The Instant Enemy

chapter 19

WITH BERNICE SEBASTIAN’S permission, I shut myself up in the study and put in a call for Albert Blevins at the Bowman Hotel. The long silence on the line was broken by a succession of voices. Albert would be right down. Albert wasn’t in his room but he was being searched for. Albert had apparently gone out, and nobody knew when he was expected back. He’d gone to a triple feature on Market Street, it was thought.

I left a message for Albert, asking him to call my answering service collect, but I doubted that I’d be hearing from him tonight.

There was another possible source of information. I got out the papers I’d acquired from Albert Blevins and laid them on Sebastian’s desk. I reread the letter which Alma R. Krug, Albert’s mother-in-law, had sent him in 1948 from her house at 209 West Capo Street in Santa Monica.

“Jasper and Laurel and the babe will be staying at our house for a while,” Mrs. Krug had written; “then Jasper wants to have a try at ranching.”

I looked for Alma Krug’s name in the telephone directory, and tried Information, in vain. Mrs. Krug’s letter had been written nearly twenty years ago. The lady must be very old, or dead.

I could think of only one way to find out which. I said good night to the Sebastians and headed back toward Santa Monica. The traffic on the freeway was still heavy but it was flowing freely now. The headlights poured down Sepulveda in a brilliant cataract.

I felt surprisingly good. If Mrs. Krug was alive and able to tell me where the ranch was, I could break the case before morning. I even let a part of my mind play with the question of what I might do with a hundred thousand dollars.

Hell, I could even retire. The possibility jarred me. I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.

I left Sepulveda at Wilshire and drove down San Vicente to Capo Street. 209 West Capo was a two-story apartment building. Transplanted palm trees lit by green floodlights leaned across the new-looking stucco front.

I found the manager in Apartment One, a middle-aged man in shirt sleeves with his finger in a book. I told him my name. He said his was Ralph Cuddy.

Cuddy had a Southern accent, probably Texan. There were crossed pistols over the mantelpiece, and several moral sayings on the walls. I said: “A Mrs. Alma Krug used to live at this location.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you know where she lives now?”

“In a home.”

“What kind of a home?”

“A convalescent home. She broke her hip a few years back.”

“That’s too bad. I’d like to talk to her.”

“What about?”

“Family matters.”

“Mrs. Krug has no family left.” He added with a self-conscious smirk: “Unless you count me.”

“She has a son-in-law in San Francisco.” And a great-grandson named Davy, God knows where. “Did she ever mention a ranch she owns in Santa Teresa County?”

“I’ve heard of the ranch.”

“Can you tell me how to find it?”

“I’ve never been there. They let it go for taxes years ago.”

“Are you related to Mrs. Krug?”

“Not exactly. I was close to the family. Still am.”

“Can you give me the address of her convalescent home?”

“Maybe. Just what do you want to see her about?”

“I ran into her son-in-law Albert Blevins today.”

Cuddy gave me a wise look. “That would be Etta’s first husband.”

“Right.”

“And where does the ranch come in?”

“Albert was talking about it. He lived there once.”

“I see.”

Ralph Cuddy laid down his open book – its title was The Role of the Security Officer in Business – and went to a desk on the far side of the room. He came back to me with the address of the Oakwood Convalescent Home neatly written on a slip of paper.

The Home turned out to be a large California Spanish house dating from the twenties. It occupied its own walled grounds in Santa Monica. The driveway was overarched by Italian stone pines. There were ten or a dozen cars in the lighted parking lot, a drift of music from the main building. You could almost imagine that time had been reversed and there was a party going on.

The illusion faded in the big reception hall. Old people sat around in groups of two or three, chatting, keeping life warm. They made me think of refugees who had been given shelter in some baronial manor.

A very contemporary-looking nurse in white nylon led me down a corridor to Mrs. Krug’s room. It was a spacious and well furnished bed-sitting room. A white-haired old lady wearing a wool robe was sitting in a wheel chair with an afghan over her knees, watching the Merv Griffin Show on television. She held an open Bible in her arthritic hands.

The nurse turned down the sound. “A gentleman to see you, Mrs. Krug.”

She looked up with keen inquiring eyes magnified by her glasses. “Who are you?”

“My name is Lew Archer. Remember Albert Blevins, who married your daughter Etta?”

“Naturally I remember him. There’s nothing the matter with my memory, thank you. What about Albert Blevins?”

“I was talking to him in San Francisco today.”

“Is that a fact? I haven’t heard from Albert in nearly twenty years. I asked him to come and see us when Jasper’s boy was born, but Albert never answered.”

She was silent, listening to silence. The nurse left the room. I sat down and Mrs. Krug leaned toward me, into the present.

“How is Albert, anyway? Is he still the same old Albert?”

“Probably. I didn’t know him when he was younger.”

“You weren’t missing much.” She smiled. “My husband always said that Albert was born too late. He should have been an old-time cowpoke. Albert was always a loner.”

“He still is. He lives in a hotel room by himself.”

“I’m not surprised. He should never have married anybody, let alone Etta. At first I blamed Albert for all the trouble between them, when he threw the lamp and set fire to the house. But when I saw the things that my daughter did later–” She closed her mouth with a click, as if to bite back memory. “Did Albert send you here to me?”

“Not exactly. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned the ranch you gave him, or let him use.”

She nodded briskly. “That was in 1927, the year Albert married Etta. I was sick of the ranch myself, if you want the truth. I was a city girl, and a trained teacher. Twenty years of feeding chickens was all I could take. I made Krug move down here. He got a good job, a security job, which he held until he retired. Albert and Etta took over the ranch. They lasted about two years, and then they split. It was a bad-luck ranch. Did Albert tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“The things that happened at that ranch. No.” She shook her head. “Albert couldn’t tell you because he didn’t know, at least not all of them. First he burned down the house, and Etta ran out on him. She left him to look after little Jasper. When that broke down my husband and I took over Jasper and raised him, which wasn’t easy, I can tell you. He was a handful.

“Then when Jasper settled down and married Laurel Dudney, he took it into his head to go back to the ranch. He didn’t plan to work it, you understand. He thought it would be a cheap place to live while he painted pretty pictures of the countryside. I guess it was cheap enough, for him, with my husband and me sending him money after he used up Laurel’s.” Her veined hands closed on the arms of the wheel chair. “Do you know how that spoiled grandson of ours showed his gratitude?”

“Albert didn’t tell me.”

“Jasper took Laurel and the little boy and shook the dust from his heels. I haven’t heard from any one of them since. Jasper is like his mother – and I say it even if she is my daughter – an ingrate through and through.”

I didn’t try to tell Alma Krug about Jasper’s death, or Laurel’s. The old woman’s eyes were getting too bright. They knew too much already. A bitter frozen expression had settled on her mouth like a foretaste of her own death.

After another silence, she turned to me. “You didn’t come here to listen to me complaining. Why did you come?”

“I want to see that ranch.”

“What for? It’s wornout land. It never was any better than semi-desert. We raised more buzzards than we did cattle. And after Jasper and Laurel took off into the blue we let it go for taxes.”

“I think your great-grandson David may be there.”

“Really? Do you know David?”

“I’ve met him.”

She calculated rapidly. “He must be a young man now.”

“A very young man. Davy is nineteen.”

“What’s he doing with himself?” she asked with the kind of hopeful interest that wasn’t betting too heavily on the answer.

“Nothing much.”

“I suppose he takes after his father. Jasper always had big dreams and nothing much to show for them afterwards.” She rotated one wheel of her chair and turned to face me. “If you know where David is, do you know where Jasper is?”

“No. And I don’t know where David is. I was hoping you could tell me how to find the ranch.”

“Sure, if it hasn’t blown away, the way that wind comes roaring down the wash. You know Rodeo City?”

“I’ve been there.”

“Go into the middle of town to the main corner, that’s the Rodeo Hotel with the sheriff’s office right across from it. Take a right turn there and drive out past the rodeo grounds and over the pass and inland about twenty miles, to a little settlement called Centerville. I taught school there once. From Centerville you drive north another twelve miles on a county road. It’s not too easy to find, especially after dark. Are you thinking of going there tonight?”

I said I was.

“Then you better ask in Centerville. Everybody in Centerville knows where the Krug ranch is.” She paused. “It’s strange how the generations of the family keep homing to that place. It’s a bad-luck place, I guess we’re a bad-luck family.”

I didn’t try to deny this. The little I knew of the family – Albert Blevins’ solitary life, the ugly fates of Jasper and Laurel fifteen years apart, Davy’s penchant for violence – only confirmed what Mrs. Krug had said.

She was sitting with her fists pressed against her body, as if she could feel the memory of labor. She shook her white head.

“I was thinking, if you see David, you could tell him where his great-grandma is. But I don’t know. I just have enough for myself. I pay six hundred a month here. Don’t tell him about me unless he asks. I wouldn’t want Jasper back on my hands again. Or Laurel. She was a sweet girl, but she turned out to be an ingrate, too. I took her into my home and did my best for her, and then she turned her back on me.”

“Was Laurel related to you, too?”

“No. She came from Texas. A very wealthy man was interested in Laurel. He sent her to us.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re not supposed to. I won’t tell on Laurel. She wasn’t my daughter or granddaughter, but I liked her better than any of them.”

She was whispering. The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers. I got up to leave.

Alma Krug gave me her knobbed, delicate hand. “Turn up the sound on your way out, please. I’d rather listen to other people talk.”

I turned up the sound and closed her door after me. Behind another door, halfway down the corridor, a quavering old man’s voice rose: “Please don’t cut me.”

The old man pulled the door open and came out into the corridor. His naked body was the shape of an elongated egg. He flung his arms around me, and pressed his almost hairless head into my solar plexus.

“Don’t let them cut me to pieces. Tell them not to, Momma.”

Though there was nobody else there, I told them not to. The little old man let go of me and went back into his room and closed the door.