The Instant Enemy

chapter 12

THE TURNING OFF of the engine woke me from dreams of supersonic flight. My car was standing beside the pumps in the hard white glare of the Power Plus station. A young man in coveralls came out of the office. He had one thin leg and wore a special boot. He moved with great rapidity, though it was late and his face was drawn.

“What can I do for you?” he asked Sebastian.

“I called you earlier. About my daughter.” His voice was low and uncertain, like a beggar’s.

“I see.” The pain and fatigue in the attendant’s face turned into sympathy, and altered the quality of the transaction. “Is she a runaway, something like that?”

“Something like that.” I got out of the car to talk to him. “Was she driving a green compact?”

“Yeah. She stopped it right where your car is standing, asked me to fill the tank. It was nearly empty, it took over nineteen gallons.”

“Did you see the others?”

“There was only the one other, the big fellow with the crew cut. He stayed in the car until he saw her phoning. She said she wanted to go to the ladies’ room. I left the pump running and went to the office to get the key for her. Then she asked me if she could use the phone for a distance call. I said, if she made it collect, which she did. I stayed there to monitor her, like. Then the other one came charging in and made her quit.”

“Did he use force?”

“He didn’t hit her. He put his arms around her, more like a hug. Then she broke down and cried, and he took her back to the car. She paid for the gas and drove away herself, in the direction of town.” He gestured toward Santa Teresa.

“You didn’t see a gun?”

“No. She acted afraid of him, though.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Just when he came charging into the office. He said she was crazy to call her folks, that they were her worst enemies.”

Sebastian muttered something inarticulate.

“Hers, or his?” I said.

“Both of them. I think he said ‘their worst enemies.’ ”

“You’re a good witness. What’s your name?”

“Fred Cram.”

I offered him a dollar.

“You don’t have to pay me.” He spoke with gentle force. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. Maybe I should have tried to stop them, or called the police or something. Only I didn’t think I had the right.”

An old Chevrolet painted with brown undercoat rolled in from the street and stopped beside the pumps. A couple of teen-age boys occupied the front seat. The bare feet of two others projected from the rear window. The driver honked for service.

I asked Fred Cram again: “Are you sure there wasn’t a third person in the car?”

He pondered the question. “Not unless you count the dog.”

“What kind of a dog?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like a big one.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“It was in the trunk. I could hear it breathing and kind of whining.”

“How do you know it was a dog?”

“She said so.”

Sebastian groaned.

“You mean it was a human being in there?” the young man said.

“I don’t know.”

Fred Cram gave me a long questioning look. His face saddened as he realized the depth of the trouble he had dipped into. Then the teen-ager honked again, imperiously, and he swung away on his mismatched legs.

“Jesus,” Sebastian said in the car. “It really happened. We’ve got to get her back, Archer.”

“We will.” I didn’t let him hear my doubts, the doubt that we could find her, the graver doubt that the law would let him keep her if we did. “The best contribution you can make is to get in touch with your wife and stay by a telephone. Sandy phoned home once, she may again.”

“If he lets her.”

But he accepted my suggestion. We checked into adjoining rooms in a beach motel near the center of Santa Teresa. It was the depth of the winter season, and the place was almost deserted. The yacht harbor under my window hung in the starlight like a dim white fantasy of summer.

The keyboy opened the door between our two rooms. I listened to Sebastian talking to his wife on the telephone. He told her with brisk cheerfulness that the case was progressing rapidly and she had nothing to worry about at all. The fine front he was putting on reminded me somehow of the young man with the thin leg, limping faster than other men could walk.

“I love you, too,” Sebastian said, and hung up.

I went to the doorway. “How is your wife taking this?”

“Terrific. She’s terrific.”

But his gaze wandered around the room, taking in the details of his catastrophe: the lonely bed, the homeless walls, and my face watching him.

I tried to smile. “I’m going out for a bit. I’ll check back with you later.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Pay a couple of visits to people in town.”

“It’s late for visiting.”

“All the better. They’re more likely to be home.”

I went back into my room, got the directory out of the drawer in the telephone table, and looked up Henry Langston, the counsellor who had had a run-in with Davy Spanner. A young girl answered Langston’s phone, and for a moment I thought by some remarkable coincidence it was Sandy.

“Who is that?” I asked her.

“Elaine, I’m just the baby-sitter. Mr. and Mrs. Langston are out for the evening.”

“When do you expect them back?”

“They promised by midnight. You want to leave a message?”

“No thanks.”

Coincidences seldom happen in my work. If you dig deep enough, you can nearly always find their single bifurcating roots. It was probably no coincidence that Jack Fleischer had taken off, presumably for his home in Santa Teresa, immediately after Laurel Smith was beaten. I looked him up in the directory and found his address: 33 Pine Street.

It was a street of older middle-class houses, appropriately pine-shaded, within walking distance of the courthouse. Most of the houses in the block were dark. I parked at the corner in front of an old church, and walked along the street looking for Fleischer’s number with my flashlight.

I found two rusty metal three’s attached to the porch of a two-story white frame house. There was light in the house, dim yellow behind drawn blinds. I knocked on the front door.

Uncertain footsteps approached the door and a woman’s voice spoke through it: “What do you want?”

“Is Mr. Fleischer home?”

“No.”

But she opened the door in order to peer out at me. She was a middle-aged blond woman whose face had been carefully made up at some point earlier in the day. Erosion had set in. In the midst of it her eyes regarded me with that steady look of hurt suspicion which takes years to develop.

There was gin on her breath, and it triggered an association in my mind. She looked enough like Laurel Smith to be her older sister.

“Mrs. Fleischer?”

She nodded grimly. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“I’m better acquainted with your husband. Do you know where I can find him?”

She spread her hands. Under her quilted pink housecoat her body was sullen. “Search me.”

“It’s pretty important. I’ve come all the way from Los Angeles.”

Her hand came out and clenched on my arm. I felt like a stand-in for Fleischer. “What’s Jack been doing down there?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“You can tell me. I’m his wife.” She jerked at my arm. “Come in, I’ll give you a drink. Any friend of Jack’s–”

I let her take me into the large drab living room. It had an air of not being lived in, just being endured. The main ornaments of the room were Fleischer’s shooting trophies on the mantel.

“What will you have? I’m drinking gin on the rocks.”

“That will suit me.”

She padded out of the room and come back with lowball glasses full of ice and gin.

I sipped at mine. “Cheers.”

“Here, have a seat.” She indicated a slip-covered davenport and sat down crowding me. “You were going to tell me what Jack is up to.”

“I don’t know all the ramifications. He seems to be doing an investigative job–”

She shut me off impatiently. “Don’t let him fool you. And don’t you cover up for him, either. There’s a woman in it, isn’t there? He’s got another place in L.A. and that woman is living with him again. Isn’t that right?”

“You know him better than I do.”

“You bet I do. We’ve been married for thirty years, and for half of those thirty years he’s been chasing the same skirt.” She leaned toward me with an avid mouth. “Have you seen the woman?”

“I’ve seen her.”

“Say I show you a picture of her,” she said, “are you willing to tell me if it’s the same woman?”

“If you’ll help me locate Jack.”

She gave my question serious thought. “He’s headed for the Bay area, God knows why. I thought at least he’d be staying overnight. But he took a shower and changed his clothes and ate the dinner I cooked for him, and then he was off again.”

“Where in the Bay area?”

“The Peninsula. I heard him call Palo Alto before he left. He made a reservation at the Sandman Motor Hotel. That’s all I know. He doesn’t tell me anything any more, and I know why. He’s after that piece of skirt again. He had that light in his eye.” Her voice buzzed with resentment, like a hornet caught in a web. She drowned it with gin. “I’ll show you her picture.”

She set down her empty glass on a table inset with polished bits of stone, left the room and came back. She thrust a small photograph at me, and turned up the three-way lamp.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

It was a full-face picture of Laurel Smith, taken when she was a dark-haired girl in her twenties. Even in this small and carelessly printed photograph, her beauty showed through. I remembered her beaten face as they lifted her into the ambulance, and I had a delayed shock, a sense of something valuable being destroyed by time and violence.

Mrs. Fleischer repeated her question. I answered her carefully: “I think it is. Where did you get this picture?”

“I got it out of Jack’s wallet while he was taking his shower. He started carrying it again. It’s an old picture he’s had for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Let’s see.” She counted on her fingers. “Fifteen years. It was fifteen years ago he picked her up. He kept her in Rodeo City, claimed she was a witness, that everything he did was strictly business. But the only crime she ever witnessed was Deputy Jack Fleischer taking off his pants.”

There was sly satisfaction in her eyes. She was betraying her husband to me just as completely as he had betrayed her. And as an old cop’s wife, she was betraying herself.

She took the picture and laid it on the table and picked up her glass. “Drink up. We’ll have another.”

I didn’t argue. Cases break in different ways. This case was opening, not like a door or even a grave, certainly not like a rose or any flower, but opening like an old sad blonde with darkness at her core.

I emptied my glass, and she took it out to the kitchen for a refill. I think while she was out of the room she sneaked an extra drink for herself. Coming back she bumped the doorframe of the living room and spilled gin on her hands.

I took both glasses from her and set them down on the stony table. She swayed in front of me, her eyes unfocused. She forced them back into focus, the cobweb of fine lines surrounding them cutting deep into her flesh.

“It’s the same woman, isn’t it?” she said.

“I’m pretty sure it is. Do you know her name?”

“She called herself Laurel Smith in Rodeo City.”

“She still does.”

“Jack’s living with her in L.A., isn’t he?”

“Nobody’s living with her that I know of.”

“Don’t try to kid me. You men are always covering up for each other. But I know when a man’s spending money on a woman. He took more than a thousand dollars out of our savings account in less than a month. And I have to beg him for twelve dollars to get my hair done.” She pushed her fingers through her fine dry wavy hair. “Is she still pretty?”

“Pretty enough.” I gathered my élan together, and paid her a compliment. “As a matter of fact, she looks quite a bit like you.”

“They always do. The women he goes for always look like me. But that’s no comfort, they’re always younger.” Her voice was like a flagellant’s whip, turned against herself. She turned it against Fleischer: “The dirty creep! He has the almighty guts to spend our hard-earned money on that bag. Then he comes home and tells me he’s investing it, going to make us rich for the rest of our lives.”

“Did he say how?”

“You ought to know. You’re one of his cronies, aren’t you?”

She picked up her glass and drained it. She looked ready to throw the empty glass at my head. I wasn’t her husband, but I wore pants.

“Drink up your drink,” she said. “I drank up mine.”

“We’ve had enough.”

“That’s what you think.”

She carried her glass out of the room. Her mules slid along the floor and her body leaned as if she was on an irreversible slope, sliding away forever into the limbo of deserted women. I heard her smashing something in the kitchen. I looked in through the open door and saw her breaking dishes in the sink.

I didn’t interfere. They were her dishes. I went back through the living room, took Laurel’s picture from the table, and left the house.

On the porch next door, a white-haired man wearing a bathrobe stood in a listening attitude. When he saw me, he turned away and went into the house. I heard him say before he closed the door:

“Jack Fleischer’s home again.”