Sleeping Beauty (10 page)

I handed the letter to Elizabeth. She read it through. There were tears in her eyes when she had finished. She wiped at them ineffectively with her fingers, and turned away.

“What’s the matter?”

“I feel so sorry for them.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of Tom.”

“As a husband for Laurel, I don’t. He’s so simple, and Laurel is so complex.”

“That combination can make a match.”

“I know it can. But in this case it hasn’t been working. He thinks he can bring her back, and close the gap between them, by moving to another house, or getting a job somewhere else.”

“He’s a willing man,” I said, “more willing than I realized. If I had been half as willing, I could have held on to my own wife.”

She gave me a direct bright look which went strangely with her tears. It passed through me like a laser beam assaying an unidentified object. My heart accelerated a little, and I wondered if her tears had been for herself as well as for Tom.

She turned the letter over. “There’s something written on the back. It’s Laurel’s handwriting.”

She read aloud: “ ‘You’re a sweet boy, and I do love you. I
think I always have. Nobody else. And I will come back. And we will get another house. Or an apartment if we can’t afford a house. And maybe we’ll have a child, after all. But you have to give me some time, Tom. I get these terrible dark depressions and then I don’t want to live in the world at all. Even with you. But I’m fighting it.’ ”

Elizabeth’s voice broke. Her eyes were wet again.

“I haven’t cried for years,” she said. “What’s the matter with me?”

“You’re turning out to be human, after all.”

She shook her head in short quick arcs like a child. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“It’s better than crying.”

“Not always. Not if you’ve got something to cry about.”

She turned her back on me and went to the window. Touched by emotion, her back was beautiful. The narrow waist blossomed out into strong hips, which narrowed down again into a fine pair of legs.

Beyond her on the water, the lights of the platform blazed cold.

“It looks like a burning ship.” She sounded like a child recognizing something for the first time. Later she said in a colder, adult voice, “It’s a recurring theme. Other people burn their bridges behind them. We do things on a grander scale in our family. We burn ships and spill oil. It’s the all-American way.”

She was losing the feeling stirred in her by Tom’s letter and Laurel’s unsent answer, dissipating it in irony. I moved up close behind her, not close enough to touch.

“You’re taking this oil spill very hard.”

“I suppose I am.”

“Laurel did, too.”

“I know that.” But it wasn’t Laurel she wanted to talk about. “It’s really made me take a look at my life. I was brought up to think in terms of gain. Not just financial gain—we didn’t need that—but gaining points, the way you do in tennis. Make good
grades in school, have more friends than anyone, marry the most eligible man, and so on. But it really doesn’t work out too well if your gain has to be someone else’s loss. Or if the rules of the game turn out to be different from what you thought.”

“I don’t quite follow that.”

“I mean you might think you’re gaining, and be a loser. I am, and I knew it long ago, but I didn’t have the courage to act on the knowledge. I’d given up a boy I met in New York who probably would have married me if I’d waited. But there were no points to be gained there—we were merely in love with each other. I married Ben because there was a war on—he was Captain War himself, going to be Commander-in-Chief Pacific someday. Also because my father wanted me to. He was in the oil business, after all, and at that time he was supplying oil to the Navy. It was what they used to call a dynastic marriage, based on mutual gain. But I was the one who lost.”

“What did you lose?”

“My life. I stayed with Ben and let it slip away from me. I should have left him in the first year of our marriage. But I was ashamed to admit that I was a loser. I was afraid that my father would turn against me. Now my father has turned around and done what I should have done.”

“What happened in the first year of your marriage? Do you mean the loss of your husband’s ship?”

“It was part of it, but the crucial thing happened before that. I lost Ben, or knew I’d lost him, before he lost his ship. I never had him, really. He had a mistress at the same time that he was courting me, and he didn’t even break with her when he married me. I suppose she was a pretty little thing from the masculine point of view, but I was appalled by her. She couldn’t even speak grammatical English.”

“You knew her?”

“I met her once. She came to see me in our new house in Bel-Air. Ben was at sea, and I was living there by myself. She came to the door one day, with her little boy, and told me she
needed money—just like that. When I asked her who she was, she explained to me that she was Ben’s girl. She was so matter-of-fact about it I couldn’t be angry with her—at least not with the little boy there. I gave her some money and she drove away in her old beat-up car.

“It was afterwards that I had the bad reaction. I couldn’t bear to live in the house any more. I wanted to burn it down. One night, I took a can of gasoline into Ben’s study. I intended to sprinkle it on the floor and furniture and on his books, and then set fire to it. At the last minute, I changed my mind.

“But I decided I couldn’t go on living there. I went home to live with my parents and lent the house to Jack and Marian. Jack had just graduated from Communications School in the East, and he was waiting on the West Coast to join Ben’s ship. Everything happened so quickly in those days. The ship came into Long Beach Harbor in a few weeks, stayed for a night or two, and then went out again, with both my husband and my brother aboard. And then the ship caught fire off Okinawa, and that was the end of Ben’s career in the Navy. It was hardly more than a month between the time I carried the gasoline can into his study and the time his ship caught fire. I used to make a connection between the two things.”

“You mean you imagined that you set fire to the ship?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But something like that. From the time that woman came to see me, with her little boy, I think I must have been a little out of touch. For all I knew, he was Ben’s illegitimate son, though she said he wasn’t.”

She was gazing at the lighted platform as if its cold blaze on the contaminated sea might be a symbol of her life and its meaning.

She moved back against me. Then she stood very still as if she had frightened herself. I put my hands on her.

“Don’t do that,” she whispered urgently.

“Why not? It’s better than burning ships and spilling oil. Or setting fire to houses.”

I dreamed I was sleeping with Laurel, and woke up guilty and sweating in her bed. Dawn was at the window, and so was Beth. Leaning into the cold marine morning, her unclothed body looked like a carved figurehead.

I threw off the blanket she had covered me with. She turned with a start, her breasts swinging.

“There’s a man out there.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Floating in the water.”

I knotted a bath towel around my waist and went out. The man was spread-eagled on the surface beyond the place where the waves were breaking. He lay face down as if he was studying the bottom, and moved as the waves moved under him. I waded in through the surf. It rose like liquid pain around my body. It was bitterly cold and tinged with brown. Farther out, the oil lay on the water like a blotched undulating skin.

I swam with my head and face held out of the water. When I got close to the floating man, I seemed to enter a special zone of cold. I tried to grasp him by the hair, but my hand slid off his scalp. It was dark with oil and almost hairless.

Facing him and kicking hard, I took hold of him by the arms and turned him over. One of his arms flopped like a broken wing. His face was damaged—I couldn’t tell how badly, because he was in blackface from the oil.

I got hold of him by the shirt collar and towed him in toward
shore. A wave broke over us and sucked him out of my grasp. He slid away from me in the brown surf, turned as he struck the sand, and rolled over and over.

Beth was waiting for him just above the farthest reach of the waves, fully clothed except for her bare feet. She ran and held the dead man until I could reach him. Each of us took an arm, and we dragged him up the beach onto dry sand, as if either water or oil could do any further damage to him or his soaked tweed suit.

I wiped his face with a corner of my towel. It was badly damaged: one eye socket was caved in. There were crinkled marks that looked like burn scars on one side of his face and on his scalp. The scars were not recent.

“What do you suppose happened to him?” Beth said. “Could he have fallen off the oil platform?”

“It’s possible. But the platform’s quite a long way out—three or four miles. I don’t think he’s been in the water that long. And he isn’t wearing working clothes. He may have fallen off a boat, or been caught and rolled by a high wave on the beach. He looks pretty frail.”

As I said that, I remembered him in life. He was the bald uncertain little man I’d seen with the younger man in Blanche’s Seafood Restaurant on the wharf.

“Do you know him, Beth?”

She leaned over to look at him. “No. I never saw him before. He has nothing to do with us.”

She straightened up, and turned. Her mother had come out of the house and started down the steps to the beach. Beth said to me in a low monotone, “Don’t call me Beth in front of Mother, please. Nobody calls me Beth.”

“Okay, Liz.”

“Not that, either.
Please.
Call me Mrs. Somerville if you have to call me anything.”

Sylvia came up beside us, wrapped in a heavy wool robe which made her look androgynous and monklike. “Where did
he
come from?”

“Mr. Archer was in the guesthouse. He saw the man in the water and swam out and brought him in.”

Sylvia looked from her daughter to me, her eyes bright and dubious in her wrinkled boy’s face. “What do you suggest we do with him?”

“We’d better call the police,” I said.

“I really hate to do that, unless we know who he is, and what killed him. You know what the press and the news programs will make of this. Look at the fuss they’ve been making about a few dead birds.”

She bent over, her hands on her knees, and looked down at the ruined man as if he was a harbinger of her own fate. She glanced up with the image of death in her eyes.

“Look. He’s got oil in his nostrils, oil in his mouth. That’s all they’ll need to ruin us.”

“We can’t just leave him lying here,” I said.

“No. We’ll take him inside, into the guesthouse.”

“Then you’ll really have trouble. It isn’t a good idea, Mrs. Lennox.”

She gave me a sharp look. “I didn’t ask you for your opinion.”

“But you’re getting it. Call the police.”

“I think we’d better, Mother. I’ll do it if you like.”

They went toward the main house, the older woman’s feet dragging in the sand. There was a fresh morning wind blowing across the beach, and I was shivering so hard that I couldn’t see straight. The wet towel hung like a cold lead apron around my loins. I was lobster red in the trunk, fish blue in the extremities, and not thinking too clearly.

I searched the dead man’s clothes. The pockets of his tweed suit were empty. But inside the right breast pocket of the jacket, a label had been sewn by the tailor who made it:

Tony Lashman came out of the house and crossed the slanting beach. He was fully dressed but his hair was uncombed and he was blinking in the morning light.

He stopped blinking when he saw the dead man. Approaching with a kind of unwilling fascination, he leaned above him and studied his damaged face.

“Do you know him?” I said.

Lashman seemed to be startled by my question. He straightened up as if I’d caught him in a compromising position:

“No, I never saw him before. Who is he, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I just pulled him out of the water.”

“What happened to his face?” Lashman touched his own face, as if he suspected that it could happen to him.

“He may have been struck with a blunt instrument. Or he may have gotten banged up on the rocks.”

“You think he was murdered?”

“It’s a strong possibility. Are you sure you’ve never seen him before?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

He backed away from the body as if death was a contagion. But he lingered not far away, and after a little time he spoke again.

“You’re a private detective, isn’t that right?”

“I work at it.”

“What kind of money do you make?”

“A hundred a day and expenses. Why? Does Mrs. Lennox want to know?”

“I was asking on my own account. I’ve sometimes thought of going into the detective business myself. But I understood there was more money in it.”

“There is for a few. But it’s not a way to get rich quick, if that’s what you’re looking for. Besides, you need some background.”

“What kind of background?”

“Most private detectives come out of police work. I used to be on the Long Beach force myself.”

“I see.” He gave me a discouraged look, and went back into the house.

I stayed with the man’s body until the Sheriff’s deputies arrived. I told them I had seen him alive in Blanche’s Restaurant, but I didn’t mention the tailor’s label sewn into the pocket of his suit. They could find it themselves if they looked.

I went back into the guesthouse and took a hot shower. It failed to free me of the smell of oil or the chill that the dead man had left on me.

I had more than one reason to take his death personally. I had pulled him out of the water; and he was connected with the young man in the turtleneck who had frightened Laurel off the beach.

Before I got on the freeway to Santa Monica, I stopped at the harbor. The plastic boom across the harbor mouth had broken during the night. The floating oil had surged in with the morning tide and covered the surface of the enclosed water, coating the hulls of the boats lying at anchor and splashing the rocks and walls that lined the inner harbor. The black scene was barely relieved by a few white gulls with dirty feet.