Sleeping Beauty Read Free Page A

where I’m going.”
    “What is that supposed to mean?”
    My voice was sharp, and she overreacted to it. “You expect me to pay you for the ride? And here I am breathing your valuable air.”
    “You want to pick a fight with someone. Why does it have to be me?”
    She chose to take this as a final rejection. She opened the doorabruptly and left the apartment. I had an urge to follow her, but I went no farther than the mailbox. I sat at my desk and began to go through the mail that had piled up during my week’s vacation.
    Most of it was bills. There was a three-hundred-dollar check from a man whose son I had found living with five other teenagers in an apartment in Isla Vista. I had gone to Mazatlán on the strength of it. There was a laboriously hand-printed letter from an inmate of a maximum security facility in central California. He said he was innocent and wanted me to prove it. He added in a postscript:
    “Even if I am not innocent, why can’t they let me go now? I am an old man, I would not hurt nobody now. What harm can I do if they let me go now?”
    Like a long-distance call being placed, my mind made an obscure series of connections. I got up, almost overturning the light chair, and went into the bathroom. The door of the medicine cabinet was partly open. There had been a vial of Nembutal in the cabinet, thirty-five or forty capsules left over from a time when I had forgotten how to sleep, and then had learned again. They weren’t there now.

chapter
4
    She had been gone ten or twelve minutes when I went down to the empty street. I got into my car and drove around the block. There were no pedestrians at all, no trace of Laurel Russo.
    I drove as far as Wilshire, then realized that I was wasting my time. I went back to my apartment and looked up Thomas Russo in the phone directory. His address was on the border of Westwood, not more than three or four miles from me. I made a note of his address and telephone number.
    His phone rang a dozen times, rhythmic and raucous as a death rattle, before the receiver was lifted. “Russo residence, Tom Russo speaking.”
    “This is Lew Archer. You don’t know me, but it’s about your wife.”
    “Laurel? Has something happened?”
    “Not yet. But I’m concerned about her. She took some sleeping pills from my apartment.”
    His voice became suspicious. “Are you her boy friend?”
    “No, I’m not. You are.”
    “What was she doing in your apartment?”
    “She wanted to phone you. When you turned her down, she left with my sleeping capsules.”
    “What kind of sleeping capsules?”
    “Three-quarter-grain Nembutal.”
    “How many?”
    “At least three dozen. Enough to kill her.”
    “I know that,” Russo said. “I’m a pharmacist.”
    “Is she likely to take them?”
    “I don’t know.” But there was a whisper of fear in his voice.
    “Has she attempted suicide before?”
    “I don’t know who I’m talking to.” Which meant she probably had. “Are you some kind of policeman?”
    “I’m a private detective.”
    “I suppose her parents hired you.”
    “Nobody hired me. I met your wife on the beach at Pacific Point. Apparently the oil spill upset her, and she asked me to bring her to Los Angeles. When you turned her down—”
    “Please don’t keep saying that. I didn’t turn her down. I told her I couldn’t take her back unless she was ready to give it agood try. I couldn’t stand another patch-up job and then another break. The last one nearly killed me.”
    “What about her?”
    “She doesn’t care about me the way I—Look, I’m telling you my family secrets.”
    “Tell me more, Mr. Russo. Who else would she be likely to call, or go to?”
    “I’d need time to think about that, and I don’t have the time. I have the night shift at the drugstore. I ought to be there now.”
    “Which store?”
    “The Save-More, in Westwood.”
    “I’ll come by there. Will you make me a list of the people she might try to get in touch