The Instant Enemy (26 page)

The words and gestures were addressed to me but meant for her father. Sebastian was appalled. He sat on the bed, then stood up quickly and brushed away the sand he had deposited.

“You can’t mean Mr. Hackett.”

“Yes I can. I blew my mind and I hardly knew what was happening. But I know old Steve Hackett when I see him.”

Like lenses in a sophisticated camera, Sebastian’s eyes were
changing. He wanted not to believe her, to find a credibility gap in her story. But the truth was there, and we both knew it.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Sandy?”

“I’m telling you now.”

“I mean last summer, when it happened.”

She regarded him with scorn. “How do you know it happened last summer? I haven’t mentioned that tonight.”

He looked around rather wildly, and rushed into speech: “Your mother said something, I don’t mean she spelled it out. But there was something in your diary, wasn’t there?”

“I
spelled it out,” she said. “I knew Bernice read my diary. But neither of you ever said a word to me. Never ever a word.”

“I took your mother’s lead in that, Sandy. After all I’m only a man and you’re a girl.”

“I know I’m a girl. I found it out the hard way.”

She was angry and troubled, but she sounded more like a woman than a girl. She wasn’t afraid. It occurred to me that she had suffered a sea-change into a woman, and that her storm would pass.

I went into the bathroom for a hot shower. The stall was warm and fragrant from Sandy’s use of it.

Then, while Sebastian took a shower, I talked to his daughter across the poker table.

We both had our clothes on now, and they seemed to impose a certain formality on the conversation. Sandy started out by thanking me, though, which wasn’t a bad sign.

I told her not to mention it, I’d been dying for a swim. “Have you decided to give life a try?”

“I’m not making any promises,” she said. “It’s a stinking world.”

“You don’t improve it by committing suicide.”

“I do for me.” She was still and silent for a while. “I thought I could break away from it all with Davy.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“It was his. He picked me up on the Strip because somebody told him that I knew the Hacketts. He needed a way to get to Steve, and I was glad to help.”

“Why?”

“You know why. I wanted to get back at him and Lupe. But it didn’t really make me feel any better. It only made me feel worse.”

“What did Davy want?”

“It’s hard to tell. He always has three or four reasons for everything, three or four different versions. It isn’t his fault. Nobody ever told him the truth, about who he was, until Laurel did. And even then he didn’t
know
it was true. Laurel was drunk when she told him.”

“Told him that Stephen Hackett was his father?”

“I don’t know what she told him. Honestly.” It was her mother’s word, and she said it with her mother’s intonation. “Davy and I weren’t talking much at the end. I was afraid to go with him, and afraid to quit. I didn’t know how far he would go. Neither did he.”

“He’s gone further now.” I thought it was time to tell her, before the changes of the night had crystallized. “Davy was shot dead this afternoon.”

She looked at me dully, as if her capacity to react was used up for the time being. “Who shot him?”

“Henry Langston.”

“I thought he was a friend of Davy’s.”

“He was, but he had troubles of his own. Most people do.”

I left her with the thought and went into the bedroom where her father was trying on clothes. He settled for a turtleneck sweater and a pair of slacks. The sweater made him look young and bold, like an actor.

“What’s on the agenda, Keith?”

“I’m going up to Hackett’s place and give him back his check.”

His statement astonished me. He looked slightly astonished
himself.

“I’m glad you feel that way. But you better let me have the check. It’s evidence.”

“Against me?”

“Against Hackett. How much money is involved?”

“The check is for a hundred thousand.”

“Plus how much cash for the tapes?”

He barely hesitated. “Ten thousand cash. I paid it over to Mrs. Fleischer.”

“What story did Hackett give you about the tapes?”

“He said Fleischer was trying to blackmail him.”

“For doing what?”

“He didn’t say. I gather he was having an affair, though.”

“When did you deliver the tapes to him?”

“Just now. Just before you came.”

“Who was there, Keith?”

“Mr. Hackett and his mother were the only ones I saw.”

“Do they have a tape recorder?”

“Yes. I saw them try the tapes on it for size.”

“How many tapes are there altogether?”

“Six.”

“Where did you put them?”

“I left them with Mrs. Marburg in the library. I don’t know what they did with them after that.”

“And they gave you a check? Right?”

“Yes. Hackett did.”

He took the yellow slip out of his wallet and handed it over. It was very like the one in my office safe, except that it was signed by Stephen Hackett instead of his mother, and not postdated.

The moral force required to part with the money generated more of the same in Sebastian. He followed me into the living room, moving eagerly. “I’ll go along with you. I want to tell that Hackett creep what I think of him.”

“No. You’ve got better things to do.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Taking your daughter back to the Center,” I said.

“Can’t I just simply take her home?”

“It’s too soon for that.”

“It always will be,” Sandy said. But she was looking at her father with changing eyes.

C
APTAIN
A
UBREY
was waiting for me at the wicket which opened onto the porch of the Sheriff’s substation. We talked in the dingy hallway of the old building, out of hearing of the officer on duty. Aubrey, when I sketched out what I knew and some of what I guessed, wanted to go along to the Hackett place.

I reminded him that he’d have to get a search warrant, and that might take some doing. Meanwhile Hackett could be destroying the tapes or erasing the sound from them.

“What makes the tapes so important?” Aubrey wanted to know.

“The death of Laurel Smith. I found out tonight that Stephen Hackett had an affair with her about twenty years ago. Davy Spanner was their illegitimate son.”

“And you think Hackett killed her?”

“It’s too early to say. I know he paid ten grand for the tapes.”

“Even so, you can’t just go in and seize them.”

“I don’t have to, Captain. I’ve been working for Mrs. Marburg. I can get into the house.”

“Can you get out again?” he said with a grim half-smile.

“I think I can. I may need some backstopping though. Give me some time alone with them first.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll play it by ear. If I need help I’ll holler.”

Aubrey followed me out to my car and leaned in at the window:

“Watch out for Mrs. Marburg. At the time of her second husband’s death I—” he cleared his throat and edited the slander out of his warning—“there was some suspicion that she was involved.”

“She may have been. Mark Hackett was killed by her son by her first husband—a man named Jasper Blevins.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Just about. I got it from Jasper Blevins’s grandmother, and it cost her some pain to tell me. She held back until she knew Jasper was dead.”

“Too many people have been dying,” Aubrey said. “Don’t you be one of them.”

His unmarked car followed me to the Hacketts’ gate. I drove on up the private road to the pass and across the dam. The house beyond the lake had lights in it, faint behind drawn curtains. As I knocked on the door I felt I was coming here for the last time.

Gerda Hackett answered the door. She looked anxious and lonely, like an overweight ghost haunting the wrong house. She brightened up unnervingly when she saw me:

“Mr. Archer! Kommen Sie nur ’rein.”

I stepped inside. “How’s your husband?”

“Much better, thank you.” She added in a disappointed tone: “It’s Stephen you wish to see?”

“And Mrs. Marburg.”

“They’re in the library. I’ll tell them you’re here.”

“Don’t bother. I know where it is.”

I left her standing like a stranger at the doorway of her house. Moving through the massive building with its institutional feeling, I could guess why Hackett had married a girl from another country. He didn’t want to be known.

The library door was closed. I could hear a voice behind it, a woman’s voice, and when I pressed my ear against the oak door I recognized the voice of Laurel Smith. It made the hair on the back of my neck bristle. Then my heart began to pound with the crazy hope that Laurel had survived.

I was close to breaking down, like a man coming near to
the end of a long climb: an inverted downward climb into the past. I could hardly breathe the air there, and I leaned against the library door.

“Thank you, Mrs. Lippert,” Laurel was saying. “You want me to give you a receipt?”

“It isn’t necessary,” another woman’s voice said. “I’ll be getting the check back from the bank.”

“How about a little drink?”

“No thanks. My husband doesn’t like it when he comes home and I have liquor on my breath.”

“You can’t smell vodka,” Laurel said.

“He
can. He’s got a nose like a beagle. Good night now.”

“Take care.”

A door closed. Laurel began to hum an old song about whistling in the dark. She must have been moving around her apartment, because her voice faded and returned.

I started to turn the knob of the library door. Ruth Marburg said:

“Who is that out there?”

I had to go in, smiling. Mrs. Marburg was sitting beside the telephone. There was no revolver in sight.

Hackett was sitting at the table where the tape recorder stood. His battered smile looked as ghastly from the outside as mine felt from the inside. He switched off Laurel’s singing.

“Mrs. Hackett told me where to find you. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Hackett started to tell me that I wasn’t, but Mrs. Marburg’s voice overbore his: “As a matter of fact you are interrupting something. My son and I are playing some old family tapes.”

“Go right ahead.”

“You wouldn’t be interested. They’re very nostalgic, but just to members of the family.” Her voice sharpened: “Do you want something?”

“I came to give you my final report.”

“This is a bad time. Come back tomorrow, eh?”

“I’d like to hear what he has to say.” Hackett looked un
easily at his mother. “As long as we’re paying him so much we might as well get the benefit of it.”

“I’d rather hear what Laurel has to say.”

Mrs. Marburg flapped her false eyelashes at me. “Laurel? Who on earth is Laurel?”

“Jasper’s wife. You’ve just been listening to her. Let’s all listen.”

Mrs. Marburg leaned toward me urgently. “Close the door behind you. I want to talk to you.”

I closed the door and leaned on it, watching them. Mrs. Marburg rose heavily, using her arms as well as her legs. Hackett reached for the tape recorder.

“Leave it alone.”

His hand hovered over the controls, and then withdrew. Mrs. Marburg walked toward me.

“So you’ve dug up a little dirt and you think you can raise the ante. You couldn’t be more wrong. If you don’t watch yourself you’ll be in jail before morning.”

“Somebody will.”

She thrust her face close to mine. “My son and I buy up people like you two for a nickel. That check I gave you is postdated. Are you too stupid to know what that means?”

“It means you didn’t trust me to stay bought. Nobody’s staying bought these days.” I got out Keith Sebastian’s check and showed it to her. “Sebastian gave me this.”

She snatched at the check. I held it out of her reach and put it away. “Don’t be grabby, Etta.”

Her whole face scowled under its mask of paint. “You mustn’t call me that name. My name is Ruth.”

She went to her chair. Instead of sitting down she opened the drawer of the telephone table. I reached her before she got the revolver out and ready to fire, and tore it out of her hands.

I backed away from her and turned to Hackett. He was on his feet, moving on me. I didn’t have to fire the gun. He started to walk backwards, rather tentatively, toward the table where he’d been sitting.

“Get away from the table, Hackett. I want you on the other side of the room, near your mother.”

He crossed in front of her and leaned against all of Dickens, then sat on a three-stepped stool in the corner, like a dunce. Mrs. Marburg stood resistant, but eventually sank back into her chair.

I took her son’s place on the chair by the tape recorder, and switched it on. Fleischer’s recording apparatus must have been noise-activated: there were no long breaks or lacunae in the sound. Laurel’s singing was followed by the small noise of Laurel making herself a drink, then by the larger noise of her making another drink.

She sang a song of her own invention, with the refrain of “Davy, Davy, Davy.”

The door of her apartment opened and closed, and Davy himself was in the room. “Hi, Laurel.”

“Call me Mother.”

“It doesn’t sound right. Hey, you don’t have to kiss me.”

“I have a right to. Haven’t I treated you like a mother?”

“Lately, you have. Sometimes I wonder why.”

“Because I
am
your mother. I’d cut off my right hand to prove it.”

“Or your head?”

She cried out, “Ahl” as if he had hurt her physically. “It isn’t very nice of you to talk like that. I didn’t have anything to do with killing your father.”

“But you know who did kill him.”

“I told you the other night, it was the young man—the beatnik with the beard.”

“They didn’t have beatniks in those days.” Davy’s voice was flat and incredulous.

“Whatever you want to call him—he was the one.”

“Who was he?”

After some hesitation she said: “I don’t know.”

“Then why did you cover up for him?”