ve worked for him over twenty-five years, ever since me and the Captain retired from the Navy, and before that. I was his special steward when he had his last sea duty. We were at Okinawa together. That’s where the Captain lost his ship. And where I got this.” He touched his crippled left hand with his right.

He seemed ready to unload his war reminiscences. I warded them off: “So you’ve known Laurel since she was a little girl?”

“Off and on, I guess you could say that. I knew her better when she was a little girl than I have since. After the war, her parents used to live in the Palisades.” He pointed downhill toward the sea. “And they used to drop her off here when they needed a baby-sitter. She was a sweet little thing, but also a handful sometimes.”

“What did she do?”

“She used to run away, just like she did on you. Sometimes I’d spend a couple of hours looking for her. If she’d been doing it for fun, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she wasn’t. She used to be really scared. You’d think I spent a lot of time beating on her. But I never raised a hand to the little tyke. I was fond of her.” His voice and eyes had softened.

“What was she scared of?”

“Just about everything. She couldn’t stand any kind of trouble – anybody lifting his hand or raising his voice in anger. If a bird flew into the window glass and got killed, it used to shake her up for half a day. I remember once I threw a stone at a cat that didn’t belong here. I wasn’t aiming to hit him, just scare him off. But I hit him and he let out a yowl and Miss Laurel saw it happen. She went and hid for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Where would she hide?”

“She had several places. She kept changing them on me. The room back of the garage. The pool house. The storage shed. Those were some of them.”

“Show me the places, will you?”

“Tonight?”

“She may not last till morning.”

He looked closely into my face. “You honestly think she could be holed up around here?”

“It’s a possibility. Sometimes when people are badly shaken they go back to childish patterns.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. I’ve done it myself.”

He led me around the house to the garage and unlocked the door. The building contained three cars – a middle-aged Continental, a new Ford, a half-ton GMC pickup – and there was no space for another car. That made me wonder if Captain Somerville wasn’t at home after all.

Laurel wasn’t in any of the cars, or in the toolroom or the half-bathroom behind the garage. Smith picked up a flashlight in the toolroom. We went down the hillside through trees, bumping our heads on unripe oranges. He opened the door of the storage shed.

It was built of roughly finished redwood, now weathered light, and filled with the random accumulations of years: old furniture, shelves of fading books, dusty luggage covered with foreign labels, a rusted filing cabinet, garden tools and insecticides and rat poison. No Laurel. Smith’s flashlight beam probed the dark corners for her.

He let the beam rest for a moment on a wooden sea chest painted blue and stenciled in red with the Captain’s name and rank and the name of a U.S. Navy vessel, Canaan Sound. Then he raised the light to a picture that hung on the rough wall above the chest. The picture had a twisted black frame out of which a man in a captain’s hat smiled through cracked dusty glass.

“That was the Captain before he lost his ship,” Smith said.

He kept his light on the picture while I studied it. The Captain had been handsome and confident, though his half-smiling mouth could hardly support the boldness of his eyes.

When we went outside, I said, “Are you sure the Captain isn’t home tonight?”

“What makes you think he is?”

“You’re showing me everything but the inside of the house.”

“Those are my orders. Nobody is allowed in the house.”

We went along a flagstone path to the pool house. The pump inside was breathing like a marathon runner. Under that noise I could hear the scurrying sounds of a small animal.

Smith handed me the flashlight and took the gun from his pocket. It looked like a .38 with a two-inch barrel.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“I hear a rat in there. Try and get the light on him.”

He pulled the door open with his crippled hand. The pool house was full of faint moving lights from the heater. I turned the flashlight on the cement floor, fearful for an instant that Laurel might be in there and be accidentally shot.

A bright-eyed rat was caught in the light. He ran for the drainage hole. Before he got there, the gun went off beside me. The rat fell in a red blur, twitched, and lay still.