The Instant Enemy

chapter 33

I DROVE TO MALIBU, forgetting that I was hungry and tired. Just before I reached the Hacketts’ gate, I passed a car going in the other direction. The man at the wheel looked like Keith Sebastian. I turned in the entrance to the Hacketts’ driveway and chased him down the hill.

I caught him at the highway STOP sign. He turned right on the highway and then left on a secondary road that looped down along the beach. He parked behind a lighted beach house and knocked on the back door. For an instant, as she opened the door for him, his daughter was silhouetted against the light.

I got out of my car and approached the house. The blinds and drapes were closed. A good deal of light leaked out but I couldn’t hear anything because of the waves marking time on the beach.

The name on the mailbox was Hackett. I knocked on the back door, trying the knob at the same time. It was locked.

Keith Sebastian said through the door: “Who is it?”

“Archer.”

There was another wait. Inside the house a door closed. Sebastian unlocked the outer door and opened it.

I stepped in past him without waiting to be asked. “What are you doing, Keith?”

He had no decent cover story. “I decided I better get away from it all for a day or two. Mr. Hackett loaned me the use of his private cottage.”

I moved from the kitchen into the next room. There were dirty dishes, set for two, on a round poker table. One of the coffee mugs had a half-moon of lipstick at the rim.

“Do you have a girl with you?”

“As a matter of fact I have.” He looked at me with hopeful foolish guile. “You won’t tell Bernice now, will you?”

“She knows, and so do I. It’s Sandy, isn’t it?”

He picked up Sandy’s coffee mug. For a moment his face was open. I think he was planning to brain me, and I stepped back out of close range. He set the mug down on the table.

“She’s my daughter,” he asserted. “I know what’s best for her.”

“Is that why her life is working out so beautifully? This is a lousy substitute for treatment.”

“It’s better than jail. She’d get no treatment at all.”

“Who’s been telling you horror stories?”

He wouldn’t answer me. He stood there shaking his stupid handsome head. I sat down at the table uninvited. After a minute he sat down opposite me. We faced each other like bluffing poker players.

“You don’t understand. Sandy and I aren’t planning to stay here. Everything’s all worked out.”

“To leave the country?”

He frowned. “Bernice told you then.”

“It’s a good thing someone did. If you skip you’ll virtually lose your citizenship. Sandy will, anyway. And how will you support yourself in a foreign country?”

“That’s all taken care of. If I look after what I’ve got, and live in the right place, I’ll never have to work again.”

“I thought you were flat broke.”

“Not any more. The whole thing’s working out.” He spoke with the deaf and blind assurance of terrible anxiety. “So please don’t try to stop me, Mr. Archer. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

“Is your wife going with you?”

“I hope so. She hasn’t decided. We’re flying out tomorrow, and she’s going to have to make up her mind in a hurry.”

“I don’t think either of you should decide in a hurry.”

“Nobody asked for your advice.”

“You did, though, in a way, when you brought me into this case. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

We sat and looked at each other, two poker players with lousy hands who were too far behind to quit. For a moment I could hear the sea more clearly, and a cold draft touched my ankles. Something jarred in another part of the house, and the draft was cut off.

“Where is your daughter?”

He crossed the room and opened a door. “Sandy!”

I followed him into a lighted bedroom. It was a strange room, as strange as Lupe’s. Wild color exploded on the walls and ceiling. A round bed stood like an altar in the middle. Sandy’s clothes were scattered across the bed.

Sebastian opened the sliding glass door. We ran down to the water. The girl was out past the surf line, swimming for her life, or for her death.

Sebastian waded in in his clothes, then turned to me helplessly. “I can’t swim very well.”

A wave knocked him down. I had to drag him out of the sucking water.

“Go and call the sheriff.”

“No!”

I slapped him. “Call the sheriff, Keith. You have to.”

He floundered up the beach. I tore off my shoes and most of my clothes, and went in after the girl. She was young, and hard to catch. By the time I reached her, we were a long way out and I was tiring.

She didn’t know I was there until I touched her. Her eyes were wide and dark as a seal’s. “Go away. I want to die.”

“I’m not going to let you.”

“You would if you knew all about me.”

“I almost do, Sandy. Come on in with me. I’m too tired to drag you.”

The eye of a searchlight winked open on the beach. It roved the sea and found us. Sandy swam away from me. Her body was white and faintly phosphorescent, shimmering like moonlight in the water.

I stayed close to her. She was the only one left. A man in a black rubber wet-suit came out on a paddleboard and took her in unresisting through the surf.

Sebastian and Captain Aubrey were waiting for us with blankets. I rescued my clothes from under the feet of the onlookers and followed Sebastian and his daughter toward the beach cottage. Captain Aubrey walked with me.

“Suicide attempt?” he said.

“She’s been talking about it for months. I hope this gets it out of her system.”

“Don’t count on it. Her family better take security precautions.”

“I’ve been telling them that.”

“You say it’s been on her mind for months. That means it antedates the current mess.”

“Correct.”

We had reached the cottage. I was shivering in my blanket, but Aubrey detained me outside. “What made her suicidal in the first place?”

“I want to talk to you about that, Captain. First I need a hot shower and a chance to get Sebastian squared away. Where will you be in the next hour?”

“I’ll wait for you in the substation.”

I opened the glass door and stepped up into the colored bedroom. Sebastian was on the far side of the room. He stood like a sentry beside an open door through which I could hear a shower running. His clothes were dripping. He had wet sand in his hair, and in his eyes a look of maniacal dutifulness.

“What do you plan to do for the next five or ten years, Keith? Stand suicide watch?”

He gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t quite follow.”

“We almost lost her just now. You can’t go on taking chances with her life. And you can’t stand around and watch her twenty-four hours a day.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Take her back to the Psychiatric Center tonight. Forget about South America. You wouldn’t like it.”

“But I made a promise.”

“To Sandy? She’d rather die than go on this way. Literally.”

“She isn’t the only one involved,” he said miserably. “I don’t have any choice about South America. It’s part of the whole ball of wax.”

“You’d better explain that.”

“I can’t. I promised not to talk about it.”

“Who did you make these promises to? Stephen Hackett?”

“No. It wasn’t Mr. Hackett.”

I moved around the bed toward him. “I can’t do anything more for you, if you won’t open up. I think you’re being taken for a ride, you and your daughter both.”

He answered me doggedly: “I know what I’m doing. I don’t want or need your help.”

“You may not want it, but you certainly need it. Are you going to take Sandy back to the Center?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll have to make you.”

“You can’t. I’m a free citizen.”

“You won’t be for long. Captain Aubrey is waiting to talk to me now. When he finds out that you’ve been buying and selling evidence in a murder case–”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the tapes you bought from Mrs. Fleischer.”

It was a guess, but an educated one, that the tapes were part of the ball of wax he’d referred to. His face confirmed my guess.

“Who did you buy them for, Keith?”

He didn’t answer.

“Who’s paying you to take your daughter out of the country?”

He still refused to answer. Sandy appeared in the doorway behind him. She had on a clean yellow terrycloth robe and was rosy from her shower. Clearly the night swim had been good for her. I found this hard to forgive.

She said to her father: “Is somebody paying you to leave? You didn’t tell me that. You said your company was giving you some separation money.”

“That’s what it is, dear, separation money.” He stood between us, looking from one to the other.

“How much money?”

“That’s none of your business, dear, I mean, let me handle the business. You don’t have to trouble your mind–”

“Gee thanks. Is Mr. Hackett giving you this money?”

“You might say so. It’s his company.”

“And you get the money if you take me to South America? Is that right? Otherwise you don’t?”

“I don’t like this cross-questioning,” Sebastian said. “After all I am your father.”

“Sure you are, Dad.” Her voice was sardonic, darkened by the authority of experienced pain. “But I don’t want to go to South America.”

“You said you did.”

“I don’t any more.” Brusquely she turned her attention to me. “Get me out of here, will you? I’ve had it with this scene. This is where I freaked out last summer, right here in this very room. This is the bed where Lupe and Steve took turns at me. In the vulva and the anus.” She touched those parts of herself like a child showing where she’d been hurt.

The words and gestures were addressed to me but meant for her father. Sebastian was appalled. He sat on the bed, then stood up quickly and brushed away the sand he had deposited.

“You can’t mean Mr. Hackett.”

“Yes I can. I blew my mind and I hardly knew what was happening. But I know old Steve Hackett when I see him.”

Like lenses in a sophisticated camera, Sebastian’s eyes were changing. He wanted not to believe her, to find a credibility gap in her story. But the truth was there, and we both knew it.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Sandy?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“I mean last summer, when it happened.”

She regarded him with scorn. “How do you know it happened last summer? I haven’t mentioned that tonight.”

He looked around rather wildly, and rushed into speech: “Your mother said something, I don’t mean she spelled it out. But there was something in your diary, wasn’t there?”

“I spelled it out,” she said. “I knew Bernice read my diary. But neither of you ever said a word to me. Never ever a word.”

“I took your mother’s lead in that, Sandy. After all I’m only a man and you’re a girl.”

“I know I’m a girl. I found it out the hard way.”

She was angry and troubled, but she sounded more like a woman than a girl. She wasn’t afraid. It occurred to me that she had suffered a sea-change into a woman, and that her storm would pass.

I went into the bathroom for a hot shower. The stall was warm and fragrant from Sandy’s use of it.

Then, while Sebastian took a shower, I talked to his daughter across the poker table.

We both had our clothes on now, and they seemed to impose a certain formality on the conversation. Sandy started out by thanking me, though, which wasn’t a bad sign.

I told her not to mention it, I’d been dying for a swim. “Have you decided to give life a try?”

“I’m not making any promises,” she said. “It’s a stinking world.”

“You don’t improve it by committing suicide.”

“I do for me.” She was still and silent for a while. “I thought I could break away from it all with Davy.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“It was his. He picked me up on the Strip because somebody told him that I knew the Hacketts. He needed a way to get to Steve, and I was glad to help.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I wanted to get back at him and Lupe. But it didn’t really make me feel any better. It only made me feel worse.”

“What did Davy want?”

“It’s hard to tell. He always has three or four reasons for everything, three or four different versions. It isn’t his fault. Nobody ever told him the truth, about who he was, until Laurel did. And even then he didn’t know it was true. Laurel was drunk when she told him.”

“Told him that Stephen Hackett was his father?”

“I don’t know what she told him. Honestly.” It was her mother’s word, and she said it with her mother’s intonation. “Davy and I weren’t talking much at the end. I was afraid to go with him, and afraid to quit. I didn’t know how far he would go. Neither did he.”

“He’s gone further now.” I thought it was time to tell her, before the changes of the night had crystallized. “Davy was shot dead this afternoon.”

She looked at me dully, as if her capacity to react was used up for the time being. “Who shot him?”

“Henry Langston.”

“I thought he was a friend of Davy’s.”

“He was, but he had troubles of his own. Most people do.”

I left her with the thought and went into the bedroom where her father was trying on clothes. He settled for a turtleneck sweater and a pair of slacks. The sweater made him look young and bold, like an actor.

“What’s on the agenda, Keith?”

“I’m going up to Hackett’s place and give him back his check.”

His statement astonished me. He looked slightly astonished himself.

“I’m glad you feel that way. But you better let me have the check. It’s evidence.”

“Against me?”

“Against Hackett. How much money is involved?”

“The check is for a hundred thousand.”

“Plus how much cash for the tapes?”

He barely hesitated. “Ten thousand cash. I paid it over to Mrs. Fleischer.”

“What story did Hackett give you about the tapes?”

“He said Fleischer was trying to blackmail him.”

“For doing what?”

“He didn’t say. I gather he was having an affair, though.”

“When did you deliver the tapes to him?”

“Just now. Just before you came.”

“Who was there, Keith?”

“Mr. Hackett and his mother were the only ones I saw.”

“Do they have a tape recorder?”

“Yes. I saw them try the tapes on it for size.”

“How many tapes are there altogether?”

“Six.”

“Where did you put them?”

“I left them with Mrs. Marburg in the library. I don’t know what they did with them after that.”

“And they gave you a check? Right?”

“Yes. Hackett did.”

He took the yellow slip out of his wallet and handed it over. It was very like the one in my office safe, except that it was signed by Stephen Hackett instead of his mother, and not postdated.

The moral force required to part with the money generated more of the same in Sebastian. He followed me into the living room, moving eagerly. “I’ll go along with you. I want to tell that Hackett creep what I think of him.”

“No. You’ve got better things to do.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Taking your daughter back to the Center,” I said.

“Can’t I just simply take her home?”

“It’s too soon for that.”

“It always will be,” Sandy said. But she was looking at her father with changing eyes.