Ross MACDONALD - Sleeping Beauty

“All this was printed in the News?”

“It certainly was. I still have the clipping somewhere if you want to see it.”

“Did you have more than one copy of the clipping?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. I thought it was important.”

“What did you do with the other copies?”

“I sent them to certain people who would be interested.”

“Like your husband and your brother-in-law?”

“Yes. I wanted them to know.”

“You wanted them to know what you had done, but not that you had done it.”

She breathed profoundly, as if she had been holding her breath all night. The walls of the hallway seemed to be closing in. Once again, it reminded me of a cell where prisoners were held without hope of release.

She said, “Why should I be the only one to suffer? You men have all the fun. And then you leave the women alone to suffer.”

“Is that what your husband did to you?”

“Again and again,” she said. “I told you, he even spent his last night ashore with her.”

“So you shot her.”

“I’m not admitting anything.”

“You admitted that you sent your husband the clipping from the News.”

“That was no crime. They can’t do anything to me for sending him a clipping. It seemed to me he had a right to know about her death.” She spoke with a kind of remembered grief, but her grief had long since turned malign. “I used to imagine the look on his face when he opened that envelope with the clipping in it and found out she was dead.”

“Why did you send one to Somerville?”

“She was his girl first. He passed her on to Jack.” She looked at me with loathing. “You men are dirty creatures, all of you. I’m glad all this has come out. I’ve been sick of this filthy pretense of a marriage for years.”

“Why did you push Nelson Bagley over the cliff?”

“He remembered me. He saw me at the woman’s house that night. He was the one who phoned me and told me my husband was with her.”

“And you went there and shot her?”

“I’m not admitting anything,” she said.

But she looked at me with the realization that there was hardly anything left to admit.

“Did Laurel see you push him over the cliff?”

“Yes. She ran away. But she came back last night.”

“Did she speak to you about it?”

“Yes, she did. She said I ought to call the police and make a full confession.”

“Are you willing to do that?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid. What will they do to me? I’ve killed three people.” Her face opened as if she was falling again.

“I can understand why you killed Allie Russo,” I said, “and Nelson Bagley. But why did Tony Lashman have to die?”

“He knew that Nelson Bagley had come here to the house. He tried to get money from me. He wanted a hundred dollars a day for life.”

Her voice was cold and resentful. She had suffered so much that she was immune to anyone else’s suffering. I was growing weary of her, and I asked her to take me to Laurel.

We went to a bedroom at the front of the house. The wall that faced the sea was made of glass, but it was heavily draped against the morning. At one end, a glass door opened onto a railed balcony.

Laurel lay asleep on the bed, a pillow under her dark head and an afghan over her. There was a telephone on the bedside table. Before I used it, I bent over Laurel and touched her warm forehead with my mouth. I could hardly believe that she was alive.

Behind me, the door to the balcony opened and closed. Marian Lennox was climbing awkwardly over the railing.

I moved toward her. “Marian, come back.”

She paid no attention to me. She stepped off into air and fell in silence until the black boulders stopped her. Smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres.

I went back to Laurel. She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive.

I picked up the phone and started to make the necessary calls.

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.