Sleeping Beauty Read Online Free Page B

picture in the morning paper.”
    “Good Lord, was that just this morning? It feels like a week ago.” He wagged his head gloomily. “They say trouble always comes in bunches. Which certainly conforms with my experience.”
    Behind his casual complaining talk I could sense a questioning doubt which wasn’t unexpected in Laurel’s father. He moved toward me and spoke in a lower voice.
    “I understand my son-in-law”—he pronounced the words with distaste—“doesn’t want to see us. Believe me, the feeling is mutual. It’s good of him to send an emissary. But I don’t quite understand your position in this matter.”
    “I’m a private detective.” I added, overstating the case a little: “Tom Russo hired me to look for your daughter.”
    “I didn’t know he cared that much.”
    “He cares. But he couldn’t leave the drugstore just now. Since I was the last one who saw her, I agreed to come here and talk to you.”
    Lennox took hold of my arm. As if he had closed a circuit, I could feel the tension running through him and into me.
    “The last one who saw her? What do you mean by that?”
    “She took off from my apartment with a vial of Nembutal capsules.” I looked at my watch. “That was a bit over an hour ago.”
    “How did she get into your apartment?”
    A hectoring note was entering his voice. His grip on my arm was tightening. I shook it off.
    “I met her on the beach at Pacific Point. She asked me to give her a lift to West Los Angeles, and I did. Then she wanted to use my phone to call her husband.”
    “What happened between Laurel and her husband?”
    “Nothing much. He was about to leave for work and couldn’t come for her. He blames himself, of course, but I don’t blame him. Your daughter was upset before she ever left Pacific Point.”
    “Upset about what?”
    “The oil spill, for one thing. She rescued a bird, and it died on her hands.”
    “Don’t give me that. People are blaming the spill for everything that happens. You’d think it was the end of the bloody world.”
    “Maybe it was for your daughter. She’s a very sensitive person, and she seems to have been living close to the edge.”
    He shook his head. He seemed to be strained close to his own limit, and he didn’t really want me to tell him about his daughter. I said:
    “Has she often been suicidal before?”
    “Not to my knowledge.”
    “Who would know?”
    “You could ask her mother.”
    He took me into the house as if he owned it. We were closetogether for a moment in the lighted hallway, and we exchanged a quick look. He was weathered brown, with impervious blue eyes, and quite a lot of wavy brown hair growing not too high on his forehead. His eyes were a little overconfident, his mouth a little spoiled. And there was a touch of dismay in the eyes and on the mouth, as if he’d felt the first cold draft of age. He had to be at least fifty but looked younger.
    His wife was waiting in the living room with Tom’s cousin, the one he had described to me at the drugstore. The two women sat on facing chairs in stiff-necked poses which meant that they had long since run out of things to say to each other.
    Tom’s cousin, the younger, had on a light blue pants suit which exaggerated the shape of her body. She looked trapped. But when I gave her a one-sided grin she gave it back to me.
    “I’m Gloria,” she said. “Gloria Flaherty.”
    The older woman looked the way Laurel might look in twenty years, if she lived. She still had some of her beauty, but there were lines of suffering connecting the wings of her nose and the corners of her mouth, and charcoal marks under her eyes as if she had been through fire. Her hair was streaked with white.
    She lifted one of her black-gloved hands and placed it limply in mine. “Mr. Archer? We can’t make any sense of this at all. Can you? Is it true as her husband says that Laurel is suicidal?”
    “She may be.”
    “But why? Did something happen?”
    “I was going to ask