The Instant Enemy Read online

  “They’re neighbors. The two girls are the real friends.” She made her decision suddenly. “I’ll ask Heidi to drop over before she goes to school.”

  “Why not right away?”

  She left the room. I made a quick search of possible hiding places, under the pink oval lamb’s-wool rug, between the mattress and springs, on the high dark shelf in the closet, behind and under the clothes in the chest of drawers. I shook out some of the books. From the center of Sonnets from the Portuguese a scrap of paper fluttered.

  I picked it up from the rug. It was part of a lined notebook page on which someone had written in precise black script:

  Listen, bird, you give me a pain

  In my blood swinging about.

  I think I better open a vein

  And let you bloody well out.

  Mrs. Sebastian was watching me from the doorway. “You’re very thorough, Mr. Archer. What is that?”

  “A little verse. I wonder if Davy wrote it.”

  She snatched it from between my fingers and read it. “It sounds quite meaningless to me.”

  “It doesn’t to me.” I snatched it back and put it in my wallet. “Is Heidi coming?”

  “She’ll be here in a little while. She’s just finishing breakfast.”

  “Good. Do you have any letters from Davy?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I thought he might have written to Sandy. I’d like to know if this verse is in his handwriting.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I’m willing to bet it is. Do you have a picture of Davy?”

  “Where would I get a picture of him?”

  “The same place you got your daughter’s diary.”

  “You needn’t keep flinging that in my face.”

  “I’m not. I’d simply like to read it. It could give me a lot of help.”

  She went into another of her somber hesitations, straining her eyes ahead over the curve of time.

  “Where is the diary, Mrs. Sebastian?”

  “It doesn’t exist any longer,” she said carefully. “I destroyed it.”

  I thought she was lying, and I didn’t try to conceal my thought. “How?”

  “I chewed it up and swallowed it, if you must know. Now you’ve got to excuse me. I have a dreadful headache.”

  She waited at the doorway for me to come out of the room, then closed and locked the door. The lock was new.

  “Whose idea was the lock?”

  “Actually it was Sandy’s. She wanted more privacy these last few months. More than she could use.”

  She went into another bedroom and shut the door. I found Sebastian back at the kitchen counter drinking coffee. He had washed and shaved and brushed his curly brown hair, put on a tie and a jacket and a more hopeful look.

  “More coffee?”

  “No thanks.” I got out a small black notebook and sat beside him. “Can you give me a description of Davy?”

  “He looked like a young thug to me.”

  “Thugs come in all shapes and sizes. What’s his height, approximately?”

  “About the same as mine. I’m six feet in my shoes.”

  “Weight?”

  “He looks heavy, maybe two hundred.”

  “Athletic build?”

  “I guess you’d say that.” He had a sour competitive note in his voice. “But I could have taken him.”

  “No doubt you could. Describe his face.”

  “He isn’t too bad-looking. But he has that typical sullen look they have.”

  “Before or after you offered to shoot him?”

  Sebastian moved to get up. “Look here, if you’re taking sides against me, what do you think we’re paying you for?”

  “For this,” I said, “and for a lot of other dull interrogations. You think this is my idea of a social good time?”

  “It’s not mine, either.”

  “No, but it belongs to you. What color is his hair?”

  “Blondish.”

  “Does he wear it long?”

  “Short. They probably cut it off in prison.”

  “Blue eyes?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Any facial hair?”

  “No.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “The standard uniform. Tight pants worn low on the hips, a faded blue shirt, boots.”

  “How did he talk?”

  “With his mouth.” Sebastian’s thin feelings were wearing thinner again.

  “Educated or uneducated? Hip or square?”

  “I didn’t hear him say enough to know. He was mad. We both were.”

  “How would you sum him up?”

  “A slob. A dangerous slob.” He turned in a queer quick movement and looked at me wide-eyed, as if I’d just applied those words to him. “Listen, I have to get down to the office. We’re having an important conference about next year’s program. And then I’m going to have lunch with Mr. Hackett.”

  Before he left, I got him to give me a description of his daughter’s car. It was a last year’s Dart two-door, light green in color, which was registered in his name. He wouldn’t let me put it on the official hot-car list. I wasn’t to tell the police anything about the case.

  “You don’t know how it is in my profession,” he said. “I have to keep up a stainless-steel front. If it slips, I slip. Confidence is our product in the savings and loan industry.”

  He drove away in a new Oldsmobile which, according to his check stubs, was costing him a hundred and twenty dollars a month.

  chapter 3

  A FEW MINUTES LATER I opened the front door for Heidi Gensler. She was a clean-looking adolescent whose yellow hair hung straight onto her thin shoulders. She wore no makeup that I could see. She carried a satchel of books.

  Her pale-blue gaze was uncertain. “Are you the man I’m supposed to talk to?”

  I said I was. “My name is Archer. Come in, Miss Gensler.”

  She looked past me into the house. “Is it all right?”

  Mrs. Sebastian emerged from her room wearing a fluffy pink robe. “Come in, Heidi dear, don’t be afraid. It’s nice of you to come.” Her voice was not maternal.

  Heidi stepped inside and lingered in the hallway, ill at ease. “Did something happen to Sandy?”

  “We don’t know, dear. If I tell you the bare facts, I want you to promise one thing: you mustn’t talk about it at school, or at home, either.”

  “I wouldn’t. I never have.”

  “What do you mean by that, dear: ‘You never have’?”

  Heidi bit her lip. “I mean—I don’t mean anything.”

  Mrs. Sebastian moved toward her like a pink bird with a keen dark outthrust head. “Did you know what was going on between her and that boy?”

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  “And yet you never told us? That wasn’t very friendly of you, dear.”

  The girl was close to tears. “Sandy is my friend.”

  “Good. Fine. Then you’ll help us get her safely home, won’t you?”

  The girl nodded. “Did she run away with Davy Spanner?”

  “Before I answer that, remember you have to promise not to talk.”

  I said: “That’s hardly necessary, Mrs. Sebastian. And I really prefer to do my own questioning.”

  She turned on me. “How can I know you’ll be discreet?”

  “You can’t. You can’t control the situation. It’s out of control. So why don’t you go away and let me handle this?”

  Mrs. Sebastian refused to go. She looked ready to fire me. I didn’t care. The case was shaping up as one on which I’d make no friends and very little money.

  Heidi touched my arm. “You could drive me to school, Mr. Archer. I don’t have a ride when Sandy isn’t here.”

  “I’ll do that. When do you want to go?”

  “Any time. If I get there too early for my first class I can always do some homework.”

  “Did Sandy drive you to school yesterday?”

&nbs
p; “No. I took the bus. She phoned me yesterday morning about this time. She said she wasn’t going to school.”

  Mrs. Sebastian leaned forward. “Did she tell you where she was going?”

  “No.” The girl had put on a closed, stubborn look. If she did know anything more, she wasn’t going to tell it to Sandy’s mother.

  Mrs. Sebastian said: “I think you’re lying, Heidi.”

  The girl flushed, and water rose in her eyes. “You have no right to say that. You’re not my mother.”

  I intervened again. Nothing worth saying was going to get said in the Sebastian house. “Come on,” I told the girl, “I’ll drive you to school.”

  We went outside and got into my car and started downhill toward the freeway. Heidi sat very sedately with her satchel of books between us on the seat. She’d probably remembered that she wasn’t supposed to get into an automobile with a strange man. But after a minute she said: “Mrs. Sebastian blames me. It isn’t fair.”

  “Blames you for what?”

  “For everything Sandy does. Just because Sandy tells me things doesn’t mean I’m responsible.”

  “Things?”

  “Like about Davy. I can’t run to Mrs. Sebastian with everything Sandy says. That would make me a stool pigeon.”

  “I can think of worse things.”

  “Like for instance?” I was questioning her code, and she spoke with some defiance.

  “Like letting your best friend get into trouble and not lifting a finger to prevent it.”

  “I didn’t let her. How could I stop her? Anyway, she isn’t in trouble, not in the way you mean.”

  “I’m not talking about having a baby. That’s a minor problem compared with the other things that can happen to a girl.”

  “What other things?”

  “Not living to have a baby. Or growing old all of a sudden.”

  Heidi made a thin sound like a small frightened animal. She said in a hushed voice: “That’s what happened to Sandy, in a way. How did you know that?”

  “I’ve seen it happen to other girls who couldn’t wait. Do you know Davy?”

  She hesitated before answering. “I’ve met him.”

  “What do you think of him?”

  “He’s quite an exciting personality,” she said carefully. “But I don’t think he’s good for Sandy. He’s rough and wild. I think he’s crazy. Sandy isn’t any of those things.” She paused in solemn thought. “A bad thing happened to her, is all. It just happened.”

  “You mean her falling for Davy?”

  “I mean the other one. Davy Spanner isn’t so bad compared with the other one.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me his name, or anything else about him.”

  “So how do you know that Davy’s an improvement?”

  “It’s easy to tell. Sandy’s happier than she was before. She used to talk about suicide all the time.”

  “When was this?”

  “In the summer, before school started. She was going to walk into the ocean at Zuma Beach and swim on out. I talked her out of it.”

  “What was bothering her—a love affair?”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  Heidi wouldn’t tell me anything further. She’d given Sandy her solemn oath never to breathe a word, and she had already broken it by what she’d said to me.

  “Did you ever see her diary?”

  “No. I know she kept one. But she never showed it to anybody, ever.” She turned toward me in the seat, pulling her skirt down over her knees. “May I ask you a question, Mr. Archer?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Just what happened to Sandy? This time, I mean?”

  “I don’t know. She drove away from home twenty-four hours ago. The night before, her father broke up a date she was having with Davy in West Hollywood. He dragged her home and locked her up overnight.”

  “No wonder Sandy left home,” the girl said.

  “Incidentally, she took along her father’s shotgun.”

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. But I understand Davy has a criminal record.”

  The girl didn’t respond to the implied question. She sat looking down at her fists, which were clenched in her lap. We reached the foot of the slope and drove toward Ventura Boulevard.

  “Do you think she’s with Davy now, Mr. Archer?”

  “That’s the assumption I’m going on. Which way?”

  “Wait a minute. Pull over to the side.”

  I parked in the sharp morning shadow of a live oak which had somehow survived the building of the freeway and the boulevard.

  “I know where Davy lives,” Heidi said. “Sandy took me to his pad once.” She used the shabby word with a certain pride, as if it proved that she was growing up. “It’s in the Laurel Apartments in Pacific Palisades. Sandy told me he gets his apartment free, for looking after the swimming pool and stuff.”

  “What happened when you visited his place?”

  “Nothing happened. We sat around and talked. It was very interesting.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “The way people live. The bad morals people have today.”

  I offered to drive Heidi the rest of the way to school, but she said she could catch a bus. I left her standing on the corner, a gentle creature who seemed a little lost in a world of high velocities and low morals.

  chapter 4

  I LEFT sEPULVEDA at Sunset Boulevard, drove south to the business section of Pacific Palisades, and made a left turn on Chautauqua. The Laurel Apartments were on Elder Street, a slanting street on the long gradual slope down to the sea.

  It was one of the newer and smaller apartment buildings in the area. I left my car at the curb and made my way into the interior court.

  The swimming pool was sparkling. The shrubs in the garden were green and carefully clipped. Red hibiscus and purple princess flowers glowed among the leaves.

  A woman who sort of went with the red hibiscus came out of one of the ground-floor apartments. Under her brilliant housecoat, orange on black, her body moved as though it was used to being watched. Her handsome face was a little coarsened by the dyed red hair that framed it. She had elegant brown legs and bare feet.

  In a pleasant, experienced voice that hadn’t been to college she asked me what I wanted.

  “Are you the manager?”

  “I’m Mrs. Smith, yes. I own this place. I don’t have any vacancies at the moment.”

  I told her my name. “I’d like to ask you some questions if I may.”

  “What about?”

  “You have an employee named Davy Spanner.”

  “Do I?”

  “I understood you did.”

  She said with a kind of weary defensiveness: “Why don’t you people leave him alone for a change?”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on him.”

  “But you’re a policeman, aren’t you? Keep after him long enough and you’ll push him over the edge again. Is that what you want?” Her voice was low but full of force, like the mutter of a furnace.

  “No, and I’m not a policeman.”

  “Probation officer then. You’re all the same to me. Davy Spanner’s a good boy.”

  “And he’s got at least one good friend,” I said, hoping to change the tone of the interview.

  “If you mean me, you’re not wrong. What do you want with Davy?”

  “Just to ask him a few questions.”

  “Ask me instead.”

  “All right. Do you know Sandy Sebastian?”

  “I’ve met her. She’s a pretty little thing.”

  “Is she here?”

  “She doesn’t live here. She lives with her parents, someplace in the Valley.”

  “She’s been missing from home since yesterday morning. Has she been here?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “What about Davy?”

  “I haven’t seen him this morning. I just got up myself.” She peered up at the
sky like a woman who loved the light but hadn’t always lived in it. “So you are a cop.”

  “A private detective. Sandy’s father hired me. I think you’d be wise to let me talk to Davy.”

  “I’ll do the talking. You don’t want to set him off.”

  She led me to a small apartment at the rear beside the entrance to the garages. The name “David Spanner” had been inscribed on a white card on the door, in the same precise hand as the verse that had fallen out of Sandy’s book.

  Mrs. Smith knocked lightly and when she got no answer called out: “Davy.”

  There were voices somewhere behind the door, a young man’s voice and then a girl’s which set my heart pounding for no good reason. I heard the soft pad of footsteps. The door opened.

  Davy was no taller than I was, but he seemed to fill the doorway from side to side. Muscles crawled under his black sweatshirt. His blond head and face had a slightly unfinished look. He peered out at the sunlight as if it had rejected him.

  “You want me?”

  “Is your girl friend with you?” Mrs. Smith had a note in her voice which I couldn’t quite place. I wondered if she was jealous of the girl.

  Apparently Davy caught the note. “Is there something the matter?”

  “This man seems to think so. He says your girl friend is missing.”

  “How can she be missing? She’s right here.” His voice was flat, as though he was guarding his feelings. “Her father sent you, no doubt,” he said to me.

  “That’s right.”

  “Go back and tell him this is the twentieth century, second half. Maybe there was a time when a chick’s old man could get away with locking her up in her room. The day’s long past. Tell old man Sebastian that.”

  “He isn’t an old man. But he’s aged in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Good. I hope he dies. And so does Sandy.”

  “May I talk to her?”

  “I’ll give you exactly one minute.” To Mrs. Smith he said: “Please go away for a minute.”

  He spoke to both of us with a certain authority, but it was a slightly manic authority. The woman seemed to feel this. She moved away across the court without an argument or a backward glance, as if she was deliberately humoring him. As she sat down by the pool I wondered again in exactly what capacity she employed him.