Sleeping Beauty by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

his pocket. It looked like a .38 with a two-inch barrel.
    “What are you going to do with that?”
    “I hear a rat in there. Try and get the light on him.”
    He pulled the door open with his crippled hand. The pool house was full of faint moving lights from the heater. I turned the flashlight on the cement floor, fearful for an instant that Laurel might be in there and be accidentally shot.
    A bright-eyed rat was caught in the light. He ran for the drainage hole. Before he got there, the gun went off beside me. The rat fell in a red blur, twitched, and lay still.

chapter
9
    As if the sound of Smith’s gun had been a prearranged signal, a phone began to ring somewhere uphill from us. It rang three times, and stopped. By that time, Smith was at the top of the hill and I was close behind him.
    We paused on the concrete pool deck at the side of the house. I could hear a man’s voice, hoarse and strained, talking inside.
    “The Captain’s at home, isn’t he?” I said.
    “That’s right. I had orders not to disturb him.”
    “Now that he’s been disturbed, will you let me see him?”
    “What about?”
    “Laurel.”
    “She isn’t here. You saw that for yourself.”
    “That could be Laurel on the phone now.”
    “I’ll ask him.”
    He unlocked a sliding glass door and went into the house, leaving me outside. I walked up and down on the deck, trying to lose my feeling of frustration. All I had to show for myevening’s work was a dead rat and a persistent vision of Laurel lying somewhere with an empty vial beside her.
    Inside the house, the Captain’s intermittent voice continued like a voice in a dream, just beyond the range of comprehension. Then I heard Smith’s voice. He came to the sliding glass door and opened it exactly wide enough to admit me.
    “The Captain says he’ll see you. Don’t keep him too long. He hasn’t had any real sleep for two nights.”
    The Captain was sitting in pajamas at the desk in his study. He was gray and haggard. In the collapsing structures of his face I could barely recognize the younger man whose picture hung in the storage shed. There were no pictures at all on the walls of his study.
    He stood up and gave me a brisk handshake which failed to convey an impression of energy. “I understand you’re a private detective, Mr. Archer. It isn’t clear to me who you’re working for.”
    “Tom Russo, your niece’s husband.”
    “Where is my niece?”
    “I don’t know. She took off with a tube of Nembutal capsules—”
    His voice cut in on mine: “Where and when?”
    “From my apartment in West Los Angeles, sometime before eight tonight.”
    “Who did she leave with?”
    “She was alone.”
    “Are you sure?” His eyes probed at me from his sun-scarred face.
    “She may have been picked up on the street,” I said.
    “Are you telling me somebody picked her up?”
    “I’m saying it could have happened.”
    “Who picked her up?”
    “I don’t know. I don’t know that she was picked up.” He turned and walked the short distance to the end of the room. His bare feet made no sound at all on the carpet. Heturned and came back toward me with his finger pointing at me like a prosecutor’s.
    “Why did you come here?”
    “I’ve been trying various places she might be. Her husband’s house. Her friend Joyce Hampshire’s place. I’ve talked to her parents.”
    “How long ago?”
    I looked at my watch. It was past eleven o’clock. “Within the last couple of hours. I don’t get the point of all these questions you’re asking.”
    “Don’t you?”
    The Captain raised himself on his toes. He was the shortest man of the three of us. Smith towered over him but held himself quite still and silent, frozen in a wartime hierarchy which should have dissolved in history long since.
    “You’re being rather mysterious, Captain.”
    “Then I’ll be plain. Before I talk to you any further, I want the name of someone who will vouch for you. Someone known to me