The Instant Enemy

chapter 3

A FEW MINUTES LATER I opened the front door for Heidi Gensler. She was a clean-looking adolescent whose yellow hair hung straight onto her thin shoulders. She wore no makeup that I could see. She carried a satchel of books.

Her pale-blue gaze was uncertain. “Are you the man I’m supposed to talk to?”

I said I was. “My name is Archer. Come in, Miss Gensler.”

She looked past me into the house. “Is it all right?”

Mrs. Sebastian emerged from her room wearing a fluffy pink robe. “Come in, Heidi dear, don’t be afraid. It’s nice of you to come.” Her voice was not maternal.

Heidi stepped inside and lingered in the hallway, ill at ease. “Did something happen to Sandy?”

“We don’t know, dear. If I tell you the bare facts, I want you to promise one thing: you mustn’t talk about it at school, or at home, either.”

“I wouldn’t. I never have.”

“What do you mean by that, dear: ‘You never have’?”

Heidi bit her lip. “I mean– I don’t mean anything.”

Mrs. Sebastian moved toward her like a pink bird with a keen dark outthrust head. “Did you know what was going on between her and that boy?”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“And yet you never told us? That wasn’t very friendly of you, dear.”

The girl was close to tears. “Sandy is my friend.”

“Good. Fine. Then you’ll help us get her safely home, won’t you?”

The girl nodded. “Did she run away with Davy Spanner?”

“Before I answer that, remember you have to promise not to talk.”

I said: “That’s hardly necessary, Mrs. Sebastian. And I really prefer to do my own questioning.”

She turned on me. “How can I know you’ll be discreet?”

“You can’t. You can’t control the situation. It’s out of control. So why don’t you go away and let me handle this?”

Mrs. Sebastian refused to go. She looked ready to fire me. I didn’t care. The case was shaping up as one on which I’d make no friends and very little money.

Heidi touched my arm. “You could drive me to school, Mr. Archer. I don’t have a ride when Sandy isn’t here.”

“I’ll do that. When do you want to go?”

“Any time. If I get there too early for my first class I can always do some homework.”

“Did Sandy drive you to school yesterday?”

“No. I took the bus. She phoned me yesterday morning about this time. She said she wasn’t going to school.”

Mrs. Sebastian leaned forward. “Did she tell you where she was going?”

“No.” The girl had put on a closed, stubborn look. If she did know anything more, she wasn’t going to tell it to Sandy’s mother.

Mrs. Sebastian said: “I think you’re lying, Heidi.”

The girl flushed, and water rose in her eyes. “You have no right to say that. You’re not my mother.”

I intervened again. Nothing worth saying was going to get said in the Sebastian house. “Come on,” I told the girl, “I’ll drive you to school.”

We went outside and got into my car and started downhill toward the freeway. Heidi sat very sedately with her satchel of books between us on the seat. She’d probably remembered that she wasn’t supposed to get into an automobile with a strange man. But after a minute she said: “Mrs. Sebastian blames me. It isn’t fair.”

“Blames you for what?”

“For everything Sandy does. Just because Sandy tells me things doesn’t mean I’m responsible.”

“Things?”

“Like about Davy. I can’t run to Mrs. Sebastian with everything Sandy says. That would make me a stool pigeon.”

“I can think of worse things.”

“Like for instance?” I was questioning her code, and she spoke with some defiance.

“Like letting your best friend get into trouble and not lifting a finger to prevent it.”

“I didn’t let her. How could I stop her? Anyway, she isn’t in trouble, not in the way you mean.”

“I’m not talking about having a baby. That’s a minor problem compared with the other things that can happen to a girl.”

“What other things?”

“Not living to have a baby. Or growing old all of a sudden.”

Heidi made a thin sound like a small frightened animal. She said in a hushed voice: “That’s what happened to Sandy, in a way. How did you know that?”

“I’ve seen it happen to other girls who couldn’t wait. Do you know Davy?”

She hesitated before answering. “I’ve met him.”

“What do you think of him?”

“He’s quite an exciting personality,” she said carefully. “But I don’t think he’s good for Sandy. He’s rough and wild. I think he’s crazy. Sandy isn’t any of those things.” She paused in solemn thought. “A bad thing happened to her, is all. It just happened.”

“You mean her falling for Davy?”

“I mean the other one. Davy Spanner isn’t so bad compared with the other one.”

“Who’s he?”

“She wouldn’t tell me his name, or anything else about him.”

“So how do you know that Davy’s an improvement?”

“It’s easy to tell. Sandy’s happier than she was before. She used to talk about suicide all the time.”

“When was this?”

“In the summer, before school started. She was going to walk into the ocean at Zuma Beach and swim on out. I talked her out of it.”

“What was bothering her – a love affair?”

“I guess you could call it that.”

Heidi wouldn’t tell me anything further. She’d given Sandy her solemn oath never to breathe a word, and she had already broken it by what she’d said to me.

“Did you ever see her diary?”

“No. I know she kept one. But she never showed it to anybody, ever.” She turned toward me in the seat, pulling her skirt down over her knees. “May I ask you a question, Mr. Archer?”

“Go ahead.”

“Just what happened to Sandy? This time, I mean?”

“I don’t know. She drove away from home twenty-four hours ago. The night before, her father broke up a date she was having with Davy in West Hollywood. He dragged her home and locked her up overnight.”

“No wonder Sandy left home,” the girl said.

“Incidentally, she took along her father’s shotgun.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know. But I understand Davy has a criminal record.”

The girl didn’t respond to the implied question. She sat looking down at her fists, which were clenched in her lap. We reached the foot of the slope and drove toward Ventura Boulevard.

“Do you think she’s with Davy now, Mr. Archer?”

“That’s the assumption I’m going on. Which way?”

“Wait a minute. Pull over to the side.”

I parked in the sharp morning shadow of a live oak which had somehow survived the building of the freeway and the boulevard.

“I know where Davy lives,” Heidi said. “Sandy took me to his pad once.” She used the shabby word with a certain pride, as if it proved that she was growing up. “It’s in the Laurel Apartments in Pacific Palisades. Sandy told me he gets his apartment free, for looking after the swimming pool and stuff.”

“What happened when you visited his place?”

“Nothing happened. We sat around and talked. It was very interesting.”

“What did you talk about?”

“The way people live. The bad morals people have today.”

I offered to drive Heidi the rest of the way to school, but she said she could catch a bus. I left her standing on the corner, a gentle creature who seemed a little lost in a world of high velocities and low morals.