Sleeping Beauty (31 page)

“What were they?”

“People like the Lennoxes own the courts, along with everything else. And they look after their own.”

I didn’t believe it, and I said so. Harold struck the air with his fist:

“I tell you I’m not lying. There’s nothing old man Lennox wouldn’t do for his son Jack. And nothing he hasn’t done, either. He hushed up that Navy fire by bringing Captain Somerville into the family business.”

“How do you know that?”

“I figured it out for myself—I’ve been making a study of these people. And Jack Lennox didn’t deny it when I called him on it the other night. He didn’t deny that he murdered the woman, either.”

“Are you talking about Allie Russo?”

He nodded rapidly several times. “Jack Lennox was with her the night she was killed. I got that from an eyewitness.”

“Nelson Bagley again?”

“That’s right. Nelson was spying on Allie the night she was killed. He saw Jack Lennox in her bedroom with her.”

“I thought Captain Somerville was her lover.”

“He was. But Somerville went to sea. And Jack Lennox came back from the East where he had been going to Navy school, and sort of inherited her. He hired her to do some baby-sitting with Laurel, but she spent more time with Jack.”

“That doesn’t prove Jack killed the woman.”

“No, but it all fits in. Nelson Bagley wasn’t lying to me, and he practically saw it happen.”

“Bagley never was a very good witness,” I said, “and now he’s unavailable.”

“Naturally he is. I’m surprised that Bagley lived as long as he did, knowing what he knew about Jack Lennox. He knew that Lennox shot him and set fire to the ship. He knew that Lennox murdered Allie Russo.”

“Are you sure he knew these things, or did he imagine them?”

“I’m sure, man, I made sure. Last Tuesday night, I set up a controlled experiment. I found out that Lennox and Somerville were going to make a television appearance, so I got Bagley out of the hospital and took him to my friend’s place. Bagley recognized both of them when they came on the tube. He said Lennox was the one he saw in Allie’s bedroom, and Lennox was the one who shot him.”

I wasn’t as sure as Harold was, or as he pretended to be. The facts of Allie’s death and Bagley’s shooting were reaching me filtered by time and probably distorted by the minds of two damaged men, one of whom was now dead himself.

“What happened to Bagley, Harold?”

“I took him to Lennox’s house on the cliff in Pacific Point. I wanted to make absolutely certain of the identification. But I had to stay out of sight because Lennox knew me.”

“He knew Bagley, too.”

“Yeah. He knew him, all right. He took him for a walk out the back of his house and shoved him over the cliff into the surf.”

“Did you actually see this happen?”

“I didn’t have to. Lennox offered me money to keep quiet. He said that he could raise it overnight if we made the whole business look like a kidnapping. I can see now that he was baiting a trap with that money, planning to double-cross me from the beginning. He thought he could shoot me dead and still be a hero. But I beat him to the draw.”

Harold licked his fever-cracked lips. His accusations against Jack Lennox sounded like a sick man’s delusions. But they were beginning to join together in a kind of weird reality. It corresponded at several points with the weird reality I had been living through, and provided an explanation for the double shooting at Sandhill Lake.

But one death hadn’t been explained—the death of Tony Lashman. I said to Harold:

“The night before last, when you visited Jack Lennox’s house on the cliff, did you go there directly from the wharf?”

“No. When I asked for Lennox, the woman at the restaurant gave me the wrong address. She gave me the address of old Mrs. Lennox on Seahorse Lane. But her secretary told me where Jack Lennox lived.”

“The secretary sent you to Jack Lennox?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you know the secretary has been killed?”

Harold appeared to be shaken by the information. But all he said was, “It figures. Lennox would knock anybody off to cover up his tracks.”

It seemed to me that he was repeating himself, ringing
changes on a single paranoid theme. I had a sudden strong desire to get away from him and I went out into the hallway.

Mrs. Sherry came toward me with a solemn face. My own face must have changed, because she looked at me with alarm:

“Has something else happened?”

“No. We’ve just been talking. But your son isn’t in very good shape. Did you call the Doctor?”

“I tried to. Mrs. Langdale said he was at the William Lennox house, and she could reach him there. Apparently something has happened to old Mr. Lennox.”

“Did she say what happened?”

“He had a heart attack and fell off a tractor. I don’t know what a man his age was doing on a tractor.”

“That’s all the Lennox family needs,” I said.

Mrs. Sherry’s eyes failed to soften. She had no sympathy for the Lennox family.

I asked her for the money and the gun. Without argument, she brought them out of her bedroom into the hallway. I checked to make sure that the carton of money was full and the gun empty.

“May I use your phone, Mrs. Sherry?”

“You’re going to phone the police?”

I said, on the spur of the moment, “It would be better if you did.”

“Better for Harold?”

“Yes. Call the Sheriff’s office in Pacific Point. Ask for Captain Dolan.”

She nodded once and didn’t raise her head. I followed her into the room where we had talked the day before. The drapes were closed against the morning sun, and shadows lay behind the furniture like vestiges of the night.

She dialed the Sheriff’s number and asked for Dolan. “This is Mrs. Sherry—Harold Sherry’s mother. Mr. Archer suggested I call you. Harold has been shot, and he isn’t armed. He wants to give himself up and turn over the money to you.”

She began to answer questions, and was still on the phone
when the front doorbell rang. I let in a heavy white-haired man who said he was Dr. Langdale. I told him that Harold was in his room.

“How is William Lennox doing, Doctor?”

“Mr. Lennox is dead.” His strained blue eyes came up to my face. “He was dead before I got to him. He was driving a bulldozer down the beach, and he had a heart attack.”

“What was he doing on a bulldozer?”

“Trying to get rid of the oil, apparently. Mr. Lennox always hated any kind of pollution on his beach.”

I passed Dolan’s official car on the highway a few miles beyond the entrance to El Rancho. I kept going toward Pacific Point.

It was still fairly early in the morning when I stepped off the elevator on the top floor of the hospital. There was no deputy on duty outside Jack Lennox’s door.

Lennox was sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray in front of him. His face was stippled with beard. His eyes looked jaded under the helmet of bandage. But there was nothing edible left on his tray.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Lennox.”

“What’s up now?”

“We’ve taken Harold Sherry and recovered your hundred thousand. He made a rather full statement.”

The air in the room seemed to freeze into solid silence. Outside,
the sounds of life went on, the clink of dishes and the other morning noises of the hospital, the intermittent sounds of traffic sixty feet down in the street.

Lennox looked at the window as if he might decide to jump out through it. I moved around to that side of his bed. He averted his face and looked at the blank television set which hung like a scanning device high on the gray wall.

He gathered his strength and his wits together, and faced me. “What did Sherry say?”

“He made some serious allegations against you.”

“He would. Sherry is a psychopathic liar, and he hates me. He hates my entire family. He mistreated Laurel when she was just a child, and I clobbered him for it. Ever since then, he’s been trying to pay me back. What lies has he been telling now?”

“He said that in the spring of 1945 you shot two people. One of them, Allie Russo, died. The other one, Nelson Bagley, was wounded in the head and burned in the ensuing gasoline fire on the
Canaan Sound.”

Lennox swung his arm in a wide gesture of dismissal. “That’s a lot of garbage.”

“I wonder. Nelson Bagley identified you himself.”

“How could he? Bagley is dead.”

“He saw you on television Tuesday night. Wednesday night he went to your house with Harold Sherry. According to Sherry’s story, you pushed Bagley over the cliff. Then you set up a meeting with Sherry intending to kill him. Unfortunately for you, he survived.”

“And you buy this nonsense?”

“I wanted to check with you first. But you’re not very responsive.”

“What do you expect? You accuse me of a couple of murders that I had nothing to do with. You expect me to fall over backwards and confess?”

“Three murders,” I said. “I omitted one. Your mother’s
secretary, Tony Lashman, was killed because he knew that Harold Sherry and Bagley went to your house Wednesday night.”

Lennox looked really dismayed for the first time. “I didn’t even know Lashman was dead.”

“His body is in the cold room on the ground floor of this hospital. So is Bagley’s. As soon as you’re strong enough, I’ll be glad to take you down and show them to you.”

“You’re helpful, aren’t you? Now why don’t you get out of here?”

“We haven’t finished. I want to hear you tell me how Bagley died, and why. I have a kind of personal interest in him. I was the one who pulled him out of the water.”

“I didn’t put him there.”

“Sherry says you did.”

“That doesn’t make it so. Sherry probably drowned him himself.”

“What was his motive?”

“A psycho like Sherry doesn’t need a motive. But if you have to have one, Sherry probably did it so he could pin it on me.”

“That isn’t very credible.”

“You don’t know Sherry, or how he feels about me.”

“I think I know. I also know he didn’t kill Bagley.”

“But I did?”

“Either that,” I said, “or you’re covering for someone.”

His eyes came back to my face, exerting an almost tangible pressure there, as if he was trying to read what was in my mind.

A nurse’s aide knocked lightly and came in for his tray. “Did you enjoy your breakfast, Mr. Lennox?”

He was so deep in thought that he didn’t hear her. She gave him a reproachful look and me a questioning one, then rattled out. When the automatic door had closed itself completely, I said to Lennox:

“Who are you covering for?”

There was a second interruption which postponed his having to answer me. The phone beside his bed rang. He picked it up:

“Jack Lennox here.… He’s dead? … Why in God’s name was he driving a tractor? … I see.… Really? Where is she? … I see. Well, take it easy. And don’t let anyone in.”

He hung up and leaned back against his pillows, drawing a series of deep breaths which didn’t appear to be manifestations of grief. Excitement had colored his cheekbones and lit his eyes.

After a while, he sat up tall in bed. “That was my wife. My father was killed this morning. I happen to be his main heir, which means I’ve taken all the crap I’m ever going to take from anybody.”

“Good for you.”

“Don’t mock me, little man.” His gaze roved around the walls, as if the room had become too small to contain him, and came back to my face. “What would you do for a hundred grand?”

I was silent.

“Would you keep quiet about the subject of our conversation this morning?”

“Are you offering me a hundred grand?”

He nodded, watching me the way a cat watches a bird.

“The same hundred grand you offered Harold Sherry?” I said.

“Maybe that could be managed.”

“And do I get a bullet to go with it, the way Harold did?”

He wrinkled up his face and made a dry spitting noise. “To hell with you. You’re not serious.”

“It’s too late to make a deal,” I said. “Harold is talking to the Sheriff’s men now. They’ll be coming to you shortly.” I waited, giving him a chance to absorb this information. “What are you going to tell them?”

He lay back against his pillows and looked at the ceiling. The surge of excitement and power that he had felt when he learned of his father’s death had passed through him and left him quite inert. He spoke in a different voice, a questioning tone that didn’t come naturally or easily from him.

“You know my daughter Laurel, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know her slightly.”

“And you like her, don’t you?”

“I like her very much.”

“Would you be willing to do Laurel a service? I’m not asking you to do it for me, but for her.”

“I’ve been trying to, as you know. I’ve been looking for her since Wednesday night.”

“You can stop looking. My wife just told me that Laurel came home last night. I found out in the same minute that my daughter was alive and my father was dead.” He spoke with a kind of egocentric sentimentality, as if he saw himself as a figure in a drama.

My heart was beating hard. “Where has she been?”

“Wandering around, I gather. Trying to get up the nerve to turn herself in.”

“What kind of shape is she in?”

“Not too good. Marian had to put her under sedation. Laurel’s still not over the idea of hurting herself.”

There was a silence between us. Lennox lay very still with his arms stretched out at his sides, as if he was trying to share and understand his daughter’s predicament.

“Did Laurel hurt anyone else?” I said.

“Yes. I’m afraid she did.”

“Did she push Nelson Bagley over the cliff?”

He nodded almost imperceptibly. “We have a cliffside patio with a low wall, and Laurel was sitting there trying to clean the oil off some kind of bird. Bagley must have seen her from the road and wandered down there. He took her by surprise, and she pushed him over.”

“Did Harold Sherry see this happen?”

“I don’t think so. He was up the road in his car. Laurel’s mother was the only witness, fortunately. But Sherry figured out what had happened—I couldn’t keep Laurel quiet, and she was yelling and sobbing—and he asked for a hundred thousand to forget it. I had to go along with it. There were other matters involved, going back a good many years.”