The Instant Enemy

chapter 13

HENRY LANGSTON’S one-story house was in a newer tract on the northern outskirts of the city. The lights were on, both inside and out. The doors of the attached garage were open but there was no car in it, only a child’s tricycle standing against one wall.

A young woman wearing a fur-collared coat came out of the house. She had bright dark eyes and a piquant oval face. She stopped short before she reached me, ready to be alarmed.

“I’m looking for Mr. Langston,” I told her.

“Why? Has something happened?”

“I’ve no reason to think so.”

“But it’s so late.”

“I’m sorry. I tried to get him earlier. Is he home now?”

She glanced over her shoulder at the open front door. She was disturbed by me, as if I carried trouble like a communicable disease from the last house I had visited.

I smiled a midnight smile. “Don’t get upset. This has nothing to do with you. I have some questions to ask him about one of his former students.”

“I’m sure he won’t want to talk to you tonight.”

“I’m sure he will. Tell him it has to do with Davy Spanner.”

“Him again.” She tossed her head like a rival, then bit her lip. “Is Davy in trouble again, or is it still?”

“I prefer to discuss that with your husband. You are Mrs. Langston?”

“Yes, and I’m cold and tired and ready to go to bed, and we had a lovely evening with some friends, and now it’s spoiled.” Perhaps she had had a drink or two, but she was deliberately indulging her feelings. She was pretty enough to do that.

“I’m sorry.”

“If you’re so sorry, go away.”

She went inside and slammed the door with a carefully calculated degree of force, between six and seven on the Richter scale. I stood where I was on the flagstone walk. Mrs. Langston reopened the door, carefully, like somebody reopening a law case.

“I apologize. I know it must be important or you wouldn’t be here. Are you a policeman?”

“A private detective. My name is Archer.”

“Henry should be back any minute. He’s just driving the baby-sitter home. Come in, it’s a chilly night.”

She backed into the living room. I followed her. The room was jammed with furniture and books. A closed baby grand piano was its central feature.

Mrs. Langston stood beside it like a nervous soloist. “Let me make you some coffee.”

“Please don’t bother. And please don’t be afraid.”

“It’s not your fault. I’m scared of Davy Spanner.”

“You were scared before his name came up.”

“Was I? I guess you’re right. You looked at me in such a strange way, as if I was going to die.”

I didn’t bother reminding her that she was going to. She took off her coat. She looked about six months pregnant.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’m just plain going to bed. Please don’t keep Henry up all night.”

“I’ll try not to. Good night.”

She fluttered her fingers at me, leaving a kind of tremulous feeling in the room. When I heard the car in the driveway I went outside.

Langston got out, leaving his station wagon outside the garage with the headlights on and the engine running. A sense of alarm seemed to be in the air, and I could see it reflected in his face. He was a large, homely, sandy-haired young man with sensitive eyes.

“Is Kate all right?”

“Your wife is fine. She let me in and went to bed.” I told him who I was. “Davy Spanner was in town tonight.”

Langston’s eyes seemed to withdraw, as if I’d touched invisible antennae. He went back to his wagon and turned off the engine and the headlights.

“We’ll talk in the car, okay? I don’t want to disturb her.”

We got into the front seat, closing the doors without slamming them.

“You didn’t see Davy tonight by any chance?”

He hesitated before answering. “Yes, I did. Briefly.”

“Where?”

“He came here to my house.”

“About what time?”

“Eight o’clock. Kate had gone to pick up Elaine – that’s the high-school girl who sits with Junior – and I was just as glad she was out of the house. Fortunately he left before she got back. Davy upsets Kate basically, you know?”

“She isn’t the only one.”

Langston gave me a sideways look. “Has he been beating his head on the wall again?”

“If that’s what you call it.”

“Davy’s a self-destroyer.”

“It’s the other people I’m worried about. Was the girl Sandy with him?”

“Very much so. She’s one of the reasons he came to me tonight. He wanted me to look after her for him. Me and Kate, that is. He said that they were going to get married but first he had a job to do. It would take a day or two.”

“Did he say what the job was?”

“No. I gathered it was going to be rough. He thought it would be nice if Sandy stayed with us until he got through with it.”

“Why you?”

“It’s what I often ask myself,” he said with a quick wry smile. “Why me? The answer is, I asked for it. I got very deeply involved with Davy’s problems, years ago, and once that happens it’s very hard to, you know, wean your affections. It almost broke up my marriage at one point. Never again. I told him what he suggested was impossible. He took it hard, as if I was letting him down. But it was a question of who – of whom – I was going to let down, Davy or my own family.”

“How did the girl react?”

“I never did get a chance to talk to her. I could see her sitting in their car, looking rather pale and tense.” He pointed with his thumb toward the street where my car was standing. “But I couldn’t take the responsibility for her. The truth is I wanted them out of here before Kate returned. She’s going to have another child, and she had a very hard time with the first – with Junior. I have to protect her from too much excitement – alarms and excursions.”

“Of course.”

“There have to be priorities,” he went on. “Otherwise you spread yourself thin and the whole structure collapses.” He sounded like an overconscientious man repeating a hard lesson he was trying to learn. But he couldn’t help caring about the girl. “She really is his fiancée, isn’t she?”

“They think so. She’s a runaway, though, and only seventeen. Her parents originally hired me to get her back.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

“Partly. What other reasons did Davy have for coming to you?”

“Other reasons?”

“You said the girl was one reason. What were the others?”

“It had to do with history,” he said rather obscurely. “He wanted some information, essentially information about himself. As I was saying, I delved pretty deeply into his case several years ago, when he was one of our students at the high school. I realize now I went too deep. I’d had some therapy when I was in college, and I thought I could use it to help him. But something happened, I don’t know how to explain it.”

His look was puzzled and inward, as if he was trying to explain the past to himself: “Something seemed to tear like a membrane in between us. There were times when our identities seemed to get mixed up. I could actually feel his feelings and think his thoughts, and I felt this terrible empathy–” He broke off. “Has that ever happened to you?”

“No. Unless you count women, in very special circumstances.”

“Women?” he said in his puzzled way. “Kate is as strange to me as the mountains of the moon. That doesn’t mean I don’t love her. I worship her.”

“Fine. You were going to tell me about Davy’s history.”

“He didn’t have any history, that was the trouble. I thought I could help him by providing some. But it turned out he couldn’t handle it. Neither could I, really. I was the one who mishandled the situation, since I was the counselor and he was just a troubled sixteen-year-old.”

Langston was troubled, too. His mind seemed to be struggling through magnetic fields of memory which put a twist on everything he said. I prompted him again: “Is it true his father was killed?”

He gave me a quick stabbing look. “You know about his father’s death?”

“Just that. How did it happen?”

“I never did find out for sure. Apparently he fell under a train near Rodeo City. The train wheels passed over him and cut his head off.” Langston drew his fingers across his own throat. “He was a young man, younger than I am now.”

“What was his name?”

“Nobody seems to know. He wasn’t carrying any identification. According to the theory of the deputy sheriff who handled the case–”

“Jack Fleischer?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“I’m looking forward to knowing him. What was his theory?”

“That the man was a migrant worker who was riding the rods and accidentally fell off. But there’s one big trouble with that theory. He had a three-year-old boy with him and if he fell off the moving train, Davy must have fallen off, too. But he was unhurt, at least in the physical sense.

“In the psychic sense,” he added, “Davy was badly hurt. I’m sure it’s the root of his trouble. He sat beside the railroad tracks all night with that headless corpse.” His voice had dropped so low I could barely hear him.

“How do you know that?”

“Deputy Fleischer found him beside the body. Davy confirmed this himself. I helped him to dredge up the memory. I thought it would be good for him. But I’m afraid it wasn’t. I realize now I was playing God, practicing psychiatry without a license.” His voice was contrite.

“He went completely wild and attacked me. We were in my office at the high school, and there wasn’t any way I could keep it quiet. As a matter of fact he gave me quite a beating. The school expelled him, over my protests. It was all I could do to keep him out of reform school.”

“Why did you want to?”

“I felt guilty, of course. I’d been playing with black magic – these repressed memories are as powerful as any magic – and the thing blew up in both our faces. He suffered permanent damage.”

“That happened long before. You’re still playing God,” I said.

“I know the extent of my responsibility. I helped to bring that terrible memory back to his conscious mind. He’s been fixed on it ever since.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, though. That’s the hell of it. He came here tonight and insisted I tell him exactly where his father’s corpse was found. It’s still the dominant thing in his mind.”

“Did you tell him?”

“Yes. It was the only way to get rid of him.”

“Can you take me to the place? Tonight?”

“I could. But it’s at least an hour’s drive up the coast.” He looked at his watch. “It’s past twelve thirty. If I take you, I won’t get home before three. And I have to be at school at a quarter to eight.”

“Forget about school. You said yourself there are priorities. This one has to do with a man’s life or death.”

“What man?”

I told Langston about the breathing in the trunk. “I thought at first was a snatch for money. The people who pull them are getting younger all the time. But the motives for kidnapping are changing with the times, too. More and more of them are naked power plays, for the sheer sake of dominating another person. God knows what goes on in Davy’s mind. Or the girl’s, for that matter. They may be planning to re-enact his father’s death.”

I had Langston’s full attention. He couldn’t resist the psychological bait. “You may be right. He was terribly urgent about finding the right place. Are the police in on this?”

“No. The victim’s family asked me to handle it myself.”

“Who is he?”

“A Los Angeles financier. The girl’s father works for one of his companies.”

“It does sound more complex than a crime for money.”

“Will you help me?” I said.

“I don’t have much choice. We’ll take your car, okay?”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Langston.”

“Please call me Hank, everybody else does.” He got out of the car. “Come into the house for a moment, won’t you? I have to leave a note for my wife.”

He wrote it on top of the baby grand while I looked over his books. They covered a surprising range including law and history. His psychology and sociology books emphasized the freer spirits in those fields: Erik Erikson and Erich Fromm, Paul Goodman, Edgar Z. Friedenberg.

He left the note to his wife on the music rack of the piano, with a small light shining on it. I read it on the way out: