Sleeping Beauty (6 page)

“How did they explain it?”

“They said it was an act of God, mainly.” There may have been some irony in his voice but I could detect no trace of it in his face. “They said that every now and then nature lets them down and all they can do is clean up after her.”

“Isn’t that a little rough on nature?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.” He took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling night air. “I look after the Captain’s place for him and that’s about all I know.”

He looked and talked like a man who knew a good deal more.

“Have you worked here long, Mr.—?”

“Smith. My name is Smith. I’ve worked for him over twenty-five years, ever since me and the Captain retired from the Navy, and before that. I was his special steward when he had his last sea duty. We were at Okinawa together. That’s where the Captain lost his ship. And where I got this.” He touched his crippled left hand with his right.

He seemed ready to unload his war reminiscences. I warded them off: “So you’ve known Laurel since she was a little girl?”

“Off and on, I guess you could say that. I knew her better when she was a little girl than I have since. After the war, her parents used to live in the Palisades.” He pointed downhill toward the sea. “And they used to drop her off here when they needed a baby-sitter. She was a sweet little thing, but also a handful sometimes.”

“What did she do?”

“She used to run away, just like she did on you. Sometimes I’d spend a couple of hours looking for her. If she’d been doing it for fun, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But she wasn’t. She used to be really scared. You’d think I spent a lot of time beating on her. But I never raised a hand to the little tyke. I was fond of her.” His voice and eyes had softened.

“What was she scared of?”

“Just about everything. She couldn’t stand any kind of trouble—anybody lifting his hand or raising his voice in anger. If a bird flew into the window glass and got killed, it used to shake her up for half a day. I remember once I threw a stone at a cat that didn’t belong here. I wasn’t aiming to hit him, just scare him off. But I hit him and he let out a yowl and Miss Laurel saw it happen. She went and hid for the rest of the afternoon.”

“Where would she hide?”

“She had several places. She kept changing them on me. The room back of the garage. The pool house. The storage shed. Those were some of them.”

“Show me the places, will you?”

“Tonight?”

“She may not last till morning.”

He looked closely into my face. “You honestly think she could be holed up around here?”

“It’s a possibility. Sometimes when people are badly shaken they go back to childish patterns.”

He nodded. “I know what you mean. I’ve done it myself.”

He led me around the house to the garage and unlocked the
door. The building contained three cars—a middle-aged Continental, a new Ford, a half-ton GMC pickup—and there was no space for another car. That made me wonder if Captain Somerville wasn’t at home after all.

Laurel wasn’t in any of the cars, or in the toolroom or the half-bathroom behind the garage. Smith picked up a flashlight in the toolroom. We went down the hillside through trees, bumping our heads on unripe oranges. He opened the door of the storage shed.

It was built of roughly finished redwood, now weathered light, and filled with the random accumulations of years: old furniture, shelves of fading books, dusty luggage covered with foreign labels, a rusted filing cabinet, garden tools and insecticides and rat poison. No Laurel. Smith’s flashlight beam probed the dark corners for her.

He let the beam rest for a moment on a wooden sea chest painted blue and stenciled in red with the Captain’s name and rank and the name of a U.S. Navy vessel,
Canaan Sound.
Then he raised the light to a picture that hung on the rough wall above the chest. The picture had a twisted black frame out of which a man in a captain’s hat smiled through cracked dusty glass.

“That was the Captain before he lost his ship,” Smith said.

He kept his light on the picture while I studied it. The Captain had been handsome and confident, though his half-smiling mouth could hardly support the boldness of his eyes.

When we went outside, I said, “Are you sure the Captain isn’t home tonight?”

“What makes you think he is?”

“You’re showing me everything but the inside of the house.”

“Those are my orders. Nobody is allowed in the house.”

We went along a flagstone path to the pool house. The pump inside was breathing like a marathon runner. Under that noise I could hear the scurrying sounds of a small animal.

Smith handed me the flashlight and took the gun from his pocket. It looked like a .38 with a two-inch barrel.

“What are you going to do with that?”

“I hear a rat in there. Try and get the light on him.”

He pulled the door open with his crippled hand. The pool house was full of faint moving lights from the heater. I turned the flashlight on the cement floor, fearful for an instant that Laurel might be in there and be accidentally shot.

A bright-eyed rat was caught in the light. He ran for the drainage hole. Before he got there, the gun went off beside me. The rat fell in a red blur, twitched, and lay still.

As if the sound of Smith’s gun had been a prearranged signal, a phone began to ring somewhere uphill from us. It rang three times, and stopped. By that time, Smith was at the top of the hill and I was close behind him.

We paused on the concrete pool deck at the side of the house. I could hear a man’s voice, hoarse and strained, talking inside.

“The Captain’s at home, isn’t he?” I said.

“That’s right. I had orders not to disturb him.”

“Now that he’s been disturbed, will you let me see him?”

“What about?”

“Laurel.”

“She isn’t here. You saw that for yourself.”

“That could be Laurel on the phone now.”

“I’ll ask him.”

He unlocked a sliding glass door and went into the house, leaving me outside. I walked up and down on the deck, trying to lose my feeling of frustration. All I had to show for my
evening’s work was a dead rat and a persistent vision of Laurel lying somewhere with an empty vial beside her.

Inside the house, the Captain’s intermittent voice continued like a voice in a dream, just beyond the range of comprehension. Then I heard Smith’s voice. He came to the sliding glass door and opened it exactly wide enough to admit me.

“The Captain says he’ll see you. Don’t keep him too long. He hasn’t had any real sleep for two nights.”

The Captain was sitting in pajamas at the desk in his study. He was gray and haggard. In the collapsing structures of his face I could barely recognize the younger man whose picture hung in the storage shed. There were no pictures at all on the walls of his study.

He stood up and gave me a brisk handshake which failed to convey an impression of energy. “I understand you’re a private detective, Mr. Archer. It isn’t clear to me who you’re working for.”

“Tom Russo, your niece’s husband.”

“Where is my niece?”

“I don’t know. She took off with a tube of Nembutal capsules—”

His voice cut in on mine: “Where and when?”

“From my apartment in West Los Angeles, sometime before eight tonight.”

“Who did she leave with?”

“She was alone.”

“Are you sure?” His eyes probed at me from his sun-scarred face.

“She may have been picked up on the street,” I said.

“Are you telling me somebody picked her up?”

“I’m saying it could have happened.”

“Who picked her up?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know that she was picked up.” He turned and walked the short distance to the end of the room. His bare feet made no sound at all on the carpet. He
turned and came back toward me with his finger pointing at me like a prosecutor’s.

“Why did you come here?”

“I’ve been trying various places she might be. Her husband’s house. Her friend Joyce Hampshire’s place. I’ve talked to her parents.”

“How long ago?”

I looked at my watch. It was past eleven o’clock. “Within the last couple of hours. I don’t get the point of all these questions you’re asking.”

“Don’t you?”

The Captain raised himself on his toes. He was the shortest man of the three of us. Smith towered over him but held himself quite still and silent, frozen in a wartime hierarchy which should have dissolved in history long since.

“You’re being rather mysterious, Captain.”

“Then I’ll be plain. Before I talk to you any further, I want the name of someone who will vouch for you. Someone known to me personally or by reputation.”

“That’s a little tough at this time of night.”

“This is a tough situation,” he said.

“All right. Do you know John Truttwell in Pacific Point?”

“Yes. I know him slightly. I know his former associate Emerson Little better. Little happens to be my mother-in-law’s attorney.”

“Ask him about me.”

The Captain sat down at his desk, made the call, and got Emerson Little at home. After a few preliminaries, he asked Little for his opinion of me. He listened to what Little had to say without any visible change in his expression. Then he thanked him and hung up.

“He gives you a clean bill of health. I hope he knows what he’s talking about.”

“I hope he does.”

“My niece’s life may be in danger.”

“I’ve been working on that assumption.”

His face closed up like a fist, which he thrust at me. “Did you know that she’s been abducted?”

“No.”

“She has been. Her father received a ransom demand shortly after he got home tonight.”

“In writing or by phone?”

“I understand by phone. The amount is quite large—a good deal more than he has available.”

“How much?”

“A hundred thousand dollars, in cash. Since Jack and Marian don’t have the money themselves, they appealed to his mother. It was his mother—Laurel’s grandmother—who phoned me just a few minutes ago. Jack asked her not to tell anyone, but she decided that she’d better consult with me. I’m the active head of the family, you might say, though I’m only a member by marriage.”

There was a streak of vanity in him, I noticed, which went a little strangely with his concern for his niece. His niece by marriage. I said:

“How soon does the money have to be available?”

“They asked for it tonight. But of course that isn’t possible, since they’re demanding cash. They’ve got to give us more time.”

“Are they going to call back?”

“I understand they are, sometime in the course of the night. Jack will try to put them off until tomorrow noon at least.”

“Is he going to call the police?”

“I don’t think so; they warned him not to. You understand I haven’t talked to Jack. I’ve only heard from my mother-in-law. Sylvia’s naturally very upset and not too coherent.”

“Is she willing to provide the money?”

“Of course she is. Sylvia is extremely fond of Laurel. We all are. There’s no problem about the money.”

“There may be other problems. Before the family pays it,
make sure that the person or persons paid actually have her. And make sure that she’s alive.”

Somerville looked at me in alarm. “I can’t assume that responsibility myself. I have my hands full with the blowout.”

“Do you think the blowout had anything to do with what’s happened to your niece?”

“I don’t quite understand. You mean some environmentalist maniac is responsible?”

“I wasn’t suggesting that. I’m a bit of an environmentalist myself. So was—” I realized as I caught myself that I half believed Laurel was dead. “Your niece is, too.”

“Then what exactly did you mean?” he said.

“The family’s been getting a lot of publicity this week, some good, some bad. You and her father were on television last night. His picture was in the paper.”

“But not Laurel’s.”

“No, but she’s the vulnerable one. And she’s the one who got taken.”

A woman’s voice said from the hall, “Who got taken?”

She brushed past Smith in the doorway, a well-made woman who looked as if she had dressed in a hurry and hadn’t brushed her blond hair. Captain Somerville got to his feet.

“Laurel was kidnapped tonight.” He gave her a few of the details: the amount of the ransom, the fact that Sylvia was willing to pay it. Then he turned to me. “Mr. Archer here is a private detective. I was about to ask him if he could help us in this matter. He saw Laurel earlier this evening.”

The woman gave me a long look, then her hand. “I’m Elizabeth Somerville, Laurel’s aunt.”

I could see a resemblance to her brother Jack in the handsome bones of her face. But her eyes were different, and they were her best feature. They were blue and candid, with depths behind them hollowed out by human feelings including pain.

“How did you happen to see Laurel?”

I told her, not omitting the sleeping pills.

“Poor Laurel. Can you help her, Mr. Archer? And help us?”

“I can try. I’ll need your brother’s cooperation.”

“I’m sure you’ll have that.”

She was wrong. When Somerville called her brother’s house in Pacific Point, Jack Lennox refused to listen to him. The rest of us in the study could hear Jack shouting over the line. Somerville slammed the receiver down.

“Jack won’t talk to me. He said he’s got to keep his house line open. He doesn’t want any interference.”

“He’s going to get it, though,” Elizabeth Somerville said. “I don’t trust Jack to handle this by himself. He’s terribly upset—I could hear it in his voice—and when my brother gets that way he makes wrong decisions.”

“I
can’t go down there now.” Somerville’s voice was querulous. “I’ve had less than two hours’ sleep in the last forty-eight, and tomorrow is going to be a really tough day. We’re going to try and plug the leak tomorrow.”

His wife was watching him with a mixed expression on her handsome face, part pity and part impatience, which made me realize that she was much younger than he was.

“What about your company’s security people?” I said. “Can’t you use them?”