The Instant Enemy

chapter 17

I CLIMBED THE STAIRS to my second-floor office on knees that shook under me. It was a few minutes past ten by the wall clock. I called my answering service. A few minutes before ten, Willie Mackey had called me from San Francisco. I returned the call now, and got Willie in his Geary Street office.

“Nice timing, Lew. I was just trying to phone you. Your man Fleischer checked in at the Sandman about 3 a.m. I put a man on him and made a deal with the night keyboy. The keyboy handles the switchboard after midnight. Fleischer left a call for seven thirty and as soon as he got up he phoned a certain Albert Blevins at the Bowman Hotel. That’s in the Mission District. Fleischer came up to the city and he and Blevins had breakfast together in a cafeteria on Fifth Street. Then they went back to Blevins’s hotel and apparently they’re still there, in his room. Does all this mean anything to you?”

“The name Blevins does.” It was the name on Laurel’s Social Security card. “Find out what you can about him, will you, and meet me at San Francisco Airport?”

“What time?”

I got a plane schedule out of my desk. “One o’clock, in the bar.”

I made an airline reservation and drove out to Los Angeles International. It was a clear bright day at both ends of the flight. When my jet came down over San Francisco Bay I could see the city standing up like a perpendicular dream and past it to the curved dark blue horizon. The endless roofs of the bedroom towns stretched southward along the Peninsula farther than I could see.

I found Willie in the airport bar drinking a Gibson. He was a smart experienced man who copied his style of life from the flamboyant San Francisco lawyers who often employed him. Willie spent his money on women and clothes, and always looked a little overdressed, as he did now. His gray hair had once been black. His very sharp black eyes hadn’t changed in the twenty years I’d known him.

“Albert Blevins,” he said, “has lived in the Bowman Hotel for about a year. It’s a pensioners’ hotel, one of the better ones in the Mission District.”

“Just how old is he?”

“Maybe sixty. I don’t know for sure. You didn’t give me much time, Lew.”

“There isn’t much time.”

I told him why. Willie was a money player, and his eyes shone like anthracite coal when he heard about Hackett’s wealth. A chunk of it would buy him a new young blonde to break his heart with again.

Willie wanted another Gibson and some lunch, but I steered him to an elevator and out to the parking lot. He backed his Jaguar out of its slot and headed up Bayshore to the city. The aching blue water and the endless mud flats gave me the pang of remembered younger days.

Willie broke into my thoughts. “What’s Albert Blevins got to do with the Hackett snatch?”

“I don’t know, but there has to be some connection. A woman named Laurel Smith who died last night – homicide victim – used to call herself Laurel Blevins. Fleischer knew her in Rodeo City fifteen years ago. Around the same time, and the same locality, an unidentified man was decapitated by a train. Apparently he was Davy Spanner’s father. Deputy Fleischer handled the case, and put it in the books as accidental death.”

“And you say it wasn’t?”

“I’m suspending judgment. There’s still another connection. Spanner was Laurel Smith’s tenant and employee, and I suspect they were closer than that, maybe very close.”

“Did he kill her?”

“I don’t think so. The point is that the people and the places are starting to repeat.” I told Willie about the midnight scene at the railroad crossing. “If we can get Fleischer and Blevins to talk, we may be able to shut the case down in a hurry. Particularly Fleischer. For the past month he’s been bugging Laurel’s apartment in Pacific Palisades.”

“You think he killed her?”

“He may have. Or he may know who did.”

Willie concentrated on the traffic as we entered the city. He left his car in an underground garage on Geary Street. I walked up to his office with him to see if the tail on Fleischer had called in. He had. Fleischer had left Blevins at the Bowman Hotel, and at the time of the call was inside the shop of the Acme Photocopy Service. This was Fleischer’s second visit to the Acme Photocopy Service. He had stopped there on his way to the Bowman Hotel.

I did the same. The Acme Service was a one-man business conducted in a narrow store on Market Street. A thin man with a cough labored over a copying machine. For five quick dollars he told me what Fleischer had had copied. On his first visit it was the front page of an old newspaper, on his second an even older birth certificate.

“Whose birth certificate?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute. Somebody called Jasper, that was the first name, I think.”

I waited, but nothing else came. “What was in the newspaper?”

“I didn’t read it. If I read everything I copy, I’d go blind.”

“You say it was old. How old?”

“I didn’t look at the date, but the paper had turned pretty yellow. I had to handle it carefully.” He coughed, and lit a cigarette in reflex. “That’s all I can tell you, mister. What’s it all about?”

I took that question to the Bowman Hotel. It was a grimy white brick building whose four rows of evenly spaced front windows had a view of the railroad yards. Some of the windows had wooden boxes nailed to their outside sills in lieu of refrigerators.

The lobby was full of old men. I wondered where all the old women were.

One of the old men told me that Albert Blevins’s room was on the second floor at the end of the hall. I went up and knocked on the door.

A husky voice said: “Who is it?”

“My name is Archer. I’d like to talk to you, Mr. Blevins.”

“What about?”

“Same thing as the other fellow.”

A key turned in the lock. Albert Blevins opened the door a few inches. He wasn’t terribly old, but his body was warped by use and his seamed face was set in the cast of permanent stubborn failure. His clear blue eyes had the oddly innocent look of a man who had never been completely broken in to human society. You used to see such men in the small towns, in the desert, on the road. Now they collected in the hollow cores of the cities.

“Will you pay me same as the other fellow?” he said.

“How much?”

“The other fellow gave me fifty dollars. Ask him yourself if you don’t believe me.” A horrible suspicion ravaged his face. “Say, you’re not from Welfare?”

“No.”

“Thank Jehosophat for that. You get a lucky windfall, they take it off your Welfare and that wipes out your luck.”

“They shouldn’t do that.”

My agreement pleased Blevins. He opened the door wider and beckoned me into the room. It was a ten-foot cube containing a chair, a table, and a bed. The iron fire escape slanted across the single window like a cancellation mark.

There was a faint sour odor of time in the room. So far as I could tell, it came from the leatherette suitcase which lay open across the bed. Some of its contents were on the table, as if Blevins had been sorting through his memories and laying them out for sale.

I could recognize some of the things on sight: a broad-bladed fisherman’s knife to which a few old fish scales were clinging like dry tears, a marriage certificate with deep fold-marks cutting across it, a bundle of letters tied together with a brown shoestring, some rifle bullets and a silver dollar in a net sack, a small miner’s pick, a couple of ancient pipes, an ineffectual-looking rabbit’s foot, some clean folded underwear and socks, a glass ball that filled itself with a miniature snowstorm when you shook it, a peacock feather watching us with its eye, and an eagle’s claw.

I sat at the table and picked up the marriage certificate. It was signed by a civil registrar, and stated that Albert D. Blevins had married Henrietta R. Krug in San Francisco on March 3, 1927. Henrietta was seventeen at the time; Albert was twenty; which made him just over sixty now.

“You want to buy my marriage paper?”

“I might.”

“The other fellow gave me fifty for the birth certificate. I’ll let this one go for twenty-five.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s of no great value to me. Marrying her was the big mistake of my life. I never should of married any woman. She told me that herself a hundred times, after we got hitched. But what’s a man to do when a girl comes to him and tells him he got her pregnant?” He spread his hands out incompletely on his faded denim knees. His painfully uncurling fingers reminded me of starfish torn from their moorings.

“I shouldn’t complain,” he said. “Her parents treated us right. They gave us their farm and moved into town. It wasn’t Mr. Krug’s fault that we had three straight years of drought and I couldn’t afford to bring in water and feed and the cattle died. I don’t even blame Etta for leaving me, not any more. It was a miserable life on that dry farm. All we had between us was going to bed together, and that dried up before the baby was born. I delivered him myself, and I guess it hurt her pretty bad. Etta never let me come near her again.”

He was talking like a man who hadn’t had a chance to reveal himself for years, if ever. He rose and paced the room, four steps each way.

“It made me mean,” he said, “living with a pretty girl and not being able to touch her. I treated her mean, and I treated the boy even worse. I used to beat the living bejesus out of him. I blamed him, see, for cutting off my nooky by being born. Sometimes I beat him until the blood would flow. Etta would try to stop me, and then I’d beat her, too.”

His calm blue eyes looked down into mine. I could feel the coldness of his innocence.

“One night I beat her once too often. She picked up the kitchen lamp and threw it at my head. I ducked, but the kerosene splashed on the hot stove and set fire to the kitchen. Before I got the fire out, most of the house was gone, and so was Etta.”

“You mean she burned to death?”

“No, I don’t mean that.” He was impatient with me for failing to divine his thoughts. “She ran away. I never saw hide nor hair of her again.”

“What happened to your son?”

“Jasper? He stayed with me for a while. This was right at the beginning of the depression. I got a government job working on the roads, and I found some boards and bought some tarpaper and roofed over what was left of the house. We lived there for a couple more years, little Jasper and me. I was treating him better, but he didn’t like me much. He was always scared of me, I can’t say I blame him. When he was four he started to run away. I tried tying him up, but he got pretty good at untying knots. What could I do? I took him to his grandparents in L.A. Mr. Krug had a watchman job with one of the oil companies and they agreed to take him off my hands.

“I went down to see Jasper a few times after that, but he always got upset. He used to run at me and hit me with his fists. So I just stopped going. I left the state. I mined silver in Colorado. I fished for salmon out of Anchorage. One day my boat turned over and I made it to shore all right but then I came down with double pneumonia. After that I lost my poop and I came back to California. That’s my sad story. I been here going on ten years.”

He sat down again. He was neither sad nor smiling. Breathing slowly and deeply, he regarded me with a certain satisfaction. He had lifted the weight of his life and set it down again in the same place.

I asked him: “Do you know what happened to Jasper?” The question made me conscious of its overtones. I was fairly sure by now that Jasper Blevins had died under a train fifteen years ago.

“He grew up and got married. Etta’s parents sent me a wedding announcement, and then about seven months after that they sent me a letter that I had a grandson. That was close to twenty years ago, when I was in Colorado, but that seven months stuck in my mind. It meant that Jasper had to get married, just the same as I did in my time.

“History repeating itself,” he said. “But there was one way I didn’t let it repeat. I kept away from my grandson. I wasn’t going to make him a-scared of me. And I didn’t want to get to know him and then get cut off from seeing him either. I’d rather stay alone right on through.”

“You wouldn’t have that letter, would you?”

“I might. I think I have.”

He untied the brown shoelace that held his bundle of letters together. His awkward fingers sorted them and picked out a blue envelope. He took the letter out of the envelope, read it slowly with moving lips, and handed it to me.

The letter was written in faded blue ink on blue notepaper with a deckled edge:

“Do you have the wedding announcement?” I asked Blevins.

“I had, but I gave it to the other fellow. I threw it in along with the birth certificate.”

“Whose birth certificate?”

“Jasper’s. Jasper is the one he’s interested in.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. This Fleischer fellow plays his cards very close to his vest. Is he really a policeman?”

“An ex-policeman.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what’s in it for you,” Blevins said. “You didn’t come here to listen to the story of my life.”

“I sort of have, though, haven’t I?”

“I guess you have.” He smiled, so widely I could count his six upper teeth. “This business of Jasper churned up a lot of memories. Why is everybody so interested in Jasper? Why are you fellows willing to pay me money? Or are you?”

Instead of answering his questions, I took three twenties from my wallet and spread them out on a bare part of the table. Blevins opened the front of his shirt and pulled out an oilskin pouch which hung around his neck on a piece of soiled rawhide. He folded the twenties small and put them in the pouch, replacing it against the sparse gray fur of his chest.

“That’s twenty-five for the marriage certificate,” I said, “twenty-five for the letter, and ten for the autobiography.”

“Come again?”

“The life story,” I said.

“Oh. Thank you very much. I been needing some warm clothes. Sixty dollars goes a long way at the rummage stores.”

I felt a little cheap when he handed me the letter and marriage certificate. I put them in my inside breast pocket. My hand came in contact with the picture Mrs. Fleischer had given me. I showed it to Albert Blevins, remembering with a pang that Laurel was newly dead.

“Do you recognize her, Mr. Blevins?”

“No.”

“It’s the girl Jasper married.”

“I never met her.”

Our hands touched as he gave the picture back to me. I felt a kind of short-circuit, a buzzing and burning, as if I had grounded the present in the actual flesh of the past.

Time blurred like tears for an instant. Davy’s father had died a violent death. His mother had died in violence. Davy the child of violence was roaring down the trail which led back to Albert Blevins. In the buzzing and the burning and the blur I got my first real feeling of what it was like to be Davy, and it jolted me.

“No,” Blevins said, “I never saw Jasper’s wife. She’s a handsome filly.”

“She was.”

I took the picture and left before either of us could ask the other more questions.