Sleeping Beauty (19 page)

“No. Look. Where are you now?”

“Pacific Point.”

“Can you come here to my office? I’ll be finished with my
other—with my patients by half past five. Then we can talk about Harold.” He hung up on me.

Elizabeth moved across the room and stood above me with her fists clenched. “Won’t he help?”

“I think he will.”

“If he’s a local doctor, my family can bring pressure to bear on him.”

“He isn’t, though. He practices in Long Beach. And I’ll probably get further with him by myself.”

Her general anger focused on me again. “You’re very self-confident, aren’t you? Overconfident, perhaps, considering your failure to protect my brother.”

“The only way I could have protected your brother was by putting him in irons. He didn’t want me to go to Sandhill Lake with him. It looked as if he wanted to have a shoot-out. Anyway, he got one. And I’m not taking any responsibility for it. Your brother pointed a gun at me and ordered me out of the car.”

“Really?”

“I’m not making this up.”

“But why would he do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know, but I plan to ask him. I’m going over to the hospital now.”

Elizabeth didn’t put up any further argument. Letting me out into the courtyard where I had left my car, she tried the knob of an outside door between the back door and the garages. The door failed to open. I said:

“What’s in there?”

“It’s Tony Lashman’s room. I keep hoping he’ll turn up. I’m worried about him.”

“Are you sure he isn’t in his room?”

“I’m not sure about anything.”

The lock on the door was of the Yale type, easy to open with a plastic credit card. The room on the other side of it was large but rather makeshift, incompletely walled with knotty pine.
The single bed was unoccupied and unmade. There was no one under the bed and no one in the closet. The floor of the closet was piled with dirty clothes intermingled with sections of a black rubber wet suit.

A windup alarm clock sat on the table beside the bed. It wasn’t ticking. It had stopped a few minutes short of midnight, or of noon.

I drove across town to the hospital and learned, after some palaver at the front desk, that Jack Lennox was in a private room on the top floor. In the hallway outside his door, I found Sergeant Shantz sitting on a metal folding chair which his flesh overlapped.

“Where have
you
been?” he said.

“I returned Jack Lennox’s car, and got involved with the family. How is he doing?”

“Okay. His wife is in there with him.” Shantz rose heavily, pushing his chair back against the wall. “If you’re going to be here for the next few minutes, I should make a phone call. The Sheriff asked me to let him know when Lennox was able to talk.”

The Sergeant moved down the hall toward the elevators, and I went into the room. It was dim, with the curtains partly closed over the windows.

Marian Lennox was standing in a protective attitude by the head of the bed. She looked rather resentful of my intrusion, as
if she valued this time alone with her husband. His face was sallow and pinched under a turban of bandage.

“Archer?”

He tried to sit up. His wife pushed him gently back against the pillows. “Please, Jack. You’re not supposed to get up.”

“Stop making like a nurse, for God’s sake.” He moved rebelliously under her hands. “You’re not good at it.”

“But the doctor says you need complete rest and quiet. After all, you’ve been shot.”

“Who shot me?”

“Don’t you remember?” I said.

“No. The last thing I remember is opening the door of the tower—the lookout tower at Sandhill Lake.” He groaned.

“Why did you go there?”

“It’s where I was supposed to leave the money.” His voice was losing its force.

“Who asked you to leave it there?”

“Nobody I knew.” He looked at his wife. “Do you know who it was?”

She shook her head. “I only talked to him once, when he made the first call. I didn’t recognize his voice.”

“It hardly matters, anyway,” I said. “It was probably the same man who shot you. And I know who that was.”

They waited in silence for me to tell them. When I gave them Harold Sherry’s name, Jack Lennox seemed blankly puzzled by it, as if the shot that had wounded him had driven all memory of Harold from his brain. But Marian’s face changed. She looked as if she could feel the recurrence in her body of an old illness.

“Don’t you remember Harold?” I said to him. “You shot him in the leg.”

“I
shot him? You’ve got to be kidding.” He sat up, balancing his head like a heavy weight. “Does that mean you’ve captured him?”

“Not yet.”

“What about the money? The hundred thousand?”

“He got away with it, at least for the present. I’m going to have to tell the police about the money.”

Lennox seemed uninterested. He didn’t ask me about his daughter Laurel. I wondered if he had perhaps forgotten her, too. He let out a long sigh and collapsed against his pillows.

Marian interposed herself between us. “I’m afraid Jack is exhausted. Couldn’t we talk outside?”

“Of course.”

She pulled up her husband’s covers, pressed his shoulder, and followed me out. She seemed to be under better control than she had been earlier. Her face was strained but focused. It occurred to me that she was one of that disappearing species of women who live in their husbands’ shadow and can only step out of it when the husbands are out of action. She said, when the door had closed behind her:

“You haven’t said anything about Laurel, Mr. Archer.”

“There hasn’t been any word on Laurel.”

“You don’t know where she is, then?”

“No. The way to her is through Harold Sherry.”

“He got his money. What more does he want?”

“I don’t know. He may want some assurance of personal safety. The money’s no good to him if he doesn’t live to spend it.”

Her gaze moved past me, pale and desolate, looking down the long arctic slope of the future. “Jack shouldn’t have shot him.”

“No. It upset the bargain. But Harold may have fired at your husband first.”

A puzzled cleft appeared between her eyes. “Why would he do that?”

“I’ll have to ask him.”

“Do you have any hope of finding Harold Sherry?”

“Some. I know the name of a doctor he’s gone to in the past. With his leg wound, he’ll be wanting to get to a doctor.”

“Would I know the doctor’s name?”

“I doubt it. He practices in Long Beach.”

“We know quite a few people in Long Beach.”

“But I don’t think I better mention his name to anyone, even you. He’s my only decent lead so far. The chances of getting Laurel back aren’t quite as good as they were this morning. I guess you know that, Mrs. Lennox.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything is so confused. It was a sorry day for Laurel—for all of us—when she met Harold Sherry. This isn’t the first time he’s abducted her, did you know that? He ran away with her when she was just fifteen.”

“I’ve heard about it. But I don’t understand his motive.”

“He was always envious of our family.”

“Was he attracted to Laurel?”

“Perhaps he was, in a sick way. I remember once he came to the house—this was before he took her to Las Vegas. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. She had to ask her father to intervene.”

“Laurel asked your husband to intervene?”

“That’s correct. Jack threw him out of the house.” Her voice was cold and featureless, like a medium reciting words whose meaning was not clear to her. “My husband has always had a violent temper.”

“I’ve seen a few indications of that. Tell me, Mrs. Lennox, has his temper ever been turned against Laurel?”

“Of course it has. Many times.”

“Recently?”

“Yes. They haven’t been getting along at all well lately. Jack hasn’t been too happy about her marriage. In fact he’s done his best to break it up.” She overheard herself and gave me a worried look. “What do you suspect Laurel of doing?”

“There is a possibility that she threw in with Harold of her own free will.”

“When they went to Vegas?”

“Then,” I said, “and now. Do you think Laurel was genuinely kidnapped last night?”

“I don’t know what to think.” She looked at me suspiciously. “What are you getting at, exactly?”

“The possibility of collusion. There’s some evidence that Laurel and Harold have been seeing each other.”

“Where did you get that story?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t name my source.” There was enough bad blood between Harold’s mother and the Lennox family. “Anyway, I don’t believe it,” she said.

She turned away to go back into her husband’s room, and paused with her hand on the door. I could see how thin and vulnerable she was. Her graying hair, cut in a long shag, curled like wispy feathers at the nape of her neck. Her shoulder blades stuck out under her dress like unfledged wings.

She had lost her daughter, and her husband had been shot. It was the kind of experience that used people up in a hurry. A week from now, if the attrition continued, she could be old and defeated like Sylvia.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Lennox. I thought you should know some of the possibilities.”

She turned quickly and almost lost her balance. “Yes, of course. You’re right. I want you to keep me informed.”

“I’ll try to do that.”

“If Laurel is involved with Harold Sherry—I don’t believe it, you understand, but
if
she is—I want to know about it before anyone else. Particularly before you tell the police.”

“I understand you.” But I made no promises.

It was a long day. When Marian Lennox left me, I sat down in Shantz’s folding chair, leaned back against the wall, and let my mind go loose. Black waves washed over it, carrying me in to a black shore. I sat up with a start.

Shantz stepped out of the elevator. He came toward me quickly, his belly swinging over his heavy gun belt. Drops of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“Sorry I kept you waiting. There’s been another death at the beach.”

“Whose death?”

“We don’t know yet. A young fellow with black hair. We’ve got him downstairs in the pathology department. If you want to take a look at him, it’s on the first floor, to your right as you leave the elevator. Captain Dolan is there with the Sheriff.”

The elevator Shantz had left was still waiting. I touched the first-floor button and leaned on the wall of the descending cubicle. I felt as if I was going down to the bottom of things.

A Chicano girl in a nurse’s-aide uniform leaned in through the door as it opened. “Is something the matter?” Her soft black eyes were solicitous.

“No. There’s nothing the matter.”

“I’m going up. Do you want to go up?”

“No.”

“Are you a patient?”

“No.”

Her question jolted me into movement. I stepped out into the first-floor corridor and walked toward the “Pathology” sign unwillingly. There had been too much violence for one day.

I hunched my mind around a little until my scar tissue was back in place. Then I knocked on the door and went in.

A grimly maternal woman behind a fixed desk dispatched me down a further corridor, through what seemed like zones of deepening cold, to the room where the dead man lay. He was still strapped to the aluminum stretcher on which the Sheriff and Captain Dolan had brought him in. His body was enclosed in a transparent plastic bag which had been opened at the top to reveal his head.

It was Tony Lashman, with oil in his eyes, oil in his open mouth. “This is Lew Archer,” Dolan said. “Sheriff Sam Whittemore, Lew.”

We shook hands across the body. Whittemore had a jolting blue glance which came at you unexpectedly out of a lined and worried face. He used his handshake to guide me to the other side of the room.

I told him that the dead man was Sylvia Lennox’s secretary, and that I had seen him alive at noon. “Where did you find him?”

“Just down the beach from Sylvia Lennox’s house. You can’t see it in that position, but the back of his head was bashed in, apparently by a rock.”

“Did you find the rock?”

The Sheriff’s bright blue eyes came up to meet mine. “We didn’t find the rock. There’re a million rocks, all of them covered with oil, around where he was lying.” He leaned toward me. “You know the Lennox family, do you?”

“I’ve met most of them in the last twenty-four hours.”

“Just off the top of your head, now, do you have any idea who’s doing these killings?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Or why?”

“I’m working on it, Sheriff. But at this point I can’t see much light.”

“Neither can we.” He added quickly, “Don’t quote me.”

Captain Dolan took his turn. “Is this the fellow you saw at Sandhill Lake when Lennox got shot?”

“No. It isn’t.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m quite certain. This is Sylvia Lennox’s secretary.”

“Why would somebody knock him in the head? Was he involved in that deal at the lake?”

“I don’t know.”

The Sheriff said, “What was the nature of that deal? I never did get it straight.”

“Jack Lennox was supposed to pay over some money.”

“Pay the other man some money?”

“That’s correct.”

“What happened to the money?”

“The other man took it away with him.”

Dolan said, “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I had to check with the Lennox family.”

“Is that where the money came from? The Lennox family?”

“Yes.”

“And who were the Lennox family paying off?”

I sat in silence for a while, trying to think of a way to leave Laurel out, and a way to preserve my sense of not being an auxiliary policeman. But Laurel was far beyond the reach of my protection, and there seemed to be no point in protecting Harold Sherry.

I gave them Harold’s name, and told them where he came from and what he had been doing. The only thing I held back was Dr. Lawrence Brokaw’s name and address in Long Beach. I wanted to be the first to talk to Brokaw.

“So it’s a snatch.” Whittemore spoke with some disgust.