The Instant Enemy

chapter 23

DEPUTY RORY PENNELL was a rawboned man of forty or so with a heavy chestnut mustache and a bad stammer. The stammer had probably been intensified by Jack Fleischer’s death. Pennell seemed genuinely upset. As we talked, his big right hand kept going back to the butt of the gun he wore on his hip.

I would have liked to spend more time in Rodeo City, talking to Pennell and Mamie Hagedorn and anyone else who might help me to reconstruct the past. It was beginning to look as though Jack Fleischer had been deeply implicated in the death of Jasper Blevins. But the question was fairly academic now, and it would have to wait. The important thing was to get Stephen Hackett home.

The two sheriff’s men from Santa Teresa would have been glad to escort him. It was a relatively safe and easy job, high in publicity value. I reminded them that Jack Fleischer’s body was lying alone on the Krug place. Somewhere in the hills north of there the boy who killed him was probably stuck in the mud.

I said good-bye to Hank and rode the ambulance south, sitting on the floor beside Hackett’s pallet. He was feeling better. He had had some first aid on his face, and sucked a cup of broth through a straw. I asked him a few of the questions that had to be asked.

“Did Sandy Sebastian hit Lupe?”

“Yes. She knocked him out with a tire iron.”

“Did she use violence on you?”

“Not directly. She did tape me while the boy held the shotgun on me. She taped my wrists and ankles and mouth, even my eyes.” He raised his hand from the blanket and touched his eyes. “Then they put me in the trunk of her car. It was hellish being shut up like that.” He lifted his head. “How long ago did it start?”

“About thirty-six hours. Did she have any special grudge against you?”

He answered slowly. “She must have. But I can’t understand what.”

“What about the boy?”

“I never saw him before. He acted crazy.”

“In what way?”

“He didn’t seem to know what he was doing. At one point he laid me out across a railroad track. I know it sounds like Victorian melodrama. But he clearly intended to kill me, by letting a train crush me. The girl ran away, and he changed his mind. He took me up to the – the other place and kept me prisoner there.

“For most of the day – yesterday? – he treated me pretty well. He took the tape off and let me move around some. Gave me water to drink, and some bread and cheese. Of course the shotgun was always in evidence. He lay on the bunk and held the gun on me. I sat in the chair. I’m not a coward, ordinarily, but it got pretty nerve-wracking after a while. I couldn’t understand what he had in mind.”

“Did he mention money, Mr. Hackett?”

“I did. I offered him a good deal of money. He said he didn’t want it.”

“What did he want?”

Hackett took a long time to answer. “He didn’t seem to know. He seemed to be living out some kind of a dream. In the evening he smoked marijuana, and he got dreamier. He seemed to be hoping for some kind of mystic experience. And I was the burnt offering.”

“Did he say so?”

“Not directly. He said it as a joke, that he and I should form a musical group. He suggested several names for it, such as The Human Sacrifice.” His voice faded. “It was no joke. I believe he meant to kill me. But he wanted to see me suffer as long as possible first.”

“Why?”

“I’m not a psychologist, but he seemed to regard me as a substitute father. Toward the end, when he got high on marijuana, he started calling me Dad. I don’t know who his real dad is or was, but he must have hated him.”

“His dad died under a train when he was three. He saw it happen.”

“Good Lord!” Hackett sat up partly. “That explains a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

“Did he talk about his father?”

“No. I didn’t encourage him to talk. Eventually he dozed off. I was planning to jump him when the other chap – Fleischer? – came in. He must have thought there was nobody there. The boy let him have both barrels. He had no chance at all. I ran outside. The boy caught me and beat me unconscious.”

He fell back onto the pallet and raised both elbows defensively, as if Davy’s fists were in his face again. We rode the rest of the way in silence. Hackett’s hoarse breathing quieted down, lengthening out gradually into the rhythms of sleep.

I spread a blanket on the vibrating floor and slept, too, while the world turned toward morning. I woke up feeling good. Stephen Hackett and I had come back together and alive. But he was still full of fear. He moaned in his sleep and covered his head with his arms.

The red sun was coming up behind the Malibu hills. The ambulance stopped in West Malibu near a sign which said “PRIVATE COLONY: NO TRESPASSING.” The driver didn’t know where to make his turn, and he gestured through the window.

I went up front with him. The other attendant got into the back with Hackett. We found our left turn and climbed through the hills to Hackett’s gate.

It was just a few minutes past six. Coming over the pass we were met by the full blaze of the morning sun, like an avalanche of light.

Ruth Marburg and Gerda Hackett came out of the house together. Ruth’s face was lined and bleary-eyed and joyful. She ran heavily toward me and pressed my hands and thanked me. Then she turned to her son, who was being lifted out of the ambulance by the attendants. She bent over him and hugged him, crying and exclaiming over his wounds.

Gerda Hackett stood behind her. She looked a little piqued, as if she felt upstaged by Ruth’s display of emotion. But she got her hug in, too, while Sidney Marburg and Dr. Converse stood and watched.

There was a third man, fortyish and heavy-shouldered, with a square unsmiling face. He acted as if he was in charge. When Hackett stood up shakily and insisted on walking into the house, instead of being carried, the heavy-shouldered man assisted him. Dr. Converse followed them in, looking rather ineffectual.

Ruth Marburg surprised me. I’d temporarily forgotten about the money she’d promised. She hadn’t. Without having to be reminded, she took me into the library and wrote a check.

“I’ve postdated this a week.” She stood up, waving the check to dry the ink. “I don’t keep this much in the bank. I’m going to have to transfer some funds and sell some securities.”

“There’s no hurry.”

“Good.” She handed me the little yellow slip. It was for the amount she had promised.

“You’re an unusual rich woman,” I said. “Most of them scream bloody murder over a nickel.”

“I haven’t always been rich. Now I have more money than I can spend.”

“So have I, now.”

“Don’t let it fool you. A hundred grand is chicken feed these days. Uncle Sam will cut it in half for you. If you take my advice you’ll put the rest in real estate and watch it grow.”

Somehow, I didn’t think I would. I put the check away in my wallet. It excited me in a way I didn’t quite like. Underlying the excitement was a vague depression, as if I belonged to the check in a way, instead of having it belong to me.

Ruth Marburg reached up and touched my cheek. It wasn’t a pass, but it was a gesture of possession. “Aren’t you happy, Lew? May I call you Lew?”

“Yes and yes.”

“You don’t look happy. You should be. You’ve done a wonderful thing, for all of us. I’m eternally grateful to you.”

“Good.” But it wasn’t so good. Even her repeated thanks were a subtle form of possession, taking and not giving.

“How on earth did you pull it off?” she said.

I told her, very briefly, about the series of leads, from Fleischer to Albert Blevins and Alma Krug, which took me to the shack where her son was held; and what I found there.

“You’ve had a terrible night. You must be exhausted.” She touched my cheek again.

“Don’t do that please.”

She withdrew her hand as if I’d tried to bite it. “What’s the matter?”

“You bought your son with this check. Not me.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it. It was a friendly gesture. Heavens, I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“The hell you are.”

She chose to take this as a compliment, and it soothed her injured feelings. “You really are tired, aren’t you, Lew? Did you get any sleep at all?

“Not much.”

“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go to bed and get some sleep now? Stephen and Gerda have plenty of room.”

The invitation sounded so good that I started yawning, like an addict for a fix. But I told her I preferred my own bed.

“You’re very independent, aren’t you, Lew?”

“I guess I am.”

“I feel the same way myself. I only wish Sidney had some of the same spirit.”

She sounded like a mother talking about her backward little boy.

“Speaking of Sidney, I wonder if I can get him to drive me. My car’s over in the Valley.”

“Of course. I’ll tell him. There’s just one thing before you leave,” she said. “Mr. Thorndike will want to talk to you.”

She went and got the heavy-shouldered man. Thorndike introduced himself as a special agent of the FBI. Ruth left us together in the library and Thorndike debriefed me, recording what I said on a portable tape recorder.

“I don’t mean to be critical,” he said, “since it all worked out. But that was kind of a wild idea, going up against a kidnapper with nobody but a high-school counselor to back you up. You could have got what Fleischer got.”

“I know that. But this is a peculiar kind of kidnapper. I don’t believe he’d shoot Langston.”

“Anyway, he didn’t get a chance to.”

Thorndike’s manner was a little superior, like a teacher giving an oral quiz to a not very apt pupil. I didn’t mind. I had brought Hackett in. He hadn’t.