The Instant Enemy by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

apprehension. “Has Stephen had an accident? Is that why he hasn’t come home?”
    “I hope not.”
    She looked at me accusingly. I was the messenger who brought bad news.
    “You said on the telephone you were a friend of Keith Sebastian’s.”
    “I know him.”
    “Has something happened to my husband? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
    “No. I suppose I’d better tell you why I’m here. May I sit down?”
    “Of course. But come inside. It’s getting cold out here in the wind.”
    She led me through a glass door, up a short flight of steps, and along a well-lit gallery hung with pictures. I recognized a Klee and a Kokoschka and a Picasso, and thought it was nowonder the place had a fence around it.
    The living room commanded a broad view of the sea, which seemed from this height to slant up to the horizon. A few white sails clung to it like moths on a blue window.
    Mrs. Hackett made me sit in an austere-looking steel-and-leather chair which turned out to be comfortable.
    “Bauhaus,” she said instructively. “Would you like a drink? Benedictine?”
    She got a stone bottle and glasses out of a portable bar and poured small drinks for us. Then sat down confidentially with her round silk knees almost touching mine. “Now what is all this business?”
    I told her that in the course of an investigation which I didn’t specify, I’d stumbled on a couple of facts. Taken together they suggested that she and her husband might be in danger of robbery or extortion.
    “Danger from whom?”
    “I can’t name names. But I think you’d be well advised to have the place guarded.”
    My advice was punctuated by a distant sound that resembled machine-gun fire. Hackett’s red sports car came into view and scooted around the lake toward the house.
    “Ach!”
Mrs. Hackett said. “He’s brought his mother with him.”
    “Doesn’t she live here?”
    “Ruth lives in Bel-Air. We are not enemies but neither are we friends. She is too close to Stephen. Her husband is younger than Stephen.”
    I seemed to have won Mrs. Hackett’s confidence, and wondered if I really wanted it. She was handsome but a little fat and dull, and full of unpredictable emotions.
    Her husband had stopped below the terrace and was helping his mother out of the car. She looked about his age, and dressed it. But if Hackett was forty, his mother had to be at least fifty-six or seven. As she came across the terrace on his arm, I could see the years accumulate behind her youthful façade.
    Mrs. Hackett went to the window and waved at them rather lifelessly. The sight of her husband’s mother seemed to drain her of energy.
    The mother was introduced to me as Mrs. Marburg. She looked at me with the arithmetical eye of an aging professional beauty: would I be viable in bed?
    Her son’s eye was equally cold and calculating, but he was interested in other questions: “Didn’t I see you in Keith Sebastian’s office?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you followed me out here? Why? I see you’ve made yourself cozy.”
    He meant the glasses on the coffee table. His wife flushed guiltily. His mother said in chiding coquetry: “I know you have a passion for privacy, Stephen. But don’t be nasty, now. I’m sure the nice man has a very good explanation.”
    She reached for his hand. Hackett winced away from her touch, but it seemed to ground some of his static. He said in a more reasonable tone: “What
is
your explanation?”
    “It was Sebastian’s idea.” I sat down and repeated the story I’d told his wife.
    It seemed to upset all three of them. Hackett got a bottle of bourbon out of the portable bar and, without offering any of it around, poured himself a solid slug which he knocked back.
    His German wife began to weep, without any sound, and then her hair came loose and flooded her shoulders. Hackett’s mother sat down beside his wife and patted her broad back with one hand. The other hand plucked at her own throat where crepe had gathered in memory of