Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

I offered him a dollar.

“You don’t have to pay me.” He spoke with gentle force. “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more. Maybe I should have tried to stop them, or called the police or something. Only I didn’t think I had the right.”

An old Chevrolet painted with brown undercoat rolled in from the street and stopped beside the pumps. A couple of teen-age boys occupied the front seat. The bare feet of two others projected from the rear window. The driver honked for service.

I asked Fred Cram again: “Are you sure there wasn’t a third person in the car?”

He pondered the question. “Not unless you count the dog.”

“What kind of a dog?”

“I don’t know. It sounded like a big one.”

“You didn’t see it?”

“It was in the trunk. I could hear it breathing and kind of whining.”

“How do you know it was a dog?”

“She said so.”

Sebastian groaned.

“You mean it was a human being in there?” the young man said.

“I don’t know.”

Fred Cram gave me a long questioning look. His face saddened as he realized the depth of the trouble he had dipped into. Then the teen-ager honked again, imperiously, and he swung away on his mismatched legs.

“Jesus,” Sebastian said in the car. “It really happened. We’ve got to get her back, Archer.”

“We will.” I didn’t let him hear my doubts, the doubt that we could find her, the graver doubt that the law would let him keep her if we did. “The best contribution you can make is to get in touch with your wife and stay by a telephone. Sandy phoned home once, she may again.”

“If he lets her.”

But he accepted my suggestion. We checked into adjoining rooms in a beach motel near the center of Santa Teresa. It was the depth of the winter season, and the place was almost deserted. The yacht harbor under my window hung in the starlight like a dim white fantasy of summer.

The keyboy opened the door between our two rooms. I listened to Sebastian talking to his wife on the telephone. He told her with brisk cheerfulness that the case was progressing rapidly and she had nothing to worry about at all. The fine front he was putting on reminded me somehow of the young man with the thin leg, limping faster than other men could walk.

“I love you, too,” Sebastian said, and hung up.

I went to the doorway. “How is your wife taking this?”

“Terrific. She’s terrific.”

But his gaze wandered around the room, taking in the details of his catastrophe: the lonely bed, the homeless walls, and my face watching him.

I tried to smile. “I’m going out for a bit. I’ll check back with you later.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Pay a couple of visits to people in town.”

“It’s late for visiting.”

“All the better. They’re more likely to be home.”

I went back into my room, got the directory out of the drawer in the telephone table, and looked up Henry Langston, the counsellor who had had a run-in with Davy Spanner. A young girl answered Langston’s phone, and for a moment I thought by some remarkable coincidence it was Sandy.

“Who is that?” I asked her.

“Elaine, I’m just the baby-sitter. Mr. and Mrs. Langston are out for the evening.”

“When do you expect them back?”

“They promised by midnight. You want to leave a message?”

“No thanks.”

Coincidences seldom happen in my work. If you dig deep enough, you can nearly always find their single bifurcating roots. It was probably no coincidence that Jack Fleischer had taken off, presumably for his home in Santa Teresa, immediately after Laurel Smith was beaten. I looked him up in the directory and found his address: 33 Pine Street.

It was a street of older middle-class houses, appropriately pine-shaded, within walking distance of the courthouse. Most of the houses in the block were dark. I parked at the corner in front of an old church, and walked along the street looking for Fleischer’s number with my flashlight.

I found two rusty metal three’s attached to the porch of a two-story white frame house. There was light in the house, dim yellow behind drawn blinds. I knocked on the front door.

Uncertain footsteps approached the door and a woman’s voice spoke through it: “What do you want?”

“Is Mr. Fleischer home?”

“No.”

But she opened the door in order to peer out at me. She was a middle-aged blond woman whose face had been carefully made up at some point earlier in the day. Erosion had set in. In the midst of it her eyes regarded me with that steady look of hurt suspicion which takes years to develop.

There was gin on her breath, and it triggered an association in my mind. She looked enough like Laurel Smith to be her older sister.

“Mrs. Fleischer?”

She nodded grimly. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“I’m better acquainted with your husband. Do you know where I can find him?”

She spread her hands. Under her quilted pink housecoat her body was sullen. “Search me.”

“It’s pretty important. I’ve come all the way from Los Angeles.”

Her hand came out and clenched on my arm. I felt like a stand-in for Fleischer. “What’s Jack been doing down there?”

“I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

“You can tell me. I’m his wife.” She jerked at my arm. “Come in, I’ll give you a drink. Any friend of Jack’s–”

I let her take me into the large drab living room. It had an air of not being lived in, just being endured. The main ornaments of the room were Fleischer’s shooting trophies on the mantel.

“What will you have? I’m drinking gin on the rocks.”

“That will suit me.”

She padded out of the room and come back with lowball glasses full of ice and gin.

I sipped at mine. “Cheers.”

“Here, have a seat.” She indicated a slip-covered davenport and sat down crowding me. “You were going to tell me what Jack is up to.”

“I don’t know all the ramifications. He seems to be doing an investigative job–”

She shut me off impatiently. “Don’t let him fool you. And don’t you cover up for him, either. There’s a woman in it, isn’t there? He’s got another place in L.A. and that woman is living with him again. Isn’t that right?”

“You know him better than I do.”

“You bet I do. We’ve been married for thirty years, and for half of those thirty years he’s been chasing the same skirt.” She leaned toward me with an avid mouth. “Have you seen the woman?”

“I’ve seen her.”

“Say I show you a picture of her,” she said, “are you willing to tell me if it’s the same woman?”

“If you’ll help me locate Jack.”

She gave my question serious thought. “He’s headed for the Bay area, God knows why. I thought at least he’d be staying overnight. But he took a shower and changed his clothes and ate the dinner I cooked for him, and then he was off again.”

“Where in the Bay area?”

“The Peninsula. I heard him call Palo Alto before he left. He made a reservation at the Sandman Motor Hotel. That’s all I know. He doesn’t tell me anything any more, and I know why. He’s after that piece of skirt again. He had that light in his eye.” Her voice buzzed with resentment, like a hornet caught in a web. She drowned it with gin. “I’ll show you her picture.”

She set down her empty glass on a table inset with polished bits of stone, left the room and came back. She thrust a small photograph at me, and turned up the three-way lamp.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

It was a full-face picture of Laurel Smith, taken when she was a dark-haired girl in her twenties. Even in this small and carelessly printed photograph, her beauty showed through. I remembered her beaten face as they lifted her into the ambulance, and I had a delayed shock, a sense of something valuable being destroyed by time and violence.