The Instant Enemy

chapter 9

ON MY WAY BACK into the city I stopped at the Laurel Apartments to see if Davy and Sandy had come back there. The door of Laurel Smith’s apartment was standing partly open. She didn’t answer when I knocked. I listened, and heard the sound of snoring deep inside the place. I guessed that Laurel had drunk herself unconscious.

But when I went in and found her in the bathtub, I saw that she’d been hit by something heavier than alcohol. Her nose was bleeding and swollen; her eyes were puffed shut, her lips cut. The bathtub was dry, except for splashes of blood. Laurel still had on her orange and black housecoat.

I went to the phone and called the police, and asked at the same time for an ambulance. In the minutes before they arrived I gave the place a quick shakedown. The first thing I looked at was the portable television set. Laurel’s account of winning it in a contest had sounded to me like a plant.

I took the back off. Glued to the inside of the cabinet was a plastic-encased bug, a miniature radio transmitter no larger than a pack of cigarettes. I left the bug where it was, and replaced the back of the set.

The other unusual thing I found was a negative fact. Nothing I came across in my hurried search suggested that Laurel Smith had a personal history: no letters or old photographs or documents. I did find, in a purse in a bedroom drawer, a savings bank book with deposits totaling over six thousand dollars, and a dog-eared Social Security card in the name of Laurel Blevins.

The same drawer contained a sparsely populated address-book in which I found two names I recognized: Jacob Belsize, and Mr. and Mrs. Edward Spanner. I made a note of the Spanners’ address, which wasn’t too far from my own apartment in West Los Angeles. Then I put everything back in the drawer and pushed it shut.

I could hear the sound of the police siren rising from Pacific Coast Highway. It was a sound I hated: the howl of disaster in the urban barrens. It climbed Chautauqua and died like a wolf in Elder Street. The ambulance was whining in the distance.

I knew the two policemen who came in. Janowski and Prince were detective-sergeants from the Purdue Street station, men in their late thirties who were proud of their work and good at it. I had to tell them what I was doing there, but I suppressed Sandy’s name. I gave them Davy Spanner’s.

Prince said: “Did Spanner do that?” He jerked his thumb toward the bathroom, where by now two ambulance men were getting Laurel Smith onto a stretcher.

“I doubt it. They were good friends.”

“How good?” Janowski said. He was a homely broad-faced Baltic type with a fair delicate skin.

“She gave him a job when he got out of jail.”

“That’s pretty good friends,” Prince said. “What was he in for?”

“Car theft.”

“So now he’s doing postgraduate work in mayhem.” Prince took crime personally. He was a former Golden Gloves welterweight who could have gone either way in his own life. Like me.

I didn’t argue with them. If they picked up Davy, they’d probably be doing him a favor. And the afternoon was slipping away. I wanted to see the Spanners before it got too late.

We went outside and watched Laurel Smith being lifted into the ambulance. Three or four of the apartment dwellers, all women, had drifted out onto the sidewalk. Laurel was their landlady, and they undoubtedly knew her, but they didn’t come too near. The snoring woman gave off the germs of disaster.

Janowski said to one of the attendants: “How bad is she hurt?”

“It’s hard to say, with head injuries. She has a broken nose, and jaw, maybe a fractured skull. I don’t think it was done with fists.”

“With what?”

“A sap, or a truncheon.”

Prince was questioning the women from the apartment building: none of them had heard or seen a thing. They were quiet and subdued, like birds when a hawk is in the neighborhood.

The ambulance rolled away. The women went into the building. Prince got into the police car and made a report in a low-pitched monotone.

Janowski went back into Laurel’s apartment. I walked up to Los Baños Street for a second look at the house with volcanic rock built into the front. The drapes were still drawn. The Cougar was no longer in the driveway.

I wandered around to the back and found an unblinded sliding glass door. The room inside contained no furniture. I looked around the small back yard. It was overgrown with dry crabgrass, which the rains had failed to revive, and surrounded by a five-foot grapestake fence.

A woman looked over the fence from the next yard. She was an attempted blonde whose eyes were magnified by purple eye shadow.

“What do you want?”

“I’m looking for the man of the house.”

“Big fellow with a bald head?”

“That’s him.”

“He left about an hour ago. It looked to me like he was moving out. Which would suit me just fine.”

“How so?”

She threw me a sorrowful purple look over the grapestake fence. “You a friend of his?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What do you want with him?”

“He was the one who wanted me. He called me out here to do some repairs.”

“On that electronic equipment he had?”

“Right.”

“You’re too late. He took it with him. Piled it in the trunk of his car and took off. Good riddance, I say.”

“Did he cause you any trouble?”

“Nothing you could put your finger on. But it was creepy having him next door, sitting all alone in an empty house. I think he’s cracked myself.”

“How do you know the house was empty?”

“I have my two good eyes,” she said. “All he took in when he moved in was a camp cot and a folding chair and a card table and that radio equipment. And that was all he took out when he left.”

“How long was he here?”

“A couple of weeks, off and on. I was getting ready to complain to Mr. Santee. It runs down the neighborhood when you don’t put furniture in a house.”

“Who’s Mr. Santee?”

“Alex Santee. The agent I rent from. He’s agent for that house, too.”

“Where can I find Mr. Santee?”

“He has an office on Sunset.” She pointed toward the Palisades downtown. “You’ve got to excuse me now, I’ve got something on the stove.”

I went to the other side of the yard and looked downhill across several other back yards. I could see Laurel Smith’s apartment. Her open door was in my direct line of vision. Detective-Sergeant Janowski came out and closed the door.