The Instant Enemy (7 page)

I went to the phone and called the police, and asked at the same time for an ambulance. In the minutes before they arrived I gave the place a quick shakedown. The first thing I looked at was the portable television set. Laurel’s account of winning it in a contest had sounded to me like a plant.

I took the back off. Glued to the inside of the cabinet was a plastic-encased bug, a miniature radio transmitter no larger than a pack of cigarettes. I left the bug where it was, and replaced the back of the set.

The other unusual thing I found was a negative fact. Nothing I came across in my hurried search suggested that Laurel Smith had a personal history: no letters or old photographs or documents. I did find, in a purse in a bedroom drawer, a savings bank book with deposits totaling over six thousand dollars, and a dog-eared Social Security card in the name of Laurel Blevins.

The same drawer contained a sparsely populated address-book in which I found two names I recognized: Jacob Belsize, and Mr. and Mrs. Edward Spanner. I made a note of the Spanners’ address, which wasn’t too far from my own apartment in West Los Angeles. Then I put everything back in the drawer and pushed it shut.

I could hear the sound of the police siren rising from Pacific Coast Highway. It was a sound I hated: the howl of disaster in the urban barrens. It climbed Chautauqua and died like a wolf in Elder Street. The ambulance was whining in the distance.

I knew the two policemen who came in. Janowski and Prince were detective-sergeants from the Purdue Street station, men in their late thirties who were proud of their work and good at it. I had to tell them what I was doing there, but I suppressed Sandy’s name. I gave them Davy Spanner’s.

Prince said: “Did Spanner do that?” He jerked his thumb toward the bathroom, where by now two ambulance men were getting Laurel Smith onto a stretcher.

“I doubt it. They were good friends.”

“How good?” Janowski said. He was a homely broad-faced Baltic type with a fair delicate skin.

“She gave him a job when he got out of jail.”

“That’s pretty good friends,” Prince said. “What was he in for?”

“Car theft.”

“So now he’s doing postgraduate work in mayhem.” Prince took crime personally. He was a former Golden Gloves welterweight who could have gone either way in his own life. Like me.

I didn’t argue with them. If they picked up Davy, they’d probably be doing him a favor. And the afternoon was slipping away. I wanted to see the Spanners before it got too late.

We went outside and watched Laurel Smith being lifted into the ambulance. Three or four of the apartment dwellers, all women, had drifted out onto the sidewalk. Laurel was
their landlady, and they undoubtedly knew her, but they didn’t come too near. The snoring woman gave off the germs of disaster.

Janowski said to one of the attendants: “How bad is she hurt?”

“It’s hard to say, with head injuries. She has a broken nose, and jaw, maybe a fractured skull. I don’t think it was done with fists.”

“With what?”

“A sap, or a truncheon.”

Prince was questioning the women from the apartment building: none of them had heard or seen a thing. They were quiet and subdued, like birds when a hawk is in the neighborhood.

The ambulance rolled away. The women went into the building. Prince got into the police car and made a report in a low-pitched monotone.

Janowski went back into Laurel’s apartment. I walked up to Los Baños Street for a second look at the house with volcanic rock built into the front. The drapes were still drawn. The Cougar was no longer in the driveway.

I wandered around to the back and found an unblinded sliding glass door. The room inside contained no furniture. I looked around the small back yard. It was overgrown with dry crabgrass, which the rains had failed to revive, and surrounded by a five-foot grapestake fence.

A woman looked over the fence from the next yard. She was an attempted blonde whose eyes were magnified by purple eye shadow.

“What do
you
want?”

“I’m looking for the man of the house.”

“Big fellow with a bald head?”

“That’s him.”

“He left about an hour ago. It looked to me like he was moving out. Which would suit me just fine.”

“How so?”

She threw me a sorrowful purple look over the grapestake
fence. “You a friend of his?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What do you want with him?”

“He was the one who wanted me. He called me out here to do some repairs.”

“On that electronic equipment he had?”

“Right.”

“You’re too late. He took it with him. Piled it in the trunk of his car and took off. Good riddance, I say.”

“Did he cause you any trouble?”

“Nothing you could put your finger on. But it was creepy having him next door, sitting all alone in an empty house. I think he’s cracked myself.”

“How do you know the house was empty?”

“I have my two good eyes,” she said. “All he took in when he moved in was a camp cot and a folding chair and a card table and that radio equipment. And that was all he took out when he left.”

“How long was he here?”

“A couple of weeks, off and on. I was getting ready to complain to Mr. Santee. It runs down the neighborhood when you don’t put furniture in a house.”

“Who’s Mr. Santee?”

“Alex Santee. The agent I rent from. He’s agent for that house, too.”

“Where can I find Mr. Santee?”

“He has an office on Sunset.” She pointed toward the Palisades downtown. “You’ve got to excuse me now, I’ve got something on the stove.”

I went to the other side of the yard and looked downhill across several other back yards. I could see Laurel Smith’s apartment. Her open door was in my direct line of vision. Detective-Sergeant Janowski came out and closed the door.

A
LEX
S
ANTEE
was a small middle-aged man with a bold stare masked by glasses. He was just closing his real-estate office when I arrived, but he was glad to stay open for a prospect.

“I only have a few minutes, though. I’ve an appointment to show a house.”

“I’m interested in a house on Los Baños Street. 702, the one with the lava front.”

“It is distinctive, isn’t it? Unfortunately it’s rented.”

“Since when? It’s standing empty.”

“Since November 15 of this year. Do you mean the party hasn’t moved in yet?”

“He’s been and gone, according to the neighbors. Moved out today.”

“That’s peculiar.” Santee shrugged. “Well, that’s his privilege. If Fleischer has moved out, the house will be available for rental on the fifteenth of this month. Three hundred and fifty a month on a one-year lease, first and last months payable in advance.”

“Maybe I better talk to him first. Did you say his name was Fleischer?”

“Jack Fleischer.” Santee looked it up in his file and spelled it out. “The address he gave me was the Dorinda Hotel in Santa Monica.”

“Did he say what business he was in?”

“He’s a retired sheriff from someplace up north.” He con
sulted the file again. “Santa Teresa. Maybe he decided to go back there.”

The desk clerk at the Dorinda Hotel, a sad man with an exuberant pompadour hairpiece, didn’t remember Jack Fleischer at first. After some research in the register he established that about a month ago, early in November, Fleischer had stayed there two nights.

In a passageway at the rear of the lobby, I found a phone booth and called the Spanners’ number. A man’s deep voice answered: “This is the Edward Spanner residence.”

“Mr. Spanner?”

“Yes.”

“This is Lew Archer. Mr. Jacob Belsize gave me your name. I’m conducting an investigation and I’d like very much to talk to you—”

“About Davy?” His voice had thinned.

“About Davy and a number of other things.”

“Has he done something wrong again?”

“His employer has been beaten up. They just took her to the hospital.”

“You mean Mrs. Smith? He never hurt a woman before.”

“I’m not saying he did this. You know him better than anybody does, Mr. Spanner. Please give me a few minutes.”

“But we were just sitting down to supper. I don’t know why you people can’t leave us alone. Davy hasn’t lived with us for years. We never did adopt him, we’re not legally responsible.”

I cut him short: “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

The sun was setting as I left the hotel. It looked like a wildfire threatening the western edge of the city. Night comes quickly in Los Angeles. The fire was burnt out when I reached the Spanner house, and evening hung like thin smoke in the air.

It was a prewar stucco bungalow squeezed into a row of other houses like it. I knocked on the front door, and Edward Spanner opened it reluctantly. He was a tall thin man with a
long face and emotional eyes. He had a lot of black hair, not only on his head but on his arms and on the backs of his hands. He was wearing a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and gave off an old-fashioned impression, almost an odor, of soured good will.

“Come in, Mr. Archer. Welcome to our abode.” He sounded like a man who had taught himself to speak correctly by reading books.

He took me through the living room, with its threadbare furnishings and its mottoes on the walls, into the kitchen where his wife was sitting at the table. She wore a plain housedress which emphasized the angularity of her body. There were marks of suffering on her face, relieved by a soft mouth and responsive eyes.

The Spanners resembled each other, and seemed very much aware of each other, unusually so for middle-aged people. Mrs. Spanner seemed rather afraid of her husband, or afraid for him.

“This is Mr. Archer, Martha. He wants to talk about Davy.”

She hung her head. Her husband said by way of explanation: “Since you called me, my wife has made a little confession. Davy was here this afternoon while I was working. Apparently she wasn’t going to tell me.” He was speaking more to her than to me. “For all I know he comes here every day behind my back.”

He’d gone too far, and she caught him off balance. “That isn’t so, and you know it. And I was
so
going to tell you. I simply didn’t want it to spoil your dinner.” She turned to me, evading the direct confrontation with Spanner. “My husband has an ulcer. This business has been hard on both of us.”

As if to illustrate her words, Spanner sat down at the head of the table and let his arms hang loose. A half-eaten plate of brown stew lay in front of him, glazing. I sat facing his wife across the table.

“When was Davy here?”

“A couple of hours ago,” she said.

“Was anybody with him?”

“He had his girl friend with him. His fiancée. She’s a
pretty
girl.” The woman seemed surprised.

“What kind of a mood were they in?”

“They both seemed quite excited. They’re planning to get married, you know.”

Edward Spanner uttered a dry snortlike laugh.

“Did Davy tell you that?” I asked his wife.

“They both did.” She smiled a little dreamily. “I realize they’re young. But I was glad to see he picked a nice girl. I gave them a ten-dollar bill for a wedding present.”

Spanner cried out in pain: “You gave him ten dollars? I cut ten heads of hair to clear ten dollars.”

“I saved up the money. It wasn’t your money.”

Spanner shook his doleful head. “No wonder he went bad. From the first day he came into our household you spoiled him rotten.”

“I didn’t. I gave him affection. He needed some, after those years in the orphanage.”

She leaned over and touched her husband’s shoulder, almost as if he and Davy were the same to her.

He rebounded into deeper despair: “We should have left him in the orphanage.”

“You don’t mean that, Edward. The three of us had ten good years.”

“Did we? Hardly a day went by that I didn’t have to use the razor strap on him. If I never heard of Davy again, I’d—”

She touched his mouth. “Don’t say it. You care about him just as much as I do.”

“After what he
did
to us?”

She looked across him at me. “My husband can’t help feeling bitter. He put a lot of stock in Davy. He was a real good father to him, too. But Davy needed more than we could give him. And when he got into trouble the first time the Holy Brethren of the Immaculate Conception asked Edward to step aside as a lay preacher. That was a terrible blow to him, and with one thing and another we left town and moved here. Then Edward came down with his ulcer, and after that
he was out of work for a long time—most of the last three years. Under the circumstances we couldn’t do much for Davy. He was running loose by that time, anyway, running loose and living on his own most of the time.”

Spanner was embarrassed by his wife’s candor: “This is all ancient history.”

“It’s what I came to hear. You say you moved here from another town?”

“We lived most of our lives in Santa Teresa,” she said.

“Do you know a man named Jack Fleischer?”

She looked at her husband. “Isn’t that the name of the man who was here last month?”

I prompted them: “Big man with a bald head? Claims to be a retired policeman.”

“That’s him,” she said. “He asked us a lot of questions about Davy, mainly his background. We told him what little we knew. We got him out of the Santa Teresa Shelter when he was six years old. He didn’t have a last name, and so we gave him ours. I wanted to adopt him, but Edward felt we weren’t up to the responsibility.”

“She means,” Spanner put in, “that if we adopted him the county wouldn’t pay us for his board.”

“But we treated him just like he was our own. We never had any children of our own. And I’ll never forget the first time we saw him in the supervisor’s office at the Shelter. He came right over to us and stood beside Edward and wouldn’t go away. ‘I want to stand beside the man,’ was what he said. You remember, Edward.”

He remembered. There was sorrowful pride in his eyes.

“Now he stands as tall as you do. I wish you’d seen him today.”

She was quite a woman, I thought: trying to create a family out of a runaway boy and a reluctant husband, a wholeness out of disappointed lives.