The Instant Enemy (22 page)

“How so?”

“You know as well as I do. Come on, drink up your drink.”

She finished hers. I drank a little of the oily mixture in my glass. I like to drink but that particular drink, in Jack Fleischer’s house and his widow’s company, reminded me of taking castor oil.

“You say you were working with Jack,” she said. “Did you help him make the tapes?”

“Tapes?”

“Don’t try to kid me. A policeman called me from L.A. this morning. He had a funny name, a Polish name, Junkowski, something like that. Know him?”

“I know a Sergeant Janowski.”

“That’s the name. He wanted to know if Jack left any tapes around the house. He said they could be important in a homicide. Laurel got it, too.” She thrust her face toward me, as though to affirm her own continued existence. “Did you know that?”

“I found it out.”

“Jack beat her to death, didn’t he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you do. I can see it in your face. You don’t have to be so tight-mouthed with me. I was married to Jack, remember. I lived with him and his wildness for thirty years. Why do you think I started drinking? I was a teetotaler when we got married. I started drinking because I couldn’t bear the thought of the things he did.”

She leaned so close her eyes crossed. She had a cool way of saying outrageous things, but her version of events was too subjective to be entirely true. Still I wanted to hear more from her, and when she told me to finish my drink I did.

She went out to the kitchen and returned with another
dose of the stuff for me, and another for her.

“What about those tapes?” she said. “Are they worth money?”

I made a quick decision. “They are to me.”

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.”

“That isn’t very much.”

“The police won’t pay you anything for the tapes. I might raise my offer, depending on what’s on them. Have you played them back?”

“No.”

“Where are they?”

“I’m not telling. I need much more than a thousand. Now that Jack is dead and gone, I’m planning to do some traveling. He never took me anywhere, not once in the last fifteen years. And you know why? Whenever he went someplace,
she
was there waiting for him. Well, now she isn’t waiting any more.” After a moment, she added in mild surprise: “Jack isn’t waiting, either. They’re both dead, aren’t they? I wished it on them so often I can’t believe it happened.”

“It happened.”

“Good.”

She went through the motions of drinking a toast and stood swaying, tangle-footed. I took the glass from her hand and put it down on the table inset with stones.

“Sanctuary muchly.”

She did a little dance step to inaudible music. She seemed to be trying hard to find something to do that would make her feel human again.

“I never thought I’d feel sorry for
her,”
she said. “But I kind of do feel sorry for her. She resembled me, did you know that? I was much more beautiful when I was young, but Laurel had fifteen years on me. I used to pretend to myself that I was her in bed with Jack. But it wasn’t all fun and frolic even for her. He put her through the ropes and over the jumps just like he did with any of his women. And in the end he caved in her pretty face for her.”

“Do you really believe your husband did that?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” She plopped down on the settee beside me. “I could tell you things that would make your flesh crawl. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I hardly blame that boy for blowing his head off for him. You know who the boy is?”

“His father was Jasper Blevins. His mother was Laurel.”

“You’re smarter than I thought.” She gave me a crinkled look. “Or did I tell you all this the other night?”

“No.”

“I bet I did, though, didn’t I? Or did they tell you in the north county? It’s common knowledge in Rodeo City.”

“What is, Mrs. Fleischer?”

“Jack and his tricks. He was the law, there was no way they could stop him. He killed that Blevins man, shoved him under a train so he could have his wife. He got Laurel to say it wasn’t her husband’s body. He put their little boy in the orphanage, because he got in the way of the big romance.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t disbelieve her. Her words hung in the unreal room, perfectly at home there, but unconnected with the daylight world.

“How do you know all this?”

“Some of it I figured out for myself.” One of her eyes gave me a wise look: the other was half closed and idiotic. “I have friends in law enforcement, or used to have. Other deputies’ wives—they did some whispering.”

“Why didn’t their husbands bring your husband to book?”

The idiotic eye closed entirely in a frozen wink; she peered at my face with the wise one. “Jack knew where too many bodies were buried. The north county’s rough territory, mister, and he was the king of it. Anyway, what could they prove? The woman Laurel said the body didn’t belong to her husband. Said she never saw him before in her life. The head was all smashed up, unrecog—” She stumbled over the word—“unrecnizable. They put it down as just another accidental death.”

“Do you know for a fact it wasn’t?”

“I know what I know.” But her one closed eye seemed to mock her seriousness.

“Are you willing to pass this on to the police?”

“What would be the use? Jack’s dead. Everybody’s dead.”

“You’re not.”

“I wish I was.” The statement surprised or alarmed her. She opened both eyes and glared at me, as if I’d threatened her with loss of life.

“And Davy Spanner isn’t dead.”

“He soon will be. There’s a fifty-man posse out after him. I talked to Rory Pennell on the phone this morning. He promised they’d shoot to kill.”

“You want them to?”

“He killed Jack, didn’t he?”

“But you said you hardly blamed him.”

“Did I?” The question was directed to herself as well as me. “I couldn’t have. Jack was my husband.”

This was where I came in. Her single life and mind were as deeply split as her marriage had been. I got up to leave.

She followed me to the door. “What about the tapes?”

“What about them? Do you have them?”

“I think I can put my hands on them.”

“For a thousand?”

“It isn’t enough,” she said. “I’m a widow now, I have to look out for myself.”

“Let me play the tapes. Then I’ll make you another offer.”

“They’re not here.”

“Where are they?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Okay, sit on them. I’ll be back, or I’ll phone you. Do you remember my name?”

“Archer,” she said. “Jack Archer.”

I left it at that. She went back into the artificial twilight of her living room.

B
EFORE
I
LEFT
Santa Teresa I called Henry Langston’s house from a gas-station telephone booth. His wife answered, formally: “This is the Langston residence.”

“Is your husband at home?”

“Who is calling, please?” But she probably knew my voice. Her voice was hostile.

“Lew Archer.”

“No, he isn’t here, and you’re responsible. He’s still up in the north county, trying to save that precious murderer of his. He’ll end up getting shot himself.”

She was semi-hysterical, and I tried to soothe her. “That isn’t very likely, Mrs. Langston.”

“You don’t know,” she said. “I have this terrible feeling of fatality, that nothing will ever go right for us again. And it’s your fault, you got him into this.”

“Not really. He’s been involved with Davy Spanner for years. He made a commitment to him, and he’s trying to follow through.”

“What about
me?”
she cried.

“Is there something specific bothering you?”

“There’s no use telling you,” she said in a kind of angry intimacy. “You’re not a doctor.”

“Are you ill, Mrs. Langston?”

She answered by hanging up on me. I was tempted to go to her house, but that would only lead to further involvement and loss of time. I sympathized with her but I couldn’t help
her. Only her husband could do that.

I got onto the freeway headed north. My body was beginning to rebel against continuous action without enough rest It felt as if my right foot on the accelerator pushed the car uphill all the way to Rodeo City.

Deputy Pennell was in the back room of his office, listening to his dispatcher’s radio. I gathered he had been sitting there ever since I talked to him in the middle of the night. His mustache and his eyes gave the impression that they were taking over his face, which was paler and thinner and needed a shave.

“What’s the word, Deputy?”

“They lost him.” His voice was edged with disgust.

“Where?”

“There’s no telling. The rain washed out his tracks. It’s still raining in the north pass.”

“Where does that lead to?”

“He’d have to come back to the coast. Inland there’s nothing but more mountain ranges. It’s snowing in the back country above five thousand feet.”

“So?”

“We head him off when he hits the highway. I’m requesting the highway patrol to set up roadblocks.”

“Is there any chance that he’s still in the valley?”

“Could be. The p-professor seems to think so, anyway.”

“Do you mean Henry Langston?”

“Yeah. He’s still hanging around the old Krug ranch. He’s got a theory that Spanner is kind of cracked on the subject of that place, and that he’ll head back there.”

“But you don’t buy that theory?”

“Naw. I never saw a p-professor yet that knew what he was talking about. They get soft in the head from reading too many books.”

I didn’t argue, and this encouraged Pennell to go on. Langston had upset him, it appeared, and he needed reassurance.

“You know what the professor tried to tell me? That Spanner
had j-j-justification for doing what he did to poor old Jack. On account of Jack putting him in the orphanage.”

“Didn’t that happen?”

“Sure, but what else could Jack do with the kid? His father got killed by a train. Jack wasn’t responsible for him.”

I could hear a little slippage, a trace of double-talk. “Jack wasn’t responsible for what, Deputy?”

“For either of them, father
or
son. I know there were dirty rumors at the time, and now this Langston is trying to start them up again, before old Jack is even in his grave.”

“What kind of rumors?”

He raised his hot sorrowful eyes. “I wouldn’t even pass them on, they’re so crazy.”

“Rumors that Jack killed the man himself?”

“Yeah. That’s all a lot of malarkey.”

“Would you swear to it, Deputy?”

“Sure I would,” he said with some bravado, “I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles. I told the p-professor that, but he wasn’t satisfied.”

Neither was I. “Would you take a lie-detector test?”

Pennell was disappointed in me. “So you think I’m a liar. And that poor old Jack was a murderer.”

“Who killed Jasper Blevins if he didn’t?”

“Plenty of people could have.”

“Who were the suspects?”

“There was a wild-looking character with a beard hanging around the ranch. He looked like a Russian, I heard.”

“Come on now, Deputy. I’m not buying any bearded anarchists. I know Jack hung around the ranch. Later, I’ve been told, he stashed the woman at Mamie Hagedorn’s place.”

“What if he did? Blevins didn’t want his wife; he made that clear.”

“Did you know Blevins?”

“I saw him once or twice.”

“Did you see him after he was dead?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it Blevins?”

“I couldn’t swear to it, one way or the other.” He added with a shifty look in his eye: “Mrs. Blevins said it wasn’t. She ought to know.”

“What did the little boy say?”

“Never said a word. He couldn’t talk; he was just a dummy.”

“That was convenient, wasn’t it?”

Pennell stood up with his hand on his gun butt. “I’ve heard enough of that kind of t-talk. Jack Fleischer was like an older b-brother to me. He t-taught me to shoot and drink. He g-got me my first woman. He m-made a m-man of me.”

“I was wondering who to blame.”

Pennell cursed me and got his gun out. I retreated. He didn’t follow me out of the office, but I was a little shaken. This was the second gun that had been pulled on me today. Sooner or later one was bound to go off.

I walked across the street to the Rodeo Hotel and asked the desk clerk where Mamie Hagedorn lived.

He looked up brightly. “Mamie retired from business.”

“Good. My intentions are social.”

“I see. She lives up the road a piece, on the way to Centerville. It’s a big red-brick house, the only red-brick house on that side of town.”

I drove out of town past the rodeo grounds and up into the hills. The red-brick house stood high on one of them, commanding the whole scene. It was a gray overcast day, and the sea was like a wornout mirror reflecting the sullen sky.

I went up the gravel drive and knocked on the door of the big house. It was answered by a Spanish American woman wearing a black uniform and white cap with a black velvet bow. She was the first maid in uniform I’d seen in quite a while.

She started to give me an oral quiz on who and what I was, and why I was here. It was interrupted by a woman’s voice
which came from the front parlor: “Send him in! I’ll talk to him.”

The maid took me into a room filled with ornate Victorian furniture, complete with antimacassars. It underlined the feeling I had when I came to the north county, though the gantries of Vandenberg were just over the county line, that I was stepping back into prewar time.

Mamie Hagedorn sustained the illusion. She was sitting on a couch, a small woman whose gold-slippered feet dangled clear of the parquet floor. She was wearing a rather formal high-necked dress. She had a pouter pigeon bosom, a rouged and raddled face, hair or a wig which was a peculiarly horrible shade of iridescent red. But I liked the way her smile broke up her face.

“What’s on your mind?” she said. “Sit down and tell Mamie.”

She raised her hand, on which a diamond winked. I sat beside her.

“I was talking to Al Simmons last night in Centerville. He mentioned that you once knew Laurel Blevins.”