The Instant Enemy

chapter 29

BEFORE I LEFT Santa Teresa I called Henry Langston’s house from a gas-station telephone booth. His wife answered, formally: “This is the Langston residence.”

“Is your husband at home?”

“Who is calling, please?” But she probably knew my voice. Her voice was hostile.

“Lew Archer.”

“No, he isn’t here, and you’re responsible. He’s still up in the north county, trying to save that precious murderer of his. He’ll end up getting shot himself.”

She was semi-hysterical, and I tried to soothe her. “That isn’t very likely, Mrs. Langston.”

“You don’t know,” she said. “I have this terrible feeling of fatality, that nothing will ever go right for us again. And it’s your fault, you got him into this.”

“Not really. He’s been involved with Davy Spanner for years. He made a commitment to him, and he’s trying to follow through.”

“What about me?” she cried.

“Is there something specific bothering you?”

“There’s no use telling you,” she said in a kind of angry intimacy. “You’re not a doctor.”

“Are you ill, Mrs. Langston?”

She answered by hanging up on me. I was tempted to go to her house, but that would only lead to further involvement and loss of time. I sympathized with her but I couldn’t help her. Only her husband could do that.

I got onto the freeway headed north. My body was beginning to rebel against continuous action without enough rest. It felt as if my right foot on the accelerator pushed the car uphill all the way to Rodeo City.

Deputy Pennell was in the back room of his office, listening to his dispatcher’s radio. I gathered he had been sitting there ever since I talked to him in the middle of the night. His mustache and his eyes gave the impression that they were taking over his face, which was paler and thinner and needed a shave.

“What’s the word, Deputy?”

“They lost him.” His voice was edged with disgust.

“Where?”

“There’s no telling. The rain washed out his tracks. It’s still raining in the north pass.”

“Where does that lead to?”

“He’d have to come back to the coast. Inland there’s nothing but more mountain ranges. It’s snowing in the back country above five thousand feet.”

“So?”

“We head him off when he hits the highway. I’m requesting the highway patrol to set up roadblocks.”

“Is there any chance that he’s still in the valley?”

“Could be. The p-professor seems to think so, anyway.”

“Do you mean Henry Langston?”

“Yeah. He’s still hanging around the old Krug ranch. He’s got a theory that Spanner is kind of cracked on the subject of that place, and that he’ll head back there.”

“But you don’t buy that theory?”

“Naw. I never saw a p-professor yet that knew what he was talking about. They get soft in the head from reading too many books.”

I didn’t argue, and this encouraged Pennell to go on. Langston had upset him, it appeared, and he needed reassurance.

“You know what the professor tried to tell me? That Spanner had j-j-justification for doing what he did to poor old Jack. On account of Jack putting him in the orphanage.”

“Didn’t that happen?”

“Sure, but what else could Jack do with the kid? His father got killed by a train. Jack wasn’t responsible for him.”

I could hear a little slippage, a trace of double-talk. “Jack wasn’t responsible for what, Deputy?”

“For either of them, father or son. I know there were dirty rumors at the time, and now this Langston is trying to start them up again, before old Jack is even in his grave.”

“What kind of rumors?”

He raised his hot sorrowful eyes. “I wouldn’t even pass them on, they’re so crazy.”

“Rumors that Jack killed the man himself?”

“Yeah. That’s all a lot of malarkey.”

“Would you swear to it, Deputy?”

“Sure I would,” he said with some bravado, “I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles. I told the p-professor that, but he wasn’t satisfied.”

Neither was I. “Would you take a lie-detector test?”

Pennell was disappointed in me. “So you think I’m a liar. And that poor old Jack was a murderer.”

“Who killed Jasper Blevins if he didn’t?”

“Plenty of people could have.”

“Who were the suspects?”

“There was a wild-looking character with a beard hanging around the ranch. He looked like a Russian, I heard.”

“Come on now, Deputy. I’m not buying any bearded anarchists. I know Jack hung around the ranch. Later, I’ve been told, he stashed the woman at Mamie Hagedorn’s place.”

“What if he did? Blevins didn’t want his wife; he made that clear.”

“Did you know Blevins?”

“I saw him once or twice.”

“Did you see him after he was dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it Blevins?”

“I couldn’t swear to it, one way or the other.” He added with a shifty look in his eye: “Mrs. Blevins said it wasn’t. She ought to know.”

“What did the little boy say?”

“Never said a word. He couldn’t talk; he was just a dummy.”

“That was convenient, wasn’t it?”

Pennell stood up with his hand on his gun butt. “I’ve heard enough of that kind of t-talk. Jack Fleischer was like an older b-brother to me. He t-taught me to shoot and drink. He g-got me my first woman. He m-made a m-man of me.”

“I was wondering who to blame.”

Pennell cursed me and got his gun out. I retreated. He didn’t follow me out of the office, but I was a little shaken. This was the second gun that had been pulled on me today. Sooner or later one was bound to go off.

I walked across the street to the Rodeo Hotel and asked the desk clerk where Mamie Hagedorn lived.

He looked up brightly. “Mamie retired from business.”

“Good. My intentions are social.”

“I see. She lives up the road a piece, on the way to Centerville. It’s a big red-brick house, the only red-brick house on that side of town.”

I drove out of town past the rodeo grounds and up into the hills. The red-brick house stood high on one of them, commanding the whole scene. It was a gray overcast day, and the sea was like a wornout mirror reflecting the sullen sky.

I went up the gravel drive and knocked on the door of the big house. It was answered by a Spanish American woman wearing a black uniform and white cap with a black velvet bow. She was the first maid in uniform I’d seen in quite a while.

She started to give me an oral quiz on who and what I was, and why I was here. It was interrupted by a woman’s voice which came from the front parlor: “Send him in! I’ll talk to him.”

The maid took me into a room filled with ornate Victorian furniture, complete with antimacassars. It underlined the feeling I had when I came to the north county, though the gantries of Vandenberg were just over the county line, that I was stepping back into prewar time.

Mamie Hagedorn sustained the illusion. She was sitting on a couch, a small woman whose gold-slippered feet dangled clear of the parquet floor. She was wearing a rather formal high-necked dress. She had a pouter pigeon bosom, a rouged and raddled face, hair or a wig which was a peculiarly horrible shade of iridescent red. But I liked the way her smile broke up her face.

“What’s on your mind?” she said. “Sit down and tell Mamie.”

She raised her hand, on which a diamond winked. I sat beside her.

“I was talking to Al Simmons last night in Centerville. He mentioned that you once knew Laurel Blevins.”

“Al talks too much for his own good,” she said cheerfully. “As a matter of fact I knew Laurel very well. She lived with me after her husband died.”

“Then it was her husband who died under the train?”

She thought about this. “I’m not sure it was. It never came out officially.”

“Why not?”

She moved uneasily. Her dress rustled and gave off a whiff of lavender. To my stretched nerves she seemed like the past itself stirring in its shroud.

“I wouldn’t want to queer things for Laurel. I always liked Laurel.”

“Then you’ll be sorry to hear that she’s dead.”

“Laurel? She’s just a young woman.”

“She didn’t die of old age. She was beaten to death.”

“Holy cripes!” the woman said. “Who did that?”

“Jack Fleischer’s a prime suspect.”

“But he’s dead, too.”

“That’s right. You can’t hurt either of them by talking, Mrs. Hagedorn.”

“Miss. I never married.” She put on horn-rimmed glasses which made her look severe, and studied my face. “Just who are you, anyway?”

I told her. Then she asked me about the case. I laid it out for her, with the names and the places.

“I knew most all of those people,” she said in a rusty voice, “going all the way back to Joe Krug and his wife Alma. I liked Joe. He was a fine figure of a man. But Alma was a Bible-thumping sobersides. Joe used to come and visit me sometimes – I ran a house in Rodeo City in case you didn’t know – and Alma never forgave me for leading him astray. I think I was one of the main reasons she made him move to Los Angeles. Cripes, that was forty years ago. What happened to Joe?”

“He’s dead now. Alma’s alive.”

“She must be old. Alma’s older than I am.”

“How old is that?”

She answered with her broken smile: “I never tell my age. I’m older than I look.”

“I bet you are.”

“Don’t flatter me.” She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Joe Krug was a good man, but he never had any luck in this neck of the woods. I heard he had a little before he died, after he moved to Los Angeles.”

“What kind of luck?”

“Money luck. Is there any other? He got himself a job with some big company and married his daughter Etta to the boss.”

“Etta?”

“Henrietta. They called her Etta for short. She was married before to a man named Albert Blevins. And he was the father of Jasper Blevins who married Laurel, poor dear.” The old woman seemed to take pride in her genealogical knowledge.

“Who killed Jasper, Miss Hagedorn?”

“I don’t know for sure.” She gave me a long shrewd look. “If I tell you what I do know, what do you plan to do with it?”

“Open up the case and let the daylight in.”

She smiled a little sadly. “That reminds me of a hymn, an old revival hymn. I was converted once, would you believe it? It lasted until the boy evangelist ran away with the week’s offerings and my best friend. What are you after, Mr. Evangelist? Money?”

“I’m being paid.”

“Who by?”

“Some people down south.”

“Why are they paying you?”

“It would take all day to explain.”

“Then why not drop it, leave it lay? Let the dead people rest in peace.”

“There are getting to be too many of them. It’s been going on for a long time now. Fifteen years.” I leaned toward her and said in a quiet voice, “Did Laurel kill her husband? Or was it Jack Fleischer?”

She countered with another question, which seemed to contain an answer hidden in it: “You said Laurel is dead. How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“Call the L.A.P.D., Purdue Street Station. Ask for Sergeant Prince or Sergeant Janowski.”

I recited the number. She slid off the couch, with the help of a needlepoint footstool, and left the room. I heard a door close down the hall. A few minutes later I heard the same door open.

She came back much more slowly. The rouge stood out on her slack cheeks. She climbed back onto the couch, reminding me for an instant of a child dressed up in attic finery, wearing an ancestor’s wig.

“So Laurel really is dead,” she said heavily. “I talked to Sergeant Prince. He’s going to send somebody up here to interview me.”

“I’m here now.”

“I know that. With Laurel dead, and Jack, I’m willing to answer your question. The answer is yes. She killed Jasper Blevins, smashed in his head with the blunt end of an ax. Jack Fleischer got rid of the body under a train. He put it down on the books as an accident, victim unknown.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Laurel told me herself. Before she left here Laurel and I were as close as mother and daughter. She told me how she killed Jasper, and she told me why. I didn’t ever blame her for a minute.” Mamie Hagedorn took a deep shuddering breath. “The only thing I blamed her for was leaving the little boy the way she did. That was a terrible thing to do. But she was bound to travel light and make her way in the world. The little boy was evidence against her.”

“She came back to him finally,” I said. “By that time it was too late for either of them.”

“You think her own boy killed her?”

“I didn’t until now. He had no motive. But if he found out that she killed his father–” I left the sentence unfinished.

“She didn’t, though.”

“You just said she did.”

“No, I said she killed her husband Jasper Blevins. He wasn’t the little boy’s father.”

“Who was?”

“Some rich fellow in Texas. Laurel got herself pregnant by him before she ever left there. His family gave her some money and shipped her off to California. Jasper married her for that money, but he never had normal relations with her. I never could respect a man who didn’t like normal meat-and-potatoes–”

I interrupted her. “How do you know all this?”

“Laurel told me after she killed him. He did things to her that no woman has to put up with. That was why she killed him, and I don’t blame her.”