Sleeping Beauty (15 page)

“I’m only speculating, trying to get a lead on the people involved.”

“There’s only the one, so far as I know.”

“A man?”

“That’s right.”

“But you didn’t recognize his voice on the phone?”

“No, I did not. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t give a damn about nailing him, is that clear? It isn’t my money, anyway. It belongs to my father and mother, and they’ve got more than they’re ever going to need.”

“I realize the money isn’t important.”

“I’m glad you do,” he said. “At least we’ve got that straight.”

“But even after the money is delivered, there’s still the question of getting Laurel back. Did he give you any idea of where she is?”

“Of course not. But there’s no problem. He gets the money, we get Laurel.”

“What if you don’t get her?”

“We will, though,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Do you think he’s got Laurel with him at Sandhill Lake?”

He turned on me, his face suffused with blood. “How the hell do I know?” The Cadillac had wandered out of its lane again,
as Lennox’s attention swerved to me. I took hold of the wheel with both hands, found the brake with my foot, and brought the heavy car to a screeching stop on the shoulder of the highway.

“What do you think you’re trying to do?” he said.

“Not get killed.”

“Then get out and walk.”

“My orders are to go along with you.”

“I’m changing the orders. Get out.”

I went on sitting where I was, beside the money. Lennox thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and pointed the pocket at me.

“Out,” he said.

I didn’t think he’d shoot me deliberately. But he seemed accident-prone, and his hand was hidden. All I needed was a bullet in the kidneys. I opened the door and climbed out and watched him drive away.

Then I followed along on foot. The Cadillac climbed a long rise and disappeared over its crest. There were few cars on the old highway, and none of them stopped to pick me up. But it was a clear bright day, and I felt a certain pleasure in being alone and on foot, listening to the meadowlarks in the fields.

Eventually I reached the top of the rise. Beyond it was a series of dunes which marched in giant rhythm along the shore. Sandhill Lake lay on their landward side, an irregular oval which looked like a spattering of sky.

On its near side I could see the green buildings of the hunting club, with Lennox’s black Cadillac parked beside them. Farther away, at the end of the lake, was a wooden lookout tower with gray shingled sides. A dirt road ran from the main buildings to the tower.

Jack Lennox was walking away from me along the dirt road, carrying the carton of money in his hands. He reached the tower and went inside. I heard a muffled explosion, and then another. Ducks rose from the lake, pintails and shovelers. They moved like visible echoes in wide expanding circles. Lennox came
out empty-handed and ran along the road and fell down and crawled and lay still.

Another man emerged from the tower, carrying the brown carton of money in his hands. He paused beside Lennox. Then he turned in the other direction and began to run, limping, toward a eucalyptus grove that stood between the tower and the highway.

He moved like a young man, in spite of his limp, and he could have been the one I had seen at Blanche’s with the man in the tweed suit. He was too far away for me to be sure. I started to run down the highway, regretting the fact that I had no gun with me, and no binoculars.

It was a long run. Before I reached the foot of the hill, the ducks had circled out over the sea and were coming back and dropping down to the lake again. As if to preserve some kind of natural balance which required live things to be in the air at all times, a flock of band-tailed pigeons exploded out of the eucalyptus grove.

Then a small green car shot out of its far end and turned down the highway away from me. It was too far away for me to catch the license number, but it looked like an old Falcon two-door.

Lennox was lying where he had fallen, unconscious but breathing. A .32 revolver was clenched in his hand, and its muzzle smelled as though it had been recently fired. A bullet had grooved the side of his head and snipped off the upper tip
of his left ear. It didn’t look like a fatal wound, but thick worms of blood ran down from it and coiled in the dust.

I tied a handkerchief around his head to staunch the flow of blood. Then I left him where he lay and used the phone in his car to call an ambulance and the Sheriff’s men.

I went back and waited with Lennox. But a funny irrational feeling grew on me that the lookout tower was watching us. I went to the half-open door and looked in. There was nothing inside but a drift of sand marked with footprints. A dilapidated ladder went up to the observation platform.

I didn’t climb the ladder, or even go in. There might be fingerprints on the rungs; the footprints in the sand might be identifiable. Anyway, the feeling of being watched had been dispelled. I leaned in the sun against the outside wall and watched the ducks fly up again when the ambulance and the Sheriff’s radio car arrived together.

They strapped Lennox onto a stretcher and took him away. Two Sheriff’s officers remained with me, and I told them how Lennox had put me out on the road, and what I had seen and heard from the hilltop.

The officers’ names were Dolan and Shantz. Dolan was a straight-backed captain with a clipped gray mustache and probing eyes. Shantz was a heavy-shouldered young sergeant who looked like a football player going to seed.

Captain Dolan picked up Lennox’s revolver and spun the chamber. Only one shot had been fired from it. He let me see that, but made no comment. The three of us walked along a dirt lane toward the eucalyptus grove, avoiding the footprints left by the running man.

Dolan bent over to examine one of the footprints. “He was losing blood. There’s blood in his right footprints, like maybe his shoe filled up with it and slopped over.” He turned to Shantz and me. “Take a look for yourselves.”

We leaned over beside him. There was a paste of blood and sand in the footprint, and more in the footprints farther on.

“You did say you heard two shots, didn’t you?” Dolan looked at me as if there might be some hope for me, after all. “It looks like a double shooting that we have here.”

“I think it was. Each man shot the other.”

Following the bloody footprints, we walked in under the gray-green eucalyptus trees. The pigeons hadn’t come back, but there were warblers busy in the treetops. I caught myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it or ourselves.

A pool of blood stood beside the deep tracks where the car had stood. I described the Falcon, and what I had seen of the man who had driven it away. Sergeant Shantz made some notes.

“Too bad you didn’t get his license number,” Dolan said. “We better get the mobile lab out here and take some casts, and check the tower for prints. You want to call ’em, Shantzie?”

The younger man went back along the lane. Dolan leaned on a peeling eucalyptus trunk and folded his arms. His eyes were bleak and intent, and they looked at me like the eyes of a rifleman getting ready to fire.

“This is an important case, you know,” he said quietly. “A double shooting, for starters. And then it’s got the Lennox name in it. They’ve been all over the newspapers the last few days, and this will blow the headlines even bigger. It could make and break some reputations in this county. Including mine,” he added. “Let’s face it.”

“It’s important, all right.”

“You know it is. You know it better than I do. The question is this, Archer. When are you going to let down your inhibitions and tell me what it’s all about?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Don’t give me that. I wish I knew what you know. This morning you pulled a body out of the water in front of Mrs. William Lennox’s beach house. Six or seven hours later, you turn up here at the scene of another crime. How do you account for that?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

Dolan frowned and bit his mustache. “I want a serious answer. Did you know that this shooting, or these shootings, were going to happen?”

“Certainly not.”

“Okay, what brought you here?”

“Jack Lennox came here on private business. His family asked me to accompany him.”

“Private business with the man who shot him?”

“I think so.”

“What was the nature of the business?”

I would have liked to tell him, but I hesitated. If Laurel was guiltily involved, I had to try to protect her. Even if she was an innocent victim, it wouldn’t do her any good to blow the case wide open at this point.

“I can’t tell you that,” I said.

“You mean you can’t or you won’t?”

“I’d have to take it up with the Lennox family first.”

“Maybe you better do that as soon as possible.” Dolan looked down at the ground between us. “It wouldn’t be a blackmail payment, by any chance?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with that body you hauled out of the sea this morning?”

“It may. I don’t know what the connection is.”

“Then how do you know there is one?”

“I don’t. But I saw two men together last night at Blanche’s on the wharf. One of them was the little man I pulled out of the water this morning. I think it was probably a coincidence that he was floating off Sylvia Lennox’s beach.”

“That could be,” Dolan said. “He was in the water for eight or ten hours, and there’s a southward current that probably brought him from the direction of town. You say you saw him with another man on the wharf?”

“In Blanche’s Restaurant, last night about seven o’clock. The
other man was young, about thirty or so. Medium to tall in height, exceptionally broad shoulders. Dark hair and eyes. Dark turtleneck sweater.”

Dolan stepped away from his tree. “Sounds like the man who drove away in the Falcon—the one with the blood in his shoe.”

“I think it was.”

The keys were in Jack Lennox’s Cadillac, and I took it. Instead of turning north toward Pacific Point, I went south to El Rancho, where his father lived.

Since I had last seen the place, an electronic gate had been installed at the entrance. The armed guard on duty refused to let me in until he had phoned William Lennox at his house. He came out of his kiosk wearing a respectful expression.

“It’s okay, Mr. Archer. Mr. Lennox says you can come right out. Know where to find his place?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

He showed me a large-scale map attached to the wall of his office. “Turn left at the far end of the golf course. That will take you past River Valley School. Then turn sharp right up the hill, and you’ll see Mr. Lennox’s mailbox at the top.”

I followed his directions, paying special attention to River Valley School. It was a scattering of weathered redwood buildings dwarfed by the great native oak trees that surrounded it. Though I’d never been inside it, the school had associations for me. Both Laurel and Elizabeth had been students there. I
wondered what it had been like to grow up in the protective shadow of those trees.

William Lennox’s mailbox was made of stone and attached to a stone wall which ran parallel with the ocean in both directions as far as I could see. In the fields beyond it, on either side of the lane that led to the house, there were horses grazing. They looked like racing stock, and one of them, a sorrel mare, was running in irregular circles, apparently for the fun of it. She came to an uncertain stop near the wall, about a hundred feet from me.

Then I noticed the woman standing inside the wall. She was wearing a riding costume topped off with a Mexican hat, and held a long-handled whip upright in her hand. She flicked it harmlessly in the air. The mare started off on another circuit, arching her neck and swinging her head like a hammer from side to side.

I got out and approached the woman. “Nice-looking horse.”

She regarded me coolly over the stone wall. “She isn’t bad.”

She was a nice-looking woman, probably in her early forties, but holding hard to what she had left of her youth. Her waist, cinched in by a wide Western belt, looked as if I could span it with my two hands. Her dark eyes looked at me as if that might be a dangerous thing to try.

“My name is Archer. I’d like to see Mr. Lennox.”

Her voice sharpened. “Is he expecting you?”

“Yes.”

“Are you the detective?”

I said I was.

She looked along the fence at the Cadillac. “Is that Jack Lennox’s car?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got shot.”

“Fatally?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.”

She looked at me so impassively that I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or relieved. Her eyes softened as the mare came running up to her, hoofs drumming. The woman leaned her whip against the wall and stroked the mare on the nose, then sent her trotting away into the field.

The woman turned back to me. “Did someone in the family shoot Jack?”

“No.”

Her eyes hardened. “You don’t have to answer me in monosyllables. I’m Mrs. Hapgood, and I have a serious interest in what’s happened. I’m trying to protect my hus—Mr. Lennox.”

“Your husband?”

“That was a slip of the tongue,” she said. “We’re not married yet. But I take my responsibility seriously. Believe it or not, I’m trying to keep this family together.”

“Why?”

“Because William wants it that way,” she said. “So what happened to Jack?”

I told her over the stone wall as we walked back toward the car. She climbed on a stile into the lane and got into the front seat beside me.

“Jack’s always been wild and impulsive. He shouldn’t have been the one to go.”

“I know that. But he was determined. And Laurel’s his daughter.”

“Is she not.”

“Have you known Laurel for a long time?”

“A very long time indeed, yes. But please don’t try to interrogate me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Weren’t you? I think you were. But I’m not your problem, or any part of it.”