The Instant Enemy (23 page)

“Al talks too much for his own good,” she said cheerfully. “As a matter of fact I knew Laurel very well. She lived with me after her husband died.”

“Then it was her husband who died under the train?”

She thought about this. “I’m not
sure
it was. It never came out officially.”

“Why not?”

She moved uneasily. Her dress rustled and gave off a whiff of lavender. To my stretched nerves she seemed like the past itself stirring in its shroud.

“I wouldn’t want to queer things for Laurel. I always liked Laurel.”

“Then you’ll be sorry to hear that she’s dead.”

“Laurel? She’s just a young woman.”

“She didn’t die of old age. She was beaten to death.”

“Holy cripes!” the woman said. “Who did that?”

“Jack Fleischer’s a prime suspect.”

“But he’s dead, too.”

“That’s right. You can’t hurt either of them by talking, Mrs. Hagedorn.”

“Miss
. I never married.” She put on horn-rimmed glasses which made her look severe, and studied my face. “Just who are you, anyway?”

I told her. Then she asked me about the case. I laid it out for her, with the names and the places.

“I knew most all of those people,” she said in a rusty voice, “going all the way back to Joe Krug and his wife Alma. I liked Joe. He was a fine figure of a man. But Alma was a Bible-thumping sobersides. Joe used to come and visit me sometimes—I ran a house in Rodeo City in case you didn’t know—and Alma never forgave me for leading him astray. I think I was one of the main reasons she made him move to Los Angeles. Cripes, that was forty years ago. What happened to Joe?”

“He’s dead now. Alma’s alive.”

“She must be old. Alma’s older than I am.”

“How old is that?”

She answered with her broken smile: “I never tell my age. I’m older than I look.”

“I bet you are.”

“Don’t flatter me.” She took off her glasses and wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “Joe Krug was a good man, but he never had any luck in this neck of the woods. I heard he had a little before he died, after he moved to Los Angeles.”

“What kind of luck?”

“Money luck. Is there any other? He got himself a job with some big company and married his daughter Etta to the boss.”

“Etta?”

“Henrietta. They called her Etta for short. She was married before to a man named Albert Blevins. And he was the father of Jasper Blevins who married Laurel, poor dear.”
The old woman seemed to take pride in her genealogical knowledge.

“Who killed Jasper, Miss Hagedorn?”

“I don’t know for sure.” She gave me a long shrewd look. “If I tell you what I do know, what do you plan to do with it?”

“Open up the case and let the daylight in.”

She smiled a little sadly. “That reminds me of a hymn, an old revival hymn. I was converted once, would you believe it? It lasted until the boy evangelist ran away with the week’s offerings and my best friend. What are you after, Mr. Evangelist? Money?”

“I’m being paid.”

“Who by?”

“Some people down south.”

“Why are they paying you?”

“It would take all day to explain.”

“Then why not drop it, leave it lay? Let the dead people rest in peace.”

“There are getting to be too many of them. It’s been going on for a long time now. Fifteen years.” I leaned toward her and said in a quiet voice, “Did Laurel kill her husband? Or was it Jack Fleischer?”

She countered with another question, which seemed to contain an answer hidden in it: “You said Laurel is dead. How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“Call the L.A.P.D., Purdue Street Station. Ask for Sergeant Prince or Sergeant Janowski.”

I recited the number. She slid off the couch, with the help of a needlepoint footstool, and left the room. I heard a door close down the hall. A few minutes later I heard the same door open.

She came back much more slowly. The rouge stood out on her slack cheeks. She climbed back onto the couch, reminding me for an instant of a child dressed up in attic finery, wearing an ancestor’s wig.

“So Laurel really is dead,” she said heavily. “I talked to
Sergeant Prince. He’s going to send somebody up here to interview me.”

“I’m here now.”

“I know that. With Laurel dead, and Jack, I’m willing to answer your question. The answer is yes. She killed Jasper Blevins, smashed in his head with the blunt end of an ax. Jack Fleischer got rid of the body under a train. He put it down on the books as an accident, victim unknown.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Laurel told me herself. Before she left here Laurel and I were as close as mother and daughter. She told me how she killed Jasper, and she told me why. I didn’t ever blame her for a minute.” Mamie Hagedorn took a deep shuddering breath. “The only thing I blamed her for was leaving the little boy the way she did. That was a terrible thing to do. But she was bound to travel light and make her way in the world. The little boy was evidence against her.”

“She came back to him finally,” I said. “By that time it was too late for either of them.”

“You think her own boy killed her?”

“I didn’t until now. He had no motive. But if he found out that she killed his father—” I left the sentence unfinished.

“She didn’t, though.”

“You just said she did.”

“No, I said she killed her husband Jasper Blevins. He wasn’t the little boy’s father.”

“Who was?”

“Some rich fellow in Texas. Laurel got herself pregnant by him before she ever left there. His family gave her some money and shipped her off to California. Jasper married her for that money, but he never had normal relations with her. I never could respect a man who didn’t like normal meat-and-potatoes—”

I interrupted her. “How do you know all this?”

“Laurel told me after she killed him. He did things to her that no woman has to put up with. That was why she killed him, and I don’t blame her.”

I
THANKED MAMIE HAGEDORN
and went out to my car. I’d let some daylight into the case, all right. But the main effect had been to change the color of the daylight.

I headed over the pass toward the Krug ranch. It was the place where all the trouble had started, where Albert Blevins had thrown a lamp at his wife (or vice versa) and ruined his house and his marriage and his son Jasper, where Jasper’s marriage had ended in murder, where Davy Spanner was born and Jack Fleischer died. I wanted to see the place in the different-colored daylight.

It wasn’t raining in the valley. The cloud cover was breaking up, letting the sky show through in places.

I went through Centerville and made my turn without pausing. I didn’t stop till I got to Buzzard Creek.

Henry Langston’s station wagon was parked on the side of the road. The creek had shrunk to a shallow stream meandering across the road through several channels cut in the mud it had deposited.

I waded through the mud, following footprints which were probably Langston’s, and climbed the rocky lane to the old ranch. The fields around it looked fresh and new. Each blade of grass, each oak leaf, was brilliantly distinct. The sky was luminous, and even the scattering clouds were like floes of light.

Only the human structures were dilapidated. They were
dwarfed by the sky, which seemed to arch like a great span of time across the valley.

Henry Langston’s footsteps led past the barn to the ruined house. Before I reached the house, he came out carrying his .32 target pistol in his left hand and a sawed-off shotgun on his right arm. For a moment I entertained the wild idea that he intended to shoot me.

Instead, he waved the shotgun at me in a friendly way and spoke my name with pleasure. “I found the murder weapon.”

“In the house?”

“No. He threw it in the river. I saw it sticking out of the mud when I came across.”

I took the shotgun out of his hands and broke it. There were two expended cartridges in the breech. The short ugly double muzzle was choked with mud.

“Any other sign of him?”

Hank shook his head. “I had a hunch that he might come back to the ranch here. It seemed to be the place he was looking for. But I was wrong.”

“Where’s the posse?”

Hank pointed toward the mountains in the northeast. Over them I could see black clouds whose trailing edges were ragged with rain.

“They may be bogged down,” he said with some satisfaction.

“You don’t want him caught, do you, Hank?”

“I’m of two minds about Davy. Of course I want him caught. He’s dangerous. But I don’t want him shot and killed without a trial. There are mitigating circumstances, remember.”

I knew that. It was one of my reasons for going on with the case. There wasn’t much chance of saving Davy from a first-degree conviction, but I hoped the girl was still reclaimable.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I stopped in Santa Teresa, by the way, talked to your wife on the phone.”

Hank gave me a quick guilty look. “Is Kate all right?”

“No, she isn’t. She’s worried about you and worried about herself.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“It may be only nerves. She said she wouldn’t tell me because I wasn’t a doctor.”

“She’s concerned about losing the baby,” he said gravely. “She was bleeding a little before I left last night.”

He started walking with long strides past the barn toward the road. The barn owl flew out, his eyes wide in his flabbergasted face. Hank took a shot at the owl with his target pistol. He missed the bird, but I didn’t like the action. It reminded me of Lupe’s shot at the mud hen.

We drove to Centerville in separate cars. Hank parked his wagon in front of Al Simmons’s beer and sandwich place. When I followed him in, he was already talking into the bar telephone: “Make it collect, please. My name is Henry Langston.”

There was a long silence, stitched by the telephone ringing at the far end of the line, and the mutter of a turned-down radio at this end. Al Simmons leaned across the bar:

“More trouble?”

“I hope not.”

The operator’s voice came over the line like a second answer to Al’s question: “Your party does not answer, sir. Do you wish me to try again?”

“I’ll try again myself, thanks.” Hank hung up and turned to me: “She must be at the nursery school picking up Henry, Jr. It’s early for that, though.”

Moving abruptly, as if he was pulled or driven, he started for the door. Al Simmons detained me.

“What’s on your friend’s mind?”

“He’s worried about his wife.”

“On account of the shotgun killer?”

“Yes.”

“I guess a lot of people will be worried. He made it out over the north pass, did you know that? The radio said he
hitched a ride on a truck.”

“Headed which way?”

“South. The truck driver says he dropped him in Santa Teresa.”

I went outside to tell Hank. He was already roaring up the county blacktop. By the time I reached the summit of the pass, his car was far down the twisting road, crawling like a flea on the mountain’s scarred flank.

Perhaps I should have stopped in Rodeo City. The trouble was that I didn’t trust Pennell’s judgment. Assuming that Davy had holed up in Langston’s house, the last thing needed was the kind of shoot-out in which innocent people could get hurt.

Once on the highway and past the roadblock which Pennell had ordered too late, I pushed the speedometer up to ninety and held it till I reached the outskirts of Santa Teresa. I took the first off-ramp and drove to the Längstens’ neighborhood.

Hank’s wagon was standing in the road with steam blowing out from under the hood. Hank was halfway between the wagon and his front door, running with his pistol in his hand.

He shouted: “Kate! Are you all right?”

Kate Langston came out screaming. She lunged toward her husband, fell on the flagstone walk before she reached him, got up bloody-kneed and crying piteously: “I’m going to lose the baby. He’s making me lose the baby.”

Hank gathered her against him with his left arm. Davy appeared in the doorway. He was muddy and unshaven, and awkward, like an actor dying of stage fright.

Hank raised his right arm, pointing the pistol like a dark elongated finger. Davy looked at him shyly, and opened his mouth to speak. Hank shot him several times. The third shot broke his left eye. He sat down on the threshold and died there very quickly.

An hour or so later, I was inside the house with Hank. The local police had come and, after getting a statement from
Hank and congratulating him, had taken the body away. Kate was in the emergency ward of the hospital under sedation for shock.

With the same general idea in mind, I was pouring whisky for Hank but not drinking much myself. On top of everything else, the whisky hit him hard. He wandered around the living room, looking for something that probably wasn’t there. He paused at the grand piano, with closed fists began to hammer the keys.

I yelled at him: “Is that necessary?”

He turned with his fists raised. His eyes were dark and wild, as wild as Davy’s had been.

“I shouldn’t have killed him, should I?”

“I’m not your conscience. There is a kind of economy in life. You don’t spend more than you have, or say more than you know, or throw your weight around more than necessary.”

“He was wrecking my marriage, driving my wife crazy. I had to made a decision, do something decisive.”

“You certainly did that.”

“The police didn’t blame me.”

“They’re not your conscience either.”

He sat swaying on the piano bench. I was disappointed in Hank, and worried about him. The second self that most of us have inside of us had stepped into the open and acted out its violence. Now he had to live with it, like an insane Siamese twin, for the rest of his life.

The telephone rang. I answered it: “Langston residence.”

“Is that you, Mr. Langston?” a woman said.

“I’m a friend of the family. There’s illness in the family.”

“I was wondering why Mrs. Langston didn’t pick up Junior.”

“Is that the nursery school?”

The woman said it was, and that she was Mrs. Hawkins.