The Instant Enemy

chapter 34

CAPTAIN AUBREY was waiting for me at the wicket which opened onto the porch of the Sheriff’s substation. We talked in the dingy hallway of the old building, out of hearing of the officer on duty. Aubrey, when I sketched out what I knew and some of what I guessed, wanted to go along to the Hackett place.

I reminded him that he’d have to get a search warrant, and that might take some doing. Meanwhile Hackett could be destroying the tapes or erasing the sound from them.

“What makes the tapes so important?” Aubrey wanted to know.

“The death of Laurel Smith. I found out tonight that Stephen Hackett had an affair with her about twenty years ago. Davy Spanner was their illegitimate son.”

“And you think Hackett killed her?”

“It’s too early to say. I know he paid ten grand for the tapes.”

“Even so, you can’t just go in and seize them.”

“I don’t have to, Captain. I’ve been working for Mrs. Marburg. I can get into the house.”

“Can you get out again?” he said with a grim half-smile.

“I think I can. I may need some backstopping though. Give me some time alone with them first.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll play it by ear. If I need help I’ll holler.”

Aubrey followed me out to my car and leaned in at the window:

“Watch out for Mrs. Marburg. At the time of her second husband’s death I–” he cleared his throat and edited the slander out of his warning “–there was some suspicion that she was involved.”

“She may have been. Mark Hackett was killed by her son by her first husband – a man named Jasper Blevins.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Just about. I got it from Jasper Blevins’s grandmother, and it cost her some pain to tell me. She held back until she knew Jasper was dead.”

“Too many people have been dying,” Aubrey said. “Don’t you be one of them.”

His unmarked car followed me to the Hacketts’ gate. I drove on up the private road to the pass and across the dam. The house beyond the lake had lights in it, faint behind drawn curtains. As I knocked on the door I felt I was coming here for the last time.

Gerda Hackett answered the door. She looked anxious and lonely, like an overweight ghost haunting the wrong house. She brightened up unnervingly when she saw me:

“Mr. Archer! Kommen Sie nur ’rein.”

I stepped inside. “How’s your husband?”

“Much better, thank you.” She added in a disappointed tone: “It’s Stephen you wish to see?”

“And Mrs. Marburg.”

“They’re in the library. I’ll tell them you’re here.”

“Don’t bother. I know where it is.”

I left her standing like a stranger at the doorway of her house. Moving through the massive building with its institutional feeling, I could guess why Hackett had married a girl from another country. He didn’t want to be known.

The library door was closed. I could hear a voice behind it, a woman’s voice, and when I pressed my ear against the oak door I recognized the voice of Laurel Smith. It made the hair on the back of my neck bristle. Then my heart began to pound with the crazy hope that Laurel had survived.

I was close to breaking down, like a man coming near to the end of a long climb: an inverted downward climb into the past. I could hardly breathe the air there, and I leaned against the library door.

“Thank you, Mrs. Lippert,” Laurel was saying. “You want me to give you a receipt?”

“It isn’t necessary,” another woman’s voice said. “I’ll be getting the check back from the bank.”

“How about a little drink?”

“No thanks. My husband doesn’t like it when he comes home and I have liquor on my breath.”

“You can’t smell vodka,” Laurel said.

“He can. He’s got a nose like a beagle. Good night now.”

“Take care.”

A door closed. Laurel began to hum an old song about whistling in the dark. She must have been moving around her apartment, because her voice faded and returned.

I started to turn the knob of the library door. Ruth Marburg said:

“Who is that out there?”

I had to go in, smiling. Mrs. Marburg was sitting beside the telephone. There was no revolver in sight.

Hackett was sitting at the table where the tape recorder stood. His battered smile looked as ghastly from the outside as mine felt from the inside. He switched off Laurel’s singing.

“Mrs. Hackett told me where to find you. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Hackett started to tell me that I wasn’t, but Mrs. Marburg’s voice overbore his: “As a matter of fact you are interrupting something. My son and I are playing some old family tapes.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You wouldn’t be interested. They’re very nostalgic, but just to members of the family.” Her voice sharpened: “Do you want something?”

“I came to give you my final report.”

“This is a bad time. Come back tomorrow, eh?”

“I’d like to hear what he has to say.” Hackett looked uneasily at his mother. “As long as we’re paying him so much we might as well get the benefit of it.”

“I’d rather hear what Laurel has to say.”

Mrs. Marburg flapped her false eyelashes at me. “Laurel? Who on earth is Laurel?”

“Jasper’s wife. You’ve just been listening to her. Let’s all listen.”

Mrs. Marburg leaned toward me urgently. “Close the door behind you. I want to talk to you.”

I closed the door and leaned on it, watching them. Mrs. Marburg rose heavily, using her arms as well as her legs. Hackett reached for the tape recorder.

“Leave it alone.”

His hand hovered over the controls, and then withdrew. Mrs. Marburg walked toward me.

“So you’ve dug up a little dirt and you think you can raise the ante. You couldn’t be more wrong. If you don’t watch yourself you’ll be in jail before morning.”

“Somebody will.”

She thrust her face close to mine. “My son and I buy up people like you two for a nickel. That check I gave you is postdated. Are you too stupid to know what that means?”

“It means you didn’t trust me to stay bought. Nobody’s staying bought these days.” I got out Keith Sebastian’s check and showed it to her. “Sebastian gave me this.”

She snatched at the check. I held it out of her reach and put it away. “Don’t be grabby, Etta.”

Her whole face scowled under its mask of paint. “You mustn’t call me that name. My name is Ruth.”

She went to her chair. Instead of sitting down she opened the drawer of the telephone table. I reached her before she got the revolver out and ready to fire, and tore it out of her hands.

I backed away from her and turned to Hackett. He was on his feet, moving on me. I didn’t have to fire the gun. He started to walk backwards, rather tentatively, toward the table where he’d been sitting.

“Get away from the table, Hackett. I want you on the other side of the room, near your mother.”

He crossed in front of her and leaned against all of Dickens, then sat on a three-stepped stool in the corner, like a dunce. Mrs. Marburg stood resistant, but eventually sank back into her chair.

I took her son’s place on the chair by the tape recorder, and switched it on. Fleischer’s recording apparatus must have been noise-activated: there were no long breaks or lacunae in the sound. Laurel’s singing was followed by the small noise of Laurel making herself a drink, then by the larger noise of her making another drink.

She sang a song of her own invention, with the refrain of “Davy, Davy, Davy.”

The door of her apartment opened and closed, and Davy himself was in the room. “Hi, Laurel.”

“Call me Mother.”

“It doesn’t sound right. Hey, you don’t have to kiss me.”

“I have a right to. Haven’t I treated you like a mother?”

“Lately, you have. Sometimes I wonder why.”

“Because I am your mother. I’d cut off my right hand to prove it.”

“Or your head?”

She cried out, “Ahl” as if he had hurt her physically. “It isn’t very nice of you to talk like that. I didn’t have anything to do with killing your father.”

“But you know who did kill him.”

“I told you the other night, it was the young man – the beatnik with the beard.”

“They didn’t have beatniks in those days.” Davy’s voice was flat and incredulous.

“Whatever you want to call him – he was the one.”

“Who was he?”

After some hesitation she said: “I don’t know.”

“Then why did you cover up for him?”

“I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. You told Fleischer and the law that the dead man wasn’t my father. But you told me he was. Either you lied to them or you’re lying to me. Which is it?”

Laurel said in a small voice: “You mustn’t be so hard on me. I didn’t lie either time. The man the train ran over–”

Mrs. Marburg groaned, so loudly that I missed the end of Laurel’s sentence. I switched the recorder off as Mrs. Marburg started to speak:

“Do I have to sit here all night and listen to this soap opera?”

“It’s a family tape,” I said. “Very nostalgic. Your grandson and his mother are talking about what happened to your son. Don’t you want to know what happened to him?”

“That’s nonsense! I only have the one son.”

She turned to Hackett in his corner and showed her teeth in what was probably meant to be a maternal smile. He moved uneasily under it. Finally he spoke, for the second time, very carefully:

“There’s not much use pretending, Mother. He can find out about Jasper quite easily. I think he already has. I also think it’s time I made a clean breast of it.”

“Don’t be a fool!”

“A clean breast of what?” I said.

“The fact that I killed my half-brother, Jasper Blevins. If you’ll give me a chance to explain what happened, I think you’ll take a different view of the matter. Certainly no jury would convict me.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” his mother said. “I say you’re making a big mistake if you trust this s.o.b.”

“I have to trust someone,” he said. “And this man saved my life. I don’t agree with you, by the way, that we should stop payment on his check. He earned the money.”

I cut in: “You were going to tell me how you killed Jasper.”

He took a deep breath. “Let me start with why I killed him. Jasper murdered my father. My father and I had been very close, though I hadn’t seen him for a long time. I was living in London, studying economics in preparation for taking over the business eventually. But Dad was a man in his prime, and I didn’t expect him to die for many years. When I got the word that he’d been murdered, it just about pushed me over the edge. I was still very young, in my early twenties. When I flew home I was determined to track down my father’s murderer.”

Hackett was talking like a book, which made it hard to believe him. “How did you track him down?”

“It turned out to be quite easy. I found out Jasper had quarreled with Dad.”

“Who told you?”

He looked at his mother. She pushed air away with the flat of her hand. “Leave me out of this. If you take my advice, you’ll shut up here and now.”

“What are you afraid of, Mrs. Marburg?”

“You,” she said.

Hackett went on with a faint whine in his voice: “I want to finish what I had to say. I learned that Jasper was at the ranch with his wife, and I drove up there. This was the second or third day after he murdered Dad. I accused him of the crime. He came at me with an ax. Fortunately I was stronger than he was, or luckier. I got the ax away from him and crushed his skull with it.”

“So you were the man with the beard?”

“Yes. I’d grown a beard when I was a student in London.”

“Was Laurel there when you killed Jasper?”

“Yes. She saw it happen.”

“And the boy Davy?”

“He was there, too. I can hardly blame him for what he did to me.” Hackett touched his swollen mouth and discolored eyes.

“What happened between you and Davy?”

“He gave me a very bad time, as you know. At first he meant to put me under a train. Then he changed his mind and forced me to show him the way to the ranch. He seemed to be trying to reconstruct what happened, and he made me confess what I’ve just told you. He gave me a terrible beating. He talked as if he meant to kill me but he changed his mind again.”

“Did you tell him you were his father, his natural father?”

A one-sided grin of surprise pulled up the corner of Hackett’s mouth and narrowed one eye. It resembled the effects of a mild paralytic stroke. “Yes, I did. I am.”

“What happened after you told him that?”

“He untaped my wrists and ankles. We had a talk. He did most of the talking. I promised him money, and even recognition, if that was what he wanted. But he was mainly interested in getting at the truth.”

“The fact that you killed Jasper?”

“Yes. He didn’t remember me consciously at all. He’d blacked out on the whole thing.”

“It isn’t entirely clear to me,” I said. “The way you tell it, you killed Jasper in self-defense. Even without that, I agree that no jury would have convicted you, of anything worse than manslaughter. Why did you cover up, and go to such lengths to dispose of the body?”

“That wasn’t my doing. It was Laurel’s. I suppose she felt guilty about our affair in Texas. And I admit I felt guilty, about that and everything else. Don’t forget that Jasper was my brother. I felt like Cain himself.”

He may have felt like Cain, once long ago, but at the moment he sounded phony to me. His mother stirred and erupted again:

“Talk is expensive. Haven’t you learned that yet? You want this s.o.b. to own you outright?”

Hackett watched my face as he answered her: “I don’t believe Mr. Archer is a blackmailer.”

“Hell, he doesn’t call it that. None of them do. They call it investigation, or personal research, or scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch yours. So we buy him an apartment house to live in, and an office building to keep his files in, and he pays us five cents on the dollar.” She stood up. “What’s the ante, this time, you s.o.b.?”

“Don’t keep saying that, Etta. It spoils the maternal image. I’ve been wondering where Laurel got her apartment building and where your mother got hers.”

“Leave my mother out of this, my mother has nothing to do with this.” I seemed to have touched Mrs. Marburg on a nerve. “Have you been talking to Alma?”

“A little. She knows a lot more than you think she does.”

For the first time in our acquaintance, Mrs. Marburg’s eyes reflected real fear. “What does she know?”

“That Jasper killed Mark Hackett. And I think she thinks that you put Jasper up to it.”

“The hell I did! It was Jasper’s own idea.”

Mrs. Marburg had blundered, and she knew it. The fear in her eyes began to spill across the rest of her face.

“Did Jasper tell you he killed Mark?” I said.

She considered the long-term consequences of her answer and finally said: “I don’t remember. It was a long time ago, and I was very upset.”

“So you’re taking the Fifth. Maybe the tape will remember.” I reached for the recorder, intending to switch it on.

“Wait,” Mrs. Marburg said. “What will you take to stop right here? Just walk out and forget about us? How much?”

“I haven’t given the matter any thought.”

“Think about it now. I’m offering you a million dollars.” She held her breath, and added: “Tax-free. You could live like a king.”

I looked around the room. “Is this the way kings live?”

Hackett spoke from his dunce’s stool: “It’s no use, Mother. It’s going to be our word against his. So we better stop talking to him, just as you said.”

“You hear that?” Mrs. Marburg said to me. “A million, taxfree. That’s our final offer. You don’t have to do a thing for it. Just walk away.”

Hackett was watching my face. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. “He doesn’t want our money. He wants our blood.”

“Be quiet both of you.”

I switched on the recorder, turned the tape back a little, and heard Davy’s voice say again: “–or you’re lying to me. Which is it?”

Then Laurel’s voice: “You mustn’t be so hard on me. I didn’t lie either time. The man the train ran over really was your father.”

“That’s not what you said the other night. You said that Stephen Hackett was my father.”

“He was.”

I looked at Hackett. He was listening intently, his eyes still focused on my face. His own face seemed queerly starved. The scorn in his eyes had changed to a chilly loneliness.

Davy said: “I don’t understand.”

“I don’t want you to, Davy. I don’t want to dig up the past.”

“But I have to know who I am,” he said in a chanting rhythm. “I have to, it’s important to me.”

“Why? You’re my son and I love you.”

“Then why won’t you tell me who my father was?”

“I have. Can’t we leave it at that? We’ll only stir up trouble.”

The door opened.

“Where are you going?” Laurel said.

“My bird is waiting. Sorry.”

The door closed. Laurel cried a little, then made a drink. She yawned. There were night movements, an inner door closing. Night sounds, cars in the street.

I speeded up the tape and jumped it ahead and heard a voice which had to be my own, saying: “–sounds like a poolroom lawyer to me.”

Laurel’s voice answered mine: “Davy’s more than that. He’s more than just a talker. And he isn’t the poolroom type. He’s a serious boy.”

“What’s he serious about?”

“He wants to grow up and be a man and do something useful.”

“I think he’s conning you, Mrs. Smith,” I heard my strange voice say, a long time ago.

I moved the tape ahead again and heard the familiar noise of the apartment door being opened. Laurel said: “What do you want?”

No answer, except the sound of the door being closed. Then Hackett’s voice:

“I want to know who you’ve been talking to. I had a phone call last night–”

“From Davy?”

“From Jack Fleischer. Who the hell is Davy?”

“Don’t you remember, Jasper?” Laurel said.

The sound of a blow on flesh was followed by Laurel’s sigh, then other blows until the sighing changed to snoring. I was watching the man who called himself Stephen Hackett. He sat tense on his stool. He seemed to be excited by the noises, emotionally transported to Laurel’s apartment.

I broke the spell: “What did you hit her with, Jasper?”

He let his breath out in a kind of soughing whine. Even his mother had turned her eyes away from him.

I said to her: “What did he hit her with?”

“How in God’s name should I know?”

“He went to you immediately afterward. He probably disposed of the weapon at your house. But mainly I think he wanted moral support. When he came back here that afternoon he brought you along with him.”

“That doesn’t make me responsible.”

“You are, though. You can’t profit from murder without taking part of the blame.”

“I didn’t know he killed Laurel,” she said with some force.

“You knew he killed Mark Hackett. Didn’t you?”

“I found out about it.”

“But you didn’t turn him in.”

“He was my son,” she said.

“Stephen was your son, too. But your maternal instincts didn’t work for him. You conspired with Jasper to kill Stephen and put Jasper in his place.”

She gave me a shocked look, as if the truth of what they had done was just occurring to her, fifteen years too late. “How could I possibly do a thing like that?”

The sentence was meant to be a denial, but it was also a question; which I answered. “You were headed for the rocks. Mark Hackett knew about your affair with Sidney Marburg. He was going to divorce you and cut you off financially. Simply killing Mark wouldn’t help you very much. The bulk of his estate was going to Stephen. So Stephen had to go.

“Nobody in California knew Stephen. He’d been out of the country for several years, and at the time he left for Europe you were all living in Texas. But your lover Sid had sharp eyes, and you didn’t want to have to knock him off, so you sent him to Mexico for the transition period. Sid caught one glimpse of Stephen wearing a beard when Stephen flew in from England.

“You shunted Stephen off to the ranch where Jasper was waiting for him. Jasper had more than money to gain from Stephen’s death. His brother’s identity was a perfect mask for the murderer of Mark Hackett. He killed Stephen and shaved his beard off.” I looked past Mrs. Marburg to her son. “You were a barber at one time, weren’t you, Jasper?”

He looked back at me with eyes as empty as a skull’s. I said to him: “You left Laurel behind to con the local law and came down here and took your brother’s place. It couldn’t have been too hard, with your mother vouching for you. I imagine the hardest part was learning to forge your brother’s signature. But then you were a bit of an artist, too. You were a bit of just about everything. But you found your real métier as a killer and conman.”

The man in the corner spat at me and missed. His role as a rich and lucky man had ended. The room with its books and pictures no longer belonged to him. He was Albert Blevins’s son, alone in blank space.

“For fourteen or fifteen years,” I said, “nothing much happened to threaten your success. You lived quietly in seclusion, developed a taste for good pictures, visited Europe. You even got up nerve enough to make a bigamous marriage.

“No doubt you were paying off Laurel all those years. You owed her a lot, really, for keeping Jack Fleischer off your trail. Unfortunately she got lonely with nothing but a little money to keep her company. And she had some pangs of conscience about the boy she’d abandoned.

“In the end she made a move toward the boy. It was enough to tip Jack Fleischer off. I’m sure he’d been suspicious of both of you from the start. His retirement freed him to act. He put Laurel’s apartment under surveillance, and started to dig into the whole background.

“We know from the tape what happened after that. Fleischer called you. You silenced Laurel. Later you got your chance to silence Fleischer. Do you want to talk about that?”

Hackett made no response of any kind. He was leaning forward with his hands on his knees. I went on:

“It isn’t hard to imagine what happened. Davy believed he had found his father, that his life was just beginning. He laid the shotgun down and untied you. You made a grab for the gun and got hold of it. But Davy got away.

“Jack Fleischer was older and not so quick. Or maybe he was paralyzed by the sudden confrontation. Did he recognize you, Jasper, and know in the moment before he died who shot him? We know, anyway. You killed Fleischer and threw the gun in the creek. Then you collapsed on the creek bank and waited to be rescued.”

“You can’t prove any of this,” Mrs. Marburg said.

Her son was doubtful. He slid off the stool and tried to rush me, clumsy and almost reluctant, trotting in slow motion toward his own revolver in my hand.

I had time to decide where to shoot him. If I had liked the man I might have shot to kill. I shot him in the right leg.

He fell at his mother’s feet, clutching his knee and moaning. She didn’t reach out to touch him or comfort him. She sat looking down at him in the way I imagine the damned look down, with pity and terror only for themselves, into lower circles than their own.

The sound of the shot brought Aubrey into the house. He arrested both of them and took them in on suspicion of conspiracy to commit murder.

Later I made my way through the crowds of night-blooming young people on the Strip and climbed the stairs to my office. The basket of cold chicken, washed down with a slug of whisky, tasted better than I expected it to.

I had a second slug to fortify my nerves. Then I got Mrs. Marburg’s check out of the safe. I tore it into small pieces and tossed the yellow confetti out the window. It drifted down on the short hairs and the long hairs, the potheads and the acid heads, draft dodgers and dollar chasers, swingers and walking wounded, idiot saints, hard cases, foolish virgins.

The End