Росс Макдональд - The Instant Enemy

“One thing I don’t understand,” I said. “If you thought she was going to school yesterday morning, what about the gun?”

“She must have put it in the trunk of her car,” Sebastian said.

“I see. She’s driving a car.”

“That’s one of the reasons we’re so concerned.” Sebastian pushed his face forward across the counter. I felt like a bartender being consulted by a drunk. But it was fear he was drunk on. “You’ve had some experience in these matters. Why would she take my shotgun, for heaven’s sake?”

“I can think of one possible reason, Mr. Sebastian. You told her you’d blow her friend’s head off with it.”

“But she couldn’t have taken me seriously.”

“I do.”

“So do I,” his wife said.

Sebastian hung his head like a prisoner in the dock. But he said under his breath: “By God, I will kill him if he doesn’t bring her back.”

“Good thinking, Keith,” his wife said.

THE FRICTION BETWEEN the two was starting to rasp on my nerves. I asked Sebastian to show me his gun cabinet. He took me into a small study which was partly library and partly gun room.

There were light and heavy rifles standing upright behind glass in the mahogany gun cabinet, and an empty slot where a double-barreled shotgun had fitted. The bookshelves held a collection of best sellers and book-club editions, and one drab row of textbooks in economics and advertising psychology.

“Are you in advertising?”

“Public relations. I’m chief PR officer for Centennial Savings and Loan. Actually I should be there this morning. We’re deciding on our program for next year.”

“It can wait one day, can’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned to the gun cabinet, opening it and the drawer under it where he kept his shells. They unlocked with the same brass key.

“Where was the key?”

“In the top drawer of my desk.” He opened the drawer and showed me. “Sandy knew where I kept it, of course.”

“But anybody else could easily have found it”

“That’s true. But I’m sure she took it.”

“Why?”

“I just have a feeling.”

“Is she gun-happy?”

“Certainly not. When you’re properly trained in the use of guns, you don’t become gun-happy, as you call it.”

“Who trained her?”

“I did, naturally. I’m her father.”

He went to the gun cabinet and touched the barrel of the heavy rifle. Carefully he closed the glass door and locked it. He must have caught his reflection in the glass. He backed away from it, scouring his bearded chin with his cupped palm.

“I look terrible. No wonder Bernice has been picking at me. My face is coming apart.”

He excused himself and went away to put his face together. I took a peek at my own face in the glass. I didn’t look too happy. Early morning was not my best thinking time, but I formulated a vague unhappy thought: Sandy was middle girl in a tense marriage, and at the moment I was middle man.

Mrs. Sebastian came softly into the room and stood beside me in front of the gun cabinet.

“I married a boy scout,” she said.

“There are sorrier fates.”

“Name one. My mother warned me not to take up with a good-looking man. Marry brains, she told me. But I wouldn’t listen. I should have stuck with my modeling career. At least I can depend on my own bones.” She patted the hip nearest me.

“You have good bones. Also, you’re very candid.”

“I got that way in the course of the night.”

“Show me your daughter’s diary.”

“I will not.”

“Are you ashamed of her?”

“Of myself,” she said. “What could the diary tell you that I can’t tell you?”

“If she was sleeping with this boy, for instance.”

“Of course she wasn’t,” she said with a little flash of anger.

“Or anybody else.”

“That’s absurd.” But her face went sallow.

“Was she?”

“Of course not. Sandy’s remarkably innocent for her age.”

“Or was. Let’s hope she still is.”

Bernice Sebastian retreated to higher ground. “I– we didn’t hire you to pry into my daughter’s morals.”

“You didn’t hire me, period. In a chancy case like this, I need a retainer, Mrs. Sebastian.”

“What do you mean, chancy?”

“Your daughter could come home at any time. Or you and your husband could change your minds–”

She stopped me with an impatient flick of her hand. “All right, how much do you want?”

“Two days’ pay and expenses, say two hundred and fifty.”

She sat at the desk, got a checkbook out of the second drawer, and wrote me a check. “What else?”

“Some recent pictures of her.”

“Sit down, I’ll get you some.”

When she was gone, I examined the checkbook stubs. After paying me my retainer, the Sebastians had less than two hundred dollars left in their bank account. Their smart new house cantilevered over a steep drop was an almost perfect image of their lives.

Mrs. Sebastian came back with a handful of pictures. Sandy was a serious-looking girl who resembled her mother in her dark coloring. Most of the pictures showed her doing things: riding a horse, riding a bicycle, standing on a diving board ready to dive, pointing a gun. The gun looked like the same .22 rifle as the one in the gun cabinet. She held it as if she knew how to use it

“What about this gun bit, Mrs. Sebastian? Was it Sandy’s idea?”

“It was Keith’s. His father brought him up to hunt. Keith passed on the great tradition to his daughter.” Her voice was sardonic.

“Is she your only child?”

“That’s right. We have no son.”

“May I go through her room?”

The woman hesitated. “What do you expect to find? Evidence of transvestitism? Narcotics?”

She was still trying to be sardonic, but the questions came through literally to me. I’d found stranger things than those in young people’s rooms.

Sandy’s room was full of sunlight and fresh sweet odors. I found pretty much what you’d expect to find in the bedroom of an innocent, serious high-school senior. A lot of sweaters and skirts and books, both high-school books and a few good novels like A High Wind in Jamaica . A menagerie of cloth animals. College pennants, mostly Ivy League. A pink-frilled vanity with cosmetics laid out on the top of it in geometrical patterns. The photograph of another young girl smiling from a silver frame on the wall.

“Who’s that?”

“Sandy’s best friend, Heidi Gensler.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

Mrs. Sebastian hesitated. These hesitations of hers were brief but tense and somber, as if she was planning her moves far ahead in a high-stakes game.

“The Genslers don’t know about this,” she said.

“You can’t look for your daughter and keep it a secret both at the same time. Are the Genslers friends of yours?”

“They’re neighbors. The two girls are the real friends.” She made her decision suddenly. “I’ll ask Heidi to drop over before she goes to school.”

“Why not right away?”

She left the room. I made a quick search of possible hiding places, under the pink oval lamb’s-wool rug, between the mattress and springs, on the high dark shelf in the closet, behind and under the clothes in the chest of drawers. I shook out some of the books. From the center of Sonnets from the Portuguese a scrap of paper fluttered.

I picked it up from the rug. It was part of a lined notebook page on which someone had written in precise black script: