The Instant Enemy

chapter 10

ALEX SANTEE was a small middle-aged man with a bold stare masked by glasses. He was just closing his real-estate office when I arrived, but he was glad to stay open for a prospect.

“I only have a few minutes, though. I’ve an appointment to show a house.”

“I’m interested in a house on Los Baños Street. 702, the one with the lava front.”

“It is distinctive, isn’t it? Unfortunately it’s rented.”

“Since when? It’s standing empty.”

“Since November 15 of this year. Do you mean the party hasn’t moved in yet?”

“He’s been and gone, according to the neighbors. Moved out today.”

“That’s peculiar.” Santee shrugged. “Well, that’s his privilege. If Fleischer has moved out, the house will be available for rental on the fifteenth of this month. Three hundred and fifty a month on a one-year lease, first and last months payable in advance.”

“Maybe I better talk to him first. Did you say his name was Fleischer?”

“Jack Fleischer.” Santee looked it up in his file and spelled it out. “The address he gave me was the Dorinda Hotel in Santa Monica.”

“Did he say what business he was in?”

“He’s a retired sheriff from someplace up north.” He consulted the file again. “Santa Teresa. Maybe he decided to go back there.”

The desk clerk at the Dorinda Hotel, a sad man with an exuberant pompadour hairpiece, didn’t remember Jack Fleischer at first. After some research in the register he established that about a month ago, early in November, Fleischer had stayed there two nights.

In a passageway at the rear of the lobby, I found a phone booth and called the Spanners’ number. A man’s deep voice answered: “This is the Edward Spanner residence.”

“Mr. Spanner?”

“Yes.”

“This is Lew Archer. Mr. Jacob Belsize gave me your name. I’m conducting an investigation and I’d like very much to talk to you–”

“About Davy?” His voice had thinned.

“About Davy and a number of other things.”

“Has he done something wrong again?”

“His employer has been beaten up. They just took her to the hospital.”

“You mean Mrs. Smith? He never hurt a woman before.”

“I’m not saying he did this. You know him better than anybody does, Mr. Spanner. Please give me a few minutes.”

“But we were just sitting down to supper. I don’t know why you people can’t leave us alone. Davy hasn’t lived with us for years. We never did adopt him, we’re not legally responsible.”

I cut him short: “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

The sun was setting as I left the hotel. It looked like a wildfire threatening the western edge of the city. Night comes quickly in Los Angeles. The fire was burnt out when I reached the Spanner house, and evening hung like thin smoke in the air.

It was a prewar stucco bungalow squeezed into a row of other houses like it. I knocked on the front door, and Edward Spanner opened it reluctantly. He was a tall thin man with a long face and emotional eyes. He had a lot of black hair, not only on his head but on his arms and on the backs of his hands. He was wearing a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and gave off an old-fashioned impression, almost an odor, of soured good will.

“Come in, Mr. Archer. Welcome to our abode.” He sounded like a man who had taught himself to speak correctly by reading books.

He took me through the living room, with its threadbare furnishings and its mottoes on the walls, into the kitchen where his wife was sitting at the table. She wore a plain housedress which emphasized the angularity of her body. There were marks of suffering on her face, relieved by a soft mouth and responsive eyes.

The Spanners resembled each other, and seemed very much aware of each other, unusually so for middle-aged people. Mrs. Spanner seemed rather afraid of her husband, or afraid for him.

“This is Mr. Archer, Martha. He wants to talk about Davy.”

She hung her head. Her husband said by way of explanation: “Since you called me, my wife has made a little confession. Davy was here this afternoon while I was working. Apparently she wasn’t going to tell me.” He was speaking more to her than to me. “For all I know he comes here every day behind my back.”

He’d gone too far, and she caught him off balance. “That isn’t so, and you know it. And I was so going to tell you. I simply didn’t want it to spoil your dinner.” She turned to me, evading the direct confrontation with Spanner. “My husband has an ulcer. This business has been hard on both of us.”

As if to illustrate her words, Spanner sat down at the head of the table and let his arms hang loose. A half-eaten plate of brown stew lay in front of him, glazing. I sat facing his wife across the table.

“When was Davy here?”

“A couple of hours ago,” she said.

“Was anybody with him?”

“He had his girl friend with him. His fiancée. She’s a pretty girl.” The woman seemed surprised.

“What kind of a mood were they in?”

“They both seemed quite excited. They’re planning to get married, you know.”

Edward Spanner uttered a dry snortlike laugh.

“Did Davy tell you that?” I asked his wife.

“They both did.” She smiled a little dreamily. “I realize they’re young. But I was glad to see he picked a nice girl. I gave them a ten-dollar bill for a wedding present.”

Spanner cried out in pain: “You gave him ten dollars? I cut ten heads of hair to clear ten dollars.”

“I saved up the money. It wasn’t your money.”

Spanner shook his doleful head. “No wonder he went bad. From the first day he came into our household you spoiled him rotten.”

“I didn’t. I gave him affection. He needed some, after those years in the orphanage.”

She leaned over and touched her husband’s shoulder, almost as if he and Davy were the same to her.

He rebounded into deeper despair: “We should have left him in the orphanage.”

“You don’t mean that, Edward. The three of us had ten good years.”

“Did we? Hardly a day went by that I didn’t have to use the razor strap on him. If I never heard of Davy again, I’d–”

She touched his mouth. “Don’t say it. You care about him just as much as I do.”

“After what he did to us?”

She looked across him at me. “My husband can’t help feeling bitter. He put a lot of stock in Davy. He was a real good father to him, too. But Davy needed more than we could give him. And when he got into trouble the first time the Holy Brethren of the Immaculate Conception asked Edward to step aside as a lay preacher. That was a terrible blow to him, and with one thing and another we left town and moved here. Then Edward came down with his ulcer, and after that he was out of work for a long time – most of the last three years. Under the circumstances we couldn’t do much for Davy. He was running loose by that time, anyway, running loose and living on his own most of the time.”

Spanner was embarrassed by his wife’s candor: “This is all ancient history.”

“It’s what I came to hear. You say you moved here from another town?”

“We lived most of our lives in Santa Teresa,” she said.

“Do you know a man named Jack Fleischer?”

She looked at her husband. “Isn’t that the name of the man who was here last month?”

I prompted them: “Big man with a bald head? Claims to be a retired policeman.”

“That’s him,” she said. “He asked us a lot of questions about Davy, mainly his background. We told him what little we knew. We got him out of the Santa Teresa Shelter when he was six years old. He didn’t have a last name, and so we gave him ours. I wanted to adopt him, but Edward felt we weren’t up to the responsibility.”

“She means,” Spanner put in, “that if we adopted him the county wouldn’t pay us for his board.”

“But we treated him just like he was our own. We never had any children of our own. And I’ll never forget the first time we saw him in the supervisor’s office at the Shelter. He came right over to us and stood beside Edward and wouldn’t go away. ‘I want to stand beside the man,’ was what he said. You remember, Edward.”

He remembered. There was sorrowful pride in his eyes.

“Now he stands as tall as you do. I wish you’d seen him today.”

She was quite a woman, I thought: trying to create a family out of a runaway boy and a reluctant husband, a wholeness out of disappointed lives.

“Do you know who his real parents were, Mrs. Spanner?”

“No, he was just an orphan. Some fieldworker died and left him in the tules. I found that out from the other man – Fleischer.”

“Did Fleischer say why he was interested in Davy?”

“I didn’t ask him. I was afraid to ask, with Davy on probation and all.” She hesitated, peering into my face. “Do you mind if I ask you the same question?”

Spanner answered for me: “Mrs. Laurel Smith got beat up. I told you that.”

Her eyes widened. “Davy wouldn’t do that to Mrs. Smith. She was the best friend he had.”

“I don’t know what he’d do,” Spanner said morosely. “Remember he hit a high-school teacher and that was the beginning of all our trouble.”

“Was it a woman teacher?” I said.

“No, it was a man. Mr. Langston at the high school. There’s one thing you can’t get away with, and that’s hitting a teacher. They wouldn’t let him back in school after that. We didn’t know what to do with him. He couldn’t get a job. It’s one reason we moved down here. Nothing went right for us after that.” He spoke of the move as if it had been a banishment.

“There was more to it than hitting a teacher,” his wife said. “Henry Langston wasn’t a teacher really. He was what they call a counselor. He was trying to counsel Davy when it happened.”

“Counsel him on what?”

“I never did get that clear.”

Spanner turned to her: “Davy has mental trouble. You never faced up to that. But it’s time you did. He had mental trouble from the time we took him out of the Shelter. He never warmed up to me. He was never a normal boy.”

Slowly she wagged her head from side to side in stubborn negation. “I don’t believe it.”

Their argument had evidently been going on for years. Probably it would last as long as they did. I interrupted it: “You saw him today, Mrs. Spanner. Did he seem to have trouble on his mind?”

“Well, he’s never cheerful. And he seemed to be pretty tense. Any young man is, these days, when he’s getting ready to marry.”

“Were they serious about getting married?”

“I’d say very serious. They could hardly wait.” She turned to her husband: “I didn’t mean to tell you this, but I guess it should all come out. Davy thought that maybe you would marry them. I explained you had no legal right, being just a lay preacher.”

“I wouldn’t marry him to anybody, anyway. I’ve got too much respect for the race of females.”

“Did they say anything more about their plans, Mrs. Spanner? Where did they plan to get married?”

“They didn’t say.”

“And you don’t know where they went after they left here?”

“No, I don’t.” But her eyes seemed to focus inward, as if she was remembering something.

“Didn’t they give you some inkling?”

She hesitated. “You never answered my question. Why are you so interested? You don’t really think he beat up Mrs. Smith?”

“No. But people are always surprising me.”

She studied my face, leaning her elbows on the table. “You don’t talk like a policeman. Are you one?”

“I used to be. I’m a private detective now – I’m not trying to pin anything on Davy.”

“What are you trying to do?”

“Make sure the girl is safe. Her father hired me for that. She’s only seventeen. She should have been in school today, not bucketing around the countryside.”

No matter how unrewarding their own married lives may be, women seem to love the idea of weddings. Mrs. Spanner’s wedding dream died hard. I watched it die.

“When I was out here in the kitchen making tea for them,” she said, “I heard them talking in the living room. They were reading the wall mottoes out loud and making fun of them. That wasn’t very nice, but maybe I shouldn’t have been listening to them. Anyway, they made a joke about the Unseen Guest. Davy said that Daddy Warbucks was going to have an unseen guest tonight.”

Spanner exploded: “That’s blasphemy!”

“Was anything else said on the subject?”

“He asked the girl was she sure she could get him in. She said it would be easy, Louis knew her.”

“Louis?” I said. “Or Lupe?”

“It could have been Lupe. Yes, I’m pretty sure it was. Do you know who they were talking about?”

“I’m afraid I do. May I use your telephone?”

“Long as it isn’t long distance,” Spanner said prudently.

I gave him a dollar and called the Hacketts’ number in Malibu. A woman’s voice which I didn’t recognize at first answered the phone. I said:

“Is Stephen Hackett there?”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Lew Archer. Is that Mrs. Marburg?”

“It is.” Her voice was thin and dry. “You were a good prophet, Mr. Archer.”

“Has something happened to your son?”

“You’re such a good prophet I wonder if it’s prophecy. Where are you?”

“In West Los Angeles.”

“Come out here right away, will you? I’ll tell my husband to open the gate.”

I left without telling the Spanners where I was going or why. On my way to Malibu I stopped at my apartment to pick up a revolver.